Conference Tricksters

Watching CallMeDave’s speech at the Conservative Pantomime Season today I was reminded of that episode of Family Guy in which Peter exhibits the skills of a great debator *– he repeats his assertions - each time a little bit louder - assertions which are non-sequiturs of such magnitude they’d make Harold Pinter soil his underwear with sticky pearly love juice.

According to Dave, Labour want to borrow.  I said they’re going to Borrow.  They’ll Borrow money, y’know.  BORROW. BORROW. BORROW. Hitler borrowed money.  Peter Sutcliffe had a bank loan.  Borrowing is evil. Satan’s running the infernal shades of Hell at an increasing deficit. Therefore, Labour are Satanic Nazis - with a side of Yorkshire Ripper.

They may not have been his exact words, but they may have well as been, because he clearly thinks that Tory Conference attendees will applaud anything, and that voters are more gullible than Rozencrantz and Guildenstern jauntily hopping into the English court with their I Heart Hamlet mugs in one hand, certificate of execution in the other. Because all governments borrow, you dead-eyed moron. Even I know that, and I’m financially incompetent.

As confidence tricks go, this speech was ambitious in the extreme.  The Eton Toad would have us believe that he wants to create an Aspiration Nation. I worked at a school once which gave all students target grades which would not have been achievable without divine intervention, or systematic fraud.  Upon questioning these targets, I was told that they were ‘aspirational’ and that I was doing The Youngsters (This was the generic term de jour for the students -a bit like Childern of the Corn) a disservice by writing them off. 

While this is seemingly reasonable, I would contend that it is, in fact, sophistic bullshit which neither understands anything of the complexities of interaction that occur in the learning process nor understands that if you try to emotionally blackmail me I will spread scurrilous rumours about you at the pub. Involving dogs, car parks and Vaseline. I may even photoshop some evidence.

It was this same clumsy technique, more suitable to a school-yard debate over whose mum's the fattest, that was employed by the tadpole-faced vacuity which masquerades as Prime Minister.  Bang and blame. We are your overlords. We are the party for aspirational achievers. We are the Will to Power. Lazy people kill children. Jam tomorrow. (Jam today for me). If you oppose us, you hate kittens. Do you hate kittens? Do you? Do you really? Death to the Kitten-Haters.

The problem with this is pretty straightforward.

Firstly, Dave – you are a mendacious little slugshit. Your lies are so many they’ve taken on a life of their own and have run to all corners of the Earth to spawn further colonies of lies, and given birth to tribes of utter porkies, gaggles of grim fibs, hoards of dark untruths. You are, essentially, not a man to be trusted. If you told me it was Saturday I’d go to work. 

Secondly, no one really wants to be lectured to about the pleasures of hard graft, and the joys of greasing the wheels of social mobility with the oil of ambition, by a man whose experience of hard work is watching the servants, and who is the antithesis of social mobility. You were born unhealthily rich, and you’re still loaded.  Although you're not exactly shifting through the classes. Why aren’t you Emperor of the Known Universe if all it takes is a slice of elbow grease and a gritty determination? 

Go on Dave. Show us how it’s done. Get a Ming the Merciless costume. Declare yourself the Ruler of All Life. Wear a big shiny crown of gold and plebs' bones.

And then fuck off into space. And then die.

* This actually happens in lots of episode.  This is a fine example. 

On the Sixth Day

When I were a lad, a certain Leo B Stanley, sometime DJ at Manchester Indie-Valhalla, The Venue, and proprietor of Identity Clothing in Affleck’s Palace, made a tidy little packet with his range of Manchester T-Shirts. These bore such legends as Manchester: North of England and Born in the North, Exist in the North, Return to the North, Die in the North, as well as This is not Manchester, this a trip. But the one which was taken up with most enthusiasm was ‘And on the sixth day, God created Manchester’. 

Some may think this latter statement is, at best, a clever pun, or at worst, a heinous blasphemy requiring correctional behavior involving hot spikes, rusty screwy things and a masked dwarf. I, however, think there is more than the smidgeon of truth in this. Only a Mancunian could have lived through the rain that Noah faced and built a boat on which to carry the band which made The House of the Rising Sun an international hit.

Being a Mancunian, I have a strained relationship with the rain. It is, simultaneously, an integral component of my cultural identity, and a wet pain in the arse. Or, more often, face.

The last few months have been kind enough to make sure I’ve never felt far from home wherever I’ve been in England. A summer of camping was accompanied by the grey symphony of celestial tears. The return to school has seen the persistent drizzle of a British Autumn. The last two days have witnessed an all-out assault on The North by the splashy elements. There have been days when it has seemed like the world is made of rain and that days of sunshine and clear skies have been the stuff that dreams are made of.

The slate sky deluge is lovely under certain circumstances.  All of these circumstances involve indoors, central heating and looking through a window. Sometimes there’s cocoa, sometimes there’s Stella. This week’s morning rain is ruined for me the moment I have to leave the house.  Sober. Another example of work metaphorically, and literally, pissing on me*.

Rain pervades British culture. Travis famously sang, questioningly, Why does it Always Rain on me?. ‘Because you’re shit’ was the obvious answer. Shirley Manson, of Garbage fame, fiercely claimed to be Only Happy When it Rains. This didn’t explain why she moved to L.A. though. Unless she meant it metaphorically and literally, and L.A.’s absence of real rain would be like emotional rain to her, thus making her happy. I may be over-thinking this. Or under-thinking it. Or not thinking it all. The point is, we’ve written a lot of songs about rain.

 James Dean was iconic in the rain. Macarthur Park’s cake got well and truly trashed in the downpour. The Cult loved it. Dustin Hoffman was a superhero who could harness its power**.

But I digress.  Rain. It’s wet, it’s outside, and it’s coming for you. Embrace the grey. Learn to love the dampness of being. It won’t be beaten ,and maybe, just maybe, you too can be a Mancunian, if even just for a day.

   *          I know this is only metaphorically. I’m not Alanis fucking Morissette. It just works better stylistically like this. Never let it be said I choose substance over form.

**     I’ve never seen Rainman. I assume this is what it’s about.

Musical Chairs

There was a rumour that during the sackings of ministers recently, Dave 'David' Cameron was drinking red wine while on the job.  Now, I'm all in favour of a casual attitude to booze, but if I tried to do my job while drinking booze, I'd be sacked. And probably on the front page of The Sun with the headline 'Drunken Disgrace of Trashed Teacher', or somesuch. All I ask for is equality of opportunity. If he can booze at work, I'd like to be allowed to sip from a can of Stella while the kids are peer-assessing their work. That's all. It's hardly the moon on a stick.

The recent Tory reshuffle (Officially the coalition's reshuffle, but let's not kid ourselves) has confirmed my belief that Dave 'Kill Me With Disease' Cameron actually has neither shame nor sense.  His appointments, movements and, equally telling, non-movements,  are reminiscent of the worst excesses of historical power, such as the time Caligula made his horse a consul, or that incident when Philip Green made his unqualified daughter a shoe designer for Top Shop. Now I only buy Ladies' shoes from ebay. Preferably pre-worn.*

Speaking of horses, there is no question that Caligula's  horse would be a much, much safer pair of hands (You know what I mean. Pipe down, pedants.) with the economy than that dead donkey Gideon is presently doing. Even now, two thousand years after its death. Dave, drop the dead donkey.

Among other appointees by Dave 'Shoot Me in the Face with a Rusty Nail Gun' Cameron is Maria Miller as Minister for Equality. This is an MP whose voting records on issue such as abortion, IVF and hate crimes makes this placement as sensible as making John Wayne Gacy Minister for Children. Or Minister for Clowns. Or Minister for Child Clowns.  The point is, it's a piss-take. Or a radical re-invention of the word 'equaility', depending on your point of view. And degree of sanity.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Toryland, Owen Patterson has found himself the Minister for the Environment. I wouldn't describe Patterson as a stereotypical Tory. That's mostly because I'm a pathological liar, but also because I wouldn't describe Hilter as a naughty boy. It'd be a tad understated. With Patterson, the giveaway is that Norman Tebbit was waxing lyrical about him on Any Questions last night, which is an endorsement as telling as the EDL's endorsement of Dave 'Feed me to Wild Dingoes' Cameron's speech on multiculturalsim last year.

Patterson likes shooting shit, killing shit, refuting scientific evidence and being the most ill-fitting ministerial appointment since Maria Miller.

More disturbing is that well-known Cockney Rhyming slang Jeremy Hunt was made Minister for Health. This weasel of a creature has spent his political career lying through his serpentine teeth while  furiously cleaning Rupert Murdoch's haemorrhroids with his mendacious tongue.  It's not just that the NHS will be doomed to ruination, but that Rupey will now have the unfettered access to the steady supply of fresh human blood in which he must bathe daily.

In essence, CallMeDave's Titanic Deckchair Shuffle** is big 'Fuck You. Fuck You. And Fuck You' to the British Public, to Human Evolution and to the Universe. Dave is King, and if he wants to sack the servants and make the peasants hand over their first-born to their feudal overlords, then that is what will be done.

Until the next election, when this shower of shite will be wiped from the face of British Politics, and become just a pub trivia question - what was the most inept British Government ever?

And why were their bodies never found?

* Not really, but there is apparently a massive market for this.

**Over-used phrase of the week

Different Class

I'm not one to go looking for an altercation, but I haven't shied away from sprinkling my tupennethworth regarding the Olympics amidst the jubilation and delirium pounding the status updates of various social media sites. Tennis and Football* aside, I really couldn't have been more indifferent had I been a vampire imprisoned  by mine enemies decades since, nailed in a sturdy coffin, behind a solid, merciless brick wall, half-awake, half-hibernating, undead, unalive, unremembered.

Because I am, quite frankly, not one to cream myself because someone can run fast or chuck something far.  I'm not five fucking years old. These may have been useful skills out on the savanna at the dawn of humanity, but nowadays we have cars.  It doesn't matter that Usain Bolt can run 100m in under ten seconds. If I'm trying to run him over whilst driving a Micra, his legs will get broken.

On the subject of which, I watched the 100m, and that was, in my humble, the most over-hyped underwhelming ten seconds since I lost my virginity.

But what has ground my gears more than anything has been the frequent comparisons between footballers and Olympic athletes. This has the been the battleground on which I have jousted verbally with friends and acquaintances of late. The 'Why can't Footballers Be More like Athletes' has wound me up no end.  For two reasons. One - footballers are athletes, but with more skill than the one-trick-ponies who emerge every four years in the hope to win a medal so they can make some extra wedge advertising tampons and shaving foam. Two - because deep down I suspect there is an element of class discrimination.

A ridiculous proportion of of GB athletes are privately educated.  The majority, I'm guessing, are middle class. Footballers are, on the whole, working class.  The dislike of the modern footballer is the dislike of the arriviste. It is the mentality that lauds the work of Blur, featuring Alex 'I make cheese ' James and his middle class mates pretending to be cockney jokers, but scorns Liam Gallagher as stupid* because he's got an accent, swears and looks after his hair. It is the scorn of Tom Buchanan for Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald knows where I'm coming from.

And, in my experience, there is no more unpleasant group, more casually racist, sexist and homophobic cackle than a university rugby team, pissed on their second pint of Fosters.  They make obscene comments at women because they don't how to talk to them, coarse homophobic jokes to hide the fact they all want to finger each other, and do more than Marx ever could to radicalise any half-sentient student. Yet this insult to evolution are more often than not laughed off as Lads Letting of Steam.

Take a similar bunch of males, but working class and highly-paid, and being slightly*** more discreet. Somehow these are no longer Lads Being Lads but The End of Western Civilisation. I'm not making any claims for the moral upstandingness of footballers, I'm not even saying I particularly like them. But I'd much rather spend an evening in the company of a Balotelli or a Cantona than a Coe or Pendleton. In fact, I'd much rather be that walled-up vampire than spend an evening with Sebastian Coe. Unless it was it at his murder.

So, if you enjoyed the Olympics - I'm glad for you. But it's football season now, and the throwers and jumpers and repeated actioners can slither back into their little holes, as the world's most popular sport once again takes centre stage. The next nine months are going to mesmerising, horrible, heartbreaking, breathtaking and incredible.  And Coe-free.


*Because they are proper sports, with balls. Literal balls, not cajones.
**To be fair, he probably is a bit a dickhead, but I no more or less than Blur and their cardboard pastiche working class culture, as seen through the eyes of the detached wanker who will never live like common people.
*** Slightly.

I got game

It's fuckitty hot. I tried to venture outside but was beaten back by the unseasonal summer blaze, and had to cool myself down by playing Skyrim in my underpants for an hour.Or three.   It's amazing how running around digital snowy peaks can (almost) make you believe you're a Scandinavian warrior from days of yore, and that it's a bit chilly, as opposed to being a semi-dressed lazy bastard living vicariously through pixellated fun, cowering from the sweltering midday sun.

I actually hate video games (or computer games. Is there a difference? Fucked if I know) because they are time vampires.  I grew up in a console free-house, and while I wouldn't make such outlandish claims to have been outdoorsy, I did spend most of my formative years outside.  Mostly throwing things at stuff. Crab apples at buses, pebbles at pigeons, flaming arrows at passers-by*.

In fact, I didn't buy a console until I was 22, and even then, it was only because I thought the initial outlay would save me money as it might stop me going to the pub. It did. In fact, it stopped me doing most things other than smoking fags, drinking coffee and trying to rescue Princess Daisy . I started to dream in Mario-vision.  I pictured any forthcoming real world tasks, such as the Do The Dishes, or Buy Some Food, as Mario-esque tasks.  Sometimes I would spend so much time awake I would start to hallucinate gold coins**. I was a fragile shell of a being, living on Pot Noodles and Power-Ups.

When, six months later, some scrotal-feeding inbred burgled my console from the Leeds house in which I was living, I was both broken and freed.  And I vowed never to get another console.  Life was mine. I took it by the horns and shoved a finger up its arse***.

Now, and for the last two years, I have been an accidental owner of an X-box, and like a crack pipe, it squats in my room reminding me that I'm weak, and it is the master.  Just One More Hit quite quickly becomes Where the Fuck Did the Last Four Hours Disappear? Those little grey bastards should have an inbuilt timer allowing a maximum of two hours a day. They are pernicious leech on the soul of humanity, and I can't take any more.

There's a dragon I've been in combat with all day. I'm going to hunt it down and kill it, then read a book or something.  I will be productive, but first? I've got to chase that dragon.


*Seriously, After watching a sword-and-sandals epic featuring 'Greek fire', we decided to make our own with paraffin and rags.  Then climb onto the roof of our flats, ignite and launch.  The council estate version of a historical re-enactment. 


**I think my cigarettes were spiked


***This isn't a sexual metaphor.  This is how South African I know trains his dogs.  At least, he says that what he's doing.

What do we get for our Troubles and Pains?

I was reluctant to leave home in my late teens.  Whereas many friends were desperate to throw off the restrictive shackles of parental control and take that breathtakingly exciting step into autonomous adulthood, I’d negotiated tacitly a set of rules with my mother which created a mutually pleasing symbiosis.  In exchange for cooking my meals, washing my clothes, letting me stay out for days on end, smoke in my room, drink in the morning and wear and do what I wanted, I wouldn’t get needlessly arrested or burn her house down. It worked for me.   There didn’t seem to be too much in the plus column of life to suggest that moving into a semi-furnished bedsit in a house full of semi-educated labourers* was a worthwhile option.

I assumed this arrangement was working for my mother too, but I suspect, with the gift of hindsight, that she was really just putting up with me until I left to go to University.  Unfortunately, there was another point of complacently.  I wasn’t in a rush to get to Uni.  If I’d been middle class, I’d probably have taken a gap year and gone to help the downtrodden and desperate in sub-Saharan Africa. After telling everyone I knew endlessly that I was planning to do so, and using it as a weapon to pull, because it’d show how I was, like, sooooo sensitive and caring.  

As it was I was trying to take a gap year in Manchester by studying part time, living off the dole and drinking White Lightning/Special Brew snakebites.  I think this was probably more educational for me than ten months in Burkina Faso ever could have been.  Did you know, for example, that no matter how much you may think you’re the re-incarnation of Jim Morrisson, you’re not. You’re just pissed and standing on a car shouting obscenities and minutes away from a criminal conviction.

Eventually this happy stasis came to an abrupt end when my mother informed me that I had to move out, as I was treating her house like a hotel. Which I thought was a bit rich, as I hadn’t defenestrated any TVs, nor sexually assaulted anyone with a baby shark**.

Fortunately I was able to procure a rented room in Whalley Range. A basement in fact.  Fully funded by the gift of housing benefit. And it was here that I actually began to grow up***. I learned to cook for myself (such classics of culinary class as Toastie de fromage et ragu, haricots et fromage, and petis pois avec de margarine).  I began to take responsibility for my life, apply to Uni, learn to operate a washing machine and, more importantly, appreciate my mother.  Because it is a massive learning curve and process of growth when you’re finally kicked out of the nest. Until you’ve left home, you’ve probably never really experienced penury. Without parental support you become more aware of the difficultly of living, more sympathetic to those who struggle. A rounded, feeling, human-being.

So when I hear that Dave 'Bury me in a Shallow Grave while still Semi-conscious’ Cameron is considering scrapping housing benefit for the under 25s, I can only think that either he wants an infantile population who won’t question him, or that he want people to hate their parents, crack up under the enforced proximity and kill them, thus saving a fortune in pensions and care for the elderly. Or that he’s utterly fucking insane.

He may claim it is a modest proposal, but for him, living at your parents’ means staying in the East Wing pissing in the eyes of peasants while the olds count their off-shore money in the West Wing, only meeting over the breakfast table to discuss how to re-introduce feudalism, and who was the better dictator, Adolf or Maggie.

However, with everything, you should always read the small print. The arse-faced hooray plans to do this if he wins the next election.  This is his version of If I Won a Million Pounds****. The only hope he has of winning the next election is if something is put into the water which makes everyone a simple-minded amnesiac. Surely even he wouldn’t do that?

Actually…

I’m off to stock up on Evian.

*For some reason, this is what I imagined my first foray into the outside would be like.  Though I preciously turned my nose up at it at the the time, I suspect it would probably have been good for me if it had turned out to be true.

** I’d never stayed in a hotel. Everything I knew about hotels I’d learned from books about Led Zeppelin.  I was extremely disappointed when I did finally stay in a hotel several years later and it was NOTHING like I expected.  

***Inasmuch as I ever have

****A game he can’t really play.  It’d be like my If I Won a Tenner…

England's Dreaming

It’s Jubilee weekend.   I appreciate that most of you will know this, but there may be one or two people who have been dwelling in a bunker deep underground, living off tins of Spam and drinking their own piss. For the last six months. 

The supermarket preparations for this jubilee have made the Easter, Christmas and Halloween Overkillfest look as understated as Hitler’s claim that he hadn’t always strived for the best interests of European Jewry.   When I noticed the creeping red, white and blue seeping into the our stores, I made the decision that, as a civilised protest, I wasn’t going to buy anything with a Union Jack on it, or the word ‘Jubilee’ in the title*. 

Initially this didn’t have many serious repercussions, as most products came in both packing options: Monarchy Sycophantic or Republican Standard. However, the seep became an epidemic, and ultimately an invasion.  Where the Nazis failed, Asda succeeded – an explosion of banners and bunting celebrating the unending reign of  a German leader. 

I’ve had to change my shopping habits as, one by one, my usual weekly consumables succumbed to the three-coloured peril. Thank fuck for the World Food aisle.  Any Union Jackerry there would look like blatant war-mongering imperialism, so has remained taint-free. Admittedly, my diet now mainly consists of salt fish and halva, but I at least can enjoy my stomach pains from a moral high ground.

I’ve been accused of being a killjoy, a contrarian and unpatriotic over this. I’m as patriotic towards England as the next man. Or woman.** I’ve also been accused of having no respect for history or tradition, which, quite frankly, is bollocks. And I’m determined to prove this. So, I shall spend my Jubilee weekend showing my love of history and tradition by learning to play God Save the Queen on guitar. The Sex Pistols’ version.  With my amp turned up to eleven. 

Happy Anniversary your majesty, you vinegary old leech.  

*Which was a fucker during my Derek Jarman filmathon

** This is true. I’m in a room with two Kiwis, one of each gender