John Martyn OBE

Oh, blimmin eck! Quite as surprising as the fact that he's still alive, is the award to John Martyn of an OBE. You could understand the Colombian govt giving it for services to that country's economy, but he's got it for services to music. Which is quite right - at his peak he trod a quite extraordinary path, never quite sounding like anyone else, and never quite influencing anyone else, but showing that you could do something different. I was a huge fan of his at the time of albums like Bless the Weather and Inside Out where he blended together an angry passion and a painful tenderness. And the music was a bizarre but compelling mixture of hard rock, folk, a bit of jazz, and an early form of trip-hop. It culminated (and fell apart I suppose) in the bitter and tearful Grace and Danger an album where the pain (of his broken marriage) is so unremitting you feel helpless. But that album also brought the element of Phil Collins into his music, and it was never quite the same, always after that a little too tidy.

Meanwhile, he was taking the rocknroll lifestyle to new levels of madness, but somehow survived. Somewhere along the way he lost half a leg, but still managed to keep going. Not just for music, then, but for proving the capacity of the human body to withstand all excess, it's a well deserved honour. Odd to think, though, that Rebecca Adlington got the same award, and she's (presumably) never taken a hard drug or drink in her life.

A Ring of Fools

It must be the cold weather - or certainly the poor offerings on telly these evenings - but I'm tackling another long long work by a dead anti-Semite. In this case, Wagner's Ring, about 14 hours of music. I'm now about 66% through it, with the longest work, Gotterdammerung, to come tomorrow. I'm listening to the CDs and reading the librettos online, the first time I've paid such close attention to the text, rather than simply enjoying the music.

What strikes me most is how stupid almost everyone involved is. In this, it reminds me of Corneille. There is an 'official' reading of the work, according to which the leading characters represent the best of humanity, and there's the reading that someone like me can't help creating, where the so-called virtues of these people are madness.

Take Wotan, assumed to be the chief god. He's crap. And I think Wagner knows it. Partly because he's one god among many, Wotan can't command, but has to negotiate, bargain and wheedle to get what he wants. At the start, he has the builders (Fasolt and Fafner) in, and they're slightly worse than super Mario. To settle the bill, they kidnap his sister, and to get her back he has to give them The Ring, Der Ring, the ring which can give anyone total power, as well as a huge heap of treasure. Once that's gone, the game is really up for Wotan, but he potters about for the next few decades. Fafner kills Fasolt, so gets all the treasure and the ring, but does he enjoy it? Does he go on a nice cruise? Nah, he changes himself into a dragon and just guards the treasure in a cave, and sleeps a lot.

And so on. Of course, as with Corneille, the strength of the work is in the conflict between the 'official' and the subversive reading. Currently, my view is that the 'message' of the work is that the concept of god is illogical, therefore collapses under any 14 hour period of scrutiny. But I would think that.

Ezra Pound

Poor mad, racist, fascist Ezra Pound. I got his complete Cantos for Christmas after it found its way onto my Amazon wish list, when the word usura bubbled back into my mind. Canto XLV is all about usura, and here's a recording of Ez reading it in 1958.

Dooomed!

Harold Pinter

A brilliant screenwriter, a great playwright, a decent actor, a well intentioned but hopelessly inept campaigner, an embarassingly bad poet. Pinter was right to protest against the invasion of Iraq but why did he do it in poetry that would shame a thirteen year old? Google Harold Pinter bad poetry for all the proof you need. But for me, he'll always be a benchmark of Tony Blair's philistinism and totalitarian tendency. When a UK citizen wins the Nobel Prize, you'd think any UK PM would wish to congratulate them. Even if, especially if that writer has been a critic of the government. At the most cynical level, it would be a demonstration of the UK PM's acceptance of free speech and open debate. A celebration, if you will, of our democratic values which we wish to spread throughout the world. When Pinter won the prize, Blair completely ignored it. Pinter wouldn't have wanted Blair's praise, of course. If he'd been offered honours, we can be sure he'd have refused them. We wait to see what (if anything) Gordon Brown has to say following his death.

Funny people

I've now replaced the ads on the right (which earned me nothing! and just continually taunted me with offers of competent tilers in Stokenchurch or somewhere) with a very web2.0 list of feeds by people I consider funny. So far they're all women, curiously. Let's as it were run through them.

Nancy Banks-Smith is, as any Guardian reader know, just the funniest reviewer of television in the world. She must be about a hundred and eight by now. Looks like she's immortal. Let's hope so.

Lucy Mangan is her natural successor. Sometimes her tv reviewing is too obviously influenced by NBS but she's genuinely witty. It helps that she has a Lewisham background - in one of the entries she talks about reading a book in Torridon Road library - and lives, I believe, in Beckenham, where she uses the same Waitrose as me. I'm beginning to sound like a stalker now.

On Balderdash and Piffle Victoria Coren managed to make etymology sexy. Since then, she's hosted Only Connect and is clearly dead clever and dead rich. Talks about poker too often, leaving me utterly confused ("when the flop went down I found I'd been flanneling a turbot"), but has the advantage of brevity that many bloggers (I mean you, Richard Herring) lack. Here's a fascinating recent article from the Observer.

Finally (for now) the one you won't have heard of, Ariane Sherine. She seems to have started the Atheist Bus campaign, and while we'll have to forgive her for having written for My Family, has promise, I think.

Inevitably

the bathroom work has now stopped until the new year. Nothing done today as other work is demanding to be done. Actually, I'm not that bothered. It really is not much more than snagging now, apart from refitting the bath panels, which builder has agreed to do tomorrow. It's more of a problem for builder, because he's having to wait longer for payment. And he's agreed to take £300 off the roofing work that we'd already identified in the new year.

I can at least move my bathroom stuff back into the bathroom for two weeks, which means I have more room in the kitchen. And it means I did a smart thing today in buying a new bogbrush. From Woolworths, as it goes, at a stupid price. What a shop! As each shelf becomes empty, they sell it. The only bags they had (to put things in) were binbags, so I was traipsing around a rather smart town in Kent (hint: I began to feel disgusted and almost wrote a letter to the Telegraph), with this huge sack over my shoulder like a lowrent premature santa.

Some shops have their own atmosphere. Woolworths was desperately sad. I went into Halfords on Saturday to get a new headlamp bulb, and it smelt of disappointed ambition. I went into BHS today for the first time in years. Previously, I was put off by the SALE SALE SALE signs everywhere. Now it's the only shop that doesn't have them. It was halfempty. And HMV was basically saying we know you're going to buy dvds and cds, you don't care how much they cost, you'll even form a snaking queue halfway around the store to pay us. Packed. Bastards. I gave up and, reader, I bought the dvd I was intending to buy in Sainsburys later for £2 less. Take that, HMV!

Not in Norwich

I've amazed myself this morning by being in and out of Bluewater by 10:15. Haven't got Christmas totally (aha) wrapped up yet but I'm well on the way, with literally days to spare. It's still touch and go if the bathroom works will be finished by Christmas. The floor is now grouted and looking good, so what's left:

shower curtain rail
mirror
tighten wc fixing to ground
replace whb splashback with one that actually matches the other colours
a bit of work on the outside window and back door

It's all entirely achievable in one day but ...