This is a rough version of my proposed new advert for the Conservative party. I originally had this idea two years ago.
Ideally, I would like the there to be a sound of cricket ball against cricket bat (to give that familiar 'thock', so redolent of Tory values) rather than the wicket sound that we have at the moment. Also, I think that it would be better without the commentators at the end and more prolonged, polite applause.
If anyone knows where I can find such sounds I would be very grateful if they told me.
Please let me know your thoughts.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Thock, Conservative
New Project: Behind the Scenes
What am I up to here?
Some kind time travel experiment?
A Wallace and Gromit style, elaborate wank?
Stay tuned to find out very soon.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
James Delingpole
Have you heard of James Delingpole? He is a right-wing journalist, author and blogger who specialises in denying man-made global warming and defending the charitable status of private schools. He is in many ways the archetypal absolute cunt; an aristo-fetishistic dickhead and slithery sassenach poster boy for Scottish independence.
But before deriding him in this way, it would be well for me to remember that I am the same me who had watched the TV version of Brideshead Revisited three times by the age of nineteen and who spent my first year at a redbrick university holed up in my room with another slightly posh boy, a bottle of port and cigars as if we were the country's last Old Etonians awaiting the bayonets of the Revolutionary Guard.
Why do I bring up this Delingpole? Well, it is because I have been reading some of his columns along with the columns of his pal Daniel Hannan (the Conservative MEP who caused a stir a few months ago by criticising the NHS on Fox News) and some other Telegraph stuff in order to toughen up my political opinions. It was my hope that by putting my political opinions through a mangle of palatable, broadsheet, centre-right opinion my political opinions would emerge a man.
My political opinions have survived this onslaught of comment quite unscathed but this has nothing to do with their robustness. Were my political opinions founded on rational thought then they might be susceptible to argument. But they aren't; they are founded on a sort of socio-aesthetic taste and are immune to argument. By that wilfully obfuscating, stupid word 'socio-aesthetic', I mean that these are opinions that appeal to me because of their position in society, the other people that hold them, their history and their stylishness. This exposure to the almost reasonable face of conservatism has not changed my beliefs but has caused me to think about how facile those beliefs are and suspect that everyone else's are just as shallow.
It seems to me to be somewhat arrogant to think that you hold your political opinions because you are sufficiently brainy do have divined the best and most fair mode of government. Whatever you think and whoever you are there are probably millions of other, smarter people than you who think something else.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera suggests that political opinions are usually based on a kind of kitsch. What we get passionate about is the particular flavour and associations of our political opinions; their superficial accoutrements.
On further self-examination I think that I barely even hold these superficial opinions. Mainly, I don't give a shit about anything at all. Having spent most of their lives in leafy, cosseted childhood, exposed to the real world my wispy, effete opinions might easily be devoured by that dark spectre of downward social mobility.
It is fitting therefore that my conclusion on Delingpole (who elsewhere has been dealt pure vitriol and been dubbed a twat) is utterly trivial. He appeared recently on a remarkable documentary called When Boris Met Dave talking about his Oxford days; days he seems to be having trouble getting over. He was roundly mocked as a Sebastian Flyte wannabe and he accepted all this with good humour and oh-so-British self-deprecation.
I am not above warming to a bit of self-deprecation and, as I explained above, I have some understanding of the potent effect of Brideshead on a certain kind of teenage brain. So my trivial conclusion is that he is a ponce with something other than bien pensant liberal views but basically clubbable.
And I have learned that I have no opinions worth talking about (notwithstanding Foulsist Robotarianism). So fuck.
But before deriding him in this way, it would be well for me to remember that I am the same me who had watched the TV version of Brideshead Revisited three times by the age of nineteen and who spent my first year at a redbrick university holed up in my room with another slightly posh boy, a bottle of port and cigars as if we were the country's last Old Etonians awaiting the bayonets of the Revolutionary Guard.
Why do I bring up this Delingpole? Well, it is because I have been reading some of his columns along with the columns of his pal Daniel Hannan (the Conservative MEP who caused a stir a few months ago by criticising the NHS on Fox News) and some other Telegraph stuff in order to toughen up my political opinions. It was my hope that by putting my political opinions through a mangle of palatable, broadsheet, centre-right opinion my political opinions would emerge a man.
My political opinions have survived this onslaught of comment quite unscathed but this has nothing to do with their robustness. Were my political opinions founded on rational thought then they might be susceptible to argument. But they aren't; they are founded on a sort of socio-aesthetic taste and are immune to argument. By that wilfully obfuscating, stupid word 'socio-aesthetic', I mean that these are opinions that appeal to me because of their position in society, the other people that hold them, their history and their stylishness. This exposure to the almost reasonable face of conservatism has not changed my beliefs but has caused me to think about how facile those beliefs are and suspect that everyone else's are just as shallow.
It seems to me to be somewhat arrogant to think that you hold your political opinions because you are sufficiently brainy do have divined the best and most fair mode of government. Whatever you think and whoever you are there are probably millions of other, smarter people than you who think something else.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera suggests that political opinions are usually based on a kind of kitsch. What we get passionate about is the particular flavour and associations of our political opinions; their superficial accoutrements.
On further self-examination I think that I barely even hold these superficial opinions. Mainly, I don't give a shit about anything at all. Having spent most of their lives in leafy, cosseted childhood, exposed to the real world my wispy, effete opinions might easily be devoured by that dark spectre of downward social mobility.
It is fitting therefore that my conclusion on Delingpole (who elsewhere has been dealt pure vitriol and been dubbed a twat) is utterly trivial. He appeared recently on a remarkable documentary called When Boris Met Dave talking about his Oxford days; days he seems to be having trouble getting over. He was roundly mocked as a Sebastian Flyte wannabe and he accepted all this with good humour and oh-so-British self-deprecation.
I am not above warming to a bit of self-deprecation and, as I explained above, I have some understanding of the potent effect of Brideshead on a certain kind of teenage brain. So my trivial conclusion is that he is a ponce with something other than bien pensant liberal views but basically clubbable.
And I have learned that I have no opinions worth talking about (notwithstanding Foulsist Robotarianism). So fuck.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
"I may be deformed..."
I am so full of shit these days. I don't just mean this blog. It used to be that I would be honest in my communication; now it's all "good to hear from you!", "really well done!", "have a good time!", "we should meet up soon": such shit. That's changing from now on.xx
*** ***
A few weeks ago I was on a train, nice pair of seats to myself, looking out the window. A jakey woman came by asking for a lighter, I told her that I didn't have one. She took a better look at me, reeled and then said, "I recognise you," waggling her finger at me. She said she had seen me walking around; she recognised me by my walk, she said. Then she did an imitation of my walk by limping around and sticking one shoulder up to her ear.
She reeled a second time, this time more violently and pointed an accusing finger at me, for a moment too astonished to speak, "You were in Star Wars!" Initially, I denied this but she persisted and I admitted that, yes, I was in Star Wars. She said that my secret was safe her, evidently recognising my desire to remain incognito – all of this audible to the rest of the carriage.
She resumed her hunchback pose and said that she could remember one of my scenes. She quoted, "I may be deformed, captain, but that doesn't mean I'm not intelligent." She went on to recall how I had been a pioneer for disabled actors, a beacon of sorts.
Throughout all of this I was continually affirming her statements, "That's right," I was saying. Eventually, she became bored and walked off.
I've changed the way comments work on this blog. We're now using something called Disqus that allows you to integrate with Facebook and Twitter and so on. It's the same as what Limmy's done: I've copied Limmy. You can try out if you like, I don't know if it works or how it will show up on Facebook.
Also, I think that if you get yourself a Gravatar you'll have a wee image with your comment.
Friday, November 13, 2009
JSA-holes
I've changed my mind about something. While studying a Social Policy module at university I discovered that the government now refers to people who claim benefits as 'customers' as opposed to 'claimants' or 'recipients'. This is an example of New Labour's mania for translating everything into the language of commerce. This tactic may originally have been a way of selling social democratic policies to people who would who would not have voted for Labour prior to 1997 but that purpose has been forgotten and such words serve to propagate free market ideology.
Or so I thought! On Wednesday, I went to a Back To Work session at the Job Centre Plus. It was a PowerPoint presentation given by a woman who explained that the session is a new government wheeze and attendance is compulsory for everyone on Job Seeker's Allowance. She rattled through it very quickly and I became disproportionately annoyed when anyone prolonged the experience by asking questions.
She referred to us as 'customers' throughout as per the JCP jargon. In this context the word seemed to inculcate the idea that the JCP was a place that provided us – customers – with a service. The JCP is not simply an office for signing on. The focus is on getting a job not on getting free money.
A 'customer' sounds like someone with rights, someone to be treated with respect. So while putting the emphasis on the search for work as opposed to claiming money, the use of the word 'customer' does not force responsibilities on us; it helps direct us towards responsibilities – possibly this is consistent with all that Nudge shit.
The word 'customer' is not as stigmatising as a word like 'claimant'. In a capitalist society such us ours it is the customers who are important; if the 'claimants' are not 'customers' then they are something else. They are apart, they are needy, and they have taken enough already – we owe them nothing.
I would rather be a customer than a claimant. So all of you sitting there in your fucking ivory tower universities, getting your fancy degrees, listen to this lesson from the university of life!
***
Or so I thought! On Wednesday, I went to a Back To Work session at the Job Centre Plus. It was a PowerPoint presentation given by a woman who explained that the session is a new government wheeze and attendance is compulsory for everyone on Job Seeker's Allowance. She rattled through it very quickly and I became disproportionately annoyed when anyone prolonged the experience by asking questions.
She referred to us as 'customers' throughout as per the JCP jargon. In this context the word seemed to inculcate the idea that the JCP was a place that provided us – customers – with a service. The JCP is not simply an office for signing on. The focus is on getting a job not on getting free money.
A 'customer' sounds like someone with rights, someone to be treated with respect. So while putting the emphasis on the search for work as opposed to claiming money, the use of the word 'customer' does not force responsibilities on us; it helps direct us towards responsibilities – possibly this is consistent with all that Nudge shit.
The word 'customer' is not as stigmatising as a word like 'claimant'. In a capitalist society such us ours it is the customers who are important; if the 'claimants' are not 'customers' then they are something else. They are apart, they are needy, and they have taken enough already – we owe them nothing.
I would rather be a customer than a claimant. So all of you sitting there in your fucking ivory tower universities, getting your fancy degrees, listen to this lesson from the university of life!
You're not allowed to do work experience while you're on JSA. I think that I need more work experience to have any chance of getting the sort of jobs that I'm after. You can do voluntary work but not work experience.
The Tories, of all people, are considering changing this for the under 25s. The government says that the tax payer ought not to be paying for weeks of unpaid work; the company should pay. But in the absence of any legislation that says that companies must pay interns and when hardly any companies pay interns, internships are too costly for most people. Certain jobs, particularly in the media, are for this reason off-limits for people whose parents cannot support them while they are not being paid.
On JSA you are required to do three 'things' a week to look for work. It would be quite easy to be doing more than that while also doing work experience. There could also be an understanding that you would stop your work experience if offered paid work.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Armistice Day
I bought a poppy last week. It's been a few years since I last wore one. I attach some thoughts to it: none of remembrance, I'm afraid; all of vanity. One is a worry that it might mark me as a member of the Countryside Alliance as I walk around south London and through art galleries. Another is that it makes me feel like the prime minister.
Today, I went to observe the two minute silence in Trafalgar Square. Stephen Fry had tweeted that he would be reading a couple of poems there and I hurried down imagining an affair of glitzy solemnity: black coats, men in uniforms, a brass band, actors, comedians and politicians.
But that wasn't the only reason I was drawn there; I had been missing the remembrance services we had at school. They were led by the man whose face (browser permitting) should accompany this paragraph (I think they continue to be led by him to this and, indeed, on this day). He is the school's principal. I remember once Mrs Denyer instructed certain year groups to stand and for the rest of us to imagine them all slaughtered to demonstrate visually the number of former pupils of the school who had died in the first world war or both world wars or all wars ever: six hundred or so.
Each year it was the same. I looked forward to the service because it offered a good hour and a half off lessons. I was then (and will always be) quite prepared to put up with any amount of boredom if it means not working. Those would be my feelings going into the service but during its course I would be built up by prayers, readings, hymns, poems, the gravity of the assembly hall, and multimedia presentations about former pupils of the school who died in war: by the time the bugler played the Last Post outside somewhere I would be feeling emotional, gripped by some abstract grief.
It was a fix of this sort that I expected to find in Trafalgar Square. I arrived just after ten. GMTV's Ben Shephard was onstage in his role as emcee. He introduced Mark Knopfler who played a boring song (all proceeds to the British Legion) and Athlete who played two more awful, boring songs. Their lead singer, Joel Pott, spoke in between the songs and had semantic trouble with the word 'lay': he had visited Arnhem where his grandfather 'lay', had lain wounded, he clarified.
All this was very disappointing. I tried to restrain within me the great power of my snobbery but this show seemed so tawdry. I looked around the crowd in search of noble sentiments, presumably a great number of these people were bereaved, but they just looked like any old milling crowd and where was the brass band? And whose idea had it been to hire this bloody insipid Ben Shephard? Why wasn't this thing being led by some grand patrician bishop or former general? Where was the nation's headmaster?
Out came Fry. He wore a nice coat and read In Flanders Fields followed by Suicide in the Trenches. An articulated truck had drawn attention with a loud parp of its horn while the poems were read; the bugle soon provided better parpery. During the silence sirens wailed continuously. A cat squawked and so did a bird. Camera shutters were audible from twenty yards away.
Then back to the show. Shephard began talking via a nineties-style 'link up' to the emcee of a similar event in Swansea. He made some reference to being us being 'up in London' and them being 'down in Swansea'. The other emcee was perhaps taken aback by Shepherd's archaic usage for he seemed to pause before responding and looked offended.
I had in mind a swift getaway and struck out towards Charing Cross station but the great tide of the people was not heading that way; they were moving to drop paper poppy petals in the more westerly of the square's fountains. I took some petals from a box and went with them. Some people lingered by the fountain after they had scattered their poppys and watched them float around. Here was something that was not to be found in those school services: actual grief. I felt guilty. Both my grandfathers fought in the second world war but for them, as far as I know, it was a great adventure. A non-fatal great adventure. My family has not lost anyone in war. I jettisoned my poppys into the water and made room for the bereaved.
I walked down Whitehall. A large crowd around the cenotaph was dispersing. Thunderous applause was emanating from the Foreign Office. I walked into Parliament Square and past the war protest there. Iraq: two million dead. Twice the number of British deaths in the first world war. Not true, apparently, but not far off.
Today, I went to observe the two minute silence in Trafalgar Square. Stephen Fry had tweeted that he would be reading a couple of poems there and I hurried down imagining an affair of glitzy solemnity: black coats, men in uniforms, a brass band, actors, comedians and politicians.
But that wasn't the only reason I was drawn there; I had been missing the remembrance services we had at school. They were led by the man whose face (browser permitting) should accompany this paragraph (I think they continue to be led by him to this and, indeed, on this day). He is the school's principal. I remember once Mrs Denyer instructed certain year groups to stand and for the rest of us to imagine them all slaughtered to demonstrate visually the number of former pupils of the school who had died in the first world war or both world wars or all wars ever: six hundred or so.Each year it was the same. I looked forward to the service because it offered a good hour and a half off lessons. I was then (and will always be) quite prepared to put up with any amount of boredom if it means not working. Those would be my feelings going into the service but during its course I would be built up by prayers, readings, hymns, poems, the gravity of the assembly hall, and multimedia presentations about former pupils of the school who died in war: by the time the bugler played the Last Post outside somewhere I would be feeling emotional, gripped by some abstract grief.
It was a fix of this sort that I expected to find in Trafalgar Square. I arrived just after ten. GMTV's Ben Shephard was onstage in his role as emcee. He introduced Mark Knopfler who played a boring song (all proceeds to the British Legion) and Athlete who played two more awful, boring songs. Their lead singer, Joel Pott, spoke in between the songs and had semantic trouble with the word 'lay': he had visited Arnhem where his grandfather 'lay', had lain wounded, he clarified.
All this was very disappointing. I tried to restrain within me the great power of my snobbery but this show seemed so tawdry. I looked around the crowd in search of noble sentiments, presumably a great number of these people were bereaved, but they just looked like any old milling crowd and where was the brass band? And whose idea had it been to hire this bloody insipid Ben Shephard? Why wasn't this thing being led by some grand patrician bishop or former general? Where was the nation's headmaster?
Out came Fry. He wore a nice coat and read In Flanders Fields followed by Suicide in the Trenches. An articulated truck had drawn attention with a loud parp of its horn while the poems were read; the bugle soon provided better parpery. During the silence sirens wailed continuously. A cat squawked and so did a bird. Camera shutters were audible from twenty yards away.Then back to the show. Shephard began talking via a nineties-style 'link up' to the emcee of a similar event in Swansea. He made some reference to being us being 'up in London' and them being 'down in Swansea'. The other emcee was perhaps taken aback by Shepherd's archaic usage for he seemed to pause before responding and looked offended.
I had in mind a swift getaway and struck out towards Charing Cross station but the great tide of the people was not heading that way; they were moving to drop paper poppy petals in the more westerly of the square's fountains. I took some petals from a box and went with them. Some people lingered by the fountain after they had scattered their poppys and watched them float around. Here was something that was not to be found in those school services: actual grief. I felt guilty. Both my grandfathers fought in the second world war but for them, as far as I know, it was a great adventure. A non-fatal great adventure. My family has not lost anyone in war. I jettisoned my poppys into the water and made room for the bereaved.
I walked down Whitehall. A large crowd around the cenotaph was dispersing. Thunderous applause was emanating from the Foreign Office. I walked into Parliament Square and past the war protest there. Iraq: two million dead. Twice the number of British deaths in the first world war. Not true, apparently, but not far off.
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