An Excitable Lot

All


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good night, and good luck
Dougal

Harold Wilson

The net is truly taking over my life. I can only wait for the day when we are all full of nanobots and wires, forever plugged into the VR world, interfacing in real-time with the world's finest minds, flying over pixel-perfect models of the world's natural wonders, but mostly, and without doubt the mainstay of the future cyberconomy, having hot cyber-sex across three continents. The internet was, after all, first designed and built by a heady mix of soldiers and computer students and no girls.

Went to the doctors today, for the first time in ten years. Well, I'm a taxpayer. Also, I have a verruca. Lovely, just what you all want to read. Anyway, my doctor gave me a prescription for some stuff, and off I went to the chemists. Six pounds fifty! I thought the NHS was supposed to be free! Bastard successive governments from 1951 to 2006... No, but still. It was a shock, and I'm not used to dealing with the health service. I suppose I am in rude health. Hale and hearty. But I could do with losing a stone. As you can see from my avatar (a word no-one used at all until about five years ago except e-nerds and the likes of Tony Parsons) I have a rugby player's frame, but also the sporting instincts of a sea anemone. I have blood pressure of 115 over 76, whatever that might mean, but for how long?

Now, at the moment, the TV has an advert for Activia yoghurts, where women of a certain age (fifty-odd, then) all talk about how bloated they might be feeling, filmed on digital camcorders in order to give it a groovy, Big Brothery, fly-on-the-wall documentary look. They're fooling no-one there. But that's not the thing, the thing is that these women then wax live-bacterial about how eating a couple of pots of these hideously expensive and vile tasting milk products a day have left them unbloated, free from gaseous embarrasment and generally feeling like a million dollars. Might it have something to do with eating yoghurt instead of cakes? Also, I read that the only reason the Atkins diet worked was that it made you so sick of eating nothing but chicken that you just stopped eating altogether. The bad breath and pounding headaches were just bonus extras, to make you feel like you were really suffering.

So we are a nation obsessed with health and looking just... so. Men, it has been reported by the Department of Stating The Painfully Obvious, have just the same problems with body image and media pressure as women. Apparently, where women all want to look like Jessica Alba, all men want to look like David Beckham. The beer belly is no longer to be worn as a badge of masculine pride. Really? Well, slap my thigh. I was just working on how to make mine truly huge, like a mating display.

I am probably a bit unfit, a bit overweight and a bit too stressed. This is because I reside in Britain and am alive. I have a reasonably well-paid job, a credit card I can pay for and some good friends. In world terms I am truly blessed, so blessed that I hardly notice it. It can't really be that bad, then. For all the worrying done in newspapers about changing societal roles and mores, we are all basically as well off as we can be. I will eat more fruit and ride my bike more. I will try not to put myself through the psychological wringer quite so much (after my lengthy pontificating about talking to girls a little while ago, I got a series of replies from women saying basically "Don't worry, we're as fucked up as you are". This was truly appreciated). My blood pressure will not be my first concern.

So now we've established a low-stress method, I'll also not have to worry too much about making the beginning of my blogs be relevant to the end. I have re-read this one a couple of times now, and I am not sure it makes too much sense. And I can't think now what Harold Wilson has to do with any of it. Oh well. Never mind. I'll worry about keeping my nanobots happy, instead. Maybe something nice from Thornton's?

Good night, and good luck
Dougal

Cool As

Cool Bands

The TV is on, and MTV2 is on the TV. On MTV2 is the Top 50 Cool Bands. I am suspicious of anything touted as cool, as it will invariably be deemed uncool within about twenty minutes - I remember the NME doing an 8-page feature about The Darkness last year, and now it seems they are having to ring publicists themselves to go to events. Also, little metal scooters, Prague and branches of Yo! Sushi.

So anyway, I turn to channel 445 to see... Babyshambles. Now, I don't want to sound like some guy who's always moaning and saying "What's that racket, you could hear the words in my day" etc, but I am absolved on this particular occasion as I was born in the same year as Pete Doherty. 1979 is the shit-hot year this year. So. Babyshambles. Never was a band more aptly named. Apart from purely musical issues (inability to tune a guitar, no songs, tin ear etc) I still have a major problem with them. They just aren't very good. But even that I could handle in isolation.

It's the cult of Pete that I can't stand. It's the idea that he's being hassled by the police deliberately, is some Byronic anti-establishment hero, the people's poet, a beautiful fucked-up genius the same as the Romantic poets, Kurt Cobain and Jagger and Richards in 1968 after they were busted for marijuana. Who would break a butterfly on the wheel, to quote the Times editorial that eventually got them off?

Well, if you are a high-profile drug addict who flaunts his habits as part of his image whilst still being constantly arrested for possession, I'd think that the police would find you interesting. If you have form like him (drugs, assault, drugs, breaking and entering and then drugs again), they'd find you interesting no matter who you are. The idea that Pete Is Innocent is frankly offensive. He flails about in eyeliner with a lighter in his mouth, mumbling incoherently and showing off his trackmarks just so, to catch the light and underline his delicacy under the crushing weight of a philistine world that cares not for truth, beauty and the bohemian way. Well, bollocks. If he was such an opressed flower they wouldn't let him off bail to play gigs. You did it so off you go to prison. Again. And it doesn't matter how many records you sell (although he really isn't as known for that as he once was and the interested should look at just how much Babyshambles sell compared to the Libertines), you were caught with a load of Class A drugs in your car, you did it, it's a fair cop, now fuck off and don't come back. If he really were on the same career trajectory as his peers he should be dead within about 18 months.

But that's nothing as compared to my opinions of the NME, who voted him the coolest person of 2005 last year. It's bad enough that his own publicity machine is selling his addictions and atrocious self-pitying behaviour as laudable, but that a national magazine with a high circulation amongst impressionable 15 year olds does is unforgivable. Slavishly uncritical editorialising (including the idea that the Met are harrassing him) and big pictures of him looking glamorously ripped to the tits are standard fare. He is an exciting, unique voice, Our Pete, our hero, one of us. Rubbish. And selling that image as attractive is tantamount to selling the drugs yourself. Calling Craig Nicholls of The Vines a genius on the basis of ripping off Nirvana and only ever eating Big Macs was another, and isn't it amazing how fast they dropped him when it turned out he wasn't a rebellious artist after all, it was just Asperger's Syndrome. That's not something we can sell. How last year is that?

In reality, he'll be fine. He'll do his time, clean up and then vanish without trace before 2007 is over. Because he's rich. Look at Kate Moss, it's the same thing there. Drugs plus money equal publicity. Get caught, cry, go into rehab in Arizona, make a load of new money advertising a perfume called Opium (Christ, it'd be funny if it wasn't true) and finally resolve to be more careful in future, checking for cameras before chopping one out, no matter how itchy you are. But the kids who fall into crack because they are suffering like their hero will not be fine. No multi-million pound ad campaign selling their images and lifestyle. No help, no chance and more than likely, no Pete.

You might say I'm just being middle aged. And I admit, I am no longer cool. I am 26, and so far too old to be of interest to advertisers. But I say no. I am not yet stood in the aisle at HMV looking at the Supertramp section and thinking "Ooh, Breakfast In America!", and by the time I am I will have no idea who the contemporary Pete Doherty might be and so no longer care. In fact, I was never cool, even when I was 17 in 1996. But I know crap when I hear it, and I definately know a twat when I see one.

Mr D had another day in court today, charged with posessing crack and heroin again, and the fact that he was nicked for it a week after his last sentencing for drugs is frankly astonishing. Kicking a Radio 1 reporter for having the nerve to do her job is one thing, but to do it on the steps of a magistrates court is quite another. He's a dick, plain and simple.

So I'm off to seethe some more and await a libel action.
Good night, and good luck
Dougal

MCG

Massive

The Commonwealth Games started today, along with all the usual opinions from the world's opinion formers that it is on its way out and a waste of money and so on. All the usual stuff that gets thrown at major events in the week before they start. I usually find that afterwards these events are inevitably described as "The Best Sports Event Of this Kind Ever!", and generally by the same people who are writing them off. But I like the Commonwealth Games. They're probably the least competitive games in the world. There's too much money, hype and bitter, bitter competition nowadays. And with the lack of Paula Radcliffe, Ian Thorpe etc, it is even less fraught. A fortnight of some low intensity fooling about seems to me to be a welcome respite. If trying to get on with people is a waste of money, then let's start wasting. And anyway, it's the only major tournament where we in the UK can hope to win something, albeit as our four seperate countries. We do this, I know, by excluding three quarters of the world, but dammit we couldn't colonise everywhere.

Anyway. I have bought Downfall on DVD, which I have only seen in bits on More4. I try to watch world cinema, especially German films. I turn off the subtitles and see if I can keep up. The answer generally is no, but practice is practice. Plus we didn't go and see Syriana yesterday, so I need a good flm ths week. I am umming and aahing about seeing The Proposition. Nick Cave writes a fine psychopathic song, but can he write films? Well, yes, obviously, he did and then someone else made it. I'll probably go, just because I like seeing Guy Pearce on the big screen. I remember him being Mike in Neighbours.

But what of love? Happily, spring is coming soon. And I am moving into Leicester. Possibly one of the reasons I still feel awful six months down the line from Max and I splitting up is that I am basically doing nothing about it. I am now sick to death of moping. It was fun for a while, but time to move on. Yet that's hard when one is living 15 miles from all your friends. Max has the advantage of quite an integrated life like that, which probably explains how she has managed to find someone else and I'm still single. That and he'd been chasing her for about a year beforehand as well. I choose not to think about that bit.

So I move into town. Although that still leaves me with the problem of the man-woman interface thing. Actually, I know full well that it's not so much men and women, more people and people. Personality types are the issue. I am soppy. I am romantic. So, I am normally a bag of nerves about this. What if, what if, what if until I am a wreck. I have only found my previous girlfriends through them literally throwing themselves at me. Anyone I have persued has inevitably come to nothing. I knock things over and act like a twat. It is not charming. It is annoying, not least to me. But then, it would be sexist to say that there is no such thing as the romantic, nervous, useless woman. We all, I am sure, have tales of being tongue-tied and clueless, of having no idea of any signals, or what.

A single man is a pathetic thing. I know of someone who might not appreciate me mentioning this, but it serves as a good example. She went to meet a couple of friends from the internet. She wanted nothing from them bar a pleasant conversation, but the fact that she, a single woman, had deigned to talk to them, single men, made it something altogether more awful. One went to the pub with only a pound in his pocket and bought his own sandwiches. She has since re-written her online profiles to eliminate all references to her relationship status. I frankly don't blame her. But then, I met a friend of a friend's girlfriend, and she seemed nice, but I haven't dared to mention it since. What if she said no? What if, and it's just as worrying a thought, she said yes?

I can only really look at this from the male point of view, though. And one can say that women in our society are at a certain advantage in that it is the male who is generally expected to make the first move. It is expected that it is the man who desires female company and it is the woman's perogative to make it as difficult as possible. A woman is always the arbiter of what happens - you're a man, I'm a woman, and me allowing you to buy me this drink will now allow you to talk to me for ten minutes. Don't fuck it up. I'm sure it is a descendent of the time when we were ape creatures in trees, and only the biggest and most impressive ape creature would be allowed to breed. And then, if a woman does express any interest, indeed makes any attempt to make personal contact at all, the man will then fall over himself to act like an idiot, mostly from a sensation of relief at not having to make the first move himself, morbid fear at this never happening again and the crushing panic of having to be impressive enough for her not to destroy him like the gimp he actually is.

Of course, I am monumentally inept at interpreting any form of non-verbal communication and so am making all of this much, much harder than it ever needs to be. But even verbal communication is no guarantee. The internet is a godsend in this terrible ordeal. We all adopt outer skins that change from person to person. Our attitudes, confidence, even our accents change, depending on who we are with. The internet, on the other hand, is in some ways really only talking to yourself. There is much less risk - I get to edit my emails to people, I get to re-read my blogs. Crap stuff I excise, good stuff I magnify. I get to look a lot more fluent here than I really am. Do you think I could maintain this level of cool in the real world? Get real, daddy-o.

At least, that's how it feels from in my shoes. Perhaps I'm right. Perhaps I'm well wrong. Perhaps this whole posting is terribly offensive to women from beginning to end. If so, I am truly sorry. In my defence, the first bits were about cricket, and that was more boring than crass. But I am aware that what I may think of as endearing whimsy could read as either endearing whimsy, but also the sociopathic bile of a man saving up all his anger and rage for the day he can lay his hands on some kind of doomsday laser. Starting a posting with "I don't want to sound bitter, but..." basically says "I am bitter and you are going to hear about it."

I know one thing, though, Never write blog entries on gloomy evenings. I'm off to watch Arrested Development until my eyeballs bleed. Hardcore.

Good night, and good luck
Dougal

Sparky

Ho Ho Ho

Well, has been the coldest winter ever, ever, ever. The Daily Express said it would get down to minus fifteen degrees, but then blamed immigrants, Tony Blair and the French, so shouldn't be taken too seriously. The map on the BBC News had quite a lot of blue on it, and that wasn't just the sea. Minus four. But I don't remember waking to find Scotland has floated away, torn by icebergs from Albion's frozen earth. And it snowed again today. I bought some new spark plugs to ensure my horribly unreliable car would stand a chance of starting when I require it, only to find that I have one odd spark plug. French cars, man. Luckily I have a big coat.

I was once in Scotland on the night it hit -18. We were spending New Year in a cottage in Banchory and the lights had gone out. Whilst we waited for the man from Scottish Hydroelectricity, we ate a week's worth of cheeseboard and drank all the port. In the resulting orgy of nausea (alleviated only by some vigorous Cealidh dancing) we forgot we had put some cans of lager in a snowdrift to cool, and so woke to find they had all burst. Similarly, I was eight when a huge blizzard hit South-East England in January 1987. It didn't get about -13 all day and dumped four feet of snow on Sheppey. I promptly went out, got my thumb stuck in the front door until it bled and so spent the rest of the fortnight the Island was snowed in, indoors, doped to the gills on junior asprin.

It's strange how where you are from exercises a kind of hold. Sheerness is a right dump, and most of Kent's towns now stagger under the weight of lagery twats and violent teenage mums. I suppose it always was - Sheerness was a naval town, and as Gibraltar and Plymouth prove, they are never especially shiny places - but I don't remember it like that. I remember endless summers, Richmond County Primary and hurting myself on all manner of trees, bikes and stinging nettles. I went back last year for my Nan's birthday, and driving round was amazed at how narrow and salt-blown it all is. I'm sure it used to be bigger, but then I always say that, especially about Cadbury's Creme Eggs. The gang who stole £53 million last weekend were holed up on Sheppey, I know it. The Great Train Robbers hid there, too. It has two maximum security prisons. It has, in the lingo, form. It does seem that they haven't managed to even leave the county, let alone the country, so where's more out-of-the-way? Plus the police found two abandoned cars on the northbound side of the A249 at Detling. Suspicous.

Sorry, I'm being parochial. I try to be international in my writings, but it can get hard to keep it up, and sometimes I can get provoked. I got an email from someone on Myspace slagging me off. Apparently he couldn't understand some references. "dude, yr blog sux! whos paul coplinwood?" it began. He then impugned my use of British spelling and references to Jackanory. A quick look at his page (terrible HTML and pictures that haven't been resized) showed me he was a 17 year-old high school student from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, whose interests were listed as "football n titties!" and whose favourite music was the music of Puddle Of Mudd. This is my reply;

Dear Jonester

Thanks for your message yesterday. I am glad you read my blog, but was upset to see that you didn't enjoy it. I endeavour to meet high editorial standards whilst retaining a readlable and light style. Also, in answer to your issues with my choice of references and spelling I will say the following: I know who Jay Leno, Jon Stewart and The Chicago Bears are. I know what a whiffle ball is. I know the rules of American Football and baseball. I know how you spell colour, favour, honour, centre, aluminium and axe. I know where Baton Rouge is. I know all of these things despite living some 4000 miles away from you. You struggle with a reference to the British Prime Minister.

Make the fucking effort, bub.

Love
Doug

Grr. An American friend on Myspace said that this was just the attitude to take as most of her countrymen and -women are thoroughgoing morons. She's in a better position to say, but I don't like to badmouth anyone, and out of 300,000,000 Americans I have met about twenty. I met a lot of them in youth hostels. People travelling on their own were unfailingly lovely, such as Mindy, a girl from Kansas who revolutionised my life by telling me how to pack a backpack properly. There was Tim, the bloke from Minnesota in Berlin who shook Bill Clinton's hand at a bookshop on Unter den Linden, and a sweet and generous woman from San Bernardino called Mariah who was made even more so in a bar in Dresden by her being unable to work out quite how many dollars there were to the Euro. Then again, the groups of recent high school graduates who had come to Amsterdam solely to buy drugs and look at prostitutes were not so welcome. "USA, USA, USA," they shouted at three am, full of sexual frustration, skunk and Oranjeboom. "We know," shouted everyone else, and called the police. I imagine The Jonester would fit in well. There was also the girl from California at my German university who was without doubt the rudest person I have ever met. But I think she was actually a bit mental, so I reserved judgement.

Well, as ever, I have lost track of what it was I meant to talk about. I was going to talk about posh pesople today (the horsey woman I saw at Harborough station with a huge dog, the utter buffoon with a deep voice and lantern jaw I saw on a news report about the male-female pay gap who saw fit to compare a woman having 9 months maternity leave with a man going backpacking, get this, in front of his girlfriend) but look, I got distracted. Also, I keep looking to see if The Jonester has replied. Nothing yet, but given a following wind and a good result for the Republicans in the midterms, I may be in real trouble.

Good night, and good luck
Dougal