Angry man, writing

I had just dropped off my nearest and dearest at Kew Gardens, where they were going to sneer at the Christmas displays and raid the shop.  I was zooming home to wait in for deliveries.  Christmas comes in a van.

It was only when I came to a halt, at the rail crossing off the Sheen Road, that I noticed it.  Checking my rear view mirror, everything was blurred.

I thought; "Well, is this it?  Should I summon assistance, or lie down with my head in a brown paper bag, or what?".

Then I realised that I had the volume on the sound system cranked up to eleven, and it was the car that was shaking, not me.  I was listening to 'Hideaway', from the album 'Never Going Home', by the band Big Skies.

I can't send you a link to that particular song (the album is on Spotify, go rack up a few pence for them, I have put a link on my Facebook today), but believe me when I say that it has the ideal intro .... sounds like a stack of stainless steel bars slowly starting into a landslide.  Jim Cubitt, 'Last of the Axemen'.

And then it led me to ponder and reflect, which is always a bad thing.  About the long, long road a-winding, from Right Turn Left, via Blue Screen Life, to Big Skies, and the kind of music they made, which always appealed to me, and why.  I think because these lads were born twenty or thirty years too late.  At almost any time in the intervening period, their songs would have been up there in what was once called the Hit Parade.  Nowadays, all we get are people who want to be Beyonce, and who generate sub-soul warblings.

What happened to rock and roll?

That's why I'm angry.  I do not want to live off my Led Zeppelin archive, or come across things like Queens of the Stone Age from time to time.  I want .... I want .... what do I want?  Artistic integrity plus killer riffs, maybe.  Is that too much to ask?

Here's a nice video of a Big Skies tune:

Keep music live, again.

I have just spent the evening doing something I thought would be tedious, but it turned out, not.

We went to a pre-Xmas street party, organised by one of the roads round here that is slightly better co-ordinated than ours.  There was mulled wine and raffles and stuff, and there was a band.  They were really very much better than to be expected.  I will try and post some info.  Here they are:

http://bourbonstreetrevival.com/

They were playing as a five piece tonight, and they were really tight.  All members were really good - I liked the guitarist in his pork pie hat, and the trumpet/keyboard player was blowing up a storm.

In the interval, the drummer poked me in the back and said; "So, you're a Doors fan, eh?  I saw your face light up when we played that number."

I am not aware of any other time in the past decade when anybody has noticed my face noticeably lighting up.  I would have bought him a drink, but when I turned around he was gone, and somebody else had spilled their lager all over my new jacket.  Even that didn't faze me.

And I would pay good money to anyone who has video film of their encore.  They played 'Mustang Sally',  and there was this choir of eight year olds who got totally into the moment when the singer presented them with the mike, and belted out 'Ride, Sally, ride!'.  Their little faces!  Some more poor kids lost to rock and roll.  

Ah, me.

Here's a thing I want to write.

I think it will be short, but it's heartfelt.  And there won't be any video links.

I am a great reader, I find solace in reading books, many of which I may have read time and time again.  I even read bad books, knowing that they're bad books, but just because they have something about them that I like.  My favourite books drive me mad, because I have to leave them for at least a year, say, before I can read them again.  Ain't it a bitch.

But music isn't like that.  [Oh god, oh god .... he's going to talk about music again!  Guards!  Guards!]

No, come on, give me a moment.  I was just browsing through some stuff on YouTube.  I know many people decry the comments section on YouTube, and yes, often it is full of moronic observations or abuse or ..... but sometimes you see people lay their lives out.  It's not always easy reading.

By coincidence, this afternoon I have read comments from two different people who have had recent tragedies in their lives, and decided to let it out by talking about music that they thought relevant.  In one case, the song in question was an undoubted work of art, in the other, it was a complete piece of garbage, trust me.

But that's not the point.  The point was that the music gave them a focus, and an emotional release.  A lot cheaper than hours in analysis.

I have never sobbed my heart out at a paragraph of Dickens, Tolstoy, Amis or Sayers, or at a single line of Plath or Housman.  I could give you three or four split second moments from some songs that would reduce me to primeval slime.  I think in one case, simply the studio ambience that precedes any actual sound made by the band would do it.  That's what music does.    

That's all I wanted to say.  

Ah, christ.  Let's all cheer up.

All hail the BBC, and YouTube

I am writing these short pieces while playing around with various blog/Facebook/Twitter settings.  That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

I heard a fascinating package on the radio this morning.  It concerned communication in the modern world.  Now, I listen almost exclusively to Radio Four - the Today programme, The World At One, and PM.  Also Robert Elm's show on Radio London.  These are the best of the BBC and they tell me everything I want to know.  I do not watch television much, and really I don't read newspapers any more.

Several threads to link here ..... must concentrate .....

Ok.  I think I've got it.

I love YouTube, I use it for all kinds of things.  I don't upload any more, but I use links to it to illustrate things I discuss on the Internet.  You can find virtually anything there.  I also try to interact with people who have commented on videos in which I have an interest, but most of the time this is like shouting into a bucket.  However, I have had meaningful conversations with a few people.  

Moving on ..... when I was a freelance copywriter, I wrote a sales leaflet for a mobile phone company, aimed at West Africa.  The company had realised that countries such as Nigeria had been too poor in the past to establish 'copper wires' telephone systems, and that they could easily go straight to cellphones at less investment cost.  The company sold the boxes and masts that would support such a service, and Nigeria has a population of 173 million (did you get that?), most of whom would want to use a phone if they could get hold of one.

The interview in the package this morning which particularly interested me was with a young lady in Nigeria who was asked how she got her 'news of the world'.  She said straight away that she got her view of the world from YouTube.  Not a newspaper, not a radio or a television channel, or a text  newsfeed to her mobile phone, but from YouTube videos.  

Analyse this!

I really haven't decided what I think about that fact.  It's a bit of a showstopper, isn't it?

The world is changing ..... many things that were ..... yeah, I know, shut up with the mock-LOTR quotes.

No, really, I'm dumbstruck.

My war against poop.

I have nothing against dogs, per se.

We are cat people, but I will fight to the death for your right to own a dog, exercise a dog in public places, even let your dog defecate where we walk and, in extremis, leave the detritus because you have no way of bagging it up and taking it away, it can happen.  Just plan better next time.  (OK, we're lucky - cats make their own arrangements and do their best to bury the evidence;  dogs and foxes think a pile of crap is something to boast about, apparently.)

But when you bag it up, and then throw the bag over our fence so that it lodges in our ivy and we wonder what that strange thing is for several days while it matures, and when we come to trim our ivy hedge discover what you've done ..... well, you're dead meat.  There's a social covenant, and you've broken it.  I'm not blaming your dog, I'm blaming you.

The man at the crease aims to hook it to square leg, but he finds his off stump has been sent tumbling

Not to put too fine a point on it (another partially cricketing term) it is p*ssing it down with rain here in leafy Kingston, and I have greeted the day with a glad scream of anguish.

See, I have this ancient cricketing injury, which I am convinced stems from the days when I was a deceptively languid mid-pace off-seam bowler for Derbyshire Colts.  From only a six and half stride run-up, I would launch tricky deliveries by stamping down my left leg (the guy above is on the follow-through, the right leg is just the brake) and using it as a pivot to hurl my thunderbolts.  As a result, forty years later the knee cartiledge is knackered.

If I sleep on it wrongly (and I always sleep on it wrongly these days), it slackens overnight and so the first movement I make is agony.  If I remember (and I usually forget) I can sleep with a spare pillow arranged just so to prevent it flexing in the wrong direction.  But after I walk around for a short while, it sorts itself out.  It is sorted now.

I didn't have a long cricketing career.  I tried to take it up again, for the Ham team that played out of the 'Hand and Flower' pub on Ham Common, but it wasn't a success - maybe one day I'll tell you about the shower I took with a visiting West Indian team ... strangely, none of my own team-mates were keen to share the experience.  I also scored eight runs that day (not a bad total for the occasion), and I was very proud of one late cut for two in particular .... the West Indians appreciated it, I remember the slip fielder saying something like; "Shit, mon, I didn't see THAT coming outta this guy!"

I was also an opening bat for Derby County, but I didn't enjoy that so much - batsman just have to make one mistake, but bowlers have a chance to redeem themselves within an over.  Once, just once, I experienced batsman nirvana.  It lasted about ten minutes.  I could see the ball coming at me in slow motion, it looked huge, and it seemed I had half an hour to decide where I would hit it on the field, to avoid fielders.  I hit boundaries all over the place, and then the power disappeared as quickly as it came.  Next ball, I played a textbook forward defensive, but unfortunately on completely the wrong line.  I missed the ball, it went by me and the stumps clattered.  Hated that noise.

Had a few occasions of bowler nirvana, they were good.  I swear, I once decided in the middle of a purple patch of seam bowling, when I was visualising and potentially hitting not just the wicket, but a precise area on my chosen stump (this is not fantasy, other bowlers report it) to change from seam to spin bowling.  I reduced my run-up, lobbed the red orb down the wicket with a vicious amount of tweak, and .... I again swear ..... it bit into the sward, turned almost ninety degrees, and laid waste to his bails.  I can still picture the batsman staring at me, wondering what the hell had just happened.  Walk, boyo!

For completeness, I will relate the other two episodes of this nirvana in my life.  I am not making this stuff up.

1)  As a teenager, I was on holiday with my family in Chesapeake Bay, USA.  The hotel had some much-abused games facilities in the basement, and I was playing table tennis with this guy .... and I suddenly realised that I could direct the ball not just to the optimum areas of the table to make it difficult for him to return, but actually hit the EDGE OF THE TABLE so that the ball would squirt off at a totally unpredictable angle.  I did not make a friend that day.

2)  I'm a deeds clerk, I have an attic full of some four thousand individually numbered client files.  If I don't think about it too hard, I can go up there with the four digit number of the file that is required in my head, and sometimes I will just look straight at it.  Ok, obviously I know roughly which series of files are in which section of the attic.   And it doesn't always work.  But when it does, it scares the bejeesus out of me.

I'm a science grad, I do not believe these things are supernatural.  I just think that our brains are incredibly complex, and sometimes they are capable of doing things at an unconscious level which our conscious thoughts can't comprehend.  Fascinating.

And before I leave this topic ... are you a motorist or cyclist?  I bet you are.  So, you're approaching a junction at which you want to turn right, and there's traffic or pedestrians also approaching the junction, and you need to avoid them.  Do you have any idea how complex the maths you are doing in your head, all unconscious?  You need a time sense, a distance sense, a velocity sense and a predictive behaviour sense, overlaid with the ability to do what on paper would be called integral calculus.  Just to turn right.  A non-verbal, purely physical transaction.  So no wonder it's the single most common cause of road traffic accidents.  

This is by way of an experiment, talk amongst yourselves.

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Things to do in Kingston when you're dead

I am an anomaly.  I am the last of a line, and I exist purely because of a strange series of happenstances.

Where to start ...... OK, I am a Deeds Clerk.  That title in itself surely alerts you to the fact that we are not talking leading-edge technology.  Listen, you wouldn't believe the half of it.  Our firm is the result of amalgamations (most law firms are) and we have acquired responsibility for the wills, deeds and files entrusted to all our predecessors, going back fifty years in some cases.  I have four lock-up garages, a huge attic, several massive safes, and filing cabinets stuffed with deeds and other documents.  I am currently down to my last six inches of shelf space for deeds, and eight months of attic space for files, maybe.  After that, I'm going to resign.  Depends how they react to the situation.  (It's a long story.)

[Note:  if anyone from my company gets to read this ..... I am going to protect client confidentiality at all times, and our reputation.  Not for my benefit, but for theirs and yours.]

I am employed by lawyers in Kingston, Surrey, and they are all hard-working, well-intentioned professionals who do their very best for clients.  Sometimes the clients make that hard.  Some of the partners are so conscientious that I can see the signs of stress in them, on a daily basis.  I try to be supportive and minimise their burden, but the work makes that difficult sometimes.

Our main source of stress is the regulatory requirements of this industry.  Believe me, if bankers had had to comply with the stuff we do, the world would not be in financial ruin;  I can understand it to an extent - solicitors are present on occasions when large and sometimes vast sums of money pass between people, for one reason or another (death, divorce, sale, treaty, negotiation) and they have to be restrained from dipping their finger in the honey jar.  But when we have to apologise to clients for the length of the first letter we send out to them, and when we have to bank every cheque within 24 hours, and submit to routine scrutinies that make the Spanish Inquisition look like ten minutes in a bouncey castle ... something is wrong.  

I didn't intend to go in this direction.  I wanted to talk about documents.

In my few years with this company, I have had to destroy vast amounts of documents.  They go for 'secure shredding', because of the personal information they contain.  Most of the time, the documents are routine.  Sometimes, they are not.

I do my very best not to destroy anything worth preserving, despite the fact I have limited time.  For example, I came across a cache of stuff relating to an early pioneer in Eastern Australia - we are talking 1860s - which was mostly dull as ditchwater conveyances relating to property he owned in Surbiton before emigrating but had great lists of names and properties that proved to be gold dust to the museum in Port Macquarie.  In those days, everything had to be written out, in exhaustive detail, signed by multiple witnesses, and highly specific.  Copies of birth and marriage certificates were required.  Even copies of documents attesting to which church people attended.  I learned that this guy had many children, one of whom was consigned to an asylum, hired convicts who had been transported out there as virtual slaves, imported Hereford cattle to that continent for the first time, and much, much more ..... incredible stuff.  If I ever visit Port Macquarie (it is to laugh!), I'm sure of a few free frosties.

And sometimes it's poignant.  Lord knows why, but one probate file I was directed to destroy contained the 'Soldier's Penny' owned by the late client.  You don't know what a 'Soldier's Penny' is?

Here's an image, followed by a link - the image is not of the actual 'Dead Man's Penny' (the popular name) kept by this particular client.  I assume his father had died in the First World War.

Wikipedia entry

I couldn't believe it when the Penny dropped out of this file.  They are solid chunks of bronze, five inches in diameter.  I didn't know what to do with it.  Obviously, this guy had passed away with no living relatives, or at least with none who wanted any of his memorabilia.  In the end, I sold it on eBay and used their facility to donate all the profits to ... I think ... the Star and Garter Home for wounded soldiers, in Richmond.  I hate eBay, but at least they do offer that option.

Other documents I have destroyed have been wills.  Yes, if you make a will and leave it with your solicitor, after fifty years or so they will assume that you're either dead and no-one cared, or you have made a later will with another firm, you ingrate.  You would not credit some of the things people put in their wills, or what accompanying documents can tell you about their lives.  99% of the time, of course, wills are dry as dust and so they should be.  Occasionally, like mining for opals, something starts to gleam out of the wall you're hacking at.

Like the guy who left a fiver to his doctor; 'to drink my health, which neither he nor the medical profession as a whole could restore to me'.  Sorry to strike a sad note, but enclosed with that will was the death certificate, dated just two weeks later, which stated; ' ...... did take his own life by inhalation of household gas.'  Stuck his head in the oven.

With another will was a whole series of correspondence, telegrams and other ephemera which I have worked up into a binder, chronologically - basically a spinster sister ran away with a music hall entertainer, and his outraged wife and the spinster's outraged family (who were frightfully well to do) tried to combine to find them and confront them with their outrageous behaviour.  I do hope the couple had a happy ending ... sadly the ending is not available to me.

People also leave vitriolic letters to their relatives, explaining why they haven't been left anything in The Will.  Usually because of what they said about Our Brenda at Kev's wedding, or something equally trivial.  They go into shredding straight away.

The reason I'm writing this piece today instead of earlier is that I am processing the very last such batch of old documents.  It is a pile of draft wills from the 1930's, which popped up when we cleared some ancient deeds boxes from the attic.  Here's an example of how ancient these are:

"To our professional charges in connection with attendances on you and correspondence in the drawing and completing of your will ....... £1/11/6"

Oooh, and I love this one .... reminds us how things were once done, and what the Royal Mail used to be:

"In accordance with the instructions which you gave to Mr Ingillson last night, we have prepared and herewith enclose engrossment of your Will.

You will notice that we have added the legacy of £3/-/- to your nephew [X] in accordance with the note which you sent to Mr. Ingillson's house this mid-day.

We think that you will find the engrossment carries out your instructions.  Mr. Ingillson will call at your house at say 9.15, tomorrow Friday morning to confirm that it is quite in order and he will then call again at 2.15 as arranged when the Will will be executed by you in his presence along with Mrs [Z]."

Good Lord and butter.  That kind of service would today cost you upwards of half a grand.

I regret saying goodbye to these documents.  Every one of them (even those which don't have eight wax seals and signatures or are - like the boring conveyance from the early 1800s that I have on my shelf at work - attached by a ribbon to a three inch wax disc seal stored inside a lead canister, all of which are now so fragile after the centuries have trodden on them) meant a great deal to someone, and they are portals to lives that are by and large wholly forgotten.

It could make a man sad.  Thank god for gallows humour.

[Attendance Note:  An hour and a half.  No client, no-one to bill.  File copy in my General File, please, Doreen.]

"A good smoke in any weather."

I hope you recognise that as a Terry Pratchett quote, from his Tiffany Aching cycle.  This isn't excatly how I envisaged the sailor, from the pack of 'Jolly Sailor' tobacco that Pratchett invents for these books, but it'll do, it'll do.

What I mean in this instance is that I want to blow off smoke here, safe in the knowledge that no-one is going to read it.  In particular, I don't want to upset my son, whose music has been subject to much remixing.

I -ing (that's another Pratchett quote, from 'The Truth') hate remixes.  I -ing hate them with a vengeance.  Because a) they are never the original (self-evident) and b) they are always -ing awful.

Except, except .... Bob and Catherine did remixes of a Nirvana tune and a Carly Simon tune and a Creep tune and others - and they were just as interesting as the original.  Contradiction City?  No, I don't think so;  I think their versions are more reinterpretations, than remixes.  While I try to clarify that thought, I may post up a link to the Alpines' rejiggeries.

And then there's this:

OK, I think these are more 'covers' than 'remixes'.  I must explore this further.

Right, here's an original Alpines tune.  It's called 'Chances'.

And now here's a remix, which has had more YouTube plays than the original.  You'll forgive me if I don't listen to it again.  God, it's horrible.

And that's my point.  These people need to go out and make their own music, and be judged by that.  Bob and Catherine spent days and days of time and years of their experience writing and recording these songs, and these people come along and shove it through some software and add some 'farts and squeaks' (I think that's how John Peel described synthesisers, he was not what you would call a big fan) ... running on empty here, into the early hours.  Just woke up wanting to make a statement.

Kurt Vonnegut: an apology

The apology is not to Kurt Vonnegut.  It is to you, dear reader.

I have been shamefully neglecting this blog.  I fell into easy ways, just posting up my stuff on Facebook when I felt like it, not including photos or links or anything ..... but now people on Facebook are starting to complain that I am clogging up their news feeds.  So I thought I'd better try and reinstate the blog habit.

But I wanted to write about Kurt.  I am reading again this book:

It's just great.

If you know Mr. Vonnegut at all, it is probably from 'Slaughterhouse Five', which gained a lot of popularity in the seventies and was made into a film.  It is fiction, but it includes his real world memories of being involved (he was a soldier, and taken prisoner by the Germans) in the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden in Germany, one of the worst single Second World War atrocities against mostly civilians, after that of Hiroshima.  We did it.  Not the Nazis, not the Soviet hordes.  We took the decision to bomb and burn a mainly unprotected mediaeval city back to the bedrock.  And yet the book is full of humour and fantasy and science fiction themes, and he is not judgemental.  'So it goes', is his verdict.  'And so on', is another damning indictment.  'Poo-tee-weet' - you'll have to look that up.

Every single book I've read of Vonnegut's is a new departure.  'Cat's cradle', 'Mother Night', 'Sirens of Titan', 'Bluebeard' ..... And yet, contrariwise, there are common elements.  He often introduces himself into the narrative - 'Look at me', he says. 'This is a book I'm writing, of the nature of books, and here I am commenting on it.  Don't be fooled, it's all fiction!'  Apart, of course from the items he includes from his own life.  His mother's suicide, his relationship with his sister ...... they don't intrude, but they sidle on from the wings.

'Breakfast of Champions' is perhaps his best work in this vein.  The protagonist is Dwayne Hoover, who is going insane, but don't let that put you off.  The book charts the course of Dwayne on his way, all unknown, to meet Kilgore Trout at an arts festival;  Trout is a science fiction writer invented by Vonnegut - and he describes many of the novels that this fictional writer has written.  Fictional fiction, if you will.  (I like in particular the one about the alien race that communicates by tapdancing and farting.)  There are unsettling passages but much that is humorous and complete flight of fantasy .... not least when Vonnegut himself enters the narrative and interacts with his own characters.  With hilarious consequences.

Did I tell you that a recurring theme of Vonnegut's is that, at our centre, we each have an unwavering band of light?  No?  Good.

[ncidentally, the character of Kilgore Trout was so persuasive that another scifi writer (Philip Jose Farmer) wrote a novella called 'Venus on the half shell' under the Trout pseudonym that is so rare that fans now pay hundreds of dollars for an early copy.  That's a lie.  About the money, I mean - the rest is true.]

Oh dear, I am out of practice at ending blog pieces.  Well ... shall I say that his writing is easy to read, and you won't realise that he has smuggled some wonderfully original idea past you until you turn the page and then say; "Hang on ....... !"

Oh, and the pages of this book are splattered with bold line drawings that he did.  He went through a phase.  Don't we all.

Gwen Stefani. An excellent video. A rocking track. Much analysis.

I'm sorry, I have neglected this blog.  It's just ... I have too much going on.  I'm all over Facebook, Twitter, I do email, I have the occasional real world contact ... and I also have to leap from tree to tree, as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia.  It all eats into my spare time, of which I admit I have much.  But any road up ....

I have viewed many fine music videos over the past few years.  'Go with the flow', by Queens of the Stone Age, is a standout.

But I really like this one.  Would you like me to deconstruct it before, or after, you view it?

The added video content in this extended version is knowing.  There are many subtle little touches ... look for the bunny in the automat machine ..... listen to the musak in the waiting room .... try and spot the questions on the clipboard ....

And the track itself is kickass!

I finally caved in and watched 'Game of Thrones'.

I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones. Throws you in at the deep end, doesn't it? What the **** is going on, mainly? And quite racey. I don't think our dear Queen, for example, would have felt comfortable at a Dothraki wedding. Which seemed to be held on Californian beaches ... anyone got any info on that? Ends on a little bit of a cliffhanger, but in reverse, so to speak. (GoT fans will get that.)

OK, I've now mulled it over for a few hours.

Without seeing any other episodes (except for a YouTube of the Red Wedding, and I don't recall the characters who appear in that, because I was just aghast at the wanton bloodletting), or reading any of the books, I make the following extrapolations. The audience will note that at no time during the performance do my fingers leave my hands.

- The white haired pretender over the water and his brutish Dothraki army come to a bad end, very enjoyable (for us). 

- His sister raises dragons (those fossils are just dormant eggs), gets tattooed, has a lot of fun cuckolding Muscle Boy with anything in sight, (including the guy who gave her the books, a sure sign), and then goes to the bad, revenging herself on any males but finally finding peace nursing sick dire wolves in a cottage in Dorset. (Not sure about that last bit.)

- Sean Bean loyally serves his buddy, until the king is treacherously murdered and Sean has to step up to the plate. He emotes a lot. But after a brief halcyon period something horrible happens, and Sean's youngest son (who has somehow survived what happened at the end of Episode One) comes into the kingdom. Hmmmm.

- The Bastard is everyone's expected king-in-waiting, but he is taken out by a meteorite. (This needs work.)

- The Dwarf roisters his way through (almost) the entire series, developing a nice line in sarky banter and depravity, before succumbing to either a stroke when he is denied a ride at Dragonland because he doesn't meet the height criterion, or something involving an edged weapon. Bets are on the latter.

- Those wolf cubs develop telepathic links with the brothers and the sister, and do a lot of meaningful growling.

- The sister proves to be more of a warrior than any of the brothers. She takes to leather.

- Something nasty comes through The Wall and lays the country to waste, combining 'Village of the Damned' with 'Blair Witch'. No-one thinks to just stop up the tunnel and forget about the whole thing. 

- Many characters can't decide their motivation, but throw themselves into it anyway and look forward to bacon butties at the commissary truck. Ooops, don't spoil the screen magic .....

- A lot more flesh is revealed, but it's all in the best possible taste and essential to the plot. My dear. (My other half remarks that the amount of tasteful male flesh has been disappointing so far.)

- A drinking game develops centred on matching drinks to the country in which the filming is taking place (chianti for Italy, porter for Ireland, schnapps for the Black Forest, weak lager for Arizona etc. etc.). Many carpets and soft furnishings thoughout the land are ruined by colourful stains.

- At no point is anyone shown raising crops, herding livestock, or otherwise generating food for all the feasts. Some cooking goes on (but only to provide a kitchen which can be overturned by brawls), but everyone has a diet of wild game which gives opportunities for hunts in which a lot of male bonding goes on. Oh yes, there will be a seer or sage trying to direct the course of the civilisation, but he will die senselessly and his books and alchemical equipment will be trashed by barbarians who sneer and pose the while. 

- Winter comes, and isn't as bad as the winters when I were a lad.