FraserWords

ONCE, the customer was always right. I remember it. I was both customer and deliverer of goods to customer (in the form of newspapers) and I distinctly remember that the customer was always right. The customer was often a complete pain in the arse, but the rightness was beyond question. Now, our world has been […]

NOTHING convinces me that we live in the age of the cretin so much as the cult of the head-hunter. In times of crisis, the media demands a head and when the head falls, the whole issue – the issue that’s totally unaddressed by the fall of the hapless dolt at the top of it […]

I WOULD like to talk to you of banjos, for the banjo is our chosen symbol for the week. It’s an instrument that for years has been unloved, on the fringes, unregarded, nothing but a jazz percussion aid. Mark Twain, who said absolutely everything that Oscar Wilde didn’t, famously remarked: ‘A gentleman is a man […]

WE are going to have to address the question of time, seeing as I’m late yet again. This was supposed to be a blog to read with your morning coffee, for the Crab’s sake. It has become something to read with your evening cocoa. But time just doesn’t work, does it? Brother Mellors and I […]

I’ve been telling you for years, not weeks, that the southern English are the worst sort of electoral cowards. The sort that would run scared when faced with even the emptiest of threats (‘The SNP are coming! Lock up your principles!’); stand obediently to one side while the weak are bullied; the sort that would […]

Think of the people who will be happy on Friday morning if all goes badly and the Conservatives win. David Cameron. Goldman Sachs. Rupert Murdoch. Paul Dacre. George Osborne. Cameron’s election chief Lynton Crosby, one of whose firms stands to make vast profits from privatised NHS contracts. God forgive me for writing the foul name […]

IF you’re wondering how to vote, I know a car park where there’s a ticket machine that can help you. It spoke to me last week, as I stood fumbling for change and squinting to read the instructions. ‘Good morning,’ it said. ‘I am a symbol. ‘I have just been placed in this Cornish car […]

It’s hard to know where to place your vote, and now the manifestos (or should that be manifestoes? I can’t be bothered to check) are out, it’s harder. For starters, most of my life democracy has been but a fiction to me. I’ve lived most of my life in Devon and Cornwall, in constituencies that […]

SORRY about last week. You know that feeling of overwhelming, unignorable tiredness, the one that steals up on you from behind and throws a great big furry fuzzling blanket over your head, cutting out all noise and sight and forcing you to fall gently to the floor, submitting like you’re auditioning for 50 Shades of […]

FIFTY years ago today I emerged onto this rock, screaming, farting and belching, looking like some hideous monster. The scene was re-enacted this morning as I was summoned into the day by two sons, two dogs and Brother Bertie’s bloody cat. If anything, the screaming has grown in volume over half a century. Half a […]