The ugliness of evil

Don't ask why, but this evening I've been looking at the website of the National Front. As a result, this post includes swearing.

I didn't think the NF still existed, but it does. Its main raison d'etre these days seems to be to criticise the BNP for being a bit namby-pamby bleeding-heart libby-wibby.

The racism, the sexism, the homophobia, etc aren't surprising. Depressing, yes, but what you'd expect. And they're honest:

the National Front would halt all non-white immigration into Britain and introduce a policy of phased and humane repatriation of all coloured people currently resident here

well, honest apart from that word 'humane'. And of course that unproblematic use of the word 'coloured'. And, unsurprisingly,

The NF would repeal the laws permitting homosexuality and its promotion.

There's a policy both inhumane and unrealistic. Any incidence of homosexuality will not be permitted. So half of Shakespeare's sonnets would have to be banned. But then, he fancied a 'dark lady', so what would you expect? Probably best to ban him entirely. And Oscar Wilde, obviously. Tennyson's suspect. And Dickens - have you ever pondered the subtext of David Copperfield's infatuation for Steerforth? Ban it!

What gives me most comfort, though, is not the sheer lunacy of the policies and the mindset behind them, but the total shit of the website design. Look at it! Just look at it! (Actually, don't look at it if you're at work!) Images squeezed into distorted boxes, text that you basically can't read because of the choice of colours and background, and animated images that take you back to the 1990s. Is the NF's membership so small that it can't even recruit a half-competent designer? Well, yes.

I remember the NF march through Lewisham in 1977. The NF site says:

[The march] was violently attacked by a large mob, possibly 10,000 strong, of Red rabble. Bricks, bottles, iron railings and other missiles were hurled at the patriots marching through Lewisham but the attempt to halt the Front failed - as it always does. Over 300 Marxists were arrested but not one NF member. Again the NF smashed its way into the national headlines!

You misunderstand, dear nazis. 10,000 people turned out to oppose you because you were evil and seen as a threat. The police arrested your opponents and protected you because that's what the police were like those days. These days you're no less evil, but no-one cares. You're history. And your website, like you, is really fucking ugly.

Charlton 2 Brentford 0

A lovely sunny day again, with the early kick-off bathing the West Stand in unwonted sunshine, and although this was more of a challenge than the two previous home games, it still felt comfortable and Charlton sit at the top of the league with six wins out of six. Unless Leeds win by five or more, that's where they'll be this evening.

Brentford are the best team we've seen come to the Valley this season, with a number 7, Sam Saunders, who could probably do really well in a higher division, but at times Charlton played beautiful, unstoppable football, particularly in the build up to the second goal. It was thrilling to watch the ball being passed around so fluently in the midfield, and I was already on my feet when Lloyd Sam got the ball in space and made a cool job of finishing it. He got a well-deserved standing ovation when substituted. He's in the best form of his life.

The first goal had come from Deon Burton, it was less pretty but maybe more important as it may give him more of the striker's main need - confidence. He again played well throughout as a holding forward, but needed more help from someone running off him - I mean Jonjo Shelvey, who once again was disappointing. The buzz around him can't have helped his game, but he needs to forget about it and start making a nuisance of himself around opposition defences. Too often today he gave up too early. He was replaced by Izale Macleod with 15 minutes to go, who looked very lively, causing problems by running at the defence with the ball. It's the obvious thing to do, but too rarely happens.

Robert Elliot still doesn't look quite the finished product - his control of the area at dead balls sometimes looks uncertain - but he pulled off a wonderful save shortly before the end of the match.

So, on we go. The next game is Southampton at home, which we should win. So we'll have 21 points in mid-September, and kids will be asking where's their Easter egg.

Dear David Howarth, MP for Cambridge

You will shortly be approached by a loud-voiced woman who dresses a lot like Hyacinth Bucket on a visit to the John Lewis soft furnishing department. Her name is Gillian and she probably comes from Beckenham or the Hayes area. She will doubtless mention her friendship with Bill Bryson, and ask if you can help find a car-park, possibly in Wolverhampton in two weeks time. She is likely to mention that she is a life member of the National Liberal Club. That's why she is counting on your help. Thought you should know this, because, thanks to a phone call and her loud voice, the rest of the bloody train carriage she was in this morning does. Thank you.

Counting down

This is not an interesting post, tbh, just one of those people write to fill in the gaps.

The countdown really has begun now: in a month's time, I'll be retired. Retired! It hardly seems possible, I hear you gasp. At last, I've started running down the workload, but there's going to be lots left over. I've got yet another complaint about what qualifies a child to be a Catholic. I am becoming an expert. So I'll tell the story of why Pope John Paul II was not a Catholic.

There's a Catholic boys' school in London that is very popular. So it gives preference to Catholic boys, and defines catholicism quite stricly according to canon law. This says that a child should take First Communion as soon as possible after they reach the Age of Reason, and that the Age of Reason is 7. So for a boy to be Catholic, he has to take First Communion before he's 8. But in Poland, they do things differently. Children don't take Communion until they are 9 or 10. The school turned down an application from a Polish boy because of this. I found out that Pope John Paul II, educated in Poland of course, had not taken Communion until he was 9 or 10. At this, the school changed its mind.

But they were right. Canon Law seems really clear on this, and it's universal: local Churches really shouldn't change it. So the Pope was not a Catholic. Most of Poland - which you'd assume to be the most Catholic country in Europe - isn't.

Second reason for celebration is Charlton's successful passage through the transfer window. No important players going and a little bit of back-up coming in. Since my last post, the winning streak has gone up to five games - Charlton's best ever start to a season. (Last season, they didn't record their fifth win until January!) And the next two games (home to Brentford and Southampton) look entirely winnable. It's utterly bizarre and intoxicating.

Charlton 2 Walsall 0

Another comfortable win. In fact it got a bit boring towards the end. Am I supporting the same club who caused me such misery last year? Shouldn't complain, of course, and it was a lovely warm - even hot - afternoon, with the heat affecting some of the players. Is the whole division as bad as Wycombe and Walsall? There really seems to be a huge gap in quality between the standard in this league and the Championship. Or maybe it's that Charlton still have some players of more or less premiership standard. Again, Charlton should have won by more, but it was a delight to watch a lot of the midfield play today. Jose Semedo was outstanding. Apparently Ray Wilkins was at the game scouting Jonjo Shelvey, but he had a quiet game, with a couple of moments of simple misjudgement.

The away support was the sparsest I've seen at the Valley - maybe 150 made the journey.

The goals were scored by Lleira (a messy scramble after a free kick) and Scott Wagstaff, about a minute after coming on as a sub for a clearly peeved Lloyd Sam, who had once again looked like he was enjoying himself.

And to top the day off, on the DLR from Greenwich to Lewisham I got the driver's seat. It was a day when nothing went wrong.

Misogyny watch

Back to Victoria Coren again. And, before it's deleted, a reader's response to her column in Sunday's Observer. The column was about women's propensity to cry and how to deal with this positively. Funny and well-written as always, but as one commenter pointed out, it could almost be a trap set for misogynists. It took him a while but at 7:38pm - nearly a whole day after publication - someone called YCC1953 offered this:

I realize this whole article was an exercise in clever writing. More form then content. (I'll bet MS. Coren chuckled to herself all the while typing away at her oh so superior non-goldfish intelect) However, comparing someones intelligence to a goldfish isn't the same as comparing their memory to that of a goldfish........one is funny, the other is insulting and if a man had said it would be outrageous, ......you have a memory like a goldfish because you have a lot of other things going on in there and not because you don't have the smarts.

Damn you and your clever writing, Coren! And how dare you insult goldfish? (I think that's what he's trying to say). How does one type away at one's intellect, by the way?

And then this:

why do you even bother to get boob jobs and wear tight clothes? you want to attract men only to belittle them and tell them how useless they are.....

Quite moving, really. There's a lot of pain there. Part of me wants to give him a manly hug, call him 'mate' and say 'Mate. Mate. It'll pass. You will love again.' But most of me just wants to point and laugh.

I was going to include a quote from Jake Thackray. In researching it, I found he died nearly seven years ago. How did I miss that? Anyway, here's the quote, mixing a misogyny that was probably partly real with a wit and brilliance that buys a lot of forgiveness:

Please understand I respect and admire the frailer sex
And I honour them every bit as much as the next
misogynist

Charlton 3 Wycombe Wanderers 2

The new season started with many of the features of last. The first half was a bit like a training game, Charlton playing the ball around nicely, and totally dominating, but lacking that final killer element. Had a two goal lead after 35 minutes but then Llera went off with a head injury and Charlton began to play a defensive game, trying to hold the position until halftime. OH FOR GOD'S SAKE CHARLTON CAN'T DEFEND DON'T EXPECT THEM TO DO THIS FOR TEN WHOLE MINUTES WITH A PLAYER MISSING. Thirty seconds before bandaged Llera came back, Wycombe scored the goal that got them back into the game, when they should have been buried.

The second half started well with the two goal advantage restored after 4 minutes. With half an hour to go, Parkinson made two substitutions: Andy Gray and Izale Macleod on for Lloyd Sam and Deon Burton, who'd both been playing pretty well. After that the team just seemed to lose any pattern, and it was desperate defending by Charlton most of the time, during which Wycombe got a second goal - gleefully running through a disappearing defence. The referee sent himself off for the last ten minutes or so. Someone suggested he'd realised this probably wasn't the job for him, but he pretended to have cramp or a pull, and strapped ice to his thigh.

So what should have been a routine win - against what surely will be one of the worst sides in the Division - turned out to be nailbitingly tense.

First impressions of this year's team are that we've held on to more of the good players than I feared, and some of them - Bailey, Shelvey, Sam, Semedo - should really be looking forward to enjoying themselves at this level. Lleira is big but slow. Richardson, the new right back, looked generally OK. The most annoying player was Kelly Youga. He's enormously gifted but has terrible lapses in concentration. The substitutions look like a mistake; but how can changing two attackers for two attackers make your defence turn into toddlers?

The materials are there for a promotion challenge, mostly - the biggest lack is cover in the centre of defence - but Parkinson still needs to do work on the basics, like concentration.

As for Wycombe. They looked fairly clueless in the first half, but Charlton specialise in making bad teams look dangerous. Their support was disappointing: they didn't fill the south end, and you'd think that their first game at this level in a ground that's not so far away would be a bigger draw than it turned out to be. But then, it's only Wycombe ... probably half the population of the town was at the Valley today.