A Clockwork Orange – live
HERE'S horrorshow fun! The droogs running riz-raz through the high streets, the krovvy flowing when some stupid veck gets inna way. Prestoopnick stuff like carrying off whatcha want from the like electro shops. Nuffink the millicents can do about it!
It's as if A Clockwork Orange has come alive. It's almost 50 years since Anthony Burgess wrote his brilliant satire of a dystopian Britain where teenagers from the sink estates have embarked on a terrifying, violent – and totally guiltless – rampage.
High on drugs and eager for aggro, they are capable of anything. They speak a teenage argot that is impenetrable to outsiders. Note the stream of barely intelligible invective that comes from the few hooded figures from the sink estates who have been briefly interviewed on television.
All right, Burgess had his feral teenagers speaking Nadsat, a mixture of Russian and Cockney rhyming slang that brilliantly made a kind of sense in spite of being nonsense, while today's rioters speak a kind of Caribbean slang (whatever their actual ethnic origin). But it only reinforces the sense of alienation, their coming from a different world.
Burgess – who for my money was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century – had it on the button. The hopeless, dehumanising existence of the inner-city sink estates; the potential for evil in any individual from whom the restraints of conscience have been removed (what the church calls original sin).
It is not a pretty picture. The great pity is that many saw A Clockwork Orange as a glorification of violence, especially after it was made into a film. It was anything but that, it was a very serious bit of moral writing.
As the politicos try to figure out what's being going on in Britain's inner cities, they could do worse than blow the dust off A Clockwork Orange.
New York tweets
ESCAPES by the denizens of zoos in New York seem to immediately set up an inane twittering process worthy of one of the birdcages.
An Egyptian cobra escaped from the Bronx Zoo earlier this year, which prompted an immediate setting up of Twitter accounts in the snake's name and tweets such as: "On top of the Empire State Building! All the people look like little mice down there. Delicious little mice!"
Now a peacock has escaped from Central Park Zoo and perched on a fifth floor window ledge.
The tweets have followed: "My feathers are fabulous" and "I'm on the window sill, looking out. If I turn my back to look inside, they may pull a fast one from behind".
What prompts this less than immortal wit? Has tweeting become some sort of psychological compulsion?
Unfallen into
A CHINESE tightrope walker almost came to grief when he lost his footing 100m above the ground and with no safety net at a place called Xingjian, in Hunan province.
Saimaiti Aishan lost his footing as in high winds he attempted what is known as Dawazi – a traditional high-wire walk - on a 15m-long steel cable stretched between two hot air balloons. But he managed to grab the cable and cling on for dear life as the balloons slowly came down to the ground.
The incident recalls the time in England when a high-wire mishap led to a memorable newspaper headline. This editor had a fixation with his own home town. If any report mentioned his town, its name had to be in the headline.
Hence: "Bolton crowd fallen into."
In this case: "Xingjian crowd unfallen into."
BRUCE the Aussie garbage collector is driving his truck along a suburban street in Sydney one morning, collecting from the wheelie bins lining the pavement .Then he comes to a house with no wheelie bin. He goes up to the front door and knocks. The door isn't answered at first. After more knocking, it's eventually opened by a Japanese gentleman.
"Hurro."
"G'day, Where's yer bin?"
"I bin sittin onna toiret"
"No, sport, I mean where's yer dustbin?"
" I dust tord you - I dustbin sittin onna toiret"
" Oh, dear. You don't understand me. What I want to know is: Where's yer wheeliebin?"
"Ah!" says the Japanese and, with a slightly embarrassed smile, he leans forward and whispers: "I wheelie bin having sex wirra sista of my wife!"
Last gasp
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
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