Family Vibrations

I was inspired by an evening of live performance last night at the Arts Organization in Nottingham. The event was called 'Family Vibrations' and consisted of a number of people with a varied mix of talents and abilities getting up on stage and performing their party pieces. Some golden nuggets were there – a man playing a recorder (of all things) accompanied by a couple of percussionists from Blackdrop (I wrote about that particular troupe a few days ago); there was sweet young Sam on the guitar, singing better than I've heard him sing before; another Broadway Bruiser - Black Feather (that's his real name, btw) - performing on the djembe drum with great accomplishment. It was a fun night – a few a capella singers; some (occasionally dire) poets; and the fabulously exotic Daniel Hallam who was at one time the white-painted model who derided me for my gold brocade shirt and orange-striped trousers at the last Unleashed event. In all, it was huge fun.

When I was a boy, I used to hear my parents (and other adults) say that the one consistent fact about all politicians is that they are filthy liars. I never really believed this – after all, I was at one time a small-time politician myself when I won two elections to become an elected Councillor – but yesterday I suddenly saw the undisguised truth of this assertion. Gordon Brown's speech at the Labour Party Conference was the biggest pile of useless hyperbolic rhetoric and hubris that I have ever heard. Endless clichés; meaningless soundbites; macho-driven clenched fists; vacuous repetition of phrases like 'good for Britain', 'the future of our country', 'Labour at its best' etc – these say nothing about policies and solutions. The awful, yawning truth of this appalling flim-flam is that the Labour delegates watching him must have known that he was lying; we knew that he was lying – even Gordon himself knew that he was lying! My parents were right after all - what a sham.

Now, this is my last word on The Machine. Those incompetent crankies at CERN have put a right spanner in the works, so they have. They have now announced that they won't be switching it back on until next Spring. This has scuppered my plans completely as I now have to plan what I'm going to do at Christmas – something I had hoped to avoid. I hate Christmas anyway (for all the obvious reasons) and it nearly always results in 'family vibrations' of an entirely different kind, I can tell you. Doh! This is ridiculous, and not what I expected when I invested - I want my £3.7 billion returned at once!