(Question: does this count as a UNIVERSE PODCAST?!?)
Wee ramble to note to the universe that Power Chords is on the way. Soonish. It’s about growing up – maybe literally – through punk and new wave. About the power of music and the need for protest. Mainly, it’s a music lover’s book. That is all, for now. Stay tuned.
(A prologue – not by way of apology but certainly to note the significant and progressive nature of the Reeves budget. Adults are in the room: some congratulations may be in order. However, I stand by what follows)…
Many of us fail to (ahem) network or even accept capitalism(?)/business/the ‘run-of-the-mill’* as a way or The Way because we don’t accept its values. It’s crap; it’s low; it’s a signal underachievement given how brilliant and generous and intelligent people can be.
*(Great phrase, by the way!)
Why would we pretend that systems designed to keep certain wealthy people wealthy and beyond accountability are satisfactory? Why would we accept them? We’re better than that.
Why are there billionaires (and why are most of them vile humans?) when most people have little or nothing by comparison? It’s not right. Why is so little of what we might call politics about redressing these obscene imbalances? (We know why: because most politicians lack the courage or decency or heart to make change and the media universe is nobbled – crippled with corruption and dictatorial myopia – by those billionaires and/or ‘media barons’ effectively corralling or twisting our views towards their own).
This may all boil down to privilege and the protection of privilege. And that may be why I have an issue with private schooling – the Industry of Privilege.
Sure there are wunnerful people – kids/families/teachers – at private schools (I know there are, I’ve met plenty of them) but they all need to be big enough to accept that they are buying or serving privilege. There can be no meaningful change – no ‘re-distribution’, no ‘levelling’ – without this first building block being hauled out, or at least called out. That is, discussed as a real thing.
The assumptions of entitlement – in the ether, in fact – start and are cultivated here. They finish, maybe, they reach their catastrophic low-point with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his ilk. How can this world (our world, Blighty) have come to be designed so that a human so grotesque and unworthy in every respect could make good on his wild, childhood intention of being Universe-King (or whatever the feck it was?) Johnson was and is a kind of icon to our system failure. It’s utterly obscene that an arse of his scale could believe and then absolutely find that everything and everybody really would fall in behind his boorish megalomania. Because of family and money and Eton and yup, everything.
In this landscape a budget from a centre-right Labour regime which has eminently capable but some might argue pitifully conciliatory people at the helm is likely to be an irrelevance: relatively. There may be encouraging splashing of the pool but there is already too much invested in the appeasement of the World Order – from issues of class to the markets, to the media, to Israel, to That Which Is Thinkable – that we know Starmer and Reeve ain’t gonna stir things too much. The leadership is largely of this place; or content with it. There is no anger and no compelling sense of mission – though they talk of little else.
The party has already fallen into the trap of silencing dissenters. However much talk we hear about ‘changes of direction’, The Radical is very much out.
Sadly both this fact and the (less heinous than the Tories but still hugely galling) evidence of ‘successful’ gifting and lobbying feeds into the painful narrative that ‘them fookin’ politicians are all the same’. Plainly they’re not, but who can blame Dave from Wythenshawe for equating hugely trumpeted Labour indiscretions with heavily obscured Tory filth? With media and social media often acting deliberately against truth, how are we to engage intelligently with anything?
I won’t watch the budget coverage because it bores me and I don’t expect it to offer much of a lift. Plus the coverage will be depressingly dim. I do hope they prove me wrong and that there are some brilliant ideas – the Labour hierarchy, unlike the previous clowns, is quite possibly capable of that. Mainly though, it will tinker when we need to rip it up..
I know this is kindof niche and I may not be in a position to entirely deny the Cooo, Sales Opportunity factor, but I re-read this (below) and found it mildly diverting. So revisiting.
It’s the transcript of a talk I gave, coupla years back, to Writing Room (writingroom.org.uk) on the ins and outs of self-publishing. Hoping it may be of interest and if not, there are a couple of laughs and the occasional philosophical insight-attempt. With Beautiful Games now unleashed into the wilderverse, and having grabbed a further bundle of knowledge about The Process of Getting Books Out There, it feels okay to piggyback the original event.
To the underslung, I would add, then:
I still really like the whole notion of self-publishing; the freedoms; the Independent Record Labelness; the relative speed of delivering your missive. In terms of practical minutiae, I *now know* that it’s the online behemoths that push for a pre-order period of a month, to allow time for the book files/cover/metadata/whatever to fully load onto their systems. Seems a bit daft in 2024, but this is just how it is. Amazon (e.g.) can put your book up there on Day One but the info about said book, online, may not be correct, or fully described for some weeks. So they call that faff-abart-time a Pre-Order Period and scramble to get things looking right – whilst obviously improving the groovy-‘early’ sales factor.
I have used Grosvenor House Publishing for Beautiful Games, because the people I dealt with were/are tidy and The Dots Will Not Be Joined felt and looked like a kosher book. (In short, happy to recommend). Costs are pretty much unchanged from those included below, other than the increase in prices for copies *to me*, for my book launch and personal supply. This I expected, given the general hike in printing costs, et al, to the producers themselves. Happy to field enquiries on anything around writing or publishing – particularly, obviously, the self-publishing route.
Here’s the new book – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beautiful-Games-Rick-Walton/dp/1803817763
The rest I think is here…
ON SELF-PUBLISHING.
Hi & welcome to everybody, wherever you’re ‘at’, geographically or writing-wise. I feel like I should start with a patently, refreshingly un-focus-grouped soundbite so here it is: I’m here to ENCOURAGE. I really am.
Am I an expert? Nope, almost certainly not… but I have gone thru this self-publishing thing. So I will and CAN give you some PRACTICAL INFO as well as waffle or spout opinion extravagantly. Ignore all diversions – there will be nonsense and mischief en route – just hold on and I will prove to you I am kosher in the sense of having self-published a book. Recently. You may, should the thing fall into your hands, powerfully dislike THE DOTS WILL NOT BE JOINED and therefore think I’m an utter fraud as a writer but the process would be the same for your fabulous, authentic equivalent.
Brief WHO AM I?
I’m Rick and I’m a writer and a sports coach/P.E. Teacher – mainly the latter, in fact. I’ve always ‘written stuff’ – whether that be songs/poems or bigger lumps of words. Always. For me. For me this is personal, so if you do take away one message from the following kaleido-rant(s) let it be this: I think we write because we can’t stop. The Rest is superfluous (for me, anyway): whether we’re famous and brilliant or mischievous and obscure and daft. (Guess which end of the spectrum I’m waving, madly, from?) The Doing is the thing. Your contribution is the thing. Please create this stuff. You need it/I need you to do it. You make the world better. Get your writing done.
I love Nearly Man/Nearly Person stories. I’ve got some byooots and if we have time I’d love to hear some of yours. Wozzat all abart? I think We Writing Peeps may need to be kinda durable or ‘philosophical’ but we may also need a sense of humour about the madness and anti-meritocracy of all this, yes? Maybe more of that later…
My story is… in god-knows-when my first play was workshopped at the Nat Theatre Studio, in London. It was entirely possible that I was gonna make it: I do actually remember a director saying “Christ, Rick, you’re gonna be SO-O BIG!!” LOLS! Been getting smaller ever since.
I shook hands with the top man there – Nick Wright – over the fact of an upcoming production of one of my plays, then got on with my life. They had ‘wanted me in the building’ so I wrote something else on a second visit. IT NEVER HAPPENED. Not because they realized I was the mischievous impostor/rebellious jukebox I may have been but because the funding was cut for new writing festivals etc. I imagine half of you have experienced something similar – the new stuff, the risky stuff being cut or excluded. I didn’t care. I just kept writing – kept living my life.
Apologies, know this is indulgent but let me stick with this momentarily on the off-chance that this feel somehow relatable and mildly diverting. I’ll mention in passing that a reader at Hampstead Theatre dubbed me a ‘free-wheeling absurdist’ (always wanted to stick that on my passport) and an equivalent at the Royal Court called me ‘the diamond in the dung-heap’ and I think that gave me enough belief… but know what? All that belief/confidence/vindication malarkey… that could be an endless discussion in itself… mainly I was happy, living in Pembrokeshire, with NO EXPECTATION or AMBITION to be somebody – be that kind of writer or public figure.
Have no regrets about this. Never, I swear sought to push open that metaphorical door: never bought directors coffee. Always knew I was a longshot and an outsider because of who I am, how I write. I wasn’t going to change that; they weren’t going to change that. We’re all wonderfully different (and I know this can sound incredibly arrogant but) for me there was and is no conciliation around this.
Know it’s going to sound weirdly against the grain of what follows here, if I say I’ve never considered the public aspect of publishing important. But I really haven’t. This is personal and I fear it will sound insufferably pompous or something… but I don’t, essentially seek or need vindication. I just write. So yeh – uncompromisingly.
THE PROCESS
Started with having the headspace and time to write a book, instead of blogs. (Am an accredited cricket writer and bloggist – have two websites. Have also had articles published in various papers and magazines; sports-stuff mainly. Wisden). COVID made the first tome possible.
Conversations (with folk I trust), who might know, about agents/publishing/stuff I’d need to aware of.
Some publishers INSIST on agents forwarding work: think that’s bollocks but it’s how it is. Didn’t expect to get an agent but googled them and chose a few. Did the same with publishers, at the same time, because a) impatient b) knew my work too ‘left-field/’unstructured’ to land with most mainstream publishers.
Looked hard at publishers, on t’internet and chose about ten, to forward manuscripts. Most want the opening 30 pages, with a chapter breakdown and/or similar highlights package. Took this seriously but opted to present in my own inimitable style, in the expectation of ‘failure’, but the hope of maybe just hitting a like-minded spirit in their camp. Didn’t!
Most publishers take months to get back to you – if they do so. They then pre-warn that any subsequent publication will take a year or more after that. This was intolerable for me, given my book feels contemporary to that 2019/20 moment – was about that moment. Feels urgent.
IN SHORT I THINK IT’S RIDICULOUS (in any case) that it takes 2 years to publish a book. In 2021/2/3? Madness. Simply don’t believe it’s necessary, in the digital age and it was a major driver in pointing me towards self-publishing.
Wrote the book between winter 2020/21 and early Summer 2021 with a view to publishing that autumn. Timing-wise, felt daft not to try to collar some of the Xmas Market. Lols!
(It had become apparent, from more conversations and possibly email exchanges with publishers, that even with lockdowns meaning half the universe was writing books, self-publishing could happen start-finish in a matter of weeks/a few months. That was the clincher, for me).
So, basically, I didn’t wait for many agents and publishers to respond. I saw an ad on-line, probably under The Guardian banner, probably on the Twitters, for self-publishing via Grosvenor House. I remember asking my good friend Paul Mason if he had any experience or knowledge around this and he said he was aware of other options, but no. Didn’t recommend his agent, neither did the other guy I spoke to. No easy ‘in’: I emailed Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd.
DETAILS AND COSTS.
Abstract: I wanted complete control of my book. I’m a Stiff Records kindofaguy rather an EMI geezer. I didn’t want proofreading or copy-editing services: I was always going to do as much editing and re-writing as anyone but I wanted to make all the choices. Independent Record Label equivalent. Self-publishing makes that possible. It can be thrillingly punky in a way I like.
In July 2021 it cost me £795 to sign up with Grosvenor House. We had inevitably exchanged some emails – you get an individual assigned to you – which prepared the ground in terms of what the writer gets and what the publisher expects. Then you get a Publishing Agreement, (show it!) with just a few pages of contractual stuff – none of which was too intimidating to a newbie like myself.
What the writer has to do – probably not an exhaustive list!
What the publisher agrees to do:
IMPORTANT NOTES.
Grosvenor House offer services such as editing/proofreading/design. The base rate for that is about £35 an hour but they will offer you specific quotations for particular tasks. They will professionally check-over your manuscript for about £200, in short. I didn’t want that and couldn’t really afford it, given my confident expectation to lose money at this venture. However, I inevitably missed a couple of typo’s and restoring those cost me about £100, post-publication.
The marketing thing is key. You, the author are doing all the marketing. They effectively produce the book and put it on Amazon. You sell it. I absolutely hated the idea that my only realistic option was to sell via Amazon BUT IS THIS IS PROBABLY HOW IT WILL BE.*
EVERYTHING IS DOWN TO ALGORITHMS AND CLICKS (apparently).
Grosvenor House did advise me that pre-publication sales can be major: if a certain number are sold, early doors, that triggers algorithms (or something) that may release your book into actual shops – or get it noticed by actual shops, who then order copies in. THIS DID NOT HAPPEN WITH MY BOOK -I’m a nobody, why would it? But FIND OUT ABOUT THIS STUFF. Lean on the publisher?
*Or by-pass Amazon, maybe… by buying lots of your own books and touting them around bookshops, yourself. (I am going to seriously consider this for my next book). Grosvenor House told me they would sell me any number of my first book at about £4 each – I bought 50, for the book launch.
Next book I may contemplate buying many more and going on a road trip: let’s do the math.
Haven’t really thought this through but it may be possible to buy at £4 and sell at £10, having persuaded the booksellers to split that remaining money. If you take £7 & the bookshop gets £3, I make that £3 profit per book, for both of you. You may only need to sell 3 or 400, to break even. Could you face that initial expenditure, that risk, that work – that selling? Could that be part of your adventure?
We’re racing ahead. You need to be cute. You also need to be realistic – or not. I simply accepted the near-certainty that I would lose money on this adventure and daren’t buy 400 of my own books – didn’t really want to charge round the country with a car full of books.
My chosen route may have been something of a cop-out, then. I bought just enough books for the book launch, and to place a few in a local hotel and a couple of local shops.
Re-wind. WHAT I DID cost me around £1,000, trying to keep costs down a bit. The Killer Truth is that if you SELL YOUR BOOK FOR around £10 Grosvenor House will pinch £4-plus of that, and so will Amazon or equivalent. MEANING YOU WILL GET A ROYALTY OF (ONLY) £1.40 for every book sold. Outrageous but true.
I bit that bullet and tried from the outset to a) live with the loss but b) push to sell as many as possible.
MARKETING.
Nobody knows who the f*** Rick Walton is. He has no clout, no real ‘presence in the market’. But he knows a man or two that do(es).
I’m a Twitter fiend and have one or two celebrity Twittermates. Or Twitter Big-hitters. Critically for my ego (maybe) and certainly for any sales, both these guys think I’m a decent bloke and an interesting writer. They have many thousands of twitter followers and they both were kind enough to pump the book just a little, on that sagacious platform. The result was I sold about 5-600 books and gathered about £700 back from my outlay.
CONCLUSION.
I loved the whole process of self-publishing. It suited me. Never for one moment did I think it would make me a profit: I was doing it for other reasons. Primarily, rightly or wrongly, I feel there’s something I have to say. It felt like a next step. If the reality is nobody’s going to take me on – no agents, no publishers – so what? I can do it anyway.
It was a brilliant, gratifying adventure; I strongly recommend it. But think about how you might sell a lot of books. You’ll probably need to sell best part of a thousand to get yourself close to parity, dollars-wise, if you do it the way I did.
So who do you know with 300,000 Twitter followers? That’s, in my experience, the way to go. Or what’s your equivalent to that going to be?
It’s not the same – they’re really not the same. But I’m going there.
Apocalypse Now, in a cinema in downtown Grimsby, and The Quiet Girl, ‘at Haverfordwest Film Society, last night. The former immediately obvious as a giant; the latter a quiet insinuator. The scale, thunder and ego of the one and the timeless farmyard-backwater of the other. Brando and delirium and slaughter; grass and potatoes and family.
Both will haunt me, or have registered in a way that feels weirdly comparable. They were both palpably affecting.
In Grimbo all those decades ago we walked out shell-shocked in a deeply disturbed silence that defied the cut of conversation or analysis. The heft of the fucking thing left us gobsmacked – 100 people, maybe. That noise; that scope; that insane, thrilling annihilation with or by poetry! Not understood or received in the same way, of course: not to be snobbish but guessing only a handful of us had read Heart the Darkness but… nobody said or *could say* a word, as we traipsed out. Not us punkettes; not the Ordinary Locals. A) Out of multi-level deference to Coppola’s staggering achievement and b) because it felt necessary to slump against the nearest wall first… and – sheesh – recover.
1979, or possibly 80. But the two lads walking out together were as they say(?) changed by the event: how could we not be when it felt obvious we’d just seen the most powerful film ever made? It was like some public/communal de-flowering – and if that’s a dangerous image, who cares? This was a dangerous, wonderful, ruinous, life-changing moment which went beyond ‘the flicks’. However we might express it – with a shrug, with a nauseated heave – we all knew this was a truly rare affirmation of the power of art.
The Quiet Girl doesn’t look to compete with that – or not in the same key. But it does affect. As the bastard-of-a-father angrily stomped to either collect his wayward daughter or (we can only hope) give her up – yup, probably angrily – to the Other Couple, people around me were already raising hands to their faces. As the credits rolled and the lights prematurely rose, nearly everyone was tearful – and some were exposed ‘in bits’. Sobbing. So The Effect was not the same… but the validation, the triumph, the rubber-stamping of the capacity of words and pictures to move folks, to stir them up or down, was there.
Quiet Girl is traumatic despite being something of an ode to the pastoral. It’s all ‘unspoilt Ireland’, except for the unseen but undoubted abuse. It’s cows and hay and loveliness and that thing of handing over – ‘just for a bit, y’understand’ – a child who may be traumatised already and feels like one too many to cope with. Whilst the baby’s being born. ‘Sure y’understand?’
In case you’re wondering, if there is ever a fear that the universe doesn’t need another exposition of any sort on the mistreatment of children then that concern is emphatically and skilfully dumped, here – in fact it’s never raised! – by the compelling nature of the tale and the acting.
This Irish Story (in the Gaelic) looks and feels grippingly authentic, except perhaps for the brief scene where the girl’s potential saviours (Eibhlin and Sean) mistakenly allow her to be watched over briefly by a neighbour. (Have foolishly just read a review of the film, from the Guardian, to grab names/check spellings – forgive me if I don’t spend ages digging out the accents over some of the names – and it completely contradicts what I am about to say about the minor role of Una. Lols. But out with it). Sean, when the child (Cait) is rescued, swiftly and profusely apologises for the error, describing it as an example of his wife’s naive generosity. She even believed in Una. (This we can believe: Eibhlin is a genuinely gorgeous human).
Two things on this: Una is so witchlike the handing-over, even for a short time, didn’t seem plausible, even allowing for the plot-line development in the relationships. And also, for me, Una is poorly-executed. Neither convincing nor darkly funny. Something may be lost in the translation, but she seemed irritatingly out of kilter with the fabulous acting from Cait’s adopted ‘parents’ and from Cait herself. But this is a minor quibble, given my intention here is to thoroughly applaud the first-time direction of Colm Bairead and re-state that this is an outstanding, affecting film. So much so, I might even quote the Guardian, for my deferential, peacemaking final flourish:
‘It is a jewel’.
There probably IS a law that says if you win 6-0 away from home, in a critical game, you should go through. In the same way that if you leg it eight times round Scotland you should get the Elgin Marbles – yeh, those ones – and score the winner. But this didn’t happen for Hempie, or for England. On a perversion-fest of an evening, Bronzie nodded an injury-time ‘clincher’ which didn’t quite clinch and fresh, starry legs somehow didn’t quite freshen. Plus er, Holland.
So the Lionesses, who were ver-ry close to superb, over the last 130-odd minutes of their Nations League campaign, were left with what ifs of a stomach-curdling magnitude.
What if Hemp had tapped in either of those gifts? What if the outrageous James had continued to rage (admittedly in her fabulous, drugged-kitten kindofaway) beyond the hour? What if the swift and intelligent Russo or the surging, willing Toone could have made a blind bit of a difference? But nope. Thrashing Scotland would have to be it. Normally – thrilling. Here – devabloodystating. Out. You. Go.
We can blame the Netherlands for being a) good and b) resolute. We can find moments when either James or Kirby dipped below their level and failed to deliver a killer pass, or Charles misread the obvious, or Stanway was a tad selfish. But mainly we should be saying ‘wow. What drama! What collective effort. What heroic stuff’. England ultimately missed out: but Jesus they entertained us on the way.
Scotland were thrashed. Fair enough. Their level is waaay down on England’s – because of resources both on and off the park. Except that hang on. Wales are similarly a slack handful of goals behind the Lionesses, but they held Germany tonight, so what does all that mean?
It may mean only that Scotland failed to find the compensatory discipline and energy which ‘lesser teams’ need to latch onto, to offer them a chance. Wales are a match for Scotland, quality-wise: ordinary, to be blunt. But despite having a disappointing, not to say torrid Nations League campaign, they battled like hell tonight, against a German side that on the proverbial paper wallops them five or six several times out of ten. (Good stuff and congratulations to Wales, then). But Scotland.
At Hampden the Scots had only a briefish period of the first half which offered hope or respite. England had gone ahead, deservedly, but the home team produced if not a rally… a flurry or two. Then it was only mild carelessness that stopped England from scoring at will. Hemp’s left-footed pass against the foot of the post wasn’t unlucky, it was a howler – a shocker. And later she found herself around the penalty spot with time to choose a corner: but no. She remained a committed bundle of energy and oozed quality, somehow, on a night when along with James, a hat-trick was surely there for the taking? (She must have felt that? She must be feeling not a little responsibility for England’s exit? Cruelly, for she – Lauren Hemp – is an authentic world star, now).
James notched with a fluke off the defender’s back and then claimed the night’s Sublime Moment with her second. Stood up the fullback, dropped the shoulder a little and eased into space. Curled a sweet one (like she does in her sleep-of-the-ju-ust-fabulous), into the far top bin. Notably – because they knew, they knew – her face betrayed not a flicker as she jogged back to go again. Four nil to the Ingerland at the break but they knew (and were constantly updated) of the requirement to stay three or more goals ahead of them pesky Oranje. Lionesses miss out on the Nations League finals and therefore the GB team (is that right?) miss the Olympics.
The Scotland boss, Losa, apologized to their fans, post-game. Fair enough. They were relatively poor, but out-gunned, patently. Disappointment but no shame. He’s entitled to grumble about lack of discipline, defensively but some of this, inevitably, is about lack of quality – of awareness. Scotland were exposed by better players: you work like hell to avoid that but it can happen.
Is it dangerous to suggest that because of the stage of development that the women’s game is in – improving wonderfully but some years away from the situation where lower-ranked teams can routinely compete – England or Germany or USA or Netherlands *might well* stick five past Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland? But it’s likely that gap will close over time. Scotland don’t have a Bronze or a Hemp or an Earp or a Stanway (even). Until either those players emerge in their squad or the general level of smarts rises, they have to get organised, battle relentlessly and hope.
Tonight England gave them little hope but their own ambitions were cruelly, dramatically squished. On a night of brilliant football, in fact.
(Pic via Daily Mirror).
First half and it’s England who are bossing the Yanks. Wow. Yes, those Yanks, who’ve been light years ahead for a decade. But suddenly – or is it suddenly? – things have changed.
The change of regime has plainly been a factor, here, as is the inevitable turning of the talent cycle. England *do* now have a clutch of ver-ry good and very experienced players who are playing, for the most part, in a Women’s Super League that is almost unrecognisable from the division of even a couple of years ago. The environment, the context has surged electrifyingly forward, skill-wise and particularly in terms of composure – just watch the matches on the tellybox. The subtle movements, the retreating into space and opening-up of angles is so-o much more sophisticated than it was. Bright, Greenwood and Daly have all transitioned from relative journeywomen to relative ball-players.
Wiegman must also take huge credit. Not just for the delivery of the first major silverware since the age of the dinosaurs but also for the cultivation of a high level of execution. And consistency. And ease, at this elevated parallel. England were nervy and ordinary as recently as the early stages of the Euros but the gaffer’s supreme equanimity and humour (as well as tactical intelligence) was surely a major factor in the development of a more fluent, confident side. A side that floods forwards relentlessly and fearlessly for 40 minutes, against the United States of America.
It’s 2-1 England, at the half, after Hemp bundles in and Stanway slots a pen. The England midfielder had earlier dwelt criminally, if momentarily, on a weighted pass from Bright that she simply had to biff away, first touch, under the imminent challenge. Instead she tried to ‘do more’, was caught, and the brilliant Smith cracked home. VAR may have robbed the visitors of their second equaliser but the home side deserved (if that’s even a thing?) their lead.
After an old-fashioned bollocking from Ted Lasso – I jest, of course, though a) they, the U.S. needed it and b) he was knocking around – the Americans turned up, post the interval. They were better, for 20 minutes. The game and the stadium quietened. Or it started to moan more, at decisions, in frustration.
Kirby – who has been on the margins – is replaced by Toone. There has been an absence of heads-up football. That sense of potential reality-check (for England) builds. Rapinoe comes into the game, without exactly influencing. Both sides make errors as the frisson, the contagion develops. Toone gets tricky *with a view to drawing a pen* but the ref rightly waives away. The pitch appears to have shrunk, or players are somehow less able to find and revel in space.
In recent days, there have been serious revelations about widespread abuse of professional female players, in the States. A horrendous, shadowy narrative that we can only hope will be shifted towards justice and resolution by powerful voices in the game such as the now-veteran American playmaker (and public/political figure) Megan Rapinoe. Tonight, on the pitch she again stands out, but more for her strikingly purple barnet than for any of her *actual contributions*. The movement is silky and assured but the effect minimal. Even she can’t string this thing together, entirely.
Stanway symbolises the whole drift by easing with some grace into the red zone then clattering agriculturally wide. The standard of officiating drops in sympathy with the play. Having emphatically and instantly given a penalty, the ref has to concede that the backside of an England player is not the extended arm she presumed it to be. In short, a howler cleared-up. There are multiple subs – this is a friendly, after all – and the (on reflection) ultimately below-par Rapinoe is amongst those withdrawn.
Late-on, Toone is wide, in space, in the box. Player of the Match Bronze finds her but the volley is medium-rank. Similarly, Smith lazily under-achieves with a ball that drops invitingly twelve yards out. Hmm. Neither side can find their players.
When the whistle goes, it’s clear the crowd’s loved it, anyway. (With the ole scoreboard saying 2-1 England and the statto’s confirming 23 matches undefeated, who am I to argue?) I won’t argue. England are in a really good place – women’s football is in a spectacular place – with improvement, development and quality visible for all to see.
Yes. Let’s finish by repeating that. Two of the best teams in the world. A massive, near record-breaking crowd and quality visible for all to see.
How is it, exactly, that we’re not on the streets? With the foulest, most rancidly prejudiced and corrupt government of my lifetime traducing the work of parliament, hour by hour? How? When the pitifully transparent Big Dog himself is cocking his leg over everything that feels right? How can this liar, this wilfully amoral clown be getting away with it?
The answers are several; some obvious, some not. Firstly of course the British Media is largely either brazenly prostituting itself beneath the Evil Barons – let’s specify; the filthy Mail/Express/Sun and their joined-up-writing equivalents The Telegraph and Times – or *mysteriously* failing to pursue stories that might lead somewhere tetchy for Johnson/Sunak/Rees-Mogg/Patel, etc. In short our ‘free press’ is either bent to the will of near-fascists, or so cosied-up to the private school/’elite’ families/personal benefit system that genuinely investigative journalism is smothered in an anaesthetic fog.
We expect the BBC and The Met to be more or less pliant to the will of the Establishment: we’ve got that. The Beeb is stacked full of decent people – lefties, even – but the Direction of Travel is being carefully steered by Daily Mail stooges. So Kuenssberg* hasn’t been a-tweeting about Partygate: extraordinarily, she didn’t have any information on any of those events, despite having unprecedented access to the drinking, dancing scumbags. And similarly, the obviously corrupt ‘tendering process’ for covid-related contracts has remained impenetrably obscure, to protect Tory families and funders.
(*Not just her, naturally. Plenty newspaper journo’s have strangely gone quiet on this one – often because their seniors were at the Downing St parties. One of the great failures to report).
I’m not sure who first used the phrase ‘the very worst of us’ to describe the execrable scheisters at the helm. But how else might we capture that sense of real, deep contempt for Johnson and Cummings and Patel and Mogg? They are surely simply not of us and yet we’ve let them besmirch us. Johnson for his utter separation from decency, truth, morality of any perceptible kind; Cummings for his evil narcissism and calculated debasement; Patel for her brazen prejudice and that faux-bullish small-person’s arrogance (or worse). Mogg is just an unspeakable caricature of tory privilege and estrangement from the real world: monied; less clever than he thinks; as stupidly unaware as the other freaks. They are The Very Worst Of Us.
As I write it seems our friends at The Met have exonerated Johnson for Partygate. Because he wasn’t in any sense responsible. And neither was poor old Carrie. They were merely hosts and Star Attractions in said events. They were, unlike their fawning underlings – lately found guilty – ‘innocently’ wee-weeing on the graves of thousands of plebs.
Out There, (here), in the meanwhile, in the Inconsequential Wastes, daft buggers like you and me were blowing masked farewell kisses down phones before bawling into our hands, because that seemed a sacrifice we all had to make. In these uniquely aching moments, in Downing Street and within the sphere of influence of the Secret Tory Machine, it was ‘Dancing Queen’ time.
Even the most cursory look at our bouffant, bumbling, unconscionable Prime fucking Minister will confirm that Johnson has never made a sacrifice in his life. Never needed to. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – like his appalling father before him – has never needed to reflect, only to drive inexorably forward, towards His Manifest Destiny. Like Rees-Mogg, assumptions towards brilliance and a kind of inevitable ‘greatness’ cossetted his ether – his aura. Boris was chosen, by his class, his schools, his clubs, his exceptional milieu, to plough on, towards oven-ready genius and fame. The irresistible power of a zillion years of feudal domination (and peasant capitulation?) was his. No wonder we chose him.
It remains – incredibly – possible that Johnston may survive the murderous incompetence, the missed COBRA meetings, the outrage that was the Covid contract-fest and now the relentless, mind-bending Partygate lies. The volumes of stupidity and naivety in the general population have carried him on, rubber-stamping Cummings’s filthy xenophobic Brexit, dumbly dancing with that poisonous conflation of Brussels with immigrants. Where we are is a triumph of sorts for Daily Mail-levels of bigotry and for the Great Families who continue to piss on our strawberries.
Never has the UK been so low, so barren, so shameful.
Two series in, so what do we think?
We think it’s pret-ty close to wonderful. We think it’s gobsmackingly surprising that something which we feared was gonna reek of America(na), of franchises, of that whole dumbing-down of the universe by checking in so constantly with the Gods Who Dance With Schmaltz turns out to be a rampaging, intelligent, bright and even poignant force for good. (Good telly; goodness in humanity).
We have fallen about, and blubbed. We’ve darn-near turned off – maybe when Ted’s made-for-American TV-isms have flown irritatingly over our heads again… but then been utterly compelled, both by the humour of the Overall Thing and by the brilliance of the sporting intel.
Say what?!? Sporting intel? Yes, even when – as always – the live sport can seem clunky and in danger of failing the myriad authenticity tests so immediately and rightly hoisted by pedantically maniacal fans like my good self. (We know footie. Don’t fuck wiv us*). YES, sporting intel, because whoever is writing/directing/playing/making this stuff does understand football (enough) and, remarkably, coaching, too.
*In fact the live sport here is waaay better than most; though admit the bar has been set appallingly low by almost every football film or series in history. Players can play, mostly, ‘live’ matches are 80% there and the changing-room vibe is decent, plus.*
Ted Lasso (the programme) makes a zillion jokes about Ted Lasso (the coach) not knowing the rules, the history, the zeitgeist in which football booms and busts and yaknow, breaks us. But – in case, friends, ya missed it – this is all knowingly done. The outstanding awareness and generosity and wisdom embedded in the Lasso Method – coaching as transformative, civilising mission, which *really does* look to empower players/individuals, through appreciation, prompting, enquiry, support – utterly squishes any idea that this Dumb American is some under-informed fraud. NO. Ted is a wonder-coach; that’s what this story is about. A bloke who, despite being absurdly out of place, re-defines the quality of that place… by being wonderful… and sophisticated… and deeply, inviolably human.
Everything is faith. That corny, hand-written sign above the door, that says BELIEVE. That ethos, where something we might need to dare to call brotherhood (and critically, authentic sisterhood) grows, becoming essential to the execution of strategies on the pitch and the veracity of the drama beyond it. If there is a tension around Ted’s flirting, or outright crazy street-meme-dancing with and through banalities-which-might-be-profundities and vice-versa, somehow it works. People love him and he bloody deserves it. We’re mercifully and pointedly not hearing anything about god, here, but the series is an ode to faith.
(Minor note. I’m a sports coach so do have some knowledge of how teams are selected, motivated, organised. It’s clear to me that Ted/the writers have a good understanding of where coaching is. Lasso’s relentless good-humour should not obscure the objective – which goes beyond any kind of ‘good guys can win’ schtick. Ted is enacting a very contemporary thread towards building ownership/decision-making/power within the player. The camaraderie and the community-of-souls thing is of course a necessary co-host to all this developing positivity. But the leadership smacks of informed, elite-level choices towards empowerment).
So Ted is a humble genius and a daft idol. Vulnerable, through family breakdown and trauma – separated, father a suicide – prone to anxiety attacks which we see, on camera, in a popular TV series. Further evidence that this world-franchise-monster is overwhelmingly a force for good in the universe. (Except that’s daft, right?)
This is a Big Television Event and it has resources. Unlike many hiked-up projects that might fall into that category it shares the quality and the stories around. Hard to find a character that isn’t well-drawn, generously developed, real enough to make us laugh or cry or root for them. (Can’t stand Awards Ceremonies so didn’t watch the Emmys but apparently it won a shedload. No wonder. Great casting, looks excellent in almost every scene, scripts top-level).
Coach Beard is brilliant – lugubrious and wise and kinda delusionally-in-lurv. He gets ‘his own episode’. Rebecca Welton is stunning and hilarious and extraordinarily multi-dimensional. Her relationship with Keeley Jones, who is willing herself rather magnificently towards Being Someone, whilst oozing with love for those around her, is knock-out and frankly, emosh. Lots of this is frankly emosh, whilst knowing exactly how close it tiptoes to that aforementioned schmaltz.
In short – because I really could go on, about Coach Nate, Mae in the pub, those daft three Greyhound supporters and Miss Fuckwitch and (Our New Hero) Sam Obisanya and (That New Pantomime Villain That I Ju-ust Think We Might Finish Up Loving) Jamie Tartt – you need to make an effort to see Ted Lasso. On Apple TV. It’s popular but grown up. There is sex – and especially via the softening but formerly hardened street-warrior Roy Kent – there is lots of fu-uck-ing language. So what? More importantly, this is a ludicrous but self-aware and ‘issues’-aware smash. A celebration. A reminder that cynicism – probably ours – is bad and that love stories can be good.
I have a memory which is tough to shake. It’s an earlyish one, probably from my late teens – a time when I was developing the political-philosophical anger that still rages. I was also in many senses finding a voice.
Simply cannot remember where or why or how I finished up listening to Dylan Thomas reading some of his poems… but I did. This was waaay pre-internet so could it have been radio? Who knows. I had found the man’s work prior to this event (and loved it) but never heard him read or speak. I was – and I know these two words don’t fit together – I was relatively shocked.
To a spiky youff from Grimsby he sounded like a posh English public schoolboy. Inflated. Pompous. Weird. But not Welsh. So un-believable.
A similar thing happened the first time I heard Kyffin Williams speak – only more so. Another toff, another fake Welshman; another medium-shocking disappointment.
Of course this is prejudicial nonsense… but it is also true. To this English-born now long, long-term resident of Wales, conscious of his own fraudulence, it hurt a little that class, that privilege had intruded so jarringly into *even this* – the sacred world of art and of the heart.
And yet Thomas (in particular) and Williams remain profound icons: in the writer’s case partly because he plainly was in some senses a big-hearted radical – at least in terms of style – and, frankly, his background wasn’t that posh. He just performed like that; believing, I imagine, that the booming suited the pomp and circumstance and mischief around the great themes of his work. But it was weird, hearing him, back then. It was a blow to my punky idealism and to the notion that hopefully, despite Thatcher *and everything* the Home Counties/Great Families domination of the universe might be vulnerable to our Northern, fraternal surge.
I still hope that what we might call The Creative Spirit can come from anywhere and be recognised: that Ordinary Folk, as well as those with time and privilege, can turn out art that is visible and moves and reflects us. However, the times again may be conspiring against this.
The author David N Thomas will probably never read this: if he does, I hope he takes the trouble to get beyond the title and the sense (that may rise in him) of liberties being taken at his expense. They are not. His book Fatal Neglect, which cuts away the sleazy distractions and outright porkies around Dylan Thomas’s death, is gripping, bold and mildly revelatory. I am bastardising his title to hint a little at the unsavoury richness he uncovers.
I say mildly revelatory because, let’s face it, many of us knew that the ultimately frail but often monstrous, boozed-up genius who gifted us Under Milk Wood had been ill-served by his inadequate compadres and the criminally arrogant doctor who oversaw his death in New York. We just didn’t have the evidence. David N proves we were denied it.
Dylan remains the co-author of his own rather grisly end – naturally – having been a drinker and a slob who mixed with or was surrounded by drinkers, drug-takers, neurotics, hypochondriacs, the privileged and the indulgent. He was in bad shape before the bronchopneumonia (obvious but undiagnosed by Feltenstein, the doctor who took charge) tipped him towards coma and death. There were *factors* – used erroneously as fact by that same doctor – which seemed to suit the romantic view of a soul destined to self-destruct: chiefly alcohol and that lack of restraint and self-care. Feltenstein was myopic enough and cheap enough to build his flimsy diagnosis and his fatally shabby treatment entirely around this most readily-available construct; something that went on to symbolise and/or haunt the extinguished poet for fifty years and more. Dylan Thomas became the extravagant drunk who killed himself with booze.
The book unravels that convenience and in doing so exposes the various inadequacies of Brinnin – the agent – and Reitell – the lover, nurse and editor. The wider group that I may with ironic klaxons a-hooting choose to call American Friends are also skilfully, damningly implicated. Fatal Neglect is about shallowness, selfishness and self-interest as much as it is a comprehensive gathering and disassembling of medical fact and half-truth.
These shitty people get skewered, for their ‘lack of anchorage’ and whilst contriving their cover-up.
Brinnin, the agent, arguably more than anyone. He failed utterly on his duty of care towards a plainly unhealthy man. He worked him, even when Thomas was visibly ill or barely able to speak, to fund his own, appallingly glitzy lifestyle. (To be fair, the Welshman had a penchant for robbing or de-frauding the chancers, suckers and sponsors around him but his Canadian-born American agent was different level). Annual European tours, first class travel, cruises: all on other people’s money. He proved to be similarly profligate in respect of his responsibilities towards scheduling: D N Thomas reveals the extent to which Brinnin needed Dylan to graft and set him to it.
Liz Reitell shares some of the same disconnect from common decencies. She thinks she is Everything, as though Caitlin doesn’t exist or have rights and she, too, drives the dangerously exhausted writer on, carelessly or callously. She shares a good deal of responsibility for the years of edited truth, too; notably overseeing the travesty that was Brinnin’s book about those last days. Reitell is a talent, a shrew, a liar… but going through this, who isn’t?
I like that a sharp wee tome about medical minutiae becomes a scrupulously fair but fierce judgement upon people who barely need to care. Because they have stuff covered. Life, money, travel, expectation. Even the honourable medical men who were horrified at what Feltenstein did closed ranks to protect the hospital and staff who capitulated to the invading, overpowering Doc.
Everything is both material and context. For me Fatal Neglect has travelled well, crossing almost seventy years of myth and mischief around the relatively public demise of one of the great figures of modern literature. (If I have sounded belligerent towards Dylan Thomas that too, has been a fraction of the whole. The opening to Under Milk Wood still strikes me as one of the great, sustained moments in musical prose. The man was flawed, oh yes but by god he was something special).
Which is way it feels satisfying, feels right, that we now know he did not simply drink himself to death. Indeed he should not and would not have died, back in ’53, had he received prompt and professional medical attention. He had pneumonia before he was admitted to hospital. He was given shots of the wrong stuff. Nobody dare tell the fella Feltenstein – who had no authority – that this wasn’t just about the hooch. ‘Friends’ mostly failed him, too – as did those who came to tell the story. Some were duped, some criminally covered-up. Class, money, appearances, disappearances. Editing. Protection.
Fatal Neglect made me feel angry, in a good way. It shines a light into both the petty, alcohol-fuelled drama-queendom of Dylan and Caitlin and the uglier, truly privileged ease of some of the Thomas Groupies. In doing this, it may have found another moment; when more chancers, toffs and tossers – Johnsons and Goves and Hancocks? – are serving up incompetence and worse, safe in the knowledge that they can wallow. Because some folks still don’t really need to care.
Afua Hirsch: ‘Brit(ish). On Race, Identity and Belonging’.
Another review of sorts. Because I have time. Because I enjoyed the book. Because in my clunky and inadequate way I want to oppose racism – even though my colour and the baggage I carry makes it likely I will execute that aspiration worryingly badly.
Brit(ish) is a rounded, personal, accomplished book on Afua Hirsch’s struggle – and it is a struggle – to get comfortable with her own identity; the imprint she should make. It’s generous and good. It speaks to ‘the denial of our imperial past & the racism that plagues our present’. (Robbed from back cover, but true enough). But hey – go see what I said. Despite the unflattering pic below! 🤣
So, yeh I liked it. Am something of a fan, in fact, having seen a certain amount of Afua Hirsch on the telly-box, lately. Find the intrigue around her relative affluence (and the obvious and profound need to ‘find herself’) rubbing up against her partner Sam’s “in the hood-ness” engaging in more than one sense. Hirsch is open about the frisson between her and Sam, much of it arising from their different (though partially shared) upbringings. The author is admirably self-aware, around this.
Quite right but hugely important to recognise your own privileges: this Afua does, whilst still going on to make a legitimate and compelling case for the continuing, multi-layered existence – arguably preponderence – of racism(s). She is medium-posh and opportunities have been there but so has crass prejudice. Things are complex, often in a bad way.
On her journey, Hirsch also gets stuff wrong. Senegal and Ghana, though necessary and urgent, even, really don’t work out. Again, very much to her credit, there are bold admissions and absolutely no self-pity, here.
An admission of my own. I don’t immediately know who Philippe Sands is. (Gonna google, any minute). On the back cover he provides the following quote:
‘Wonderful, important, courageous… Warm, funny and wise”.
‘Brit(ish)’ is probably all, or most of that. But I found the word ‘warm’ interesting and wondered briefly if this reflected a certain cosiness… which might be something of a negative(?)
Could be that this book is less directly challenging than the Layla F Saad or Renni Eddo-Lodge works I’ve read recently – reviewed elsewhere. But no. It’s warm in the sense of its generosity, its open-ness, I think. It’s personal without being indulgent: it reveals. So I like it; I rate it and do recommend.
bowlingatvincent 