Memories of a Cider-Fuelled Youth

When I’m feeling ill, if I want to drink I tend to engage with cider. Because it’s fruit, clearly.  It was for this reason that some time ago, at a gig with friends, I accidentally stumbled into the 1990s teenage world of snakebite.  Somewhat under the weather, I had been repairing my failing health with the magic fizzy apple juice when one of the aforementioned friends kindly returned from the bar with a can of Red Stripe. While it is Jamaica’s finest, it‘s obviously not appley-medicine. 

Luckily, however, as a teen I was a well-versed in the arts of drinking like a hobo, so made myself a shitfacing classic of yesteryear*. 

Snakebite. Fizzy filth.

I was reminded of this alchemy yesterday as the spouse of same lager-buying friend posted a pic of a pint of the same amber evil which her husband had ordered in the pub, and laid the blame squarely at my feet for re-introducing the beverage into our collective memory.  It was the second time in a week that snakebite had resurfaced into my milieu, as last week, once again in a state of physical disrepair, I ordered lager, realised I couldn’t face the taste, and summoned the serpent of fizz. It was a wise decision.

There’s a word for these states of being wherein you become aware of something – a word, a person, a tropical disease – and then it seems to be everywhere. I don’t know what the word is, but it’s out there. Look it up. No doubt once you come across it, it’ll be in every post you read, every smile of every child, every stranger’s eyes etc.  

Now, twice in a week may not seem to be a frequency which allows snakebite to fall into this category, but given that - the gig above aside – I’d not heard the words for nearly a decade, I’m making an exception. Because I can.  Besides, it’ll all tie together like a Dickens novel in the final paragraph, trust me.

As a result of last weekend’s grimness, I was very much a token gesture of a son for Mother’s Day, with my efforts limited to sniffling over to my Ma’s, dropping off a card from Asda, a painted watering can, and a promise to be a bit more the Prodigal Son this weekend.

And today, a paragon of health, I kept to my word.

When I take the old girl out for the day, I’m going to one of two places.  Upon asking where she’d like to go, I’m told Anywhere You Want or Anywhere You Want But if You Feel Like Driving to Lytham.

For those who don’t know, Lytham is a small coastal town south of Blackpool where rich old northerners go to die.  It has a special place in my mother’s heart because she was brought up there from the age of eight. And like most people in my family, she has the tiresome habit of telling the same stories again and again.  I used to think it was age, but then I realised she’s been telling the same stories for the past forty years.  My brother is also prone to the same habits.  I know every time I see him for the next two months I’m going to be fascinated to death by his detailed account of how he was sat AT THE FRONT of an Adele concert, and how IT WAS LIKE HAVING A PERSONAL gig.  It only happened a week ago, and I’ve already heard it twice.

I have caught myself indulging in the same dirty habit at times. Ever heard about the time I tried to start a fight with Graham Coxon from Blur? The time I broke my ankle playing football? How I was born in a cross-fire hurricaine AND under a wandering star? Spend more than two drinking events with me, and you will.

Back to Lytham. I’ve heard the stories of a post-war childhood in Lytham since I can remember, to the extent that, like religion, I know the verse without really thinking about the meaning.  It’s long been at the point where I nod politely, and ask the same generic questions out of courtesy.  Today, however, I actually paid attention.

The seafront at Lytham was stunning.  A sky of salmon pink infused with a wash of white-charcoal clouds; a haze which gave the air a mystical quality, almost Avalonesque; a sun straight off an Apocalypse Now poster. It was pretty lovely.  Off guard, I actually paid attention to the memories she was sharing, as she remembered being in the same spot some sixty-odd years ago where we then stood, losing half-a-crown and pissing about on Lytham Windmill**.

And I realised that my mum was talking about actual memories of actual events with actual people from when she was a very small child.  The noise became a life. To me, those details had always belonged to the Long, Long Ago, in the Beforetimes.  Now they had substance.

And this leads me back to snakebite. It is cheap, it is messy. And it fuelled many event-filled, life-developing nights in my youth.  And those memories make good tales for the teller probably more than they do the listener. But it’s easy as an adult to live on the sniff of those memories, and conveyor belt your way through adult life.  Work is a time vampire, no doubt.  But it doesn’t need to be a life vampire.  Make new memories while you can. Drink the snakebite, watch the sunset, see some overrated singer at an extortionate price.  So that when you really can’t make new memories, you have a stash to see you through to the end.  Like a Dickens novel***.

*I realise that to a lot of Antipodeans in London, Snakey is the cutting edge of alcoholic novelty. But it’s only new to you.

** They’re very proud of their windmill

***Nothing like a Dickens novel, but I did make a promise. 

Virtual Insanity

I don’t really consider myself a gamer. I play games, but I don’t cosplay, I don’t have special joypads or a customised headset. As a teenager, while my contemporaries were locked in their bedrooms, swearing at the length of time it took a ZD Spectrum to load a game,  I was throwing crab apples at buses and making dens in subway bushes.  When Sega and Nintendo happened upon the market, girls and booze and disco dancing happened upon me.  Those first big waves bypassed my formative years.

It wasn't until Uni that I first bought a console, a SNES, because it was half-price and because I had no concept of money. My hope was that it would keep me out of pubs and off the streets. It did. Unfortunately, it also took over my life like an electronic brain-devouring parasite. Months of being locked away with Mario, Chun Lee, mates and social enhancers. They may have been great times. I can’t really remember. It’s all a bit of lo-fi, primary-coloured, pixellated blur.

When the Grey Plastic Time Vampire was taken during a burglary a few months later, I looked on it as a blessing.  Its stranglehold on me was loosened, and I could now devote my time to much more worthwhile habits.  And so I did, with gusto.

A few years ago an Xbox came into my life by accident. The digital smackdown began again.  Bioshock, Call of Duty, FIFA, Skyrim, Assassins Creed.  The came into my life, and then they took it over.    

The problem is pretty simple.  It starts with a solemn promise to play for no more than half an hour. That half hour passes and you realise you've slipped into some twisted space-time continuum because, instead of being seven in the evening, it’s three in the morning, and you have to be up in four hours. There’s little more humbling than a console showing you have less willpower than a scouser in a pound shop. Apart from possibly being a Man United fan, or a Nickelback fan whose hearing aid suddenly starts working.

The second coming wasn't as all-consuming as my first foray. I wasn’t chained to screen night after night. I’d have waves where I’d be wandering the Texas desert in Red Dead Redemption looking to shoot Mexicans, as if in some Donald Trump time-travelling fantasy, and waves where I’d actually get on with my life and leave the house and shit like that.  And that’s the trick really.  People have accused me of wasting time shooting up post-apocalyptic wastelands, or stealing cars and killing cops until I get gummed down in nihilistic blaze of glory. And I probably am. But no more than watching vacuity such as Strictly or Nazi Storage Hunters or somesuch nonsense. And as long as there’s balance, then I’m like, totally Zen about it. Life is just killing time between birth and death, after all.

I’m troubled today, however, as I’ve had a massive Fallout 4 bender this week, and I feel slightly adulterated.  Every time I look at an object, I expect to be given the option to pick it up.  When someone walks past my house, my first reaction is to get my mini-nuke ready in case they’re hostile. If I’m replying to someone talking to me, I wonder which of my four conversation options will get me the most XP. Last night, instead of going to the pub, I decided to play for just another half hour. 

At five this morning I decided I should go to bed.

So I’m striking out. I’m laying down the law. Drawing a line in the sand. The ghouls can roam, the raiders can raid. The Commonwealth can rebuild itself. I’m not going to allow my life to be dictated to and distorted by digital crack. I’m through with addictive destructive interactions.

New day, new me.  Yes. I will be strong. Starting now.

I’m off the pub. Anyone fancy a pint?

Back to Black

Let’s get this out of the way before we go anywhere else. I am not a hipster. I don’t have a beard. Beards don’t smack of style to me, they reek of Action Man Adventurer, Geography teachers of Grange Hill, and men trying to hide their chins.  I did once have a beard, but that was because I’d broken my ankle and couldn’t stand up to shave.  After three weeks I was very hirsute of face. As is common to men with beards, I did not look the sine qua non of style, I just looked rough. A cross between Cat Stevens and a particularly lazy suicide bomber.  I don’t like beards, I don’t do beards.  Like Alexander the Great, I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity to not feel the need to stick it on my face like a circus sideshow.

Similarly, I have neither sleeve tattoo, German footwear nor an appetite for quinoa and locally sourced meats. I am not a hipster.

What I do have is a newly acquired acquaintance with vinyl, - the round grooved type, not the cheap, practical flooring material.  Here is where I intersect with hipsters in the Venn diagram of life.  

And, I suppose, I owe those bearded, sleeve-tattooed, craft-beer drinking wankers a debt of gratitude. While I’ve been away for the last twenty years in the easy world of digital, the Hoxton wankers insistence on being Bona Fide has kept the coma-ridden, semi-cadaverous playing of records on life support.  So, twats of the world, thank you.  Without you, there would be nothing to return to, and my collection of choice platters would be as useful as the two-hundred TDKs I buried in landfill last year.

My conversion to CD wasn’t straightforward.  As a youth, I bought a lot of records.  Obsessively so at times.  I have All About Eve singles on five formats.  I have box sets of songs I didn’t particularly like, but whose packaging lured me into purchase like a shiny fly to a stupid fish. I’ve got albums I still haven’t played, but still plan to one day*. When my peers were turning to CDs because ‘they sounded cleaner’ I stuck to my ancient ways. 

Until idleness took over.  The true advantage of CDs was that you didn’t get up halfway through to turn them over.  While this wasn’t a problem most of the time, it was a particular burn with Pink Floyd albums, for reasons I won’t spell out.  See also Jimi Hendrix, Late Beatles, Hawkwind, Screamadelica, Smokers’ Delight, You Lazy Fucker, Get a Job and Stop Laying Around and Too Stoned to Move. It was a revelation from which I did not recover for many years.

People of a certain age will remember being told that CDs were indestructible. TV shows were riddled with demos of them being smeared with jam, used as coasters, spat on and shat on**. The host would then wipe down the disc of wonder, insert it into one of those VHS player sized CD machines and –hey fucking presto – the unjammed, coffee free sounds of Dire Straits.  It was always Dire Straits, Brothering their fucking Arms.

Yes, we were told they were indestructible. The Incredible Hulk of the musical formats. We were lied to***.

I have hundreds of CDs, and mostly they skip like a schoolgirl on meth. They are less useful than the proverbial chocolate teapot, because at least a chocolate teapot can be eaten. They don’t even make particularly good Frisbees. Shiny discs of corporate theft.

So I’ve bought a record player, I’ve resurrected my collection, and can now be found wandering junk shops in search of hidden gems, elbowing beardy, sandalistas out of my way. Ebay is a new danger in a way it never has been before. Do I need This Charming Man in three different formats? No, of course I don’t, but I’ve bought them anyway. Three versions of Atoms for Peace? Yeah, why not.

 I suspect my love of vinyl is going to kill me financially.         

 

Luckily, while I was still buying vinyl in the mid-nineties, everyone was else was buying CDs. It means that all my Oasis records are now highly sought-after, as is my Aphex Twin brown vinyl and a variety of other things I’ll never listen to again. Ebay taketh away but Ebay also giveth.  I can flog old to hipsters for stupid money, and buy new.  

Wanna buy a copy of Me and my Beard by the Geography Teachers, squire? First pressing – scratch n sniff organic meats and beard oil? Yours for fifty son…

* Zodiac Mindwarp, I’m looking at you.

**Maybe not this one, lthough I could still hear traces of faecal matter, so I’m not ruling it out.

***The motto of the 20^th and 21^st Century, surely.

Standing on a Beach

The first time I stood on a beach, and saw the sea, endless and magnificent. I was about seven, and it was like being smacked full in the face with a metaphysical, heavy-bottomed frying pan. I was on a day-trip to Blackpool, home of seaside rock and beachfront misery, and wasn't really expecting to have such a life-affirming epiphany. Mostly because I was only about seven. My life revolved around colouring-in and Vimto.

The steely, grey-cold plane of water, stretching into an infinity made me feel like I was standing on the edge of forever, staring into oblivion, facing down God*, and both growing in strength and shrivelling in fear simultaneously. It was a feeling such as the Romantics would later term The Sublime, but at that undeveloped age, with my small vocabulary and limited knowledge of classical French philosophy, I merely stared, and, pointing to the edge of the world, said to my mother, ‘There’s the sea’.

I was always perceptive.

I’ve loved beaches, and the sea, ever since.  They are reminder of the unfathomable possibilities of life on Earth, of the journeys we might take, the places we may visit.  The sea in particular invokes a sense of connectedness, as the water which leaves Blackpool is the water which laps the shores of Brighton, crashes into New York harbours, purrs around the sunny shores of South America and imprisons the convicts of Australia.  Staring at the sea is staring at the world, and remembering that we all live here, now, on this rock, at this time in the history of the universe, at this pinprick in the scope of existence.

And, while I genuinely love a sun-washed party-beach, fringed with ramshackle bars selling cheap unidentifiable booze and banging out soulless, plastic techno-pop, I’ve reached an age where the dark melancholy of Northern English beaches is coming into its own.

I took the old mother of earlier Blackpool fame to Formby beach for a Mother’s Day outing today. The sky was thickly grey, the sea  sheet of heavy black.  A cold nip needled the air, the sand was damp and chill. It was gothly lovely.  As when I was seven, the sensation of being strangled by the enormity of existence fizzed around, and the sea, the same sea I saw thirty five years ago, held all the above meaning, but more.

Because I realised that the seas had been there for billions of years, in one form or other, and probably would be for many to come. But the time here for me, for everyone else on that beach, in Formby, in Liverpool**, in the world, was very finite. And I realised that the attraction of the beach/sea combo is a paradoxical one – one of feeling connected to the universe, and one of knowing that our place in the universe is very, very temporary.

And it’s at these spots, reminders of our mortality, our worthlessness, that we choose to spend our free time, that we spend our hard-earned***money visiting.  We actively go out of our way to be reminded that we’re nothing and we’re going to die.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  Because if we realise we’ll eventually be gone, but the world will continue, and hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now, other little boys and girls will see the sea for the first time, and they, too, will marvel at the hugeness of everything, and feel the connectedness with all that lives on this planet, and all that has come and will come, maybe we’ll stop fucking up the planet and the people who live on it.

And if not? Well, the sea will surely survive.

*On which note, God, if you ever want a scrap, I’ll meet you on the grass down the bottom of the park. I’ve got a few bones to pick.

** To be fair, this particular detail didn't feel quite as serious. 

***Or stolen, inherited, found etc

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