first TV abortion ad: new medium, old agendas

I've just seen Marie Stopes' advert on John Smeaton's site and, although I should be doing an application form right now, had to get blogging. First, have a look at the advert.



It starts pretty unremarkably with "Jenny Evans" standing at a bus-stop, and the graphics telling us that she is late, ie has not had her period when expected.

Then the interesting stuff starts. We go to "Katie Simmons", who is also late. She is propelling a baby in a pram with one hane and trying to control a toddler with the other. Marie Stopes' message, you might think is that two is enough; three would be too many. However, when you see the difficulty she's having with two children, the subliminal message becomes clear: one child is enough, two are too many. Fittingly, Father Tim Finnegan of The Hermeneutic of Continuity reports the visit last week of Ms Li Bin, called "Madame Sterilisation" (she heads China's forced sterilisation policy) to Marie Stopes' London headquarters. He links to Tibet-Truth, which says of Marie Stopes International that it is "an organization which by its silence, and open support of the Chinese population program, surely merits criticism and challenge".

The last lady we see is "Shareen Butler", a black lady who is in a pottery class. Here we come to the rotten core of the population control movement, as is witnessed to by Arnold Culbreath, Urban Outreach Director of US organisation Protecting Black Life. In asking why abortion providers are particularly interested in building sites in poor black areas of the US, we get a glimpse of their ugly agenda.

In today's Telegraph, trainee consultant Max Pemberton cries for less heat, more light on abortion, protesting that he sat in on a Marie Stopes counselling session with a patient who had been abandoned by the father of her unborn child. The session ended with the patient, contrary to what Pemberton would have wanted, deciding to keep the child. Personally, if I was a Marie Stopes counsellor and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph - known to be friendly to Judaeo-Christian traditions and the pro-life cause - was sitting in, I would have made sure that the pregnancy was continued as well. Tellingly, Pemberton reveals that the woman had a mental illness, in another confirmation of the pro-choice/anti-life eugenics agenda of the abortion industry.

If abortion services are going to advertise their wares on TV, why are pro-life organisations still barred from using this medium to raise awareness of the possible and proven side-effects of abortion? I can only hope that the Coalition Government will do what it can to level the playing-field which has been skewed in favour of the eugenics lobby for the best part of a century. All I can say to strengthen their resolve in this project is: your voters are watching you.

don't kids with HIV suffer enough without this?

We may have a new government but, behind the scenes, the same unelected sinister forces are pushing their agendas at our children.

HYPNet - the HIV in Young People Network - describes itself as "a multidisciplinary group of health professionals and voluntary sector representatives" working for people between the ages of 14-24 who are unfortunate enough to be living with HIV.

They've just released draft guidelines on the management of sexual and reproductive health for adolescents living with HIV 2010.

The first thing that worried me on the guidance came as early as Section 3, Definitions. In this draft document, which dealt with "possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences" for adolescents, the term "adolescence" itself is defined worryingly:

The term adolescent will be used throughout these guidelines to denote young people aged 10-24 years old, which covers the age from the onset of menarche in the UK to the upper limit of the definition of young adult...

I had to read the lower limit of that definition again: 10. This is no faux alarm - the Telegraph's Aislinn Laing reported recently that "Between 2000 and 2007, a total of 15 ten year olds and 39 aged 11 fell pregnant in England and Wales". HYPnet's somewhat abusive take on sexual health care is outlined in bold letters at point 8.1:

PHCP [paediatric healthcare professionals] need to take responsibility for seeing that Sexual Health needs, if not brought up by the adolescent, are raised in consultations, starting well before sexual maturity is reached.

Yet, although the paper states twice that in England and Wales sexual activity involving under-13's is illegal and indeed rape (under common law consent is meaningless under this age), the waters are muddied by a statement in point 6.3, which concerns the Sexual Offences Act 2003, that "this document does not advocate mandatory reporting to police or social services of every sexually active under 18 if there is no cause for concern"; the cut-off point of 13 has been dropped.

A pattern starts to emerge at point 8.3, where we read under the heading of Sexual Health Education that "Psychosexual issues may arise from cultural and religious beliefs around...female circumcision". Again, there is no comment, even to the effect that "female circumcision", more properly known as female genital mutilation, is a vicious assault on a young girl which, even if it is carried out abroad, is still an offence as if it had been done in the UK under the terms of the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003. But the foul practice is listed as if it had no more significance than being one cultural phenomenon among many.

In 2006 Anthony Ozimic, Political Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) identified that the term "sexual and reproductive health" cannot be taken within any legal framework to include abortion.

The news has travelled slowly: point 9.2 in this document about sexual and reproductive health is a "checklist for sexual history discussion", and the ninth crib-note states: "Managing an unplanned pregnancy. Options of continuing with pregnancy, adoption or termination of pregnancy; methods of termination." The thought of an adolescent girl, already emotionally fragile through the stigma many people living with HIV are still exposed to, being put at risk of post-abortion trauma is as heartbreaking as is the omission of the risk of PAT from the crib-notes. Similarly, the advice under 16.4, emergency contraception, advises not only the morning-after pill Levonelle, which is basically a form of chemical abortion, but that double the dose (3000 micrograms instead of 1500) be given, and that the dose be documented because Levonelle is not licensed to be given in this quantity. There's no mention in the paper of the patient being informed of this in the event of the drug being given in a sexual health clinic as opposed to a pharmacy.

Ironically, the one area (16.5) where the paper hits the nail right on the head is the one that workers whose fields intersect that of sexual health are asked to keep quiet about:

Condoms are estimated to prevent HIV transmission in only 13% (4-40) of cases (Davis and Weller 1999) and should not therefore be relied on alone for contraception.

I recommend that you follow the link to the Davis and Weller article, which seems to contextualise a later study in the New England Journal of Medicine that found a higher rate of protection (22% - albeit against HPV transmission) - when condoms were used 100% of the time.

Draft Guidance on the Management of Sexual and Reproductive Health for Adolescents Living with HIV 2010 is a case-in-point of how wilfully incomplete advice drawn up along ideological lines can put real, vulnerable, people right in the firing line of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The nhsnetworks listing for HYPNet shows that membership is open to all, and current membership is 2 (one of whom is paediatric HIV expert Dr Simon Portsmouth, right) - who have managed to get this paper distributed throughout the world by the otherwise well-regarded aidsmap e-bulletin.

The trojan horse was an article called Numerous unplanned pregnancies in vertically-infected teenagers (the term indicating that the virus was transmitted during pregnancy or at birth), which did not appear to consider that there are numerous unplanned pregnancies in teenagers generally - Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe - precisely because of abusive sex education strategies of the sort championed by HYPNet.

If you are concerned or disturbed about any of the issues in this post, please respectfully and with sensitivity towards the difficulties faced by young people with HIV email Dr Simon Portsmouth.

top tips for Tuesday

Ten top tips this week, starting with Cambridge's Big Three Conservative bloggers!

The Coleridge Conservative Action Team, including City Councillor Chris Howell and candidate Andy Bower, looks at the police's success in closing down two brothels in the city's south-east area, then meditates on the injustice in doffenences in the BBC's coverage of the financial affairs of Conservative and Labour donors...

...Cambridge's Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, Nick Hillman, blogs on Rwanda's President Kagame's speech to the Royal Commonwealth Society on his country's entry to the Commonwealth, focussing on young people in Africa and the world...

...and Richard Normington picks up on Iain Dale's question of why the next Budget hasn't been announced yet.

Alex Ferguson watch out: Lisa Zyga speculates on the US site physorg.com on whether the result of a football game can be predicted through maths.

Anybody who knows anything about mental illness or recovery from drugs misuse has heard of serotonin and dopamine - here Neuroskeptic summarises the case of a chap who was born with a brain unable to synthesize either.

The cartoonist Bones - aka Yaakov Kirschen - looks at a meeting of three modern dictators and compares in to events on the eve of the Second world War - click the pic to see the whole cartoon.

One for the photographers of both digital and analogue disposition: petapixel posts a link to an online application that calculates the "golden hours" - the time immediately after dawn or before sunset - for anywhere on the globe.

The Seventeenth Century History blog ponders the decisions to sack Naomi Tadmor and David Ganz, respectively an early modern historian and Britain's only Professor of Paleography, in a polyglot post bemoaning the dumbing-down of our education.

Father TF looks at That "Adam & Steve Apology in the wake of a deacon having been forced to make an apology over the prospect of same-sex marriage that, FrTF points out, may not have come from homosexual activists.

But I can make a cappuccino, asserts Linda from Don't Poke the Baby, meditating upon the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

top tip for Tuesday

Only time for one tip this week, as I'm experimenting with the seat-of-the-pants style of editing the church mag: but what a tip it is.

Last Friday John Smeaton, director of SPUC (the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children) drews a line in the sand in response to the Government's abusive proposals for sex education in schools, which bode ill for the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim voluntary grant-aided

Smeaton cites a Government media release praising St Thomas More's RC School in Bedford on the grounds that, among other things,

St Thomas More delivers SRE [sex and relationships education] through the pastoral programme in conjunction with the RE syllabus...the school explicitly recognises the reality that some young people may choose to be sexually active and, if that is the case, they need the knowledge and confidence to make an informed choice to protect themselves from pregnancy and STIs. The school nurse provides students with clear accurate information about the full range of contraception and STIs and details of local services...Pregnancy options, including abortion, are also discussed in a non-judgemental way with the RE syllabus requiring students to understand the spectrum of pro- and anti-choice views on abortion.

Smeaton provides a long list of tenets of the Roman Catholic faith that these grounds violate, after announcing that "I will be writing to St Thomas More school, asking them to confirm or deny the government's claims about what is happening in its school."

Later that day, the Telegraph's Blogs Editor, Damian Thomson forecast Bad Things for Oona Stannard, chief executive of the Catholic Education Service, which, as Smeaton identified, had helped the Government draw up its guidelines. Fr Tim Finnegan, a frequent flier on this feature, refers to both posts as he runs with the theme on his blog The Hermeneutic of Continuity. He asks how far the moral relativism will be taken:

I doubt whether you would get Healthy Schools Status if you taught that there was a range of views on the advantages of smoking tobacco; and I don't suppose there is meant to be a valid range of views on the pros and cons of nazism as a system of government. The relativism of Ed Balls and his friends who are setting the agenda for secular Britain is actually only applied to the "views" they disagree with, such as Catholic moral teaching on the sanctity of life, marriage, and the procreation of children.

The Government is mounting an attack both on one Faith and on faith. I remember minor Scottish politicians muttering about "Rome on the rates" and, as they have risen, they have dripped their poison slowly through the years in the hope that the erosion would create a cavity large enough to insert their specious moral outrage about "religion on the rates".

As John Smeaton notes, today - Tuesday 23 - is the day when Parliament is due to vote on what is effectively the nationalisation of the bodies, minds and spirits of our children.

Smeaton remarks that St Thomas More "preferred to sacrifice himself rather than put the state's demands above the church's teachings", as can be seen in the 1966 film
A man for All Seasons starring, among others, Paul Scofield and Susannah York. I wonder if the Government was careful to use a school bearing his name as a Trojan horse to try to use the state's demands to extinguish the church's teaching?

touching home: the day after Valentine's

Mindnight having passed, this should really be called "the day after the day after Valentine's", but then I suppose that depends on where you are when you're reading it.

Maxima and I try to refrain from going overboard with cards and gifts now that the girls are a little older. We celebrate Christmas religiously, but otherwise don't bother too much with cards etc. Except when we do. That's the problem with an unofficial arrangement.

So I was nonplussed when Maxima handed me an envelope that morning, with a very nice card touched my heart. She left the room to do something - at which Minora came in, slipped an envelope into my hand and whispered in my ear - in a manner a Sergeant Major would be proud of - "fill it in!" I know when I'm licked.

I can't lay my hand on the card right now, but I remember the verse being a little treacly. Was this the only card she could find, or is that how she sees love between a couple who have nearly been married 20 years? Or is that how our love would seem to me if my tired old hull weren't so barnacled?

I remember a party my Uncle and Aunt had for their 25th wedding anniversary - he said he loved her, and went bright red. It was the first time, I believe, their children had heard it said 'twixt one and the other. It was almost like a line I once read in a classic detective story set in Sicily by Leonardo Sciascia called Il Giorno della Civetta (later made into an Italian-language film with Claudia Cardinale) where the detective asks a newly-widowed woman "Did you love him?" and she answers "Of course - we were married". I don't want the girls, in the future when we're gone, to assume that we must have loved each other because we were married, because unfortunately, even these days, it ain't necessarily so. I'm glad that they can hear us say it as well as see us show it, like the two sides of a coin.

After attending a service of Holy Communion at St Gallicus we came home and dinner was put on. I hadn't been aware of my mood being slightly elevated towards the end of the week, but I felt a leaden weight drag my mind down while mashing the potatoes. Maxima saw me slow down and start to slouch, and placed me at the table while she finished the tatties. Yet again, with my family around me, I experienced love as the safety-net under the trapeze.

Thankfully we were able to attend St Gallicus for a Valentine's Day Celebration of Marriage, one of hundreds that were happening up and down the country. There were three hymns from the top ten wedding hymns during the service - Amazing Grace, Make me a Channel of your Peace and Praise my Soul the King of Heaven. Between the second and third the married couples faced each other and renewed our wedding vows, saying "I took you..." and "with this ring I wed you...", etc. With a peal of bells beforehand and a slice of cake and glass of champagne or orange juice afterwards, it was good to touch home with where we'd started out all those years ago - scrape off the barnacles, as it were.

I didn't feel well enough to the discussion on theology Rector Pellegrina was hosting that evening, but it was a lovely day and - one of the major points, I think - Minora and even Minima (now a teenager) had went a little misty eyed at the flowers, bells, etc. The service was thoroughly grounded in the continuing theological thread concerning marriage running through the Old and New Testaments (hardly surprising, since the Christian Bible starts with one marriage and ends with another). I found this all the more comforting for not feeling too great; something Richard Dawkins would sneer at, but I think Bishop David Thomson, in his Valentine's Day Sermon on the Four Loves, explained it consummately: "Religion is easily accused of being a crutch, but I have no problem myself with an A and E department if I’ve been in an accident, and life is full of accidents." Amen to that.

I never had time to write all this down on Valentine's Day as I had to be up early for work - which compliments medication excellently in putting mental illness in its place - but I hope your Valentine's day was good or, if it wasn't, that it wasn't too bad. Touch home more than once a year.

body image isn't all it looks like

Cavete: discusses and links to material some people may find disturbing

When I was in my mid-teens I developed acne. Never having been one to do things by halves, mine was in the form of angry boils flowering luxuriantly over my fizzog. I didn't have much of a problem with it, and didn't get more hassle than one might have expected in a working-class Glaswegian housing estate.

Then I went to university in Italy, and the head of my college decided he did have a problem with my acne, and at his insistence I set out on courses of antibiotics and various other pills and potions - one of which, as I remember, turned my first wee of the morning bright red, which was quite a thing if you weren't prepared for it.

During my first year at uni I fell into a deep depression, and I wonder if the head's effective declaration that my appearance was undesirable contributed to the mix of being away from home from the first time and studying like I'd never done before. But the past can be a dangerous place to form assumptions about, so who knows?

I found myself thinking about this period of my life for the first time in a while after an advert directed me to BBC Radio 1's listen-again feature, where Aled Jones from the Chris Moyles show (me neither) had hosted a "surgery" about body-image, when a young man called in to speak about his desperation that nothing his doctor gave him was touching his acne. I felt for him.

An American psychotherapist called Aaron Haydn Jones explained the process of filtering, whereby we might ignore 100 positive comments and dwell on one negative one. I can't argue with that - Richard Carpenter attributed one journalist's comments about his sister's weight in the early 1970s to her tortured death in 1983.

The show, however, wasn't exclusively about anorexia and bulimia as such but about unhappinesses with one's body (which might admittedly feed the pathogenesis of one of these terrible illnesses). I started to wonder about the direction of the show when one chap rang in to complain about the shape of one of his eyebrows, but then a young woman said that she'd had problems with her mum after she (filia) had a breast reduction: Aaron was running with the ball immediately, and wondered if the girl had had cosmetic surgery for what was a relational problem, and spoke of feelings of jealousy - or at least displacement - that can sometimes occur between mother and daughter, father and son. Then, of course, another young woman rang in to complain that her breasts were too small.

Something that's been in the news recently is airbrushing - a case in point being a photo of model Phillipa Hamilton where her waist appears smaller than her head, an image that made fashion house advertisers Ralph Lauren regret their use of Photoshop and ultimately issue a reluctant apology. To indicate the power of the program, some Radio 1 figures allowed their images to be retouched and posted on the website.

Where things started to get interesting was when Emma Ledger, deputy editor of More clebrity magazine, came on the show briefly to say that the publication had no policy as to the sizes of models whose photos it published, and that it only airbrushed to get rid of zits or tidy up hair. "Who wants to see a zit on the cover of a magazine?" she moaned, and suddenly I realised that perhaps punk had a point after all.

The first thing I did was to reflect that if a mag is publishing pics of clothes that are supplied to it, its in-house policies on model sizes are meaningless if the sample garments supplied to it only fit "size-zero" models; something which caused (British) Vogue editor Alexandra Schulman to fire off an angry letter to designers.

The second thing I did was to buy a copy of More, and try not to look too embarrassed as I payed for it. This is something I did when suspicious about Now editor Abigail Blackburn's protestations of innocence to Louise Redknapp, who had accused her magazine of triggering "pregorexia; the issue of Now brought out to coincide with Redknapp's crusading documentary was a celebrity pregnancy special, but the devil was in the detail, and the detail turned out to be in the back issues.

I have no back issues of More, but on flicking through the magazine did find an advert for Tesco Clothing Online featuring a photo of a woman who looked as though she had other priorities than eating. Had the magazine been supplied with the pic, or with clothes that would only fit somebody of her dimensions?

What caught Maxima's eyes made a bee in her bonnet buzz furoiusly: she pointed to a photo of Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud with (I think) Tom Crane, and, pointing to Crane's form (which compared to mine looks skeletal), demanded to know why men could look any way they wanted while women had to look like Barbie. At least she let up quite soon - one Hogmanay she went on and on about male performers looking like they'd been dragged through a hedge while female ones were expected to exude glamour. At least she had a point. But I hope the bloke who phoned in to complain about his eyebrow never had a look at the "More man of the week" (Kellan Lutz from vampire flick Twilight); no wonder illicit steroid sales are booming, as vulnerable young men think they have to "get ripped". It's not for me to contradict Emma Ledger and say that the photo was digitally manipulated, but Radio 1 DJ Vis showed that it could be done (see pic below).

Ledger did stress that her magazine was for 18-26-year-olds ("of all shapes and sizes"), but the feature that gave me most cause for concern was nothing to do with body-image, rather "position of the week", demonstrated with Barbie and Ken dolls. I thought of the poor girl who texted Jones' show to say that she only felt good about herself if a boy told her she was pretty, and felt furthermore that the only way to bring this about was to sleep with said boy. I remembered sadly the travellers' tales of former colleagues in drugs work, who had given talks to schoolchildren and reported back that girls said that some boys threatened to spread the word that they were "frigid" if they refused to have sex. Sometimes we fellows are unconscionably nasty people, and moreover, while More is by no means the worst offender, I'm also not sure what Ms Ledger thinks happens to somebody on their 18th birthday to make them less vulnerable to masculine con-tricks than they were at 17 years and 364 days old.

Now I only look in the mirror on those occasions when I have no choice but to shave and comb my hair; but I remember a strange young man who would examine his image, although I'm no longer sure what he was looking for or even at. Young people today are not the means to enrichment of the staff of celebrity magazines and/or the shareholders of companies that own them. It's no cliché that children are the future: young people will father and bear our grandchildren, will work in supermarkets and universities and, among a milion other things, will hopefully enjoy life enough to convince the grumpier among us that there's a point to it all.

And, on a personal note, I'd like to send a message to the young man with acne. Nothing worked for me either - but it faded in every way as I got older.

Related posts:

Abigail Blackburn and the truth about pregorexia

Claire Sweeney's big fat...

sport: is morality the enemy at the gate?

I was never a sports fan; but it's so pervasive that, even being averse to it if not phobic, I was caught up by the cloud of depression caused by Kenny Dalglish's departure to Liverpool from Celtic that hung over our school for a day. I think I went home and gazed at his picture on one of the football cards you got with bubble-gum brought from ice-cream vans and mentally asked, "how could you do it?" But I was better the next day, and was back in the school's small car-park with my Eye-spy Book of Cars.

The behaviour of sports personalities off the pitch, field or course has been high in the media spotlight recently but, in an article whose title refers to Pele's description of football as "the beautiful game", the Telegraph's Mick Brown shows us that extra-curricular activities are nothing new:

One of the more poignant football stories this week was the revelation that during the Second World War those two examplars of a finer age of Corinthian values, Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen, were arrested for trying to sell contraband coffee and soap while playing an international match in Belgium. Their excuse, touchingly, was that they needed the money to buy presents for their wives. The two men were given formal reprimands, and the incident buried away in Ministry of Defence documents which have been kept secret for more than 65 years.

However, stories coming out in recent years seem to be of a more serious nature than spivviness.

For example, we had the infamous "dentist's chair" incident in the 1996 European Cup, where members of the England Football Team adopted the posture of a client of said professional to have spirits poured into their mouths. The incident probably had a two-way relationship with Paul Gascoigne's increasingly problematic drinking; as the Guardian's Mark Watson wote last year, "if Gascoigne's gluttony ended up being his fatal flaw, the media were equally greedy for details of his impending downfall. The tabloids who demand 'GET HELP FOR THIS MAN' these days are, by and large, the same ones whose relentless scrutiny fuelled Gascoigne's decline."

More recently, a presumably fatigued Tiger Woods has been intimately linked with nineteen women. But compare his attendance at a clinic that treats addiction to sex while Iris Robinson, MP in the devolved Stormont Assembly in Northern Ireland, who had a fling with one man who fleeced her for £50,000, told all in a BBC documentary and is now a star on Facebook, was taken into psychiatric care when the scandal broke. I'm not trying to say that committing adultery with one person is more excusable than committing it with nineteen, merely that being diversity-ridden does not protect society from institutionalised sexism.

It's as if sports stars, whether playing or not, are in an enclave where normal morality is kept at the gates. In an essay on Moral Reasoning in the Context of Sport, David Shields and Brenda Bredemeier of the Univesity of Missouri's Center for Character and Citizenship state they found in a study of 50 college students that "the nonathletes had significantly more mature moral reasoning than did the basketball players", explaining:

we also noted that in the philosophical and social science literature on play, games, and sport it was commonplace to discuss these activities as somehow "set apart" from everyday life. The noted philosopher Huizinga, for example, described play as "a stepping out of 'real life' into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own". Handelman, an anthropologist, wrote that entry into the play realm requires "a radical transformation in cognition and perception". Schmitz, a sociologist, similarly suggested that play transfers participants into a world with new forms of space, time, and behavior, "delivering its own values in and for itself".

Now we have the news that John Terry, captain of the England football team, had an affair with the wife of his team-mate Wayne Bridge - but there's something different here. Famously strict England manager Fabio Capello, in seeking to lance "the most pernicious boil threatening his meticulous preparations for the World Cup", indicated that he's opening the gates of the enclave when he asked Bridge if he would be prepared to play under Terry's captaincy, the result being that England is seeking a new captain.

One could argue that heaping more money and fame upon young males than they can reasonably be expected to cope with is asking for trouble. It's a compelling argument and is in many cases true, but there's more. Firstly, huge amounts of money pumped into sport by TV deals and sponsorship that distort the playing field in every sense - from which even the sedate world of cricket isn't immune; secondly, the fête-'em-and-slate-'em attitude embraced by celebrity magazines and the worse tabloids which assumes that being in the public eye is a hubristic act that must be punished by astounding violations of privacy; and thirdly, a notion on the part of the Establishment that success - that being known for being good at sport, perspicacious at business, or just being known for being known - is an end in inself and a "get out of jail free" card.

However, Capello's reaction to his former captain's phiandering - making Terry the first England player demoted for non-football-related matters - wasn't the only surprising thing about the affair; the "other woman" has announced that she won't be selling her story. If things keep going on like this, I might just look out my old football cards.

top ten songs for St Valentine's Day

Click here to view this post for 56k modems, or slow broadband connections

Once again we're approaching St Valentine's day, in the runup to which postal workers are kept working overtime taking cards ranging from the sublime to the cheesy - and often unsigned - from A to B.

Valentine is reckoned to have been a bishop of the early church in Rome at a time when legionaries had been forbidden to marry, as senior members of the Senate reckoned the marital to detract from the martial. Managers of football teams used to have equivalent ideas and ban WAGS from travelling with players for big fixtures; o tempora, o mores...

10 - The Carpenters voice what it feels like to want to be in love, but for love to escape one...a feeling not unknown to adolescents nor, unfortunately, to Karen Carpenter for most of her life.





9 Deep Purple, in something of a symphonic rarity from their 1969 Book of Taliesyn LP, describe from an adolescent male's point of view the emptiness referred to in the above song, and the epic heights to which boys (and men) can elevate an attraction that's not always much more than hormonal.




8 Sometimes young people find themselves thrown together then torn apart - especially in times of war. Here's Dame Vera Lynn singing about precious time together in a song that elements in the Government of the time tried unsuccessfully to ban: That Lovely Weekend.




7 Symphonie Fantastique, 1st movement: Hector Berlioz composed this section of his emotional record of artistic life recalling himself at a dance when his beloved - Harriet Smithson - suddenly appears: a sweet moment when it happens, and sometimes this sort of thing does. One might see it as a classical version of Lennon and McCartney's I saw her standing there. Here it is performed by Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School's Senior Orchestra.





6 Janine - David Bowie, written by the songsmith about the girlfriend of a Polish acquaintance. I'm reminded of a trip to Ireland in the 1970s a my Mum sought out somebody she'd met at a party, presumably to ease the loneliness in the wake of my Dad's death. (Coming back there were no hotel places, but a Dublin Gardaí division let us sleep in their interrogation room.) Also of an ill-advised engagement to a Swiss girl after a holiday romance; thankfully, in both cases, good sense intervened before too much damage could be done.




5 There's an ongoing debate over the degree to which Shakespeare understood women. I don't know if that will ever be resolved, but Abba's songwriting team of Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson put words into the mouths of their spouses, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog, that evinced an understanding of the female mind that sold millions of records, not least to women. One record in particular, The Day before you Came, reminds me of a poem by rennaissance woman Joyce Grenfell called Ordinary Morning:

It felt like an ordinary morning
It began in an ordinary way
And then, without warning
Ordinary morning
Became extraordinary day.

Hadn't the slightest sort of inkling -
No-one said love was on its way -
And then, within a twinkling
Without the smallest inkling
It became an extraordinary day.

For there you were
And the whole world stood still.
There you were,
I lved you then, and I always will.

At first, an ordinary morning.
Began on an ordinary way,
And then my heart was beating
At this ordinary meeting
And we both knew
This was not an ordinary day.

The song is all the more poignant as it was released as the band was disintegrating:





4 Sometimes we form pairings that, for better or worse, fall apart. Sometimes couples reunite, other times they don't; the pain of parting is universal - but not all separations are forever...





3 ...as Emmy-Lou Harris sings: Together Again.





2 And when he and she are reunited, one hopes that romance still lives:





1 This song reminds me of my wedding to Maxima, my love. We had no money, but when we arrived at Church there were so many beautiful flowers; to this dayI don't know who provided them, but every night I thank God for them.




Have a happy Valentine's Day.

If you enjoyed this, click here for more Top ten songs about...

top ten songs for St Valentine's Day for 56k modems

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Once again we're approaching St Valentine's day, in the runup to which postal workers are kept working overtime taking cards ranging from the sublime to the cheesy - and often unsigned - from A to B.

Valentine is reckoned to have been a bishop of the early church in Rome at a time when legionaries had been forbidden to marry, as senior members of the Senate reckoned the marital to detract from the martial. Managers of football teams used to have equivalent ideas and ban WAGS from travelling with players for big fixtures; o tempora, o mores...

10 - The Carpenters voice what it feels like to want to be in love, but for love to escape one...a feeling not unknown to adolescents nor, unfortunately, to Karen Carpenter for most of her life.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1tjFIuyCAU

9 Deep Purple, in something of a symphonic rarity from their 1969 Book of Taliesyn LP, describe from an adolescent male's point of view the emptiness referred to in the above song, and the epic heights to which boys (and men) can elevate an attraction that's not always much more than hormonal.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAsGTkksHB4

8 Sometimes young people find themselves thrown together then torn apart - especially in times of war. Here's Dame Vera Lynn singing about precious time together in a song that elements in the Government of the time tried unsuccessfully to ban: That Lovely Weekend.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUeBMKN0mGM

7 Symphonie Fantastique, 1st movement: Hector Berlioz composed this section of his emotional record of artistic life recalling himself at a dance when his beloved - Harriet Smithson - suddenly appears: a sweet moment when it happens, and sometimes this sort of thing does. One might see it as a classical version of Lennon and McCartney's I saw her standing there. Here it is performed by Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School's Senior Orchestra.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2yLUxvrCvc

6 Janine - David Bowie, written by the songsmith about the girlfriend of a Polish acquaintance. I'm reminded of a trip to Ireland in the 1970s a my Mum sought out somebody she'd met at a party, presumably to ease the loneliness in the wake of my Dad's death. (Coming back there were no hotel places, but a Dublin Gardaí division let us sleep in their interrogation room.) Also of an ill-advised engagement to a Swiss girl after a holiday romance; thankfully, in both cases, good sense intervened before too much damage could be done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSt9PJV5CAo

5 There's an ongoing debate over the degree to which Shakespeare understood women. I don't know if that will ever be resolved, but Abba's songwriting team of Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson put words into the mouths of their spouses, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog, that evinced an understanding of the female mind that sold millions of records, not least to women. One record in particular, The Day before you Came, reminds me of a poem by rennaissance woman Joyce Grenfell called Ordinary Morning:

It felt like an ordinary morning
It began in an ordinary way
And then, without warning
Ordinary morning
Became extraordinary day.

Hadn't the slightest sort of inkling -
No-one said love was on its way -
And then, within a twinkling
Without the smallest inkling
It became an extraordinary day.

For there you were
And the whole world stood still.
There you were,
I lved you then, and I always will.

At first, an ordinary morning.
Began on an ordinary way,
And then my heart was beating
At this ordinary meeting
And we both knew
This was not an ordinary day.

The song is all the more poignant as it was released as the band was disintegrating:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIV2ZE-cf6A

4 Sometimes we form pairings that, for better or worse, fall apart. Sometimes couples reunite, other times they don't; the pain of parting is universal - but not all separations are forever...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1O_0ibqzUg


3 ...as Emmy-Lou Harris sings: Together Again.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG1qTFZSiAM

2 And when he and she are reunited, one hopes that romance still lives:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyrqgTsjNGg

1 This song reminds me of my wedding to Maxima, my love. We had no money, but when we arrived at Church there were so many beautiful flowers; to this dayI don't know who provided them, but every night I thank God for them.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnbqwWm17Sc


Have a happy Valentine's Day.

Elvis lives in our memories

The first time I saw an Elvis impersonator was in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when one jumped out of a Sarcophagus in the role of Pharoah to delighted screams from the crowd - he'd just been dead two or three years.

The lasting cultural impact of Elvis can't be underestimated. In Roland Emmerich's 1998 remake of Godzilla, Jean Reno, playing a French intelligent agent, gets through a US security barrier by saying the classic line "thang-you very much!", and in Men in Black, when the cvar is speeding upside-down through a tunnel to the accompaniment of Elvis singing Promised Land, Tommy Lee Jones' character remarks to Will Smith's that "Elvis didin't die, he just went home". My favourite, though, is in the film of John Grisham's novel The Firm. In the book, main character Mitchell McDeere, in fleeing, hitches a ride with a lorry-driver who is an Elvis impersonator; whereas in the firm we see Tom Cruise, playing the part, in the passenger's seat beside a driver who looks just like Elvis - a nod, no doubt, to the enduring rumours that Elvis is alive.

I remember when he died in 1977 because my Mum, a huge fan, came into my room weeping to tell me the news. She'd been hooked since she'd first heard one of his singles on Radio Luxembourg - which, by chance, was the first European station to announce his death. She related to me how the only of his songs she couldn't listen to was Teddy Bear, because when she was a young woman with TB in Mearnskirk Hospital near Glasgow, a wardmate had played it continuously on a wind-up record-player until, to the guilty relief of all those around her, the object of her infatuation decided to call things off in a letter.

I think two things in particular attracted Mum and her peers to Elvis. Firstly, living in poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi before moving to Tennessee's Memphis, he was a true working-class hero long before John Lennon coined the term in song while living in the lap of luxury, and - again unlike Lennon - he never forgot where he came from.

Secondly, his performances exuded sexuality in a "safe" way that was not only due to his distance from Scotland. The Southern laws of deference and politeness that his generation were instructed to observe almost religiously led Ed Sullivan to extemporise a paean to his decency, telling the audience at a time when Presley was being attacked with all the might of the Establishment machine that he was "a fine, decent boy" and called everybody "Sir".

Another side of "Elvis the Pelvis" was a fierce love for his mother, something well understood in Celtic countries, so the rumour being disseminated in the late 1950's that he had killed her must have really hurt. The late Elaine Dundy, who wrote a book on this relationship called Elvis and Gladys, captured the more extreme devotion that still surrounds the star:

Here and now I feel sure that in the next millennium, excavations on the site of what was once Memphis, Tennessee, will uncover artifacts which lead archeologists to conclude there was once a god called Elvis who resided in the sacred temple "Graceland" where his followers gathered twice every year to worship: on the day of his birth, and on the day of his death.

Elvis popularised a "black" style of music because of the musicians he jammed with and, like them, had long(ish) hair that migrated into the "duck's tail" (to give it a more polite name) hairstyle that was sported by, for example, Chuck Berry; unlike his black co-musicians, his hair was longer because he couldn't afford to get it cut so often. So, unlike singers of sanitized pop that were being given airtime with Establishment blessings, when he burst onto the scene he was rough and ready to rock, popularising real rhythm'n'blues that let black performers start to take their rightful place in mainstream music on his coat-tails.

His ancestry was patchwork - Scottish, Irish, French, Jewish - and Native American (Cherokee ) - the latter perhaps informing his perfromance as a half-Kiowa frontiersman in Flaming Star, which was remarkably free of melting-pot fuzziness right up to its bleak conclusion. Like George Harrison, Van Morrison and Beverley Knight - andf arguably the majority of artists - he was haunted by a need to pursue a more numinous reality than that which informed his life as a touring and recording artist, dogged by the necessity of feeding the financial appetites of Colonel Parker, both who manipulated him and suppressed many of his talents in favour of what printed money.

As Elaine Dundy said, "prior to '77...it was possible to get through a day without hearing Elvis' name". At this time of year - and particularly this year, when had he lived he'd have turned 75, sometimes it seems that one hears little else. And, given the incredible generosity of this phenomenal man who gave joy to millions, that's fine with me.