Things I like

I like Robert Crampton’s column in The Times magazine on Saturdays. It’s called Beta Male and, specifically identifying himself against an Alpha Male culture, he’s on the right side. Although how he can be married, have children and hold down such a great job and still be Beta Male is hard to say. It’s a bit like Philip Larkin being the best poet of his generation and yet pretending he didn’t want to get famous.
What Robert does when he runs out of stories about family life or his job is simply go on a spree about things he likes and then the next week he’ll do the same about things he doesn’t like. He gets paid big bunches of spendable cash for doing that. But I’ll tell you mine for nothing.
I like Diana Ross & the Supremes, especially when singing Come See About Me, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PycKSdKG_74 . I like to cook up a saucepan of Sainsbury’s 29p Spicy Vegetable Rice, put half a tin of Chick Pea Dhal into it just before it boils dry and have it with three Cauldron Lincolnshire Sausages and some Jalapeno Cole Slaw.

I like it on a Saturday morning, or any other time of the week, if I investigate my garden and find that next door haven’t chucked their very specifically identifiable white-filtered fag ends over the wall. I’m sure it’s her and I wonder if she’s crazy. Why would you live there for two or three years and then start smoking at the age of thirty and start doing such a thing.
I like mist, I like snow, I like rain. It’s all good and necessary. I like Radio 3 as long as it’s not at those times of the weekend when it plays jazz (for ‘jazz’, see next week). I like books, not all books but the idea of books and good ones especially. I like Count Arthur Strong, The Men from the Ministry, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Much Binding in the Marsh. I like Danny Baker although he is clearly not what he once was.
I like Handel. I like Bach and I like The Magnetic Fields, and Stephin Merritt whose terrible voice was last week reviewed as a ‘wonderful bartione’. I had thought that, like some other great songwriters who couldn’t sing, like Dylan, he had invented his own style and got away with it. But L.D. Begthol still ought to be a part of The Magnetic Fields.
I like friends. The best philosophy tells us that good friends are the answer to most things. I don’t have enough of them but wouldn’t swap the best ones that I have for more because I don’t think I would be dealt a better hand.
I like horse racing. What more noble way could there be to remain poor. Jump racing, not the flat. Everything about it is so heroic and yet so unreliable. Could there be any other world so full of spivs, unreliable reputations, stories, tipsters, fraudsters and yet also complete class acts? Well, yes, there could. Lds & Gnlmn, I like poets, too.
We might find the other side of some of these categories appearing next week.
But, in the mean time, I like hats, I like unfashionable people who can pull it off, I would like everything ‘gay’ if they could just shut up and get on with it, I like Tony Blackburn, chips from the chip shop but not the one nearest to where I live, Japan, Jamaica, the best bits of Scotland, France, French, Latin, Astronomy, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Tommy Cooper, George Best, Derek Randall and, most of all sportspersons now, Jessica Ennis, but mostly, Mark Cavendish.
I do like Robert Crampton but I’m surprised he gets paid as much as he does for doing a list that is no better than this.