Kangaroo & Chips

Like the time Alan and I ate shark and whatever it was with Mrs Jefferies, this sort of thing sounds exotic. So did the ostrich Taha and I ate not so long ago, but basically a steak is a steak. To some, soya might seem equally exotic, ditto quorn, in spite of its blubbery texture.

The same can be said of many other things in life. The exotic, the unusual, even the dangerous can be extremely tempting, but at the end of the day it’s still only meat, or whatever you are substituting it for. And if it is only exotic rather than forbidden fruit, you don’t even get a rush out of it.

My Final Word On The Harvey Weinstein Scandal

In November 1989, a young woman named Deborah was lured to an hotel room by an older man, Wash Jones Williams. Once there he raped her and gave her fifty dollars. She threw the money back at him, saying she was not a prostitute, and afterwards went straight to the police. Deborah was a genuinely vulnerable young woman; she was staying at a homeless shelter with her sister, was obviously extremely gullible, and was outweighed by her violator by more than a hundred pounds, yet she did the right thing unthinkingly. I get the impression that if Williams had offered her fifty thousand dollars after or before his sordid act she would still have turned him down and reported him for rape afterwards.

Contrast her with the “victims” of Harvey Weinstein, supposedly empowered women going places. Isn’t that what feminism is all about? Yet only one of them...one...both turned him down and reported him to the police at once, the Italian model Ambra Gutierrez who is clearly cut from the same cloth as Deborah, and a young woman who deserves to go far.

And all the others? Some of them complained about his antics, not to the police, but to his company, then took his shilling and remained silent until he was toppled. Did Weinstein rape any of these women? Some claim he did, but why should we believe them, any of them? Genuine rape victims do what Deborah did. A reasonably intelligent, educated woman who doesn’t under similar circumstances has zero credibility. They don’t deserve our sympathy, they don’t even deserve our ink, because it is women like them, not pigs like Weinstein, who are the real problem.

Did even one of these victims or as we are now to call them survivors so much as slap his face? If one or two had, or had kicked him where it hurts, he would soon have got the message. Instead they acquiesced in silence; that is not rape, it is quid pro quo.

Memory Is A Strange Thing

Many years ago I read The Book Of Excuses. I always remembered its author as Chris Welch, whom I knew to be a music journalist. I thought The Book Of Excuses was very lame. Last month I ran into Chris Welch at the fortieth birthday party of ALCS, and we got talking. I mentioned the book to him, and he told me it was not one of his. Are you sure, I asked? Or words to that effect. I was so certain he was the author, but figuring he might be ashamed of it, him being a pleasant guy, and it being a party, I stopped a long way short of accusing him of lying. Later I looked up the book; it was written by Gyles Brandreth, and on looking it over again at Saint Pancras, I realised it wasn’t so bad after all.

Awhile ago I found a ticket to a Joe Satriani concert in the suitcase atop my wardrobe; that’s it below.

I was very much into Satriani at the time and still am; in June 2011, I listed his Flying In A Blue Dream as one of my top fifteen albums. I remember running along the seafront at Blackpool in 1990 late at night listening to The Forgotten (Part Two) as waves crashed against the rocks, something that made me feel great to be alive. Yet I have no recollection at all of the December 1995 concert at Wembley Arena. I must have been there, surely?

How then can any system of justice, criminal or civil, entertain prosecutions of historical cases on the fragmented confabulations of head cases, attention seekers, and plain, old-fashioned liars?