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today....

2011-11-08T02:36:00.002Z

Ho Hum
back whenever

today : the dan (and randy)

2011-11-01T03:38:00.001Z

I've been playing a lot of guitar recently. Playing like a 15 year old obsessive might, for hours at a time. This week I will turn 45. Damn that 9 year old kid who kicked a whiffle ball out of my hand in 1976, breaking my left little finger. It was never right after that and playing a lot of guitar 35 years later keeps reminding me. It sometimes doesn't do what I want it to after playing for long periods. But I guess our imperfections are part of our individual styles. Django Reinhart only had two working fingers fercrissakes. Tony Iommi chopped the tips off his in a metal press.

So anyway, there I was playing in a new set of DR black beauty strings on my red Music Man. I looped some simple-ish chords on the delay and played along. There was a phrase I kept returning to that I knew sounded familiar. It bugged me all day and I kept playing it and replaying it my head until it suddenly struck me that was a tiny bit of the guitar solo from My Old School by Steely Dan.

So for the next week or two I started listening to Steely Dan a lot. Two long road trips later and I'd covered the 'Citizen' box set twice over in two days. That's all the albums plus The Nightfly trilogy plus one two other tracks. Twice in two days.

They are an odd prospect, but fascinating. People get obsessed by them in a nerdy kind of way. To some ears they are fatally easy listening and bland. But maybe that's because they kind of invented that smooth California sounding jazz-rock or rock-jazz that was maybe too soft for rock fans and too rock for jazz fans. That kind of muso music that was made for hi-fi systems, when hi-fi was entirely the preserve of the people who are now computer and gadget geeks. Then there's the lyrics, which because they aren't ooh-baby-baby, rock and roll lyrics get pored over and dissected and deconstructed and analysed ad nauseum. There are pages on the web that contain glossaries, dictionaries and entire rambling essays about Steely Dan Lyrics.

I must say, there are plenty of Dan tracks (songs? cuts? sides?) that don't excite me too much. Yes, the playing is superb and the production pin sharp. But the songs. Some of them are too welded together - trying to fix clever-clever lyrics to clever-clever chord sequences. Let's see how many Minor ninths with an added fifth and a dropped second we can string together - on a chorussed electric piano even dreary chords sound dreamy. Green Earrings, for example.

Which is fair enough. Great songs somehow perform alchemy from mundane elements. Chords, melody, rhythm, meter, arrangements and lyrics somehow fit perfectly together as if they always were that way. Think of Cole Porter's Anything Goes. How could you improve that song? And most bands and artists hit the heights maybe once or twice in a career. So I'll forgive Steely Dan for the forced noodly non-melodies, the repetitive syncopated piano that appears too much too often and the songs that have a great lyric but a boring arrangement. I'll forgive them for inspiring uninspired bands like Deacon Blue and a million and one late 70s/early80s TV and movie soundtracks. I'll even forgive them for the overuse of that really annoying synthesised harmonica/unidentifiable reed instrument sound that they overused on later recordings, rendering them almost unlistenable.

I have a general theory of bands and artists that they have done well if you can make a best-of that reaches 8 tracks. Most good bands' truly best work amounts to somewhere between one and five tracks i.e. almost nobody even makes one entire album where every track is a killer. If you can get past ten outstanding tracks, even in a decades long career, then a band is pretty great. It's a fun game. You have try to be objective and have a super-high quality threshold. So you can't have track that has a great riff, or a great line, or a great chorus, or a great solo. The best-of songs have to have pretty much all the elements in place.

Let's use REM as an example. Most people (including me) likes their song Everybody Hurts. But it just doesn't make it, because it's a terrific vocal performance, and it has one terrific chord change (don't let yourself go: Amajor to Eminor), but is not really a great song. On my list Coldplay have a best-of that amounts to one song (Don't Panic), as do U2 (With or Without You).

As I said, it's a fun game. You can skewer peoples' favourites and they get really riled, partly because true objectivity is impossible and is always a cover for personal prejudice. But in music I think there is a real difference between favourite and best.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Steely Dan. Off the top of my head: Pearl of the Quarter, Peg, Do It Again, Only a Fool Would Say That, Reelin in the Years, My Old School, Pretzel Logic, Kid Charlemagne, Any Major Dude, Deacon Blues - there's 10 without even thinking, and not even touching The Nightfly, which IS one of those albums where pretty much every track is outstanding (although I hate that song IGY - ironically the one that was a hit of sorts and everyone else likes).

When I was a High School English Teacher I used to do this thing with songs. I would take a lyric, pick out lines and use them as a jumping off point for discussion, analysis and creative work.

"I would go out tomorrow, if I could borrow a coat to wear" was a favourite. I was always struck, even as a child, by what a weird song Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear is. It somehow ended up in the kids' songs category due to its jauntiness and the fact that it has a dancing bear in the title. But the story in the lyric contains such scope for interpretation that it is far too complex for Tony Blackburn and Arnold the dog. I guess this is Randy Newman's trick. Levels of irony piled high in apparently simple songs and almost always something disturbing lurking in the subtext. Even 'I Love LA' has these odd minor key bits in the music that deliver a slightly disturbing haunted circussy undertow to the enthusiasm of the lyric. And I always liked Same Girl. Apparently a simple, beautiful paen to a long time or long lost love. But there's that bit about the nights on the streets and the holes her arm that give it that undermining twist. I especially liked Mathilde Santing's version, which gives the song a gender makeover.

It'a amazing, (alarming outrageous and charming) actually, how quickly 13 and 14 year old kids get into Simon Smith and weave stories around the lyrics as they are revealed line by line. He's an outsider, the bear is is in his head, that sort of thing.

Another one I used was from Green Flower Street (which is Donald Fagen, but firmly in the Steely Dan ouevre) : "Lou Chang, her brother, is burning with rage." I remember one kid putting up his hand and saying that it's about a white guy going out with a Chinese girl and the brother doesn't like it. Just like that, from one line.

Which is one of the reasons I like Steely Dan. They take care over their lyrics and write songs about odd stuff. But somehow, to my ears, it's mostly not pretentious. And if you feel like it you can construct the story and work out the viewpoints. At their best, the songs are as good as anything American music has ever produced.

today : another number

2011-10-29T01:32:00.003+01:00

boo hoo

2011-10-18T01:24:00.004+01:00

Boo hoo. My humble little 'internetweblog' is feeling neglected, as represented by the endlessly pathetic Dawson Leary. That's becoz I can't be bothered saying anything recently. You can't help but look around and just feel disappointed with the world and think that someone whinging in an obscure part of the internetweb will have no impact on the corruption, hatred, selfishness and misery.

today : the tories at conference

2011-10-06T05:38:00.002+01:00

Immigrants...blah blah blah....lower taxes...blah blah blah...continue to blame the other lot...blah blah blah...bin collections...blah blah blah...hate Europe...blah blah blah...dole scroungers...blah blah blah...hang 'em, flog 'em...blah blah blah. Same old shite.

today: guitar time again

2011-10-02T02:31:00.002+01:00

I bought one of these. So sue me.

today : a groovy tune from Ane Brun

2011-09-20T04:32:00.001+01:00

heard this on the radio and it is very catchy and groovy.

today : I show no interest

2011-09-10T06:28:00.003+01:00

The other day I was watching breakfast TV. For some reason or other they were having a debate about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. People were lined up on each side of the argument.

I switched over.

It reminded me that I just don't care about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It's one of those things that will forever remain controversial amongst people who like to obsess about these things. It's an industry for some scholars and busybodies. A new book or a film will come out and it will all be dragged up again.

Don't get me wrong. It doesn't mean that I don't care about Shakespeare the writer. The more I read the plays and poetry the more I am smitten with the beauty, scale and richness of it. People who dismiss Shakespeare - the plays - are idiots.

But whether a single man called 'Shakespeare' actually wrote them. Don't care.

Soon after, the show had a feature about Madonna's film about Wallis Simpson. Everyone is obsessed with Wallis Simpson and the abdication. But it is yet another thing that interests me not one jot. For a start I have no interest in the lives of the royals, and the abdication was also decades before I was born.

Which made me think about some of the other things I don't care a fig for, but seemingly take up much of other peoples' time and effort. Richard III - evil or not? I don't care. The identity of Jack The Ripper? Well, his name was Jack, so that one's cleared up enough for me and beyond that I just can't be bothered wasting the energy. Was Robin Hood a real person, and if he was, was it in Nottinghamshire or South Yorkshire? Don't care if he existed or not, don't care where he may or may not have lived and roamed if he did.

John Martyn? Nasty evil wife beater or beautiful troubador? Sinatra. How involved in the Mafia was he really? Wa Marilyn murdered by the Kennedy's?

The list of things other people are apparently interested in, nay, fascinated and obsessed by, but leaves me totally cold, is endless. It must just be me. Not got the interested in pointless speculation gene.

today : september # 3

2011-09-09T04:47:00.001+01:00

today : September # 2

2011-09-09T04:29:00.005+01:00

Whenever September rolls around, I am reminded that it is my least favourite month. In recent years, operations meant that I spent 2 of the last four Septembers in painful recovery, which is still fresh in my memory. But long before that Septembers were harbingers of misery.

When I was a teacher it, of course, meant going back to work. Some other teachers seemed to happy to be back in school. I imagine they maybe had broods of children and, as the adult at home for the previous six weeks, had spent the entire time trying to entertain their offspring. Maybe, for them, returning to work would herald at least some of the day being in their own control, some return to normal adulthood.

But for the childless me it spelt the end of freedom. The summer holidays were the time when I could cut loose from all routines and responsibilities. Sometimes I went on holiday for the whole time. Other years I would write solidly, or record and mix an album, or just do what I wanted for as long as I wanted. For example, I always like sitting down when the Olympics or whatever is on and consuming it all night and day knowing that other Olympics watchers were rationed to highlights brief moments.

But September was when the watch went back on my wrist and the collars and ties moved to the front of the wardrobe. Time to start being grown up.

Not that returning to school is totally without joy. There is something comforting in routine and work. I personally find something deeply satisfying in falling asleep in front of the TV on a Friday evening, overdosed on take-away additives and a glass of cold beer, but properly tired from hard work rather than sleepy from staying up the previous night playing GTA3. And teaching always throws up new challenges, new pupils and new colleagues - all generally positive. There's nothing like finding some gems amongst the new intake of pupils - either ones you know you can help get on and enjoy teaching or ones who are crazy and/or strange to the point of sheer entertainment. Same with new staff. Sometimes the churn of new colleagues can throw up interesting and positive dynamics. A new friend even.

But as the years went by looming Septembers started to outshine the potential positives of a new academic year. Eventually, for me, that first six-week half-term started the downward spiral towards the Xmas half-term, which is the nadir of any school year. The first couple of weeks in September are filled with energy and various kinds of newness. The next four filled with dread and pessimism at the knowledge that the clocks will go back and the six weeks from Bonfire night through to Christmas will be some kind of dark troop towards hell.

Let me explain. The minute the October half-term ends the entire nation is on a run-up to Christmas. Children are almost entirely distracted by the hyped promise of whatever gifts they are to receive. But everyone is also drained by the darkness of the winter mornings and evenings and those days where it never really gets properly light. Motivation is at its lowest. Tiredness makes everyone grouchy and hard to live with and there are more windy, rainy and cold days than not. It's not a massive change - but 1% less motivation and 1% less cooperative behaviour can tip the balance significantly.

Anyway, that's all in my past and not the real reason why I hate September. The real reason is that as soon as September comes around the so-called 'silly season' ends. I turn on the TV and find that I am bombarded with crap. Not only do the political correspondants all return from their hols but so do the politicians. After a blessed few weeks where we have had a nice break, everything returns to its appalling norm. That is: an endless parade of politicians, their fat awful corrupt lying smug holiday-tanned faces, spouting their endless specious bullshit. All their speeches and policy initiatives and hobby-horse ideology. All their psychotic egotistical preening and their arrogant self-serving miasma, poisoning the airwaves and the air with their pointless noise.

It reminds you that modern-day politics is not about running the country - after all, whilst they were away inflicting their odious selves on the people of California, Tuscany, Devon and the Dordoigne, the country more or less kept running. It is about egotistical shallow bastards promoting themselves and the hollow certainty of their own cretinous opinions and shoring up the wealth of themselves and their friends. It's no less tribal and objectionable than in Afghanistan or Libya.

today : September # 1

2011-09-09T04:27:00.002+01:00

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

today : some groovy tunes

2011-09-03T01:13:00.000+01:00

Jazzsteppa - dubstep with jazz: genius

SBTRKT - Pharoahs. Superb electro groove. genius

Soul Creations Funky Jive pt1 (I actually prefer Pt 2 as it has more jazzy soloing but I couldn't find a youtube for it). Check out the wah wah funky guitar: genius.

I noticed this tune Atlas by Battles cropped up on an advert recently. When Battles hit a groove -like on this or Tij, they are genius.

Twilight 22 Electric Kingdom. Old School 1983 genius.

Fujiya and Miyagi should be more successful than they are. Their music is interesting and textured. This video for Ankle Injuries (could be my theme tune) is genius.

today : spineless swines, cemented minds

2011-08-30T01:16:00.003+01:00

Michael Gove's free schools open in a few days. It'll be interesting to see whether they achieve any success.

I suspect we'll never know if they are better than other schools. No doubt they will be measured differently when it comes to results. I also suspect that the fact that they are an ideologically, rather than educationally, driven project that they won't be allowed to fail. So expect to see the exact amounts of direct funding being quite difficult to fathom, with various obfuscated forms of financial support that other schools won't receive.

The rub, of course, being that their freedom is supposed to replace a failing national curriculum. Mmmm, that's the NC that was a Tory invention in 1991, mainly as a response to bogus tabloid fears of left wing Local Education Authorities brainwashing our precious kids with their loony leftism and forced gayness. And now a new thing to replace old thing. The fears are little changed. Centralising control and exercising it through grateful proxies. Bypassing the swathes of immoral ill-disciplined (liberal lefty) teachers that populate normal inner-city schools. And still there's the suspicion that inner cities are run by Labour lefties who cannot be allowed to have access to our childrens' purely capitalist minds.

I bet that when it all comes out in the wash, in an age of cuts across the education system, the money per pupil spent in free schools will easily outweigh Gove's trumpeted pupil premium. And lets not forget that it was the Tories who relentlessly stripped cash out of the system over for twenty years, leaving schools, pupils and teachers gasping for breath.

today : I meet someone I don't know

2011-08-22T04:59:00.001+01:00

I'd like to use the opportunity of me owning an internetweb weblog to announce categorically that I have never knowingly met or befriended a haemophiliac.

Don't get me wrong. In no way have I sought to avoid haemophiliacs. I have nothing against them and am sure that they are all very nice people. In fact I am further certain that many, if not all, of them are worthy of some measure of admiration for living with such a potentially difficult and problematic condition.

But still, as far as I know I have never met one.

I just thought I'd clear that up.

Because today I was in the process of donating some old stuff - a stereo system that worked but was obsolete due to the lack of a CD player, some fine quality but little-used hiking boots that were in hindsight, seeing as I literally cannot walk, an optimistic purchase, and some books - to a charity shop. I know the guy in the shop and it's my first choice whenever I have anything to donate.

(Without wishing to appear too worthy and preachy and that I do a lot of work for charidee without wishing to talk about it, if you are ever thinking of donating to a charity shop it's a good idea, so my contacts on the inside inform me, to only give half-decent stuff. It seems that lots of people use charity shops as a way of throwing stuff away, including lots of stuff that is genuine rubbish and sometimes disgusting, like soiled underwear, unwashed nappies and bloodstained bedclothes. This means that charity shops have to spend time to sort out the good stuff and pay extra to throw the bad stuff away. The rule is that if you yourself wouldn't think of buying something were it in a charity shop, then it's probably best being put in the bin or taken to the tip, especially if it appears to be covered in suspicious bodily fluids.)

So there I was, parked at the backdoor of the shop unloading my donations from the car. My friend was helping, given that my walking sticks mean I have 100% less available hands than your average normal person to carry bags etc. In fact, to say that I was unloading is only true in its broadest, continuous sense. What I specifically was doing was pointing at the various items in the boot of my car, which my friend then unloaded and took inside.

Nearby, outside a charity clothes shop (it is a salubrious area), there was a parked red van. A wheezing circular bloke wearing blue overalls was piling stuff into the back. Once he'd finished and theatrically slammed the doors he walked over to me. From about a foot away he pointed firmly at my chest.
"I know you. You're Darren's mate. Good to see you."
I can quite honestly say that I didn't know this guy. Never seen him before. In point of fact, I've never even known anyone who could be mistaken for him. Moreover, I don't know anyone called Darren. The last person I knew of that name was at middle school aged about twelve. When we moved on to new school we quickly lost touch. Not a surprise given that we were never really good friends: the only bond we really had was that I was the maverick right-sided midfielder in the school footie team and Darren was a pretty tall and fast centre forward who benefited immensely from a number of my crosses, through-balls, back-heels and other skillful and creative assists.

There aren't even many famous Darrens. D-list musical and panto actor/tabloid love-rat Darren Day, Darrin from Bewitched, footballers Darren Huckerby and scoop-faced serially-injured Darren Anderton and pretentious film director Darren Aranovsky are the only ones I can conjure up at the moment, and one of them is fictional and spelt differently.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know a Darren."
"Yeah you do. Darren. Darr-en. Darren from Ellington Avenue!" He'd started to speak to me in that slightly shouty way people speak to foreigners who don't understand English, or the elderly whose ears and memories are assumed to be suspect.
"I'm sorry," I said, rapidly rifling through people I'd known who'd lived in the area of Ellington Avenue but never thought of for years just to see if I missed a Darren. I rapidly came up with a Neil, a Niall, an Andrew, a Chris, a Jonathon and a Dean, but no Darrens.
"Darren the haemophiliac!" he said, as if this piece of medical information would prove the key fact that made me unable to further deny my knowing Darren from Ellington Avenue.
"I don't know what to say," I said. "I am local and I grew up around here, so maybe you've seen me around. I even know Ellington Avenue because a girl in my class lived there..."
"What school did you go to?"
"Greenwood High."
"How old are you?"
"Forty-four."
"Oh," he looked momentarily crestfallen. "I'm thirty six." He was silent for a moment while we both absorbed the import of our ages: with the maximum crossover for people being in school at the same time being seven years, any notion that we went to school together was scuppered.

Apparently this was his last gambit for creating some historical connection between us.

"Well, gotta run," he announced. "This stuff won't take itself to the tip," he said and walked away back to his van.

today : same old sh*t

2011-08-16T01:42:00.003+01:00

Knee + Jerk

National Service
Cut Benefits
More Discipline in Schools (bring back caning)
Cut more Benefits
Longer Prison sentences
Chain Gangs
Employ American advisors
Blame the previous government
Blame immigrants

(and btw cut taxes for the rich)

today : feel the pain...take the blame

2011-08-13T04:07:00.002+01:00

Barring further incidents, there will be a torrent, a clamour, of blame, analyse and explain in the next week or so. None of the MPs, newspaper columnists, journalists, think-tank directors, commentators or bloggers will admit the truth. None of them will personally take the blame for what happened in August 2011. Overwhelmingly, opinion is that nobody understands. But that is the point. We/they will show that we/they understand so little that they hardly have a way to grasp it. They don't even understand how little they understand. But once again, they/we won't look in the mirror. If control was lost then there's nobody else who could have lost it. If there has been a moral shift, it didn't just happen without cause. If society is 'broken', as the politicians seem to insist, then it didn't just break on its own. The hard truth is that we/they broke it. They will bang on endlessly about others' lack of responsibility without once genuinely taking responsibility themselves. If the young lack role models and examples, then older generations are the ones who failed to be the example or the role model. If the young lack opportunity then we are the ones who failed to ensure it. Everyone expressed some measure of shock and surprise that the country exploded in riots, but nobody will really admit their part in a society that engenders such violence.

today : I predict a roti

2011-08-13T02:38:00.001+01:00

today : 90 degrees in my shades

2011-08-03T01:12:00.003+01:00

Today it was 88 degrees in my kitchen, which for England is pretty hot. Summer is erratic and often very short and it always amuses me that we complain when it gets really hot, just as we complain when it gets really cold, or when it is neither especially hot nor especially cold. We also complain when it rains, or not.

But I am out of step with other Brits. I love it hot. As hot as possible please. If I was (and sadly, I am not) the person who won £161 million on the lottery the other week (and there's none of this American lottery nonsense where you get it over 20 years. Here it's one of those oversized cheques in a single beautiful chunk) I would instantly move to somewhere like Santa Fe for the dry heat and/or New Orleans for the humid heat, holidaying in Calcutta, Rio and North Africa for a change.

Anyway I am not even going to pretend that I am not , in part, using the heat as a rather feeble excuse to post pictures of Claudia Cardinale modelling various items of 'summer' clothing.

today : tweet tweet

2011-07-28T04:32:00.004+01:00

where do all the tweets and texts go? More and more tv and radio shows spend more and more of their time imploring viewers and listeners to tweet and txt. its a kneejerk part of any show now, despite the context. at the weekend i noticed, in between the uncomfortable and intrusive questions to survivors of the norway massacre (how did you feel thinking that you were going to die? by the way, what was it like to watch your friends be murdered in front of you?) the news folk begged us to send our thoughts by twitter and txt. what did they expect? later on, a couple of comments were read out. people felt sad for the people who died. one or two were angry at the guy who did it. surprise.

If someone did manage to send in a detailed and insightful comment it would never make it to air. ok, i get it on the radio. lauren laverne asks for people to request their favourite recent track. Fine. sometimes a pithy topic of discussion crops up and listener contributions add to the flavour of a show. but asking people to comment on an unfolding big news story with scant detail is just pointless and bizarre. what possible contribution could they make? and what happens to all the tweets and emails and txt that are sent and posted but never make it to air?

today : instant classic

2011-07-26T05:48:00.002+01:00

According to what I read, John Grant almost gave up on music and on life after a crappy run of luck. But he didn't, and his album Queen of Denmark is terrific - not been off my Dansette for months. This song, in particular - especially in its long form, is an instant classic. As good as anything I've ever heard.

today : twaaannnggg!!! (reprise)

2011-07-24T05:24:00.002+01:00

My Semi-Acoustic got a new set up and a set of flatwounds. Money I can't really afford. So sue me.

today's very interesting music is...

2011-07-23T04:14:00.000+01:00

Fuguefat by The Octopus Project

today : I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.

2011-07-21T06:02:00.002+01:00

One of the things, as a Labour supporter throughout the period of the last government, that I was always reluctant to do was to openly criticise them. This, on the the grounds that I knew what the alternative was, and Labour plus imperfection and mistakes always always trumps the Tories.

There were three main areas where I thought they fell down. Iraq, obviously. You can argue they had no choice but to follow Bush but in the end the whole thing was monumentally stupid. Then there was their puppy-dog overenthusiasm for things like databases (I always think the plural should be databii), surveillance cameras and all that stuff. Not only is it ideologically dodgy to go all Patriot Act on the asses of the innocent public, but these things always cost stupid amounts of money and rarely succeed. The NHS database, as an example, was a lovely Utopian idea but was ill-executed and ended up as a hideously costly failure that everybody but the people in charge could see coming a mile off.

But even in the heady days before Iraq, I was always critical of the way New Labour seemed to pander to the media. There was a desperation to control the news cycle which led to many hasty policy ideas and, ultimately a scatter-shot approach to policy that left too much important stuff undone or half-finished. It also seemed to be that lots of more radical and interesting policies were put into turnaround or watered down at the behest of the media. In some ways they can be let off the hook by dint of inexperience. New Labour were the first government to operate in the 24hr media world and also the first to live in the internet age. As the media world expanded so explosively, it looked like they were trying to corral it all. It ended up looking like someone trying to herd flies or someone trying to catch a thousand ping-pong balls and hold onto them. And after 20 years of relentless attacks on the left by the press, who could blame them if they convinced themselves that they needed to court the newspapers.

Recently, some people have been saying that this wasn't necessary, that the Sun never wot won anything on its own. But when you have 6 major newpapers against you and only one consistently for, then perhaps you have to try something to reduce the effect. In this climate the power of the press expanded to fill the gaps in competence and experience. The problem was that nobody said "Enough", the more the media tried to undermine, the more Labour tried to pander. More than once they back-pedalled. More than once they looked weak and foolish.

The 24hr news media still rely too much on the newspapers. Despite TV having 70% of the news market and the Beeb having 70% of that, even the BBC uncritically follows the front pages of some of the most agenda-driven and politically biased papers. It's not often that the Beeb creates the news agenda anymore. Occasionally they'll do a Panorama that enacts some small change, but even Rough Justice is long gone. Turn on News 24 and there is almost no investigative element to the journalism. They read out the same newswire reports, recycle the same stories as everyone else, and use the same small coterie of experts and commentators.

Knowing that nobody else is stepping up to take the lead puts power in the hands of the newspaper proprietors, whose ultimate job is to sell newsprint, and not really be custodians of balance and democracy.

A great example of this is a kind of non-political story: the MMR/Autism controversy. The newspapers went crazy over the story without ever checking the facts. They know that fear is an easy selling tool. It served their agenda of attacking the government and pressuring Tony Blair. on MMR they could attack at will because no government was going to change their vaccination policy in such circumstances. The Mail and The Express lazily live off health scares and/or miracle cures. But this time, even the broadsheets and TV jumped in, middle class journos caught up in the paranoia of not producing perfect offspring. The result : almost an entire generation of middle class kids unvaccinated and an pointless surge in measles. It's killed some of these very children, whose parents are, in the end, little different from those who swallowed the evangelism and fed their kids the Kool Aid at Jonestown.

The other thing that has happened is that the papers as a whole have enjoyed free reign to bully whosoever they please. Politicians are wary of criticising the papers because they know that the papers have files on them, or might stop at nothing to relentlessly smear them - smears which echo unchallenged across TV and radio channels. Therefore their only option has to cosy up. Keep your enemies closer.

On the surface it seems that recent events have cracked the press/police/politician nexus wide open for all to see. People are calling left and right for reform. But even if Murdoch's influence declines (after all he will retire/die eventually) let's remember to revisit the media/politics/police relationship in a few years time and see what reforms have been successfully enacted, and how things have changed. After all, three years later and the banks have paid themselves 14 billion quid of bonuses out of our pockets. Whilst surviving on our cash, they still believe they are so clever that they have abolished debt liability, still poise themselves to feed like vultures on the very economies their actions put in peril, and still celebrate their imagined profitability at the end of each day with bottles of vintage Bollinger. Root and branch reform was mooted, and then promised. To qoute George Carlin. We put a dollar in the change machine and nothing changed.

today : my latest hobby

2011-07-18T02:57:00.002+01:00

Watching the floodgates open/the dam burst etc

today : twaaannnggg!!!

2011-07-17T03:40:00.002+01:00

I bought one of these. So sue me.

today : The Laughing Policeman

2011-07-14T06:00:00.001+01:00

I was thinking about this today. It's funny, sinister and quite bizarre.

today : Go Gordon

2011-07-14T05:50:00.003+01:00

I always thought that it was a mistake for the spin-doctors to shackle Gordon Brown's streak of righteous anger. He is always ay his best when raining Presbyterian fire and brimstone on the head of injustice. One of the few politicians who I believe is driven by ideals rather than pure self-regard.

And finally, he looked the bullies in the eye and unloaded. Ironically, his critics are still in the mode where everything he does is worthy of ridicule i.e. the line pushed by Murdoch's press and then echoed by the rest of the kow-towing spineless news community, but he was spot on the target and delivered the kind of missive today that, had it come 18 months ago, might have won him the election.

today : i visit a farm

2011-07-09T01:20:00.003+01:00

So anyway, I started to go to a Farm Shop instead of the supermarket for some things. It is not some kind of trendy Sunday supplement fashion thing - there is a Sunday Farmer's Market near my house, but it's overpriced and attended by people who drive big German 4x4 cars and have nannies for their children. It's my sister's fault. She gave me a slice of pie. It was home-made chicken and ham from the farm shop. Unlike most pies that contain mainly air and a kind of ill-defined reclaimed (now I don't have anything against reclaimed meat on principal. If you eat the rump then you should be prepared to also eat the cartilage, eyeballs or whatever) mush, this pie was stuffed full with big chunks of chicken and tasty pieces of smoky ham (you get a gratis pot of chicken gravy with it too, rather than them put the gravy inside the pie). There seemed to be nothing reclaimed about the meat in the 'Farm' pie. In fact it looks and tastes like the opposite: extra-virgin cuts with proper chickeny texture and flavour.

I am really not a big eater of meat. I can go for days without touching it. I can't remember the last time I ate an actual roast. Occasionally I'll get a lamb chop, chicken legs, a bit of bacon or a steak but I never even did that 100 ways to cook mince thing with mince. One of the main reasons is that meat is so goddam expensive (compared to standing outside the gates of the posh houses and waiting for them to throw pieces of dripping-soaked stale bread). And supermarket meat is often of variable quality. You can get a tasty steak but are just as likely to get a fatty stringy one. I also never buy cheap cuts of chicken. My strong suspicion is that caged chickens spend all day mouldering in their own shit whilst being pumped full of who-knows-what. And you can tell. Just break the film on a cheap pack of chicken and breathe it in. It's rank. It smells of chiken shit and who-knows-what. And the best flavour you can get after cooking it is no flavour at all.

So anyway, I wanted some eggs and dropped into the farm shop. My first thought was: 'why am I buying 6 free-range locally produced eggs at the supermarket and paying £1-70?' At the farm £1-70 gets a dozen. And they are locally laid in a field round the back by grinning chickens who frolic away in the open air and only go inside to replenish their Pimms and Lemonades.

My second thought was to buy an invitingly crusty chicken and ham pie. But I got 2 because they were very reasonable. Then I thought I might like to do my world famous North African-style lamb with steamed vegetables and cous-cous. Really it was an excuse to buy a couple of lamb steaks, because they were less than half the price of the supermarket. It figures. The local supermarket flies them from New Zealand, which is just about as far away and jet-fuel heavy as you can get. Unless the farm is an elaborate ruse, the sheep bleating away in the surrounding fields were within walking distance. I guess they might not be the actual sheep that I would be pan-frying (why 'pan'-frying? is there some kind of way of frying something that doesn't involve a pan?) the next day, but there's a good chance they are.

Then I spotted some locally made cheese, a freshly baked quiche, a piece of fillet steak, golden brown pork pies, home churned ice cream and myriad other hearty delights. My eyes were bigger than my wallet, but even though I was light on cash I still left with quite a hefty bagful of stuff.

And of course, when I got home there was no room in the fridge or the freezer. I have one of those English-sized fridges that are designed for our miniature over-crowded houses. An average American would spontaneously guffaw at the comic dinkiness of them. Like a fridge, only much smaller. I also have a freezer of similar stature. So I was stumped.

Either I would have to cook an immediate multi-course banquet of delicious farmhouse fayre, or re-organise things somewhat. After a careful half-hour of ergonomic calculations and selective fridge and freezer rationalisation (bye bye plastic containers of leftovers, undrunk cheap beer, year-old frozen spinach, unused bags of ice-cubes and my trusty 2lb bag of frozen peas that has for two years or more only ever been used as a cold compress for my ailing joints before being returned to its icy home for re-cooling), I'd created enough room for the extensive farm-purchased food. It meant cutting the pies into manageable slices and individually wrapping them.

Later, I concocted my world famous North African-style lamb with steamed vegetables and cous-cous, and the farm-bought lamb took it to another level - inter-galactically famous, perhaps. Don't get me wrong. The supermarket lamb is almost always okay. But the farm-bought lamb was twice as tasty and twice as tender as any I've ever bought from the supermarket. I am very careful to make sure I have plenty of freshly grown herbs and garlic for such a cooking eventuality. I even squeezed fresh lemon juice. So why ever did I cook such a thing previously, knowing that one of my main ingredients was supermarket sub-standard?

I don't think there's a particular moral to this story. Maybe that people who don't personally know me might regret not being amongst my close circle of family and friends who have direct access to my world famous North African-style lamb with steamed vegetables and cous-cous. Perhaps it tells me how easily pleased I am. Maybe it is to re-inforce the truism that quality ingredients are the basis of any quality meal. But in the end it probably says something about how easy it is to be lazy and sloppy about such things as where you buy your food, and the tiniest bit of effort in such areas can increase the quality of a person's life by an immeasurable amount.

today : people don't get how great Lyle Lovett really is

2011-07-08T02:35:00.002+01:00

today : Public apples/Private oranges

2011-06-30T04:51:00.000+01:00

I've heard a ton of guff about the fact that public sector workers should have the same kind of pension and salary cuts etc as many in the private sector have already suffered.

As usual, the people who trumpet this nonsense are driven by ideology. They use their bogus arguments always to shadow their real intentions. Do we want a race to the bottom? It seems that they do. They always, remember, start from a standpoint of hating the public sector. After all - those who are generally making and promoting these policies and ideas don't need public education, health, transport etc, as they are very very rich. Public services are there for the little people and from inside our gated communities and behind the tinted windows of our Maybacks, we try not to have anything to do with them, never mind caring what they think or how they live. Remember, if the economy does well or badly we set the system up so we cannot lose. We bet on either or both outcomes so even if our game-fixing somehow doesn't work, we still cash in.

The difference with the public sector is that people join it knowing, not that they will be paid poorly, as wages themselves are often equivalent, but knowing that there is a limit to their advancement. They trade-off job security and a secure pension for the limited opportunities to earn big money.

The private sector has no theoretical limits, and operates on a simple risk and reward basis. If you want to become a multi-millionaire or billionaire then you can. But if you are a nurse or an ambulance driver or a teacher then you settle for some level of comfort and security (perhaps also a measure of altruistic fulfilment) in return for abandoning such limitless ambition.

Of course, this necessitates a structure within which complacency can flourish. I strongly agree that public sector institutions need to tighten up and be more efficient - somewhat more connected to the real world than they often are. I've worked in the public sector most of my adult life and seen some horrendous incompetence and profligacy - health administrators ordering taxis to travel half a mile and paying people to polish and water the office plants and schools that in difficult places, make no effort or spend pots of cash on inappropriate schemes and initiatives that only exist to look good on a manager's CV. Example : the deputy head-teacher who uses the school to pay for their Headship qualifications whilst doing as little as possible in their actual primary job, the new head who buys 300 computers without backing them up with maintenance contracts or staff and student training, or school that spends a lot of time, effort and money in manipulating the league tables rather than spending similar time effort and money on getting their results legitmately by actually teaching the pupils.

Sometimes, in the case of the schools and health especially, organisations and institutions have to be, what would be called in the private sector, loss-making. You have to give chemotherapy to a frail elderly person or weak and damaged baby, despite their percentage chance of survival. In the private sector that would be seen as throwing good money after bad. In education, you cannot give up on a single child. Let's also remember that, as we are reminded too rarely, that the school system is first and foremost a 'free' nationalised childcare facility. You can't just shut the thing down without a huge knock-on. But in the private sector a school that shows no improvement in results and seemingly shows no return for any investment would be gone in a heartbeat.

It is fine to try and improve the less efficient aspects of public services, but fundamentally I believe that a modern, decent society should show them (and more importantly the servants themselves) a healthy measure of respect. Using public servants as an easy target for cuts, seeding the press with stories that fuel jealousy and anger and making bogus comparisons with some mythical private sector is the opposite of this.

today : bad apples

2011-06-29T04:14:00.002+01:00

ipads are stupid and I hate them. Actually I don't hate them at all really. And they are also undeniably a miraculously clever invention. They are another example of how actual things are now seemingly outstripping the sci-fi predictions of my youth.

But watching Sky News in the past couple of weeks has made me notice something. What are stupid and hateful are the people who wave their ipads around, showing them off. One or two of the presenters on Sky do this during the late-night paper review. Obviously they have a new thing where tomorrows front pages are now stored on an iPad, connected to the screen behind them. As they move through the stories and discuss them with whichever guest (they have pretty good guests most nights), they can control what appears by using their iPad rather than having some technical boffin in the gantry do it for them. I guess the presenters have all been given a shiny iPad. Some of them can't help but blatantly angle them towards the camera and make very obvious iPaddy gestures. Sometimes when they are scrolling or resizing a picture the camera gives us a close up of fingers on screen. They might as well have a t-shirt that says 'iPad Owners Club' on the front.

The same thing happened with the F1 coverage on the Beeb last year. That guy who's like a Blue Peter presenter who presents it, insisted on walking around with his iPad on show, until a certain point arrived when, either he realised that it looked stupid and childish, or someone from the Beeb got nervous about product placement and confiscated it.

I've seen this a lot in the past. I was a teacher during the original rise of the mobile phone and most children, upon getting one, would find any excuse to wave it around and show off. I expect this from children, but when the iphone appeared this behaviour broke out among adults too. Any visit to the supermarket or a coffee shop meant negotiating people pointlessly waving their iphones around whilst clogging up the town. Notice how they never call it a phone, but make sure they use the word iphone. It's a phone, and tell me how many of the hundreds of 'apps' on yours you actually use regularly, and how many are sitting there - 99p wasted? Apps are the new ringtones. Eventually people grew up and realised that variations on the sound of a phone ringing was quite adequate enough thank-you.

It's clever of Apple to harness this childish impulse towards one-upmanship. Coupled with the quasi-cult religion behaviour amongst Apple fans, it puts almost a mystical air around their machines. This I can kind of get. The machines themselves are pretty brilliant and unbelievable expressions of technology. But I personally am baffled by the shots of gawky bespectacled boys sleeping on pavements in order to be the first to pick up a new Apple gizmo. What's the point in having 'face-time' in your pocket when you don't have an awful lot of real friends?

I'm stereotyping nerds, of course. Which is unfair. But actually, nerds aren't the issue. They'll always go for the next latest gadget and endlessly discuss it with other nerds. No problem for the rest of us, and possibly an essential part of the leaps forward technology is making in recent years. The problem is the try-hards, the self nominated fashionable and cool people. Because all this boils down to what's considered cool.

Like the Apprentice style business-suited woman in front of me in the queue for cigarettes today in the supermarket. Shouting into her iphone like Dom Joly's mobile phone man, I noticed she mentioned the fact that she was using an iphone twice to the person on the other end. Unless it was being conducted in code and she was some kind of Anna Chapman figure, the rest of the conversation did not seem to be of any consequence. At the counter she put her phone onto speaker, placed her iphone on the counter ("I'm putting my iphone onto speaker") and continued to shout at it whilst she bought a single can of Red Bull and paid for it using a credit card. Everyone in the queue crossed their arms and tapped their fingers as she continued to juggle the conversation, entering her pin number and putting her card back into her bag. Finally she finished and I quickly bought my cigarettes. On the way out I passed her. She was now standing still talking into her phone.
"Okay, see you in two minutes. I'm heading back to the office now." she said.

today : Greece is the word

2011-06-25T03:13:00.002+01:00

You can't blame the greeks for rioting and getting upset (it reminds me of the old joke 'What's a Grecian Urn? Answer: these days not much at all"). After all, they didn't really do anything wrong. This is almost always the case with the population of a country. In the UK public service workers are facing slash and burn cuts to their pensions (although this is an ideological thing that also happens to help cut public debt - like all the Tories' policies. They are driven by ideology first and any notion of national interest second).

There are two ways that people and nations get into unmanageable debt. The first is if they behave fraudulently. But the main one is when they behave like sub-prime shopaholics. Speculative lenders continue lending to them - which they seem to often do even when the sums don't add up and the loan is more risky than becoming Spinal Tap's new drummer. Of course, in recent years the lenders convinced themselves that credit default swaps abolished risk, so they simply ignored the sums.

One wonders, why they continue to hurl money at obvious bubbles and economies that are on ther brink of collapse? It's not like it's a new phenomenon.

S'funny, but when it all goes wrong, as it repeatedly does, I am not seeing many lenders taking the hit. Their hair remains resolutely lengthy. It's always the lendee who loses. In the case of countries, it's the taxpayer: always the taxpayer (never the tax avoider who shelters their assets offshore and has a team of people from accenture to minimise 'liability').

The super-rich speculative lenders know this. They know that when it all goes mammary-skyward, the IMF will come along and do their bidding. The first people to get paid are always the super-rich. God forbid if they should actually ever lose out, so they skew the system to keep themselves rich, even whilst convincing themselves (or trying to convince the rest of us) that the market is 'free'. It is the belief that they are secure and living above risk that feeds the frenzy that inevitably creates bubbles in property and stocks, dragging the rest of us poor saps along. The super-rich feel that they are entitled to make more money out of any given situation, however dire. Hence the fact that the investment banks bet on their own failure in 2007/8.

Meanwhile the little people - you and I, dear reader - are squeezed like the lemons in a Wimbledon debenture holder's Pimms. Why are we paying more for food and fuel? Well, rather a lot of money was 'printed' to keep the system flowing i.e. to help the speculators keep their money-making schemes afloat (a bit like the house advancing credit to a rouletteer whose luck is about to turn, honest). The speculators had killed their preferred equities and property markets as money-making prospects, so they instead looked at the commodities markets. They took their free money (as kindly handed out by treasuries and central banks) and started to gamble it in wheat, oil, macadamia nuts and, I guess, pickled onions, precious metals and Stinking Bishop. It created a bit of a bubble, not dissimilar to footballers wages and transfer fees. Commodities are now overpriced, which means less for more for the rest of us and a consequent push back towards recession, which will lead in turn to more over-leveraged governments struggling to pay their bills as their welfare tab goes up and their tax-take goes down. In the meantime the super-rich will take their free money and start attacking weak currencies, which will further push countries towards bankruptcy by doing things like making oil really expensive. They'll also use the money that the governments gave them to lend back to the governments at an inflated rate of interest (wasn't it specifically the money lenders that Jesus threw out of the temple?).

But none of this will matter. Many speculators still believe that all they have to do is off-set their risk by using the magic of their own genius made up sums.

And even if they get it wrong and end up in trouble they know that the systems of 'rescue' are not there to rescue countries and their people, but always to rescue the wealthy investors' money.

The job of the rich is to stay rich and get richer. Everything they do is towards this end. They spend some of their money making sure the law is there to support their aims by strongly influencing (incentivising politicians with campaign donations, the possibility of negative media coverage etc) governments to skew the rules.

This is why there will be a bailout of Greece, as there have been in Ireland and in the past some of the Tiger economies where a trumpeted economic miracle fell flat on its arse. If Greece does default, it is not really the Euro that will be a problem - Greece will have to revert and everyone else will carry on with the single currency project. What would be the problem is that all the gambling investors would lose their money. And that simply wouldn't do. So the not-so-rich taxpayers of Greece and the rest of the Eurozone will cough up, as they always do, to make sure the rich remain rich.

A cynic might see it as a legitimate tactic. A couple of Davos summits later and the super-wealthy get a guaranteed payback from the poor, and as a condition of not going bankrupt Greece (or whatever country) has to privatise its publically owned assets - by selling them to... the rich. Taking things ostensibly owned and controlled by the average citizens and placing them in the hands of a wealthy few. Shock horror.

2011-06-14T05:17:00.001+01:00

If I talk about fuel prices, and the fact that they are insanely high, I am aware that I am probably nailing a moment in history. Looking back in a few years time, it's inevitable that the outrageous 75 quid a tank will seem laughably cheap. Or maybe we'll look back in nostalgia at the time when when cars still required petrol.

I would have liked to get an electric or a hybrid vehicle this time. But the backward looking inertia of the motor corporations mean that they are still specialist vehicles with specialist price tags. Did they not employ people a decade -two decades- ago to develop the future? Everyone knows that in business the secret is to be ahead of the game, and it's been clear for ages now that a petrol driven future is untenable. At the moment it looks like Honda might clean up with hydrogen (I am surprised Apple are not working on it - they could brand it as i-drogen) : providing that the other manufacturers don't gang together and kill their progress by any means necessary. Car companies seem always to have been resistant to innovation, even when it would clearly benefit them and their customers. Just watch that film 'Tucker'. Their default setting seems to be stuck in 'No We Can't'.

I've talked about this several times, but my new car was delivered yesterday. I was sitting in the showroom waiting for the handover and felt like I'd been whisked backwards in time to an era where CD players and mobile phones are cutting edge inventions, where air conditioning has only just been introduced as an experimental technology and electric motors to magically move the windows up and down cause the disbelieving public to behave like dogs do, when they sniff behind the TV screen trying to find the distant pooches they've just seen in the magic window. All the cars had stickers and posters declaring stuff like '4 wheels! Brakes! Lights! Windows front back AND sides!

Which is annoying but no big deal. So what if I don't have electric windows front and back, or I have to buy a phone holder as an extra?

But having no choice other than to help pollute the air and negatively impact the climate: that's not fair. I know the technology exists to make electric or hybrid vehicles. Even if it's not quite developed, I know that they've been lazy and pathetic about seeing into the future and it could have been here now.

I could walk, you might say. But disability disbars me from taking alternatives. Can't pedal a bike, can't walk to the station or to and from the bus stop. Plus the fact that I like having a car. Even when I could walk I liked the freedom of choice and movement it gave me. I liked driving along with the stereo blaring. But if I am to own a car what choice do I have but to add my helpful contribution to the rates of childhood asthma and rising sea levels? To line the pockets of the petroleum billionaires and play my part in the global war games over oil. To be a tiny cog in the machine that perpetrated genocide on the wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico?

I am looking at Germany and seeing a possible model for the future. Okay, so their brave decision to shun nuclear is a combination of paranoia over safety, historical resistance (I have a sticker on my guitar case from the 1980s that says 'atomkraft nein danke!'), coalition politicking and electoral populism. But if they can cut out nuclear energy in the timescales they want, then it will set a benchmark for proactive decision making that forces an issue. I hope Germany will be become a hothouse of alternative energy supply that can set an example to the rest of the world.

The same could and should happen in the motor industry. If one single big company like Honda or Toyota switched to making only electric or hybrid vehicles, they would clean up every customer who wants to do their bit and assuage their conscience.

And it would tip the market into the future. Sometimes it needs someone to stand up and declare that the emperor's clothes are falling off.

todays perfect europop song is...

2011-06-07T05:03:00.001+01:00

Taffy - I Love My Radio

today : my left foot

2011-05-14T02:03:00.004+01:00

This picture isn't my foot, but could be. Problems/issues with my left foot have prevented me from doing much, including posting on my blog. May be a while before I resume.

Before I take a break, I am wondering why the 'Hardest Hit' march against the cuts got pretty much no coverage on mainstream news? How do the voiceless get heard if, even when they organise, they are ignored? About 1.4 million disabled people will be directly worse off due to government cuts in the next year. If they were middle class journalists it would have led the news and front pages all week.

today : Melvin sums it all up

2011-05-01T03:10:00.001+01:00

Mad Melvin's royal wedding radio rant

today : chimey guitar mini-festival

2011-05-01T03:00:00.002+01:00

today : a post to excuse my lack of posting

2011-04-15T03:42:00.002+01:00

My writing has taken a turn recently and I've been working on a long piece. It's 30,000ish words so far. Which explains the fact that I have been neglecting my 'umble blog. As I've said before, even tho' I have no real readers I feel bad when I don't post as it means my discipline looks like it is slipping. Which is why I;m posting a list of things I might write about if I could be bothered or had the time.
Why I am voting no to AV.
The nature of the parasocial relationships I have with radio presenters
sub topic: how I have gradually given up on Five Live as their presenters have got worse.
I am excited about getting a new car.
Gardening season has arrived again.
Why my Rugby League team - The Leeds Rhinos - have gone from Champions to useless.
Hating having a Tory government.
I like the music of prog-rock, but generally hate the lyrics.

today : bleep bleep boop

2011-04-11T02:00:00.001+01:00

today : Robin Hood in Reverse

2011-04-05T03:19:00.007+01:00

Yet again today we got the same old guff about reforming welfare, on the grounds that pretty much everyone who gets anything is a lying scrounging worthless bastard.

The Tories published their welfare bill before the consultation had finished. Their version of 'listening' is to selectively hear and then ignore. The decision to attack to poor and helpless had already been made and designed. After all, it's in their ideological DNA to hate people who are different. Especially if those people might need a little help and support. Let the bankers keep their bonuses and the corporations pay less tax, it's okay. We'll just take from the poor.

The 'tests' for people on incapacity benefit are imported from the USA. They're the same ones the HMOs use to try and not pay for treatment. You can read lots more about this governments ideological and mean-spirited attack on the disabled at The Broken of Britain.

today : Hooray for Casey

2011-04-03T05:43:00.003+01:00

Despite the pretty distasteful and exploitative follow ups on the Aussie news channels, and the fact that the usual cretinous anonymous internet bullies (oh ,the irony) have decided to mete out to the bully, it's still gratifying to see the original clip of Aussie schoolboy Casey Haynes snapping and doling out a beating to his tormentor.

today : for arts sake

2011-03-31T05:36:00.006+01:00

Of course our government was going to decimate the arts. They hate the arts. But of course they would save the RSC, the ROH and the big London Ballet companies (from what I saw of the recent BBC documentary about the English National Ballet, it's run by a bunch of highly string incompetents). It's a bit like only saving Man Utd, Arsenal and Spurs. Or only supporting M&S and Tesco. The English National Opera has been spared because it has a business model 'still in development', They've only had since 1974. But they also have 'artistic ambition', which is shorthand for spending silly amounts of money on hand-beading 1000 custom made costumes for the chorus to wear for 8 performances.

I have nothing against opera or ballet. In fact I love both. What I do have a problem with is that things are still divided in terms of high and low culture. The old arts always win out, because to public schoolboys culture is ossified, backward looking and should only be consumed as a marker of status.

Tories always have a very good idea of the price of everything and the value of nothing. I doubt they have the mental capacity to appreciate art. After all, to have your soul stirred by an aria, an arpeggio or an aubade; first you have to have a soul.

Again, it is the ideological rather than the practical. What better example of unecessary state funding than money which supports something you don't understand and are suspicious of? The Arts, after all, deal in ambiguity, ideas and transformation. It's the opposite of Conservatism which panics if anything is less than simple, fixed and frightened of the future.

Local theatres closing, youth projects abandoned. These arty people, after all, should get proper jobs - like building million pound missiles so the politicians can act out their toy soldier fantasies in real life.

today : I have a first world problem or two

2011-03-30T03:02:00.004+01:00

I was reading the other day about 'First World Problems'. If it isn't a phrase dreamt up by Douglas Coupland then it should be.

For the uninitiated, the first world problem is a topic of complaint by someone so used to having not to worry or grow angry and frustrated about the fundamentals of life, that the trivial - stuff that can only be a fleeting and pretty-much meaningless annoyance - becomes worthy of these emotions.

Example from my own life: Asda didn't have any pimento stuffed olives so I had to buy plain pitted olives instead. Three aisles later, they kept their Papua New Guinea Free Trade Premium Instant Coffee on offer at 2 jars for a fiver, but also had Nescafe Alta Rica on offer at £2 per jar. The very definition of 'the horns of a dilemma, I think you'll agree.

Or today's thought: do I fill up at this Shell Station and get some Shell points, or do I drive a little way to fill up at Morrison's and get some Morrison's points? Which points are worth more?

today : I break my own code and do a rock review

2011-03-25T03:24:00.013Z

I rarely feel like writing reviews. Let's face it. The world is too full of reviews. Most critics add little or nothing to the sum total knowledge of the world and its artistic endeavours. The few that I do read or follow, it's mainly about their style than their opinions. The Kermodian rant is, in itself, simply entertaining, as is the Joe Queenan essay. Clive James reviewing books old and new is mainly about the plethora of elegant sentences rather than a recommendation or rejection. Anthony Lane reviewing films holds a similar appeal. They simply use the medium of the review to write or talk pleasingly. Charlie Brooker's intelligently acerbic analyses of TV are about his bitterly romantic worldview and persona rather than the specific shows.

Much less useful than most paid critics are amateur reviewers. In line with the old adage, everybody does have an opinion about things they've read, heard and seen. There is nothing more demoralising than people who believe that their opinion is more worthy than the opinions of others. We know who these people are. The ones who clog Amazon up with their infinite and infinitely turgid opinions, the ones who blog endlessly and pointlessly their often inelegant and under-considered responses to whatever CD they've bought or film they've seen. Mostly this is to do with the fact that their reviews are written from a standpoint of blind love or blind hatred.

Sometimes it is to do with the fact that the medium of the review is a dead easy way for people to pretend they write with legitimacy. In much the same way as blogs (including my own) contain varying levels of envy. Nuggets of jealousy that someone else somehow gets to write their opinions in a newspaper column or pronounce them on TV: amateur reviewers ( like bloggers - like me) are essentially saying 'I can do that. It's not that hard'.

But the other night I saw Elbow in concert and am inclined to review it. It was a strange event for me. Elbow are my brother's band. Unlike me, he has their albums in his collection and would declare himself a fan. Possible dates coincided with the beginning of him taking a couple of weeks off work and also my neice's Easter break from University. She and her graduate student brother decided it would be a good idea to cajole him to go and see one of the shows and roped me into the role of organiser. But on the morning of the show he was knocked off his bicycle by a lunatic driver and ended up in the hospital. Thankfully the injuries. although not superficial, were also not life threatening.

But we faced the coming evening with the stress of worry and general deflation. We were gutted for my brother, whom, despite a determination to get out of A&E in time to make the trip, was clearly in no condition to travel. Broken hands require some attention and a serious bike crash can leave a person battered, bruised and traumatised. Even if the x-rays, casts, prescriptions etc could be completed in time to set off, he would be in no physical condition to attend a show for quite some days or weeks.

With the main quarter of our party incapacitated we were disinclined to go. But my bro insisted. Being the cause of our non-attendance would be, for him, much worse than not attending himself. So off we went.

Elbow are one of those bands that exist, for me, in the quite good/quite interesting category. I own none of their records and have never seen them live. But each time I've seen them on TV or heard them on the radio I felt well-disposed towards them. Like lots of people, I watched their 2009 Glastonbury show on the telly. It's widely acknowledged as their breakthrough moment. The string laden encore of 'A Day Like This' was one of those 'Glastonbury Moments' (like Orbital playing as the sun went down in 1994, Travis playing Why Does it Always Rain as the rain fell in 2004, Pulp doing Common People in 1996 and Blur's rendition of Tender in 2008). It thrust the song into the limelight and consequently it became the soundtrack of many peoples' summer.

Unfortunately, they were a bit overplayed. I didn't need to own The Seldom Seen Kid album, as it was used in every TV show and trailer for months afterwards. The aforementioned 'A Day Like This' soundtracked antiques shows, the X factor, science shows and reality shows ad infinitum. Close behind was 'Grounds for Divorce'.

And I sometimes listen to Guy Garvey on his radio show. He seems like a nice chap, and plays an interesting palette of sounds.

A couple of weeks ago, before we'd booked any tickets, I heard the band play a session on the now late lamented Radcliffe and Maconie evening show. I was struck with how restrained and elegant the music was. When we got our tickets I wondered how they could translate this mature, reflective music into an arena.

Here is my review. I needn't have wondered. The Elbow show at Sheffield Arena on March 19th 2011 was simply quite magnificent.

I came away thinking that, even not as a fanatic fan, I had witnessed a band who knew exactly what they wanted to do and executed it perfectly. These were people who had worked hard over a long time before they achieved great success, but perhaps because of their age and experience, knew how to embrace and enjoy it. What made the show so marvellous and totally engaging was the strong impression of sheer sincerity. In amongst the technical wizardry of the light and video show and the cavernous space with its giant crowd, they managed to maintain an intimate atmosphere, devoid of pomposity. It was spectacular but never flashy. A great show that didn't need to be showy to be great.

today : both feet forward into sand

2011-03-23T01:51:00.003Z

I'm inclined to think that jumping into any endeavour with both feet is unwise, unless of course you are aiming for the long or triple jump gold medal.

The recent acceleration of the 'coalition' from wait a minute to chocks away gung-ho in Libya suggests two things:

1. Either they have cobbled together a strategy on the back of an envelope or by sending faxes to each other (no emails since Wikileaks) over a few short hours and, worryingly, have engaged in a full on military action without really thinking it through.

or

2. The plan was already in place and now was the opportunity to enact it.

Either option is somewhat disturbing. There seem to be few answers emerging from the fog of war.

today : some more songs I was listening to today

2011-03-19T01:34:00.003Z

today : a kind of miracle

2011-03-15T01:25:00.003Z

Think about it. I was chatting to a friend from the car today. They were in their own car. You have a thing in your pocket that means you can talk to pretty much anyone, ANYWHERE in the world. It costs hardly anything. It's a kind of miracle.

And like lots of people, I have been watching the awesome footage of the Japan tsunami. The reason: many people have di-def video cameras that they carry around in their pockets. They film it even as it happens to them. Stuff from the other side of the world comes out of my telly either live or almost live. Many of us will never have actually seen a proper Tsunami up close before. Now we know what it looks like. It's a kind of miracle.

And I sold my beloved but little used J Busilacchio Reed organ to a very nice chap in Sardinia. He wrote to me in Italian; I wrote to him in English. A website automatically translated our words. The click of a mouse was how he paid me. It cost hardly more than the price of a take-away to send it from Northern England to a Mediterranean island. It was collected at my door in Leeds and delivered to his in Sassari. It got there in about two days. It's a kind of miracle.

today : a rant of sorts

2011-03-13T04:55:00.000Z

I'm frustrated. Indeed by having a government whose policies i entirely disagree with in almost every way you could think of. but also by the seeming inevitability of it all.

but what makes me really frustrated is that the conduit of our grievances - the opposition, are apparently so lily-livered and meek. they appear to have no fight.

i wonder if the general election of last year financially cleaned out the labour party completely. these things tend to happen, and it takes time to rebuild the war chest. but what frustrates me more and more is that it looks like the labour party wanted to be in opposition. were happy and relieved to go back to policy reviews and standing in the background.

i was sceptical from the start with their strategy leading up the election. from moment one of brown's tenure they just got it wrong. they tried selling brown as blair pt2. it was a bit like they only knew one template for success so thought they'd repeat it. only brown wasn't blair and was clearly never comfortable being the friendly pm. but they didn't have the guts to alter the strategy. brown clearly didn't have the tv charisma of blair. what's more, cameron had moved onto blair's ground.

the whole 'bigoted woman' thing during the election sprang from the notion that they should truck brown round the country meeting voters in a effort to cuddlify his image. what they should have done is let him come across as tough, impatient and brusque but talked up his competence, especially during the financial collapse when cameron and the tories stood on the sidelines dithering.

they also played perfectly into the hands of the press, who embarked on a two year long character assassination of brown. each time he attempted an uncomfortable tv smile or tried and failed to come across as soft and approachable it shored up the press's version of him as some kind of incompetent by giving them things to point and laugh at.

then they made it worse by apologising for him. the so called spin gurus, mandelson and campbell, came off as if they didn't actually believe in what they were selling, or only had one strategy that was outdated and tailored for another time. in fact it looks as if they were desperate to get it finished with so they could write their memoirs and become pundits rather than players.

at the same time labour resignedly marshalled themselves for opposition. the milibands set up for a leadership contest and some excellent senior figures began organising their political retirement into documentary making and non-executive directorships. they shrugged and accepted that their generational tranche of ministers were finished. darling, for example, should still be at the top. he'd make mincemeat out of osborne.

even after all this surrendering, they still managed not to lose outright. even with all the press backing and the momentum the country was still unsure about the tories.

but labour were resigned to losing and this meant leadership changes, policy reviews, public soul-searching and self-flagellation. following the model the tories set after 1997. too many good experienced people got out. what's more the wrong guy was elected leader. this is david miliband's fault. he bottled it at the last minute. but maybe he wasn't the right guy after all, because rather than face defeat with some backbone he took his bat home.

so when the coalition turned out to be a nightmarish blend of ultra-right wing ideology and blundering incompetence labour was this morass of jelly-spined mewling apology addicts.

last week i heard mandelson give an interview and, whilst praising cameron, he continued apologising. also last week i watched miliband give a speech in which he was still self-flagellating and positing a re-appraisal of values and policy initiatives. what happened to the ones that were already there? are these things so moveable that an election reverse can undermine them completely?

in short, a year on, they are still stuck on the back foot. word of advice: counterpunching can work, being Audley Harrison can never work.

nothing could illustrate their stance more than when miliband appointed alan johnson as shadow chancellor. johnson was a nice guy, but as lightweight as they come. he proved when in the cabinet that he was intellectually incapable of being a real threat. what Miliband needed was what he ended up with by default, someone with heft. but even ed balls seems to be being kept on a leesh. the strategy seems to be to wait until the cuts really bite and then cash in on the tory unpopularity.

but what kind of strategy is that? like waiting for AC milan to score an own goal. my only conclusion is that the labour party has convinced itself that it can no longer exist on principals - defending the poor, standing up for workers. it can now only play the game along with the others. -changing policy and presentation to try and cynically woo the few who swing elections. if you don't move forward then there is no chance of momentum, if you don't have a solid stance you will only be knocked over.

so where do we turn? for example, it seems that labour supports the alternative vote and will be generally supporting clegg and co in the referendum. but if you are going to play the game, voting against the alternative vote is the thing to do. there's a big chunk of libdems who are holding their noses in order to get to electoral reform. in fact, this is their only mission; the only reason they went into coalition. vote it down and they have no reason to shore up tory policies. the basis for coalition begins to crumble.

surely the thing about a coalition is that it is fundamentally weak. why aren't opposition politicians chipping away at vince cable, why aren't they driving every wedge they can to bring the government down?

is it that the labour party is actually culturally embarrassed about being in charge and (the current crop of senior figures at least) unable to break out of a long held habit: that the tories are the natural party of government and the best labour can do is be an intermittent interloper?

if this is the case, where do we go to register our protest and dissatisfaction? if the referendum succeeds then it will potentially be a nightmare. get ready for ukip and other bonkers idiots to put people in parliament.

but if you're a labour politician, don't come complaining to me about it. it will be your own fault for lacking the cojones to fight.

today : life imitating art

2011-03-12T04:05:00.002Z

today : some songs

2011-03-11T01:25:00.003Z

Some songs I was listening to today:

today : brrrm, brrrm, I got a new car

2011-03-07T23:46:00.002Z

today : the habit of empire

2011-03-04T02:40:00.001Z

I'm wondering why are we interfering in Libya? I say this because somehow everyone is now talking about no-fly zones with attendant air-attacks (to take out air defence capabilities). Some people are even positing a ground war to enact regime change. Of course, it's about the oil and the money, but our governments will never admit that. The same went for the recent appeasemant of Gadaffi. But now Gadaffi is losing power it seems obvious that the EU and the USA want to use the chance to turn Libya and its oil our way. Or more precisely, they want to see that it doesn't turn someone else's way. But I also think we are getting involved out of habit. Libya, after all, is yet another country that was artifically created under European colonial control. We have a long history of meddling in the regional and local politics of much of the world. And I suspect that habit plays a part. The formerly colonial powers of Europe, like Britain, just can't bring themselves to stand aside when the chance of a bit of meddling comes along. Viz Afghanistan. And it's not out some post-colonial guilt or responsibility. Look at the way the Belgians washed their hands of Rwanda, and the way the French and British helped arm the genocide.

today : phew!/help!

2011-02-23T01:16:00.003Z

It's okay. I may wake up any minute to find that it's all just a recurring nightmare. Phew! Alternatively, it is all too real and will only get worse. Like Thatcherism, but turned up to el-ev-en, with a snort of Angel Dust. Help!

today : The curse of the black dye

2011-02-22T08:31:00.002Z

Ok, t'would be hard for Mugabe to look the same as the others, but look at the dictators (another caveat - Berlusconi isn't really a dictator but you know what I mean). They have the same stylist (apart from Gadaffi, whose stylist clearly also does ex-members of Motley Crue and current members of Aerosmith). Chavez's hair, I swear, is crocheted, the rest co-opted from the residents of Legoland.

If you live in a country run by someone who is well over 70 but with a jet black syrup and an Amanda Holden-level of botox, then here's your chance. Get out on the streets now.

today : women of the revolution

2011-02-13T04:22:00.001Z

Interestingly, even in the midst of chaos and revolution, news producers still behave much the same. Noticeably, three women have cropped up again and again on our screens.

Why have some fusty academics, greying news anchors or earnest bearded male activists on screen when you can have three rather photogenic young women instead?

Hence, doe-eyed perfect teethed activist ( I've invented a new word to describe her - she's not just an activist, but an 'Attractivist') Gigi Ibrahim must have appeared on the news about 100 times in the past week. The BBC, especially, loves her.

Would Shahira Amin have been such a big story had she been a grey, sober middle-aged man? I suspect not. I am not thinking that she will find it hard to get another job.

And CNN have spotted that Hala Gorani gives quality screen. She speaks Arabic and got pushed around by some pro-Mubarak protesters and this got her shifted from the relative backwaters of her slot on CNN World into co-anchoring alongside heavyweights Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper. Good for her, she's no bimbo, but easily the equal of them as a journalist, as well as being far easier on the eye.

I'm not suggesting that any of these women are not worthy - quite the opposite. Ibrahim speaks with intelligence and sense - even after several days clearly without any sleep. Shahira Amin genuinely put her reputation and safety on the line to do what she thought was right.

If they can make progress by looking good on the TV then good for them.

today : A wizard deal for Osborne's chums

2011-02-10T02:06:00.004Z

So, using my magical mystical (even wizard-like) powers, I managed to predict what would happen with 'Project Merlin'

If the Daily Mail says stuff like this about a Tory government, then maybe there's a problem Independent You kind of expect the Indie to be unbiased towards the Tories

But the FT tends to just tell it like it is. "The accord effectively saw Mr Osborne give a green light to banks to pay multibillion-pound bonuses in exchange for a promise to increase lending to small companies by 15 per cent from £66bn to £76bn.

Reuters summed it up for the rest of the world to report

The Guardian well, they would say that wouldn't they?

Wall Street Journal "But the truce—the product of more than two months of negotiations between government and industry leaders amid heated debate over the role of banks in society—doesn't require the banks to do much beyond what they're already doing."

FT again on Cameron's multiculturalism stance.

Is David Cameron not a PR specialist?

today : David Cameron ruins my weekend

2011-02-06T07:40:00.001Z

Please. Just once. Just one weekend, or even one day, when I turn on the TV and don't find some politician, obsessed with controlling the news cycle. There they are day in and day out. Announcing new initiatives, promoting policy directions, trumpeting their every action (or inaction for that matter) as an achievement. Forever feeding the feral beast its ration of topics to discuss and proposals to dissect.

Much of the time I can kind of ignore it. Most of what they feed the beast is just white sugar: empty calories. The here today, gone tomorrow news-cycle stop-gaps. The increasingly fake-looking and annoying Clegg restates some minor aspect of policy, some junior housing minister says something about houses, things that might go in a green paper maybe possibly or not.

But I can't ignore things that I think are just wrong. Things that are not just ruining my day or my weekend, but ruining peoples' lives. And my fate in the past months has been to be bombarded with stuff which is, however empty sometimes, just plain wrong. And it keeps on coming.

This weekend I was forced into a response. Like an unannounced visitor or a stalker, I couldn't ignore it and switch over to the footie. Cameron went on TV to peddle his utter nonsense about Islam and British identity.

I can't even make the time to explain how mind-bendingly wrong the content of his speech was. It was staggeringly wrong on every single level.

But the question remains why? Why now?

Is it something to do with Bob Diamond's 9 million quid bonus, or the fact that the IFS criticised Osborne's policies? Is it the fact that the inflation and employment figures are pretty poor? Is it the fact that MPs were complaining about their expenses during the week? What is in the air that is even worse bad news? Is there something buried on page 12 that shows the government in a bad light. Is one of the Sunday papers sitting on some phone-hacking gold. What flatlining figures are announced on Monday?

Or is the fact that, when the Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph are starting to fill their pages with critical, questioning headlines and stories only 9 months into a government term, there is a real danger that the strategy is crumbling at the edges.

And one sure fire way to get the Mail, Express and Telegraph back on side is to pander to their basest of impulses. Get them on about immigration, Muslims, terrorism. Feed their racism and xenophobia. Big up their rose-tinted misty eyed, almost entirely false vision of some mythical lost white Britain/England. A couple of months out from the local elections and Clegg's big electoral reform vote, start to wind up the old retrenched Tory rhetoric.

And ruin my weekend.

today : keep an eye on this name

2011-02-06T05:07:00.003Z

Chuka Umunna. You'll be seeing it & hearing it a lot more in the future.

today: bread, freedom and social justice

2011-02-01T02:33:00.003Z

When I called, in my recent Christmas message to the world, for people to take action, little did I know that the citizens of North Africa would take me so directly at my word. Actually, I do realise that some anonymous person on a little read blog did not cause the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. At any given moment there are always revolutions in train, or ready to take place. Many of them are little reported. People die for principle every day and are never commemorated. You also don't need to be Mystic Meg to see that things are reaching a tipping point in many areas of the world.

Bread, freedom and social justice. It's always about these things. The best thing any dictator can do to maintain power and is to give their people these three simple things. If they did, they might not be overthrown, put on trial or shot against a wall. I guess most dictators are so blinkered and stupid that they don't see it.

today: four aeroplanes

2011-01-30T05:15:00.014Z

The Harrier Jump Jet

Even though I can picture it in my mind, I suspect that one of my earliest memories is not actually mine. I think it's probably a collective family memory - something that was oft repeated and supported by things I've seen on TV.

I am very young and we are all sitting on the roof the car looking across other cars parked in neat rows, and a crowd of people downwards into a green idyllic valley. We are at an air show. Suddenly, from behind a line of trees a noise begins. It's a whining roar that swells in volume until it is almost deafening. And then a blue aeroplane appears. It rises - miraculously - vertically from behind the trees and continues lifting straight up into the sunny sky, as if on a fishing line or attached to a crane. The crowd gasp in delight and excitement. Some people begin applauding. Then it stops. It just sits there in the sky. The noise is too loud for my sensitive young ears and I think I might have started to cry. The plane, standing still in the air, wavers a little and then suddenly zooms, nose first, away.

It was, of course, a Harrier jump jet. And the thing was, even if this time I wasn't actually there, or was too young to remember, I've seen Harriers do the same thing many times since. Each time it is miraculous and exciting. It is, after all, a plane that can rise vertically from the ground into the sunny sky. Another time I remember seeing a Harrier fly horizontally towards where the air-show crowd was gathered and then just stop in mid-air as if it had hit an invisible wall. I've seen a pair of Harrier's circling each other, nose facing nose, as if they were dancing a chaste kind of tango, or as if they were Judo players waiting for the moment of attack.

The Harrier was so exciting because you can't believe your eyes. You know that, like proverbial sharks, aeroplanes need speed and forward motion to stay alive. When a helicopter hovers you can see the blades whirring away and make the connection in your mind that it is the rotor that is holding it in the air. But a Harrier just sits there above the ground with no visible means of support. It can even fly backwards, and whether young or old, it kind of does your head in.

And always accompanied by the noise. That whining, roaring sound that blasts your ears and rumbles your insides.

Late last year government cuts scrapped the UK's Harriers. I watched the live coverage as the pilots, in formation, climbed out of their planes for the last time, leaving them static on the runway as they walked together towards a final parade. None of the pilots looked back. I imagine they got an order from command to remain stoic, but I also guess none of them could bear to turn their heads.

Concorde

Leeds/Bradford airport was always part of my world. It was about 5 miles from our house growing up and it is still only about 6 miles from where I live today. In our old house we could hear the planes taking off and their flight path went directly over the valley our house overlooked. Out of my childhood bedroom window we could watch as they climbed across the sky before slowly turning away into the distance.

It's an odd airport - small and provincial. I have taken connecting flights from there in recent years and had to walk to prop a driven aircraft before climbing a short staircase onto the plane. It felt like the 1930s. Big airports always feel like places that stand outside of real geography. They are the portals of globalisation. Places like Atlanta, O'Hare, or Heathrow or CDG or Schipol are big, exciting, intimidating places. Sprawling towns occupied by excited transients from all corners of the globe. LBA doesn't feel like that. It's like a lego version. A little underused, a little windswept. Every half an hour fifty or a hundred people roll up to or emerge from its low doorways. If you collect or drop off a friend or relative you can almost drive up to the door, as if you were collecting them from their house.

Some years ago the airport had its runway extended. The road along the west side of the airport now goes underneath the runway extension and I drive through this short tunnel often. Sometimes, approaching the tunnel you can watch a 747 land and then immediately drive underneath it, knowing that you are maybe 30 feet from the wheels as they rumble above your head.

The main benefit of having an extended runway was that for a while, LBA was one of the rare provincial airports that could handle Concorde. A few times a year a Concorde would come along. Sometimes they toured provincial airports and people could book a short flight - a half-hour Concorde joyride. It was always prohibitively expensive. When we were young we could tell when it was taking off, as it made a noise unlike any other plane. It was fabulously loud. We'd get up and rush to the window or outside into the garden to watch it as it climbed above the valley.

I think most people in the UK love Concorde. It is genuinely iconic - hence the generic name that defines it as unique and special. I don't think we were alone in rushing out to watch it soar across the sky. I remember being at Wimbledon in the 1980s to watch the tennis. Sitting out on court 2, with its open banks of seating, the familiar unique roar emanated from the direction of Heathrow. As an ascending Concorde appeared above SW19 I noticed almost everyone in the crowd avert their eyes from watching Hanna Mandlikova play someone like Catherine Tanvier for a few seconds to watch Concorde as it rose across the skyline.

My most vivid memory of Concorde was from an air show. It was, I think, a last minute addition to the programme - probably on its way to somewhere else and able to fit in a fly-past. We were sitting on top of the car and could see it in the distance to our left. Excitement grew as it approached. As it did it dipped down lower and lower to the ground, until it was flying at only three or four hundred feet. As it reached the airfield where the crowd was gathered it slowly rolled, so as it flew in front of the crowd it tilted away, underside exposed to the onlookers. It was magic. There was Concorde (CONCORDE!) only yards away, flying sideways with one wing almost touching the ground. As it rolled back onto its belly and flew off the crowd cheered.

About 15 minutes later it had turned around and came in again from the other side, repeating the manoeuvre, only this time with it's top-side facing the crowd. And then it was gone.

The A-10 Warthog

I'm lucky. I grew up and still live in a beautiful part of the world. The Yorkshire Dales are literally on my doorstep and the Lake District is only about an hour away. When we were kids we'd all pile in the car and drive into the country for days out or camping holidays. Imagine that. Going on holiday to places that are only only 20 or 30 miles from home.

Days in the country were somehow not complete without the summer idyll of picturesque villages being suddenly and violently shattered by the screaming noise of low-flying jets. The Lightnings, Buccaneers and Tornadoes used the Dales and the Lakes as perfect practice grounds for low flying. There you were, sitting eating an ice-cream or sipping tea outside a country tea shop and the sky would suddenly, thrillingly, be split apart by the racket from low-flying jets speeding across the countryside, just feet above the ground.

It doesn't happen as much these days. It's easy to forget that The Cold War was a pretty militarised time in our history.

I might be conflating a series of memories. It could have been Nidderdale, where the road snakes from the valley-head village of Lofthouse and the hidden limestone gorge at How Stean, along the edge of Gouthwaite reservoir and into Pateley Bridge, but I am sure it was the Lake District.

In the Summer of 1979, we stayed in a cottage on the shores of Bassenthwaite Lake, one of the quietest and least populated lake-shores in Cumbria. Perhaps we'd hiked up the fell above our cottage, or maybe we took the narrow tunnel under the road that led us to the stony shore and were standing at water level. The cottage was one of the very few buildings along the 4 mile length of the lake and the path through the tunnel down to the water was more or less private access to the water. We spent a few afternoons fishing or playing in the water in our inflatable dinghy.

Such details are a little fuzzy, but not the memory of a pair of A-10 jets that suddenly appeared at one end of the lake, flying no more than 30 feet from the surface of the water. They skimmed at enormous speed along the length of the lake before arcing upwards towards the hill that rises about 700 feet and marks the Southern end of the lake. Their engines growled and screamed as they split apart. One jet swooped to the left and one to the right of the hill.

A year or two later, at the same air-show that hosted the Concorde, there was an A-10 parked in the static display. My Dad and I climbed the steps up to a platform to look into the cock-pit. The pilot - a clean cut midwestern-looking American who looked like he was called Chip or Brad, told us all about the history of the plane, including the fact that the pilots referred to it as The 'Warthog'. The A-10 had none of the elegance of a Concorde, but instead was a pretty ugly looking machine. It's uniqueness was the twin jet engines mounted in front of a U-shaped tail, and a short stubby nose. It did indeed look not unlike a Warthog. Squat, powerful and pig-like.

I thought it was great. Having Chip give us a guided tour made me instantly develop a fondness for it. I don't think I'd ever met a proper American before and this made the tour even more memorable.

After that, in the last years of the Cold War, I'd look out for the A10s blasting low across the Dales and the Lakes and felt an affinity for them. It was personal cult plane, unloved by many, but adored by me.

The Vulcan Bomber

I hate war, which amuses me when I think of how much I am smitten with war planes. I never harboured the desire to become a pilot, although I did know a guy at University who was training as a fighter pilot and went on to fly Tornadoes in the first Gulf War. I talked to him a couple of times about planes, but I think he was stunned. I was a goth-looking literature student with a strange haircut and a range of adolescent affectations. He was the complete opposite. Clean-cut, clean living. Organised, disciplined and responsible. I imagine he couldn't believe I was really interested in planes. And in some ways I'm not interested in them. I don't care about the technical specifications and would never risk being thrown into a foreign gaol by ogling or photographing them. I don't aspire to tick them off on a list, or look them up in books. I don't even know much about them apart from some of the names and shapes. But certain planes do for me is what certain cars seem to do for other people. They inspire an emotional response. I am in love with them.

What enchants me is the aesthetics and the visceral excitement. I just love to see these big, noisy, aggressive, impressive machines close up. Even more than that I love the noise.

And nothing sounds like a Vulcan bomber.

Climbing into the sky the Vulcan made a hellish basso roar. When the afterburners went on, the engines glowed a deep fiery orange and a low malevolent crackle ripped through the air. It shifted your diaphragm and resonated in your visceral cavity. It was frightening and thrilling and somehow primeval.

Vulcans are beautiful. They have delta wings like Concorde, but a Vulcan's wings are broad and as wide as the body is long. In flight they look like a soaring eagle, the curve of their wings has an almost organic grace.

But their beauty is matched by an indefinable quality. Power. When a Vulcan takes off, despite it's elegant design, there is no mistaking the fact that this is basically a 40 ton block of very solid, very heavy metal. You can tangibly feel the physics involved in getting this huge 100 foot machine to lift off and fly. And of course, the power is mind-boggling. It's something like the equivalent of having 150,000 horse power.

Here's why it's my favourite plane: the Vulcan somehow transmits all of this when you see it flying up close. Lots of planes seem to be effortless as they dive around the skies. The Vulcan appears to wheeze and sweat, like a superheavyweight weight-lifter straining every bone and sinew to put the weights over his head and you can see that the weight is so great that the metal bar is actually bending under the strain.

The paradox is that the take-off is rather serene. Like a kite a Vulcan suddenly catches the air under its giant wings and lifts gently off the ground. But then it can't go any higher without the supreme effort of those massive engines. They slowly grind into life, producing an oily looking trail of what can only be grimy, caustic smoke that reminds me of the belching chimneys of Victorian dark satanic mills. And that's when the great roaring, hulking machine soars into the sky.

They scrapped the Vulcan fleet in the mid-1980s, and only recently a bunch of nutty enthusiasts have restored one until it can again fly. They take it round air-shows. The thing is, they're not really nutty at all, just besotted.

today : two deaths reported

2011-01-29T04:45:00.004Z

In a world where people like David Kato are murdered just for being different it's hard to know what to do to influence things. One thing not to do is to randomly slash the budget of the BBC World Service, which - despite its beginnings as the Empire Service and over the years has received criticism - is one sure way of providing an influential and impartial voice to people who don't have local access to unbiased information.

Sean Rossington was different too. This time he wasn't in a country under the influence of bigoted evangelicals, poor educational standards and with retrogressive social attitudes. He was from Lincoln. But he was still killed. They thought his Aspergers made him an easy mark for exploitation, but when it turned out he had no money they stanped him to death.

today : blow the cobwebs out

2011-01-27T01:33:00.001Z

by listening to this song. It's Sunset by White Noise Sound.

today : aeroplanes

2011-01-27T01:25:00.003Z

I am currently writing about my possibly antediluvian love of military aeroplanes. I've not finished the writing bit enough to post, but today was the day that he government scrapped the Nimrod, following their scrapping of the Harrier and I thought I'd mention it.

Bizarrely I am posting a picture of the best plane of them all - The Vulcan bomber.

Today: I come off as a clever-clever superior so-and-so

2011-01-24T04:47:00.002Z

This is the sentence that jumped out at me:

"Wolper began working on Albertus in 1932 and it swiftly appeared on book jackets, announcing the young Seamus Heaney and William Golding as writers too good to ignore."

There is a problem here. Well, two problems. The use of the adverb 'swiftly' strongly implies that the young Seamus Heaney and William Golding were among the early beneficiaries of the Albertus font, and its use on Faber book jackets. In actual fact, Golding's first published novel was Lord of the Flies in 1954 - 22 years after Albertus was initiated and some 13 years after its adoption in 1941 by Faber, and Heaney wasn't born until 1939 and didn't publish his first collection until 1966 - 34 years after Wolpe's design and 25 years after it was adopted by Faber.

Either the sentence is poorly expressed or the writer is winging the facts and trying to be in command of an area that he knows little about. Switch out the word 'swiftly' for the word 'later' and all is fine.

I'd read about and heard about Simon Garfield's book 'Just My Type'. I remembered Garfield from his excellent book about the rancorous history of Radio 1 (The Nation's Favourite), and thought a book about fonts was potentially interesting.

It turns out that the book is a better idea than it is a book. It has lots of nuggets of history, information and quirky by-ways by the way of font related stuff, but really lacks a narrative of the kind even non-fiction needs. It even looks as if the author has done lots of research up to the point where he had enough material for a book, but really doesn't exude the depth of expertise that we are used to these days in this world of Stephen Pinker, Hawking and writers like Dava Sobel.

Anyway, that's an aside. My real topic is how it only takes one bad sentence. Or one wrong fact, or one moment of sloppiness to undermine the whole of someones work.

I find it hard not to be grumpy and clever-clever superior so-and-so when I see it. The other day I saw a newsreader pronounce the word Berwick (as in the town-on-Tweed) phonetically as Ber-wick. Tonight I saw a scrolling line of news on BBC news 24 reporting that "Senator Gifford's condition downgraded from 'critical' to 'serous'" That's not just a typo but an apostrophe catastrophe, as well as a further typo. What it meant was that the person typing the stuff into the news ticker scrolling software was not aware that Gabrielle Giffords has an 's' on her name all the time. It also meant that nobody checked the typing before it was posted. Even though I was on my own at home I tried hard not to think grumpy superior thoughts.

I make these mistakes myself all the time on my blog and other places. Typos are all over the place if you look. But I am not a professional news ticker typer-inner; neither am I the BBC, or the editor of a widely available and much publicised book (as I write it's #124 on the Amazon chart). In fact I have a kind of typing dyslexia, where my mind sends messages to my fingers that it thinks are perfectly exact, but my fingers automatically reverse certain letter combinations. Sometimes whole strings appear backwards. Curiously I have no such trouble when playing the guitar or piano.

My instant question is: "If he was sloppy on this, then what else?". It could be just a spellchecking error, or he wrote his book using software that automatically switches out words for what it thinks are synonyms. It could be a sentence added in the editing and not properly proofed. Deadlines could have intervened.

It could be any number of things. But what remains is a hazy grasp on the facts, or an inability to write a sentence that expresses exactitude and command of the material. I couldn't help it. This glaringly poor sentence undermined the credibility of the entire book.

today : I get a sore throat

2011-01-24T02:16:00.004Z

My recent mild obsession with Mongolian Throat Singing began a few weeks ago. I was listening to the World Service and a programme about music and singing caught my ear. In it, a Bulgarian singer was talking about how her and her fellow singers (it may have been the actual Trio Bulgarka, but if it wasn't, it was something very similar) constructed their harmonies, and how they were different from western harmony. They actively pursued dissonance, which, of course gives that Bulgarian Choir singing its eerie, strange 'Eastern' quality.

Then there was a short section about Mongolian Throat singing. As I was pottering around the house, I didn't listen so intently, but it has long interested me. Some guy who sounded like a professor of music or acoustics or something explained the principle. You kind of force a sustained note through your vocal chords and then use your tongue and palate to create a harmonic. What transpires is two separate notes at the same time, not unlike a bagpipe or a harmonuim with the original drone overtopped by a higher note, which sounds a bit like a wibbly bamboo flute sort of noise.

I didn't catch all the talk about how the notes were produced but I tried it anyway. My voice used to be okay. As a singer-songwriter I could handle a vocal performance and stay in tune. On its best days my voice came out sounding like someone like Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance - a kind of dark chocolate pseudo baritone with a slight, but not unpleasant, droney quality. I also had quite a decent range up to falsetto, which I never really had the confidence to use, but could have developed with some practice.

But then, about 8 years ago, I got a spectacular ENT infection, which caused me to lose my voice completely. I'm not talking about being a bit raspy or whispery, but no sound at all coming out. It was odd and a bit scary, the hearing in my right ear became very muffled and when I opened my mouth to say something my vocal chords were just frozen. I couldn't talk at all for almost a week. I was teaching English in a high school at the time and continued to work. It was a pretty good test of my classroom management and general pedagogical skills to conduct all my lessons using only gestures and a hand held whiteboard and pen. Looking back it was laughable, really. I should have just taken the week off. But loyalty to your pupils is a powerful thing. (as an aside it also taught me that when you do something above and beyond, like teaching for a whole week using only a mini-white board and pen for communication, you get zero credit from the suits - in fact they take it as an excuse to raise their expectations of what you will do without credit or reward)

The spectacular ENT infection which had disabled my voice eventually cleared up (my vocal chords resumed some kind of operation after I coughed percussively and literally felt the infection in my throat burst open. I spat out a single gout of deeply unpleasant blood and mucus, and was subsequently able to manage a whisper and hear again in my right ear). It wasn't pleasant but at least I wasn't destined to be a mute forever. It would have made things pretty difficult.

But my singing voice felt comprehensively wrecked. Now I'm not denying that tobacco consumption has also had an effect on my voice, but until the ENT infection it was noticeable but not so damaging. Now I can't sustain a note. My voice dies unevenly like an engine running with a misfiring cylinder. I also can't really change notes without it being a bit like a dodgy gearbox.

Ironically, before I heard the radio show about Mongolian Throat singers, I'd decided to try and practice singing to improve my voice. So I'd belt out scales and sing along loudly to the car stereo. It seemed to be working a little, adding a note or two to my top range and making some of the notes of the scale a tad more stable, but I was still unhappy. The thing is, I could always effect a mannered singing voice and make it work quite well. Even now, I can use my wrecked voice to do this kind of Tom Waits blues shouter thing, like when he sings the song 'Walking Spanish'. Before, I used to be able to do a passable mannered falsetto like the guy in the Fine Young Cannibals. And of course, everyone can do a mannered voice like Bryan Ferry in the 70s, or Ian Curtis and David Sylvian in the 80s, or the guy from the Tindersticks in the 90s. But I never had the confidence to adopt a mannered vocal style. Not being Marvin Gaye or someone whose voice was ever truly an instrument, I always liked my singing to sound at least a little bit like me. Like Lloyd Cole or Damon Gough don't seem to significantly change between their speaking and singing voices. Maybe I'll have to use mannered styles from now on, just to be able to use my voice at all.

Anyway, I replaced practicing vocal scales with the droning notes of Mongolian Throat Singing. It was frustrating. I can drone along happily, but then my vocal chords start to misbehave. To return to my previous car metaphors, it's like the timing belt is out and the engine note starts to waver and randomly drop in and out.

To put it simply, Mongolian Throat Singing utilises the voice box in the throat, and the tongue and palate in the mouth. The two simultaneous notes feel like they are in different parts of your mouth - the low note through the throat and low in the mouth; the high note placed somewhere between the tongue and palate. Once you get it going you can control the high harmonic by pressing your tongue against the back of your teeth.

Try as I might, I couldn't do it. It reminded me of getting a note out of a trombone, or a clarinet. There's a knack, and you just have to get the knack. But my suspicion is that my wrecked voice was the underlying cause of my failure. There were plenty of times when I felt close to achieving the split-note effect. But even though I could hear and feel them almost splitting apart, frustratingly the notes remained bonded together,

But then I got a sore throat. Not a devastating ENT infection like I had before, but just a regular sore throat. Clearly, singing of any type is a silly thing to do with a throat infection. But there I was in the car, driving somewhere. I starting my droning exercises and placed my tongue at the back of my teeth.

And then it happened. For a few seconds my voice split into two, creating the drone and the harmonic. It was fantastic. My voice sounded like an alien thing that didn't belong to me. I tried controlling the harmonic with my tongue, but without success. Then I ran out of breath. I tried again. This time it happened only for a second or so. The third time I was back to normal - feeling like it was almost, but never quite actually happening.

I decided that it would be daft to try again too soon whilst my throat was still sore. Memories of my mute week 8 years ago made me wary of dong any further damage. But I am still wondering if my voice can still do it, or will I have to somehow induce a sore throat to be able to repeat my triumphant few seconds?

today : The Tory Keywords

2011-01-18T01:42:00.003Z

'Choice' and 'Competition'.

Beware the Tory keywords. Choice meaning privatisation, and competition meaning unregulated privatisation.

Ask utility consumers in Britain (i.e. everyone). How did that choicy -competitiony thing work out for ya?

They cannot escape their ideology. Education and now the health service. No top-down re-organisations, erm, apart from this massive one that we forgot to tell you about. Y'know, the one where we finish the dismantling job that we tried in the 90s and got chucked out for.

Just don't get sick. Don't be poor, don't be born disabled, don't expect a public education.

Next stop. More anti-union laws and an unfortunate necessity to freeze the minimum wage.

today : a simple question?

2011-01-13T03:40:00.001Z

Just what the hell is a 'pundent'?

today : Smile!

2011-01-12T01:49:00.000Z

today : Surprise!

2011-01-12T01:36:00.002Z

Clegg turns out to be an honest politician. Who'd've thunk it?

today : Surprise!

2011-01-12T01:33:00.003Z

Surprise. The Gay Baronet (pictured on right) blathers about limiting his mates' bonuses but does nothing about it. He never was and never will. Who shits in their own backyard?

today : pre-decadial tension

2010-12-31T03:49:00.002Z

I thought of you
When they closed down the school
And the hospital too...

today : My Xmas message to the world

2010-12-27T02:45:00.003Z

It's time to stop looking backwards. It's time we woke up. Nothing ever gets better when people cling onto old ways, old habits, old advantages. Some people will never change. They'll never learn from history and keep repeating the same old errors. They are too scared to jump out of their cosy little lives and actually try to effect change for the better. Or worse, they don't care about better at all. They don't care about the future as long as they're cocooned inside their accrued wealth and power.

So my Christmas message to the world is to keep the pressure on. Don't let them get away with their lazy, selfish small-mindedness. If you have to get out on the streets then why not do it? If you have to stand up and say you disagree, then why not do it? If you can change some slight thing in your own life and those of people around you then why not?

You don't have to take this crap. But you also don't have to sit back and relax.

If you live in a places where voting works, then vote old, backward-staring people out. Stand for office yourself even. If you don't have a vote, or it changes nothing then you might have to be a bit braver. But why not do it? Who else will try and make things better for the next generations.

If we do nothing they and we will be worse off, more oppressed and less free. The opposite of progress.

today : Merry Christmas, your arse!

2010-12-14T02:18:00.003Z

This year it took me until 9th December to hear Fairytale of New York. Which is quite a feat, as to only really encounter Christmas in December is rare these days. Hearing it played around is the unofficial start of the Season of Peace and goodwill to men. Needless to say it was in the supermarket, and then on Dec 10th I heard it played on the radio. Avoiding it for so long maybe had something to do with the recent snow, that kept me indoors for more than a week, and also the fact that I haven't really visited any shops. All my Xmas shopping has been done online this year and is already completed. How convenient.

As I say year on year, it's a brilliant song and is in some ways too good for endless Christmas repetition. You wouldn't really want to hear the Lachrymosa from Mozart's Requiem every day for two months in the supermarket, in the local shop, on the radio or at the mall would you, or Strange Fruit, or Miles Runs The Voodoo Down, or Supper's Ready or The Drunkship of Lanterns, or anything else for that matter.

And just in time for the season of goodwill to all men, there are more presents from our friend Gideon the Baronet, and his elves.

Gift number one
Hacking away at council services. The biggest cuts 'in a generation' i.e. since the last time the Tories were in charge.

Gift number two
'Efficiency' savings in the NHS - which in reality is reversing all of the recent infusions of cash into our most beloved public service. Something that hasn't happened in 'a generation' i.e. the last time the Tories were in charge.

Gift number three

Abolishing EMA.

Gift number four

Abolishing the individual living fund for severely disabled people. We're all in this together, it seems.

and more help for the disabled

Merry Christmas, your arse, I pray God it's our last

today the snow came

2010-12-08T02:08:00.002Z

This photo was borrowed from here, a nice blog about where I live.

today : spirit of 68

2010-12-02T05:26:00.002Z

I've enjoyed seeing students on the march in the past few weeks. I don't like individual police getting hurt, but smashing windows can make a difference. If it didn't then the establishment wouldn't make such an effort to condemn when a brick gets thrown, or someone spray paints slogans on a police van.

I don't know the motivation of every protestor but it is clear that the ConDems don't get it. The issue is deeper than simply the workings of whatever loan scheme. Youngsters rightly are angry that their parents' and grandparents' generations got it so wrong. Peoples' parents came out of University and were afforded the opportunity to build a stable and comfortable life. Now, many graduates are facing the possibility of never being able to put down roots. Housing costs and restrictive mortgages mean that house ownership seems like a faraway dream. Graduate salaries are flattening out, and they're constantly being told that they can't rely on a lifelong career. They look around the world where there are opportunities but even then they were let down by a system invented and run by their forebears. Whilst everyone in Europe and the Far East was learning English there was no focus on languages in British schools. This makes the EU labour market unbalanced. You were never prepared for a world where your job might be in Germany or Macedonia or China. They told you your Sats results were crucial, then your GCSEs, then your various A levels and finally your degree. You work hard, you believe them and you follow the path. Finally it spews you out into a world where there are no jobs, no mortgages and all you have is a big pile of debt.

When you're 18 or 19 you know that the nearest you can start actually living like an adult is somewhere way past 30. I remember being 18, and 35 is literally a lifetime away.

And whatever they might say, the Libdems lied. They made a solemn pledge about tuition fees but went back on it almost immediately. Why shouldn't intelligent young people feel angry and dissatisfied? Their elders, betters and leaders duped them again. What kind of an example is that?

I never understood political pledges as an election tool. Firstly, nobody ever believes them in the first place and, as the Dems have discovered, circumstance means that sometimes you are squeezed into breaking them. You end up looking hollow and unprincipled.

today : I give out some plaudits

2010-11-29T02:14:00.002Z

Hurrah for George Osborne. We know we can trust Gideon the Baronet to be 'fair' and look after our interests. That's why, after running on an election promise of dealing with the amoral, greedy rich, he's put the brakes on regulating bank bonuses under the guise of needing to do things Europe-wide. Pretty generous of someone who has long been a declared Euro-sceptic. Oh, and the heir to an Irish baronetcy has also given the Irish 7 billion of the quid he's slashed from our public services and welfare.

Hurrah also for Eric Pickles, who has told councils that they must celebrate Christmas as a Christian festival. Yet another declaration that isn't needed but so kind of him to make Daily Mail readers feel good about themselves. So Birmingham has a Winterval event that encompasses Xmas, Eid, Divali and Hanukkah. Does that mean that the politically correct police go around fining people for going to a Christian Church and singing carols? No, it means that the council only has to put up one set of lights and can never be accused of ignoring or marginalising any group in it's huge and diverse population that has a religious festival around December (that's most religions, btw)

But the biggest hurrah is for Michael Gove. Not only has he proved that you can get to the top of politics, despite being half-man, half Atlantic Cod, but he has finally solved all the problems in the education system by the simple measure of making everyone do what he and his cronies did at school. That's a great relief for the poor and educationally disadvantaged. They'll now be able to finally learn all the Latin and Greek they've been hankering after for years, and be tested on Thomas Hardy novels only by yet more proper fashioned exams, instead of that annoyingly inclusive namby-pamby broad-based teacher-led assessment. To help with the Greek and Latin lessons Gove has also made sure that they will be conducted in broken down, semi-derelict and ruined buildings, just for authenticity. Oh, and he's going to solve all disciplinary problems by turning a few soldiers into teachers. That'll sort everything out in about 6 months and everything will be okay. What a relief.

today : two brains (no) good

2010-11-25T10:48:00.001Z

Hurrah for David Willetts, the Universities minister, whose considered first response to the recent student protests was to demonstrate how supportive and in-touch he is with his minsterial constituents.

His opinion? Not even to acknowledge the validity of the protest or to argue the case for raising fees, but merely the suggestion that most of the students and school pupils protesting the tripling of fees were confused and didn't understand the policy change. Such confidence in the young people of the nation is exactly what a Universities minister needs. Surely they can sleep safe in their halls knowing that the man in charge of their educational futures is such a sympathetic, understanding and respectful character. Willets (who went to a private school and then Christ Church Oxford) , is clearly down wiv the kids.

He does understand the concept of confusion, though. Perhaps it was confusion that led him to lie to a select committee in 1996 and having to resign from government.

today : I apportion blame

2010-11-24T01:37:00.002Z

Again we have a complex economic story. Who truly understands it? Not the newspapers and their £300 per person they reckon we are going to give to the Irish. Not even the economics reporters. Maybe they do understand it but can't really explain all the nuances in a 2 minute report. Certainly not any of the people who are vox-popped on the street and asked about a situation that could keep economics professors awake at night.

Perhaps not even the Irish government.

But one thing is for sure. Follow the trail back to its source and you get to the banks again.

today : who are the Royal Watchers?

2010-11-17T03:14:00.002Z

9 hours into the royal engagement story and everything is as you would expect. There is only one fact to report and the news people are doing their best to spin it out as much as they can. One question intrigues me. Just who are these people who brand themselves 'Royal Watchers'?

When I was a mere teenager, I had a pal whose mother was obsessed with the royals. It was around the time of the Charles and Diana wedding and she'd been completely overcome with it. I, a staunch republican, was once more or less frogmarched from their house for suggesting that the tyranny of the monrachy should be overthrown. Apparently, my standpoint had caused actual tears. Things were never quite the same. Nowadays I am still a republican but am more sanguine towards the actual people. Then, asking why we should fete and look up to Diana, possessor of precisely no O levels, at a time when the rest of us were desperately caught up in the scramble for exam grades, was one of the things that set my friend's mother off. Of course, I'd simply driven a wedge into the faultline of the poor woman's hypocrisy, but on reflection I could have kept my counsel, realising that her obsession was beyond logic. These days I possess no particular liking of the royals. But neither do I harbour any malice towards them as people.

What continues to baffle me are the snoots who appear out of the woodwork each time there is a Royal story.

They teemed across my TV screen today. Hour after hour I was assailed by women in twin sets with double barrelled names and ski-holiday tans; and men with comb-overs, tweed jackets and dubious dental hygeine.

There must be a specific path set out for them. If you attend a minor public school and are just not quite characterful enough, or well-bred enough, or pretty enough, or clever enough, to become barristers or editors or PR people, then I imagine the careers advice is to become a Royal Watcher. Except none of them actually brought any insight or knowledge to the role.

They are (along with much of the current Cabinet) the best example of how a private education can go a long way. Teach people that they are superior beings and it doesn't matter how thick/useless/lazy they are; they will breeze through life with a brash unself-awareness, somehow convincing everyone that they are worth something when, if you scratch one billimetre beneath the surface, they pretty much aren't.

It is these people who have infested my TV and radio for the last 9 hours, telling me that Kate Middleton is a naturally beautiful woman with lovely teeth (always a measure used by the upper classes - without shame they assess their women as bloodstock). It was one of these people who commented that it would be controversial that Kate is a 'commoner' marrying into a blueblood dynasty - the inference that she might contaminte the bloodline with dangerous mediocrity. When was the last time you heard someone referred to as a 'commoner'? Somewhere around 1788, perhaps.

today : that's the sound of the men working on the chain gang

2010-11-10T06:08:00.005Z

Nothing wrong with helping the long-term unemployed gain work experience and the confidence to re-enter the job market. It's quite easy to get a caught up in a whirlpool of low self-esteem while the waterfall flows over you.

But, as always, the Tories give themselves away with their rhetoric. In the past six months it has been a relentless barrage of negativity fired at the most vulnerable. It's a blatant attempt to create an orthodoxy of division and blame in order to justify their all-out attack on the poor. Anytime anyone points out that the rich seem to be getting richer they jump up and bleat on about class warfare. The real class warfare is in slashing investment, hacking away at the poorest in society, wilfully destroying jobs in vulnerable areas and continually attacking the poor for being poor.

And now the unemployed are to be put to work picking up litter and cleaning graffiti for their £65 a week. This appeared in the press. A Coalition source said: ‘We cannot go on allowing tens of thousands of people to wilfully avoid getting a job. Some go to great lengths to sabotage all efforts to help them find work. That is partly why the welfare bill has gone up so much and it is why hard-working taxpayers get so angry. ‘Some have been out of work for so long that they are literally incapable of obtaining or holding down a job. They have lost the discipline and all sense of work ethic. ‘This programme is designed to address that. It is not intended to apply to people who have genuinely tried to find work or who genuinely cannot work. Some people have simply got out of the habit of working. Hopefully this scheme will help them get back into a nine-to-five routine. ‘But is it meant as a sanction? Yes – and we are convinced it will have an effect. ‘All research shows that when sanctions are applied to those who can work but try to avoid it, they soon get the message and get off their backsides.’

The first thing that is worth pointing out here is that something like these measures already exist. Long term unemployed people are compelled to attend job-seekers training courses. I know, because I taught a bunch of them basic skills (and in the process managed to help a few get a job). If they fail to attend the training then their benefits are compromised. So all that's changed is that instead of endeavouring to help people, the Coalition has decided to declare this kind of thing as a sanction. The inference here is that people should be punished for being poor. An orange jump-suit and a shackle away from a chain-gang.

As with the relentless drive to demonise the disabled. At best this is merely a way of justifying what is really an easy choice for amoral politicians. It's easy to demonise the poor and voiceless as you attack them, just as it's easy to kick someone while they're down. At worst it is an expression of their hatred and contempt for the poor, disabled and voiceless. All evidence from the past suggests that they really do despise the poor and relish the opportunity to attack and undermine them. Remember that these are the people whose ranks include George Young (current Tory leader of the house) who described the homeless as the people you step over on the way to the opera.

today ...and the Daily Express

2010-11-09T04:25:00.002Z

here

today : and the Mail on Sunday duly delivers

2010-11-07T10:26:00.001Z

text quoted from here

The feckless unemployed will be forced to take part in a punishing U.S.-style ‘workfare’ scheme involving gardening, clearing litter and other menial tasks for just £1 an hour in a new crackdown on scroungers.

And if they fail to turn up on time or work hard they will be stripped of their dole for three months.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith will tomorrow unveil ‘compulsory community placements’ in an attempt to stop people living on benefits for years without bothering to look for work.

The ‘Workfare UK’ project will be targeted at tens of thousands of people suspected of sabotaging attempts to make them work.

The measure is a key part of David Cameron’s drive to slash Britain’s annual £192 billion welfare budget.

But Labour MPs condemned the scheme. One said: ‘This sounds like slave labour.’

The scheme is also likely to run into fierce opposition from some Liberal Democrat MPs.

Under Mr Duncan Smith’s anti-scroungers blueprint, employment office chiefs will be given the power to order the long-term jobless to take part in four-week mandatory work schemes.

Instead of receiving their usual £65-a-week Jobseeker’s Allowance for sitting at home doing nothing, they will get substantially less – and will have to clock on and off on time and work flat out.

The Government has not decided how much people on ‘community placements’ will be paid but it is understood the figure will be between £30 and £40 a week – the equivalent to £1 an hour, one sixth of the minimum wage.

They will also be expected to look for a ‘proper job’ for when they complete the scheme. Each participant will be expected to spend at least 30 hours a week on their specified ‘work activity placement’.

If the unemployed fail to turn up on time or work hard they will be stripped of their dole for three months

A Coalition source said: ‘We cannot go on allowing tens of thousands of people to wilfully avoid getting a job. Some go to great lengths to sabotage all efforts to help them find work. That is partly why the welfare bill has gone up so much and it is why hard-working taxpayers get so angry.

‘Some have been out of work for so long that they are literally incapable of obtaining or holding down a job. They have lost the discipline and all sense of work ethic.

‘This programme is designed to address that. It is not intended
to apply to people who have genuinely tried to find work or who genuinely cannot work.

Some people have simply got out of the habit of working. Hopefully this scheme will help them get back into a nine-to-five routine.

‘But is it meant as a sanction? Yes – and we are convinced it will have an effect.

‘All research shows that when sanctions are applied to those who can work but try to avoid it, they soon get the message and get off their backsides.’

The projects will involve all kinds of work, from gardening to clearing litter, repairing vandalised bus stops and buildings and street cleaning.

There are an estimated five million people stuck on various kinds of out-of-work benefits in the UK. Britain now has one of the highest rates of workless households in Europe, with 1.9 million children living in homes where no one has a job.

The proposals are part of a Government White Paper on welfare reform which will herald a bonfire of dozens of complex benefits, to be replaced by a more straightforward single Universal Credit.

today : I continue to be a lazy scrounger

2010-10-31T01:29:00.001+01:00

It already started when the coalition was installed. The chipping away, the cynical stories relentlessly in the lap-dog Tory media, the repeated statements made in an attempt to coin an orthodoxy of opinion, the unfiltered, unbalanced think-tank reports.

But it will get worse. At least once a week there will be a planted story in the media, a minister making some statement or even better, the single news reports focusing on individuals.

The uncomfortable truth is that there is a section of people who exploit benefits. Mainly, these are people who commit straight up fraud - the people who claim to be unemployed but work cash in hand, or those who put on an elaborate charade of disability in order to get DLA and a car. But for the vast majority, benefits are a port of last resort. Almost everybody who claims welfare has to grit their teeth and put aside their personal pride in order to do so. Go to the Jobcentre and just hang out. You can feel it in the air - a sense of bitterness and reluctant defeatedness that just hangs there.

Yes, there are some who get trapped into it, and can see no way out. Children of parents who have been brought up feeling keenly their place at the bottom of the pile. There are also some who end up marginalised and caught in the habit. Quite a few are trapped by the system itself - the fact that going back to work will actually make them poorer.

And lets not get mixed up here. People who live on government benefits don't live but survive. When I worked with the unemployed many of the people walked to and from my literacy classroom to save a few pennies on bus fares. The ones who are (and will be) trumpeted in the Express and the Mail are a tiny minority. Even then, I would defy any tutting Mail or Express reader to swap lives or incomes with them. The amount of people making themselves rich from defrauding the system is absolutely tiny.

At the moment, I'm one of the ones who has to survive on benefits. I'm one of those ill/disabled people who you might think, if you saw me, was perfectly capable of working but is just lazy. I'm not - I have ongoing chronic pain issues that you can't see. I don't screech all day or go around with my operation scars on display. I've seen it from all sides. Not only have I had well paid employment, but have also worked closely with the unemployed and disabled. I'm honest and try and make my way. I've paid a stack into the system and now have to draw on it.

I'll be swept up in the broad attacks built from little stories. I claim housing benefit, but I'll be lumped in with the very very few who live in central London and claim against extortionate rents (why not fix the whole London rents issue by doing what New York does and have a rent control policy?). Consequently nobody will stand up for me. When the cuts bite I'll actually be about £90 per month worse off. That's about three weeks food shopping per month. That's about half my utility bills I won't be able to cover. But I will be branded some kind of scrounger.

I claim DLA too - a double whammy. I get ESA - a triple whammy (this will be slashed along with most other things). The DLA claimants who run marathons or dance the tango are always front page news, but the subtext is always the same: disabled people are scroungers. Unemployed people are scroungers. Ill people are scroungers. Why should we pay for their laziness?

today : in my dark cupboard with my great big cake

2010-10-29T04:20:00.003+01:00

today : blame Canada

2010-10-28T02:20:00.000+01:00

Now the Tories are in, and doing the same old things, there is a temptation to will the economy to tank, to wish them to screw up so I can not only see them tipped out of power again, but to enjoy it. A bit like the extra relish you get from a four nil victory, that's not just a victory, but leads to the opposition manager being sacked.

But I also know plenty of people who are teetering financially, and if Osborne's gamble fails, will take a pretty nasty hit. Because to will failure on Tory policy is to will people out of work and to will people into living on the streets. So I really want everything to be okay.

Except it won't be. I talked before about the intellectual basis of Osborne's cuts and I am reminded of Thatcher. She, of course, had many qualities. I cannot but admire the way she went back to work the day after the IRA tried, and almost succeeded, in blowing her up. It takes a strong and wilful person to carry on in such a situation. Likewise her willingness to be disliked and apparently not care. But, of course, she was wrong on almost all policy issues, morally suspect in consorting with likes of Pinochet and heartless in face of the suffering of her own people. The same qualities that I could admire, unfortunately sprang not from a Churchillian resolve and vision, but from being blinkered and, frankly, a bit thick.

She, of course, was seduced by the Monetarist vision poured into her ear by Keith Joseph (shamefully, he was my MP). And I am always extremely suspect of anyone who proffers an evangelistic position on anything. There is certainty of vision, and then there is a kind of swivel-eyed adherence to ideology that appears to ignore doubt. I have never known an intelligent person who didn't question or moderate their opinions by reflection and engaging in a dialectical process with alternative viewpoints. I have, conversely, known many, many very stupid people who are absolutely certain of their own correctness.

Osborne and his people seem to have been seduced by what happened in Canada in the 1990s. A massive deficit reduction programme, with a goal of balancing the books within a few short years not only got Canada out of a financial hole, but counter-intuitively, the economy grew at the same time.

As with all situations, Canada's economy at the time was subject to very specific conditions. To extrapolate a template from what happened is risky at best and folly at worst. But isn't this what all ideologues do? They constantly try to find a magic solution, a simple set of rules that solves or explains everything. Always, it ends in tears. Whether it's Stalin bolting his own notions onto Marx and coming up with the Soviet nightmare, or a free market, light-touch regulation of financial institutions leading to a collapse of the banking system.

today 80s music fest continued

2010-10-23T05:09:00.000+01:00

there's a good argument that this song was the first ever goth song.

this is possibly my favourite song of the 80s. How I adored ice queen Susanne Freytag. I saw them play live and she never cracked a smile the whole time.

today : feels like the 80s again

2010-10-23T03:43:00.002+01:00

tonight I switched on the TV. Newsnight was going on about the Tories slashing public services and then Heaven 17 were on Jools Holland's show.

It was like the 90s and 00s had never happened. So I decided to have a small 80s music fest.

Starting with these gems:

today: The laughing gnomes

2010-10-22T05:15:00.003+01:00

There are many things I could write about the 'cuts' that happened this week. I'll quickly list them.
1. The Tories sudden antipathy towards the IFS - long used by them as the analysts of choice and tool to beat Labour with, but now peddlers of nonsense.
2. The utter lack of an intellectual justification for their actions. Osborne : "We have to do this.", Questioner: "Why?", Osborne : "Because it must be done"
3. The obvious fact that the speech itself was full of obfuscation and structured like all budget speeches with the clear and coherent parts all about handouts and the detailed and long-winded parts all about the bad stuff. 4. The lack of detail.
5 The fact that the lack of detailed plans left the teams of journalists and correspondents floundering. At one point in Osborne's speech Nick Robinson posted insightfully: "7 Billion in cuts is the same as £10000 less for 7 million people." Perhaps they could have got Rachel Riley in instead.
6. The way the TV companies all produced logos and graphics on the 'budget day' model for something that was not a budget, and looked a bit daft. Thursday morning: Louise Minchin sent to talk to 'poor' people at Dickensian market in East London. The best she could come up with was a fruit stall holder who told her that people spend about £3 a week on fruit and after the cuts might only spend £1 a week. A point Louise reiterated at least three times.

But the thing I noticed most was something that Alan Johnson pointed out in his rebuttal speech, but didn't hit hard enough on. It was the sight and sound of Tory MPs and Minsters cheering job cuts, cheering slashes in public services, cheering austerity and poverty, cheering benefit cuts.

It gave them away. At no point was there a single note of regret. No notion of 'we have to do this but it gives us no pleasure to throw half a million dedicated public servants out of work'. No mention that some people will be badly affected but it is a painful but necessary choice.

They enjoyed it. They revelled in it. They celebrated it. Whilst telling us all we must take the pain, Gideon Osborne - future 18th Baronet of Ballintaylor (worth 4 1/2 million), Cameron (worth 4 million - set to inherit up to 30 million) and Clegg (worth a couple of million with family wealth of several million more) were, and remain, gung-ho.

It was if the whole party had been waiting desperately for the last 13 years, swelling up with the pressure that builds and builds when you are constantly denied the chance to kick the poor in their pasty, subservient, worthless faces. And they couldn't help letting it all out in a smug tsunami of arrogance and guffawing cruel stupidity. Like bullies pissing on a cripple and sticking the video on youtube.

It not only shows the Tories in a poor light, and, as Johnson pointed out, caught up more in their ideology than any notion of patriotism or reality, but also does politics itself no good. We have MPs who have apparently cleaned house on their own scams and fraudulent behaviour, happily laughing in the face of the ruin of millions. The fact that nobody in their own ranks thought to brief them about how such behaviour would look says an awful lot about how remote and ideologically driven these children of Thatcher really are.

today : "The Bonnie Lassie" says 'Awa an bile yer heid, Auldjin!"

2010-10-22T02:56:00.000+01:00

Today's guest blogger is "The Bonnie Lassie" who relates an unusual blue-badge parking incident.

I also have had some hassle so to speak from members of the public sticking their noses places its not wanted! I parked in a disabled bay and put my badge on the dash and after locking my car realised there was this elderly man watching me from beside his car (also in a disabled bay). While I was walking past him he mentioned that did I know I was parked in a disabled bay to which I replied 'Of course I do and my badge is on the dash'.....tried to continue on my way and he stopped me again and said 'And you do know young lady,you are not meant to use someone else's badge to park there'.
'It's not someone elses badge it's my badge'.
'And whats wrong with you that gives you a right to have a blue badge?' he asked!!! 'What would you do if I called the police on you?'
To which I replied 'Laugh at you for making a fool of yourself!'

This got my back up and I told him in no uncertain terms that he was neither my consultant nor my GP and I didn't need to justify myself to HIM why I was entitled to a blue badge, but if he must know I suffer from Severe Bilataeral Talipes with Pes Cavus, and I've had it since birth!! I then added that he was just a bitter old man, whom, just because time wasn't on his side doesn't have the right to question anyone else about their disabilities and he should wind his neck in and mind his own business!!!

When I got home to my mum I was so distressed that I wanted to hand my badge back there and then! My mum being my mum called the police as I had noted the mans reg number and they came and took a statement from me and paid the old man a visit! He was still protesting to the police that I am not disabled and I shouldn't have been parked there as I was young and fit!! To which the police replied 'Have you never heard of someone being born with a disability,which this young lady was and she suffers from quite a painful deformity of her feet'......The old man never replied after being told that and to keep his opinions to himself as I could have had him charged with breach of the peace for putting me in an unnecessary state of alarm!!

Happy Days haha!!!

today : my life is shit and I need someone to blame

2010-10-19T04:21:00.001+01:00

It increasingly looks like the American Democrats will suffer a bloodbath in the upcoming midterms. I guess this is to be expected. Everywhere people are frightened about being poor.

But what happens in America always interests and amuses me. Their politics is so messed up that they really cannot see that they are consistently undermining themselves as a power. It seems that Americans are like Liverpool fans. Once, a long time ago they ruled the roost and perennially expect that they should continue to do so by default. But the world has changed since they were on top. Okay, so Liverpool have done well in the Champions league in the past decade, but that's a cup competition. Any team or country can shine in a cup competition, or in an individual area of business.

The story of the the midterms is that a mature Internet has fragmented the narratives of politics. This has always been the case to some extent in the USA because it is such a huge, geographically, culturally and economically diverse country. But the less people get their news and information from central sources, the more localised things seemingly have become. Localised to the point of reconfiguring communities outside of geography - meaning that people with similar opinions can form together and campaign more easily. Shazam! The Tea Party, connecting together confused, disappointed, bitter people everywhere with other confused disappointed and bitter people. It looks to me like the Tea Party (although much more complex than I'm portraying, and with some agenda driven people behind it) could easily be renamed the 'My Life Turned Out Shit and I Need Someone To Blame Party' - a party whose membership are almost entirely campaigning against stuff rather than for it.

This does diminish the power of the Metropolitan opinion formers and media. They grow ever more irrelevant to the discourse. Even when that discourse is riddled with prejudice, inaccuracy and selfish short-sightedness.

American politics has also suffered from the lack of balanced voice. One warning Brits can take from watching the USA is that to destroy the BBC would leave us open to anti-democratic Fox News-style broadcasters; 'news' channels that exploit freedom of speech to relentlessly and cynically push the agenda of their owners. In Fox's case, of course, this is Murdoch, whose only interest is in creating more wealth and power for himself and his companies. A 'News' channel is just one of his any means necessary.

today : I become a murderer

2010-10-16T09:43:00.002+01:00

I am a murderer. I am not proud of it. But I was provoked. A single fly decided to inhabit my house. It was okay at first. I saw it crawling across the ceiling, or sitting on the wall near the phone and it troubled me not. As long as it wasn't causing any harm or irritation. I did consider that the spider that lives in the living room light might even enjoy having a fly to catch. This is the spider that miraculously lowers itself the ten feet or so from the ceiling and hangs there, a small dot in my eye-line, visible against the light from the TV. I amused myself in thinking that maybe it just wanted to watch World News America. But after hanging there awhile, it gets bored and continues the perilous precarious descent, until it lands on the coffee table. Once or twice it has aborted the mission and climbed back up - the kind of rope ascent that would defeat the average human, but to the spider is as easy as pie.

The fly became bolder. It started to circle. It landed on the coffee table at the far side from where I was sitting. I tried to creep up on it and waft it away. I tried leaving the back door open for a few minutes, hoping it would escape. But it probably didn't fancy going out in the cold and the rain, so stayed stubbornly inside.

Then, the day before yesterday, it landed on my arm. I was watching Horizon and felt a slight itch. I looked down and there it was. This time the fly had crossed the line. It was, your honour. provocation. It invaded my personal space. I held my other hand still and then swiftly brought it down on my forearm. Slap! But the fly saw it coming and made a swift escape and found safe-haven on the ceiling, where it stared down at me mockingly.

I was reminded of the time some years ago when my beloved Dalmatian - Millie- had swatted a fly. Millie was laying in front of the fire on her side, apparently, asleep. The family were sitting around watching TV. A rogue fly appeared in the room and began buzzing around. We all tried to swat it. When it landed on furniture we all tried to bash it with magazines or cushions. It even survived one of us creeping up on it and standing over it, hands, apart, ready to clap them together. This is a 100% guaranteed way to eliminate a fly, and scientifically proven. It's said that flies cannot look upwards and also can only take off vertically. The waft created by clapping hands shocks the fly into trying to evade the attack it can feel but cannot see. It tries to buzz away from danger, but on take-off only succeeds in flying vertically, directly into the path of the clapping hands and its
inevitable demise by squishing.

Maybe we didn't clap hard enough. We all shrugged as it sat on high on the wall looking down. But then it took off again and buzzed circles around the room. Millie, snoring contentedly in front of the fire had been apparently oblivious to people vs fly contest that was taking place. The fly flew by her nose. She did not stir. But then it made a return journey. As it went past she momentarily awoke. A paw shot into the air - lightning fast - and batted it right out of the sky. Stone dead.

But Millie had grown old and died many years ago. This time I had no secret weapon. It was a one-on-one situation which was about to escalate.

Because yesterday it landed on my head, then danced contemptuously along the coffee table, just out of reach from where I lay prone watching Season 4 Episode 1 of Chuck.

Then this morning it went too far. I was about to set out on a trip to the fine city of Liverpool, 60 miles away from home. In preparation for the trip I was noshing a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast and coffee. I brought the small plate of eggs on toast into living room and placed it on the table. Remembering that I'd forgotten to get a knife, I returned to the kitchen. When I got back, some 10 seconds later, there it was. It was sitting on the edge of the plate. It saw me and buzzed away. I sat down, risking the contaminated plate.

It was not content. The damn thing then landed right on the rim of my coffee cup. I wafted my knife at it and again it took off and made an escape.

The provocation was unacceptable. I could not now look the other way. This meant war.

I had a simple plan. When I went out I would spray the room with fly-killer. After all, the instructions advised to spray the room, then seal it for 30 minutes to an hour, rather than use the spray as a gun and expel a direct hit of fly killer onto the target.

So, before leaving on my trip, I loaded the room with enough of the stuff to kill Jeff Goldblum.

On my way back, I didn't even think about the fly. Like George W Bush on the deck of an aircraft carrier, I had already declared victory. With my superior fire-power, I just assumed that I'd won.

After grabbing something to eat, I settled down to catch up the news. Everything was fine and relaxed. But then the fly nonchalantly landed on the coffee table and began to strut around as if it had received lessons from Miss J.

I was stuck, entrenched in a war that was beginning to look, if not unwinnable, at least attritional. My exit strategy had failed. All that was left was shock and awe.

I got the spray from the kitchen and sat, like an SAS man in his foxhole, waiting for my moment. I didn't have to wait too long. The fly came back. This time it landed directly in the line of fire. I unleashed a barrage of fly spray, enough to drench the surface of the coffee table. The fly buzzed away but surely this was the end. No living thing could have survived such disproportionate use of chemical weapons. I knew this because I began to taste the bitter chemicals, and soon was reduced to a coughing fit as the poison infiltrated my system.

I went to the door to get some fresh air, and then retired upstairs to read Michael Connelly's latest Mickey Haller thriller which I'd bought on my trip. After an hour, my eyes were tired and I figured that the poison levels would have returned to within safe limits. so I went back downstairs. Salman Rushdie was being interviewed on HardTalk and I wanted to see what he had to say.

Re-entering the living room I was shocked into swearing out-loud. Not only was the fly perched casually on the coffee table, but it was close to ground zero, where I had saturated the table top with spray. What's more it looked in rude health, a fact which it proved by buzzing away as soon as I approached it with a rolled up copy of the Radio Times. Rasputin was easier to dispatch. A highlander was positively fragile compared to this fly.

I gave up. Sitting back on the sofa I switched on the TV to watch a relaxed and well-fed looking Salman Rushdie discuss his latest novel and various related topics.

Just as Rushdie was answering in the inevitable questions about The Satanic Verses, I felt a movement in the air near my ear. The fly had re-appeared and was manically circling my head, as if attempting to re-enact the sad demise of Rhandy Rhodes. I tried batting at it with my hands I couldn't get near it.

I decided to give up. To surrender. I was sure that flies don't live that long. If I just let it go then the thing would die of natural causes or be caught by the ceiling spider.

It was painful and politically damaging to admit defeat, but I had to respect any adversary that survived using wiles and an apparent immunity to Raid.

Salman had now finished his interview and a weatherman appeared. As I picked up the remote to channel surf the fly came buzzing round again. I decided to try and ignore its taunts. It flew in front of the TV three or four times. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz one way and then Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz the other. But then, just as I settle on the Jools Holland show, it buzzed into view again. Bzzzzzzzz...then silence. half way through its pass across my field of vision it simply stopped, like a WW1 biplane suffering an engine stall, and fell dead directly into the ashtray that was sitting on the coffee table. It landed upside down, feet in the air, in the classic pose.

I was a murderer. But I'd won.

today : same old same old

2010-10-12T03:19:00.000+01:00

I was talking to a long-time friend the other day. She said that she had a reunion with some people from her Uni days and everyone (now in their early 40s) was having some kind of mid-life crisis.
"None of them were happy," she said.

I would include myself in that category. My 'crisis' has been inspired my medical issues : suddenly not being able to walk has made me have to resign myself to the things I'll never do and regret many of the chances I didn't take. For example, disability travel, while not impossible, is much more daunting and expensive than able-bodied travel. Disabled employment is problematic and restricted. My ambit of my choices has been narrowed somewhat.

So for me it is not really a crisis of 'mid-life' as such. The timing is a kind of coincidence. But qualitatively, the effects are the same. Someone who has reached a stage of career boredom, feels stuck in a marriage and bound by children. someone who counts the grey in their hair. They feel trapped by circumstance. The fact that the circumstance is solely the result of choices they made when younger doesn't really make a difference.

I am wondering if some of it is triggered by the nostalgia of living under a Tory government. I became politicised in the 80s when we had to suffer what felt like a hundred years of Thatcher. In many ways Britain really was an unpleasant, divided and pretty dour place to be during those years. People forget.

I've noticed a similar feeling hanging around recently. It gets stronger and stronger. Every time I hear a Tory minister bluster out the same old Tory nonsense, I feel a mixture of annoyance and despair that reminds me of when I was younger and just getting to grips with the complexity and unfairness of the world.

In those days it was the knowledge that people were being punished for being poor and working class. Nowadays it is the fact that...erm...people are being punished for being poor and working class. It might not seem that way on the surface, but cuts never affect the rich, because they are rich. Taxes affect the rich, which is why the Tories are so against taxes.

I am a little confused as to the basis of the 2010 Tory economic vision. I suspect that they have embraced Canadian style balanced book ideas, whereas before it was all about Friedman. But as any Canadian who is about to suffer the collapse of their property bubble will tell you, balancing the budget was not the answer.

But then again, it also looks like the deficit is an excellent excuse to continue prosecuting the same old free-market ideology that has proved so successful at making the rich richer and the poor poorer over the past 30 years. Under the guise of essential deficit reductions they are poised to make 25% cuts over four years. I don't really think the average voter has any idea how much of our economy relies on the collective and what this will do. Sitting in a castle, the average old-money rich person will see little difference. They don't use public health, education, social support etc, so for them it won't matter. For the rest of us things are going to be quite different.

In one way I was wrong about the Cameron Tories. I thought they might be a little more easy going than the Thatcherites. But no. From day one there seems to be a determination to roll back everything that Labour did in the last 13 years, whether it is good or bad, useful or not. A 'market' in the health service, check, returning higher education into the hands of the wealthy, check. Constantly attacking vulnerable groups like the elderly and the disabled. Check.

The nub of how they haven't changed can be seen in their PR. The recession, that everyone in the world knows was caused by irresponsibility in the global banking system, was 'Brown and Darling's recession' in the lead up to the election. Not unexpectedly they conflated the meanings of recession in the UK economy caused by mismanagement in the UK system, as in Brown wishing to abolish boom and bust, with the meaning of global recession caused by global issues and actually sparked by Bush spending on 2 wars, tax breaks for the rich and lowering interest rates to 1% to create a false boom in property. It all became the same thing in order to sell a simple narrative to the electorate. But since getting in they have carried this on. It is their way of avoiding any blame for what might happen in the economy and a nice convenient cover for their unnecessary and ideologically driven public spending cuts.

A side effect is that the banks no longer caused any problems. It was all Brown and Darling. So no need to reign in their friends in the City.

It's the same old simpletons' view of the world. Stuck in an ideological rut.

Next week we'll get the cuts. They won't be quite as savage as we've been led to believe. There'll be some sweeteners. Something like Winter fuel payments or social care will be spared to make them look cuddly.

But they are the same moronic selfish bastards that they always were.

today : I help people but get treated like crap

2010-10-10T01:35:00.002+01:00

Even though I say it myself, I am a pretty altruistic person. Well, I try to be. But I always get it wrong. I always misjudge the line between helping others and feeling used and disrespected.

Let me give you an example. You give someone a lift to work or wherever each day. After a while you arrive at the specified time but have to wait around because they are tardy getting ready. This is okay but once in a while you want to be at work sharp on time for some reason and you start to resent the fact that, instead of being able to get there to do what you wanted first thing, you sit in the car wasting ten minutes.

Then, for some reason you are late in picking the person up. Now the tables are turned. They complain about you being late. It's messed up their schedule. So what do you do? My instinct is to tip them out of the car and let them walk. Maybe present them with a bill for all the petrol they drifted into not paying for. But that makes you as selfish and petty as them.

When I was younger I used to have a friend who would happily accept lifts all over the place, but would complain like a small child if he didn't like the music I was playing. One of those people who has a different 'cool' fashionable taste each week, so whatever you're playing is generally not what he wanted to hear. In hindsight I should have kicked him from the car when he complained, but didn't.

And even today. I did a favour for someone. It's not the first favour I've done them recently and I did it despite being quite ill. To be honest they'd got in a position where they needed help. But it wasn't just expected that I would do one favour, they had planned for me to give up my entire weekend to help them - thinking that rather than tell me this, they would get me at their house and then reveal the extent of their problems. But I was ill and they knew that. Having done exactly what I'd promised to help, turned around and came home.

An hour later I got a nasty text, everything I'd done already was wrong and useless and I was an unpleasant and selfish person.

What do you do? Carry on driving or throw them out and make them walk 20 miles?

today : the poverty line

2010-10-07T01:22:00.001+01:00

Hilarious. Ear splitting howls of protest from people over child-beneft cuts for high earners. Poor them. There was a woman on the news who admitted that her family would be punished. That it is unfair.
"I don't know where we can make any more savings," she said.

On what planet is the belief that £44,000 (about $70,000 - when the famous stat is that half the world live on less than $730 per year) is a level at which you cannot make savings? How many holidays do you take a year? How many times do you eat out a month? How many pairs of shoes do you have?

I have no objection to people earning and spending as much as they can. But nobody is automatically entitled to a luxury lifestyle. We are talking roughly double the average UK income here. How mollycoddled, financially cavalier and caught up in a feeling of entitlement is someone if they cannot take a 2% cut from £44000? A little less wine and skiing would do it.

Whilst the recent financial troubles in the rich nations have certainly caused problems for people, there are very few who have been left destitute, homeless or starving. A bit of belt tightening is all most people have or will suffered. Maybe a bit of worry or a period of unemployment.

In about 60% of the world's nations the financial crisis had had little real effect. That's the nations that don't have an economy to suffer a downturn or an uptick. That's where people scrape by, subsisting in agrarian communities. No TV, no Wii, no holidays, no pensions, no prescriptions (also no anorexia, no prozac and no mid-life crises).

Whilst rightly arguing the various corners of political policies we could all do with taking a reality check.

Having said that, it's interesting to note that the Tories first hack at welfare is a universal benefit. Tories hate universal benefits because they are clearly 3/4 of the way to Communism. Watch out.

today : tell them to shut up

2010-09-29T03:45:00.002+01:00

People don't often say this, but right wing people are almost entirely stupid. I'm not using it in a general insult kind of way - saying, "Oh, people who disagree with me, they must be idiots." What I'm saying is that they actually are stupid, as in feeble minded, unintelligent and shallow of thought.

They are also liars. Maybe their lying springs from the fact that because they are stupid they get confused over things like logic, so they lie accidentally. But it's still lies. Here's a right wing economic lie: "The government should be small and taxes should be lower."
What they mean is, the government shouldn't do anything for anyone apart from me, and taxes should be lower for me.

Did I mention that right wing people are invariably totally selfish?

Here's another lie that right wing people trot out. Immigration is bad. What they mean (in England and America anyway), is that black and brown people are bad. No Daily Mail articles about all those nasty American actors and academics, aussie barmaids or South African Cricketers. It's foreigners who are bad. People who look different, or talk a different language. Which is a childish way of sorting out the world. People who look and talk like me - good: people who look different and talk different - bad.

Right wing people are invariably childish in their view of the world.

This is because they either haven't realised, or can't cope with the idea that things are complex and difficult. Right wingers are always desperate to reduce things to a simple binary level. Often they lie to make the world fit into their simple-minded perceptions. Invariably they are selfish in the way they simplify the world. It always ends up as me/you, us/them.

And most of all they are cowards. Scared to death of change, complexity, difference and reality.

In order to justify their fear they will adopt extreme standpoints that are illogical and dangerous. Yet it never crosses their minds that, for example, you cannot be a Christian and hate everyone else in the world. It says so in the Bible. Perhaps they are too stupid to read it.

Right wingers don't do ideology (the people who exploit them do do ideology - this is a whole new category. Not Right Wing but just evil). Ideology is about 3 syllables too long for right wingers to cope with. In fact they don't even do ideas.

Left thinking people don't point these obvious truths out enough. Left thinkers give right wing people too much credit. We sympathise with them. We imagine they are as intelligent, insightful and sensitive as we are. We defend their right to spout whatever moronic crap they are thinking, in their small, stupid, childish, selfish frightened little minds.

We really should just tell them to shut up.

today : this amused me

2010-09-27T01:36:00.002+01:00

this amused me

today : bad people who do good things

2010-09-14T02:09:00.002+01:00

Ok, so Phil Spector is not a nice man. But Be My Baby is possibly the greatest record of all time.

today : Dade in flame

2010-09-13T03:13:00.003+01:00

Okay, I know Gainesville ain't Miami but the pun was irresistable
Although all the criticism of Pastor John is totally justified, in that he is clearly one of those egotisical and not overly bright semi-charlatans who need to set up their own church in order to feel important, let us not forget that he only threatened to burn a few books. What is really stupid is that the very idea of burning some paper ( or drawing a picture, or writing down some words) can be so inflamatory to some people that they will potentially kill innocent bystanders who would no more burn a Qu'ran than eat their own shoes in a sandwich with sliced domestic guinea pig and picallili. So while everyone continues to condemn this silly man in Florida, let's not just accept insane extremism as a given, but point it out and stand up against it.

today: bye bye bass

2010-09-07T02:30:00.005+01:00

I sold my acoustic bass guitar today. The fourth guitar I've sold in the last few weeks. The old battered 1950s Egmond, the Black Strat and the bowl-back acoustic were fine. I felt no pangs. I never loved them, it seems. But the bass. Well, it was hard to let it go. As the deadline approached and the ebay bidders didn't materialise I grew kind of giddy - hoping that it wouldn't sell. That would be my excuse to keep it. But in the last minute someone offered the reserve price and it was gone forever.

today : the gift that keeps on giving

2010-09-07T02:15:00.000+01:00

The good news for the Labour Party is that the Andy Coulson phone hacking story looks like it's got legs. After all, there can be statements of denial aplenty, but the source of the recent accusations isn't some partisan blogger or a Labour spin doctor, but The New York Times. And say what you like about the big US papers but they don't go to print unless they have sources and corroborations.

What's interesting to me is how the broadcasters have treated this story. Trying not to appear anti-Sky (knowing they are facing sustained and vengeful attack from the Tories and their News International cronies when the license settlement arises in 2012), the BBC didn't touch it (and were criticised for it) until politicians and maligned public figures waded in. Sky News has tried to portray the story as an attempt by Labour to attack the government, rather than a story in itself. Funny how the echo chamber suddenly becomes padded and soundless for the news channel that bases much of its content on whatever is being printed in the tabloids or posted on the Web, regardless of provenance or relevance.

And of course, all the other Murdoch papers are treating it as commercial jealousy on behalf of the NYT. Other Tory worshipping press are filing it away on page 10. You couldn't get better evidence that they are worried and probably think (or know) it's a story that won't go away.

The important thing is that it all rings true. Coulson either had to be in the loop as editor of the NOTW, or else he was a shoddy editor who wasn't across the scoops that came from hacked phone messages, didn't talk to his staff and wasn't in any meetings with lawyers. You only have to hear the defensive interventions of coalition cabinet ministers to see how worried they are. Cameron has been careful to offer his support to Coulson in second hand statements and not from his own mouth.

I am personally not even so bothered about 'the dark arts'. If some mindless celebrity or politician or Royal leaves themself open to simple eavesdropping and blabs away on their mobile without securing it as best they can - then maybe they are asking for it.

But that's a side issue. The fact is that what happened was illegal, and Coulson's denials sound as shrill and thin as the Pakistani High Commisioner claiming the videos were shot AFTER the match.

All of which is good news for Labour. If the story breaks open and Coulson has to resign it will damage Cameron big-time. But if the Establishment manages to keep a lid on any investigation it will always swirl around and Labour will be able to turn again time after time to it. It will be the gift that keeps on giving.

If Labour doesn't screw it up (which they might) they have a big chance to damage Cameron. If they don't screw it up then Coulson will remain the story and sooner or later have to go. Once that happens there are endless questions about judgement and the closeness of the Tories and Mr Murdoch.