NYE

It’s New Year’s Eve.  A time for quiet reflection; for anticipation of change and growth; for getting utterly totalled and starting the year in a pool of quiet, hungover regret. The latter two are yet to come, it still being the morning.  Long gone are the days are when I could start celebrations before midday and remain standing beyond the Six O’Clock News.  Now, I have to postpone the first drink until well into the evening if I am to avoid being the King of Early Doors.

 Many years of Bacchic indulgence have taught me that nothing really interesting happens before midnight, when Cinderella and all the other debutantes have scuttled off back to their cold kitchens to sit amongst mice, or in front of their aga, drinking Mint Options and listening to back end of Radio 4 before bed. During my youth, I lived by this maxim: the later the night, the fuller the life.  I didn’t achieve a great deal during this period of my life, coincidentally. Apart from becoming a skilled martini mixer. And a champion smoker of fags.

The importance of New Year’s Eve has rollercoastered over the years.  That is, there have been slow ones, fast ones, headlong plunges into murky abysses, loud screaming ones, quiet anticipatory ones which never quite live up to expectations, and horribly expensive ones which are over before you really know what’s going on, and which leave you with a blur of colours for memories, and little else. I think they were the best. But I’m not quite sure.

 I remember once leaving a pub at a quarter to midnight, spending midnight itself on the tube with a squadron of party comrades, and drinking and smoking on same tube.  What strikes me most is that no-one was bothered we were smoking on the tube.  There was a general air of insouciance – it’s New Year’s Eve, let shit happen.  I suspect if I were to light up on the tube now, I’d be locked up, and I wouldn’t even deign to complain. Those were more innocent times, the likes of which we shall never see again.  

I suspect my celebrations will involve a few home tipples, a trip to a late night pub, and a moment when I decide shots will be a great idea, followed closely by a cab home. Fairly tame, but very age-appropriate.

Whatever it is you plan to do –whether you’re already on the Jaegerbombs and chemical bumps, or you plan a nice evening in with a bottle of port, the remnants of a Christmas cheeseboard and Classic FM, or something between the spectrum of nihilistic hedonism and cosy tweeness, enjoy.  But remember, the numbers don’t matter.  Two Thousand and Twelve and Two Eleven are artificial constructs. Tomorrow will be a variant on today, there will be no magical transformation at midnight as the stars realign and a new era crashes in.  We mark time for many reasons, reflection, anticipation, so we know when to turn on the TV to watch whatever shite is going to kill a bit more time. But that's all they are. An imposition on the chaos of  existence so we can down the days between weekends.

For what is life, other than killing time between birth and death? The dates remind us – we’re not here forever, but we are here now. This is your life. Get out there and live it.  Even if tomorrow you regret it. It’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t.  

It'sss Christmassss!!!!!!

At my work Christmas do on Friday afternoon*, after a few afternoon warmers, and a decision that driving home was going to be a Saturday morning activity rather than a Friday afternoon one, the conversation turned to favourite Christmas songs.  The results were fairly predictable – a majority vote for Fairytale of New York, the youngest member of staff showing both their age  and ignorance by claiming supremacy for Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is Everything Including the Head of John the Baptist ( or whatever it was she sang), and my vote for David Bowie and Bing Crosby. Because I’m cooler than everyone else, and occasionally people need to be reminded of that fact.**  

The conversation quickly moved on to who fancied whom, festive tales of throwing up at parties and other gastric incidents, and what everyone wanted for Christmas versus the depressing reality of what everyone would probably get.  I want a vintage Rickenbacker.  I will, undoubtedly, get some kind of shaving kit, chocolates, and probably something electronic that I already have, like a Kindle or toothbrush. ***

The following day, groaning on my sofa, I read an article in The Guardian in which a group of ‘experts’ had a similar musical conversation, giving their judgment on popular Christmas tunes.  Fairytale was one of the songs, as you’d expect, and Mariah was there, just to remind us that Christmas and Free Market Capitalism go hand in hand, and there was also the unwelcome appearance of Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Whine, to remind us why Christianity and Christmas should be kept very far apart.  Lennon’s Merry Xmas (War is Over) was also there, to make us feel guilty that we’re all running around whinging about not getting Rickenbackers rather than out rescuing orphans and all that worthy shit.

What happened next has shaken my grip on the world and existence itself.  One of the experts is the Professor of Music at some shitty university (Bristol, I think. Not the one I went to. Ergo, a shitty university), and she bitched about Fairytale in a manner that suggested she must have something personal against Shane McGowan, Kirtsy MacColl and the whole of Ireland. I can only suggest Shane nicked her pint once, or she looks like Elvis and used to work in a chip shop.**** She gave the song 0/10, which I, I believe, was a little ungenerous. 

So, a song which many people claim is the best Christmas song ever (although it isn’t) is judged, by an educated elite, to be so poor as to not even register the merit to gain one pitiful mark.  Or, to put it another way, she thinks it is so utterly shite  that the world would be a better place if it had never been recorded.  She must really hate the Irish.

But there’s more.

I can only assume that Bristol University’s Music Department is some sort of Situationist Art Installment, or an elaborate practical joke, because there are literally no other explanations for this: she gave Cliff Ten Out of Ten.  This piss poor excuse for a sentient human, who is responsible for the musical education of future generations, and presunably gets paid for it, not only judges Cliff to better than The Pogues, but deems that this earshite piece of aural cockwash is Perfect. It is the Sine Qua Non of Christmas music; it is flawless, unimprovable and untouchable; the apotheosis of Yuletide tunery. There is nowhere left to go from here.

Of course, she’s talking bollocks. Cliff’s song is without doubt one of the worst products of human endeavour. When I have the misfortune to hear it, I wish our ancestors had never evolved opposable thumbs and tool usage.  Either that or our simian cousins would come down from the trees, rise up in a massed army and singlehandedly destroy every recording of this travesty of music, disembowel Cliff and, while they’re here, set fire to the Bristol University School of Music.

Of course, this is Christmas, and you never get want you want unless you buy it yourself. I’m going back down to  my basement with my Milton Bradley Junior Genetics Kit to continue my attempt to create Supermonkeys. Hope you all have Cliff-free Christmas

*In the 6^th Form common room, 24 quid a head. No free booze. Anyone complaining about Public Sector pensions can Fuck Right Off

       **  Or I’m trying too hard.

      *** If you know me, and you’ve bought anything that falls into this category, don’t worry.   I have eBay.

**** I was going to make a boat joke, but even I have boundaries. 

Legal Note: I'm not really suggesting that this 'person' hates the Irish. Stop writing that email to your lawyers. 

Mind Yer PMQs

I had the privilege of being able to listen to Prime Minister’s Questions live today, as I was in bed, on strike, rather than teaching a Year Seven Class as I would ordinarily be doing.

By privilege, I do of course mean Utter Misfortune, and by Prime Minister I mean PigShitBrainsDave.

I do occasionally read reaction and analysis to PMQs, but wasn’t really aware of the full embarrassment of the thing.  It was like listening to a bunch of ill-informed sixth form students, with clear sociopathic tendencies, arguing over whose mother was ugliest,  while standing in a room filled variously with lowing cattle, hyperactive geese and dying elephants. 

The centerpiece of the affair was Miliband Junior attempting to give PSBD a grilling on his utter failure as both a politician and a human being, but struggling to do so because of the noise. And his own limitations as a a public debater. 

Fortunately, his adversary is equally limited on substance and was reminiscent of one of Orwell’s more successful pigs claiming that all animals are equal but David Cameron is a more equal pig than others.  Every word he says communicates not so much a grasp of the world in which he lives, or indeed, in which the rest of us live, but that all he really wants to do is , in the immortal (and ironic) words of the great Jello Biafra, Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill the Poor. Donkey fucking pig felcher.

I’ll lay my cards on the table – I hate David Cameron more than I hate Alex Ferguson, and I really hate Alex Ferguson.  There are fewer people who have brought misery to my life over the last twenty years.

I don’t hate Dave just because he’s rich, or successful, or a Tory, although the combination is one to which I am vehemently antithetical. I hate Dave because he clearly wants to start a class war, and return to the glory days of workhouses, Modest Proposals and Caligula-esque social divisions. 

Hence today’s strike.

I’ve been on strike today because I do a vital job for a reasonable wage, albeit a modest wage compared to people of a comparable level of education and training in the private sector.  Along with everyone else who works in the public sector, there are few perks to the job.  Christmas parties are not paid for, there are no bonuses. In times of plenty, there are no massive pay rises or corporate jollies. When the financial shit hits the fan of What The Fuck Do We Do Now, we’re the first to be smacked in the pecuniary face. 

The sole perk for most public sector workers is that there is a reasonable pension to take the bitter edge off the approach to death as we hit our dotage*. Private sector pensions may not be as well subsidised, but if I worked in the private sector I would have been earning shit load more money than I have been, and would have been able to make much larger contributions to my own private pension.  I don’t, because I have a sense of social responsibility.  I’ve chosen to earn less than my peers, to pursue a career which means I drive a Micra, can only afford a faux-aged Fender rather than real vintage one, and which means my holidays are more likely to be spent in a tent I France than a hotel in Dubai.

The usual refrain when I tell people that I’m a teacher is ‘I couldn’t do what you do.’  If Eton-educated, son of a millionaire, husband of minor aristocracy, former member of The Bullingdon Club and all round parody of a ruling elite gets his way, it’ll be ‘I wouldn’t do your job.’

Support the strikes. Do it for the kids.

*I also get great holidays. There’s no denying it.

Muskahounds are always ready

The overtimely death of Jimmy Savile came as shock to anyone beyond the age of thirty-five this week. Shocked not so much by the actual death, but by the fact that he hadn’t died ages ago, and then wearily slipped out of our collective consciousness and onto the graying mists of forgetfulness, in much the same way as Jill Dando, the dead one from Westlife*, and Jesus.

Jimmy Savile is famous, of course, for selflessly bringing the dreams of literally tens of children true, providing those dreams meant meeting a celebrity generous or desperate enough to appear on Big Jim’s seminal show Jim’ll Fix It. And by seminal, I do, of course, mean it was big bag of funky smelling semen. Metaphorically speaking, of course. The kids were generally anodyne but grateful, and the celebs were dull, dull, dull.

It did also help if said kid had some ailment or disability.  It was, essentially, a Sunday Tea Time Freak Show, masquerading as Clean Family Fun.

It was, like many programmes from my childhood, dreadful shite which was watchable in the same way that you watch those TV screens in larger Post Offices telling you about the wonders of Post Office Insurance, and Post Office Doggy Treats, and Postland, Postland Uber Alles. You watch it, because you’re there, and it’s on.  You watched Uncle Jim with the kiddies on his knees because it was raining outside, The Love Boat had finished on ITV, and there were no other channels. Except BBC2, which was never a viable option for a child. There be’d monsters.

I suspect the same principle of Its This Or Nothing Except Maybe Your Homework Or Talking To Your Family which was behind the televisual success of other much-feted but ultimately really quite duff stalwarts of the small screen such as Blue Peter, John Craven’s Newsround and Jackanory**.  Why Don’t You was really pretty shit too, once the theme music was over, and Playschool was always ruined by the midway visit to a milk-bottling factory, in which a grumpy little man with a tache and bushy eyebrows would be filmed watching milk getting bottled and looking nervous, as if he knew that as soon as the cameras stopped rolling, he would be ritually and violently sacrificed to appease the gods of the BBC.  

And Tiswas. God, I hated Tiswas.

I know this is controversial, but I don’t care who thinks Tiswas was good. It wasn’t. It was hot shit on a stick. It was like spending Saturday morning with the ADHD kid who was ruining your education during the week by dicking around at school like an underfed whirling dervish on Crystal Meth. If Tiswas was a child, it would be snotty, skinny and mercilessly beaten at playtime twice weekly. Tiswas: a bullied child in TV form.

 

I preferred Swap Shop, although admitting this  has always been social suicide, especially at those parties in your late teens when you realise your childhood is over and everyone starts reminiscing about the TV We Watched When We Were Kids***.

Admitting to preferring Swap Shop to Tiswas was tantamount to proudly admitting to being a Young Conserative and wearing your hair in a side-parting. It was very much not cool. But sometimes, the truth is not cool. Sometimes one must sacrifice being accepted by the herd in exchange for personal integrity.

 Having said that, Swap Shop was also shit. Just not as shit as Tiswas.

And don’t even get me started on No.73. 

I’m off to watch episodes of Dogtanian on Youtube and remind myself, that lurking in every black sky of cloudy evil there is a slither of a silver lining. It might be the shiny glint of a pointy knife in the back of childhood memories, but it’s there.

I hope it’s as good as a I remember.

P.S  Dear Mr ‘Fix-It’. I asked to meet Adam Ant. You never replied. You fucker.

*Or was it Boyzone?

**Except the one with Rik Mayall.

***This would invariably involve discussing The Magic Roundabout characters as drug types, sexual innuendo in Rainbow, and lies about Captain Pugwash. 

Sniffles

I’m just coming out of a bout of cold. Not the chilly isn’t-the-weather-turning kind, but the Please Stop Sweating My Head Hurts Ow Ow Ow kind.  The problem with a cold is that if you tell people you can’t come into work/go to the pub/make your own Lemsip because you’ve got a cold, you tend to be on the receiving end of a sneer, and a scowling look which says You Workshy Piss-taking Lightweight Motherfucker.  The solution to this, obviously, is to take a trot to the other end of the snot spectrum, and Have Flu.

I’m reluctant to participate in this particular technique, because I’ve had flu proper, and it makes a nasty, headshitting, bone-aching, sweatfest cold seem like a summer stroll, in a well-manicured park, in comparison.  From what I remember it was somewhere between Ketamine, Acid and being made of a thick mixture of tepid vomit and broken glass.  I spent a week in bed delirious, asleep,  or, in moments of lucidity, desperately hoping I was on the mend so I could get to the pub. I went a week without a drink.  I never want flu again.

It is out of respect for the Flu Gods (may they never strike me down again) that I don’t cross the boundary between Killer Cold and Bona Fide Flu.  The paucity of the English Language lets us down again.  We need a word which sits neatly on the spectrum, in the middle, laughing at the sniffle and minor ache that a standard Lempsip can mask, but trembling in fear at the Flu which kills like an American Student with a grudge and bag of guns.

In the animal kingdom, these hybrids take the simple and make it special. Take a lion and a tiger, some cat KY and whatever the feline equivalent of a dinner date and Barry White is. Take the offspring of said coupling, and choose one of two options. If the lion is the daddy, it’s a liger*. If a tiger takes parental responsibilities, it’s a tion. Proof that patriarchal priority is not a human construct, but exist in the animal kingdom too.  Faultless logic. Ahem.

Moving swiftly on.

This wouldn’t work for the cold/flu hybrid. ‘I’ve got a fold’ sounds, to me, to be vaguely sexually, but not pleasantly so. ‘I’ve got a clu’ sounds like a Scooby-Doo re-enactment. I suggest, therefore, that it is time to neologise, and step forth into new linguistic territory. From now, a cold which is more like the runny nose and ache of a particularly chemical night out, will remain a ‘sniffle’. Flu remains flu. It doesn’t need pig-, bird-, cat-or donkey-  in front of it to sound unpleasant.  (Please don’t tell me you’ve got bird flu. I don’t tell you I’ve got monkey-AIDS*).  And in the middle, the cold that ruins Christmas from a great height;that wipes out November weekends in sheets of sweat; which kills the occasional frail old lady who forgets to stock up on Lemsip. This beast shall, henceforth, be known as snotfuckery. Please spread the word with your germs.

*Pretty much Napoleon Dynamite’s favourite animal

** Mostly because I don’t have AIDS. But if I did, I wouldn’t try to overegg the viral pudding by throwing the simian prefix into the package. ***

***I’m allowed to make jokes about AIDS, South Park said so. I’m a product of the TV generation.

Work is a Four Letter Word

One of the problems with keeping a blog with my own name on it is that I have to be very cautious about mentioning real people, or pissing off real people. I didn’t mention, for example, the friend who blah blah blah. Nor have I shared my opinions on the recent trend for short pencil skirts, for fear off the repercussions that might emanate from my girlf.*

I find myself in an unusual position at this present moment. I’ve started a new job, and nobody there knows that I e-scribble. I can, therefore, let rip fearlessly, like a man with Irritable Bowel Syndrome at a deaf convention.  So...

Unfortunately, the downside of this is that I don’t really know anyone well enough to have formed anything other than a fleeting impression. First impressions are that everyone is essentially superficially pleasant, tending towards the conservative side of life, and a bit mumsy. The younger staff look like embryonic versions of the old staff, and it’s all a bit Midwich Cuckoos. I hope I’m wrong, and beneath the still surface there is world of filth, vice and excitement, otherwise I may get bored. I suspect I’m going to be yawning and looking at my watch a lot. 

The thing about the workplace for me is that I generally resent the entire concept of getting up and having to do what I’m told so I can afford to drink, smoke and make contributions to a sensible  pension fund. I suspect it stems from watching Jeeves and Wooster as a teenager and wanting that carefree, work free life, and realising that, as I wasn’t born on an absolute pile, the life of an idle and  feckless drone wasn’t really an option. Gutted.

 To counter this simmering black-hearted resentment I’ve always relied on a workplace which is as equally social as requiring of actual productive work.  And, when I first entered the world of paid employment, this is what mostly I encountered.  Mostly because I was indentured in a call-centre wishing swift death on the public, with a bunch of other graduates who had also failed to look for a proper job and were similarly under a mental and emotional apocalypse.  The one perk of hating your job is that it drives you to drink, and many evenings were spent pissing away the pittance of a wage, drowning the dawning sense of the futility of life. Well that, and trying to pull anyone who’d have me.

I’ve had some exceptional experiences through work, and I’ve made some great friends.  I once bonded with a supervisor after explaining to him I’d be a little off form as I’d had a little too much party the night before.  He was very sympathetic to my predicament and sniffing as, he admitted, he too had spent the night being similarly careless with the party favours. My girlfriend was originally a workmate, a first year teacher in a school in New Zealand.  I miss my workmates from last year, with whom the day would disappear amidst teaching, filthy jokes and casually cutting insults.

However, in these times of Economic Uncertainty**, as the BBC calls our financial predicament, such luxuries are not always available.  For now, at least, Work is a place of work, a place where everything is pleasant but serious, and I have no outlet for scathing cynicism about the world in which live.

Until I work out how to break the firewall and get on Facebook. And if you see me there, and if I seem more vitriolic that usual, you know why. You fuckers.  

*I’ve dropped this in to see if she really does read this. If I get an earful about pencil skirts, and accusing her of being capable of giving me an earful, I’ll know she’s read it. That’s all this is, my love. A cunning trap.

** Why don’t they just say the economy is double plus bad. We live times of economic fuckedness, and the Tories are making it worse.  For once I’d love to hear on the news ‘In these times of oh-my-god-the-country-is-in-the-hands-a-gaggle-of-fuckwit-incompetents-and-we’re-all-going-to-die’.

New Life

I started a new job today. For some, this would be a time of excitement, a new challenge to feast upon, a gateway into a world of new friends, new opportunities, new newy stuff. 

Indeed, I’ve always loved The New.  In my youth, there was the thrill of changing schools and hoping it’ll somehow make learning easier and there’ll be someone desperate to go out with you, as an adult, the buzz of a new job and the promise of becoming financially solvent, and throughout my life,  the unknown pleasure of discovering new booze. Although it’s been about a gazillion years since I finally worked my way through all known types of alcohol.  Verdict? Campari tastes like earwax. The rest of it is pretty palatable.   

The embarkation into the untouched is often accompanied by a smorgasbord of mental and emotional states, in much the same way as dropping acid, but with less vivid colours. A dash of nerves, a slice of worry, a side of eager anticipation. I like to believe it’s a hangover from our pre-historic ancestors, out in the savannah, wandering aimlessly into the unchartered in search of food, shelter and, latterly, fame.  They would’ve crossed deserts, traversed jungles, not knowing whether their journey would end in the discovery of a banquet of plenty, or becoming a banquet of plenty.

Partly I like to think this to remind myself we are connected, across millennia, though space and time, with that diaspora, starting in deepest Africa and forging its way into the world, into the East, into the Americas, into Milton Keynes. Partly I like to think of it for that fervent romantic idea, but mostly it’s to remind me that I believe in evolution, so I can feel intellectually smug, even if spiritually bereft. It’s a fair trade-off. 

Last night however, I felt none of these things.  I wasn’t brimming with happy suspense, like a cat in bag, nor edgily nervous, like the same cat. I was indifferent. I went to bed a little earlier, but that was my only concession.  And I slept pretty well. 

I suspect this means one of two things. Either I’m the endpoint of evolution, or, more likely, I’ve changed schools/jobs/addresses/cigarette brands so often that there is nothing new about The New. My fickle nature has killed the thrill of change.  Variety may be the spice of life, but even a diet of curry needs a plain nan. 

In order to counter this, I’ve decided to take drastic action.  I’m going to not leave my job, not pack up my troubles in a Berghaus kit bag, and not hit the hippy trail in India, nor the Inca trail in Peru. I’m heading for darkest dull routine.  It’s new for me. I’m quite excited.

When Worlds Collide

I've tried to avoid writing on the attacks on the World Trade Centre, because I didn't want offend anyone. But fuck it. I'm going to. Anyway. the rest of the Western World is at it, so why can't I?

It is well-known that when Dubya was informed about the attacks on the Twin Towers he was in classroom reading a book with some primary school children, an action for which he was widely criticised.  I think this is a little unfair.  If I had nearly read a whole book for the first time in my life, I’d be loathe to put it down because the country of which I was President was seemingly under attack and three thousand people had just died in downtown New York.  Besides, I bet he really wanted to know what was going to happen to that hungry little caterpillar, and the world could wait an hour or two while he finished the remaining few pages.

I remember when the towers were attacked that I found it surprising, and horrific, but not shocking.  Anyone outside of The States was aware that the world was at best ambivalent towards it* and quite often antagonistic. Ask the Vietnamese. Or Guatemalans. Or Palestinians. Or French film directors.  So when in the news, in the days following the attack, we saw footage of people celebrating, burning American flags and dancing like drunken monkeys, it seemed to me that this would be a good time for reflection.  A time to ask ‘ Why has this happened?’. A pertinent moment in history for the USA to consider its role in the recent global history.

What we got instead was a machismoid explosion of unblinking patriotism.  The mindless chant of Yoo-Ess-Ay, the If You’re Not With Us You’e A Satanic Fuckbag, the search for Someone To Blame.

It’s a common reaction. Maybe it’s instinctual, maybe it’s cultural. But when something bad happens to us, our first knee-jerk is often WhoTheFuckDidThat? Quite often followed by AndHowDoIFuckThemUp? On a personal level, this will most usually result in, at most, light swearing. Quite often under the breath, with inner dreams of bloody revenge against the person we think cut us up at the traffic lights. Or took the last disposable barbecue from Asda. Or that twat in the black on the field who fails to notice that Wales’ kicked goal was possibly between the posts. We look to blame, even though sometimes, shit just happens.

The problem Dubya and his gang of blamers faced was that there were people who were responsible for the murders of over three thousand people.  Unfortunately, those were people were dead. Short of attempting a mystical quest to the Underworld to persuading Hades to let him bang out some Extraordinary Rendition, there was nothing Dubs could do to those people. There was no-one to hit back at. This was a perfect opportunity for reflection.

Unless you realise that Dubya has logic which works beyond that of the common-or-garden human. I suspect he realised that he didn’t like the attackers, and he didn’t like the Taliban. Therefore, as these two have his dislike in common, they must be the same. Ergo, the Taliban, a group of militants based in the mountains of Afghanistan were the same as educated Saudis with pilots’ licences, a bag full of vague grievances and a fierce drive to get laid by virgins.

The rest is history. And the curse of humanity is that we are doomed to learn nothing from history. Ten years on, Afghanistan and Iraq are changed, but violently unstable, The States are more expectant of an attack than ever, and they are still held in uncertain ambivalence beyond their borders.

I’d like to dedicate this to anyone who died needlessly in those attacks, and anyone who has died needlessly as a result of reactions to those attacks.  Ten years on, at a time of remembrance, let this also be a time for reflection and realisation.  When you try to impose yourself and your beliefs on people, and especially if you do that with violence, your achievement is the same.  You become a monolith, and people want to bring you down.

Darth Vader realised this, when he finally chose to sacrifice himself to bring down the Empire he had helped create.  Let’s take a lesson from the book of Jedi. Fear and anger lead to the Dark Side, and it’s called the Dark Side for a reason. Because it’s dark. What we need to do is stay in the light. It’s shinier.

*I don’t know whether to treat The States as a singular or plural.  I’ll do whatever feels best. I’m a bit Ayn Rand like that.

Back to School

Over the land night is falling. It is falling over the dark central plain of Birmingham, the treeless hills of Wales, falling softly on the Manchester Ship Canal and, farther Northward, softly falling on the dark mutinous estates of Newcastle. And as it falls, the late summer evenings hang heavy with the threat of imminent endings. Children across the country are preparing themselves for a future pregnant with potential and possibility*. It’s Back to School time.

Although customers of certain supermarkets could be forgiven for thinking that the schools holidays finished about five weeks ago, because that’s when Asda started banging out their cheap school uniforms and unreliable stationery. And advertising these in massive signs greeting everyone at the entrance. Just to let any kid unfortunate enough to see them know that their freedom isn’t going to last forever, so don’t get carried away. You may feel footloose and fancy free now, children, but in five weeks, you’ll be back in the hard grind of dry academic routine. A bit like being given a picture of a tombstone when you’re twenty, just to let you know that it’s all going to come to massive grinding halt one day.

At least, that’s how I see it.

I must admit, I was decidedly ambivalent about the end of the summer of the holidays when I was younger. In July, that start of the six weeks holidays spread before me, a picnic blanket of opportunity, and I would have fizzy notions of a summer of fun, and love, and saxophone solos, a bit like an old Coke advert.

 In reality, what I’d mostly get was grey drizzle, a family argument in Blackpool and unfulfilled romances with girls I’d briefly met at Moss Side Swimming Pool, girls with names like Melody or Tracy.  Heady days.

The start of the fresh school year meant, for me, the chance to lose myself in learning, to re-invent myself anew to my classmates. The warm still evenings as summer began to dwindle still carried enough of that Coke advert atmosphere for post-school afternoons and evenings to have the buzz of frivolous youth. Admittedly, about two weeks in I’d be behind with most of my homework, my new pens would have all run out, and my new shiny haircut would be getting its familiar uncontrollable nylon-sheen curliness. But those first two weeks were a brave new world, a chance at a pivotal life-changing progression, a living dream.

It’s a reason I still love this time of the year.  The swan song of summer is starting, but Autumn is some way off yet.  The nostalgia of recent holidays and barbecues and beers is starting to solidify, and I feel like a new phase is about to Kick Out the Jams**. Tomorrow, I will get a haircut, and maybe even buy a new pen.

And this year, I won’t fall behind with my homework. I promise.

*Apart from the one’s who aren’t
**Motherfuckers

Festival Frivolities

In Jospeh Conrad’s Heart of Darkness a trader, Kurtz, disappears into the Congolese jungle while working for some Belgian Colonial Exploitation Machine, or something like that , and is eventually found having, in the popular parlance of the time, gone native. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies charts the similar descent of a group of shipwrecked boys as they shed the niceties of civilisation for the more entertaining activities of daubing themselves in warpaint, doing unspeakable acts to wild pigs, and picking on the fat kid.  As with Kurtz, this transformation takes some time. Not as long as it takes David Cameron to come back from his 9k-a-week holiday when the country he’s supposed to be leading erupts into spontaneous aggressive street parties, or ‘looting’ if you prefer. No, not that long, but they are not overnight transformations.

Considering that, I’m convinced that there be some kind of temporal distortion field* around Reading every late August because when I arrived at the festival last Thursday afternoon, and the gates had been open less than twenty four hours, I was greeted with a sight reminiscent of El Greco’s depictions of hell, but with more Day-Glo facepaint and cans of shit lager.

Within the space of a day a mass of what I imagined had been, just two days earlier, mostly functioning members of society had transmogrified into a phantasmagoria of mud-dwelling, hollering, Stigs-of-the-Dump. I suspect some of the younger members had seen the famous images of the mud-crusted in reports of festivals of yesteryear, and had spent the first few hours rolling around on the ground to cultivate the look of a veteran. Some people were clearly just relieved to give into their inner laziness and not have to wash or change any clothes. Because it is such an effort, as we all know. However, I suspect the majority of people were more concerned with conducting a contained experiment to see how twatted a human can get without a total cheese-brained meltdown.  They could have saved themselves a lot of time and money and asked me. I’ve already conducted this experiment. The answer is Very.

I went to my first festival when I was eighteen, travelling all the way from Manchester, on a baking hot day, on a National Express coach. It was like a pilgrimage, a rite-of-passage. There was a sense that, like the Native American Sun Dance Ritual** without the experience of Music Festival no amount of Sisters of Mercy T-shirts, or Stone Roses Twelve-inches could allow you to be considered a true disciple of an Alternative Music Scene**.

The first Reading Festival Proper was in 1971, and it must have been absolutely fucking awesome as I’ve met a shedload of people who’ve complained about how it used to be much better, and how it’s gone more downhill than a fat cheese on Cooper’s Hill.  This must mean that every year is worse than the previous, and that eventually it’s downward trajectory will mean it is so shite that it will cause a black hole of musical evil to rip open the planet, and we’ll be left in a perpetual hell of Jedward and Milli Vanilli miming to the Bay City Rollers. With bongos.  

Alternatively, these people are talking through their greying rectums (recta?) and the past is really like a foreign country.  While you’re there it’s a bit Meh, but when you got home and look at your photos after a few beers you only remember the sun and architecture, and forget the dysentery and ouzo.

I’ve already forgotten the horror of the toilets, and have fond memories of sipping cider in the sunshine. The water torture of a slightly leaky tent has been fuzzed out by the reassuring image of a soft pitter-patter on the protective canvas. And where once there were some excruciatingly irritating public school tossers promoting psychopathic thoughts of class war and petrol-bombed tents, there are now vague reflections of carefree youth, riding the wave of the contemporary Sun Dance.

 Now they are no longer the innocent, the untried.  Having experienced their first festival, they are warriors of the scene. Yes, they too can now join their elders in reflecting on how great everything used to be when we were kids, and how shit everything is now. In the words of the Great Colonial Overlord Rudyard Kipling, if you too, my son, can keep your head for a weekend while drinking watery lager , while all around are losing theirs in K-holes and the like, then you are a man. Or at least, you’re no longer a festival virgin, and that’s gotta be worth something.

*Or whatever those things from Star Trek are called

** Which sounds very fucking painful : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Dance

***Or maybe it was just me and my insecurity.

Dribble

Yesterday evening, as I sipped a refreshing summer cooler*, the Cornish sky was kissed with searing pinks and reds, flamed with a glowing orange, shitfaced with colour.  It was the kind of summer sky which grabs the heart and atomises it.  This morning I looked out of my bedroom window and half expected to see Noah and all his wee beasties looking smug and dry in their Godboat, so plentiful was the rain. It was truly shitting down. Luckily I'd cashed in my year's worth of Nectar points for a rather fetching floral umbrella so at least I can pretend it's sunny when it's actually raining sideways.

Now the sky is grey and there is an all-encompassing drizzling mist across the ground. It is clearly summer in England. I differentiate England from the rest of Britain, because I’ve never seen anything but rain in a Welsh summer, Scottish summers are made of midges, and I was mostly in the pub when I went to Ireland, and so don’t feel qualified to speak about the Emerald outdoors. I’m sure it’s there, in the same way that the centre of the earth is there. I’m vaguely aware of it,  but it never really concerns me.

It is telling that the words British Summer Time do not stereotypically invoke visions of turquoise sunsets, sticky thick heat and bronzed bodies lazily going about their daily lives but rather a reminder to change your clocks and feel jetlagged at work for half a week. I suspect this deed is less to do with the changing light of days and more to do with the fact that we need a marker so we can say for definite that it is summer because, although the weather might bear witness to the contrary, we’ve changed our clocks, so it has to be summer.

I didn’t really believe people who claimed that a pre-occupation with weather was peculiarly British trait when I was younger, because I thought stereotypes were lazy, and that we didn’t really talk about the weather ad nauseam. As I’ve grown older and wiser and rounder, I found that the reason for many stereotypes is a tenuous grounding in reality. Northeners are friendlier (or more intrusive, if you’d prefer), goalkeepers and drummers are all slightly nuts, and Tories are callous heartless tautological arseholes.

And the British, generally, talk about the weather. Frequently. I suspect there are two reasons for this. One is as a conversational ‘in’, especially with strangers/potential romances. Lots of Rain We’re Having opens the gates for Nice Eyes leading to Here’s My Number which swiftly steps into I Do and it all ends happily with You’ll Hear from my Lawyer.

The second reason is that we have lots of it, over forty-nine different flavours, and it can’t be taken for granted.  We spend our lives subconsciously noting how minute atmospheric pressure changes mean that although, yes, the sky is blue, and yes, although the sun is battering down, it is clearly going to start raining like a motherfucker in twenty minutes. More so if you leave house without a coat.  This ingrained, hypersensitive barometer allows us to negotiate our way through the fickle meteorological smorgasbord in which we are immersed.

But it comes at a price. Like the model train collector, or antique lawnmower collector you surprisingly find yourself talking to a party at which you know no-one else, expertise borders on obsession. I think it’s time we decided to shed this weather-obsessed image, and to promote ourselves globally with a more hip, glamorous image.  There must be other interests we share as a group of nations, something with more jazz and dazzle around which we can start all conversation.

It is with a sense of national obligation, therefore, that any conversation I have with anyone who is not a native Briton, and probably even if they are, will not be about the weather. It’s time to forge a new National Stereotype, to change our global image. Something sexy and dynamic, worthy of the Twenty First Century. A topic we can all unite about, about which we can all have an opinion or an anecdote. I’m going talk about Nectar Points. Join me in this brave new world. Do it for your country.


*Sainsbury's Vodka. Double Nectar Points