September

[Sweder]

On the bike this morning for an essential detox after the Night of the Choking Scotsman* round at Captain Tom’s. The night started inauspiciously, we three well-met, well-fed fellows sharing a few gentle pints and a game of Eight Ball in the backroom at the Two Brewers. A cluster of grim-looking youths took an interest led by an under-fed extra from The Hills Have Eyes and a rather portly tattooed gentleman and his equally rotund concubine. Hills thought it would be a good idea to poke a large bear with a stick, deliberately knocking Captain Tom’s cueing arm mid-shot. There followed a low-key exchange of observations and opinions. SP ventured that our new-found companions may have taken a rather shallow dip in the gene pool and I added the observation that Hills might be the sort of person to find pleasure in his own company a little too often. It all broke up amicably enough, the wobbly female berating the tattooed lard mountain for starting it all (when in fact he’d tried to defuse things as soon as he’d taken stock of the size and grizzled appearance of his potential adversaries). There is, it seems, justice in the world.

Conflict and its resolution were in my thoughts as I flogged my sorry carcass across the Downs. The sky had the look of a cream pudding left on the stove too long, the high white layer of cloud broken and cracked, yellow at the edges as the sun peeped sheepishly through as if to apologise for having missed most of summer. As I pedalled frantically and without great effect Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow provided the soundtrack via the excellent Stargazer. Cozy Powell’s marvellous manic intro, pounding, Blackmore's driving rhythms and hugely dramatic, overblown guitar riffs, Ronnie James Dio’s haunting, powerful voice belting out lyrics laden with gravitas if a little confused in their meaning . You get songs like this, especially in the sword and sorcery world of heavy rock. Slow, rumbling music (Zeppelin’s Cashmere is another good example), conjuring images of slaves dragging ludicrously large slabs of stone through endless shifting sands under a merciless sun. The words bring added weight, often making little or no sense under careful interrogation but hey, this is heavy metal not anything important like, oh I don’t know, global politics. Barrack Obama calls the faithful to him, his own carefully crafted speeches filling vast auditoriums, echoes of the past chiming with an ernest demand for change, for a better, friendlier world. For all the plaudits, ovations and the sagely nodding of wise old heads you have to sift through the text for quite some time before anything substantial emerges.

I got to thinking about his adversaries. John McCain seems solid enough, what I call a Ronseal Republican; he does exactly what it says on the tin. But I was thinking specifically about Sarah Palin. Tomorrow in Cern, Switzerland, a bunch of (probably) mad scientists are going to fire up the world’s most powerful pea-shooter, the Large Hadron Collider, to re-create the birth of our universe. It all sounds a bit dodgy to me. There’s a 1 in 500 million chance it could all go tits up and we end up getting sucked up our own backsides as the world implodes. On one hand not very likely, but on the other if it did happen we’ll hardly be in a position to take the whacked-out white-coats to task. The Lovely Sarah [SIZE="1"]TM[/SIZE] is an avowed Creationist. Put simply she believes that the Swiss fiddlers have it all wrong as it wasn’t a simple cosmic collision that started all this at all but an old chap in white robes with a long curly beard and eyes of fire named God. And that worries me no end. Because if the American voters make a pig’s ear of things in November this lady will be a (rather old) heartbeat away from the ultimate executive power and the Big Red Button. As we enter the coldest snap in East West relations since the bad old days of Spitting Image we face the real prospect of the person with her finger on the trigger holding the firm belief that should the worst happen and she unleash World War Three Big G will simply whip out his celestial clapper board and yell ‘cut!’ closely followed by ‘The Earth, Take Two.’ It’s a heck of way to play poker; you can call your opponent’s bluff every time because you know what? You’ve got the ultimate resurrection card, your very own Ace of Spades, and who knows? Maybe God won’t create any Ruskies next time. God is almost certainly a Republican; I'm pretty sure I spotted him at the convention last week.

So there I was, sweating out a small flood of residual Guinness and Harvey’s, not to mention a few drops of fine late-night curry, wondering which Big Bang we should be most afraid of. I can at least sleep soundly in my bed tonight. If the boffins in Cern flip a switch tomorrow and we all take that Big Dipper to the other side of the Galaxy I’ll be the one screaming ‘I told you so!’

*[SIZE="1"]Night of the Choking Scotsman is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Mr Andrew Murray being ‘British’ when he wins and ‘Scottish’ when he loses.
For the record Murray didn’t choke, he simply lost to the Greatest Tennis Player on the Planet TM playing at an unwordly level.[/SIZE]