demons and angels

When I heard the news last week that people were paying their tributes to the king of pop I feared that the government had found a way that Dandelion and Burdock could be used by terrorists, possibly by combining it with Iron Bru to make nitro glycerine, or perhaps pouring over railway points to make them too sticky to operate, although that might backfire on the saboteurs by washing away the rust and actually making them work properly, and had ordered all stocks removed from the shelves for use only by the military in dropping on wedding receptions in Afganistan. I was still quite sad to discover they were referring to Michael Jackson though, who certainly seemed to have a lot of London newspaper colomnists who knew all of the personal thoughts and demons of a fellow from California they'd seen in a music video in the eighties. Not being endowed with the power of telepathic insight I just tried to think back to when I was young, black and gifted but sadly couldn't remember ever being any of those things, and nowadays would more likely be mistaken for one of the zombies in the thriller video than the man himself, and that just made me feel even worse.


In other showbusiness news original Charlie's Angel Farah Fawcett also left us. Mrs Clewley reminded me of one of the other first angels when we met, more specifically the one who never took her clothes off in the show. That was a regret back then, but should be seen as more of a blessing nowadays. I heard somebody say something to the effect that when someone we had in poster form on our bedroom wall in our youth dies then a bit of our own youth fades a little too. This is something we all share and as I felt last week so even Gordon Brown, often depicted as lacking human warmth, will feel when Kim Jong Il finally shuffles off this mortal coil and the world of unelected hereditary tin pot dictators gets a little bit smaller. Gordon Brown does claim that his own North Korea style authoritarianism at home and military threats abroad are in pursuit of democracy and not in ensuring that his own future earnings on the US lecture circuit match his predecessor's however the speed with which someone's light hearted swipe at the influence the Ministry of Defence have on the local affairs of this district vanished from the Richmond website message board last week at the demand of Richmondshire District Council suggests that unless Afghanistan is getting rather more democracy than we're getting at home it's probably best to give stunts like yesterday's 'Armed Forces Day' the wide berth they deserve and stay in, make a cup of tea, and wistfully click one more time on 'One day in your life' on youtube instead.