Tag Archives: politics

Otto the Hill

OTTO THE HILL 2. Whose Land Is It Anyway?

Good morning good morning good morning what a hearteningly marvellous morning it is too! Gosh, a sunny crisp winter morning is just what the doctor ordered.

Because good heavens these are trying times if you’re a British hill like I am. Which, if you’re reading this is unlikely, I grant you, but let me tell you things have been fraught with tension here in the Sussex substratum.

And there’s only one reason for it: Brexit.

I first heard that dreadful term a few years ago, but I could never have envisaged how it would come to represent all that is most moronic about the humans occupying my surface. And that, coming from the island in whose name other hills the world over have been stabbed by British flags simply for being populated by people of colour, is up against some pretty stiff competition.

I honestly have no idea why, but Brexiteers keep alluding to the Blitz spirit (apparently remembered best with bunting and teacakes, not bunkers filled with terrified civilians), surviving the War (many didn’t, we’re still at war and survival is apparently the best we can hope for now) and stopping duplicitous foreigners taking the jobs nobody wants but without which the country will grind to a halt like cake-baking during rationing. Result: a green and pleasant land populated by nose-less spited faces.

Well, none of this truly affects me of course because I’m literally part of the scenery and you all come and go so swiftly to me. But I do rather resent being used as the rallying cry by those who have at best a nodding acquaintance with my geography and history.

And it gives me the hump. Or hill.

So here’s a reality check: you know that speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II? The one about this royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, blabla demi-paradise, yada yada this earth, this realm, this England, cue orgasmic crescendo of Jerusalem? Ok well that’s not where it ends.

No, it goes on rather prophetically:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

Everyone always forgets that bit.

Otto, Nero's violin tutor

OTTO THE TUTOR 1. Nervous With Nero

Erm… Is this thing on? Can you hear me? I haven’t got long (His Imperial Bipolarness is just catching a show in the Colosseum), so I’ll make this quick.

Right. So my name is Otto, although given this forum I think you already knew that. And I work for the Emperor Nero – yes, the one who made Rome nice and toasty – as his violin tutor. It could be worse. I could be his official food taster and have a life expectancy of three meals.

My boss, let’s face it, isn’t very popular. I mean, he’s not even a Marmite sort of bloke (you know, hated or loved); he’s more a flatulence kind of guy. Only the dealer likes the smell, the rest of us stand upwind. I just pray he never finds this tablet as I’d be crucified along the Appian Way faster than that hippy in Judea.

Luckily he’s also the dumbest man since Severus the Simple headed north to “talk some sense into the Visigoths”. Nero, in short, doesn’t know his culus from his cubitus.

Which is a good thing, because his capacity for inflicting agonizing pain is frankly impressive. In an age when casual sadism is celebrated as heroism, when 8 out of 10 Big Cats prefer kosher meat, and when the main form of exercise for women is Escape the Rape, you’ll understand what I mean when I say Nero makes Genghis Khan look like a hypnotised sloth in a floatation tank. Oedipus was a well-adjusted first-born compared with He Who Can Not Be Shamed.

I confess, he makes me a little nervous. I’ve had to put three smallish fires out already this week, and I’m running out of ways to say “E Minor, not A Major” without implying that he is less musical than Tarquinius the Tone-deaf Tenor. (You know: the one who was publicly lynched for his rendition of Mamma Mia in the forum. His own fault: there’s nothing more dangerous than an angry mob maddened by tritone dissonance.)

I’d better go. I can hear screams of agony from the corridor and the pitter-patter of tiny feet running for their lives; ah the little tell-tale signs that His Unhinged Majesty is on his way and has a story to relate.

Next week: Otto fiddles while his toast burns