Gene, I do hope you won't mind me contacting you like this. We haven't actually met but you are friends with my uncle...

 

A BLAST FROM THE PAST

Originally published February 2017

Step forward 'Canting' Detterling...

On this grey overcast February day, with the pathetic fallacy right on cue, which aging Tyneside bottlejob's mood matches the gloomy skies?

Step forward 'Canting' Detterling, retired supply teacher and long term malingerer.

And what I hear you ask has cast this Wincarnis-tippling pseud into the Slough of Despond?

I can reveal that the old phoney's depression has been caused by his being once again outwitted by his arch-rival Gene. Detterling thought he would get possession of some archive press material which he could use to maliciously identify Gene and ruin his good name. But Gene was too wily for him and his nefarious plans have collapsed in ignominy.

Shall we visit Chez Detterling and see things close up? Well yes I think we shall.

Detterling is sitting, head in hands, at the kitchen table. He is still in his dressing gown although it is past midday. Delia Detterling is busy preparing lunch.

DETTERLING: Oh! Infamy! Infamy! Gene's got it in for me. I shall be ruined. With Gene's rapier-like wit and finely honed and deadly accurate satire I don't stand a chance. I'll be the laughing stock of cyberspace. Remember Delia how a couple of years back he wrote that devastating piece about me as a teenager climbing up into a sycamore tree with a copy of Health & Efficiency and in the leafy shade engaging in the sin of Onan? I was afraid to show my face on Tyneside for weeks.

DELIA DETTERLING: Oh! for God's sake. Don't be such a canting old phoney Detters. Face Gene like a man on the level playing field of satire. What rubbish about you being afraid to show your face. Not a single person on Tyneside or anywhere else knows you as Detterling. Likewise nobody knows me as Delia. Stop such pretence about you protecting your family. The truth is you don't have the wit, humour or literary style to better Gene in your cyberspace tussle.

And while I am at it please pack in that filthy language you use on your blog. I don't know what is worse: the filthy, obscene language or the filthy graphics. You won't find anything like that on Gene's blog. That's because he has the literary skill to express himself. Besides he is much too decent a man to use such disgusting language. 

And pack in your evil attempts to identify him and cause him harm. Has he ever tried to identify you or yours? Of course he hasn't.

Reporting him to the Daily Mail indeed! And yet you have the hypocrisy to come out with all this pinko liberal rubbish. Call yourself a man?

Oops! Sorry. It looks like we have walked in on a 'domestic'. We shall return later.

Delia Detterling



Thursday, 23 March 2017

Gene, I do hope you won't mind me contacting you like this. We haven't actually met but you are friends with my uncle...

Gene, I do hope you won't mind me contacting you like this. We haven't actually met but you are friends with my uncle...

It is an uneventful October afternoon in the school staffroom - lunchtime break. Some arguments going on as I had been stirring things up. It is a few days after Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and I am taking full advantage of this news. I had been saying for years that Bob should get the award. When I first started saying this many years ago people laughed at me. But as usual I did know what I was talking about and now here it was and I am certainly making capital of the event.

Enough stirring accomplished I head upstairs to the sanctuary of my Sixth Form office...

I open up my emails. I delete the rubbish (in other words anything about UCAS. Tee! Hee! Hee!) and am almost deleting the email titled 'Gene, I hope you won't mind me contacting you like this. We haven't actually met but you are friends with my uncle...'  when  on a sixth sense I open it. Boy am I glad I did! 

...

All that afternoon the contents of that email kept running through my head. So much so that when I was on the phone ordering copies of NUTSHELLS CONTRACT LAW by Robert Duxbury I said Robert Detterling causing momentary confusion.

In the end I phoned Tony of the big saloon and arranged to talk to him about the email after work. We don't teach in the same school so I arranged that we meet up in the Harris & Hoole coffee bar in Uxbridge High Street at 5.00pm. I arrived at the coffee bar early. They do wonderful hand-roasted coffee here. I sat at a table looking out towards Uxbridge Underground Station. Just love that sculpture by Anita Lafford in front of the station. Entitled 'Anticipation' it is quite conventional but has a definite charm. I love the way families often congregate around it.

ANTICIPATION by Anita Lafford

I took out my mobile smart phone which has FM radio, plugged in my earpiece, and listened to the PM programme on Radio 4. Serendipitously there was a feature broadcast about Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize. It seems that Bob has so far not made any acknowledgement of being awarded the prize and it's not known if he will attend the award ceremonies - or even if he will accept the prize. Some nobody from the Swedish Academy is calling Bob's silence extremely rude. Good old Bob!

I was so engrossed in the radio that I didn't see Tony arrive. I went to the counter and bought Tony a chocolate muffin and a cappuccino and had another black coffee myself.

"Well, in a nutshell Tony, I have had an email from Detterling's ginger nephew. He has had a major rift for some years with his uncle and seems to feel that I may be in a position to help heal things."

"You sure the email is kosher?" Tony responded. "Oh yes. No question. Some details about my correspondence with his uncle only he could have known," I assured him.

Tony replied,"Gene you have always been known to lend a helping hand to those in need. I guess you will do the same here."

I hesitated a little and said, "Yes, I have had much correspondence with Detterling for almost twelve years now. However I have not had intercourse with his nephew. I wonder if I am the right man for the task."

"If Detterling's nephew has taken the trouble of contacting you then he must be confident you can help. I'm sure he will bend over backwards to make sure everything will pan out," ventured Tony.

...

Despite Tony's reassurance I remained in Hamlet-like indecision all evening. Should I reply to that email? I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed and knocked on Marianne's bedroom door. (Since the children have left home we have separate bedrooms. It's ideal really and saves Marianne a lot of discomfort when I arrive home from the Good Yarn Friday nights semi-plastered after six pints of Tuborg and maybe a couple of Jameson's Irish whiskies.)

I talked to Marianne about my dilemma over the email from Detterling's nephew. (She never reads my blog by the way.)

Marianne didn't want to know and asked me to close the door quietly behind me on the way out.

I got up again about half past four in the morning and went to my study, switched on the computer and replied to the email from Detterling's nephew. What had I unleashed?

Next day in school I kept checking my emails. (I have to do this surreptitiously as there was an issue some time back about me using social media in directed time. As always I brushed the matter aside. I think the young Deputy Head who was detailed to speak to me about this was totally overawed by me and my reputation.) Still, better be careful. I don't want anything blotting my copybook in my final months of teaching.

Nothing throughout the day. That evening the first proper intimations of approaching winter fell. It was a dark and stormy night. The wind howled and the heavy rain lashed up the drive sweeping over my exposed Nissan and the front windows of Chez Vincent.

About 9.30 I went into my study to put the finishing touches on my Sixth Form assembly talk and to do some further research on the ramifications of the case of Peter and Hazel Bull which I am working through with my Year 12 'A' Level Law cohort.

Peter and Hazel Bull

Ping! and lo and behold there it was on the screen; a reply from Detterling's gay nephew to my email. I was beside myself.

The email began:

Hi Gene,

Thank you so much for responding to me. I think something good will come out of this for all parties.

First let me say that I and my partner **** are big, big fans of you blog. We just loved your 'Sweeney' pastiche THEY LOOK A BIT GINGER TO ME GUV. Hilarious! In many ways you appear to be the new Jeffrey Bernard, Uxbridge the new Soho, and The Good Yarn the new Coach & Horses. We wish you every blessing with your fulltime writing career. Any publishing deals yet?

' I enjoy doing nothing.'  Jeffrey Bernard

    

Now I have begun this correspondence because I feel you are just the man to broker a peace in this long-standing rift between Uncle Detterling and myself. Yes, while it was very wrong of him to publish on your blog that I had committed suicide I must try to forgive him. He has posted to you that he may not have very long more in this Vale of Tears so I must act before it gets too late. 

I replied immediately:


Hi ****

So good to hear from you. I'm so glad to hear that you and your partner **** enjoy reading my blog. It's the first time my writing has been compared with that of Jeffrey Bernard. Usually the comparisons are to James Joyce, Albert Camus and Ernest Hemingway. Nevertheless I regard the Jeffrey Bernard comparison as a compliment. By the way your uncle Detterling's writing has often been compared with that of Melvyn Bragg. Tee! Hee! Hee! Oh! well. Maybe Melvyn Bragg is one of his literary heroes?

Melvyn Bragg  ...   Detterling's literary hero?

By the way I have often thought that the young Jeffrey Bernard bears a remarkable resemblance to the young David Essex.

The young Jeffrey Bernard

Yes, I may well be the man to broker a peace in this  feud between you and your uncle Detters. I have got to know Detters quite well over the years and figure I have a good handle on his psychology.

Yours etc

GENE

[By the way from this point onwards in this narrative I shall, in the interests of preserving their anonymity but giving them actual names, be referring to Detterling's nephew and his nephew's partner as Cosmas and Damian. I did toy with the idea of calling them David and Jonathan and then Sandy and Julian but no: Cosmas and Damian, two saints names always linked together, really fits the bill. Cosmas Detterling's nephew and Damian his partner.]

COSMAS and DAMIAN

To this email I had the following swift reply from Cosmas:

Hi Gene,

Yes you have indeed a good handle on Uncle Detters' psychology - in fact I remember a psychological profile of him that you compiled.  He is of course the archetypal pinko liberal Guardian-reading pseud that you depict him  - but there is more. Can I recount an episode from his youth that may be of interest to understanding his fragile psychological make up and his contradictory and often hypocritical stance on sexual matters?

The incident I want to describe dates back to when Detters was a Sixth Former. So I guess it must have been around the time of the Butler Education Act (Tee! Hee! Hee! as you would comment Gene.) Anyhow he was observed by his fellow students to be in possession of a then rather risqué publication entitled HEALTH & EFFICIENCY. He was hauled up to appear before a meeting of the Sixth Form students' council to explain himself. His explanation was that the magazine was not his but that he had bought it for an elderly house-bound neighbour. He was asked to wait outside while the council deliberated.

Eventually the chairman of the council appeared and read out to Detterling a prepared statement:

'Detterling we do not accept your explanation for being in possession of this publication. We believe that you have been using HEALTH & EFFICIENCY as an aide-memoir to masturbation. We therefore instruct all Sixth Formers to ostracise you forthwith.'

The chairman went on to say:

"And off the record Detterling let me say that you are displaying the subtle undertones of sexual abnormality which if left unchecked will curdle into pathology."

The student council chairman was gay and thereafter Uncle Detterling harboured a deep-seated subliminal resentment to gays.

Hope this is helpful Gene.

All the best,

COSMAS

Well, well, well. How interesting. The youthful Detterling sent to Coventry accused of engaging in the Sin of Onan. I wrote straight back to Cosmas:

Hi Cosmas,

Thank you so much for this. It gives me another angle on your uncle's tangled psychology. Maybe some insights here into his persistent anger and ever-present misanthropy?

 This was a strange incident indeed but I have one of equal strangeness and much more recent involving the old boy. 

I know that you and Damian have been following Detters' exploits over the years on the TES website. You remember a poster named Middlemarch? She was  a Headteacher and a very capable and well-informed lady. We formed quite a friendship over the years. Anyhow she told me that she once attended a TES meet - I think it was in Leeds - and had a close encounter with the canting old phony. It seems he approached her crooning: "I believe in miracles. Where you from? You sexy thing?" How corny. But it gets worse. He then came up with the most bizarre pick-up lines in the history of the universe. He leered at her in a most suggestive manner and said: "My dear has anyone ever mentioned that you look the spit image of Fanny Burney? Spankest thou? Hast thou ever been spanked? Wouldst thou spanketh me my dear?"

Fanny Burney

Needless to say faced with such weirdness Middlemarch got out  of there mucho pronto.

Will be back in touch soon Cosmas,

GENE

To this Cosmas replied:



Thanks Gene,

Another insight into the weirdness that is my Uncle Detters. In this Middlemarch interlude it sounds to me as if the old boy had been at the Wincarnis again.

And this business of his memoirs... you are sensibly taking that with a pinch of salt. It will never happen. Detterling has always entertained this delusion that he is a writer. I remember visiting him as a little boy and he had a designated writing room which he pretentiously called his 'studio'. My word was that 'studio' a desolate place? Spartan  and almost unfurnished with an Olivetti electric typewriter on a rickety trestle table and two pictures on the walls: framed photographs of Rock Hudson and Kathy Kirby.

Kathy Kirby

Rock Hudson

He always made a big deal about never being disturbed while he was working in the studio saying: "My boy, we writers are fickle creatures. The muse and our genius can desert us in a second's flash if we allow this world to intrude."

All the best Gene,

Cosmas

To be continued

Rev Giles Fraser ... what a prat!

 

Rev Giles Fraser ... what a prat!

REV GILES FRASER   ...   what a prat!

 The story of the virgin birth runs against the grain of Christianity

Giles Fraser

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/24/story-virgin-birth-christianity-mary-sex-femininity

The earliest polemic against Christianity focused on the circumstances of Jesus’s birth. “We have not been born of fornication,” says a hostile gathering to Jesus in John’s gospel. The implication being: we weren’t, but you were. In the second century, the Greek writer Celsus wrote a book about how Jesus was the illegitimate low-birth offspring of a spinner called Mary and a Roman soldier called Panthera.

What rubbish!

In Christianity, purity is abolished. Indeed, the core idea that the all-perfect God almighty might actually steep so low as to be born as a bleeding, defecating human being would have been regarded by all previously orthodox believers – both Greek and Jew – as disgusting. But this is the central insight of Christianity: that in the person of Jesus, there is no contradiction between being fully human and fully divine. Or, in other words, God is perfectly at home in a human life, with all its ritualistic mess, from blood to semen. There is no shame in the constituent elements of our humanity, including the manner in which we are made. Which is why the “pure virgin” tradition runs totally against the grain. The problem is not just basic biology: it doesn’t add up theologically.

What rubbish!

GRANNY BARKES FELL IN WOOLWORTHS TO BE PUBLISHED IN APRIL 2021

GRANNY BARKES

Woolworths Uxbridge High Street circa 1960

 THE NEW LOOK GENE

Readers will recall that I made big new year's resolutions for 1st January 2019. 

So far so good. A vegetarian diet and no spirits. I drink only wine and beer now - mostly Chianti and Budweiser. Tuborg, my favourite, isn't so easy to find. I now drink in the Metropolitan or The Queen's Head both located in Windsor Street, Uxbridge.

I also on 31/12/2018 ceased shaving my head. It's now over twenty years since I first sported the shaven-head look. Then I was in my forties and it was a young, hip, cool, stylish look. Now that I am in my sixties I don't think it is appropriate anymore. My hair is now about a centimetre in length all over and is snow white - as is my goatee beard. Thankfully it's still very thick with just a little thining at the crown. It changes my appearance radically. I get people doing a second take and comments like, "Is that a wig Gene?" Also, absurdly, I get comments like: "There's something different about you. Have you had a haircut?"

Still, I think I cut an impressive figure as I walk through Uxbridge wearing my fawn duffel coat - exactly like that one worn by Trevor Howard in 'The Third Man'.

 GENE'S BLOG RETURNS

Stand by for some great larks!!!

Pope lashes out at blogging ambassadors

Associated Press

ATICAN CITY – Pope Francis has demanded obedience from Vatican ambassadors and reminded them of their duties before him, God and the faithful after years of scandal have tarnished the reputation of the Holy See's diplomatic corps.

Francis told envoys they may have reservations about papal policy but they don't represent themselves and can't "criticize the pope behind his back, have blogs or join groups hostile to him."

The unusual dressing down came in a speech that was handed out but not spoken on Thursday. It followed several sex scandals among Vatican envoys and explosive claims by the former Vatican ambassador to the U.S. that Francis ignored his 2013 warnings about a cardinal's sexual encounters with seminarians.

Francis defrocked ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in February and has said he doesn't remember receiving a warning.

• 
  

Cardinal Pell’s appeal begins...

In opening arguments, Cardinal Pell’s lawyers set out case for appeal

Catholic News Agency

5 June, 2019

Cardinal George Pell leaves the Supreme Court of Victoria on June 05, 2019 (Getty)

Pell's lawyers argued their client was treated unreasonably during the jury trial

The legal team for Cardinal George Pell set out its case for appeal at the Supreme Court of Victoria Wednesday morning. Judges heard the opening arguments for the defense as they sought leave to appeal.

Bret Walker SC, arguing on June 4, told the three-judge Court of Appeal, led by Chief Justice Anne Feguson, that Pell was seeking leave to appeal on the grounds that his conviction by a jury was “unsafe.”

In a controversial verdict, the cardinal was convicted in on December 11 of five counts of sexual abuse of minors.

Pell’s legal team is seeking appeal on three separate grounds, the first of which is that a guilty verdict was returned despite the lack of proof beyond reasonable doubt. If successful, an appeal on that ground would see Pell’s conviction overturned and the cardinal set free.

In March, Pell was sentenced to six years in prison.

The secondary appeals, made on more procedural grounds, could lead to a retrial if successful.

At the opening of the two-day hearing, Justice Ferguson noted that the judges had reviewed the evidence from the trial, visited Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and inspected the vestments Pell is alleged to have been wearing at the time of the supposed abuse.

Ferguson explained that the purpose of the hearing was not to re-litigate the trial, or for the defense or prosecution to present the whole of its argument, which had been submitted in writing.

Walker argued that the evidence used to convict Pell was clearly insufficient to allow the jury to reach a unanimous finding of guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

“The main argument, ground one, is one of those challenges to verdicts that used to go by the expression ‘unsafe and unsatisfactory,’” he told the judges.

Focusing his argument intially on the first supposed assault, in which Pell is alleged to have committed acts of sexual assault on two choir boys simultaneously for five to six minutes, despite the busy time and place in which it was alleged to have happened, Walker highlighted what he called serious inconsistencies in the evidence.

“Nobody apart from the alleged victims and the alleged perpetrator were present in the room called the priest’s sacristy with which [the judges] are now familiar.”

The circumstances of the alleged assault, supposed to have taken place immediately following Sunday Mass, included, Walker noted for the judges, the full vestments Pell was supposed to have been wearing at the time.

Describing the circumstances of the alleged assault as “matters of physical improbability to the point of impossibility,” Pell’s lawyer also said the inconsistency in the dates of Pell’s alleged crimes points the weakness of his conviction.

Prosecutors initially charged that the assault might have happened sometime between Pell’s installation in August of 1996 and the end of December of the same year, but during the trial evidence left only two dates for the jury to consider: December 15 or 22, 1996, the first two occasions when Pell celebrated Sunday Mass in the cathedral.

Walker then drew the judges’ attention to prosecution attempts to introduce a third possible date during the appeal process, suggesting November 3 as a possibility, calling it an indication that prosecutors did not believe their own arguments.

“The notion that on appeal the unsafe and unsatisfactory nature of a verdict on a case put to the jury of either the 15 or 22 of December can or should be answered or rehabilitated by a distinctly new case [for] 3 November being advanced is in itself disturbing, should disturb this court.”

Walker argued that even though the prosecution had withdrawn the argument suggesting November 3 as a possibility, “it is an appropriate reflection, forensically manifested by the Crown, of the doubts to which I am going to speak, involved in the theory that this supposed first incident indeed took place on the 15 or 22 December – and if it didn’t take place on one of those two dates then the Crown case fails.”

“Date is important,” Walker said. “Pell was appointed in July, installed in August, but didn’t say his first Sunday high Mass at the cathedral until 15 December.”

The defence also argued that, on whatever Sunday the assault was supposed to have taken place, the circumstances of the allegations did not add up.

According to the narrative of the alleged victim and sole witness, the alleged abuse had to take place after Sunday Mass, at which Pell had presided and for which he was still fully vested.

Walker argued that witness accounts of Pell’s public visibility after Mass meant that for him to have assaulted the two teenagers for a period of 5-6 minutes alone in the sacristy was “literally and logically impossible according to the complainant’s account,” and that there was no other account offered of the alleged abuse.

The difficulty in establishing a possible date for the alleged offense, together with witnesses who testified to Pell’s visibility after Mass, meant, Walker said, that the prosecution case could not mount a credible claim to being beyond reasonable doubt.

“If you have to be, for the offending, in a particular place in a particular time, then credible evidence, never challenged, places the archbishop in a position carrying out an activity at a time rendering the offending, according to the complainant’s account impossible, or put more softly simply not a realistic possibility.”

Walker also presented several other lines of argumentation that he said showed the weakness of the prosecution’s case and the failure of investigators to call or interview material witnesses.

He specifically argued that the alleged date for a second offense by Pell was unsupported by even the alleged victim’s testimony and had been chosen simply as “the next time the prosecution could suggest that the Archbishop was at Sunday Mass in the cathedral.”

The defense also argued that the jury had been effectively invited to consider the alleged victim as credible, despite the defense being unable to test his credibility in court. It was, Walker said, impossible to raise a reasonable doubt about evidence which could not be properly subjected to in-person cross-examination.

Pell, who was present in court, turns 78 this week. The hearing is set to continue throughout Wednesday and Thursday. The judges could deliver their verdict at any point during the two days, or reserve their judgement to a later date.