Hit me!

To the Edgar Wallace pub in Essex St yesterday afternoon for the now-monthly meeting of the London chapter of the British APL Association and a pint of an odd beer from Berkshire with a smack of haggis to the taste. (Just in time, for we neglected Burns’ Night this year.)

To the Leicester Square Theatre to see Hit Me!, a bio-musical about the life of Ian Dury. I do not buy programmes as a habit, but had one pressed upon me by the stage manager Gemskii, without whose advice I should not have known that the best part was her bio at the back. Despite all the reservations one should have about hanging around nostalgic former punk-rockers it was a great show, with some sharp-as-a-tack writing. Here’s Dury soliloquising about starting at High Wycombe Grammar School.

Everyone was very nice to me at first, and over-helpful. Then they saw I didn’t need much help and thought I was a bit of a villain for accepting it. It was a bit difficult to know how to behave in that situation, so I became a right little cunt.

Gemskii had asked me my favourite Dury song. Unprepared, I had offered “My Old Man”, which is a great favourite. But the show reminded me that my very favourite remains “Sex an’ Drugs an’ Rock an’ Roll” for its last six lines:

Don’t do nothing that is cut price
You know what that’ll make you be
They will try their tricky device
Trap you in the ordinary
Get your teeth into a small slice
The cake of liberty

The cake of liberty shrank in the last decade, and the state presses us in more and more and more ways to account for ourselves and cough up information we are otherwise careful about whom we trust it with. Come on 28 February to the debate Parliament won’t hold, to assess the damage and decide what to do about it.

Get yourself a ticket to the Convention on Modern Liberty.