Box-Shaped Heart:A Journey Into The World Of Cholesterol Skepticism.

Do you have high cholesterol? About 60% of the adult population of the UK do so if you do you're not alone. I used to have it but I've not had it checked for years, decades even (or at least I don't think so - who knows what they check in hospitals or following blood tests?). Even if more people have high cholesterol than not, that doesn't mean it's a good thing. The lower your cholesterol, the better.

So why are some people, often people with some degree of influence, skeptical about cholesterol and its effects? I can't say I'd given it much thought but cardiologist Dr Christopher Labos gave a speech, live from Canada, this evening (UK time), for Skeptics in the Pub - Online - their 111th online event though - sadly - not a particularly well attended one, called 'How cholesterol skepticism became a pseudoscience' and it was actually quite interesting. If a little worrying for someone who has had, and may still have, high cholesterol - and someone who definitely has high blood pressure.

The talk, Dr Labos began by saying, would focus on the intersection between cholesterol skepticism and general anti-science, anti-vax, and Covid denial beliefs. He showed us a cover of The Atlantic magazine from September 1989 which featured an article by the journalist Thomas J. Moore. It made the claim that attempting to lower cholesterol was either pointless or dangerous - as well as being nigh on impossible.

While that may once have been a reasonable argument to make, science has moved on - both before and after 1989 - and those claims are simply untrue. Why do these claims get made about cholesterol but not about offer cardiovascular risks like diabetes, hypertension, and smoking?

Well, they once did. Quite famously, the tobacco lobby campaigned long and hard to prove that smoking was not bad for you and even, in some cases, that it was good for you. About a century ago, many noted medical people believed, and said, that we shouldn't even try to treat high blood pressure/hypertension. Some even said the greatest danger for those with high blood pressure came in trying to reduce it.

Knowledge, and understanding, of cholesterol is much newer than that of blood pressure. The latter was first measured back in 1733 while cholesterol is a 20th century discovery. So, initially - when little was known, cholesterol skepticism was understandable - perhaps even logical.

The Russian physician Nikolai Anichkov (1865-1944) was the first to demonstrate that cholesterol was linked to cardiovascular disease, specifically atherosclerosis. He did it by experimenting on rabbits but when he tried the same tests on rats and dogs it didn't 'work'. People at the time suggested that was because rabbits are herbivores and we humans are, like dogs and rats, carnivores. Even if many of us are not.

That led to a degree of skepticism but animal experiments, I believe, are not always a very good way to decide such things - plus they are unspeakably cruel. Chocolate, if enough of it is eaten, can kill a dog. That's not the case with humans. Unless, I suppose, you eat an incredibly large amount of chocolate. It turned out that dogs and rats happened to be two animals who were particularly good at converting cholesterol to bile acids and were, therefore, able to simply shit it out. Lucky dogs. Lucky rats. Apart from being experimented on, that is.

Anichkov's findings were largely rejected - and serious research into the links between cholesterol and heart disease didn't begin again for about thirty years. In the 1940s when, in the US, more and more people started dying of heart attacks.

Epidemiology studies took off. Including the Japanese Migration Study, the Seven Countries Study of 1955, and the Framingham Heart Study which began in 1948 and is still ongoing. Framingham, which coined the term 'risk factor', considered cholesterol, blood pressure, smoking, and physical activity and how these things affected the heart.

Diet studies followed in the wake of the epidemiology studies and, for the first time, people started looking into ways of lowering cholesterol and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. Often these studies would look at replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat and swapping meat fat for vegetable fat/oil.

Not all the studies were positive. Three UK based studies found that corn oil, soya bean oil, or low fat diets did not reduce the risk factor of heart disease for people. But, Dr Labos contested - and some will disagree, diet is not an efficient way to treat cholesterol. It works for a small minority of people and, of course, it's always helpful to eat healthily (he mentioned that meat, rather than eggs, chips (including chip fat), was by far the largest dietary source of cholesterol, especially red meat) but most cholesterol is genetic. There being a difference between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol.

With that in mind, the only way to reduce cholesterol (for a majority of people) is through medication. A finding that led to some skepticism even though cholesterol was, and is, a major factor in heart disease. The skepticism arose, it seems, because although the link was clear it was unclear exactly how that link worked. Cholesterol science is confusing and complicated. Probably more confusing and complicated, even, than some of the slides and diagrams Dr Labos illustrated his speech with.

I didn't understand the graphs and I don't understand the science regarding cholesterol (in these blogs I try and report what people better educated and better informed than me have to say on the topics) though perhaps I should try and learn more. I'm not getting any younger as my ever increasing contact with doctors and daily blood pressure medication painfully underlines.

In the early days of attempting to lower cholesterol, some of the medicines - like clofibrate, weren't very good. Which caused further skepticism. 1984's Coronary Primary Prevention Trial of cholestyramine revealed that, like clofibrate before it, it did reduce cholesterol. But, importantly, it didn't actual reduce mortality rates. On top of that it had a side effect of giving some users such awful gastroenteritis that taking the drug became intolerable.

Weirdly, studies showed that there was a higher number of deaths by accidents, homicides, and suicides (violent deaths, essentially) in the cholestyramine study group than in the normal population. This could have been a freak result but it seems to have never really been explained. It led some to come to the conclusion that forcibly lowering one's cholesterol led to a loss of brain function and this led, indirectly, to that Atlantic article in 1989.

The game changer came with the arrival of statins. First developed by the Japanese biochemist Akira Endo (who's still about - and is now ninety years old - so something's working for him) using fungi and then mass marketed by the multinational pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co. Merck put out the first BIG statins and they had a BIG effect. They were 'blockbuster' drugs and had a clear benefit on reducing mortality via heart disease.

The evidence that statins worked was, and remains, overwhelming (while none of the so-called natural remedies that your hippy friends recommend to you work at all and have been proven not to in trial after trial) yet many people still strongly opposed the use, and development, of statins. So many studies were made regarding statins that to suggest some kind of 'big pharma' conspiracy is, frankly, ludicrous. Any conspiracy would need to involve tens of thousands of people, all seemingly unconcerned about others dying of heart attacks.

Despite everything, I believe humans are better than that - and they're certainly not that well organised. Lies spread that statins didn't work for women or for the elderly and some said statins had pleiotropic effects (which was part of the talk I must admit to getting lost during - I'd never even heard the word 'pleiotropic' before) but the evidence simply doesn't stack up.

Most of these debates, or arguments, are no longer relevant (Dr Labos suggested this was like relitigating the debate about Betamax being better than VHS - although it has to be said that nobody has been having that debate for about thirty-five years, an anachronistic example) and the idea that we're over treating people these days, pathologising normality, can be countered by the argument that in the past we didn't treat people well enough - and they died before their time.

Dr Labos' belief is that we have to rethink 'normal'. If we lived in a society where everybody smoked, we would consider lung cancer to be a normal disease. If everyone, or 60% of the UK population, has high cholesterol levels then we start to see cardiovascular diseases as normal. Which they may well be. But surely we should do all we can to help people avoid them. Heart attacks don't look fun. I worry about having one all the time.

Dr Labos' takeway from the talk was that if we lower cholesterol we reduce the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems. So why would we not try and do it, for ourselves and others? How we do it is irrelevant. If you're one of the lucky few and can do it with a change of diet then great. If you need to use safe and reliable, and now comparatively cheap, medication then so be it.

To do otherwise you would have to deny overwhelming proof and scientific consensus. This puts you alongside anti-vaxxers and Covid denialists and that's no place for anyone to be. It's a pathway to QAnon. Don't go there.

Thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online, thanks to Brian Eggo for hosting (even if he did claim that Together in Electric Dreams was by The Human League when it was actually a solo single by Philip Oakey in collaboration with Giorgio Moroder - although, it turns out, The Human League do now play it live), and thanks to Dr Christoper Labos who proved generous with his time, informative, and impassioned about a subject dear to his heart. As a bonus he even got his bowtied pooch, Toby, out for the camera.

I've got to see the doctor soon for a blood test and a prostate cancer test (just routine, apparently, though the unsolicited text from an unknown number scared the shit out of me) and maybe it would make sense to ask them to do a cholesterol test while I'm there. I don't want to die just yet. There's still a lot of things I want to do - and attending these Skeptics events are one of them.

Everything Has Already Happened:Yard Act @ Hammersmith Apollo.

"It's all so pointless. It is and that's beautiful - l find it humbling, sincerely. And when you're gone it brings me peace of mind to know that this will all just carry on with someone else, with something new. No need to be blue. Everything has already happened, time is an illusion" - 100% Endurance, Yard Act

Anyone who made the mistake of writing off Yard Act as one trick ponies will be needing to review  their view of the band. They only formed in 2019, their second album - Where's My Utopia? only came out at the start of this month, and yet they're headlining as august and storied as the Art Deco treasure that is Hammersmith Apollo with the confidence and the adoring crowd of a band that have been around much much longer.

It's one of those gigs where you can see people dancing, punching the air, and singing along to even the deepest cuts everywhere you look. Plastic pint pots fly through the air, a perfectly good anorak is launched towards the stage, and, at one point, a young lady in the crowd flashes her boobs to the band - who don't seem to notice. For a split second, I could have been at Monsters of Rock 1985 (Metallica! Marillion! ZZ Top! Bon Jovi! Tommy Vance DJ set!).

The whole thing was a lot of fun (and I was only on the lemonade). It was a gig I'd not planned to attend. In fact when I woke up yesterday morning it was a gig I didn't even know was on. I got a WhatsApp message from my friend Bee who was, sadly, feeling unwell and unable to go. Rather than wasting the ticket, she gave (gave, not sold) it to me. Stupidly, I nearly said no.

But then I checked myself. I like Yard Act. They're great. Why would I turn down a free ticket to see them? With the late notice I didn't have much time to do my 'homework' and I'm not familiar with much of the new album (one of the few in the crowd NOT singing along for the most part) but once Warmduscher had, er, warmed us up (I enjoyed them far more than when I saw them supporting Parquet Courts at Brixton Academy back in June 2022, they even lived up to - almost - Stu's description of them as "the disco Butthole Surfers") it was time for Yard Act to see if they could deliver the goods. That was never really in doubt. I shook my leg(s) so hard that my step count for the day (which also included walking from home to Victoria station) ended up hitting 29,307.

We Make Hits splits the difference between baggy grooves and post-punk sprechgesang as it manages to tell a story about the music industry which isn't even boring (songs about 'the biz' can be deadly dull, Paint A Vulgar Picture may be The Smiths' worst ever song). Vocalist James Smith (looking a little like Josh Widdicombe) kicks the air, shakes his arse, and waves the mic stand around as bassist Ryan Needham makes shapes and looks like he's on loan from Pulp or, perhaps, The Long Blondes. Drummer Jay Russell pounds away with gusto and guitarist Sam Shipstone shreds while managing to look as if he'd pass the audition as a Bad Seed as surely as he would a Peaky Blinder.

The band have improved by adding a nod towards indie-dance grooves. There's a keyboardist (Christopher Duffin) and two very enthusiastic female backing vocalists (Lauren Fitzpatrick and Daisy Smith) who bring far more than their voices to the party. They dance like nobody's watching, they flank Smith in some of the gig's more theatrical moments, and they bash away at various percussive instruments. Adding to both the gaiety of the gig and the overall sonic effect. Don't just feel the beat of the tambourine, feel the beat of the woodblocks too.

Down By The Stream, a tale of teenage innocence and idiocy, is angular and jaunty, Dream Job has a sweet pop-funk feel even if Smith appears to sing/talk the lyrics through his nose (that's not a criticism, it works very well), Petroleum is slinkier but in a similar vein, When The Laughter Stops reminded me of the debt the band owe to both The Fall and Pulp, and The Overload was nothing short of bionic. Thrashing away and having the time of their lives on stage, the fact that they recently had Shane Embury of Napalm Death on stage for a cover of Motorhead's Ace of Spades now made perfect sense.

Best of all, for me, was 100% Endurance ("Whose sofa was this? Where were my shoes? What did we do last night? I don't remember leaving Nathan's house") with its pensive lyrics about the pointlessness of life, the transience of everything, and how that should be freeing rather than constricting. When Smith delivered the line "no need to be blue", accompanied by an illustrative opening of the palm, a chill went up my back. You expect Yard Act to deliver thrills and spills but a moment of transcendence like that caught me offguard - and very pleasantly so.

There was even a rendition of Happy Birthday for Tarra from support band Gustaf (who we'd missed) and when she was presented with a Colin the Caterpillar cake, Smith had to explain to her that particular British tradition (Gustaf are from Brooklyn). As it was her birthday she got to spin the wheel, game show style, to decide what track from the band's debut EP they'd play.

It fell on Peanuts - a song that demonstrated just how far Yard Act have come and how much they've diversified and expanded their sound. Smith, ever the entertaining frontman, took time out to reflect on supporting Jack White at this venue and appearing here as part of the 2022 Mercury Prize event (when they lost out, reasonably enough, to Little Simz) and, towards the end, dedicated the gig (the last one of the tour) to those suffering in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza.

In fact the end of the gig reminded me a bit of the way Super Furry Animals (and their massive tank) used to round off shows. The indie sounds of The Trenchcoat Museum gave way to a funk infused techno workout, the backing singers (and plenty of others) joined in what appeared to be almost a can-can on stage, and a soulful guest vocalist (whose name I can't find) took over the reins as Smith stood by proudly presiding over the gleeful chaos him and his band had conjured up - again! I can see Yard Act tearing up some festival stages this summer.

Thanks to Pam for joining me (well, me joining her really) for this gig and thanks, especially, to Bee for her incredible generosity. Hope you're feeling better soon. I owe you one.

They Were Searching For Something That Didn't Exist - And They Found It!

"Here's to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He'll give you 666. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer. Sad Satan" - Stairway To Heaven, Led Zeppelin (if you play it backwards - and if someone tells you that's what it's saying).

You may remember the outrage about backmasking and subliminal messaging in rock, and some pop, music from the early nineties. Judas Priest, as well as Led Zeppelin (whose reverse paean to sad Satan and his tool shed I wrote about back in April 2018), were at the sharp end when their song 'Better by You, Better than Me" (a Spooky Tooth cover) was accused of having a hidden, backwards, message suggesting that listeners "do it, do it".

What 'it' was remains open to multiple interpretations but, according to the families of 18 year old Raymond Belknap and 20 year old James Vance in Nevada, "it" was suicide - which both the young men attempted, Belknap successfully. Vance disfigured himself and died three years later of a suspected drug overdose.

Judas Priest singer Rob Halford pointed out, correctly, at the time that if he was to hide subliminal messages in his songs he'd hide ones imploring his fans to buy more Judas Priest records and not to kill themselves. Not least as that would be a terrible business model for a band. I wondered at the time who it was who was buying records by bands they didn't like and then playing them backwards.

It was a story we ended up chatting about last night in The Bell at Whitechapel and that's because it was a story that was touched on by Professor Chris French's Hidden Messages (that aren't really there) talk for the London Fortean Society. A fun talk it was too, lots of (optional) audience participation, and, by Chris's own admission, possibly the least academic talk he'd ever given.

Though there was a tiny bit of academia (of sorts) to begin with when Chris talked about pareidolia (the tendency to see patterns or, often, faces in random/ambiguous visual patterns), how we use both top down and bottom up processing to make sense of the very confusing world we live in and how seeing patterns in life is one of humanity's greatest strengths. The problems coming when we subconsciously overplay our hand in this field.

From thereon in, for the most part, Chris simply talked about, and showed us, examples of occasions when people have seen things that are not really there. Some were better than others. Some you can see (or hear) straight away, some you need cajoling towards, and some, quite frankly, are total and utter bollocks.

There's the immaculate confection that heads up this blog. Is it a nun or is it a bun? SPOILER ALERT - it's a cinnamon bun but it does, to me, look a bit like Mother Teresa. I think it's better than the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich that eventually sold for $28,000 and is now believed to be an exhibit in a museum in Las Vegas. The less said about the testicle that looks like a face the better. Why only one testicle you may ask. Well, would you want to share a scrotum with THAT?

Many years ago, Salvador Dali was shown an image of an African village but he was shown it sideways on and mistook it for a face by Pablo Picasso. Dali later adapted it into his own work, Paranoiac Village (c.1931). You can make you own mind up below.

There were further visual examples but Chris has got a book to sell (The Science of Weird Shit:Why Our Minds Conjure The Paranormal) so I won't tell ALL his stories here (not that many people will read it anyway). We soon moved on to auditory hidden messages (that aren't really there) and a section on electronic voice phenomena.

Most of these are recorded in supposedly haunted houses and the like and most of them, you guessed it, have to be played backwards to be understood. Except, you'll do very well if you can understand anything without someone first suggesting what it is you might hear. There's a range of hidden messages from "John Belushi", the positive "we keep planning for peace", the far less positive "prepare to die", and the frankly bizarre "hidden morphine" which, no matter how many times we - the audience - listened to it sounded much more like "it's working". Suggesting the words weren't uttered by a ghost at all but by the tape recorder operator. 

Although that would require them to be able to talk backwards. Which brings us to the Australian writer David Oates (based, not entirely surprisingly, in California) who has proposed a theory about reverse speech. He believes that our brains consist of a left 'hemisphere' and a right 'hemisphere'. The left hemisphere is responsible for what we say and what others hear us say. The right hemisphere however is incapable of lying and as we glibly spout untruths from our mouths, the right hemisphere of our brain makes sure that these words, if listened to backwards - of course, are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Oates believes in this horseshit to such a degree that he believes the police should listen to interviews with suspects backwards to ascertain if they're guilty or not. We got a couple of examples of reverse speech from a couple of well known American politicians. There was Hillary Clinton telling some unremarkable anecdote (if you listen to it forwards) but saying "bless the ale - this is the life" if you listen to it backwards.

Then there was Donald Trump. Puce with rage, as ever, I can't even recall what bullshit was coming out of his cat's arse of a mouth when he spoke forward but played backwards he appeared to be saying "send my bigots in". I'm not even sure they were actually playing that one backwards. What a wanker he is.

Then, of course - as outlined earlier, there was the music. Not just Led Zeppelin and sad Satan's little tool-shed or Judas Priest decimating their own fanbase but Freddie Mercury telling us "it's fun to smoke marijuana" in Queen's Another One Bites The Dust and Michael Jackson explaining quite a lot in Beat It which, if played backwards and if you let your imagination run wild, features the King of Pop revealing that "I believe it was Satan in me".

Lady Gaga is another, like Taylor Swift, who right wing Christian fundamentalists in America believe is in thrall to Beelzebub. Just listen to Paparazzi backwards and the proof is there:- "we model it on the arts of Lucifer". In fact there are few pop or rock stars who are not in league with Old Nick. Though we did wonder if you played the music of openly demonic rock bands, like Deicide and Burzum, backwards would the hidden messages be about letting God into your life and surrendering yourself to Christianity!

Probably not. Satanists aren't as weird as Christians so they don't waste time trying to prove that shit. Nearly as weird as Christians are Internet cat people and you'll not be surprised to find that there is a subset of people on the Internet who have found hidden messages when interpreting their cat's speech! One moggy insists "I'm cold" and demands a towel, another complains, or simply comments, about being alone but the star has to be the bowtied black and white cat Big Billy.

Big Billy, if you listen 'carefully', proudly announces that "I'm Big Billy" and that he has "the biggest wet willy". It was a fun note to end a fun, yet informative, talk on and after a Q&A session (that took in Pink Floyd, ELO, Mr Ed the talking horse, Handel's Messiah, QAnon, Rupert Sheldrake, fairies, UFO abduction, and the unreliability of memory) soon we all repaired downstairs to talk about crisps, police identity parades, and Wales losing out on a place in the 2024 Euros to Poland by the final penalty in a shoot out.

Thanks to Professor Chris French for a(nother) great talk, thanks to David for hosting, and thanks to Jade, Dewi, Tim, Michael, and Paula for joining me at the talk and in the pub downstairs afterwards. Next time you think you hear hidden message but suspect it wasn't really there, don't build up some conspiracy theory around it, have a bit of fun with it. It's what Big Billy, Rob Halford, and the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich would want.

Fleapit revisited:Monster.

"If only some people can have it, that's not happiness. That's just nonsense. Happiness is something anyone can have"- Makiko Fushimi

Happiness IS something anyone can have but life is difficult and confusing and though happiness is there it's not always the easiest thing to find. Us adults have made the world such a bewildering, confusing, and, sometimes, hateful place that many of those who find it hardest to find happiness now are children. The people on the planet who deserve, and should feel, the most happiness.

For that we should hang our heads in shame. Single parents, usually mothers but sometimes fathers, probably feel the burden of creating happiness and safety for their children more than anyone so how would it feel if you were a single mother and your young son (roughly about ten/eleven years old) came home one day, having chopped lumps out of his hair, having lost one of his sneakers, and told you that he didn't have the brain of a human but that of a pig.

That he was neither human nor pig - but some kind of monster. That's what happens to Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando) in Hirokazu Kore-eda's excellent, yet slow burning, new film Monster (written by Yuji Sakamoto). Her son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), has befriended another boy at school and that boy, Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), is being mercilessly bullied by other boys because he's effeminate, possibly gay, and because his father, Kiyotaka (Shido Nakamura), is an abusive drunk.

Kiyotaka does nothing to protect Yori. Instead he tries to pile further misery and shame upon him. But Yori is tough and, despite everything, manages to keep up his happy-go-lucky persona as he skips down the corridors at school and explores abandoned train tunnels in the countryside near his home.

Minato finds it less easy. He's afraid of the bulllies and tells Yori not to talk to him during class, he jumps out of his mother's car when it is moving (shades of Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird), and worries that he may not grow into the same kind of man, a heterosexual one, that his now dead father was. 

He reports to his mother that his bandaged ear and bloodied nose come from a result of bullying and abuse by his new teacher Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama) so Saori goes to the school to register a complaint where she is met with a frankly bizarre response from Mr Hori (who sneakily eats candy from his jacket pocket during the meeting) and the school principal Mrs Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka) who, it soon transpires, is dealing with her own demons.

Initially, it's hard to work out what's really going on but the story is told three times from three different perspectives. Saori's, Mr Hori's, and, finally, Minato's. It is, as you might expect if you are familiar with Kore-eda's work, Minato's version of events, the "shrewd perspective", that makes the most sense. Kore-eda seems to have a deep affinity with, and understanding of, what it feels like to be child. Both the awe and the fear.

Among the beautiful cherry blossoms, we find a burning building, a 'hostess bar', a potentially disturbing (for a 12A film) cat cremation scene, a mudslide, a child playing a trombone, and something that comes close to a suicide attempt (12A?) and yet, with Ryuichi Sakamoto's elegiac score (he died in March last year so possibly his very last) acting as a kind of salve, none of these things seem sensational or exploitative but merely part of Minato's and Yori's life.

For it is, ultimately, a story about Minato and Yori and it's a sweet and tender one too. At their young age the idea of sex is clearly inappropriate but the film bravely suggests that they are starting to have feelings for each other that they know may cause them problems later in life and this is at the core of the entire film.

In Monster, it rains a lot. The rain falls hard and often and in a film that's not short of symbolism the precipitation seems to act as a metaphor for life itself. You can drown in the rain or you can sing and dance it. You can let the rain wash away your sins. Even when you have not sinned. A minor classic and one that leaves you thinking about it long after you've left the cinema.

The Times That We All Hoped Would Last:One Day.

"The times that we all hoped would last, like a train they have gone by so fast - and though we stood together at the edge of the platform we were not moved by them" - St. Swithin's Day, Billy Bragg

"But it's the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day" - Great Expectations, Charles Dickens 

When Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) and Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall) meet at the University of Edinburgh's Graduation Ball in 1988 a chain of events is set in motion that will change both of their lives forever - even if they don't know it at the time. Netflix's One Day (based on the 2009 book by David Nicholls and directed, variously, by Molly Manners, Kate Hewitt, John Hardwick, and Luke Snellin) as they fall in love, fall out of love, become best friends, fall out with each other, and fall back in again and it does so by revisiting Emma and Dexter every year from 1988 to the early 2000s.

Every time, bar one notable exception, on July 15th - St. Swithin's Day. In doing so it manages to take in a wide sweep of emotions and a equally large number of themes. There are meditations on class, privilege, ageing, and family but, more than anything else, this is a story about friendship and love and where the boundary between those two vitally important parts of life stands. Is it worth risking sacrificing a beloved friendship for the chance of something even deeper? 

It is, essentially, a will they/won't they story but it's much more than that too. Very few films or television shows I've ever seen have shown quite so adroitly how it feels to be so close to somebody - yet to be so far away from them at the same time. Neither Emma and Dexter are perfect. In fact, at times, they can be frustrating, irritating even. Yet that makes them feel all the more real, more relatable. Often the people we love most can frustrate and irritate us. It is the bargain we make by allowing love to enter our lives.

They are both certainly very different. He's posh, moneyed, supremely confident (to begin with), and comes across as somewhat vapid. She's blunt, northern, and performative in her intellectual prowess. They may start as cliches, ciphers even, but as One Day's narrative arc develops so do their characters and we see that they are, as we all are, far more complex characters.

It makes for an engrossing, compelling, moving, and sweet drama. When we first meet the two protagonists, classic star-crossed lovers set in a very specific era, in Edinburgh they're both drunk. Upper class Dexter from London is handsome and more than a little bit arrogant and is planning to travel the world. Working class Emma from Leeds is cultured, idealistic, and wants to make a difference. She reads R.D. Laing and Milan Kundera and she is wary of becoming just another notch on Dexter's bedpost.

He offers her a drink, they kiss, but she draws the line at sex - preferring to talk - which she says is sexier. The next day they climb Arthur's Seat and hang out together and he invites her to stay at his parents with him when he returns from France. But when we meet them one year later he's with somebody else, the first in a string of many a short-lived relationships, and she's with Gary (Tim Preston) who runs a shambolic theatre troupe, Sledgehammer, who tour schools with their politically correct productions and bicker amongst themselves.

Despite being apart, they are still writing letters to each other. Gary's a bit of a dick, and perhaps a lightly sketched character, but Emma's next, and more serious, relationship with Ian (Jonny Weldon) is far more interesting. Ian is a sweet man who clearly adores Emma but he's a 'comedian' and his 'jokes' are absolutely terrible. They may get him gigs at The Frog And Parrot in Cockfosters and The Cheshire Cat in Colliers Wood but they start to, quite understandably, grate on Emma.

Emma met Ian when she moved to London to live with her best friend Tilly (Amber Grappy) and ended up working in a Mexican restaurant before becoming a teacher in Walthamstow while trying to write a play or a book, trying to write something. I feel her pain. When Emma splits with Ian she has an affair withe the headmaster, the fantastically named Phil Godalming (Mark Rowley), at the school she teaches in.

Dexter, meanwhile, moves from Magenta Devine lookalike Naomi (Ella Rae-Smith) to Ingrid (not even seen) and on to Suki (Rebekah Murrell) before entering his first serious, and lengthy, relationship with Sylvie (Eleanor Tomlinson), who I found reminded me of the mathematician and broadcaster Hannah Fry.

He takes the Grand Tour (while he's in Rome, it's instructive that Emma is in Wolverhampton) and, back in London, he becomes a television presenter on Larging It (a cross between Network 7 and The Word) which turns him into a minor celebrity and heartthrob surrounded by screaming girls as well as a whipping boy for the press who call him "the most odious man on television" and a "smug self-satisfied smart arse".

Which is hurtful if not necessarily harsh. At this point, Dexter has become a parody of himself. Snorting coke in private member's clubs, hanging out with baronets, and presenting a show which features a segment called "Britain's ugliest girlfriend". Behind the scenes, though, he's not so happy. His mother has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and he's masking the pain with vodka and pills.

Despite the fact they've recently holidayed together on a beautiful Greek island, Emma can't bear to be around him during this period and that bring pain to both of them. Predictably, their fortunes change and this brings them back together but will they come back as friends or as lovers. This is where One Day really starts to press the right buttons and on more then one occasion I found I had something in my eye. In fact, I had quite a lot of stuff there. In both eyes.

The story takes us from an era of cassette tapes and Kestrel lager to the time of Shooting Stars and Nokia phones via curtain haircuts, Basic Instinct, Princess Di, and Indecent Proposal on VHS but nothing sets it in the era more than the superbly realised soundtrack. My friend Darren contended that the soundtrack was the best part of it though I'd have to counter that the rest of it was equal to the soundtrack. Take a deep breath and check this lot out:-

New Order, Pixies, The Stone Roses, Cocteau Twins, The Charlatans, Massive Attack, The Cranberries, Portishead, Primal Scream, Cat Power, The Fall (Bill Is Dead!), Orange Juice, Nick Drake, The Velvet Underground, The Kinks, Manic Street Preachers, Suede, Lou Reed, Blur, Cameo, The Verve, Radiohead, Stereolab, Stereo MCs, Leftfield, Robyn S, Elastica, Frankie Knuckles, N-Joi, Soul II Soul, Karen Dalton, Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man, MC Solaar, Jeff Buckley, Elbow, Gene, Rednex (!), The Magnetic Fields, Gomez, Lambchop, Inner City, S-Express, The House Of Love (Love In A Car!), Badly Drawn Boy, The Mekons, N-Trance, Irma Thomas, The The, Cornershop, Rotary Connection, Belle & Sebastian, and Public Enemy.

If you can't find a lot to enjoy there then I'm not sure we can be friends. The London locations are the sort of places people who live in London actually go (Primrose Hill, Hammersmith Bridge, Charlton Lido, and The Rugby Tavern pub in Holborn) and all the supporting performances (while very much in service to the two leads) are uniformly excellent. Shout outs to Tim McInnerny and Essie Davis as Dexter's parents, Brendan Quinn as Dexter's mate Callum, John MacMillan as his agent Aaron, Adam Loxley as Tilly's partner Graham, and Joely Richardson and Toby Stephens as Sylvie's affluent mummy and daddy.

As Emma and Dexter get older and move on with their lives, it seems the chances of them ever being together become more and more remote and the meetings between them become more and more emotionally charged. At Tilly and Graham's wedding we see this reach what feels like an apex but there are higher highs and lower lows to come. To tell you what they are would render me guilty of spoilers and I don't want to go there as I think you should watch One Day and find out for yourselves.

One Day did an incredible job of showing how much joy there is in life - as well as how much pain we must all suffer. Best of all, it showed how joy and pain always go hand in hand. Without one, it seems, we cannot have the other. Watch it. Feel the pain. Feel the joy.

"The Polaroids that hold us together will surely fade away like the love that we spoke of forever on St. Swithin's Day"

 

Kakistocracy XLIX:Taxi For Mr.Sunak.

It's been 153 days since I last wrote one of these Kakistocracy blogs but don't imagine, for one second, that the shit has not continued pouring out of the rotten Tory arsehole. If anything the flow of cack has become even more rapid as the Tory party splinters into ever more balkanised factions and each faction stabs the other in the back as they slowly consign their vile yet vainglorious party to the dustbin of history.

I rather suspect that after they lose the next election they'll merge with the equally odious Reform party but for my 49th Kakistocracy blog (and it could easily have been 490) I'd like to remind you, me, and everyone else of the shit the Tory party has put the country through since the 18th of October of last year.

Or at least some of it. No blog would be long enough to cover the sheer amount of crap they've put our country though. I've done it in a form of questions addressed to possibly the weakest, yet almost certainly the wealthiest, Prime Minister in British History, Rishi Sunak. Just ten - though there could easily be two hundred - as it's a short blog just to catch up the shitshow before I get back into writing longer ones again.

1.Do you think it is acceptable for your largest donor, Frank Hester, to suggest that the MP Diane Abbott should be shot?

2.Do you not think that looks particularly bad at a time when Michael Gove has announced a crackdown on extremism and many MPs have been talking about receiving death threats just for doing their jobs? Not least when in the last eight years two MPs, Jo Cox and David Amess, have been murdered?

3.Do you believe Frank Hester when he says his criticism of Abbott has "nothing to do with her nor colour of skin". Considering he said he wants to "hate all black women just because she's there"?

4.Did you think bringing David Cameron back into government as Foreign Secretary would make you look more moderate and are you ashamed that the Tory party has now lurched so far to the right that Cameron is one of its more moderate members?

5.Were you ashamed to serve alongside Nadine Dorries who made ludicrous, conspiracy theory based, claims that the Tory party were run by a secret cabal that included people called Dr No, The Wolf, and The Dark Lord, and that one of them nailed dead animals to their opponent's doors?

6.Were you ashamed to serve alongside Lee Anderson (and even promote him to be Chairman of the Conservative Party) when he made ridiculous claims that London, under the mayoralty of Sadiq Khan, has fallen to Islamists? I live in London. There are pubs, women walk around with their faces, their hair, and even their shoulders exposed, I've never seen anyone stoned, executed, or have their hands chopped off in public. It doesn't feel like we're living under ISIS.

7.Why do you have so little control of your catastrophic party and why are you allowing plotters in the party to suggest Penny Mordaunt will take over from you in the coming weeks or months? Why don't you kick these people out of the party? Are you too weak?

8.Is it embarrassing that a party that has always prided itself on being careful and sensible custodians of the economy are presiding over a crippling cost of living crisis and have overseen the highest tax rises since the end of World War II?

9.Are you not cringing with shame when your two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, have been campaigning for the reelection of Donald Trump, a man who has openly said he will not support Ukraine and will even encourage Vladimir Putin to invade other countries - as well as a man who has said there will be a "bloodbath" if he does not win the next election? Do you have no shame? These are your colleagues and though they're not your friends (because Tories don't have friends) you have defended them and you are guilty by association.

 10.When, as seems very likely, you humiliatingly lose the next election will you, as I suspect, merge with the Reform Party and perhaps even allow Nigel Farage to have a go at being leader? Have you really sunk that low? Shame on you.

Mr Sunak, please fuck off. Call a general election and then go and live in California (sorry to my Californian friends but the prisons here, as we keep hearing, are full) with David Beckham, Prince Harry, and Robbie Williams and take Boris Johnson and Liz Truss (and the rest of your rotten party with you). Never bother British politics again. Taxi for Mr Sunak!