53 comments on “The Great Orme”

1. Whatever other musical styles he may have occasionally drifted into, J.J. Cale was a fine blues guitarist, but I take issue with your addition of ‘n’ Western. Perhaps we should let him – and Robert Robinson – rest in peace now.

   Football is beneath me, too, as are rugby and golf. You may need to seek advice from someone – or something – even lower down the social pecking order.
2. Blameworthy, are you taking issue with the idea that JJ Cale’s music contained a significant country element? Or did he work exclusively in the field of German Oompah?

   I apologise profusely for my football references. Football is beneath even me; it’s why I always defer to you on the matter.
3. So, knowing nothing about J.J. Cale, you consulted the Telegraph who were equally ill-informed, and then compounded the error by adding ‘n’ Western for ill-judged comic effect. With your aristocratic pretensions I’m surprised you didn’t spend an afternoon browsing through the archives of The Whig Weekly.

   I applaud your new-found enthusiasm for football, perhaps it will give you a new zest for life. You need to be aware, though, that there are two goals and you’re supposed to get the ball into the one up the other end.
4. ‘Distinctive blend of country, blues and rockabilly.’ Not my words on JJ Cale but those of the Daily Torygraph obituary. This is supposed to be your ‘technical area’ but I seem nevertheless to have scored.
5. I’m sure all readers of this blog – whether General, Intelligent, Regular, Deaf, or a combination thereof – will be aware that GloomLaden’s knowledge of popular culture ends with the passing of Lord Byron and is heavily influenced by the opinions of Lord Snooty, but J.J. Cale, sub-country & western?

   Once again, GloomLaden, you have whipped open your metaphorical old raincoat – which always lets you down – to reveal woeful inadequacies. You have exposed yourself as a fraud. Get back in your technical area!

   And you can sneer haughtily down the barrel of your tortoiseshell, art nouveau cigarette holder at me all you like, I merely hoot back in your face with derision.
6. I hate JJ Cale. Twangly sub country ‘n’ western guitarist (emphasis all to firmly on the ‘n’) whose songs have no place or relevance to a proper Englishman. Put on Edith Sitwell’s Façade and know true song.
7. Oh please God, Fitrambler, stem the flow; stem the flow! Save me from further punishment at the hands of this ruthless intellectual colossus.
8. I took quite a few photos in Betws-y-coed of which I have completed a blog article on. However, I have been loath to publish because I have been enjoying the comments flying back and forth. I would really hate to stem the flow – that phrase for some reason always makes my eyes water. A tad on the Freudian side, perhaps. Ok, sorry I’l leave the highbrow stuff to you chaps…
9. Oh, and by the way: loved the holiday snaps, Fitters. Got any more?
10. You may fancy yourself as a cerebral hard man, GloomLaden, but for all your intellectual posturing I’ll wager you knew who sang Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep without having to look it up. And is that Gilbert O’Sullivan I can hear gently playing in the background as you slump heavily on your soiled mattress listing the names of those high-brow authors, previously unknown to you, from a hastily borrowed library copy of The Oxford Companion to English Literature? – Alone Again (Naturally).

    But please don’t sully the name of JJ Cale by introducing it into our petty squabbles. It ill behoves a man of your cultural eminence to speak ill of the dead. Best leave that to ill-mannered oiks such as I.
11. Blameworthy, I’ve read much else. While you were tittering, russet cheeked and spittle flecked at your cleverness in comparing Zola’s La Bete Humanin to Little White Bull by Tommy Steel, I was reading. While you were metaphorically wetting your Y-fronts by favourably comparing Bob Dylan’s Wiggle It to The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, I was reading. While you capered like an ecstatic Arthur Askey at the supposed superiority of an album track by JJ Cale I won’t even sully myself looking up the name of, to the early novels of L P Hartley, I was reading. What is more, I was reading wisely and well, not squandering precious time on the Alzheimer inflected incontinences of Terry Pratchett or the post stroke accountant pleasing doodlings of Tom Sharpe. Only by sneakily retiring to read Proust have you managed to find a vantage point from which to claim some kind of literary authority to which you have no right. On literary matters at least, I can only paraphrase what the youths dwelling down that Stabbers Alley of a cycle track of yours habitually say: come and have a go if you think you’re sufficiently literary.’
12. How many times have you read Brian Sewell’s ‘The Art of Disdainful, Pompous Snobbery’ now, GloomLaden? Have you ever read anything else?
13. Now, Blameworthy, I am no great fan of Cowper Powys. And I am no great fan of Van Morrison, whenever his period should happen to fall. But what I am really not a fan of is the manner in which you mention the two in the same breath. It is typical of the manner in which, by foul means or – actually, no, just foul – you try to give greater credence to your cultural enthusiasms than they deserve. Are you seriously contending that Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road is on a par with Charles Dickens’ The Uncommercial Traveller? Or that a 1976 episode of The Double Deckers is as worthy of critical attention as Beethoven’s Late Quartets – which, oddly, have always been bang on time whenever I’ve put the CD on. Yes you are. It is a result of a poor education proudly worn.
14. … but those full of drink are not invariably full of life.

    You fail to comprehend the mystical element in the concept of ‘aliveness’, GloomLaden. Just as you failed to get to grips with Cowper Powys or mid-period Van Morrison.
15. Ah, Blamers, I have always found that those said to be full of life are invariably full of drink.
16. The Intelligent General Reader, GloomLaden, if there is such a one as he, or she, would have given due consideration to my last comment and replied intelligently, rather than prematurely issuing forth a torrent of inane drivel based on little in the way of understanding. But you can always be relied upon to jump the gun and go off half-cock.

    I was merely suggesting that Bob may have been less alive at the time of his passing than Mrs. Sunshine was at the time of hers, although I would be the first to concede that, while suffering from a chronic lack of motivation in the face of your relentless obsessional Robinsonitis, I may not have explained myself in sufficient detail.

    And of course it depends on our definition of ‘alive’. Was Bob ever so full of life as Mrs. S. was when you sang Gilbert to her?
17. Now, Blameworthy, I feel the need to correct you here. The idea that Bob was deader at the point before he died than at any given point after his death – now,say, or now – is clearly absurd. You might have done better to point out that Bob was less alive at the point immediately preceding his death than he was at, say twenty-one years of age. Though predicated on the false notion that death is the logical extension, rather than the conclusion, of a process of aging, the thought would find a degree of emotional sympathy among thinkers. But you choose to eschew eve this forgivable faux pas for a conceit to which absolutely no-one would give credence. Bloody typical slipshod metaphysics, the intelligent general reader will doubtless opine.
18. Being dead longer does not make one ‘deader’, GloomLaden, only more decomposed. Although it could be argued that Bob was less alive when he drew his last breath.
19. It was, I think, only the first verse I recited to Mrs Sunshine and my recitation was sufficiently mannered to cause hilarity rather than any romantic effusion. But ‘What does it matter,’ one can almost hear the Regular Reader ask his or herself ‘when the woman is deader than Robert Robinson?’
20. But that wasn’t long after I started. Perhaps I shouldn’t have started.

    Can I ask: did you recite the complete lyrics of What’s In A Kiss to Mrs. Sunshine or just the first verse? And if, like Jonathan Meades, you feel there is something unnatural about kissing, how come it was the only song you were able to remember when you serenaded her? I still think Ooh Wacka Doo Wacka Day would have prompted a more positive response.
21. I don’t think you do always know when to stop, Blameworthy, else you’d have stopped circa 1978.
22. I always know exactly when to stop, GloomLaden, but – as you well know – being aware of the precise point at which one should sensibly stop does not necessarily mean that one actually sensibly does so.
23. The trouble with you, Blameworthy, is that you don’t know when to stop. The trouble with me is that I don’t know why to start.
24. Perhaps this might be a good time to consider The Regular Reader, without whom all this would be worthless and futile.

    Without The Regular Reader I could not go on…

    and on… and on… and on… and on…

    I’ll go on.
25. It’s good that you recognise that Robert Robinson is ‘the’ dead bloke rather than just a dead bloke. It demonstrates a respect we know you don’t feel but which, in the fullness of time, may develop into reverence as your prissy literary tastes seem to have developed you into a Reverend.
26. Robert Robinson is… The Dead Bloke.
27. Nice to hear from you again Deaf Blokes; it’s been a long time.

    I SAID IT’S NICE TO HEAR FROM YOU AGAIN!!!

    Oh for fuck’s sake! Dead? Deaf? What does it matter?
28. No, Blamers, my autobiography was and is going to be called We Should All Be Dead. One of the Deaf Blokes said – well, bellowed incoherently, him being deaf – that his autobiography was gong to be called We Should All Be Deaf. I said ‘Surely you Deaf Blokes are all deaf.’ I don’t think he heard me.
29. Wasn’t that one of the suggestions for the title of the autobiography you’ve been working on for the past twenty years?

    Not to worry, I’m sure we can come up with a better one.
30. I haven’t actually read any John Creasy books, obviously. Like the sound of The Toff, though.
31. I’ve read quite a few of the John Creasey books of late but have decided on a change. Got a few Samuel Becket books lined up. Variety being the spice and all that….
32. You snivelling worm, GloomLaden. Unable to cope with the pus and vomit that is the reality of the human condition, you curl up in a darkened, locked room on an orthopaedic mattress, over a hard, narrow, single cast-iron bedstead under a patchwork quilted eiderdown with the waxy stump of a guttering candle clutched in one fist and a leather-bound edition of The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom in the other, hotly absorbed in lurid fictional tales concerning the repellent debauchery of others, while all the while having the brass neck to maliciously mock me for having captured the moral high-ground. You should cleanse the hardened plaque of intellectual sewage from your mind by joining me up the downs with Richard Jefferies.
33. Not forgetting Patrick Dawlish, Dr Palfrey (not to be confused with Mrs Pumfrey from All Creatures Great and Small – the old gal with the dog Trixi-woo) Department Z,. He also wrote quite a few stand alone novels…
34. Commander Gideon, Inspector West, The Toff are but a few of the series characters he wrote about. And there was of course The Baron, like Gideon, that was made into a tv series…
35. I am no libertine, Blameworthy. In every field other than Literature, you will find me hiding behind the settee so as not to see the awfulness life is. But books are there to deal with such stuff and it is ridiculous of you to shy away from such a dilute form of decadence. It’s reading the Daily Mail that’s done for you, I suspect.
36. As may be know old John was quite prolific. Well, over 500 books in his life. Many under other names…although he stuck mainly to the crime genre….mmm…
37. Hang on a minute, GloomLaden. I know you’ve suffered some serious mental trauma this year, but at what point did you suddenly turn into this raging libertine? You, who used to berate me for my repellent imaginative thoughts, despicable behaviour and ill manners. Since when have you allowed yourself to stoop to the level of Saville victims buttocks? It’s like Ivy Compton-Burnett rolling up, uninvited, at a Marquis de Sade orgy, dressed only in a rubber thong. Get a grip, man, before you get yourself hauled up before the beak.
38. Just thought I’d mention it….I’ll get me coat….
39. Talking of good old John C. Bought a few of his books while I was away.
40. Proust??? More wholesome? That mincing, nimminy-pimminy, sickly, rarefied, garlic scented, wan faced Frog with his prose as constipated as his indoor boy’s bowel, his snootily fastidious attention to detail and callous inattention to the wider world?? The writer who, with his etiolated whining and utterly dishonest shielding of his filthy sexual nature, led even Bob astray into the belief that his shapeless, over extended cod novel was an essential classic??? Proust is nothing more than a biographer with a taste for the queer curlicues of his own elaborate prose style, a sniveller, a man who has lost the tale in its telling and writes as if the world is willing to stop for half a life to unravel his sentences only to find that their structure is as putridly elusive as their meaning. Fetch hither a stalwart John Creasey novel say I.
41. I never said I objected to the vile characters in those novels you know and love so well, GloomLaden, merely that I couldn’t relate to them. The fact that you can – with relish – says it all really. Indulge yourself in an orgy of murder, rape, greed and horror if you will, but allow me my relaxed indifference.

    You should read Proust, he’s much more wholesome.
42. My serious allegation remains. Unable to face the tart flavours of modern fictioneers such as Jonathan Meades and Martin Amis, you hop from foot to foot as if the ground itself comprised the buttocks of Savile victims, whinnying pitiful protestations of your modesty and burying your twitchily oversensitive conk in a nosegay while somehow wringing your hands after the manner of an especially fey clergyman at Belsen. ‘Oh, no, I don’t like this.’ you mimsily opine, cleaving hard to your Richard Jefferies novels as the global exhibition of murder, rape, greed and horror otherwise known as life continues bloodily towards its and your extinction.
43. The knee still gives me trouble and stopped all further distance walking for the holiday. However, we did get about by bus. Conwy was Monday but all other traditionally visited places like Chester, Colwyn Bay, Rhyl and Rhos-on-sea were no-nos. We did go to Betws-y-coed which is something we didn’t do before and it is the subject of one of half a dozen blog entries yet to be finalised. So, beware!

    Afternoon, Gloomers, a top of the Bob to you.
44. Thank God, Fitrambler lives! Last heard of limping back to the guest house dining room to tackle another huge dinner the like of which might feed a family of five in Bangor for six weeks; I feared the worst. Welcome back Fitters, it’s good to hear from you.
45. Was this Robertson Chappie the one who used to appeal in the adverts for squash. I used to like those when I was a young boy; very amusing. But I’m sure he had hair, quite a lot and black
46. I had hoped you wouldn’t have seen through my mask of Victorian womanhood. I spent a lot of time running up that long, flowing, lacy pinafore number on my vintage treadle-operated Singer sewing machine. If only I’d made the button holes a bit tighter; when the front popped open to reveal my Great Poxy Knob Brewery and Bake House tee-shirt underneath, I knew the game was up. But be honest, for the first couple of rounds you really believed you were enjoying a drink and a chat with Mrs. Gaskell.

    And before you come over all smug and start boasting to your work colleagues about that time you bumped into Elizabeth Barrett-Browning in the Old Town Co-Op and had a lengthy, intimate conversation regarding the use of rhyming stanzas in her husband’s poetry – That was me! I didn’t let my mask of Victorian womanhood slip for one moment on that occasion, as we traded anecdotes in the bottled ales aisle.

    So if you gaze out from your front window and see a tallish, severe-looking woman got up in Victorian garb, hanging around outside the Clifton just after eleven on Saturday morning… that will most likely be Charlotte Bronte back from the dead. I’ll be along a bit later though, and we’ll still get to the Carter’s in time for opening.

    And if the putrid, festering pile of gristle and bone formerly answering to the name of Bob should slope surreptitiously into the lounge and order a large pink gin, please don’t make an arse of yourself by rolling around sycophantically in the approximate vicinity of the place where his feet used to be whilst simultaneously slavering over the dried tattered bits of leather which will be all that survives of his expensive Oxford brogues. He won’t thank you for it.
47. Blameworthy, the suggestion that Bob might not be fully clothed on his return ill behoves a man who has recently been eschewing vast tracts of the modernist and post modern literary canon on the grounds that they are ‘unsavoury’. The mask of Victorian womanhood that you have been wearing, having doubtless caused more than a modicum of chafing against your facial hair, has slipped and we see a man whose imagination conjures images of a naked, reanimated corpse Robert Robinson propping up the bar of the Carter’s Rest of a Saturday lunchtime. Jonathan Meades tales of auto asphyxia in Seend are tame by comparison. However, now you’ve mooted the possibility, we’d better keep the session when it is.
48. Oh, for Bob’s sake, GloomLaden! The man is dead; he’s not coming back. You need to pull yourself together, put it all behind you, and get on with what remains of your own futile existence. I sneer at your allegation that I may have been reveling in Robinson’s demise, that would be paying the man far more attention than he deserves. Neither his existence or his passing would have troubled my, already fevered, mind had you not kept harping on about him for the last three years.

    However, I shall continue to be concerned about your own state of mind as long as we both remain in the land of the living. Would it help if I was to suggest delaying our forthcoming session until next Tuesday – the third anniversary of Bob’s death. We could have a minute’s silence in the pub as a mark of remembrance and respect. In all the time we’ve spent drinking together over the past twenty years I don’t think we’ve ever had a minute’s silence; it could be a first.

    And if he should suddenly appear alive and well at the bar you can go home, get your wallet and buy him a drink. In all the time we’ve spent in the pub together over the last twenty years, I don’t think you’ve ever bought a drink; it could be a first. Or possibly a thirst.

    I wonder how old he will be if he does return from the dead. Will he have aged three years? Will his hair have grown all down one side? Will he still be fully clothed?
49. Doubtless there will be readers out there interested in an update on what the modern media would no doubt term ‘the Robert Robinson situation’. Alas, he remains dead. Philosophical difficulties are going to be involved in going much deeper into the matter than that. Those of the materialist school might say that he was, in the purely physical sense, more dead now than hitherto. Platonic idealists would adhere to the notion that death is an absolute quality and that, therefor, degrees of it are out of the question. Spiritualists will say the matter is immaterial and that he can, in any case, be contacted by means of Planchette. Blameworthy has, since news of Robinson’s death, frankly revelled in it. He goes about the world eyes aglitter with delight at the total absence of the living Robert Robinson. Not that the living Robert Robinson ever manifested himself before Blameworthy’s eyes prior to his death, unless Blameworthy has been concealing from me an anecdote of considerable interest. I shouldn’t put it past him. Anyway, new books and broadcasts fail to emerge from the sage of Cheyne Walk. With each new failure to manifest, I grieve afresh as Blameworthy rejoices anew. This state of affairs could be ended at once if Bob were to return. But every fresh-coined second, every new minted fraction thereof, the chances of such a renaissance in the Bobular sphere grows more remote. But not impossible, surely. Let the comments section of this humble blog stand alone against tyrannical probability in believing that the possibility remains – no matter how remote – that Bob will cease to be dead at some point in the future. Hope, gentlemen, pray.
50. Impressive views of the steep slopes of the Great Orme, Fitters, but where are the sheep? Stained glass in the Rest And Be Thankful is all very well, but I’m sure regular readers would have preferred to see more of those cute, muttony faces on the other side of the window.

    Legend has it that a crazed, lunatic sheep stalker once prowled the highest outcrops of the Orme, armed only with a cheap, plastic Instamatic he would regularly prostrate himself on the sod in search of the perfect woolly snapshot. Many generations of lambs have passed over into the celestial hotpot since those distant times but today’s sheep still crave the attention that the sozzled snapper once lavished upon them.

    Beulah Speckled, Balwens, Radnors or Llanwenogs, it matters not. Just give us more Welsh sheep shots! Grab your stick, get back up them hills and get snapping! Be assured, your readers will not be fobbed off with a steamy brown photograph of tomorrow evening’s lamb casserole dinner in the guest house, not even with a photoshop-ed mint sauce garnish as an afterthought.

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