Tom Watson: The Hardest Word

Yeah, right...

Great quotes of our time; 'I certainly did not want to take part in a baseless witch hunt...'

And I am Marie of Romania.

Thought For The Day: Graham Norton

“You have your own rules as you get older. I would prefer to live alone for the rest of my life rather than live with towels that were folded incorrectly.

"Petty is important. That’s why marriages break up. Marriages don’t break up because of big things.

“The older you get, the less right you have to be fussy and yet the older you get the fussier you become, so oddly when your standards should be dropping you find them getting higher. You see younger friends starting relationships and you know how that story ends. You just sit there and wait for the end.

“When you’re young if you meet a partner and they’re cheating on someone to be with you but then they go with you, you think: ‘That’s great.’

“But of course as older people we know they then cheat on you.

“So I’m careful. Why do you want to be heartbroken again because if you keep being heartbroken you’re a moron.”

Mirror.

See the happy moron
He doesn't give a damn
I wish I was a moron
My god, perhaps I am!

Dorothy Parker, arguably.

Fagburn: Current Mood

'And love is a thing that can never go wrong...'

Independence Day: Happy July 4th Day, American Dudes!

Any country that produced Noam Chomsky, Dorothy Parker, Elvis Presley and The Simpsons can't be all bad.
x

Attitude: What Fresh Hell Is This?

Fagburn's a sucker for a cute lad with a nice quiff, so we'll let this one pass.
Let's just hope he loves his gay fans.

On Success/Happiness/Optimism: Apropos Of Nothing/Something/Everything

"I don't give a toss if people say I haven't fulfilled my promise. I think my values are right but I don't want to impose them on other people. I've been lucky enough to be born in a democratic country where I can say what I like, with parents who were decent, intelligent people, where I'm reasonably well off, and where I've met a lot of interesting people and been to some interesting places. How much luckier can you get?
"Life is a matter of passing the time enjoyably. There may be other things in life, but I've been too busy passing my time enjoyably to think very deeply about them." 

Peter Cook.

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

Bob Dylan. 

"I believe the key to happiness is: someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to."

Elvis.

"Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs or you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on something that happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is you try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well, you commit yourself to that one percent."

Noam Chomsky.

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, 
A medley of extemporanea; 
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; 
And I am Marie of Romania."

Dorothy Parker.

"Fuck' em."

Mick Jones.

"Oh, what's the bloody point?"

Kenneth Williams. 

"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."*

Antonio Gramsci. 

* There's some debate as to whether Gramsci ever said this, and it's nicked off someone else whatever, so don't write in Marxist pedants.

 

Littlejohn 2.0: Making Your Mind Up

There's an ecstatic review in the Mail of Bucks Fizz playing G-A-Y's Eurovision party on Saturday night.
"They took G.A.Y by storm as they performed a six-song set of their old favourites," Georgina Littlejohn writes, giving the late Dorothy Parker a run for her money.
Hoorah for the mighty Fizz, verily it must have been a magical night!
This isn't the first time Georgina has written about having a gay old time getting down with The Gays at G-A-Y.
I wonder if her father approves of the nocturnal company she keeps?
By a wonderful - yet statistically improbable - coincidence her old man also writes for the Daily Mail.
He is - oh, you're ahead of me - the Daily Mail's £700,000 a-year star columnist and homophobe-in-chief, Richard Littlejohn.

EM Forster: Too Fucking Busy

One might have thought it a somewhat Herculean task to get the word "sex" into a headline about E M Forster.
But The Sunday Times have managed it today in a feature about Wendy Moffat's rather literally titled new life of E M Forster, E M Forster: A New Life.
Much is made of Moffat having access to the novelist's "sex diary" - meaning a diary which, rather demurely it seems, occasionally mention his sex life, or the lack of it.
This led to some sub-Freudian musing by Richard Brooks; "his creative drive was curbed after he lost his virginity to a wounded soldier on an Egyptian beach when he was 38 and met his long-term lover — a married policeman — several years later." Around the time he met Bob Buckingham Forster ceased writing novels.
Brooks believes that old pink chestnut that the repressed EMF had sublimated his desires and channeled it into his work.
Maybe.
Brookes quotes an oft quoted note from Forster; “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter.”
But writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst argues persuasively; "His note has usually been seen as an expression of regret. Moffat makes a compelling case for thinking that it was actually a sigh of relief."
Maybe - to quote Dorothy Parker - EM Forster was just; "Too fucking busy - and vice versa."