Waiting for the Sun to Set

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest television progamme ever made*, and when it came to a close in 2003, I was rather lost, although I felt it had not only Jumped the Shark, but rode the back of, spat at and defecated in the eye of the same sea beastie.

The show ended not because the producers realised they were developing a walking corpse that wouldn’t play dead, but because Sarah Michelle Gellar decided she wanted to move onto bigger and better things.  By which she meant become a film star and make a shitload of cash.  

I discovered last week that Gellar is a Republican, and it left a bitter nastiness in my metaphorical mouth.  I love Buffy because, behind the mask of inanity, there was a programme which was quite progressive for a mainstream American show.  I considered it be an Ideas Smuggler – surreptitiously provoking Americans into thinking while they thought they were watching a programme about a blonde cheerleader killing vampires.  Obviously, they were watching a programme about a blonde cheerleader killing vampires, but it was oh-so-much more.

To discover that the hero of this modern masterpiece is playing, politically speaking, for the other side meant that my sturdy walls of perception came tumbling down, as if a fog had been lifted from my eyes, like a cubic zirconia bullet right through my forehead.  It was up there with the time I realised that God didn’t exist, and the realisation at the age of ten that, despite my claims to the contrary, Manchester City were not better than Manchester United, and weren’t the greatest team in the world***.

Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there is a Buffy comic which takes up the story from the end of the final season and it’s actually quite good.  More importantly, because it’s a comic, SMG isn’t actually required, and doesn’t profit, and I am not forced to deal with the dichotomy of reality vs.fiction.

The moral of this tale is that sometimes it can be a good thing to dig up the rotting corpses of popular media and re-animate the cadaver, slap on a bit of lippy and give it a new haircut, and send it back into the world.

However, some corpses should remain buried. Buried forever.

This forthcoming Sunday the Crown Prince of Corporeal Evil, Rupert Murdoch, will attempt to insult an entire nation with the relaunch of his cesspit of a rag, The News of the World, under the guise of The Sun of Sunday.  After his performance at the select committee hearing in which he claimed to be living the humblest day of his life in a manner which was, tellingly, very fucking far from humble, I hoped that he would least have the sense to accept that the hacking of a murdered child’s phone was so far below any kind of accepted civilisation as to  understand that he might as well dance up and down on Milly Downer’s grave as try to bring back a Sunday paper.  I underestimated him.

To my mind, this is a little like Hitler claiming he’d seen the error of his ways in trying to wipe an entire group of people of the face of the earth, and he felt humble because he’d had an epiphany, rather than because he’d been busted. And while he was at it, would anyone be interested in reading the new edition of his book, which would no longer be known as Mein Kampf, but would now bear the moniker How to Kill Friends and Liquidate people. A little like this.

The comparisons might be a bit extreme, I admit, but the principle’s the same.  

I am hopeful, however, that the target demograph for The Sun, the kind of people who attacked a paediatrician believing she was a paedophile****, aren’t quite so forgiving or forgetful as Rupert the Human Cancer would believe.  In fact, given The Sun’s history of moral outrage, I fully expected the weekday Sun to run a campaign against The Sun on Sunday. I’ll even give them their headline for free.

Humble hacker in Pseudo Sorry Sunday Sun shocker.

Or, preferably, Murdoch Falls in Mincer: Nation Rejoices.

Please don’t buy this piece of shit.  You can make a difference.

*I’m serious**

**No, really, I am.  Closely followed by Battlestar Galactica (The new one, obviously), and Duckula.  

***Both these problems have now been addressed

****I shit you not

Sicknote

As icy days close in, and the previously absent winter has a go at reminding us it still exists, out come the unused Christmas hats and gloves, breakfast porridge makes its annual appearance, and up pops the duvet safety of sick days.  

It’s at this stage of the season that petty sickness creeps apace, winding its way round the workplace like a sulphuric fart in a small lift, leaving no corner unfouled. People drop off the work radar for a couple of days, followed out, on their return, by another shivering sniffler, like a hibernal game of contagiously diseased dominoes. I had my turn last week.

The problem with sick days, for me, is that finding myself with a whole day I’d otherwise be sacrificing to the gods of work, I don’t want to waste my opportunity to get stuff done, go places I’d normally never see and do stuff I’d normally never do.  There’s a plethora of art galleries and museums I heartily neglect, a world of books I intend to read which perch on my To Be Read shelf.  (In truth, this is more like my To Be Read shelves, and is on the brink of becoming my To Be Read bookcase.  I estimate it will be a To Be Read library by the time I retire. I really ought to buy shares in Waterstone’s).

Unfortunately the nature of sickdays, is that I’m, not to put too fine a point on it, sick. Well, usually.  Or sometimes, at least.

 I may want to fill my time with worth, but the sad truth is I’m more likely to sleep until midday, wake for a Lemsip and then spend the day dozing in and out of consciousness whilst listening to some play on Radio 4 about a bunch of middle class people uncovering the secrets of their grandparents’ abuse of servants in India during the Raj, or some other offering from the Radio 4 write-by-numbers drama factory. By the time I feel anywhere near rested enough to do something, it’s pretty much the time I’d be getting home anyway.

Johnny Rotten, before he became the face of whatever dairy product it is he advertises, once asked ‘ Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ . Yes, Mr Rotten, I have. Every time I waste a sick day on actually being sick. 

What is more annoying than this is when the sickness pounces and it is not a work day.  There is no greater injustice in this world* than arriving home on a Friday to discover that your body has developed a malfunction which results in being bed bound and incapable of doing anything beyond groaning and making Mr Kleenex rich**.

The real shit-smeared nail in the coffin of life here is that, no matter how extraordinarily unwell you are, you will always have recovered by Monday, and have no legitimate excuse to take a sick day. This, along with the existence of the parasitic wasp and Alex Ferguson, is the keystone on which I base my unshakeable belief that there is no God.

And, on that theological bombshell, I’m withdrawing back under the covers because I’m feeling slighty queasy. And, unbelievably, I’m on holiday. Today I planned to do those things I neglect – play guitar, read a book, leave the house.  Curse you, lack of God.   So, instead, I’m off to have that same fitful dream in which a thousand gloomy towers of unread books loom over me, berating me in thunderous tones for depriving them of their destiny while a billion tiny pixies adorned in Waterstone’s T-shirts dance gleefully on piles of burning money.  It’s a recurring highly vivid dream.

If only I knew what it meant.

*This is obviously a lie.

**From blasting snot out of your nose, you filthy minded guttersnipe.

Let's re-invent time

I’ve been procrastinating writing for a few weeks now, for the same reason I’ve been procrastinating scanning photographs, doing dishes and tidying the house. It’s January, and I’ve got post-Christmas comedown, A.K.A. New Year Blues A.K.A. Not Another Fucking Year Already A.K.A. Blearrrghghh.  If I could get away with not washing or brushing my teeth, I probably would.  If I could get away with not getting out bed, I undoubtedly would. January sucks.

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that April is the cruelest month, but that’s clearly bollocks because for wretched evil misery nothing beats the gateway to the year.  Christmas is over, and all the build up and festive sleigh ride rapidly turns into a festive train wreck and then, abruptly, into a post-festive lemming-dive off the cliff of New Year’s Eve into the grey wet plains of Back to Work You Shitty Little Peasants, Fun’s Over.

Not all Januaries have been dismal, admittedly. The crash has sometimes been softened by the cushion of Christmas presents, whether the Millennium Falcon of childhood, or the Walkman and booze of late teens, to the lovely acoustic guitar I got two years ago.  Quite often the social imbibing in January ups itself a notch as people wrestle with the impact, which is an aspect I’ve also previously appreciated.  Sometimes, a Christmas Romance blossoms into a Winter Girlfriend. It might not last, but it takes the edge off the cold.  At worst, there’s usually a bit of snow to re-ignite the smouldering Yuletide embers.

This year, no such.  While I appreciate all the presents I received from my nearest and dearest, a throttle box for my Micra isn’t a game-changer. I love my new Adidas Star Wars Rebel Force trainers, but a particularly expensive December has left me in a financial quagmire, and I can’t go out and about looking fly in them.

I did, however, plan for this month of doom, and asked for two X-Box games, which is pretty much my January, between getting home from work and slinking off to bed.  And while these digital distractions are fun (with a slice of WTF? everytime I get beat 6-0 on FIFA 12), the fact that I not only planned for a month indoors, but did so by sacrificing the option of a new guitar pedal for something that deep down I think I probably should’ve given up many, many, many years ago, leaves me with a feeling of bemused depression.  Although, it being January, I could’ve been given games, pedals, the Palaces of Shangri-La and the moon on a diamond-encrusted stick, and I’d still find something to complain about.

The fundamental problem isn’t that I’m a neurotic whinger, but that if humans were meant to do January, we’d be made of Gore-Tex and Fur, with torches for eyes.  There are few feelings more groan-inducing than the realisation of existence when an alarm goes off at seven a.m. on a January morning and you realise you’ve got to get up from the warm oblivion of sleep and go out into the frosty darkness to spend the day with a bunch of people who feel equally resentful about work, life and the existence of other people.

January is the cruelest month, not April. April isn’t frosty, in April nighttime doesn’t masquerade as the morning, and in April Christmas is a fond distant memory, just as you can look fondly on a past relationship years later, even though in the immediate aftermath you were a drunken wreck of despair and failure.

January is the raw break up from our relationship with Christmas. Either full of a profound sense of loss, or the needling regret that it never quite lived up to the promise it, well, promised.

So I’m starting it now. We have a year to do it.  I’m suggesting a radical rethinking of the calendar. Next year, I want two Decembers, then February.  It’ll be my Christmas gift to the world. 

Death to January.

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.