I'm in the grip - every so slightly - of a religious crisis.
This is quite hard to carry off if you're not religious, but I'm doing my best. It's probably more to do with my massive distrust of certainty and people who display it. While this normally involves me hating the Pope and Mrs Thatcher, this Christmas I'm getting more bothered by atheists.
Atheists are *not* the same as agnostics, who I love since if they were actually a religion and needed a gesture equivalent of the Catholic crossing of one's self would be to give a gentle shrug.
Our father, who might just possibly be in heaven.
Hallowed be thy name, though obviously you don't have one. Certainly not in this prayer. That's a bit of an oversight, isn't it?
Thy kingdom be available to believers of other faiths or none
As they possibly are right about all this and you may not exist at all or at least not in the way presented by generations of Judeo-Christian scholars
Thy will be done as it is in heaven, which is a great get-out clause because if heaven doesn't exist then your will won't be done, in which case that will be just fine.
Give us this day our daily bread, but if not we'll just make it ourselves or get it from Tesco's...
Etc
But I'm struggling with two things lately. The first is a few friends who've been heading off to "Godless Carols". The idea of trying to strip Christmas of any remaining religious overtones after years of steadily suffocating commercialisation hits me as about as necessary as launching a campaign to eradicate the letter "H" in the speech of Essex school children. It's happening anyway, and frankly you're making yourself look weird.
The second is that this actually made me angry*. Not because they're necessarily wrong, or that I even disagree with most of it - Creationists are scary bastards and should stay out of our schools. If God exists he'll survive scientists, after all. But principally it's the bit about how atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I'll believe that when I see non-stamp collectors make a short film about how people shouldn't collect stamps and that everyone who does is a cunt. Or when people post on Facebook that they're heading off to buy a "stampless" stamp-album. I found that little video to be screamingly smug and so full of its own righteousness that it made me wonder how long it would be before we have our own atheist suicide bomber.
I recognise that the rise of of the Christian right and creationists in America requires response, but we don't have them over here, instead we have millions of people who believe in all sort of things (and are treated equally nonetheless), some of them, every now again, perfectly reasonable.
So leave off all the stuff about believing in invisible men in the sky being mental: now mater how seductive a viewpoint, it's intolerant. And if you've got a problem with the religious aspects of Christmas, don't sing fucking carols in the first place.
* yes, I was a bit surprised at my reaction too
Sunday, 19 December 2010
Great
I now use the word "great" exclusively in an ironic* way.
I'm sure at one point it was a word that might have come forth in order to appreciate the wonders of life and the universe, like "brilliant" and (if you're from Essex and in your late 30s) "skill". But now it just crops up at the end of statements like "Well, that's just great" or all alone with overtones of Blackadderian despair.
Great.
However, I still admire it's tricky homophonic qualities, and will never forget the email I once read from a disgruntled former employee who had railed against her boss for not defending her from being made redundant. She made much play of how this boss would be unable to cope without her due to his tendency to be disorganised and - crucially - misspell everything, a flaw that she would heroinically mend with her attention to detail and, er, encyclopedic grasp of the dictionary.
The subject heading?
Ungreatful.
Perhaps she, too, was being ironic.
* all right, I mean "sarcastic", but irony sounds so much more sophisticated.
I'm sure at one point it was a word that might have come forth in order to appreciate the wonders of life and the universe, like "brilliant" and (if you're from Essex and in your late 30s) "skill". But now it just crops up at the end of statements like "Well, that's just great" or all alone with overtones of Blackadderian despair.
Great.
However, I still admire it's tricky homophonic qualities, and will never forget the email I once read from a disgruntled former employee who had railed against her boss for not defending her from being made redundant. She made much play of how this boss would be unable to cope without her due to his tendency to be disorganised and - crucially - misspell everything, a flaw that she would heroinically mend with her attention to detail and, er, encyclopedic grasp of the dictionary.
The subject heading?
Ungreatful.
Perhaps she, too, was being ironic.
* all right, I mean "sarcastic", but irony sounds so much more sophisticated.
Midnight
But I miss you midnight. Maybe see you later.
Director
I've signed up to another play. It's another Shakespearean bit-part, so I might need to make sure I do something very different soon*, but it won't require much effort and I should be able to learn the lines in the twenty minute interval between the end of the Verve's "Urban Hymns" and the bit with the spooky baby crying.
I would have liked a bigger part, obviously, but this cameo thing does have it's advantages - I'm much less like to reach the stage where I want to kill the Director. Not a personal slight on the *actual* Director, it must be said, but merely an honest reflection of how I have felt about most of the ones with which I have previously worked. As a sub-species, Directors tend to display a debilitating mixture of narcissism, narcissism and - very occasionally - narcissism. Whether it manifests itself in long, droning, opinionated verbal meanderings, attempting to control every aspect of an actor's performance ("puppet theatre") or an ability to understand that their play is not the most important thing in the universe, there's nothing more that the average Director deserves more for Christmas than a punch in the face.
But the real reason I'm reticent is because my last proper Director was really nice. It was like finding a Tory that doesn't like to spit at poor people, or an England cricket team that can beat Australia. I'm very worried that the next one will be like Perth - a crushing disappointment. But I'm sure they won't. And if they are, I won't have to put up with it for very long. Commitmentphobe actors - just what the world needs more of.
* yes, even non-professionals** get type cast
** amateur scum
I would have liked a bigger part, obviously, but this cameo thing does have it's advantages - I'm much less like to reach the stage where I want to kill the Director. Not a personal slight on the *actual* Director, it must be said, but merely an honest reflection of how I have felt about most of the ones with which I have previously worked. As a sub-species, Directors tend to display a debilitating mixture of narcissism, narcissism and - very occasionally - narcissism. Whether it manifests itself in long, droning, opinionated verbal meanderings, attempting to control every aspect of an actor's performance ("puppet theatre") or an ability to understand that their play is not the most important thing in the universe, there's nothing more that the average Director deserves more for Christmas than a punch in the face.
But the real reason I'm reticent is because my last proper Director was really nice. It was like finding a Tory that doesn't like to spit at poor people, or an England cricket team that can beat Australia. I'm very worried that the next one will be like Perth - a crushing disappointment. But I'm sure they won't. And if they are, I won't have to put up with it for very long. Commitmentphobe actors - just what the world needs more of.
* yes, even non-professionals** get type cast
** amateur scum
Sunday, 14 November 2010
Rescue
My girlfriend had a strange dream last night.
That is not, in itself, newsworthy. My girlfriend has some of the strangest dreams I've ever heard, which she can recall with alarming clarity. This particularly one involved a cat getting stuck in some quicksand. Apparently, after some distress and trying to rescue it, the cat sank completely, only to appear a few minutes later in another location completely unharmed.
I think this dream has meaning. Well, I don't really, but I mean I can pretend that it does and twist it to make a point, like all dream 'experts'. And it's this. Animals can look after themselves. If I hear of another drowned human who jumped into a freezing lake to save a dog which subsequently got out, I'll scream. The dog is laughing at you. It's dog murder. They discuss it in advance, and afterwards they go and howl about it down the dog pub. A dog who tricks his owner into dying a cold and watery death gets a lot of kudos and even more bitches. Don't fall for their big eyed adoration look, it's all a sham. They'll have you in the deep freeze before you can throw a stick.
I'm not saying cats have got it in for you in the same way, it's just they'd eat your face if they could get away with it. Just sayin'.
That is not, in itself, newsworthy. My girlfriend has some of the strangest dreams I've ever heard, which she can recall with alarming clarity. This particularly one involved a cat getting stuck in some quicksand. Apparently, after some distress and trying to rescue it, the cat sank completely, only to appear a few minutes later in another location completely unharmed.
I think this dream has meaning. Well, I don't really, but I mean I can pretend that it does and twist it to make a point, like all dream 'experts'. And it's this. Animals can look after themselves. If I hear of another drowned human who jumped into a freezing lake to save a dog which subsequently got out, I'll scream. The dog is laughing at you. It's dog murder. They discuss it in advance, and afterwards they go and howl about it down the dog pub. A dog who tricks his owner into dying a cold and watery death gets a lot of kudos and even more bitches. Don't fall for their big eyed adoration look, it's all a sham. They'll have you in the deep freeze before you can throw a stick.
I'm not saying cats have got it in for you in the same way, it's just they'd eat your face if they could get away with it. Just sayin'.
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Consensus
Very hard not to write an entry that belongs more in Speedy Rants than this. The word "consensus" is becoming a bit of a pejorative word since it has become a way of representing horrible ideas and abandoning principle on the basis of doing what everyone wants. This seems to result in doing things that no one wants but no one quite knows who to blame anymore.
Once you've got the word "consensus" into your head as a rather grim one that involves people grudgingly accepting compromise rather than gleefully participating its use in relation to sex suddenly becomes oddly depressing. "Consenting Adults" goes from a phrase representing mutual trust leading to the abandonment of physical inhibitions and the pursuit of ecstasy, to "oh all right, suck it if you must but hurry up, Nick Clegg's on Question Time in a minute."
Once you've got the word "consensus" into your head as a rather grim one that involves people grudgingly accepting compromise rather than gleefully participating its use in relation to sex suddenly becomes oddly depressing. "Consenting Adults" goes from a phrase representing mutual trust leading to the abandonment of physical inhibitions and the pursuit of ecstasy, to "oh all right, suck it if you must but hurry up, Nick Clegg's on Question Time in a minute."
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Menu
Ah, falling further behind....
A menu for a vegetarian is an odd beast. It is not (generally) an array of options, but rather a puzzle, a bit of mental stimulation that lies between you and digestive happiness. The Find the Vegetarian Meal replaces the no doubt far more tricky but enjoyable "what do I feel like eating" experience that most diners get.
There's almost certain to be a starter with Goat's Cheese in it. However, this may not actually be marked with a "V", leaving you in a state of uncertainty as to exactly how the Goat's Cheese was made. So you may just have to have some sort of spinach and pastry composition on the basis that if either of those things have dead animal you've probably accidentally wandered into Sweeney Todd's Delicatessen.
For the mains I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you will probably be offered Risotto. In all likelihood mushroom, though in these enlightened times you might be offered Butternut Squash. Things have come a long way since you were given mushrooms with melted cheese on them, and lightly flayed by the Chef and your skin served to the Duke of Cambridge as a dessert if you complained.
All of which makes vegetarian restaurants a complete nightmare. I have lost (or never developed) all the necessary skills of actually making a proper choice from a menu. It's horrible, and makes me want to hide in a corner with a pillow over my head gently murmuring a nursery rhyme about cats. Too much choice! Bring me a salad. And maybe a pastry with spinach. It's fine, really. Now go away.
A menu for a vegetarian is an odd beast. It is not (generally) an array of options, but rather a puzzle, a bit of mental stimulation that lies between you and digestive happiness. The Find the Vegetarian Meal replaces the no doubt far more tricky but enjoyable "what do I feel like eating" experience that most diners get.
There's almost certain to be a starter with Goat's Cheese in it. However, this may not actually be marked with a "V", leaving you in a state of uncertainty as to exactly how the Goat's Cheese was made. So you may just have to have some sort of spinach and pastry composition on the basis that if either of those things have dead animal you've probably accidentally wandered into Sweeney Todd's Delicatessen.
For the mains I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you will probably be offered Risotto. In all likelihood mushroom, though in these enlightened times you might be offered Butternut Squash. Things have come a long way since you were given mushrooms with melted cheese on them, and lightly flayed by the Chef and your skin served to the Duke of Cambridge as a dessert if you complained.
All of which makes vegetarian restaurants a complete nightmare. I have lost (or never developed) all the necessary skills of actually making a proper choice from a menu. It's horrible, and makes me want to hide in a corner with a pillow over my head gently murmuring a nursery rhyme about cats. Too much choice! Bring me a salad. And maybe a pastry with spinach. It's fine, really. Now go away.
Sunday, 17 October 2010
Correlate
There's a piece in the media Guardian today saying that there's no correlation between a newspaper's online circulation and any falls in it's print readership. It's fairly interesting and a bit surprising, but not as surprising as finding out that The Daily Mail's online readership is growing by 60% a year.
I truly don't understand. I can imagine the 2m Mail readers pouring over it's racist cancer scare stories and wiping the ink from their fingers on the face of a passing
immigrant child. What I don't expect them to do is be surfing away and choosing the Daily Mail when they could looking for porn footage of someone in a Winston Churchill mask buggering someone dressed up as Jacques Delors.
In short I have a default expectation of Internet users to be young trendy liberal types. In other news Narnia is real and the Government truly believes in fairness. Yup, I'm as naive as a Disney character.
It's not like there's a single sane person commenting at the bottom of BBC articles. These angry drooling maniacs have clearly found a perfect bosom to nestle in with Mail Online. If we could hack into it and, at a peak traffic moment, transmit a deadly ray that pierces their living brains and turns them into smoking husks we might just make the world a better place. Though mass murder probably causes cancer, so I'd better not.
I truly don't understand. I can imagine the 2m Mail readers pouring over it's racist cancer scare stories and wiping the ink from their fingers on the face of a passing
immigrant child. What I don't expect them to do is be surfing away and choosing the Daily Mail when they could looking for porn footage of someone in a Winston Churchill mask buggering someone dressed up as Jacques Delors.
In short I have a default expectation of Internet users to be young trendy liberal types. In other news Narnia is real and the Government truly believes in fairness. Yup, I'm as naive as a Disney character.
It's not like there's a single sane person commenting at the bottom of BBC articles. These angry drooling maniacs have clearly found a perfect bosom to nestle in with Mail Online. If we could hack into it and, at a peak traffic moment, transmit a deadly ray that pierces their living brains and turns them into smoking husks we might just make the world a better place. Though mass murder probably causes cancer, so I'd better not.
Saturday, 16 October 2010
Shedding
When a reptile sheds its skin, does it hang it up next to the lawnmower? Not if it's a snake. Given what happens to a hose pipe when it gets put in the shed, I reckon no snake would be safe to go in there.
Bad jokes, I know. But I wonder how long it will be before the word "shedding" morphs into some sort equivalent of "housing" but with more wood and a tendency to house families of robins? Words change all the time, and since so do human habits (I know some who started a business in their shed) and people need words for them they might just save time and borrow this one.
When I was a kid my parents had an asbestos shed. That's reassuring, isn't it? An entire shed made of one of earth's most poisonous naturally occurring substances. A bit like building a shed out of nuclear waste, or making a chicken coop by tying a load of foxes together in a hoop. We only got rid of it becuase while we were on holiday one of the neighbours' kids climbed on it and fell through the roof. The asbestos roof. She's still alive. So far. I'll wait another decade before I breathe a sigh of relief. With a hankie over my mouth.
Still, the shed never burned down, eh? That's a relief. Almost worth it.
Bad jokes, I know. But I wonder how long it will be before the word "shedding" morphs into some sort equivalent of "housing" but with more wood and a tendency to house families of robins? Words change all the time, and since so do human habits (I know some who started a business in their shed) and people need words for them they might just save time and borrow this one.
When I was a kid my parents had an asbestos shed. That's reassuring, isn't it? An entire shed made of one of earth's most poisonous naturally occurring substances. A bit like building a shed out of nuclear waste, or making a chicken coop by tying a load of foxes together in a hoop. We only got rid of it becuase while we were on holiday one of the neighbours' kids climbed on it and fell through the roof. The asbestos roof. She's still alive. So far. I'll wait another decade before I breathe a sigh of relief. With a hankie over my mouth.
Still, the shed never burned down, eh? That's a relief. Almost worth it.
Decay
There's definitely something going on with my teeth. They've come over all sensitive after a lifetime of being fine, like a 35 year old ballet-dancer suddenly thinking "shit, you can basically see my cock in this outfit! Get me some trousers!"
It's most disconcerting.
Of course, my 2 bottles of Irn Bru-a-day habit probably isn't really making positive contribution to my dental health, so it was always a matter of time. It's a miracle that I have anything sticking out of my gums other than blackened stumps. Maybe I should just think "stuff it" and have them all removed. After all, they're all going to fall out in the end anyway (unless I'm beaten to death by members of the Bullingdon Club on a day trip to Cambridge, thus sparing me the pain of ageing). At least I wouldn't have to chew anything anymore. I could have all my hair lasered out to get used to being bald husk, and have tiny brown spots tattooed all over my hands. Genius. Age will hold no fears.
But what to do about my decent skin? I could spend hours a week deliberately exposing myself to harmful radiation in order to accelerate the decay of my skin cells. I hear it has the unfortunate side effect of making you look - very briefly - healthy and good looking, but don't worry, that wears off pretty fucking quickly.
It's most disconcerting.
Of course, my 2 bottles of Irn Bru-a-day habit probably isn't really making positive contribution to my dental health, so it was always a matter of time. It's a miracle that I have anything sticking out of my gums other than blackened stumps. Maybe I should just think "stuff it" and have them all removed. After all, they're all going to fall out in the end anyway (unless I'm beaten to death by members of the Bullingdon Club on a day trip to Cambridge, thus sparing me the pain of ageing). At least I wouldn't have to chew anything anymore. I could have all my hair lasered out to get used to being bald husk, and have tiny brown spots tattooed all over my hands. Genius. Age will hold no fears.
But what to do about my decent skin? I could spend hours a week deliberately exposing myself to harmful radiation in order to accelerate the decay of my skin cells. I hear it has the unfortunate side effect of making you look - very briefly - healthy and good looking, but don't worry, that wears off pretty fucking quickly.
Disguise
There's a tradition in drama and comedy of a lead character disguising himself (or possibly herself) and hearing truths about themselves that they would never normally discover (think Henry V walking amongst his troops). This may be the cause of the old expression that eavesdroppers never heard anything good about themselves.
That's fairly harsh. Are they suggesting that the kind of person who would eavesdrop is clearly a cunt, and therefore all their friends will be saying: "Geoff, he's such a fuckface. And he's an eavesdropper, the weaselly shit, I hacked into his emails and read him talking about it.What a misshapen cock."? Or is it just supposed to be bad luck, so that if you eavesdrop it will be the one moment when someone is saying "... and he fucks badgers..." and then you run away screaming and miss the bit where they add "...but no one minds cos he's so nice the rest of the time and who doesn't occasionally want to violate a medium sized omnivorous mammal anyway, I say fair enough."?
It's a fucking minefield.
That's fairly harsh. Are they suggesting that the kind of person who would eavesdrop is clearly a cunt, and therefore all their friends will be saying: "Geoff, he's such a fuckface. And he's an eavesdropper, the weaselly shit, I hacked into his emails and read him talking about it.What a misshapen cock."? Or is it just supposed to be bad luck, so that if you eavesdrop it will be the one moment when someone is saying "... and he fucks badgers..." and then you run away screaming and miss the bit where they add "...but no one minds cos he's so nice the rest of the time and who doesn't occasionally want to violate a medium sized omnivorous mammal anyway, I say fair enough."?
It's a fucking minefield.
Helping
One of these days I will work out why people have second "helpings". How does a bowl of custard become a "helping"? It's not the most helpful of substances. You can't paint your house with it (not for very long, anyway). It won't do the dishes. Apparently it can be promoted to run a government department, but so can squirrels and Chris Grayling, so that's hardly high praise.
It's probably something to do with "helping yourself", showing that the idea of self-service long preceded petrol companies trying to save a packet at gas stations.
I've just looked at the bottom of this blog, where some text is begging me to "label" this blog, and gives the examples "scooters, holidays, autumn". I've like to know who decided that those were the ideal archetypes of a successful blog. Perhaps they'd just returned from a scooter holiday in late September. Or maybe they were just really stuck for something interesting to suggest that a blog might be about, which is fair enough on the basis of this one.
I'm not helping.
It's probably something to do with "helping yourself", showing that the idea of self-service long preceded petrol companies trying to save a packet at gas stations.
I've just looked at the bottom of this blog, where some text is begging me to "label" this blog, and gives the examples "scooters, holidays, autumn". I've like to know who decided that those were the ideal archetypes of a successful blog. Perhaps they'd just returned from a scooter holiday in late September. Or maybe they were just really stuck for something interesting to suggest that a blog might be about, which is fair enough on the basis of this one.
I'm not helping.
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
Repertory
A hard word to spell, repertory. Even harder to explain what it was. My dad wistfully recalls days when there were many rep theatres, and they were a popular form of entertainment for decades, and a key way for young actors to earn their Equity cards and work their way up to the West End.
I'm sure a lot of it was awful, and you couldn't switch it off after 5 minutes and stick the snooker on, which is probably why television was so beautifully placed to steal its ecological niche and push it towards extinction. It's a shame TV took over, though. Just think what Sky could have achieved if they'd managed to deploy Live Pause at the Bolton Empire.
There probably isn't a Bolton Empire. But I suppose in some sort of post-apocalyptic nuclear bomb ravaged world where the North West of England is the first to recover we could soon all be under the dominion of hordes of suburban Mancunians desperate to avenge the Bolton massacre. Best to die in the first flash, I think.
I'm sure a lot of it was awful, and you couldn't switch it off after 5 minutes and stick the snooker on, which is probably why television was so beautifully placed to steal its ecological niche and push it towards extinction. It's a shame TV took over, though. Just think what Sky could have achieved if they'd managed to deploy Live Pause at the Bolton Empire.
There probably isn't a Bolton Empire. But I suppose in some sort of post-apocalyptic nuclear bomb ravaged world where the North West of England is the first to recover we could soon all be under the dominion of hordes of suburban Mancunians desperate to avenge the Bolton massacre. Best to die in the first flash, I think.
Chew
My granddad always used to tell me to chew my food 32 times. I don't know where the number came from. It feels somewhat unlikely that extensive field tests had been conducted with a troupe of volunteers munching away on a specially prepared batch of sesame seed buns, all chewing them for a different number of chews and then monitoring their digestion and testing the quality of their stools.
"Sir, I have the results! The stools which demonstrated the most efficient processing of the useful, nutritious parts of the special sesame seed bun belonged to volunteer Clyde, sir."
"Clyde? But isn't he the one you made chew 32 times because he looked at you a bit funny? Something of an own goal!"
One chew for each tooth. It's good as a beginning. If you have no teeth then I suppose you want food that you don't need to chew at all. Where it breaks down is in between. What the fuck are you supposed to do if you only have one tooth left? What requires one chew? And how can you chew with one tooth anyway, even once? It's bullshit, granddad, it's bullshit I tell you!
Still, I miss him sometimes, even if he did talk shit about chewing.
"Sir, I have the results! The stools which demonstrated the most efficient processing of the useful, nutritious parts of the special sesame seed bun belonged to volunteer Clyde, sir."
"Clyde? But isn't he the one you made chew 32 times because he looked at you a bit funny? Something of an own goal!"
One chew for each tooth. It's good as a beginning. If you have no teeth then I suppose you want food that you don't need to chew at all. Where it breaks down is in between. What the fuck are you supposed to do if you only have one tooth left? What requires one chew? And how can you chew with one tooth anyway, even once? It's bullshit, granddad, it's bullshit I tell you!
Still, I miss him sometimes, even if he did talk shit about chewing.
Barrister
I spent some considerable time last night seething. I love the word seethe, but I don't love seething. Especially when trying to sleep. It's not soothing, seething.
The reason for the seething was just one of many reasons I'm a supporter of trade unions (this doesn't necessarily mean being a supporter of Bob Crow, any more than saying you're a people person compels you to like Donald Rumsfeld). But you really shouldn't be able to fuck people over when it comes to jobs. A very good friend had been offered a temp job doing some clerking for a barrister (I think he's a barrister - I'm very hazy about this things. Apparently there's things called "laws" and stuff). Unfortunately she spent the entire weekend before her first day with a stomach bug that left her vomiting like a lawn sprinkler, aching in places that didn't ought to have ached, Mr Frodo, running a scary fever and being semi-comatose.
Come Monday morning, she got up, vomited again, made her sandwiches, vomited again, put on her jacket, fell on the floor for a while, then got up and went to work. After 400 yards she nearly collapsed in the street, so she phoned her boss to explain, was nearly sick over her phone, left him a message and staggered back to bed.
She kept calling to try and get hold of the barrister, but he didn't answer his phone. She called a mutual acquaintance who managed to get hold of him and see what the situation was.
He replied with a single message: "No longer required"
Now, I appreciate the frustrations of someone trying to do a job when someone helping them doesn't turn up, but anyone who isn't even prepared to listen when that someone tried their very best and just physically could not manage the journey is really just a spiteful cunt. He probably feels a lot better about his life now, grasping at the illusion of power in a vast and uncaring universe. That's nice. I'm sure he gets a warm glow. Hopefully he'll get so excited about it that he'll drink too much on his own in his kitchen, and run skipping happily into the street, where he'll slip on a discarded used condom, crack his head on the pavement and wake up hours later with all his fingers eaten by rats.
You can but dream.
Hmm. Actually, this probably puts me in the same camp as Bob Crow and Donald Rumsfeld.
The reason for the seething was just one of many reasons I'm a supporter of trade unions (this doesn't necessarily mean being a supporter of Bob Crow, any more than saying you're a people person compels you to like Donald Rumsfeld). But you really shouldn't be able to fuck people over when it comes to jobs. A very good friend had been offered a temp job doing some clerking for a barrister (I think he's a barrister - I'm very hazy about this things. Apparently there's things called "laws" and stuff). Unfortunately she spent the entire weekend before her first day with a stomach bug that left her vomiting like a lawn sprinkler, aching in places that didn't ought to have ached, Mr Frodo, running a scary fever and being semi-comatose.
Come Monday morning, she got up, vomited again, made her sandwiches, vomited again, put on her jacket, fell on the floor for a while, then got up and went to work. After 400 yards she nearly collapsed in the street, so she phoned her boss to explain, was nearly sick over her phone, left him a message and staggered back to bed.
She kept calling to try and get hold of the barrister, but he didn't answer his phone. She called a mutual acquaintance who managed to get hold of him and see what the situation was.
He replied with a single message: "No longer required"
Now, I appreciate the frustrations of someone trying to do a job when someone helping them doesn't turn up, but anyone who isn't even prepared to listen when that someone tried their very best and just physically could not manage the journey is really just a spiteful cunt. He probably feels a lot better about his life now, grasping at the illusion of power in a vast and uncaring universe. That's nice. I'm sure he gets a warm glow. Hopefully he'll get so excited about it that he'll drink too much on his own in his kitchen, and run skipping happily into the street, where he'll slip on a discarded used condom, crack his head on the pavement and wake up hours later with all his fingers eaten by rats.
You can but dream.
Hmm. Actually, this probably puts me in the same camp as Bob Crow and Donald Rumsfeld.
Hairstyle
I'm quite lucky to still have one. Hairstyles seem to be a bit like making new friends down the pub, or having a favourite advert or something, a thing that somehow fades with age until not only is it not there, but it seems odd to have ever cared in the first place.
Not that I ever made any new friends down the pub. I always assumed it was something that happened to other people. Maybe it didn't. Or only to pub-based alcoholics. If you're an alcoholic, being pub-based is either a) a really good idea or b) a really fucking stupid idea. Not quite sure which.
Anyway.
I have a hairstyle, of sorts. It only looks very good when I treat it with a special hairstyling implement, known to some as millinery, and to me as a hat. If I don't wear a hat, the hairstyle adopts sarcastic quote marks around it, and becomes a hair "style", mostly consisting of some sort of tenacious fluff, like a really stubborn dandelion in a gale.
I don't really get to choose my hairstyle. It sort of happens to me. I'm currently sporting what is almost certainly called a grown out mid-period Alan Turing. Ha. I bet there's no-one reading this* who has one of them.
* a statement which is equally true if you just stop at this asterisk.
Not that I ever made any new friends down the pub. I always assumed it was something that happened to other people. Maybe it didn't. Or only to pub-based alcoholics. If you're an alcoholic, being pub-based is either a) a really good idea or b) a really fucking stupid idea. Not quite sure which.
Anyway.
I have a hairstyle, of sorts. It only looks very good when I treat it with a special hairstyling implement, known to some as millinery, and to me as a hat. If I don't wear a hat, the hairstyle adopts sarcastic quote marks around it, and becomes a hair "style", mostly consisting of some sort of tenacious fluff, like a really stubborn dandelion in a gale.
I don't really get to choose my hairstyle. It sort of happens to me. I'm currently sporting what is almost certainly called a grown out mid-period Alan Turing. Ha. I bet there's no-one reading this* who has one of them.
* a statement which is equally true if you just stop at this asterisk.
Monday, 4 October 2010
Cancan
Having read and agreed with Victoria Coren's excoriation of School Cheerleading, I was disappointed to be corrected by a younger (female) person who apparently knows about these things and told me that British schools have male cheerleaders too. There goes that little bit of (male) feminist outrage in me, and leaves me feeling slightly bewildered, as if a lamb had got up and head-butted me for my vegetarianism.
If indeed we have equal opportunities cheerleading the UK, then I suppose the argument moves from "is it sexist bullshit" to purely "is it sport?". And the problem that goes with that is simply that no-one has an agreed definition of what sport actually is, so any attempt to answer the question reveals a suitcase full of interesting prejudices and preconceptions that say quite a lot about the person shoving their oar in. Ooh, that was a sporty metaphor. Or was it?
I have grave misgivings about the idea of dance as sport, but I'll also admit that this is based on no real analysis of the arguments and little more than a lingering feeling that giving someone a Gold medal in Traditional Morris is sillier than giving the same for running into a sandpit in a slightly complicated way.
Which it may not be.
All of which has left me feeling a little bit confused and lacking in a good dose of moral certainty and outrage. So what I need the Government to do - right now - is introduce can-can dancing to the national curriculum, making it eligible only to pretty girls whose legs represent at least 60% of their total height and who have perfect skin. Then all I'd have to do is wrestle with whether or not it was more sexist and degrading than Beach Volleyball.
Sunday, 3 October 2010
Mileage
I'm running out of steam it would appear. All down to a shocking lack of commitment. I keep telling myself that I'm just too busy and a bit tired and therefore can;t keep up, but it's all shocking self-delusion and the simple fact is that I'm a lazy bugger.
I always wanted to be a writer. Much more than I wanted to be an actor, singer or cricketer, and certainly much more than I wanted to be an office worker. But like almost everyone else the job that pays the bills takes over the rest of your life. Why else is the small talk protocol to ask "so what do you do" so early on in a conversation?
"So, what do you do?"
"Well, sometimes I eat. Tea, breakfast, lunch - that sort of thing. Occasionally a Mars bar, but not so much since my last tooth fell out."
"No, I mean, what do you do for a living?"
"Well, I wouldn't be living if I didn't eat. Excuse me, but you seem a bit dim."
The Onion has a particularly nice take on it here
But I shall not give up! Oh, not me. The purpose of this blog is to keep me writing, so that eventually I start writing properly. You've got to keep your hand in. So I can't give up. Plenty of mileage in this yet.
I always wanted to be a writer. Much more than I wanted to be an actor, singer or cricketer, and certainly much more than I wanted to be an office worker. But like almost everyone else the job that pays the bills takes over the rest of your life. Why else is the small talk protocol to ask "so what do you do" so early on in a conversation?
"So, what do you do?"
"Well, sometimes I eat. Tea, breakfast, lunch - that sort of thing. Occasionally a Mars bar, but not so much since my last tooth fell out."
"No, I mean, what do you do for a living?"
"Well, I wouldn't be living if I didn't eat. Excuse me, but you seem a bit dim."
The Onion has a particularly nice take on it here
But I shall not give up! Oh, not me. The purpose of this blog is to keep me writing, so that eventually I start writing properly. You've got to keep your hand in. So I can't give up. Plenty of mileage in this yet.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
Shareholder
I have a share. It's in Rio Tinto. I didn't mean to buy it, it was all sorted for me as some sort of protest. But for years they kept sending me little notes saying that wanted to give me my dividend, which was frequently 7p and would have required me to cash a cheque in order to benefit. I like to think I cost them a lot in postage, anyway.
They gave up in the end, but I assume I still a Rio Tinto shareholder. Does this make me a capitalist?
They gave up in the end, but I assume I still a Rio Tinto shareholder. Does this make me a capitalist?
Query
I'm not very good at asking questions. Rubbish, in fact. This doesn't mean I don't question things, probably more that I don't question small things. It might be part of my inability to master small talk. I am more interested in the fact that you had a good weekend than I am in the details. Unless they're interesting details. And I doubt very much the details are going to become more interesting if I cross examine you. You'd probably have mentioned if you'd found out that your toddler was a werebadger, or if the Montgolfier brothers accidentally sailed their balloon through a rift in time and across your front room while you were watching Spooks.
All in all this is a slightly worrying proposition for a writer. Aren't I supposed to be interested in everything?
Even worse, it means I will never get a job anywhere where they expect you to ask an interesting question. I'm too terrified of asking something and getting the reply "I think you'll find that's in the information we sent you". It's not going to happen, unless I develop a list of special catch all questions that are very unlikely to be in the supporting documentation:
* do you have any giraffes working here?
* what is your average room temperature at 4pm?
* do you have the same number of Tuesdays as [fill in rival organisation name here]?
* when was the last time you decorated the office?
* if you added together all the salaries of the people working here, how many square feet of the moon could you buy?
That should do it.
All in all this is a slightly worrying proposition for a writer. Aren't I supposed to be interested in everything?
Even worse, it means I will never get a job anywhere where they expect you to ask an interesting question. I'm too terrified of asking something and getting the reply "I think you'll find that's in the information we sent you". It's not going to happen, unless I develop a list of special catch all questions that are very unlikely to be in the supporting documentation:
* do you have any giraffes working here?
* what is your average room temperature at 4pm?
* do you have the same number of Tuesdays as [fill in rival organisation name here]?
* when was the last time you decorated the office?
* if you added together all the salaries of the people working here, how many square feet of the moon could you buy?
That should do it.
Note
Because I sometimes just have to have a massive rant about something and it tends to distort this little(tardy) word project, I now have a sister blog for no-one to read called Speedy Rants, because he frequently does.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Sending
Everything is sending me mad at the moment.
As this HR Review article points out, a right-wing think tank thinks trade unions are "more powerful than ever".
Given that Labour didn't repeal any of Thatcher and Major's anti-union laws, this takes some stomaching. But hilarious they justify this on the basis of unions being anti-democratic. Their argument is that only 31% of the UNITE membership of the recent strikes voted for action.
They are pushing for the assumption that if you don't vote you don't want to strike. But since strikes cost staff money, if you didn't want one surely you'd make more of an effort to oppose it?
But since the general election turn out was 65% and the Tories got 36% of that, if 31% isn't enough for a strike, when did 24.5% become enough to fuck up the country?
Tale
It's quite alarming at times how the "narrative" of what's happening starts to get in the way of, say, the truth, or reality. Lots of people have commented before how press stories rely on articles that contribute to an expected pattern - the latest stage in some minor or major story that makes sense to the reader and does not jar them out of their torpid acceptance of what's told them.
But hilariously, the public sometimes make these things up for themselves.
Having watched with an inchoate horror as poll after poll affirmed that the British people were firmly behind Dave and George's deficit slashing mania (despite the lack of economic backing for it), I am entertained to find a poll in the fire-walled Times today suggests that 49% of the public think the deficit is Dave and George's fault.
Normally I'd be outraged by such a gross misrepresentation of the truth. But this time it's just making me laugh. For a start The Conservative members of the coalition have repeatedly talked down the economy, using the admittedly scary numbers involved in deficit calculations to terrify the voters into accepting their harsh medicine. Most of these statements have been reprehensible lies: continuous comparisons to Greece, for example, when most actual economists agree we have almost nothing in common with them. Talking down an economy is a very dangerous game to play, and when it's based on lies and deceit is pretty despicable. So the deficit might not be their fault, but they're playing fast and loose with it for their own agenda. Secondly, they've not stinted in their efforts to portray the debt as Brown and Labour's fault, despite the fact that Governments always emerge from recessions with big deficits (Thatcher and Major both did) and that this particular recession is widely believed to have been the worst since the Depression (so quite logical to expect a Big Debt). Given there's a considerable body of expert opinion (Nobel laureate Paul Kruger, for example) who believe that the Brown-led fiscal stimulus packages around the world saved us from another actual Depression, just smacking Gordo over the head and screeching "your fault!" is such a one-sided argument that it doesn't exist in the other two dimensions.
Blaming previous Governments for things is par for the course. The interesting thing is that the Coalition have sought to justify almost everything they have chosen to do in the name of opposing what Labour did. They don't have any kind of vision of for the country, or at least not one they actually dare tell us about.
Therefore it's kind of funny that the thing they are most trying to pin on Labour is now being blamed on them, even though they - by definition of "opposition" - had very little to do with it.
The most encouraging thing, however, having got used to the flow of 'narratives' is that the poll shows the public reading a different tale the one recently promoted. So they blame not the gold-plated public sector pensions and welfare layabouts as promoted by the Daily Mail, or the Labour politicians as suggested by the Tories. 74% of them are blaming the banks.
For once, at least, the narrative tale read by the public is a true story.
But hilariously, the public sometimes make these things up for themselves.
Having watched with an inchoate horror as poll after poll affirmed that the British people were firmly behind Dave and George's deficit slashing mania (despite the lack of economic backing for it), I am entertained to find a poll in the fire-walled Times today suggests that 49% of the public think the deficit is Dave and George's fault.
Normally I'd be outraged by such a gross misrepresentation of the truth. But this time it's just making me laugh. For a start The Conservative members of the coalition have repeatedly talked down the economy, using the admittedly scary numbers involved in deficit calculations to terrify the voters into accepting their harsh medicine. Most of these statements have been reprehensible lies: continuous comparisons to Greece, for example, when most actual economists agree we have almost nothing in common with them. Talking down an economy is a very dangerous game to play, and when it's based on lies and deceit is pretty despicable. So the deficit might not be their fault, but they're playing fast and loose with it for their own agenda. Secondly, they've not stinted in their efforts to portray the debt as Brown and Labour's fault, despite the fact that Governments always emerge from recessions with big deficits (Thatcher and Major both did) and that this particular recession is widely believed to have been the worst since the Depression (so quite logical to expect a Big Debt). Given there's a considerable body of expert opinion (Nobel laureate Paul Kruger, for example) who believe that the Brown-led fiscal stimulus packages around the world saved us from another actual Depression, just smacking Gordo over the head and screeching "your fault!" is such a one-sided argument that it doesn't exist in the other two dimensions.
Blaming previous Governments for things is par for the course. The interesting thing is that the Coalition have sought to justify almost everything they have chosen to do in the name of opposing what Labour did. They don't have any kind of vision of for the country, or at least not one they actually dare tell us about.
Therefore it's kind of funny that the thing they are most trying to pin on Labour is now being blamed on them, even though they - by definition of "opposition" - had very little to do with it.
The most encouraging thing, however, having got used to the flow of 'narratives' is that the poll shows the public reading a different tale the one recently promoted. So they blame not the gold-plated public sector pensions and welfare layabouts as promoted by the Daily Mail, or the Labour politicians as suggested by the Tories. 74% of them are blaming the banks.
For once, at least, the narrative tale read by the public is a true story.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Appreciation
When you're a kid you get appreciated for lots of things. Walking across the width of swimming pools. Drawing a brightly coloured shapeless blob and entitling it "mUm". Tying your shoelaces. Not shitting in your underwear. That sort of thing. Little kids even get appreciated for being beautiful without anyone descrying how they've turned into commodities and isn't it about time we appreciated their sophisticated personalities instead?
It does make being an adult feel a little unappreciated. I wonder if that's why I spend so much of my time acting or playing cricket? They are both areas where the rules seem to shift and suddenly you are applauded for doing what you are supposed to do, exactly what is frowned on the rest of the time. If I got a round of applause for turning up to work on time (other than a sarcastic one, which is quite common), or pressing the right button in the lift, or turning up with my shirt buttons done up correctly, I'd feel patronised and slightly disconcerted. On a cricket pitch, if I stop the ball when fielding (which I am supposed to do) or bowl a good ball (again...) there'll be general shouts of "well done Speedy" and a wee clap. On stage all you have to do is not vomit on the audience half way through the play and you're almost guaranteed a clap, even if the play was about as entertaining as having a weasel shit into your eyes for an hour. It's no better than the coloured mUm blob.
My point is, I am clearly a child. I want to be clapped for things. Clap me, you bastards, clap me! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
It does make being an adult feel a little unappreciated. I wonder if that's why I spend so much of my time acting or playing cricket? They are both areas where the rules seem to shift and suddenly you are applauded for doing what you are supposed to do, exactly what is frowned on the rest of the time. If I got a round of applause for turning up to work on time (other than a sarcastic one, which is quite common), or pressing the right button in the lift, or turning up with my shirt buttons done up correctly, I'd feel patronised and slightly disconcerted. On a cricket pitch, if I stop the ball when fielding (which I am supposed to do) or bowl a good ball (again...) there'll be general shouts of "well done Speedy" and a wee clap. On stage all you have to do is not vomit on the audience half way through the play and you're almost guaranteed a clap, even if the play was about as entertaining as having a weasel shit into your eyes for an hour. It's no better than the coloured mUm blob.
My point is, I am clearly a child. I want to be clapped for things. Clap me, you bastards, clap me! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Monday, 30 August 2010
Tug
Well, there's a tricky word. A world of slightly off-colour avenues present themselves. I shall not go there.
I have been having problems with my forelock though. Not because I'm tugging it too much, but simply because it likes to turn to sponge during the course of the day. It doesn't matter what product I use or how expensive my conditioner it, but I end up looking like I've been the target in some sort of circus game of "throw the sponge at the smug twat". I hope someone somewhere has been rewarded with a big cuddly stuffed jelly fish for their efforts. In the meanwhile, I'm putting on a hat and hoping not to meet any members of the aristocracy.
I have been having problems with my forelock though. Not because I'm tugging it too much, but simply because it likes to turn to sponge during the course of the day. It doesn't matter what product I use or how expensive my conditioner it, but I end up looking like I've been the target in some sort of circus game of "throw the sponge at the smug twat". I hope someone somewhere has been rewarded with a big cuddly stuffed jelly fish for their efforts. In the meanwhile, I'm putting on a hat and hoping not to meet any members of the aristocracy.
Speech
A married friend of mine has just posted the video of the Best Man's Speech made by a mutual friend, so it's funny that the randomiser just spat "speech" at me. Well, I say funny.
I had a pleasurable 15 minutes watching the speech, feeling transported by to 2005 and admiring the way in which the Best man somehow steered clear of saying anything truly embarrassing about the Groom whilst at the same time *appearing* to be utterly humiliating him. It's a fine line, and I suspect one that gets transgressed more than the popping crease at Lord's.
That's all really. I've hardly been to any weddings (my friends have a tendency not only not to get married but for some reason to bumble on like increasingly grey students and not find a mate). Also everyone hates me so they don't invite me.
That last bit may or may not be a joke. You'd have to ask them.
But it strikes me that if you can give the punters what they want (ritual abuse of the groom) whilst not giving them what they don't want (jokes about his misshaped cock made in front of his granny) you've done admirably well.
On the other hand it would have been nice if the whole thing hadn't sounded like a Tony Blair speech. I suppose you can't have everything.
I had a pleasurable 15 minutes watching the speech, feeling transported by to 2005 and admiring the way in which the Best man somehow steered clear of saying anything truly embarrassing about the Groom whilst at the same time *appearing* to be utterly humiliating him. It's a fine line, and I suspect one that gets transgressed more than the popping crease at Lord's.
That's all really. I've hardly been to any weddings (my friends have a tendency not only not to get married but for some reason to bumble on like increasingly grey students and not find a mate). Also everyone hates me so they don't invite me.
That last bit may or may not be a joke. You'd have to ask them.
But it strikes me that if you can give the punters what they want (ritual abuse of the groom) whilst not giving them what they don't want (jokes about his misshaped cock made in front of his granny) you've done admirably well.
On the other hand it would have been nice if the whole thing hadn't sounded like a Tony Blair speech. I suppose you can't have everything.
Fluctuations
I've been getting increasingly restless reading about the "spot-fixing" scandal surrounding the recent England v Pakistan Test at Lord's. Not because of the moral angle - though clearly (no matter how benign it sounds) taking money to do something in the middle of a top level sorting contest diminishes the whole thing a bit and - since millions of people derive pleasure from such sporting contests - must be stopped wherever possible. No, I'm getting tetchy because of the insistence of at least one commentator that the recent result should be scrubbed because it "wasn't proper cricket".
Perhaps my views are incompatible. I've already said that spot-fixing diminishes the contest and must be stopped - why don't I don't think the match result should be expunged?
It's as simple as this. The problem with this form of spot fixing is that any form of interference creates doubts and uncertainties that take a sheen from the pure pleasure of watching two sides do their utmost to win. It's very much a question of the viewing pleasure of the spectators and their personal reaction to it. My first problem with the expunging of the Test is that it would be suggesting that any game where there was a sniff of something dodgy going on becomes fundamentally pointless, and that is surely more, and not less, likely to persuade spectators that watching cricket is a waste of their time: a dangerous statement to make.
Secondly, I take issue with the fact that bowling 3 no balls in itself devalues the efforts of the honest players (or even the dishonest players) in the match.
Barney Ronay, in his Over-by-Over commentary on The Guardian website, stated:
"The whole performance becomes a mockery. and what if you get the batsman out and it's a planned no-ball?"
This doesn't make the whole performance a mockery. True, I can think of circumstances where it would: let's say a batsman is under the cosh and has faced a succession of dot balls. He's getting antsy and nervous and decides he is going to have a premeditated heave at the next ball bowled at him irrespective of what the delivery is. He misses, or slices in the air - it's a no ball. A genuine bit of sporting rivalry has been torpedoed by cheats.
But really that's about it. Ronay himself suggests "you don't just switch on and off like that, you can't try 100%, try 100%, try 100% and then - oh, quick no ball - then try 100% etc etc.*" Suggesting that an entire bowling performance is going to be affected by the fact that you have to remember to bowl a no-ball in the 36th over is a bold statement, but suggesting that at the same time should a batsman get out to the said no ball it would make a mockery of the whole test is to reverse the logic to fit into the argument. And it ignores what I shall call - despite my mathematical ignorance - the Chaos Theory of Cricket.
Batsmen play shots based on what is bowled that them (part of the "initial conditions" of the system that is any interplay between bowlers and batsmen), and a delivery is very specifically related to a number of factors, including from where it was bowled. The simple response should a batsman have been dismissed by one of these no-balls is that the chances of him having played the same shot to a legitimate delivery are negligible. Fluctuations in the angle and speed of the delivery means that he would almost certainly (doubt created merely by that example I give above) have a played a different shot.
He might still have got out, but would be no more likely to have done so than from any other ball bowled in the entire game. The margins of dismissal - thin edges, balls evading fielders, even the bails refusing to drop from the stumps when hit - are often so infinitesimally small that making broad comments like "that would have been a wicket had it not been a no ball" are a bit stupid. And I think that about legit no-balls too - the bowlers always hang their head and kick the turf, but they have no way of knowing if the same result would have been achieved had they changed a fundamental part of the mechanical composition of the delivery - where it was bowled from. An inch makes a difference. If it didn't we wouldn't have a no-ball rule in the first place.
So the only sensible thing to do is look at it this way: there were three planned points at which legitimate cricket ceased and corrupt silliness took over. That does take the sheen off the game, but it doesn't make it pointless. True, whatever had happened in those three balls would have made a difference if they somehow broke crucial pressure, or if the penalty/actual runs stemming from them skewed the final result. England won the game by an innings and 225 runs. I think you can safely say that it would have taken a lot more than three oversteps to make that a borderline result.
My third problem is that expunging the game punishes the wrong people. Stuart Broad is a bit of a dick sometimes, but the boy scored his maiden Test century in the game. His performance had nothing to do with any dodgy practice, and certainly should count as an achievement even if Pakistan were 5% off their game because they were thinking about cheating. After all, Pakistan at 95% effective are still a fuck of a lot better than Zimbabwe - no one suggests canceling Matthew Hayden's (once) record breaking score on the basis that the oppo were embarrassingly poor.
That's enough. Get on with the game.
S.
* At one point Amir had taken 6 wickets for 29 runs. I'd hate to see him when he was concentrating.
Perhaps my views are incompatible. I've already said that spot-fixing diminishes the contest and must be stopped - why don't I don't think the match result should be expunged?
It's as simple as this. The problem with this form of spot fixing is that any form of interference creates doubts and uncertainties that take a sheen from the pure pleasure of watching two sides do their utmost to win. It's very much a question of the viewing pleasure of the spectators and their personal reaction to it. My first problem with the expunging of the Test is that it would be suggesting that any game where there was a sniff of something dodgy going on becomes fundamentally pointless, and that is surely more, and not less, likely to persuade spectators that watching cricket is a waste of their time: a dangerous statement to make.
Secondly, I take issue with the fact that bowling 3 no balls in itself devalues the efforts of the honest players (or even the dishonest players) in the match.
Barney Ronay, in his Over-by-Over commentary on The Guardian website, stated:
"The whole performance becomes a mockery. and what if you get the batsman out and it's a planned no-ball?"
This doesn't make the whole performance a mockery. True, I can think of circumstances where it would: let's say a batsman is under the cosh and has faced a succession of dot balls. He's getting antsy and nervous and decides he is going to have a premeditated heave at the next ball bowled at him irrespective of what the delivery is. He misses, or slices in the air - it's a no ball. A genuine bit of sporting rivalry has been torpedoed by cheats.
But really that's about it. Ronay himself suggests "you don't just switch on and off like that, you can't try 100%, try 100%, try 100% and then - oh, quick no ball - then try 100% etc etc.*" Suggesting that an entire bowling performance is going to be affected by the fact that you have to remember to bowl a no-ball in the 36th over is a bold statement, but suggesting that at the same time should a batsman get out to the said no ball it would make a mockery of the whole test is to reverse the logic to fit into the argument. And it ignores what I shall call - despite my mathematical ignorance - the Chaos Theory of Cricket.
Batsmen play shots based on what is bowled that them (part of the "initial conditions" of the system that is any interplay between bowlers and batsmen), and a delivery is very specifically related to a number of factors, including from where it was bowled. The simple response should a batsman have been dismissed by one of these no-balls is that the chances of him having played the same shot to a legitimate delivery are negligible. Fluctuations in the angle and speed of the delivery means that he would almost certainly (doubt created merely by that example I give above) have a played a different shot.
He might still have got out, but would be no more likely to have done so than from any other ball bowled in the entire game. The margins of dismissal - thin edges, balls evading fielders, even the bails refusing to drop from the stumps when hit - are often so infinitesimally small that making broad comments like "that would have been a wicket had it not been a no ball" are a bit stupid. And I think that about legit no-balls too - the bowlers always hang their head and kick the turf, but they have no way of knowing if the same result would have been achieved had they changed a fundamental part of the mechanical composition of the delivery - where it was bowled from. An inch makes a difference. If it didn't we wouldn't have a no-ball rule in the first place.
So the only sensible thing to do is look at it this way: there were three planned points at which legitimate cricket ceased and corrupt silliness took over. That does take the sheen off the game, but it doesn't make it pointless. True, whatever had happened in those three balls would have made a difference if they somehow broke crucial pressure, or if the penalty/actual runs stemming from them skewed the final result. England won the game by an innings and 225 runs. I think you can safely say that it would have taken a lot more than three oversteps to make that a borderline result.
My third problem is that expunging the game punishes the wrong people. Stuart Broad is a bit of a dick sometimes, but the boy scored his maiden Test century in the game. His performance had nothing to do with any dodgy practice, and certainly should count as an achievement even if Pakistan were 5% off their game because they were thinking about cheating. After all, Pakistan at 95% effective are still a fuck of a lot better than Zimbabwe - no one suggests canceling Matthew Hayden's (once) record breaking score on the basis that the oppo were embarrassingly poor.
That's enough. Get on with the game.
S.
* At one point Amir had taken 6 wickets for 29 runs. I'd hate to see him when he was concentrating.
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Influx
Interesting article today in the New Statesman (or should that be ON the New Stateman, given I saw it online?) picking apart figures on immigration as provided by MigrationWatch, “an independent, voluntary, non political body which is concerned about the present scale of immigration into the UK.”
The article notes a few recent stats the group have used to back up their claim that immigration costs jobs, comparing several years’ migration figures to one year’s unemployment figures - fatuous in the extreme. Read it. It may make you cry, especially when you consider that this stuff gets presented as news.
It’s not necessarily racist to have concerns about a national immigration policy. It is however pretty fucking despicable if you have to lie in order to back up whatever opinion once crawled into your brain and died there like a rat in an airvent.
The article notes a few recent stats the group have used to back up their claim that immigration costs jobs, comparing several years’ migration figures to one year’s unemployment figures - fatuous in the extreme. Read it. It may make you cry, especially when you consider that this stuff gets presented as news.
It’s not necessarily racist to have concerns about a national immigration policy. It is however pretty fucking despicable if you have to lie in order to back up whatever opinion once crawled into your brain and died there like a rat in an airvent.
Monday, 16 August 2010
Fecundated
There’s a bit of a ding-dong going on today in the Twitterverse and Bloggersphere (or “online” as it used to be prosaically known) about benefits and children.
The Sun today ran as a headline “Dozen it make you sick”, (http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3097118/12th-kid-for-jobless-scroungers.html) about a family on benefits who are expecting their 12th child. Alongside a deeply (and no doubt intentionally) unflattering picture of the mother looking as much like a Kathy Burke character as they could manage, are various claims and attacks. Among them are that they bring in over £30,000 in benefits.
What the article doesn’t say that the £30k will certainly include housing benefit, which of course they have to pay back to the council for their 5 bedroom home, which won’t be cheap (in fact the Sun says it’s 1,200pcm), meaning they are probably bringing up 11 (and now 12) children on just over £15k. That’s a monthly family income of £1,300. Not bad, except they’re paying to feed and clothe 13 (soon to be 14) people on it. Now, I have no children, but people keep telling me they’re expensive, so is £100pcm each for food and clothing (and anything else) really the lap of luxury? Not to mention he fact that even at £1,200pcm, a 5 bedroom house is still inadequate for 14 people.
None of those provisos has stopped Iain Dale, doyenne of right-wing bloggers, from announcing his horror and dismay at the story and another like it yesterday. “Having children is not a human right,” he rages. He then slightly undermines his position with logic – a very foolish thing to do as a right-wing blogger. “It's irresponsible to have so many children if you haven't the means to support them.”
Yes, Iain. Yes it probably is. But the irresponsibil8ity of it does not counteract the right o have children. The debate is not about whether or not it is right that some people who clearly lack the means to support children continue to have them, it’s about how comfortable anyone should be about telling them that they *can’t* have them.
This supposedly “most Liberal of governments” [© Nick Clegg] has amongst its main cheerleaders media outlets and commentators who denounce the behaviour of British subjects without any idea at all about what they are saying.
If it is not a human right to have a child, then clearly it is fair for the Government to intervene and stop them.
How, exactly?
Oddly enough, when posters suggested to Dale that he was advocating 19th century eugenics, he was pretty upset. He described it as showing the “intolerant left at its worst”. But this is the problem with the “just sayin’” culture, where people shove their oar in to a delicate moral debate without having the intellect or the backbone to follow their ideas through.
Just saying.
The logical outcome of removing the status of child birth as a human right is either a) Chinese style birth bans / sterilisation or b) compulsory adoption. There is no other effective sanction against what the 14-strong family and their ilk have done. Now, the compulsory adoption need not be as blunt as marching in and stealing the babies – perhaps benefits will be removed for the 6th child, and as soon as the parents are proved to be incapable of supporting the children they will be taken away and put into care. This gives the family the chance to become decent, upright citizens and get proper jobs. Hmmm.
The big, pragmatic problem with this is that it costs an awful lot more to keep children in care than it does to leave them with a family (however apparently dysfunctional) who want them. And adoption takes a while to sort out.
So when Ian Dale (and the Tax Payers' Alliance) rages against the iniquity of everything, he must remember that the only cheaper option than continuing to pay these benefits is to sterilise mothers of multiple children or just to kill their babies. I am absolutely certain that Mr Dale does not want these things to happen, but I’d be very grateful if he could pull his finger out and make clear exactly what point he *is* trying to make, instead of just contributing to public benefits hysteria and then squealing when people point out the dangerous nature of his logic.
The Sun today ran as a headline “Dozen it make you sick”, (http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3097118/12th-kid-for-jobless-scroungers.html) about a family on benefits who are expecting their 12th child. Alongside a deeply (and no doubt intentionally) unflattering picture of the mother looking as much like a Kathy Burke character as they could manage, are various claims and attacks. Among them are that they bring in over £30,000 in benefits.
What the article doesn’t say that the £30k will certainly include housing benefit, which of course they have to pay back to the council for their 5 bedroom home, which won’t be cheap (in fact the Sun says it’s 1,200pcm), meaning they are probably bringing up 11 (and now 12) children on just over £15k. That’s a monthly family income of £1,300. Not bad, except they’re paying to feed and clothe 13 (soon to be 14) people on it. Now, I have no children, but people keep telling me they’re expensive, so is £100pcm each for food and clothing (and anything else) really the lap of luxury? Not to mention he fact that even at £1,200pcm, a 5 bedroom house is still inadequate for 14 people.
None of those provisos has stopped Iain Dale, doyenne of right-wing bloggers, from announcing his horror and dismay at the story and another like it yesterday. “Having children is not a human right,” he rages. He then slightly undermines his position with logic – a very foolish thing to do as a right-wing blogger. “It's irresponsible to have so many children if you haven't the means to support them.”
Yes, Iain. Yes it probably is. But the irresponsibil8ity of it does not counteract the right o have children. The debate is not about whether or not it is right that some people who clearly lack the means to support children continue to have them, it’s about how comfortable anyone should be about telling them that they *can’t* have them.
This supposedly “most Liberal of governments” [© Nick Clegg] has amongst its main cheerleaders media outlets and commentators who denounce the behaviour of British subjects without any idea at all about what they are saying.
If it is not a human right to have a child, then clearly it is fair for the Government to intervene and stop them.
How, exactly?
Oddly enough, when posters suggested to Dale that he was advocating 19th century eugenics, he was pretty upset. He described it as showing the “intolerant left at its worst”. But this is the problem with the “just sayin’” culture, where people shove their oar in to a delicate moral debate without having the intellect or the backbone to follow their ideas through.
Just saying.
The logical outcome of removing the status of child birth as a human right is either a) Chinese style birth bans / sterilisation or b) compulsory adoption. There is no other effective sanction against what the 14-strong family and their ilk have done. Now, the compulsory adoption need not be as blunt as marching in and stealing the babies – perhaps benefits will be removed for the 6th child, and as soon as the parents are proved to be incapable of supporting the children they will be taken away and put into care. This gives the family the chance to become decent, upright citizens and get proper jobs. Hmmm.
The big, pragmatic problem with this is that it costs an awful lot more to keep children in care than it does to leave them with a family (however apparently dysfunctional) who want them. And adoption takes a while to sort out.
So when Ian Dale (and the Tax Payers' Alliance) rages against the iniquity of everything, he must remember that the only cheaper option than continuing to pay these benefits is to sterilise mothers of multiple children or just to kill their babies. I am absolutely certain that Mr Dale does not want these things to happen, but I’d be very grateful if he could pull his finger out and make clear exactly what point he *is* trying to make, instead of just contributing to public benefits hysteria and then squealing when people point out the dangerous nature of his logic.
Execrable
An execrable performance on the cricket field yesterday has left me sleepless. Not in Seattle, though I’m led to believe cricket is quite popular there – nice to see an English tradition of playing cricket in the rainiest part of a country lives on in the colonies.
I haven’t quite worked out why I don’t sleep well after a loss. After all, there’s not always that much a captain can do about it. Yesterday a team we picked to play a bunch of wandering crickety types instead ran into a team full of league players who’d had their Saturday games rained off. I felt like the Polish cavalry charging the German panzers. But, y’know, without death and the end of national independence. Just slightly soiled bowling figures and a batting collapse.
All of which spreads to a day’s work like some sort of fungus, and may even infect my week. I hope not. I don’t want my working week to end up like my flat, which seems to be turning into a menagerie and toadstool garden, with comedy mushrooms on the window sill, spiders galore, snails on the boathroom wall and this week’s special a three inch long coachman beetle. It’ll be toads next.
I haven’t quite worked out why I don’t sleep well after a loss. After all, there’s not always that much a captain can do about it. Yesterday a team we picked to play a bunch of wandering crickety types instead ran into a team full of league players who’d had their Saturday games rained off. I felt like the Polish cavalry charging the German panzers. But, y’know, without death and the end of national independence. Just slightly soiled bowling figures and a batting collapse.
All of which spreads to a day’s work like some sort of fungus, and may even infect my week. I hope not. I don’t want my working week to end up like my flat, which seems to be turning into a menagerie and toadstool garden, with comedy mushrooms on the window sill, spiders galore, snails on the boathroom wall and this week’s special a three inch long coachman beetle. It’ll be toads next.
Monday, 26 July 2010
Sustainable
I wonder if this blog is sustainable?
Not in the green sense – obviously it’s no more or less sustainable than any other interaction with online services. There’s hardly any change in the world’s energy usage when I update my blog, but the collective energy surge of 100m self-interested tweeting wankers is the equivalent of 50,000 cows farting in the face of a child over and over again for an hour.
Or so I’m told *
But the simple problem is that I’m writing it because I was finding it hard to write. So either I find it easier to write, in which case I’ll go and do something more worthy, or I don’t which case this will be like threading one’s own pubic hair.
S
* actually, I’m not. But you knew that.
2 June - ha!
Not in the green sense – obviously it’s no more or less sustainable than any other interaction with online services. There’s hardly any change in the world’s energy usage when I update my blog, but the collective energy surge of 100m self-interested tweeting wankers is the equivalent of 50,000 cows farting in the face of a child over and over again for an hour.
Or so I’m told *
But the simple problem is that I’m writing it because I was finding it hard to write. So either I find it easier to write, in which case I’ll go and do something more worthy, or I don’t which case this will be like threading one’s own pubic hair.
S
* actually, I’m not. But you knew that.
2 June - ha!
Unperformed
I have post-show blues.
It may be rather obvious that this blog is well behind schedule – the disparity between the official date and the posted date being but one clue, the excessive radio silence over the last month being another. But I haven’t given up, I’ve just been a smidge preoccupied.
I’ve just completed a run of Don Juan in Soho. It was enormously good fun, had a lovely talented and charming cast and probably the best director I’ve had the pleasure of working with. But like all “society productions” it was only on for a week. It’s faintly depressing.
I’ve tried to cheer myself up with the thought that I’ve been in a few shows that I was mighty glad were only a week long. The thought of performing “Light in the Village” for three months is enough to daunt even the most committed professional.
I’ll get over it. Already my hair and accent are fading. Soon I’ll look and sound like me again. Sad day. Hopefully I will get to catch up with my lovely cast mates before the inevitable happens and they completely stop caring. Casts are like mammal parents – they form a bond that seems incredibly intense, and then suddenly it stops and you never hear from them again. Possibly they drive you out of the burrow, I’m not sure. Just as long as they don’t bite.
(technically for 2 June - who am I kidding?)
It may be rather obvious that this blog is well behind schedule – the disparity between the official date and the posted date being but one clue, the excessive radio silence over the last month being another. But I haven’t given up, I’ve just been a smidge preoccupied.
I’ve just completed a run of Don Juan in Soho. It was enormously good fun, had a lovely talented and charming cast and probably the best director I’ve had the pleasure of working with. But like all “society productions” it was only on for a week. It’s faintly depressing.
I’ve tried to cheer myself up with the thought that I’ve been in a few shows that I was mighty glad were only a week long. The thought of performing “Light in the Village” for three months is enough to daunt even the most committed professional.
I’ll get over it. Already my hair and accent are fading. Soon I’ll look and sound like me again. Sad day. Hopefully I will get to catch up with my lovely cast mates before the inevitable happens and they completely stop caring. Casts are like mammal parents – they form a bond that seems incredibly intense, and then suddenly it stops and you never hear from them again. Possibly they drive you out of the burrow, I’m not sure. Just as long as they don’t bite.
(technically for 2 June - who am I kidding?)
Monday, 14 June 2010
Propulsive
1 June 2010
Recently, I have needed a rocket up my arse on a Monday morning; or something similarly propulsive. I just can’t get going. I was half an hour late last Monday, 25 minutes late today. Admittedly if I plotted this on a graph I would be able to suggest that I was on an upward trend, but there’s no denying it’s a bit shit.
I’m trying to think of reasons why this may be. I’m not a morning person anyway. I think fellow non-morning people have a bit too much of their reptile brain at work and, despite having naturally warmed blood, stagger about in the expectation of needing a few hours sitting on a rock before they can do anything useful. My pesky mammalian competitors, on the other hand, are bounding about catching sluggish moths long before I’ve managed to open a bottle of Lucozade.
Come to think of it, I always am rather cold in the mornings. Maybe I should try catching things with my tongue, or shutting my eyes and seeing if I can detect mice through body heat alone. There might be something in this.
Recently, I have needed a rocket up my arse on a Monday morning; or something similarly propulsive. I just can’t get going. I was half an hour late last Monday, 25 minutes late today. Admittedly if I plotted this on a graph I would be able to suggest that I was on an upward trend, but there’s no denying it’s a bit shit.
I’m trying to think of reasons why this may be. I’m not a morning person anyway. I think fellow non-morning people have a bit too much of their reptile brain at work and, despite having naturally warmed blood, stagger about in the expectation of needing a few hours sitting on a rock before they can do anything useful. My pesky mammalian competitors, on the other hand, are bounding about catching sluggish moths long before I’ve managed to open a bottle of Lucozade.
Come to think of it, I always am rather cold in the mornings. Maybe I should try catching things with my tongue, or shutting my eyes and seeing if I can detect mice through body heat alone. There might be something in this.
Friday, 11 June 2010
Victim
31 May 2010
Tonight I’m going to get stabbed in the balls. Six times. The person who will do the stabbing is going to enjoy it and will probably crow about it on Facebook. He usually does.
There is a debate in the media as to whether the state is on the side of the victim or the criminal. This is silly.
The state is on the side of monkeys.
Has a monkey ever been convicted of any crime in this country? Never! It’s a fix. And with an infinite number of them up a tree somewhere typing Shakespeare there must be some hanging about causing trouble. It’s a Government cover up and I for one have had enough of it.
Tonight I’m going to get stabbed in the balls. Six times. The person who will do the stabbing is going to enjoy it and will probably crow about it on Facebook. He usually does.
There is a debate in the media as to whether the state is on the side of the victim or the criminal. This is silly.
The state is on the side of monkeys.
Has a monkey ever been convicted of any crime in this country? Never! It’s a fix. And with an infinite number of them up a tree somewhere typing Shakespeare there must be some hanging about causing trouble. It’s a Government cover up and I for one have had enough of it.
Bating
30 May 2010
This is another word that people use because it exists in a clichéd sentence. In this case “I wait with bated breath”.
Apparently it means lessened, so the cliché means that the waiting person has levels of anticipation that means they can scarcely breathe. I can scarcely breathe at the moment, but there’s no bating going on, I’m just desperate to go to sleep.
Whatever is wrong with me, it is refusing to go away. If I become any more zombie-like I will actually start eating people. It was inevitable that I’d never get to be any thing cool like a vampire or werewolf.
Is there a Facebook quiz called “which classic supernatural beast are you? “ I bet there fucking is.
This is another word that people use because it exists in a clichéd sentence. In this case “I wait with bated breath”.
Apparently it means lessened, so the cliché means that the waiting person has levels of anticipation that means they can scarcely breathe. I can scarcely breathe at the moment, but there’s no bating going on, I’m just desperate to go to sleep.
Whatever is wrong with me, it is refusing to go away. If I become any more zombie-like I will actually start eating people. It was inevitable that I’d never get to be any thing cool like a vampire or werewolf.
Is there a Facebook quiz called “which classic supernatural beast are you? “ I bet there fucking is.
Thursday, 10 June 2010
Goddamn
May 29 2010
Now there’s a word! But having been given wordy permission to rail against the world I find my aim diffuse and uncertain. At what do I launch my goddamn tirade? I surely have to keep my powder dry on the ConDem coalition, for they will do many evil things before the year is up. The England cricket team appear to be operating at a satisfactory level and my play is going quite well, despite the looming threat of Primark Chinos.
Work is OK, though difficult when I have all the energy of a stick of celery, the weather is disappointing but not actually dire…
Can it be that life is actually OK?
Of course not. For it contains gelatine! Goddamn, mother fucking gelatine. Always lurking away ready to piss me off. Today was a work birthday for someone who brought in an impressive selection of M and S chocolate snacks as a treat. A friend Facebooked that she had “fallen in love with rocky road mini bites”. I rushed to try them. They contain pork.
CHOCOLATE SNACKS CONTAINING PORK! What the fuck is wrong with the world? Do you really want ham centred Quality Streets and bacon flavour Celebrations? You goddamn fuckers.
See. There’s always something to annoy me. I feel better already.
Work is OK, though difficult when I have all the energy of a stick of celery, the weather is disappointing but not actually dire…
Can it be that life is actually OK?
Of course not. For it contains gelatine! Goddamn, mother fucking gelatine. Always lurking away ready to piss me off. Today was a work birthday for someone who brought in an impressive selection of M and S chocolate snacks as a treat. A friend Facebooked that she had “fallen in love with rocky road mini bites”. I rushed to try them. They contain pork.
CHOCOLATE SNACKS CONTAINING PORK! What the fuck is wrong with the world? Do you really want ham centred Quality Streets and bacon flavour Celebrations? You goddamn fuckers.
See. There’s always something to annoy me. I feel better already.
Kilohertz
27 May 2010
I don’t know the last time I listened to the radio. I’m not sure why I never do it. One of my favourite things in the entire world is a radio series – the 1981 BBC “Lord of the Rings” adaptation which remains (with apologies to Peter Jackson) the very best adaption of Tolkien’s works to date, and is indeed so good that there’s an argument to be had for it being better than the books (you’d lose the argument, but you could have it without looking like a complete arse).
Every now and again someone sends me a link for a radio show, particularly if it is in some way related to Charlie Brooker, and I listen, laugh and completely forget that I could tune in for myself without using iPlayer.
So I miss out on the today programme, on R4’s selection of experimental comedy shows, on new music and on really annoying bastards doing breakfast shows and being enormously smug. It’s deprivation, that’s what it is, and self-imposed.
I think my problem with the radio was summed up the first time I listened to Brooker’s show “So Good It’s Bad”. The iPlayer helpfully provides a graphic while you listen, in this case Charlie Brooker in a quilted smoking jacket looking fairly disgusted with everything. I stared at it for a full ten minutes before it occurred to me that I didn’t need to. I started doing something else and immediately lost track of what was going on in the show.
I lack radio skills. I am a failure.
I don’t know the last time I listened to the radio. I’m not sure why I never do it. One of my favourite things in the entire world is a radio series – the 1981 BBC “Lord of the Rings” adaptation which remains (with apologies to Peter Jackson) the very best adaption of Tolkien’s works to date, and is indeed so good that there’s an argument to be had for it being better than the books (you’d lose the argument, but you could have it without looking like a complete arse).
Every now and again someone sends me a link for a radio show, particularly if it is in some way related to Charlie Brooker, and I listen, laugh and completely forget that I could tune in for myself without using iPlayer.
So I miss out on the today programme, on R4’s selection of experimental comedy shows, on new music and on really annoying bastards doing breakfast shows and being enormously smug. It’s deprivation, that’s what it is, and self-imposed.
I think my problem with the radio was summed up the first time I listened to Brooker’s show “So Good It’s Bad”. The iPlayer helpfully provides a graphic while you listen, in this case Charlie Brooker in a quilted smoking jacket looking fairly disgusted with everything. I stared at it for a full ten minutes before it occurred to me that I didn’t need to. I started doing something else and immediately lost track of what was going on in the show.
I lack radio skills. I am a failure.
Storey
26 May 2010
I don’t like heights very much.
It’s not that I’m terrified of them, and it’s not that I don’t quite enjoy them in some regards, but too much exposure to loftiness and a I get a little nervous. Maybe it’s working for 15 years on the second storey. It’s mundane.
This has got worse as I’ve got older. Admittedly most things have got worse as I’ve got older, including my ability o handle alcohol, my skin tone and my ability to concentrate on one thing for more than two minutes, and all of these things have a greater day to day impact on my life. But it’s still a shame.
A few years ago I was holidaying in New Zealand, on only my second real trip away from the UK. I had fallen in with a group of people – who were mostly much younger than me – and as we got to Lake Taupo on the north island they were determined to Skydive.
Being a bit reticent about elevation, I decided I would give this a miss and await them on the ground.
I hadn’t reckoned, however, on that pesky desire not to be left out of the fun. As I watched them handing over their NZ$300 to the receptionist and get told when their tiny plane would leave I began to feel a little resentful of my own cowardice. I ummed. I’m sorry to say, fair reader, that I may even have aahed. I weighed up terror against being all bored and regretful, and (unusually for me) decided I would tweak the nose of the dreadful spindly killer fish and give Skydiving a go. And there was always the idea that I might tackle my mild fear of heights and emerge a stronger man for it.
Oh, it’s all find and games at first, as they give you a blue (literal) jump suit and poke a camcorder in your face. The terror still isn’t real as they buckle you up to the harness with which your tandem expert will eventually cleave himself unto you. But as they march you out of the preparatory hangar and you see the light aircraft – which has been quite clearly constructed out of used cigarette packets and a tube of Uhu glue – it all gets quite scary.
I was already having second thoughts as we took off. The cardboard plane was rickety enough, which just served to remind me that I was about to be surrounded by nothing but air. I felt sick. There are photos of me looking bleached of all colour. Still, I thought, if it comes to it I don’t have to jump. A waste of $300, yes, but no one is going to make me.
And then it dawned on me. I was right at the front of the plane.
It was a narrow plane. Perhaps they hadn’t found enough cigarette packets, but the design was such that if someone decided that they didn’t fancy this jumping lark it was going to be horribly awkward squeezing everyone else past him. As my tandemee (an insane Aussie whose name was something like Killer Bob) glee pointed out that we still had half the ascent to go, I started to realise that I was a bit stuck. I could jump, or I could do something even more unimaginable.
I could inconvenience everyone else.
I began to panic in earnest. Could I move before we reached the correct altitude and, in effect, multi-task my meekness? No, we were belted firmly and there was no room to manoeuvre. If I shrank to one side would they get passed me? Probably, with a lot of climbing and kneeing each other in the face. No, there was nothing for it.
I would have to skydive out of sheer Englishness.
No half paralysed with fear, I allowed myself to be dragged to the open door of the plane, was shown the infinitely terrifying blue of the endless sky (which scares me far more than the ground, so much for one-size-fits-all psychology) and was pushed off.
The really odd thing was that I was so terrified of the general falling through the air thing, that it didn’t occur to me to be afraid of dying. It wasn’t until long after the parachute had opened that I remembered that there is always a small but real risk of malfunction. I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. This says everything you need to know about fear. It’s basically shit.
The other odd things was that I recall that I absolutely fucking loved it. But I say “I recall” for a good reason. I can’t conjure up the feeling anymore. I have no physical memory of that adrenalin rush, I just recall that I once had it. The fear, on the other hand, was so intense that I can still feel it now.
The upshot is that these days I am even more scared of heights than I ever was. But I can watch the official video of my jump with a certain amount of pride, even if my technical contribution to the whole process was the screaming. But I’m not doing it again. Oh no. Fuck right off.
I don’t like heights very much.
It’s not that I’m terrified of them, and it’s not that I don’t quite enjoy them in some regards, but too much exposure to loftiness and a I get a little nervous. Maybe it’s working for 15 years on the second storey. It’s mundane.
This has got worse as I’ve got older. Admittedly most things have got worse as I’ve got older, including my ability o handle alcohol, my skin tone and my ability to concentrate on one thing for more than two minutes, and all of these things have a greater day to day impact on my life. But it’s still a shame.
A few years ago I was holidaying in New Zealand, on only my second real trip away from the UK. I had fallen in with a group of people – who were mostly much younger than me – and as we got to Lake Taupo on the north island they were determined to Skydive.
Being a bit reticent about elevation, I decided I would give this a miss and await them on the ground.
I hadn’t reckoned, however, on that pesky desire not to be left out of the fun. As I watched them handing over their NZ$300 to the receptionist and get told when their tiny plane would leave I began to feel a little resentful of my own cowardice. I ummed. I’m sorry to say, fair reader, that I may even have aahed. I weighed up terror against being all bored and regretful, and (unusually for me) decided I would tweak the nose of the dreadful spindly killer fish and give Skydiving a go. And there was always the idea that I might tackle my mild fear of heights and emerge a stronger man for it.
Oh, it’s all find and games at first, as they give you a blue (literal) jump suit and poke a camcorder in your face. The terror still isn’t real as they buckle you up to the harness with which your tandem expert will eventually cleave himself unto you. But as they march you out of the preparatory hangar and you see the light aircraft – which has been quite clearly constructed out of used cigarette packets and a tube of Uhu glue – it all gets quite scary.
I was already having second thoughts as we took off. The cardboard plane was rickety enough, which just served to remind me that I was about to be surrounded by nothing but air. I felt sick. There are photos of me looking bleached of all colour. Still, I thought, if it comes to it I don’t have to jump. A waste of $300, yes, but no one is going to make me.
And then it dawned on me. I was right at the front of the plane.
It was a narrow plane. Perhaps they hadn’t found enough cigarette packets, but the design was such that if someone decided that they didn’t fancy this jumping lark it was going to be horribly awkward squeezing everyone else past him. As my tandemee (an insane Aussie whose name was something like Killer Bob) glee pointed out that we still had half the ascent to go, I started to realise that I was a bit stuck. I could jump, or I could do something even more unimaginable.
I could inconvenience everyone else.
I began to panic in earnest. Could I move before we reached the correct altitude and, in effect, multi-task my meekness? No, we were belted firmly and there was no room to manoeuvre. If I shrank to one side would they get passed me? Probably, with a lot of climbing and kneeing each other in the face. No, there was nothing for it.
I would have to skydive out of sheer Englishness.
No half paralysed with fear, I allowed myself to be dragged to the open door of the plane, was shown the infinitely terrifying blue of the endless sky (which scares me far more than the ground, so much for one-size-fits-all psychology) and was pushed off.
The really odd thing was that I was so terrified of the general falling through the air thing, that it didn’t occur to me to be afraid of dying. It wasn’t until long after the parachute had opened that I remembered that there is always a small but real risk of malfunction. I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. This says everything you need to know about fear. It’s basically shit.
The other odd things was that I recall that I absolutely fucking loved it. But I say “I recall” for a good reason. I can’t conjure up the feeling anymore. I have no physical memory of that adrenalin rush, I just recall that I once had it. The fear, on the other hand, was so intense that I can still feel it now.
The upshot is that these days I am even more scared of heights than I ever was. But I can watch the official video of my jump with a certain amount of pride, even if my technical contribution to the whole process was the screaming. But I’m not doing it again. Oh no. Fuck right off.
Resource
25 May 2010
I don’t know if I count as resourceful. I’m certainly not very practical, but I do manage to find a way through life despite, essentially, being so grossly unprepared for it that I should be dead about 50,000 times over, probably through malnutrition or accidentally forgetting that standing in front of elephants is dangerous.
Life’s a big, scary complicated thing. I imagine that most people don’t spend an enormous amount of time considering their relationship to shifting tectonic plates, evolution, solar flares, wildebeest migrations, mud, isotopes, the orange harvest, Mount Kilimanjaro and Uncle Ben’s boil in a bag egg fried rice. You’d never get anything done. So I often like to remind myself that no-one – no matter that they might be successful game players in the competition of Life like Rupert Murdoch or Sir Terry Tesco or whatever his name is, actually knows very much in the big scheme of things. They might know more about high finance and the manipulation of ordinary human beings, but they’d be stuck if they were asked to extemporise for 30 seconds on what makes a toaster happy.
These things get me through the day.
I don’t know if I count as resourceful. I’m certainly not very practical, but I do manage to find a way through life despite, essentially, being so grossly unprepared for it that I should be dead about 50,000 times over, probably through malnutrition or accidentally forgetting that standing in front of elephants is dangerous.
Life’s a big, scary complicated thing. I imagine that most people don’t spend an enormous amount of time considering their relationship to shifting tectonic plates, evolution, solar flares, wildebeest migrations, mud, isotopes, the orange harvest, Mount Kilimanjaro and Uncle Ben’s boil in a bag egg fried rice. You’d never get anything done. So I often like to remind myself that no-one – no matter that they might be successful game players in the competition of Life like Rupert Murdoch or Sir Terry Tesco or whatever his name is, actually knows very much in the big scheme of things. They might know more about high finance and the manipulation of ordinary human beings, but they’d be stuck if they were asked to extemporise for 30 seconds on what makes a toaster happy.
These things get me through the day.
Sunday, 6 June 2010
May
24 May 2010
It's a good job I'm running so far behind. Imagine if this had come up under a June heading! How embarrassing would that have been???
Last night I met an old friend who's girlfriend is expecting their first child. They want to call it May (if she's a girl). But she's going to be born in November. They're not letting that put them off though, especially since November is a bit of a handful and could confuse people (though I do know someone called October). I suppose most of the months make passable names, with the possible exception of February, which you wouldn't want to be associated with and which is a bit tricky to spell, especially if you're 6. Though it could give her an edge in spelling bees.
Do we have spelling bees here yet? It doesn't sound very difficult anyway. B.E.E.S. There, that wasn't so hard. If they hold a Spelling Chrysanthemum* let me know.
* this is the first time I've had to spell chrysanthemum since its correct spelling was ruthlessly drummed into my head 33 years ago. Just goes to show. I'm not sure what is goes to show, but it does, nevertheless. Which is a word a little like chrysanthemum. Nevertheless chrysanthemums. I want that on my tombstone.
It's a good job I'm running so far behind. Imagine if this had come up under a June heading! How embarrassing would that have been???
Last night I met an old friend who's girlfriend is expecting their first child. They want to call it May (if she's a girl). But she's going to be born in November. They're not letting that put them off though, especially since November is a bit of a handful and could confuse people (though I do know someone called October). I suppose most of the months make passable names, with the possible exception of February, which you wouldn't want to be associated with and which is a bit tricky to spell, especially if you're 6. Though it could give her an edge in spelling bees.
Do we have spelling bees here yet? It doesn't sound very difficult anyway. B.E.E.S. There, that wasn't so hard. If they hold a Spelling Chrysanthemum* let me know.
* this is the first time I've had to spell chrysanthemum since its correct spelling was ruthlessly drummed into my head 33 years ago. Just goes to show. I'm not sure what is goes to show, but it does, nevertheless. Which is a word a little like chrysanthemum. Nevertheless chrysanthemums. I want that on my tombstone.
Cozy
23 May 2010
I'm falling rapidly behind. I have to take little snatches of time available to me because I'm frankly so over-committed I'm probably breaking the working time directive (except, y'know, no-one's paying me for most of the activity).
And I wish I was cozy. I'm in my bedroom tapping away, and it ought to be cozy, because it's been warm outside for days, but it's hard to be cozy in a room with natural ambient temperature of 83%. Sleeping in here sometimes feels like taking a shallow bath. When I confronting my letting agents with the humidity issue they told me to sleep with the door open. When I tried it, not only did all the local wildlife wander in through the french doors, the humidity went up by 2%. Buggers.
Anyway, I'll catch up eventually. When I'm dead, possibly.
I'm falling rapidly behind. I have to take little snatches of time available to me because I'm frankly so over-committed I'm probably breaking the working time directive (except, y'know, no-one's paying me for most of the activity).
And I wish I was cozy. I'm in my bedroom tapping away, and it ought to be cozy, because it's been warm outside for days, but it's hard to be cozy in a room with natural ambient temperature of 83%. Sleeping in here sometimes feels like taking a shallow bath. When I confronting my letting agents with the humidity issue they told me to sleep with the door open. When I tried it, not only did all the local wildlife wander in through the french doors, the humidity went up by 2%. Buggers.
Anyway, I'll catch up eventually. When I'm dead, possibly.
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Hotcake
22 May 2010
Going like hotcakes. I had to sday that, because it's the only surviving instance where the term "hotcakes" can still be used. Would you walk into a bakery and ask about their range of hotcakes? Would you annouce to your friends that they should bring hotcakes to the dinner party?
There clearly *are* still hotcakes out there. It's not as though hotcakes died out after a giant scone crashed into the earth causing a billion tons of crumbs to be flung into the atmosphere and denied cakes the hotness necessary to survive as a popular confection. Or the incursion of cold cakes hasn't driven them north, so only a few remain scratching a living in cake shops in the Inner Hebrides. We just don't call them hotcakes. I suppose it's like birds and dinosaurs. Except, y'know, with flour as well as eggs.
All of which makes we wonder about the insistence of the British to cling to their little saying. There's just something nicely balanced about the phrase "going like hotcakes", something also inoffensive and pleasant. Even if we don't call anything a hotcake anymore, we can still imagine eating one and having a nice smile as we munch it. "Going like undervalued public ututily shares under Mrs Thatcher" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.
In so many ways.
Going like hotcakes. I had to sday that, because it's the only surviving instance where the term "hotcakes" can still be used. Would you walk into a bakery and ask about their range of hotcakes? Would you annouce to your friends that they should bring hotcakes to the dinner party?
There clearly *are* still hotcakes out there. It's not as though hotcakes died out after a giant scone crashed into the earth causing a billion tons of crumbs to be flung into the atmosphere and denied cakes the hotness necessary to survive as a popular confection. Or the incursion of cold cakes hasn't driven them north, so only a few remain scratching a living in cake shops in the Inner Hebrides. We just don't call them hotcakes. I suppose it's like birds and dinosaurs. Except, y'know, with flour as well as eggs.
All of which makes we wonder about the insistence of the British to cling to their little saying. There's just something nicely balanced about the phrase "going like hotcakes", something also inoffensive and pleasant. Even if we don't call anything a hotcake anymore, we can still imagine eating one and having a nice smile as we munch it. "Going like undervalued public ututily shares under Mrs Thatcher" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.
In so many ways.
Son
21 May 2010
Children freak me out. Not because they look a bit like aliens, with their big heads on little bodies and Roswell-esque eyes. Not because nothing that small and frail should be able to make that amount of noise. No, they freak me out because of the effect they have on other people.
To a non-parent like me, who has yet to be exposed to the toxins of the "parental bond" and paternal instinct, the change on new parents looks like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I'm sure to a parent it all feels terribly natural. To the cynical observer it's deeply creepy.
To me, the worst thing about your baby crying all night is that you can't sleep. To your actual parent, that's coupled with the anguish of the fact that your baby is crying in the first place. Are they in terrible anguish? Are you doing something wrong (if you read the Daily Mail you will be extra convinced that you are, but that's OK, because you will deserve to feel bad)? Will they hate you when they're 31 because you couldn't comfort them? You'll spend the next day, all shadow-eyed and narcoleptic, expressing your pain at watching their little face endure all that anguish.
They probably had an itchy bum.
This is why it's probably a good thing that I don't have a son or daughter, though if I did, I'm sure I'd be infected with the same brain-sucked-out-through-my-earholes devotion that everyone else seems to be. And that freaks me out more than anything else.
Children freak me out. Not because they look a bit like aliens, with their big heads on little bodies and Roswell-esque eyes. Not because nothing that small and frail should be able to make that amount of noise. No, they freak me out because of the effect they have on other people.
To a non-parent like me, who has yet to be exposed to the toxins of the "parental bond" and paternal instinct, the change on new parents looks like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I'm sure to a parent it all feels terribly natural. To the cynical observer it's deeply creepy.
To me, the worst thing about your baby crying all night is that you can't sleep. To your actual parent, that's coupled with the anguish of the fact that your baby is crying in the first place. Are they in terrible anguish? Are you doing something wrong (if you read the Daily Mail you will be extra convinced that you are, but that's OK, because you will deserve to feel bad)? Will they hate you when they're 31 because you couldn't comfort them? You'll spend the next day, all shadow-eyed and narcoleptic, expressing your pain at watching their little face endure all that anguish.
They probably had an itchy bum.
This is why it's probably a good thing that I don't have a son or daughter, though if I did, I'm sure I'd be infected with the same brain-sucked-out-through-my-earholes devotion that everyone else seems to be. And that freaks me out more than anything else.
Sunday, 30 May 2010
Barrel
20 May 2010
Just a short one. I'm trying to lose weight, and am slowly convinced that instead I am becoming more barrel chested with age. And barrel stomached, but that's probably because I will insist on drinking copious amounts of the contents of barrels.
Enough. Time for a sparkling water, methinks.
Just a short one. I'm trying to lose weight, and am slowly convinced that instead I am becoming more barrel chested with age. And barrel stomached, but that's probably because I will insist on drinking copious amounts of the contents of barrels.
Enough. Time for a sparkling water, methinks.
Expansion
19 May 2010
I'm a member of two theatre companies now. I've recently joined the Tower Theatre, currently based around the Bridewell Theatre off Fleet Street but with designs on a new build home on Curtain Road in Shoreditch. The other is Incognito, of which I've been a member for 8 years. They're based in the rather less impressive sounding suburbs of Friern Barnet at the far north of the 43 bus route.
Incognito also have their eyes on a bit of building activity, but in their case the expansion of their current home. Converted in the post-war years from an old biscuit factory, the cute little 65-seater needs a bit of work to keep it up to date with pesky modern requirements like running drinking water and disabled access.
(I originally mistyped that it required " a bit of ork", bringing figures of fanged, grey skinned cockneys dancing around on stage and eating live squirrels whilst singing "My Old Man's a Dustman")
The key difference between the two groups so far is that Incognito seem determined not to scrimp on their productions whilst they raise funds for their building work. I've just seen a production of Barefoot in the Park that had the most elaborate set imaginable, complete with a running tap, a stage build up by a foot so that it would look more like people coming on stage had just climbed up stairs and a brilliant skylight.
The Tower, meanwhile, have set a costume budget for our current show of about £80. This means that a character described as "Satan in a suit from Saville Row" will appear in the final act in a pair of Primark chinos.
Hmm.
I'm a member of two theatre companies now. I've recently joined the Tower Theatre, currently based around the Bridewell Theatre off Fleet Street but with designs on a new build home on Curtain Road in Shoreditch. The other is Incognito, of which I've been a member for 8 years. They're based in the rather less impressive sounding suburbs of Friern Barnet at the far north of the 43 bus route.
Incognito also have their eyes on a bit of building activity, but in their case the expansion of their current home. Converted in the post-war years from an old biscuit factory, the cute little 65-seater needs a bit of work to keep it up to date with pesky modern requirements like running drinking water and disabled access.
(I originally mistyped that it required " a bit of ork", bringing figures of fanged, grey skinned cockneys dancing around on stage and eating live squirrels whilst singing "My Old Man's a Dustman")
The key difference between the two groups so far is that Incognito seem determined not to scrimp on their productions whilst they raise funds for their building work. I've just seen a production of Barefoot in the Park that had the most elaborate set imaginable, complete with a running tap, a stage build up by a foot so that it would look more like people coming on stage had just climbed up stairs and a brilliant skylight.
The Tower, meanwhile, have set a costume budget for our current show of about £80. This means that a character described as "Satan in a suit from Saville Row" will appear in the final act in a pair of Primark chinos.
Hmm.
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Heterosexual
18 May 2010
I'm getting a certain amount of ribbing from my friends having been cast as Don Juan in a production of Patrick Marber's excellent Don Juan in Soho. I suppose I was hardly likely to get away with portraying a character who has had apparently had sex with about 20,000 women without a little comment. I keep having to point out that the original cast had Rhys Ifans in it, rather than Johnny Depp, and that therefore having the temerity to accept the casting did not mean I thought I was Adonis. Well, maybe Lord Adonis.
I was looking at reviews of the original production yesterday, and I spotted an odd reference:
"In a flash of sexual timidity, also, Grandage has removed Marber's apt allusion to DJ's gay proclivities, when no females came to hand."
Now, being familiar with the script by now, I know the line in question. "Skirt, and every once in a while, trouser. He's no poof, but he's got the appetite..."
I'd be interested to know who thought that was a problem. A man so sex obsessed that he will seduce a thousand-score women would probably fuck a cabbage patch doll if there was nothing else around, and in these days the "men who have sex with men" thing is practically old hat. The play is immoral, rude and largely played for laughs. I'm trying to work out if the director cut the reference because he wanted a purely heterosexual anti-hero, and if so why? Could it be that he wanted to stress that this particular kind of Lothario needed to be kept aside from the usual tabloid assumptions of homosexual promiscuity? i.e. to make him "a bit gay" would be to pander to the Daily Mail and make them think "well, what do you expect then?" But by doing so are you not accepting their view of the world? Hmmm.
I doubt I'll get a chance to ask.
I'm getting a certain amount of ribbing from my friends having been cast as Don Juan in a production of Patrick Marber's excellent Don Juan in Soho. I suppose I was hardly likely to get away with portraying a character who has had apparently had sex with about 20,000 women without a little comment. I keep having to point out that the original cast had Rhys Ifans in it, rather than Johnny Depp, and that therefore having the temerity to accept the casting did not mean I thought I was Adonis. Well, maybe Lord Adonis.
I was looking at reviews of the original production yesterday, and I spotted an odd reference:
"In a flash of sexual timidity, also, Grandage has removed Marber's apt allusion to DJ's gay proclivities, when no females came to hand."
Now, being familiar with the script by now, I know the line in question. "Skirt, and every once in a while, trouser. He's no poof, but he's got the appetite..."
I'd be interested to know who thought that was a problem. A man so sex obsessed that he will seduce a thousand-score women would probably fuck a cabbage patch doll if there was nothing else around, and in these days the "men who have sex with men" thing is practically old hat. The play is immoral, rude and largely played for laughs. I'm trying to work out if the director cut the reference because he wanted a purely heterosexual anti-hero, and if so why? Could it be that he wanted to stress that this particular kind of Lothario needed to be kept aside from the usual tabloid assumptions of homosexual promiscuity? i.e. to make him "a bit gay" would be to pander to the Daily Mail and make them think "well, what do you expect then?" But by doing so are you not accepting their view of the world? Hmmm.
I doubt I'll get a chance to ask.
Line
17 May 2010
I have crossed the line from functioning existence into some kind of sleepwalking state where simple things like raising a sarcastic eyebrow are just tooo much effort. It's debilitating. I can barely raise a tirade of abuse about the Queen's Speech or point and laugh at Teresa May.
What can I do?
This morning I was viciously assaulted by a selection of alarms. While the Ducks of Death on my iPod quacked furiously at me, my Nokia phone played a merrily insufferable tune and my computer boomed its auto-start-up noise.
It didn't make any difference. I just lay there, listening to it bleep my brain to a pulp. And lo, just when I think I've got enough energy to crawl to work, I can't get into the bathroom.
It's all too much. Someone throw me a line, will they?
I have crossed the line from functioning existence into some kind of sleepwalking state where simple things like raising a sarcastic eyebrow are just tooo much effort. It's debilitating. I can barely raise a tirade of abuse about the Queen's Speech or point and laugh at Teresa May.
What can I do?
This morning I was viciously assaulted by a selection of alarms. While the Ducks of Death on my iPod quacked furiously at me, my Nokia phone played a merrily insufferable tune and my computer boomed its auto-start-up noise.
It didn't make any difference. I just lay there, listening to it bleep my brain to a pulp. And lo, just when I think I've got enough energy to crawl to work, I can't get into the bathroom.
It's all too much. Someone throw me a line, will they?
Friday, 21 May 2010
Torture
15 May 2010
I can't do it. I should talk about British complicity in torture in war zones, or the new Government's admirable commitment not to deport those who may face torture in their home countries. I should talk about how I hope the LibCon coalition will live up to their responsibilities as a self-professed reforming liberal Government and end all UK involvement with the Big T.
But it's been a long week, and I've been on the receiving end of some violence, so I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself.
I've been hit in the face by cricket balls preceisely twice in my life. Unfortunately, both those times have been in the past fortnight. I don't know what I did to the cricketing gods, but clearly Stumpy, the Cricketing God of Disfigurement, or Bodyline, the Cricketing God of Violence have been at work manipulating things so that I have my own, mild version of torture.
It's creating a bit of a stir at work. There is general consensus that I've been having a punch up, perhaps with Liberal Conservatives. This is a fair enough assumptions since I spent the lection period ranting fanatically about the evils of Tories and then come to work covered with unsightly abrasions and swellings, like someone performing "The Elephant Man Meets Raging Bull" or something. People shuffle away from me on the street - even more swiftly than they usually do. I'm having to dress quite smartly to avoid being denied access to shops by security guards worried that I'm only there to thieve and support my crack habit. The second blow was on the forehead right between the eyes. My brow swelled up so much I looked like one of the vampires from Buffy - one that clearly wasn't important enough a character to ever get to take their makeup off.
Just to cheer me up, my cricketing friends have taken to pointing out that "these things come in threes". It's not my face I'm worried about (well, it *is*, but...), it's just that if I get hit again my dignity will be gone from the cricket field forever and I won't hear the end of it. That would be tortuous, if not actual torture.
I can't do it. I should talk about British complicity in torture in war zones, or the new Government's admirable commitment not to deport those who may face torture in their home countries. I should talk about how I hope the LibCon coalition will live up to their responsibilities as a self-professed reforming liberal Government and end all UK involvement with the Big T.
But it's been a long week, and I've been on the receiving end of some violence, so I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself.
I've been hit in the face by cricket balls preceisely twice in my life. Unfortunately, both those times have been in the past fortnight. I don't know what I did to the cricketing gods, but clearly Stumpy, the Cricketing God of Disfigurement, or Bodyline, the Cricketing God of Violence have been at work manipulating things so that I have my own, mild version of torture.
It's creating a bit of a stir at work. There is general consensus that I've been having a punch up, perhaps with Liberal Conservatives. This is a fair enough assumptions since I spent the lection period ranting fanatically about the evils of Tories and then come to work covered with unsightly abrasions and swellings, like someone performing "The Elephant Man Meets Raging Bull" or something. People shuffle away from me on the street - even more swiftly than they usually do. I'm having to dress quite smartly to avoid being denied access to shops by security guards worried that I'm only there to thieve and support my crack habit. The second blow was on the forehead right between the eyes. My brow swelled up so much I looked like one of the vampires from Buffy - one that clearly wasn't important enough a character to ever get to take their makeup off.
Just to cheer me up, my cricketing friends have taken to pointing out that "these things come in threes". It's not my face I'm worried about (well, it *is*, but...), it's just that if I get hit again my dignity will be gone from the cricket field forever and I won't hear the end of it. That would be tortuous, if not actual torture.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Poet
14 May 2010
I am not a poet.
This is probably fairly obvious if you have actually had the patience to read any of my previous prosaic ramblings. I don't really read poetry, and I certainly haven't tried to write very much of it, especially not since I stopped being a lonely love-lorn teenager.
I'm not entirely sure what natural imperative drives teenagers to wrote poetry when they're depressed. Why does it even occur to them? Are there 14 year olds from amazonian tribes uncontacted by modern society that get rejected by the chief's daughter and inscribe their pain and longing into the bark of a Gwahu tree, and tattoo it with ink gained by squeezing the ribcage of the rainbow Splillip Frog until it vomits on their wooden stylus? It seems likely. But why?
I suspect that it's just because teenagers are fucking lazy, and poems are generally short. If poetry didn't exist they wouldn't transcribe their pain in the form of a three part Proustian epic. They'd probably just have another wank.
I am not a poet.
This is probably fairly obvious if you have actually had the patience to read any of my previous prosaic ramblings. I don't really read poetry, and I certainly haven't tried to write very much of it, especially not since I stopped being a lonely love-lorn teenager.
I'm not entirely sure what natural imperative drives teenagers to wrote poetry when they're depressed. Why does it even occur to them? Are there 14 year olds from amazonian tribes uncontacted by modern society that get rejected by the chief's daughter and inscribe their pain and longing into the bark of a Gwahu tree, and tattoo it with ink gained by squeezing the ribcage of the rainbow Splillip Frog until it vomits on their wooden stylus? It seems likely. But why?
I suspect that it's just because teenagers are fucking lazy, and poems are generally short. If poetry didn't exist they wouldn't transcribe their pain in the form of a three part Proustian epic. They'd probably just have another wank.
Friday, 14 May 2010
Packing
13 May 2010
Packing. I hate packing. It doesn't matter that packing is a precursor to a theoretically exciting moment in life - it's still a kind of distilled tidying, and as such I loathe it. After all, what's the difference between finding a home for everything by putting related objects in a draw or a filing cabinet, and putting together all the things that will be useful in the amazon basin into one backpack? It's natures evil attempt to make you organised against your will.
Islamic artists insert a deliberate flaw into anything they do, because only God is perfect. Aside from the arrogance inherent in the suggestion that without the intentional flaw their work would have been perfect, it's a concept I can relate to. Whenever I pack for a holiday, I intentionally forget one really crucial item - plane tickets, malaria medication, trousers - in order to bring me luck later on.
Actually, that's a lie. I'm just an idiot, but it was a nice idea.
Packing. I hate packing. It doesn't matter that packing is a precursor to a theoretically exciting moment in life - it's still a kind of distilled tidying, and as such I loathe it. After all, what's the difference between finding a home for everything by putting related objects in a draw or a filing cabinet, and putting together all the things that will be useful in the amazon basin into one backpack? It's natures evil attempt to make you organised against your will.
Islamic artists insert a deliberate flaw into anything they do, because only God is perfect. Aside from the arrogance inherent in the suggestion that without the intentional flaw their work would have been perfect, it's a concept I can relate to. Whenever I pack for a holiday, I intentionally forget one really crucial item - plane tickets, malaria medication, trousers - in order to bring me luck later on.
Actually, that's a lie. I'm just an idiot, but it was a nice idea.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Downturn
12 May 2010
Downturn? That's a sneaky one. After desperately squishing various words into allowing me to rant about the election, it throws a genuinely political word at me. Nasty trick.
The Conservative-Liberal-Democrat Government that has been set up has a big job to do is avoiding a further downturn as it seeks to repay Gordon's bills. It would have been a perfect scenario for pure Tories, since despite the fact that we are mostly in massive debt because of the cost of recapitalising David Cameron's old chums in the banking sector, they have convinced many of the public that it's all because of government waste. For Tories, spending 5 years cheerfully wielding the axe would be like a pervert getting a job quality testing butt-plugs.
But I don't think it is going to be quite so much fun for the Whigs. At the moment they're crowing that the policy deals they have done with the Tories are (as one LibDem put it) a "centre-left agenda with occasional moments of right-wing madness"*. But the deal does not say where the axe will fall. For a party that believed that cutting spending too soon could lead us to a double-dip recession to engage in as yet undefined cost-cutting must be very alarming. If it all goes wrong their own membership won't forgive them, let alone the voters.
But what the hell. Some people say that we're heading for Greek style unrest. Since Greek style yoghurt is so nice I wonder if their unrest might not be pretty good too. Though I'd prefer strawberry. Possibly low fat macrobiotic, strawberry unrest, personally churned by Vince Cable whilst people throw marzipan sparrows at his head. It's the only way.
* "a bit like the last Government", as he put it.
Downturn? That's a sneaky one. After desperately squishing various words into allowing me to rant about the election, it throws a genuinely political word at me. Nasty trick.
The Conservative-Liberal-Democrat Government that has been set up has a big job to do is avoiding a further downturn as it seeks to repay Gordon's bills. It would have been a perfect scenario for pure Tories, since despite the fact that we are mostly in massive debt because of the cost of recapitalising David Cameron's old chums in the banking sector, they have convinced many of the public that it's all because of government waste. For Tories, spending 5 years cheerfully wielding the axe would be like a pervert getting a job quality testing butt-plugs.
But I don't think it is going to be quite so much fun for the Whigs. At the moment they're crowing that the policy deals they have done with the Tories are (as one LibDem put it) a "centre-left agenda with occasional moments of right-wing madness"*. But the deal does not say where the axe will fall. For a party that believed that cutting spending too soon could lead us to a double-dip recession to engage in as yet undefined cost-cutting must be very alarming. If it all goes wrong their own membership won't forgive them, let alone the voters.
But what the hell. Some people say that we're heading for Greek style unrest. Since Greek style yoghurt is so nice I wonder if their unrest might not be pretty good too. Though I'd prefer strawberry. Possibly low fat macrobiotic, strawberry unrest, personally churned by Vince Cable whilst people throw marzipan sparrows at his head. It's the only way.
* "a bit like the last Government", as he put it.
Family
Just discovered that the Whigs have been unable to stop the Tory plan to reward marriage with £150 in tax breaks.
Despite the various anomalies, such as the fact that it will punish widows and widowers for negligently allowing their partners to die of cancer or get run over by cunts, or cause a quandary for quite a lot of people who quote statistics that show that women tend to feel less fulfilled after they get married, the LibDems best response is to abstain.
This means that without a serious rebellion for the members of the Conservative Party who aren't still living in the 19th century it's pretty much certain that in the middle of an economic crisis we're going to spend millions of pounds on the lamest behavioural engineering experiment since my mum offered me 20p to tidy my room.
No wonder the pound is plummeting. Which will make £150 even more pathetic.
11 May 2010
Despite the various anomalies, such as the fact that it will punish widows and widowers for negligently allowing their partners to die of cancer or get run over by cunts, or cause a quandary for quite a lot of people who quote statistics that show that women tend to feel less fulfilled after they get married, the LibDems best response is to abstain.
This means that without a serious rebellion for the members of the Conservative Party who aren't still living in the 19th century it's pretty much certain that in the middle of an economic crisis we're going to spend millions of pounds on the lamest behavioural engineering experiment since my mum offered me 20p to tidy my room.
No wonder the pound is plummeting. Which will make £150 even more pathetic.
11 May 2010
Blastoff
I don't think I'd like to go into space.
Not at the moment, anyway. I'd rather a few other people strapped themselves into a Virgin spaceship and risked being evaporated with rocket fuel before I give it a go.
But then, I am an official tardy-adopter, especially with anything dangerous. I went to university and met a load of people who'd had a gap year when they were 18 and spent it rescuing Zambian babies from crocodiles or building houses for poor people in Laos out of dental floss. Ignoring a school trip to Paris, I left the country for the first time when I was 28. I learned to drive in my twenties. I'm still not quite brave enough to turn the TV on during a thunderstorm, and I have to really gather my willpower to swim less than an hour after eating an edamame.
So I might give space travel a miss. You know, just for now.
10 May 2010
Not at the moment, anyway. I'd rather a few other people strapped themselves into a Virgin spaceship and risked being evaporated with rocket fuel before I give it a go.
But then, I am an official tardy-adopter, especially with anything dangerous. I went to university and met a load of people who'd had a gap year when they were 18 and spent it rescuing Zambian babies from crocodiles or building houses for poor people in Laos out of dental floss. Ignoring a school trip to Paris, I left the country for the first time when I was 28. I learned to drive in my twenties. I'm still not quite brave enough to turn the TV on during a thunderstorm, and I have to really gather my willpower to swim less than an hour after eating an edamame.
So I might give space travel a miss. You know, just for now.
10 May 2010
Fatalism
I'm watching Sri Lanka play cricket on TV. They seem to have given up.
I wonder if that's because Sri Lankans are Buddhist fatalists? When I was there in 2001 I was driven around for a few days by an amusing man called Lal, who tried to fill me in on as much of Sri Lankan culture as is possible as you get driven jet lagged along the pot-holed highways of central Serendib.
He warned me, as yet another truck swung dangerously into the path of our tiny vehicle, that Sri Lanka had a fairly poor traffic record. I was much more likely to die on the roads - he said helpfully as I sat stuck in a car on a road - than I was at the hands of the Tamil Tigers and their terrorist campaign.
Apparently this is because they are fatalists. Rather than servicing their cars and paying careful attention on the roads, many of them choose to believe that whether they make it alive to the end of their journey is entirely in the hands of fate and not, say, having your eyes open and not driving into a tree.
Clearly they don't all think this. Possibly not even that many. But as any teacher will tell you, it only takes a few to ruin it for the rest of us.
entry 9 May 2010
I wonder if that's because Sri Lankans are Buddhist fatalists? When I was there in 2001 I was driven around for a few days by an amusing man called Lal, who tried to fill me in on as much of Sri Lankan culture as is possible as you get driven jet lagged along the pot-holed highways of central Serendib.
He warned me, as yet another truck swung dangerously into the path of our tiny vehicle, that Sri Lanka had a fairly poor traffic record. I was much more likely to die on the roads - he said helpfully as I sat stuck in a car on a road - than I was at the hands of the Tamil Tigers and their terrorist campaign.
Apparently this is because they are fatalists. Rather than servicing their cars and paying careful attention on the roads, many of them choose to believe that whether they make it alive to the end of their journey is entirely in the hands of fate and not, say, having your eyes open and not driving into a tree.
Clearly they don't all think this. Possibly not even that many. But as any teacher will tell you, it only takes a few to ruin it for the rest of us.
entry 9 May 2010
Uniting
This could be an excuse to talk more about the election.
Instead I will just reflect on the Uniting Church of Australia. I have always been gently impressed with this concept, because it was formed of Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1977 when they realised that there were only about 15 of them in each church, and if they got together they would be closer in size to the Australian Anglicans (54 people) and the Australian Catholics (69 people).
I imagine these figures are wrong, but Australians have never struck me as particularly religious. Though they have frequently just struck me.
I don't know much about ecumenicism, but I suspect that getting Methodists and Congregationalists to merge is fairly tricky*, otherwise they wouldn't have been separate churches in the first place.
But my favourite fact is that the members of the church who oppose the ordination of gay and lesbians formed a group called Evangelical Members of the Uniting church. Otherwise known as EMU.
It's fairly sad to be homophobic. It's even sadder to desperately shoe-horn the name of your reactionary movement into an Australian animal.
They should have called themselves the Knob-ends And Nincompoops Gagging At Respect for Other Ones, or something.
Or just cunts.
* hmm. This merger business could catch on.
entry for May 8
Instead I will just reflect on the Uniting Church of Australia. I have always been gently impressed with this concept, because it was formed of Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1977 when they realised that there were only about 15 of them in each church, and if they got together they would be closer in size to the Australian Anglicans (54 people) and the Australian Catholics (69 people).
I imagine these figures are wrong, but Australians have never struck me as particularly religious. Though they have frequently just struck me.
I don't know much about ecumenicism, but I suspect that getting Methodists and Congregationalists to merge is fairly tricky*, otherwise they wouldn't have been separate churches in the first place.
But my favourite fact is that the members of the church who oppose the ordination of gay and lesbians formed a group called Evangelical Members of the Uniting church. Otherwise known as EMU.
It's fairly sad to be homophobic. It's even sadder to desperately shoe-horn the name of your reactionary movement into an Australian animal.
They should have called themselves the Knob-ends And Nincompoops Gagging At Respect for Other Ones, or something.
Or just cunts.
* hmm. This merger business could catch on.
entry for May 8
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Given
The Lib Dems seem to have been given quite a few concessions. Britain's state pensioners have finally had the link to earnings restored (you have to assume that was LibDem pressure), there'll at least be a review of Britain's nuclear deterrent (though a commitment to having one) and the Inheritance Tax threshold will remain where it is.
But I will scream if I hear one more commentator suggest that the huge raising of the income tax allowance is a major concession. No, it wasn't Tory policy, but it is intrinsically a Tory wet-dream. It's a tax cut. And it's not a tax cut for the worse off, it's a tax cut for the lower middle-classes, exactly the kind of people that the Tories could do with securing before the next election. Who'll get the credit for it? I fear the more successful the Liberal influence over the Tories, the better it will make the Tories look. If the Tories get a full majority next time on the back of successful coalition governance, the voters will be in for a shock.
That's a given.
May 6 2010
But I will scream if I hear one more commentator suggest that the huge raising of the income tax allowance is a major concession. No, it wasn't Tory policy, but it is intrinsically a Tory wet-dream. It's a tax cut. And it's not a tax cut for the worse off, it's a tax cut for the lower middle-classes, exactly the kind of people that the Tories could do with securing before the next election. Who'll get the credit for it? I fear the more successful the Liberal influence over the Tories, the better it will make the Tories look. If the Tories get a full majority next time on the back of successful coalition governance, the voters will be in for a shock.
That's a given.
May 6 2010
Monopoly
Vince Cable (I keep wanting to call him Vince Clark, which then leads to the terrifying image of him with an enormous New Romatic-style fringe wiggling slightly as he plays keyboards) has been appointed Business Secretary, with responsibility for sorting out the banks.
Vince often fails to correct people who suggest that he saw the banking crisis coming. He didn't. He warned extensively that levels of personal debt were unsustainable (they were) but like everyone else was taken unawares by the impact of the hideous rapacity of Britain's banking sector.
Cable (or possibly Clarke's) appointment as chief of all things banking does at least mean that the Tory "victory" has not had the one unbearable aspect that it seemed to - that the banking crisis had handed power to.... the banks. Cable is not a Tory and comes from a very different bankground (er, big oil - ed), and this at least shows Cameron's willingness to distance himself from the pinstriped mob that gave him his votes in the first place.
So perhaps we'll see the major rule change to the eternal game of Monopoly, and see the Banks becoming part of the board rather than the mysterious power that oversees it.
Or not. We'll see if we ever pass Go again.
entry for May 5 2010
Vince often fails to correct people who suggest that he saw the banking crisis coming. He didn't. He warned extensively that levels of personal debt were unsustainable (they were) but like everyone else was taken unawares by the impact of the hideous rapacity of Britain's banking sector.
Cable (or possibly Clarke's) appointment as chief of all things banking does at least mean that the Tory "victory" has not had the one unbearable aspect that it seemed to - that the banking crisis had handed power to.... the banks. Cable is not a Tory and comes from a very different bankground (er, big oil - ed), and this at least shows Cameron's willingness to distance himself from the pinstriped mob that gave him his votes in the first place.
So perhaps we'll see the major rule change to the eternal game of Monopoly, and see the Banks becoming part of the board rather than the mysterious power that oversees it.
Or not. We'll see if we ever pass Go again.
entry for May 5 2010
Thousand
A thousand years ago Ethelred 'The Unready' was King of the English. Not of England, you understand, because it didn't exist as a political entity (a bit like now), but then most countries didn't, so it wasn't as though we were all that far down any league tables (unlike now).
Apparently Ethelred wasn't all that Unready, which is all very well, but he certainly didn't have an easy time of it. His reign was disrupted because no-one could quite decide who had the right to rule outright. The 'country' was divided, with some favouring Ethelred, and other Canute, he of the holding-back-the-sea experiment and general all-round Danish bloke.
After Ethel died a power-sharing agreement was set up between Canute and Edmond Ironside, Ethelred's son, after Edmund's claim for the crown turned out not to be backed by his party. Did I say party? I meant counsellors. Eventually Edmund agreed that whichever ruler died first should cede their territories to the other. The ink probably wasn't dry before he snuffed it. Conspiracy theories abound.
Why am I writing this down? No idea. Can't see any parallels around the dangers of power sharing.
Hmm. Edmund was very popular in London but outside the city the people wanted a different ruler. Some things never change.
technical entry for May 4
Apparently Ethelred wasn't all that Unready, which is all very well, but he certainly didn't have an easy time of it. His reign was disrupted because no-one could quite decide who had the right to rule outright. The 'country' was divided, with some favouring Ethelred, and other Canute, he of the holding-back-the-sea experiment and general all-round Danish bloke.
After Ethel died a power-sharing agreement was set up between Canute and Edmond Ironside, Ethelred's son, after Edmund's claim for the crown turned out not to be backed by his party. Did I say party? I meant counsellors. Eventually Edmund agreed that whichever ruler died first should cede their territories to the other. The ink probably wasn't dry before he snuffed it. Conspiracy theories abound.
Why am I writing this down? No idea. Can't see any parallels around the dangers of power sharing.
Hmm. Edmund was very popular in London but outside the city the people wanted a different ruler. Some things never change.
technical entry for May 4
West
I'm heading out West on Sunday. Not very far west, it must be said. I'm not going to Idaho, or even the Bahamas. Just Oxfordshire. On one level this is a shame - I'm dying to get out of the country for a couple of weeks for a rest but I'm stuck here by a combination of rehearsals and lack of funds - but I am getting to play cricket on a very pretty ground in beautiful countryside, so it seems churlish to dwell too much on the fact that Barbados would be slightly more exciting.
If there's anything worrying me, it's the fact that this particular hillside is fairly exposed and faces east. Given the May we're having, there's a very real risk that there will be a gale from Siberia with a wind chill of -1 howling across the rape fields and rubbing our skin with icy cheese-graters. About 12 years ago I arrived at this ground on a dat so chill that the man at mid-off was wearing a ski-mask, like someone fielding for the UDA in the 1984 Northern Ireland inter-faction terrorists one-day final.
So wish me a westerly breeze. After all, it'll probably make it warmer for you, too.
technical entry for May 3
If there's anything worrying me, it's the fact that this particular hillside is fairly exposed and faces east. Given the May we're having, there's a very real risk that there will be a gale from Siberia with a wind chill of -1 howling across the rape fields and rubbing our skin with icy cheese-graters. About 12 years ago I arrived at this ground on a dat so chill that the man at mid-off was wearing a ski-mask, like someone fielding for the UDA in the 1984 Northern Ireland inter-faction terrorists one-day final.
So wish me a westerly breeze. After all, it'll probably make it warmer for you, too.
technical entry for May 3
Sweating
There has been a fair bit of sweating in the last few days. Sweating from Gordon Brown over whether he had a future (I'm afraid not Gordon, go and have a long lie down, you deserve it). Sweat from David Cameron as to whether his grand project would founder on a minority Government where he had to defer to every right-wing psychopath on his backbenches to get through even the smallest piece of legislation. Sweating from the LibDems as to whether their wider party would back whatever deal they made with the Tories.
That's a lot of sweat.
It's not over. The Whig's "triple lock" device to stop over-mighty leaders jumping into bed with the wrong people on the wrong terms (or even the right people on the wrong terms) might have been partially negotiated (the parliamentary party and the national exec have backed Clegg) but the leader has decided that he wishes to consult the third part of the lock (the wider party) even though he doesn't have to.
Why? More sweat?
Nick Clegg knows the problem he's going to have selling this deal. He thinks he's got a good one but knows that any deal with the Tories is uncomfortable for his supporters, and that therefore any deal he makes might turn out to be not quite enough for them.
Now, LibDem voters might be disappointed by a deal with the Tories, but Clegg may be wagering that voters don't get anywhere near the Tory hating levels of actual party members. They hate them with a fiery passion that would make a Labour supporter blush with shame at their own pluralism. So the party - appropriately - become the miners' canaries, chirping happily if everything is fine, or dropping dead out of sheer disgust if the deal on the table is insufficient to compensate for the horror of seeing their boys in a cabinet with Theresa May and Liam Fox in it.
If the party membership can wear it, Clegg might think, anyone will. And if they don't, he can still walk away without actually having shafted anyone. And that's worth a bit more sweat.
technical entry for May 2 2010
That's a lot of sweat.
It's not over. The Whig's "triple lock" device to stop over-mighty leaders jumping into bed with the wrong people on the wrong terms (or even the right people on the wrong terms) might have been partially negotiated (the parliamentary party and the national exec have backed Clegg) but the leader has decided that he wishes to consult the third part of the lock (the wider party) even though he doesn't have to.
Why? More sweat?
Nick Clegg knows the problem he's going to have selling this deal. He thinks he's got a good one but knows that any deal with the Tories is uncomfortable for his supporters, and that therefore any deal he makes might turn out to be not quite enough for them.
Now, LibDem voters might be disappointed by a deal with the Tories, but Clegg may be wagering that voters don't get anywhere near the Tory hating levels of actual party members. They hate them with a fiery passion that would make a Labour supporter blush with shame at their own pluralism. So the party - appropriately - become the miners' canaries, chirping happily if everything is fine, or dropping dead out of sheer disgust if the deal on the table is insufficient to compensate for the horror of seeing their boys in a cabinet with Theresa May and Liam Fox in it.
If the party membership can wear it, Clegg might think, anyone will. And if they don't, he can still walk away without actually having shafted anyone. And that's worth a bit more sweat.
technical entry for May 2 2010
Monday, 10 May 2010
Ribbon
Interesting times. It's fascinating watching the external presentations of the deal making between David Cameron's Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats' Nick Clegg (intentional inversion). Of course, we have no real idea of the conversations going on between the Tories and Whigs. They might be just as amicable as they are claiming, or the alleged personal vitriol between Clegg and Cameron maybe be sparking acidic fires around the room. We won't know for ages, probably until after the next election.
But what we do know it what is at stake. The Lib Dems want their cherished electoral reform. The simplistic view is that they should insist on a referendum for it as a pre-condition of joining a coalition. But the real responsibility on the Lib Dems is to gain a referendum and then win it, and they are understandably cautious about losing the only chance for a generation to secure fairer voting.
The easiest way to guarantee a referendum would be treat with Labour. But although no sprinter broke the ribbon and stormed to victory in the electoral race, Gordon Brown's abiding unpopularity with the wider public risks the fairness part of the argument (why should a party with less than 40% of the vote get to govern?) losing out to what we shall call the fearness part (PR is so fucked up it allows Gordon Brown to stay as Prime Minister).
Clegg is therefore understandable nervous that the fearness factor would lose him the referendum he had gained by joining with Labour. Thus he is still trying to make a deal with the Tories work despite the obvious roadblocks. Many in his party are urging him not to budge on PR.
But Clegg's second dilemma is this. If he walks away from the Tories, he condems the country to some sort of minority rule. That might be just fine - and it a fair representation of the vote - but ultimately people will fear the instability and might reflect on the limits of a new voting system that will make horse trading such as this much, much more likely. In effect he has a responsbility to make the inevitable results of PR look good, so that voters are more comfortable with the idea And that means he might be best served by selling out his voters and joining Cameron in the Cabinet and then trying to engineer a referendum in a different way.
Ouch.
This was the official entry for 1 May 2010. Until I catch up the date will be at the bottom of the blog!
But what we do know it what is at stake. The Lib Dems want their cherished electoral reform. The simplistic view is that they should insist on a referendum for it as a pre-condition of joining a coalition. But the real responsibility on the Lib Dems is to gain a referendum and then win it, and they are understandably cautious about losing the only chance for a generation to secure fairer voting.
The easiest way to guarantee a referendum would be treat with Labour. But although no sprinter broke the ribbon and stormed to victory in the electoral race, Gordon Brown's abiding unpopularity with the wider public risks the fairness part of the argument (why should a party with less than 40% of the vote get to govern?) losing out to what we shall call the fearness part (PR is so fucked up it allows Gordon Brown to stay as Prime Minister).
Clegg is therefore understandable nervous that the fearness factor would lose him the referendum he had gained by joining with Labour. Thus he is still trying to make a deal with the Tories work despite the obvious roadblocks. Many in his party are urging him not to budge on PR.
But Clegg's second dilemma is this. If he walks away from the Tories, he condems the country to some sort of minority rule. That might be just fine - and it a fair representation of the vote - but ultimately people will fear the instability and might reflect on the limits of a new voting system that will make horse trading such as this much, much more likely. In effect he has a responsbility to make the inevitable results of PR look good, so that voters are more comfortable with the idea And that means he might be best served by selling out his voters and joining Cameron in the Cabinet and then trying to engineer a referendum in a different way.
Ouch.
This was the official entry for 1 May 2010. Until I catch up the date will be at the bottom of the blog!
Saturday, 8 May 2010
Mileage
30 April 2010
It's a amazing how much having a life gets in the way of having a life. It would have been very kind of Gordon Brown not to call an election at the same moment that I was starting the cricket season and appearing in a play, but I suppose he'd run out of choice. June would have been almost as bad, though I might have got into a rhythm by then.
And so I'm still behind - it's May 8th and the British political system is in chaos. Sort of. Rather, we're facing what most other European nations - including our more successful rivals Germany and France - have to deal with all the time: coalition politics. At the moment Clegg and Cameron are playing footsie under the table, but there's an elephant the size of Canary Wharf in the room (well, obviously if it's that big it can't be in the room. Unless the 'room' is the O2 with the walls demolished and it's lying down. Which it probably is - if you're that big you'd need to lie down a lot). If Clegg wants power, he has to give up electoral reform but doing decreases his chances of ever properly getting power. If Cameron wants power on majority terms, he has to agree to electoral reform (or a referendum on it at least), but doing so decreases his chances of future power for him and his party, since the majority of the population still fear and despise them.
Who will budge? I'm not sure there's much mileage in a Lib-Con pact, but we shall see.
It's a amazing how much having a life gets in the way of having a life. It would have been very kind of Gordon Brown not to call an election at the same moment that I was starting the cricket season and appearing in a play, but I suppose he'd run out of choice. June would have been almost as bad, though I might have got into a rhythm by then.
And so I'm still behind - it's May 8th and the British political system is in chaos. Sort of. Rather, we're facing what most other European nations - including our more successful rivals Germany and France - have to deal with all the time: coalition politics. At the moment Clegg and Cameron are playing footsie under the table, but there's an elephant the size of Canary Wharf in the room (well, obviously if it's that big it can't be in the room. Unless the 'room' is the O2 with the walls demolished and it's lying down. Which it probably is - if you're that big you'd need to lie down a lot). If Clegg wants power, he has to give up electoral reform but doing decreases his chances of ever properly getting power. If Cameron wants power on majority terms, he has to agree to electoral reform (or a referendum on it at least), but doing so decreases his chances of future power for him and his party, since the majority of the population still fear and despise them.
Who will budge? I'm not sure there's much mileage in a Lib-Con pact, but we shall see.
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Mining
29 April 2010
I was hoping for a string of frothy words so that I could catch up - it's really May 5th - but watchout4snakes seems determined to steer me towards sensible topics. After all, it's impossible to approach the general election tomorrow with the word "mining" in your head and not think of the last Conservative Government.
David Cameron, I suppose, cannot help what his party did in the 1980s but it clearly didn't bother him all that much or he wouldn't have joined it. Indeed, as Gary Younge says in the Guardian “As a young man Cameron looked out on the social carnage of pit closures and mass unemployment, looked at Margaret Thatcher's government and thought, these are my people. When all the debating is done, that is really all I need to know.”
Put alongside the risk of double-dip recessions, links to people who think they can ‘heal’ gay-people with prayer or who run extreme right wing societies who believe that the NHS is a waste of money, and with fellow shadow cabinet members backing homophobic B&B owners, when faced with a slogan of “we’re all in it together” while unveiling tax breaks that benefit only the rich, it really is too much to ask that the Conservative Party – sorry “David Cameron’s Conservatives” have changed. Expect to see, very soon, the Conservative’s David Cameron, and the undermining of many good things we take for granted.
I was hoping for a string of frothy words so that I could catch up - it's really May 5th - but watchout4snakes seems determined to steer me towards sensible topics. After all, it's impossible to approach the general election tomorrow with the word "mining" in your head and not think of the last Conservative Government.
David Cameron, I suppose, cannot help what his party did in the 1980s but it clearly didn't bother him all that much or he wouldn't have joined it. Indeed, as Gary Younge says in the Guardian “As a young man Cameron looked out on the social carnage of pit closures and mass unemployment, looked at Margaret Thatcher's government and thought, these are my people. When all the debating is done, that is really all I need to know.”
Put alongside the risk of double-dip recessions, links to people who think they can ‘heal’ gay-people with prayer or who run extreme right wing societies who believe that the NHS is a waste of money, and with fellow shadow cabinet members backing homophobic B&B owners, when faced with a slogan of “we’re all in it together” while unveiling tax breaks that benefit only the rich, it really is too much to ask that the Conservative Party – sorry “David Cameron’s Conservatives” have changed. Expect to see, very soon, the Conservative’s David Cameron, and the undermining of many good things we take for granted.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Cambric
28 April 2010
It's a stitch up.
Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. But in the spirit of a random word whcih is afabric used for needlework, the stitching up link is too good to miss.
'Bigotgate', as it persists in being called despite teasing from The Daily Show, has rumbled on for a bit, despite the "victim" accepting Brown's apology and the growing realisation that the other party leaders have not made hay on this issue because they know that if anyone reported what *they* say about voters after they've got in the car it wouldn't look so good for them either.
What interests me is the idea that the only time Brown forgot his mic was on, he calls a voter "bigoted". Hmm. Brown is clumsy and gauche, but he's not stupid. It's rather tempting to imagine that he's left his microphone on before, but nothing has ever come of it.
This suggests two things - one, that the bigot remark is the worst thing this alleged raging bully has ever said and two, that news companies are effectively eavesdropping on the Prime Minister.
The irony of a Government whose worst sin has been to try and convince the country that it needs to be watched 24/7 to keep it safe being monitored by the media is not lost on me, but what would have happend if Gordon Brown had received a confidential call on a matter of national security or somethign while Sky was listening? Would we be expected to trust that they would not break cover to reveal that they were monitoring Brown's communications? There's something a bit creepy about it.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it doesn't seem unfortunate beyond even Brown's renowned bad luck that this was the only time he has ever left his mic on.
As for Duffy - it's not bigoted to raise the issue of immigration and ask about its impact. But the question "where are all these Eastern Europeans flocking from?" is not only the stupidest you'll hear all year (where the fuck do you think they are flocking from?), but is also a provocative, insensitive one that has nothign to do with genuine concern and everything to do with reflected the mass panic of the right wing media machine. Again, maybe I am unkind - Duffy is clearly not a particularly articulate woman, and there is a difference between being an actual bigot, and being unable to express yourself in a way which avoids that impression. But flocking is one level down from "swamping" in terms of the pejorative language of the immigration debate, and I'm not at all surprised that Brown thought she was bigoted. Indeed he was surprisingly polite. But for a man regarded by many as terribly out of touch, it was yet another demonstration of his complete lack of sensitivity to the PR needs of the modern election campaign. We need to hope that he is made of tougher material than this.
It's a stitch up.
Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. But in the spirit of a random word whcih is afabric used for needlework, the stitching up link is too good to miss.
'Bigotgate', as it persists in being called despite teasing from The Daily Show, has rumbled on for a bit, despite the "victim" accepting Brown's apology and the growing realisation that the other party leaders have not made hay on this issue because they know that if anyone reported what *they* say about voters after they've got in the car it wouldn't look so good for them either.
What interests me is the idea that the only time Brown forgot his mic was on, he calls a voter "bigoted". Hmm. Brown is clumsy and gauche, but he's not stupid. It's rather tempting to imagine that he's left his microphone on before, but nothing has ever come of it.
This suggests two things - one, that the bigot remark is the worst thing this alleged raging bully has ever said and two, that news companies are effectively eavesdropping on the Prime Minister.
The irony of a Government whose worst sin has been to try and convince the country that it needs to be watched 24/7 to keep it safe being monitored by the media is not lost on me, but what would have happend if Gordon Brown had received a confidential call on a matter of national security or somethign while Sky was listening? Would we be expected to trust that they would not break cover to reveal that they were monitoring Brown's communications? There's something a bit creepy about it.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it doesn't seem unfortunate beyond even Brown's renowned bad luck that this was the only time he has ever left his mic on.
As for Duffy - it's not bigoted to raise the issue of immigration and ask about its impact. But the question "where are all these Eastern Europeans flocking from?" is not only the stupidest you'll hear all year (where the fuck do you think they are flocking from?), but is also a provocative, insensitive one that has nothign to do with genuine concern and everything to do with reflected the mass panic of the right wing media machine. Again, maybe I am unkind - Duffy is clearly not a particularly articulate woman, and there is a difference between being an actual bigot, and being unable to express yourself in a way which avoids that impression. But flocking is one level down from "swamping" in terms of the pejorative language of the immigration debate, and I'm not at all surprised that Brown thought she was bigoted. Indeed he was surprisingly polite. But for a man regarded by many as terribly out of touch, it was yet another demonstration of his complete lack of sensitivity to the PR needs of the modern election campaign. We need to hope that he is made of tougher material than this.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Effusion
27 April 2010
I wonder if - a la the Matrix - it would be possible to solve the world's energy crisis not with wind farms and wave power floaty stuff, but with people. Not just any people though - and certainly not me - with with effusive people. People who seem to have way to much energy.
Being utterly energy dependent rather than energy giving (as I insert little tubes into my arm to receive the constant drip of Irn Bru and Lucozade into my blood stream) I watch these people with a certain amount of awe. I can only imagine what I could get done if I had half the energy of these walking, talking (and occasionally shrieking) nuclear reactors. But at the very least I'd like to plug them in somewhere and have them run the UK rail network or something.
Effusion power. It's the way forward.
I wonder if - a la the Matrix - it would be possible to solve the world's energy crisis not with wind farms and wave power floaty stuff, but with people. Not just any people though - and certainly not me - with with effusive people. People who seem to have way to much energy.
Being utterly energy dependent rather than energy giving (as I insert little tubes into my arm to receive the constant drip of Irn Bru and Lucozade into my blood stream) I watch these people with a certain amount of awe. I can only imagine what I could get done if I had half the energy of these walking, talking (and occasionally shrieking) nuclear reactors. But at the very least I'd like to plug them in somewhere and have them run the UK rail network or something.
Effusion power. It's the way forward.
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