This post is a way of saying I love my father

Daddy is a man of fixed daily habits which can only suffer when he travels in foreign lands, like going to the gym, having naps, eating salads and lingering over the newspaper. So I was anxious to run damage - we went on long walks instead of going to the gym, we came back from field trips to make sure he could get a nap in most days, I made salads when my inclination was more towards eating some more canoli (magically, as soon as we went grocery shopping together canolis started appearing before me), and while we were in Antwerp I spied a newsagents in between the diamond stores and ushered him in to get something in English or the Gazzetto dello sporto or something.

There was nothing there I thought he'd be remotely interested in as there was nothing North American or Italian, and then I saw it.

'Look, Daddy, it's the Daily Telegraph. That's the newspaper Grandpa liked,' I said hopefully, as Daddy has a huge respect for his now defunct father-in-law, who liked the Daily Telegraph. My maternal grandfather was a good man so I can only excuse his fondness for the Daily Telegraph by saying his fine aesthetic sensibilities meant he preferred the knuckle-dragging piss mongers who produce it to the Guardian staff, who use too many commas. Like me.

Se he bought it and the next day he lingered over it, and he came across this article. It upset him a bit. Tenors only touch me when sopranos are drowning them out by shouting 'Di te, de ti scordarmi!' in 'Miserere', but Daddy had a soft spot for Pavarotti, and the fact that some cunt in a right wing snotrag saw fit to make fun of the man's fattidom and populist and money-grabbing tendencies when he wasn't even cold in his grave yet makes my blood fucking boil.

First of all, we all knew Pavarotti was fat and sort of lazy about learning his parts and a populist money grubber and that Cecilia Bartoli is way classier, please and thank you. You're not making some fantastic and original point by mapping his human shortcomings out five minutes after the poor fuck dies of cancer, you're being a cunt. A stupid opportunistic troggy cunt who comes off as wizened with disappointed bitterness as Germaine Greer crowing over the fresh corpse of that animal-provoking Australian incompetent, both revealing more than you intended about your own profound jealousy of your exponentially more successful contemporaries.

Not to mention the need to have some sort of nasty opposition in the press in lieu of news. Because it's not about journalistic integrity when you harp on about the shittiness of a dead celebrity. A celebrity is just a celebrity - they call them that because their fame is exponentially fame inducing, and not because they're Winston Fucking Churchill or something who has some overwhelming historical legacy which needs discussing whether they're alive or dead or something in between. And if you rip into them when they're fresh in the public minds because they died, why, you're just the scum of the fucking earth, aren't you? Just a repellent shitwad of an opportunistic parasite, willing to be a total fucking cunt just so that foul mouthed bloggers like me give a shit about you on their way to work in the morning.

Bravo, maestro.

As well as having been a celebrity, now Pavarotti is a legend, whether you or I like him, because his voice and his performing persona brought millions of people to opera and 50,000 people to his funeral. Cecilia Bartoli might be a million times classier, but some backwater girl growing up in the sticks like me might never have heard of her if it hadn't been for the amazing larger-than-life tenor of Old Eyebrows bellowing Nessun Dorma over one of Michael Bolton's bowel movements so that he could buy his 60th mistress a house or a mink coat and some blow or something.

What I mean to say is that some nonentity in the British right wing press has no right to ruin even a quarter of an hour of my father's vacation by ripping into a man who will be remembered as having been mourned by tens of thousands, when that nonentity's best chance of being remembered is as a parasitic fuck who raised the traffic to the Daily Telegraph one weekend by being a cunt.