Bang and Blame.

I was listening to Any Answers on Radio 4 earlier today, as I do occasionally when I want to feel intellectually superior to the general public. I'm not claiming actual superiority per se, just the ability to tell the difference between the joint which links the humerus and ulma, and the orifice from which faecal matter is passed.

I use this image as the phrase 'faecal matter' was one which leapt energetically to the forefront of my mind in reaction to the opinions of a handful of contributors.

In keeping with the current spirit of the age there was a barrage of attack, a sheetwind of accusations of Skullduggery, Shiftlessness and General Ne'er-Do-Wellery amongst the poorer members of society, who are actively evading bettering themselves. It was most informative.

Indeed, I was more than glad to be enlightened about the plethora of employment opportunities available out there. There are untold golden doors leading forth, and we should encourage people to snap up gleaming career-paths such as zero-hour contracts at Sports Direct (Alan Pardew's  current job, seemingly), or  low-effort, high-yield roles in the field of black-market organ 'donation'*.  

And to highlight the wonder of these career-opportunities, we must make the carrot shine by smacking the shit out of people with the pointy stick of not paying any kind of benefit to the unemployed.  How did I not see the simplicity of this logic before?

Britain's soft-touch, over-indulgence of the feckless layabout class does nothing other than to encourage people to stay out of work, breeding like jack-rabbits, smoking like laboratory beagles and laughing at Ordinary, Hard-Working Families, all while watching Jeremy Kyle  and Bid-Up TV on their 52" Plasma flatscreens. It cannot continue.

Equally, I was beyond grateful for the enlightening fact that if we provide Child-Benefit for single-mothers with more than three offspring, we are only encouraging 'them' to keep popping the little buggers out.  I don't know why I had never thought of it, but the solution to this problem was there, as clear as day, dancing a little jig of revelation in front of my stupid, complacent face: don't support anyone with four** kids. Let the little fuckers starve. That'll teach  them to be born.

I used to think opinions like these belonged to a minority of insaners.  Worryingly, I'm coming into contact with them more and more frequently.  Speaking to an elderly relative recently I was moderately shocked*** that she was banging on about Romany coming over here like cockroaches, laying eggs, committing crime and depriving our own criminal lads of thievery opportunities in their own country. What's the world coming to when you can't mug old ladies in your own backyard because some benefit-claiming, Polish-Speaking Bulgarian Gypsy has already stolen all their stuff for scrap?

It is dishearteningly true that, as a teacher, I come into contact with this level of ill-conceived crazy on an almost hourly basis. Most popular questions of late have been 'Why are we giving benefits to illegal immigrants?' and 'Why can't we celebrate Easter any more?'.  Usually in the classroom, although sometimes in the staffroom.

I do try point out that if anyone is here illegally, it's unlikely they're registered to receive state help. And,if you want to celebrate a festival which commemorates some dude getting nailed to planks two-thousand years ago, then not only are you free to do so, but you've got a four-day weekend over which to do it.  Stuff yourself with chocolate for Jesus. 

Unfortunately, by this point, the other member of the conversation is usually staring into the distance, dreaming a world in which there are no poor, no strugglers, no dissenters, no rabble-rousers, no foreigners, no one in need of help, no-one angry at injustice. A world of beige Swastikas.

There is definite social-shift towards more right-wing attitudes riding the Zeitgeist.  I suspect it goes in cycles, as people grow dissatisfied with one general hue of the political-attitudes spectrum, there is a slide along to the other side, and then, after some time down that end, vice-versa.

I'm hoping that we're as far towards the right as we're going to get, and that people will start to question the course of the National Conversation, in much the same way that people are beginning to question the coll quotient of beards. They are not actually cool, but they are one-step away from living in the woods and shagging goats to assert some sort of misguided masculinity.

And I hope we are not on a slide towards further blame and accusation against those most in need. I hope this because, today, I read about the detrimental impact of zero-hours on the psychological well-being of those who are on them. I read about the rise in the need for food-banks in the sixth-richest country in the world.

I also read that Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles (Or is she Camiila Windsor now? I have no idea how the apportioning of names works in those levels of the German Nobility) charged the taxpayer £30,000 for a plane from Windsor to Scotland, for a personal trip. Because Lord Ears 'is always on duty'. I also read that the average annual salary for the CEOs of the top 100 companies in Britain is £4.4m.

And I wonder how, when we live a society like that, where the rich are, in the words of the song, getting richer, and the poor, in the words of another song, are getting rained on from a great height, that people don't look up to see why they're actually getting shafted, but look across, or look down, and see blame where there should be human solidarity.

Any answers?

* The latter was implied, rather than explicitly stated. I was listening to Radio Four, after all. Not BBC London.

** This may seem like an arbitrary number. It's not of course. Any less, and we'd be no better than those there Chinese communists. And besides, we need to keep breeding so we don't get outbred by them there Muslims, innit?

***Moderately . There does seem to be a correlation between ageing and being the Daily Mail in human form. 

In Defence of Shakespeare

It may seem a wee hubristic for me to assume that Shakespeare needs defending, given that he's outsold me by about a gazillion to one, but following a few conversations recently, I feel I need to grab a Stetson, pull on my boots, and get on my high horse.

I  was talking to a relative this weekend, and as invariably happens when you're a teacher, everyone who ever went to school* has  an opinion with what's wrong with education, and how it can be fixed. ***

The relative's current bugbear was Shakespeare. For those not aware, it is legally compulsory to teach Shakespeare in English secondary  schools.  This was the initial complaint, and it is one I can somewhat sympathise with. If Shakespeare's works are so good, why do they have to be compulsory? The sad answer, however,  is because Shakespeare is also difficult, and if it didn't have to be there, it'd be wiped off many a school curriculum faster than the smile of Phil Jones's face at the end of the 2011/2012 season.

This semi-reasonable point was swiftly followed by the unforgivably irrelevant.

'They don't even think Shakespeare wrote his plays, so why is everyone so Wow! about it?'

Apart from the issues of Who The Fuck Are 'They'? and Who The Fuck Is 'Everyone', this is a statement which bores to the core of the fabric of my being.  I shit you not.

There are bonds of family and kinship that provoke an inherent abhorrence against reckless, unbridled violence towards the members of your nearest and dearest. I was tempted to put them aside.

My main problem with this witless vacuity is that it seems pretty clear to me that it was rampant class prejudice which  lead to this cock-arsed idea that Shakespeare couldn't have written his plays, because he wasn't spat out of one of England's public schools, wasn't a member of the nobility. He wasn't, in short, the inbred offspring of two fat-necked chinless land-owning cousins from the shires, but was, instead,  the son of a glove-maker from the Midlands.

The other important things about this is that it is matters even less than William Hague's empty whinges in the  vague direction of Putin's embryonic invasion of Ukraine, while simultaneously the British government aren't prepared to sacrifice all that lovely Russian loot by imposing any kind of sanction.  It doesn't matter who wrote the plays and poems. When we talk about 'Shakespeare' we're talking about a body of work,  not a body of man.  Shakespeare is important in the words that exist, not in The Life and Times of a Glove-Making Yokel****.

And Shakespeare, the body of work, is brilliant. I fell in love with Macbeth (the play) at school, when I fell in love with Lady Macbeth  (the character, worryingly).  Like most snotty reactionaries I then drove my cultural tanks onto the lawns of The Bard, and started firing rounds of accusation. Mostly that Shakespeare  was a fuck-arse verbose wanker. I was always charmingly eloquent.

But I refound my love, and now try to pass it on, and to kindle at least a slice of that  love in my young charges, my Shakespeare padawans.

I gave a slightly less antagonistic version of the above in response to the unnamed relative.  The next ball in this game of Ignorance Tennis was a cracker:

'I bet if Shakespeare came back he'd be like 'That's not what I meant' to all these university professors who write about him.'

This is, to me, the equivalent of wearing a t-shirt which says  'I am a fucking moron, stab me'. No-one ever says to kids doing doughnuts in a Ford Escort round Aldi carparks, 'That's not what Henry Ford had in mind.'

In fact, if Shakespeare came back from that undiscover'd country from which no traveller doth return, and started bitching about how his writings were being misinterpreted, I'd tell him to sling his hook, encounter the darkness as a bride, and fuck off back to Deadland.  I'm no more interested in what he's got to say about his writing than wondering whether Yaya's Toure's equaliser in the Capital One Cup was deliberate or not. It was a thing of beauty. That is enough.

Shakespeare is divisive. But Shakespeare is complex. For every over-wrought, long-winded phrase, there's a finely-balanced, killer phrase which can encapsulate  tomes of philosophical weight in a few words. There are the famous ones: To be or not to be - the futility of existence, and the paradox of life, in six words. The beautiful ones: A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet - the arbitrary relationship between language and existence.

 And, of course, the lesser known gems: It's a game of two halves, and it's not over till Nasri says it's over.

Well done City, cheers Shakey.  

* Everyone **

** Of course, there are people who don't have the luck of access to education. I don't meet these people, unfortunately.

*** I hate to break this to you, but most of you are wrong. No offence, that's just the way it is. Live with it.

****Actually, his old man seems to be have been a pretty well-off small business older. Shakespeare is no more a yokel than Lily Allen, Damon All-Bran and Jamie Oliver are cockneys. 

Gerrorrff Moi Lahnd.

I've been for a pleasant afternoon amble in the Surrey countryside today, partly to clear out the Christmas Cobwebs, partly because tomorrow is Return to Work Monday - the double misery of a Monday and the end to the holidays. Factor in the the fact that it is January - the waking hangover of the calendar year - and you have a Holy Trinity of abject Misery.

Luckily, it was a head-clearer of a day.  No pesky distractions such as sunshine or dry, unsodden paths were to to be found anywhere. In fact, the majority of the paths seemed, like the earth itself, to have started commemorating the centenary of the First World War by emulating the conditions of the trenches of Flanders Field. Or maybe it was nature's protest about Michael Gove's jingoistic rewriting of the catalysts and conditions of that same war. Even the ground weeps when he speaks.

Regardless, there were paths, and they afforded a pleasant afternoon under grey, open skies, along the skeletal fingers of winterdead trees. Surrey is an opinion-splitter for me, as a place to walk. It is very pretty, and generally a gentle amble rather than a Let's-All-Go-To-Mount-Doom epic mountain trek.  Quaint, rather than rugged. A nice place for a nice, easy, Sunday stroll. 

The maggot in the ointment amongst this twee world of stone cottages and red telephone boxes is the level of  ostentation and suspicion inherent in the local folk.  The county reeks of money and isolationism. Whether in the array of superbly expensive vehicles in the drives of cottages which once would have been peopled by rural workers, but are now peopled by balding, middle-aged City workers, aiming to live a little slice of Ambridge. Whether in the looks of You're-Not-From-Round-Here in the dead eyes of every waxed-jacket, tweed-cap wearing would-be Lord of the Manor you pass. Whether in the huge barn conversions whacked in the middle of fields, where the established rights-of-way are often blocked , sometimes hidden, sometimes invisible.

These sweeping strokes of my digital pen are obviously not true of all. There are many paths which are well-maintained, many styles which function. But often you are made to feel as if you are trespassing, and that the gentrified version of Farmer Palmer will be lurking with intent behind every shadowy yew.

When I was younger I often heard the phrase 'Property is Theft'. It stuck me as slightly odd, because I definitely had not stolen any of my Star Wars figures or Action Men, and I clearly remember my mum actually paying for my bike. As I grew, I began to see that there was truth in this. 

Noone actually has a right to ownership of any land. We're all born on the planet, and it was here long before we were, and will be long after we've wiped ourselves out by not looking after it properly. Over the millennia groups of people staked a claim to areas of land, because that's where they and their ancestors lived,  and they were harder than you, so fuck off. Or, groups of people nicked land, because they were harder than you, and had bigger spears, or brighter flags. Most property has been thieved. At best, we can call ourselves custodians. In most cases, we're really borrowers. But in many cases, it is outright stealing. And stealing is wrong, as the Catholic Church of my childhood told me daily, from atop a chryselephatine altar.

But my bugbear today isn't those group land-grabs. That's a much wider field than I'm prepared to cross*. It's when individuals hog land. 

In Britain, we have a hard-fought-and-won right to use established rights of way. Paths, ancient and modern, which have been used regularly,can be deemed an established route open to all.  It is, for many, the only way that they are able to explore the wet, dank beauty of the British countryside.

And now, enter stage right (of course), Owen Paterson, an environment secretary so hostile to the environment that he is less suited to his role than Fred West's Babysitting Service or Jesus Christ's School of Revenge.

Mr Paterson wants land-thieves (or landowners, if you prefer), to be able to ignore these rights-of-way. That's Owen Paterson, who lives in a massive house, on a massive hill, in a massive field, surrounded by a massive wall, in the Shropshire Countryside. I'm not saying there's a conflict of interest, in the same way I wouldn't say David Cameron isn't trustworthy. It'd be like pointing up and shouting, 'Look - the sky!'.

Supporting climate-change-denying, badger-baiting, fracking-supporting Mr Paterson is popular television gobshite and all-round turdblood, Jeremy Clarckson. A man whom I would tire of slapping, but it would be a physical tiring rather than an emotional one. I reckon I could go at him for a good fifteen and half hours before my arms would ache too much though. Then I'd run him over with a pink Fiat Punto, bundle him the boot of a pink Fiat Uno, and drive it into the sea, condemning him to a perpetual burial in a car he would no doubt claim is driven by someone black, lesbian, midget, Guardian-reading, and all those other eighties-right-wing-cliches-about-left-wingers. 

His support for this would be enough, in itself, to for me take up an opposing view, as the odds on such a view making sense would be phenomenally high. I have yet to hear him utter anything that doesn't make me dream of slow-murder.  Coupled with Paterson's support, I'm waving the flag before even reading the minutiae of the proposal. After reading the minutiae, I'm loading the metaphorical cannons.

This government is on an ideological crusade. And crusade is an apt word, because it is to the time of The Crusades that they wish to return. Paterson wants to play the feudal overlord, and if there's one thing feudal overlords hate, it's groups of oiks tramping over their land, arguing about which path to take. 

Remember, if it weren't for the dedication of walkers past, Sauron would have won. Don't let these dark lords get away with it. 

Walk, hassle MPs, don't buy anything endorsed by Clarkson. Get out into the country. Remind the 1% that the 99% are here, and won't go down with out a fight. Or a firm stroll, at least.

*Boom Boom