Every now and then I remember that you don’t have to keep watching your recommended and you can instead explore all kinds of weird and wonderful material on the Youtube. That said, I think these both came off my recommended.

I’m a dickhead and so I like Tom Stoppard. That is to say, I like annoying plays. That is to say, I like stuff an English Literature student would’ve heard of.

Back in the 1700s, Oliver Goldsmith wrote a poem, thus:

An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog

Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.

In Islington there was a man
Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran—
Whene’er he went to pray.

A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad—
When he put on his clothes.

And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.

This dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man.

Around from all the neighbouring streets
The wond’ring neighbours ran,
And swore the dog had lost its wits
To bite so good a man.

The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
They swore the man would die.

But soon a wonder came to light
That showed the rogues they lied,—
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died!

End

I pulled that text from All Poetry, and I’m just saying that because their site looked pretty. It’s an old poem, so no-one owes anyone any copyright or whatever.

I found the poem because I watched a short film “It was the dog that died” based on a Tom Stoppard play. Slight plot spoilers, it’s about a double agent who’s done so many double and triple and quadruple bluffs that he no longer knows who’s side he’s on. Being a principled man, he therefore tries to do the only thing he reasonably can do in that situation, but an animal is unfortunately harmed in the process.

I like spies, I like Tom Stoppard, I’m starting to like Alan Bates as an actor, so all the ingredients are right. And I’m big into the 70s because I think it was the last time Britain had an almost coherent national identity, so I love looking back on it with my rose-tinted glasses and eating up bucketfuls of nostalgia that I – by rights – shouldn’t feel, since I wasn’t born then. Doesn’t nostalgia always hit harder when you weren’t actually there at the time?

Anyway, watching that film led me to “A Land of Ice Cream“, which feels like another play but might technically be an evening drama for the telly. It was written by Welshman Alun Richards, who I should probably now find out more about. And again, I love it for the peculiar nostalgia and the sense of impending doom. Basically, a successful Welsh Labour politician gets the train and finds some old friends. Slowly – or not so slowly – we realise he’s long since betrayed all the values he pretended to hold as a young politician and is now a fucking scumbag. But it’s the other characters that make this an interesting premise or observation. The people he casts aside.

In the background I’m brewing some writing about British culture – not because I’m some patriotic nationalist, but because we don’t seem to have any these days. People wheel out Grime as new British music culture, which it is, but it’s also not enough and has already sold out. What else have we got? And racism doesn’t count.