An Excitable Lot

All


Well, it's ten Radio One minutes past eleven, and that means it's time to see what's happened today. Well, Condoleeza Rice is in Blackburn visiting the home constituency of our Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. This is to return the favour of her putting him up at her ranch in Alabama last year. He obviously didn't enjoy it much of all she gets out of it is a trip to Ewood Park to watch Blackburn Rovers youth team. But anyway. It was asked on the Today programme this morning what she might see on her visit to the mill towns of Lancashire. To answer this, professional talking head (I am not sure if he has another job at all) Wayne Hemmingway was wheeled on to reminisce about his home town. He went on to talk fruitily of curry houses and a bar decorated entirely with pictures of Lenin. I personally reckon that the crowd of 50,000 pissed off Muslims might distract her from the Taj Mahal Tandoori on Whalley Range.

Anyway. Amongst the jolly Rabbis on Thought For The Day and the avuncular rambling about migratory birds and racing tips that actually make up the bulk of Today (in fact, most of Radio 4's broadcasting day) was news that soon schoolkids will be penalised in English lessons if they can't punctuate properly. Well, good. About time. It needs to be taught from an early age that "Apple's" isn't the correct way to form a plural. I doubt if you could do a whole maths GCSE without knowing what an "=" is. I can't add up at all, but I know how to use an apostrophe.

I have also read the blood-curdling threat by the head of UK Athletics that athletes deemed to have underperformed in Melbourne will have their funding cut. I expected this - it seems that if you lose at a major event you will have your money cut for not getting a return, and if you win, you have your money cut because you clearly don't need it any more.

Is this neccessarily a good system in the run up to the Olympics? It'll hardly help morale - ruling by fear seldom does. We still seem to think that a plucky but talented amateur can beat the soulless professionals, and that there is something inexcusably wasteful in subsidising a vainglorious, namby-pamby endeavour like sport. We have the idea that we can produce world-beaters in local leisure centres who train between shifts at the call centre. We forget that for the athletes, this is their job. But if we don't win lots and lots of medals in London we will tear our sportsmen and women to shreds as a waste of precious public cash. How very Magwitch-like. How very British. The Americans spend billions, at universities and in public funding, on their Olympic team. In Britain we think that kind of behaviour is just vulgar. You'd almost think they want to win.

Olympic and Commonwealth sport can't ever make enough money to give athletes the full-time training they need to compete, let alone the facilities they need to win. The likes of Paula Radcliffe are so rare as to basically not exist. Not even the hallowed game of football makes a profit overall, not anywhere near. If you're a British swimmer, or gymnast, or cyclist, or whatever, you'd better do well, or that's you out of a job.

But then again, how important is all ths? Because we are all going to die. This is the one thing that we can be sure of. The method of our demise is open to various options both natural and man-made. And this is not even taking account of the stupid stuff like bird flu, SARS, vCJD, ebloa, anthrax, a, salmonella in eggs, lead in farmed salmon, mercury in butter, listeria in hazlenut yougurts, botulism in tins of tuna and too much oestrogen in the water from the Pill, which itself both causes and prevents cervical cancer. Chocolate is good for you this week, but will be unhealthy again as of the beginning of April.

And if it's not that, it's the constant threat of some kind of ill-defined and vague foreign menace. Look out, there's a vague and ill-defined foreign menace about. You, me, him, all of them. Bastards. And what can we do?. I mean, everyone, absolutely everyone, is a potential terrorist. In fact, as the Daily Mail is keen to point out, they're here already. The 92 percent of the UK that describes itself as of white ethnicity and British culture, and is so already being mercilessly wiped out by the endless tide of waiters, bus drivers and cleaners flooding across our borders from abroad as part of a massive left-wing conspiracy to destroy the English middle class, must be ever vigilant lest the forces of Terror defeat us and take our freedom, that freedom we all hold so dear that up to 55 percent of hose registered to vote do so.

But it is clear that in fighting this vague, ill-defined, probably self-inflicted and fairly likely to be entirely non-existent foreign threat we must all make our own sacrifices in the name of liberty. Sacrifice liberty itself, in fact. Excellent. Possibly also spend 15 million pounds a week on invading Iraq, which has obviously been a tremendous boon. We could put every detail of everybody in Britain on a large governmental database perhaps, and as we all know, these are always totally reliable, well-managed and secure. Cosy up to the Bush administration. Try not to ask too many awkward questions. Because the best part of fifty years of fucking about with the Middle East has absolutely nothing to do with it, and you'd be a terrorist yourself to think so. God Save the Queen.

Good night, and good luck
Dougal