banned video, twentytwelve, Glastonbury and a snake

The New Young Conservatives
Uploaded by DontPanicOnline. - News videos hot off the press.

A strange story has come to my attention. The online magazine Don't Panic is in a spot of bother with Conservative Future - a rebranded version of the Young Conservatives - over this videoclip. London Conservative Future has managed to get the above clip taken down on YouTube after claiming copyright. Not liking that sort of censorship under the guise of copyright - can't these people take a joke? - here it is...

Young people these days. Tut...

My profile includes an exhortation to WR readers to buy my novel twentytwelve in a desperate bid to get its amazon.co.uk rating below half a million. No-one took any notice at all and the amazon rating drifted down and down to over 1.1 million. Imagine my surprise when checking for the first time in ages yesterday to see an amazon rating for twentytwelve of a mere 110,000, Before I got too excited, I reminded myself that this probably simply meant that someone had bought a copy. There are two things amazon will not explain: how many copies of anything they sell and what their ratings mean. Ratings can whizz up and down in bizarre patterns and small sales can cause huge shifts in ratings. I occasionally think whimsically that everyone who has vaguely thought of buying twentytwelve when they get around to it should form some sort of virtual flash mob and order it at the same time. The rating would (briefly) go stellar! I can dream...

I caught Neil Young at Glastonbury on TV on Friday night. It must be said that the elderly gent was on stonkingly good form. What particularly amused me was that at one point he was performing with one sleeve of his jacket having arm inserted and one sleeve flapping loose. He doesn't care. He's not called the godfather of grunge for nothing. On Saturday, I moved out of London flat with the aid of the Polish removal guys (see WR 12 Feb for Polish removal guys and background). I'd got the flat at the end of 2008 and it came to represent everything that pissed me off. I don't like living on my own, it cost far too much for somewhere I didn't spend much time in because now pretty much all my work is in the Midlands and not in London and the flat was nothing special for something so expensive. So I invoked the break clause in the tenancy agreement and the present deal is that I should be moving into a flat in Birmingham to share with a colleague in the not too distant future until - well - something else happens. In the meantime, I'm of no fixed abode again but hopefully for no more than a couple of weeks.

I celebrated being of no fixed abode by going to a very fine - and not too expensive Indian restaurant in Brockley - South East London for the uninitiated - and much to my annoyance missed Bruce at Glastonbury on TV due to the very short gap between returning from restaurant and retiring to share a room with a snake. It was okay - the snake doesn't do much. Apparently all it does is eat one large or two small mice a fortnight and then sleeps the meal off (it swallows them whole) and sheds its skin once a month. Personally, I would prefer a more active pet.

Having mentioned Neil Young, here is the elderly gent (when hugely younger) with The Band and Helpless. I do like the line 'blue, blue windows behind the stars...'