Probably Not.

Hi! You don't mind playing a game with me?

If you could ask each Beatle only one question however without any consequences what would you ask them~?

Hi!!! Sorry I took a while to get to this, what a fun ask!!!!

I am presuming they will tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (including things they maybe actually forgot in the meantime).

This is very hard, because of course I'm nosy about specific historical facts.

So, here are my thoughtful, more open-ended questions that I think would lead to something pretty insightful:

Ringo: How have your feelings on the Beatles breakup changed over the years and did Get Back have a specific impact?

George: What role has forgiveness played in your relationships and how do you feel about your willingness to forgive?

John: How do you reconcile your need to be authentic with the inherent performance of fame?

Paul: What are you most afraid could happen to your legacy once you're no longer with us?

And here are my kneejerk "EXPLAIN THIS!!!!"-type questions. Imagine me throwing a chair before yelling these. (also I avoided questions where the answer might depress me too much or that presume things I'm not actually sure about lol)

Ringo: What happened that one time on tour you went on some sort of bender and were maybe suicidal? :(

George: The Maureen affair. Please Elaborate.

John: What was going through your mind when you told Hunter Davies you slept with Brian in Barcelona?????

(still hoping Davies' archive might give me some clue regarding this one, once it becomes available....)

Paul: I Demand Your Actual Unfiltered Yoko Take, Sir.

Hate that sneaky spotify tag bro I did not tag you

#ep14

On Instagram

me when I'm gay and omw to yell at teachers striking during my son's exams

Living for the city

By a stroke of luck I caught the second episode of BBC2’s ‘Welcome to Lagos’ last night, and it was just as fascinating as the first. Last week the focus was on born-and-bred city people, but this time the thousands who migrate from Nigeria’s countryside to live in the city’s slums were in the spotlight. In the same way that the first episode looked at life on the rubbish dump, the lives of various people living in the slum of Makoko, built on stilts over the massive Lagos Lagoon, were examined. Chief among the many characters was Chubey – fisherman, entrepeneur, father of 18 children and master of the weekly Lotto, who served a linchpin for the other stories to revolve around. Highly intelligent, with plenty of what we Irish call ‘cop-on’, Chubey nevertheless was a firm believer in traditional sorcery and remedies, wearing what appeared to be a bird’s head around his neck and arranging for his son to receive an elaborate cleansing ceremony when he started running with a bad crowd. It’s not just rural ignorance that causes people to cling to such remedies – as Chubey revealed when he stated ‘We don’t have gates and guards like the rich men in the city, so we use our own protection’ – it’s also about asserting identity in a city where the haves and have-nots look at each other across such a vast chasm. Racial identity is also maintained through these practices – many people spoke of how traditional medicine was a uniquely black way of doing things, distinct and separate from the ways of white people. Makoko is like a slum Venice, made up out of thousands of small wooden huts supported on stilts sunk into the thick black sand of the lagoon bed. Inhabitants get around on small rowboats, often perilously overloaded with people, logs, sand, bricks and other bits and pieces. The presenter (refreshingly always behind the camera) astutely noted how ancient and modern coexist almost seamlessly in this place – the few medical centres provide antibiotics and tree-bark potion, everybody has a mobile phone but the primary method of disseminating information is still word-of-mouth. The patchy-to-nonexistent levels of service provided to the inhabitants was revealed by two deaths by electrocution of saw operators in the slum’s largest business, the Ebute Metta timber yard. Worn cables and a lack of protective gloves meant that even touching the wrong part of the wire connecting the huge electric saws to the power source led to instant death for two unlucky employees. The workers formed a makeshift union and demanded rubber shoes and gloves for safety, which appear to have eventually been provided. Also working at the mill were two boys of about eleven, who had left their rural villages behind and were saving to return home and build a house. How realistic their ambitions were remains to be seen. But as Chubey pointed out ‘If you come to Lagos and don’t have sense, you will get sense very quickly. You will never leave Lagos without getting sense.’ One person who seemed to be lacking in sense was Chubey’s teenage son Payo, who, as Chubey put it ‘is only good at going out’. Despite the traditional ceremony, he continued on his no-good-nik ways until eventually he was thrown out of the family home, along with his mattress and few belongings. Teenagers everywhere fall out with their parents and run away from home, but I don’t envy Payo trying to negotiate a life alone in Lagos’ slums. He maintained ‘I refuse to beg him [Chubey]’ but a few weeks out in the world might make him rethink his stubbornness. Female voices have been fairly absent from the series so far, probably due to to the fact that the central characters tend to be family patriarchs who would be unlikely to allow their wives (seemingly plural in Chubey’s case at least) and daughters to speak alone to the camera team. However the women of the slum were noisily present in most scenes last night, even if we didn’t get to find out much about their thoughts on life. One charged into the sawmill when she heard of the second electrocution, clutching an empty bottle of schnapps and roaring about how God had forsaken them. Meanwhile a couple of concerned sisterly types tried to persuade Payo to apologise to his father, but to no avail. Chubey – who despite his rather aggressively irascible manner, seemd fundamentally decent – eventually won the equivalent of £54 on the state Lotto, and the programme ended with his entire (and extensive) family celebrating. Another man, Paul, saved up enough money from his work at the timber yard to buy his own tiny home. Their ebullience and repeated assertions that money was making them extremely happy shows yet again that the bizarre mental trickery involved in separating money from a certain level of contentment is an invention of the affluent West. Again this super series provides a humanist, unpatronising view into the lives of people inhabiting a confusing, dreadful, fascinating and thoroughly modern city. I look forward to the next episode!

Beatlemania was fun but now it's time for beatledepression

“Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

On Instagram

me looking at the two english actors in this lineup

lmao even