Youth

We have a niece coming to stay, I think she's about fifteen, but I'm not sure. It throws us in to all sorts of slightly enjoyable quandries since we are not used to others about the place. Like for instance, what do they like to eat? Will they say everything is 'awesome' all the time? What will they think of all the stuff on our walls- especially the girl in the wheelbarrow holding a gun against the clown who's fucking her while wheeling her around? Can she watch Tv for long stretches of the evening? Can we? Will I fall over again dancing to 'Street Fighting Man? Do we have Coca Cola or should we encourage a slug of wine? It is a world of imponderables.

Scott says stock up on shaped chicken nuggets and ketamine and she'll be fine.

Paul Shepheard

Paul is a superb writer on architecture, the best of his generation I think. Three lovely books: 'What is Architecture?', 'The Cultivated Wilderness', and 'Artificial Love' prove it, they are an inspiration. So we went along to see him talk last night at the 'Longplayer' festival in docklands, which means a festival you can't find even with sat-nav in your taxi because the road system seems designed to throw you all over the place other than where you want to go via flyover and in circles around HSBC headquarters. Anyway, there we were on some wharf or another, with planes screaming overhead periodically.

He doesn't disappoint. When you eventually get there, there is certainly poetry. My problem is, am I in the mood for poetry? I first met Paul on a flight to Munster and we agreed a trickiness in flying over Germany, especially if you imagined your plane a Lancaster, but that's about it, he was very funny, and I buggered up a launch of his by talking about my own work rather than his by mistake, but I follow from a distance and via my students response to his texts.

Clearly something has happened to me, while I can seep into that silky world I started to get irritated. So I chirped up. Julie likes me to chirp up, she usually nudges me to do so as if thwacking a horse with a whip. The sort of thing I chirp up with these days is; 'Neoliberalist bullshit!'

Or words to the effect. I say:

'You can't ignore the 700,000 kids who died at Stalingrad on the the Russian side alone, people who died in ideological struggle - and say that no matter what happens to us hornbills will still roost dangerously on some island of Scotland!'..... 'We are not birds!!' I exclaim... 'If we are not here, the world no longer exists to us!'

It was the return of that Ian Sinclair moment. I am clearly troubled.

Hookers in Las Vegas

Woke up thinking about a couple of hookers in Las Vegas. It's good to have known a couple of hookers in Las Vegas, it made me smile. It's not as if I do it all the time, this was my first recollection in ten years. Was it Standal who said his finest memory in life was his first visit to a brothel? I can understand that. It was a poignant memory, not sordid in anyway at all, in fact the opposite really, touching. I remember Morgan getting drunk and saying The Shawshank Redemption was the best film ever made and you knew she meant it in every way. She looked like Stevie Nicks. We were sitting at a bar in Caesars, fending off a redneck. She wrote to me later. That's what I mean by touching not sordid. We actually exchanged addresses.

Writing on the Wall

Julie's gone out with an old friend returning from New York, which means, for me, a good dose of Keef's shepherds pie and Little Feat's 'Rock and Roll Doctor' just excellent, also 'Spanish Moon' off 'Feats Don't Fail Me Now' then a touch of Joe Satriani in his blue dream, then it will probably mature (!) to Rush and the crowd pleasing 'Spirit of the Radio', maybe ACDC live with 'Thunderstruck' later. I wish sometimes I could be more imaginative.

But, when I was in the White Horse yesterday staring at the MTV screen, I realized I have no clue about contemporary music at all. McLuhan was right about all this stuff, I can't get it because I don't get the technology that goes into it, let alone the sounds generated, which I can only categorize via genre, just as I can only say famous girls of the fifties; huge breasts, famous girls of the sixties; no breasts, famous girls today; bottoms. But no matter, I sit around watching Battlefield Detectives and think about the Romans.

Girl from New York apparently making headway with 3D photos which I don't understand either.

The excellent Dan sent me a message today from Beijing saying he's second in command of a project for a city for 42 million people in China. He's just got his degree. They might take him to Macao for fun with the authorities because he's from Hull. As a good Marxist he should absorb all information.

Writings on the wall ladies and gentlemen.

McLuhan

Spent the morning ramping up 'cause and effect' 'We're not in the C16th' I said, 'it's not a case of divine wind' unfortunately mixing my metaphors. I was thinking about papyrus. Marshall McLuhan says that the Romans could build straight roads because they imported papyrus from Egypt and could hence make durable lightweight maps. Presumably you need maps to build straight roads. On straight roads you run chariots and march legions. Without straight roads (the Dark Ages- caused by Egyptian ban on papyrus exports!) you need cavalry, and for cavalry in heavy armour you need stirrups. Now to bring empires down to stirrups or lack of them is a bit questionable. However, sure thing the ancient Greeks didn't have papyrus he says, and didn't build roads in straight lines either. However they certainly did have chariots, so how do you square that? I thought Greece was just too hilly.

However I do believe in the more complex enquiry in to cause and effect. As I enjoyed refreshment in the White Horse, the ever reliable Lily said she 'wanted to go to California, join a commune and worship carrots'. I wondered if this didn't rather discriminate against other inhabitants of the vegetable patch, onions for instance, or broad beans, but she was having none of it.

'Tendrils' she said.

Quiet Coach

They should re-name the 'quiet coach' the 'confrontation coach'. We have yet to have ridden the railways in the sure knowledge of quietitude. Instead, we find ourselves in arguments, admittedly sometimes silent arguments with each other, but sometimes boiling over into stark confrontation with the young family playing snap, or the lady re-scheduling her precious fucking film shoot on her mobile phone. Why on earth, if you're a mum with three young shouting kids eager to go on holiday, did you book the quiet coach in the first place? I'm sure next time we will be hailed as heroes by the silent majority of 'quiet coach' dwellers as the quite coach militia. We should wear tee shirts. Or maybe, when it comes to the next booking, I'll just say 'Well do you fancy a little confrontation next Sunday darling?' Or would you prefer some peace and quiet in the noisy section?

We were only going to Peterborough, but I can assure you a weekend with mum and dad is exhausting work. Hence we snapped at the snap. Endless questions such as 'Do you have a whisk then?' are the sort of thing you get from elderly mums and dads, and then there's the endless 'Would you like some coffee?' when after about a million exclamations, they must know you don't touch the stuff. Or, when you retreat to the Garden Centre, 'Did you have a nice coffee?' 'No we went to the pub'. Still, it is their world, and we join in as best we can.

Soho today

Trying to write my history book in the mornings, I got to the Romans today, completing ancient Greece yesterday, and found myself juggling Asterix with Gibbon, Carry on Cleo and Up Pompeii! Ventured out to the West End as oft I used to do in search of less rarified air. The hairdressers next to the Coach and Horses has historically been most convenient, and I thought; 'A haircut always cheers you up' and 'a chance to cut loose like a dog off the leash' etc etc. After a couple of stops on the way (a dog has his lamp posts) I found myself back in the Coach anxious to see how new owners Fullers were doing, only to find the old manager Alistair still in charge and the place still bereft of carpets or anything or anybody hospitable. I don't know how he did it, manage to ruin a whole institution in such a short time. Anyway Mark was there still becoming an astrophysicist wearing a straw cowboy hat.

I braced myself for a visit next door, only to be comforted by the sight of Laila from Lithuania. If you are going to sit supine in anybodies chair (dentists/hairdressers/psychiatrists etc) I definitely prefer to be sure of the operators powers, and the lovely Laila not only looked as if she could pull a tractor (a look I've always liked) but had the most fantastic tits.

Suitably reclined, I watched her work away to create the most esteemed of victorian beards. Thankfully one part of Soho still works, but the rest, I guess I'm past it now, twenty years in the Coach was enough, let it go, to be honest I couldn't wait to get home.

Murdoch as Faust

Rupert Murdoch reminds me of my father. Watching him this afternoon, of course frail, but still thumping his hand on the desk continually, almost like he had some nervous affliction, not pretty, but you see, he's old, but when guys like him are old they don't stop, they get worse! His appearance told me that this is what he does on a day to day basis to everybody he encounters- thump the desk-still extolling his innocence, his righteousness, his roots, his belief, to everyone. There could be no better contemporary incarnation of a Faustian figure. Faustian figures need to read the story of Faust.

My father has never read a book as far as I know, I figure Rupert Murdoch has only ever read a newspaper. This indeed was 'his most humbling moment' but when your interest in the News of the World only counts for 1% of your empire, don't try and tell me you are not a total bastard when you peddle shit like Fox News.

So they all roll over as best they can, leaving the forensics to chase the real tale. It could be the real tale is something that most of us know but would rather not say, that the whole business is rotten to the core. If it is, and perhaps it has always been, only the radical perpetuation of an ideal of truth beyond what people 'believe' will suffice to draw us out of it, and it will be a planetary truth way beyond the contingences of present political shit.

Flakes

Little could put a smile on my face more than the thought of David Cameron squealing back to London with his sphincter firmly clenched at the thought that everything might possibly go totally tits up for his government of privilege. Especially since we spent most of the weekend in the dark because the local scaghead had whipped out our electricity supply isolators in desperation so he might sell the copper and buy one last shot of smack, and Tower Hamlets had outsourced all it's emergency services to totally flakey so called service providers, who in any reasonable world would be renamed service non-providers, who sit in vans in laybyes somewhere scratching their balls and finding each others jokes, practical or otherwise, utterly hilarious.

The unfortunate heroin addict, in any reasonable world should be looked after, given his heroin, cleaned up, given a room and care so that he might, just might, slowly get himself out of whatever hell he's in now. The conglomerate service non-providers, the Mears and Morrisons of this world, have grown too big to know anything about what they are doing at all, and probably spend all day fiddling the books while the non-operatives sit in their vans reading The Sun.

Two whole floors were out; families with babies, old people, those who don't know what day it is, those who can't speak English and don't know what the Council is. We phoned the council on the hour every hour (when we weren't sleeping) but by Monday morning, almost twenty hours later, Mears hadn't even heard of us.

LA Woman

Most rock and roll is about trying to die. If rock stars don't understand this they are deluded. Just listen to the Doors LA Woman with some kind of sensitivity. Trying to die and not succeeding is the key to teenage and other hearts. ROCK will disappear when it becomes ordinary or programatic. ROCK could be the last vestige of ancient greece, this ancient violence and duty and possible virtue.

Absurd Superstructure

How many standard performance indicators does it take to change a lightbulb? Following on from below, I read today that over the last thirty years, universities have increased their administrative staff by 85%, they have increased something called 'associated professional staff' by 240% and increased faculty teaching by a mere 51%. One again the ridiculous nature of our predicament is made clear, this is 'superstructure' that is absurdly unnecessary, simply representing 'everybody checking on everybody else' whilst in terms of production, the margins for profitability are so thin that we find the banks and media cheating to keep the ship afloat. But even at my university, we spend a whole two months out of the total academic year examining students. That leaves a rather small amount of time actually teaching them. With more regulation, demanded by the seemingly inevitable malpractice, this becomes a vicious circle.

Medievilism

Faster than I thought, we return to medievilism; the clean are dirty, the dirty are virtuous. Back then, the saints were filthy. Evil monsters lived in the sea, so cleanliness in general was suspicious. After another meeting today I can see it right before my eyes, those in the smart suits are those leading the charge to ruin everything in the name of all ducks set in the line, a corrupt line of course, but one that puts up a good face. Of course this has been happening for ages, and I'm thankful architectural departments in universities are most suspicious of such types, most resilient, seeing as all students and staff in architecture know it's best run on dirt. But it's going to very very hard to preserve this heritage.

On recovery from that meeting, I met a 'ducks in a line' merchant in the White Horse. Must be a decent chap because he was drinking himself sensible. He told me a few stories, all confidential of course, like the one about the 'dreamweaver' hired from California (where else?) for £7,000 a day by a government department, to well, facilitate 'well being'. When I come across these people and these figures, I know I'm a poor dirty wretch for sure.

And as I watch, over and over, the latest News Corp news, I realize moral indignation, the only emotion brought to the table, is not much of a tool to operate with. It should be Zizek and Badiou up there, scoffing at such 'moral indignation' and telling us exactly how it is- that a society gets what it deserves, that the system is bankrupt, not the bank, not the media company, not the country.

Wheeler Dealers

OK, so why do I find Wheeler Dealers interesting. Well for one, in this realm of invisible technology, the tall guy fixes cars up like you would like to yourself - it's nostalgic. Unlikely as it might sound, I have stripped engines and stuff, I've run my own motorcycles and fixed them in very strange circumstances in very strange places I can hardly remember, so it certainly appeals to me. It is a youthful thing to do, strip an engine or whatever, put it together again, ride off in to the sunset. Second, the cars are de-mystified in the process, you get to the essentials of the value of the car. But what is the value of the car? That's why you need the little guy; because the car has to be sold for a profit, so the balance between use and exchange value is somewhat volatile, and the little guy is just interested in the money and enthusiastic about the cars at the same time- the balance has to be struck- you love it and you have to sell it- a dichotomy perhaps. A happy ending is he loves the car and he also sells it. That's NOT what car/bike fans do. So you the viewer are the beneficiary here- at least in prospect. And they don't charge in the labour- they do it for love.

Salad Days are Over

I'm not sure how the term 'salad days' came about, but I can tell you that I fear as far as this correspondent is concerned, they're over. Academic meetings are never good for Paul kind, never ever, and this time came the realization that despite having grown up to write about little than sitting in pub and other amusements in the everyday realm of life, and believing my new boss supported such activities to the hilt, there may be a requirement for me to go backwards and write an 'academic paper'. I'll have to look on my cv to work out when I last wrote an academic paper. I wasn't much impressed by them and soon moved on to more interesting and less box ticking genres (writing for books/magazines) until I got pissed off with them as well and ended up being far too tempted by episodes of 'Wheeler Dealers' (Bond Bug today- COOL!!) and a good afternoon snooze/read with the classics to hand and, I guess, this little enterprise of blogging and the little books Julie and I publish ourselves. Bugger it. The machine flexes it's muscles once more.

At the end of my academic paper writing career I would simply have written a paper on 'Wheeler Dealers' itself, in fact I wrote quite a good paper on why architectural education is (while wonderful) essentially a waste of time in the most profound sense. But I can't go back to that. I suppose I could write about the perfect bacon sandwich.

Barbarella

Barbarella must be one of the most preposterous films ever made. I stayed up last night goggle eyed at the idea that Roger Vadim could have got away with it. I mean, the discussions:

'So what's the plot?'

'Well Barbarella, whose a piece of space easy and incidentally my wife, finds herself on the planet Splodge, and is variously fiddled around with in and out of lots of costumes.....er.......not much else'

'What about the other characters then?'

'Well we've got a blind angel with erectile dysfunction, Anita Pallenberg playing an evil witch because she's an evil witch....but would you believe it she sounds like Fenella Fielding in Carry on Screaming, and a bloke who looks like Keith Moon to play a bloke like Keith Moon who plays a orgasmatron thing which Jane breaks because......well.......she's insatiable........as I well know'.

'OK sounds great.....go ahead, here's a few million quid.'

Those were some days. But maybe we could do with a bit more utterly ridiculous space fantasy. We seem to have lost our touch that way, it's all become a bit too real and a bit too disheartening.

(PS But I can't help thinking about Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest)

Postscript

Please see postscript below.

Fuck You Murdoch

That bag of shit the News of the World has closed. Spirits lift: Van Halen's Jump goes on the system loud. Those guys were genuine. I do the washing up, clearing up the house just as you should at such news. I just hope my neighbours understand that playing 'Drop Dead Legs' at high volume represents pure Marxist Leninist political exuberance (However I doubt it , they are already pissed off with the other neighbours praying to Allah.)

This is great news, the closing of a shit newspaper, and don't be daft I know it will be replaced by more shit news and 'we are all just pissing in the wind' (Neil Young On The Beach Ambulance Blues- fabulous) but just give me that moment to say 'Fuck You Murdoch'. He must have realized he had one hell of a fire in the hole.

Postscript: It is interesting that the banks were too big to fail, and now the media is too big to fail. Despite widespread understanding that illegal practices have been almost universal in both cases. Perhaps that's because it is the only way to make money as we crawl toward the end of times. To be frank it makes the Borghias look like Everybody Loves Raymond, it makes Watergate look like some kind of minor classroom prank. Here we have the press, the politicians, the police, all in it up to their necks, it is absolute corruption as a way of life, it is sordid and miserable. It makes Bellousconi look righteous. The scum has risen to the top, largely because the public wanted them to, they bought the newspapers, they voted in the politicians, they believe the judiciary, they think the police are good, they will turn a blind eye to everything as long as there are 99p fish fingers in Iceland.

But I'm not going to let it get me down, but if Mr Milliband had any balls, he could have these people.

Playboy Club

My review of the new Playboy Club in Mayfair is presently in the July Architectural Review. Not surprisingly you can't buy the Architectural Review in Bethnal Green so I haven't read it yet, also I doubt many of you subscribe, and on top of that I'm absolutely certain it will have been hacked about by an intern or two. However, of course, that is their job. So here it is in the original for your hopeful pleasure:

It’s easy to feel despondent when you walk down Park Lane. The tyranny of opulence, a low millage Lamborghini for £199,000 or a white Range Rover that looks like it’s been crossed with a Gucci handbag all unspeakable, and I’m escorting my somewhat flagging middle-aged mojo for a spot of re-vitalization at the newly opened Playboy Club. Playboy has certainly managed to put a twinkle back in it’s own eye. Playboy started with ‘Heff’ at the kitchen table with a big idea and a naked pin up of Marilyn Monroe in 1953, grew to make Playboy one of the more radical publications of an era, spread itself to kooky mansions and into aeroplanes and hideaways of rock and roll largesse, started gaming clubs for everybody who thought he was James Bond (I am of the age where my only slightly older colleagues married Playboy bunnies) and then retired to the surer ground of broadcast media as feminism grasped the physically preposterous politics of girls dressed as rabbits.

As I strolled in through the discrete glass portal, full of these imaginings and half memories, I was rather hoping to be met by a buxom playmate who would nuzzle up and gently sooth my battered ego over several cocktails until I tottered out, temporarily sated, back into the bruising metropolis. So what if it was five thirty in the afternoon.

How old fashioned I am. I was greeted by half a dozen executives for this and that, including the highly obliging architects from Jestico and Whiles. This was not rumpled suit territory; this was corporate new tomorrow. Playboy is back with a brand stronger than ever in the franchise business. We have Playboy Las Vegas, Macau, and Miami, there will no doubt be Moscow and Cancun, all franchises under the wing of umbrella casino operations. Playboy now sells style like Lacoste but with no merchandise other than itself. There was the US representative for Playboy, a man of smart dark suit, white open necked shirt and the more than a smidgen of essence of Daniel Craig or Jude Law. He reminded me of those young entrepreneurs, living the dream at both ends, who grace the pages of LA Style. There were PA for the club and PA the architects, there are many stories to be communicated about this new brand, this new atmosphere, this new experience. There are also plenty of questions that nobody wanted to answer. That is the post-modern business world for you.

The design, which you might be able to detect down into the microfibres of the carpets, bares the theme of heaven and hell, with a side of Alice in Wonderland (disappearing down a rabbit hole). It is louche, louche, louche and nothing, nothing is left to accident. Cigar smoke curls on the ceiling, but as an effect. There are monograms on the walls and silhouettes in the lifts, there are series of fabulous bar displays. Sumptuous ice buckets descend into tables. It is not the memorabilia store of the Hard Rock Café, and neither is it the sexualized warehouse of Spearmint Rhino. The architects flexed their subtlety muscles just as far as they could, squeezing themselves into every detail, with printed movable translucent fabric screens around the fine dining area that offer, when in action, rather a nice parody of Maurice Binder’s intro sequences to the Bond films. The toilets offer bewildering complexity worthy of Lewis Carroll. There are some large retro prints on the wall, but only around the comparatively neutral staircase linking the two floors. They have resisted the museum, instead this is all about detail, nuance, accent and atmosphere; an architecture which includes the minimum two inch high heels for the bunnies and possibly their perfume too.

So of course that restaurant is not serving Bond’s favourite spaghetti bolognaise washed down with a rough Chianti, it is serving fusion food. Fusion food is what you get in Mayfair, just as Park Lane symbolizes everything and nothing simultaneously. Bond was a phantom of already bygone Britain. International late capitalism replaced him in as many guises as you like, and you will no doubt find them all in the Playboy club. To paraphrase AA Gill, you’ve couldn’t be shabby here, you’d let down your car.

And what of the burning question; the contemporary relevance of those bunnies? The answer could not be easier; with the current fashion for the burlesque, what was considered degrading in ancient history is now easily considered rather cool retro chic. Four thousand ladies applied for the eighty-two bunny costumes.

William and Kate balls

Snapped to attention last night as the news, with yet another fawning report on the Royals in Canada, expressed the notion that they might 'be going off to investigate by themselves' in a canoe. The pleasurable thought of an upturned canoe floating empty across some vast expanse of unforgiving water floated straight in to our minds.

I used to know a News International journalist, he went mad and started throwing chairs out of windows after a couple of afternoon Holstein Pils, ended up in hospital with a whole gamut of crises. Terribly nice chap.

Just the image of Tony Blair kissing Rebecca Brookes on both cheeks made my skin crawl. Cameron is no better, up to his neck in it if you ask me. Somebody did, a nice boy who came round for advice about choosing a university, well not just that, even a course. I suggested PPE, but I think he'll plump for journalism. Of course journalists are all shits and politicians are no better according to him, but he seemed to relish the challenge. Thankfully some people still do.

Photo of girl 'nooing' with the nice arse from 'innerhippy.com'. A cautionary tale (quite amusing) of a couple from Richmond or somewhere like that.

Sky Plus balls

Despite the fact that a survey of our middle class identified the Queen (1) Bear Grylls (2), Jamie Oliver (5) and Anne Widdecombe (10) in the top ten of people who are role models for us all, I want you to know I don't hate everything. I can even sit through Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason as a last resort of saturday evening programming as long as I'm thinking thoughts such as 'Well they couldn't have made this schmaltz without the aid of Josef Goebels' (think about it). However It appears I am at war with the TV schedules, because I don't have Sky Plus and I don't look at anything whenever I want to. Frankly the opportunity would be too bewildering and give me what Julie calls, 'fuzzy head'. So having sat through the sentimental slop of 'Jones' that feeds the masses so successfully I would have to stay up to watch a treat like 'Heat' (with the finest heist shootout of all time by the utterly fabulous Michael Mann) or even Lethal Weapon Two of which little is actually memorable at all but I still like it. But I'm too tired and I want to go to bed.

However, when I get up in the morning I can also delight to the surprise of finding the indomitable James Robertson Justice star in the classic B&W WW2 escape caper Very Important Person. Now that sort of surprise justifies the good old schedules, so maybe it's not best to have whatever you want whenever you want it after all.

Back in the Trench

Once more, my tutorial with Scott the horseman of the apocalypse turns hysterically funny and suicidally tragic at the same time. The cycle of development, we figure, takes many forms and many time frames, most of which we appear to prefer short term to keep things easy. If you don't think like this your world gets extremely problematic, but at least you are thinking about something else other your next holiday.

The big one, the long one, that of our Great Western Enlightenment Project, which runs something like absolutism (Pharaohs) through feudalism through mercantilism through to capitalism (at which point you have an interesting choice of progression) probably is reversing itself. What goes up, after all, must go down. It's possible that with the new world of the super corporation - movable money rather than national asset - the Toyota Parthenon rather than the Greek Parthenon, that we have already moved onward to mercantilism again. As resources diminish, feudalism will follow, and before you know it we'll be back to the land of the pharaohs. Of course we can witness this decline easily and most vividly in films such as 'The Time Machine', there our destination inverts the Great Pyramid into a great pit in the earth where you die. HG Wells may have been an egotistical loony but he does now seem to have a point.

Ooooooh

Football fans don't go 'Oooooooh' when their player misses a shot. Football fans shout 'wanker', 'you fucking wanker' and much worse. This of course makes tennis a middle class sport and football the working class ballet, at least that's how it appears. Pippa Middleton may well be muttering 'fucking wanker' at Wimbledon, and I'd like it much more if she did, but it would these days be always under her breath, and probably getting deeper under it as she scales the British social ladder, even though the upper classes here are famous for their bad language. This is a curious paradox and the viciousness of appearances and spectacle. I wish she'd accepted that offer from Vivid to do a porn film for a million or two, that would have been most decent of her.

There's a good chapter on 'Oooooooooooooooooooohs' in Josef Heller's Catch 22 (pg236), one of my favourite novels, where 'Oooo....h's' become catching in the briefing room as a particularly voluptuous nurse in a tight top accompanies General Dreedle. Major Danby, concentrating on clocks and procedure, utters the final 'Ooooh' amongst the silencing of 'Oooooo...h's'. Dreedle immediately replies; 'Take him out and shoot him' as a result of this unfortunate last 'Ooooh'. But it was only really an 'Oh' because he actually 'Oh'd' at something else entirely (timekeeping). The nuance of language, the absurdity of life, is all there. I guess we might try the same with 'Aaaagh's' and their various meanings. I guess that's how I'd like to read bloody fucking Wimbledon.