More Letters Never Sent

Back in August, 2014, I took to the habit of saying exactly what I felt needed to be said when engaging with others through social media, then not saying it, instead filing my testimony away with others of its kind in a place where it could do no harm. This practice has saved a lot of arguments which probably wouldn't have been worth having, and gets it out of my system. Having already shared a golden cornucopia of these passive-aggressive - and probably a little confusing given the lack of context - treasures, here's another helping in the absence of my having done anything even remotely interesting this week.

You know who else speaks as they see it? Very small children who have yet to develop the intelligence to reason anything through. I realise this will sound harsh, but then truth hurts, as they say; but if anyone remembers being about fifteen and believing you know everything there is to know, then compare that to how fucking ridiculous that same fifteen-year old seems once you're a little older. That's how Katy Hopkins looks to those of us who have tried to keep on learning as we've grown older, and that's why we get called whinning lefties (sic) by people who can't spell the principal language of their own country and who haven't made any effort to understand any argument which isn't their own, as prepackaged from the usual sources - because they're intimidated and feel justifiably inferior.

Sorry if that makes anyone feel sad. It's because you're thick, not because we're the liberal media elite. Please feel free to address this argument when you've learned how to compose a sentence using your own words.

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I'm not scared of it in the least. I simply regard it as pointless, at best a soon to be technological appendix on the way to a device which might actually do something that needs doing rather than just saving idiots the effort of walking three feet to the dimmer switch.

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Given that my wife's entire point was about semantic riddles rather than a discussion of gender politics, piss off and please try to avoid making assumptions about what potentially bigoted views others may or may not hold based on a joke you either didn't understand or chose to take as a statement for reasons best known to yourself. Ta.

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Commiserations. If it's any consolation, my worst ever disaster spiral ended a day of that sort of stuff with myself sat on the toilet suffering from mysterious explosions of such force as to warrant my screaming, how the fucking fuck did it get up there?, having somehow managed to blast some of the substance of which I speak up onto the light fitting in the ceiling. I hope your day gets better.

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Not to be sniffed at, I know, but much as I love those Sleaford chaps, Dustbin of Sound was superior to English Tapas in my opinion. I haven't heard any of the rest but I suspect you should be higher in that list.

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I have a good friend from way back who belongs to the Countryside Alliance and speaks from actual experience of everything involved with the hunt, and we had quite a long talk about it. His take on it was that yes, the hunt is cruel, but so is nature; that hunting is a necessary evil in that the countryside is an artificial environment resulting from centuries of agriculture and therefore requires artificial maintenance of this sort, and the hunt is statistically less barbaric than a farmer taking potshots at foxes with a rifle, and most likely maiming rather than killing. That was his position, which I could sort of respect in relation to his agreeing that the hunt is nevertheless barbaric and that the chaps in the red coats are mostly overmoneyed arseholes. My take on it is that if it's genuinely so vital that the fox population be controlled, then simply there needs to be a better way of doing it. 

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Funnily enough I've been thinking about Oasis of late, partially inspired by stumbling across some interview with Liam Gallagher in which he made me laugh, despite my dislike of the guy.

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I can't be bothered to read the above four million comments, but you should probably up your game when it comes to spelling and grammar before criticising others for their own, which I offer only as a helpful suggestion. Also, describing those who dislike Trump as cranky, obsessed or whatever it was you said is somewhat undermined by your following and posting on a facebook page which would seem to be mostly pitched against Trump. Do you see?

Whatever your reasons may be for supporting the man are made redundant by the childish way in which you show that support, which really looks just like a basic reactionary dislike of persons who use long, fancy words.

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I only really mentioned the cost in contrast to prices in England, admittedly as of about six or seven years ago. There used to be a few small places where vegetables were reasonably cheap in my bit of London - or at least which I could afford, although I was thankfully a couple of quid above minimum wage at the time. Here it mostly seems to be massive chain stores full of facelifty types, so we seem to be at the extreme towards which England seems to be heading - is what I mean.

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It's probably significant that, having moved to the US, I'm no longer exposed to the same bits of music used as soundtrack for trailers for TV sporting events - New Order, Moby, Fatboy Slim, Underworld and so on. I think I'd already heard most of this record just on trailers for tennis alone - but without that...

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I watched three series and that seemed like enough for me. There was some good stuff in there, but I was beginning to find it a bit too depressing.

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I am, and I'm going to insist on an extra religious one too.

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As with all of these guys, he pulls a spooky face and whispers no-one knows in a ghostly voice, and that's really all he has. I've heard similar arguments made regarding structures in Mexico, and it's all bullshit.

These simple but happy jungle bunnies can't possibly have built this without help from someone a bit more advanced, you know - a bit more like us - so therefore it can only have been blah blah blah…

It's explaining things which either don't require an explanation or which already have a better explanation, just a less spooky one. This stuff pisses me off, and it pisses me off that people will read Graham Hancock before they'll read an actual archeological source, which you would think might be the first choice if they're that interested.

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I'm never watching another Philip K. Dick adaptation ever again. I don't need any more blue and orange in my life, or another chiselled Keanu crying in the pouring rain about whether he's even real. Twenty times bitten, twenty-one times shy, as they admittedly don't actually say.

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I've got to say I have doubts about this one. Pensioners are definitely getting stiffed big time, but I'd fucking love to know how an illegal immigrant goes about claiming that weekly hardship allowance if they're illegal. I'm additionally sceptical that our 2018 illegal immigrant takes home eight-thousand quid per annum more than I did in a full time job back in 2009. Anyone can type a bunch of invented statistics on facebook and get it shared. Typing out illegal muzzie pedos get a special pedo grant of nine million quid a year while our veterans get nuffink doesn't make it true. This sort of thing really doesn't look like it gives a shit about pensioners so much as stirring up the usual white supremacist bullshit.

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Some of the opinions expressed in this thread make me so tired I want to fucking punch something. I've already replied three times then deleted the comment. Anyway, I was raised with an inherent distrust of authority due to having grown up reading the Bash Street Kids rather than Superman, so yes - fiction about good little soldiers doing the job the way it should be done is dull, which is why film and television tends to be dull; because as a medium it is at heart conservative and authoritarian, with super episodes of great shows featuring Cumberbatch dished out as a reward for loyal service or consumption of goods. It is at best commodified rebellion like Buffy the Lucrative Franchise, Product Trek, or Doctor Collectible so that we get to feel a little bit dangerous as a sweetener to the drudgery. Losers and fuck ups - as defined by the spectacle - make for a much more interesting story.

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Still, on a more positive note, at least whilst the common man has his gun, we know a corrupt authoritarian government full of nest-feathering shitbags will never rise to power in America because constitutional amendment mumble mumble...

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Oh Fuck - it's David Tibet was coincidentally also the name of a projected hidden camera comedy game show on Channel 4. Unfortunately I think it stalled at an argument over using the Horst Wessel song as the main theme tune, even though it would have been totally ironic, obviously.

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If you're referring to Islam, as was the bloke I quoted, that seems to be suggesting there's such a thing as a thousand-year old culture in which aggression and rape are culturally ingrained as normal behaviour, which is the position taken by far-right racist organisations and which doesn't seem to refer to anything I recognise in the real world. It's the same argument as black people cannot be civilised, so I hope that isn't what you're saying.

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I disliked that one with some intensity, plus it probably doesn't help that I've never been that bothered about van Gogh. There are many other painters of that era which I much prefer.

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Okay, enough. I'm out of this group. Three days and I've had enough of people screaming about keeping cats inside when, you know, maybe some of us are thinking about the cats rather than ourselves. If you can't stand the thought of a cat living a happy life outside - and yes there are dangers - then maybe a cat isn't the pet for you. Maybe get a goldfish. Yesterday or maybe the day before there was a post by a woman whose cat had a broken leg, greeted with a mix of well-wishers, the understandably concerned, and people screaming either keep cat inside or we need to find out who did this and kill them. Some of you even referred to the female cat as a male, presumably not having bothered to read the thread. Frankly, I felt ashamed. Some of you are clearly wonderful people with great cats, others seem driven to cause drama.

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Where was it moving by the way? I saw plenty of big-eyed Mockney manga girls boo-hooing because I wuv woo, Doctor Woctor with deafening sad music blowing both speakers just in case anyone didn't get it, and yes I saw the one about celebrated tea-towel artist Vincent van Gogh (the personified Dire Straits album of modernism) but I didn't see anything moving. I must have missed that one, which additionally casts doubt upon it being unmissable.

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By way of example, I once linked some article about the impending extinction of elephants on friendface. One of the first replies came from Tim of Warwick posting in this usual real-life Alan Partridge spirit about what a shame it was because of course, as we all know, elephants are a nuisance and must be culled in certain parts of Africa blah blah blah economic sense blah blah blah lefty cloud cuckoo land blah blah blah - the thing was that, whilst he may have had some point relating to something existing in the real world, banging on about the necessity of shooting elephants in response to something suggesting that there are reasons it might not be such a great idea seemed extraordinarily misjudged to me, and my first thought was simply, oh fuck off, you stupid wanker. That was also my second and third thought, based partially on Tim not actually having much experience of anything beyond the end of his road, then standing as a UKIP candidate in local elections, and yet somehow believing his testimony to have some value despite all of the above.

Alun Jones

It was 1985 and I was happily burning taxpayers money at Maidstone College of Art, cackling as all those tenners went up in smoke in the name of long, dull video pieces about what it was like being me. I had a friend in the neighbouring town of Chatham, a fellow student who happened to be singer and guitarist in a band called Apricot Brigade. The Medway towns, of which Chatham was but one, had quite a lively music scene which had produced, most famously, The Milkshakes, The Mighty Caesars, and The Dentists. Apricot Brigade never put out a record or achieved the fame of those aforementioned, but they played a lot of gigs and were relatively popular on the local circuit for a time. I saw them enough to be able to hum at least a few of the songs even now, thirty years later; and with hindsight, I'd say they sounded oddly like Suede, or at least Suede trying hard to be the Swans; maybe...

Alun Jones was their drummer, and the member of the band whom I initially found the most intimidating. He was taller than me, and his face seemed suited to brooding disapproval, and he said very little. I eventually got to know him moderately better and to appreciate that his face had simply formed that way; and also that he was a man of few words not because, as it sometimes appeared, they'd all become lodged in his throat like a thousand furiously red-faced colonels all attempting to exit the drawing room at the same time, but simply due to his being a quiet, reflective soul - someone not given to speech when he had nothing he wanted to say. Nevertheless, initially I didn't quite know what to make of him.

This ceased to be an issue when he left the band and joined The Dentists, at first filling in on the recording of their Down and Out in Paris and Chatham EP before signing up full time, as I remember. I liked The Dentists, but I was never much of a gig goer, and what few gigs I attended were usually snivelling nobodies playing to an audience of three in some pub toilet, so I didn't really see Alun around for a while. Furthermore, I'd ended up as his replacement when Apricot Brigade rebranded themselves as Envy, and I was brought in to play keyboard and press the go button on a TR606 drum machine. I also repeatedly hit a car door with a hammer during one song performed before a paying audience in a pathetic attempt to hitch the Envy caravan to the then lucrative Test Department bandwagon, but the less said about that the better. I think Alun may have been in the audience during one of these gigs, assuming I recall correctly that we played live more than once, but I had the impression that I was resented, that I had somehow ousted him from the group, despite the obvious fact that he was now pounding the triangle for an altogether more listenable combo who actually put out records every once in a while, and which people wanted to hear.

Alun and Mick of The Dentists.

The three years of my degree course at Maidstone College of Art came to an end in 1987, and so I moved to Chatham because the town had a less depressing dole office. As a man of leisure, freed from the rigorous demands of turning up to mumble something into a video camera every few weeks, I signed on and discovered Gruts, a café situated on the border of Chatham and Rochester run by a bloke named Gerald and his girlfriend, who I'm fairly certain was called Caroline. I took to spending long afternoons in Gruts, drinking tea, eating toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, contemplating things which no longer matter and talking rubbish with other regulars. The roster of visitors included Billy Childish, Bill Lewis, Tim Webster, and an assortment of other Medway musicians and artists, so the standard of rubbish was high; and amongst this group was Alun Jones.

He would turn up in his old man's flat cap, buy a tea, and settle in for a couple of hours, and I soon came to realise that his fearsome demeanour had happened mainly in my imagination, wrongly interpreted from the previously mentioned habit of keeping his mouth shut when he had nothing to say in conjunction with the eyebrows of a more stern personality. Whilst we didn't exactly become close friends, I certainly grew to appreciate both his presence and his sharp sense of humour. I also liked that he was not well-disposed towards the dispensation of bullshit and was accordingly and refreshingly honest.

'What I'm trying to say with my paintings,' I probably tried to explain at some point before being cut off with a withering glare.

'What I'm trying to explain with my paintings, Sergeant Major,' he would parrot with acid sarcasm before abruptly transforming into the Windsor Davies character from It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. 'Shut up!!!'

There's probably not much joy to be had from explaining the hilarity which dare speak its name only providing you were actually there, but that is - for better or worse - mainly what I remember about Alun, that he was quiet without seeming necessarily retiring, and very, very funny.

As the collected taxpayers of the British Isles drafted me into something called Job Club, a joyless institution inspired by the idea that I shouldn't stay on the dole indefinitely, I would spend each morning half-heartedly scouring classified adverts in the company of fellow scroungers and then, having fired off my daily quota of ten job applications to companies I knew would never hire me in a million years, I would head for Gruts. Alun seemed to be there most afternoons, and there was always something pleasurable about filling him in on the details of that morning's session.

He would politely enquire as to whether I had managed to secure a place to play in the sandpit that day, or he would envision new back to work campaigns to which we might soon be subjected by the DHSS.

'Job Bus™ is coming to your area,' he once chirped with a faraway look in his eyes, 'bringing jobs to suit young and old alike.'

I would relate the latest news of a fellow Job Club attendee who resembled Ronnie Corbett and was almost certainly called Dave. Dave had told me of a book purchased for his young child in which conflicted groups of black elephants and white elephants were somehow blended to become grey elephants as a result of getting all mixed up during either a fight or the spin cycle, thus presenting a portentous if slightly useless lesson about racism. This sort of ethical overcompensation would usually prompt Alun to channel either Windsor Davies or Sexton Ming's version of Olly Reed, not so much in response to political correctness gone mad, but in response to something that was quite obviously just bollocks.

Gruts closed in 1989 or thereabouts, and I moved away from Chatham, and that was the last I saw of Alun Jones. It was also the last I heard of him until a few days ago when the following appeared on facebook from Dentists guitarist Bob Collins:

I'm really sorry to post this but we've had the tragic news that Alun Jones died on Thursday night after a fire in his flat in Gillingham. Alun was our drummer from 1986 to 1991 and we lost contact with him for many years after he left the band, although we saw him fleetingly in more recent times. But he was a big part of our lives back then and will always be in our thoughts. Our heads are just spinning at the moment.

It's strange, how death works. Off the top of my head I could name ten people with whom I've shared much closer friendship than with Alun Jones, and yet whose passing wouldn't merit more than a shrug and oh well. It's been nearly a quarter of a century since we spoke and yet I always liked to think that he was out there somewhere, still chuckling quietly to himself and pulling those incredulous faces whenever voices were raised in the general spirit of ludicrous bullshit. Now that his name has been unfortunately thrust to the forefront of my thoughts, I realise what a strong impression he left for someone I knew so briefly. Every time I hear The Smiths, even if just for a second, I tend to think of Alun; and I'm still tempted on an almost daily basis to counter preposterous claims by repeating them back to their couriers whilst addressing them as Mr. La-di-da Gunner Graham, but my Windsor Davies was never so good as Alun's rendition, and I now live in Texas where no-one would get the reference. I'd probably even forgotten where that came from until news of Alun's passing obliged me to think about such things. He cast a very long shadow for someone who said so little, if you'll pardon the slightly mismatched allusions.

With all the miserable buggers still walking around droning on an on about nothing at all and who will probably live forever, it seems particularly unfair when we lose one of the good ones.