The diary room

Playing it Straight (or Jewish?)

2007-12-11T15:08:00.000Z

Now I rather like trashy TV, me. It appeals to my inner chav.

To satisfy this need, the other night I was watching “Playing it Straight” on Channel ITV 7 (or something), as it’s mindless enough to watch whilst packing a suitcase. The idea is that a gorgeous girl needs to work out from a group of about 10 all very attractive men which ones are gay and which ones are straight. If she picks the man of her dreams, there’s a risk that he might turn out to be gay, in which case he wins $200,000 or something preposterous and she gets nothing except disappointment and national humiliation for the weakness of her gaydar. In a previous series, this happened but the deluding gayboy chose to split the winnings with her; presumably on strict condition that she didn’t try to celebrate with a shag.

It’s all fairly harmless fun, or so it seems. I happened to channel hop to something where some Jewish guy was being very earnest about persecution of the Jews. Fair enough, the Jews have had a seriously rough time. Then I realised that gays were also victims of the holocaust and are still seriously persecuted around the World.

Let me pitch an idea to you. How about a TV series where a group of blokes tries to get the amorous attention of a girl? If she accidentally picks one of the Jews though, he gets to keep the money and all the viewers get to laugh at how he was obviously Jewish and she must have very poor skills at spotting a Jew when she sees one. The point is that he’d have to hide his Jewishness for a several weeks to get there.

You buying the idea? Well, I hope not because it’s appallingly offensive. Yet we tolerate the idea that gay men hide their sexuality in the name of entertainment, with the show playing to every stereotype in the book along the way. The fact that this is OK (and that I’d not even thought it otherwise), yet the parallel Jewish show would have the square root of zero chance of being made really made me wonder. Either it’s time that Jewish people got over their past (and present) persecution, or that we gay men need to be much more alert to being ridiculed, lest this ridicule turn to something more sinister. Most probably some combination of both.

A query for Boris

2007-12-02T19:53:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of blog entries for ages. I've been simply excessively busy so I made a conscious decision to suspend just about all of my hobbies until I'd cleared my backlog. This included blogging.

Having moved to London recently for work, I have become reacquainted with all the city's good things (eg theatre) and its many bad things (principally everything to do with transport).
One of the things I have long despised about London is the sheer lack of taxis. London cabbies seem to be held in a public affection that I find wholly impossible to understand. There are too few taxis in London, especially at night. We all tolerate it and we shouldn't.
Boris Johnson is slightly mad but he's running to become mayor of London. Despite Boris's free market enthusiasms, I saw nothing on his website about specifics of exactly how he was going to improve London's pitiful transport system, should he become mayor. I therefore sent this query via his website:

"Hi

Could you please tell me what Boris’s position is with respect to taxi deregulation, or at least doing something that means it’s possible to get a taxi in London late at night? I’ve travelled to a lot of cities around the world and without doubt London has the most expensive, most hard-to-get taxis of any city I’ve visited. Many people don’t go into central London at the weekend because of the pain of getting home. This must be extremely bad for London’s economy and robs us of the facility to enjoy our city to its full potential.

If Boris were clearly to support a policy of loosening the grip that licensed taxi drivers have over cabs in London, he’d get my vote instead of Ken. I just can’t bear the idea of vast numbers of foreign visitors coming to London for the Olympics and finding that we have about eight taxis that work after 11pm and they cost a king’s ransom. In an age of GPS, there is simply no need for “the knowledge” and the restrictive practices that go with it. More, cheaper taxis would improve people’s lives much more than they might initially imagine.

Regards"

I shall let you know what reply I get.

Reinventing the wheel. Yet making it worse.

2007-09-09T10:58:00.000Z

After Enron’s collapse, the US government passed a new law on corporate governance. This law placed all sorts of restrictions on what directors of listed companies could do, it imposed an obligation to maintain systems of proper controls; it tightened up procedures to ensure that auditors were more independent of the directors who appointed them, allowing the auditors to report more faithfully to the shareholders who were really employing them. So far, so good… sounding.

In reality, it’s a mess. The ensuing Sarbanes-Oxley Act (so named after its senate sponsors) is an over-long mess of box-ticking specificity and officousness without much by way of principles. It’s a classic case of a bad law being passed in a hurry to achieve a noble aim. It also highlights another characteristic of America that I find irksome; the lack of willingness to look outside their own country for solutions.

In the UK, we had our corporate governance scandals a decade earlier with the likes of Robert Maxwell raiding his employees’ pension funds to bolster up his fraud ridden empire. Our response was various calmly researched evidence based reports, culminating in the UK Combined Code. The Combined Code works. You can also print it out and fold it and put it in your pocket, which always seems a good characteristic to me of well drafted laws. Its authors, especially Sir Adrian Cadbury, are eloquent champions of practical, good corporate citizenship. Many of the “innovations” of Sarbanes-Oxley were rather similar to the UK’s existing rules, yet with an impractical bent added to them. They were thus neither innovative nor efficacious. There is fairly compelling evidence that directors of US listed companies are now unwilling to take normal commercial risks, such is the fear of personal liability they work under. This risk drives up their salaries. They are cutting back fiercely on R&D. Their companies are holding excessive cash balances. In other words, they’ve become scared of their own shadows. This is a bad thing in a free market system. At the same time, accounting firms and lawyers are all making bumper fees on “S-Ox” advice to directors, which I am sure is generally a lot of money for stating the obvious, yet providing directors with a literal “get out of jail” card if anything should go wrong. The whole thing means that investment is not happening and resources are being squandered.

Perhaps it’s because we’re a small country, but in the UK we have a noble tradition of looking abroad for solutions before trying to fix problems ourselves. In my experience, we should generally look to Australia first for solutions to most problems. No nonsense Aussie pragmatism has generally solved most problems already I feel. Our national football team has recently been managed by a Swede. Our royal family are basically German. We’ve allowed our domestic car manufacturers to die, because we knew they were rubbish. Nationalism should not be allowed to get in the way of commonsense.

Sarbanes-Oxley could be greatly improved by scrapping it, especially section 404 (too tedious to bore on about why here) and replacing it with the UK’s Combined Code. But that’s not going to happen.

28 years since they blew up Mountbatten

2007-08-27T03:13:00.000Z

On this date in 1979, the provisional IRA blew up a small boat off the coast of Ireland that was owned by Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin or something or other of the Queen. I remember it very clearly and, interestingly to me at least, despite the fact that I was just ten years old and despite the time that’s lapsed, my views haven’t much changed.

Even at the time, I remember having formed the idea that Lord Mountbatten represented everything wrong about Britain and its colonial past. He was born into supreme privilege and despite having no recognisable skills held a series of lofty positions, including being the last Viceroy of India. Leaving aside the fact that Viceroy is a silly concept and Britain had no right to occupy India or anywhere else in the first place, surely such an important position ought to have been filled by somebody with some relevant skills, rather than simply being closely linked to the royal family. I have read a number of analyses of the latter days of British rule of India and in particular the manner in which Britain withdrew in an unorganised fashion; leading to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. No historian I have read had much good to say about him. He must have stood on many people of more lowly origin but incalculably greater talent in his allegedly distinguished career.

He had a castle in Ireland, apparently some relic of British imperial rule there too. Every single aspect about him that I have ever heard of says uniformly “upper class twit”. I have much respect for the institution of constitutional monarchy and great respect for the Queen as our head of state but, paradoxically I’ll accept, I have a considerable loathing for power that comes from inherited privilege. This is especially so when it’s twinned with natural arrogance.

One of the reassuring things about the British royal family is how essentially middle class they are in their values and lifestyles, despite the opulence that surrounds them. They are, however, surrounded by a ring of toffs who I to this day hold in considerable contempt. Many of said toffs are relics of defunct foreign royalty; deposed in their own country for being generally objectionable. Lord Mountbatten’s real name was Von Battenburg. Go figure. Prince Phillip (unloved husband of our Queen) is truly Prince Phillip of Greece. Prince Phillip is Louis Mountbatten’s nephew. Go figure again.

Now not saying that he deserved to die, but he did mouth off an awful lot and frankly if anybody is ever a legitimate target (big “if”), it was him and everything he stood for. At the time, I distinctly remember saying “no loss” or words to that effect, to the considerable surprise of my family. Having learned more about the man since, I’m afraid my sentiments remain entirely the same.

I must have been a very odd ten year old.

Why I love the BBC

2007-08-26T19:16:00.000Z

I note that the BBC has been denied the licence fee income that it wanted. I am saddened by this as I personally am willing to tolerate some inefficiencies in the BBC if allowing some inefficiencies to exist means the BBC can focus on making programmes and not playing politics with the latest government fashion for consultants and targets.

We in Britain have this curious system of licence fees. If you own a television in the UK, you have to buy a licence for it, at an annual cost of GBP 135.50. This is used directly to fund the BBC, without going through a central slush fund the way our car licences do. Many people resent paying this, especially those on lower incomes who are less likely to watch as much BBC output as the intelligentsia. I think they have no idea what good value for money it is. For this fee, we get four main television stations, a suite of stations for kids (meaning that parents can park their kids in front of the TV in the knowledge that the kids aren’t being sold to by advertising). We get seven national radio stations, from the wonders of radio 4 (talk radio as it ought to be) to pop music. There is a network of local radio stations, which I’m not interested in but I’m glad they’re there. We get the outstandingly excellent BBC online, which I notice is most people’s home page, throughout the world. Per service provided per day, it’s amazingly cheap.

The BBC works out therefore at GBP 11 per household per month. Many, many people pay over three times that for satellite channels which are, in my opinion, rubbish. I’m glad that the choice exists but we need to remember that illusion that commercial channels are free really is an illusion. Commercial channels make revenue from advertising. Coca Cola, for example, must match the commercial spend of Pepsi to stay alive. Hence companies have to pay lots of money on advertising, which is passed on through the cost of their products. It’s a form of indirect tax. I believe that studies suggest that the true cost of commercial television is at least three times higher than the cost of the BBC.

I take heart from the fact that political parties all accuse the BBC of bias against them. This means the BBC is doing its job of investigating and not pandering to power. This is in marked contrast to American news stations, about which I have nothing much good to say at all.

I really believe that the BBC sets the standard in broadcast journalism. We Brits are no better than any other nation at believing our own propaganda and so we should be sceptical about generally touted views such as this. For example, my travels around the world have confirmed for me once and for all that Britain’s NHS resolutely is NOT the envy of the world, despite what people and politicians say. Indeed, most countries are somewhat bewildered by it. I’d take the Australian or French health care systems any day. The BBC really does stand for the best of British though; sometimes the received wisdom is actually wise. When big news breaks (and I mean news that people actually deep down believe is news, not missing kids in Portugal), they all switch to the BBC. BBC America enjoys a similar effect in the USA, I’m told. News and current affairs are the raison d’etre of the BBC. I’m awfully glad that more lowbrow channels exist, for I love my dose of Big Brother, but the BBC stands unique.

I believe that the licence fee is unfair and I think it creates an annual public relations nightmare that the BBC ought to live without, although this doesn’t mean the BBC ought to take any advertising. The BBC ought to be funded out of general taxation, with fees set by an independent board of governors with limited ability for the government of the day to resist this. It’s right that the government of the day has little control over the BBC’s policies but has control of the purse strings with the annual fight over setting licence fees. The BBC ought to be entirely independent of government, guaranteeing its constitutional place as the core of the independent news media. Partiality becomes obvious when compared with the litmus test of the BBC’s coverage.

So I do wish that we’d stop making the lives of those who run the BBC so bloody difficult. We seem to mourn the BBC rather than celebrate it. Sure, the BBC is occasionally politically biased. Sure, it can sometimes be a bit smug. Sure, I’ve met some people whose puffed up “I work for the BBC” manner does little to make up for their actual unendurable mediocrity. Overall though, the BBC is a thing of wonder. It’s always the thing I miss most when I’m out of the UK. Please let’s keep it special and realise how much value it gives to our society. Without recognising its value, we might lose it. Trust me, once it’s gone, you’ll miss it more than you’d ever imagine.

Dodging Dean

2007-08-24T00:36:00.000Z

I’m currently on yet another work trip to Jamaica. As more frequent readers will know, I have rather mixed feelings about Jamaica. The last week has made me significantly fonder of it.

When I arrived, the taxi driver told me that a star was coming. Excited by the remote possibility that Matt Damon had finally come to claim me as rightfully his, I asked for clarification. Then I realised that “star” was heavily Jamaican accented “storm”. In these parts of the world, you don’t hear people talk in hyperbolic terms about hurricanes; they just talk about storms. If they’re recalling a particular storm, they talk about Gilbert or Wilma, as if talking of members of their family. Ivan is the Jamaican equivalent of Voldemort: the storm that shall not be mentioned by name. Ivan made a right mess. Ivan was a bastard.

I rather like the fact that they call a hurricane a storm. That is, after all, what it is, albeit a bloody big one.

Talk of the impending storm was always there in the background of most conversations, but it only came to the foreground on Friday. Hurricanes tend to change directions so often that people keep a watch on it, but don’t get too jumpy until a strike seems imminent. As ever, I was amused/ bemused by CNN, where presenters openly and pompously stated that the people of Jamaica They really weren’t; they just deal with stuff as it happens and in a proportionate way. God, I despise the American “news” media, for their sheer lack of professionalism. Huge storms are a constant risk here. If people panicked each time one might strike, they’d live in constant, debilitating fear, so the people of Jamaica keep are wary, but they don’t get carried away. Most people are OK in storms. Generally, if you have a house with a roof that’s not made of corrugated zinc, you’ll be OK. If you live away from the shoreline, you’ll be fine. It won’t be fun, but you’ll be fine. And it probably won’t happen anyway, so (to quote one of my colleagues here) “will ya get a grip, man!” I feel that Jamaicans could teach many people in the world a thing or two about dealing with the distant threat of terrorism. My own anxiety about hurricanes is understandable, but it’s fuelled by the media and is thus disproportionate to the real risk. were ill prepared and in denial about the impending catastrophe.

In fact, Jamaica has a very well organised system of dealing with impending hurricanes. They take the power grid down a few hours before the storm hits in order to minimise damage that live wires inflict upon themselves and thus minimise overall down time. They offer shelter to the poorest. They impose a curfew to limit looting because, God knows, there’s no shortage of less savoury Jamaicans who love nothing more than a nice bit of looting. In other words, they have it pretty much sorted. They know that hurricanes are a threat to the poorest and that’s where they dedicate their efforts; the rich are well enough resourced to look after themselves. The Jamaican authorities apparently spoke to FEMA in the USA as Katrina headed for New Orleans and said that their experience would be useful to help the poor of Louisiana, seeing clear parallels with their own situation. With predictable arrogance, the US authorities spurned the offer; countless Americans suffered or died as a consequence, while the authorities focused their attention on marshalling fleets of underfilled 4x4 cars out of town, leaving the poor in their homes below sea level to suffer without support.

I’m sounding rather anti-American. I don’t mean to; I like America and I adore the American dream. I just find it extremely frustrating and arrogant in parts.

We finished work at lunchtime on Saturday, three hours early to give people time to board up, etc. Most people have some and basics ready; only the terminally badly organised made a run on the supermarkets. Again, the news coverage was misleading. I’m afraid that if people can’t work out that they need to have certain non-perishable basics (torch, candles, battery powered radio with spares, tinned food, manual tin opener, bottled gas stove) ready for the season for the hurricane season, the Darwinian order is that their terminally poor organisation puts them at serious risk of involuntary removal from the gene pool. These people were a minority, but a minority that provides good pictures for television. Hence the World is presented with them as the norm.

I was planning to go to Florida for a few days in any event, as I had a layover and I’d prefer to spend it in Florida than Kingston. I brought my plans forward a day, as although I was rather tempted to experience a hurricane, but I feared the potential lawlessness that may follow from a direct hit from a category 4 storm. Jamaica’s not the most law abiding of places at the best of times. Desperate people and stretched emergency services could be a bad combination. I realised it would be foolish to stay, so I left, but I felt a coward in doing so. In the end, I left to avoid days of involuntary disconnection from my creature comforts, like itunes, blogging and Facebook. That’s the measure of how shallow I am.

The phrase “calm before the storm” should be taken fairly literally. One does indeed experience a significant calm, with blue clear skies and little wind. I can’t be sure that I’m reading something into this because I knew of the imminent storm, but there was a sense of something unreal. Atmospheric pressures plummet as a hurricane approaches, so perhaps we can all sense that? Certainly, the low lying land by the sea on the way to the airport was oddly flooded by a calm sea. It just looked and felt odd; the same way that a solar eclipse feels strange even before totality; the light is like twilight but with no long shadows. It’s obvious that something eerie is approaching. Seasoned locals told me that suddenly elevated sea levels are their natural warning to batten down the hatches. The low pressure literally sucks the sea up a good few feet. This is what causes the most damage; sea levels are high even when calm. Add a big storm to that and you don’t want to be too near the sea, or live below sea level. Guess where the rich people and the poor people live?

Let me just do a quick diversion into the story of the flight out. I got a flight to Atlanta, which Delta had laid on specially, presumably as a profit seeking enterprise. The flight was busy but not full. Stories of planes leaving full with stranded distraught people left behind do not tally at all with my experience. Despite the sense of emergency and despite having driven past homes that the very poor were in serious danger of losing, there was still no end of fuss from the overprivileged, overpampered and plain overfed passengers. The two girls in front of me (who were morbidly obese and were Jamaican-Americans I think) had asked the crew for four packs of peanuts before we’d even pushed back. They were, so they said, “starving”. I shit thee not when I say that one even pushed the crew call button to ask for more food as we were rolling along the runway for take-off. Trust me, they could have not eaten for three months and still be far from even thin. One had come equipped with a special extender seat belt because the standard one couldn’t reach around her girth. There’s something utterly wrong about this kind of scenario. I felt like I was one of Marie Antoinette’s closest helpmeets at this moment, just for being there. Some inner sense of morality made me decline the free food and drink. It just seemed wrong to feast as we flew out of a potential disaster zone. The people who’d driven us all to the airport, who had handled our bags and efficiently screened us through security were all staying and they weren’t making any fuss, yet “we” continued to be unreasonable and demanding. They had every reason to hate us, yet they didn’t seem to. Indeed, they mostly seemed to think it was a lot of fuss about a “starm” that might not even strike anyway, although it was seen as a real risk. It was seen as a particular risk as it had a male name. In a place as superstitious as Jamaica, the pattern that hurricanes with male names are the ones to hit the island has not gone unnoticed.

I’ve blogged separately about Atlanta airport, but I truthfully believe that riding out a category 4 storm would be less stressful than flying through American airports on international flights with American airlines (any of them rather than American Airlines the company, hence the lower case a in airlines; grammar matters!) I loathe Atlanta airport and the fuss coming out of Fort Lauderdale I shall bang on separately about that. Suffice to say that the calm way in which Jamaicans deal with real risks in a proportionate way compares exceptionally favourably with how the US government deals hysterically with overstated risks of terrorism. The Jamaicans address their risks; the Americans make lots of noise and fuss but don’t deal with the actual risks in anything like an efficient manner. today was inexcusable and a major security risk in itself.

So back in Jamaica, things are almost normal. The eye of the storm passed about 50 miles to the south of the island and it didn’t intensify to category 5. There’s a vast difference in the destructive power of category 5 compared with category 4 and a huge difference between a direct hit and a near miss. This hotel is still running on its own generators, but all is near normal. Only the pool remains closed. Such is their lack of fuss that I imagine there’s a good reason for the pool to be closed. I expect it will open again just as soon as they’re sure there’s no more glass in the bottom of it, or whatever the danger is.

I was staying at the Pegaus hotel. Courtesy of airlines’ odd pricing, it was cheaper for me to bundle two weeks hotel stay with the flight rather than just the flight, because it was then deemed to be a holiday. This means I didn’t check out of the hotel when I left, because I expected to come back. I did tell reception what I was doing, but I think they were a bit too preoccupied with the matter immediately in hand to pay much attention. When I arrived today, I found out that the hotel was closed as there had been a fire there. I began to explain what I’d done and the girl smiled and said “Ah, you must be Mr [my name]! We’d wondered what had happened to you!” For a hotel with hundreds of rooms, this was rather cute. It’s not been a good 12 months for the Kingston Pegasus hotel. Firstly it achieved notoriety for the alleged murder of Bob Woolmer. Then came Dean; immediately followed by a fire that caused its temporary closure. Apparently, one of the backup generators caught fire, with this fire spreading to the storeroom where they keep the drink. Jamaican rum, I am told with some chuckling by the remaining staff, turns out to be a mightily good fire accelerant. You couldn’t make it up, could you? So they booked me into the neighbouring hotel, from whence I presently blog. All is fine. It would be better if Sprit Airlines had managed to deliver my bag to Kingston as well as deliver me. My recent experience is that the people of Jamaica make considerably less fuss about hurricanes and hotel fires than the people of America make about routine baggage handling. I have decided that there is much about Jamaica that I like. If ever I’m here again when there’s a “starm cummin’”, I shall choose to ride it out.

STOP PRESS! Atlanta airport WORSE than LHR/ LGW!

2007-08-22T23:49:00.000Z

Forgive the laziness of this posting. I admit that it's a cut and paste from an email I just sent to a friend. I'm still steeling myself for the blog about hurricane preparation that just has too much to say and will need serious editing down.

(Australian friend had just described herself as being so tired she was "flat out like a lizard drinking").

I love the slang “flat out like a lizard drinking”. I don’t entirely know what it means, having no more than the most trivial of knowledge of lizards and their habits, but I like the imagery of it. I’m in the USA at the moment, so anything figurative, metaphorical and generally not desiccated of all irony works well with me. As I’m sure I’ve banged on about a hundred times, America enthrals and appals in equal measure for me. Excuse me here while I relive a horror to help exorcise the ghost of it and deal with the stress….. I got here yesterday, having experienced the quite shocking horror of the process of arriving in Atlanta airport from an international flight. I won’t go on, but suffice to say that it was an entirely unnecessary drama and chaos that I seriously doubt even the Czech Ministry of Bullshit could have come up with. Basically, you go through immigration (drama), collect your bags (unseemly drama) then go through customs (drama). So far, so normal. However, you then re-check your bags as if embarking on a ghost flight, go through security for some ghost flight (utter drama), get a train to another part of the airport (drama as the layout of the airport makes no sense and the announcements are entirely unintelligible even to a native English speaker), get back on the train after getting off at the wrong place several times, then appear in some vast hall that merges seamlessly into a car park where there is a rabble of shouting people climbing over each other and shouting some more. This is the second baggage collection from Hell experience in an hour, but this one is so very much worse than the first. Last night, it took me nearly two hours to find the bags that I had already picked up in the same airport. As the whole thing is open to the general public, there’s always a very strong fear that it’s just been nicked by one of the many hovering n’er do wells. Just appalling: quite the worst airport experience I’ve ever had, including the Balkans, Africa and everywhere in Eastern Europe a decade ago. The whole scene was a disgrace to civilisation. The evil genius of the Bush administration is that somehow everybody blames this state of affairs on the irksomely misnamed “war on terror”. So don’t blame non-existent organisation, blame the darkies.

Get Real!

2007-08-20T14:39:00.000Z

This is an interim blog, knocked out before I settle down to the mother of all blogs, being my heroic experience of being in the course of a hurricane before I got on a plane to considerable safety and comfort. Were I a CNN reporter, I’d be looking for a medal for my bravery at leaving it to the last minute before leaving the thousands of natives behind.

I digress and I haven’t even started. Impressive, huh?

The theme of today’s lesson, ladies and gentlemen, is the important difference between what is REAL and what is NOT REAL. I feel that there is ever a growing blur and it’s not a GOOD THING. For the benefit of people who have a difficulty separating the two things, I shall use block capitals. To start the illustration, I shall recognise that saying this is a lesson is NOT REAL. Saying it’s a rant is REAL.

Mika has a song in the UK charts at the moment called “Big girls, you are beautiful”. The video, as far as I can tell, includes a large number of “curvy” ladies gettin’ on down with the super-lithe Leb and them all having a good time. As far as I can tell, for I had to avert my gaze for fear of bringing back up the pie I’d just wolfed.

For the love of God. What would Mika know? He is somewhat flamboyant, light on his feet, etc? I just cannot wait for the Pet Shop Boys to release a sarcastic cover version of the song called Big girls, you are beautiful (but if you were thin, you’d be sexy). I’m no snake hipped wonder myself, but I know that. Because I can cope with what is REAL. Pretending to be sexy whilst excessively “curvy” (ie fat) is NOT REAL. Get REAL before the cakes destroy your lives, will ya? Lay off the pies, big girls, or there is a serious risk that you will enter your forties with an inadequate ration of lifelong sex, a house full of cats and toe nails painted blue, because you think it’s wacky. Save yourselves now by engaging in what is REAL and spurning all that is NOT REAL. It may be tougher in the short-term but the longer-term benefits can be considerable.

Clothes sizes are surely part of this. I take anything between a 32 and a 36 waist, depending on where I shop. Certain shops are known to be “generous” in their sizes, which means I guess I’m really buying a 38, masquerading as a 34; especially if I’m in America. This sort of nonsense wastes time as I have to try on multiple sizes that can wildly and depressingly wrong. Why don’t they just use REAL sizes? I’m convinced that NOT REAL clothes sizes are a contributor to the very REAL obesity epidemic.

Why do lifestyle magazines always release the August edition at the end of June? The REAL story is that it’s July’s edition but that’s not exciting, so they call July’s edition August, even though it is NOT REAL. I can hypothesise no reason for this at all. Any suggestions are warmly welcomed.

Mika, according to Wikipedia, is dyslexic. Dyslexia is REAL, although I very, very strongly suspect that for a lot of claimants, it is NOT REAL. I’m a bit of a rubbish reader myself, but being that I was brought up neither in the 21^st century nor amid the middle class, I was never labelled as such. I was just a bit crap at reading, in much the same way that I am crap at catching a ball or running. I learned to cope perfectly well with both impediments. Despite my possible dyslexia, I was never bullied at school; which I attribute to not claiming to be dyslexic. I believe the same is true of food allergies, with 90% of claimed food allergies being imagined but 90% of genuine sufferers being undiagnosed.

Next in the list is science fiction. Sorry folks, but jedis, the Force, the Lord of the Rings, second lifers and the whole plethora of related things are NOT REAL. Speaking to other weirdos in Klingon is not clever, it just makes you a knobhead. You could have spent that time learning Spanish, for Christ’s sake. Spanish is useful, because it is a REAL language used for conversation and commercial discourse by lots of REAL people to buy and sell REAL things in REAL places.

And to finish for today, let me, predictably, get onto A level grades. Fully more than a quarter of people who enter for exams get a grade A now. This has been achieved despite far more people staying on to do A levels than in the past, presumably meaning the population taking the exams are on average less academically inclined than a couple of decades ago. The only purpose of A levels is surely to filter out those who have a natural aptitude for the subject they’ve taken, heavily laced with a measure of who did their homework. In fact, I firmly believe that all exams are 80% the latter and 20% the former; in years of teaching I’ve known many dumb but studious people do well. They are thus intended to be a relative measure, which is useful in deciding who gets a place at Cambridge (I didn’t but fair enough as I was both insufficiently bright and insufficiently studious) and who gets to do media studies at a former polytechnic.

Every single year for 20 years or so, the number of people getting the higher grades has increased. Not one year has shown a backwards step. This purported improvement in standards is self-evidently NOT REAL because it’s simply not logical. Neither human evolution nor teaching can advance to the stage where an absolute increase in intelligence is possible in one generation. Neither can everybody be above average. “Average” has become a euphemism for below average in all sorts of things (gentlemen, a different issue I know but you know what I mean….) Claiming that this is an advance is NOT REAL. Recognising it to be what it is, inflation, is REAL. A grade A in history simply doesn’t have the same buying power in 2007 as it did in 1987. At GCSE, they’ve introduced A* above grade A, which is both illogical and similar to when the Bank of England at some point decided it was now necessary to drop 1/2p coins and print £50 notes. That’s inflation. No number of smug articles by “educationalists” in the Guardian can alter this self-evident fact. Each year, we observe people who can neither spell nor name the capital of Germany receive top grades. The rest of us, including some A level markers I happen to know, observe with disbelief at how this situation which is clearly NOT REAL can be seen as REAL by anybody with any REAL intelligence. This happens amid a festival of back slapping and self-congratulations from teachers, whose pay and budgets are often linked to grade performance. You might as well pay Robert Mugabe based on how many new bank notes he's ordered printed this month.

Let me say warm congratulations to people who recently got A level results they were happy with. Some of you have worked really hard and are very deserving. Unfortunately, I've no means of knowing who you are.

So all in all, I’d like to start a campaign to GET REAL. It may not always be the easiest or most comfortable route, but it’s better for us all in the end.

Anybody wishing to leave a comment that I'm a miserable, mean spirited bastard; may I please ask you to stand on some bathroom scales, check for blue toe nail paint and for the presence of more than one cat first?

British airports: 4 years before London 2012 to make them less dreadful

2007-08-16T02:31:00.001Z

I am writing this from the British Airways business class lounge at London Gatwick airport. If you can somehow filter out the screaming children who are running around, it’s OK. Unfortunately, my head did not come equipped with Dolby brat noise reduction. I think there’s something quite healthy in recognising the difference between being at home and being in a public space. In the latter, one has to share with others and hence consequential need to temper one’s behaviour and the behaviour of one’s children. This is an increasingly unfashionable thought.

Gatwick used to be a rather good airport, but now that security is so much slower, it’s not. BAA and its owner Ferrovial get a rough time for the unpleasantness of London’s airports, some of which I find a bit harsh. It’s not BAA’s fault that the government has introduced a number of purported security measures that slow everything up, I suspect for very little actual benefit. It’s not their fault that the trade union won’t allow them to bring in temporary labour at peak times to help ease congestion at security. Apparently, the union said they’d strike if they did this, as their members were doing rather well from the overtime that comes from snaking queues of frustrated, harried passengers. There were some very pleasant people at security today, but many enjoy their petty authority too much, if you get what I mean.

The client I’m working for has kindly bought me a business class ticket, as it’s a ten hour flight and it’s the third time I’ve been there in three months. £2,000 for the ticket means that I get a “fast track” sticker on my boarding pass, which ought to allow me to get through security quickly with a dedicated queue that I have indirectly paid a big premium to use. I am therefore subsidising everybody else, which is fair enough. I’ve spent so much time at airports in the last ten years I now see them dreary necessities to be got through as quickly as possible. I’d be willing to pay an extra £10 to knock 20 minutes off a security queue even if I were flying with Easyjet for a personal holiday. This simple solution isn’t offered for people who aren’t flying business class flights but don’t want to queue forever. The result is that families on charter flights all flood the Fast Track queue, rendering it absolutely meaningless. There’s a slight air that this queue jumping is a pleasing bit of toff bashing, which must make me the first toff ever from a mining town outside Wigan. It’s the sort of misguided nonsense that caused the eventual, inevitable, collapse of communism. I don’t think I’m better because my seat is at the front of the plane, but I paid vastly more so I have a right to the service I’ve paid for. Why am I expected to “muck in” at an airport as if it were still the Blitz?

Tony Wilson

2007-08-11T09:05:00.001Z

Tony Wilson died yesterday. I guess many people won't know who he was. Essentially, he was Manchester royalty. I first remember him as a presenter on Granada TV in the 1970s, when his role was to play the fool. His credibility was only slightly above that of Keith Chegwin. He somehow managed to mix this with presenting a cool, late night music show. As a fairly young child at the time, I always thought he was rather puffed up and took himself far too seriously. I suspect I was right.

Like every single person, he clearly had faults but he was extraordinarily driven. His vision was absolutely critical to getting a vibrant music scene going in a town whose decay was very comparable to that of Liverpool. That was no small achievement. The rest is, of course, history. I believe that the amazing rebirth of Manchester from unlovely mediocrity and decay to vibrancy owes much to Tony Wilson. He may have taken himself too seriously at times but Manchester needed him. I live almost next door to the Boardwalk club and the Hacienda. I've seen him in my local coffee shop a few times. I won't miss his occasional self-importance, but I will miss his vision, his drive and his preternatural level of pride in this city.

Tony, for all your weaknesses, I salute you.

Lamenting the demise of real journalism

2007-08-11T00:00:00.001Z

I just joined a group on Facebook, which is called “Enough with the Madeleine McCann Groups!” I feel I need to justify having joined this group, so here goes. Forgive the length!

The McCann parents may have been negligent leaving their three kids unattended but their subsequent suffering is out of proportion to their bad judgement, so let’s leave them alone. It’s right that they should be investigated as suspects though; simply being articulate and apparently nice people doesn’t mean the normal rules of police investigations should be suspended. Some of the more stupid media in the UK seem to be morally outraged that these “lovely people” are themselves being investigated. Bullshit, the facts are that children who are murdered are normally murdered by their closest relatives.

It seems to me that the McCanns are about the most level headed people in this whole affair and they deserve great credit for that. They’ve spoken against the press hounding of Robert Murat. The way the media (Sky in particular) subjected him to slur and trial by media is a pure disgrace. He’s probably a weirdo, but he’s entitled to be presumed innocent like the rest of us. Reporters who fill endless air time with irresponsible guff like “the police don’t yet have enough evidence to arrest Mr Murat” need to reflect on the fact that having no evidence tends to suggest innocence. His life is ruined.

My beef is how the media have turned one family’s suffering into a sick soap opera. For sure, this is a parent’s nightmare but how many other parents have experienced similar nightmares in the last 100 days? (Clue: a lot). They’ve had no publicity. The hysteria we’re seeing is probably worse than when Princess Diana died. It’s as if you don’t have a poster saying “Find Maddy” in your window, you’re almost presumed to be a latent a child killer. It’s the rule of the mob over reason and it’s just wrong.

This is a huge tragedy for the family, but reality is that it doesn’t affect the rest of us. News media ought to be more responsible and not air stories that sell disproportionate, exaggerated fear. Fear gets viewers and sells newspapers but all stories aren’t news. Even the BBC gave into this sort of pressure, which shows how much the BBC’s standards have been dumbed down.

I understand there’s zero forensic evidence of any forced entry to the flat. Isn’t it just more likely that she woke up (perhaps from a nightmare, as kids do) and let herself out onto the street? Sure, she was then abducted from the road, but it’s a “better” story to sell the fear that somebody’s going to break into your home and take your kids. After sufficient repetition, this has become a virtual truth, even in the absence of any evidence to support that theory. Folks, it’s a theory, not the truth.

This is the sort of pitifully poor “news” coverage that pollutes the airwaves of the USA. We in Britain used to have higher standards. I joined the Facebook group solely because I want those standards back. If you think that makes me a sicko, I’m afraid you need to grow up. I would be truly delighted if she is found unharmed, but I resolutely will not be putting a poster up in my window. It’s time that the McCanns tried to move on, no matter how hard it might be for them. The rest of us should have done that 99 days ago.

Weird comparisons

2007-08-07T16:43:00.001Z

Has anybody else noticed how there is a tendency for writers to express the size of things relative to other, incongruous, things? Fair enough you might say but increasingly I’m finding myself nonplussed. I just read of a planet from another solar system that is apparently several thousand times further away than Mars. As I’ve never made the journey to Mars, I have little idea of what distance said planet may be, except that it is a long way away; as planets are apt to be. I imagine that travelling to Mars would take about the same time as our annual drive to Cornwall took in the 1970s, but I’m guessing.

I have also similarly informed that the average car these days is built so well that it could drive to the moon before the engine gives up. When I look at the moon, I have no means of judging whether it’s very, very big and a very, very long way away; or whether it’s just fairly big and a fairly long way away. Never having attempted to drive to the moon (not least due to the problem of reaching escape velocity in a Skoda), it doesn’t mean much to me anyway.

Frequently used comparitors are football pitches and London double decker buses, which are indeed used so frequently that I feel they ought to become a standard measure in the imperial system. The Petronas Towers in KL may be referred to as a 250 bus building and the like. Like practically every woman and gay man, I have never had a clue about football. Informing me that the Queen Mary 2 is about the length of three football pitches is considerably less helpful than just telling me how many metres long it is. In the absence of a figure in metres, I make a guess of how big a football pitch is (which is likely to be wildly wrong) and multiply my error by three. The Queen Mary 2 is 350 metres long, which I know to be exactly 7 times the length of an Olympic pool or 7.01 times the length of the pool in Wigan that was built to slightly the wrong spec because somebody bought cheap tiles.

I feel that experiences are easier to compare. If I were to describe the experience of watching a truly dull theatre production as being at least twice as long and tedious as hymn practice at school, I expect you’d know what I mean.

Very funny spoof advert

2007-08-06T23:58:00.001Z

I can't even remember what the real advert was for, Sony Bravia televisions perhaps? I just happened upon this video on youtube and I think it's worth sharing. It only makes sense if you've seen the original adverts, I guess. This is what t'Internet is for! Congratulations to whomever made this spoof advert: you're loads funnier than most comedy on television.

Drop, cough and sunshine

2007-07-31T20:56:00.000Z

Today the sun shined in Manchester. Woo hoo! Having been travelling abroad a lot for work, I’ve not really experienced the full horror of this year’s summer. It’s rained and rained and rained. When it’s not been raining, it’s looked like it was shortly about to rain. Hull and Tewkesbury were both very flooded, although Tewkesbury got vastly more coverage as it’s in the South. Hull is also rumoured to look better underwater. God, imagine discovering the lost city of Atlantis; only to find that it looked like Hull!

I had my pilot’s medical today, which means that I’m now OK to keep flying for the next four years. It’s always a bit nervy about these sorts of things, but it’s oddly pleasing to be told that there are no latent signs of anything wrong. No matter how secure one might feel in general, there's nothing to quite get around the dread that accompanies that instruction to cough as one stands there in naught but underpants. What's that for anyway? I feel a bit of "world wide interweb" research coming on. If anybody happens to know, please leave the answer as a comment below.

Facebook

2007-07-29T23:31:00.000Z

Just in case you're somebody who tunes into this site at all frequently, I apologise for the lack of posts recently. It's not that I've had nothing to talk about. Since my last post, I have (in chronological order):

Travelled again to Jamaica and had a rather nice time. That's the subject of a reasonably detailed post that I'll do soon. I'm now growing to like Jamaica as much as I've always liked the people I work with there.
Been selected for "secondary" immigration questionning at Fort Lauderdale airport (I was the only white person in a waiting room of 45 others, which I still find troubling).
Had a rather pleasant couple of days in Fort Lauderdale.
Met some lovely and interesting people in Fort Lauderdale at a very tasteful gay only hotel.
Made a recorded complaint about the sarcastic attitude of a security guy in the flight connections centre at Heathrow (sorry, but there's no excuse even though I appreciate they often deal with knobheads). I consider tackling petty officiousness to be nothing less than a citizen's duty. I shudder to think that there are tens of thousands of foreigners who change planes at Heathrow, for whom the flight connections centre is the only taste they get of this country.
Begun to panic about how a fairly small job I'm doing for BPP and how it's taking forever.
Been offered a fairly interesting sounding job outside the UK, but I can't tell you about that because I don't know who might be reading this.

but above all....

I discovered "Facebook". I hated it at first, because most of the posts you'll see (between users you don't know because they're friends of friends of friends of friends) are just teenage witter in text-talk. Ahem, "LOL". I think it can be too habit forming and I'm right on the edge. It can be interesting and useful though if used carefully. I've got back in contact with a few people who I'd lost contact with. I recommend it, but set yourself some limits such as NEVER using it during work hours and limiting how much time you spend on it each day. It's a bit like thinking you can handle crack cocaine though; be warned.

Text talk

2007-07-15T14:47:00.000Z

Oh, how much do I hope that the current affectation of using text-talk will pass? I understand how such things as “m8” for “mate” and “LOL” for either “laughing out loud” or “lots of love” developed in the days when text messages cost a lot of cash and were laborious to write. Nowadays though, all phones have predictive text messaging and texts are much cheaper to send. There is thus little need for these affectations and there’s no need or excuse whatever when using a keyboard.

Sadly, I note a tendency to use these things even when using a keyboard to send emails. There is positively no excuse whatever for “neway” in place of “anyway”. This is especially as it took me some time to realise it meant N.E.way rather than new-way. “LOL” seems to have taken the place of exclamation marks, the latter having been so acutely overused that they no longer had any meaning to less articulate teenagers (and the middle aged attempting against all the odds and the evidence to appear still young).

I really do loathe this. I know I’m a miserable bastard, but I truly loathe it.

I have also noticed that text-talker types are prone to having their phone speakers play tinny music in public places. Said people are also likely to choose the Morse sms (… -- …) as their sms alert tone. Invariably, anybody who selects that tone also selects it at maximum volume. It’s a hallmark of idiocy.

If I reply to any messages sent to me using this form of nonsense, I shall do so employing my own derivative code. I shall, for example, spell mate as m-eight. Hopefully, this will greight on the nerves of text talking types as much as their bullshit patois gr8s on mine.

Barats and Bareta

2007-07-11T15:19:00.000Z

If you haven’t yet discovered the rather wonderful college humour (well, strictly, humor) of Barats and Bareta, I suggest you have a look at their website.

In particular, “Other Son” had me laughing out loud when I first saw it. Listen out for the “My Dad!” exclamation. Watch it and it will make sense. Then look at "Cubicle Wars".

When I said laughing out loud, I meant it literally. I don’t use horrid “LOL” chatroom text-talk affectation that is so depressingly prevalent. No, I shall not say prevalent; I shall say common.

For the benefit of anybody not from working class Wigan, there is no greater insult than to be called common. It’s the old fashioned term for chav.

Creative Genuis by Skoda

2007-07-06T17:42:00.000Z

Skodas used to be jokes of cars. It’s a little known fact that in Czech (where they’re made), the word skoda means “pity” or “shame”. They don’t make a big deal about that, but I feel oddly pleased at knowing it.

They’re great cars now and I own one myself. They have a lovely advert on TV at the moment where, bizarrely, a group of cooks bake a cake the shape and size of a new Skoda Fabia. See it here if you’ve not already seen it. The slogan is “Skoda Fabia: full of lovely stuff", which I think is immensely cleverly evocative. Another slogan is “Skoda: manufacturer of happy drivers”. Brilliant, just brilliant.

It’s a fantastic advert; really creative. It also generates much conversation and some heated debate on whether it’s genuine or a fake, which further adds to its efficacy and brilliance. How many adverts really get noticed, let alone get people talking about them? A friend of mine is entirely convinced that it’s a normal Skoda Fabia, covered in a thin layer of icing. I’m considering nicknaming him “Grassy Knoll” from now on.

The soundtrack is “Favourite Things” from the Sound of Music, thus confirming that Skoda Fabias are exclusively intended to be driven carefully by women and gay men. Although I’ve heard said song lots of times (natch), I’d never before noticed how preposterous the words were. Julie Andrews chirps that, inter alia, her favourite things are “door bells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles”. Schnitzel with noodles is right up there with chicken tikka lasagne as fusion food I don’t wish to try. Said song progresses to say “When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling saaaaaad, I simply remember my favourite things and then I don’t feeeeeel…. so bad!”

Now call me excessively literal and insufficiently romantic, but if a German Shepherd had just angrily taken a lump out of my leg, I really can’t imagine that picturing a doorbell in my mind would have any palliative effect.

I apologise for having put Sound of Music songs in your head. They’ll be there all day. Blame me if you sing them out loud.

Random catch up

2007-07-04T16:59:00.000Z

New prime minister. Well yes, what is there to say that isn’t already being said? I reckon that Gordon Brown would be well advised to call an election very soon, in order to give him legitimacy. The economy could go tits up soon and if it does he has very little chance of winning the office. Somehow though, I don’t really care.

Bomb attacks. Am I the only person who isn’t horrified by the attempted bombings recently? My thoughts are more of relief. If the best that they can do is some bungled and amateur attempts like driving a car into an airport terminal, I am much reassured.

Bikes. Mundane as it may be as a topic for a blog, I have recently rediscovered my love of bikes. I had my bike serviced for the princely sum of £50, including several new parts. Bikes are great and blokes who work in bike shops are always lovely. I wish to marry one. To the right is a picture of my lovely Trek 950 bike in my hallway. This bike is a thing of real beauty to me and gives me more pleasure than I think owning a flash car would. Certainly per £ invested, it’s a mightily good return in terms of health and pleasure.

The Dutch. I took a week’s holiday to Spain last week, flying somewhat oddly with KLM. For somebody who’s travelled so much, it’s somewhat astounding that I’ve never been to the Netherlands. I really ought to as there’s something really likeable about the Dutch. They may be somewhat too fond of church and caravans for my true comfort, but they always seem so practical, businesslike and yet without any prissiness that I feel I’d love a weekend in Amsterdam. Anybody fancy going?

Spain. Yup, another year and another week in Sitges. That’s a bit of a gay cliché, but it’s such a great town. I also find holidays a great place to meet people, indeed about the only place I really meet people properly. I didn’t go there last year. I was a fool.

Running. Upon my return from Spain, where I’d drunk rather a lot and got into the habit where bed at 4am was an early night, I ran the London 10k run with a very good friend of mine. We did the 10k in Manchester a couple of months ago. Manchester was a lot of fun, but every step of the London one was painful. I’m still somewhat surprised that I finished it, let alone finished it with a reduced time from last time. It was grim though. Perhaps getting 4 hours’ sleep after a week of alcoholic toxic shock and no exercise beyond getting “jacked up on some cheap champagne” isn’t the best means of preparation for endurance events?

London 2012 again

2007-06-22T13:37:00.001Z

I know I've already talked about this, but I had to come back to it.
Somebody pointed out to me the other day that the London 2012 logo looks rather like Lisa Simpson giving a blow job to a person unknown.
This seems like one of those ink blot tests that are designed to see if you're likely to become a serial killer sometime soon but I can see what they mean. I wouldn't have seen it myself, but now it's been pointed out to me, I can't see it as anything else.
I also hadn't noticed how "London" had been printed with the irksome but trendy affectation of favouring a lower case initial letter. How very annoying that is. Capital letters seem to be used somewhat randomly more and more. I don't approve!

Arise, Sir Salman

2007-06-19T12:43:00.000Z

So, the furore this week surrounding Britain’s allegedly troubled relationship with Islam is that Salman Rushdie appeared in the Queen’s birthday honours list and is to become Sir Salman Rushdie. The nonsense starts with the fact that those named on which are not chosen by the Queen nor is it issued on her real birthday, so it is neither her honour nor her birthday, but I digress.

Salman Rusdie achieved great fame by being sentenced to death (in absentia) by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, whom I imagine was nicknamed “Laughaminute” by his friends. This “fatwa” is now not officially sponsored by Iran but a good proportion of the allegedly devout (for which read violent nutters) support it. Put it this way, I’d not want to live next door to the Rushdies nor be on the same flight as him.

He won the major UK prize for literature before he wrote the Satanic Verses, a book that I am reliably informed is not very good. It’s hardly unusual for an author of his fame to be given an honour of this sort. The government of Pakistan has angrily demanded that the Queen retracts the honour because “The move is part of a campaign being waged in Europe and the West to hurt the feelings of Muslims”. No, boys and girls, it’s called free speech. Pakistan should feel entirely welcome to give whatever honour it bestows on any author who writes a dull book that allegedly defames Christianity, the Queen, homosexuality and anything else that I consider to be part of my culture and personal make-up. That’s why England and Pakistan are separate nation states. We pander far too much to the affected brittleness of others, be they Pakistani or Welsh speakers.

Once more I feel principally concerned that the sort of tiresome, deeply predictable flag burning and affected hysteria reflects very badly on the vast majority of calm, sensible Muslims. I imagine a great many of them today are thinking “not in my name”. At least, I hope so. I am actually quite pleased that whoever decided to give this UK honour to a UK citizen rightly disregarded as irrelevant the opinions of an hysterical, posturing, ill-informed group of head cases. We should not refrain from giving an honour in these circumstances any more than we should choose to bestow an honour on Martha Stewart because a lot of Americans believe she’s a great person.

Islam appears to me to attract far too much attention from a crazy minority whom we all need to stand up to. This is straightforward bullying, dressed up as a more reasonable request for respect for the religion of another. The British high commissioner had been summoned to the Pakistan government’s offices for a good dressing down. That is their right. I really believe that Pakistan’s high commissioner to the UK should be summoned to Buckingham Palace, where I heartily encourage the Queen to exercise her right (being head of state and thus above the laws of the land) to bend over and show him her arse. Go on Liz, I dare you.

Perils of not knowing your brands

2007-06-18T23:05:00.000Z

I don’t like clothes shopping. On my most recent trip to Australia I found a brand of T-shirts that I really like so I did my usual thing in these situations. I bought two t-shirts and immediately wished I’d bought more. For some reason, Australian clothes appeal to me. In an attempt to procure more similar kit with the same logo, I went online to see if I could buy any direct from the manufacturer or some

distributor. Imagine my considerable surprise when I discovered that “element” is a brand pretty much exclusively worn by skateboarders. I’d sort of come to accept that O’Neill, Billabong and Rip Curl are very Australian and somewhat associated with surfers but this doesn’t really bother me. Australians of many ages continue to surf and it’s normal to wear that stuff without actually being a surfer. But skateboarding? As if.

Even when I was 20 years younger and 20 pounds lighter, in the absolute best case I would have looked ungainly on a skateboard. Well, ungainly and fearful. Ungainly, fearful and oddly improbable. Sort of like David Cameron when he’s trying to look down with the kids. Right now, I’d look like a bad comedy sketch. So I now realise that my favourite t-shirts are an unwitting attempt to tell the world “I really like skateboarding, me.” Hopefully there won’t be any other skateboarders in the streets of Manchester to notice. Don’t tell, ok?

Jamaica deserves better

2007-06-12T17:41:00.001Z

I've now got home from Jamaica. Fundamentally, Jamaica sucks for the reasons in one of the blogs below. I feel sad for the overwhelming majority of Jamaicans, who I found to be lovely people. Sure, customer service can be surly and the place needs some serious work to be a viable tourist destination, but this is small scale stuff. Most Jamaicans are very decent, passionate people who really deserve to live in a safer, less corrupt, place than they do. This is a subject much discussed by the Jamaicans I met.
I've no idea what to do to deal with the corrpution and crime that's slowly destroying their society. I hope that somebody works it out.

What's Welsh for "bullshit"?

2007-06-11T11:53:00.000Z

I read on the BBC news website this morning (here) that Thomas Cook travel agents are in trouble for alleged racism. The reason? They requested that Welsh speaking staff in their Bangor office hold work-related conversations in English rather than Welsh. There is uproar. These are my initial thoughts:

Good luck to anybody who speaks Welsh. It’s a lovely language and it’s an important part of the Welsh heritage (but nothing to do with my English heritage so I don’t feel any personal connection with it).
In a work environment, it’s practical to require that the dominant language is spoken by everybody. If not, things go wrong. It’s completely practical.
When in Wales, English people are generally paranoid that Welsh speakers drop into Welsh only when bitching about the English people. Given how few people speak Welsh as their first language, code switching into Welsh (as a second language) is mostly an active choice in the way that a friend of mine and I sometimes switch to Czech when we don’t want to be understood. This therefore uses a language as a deliberate barrier, which isn’t good publicity for the language and culture.
I can’t find any solid statistics for what proportion of Welsh people speak Welsh as their first language, but it seems to be about 10% from a quick look at various surveys online. I also suspect that a lot of people would claim is to be their first language for patriotic reasons but truly it isn’t. In the United Kingdom, the de facto national language is English. Welsh and Gaelic should be kept alive, but not to the exclusion of commonsense.

If the office in question is made up of Welsh speakers, then requiring them to speak English as the official office language would be an outrage. But somebody must have complained to Thomas Cook’s HR department here. That suggests that there’s a certain amount of nastiness behind the use of a language that others don’t speak. Welsh deserves more than to be used as a code language for work place bitching.

Three cheers for amateurs!

2007-06-07T16:35:00.001Z

Today’s my 38^th birthday. I am in a hotel that resembles a prison in a place I’m not fond of. Rather than being downhearted, I am using the time to do some serious catching up on rubbish on the Internet for the morning. Then I shall spend this afternoon doing some work that is now very overdue. It’s my birthday though, so sod it: I am going to take the morning off.

The picture to the above right is the official logo of the 2012 Olympic games in London. I, for one, think that it’s shite. I also expect that it took a lot of cash to produce it.

The BBC online invited people to send their own contributions in and I personally thought the one below was great. It’s altogether better than the rubbish they actually chose, although I suspect it came from some small time guy who isn’t an amateur, but who doesn’t work for some big agency.

So very often, the amateurs or the small guys are so very much better, yet are pretty much always overlooked. It’s a shame.

Jamaica: Lovely people, yet hard to love

2007-06-07T01:42:00.000Z

I’ve not been blogging much recently. I feel fairly sure that my blogees continue to have fulfilling and happy lives without my ramblings, but they do then stop tuning in.

The reason is that I’ve been dealing with a seasonal spike of work and travelling a lot. Sadly, I mostly travel to places I don’t altogether love, such as the Czech Republic and Jamaica, where I am right now.

I pity poor people who come to Jamaica for holidays because I think it’s a dangerous shithole. Many of the people you meet are lovely, but many clearly just hate your guts because you’re white. Oh yes, racism is a two way street. As the experience of being in a white minority goes, it’s a world away from Ghana and Zambia. Also, things work in Zambia and it doesn’t come with the impression that everybody’s trying to rip you off or trick you somehow.

After a long flight, my pre-booked pickup at the airport wasn’t there. After about 20 minutes of loitering, along with a number of other lily white assed people, I began to feel that I was starting to look like the wildebeest that was tiring first. I thus expected to become prey to some scandal. Then I eventually noticed somebody holding an A4 piece of paper, rolled up and yet through which I could see my name. There was my pick up, found by accident. Things just don’t work here. He was a nice enough guy, but he’d just arrived and thought nothing of being late. Trust me, after a flight of nearly 10 hours, in 32 Centigrade heat but wearing clothes for an English early morning, you don’t want delays.

At the hotel, I was checked into a room which I strode into, sighed heavily and noticed that the room was already amply filled by a big angry bloke. It had taken me ten minutes of humping luggage about (no lift, no offer of help) before I’d found it, as the room numbering system is truly random. No apologies followed for the error but I now have a room with aircon. I’m making the most of it, as apparently it stopped working for a day yesterday.

I just want to be at home. The Caribbean generally is very over-rated (give me Greece or Spain any day).

The picture is a snap of the pretty view from my bedroom window. It aint pretty, but I’m glad the barbed wire is there.

Now don't let me encourage any racism here. One of the reasons I dislike it as I do is because I honestly am entirely indifferent to the colour of a person's skin myself, yet I feel a lot of Jamaicans make assumptions about me because I happen to be white. I've no respect for racists, but ignoring nastiness becasue the people invovled happen to be black is itself racist. Colour doesn't matter: if somebody's an arse who happens to be black, they're still an arse. Period.

Hen night free zone: show me the way!

2007-05-28T14:38:00.003Z

I read on the BBC website today that a bar in Melbourne (one of my favourite cities in the world) has banned heterosexuals. I can just imagine the Daily Mail’s reaction now.

This may sound bizarre, but I think that it’s a terribly understandable thing to do. It’s not that we gaylords are heterophobic as such, but I’m afraid that straight readers have to accept that we often encounter the least acceptable face of straight-dom. Our social encounters with straight people are often in the format of hen nights, who unaccountably believe their impending heterosexual marriage is best celebrated by monopolising any gay bar they can find. Now that it’s no longer acceptable to go and laugh at lunatics in asylums, we queers will have to do. It’s a well observed fact that the atmosphere of Canal Street in Manchester is now considerably less pleasant than it used to be. This is almost entirely due to the prodigious presence of vulgar, loud and drunken hen nights. I take particular objection to having to wait to get into a bar because it’s full when it’s full with people who have no shortage of other places that they could go to laugh raucously at 3 foot inflatable phalluses and wear L plates. For the benefit of any non-English readers means “learner”; a spurious allusion to sexual naivety prior to a wedding night, although I suggest that it ought to be taken to mean “leper”.

It surprises me not one bit that Australia, country of all things good and much commonsense, has supported this bar’s decision. I fear that in the UK few bars would have the nerve to do so.

Brokeback Mountain

2007-05-23T18:03:00.001Z

After work today, I luxuriated for a few hours with the DVD of “Brokeback Mountain”. I seem to never get time to do stuff like that at the moment and it was an absolute joy. What a great, great film it is. I know that’s really uber-gay of me and I have to admit that my three all time favourite films (Talented Mr Ripley, Beautiful Thing and Brokeback Mountain) all have gay stuff at the centre or near the centre of the plot.

I was sent an email joke at the time of the film coming out that I dug out of my Outlook and thought I’d share with you. I know the people who invented this email and I feel it deserves wider dissemination as I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. If you don’t get it, you’re either not gay, not a fag hag or you don’t know enough poofs so you should go out more.

Brokeback Mountain Weekly Grocery Lists
for Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, Summer, 1963

WEEK ONE
Beans
Bacon
Coffee
Whiskey

WEEK TWO
Beans
Ham
Coffee
Whiskey

WEEK THREE
Beans al fresca
Thin-sliced Bacon
Hazelnut Coffee
Sky vodka & Tanqueray gin
K-Y gel

WEEK FOUR
Beans en salade
Pancetta
Coffee (espresso grind)
5-6 bottles best Chardonnay
2 tubes K-Y gel

WEEK FIVE
Fresh Fava beans
Jasmine rice
Prosciutto, approx. 8 ounces, thinly sliced
Medallions of veal
Porcini mushrooms
1/2 pint of heavy whipping cream
1 Cub Scout uniform, size 42 long
5-6 bottles French Bordeaux (Estate Reserve)
1 extra large! bottle Astro-glide

WEEK SIX
Yukon Gold potatoes
Heavy whipping cream
Asparagus (very thin)
Organic Eggs
Spanish Lemons
Gruyere cheese (well aged)
Crushed Walnuts
Arugula
Clarified Butter
Extra Virgin Olive oil
Pure Balsamic vinegar
6 yards white silk organdy
6 yards pale ivory taffeta
3 Cases of Dom Perignon Masters Reserve
Large tin Crisco

Cool Running

2007-05-22T11:17:00.000Z

Two days ago, my very wonderful friend Rose and I ran the Great Manchester Run. That’s 10 kilometres around Manchester City Centre, down to Old Trafford and around Salford Keys. I did this with no training and it was actually rather wonderful. It was a really rather wonderful event, with 28,000 people taking part.

We took it very easy and stopped for a toilet break, which involved probably about five minutes’ queuing. Even with stoppage time, we finished in one hour 16 minutes dead on, which I think is pretty good considering the lack of preparation. I am thus now convinced that athleticism is the way forward.

The only thing that slightly troubles me about this is that it seems to me that men tend to discover running as they approach middle age. Often, they discover it about the time that they buy their first sports car. I guess this means that I’m properly middle aged. Crap. Maybe I’ll stick to television and chocolate.

Paris, Paris, Prince and Prejudice

2007-05-18T19:00:00.001Z

These seem to be the main topics of the news recently.

Paris

Either Paris Hilton (official dumb bitch) has had her jail sentence cut in half for good behaviour. Not sure how, as I don’t think she’s even started her sentence yet. This all seems very strange indeed to me.

Also, Paris yesterday saw the inauguration of a new president of France. Hooray for Sarkozy. I have always utterly despised Chirac and it’s nice to hear the new president condemn the posturing of his predecessor to veto any UN action in Iraq as arrogant. Too right it was: disarming the UN made a US invasion a certainty rather than a great probability. It will be nice to not totally despise our nearest neighbour’s head of state.

Prince

So Prince Harry will not be sent to Iraq. There is much hoo-ha about this, with various rubbish media rather predictably running the populist line of “if Iraq’s too dangerous for a prince, why are our boys there”? Ahem, not the point. I am sure that Harry would go to Iraq and serve with distinction. He seems like a good bloke to me and he’s certainly grown up to be cute, which I think came as a surprise to the whole nation. But I digress. In days of yore, royals would lead from the front (ish). This was all well and good when fighting the Frogs or the Hun, but said Frogs and Hun could be relied upon to act passably like gentlemen in the event of catching a prisoner. In Iraq, any area with Harry in it would be a magnet for attack. In the best case, this would be a huge diversion of resources. In the worst case, he would be captured and could fairly surely not rely on the Geneva Protocol. Guerrilla war is now all about beheadings being shown on YouTube and less about civilised PoW camps. That would be some prize for Harry’s potential captors and would have to be avoided.

It was obvious that Harry was never going to be sent to anywhere in real danger, simply because of the danger this would present to others. How grim his life must be. He’s not academically bright, he has no privacy, he can’t do the job he wants to and both his closest relatives will one day be king of England. Meanwhile, he’ll get to be, well, constitutionally pointless. I feel sorry for him. Should he feel the need for a bit of intimate comfort, he should feel free to Skype me. I’m all heart, me.

Prejudice

The “story” of the missing kid in Portugal continues to be covered in a truly disgraceful way on Sky TV. The police have one principal suspect, who seems to me to be little more than a local busybody. Endless coverage continues to say that the police don’t have enough evidence to charge him (in truth, they’ve never had enough evidence to arrest him, which is most probably because he’s totally innocent). Yet this man’s life is now ruined because he will be recognised forever as the man who killed a young kid. Why? Because Sky said so.

Firestorm of fretfulness

2007-05-14T13:14:00.000Z

About two weeks ago, two parents on holiday in

Portugal

put their young children to bed and then left them as they went for dinner and a few drinks at the bar in their complex. Now one might say that it’s not particularly wise to leave kids unattended, as a lone three year old is apt to discover the kitchen knives and how to plug the iron in. Personally, I think it’s a reasonable thing to do if they’re in range of a baby monitor but not otherwise. I see their behaviour as negligent. Planning to go and check on the kids every 15 minutes or so (which would surely be every 45 minutes or so after drinking) isn’t the action of a good parent. The greatest danger to an unattended child is surely the child itself but in this case, with immense improbability, somebody entered the property and took three year old Madeleine.

This is a great tragedy for the child and the parents but it absolutely resolutely is not a world event. In the last two weeks, there has been a frenzy in the UK that I last saw when Princess Diana died. Football clubs replaced their normal kits with T-shirts with the kid’s photo; posters appear everywhere with the kid’s photo and an entreaty to help look for her. Now, I had a good look in my airing cupboard but I found nothing. For the love of God, what can I possibly do? Given that the helpfulness of my contribution will inevitably be the square root of bugger all, why should I trouble myself worrying about it?

It seems to me that the British have become grief junkies. It started with Diana and it’s got worse since. It’s not helped by the rolling news cycle, with 24 hour news stations being desperate to fill time. Eventually, the coverage of a human interest story itself becomes the news and a firestorm starts.

I sincerely hope that the kid is found unharmed, although that’s surely an ever more remote possibility. The top story on the BBC news today is that her father believes she’s fine. Once more, I hope that this brings him some comfort, but how does he know? And since when has the hunch of an anxious, arguably negligent, father been a big enough story to top every other event happening in the world today?

Now I know that in the period that saw Tony Blair finally step down, my own headline was a whinge about Eurovision and that’s pretty trivial. But I’m just a middle aged poof who keeps a blog. I am entitled to my random, deeply disproportionate rantings because I’m not the BBC.

I find this sort of thing deeply distasteful. If there’s one thing that “sells” better than fear, it’s fear for the safety of children. The sort of frenzied coverage of this event further convinces people that the world’s more dangerous than ever (the bald facts are that it’s not). So fewer children get to walk to school and society trembles itself to pieces even more. This sort of grief journalism is plain irresponsible. I also wonder how many parents in Iraq tucked their kids in bed shortly before a “smart” bomb blew them all to pieces or how many kids have become orphans as a consequence of our dumb decision to turn their country into one huge hornets’ nest. Giving this sort of attention to the suffering of one family that were causally responsible for the event itself is plain disrespectful to the thousands of people who suffer greater tragedy every day through no fault of their own.

I predict that in a week or so, there will become considerable pressure to buy a yellow ribbon to wear to “show support” and pay money into the fund that has apparently been set up for…. Well, it’s hard to be sure what for. I strongly urge you to not contribute. Write a letter of support to the parents if you feel sufficiently moved to do so, but don’t encourage this sort of lachrymose frenzy that has become all too common.

Mourning the loss of Eurovision

2007-05-13T10:33:00.000Z

Last night was Eurovision, an event that I somewhat predictably love. Well, I used to love it but now it’s become a farce. The UK’s entry was a cheesy novelty thing that really didn’t deserve to win. When will the UK realise that uber-camp novelty acts don’t actually win very often? Or if they do, it’s because the camp stuff is a veneer on top of a decent song?

Bad song or great song though, the UK had no chance whatever of winning because:

Most European countries think we’re the USA’s lackey, so they don’t vote for us because they hate us.
The contest is now dominated so much by Eastern European countries that en bloc don’t like the West. So although we invented it and pay for the bloody thing, they screw us over every year. Watching it last night, I was able to predict the scores from every country with almost total accuracy. This skill rather spooked the other people at the Eurovision party I was at, but it is entirely explained by the fact that years of working in Eastern Europe means I know which countries border which. FYR Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (whose name I sneer and laugh at, incidentally) were always going to give marks to Serbia, etc, etc. These countries are a joke: if they’re not shooting each other’s sister, they’re making a big show of supposed Slavic unity.

Almost straight after, I noticed this viewer feedback on the BBC website:

None of the Big Four [the four permanently-placed members of the EBU - France, Germany, the UK and Spain due to their immense financial contribution] have won since we did in 1997. If these four nations boycott Eurovision, it couldn't happen happen (sic), and we could laugh at the Balkan Bloc, the Russian Bloc, the Nordic Bloc and the Greek/Turkish Bloc not being able to exercise (sic) their ridiculous voting power.

Ban the Yugoslavian Bloc until they grow up, or just leave the EBU.

Hahaha.

Hugh Morley, Ashford, United Kingdom

Well said, Hugh.

Apparently, some academic insists that politics aren’t a factor in Eurovision voting. This also reminds me how full of crap and disconnected from self-evident truth academics are wont to be. See the story here.

I think we should stop paying for Eurovision in its current ludicrous form and launch “Eurovision classic”, with the states with a clear record of voting for each other excluded. If France, the UK, Germany and Spain actually have some chance of winning, they might even enter decent songs. Until then, I think I’ll stop watching it.

2007-05-06T12:33:00.000Z

Prompted by one of my blogees’ comments below, I feel prompted to say something about the Daily Mail and its expose of Lord Browne, the CEO of BP. Said scandal is that this confirmed bachelor it seems has been having a romantic relationship with a younger MAN (yes man!) who not only is a homo but who used to be a male prostitute!

I found out about this as Malaysia Airlines only had copies of the Daily Mail as I left KL the other day. Why do airlines always give out the Daily Fucking Mail? I loathe the Daily Mail with a passion that cannot be expressed in polite fucking words. If you read the Daily Mail, stop reading this right now; you’re not welcome in here. What I loathe so much about it is the way that it pretends to be the voice of reason, whilst actually presenting the world with hatred and peevishness to an Olympic standard. Having ruined at talented and decent man’s career, they are keen to point out that they did this to expose his poor judgement in remaining silent (lest he become the victim of blackmail). It’s nothing to do with homophobia really. Or so they, most unconvincingly, say.

Now if I were a shareholder in BP, I would be most keen that my Gaylord chief executive should keep his private life private. Being an oil company necessarily involves dealing with some pretty unpleasant people: the tyrants that run Saudi Arabia; the Iranians, Hugo Chavez; George W Bush. None of these symbols of backwardness and intolerance are likely to react well to not being able to choose to avoid the fact that they know their joint venture partner to be an uphill gardener. If I were a shareholder in BP, I’d like to keep my CEO and I’d recognise the need for him to keep quiet. Whether he keeps silent by keeping his mouth actually shut or just unable to speak because it’s full of rent boy cock, I couldn’t care less as long as he keeps schtum.

By exposing this hypocrisy, the Daily Mail has done immense damage to a man and the sheer duplicity in peddling this kind of self-righteous peevish, small minded homophobia as something honourable makes me hate them all the more. I’d rather have Ahmadinejad, the Pope or the House of Saud. They may be hateful bigots, but at least they have the courage to express their true opinions.

Hotel toasters

2007-05-04T21:25:00.000Z

At 8am this morning (

Malaysia

time, which is 1am

time), I bolted back a quick breakfast at the competent but soulless hotel I’d been staying in.

Who makes the toasters that one finds as a universal presence in hotels the world over? You know the type… they about the size of a colour laser printer but with lots more noise and steel lattice work. You find a slice of bread, which you place on the bit that’s sliding into the thing and then you stand around for an indeterminate time trying not to look self-conscious. Now a variation comes in; some of the machines just gently ease your slice of bread out of the bottom but many shoot it out without warning and with considerable power. You have to try to catch the thing before it shoots on the floor in the manner of somebody practising tennis with one of those machines. In both cases though, your bread will emerge hot but curiously not actually toasted. You probably try the obvious tactic of repeating the whole cycle again but some very minor anxiety tells you that it will spit out cinders next time. Your fear is always well founded as the machine emanates smoke dramatically.

In a globalised world filled with countless mediocre hotels, why has nobody yet managed to market a toaster that actually works?

Why I hate shopping

2007-05-01T09:15:00.000Z

Malaysia Airlines sadly did not manage to deliver both my bags to KL when they delivered me here. Any baggage delay for more than four hours gives me £300 to spend on clothes, etc as long as I use my Amex card to pay for them. If the bag’s delayed by more than 48 hours, I get another £300. Truthfully, I’d prefer just to have my bag and sod the free money.

To most people, this sudden budget would be a source of considerable joy. Not to me though; I dislike shopping in general and clothes shopping is something that I hate with a passion. I’m aware that many people just love shopping for the sake of it and indeed there is even such a thing as “window shopping”. To me, recreational shopping makes as much sense as recreational ironing. Recreational window shopping makes as much sense as looking at a pile of clothes awaiting ironing. I routinely split my luggage between two small suitcases, so the non-arrival of case 2 isn’t so much of a disaster, but it did leave me without a pair of jeans and no T-shirts. So out shopping I was forced to go. (Why does that sound like Yoda?)

I am faintly fearful of crowds and especially milling crowds where people keep bumping into me. It’s a public holiday in KL and so all of Malaysia was out shopping, as I don’t think that there’s anything else to do here. KL’s like one of those American or Arabian Gulf cities that’s grown so fast that it’s little more than a collection of tall buildings with no identifiable city centre or obvious purpose for existing at all. Its entire purpose appears to be retail, which makes it heaven for many people; but which makes it a vacuous nowhere in my mind. Here are some other reasons why shopping is a fun-free zone:

I can’t bear how parents don’t seem to realise that their kids are not as cute as they think. In one shop, a young girl had locked herself into the only changing cubicle and was screaming and refusing to come out. Her Irish mother seemed to think this hilarious. I am unable to see anything cute or even mildly funny in this brattishness whatever.

It forces me to look my own body image and self-esteem issues in the face (or more precisely the waist). I can live without that, thanks; especially after a week in Africa where the only food that was reasonably certain not to give you food poisoning was chips.

I utterly hate being pestered (or mithered as we’d say in Manchester). If a shop assistant approaches me with unsolicited wittering more than twice, I walk out of the shop. There are no exceptions to this. They could be giving stuff away free but I wouldn’t care; just get out of my face.

To avoid the above, I have developed a routine where I walk so quickly round each shop that they don’t get the chance to follow me. I then work out which shops appear to be worth enduring the endless wittering from staff, although I make it politely but perfectly clear that I don’t “need help”. Looking at clothes is, after all, a perfectly straightforward exercise. I imagine I’d need help with calculus but I don’t need help to flick through a rack of T-shirts, thanks. I suppose what they expect is some pointless chat about what’s “nice”, but life’s too short to fill it with that sort of crap.

Department stores offer less respite from all this than one might expect, as more and more seem to be reconfigured into the American style of department store, which seem to be organised by designer. I truly couldn’t care if clothes are made my Gucci, Guess or George at ASDA as long as they look OK. They’re all made using child peasant labour in Indonesia anyway. It just drags the process out to have to look at each designer’s shirts (along with the other 95% of their stuff that I haven’t the slightest passing interest in). What a waste of time.

I find it irritating that shopping malls often stagger the escalators in random places to force you to walk around and see other shops that you had no desire to walk past. I can see the logic in this but if I’ve gone out for a couple of T-shirts, I’m deeply unlikely to buy anything else; especially if my egress has been blocked by a milling crowd moving at about 0.1 mph.

Eventually, after coming to hate the entire experience (humidity and jet lag did not help either), I saw a branch of Quicksilver. To my considerable joy, the staff said hi and invited me to shout them if I wanted anything but then just left me alone. What a relief the soft sell was after being followed by assistants in numerous small shops, Guess and Timberland. About £130 later, I left very pleased with having found the place. They even had the courtesy to provide a pair of jeans that fit with a 34” waist. 34 inches, my arse! Well, my arse is 36 inches to be more precise.

I hope my case turns up though. It’s got my favourite casual clothes in and the idea of replacing them is horrid as it would involve numerous trips to numerous shops. Yuk.

The rather weary traveller

2007-05-01T02:40:00.000Z

I’ve been bad at blogging recently, haven’t I? Apologies- I’ve actually been rather busy. I’ve travelled to Accra (Ghana), Lusaka (Zambia) in the last week and I’m writing this in KL (Malaysia). All that travel and hotel breakfasts has left me rather bewildered and short of time.

Africa was a fantastic experience, if you can ignore the chaotically bad organisation from some of my colleagues. Which I can’t, but I won’t bore you with my gripes. Zambia in particular was quite a surprise with Lusaka reminding me of Canberra of all places. I’d go back to both Ghana and Zambia again given the chance. Right now I’m on the 23^rd floor of a typically clean and soulless but competent Asian hotel. KL, like Singapore, is a place that it’s hard to have any real opinions of at all. Mind you, after a week in places with bags of character in Africa, it’s nice to have somewhere where it’s safe to eat the fruit and where I’ve not brought my own supply of medical sharps in case of emergencies (HIV rates sadly being what they are in Africa).

The photo is a picture I took of my class in Accra: over 100 very pleasant and hard working ACCA students who I was hopefully helping in their attempts to pass auditing exams. These students deserve a better future, given their attitude and hard work. It’s nice to be able to help in this, especially as I was being paid to be there!

I’ll get back to the usual opinionated drivel soon. Please keep watching this space and leaving the odd comment.

Parallel life?

2007-03-30T15:17:00.000Z

Today, I received a letter from Continental Airlines profusely apologising for having recently lost my baggage and giving me a claim number. This confused me somewhat, as I’ve only flown with Continental once; that was several years ago and none of my bags went missing.

I also just received an email with my “personal” photos of me running the Prague half marathon, which happened when I was in Australia. To be fair, I’d entered for it but had decided that an Australian beach would be more fun. I'm curious therefore how personal my "personal" photos can be.

If I have a parallel second life that I’m unaware of, at least it seems like an interesting one. I don’t know what to do about the Continental Airlines thing. If I stay quiet perhaps they’ll offer me a free flight as compensation? I’m not sure what it’s compensation for but I’ll take any free flight going.

So where the bloody hell are you?

2007-03-28T06:00:00.000Z

This is my first morning back in England and I notice from the BBC news website that the absolutely brilliant adverts for Australia tourism here have been banned, reprimanded or some other such nonsense. The adverts (see them here if you’ve not already) are a great showcase for

Australia

and finish with the slogan “So where the bloody hell are you”? It’s just such a good set of adverts, yet apparently the word “bloody” is shocking to a more delicate brand of Brit. Up theirs, I say. It makes me want to get on the next plane back.

MAD: 21st century thoughts

2007-03-27T04:05:00.000Z

I’m writing this from Seoul airport, which is somewhat disturbingly close to Pyongyang and its “dear leader” Kim Jong-il. The cold war is over in Europe and so it’s easy to forget the nuclear threat. Instead, we worry about (grossly overstated) terrorist risks to our day to day existence. I have long felt that the threat of Islamist terrorism is comparable to the daily threat of the cold war (which I’m just old enough to remember) is like comparing one sneeze to a base dose of hepatitis, yet there seem to be much more noise day to day about threats now than when the Soviets were aiming hydrogen bombs at all our population centres. (Discuss: 25 marks).

Anyway, being in reach of North Korea’s new nuclear capability and aware of the recent attempts by Iran to piss off the West by kidnapping sailors got my mind moving to nuclear proliferation. As it would. Upon minor jet lag driven consideration, I’m of the mind that we shouldn’t worry too much about it for most states, as most states fundamentally act rationally. So I’m not too worried about Iran developing a nuclear weapon; not least as I don’t see how they could deliver the thing to Manchester unintercepted. Rocket technology is much tougher than nuclear weapons and making nuclear weapons small enough to “deliver” is much tougher than making one so bulky that nothing could ever get it in the air.

If I were the president of Iran, I’d sure as shit want my own nuclear weapons. History would tell me that the USA government isn’t averse to invading countries it sees as a threat, even a rather spurious threat. Israel has nuclear weapons that point at me 24 hours a day and they have a record of a distinct lack of restraint in dealings with Arab neighbours. In other words, I’d want big bombs for defence (a much mis- and over-used word). If I had some nukes in the basement, I’d be rather more confident that the yanks weren’t about to roll tanks into my country as such a move would provoke immense retaliation. In other words, mutually assured destruction.

People of my age (37) were brought up with MAD as a faintly cosy concept that guaranteed peace. I was never totally sold on that but it made a certain amount of sense. Only when leaders can be 100% sure that their own lives and lives of their families with be practically destroyed are they reasonably certain not to invade other countries. I wonder if Bush would have been so determined to invade Iraq if he’d known that his twin daughters would probably die as a result? I doubt it.

So I think we should stop being hysterical. There are rogue states in the world (eg North Korea) but even a fairly superficial analysis of just about every other purported threat shows them to be repugnant, but rational. If they develop the bomb, so be it. Meanwhile, I hope that somebody’s trying really hard to do whatever’s necessary to protect the good people of South Korea and Japan from their genuinely crazy neighbour.

Stuff I love about Australia

2007-03-25T01:10:00.000Z

Many times, I’ve worried that I’m truly a miserable bastard. I really grew to dislike living in Prague when everybody kept telling me how great it must be. I truly struggled to find things about it that I liked. I grew to worry that I was a misanthrope and possibly even a nationalist.

This is given the lie by my views of Australia. I love this place, I really do. I actually struggle to find things about Australia that I don’t like. It’s basically some of the foreign tourists who bother me and that’s about it.

In no particular order, here are some things that I love about Australia:

Virgin Blue airlines (I’ll do a whole separate blog on them)
The Australian irreverent and ironic sense of humour, which is pervasive in just about all conversations.
The huge number of 50 metre pools that are spotlessly clean and cheap.
Customer service generally (eg the cheapish hotel I’m staying in provides free bikes for guests to use, enabling me to explore Sydney in a whole new way).
The natural stuff: climate, landscape, vastness, the clarity of the night sky, the Great Barrier Reef.
The fact that even the queens are nice to other queens. Trust me, when gay men are nice to other gay men instead of sniping and superior that’s friendliness.
The kindness of strangers. In previous trips when I didn’t know my way around Sydney, I took to reading my map in doorways as I wanted to get my own bearings and locals kept offering help.
The humorous slang, eg swimming trunks become “budgie smugglers”, the vast Bondi Junction shopping centre is universally nicknamed “The Death Star”.
The food, which is cheap, often Asian influenced and healthier than in the UK.
The quality of newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald and “The Age” in Melbourne are the best all-round newspapers I’ve ever read.
The phrases “No worries”, “no drama”, “She’ll be right” and the whole popular culture that goes behind them.
The public spiritedness, exemplified in the surf rescue people. Those guys are utter wonders and I’d let myself down with any (or preferably all) of them.

So in summary, I like this place immensely, which means I can't be 100% a miserable bastard. Please don’t tell too many people though, as I don’t want any more “whining poms” here.

Aussies: friendly, easy going users of irony

2007-03-11T04:18:00.000Z

I love many things about

Australia

. Chief amongst these things is the way that Aussies use the English language and their style of humour. They spell humour with a "u", so it's humour that contains irony. Compare most "humor".

For example, there are the slang names of things and places. A pair of Speedos is often referred to as “budgie smugglers”. Observe how well endowed men look when wearing them if you don’t get it. Quite commonly, an act of foolishness will earn a rebuke for being a “spaz” or even “special needs kid”. Such terms are to be heard on the radio, in parliament as well as in everyday conversation. Political correctness is seen as a silly affectation here.

The anti-drink driving campaign has for ten years been using the strapline “you bloody idiot” to good effect. For example, an advertising hoarding will have a photo of road carnage with the text “Only a bit over the limit? Only a bit dead. You bloody idiot”. It makes the point altogether better than any number of clever TV ads in the UK.

Last time I was here, I saw a rather quiet looking 20 something guy wearing a T-shirt that said in smallish lettering “I like quite heavy metal”. (“Quite” has the same meaning here as in the UK, ie a bit. In the USA it often means “very”). The understated irony made brought a smirk to my drunken visage all evening. The T-shirt’s owner was happy to share the joke and have a chat for a while. When even the cute 20 something year-old gayboys are friendly to 30 something year-old not as cute gayboys, you know that a society has something going for it.

The developers of the enormous Bondi Junction shopping centre in Sydney clearly made great efforts to make the place seem naturally integrated into the city (the food court offers the best low rent way to get a fantastic view of Sydney Harbour, backpackers may wish to note). I can only imagine their disappointment when Sydneysiders almost instantly took to calling the vast complex “The Death Star”. Trust me, it’s a funny and very apposite name.

There remains some scope for linguistic confusion however. I overheard a rather elderly woman describe how she found it hard to wear thongs and walk naturally. It becomes less disturbing an image when one knows that “thongs” in Australian English means what we Brits call flip flops.

Arrival in Sydney. Now for breakfast!

2007-03-08T20:59:00.000Z

Jet lag is a most mysterious thing. Apologies for the slight tardiness of this posting but I’ve been spending the days wandering around in a state of slight bewildered confusion as day has inexplicably become night and night has inexplicably become day. What’s more, it’s inexplicably become early autumn instead of early spring.

Korean Air were pretty good on the way to Sydney. In the 34 hours it took to get here from Manchester, I even managed to get about five hours’ sleep. That’s not bad for me. Arriving at the Marriott hotel in Sydney at 8am, the darlings that they are took pity on me and found me a room straight away. A bathtub the size of Hertfordshire, a crisp linen bed and the wonders of the buffet breakfast awaited me. Having shunned most of the mediocre food on the flight, I was quite ready for a bit of a congratulatory blow out. I can’t remember exactly how much I had but it was something like this below. You may choose to sing this out loud, especially if you’re reading this in a crowded office.

On my first day Down under
My buffet breakfast be:

Twelve biscuits dunking
Eleven bowls of corn flakes
Ten mugs of coffee
Nine bacon rashers
Eight Danish pastries
Seven jumbo sausage
Six orange juices
FIVE HASH BROWNS
Four tins of beans
Three French toast
Two eggs benedict
And a partridge in a pear tree!

I’ve been guiltily starting each day since with a bowl of yoghurt and a black coffee.

Travelblog 2: part one

2007-03-02T18:19:00.000Z

I have never before flown Air France. Based on my experience of how Air France on the ground (they do check in for Czech Airlines at Heathrow) I’d imagined them to be a byword for arseyness and poor service. Now it pains me to say this because as a true Englishman I reflexively sneer at all things French, but (shuffles feet and coughs slightly); well, I was wrong.

I was sitting in the first row, which enabled me to witness the rather young captain exchanging scribbled notes with the ground crew. This, it seems, was a bit of serial flirtation this particular captain has with some member of the ground crew who presumably wasn’t on duty this afternoon. On stopovers, they probably shag like rabbits. I would let myself down with him; he was, like, well cute dude. There was much good humoured ribbing of the captain from the very pleasant crew. Everybody seemed happy to raise eyebrows and share the joke with the nearby passengers. Eventually, the captain decided the door should be closed and we should go. He didn’t throw a Gitanes out of the door before closing it, but it would have completed the image if he did. Suddenly being British seemed a bit awkward and unnecessarily rigid.

I am now writing this from Charles de Gaulle airport, where I’m waiting for my connecting flight to Seoul. I’m on my way to Sydney via a rather torturous route.

I have decided that should I ever become a dictator, I don’t want an airport named after me, as it might one day end up like Charles de Gaulle. Do kindly note this, as I do fully expect to be asked to fulfil my function in life to sort stuff out on a grand scale. Anyway, back to the plot. The people are pleasant enough and I’m sure it makes some sense if you’re familiar with the place, but it’s bewildering on a vast scale otherwise. Baggage carousels, passport control and security checkpoints all seem to be in random places as if they know they have to have them but they’ve no idea what they’re actually for. I have no idea how I found my way to the business class lounge, but now I’m here I’m rather enjoying it. The airport is a concrete maze, but they have free Bollinger champagne to help yourself to. Only in France would that happen. In Britain, it would be a slightly mean and peevish affair, no doubt providing the nastiest of cava. I suspect that there’s a very material chance that my bag may take months to catch up with me, but I’m relaxing into the modus operandi of the place by pouring myself an uncivilised amount of free bubbly stuff. I am very much a lad from Wigan at heart and the idea of free (yet expensive) champagne means I give scant regard to the fact that I’m brewing up the hangover from hell. I am going to neck as much as I can without getting so drunk I might forget I have a plane to catch.

I’m not so much looking forward to the onward flight as I’ve heard that Korean Air isn’t a nice experience. They no longer crash with the frequency that they used to, but apparently the cultural difference can be trying for we English. The middle-aged Korean guy next to me on the flight here is obviously on the same onward flight to Seoul. I’d forgotten the cultural norm in parts of East Asia He was more snot than man. Anybody with ears could clearly deduce that his aim in life seemed to be to fill his head cavities with snot, leaving just enough air gaps to allow him to noisy and continually rearrange by snorting every ten seconds or so. Gross huh? You betcha. Ah well, I’ll just anaesthatise myself with free (yet expensive) champagne. I want to get pissed enough to fall instantly asleep, without being too hammered to enjoy the slight thrill of getting onto a plane and turning left. Like I said, I’m from Wigan. What do you want? Genuine class? of publicly making the sort of loud snot-dragging noises that an Englishman would feel a frisson of shame for making even alone in his own bathroom.

Thank the Lord for Gays! (or "It's the Poofs, Stupid!")

2007-02-22T14:34:00.000Z

The

parliament is currently enacting a law that, amongst other things, would make it unlawful for adoption agencies to discriminate against prospective adoptive or fostering gay parents. This seems to me to be a classic case of bad law, as how the hell can it be policed? Laws that can’t be enforced are simply bad laws. But I digress.

The Catholic church (which apparently loves us all) runs a number of adoption agencies in the UK. Good luck to them, and I don’t mind that they’re funded by the state (and thus by own queer taxes). I’m sure that they do good work and improve lives. This is just the sort of thing that religions should do, instead of peevishly mumbling in cold buildings and spreading fear and hate.

Should the new law be passed, the Catholic church is fearful that they might have to place a child with Sodomites (or whatever lesbians do). Rather than face the possibility of delivering a child into the hands of Ellen DeGeneres rather than Fred and Rosemary West, they are saying that they’ll close their children’s homes, presumably producing a new generation of Oliver Twist-esque street urchins. Better eat from bins and mug old women for drug money than be given a loving home with a couple of dykes, eh?

It’s always worth pointing out that the Jesus was completely silent on the issue of homosexuality, which I conclude means He thought it unimportant. Homophobes have to delve into the otherwise ignored madder parts of the Old Testament to find something that might be construed as a backdoor eleventh commandment against poofterdom. Anybody who hates poofs in the name of God, but fails to stone raped women is a hypocrite. Read the Bible and check. I have.

The truth here is that preaching homophobia is good for market share. The Catholic and Anglican churches compete fiercely for share of developing markets such as Africa. It’s just business. Rather than take a meaningful stance on Christian-Muslim-Jewish reconciliation (which would stop no end of suffering) and a million other things that could make the world a happier place, they prefer to indulge in a spot of queerbashing. In a move which I see as the very zenith of cynicism, they invoke that old chestnut of an idea that poofs are a danger to children. Unlike priests, presumably.

It’s just the sort of thing that makes me and many others despise organised religion. Rowan Williams (head honcho Anglican) has predictably sat on the fence on this issue once more, as he can’t afford to lose the homophones himself. Rowan, you’re a bloody coward. This sort of stuff doesn’t just mean right thinking people stop going to church, it makes them actively dislike those that do. I feel sure that Jesus of Nazareth would not have been impressed.

Cool at last!

2007-02-21T18:42:00.000Z

Yes dear blogees, after what seems like an eternity I have finally finished my flight training and taken my pilot skill test. What makes this a happy blog is that I passed first time, with the result that I am now a qualified pilot. Well, I’m properly qualified to fly a single engine piston aircraft with passengers, as long as I pay my fair share of the costs of flying the aircraft. Flying professionally requires an upgrade to a commercial licence and, understandably, a fair amount of experience.

I have no idea how I passed, since I flew worse than I think I’ve flown for a long time. Indeed, I think I answered the examiner’s question of how I thought it had gone with the un-PC answer “let’s face it, I flew like a spaz.” It takes nearly three hours of flying before getting the news of pass or spaz, which can feel like dragging out the agony if you're convinced you've already messed up. Apparently what saved me was my own recognition of spazzy behaviour and timely correction of errors (one of which was kind of the equivalent of driving on the wrong side of the road). Hell, I was nervous. Give me a break. Who could have imagined that muttering "arse" under one's breath could have such positive results? Apparently it made it clear that I'd spotted errors and could correct them. A positive side of my quasi-Tourettes manners!

As one “friend” recently told me, I’m not exactly a geek, because geeks have a certain odd anti-charismatic charm. No, I am one level below geekiness ; languishing in the nadir of social existence that is nerddom. Well, I’m now a nerd with wings, which I think makes me passably cool and might even drag me up to geek status. To support the nerd diagnosis however, immediately I got home, I laminated the pass certificate and put it on my fridge before celebrating with a coffee but no champagne. OK, I’m a nerd and I should stop trying.

Travelblog part 2

2007-02-10T16:26:00.000Z

I’ve not written a travelblog for some days as I was actually quite busy in the Caribbean with work, but particularly with travel. In summary form, here are some stories and things I learned over the last week. Sorry this is really long, but there’s a lot to catch up on.

Trinidad is a rather charming place with smiley people the norm. It’s also sporadically dangerous but overall quite fun. Don’t walk around carrying anything you’d be tempted to fight to keep from a mugger and you’ll be fine.
“To lime” is Trinidad and Tobago dialect for any sort of social interaction with others.
Trinidad carnival is an enormous “lime” that is more than traditional fun costumes and steel bands. When I arrived at my hotel at 2am, the very structure of the building was shaking from a carnival event at the nearby stadium. The “music” was hip hop, which (being far from ABBA) doesn’t do it for me the best of times but particularly unwelcome after a long journey that had been made very long indeed by American Airlines.
American Airlines are OK (but no more) internationally but domestically they make Ryanair look good. You get $25 compensation for a five hour delay due to aircraft technical problems and your bag not turning up when you eventually get there, I now know. This is if you’re in first class. I suspect that you get nothing in “coach” class, which is more like a school bus than a coach. Also if you find yourself sitting on an aircraft for four hours while people try to fix the starboard engine, in first class you get a couple of glasses of orange juice. In coach, you get to drink from the toilet if you become truly desperate.
Seemingly every aircraft flying domestically in the States was bought 15 years ago and has never been refitted. Each flight crew seems to have some yin and yan balance in that half of them are lovely and the other half gratuitously rude.
If you’re flying through the USA in transit you have to complete immigration as if you’re going there for 3 months, pick up your bag and re-check it at a rather chaotic drop-off point that provides an unwelcome sight into the workings of baggage handling. You will also have to go through security time and time again, which is a tawdry affair with much shouting of weird instructions about having to have your boarding pass in your hand at all times. This is despite you not actually leaving the terminal building. I’m always intrigued by having to declare that I’m not seeking entry to the USA for “immoral purposes” and have been tempted to ask for clarification. IS taking opportunities for casual sex immoral? If on the borderline, how far can I go? I’ve also had my fingerprints taken repeatedly, presumably in case I changed them from the week before when I last entered the country. The staff doing this seem to recognise that it’s all a bit of a nonsense and they’re pleasant enough. How would fingerprints have helped on 9/11?
If you forget to take your US to UK adapter for your laptop, American Airlines front desks at the enormous business lounges at either Miami or Boston will not be able to loan you any sort of adapter. The fact that the world doesn’t all use US style plugs will genuinely be news to the very cordial but clueless person on the front desk.
If you pay to fly first class within the US or Caribbean, you will not get access to the business class lounge unless you also buy a day pass for $45, payable only in Dollars. This means that you can leave Jamaica in first class at 0750 in transit to the UK (so with no US Dollars expected to be needed), not be given breakfast and be denied access to the lounge and its weak coffee during your four hour stopover. A certain amount of stink making becomes necessary upon the discovery that only one ATM is actually working and that one maddeningly refuses to accept the validity of any non-US issued bank card. You may mention in passing that your onward flight is to Europe, upon which the staff will scold you for not mentioning this previously as this “obviously” is different. Apparently if you’re a connecting long haul passenger on business class ticket, you can use the lounge. This key piece of information will not have been asked of you, despite handing them a British passport when you first met. You will be told this policy is the same as for domestic flights in Europe for all European airlines. You will not want to waste time informing them that this is total crap as you will then be in sight of a glass of water, a cup of coffee and a chair that’s not made of PVC and steel.
The people who are on the governing council of the Institutes of Chartered Accountants in Trinidad and Tobago and in Jamaica are lovely people. I want to do a good job for them.
Exchanging horror stories of taking connecting flights through Miami is a common way to bond with strangers in the Caribbean. Colleagues whose middle name is “Mohammed” will have the best (ie worst) stories to share. These stories will make it abundantly clear that the Department of Homeland Security has only one response to perceived terrorist threat: Muslims are threats, everybody else is probably OK but best hassle all foreigners a bit for the sake of appearances.
Taking a flight from Trinidad to Jamaica is a pleasing experience indeed. Barbados looked to really be rather a paradise from my very brief flight in and out of there. For flying geeks such as myself it’s also real fun to be on a 737 that they fly on low level approaches as if it were a four seater aircraft, complete with kids waving at you as you pass alarmingly close above their heads. Caribbean Airlines is curiously referred to by one and all as “Bee wee” and it’s an altogether more pleasant experience than American Airlines.
There are some very nice people in Kingston, Jamaica but it’s clear that one would not have to go far to get mugged. A five minute walk outside the hotel one evening to the neighbouring branch of KFC in supposedly safe New Kingston is not an experience I’m going to repeat. The advice is generally to take taxis everywhere, but I was ripped off even then on the way back to the airport.
Prince William was staying at the neighbouring hotel to mine in Kingston when we were there. I’m pretty certain that I saw him mingling at an evening business do but one of my colleagues disputes this. He certainly was there though and this means that he doesn’t mind roughing it as it wasn’t a great hotel.
£50 buys you a rather faded but enormous suite in New Kingston. Presumably the fact that it doesn’t feel safe to leave the hotel has something to do with this bargain.

I promise that I’m not anti-American, although I realise this sounds it. The USA enthrals and appals me in approximately equal measure. Weirdly, there’s almost never a moment of indifference. As a country, it just feels like a teenager; thinking it has all the answers but actually laughably naïve. Misplaced efforts at preventing “terror” can make travel to or through the USA simply more trouble than it’s worth. If they didn’t act like an imperial power with all the arrogance and error that implies, it would be a nice enough place to visit. It would also be good if they could get a perspective on how the damage being done by global warming is greater than Islamist terrorism.

So the Caribbean is fine, but frankly most of it doesn’t seem to be as pleasant as much of Spain or Greece. If you’re going to fly long haul on holiday, go to Asia. If you want class, go to Italy. If you’re going to go anywhere at all, avoid American Airlines. I think we imagine it’s so exotic because of the inadvertent US influence over us, given that it’s their equivalent of the Costa del Sol.

I just love this video

2007-02-07T00:15:00.000Z

This is an odd blog entry to post during a trip to Trinidad and Jamaica, but time's tight and I can't do the trip justice with a quick blog entry. But I thought I'd suggest that you look at this video on utube. It's completely great. It cheers me up each time I see it. Have a click through to utube and tell me what you think. The song's from Jerry Springer the Opera, I believe.

Travelblog part 1

2007-02-03T08:29:00.000Z

I am currently on the first leg of a long journey to Trinidad for a business meeting. I don’t much see the need for this meeting but the client is paying me my daily charge rate to go and to fly business class, so I’m not complaining.

As BA seemed likely to go on strike, I decided to fly with American Airlines, which is a first. My life is thus existing in an odd parallel to Timorous Beastie’s.

You find me in the business lounge at Heathrow, which is a place that’s trying so hard to be plutocratic. Plutocratic doesn’t describe it though and as I don’t know of any word that combines plutocratic, kitch, bogus and snooty I’m not sure there is a word to describe describe it pithily. Imagine some very snotty country club in California; a place where the urge to conform has persisted into late middle age instead of dying out with adolescence. Deck all the walls with lots of dark redwood panelling in the presumed manner of a Pall Mall gentleman’s club. Create lots of recessed little backlit alcoves, into which incongruously place fake bronze busts and little statues of Greek and Roman gods. Picture a few servile members of staff silently removing used plates from their sahibs’ tables in return for no eye contact and no thanks. You’re getting close. I just took a picture of the place with my camera phone to the obvious disapproval of the guy in Polo Ralph Lauren weekend gear next to me. His reproachful glance told me instantly that I have been categorised at white trash. Which, to be fair, I sort of am.

This is the up-itself world of “posh” America; for which read America with money. Those at the front of the plane have a very different experience to those at the back. The gulf in the plane mirrors the gulf in American society. Sure, business class on Virgin Atlantic is vastly better (and I really do mean much better) than economy but it’s understood to be a business transaction, not that one is simply better.

American airlines (lower case helpfully denoting the generic rather than the particular brand: grammar does matter) are generally a disappointment, with Continental the only US airline I’ve ever liked. In a society famed for customer service, I’ve generally found them to be uncomfortable and generally pretty shoddy. Their puritanical attitude to alcohol is irksome.

America entrances me and appals me in approximately equal measure. It is the land that gave us Bush but it also gave us “South Park” and “the Simpsons”. It is a land of extraordinary clashes and contradictions. Americans treat their Bill of Rights with religious reverence and are smug in how they dreamed it up; ignoring the little known fact that it largely plagiarises the English Bill of Rights of 1688. Despite treating freedom as a word that denotes all things good, half of America is none too keen on the freedom of others (viz abortion, gay marriage). I find exposure to American society surprisingly tiring. The paperwork I was given at check-in is wearisome in its earnestness and officiousness. A European airline wouldn’t behave in such a way and I’m pleased about that. Get me to my bed at the other end and then get me back to Manchester.

Reflections on Jade

2007-01-30T23:23:00.000Z

OK, I give into peer pressure. I resist it generally but on this occasion I think that I’m right to bend to the greater will of the population at large.

I watched the last night of “Celebrity” Big Brother on Sunday evening. No surprise at all that Shilpa won, because if there’s one thing we English love it’s an underdog. Also, she’s OK (but I don’t believe she’d have won if she hadn’t been seen as the victim of abuse).

I did get to see more of the horrid Jade and I’ve decided that she really is bloody awful. I still think she’s a bully and that she really does believe that she’s not “racial” (sic). I also still think that the two other girls are monumentally horrid and they’ve not been getting enough stick. In the case of one of them, I suspect my loathing is partly driven by my tendency to dislike scousers.

So I am sorry for having attempted to speak slightly in Jade’s defence. I was roundly rebuked at the weekend for having done so and I’ll try not to do it again!

Art without the bull

2007-01-25T14:32:00.000Z

This blog finds me sitting in the basement at Suburb coffee shop in Manchester. This is one of my favourite places and I have become such a regular here (in my occasionally unchallenging life) that I’ve become rather friendly with the staff and other regulars. It’s the sort of life I thought New York was about, but have yet to find any evidence that supports this myth.

I just had a nice chat with Neil Roland, the photographer who has an exhibition at Suburb. Apparently, a group of art school students are studying him and people have written theses about his work. He is openly at a loss to understand why. For example, his preference for producing series of photographs in one dominant colour is all to do with the fact that it sells and he thinks it looks pretty. He likes to take pictures of nudes because he thinks they look pretty and he quite likes the control of a nude model doing what he says. Well, who wouldn't? He insists that it’s nothing to do with statements about the vulnerability of the frail human body against harsh industrial backgrounds: he just likes to take pictures of women with big tits and young boys with big biceps and knobs getting naked in public places. Again, who wouldn't?

I find it wonderfully refreshing to hear somebody say “the only reason anybody would buy that over there (points to a series of seven pictures in one frame entitled “Manchester in green”) is because they think it looks nice but mostly because they have a green carpet.” If only all people with talent were so unpretentious I might actually go to art galleries and the opera.

Shipwreck tat galore!

2007-01-23T12:40:00.000Z

Does anybody else think that it’s been totally bizarre to see what’s been going on in Devon? A cargo ship ran aground off the South West coast, spilling some of its contents. There then followed an unseemly scramble to pick up whatever had been washed up on the seashore. This, let us remember, is all stuff that belongs to somebody else.

There was a TV interview with somebody explaining his joy with the new BMW motorbike that he had "found". One presumes it had been found in a container that had been moving somebody's belongings from Country A to Country B. Surely that’s not possible? If it’s useable surely it still belongs to its previous owner? (The answer is yes it does: English law has no concept at all of "finders keepers".)

The media had a big story. What’s even more brilliant is that they had a big story with great pictures. Woo hoo! The story was all over the place and this encouraged even more people to go along, taking crowbars to prize open any container that refused to open easily, lest somebody else's BMW motorbike was still safely inside. Weirdly, people seemed delighted to find things like a pair of trainers that are “about their size” and will probably be ok once the seawater’s dried out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see such things if a container ship should run aground off a third world country, but is a sodden pair of somebody else’s trainers really such exciting booty in 21st century England?

Today the police (spoilsports) have cordoned off the beach and have finally got the media to mention in passing that this is all theft and that anybody breaching the cordon will be arrested for theft. Some measure of sanity seems to be restored. I do feel that the world is going madder and madder.

The nation's new hate figure

2007-01-20T10:22:00.000Z

Jade Goody, the nation’s pet chav, has been kicked out of the Big Brother house with 82% of the public vote. Right now, the nation seems to have found itself a new Myra Hindley; our new hate figure in chief.

I’m not a fan of Jade Goody. She is common, she hardly pauses from breath in her loud wittering, she’s argumentative and she bullies. Her mother was in the house this year too and her mother is worse, which explains much. The redeeming feature that I believe she has though is that she is willing to look at how her behaviour affects others and is wiling to confront her weaknesses. I’d prefer somebody who acts badly but is strong enough to look at the truth in preference to somebody who just happens to mostly do the right thing because they were lucky enough to be brought up by a decent family.

To me, the racism argument is really missing the point. Jade was the alpha female of the group. She was really upfront about how she didn’t like Shilpa (I’m not sure I can condemn her for that; Shilpa would be difficult to get on with). Sadly, two other rather dim women followed her and suddenly there was a group bullying Shilpa. So the weak-minded follow the alpha female. No news so far.

It shows an immaturity in our society that faced with bullying where the bullies pick on a foreign accent, the nation goes into paroxysm of self-doubt about whether we’re all latent racists rather than whether we’re all latent bullies. As I said in a previous post, a group of bullies will pick on anything about their victim that they can. Racism is not to be tolerated in society, but neither is bullying. I noticed just now that the two remaining girls who were bullying Shilpa with Jade have now moved into the double bed together. I really don’t understand the psychology of groups of young and dumb women. It all seems so extreme; they always seem to be either constantly bonding in an exaggerated and rather insincere way or ripping other people to shreds.

I think it’s unfair to demonise Jade. In my opinion, the nastier bully was the pointless scouser former Miss UK (Danielle). Jade is taking the fall for the greater sins of others as well as her own. She dealt with the post-eviction interview with considerable self-reflection, remorse and fortitude. I feel sorry for her but I wouldn’t want to meet her.

In need of Viagra

2007-01-19T11:24:00.000Z

I receive a prodigious amount of spam emails. This is despite me being rather careful not to give out my email address generally and despite me being a distinctly low level consumer of internet porn.

However, I decided to read one of my recent spam messages, as I’ve been taking a certain amount of comfort from the fact that I get rather fewer emails these days suggesting a penis enlargement. My self-esteem is consequently flourishing.

Having come to terms with the fact that I’m not in unusually great need of a penis enlargement, the sellers of goods on the internet now seem to be determining that I have a clear need for Viagra. They have also taken to sending me spam emails with embedded images, presumably to get past my spam filter. I attach one such image at the top of this posting.

What caught my eye with this one is that it is now possible, it seems, to buy “Viagra Professional”. It seems to me that the only professional users of Viagra would be porn stars (in lieu of fluffers who have been largely made redundant I am told) or prostitutes. As I am neither, I have no need of Viagra professional, although I’m somewhat curious to try Viagra amateur for the hell of it.

What is it with use of words like “professional”, “direct” and “express” that is presumed to jazz up any mediocre product? I have seen a shop called “Pizza Direct”, which would only make sense if there were such a thing as a pizza broker. To the best of my knowledge, such a thing does not exist. Long suffering users of the Transpennine Express will also be able to testify how there is nothing whatever express about trundling to Yorkshire at bicycle speed. They presume it sounds good though.

Big Brother the alleged racist

2007-01-18T09:51:00.000Z

There is much furore in

England

at the moment about whether a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother is the victim of racism. This story is eclipsing the humdrum non-news of how many people are dying in Iraq. It's doing wonders for the viewing figures of the rather poor TV show. I just submitted a response to the BBC news "have your say" page. There is virtually no chance it will be published as they seem to eschew any sort of comment from people who can spell so I thought I'd rather egotistically publish it here:

I gave up watching BB because I found the contestants irksome, including Shilpa. She lay it on thick about her wealth and that's uncharming. The catty and dim young women in there would have seized on anything that makes another person different to them. We shouldn't go into a paroxysm of self-doubt about if we're a nation of racists. They would mock her Manchester accent, if she had one. If she were to be immune from this sort of unpleasantness because she's Indian, that would be racist.

That was as many characters as can be submitted. Shilpa's OK but she's mightily good at turning on the water works and generally I think she's a bit of a fake. Everybody seems to have forgotten that BB's a game. In her position, easily the best tactic to get votes would be to feign being hurt by the racist digs from the others. These seem to me to be minor school yard stuff which is inexcusably bitchy and gratuitous but anybody of normal resilience takes this kind of stuff from other people every day.

I'm not excusing the bitchiness of the vacuous other girls in there, but it's normal. There are a vast number of bigger issues going on. This is just reality, so we shouldn't be surprised to see it on a reality TV show.

Rejoice all ye fatties! Rejoice!

2007-01-15T21:53:00.000Z

Fatties of the World, rejoice! Apparently there will soon be a type of chewing gum that stops you feeling hungry and thus the obesity crisis will be over! There will be much happiness and dancing (well initially, more like waddling) in the streets!

The story’s here on the BBC news website if you’ve not yet heard of the impending medical miracle.

Spot how it’s not going to work? If not, you’re probably not overweight.

Speaking as somebody who has spent about half of his life on the somewhat plump side (having spent the other half resoundingly on the “fat bastard” side), I can confirm that overeating for me has little to do with being hungry. I rarely pause eating for long enough to actually get hungry. Appetite suppressants are well meaning attempts by thin people, or possibly self-deluding fat people, to deal with the problem.

My own experiences of when I put on weight are this:

I put on weight when I’m not happy. If I’m happy, I lose weight with no effort at all.
I put on weight when I’m cold and when it’s dark. This is just another way of saying the same as point 1 really.
I put on weight when I don’t get enough sleep, which is most of the time. When I’m relaxed and rested, I don’t feel the need for constant sugar fixes. This isn’t the same as being hungry; it’s an almost physical need for sugars to keep going.
I put on weight when I’m on the road, but this is largely linked to not getting enough sleep and not being particularly happy. It’s also a bad thing to stay in a hotel with a prepaid buffet breakfast.

The obesity problem is surely nothing to do with us being hungrier. It’s got everything to do with us being more stressed and less happy than we used to be. The temptation to comfort eat is there and the ease with which this can be done is a danger.

I remember diving in Australia and being somewhat surprised to see the whole food chain swimming around in the same place, seemingly co-existing very happily in peace. I didn’t see one fish eat another fish and I couldn’t work out why. Then I noticed one trying and realised that it’s remarkably hard work to catch live prey and eat it. In other words, you’d only go to the trouble of eating if you were bloody hungry. This probably explains why I find it hard to pass McDonalds, but I’ve never walked past a cow and been tempted to run after it and take a bite out of its arse.

So my theory on the obesity epidemic is that it’s a symptom of a problem with mental health rather than a problem in itself. It’s compounded by high calorie food being too easy to come by. Pills aren’t going to help. We fatties just need to “get real” and that’s the end of the story.

Matt Damon for president!

2007-01-15T00:09:00.000Z

As I may have mentioned before, I have a bit of a hero worship thing going on with Matt Damon. He talks loads of sense, he can sure act, is very bright and has a good sense of humour. He’s the person in the world who I’d most like to have a beer with. Actually, I’d like to share considerably more than a beer with Mr Damon, but even one’s dreams should have some grounding in real hope! Mr Damon is married (to a former barmaid he met whist filming a few years ago).

Anyway, I just happened upon the story that MD did an interview recently where he said that he believed that there should be conscription to get troops for Iraq. I was perplexed; this didn’t sound like the views of a Harvard liberal one bit. On closer inspection and watching a video clip (see it here on youtube) I got the argument. The USA has a military force almost totally drawn from a poor underclass. They serve becuase of economic need, not because of patriotism. It’s disproportionately black. At some sick level, the civilian leadership of the US military sees the value of US servicemen’s lives as worth less than their own. I understand Matt’s argument and have to say it has some merit. If a society believes that going to war is necessary, it should be willing to share the dangers randomly and fairly. Would Bush really have invaded Iraq if there had been a chance that his twin daughters might be randomly selected to go into danger? I doubt it. If you’re a political leader who’s not willing to take chances with the safety of people you love, you shouldn’t be willing to take chances with the lives of people others love.

Matt Damon for president of the United States! God knows, he’d do a better job than the current idiot.

Power of the internet: the real end of Saddam

2007-01-09T17:44:00.000Z

I love the internet. It provides many people with porn without the awkwardness of actually buying it. It allows many people to meet in virtual space, some of whom actually find that they like each other in reality. It does many good things, even if you think that porn is wrong just because it’s porn. If so, you have issues that you should talk through with somebody more grounded and wiser than yourself.

The most useful thing that the Internet does in my opinion though is prop up democracy and truth. I do not support the decision to hang Saddam Hussein, since it was obviously going to make him into a martyr. I also oppose the death penalty in all cases since I believe it is a manifestation of all that is bad in human nature. Civilised societies shouldn’t kill in cold blood, although they really ought to dish out life sentences that mean life.

The first pictures we saw of the execution gave the impression of a solemn and almost dignified affair. One could momentarily forget the barbarism of what was about to happen (not that the official version did show all that happened). The world was transfixed. Predictably, the news networks went into a 48 hour frenzy of repeating the same 48 second video and commentary. Gone are the days of news analysis, I’m afraid.

Then a few days later a video appeared that somebody had taken with their mobile phone. All power to them, I say. If you’re going to televise something so barbaric as an execution, do it warts and all. The unofficial video would not have been possible without the internet. Even the BBC wouldn’t have covered it nearly so much if millions of people hadn’t already seen it. It showed the official version to be deeply sanitised to the point of being an untruth. Saddam himself looked even more like a dignified victim of victors’ justice (instead of the sociopathic monster that he really was).

Despite the endless and repetitive coverage of the event no journalist seemed to note the fact that it appears to have been conducted using the British style “long drop” method. This, dear friends, is where a drop of about seven feet is used so that the victim is instantly rendered deeply unconscious by snapping of the neck vertebrae, when their brief journey to the floor is abruptly terminated by a rope around their neck. A bit of research (thanks again to the internet) reveals that this method has never been the official method in USA or Iraq. The US states that have used hanging have always preferred the “short drop” method where the victim strangles whilst still being conscious and involuntarily fighting to breathe and escape; sometimes for some minutes. In other words, courtesy of the internet and somebody’s Nokia, we now know that Saddam was spared the normal and barbaric method and that his death was near instant. We thus know that at least the executioners themselves went about their terrible business with some compassion and professionalism.

Without the internet, we’d know none of this. I’m not altogether sure that I want to know all of it, but if the truth is out there, let’s see it. All too often you won’t actually be told the full truth, as the full truth is inconvenient or just too much like hard work for the average (ie insufferably mediocre) news programme to bother covering. But should you care to find the truth, it’s there for you to find.

If you’re of slightly sick mind and you want to watch the full video by the way, see it here.

Great pub talk about stuff that doesn’t matter

2006-12-27T23:19:00.000Z

Now, I know for absolute certain that there are a number of readers of this blog, but very few ever leave comments. The principal purpose of this entry is to try to get people to actually contribute. Well, and to improve my own social life. I REALLY want to hear contributions on this one folks, even if you come back and add them in six months.

The idea is to identify the top ten topics as a subject for pub conversation. A good pub conversation is something that people will tend to have strong opinions on, yet is completely inconsequential so is unlikely to accidentally offend or accidentally lapse into socially divisive profundity. It is a celebration of all that is great about shallowness.

Here are my starting offerings (forgive me for I shall doubtless add more as comments to my own blog, which seems faintly egocentric):

Who was the more talented Beatle? Lennon or McCartney?
At what stage exactly did Friends stop being funny and why?
Which year was the best for “Big Brother”?
What was the best number one of the 1980s?
What song would be a better national anthem for the UK than "God save the Queen"?
Which is the best ABBA album and single?

Feel free to contribute answers to any of the above questions, but PLEASE add similarly inane questions.

Cute and funny v tedious and depressing

2006-12-25T21:29:00.000Z

When surfing youtube a while ago, I came across this brilliant spoof song by one Stephen Lynch. It really is funny and it's so worth looking at. I did laugh. Have a look at it by clicking here. That shoudl take you to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkx8khougwY

He's also a bit of a cutie to boot, eh?

Oh God, as I write this I'm watching East Enders special Christmas Day edition. Because it's East Enders, one of the longest running characters has just died. Why do they always do something miserable on East Enders for Christmas? I'm a bit "bah humbug" about Christmas, especially this year as the first Christmas since my parents split up, but I want cheering up a bit rather than depressing. East Enders is so self-consciously gritty that it's just plain depressing.

Japanese Paris syndrome

2006-12-21T23:13:00.000Z

I just love this story I heard of today. Read it by clicking here. Honestly, it's so worth it.
It's almost wonderful how much different nationalities conform to the stereotype.

Cartoon legend snuffs it

2006-12-19T08:57:00.000Z

It’s sad that Joseph Barbera has died. He was half of Hanna Barbera, who made the most excellent cartoons that people my age grew up with.

It’s always been odd to me that Disney have a bigger name, when Disney’s cartoon characters were frankly rubbish compared to MGM (who Hanna and Barbera previously worked for) and HB studios later. Really, the most minor characters in HB cartoons were better than any of the Disney characters. Rosemary the telephone operator’s bit parts in “Hong Kong Phooey” were more memorable than anything I’ve ever seen Mickey Mouse do. It’s such a shame that HB didn’t open the theme parks. Disneyworld is excellent (I’m gay, remember) but just how excellent would it be if the characters there instead of being lame arse nothingness like Minnie Mouse were instead Scooby Doo (not Scrappy Do though, which was a serious error), Top Cat, Hong Kong Phooey, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Dick Dastardly and Mutley? Disney, or more precisely Pixar, have come up with some excellent characters in recent years but HB were always in the lead when they were still in the game.

Isn’t it curious how if you were to ask people to name a cartoon character, many would say Mickey Mouse first, even though few will have ever seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Something to do with branding I suppose.

Christmas carols

2006-12-18T10:08:00.000Z

I just heard a Christmas carol for the first time this year. It surprised me how lovely it was and how much it made me connect with childhood feelings of Christmas, instead of adult hassle of Christmas. One so rarely hears Christmas carols these days because shops just endlessly play bloody awful compilation albums of bloody awful Christmas pop songs. Instead of “silent night” or other beautiful songs, we endure an endless loop of Slade and Yoko Ono singing “a velly melly Cleesemas.” Happy Christmas (War is Over) my arse, Mr Lennon. I really do want the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to be over, as do most people in Britain and America, but our earnest wanting doesn’t seem to make any difference. Christmas really isn’t about politics anyway, especially the naïve sixth form nonsense you passed off as philosophy. I've always really quietly had it in for the myth of John Lennon.

Stop! Season of goodwill and all!

I do wish that it were easier to hear more of “O come all ye faithful!” and the like. They are simply more lovely songs than the pop trash. I should remind you that this statement comes from somebody who genuinely loves "STEPS", so I've no objection to pop music whatever! There's a time and a place though. Do we not hear them because shops are afraid somehow of upsetting non-Christians? If so, isn’t the mere mention of Christmas a problem?

I do like to hear “Stop the Cavalry” by Jona Lewie and the Band Aid song though. They can stay.

Financial learnings of the Great Britain for make benefit glorious nation of Romania

2006-12-17T12:37:00.000Z

Greetings from Bucharest Otopeni airport. I’ve been in

Romania

for a few days, teaching how to account for complex financial instruments that to a large extent don’t yet exist in this country to a small group of appreciative, motivated and generally pleasant people.

I am fond of Romania. The Economist newspaper recently fairly described it as a charming and spirited place. These are the last couple of weeks of Romania being in Europe but not in the EU, as 1 January heralds what I hope will be a real new start for this poor but potential-laden country.

If you sneer at the idea of Bucharest, first look at the town around you. If you live in Wigan, your home does not measure up to Bucharest in terms of charm, prettiness and things to do. It’s also unlikely that your neighbours are as nice. Here are some things about Romania that I find interesting:

“Cold Mountain” was filmed here. To be fair, so was much of “Borat”. Much of the Romanian countryside is remarkably beautiful.
The people from Borat’s village are much miffed at being misled about the eventual film. They are each speaking in Romanian in the film, which is odd as Borat himself speaks semi-disguised Czech.
The price of land around Bucharest has gone up by a factor of about 20 in the last few years.
A few years ago, I failed to take advantage of an investment opportunity to buy land in Bucharest.
The language is surprisingly easy to understand, being that it’s the closest surviving language to Latin. As almost all the TV’s in English with Romanian subtitles, just about everybody has enough English to communicate and they’re happy to.
The people are distinctly Latin in temperament. They have little of the sullenness and arsyness that so characterises many Slavic countries.
Ceausescu’s “securitate” had a reputation for being the most brutal of the communist secret police. They’d have to be; getting Romanians to obey anything, including traffic signals, would require some measure of brutality even today.
The currency is the new leu (lion in English). The old leu was hyperinflationary, meaning that an average hotel meal could easily set you back over a million. There were 50,000 to the pound. Last year, they launched the new leu. This confusingly knocked off four zeros instead of a vastly more intuitive three or six. New sparkly indestructible Australian style plastic bank notes were issued, to replace the sparkly plastic indestructible bank notes that had only very recently been introduced.
People still speak in terms of the old leu. When somebody asks for 26,000 lei, they really mean 2.6 lei. Generally, I meet this confusion by stuffing the equivalent of a 50 pound note in their hands and wait for a total surprise about how much change I get. To date, I’ve never been short changed, despite it seeming that I haven’t the first clue of what the money means. (I have a habit of checking afterwards when I have time). I fear that the same would not be true of taxi drivers and street hawkers in England.

At airport security, the same rules apply here as in the UK; with our recent paranoia that small bottles of water may be an immediate threat to life. In the UK, there are always the plastic boxes the other side of security that contain a querulous and petty little collection of nail files, small nail scissors and the occasional corkscrew. I just saw a similar collection here, except that it was augmented by flick knives, Swiss army knives and, most amusingly, a foot long wooden mallet with metal spikes at the end of it. This didn’t fit in the plastic box, so had been left on top of it, within easy reach of anybody else who had just passed through security. I can only imagine the argument that would have ensued as this was confiscated; presumably from an irate chef. It would not have been out of context to see hand guns and assault rifles in there as well.

In Russia, I’d find all of this truly scary. Somehow here in Romania, it’s funny and oddly charming. As the Economist said, it’s a charming and spirited place.

A rant about organic food

2006-12-14T15:56:00.000Z

I’ve just been reading some facts (I like me facts, me) about how it’s actually more environmentally friendly to buy

New Zealand

lamb in the

than Welsh lamb. This is a thorny subject which I suspect will elicit a response from a certain blogee and I have to say I’m not convinced entirely, but it’s interesting to consider the facts. What appears to be the right thing to do so very often isn’t. For the curious or the Welsh amongst you, this is apparently due to the fact that production in New Zealand requires virtually no energy and the meat is cheaply transported by slow, densely packed boats.

Take organic food. Well, if you must. It is now a talisman of being posh and English to buy organic food, as to feed kids anything other than organic food is seen as downright evil. I’m afraid I think the evil is the school run filling the middle class roads with cars and helping fragment society, but that’s a different matter. Here are a few facts about organic food that somewhat challenge the bogus green credentials of “going organic”:

It takes vastly more space to produce than intensively farmed food, especially organic meat. There’s not enough land for Britain to feed itself organically.

Organic is resolutely NOT a synonym for environmentally friendly. It is very rarely produced locally, often instead being airlifted from warm places far away. Sorry folks, but if you want organically produced asparagus and mandarins with your Christmas dinner, they didn’t grow in the Costwolds. They started their journey to your table being packed into a crate to fit into a 747 somewhere a long way away, quite possibly by people who would see a job with Nike in Indonesia In environmental and ethical terms, the avoidance of pesticides isn’t the issue. as a bit of a step up in their earning potential.

Farmers’ markets are bollocks. Have you ever seen the inside of a Tesco truck? It’s packed to utilise every centimetre and is a remarkably efficient way of getting stuff from its point of production (“A”) to its point of consumption (“B”). Driving a 4x4 with one passenger to a farmer’s market 20 miles away to buy some carrots and broccoli produces a warm feeling of being at one with nature, but also a much bigger carbon footprint than Tesco’s mass logistics. Of course, it would be rather good if Tesco favoured local suppliers and they would if we really wanted them to. Tesco would sell pretty much anything if we showed any sign of wanting to buy it. That’s the plus side of them being psychopaths.

I am always amused at the sight of 4x4s parked outside organic shops (there’s one in Chorlton in Manchester if you fancy a look at what I mean). The irony would be funny if climate change weren’t such an immediate crisis. The reality, of course, is that people aren’t actually buying organic food. They’re buying the idea that they’re a nice person and they don’t care to look too deeply under the surface to things as pesky as facts.

While we’re on a roll, let’s have a look at the Common Agricultural Policy.

The CAP is an abomination. It may have made some slight sense in the 1950s (especially if you were French) but it’s a nonsense now. It indisputably keeps the price of produce higher than it would naturally be. I’ve heard reliable estimates that each family in the UK pays EUR 900 more than it would need to each year because of CAP subsidies.

Such things don’t especially bother me because, let’s face it, me and pretty much all of my friends can afford to pay this premium for keeping Provence real priddy for our biannual trips to the Med. But a high proportion of Britain’s population get by courtesy of the ASDA value range. These kinds of costs matter to somebody earning the minimum wage. They matter a lot.

By keeping prices artificially high in the EU and paying EU farmers to over-produce, it makes it mightily difficult for farmers in developing countries to get a fair price for their goods. The CAP is a cruel barrier to fair trade and we owe it to people in developing nations to abolish it.

Which leads me onto “fair trade”. Ah, perhaps I should leave that for the next post while I wait for your shouts at me.

Gym bunnies

2006-12-01T14:01:00.000Z

Today’s been busy so far. I’m flying to Prague for work and am on a Friday afternoon flight from Manchester to Prague. The flight, predictably, is full of stag night boys, each of whom is determined to have the time of his life. If that’s not possible, each seems to be earnestly determined to beat their “PB” for beers sunk. The drinking has clearly started and as far as I can see it’s all a very well intentioned affair. Nevertheless, the Friday afternoon MAN – PRG flight is basically the preserve of stag nights up for “doing it large”. Henceforth, I shall refer to Friday’s flight OK645 as “the vomit rocket”.

I managed to get to Homos Place for a personal trainer session this morning, which I’m proud of managing to squeeze in. Once again, there were two muscle men, who I think are German judging by their accent. I’ve no idea if they were trying to be funny (I instinctively assume not) but they were weightlifting together and rather egging each other on, in heavily accented English. Here are some of the phrases used to encourage each other through the pain of lifting remarkably big weights:

“Harder! Come on, harder!”
“Take it! It’s no good if it’s not hard!”
“Hard, you want it hard!”
“Yes, come on, that’s it, PUSH!”
“Come on, make it hurt!”
“Give me more, you KNOW you can give me more!”

Andy (personal trainer) and I rather followed them around for an hour, as it was completely class entertainment. I don’t think that they had any idea how much like some bad porn film soundtrack they sounded. We giggled like schoolgirls at some of the stuff they were coming out with. It’s all great fun.

I bloviate, you bloviate, (and more probably) he bloviates…

2006-11-27T16:01:00.000Z

Dictionary.com has a great opt-in, which is to receive an email with their word of the day. It’s an American site, which means that sometimes the definitions they send are slightly off target compared to their “proper” English use. For example, it defined prevaricate as to deliberately depart from the truth. A flurry of emails between me and similarly minded English pedants later and we concluded that this must be the US meaning, which is more sinister than the UK meaning. The same is true of the word scheme, which in the UK is often something as benevolent as a pension but in American English almost certainly refers to criminality and conspiracy. Perhaps this says something about the more twitchy and suspicious nature of US society?

One word that came from word of the day is “bloviate”, which is rare in America and virtually non-existent in England. This is a shame, as it’s a fabulous word. The Americans have done such violence to the English language but we should encourage them when they invent good words by using them. To bloviate means to speak loudly, pompously and at length. I’m currently having lunch in my favourite coffee shop in Manchester and listening to a solicitor bloviate to his more junior colleague. Simply listening in has given me much information about their business, their colleagues and potentially sensitive information about their corporate clients. Surely no profession has the same tendency to bloviate as lawyers? As a chartered accountant, I’d recognise that bloviating in a public place is also a breach of confidentiality ethics.

I’m so glad to be out of law.

Veil, again

2006-11-24T17:05:00.000Z

So, the teaching assistant in Yorkshire who was suspended for refusing to take off her veil when teaching English to kids with special English needs has been sacked. Quite right, too. Click here for the story if you've not read it.

This comment is resolutely not racist. It’s simply not possible to do the job properly with some kids with one’s mouth covered, as some lipread. She’s no more qualified to do that job than I am qualified to work as a Rabbi. The local authority did well to stand up for commonsense against the tediously inevitable charges of racism. That slightly surprises me, although it pleases me too.

I have to say that I find the Arabic tradition’s assumption that women have to cover themselves with a veil, or men will be driven into a frenzy of unstoppable sexual urge rather offensive to straight men. I don’t think that’s racist but I’m open to feedback that it is. I suppose that if they’re not used to the sight of a woman’s naked (feigns shock…) face then it might be mildly distracting for a moment, but they’d get over it. In much the same way that I got over the slight distraction of seeing lots of completely naked unusually fit men at the gym. You simply quickly stop noticing such things and get about your business. Sorry boys and girls, I defend your right to wear what you want in general, but you really are being silly. Get over it.

Dragostea Tin Dei (and other shite)

2006-11-23T13:49:00.000Z

Sorry for the slight interruption in ramblings. I’ve been chided by a few people by email for the interruption. Sorry, I was in Gran Canaria for a week, doing very little (or at least very little worth hearing about).

I came down to London for what was basically a job interview yesterday and am catching up with friends. The interview was more of a fireside chat with somebody I’ve known for ages, although not well. An advantage of being an old git is that people in “the industry” already know who I am so it’s really just a case of whoring myself around for the best offer. Here was a typical part of the conversation with my female interviewer/ past colleague:

Interviewer: “If you’d come here six months ago, we were so busy, I would have bitten your hand off right there and then. And your head.”

Me: “Well, as long as you’d left the bits I really care about alone.”

Interviewer: (Laughs) “No point going there. I know that I’m not exactly your sort.”

Me: “Not unless you’re hiding a big secret. The bigger the better, if you get me.”

(General “fat slags” giggling and pleasing thoughts that we’re both being paid to talk shite).

The evening brought a very pleasing dinner with a friend who is very good fun and who I am apt to forget is very important. In a couple of hours, she basically put several months’ worth of work my way. I am lucky indeed to not only be able to get work quite easily, but also to get to work with people I like and respect. If I’m currently whoring myself around for money (as I am), I have the advantage of being a whore who’s fond of his clients. Can’t moan at that.

I between meetings, I went to Holmes Place in Putney. It’s much smaller and more crowded than I remember from my years of living in Putney; nothing like as good as Homos’ Place at the Printworks in Manchester. I’ve developed an unfortunate habit whilst jogging of unconsciously singing along to whatever’s on my ipod. As playlist “Gym A”, includes high energy camp trash that even I’m quite embarrassed to like, this can be particularly unfortunate. I realised that I was muttering away to “Numa Numa” yesterday; to the slightly amused bewilderment of the guy in the Coldplay T-shirt next to me. Muttering is about accurate, as this particular piece of auditory shite is in Romanian so I understand only a very few of the words. Sod it, he’ll never know who I am. In Manchester, people are far enough spaced apart that they don’t hear. In the more high density set up of London, I’ll have to learn to breathe through a gag whilst still jogging.

Freedom of speech, again

2006-11-11T11:58:00.000Z

Our glorious government is apparently outraged that the fact that a jury has acquitted Nick Griffin, the leader of the extreme right wing British National Party, of inciting race hatred. He’d described Islam as a “wicked, vicious faith”. Read the BBC news version of the story here.

Yet again, I despair of New Labour and thank God (or Allah if you prefer) for our common law traditions. A jury of 12 ordinary people has more power than the government. I find Nick Griffin and his compatriots repellent. Yet who the hell can possibly believe that passing laws to prevent people from expressing their sick views is going to kill those views? Who shall decide what it’s OK to say and what it’s not OK to say?

Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, head of judiciary and a prize moron said “[ramble, ramble, ramble…..] what is being said to young Muslim people in this country is that we as a country are anti-Islam, and we have got to demonstrate without compromising freedom that we are not.”

Look Charlie, you fool, the truth is a significant minority in Britain is horribly racist. The bare fact is that parts of this country are anti-Islam. I don’t consider myself racist, but there are certain elements of Islam that I don’t like one bit, mostly because of its homophobia, and I ought to be able to say so. Criminalising opinions that you don’t agree with will, rightly, make martyrs of people.

How will “Charlie’s law” work? Will there be lists in the town halls of Britain saying what we can say and what we can’t? The common law has had hundreds of years to determine an appropriate balance between freedom of speech and inciting violence and it’s done a good job: a much better job than I can imagine Charlie Falconer could do of anything. Keep your interfering hands off this country’s traditions.

Why you should despise Bush

2006-11-08T14:55:00.000Z

To my considerable shock, I discovered this morning that my cleaner supports George W Bush “because he’s a nice man.” She must be one of the small minority of people in Britain who knows the results of the

mid-term elections and not be both pleased and relieved. I hardly knew where to start and I seriously momentarily thought about asking for her key and suggesting that she doesn’t come back.

My cleaner is a nice person, who I suspect is greatly influenced by a friend of hers who lives in my block. This friend is somebody who I took a visceral dislike to when I met her (she seems the living definition of smug, petty, reactionary horridness).

Some things are so obvious that it’s hard to say why you believe them. If somebody were to ask you on the spot why murder is wrong, you may stumble for a moment to collect your thoughts. Your most likely answer is “because it obviously is!” That’s much how I answered the question of why I believe Bush to be bad news.

Now that I’ve had a bit of time to think it through, I thought I’d outline my top ten reasons for why the right thing to feel about Bush is loathing. I’ve tried to restrict myself to ten. Only the first two of these came to mind quickly enough to share them with my cleaner.

He stole the 2000 election. His henchmen deliberately designed voting forms to cause voter confusion in Florida. His pals on the Supreme Court shamelessly abused the sacred trust given to them when they were sworn in when they stopped the proper process of enquiry to usher Bush into power. Any statistical analysis shows the result in Florida to be totally invalid.
Despite the above, he had the sheer gall to take the oath of office; the only promise of which is to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. This supposedly Christian man took this oath with his hand on the Bible. This means he’s either lying about his faith, totally without understanding of what the oath means or just deeply stupid. My belief is that he’s all three.
Despite overwhelming evidence, he refuses to even acknowledge the damage to the planet that his buddies in the oil industry are doing. This is unforgivable.
He has no understanding or respect for the rule of law. Guantanamo Bay is an abomination. Tony Blair has a similar disregard for law. In civilised countries, we are ruled by laws, not by the whims of the most powerful. Protracted internment without trial is indefensible in all situations. Any court would agree to imprison people who clearly represent a danger. So why is Bush so determined to keep them outside the reach of the judiciary (remembering that a bent judiciary gave him a job in the first place?) Guantanamo Bay is also a violation of the US Constitution. I refer to my earlier point about failing to even observe the constitution, let alone protect it.
His government frequently bullies the media to ensure that alternative arguments are not given voice. A democracy requires a free media and he knows that. The neo-conservatives in the US aren’t just hostile to the Democrats, they’re hostile to democracy.
He greatly exaggerates fear of terrorism to get his way on a bunch of deeply unconnected things. He never tires of making political capital out of the tragedy of 9/11. This desecrates the memory of those who died.
His management of the US economy shows a deep lack of concern for consequences, as long as those consequences won’t be on his watch. The US economy is in la-la land and will inevitably crash sometime soon because the deficit has spun out of control from the beginning of his administration. He inherited the US economy in excellent state and has destroyed this in rapid time. Once again, the Democrats will have to mop up the mess. Bush and his pals will manage to spin this as the Democrats’ fault.
He smoothed over the anger caused by stealing an election in 2000 by promising to be “a uniter”. He then went on to bang on about gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research and all sorts of other issues that have no place in US politics (if you don’t know why, read the declaration of independence and the constitution itself. You’ll find very little about morals and values and rather a lot about freedom, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”). He did this as a way to keep his pals in the home educating, frothing-at-the-mouth, howling-at-the-moon extreme Christian right happy. He has surely been the most divisive president in living history. He has divided America in a way that will take decades to repair. In 1787, the world was a much more religious place, but the authors of the constitution were wise enough to ensure that religion and politics were kept at a safe distance for the good of both. Bush doesn’t care about this, as long as it gets him votes.
His obfuscation over a wide range of political issues is shocking. Osama bin Laden (remember him? He’s not talked of much now as he got away) has never had anything whatever in common with Saddam Hussein. They’re both foreign and frankly darkies. That’s good enough a connection for most of America. Bush knows this and he plays on it, despite the inevitable consequences of social strife and division.
He is just plain stupid. Leaving aside his inability to string together a sentence (even when an obliging speechwriter has pre-strung and autocued it for him) he has little less than contempt for history. Gulf War (part 2) was clearly going to become Vietnam (part 2). People in the street in Manchester could have told him that. At the time, I believed that invading Iraq was unavoidable, at least after some of the grandstanding and pose striking of the equally odious Jacques Chirac. However, there was never any hint of an exit strategy. He was stupid enough to believe that “mission accomplished” was true back in May 2003. Nobody who takes such a misplaced pride in being ignorant of the lessons of history should be polishing the White House floors, let alone soiling the Oval Office with his presence.

If you’re a Republican supporter and you’re offended by any of this, go to hell. Leave a comment though, as your pathetic attempts to justify your mindlessness will give us all a laugh.

On the plus side, America has belatedly woken up to all this. This is despite the inexpressible right wing propagandist bias of the US “news” media, meaning that a decent number of Americans are defiantly able, against considerable odds, to think for themselves – eventually.

God Bless America.

Morrissey, just get over yourself mate

2006-11-07T13:58:00.000Z

My earlier excitement at my “new” Technics turntable has faded somewhat.

I’ve come to realise that it’s just not very good. I was listening once again to Strangeways here we come by the Smiths yesterday. Of course, Morrissey’s always rather been one for slurring and wailing but I’ve had to come to realise that every now and again my turntable slows down and speeds up again. This causes transient key changes that are little short of alarming.

Ah well, what do you expect from ebay? I’m not going to buy another though. It’s good enough to get the gist of the old records. Back in 1987, lyrics like “there’s too much caffeine in your bloodstream and a lack of real spice in your life” just seemed ironic and funny. On a bad day nowadays, they sound semi-autobiographical.

Oh God, I'm turning into Morrissey.

2006-11-05T13:37:00.000Z

From 13 November – 20 November, I shall be in Gran Canaria on holiday. I can’t wait. I shall probably take my computer and thus blog from the poolside. Escape from my rantings is not that easy.

I’ve just found out that BBC Children in Need is Friday 17 November. This means that I shall miss the annual spectacle of:

People behind the counter in building societies dressing unconvincingly as a teddy bear
TV newsreaders doing a “hilarious” can can dance routine
Weathergirls doing “Singing in the rain” (or some other such pun)…again
Having a can waved under my nose with money demanded with menaces.

You will have gathered that there is little about Children in Need night that I don’t thoroughly loathe. I loathe the forced, false, embarrassing hilarity. I deeply resent the implication that if I don’t give generously, I’m a total bastard and most probably a child molester. I deeply disapprove of TV newsreaders becoming celebrities in any case and watching them do “wacky” things is as inappropriate as it’s embarrassing. In general, anything that tends to be described as “wacky” is hard to bear.

Perhaps above all, I deeply think that we shouldn’t live in a society where children can be in genuine need and get government off the hook by contributing to charity. If there’s need there, it’s the job of government to tax me to fix the need. This means that it’s almost certainly not need, but want. Very often, the “need” is actually disability. So it’s just one big conscience assuaging exercise in pity, allowing people to then spend the next 12 months pretending real social need isn’t there. The whole thing is as bogus as hell and I’m so glad to be missing it. Don’t give them any money; it only encourages it.

2006-11-03T10:12:00.000Z

In just over a week, it will be Remembrance Day. When I was at school (I left in 1987) almost everybody wore the Haig Fund remembrance poppy from the start of November for about two weeks. The word “poppy” sounds soft but it was a touching symbol of remembering the suffering and sacrifice of previous generations.

For the benefit of foreign readers, Remembrance Day is the anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War. It is the eleventh hour or the eleventh day of the eleventh month each year. The national ceremony of remembrance is led by the Queen the nearest Sunday to this date. It’s normal to wear a poppy as remembrance. This isn’t a tradition in Ireland, even though huge numbers of Irishmen died in WW1 under the British flag.

I’ve noticed that each year, fewer and fewer people wear a poppy. I find this sad. When I was in my early twenties, I always thought that it might be some distant comfort to veterans and surviving relatives of those who died to see younger people recognising their sacrifice and loss. There are still lots of these people around. Also, I honestly believe that there is a need to remember. It’s a cliché that he who doesn’t learn from history is doomed to repeat it. Perhaps it’s not a cliché? After all, the Bush administration seems not to have heard it.

Yesterday in central Manchester, I noted that perhaps one in a hundred people was wearing a poppy. British troops are being killed in significant numbers in Iraq right now and don’t we need to remember that?

Go on, get over the fact that wearing a poppy sounds a bit like like wearing a pansy! This is one of our few clearly honourable traditions and we shouldn’t let it fade away.

The wheel of steel

2006-11-02T00:18:00.000Z

For the last 20 years or so, I’ve really wanted to own a Technics turntable. I’d always resisted this, but gave in a year ago and bought one on ebay. It arrived without a stylus, which was a considerable disappointment that it took me nearly a further year to fix. But fixed today it was. Now I have a sexy technics turntable, together with the strobe light thing to get the speed right. I find that strobe light thing really ace for some reason.

So I shall spend the next few weeks making friends once more with the inexcusable shite that I listened to in the 1980s. A brief run-through of some of the records (especially the greatest hits compilations) really proves beyond reasonable doubt that ephemeral pop of the 1980s really was as bad as you remember it to be.

Tears for Fears (OK), Go West (one good single), Tanita Tikaram’s second album (shocking), Howard Jones (surprisingly OK) and the Thompson Twins (who I shouldn’t have mentioned because you’ll now have “Hold. Me. Now” in your head all day. Sorry.

Room 101

2006-10-31T08:18:00.000Z

I’m aware that I have a habit of writing nothing on this blog for ages, then come in there with a big long blog entry that is so long it puts people off reading it. This is reducing my potential number of readers and is certainly reducing the number of comments I receive.

So forgive me, if you will, for indulging in something of a filler tactic. I have fallen into a habit with a good friend of mine that we send each other very short text messages about two things. The first is when one of us spots a celebrity. For example, when I saw Sir Ian McKellen at Homos Place gym the other week I sent her a text message just saying “Ian McKellen, Homos Place, MCR”. It’s a strangely satisfying thing to do. I shall share such things with you as well on the odd occasion that they happen (I live in Manchester, not Soho).

The other thing we do is send each other text messages about the small daily irritations of life. Sharing them with another really helps restore balance and sanity. I recommend that you do the same. Feel free to post your “Room 101” entries as comments.

The name, as I’m sure you know, is derived from a (still) very good TV show in the UK where celebrities come on and list things that would be in their own private Room 101 (from Orwell’s 1984). It’s rarely less than funny. Ann Robinson famously put the Welsh in Room 101, which is the only noteworthy thing I feel she’s ever done.

Anyway, here’s one I sent the other day to get the ball rolling.

Room 101:Daft young women who go to work in MCR in late October wearing sod all, whine endlessly about the cold & inflict suffocating extreme heating on others.

To make it more sport, if it’s possible to keep these within 160 characters (I’m too mean to pay for long text messages), it’s best to do so. On a blog I guess one could be more creative. Write them as haiku perhaps?

For a laugh

2006-10-27T08:47:00.000Z

This is a slightly unusual blog entry for me. No stream of consciousness, no ranting.
I was sent this by a friend today and I thought I'd share it. It really amused me and I hope it amuses you too.
A week after my car was broken into, I still haven't got it back. It's all a bit of a pain now.

Hell hath no fury like a woman who needs a slap

2006-10-26T07:41:00.000Z

So, Naomi Campbell has been arrested for assault. See the story here. Technically, I expect that she’s been arrested for battery, but I won’t go all lawyer on y’all.

As the title implies, I believe that she needs a slap. Sod counselling, just a slap. In Britain, it's now illegal to smack children, but I do believe it should be legal to slap adults who are really, really asking for it.

I’ve always found her completely insufferable and this doesn’t surprise me one bit. I completely fail to understand how anybody who consistently behaves so badly without actually doing anything interesting to balance it can attract the admiration of absolutely anybody. Am I the only person who thinks that she’s dense and spoilt? Sure, shooting to fame age 15 must be quite tough (especially for somebody clearly below average intelligence) but she sure as shit has enough money to buy counselling to deal with it. To be fair, it's alleged that it was her counsellor who she hit, so perhaps that won't work. Personally, I think she should be kept in a cage, away from the rest of us.

Diana Ross, amusingly, was arrested at Heathrow a few years ago for battering a security woman. She defended herself by saying she was a “diva”. Silly bint. I faintly forgive her though because she’s made some nice hummable tunes over the years. In Britain though, if a celebrity slaps somebody else, they get arrested. She and her publicity people were appalled that she was subject to the same rules as the rest of us. Welcome to Britain, sweetheart.

And while we’re at it, what do we think of Heather Mills-McCartney? I’ll leave that for another blog, I think. Let's just say that I'm going to take a bit of convincing that she's telling the truth.

Unexpected poignancy

2006-10-24T19:05:00.000Z

As you may know if you read the blog below, my father recently left my mother. I’ve no idea if they’ll get back together, or even if I want them to. If it means a significant chance of everybody going through this again if it reunion doesn’t work, it would be best for everybody for them to part for good.

This seismic event happened a fortnight ago and I’d not actually seen Mum since. Don’t jump on me with this one: my Mum and I are very much alike. We appreciate the offers of help and support but only want to see people when the time is right. We’re much the same when we’re ill. I knew that I had to force myself to keep contact to phone only until she suggested meeting.

I don’t think I’ll come to terms with calling that house “Mum’s” rather than “Mum and Dad’s”. I think she should sell it and buy something smaller somewhere else. Even if they somehow get back together, the place will be full of unhappy recent memories. I think she’ll do that.

We had a very enjoyable evening together, talking a lot and going for dinner in a nearby pub. Neither of us cried, although it was always under the surface. It’s the small things that catch you unprepared and thus likely to cry. I stayed overnight but lay in bed until Mum had gone to work. Again, it’s what she’d want: she hates saying goodbye. After she’d gone, I got out of the house quite quickly but noticed the odd sadness of noticing that the fridge and cupboards were full. It might be comfort shopping (which would be out of character) but instead I think it’s just that she’s never in her whole life shopped for just one person. She has no idea of how few things she actually needs, so the fridge is full and stuff goes to waste. This will upset her, I know.

I’m sure that people who have experienced bereavement know these feelings. You come to terms with the drive and the wardrobe being empty. You rehearse the right words to use and refer to “the situation”. But you’re not quite ready for the shock of seeing the shocking nakedness of your mother’s hands with no rings for the first ever time. You’re not ready for opening the cupboard and finding yourself implausibly blabbering over the unexpected sight of an unopened packet of ginger nuts. It’s truly strange.

Thieving Salford Scallies

2006-10-21T09:26:00.000Z

On the whole, I respect the police. Well, the English ones at least. I am not a fan of the Czech police one bit, who I invariably found to be parasitic and a general irritation. I always thought of them as wasps; seem to see them out everywhere in vast hovering numbers (at least when the weather’s nice); a generally malevolent presence and source of irritation without any apparent purpose.

The Greater Manchester Police called on me yesterday to tell me that my car had been broken into. They were down to earth but polite - first name terms straight away. They followed the rules by the book, for example by making sure that I didn’t see the twelve year old scrote who threw a brick through the driver’s window to steal my satnav. This, apparently, is because it’s not unknown for irate victims of petty crime to take the law into their own hands and give the kid a good kicking, even though the police are right there. Predictably, I find this idea amusing. It was also pretty obvious that the police would have been quite pleased to see somebody deliver a good kicking to the kid and his associates that he’d grassed up but professionalism precluded them turning a blind eye.

I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that I was politely asked if I could take myself and my car to a police station a few miles away while they took this kid for “a word with his parents”. They promised to join me there in half an hour and keep me for no longer than half an hour when I got there. They were good to their word on both counts.

During my wait at the police station for the arresting officer to come and take my statement, I found out a number of interesting things. The first is unsurprising; the police deal with the dregs of society and generally have a slight gallows humour about society as a result. They were quite clearly pleased to be dealing with a punter (me) who was polite to them and keen to help without making a fuss or wallowing in self-pity. It’s only a car after all. To be more precise, it’s only a skoda.

I hadn’t paid attention when the arresting officer gave me his name so I didn’t know who to ask for. The best I could come up with to describe who I was looking for was “Late twenties, about five foot eleven, scouser”. This was a sanitised version of what I had really been thinking which went more like “Late twenties, nicely toned, cute, nice eyes, nice smile, about size 11 feet and surprisingly pleasing voice for a scouser”. I thought it best to find something between my description and theirs which would probably be “Male IC2” or something equally technical.

The policeman on the desk smiled wryly and said “They’re all scousers. Manchester’s policed by scousers and Liverpool’s policed by Mancs. It’s the only way they can all get a normal life when they get home.” I find this fascinating. The M62 evidently daily supports a partial swap of populations that police each other, presumably crossing in the demilitarised zone known as Warrington.

Anyway, they got the kid, I was able to confirm that the satnav they’d caught him with red handed was mine because it had all my data in it and they’re now confident that they can “finger” four scallies that they’ve been after for a while. They were quite open about this being a “nice job”. They were all a bit upset that this had happened at the end of their shift and they would miss the Liverpool football game as a result, but the job had to be done.

To make things even better, the immensely helpful skoda garage stayed open a bit late to take my car from me and keep it secure for a few days while they replace the bust locks and the window; thus allowing me to get the 0730 flight to Bucharest the following morning.

Cute policeman told me that the parents of the scally they’d found with my satnav seemed pretty likely to dispense some tough love over the weekend. This added to the “nice job” aspect, as this is apparently rare. It’s normal for such parents to smack the kid around for having screwed up their job, apparently. It seems that this kid had fallen in with the wrong crowd.

In a rather strange twist, I’m told that I am invited to go back and make a further statement about my feelings of what punishment the kid should get. I don’t approve of this. I want the kid (or his parents) to pay for the damage but it’s not the place of victims to decide punishment. We don’t have a system of sharia law in England, nor should we have. Victims of crime are hardly likely to come up with a proportionate response. Of course, I’ll have to pretend to be outraged to slightly balance the softy social workers who will be pulling in the opposite direction. It’s all nonsense though.

Ah, what a nice thought this is. Nice policeman has my mobile number and he’s promised to call me on Monday. Is it wrong for me to be looking forward to my rendezvous with a handsome man in uniform?

A human tragedy

2006-10-16T22:27:00.000Z

This is a photo of a fifteen year-old who in Manchester today pleaded guilty to murder of a younger boy. He was duly given a life sentence with a minimum “tariff” of twelve years. It’s been the main story on the BBC news site all day. For those unfamiliar with English justice, this means that he will be inside for twelve years at an absolute minimum, no matter how contrite and unthreatening to society the parole board judges him to be. If he’s not held to be no threat to society, he will be inside for life without any further trial.

It’s a really very tragic story, of course. He cynically persuaded the younger boy to his house, made a sexual advance on him and, upon being rebuffed, apparently felt that he had to kill the younger lad as this was the only sure fire way of making sure that nobody would find out. This latter stage of the plan also appears to be premeditated as a contingency.

A few thoughts occur to me on this, in addition to feeling the pain of the family of the victim. The first is what the hell is going on with our society when a fifteen year old is so messed up about his sexuality that the fear of it being discovered motivates murder? Obviously, this kid had some huge psychological damage but it was a gay panic moment that caused the murder itself. The media is making a bit of a deal of the fact that he’s gay, which I can’t help but feel is probably helping create the circumstances that caused this murder in the first place.

I also did find the photo rather sad. This is obviously a kid who is really scared and he looks vulnerable too. This kid seems to me to be a bit of a victim too. Obviously, about 0.0001% as much of a victim as the kid that he killed with a frying pan and a knife, but a victim nevertheless.

Perhaps most disturbingly of all, I have to admit that I found him really cute. It’s something to do with the rabbit caught in headlamps look. Perhaps this explains my tendency to find occasional romantic partners who are both younger than me and generally also nutters? They’ve never been fifteen though, I wish to point out!

It’s all very sad indeed. I don’t think that vengeance is an honourable thing in a civilised society and I do wonder how this kid (who is a few miles from my flat I presume) is feeling tonight. Still, at least nobody in the prison’s preparing a lethal injection as I suspect they would be on the other side of the Atlantic.

Veiled racism or commonsense? You decide.

2006-10-15T04:56:00.000Z

Britain

is currently caught up in debate over the preference for (a minority of) Muslim women’s preference for wearing a veil is a Good Thing. Have a look at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/6050392.stm if you’re not up with the story.

I find it slightly depressing that the only time we have a debate about something like this (ie something that matters) is when a politician whose star is fading sees it as an opportunity to make a run for the deputy leadership of his party. Sorry Jack, mate, I’ve always thought you were OK, but nobody’s fooled by the timing here. A whole party conference just passed and nobody even noticed you. It was time for you to stir something up to get noticed again.

We have become scared to debate anything that might offend people in this country. To illustrate, speaking as a gay man, I’m totally happy for people to tell me they think I deserve to burn in hell. I’m happy for them to express these (shit) opinions as long as they don’t start the process there and then with a petrol bomb. It remains my absolute moral right to do as I wish, no matter how much they voice their disapproval. Equally, Muslim women are thoroughly entitled to wear whatever they wish, but it remains our right to give voice to the self-evident observation that it’s an impediment to fully functioning in our culture and that, frankly, many of them look like an obese version of Darth Vader and thus plain silly.

As I understand the law of England now, however, anybody having a pop at me for my sexual preference could be accused of a hatecrime. Equally, I could be accused of inciting racial hatred for the paragraph above. Sure, it might be bad taste and/ or unfunny to others, but it’s nothing to do with hatred. It is wrong to choke off a right so important as freedom of expression to protect a (non-existent) right to not be offended by the views of others. Britain has never had any right to be protected from being offended, nor should it ever have one.

If a person can’t do their job properly because of some traditional article of clothing, that’s unfortunate but surely just bad luck. She has to get another job which enables her to exercise her right to dress as she wishes, whilst still being able to perform properly in the job. Some jobs are incompatible with people’s traditions by their nature and denying this is the folly of dogma. All dogmatic politics and religion are, in my view, just institutionalised and ritualised cop outs from reality.

There’s something faintly disturbing about how a well reasoned, measured (if politically opportune or cynical) comment by one of yesterday’s men can cause such furore, followed by overwhelming support. What other latent views do we near universally share that could equally be ignited I wonder? I do hope that they’re benign.

I have a confession to make. This blog entry was originally posted as a comment on the very excellent ambulance driver blog http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog It’s worth a look at this blog if you haven’t already. The book of its previous entries “Blood, Sweat and Tea” is also a good Christmas gift.