I don't know much. But I know one thing. It's a long and involved route to Reading. I know this becasue I went there on Saturday to attend the chirstenings of my little cousins Christopher and Gabriella. To do this involved me taking a series of decisions that lead to me being sat here, writing this blog, and not at the cinema at Meridian watching Superman Returns, even after Blake bought me a ticket and let me beat him at badminton. I will also try and get Welsh language television, Honda adverts and black-and-white cookies in, just to add interest.
The first decision was not mine. It was forced upon me by my Mum. My parents are remarkably cool people. I mentioned in a blog a while back that they had taken in their hugely depressed and homeless-through-his-own-inertia twenty-six-year-old son without a word, fed him for six months and then hired him a van and helped him move house. That man was me, and I am eternally greatful to them for it. Blood is supposed to be thicker than water, but I have the best blood anyone could ask for. However, my Mum still has a couple of blind spots - a maternal tendency to think the worst about what might happen to my sister and I and then prepare for it long before it doesn't happen, and my hair.
The first is easily dealt with - book ahead, ring home when you arrive and always bring back a fridge magnet. The second is an intractable mountain that faith simply cannot move, and she's a big girl. Mum has never been able to get round my belief that, as it is my hair, I should be the judge of when it needs to be cut. She thinks I look good with nice, short gelled hair and that when the ringlets in my hair start to appear it is time for a trip to the barber's. I think it makes my head look like a balloon, and that when the ringlets appear it is time to start looking in the mirror again. We will never, ever agree on this.
In fact, that which grows out of my body is apparently fair game to my family, like someone else's chips in a restaurant. My cousin Blue (who I could annoy immensely by calling her Lynda, which is actually her name, but I won't because otherwise she's very cool) will, whenever we meet, grab my ears and start making plans to wax my eyebrows. "You'd look hot, babes" she says. I respond, I think, with impeccable logic, "Wouldn't it hurt like nothing else?". She says "No pain, no gain, cuz" and I then ask her to let go of my ears. Every single time I see her. My sister is the same, but she tempers it because as my sister, I can hit her. My Dad tells me to stop biting my fingernails most days and even though I stopped doping it when I was about seven, any motion to touch my face in any way at all is met with a chorus of "Don't pick your nose!". This is especially trying during hayfever season.
However, it was a family do, and a three line whip had been given. Cut your hair and wear a suit, and don't even think about being late. So a trip to the barber's later, I laid out my clothes for the morning and went to bed very, very early. I was up at six-thirty am and out by seven fifteen. I drove to Stoughton, we all piled into Suzy's car and were off by eight, full of criossants and chocolate milk. Ha. Dad led the small convoy and as is traditional, we lost him within about ten minutes when he forgot we were follwing and was gone.
For Dad the open road is like the current Honda ad, where the man in a caravan travels across the world in a series of Hondas, from a tiny motorbike to a Formula 1 racing car to a huge speedboat which he drives (sails? pilots? I don't know) over a waterfall whilst singing "To Dream The Impossible Dream". I like this advert very much, despite my usual and well known feelings about all television advertising. I also like the one with the stamping choir doing an impression of a Honda Civic. But anyway. Whereas Dad likes nothing more than to speed along life's open highway, I go by my own experience of piloting a Renault 5 through Leicester's semi-permanent traffic jams and coping with traffic levels ten times what they were in the late sixties when Dad passed his test. Ours are not the same outlooks.
The practical upshot of all this is that we navigated ourselves to Cheivley services on the M4 where we then shouted at Dad for speeding off and I paid fifteen quid for five cups of coffee. Then to Arborfield Garrison and the do. My cousin James is an ASM in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and so the ceremony was done by the regimental padre in the garrison church. There is something, I think, especially English about all this, a small church on a big base, where the walls are lined with plaques to the dead of many, many wars and a congregation of thirty sang "I Vow To The My Country". C of E is in many ways a very non-religious religion, being more about the Royal Family and lemon curd than anything else. The idea of a C of E zealot is a very unlikely one.
We hit the house for some post-church refreshments and I was forced to play the guitar for Gabs, who is ten and so full of energy. Christopher is fourteen and so is quite adept at hiding, even on his own Christening. We watched Gabs bounce on the trampoline, fling a frisbee about and do many cartwheels. I remember being that young and having, well, not that much energy, but certainly more than I have now. The other thing little cousins make you do is feel old. Christopher (who I can only really picture as a baby) is now as tall as me and has stubble. Christ. Was I really born in the seventies? Me, Suzy and Lynda sat on the swinging chair under the tree and took the piss out of eachother. Shadrach, Mishach and Abendigo.
It was very hot and blindingly sunny. I ate canapes until I felt ill, and then just as everyone was getting really drowsy from the warmth and the barbecued food, it was time to drive home. I got lost in Wokingham and again in Northampton. But by the time I reached Stoughton I was beyond tired. Suzy made some nachos and we watched TV, but my mind was elsewhere. Don't ask me where, though, as I was too tired to pay attention. I even watched ten minutes of the mutants on Big Brother, simply becasue I didn't have the energy to complain. I drove home and slept for twelve hours, giving quiet thanks to the C of E God (he's a low-key fellow, as I said before, and prefers not to have anyone make a fuss) that I had Sunday to recover.
This morning I played badminton, hurt my neck and here I am. I must admit to being on form for me, only losing four out of six sets of doubles, but then being hollowed out and filled with bees by James, who beat me 15-1 and then 15-0. But I enjoyed it, even if I have spent the rest of the day unable to turn my head by more than five degrees. I had to move the chair so I could watch the cricket without pain. And as for going to the cinema, well, I reckon that would have killed me. Craning at special-effect laden mayhem was not what I wanted to do. I want to see The Notorious Bettie Page instead. There is a picture of Gretchen Moll, who plays the eponymous nude heroine, covered in balloons in Total Film. I will not elucidate further.
I am not sure how I meant to work Welsh TV and fashionable confection into this, but for what it's worth, S4C is strange to watch at first, what with Wales looking almost exactly like England but having a population that speak Martian, but oddly addictive after a while. Today I saw a documentary about what I assume were non-conformist choirs in the Rhondda, and it was wonderful. And as for black-and-white cookies, all I can say is that the Americans must be easily impressed. Two flavours of icing? Stop the presses. Perhaps when I eat one I may be converted forever, but for now they just look like biscuits to me.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Heat
I am hot. And not just in the Diet Coke sense, ladies, oh yes. It has been, apparently, the hottest day of the year so far. In fact, the Met Office will go further, it has been the hottest day in Britain ever. A whole 39C. That's a lot of centigrade for us, but perhaps we need some perspective on this. What is the effect of this unprecedented heat wave? How are we dealing with it? And most importantly, why is it so bastard hot in the first place?
One if the immediate effects is the annual appearence of the Bikini Three. Every time the sun comes out, the Sun sends photographers to Brighton and Bournemouth to find some girls in skimpy swimwear. We are then treated to a picture of them stood arms loosely around eachother's waists, their left hips relaxed into a luxurious and unselfconsciously seductive pose. Perhaps later they will run lotion into each other's glowing bodies, feeling the liberating effects of the heat as they loosen their bikini straps and their inhibitions with them.
I am sorry to bring ersatz fantasy lesbianism into the mix so early, but it really is a regular thing. There is, on the BBC News website, a picture of three bikini'd lovelies cooling their tootsies in the Diana Fountain in Hyde Park. Why this is neccessary to illustrate an article that is stating the extremely obvious - it is hot and people are going to the seaside - I don't know. I grew up by the sea. 99 percent of Britain's beaches are either flint, stone or shingle. A bikini is not idea clotihng for this, as some of the briefer examples as worn by the Bikini Three can lead to sand entering places you don't want sand to be. Most people at the beach wear sturdy swimsuits. Also, most people don't look like models shipped in especially to pose on Brighton Beach.
The other tale regularly told is that of Commuter Chaos. Commuting is uncomfortable at the best of times, and in the UK years and years of cheapskatery regarding trasnportation is now firmly home to roost. The trains, crap to begin with, are now being cancelled nationwide because it is too hot. The rails are buckling in the sun. Given that it the rails regularly become brittle in the cold we are now left wondering if there is any weather where the trains will run at all. And that's just the rails. If you have the good fortune to find a train that is working, it is a fair bet that the air conditioning will not be, if there is aircon at all. The London Underground is having to provide free cool drinks to stop people fainting on the platforms.
Given all this, perhaps we might decide to drive, but no, the roads are melting as well. Bits of the M25 and M1 have been shut because the surface has been sticking to lorry tyres and leaving holes. And we won't get far anyway because the queues to the beach are a thousand cars long, all keen to get a glimpse of the bikini clad lovelies the papers reliably tell us are there.
And this is only Wednesday. I will admit, the pictures of the office workers dancing in the fountains in Trafalgar Square do look fun - I did it once a couple of years back, and it was great. But really all it does is encourage fat men to take off their shirts. I haven't been outside without a shirt on since I was about eight years old. And we will get the ever cheery weatherman telling us that this "glorious" weather will continue for the next week when we will "sadly" see some showers.
By the weekend, of course, the guilt will have settled in. We will see anguished debates on Newsnight and in the Independent about how this freak heat, which has happened every summer as far back as I can remember, is due to global warming and should we consider nuclear power, lacking as it does the nasty carbon dioxide that will kill us all? There will be tales of how people are dying in their homes from exhaustion and sunstroke, and dire warnings of skin cancer if you step outside for more than a few seconds.
Bear in mind that I am anti-nuclear, well aware of the problems of climate change and depleted ozone. But it is the same every year - it gets hot in the summer and we are surprised. It's like snow - it snows in the winter and we are surprised. Every summer is the hottest on record now, every winter the coldest, and despite the experience of having last year's doom-laden warnings utterly fail to come about, we still seem to think that the world is about to end if it stays above 20C for three days in the week.
I think we just like to complain. It was 50C in Kuwait City today, and 40C in Denver. That's hot. That's surprisingly hot. And for a nation with so much weather, we seem utterly unable to cope with it. It can rain, shine, hail and fog here in the space of an hour. We are used to that. And of course, there was a time when temperatures of 20C would make the news. Bill Bryson once quoted a newspaper from 1977 which carried the headine "BRITAIN SIZZLES IN THE SEVENTIES" That's about 19 centigrade.
Well. Yest again in the course of my attempt at a dialectic on the weather and what it may say about British culture, I have managed to contradict myself just before the end. The inane spiel of the weatherman makes me think that the reason we are so affected by the heat is that we are constantly expecting it to end, whereas the Spanish, whose weather is less exciting in that it is generally hotter and drier, expect only to be hot between May and September. Besides, they are too busy dealing with the regular fires that burn down most of Europe's trees every August. And they have bikinis on the news, man. That's living.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
One if the immediate effects is the annual appearence of the Bikini Three. Every time the sun comes out, the Sun sends photographers to Brighton and Bournemouth to find some girls in skimpy swimwear. We are then treated to a picture of them stood arms loosely around eachother's waists, their left hips relaxed into a luxurious and unselfconsciously seductive pose. Perhaps later they will run lotion into each other's glowing bodies, feeling the liberating effects of the heat as they loosen their bikini straps and their inhibitions with them.
I am sorry to bring ersatz fantasy lesbianism into the mix so early, but it really is a regular thing. There is, on the BBC News website, a picture of three bikini'd lovelies cooling their tootsies in the Diana Fountain in Hyde Park. Why this is neccessary to illustrate an article that is stating the extremely obvious - it is hot and people are going to the seaside - I don't know. I grew up by the sea. 99 percent of Britain's beaches are either flint, stone or shingle. A bikini is not idea clotihng for this, as some of the briefer examples as worn by the Bikini Three can lead to sand entering places you don't want sand to be. Most people at the beach wear sturdy swimsuits. Also, most people don't look like models shipped in especially to pose on Brighton Beach.
The other tale regularly told is that of Commuter Chaos. Commuting is uncomfortable at the best of times, and in the UK years and years of cheapskatery regarding trasnportation is now firmly home to roost. The trains, crap to begin with, are now being cancelled nationwide because it is too hot. The rails are buckling in the sun. Given that it the rails regularly become brittle in the cold we are now left wondering if there is any weather where the trains will run at all. And that's just the rails. If you have the good fortune to find a train that is working, it is a fair bet that the air conditioning will not be, if there is aircon at all. The London Underground is having to provide free cool drinks to stop people fainting on the platforms.
Given all this, perhaps we might decide to drive, but no, the roads are melting as well. Bits of the M25 and M1 have been shut because the surface has been sticking to lorry tyres and leaving holes. And we won't get far anyway because the queues to the beach are a thousand cars long, all keen to get a glimpse of the bikini clad lovelies the papers reliably tell us are there.
And this is only Wednesday. I will admit, the pictures of the office workers dancing in the fountains in Trafalgar Square do look fun - I did it once a couple of years back, and it was great. But really all it does is encourage fat men to take off their shirts. I haven't been outside without a shirt on since I was about eight years old. And we will get the ever cheery weatherman telling us that this "glorious" weather will continue for the next week when we will "sadly" see some showers.
By the weekend, of course, the guilt will have settled in. We will see anguished debates on Newsnight and in the Independent about how this freak heat, which has happened every summer as far back as I can remember, is due to global warming and should we consider nuclear power, lacking as it does the nasty carbon dioxide that will kill us all? There will be tales of how people are dying in their homes from exhaustion and sunstroke, and dire warnings of skin cancer if you step outside for more than a few seconds.
Bear in mind that I am anti-nuclear, well aware of the problems of climate change and depleted ozone. But it is the same every year - it gets hot in the summer and we are surprised. It's like snow - it snows in the winter and we are surprised. Every summer is the hottest on record now, every winter the coldest, and despite the experience of having last year's doom-laden warnings utterly fail to come about, we still seem to think that the world is about to end if it stays above 20C for three days in the week.
I think we just like to complain. It was 50C in Kuwait City today, and 40C in Denver. That's hot. That's surprisingly hot. And for a nation with so much weather, we seem utterly unable to cope with it. It can rain, shine, hail and fog here in the space of an hour. We are used to that. And of course, there was a time when temperatures of 20C would make the news. Bill Bryson once quoted a newspaper from 1977 which carried the headine "BRITAIN SIZZLES IN THE SEVENTIES" That's about 19 centigrade.
Well. Yest again in the course of my attempt at a dialectic on the weather and what it may say about British culture, I have managed to contradict myself just before the end. The inane spiel of the weatherman makes me think that the reason we are so affected by the heat is that we are constantly expecting it to end, whereas the Spanish, whose weather is less exciting in that it is generally hotter and drier, expect only to be hot between May and September. Besides, they are too busy dealing with the regular fires that burn down most of Europe's trees every August. And they have bikinis on the news, man. That's living.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Friday, July 07, 2006
The Attack Of The Killer Idiots
There really is a lot of dreadful tat on MySpace masquerading as content. I have just come back from an unwise excursion outside of my usual MS area and I am franky appalled. But it's kind of my own fault.
I was feeding my ego, you see. I am at a loose end, having managed to come and visit James and Louise in London on the weekend the entire paternal family are in town for a christening. I am home alone. As it is, several leisure opportunities are there to be had. I could watch TV, read a book or do what D H Lawrence used to do, which was throw his post out of the window rather than walk to the post box, and wait for the replies to arrive. He did this in the solid belief that no good Englishman would steal another chap's correspondance. He would instead, post it, possibly saluting the image of King George VI on the stamp as he did so, and he was nearly always right, too. He was only let down by the man who stole his revised draft of The Rainbow, which took out all the dross and replaced with exciting car chases and hot sex with green alien babes. Sadly this draft never reached his publishers, so we are left with the pile of shite we know and hate today.
But back to me. Lacking as I do either post to send, stamps to affix to said post, or to be living in the twenties before civilisation collapsed entirely, the answer was the same as it would be any other day - a session on MySpace. I re-did my last posting about the Pips gig, as I originally wrote it at 1:30am and could see floating shapes in front of my eyes as I typed. I demand blog perfection, and am not above a bit of Stalin-style revisionism to get it. This post will no doubt undergo some pretty heavy edits before it goes up.
But I also, and this is where I fell down, looked at the rankings page to see if I was anywhere near the top. I have taken to using Paulio's neat little trick, which is to enter my nonsense into the most obscure and pretentious category there is, namely Dreams and the Supernatural. I would have put it under poetry, as I did English Literature at university and would regularly amuse myself by pissing off as many poets as much as I could by refusing to take them seriously, or at least as seriously as they took themselves. However, after a while I started getting threatening odes through the door and blood-curdling haikus in my pidgeonhole, and so I abated a little. Sensitive souls are quite often one sonnet short of a portfolio, that's for certain. I didn't want to find any of my housemates pinioned to the porch of our shared house with a very tightly rolled-up volume of Donne by a short sighted but vengeful poet-assassin.
So I chose Dreams on the reasonable certainty that the most regular posters there would be asleep most of the time, and so a bit too muzzy to spot me interloping in their 'hood. And so it was. My last one about Germany winning against Argentina got to No.7. I was proud of myself, and quieted my suspicions that it only got so many comments because it was full of pictures. Of course, we all know where this is going. I had transgressed, and I had to pay.
Hubris is not pretty. And nor is the fall. My blog was not there any more, replaced by one that was actually about Dreams and the Supernatural. What was that doing there? I sagged. Like Icarus, I had got too cocky and flown too close to the sun, and my waxen wings had melted under the glare. I fell into the sea below and was enveloped, assailed even.
I was drowned. By the most popular blogs on MySpace. As we all know, "Popular" does not always, or even ever, directly correlate with "Good". For example, the most popular programme on TV in Britain is the final of Big Brother. In 2001 more people voted for Brian than voted for Labour. That's not a hopeful sign, no matter how you look at it. Tony Blair for one was so offended that he immediately lent our armed forces to our neighbours opposite, and they still haven't given them back, even after we pointed out that they have labels on them saying "Property of the United Kingdom". They'd better not break them.
Anyway, what is popular is not always worth it if you have an IQ of more than, say, sixty. The Sun, Carling Black Label, oven chips, Anthony Worral-Thopmson, Ricky Gervaise or Crazy Frog, I really would be happier to do without them. And we can add to that the blogs of Tila Tequila. I won't go into what's wrong with her specifically, because that kind of thing can get you into all sorts of exciting legal trouble, but I am not happy with what she represents. It is the idea that as log as you have a tight enough bum and funky-fresh enough attitude you will be successful. Well, I am unconvinced. I would urge you to listen to the music she provides and read some of her writing, but I think you can make a guess at what you'd find. A bright child of nine could do better. A stupid child of nine could, come to that.
Well, now I think about it, we can see that Tila herself isn't the problem, but she is certainly the most noticable symptom. MySpace is obviously a phenomenal way to sell things. It offers direct contact with artists that just wouldn't be possible before, and I am fine with that. If it weren't for MS I wouldn't know that Belle and Sebastian need a harp player (I sold mine to fund my badminton shor habit - if only I'd known sooner). And the fact that we can communicate directly with the artist means we are more inclined to buy their stuff. But the more people there are, the lower the Lowest Common Denominator falls, the more there is to sell the more blatant and therefore mindless your advertising becomes, and we pretty soon end up where we are now - the most popular person on MySpace is not a writer of note, or the personal page of a creative and acclaimed rock star, but a dim bulb Britney Spears wannabe who sells her shoddy products with pretend non-conformity and patently fake tits. And she's just the most visible of a million of them. It's all so... Rupert Murdoch, isn't it?
What I really don't like is the perpetration of yet another lie to make the male and stupid part with our cash. I am both male and stupid, but I learned long ago that a Lad Mag cannot be judged by its cover. Tila is currently gracing the cover of UK Maxim (seemingly unaware that she is only there because all of the cast of Hollyoaks are busy this month), surrounded by the usual excitable headlines - "The Hottest Girl On The Web!" and so on. There she is, covered in a thin film of engine oil, nearly pulling her knickers down and pouting at the camera with her blow-job lips. Call me jaded, but I may have seen that pose somewhere before. But as long as the kind of men who dig holes in roads and fifteen year old boys too scared to buy proper pornography part with their £3.50 every month, on it goes. It's her out of Corrie next month, then Jennifer Ellison again, as long as she hasn't put on any weight.
But anyway. We all know how dreadful and deadening to the soul 99.9 percent of the media is, and I shouldn't be too surprised that MySpace is basically the same. At least I still have the ability to pour scorn on it whilst slavishly checking to see if I have any messages every two to three hours. People of the towering cynicism of Tila and her ilk are only so annoying due to their dominance in MS's image. MySpace is the world, and as we know the world is full of the images of the heartless selling the unneccessary to the credulous with the untruthful. Most of the rest of the popular blogs were of the text-speak-heavy pink-goth teenage girl sort, and although their spelling and syntax can induce stomach ulcers in the pedantic, they are harmless enough. At least they are enjoying themselves I suppose. And accordingly, mst of the people in the world are nice people who think basically the same as me, but, crucially, don't type it all out in punishing detail and then expect people to read it. I am just bitter that I wasn't at no.7 any more.
All this is really doing is revealing myself to be not so much the master of the quirkily mundane as the kind of person who writes to Feedback on Radio 4 to complain about something I heard on Front Row (Mark Lawson, normally, the egg-shaped windbag). Plus I have just had a text message from nick asking me not to tell him what happens in the final episode of Doctor Who tomorrow night. So I'm off. I have a pizza, kindly supplied by mine fine hosts, to cook, and a choice of viewing - either a bizarre French comedy about dinner and briefcases, or Johnny Halliday's 50th anniversary concert in Paris, featuring topless dancers, terrible music and the man himself driving a tank down the Champs Elysees. Now that's what I mean by high-brow entertainment.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
I was feeding my ego, you see. I am at a loose end, having managed to come and visit James and Louise in London on the weekend the entire paternal family are in town for a christening. I am home alone. As it is, several leisure opportunities are there to be had. I could watch TV, read a book or do what D H Lawrence used to do, which was throw his post out of the window rather than walk to the post box, and wait for the replies to arrive. He did this in the solid belief that no good Englishman would steal another chap's correspondance. He would instead, post it, possibly saluting the image of King George VI on the stamp as he did so, and he was nearly always right, too. He was only let down by the man who stole his revised draft of The Rainbow, which took out all the dross and replaced with exciting car chases and hot sex with green alien babes. Sadly this draft never reached his publishers, so we are left with the pile of shite we know and hate today.
But back to me. Lacking as I do either post to send, stamps to affix to said post, or to be living in the twenties before civilisation collapsed entirely, the answer was the same as it would be any other day - a session on MySpace. I re-did my last posting about the Pips gig, as I originally wrote it at 1:30am and could see floating shapes in front of my eyes as I typed. I demand blog perfection, and am not above a bit of Stalin-style revisionism to get it. This post will no doubt undergo some pretty heavy edits before it goes up.
But I also, and this is where I fell down, looked at the rankings page to see if I was anywhere near the top. I have taken to using Paulio's neat little trick, which is to enter my nonsense into the most obscure and pretentious category there is, namely Dreams and the Supernatural. I would have put it under poetry, as I did English Literature at university and would regularly amuse myself by pissing off as many poets as much as I could by refusing to take them seriously, or at least as seriously as they took themselves. However, after a while I started getting threatening odes through the door and blood-curdling haikus in my pidgeonhole, and so I abated a little. Sensitive souls are quite often one sonnet short of a portfolio, that's for certain. I didn't want to find any of my housemates pinioned to the porch of our shared house with a very tightly rolled-up volume of Donne by a short sighted but vengeful poet-assassin.
So I chose Dreams on the reasonable certainty that the most regular posters there would be asleep most of the time, and so a bit too muzzy to spot me interloping in their 'hood. And so it was. My last one about Germany winning against Argentina got to No.7. I was proud of myself, and quieted my suspicions that it only got so many comments because it was full of pictures. Of course, we all know where this is going. I had transgressed, and I had to pay.
Hubris is not pretty. And nor is the fall. My blog was not there any more, replaced by one that was actually about Dreams and the Supernatural. What was that doing there? I sagged. Like Icarus, I had got too cocky and flown too close to the sun, and my waxen wings had melted under the glare. I fell into the sea below and was enveloped, assailed even.
I was drowned. By the most popular blogs on MySpace. As we all know, "Popular" does not always, or even ever, directly correlate with "Good". For example, the most popular programme on TV in Britain is the final of Big Brother. In 2001 more people voted for Brian than voted for Labour. That's not a hopeful sign, no matter how you look at it. Tony Blair for one was so offended that he immediately lent our armed forces to our neighbours opposite, and they still haven't given them back, even after we pointed out that they have labels on them saying "Property of the United Kingdom". They'd better not break them.
Anyway, what is popular is not always worth it if you have an IQ of more than, say, sixty. The Sun, Carling Black Label, oven chips, Anthony Worral-Thopmson, Ricky Gervaise or Crazy Frog, I really would be happier to do without them. And we can add to that the blogs of Tila Tequila. I won't go into what's wrong with her specifically, because that kind of thing can get you into all sorts of exciting legal trouble, but I am not happy with what she represents. It is the idea that as log as you have a tight enough bum and funky-fresh enough attitude you will be successful. Well, I am unconvinced. I would urge you to listen to the music she provides and read some of her writing, but I think you can make a guess at what you'd find. A bright child of nine could do better. A stupid child of nine could, come to that.
Well, now I think about it, we can see that Tila herself isn't the problem, but she is certainly the most noticable symptom. MySpace is obviously a phenomenal way to sell things. It offers direct contact with artists that just wouldn't be possible before, and I am fine with that. If it weren't for MS I wouldn't know that Belle and Sebastian need a harp player (I sold mine to fund my badminton shor habit - if only I'd known sooner). And the fact that we can communicate directly with the artist means we are more inclined to buy their stuff. But the more people there are, the lower the Lowest Common Denominator falls, the more there is to sell the more blatant and therefore mindless your advertising becomes, and we pretty soon end up where we are now - the most popular person on MySpace is not a writer of note, or the personal page of a creative and acclaimed rock star, but a dim bulb Britney Spears wannabe who sells her shoddy products with pretend non-conformity and patently fake tits. And she's just the most visible of a million of them. It's all so... Rupert Murdoch, isn't it?
What I really don't like is the perpetration of yet another lie to make the male and stupid part with our cash. I am both male and stupid, but I learned long ago that a Lad Mag cannot be judged by its cover. Tila is currently gracing the cover of UK Maxim (seemingly unaware that she is only there because all of the cast of Hollyoaks are busy this month), surrounded by the usual excitable headlines - "The Hottest Girl On The Web!" and so on. There she is, covered in a thin film of engine oil, nearly pulling her knickers down and pouting at the camera with her blow-job lips. Call me jaded, but I may have seen that pose somewhere before. But as long as the kind of men who dig holes in roads and fifteen year old boys too scared to buy proper pornography part with their £3.50 every month, on it goes. It's her out of Corrie next month, then Jennifer Ellison again, as long as she hasn't put on any weight.
But anyway. We all know how dreadful and deadening to the soul 99.9 percent of the media is, and I shouldn't be too surprised that MySpace is basically the same. At least I still have the ability to pour scorn on it whilst slavishly checking to see if I have any messages every two to three hours. People of the towering cynicism of Tila and her ilk are only so annoying due to their dominance in MS's image. MySpace is the world, and as we know the world is full of the images of the heartless selling the unneccessary to the credulous with the untruthful. Most of the rest of the popular blogs were of the text-speak-heavy pink-goth teenage girl sort, and although their spelling and syntax can induce stomach ulcers in the pedantic, they are harmless enough. At least they are enjoying themselves I suppose. And accordingly, mst of the people in the world are nice people who think basically the same as me, but, crucially, don't type it all out in punishing detail and then expect people to read it. I am just bitter that I wasn't at no.7 any more.
All this is really doing is revealing myself to be not so much the master of the quirkily mundane as the kind of person who writes to Feedback on Radio 4 to complain about something I heard on Front Row (Mark Lawson, normally, the egg-shaped windbag). Plus I have just had a text message from nick asking me not to tell him what happens in the final episode of Doctor Who tomorrow night. So I'm off. I have a pizza, kindly supplied by mine fine hosts, to cook, and a choice of viewing - either a bizarre French comedy about dinner and briefcases, or Johnny Halliday's 50th anniversary concert in Paris, featuring topless dancers, terrible music and the man himself driving a tank down the Champs Elysees. Now that's what I mean by high-brow entertainment.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Germany
"Fussball Fieber herrscht in Deutschland!"
This is the measured opinion of the guy on ZDF last night, as he presented an article full of people with the colours of the German flag dyed in their hair and painted on their faces. Amateurs. Morons at home have been doing that for years, for all the good it's done. Even the fairly recent advent of flags for your car has done nothing for the fortunes of England, and many people's highlight of the tournament will be the sight of David Beckham throwing up before his free kick against Ecuador.
Anyway. I have been here on business for three days now, and am getting back into it. I am currently sat in an internet cafe in Karlsruhe in Germany, home of, well, not much really, but it is where the company we deal with at work live. I am here for a series of meetings and some actual work, too. That's fair enough - I'd be doing this kind of thing at home anyway, and it's a week where all my meals are paid for so I don't have to do any food shopping; this is becoming a serious imposition on my time, despite my earlier enthusiasm for cooking my own dinners. I am sick of my own cooking now, and want someone else to start doing it.
I had forgotten so much about living abroad. For example, the fine art of crossing the road. I spent a good two days after arriving , looking the wrong way every time I crossed a road. This kind of thing is hard-wired into our brains and is very difficult to change.
Similarly, saying "excuse me" when you walk into someone. It has happened a couple of times that, when bumbling into someone, my embarrased apology has been met with blank bewilderment. What should I be apologising for, they say. Well, in England we apologise when someone bumps into us, so I really can't help it. And for those English people reading (I say English because in my experience, Scots don't do it), who might be saying "Bollocks, I'm my own man and don't apologise to no-one for nuffink", I bet you do.
Queue jumping. I have seen it here before, but this is one of those things that is more percieved that true. Perceptions are powerful things, and tint our views in all sorts of odd ways. Germans are, I feel particularly ill-served by the Anglo-Saxon nations. We have several ready-made stereotypes which are far too tiresome and inaccurate to detail here, but I will say the one about them all being opium-wracked decadent Weimar-Republic throwbacks is my particular favourite.
In my experience, they simply do not listen to David Hasselhof, and find his belief that his concert at the Berlin Wall in 1988 was the main factor in the fall of the Wall a year later, mystifying. You can buy all sorts of foods that do not involve sausages. There is some truth in the idea that hey dress appalingly - socks with sandals are a regular sight, along with terrycloth trackie bottoms and orange short-sleeved shirts - but it must be remembered that, compared to the rest of North-Western Europe they are no worse than anyone else. The British, the Dutch and the Germans are the worst dressed societies in the world, and I can back this opinion up with as many fake statistics as you want. But having lived in Saarbruecken for nine months as a student surrounded by people who do nothing but work, and most recently spent a week in an office on an industrial estate with 200 of the quietest, most shy and retiring people you can ever imagine, the idea that they are all rude and loud and pushy is frankly laughable.
But it is, I think, easily the most durable. For example. I was at Stanstead Airport on Monday, and as usual, Ryanair's queueing system had broken down into anarchy. I found myself with a ticket to board first, but on the wrong side of the velvet rope between my batch of people and those who had to wait. And so, and I am ashamed of this, I slipped beneath the rope and basically cut the queue. I do feel I have some defence in this, as it was the queue I was supposed to be in, but this did not prepare me for what happened next. Anyone wanting a crash course in how the English deal with rule breakers, take note.
The person behind me started swearing, in lavish terms, about me. But not to me, to his girlfriend. I ignored it, as I already felt bad enough. But the it dawned on me - they thought that because I had pushed into the queu for a flight to Germany, I could only be German, and so genetically unable to queue. If I was German, the logic went, I would therefore be unable to understand English and they were free to swear at me. Swear at me to eachother, of course. This went on for some minutes as the ever-friendly and well-trained Ryanair ground staff ran about getting in eachother's way and doing everything bar let people onto the plane. Then, the piece de resistance.
The man turned to his girlfriend and said "You did German at school, how do you say 'Get out of the fucking queue, you German cunt?'"
"Erm..." she replied. There was a pause as she thought about it. I turned round and levelled a calm look at them, although inside I was alive with adrenaline at the thought that he could well hit me.
"Aus der Reihe, du detusches Foetze, " I began, "But you could have said it in English. I would have understood you perfectly well".
He looked terrified in a way that you only see on the face of someone who has been very rude about you in a language they are confident you cannot understand, but then finds out you can. And with that, he apologised to me as profusely as anyone has ever done, and we all boarded the plane.
All this is by way of coming round to my chosen subject for today, which is that some cultures are simply better at some things than others. This is not an original observation. Bill Bryson, not long after he'd moved back to the USA after twenty-odd years lving in Britain, was so taken with the idea of the post office holding an annual Customer Appreciation Day with free coffee and cakes that he wrote a three page article for the Mail on Sunday. And he has a point - the Royal Mail won't even provide you with a pen to fill in one of their many forms, let alone a free doughnut. However, he then told us how he made the dire oversight of posting a letter without a ZIP code only to have it come back three weeks later with an invoice for wasting USPS time. This wouldn't happen at home as I know from experience - when we moved from Devon to Leicestershire we told eveyone we knew our new address, but got the postcode wrong, and I mean really wrong. Wrong postal town, wrong district, eveything. Even now letters arrive with NN17 on them, despite the actual code being LE9. The point is, they arrive.
Anyway, I am not planning on talking about the post office for a whole blog posting (although I am determined to get maximum value out of my 2 of internet cafe time), but I am instead going to try and tackle at least one of those things which baffle us all, and that is understanding cultural difference. I am British. You may well have worked this out already, but I'm talking about more than just spelling colour with a U or driving on the left. What makes a culture is, in my opinion, a plethora of little things which point out the bigger things that, together, makes us into the English, Americans, Germans and so on. I can't speak for other European nations and I know absolutely nothing about the other Anglophone cultures of the world, so I won't try and make any incisive comments there. I'd end up making some baseless and sweeping statement and no-one would want to speak to me again. But I do know that as soon as it's not there, I start to miss the shipping forecast
The shipping forecast, for those who don't know, is a specialised weather forecast broadcast on Radio 4 first thing in the morning, just after lunch and last thing at night. It always begins the same way:
"There now follows the shipping forecast, issued at 1146 BST by the Met Office."
It then descends into what at first listen is a stream of abstract gibberish:
"Dogger, Malin Head, Fastnet fifteen to twenty, rising, medium to good. FitzRoy, Cromarty, Trafalgar, twenty to twenty-five, rising, good becoming meduim"
It goes on like this, through all twenty-six shipping areas around the British Isles, stretching from Norway to Iceland to Spain, in the same measured tones and sparse fashion. In fact, it is nothing but wind speeds, barometer readings and visibility. Anyone with a decent GPS guide could find all this out, and almost all ships do. Then it's the Archers. I'm sure if you look at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 you'll find an example.
But it's not really for the seafaring. It's for us. Bizarrely, the shipping forecast is one of the most popular things on British radio. People tune in especially to listen to it, people who live many miles form the sea. Millions hear it every day. People write long, affectionate books about it, and Blur's This Is A Low is based on it. If it is even suggested that it be changed even slightly, there is uproar and questions are asked in Parliament. Really, I'm not making that up. People write in to Radio 4 and complain if the broadcaster reads it too fast, too slowly, too seriously, too lightly. The 0048 broadcast even has its own theme song, Sailing By. Anyone British will know the names of at least a few areas.
Why? There is absolutely no sensible reason why this tiny programme, irrelevant to almost everyone that listens to it and ignored by those that it's for, should be so important to so many. I can't really account for a lot of thise people. But for me it serves as a reminder. I was born by the sea, grew up by the sea. Sheerness had a huge container port, a ferry to Holland and a fishing fleet. We got an RNLI lifeboat off of Blue Peter one year, and it has since done thousands of rescues, manned entirely by volunteers. For me, and I suppose hundreds of thousands like me, the sea is not some water next to the land that you swim in when it's warm. It is something else, something powerful, something romantic, something deeply important and to be respected. It's alive. Sheerness flooded in 1953 and again in 1978. Half the town worked on the docks when I was a kid, although fewer do now it's all been automated. Thanks to the amount of fruit that comes in through Sheerness, it is the only place in Britain that has wild scorpoins. They arrived in a consignment of bananas in 1960 and took up home in a disused church. They are still there.
And to hear this list of places, most of them nothing but water in the busiest shipping lane in the world, recited in a calm voice just before I go to bed, brings all this back to me. Home. I don't make a claim to native marine wisdom, but I know I see it for what it is. Part of me, bound up in where I am from and the times that made me. The place that made me. My uncle was a lifeboatman. We know the fear that he wasn't coming back. The thought of thousands of men over hundreds of years, setting out from Sheerness over the storms of the North Sea to whatever fate awaits them. Who knows? It has left a hell of a lot of widows over the years. Do not, I repeat, do not fuck with the sea. A lot of people, I think, will feel the same way.
Good night, and Good Luck
Dougal.
This is the measured opinion of the guy on ZDF last night, as he presented an article full of people with the colours of the German flag dyed in their hair and painted on their faces. Amateurs. Morons at home have been doing that for years, for all the good it's done. Even the fairly recent advent of flags for your car has done nothing for the fortunes of England, and many people's highlight of the tournament will be the sight of David Beckham throwing up before his free kick against Ecuador.
Anyway. I have been here on business for three days now, and am getting back into it. I am currently sat in an internet cafe in Karlsruhe in Germany, home of, well, not much really, but it is where the company we deal with at work live. I am here for a series of meetings and some actual work, too. That's fair enough - I'd be doing this kind of thing at home anyway, and it's a week where all my meals are paid for so I don't have to do any food shopping; this is becoming a serious imposition on my time, despite my earlier enthusiasm for cooking my own dinners. I am sick of my own cooking now, and want someone else to start doing it.
I had forgotten so much about living abroad. For example, the fine art of crossing the road. I spent a good two days after arriving , looking the wrong way every time I crossed a road. This kind of thing is hard-wired into our brains and is very difficult to change.
Similarly, saying "excuse me" when you walk into someone. It has happened a couple of times that, when bumbling into someone, my embarrased apology has been met with blank bewilderment. What should I be apologising for, they say. Well, in England we apologise when someone bumps into us, so I really can't help it. And for those English people reading (I say English because in my experience, Scots don't do it), who might be saying "Bollocks, I'm my own man and don't apologise to no-one for nuffink", I bet you do.
Queue jumping. I have seen it here before, but this is one of those things that is more percieved that true. Perceptions are powerful things, and tint our views in all sorts of odd ways. Germans are, I feel particularly ill-served by the Anglo-Saxon nations. We have several ready-made stereotypes which are far too tiresome and inaccurate to detail here, but I will say the one about them all being opium-wracked decadent Weimar-Republic throwbacks is my particular favourite.
In my experience, they simply do not listen to David Hasselhof, and find his belief that his concert at the Berlin Wall in 1988 was the main factor in the fall of the Wall a year later, mystifying. You can buy all sorts of foods that do not involve sausages. There is some truth in the idea that hey dress appalingly - socks with sandals are a regular sight, along with terrycloth trackie bottoms and orange short-sleeved shirts - but it must be remembered that, compared to the rest of North-Western Europe they are no worse than anyone else. The British, the Dutch and the Germans are the worst dressed societies in the world, and I can back this opinion up with as many fake statistics as you want. But having lived in Saarbruecken for nine months as a student surrounded by people who do nothing but work, and most recently spent a week in an office on an industrial estate with 200 of the quietest, most shy and retiring people you can ever imagine, the idea that they are all rude and loud and pushy is frankly laughable.
But it is, I think, easily the most durable. For example. I was at Stanstead Airport on Monday, and as usual, Ryanair's queueing system had broken down into anarchy. I found myself with a ticket to board first, but on the wrong side of the velvet rope between my batch of people and those who had to wait. And so, and I am ashamed of this, I slipped beneath the rope and basically cut the queue. I do feel I have some defence in this, as it was the queue I was supposed to be in, but this did not prepare me for what happened next. Anyone wanting a crash course in how the English deal with rule breakers, take note.
The person behind me started swearing, in lavish terms, about me. But not to me, to his girlfriend. I ignored it, as I already felt bad enough. But the it dawned on me - they thought that because I had pushed into the queu for a flight to Germany, I could only be German, and so genetically unable to queue. If I was German, the logic went, I would therefore be unable to understand English and they were free to swear at me. Swear at me to eachother, of course. This went on for some minutes as the ever-friendly and well-trained Ryanair ground staff ran about getting in eachother's way and doing everything bar let people onto the plane. Then, the piece de resistance.
The man turned to his girlfriend and said "You did German at school, how do you say 'Get out of the fucking queue, you German cunt?'"
"Erm..." she replied. There was a pause as she thought about it. I turned round and levelled a calm look at them, although inside I was alive with adrenaline at the thought that he could well hit me.
"Aus der Reihe, du detusches Foetze, " I began, "But you could have said it in English. I would have understood you perfectly well".
He looked terrified in a way that you only see on the face of someone who has been very rude about you in a language they are confident you cannot understand, but then finds out you can. And with that, he apologised to me as profusely as anyone has ever done, and we all boarded the plane.
All this is by way of coming round to my chosen subject for today, which is that some cultures are simply better at some things than others. This is not an original observation. Bill Bryson, not long after he'd moved back to the USA after twenty-odd years lving in Britain, was so taken with the idea of the post office holding an annual Customer Appreciation Day with free coffee and cakes that he wrote a three page article for the Mail on Sunday. And he has a point - the Royal Mail won't even provide you with a pen to fill in one of their many forms, let alone a free doughnut. However, he then told us how he made the dire oversight of posting a letter without a ZIP code only to have it come back three weeks later with an invoice for wasting USPS time. This wouldn't happen at home as I know from experience - when we moved from Devon to Leicestershire we told eveyone we knew our new address, but got the postcode wrong, and I mean really wrong. Wrong postal town, wrong district, eveything. Even now letters arrive with NN17 on them, despite the actual code being LE9. The point is, they arrive.
Anyway, I am not planning on talking about the post office for a whole blog posting (although I am determined to get maximum value out of my 2 of internet cafe time), but I am instead going to try and tackle at least one of those things which baffle us all, and that is understanding cultural difference. I am British. You may well have worked this out already, but I'm talking about more than just spelling colour with a U or driving on the left. What makes a culture is, in my opinion, a plethora of little things which point out the bigger things that, together, makes us into the English, Americans, Germans and so on. I can't speak for other European nations and I know absolutely nothing about the other Anglophone cultures of the world, so I won't try and make any incisive comments there. I'd end up making some baseless and sweeping statement and no-one would want to speak to me again. But I do know that as soon as it's not there, I start to miss the shipping forecast
The shipping forecast, for those who don't know, is a specialised weather forecast broadcast on Radio 4 first thing in the morning, just after lunch and last thing at night. It always begins the same way:
"There now follows the shipping forecast, issued at 1146 BST by the Met Office."
It then descends into what at first listen is a stream of abstract gibberish:
"Dogger, Malin Head, Fastnet fifteen to twenty, rising, medium to good. FitzRoy, Cromarty, Trafalgar, twenty to twenty-five, rising, good becoming meduim"
It goes on like this, through all twenty-six shipping areas around the British Isles, stretching from Norway to Iceland to Spain, in the same measured tones and sparse fashion. In fact, it is nothing but wind speeds, barometer readings and visibility. Anyone with a decent GPS guide could find all this out, and almost all ships do. Then it's the Archers. I'm sure if you look at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 you'll find an example.
But it's not really for the seafaring. It's for us. Bizarrely, the shipping forecast is one of the most popular things on British radio. People tune in especially to listen to it, people who live many miles form the sea. Millions hear it every day. People write long, affectionate books about it, and Blur's This Is A Low is based on it. If it is even suggested that it be changed even slightly, there is uproar and questions are asked in Parliament. Really, I'm not making that up. People write in to Radio 4 and complain if the broadcaster reads it too fast, too slowly, too seriously, too lightly. The 0048 broadcast even has its own theme song, Sailing By. Anyone British will know the names of at least a few areas.
Why? There is absolutely no sensible reason why this tiny programme, irrelevant to almost everyone that listens to it and ignored by those that it's for, should be so important to so many. I can't really account for a lot of thise people. But for me it serves as a reminder. I was born by the sea, grew up by the sea. Sheerness had a huge container port, a ferry to Holland and a fishing fleet. We got an RNLI lifeboat off of Blue Peter one year, and it has since done thousands of rescues, manned entirely by volunteers. For me, and I suppose hundreds of thousands like me, the sea is not some water next to the land that you swim in when it's warm. It is something else, something powerful, something romantic, something deeply important and to be respected. It's alive. Sheerness flooded in 1953 and again in 1978. Half the town worked on the docks when I was a kid, although fewer do now it's all been automated. Thanks to the amount of fruit that comes in through Sheerness, it is the only place in Britain that has wild scorpoins. They arrived in a consignment of bananas in 1960 and took up home in a disused church. They are still there.
And to hear this list of places, most of them nothing but water in the busiest shipping lane in the world, recited in a calm voice just before I go to bed, brings all this back to me. Home. I don't make a claim to native marine wisdom, but I know I see it for what it is. Part of me, bound up in where I am from and the times that made me. The place that made me. My uncle was a lifeboatman. We know the fear that he wasn't coming back. The thought of thousands of men over hundreds of years, setting out from Sheerness over the storms of the North Sea to whatever fate awaits them. Who knows? It has left a hell of a lot of widows over the years. Do not, I repeat, do not fuck with the sea. A lot of people, I think, will feel the same way.
Good night, and Good Luck
Dougal.
Holiday
Speaking as one of the five-and-three-quarter billion people who didn't get a day off today, happy 4th of July to all you Americans out there. I hope you are all having enjoyable barbecues, fireworks, football games etc. We in Britain are having Bitterness Day, where the lingering resentment of a 230 year old war is allowed to have its full run and we moan about the bloody Yanks all day long.
I in fact spent today with a work experience girl called Margot. She had just done her GCSEs and was taking a week to see what Leicester City Council do with her parent's money. Actually her family live in a huge house in a tiny village in the countryside and send her to boarding school in Oundle, so Council Tax in their house is not quite the issue it has been in mine recently. It also explains why she was called Margot. She was very 21st Century public school - a combination of BBC English, hockey sticks, clothes from Fat Face and the unbendable self-confidence that comes from having extremely rich parents.
She was actually very pleasant, and we spent most of the day talking about her choice of university. I warned her off Cambridge as it is in the middle of nowhere and full of unbearable tossers and Americans on holiday. Edinburgh, on the other hand, is lovely, as is Durham. Oxford was her choice as she wanted to be an Arabist, and the Foreign Office are well known for only opening letters from Oxbridge graduates, the me-rejecting bastards.
Anyway. I was thinking on the way home from the laundrette about the smart new Germany shirt in my clothes bag and the fact that despite England's timely exit from the World Cup being five days ago, a good two thirds of the flags on display for the team are still there. There will always be a general background number of them gracing the cars and the houses of the poor, but the levels of St George on my street at least are still abnormally high. As I walked past the Merry Monarch pub (a misleading name if ever there was one - it isn't regal and it certainly ain't merry) on Fosse Road I wondered how long I'd last if I were to don my lovely white DVB shirt and walk into the snug. About two minutes at the outside, I reckoned. The levels of cultural tolerance in Britain are varied to say the least. It is profoundly depressing to think that someone younger than me felt that World War Two was an acceptable reason to point at me and make aggressive mutterings when I went outside in my Germany shirt for about five minutes on Saturday afternoon. It was my own fault, of course. I really shold have known better. The fact that there is a better to know, I have a problem with. But this is not quite the subject for this particular day.
Now before we start, I want it understood that I lack all national feeling. At no time will you hear me trumpeting Britain as the fount of all that is good in the world, or that the people of some other nation are not as fabulous as we are. I live where I live, and that's it. I was just as happy to see Germany win their big game against Argentina on Friday as I would have been had England managed to beat a country with a population of less than that of Yorkshire the day after.
To crack that last snide remark I had to look at Wikipedia to find the population of Portugal. I am a thorough man, with not much to be doing, so I can only assume anyone reading this blog will be looking for factual errors as closely as I would to everyone else. I am not going to be caught out. Anyway, I was not surprised to see that the entry for that country is currently protected from editing due to vandalism. A deeper look found that the entries for Christiano Ronaldo and Big Phil Scolari are similarly protected. That's so depressing it makes me want to cry. But that's what English national feeling seems so often to be - the cream of English manhood trying to put the words "Cheating Cunts" into Wikipedia articles becasue we lost a football game. This is another reason why I am less than patriotic. Again, this is something for another day.
So. I am not coming at this from some percieved culturally superior standpoint. But there is little we like better in Britain to have a good old go at the Yanks, and today, on the day you celebrate a fringe of political outcasts making a declaration of independence that hardly anyone wanted from a country that had fewer individual freedoms than you did to begin with and was at best only nominally in charge anyway, that's what we shall do.
First of all, well, where to begin? I was going to say "being loud", but then I thought of "dreadful television programmes", "all the crap that surrounds hip-hop music" and "dimwitted politicians". There is also Christian Fundamentalism, a general lack of awareness of the rest of the world around them, their thing about guns, a tendency towards flag-waving, the death penalty, a nasty habit of invading countires with little thought as to what to do afterwards and finally Tom MySpace, whose omnipresent shit-eating grin and willingness to sell the contents of my blog to the highest bidder I can well be shot of.
But then I think, what do they think of us? I don't really know, but I do know that we must sometimes look odd. Cold, stand-offish, repressed, scruffy, deluded as to our own importance, stuck in the past, smug, arch and superior. The French call us their cousins. That means we're family, it doesn't mean they like us. The Germans call us partners. That means they sell us things with us, it doesn't mean they like us. No-one does really, if the results of this year's Eurovision Song Contest are anything to go by. So who am I to judge?
Frankly, no-one. I have never been outside the European Union and know full well that even after nine months of immersion in a culture, as I had when I lived in Germany, you still lack a lot of insight. I wouldn't presume to know how a German looks at the world. I just don't know. Also, falling madly in love with a girl from Cambridge may have limited the impulse to absorb more of Germany. However, that's by the by.
So yes, this culture thing. Basically I don't understand the Americans and I don't really expect them to understand me. I think the death penalty is barbaric and pointless, abortion is unpleasant but neccessary and, contrary to Charlton Heston's proclaimations, guns do in fact kill people. I know lots of Americans feel the same way. Similarly I find it ridiculous that the English are so self-important, embarrassing that we can't have a drink without also having a vicious punch-up and that we'd all be an awful lot happier if we could bring ourselves to just talk to people rather than rely on gossip, innuendo and baseless stereotyping. I know lots of Britons feel the same way as well.
But the next time you're in Europe, remember - chanting "USA! USA! USA!" in a bar will not endear you to anyone. And don't put a maple leaf flag on your backpack and try to pretend you're Canadian, either. The Canadians find it very annoying, plus we all caught on to that little trick pretty much straight away.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
I in fact spent today with a work experience girl called Margot. She had just done her GCSEs and was taking a week to see what Leicester City Council do with her parent's money. Actually her family live in a huge house in a tiny village in the countryside and send her to boarding school in Oundle, so Council Tax in their house is not quite the issue it has been in mine recently. It also explains why she was called Margot. She was very 21st Century public school - a combination of BBC English, hockey sticks, clothes from Fat Face and the unbendable self-confidence that comes from having extremely rich parents.
She was actually very pleasant, and we spent most of the day talking about her choice of university. I warned her off Cambridge as it is in the middle of nowhere and full of unbearable tossers and Americans on holiday. Edinburgh, on the other hand, is lovely, as is Durham. Oxford was her choice as she wanted to be an Arabist, and the Foreign Office are well known for only opening letters from Oxbridge graduates, the me-rejecting bastards.
Anyway. I was thinking on the way home from the laundrette about the smart new Germany shirt in my clothes bag and the fact that despite England's timely exit from the World Cup being five days ago, a good two thirds of the flags on display for the team are still there. There will always be a general background number of them gracing the cars and the houses of the poor, but the levels of St George on my street at least are still abnormally high. As I walked past the Merry Monarch pub (a misleading name if ever there was one - it isn't regal and it certainly ain't merry) on Fosse Road I wondered how long I'd last if I were to don my lovely white DVB shirt and walk into the snug. About two minutes at the outside, I reckoned. The levels of cultural tolerance in Britain are varied to say the least. It is profoundly depressing to think that someone younger than me felt that World War Two was an acceptable reason to point at me and make aggressive mutterings when I went outside in my Germany shirt for about five minutes on Saturday afternoon. It was my own fault, of course. I really shold have known better. The fact that there is a better to know, I have a problem with. But this is not quite the subject for this particular day.
Now before we start, I want it understood that I lack all national feeling. At no time will you hear me trumpeting Britain as the fount of all that is good in the world, or that the people of some other nation are not as fabulous as we are. I live where I live, and that's it. I was just as happy to see Germany win their big game against Argentina on Friday as I would have been had England managed to beat a country with a population of less than that of Yorkshire the day after.
To crack that last snide remark I had to look at Wikipedia to find the population of Portugal. I am a thorough man, with not much to be doing, so I can only assume anyone reading this blog will be looking for factual errors as closely as I would to everyone else. I am not going to be caught out. Anyway, I was not surprised to see that the entry for that country is currently protected from editing due to vandalism. A deeper look found that the entries for Christiano Ronaldo and Big Phil Scolari are similarly protected. That's so depressing it makes me want to cry. But that's what English national feeling seems so often to be - the cream of English manhood trying to put the words "Cheating Cunts" into Wikipedia articles becasue we lost a football game. This is another reason why I am less than patriotic. Again, this is something for another day.
So. I am not coming at this from some percieved culturally superior standpoint. But there is little we like better in Britain to have a good old go at the Yanks, and today, on the day you celebrate a fringe of political outcasts making a declaration of independence that hardly anyone wanted from a country that had fewer individual freedoms than you did to begin with and was at best only nominally in charge anyway, that's what we shall do.
First of all, well, where to begin? I was going to say "being loud", but then I thought of "dreadful television programmes", "all the crap that surrounds hip-hop music" and "dimwitted politicians". There is also Christian Fundamentalism, a general lack of awareness of the rest of the world around them, their thing about guns, a tendency towards flag-waving, the death penalty, a nasty habit of invading countires with little thought as to what to do afterwards and finally Tom MySpace, whose omnipresent shit-eating grin and willingness to sell the contents of my blog to the highest bidder I can well be shot of.
But then I think, what do they think of us? I don't really know, but I do know that we must sometimes look odd. Cold, stand-offish, repressed, scruffy, deluded as to our own importance, stuck in the past, smug, arch and superior. The French call us their cousins. That means we're family, it doesn't mean they like us. The Germans call us partners. That means they sell us things with us, it doesn't mean they like us. No-one does really, if the results of this year's Eurovision Song Contest are anything to go by. So who am I to judge?
Frankly, no-one. I have never been outside the European Union and know full well that even after nine months of immersion in a culture, as I had when I lived in Germany, you still lack a lot of insight. I wouldn't presume to know how a German looks at the world. I just don't know. Also, falling madly in love with a girl from Cambridge may have limited the impulse to absorb more of Germany. However, that's by the by.
So yes, this culture thing. Basically I don't understand the Americans and I don't really expect them to understand me. I think the death penalty is barbaric and pointless, abortion is unpleasant but neccessary and, contrary to Charlton Heston's proclaimations, guns do in fact kill people. I know lots of Americans feel the same way. Similarly I find it ridiculous that the English are so self-important, embarrassing that we can't have a drink without also having a vicious punch-up and that we'd all be an awful lot happier if we could bring ourselves to just talk to people rather than rely on gossip, innuendo and baseless stereotyping. I know lots of Britons feel the same way as well.
But the next time you're in Europe, remember - chanting "USA! USA! USA!" in a bar will not endear you to anyone. And don't put a maple leaf flag on your backpack and try to pretend you're Canadian, either. The Canadians find it very annoying, plus we all caught on to that little trick pretty much straight away.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
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