Take yer Eastenders aand shove it ...

It's half one in the morning, and I'm reclined on the sofa at my mum's, finally wrestling off the vestiges of my New Year's Day hangover with the aid of a hot chocolate and Fake Bailey's. The festive season is crawling off, wounded, into the gossamer field of memories, and the bleak, soulless January spreads before us - a bitter necessary evil to be borne,to be faced with determination and, hopefully, to be survived. It wants to defeat you. You must resist.

However, there are remnants of Christmas still with us, and they make the slide from Yule Joy into New Year Horror the more bearable.  There are still some Roses left, and not just the shitty caramels and poisonous orange creams. I've got more Stilton than I can hope to eat in this lifetime, and the novelty of my Christmas toys hasn't worn off yet. And there is still a smattering of interesting and unusual TV to watch, a festive selection pack of viewability.

Not a whole lot though. It's not been a vintage year for Christmas telly.  Readers of a certain vintage will remember the pre-Christmas excitement when the bumper double issues of Radio Times and TV Times were released on the approach road to the holidays. Gaggles of small children would pour over the pages like pirates drooling over new treasure maps, carefully planning the fortnights viewing, accompanied by intermittent 'oohs' and 'ahs' as another televisual wonderment was unearthed*.

I remember TV at Christmas as being packed with nuggets of distraction, fizzing with spectacle, transmitting unending fantabulousisms. Among the ever-present Bonds, Poppinses and Wizards of Ozzess were mornings of wacky cartoon treats, obscure gems like Anne of Green Gables and strange films from the Australian Children's Film Workshop. There were big film premières  middle-class seasonal uplifters like Truly Madly Deeply, and costume dramas so superior to Dumbtown Abbey they could kill it with one hand while munching a mince pie and sipping a brandy.

Even the nostalgia was better then,.

During the Yule weeks, one of the great things over the years has been lazing around, hungover, watching good honest programming.  Unfortunately, these last two weeks it seems to have mostly been Diagnosis Murder and Bones repeats, with the occasional scrap of quality meat thrown at our feet to remind us how shit everything else is. Even Christmas Day's Dr Who was a bit of a limper.  Sadly, the best TV has been the four episodes of Match of the Day**.

But tonight, I've found some nuggets. A programme about nasty insects. Two BBC Four docs  - on Roman Art and Art Nouveau. And a QI I haven't yet seen.  And I'm watching them. Because I must. Christmas is a time for traditions, and I refuse to let those traditions die.  Even if I am dog-tired, and there is the siren call of bed awaiting.  If I give up on this, I let January win.

Never let January win.

* I may be slightly over-romanticising this.
**Apart from the one where Sunderland beat City which was both implausible and overly-tragic. Like Mike Leigh's Naked in sporting form.

Ebeneezer's Gift

It is sometime suggested that the very rich should pay their slice of the tax burden. That, in a society where people are able to make stupidly large piles of cash, the contribution of those who benefit most should be, equally, the biggest contribution.  This reasonable suggestion is often pursued by the squealing, petulant cries that this is The Politics of Envy. Cries which can be heard all the way from The Carlton Club to The Commons.

Gideon’s been at it again this morning, uttering the bizarre statement that those who see their benefit-scrounging neighbours asleep, as they themselves rise at the crack of sparrows and trudge off to a day's hard work, should be treated fairly. What he means by this is that the sleeping neighbour should be treated more harshly, and that this deceitful act of sophistry will somehow make the world a sunnier, shinier place.  

This is bizarre on many levels, not least because anyone who sees their neighbours sleeping as they are work-bound is either a peeping tom, shagging someone from next door, or has a neighbour passed-out on their front lawn. Only one of those scenarios elicits even a slither of sympathy, and given that the streets and avenues of England aren’t strewn with snoring, vagrant slumberers, I can only assume that Gideon has the first two situations in mind.  I’d hate to live near him.

The real issue, though, isn’t that Mad George thinks that people are shinnying up drainpipes to gaze in anger at the terminally, and temporarily, unemployed – snugly wrapped in their beds of workshy irresponsibility.  The real issue is that that the rich out-of-touch spoilt, sheltered, sniveling, social and economic human failure masquerading a sentient being has decided to address the concerns of these sinister, but employed, voyeurs, by pinning future benefit increases to 1%, well below inflation.

This is the real politics of envy.  Because it makes not a jot of difference to anyone if the out-of-work residents in my ‘hood are getting a rise of three pounds weekly, or one pound a week.  We won’t see any of that money. The taxes we pay won’t decrease. Nurses won’t find the money saved in their paychecks, nor teachers, nor the five-oh. The only effect is that those who are already living at the shittest end of the stick of life will be getting prodded with an even bigger, shittier stick. And those prodding the stick will be getting bigger, pointier, goldier* sticks.

I’ve lived on the dole. In fact, I was brought up on it. It’s wretched. There’s just enough money to survive. The reason people on the dole stay in bed late is because it costs nothing to be asleep, and nothing is pretty much what you can afford.  Besides, TV is utter dross before midday, at which point it becomes just about tolerable. There’s really no point in getting up early if you’re skint and unemployed. Let’s face it, only the criminally insane, and criminally annoying, are keen to be up and about at dawn on a day of no work.

Back to the whingers. There will also be those who peddle the same miserable lies that everyone signing on has Sky, and a mobile phone, and other such luxuries like shoes and a change of socks.  I’d hazard a guess that anyone with Sky, in receipt of benefit, isn't paying for that out of their benefit.  In fact, I’d hazard an equal guess that there are many illegal Sky sets kicking around the black market.  And to anyone who wants to complain that people are getting Sky for free while they have to pay a small fortune for it, can I suggest you’re looking in the wrong direction.  Rupert didn't look hungry last time I saw him. He did, unfortunately, still look alive. Not short of a few spare pennies, but still, sadly, not dead.**

 It is a depressing aspect of our society.  There will always be people who don’t work. Some will choose not to, some will have it thrust upon them.  Some will be born stinking rich and not have to, but will instead find themselves the focus of seven pages of The Mirror because they got knocked up and felt a bit queasy.

 Just because there are a handful of people who will take the piss, doesn't mean we collectively punish to assuage our Daily Mail-fuelled belief that the poor of Britain are actually sitting on bags of cash, drinking Cristal while watching Bargain Hunt on their Plasma Teevs. It’s bollocks. The poor of Britain are generally having a miserable old time, and it’s getting shitter every day. A reverse Beatles, if you will. ***

So, Gideon, stop picking on those too weak and weary to fight back. Stop using a crane to crush a fly. Remember that you’re where you are because your daddy racked up the dollars selling interior décor. If only he’d had a grasp of social responsibility and made the contribution to society he could have.

And had a vasectomy on reaching puberty.

 *Neologism. Pedant.

*Dear Santa, with Christmas approaching, and your skillset in breaking and entering, and leaving without a trace, I have a very particular request…

*This one 

Tricky Treats

The unfolding events  in New York and along the Eastern Seaboard of the past few days have seemed, to me at least, to be Hollywood Live.  I know that there has been massive destruction, and many have died, but this is also true of Haiti and Jamaica among others.   Only the news from The States has been an uber-intense uber-spectacle.

The media build-up, and rolling reporting, was like an interactive movie event.  Part of this is that New York, for most people, only exists on the cinema screen – and quite often getting its arse handed to it on fat concrete plate by giant apes, earthquakes, global warming,  alien invaders and giant smiling marshmallow sailors.

It is this same American Cultural Omnipresence which has changed the nature of this  very evening, too.  When I was a nipper, Halloween was the shittest name in the Calendar of Special Days of the year.  It only really manifested itself in the crappy drawing of pumpkins and witches at school.  I didn’t actually know that a pumpkin was real vegetable until my twenties, when they started to slowly appear on the supermarket shelves.

The spook creep didn’t end there.  Halloween parties started to pop up all over the place, as did a plethora of sexy devil outfits and killer nurse outfits.  Why killer nurses would wear fishnets and skimpy tops is beyond me.  Surely they’d get blood and viscera everywhere.  They would if they were doing properly anyway.

And now: it’s a Wednesday, and I’m getting ready to go to my brother’s flat for some Halloween shenanigans.  Outside, packs of children trot from house to house, feeding their inevitable diabetes and burgeoning hatred of their own flabby bodies by begging cheap sugary yuck from the local community. Inside, the news is banging on about some Halloween shit I’m trying to tune out.  My brother is putting on nibbles and drinks to celebrate the mythical thinning of the gateway between this world and the next.

How did this transformation come upon us? It wasn’t witchcraft, contrary to what the Christian Right would have you believe.  I blame it primarily on The Simpsons, with a slice of Buffy, Michael Myers and generic  American sitcoms.   The children of Britain have come into being in world where Halloween is not about sticking your head in bowl of water in the fruitless pursuit of a floating apple, but a festival of the plastic macabre, of demonic prostitution, of green creme eggs.

And why might I whinge so, you may ask? Because it’s Halloween.  If my words can create even an ounce of misery and doubt, I’ve done my bit for today’s evil.

Whahahahahahahhahaaaaaahahahahahaahahahahaaa etc.

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.