Peer to Peer

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

Gig Review

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.

Armistice Day

I bought a poppy last week. It's been a few years since I last wore one. I attach some thoughts to it: none of remembrance, I'm afraid; all of vanity. One is a worry that it might mark me as a member of the Countryside Alliance as I walk around south London and through art galleries. Another is that it makes me feel like the prime minister.

Today, I went to observe the two minute silence in Trafalgar Square. Stephen Fry had tweeted that he would be reading a couple of poems there and I hurried down imagining an affair of glitzy solemnity: black coats, men in uniforms, a brass band, actors, comedians and politicians.

But that wasn't the only reason I was drawn there; I had been missing the remembrance services we had at school. They were led by the man whose face (browser permitting) should accompany this paragraph (I think they continue to be led by him to this and, indeed, on this day). He is the school's principal. I remember once Mrs Denyer instructed certain year groups to stand and for the rest of us to imagine them all slaughtered to demonstrate visually the number of former pupils of the school who had died in the first world war or both world wars or all wars ever: six hundred or so.

Each year it was the same. I looked forward to the service because it offered a good hour and a half off lessons. I was then (and will always be) quite prepared to put up with any amount of boredom if it means not working. Those would be my feelings going into the service but during its course I would be built up by prayers, readings, hymns, poems, the gravity of the assembly hall, and multimedia presentations about former pupils of the school who died in war: by the time the bugler played the Last Post outside somewhere I would be feeling emotional, gripped by some abstract grief.

It was a fix of this sort that I expected to find in Trafalgar Square. I arrived just after ten. GMTV's Ben Shephard was onstage in his role as emcee. He introduced Mark Knopfler who played a boring song (all proceeds to the British Legion) and Athlete who played two more awful, boring songs. Their lead singer, Joel Pott, spoke in between the songs and had semantic trouble with the word 'lay': he had visited Arnhem where his grandfather 'lay', had lain wounded, he clarified.

All this was very disappointing. I tried to restrain within me the great power of my snobbery but this show seemed so tawdry. I looked around the crowd in search of noble sentiments, presumably a great number of these people were bereaved, but they just looked like any old milling crowd and where was the brass band? And whose idea had it been to hire this bloody insipid Ben Shephard? Why wasn't this thing being led by some grand patrician bishop or former general? Where was the nation's headmaster?

Out came Fry. He wore a nice coat and read In Flanders Fields followed by Suicide in the Trenches. An articulated truck had drawn attention with a loud parp of its horn while the poems were read; the bugle soon provided better parpery. During the silence sirens wailed continuously. A cat squawked and so did a bird. Camera shutters were audible from twenty yards away.

Then back to the show. Shephard began talking via a nineties-style 'link up' to the emcee of a similar event in Swansea. He made some reference to being us being 'up in London' and them being 'down in Swansea'. The other emcee was perhaps taken aback by Shepherd's archaic usage for he seemed to pause before responding and looked offended.

I had in mind a swift getaway and struck out towards Charing Cross station but the great tide of the people was not heading that way; they were moving to drop paper poppy petals in the more westerly of the square's fountains. I took some petals from a box and went with them. Some people lingered by the fountain after they had scattered their poppys and watched them float around. Here was something that was not to be found in those school services: actual grief. I felt guilty. Both my grandfathers fought in the second world war but for them, as far as I know, it was a great adventure. A non-fatal great adventure. My family has not lost anyone in war. I jettisoned my poppys into the water and made room for the bereaved.

I walked down Whitehall. A large crowd around the cenotaph was dispersing. Thunderous applause was emanating from the Foreign Office. I walked into Parliament Square and past the war protest there. Iraq: two million dead. Twice the number of British deaths in the first world war. Not true, apparently, but not far off.

Handwringing

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.

What is your Purpose Target?

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...

Repulsed of Foulstopia

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,

[Fouls]

***

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.

People Are Twats

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.