The Fouls Tribune

Don't piss in the kettle

2010-12-13T18:38:00.001Z

Since last posting here, I have become a full time dissident.

We did not rise early on Thursday. There was no need to: the Commons wouldn't be voting until 5pm and the protest began at 12. We were marching to stop Nick Clegg from bringing off his latest and most dastardly plot. The crowd assembled at ULU. Above us was the Apache helicopter off Wikileaks, ready to gun down with relish anyone seen carrying a beach umbrella. Around us people were handing out flyers giving advice on what to do if we were arrested and earnest men were debating the relative merits of mutualism and collectivism; speaking much as if the matter would have to be settled by the end of the day, by which time we would have seized all major offices of state and it would be necessary for us to install some new form of government (or indeed non-government).

There was also a stall selling the Socialist Worker. My friends and I have long taken issue with the Socialist Worker's "F**K FEES" slogan.

"You should have courage in your expletives," my friend told one of the people running the stall.

"That's actually an old argument," he replied, "You know it's actually illegal to display obscenities and actually you can be prosecuted for it."

That's the spirit.

Soon we were marching. My two friends and I had with us blackboards and chalk. On these we wrote withering, ironic phrases which we angled at passing media people. "Don't piss in the kettle" (accompanied by a picture of a kettle) was an early favourite.

We marched and marched and marched and when we reached the north side of Parliament Square we stopped. Now, it was apparently at this stage that we "deviated from the agreed route": we were supposed to carry on up Whitehall then turn right and have a rally up by the Hungerford Railway Bridge.

There are two things that it is worth saying about this. One, most of us had not heard anything about any agreed route and it seemed as though the way up Whitehall was blocked. Two, the proposed rally point, up by the Hungerford Railway Bridge, is about three quarters of a kilometre from the House of Commons and isolated from politically iconic buildings.

The green on Parliament Square was protected by temporary fencing but some people broke it down on the south side of the square and soon we had all piled in. As a crowd, we were pushing to the west towards the Palace of Westminster. Some sort of battling was going on at the front but, back where we were, we practised our chants and drank whisky-laced coffee:

"Whose streets? Arse treats! Whose streets? Arse treats!"

This went on for some time and people began settling in, making fires from placards and so on. It seems perversely radical to burn your own message.

Then, for reasons few of us understood at the time, we all abandoned the eastern front and tried to scarper off down Victoria Steeet in the south-west corner of the square (I learned later that we were trying to avoid being kettled and that this was the last way out of the square). It was in that corner that the Met had stationed its most ill-tempered employees. It had hoisted some on enormous horses.

There was a certain amount of stick and smoke-bomb chucking going on. Soon, there were cries of "make way, make way" as young girls bleeding from the head were carried back through the crowd. My friend, who is taller than me, said that from what he could see, one of the police officers was a special maniac and might have been responsible for this.

Then there was a cavalry charge. Trying to stay upright in a terrified crowd of hundreds of people while carrying a blackboard and fleeing charging horses as fast as you can is difficult. The Python Terry Jones used to say that he was tickled by the use of 'run away!' as a military command and enjoyed putting it in the script of Holy Grail as many times as possible. On Thursday, it was the only command I had any use for. When I turned round I saw two figures standing among the horses holding each other. They each looked about four and a half feet tall. This little phase was later reported by Sky News as "Mounted police attacked by protesters".

As the crowd reformed, the mood changed. Time to redaub our chalky palimpsests with more serious-minded, horse-themed slogans. My friend came up with "We met at the riding club". I had "Courses not horses". The fences around the green had been supported by concrete blocks; people were now smashing these into smaller pieces to hurl at the police lines. While I watched someone doing this, a man said to me that he thought throwing lumps of concrete was going too far. I suggested that so long as they were very small lumps – gravel-size, say – it might not be that bad. Another man explained to him that he only had these reservations because he is English: in continental Europe they do this sort of thing all the time and everybody thinks it's fine – indeed, it is fine (he said).

It became clear that getting out on to Victoria Street was no longer possible. We drifted back to the green for a slow simmer in the kettle and waited for the outcome of the vote, which was to be announced some time after 5.30pm. We ate some homemade samosas and someone set fire to a plastic booth creating a vast column of black smoke. The air was seriously acrid and choking from this point on.

We had a little radio and were able to announce that the bill had passed to some nearby people. No reaction. We booed a bit and then set about trying to leave. This turned out to be impossible and one of my friends became separated from the other two of us.

Twenty minutes later, I spotted him in a surging crowd of hundreds of people running away from a police baton charge. I pulled him into the relatively calmer waters at the edge of the Treasury building. No sooner had we achieved this reunion than we became the front line. We were some of the only people standing between police lines and people trying to break a Treasury window. A strong light shone on us from a helicopter far above.

The crowd began doing some fairly unusual multi-tasking. One eye had to be kept on the agitated police line but the other eye was needed to appraise the work of the window smashers who, at this stage, were doing a clearly inadequate job. For one thing, they were hitting the central and most boingy window panes. For another, they were using blunt pieces of concrete. People began shouting advice: "smash the wood!"; "no, smash the glass and then pull out the frame!"; "get a run up!".

Eventually, some masked men turned up with a big metal pole and began lancing the window. "Sorry, sorry. Excuse me," was their cry as they came through the crowd.

A light came on inside the room, suggesting that there were police inside. This was a bad window, the crowd decided. There is a board behind it and, even though we've got through the glass, there'll be no getting through that board. Next window!

The next window had no board behind it and was helpless in the face of seasoned lancers. The blind was ripped out and burned. Hurrah! said the crowd.

My friend asked me what we would do if people started going in to the Treasury. Would we go in? There was no time to answer this question: the police had picked their moment and were charging full pelt with their batons, whacking everyone in their way. Disarray ensued. My friend and I were briefly part of a sit down protest. "Sit down! Everyone sit down!" we were yelling. Then the police charged again: "Fuck! Don't sit down! Don't sit down!"

Running away, we discovered a man smashing a Treasury door. With a little bit of help from others, he was through and people began streaming into the building. Time for that question again: are we going to go in? But, within seconds, everyone was streaming out again, as if repelled by a dragon.

Then began a long fight against the police officers inside using a piece of fencing. People smashed the windows around the door and chucked in bangers. Some people managed to grab truncheons. People hurled themselves at police shields. A masked boy opened a window that seemed to have been unlocked. Back in the audience, between 2 and 10 metres away, we were busy contextualising. Storming the Treasury: the most significant bit of civil disobedience since the poll tax riots, or even the Chartists. A new 1968.

The debate disbanded as police made another baton charge. At this point, we were in danger of being crushed between two separate police lines so we headed away from the Treasury down towards the Supreme Court. In this, the most quiet part of the square, we encountered a Financial Times journalist. She wanted to know what was going on but refused to go any nearer to the noisy section. We could have told her anything.

Further along, a pasty man who was bleeding from the head in two places was wobbling on his feet and asking police if he might be allowed to leave in order to attend hospital. The police told him that they were not going to let him through. Where had he got that bandage? they asked him. He had got it at first aid tent on the green, his friends told them. The police were suspicious of this. The pasty man's companions were in a mood of perfect consternation:

"What's the quickest way we can get him to hospital? Please get him an ambulance."

"All the ambulances are gone and I can't let you through."

After a lot more of this a police medic let him through.

Towards the abbey, another police officer was moving batonless through the kettle rounding up tired people who wanted to leave. He proposed letting us leave in small groups from the south-east corner. We stood in a crowd in that corner for a long time. The police guarding the barriers said they wanted young girls. The bored crowd offered this virginal sacrifice with no resistance but still we were not allowed to leave. An hour later, the police told us that they wouldn't be letting us out after all. Terrible service.

We moped around at the barriers by the parliament. A while later, the police were up to something. Hundreds more were pouring in from the House of Lords end. They had dogs. As they formed their lines, someone played the Imperial March from Star Wars through a megaphone.

Then some good news: we were to be set free! Simply head up to Westminster Bridge and we'll let you out. Thank you, police. Very kind. We read our what-to-do-if-you-get-arrested slips and walked on to Westminster Bridge. The police line ahead of us halted and a new one formed behind us. Much colder out on the bridge. People made some fires and started doing the hokey cokey.

Someone with a radio said that the news was reporting that we were refusing to leave. We did a lot of non-political, 'let us go'-themed chanting.

Someone else with a radio said that we were being held in the cold in order to allow Prince Charles to get to the Palladium safely. This was angry-making news.

Some time after 11, they started letting us out. When we got home, we found that the news was only interested in the Charles and Camilla paint business.

Maximum solidarity

2010-10-06T22:15:00.002+01:00

I have been thinking long and hard about how to optimise passive solidarity with striking tube workers. All week in fact. Is it more solidarious to make a big deal of the pain the associated disruption caused you or is it more solidarious to take it in your stride? The point of the strike is disruption; a successful strike is disruptive. In which case, it is important to stress that the strike caused you lots of trouble – this should count as praise of the strike. This is generally the line taken by all those goofs the Evening Standard finds on the street and recruits for 20 words of moaning.

The trouble with those goofs is that they all too often go on to suggest that the strikers are of their essence very bad and should be prevented by emergency legislation from enacting any further heinous withdrawal of labour. This is where they go wrong.

I have devised an equation for constructing strike-sympathetic comments to provide to newspapers:

Stress enormous painful disruption caused + Express sympathy for strikers themselves = Maximum optimal solidarity

Also, who are those 'volunteers' who appear in Underground stations during strikes? Are they picket line-crossing tube workers or are they general purpose anti-strike fans? What is their fucking game?

The least trustworthy of animals

2010-08-21T11:14:00.008+01:00

The animal least worthy of trust is the centaur. With its soft, downy fur and playful sense of irony it pretends mammalianism but, like the insect, its limbs are six. The internet has noticed:

Re: Mommy, where do Centaurs come from?
Eldariel, 08-28-2009, 09:00 AM
It's worth remembering that Centaurs have 6 limbs and thus cannot be mammals. Indeed, I'd say their likeness to Humans and Horses is only coincidental and they are descend from insects whose exoskeleton just so happens to remind skin (why do you think they have natural armor?) and whose antennae have developed to double as ears.

Eldariel called it good. But further down on the same page of internet Mark Hall says this:

Mark Hall, 08-28-2009, 08:21 PM
Technically, 5. Humans and other apes are a little freakish in that we've only got 4, though our 5th is visible in our skeletons.

Hall means tails. Tails are limbs ergo mammals have five limbs. But are tails limbs, Hall? According to the dictionary, a tail is a jointed or prehensile appendage. Prehensile can mean grabby, quick on the uptake, or avaricious. Consider the horse's tail: it is none of these things. At best, the horse's tail is swishy. Here is a diagram:

In a modern horse, the tail does contain some bones and is ergo jointed. But the bones are few and the nature of the horse's tail is predominantly swishy, not jointed. Ergo, the horse's tail is not a limb and ergo centaurs are insects.

Turning now to the skeletal system of a modern centaur, we see that the problems make manifold their instances:

Two ribcages. Wherein, we are supposed to believe, throb two hearts, two pancreata, two souls? Not likely. The centaurs' treachery is too base to be given full expression in Earth languages.

Peer to Peer

2010-07-10T10:47:00.004+01:00

Here is an idea for a new television programme.

Two young men (with iPhones) compete to see who can ascend to the higher rank of peerage in a year. They are set challenges: promoting organic chicken against the clock, redecorating a house against the clock, getting youngsters to try tripe against the clock, delivering thirty pizzas.

The two are life-long friends. Their names are Joss and Helena. Even at school, each knew that to live his life untitled would be unbearable.

Helena says, "I got a lot of peer pressure at school: Dad was only a baronet and sometimes that was pretty hard."

Joss says, "I'm really stoked about this year. What do I want out of it? A dukedom would be great but I think I'd probably be just as happy to be an earl."

Along the way, they are given advice by John Prescott, Tony Benn and others. Their story is interspersed with real-life stories of those that made it — Prescott himself, Voldemort — and tragic no-hopers — Stephen Fry, Eamon Holmes.

Alternative names for the show:

Lordy!
Peer Pressure
We Woz Robed

Very Good Speech

2010-05-04T18:57:00.003+01:00

I have done a painting to commemorate Gordon Brown's very good speech to Citizens UK yesterday.

You can also watch the very good speech right here.

Avatarpagitica

2010-02-25T10:11:00.002Z

In Woody Allen's Stardust Memories the central character, a film director played by Allen himself, is accused of making films that are merely psychological and not political. When we think politically we think in terms of types: old people, workers, children, disabled people, Muslim people. Art allows us to see political problems through idiosyncratic individual experience. Unlike politics, art can concern itself with the specificities and ambiguities of human lives. Marx and Engels were keen that fictional characters should combine typicality (the quality of being representative of politically-relevant types of person) with individuality. Such characters "incarnate historical forces without thereby ceasing to be richly individualised".

It is with this idea in mind that were I making a film about a black child in the American state of Georgia in the 1970s and I wished to have a television in a scene, I would be wary about having the television play Rumpole of the Bailey despite the fact that I know that Reginald D Hunter, who is a black man raised in Georgia, watched Rumpole of the Bailey on the television during that time. It would risk subverting the typicality of that experience. Probably, there are other examples.

Avatar is a film that fails politically and psychologically.

Its psychological failure is of an unremarkable kind commonly associated with admiral-class blockbuster movies. There are several characters in the film: a soldier, a scientist, a corporate man, a general, some tribespeople. The soldier is a wheelchair user and the scientist is an occasional smoker. That's it for characterisation. This is a film that embraces typicality so completely that it is anti-human.

Avatar's political failure is far richer and more unusual. In this its central achievement is managing to be racist (in at least three distinct ways) while also being crudely anti-militaristic.

The first way in which Avatar is racist is in the portrayal of the indigenous Na'vi people. The Na'vi are a blue-skinned alien race who inhabit a mineral-rich world that is invaded by bad imperialist Earthlings. They are depicted dismissively as generic savages who are closer to beasts than the capitalist military colonialists. They growl and tense when confronted with disagreeable things, they wear tan loin-cloths and discount faux-tribal jewellery from Accessorize, they are vaguely "spiritual" and are concerned about ecological "balance". You do not have to be an anthropologist to imagine that there might be more to aboriginal people than this thoughtless stereotyping. There might even be cultural differences between different groups of aboriginal people. More of this sordid association with typicality, then.

The second way in which Avatar is monstrously racist is that it assumes that its story will be only be broadly appreciated if told through the eyes of a Western white man: a normal person. It is this nice normal person who renounces his technologically-rich upbringing and industrialist society and embraces instead spirituality and balance. This white person, with whom the entire audience can so easily identify, goes on to become the very best of the savages; a prophesied Warrior-King of the beast people who lands them a great victory. It is beyond the abilities of the charming, dumb aboriginals to bring about their own victory and no one would have appreciated a story told from their perspective.

It is in this feature of the film that we are invited to bear witness to the process by which the white man appoints himself entitled to absolve himself of his sins. We thus feel very good that we the audience, being nice post-white white people, identify with the white man who liberates and leads the oppressed rather than the cruel, pillaging white people with whom we have nothing in common. Similarly we have nothing in common with our colonial forebears: that is why everything is fine now.

The third way in which Avatar is racist is contained in a single piece of dialogue from the smoking scientist character. The religion of the Na'vi is based on ancestor worship. They believe that they channel the wisdom of the their ancestors through large sacred trees. The scientist explains that much of the flora of the planet is connected in the manner of synapses and exists as something like a planet-wide brain. The Na'vi, she explains, are able to tap in to the accrued knowledge of the planet through their sacred places.

So while the invading imperialists are dreadful, bad and evil they are, in fact, right and they have a better understanding of the natives' planet than the natives themselves who, earnest simpleminded pagans that they are, have but a misconceived and primitive apprehension.

So much for the racism. The anti-militarism in Avatar is not so elegantly trifurcated as the racism but it is impressive that the filmmakers were able to combine it with all the other disagreeableness. The soldiers in the film are portrayed as relentlessly mean, bloodthirsty bastards. We cheer as they are toppled from their hideous machines, stripped of their nasty overtly technological weapons and dismembered on the sacred CGI forest floor.

Western powers are currently engaged in war and the message that Avatar seems to be keen to send to the soldiers is that the wrongness of war and the root of much of the pain caused by war is the simple bastardry of the average soldier. Politics plays a part in the upper-echelons, of course, but the major problem, lest we forget, is that soldiers are awful.

But Avatar's failures are not only political and psychological they are also visual. Everyone but everyone but everyone but everyone seems to think that – whatever Avatar's other flaws – to look at it, to actually see it with your eyes is to be confronted with a parade of cinematic frames of such poignant beauty that they surpass not only all the images from other movies that we may have previously considered beautiful but all other sights that have ever encountered human retinae. I'm here to tell you that this isn't the case. The emperor is a hideous dresser.

The Na'vi are proud, lissom elf-cat people of the sort that can be found on all fantasy art forums:

The CGI forest looks fairly real but not much more so than the forest in the 2007 video game Crysis and certainly not more real than real forest, which has been seen in some films before. Throughout the film, the hatefulness and banality of what is going on taints the film so all pervasively that it is impossible to find any of it beautiful.

It also turns out that 3D does not look so much like the 3D we are used to from the real 3D world, what counts as 3D, apparently, is a series of two-dimensional planes. And high class 3D, which we are told is what Avatar has, does not involve having things appearing to point out of the screen or dangle before your eyes (in the fun way that you get in Disneyland), high class 3D is about being distracted by different layers of jellyfish seed things and having a headache.

You would be better off watching Local Hero, a film with a similar premise featuring a lanky and youthful Peter Capaldi. In Local Hero the agent of the oppressor is a young American oil executive, MacIntyre, who is sent to the northwest coast of Scotland to buy out the land from under a village in order to build an oil refinery. There he finds a close-knit community where the local hotelier is the lawyer and the preacher too. But, unlike the Na'vi, these indigenes are glad of the arrival of the neocolonialist and they see it as an opportunity to become very rich.

At first, they feign scepticism to drive up the price of the deal and MacIntyre's time there is prolonged. What follows is at once more humane than Avatar and mystical in its own right.

And, what is more, featuring, as it does, the sands of Morar, it is better looking than Avatar:

I enjoyed some other pieces about Avatar.

Election Prediction

2010-02-22T12:32:00.005Z

Brown will get extradited to China over this bullying shit.

Cameron will bottle it and get caught trying to flee wearing a false moustache and carrying an old suitcase full of ladies' underwear.

Boris will see this as his chance and "form-up" in the manner of the Power Rangers to become over three hundred feet tall. He'll stride down the wider streets of London saying, in his booming giant's voice, "Who would dare not vote for me?"

In the end no one votes for him and he'll skulk off out to sea grumbling.

At this point Brown will return having grown a big horrible beard because he's been tortured. He's just in time to stop the nuclear bomb!

Everybody throws a big party for Brown.

Mince That Spins

2010-02-03T21:00:00.002Z

WMD

2010-02-02T12:12:00.000Z

We, all of us, get awfully het up when people on the news misuse words and mispronounce things. They say 'venal' when they mean 'venial', they use 'crescendo' to mean a climax and they put the emphasis in a funny place when they say 'controversy'. It's a wonder that we can even bear to look at a broadcast journalist some days.

It is against this backdrop, this history of misdeeds, that we should take pains to recognise the good. We ought to celebrate those few instances where broadcast journalists come across something tricky and consistently get it right. In this way they will come to associate good behaviour with reward.

An example of such a success is WMD. The acronym is used cheifly in relation to the build up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The question was whether Saddam Hussien's regime had programmes for building weapons of mass destruction. In this case we are almost always talking about WMD in the plural so it would be tempting to say 'WMDs'. This would be wrong because the pluralisation happens back next to the W: we are not talking about weapons of mass destructions.

Now, you watch: they almost always get this right. They have mastered it. This is particularly impressive when you consider that in the associated discussions about the progress of wars in the Middle East they often have to refer to IEDs and older journalists will have been used to talking about ICBMs.

So when, later this year, you're out for your regular fast buck compiling that dreary annual of yours (the one with all the journalists' cock-ups in it) think about all the times they said the right thing. Think about WMD.

Westminster

2010-01-28T18:32:00.002Z

Oliver Cromwell peers down from his plinth outside the Palace of Westminster. Below is sprawled a lion and Cromwell is hoping that thing he heard about lions being no good at climbing is true. The lion is wearing a passive expression and appears to be more interested in watching the armed police officers who loiter nearby like extras in a mid-noughties docu-drama about a biological terrorist attack. Those used to observing cats hunting would recognise the lion's apparent lack of interest in Cromwell as a common tactic of feline misdirection.

Inside, the palace is strikingly ecclesiastical. The implication seems to be that the authority wielded here is derived directly from God and the building is an apparatus for conducting His will. Tall unadorned stone spaces act as resonating chambers and divine vibrations are picked up in rooms all over the building where they are translated into statutes, motions, addenda and so on.

The Right Honourable Keith Vaz feels these vibrations as he sits as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee. On the menu today: antisocial behaviour. MPs sit primed to scrutinise the issue. On the wall: a grand portrait of Joseph Stalin, or, at least, what looks like one. Louise Casey of the Home Office is to be interrogated regarding her role in addressing antisocial behaviour.

Her message is clear. The problem of naughty children is of a second order kind; the problem is the parents. We tackle this problem best when we intervene early and when we educate the parents. Indeed, we should intervene early in other ways too; the police should be vigilant in tackling low-level crime. The word 'zero-tolerancing' is used.

Despite this clarity, one MP is unimpressed and, during his set of questions, accuses Casey of taking us "all around the houses".

The discussion moves on to examine more specific things to do with youth organisations and the simple measures that could be taken to improve the way they work: having youth clubs open a Friday evening rather than a Wednesday evening is one example.

This bores Vaz and he pipes up with his own line of questioning.

"What about spin?" he asks, "Has there been a problem of spin with antisocial behaviour?"

The statistics say that crime is down, replies Casey.

Vaz invites Casey to dispel the rumour in the Evening Standard that she would like to stand as a Labour candidate for London mayor. She says that the rumour is "nonsense". She is free to go.

Next, three people representing youth organisations. Their message is slightly different. Dysfunctional families are part of the problem, yes, but really the problem is of a third order kind: it is the problem of intergenerational poverty. This ideological shift elicits murmurs and shuffling in their seats from the MPs. Also, a little nodding.

One of these three is a young man recently released from prison. He is now involved with a charity called User Voice.

Vaz leans forward, "Why did you commit your crimes?"

The young man talks of not feeling connected, of not feeling that he and his friends were part of the same society that he saw depicted on the news. He has seen Vaz on the television but feels no connection to the people in the suits.

"You're in a suit!"

At first it is difficult to tell where this ejaculation has come from: everyone speaks into microphones and their voices seem to emanate from the same place. Soon it is clear that it was David Davies MP (not to be confused with former Tory party leadership candidate David Davis MP) who spoke.

The young man ignores this and continues to describe the perspective of youth. He felt that he did not want to be part of the nine-to-five world.

An unabashed Davies rallies, "Neither do we!"

The committee sits for another hour or so. Outside and along the river in Whitehall Gardens, palm trees shiver and pigeons perform synchronised aerial drills to stave off the cold.

While I know the names of all the people that spoke before the select committee that day I haven't included them here in case they Google themselves and end up finding this nonsense.

Also, while the work of select committees is, as far as I know, always entirely public I don't know where I stand legally as regards writing about this so I've tried to be careful. Certain things – particularly the order of events and the characterisation of Keith Vaz – are fictonal.

I was there while on work experience with Inside Housing and the reporter I was with wrote something about the meeting as well.

Harry Potter and the Pope of Rome

2010-01-22T19:55:00.010Z

Harry Potter stood looking at a shiny large sturdy black panelled varnished handleless black wooden fucking door in the Department of Mysteries. He had been here before and often wondered what lay beyond. Now, clutching his magical swipe card in his hand, he was about to find out.

A month had passed since the battle in Hogwarts. Harry had been elated for a fortnight and then began to feel restless. Ron was in America at a Wu-Tang concert. Percy Weasley suggested that Harry do some work experience at the Ministry of Magic. Harry already had the beginnings of a dynamite career set up for September and certainly didn’t need to improve his CV but Percy went ahead and arranged a week at the ministry anyway and now Harry felt obligated. Also, Hermione was already working there and she said she needed “someone to go to lunch with”.

Harry prodded the door and tried various things with his wand. It didn’t move. Six years of magical education, funded by what means he had never thought to ask, had not taught him everything there was to know about doors. Harry waved his temporary magical security swipe card unsurely in front of the door. Nothing happened. He tried shoving it between the door and the door frame and running it up and down. Still nothing happened.

Harry stood back to think and rearrange his boxers, these being the baggy ones that wouldn’t quit going up his ass crack, especially on warm days like this.

No sooner had he started rummaging down there than letters started to appear on the door as if a befonted hammer were smashing them there, punching through the black paint to reveal pale wood behind. Splinters of cheap pine ricocheted off Harry’s glasses.

CENSUS VENIFICUS

So read the words. Harry had no idea what they meant. He didn’t have long to look at them either because pretty soon the door was tottering backwards and forwards, creaking and then beginning to fall towards Harry who ducked and rolled out of the way before it crashed on the tile floor.

Through the dust Harry perceived a uniformed clerk with a desk and a pot plant. The behaviour of the door was clearly of no surprise to the clerk for he did not raise his eyes from his copy of Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

He gave Harry some forms to fill in and said, “The thesis is that antisemitism was deeply embedded in German identity. It is a controversial idea.”

“Do you mean about the door? I’m sorry,” said Harry with wide-eyed ignorance.

The clerk frowned and directed Harry to a waiting area. He told him that the sort of waiting he should do was waiting for a Magical Safety In The Workplace Induction and that later he should return to this place to do waiting for his Magical Fire Safety Induction.

For both of these Harry was inducted by Raymond, a kindly old man who had been inducting people since he was sixteen. It was fair to say that Raymond knew better than most that inductions could be very dull and early in his career he realised that he could stop his inductees becoming too bored by making jokes. Raymond had worked hard on these jokes and over the decades his inductions had become something in the order of a well-crafted comedy routine.

Harry was powerless in the face of these jokes. He felt that he was coming across as a humourless twat because he wasn’t joking back. It was a profoundly stressful morning.

After the inductions Raymond gave Harry a magical photo ID card and said that he would escort Harry to his magical workstation. Harry felt suddenly excited, he was about to find out what went on in this most mysterious department in the Department of Mysteries.

Raymond led Harry down a passageway of grand polystyrene panelling, magically coated to look like tropical hardwood. High mullionedly mullioned windows offered glimpses of strange lights and eruptions.

Harry’s heart was pounding as Raymond bent to fondle one of the polystyrene panels. Raymond fondled with his eyes half-closed and made murmurs of subdued ecstasy. Harry marvelled at the strange wonderful magic of the old man.

After a time the panel fell away to reveal a dark cupboard-like space behind. Raymond felt around in the cupboard and retrieved from the gloom a brand new Montblanc pen in a luxury display box. Removing the pen from the box with a paper serviette, Raymond instructed Harry to touch the pen in order to be transported to his workstation.

This was it, thought Harry, now experiencing near uncontainable feversish exhilaration at what he might be about to discover. Gulping, Harry seized the Montblanc pen, felt that familiar yoinking sensation and the heat of a thousand suns as he burrowed through the fabric of space before emerging into the bleak light of a car park on an industrial estate.

***
Harry did all the usual blinking and looking around before he noticed a sign next to him that said in large letters “DoM” and in smaller letters “Building 18, eLyssian Fields Business Park”. Ahead of him was a single-storey office building.

Inside a receptionist witch ignored Harry’s Hugh Grant-style bashful greetings and bumblings and told him to go to desk 31, pointing to a set of doors to her right.

“Shouldn’t this building be disguised? You know, so muggles can’t see it,” said Harry.

The receptionist shrugged, “What’s there to disguise?”

Through the doors there were rows and rows of typewriters, witches and wizards busy at each of them. Harry found desk 31 and noticed immediately that it had no chair. The desk was entirely bare except for a typewriter and Bunsen burner. Harry bent over the desk and looked at the typewriter. Immediately, it began to produce text of its own accord:

Welcome to MagicosoftDOS

M:>MagicsoftDOS version 1.3.2. All rights reserved 1982
M:>MagicsoftDOS version 1.3.2. All rights reserved 1982
M:>MagicsoftDOS version 1.3.2. All rights reserved 1982
M:>MagicsoftDOS version 1.3.2. All rights reserved 1982

Indexing... MAJ MAg Looking for volume...

AUto MAJ BAT 18_9_9_44
TAXo MAJ BAT 18_9_8_31
EX GOD 34_2_21_1

Looking for M:>drive...

Not found...
Not found...
Not found...
Not found...
ERROR

L&oking f`w M@>...

Not found...
Not found...
Not found...
Not found...
Not found...
Not found...
Not found_

Then it stopped. Harry tried pressing a the H key. The typewriter creaked a little but no H appeared. Fuck, thought Harry. He looked around pathetically for someone to help him, still leaning on his desk without a chair. Fuck.

Yellow flames burst from the Bunsen burner and a red-haired human head the size of a scotch egg squeezed itself up the tube and into view.

“Percy!”

“Hallo, Harry. Thought I’d see how you’re getting on.”

“Er, alright. I’ve broken my typewriter.”

“Oh don’t worry, just call IT services. Listen, I’m a bit busy what with the Pope and everything but I thought I’d see how you’re getting on.”

“Yeah...”

“Very busy actually. Trying to come up with a new education bill. Root and branch reform. It’s very difficult of course, we’re all Old Hogwartians so most of us can barely count! Transfiguration and potions are all good fun of course but no good for the business of government. I know you don’t like hearing people criticise old Dumbledore, Harry, but I must say it was his mania for practical magical education that has left us with a generation that is very nearly illiterate and entirely innumerate. And that’s just the civil servants! It’s as if he thought that we were all in training to go off and be sorcerers living in caves in the hills, staring gloomily into cauldrons. That may will have been the way it was in his day but we need different skills in the modern wizarding world.

“We’ve had to get some muggle politicos in and keep them under memory charms. The results from our first consultation have been very interesting. Vincent Cable was able to draw our attention to the spectacular wealth inequality in wizard society. You know there are perfectly viable residential properties lying vacant on Knockturn Alley – that’s why the place is such a dive. We’re thinking of proposing a property tax so that for the first time there’s a charge on the use-value of property. In the mean time we’re issuing management orders on those properties. Affordable homes. It’s a sea change in wizarding politics, Harry. And the power of taxation, Harry, its a magic beyond anything I’ve seen before! You must be very excited to be working down there in Magical Tax Inquiries.”

“What?”

“Don’t thank me yet though – I knew you’d like it! Of course, that wealth tax thing isn’t quite in my remit. As far as the education thing goes, it’s not only the curriculum of the school Harry but the funding. You know, and I hate to be so critical of Dumbledore again, but he really alienated the donors. Hogwarts is run entirely thanks to donations from wealthy wizarding families – the Malfoys and so on. I’m afraid to say that Dumbledore did nothing but treat them with contempt, so money that should have gone on teaching went on new armchairs for the Slytherin common room. It’s ridiculous. The school’s practically, in fact, very nearly bankrupt. So we either appease the donors with some radical pure-blood only type entrance standards or we nationalise the school. But that would mean massive wizarding tax hikes and I don’t know if the rest of the ministry would wear it. Of course, it all depends on what happens with the Pope this afternoon.”

“Right...”

“I’ve been speaking to your friend Hermione – very interesting ideas she has! What was it she said... I remember! Wholesale sacio-demacrotic reform, if not full Seychellism. It’s a very exciting time, Harry! Anyway, glad to hear you’re enjoying yourself. I’ve enjoyed chatting with you but, as I say, I’m very busy so I don’t have much time but, you know, if you need anything or anything then... you know. Anyway, best be off!”

Percy’s head retreated down the tube. Harry had no idea what Percy was talking about and suspected that Percy didn’t either.

He looked at his typewriter. The text from before was gone and had been replaced:

NO SIGNAL INPUT_

Christ, muttered Harry. But he didn’t have time to dwell on this – white smoke was billowing from the Bunsen burner. The smoke coalesced into another miniature male human head, this time an old gaunt one wearing a red zucchetto.

“Harry Potter, His Eminence the Bishop of Rome requests ah that you meet him in the ah Ministry of Magic at your earliest ah convenience.”

“Who?” asked Harry, looking stern and channelling a portion of the anger that he was feeling towards his typewriter.

“The ah Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, ah Primate of Italy...” replied the old man fervently before Harry interrupted.

“OK, and who should I ask for?”

“The ah Pope.”

“Right. Thank you.”

The man’s head nodded and then burst into smoke that drifted over to the woman working at the desk next to Harry causing her to splutter and cough.

“Sorry,” said Harry but she wafted away his apology and kept typing.

He massaged his brow and marvelled that the world is even more confusing than his previous estimation of how confusing it is, which was that it is remarkably confusing.

Fierce blue flames rose from the Bunsen burner and Harry watched them resignedly, expecting to be invited to supper with the androids.

Up popped Hermione’s head.

“Hi, Harry. You look exhausted.”

“No, no, I’m fine,” said Harry, smiling.

“Right, well where shall we do lunch then?” asked Hermione brightly.

“Do? Oh shit, sorry, I’ve got to see Pope or something. Maybe we could go afterwards. I’ll be back in London for that anyway...”

“You’re doing what? The Pope?” said Hermione, and Harry was disappointed to see that she was looking really fucking annoyed, “Why Harry?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know who Pope is.”

“Honestly. I know it’s not your fault and everything, but between your muggle upbringing and wizarding secondary education you’ve contrived to know nothing about anything.”

“Thank you,” said Harry.

Hermione explained to Harry who the Pope is.

“OK, he’s a sort of muggle king then?”

“Um, yeeees... No,” said Hermione, “Anyway, the point is, the Pope is responsible for choosing the Minister of Magic.”

“Oh right,” said Harry, feigning understanding.

“ ‘Oh right’...?” Hermione said, now looking dangerously cross, “Don’t you think it’s ridiculous?”

“I guess so...”

“Well it is ridiculous! A disgrace. And it’s one of the first priorities for reform, in my view...”

This was followed by a dilation on the weaknesses of the magical constitution and the need in the wizarding community for a strong secular voice in the absence of Dumbledore. All this was peppered with a variety of disparaging references to “the Pope of Rome”.

Harry was too worn out by the morning’s activity to apparate back to the Ministry of Magic for his date with the Pope so he took The Daye Bus. The Daye Bus is in some ways similar to the other great wizarding bus, The Knight Bus, but it stays more or less on the roads, doesn’t teleport and rarely goes faster than 45 miles an hour. For someone who had spent the last year engaged full time in guerrilla warfare and espionage, Harry’s first experience of work had taken a surprising toll and he slept most of the way.

***
When Harry arrived back at the ministry he was told that the Pope would see him in the minister’s rooms on the seventh floor, the top floor. Harry went up in the lift and made his way through an antechamber where thronged cardinals dressed in all their cardinalia waited in vestibular relegation and eyed Harry jealously.

Harry knocked on the door to the minister’s office and entered to find the Pope established at the minister’s desk and yelling down a diplomatic telephone.

“A hundred thousand galleons? I won’t pay it.”

With a flourish of the papal left hand, the Pope acknowledged Harry and indicated that he should shut the door and could help himself to newspapers and bagels.

“Uh huh, well you may say sodomite, Charles, but I say cocksucker... No, no, he’s a cocksucker... Tell him I won’t pay... Tell him sixty thousand and not a knut more...”

Harry sat down and ate a bit of smoked salmon. As the Pope continued to talk on the phone he caught Harry’s gaze and rolled his eyes as if to communicate the exasperating nature and regrettable necessity of temporal commerce and telephone calls in general.

“Uh huh, well we’ll see... OK, bye.”

The Pope replaced the receiver and leant back in his chair like a tycoon.

“Harry Potter,” he said, shaking his head and then drumming his fingers on his robed chest. “Vermouth? Vodka? Sherry?”

“Er, OK. Yes please. Er... Vermouth.”

“Bon,” said the Pope, springing alacritiously from his chair and making his way to a large drinks cabinet. “I’ve been very much looking forward to seeing you, Harry. I suppose you know why I’m here?”

“Yes,” said Harry.

The Pope walked over to Harry and handed him his drink. He gestured to the scar on Harry’s forehead, “May I?”

“Um, OK,” said Harry.

He stood up and the Pope stroked his scar. The papal jowls wobbled as the Pope closed his eyes and made Latin mutterings. With two fingers on the scar, he forced Harry’s head backwards. He ripped away Harry’s glasses and looked hard into Harry’s eyes. Finally, he let go, handed Harry back his glasses and did one of those two-fingered blessings that Popes do.

“Molto bene!” he said, now embracing Harry, “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Harry.

“Sorry about that. Had to be sure.

“Self-exorcism, Harry, I suppose that is how we must understand it. Very impressive. And that poor man you killed, you would not extend to him the benefit of these gifts of yours?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“No, you’re right. Not your gifts, really – the Lord’s, granted according to His divine will.

“Well, back to the business of the day. Who do we choose, Harry? Who should be the next Secretary of State for Magical Affairs?”

“You’re including me in this decision?” For a moment, despite his mean understanding of what was going on, Harry experienced excitement in the ignoble thought that the Pope was proposing that he, Harry, could become Minister.

“Apparently there’s some youngsters in the ministry with expensive, not to say dangerous, ideas. We need somebody to keep them at bay...”

A buzzer sounded on the Pope’s desk. The Pope scowled and pressed a button.

“What is it, Claire? I thought I said no interruptions... Oh! Oh, why didn’t you say? No, let him in, of course.

“Excellente!”

The door opened and Lucius Malfoy sashayed in.

“Lenny,” he said, his arms outstretched and his face wearing a warm smile.

“Lucy,” said the Pope, taking Lucius into a cuddle.

“Harry, this is the newly anointed Archbishop of Hogsmeade, Lucius Malfoy. Have you met before?”

Were Harry more of a total gimp, he would have said that this took the archiepiscopal piss. Instead, he drew his wand and shot two curses: one to kill Lucius and the other to stun the Pope. Both found their mark.

Harry felt, for the first time all day, that he was in his element. He knew exactly what to do. He defenestrated the body of the pontiff and then dove after it.

Glib Bullshit

2009-12-23T16:38:00.005Z

A sense of humour is to women what democracy is to neoconservatives. While women may say that they like a man with a sense of humour, what they really mean is that in a choice between Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt with a sense of humour they would choose Brad Pitt with a sense of humour. While neoconservatives say that they value democracy and want to spread it all over the world, what they really mean is in a choice between oil from Saudi Arabia and oil from a democratic Saudi Arabia they would choose oil from a democratic Saudi Arabia.

Thus, despite their claims to the contrary, women apply a strategy of Kissingerian realpolitik to their love lives and neoconservatives go for hunks.

Merry Christmas!

Gig Review

2009-12-18T14:45:00.006Z

Joe Gideon (of Joe Gideon and the Shark) stood on the stage and looked out at the audience, grinning his guilty grin and apparently feeling no pressure to use this time to tune his guitars. We stood near the front of the crowd and looked back at him.

A group of three young women moved in front of us, each no more than five feet and one inch tall. I am myself strikingly short (so short, in fact, that when recently I asked a friend for what proportion of the people I know did he estimate that I am the shortest fully-grown man they know he replied, "Sixty per cent," and added that I am the shortest man he knows). Being faced with this group of even shorter people was exciting.

I turned to my friend and said, "Watch me tower over these girls." I raised my nose high into the air and waved it around. I squinted and looked down my nose at the young women as if struggling to perceive them through many layers of cloud.

The woman closest to me turned around in a flutter of long dark eyelashes. She confronted me with large brown eyes and said, "I'm sorry, I'm standing in your way." I began attempting to communicate the idea that she was not obscuring my view and that really she was causing me no problem at all. I did this by flapping my hands about and shaking my head. I used more hand gestures accompanied by low grunting to indicate that she was actually positioned somewhat to the left of the portion of my field of vision that I required for a comprehensive view of the performers.

She turned to face the front again and at once my mind was awash with sparkling quips and visions of the prosecco-fuelled four-in-a-bed romps that would have naturally followed the successful deployment of any one of those sparkling quips.

This fantasy faded to be replaced by the grim conviction that my breath stank. Putrid swamp-coloured air seeped from my mouth and coiled around the slender neck of the woman who had spoken to me.

At length my thoughts turned to Stephen Fry. Most probably he has been offered an OBE or knighthood, I thought. Why has he turned it down? Not modesty: what modesty is left to a man who was willing to have BBC Four devote two nights to his hagiography. Some objection to being associated with Empire then or some darker malevolence – no need for a paltry knighthood when you plan to seize the crown itself with an army of QI fans.

A reign of fruity epigrams; of mothers smashing the noses of their sons so that they better resemble the King; and of a nation bankrupted by gratuitous over-investment in Radio Four panel shows.

Joe Gideon and the Shark began to play – a song about love in the snake house.

Griddle Pan Me This

2009-12-17T15:25:00.002Z

1^st Gent: Was Jesus with the fishes five thousand?
2^nd Gent: No, fifty.

Such were the words of two men in front of me in the queue at Feeding the 5000 yesterday: an event in Trafalgar Square to "highlight the ease of cutting the unimaginable levels of food waste in the the UK and internationally". The men went on to discuss national bankruptcy, Gordon Brown and those bastard Scots with their subsidised whisky.

The message of this event was clear: all of you with your fresh fruit and vegetables – you posers – you never eat it, you don't even like it, you just let it go soft and then throw it out, yous ought to stick to Mars Bars and the smaller sized baked bean tins – that way you won't be so fucking wasteful. I'm paraphrasing here – there may have been something about supermarkets as well.

Their plan was to feed five thousand or so people with food that would otherwise have been discarded. Naturally, there was a long queue and the organisers had been instructed by London authorities that the queue should not extend beyond a certain point so as not to impede the free flow of pedestrian traffic across the square. In deference to this instruction, a battalion of stewards had been hired to corral the queuers. Their leader was equipped with a megaphone and she moved up and down the queue, shouting at it, telling it to bunch up. In addition, it was snowing and there was a stiff breeze. The experience of queueing was thus something like being in a jolly Gulag.

The free food was very good: bread, fruit, a smoothie, a vegetable curry and an onion bhaji. The curry was tasty and nicely spiced: how had they got hold of such a quantity discarded spices? I'm sure supermarkets throw away perfectly fresh spices all the time but this must be almost nothing compared to the quantities of fruit and vegetables that they throw away. It's one thing to stew vegetables for the five thousand but quite another to spice the five thousand. Clever them.

Upon leaving I was distracted by this zombie bear.

It turned out to be a snare and I found myself fallen among operatives of the World Wide Fund for Nature. They had me on all sides and immediately I was set about by their representative Bex to whom I surrendered my contact details so that they could telephone in the coming days to arrange the payment of my ransom.

***My next aim for the outdoor part of my day was Christmas shopping. I had been given money by my grandmothers with which to buy presents for me from them: I buy them, I hand them over to them, they wrap them, I am presented with them on Christmas Day. It ill becomes you to scoff at the Christmas traditions of other families, so stop it: this is entirely sane behaviour.

The task was plainly a very simple one. I was aware, however, of a few things to be borne in mind: these items must be light and small as I will have to carry them in my luggage on the train; also, it would not do to spend all afternoon shopping for them – the Christmas spirit is not kindled by shopping for yourself. Beyond that, clearly I am well placed to know what I like so it should be easy.

So it was that, not three hours later, my attention was drawn to a cast-iron griddle pan. A few more hours carrying it all over town revealed that it really was of singularly robust construction – a welcome addition to my kitchen equipment. Having assembled a handful of other suitable trinkets, I was able to return home, griddle-panning London shoppers and commuters about the shins as I went.

Floreat Vaizeum

2009-12-15T10:29:00.006Z

When I left school and met for the first time that strange breed of people who might be best described as people who did not go to my school, I was shaken. These were people who used words like wicked and mate without joking and who understood none of the usual cultural signifiers – so that when I referred to the Lucas Reunion or 'the sort of person who stands on the steps at the back of the school' they had no idea what I was talking about.

What's more, they would not accept that my way of talking is simply The Globally-recognised Natural Language of Man spoken in the Normal Accent. It is the way that God spoke when once He walked among us and it is the language in which He will proclaim His judgment.

I soon realised that these people were too stubborn to be taught the correct way of things and I set about trying to justify myself to them. Chiefly, this meant that when I was drunk I would begin to talk about schools – your school, my school – and also why all this meant that I am "not actually that posh".

In the mornings after these bouts of misrepresentation and pontificating I would feel an unbearable shame. It felt as if a demon had reversed the usual progress of fecal matter through my body, transfiguring it into terrible words and letting those words issue noxiously from my idiotic mouth.

This happened so many times I can't remember but gradually I mastered the demon and, with considerable effort, I banished him. I would still talk embarrassing nonsense shite when drunk but not about schools and not about class.

Many years passed. I remained always vigilant, fearing his return. But he did not return and I began at last to form a shaky understanding with these people who did not go to my school: a little wool for some corn; they taught me their names for the sky and the clouds and for the rain that falls with the seventh moon; I showed them a compass and demonstrated gunpowder.

And then the demon returned. He has visited twice in the last month and I felt as wretched as ever I did in those early days.

The demon's return has coincided with the re-emergence of the rhetoric of class war in British politics kicked off in awkward and jowly fashion by Gordon Brown and his "playing fields of Eton" jibe. Over the past fortnight we have been given the chance to see British politicians squirming and being forced to give protracted defences of their background in an effort to demonstrate that they are not that posh.

It is thus that I have come to realise that the business of justifying your privileged background is an essential skill that must be learned by all members of the governing class. It may be torturous and there may be a great shame to be felt in doing it but in the democratic age the old elites cannot expect to remain in power any other way. The only shame is in doing it badly: the demon is not laughing at you; he is admonishing you.

Ed Vaizey MP is an unrivalled expert at this game; in his deft hands it becomes an art form. He was titled from birth, attended a major public school and then Oxford. He is, in other words, as posh as it is possible to be and still be able to stand unassisted. And yet here he is in this video sitting down and making a convincing argument that, despite all this, he is not that posh.

He was not always such a master: I remember that the "About Ed Vaizey" section of his website used to make clumsy reference to his having attended a state primary school.

American politicians do this better than anybody else. Not only have they convinced their electorate that they are not posh, they have convinced them that they live in a classless meritocracy. George W Bush managed two terms as president regarded as a humble everyman despite being descended from vampires and educated at a school at the centre of the Earth run by Freemasons.

Little Private Schoolboy

2009-12-03T15:27:00.010Z

Little private schoolboy
Shopping with your mum
Daddy's gorn till Tuesday
Ho hum, ho hum

Cunting bloody trolley
'Sgot a wonky wheel
Grab some Smarties cookies
And eat them before your meal

Little private schoolboy
Nintendo in your pocket
Daddy's off in Belgium
Maybe he'll bring back chocolate

Bring Back Nostalgia

2009-12-02T17:26:00.001Z

Athelstan the Homophobe

2009-12-01T15:20:00.004Z

I have made a song. It features all of the names of the kings and queens of England and excerpts from a homophobic article by Melanie Philips.

I welcome your questions.

I am Red Superman

2009-11-27T17:01:00.003Z

Months ago, I remarked that so determined was I to keep this blog going I would publish any old crap. I wrote, "Probably, I'll soon be publishing all of my emails off Amazon and that sort of thing." Well, here it goes.

Amazon has a very high opinion of me. This morning they sent me some recommendations for the sort of things they thought I might like to buy. Click on the image to see it larger.

Lacan, Marx, cast-iron dumbbells. Amazon thinks of me as a sort of soviet athlete. A specimen of physical and ideological perfection.

This is not the consumer profile of an ordinary man. These recommendations reflect the purchasing habits of a communist superman.

Not just any old communist superman, though: a communist superman with a keen interest in the life of the human psyche (Lacan) and a pop-culture-informed vision of the perils of totalitarianism (V for Vendetta).

***

I have an idea for a news item: Manservant or Master? We start with footage from Jeeves and Wooster, showing how in the olden days it was easy to tell in an instant who wore the spats. Then we explain how these days it can often be hard to tell, gentlemen being apt to conduct their business in flip flops, a vest, jogging bottoms and with a pastiche of the proletarian accent while their valets might go about double-breasted and hatless.

We take two young men – one a gentleman dressed in a yellow H&M cardigan and black and white kiffiyeh, the other his personal gentleman's gentleman decked out in Jack Wills stripey blue shirt and brown shoes – on to the street and ask the public: Manservant of Master?

They all get it wrong! We ask them why they think they it got it wrong. They respond that these days the old markers of dress and accent have broken down. We live now in a world now where it is hard to distinguish between the nobility and the servant class. Most agree that while this can be embarrassing sometimes – when you tip a duke or shake hands with the stable boy – overall, this is a good thing and demonstrates how much fairer we are as a society.

We conclude that this is indeed a brave new world, a new Britain thinly lacquered with equality. The Empire has certainly come along way since the fifties; what will the next fifty years have in store?

Thock, Conservative

2009-11-19T16:28:00.011Z

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.

New Project: Behind the Scenes

2009-11-19T16:10:00.008Z

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.

James Delingpole

2009-11-18T23:34:00.003Z

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.

The Man I Love

2009-11-16T19:04:00.001Z

"I may be deformed..."

2009-11-15T12:28:00.011Z

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.

JSA-holes

2009-11-13T12:00:00.000Z

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!

***

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.

Armistice Day

2009-11-11T17:14:00.001Z

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.

Brown Comedy

2009-11-10T11:28:00.006Z

Larry David plays Gordon Brown in a new comedy. Sarah Brown is played by Cheryl Hines.

Excerpt: In this scene Gordon and Sarah are talking in the kitchen of their palatial Santa Monica home. Sarah has a copy of the Sun newspaper and is dismayed by the front page.

Gordon: [Eating a yoghurt] Mm! You know Lewis' new girlfriend makes these. Very tasty. Pretty... pretty...

Sarah: Larry...

G: Pretty... pretty...

S: Larry...

G: Prettaaaayyyy...

S: Larry!

G: Pretty good. What?

S: Have you seen this article in the Sun?

G: The Sun? What's that?

S: It's an English newspaper. It says that you insulted the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan.

G: Whaaaat? Give that here. [Gordon takes the paper and examines the front page, muttering to himself for a moment] Oh this is bullshit! I insulted her? Bullshit!

S: Larry, why would you insult the mother of a soldier who died...

G: I didn't insult her. I wrote her a letter offering my condolences – which I do for all the close relatives of members of the armed services who die in action, by the way – and now she's saying that because my handwriting is bad she's insulted.

S: [Examining the scanned copy of the letter in the Sun] Larry, this is horrible, look at all the spelling mistakes and your handwriting is just awful.

G: I've got one eye! Of course it's fucking bad. You know how many of those things I have to write, two soldiers die in Afghanistan every week!

S: So you begrudge writing them?

G: No, I didn't say that. [Shaking his head furiously] It's a nice gesture, I think. I don't mind doing it. This is such bullshit, you can't criticise a polite gesture. You should be thankful for the gesture, thankful.

S: Well, I think you should phone this woman and apologise.

G: Phone her? Uch.

S: Larry! This woman has lost a son, you've insulted her...

G: Alright, alright. [Gordon picks up the phone].

Update November 12: I think that link to the audio of the phone call on the Sun website has stopped working. Here's a transcript.

Jingle Bells

2009-11-05T19:51:00.003Z

Sphynxorem Foulis

2009-11-05T15:25:00.004Z

Spotify playlist

2009-11-04T22:53:00.005Z

I've started a little Spotify playlist. You can get to it by clicking that link that says 'Spotifouls' up the top there... or on this blue phrase: ménage à une. Perhaps, by listening to the music there, you will be able to unravel some small part of the mystery of my sphinxy brain.

Sexy Ladies

2009-11-04T01:18:00.004Z

Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time

2009-11-02T21:57:00.007Z

On Immortality

2009-11-02T16:07:00.010Z

I wrote the bulk of this on May 24 just after I finished my university final year exams but I didn't post it. Today, I finished it off. And now, after all these months, you get to read it, Larry, you sick fuck.

It it with some guilt and trepidation that I proceed to put forward what I fear will be trite and pretentious so-called 'reflections' on the character of the angst of young people with comfortable upbringings as they confront a new section their lives. However, the angst felt by amateur bloggers is, if possible, less compelling so I had better get over this and proceed.

One thing that people seem to be concerned with is the extent of the command over the world's resources that they expect to be afforded by the various employments that are in prospect for them. A fellow graduand predicted that, in seven or so years, he would be compensated for the application of his knowledge of English law with goods amounting to an equivalent of eighty thousand pounds every year. Others were disposed to compare the scale of their annual consumption now (typically around half of an average British income) to conservative estimates of the remunerations prevailing in the industries to which they proposed to hire their labour power. Many expected that the increase in income would lead to an unprecedented capability to acquire consumer electronics and a relaxed attitude towards restaurant bills.

It was not thought that the future would be unambiguously better than the present. Quantity of resources is only one of a plurality of criteria by which future well-being may be measured. A colleague was grimly confident that he would never again be able to down tools and go outside to enjoy fine weather.

Intense work of the kind required for university finals leaves no time for reflection. It requires concentration on specifics; broader concerns are forgotten; as is the inevitability of death. The period after a time of intense work thus encourages mild catatonia and a heightened awareness of mortality. It is often said that young think that they will live forever. They may claim to fully acknowledge that we all will certainly die but they do not give that fact the proper attention in their thoughts and actions.

And, indeed, I find it difficult to believe that it is so certain that I will die. It has not yet been conclusively demonstrated that I, you and anyone else now alive will ever die. Of the 90-110 billion people that have ever lived, it has not been shown that 6.67 billion are mortal. The same is true of all the world's plants, fungi and other members of animal species living now. Several of my ancestors have not died. As such there may be a genetic precedent for my immortality. A critic might point out that all of my ancestors who have not died are the ones who have been most recently born. Furthermore, they constitute a vanishingly small fraction of the group of people to whom I owe my genetic inheritance. Most of them have shown themselves to be susceptible to the process of cell-death and corruption evinced in the ageing process.

But then I certainly feel immortal. I remember remarking to my mother when I was about five that while I realised that I had only been around for about five years, it felt like forever to me. I feel much the same way now. Also, as I consider my future, I am only in a position to prepare for or conceive of the next year or so. I may live for much longer than a year, it may as well be eternity.

What would eternal life be like? Very bad, say some, notably Ronnie the Bear who, in Wizard People, Dear Reader, declaims against heaven, calling it "the sick bed of pansy lies":

Far better "to live in the flesh and blood of the now" than to dwell on the possibility of cowardly dreams of infinite life. Dicky Dawkins takes a similar line, saying that he would like two to three hundred years but no more.

He imagines that such a period of time would be sufficient to be hailed as a Númenórean overlord provided that it was only he that enjoyed such a span of life. I think that four or six hundred years would be necessary for such a plan, something that he will perhaps realise in time. In this endeavour he will, of course, be well served by his knowledge of genetics; doubtless he could adapt his body for expiry at three hundred but leave open the possibility for extension of a further three hundred years when he reached two hundred and fifty. I wish him well.

I am quite happy with the idea that I might live forever. Given the likely progress of matter into drifted-apartness and entropy most of this eternal life would be spent floating alone in space; I would need to have plenty of interesting things to think about; maybe I would extend my immortality to some books and DVDs. That is unless you subscribe to the theory of the oscillating universe: big bang, big crunch, big bang, big crunch, big bang, big crunch ek setru. In fact, if the universe does oscillate then the theory of the oscillating universe is true whether you subscribe to it or not; why you ever thought that your weak-minded opinions have an effect on material reality I do not know. You're just an egotist like the rest of them, I guess.

Glenn Beck ain't so bad

2009-11-02T12:25:00.004Z

A few months ago we all get very excited when Charlie Brooker used his programme Newswipe to bring to our attention Fox News' Glenn Beck and his foaming-at-the-mouth ways. Prior to that I had been aware of Bill O'Reilly but Brooker opened the door to a rich and varied world of right-wing, polemical, broadcast-maniacism. Here's a video of it - the Beck bit starts at 3.25:

Since then I've come across Beck on YouTube a few times and often he did seem every bit as nutty as he was on Newswipe. But (this is my big scoop, by the way) I think that Brooker (very slightly) misrepresented him. Beck has a sense of humour. In July, the Emmy award-winning, former Saturday Night Live writer and performer Al Franken became a senator - here is Beck's reaction:

"You don't want me as a senator!" Check it out! He knows what he is, he knows he's a crazed, current affairs jester.

Here he is talking to Telegraph blogger and libertarian conservative journalist James Delingpole (skip to 1.19):

Look at those two carrying on; having a rare time, so they are. I think it might be fair to say that each take neither themselves nor each other very seriously, or, at least, they don't take themselves seriously all the time. Comedy was captured by the left in the eighties; to go on telly and display humour even in the merest way must be very gratifying for someone on the right.

Beck is not a comedian but there is a undercurrent to his show and his presentation style that is knowingly frivolous. I doubt that he would be at all surprised at what your average European leftie would make of him.

Don't get me wrong – how dare you even think of getting me wrong! - he is reasonably crazy and doubtless he'll poison a few minds but really he is a distraction. Probably, we should be more concerned about the fact that Rupert Murdoch, by dint of having money, has been able to pollute much of the world's media with his Palpatinite agenda.

***
Bonus features

Here is a video of Al Franken (the senator/comedian I mentioned earlier) talking universal healthcare or, as Rich Fulcher put it, "This is Al Franken doing what a Senator should do: kick raw ass and take raw names!"

And because the Fouls Tribune is Fair and Balanced why not read Christopher Hitchens being critical of him, in an article I haven't fully read, here.

Nick Griffin is right

2009-10-23T17:34:00.004+01:00

It has been nearly six months since I blogged about the prospect of the BNP winning the right to represent Britain in the European parliament and a week since 'Nicky' Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time. I found the excitement that preceded his appearance bewildering: why was everyone so sure what the consequences would be? It seemed strange to me that the Free Speechers saw Question Time as the sort of forum wherein can take place clear-eyed debate and the demolishing of weak theories. And neither was I convinced that Question Time would be the BNP's springboard to power. With the benefit of my enlightened and subtle mind I concluded that we could predict no more than that the shit would be stirred; how it would settle was unforeseeable. I now realise that things are no clearer in the post-Question Time landscape; the shit, it seems, is in constant motion.

Too much time has since passed for it to be worthwhile talking about what happened during the show; whether I think Jack Straw waffled for long enough to defeat fascism or who wore the most pluralistic tie. But one of things that Nick Griffin said, it got me thinking it did. He said, "Everybody's always going on about the Aborigines but no one but no one gives a fuck about the English." He's right! I thought - I don't give a fuck about the English or the British, for that matter. The panel's response to this was that 'the English' is a silly concept because people who live in England have been marrying foreigners for hundreds of years; the English are not genetically distinct from the rest of the world. But that's not why I don't give a fuck, I thought, I wouldn't give a fuck even if they were genetically distinct and, what's more, conceding that it might be important to preserve genetic types is to buy into a racist myth. And this got me thinking about why I don't give a fuck about all kinds of other things: why don't I give a fuck about preferential treatment for women; why don't I give a fuck about why black people seem to be allowed to say nigga with impunity and white people aren't and why I don't give a fuck about mocking Christianity when I would be wary of mocking Islam. And then finally: might I not give a fuck about all these things for the same reason?

So I'm going to have good old-fashioned think about these things to see if they are connected. Then I'll get back to you. Boy, you're lucky.

Handwringing

2009-10-17T09:50:00.010+01:00

I spent yesterday surfing the Jan Moir pre-emptive Gately grave trampling Twitter-wave, even going as far as submitting a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission. Now it's the morning after (the morning after surfing a wave, so what?) and it seems that for all the righteous anger felt by me and my close Twitter friends – Stephen Fry, Graham Linehan, Victoria Coren, Peter Serafinowicz, Derren Brown and Caitlin Moran among others – there is a chance that Gately's family and friends will not be gladdened by all this fuss and may not have appreciated the interruption of their grief by a call from the PCC.

It's often said by us Guardianista, Twitteratchik, blogrades that the Daily Mail is a paper that trades in rage and hate, that its readers will feel anxious if by lunchtime they have had no reason to swell into a Vernon Dursley-style fury. Sometimes, when especially droll, we call it the Daily Hate. But we Observermmunists like to vent our anger too – check out the most viewed stories on the Guardian website this morning:

Ignoring for a moment that three of them directly relate to this Jan Moir buisness, it is noticeable that two of the top five mention 'outrage' and all of them are about the woeful, immoral ways of lesser publications printed on less spacious paper. I know this is not representative of the most viewed all of the time but it does seem to reveal a unhealthy level of press-tribalism.

***

Anyway, having vented my worries about the speed of this Jan Moir bandwagon, I'm going chip in my two cents about her
stupid article. First of all, this bit:

"Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened."

What the fuck? That last sentence: I have no idea what she means. Does she mean 'what happened' to same-sex relationships? Does she mean 'what happened' on the night of Gately's death? Does she mean 'what happened' concerning Kevin McGee's death? Or does she just have not know what she's talking about? Did she, like me, become lost in that sentence? Of course, these deaths are clearly the same seeing as they're both gay.

Several clever Twitter people also pointed out another example of her Bad Grammar wherein she claims (unintentionally, we would imagine) to be a champion of gay rights:

"As a gay rights champion, I am sure he would want..."

This, I am reliably informed, is an example of the dangling modifier. As a hate-spreading idiot who doesn't deserve to be a journalist, I would have thought Jan Moir would be au fait with this sort of thing.

Elsewhere in her column she calls Tara Palmer-Tomkinson too old, the Nolan Sisters too fat and denounces maternity leave. She's just bitter cos she's gay.

Fearless Blogger Changes The Face Of UK Drug Policy

2009-07-31T16:48:00.002+01:00

It seems that the Home Office have finally started to sit up and pay attention ... to me! Sort of.

Almost similar to concerns I raised here.

What's Luv?

2009-06-03T15:28:00.002+01:00

Soulmates

2009-05-26T15:00:00.002+01:00

Each Saturday in the Guardian Guide there is a section of personal ads. This section also features two 'Soulmates of the week'. These are excerpts from the profiles of people on the Guardian's online-dating site. Here's a selection of them from the last few weeks (click on the images to enlarge them; Blogspot seems to have its own ideas about how big I want images to be).

Read them? Good. Did you notice anything, something that they had in common? Exactly! "They all seem like cunts." Couldn't have put it better myself.

Someone is choosing these people each week. It might be that this person is performing a practical joke and the hilarious resolution is yet to be delivered. More simply, they might be making a statement to regular readers – Online Dating: sail the boundless ocean of banality, electronically meet a thousand 'outgoing' people who are also 'a bit introvert' and like nothing better than to have 'a few beers and a few laughs with friends in the pub'. Wit and charm will be but a distant memory as you discover shared passions such as 'going to restaurants or the cinema sometimes'.

To join the ranks of a group of insecure, romantically unsuccessful, boring people would be scary. I imagine that they would hide behind the arcane language of early twenty-first century, codified, courtship practice. Knowing references to phenomena such as 'the third date' would abound. I seem to remember that on Friends the third date was known as 'the fuck date'. This strikes me as a singularly terrifying prospect. First of all, you will need to choose a set of clothes that are every bit as clean and appropriate as the clothes that you wore on the first two dates but, crucially, are not the same clothes. It may be that you have to resort to buying entirely new clothes. In many ways this evening's meeting will be the culmination of several hours work in various date-venues over the past few weeks displaying the most socially-acceptable aspects of your tightly-corseted personality. Devil may care post-nightclub sex is not on the cards; this is the test drive for, the ominous-sounding, LTR. Candidates will be assessed on: the size and shape of their bodies; the arrangement and relative size of their facial features; their choice of shirt; the number of buttons that have been done up on that shirt; the tenor of their voice; method of eating asparagus; the co-ordination manifest in their choice of shirt, socks and shoes; annual income; judgement of whether or not I am the sort of girl who thinks that you should pay; competence of tipping/giving-orgasms.

And yet there is still hope. In January, the Guardian published a selection of personal ads from the London Review of Books. Many of them are very funny (again, click to enlarge).

Pictures

2009-05-25T10:38:00.012+01:00

Quentin Tarantino

Prince William

Lord Lloyd-Webber

Prince Harry

The guy who used to do the sport on Scotland Today or someone involved in the SPL or a jockey.

Seasonably Warm Weather

2009-05-24T18:47:00.008+01:00

Seasonably warm weather today. Many planes and many jet trails in the sky. This brought me to reflect on how we take for granted our easy mastery of the skies. Although, it is not so much our mastery of the skies but the knowledge of a few individuals. I do not know how to build aeroplanes or to endow them with the magic that causes their constituent parts to forget that they should be bound to the earth, nor does anyone that I know.

These meditations brought me to imagine the following scene.

For two centuries humans have lived in the Glorious Robot Future. Sorrow is long departed. But they grow restless and a delegation is sent to meet with robot representatives in The Temple Conversal; a proud but unused structure built in the early years of Robot Future to accommodate discussion between the humans and their unseen robot servants.

   Upon entering the Temple they find a light-filled columnated room with a large round table, at its centre fresh fruit that seems the gleam with vitality. They sit at the table and wait. A beautiful man descends the stairs, comes to stand by the table and face the party of human representatives.
   "You are robotic?" asks one of the human delegation, an old man with an athletic build, reminiscent of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
   "Yes," says the beautiful man.
   "And these fruit..."
   "Artificial."
   "You have perfected biological creation," says the man who looks like God.
   "Perfected is the word," replies the beautiful robotic man.
   The humans each raise an intrigued eyebrow.
   "I will not die," says the robotic man. Each of the humans is beautiful and wise but they do not compare to this ultimate specimen. The robotic man senses that they feel humbled, clasps his hands behind his back and reasserts the feudal order, "My masters, on what business do you come to the Temple?"
   "The conquest of the heavens," says a woman.
   "I see," says the robotic man.
   "We will need ships, ships capable of travelling through space at many times the speed of light. Out scientists thought it impossible..."
   The robotic man smiled, "Human 'scientists' thought many things. Were you to show a ball-point pen to scientists of termite societies they would not think its creation possible."
   "Then... you think it might be possible after all?"

"To make ball-point pens? Well, of course..."

   "No, no, superluminal flight."
   "Ah, my apologies. Let me say this: we robots have learnt much about human history; we wished to anticipate your desires. The impulse to explore is marked among your kind. I think we may have some things that might interest you. If you would follow me through these doors."
   The humans rose and followed the robotic man. Thus began a marvellous age in which the glories of Robot Future extended across the galaxy.

Cocaine

2009-05-13T21:18:00.009+01:00

This business was in the news yesterday. Apparently the efforts of drugs enforcement agencies across the world have resulted in an increased wholesale price for cocaine. Prices on 'the street' have remained stable but the purity of the drug has declined. In 2004 the purity of the cocaine seized by police was on average over 50 per cent; it is now just over 30 per cent.

We might imagine (arguably naively) that certain drugs are illegal because we must be protected from the harm that they can do us. The primary reason for enforcing the drug laws must be to prevent us from acquiring these drugs and thus protect us from harm. It is not certain that the rise in the wholesale price of cocaine is causally related to the authorities making it more difficult for those that trade in the drug; the decrease in the strength of the pound may also be a factor. It could be that this is an ill-founded claim made to create good PR for drugs enforcement worldwide. But if the rise in price can be put down to enforcement, it seems that the effect of enforcement has not been to protect the public from a harmful substance but to make the harmful substance that the public are managing quite easily to acquire more harmful by reducing its purity.

This may not be the only the only effect of work of drugs enforcement agencies (cue wild conjecture): it may be that their activities are making the business of trading in drugs more perilous than it already is by frustrating supply routes. Perhaps it has resulted in more drugs-trade-related deaths. If they have been at all successful then it will have resulted in more people having to spend time in jail, more people's lives being branded criminal.

If these are the effects of enforcing the drugs laws then what is the point? How can making cocaine more dangerous be good news?

In Portugal, there are no criminal penalties for possessing personal quantities of drugs. This policy has been successful in reducing the number of people taking drugs and increasing the number of people with drugs problems seeking treatment.

Decriminalising the trade in drugs would be another thing entirely. It is fraught because it would mean that governments themselves were selling or, at least, sanctioning drugs. But if the only effect of enforcing the current drugs laws is to make taking drugs more dangerous and not to decrease their availability, it may be time for the authorities to desist. If the trade were decriminalised then young people would not find themselves inducted into an illicit market and made criminals.

It would be impossible for a country to do this unilaterally. But it seems that much of the harm done by illegal drugs is a product of their being illegal and it must be worth thinking about changing this state of affairs.

I have not previously known what I think about the illegality of drugs. In this piece I try on an opinion that is fresh and new to me. It should not be taken that what is written above is the pure revealed essence of What I Think On The Matter.

Blogflash!

2009-05-12T22:50:00.003+01:00

Got an anonymous commenter on the The BNP article with a bit of nonsense on him/her if yous are interested.

Robot Future

2009-05-12T19:26:00.012+01:00

I hinted in the previous post that I would elucidate on my true politics. It is a programme called Robot Future and it is revolutionary in its scope. Robot Future is achieved through the following phased process:

Global IQ Test. Everyone in the world is subjected to an IQ test. Those who score in the top 20 per cent of this test or who already have expertise in artificial intelligence are immediately set to work developing robots, robots to fulfil our every need.
The rest work in agriculture and industry supporting the robot developers. The robot developers can recruit as many people as they deem necessary to perform tasks that help them in the development of robots.
If anyone dissents however inconsequentially and for whatever reason they are killed immediately. NOTHING MUST JEOPARDISE ROBOT FUTURE.
Once all the robots have been developed no one need ever work again. Robots work behind the scenes and cater for every human need.
The education system teaches a lot of philosophy and (as pupils will never have to work) they are instructed on how to live well.
They are also taught about the appalling atrocities that were committed in the robot development stage. THESE MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN AGAIN.

I also constructed a less violent version of this plan but I decided that it is unworkable. It was based on an insight of Bertrand Russell's in In Praise of Idleness. He notes that in the entire course of human history the development of new technology has always been seen as an opportunity to produce more rather than to work less. (In the same book he recommends that the human race be accommodated in Oxbridge-style colleges). My revised version of Robot Future (called Robot Future v.II) involved directing all future technological developments at less working rather than more producing so that eventually all work would be undertaken by machinery. I decided that since an iron fist would be needed to bring about this change of attitude we would as well to go with the assured iron-fist route of Robot Future v.I and get it done quicker.

Karl Marx was of the opinion that as the forces of competition increased the proportion of capital outlaid on labour-saving machinery the rate of profit will fall. This, thought Marx, will lead to the eventual collapse of capitalism. I have no idea how this relates to Robot Future. Sorry.

Under Robot Future all humans will live as members of the idle rich. They will be free to pursue their interests, do nothing, grow carrots, hump, read Middlemarch, build kick-ass sand castles. Some people will be worried that without employment these humans will be unable to find fulfilment. This may indeed be the case for some of the first generation of Robot Futurees who were used to the to the old way of doing things. But the subsequent generations, with the benefit of the outstanding robotic education system, would not have this problem. According to Alain de Botton in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work the idea that we are to find meaning in our day-to-day employment is new. Other cultures have sought happiness in their leisure time.

What I need now is recruits. We'll start by lobbying the UN and so on but if that fails we will need to take more drastic action. It began here.

I apologise to people that I have bored with this theory before. But, then again, why did you read it all?

Citadel del Fouls

2009-05-07T16:27:00.017+01:00

I know someone who (if only he had the vocabulary) would call me a champagne socialist. Instead, when he briefs against me he struggles to properly describe the kernel of no-goodness at the heart of my withered soul. He lumbers around near to what he means to say. And he's pretty much got it right. The fullest expression of my ideals would probably be in communism. I imagine a state of affairs where people have a monk-like indifference about the relationship between the nature of the work they do and how much they receive in return. That society's credo would be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". The trouble is that this quixotic dream shrivels in the cold bath of cynicism, apathy and greed that is the rest of my psyche. It is only used for the purposes of buying newspapers and judging others.

(My real politics – after several years studying the subject – may most accurately be termed Foulist-Robotarianism. I may write about that at another time).

In addition to this, I am an atheist. This probably has its origin in early childhood but it has been galvanised more recently by friendships with evangelical Christians. You can take the horse to a Christian Union quiz social but you can't make it accept Jesus as its own personal saviour, as they say. In fact, the horse will be apt to resent any further attempts to make it accept Jesus.

In spite of this I have no trouble imagining what my beliefs would be were I either politically right-wing or religious. For some reason I have well-developed ideas about what I would think and the sort of things I would say that sit in my brain like the developer levels on Goldeneye; unplayable except with a GameShark (I suppose I am using the GameShark here as a metaphor for a life experience that is sufficiently harrowing for it to wholly change my values and beliefs, which is a strange thing to use a GameShark for).

If I were a right-wing sort of person I would think the following things. There is a moral value to hard work and personal responsibility. It is good to get up early. Despite this people should, more often than not, be left to their own devices. High rates of income tax for the very wealthy are not dreadful because most of those guys are Daddys' boys who don't deserve those jobs but it's a pretty raw deal for people who did work their way up. The Royal family do not interest me. Our economy isn't built on social workers. Business and greed are not synonymous. It's good to see someone running their own shop; real pride of ownership; not like these lackeys in the supermarkets. We can't all just be selling each other car insurance; some of us need to make stuff.

Were I a man of religion I would eliminate superstitions as much as possible. No demons, no miracles, no visions, no angels, no ark, no Eden, no virgin birth. God is imminent; he is everywhere and he is everything. In death, we all come to know God, we are God and we are one. No more sui generis Fouls, no more sui generis you. It is blissful; like looking into the sun and it not hurting. The blinkers are off and we know everything. Supreme gangsta shit, we dream gangsta shit. No judgment and no punishment. We know the nature of our crimes and we now ourselves and everyone else.

It's difficult to know what these phantom ideologies are for. The right-wing one definitely has a voice in my head like an unimpressed father. And I feel that I ought to apply his standards about working hard to my own life if not to anyone else's. The religious ideas are perhaps meant to be an aesthetic improvement on my friends' Christian beliefs. They are more modern with sharper lines and a more metallic finish. Perhaps these alternative and unused beliefs exist in preparation for the well-publicised process of a person's views becoming more conservative as they get older.

I got that picture of a (right) wing from a Conservative blog but I had to flip it horizontally... because they'd used a fucking left wing. It was under the heading "What next for the right?"

*Update: having looked at it again I can't tell if that is a right or a left wing. So they may not be idiots.

Blogflash!

2009-05-07T13:56:00.004+01:00

Newsflash! I no longer have time for blogging. Instead I will be spending all my time on my new hobby: changing the way my blog looks. Talk among yourselves.

Layout!@£$%^&(&^%$

2009-05-06T14:23:00.002+01:00

I'm playing about with the layout of this blog today so expect it to look fucked. It'll look snazzy by tomorrow hopefully.&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&GNGNFNnfg;;;;';afwe';';'''';34(*&*^%^&*)(*&&^$&^&*)&^%$&^%^£%^%^%^%^%$^&*^&%££@£$%^&*&^$£@£$%^&**&^%$£@£$%^&*

The BNP

2009-05-05T17:41:00.012+01:00

If there’s one thing that we’re supposed to be good at in this country it’s discriminating against people on the basis of their class. Why is it then that we have got ourselves into a position where on June 4 we might be sending a new BNP MEP off to Europe? Thanks to proportional representation, if the BNP get 8.4% of the vote in the North West of England in the upcoming European elections then they will have a seat in Brussels. At best this will be colossally embarrassing; at worst it’s the first step on the road to full-blown Naziorrhoea.

The BNP is not representative of the working class. But the working class have more justifiable reasons to feel aggrieved about immigration than the middle class do. Table 1 shows that respondents to the 2006 British Social Attitudes survey who identified themselves as working class were less inclined than respondents who identified themselves as middle class to agree that people from abroad who settle in Britain have a right to call themselves British.

These data do not show a huge divergence between the two groups but I want to keep going with this blog post and it has no foundation other than the lazy generalisation that working class people are more likely than middle class people to be concerned about immigration and support the BNP. Moreover, I was quite taken with the opening sentence of this blog when it came to me; it is for the sake of its preservation that I proceed.

The experience of immigration for working class and middle class people is different. For middle class people immigration means North Indian Frontier Cuisine, great sushi and Slumdog Millionaire. For working class people it might mean increased competition for jobs and sending your children to a school where 40% of the pupils do not have English as a first language.* Some people will have more thoroughgoing reasons for being in favour of relatively open immigration but middle class people who approve of immigration for whatever reason must be aware that they are can scarcely help but be complacent given that it is unlikely that it will adversely affect their lives.

In the coming years I look to the Tory party who have behind them centuries' experience in ignoring and marginalising everyone other than the elite. If they bring any of that skill to bear then I'm sure they could crush the BNP. In the meantime we do not have a Tory government to rely on and we will have to find other ways of halting the BNP at the European election. Students that have moved away from home to go to university have an opportunity to vote in local elections where they go to university as well as back home. This has always seemed to me to be a appallingly undemocratic state of affairs and I have not previously taken advantage of this loophole. I could have voted for the congestion charge in Manchester but because I am unlikely to remain in this region after I graduate I felt that it would be unfair for me to express my will in the referendum. I might like to have a say in the presidential election in the US but it is right that I am not allowed to.

Incidentally, this was not a view shared by the Guardian who in 2004 launched Operation Clark County and encouraged readers to send letters to voters on Ohio advising them on who to vote for.

However, this might be just the time to put this undemocratic set up to good use. If we were able to mobilise tens of thousands of middle class students with no interest in the future of the North West to vote for anyone other than the BNP then it might be possible to stop the BNP gaining a European seat. Such an effort in indeed being organised by Hope Not Hate. It seems that in Britain today we still have a political set up that allows us to keep the marginalised disenfranchised if only we have the courage to use it.

I should add that I was inspired to write this BNP blog because an article about the BNP kept my article from getting the top spot on the Most Popular section of the Student Direct website. A far right forum called Stormfront encouraged BNP sympathisers to troll the message board for the BNP article to create the impression that the BNP is more popular and has more internet presence than it actually does. It is my opinion that it is their fault that my article was never on the top spot and it has nothing to do with the BNP article being better, more interesting and more thoroughly researched than mine. They're going to be sorry they crossed me, eh?

*These claims are not based on any real research; I made them up so you should take them with a pinch of salt. I recommend Maldon sea salt. The advice on how much a pinch of Maldon sea salt is is contradictory; you should keep your own counsel. The Maldon sea salt box says, "Its pronounced and distinctive 'salty' taste means less is required, an advantage for those who wish to reduce their salt intake." On the other hand, Nigella Lawson says that it is less salty than table salt and you should use more.

Three Ways In Which To Become A More Impressive Man

2009-04-29T16:35:00.006+01:00

Herewith follows an email that I wrote to a friend over a year ago. It was always intended that this become a blog post but I dared not publish it for fear of my tactics, which I was keen to employ myself, becoming known to those that I wished to use them on. I thought it best, for the sake of transparency, that these now be made public.

Walk about eating an apple. Walking about eating an apple is not only impressive but stylish. It is hard not to be impressed by a man who is eating an apple. A man who walks about eating an apple is in illustrious company: in one episode of Hugh’s Chicken Run Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall eats an apple whilst inspecting the hall in Axminster that he uses to launch his Chicken Out campaign. In a podcast, Joe Cornish says he sometimes walks down the street eating an apple and that when he does this he feels superior. You should munch through your apple as if it had the consistency of butter; like a cartoon character would. In reality, people often wear an unsightly grimace when they bite into apples – this is unattractive. Method Of Consumption For The Man Seeking To Impress: pluck your apple from a convenient tree and bounce it deftly off your elbow before taking a crescent shaped bite all the while serenading your lady-prey with an old-timey number such as Just Around The Corner. Later, you will be able to ravish her in a crepuscular setting.

Use of the word ‘delight’. As in, “To see you was a delight,” and, “I delight in your eyes.” Or advice, “Let small things delight you: a bright, very clean, check tablecloth; some flowers standing in a blue and white striped mug on the table; that big marmalade cat that came and made confidence to you; the excellent omelette and the carafe of rough wine. How good it all was.”

Not wearing a rucksack. Wearing a rucksack encumbers a man. The apple eating is all of a sudden more prosaic. The rucksack-wearer is already too awkward to have the confidence to use the word ‘delight’. Rucksack-wearing has its purposes. If, for example, you have risen early and exercised before heading off to work in a library or wherever you will amplify the feeling of industriousness by wearing a rucksack. Suicide bombers, presumably feel this way when they wear heavily laden rucksacks on the way to Underground stations.

Narcissism Watch

2009-04-27T15:24:00.007+01:00

I am growing increasingly aware that my persistent going on about my article in Student Direct, its sub-editing and the response to it fairly stinks of self-obsession. However, before I stop talking about it, I thought that I would put another link to my article on the Student Direct website because it has some comments now. The College Media Matters blog has also mentioned my article. I now feel very exposed and want to retreat into a cave.

***

The warm feeling of life on Twitter knows no bounds. I was recently honoured to have a few exchanges with the sublime Fred Deakin of Lemon Jelly fame. I hadn't listened to this Make Things Right B-side before but I plan to make amends now by listening to it all afternoon.

Sam Hill

2009-04-27T12:36:00.009+01:00

What in the Sam Hill is going on here? Tom Meltzer, a 21 year old, has a column in the Guardian's G2 supplement today. Apparently, he is doing work experience at the Guardian and he has been allowed to fill in for Charlie Brooker this week (Charlie Brooker has a herniated C7 disc and cannot write his column at the moment).

The more keen-brained among you will have realised, upon discovering this blog, that I have some ambitions in the direction of being allowed to write things for newspapers. Opening G2 this morning to find that a 21 year old had written a column was galling. I felt much like what I imagine an Olympic sprinter would feel like if while he was wandering around behind the starting blocks with his trousers still on and doing a bit of stretching, another runner set off three minutes before the gun, jogged to the finish line and was declared the winner. Here I am putting my toe in the water with a little blog and pathetically grateful to have garbled versions of my articles in the fucking student newspaper, and there he is swilling around the Guardian offices gayly tossing off columns for national consumption.

***

The student newspaper's campaign to ruin my embryonic Reputation As A Journalist continued this week. I wrote into the paper following the publication of my article last week: "Dear Student Direct, Nicholas Foulis has obviously not being watching the same The Wire as me otherwise he wouldn't have called it 'a typical US drama.' Yours faithfully, Nicholas Foulis." I later regretted this but thought that anyone who read it would, at worse, dismiss it as nonsense spouted by a misguided eccentric. It did not feature as a letter. Instead it cropped up in the "Text Us" section minus the "Yours faithfully, Nicholas Foulis" bit. This, you will realise, removed the point. My attempt to make a mild jibe at the paper's overly alteration-happy sub-editing and make clear where I stand on the subject of The Wire has been deflected back at me. Student Direct is like a bully who, having grabbed my hands, is asking me, "Why are you hitting yourself Fouls? Stop hitting yourself," while pummelling me in the face... maybe over-egged it a bit there, but perhaps you see what I am trying to say.

I was more pleased to discover that there was a letter of complaint about my article from someone other than me. My article was described as "almost comically cynical". I had to read this a few times but I think that we are meant to understand "comically cynical" to be a bad thing.

What is your Purpose Target?

2009-04-23T18:47:00.007+01:00

During the course of my research today I came across this diagram. First class nonsense from the Scottish Government. In context here.

Also, Serafinowicz. He is funny and for some reason and I never have any trouble spelling his name even though it looks like the sort of name that it would be hard to spell.

Enjoying Twitter far too much. If you follow both Limmy and Stephen Fry you get this kind of shit happening...

Dr Gillian McProfiteering Bitch and Other News

2009-04-20T15:14:00.008+01:00

She actually seems to have dropped the doctor bit; her preferred form of swindling is no longer charlatanry. Look at this:

Here it is closer:

£1.69. Steep for a little health bar thing bearing the face of someone who is best known for plumbing poo out of people and then smelling it; Gillian McKeith's Cacao Bean Bar. It is made entirely from organic matter, apparently. The ingredients are a list of the sorts of things Gillian McKeith recommends we eat; brown rice, apple juice (that explains the price then). It is almost as if it is a little block of stuff that Gillian McKeith has herself eaten that has then been reconstituted through some sort of system. Gillian McKeith's Cacao Bean Bar. Gillian McKeith's Own Brown Bar. Gillian McKeith's Ideal Poo. Gillian McKeith's Cacao Bean Bar.

***

Around the time people were using Napster I used to say, "Eventually you'll be able to listen to any song you want wherever you are as they'll all be able on some global network." Unfortunately, absolutely nobody disagreed with me so the advent of Spotify does not allow me to wallow in the glory of my unique prescientness. Wikipedia tells me they're developing a Spotify application for the iPhone making my dreams of all those years ago a reality. Or, at least, it would if I had an iPhone.

Isn't it good that the people at YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, and Spotify haven't demeaned themselves by using the copycat 'i' prefix. Unlike those fools at the BBC. Why iPlayer? (Why aye). Why not Watch Again or something?

***

Because it's gone all sunny I have been listening to some of my usual summer music. I have been dismayed to discover that it's gone off since last year. Come summertime I listen to Groove Armada and Bob Marley. This is how it has been for many years. Time was I associated Groove Armada with blissful sunny afternoons, the start of the summer holidays and so on. Now it sounds like the music of a polywristbanded wanker who thinks he would like to be a ravey toff but doesn't want to stray too far from Keane. He would probably listen to Bob Marley too and then go to Cornwall and drink Magner's like a cunt.

By my estimation, nothing after 1993 has yet become retro cool. We have perhaps five or six years until Groove Armada achieves retro cool. What's Marley's excuse? Well, these things are probably cyclical; Marley is on a low right now. Maybe his listenableness follows the economic cycle. Or maybe it presages the economic cycle. This could be powerful knowledge. Look out for a pick up in the sales of his records; green shoots they are. Green shoots! How appropriate! Har har har har har! (As in cannabis cos he liked cannabis didn't he).

***

That thing on the right of this page is not an advert for Virgin Media; although it's doing its best to look like one. It is in fact an advert for my friends' band Sea Bass Kid. You can play one of their songs on it. You should have a listen; it's good. They have a page on the Road to V website where you can vote for them. They have a MySpace too but I'm not going to link to it again lazy people; there is already a link over there–> somewhere. Under 'Links' in fact.

***

I've got Twitter and like so totally get it now. There's no point following me on it because I don't say anything but if I do start saying things I will warn you.

***

By the way, there is another new post under this one.

Update: I've put my Twitter up over there under Prattle. I'm going to start saying stuff now: get ready!

Grand Début de Fouls!

2009-04-20T11:59:00.011+01:00

Today is the day that I, Fouls, have had a thing printed in the student newspaper. Without further ado, here it is for you: my great blog reading public – without you none of this would have been possible.

The CV Piece

I have written this so that I can write “wrote for the student newspaper” in my CV. It may also mean that under “Early Career” in my Wikipedia entry (no such thing currently exists; an astonishing lapse on the part of my fans) you will see the sentence “At university he wrote for the student newspaper” rather than “At university he watched all of YouTube”. I think that it is important that I make my motive plain now and remind you that you need not read any further.

I had toyed with the idea of filling up the rest of these 650-750 words with a load of aimless wittering about how I had thought even when I was in school that it would be a good idea to write for the student newspaper. Other, as yet unfulfilled, ambitions included becoming really good at tango, becoming really good at capoeira, ditto photography, acting and directing, and developing enormous muscles. But I am not going to waste your time (at least not in that way). Prepare instead, dear reader, for your world to be upended by my incisive and damning examination of The Whole Sordid Business Of Writing Stuff For The Student Newspaper Just To Say That You’ve Done So In Your CV itself!

It would not be controversial, I think, to claim that the CV-bolstering instinct accounts for much of what is written in this paper. People write and submit pieces for all sorts of other reasons — many of them noble, I’m sure — but career prospects must be at the forefront of many a student writer’s mind. Is this a bad thing? After all, this pursuit of self-interest ensures that every issue of our student weekly is well stocked with articles. Arguably, it would be a skimpier publication were this incentive absent.

Self-interest, it seems, is the central issue here and in what follows I present for your delectation my little treatise on the subject based on stuff that I have seen on the telly. The Wire (kind of a drama) is a programme that hates careerists. It tells stories of institutional dysfunction and more often than not change is obstructed by characters’ desire for self-advancement. In another television programme, Adam Curtis’ documentary The Trap, an alternative take on self-interest is presented in an interview with economist James M. Buchanan who suggests that public servants who are motivated by things other than money (cited alternatives are job satisfaction and a sense of public duty) are dangerously unpredictable and “zealots”.

“So,” you say, “what does this mean for Student Direct? Please enlighten me further.” I say, “Open your mind. Let us not look solely at student journalism let us look also at student politics.” That’s right, sit up; we’re talking Politics now. I have no figures to hand but I’m not going to let that hold me back from claiming that a large proportion of Manchester students don’t bother to vote in the union elections. I’ve certainly never bothered voting. In my first year I went along to the union to vote but the queue looked to be several orders of scale larger than the shit that I gave about who got elected.

The main reason that I tend not to vote in these elections is the spectre of careerism that I see hanging over the whole event. Many of our national politicians start off in student unions; often it is the beginning of their political careers. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron have been marketed on the basis of their not having been involved in student politics; it seems that their strategists identified that the British public has a distaste for cloistered political careerists. I share this distaste; you may not. So I hope that if you voted in the union elections recently you thought about your political convictions, your partisan leanings and all that good stuff, but you might now spare a moment to think about think about how you would feel in twenty years time if you saw the face of that person you voted for turn up on Question Time pontificating about welfare-dependence or equivocating about immigration with Paxman or pretending be on first name terms with the UN Secretary-General in smarmy conversation with Andrew Neil. Could you live with it? You helped them on the way. Think about it.

***

Now, far be from me to bite the hand that slightly enhances my career prospects, I have some problems with the sub-editing. This was the cue for much Eastwood-in-Gran-Torino-esque grunting: grrrrrr! I realise that I have this in common with anyone who has ever written a thing for printing in a bigger thing but who's going to stop me having a moan anyway? It's not going to be you, that's for sure. What you see above is how I originally wrote the article. It is not perfect and in fact I am quite embarrassed by it for all sorts of narcissistic reasons; we needn't go into that as there is plenty of self loathing elsewhere on this blog (particularly in the early posts, if you are interested). However, some of the things that got changed were weird. There was some editing for length; this, I am fine with. But in the first paragraph the word "lapse" was joined by the words "of judgement" for no reason. Later on the the word "spectre" was Americanised. The word "wittering" became "twittering"(!?). Worst of all, perhaps, The Wire became "a typical US drama"... I'm sorry The Wire, very, very sorry. This is just a taster; there were other changes and I imagine that were you to see them you would be just as scandalised as I was. As such, I will post the altered version as a comment on here as soon as it goes up on the paper's website.

Despite all this, the fact of this thing's being printed is basically good news. Hurrah!

(Should also mention some of the Good Changes: condensing some of my nonsense and a great title: This Will Look Good On My CV. Thanks).

Update: this is the picture of me that was used:

In the cropped version in the paper I looked like I might turn into Brian Blessed at any moment.

New Book

2009-04-08T12:47:00.002+01:00

The new Alain de Botton book arrived in the post today. First impressions: surprisingly heavy for its size and smells very good. I'm already reading a book; it's some important fiction and I've been enjoying it. That will stop now. Reading it will become a chore. I will yearn for accessible de Botton wisdom while I drudge through some of the remaining chapters before giving up 150 pages from the end. De Botton – despite his many insights – did not foresee this. In this careless act of publishing (that is like a bolt of lighting cast down upon the world by one of the Greek gods he probably uses in many of his own analogies) he has destroyed something rare and precious in the life of this mortal – a readable and enjoyable important book. How much he still has to learn.

First Teenage Dirtbag in the Whitehouse

2009-03-29T19:13:00.006+01:00

You're probably better off watching the video before reading this – but, you know, do what you want. This video started off as an innocent little idea of mine on election night. Now, months later, it has metamorphosed into a whole Sunday afternoon's worth of ball ache. Converting the video into something that iMovie would go anywhere near took up most of the time. During its long journey the original speech video (all 30 minutes of it) was at various times an .flv file, an .avi file, a corrupt .mov file, an .m4v file, an .mp4 file and then finally a working .mov file. The sides are chopped off and the quality is awful but I don't care anymore. Also (to continue this little paragraph of geeky complaining), getting the audio to sound stadiumy was not straightforward. GarageBand has a reverb option but this and all the other effects seem to do pretty much nothing at all. Some tugging at a graphic equaliser at least let me put the bass up good and high and this sort of achieved what I wanted.

The video converting thing that worked in the end was called ffmpegx By The Way.

Enjoy!

Cremsihx

2009-03-27T17:45:00.003Z

Brandish yon cans
And towister sods
Lemons cran wid
Lemonsh cran wod.

Blog Roll

2009-03-18T14:43:00.004Z

I've got a blog (roll)! I've got a blog (roll)! Rudy rudy schploody rudy blog (roll) blog (roll) blog (roll), I've got a blaw-og (roll).

Maybe a bad idea; now you can bypass me entirely and go straight to my sources. It wouldn't let me add this Jesse Armstrong link for some reason.

Repulsed of Foulstopia

2009-03-17T00:31:00.014Z

Here's an article from the sports section of my university's newspaper last week:

THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN QUESTION
By Matt Nixon, Sports Editor

SCOTLAND HAVE been a thorn in the side of the home nations for too long; it is time for this to be addressed. They beat England in the Six Nations last year for God’s sake. Scotland’s sporting sovereignty needs to be rescinded.

After the infamous West Lothian question – in which Scottish MP Tam Dalyell pointed out that he could vote with merry abandon in Westminster on issues that were only being proposed for England – Scotland have frankly been taking the piss. And now it’s sport’s turn to suffer.

The idea of a Great Britain football team is one that has been mooted for a long time. It’s a nice idea, especially as we head towards London 2012, when we will compete as Great Britain, as per every Olympics. But the idea is always shot down by Scotland. They fear for their national football union’s sovereignty, and refuse point-blank to consider the concept of such a team in case it is the first step towards outlawing Scotland as an entity. Never mind devolution. Never mind the Scottish Parliament. Don’t those measures suggest that really the majority of people are quite happy to let Scotland be, and certainly don’t fancy storming Edinburgh to reassert proper Westminster rule on the recalcitrant Jocks?

Well now is the time to say, quite frankly, f*ck off Scotland. Which players does Wee Jock McVitie at the SFA think Great Britain would want anyway? Craig Gordon, currently being kept out of the Sunderland side by a Hungarian goatherd? You could say that this is the sporting West Lothian question – the Heart of Midlothian question, if you will – Scotland pissing in England’s porridge (NOT “porage”, if any tartan-clad illiterates from Scott’s Oats are reading) because they know it wouldn’t affect them in the least as their players would never get picked.

For a while, England fans that wanted to hedge their bets mooted the idea – nobody wanted a Great Britain team, they just wanted England with Ryan Giggs. Or going back further, George Best. Or John Charles. Rarely in history has there been a side other than England capable of dominating a Home Nations Select XI. But though it would be forced, of course, and artificial, a team picked from all the home nations, with a limit on players from each side would be a nice gesture of solidarity, especially since sport is at its best as a means for unison rather than division, particularly when it comes to the Olympics.

I can almost hear the cry from across the border: “Alright then you arrogant English, we’ll take back Chris Hoy and his medals! Ha! See how you like that!” Well, OK. Build him your own Velodrome then. With any luck it’ll go the same way as the Scottish Parliament building.

***

And here's a couple of letters of complaint about that article in this week's edition (the second one is from me):

Dear Student Direct,

I am emailing to complain about the column on page 30 of the 9th March issue of Student Direct.

This article (and I use the term loosely) is a blatant and, indeed, self-satisfied prejudiced. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing I have become sickeningly used to reading in the this uninspiring waste of paper. What makes this even worse, however, is that Matt Nixon's main issue with Scotland is that they won't do what the English say. He seemingly believes that English sports persons are inherently better that Scottish ones, for no other reason than that they are English. In addition to this, he uses the term "home nations" to mean England itself, as if this were the only nation worth bothering about.

I am English myself and have no connections with Scotland, but I find this column offensive to say the least. It is obvious that if this sort of trash is allowed to be printed in the newspaper (again note the stretching of the meaning of this word to its limits) once, then I am sure it will be again, whether it is aimed at Scotland, Wales, Ireland or any other country.

Yours

A very disgusted Simon Rookyard

Dear Student Direct,

To form a Great Britain football team for the 2012 Olympics would be a nakedly political move. It would not be "a heartwarming gesture of solidarity" for the SNP and its supporters who are sufficiently numerous to mean that Scotland has a SNP government.

Furthermore, I take exception to some of the language that this article was couched in. Does the phrase "fuck off Scotland" have a place in a newspaper that claims to be representative of all University of Manchester students? Scottish students here may be relatively few in number but nevertheless we are here. It is surprising to see this Kelvin MacKenzie-style vitriol in Student Direct.

Incidentally, the people at Scott's Porage Oats chose a vernacular spelling not because they are "tartan-clad illiterates" but in order to give their brand a superficially authentic feel.

Yours faithfully,

Nicholas Foulis

***

Now, what do yous make of all this? I was pleased that this other guy also wrote in; he uses less temperate language than I do and I think the two letters complimented each other nicely on the letters page. I decided to avoid using the word "offended" or any of its variants mainly because I recently listened to Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens talking about the pointlessness of pathetic people who make their business to be offended. It's a good tip, I think.

I don't know Matt Nixon but in visiting the Student Direct website to find this article I discovered that he won the Guardian Student Sports Writer of the Year Award last year.

I should add that the main reason for this post is plump up the blog with absolutely anything I write. Probably, I'll soon be publishing all of my emails off Amazon and that sort of thing. Anything to avoid last year's nine month hiatus.

But the other reason is to see what my readers think about this. Should I have been angrier? Should this guy be sacked? Did I misread the article and it was actually perfectly friendly about Scotland (a fear that I had after I sent off that letter)? It would be nice to get some comments on this. In particular, comments that incite the organising of lynch mobs etc.

Introducing Rembrandt Semi-Fishe P.I.

2009-03-11T21:28:00.013Z

My name is Rembrandt Semi-Fishe and I am a sleuth, P.I., dangerman. I go where wise men never go and where angels fear to tread. The other day I spotted this image on Fouls' wall. What did it mean? Who was this man and what was his significance? I had to know. The tag line runs, "A journey brings us face to face with ourselves." Code?

In the spirit of my fearless forebears I riffled through Fouls' documents and came across his private diaries along with this interesting entry:

"The Twentieth of Octobre Two Thousand and Eighte. Mine walle is much beautyfied by its new adornemente of Mikhail Gorbachev with Louis Vuitton bag. O wherefore Gorbachev doth embrace vacuously brand-oriented face of Westerne capytalism? The bounty on the after dinner speaker circuit doth dry up methinks. Shalle I blog about this in time? Perhapes guis-ed under one of the silly character names that spilleth recently from mine braine..."

It was time to put the old Semi-Fishe investigatory skills into action: I typed "mikhail gorbachev louis vuitton" into Google. In fine Semi-Fishe tradition my first line of enquiry was the top hit... bingo! But more questions: my honed sleuthing nose had uncovered more mysteries. The top hit was an article from a publication called the New York Times. Now, as a P.I., I peel my eyes twice a day but these guys must do it four or five times a day because they had spotted something that I had not. The little booklet poking out of the bag in the picture has some Russian writing on it. These cunning coves had translated it: "“The Murder of Litvinenko: They Wanted to Give Up the Suspect for $7,000.” Intriguing... who was this Litvinenko? And what was a "suspect"? The adventure wasn't over; next stop Dictionary.com...

The South Bank Show: Fouls

2009-03-09T16:17:00.008Z

While reading a review of the film New in Town just now I had an idea about how to conduct myself in interviews in the future. The reviewer wonders why Renée Zellweger "agrees to appear in such dross". Reading this elicited this little fantasy in my head:

Interviewer: [sycophantic, nervous] Looking back at your career, the films you have appeared in have been uniformly brilliant. I mean, ha!, most of the great actors have produced a couple of stinkers; it's just good form!
Me: [reclining, entirely failing to suppress a little grin while taking a smug sip of water] I've been lucky. My friends in this industry just do good work. I mean, I think, for a lot of people, for a lot of actors, they have these obligations to other people in the business, you know, to be polite or whatever. So, you know, a lot of the time when people get accused of selling out or doing it for the money or whatever it's really just out of a... out of wanting to avoid rudeness. I just work with talented people; they give me these great scripts and I know I can trust the producer and, you know, the director's a visionary [complacent chortle] and we just make the movie and I've never had to worry about pissing anyone off or anything.

Mussel Inn

2009-02-17T20:46:00.001Z

Not a pun of my own creation but the name of restaurant that I went to three times over the Christmas period. On the walls are painted great blue cartoon waves. The tables and chairs are made from clean and pleasing pine. Immediately prior to the first of these three most recent visits I had been in the St James Centre; a fetid, marshy place of retail and swarming crowds. The combination of blue waves and crisp pine furniture relieved me of my St James Centre-induced troglodytic hunch and mistrustful countenance and reminded me that our nation is a prosperous archipelago; a place where the sea and its rich bounty is never far away.

A portion of the selfsame bounty is served up in the Mussel Inn nearly every day. The mussel stars. Mussels can be eaten by the (literal) bucket-load or the more manageable plate-load. At lunchtime a plate-load of mussels in one of a variety of simple preparations, some crusty bread, a bowl of chips or a salad, and a bottle of beer, a glass of wine or a soft drink are yours for £7.50. This is called the Lunchtime Quickie and it is thus that the Mussel Inn provides for the impecunious and the stingy.

The mussels are, to a man, plump and healthy (albeit dead, of course). They come plated in piles that are immersed up to about 5cm in a mixture of white wine, cream, shallots and parsley (or some variation on that theme). Other options that I did not eat and that do not follow this pattern include the 'Moroccan' and a preparation involving red peppers. My companion on all three occasions chose the Moroccan. He reported that its ingredients were deserving of companionship with mussels and found that the spiciness varied.

After the meal you are given a hot towel that creates a disquieting smell of nappies. The waiting staff are neither rude nor overly intrusive and obsequious. So pleasing is the experience that it seems to me that there should be modest restaurants serving mussels all over the country. Such places would be at least as deserving of synonymity with Scotland as tartan and shortbread.

There are Mussel Inns on Rose Street in Edinburgh and Hope Street in Glasgow.

Fail

2009-01-19T16:29:00.006Z

I sent this picture into failblog.org today and now I feel quite low. This photo was taken in the Lidl on Oxford Road in Manchester. Anyway, look out for it in their site.... fingers crossed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Coolio is on Celebrity Big Brother

2009-01-04T13:24:00.004Z

Coolio is on Celebrity Big Brother.

Coolio is a rap and comedy genius.

Coolio says, "I have the heart, liver, kidneys and sexual function of a 25 year old." (Coolio is 45).

Shaka Zulu

Bitches Ain't Shit

2008-12-21T12:15:00.011Z

My friend Alun recently tossed off this on my computer. I present it to you here without his permission.

It's a work in progress; allowing it this taste of the air may be a little premature. Alun took inspiration from something by Dr Dre that I was singing in the kitchen one day. He also has a MySpace with music on it.

Update, November 5 2009: new "SoundCloud" player so this should work on browsers other than mine now.

Christmas Time is Here

2008-12-17T22:22:00.005Z

A Christmas song that I like is called Christmas Time is Here and is performed by the Vince Guaraldi trio. It is from the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. I tend to listen to the instrumental version.

It was used it in Louis Theroux's programme about cosmetic surgery and on occasions that a character was feeling dejected in Arrested Development. Nigella Lawson played it while she entertained some pretend friends earlier this week.

Fouls Eats His Porridge

2008-12-14T12:49:00.001Z

Christmas Reminiscences with Fouls

2008-12-09T14:23:00.011Z

Last night I had a meal that inspired me. I have not had a worse plate of food all year. It was that style of Christmas meal that you have once or twice a December with a group of people with whom you are related through some institution.

Familiarity with this practice is engrained early in life. I remember a few such meals at primary school: there was one year where we were required to put in orders months in advance. There was a seating plan and table service – a glorious occasion, undiluted Christmassyness. Another year we were back to cafeteria service and by the time I got there none of the Christmas food was left so I was given Chicken In The Jungle with Smiley Faces. Chicken In The Jungle is food that belongs to a benighted future where the people no longer know what chickens or jungles are. There were posters next to the illuminated bain-marie stations of cartoon chickens galloping around a lush cartoon rainforest.

It was an exciting time to be nourished as a child: we were the first generation to be fed entirely on this kind of space food. Jamie Oliver put a stop to the practice a few years ago and children now grow strong on something called NutritionalSoup!: a consommé made from the garlic and rosemary tears that Oliver cried when he first encountered Turkey Twizzlers (themselves a genetic descendant of Chicken In The Jungle). The next generation to eat the way we did will be born on a Space Ark on a ten thousand year journey to find a new Earth. All the food will made from a substance called Recalibrated_Nuriton_5 which is formed by harvesting intergalactic dust and pressing it into patties.

The Christmas Feed tradition continued at high school. For a few years the caterers developed the unfortunate habit of serving us heated balls of wafer thin sandwich turkey. This was not a gratifying eat. The balls were accompanied by something called Tasty Gravy: a yellow liquid substance that perhaps leaks out of sandwich turkey when it is heated. There was an option to have either a Taz or a Freddo to compliment your meal. It was customary to feel glum once you had finished.

Which brings me to last night’s experience. The event was held in a pub near where I live. As I entered I spied a large group of people sitting in a conservatory. The atmosphere was effervescent and I approached eagerly. It did seem that they were involved in some kind of Christmas meal but it became quickly apparent that I recognised no one and this was not my party. Ten minutes later I found a side door outside that led to a dungeon. This dank place was crammed with people and saturated with noise. Bill Nighy's version of Wet Wet Wet's Love is All Around was playing at full volume and on loop; a boy sat knocking two bottles of wine together and yelling; many of the rest of the room’s inhabitants comprised a surging mass of pilgrims piling on to the bar. I hunkered down on a chair and through the stampeding hordes I perceived some oppressed faces that I recognised: this was my party.

Plates of food began to turn up sporadically. At one point I had before me a plate with a mushroom doused in cheese and a cold can of chopped tomatoes on it – this soon disappeared again. Not long after, I got my hands on another plate of food; it was the main event: the turkey meal. The plate's architect had sought to evoke Orkney: various items sat like islands in a brown sea of gravy. He also made a comment about the dangers of rising sea levels: surplus gravy cascaded off the plate and formed puddles on the table; puddles for someone to put their elbows in later on. The largest of the islands was an anemic, floppy wedge. It was a proud statement of the sovereignty of human will: the pallid slice possessed no properties to recommend it as turkey to a discerning mind, and yet it was turkey! It was turkey because we said it was turkey. Human beings are the originators of meaning in the universe! What we say goes.

By dividing the other things on the plate into smaller pieces using a knife and fork and then putting them in my mouth where I ground them down further using my teeth I was able to make a paste that I could swallow. Once this stuff had reached my stomach it did not cause me to be instantly sick: it seemed that it was food. There were a few exceptions. An appealing looking object that appeared to be a chipolata wrapped in bacon tasted of plasticine. So did the cauliflower.

Overall the experience was what it must be like for a ghost to eat. When eating the carrots, for example, I was dimly aware of apprehending something like the taste of carrots but this felt more like a memory than a living experience. It was a tantalising wisp of something once vital now forgotten.

What explains the popularity of this Christmas tradition? Red-faced people in paper crowns, a rambunctious mood, giggly colleagues: all these I like; all these could exist without crap turkey. Have a curry, have a hearty stew, have drinks and a buffet. Save the roasted bird for the big day. Not that there is anything particularly despicable about bad food per se. Disgusting cheesey things, low grade meat things and nonsense pies have their sickly gluttonous place. But these weak, tasteless roast approximations elicit consternation from high falutin’ gastrognomes and gobbling half-donner-pizza-and-chips fanciers alike. This is awful. It must stop.

too small

2008-12-08T14:42:00.002Z

These recent posts are too small. I should write something more substantial. This isn't a fucking twitter thing.

'Fucking Awful' George Lamb

2008-12-08T13:13:00.008Z

George Lamb is a BBC 6 Music DJ. Earlier this year I read this article in Viz:

There's a slew of stuff out there: petitions to have him sacked, Facebook groups and reems of vitriol in YouTube comments. People fucking hate him. I've never listened to George Lamb's show but I enjoy the flavour of this hate, so that's me on board.

Get him off the air!

Cameron in Banal Talking Outrage

2008-12-08T13:02:00.004Z

America's President-elect, Barack Obama, reports being 'bored to fuck' by the Conservative leader, David Cameron. When asked if he and Cameron had got along Obama replied, "Naw, he's got shite chat."

The full story is here.

Are you dressed like a fud cos you're no getting your hole?

2008-12-06T12:51:00.002Z

The Discourse of Paradigm: Surrealism and the posttextual paradigm of narrative

2008-10-28T22:45:00.003Z

Cultural neosemioticist theory.

It's different each time you refresh the page.

Fucking Hail!

2008-10-16T11:24:00.001+01:00

I was in a t-shirt the other day.

RE: Recession Proofing Our Jobs

2008-10-16T09:32:00.011+01:00

It's a good time to go into the textbook business; most of them will need to be rewritten...

A Burning Yearning to Learn

2008-10-09T22:42:00.002+01:00

(I wrote this ages ago and I can't really remember what my point was. It needs a conclusion. I guess it's not total shite though so I thought why not publish it...)

People talk about how, through travelling, they have learnt some things about different cultures and gleaned insight about the perspective of people from different parts of the world. I think that this is quite rare and the "travelling" is just a poncey word that means a type of holiday where you move around a bit more and stay in cheaper accomodation (which isn't to say that it isn't fun). Bum-blowing epiphanies seldom happen but, I think, I have, in my time, on occasion, experienced some impression of a different approach to life. One example of this was in Guatemala whilst I was at a language school. For a month I spent four hours of each day in one-to-one Spanish tuition. There was a day early on when I was quite tired and evidently not demonstrating a great deal of application because my teacher asked if I wanted to finish the lesson early. I realised, on reflection, that I had brought with me the same attitude to learning that I had had at school; I treated it as a chore. My teacher could not see this and her logic was compelling: I had started the language course voluntarily, why would I do this if I didn't want to be there? Being asked if I wanted the lesson to finish early hit me amidships; the language school was an institution and, as such, I was using the institutionalised thinking that I had learnt at school. Four hours a day was, in my mind, a rule that could not be disobeyed. But here was a bizarre situation: I was in an environment very similar to school but there of my own volition and free to leave if I felt like it. By turning up for fours a day I felt I was fulfilling some kind of minimum requirement but I was simply going through the motions and where was the point in that? The idea was to learn Spanish, not to achieve a good attendence record.

I think that we use this kind of thinking quite a lot in this Britain. We spend much of time doing things out of some vague sense of obligation. This is a strange way to lead a life. Surely it makes sense to do things because they are necessary or because we want to. To be conducting our lives on the basis of a neuroses picked up at school is unwise and I think the Guatemalans - if this is a national trait - are on to something.

Going to university is a similar situation. There is a popular Facebook group called "Stop putting your hand up in lectures shitbag. Fuck you and your enquiring mind" or something. I'm a university student and I have never asked a question during a lecture. This is partly because the material in lectures is generally introductory and I am too thick to have understood it to the level where I could ask anything useful by the end of the lecture. It's also because I don't want to invoke the wrath of members or sympathisers of the group I mentioned above. However, if a person has a sufficient grasp of the material and is suitably self-assured then I think asking questions is fine. That it annoys so many people that people ask questions during lectures is, I think, symptomatic of the kind of thinking that I was employing whilst I was at the language school. Few people are at university because they have a passion for their chosen subject. For them, the purpose of the degree is to gain some kind of currency to be used with employers. If not that, it is to satisfy their parents. Or it is a response to some notion of maintaining a kind of bouergois respectability. The content of any one lecture is insignificant. Attendence at the lecture is a result of a sense of obligation and that the lecture is stimulating is an irrelevance. Those that ask questions have the right idea, I think. It seems a much better thing to be at university in order to learn. To be there because you want to be; because you enjoy it; because it is what fulfils you at that time in your life.

The trouble is there are plenty of people, I'm sure, who are making themselves heard in lectures for all the wrong reasons. They are doing it to show off or simply to be pretentious arseholes. This, I do not condone. And, I do not think that the position of the person who is irked by question-asking in lectures is utterly indefensible. Being at university for less noble reasons than the question-asker is understandable. Students may realise that they don't know what they want out of life; the universe offers them desolation and it is natural to be stumped for a response. University offers a good oppurtunity to fill in time and not do very much whilst striking at purpose in life through hedonistic means. Stimulating lectures are unnecessary for this. It may have less dignity as a reason for going to university but it is absolutely understandable. In a similar way, I think there is some justification for my attitude at the language school. I was living in a village full of friends that I had met during my travels, we were all gloriously free of responsibilty and working on learning Spanish was the last thing on my mind.

Not Writing Anything

2008-01-21T16:16:00.000Z

Since my first few posts, which I like to think form a sort of trilogy, I haven't published anything for a while. I have written a few things but I don't know if I want to put them up yet. One of them has a good title: "A Burning Yearning to Learn". That title came from a Doris Day song called Teacher's Pet. The trouble was that the article wasn't very funny and my readers demand that I be very very funny all of the time. The other thing I have started writing is full of dubious social and cultural history that came from my head. It also has a picture in it, which is something of a technological leap for this blog.

I've been making sorties into fiction as well. One of these is quite unpublishably horrible so you won't be seeing that here. And I've constructed an outline for a screenplay/novel that features love, betrayal, time travel and easy listening classics that would ideally star a young Bill Murray, Amy Adams and myself.

Never fear, I will at some point put up another proper article or post or blog or whatever you're supposed to call these. I have become quite bored with the affected vitriol of my earlier posts so I might not write like that again. Anyway, that's the end of this shameless "gawd I'd better write something on this shitting site before I'm unregistered" post.

I'm a Twat

2007-11-16T16:55:00.002Z

In my first two posts here I directed a stream of unremitting invective at all of the people of the world. I have called them idiots and twats, described them as pointless and insipid, and implied that they are shallow and self-deluding. Now I'm going to turn the gun on myself, as it were. I am going to assert that not only am I a twat too but that I am the biggest twat of them all.

People who have read my other posts may well have realised this already; there is plenty of evidence there. For a start, I am about as pompous as twelve posh school headmasters put together. Witness the phrase "it is my contention" in the first post. Witness also the context in which I used the word 'witness' in this and the previous sentence. Consider the Shakespeare quoting in the first post (incidentally, I have never read A Winter's Tale; I had read that quote in the paper. Look, here it is:

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9653083

But did I make it clear at the time that that was where I found it? No... because I'm a twat). I'm sure you can find countless other examples of my pomposity. In fact, let's have a competition! Leave a comment on this post citing all the instances of pomposity or general twatishness you can find on this blog and we'll see who gets the most.

Of course this problem of mine extends well beyond this blog. I have the love life of a giant panda that works nights. I buy the Big Issue and then - rather than putting it in my bag - carry it round in my absurdly clammy hand so other people can see it and think well of me. More damning still, I laugh raucously at my own jokes; louder than anyone else. I not only don't remember people's names but don't listen when I am told them in the first place. I sneer unreservedly at people who are better able at enjoying themselves than I am (again, see my first post). I am a snob about music, food, books, tv, films, words and how people decorate their rooms. I judge people by the clothes they wear. I spend most Sundays telling people the endings of films with big twists in them. I like to toss foreign coins to beggars. Before the introduction of the electronic system I used to spend time forging seat reservation slips so I could have whole train carriages to myself. I'm a founder member of a group that organises annual trips to Center Parcs for Holocaust deniers. I have a Stanley knife that I use exclusively for scratching rented DVDs before I return them. If I know that I will be getting on a crowded bus or tube train I don't brush my teeth that morning and have a plate of scotch eggs, raw onions and Flamin' Hot Monster Munch. If I'm having a meal out with a large number of people I will pay roughly £3 less than I know to be the total cost of my order. I take a couple more bags off baggage carousels in airports than I, strictly speaking, own. I also like to purchase small quantities of drugs before I go on holiday, which I sneak into the hand baggage of my travel companions in order to free up space in the hotel room.

I know what you're thinking: "Who doesn't? This is the sort of stuff everyone gets up to now and again. Don't be so harsh on yourself!" And you'd probably be right. I suppose the important thing is to be aware of our failings. "Know thyself," said the Ancient Greeks. I think that's what I've been promoting here. Deep down we know we're all twats and it is realising this wherein our best hope lies.

People Are Twats

2007-11-16T13:00:00.004Z

My previous post dealt largely with explaining that young people are rubbish. This time I want to do some broadening out of this theory. I was unduly fair on what I termed 'older people'; I said that they were "of worth to society" and "had something to say". I want now to show that these claims are demonstrably untrue. All people are, in fact, twats.

I doubt that it is would be easy to find an empirical argument for this so, to begin with, I want to deal with what conclusions we can come to inductively. The first - and perhaps most obvious reason - for thinking that people are twats is that they never tell you who to make cheques payable to without prompting. In the history of humanity no one has ever composed an initial letter, email or advertisement soliciting money that included information about who to make cheques payable to. This means that other people have to spend innumerable non-life-affirming hours trawling through company websites, phoning 'any queries' numbers with no one at the end of them, or sending emails that weeks later receive replies saying, "sorry, we've already sold out of tickets/ cheap printer ink cartridges/ vibrating eggs."

It's self-evident that children are twats: they still like toys and spend their time going to weddings and classical music concerts so they can wail during the quiet bits. And I explained why young people are twats last time. So it is now incumbent on me to give an account of why people older than young people are twats. In the previous post I, to an extent, suggested that experience breeds insight and wisdom and therefore "things to say". It is a sad fact that this is seldom the case: 43% of people aged 45 and over can only think of concepts in terms of where their children or their aquaintances' children go to university. A smaller, but sizable, proportion can only think of concepts in terms of Agas. There is also a trend for the complacently unfunny among these people to go on programmes like Grumpy Old Men and talk about how bloody hilarious becoming middle aged is. Eight in ten of their jokes follow this format: 'these days I groan when I get out of a chair.'

A response to this argument might be to say, "What about Gandhi, Mother Teresa or national treasure, Stephen Fry? Surely these people are not twats?" My answer is: I have not met them. My experience with other people tells me that they most probably are/were twats. I know this in the same way that I know the sun will rise again tomorrow, if I don't eat I will become hungry and if I go to Manchester's Opus nightclub I will not enjoy myself.

If you need further convincing, I suggest you watch the first episode of Armando Iannucci's 'The Armando Iannucci Shows', which covers this ground in far greater depth than I have here.

*1/3/09 — the misuse of the word empirical in this post is a source of undying embarrassment for me; I am a philosophy student for chrissake's! I am not going to change it though; let it stand as a monument to my stupidity.

Young People Are Pointless

2007-11-15T15:11:00.001Z

A few weeks back I was at a party of a school friend in the town where he goes to university. The party lasted into the small hours and towards the end my friend - having decided the oppurtunity for romantic conquest had passed - sat me down to have a talk. After a brief preamble about how the booze seemed to have dried up, he returned to one of his favourite subjects: the importance of enjoying yourself while you're young given the Unrelenting Drabness of Working Life. He said this pointedly because it is his opinion that I spend too much time cooking food and reading newspaper weekend supplements; activities that it would be better to save for middle age or later. I would like to take issue with the assumption that being young is any good. In fact, it is my contention that there are plenty of reasons for thinking that being young is completely awful.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people would disagree with me on this and you can see why. Consider, for example: staying up until sunrise at a beach party vs. getting up before its light for work; a thrilling sense of vitality and possiblility vs. a growing awareness of your own mortality; going out six nights in a row vs. six visits to the toilet in one night; a spur of the moment road trip to Morocco vs. having unexpectedly to drive out to Stenhousemuir at 9.30 on a Thursday evening; living in a flat full of hilarious mates vs. dying in a care home. The case appears to be open and shut. But I don't think so. All of the things commonly taken to make life fulfilling are generally absent from youngs lives. Fewer of us are in meaningful and loving relationships, fewer of us are raising children and almost none of us having the satisfaction of knowing we are doing useful work and that we are part of a community. Instead, we lead empty, pointless lives. For those of us without religion or a significant other we face the universe from a position of existential purity; just a person, pissing into the unforgiving void.

Another problem is that as a young person you have to hang around with other young people who are, with few exceptions, vapid idiots. Young people have not done as many things as older people so they do not have as much to say; they resort, instead, to saying things like, "I want to watch Neighbours," and, "when does the new Artic Monkeys album come out?" The intellectual zenith of most young people's lives is having said "belated birthday". Young people don't know anything: I'm young and I certainly don't. I met a young person the other day who didn't know what a brillo pad was. In comparison, older people know how to do things like building bridges, conducting public spending reviews and putting up shelves. Nor are young people funny. The comedian, Russell Howard, of BBC2's superfluous, scripted, improvisation show Mock the Week is known for being very young and he is one of the least funny men in living memory.

In short, young people spend there time wondering if its already too late to get involved in the man cardigan craze and their more mature counterparts are of worth to society. Young people are insipid twats and there is, at least, a chance that an older person might have something to say. Shakespeare may have agreed with me: in "A Winter's Tale" an old shepherd says,

"I would there were no age between ten and three and
twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is
nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging
the ancientry, stealing, fighting-"

So there you go. Sorry about the pretentious ending...

The Fouls Tribune

Don't piss in the kettle

Maximum solidarity

The least trustworthy of animals

Peer to Peer

Very Good Speech

Avatarpagitica

Election Prediction

Mince That Spins

WMD

Westminster

Harry Potter and the Pope of Rome

Glib Bullshit

Gig Review

Griddle Pan Me This

Floreat Vaizeum

Little Private Schoolboy

Bring Back Nostalgia

Athelstan the Homophobe

I am Red Superman

Thock, Conservative

New Project: Behind the Scenes

James Delingpole

The Man I Love

"I may be deformed..."

JSA-holes

Armistice Day

Brown Comedy

Jingle Bells

Sphynxorem Foulis

Spotify playlist

Sexy Ladies

Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time

On Immortality

Glenn Beck ain't so bad

Nick Griffin is right

Handwringing

Fearless Blogger Changes The Face Of UK Drug Policy

What's Luv?

Soulmates

Pictures

Seasonably Warm Weather

Cocaine

Blogflash!

Robot Future

Citadel del Fouls

Blogflash!

Layout!@£$%^&*(*&^%$

The BNP

Three Ways In Which To Become A More Impressive Man

Narcissism Watch

Sam Hill

What is your Purpose Target?

Dr Gillian McProfiteering Bitch and Other News

Grand Début de Fouls!

New Book

First Teenage Dirtbag in the Whitehouse

Cremsihx

Blog Roll

Repulsed of Foulstopia

Introducing Rembrandt Semi-Fishe P.I.

The South Bank Show: Fouls

Mussel Inn

Fail

Coolio is on Celebrity Big Brother

Bitches Ain't Shit

Christmas Time is Here

Fouls Eats His Porridge

Christmas Reminiscences with Fouls

too small

'Fucking Awful' George Lamb

Cameron in Banal Talking Outrage

Are you dressed like a fud cos you're no getting your hole?

The Discourse of Paradigm: Surrealism and the posttextual paradigm of narrative

Fucking Hail!

RE: Recession Proofing Our Jobs

A Burning Yearning to Learn

Not Writing Anything

I'm a Twat

People Are Twats

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