I think it was in his adverts for the Inland Revenue's taxation self-assasment forms that Adam Hart-Davies that said "Tax doesn't have to be taxing". Well bollocks. He only said it becasue they'd locked him in a giant egg timer and wouldn't let him out unless he said nice things about an SA100 form before he was sucked through the pinch and crushed under eight cubic kilometres of sand.
He'd be singing a different tune if he'd had to deal with Leicester City Council's Revenues and Benefits service. Such a shower of monkeys I have seldom known. I can't say never as I am a BT Internet customer and as such I am in the ninth circle of customer service hell already. I also regularly use our nation's railways, famous across the world for their inability to tell their arse from a hole in the ground. But at least they haven't seen fit to send me three mutually contradictory letters in less than a week.
Now let me start by saying that I am not one of these libertarian types who thinks all tax is theft and the whole world would be one blissfully contented giant version of Switzerland if we abolished all government and let the free market sort it all out. People like that are not neccessarily known for their well-thought-out opinions and often tend to be members of organisations like News International or the Ku Klux Klan as well. This is not, I want to make clear, to imply in any way that Rupert Murdoch is in some way intolerant of difference in others or those less fortunate than he so clearly is. I do not make that claim here at all. You might want to, but remember that his lawyers are doubtless well-paid, very reliable and ever-vigilant.
In fact, to return to the very long-winded run up to my eventual point, we in Britain are happily largely free from the Pat Buchanan/ Steve Forbes types in our political discourse. Yes there is the UK Independence Party who advocate a flat tax rate of ten percent to be levelled on everyone and everything regardless of individual wealth, but they also campaign for repatriation of war refugees and leaving the European Union. Again, these are not aims which I can share, having as I do an IQ of more than fifty.
I will grant that Adam Smith, the spiritual founder of modern capitalist economics, was British but then so is Simon Cowell and I don't think he's neccessarily right about everything either. Smith's idea was that taxation was extortion, levelled on the poor to keep them nicely oppressed and supply the idle rich with all the venison and wig pomade they could eat. This may have been true at the time, but the time was the 1700s, when the idle rich were all inbred aristocrats who thought they were rich because God liked them more than their serfs and villeins. Things have moved on since then. We now have the NHS to pay for, along with schools, roads, defence, pensions and all the other stuff we need to keep us alive. Smith unaccountably failed to take account of the cost of government IT systems when he first wrote The Wealth of Nations, possibly because they didn't exist at the time. Also, he decided that if any inequalites should by chance arise, God would sort it out for us. Excellent work, there Adam. Right up there with mesmerism and Boswellox.
So in order to escape the shackles of a modern liberal democracy that Adam Smith, and later Milton "Bonkers" Friedmann and Friedrich "Hallucinations" Hayek so disapproved of (like pensions you could live on and trains that actually work) we have, over the last thirty years, voted for a series of governments that smashed up and sold off basically everything that wasn't nailed down, and much that was. All that is left now is the Royal Family, nuclear weapons and, bizarrely, the Tote. Nuclear power stations and air traffic control were the last to go, after steel, coal, electricity, water, gas, British Leyland, hospital cleaning, school dinners, ports, airports, the railways, the buses, North Sea oil, bin men, the Royal Ordonance, universities, the Post Office, care of the elderly, mental health provision, most of the NHS and Caledonian MacBrayne ferries. There may be more, but that's quite a lot as it is.
As we can see, all of these institutions in Britain are now very obviously the envy of the world and not at all a hollow bastardised shell of the dedicated public service institutions they once were. But this still leaves us with a question - why do we still moan about paying our taxes when we don't have that much left to pay for, can fairly easily see what it is we do pay for, and we don't really pay that much compared to the rest of Europe anyway?
Well. Perhaps I'm missing something. Perhaps the British are just very, very stupid. Who knows? Either way, the people of the world's fifth largest economy deem it too expensive to pay for university education, a non-commercial public service broadcaster or decent public transport. You know, all the things the rest of Europe wonder how we do without. We compare ourselves with the Americans, but I think that this is not really a valid model. For a start, whereas the US is 4000 miles away, France is twenty. Secondly, Canada. This is a cause of endless anger to me, and if I start I won't stop.
But, when it comes to the crunch, I am beginning to see their point. Not as to the need to pay for public services, as unlike some I don't believe that fires will somehow magically put themselves out, nor do I think that having a mechanism to keep me from starving to death in the streeet is somehow an unacceptable burden on the middle classes. No. But I wish that the Council could sort out their fucking letters.
Afetr I moved house, I go to the Council Tax office at the beginning of May, sort out a direct debit for the first of the month and feel happy that my bills are all taken care of, leaving me more free time to write these endless blogs and eat pizza. Then I get a threatening letter on Wednesday telling me that if I don't pay up the full 714 quid within seven days they'll break my legs and bailiffs will take my pancreas (and did you know that if bailiffs come to repossess your possessions you have to pay for their services? No, I didn't either until Wednesday). So on Thursday I go to see them with the copy of the direct debit form that they gave me telling me that they would take 90 notes on the first of June, a copy of my bank statement showing that at no point did they even try, and finally the aforesaid threatening letter with its predicitons of a court-ordered doom.
I know Council Tax well. I work for the council so in effect I am paying at least some of my own wages, but I am not too worried about that. As long as I can afford broadband and houmous I am happy. I know what else it pays for as well - social services, parks, bus stops, and all sorts of contracts from things like bin collection to things like traffic wardens. And really, it isn't too onerous. Me and Blake pay ninety pounds a month for our Band A house. The price you pay depends on where you live. Our mate Hardip pays a thousand a year but he lives in a nice new flat (it's lovely, like something from an expensive lifestyle magazine - wood floors, recessed lighting, the works) in a nice bit of town, hence he's Band B, hence he pays more. We live in a two-up two-down in what was until very recently a slum where the local pub was so rough the police closed it down. It's lovely now, and is flying the flags of all the nations so far knocked out of the World Cup. But back to my story.
Turned out they'd mixed up the last two digits of my bank account number when some clerk typed it in. Now, I am a tolerant man, and used to be a data-entry clerk myself, but I am unhappy to receive a blood-curdling official letter telling me to look forward to my new career as prison bitch to a GBH convict called Psycho because some sausage-fingered idiot can't type an eight digit number properly. And when this morning saw the delivery of yet another letter from the Revenues and Benefits Department (hereafter to be known as The Leicester City Council Gilbert and Sullivan Society, because they sure as hell can't cope with administering local taxation) dated the day before yesterday telling me that they'd made an admin error and I should ignore their previous correspondance I am even less inclined to be as forgiving as I'd like.
And they still haven't emptied my recycling bin either. Next chance I get, I'm moving to Switzerland.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Guidebook
Change is in the air. Dangerous, reckless change. Yes, the BBC is cancelling Top of the Pops. It is, apparently, out of date and not relevant to the modern young audience. Well, I beg to differ. I may not be young anymore, but I am not quite old just yet, and have these people no idea of tradition? If it wasn't for TOTP I'd have never seen and been scared by the video to Duran Duran's Wild Boys or been made to feel... funny by Louise Wener of Sleeper in 1994. Great days.
Of course, the rot set in years ago. First Going Live, then Sportsnight, then Tomorrow's World. Bastards. These were the foundations of my childhood. I watched Going Live for gunge, Sportsnight for ice skating and crown green bowls and Tomorrow's World for a glimpse of a world ruled by robots and to be made to feel... funny by Phillipa Forrester.
Nowadays it is all much different. Phillip Schofield left Going Live to be Joseph in his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, whilst Peter Simon now makes his living as a bitter shell of a man flogging diamonique jewellery and no-effort weight loss programs on Bid-Up TV. Sportsnight was never really that good anyway, and even the excellent music has been ruined by having Jonny Vaughan steal it for one of his many short-lived and hateful Letterman rip-offs - why the BBC ever though giving that man money was a good idea is beyond me. And now it actually is the 21st century Tomorrow's World has been passed by events, whilst these days Phillipa Forrester presents some God Slot programme on BBC2 on Sunday morning and can now only be described by the word "homely". Oh, the passage of time.
But anyway. Our principal subject today is the perennially thorny one of foreigners. Now I know some of you who choose to subscribe to my irregular but depressingly frequent column are, in fact, foreign yourselves, but don't worry, you can't help it and I sympathise as much as I can.
I may be joking there. But I am off to Germany on Monday with work for a week, and I have been thinking about travel generally, having bought a new Lonely Planet guide to take with me. The sight of a hundred LPs for a hundred countries in Waterstones always makes me want to head off with my backpack for as long as I can afford and work will let me get away with. I lived in Germany for the 1999/2000 academic year and reading my guidebook in Caffe Nero I found myself smiling widely and laughing at old memories. The holiday season is here. Thank God.
I am lucky in many ways. I live not too far from a couple of decent airports and Ryanair or Easyjet can generally get me to somewhere European for about thirty quid. I have taken plenty of advantage of this cheap and easy way out of the country. I find it invigorating. You meet some cool people and do things you wouldn't normally do. I tend towards the Lonely Planet and backpack method of travel, so it's always a slightly enclosed existence. Like being in a bubble. I like that a lot, it makes me feel like Bill Bryson. Perhaps that's not as cool a travel writer as I could choose, but he has a way with words I admire greatly. Plus it's my blog, so there.
There's nothing to compare with being 19 and spending a week in Rome eating nothing but pizza and trying to persuade a girl from Sweden called Christa to let you see her naked. In a more measured example, an Australian girl called Mindy and I accidentally crashed an art gallery launch party in Krakow (no blame attahces itself to us in this - we were looking for coffee, and the sign in the window said it was a cafe. The fact that it turned out to be an exhibit in said gallery, we did not know) but were allowed to stay because we spoke English and I knew who Paul Klee was. We got riotously drunk on free Bulgarian wine and ate our weights in Pringles.
You see things that you'd never see. An open-air rave on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, a street which belies its fearsome and seedy reputation as Germany's biggest sink of iniquity by having a huge furniture shop and a theatre playing Cats halfway down it. Six men with astounding moustaches on Castle Hill in Prague singing ancient and beautiful folk songs that, if you picked up the translated lyrics from their stall turned out to all (and I mean all) be about hunting down Russians and skinning them alive. Buying beer like liquid honey and foot-long cigars for the equivalent of three pounds in Lublin. Getting into an argument with an East German about architecture. Meeting six members of the USAF in two days in a hostel in Paris. Wearing a water melon on my head on a Roman beach.
In fact, Christa turned out to be nuts. She lived in Brighton, which is much less impressive than Sweden, and spent her days stealing clothes from BHS because they were a big chainstore and, in her words, no-one got hurt. I was very careful with my wallet after that. For each excellent person you meet there is always someone you never want to see again, even naked. Mindy was nice though, and taught me the most space efficient way to pack a backpack. Useful.
I'd bore you with more, but I won't. I will be off now to read in my LP about Karlsruhe, the German city work are sending me to. It's work, sure, but I can get Apfelschorle whenever I want. And perhaps that's the greatest reward of all.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Of course, the rot set in years ago. First Going Live, then Sportsnight, then Tomorrow's World. Bastards. These were the foundations of my childhood. I watched Going Live for gunge, Sportsnight for ice skating and crown green bowls and Tomorrow's World for a glimpse of a world ruled by robots and to be made to feel... funny by Phillipa Forrester.
Nowadays it is all much different. Phillip Schofield left Going Live to be Joseph in his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, whilst Peter Simon now makes his living as a bitter shell of a man flogging diamonique jewellery and no-effort weight loss programs on Bid-Up TV. Sportsnight was never really that good anyway, and even the excellent music has been ruined by having Jonny Vaughan steal it for one of his many short-lived and hateful Letterman rip-offs - why the BBC ever though giving that man money was a good idea is beyond me. And now it actually is the 21st century Tomorrow's World has been passed by events, whilst these days Phillipa Forrester presents some God Slot programme on BBC2 on Sunday morning and can now only be described by the word "homely". Oh, the passage of time.
But anyway. Our principal subject today is the perennially thorny one of foreigners. Now I know some of you who choose to subscribe to my irregular but depressingly frequent column are, in fact, foreign yourselves, but don't worry, you can't help it and I sympathise as much as I can.
I may be joking there. But I am off to Germany on Monday with work for a week, and I have been thinking about travel generally, having bought a new Lonely Planet guide to take with me. The sight of a hundred LPs for a hundred countries in Waterstones always makes me want to head off with my backpack for as long as I can afford and work will let me get away with. I lived in Germany for the 1999/2000 academic year and reading my guidebook in Caffe Nero I found myself smiling widely and laughing at old memories. The holiday season is here. Thank God.
I am lucky in many ways. I live not too far from a couple of decent airports and Ryanair or Easyjet can generally get me to somewhere European for about thirty quid. I have taken plenty of advantage of this cheap and easy way out of the country. I find it invigorating. You meet some cool people and do things you wouldn't normally do. I tend towards the Lonely Planet and backpack method of travel, so it's always a slightly enclosed existence. Like being in a bubble. I like that a lot, it makes me feel like Bill Bryson. Perhaps that's not as cool a travel writer as I could choose, but he has a way with words I admire greatly. Plus it's my blog, so there.
There's nothing to compare with being 19 and spending a week in Rome eating nothing but pizza and trying to persuade a girl from Sweden called Christa to let you see her naked. In a more measured example, an Australian girl called Mindy and I accidentally crashed an art gallery launch party in Krakow (no blame attahces itself to us in this - we were looking for coffee, and the sign in the window said it was a cafe. The fact that it turned out to be an exhibit in said gallery, we did not know) but were allowed to stay because we spoke English and I knew who Paul Klee was. We got riotously drunk on free Bulgarian wine and ate our weights in Pringles.
You see things that you'd never see. An open-air rave on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, a street which belies its fearsome and seedy reputation as Germany's biggest sink of iniquity by having a huge furniture shop and a theatre playing Cats halfway down it. Six men with astounding moustaches on Castle Hill in Prague singing ancient and beautiful folk songs that, if you picked up the translated lyrics from their stall turned out to all (and I mean all) be about hunting down Russians and skinning them alive. Buying beer like liquid honey and foot-long cigars for the equivalent of three pounds in Lublin. Getting into an argument with an East German about architecture. Meeting six members of the USAF in two days in a hostel in Paris. Wearing a water melon on my head on a Roman beach.
In fact, Christa turned out to be nuts. She lived in Brighton, which is much less impressive than Sweden, and spent her days stealing clothes from BHS because they were a big chainstore and, in her words, no-one got hurt. I was very careful with my wallet after that. For each excellent person you meet there is always someone you never want to see again, even naked. Mindy was nice though, and taught me the most space efficient way to pack a backpack. Useful.
I'd bore you with more, but I won't. I will be off now to read in my LP about Karlsruhe, the German city work are sending me to. It's work, sure, but I can get Apfelschorle whenever I want. And perhaps that's the greatest reward of all.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Beautiful
We start today with a fact; Dindos is Greek for Latin and also Latin for Greek. How's about that? I had literally no idea. I learnt that from a repeat of Yes, Minister on UK Gold. It's amazing what you pick up. I have also realised that if I write my posts out in shorthand before I begin to type they generally make more sense. Can you guess which method I used today? There will be a small* prize if you guess correctly.
So onto my main topic, which today is change. Basically, as I have said before, the British are ambivalent towards the internet. It's a bit like CB radio was in the 70's - you have to learn how it works, so it's automatically for poofs and lasses. Sad-acts who can't talk to girls and spend all their waking hours masturbating over pictures of buxom axe-carrying elves in leather combat gear and playing Warhammer 40,000 with other withdrawn losers in South Korea. Real people are too busy drinking delicious lager and fighting. The internet is for four things -
a) Tesco Direct,
b) hard core pornography,
c) child molesters, and
d) complaining about.
I may have touched on these themes before. Nowadays I am worrying less but still keeping my blog notebook well out of sight in public. Prejudices linger in all sorts of places. And I know, get to the point, Burgess, but stick with me, this does all come together eventually.
So anyway, Land of War or whatever it's called. It seems that one day in some fantasy MORPG somewhere, a person was talking to another person in battle-clad guise. The conversation, after the obligatory "I am Skra-gorn, son of Arathorn, my personality is seventy-six" stuff, they both discovered that they were British women and began to talk like normal people instead. Even in virtual space, we Brits can get very self-conscious if caught playing about with fancy dress. And so the conversation turned, as the Human League said, until the sun went down. A new friend had been made.
After a while the subject of men came up. And in her turn Warrior A said to Warrior B,
"Actually, I'm gay".
"Oh," said Warrior B and thought no more of it until about ten minutes later a message arrived from the moderator of this fantasy place saying:
"Talking about being gay is inappropriate for this game, cease and desist".
"But I am," said Warrior A.
"Nonetheless, keep it to yourself," came the reply, "we'll have none of that kind of thing here. Go back to casting spells and battling orcs."
"So I can't be gay on here?" asked A
"No," said the moderator.
A thought about this for a while, and using the magic of email organised a reply to this edict that would get her point across in a way that could not be ignored. And so, one day, from all five corners of this virtual magical kingdom came eleves, knights, warriros, trolls and warlocks to the first annual Fantasy Land Gay Pride Parade. Rainbow flags were draped on the walls of the city and thousands marched through the streets for equality and self-determination. Now there is a gay bar and several alternative bookshops, plus support groups for gay wizards and closeted necromancers.
See? Things change. World Of Goblins is now the main RPG for the world gay community. Society moves on in many ways, some subtle, some less so. I think the wholehearted acceptance by the public at large of James Blunt is a sign that we are less macho now than we once were during the Go-Go Eighties when Europe and Bon Jovi ruled the airwaves. Whereas then we would have called them a bunch of bleeding-heart nancy boys, now we take these sensitive balladeers to our hearts and nurture their bruised sensibilites with love, affection and a room full of money.
James Blunt, is of course, a trained killer. I saw him and Damien Rice fighting in the car park of Morrison's in Leicester over who was the most lovelorn and James made mincemeat of him. The last I saw as I ran away was James garotting Damien with a cello string having pulled out his eyeballs with the sharp edge of a slim volume of Keats's Odes. Nasty. He didn't stand a chance against a Sandhurst graduate, and all that was left when I came back was a scarred acoustic guitar fretboard and a human heart with a knitting needle stuck through it.
I have opinions now on all sorts of things I never used to think about at all. Traffic. The police. The need for team games to be played in school and the quality of said teaching. That last one is a big surprise. I used to fulminate endlessly about the unfairness of forcing us kids out into the cold to play rugby on Wednesday afternoons, and I still feel as sharply now what I felt about it at the time. But I also now realise, that it was in fact down to the sheer awfulness of most PE teachers, not to the activity itself. If you were to ask me now I'd say that it was vitally important that kids learn how to operate in teams and get into the habit of doing at least some exercise between bouts of Death Kille 3 on the X-Box 360. This leads me neatly (or not so neatly, don't split hairs) to last night's draw with Sweden, a team we haven't beaten since 1968, and hey, surprise surprise, that's a record that still stands today.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - we are a society of highly competitive yet deeply lazy hypocritical bastards. Perfidious Albion indeed, especially when it comes to the life or death subject of Professional Football. Therefore I don't see how our placing of our vicarious sense of keep fit and competition in the persons of the eleven men of the England football team is wise. They can only disappoint us, and yesterday they did just that.
I don't see how they can't see it. Is it just me or do Joe "Twinkle Toes" Cole's displays of his silky dribbling skills generally come when he's stood by a corner flag with four defenders surrounding him? Perhaps he could have passed the ball on when he had the opportunity earlier, although that wouldn't have been infront of a camera. But there he is, dancing expertly away where he is doing no good whatsoever except to Sweden who then take the ball away and menace the England end largely unchallenged. Here we find Rio "King of the Strollers" Ferdinand, who has been known to set up a deckchair on the 18 yard line and take a nap during matches.
This is not to criticse Joe Cole (although I will go on record as taking a pop at Rio, the stupid haired lion-faced berk). I have no skill with a football whatsoever, but looking at last night's game with a dispassionate organisational eye, it strikes me that it's all very well celebrating a goal, but when you spend so much time shouting, waving, hugging Peter Crouch and kissing the Three Lions adorning the shirt as England did last night, you are likely to be forgetting that the whole Swedish team are now running towards the England goal with the ball. Similarly, a game lasts 90 minutes and not just until England score. With that in mind, perhaps remembering to be paying attention for that whole period might be in order should we hope to see the team progress beyond the next round.
But that's an aside. Things, as the Bluetones sang back in the heady days of '95, Change. I read on the BBC website that the German police have been extremely impressed with the behaviour of England fans at the World Cup so far. The dreadful reputation of the past seems to be just that. They did, admittedly, confiscate 3000 people's passports to stop them travelling to Germany and they did send 500 uniformed bobbies to patrol the venues alongside their colleagues from the Polizei so perhaps it's more down to the huge policing operation, but still, there have been no baton charges yet, and so, for now, we can be pleased with ourselves. Nowadays we are happier for people like the Germans or Spanish to be foreign at us when we go abroad. Wait till we meet the Germans in the next round and lose, though.
Closer to home, I never used to get hayfever. I grew up on the coast where the sand meets the sea. The bracing sea breezes meant any pollen was muscularly diverted from the area and I could breathe easily throughout my childhood years, as though Tunes were no more than the fevered imaginings of a madman. Now I am a wreck, rattling with pills and my nose red from blowing. Damn immune system. But that's not all. It is a far deeper change than the acquisition of a mere immune disorder.
Nowadays I find myself saying things like "It's expensive, but it'll last longer than a cheap one" and "I'm busy in August, how about October?" and "I'd love to come out, but I've got to be in Nottingham for work by ten," and so on. I am turning into my parents, and the really scary thing is that I don't really mind. I long for domesticity. Perhaps this is because I am sick of the single batchelor life. That, by the way, is a myth. I do not have a WKD side, nor do I subscribe to the Lynx Effect. I am too busy to go out and shark about in some gloomy hangout full of people a decade younger than me. I can't go to work with a hangover, partly because I have stuff to do that needs me to be functioning properly and partly because if I do drink I am ill for the best part of a week. And if you do drink WKD and are over fifteen, you are a lost cause and I will trouble to think of you no more.
Well, maybe I have always been like this, especially the bit about drink. I make no claims of a wild youth. I was a child of the 90's and as such feel guilt for just walking past a MacDonalds. But I know one thing. James Blunt is a vicious bugger when he's cornered. Look out, kids.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
*There is no prize in fact. You may have guessed this.
So onto my main topic, which today is change. Basically, as I have said before, the British are ambivalent towards the internet. It's a bit like CB radio was in the 70's - you have to learn how it works, so it's automatically for poofs and lasses. Sad-acts who can't talk to girls and spend all their waking hours masturbating over pictures of buxom axe-carrying elves in leather combat gear and playing Warhammer 40,000 with other withdrawn losers in South Korea. Real people are too busy drinking delicious lager and fighting. The internet is for four things -
a) Tesco Direct,
b) hard core pornography,
c) child molesters, and
d) complaining about.
I may have touched on these themes before. Nowadays I am worrying less but still keeping my blog notebook well out of sight in public. Prejudices linger in all sorts of places. And I know, get to the point, Burgess, but stick with me, this does all come together eventually.
So anyway, Land of War or whatever it's called. It seems that one day in some fantasy MORPG somewhere, a person was talking to another person in battle-clad guise. The conversation, after the obligatory "I am Skra-gorn, son of Arathorn, my personality is seventy-six" stuff, they both discovered that they were British women and began to talk like normal people instead. Even in virtual space, we Brits can get very self-conscious if caught playing about with fancy dress. And so the conversation turned, as the Human League said, until the sun went down. A new friend had been made.
After a while the subject of men came up. And in her turn Warrior A said to Warrior B,
"Actually, I'm gay".
"Oh," said Warrior B and thought no more of it until about ten minutes later a message arrived from the moderator of this fantasy place saying:
"Talking about being gay is inappropriate for this game, cease and desist".
"But I am," said Warrior A.
"Nonetheless, keep it to yourself," came the reply, "we'll have none of that kind of thing here. Go back to casting spells and battling orcs."
"So I can't be gay on here?" asked A
"No," said the moderator.
A thought about this for a while, and using the magic of email organised a reply to this edict that would get her point across in a way that could not be ignored. And so, one day, from all five corners of this virtual magical kingdom came eleves, knights, warriros, trolls and warlocks to the first annual Fantasy Land Gay Pride Parade. Rainbow flags were draped on the walls of the city and thousands marched through the streets for equality and self-determination. Now there is a gay bar and several alternative bookshops, plus support groups for gay wizards and closeted necromancers.
See? Things change. World Of Goblins is now the main RPG for the world gay community. Society moves on in many ways, some subtle, some less so. I think the wholehearted acceptance by the public at large of James Blunt is a sign that we are less macho now than we once were during the Go-Go Eighties when Europe and Bon Jovi ruled the airwaves. Whereas then we would have called them a bunch of bleeding-heart nancy boys, now we take these sensitive balladeers to our hearts and nurture their bruised sensibilites with love, affection and a room full of money.
James Blunt, is of course, a trained killer. I saw him and Damien Rice fighting in the car park of Morrison's in Leicester over who was the most lovelorn and James made mincemeat of him. The last I saw as I ran away was James garotting Damien with a cello string having pulled out his eyeballs with the sharp edge of a slim volume of Keats's Odes. Nasty. He didn't stand a chance against a Sandhurst graduate, and all that was left when I came back was a scarred acoustic guitar fretboard and a human heart with a knitting needle stuck through it.
I have opinions now on all sorts of things I never used to think about at all. Traffic. The police. The need for team games to be played in school and the quality of said teaching. That last one is a big surprise. I used to fulminate endlessly about the unfairness of forcing us kids out into the cold to play rugby on Wednesday afternoons, and I still feel as sharply now what I felt about it at the time. But I also now realise, that it was in fact down to the sheer awfulness of most PE teachers, not to the activity itself. If you were to ask me now I'd say that it was vitally important that kids learn how to operate in teams and get into the habit of doing at least some exercise between bouts of Death Kille 3 on the X-Box 360. This leads me neatly (or not so neatly, don't split hairs) to last night's draw with Sweden, a team we haven't beaten since 1968, and hey, surprise surprise, that's a record that still stands today.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - we are a society of highly competitive yet deeply lazy hypocritical bastards. Perfidious Albion indeed, especially when it comes to the life or death subject of Professional Football. Therefore I don't see how our placing of our vicarious sense of keep fit and competition in the persons of the eleven men of the England football team is wise. They can only disappoint us, and yesterday they did just that.
I don't see how they can't see it. Is it just me or do Joe "Twinkle Toes" Cole's displays of his silky dribbling skills generally come when he's stood by a corner flag with four defenders surrounding him? Perhaps he could have passed the ball on when he had the opportunity earlier, although that wouldn't have been infront of a camera. But there he is, dancing expertly away where he is doing no good whatsoever except to Sweden who then take the ball away and menace the England end largely unchallenged. Here we find Rio "King of the Strollers" Ferdinand, who has been known to set up a deckchair on the 18 yard line and take a nap during matches.
This is not to criticse Joe Cole (although I will go on record as taking a pop at Rio, the stupid haired lion-faced berk). I have no skill with a football whatsoever, but looking at last night's game with a dispassionate organisational eye, it strikes me that it's all very well celebrating a goal, but when you spend so much time shouting, waving, hugging Peter Crouch and kissing the Three Lions adorning the shirt as England did last night, you are likely to be forgetting that the whole Swedish team are now running towards the England goal with the ball. Similarly, a game lasts 90 minutes and not just until England score. With that in mind, perhaps remembering to be paying attention for that whole period might be in order should we hope to see the team progress beyond the next round.
But that's an aside. Things, as the Bluetones sang back in the heady days of '95, Change. I read on the BBC website that the German police have been extremely impressed with the behaviour of England fans at the World Cup so far. The dreadful reputation of the past seems to be just that. They did, admittedly, confiscate 3000 people's passports to stop them travelling to Germany and they did send 500 uniformed bobbies to patrol the venues alongside their colleagues from the Polizei so perhaps it's more down to the huge policing operation, but still, there have been no baton charges yet, and so, for now, we can be pleased with ourselves. Nowadays we are happier for people like the Germans or Spanish to be foreign at us when we go abroad. Wait till we meet the Germans in the next round and lose, though.
Closer to home, I never used to get hayfever. I grew up on the coast where the sand meets the sea. The bracing sea breezes meant any pollen was muscularly diverted from the area and I could breathe easily throughout my childhood years, as though Tunes were no more than the fevered imaginings of a madman. Now I am a wreck, rattling with pills and my nose red from blowing. Damn immune system. But that's not all. It is a far deeper change than the acquisition of a mere immune disorder.
Nowadays I find myself saying things like "It's expensive, but it'll last longer than a cheap one" and "I'm busy in August, how about October?" and "I'd love to come out, but I've got to be in Nottingham for work by ten," and so on. I am turning into my parents, and the really scary thing is that I don't really mind. I long for domesticity. Perhaps this is because I am sick of the single batchelor life. That, by the way, is a myth. I do not have a WKD side, nor do I subscribe to the Lynx Effect. I am too busy to go out and shark about in some gloomy hangout full of people a decade younger than me. I can't go to work with a hangover, partly because I have stuff to do that needs me to be functioning properly and partly because if I do drink I am ill for the best part of a week. And if you do drink WKD and are over fifteen, you are a lost cause and I will trouble to think of you no more.
Well, maybe I have always been like this, especially the bit about drink. I make no claims of a wild youth. I was a child of the 90's and as such feel guilt for just walking past a MacDonalds. But I know one thing. James Blunt is a vicious bugger when he's cornered. Look out, kids.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
*There is no prize in fact. You may have guessed this.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
L'avis (With apologies to Arthur Abromov)
All
Welcome to my latest experiment. You may have read in my latest post (if you got that far) about my trip to the National Theatre to see Peter Shaffer's Royal Hunt Of The Sun. Inspired, I dug out all of my drama texts from university, hit Amazon for more, and started to read. So far I have gone through Edward Bond (epic-scale settings, extreme violence and an on-stage autopsy), David Mamet (the decay of the American Dream, lots of swearing and an on-stage autopsy) and Samuel Beckett (bleak abstractness, gallows humour and an on-stage autopsy).
Not all of those descriptions may be truly accurate. But my renewed interest in theatre has bought me back to reading the Theatre of the Absurd. This was a school of drama, mostly French, that started as a reaction to the Victorian school of the "well-made" play and its hectoring insistence on a beginning, middle and end, plus moral. Ibsen's The Pillars of Society is a good example. The absurdists decided that instead a play should instead be as far from a didactic text as possible, and also, for preference, very difficult to stage. Ionesco's Chairs, for example, demands the stage be filled with about a hundred chairs and two actors talking to the invisible occupants of those chairs. Beckett put people in big jars and dustbins and Brecht didn't use scenery at all. This is just being awkward in my opinion, but it would save on nails and plywood at a time of post WWII austerity. Theatrical props were also in short supply, having all been melted down to build Lancaster Bombers.
How does this relate to me? Well, I have run out of ideas. I am serious when I say I have no opinions left. I doubt if anyone is interested in a recapitulation of my feelings towards Coca-Cola's World Cup marketing campaign, although just typing those words has made me grind another layer of enamel off my teeth in rage. Similarly, yes I had a nice weekend, but then so did a billion other people but only a small number decided to write it up in longhand, decorate it with pictures and then show it to people. Holiday snaps are inherently boring, and mine had a commentary. Two for the price of one, and I didn't even wait to be asked.
So I'm struggling. I need an angle to keep up the momentum to towards the day when I displace the gorgeous, pouting and unutterably inane Tila Tequila from the top of the MS blog rankings, and lacking as I do fantastic buns, I must do it with words alone. I am driven, ambitious and also, doomed.
For I was born middle aged, like Trevor Howard or Jeffrey Barnard. All I do is complain. I'd go on Grumpy Old Men, but Rick Wakeman is so much more photogenic. And anyway, one of the cheif gripes of the guests on that august show is the internet and their bewilderment at what it does, who uses it and why they can't do it. I am quite adept at this internet lark, am discerning enough to use Firefox instead of Explorer, can do some light HTML when required and so would be exiled from the curmudgeonly set as some kind of fifth columnist.
So not only must I do this with just words, I must do it alone. Perhaps I could do what those Hammer chaps are doing, and be fiercly critical of other people's blogs until I get a publishing deal with Random House (thus keeping it all within the Rupertocracy and only having to pay one set of solicitors fees). I dare say I can slag off some of MS's more modelly members because what are the chances of them
a) ever getting to my poison pen portraits through the millions of emailed photos of fraternity brother's penises and the unsolicited lurid sexual fantasies from wierdos that all women on MS get, and
b) understanding them.
Well, perhaps that's cruel. I have worked out however, that it is perfectly acceptable to call dessert90210 a pointless, air-headed cipher of a Pamela Anderson wannabe who'd be out of her intellectual depth in a puddle, if I make it clear that it's just conjectural and not an actual opinion. Which it was. No misunderstandings there, I hope. I bet she's lovely. Hello there!
In keeping with this, I could become bitter and twisted and berate society for its iniquities, God for allowing pain and suffering and girls for not wanting to go out with me. I could tear myself to pieces in a full-on Freudian deconstruction, but I've done that already and although everyone who replied was very nice, I doubt if they'd want to hear it all again. I could become reactionary and talk about nothing but the Queen and how much we all love her in the Commonwealth, but that'd be boring, pointless and also a lie. Or I could just descend into self parody and ramble endlessly about badminton, cooking and parking a car in Leicester. Choices, choices.
All this brings us back to the Theatre of the Absurd. Well, actually it doesn't, but I want to get lunch before three and so have to stop somewhere. It is my aim, then, in tribute to these brave, revolutionary and deeply pretentious playwrights of the 1920's to string together something like a thousand words and say nothing. A blog void of all content and empty of all meaning. What do we think? Perhaps this was a success, perhaps not. Perhaps that's the point, intellecutally speaking.
Mind you, it's all for naught anyway, as I heard on the radio this morning that half of all Europe's eggs are currently infected with salmonella and gastric death is mere hours away, except for vegans who are doubtless relishing the chance to be twice as smug as usual whilst the rest of us less awkward people fall dead in the streets from egg ague. I'll look out for it; until then I will be outside eating chocolate cake and smoking high tar cigarettes. That way I get to live forever.
Good Night, And Good Luck
Dougal
Welcome to my latest experiment. You may have read in my latest post (if you got that far) about my trip to the National Theatre to see Peter Shaffer's Royal Hunt Of The Sun. Inspired, I dug out all of my drama texts from university, hit Amazon for more, and started to read. So far I have gone through Edward Bond (epic-scale settings, extreme violence and an on-stage autopsy), David Mamet (the decay of the American Dream, lots of swearing and an on-stage autopsy) and Samuel Beckett (bleak abstractness, gallows humour and an on-stage autopsy).
Not all of those descriptions may be truly accurate. But my renewed interest in theatre has bought me back to reading the Theatre of the Absurd. This was a school of drama, mostly French, that started as a reaction to the Victorian school of the "well-made" play and its hectoring insistence on a beginning, middle and end, plus moral. Ibsen's The Pillars of Society is a good example. The absurdists decided that instead a play should instead be as far from a didactic text as possible, and also, for preference, very difficult to stage. Ionesco's Chairs, for example, demands the stage be filled with about a hundred chairs and two actors talking to the invisible occupants of those chairs. Beckett put people in big jars and dustbins and Brecht didn't use scenery at all. This is just being awkward in my opinion, but it would save on nails and plywood at a time of post WWII austerity. Theatrical props were also in short supply, having all been melted down to build Lancaster Bombers.
How does this relate to me? Well, I have run out of ideas. I am serious when I say I have no opinions left. I doubt if anyone is interested in a recapitulation of my feelings towards Coca-Cola's World Cup marketing campaign, although just typing those words has made me grind another layer of enamel off my teeth in rage. Similarly, yes I had a nice weekend, but then so did a billion other people but only a small number decided to write it up in longhand, decorate it with pictures and then show it to people. Holiday snaps are inherently boring, and mine had a commentary. Two for the price of one, and I didn't even wait to be asked.
So I'm struggling. I need an angle to keep up the momentum to towards the day when I displace the gorgeous, pouting and unutterably inane Tila Tequila from the top of the MS blog rankings, and lacking as I do fantastic buns, I must do it with words alone. I am driven, ambitious and also, doomed.
For I was born middle aged, like Trevor Howard or Jeffrey Barnard. All I do is complain. I'd go on Grumpy Old Men, but Rick Wakeman is so much more photogenic. And anyway, one of the cheif gripes of the guests on that august show is the internet and their bewilderment at what it does, who uses it and why they can't do it. I am quite adept at this internet lark, am discerning enough to use Firefox instead of Explorer, can do some light HTML when required and so would be exiled from the curmudgeonly set as some kind of fifth columnist.
So not only must I do this with just words, I must do it alone. Perhaps I could do what those Hammer chaps are doing, and be fiercly critical of other people's blogs until I get a publishing deal with Random House (thus keeping it all within the Rupertocracy and only having to pay one set of solicitors fees). I dare say I can slag off some of MS's more modelly members because what are the chances of them
a) ever getting to my poison pen portraits through the millions of emailed photos of fraternity brother's penises and the unsolicited lurid sexual fantasies from wierdos that all women on MS get, and
b) understanding them.
Well, perhaps that's cruel. I have worked out however, that it is perfectly acceptable to call dessert90210 a pointless, air-headed cipher of a Pamela Anderson wannabe who'd be out of her intellectual depth in a puddle, if I make it clear that it's just conjectural and not an actual opinion. Which it was. No misunderstandings there, I hope. I bet she's lovely. Hello there!
In keeping with this, I could become bitter and twisted and berate society for its iniquities, God for allowing pain and suffering and girls for not wanting to go out with me. I could tear myself to pieces in a full-on Freudian deconstruction, but I've done that already and although everyone who replied was very nice, I doubt if they'd want to hear it all again. I could become reactionary and talk about nothing but the Queen and how much we all love her in the Commonwealth, but that'd be boring, pointless and also a lie. Or I could just descend into self parody and ramble endlessly about badminton, cooking and parking a car in Leicester. Choices, choices.
All this brings us back to the Theatre of the Absurd. Well, actually it doesn't, but I want to get lunch before three and so have to stop somewhere. It is my aim, then, in tribute to these brave, revolutionary and deeply pretentious playwrights of the 1920's to string together something like a thousand words and say nothing. A blog void of all content and empty of all meaning. What do we think? Perhaps this was a success, perhaps not. Perhaps that's the point, intellecutally speaking.
Mind you, it's all for naught anyway, as I heard on the radio this morning that half of all Europe's eggs are currently infected with salmonella and gastric death is mere hours away, except for vegans who are doubtless relishing the chance to be twice as smug as usual whilst the rest of us less awkward people fall dead in the streets from egg ague. I'll look out for it; until then I will be outside eating chocolate cake and smoking high tar cigarettes. That way I get to live forever.
Good Night, And Good Luck
Dougal
Monday, June 12, 2006
Saturday
Hello again.
A couple of things - this will cover Saturday and Sunday, but if anyone really wants to spread the process of reading about my weekend away then I will tell you when to look away and you can pick it up again there tomorrow. It's a bit like having to avoid football scores on the news and Huw Edwards says "If you don't want to know the score, then look away now". If I was Huw Edwards, though, I'd wait just a couple of seconds, for the nation to turn away from the screen, and then shout out the score as loud as I could. Perhaps on my last day.
So yes, Saturday. Really, after the dizzying highs of Friday night the rest of the weekend was bound to be conducted at a lower pace. Accordingly we bummed around the flat until about eleven and then leapt on the train to Borough Market for lunch.
The Duke of Edinburgh gives his daily blessing to the nation on all channels and in all major public places.
Borough Market is the single most middle class place in the world, and by that I mean the posh end of middle class. The kind of Dads who carry their babies in titanium framed papooses whilst Mum looks at the organic cold-pressed extra virgin olive oils and gluten free hand-baked Polish breads. Companies that sell four hundred different types of coffee bean. Prominent use of the word "Welsh", for I know not what reason. Stalls exist which sell nothing but one type of cheese. Very nice cheese, but if the bottom falls out of the Caerphilly market, Euros Morgan of Borough Market will suffer badly, and at twenty-three quid a kilo that's avery selective market to begin with. It is a different world. It is also where my friend Dave had had three mobile phones stolen in two years and someone gets their pockets picked ten times a day.
I had a lovely organic lamb kebab with home-made garlic Tzatziki on an authentic Minoan flatbread (I will stop, this is starting to sound like an M&S Food commercial), but at four pounds fifty it couldn't have not been delicious or blood would have been spilled. I also bought a chocolate brownie so chocolately I went blind. Flour came second on the ingredients list after chocolate. Felt sick and dirty, more dead than alive.
Then to the South Bank.
Home of Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall but most importantly, South London's biggest smack shooting gallery. You don't get this kind of information in a Let's Go guide, do you?
We walked, bought expensive ice lollies (cherry brandy and cider lollies - childhood nirvana, but I don't remember them being one fifty each) and then hit a huge crowd at the Festival Hall, there for the Festival de Cuba. We didn't linger as the crowd was one of those that would set off claustrophobic episodes in people who live in a wardrobe. The sheer density of morons was challenging as well. I heard an Australian woman saying very loudly that she was sure churros had meat in them, despite being stood under a sign that said "Vegan Friendly" in big yellow letters. I don't know, perhaps she thought it meant that they were merely well disposed to vegans, as opposed to selling things they could eat. Add the people who don't know how to walk in a crowd without fucking everyone else off despite millions of years of evolution as social animals (the stall selling Mexican wrestling masks will still be there in half an hour; keep walking or else three hundred people will tear you to bits and throuw the pieces in the Thames) we decided not to linger. It was unpleasant, and thirty five degrees. We retired to Streatham Hill for the rest of the day.
We in fact came back a couple of hours later to watch the National Theatre's excellent production of Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt Of The Sun. All about Aztecs, conquistadors and tragedy. Very, very good. It was a big slice of old-fashioned Brechtian design with peerless performances from Alun Armstrong and Paterson Joseph (you now, him out of Hustle). I was inspired enough to hit Amazon's zShops and buy a load of second-hand Edward Bond and Peter Shaffer plays - I used to read that kind of thing for pleasure but haven't in ages. Time to start again. Anyway, during the interval we stood on the high balcony of the NT and breathed deeply of the miasma that London makes in the Summer - pollen, pollution and eight million people's used air. I was very happy.
Sunday was another boiling day. We ate breakfast and then hit Tooting Bec Common. We took water, sun lotion, straw mats, guitars and an aerosol of some disgusting stuff that Louise bought called Magicool. It, apparently, cools you down in the heat. I just though it smelled of chemicals and not good huffable ones, at that. If you say the name fast enough, is sounds like "magical", but that's not a good enough justification for such a crap product. If you're hot, either stand under a tree or move to Iceland. Simple. You can buy cans of scented oxygen as well these days. Christ on a bike.
This is James, by the way.
And this is Louise.
Look, she's shy.
Really the weather was a bit too hot. The British go mad at the first sign of a sunbeam. Barbecues are lit all along the nation and 40 million cans of Carling are drunk every hour. The redtop tabloids head to Bournemouth to photograph comely 19 year old women in bikinis as soon as the thermometer hits 20. We take off our shirts and head for the park, garden or beach, turn red and then complain of having sunburn. The Australians, a society famous for spending 250 out of 365 days a year without going indoors at all, know how to do it right. Slip, slap, slop. They also have the bulk of the hole in the ozone layer, so you can say they have more incentive. That's as maybe. We are just stupid. So we sat under a nice big tree full of Britain's only wild parakeets playing summery tunes to the uninterested but mercifully tolerant people of Streatham and felt very happy with the world. Then it was time to go home.
I headed back to St Pancras on the 59 Death Run, driven by a bug-eyed driver who missed most of the stops, jumped red lights and tested the roadholding ability of a double-decker bus to its limits. This happens occasionally. London bus drivers are a strange breed. Argue with them and they will destroy you. I once saw one on a 91 at Aldwych shout at a mouthy woman (who was, by the way, entirely wrong) so loudly that he left a haze of spit on the inside of his violence-proof screen. Those things work both ways. Perhaps they are driven mad by the screens that are appearing on buses now that show a constantly-repeating four-minute loop of E! News reports about Ashlee Simpson and the cast of Desperate Housewives. It was quite harrowing, all told.
Good Night, And Good Luck
Dougal
A couple of things - this will cover Saturday and Sunday, but if anyone really wants to spread the process of reading about my weekend away then I will tell you when to look away and you can pick it up again there tomorrow. It's a bit like having to avoid football scores on the news and Huw Edwards says "If you don't want to know the score, then look away now". If I was Huw Edwards, though, I'd wait just a couple of seconds, for the nation to turn away from the screen, and then shout out the score as loud as I could. Perhaps on my last day.
So yes, Saturday. Really, after the dizzying highs of Friday night the rest of the weekend was bound to be conducted at a lower pace. Accordingly we bummed around the flat until about eleven and then leapt on the train to Borough Market for lunch.
The Duke of Edinburgh gives his daily blessing to the nation on all channels and in all major public places.
Borough Market is the single most middle class place in the world, and by that I mean the posh end of middle class. The kind of Dads who carry their babies in titanium framed papooses whilst Mum looks at the organic cold-pressed extra virgin olive oils and gluten free hand-baked Polish breads. Companies that sell four hundred different types of coffee bean. Prominent use of the word "Welsh", for I know not what reason. Stalls exist which sell nothing but one type of cheese. Very nice cheese, but if the bottom falls out of the Caerphilly market, Euros Morgan of Borough Market will suffer badly, and at twenty-three quid a kilo that's avery selective market to begin with. It is a different world. It is also where my friend Dave had had three mobile phones stolen in two years and someone gets their pockets picked ten times a day.
I had a lovely organic lamb kebab with home-made garlic Tzatziki on an authentic Minoan flatbread (I will stop, this is starting to sound like an M&S Food commercial), but at four pounds fifty it couldn't have not been delicious or blood would have been spilled. I also bought a chocolate brownie so chocolately I went blind. Flour came second on the ingredients list after chocolate. Felt sick and dirty, more dead than alive.
Then to the South Bank.
Home of Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall but most importantly, South London's biggest smack shooting gallery. You don't get this kind of information in a Let's Go guide, do you?
We walked, bought expensive ice lollies (cherry brandy and cider lollies - childhood nirvana, but I don't remember them being one fifty each) and then hit a huge crowd at the Festival Hall, there for the Festival de Cuba. We didn't linger as the crowd was one of those that would set off claustrophobic episodes in people who live in a wardrobe. The sheer density of morons was challenging as well. I heard an Australian woman saying very loudly that she was sure churros had meat in them, despite being stood under a sign that said "Vegan Friendly" in big yellow letters. I don't know, perhaps she thought it meant that they were merely well disposed to vegans, as opposed to selling things they could eat. Add the people who don't know how to walk in a crowd without fucking everyone else off despite millions of years of evolution as social animals (the stall selling Mexican wrestling masks will still be there in half an hour; keep walking or else three hundred people will tear you to bits and throuw the pieces in the Thames) we decided not to linger. It was unpleasant, and thirty five degrees. We retired to Streatham Hill for the rest of the day.
We in fact came back a couple of hours later to watch the National Theatre's excellent production of Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt Of The Sun. All about Aztecs, conquistadors and tragedy. Very, very good. It was a big slice of old-fashioned Brechtian design with peerless performances from Alun Armstrong and Paterson Joseph (you now, him out of Hustle). I was inspired enough to hit Amazon's zShops and buy a load of second-hand Edward Bond and Peter Shaffer plays - I used to read that kind of thing for pleasure but haven't in ages. Time to start again. Anyway, during the interval we stood on the high balcony of the NT and breathed deeply of the miasma that London makes in the Summer - pollen, pollution and eight million people's used air. I was very happy.
Sunday was another boiling day. We ate breakfast and then hit Tooting Bec Common. We took water, sun lotion, straw mats, guitars and an aerosol of some disgusting stuff that Louise bought called Magicool. It, apparently, cools you down in the heat. I just though it smelled of chemicals and not good huffable ones, at that. If you say the name fast enough, is sounds like "magical", but that's not a good enough justification for such a crap product. If you're hot, either stand under a tree or move to Iceland. Simple. You can buy cans of scented oxygen as well these days. Christ on a bike.
This is James, by the way.
And this is Louise.
Look, she's shy.
Really the weather was a bit too hot. The British go mad at the first sign of a sunbeam. Barbecues are lit all along the nation and 40 million cans of Carling are drunk every hour. The redtop tabloids head to Bournemouth to photograph comely 19 year old women in bikinis as soon as the thermometer hits 20. We take off our shirts and head for the park, garden or beach, turn red and then complain of having sunburn. The Australians, a society famous for spending 250 out of 365 days a year without going indoors at all, know how to do it right. Slip, slap, slop. They also have the bulk of the hole in the ozone layer, so you can say they have more incentive. That's as maybe. We are just stupid. So we sat under a nice big tree full of Britain's only wild parakeets playing summery tunes to the uninterested but mercifully tolerant people of Streatham and felt very happy with the world. Then it was time to go home.
I headed back to St Pancras on the 59 Death Run, driven by a bug-eyed driver who missed most of the stops, jumped red lights and tested the roadholding ability of a double-decker bus to its limits. This happens occasionally. London bus drivers are a strange breed. Argue with them and they will destroy you. I once saw one on a 91 at Aldwych shout at a mouthy woman (who was, by the way, entirely wrong) so loudly that he left a haze of spit on the inside of his violence-proof screen. Those things work both ways. Perhaps they are driven mad by the screens that are appearing on buses now that show a constantly-repeating four-minute loop of E! News reports about Ashlee Simpson and the cast of Desperate Housewives. It was quite harrowing, all told.
Good Night, And Good Luck
Dougal
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