Anything for then

Once More Unto The Breach?

2011-01-30T08:37:00.002Z

So are these words implanted into the lips of Henry V, hero of Agincourt, by the wholesome bard. It is with mixed feelings that I hope to re-enter the world of blogging. Leaving aside the question of whether this medium is as relevant as it may once have been - it having been supplanted by Twitter and all other manner of inventions - it is with mixed feelings that I make the decision.

I gave up on writing, in any form, when I moved to London, as there appeared to be no need to continue. Before that, it had been a means of ensuring happiness and general well-being, but the return to the Capital appeared to ensure said happiness by other means. So I am torn about whether to take my wish to blog again as an indication of a general lack of well-being.

But perhaps I investigate too much. Onwards, and to the glorious emancipation that comes from that noble pursuit, talking rubbish!

The Staged Game

2009-05-05T21:39:00.004+01:00

It is a beautiful thing, hindsight.
When I wrote a blog entry called “Economical With The Truth” (a year ago, but only a pitiful three entries ago) I had little idea of the spectacular disaster that those then embryonic rumblings in the economy would turn into. That blog, as with most of mine, had a fair dose of idiocy, perhaps very partially counter-balanced by a mouse’s paintbrush worth of actual concrete knowledge. Even so, I have been able to glean that my outlook, even if it identified the existence of some of the balloons that subsequently burst, had the wrong focus.

There I was, trying to drum up heroic assumptions about inflation, about some infinite snowball of unutterable speed gathering, rendering all our basic foodstuffs and commodities beyond our grasp as their prices soared, and at the same time dismissing the stormtroopers of the sub-prime mortgage market as a distant and unfocussed army, the masts of their ships barely visible against the horizon. Holed up in my flat, I was unable to see the ticking numbers and jagged lines that tell of sub-prime chaos, of widening TED spreads, of indexes that betray all manner of knowledge and guidance to those in the know and those on the make. Even if I was able to, I would not (and still do not) know what the vast majority of the signals meant. Are these warning lights or fairy lights? Does that number signal prosperity or madness? Does this line on the hospital monitor signal health or a heart attack? Easier therefore to lament about the then daily reports of rises in the price of bread, or rice, or petrol. This is something graspable – that the fiver in my pocket will not stretch as it used to, even though the pain associated with earning said fiver remains the same.

But the thing that brought the dam down was a far slipper thing, some kind of cosmic eel with no head and no tail that lay draped and occasionally writhing until the whole structure gave way. I profess it was through a lack of overall understanding and an inability to see the economy for what it really is - a playground seesaw with seventy obese children scrambling all over it. About ten weeks after writing that entry, and utterly unforseen by me, Lehman Brothers collapsed and dragged the world, bloodied fingernails tearing at the edge, screaming after it.

And so here we are, deflation for the first time in some 49 years (though only in a narrow definition of the word), and all of our preconceptions, even about those gathering storm clouds last summer, turned entirely, whimsically on their heads. That a single rotten grain of rice can infect an entire barrel is not in doubt. And that folk carried away in a circus of spinning pound signs are not to be trusted to make the most rudimentary of decisions, especially when the economy of the world is at stake, is undeniable. A drunken gambler is seldom allowed to write the business plan of a casino, after all. This then is the problem – an interesting one of human nature, herd behaviour, and of the volatile spread of blind panic that underlies all things financial. But let’s save that for another time.

Like depression, or grief, there appear to be stages to the formation of such catastrophes, their aftermaths and the state of normality and its slow transformation that then occurs.

Stage One would appear to be Denial. There was a heady mix of statements of denial wafting around like the involuntary flatulence of a stood-on dog. Mostly it took the form of various commentators denying that a problem existed. In the main, the public (myself included) did not heed either the warnings nor the reassurance because we didn’t understand, and in any case the problem was so abstract as to be invisible, while the possible consequences seemed as important as the outcome of a Su Doku puzzle and there was little we on the street could do about it. Feel like handing your house back to the bank and demanding they charge you a larger down-payment on it anyone? Demand they give you a lower return on that hard-earned cash you deposit with the branch? Thought not.

Gordon Brown made hilarious (again, in hindsight) statements rebutting and patronising the venerable Vince Cable on the floor for the Commons for the latter’s seemingly relentless pessissimism. Of course, there is truth in John Kenneth Galbraith’s assertion that everyone remembers those that talked up the market before the crash, while those who banged on for years about an impending crash are never remembered as these crashes fail to happen, but Mr Cable knows of what he speaks. (A statement that I promise will not be without qualification – see book recommendation later).

Stage Two seems to be the actual Panic. At this point, computer monitors on stock exchanges show terrible images (once the porn window has been minimised), and people drop forks to the floor, stubbing into their feet which have been so numbed with terror as to have lost the ability to feel pain. From their mouths dribble the remnants of lattes and sushi or salt-loaded sandwiches as news tickers give minute-by-minute accounts of drops or rises in numbers that few of us ever understand but that all in that room realise to be Very Very Important. For the rest of us, commentators come onto news channels, some wearing their agendas down their fronts like intellectual vomit, extolling wisdom on what might happen next, while others, more honest, profess to having no idea what is going on, but isn’t it all rather dramatic, and that they hope you have been sharpening your claws so that you can fight off adversaries as you scrabble for a meal from that skip.

The newsreels are peppered with references to phrases with a Daliesque quality about them – with analogies that John Steinbeck would have been proud of, all shoehorned together in a mass conveyor belt of financial bile that portrays a scene of utter chaos and irrevocable damage without leaving any humanly image that can be wrapped up and taken home and broadcast on the inside of the eyelids when you lie in your bed. Things like “a complete evaporation of liquidity”, some kind of chemical reaction no doubt, and “Credit Crunch”, a nut-infused chocolate bar, are blurted out by people taken over by their autocues. Again, Mr Galbraith points out that it is possible to enjoy the entire spectre of human folly in this time, for “while it is a time of great tragedy, all that is being lost is money.” This crisis afforded a great amount of time on which to sit on the balcony watching the explosions, for it lurched from side-to-side on an hourly basis for the best part of six weeks like a crazed couple imbibing improbable volumes of narcotics while having continuous tantric sex on a violently yawing ship. Not only that, but there was a historical Presidential race happening in the midst of this swirling maelstrom - we were positively spoiled. But then, the chaos hadn’t personally touched most of us yet. I’ll return to the panic another time, but for now, onwards.

Stage Three appeared to be Reaction. As Vince Cable wrote, there was a realisation that “every lever had to be pulled”. The sheer scale of catastrophe, the complexity of the problems, the confluence of so many horrific forces, could only be met by a determined show of vigour, a raking of machine gun fire against an alien evil. Even as lines fell limply off charts and different combinations of those obese children fell off and climbed onto different parts of the economic seesaw, various heroes emerged in different guises – perhaps most improbably our own dour Mr Brown – and swung into action. The reactions were almost as incomprehensible to the likes of me as the panic itself. Injections of liquidity, a driving down of the LIBOR overnight rate, a slamming down of interest rates almost out of existence, and part-nationalisation of banks like RBS that once stood proud with edifices of ashlar stone and commanded unearthly positions in our psyches. Robert Peston continued portraying our outlook and the meaning and likely success of these various interventions using his Mouth of God and forecasting manias and slumps to such a specific degree that you had to wonder that he wasn’t controlling every news ticker, stock monitor and index graph from behind a curtain with levers and a loudspeaker like the Wizard of Oz.

Stage Four, which I believe us now to be in, is Holding Tight. The panic is slightly in the past, and the markets are enjoying a rally. Structural problems remain – the economy is like a building that has been hit by an earthquake. Its total collapse was just about prevented, but at the moment we are shoring up what we can with scaffolding, and dragging out survivors. The tumultuous events of last Autumn still appear fresh – there is uncertainty, but almost every week we are bombarded with the richochet of the odd errant cannonball – a bankruptcy here, an unemployment statistic there, an drop in RPI, a drop in GDP, and once in a while a true disappointment, or betrayal, such as the Budget. Our situation now is one of the long slog. We may have viewed the excitement of the explosions from the balcony before, but the ensuing fire is approaching, licking at our feet, and many already have succumbed. In a more personal way, the horror is that of the grim sceptre of being thrown out of work, and of that fiver not stretching because of far darker forces than the more relatively benign ones of inflation. And no one knows which view is over-reaction, and which is under-reaction. The ‘green shoots’ of which the papers speak may be genuine indications of a bright new turn in the road ahead, or they may be quickly yellowing weeds prising open the cracks in the concrete of a freshly-destroyed city. Nothing can be done but to hold tight, sniffing our way out of this mess but being wary of false aromas.

Stage Five is Recovery and Reflection, or R&R if you will. Shattered windows are fixed, and the circus reassembles, slowly, with less gumption than before and with new checks and balances. The folk with their hands at the lever, their knuckles now utterly white with the tension of their grip, now start to relax them a little, tentatively. The sweat still streaming through their eyes, they make bellicose speeches with the last of their breath, about how their reforms will ensure that there will never be a repeat. They stagger shakily to the edge of the stage and bow for the deliverance that they have loudly effected following the catastrophe that they silently caused. And Reflection of course courts its venomous counterpart, Blame. Do we mete out punishment to the bankers who caused this? And as is famously known and quoted from the MP's motion following the South Sea Bubble collapse, do we tie the bankers up into sacks full of poisonous snakes and hurl them into the Thames? Though in honesty I think this terribly unfair on the snakes…

And then Stage Six, many decades away, is Erosion. The slow eroding of the innovation-stifling and pesky reforms of the late 2000’s to form a much looser, spirited and wonderful era of financial wizardry, young suits with six-figure hover-boards meandering along Threadneedle Street, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf and the newly revitalised district, now a global financial heartland, of Willesden Junction, to perform their heavenly tasks and reap rewards in both money and status. And somewhere out there, speculation in a special kind of vodka starts to go awry, and Stage One beckons. But you needn’t worry about that for now, for in the long run – as John Maynard Keynes once said - we are all dead.

There then, a personal take on what human nature might drive us to as we attempt to build a system to share out our planet’s scarce resources – for that, according to some, is the primary definition of Economics. Stages Five and Six are the “normal” states of things, but I believe that Stages One to Four will periodically occur. I’m probably wrong, and if I were to extol such a simple theory of economic convulsion beyond the single-digit readership of your this humble blog it would surely be shot down in flames like a wayward Messerschmitt over a farmhouse gun turret. Our capacity to pass on information from generation to generation appears to be weak, though, and for that reason we must be doomed to continue this cyclic pattern of disorder, be it over tulips, companies in the ‘South Seas’, land in Florida, blind speculation that afflicted a generation, the devaluation of the Thai baht, worthless mortgages, or simply the mistimed sneeze of an influential stock trader. Every generation seems, like a crawling toddler, doomed to have to repeat and learn from its own mistakes. The trick to the avoidance of catastrophe cannot be learned vicariously. And on that sage, and possibly slightly patronising note (sorry), I bid you adieu.

Though not without one small aside – to actually attempt to understand this whole situation, for you’ll get scant little sense out of me, I recommend “The Storm” by Vince Cable, written in the aftermath of the panic and yet with a measured and confident take on it all.

This week, Kiran came to terms with the fact that he is a spreadsheet jockey, and that any pretense he held to having a say in what is right and sensible, or of ever having any influence over anything work-related was truly illusory. Accordingly, he has withdrawn entirely from the “decision-making process” and will devote his time to become so indispensable in the use of transport software as to be completely unsackable. It goes without saying (though not without writing) that he is extremely grateful to have this, or any, job. He also went to Devon, bought his first hoodie, froze weirdly in the sunshine and ate his first 80 mph cream tea on the M4 while maintaining marginal control of the vehicle.
Last week he went to his first “Redundancy Drinks”, which seemed a strangely euphoric and hyperbolic affair for those concerned.

The Black Canvas, Part 1

2009-04-20T23:17:00.005+01:00

Once upon a time there was a wonderful vodka, distilled from the finest potatoes in all the land. It was so potent that it made drinkers weep hopelessly in awe. The purest sensation of drunkeness could be achieved, a magical haze of inebriation so pure that in lieu of a hangover one could awaken with a rainbow on one’s lips and a song in one’s heart. Many wondered how this product could ever exist on our Earthly lands. It surely could only have been a manufacture of the heavens, brewed from well within the pinpricks of light of the telling constellations above. Crowds thronged the streets, in cobblestoned squares fountains glistened with the produce, lecherous drunks tumbling in and rising bleary eyed, arms outstretched to the heavens, sticky like the Gods of Fermentation.

In the twinkling of a maladjusted eye, as is the way of us humans, the chance of making money from such an elixir was noted. Those that owned the vodka happily sold it on wholesale, pocketing a profit that reduced their need to sell one-by-one in so demeaning a manner to the proles. Realising that their stock of golden potatoes would not last forever, and ravenous for profit, they cultivated, cheaper, weaker potatoes. Others did the same, for imitation was the purest form of flattery.

As time went on, the potatoes that were used grew more and more dubious. Specimens with strange clots on their surfaces, patches of green, coarse skins like the roughened soles of a primitive soldier, all were used. The vodka-makers subtly mixed in their cheap vodka with the pure elixir to hide their tracks. And yet, in all the euphoria around, no one noticed. Indeed the finest vodka-tasters in all the land had been invited into these spin-offs’ premises, induced with hefty bribes to slap their seal of approval onto the bottles. Even those that had started with this pure and godly liquid remixed their vodka, sold it on at higher prices, labelled as pure, which it then passed onto more and more wholesalers. The public, emboldened by the heady mix, started to hoard the vodka, they too realised its potential, they quickly shifted from consumer to speculator. They locked the vodka in their cellars, confident of its value, having a sip now and then but mainly just letting it burgeon invisibly in value, tucked away. From below, the warm glow of wealth would seem to prise itself between floorboards, and couples would give themselves knowing glances of security, of happiness, of faith that all was good and that they were only slightly plastered.

The seams of the pockets of the vodka-makers started to burst, laden with coins that pulled their pockets out of shape, endlessly expanding like the stomach of a donkey pumped full of falafel by some kind of hideous Arabic snack fetishist. Their pockets dragged behind them, driving great divets into the road, and the gilt-edged sparkle they left behind left no one in any doubt of the accumulation of riches being attained. More and more of this luscious vodka was being produced, far out-stripping any reasonable supply of golden potatoes. The vodka-makers, lusting after more money to wreck their trouser pockets, resorted to more and more dilution of the original luscious vodka, mixing all manner of ingredients, until the substance was barely recognisable. But the people saw that the vodka-tasters had endorsed it, and the other merchants saw that the labels were thus genuine, and the happy trade and bingefest carried on unabated.

The vodka was traded abroad, so that now it was not only a potent drink with which the population could gorge itself with but many riches from abroad – brilliant contraptions of the latest technology, the most sumptuous of foods – honey-infused beetles stuffed into snakes stuffed into geese stuffed into cows stuffed into elephants stuffed into a blue whale, dragged ashore using great cogs constructed from the finest steel and powered by the purest of fuels, dreamed up by alchemy, and paid for with the proceeds of the vodka.

Then one day, a bellyache occurred. It afflicted only an individual a first, but then more and more people were struck down. Their locations were so random that the only similarity that could be gleaned with any certainty was that they had all touched the vodka. Even tracing the batch was of no use, everything had been so thoroughly mixed that any barrel at any time could spread the contagion. Who could be certain that their ‘pure vodka’ had not been infected with the same incipent ingredient as that which provoked the illness? Suddenly the warm glows of wealth from beneath the floorboards turned to dark shadows. People tried to ignore their cellars, they turned away from their hoards as a source of shame. They offloaded their barrels to the highest bidder, and as time went on each bid fell and fell. The first surly hints of distress, evidenced in the simple shaking of the head of a doctor at a bedside, grew into a vortex of panic. No one trusted anyone else – for a barrel that looked as if it might yield the elixir of purest joy could yet be mixed with the foulest of belly-aching substances, joyriding mischievously within its liquid.

Soon, the barrels were being tipped down drains, into the sea. The very choppy waters which had supported vessels of trade became soiled with the stain of a nation’s shame. A currency of vodka degenerated into a fool’s gold, offloaded by all those abroad, no longer entrusted with storing value. The very money with which the vodka-sellers had rutted the roads grew worthless, poisonous even. Exasperated, no longer able to feast on dolphin imported from this or that colony, or to trade vodka for silken clothes of jaw-dropping sumptuousness, the King minted more and more coins. And as he did so, the wealth of each coin seemed to dissipate. The folk felt more laden with money than ever, and yet poorer than they could ever have conceived. Their sense of wealth dwindled by the day. Long after the vapours of vodka had finished rising from the drains and ports, the sense of doom persisted.

People stayed in their homes, those that could afford to have homes, others still made the streets their homesteads. Folk who had made an honest living, far away from the tainted glory of the vodka, found that their trade had in fact survived on overspill from the vodka orgy, from the spend-happy merchants and vodka-hoarders that had whimsically crossed their threshold, and now even these honest thousands were thrown out of work. And all around, people stood staring fixatedly on their palms as if some lost story or moral might be etched there. And still others rooted around in the waste that was left, searching for something real to cling to that might wish the invisible collapse that followed the invisible fortune away. Searching for a single pinprick of light in the burnt black canvas.

The Path From Neptune

2009-03-10T22:41:00.000Z

It isn’t easy to immerse yourself in normal life when you’ve been abducted and deposited with all the ceremony of a cockroach’s coronation onto the surface of the icy moon of Triton. In no exaggerated sense, it’s a little like getting on a bus and finding that the seats are occupied by sentient yet intelligent liquids with the aesthetics of poorly mixed custard but the keen and introspective minds of the kind of people that describe pure mathematics as ‘elegant’.

Though perhaps I should go back a little, to last summer, when the fateful events that have plagued me these past few months commenced.

It all started when I visited my doctor, complaining of some kind of mental anguish caused by unceasing boredom. Bless the open door policy of the National Health Service. Whether you’re a soul in need of comfort and hypnotic drugs, or a superbug with a penchant for the smooth-tiled floor of a well-tended ward, all are welcome. Except of course that the latter don’t pay taxes, the thieving supergits.

But you see, the problem with boredom and banality carried to its furthest extreme is that it is always viewed as a benign thing and thus underestimated. Nothing, I grant you, could be further from the truth. While in small doses it may be no more than a minor irritant, something that prolonges time and blends your once-focussed thoughts into a kind of weak and unwholesome mixture (like Cup-A-Soup dissolved in an overly large mug), in large doses it can be utterly fatal. The brain, numbed of all rational activity, turns inwards, like an errant toenail with the personality of Stalin, and starts to feed upon itself. It mines its own gelatinous folds for signs of insecurity and devours these until any fermenting creativity or logic that once may have nested there is obliterated. It probably causes people to burn things and kill people, I kid you not. The number of horrors committed falsely in the name of some trumped-up cause or other, but whose blame could squarely be laid at boredom’s door, does not bear thinking about.

But I digress, some habits die hard. The doctor was a well-meaning, angelic type, and possessed these magical receipts that could be used in exchange for drugs. My local alchemist, Boots, furnished me with the goods, and it was at some point in the ensuing week that the abduction took place.

I had known for a long while that the gaping hole in my bedroom ceiling should be fixed. I’d stare up at it at night and wonder what kind of terrors might crawl through there. The hole had the girth of an alligator, so naturally it was towards this kind of predator that my mind was tuned. It didn’t elude me though, that a shark, radioactive six-foot caterpillar, or even some kind of mutated leg plastercast brought to life using only willpower, a vast quantity of electricity and the adoring strokes of a decadent Venetian, could have also easily fitted through that gap and smothered me in my sleep. In the event, it was none of these conventional predators, but instead a kind of long, metal club-ended pole. At first I wondered what kind of maniac would be trying to infiltrate our flat with a golf club. A solid sandstone tenement demands nothing less than a cannon, or perhaps an incendiary explosive, as any primary school child could tell you. After a few swipes of the golf club, which I feebly batted away with my outstretched palm (violence is not my strong point at 3am), it finally clouted me on the head.

In the rising vapours of the freezing moon, shapes were difficult to make out. The first sensation is of the intensely cold surface as you lie there, like a deep-chilled pumice stone being nudged into the small of your back by an over-affectionate cat. My glasses had gone, as they always do at the first sign of distress. I only buy cowardly glasses that shatter at the first sign of trouble, because I would rather be buried with them off, frankly. Why a monument to mal-sight should be welded to me like some face-hugging alien in my final hours is beyond me. I’d rather not see the combine harvester advancing towards me as I’m trapped in the quicksand if there is absolutely nothing I can do to save myself. Still, as the vapour shifted, it revealed the faces of my abductors.

Face is not quite the word, a person can have a face, a dog can have a face, even a clock can have a face, but using the word face here is to stretch the word’s meaning to the most tenuous threads of its extremities. The beings were more like semi-transparent shafts of light, with half-solid, half-vaporous tentacle forms writhing to their sides, melding with the omnisicent vapour of the moon. If peace could have a visual form, it would be encapsulated in the strange beauty staring down at me, and yet, over the coming months, I would soon find that this deceptive beauty shielded a wrath of unspeakable viciousness.

They were only capable of making one noise, a kind of ghastly squeal on the moment of death, which in itself was a ceremony visited upon them one-by-one as and when the community felt that the usefulness of that being had evaporated. It was strangely democratic yet utterly arbitrary and despicable at once. That squeal was the pent up release of all the gathered knowledge and emotion of a short life half-lived, not one of the squeals ever sounded like the dull exhalation of air that one felt would have embodied the dying gasp of a full and unregretted existence.

For the rest of the time, though, for I would not witness my first enforced death for many weeks, they communicated by their normal form – a kind of gestured telepathy (of the kind seen in enraged motorists, hurling lip-readable abuse from behind their warrior-mobile’s windows). The shafts of light would move into impossible shapes, semaphore-like, and at first it was this that was easiest to decipher. Then, it was possible to perceive of a kind of subconscious signal, one that led deeper meaning to the contrivances of the tentacles. Before long, I had grown luminescent tentacles of my own, though mine were far clumsier and unable to whisk the atmospheric vapour into the ornamental swirls and vortices that I witnessed from the others. The telepathy grew stronger too, though this had to be used with caution, as even your deepest thoughts could be unwittingly communicated, and once or twice this aroused the rage of my captors, their tentacles spinning helicopter-like. Often, they would choose to incarcerate me in a hemispherical rock cave, sculpted to perfection by one of the beings, the rounded dome resembling the smooth convex whiteness of an exposed skull. In these times, I would still be unable to think freely, and my leaking thoughts might earn me further torture. The guardians enjoyed flailing with their tentacles, and this would lend a slight burning sensation to the skin, that made it feel strangely crisp and smelling of prawns.

The landscape on Triton is nothing like the astronomy books would lead you to believe (whatever that is, I dropped my love of astronomy when regrettably young, and no one had thought to send a probe to this enchanting place at that point). No, it had more the landscape of Arizona, only without that red-auburn desert glow. The rock mushroomed into spectacular gravity-defying structures, and on some of these lofty plateaus, the beings would gather and thrust their tentacles toward the great god Neptune. Still no noise would be omitted, except of course from the victims of the executions whose wails would richochet off the statuesque rockforms.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the experience was that these beings took almost no interest in me. I believe I was simply a companion, one to be tortured for amusement, yes, but certainly not a kind of artefact to be learned from as in other abductions. If I were to reflect, I would surmise that in that state of banality my status was little more than that of a domestic pet. I’d reason that my abduction had been engineered so that their species may have a plaything to make them feel their superiority (as though that had not already been demonstrated by their four light-hours flight to Earth). Indeed in the advanced state of their communication, their ability to transcend space, their ability to intimate thoughts so directly to the core of an alien brain, and in their gargantuan architecture, those same semaphoric tentacles able to sear rocks into molten form in a feat of sheer wizardry, they were truly awe-inspiring. Their scale of ambition was humbling, and left the similar kind of disappointment of oneself as that felt for your own generation when reading about the exploits of the Victorians.

In fact, to them, I was probably more modest even than a furred domestic pet. Possibly more like a snowshaker – shake him and see him rattle, sear him with your tentacle and watch his nostrils flare at the pungent seafood smell. I befriended one, ogre-shaped mass, whose light had clearly dimmed over time, and who yet his peers had not yet decided to sacrifice. His tentacles transcribed the words Angil-Twan (his name) in the air, and with my still embryonic tentacles, I spent a good four hours describing my name to him. I was more than content to ‘listen’ however. The reason for my abduction was never spelt out to me, yet he told of the great plagues, famines, wars, that existed when the beings, he called them the Lyntoc (I am reminded though, of H.G. Wells’s assertion that the beasts he encountered on our own moon were a mixture of Mooncalfs and Selenites, but how did he know of their names? But please, no more enquiries), existed in their solid state.

In turns out that these Lyntoc had once been more scaly versions of themselves, far from the lofty glowing, dancing shapes they now resembled. In fact, the creatures described were more like armadillos, shuffling along, calamitously waging war on each other for merely eyeing each other up wrong. One side-effect of being so low to the ground was that there was little variation in head height, and outbreaks of skirmishes that could soon lengthen into bloody battles could be occasioned by even the most innocent meetings of eyes. In time, they evolved, though instead of gaining a more upright posture, like man, they started to court more with the gaseous state. In time, they abandoned the conflicts and sorrow of the solid world, choosing instead to court with light, vapour and excesses of temperature. Their stewardship of the solid world despite their gaseous forms had elevated them above their surroundings, and they were at last in a relative if imperfect peace. But for the whole execution business that is, though I wasn’t brave enough to pull them up on that, and with my mastery of tentacular discussion, it would have taken the best part of a fortnight by which time even the impossibly patient Angil-Twan would have flail-seared me to death and had me thrust upon the jagged spike of the traitor’s mountain as a warning to all aliens who attempt such tomfoolery.

To cut a fairly rambling account short, they finally got bored themselves. There is only so much fun you can have with a snow-shaker after all. No matter how gothic the incarcerated castle, or how lifelike the snow - and even if that falling snow strikes the sunlight as beautifully as the dandruff from an unkempt street-urchin’s head as he is shaken in some kind of industrial oscillating device for the separating of paint, at some point, you get bored of it and have to dash it with anguish against a wall and then sit on your bed with your knees tucked up against your face, rocking gently yet somehow violently while sobbing and whispering doleful gibberish about the futility of it all and of the fallacy of having snow rise from the ground and adorn an upside down castle in any case, while the glass-sharded palm of your hand trickles blood lazily onto the duvet like some half-hearted volcano’s lacklustre attempt to bury a hamlet in lava.

In the end, I went out as I came in, with a swift blow of a golf club to the head. Awaking in my bed, I threw away my pills – for no alchemy could touch the insanity of Triton, and quickly gained my senses.

Then I moved back to London, but that’s a whole different story. Life appears to have reached a more normal equilibrium now, though the grim spectre of banality with all her destructive potency stands guard at a nearby corner that I hope never to reach. I still often open jars of seafood sauce at the supermarket to gain a heady whiff of that aroma that takes me back to those strangely alluring yet torturous days. But I still miss my tentacles.

Economical With The Truth

2008-06-28T17:40:00.004+01:00

The folk with the sandwich boards may be right. I don’t mean the folk in Oxford Street proclaiming “Golf Sale” with gigantic arrows on boards, though they are probably also right - it makes little commercial sense to lie about such things. Unless they are directing you into the knifepoint of some one-too-many-time-happy-slapped disgruntled youth trying to save enough money from hapless tourists and Chino-wearing golfers for their next fix of superglue. Incidentally, if you want to peddle golf equipment to people, I can think of better places to do it than Oxford Street where most people are listlessly pacing, chewing like drunken cattle, aimlessly spinning like tops into the path of buses in a vain effort to thrust themselves into some alternate Universe where life does not consist of supermarket queues, pickpockets and limpet-like shop assistants. Perhaps set up a golf range on Hampstead Heath with some tasteful caricatures of Gordon Brown or Wendy Alexander for the general public to aim at. Put the figures in those “Trust me, I’m not a fuckwit” poses beloved of politicians and the infuriated public will soon get into the swing of it. Groan.

Anyway, what I was referring to is those people with the “The End Is Nigh” billboards. You see, in a year’s time, that pound in your pocket – or anyone else’s – will be worth 3.3% less than it is now. Actually, it feels like things will be worse than that, perhaps the mighty Bank has been a little optimistic or perhaps that figure will be the start of a rollercoaster tumble featuring larger and larger numbers until we are lost in a whirlpool of scientific notation, lists of zeroes jamming down our throats as we hold a fuel pump pistol-like to our welcoming temples. Or perhaps not.

In an effort to find out what the fuck is happening, I went to the Bank of England Museum, which you can reach off Bartholomew Lane in The City. It was a strange mixture of Legoland and Imperial Celebration, what with springy toys demonstrating the link between inflation and interest rates, and all those 19th Century black and white sketches of wagon-loads of gold pilfered from the colonies trundling through the doors of Threadneedle Street while scantily-clad street urchins with chimney-soot faces dance endearingly to scores from Oliver with synchronized choreography.

Now, the museum is really great and all and I heartily recommend it, but it hadn’t caught up with events. In tone, it seemed self-congratulatory about how in over ten years of independence from the Government it had only failed on its inflation target in one month, information two days out of date by the time I visited. Dejected, I found another source, namely fiscal expert Lord Farquhar of Sotheby, and sent this blog’s fictional minion, Slug the Journo, to meet him at his orchard near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire to discuss exactly which shade of shite we have collectively found ourselves in this time, and whether Dulux would be able to keep their promise to produce a paint of that colour to fittingly bedeck the innards of the London Stock Exchange come autumn.

The scene is a lovingly restored orchard. Restored, of course, after the catastrophic Great Scrumping of ’04 in which many newborn apples were needlessly slaughtered by tykes on unicycles. Slug and Lord Farquhar are deep in conversation about the serious and dour-faced economical woes facing the British economy today:

Slug: Lord Farquhar, great to have someone of your esteemed stature with us on this fine day.
Lord: This is my orchard, mine I tell you. You are with me. My secretary said that you were a professional.
Slug: Indeed, humble apologies. Now, you have been dealing with the economy for a number of years. Might I ask in what capacity you have been involved?
Lord: Indeed [brushes cravat clumsily to one side, though it immediately flops back to the front].
I have been involved in a number of ways, buying and selling and that kind of thing. Mainly buying though. Things like bread, milk, croutons. Though in fairness my secretary usually deals with it all ‘front line’. I can’t stand those newsagents as they call them, their musty air plays havoc with my lungs, they have been so feeble of late.
Slug: Now you are known as something of a giant in the economy, coming in at a hefty twenty stone which is pretty bloody heavy for those of you reading in metric, indeed it took three hours for the contractor to winch you into this apple tree in which you have insisted we conduct this interview.
Lord: Yes?
Slug: Well, is there a reason that you have chosen this setting?
Lord: Indeed. Now I don’t want to labour the point, but the economy of late has been a frightful fucking mess. I had my home repossessed by the Bank two months ago. Those forty or so seagulls you can see orbiting the mansion are the new tenants.
Slug: Indeed that is fucking frightful. What would you have us believe is the reason for this?
Lord: Well in the main, all this inflation is being caused by rising fuel prices and rising food prices. I personally believe that a few speculators have been buying in vast quantities of oil and taking it off the market, which has the effect of inflating prices for the rest of us. Of course that could be mere speculation on my part!
[Finding his own joke incredibly funny, he proceeds to guffaw in a raucous manner so that the folds in his stomach can be seen to quiver from under his waistcoat. The entire tree gyrates dangerously under his heaving weight before the trunk lurches to a fifteen degree angle].
Slug: How do you think these rising prices, combined with the credit crunch and the effect on house prices is going to affect us in the near future?
Lord: Well I know for a fact that the credit rating of a few of those seagulls is pretty poor, so I don’t imagine that they are going to be able to hold on to it for long. The wider picture is that with the price of fuel rising exponentially to an estimated ten pounds a litre by next year, and perhaps ten-fold for each of the following five consecutive years, we are going to have to indulge in some very unpalatable activities.
Slug: Such as…?
Lord: Please, do have an apple, you are my guest after all. Yes, I am talking about walking. In fact it is my prediction that we will evolve to have much tougher soles on our feet, like frogs, or trainers have. The human race has an enormous ability to adapt you see. Look at how we survived the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs using the never-before tried or tested ‘duck and cover’ method. The shape of the dinosaurs’ skeletons precluded their adopting that position. That’s what evolution did for us, baby.
Slug: Quite.
Lord: Also, with the supermarket cartel tightening its grip on the public’s wallets like the thieving claws of a soap-dodging street robber, other sources of food and nourishment are going to have to be considered. Won’t you have another apple?
Slug: Thank you. And what shape might these new foodstuffs take?
Lord: Well, there are always those biofuels that people are talking about. A couple of pints of that stuff will knock you cold for several days at a time leaving you incapable of worrying about the cost of food or fuel. My dear wife Dorothy unfortunately drank a yard of biofuel for a bet shortly before her sudden and unexplained death last year, so I can vouch for its potency. Also, we might have to resort to more drastic measures, food-wise.
Slug: You mean…
Lord: Yes, cannibalism.
[At this point, Lord Farquhar looks down at my thigh. It is exposed as my trousers suffered a large gash when I tried to climb into the apple tree prior to the interview and snagged the trousers on the deliberately sharpened point of a tree limb. On that same tree limb had been skewered four squirrels in various states of decay.
Lord Farquhar licks his lips and moves his head almost imperceptibly closer to my flesh. I try to combat an urge to ditch my journalistic integrity in favour of fleeing for my life].
Slug: So, do you see any other way out of this financial crisis apart from a human society defiled by excesses of drinking biofuel and ravaging each other like deep-fried chicken drumsticks after a particularly savage night out?
Lord: None at all. In the wayward trends in our economy, however, I do not see a reason to give up hope. Rather I see an opportunity. This is merely a stage of advancement for the human race, where we ditch currency and markets and economy and all the chains and morals that bind our society into our current primitive state and move in to a freer more equal society where we can feast on each other at will, lathering each other in peanut butter before gorging ourselves on street-side banquets fit for Zeus.
Slug: Lord Farquhar, thank you for your time.
[At this point, the tree collapses, and the aforementioned tree limb skewers Lord Farquhar through the heart so that he appears inanimate, like a fifth, obese, aristocratic squirrel, pierced and motionless, waiting for his slow demise by decay, never to view the dawn of the day when society would act out his words and devolve into a cesspool of horror and fermented wheat].

===

LAST NIGHT, Kiran saw Radiohead in Glasgow Green which was so fucking fantastic that it defies words. At several moments he experienced joy so profound that he almost had a seizure. Indeed his left leg has still not fully recovered which makes using the clutch hard. Today is his last official day in Glasgow.
Experience some live Radiohead action for yourself – here is a snippet from a secret gig they played in London’s Brick Lane back in January.

The Great Smokey Vortex

2008-06-24T17:44:00.006+01:00

Four months passed. Unutterable things happened. Not all of them, I should add, interesting.

“Does it make you feel large and tragic?”, asks a character in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden about another character’s unrelenting self-pity. Perhaps that is at the root of the contented knifeless masochism we call self-pity. Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, it had to be trampled into the ground. Wading knee-deep through the viscous surrounds that it produces is a ticket to stagnation, apathy and misery.

Glasgow seems to epitomise self-pity. Here is a city that once proudly held itself as a giant of trade and commerce, that thrust up stone into the sky as if it were feather to form gargantuan edifices and then carved ornate embellishments into the façades, treating the stone now as butter. At one point in the nineteenth century, a third of the steam locomotives in the world could claim to have been born in one district of Glasgow – Springburn. Four hundred shipyards lined the banks of the humble River Clyde, humble both in width and in trajectory. Even in its present man-modified state, it still takes a hefty depth of imagination to populate it with ships, grit and clinkers and the metallic noise of grinding industry, so peaceful and insignificant does it now appear.

Then it was all gone. The city that had weathered industrial rifts of the past - the decline of cotton, the gaining of independence in America and the resultant overnight destruction of the tobacco trade - felt unable to cope with a competition so profound that is simply curled up into a ball and died. It haemorrhaged population, diminishing from well over a million to just over half that today. All the while it faked regeneration as it tore lumps out its own torso and deposited its inner-city population, tentacular in method, to countryside ghettos. All this frenzied activity of construction was merely an exercise in disguising death. In thrusting scaffolding thirty-storeys into the sky and encasing citizens in erect cuboids of dull concrete, the city kidded itself that it was reanimating itself, renewing itself. It is damned into this spiral now.

But, I here you say, for my mind in its madness is more pervious to the whispered insecurities of the breeze: Has there not been real progress? Have there not been awards, accolades, sporting events, beautification, do people’s hearts not soar at the majestic transformation of Buchanan Street? Cosmetically, the city has burned its industrial core it is true. It has denied its past and repaved its fabric with street-performers, opera, galleries of commerce so that we can consume, consume, consume and forget that it is all falling apart not one mile from the centre. As if putting foundation, mascara and lipstick on the hopeful face of a snake would gloss over the sloughing scales and withering tail of its fermenting body. Glasgow rots from the edges in, and it renews from the centre out, and in between lies a doughnut of half-built luxury apartments that will not be graced by gentrified footsteps for many years.

I digress though, at the heart of all this, is that the mindset of Glasgow is not to be reborn. What is mistaken for regenerative zeal is probably just the words and actions of a few whose own progress relies on the perceived success of their ambitions for the city. All the while, the Graduate Graveyard plods on, like an asthmatic tortoise towards an uncertain end. Its rueful nostalgia for long-gone days of industry cannot help it. I have a great emotive connection to the city, I will schizophrenically continue to sing its praises because I will never be able to deny the profound impact that is has had on my life, on my outlook. But I should only return when my own state of mind has melded with that of the city. In practice, this should be when my blood is becoming tumourous, my bones bubbling with the onset of osteoporosis, when this embryonic daily wheeze I have gained turns into a full-pelt clamour for oxygen, and when my liver has been stained kaleidoscopically from years of abuse. It should be in the sunset of my life when I view with terror the setting blood-red orb burning slowly through its throne of cloud. Then I will be happy to lie face-down in a Glasgow puddle, but not a moment before.

Mighty feelings indeed, and undoubtedly utter bollocks – for I am too young to know anything and too old to learn anything. I have no experience to make such high-minded claims, I will turn tail a thousand times and learn nothing. I will make proclamations and extol pretensions and then throw my promises away while no one is looking. There is only one place where that frame of mind could be tolerated or subsumed. Will Self described it as “thrashing and mewling”, and whether in hatred or in awe, he was talking about London.

London, that feeling of burning behind your eyes when you have been manacled upside-down from the ankles for too long. That dark silhouette of a dagger lurking behind the shower curtain. That great smokey vortex within which you disappear from all who knew you in a theatrical whirl of fog and scuttle with such energy that all thought becomes reduced to a characterless list of items which has no end and which you will never be furnished with enough time to finish. Venture into Victoria Park and muse at the wonder of undead grass in the inner-city. Pierce a javelin through your lip and hurl yourself drunkenly across Camden High Street. Enter the ring of steel and wonder how long it will take a determined woodworm to tunnel through the Bank of England’s vault wall in Princes Street. Feast on desiccated coconut next to a police cordon at a Hare Krishna parade. Forget the terrifying thought that you might need the animation of the city to substitute for a lack of your own inherent energy and that the only way you can survive is to feed parasitically off the bustle. I’m trying to. Or go to a Somali market in Whitechapel and legally buy four bunches of hallucinogenic khat leaves to chew on if it all becomes too much.

So here I am, gluttonous traitor that I am. In six days I start work. For four days I have inhabited this flat, and in a colourful (though mainly red) daze of scene-blurring cycling and memory-blurring inebriation I have subsisted, not entirely sure what form this particular failure will take, but determined as hell to make sure that this episode is the finest drip to ever top that banal pyramid of ear-wax we call life. For I have failed again, both by my own standards and by the recessive standards of society. Though meet me and you may find that I’m the happiest failure you ever have the misfortune to shake hands with.

Back to normal after this: less of this pretentious shite, and more objectivity hopefully – though what is objectivity but the collective sum and average of a billion subjectively held opinions? Muse on that as you feed bread into your toaster. And wonder at the glory of such an invention.

The Last Post? (Or, A Change of Tack)

2008-02-27T12:12:00.004Z

Hello.

It is vastly enjoyable writing all this rubbish down time and again, and it has been wonderful to expound utter gibberish on anything that pops into my tedious head over the last 4 months.

But there are a vast number of flaws with this blog as a blog.

a) Entries too long.
b) No continuous subject.
c) Not enough links.
d) No multi-media: pictures, YouTube snippets etc.
e) Plenty else, though if I knew all of these I would be able to rectify them and improve the thing.

Anyway, it has been really heartening to find that going too long without writing something down (even if it happens to be about reading on the toilet, mouth ulcers, conflict in Kosovo or a different take on the Nativity) makes me itch to get back to it. For this reason I know it is an interest and not just a chore. But this is probably not the medium to do it and it should never have been intended as such.

Therefore the point of this blog is changing. Rather than being a distraction from what I really want to write about (as in the past), I am purely going to use it as a testing or dumping ground for entries not necessarily meant to be read, or for the public domain, but which do no harm by being there. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then perhaps blogging is the continuation of writing by other means. I need to get back to the point of the whole endeavour. I intend to set up another blog based on more rigid subject matter inspired by the happy popularity of one post in particular. Perhaps, if that goes well, I'll link it to this blog. But for now I look forward to the far warmer cloak of true anonymity.

Cheers for reading,
Kiran

Demons of the Mouth

2008-02-26T23:53:00.001Z

I’ve been away. Not really Away, you understand, just away. But all calm now. I guess you have to change your perspective a little. Rather than standing in the fire, just use it to toast that marshmallow. And yes, I know they’re carcinogenic. Anyway, this thankfully leaves me free to think again about the more trivial things in life. Like mouth ulcers.

Mouth ulcers are like thorny stowaways, lying in wait in the cargo hold with a bomb in their shoe, fondling your belongings as they rustle up a comforting pocket away from all that nasty bunker-cold before lighting the ignition and blowing you out the sky. Or perhaps I am overstepping a little. Ulcers are more like simple hijackers, steering you away from all that meaty food that you love, forcing you to mouth over soft, supple foods as if you had prematurely lost your teeth or receded in time to become some infant, bibbed and spitting wretched ready-chewed peas and carrots onto the moulded plastic tray locked in front of you. The horror.

There are a number of ways to get one. You can order them from Argos, because you can order everything from Argos, or you can eat something unexpectedly hot that irritates a patch of your gums like cosmetics in a rabbit’s eye. You may summon one on an adversary through incantation of course. This normally involves finding a suitably heavy stick, a piece of driftwood is ideal, and then waving it theatrically at some roadkill until you invoke the Spirit of Suffering, and from there, using said wood as a receptacle, transport the Spirit into the gums of your victims, ideally while they are asleep and their lips are rippling from the snoring like loose flaps on a marquee at a windswept beach resort for retired junkies.

From personal experience though, the best way to get a mouth ulcer is undoubtedly to smack your gums with your toothbrush. This incident has all the best hallmarks of the perfect accident. It happens, of course, by surprise. It happens while you are doing something routine and mundane, a bit like how that serial killer will get you while you have your back-turned to the door while microwaving up some popcorn that you and your girlfriend can pick idly at while watching some sordid rom-com starring an affable Englishman with the charm of neutered snake. Cheap skates. That’ll learn you for shunning Odeon. People hardly ever get killed there. Also, toothbrush-ulcers are more likely to happen locally, much like minor road accidents. Though admittedly few road accidents actually happen in your bathroom. And lastly, they always happen when you take your eye off the ball for just a second.

The bastard toothbrush, in all its existence, has only a few minutes a day to really shine. It is itching to, storing up all that energy through the night waiting for that moment when it can justify itself to its owner again, and then there it is, greeting you like a happy dog. Just like a happy dog though, you can’t face it early in the morning, you just want to get after it with the rolling pin. And unlike a happy dog, you put this weapon of bristly vice into your mouth and try and manhandle it round what is really your fundamental access-point, in a half-witted state of dreamery. For perhaps a hundred consecutive times, all goes according to plan. You avoid your own reflection bleary eyed while idly gobbing a mouthful of foaming spit into the basin. You muse as it slips toward the plug hole, pulled in by the inexorable forces of Newton, emulating the lava flow from some volcano that had been used to dispose of all the detergent that had failed the Daz doorstep challenge, and then think about whether to jump from your third-floor window and risk being crippled rather than certain death, or just go to work and carry on as before because, let’s face it, no one likes change.

But then, just that one time, the toothbrush slips. Time slows down. Your dreary malaise is lifted into a heightened state of awareness, your eyes widen to detect untoward motion under some kind of predatorial instinct that kept your cave-wife Linda safe from sabre-toothed chipmunks in the prehistoric era. And then, before you even have time to regret wrong decisions and lost opportunities, collision. A numbing pain echoes through your face, and even as the neurones arc the blinding sensation across, you realise that this is nothing compared with what you will endure over the next two weeks. You retire to your room, tonguing the embryonic wound in a self-piteous manner, and then, if you are like me, set up an ad hoc schedule, cramming your favourite foods into the next two days of meals before the young ash-mound turns into a full-blown Vesuvius.

The pattern then unfolds over the next fortnight. After the heady glut of rich and sumptuous foods which you can now readily afford since your daily food spend is about to dwindle to the low double-digits of pence when the bastard really kicks in (honestly, it’s worth getting a loan to get through the first few days of opportunity, you will have no trouble paying it back having saved in the days of food-poverty that follow), you start to feel the monster glowing inside you. You tenuously peel your lip down and gaze at it in the mirror. It does not look like the hideous tent-like lump of cling-film portrayed in the adverts. If you touch it, you find it has more the texture of under-cooked sausage, lightly pink on the inside, taunting with its moist beauty yet harbouring demonically in the same breath. Of course you appreciate this more after the forty minute bout of crying in the foetal position from the shot of pain that touching the ulcer gives you is over. It does not resemble an outgrowth, like a teenage pluke, but instead looks as if some miniscule creature like a Fraggle has taken a circular saw and gouged a small, grey crater into the back of your lip. It reminds me of the disc-shaped gouge left in ceilings when drilling in roof-lights during my days helping renovate pubs as a summer job.

Today, which happens to be midway through the ulcer-fortnight, I tried the new tack of scalding it out. At hourly intervals (and in constant risk of losing my job – they do not handcuff you to the desk as they wish to betray the image of an ‘open company’, but they are always watching, WATCHING, I tell you…), I would fetch some boiling water in a mug, and force myself to drink it, bulging my bottom lip out as it cascaded its steamy torture around the vile, craterous skin-terrorist. Actually I did well not to scream out loud. The entire gum around that area is wracked with pain now, and I may well have killed the parts of my tongue that taste salt, mauve-coloured foods, and things from Korea (my tongue is more ghettoised than 1930’s Chicago). Going on the principle that it is like an unwelcome lodger, I would try throwing its belongings out the window, but unfortunately it is a Marxist mouth ulcer and has none to speak off. So instead I am going to draft it a strongly-worded legal document and use it to paper-cut it to death. If someone could pick me up from A&E in a couple of weeks time it would be much appreciated.

Anyway, after the original grief of inheriting the mouth ulcer, you start to learn to live with it. You stop tonguing it, knowing that the throbbing agony it induces down one side of your face has lost its novelty. You tilt your head to one side as you chew, summoning the food to the ‘good side’. You do not open your mouth as wide, lest you stretch the be-ulcered section with hideous consequences. You even sleep differently, trying to place your head so that the jaw lies slack off the side of your pillow. This has two results in the morning: either you have drooled an inexplicably large volume of sputum onto your mattress, it soaking it up sponge-like so that you feel as if you have been cut adrift in the North Atlantic on a punctured hovercraft; or you roll about in a state of unconsciousness, banging your ulcer gaily off your teeth so that as you rouse to consciousness in the morning your mouth is in such severe pain that you feel as if a rodent is burrowing through it on a long and convoluted trip to the secret trapdoor in your colon that leads to Narnia. Those darn rodents miss Narnia.

Eventually, it subsides. You start tonguing it again. It mutates from a grey crater back into a burgundy gentle lump, with the barely-raised geometry of those useless painted white discs on mini-roundabouts. You note with glee that you can use both sides of your mouth. You feast again, and repay the gluttony debt. The bastard, like a flea infestation, a violent pet or a suddenly unstuck baked-beans tin previously wedged under your brake pedal as you hurtled towards the back of a traffic queue, is gone in the most welcome manner possible.

I like food. I practically live for it. Getting a mouth ulcer for me is like cutting off a marathon runner’s leg and then still forcing the marathon runner to run anyway. So why, you ask – if you have got this far, which you haven’t – don’t you take some sensible precautions? Perhaps I could set aside a more awakened time of day to indulge in tooth-brushing, like during lunch perhaps, or while performing some full-attention activity like manoeuvring a light aircraft around the Outer Hebrides? Or perhaps I should avoid traditional ‘manual’ toothbrushes altogether.

Electric toothbrushes. They seem a little like overkill to me. Like using a jack-hammer to get through pie crust, a cannon to scare pigeons off your porch roof, or using a bus to run over your piggy bank to scab enough money to buy a Twix that you don’t really want, only it breaks up the boredom of a night of watching repeats of CSI and swearing at your laptop because it will not run Channel 4 On-Demand due to some trifling error that is written in hexadecimal and requires special glasses to read, and knowledge of a manual the weight of a small asteroid which nevertheless harbours lichen that could have yielded the fruit of life, to solve.

And then, say the omnipresent boffins who have the same mentality as those who stand over your shoulder, casting a shadow onto your desk, and give you tips while you play ‘Solitaire’ (it’s called ‘Solitaire’ for a reason. Now fuck off before I thrust a second javelin through your right testicle and then you can use the javelins to bollock-ski off to casualty and possibly appear in some local news item about ‘the jovial impacts of office-rage’), “Why not use Bonjela?” I’ll tell you why. While I freely admit that is has a lovely anaesthetising effect, and that indeed I would happily bathe in it and then, even as a man, give birth afterwards free from the slightest twinge of pain, the agony that results when it wears off is excruciating. And it is tasty, and you are more likely to eat it when your normal access to food has been inhibited for so long anyway. If you are trapped in a room with a bear, you should leave it alone. You should not cover it in jelly, chuck a net over it and then taunt it with a stick because it will eventually get out and then tear its way through you that makes a dark-hatted Austrian doctor performing a live autopsy seem mild-mannered.

Anyway, brush carefully. And remember to lock all your doors. (Well you ought to learn at least one good practice from reading these pages).

A Wee Nanostory

2008-02-19T21:50:00.000Z

At his shoulder tugged a hand, gently at first, then gaining in toughness until it roughly grabbed him away from his squatted stance. The soldering iron clattered clumsily to the floor. He turned a shade, gave a glimpse half-behind him. Reaching into infinity, a solid arm bulging with vein and muscle tugged him further round until his neck was wrung to the point of pain. He rose to his feet, joints snapping, the squat unravelling to a stoop and then to a full stand, and he walked slowly forward, following the pulling hand, following the arm as it receded into the sky. He looked left and right. Others about him were following the same, a medusa’s head of arms coaxing them forwards, their origin unknown, masked in the industrial fog above. None of them felt fear, only an underhand obedience, unqualified but binding.

He didn’t look back at the cranes with their seemingly unguided mechanics, lowering and tugging at the metallic forms strewn across the ground. They were behind him now. Slowly, the hand released him but his slow momentum carried him terrifically forward. The hands parted with a final beckoning gesture. He continued through the wrought-iron gate as the suffocating fog gathered the hands up into an unseen bundle. Into the cobblestone street now, but the cobbles seemed to lose firmness. Under his soles they appeared to crumble until they resembled foam. His boots glided slowly through this unsure footing. He looked up for something of security, but the buildings seemed to lose their form also. The blackened brick melted, caramel-like, until it snaked in viscous flows about him, melding with the foamed cobbles, pooling about his feet.

The fog descended lower, it had lost its blackness now. A grey infusion whirled inside the fog, whipped up by thrusting winds into vortex formations around, obscuring all solidity. Then he was grabbed by a sudden urgency to hold on. He fed his fingers quickly through a gap in the rails. They encased him but for the deathly gap. His feet had at last found a solid platform, but beyond this platform lay a thirty-storey drop through still air and stranded mist. The ground lay beneath him but he chanced only a glance below before levelling his eyes at the rectangular forms ahead. They loomed, monster-like, never revealing themselves as if they must remain as silhouettes. He squinted and strained, keeping his firm grip on the rails preventing his fall. The monsters remained shrouded in their secure cloak.

Dejected, he turned away, walking off the balcony and into the room behind. He drew his hand down over his cheeks. The skin felt gaunt now. His arms were speckled and grey, aged, starved. He pinched at the skin and drew it away from the bone, dragging it with ease before releasing it and watching it shrink back to enwrap loosely again. The room had a damp nature, the wallpaper peeled away from the ceiling corners while dark, rusty stains cried downwards in streaks, narrowing as they reached downwards. Aimless, he eyed the photographs aligned along the mantelpiece, combing them idly with his hand. The people looked familiar, children with his features, himself in various states of age, surrounded by strangers.

A sense of unease gripped at his throat and he lunged for the door, into the cold corridor, running into clouds of his own breath’s freezing steam. Finally he reached the lift. An apparition of a gangly boy stood in the corner with dead eyes. He did not regard the boy as human. Instead he became a mere fixture pinned to a wall, inanimate. He was present only momentarily and then gone, replaced with rusting tools locked with impossible density. He climbed in among the tools as the doors noisily closed. With the clatter of ageing cogs and chains and the whine of belts he presently reached the foot of the block. The doors thrust half-open, and with a grunt he shouldered them aside.

Staggering into the field, his breathlessness drew sharp pains into his torso, into his left arm. He had aged once more. From his scalp he pulled a clump of whitened hair. The mist thickened around him, soup-like, and he outstretched his arms, listening to the grim overture of his ever-growing wheeze as the mist constricted still tighter. As he crimped his eyebrows to gain sight of the distance, he saw again the monsters looming upwards, standing stock-still. Other, more dinosaur-like beasts rolled slowly about them, picking at their sides. Their heavy presence sent tremors through the ground, quivering the blades of grass and climbing the bones of his legs, clamouring at his eardrums. A low, mournful wailing of scant-oiled metal against metal. Then, with awful suddenness, and with a staggering silence that was betrayed only by the sounds of his lungs, the monsters disappeared.

The city was gone. The pain in his arm soared, inducing a tunnelling of his vision. Around the dimming periphery of his sight lay only the white fog, the approaching night stealthily stealing its brilliance shade by shade. He collapsed onto the ground and let the dewy, wet grass brush against his cheek. He tried to grieve for his dead city. He hoped he would make it to the morning. Perhaps it would brighten up.

Eavesdropping Part 1

2008-02-19T10:17:00.004Z

Overheard in the office:

First Person: Did you hear about that body they found in that hotel in town?
Second Person: Naw.
First Person: They found this body in wannae the rooms in the ### Hotel, had been there fur days.
Second Person: What the fuck? How did naebody find it before then?
First Person: Dirty bastards never clean the rooms that's why. D'ye know how they punished the hotel owners?
Second Person: Naw.
First Person: Took away its drinks licence!
Second Person: What the hell? Why, did the guy die of alcohol poisoning or something?
First Person: Naw, I 'hink it wuz just natural causes.
Third Person (Overhearing the conversation): I thought it was a heroin overdose actually.
First Person: Aye, well in Glasgow, a heroin overdose is natural causes.

Ahh, good to see the black humour hasn't died yet...

All Kneel to the Big Numbers

2008-02-19T08:13:00.005Z

Northern Rock. Yes, stifle that yawn for just a moment. If that news story could just go away now that would be fan-dabbie-dozey. We know that it involves an inordinate amount of cash of the type that us non-financial types can never understand. Someone said something like £55 billion. There is just no way to comprehend 'a billion'. Other, more helpful types, say that it is equivalent to 69 Millenium Domes. All well and good, 69 is well within our cranial radars, until you realise that one Millenium Dome is £800 million. Again, a number far beyond our reach.

Actually this is part of a trend to blow us down with numbers too big to comprehend. Over the despatch box of a Wednesday, the suffix 'million' or 'billion' is used by the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition in turn as a kind of beating stick. The fact is, we don't know whether this figure was bigger than the last figure, or whether the number being talked about, in context, is even that much. I mean there are 60 million people for these services to go around, so you would hope that any kind of investment that was not of an extraordinarily specialised nature would at least be in the millions. Even if the government wanted to grant every taxpayer a mere one bag of Salt and Vinegar (take it or leave it) crisps in lieu of a tax rebate, a minister could still hammer down on the despatch box and holler about the millions being given back to the Great British Public.

But back to the point. The Northern Rock story, though important to account holders and shareholders alike, seems to have been 'solved' for now. Account holders have their money safeguarded, and it may have mightily pissed off the shareholders, but you could argue the whole solution down to the concept of Utilitarianism I suppose. Whether it is the right solution remains to be seen. I seem to remember how, for the last few weeks, people harped on about the catastrophic decision-making of Alastair Darling and how they should nationalise the bank. I don't understand enough to know why this seemed like the best option, so I took it at face value. Now that the bank has been nationalised, people are again winding themselves into a twisted frenzy, spurred on by the column-furlongs devoted to the subject, wheeling out every cobweb-ridden financial commentator from the past in a sordid circus of dart-throwing. Poor Mr Darling rotates on the wheel while knives anchor themselves by, and occasionally into, his limbs. It may be that the government is guilty of incompetence, as is alleged, but I didn't see the Opposition come up with a better solution. Only the Liberal Democrats mooted nationalisation as the answer from the off. For this reason I reserve any defence or support of anyone on the matter, the issue is simply too cloudy.

The main point though, is please can we hand over the news to something else now? There is plenty else happening. The independence of Kosovo, new strife in Afghanistan, elections in Pakistan to name but three. The 'temporary' arrangement surrounding Northern Rock is temporary as in the 'few years' meaning of the word, therefore we don't really need to hear about it again for a few years.

I propose that there be a blanket ban on reporting on this story until something genuinely newsworthy happens, like an endangered species of dolphin is found in the bank's main vault in Newcastle and is elevated to the status of CEO. Perhaps Flipper could sort out the bank's troubles.

Sinbad, Arrr!

2008-02-17T20:08:00.002Z

Possilpark Town Hall, 14th February 2008
Sinbad IV, The Final Scene

The cast, ensconced in a cave made dutifully by the peasant folk from papier mache and fibre-glass, are being attacked by a fearsome beast, played by an obese Scottish woman in a dragon costume. Sinbad, cutlass between his teeth, swings in on a specially adapted grape vine, smashing through an inexplicable stained-glass window that is totally out of keeping with ancient Arabic times. Meanwhile two luscious wenches are screaming like damsels, and one of them takes a theatrical swipe at the enraged beast, tearing a shallow wound in the cheek of the beast. In keeping with scenes of such reverence, an ageing man with a hallowed beard that has done the rounds of vessels throughout the ages, imbuing with a salty essence of adventures past. He weeps quietly, wondering how he has lowered himself to performing in plays with little merit and even less universal appeal.

Beast: Raaar!
Wench #1: Why, why is he doing this to us?
Beast: Raaaar!
Wench #2: I think he must be hungry.
The wenches scream and shield their faces from the hideousness that is the beast.

Sinbad: Don’t worry, my wenches, I shall save you. Here, take this sword!

The sword is thrown by Sinbad but tragically remains uncaught, thrusting itself right through the bosom of Wench #2, the lesser wench who up until now has had little point in the play but to make muted expressions of horror, and show off the glamour of her legs while needlessly rock-climbing over the amateur set.
The death is expertly conveyed to the adoring fans through liberal use of tomato puree mixed with Tabasco sauce, and a dashing and charismatic smile flashed by Sinbad to cover his error. Wench #1 wipes a tear from her eye at the demise of her wenching companion, but moves swiftly on.

Old Man With Beard: Here, Sinbad, joust it from behind! It is the only manner by which this beast will be killed!
Sinbad: I will do no such thing, Sir! I am a man of honesty, dignity and…
At this point, the beast makes a lunging moment towards the orating Sinbad, biting a large chunk out of his left leg, which is a prosthetic one for this purpose. His real leg is tucked up behind his arse. Sinbad screams and staggers slowly towards the audience to deliver a tearful soliloquy.

Sinbad: Why do such things happen? I have toiled across Arabia, through desert storms and icy winds of the night, beneath the screeching vultures, those vampires of the sky, and above the piranha-filled pools of black water so deep that it were as if staring into the gates of hell, the bowels of treachery through which one might follow the avenue of vanity. I have defrauded my way through checkpoints, and seared my name with bloodied arm into the rocks strewn across my path. All that I might seek the end, the glorious and justified happy end for my wenches… Looks around at dead Wench #2, her hand outstretched as if beckoning for a last dance… Err, my wench. And now, you see before you this hideous beast, this abomination before the eyes of you, the faithful watchers. Can the clouds of terror be lifted from this ropey scene by a single swing of the scythe, or will the fight have to continue, long into the night, excreting casualties like a diarrhoea-infested viper, venomous and frothing? Will I have to continue this speech before you, so that I might blind my eyes from the terror unfolding behind me, yet knowing, that in the expounding of my awesome theories, the dissemination from the joyous caverns of my heart that in my education of my trusting listeners, I do the wench behind me yet more service that could ever be gained by the risking of my fragile, yet supple body to the causes of victory?

Behind Sinbad, the beast continues mauling the remaining wench. The beast recoils in shock occasionally, as the wench swings a handbag with astonishing force, almost ripping part of the beast’s mask. A papier mache dragon’s tongue lies on the ground being trampled by both wench and beast. In the background, the Old Man With The Beard hums softly while reading excerpts from the Oxford English Dictionary in his characteristic West Country drawl.

Sinbad (continuing): But no, I must do right by my wench, I shall lure the monster with this!
Sinbad pulls a Findus Crispy Pancake from his jodhpurs and bites the end off before tossing it in the direction of the beast like a grenade. There is a flash of purple smoke and the beast, riled with anger, bounds towards Sinbad. Wench #1, exhausted, collapses to the ground, one hand idly scurrying about her handbag looking in vain for her Lipsil.

Sinbad: Ahh, now we must do battle! What say you in your defence?
The beast growls inquisitively, and spits out several litres of watermelon seeds onto the stage.
Sinbad: So it is like this is it?
The Old Man, having finished the dictionary, for it is the abridged version, lights his pipe and puffs away nonchalantly, crossing his legs and draping his robe up over the knee lest there be any undignified insights. Noticing that Sinbad is coming off worse in the tussle, he suddenly leaps down from his rock, leaving a dangerously sagging crack in the ‘rock’ which an underpaid stage-hand, skin drawn over her bones by the onslaught of poverty, sets at repairing with industrial solvent and glue.

Old Man With Beard: Here Sinbad, this fearsome potion should take the edge of him!
Sinbad: What doth it do?
Old Man With Beard: What?
Sinbad: I mean, what does it do?
Old Man: It will sedate the beast! Then we may joust it from behind!
Sinbad: Again, I shall sedate him, but you may joust in your own time, your sordid displays of affection have no place in this cavern.
The potion, contained in a vial that is clearly a halved Coke bottle with cling-film over the sawn-off end, and containing a Radox-style substance bubbling, is thrown to Sinbad, and he grabs the beast about the neck and jars its mouth open, filling it from the vial.

Beast: Gnaaarrrll!
The beast expires, and on cue, the stage-hand and Wench #1, who are now both trying to fix the crack with a sweaty haste, fall through the set and land beneath the hollow stage-rocks with a dull ‘wumph’. A geyser-like wisp of dust erupts through the hole in the rocks through which they have fallen. Sinbad and the Old Man, previously joyous at the beast slaying turn round and look anxiously. The Old Man clutches his hands at his own face and drops to his knees in howling anguish.

Old Man With Beard: Oh, my career! I wanted to emulate Gielgud, I wanted to premiere with the Royal Shakespeare Company, debuting as Hamlet, affixing my name to he, that character of masterful speech. And now look upon my pitiful crumpled body, condemned forever to act out this bloody farce. My mother would be so disappointed!
He sobs convulsively as the audience rise to their feet in raucous applause. Roses are thrown onto the stage which the dead beast, struggling to feign death, snatches at with claws and stuffs into her mouth. Petals drop from her lips and she turns her head away. Sinbad, thinking that the applause is for him, bows deeply, his straggly hair tumbling forward from his shoulders. The crowd erupt onto the stage in a spontaneous display of appreciative violence. Sinbad is levelled with a folding chair wrapped around his head.

Review - By the late Monsieur Launder Ette:

I found this play deeply moving. The casting was exquisite, with latter-day Hollywood hunk-hero Salty Gonadson forming a believable likeness to Sinbad. His hair, even his perfume, seemed to exude the triumphant confidence with which this brave play was executed. The introduction of members of the crew, so often left to languish starving in the sidelines, into a pivotal scene near the end of the play was inspired. There were lesser moments of course. The attempted lynching of Sinbad by members of the audience seemed a trifle unfair, and though I have every faith that the chicken feathers will be plucked and the tar brushed from his overtly-masculine skin, I fear the emotional scars will be harder to overcome. The ceremonially crossing of the fourth wall occurred of course with the nervous breakdown of Old Man With Beard – his name has never been disclosed. On further investigation, it was found that the Old Man was in fact a vagrant plucked from the streets of the Tenth Arrondisement in Paris, and had been shunted from institution to institution before finding his calling in the North Glasgow Community Theatre. He has been a welcome addition to the cast, and for those of us that have had the opportunity to watch his downward spiral into madness night-after-night, it has been a richly rewarding experience of the type rivalled only by settling down in a red upholstered armchair with a freshly-rolled Cuban cigar and a manuscript by Harold Pinter.

My main complaint would be the odious script, clearly written by a fornicating crouton-ingester. I imagine him there, quill in hand, lines of dried breadcrumbs assorted by debt-ridden credit card into tidy lines upon the see-through glass table, feverishly concocting obese beasts in his decrepit mind. That the cast were able to turn such dour fayre into an entertaining spectacle that was both emotional and slapstick is a miracle. It warms my heart that such acting talent still exists. The stage-hand has since retired, I am well informed, and is now making a new living as a greyhound racing commentator following extensive spinal surgery after her fall on-stage.

Monsieur Ette died in a snow-boarding incident in the Mojave Desert in Nevada last week, following diagnosis of acute sand-burn caused by prolonged abrasion. His book, already the source of rioting across the Christian world, will be published in the UK posthumously next month, entitled “Christ’s Second Monkey”.

The World’s Newest Country

2008-02-17T14:26:00.000Z

Today, a new country may well be born. Kosovo. I was wrong before in my prediction that the simmering disputes in the Balkans might explode back in December with the non-resolution of this place’s status. It remains to be seen what an actual declaration of independence will bring, and how the aggrieved parties, namely Serbia and Russia, will react. An eye needs to remain firmly fixed on the region through this tumultuous time.

Putin laughably stated that all such disputes over the independence of territories should be treated identically. They must all be treated as independent, or not. Of course, even the slightest injection of common sense would lead to the conclusion that regions must be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Every region is different in its history and make-up. Putin also compares Kosovo to its own claims for territories from Moldova and Georgia: Trans Dniester, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but has said that he will not stoop down to the West’s games and recognise their rights to independence in similar fashion. Although this was wonderfully ambiguously reported in the news sites on Friday. Several claimed that Kosovo’s independence would result in Russia’s recognition of three other ‘countries’, while then going on to contradict themselves by quoting that Putin had in fact, stated he would not do this.

Others ranted about the likelihood of violence should Kosovan Albanians attempt to move into the Serb-dominated north of the new country. Serb policemen had made brusque remarks to such effect to journalists, and they felt duty-bound to report them. The Serbian government has ruled out using force to state its territorial claim, however.

If there has been a rollercoaster in reporting of this strange event, nine years in the making, it can only be mimicking the equally stomach-churning progression of politics in this long-suffering region. I hope it goes right this time, the penalty for wrong-footing is gravely etched into the annals of recent history.

Excrapy, The Theory Explained

2008-02-17T14:21:00.002Z

I’m no physicist, but I suspect that I have concocted a grand new theory of how the universe operates. It is not a theory based on equilibrium, like many others, but perhaps lends more to the concept of Entropy. Entropy is a number representing chaos and it is always increasing. Even if you hoover your flat, you are re-arranging all the filth and objects in a way which is technically further away from its previous configuration, thus increasing the amount of disorder in the universe. As I said, I’m no physicist, and am sure the scrappy definition above will be happily dissected and burned (in a bin of sufficient size).

My theory is The Theory of Excrapy. It describes the fact that everything, over time, becomes slowly and incrementally crapper. For example, the pasta tub that I buy from Tesco for lunch in the misguided belief that it is much better for you than, say, a haggis supper, went up in price by 12 pence last week. One more increment of crapulation right there. The Council Tax freeze sounded good, until I learned that council workers would be laid off as a result. No belt-tightening or elimination of waste there then, just a simple cull. Many more increments of crap. A light bulb blows, a cable snaps off the ‘Squinty Bridge’ across the Clyde, my father has a minor car accident, a motorways gets given the go-ahead in seriously dubious circumstances, Bush tightens controls on tourists entering America, Putin delivers another snipe at the West, a birthday comes and goes, the McDonalds 2-for-1 vouchers expire. You see, the world is full of small increments of crap that accumulate into a tidal wave of sewage being surfed by the top-hatted fat-cat capitalists that turn our globe with the arms of industry. I’ll put your complaint letter by my bust of Lenin, don’t worry.

The research into this theory will involve mice undergoing the daily tribulations of life and measurement of the anxiety that follows:

Experiment 1: A mouse is put into a small vehicle that can be operated by whisker. It is made to merge into a stream of traffic generated by other mice, and is viciously cut up by the other rodentmobiles. Anxiety from the crapness of life results and is measured by cranial probing.

Experiment 2: A mouse is put through an interview by a specially-trained authoritarian cat. The reward for success is a life-time in the grind of a spirit-sapping company run by said cat. Failure is rewarded by instant death by consumption. Anxiety measured in both eventualities.

Experiment 3: A mouse is made to iron 400 shirts and then subjected to candle-wax dripping on its chest as is common in some of the more interesting brothels in my dear home city. Anxiety measured and a value of crapness attributed.

Experiment 4: An innocent mouse has an ear grown on its back and is then interviewed by Jeremy Paxman about his role in the alleged bribery of a High Court Judge in the infamous Kitten-Bugging Scandal of ’04. A value of crapness is assigned to the mouse’s broken heart at the injustice of it all.

Experiment 5: A mouse is brought up from birth to believe that it is a beautiful swan and then, in old age, is invited to swim across a pond. Anxiety measured as it drowns and level of crapness decided accordingly, once again.

Experiment 6: A male mouse is induced to fall in love with another mouse. This other mouse has been trained in the art of deception, and they are treated to many nights out together, eating spaghetti on a moonlit porch in the French Riviera, sampling delectable wines with the 'he mouse' climbing the ivy of a night to reach the balcony of his love, so as to indulge in the heady passion of gaining the merest glimpse of the beautiful visage of his mirthful companion. At a predestined date, the wig and mask disguising the ‘female’ mouse is removed to reveal a horrid boil-ridden monster mouse, and the original mouse feels only self-loathing and disgust. Cranial probing commences.

At the end, all surviving mice will have their level of excrapy measured, just to prove that is has grown incrementally as the days in captivity and grievous human-life-mimicking torture proceeds.

Every physical constant of course needs a unit of measurement and an object of calibration. The unit of measurement is to be called ‘the feltz’. A kilofeltz, therefore, is defined as equal to your favourite pub burning down. A feltz, perhaps, would be missing a bus, or taking a pie out the oven, placing it on your plate while you salivate with anticipation, only to stick your knife in and discover the deceptive filling is still cool on the inside. Creamy chicken stirred with asparagus can outwit a human being like no other, lesser, filling, you see.
But, I hear you scream, just audible above the sounds of those voices telling me to murder kittens to appease Freedbot, the Liberty God, there are many beautiful and wonderful things happening in the world. Indeed, a friend of mine has just had a baby. That must be a life-affirming situation of a scale and intensity that I cannot yet hope to understand. My point is though, that the positive events are normally glitches. Small spikes on an otherwise steady descent into depravity. I need to believe this piece of delusion if I am to have a hope in hell’s chance of getting that research grant for my copious embezzlement needs.

Gentrifuckation

2008-02-17T13:51:00.009Z

Maryhill is a very large district in the North West of Glasgow, home to a large community that still suffers from the fall-out of the collapse of heavy industry in this city. Developers have eyed-it up, almost in its entirety, as ripe for social-cleansing, blessed (or condemned) as it is with proximity to the City Centre, easy access to the M8 motorway and its links to the rest of Scotland, the River Kelvin on its southern flank and the Forth and Clyde Canal and the exciting ‘opportunities’ that it represents. It follows a trend being echoed in cities across Britain. Oh dear.

Being four hundred miles from London puts you well outside the radar of government. Up here we are far beyond the rim of the Westminster magnifying glass. Sometimes it is almost as if a different, more pliable, set of rules exists up here. Scottish politicians have an uncanny ability to be an unlikeable and muddy bunch, even by the judiciously high-standards of unlikeability set by their profession. I am often reminded of the cunning quote used in a book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland which describes the honour involved in assuming power, however small – “trumped up to the level of village Napoleons” – when thinking about politics in this tiny country.

There seems to be a level of intransigence and lack of transparency here that can only be compared with the deep-seated aloofness of some American city governments of old. Unfortunately the by-product of that situation does not seem to have transplanted across the pond. The "Take It To City Hall" mentality does not appear to exist within the apathetic confines of Glasgow, and the movement to resist the irrepressible forces of developers rises barely to a whimper above the deafening sounds of the bulldozer.

This city also appears to suffer from an unfortunate propensity to become star-struck - "All fur coat and nae knickers" - as some would put it. If Ken Livingstone is alleged by some to be a ‘Zone 1’ Mayor for an apparent lack of concern for problems that do not afflict Central London, then their counterparts Glasgow similarly appear to some, whether in truth or not, to lack much concern outside of the cosmetic clean-ups of the West End and the City Centre and the glamour of things like Architecture awards, City of Culture status and the Commonwealth Games. Except, of course, when it comes to social-cleansing, a tradition that has been forged to perfection after decades of practice and one that is not at all unique to this city.

Social Cleansing (Soh-shill Klen-Ziiing)(n.):1. The art of displacing people of a perceived lower social-order from an area in order to gentrify said area and construct garaged suburban-style housing, Singapore-style condominiums, contorted cul-de-sacs and Tapas Bars. 2. The alternative to regenerating an area to help eliminate the social problems faced by the local population. Often motivated by the fact that is makes far more money, results in a more apparent aesthetic change in the character of the area, relegates the previous ‘troublesome’ inhabitants elsewhere, often beyond the scope of the city* and puts smiles on the faces of developers which is heart-warming in a slimy, wrist-cutting kind of way.

* - Which, incidentally, is the en masse equivalent of the American sheriffs of yore ‘running criminals over the state line’ so that they will be outwith the jurisdiction of said sheriff and thus be no more of a headache to him. Flattening parts of Nitshill on the south-western edge of the city and precipitating an accidental transplant of its inhabitants into neighbouring Barrhead, under the jurisdiction of East Renfrewshire not Glasgow, merely seemed to have the effect of moving the social problems there. Far from an attempt to cure social problems then. Of course, the rush to confuse causality with correlation should be guarded against. It cannot be proven that displaced social problems were caused by these events, only hypothesised.

For Sale: One Maryhill

One carefree owner. Any offer invited provided it will inject millions into the city and result in wholescale transfusion of human population of the type that worked so wonderfully in the Le Corbusier-inspired Clearances of decades gone. See how they smile in those Soviet-style blocks. Must be able to take advice from architects who have identical ideas on residential ‘buildings of the future’, consisting as they do of wood-slatted balconies, steel framing and vast use of concrete judiciously covered over with colourful, panelled cladding to hide the resemblance and cheapness of their building technique from that of the hated council infrastructure** of the fifties and sixties.

** Anyone doubting the Utopian pretensions of the last wave of city planners to swing their wounding scythe should head for the Second Floor of the Mitchell Library and its wonderfully helpful staff, where there is a depth of material with artist's impressions of how tower blocks would transform the Gorbals, Anderston, Sighthill, and so on into heavenly dream-worlds of face-achingly happy citizens. The artist's impressions bear an eerily resemblance to those of contemporary images, albeit without the Photoshopping and computer-trickery available today. Why do these 'community walkways' not show desertion and newspapers blowing about in the corridored wind, I wonder? And why is the sun always shining?

Err, A Sermon, Delivered From The Steps Of the City Chambers, George Square

The problem is that this logic of displacement treats the district itself as the organism, and the people within it as parasitic, for good or bad. It is akin to flushing out perceived cancerous cells and allowing perceived healthy ones to breed. The definition of ‘healthy’ and ‘cancerous’ of course being fabrications in the minds of councillors and developers. The organism, being the district, at the end of this process, is of course much healthier-looking. It would be easy, with an injection of money, to level swathes of Maryhill and build luxury apartments. I dare say, there are enough of the professional classes living in the fringes outside the city boundaries to snap up such properties, look at the transformation near Ruchill, for example. That, to most people, would appear to be ‘The Saving of Maryhill’. The old cells are flushed out and the new ones substituted. But the district is not the organism. The people are the organism. A bloody obvious point, but it escapes many who drive around these new neighbourhoods and wonder at the awesome transformation. If you simply substitute the people of Maryhill with newly-found white-collar workers, you displace the original inhabitants, and you displace the social problems that were rife in those communities. The new neighbourhoods you see are not populated by the previous inhabitants, for they have been driven elsewhere. God knows where. A website proclaims that the high population density of the area presents a ‘barrier’ to would-be developers’ dream of wholesale demolition. I wonder whether this is the actual mentality of developers. I suppose rapid depopulation of a problem-afflicted area would represent a ‘win’ for the client.

It is quite easy to allow an area to become abandoned in a generally low-density and slowly-depopulating city such as this one, and it is a practice that has possibly been purposefully taking place in Glasgow for many years. I hypothesise the process to be as follows (I am not saying that the Council or the Housing Association indulges or has ever actively indulged in this kind of activity, merely that it is a possible theory to explain the mysteriously rapid decline of such districts - again I have eight-year-old photos of every stage described below, predominantly from Drumchapel, Cranhill and Possilpark which I will post when my Luddite brain figures out how):

1 – You rehouse a couple of tenants, and do not fill up their properties again. Immediately, the presence of metal shutters on the windows of the vacant flats signals the area as an investment blackspot.
2 – Abandoned properties attract vandals and crime. More people move out, and their flats are left vacant. The lower densities of people increases the danger of the area, the limited self-policing-effect of the community becomes far more patchy. People set fire to some of the abandoned properties for shits and giggles and mainly because they can get away with it.
3 – Streets are intermittently bulldozed once all the properties on the street are empty. This can be expedited by offering small sums of cash to ‘will’ tenants into relocating. The tenants who remain in the area feel marginalised, the gentle hand of government flat against their backs, pushing.
4 – The effect of streets-without-buildings is a blight like no other. I have photos of this from 2000 which I hope to post in due course. They present opportunities for burning out stolen cars and organising 'gang' fights. The neighbourhood looks dilapidated, its days numbered.

What happens next is a fork in the road. One path, the venerable one, is the replacement of housing stock and an attempt to cure the ills of the district from the core. In many cases, Glasgow City Council has made sterling efforts to rehouse the displaced in a nearby (or even the same) area in far better-quality housing. Since the stock transfer to the Glasgow Housing Association, this has also been much in evidence, in places like Drumchapel for instance, and can only be applauded. Improvements including central-heating, double-glazing, lockable tenement closes with password protection and the like are seemingly small improvements that vastly improve quality of life. A step in the right direction at least. It is the noble and right way to continue improving the city and the lot of its inhabitants.

However, in the case of Maryhill in the next few years, I doubt many of the previous inhabitants will be welcome back to the area, as can be testified by even a cursory glance at the plans. This is the other path, private development. I mentioned before that our distance from central government’s watchful eye allows us to limbo under well-placed barriers. There is very little enforcement of principles that address the need for social or affordable housing. Even the parsimonious nod given to the concept in the London Boroughs seems luxurious when compared with here. The canalside apartments of steel and glass with their sun lounges will, I predict, not be aimed at the unfortunate souls who fell through the gap between the loss of heavy industry and its very partial and piecemeal replacement with services.

Glasgow Harbour, a development on the Clyde waterfront not two miles to the south is a case in point. There was a unique opportunity to wipe out the derelict industrial infrastructure (though this unfortunately included the enormous, beautiful and monolithic Granary, a building of incredible size which could surely have undergone a transformation similar if not larger in scale to the present Tate Modern in London) and give something back to the citizens of the area. It is now being filled with multi-storey blocks that will offer condominium-style luxury living on the banks of the Clyde, building what might possibly become a new wall of severance for the more traditional communities of the area to replace the old one. Even the BBC ran an article asking whether we had lost a golden opportunity to create something beautiful, and public, allowing existing residents access to the river.

Don’t get me wrong. Turning Maryhill into the Venice of Glasgow is a wonderful idea. Doing it at the expense of those who belong there is the issue. It would be wrong to let the championing of such causes remain purely in the hands of the Scottish Socialist Party (however genuinely selfless its aims may be) and a few self-interested hard-left fringe groups that breed personalities who hitch lifts with the nearest cause galloping by in order to hoist themselves into a position where they have a stab at leadership and glory. It is a fundamental concern that affects us all. For when the higher powers start selling swathes of our precious city into the hands of private developers, those acres will remain fenced off from the rest of us forever. Wrenching apart communities to inject the monied, and in so doing setting into motion enforced exoduses of population is what got this city into this mess in the first place.

I can’t actually lay the blame with the City Council, the Housing Association, politicians or developers. For the most part, the plans offered up are the result of a genuine attempt at well-meaning resolutions for the problems of districts, not of people. Only the reckless would point the finger entirely at organisations like the Housing Association that do not exist for profit, and that have been ensured by politicial process to have nothing to gain. The market economy will always dictate that money flows where it can be invested. Governments and organisations like the Council and the Housing Association can and should however use their powers to influence, tugging at the strings of the puppeteers (developers, and so forth) to legislate in favour of existing residents and thus safeguarding the character and, more importantly, the justice that city residents deserve. Adopting Ken Livingstone's strategy of a concrete (excuse the pun) commitment to affordable and social housing would be a good first, if small, step. Glasgow is an amazing city, and to now relegate the communities that have contibuted so much to the city's past to the sidelines, all to turn this place into the kind of faceless 'Clone City' satellite-town of the kind that are ten-a-penny throughout the developed world would be a terrible loss.

It is the lack of willingness to learn from mistakes, of our own city's and of others, and also a result of a general apathy and tendency to remain disunited, that means that Glaswegians will always be condemned to be pushed around like cold mashed potato around a child's plate. It is no puzzle where the phrase, “Glasgow cares more for the dead than it does for the living” comes from. Take a walk around the Necropolis at the stunning stone monuments for the departed, and then look down the slopes at the filing-cabinets in the sky filled with the living. Take a read of the plans past and present that have been stapled onto the city maps in the Mitchells Library and wonder at the carelessness of the treatment of the city and its inhabitants. Successions of short-sighted plans glued together haphazardly to masquerade as a unified solution for a long-term problem. In some cases it has worked marvellously, and has helped to lift poverty from long-afflicted districts, and for this we can only be thankful. But much of the time, it appears to be treated as if it were simply a cynical attempt to save a long-drowned man one finger at a time. It is not that the city deserves better, it is that its people do.

The Canine Revolution

2008-02-10T18:12:00.000Z

I may offend some people here, more so than usual. Not because I am going to talk about religion, or about politics. Not because I am, like Rowan Williams, going to say something so utterly confounding and stupid, however genuinely well-meaning he may have been trying to be, that it turns the stomachs of the general population. No. It is because we are, first and foremost, a nation of animal lovers, and I am going to talk negatively about dogs. Indeed, it would be interesting to compare the donations received by the RSPCA and the NSPCC, which are for animals’ and children’s rights respectively. One glance at the hideously voice-overed animal home advertisements will show you what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I like animals, so long as they are not dogs.

Dogs. The most useless organism to ever have risen from the malaise of the primordial soup. They should probably have remained in their aeons-past fish-state for ever, patrolling the oceans and keeping dolphins awake with their incessant yapping. They are the animal equivalent of cluster bombs, you never know when you will run into one, they exist only to fulfil the narrow, blinkered needs of their owners without regard for the dying around them, skin shorn from their ankles, groaning. The worst thing about them is that despite their supposed intelligence, they seem incredibly adept at doing stupid things. Maybe a golden retriever did design some software behind a tree in scrubland in the Russian steppe. But that doesn’t stop it shitting in the street with impunity. Perhaps, as may have been documented, a Chihuahua in Iceland was the first animal ever to navigate down a geyser shaft without breathing equipment. But that doesn’t stop it humping your leg. And just maybe, it is an American dog not a human that will be the first organism to steer a spacecraft to Mars, completing the two-year mission successfully much to the chagrin of our Chinese brethren, but that won’t stop the little bastard yapping all hours of the night because it suspects that the pizza-smell emanating from the shop below is actually a burglar.

Many millions of people have been duped by the creative affection with which they become enwrapped. It is all a ploy, however, the dog is trying to get to your wallet. They are like small gangs of thieves, using the most cynical means necessary, feigning of love, to worm their way into your lives. Once they are there, they earn a place in your most coveted bubble of security. From there, they are able to exercise the power which they most seek – to make other people’s lives a living hell. Bastards.

Let us look at the charge sheet for dogs:

Count 1: Rampant fouling of the street: No other animal is able to get away with this, apart from pigeons, and they are roundly discriminated against, being banned from Trafalgar Square by the good-intentioned, but horribly unpleasant person, the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone. I would like to lead a bear around Glasgow, but I doubt I will ever be allowed to lest it defecates on a taxi bonnet. A case of hypocrisy if ever I found one. Incidentally, the bear would signify the strong-arm politics that I would hope to sell should I ever become Overlord of the City of Glasgow, a new post that will be created above Lord Provost, free from political affiliation. In a similar vein, a friend of my sisters once lead a donkey around Drumchapel in the name of the church, and it wasn’t even killed once. I am sure that had the donkey shat in Kinfauns Drive it would have been shot by a police sniper.

Count 2: Extreme propensity to bark at nothing: Dogs are loud. They have been given vocal chords in order to whittle down the human population using a way of sonic attrition. While this is a laudable aim, it doesn’t mean that I can’t scream while I go down in flames. There are many ranges of barks. There is the endearing low ‘wulph’ of the Saint Bernard who, child-abductor Beethoven aside, are about the most stomachable of dogs. Then there is the familiar ‘ruff’ sound of medium-size but non-inquisitive dogs. They are vaguely tolerable, so long as there is enough of a degree of separation between you and it. Like a river or a motorway interchange, for example. The noise of these dogs is tolerable if they are barking for a reason, such as, because someone’s foot is on their head, they are trying to dissuade a helicopter gunship from nuking a Palestinian shop, or they are trying to save a child who is not an actor, from a mine-shaft. Finally, there is the high-pitched scratching ‘yap’ of smaller dogs like lap-dogs. One strike and you’re out for these I’m afraid. Death sentence by strimmer. It is the most humane way.

Count 3: Breeding with people’s legs: Legs are nice things. If you have two you can walk. If you have three, you can run up behind a member of the Cabinet and kick him up the arse without breaking step. If you have four, you can star in films such as Black Beauty, without even needing to put on an accent, perfect your grief-face or put yourself in the shoes of a nineteenth-century farmhand. But anyway, we like legs and we want to keep them. Both of them. We don’t want to have one humped right off by the hairy, knee-high, parcel-sized bundle of rapist that we lovingly label ‘a dog’. Also, if dogs are so intelligent, how do they mistake a person’s leg for a female dog? Do they get into such an ecstasy over being let out into the street after their justified incarceration that they get the canine-equivalent of beer goggles? How have they managed to breed and survive this far if they have been attempting to copulate with everything that has the slightest association with a female dog, i.e., that they both have skin, on the off-chance that one day they will happen on their natural partner? I think we should conduct an experiment. For example, will a dog attempt to copulate with a elephant’s leg? And will the elephant be so tolerant?

Count 4: Feigning Intelligence: Everything that is associated with a dog’s intelligence is down to conditioning. Whether it is getting a dog to salivate by ringing a bell, or simply telling the dog to ‘sit’. Also, all this intelligence is motivated by a selfish greed for food. You can make a dog do anything by willing it with the reward for food. In this respect not much separates them from me. You could probably make a dog play the piano with its foot by promising it a gnaw on a lamb’s bone afterwards. And the thick bastard still wouldn’t be able to sook the marrow out afterwards. There have been a few cases of ‘acting dogs’. But I contest that chimpanzees and parrots make far better actors, even when compared to many human soap-stars such from as the all round adolescent misery-fest that is Hollyoaks. I reckon no human, or dog, could shout down a parrot. They are skilled and adept at tactical manipulations. In fact, it will be one of my goals when I become Overlord to orchestrate chess-games between parrots, with perches hung from the ceiling so that the parrots can move the pieces with their beaks. I don’t understand chess, and am hoping that these versatile and conversational creatures can teach me without the condescension that a human master of the game would exhibit. But back on point. Dogs are not intelligent, they are just programmable, just like computers. And just like an accidental mis-association on your part on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet could fuck up your finances, so a wrongly programmed dog can cause great harm.

Count 5: Duping their owners into become slave-bots: Don’t get me wrong. If you are a dog-owner then you are not in need of punishment, but rehabilitation. The dog’s only purpose is to subvert your intelligence and free thought so that you may come under its total jurisdiction for evermore. A suitable treatment would be to have your eyes held-open using a Clockwork Orange-style eye-brace (I will use this word for it from now on, it features highly among treatments for the many ills of the world), while watching videos of dogs tearing into rotten meat left on city pavements. In order to heighten the strange sense of such unpalatable events being at odds with the setting, rotten-meat-dogs could be put in front of Buckingham Palace, or in an elegant rose garden, or in a crèche, or in the Sainsburys salad counter. Only by conditioning dog-owners into seeing the foulness of the beasts can they be successfully rehabilitated, poor souls.

Count 6: Becoming a fashion accessory: Many self-confessed ‘hard men’ will walk vicious dogs about the streets which will eye-up and occasionally bite innocents. This gives a legitimate method for the bastard to get away with assault. It is far more difficult to pull up an animal for its behaviour than a human. If you want to portray an image of danger, why not just buy a car? You can cause far more mayhem and death with a car by, say, driving it down a pedestrian precinct than even the most genocidal dog would be capable of. Or if it must be an animal, how about a shark. Sharks are readily available, and free. Not two miles from my flat is the Forth and Clyde Canal which is festooned with sharks. Err, possibly. They are attracted to cheese and onion crisps, and if you glue them to a mannequin which is then dipped into the canal, you are bound to attract a fine specimen indeed. Then it is a simple matter of knocking up a wooden tank with wheels on it and filling it up with water. If you are kind, you will use Evian or some other kind of bottled water. Sharks are pretty picky and you don’t want to piss them off. Then wheel it down the precinct and watch in awe as people get out of your way. One sight of that dorsal fin peeking from above the wooden tank-walls will send that muppet with his rottweiler scampering for the safety of a greeting card shop awning. Also, some young women in places like Santa Monica have tiny dogs that they keep in their handbags. There are no words to describe how pitiful this act is, therefore please just shake your heads slowly in disbelief with me.

Count 7: Killing people: Dogs kill people. They do. Whenever cats kill people, they are the large wild things like leopards that people don’t normally keep in their houses unless they have the kind of adrenalin-seeking nature that downhill skiers possess combined with the propensity for masochism of ritual body-piercers. Dogs on the other hand, routinely kill people. Occasionally there will be a story about how some rottweiler or pit-bull has mauled the face off a toddler. Their jaws clamp tight, so that often the only way to get them to release their grip is to slam their head in a car door. Alternatively, apparently you should pull both their front legs outwards to the side which obviously breaks something pivotal in their bodies. Then, some minister will be invited onto the evening news and they will make grandiose promises about changing dog legislation and then literally nothing will happen. But anyway, why take the risk of having the dog in the first place? If there was a homicidal maniac who occasionally lashed out with a knife, but by and by, he was pretty good to have a round due to his witty banter, would you still keep him in your house? There should be some sort of licensing system, and the owners should be made to sit some kind of physical training test, much as they did on “Dog Borstal”, to prove they were not total half-wits that would let their chair-sized packages of violent death maul the nearest child. Or else they could make the dog sit a test. A simple multiple-choice test would suffice, they could hold the pens in their mouths.

Anyway, so that is my case against dogs. There are other things, like the way they just sniff around you for no reason as they pass you in the street, and the way they follow you for no reason. Today, while walking along the Kelvin towpath, a dog did just that. I should have shot it and thrown it in the river, but I don’t own a gun, and anyway since dogs are the devil incarnate it would just have leaped out the river, mended itself and then wrapped its jaws around my neck. And then there was that dog that, years ago, came out of nowhere and followed me along the West Highland Way as I returned to the city and then followed me through the streets until I lost it in the traffic (I was cycling). You may call me heartless, but I would say it was more Darwinian. As is the case when a dog chased after a jeep that a friend of mine was in. They were travelling relatively slowly and when the dog finally caught up it ran right under the back wheel and was run over. Muppet.

I recognise that people would miss their dogs so I propose the following solution to make the pain easier to bear. Take forty marshmallows and melt them into a saucepan. Take the mixture out and pour it into a semi-spherical mould. When it solidifies you will have half a sphere of marshmallow. Next, take some spaghetti, boil in a pan and flavour with salt. When suitably drapable, drape on top of the marshmallow semi-ball, and through the flat-side plunge a mop handle. Call this object Puppy and have it as your pet. It has a number of uses. You can still use it as a mop, and it won’t bark. You can use it to fend off burglars, they hate getting marshmallow on them, and it still will not bark. And when you get bored of it you can eat it, and even then it will not bark. If the giant marshmallow is still not good enough company for you - perhaps it is too intelligent and not docile and blindly affectionate like your exiled dog - then you could always have a child. Children rarely kill people, and most of them don’t bark. For authenticity you could give it a suitable dog-like name like Rover, if it’s a boy, or Wolverine, if it’s a girl. In fact if I ever have a daughter, she is going to be called Wolverine anyway, though for strictly and intensely personal reasons.

This being Britain, it will be difficult to dispose of all the dogs without journalistic scrutiny and uproar from the public. In my capacity as Overlord, it will not be my desire to cause undo cruelty to dogs. Therefore, I propose the following method. The dogs will all be shot with tranquilliser darts. The dose will be the same regardless of the particular dog, which has the advantage that it will probably induce an ever-lasting slumber in the smallest lap-dogs immediately. The other dogs will be laid out on bridges and docksides with strips of seasoned bacon draped on them so that seagulls, the evil flying carnivorous pterodactyls of the 21st century, can feast upon them. This has the advantage that it should satisfy their appetite for many years, thus delaying the inevitable day when they migrate inland and destroy civilisation.

Incidentally, and unrelated:

On the television is the strangest fusion I have ever seen. Someone is performing a rock number with a live band while models strut across the stage and perform some kind of jig with him before walking off. The rock bloke is prancing like a hallucinating ape and making it just as dangerous for the models in their tripping gowns as if they were cat-walking across a high-speed freight line. Still, models don’t get about much. It will be good for their immune system and sense of real life to put some danger in their paths once in a while. Perhaps making them walk around courses avoiding traffic cones chicane-style like in the “Lovely Girls Competition” in Father Ted would work. I’ll bear that in mind when I become Overlord. Oh fuck now Lily Allen’s on. I might have to throw this television contraption out of the window. If I’m really lucky it will take out a Number 9 bendy-bus on its way down. They like to make noise at the bus stop outside my bedroom window, though in a more intelligent manner than the dogs do.

Another Concrete Snake

2008-02-09T12:52:00.000Z

One thing you normally don’t do to someone in the spirit of altruism is bring out a scythe and start scoring lines across his chest. Unfortunately, what we aren’t willing to do to an individual, we are willing to band together and execute upon a much larger scale, still in a distorted version of altruism. Upon, say, a city.

Glasgow has a motorway running through its heart, which is fairly odd for a European city, This is a phenomenon that is a natural occurrence in America, but is not much favoured here. Or not anymore, I should add. The thing snakes from the east of the city, navigates through the city centre, rubbing shoulders with the historic Mitchell Library and graceful mansion houses of Charing Cross before hurling over the River Clyde on what is almost universally accepted (Google it!) to be the busiest bridge in Europe – the ten-lane Kingston Bridge - and then snakes onwards through the western suburbs. Another motorway, the one from England, latches onto it in the eastern suburbs, and during my lifetime, two more motorways, one heading north-east, and one south-west, have been linked to it, winding their way through the inner city before breaking free into the countryside. Glasgow is utterly unique in Britain in being linked together in this way, but the ideas that brought this about do not belong to here alone. In the sixties, during that same gin-fuelled orgy that created our tower-block-streaked skylines, many cities, London and Newcastle among them, indulged in breath-taking schemes to plaster over all their slum-ridden areas with vast motorway networks, heralding an age when motorists in convertibles could speed California-style down the open highway, with the wind in their hair, and with only the slight drenching of rain otherwise detracting from their very own British Dream. London was going to have four concentric motorways among many others. The inner-most would have decimated some of the most culturally rich areas of the city such as Kilburn, Camden, Highbury, Hackney, Bow, Peckham, Brixton, Clapham, Battersea, Shepherds Bush and the like. One glance at the plans invites revulsion, and the ‘artist’s impressions’ of Utopian couples holding hands in apparently beautifully sculpted underpasses in the middle of places like Camden Town is laughable and sad at the same time. Have a look at the anticipated state of Kilburn afterwards, that tiny thin road running on stilts through the centre of the scene is all that is left of the busy shop-fronted High Road. Three very tiny portions got built, but the movement petered out before it ever got going, thankfully.

The difference with Glasgow is that we actually went through with it. Well that’s not quite accurate. The actual plans were mind-blowing, and possibly only a fifth of them actually got built. The swathes of concrete winding their way through this city today are a fraction of what was intended. The thinking, in the case of the main motorway running through the centre, the M8, was that to stop the dense street traffic travelling through the city detracting from the quality of life in the centre of the city, they would simply plunge a motorway through the middle. To anyone alive who was responsible for this decision, I would like to say that driving a motorway through the centre of a city to make it less appealing to traffic is like burning your house down to make it less appealing to burglars. Even Billy Connolly has remarked that only this city would attempt to a build a ring-road right through the centre of town. At the time, a delegation was even dispatched to the Eastern coast of the United States to study the freeway networks there before formulating their plans. The conspicuous lack of giant roundabouts and the proliferation of spaghetti-like slip roads feeding into city centre streets betray the American principles behind the designs. Not to mention those unnerving entrances and exits that enter and leave from the fast lane. The scheme was pushed through disguised as simple slum clearance even though many other areas of slums were simply bulldozed to form slightly more publicly-amenable parks.

I can just imagine the council meeting in the City Chambers to sell this marvel of infrastructure:

Lord Butcher of Dennistoun: I call this meeting to order. On today’s agenda, the matter of accommodating the motor vehicles of our city. On behalf of the Scottish Road-Builders and Future Ages Society, I call Lord Asphalt.

Lord Asphalt: Thank you, your grace. I stand before you here to plead our case. For hundreds of years, Glasgow has endured the shame of the horse and cart. Now, we have the automobile, and yet Glasgow, looking upon its post-industrial future, stands shamefully still. The only course of action is to embrace our American brethren, and build motorways of our own.

Lady Swampy of the Heath: How many trees will it destroy? And will my daughter in Kinning Park be forever safeguarded?
Breaks down into tears, blowing her nose in an incredibly unlady-like fashion on a silken handkerchief with a small pony in the corner.

Lord Asphalt: I assure you, m’lady. No harm will come to your daughter, though her house will be bulldozed.
Raises voice to be heard by all assembled.
I must stress, citizens, that this is in the name of progress! Soon, we will be able to put man on the Moon. Is it too much to ask that we can drive at 50 mph through the centre of this nation’s largest city? I think not. Those that would hinder us in this battle are heathens and Luddites. I suppose you would have me conduct my affairs on a penny farthing? You know who I mean!

Skag Boy, The Wonder Midget: Haw! Where yeez gonnae pit it but? If yer gawny save the centre?

Lord Asphalt: I’m glad you asked that, young boy. And may I compliment you on your esteemed midgetry.
Lord Asphalt, who, it should be explained, has a very severe twitch in his right arm, takes a pen that is handed to him by a servant boy averting his eyes and draws a jagged line roughly east-west across a wall-map of the city, only just missing Central Station.
This is the proposed route. As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, we can kill two birds with one stone. Not only can we accommodate all those who wish to drive to the centre at great speed by building this road, but by actually routing it through the centre, we also destroy the centre as a destination, thereby diminishing the traffic on our streets still further!

Bystander Who I Can’t Be Arsed Inventing A Name For: But, you mean that…?

Lord Asphalt: Yes, by removing the very streets that we are worried about and building in their place this rather large motorway, we can eliminate the problem of having to worry about the effect of automobiles on those same streets, for they will no longer exist. For this reason, I propose that some of our most historic streets be eliminated, or at the very least, severed.
Rapturous applause from the crowd.

Lord Asphalt: To those of you who are yet to be convinced, and for the sake of brevity I shall deem those people, “Communists”, let me show you some exhibits to illustrate the point.
Pulls out one of the aforementioned ‘artist’s impressions’.
Here, we have a drawing of the city with the motorway built and as you can see, the people in the picture are tastefully clothed, and smiling, for the sun as out. This will be a more common occurrence as the smog caused by the lack of motorway will have been forever lifted, giving Glasgow a more cosmopolitan, Floridaesque feeling. On the motorway overpass, which will be coated in rose petals, you can see that swings made of ivy have been attached, and children who have been lifted out of poverty by the demolishing and non-replacement of their homes are swinging on it laughing with that giddy innocent laughter of youth. Ahh, look at them there. Such warmth! On the top is a car driver, whooping with excitement and throwing bouquets of flowers to the people emerging from the underpass below. And in the tunnel further back down the underpass, we see a Rangers and a Celtic fan locked in a conciliatory embrace.
The crowd break down and weep joyfully, while a small carefully-installed orphan-boy in the back of the room starts singing ‘Hallelujah’ in the style of the not-yet-born Jeff Buckley.

Lord Butcher: Bravo, bravo!

Lord Asphalt: Suddenly lowers his voice and issues a more threatening tone.
Now. Here is an image of Glasgow in a mere five years time if we do not build the motorway.
A projection of a black and white photograph showing the aftermath of a bloody battle in the Korean War is flashed briefly onto the scene.
Look at the carnage, you see, there really is no contest.
The crowd once again break down into wails of joy.

Lord Asphalt: AND, might I add, we wish to build seven more motorways through the city just like it!
All round fainting with admiration, while the ‘Communists’, mute with shock throughout the proceedings are dragged out the back and set upon by the Secret Police.

A fairly accurate representation of a council planning meeting I’m sure you’ll agree. See, I could have done government.

The sacrifice that Glasgow unwillingly made was, in the event, a God-send for towns and cities up and down the country. On surveying the brutality of the destruction of elegant townhouses, Victorian mansions and untold square miles of historic tenements, central government in Westminster declared that such vandalism would not be visited on any other city. Urban highway schemes up and down the land had the plug pulled. Stubs of some of those extra motorways were lengthened throughout the nineties in the name of ‘completion’, but it remained a curiously local glitch of the, “Well, we’ve come so far” variety. The new motorway to the south-west justifiably sold itself on safety grounds – it replaced the most dangerous road in Scotland - but it also sacrificed areas of one of Glasgow’s most beautiful parks, Pollok Park, by doing so. Then, by the time of the New Labour cull on new road schemes, it seemed that at last the simmering longing to plunge more motorways through the city had cooled to a rippled calm.

And that should be the end of the story. But it is not.
Something a little perplexing is happening now, taken in the context of what central government wishes to achieve, and in terms of the prevailing mood. Mention the M74 to anyone in the south-east of the city, and you are likely to illicit a fairly violent reaction one way or the other. Indeed, they are building another motorway through the urban landscape. Construction begins later in the year. Already old warehouses and businesses have been flattened. Venture down Cathcart Road or Polmadie Road or around the strange grid-of-streets-without-used-buildings that is Tradeston, and you will see that large signs have appeared proclaiming archaeological digs and preparation works. These are in the middle of heavily urbanised areas. I might stick some photos up when it gets dry enough to actually leave the flat. Plunging motorways through built-up areas being a universal sin in developed countries these days, this one anomaly does give a fascinating insight into the amount of destruction required.

In a master-stroke of branding, the project is called the “M74 Completion”, not, as campaigners will contend, The M74 Extension. A plethora of studies have been undertaken to justify this road, and they have lent towards the imperative for completion lest the West of Scotland fall behind (did they mean ‘fall further behind?’) the rest of the UK. A staggering viewpoint when put in the context of Edinburgh, a hellishly successful city despite having a pisspoor road network that consists of little more than narrow surface streets. A Geography teacher of mine once made the point that, “If you want to make poor people richer, give them the money. Don’t spend it on building roads around them. People without cars don’t need motorways.” A fair point. Glaswegians have among the lowest car-ownership levels in Europe. There are surely more direct ways to help the local economy.

One of the strangest things about the arguments for this road, though it is absolutely futile to discuss it now that all argument is at an end and the spades and diggers are even now churning the soil, is the amount of inconsistency and contradiction involved. This seems to have wormed its way into the arguments of erstwhile intelligent and well-informed people by means of an avenue of desperation. There is the argument that the congestion on the ‘old motorway’ (that which I described in the first-half of this entry) will be relieved, and thus help the economy of Glasgow. True, the Kingston Bridge will almost certainly lose its mantle as busiest bridge in Europe once the motorway is completed. The M8 is one of the most congested roads in the UK, rivalling the M25 and the M6 (not that you would know it from the national media). The bottleneck not only paralyses the trunk road network, but jams up the slip roads and into every city centre street and various other parts of the city. Trying to get out of the city at peak times is often an exercise in bypassing the ‘bypass’. But, this is contrasted with the argument that increasing road provision drags more drivers onto the roads. Ultimately, this gunges up the city as it was before, only now there are more vehicles causing the chaos, and thus more problems when they slip off the motorway onto the surface streets. I love it when people contradict this argument. There are a finite number of people and vehicles, so it goes, and therefore you can build your way out of congestion. Build enough roads, and you will finally satisfy demand.

But the real situation is more like this:
You live several miles from the city, out in the leafy periphery. You have a nice house with its own driveway. You have a privet hedge. Your wife can look at her neighbours and indulge in the sordid horse-play of one-up-man-ship. You daughter’s life is so utterly banal and driven by the cosmetic needs and materialistic nature of everyday life that she has descended to hell and become a goth (by the way they are generally really nice people actually from experience), wearing black lipstick to shock you into actually saying something to her, into betraying that you are actually a feeling, sentient being. You are – in a word – suburban. But, there is one real thorn in your side. Gosh, the commute down that motorway every day is hell. It takes you nearly an hour to get into town, and then another hour to get back, and by that time you are in a foul mood and you come crashing through the door giving the cat a huge kick out the way causing yet more of its hair is shed from its arse – I mean Christ, it already looks like some kind of snarling bald-arsed baboon. You eat your dinner in silence and don’t give a fuck about your equally mute daughter. You head upstairs dejected and don’t even bother getting through seven minutes of the Tantric Sex Manual by Sting that you bought your wife as a “Sorry I forgot our fucking anniversary” present because in your head is just the seething memory of stop-start vegetable-driving behind a thousand other pricks in their metal boxes with their CD players and their fragrant trees spinning from the rear-view mirror. You just wish they would widen that motorway and then you would get to work and back faster.

And then one day, Lord Asphalt, now a stately 105 years of age, presents his widening proposal to The Board, and the gap-toothed ubermuppets who run the city grin and nod in approval and then five years later it is finished, coming in at a parsimonious £1000 per inch, and hey presto, your commute takes 35 minutes. For a year, it is wonderful. Your daughter enrols at a prestigious college. You come home early and help your wife with the cooking, eagerly promoting Oyster Thursday when you gulp down the aphrodisiac and then settle down for the evening and then all through the night, with “Fields of Gold” in the background, you make earth-moving motions, having committed the Tantric book to memory in all your spare time. Great! Then, one day, while you are bending over putting away the dried plates into the bottom drawer, you hear subtle shaking. The surface of your coffee ever so slightly ripples. What is this? Some kind of velociraptor unleashed from a prehistoric theme park?

No, you run to the window, and that leafy tree-covered hill behind your house is being rampaged upon by a bulldozer. You read in the press the advertisements for a new development called Heavenly Rise, now within easy commuting distance of the city. A few months later, some horrendous Gingerbread cottage development of identical clone-houses built by a multi-national company has festooned the slopes with cheap brick-imitation prefabricated piles of wafer-thin-walled twat-housing and they have other families in them with other children. But God, don’t they look just like you? Just like your family? Yes, they are just like you. And those parents work in the city too. And guess what? They’re going to use your motorway. And then it all clogs up again, except now there is one more lane of blinking lights to gaze at while you chew your own tongue in frustration, and it is back to the hour long commute, only now when you get to the city, you are competing with even more traffic for those city streets, and those parking places, and trying to beat that amber light, or sitting stewing in your own flatulence while pedestrians cross between the bonnet of your car and the boot of the one in front, and Oh Christ what is the fucking point, I might as well get this car back into my garage and run the engine with a hosepipe from the exhaust coming straight into the car until I croak. Hmm, if only they would just widen the motorway again…

So that is one contradiction. The other is that they are falling over each other and pulling each other’s knickers down about the actual purpose of the motorway. It is variously seen as a way of helping Glasgow, or of helping bypass Glasgow. If it is the former, then why have they taken great pains to omit local junctions that would allow local traffic to get around the city more easily. And also why have they barred people from connecting from the new motorway to the Kingston Bridge and into the city and the western districts, which was part of the original plan in Day One? Whatever the ideology behind the construction, people will end up rat-running around surface streets to get between the new motorway and the bridge of the old motorway to get into the city centre, and wasn’t the point of all this to reduce surface traffic? And if it is to bypass Glasgow, then why the hell build it through Glasgow? That was the mistake they made with the old motorway. This one will pass half a mile from the city centre, albeit on the other side of the river from it. It will pass through inner city areas that do not benefit from it (due to lack of access), like Govanhill and The Gorbals.

The final contradiction can be found in two competing sources of official information. One document, on the M74 Completion website – head to the last frequently-asked question here holds that there will be a decrease in traffic everywhere, but perhaps a very small increase in traffic on the existing motorway network where the new motorway joins back in. The official site claims a tootling increase of 0.2% in ‘the study area’. This kind of traffic prediction is such an imperfect, black art though, based as it is on notoriously whimsical human behaviour, that the margin of error is probably several times this figure. I cannot claim that the figure is wrong, but I can contrast it with the findings below, from a source so indelibly linked to the first that you wonder how the chasm was leaped.

This other document, from the Scottish Government itself who are trying to promote the project, paints a very different picture. It forecasts queues, even on the new motorway, and it forecasts large increases in traffic on the existing motorway network west of the joining point. It even details the case for widening the existing motorways in these areas. This is being done. The hard shoulders, usually for stopping in emergencies, will become running lanes deep into the south-west of the city on two different motorways. It also makes a lacklustre attempt to argue its way out of the blunder of not connecting to the bridge, using deeply contradictory arguments. The main objectioner, a retired traffic engineer called George Baillie, was rail-roaded over by self-conflicting nonsense – from paragraph 4.23 onwards here, though I admit this will be of purely very local interest.

And one final, if overlapping, contradiction. The motorway project is hailed as a harbinger of regeneration to the run-down and derelict areas along its proposed route. Take a look on Google maps here and you will see a swathe of abandonment and ridiculously low-quality land uses such as warehouses (bear in mind that you are only a mile or two from the centre of a large city, the centre lies just to the north) with more dense areas of buildings to the south, further from the city centre. Many of the factories in the south-east and north-west of the picture have been demolished in the last year. It is no coincidence that this corridor of blight exists. It was cleared and largely prevented from being put to higher-quality uses by the very fact that this project has hanged in the air for decades. To say that building a road will be good at removing a blight that has been caused by speculation that a road will be built there is a circuitous feedback argument that should be deafeningly pointless to anyone. And I won’t even go into the contradiction behind the right-hand forwarding a new motorway as a transport option when left-hand (presumably using shadow puppetry) is rightly ranting about the benefits of dragging people out their cars and onto public transport.

So shall I end by hugging a tree then? Well, no. Amazingly, given the above, I am not actually utterly against this project. I have not yet made up my mind. For all the errors and bumbling in the presented arguments which would require a thick-spectacled corporate lawyer to even attempt to make sense of, there are undoubtedly advantages to going through with it. It may damage the city, but it will help the region. Areas west and east of the city, such as Renfrewshire, Inverclyde and Lanarkshire will be helped by the direct linking. The entire west of Scotland is still trying to find its feet in a lingering and destructive post-Industrial present. Any potential for lift needs to be seized upon. The problem for councillors is that they have to sell the project to the city that it partially demolishes. There is no problem in selling it to the districts listed above which are outside the city, which will feel more direct benefit, and with the added bonus that they lose nothing (a small part of Rutherglen in South Lanarkshire aside). Glasgow, which takes the damage, also sees scant benefit relative to these areas. It has long been a paradox that the infrastructure of this city seems generous for its size, but that it is gridlocked because it is used by folk from wealthy surrounding suburbs and satellite towns that contribute nothing to the city’s upkeep due to the cynical gerrymandering of the nineties that tightly bound the boundaries of the city, effectively shutting out commuters' tax money. This is another big issue that is an abomination of political manipulation and which I will need to deal with more fully sometime.

The fact that I feel it easier to argue against it probably stems from a lingering despair about our lack of ability to change of our way of thinking. A few years ago, Private Eye observed that Glasgow is still locked in the car-crazy 1950’s, and much of that is in evidence. It also is to do with the fact that it's easier to pick a fight with those that have laid their feelings and arguments bare, able to be picked off by conversational vultures like myself whenever we choose. It would be nice for the councillors to bury their heads in books by Jane Jacobs, of the excellent (if viciously flawed by attempting to compare Venice and Los Angeles) book, Car Free Cities by JH Crawford. The campaigners have mainly wailed about the horror of motorways and cars in general, or about the need to preserve communities in Oatlands, Govanhill and the like, or about other such things that it is difficult to argue against. Perhaps the root of being objective about something is about appreciating the sum of all others’ subjective opinions. In that case, I would have to put myself in the shoes of someone whose business was being knocked down, or whose view from their window will be blighted by another concrete snake, or whose son’s primary school will now be subjected to the constant cacophony of roaring traffic. Or perhaps I should put myself in the shoes of the delivery company owner who loses thousands of pounds a day from traffic congestion and that factory-worker whose wages are squeezed because the boss’s costs sky-rocket every time a consignment of raw materials is delayed as it moves at walking pace through countless underpasses, or maybe just into the shoes of that man in Motherwell who really just wants to get home in time to squeeze in some tantric action with his wife in before CSI:Miami starts.

In the end, we are stuck with the outcome we have. And if it can be done here, it can be done anywhere. In Britain, a supposed bastion of the new environmental movement, we are sending the message that we still allow such things to happen. The most shameful thing is the cynical and condescending way that it is being sold by the powers of government and by other interested parties. It may be that the project, looked at as a whole, may turn out to be a marginally more good than bad thing, though I would guess not. I do not claim to have an authoritative answer on this - nobody can - but it has been such a fuck-up of public-relations, such a sham of a public consultation and general standard white-wash of a case, that any actual benefits that could be claimed were long ago lost in a fog of oratory bollocks. Everyone has rightly stopped listening. It will take decades to find out whether the new road will have brought about the benefits it is supposed to bring, or to see whether the old and new motorways pack up to the legendary levels of gridlock that the former faces now. Is it really the case, that up here in this sometimes narrow-minded city, the terrible lessons of urban-planning-gone-wrong will have to be taught anew by actual implementation to each new generation, even while the monuments to the last generation's still stand?

What will be seen more quickly though, is the effect of the great swinging scythe on our city. Glasgow's ruinous past makes it the ideal tapestry for generation after generation of politicians and city planners to place their stamp upon it. This is not a historic-looking 'finished' city like Edinburgh or Paris. Its dereliction and its poverty make it an ideal guinea-pig for people bent on erasing the mistakes of the past with single-minded plans that in turn produce more mistakes, all in the name of misguided altruism. The effect of that scythe that has again broken free after decades of restraint will shortly become all too clear.

The Red Light

2008-02-05T23:18:00.000Z

I came home on Sunday night to an odd scene after a strange musical event in the Old Fruitmarket, one of those beautiful old buildings in Glasgow that was actually saved from sixties demolition. Probably by accident. My flatmate had switched the light bulbs in my room.

I should probably elaborate. I have had a fascination with red light-bulbs since just before I left London, when my flatmates tried to give our flat some Halloween cheer by installing a red light in the bathroom. It looked evil, and I loved it. Of course they were sensible types and got rid of it once the festivities are over. Nothing good lasts for long you see, joy must be reigned in with dictator-style levels of obedience. Take sky-dives, crocodile-taunting or amateur ping-pong rallies as just three examples.

Anyway, a while back, my present flatmate acquired a car, I know not where, and I have no reason to ask him, it just appeared shortly before Christmas. After we dumped the body in the boot into the canal, it pretty much became an object of much greatness. How we mourned when it got broken into a week later, but we have recovered. In our giddiness we decided that we would drive to a supermarket, much as real-life adults do. My flatmate bought all manner of useful objects, like food, frying pans, and a Banzai video reduced to £1, while I, mindful of my fleeting love affair with the red light-bulb, bought one of my own. I would not be cheated out of a red-light room this time I thought, triumphantly. I also bought some perishable food items that are currently evolving in my fridge into some miracle cure for cancer or a new building material fit for Emperors and oil-rich Sheikhs with one-step escalators in the their humble, fifty-hectare abodes.

The red-light bulb sat on a shelf for weeks and wept quietly to itself. Sometimes, I would whisper to it to calm it down, let it know that life outside the lamp was alright, but all it really wanted was to be inserted where the light don’t shine so that it could emit a radiant light of its own. Think of how a tapeworm feels outside the gut. Lonely, desolate, drained of emotion, starved of love and affection, of a purpose, of that palpable feeling that life has a meaning, a heightened inability to fit in, writhing on the ground or in the toilet bowl dreaming again of the womb-like encapsulation that once offered it the promises of the ages. It dares to dream. Yes, tapeworms are complex creatures, I’m sure you can sympathise.

Imagine my surprise when I returned to find my room a shade of erotic red. Shock passed, a rational assessment of reality followed, hampered somewhat by the alcohol, but then steadily a dawning realisation that something of beauty had occurred came over me. The red light, in which now I sit in typing, has four effects that I can think of immediately. Firstly, it has destroyed my ability to read in my room as it is too dark, and reading in the dark (and under a duvet) is apparently the reason for my tragic semi-blindness that leaves me startled in the face of oncoming buses whenever I try and wipe the omnipresent rain from the lenses. I now have to decamp to our permafrozen lounge which is a better place in any case, as I don’t fall asleep immediately. Perhaps I need to change my reading material. The second effect, which is slightly stranger, is that even innocent activities, such as changing into a tracksuit or taking off a jumper, make you feel slightly like a whore. The third effect, which usually occurs first thing in the morning when your brain is still circulating chemicals that make you think you are flying or try to make you tie a noose from your shoelaces, is that you feel like you are in a dark-room. Locked in a three-year nightmare to develop those agonisingly set-up photographs that, Eugene Smith-like in the apocalyptic territory of the dying industry of Pittsburgh, no one will ever see. The fourth effect, and possibly the most rewarding, is that if you cross the main road outside my flat and look up, it looks as if my bedroom is on fire. If I could install a ceiling fan that would interrupt the emitted light, it would look still more like flames were dancing dangerously in my own room. Or, more perplexingly, that somehow some hard-up call girl had broken into my flat and was now practicing pole-dancing using the fluorescent tube-light from our kitchen. Shadows play tricks on the mind you see, just like psychic temple-shooter Derren Brown.

All Eyes On America

2008-02-05T23:09:00.000Z

It’s here! Super Tuesday. Or, as we in Britain call it, Pancake Day. In this country, as is well documented in the Magna Carta and in other documents such as that fore-runner to the Land Registry, the Doomsday Book, and numerous Council meeting minutes, our democratic process revolves mainly around pancakes. Indeed, was in not Margaret Thatcher herself that sealed her right-wing political bent by a gratuitously poor-aimed pancake throw in the dark Chamber of Tossery in the basement of the House of Commons. Was it not a similarly wayward throw of the ideology pancake in that same chamber that dictated Tony Blair’s lurch to the right in 1997? Indeed, the process by which seasoned MP’s, party whips and lobbyists hope to dampen the pancake by applying a dose of syrup here, or a clove of butter there, or even just giving the flour mixture a sound beating so as to affect its path when the Throwing Poll begins has been an essential part of British politics for centuries. Who can forget the awesome japery that lead to Iain Duncan Smith’s fatal toss a few years ago. Then, as the once-proud politician stood stock-still in the chambers, pancake on face as tipsy journalists guffawed with laughter, and molten butter ran down his sleeves, political punditry excelled in an orgy of column-inches about the wrongness of his throwing technique.

But still, that is here. And tonight’s competition will be a hushed affair, none of the ticker tape and confetti evident across the Atlantic will appear as Gordon Brown tugs sharply at his lapels and then spins with effortless ease his one pancake into the centre of the chamber, dictating for another year the angle which his politics should take. And of course, as none of this is really happening, we might as well take a look at things across ‘the pond’ at the competition that might help shape global politics for perhaps as much as the next eight years.

Super Tuesday (or Super Duper Tuesday, or Mega Tuesday, or The Day of Rampant Change) as I may or may not have explained correctly last month, is the voting of over twenty states to decide the Democratic and Republican nominees to run in the general election in November. There have been a few primaries already, and all that has been decided is that Obama and Clinton are neck and neck, John McCain has reversed his fortunes astoundingly to seize an opportunity that will perhaps see him as the Republican nominee tomorrow morning, and that ‘America’s Mayor’ Rudolph Giuliani made a tragic miscalculation in putting all his eggs in the Floridian basket. It has been pointed out, in the lattermost case, that this mistake resulted from his missing out on the publicity available in the earlier competitions, so that he became an irrelevance, and also the fact that the more the Florida public got to know about Giuliani, the less they warmed to him. A lot of talk about the past and none about the future. Incidentally, on the Republican side, there are still two other possibilities, the Mormon millionaire of tanned skin, portably air-brushed, taut of face, clean of feature and pressed of suit, Mitt Romney; and the favourite man of the evangelicals and that Bible-embracing group of insane creationists, the Christian Right, Mike Huckabee. There was someone a little more palatable (by Republican standards) called Ron Paul but he appears to have sensibly foregone the extreme expense of transporting a failed campaign ping-pong style across that vast country. On the Democratic side John Edwards bowed out gracefully, but only after a nice stint at playing primary school teacher when the toddlers Clinton and Obama got out of hand on a televised debate and started throwing toys out of their collective prams.

Here then, is the Totally Infallible Guide to Super Duper Tuesday, dumbed down for us Brits who don’t need intricacies:

Each party has its own rules, and this being the United States, each State also has its own rules. Amazingly the parties seem powerless to stop some wayward states from crashing the process and can only penalise them accordingly. That show-stopping state, Florida, site of so many of the tribulations of the American political process, illegally moved their primary to before Super Tuesday so as to have more influence but was roundly shut out of the Democratic contest as a result. Their delegates will not be allowed into the party convention where the nominee is actually picked after a round of ballots. Clinton will try and reverse this, as she ended up winning when the other two pulled out in protest. The Democratic party does not have a ‘winner takes all’ system, therefore delegates can be won in states by candidates who do not win the overall state. States have numbers of delegates approximately in proportion to their size, therefore California is the Death By Chocolate of this occasion, while smaller states like Maine and Wyoming are more like your Tic-Tacs or Wine Gums. New York is possibly a strawberry cheesecake, fruity on the top with a luscious biscuit under-base, much like the actual city – which did pose tunnelling problems for those mavericks who dug the Subway, but I digress.

In terms of who will do well where, that depends a great deal on the demographics of each State, which vary wildly across that massive country. Candidates tend to do well in their home states. Democrats in general do better in urban areas, while Republicans do better in rural areas – a fact largely irrelevant in the primaries but which will affect the general election. Obama is likely to do better in the more African-American populated south, and also in his home state in Illinois, but may fair less well in Hispanic-populated areas on the south-west and west coast such as New Mexico and Nevada. He does seem popular among disillusioned Republicans and Independents, however. Clinton seems to have strong support in New York, which is obvious, and seems ever-so-slightly ahead in many other states, including the grand prize California. Obama is, as has been pointed out repeatedly, catching up though. Republicans seem to be switching to elderly statesman McCain in droves, a thought unthinkable a few months ago. But he upsets many grassroots republican ultra-conservatives, who want a dick-swinging trigger-happy testosterone-fest with a rusted, red pick-up truck, his own ranch, a penchant for American family values, tightening of immigration, unfundable tax cuts, the death of the last semblances of a welfare system and adventurism in dusty Middle-Eastern societies and a special horn kept under the bed from which he can hear voices from God telling him to instigate a Crusade among the uncivilised ones and to for-Christ’s-sake keep those ‘eye’-raqi terrorists from landing on the roof of the sheriff’s offices and releasing all those sinning Prohibition-breaking whisky smugglers from raping their honest daughters. At this point, though possibly several paragraphs before, my knowledge becomes very ropey, and incidentally if you are depending on my blog for some honest information about this contest then you had better seek psychiatric help. I don’t mean the phone number at the end of Hollyoaks, I mean a proper head-to-head power-chat with a psychotherapist, or at the very least a bus driver. Here is what CNN have to say, and they have plenty of links - though the main news site will be better if Super Tuesday is significantly over. If, like me, you get frustrated at constant references to the GOP then I have it on authority that GOP simply means the Republican Party. It stands for ‘Grand Old Party’ and is a familiar acronym among American’s of both stripes.

To continue. In California, ancient rules (by American standards, dating back to 1966) dictate that the governor of the state will fire rounds into the air from a six-chamber pistol while the candidates run through a course of tyres spread on the ground. At the last shot, the candidate who has gone furthest will be awarded the next delegate. With over four hundred delegates, it is a gruelling contest. There is speculation that Bill Clinton will don a Hillary mask and take alternate rounds. In Nevada, delegate-assignments are based on slot machines. One-armed bandit rounds will be repeated until a winner is found. It is generally good practice to donate the quarters won to charity, though famously Nixon had them bugged and placed in rivals’ pockets. Quartergate rocked American political society. Illinois primaries are generally decided by the Democratic Water Skiing Championship on Lake Michigan, within sight of the beautiful Chicago skyline. Obama is bound to do well here, due to waterfront support and his proven track record of superior balance when confronted by shark attacks. In New York, in a break with tradition, the infamous scaling of the Statue of Liberty has been repealed on security grounds and replaced with a Belgian Waffle-Eating Contest that will favour the Clintons. Hillary is reported to have been in training for many months, and has even perfected the potentially fatal ‘nasal-technique’ of ingestion. Alabama on the other hand, is having a good old-fashioned contest with voting on paper ballots that will be ingeniously filled-in behind partitions and then deposited in a so-called ‘ballot box’. Use of guns is optional. And so on. You get the idea.

Expect there to be plenty of chatter tomorrow morning from political pundits about how wrong the polls got it, how there is no clear winner in the Democratic primaries but that (unfortunately, in my opinion) Obama may have a slightly steeper hill to climb. McCain may effectively get a coronation tomorrow morning, though Romney might be stubborn, with plenty of his personal fortune left to spend, and keep going to spite him anyway. We are talking about his opposing a person who refused to be released from Vietnamese torture until the rest of his soldier friends were released though. The guy has balls. He is Republican and it would be horrific to have him in the White House, especially after the years of ghastly vandalism that have been committed there since the turn of the millennium, but you can’t take that away from him. Personally, if I had a vote, I would be leaning heavily towards Obama. But that is a whole other (and entirely subjective) story.

I can’t help thinking that if they just all got their act together, in the name of unity, and settled the whole ugly, false business with a nice gentle bout of pancake-jousting on a gently sloping field in rural Wiltshire, while summer-dressed forty-somethings, pipe-smokers and retired sheep-dippers looked on and clapped every-so-softly in genuine rapture and good-nature, that the image of understatement produced would make the whole gravity of this situation all the more awe-inspiring.

A Correction

When I did last harp on about the US primaries, at the beginning of the year (and was so bold as to put an image, heaven forefend, on my blog), I had conducted the same level of scant research that I have this time. Though in fairness I have become obsessed with the whole gripping spectacle since then, like a reality television show where the outcome has an impact beyond a week of tabloid headlines and an entry in an End of Year four-hour spectacular countdown called “Celebrities That You Wish Disney Would Scoop Up And Throw Off A Cliff In The Same Manner That They Did With Those Lemmings” (see here). But in my deficient research, I tried to palm off caucuses and primaries as one and the same. A primary is an election open to the public to decide the nominee of a particular party, whilst a caucus has the same aim, but is conducted behind closed doors with only politicians able to vote, and is preceded by speeches from the candidates. All of the contests I referred to in that blog were primaries, not caucuses. Damn it.

The Knockout

2008-02-05T23:08:00.000Z

In this unrepentant trio of entries today, I could have added a fourth, which would have been called ‘Riding the Syphilis Pony’ but alas, I think this is enough rubbish for any brain to endure, so perhaps another time. Along with all that other skip-filler I have been meaning to finish, such as the love triangle of my flatmate, a fax machine, and a teasing bitch of a photocopier, and that horoscope I have been meaning to write since December, of course.

Still, one more thing to report, and that is on the most-talked about sporting event since the Grass-Ripping Frolickery Competition on the Queen’s View, a hill to the north of Glasgow. It is, of course, our First Annual Flat Random Knock-Out Competition. It has progressed through many knockout stages, and the Semi-Finals culminated today. In the kitchen, it was Kiran versus the Baking Tray. This particular stage has lasted many days, with an accumulation of points between myself and the Baking Tray, but it gallantly progresses to the final after a 6-0 routing of your pitiful blogger.

In the lounge, meanwhile, the other semi-final progressed with much heated debate from the assembled pundits. Both parties were on triumphant form, having been training for several hours. After a few cautionary words from the referee, they were off. Mojo (my flatmate’s girlfriend) and The Pistachio Nut With No Name tussled for what seemed like hours, with astonished gasps and frantic applause from the assembled, until Mojo won out against the once-animate object (pistachios were a tribe in Venezuela). The Pistachio Nut With No Name sidled off to the side dejected and I will meet it in the 3rd and 4th Place Play-offs next week.

We all look forward to the final, Mojo versus the Baking Tray, with baited breath.

The Trench of the Narrow Mind

2008-02-02T11:47:00.000Z

After the galeforce winds, the broken, dying umbrellas lie wailing on the pavements. I pass them and look down forlornly. I know that I should stamp on them to put them out of their agonised misery, but I don’t have the heart to. I am too squeamish. Their horrid suffering interrupts my sleep, manifests itself in apparitions of my slow death at the hands of the Umbrella God, Rainer. They loom towards me in my nightmares as giant cloth and metal jellyfish, and they embed their points in the pores of my skin, opening and closing until they have burrowed right through, incrementally forcing their way through my insides until I am wrought through with steel and spokes. A grim death indeed. There is also about a half-inch of snow which is grossly disappointing after the fevered talk of a Victorian Christmas-style blizzard. In the excellent American cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes, the young boy Calvin looks at the meagre snow that has fallen and says words to the effect of, “Getting half an inch of snow is like winning ten cents in the lottery”. I’ve seldom read anything so apt. But this all has nothing to do with what I would like to talk about.

At work, earlier in the week, I came across an issue that required an assessment of morals. These are always upsetting. They derail whatever else is in your brain (the catchy guitar riff in ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m only Bleeding’ by Bob Dylan, since you ask) and insert themselves like a lump of coal in a sink drain. There they do not budge until you either make your judgement – ever impossible - or put it out of your brain temporarily through some cathartic activity like punching plastic bins, or writing.

In this case, the issue hinges around a person I have come to know only recently. He is an outwardly nice person, and certainly friendly enough. But then, buried at the bottom of his conscious, rising to the surface only when prompted, is an intense hatred of the English. In fact he exhibited this in a way I have not seen since the primary school playground, where being English seemed fair game as a term of abuse. Indeed one of my earliest memories is of a kid pulling an atlas off a bookshelf, pointing at England and proclaiming, “We hate them!” In retrospect, it’s pretty impressive he was able to find the right page at the age of six. I have visions of him sitting opposite his austere father the night before, atlas spread on table.
Father has a pointer in his hand, “Now, son, these are the people you must hate”.
“But that’s jist a bit ‘a paper. Whit ye talkin’ aboot?”
“No son! This is a map, here gaze upon the heathen southern lands with their brigands and their bastards.”
“Which way’s south? How will I know where they come from?”, asked the boy, eagerly.
“Well son, come here to this window.” They walk over to a window that has been conveniently located near to where this scene is taking place. In fact it had been installed years before with the express purpose of being an ‘Instruction Window’. Generations of young Scots had been taken here for the purposes of paternal tuition in the ways of xenophobia.
“You see the glare of the midday sun through there?” asks the father, in a tone betraying his sense of impatience.
“Naw, Da”, answered the son truthfully.
“Well that is to be expected, we are in Scotland after all son, but if you could imagine the sun were not obscured by those clouds that the English have sent here, you would see the direction from which they come.”
“Ahhh, and what did they dae tae us, Da?” asked the boy.
The father silences him with an swift slap to the cheek.
“If ye have tae ask, yer wannae them. No son ‘a mine’ll question this. It comes fae the heart. Now hasten back tae the school from which I plucked ye to the amazement of your teachers not ten minutes ago, and spread the word! Page forty-four of the atlas by the way.”
I’m not quite sure why the father seemed to retreat centuries language-wise, but it gives it that desired heaviness.

Anyway, this newfound acquaintance of ours was justly rounded upon by all present. One of the girls went out with an Englishman and was deeply offended, and another was born there, but moved north at an early age and considered himself Scottish.
“Why do you hate them?”, asked the girl.
“Dunno, they’re just… They’re just scum”, he replied, shrugging his shoulders.
“Have you ever met anyone actually from there?”, I asked.
“Naw, but I widnae talk to them anyway. Dunno why, I just don’t like them.” And so on. Then he closed up like a clam, probably none the wiser, possibly even more sure in his convictions that everyone else is wrong.

I should explain that this guy is only a shade under thirty and should really know better. Now, it would be seriously naïve of me to think that this does not go on. The chances of me being around when an episode of this nature happens is not particularly high. I do not habitually carry an English person with me just to provoke this kind of behaviour. Though what kind of form might that take? I am thinking a small Morris dancer on the shoulder might work. Still, it is a bit disappointing to find someone able to feel like that. You always assume the narrow-minded will have a large sign on them, that they will be easily recognisable by the fact they are beating a grandmother unconscious on a traffic island with a totally inappropriate golf club. Or that they will be idly drowning puppies in a metal dustbin in a pedestrian precinct with one hand and nail-gunning pigeons to concrete bollards with the other. To find someone who genuinely seems nice who thinks that it is acceptable to think like this, and then have the gall to actually say it in a crowded room, and then appear shocked when they illicit the reaction they do, is a little confounding.

I shouldn’t confuse the matter by feigning amazement that such people exist. Only someone entirely immersed in the warm bath of naivety would deny that there is a large contingent of the population who believes it acceptable to think in such a way. The government have nicely thrown shackles around the population, such that the overwhelming majority fear saying anything. But to think that just because it isn’t being screamed from the rooftops or scrawled on walls means it no longer exists is equally naïve. There seems to be a thought that just because we are advancing so fast technologically, and that this is apparently civilising us, that there must be a commensurate adaptation in our brains, driving us to the same noble end. Unfortunately biology takes a while to catch up. Our instincts still push us in the direction of animal urges and perhaps this hatred of other groups is one manifestation of this desire to look after our own. My flatmate is right when he points out there is something a little unsettling about the Carling advert’s motto of “Belong”. It might be that in spite of our human nature, not because of it, we are still able to exercise moral judgement and sympathise with the wronged elsewhere.

But the question that most floored me, and the subject of this entry, is this: Am I so upset by this person hating the English because the vast majority of my friends happen to be from England? Or put in a slightly more venomous way: Would I be slightly less upset, and feel his stance slightly less morally wrong if I didn’t know any English people? I’m not sure how to answer that. I would dearly hope that the answer to both versions of the question is ‘No’. If, however, the answer is ‘Yes’ or even ‘Perhaps’ then we do indeed have an ugly proposition on our hands. It goes some way to explaining the blind eye turned to conflicts everywhere, just because we have no vested interest and less of an objective manner in which to sympathise with the victims. I am not saying by any account that the sense of moral outrage at such things disappears altogether. It simply diminishes a little. And if that slight diminishing translates into apathy in the face of some crime being committed far beyond out shores then it is a grievous problem indeed. To trot out that often-used quote, “All that is required for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing.” I speak in the first-person, but it is probable that a little of that impulse exists in everyone. The particular allegiance can be absolutely arbitrary to begin with, but once fully-formed it silently steers your every thought and action.

Hypothetically, you can conceive of a situation where that moral gap between caring about slights against groups you care about, and groups towards whom you are ambivalent can be levered open into a yawning chasm. Say, if your life depended on it. How can anyone profess to their blood being any different from those of nationalities that have, in the past, been guilty of genocide along any divisive line, be that racial divisions or political belief? Germans, Serbs, Turks, Japanese, Rwandan Hutus, there is no difference between any of them and us. If the spark that lights it is ignited by out refusal to stare it in the face, then we are guilty indeed. Only by hurdling that gap, that difference that grows out of vested interest versus perceived irrelevance, can there ever be any true heart-felt action to stop such idiocy.

But this is all garbled. There are many criticisms that could be levelled at this argument. Firstly, I have no experience to speak of, so how could I assert that the explanation even partially lies within the scope of the trait described above? Not sure, these are just thoughts for now. Secondly, haven’t you wandered into the realms of ridiculousness, describing genocide in almost the same breath as a throwaway comment by a colleague? Do you really think that in the highly unlikely event that (God forbid) should such conditions ever fall upon Scotland, that he would be one of those people that is described by some wide-eyed reporter as having slaughtered his own neighbour in the name of nationality? It does indeed sound ridiculous. I have only anecdotal evidence. Are there not, in every civil conflict, cases where exactly this kind of thing happens? In Bosnia, there were Serbs and Bosnian Muslims who lived happily next door to each other until a fateful day when driven by a hateful machine the former turned on the latter. In Kosovo, things were repeated between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. In Rwanda, teachers turned on pupils, in Kenya, as you sit here reading this, people who have known each other for years now face each other across an invisible line and use coercion and murder to further their own political ends. Yesterday, there was a wounded Kenyan man on the news who described how his own work colleagues – he described them as ‘friends’ - hacked at him with a machete. Iraq managed to burst apart along religious lines into an utter catastrophe which only now seems within sight of lessening in scale and horror – though even yesterday a double car-bombing killed scores. Need the list continue?

And in case the argument is levelled that in some way these countries are culturally different, that it is the manifestation of a grievance with poverty of a kind that is unthinkable here and is merely disguised as ethnic or religious conflict, then you could take Northern Ireland. Though far less in scale, the crimes committed there are still in keeping with the sectarian character of the above conflicts. And the pivotal argument - that our failure to identify directly with the victims only gives heart to those committing the crimes - holds true even in a conflict that was right under our noses. Lord Chichester, sent there in the seventies to mediate and having little effect, declared on his departure, “What a bloody God-awful country, get me a brandy!”, distancing himself from a problem that was as much his as any Brit’s, horribly belittling it in the process. As recently as a decade ago, newspapers were berated for their ‘Ulan Bator’-style coverage of the Omagh bombings. Many had a small map of Northern Ireland, with a small dot showing Omagh, and Belfast included as the reference. This is indeed how an event transpiring in Mongolia or some other far-flung place would be reported. We effectively try and wash our hands of such unpleasantness, divorce ourselves from the facts that we all might have the capacity to think like this. Only in our good fortune have we not landed ourselves in the petri dish that fosters the exact conditions for such things to transpire.

I suppose the only point I’m really making is that it is difficult to understand this lessening or heightening of feeling on the subject which is caused by your stance and relation to the specific parties involved. And that this relative difference dictates how many similar situations will go unnoticed. If a man can proclaim that he hates the English, and supposedly moral people stand by with differing feelings that are dictated only by their own relation to said English, then it gives seed to the man to continue his thoughts – less are the people that will stop him should he ever have the opportunity transform thought to action. I may have happened, in this instance, to be within the group with heightened outrage due to my allegiances and friendships, but I could easily have lurched into ambivalence had the subject of his hate been a party to which I have no stance, such as, for example, Mormons. If this distinction really exists then we are truly sunk. I realise this is a tenuous argument. It is the reason I also spiked this entry yesterday, but I have put it up here again in the hope that somebody will say something to prove me wrong. I will probably revisit this subject time and again. Time and again it will appear just as garbled. Until I have straightened, and hopefully extinguished, this line of thinking, it will have to be written and rewritten. Perhaps it will layer slowly with logic and rise out of the mess that you have just waded through. But above all, I would dearly love to be wrong.

This time last week, I was awoken by a Catholic march in the street outside. It was followed and headed by police vans, about a dozen in number. People who would not normally be awake at 10am on a Saturday stood in the close mouths of the tenements and jeered and swore. The people in the march itself shouted back. The police officers, noticing some eruption of violence a little further down the street and still well within sight of my window, slid open the van doors, jumped out and ran. About twenty of them rounded on the individuals, wrenching, pulling and scuffling. The banners in the march screamed slogans about the independence of Irish-born Scots. The entire spectacle smacked of ‘us against them’. All I wanted was some sleep. If there are a couple of spare rays of that light going free, shine them over here. We haven’t risen above it all yet.

That still unnecessary and sporadic bit about what your solemn blogger did this week, the deluded bastard.

This week, Kiran watched Mississippi Burning, which is an amazing film. Even though he is a seasoned Luddite, he eventually got his printer working after two months, which was cause for celebration and a victory lap. He spent all his Christmas book tokens on books by William Faulkner that he won’t understand. He continues to read and love God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, though was frightened of being expelled from an Indian takeaway for bringing such potentially blasphemous material into their hallowed chamber. His job lurched from monotony to banality and his intense interest in the captivating US primaries showed no signs of abating - much to the despair of those around him who have to listen to his drunken slobbering drivel about voter demography in South Carolina.

Admission 1

2008-02-02T01:55:00.000Z

I have spiked my own long-written entry. It was to be about the fascinating US primaries and its relationship to race and the clear-cut lines that, despite the apparently well-sifted character of the public of that country, appears as partisan as ever. A compelling soap in the history of a superpower's politics it is and will continue to be. But this further comment will be forthcoming, just as soon as I de-poison it of all litigious material. Should you somehow still be interested, please stay tuned... Replacement (involving a personal experience of the unpleasant face of Scottish nationalism) later, but much-needed shut-eye needed 'the-now'. Happy February.

Menuvator's Corner

2008-01-28T23:23:00.000Z

Probably the main problem with life being an utterly pointless pursuit, like eating soup with chopsticks - sprinkling a room with sage in order to catch a snake, or trying to explain away the localised escalation of the murder rates of Wiltshire villages to super-Colombian levels in Midsummer Murders - is that you need to qualify it somehow. Many people do this through their jobs. For those of us magnificently lucky enough to take day-to-day survival for granted by living in a country such as Britain, there is a general consensus that you can have a moderate chance of being happy if you can find a job you like and which is fulfilling. A fulfilling job is defined as being attained once you find the niche of work that you detest the least and then kow-tow to every sordid whim of your employer (or in the case of the self-employed, your clients) until you either reach the ripe old age of fifty when you then die painfully with stress-induced boils on your face, or reach the even riper and positively mouldy age of 65 and get handed a cheque that might get you some economy baked beans and enough gin to numb your mind long enough to aim that crossbow at your own eye while standing on the parapet of a suspension bridge.

My own record on this attainment of finding a fulfilling and non-wrist-cutting job is woefully poor. Indeed a fairly hefty barricade to gaining a fulfilling job can be done without any outside intervention. Not knowing what you want to do yourself practically condemns you to one miserable job after another, and then your only hope is trying to shoehorn some semblance of a meaningful life into the remaining hours of time that remain outside work. A little like filling cracks in a wall with polyfill, but with a demonstrably lesser chance of success. That said, there is one last tactic that can at least slightly increase the probability of attaining happiness, or if not, at least stave you off that tempting-sounding newspaper clipping advertisement:

“Mortapill Corporation is looking for Experienced Smallpox Testers.
Salary: £5.52 per hour before death, rising to £11.75 after, plus bonuses and company car.
Duties: A keen advocate of alternative technologies, enthusiastic and intelligent, you will have considerable experience of catching near-fatal illnesses, and of wheezing in a generally theatrical and playful manner. A keen team-worker, your responsibilities will include drinking vial after vial of deadly smallpox, while effusing the buoyant and youth-grabbing qualities of the firm. We aim to foster a friendly environment for our staff, and have a competitiveness life insurance scheme.”

Cathartic as it sounds, it may not be the way forward. Instead, pick one thing that you enjoy, and try and tease a job out of it, much as you would tease out a flesh-eating maggot with a flame. Of course, that is to completely forget about the fact that you need skills – as Gordon Brown said approximately 60 times in a five minute television interview last night – and probably talent. My own situation involving several failed attempts at growing into a job, or attaining the necessary skills to find an enjoyable one, together with a final dismal settlement with no conceivable way out, for now, has meant some desperate thinking. The one thing I know I can stomach (excuse the upcoming pun) with any certainty is food. Cooking is not an option due to the complexity, skill, common-sense and judgement involved, and this therefore leaves two remainders – food-tasting or becoming a restaurant critic.

The first option at first seems appealing. The type of people who need food-tasters generally have a beautiful diet, rich in all the giddy nutrients that Earth can hold, and sumptuous to the extreme. The downside is unfortunately rather similar to that of the smallpox-tester. Which leaves the ‘becoming a restaurant critic’ option. And here, just for you, is my first review.

Alabama Fried Chicken, Springburn, Glasgow.

Situated in a rather unlikely position, far from the boutiques, cafes and Italian fayre of the Merchant City, this northern vestige of the city nevertheless does have the distinction of containing this delightful-looking rural United States-themed restaurant. Indeed with many pretenders aiming to leap to the heady pedestal of gastronomic perfection in this genre, it seems the perfect time to investigate exactly which treats were on offer to the discerning gentleman and his lady friend.

My esteemed guest, Lady Henrietta of Balerno, and I, did survey the outside scene with intrepidation. It seemed a far way from the good-quality fried mystique, dusty houses, broken windmills and rustic scenes of lynchings that the name of the place evoked. We were treated to an uncommon vista of tower blocks and a positively frightful dual-carriageway which seemed to take the discerning tinge off my fine-tuned palette in a way which had been foreign to me since that over-spiced filet de mignon in the Café Montmartre back in ’66. I am afraid to say that my goodly friend almost swooned as a result, but a delicate shot of snuff to her aristocratic nostrils as we traversed the ‘Drive Thru’, as the proles are want to call it, was enough to bring her round.

We entered an atmosphere of slight disarray, but which nevertheless gave the impression of a generous and pulsating vitality to the scene. The décor was of a gloriously simple design, adorned with black and white photographs of children holding coloured pieces of chicken. This was a beautiful touch which lent itself somewhat to the post-structuralist discourse of Freud while infusing his stringent prose with the playful abandonism of Andy Warhol slap-dashing colour prints on a tiled wall while sucking the gravelled voice of Lou Reed through his tobacco-forested pipe. One could imagine the musty southern air, the rising scent of the majestic Mississippi river as immortalised so vividly through childish eyes by Mark Twain, and the authentic sound of tills beeping and adolescents shouting above screaming, pissing children.

If the atmosphere did evoke the swamps and passion of the South, the service unfortunately did not. Lady Henrietta and I assumed our positions by the waiters’ pedestal to be seated, only to notice with disgust that said proles were emptying trays of festering bones into them in front of our eyes. I did my best to shield my lady’s eyes from the cruel sight with her veil, only to illicit a not-entirely-justified slap, which stung much like a honeybee upon the knee while swinging innocently from a bough in the height of a gruelling summer. In time, we found our own way to the tables, which were of a quality that I have not seen since my days as an ambassador in the Levant. Another interminable wait followed, whereupon I seized my Lady roughly by the arm, as masculine etiquette dictates and we reluctantly joined the multiple queues ahead. The floor was sticky and slightly soiled to the touch, but it did add an air of authenticity in its greasy feel.

In my mind, I had summoned up ravenous images of raspberry tartlets, drizzled balsamic vinegar, croutons tender to the touch, steaks suffused with ecstatic juices and Southern spices and the radiant taste of wine. I inquired about the house wine but was met with looks that bordered on shock. My dearest Lady Henrietta noticed that there was an option involving a bucket, and a serving-wench was duly dispatched to fetch the item, such was our unabated curiosity. We seized the bucket, and with child-like haste and joy ran back to the table and succumbed to our hunger with beast-like instinct. The joys at this simplistic food cannot be overstated. The skin of the chicken, moist to the touch, leaking a bountiful burst of oil at the slightest depression, soaked into the tongue and slipped easily down the throat like a scant-seasoned oyster on a moonlit night in Seville. The teasing way in which the skin separates from the flesh of the chicken is most pleasing to the eye, and Lady Henrietta found a renewed enthusiasm in discovering the explosive mix of flavours that could be reached by wrapping a chip in the greasy skin, and devouring it whole. A side order of barbecue sauce, for which we were grateful not to be charged, made us almost reach a gustatory climax of pleasure. For a brief moment, I felt almost as if an apparition of the South had appeared before me, as though I were making my way steadily westwards through the scrub as a wild-eyed pilgrim, my wood-carved belongings and sixteen children behind me, my trusty steeds afore, and my trusting Lady to my side. I lost myself in the moment, emitting a “Yee Hah!”, while my Lady Henrietta fell into a joy-induced coma and lay spreadeagled on the floor while small youths clad in athletic gear and waving knives as though partaking in a beautiful pagan ritual danced about her sprawled figure.

The bucket duly finished, I asked once again for a wine list, but noted rather disappointedly that only carbonated soft drinks were on offer. The strangely diluted version of House Coke was pleasing to the gut, and it layered itself with the oil in my stomach in a tumultuous but strangely alluring way. In the majestic simplicity of their offerings, they had indeed allowed me and my joy-maddened Lady to reach a short-aired peak of the senses, rivalling a tearful sunset on the Indian plains as viewed from a moving train wagon or the sheer beauty in innocence of a teen gang scrumping for apples and gently breaking the ribs of the prostrate–lying orchard-owner with their boots, as he looks on in awe and with the honour of the ages flickering in his slowly diminishing eyes.

I left the restaurant with a renewed spring in my step and a zest for life. Even without my Lady Henrietta of Balerno by my side - she was last seen boarding a cargo plane bound for Sudan - I still feel only gratitude for the direction that the simple grub of Alabama Fried Chicken has given me.

Next week: The Shettleston Cuban-themed restaurant Fidel Gastro gets the going over by Kiran and his new companion Lord Tarquin of the Antipodes. AA Gill is having his stomached pumped after he was accidentally served an eel filled with semen at a chip shop in Solihull.

A Short Diversion

2008-01-17T23:35:00.000Z

My flatmate recently wrote a song. A very talented individual he is indeed. Anyway, it prompted me to attempt a short story on the subject of said song – here is Part 1. Concludes whenever I get round to it…

Dave, hairbrush in hand, examined the light acne on his forehead in the wall-hung mirror. Thoughts of age, thoughts of spent youth, the clutter of the hours inching out the substance from his day-to-day life. And his Janus. Sapping from him on one hand and at the same moment giving to him an outstretched palm of riches, those he had yearned for and yet which had disappointed him in the finding.
He surged the focus of his eyes outward, turning from his own image to that projected of his Janus, sitting on the bed, brush also in her hand, in the pristine act of straightening the bedraggled dark hair, pensive and with an expression of suppressed pain on her face. This girl who co-habited, who seemed to watch him even as he startled his computer to life in the morning, who seemed to cast her reflection into the top of his tea, lunged at his thoughts mid-sentence. Her and her beautiful hair, and yet she had coaxed him gently in to their entanglement, and now wished to shun him.
She got up roughly from the bed, in the throws of routine, and sidled over to him. Thoughts flicked across of her transformation, an evening in a health spa, stupid green gunk lathered on her stupid unknowing face, cucumbers on the eyes, the faith-healing rays as spouted from the health therapist’s mouth, all this layered and layered in her mind, poisoning it, and she in turn poisoning him, the overspill, the victim. He watched her figure grow in the mirror, his hand had been steady for minutes, not one stroke of the brush, not one fidget or change in posture as he mused the banality. She placed her arms around him, embracing his shoulders, a gift of affection that she would cheaply trade with another. The bitch. How she hoarded her affections, doling them out like a miserly drip by a hospital bed, never overloading, tickling enough to set the itch in place and hiding the consoling scratch under the covers, withdrawn from his life until she saw fit.
He murmured a dead-pan phrase of affection, grunted almost. Spat the toothpaste into the sink, how long had that been in his mouth? A torrent of scolding, warnings, brooding advice and a loveless peck later and he was on the street, on the train, at his office building keypad, 3, 7, 4, 5, blink and in, at his desk, the tea swirling by his side, the monitor flashing up in front of him, ready to pilfer another eight hours from his egg-timed life. And still he thought about Janus, her loveless peck and her primary colour duvets and her stuffed animals and that kitten. The kitten, the bastard. His fingers tapped at the keyboard, piles of text inputted by ape-technology by an ape into an overlord database. We created that which we are in the mercy of. Faster, faster.
And then home. Older. He caught her at it again, kitten in hand, fondling it, bearing her cheek against it until they became a synthesis, one beautiful bedevilled girl, and one object, living but useless, somehow conditioning us to love it, to put its food before ours. That bastard kitten, it steals all her love from me. And that bitch, she throws all her love upon it, this object, almost inanimate.
“Why do you spend so much time with that fucking thing?”, he spat, before he had time to rein it in.
She shot him a glance, half in mock-fear as though he were some outraged wife-beater, half in contempt.
“This kitten loves me, it knows how I feel”, Janus said.
“It’s a ball of fur, it knows fuck all, and it is in my seat”, said Dave, voice calmed.
He nearly drowned in self-loathing then. The vicious words uttered at the end of a soulless day could be as lastingly wounding as a rusted sword and could never be taken back. And Janus, always the recipient. He directed his venom at the kitten though, it lay there mockingly, pride of place. Dave lazily poised his arse towards it, ready to sit, shadowing in like a sinking whale, and the kitten, growing wide-eyed and fearful, crawled slowly away, its claws snagging on the material of the sofa.
“Don’t talk to me when you get home from work, you’re a grouch, I don’t want to be near you”, she said, and she grasped the kitten, scooping it into her arms and whisking it and herself away to the bedroom. In her absence, Dave settled out suddenly on the couch, as if a spring had been uncoiled and his unfurling limbs had to find the extremities of their purpose. One day he would get that kitten. He would get her, if the kitten was an unknowing pawn in this wounding game of hate, then it too would pay the forfeit. After all it was only a kitten, he would get the better of it.
Three more day-cycles of dark and light grey and he lay on his hands in a rapidly spreading pool of beer at the ‘Leper and Prosthetic’, his oaken local. Across from him lay a far drunker Ronnie, looking through the encompassing mesh of his eyes at the pitiful figure opposite. Four hours of hearing Dave harp on about his woes had lead him into an alcoholic tailspin, throwing back drinks until they rivered in his throat as Dave looked on unaware, trapped in his own head, bouncing thoughts off the twisted mug of Ronnie. At one point he even downed a yard of ale, resting the bulb on Dave’s unflinching shoulder.
Ronnie glanced at his wristwatch. Two hands waved theatrically back at him, made a number of subtle movements and then scarpered from his vision. The time for action had come, he decided, it felt right.
“Look here!”, he shouted, pointing in his companion’s general direction. Dave lifted up his head and was poked immediately in the left eye, which began to weep.
“You have to do something about this err, fucking, err”
“Kitten?”
“No! The woman, you need to tame her, set her back on the straight and, and just sort yourself out!”, Ronnie continued drawing patterns in the air with his scolding finger, occasionally touching and streaking the tears on Dave’s face.
“You cannot get her back”, he continued, “Unless you eliminate the kitten. I told you this would happen, the fickle bitches, they will love anything, so long as it is furry.”
Dave looked down at his arms and mused that he was that furry at all, and then he wondered when Ronnie would be quiet again. He picked up the pool cue leaning next to his bench and poked idly at Ronnie’s shoulder to try and make him stop, but he simply went on, “Listen, you need to make her jealous. Have an affair, it doesn’t matter what with.”
Almost as his slurred words faded he found himself sat in front of the computer, the monitor off, bloodshot eyes in the black reflection, right arm under the table fumbling for the power button. He tried to recount the events following the conversation. Taxi home, or bicycle perhaps. Whose bicycle? The monk’s? Then at home, a kitchen knife, no, not a knife, too violent, just a chopstick. Oh my god, not Janus?! No, nothing like that, not murder, not last night, not on a Thursday. Chopstick in hand, gathering support, a smashed cabinet, shoulder-barged perhaps, he felt his shoulder, yes, tender, makes sense, but was this before or after. He looked down at the mouse. A mouse? What did he do with the chopstick? And then, fumbling around the bedroom, “Shhhh, be quiet, you’ll wake him!”
Wake what? Nothing to wake, no, not murder, but still chopstick in hand, lighter shadows now, outside, fumbling around, more broken glass, yes, the patio door, and then back in. Janus in a nightgown, nauseating pink, how it offends the eyes, like being microwaved. Then finding it. His finger, orbiting the power button for minutes, falls in the dimple and ignites the machine. Cast back to last night again, focus, the kitten, the chopstick through the eye. The screaming, from Janus, the wailing and mewling, from the kitten, and then drop-kicked into the street, and Janus fleeing, gowns billowing behind her like chasing candy floss, enwrapping, swaddling her.
“Jesus!”, screamed Dave, and he ejected his chair back behind him, knocking over some fucking co-worker or other, sunken and dead in the heart, and leapt down the stairs, back to his house. The street was cordoned off. Exhibit A, chopstick kitten, was being manhandled into a plastic bag. In the background a woman in the crowd wept audibly. Janus was nowhere to be seen, probably never would be. The street seemed desolate and cold, despite the wafting crowds. All looked on, policemen consoling each other, people shaking their heads in mute disbelief, anxiety, the ills of society personified in the man who could do this. The weight of the world lent their heavy presence to the scene, the deities hovered just above, receiving that kitten soul, that symbol of purity, destroyed with a human eating implement. Those were Dave’s favourite chopsticks as well. What, in his drunken mind, had aroused such carefree waste in him?
He wrapped his scarf tightly around his mouth and nose and sidled away, gently asphyxiating, moisture from his smoker’s cough beading the material inside, creating a warm must of tobacco scent. The flat being off-limits, he went back to his office, his only other place of the Known apart from the supermarket, though the cold aisles and spear-stares of Tesco did not appeal. In front of his desk, his felled co-worker lay barely moving, the odd twitch from the corner of her mouth betraying her living, people stepping over her reading faxes. Faxes. As he lowered his aching drunk-starved body onto the chair, he looked over at the supple curves of the fax machine. Its grey figure, silhouetted.
“Yes, fax machine”, he whispered, “You understand me”. Dave looked around and then rose slowly but shakily to his feet. Using minimum footsteps, soft to the carpeted floor, he approached the fax machine as his heart bounded within his shirted chest. “You understand me”, he dropped his tone further. He outstretched his hand and lightly patted the top. The machine beeped loudly and, startled, Dave fled back to his desk. The secretary watched him with one chameleon eye, the other focuses on “Heat” magazine in front of her, her obese face chewing like a cow in the ecstasies of pasture. She snorted gently as unknown bodies passed into her, salad, perhaps, or pine nuts.
Over the coming days, Dave progressed with his work at a stately pace, sidling over to the fax machine in his lunch breaks. Too scared to return to his sealed-off home, as the Chopstick Kitten Controversy hit the headlines somewhere beneath celebrity jail-breaks and above African civil wars, he set up hostel within the warming dividers and ring-binders of the stationery cupboard, ruminating with his mind in the early hours of the evening after the office closed as the dispiriting sound of vaccum cleaners and Eastern European voices echoed through the closed door.
During the day he would edge closer to the fax machine, making gestures to it, sometimes stopping to make small-talk. It responded nonchalantly at first, an idle beep here or whirring noise there, but as the days grew longer with the onset of another fusty summer, she too seemed to warm to him, sending him read receipts on hearing a joke, the fax machine equivalent of maniacal and true-boned laughter. It was in early May, when all in the office now avoided him and his five-month body-clung shirt and strangely Post-it-note-gum-smelling breath, that he dared once again to stroke the smooth, dusted, powder-grey surface of his love. The fax machine purred gently, various lights illuminating a captivating green and then extinguishing playfully like sudden-hid emeralds. Harbingers of a wealth awaiting persistence.
Dave first made love to the fax machine on Independence Day. He had coaxed it into the cupboard after the office drones had left to hasten home behind blinking brake lights to microwave Macaroni and watch X-Factor. A3 folders and staplers cascaded from the highest shelves, denting his dear fax machine and bruising his head, yet still he continued in the throws of passion. It seemed that his love would never end, that in this selfless apparition, this almost Holy sender of messages, a female Mercury, with her wings replaced with toner, her oral senses replaced with sensual buttons, and the throbbing muscles of the thighs replaced with heady electronic infusions pulsing through her circuit veins with the inexorable eagerness to spread the word of clients and suppliers alike, he had but glimpsed the figure atop the pedestal, and now that he had drunk from this cup, he would forever yearn for more. If only it could be like this forever, he thought, but already, boiling within him, a torrent of bile was urging his feelings away, trying in vain to prepare him for a fall that would have to come, for around the apex of ecstasy lies only monotonous plains, and the next peak may never be within sight or reach. As he staggered, drained, limp, from the stationery cupboard, fax machine in hand, he caught a wink from across the room. From the photocopier…

To be continued.

Off The Campaign Trail

2008-01-14T00:28:00.000Z

A belated Happy New Year. Though for at least a fifth of the human race, my greetings in fact come early. The Year of the Rat does not officially begin until the 7th of February.

But let's move on. About three years ago, a seventy year old Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head while relatives waited patiently in the next room for him to return from some errand or other. His ashes, as befitted his eccentric nature, were fired from a cannon of his own design. He is better known as the author of the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, later turned into a film starring Johnny Depp. Whatever your impression of that book and film and the character portrayed, albeit with some embellishment, make no mistake about the journalistic credentials of the late Mr. Thompson.

In these fevered times, therefore, I heartily recommend Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, written in 1972 when the likes of Richard Nixon and George McGovern were running for the presidential nomination. Thompson’s prose is punchy and violent, he lurches from topic to topic at a head-swimming pace while dragging the reader screaming between hazy flashback and face-slapping present, all the while turning out brutal phrases as if his survival depended on his stapling them to page. Which may of course have been true. What can be more difficult to reconcile is the gaping void between his materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle, and his liberal, underdog championing and genuine compassion for the afflictions that plagues early seventies America. Perhaps it was a genuine attempt at horizon-broadening. His aggressive cynicism never seems forced, however, and he literally transmits unhindered thought from mind to page, without the literary garnish that can so often be appended as an after-thought in political writing.

Much of the charm lies in the anecdotes that are littered in the text, and of the heavily first-person narrative which came to define the ‘gonzo’ style of journalism that was his creation. Often the flowing prose reduces to snapshots and bullet-points, as even his thoughts on the labour that the book was becoming became sprawled onto the page. What is amazing is how the year-long agony of turkey sandwiches, chicken coop-style, flatulence-filled domestic flights and resonating rhetoric is recounted with humour, and even the most banal observation is portrayed with a refreshing urgency and is brought into context. The dashes of creative writing that were also the hallmark of Thompson, when journalism occasionally tired him, are also evident. Only he could have been incarcerated in this Groundhog Day scenario and had the impulse to reflect that perhaps the eccentric behaviour of one weak candidate could be attributed to a hallucinogenic drug from West Africa called Ibogaine.

His cynicism was not the acerbic tongue of an angry young man desperate to make a splash, but instead that of a weary commentator, hoping that with enough force some of the underlying message might eke into his readers. While he saw the farce unfold in front of him and relished in carnival-write-ups of the intricacies – madmen hijacking campaign trains, gatecrashing the right-wing elite in Republican conferences while wearing an opposing candidate’s badge, attaching rows of stolen hotel keys to the baggage cabins in the journalists’ aircraft so that they jangle on take-off, for example – he always takes time to come back to earth to make us aware of the seismic importance of what is at stake - some achievement for a writer ensconced in the bleak desolation that must face those following the arduous campaign trail to effectively re-type press releases. Of course the book is not perfect. Thompson’s staccato-style can be his undoing, making the text unreadable and frustrating at times, and his well-placed suspicion can appear to border into unbridled hatred at times, but overall it is a very amusing and informative read from an active and focused mind, and very topical.

Which brings us neatly to the present campaign trail, now setting out in earnest having gathered people into a frenzy in Iowa and New Hampshire, and now aligning South Carolina in its comprehensively destructive sights. To us Brits, the circus mewling across the pond can smack a little of the stereotypically extravagant Game Show-style posturing we think we should expect from our American neighbours. Politics in the UK is more obviously portrayed as a no-brainer, reduced down like a dying stock cube into a generally dull liquid malaise of pissy comments at the despatch box, white lies about spending and taxes that can be undone with a calculator, and podium-climbing wearing banners emblazoned with large-sounding numbers which diminish rapidly when put in the context of a 60 million population – spending £3 billion on the NHS amounts to £50 per person, far less than it costs to put in a filling. There is sloganeering, of course, but in reality there are at least token safeguards that occasionally out the truth. The cap on election spending, an inquiring press and an incredulous and cynical public all help.

In the United States, donations to campaigns are unrestricted, and the amount that can be spent by candidates is only limited by the comparative wealth of the candidate and his or her campaign coffers. Hence ludicrous stunts to plea for money that can border on the insane, such as the candidate who in June last year asked supporters to give £23 to his campaign. “Why £23?” asked a journalist who was clearly the spokesperson for a thousand lips at that rally, “Why not?” answered the politician, unfazed. It is sobering to reflect that since the Second World War, the party that has invested more in their presidential campaign has always won.

Allegiance to the political parties in the States is more akin to your blood group at birth. You are born Republican or you are born Democrat, and those of an extreme nature and a penchant for free thought can register themselves as ‘Independents’, and presumably run the risk of being labelled as heretics. The Primaries aim to have a one presidential candidate elected to run for office in each party. This is a strange concept, it means that for an entire year, both presidential parties tear themselves apart, almost as much as they tear into each other. In Britain, the concept of the ‘coronation’ of Gordon Brown was viewed as being preferable to a mud-slinging internal haemorrhaging of the Labour party, whilst in the States, the latter concept is enshrined in the electoral system. It is as if every five years, your party becomes a mentally-unstable individual forced to undergo a programme of schizophrenic self-promotion of its multiple personalities, all the while each personality publicly defaming the others, before forcing nine-tenths of itself to commit suicide and then make its way to the roof of the asylum where a similar individual awaits his chance to duel you.

The effect on the public is probably just as nauseating. Imagine this. Awaking after being absorbed in some candy floss-wrapped nightmare, smothered and smothered with woolly action-phrases and political grand-standing until you writhe from your bed, sweating, dishevelled and unbalanced from the tortures the lecherous candidates residing in your brain inflicted in sleep, you spit red, white and blue confetti from your mouth and stagger for that glass of water that will make it all go away. Only it won’t. This ludicrous spectacle will, like the overdrawn Highland Festival of the Arts, last for an entire year. Day after day the message, whatever that might be, will be rammed down your throat until you choke; your Adam’s apple, should you possess one, bobbing up and down in rage. The hands of the politicians tighten on your throats, “It’s not us, it’s you” they fawn, “This is about you, elect us, for you”, and then the tears come to your eyes, you lose the power of thought, and then you may settle to your default, your upbringing that tells you that you must vote left or right, or maybe you may pick one policy out of the air, something that you saw on the side of the campaign bus, or something that some political commentator or candidate happened to mutter while you flicked between “Sex and the City” and an infomercial on cross-trainers that will give you thighs like tree-trunks so that you can give that Iraqi a hiding should he parachute down on your Indiana town’s sheriff’s office and try and peek a gander at your Susie’s ankles. Eventually the whole spectacle becomes so tiresome, in the same way heroin wrenches your dopamine receptors ajar so that you can no longer feel pleasure or normality, and you go for the candidate with the nicest smile, or who uses the most awe-capturing speech-written words, or who believes in creationism, or who says the word “America” often enough. Or perhaps you will attack the whole thing in a more negative manner. Not voting for the person who tripped while walking up to the podium (you want a strong leader), or whose middle name is the same as the surname of an ousted Middle Eastern dictator, or who mispronounced Minneapolis during an ill-timed rally speech.

This is not to undermine the intelligence of the American people to choose a candidate based on their actual policies, it is just that the Primaries are based on such a superficial foundation that it is hard for these policies to be heard above the jamborees, fist-shaking, zombie-cheering, sensationalism and general information overload. The turkey cannot comprehend what a great meal it will make for the lingering taste of sage and onion stuffing in it’s mouth (apologies, I am a poor cook).
The Primaries even has a day called ‘Super Tuesday’ for God’s sake. If I were to actually live in the States, I would have to put an axe through my television screen lest my eyeballs fall out from election-exposure and loll about like those joke glasses with the slinky-springs and I would have to live in the corner of a KFC stuffing drumsticks, bone and all, into my mouth and dribbling my sentiments on Third World Debt to passers-by.

Under this kind of duress, even Noam Chomsky might be persuaded in a red-eyed insomniac moment of duress to vote a fictional fairy called Chantelle from an animated series about a said fictional fairy who was too close to a radiation leak on Three Mile Island and developed super-powers when donning a cape, touring the barbarous and savage world beyond the Bosphorus to spread her message of democracy and freedom using here Magical Cluster Bomb of Love. I half expect a CGI overlay of Lara Croft to link arms with Barack Obama during his next rally, just to up his campaign’s sex appeal among Ivy League college students.

The policies are not being heard, they are being hidden by falsified promises with as much content as a burned encyclopaedia. There has been much great journalism and this has helped clarify the respective candidate’s positions when their own knotted tongues are delicately patting our head with newspeak, and much of this journalism has followed the well-worn path of satire. But while the candidates and their campaign-styles have been ridiculed by the press, as I would do in the same situation, there seems to be little reflection that the monstrous process, has shoe-horned candidates into this way of campaigning, and that the general public is bored past caring beyond the toothpaste that each uses to get that glittering smile. The process itself is probably a result of the ratcheting up of the superficial nature of each contest with the passing years, but I doubt that there is anyone, candidate, journalist, or member of the public alike, that would condone this manner of campaigning were they to be asked.

Basing a presidential campaign with global consequences almost entirely on personality alone is as vacuous as holding a Big Brother-style phone-in, choosing someone on likeability alone, to elect a solution-provider for the electoral strife in Kenya, or the turbulence in Pakistan, or the only sporadically remembered events in Darfur. This would be only an analogy if it were not so directly close to the truth. The real problem with this shallow appeal for popularity is that it stands at the centre of the process to elect the President of the United States. The American government is an extrovert government ruling over an introverted population. The government may have jurisdiction over 4% of the population of the Earth, and may only be elected by an even smaller fraction, but it impacts directly on the entire world. When Bush beat Kerry in the last election, we drowning our sorrows in the pub in London felt that we should have been given the opportunity to vote out the ranch-golfing, oil-junkie out. We all should have had that opportunity, every person on Earth.

Vying for the award of most sickening moment on the still new-born campaign trail of 2008 must be the partial break-down of Hilary Clinton in front of the press between the Iowa Primary and the New Hampshire Caucus. Elsewhere, had it been outed as a cynical method for a perceived emotionless droid to win votes, it would have tainted the race. In this case, Hilary received rapturous applause before the tears had even dried from her cheeks. “A master-stroke of electioneering!”, they must have swooned. Is it possible that this performance had a part to play in the reversal of her fortunes in the subsequent New Hampshire vote? And if so, does this not confirm everything that has been written about the nature of this contest with as much to do with real political decisions and policies as Crufts? It is wrong, I realise, to single out Mrs Clinton in this way, all are guilty, but it is merely an example that springs to mind.

What is missing, despite all the level-headed and gently entertaining journalism that the contest is attracting, is a really creative look at the forces at play, how they will affect society, and what those petty occurrences combined with education from political anecdotes from the past mean to the bigger picture. Hunter S. Thomson did not lose his sense of indignance at the motions of American politics and its impact on the world right up until his last days. As recently as 2003 he labelled George W. Bush a “whore beast”, language that other political commentators such as John Simpson would surely have shied away from, to put it mildly. What Thomson would have made of the current spectacle now unfolding across the Atlantic would have been, for those lucky enough to make the rewarding dive into his rich and inquisitive mind, very instructive.

A clarification:

Whilst indeed a year will elapse between the start of the primaries at New Year and the eventual presidential elections, the contest for the nomination is likely to be decided in large part on Super Tuesday, 5th February 2008, when 22 states will cast their votes. In any case, by March it is almost certain that the identities of the Democratic and Republican candidates will be known, though caucuses continue into June. The fact that the parade of party conventions and mud-slinging will continue until next year will be incidental to those voters who, having influenced the outcome earlier in the year, choose to hibernate in their panic rooms, nuclear bunkers or missile-proof SUV's in a vain bid to escape the lasting medical effects of political over-exposure. For the record, most of us Brits don't mind what populist contortions you find necessary to endure to arrive at the answer of who should lead your country and mop up the eight years of spilt excrement that has touched every continent. Just please, for fuck's sake, get it right this time.

Merry Non-Descript Religious Festival

2007-12-25T16:49:00.000Z

I did promise a horoscope in this post, but I’ll leave it until later. There are more pressing matters at hand, namely, Christmas.

Enough people hate Christmas that I would be doing no one a favour by adding my own cynical and probably hastily concocted rant to the orgy of writing that has already been done on the subject. It would be hard to parallel the spleen-venting exhibited by Will Self in “Grumpy Old Men”, with words along the lines of: stuffing yourself to the point of death, toppling over while emitting a burst of flatulence and lying there with your slippered feet twitching in the fetid air. So let’s take a different tack, as a homesick sailor with a minor cannonball wound in his right side might say.

We all know the story of Christmas and the nativity, or we think we do. But in a triumph of investigative journalism, I have uncovered a more accurate version of events. Caution: This is heavily blasphemous, and is intended in jest. Religious folk of sensitive sensibilities press "Back" now.

The Story of the Nativity
As recounted by Jesus Christ, Superstar, to Martin Bashar, with their heads tipped at a slightly doleful 45 degree angle:

Some time ago, there was a woman called Mary, who took pride in the trimming of her privet hedge, loyally devoting her time between chores and trips to the Nazareth branch of Homebase to the leading of a fulfilling and pious life, austere but faithful, moral and humble. One time she had scarcely unloaded the shopping onto the kitchen floor, when out of the corner of her eye, that tell-tale red light from the answer machine caught her hypnotically. Her first ever message. She had often looked at the machine in the past, puzzled, musing on how great it would be if someone would invent the telephone so that the answer machine could finally have a use. But here, paradoxically, that red glinting light betrayed that some great event had unfolded.

Gingerly, she tiptoed over the strewn shopping bags and pressed the dust-covered button of the machine. It was the Angel Gabriel, and he told unto her that she would give birth to a beautiful bouncing baby that was the son of the Holy Bearded One, without having ever bumped uglies, and to fear not, for Joseph her husband would also be informed, so that he would not have to send an inept Relationship Detective stalking after her, culminating in the usual guilty verdict and the inevitable dispatching of a sniper in her direction as was fashionable at the time. Mary was much shocked by the news, as it would mean having to give up smoking, but she conceded that perhaps an event of this scale was more important than fulfilling the daily nicotine high. In any case, a shepherd wandering about the hills had discovered a substance secreted by sheep on their point of climax that turned out to be a suitable substitute for nicotine. It’s lonely in them hills.

At this point, the Israeli government, which presided over Nazareth and other nearby towns in its ‘territory’, ordered that families return to the town of the bread-winners birth to pay taxes to that most ordered and merciful government which had looked after their interests with such gusto and with only a minimum of artillery fire. In one of those anomalies caused by intense bureaucracy and bloody-mindedness, the town of Nazareth was under curfew, with soldiers shooting people indulging in the wicked activity of transport. Thus people had to make their way under cover of stealth to their birth-towns to pay their taxes to said government and avoid the ritual punishment of dunking for being in arrears. The journey was only 70 miles, but as their donkey did not have an Israeli number plate, they were stopped at several checkpoints, where they had to plead and perform small dances. To make matters worse, they were further delayed when their donkey broke an axle, and they had to be taken onward by a friendly passing taxi driver – “I wouldn’t normally, but as you’re pregnant and, well, it is Christmas…”

When they got to the outskirts of Bethlehem, Joseph’s place of birth, they found a group of power-hungry soldiers who were barely out of their cots jeering and poking their gun barrels at the hapless taxi driver, refusing to let them through. An argument ensued in which shots were fired, but luckily there were only superficial injuries. In time, and after serious bribery, they were allowed on their way, by which point Mary was heavily in labour. They arrived in Bethlehem to the sound of heavy shelling. The IDF was midway through an operation to clear the area of militants, later declaring the mission successful after they announced the killing of the ring-leader, a four year-old girl, and her second-in-command, a blind orphan. Every hotel that the taxi went to was full of journalists from BBC News 24, Sky and Al Jazeera, and so in desperation they retired to a barn after evicting the poultry which provided target practice for the assembled soldiers.

The virgin birth, like many events supposedly ordained from the heavens - such as the horrific earthquake in 18th century Lisbon, tsunamis that drown hundreds of thousands and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions in Indonesia that cause global weather effects that persist for years - was not entirely palatable in the aesthetic sense. Now, audiences at this time had not yet been inured to scenes of graphic gore by such events as the Alien Trilogy, The Seven Years War or various Japanese gameshows as over-dubbed by a mirthful and slightly-too-nonchalant Chris Tarrant, so the outright horror provoked shock in the assembled. Accordingly, one of the onlookers exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” as the vast tangle of limbs, cords and fluids that, like most child-births, could well have been coloured by a painter vomiting onto an easel. That name stuck for the baby, and many historians have recounted how it was fortunate how the exclamation was not, “Gordon Bennett!”, or “Janet Street-Fucking-Porter!”. Indeed, it would have brought the vast majority of Sunday school goers to tears that no amount of scones could subdue.

Meanwhile, three wise men decided to follow an especially bright star in the sky that was said to lead to Bethlehem and the virgin birth. As most people know, many stars rise and set like the sun, and this star was no exception. Every night it would rise in the east, travel slowly in a grand arc to the west, while the hapless wise men followed its course on land in a large curve westwards. As the star set, they would resolve to carry on following the next night, after catching up on much needed sleep during the day. The next morning, they would head back east to where the star was rising and start again. The first wise man died of starvation after lying crippled for four days after a particularly vicious happy-slapping, and the second was eaten by a puma around day ten. The third wise man, Caspar, who later took on a Hollywood role portraying a friendly ghost that did not scare children into shitting themselves, took up the gifts of the other two, and wisely decided around day fifteen to use his SatNav instead, reaching Bethlehem by the evening.

The baby was presented with the three great gifts which, apart from the gold, make little sense in today’s materialistic, crass and immoral word devoid of religion and filled only with cynical half-wits like myself. So it came to pass that a lowly barn-baby made his name famous, for his charming chivalry, selflessness, good humour and links with the music industry.

A Short Piece of the Interview Transcript:
As recovered from a bin in Wood Lane by a tramp trying to retrieve a piece of falafel, still moist to the touch but with spicy malingerings reminiscent of his own spell as a Foreign Correspondent in the Middle East:

Bashar: What were your first thoughts as you emerged into that barn?
JC, Superstar: I did wonder how someone as supposedly important as myself could have ended up being born in such a place. Even under a pool table would have been more dignified. A quick look in the Yellow Pages after all the crowds had gone revealed plenty of more luxury places, such as the Hilton on Al Quds Street, and the tastefully redecorated Nativity Hostel only 200 yards from the barn. It was the gifts I was more disgusted with, in truth, the gold and frankincense weren’t even chewable. And the model of the Mir space station was downright unrealistic, it never had solar refractors that shape.
Bashar: When did you first suspect that you were the son of God?
Superstar: My religious education class at primary school was the first inkling. I saw a stylised picture of myself being born in that barn. That, and the incident when I turned our Special Needs teacher into a toad.
Bashar: That business with the loaves and fishes, it was reported widely on Sky News at the time, how much of that was fabrication?
Superstar: It was a little exaggerated by the press, but they had this sale of bread on in Lidl’s, plus I had some leftover fish in the freezer from that fishing trip with Moses in the Autumn. I long to do some proper fishing though. I do feel his method of splitting the lake down the middle causing the fish to instantaneously drop dead onto the lake-bed took some of the joy out of it.
Bashar: You realise what you just said is not historically accurate?
Superstar: How can you call someone the son of God and then deprive him of the ability to practice Time Travel?
Bashar: Fair enough. What would you say were the most challenging aspects of your position in society?
Superstar: The paparazzi are a constant headache. Not one bloody issue of Heat seems to go by without a picture of me picking up some milk from Costcutter, and some slanderous, venomous caption about my alleged tight-fistedness. Being descended from a deity doesn’t mean you can’t be thrifty.
Bashar: Fair point, can I have your autograph?
At this point, two laser beams shoot from Superstar’s eyes and through Marty’s hand, causing it to melt as his clipboard, now revealed to be hosting an obscene doodle, clatters to the ground. The interviewer collapses onto the floor writhing in agony. The interview is brought to a quick close as the Health & Safety Executive are called in to mull over the accuracy of the ‘Interviewing JC Risk Register’ that had been submitted prior to filming.

An un-edited version of this interview will be shown on Bravo in the Spring. JC’s new book, My Father’s Stepladder – Prying Insights Into What Makes God Tick, will be available from all good bookshops on January 14th. He can also be seen presenting Have I Got News For You on February 7th.

Merry Christmas.

The Telescope’s Lure

2007-12-24T09:52:00.000Z

If I were feeling charitable, I would quietly add astrology to the ever-lengthening list of “Things I Don’t Get”, along with cigars, India, contraflow bus lanes and God and leave it at that. But this being a seasonal time of year (whatever that means), I am spoiling for a fight with this ropey and imbecilic concept.

Way back in 3000 B.B. (before broadband), several people of the notably underemployed variety looked up at the stars and then looked back down at their filth-stained landscape - full of people lancing each other’s boils and murdering cats, dropping their babies off ledges while grasping for the gin bottle and writing words with too many ‘e’s at the end, throwing excrement at the blasphemous in the stocks and generally wallowing in a steaming pit of bilious fluids and eking out an existence straddling the bread line all the while trying to maintain some kind of pious dignity because their creator and tormentor must be appeased or else they’re fucked and will be sent to a place in which worms gnaw at your eye and there ain’t a great deal you can do about it – and they thought, the sky must hold the answers, because they sure as hell aren’t down here. “In the stars, people!”, they said. “Up there your fate is decided, not down here. Even yours you lecherous kerb-suckler” (kerb suckling being an important profession at the time).

So we see the dubious beginnings of the ‘science’ (Kiran quickly swallows down momentary rising of phlegm) of astrology. A while ago, my mum came back from abroad brandishing a piece of paper in which my fate had been decided by an astrologer or snake-oil salesman, based only on the time and date of my birth. I have been here before. I have been told to sign my name doubling my first initial to “KK” as this would rectify an imbalance in the Numbers of Purity or whatever and redeem my sinful life into a new-born existence inextricably linked to the planets. No matter that it left me one ‘K’ short of a vicious sect of yore. Anyway, said bit of paper was interesting as it charted my life and attributes from birth, and therefore gave me over two and a half decades of history. Apart from discerning that I was male (and I think they had to be told that first off) and that I am argumentative, and that I was likely to have a serious disease when I was three years old, it was pretty bollocks. And it also predicted a serious disease at three-year intervals which miraculously failed to transpire. Though luckily this life-map was wrenched from my mother’s hands, when it turned out she had got the year of my birth wrong, negating the whole thing even in her eyes. Well who keeps count anyway. I haven’t since I turned 26 or 40 or so.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually find astrology a physically dangerous belief in the same way that religion or homeopathy are, it’s just that there is something vaguely unsettling about it. All those charts, all that smoke and mirrors, knowing that in tandem with the work of astronomers, that there is also astrology, a parasitical barnacle appended to the astronomer’s arse, mimicking their actions but then running off on a tangent to dupe the weak-willed into subservience. It is about as appetising as a televised circumcision. If astronomy explains the walls and the ceilings that provide your shelter, and the cooker that kills the bacteria in your food, then astrology is a drunken cousin who comes down the chimney and shits in your soup. Or perhaps I’m getting confused with Santa.

Anyway, what is great is that, once again, science dicks on superstition. People are said to be born under a constellation, meaning that the Sun appears to be residing within a certain constellation at the time of birth. The Sun traverses the entire apparent sphere of the sky in a year, and sits in each of the zodiac constellations for about a twelfth of that time. The thing is:

a) The constellations aren’t even approximately the same size, so these zodiac periods all differ wildly in size. The sun is only in Scorpio for one week of the year, not a month.
b) Due to something called ‘precession of the equinoxes’, 86% of people have the wrong star sign (i.e. mostly they are one sign out, though a few are two signs out). The whole map has ‘shifted’ since the Plague Era when people drew up their maps and charts.

On the last point, this is due to the tilt of the Earth and the way in which the squint axis (which causes the seasons) itself rotates very slowly relative to the Sun over a period of 25,765 years changing the star we designate the pole star every few thousand years and realigning the position of the celestial sphere in relation to the ecli… la, la, la, yawn…

Once upon a time there was a little advertising executive called Samantha who was thirty years old and lived on her own in a cottage made of marshmallow imbued with asbestos so that the gentle fire in the hearth did not cause any undue damage and she had an ickle fluffy rabbit that she loved called Monsieur Fluffboots. Of course Samantha lived in a wonderful land of milk and honey called Rainbow Land which is situated in north-eastern France and can only be reached by rubbing your left-shoulder against the Rainbow Tree which can be found thanks to a yellowing treasure map left in a Starbucks in Reims by a group of dispirited pirates way back when.
Samantha loved her ickle fluffy rabbit and she used to talk to it constantly, muzzling her face in its fur and tickling it and giving it anything it so desired, as long as that was talcum powder or brandy.
One day ickle wickle Monsieur Fluffboots got very sick and sneezed great swedges of mucus onto the walls of his hutch and Samantha got very upset so she went and told her therapist who told her to get a fucking grip because it is only a fucking rabbit. This made things alright for a while, the sensitive charm of her therapist allowing her to get through the difficult days ahead. But Monsieur Fluffboots got more and more ill, refusing his brandy and insisting on gin and tonic, which was very expensive as it had to be imported from outside Rainbow Land, and whole lorry loads had to be reversed backwards and forwards so that their left sides rubbed against the Rainbow Tree so they could gain access to the kingdom of the Rainbows.
As the days wore on, Monsieur Fluffboots left eye swelled and turned blue and then at last burst, causing him to kick his ickle fluffy bucket and go up to the fluffy pink clouds and harp-playing rabbits and marsupials of wabbit-heaven. Awwww.
This made Samantha sick with rage at the injustice and she climbed up a nearby tree never to set foot on the hallowed turf of Rainbow Land again. There she would sit for hours, weeping, eating marshmallows, and hugging the steadfast ready-embracing tree that had offered her comfort in her time of woe.
Samantha’s mother was a kindly old woman who was able to bake pies that steamed satisfyingly and brought all the ickle squirrels and robin red-breasts to the ends of tree limbs whistling happy tunes whenever her and her pies were there. Samantha’s favourite was a marmalade pie, but day after day her mother left them on the ground next to the trunk and still the little advertising executive never touched them. One day, several years later, the ten-foot high rotting mass of decaying marmalade and pastry became too much for Samantha and she jumped into the middle of it and smothered herself all over and it all got a little pornographic and this is the point when you always wake up isn’t it…

…Welcome back. As I was saying, this slow movement of the ecliptic (the path along which the Sun appears to move) means that if you think you are an Aquarius, you are probably really a Capricorn. And just to really mess things up, a thirteenth constellation has hijacked part of the zodiac. It is called Ophiuchus, and is slotted awkwardly between Scorpio and Sagittarius like a bald-headed alcoholic miraculously appearing in your tourist snap of the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square. So if you were born in late November, chances are you are actually Ophiuchus (pronounce it “Oh fuck us”, it’s close enough), the Serpent Bearer, which means you are great at handling feathered boas and the like. Unless by ‘bearing’, they mean it in the ‘child-bearing’ sense, in which case, lucky you, you are going to be giving birth to a snake at some point. I imagine that is even more upsetting if you are male.

There then, is my guide to astrology and its merits. “But it’s only just a piece of fun”, I hear you say (I do believe in telepathy), and it’s Christmas, think of the children.
All valid points. Which is why in the next post, you will get your very own real horoscope, courtesy of my alter-ego, El Keranu, who likes incense and tie-dye clothing and acupuncture and alchemy and the good word of the Bible and the mystical flowings of ying and yang and those zen gardens that have a small rake and a tiny sand pit too small to drown even a stunted toddler in. Until then…

The Reflourishing Act and The King Salmon

2007-12-23T15:48:00.000Z

Ever so often, from behind the miraculous Cabinet Of The Future that I bought in a car boot sale in Yoker, back when such events weren’t hijacked by skag addicts toting skips of stripped-out copper piping for paying for that bloodshot habit, I find an article from the future. I have kept this mostly to myself, as releasing such information generally plays havoc with bookmakers, who have a nasty habit of setting about your knees with crow-bars, and also, frankly, because I am evil. But here I thought I would share one such article, from a local newspaper about 20 years hence:

EVENING CHIMES, 3 July 2027,
Glasgow, People’s Democratic Republic of Scotland.

Our Illustrious Leader, King Lexus Salmon, decreed a year ago this day the commencement of the 2026 Reflourishing Act, that we may all in the near future revel in the beauty that has become of our fair city in the years since independence. It is the duty of this esteemed organ, which is in no way affiliated or steered by Our Illustrious Leader or Our Highly Esteemed Government, peace be upon them, to detail the ways in which every Scot’s life, be they man, woman, child or botch-job post-op hermaphrodite, has been enriched by our Leader’s policy founded on the principles of love, beauty and freedom.

Already, the impact of the Tartan Army’s invasion of North and South Korea five years ago has meant the disabling and dismantling of their ship-building industry, meaning the re-opening of yards up and down the Clyde. Happy workers could be seen hobbling with mirthful delight etched upon their faces, meatball tins in hand, apprentice workers shirking off playful cuffs to the ear from their elders. The ripping up of tarmac has continued unabated, with rail-layers working around the clock to re-instate the tram lines torn up decades before by Folk from the Labour Side.

With the oil crises precipitated by the Iran War, the Venezuela “Police Action”, and the 2nd American Civil War which has resulted in Bush gaining an unprecedented sixth term in what is now termed the United States of Florida, King Lexus Salmon was quick to defend Scotland’s policy of shunning oil. “We have seen, in our lifetimes, the horror, hatred and sheer belligerence resulting from this little black substance which, truth be told, doesn’t even taste that good. Except the North Sea variety of course”, several people were seen to swoon at this oratory genius, theatrically pressing hand-back to forehead as they went under, “The time has come to look forward!” he went on, bellowing at the fire afore, “Trams! These are the vehicles of the future”. No sooner had these words been uttered, than these green and orange contraptions were wheeling about the roads, though a manufacturing fault meant that within a day the vast majority had piled up in depots and route-ends, reverse gears having been mistakenly omitted. This was palmed off eloquently by the administration as a minor hitch, and “A price worth paying for progress”.

Those cynics who dubbed the “Let Glasgow Reflourish” campaign “The Great Leap Backward” are starting to eat their words, watching with awe as thousands take to the motorways with their jack-hammers, breaking up the tarmac before the stone-masons cart in their quarried sandstone to once again thrust their solid tenement edifices skyward. Progress comes at a cost, of course, and a dubious decision was made not to close the roads before their destruction, “Can you imagine the carnage? All of Scotland gridlocked! We will close the roads when there is no road left to close”, Transport Minister Scott Raille was quoted as saying while striding to his waiting tram, before lifting a briefcase in front of his face and punching a photographer. Meanwhile, several drivers were admitted to the city’s hospitals with injuries after driving into lumps of sandstone, and, in one notable incident, driving into a freshly-planted tree on the Seaward Street off-ramp. Thousands queued up along the Broomielaw to buy souvenir pieces of the Kingston Bridge in scenes reminiscent of post-Cold War Berlin. Commentators speculated that pieces sold so far amounted to three times the volume of the original bridge.

Clattie Dreg, Owner of the Stomped Englishman chain of pubs that has been one of Scotland’s most outstanding success stories since independence, reported that there had been a 200% upturn in alcohol sales, as people drank away the misery of living in the newly re-built slums, part of the much-lauded, “Drive for Authenticity” that has adorned the banners in George Square since the enactment. The upturn in numbers of children admitted to clinics with rat-bites in the new hovels was trumpeted as “A tremendous achievement” by Health Secretary Annie Chess, and a true sign that “Scotland is embracing the character and grit, warts and all, that got us through two World Wars and will get us through the impending Third”. All around city centre streets last night as every night these days, joyous crowds in varying degrees of consciousness swaggered and laid about, sipping on their greened-with-town-gas milk bottles.

In the east end, many dance halls that had not seen the light of so much as a solitary disco-ball for some decades suddenly kicked themselves into life; men in cloth caps mingling with the glad-ragged girls, all frolicking together in scenes reminiscent of a late-night film in which romance is interspersed with moody exchanges of glares, standings of pints, and the odd sharply-curtailed scuffle in a piss-stained alleyway. Elsewhere, the old gangs made their return to the centre, the peripheral housing schemes being gently bulldozed street-by-street and coaxed into piles of masonry and concrete, never to rot, only to crumble and exfoliate with the battering of the seasons. Shug Sharpe, CEO of Silhouette Razor Blades went teary-eyed in front of our reporter as he recounted how he had longed for these days to return. “It is so nice to see us return to our values, namely, the use of the good old-fashioned razor blade to settle a score. I have watched sadly as the youth of yesteryear turned their backs on these beautiful implements, in favour of more coarse items like bog-standard knives or, dare I say it…”, he looked around and when he was sure they were alone, whispered, “Guns”. Business had been booming, especially at the newly constructed Tram-Thru facility in Garscube Road where punters can merely lean out the tram window and swap their Five Jock Note for a ready blade. He plans to open another branch in Cumberland Street in the autumn.

The final touches of soot-daubing were being added to the tenements lining Dumbarton Road last night, in a city-wide drive to undo the sand-blasting that ‘disfigured’ the city in the 1980’s, reinstating the industrial heritage that, as King Lexus put it, “Coloured our past with eye-dazzling shades of grey and so will colour our future for evermore”. King Lexus also hinted last night that the HMS Thistle Bru was in the final stages of fit-out in preparation for its voyage of discovery to Panama. Admiral Lyon Jackson was said to be wetting himself with anticipation.

Next Week: How has it affected the pigeons? Our “Whatever Happened To…?” series concludes with a piece on Lulu, and The Truth Behind the Squirrel Killings.

Other Famous Salmons:

Though our illustrious leader be a great salmon himself, there are other lesser salmons around. Here, courtesy of the Evening Chimes, is a guide:

Salmon Hayek – Famous actress, best known for her role in popular flick “Leaping the Falls”, about a coming-of-age Texan girl-salmon and her trials at the hands of her mischievous snake-charming stepfather and his playful goat, Sonny.

Salmon Rushdie – In the heady days following the lifting of his fatwa for offending a notable religion practiced by Puffer fish, he has gone on to found a successful college for young salmon writers. Following complaints from the Racial Equality Commission, this was broadened to include all fish, except halibut because said religion disapproves of getting battered.

Osalmon Bin Laden – Notorious terrorist and harbinger of doom. Often seen toting a Kalshnikov while his latest video release is played on infinite loop on Al Quatic, a cable channel dedicated to the mercenaries of the deep.

Salmon Flaps – Pornographer extraordinaire, who specialised in the much-coveted “waterfall shot” and who choreographed zoological masterpiece, Deep Stoat.

Jaws – Vicious bastard of a fish. The Great White Salmon is said to have outwitted Captain Ahab and his harpoons long before the advent of whales in 1772.

Let Them Eat Kayak

2007-12-12T21:20:00.000Z

Or alternatively “Darwin Story Evolves”, or “Och aye canoe”. Paul Merton and the tabloids have the monopoly on puns in this instance though, so no more from me.

In my nine years in London, these are three of the things I learned:

1) Never fall asleep on a Night Bus.
2) The entire UK construction industry, from the loftiest CEO to the lowliest asthmatic work-horse that drags a wagon full of steel to the building site every morning, is irretrievably fucked.
3) If you sit down, press your knuckles against your forehead and strain hard enough, eventually you will either have a dump or a creative idea.

By a link more tenuous than a weather-beaten rope bridge across an Andes gorge, I’m guessing that John Darwin and his wife wished there had been an entirely different outcome when practicing option three - for their idea, though creative, was completely unworkable. In case you have been on another planet, or you have enough of a life (unlike me) to avoid populist soap-opera news and its mind-contorting whims, this is about the unfolding story of a canoeist who disappeared among the decommissioned ghost ships and grey waters of the North Sea near Hartlepool, back in 2000.

After £60,000 spent on helicopter, RNLI and police searches, and possibly even with the input of the little-known Militarily Trained Otter Squad (indispensable for uncovering mines in the English Channel during the Second World War, the poor furry suicide freaks), the search was called off. The people put down their newspapers, shook their heads and went back to their cups of tea, lamenting about poor Mr Darwin succumbing to a Giant Octopus, Great White Shark, prehistoric sea scorpion or any other thing that could explain the total absence of a body.

It is a fairly common occurrence for people to die from the elements in this country. This is a wet place, and an island, and so people drown, and it has some quite seductive hills, and so people die of exposure in them, quite possibly adorned in the “khaki shorts and flip-flops” so hated by Billy Connolly. Duly, those far from the story forgot quite quickly about it, possibly within minutes of its third- or fourth-priority airing on the national news. When the story was dredged up again, rather unlike John Darwin himself, most people did not have any recollection of the original disappearance.

But how things change. In a quirk that has amazed all, and certainly entertained Charlie Brooker if not all of us, Mr Darwin has come back from the dead and walked into a police station in London, claiming that “he thinks he might be a missing person”. On the first day that this story broke, it was treated with the kind of innocent happy-go-lucky reporting normally seen in the “And finally…” section of Metro. That it involved an apparent death need not harm the jovial nature of the story. After all that self-same “And finally…” column featured a man in Germany who allegedly lived off only cabbage and beans and suffocated to death in his own flatulence. Apparently a few of the people who retrieved his body from the bed also succumbed to the fumes and had to be hospitalised. A poor man died, but the story still provided us with much-needed mirth amid the gulping of other people’s sweat that occurs during the daily commuting headlock.

The fog of innocence seemed to lift quickly in the canoe saga though. First, the confounding news that John Darwin had been arrested. Then the focusing of the media noose on his wife in Panama, cue panoramic shots of a strangely futuristic and skyscraper-littered Panama City, looking every bit the tax–evading hideaway. Then, apparent genuine shock from the wife, but the confusion mounting with the amount of time she seemed to be taking to reunite with her long-lost husband. Then outrage from their sons who apparently knew nothing, one of whom then disappeared mysteriously leaving his girlfriend a note that he had gone abroad. Nothing like some well-placed anger to throw the dogs off the scent (and hopefully down the stairs to be impaled on a rake, I detest the animals). All of this allegedly of course, no one knows anything with any certainty yet. And lastly, but most brilliantly, someone types in the Darwin’s names and ‘Panama’ into Google, and a photograph taken last year shows them happily standing together along with the estate agent pops up. It reminds me of the time I posed with that body-bag. Really bad move, but at least I got an Open University degree in Bathroom Tiling out of my time inside.

The unravelling of this story has captivated the nation, but it has done so in quite a different way than we are used to. This story is different; there is no hysteria, just gentle but definite interest. The story is so rich and amusing that a fiction writer would have trouble crafting something comparable even when uninhibited by boundaries and physical realities. It climbed quickly to number one on the news priority scale, and has remained perched atop this infamous throne for a number of days now. The government must be happy that something so frivolous at least seems to be taking the heat off the dodgy donations stories that had occupied us before.

This mystery has all the great hallmarks: Houdini-style disappearance, family rifts, flights abroad, public U-turns on national news, rampant amnesia, sweaty and nervous visits to a Catholic church, false doors in flats, scrawled notes and packed bags, ashen-faced understatement from a Cleveland police spokesman, an incriminating photograph… Pink Floyd could write a concept album on it. All the story needs is a furry animal or two, a guest appearance from Paris Hilton and a subtle finger of blame pointing at binge drinking culture and unilateral military intervention and we’ll have ticked all of the boxes.

Mrs Darwin returned to the UK and is as we speak being questioned by police. The life insurance people won’t take this apparent abuse of their service sitting down. With every day that goes by, the story gets murkier and murkier. Fascinating. The story has more holes in it than a moth-eaten shirt kept in a stuffy Oklahoma drawer since the Dust Bowl migrations. But enough of this or we will drown, again unlike Mr Darwin, in a sea. Of metaphors that is (groan).

Instead, here is my guide to How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found (and no, no link to the Radiohead song of the similar name, you have to pace yourself or you will find yourself on a bridge parapet, sack of coal in hand, staring at the river beneath you and wondering how cold it will be). This might be useful should you ever have to flee, especially from the Law (rub hands with glee to maintain warmth):

1) Change your name to something very prevalent in the general population. John Smith is good, as it is ubiquitous. John Doe is not so good, as you will be automatically implicated in court cases for people who need to remain publicly anonymous. Actually they will still find you. Haven’t you heard of CCTV? Only use as a last resort.
2) The old plastic surgery trick. Go under the knife. Cheap surgeries can be done on the street in Glasgow and with often minimal blood loss as our knifemen are technically adept and enjoy to practice. With any luck, you will lose quite a bit of weight as well. A well-placed pool of melted set-square can puff out those unsightly gouge marks.
3) Chameleon Blood Infusions. Since global warming brought more tropical climates to our south coast, chameleons have been arriving on their little lizard boats in droves. They often arrive unannounced in such towns as Hastings, Littlehampton and Bournemouth and often go unnoticed in the general population, many within the service industries, and they have even carved their own niche in the lucrative paint-mixing industry, adept as they are at colour emulation. However, some of them fall on hard times, and do not find such ready acceptance. Many resort to alcoholism, and their most steady source of income is the selling of their blood to people, like yourself, who want to be able to blend into their surroundings so as to avoid discovery. The going rate is £10 a pint, and two pints should be more than enough for you to turn into a chessboard or a psychedelically-patterned curtain in an instant. Hang around the waterfront at the aforementioned towns and whistle the Archer’s theme tune to attract the blood-letters.
4) Become a viking. For many years, this used to be an idle pass-time for people with pots of money and oodles of leisure time. These days, a Viking package tour will set you back a fraction of the cost, and you can go back and reclaim the Norse kingdoms without need of a passport or National Insurance number. Horned helmet optional but advised.
5) Deify yourself. Easier said than done. But as a god, you will be worshipped by millions and be immune from prosecution. Just the ticket when you are being hunted down by the authorities for starting that earthquake. Learning the harp, adhering to a strictly focused exercise regime that will build your biceps into an aileron-shape capable of flight, and installing a megaphone amplifier in your throat, hooked up to the battery supply for your pacemaker (for that godly “Wizard of Oz” effect) won’t disappoint.
6) Live in international waters. For this, you will need a dinghy, an oar, and several decades supply of food. Once there, it will be impossible to be prosecuted or extradited. Whatever you do, don’t use a canoe though.
7) Powder of Sympathy. This substance, popular in eighteenth century France among madmen, alchemists, would-be navigators and injured dogs, can be mixed together from Copper Sulphate, mixed under the auspices of the Sun when it is in the constellation of Leo. When an implement that has been used to wound someone is dipped in the powder, it triggers a sharp pain in the victim. Lightly wound the judge in your impending court case and then while the case is being heard, continually dip the knife in the sympathy powder. The pain will cause him to adjourn the trial. Then quietly slip out the fire escape and away! Away!
8) Become an Avon Lady (cross-dress if necessary). No one knows where the fuck they went, do they?

Ah, Mr Darwin. Such a fall from grace. To think you could have stuck with the earthworm studies and world-changing biological theories. Charlie Brooker reckons that they should be let off for entertaining the nation. I reckon it won’t be long until they are up there with great current-affairs personalities like celebrity terrorist-tackler, Smeato.

Brakes to the Grindstone

2007-12-09T20:28:00.000Z

Somewhere during a murmuring sleepless night recently – too much taurine - staring at the jagged France-shaped hole in my ceiling, I collected a few splinters of thoughts together regarding a new predicament. It may have become a little muddled, shelved as it was between other thoughts such as my recurring fear of an upcoming but fictional exam, and a prolonged scene of harmless affection involving Claire Danes. Bless her wee cotton socks.

Anyway, in the sweatshop world of data entry, I was thinking that there is one reason to maintain efficiency, and two reasons to abort it. The reason for efficiency is driven by the obvious fear of being laid off for non-performance. It is no shock that your labours are catalogued on lists and poured through. I found a mysterious stack of my spent data sheets balancing on an in-tray with my initials appended, due for filing. I found a group of people sitting by my desk one morning when I arrived, discussing the merits of so-and-so, and how many database entries each had done. All these people whose fate they were deciding were only initials to them, they had no idea that one of their number was listening while waiting anxiously to get his seat back and paper-cut his way through another day.

The two linked reasons for procrastinating, on the other hand, are firstly that you are paid by the hour, and therefore naturally find merit in increasing work time at the expense of efficiency. The second reason is the distinct possibility that your work might run out, and that you will be cast into the street, inevitably in the pouring rain, to wheedle home in a lamenting state and roll up all your empty timesheets and burn them under a chimney flue so that you can at least you can try and delude passers-by that you are choosing a new Pope, however unlikely that act is to take place in Streatham or wherever.

But these contradictions add up to the work-equivalent of seeing a 15 mph speed limit on an open motorway.

In the end, I, along with others who started at the same time, will fall victim to that very last reason, the finite nature of the work, next week. In the horribly imposed competition, done on sleuth, we were willed to go as fast as we dared, knowing we were racing towards a wall, but preferring to hit the wall in the distance rather than be dragged screaming off the course mid-way for slipping behind as at least that way we stayed in the race the longest. I suppose that had we been more organised, some kind of union or cartel kind of arrangement could have taken place where we gained some kind of mutual benefit by grouping together at a slower pace. Applying Game Theory and the Prisoner Dilemma to the real-life scenario of keeping a job didn’t really cross my mind as I don’t fully understand it, and the intricacies of ‘Generous Tit-for-Tat’ and other statistical lunacies pale when you are confronted with a large stack of paper. But it is still a harsh lesson to learn a fortnight before Christmas. The bar scene in “A Beautiful Mind” illustrates this nicely.

Now I realise that in order for companies and capitalism to work, there can be no other way for them to operate. And that is not to say that I am not about to dig up Marx from his Highgate resting place and tote him around on a stick down Oxford Street, standing beside the “Golf Sale” people and extolling the virtues of seizing back top-hats’ profits for the liberation of the masses. It is just an observation. On a side note, an accountant friend once told me of his desire to read “Das Kapital”, Marx’s tome pleading his economic case. Normally the word ‘seminal’ would be used here, much as it is customary to use the word ‘eclectic’ when referring to Jools Holland’s show, but I feel the author’s name speaks for itself. We finally found it towards the end of a day filled with aimless absurdities and considerable dog-earing of a travelcard. We had expected an awe-inspiring political pamphlet like The Communist Manifesto which is slim, readable on a medium-length city bus journey and thought-provoking to the extreme. By which I mean that you step off the bus cross-eyed. The thing actually turned out to be split into volumes, each of which was so weighty that to fondle it out from the bottom shelf and lift it to reading height would have contorted your spine into an irreversibly damaged shape, possibly consigning you to your bed for life, and able to amply claim that device of income redistribution by the state we call Incapacity Benefit. Perhaps that’s ironic or something.

My real point is not to weigh one economic system against another, I have neither the knowledge nor the insight to achieve this, nor is it to advocate one method of work as opposed to another. It is simply to ask this: Why the fuck are we all going so fast? And what is this going to cost us?

The world is full of technological innovations that were supposed to turn our lives around, to free us from the all-waking-hour necessity of gaining nourishment, inviting us to pursue leisure. No need to grill bread, here’s something called the toaster. Need to get to work? Why not live miles away and we’ll slap down some tarmac so that you can jump in a vehicle and be there in minutes. What’s more, you can now separate out from your neighbours in all the new space afforded, and spend your ample down-time fulfillingly in the expanses of park in between. The vacuum cleaner was widely marketed as the tool that was going to liberate wives from house work. Yes, this magical suction device will mean you can make the home spotless in a fraction of the time, meaning that you can take your children to the lovely new park after their morning toast for hours at a time, marvelling at that motorway on-ramp that made all of this possible.

A couple of years ago, I read a report that the human race has accumulated more information and data in the last five years than in the entire history of the species prior to that. In the couple of years since that report, it would not surprise me if we had near doubled that amount again. There will be no end.

I don’t deny the beauty of technology and the outstanding effects some of it has had on the human race, I just wonder whether at some point we might all realise that in some aspects we have been chasing our own tails. I have long wondered whether there is a state of equilibrium for the amount of discomfort that we can experience collectively, and that some ‘improvements’ only serve to change the position of this equilibrium. This would be fine if this point of equilibrium was at a point of comfort. But our nature means we must push it as far as it will go, to a level bordering on the intolerable, and there we shall stagnate until relief pushes us onto a differently situated but equally intolerable position. But there is an absolute cost as well. This new position can arguably be worse, as lifting the benchmark forces everyone to meet the new target. Compare it with, say, the measures made in the UK to allow people onto the housing ladder. Banks allowing mortgage-lending at higher levels relative to salaries and other policies to make borrowing easier have the laudable aim of letting people access properties which higher prices had sadly ruled out. However, everyone has been given this same chance, the equilibrium of what people can afford moves upward, and it is against this new benchmark that all people will now have to climb. And they wonder why bricks are like gold dust. More on this in later posts.

Of course, all this means that everyone has further to fall when it all goes wrong. One defective rung of the ladder, let’s call it the sub-prime rung, might rot through, causing everyone to tumble. And in every walk of life where this principle of endless efficiency gains become more and more vulnerable as time goes on, and the boundary drifts further ahead, like the horizon you can always sail towards but never reach. The problem with this theory of undoing the endless acceleration and turning it into a collective deceleration that will allow us to move the point of equilibrium to a place more comfortably within the capabilities of our ape-descended minds, is that it only works if everyone does it. Or if we do it in total isolation, Amish-style. Unfortunately for us, this is probably a futile enterprise.

Unless, that is, my plan to found my own state on a very small area of a third-floor flat in Glasgow comes to fruition. I realise this idea has been travelled to the nth degree on TV programmes and the like, but my state is special as it is going to be founded on a hopefully harmless ideology. It will be called The Republic of Lethargy, and the order of the day will be the living of life at a reasonable speed. And in a group, it is only fair that that falls to the speed of the slowest member. Procrastination, rather than being seen as the thief of time, will be seen instead as the borrower of life. There will be no king or queen, only a democratically-elected chairman, who, as the name suggests, will be required to remain seated at all times (on a commode though, for hygiene reasons) so as to eliminate the possibility of he or she partaking in a fitful burst of pointless work. My flatmate and I have already made admirable steps in eliminating all unnecessary haste, slobbing of a workday evening under duvets in the lounge. In order to maintain the sanity of the weak-willed, a state religion will be introduced, though it will be optional and possibly only practised by those under the temporary umbrella of despair. As one of the aforementioned duvets in the flat is decorated with the character, Hamtaro “Little Hamster, Big Adventures”, I feel it is only fair that Hamtarism become this religion. I am sure nothing sinister can come from the expansion of a state founded on a sole economic idea and a flimsy religion. We wouldn’t have the energy to fill in the paperwork to buy a missile anyway.

Anyway, so I plead with you, please come and join the Republic of Lethargy and help end this circus once and for all!

In recognition of this plea, and it is especially directed at the millions of needlessly frantic people in London, here is an invitation to listen to a beautiful song named Go Slowly by Radiohead. Even if the original meaning of the song is not entirely related to this blog entry, perhaps its leisurely pace will convince you of the merits of avoiding breakneck speed for a while. Not all races are worth sprinting. Round that last corner and you’ll be within sight of the cemetery.

You shouldn’t take any of this too seriously though. I am just bitter about losing my job. I should be able to find another one from the temping agency hopefully. That is, if someone else doesn’t get there first.

The Jags, the Healthier Alternative

2007-12-05T22:53:00.000Z

There is another way to support football round here. One that doesn’t involve the fear of having your belly ripped open for wearing the wrong shirt in the wrong pub. Why not have a go at the other options? There at least half a dozen other league teams in the Glasgow area. It is a sad state of affairs that the state of play in this city is such that you might want to scurry scared from its most popular teams, but that is the unfortunate state we are in.

So it was in this resigned spirit that last Saturday a few of us dragged ourselves out of bed even though overnight the Atlantic had somehow been evaporated into the sky, mooring fishing boats, sperm whales and a Soviet-era mechanical shark (with attached bugging devices to uncover the inner discussions of capitalist halibut) on the beach at Largs. Above, ever-ready to spill, the upturned ocean chopped and bulged, black as coal, poisonous intent within. It had awe-inspiring patience. While I faffed about looking for shoes under the bin bags, scraping mould off a plate so that I could cut toast on it, cursing while I looked for my keys, trying to brush my teeth without the brush slipping, banging my gums and triggering a fortnight-persisting ulcer of eternal agony, all the while my hands fingering from the still undissipated alcohol, the sky looked on and said, “Not now, boys, just hold on there, await my signal.”

Six flights of stairs, several dog barks and a slam of the front door later and the lot came down. A plague of water. I did what any decent human being would do, and ran fearlessly across the road with the elegance of a three-legged horse on hot coals. In doing so I was narrrowly missed by those colostomy bags-on-wheels, the four-wheel-drive. Bastards. At the local barbers, I learned about such things as the new supermarket (which will be run by coke dealers), the new business that had opened up next door (run by coke dealers), and about the local coke dealers (run by national coke dealers). But all this is a pre-amble to the impending visit to the ground of the glorious third team of football, the mighty Jags, yes, Partick Thistle!

I do not support a football team anymore and I have pretty good reasons for this. But given the opportunity to watch football, in Glasgow, without people singing about being up to their knees in so-and-so’s blood, or about committing gratuitous sexual acts to a head of the clergy, I couldn’t really pass up. So it came to pass, on a day dreich even by Scottish standards, that we braved a freezing monsoon to climb up a hill to a lonely stadium. Everything of note in this city is up a hill, there are eighty-eight of them (in your face, Rome), something to do with glaciers I believe, and they are so prevalent that it even makes walking places “as the crow flies” an often regretted move. Fucking crows, see how they laugh at us with their squawking and how they mock us with those devil wings. Sorry, I had a bad dream about them once, luckily my mattress was still dry when I woke up, but it was a close-run thing.

Firhill stadium is in a strange place. Locked in a desolate location, one of those many parts that have had random tenements smashed to the ground in Le Corbusier-fuelled “artist’s vision” city-planning, it perches on the side of aforementioned hill, clinging like a barnacle, and looks almost like a temporary fixture. Indeed, it is one of those teams that I always fear may make some cost-cutting exercise and move to some random town like Aberfoyle, alienating all its supporters much as Wimbledon did years ago but I’m sure they’re far more sensible than that. Now I have already professed to knowing nothing about football, but it is a laugh, and it allows some of the most spectacular people-watching (albeit, sporadically) available. And also they have pies, delectable, bite-sized, rough of crust yet melding soft through the inside, toasting warmly within you like a single internal ray of sunshine amidst the horror of a Scottish winter.

Of course, like any hard man, I came well equipped with a sturdy Ribena bottle only to have it removed and binned by a police officer. Well, you can hardly blame them. Who can forget the blackcurrent-fuelled orgies of rage that saw European football plagued by casual violence and thuggery in decades past? The sight of grown men lamping each other over the skull with blackcurrant cordial bottles will become, in centuries to come, an iconic image for use on tapestries. Indeed historians (now sadly beardless for the radioactive fallout of the next world war will have rendered the hirsute extinct) will comment wisely, stroking their sideburns and giving sure-eyed, scientific glances while removing their spectacles to make salient points about the blackcurrant invasions of yore, the effect of thousands of angry young men taunted by a small leather ball and the horror of an entire generation in the advanced stages of pie addiction. I think we should set to work on these tapestries immediately, lest the memory fades. The Great Bovril Flood of ’04 could be beautifully invoked using embroidery, I feel.

The strange thing about the policeman (remember him?), is that he actually asked me whether he could have my Ribena bottle. I might have tried politely refusing, but then that would have been the start of the tear gas, water cannon and repeated baton charges, while I flailed in his general direction, blinded, using the girl next to me’s scarf (with girl still attached). I might have caught him in the throat with a particularly vicious woollen bauble but it is no use putting these things down to chance. I have been outwitted by a bin, several kerbs, at least two flights of stairs, a glass balcony door (haven’t we all?), a telephone and several other inanimate objects in my past, so perhaps I should leave tangling with trained police officers for a little while. And I am meant to be preaching pacifism Jags-style anyway.

Most of the sheltered seats were taken over by shivering folk huddling themselves up for warmth, and also some cunning labels to show the seats reserved for season ticket holders. The labels seemed warm enough but I fancy the people were only minutes away from wheeling some bins in and setting them on fire, allowing them to do the pat-the-flames manoeuvre with their mittens. For reasons of cost, I suppose, the roof doesn’t quite reach over all the seats, and the sodden ones down the front were free. We shuffled along and then sat down, our arses having been numbed by the cold before they even made contact. The sleet was like a poor man’s light show, with spectacular choreography of left-leaning, right-leaning, the occasional vertical and even the odd upward draft of rain scattering afore as if afflicted by the gravity in an Escher print. Making a shot in this wind would be interesting at least.

The actual game was entertaining enough. There was a good sense of desparation reflected in the pace, though at no point did anyone bring out a shovel and proclaim that he was digging for victory, as may have occurred in games of lesser standard. Lest it be forgotten that the most dramatic scoreline in professional football’s history occurred in Scotland. A trouncing of Bon Accord by Arbroath 36 (count ‘em) nil. The players of the former are now presumably in alternative employment doing dressage, show-jumping or any other equestrian pursuit where you are actually meant to let things go between your legs. Luckily play did not have to be abandoned for flooding, as the water only got about neck high, but it came down in torrents. We soon started to resemble the stereotypical gurning Scotsman, face screwed up against the sleet, crevices etched into the face, pinched by the cold and numb. The skin so frozen that even raising an eyebrow seems to release a crack of noise. I am torn between whether this is a better or not stereotypical image than the kilted behemoth in a field of corn, sunshine lapping down, shot putt in hand as he aims for some-or-other piece of wild game to slaughter that he can then sling over his back as he stomps merrily down the hill to his wife, Leanne, for her to slave over on the stove while the weans catch the potatoes as they frolic in their pen.

Partick Thistle were 2-0 up until the last five minutes of the game. The man sitting in front of him, who was nothing short of a lyrical genius. He managed about twenty different intonations of the word, “cunt”, ranging through spat-out, inquisitive, coughed, staccato, and my own personal favourite, the sneer. He also came out with some more drawn out comments, clearing his throat as if addressing a crowd, and seeming to grasp at an invisible lectern as he did so, “Aha. Yous lot’ve left yer wive’s daein the late night shoppin’ while you sit here an’ watch yer team get fucked”. I should mention that they were playing Saint Johnstone, from Perth which is very, very north. The last town before you get to the proper Highlands. They have those feathery, clipped accents that are quite becoming, not like our nasal drawl. At one moment, that same man turned round to say our pal, who was from Greece and still very much in learning of our local dialect, “You know, I’ve got a wet arse”. His wife then added, “I bet you feel much happier for knowing that”. He nodded in reply a little too eagerly.

Then suddenly all bets were off. For no reason, a penalty was awarded for Saint Johnstone, which they scored on the 90th minute. Cue whistling, demented slaggings and a pouring out of hatreds until we were knee-deep in the viscous stuff. Even eight-year-old children were pouring out words that they had instantly plucked from the air and thrown forth from their lungs in ecstatic rage. It really was heart-warming how you could boil up that much hatred, even without religion to stir things up. It makes you rest easy and believe in the inately passionate nature of man. At least, I think that’s what the announcer said.

The announcer, by the way, has the second-best job in football. She was having a whale of a time. Apart from seeming to get a substituted-off player’s name wrong “No wonder we’re getting fucked, that man’s been deid since 1968”. Someone seemed to be up there in the commentary box tickling her feet with that gopher carcass (there’s always a gopher carcass involved) while she tried to keep her composure. I would dearly covet that job. Of course the best job in football is the mascot. Partick Thistle’s mascot is absolutely brilliant and I love it. It is like a puffin*, drawn by a deeply autistic child with a penchant for purple. The child’s typical landscape drawing would have involved a lime green sky. This puffin thing has a multi-coloured beak which makes it look like it hurried home after a hard day fishing with rampant nookie on his mind and took a wrong turn accidentally braining himself in a Dulux factory. This mascot made an appearance for about five minutes on the edge of the pitch, trying his best to take people’s mind off their slowly developing hypthermia by flapping jovially. Inside, maybe, was a grown man weeping away while looking at a passport-sized photo of his family that he had stuck to the inside of the costume, though I do hope not. He then went for a ‘jog’ around the pitch, before patting one of the ball-fetcher-boy’s heads and then slinking off down a concealed exit. Oddly, I couldn’t see any holes where he could have seen out. I can only assume that he has trodden the hallowed turf of Firhill so often that he knows every little clump and divot by toe-touch alone. That’s devotion for you, as the advert goes. He was never seen again. I can only assume that he was set upon by other Glasgow team mascots and then taken to an out-of-town shopping centre car park and shot, gangland style. Lucrative business this dressing-up-in-animal costumes lark. Just watch “Death to Smoochie” (a box-office flop but a fantastic film). That would be a real shame. If anyone has seen a purple puffin being beaten with sticks by a bear and a hound, you should contact Strathclyde Police.

Anyway, after Saint Johnstone scored their penalty three minutes from time, they then hacked in another goal in the final minute, and a devastated crowd bayed for the referee’s blood for awarding the earlier penalty, which had now contributed to an eleventh-hour 2-2 draw. A large-faced woman led the abuse, concocting a several minutes-long speech using several newly invented curse-words without taking a breath and turning a level of scarlet that even momentarily melted through the permafrost. We screamed until we were hoarse, and chanted “Cheat, cheat, cheat”, and when the officials finally left the ground I had a feeling that there were some plastic surgeons out back ready to change their identities. They might even have hired that finger-print-melting identity-destroyer from Men in Black. Fitting for a referee don’t you think?

Despite the result, a thoroughly great experience. My toes have almost thawed now, which is lucky because sucking them isn’t half as much fun when they are numb. Don’t worry that deserting the Old Firm is going to sap some passion out of your football crowd experience. The path to the Jags lies open and with it every high and low you could ask for. I have no knowledge of football, but I know good entertainment when I see it…

* - On doing a little research (typing three words and clicking the mouse a couple of times), it transpires that the “puffin” is in fact a toucan. It is called Pee Tee and is my new hero. It is too late for me to pick a football team to support anew, and like renaming a boat, I’m sure switching team allegiance brings monumental bad luck. But I support Pee Tee. May he reign supreme and see us to the end with a cheery flap of his wings.

That Absence In Full

2007-11-30T00:18:00.000Z

Whatever happened to willpower eh? What happened to the noble ethic of tying yourself down to a decent repetitive task and seeing it through to the end? It is with a heavy heart, as Robin Cook would say, that I confess that I have let this particular routine slip. The one of expounding half-truths and semi-chewed opinions using the fabulous medium of the humble weblog I mean. But I have an excuse. Oh yes. This is what happened, and you may want to sit down for this, for it is quite harrowing and I got really really wet.

About four days ago I was inspecting a manhole, for no other reason that that the lid had been partially placed on it at a jaunty angle, and it seemed vaguely artistic. Now, I have no pretensions of understanding art, but it may be that the awesome beauty of this everyday object tossed with gay abandon into an unfamiliar pose was enough to send me swooning and I duly collapsed into said manhole.

There it was dark. And wet, note earlier comment. At times like this, you have only a few options:

a) Weep uncontrollably – we’ll come back to this one.
b) Summon some kind of superhero using the rims of your spectacles to glance sunlight into a Morse code distress signal. Or better still, morph an image in the clouds of your chosen distress signal in plain English, if your glasses have this facility, so that even the Strathclyde Police may come to your help. Those of you with 20-20 vision or contact lenses are fucked at this point.
c) Using your nail file and/or pick-axe, dig your way out, causing untold damage to the pavement the fixing of which will be more than amply paid for by your outrageous council tax.
d) Holler like an orphan trapped in a water-wheel.

Of course, unbeknown to me, bounding across the fields and pastures of the PC World car park was a four-legged friend opening up exciting option (e): Salvation By Border Collie. Her timing was unfortunate. No sooner had she started to alert passers-by to the fact that there was an animal trapped in the manhole, than the hunger pangs began to bite. I had been down there at least 20 minutes. I promptly shot the dog and marinaded it in salsa sauce before ingesting it whole, in the manner of a snake, which did my digestion no good.

Later in the night, I slowly realised the horror of my situation. Had my hunger really been so burdensome that I would sacrifice my only hope of escape? Indeed. It was then I decided that weeping would be the way forward. By weeping enough, I would be able to fill the manhole with water, thus bringing me to a triumphant, and buoyant, conclusion to my adventures. As the murky saline sloshed against the bridge of my nose though, I realised that I was drowning, and decided that I would have to sacrifice the weighty boots dragging me down. With further disillusion, I noticed that the water was just draining slowly into the rock beneath me, and that I would never weep enough to float myself to the surface. In desperation, I tried to think of the truly upsetting injustices in the world, like impending global conflict, and that new one-way system on the South Side, but alas to no avail.

I wiped the leftover dog hair from my mouth and decided on a course of action. You may or may not know, or care, that there is a large belt of coal that runs from the Ruhr Valley in Germany, under the North Sea, through the northern part of Britain and all the way across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania in the States. This explains the geography of the coal industry in these regions. Anyway, by judiciously picking my way through the coal seams, I made my way westward towards the promised land, knowing that the only way I would ever see the azure sky, the bronze stone-lapping light of sunset and all those above-ground things we hold dear in our everyday lives, like orchards, wooded hilltops and pterodactyls, I would have to pick myself free, wherever the seam might take me.

The subterranean passage was a fantasy world of dark blacks, lighter blacks, and here and there the odd playful sparkle of charred black all set against the radiant background of pitch darkness. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark and changed shape accordingly. Somewhere around mile nine, the fingers started to become calloused and gentle bruises turned to scabs which sloughed off to reveal a reptilian under-skin. The fingers appeared to become more varnished and claw-like, grappling with the endless coal ahead and only occasionally stopping to feel nimbly around unexpected obstructions – the metallic clink of gas pipes, or the supple curves in the bones of a forcibly expired gang member.

Long story short, I made it to Pennsylvania a few days later, and surfaced through a disused raccoon tunnel that had fallen on hard times. I was welcomed into a rickety barn by a withered-looking man, but I had cause to mistrust him, for his beard was too short. He said his name was “Stew” but that people called him “Lumber” because he was as quick-witted as a felled tree trunk. He told me that he did not understand this statement and would I please explain it to him. Something must have got lost in the translation because he then imprisoned me for what seemed an interminable amount of time, feeding me on corn and threatening that he would send me to the guillotine if I didn’t lay an egg damn soon. But by now, my digging claws had evolved into machine-like tools of escape and freedom was cheaply won.

For a time, I lived as a wandering hobo, lankily making my naïve way with a song between my lips and a lightness of step (which comes from a diet of corn over many weeks). Hoboism is not nearly as romantic as you will suppose. People spit at you. They unravel that cloth that you have tied to the end of your stick and spit into that. They jeer at you, and spit at your boots. They spit in your food, and on your donkey. It is a low low life. Eventually, I thought that I heard home calling me, but quickly realised it was the rumbling sound of those oysters repeating on me. The gathering storm lay within, false signal or not, and I had to head home.

Luckily my facial hair was enough to convince those friendly people at customs that I must be expelled from the country as quickly as possible, and after only the briefest of cavity searches – they didn’t even use the Suction Device - I found myself passing the sweet Statue of Liberty herself on an ocean-going liner bound for Liverpool. Those were the heydays of steam shipping of course, back in mid-November 2007. After a brief mishap involving an iceberg and Kate Winslet, which was all sorted out with a bit of back-slapping, tobacco in the pipe, politely declined shrimp-on-sticks, a charming orchestra with a tasty bassoonist, and a toast to appease the Ice God, Thaw, I made it ashore on a plank of wood, where I emerged from the water looking like a male version of Ursula Andress, but with larger baps.

I write to you now in-between surgeries to have my long-suffering hands transmuted from Godzilla-face-tearer back into their original stumpy, human form. In manhole world, many months had passed, but I am surprised to note that, here in Glasgow, a mere four days have elapsed. Which is only long enough for four government scandals.

“Beware ye the lure of the manhole. In its darkness lies the ruin of pity” – Neil O’Pinion (2002), famous potholer and necrophiliac whose bestselling book, Me and My Stiffy is in all good bookshops now.

Something In The Way She Rains

2007-11-23T18:40:00.000Z

It was freezing the other day. I knew this because no less than three different (and completely unknown to me) people told me this:

First Person (at the bank): Freezing the day, eh?
Me: Oh aye.

Second Person (at the hospital. No, nothing serious): It’s pure freezing, don’t you reckon?
Me: Oh aye.

Third Person (at the chip shop): Pretty cold out there!
Me: Oh aye. Should get one of those things up there I reckon (I point at what looks like an electric bar heater on wall).
Third Person: (Gives me shifty look, looks up at the ‘heater’ which I now gather to be in fact a fly zapper, then looks away and shakes head slowly).

In the third instance, I managed to get away without any physical injuries, despite having suggested to a total stranger that he go away and electrocute himself if he is cold. No Irn Bru bottle through the teeth even.

Of course the other reason I knew it was cold was that my fingers had turned blue. This is especially impressive when you consider the ethnic nature of my fingers (my current fingers were adopted after the ‘car door incident’).

It did get myself to thinking though. Why this fixation on the weather? Is it that strange British genetic implant that makes some people find the shipping forecast on Radio 4 alluring? Does it hark back to the pagan Stonehenge days when the sun ruled above all and that globe of fire had its own spin in determining our fates? Could it be, that at some time in the past, the weather had a far more significant impact on us? Did a Wednesday afternoon with sunny spells and scattered showers used to be an ominous sign that the God Thor was unhappy with his latest sacrificial offering of a stuffed goat in lieu of the actual virgin goat that should have been slaughtered, only Boadicea had taken a liking to it with its masculine and rugged features? Part of me wants to say that it is because we have little else to talk about, apart from reality television and how much blood can be extracted from a football coach during a live radio phone-in before he dies, but I fear that is to simplify.

Britain must have the most mediocre and boring weather in the world. It usually only lightly rains, and if it rains a little harder all the infrastructure gets royally fucked, so unaware of extreme weather are we. If it is windy then a few tiles blow off the roof, but cows do not get swept into the air and busty blondes do not run around ahead of frightening storms with scientific equipment and laptops with swirly Fisher Price graphics shaped to look more fanciful than they really need be. With the ridiculous cult of personality that we seem to have inherited from across the pond, we have even elevated to cult status Michael Fish, the weatherman so used to this pattern of banality he could not predict an actual storm.

Now I don’t mean to belittle the weather disasters on our beleaguered island, nor deny that it must be the work of terrorists, but it is not as if we are living on the bulging side of Mount Saint Helens (and if you do, you would do well to get yourself incarcerated for shoplifting or something, as the only people surviving that eruption in 1980 were prisoners). We do not have tidal waves or monsoons. We are almost as short on weather disasters as on natural disasters. No, that black cloud is not nuclear fallout from Dounreay power station, and that funny red coloured running thing is not a lava flow, it is a river full of migrating smoked salmon with dill. The rumble you just heard was the Dial-a-Bus going over a speed bump, and did not feature on the Richter scale.

I did once hear from a girl in my class - the house of whom kind town planners had placed near the lowest point of a flood plain on a spot which had probably in all fairness been known to flood for centuries as proved by a map of 1745 which designated the district as a “Beware Ye Flashe Floode For ‘Twas Terrible Afore” zone - that the water does not ring the doorbell and then lap over the step into your front room after blowing a brief raspberry at the single limp sandbag that the council provided you with, all while holding a clipboard, as you would expect in a British flood. Instead it bubbles up through the floorboards, which must be a bastard if you are playing Twister. Incidentally, why are electric plug sockets so low down meaning that only five inches of water will knacker them? Eh?

Where were we? Oh yes, we do not even get forked lightning except maybe on a leap year, and even when we do the newspapers have to reprimand us for doing foolish things like wearing metal-wired bras in parks. Apparently that was the reason for some girl getting struck in Hyde Park. I knew those implements were unnatural. We once had a blizzard, but then I still lived in Scotland then and the weather can occasionally be more fun. Glasgow is on the same latitude as Moscow, as no less than three Geography teachers told me, though as I had no idea where, or what Moscow was, this was lost on me at the time - it could have been a tropical paradise as far as I was concerned. The temperature did get so low though that it was two degrees away from freezing people’s contact lenses to their eyes (minus 34 Celsius, since you ask). Cheaper than laser treatment anyway.

In Britain, the tornadoes are so pitiful that one can come along every decade or so in a built-up area and overturn Mrs Lampton’s plant pots, cause havoc with the privet that had been kept pristinely pruned by her long-suffering husband, even with his back, and set off a car alarm that of course everyone ignored, and still make the National News, with voyeuristic saps from a fifteen-mile radius crunching up the streets all around with their vehicles just to get snaps of the ‘damage’ on their camera-phones, so that they can submitted to some news agency website that you, having been infected with that British Weather Curiosity Bug will even interrupt that one-hour-and-counting Facebook session of a Thursday afternoon to have a gander at. And then your manager finds you out and you come in the next morning to a note on your desk saying that you’ve been fired and all your belongings are in a skip outside which by the way is double-parked and has therefore been towed two hundred miles to the pound in Chester and you then have to spend the rest of your life dividing up your dole money between buying food and acquiring the equipment required to carry out your ‘eradication plan’ against the snivelling IT bastard who mumbles acronyms to himself and who reported your internet usage to the big man.

I can only come up with one sensible and scientific suggestion as to why the weather appears to be such an urgent and omnipresent topic. I believe there are a significant number of people in this country who are soluble, and so afraid are they of getting caught out, they cannot even risk migrating to a less damp place. If this is the case, I think the government should intervene. They probably know the whereabouts of these Solubites. The government always has more power than you think – take Stalin’s attempts to have crop-dusting planes spray the clouds with Amazing Chemicals if rain threatened to dampen some victory parade or other. Mind you, with our joined up government, one department would sanction the use of cloud-busting planes, and the other department would have them shot down onto a residential area shortly after.

But Solubites are demanding of our attention. Of course you haven’t seen them leaning against doorways with their coffee cups. What if it rains? But they are there, and their plight is real. There can be little more harrowing than walking down the street with your friend when all of a sudden it starts drizzling and he grimaces slightly before fizzing up like an Alka-Seltzer. And isn’t there an antidote? I’m sure there is something you could mix in with little dearly departed puddle-of-Johnny that will at least let the important bits of him stick as deposits to the inside of a conical flask. Then there is just the small matter of some sellotape and a skateboard to restore full mobility, and we can work on the verbal communication and the aesthetics later. Incidentally, if a friend of yours does melt into a viscous pool, do not store their remains in your fridge in an empty peanut butter jar with its label still on. I speak from experience.

If anyone has any other answers (though I reckon I have hit the nail on the head), I’d like to hear them. Now beware of that frost underfoot.

Bugger me, it’s that totally unnecessary third-person bit again:

Kiran is now in full-time employment as a Data Entry clerk. As of next week anyway. This will suit his beaten-to-death-by-engineering brain just fine while he figures out what else there is to life.

This was the practice session, conducted under armed guard:
10110100010101 Next,
00110001011110 Next,
1101011110 Damn,
Backspace Backspace Backspace 0001100 Etc.

He promises to try not to mail a list of every married couples’ pin-number to a statistician using the bog-standard post. Not even if it has an attached post-it note saying “Private and Confidential. Really boring list of no use to thieves” included as an added security precaution.

That Corner Of Europe Again.

2007-11-21T17:14:00.000Z

Instead of the first-person rant of whinging that I exhibited yesterday, I had originally planned to react to Andrew Rawnsley’s column in the Guardian about the shaky future of the Balkans. I’m glad I delayed it. With Simon Jenkins today also wading into the debate, (see here) it seems that finally this issue, in the media at least, is rearing its head and making its presence known in a way that is now necessary.

December the 10th is when it could all go horrifically wrong. That’s three weeks on Monday. But first, a momentary pause. Possibly more than any other contemporary conflict, this is one that cannot simply be waded into with wild gesticulations and emotive language. Of course none should, but this conflict is more prone to mouthing-off without understanding than any other, in my opinion. This is not an ‘A’ versus ‘B' conflict like with Israel and Palestine (simplistically put), or the thankfully stalled civil war in Cote d’Ivoire. It is not a geopolitical storm that is coloured mainly by territorial ambitions, such as the plethora of rumbling conflicts in the Caucasus. It is not a straight oil-grab like Iraq. It is not even a chaotic mess of shifting allegiances as much of the conflict in DR Congo appears. The Balkans is a mess where all sides have concrete convictions and where no-one’s interests match anyone else’s. It is more like some corrupted Venn diagram with hopeless overlaps containing thousands of people and with new bubbles being spawned with every convulsion of the whole ugly nightmare.

So leave the keys in the bulldozer unturned for now. I will attempt to avoid the same mistake, I have spent enough time trying to twist my mind around this terrible conflict for long enough to know that nothing short of a specialist Master’s in the subject, or perhaps prolonged exposure to it from all angles as a politician can prepare you for the complexities that it heralds. Instead I am going to try and highlight the problem and a very abridged version of why it has come to be, and what there is to lose.

The problem is essentially this. The Balkans have acted like a motorway intersection for the politics, cultures and religions that have breezed through Eastern Europe and Western Asia to pass through. Each has left its indelible mark, from Islam to Christianity to the Greek Orthodox faith. From the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires through to Soviet occupation. It is all desperately complicated.

I can safely claim to have tried to read three and a half books on this subject and yet this, I admit, is not nearly good enough to enter my two cents worth. But I’m still going to. Lambast me if necessary. The ‘half book’, by the way, will possibly prove to be the most useful, in terms of knowledge-building, of the lot. That is if I could get my muddled brain into it. I bought it five years ago and have been intermittently reading it ever since. Have a go yourself, it is great, possibly the authoritative book on the subject: Misha Glenny’s “The Balkans”, but the situation it tries to describe is confounding at best and stomach-churning at worst. Though, like all good political books, it has been read (and commented on favourably, in this case) by Jeremy Paxman. I really don’t know how he finds the time to do all this reading. I am in awe.

The result of all this complexity is that we now have a confederation of independent and aspiring-to-be-independent states that all have different relationships to each other. Ever so often the map of this area changes. The last change happened only a short time ago, when Montenegro declared independence from Serbia to become (as it still is), the world’s newest country, as well as a new Eurovision team, unfortunately. Thankfully this breakaway passed largely without incident. Other times, the lines on the map of this precarious region twist and writhe and subsume into the grasp of death many thousands with every contortion. I almost believe that through the crimson fogs of hell there is a demon with a blackboard and a piece of chalk messing around with the boundaries when he has a spare moment. When the world looks a little too rosy perhaps.

So why the Tenth of December? That will be the final of many deadlines to impose some kind of agreement on the outcome of the Kosovo situation. Ever since Serb armies were kicked out and that country convulsed into its own downfall, causing the welcome incarceration of Milosevic (who that same demon spared the just fate of, dying as he did in prison) but also suffering a rocky journey, including the assassination of a following leader, Kosovo has been on shaky ground. Neither gaining statehood nor being subsumed into Serbia, it was effectively put under the administration of Western powers. The idea was presumably to come to a permanent resolution on it when all the tensions had died down a little, and ever since it has teetered like an ornament on the edge of a mantelpiece. The price for letting it drop is high.

The danger now is that Kosovo will simply declare itself independent, to the anger of Serbia, and Kosovo’s Serb-minority population, sparking off a spiralling collapse in the shaky peace that has held since the end of the last century. Some Serbs see a spiritual reason to keep Kosovo Serb. It has been seen as a holy grail, a land which is rightfully theirs in folklore, for religious reasons, their Jerusalem. It would take a firm hand unafraid of bloodshed to slap away those ambitions in one fell swoop, whether justified or not. Then there is Albanian intentions with the region. Kosovo is 90% Albanian, and independence for the country could see it slip into some Greater Albanian region that would then itch to include parts of Greece in its newfound borders. There is the problem of whether Kosovo even presents a viable option as an independent state without Western intervention. Simon Jenkins states today that the country claims more aid than any country in Asia or Africa which may seem suddenly unsustainable if it gains nationhood. Though this conclusion could be challenged when one considers the ample aid received by Israel in much the same vein. Then there is the question of where Croatia, Bosnia, Vojvodina and a whole host of other regions lie, each with more or less vested interests in the former Yugoslav region as a whole (thankfully, another potential complication can be avoided if we treat Slovenia as a homogenous region, making steps to move away from this mess). Then we have the eagerness to save face by Western countries, by allowing Kosovo its independence, and opposite and equally strong pull from a newly nationalistic and resurgent Russia to protect Serbian nationalism.

Jesus, if I wasn’t already sitting down, I would need to sit down. The above is not even a tenth of it. For nine years, proper resolution of this problem has been put off, but now it has finally bubbled to the top of the pond. Macedonia has made a break for it, Montenegro strode into the independent world, and now Kosovans are asking why their turn has not come. I can’t see any commentator coming up with an answer, I sure as hell don't see a way out. It is like trying to please one individual in a crowd to the detriment of the other five. And whatever you do it will be the same. You will please a different person and piss off the other five. Does this unfortunate region really need to bleed again to force a timely and permanent resolution? Or is it really true that this region is damned to ever-shifting borders and scrappy civil and cross-border conflicts?

This region has even lent its name to a word, ‘Balkanisation’ that has been galvanised in the minds of all to simply stand for the wrenching apart and lasting division of an entity. Many have said that the only solution to the area was the kind of binding Greater Yugoslavia, a loose coalition of nationalities as presided over by Tito, no matter how unpalatable the side-effects were. It might be that we are paying the price now for the satisfying of nationalism in the horrific wars of the 1990’s and that this is merely the final chapter in a genocidal conflict that started with the secession of the first state over 15 years ago.

This was a conflict in which previously happy neighbouring families were convinced almost overnight to murder each other over newfound patriotic loyalties. A conflict in which even the word ‘genocide’ found two new concrete definitions. Firstly, codifying that mass-killing of only males could also be considered genocide, as they were unarmed, and stipulating 8,000 as a number acceptable to be labelled as such. This precedent was found on considering Srebrenica. Secondly, it realised that in defining ‘genocide’ was the destruction of people, it submitted that mass rape also constituted genocide, as occurred when rape was used as a deliberate policy by the Serb armies to water down the gene pool of a certain ethnic group. The gravity of this conflict should never be forgotten, and its potential to reignite should never be ignored. There will clearly be plenty of unsettled scores here ready to seep up through the cracks in the ground that were not sealed properly in the previous decade.

What mustn’t happen is for politicians to hide from the inevitable deadline. In the middle of all the worrying and head-shaking over Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Darfur and all the rest, all of course deserving of sensitive resolution, it would be a travesty to let this issue in a corner of our own continent to become obscured. It would be wrong to have it treated as an inconsequential secession of a miniscule state from a country deserving of punishment. It’s easy to sound a bugle for Kosovo’s independence as a final shame on the heads of the Serbs. Many have pointed out that in a conflict of this complexity, the customary search for ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in the Hollywood tradition is pretty much futile. The balance in those wars swings against the Serbs, certainly, but it is so unclear in its details that to base present decisions on a need for collective punishment is dangerous.

The trying of Serbia’s war criminals, and the search and conviction for those missing ones should be the just punishment to the country for its atrocities To mete out punishment for a past conflict that is intrinsically contained within the settlement of the present situation smacks a little of the reparations demanded from Germany in the wake of the First World War. And talking of that era, lest it be forgotten that that very war started from a single act in the tinderbox of Serbia? It would be melodrama to portray the present situation as likely to have similar implications. Given the horrors that have gone on in the Balkans in the recent past, however, not even the slightest chance on allowing a new outbreak of armed conflict can be allowed.

It remains to be seen how much influence other leaders like our own will have over events. The best that we can hope for for now is that this issue does not fall off our politicians’ radars. It remains to be seen how much influence global leaders will have over events. And amid all the fear-fabricating that is going on to fuel evermore extreme policies relating to the War on Terror, hope that it has been realised that, not too far away, an aching finger is about to be lifted from the pause button of a venomous conflict.

Feeling Vacant?

2007-11-20T19:35:00.000Z

I warn you now that this is an even more subjective post than normal. If you’ve been hearing rants all day, perhaps you’d like to go and do something more therapeutic, like drowning a therapist.

Last night a minister braved the driving rain and proximity to the huddled and diseased masses on public transport to make his way to a television studio and tell the nation in a low and self-assured voice that there are 660,000 job vacancies in this country.

This was in the context of a debate about the level of incapacity benefits being handed out. Still, it was nice to see a politician call himself, on behalf of all other politicians, “silly”, when explaining how it was easy to see why people who had been registered as simply unemployed were now trying to get onto the larger incapacity payout. They should give all these politicians a big hat with “dope” written on it that could be worn in the House of Commons in place of that childish jeering that happens whenever anyone fouls up. Or to anyone who mentions the name of their own constituency more than seven times in a single sitting. While they’re at it, they should have a “corner” that MP’s can go and stand in when they have disgraced themselves. Gordon Brown could himself have been sent there when he accused the opposition of “deliberately misleading the public” on some or other matter and was reprimanded and advised to use “more temperate language”. David Cameron could have been sent there for his famed cycling-ahead-of-ministerial-car debacle and about a billion other misdemeanours.

This is a difficult call though. Generally it is the speaker who decides such matters, and as the Private Eye has made abundantly clear on occasion, our present speaker is a little erratic. I fear it would have to be “Gorbals Mick” himself that would have to stand in the corner many a time. Perhaps they could give him two large embroidered “eyes” on the back of his gown so that politicians could still address him in the proper manner during debates. Perhaps the designers of the new House will take this into account, and maybe even prepare a special temporary “corner” in Lakeside Shopping Centre or wherever the House will move to in the interim.

Personally, I would like to know where these 660,000 job vacancies are. I have no doubt they exist, but is there a list somewhere? I am not greedy, I merely want to fill one of them so that I can once again make my very tiny contribution to the burgeoning British economy. Who knows, a few thousand of them filled and it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (well someone has to, I mean they have ridiculous stamina and need to be cut down to size or else they will get complacent and never win another athletic championship). We may even gain a few overseas colonies if we can fill enough of those vacancies. Or better still, and much less sick, we could find an estate agent masterfully trained in the art of deception to invent a few. I would happily draw a new map to be put in all those little ones’ textbooks, bless ‘em. We could fabricate an island out of pumice stone and landfilled plastic bags in the middle of the Atlantic and call it Narnia. We could even build an IKEA there to sell the necessary wardrobes. Think of the jobs it would create.

The odd thing about walking around the city centre in pursuit of a job is the things that jump out at you. These are things which were there all the time, but only now seem of sudden and throat-seizing significance. That passing bus with something like “New Call Centre at Whatever Quay. Recruiting Now” (they lied, I checked, they should have torn that advertisement down in favour of the generic “Santa (Glasgow region) number 12 of 30 happily bouncing children on his lap in his Lair at Roguehill Shopping Centre from 1st Dec”. Then there was that sign on the side of the bookshop that was been partly obscured by an umbrella, saying “Vacancies”. Once the woman had finished communicating with Neptunians on her i-Phone and single-button mouse add-on, she moved away to reveal the word “NO” written above.

And then there was the warm and friendly announcement outside another store that read, “We are recruiting now for driven individuals adept at customer relations and the provision of an excellent quality service in return for excellent pay. Ideally will be available to work late shifts, weekends, Christmas Eve, Boxing Day etc.” I went into the shop and was pretty much turned back out again.

In case you have not already donned your cynical hat (and if not, why not?), let me paraphrase this announcement for you:
“We are looking for people with lots and lots of experience in customer service so that they will be able to cope adequately with the hell that is catering to people driven insane by Yuletide-frenzy. Must be able to ward off predatory and armed males and females using nothing more than a cracked CD cover and standard-issue store-cattle-prod. Cool under pressure, you will think nothing of clearing away a dismembered corpse (a victim of Retail Rage) and carrying on with decorum all the while expounding the virtuous name of this large multinational company which has you, as a valued employee, saved on our database as a nine-digit number because we care and because you are not human, you are a robot. A ROBOT I tell you. Must be willing to work 24/7 for minimum wage and not weep when missing Christmas. Gruel provided on Thursdays courtesy of the Board”.

You know it is getting desperate when I still thought (and think) it would be a rewarding experience nonetheless and when I was genuinely let down as I was turned away. The situation, as it occurred, by means (to protect identity) of a string-vested Alabama man with razor-sharp stubble, leaning forward, palms flat on thighs while sitting on a stoop in front of the shop:

MAN (with his infamous drawl): What d’you want, boy?
ME: Err, a job, here’s my CV.
MAN: I don’t want ‘yo damn CV you dumb cracker (strange, as I am of Asian appearance). We lookin’ for excellent quality customer service. An’ you look laak a right fuckwit. Any experience?
ME (cap in hand): Uh, no sir (might as well get in character), but it’d be right kind if you’d grant me a chance though, ah kin communicate.
MAN: Kin you hell! (Waves pipe in my direction) Set the dogs on this son’f’a’bitch.

So unfortunately this particular chapter of employment is not open to me at this time. Onwards, and another inviting sign pops out, this time above an Evening Times seller’s head in bold writing, “Hundreds of Vacancies Every Monday” and forty pence and a free can of Pepsi later I was on my way with it tucked under my arm. I tried to ignore the headline about the 34 year old mother raped in her own flat somewhere in the city. A timely reminder that I am still in a heavenly situation compared to most.

The Travel Centre looked inviting (it had an open door and no customers inside) but the woman was definitely not in the mood for stupid questions. “Ah don’t know about any vacancies, ye’ll hoff tae get oan the SPT site”, she barked, before seeming to reach for what could have been her special hobo-poking stick. The SPT site wanted people with cash-handling skills that could work in East Kilbride, so another no-go. I know you’re not supposed to eat money, the non-chocolate kind anyway. Does that count?

Not helping things is that my strangely-mute temping agency has disappeared back to its home planet after furnishing me with exactly one possibility in the last three weeks. And that was so far out of Glasgow that the working day would have been over before I got to the front door. The entire Victorian-era six-storey building housing the agency had vanished and in its place lay a patch of wasteland at the corner of two city centre streets, with a small flag waving limply in the wind amidst the rising steam. The flag on closer inspection read, “Fuck you. We have your bank details.” Not that I can think what they would do with them. Perhaps they will make a one-off Christmas donation into my current account as part of their Empathy Drive. Perhaps people will be hospitalised with pneuomonia in hell.

So, with the light fading on my once-glorious idea of an alternative dream career, and with both the “Follow Your Dreams”, and the more realistic “Know Your Limits” mantra now progressing yet one more rung down to “Get Anything, You Dick” it is time for another re-evaluation. There is the horror of swallowing the pride and going back to my vocation, but I don’t believe we are docking with that port quite yet. Or there is the Job Centre in Partick. I hope that as I head towards it tomorrow, at a 45 degree angle due to the driving rain, and with my scarf wrapped maniacally around my forehead like a bandana to prevent brain-freezing, that the centre will emit the radiant glow of infinite possibilities. Or failing that, the minimum wage data entry job that my now-disappeared temping agency failed to find. One sobering thought is that there are perhaps thousands of people in this city who have been continuously unemployed since the demise of Clydeside’s heavy industry. We’re talking forty years here.

A dream is a thing with no ceiling, no floor and no walls. And though it has no boundaries and no parameters, this flimsy concept is yet used by many including me to define some kind of possible progression in life. But if you want to remain rooted in terra firma, maybe it isn’t so wise to leave your head up there with the harps and the wispy bits. One thing at a time, though. Sincere apologies for standing you in front of the vent.

How To Be Gutted Like A Fish (And Still Not Die)

2007-11-18T20:04:00.000Z

I think we know how. It is about blind belief in the near-impossible. Bill Bryson’s excellent adventure, erm, book, “Down Under”, mentions how he was so bored in the bar of a Canberra hotel that he resorted to doodling a cartoon in which two salmon are taking a rest after jumping a succession of waterfalls as part of their mating ritual. There are still more waterfalls ahead. One of the salmon is quoted as saying, “Shall we just stop here and have a wank?” This defeatism was not greatly evident last night, when we were all collectively harpooned and dragged ashore by fate, gutted and our entrails turned into soap. I always knew it was going to end that way.

Last night, fate straddled the docks of sporting prowess. We all, five million of us, in a standard issue lifeboat a la Titanic, stood beneath the straddling legs of this bastard Colossus, intent on our deaths, while his unmentionable bits dangled in front of us obscuring a weary sun. For a while we were tossed about with ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and then, in the seventy-second second, fate, temporarily wearing an Italian flag bandana, dealt us a sound blow and we all capsized into what turned out to be the foamy heads of a million pints. Although no one in any pub was in control, everyone would summon some unknown ingredient in the blood and vent it to try and alter the course of things, but really the kind of future shown on television is as able to be influenced as the past. Things happened after the initial capsize, of course, but the sinking seems characteristic.

I am not about to discuss this match. For one thing, though I enjoy watching football, I know practically nothing about it. I am one of those hated individuals who can’t help being whipped up into a patriotic frenzy by an upcoming game of national importance. My commenting seriously on the technical side of football would like having a hijacker on a plane threatening everyone with the sharp bit of a fluffy toy that doesn’t quite conform to EU-standards plead to be taken seriously. So when the kind people at the BBC informed us that this was Scotland’s match of the decade, my tongue lolled out like a happy dog spying a marrow-stuffed bone in the corner of the lounge that had inexplicably been left unattended. And they say humans are more intelligent. Shortly after, I made the pathetic mistake of assuming the thing was on terrestrial television and then missing almost the whole damn thing. I submit here that watching the minute-by-minute text commentary on a computer is not quite the same thing. It is about as adrenalin-pumping as watching a live feed of the Sterling versus Yen exchange rate. When I finally found a more atmospheric medium the thing was damn near over.

Still, that was probably for the best. The owner of the pub which my friends were at were hopefully still mulling over my CV (but far more likely using it as toilet paper or setting fire to it or whatever), and I fear the image of my drunken sickness, putridly stained T-shirt front, and the scrum of people struggling to drag ten stone of awkwardly-writhing flab out the door to be tossed into the street like an upturned pizza was probably at odds with the ‘excellent verbal communication skills’ and ‘heightened sense of responsibility.’ I don’t really use phrases like that, don’t worry.

Now, due to my ongoing addiction to driving, a bit later that evening I ended up chauffeuring my sister around Glasgow while she tried to contact half a dozen different people, in different parts of the city, who had been involved in various different incidents, with varying amounts of battery and credit left on their phones, and, most importantly, in varying states of drunkenness. The biscuit goes to the lad who had been the only one from eleven of his crowd to escape without being covered in blood after a gallant brawl in the centre of the town. He was now sadly alone, the rest having been carted off to police cells, but his banter was entertaining enough and he wasn’t sick once. Others still had gone on the rampage hitting everything they could, every thump punctuating their sense of woe with a welcome joyful beat. The second biscuit goes to the lad hailing everything that passed in the street, including a police car, before deciding to step in front of a bus which mercifully missed him. A little while later, he was viewed trying to give directions to a group of girls by whirling around theatrically before staggering and slumping against a scaffold pole. He never dropped his chips once, the drunken gyroscope cares not of a man’s stability, but will forever ensure that his chips remain intact and his beer unspilt. This was all before we got to Sauchiehall Street, but there were things happening there that must forever remain unwritten.

In the bar, the aftermath of a national letdown could be seen. No one seemed to really care in the actively weeping sense, and the mood of celebration and insanity was contagious. All around were people bedecked in kilts (I noted for the Nth time that I wish I had the courage to wear one). And this is the point. All the while there was plenty to be upset about, but people just let their anguish out and then get on with things. There might have been a brawl, but that is fairly par for the course wherever you go, and on whatever night. There might have been drunken vomit rolling along the gutters lapping romantically at the kerbstones like azure waves on a white-sanded beach, but again this is a casual nightly observance. In any case, I think it eases the parking restrictions. Where double-yellow lines are covered by snow, it is legal to park (apparently), and I assume the same is true when covered with vomit. Take note Soho mini-cabs.

What there conspicuously wasn’t was any sense of hatred against anyone, no chants against Italy, no jovial lynchings, not that I could see anyway. There is one simple beauty of being Scottish. We lose fucking everything (except curling), and like a man who has nothing to lose, there is therefore no reason to take anything too seriously. And what little I do know is that Scotland’s campaign to get through the qualifiers has been truly awe-inspiring, and that is good enough. And when finally something does go Scotland’s way, it is all the sweeter. There isn’t that air of gentle pleasure tainted with inevitability that is the most positive emotion that a country that expects to win everything (naming no names) can hope to gain from victory. After all is the whole thing not about having a good time? But this is what really confuses me. Is this the same nation that revels in the spectacle of the Old Firm?

Talking of Italians and the Old Firm, and of the stupidly low troughs into which that battle can sink, I even heard of a story where an ice cream van was overturned after one such match. It turned out that the person running the van had an Italian-sounding name emblazoned on the side. The van was overturned for no other tenuous reason than Italian = Roman Catholic = The Wrong Side. It would take Columbo to reconcile the paradox of one and the same man being a Scotland fan, and all that entails, and then the next week singing about 17th century battles in Holland or now-defunct paramilitary organisations across the sea. Still, I’m just observing, I’ll leave preaching to the knowledgeable and those with a death-wish.

Today there was a city awaking from a hangover. Fate had been at work on his nicer side. The rain was gentle to compensate, just enough to moisten the face refreshingly, without being heavy enough to hunch you up and make you spit at the ground in protest at the sky. Even the temperature was just bracing enough to arouse you out of bed, lead you to that fry-up, potato bread and all, and start looking forward to World Cup 2010, the Commonwealth Games or just a lazy Sunday under the duvet. Sometimes fate feels remorse and has to flourish a quick smile just so you don’t go back another horse instead.

So how can you be gutted (repeatedly) and still survive? Ask the Tartan Army.

That Scottish Monster

2007-11-16T16:34:00.000Z

I write to you from beyond the grave. By that I mean there is a graveyard between my flat and the main street through which you would have to walk to get here. But don’t believe everything you read.

I can think of three ways to get killed in Glasgow. In reality there are many many more, but I will only mention these three for now. The first one is to mention anything about a certain 6th century religion. Actually that will get you killed anywhere. The second is to mention anything to do with the Old Firm, an alias for our local friendly football team rivalry between Rangers and Celtic with a heady dose of mock religion thrown in just to spice things up and ratchet up our already woeful murder rate. The third way would be to examine that Scottish monster too closely.

No, I don’t mean Nessie. I mean Independence. This is just a snippet of the situation, and it will have to be examined in more detail and with more evidence than will be presented this time round. During recent days, when my escapades consist of checking with a temping agency for upcoming jobs in data entry that do not involve a three day trek by camel to a retail park just off the A7714, attempting to clarify with my online recruitment company that it is not a job in engineering I am after, handing my CV’s into pubs where landlords disgustedly stare through you as though you were a stained glass window depicting an old hag fornicating with four serpents, pacing round hospital wards looking for the recruitment helpdesks and concocting ever more flowery-languaged cover letters in an attempt to shoehorn myself back into employed society, (breathe), I have had some time to think about the predicament the five million of us Scots find ourselves in.

The Act of Union in 1707 melded together Scotland with England and Wales to form one happy country. The wrangling with Irish Republic, Northern Ireland, Michael Collins, the IRA and the like are too complex to go into here, but round about 1921, Ireland was partitioned, the north joining the union to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland we that know today.

Perhaps it would be worth a cursory glance at one of the many reasons that Scotland forced itself into such a situation. Really it was a lesson in the danger of unbridled adventurism. Scotland, convinced of its own status as a world power, and mindful of the vast conquests that its southern neighbour and European counterparts had made, set of on its own wild trip across the Atlantic Ocean to stake a claim in Panama. Presumably there then would be a plantation of people and crops, and this central American outpost would turn into a bastion of economic glory and the start of a Scottish empire that would be the envy of the world.

It really fucked up. A more factual account can be found in this article from the Guardian, but I imagine the landing in 1698 was a little like this:

Captain: Land ahoy!
First Mate: Why am I called this?
Chief Oarsman: Me arm’s givin’ me jip. Can we no gie it a rest for a bit?
Captain: Naw, keep going, ah can see a McDonald’s drive-thru fae here.
Rigger (played by Alan Hanson): Grand, I’ve got a discount voucher wi’ me. Aye, and those blokes have got shite defence, we’ll get through there nae problem.

A short while later, the crew maroon their boat on the shore, the other four boats marooning nearby. The Captain steps ashore, followed by his well-bearded crew. In order to avoid detection from murderous natives, they cover the sound of their footsteps by playing the bagpipes as loudly as possible.

Captain (shouting to pipers): Gie’ it laldy oan Mambo Number Five!
First Mate: Seriously, why am I called this? Ah havnae done anythin’ all voyage ‘cept play cairds and eat that bloke Cumberland as he lay coiled in his hammock ‘cos ah were deid hungry.
Rigger (looking at the exposed knob of a local): Ma word, look at that tackle. Great defence!
Chief Oarsman (to Rigger): Look! You’ve got a big boil on your face.
Captain (to all): Aw shite, we all have! It must be the Plague that that Guardian article warned us aboot!

All decease while clutching throats, spitting black blood, and theatrically quoting the poems of Rabbie Burns, yet to be born. Exit stage left.

The whole escapade swallowed into its gaping mouth fully one-third of Scotland’s wealth and left a country that was gutted and licking the wounds caused by its fatal mistake. And this was the bitterest pill to swallow, that not only was it a mistake, one that could be learned on in order to improve future empire-building, but that it was so crippling to the country that only union with its arch-rival could save it from total ruin. Now, I realise there are many versions of this history that may be at odds with what I have just said. Some maintain that it was primarily rich landowners who sold the country to the English. Some maintain that it was a result of bullying from the southern neighbour, or some form of deception or trickery.

History aside, the fact remains that the union occurred and is in much the same form now as it was at its outset. Devolution has allowed the ingress of a few policies that have really aroused the anger of our neighbours, and our law systems may remain completely separate, but in general the union is binding. Incidentally, does anyone else think that devolution sounds like the opposite of evolution? And that it therefore condemns us to reversion back to ape-like primates, our knuckles dragging along the ground? Albeit apes with tax-varying powers mind.

The important thing is that Scotland has now been tightly wedded to the United Kingdom for three hunderd years, and its economy has been so melded with that of the south, that severance could cause some complex and possibly counter-intuitive effects. For example, would the ownership of the North Sea oil fields really rake enough money into the local economy to counteract the losing of the monetary benefits afforded by the union? At last survey, the greatest ingress of money to Scotland was from tourism, and would this be affected by stricter border controls? How sustainable would the dominance of Scottish politicians in the Westminster parliament be, already suspicious to many, when the country of their birth was independent and outside of that system? The Liberal Democrats made much noise in the Scottish parliament building yesterday, presumably turning their spiralling eyes away from the mind-boggling architecture long enough to make a salient point, that the disparity between the funding for educational institutions between Scotland and the rest of the UK was already causing a shortfall in funds.

In truth, most people in Scotland are against independence, as poll upon poll shows. I am proud of being Scottish, but despite this ugly adoption we call patriotism, some facts need to be noted. The inescapable fact remains that the south east of England, and London in particular, props up many of the economies of less affluent parts of the UK. This does not only include Scotland. The fact, or perception, depending on viewpoint, that there is a London bias in the media (in my humble opinion it is fact), or that undue attention is only given by politicians to financial worries when they afflict the south (such as the much quoted thought that economic policy is dictated by central government based on house prices in the south-east) does not detract from the facts portayed by numbers about the flow of money originating from that area.

Redistribution is a necessary and vital part of maintaining the economy of any country, as well as being a morally correct and noble principle of the left. It is only right that this kind of balance remains, and that is a strong argument, from Scotland’s point of view, for remaining within the union. It could be argued that England would be better off economically without us. But I don’t know a great deal about the details, and it may be that I am wrong on all counts, I am merely trying to use some broad facts to come to a common sense conclusion, if people have evidence to the contrary then bring it forward.

The reasons for these rumblings on independence stem from the gaining of Scottish governmental power by the Scottish National Party (SNP). This is a historic first. The SNP are a party who put Scottish independence at the heart of their agenda, and more on this in coming posts. What needs to be carefully considered, however, is whether their gaining of power was truly symptomatic of a general yearning for independence. It is more than possible that the vote was less a vote for the SNP, than a protest vote away from Labour. We are fortunate (if that is the word that can be used) to have an alternative to Labour that has not been tainted by associations with Thatcherism and a terrifying harking back to the grim past in the way the Tories have. They have also harnessed the magical grail of the promise of vast change and wealth, so that the debate here appears almost ideological, as compared with the penny-on / penny-off income tax politics of Westminister, a place where policies appear photocopied from each other by the two mighty adversaries taunting each other over the dispatch box of a Wednesday afternoon.

But amid this romanticism, an inhalation of breath won’t hurt. If a protest vote against monotony, perceived or real broken promises, and the horrors of the Iraq war turns into a headlong hurtling down a never-to-be-taken-back plea for independence, then a serious break in what should be a logical chain of thought will have been made. And it is worth bearing in mind that the more localised (as opposed to general) elections such as the kind that brought the SNP into power, often exaggerate swings in the sentiment of voters, and that voters tend to revert back to more ingrained loyalties when they realise more is at stake, such as during a UK General Election. Still, I know how easy it is to be swept along in a tide of political fervour, to feel excited as if standing on the cliff edge, gazing onwards to a supposedly bright and flourishing future.

About five years ago, I almost fell into the trap of Utopia-finding myself. I often had the spit of workers and members from a now defunct political party land on my face as they ejaculated their carefully orchestrated speechs of outrage in the months leading up to the Iraq war. I sat there as meek meetings about leaflet-distributing and banner painting were hijacked by the dick-swinging swagger of self-assured wannabe politicians, badges pinned to jacket and fists clanging on MDF-coated tables as they attempted to invoke the heroic rhetoric of Lenin in a small, freezing and slightly damp room somewhere in Glasgow. We aimed to help make a government see the light with regards to the Iraq war but we were being manipulated and whipped up into armchair revolutionaries. Anything to belong. Anything to have something to fight for, however slippery.

I have no idea where the coming years will take Scotland. Will we step over the line into independence and the tumultuous chain of events that that could lead to? Or will we stand back from the brink, whether for good or for bad? Perhaps one day we will be walking down Sir Billy Connolly Avenue in the redeveloped docks of Glasgow (where the Big Yin himself once worked), with the newfound sunshine of independence bronzing our faces, gazing up at the Dubai-style skyscrapers while the new-born citizens of Scotland in their Mercedes hovercars zip up and down. And perhaps Barrs, makers of Irn Bru will grow to be a world capitalistic power to rival Microsoft and McDonalds, exporting the good name of an independent Scotland all over the world. Or then again will we all die being jousted by loin-clothed invaders while the bilious bubonic boils on our faces and torsos burst in a plague-fuelled orgy as if thousands of tiny mites had struck oil beneath the pores of our skin? I guess that would give us a fourth way to die in Glasgow.

But I suspect the truth will lie somewhere between those two wild predictions. So long as we don’t set sail for central America we should get through it fine. I am pleased to report that there are some tough cookies around here.

The Trough and The Dam Builders

2007-11-15T23:59:00.000Z

It always happens eventually. That trough. In the past few weeks it has been successfully suffocated under the pillow, that rising serpent bearing its dripping fangs and threatening to sink them into your arm. There is no way to defeat it when it first comes though, the stranglehold grabs you and then you are lunged into a semi-catatonic state of immobility.

This happened to me halfway up Hope Street this evening and had been triggered by a combination of another fruitless day of street-pounding, a sinking sun, a random phase in that oscillatory cycle of good and bad that afflicts everyone, and a pointless hilly section of street which I knew I was only going to be herded back down by dear Father Gravity in a few footsteps time. Still, it happens to everyone, and it can strike at any time. One moment you’re going to sleep with a smile on your face, listening intently as your neighbours procreate to bring another sunshine-faced little bundle of joy into the world, and the next your rational thoughts are paralysed by your brain deciding that it will switch the autopilot on to handle those hidden bodily functions – presumably to stop all your innards from seeping out of your pores into a wicked witch of the West-style pool. It does this so it can lead itself under the duvet of despair which, by the way, is somewhere to the left of the tonsils, and can be reached by knocking on the door to the rhythm of a secret fatalistic mantra. Incidentally I am coming to the nature programme bit shortly, try not to fall asleep.

Once there, it will implant thoughts of totally irrational nature, starting with a poor and exaggerated assessment of the current situation. This could be something like slight emotion at the fact it is raining transforming into a feeling of desolation that you might get hit by some shrapnel from the bombs falling from that big black Stratofortress flying overhead. Or overhearing a small crowd of teenagers laughing innocently about their latest happy-slapping victim, who perished hilariously from a motorway footbridge, and thinking instead that it is the entire city tuning into a specially dedicated channel (I fancy, filling one of those gaps left by those fraudulent quiz channels most of which were recently vanquished) where they are able to view your every move and point and laugh in unison until you feel three inches high and likely to be torn apart by a hedgehog. Vicious bastards.

The point is, I took this thing home with me, hoping the damned brain would snap out of it, climb back up the stairs and take up control before I got hit by a bus or something. This is where living in London actually used to make things easier. Before my move up north, I was happily immersed in an immense ocean of people, most of whom were at any one time caught in a state of mind halfway between what I have just described, and a kind of insane rage that being immersed head-in-armpit, encased in a cage of hurtling metal and sunken into a rat tunnel hundreds of feet beneath the ground would drive any mammal to. Then, a point of lowliness could be disguised by thrusting it in with a heady dose of anger and bingo, you melded back into the mass. Never have I seen the “misery loves company” concept followed to such an extreme - the magic number appears to be seven million. Forgive me, I do love London, but this one trait needs to be concentrated on to illustrate this point.

Outside of that surrounding, it is harder to bury. You can’t be so easily immersed. Which is a shame when your now delusional mind, obsessed with self-pity and reminding you that your blood has now turned so cold and metallic that if someone were to tear your arm off, little beads of mercury would spill out as if from a broken thermometer, is intent on rampaging in a futile tantrum. It is no good huddling up and taking this irrational sentiment home with you either, because in the midst of it, you can see it as un-ending. It is at once intimate and infinite. And in any case you are as huddled up as you can be when it is minus two outside.

So at once you are out of place: like dropping a maggot into a bowl of caviar and asking it to get acquainted. If it spoke English. It might have learned it from an audio-guide, I’m sure the headphones would fit, after all they are adjustable. Of course you are not to know how many other people in the street have just fallen prey to that same type of episode, because although every single person gets them, it is not particularly contagious by proximity. More likely at any given time they are sporadically dotted all over the city, in a constantly changing pattern that will touch every citizen in their due turn. And it’s just that it gets harder to hide things like that when you are within a population with the noble habit of thanking people when paying for things, saying hello to the friendly people in the newsagent and have a general acceptance of pleasant discourse with strangers as the norm.

Anyway, a while ago I beat myself over the head with a lead pipe to clear my head of this kind of Californian analysis that is undoubtedly flawed and is the discursive equivalent of creating a delicate oil-painting with a roll-mop, but unfortunately the words all cascaded around in the air like a television signal and then landed on the page. And now when I push a button, whack, it will be on the internet. Almost too easy. I would hate to have to etch it into some rock face in some abandoned cave using symbols of galloping buffalo, spears and a close-up of the face of a strangely wide-eyed girl.

The snap-out trigger is an interesting stage. It rises and then all around is rainbows and unicorns and wildfires being extinguished by low-flying helicopters. Normally all it takes is a conversation about total rubbish with your flatmate or whoever. Sometimes it is a single pint of Guinness. In this case, it took a stoat and a combination of other animals, including Bill Oddie.

Now Bill Oddie is fantastic in a strangely irritating way. If there is a quota of words that can be spoken by the human race before a bearded bloke sitting on a cloud with a harp and a sniper rifle picks every last one of us one-by-one (the total semi-instant annihilation thing is too easy, and is no fun since we nearly demonstrated we could do it ourselves in 1962), then Mr Oddie is doing everything he can to hurry us towards this fate. The subtitler, shortly before she died from a strangely potent form of repetitive strain injury in her fingers, was said to often remark on the rising steam from the keyboard as she tapped away his prolific discourse. His co-host, bless her, is one accordingly of the mutest people I have seen on television, even more so than the extras playing pool in the background in Home and Away.

There was an entertaining stoat which appeared to be prancing around a field looking as if a chilli had been inserted in its rectum but nevertheless seemed joyously happy with all aspects of life. It even hopped about and swam in what looked like a drinking fountain. The camera cut away to the two presenters laughing jovially, presumably an instant before the stoat was whisked away by a bird of prey to be incarcerated in its treetop Gulag.

The beavers were busily gnawing down small trees to turn into material for building dams. They stopped for a quick chat and a fag break, occasionally had a bit of food and licked themselves, all things that I have also witnessed humans doing on their own building sites - but here is the difference. These little furry bastards were enjoying themselves. They were working with each other, listening to the foreman and generally getting the job done. You could see in their cheery faces as they swam to and from the rising dam that they revelled in the unity of purpose and mutual familial-like love prospering in that environment.

Therefore, I have decided to try a different tack towards engineering. It is called, the Beaver Builds Best imitative (or The 3B Initiative for short, because our 21st century brains only understand acronyms). I can practice this on my off days from my Alchemy plan, see “Security of Failure post below. Basically, I install a beaver in my bathtub in a non-cruel manner, using proper contractors and certified beaver-installers. Next, from a nearby park or wooded area, such as that small plot of land between the expressway and Exhibition Centre station, I pilfer a few young trees and feed them, assembly-line-style to said beaver. It is then allowed to build a dam in the bathtub, which I then disassemble into components, carefully consulting with the beaver at all times, and sell on as prefabricated parts for dams all around the world. I forgot to mention that the bath is 90,000 acres in size. Sort of. And in any down moments I can pinch its puffy little beaver cheeks for amusement before heading off with a skip in my step to Accident & Emergency to have my finger sewn back on.

I defy anyone not to lift themselves out of the trough after that.

Literary Cubicles

2007-11-14T17:51:00.000Z

I am not nearly as well read as I would like to be. I attribute this to having a fully functioning digestive system that means that trips to the lavatory are kept to a largely sensible and minimal number. Allow me to elaborate. And please excuse my short attention span on any one train of thought.

As many men know, there can be few pleasures in life better than sitting on the toilet reading a good book. Or failing that, a simple magazine or newspaper. I think that may be one of the unfortunate failings of blogs, that this essential opportunity to scream to the reading public is not captured by the medium. Perhaps drilling a small hole in the bathroom door, inserting an ethernet cable, and riding the throne with a laptop pressed against your lap might be an art worth pursuing, though I fear it may not be the grail it appears at first glance. That image would make a great sculpture to be placed in front of Microsoft headquarters or the like.

The choice of reading material does not seem to matter much, it is merely a means to achieving inner peace and sancitity whilst seated upon the porcelain throne, idly wiling away the hours, lost in the simple beauty of sentences or merely allowing the mind to ramble and slosh like the water from a bloated river in an abandoned sitting room after heavy rainfall in an over-developed flood plain.

Now, I know better than to pick at the untidy seam that stitches the two genders together into what we so aptly call the human race. I say this, but I would not be averse to watching a live televised all-out cage fight between Jeremy Clarkson and Germaine Greer. I imagine the sheer level of mauling would be spectacular, and that there would be some pretty informed and witty commentary from the participants themselves, with the slapstick enlivened by the use of props like a wrenched-off speed camera from Mr Clarkson, and a hardback copy of one of her best-selling books from Ms Greer. Alan Hanson could commentate to give that added bit of cynical zest. Sorry about that, back to the point at hand. Despite my fence-sitting stance, I would have to rule that our toilet-reading nature is one of the fundamental differences between us.

Worthy experience has shown that there is no better way to avoid having to sit in front of Ugly Betty double-bill of an evening, as your soul slowly implodes itself using a really hard-to-reach self-destruct button, and as one of your manically twitching eyes shifts over to catch a glance at the Argos catalogue on the floor, allowing your brain to wonder into a fantasy kingdom where it considers whether ingesting a thousand-page catalogue sideways would actually be fatal. At this point, your eyes normally give up and swivel into the back of your head from the lethal infusion of primary colours emanating from the screen and drilling through your frontal lobes and then you collapse. And then your number is really up. Because no on else is budging to help you until the remaining 55 minutes of the televisual feast is over. And then they can watch it all over again on the “+1” channel to catch some more of the bitter wit and peppy dialogue apparently so rampant in the modelling industry. Err, yes I have watched it. Someone was using the shower. But as no lesser genius of a hero than Father Ted once said of television, “chewing gum for the eyes.” Lock yourself in the bathroom instead and weep into something by Albert Camus.

“But, Mr Anything For Then, you appear to be using this flimsy concept in a really half-arsed way as the entire basis for some post-structuralist discourse about the separating nature that our reading habits have on the unity of inter-gender relations. And that is a crap name for a blog by the way.” Firstly, I don’t know what you mean with your fancy words, and secondly, I know this, the name happened by accident.

So let’s go slightly deeper. Always a difficult and dangerous thing to do when talking about toilets, but bring a torch and we’ll be fine. Why indeed does the humble bathroom seem like the only place of total isolation left? Someone once said that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Let’s forget for a moment that most people aren’t English and that this quote was possibly the opinion of a colonial-minded right-winger who wished that he could hark back to the vainglorious days of the nineteenth century when the globe was blotted with red from all the vast dominions this small island had conquered, using nothing more than beads, mirrors and a nuclear submarine or two (according to my sources). And also try to forget whether this quote applies to bedsits. I vaguely recall watching interviews with recently arrived Asians who had been expelled from Uganda by illustrious King of the Fishes in the Sea and All Other Madness, Idi Amin, where they recounted the trip from Gatwick Airport by train through south London. They had all been genuinely shocked by the smallness of those soot-stained brick terraces in which the majority of these castle-minded Englishmen seemed to reside.

It’s funny the images that get exported, but how, in the intervening period, has this mind-castle diminished to a water closet? Is it that life now has such a stranglehold on us with its muddy gloves around our neck that the only place of true privacy is an act that, so far, technology has been unable to supersede? Or has this phenomenon been around for ages? And what, more importantly, is the female equivalent of toilet-reading? I don’t know any of these things, I just like asking questions. It lands you a few bruises in the face but occasionally you get an answer. If you were around in the seventeenth century though, and are an avid-reading male who liked nothing than to squat over the latrine with a copy of the latest parchment issue of Plague News, or you have the answer to the female-equivalent-question then I really would like to hear from you.

To get back to an earlier suggestion, I suspect that all this progress and intrusion might be the very reason that we must never drill a hole in the bathroom door and lead the internet inside. To be shut off from the world must sometimes be necessary, and allowing the demon of technology, which I am ironically trying to harness to my own ends, to access this one final place of security and isolation, is to drown a concept worth keeping. Just let us have it a little while longer before we have to upload our waste products via USB to the online Bazalgette network where it can be recycled into scripts for daytime televisual output.

Still, to those uninitiated to this great pastime, here are a few of the things you are missing out on, and bear in mind that you do not have to do much actual reading while you’re in there, you can merely use the reading material as an excuse for the below:

1 - Time to just stop.
2 - Time to ponder the meaning of life, and possibly even get round to reading the cover jacket of that book you have got a hundred pages into without understanding.
3 - Time to ponder how long that spider’s web has been up there, and why almost all cobwebs seem empty. Have they been reposessed by ruthless web-lenders and are they now living on the street under thimbles? And how does a loan shark get far enough ashore to challenge a spider’s mortgage payments anyway?
4 - The opportunity to avoid aforementioned death by Ugly Betty.
5 - If in a public toilet cubicle, time to read some of the magnificent grafitti. I don’t mean the ‘cock fun’ phone numbers, but gems such as, “Everyone pees on the floor, be a hero and shit on the ceiling.”
6 - Time to think up an itinerary for your Saturday to get out of that trip to the Farmer’s Market.
7 - Time to think of more things to put in a list like this.

But enough, I feel you have been subjected to enough of this nonsense today. I’m off to the out-house to catch up on some good old-fashioned paper reading. Besides which, my ethernet cable doesn’t reach that far.

Estate Agent Application Form

2007-11-13T14:42:00.000Z

Congratulations, reader. You have successfully managed to get hold of an application form for employment with Bastard & Swindle Ltd, one of the top estate agents in North-West Glasgow, excluding Lambhill and the odd-numbered year leasehold sector.

Answer all questions truthfully except where indicated:

1 – How often are you a bastard?

A: From time to time, for example, when I have stubbed my toe.
B: During normal office hours only.
C: All the time. Fuck you.

2 – Numeracy is important as an estate agent. What number follows 4 (four)?

A: 5
B: 6
C: Fear.

3 – A young couple are interested in getting a two-bedroom flat, but there is a patch of dry rot coming through one of the bedroom ceiling that you have spotted, but has not been noticed by the couple. What should you do?

A: Alert them to the fact that dry rot can be a potentially difficult and expensive problem to solve, that it should be looked into, and that it should perhaps be grounds to lower the offer price.
B: Ignore the patch of dry rot, and walk on through to the kitchen, whistling nonchalantly to disguise guilt and then comment on the remarkable period features in the kitchen, fitted in the 1970’s.
C: Alert them to the dry rot, and say that this was a very desirable trait in palaces in pre-Renaissance France and that accordingly they should consider hiking up their offer price as many other couples will find the flat an attractive option for this reason. Say that you’ll even doctor all the forms for you if we remember.

4 – A group of students walks into the office asking about four-bedroom flats in Kelvinbridge for under £150 a week. What action should you take?

A: Politely tell them that though this might be too cheap for the area, there may be other areas near by that are more affordable, and offer to show them a list of possibilities.
B: Point and laugh.
C: Chase all but one of them out of the office using a machete, and then lock all the doors taking the remaining student hostage and holding him (with the help of a colleague if necessary) with his mouth open under the open water cooler tap, all the while chanting “You will never be a human, you will never be a human”, and then finally decapitating him and having his head mounted like an animal trophy on the wall, placing a mortarboard graduation hat on his head at a jaunty angle, as a reminder to any other idiot students foolhardy enough to grace your saintly estate agent carpet with their scummy in-bred feet.

5 – Have you ever tortured an animal?

A: No, you sick bastard.
B: I once came across a badger waddling with a thorn in its paw down Dumbarton Road and I managed to catch up with it, and thought about tormenting it with a discarded stick I had found, but then I felt dirty and had to have a shower for three days.
C: Yes, regularly, it is good for the soul. I have a bath tub full of small furry animals, and I often torment them with a stick I have specially carved with demonic runes for that very purpose. Sometimes I like to heat up the end of the stick and poke the really cute ones in the eye.

6 – You have made a mistake in recording rent payments, missing some out because you could not be fucked doing your job. Do you:

A: Accept responsibility for the problem, clarify the error, and advise the tenant and landlord of the situation.
B: Point the finger immediately at the tenant, putting the onus on them to provide proof in the form of bank statements that they paid rent.
C: Do nothing until it comes up four years later and then deny everything. Go home after work and torment an animal with a stick for shits and giggles.

7 – Do you have any unspent criminal convictions?

A: Nope. Squeaky clean like a rubber ducky.
B: Only that assault conviction, but he totally deserved it. Those chips were mine.
C: I have been convicted several times of fraud and perjury. I also lied to a judge and said that my cat killed my wife, causing it to be executed by lethal injection. Once I also planted a loaded gun in the hand of this dead guy I found in the park. I say found, but really I shot him for looking at me funny. I think he winked or something.

8 – You are showing a couple around a lakeside villa in Yoker when you notice that your best friend is drowning in the lake. There is a raft tethered to a pier near to where the drowning person is. All pretty coincidental, but it could happen. What do you do?

A: Apologise to the couple for the inconvenience. Untie the raft and row out to your friend, saving him and making sure he is alright.
B: Continue showing the couple around the property.
C: Take the couple into the raft and sail onto the top of your friend’s head, as coincidentally that is in fact the position from which you can have the best view of this glorious property which has been on the market for only a week, and has a beautifully ornate wood-carved awning providing ample protection from the elements for those little sproglets when they arrive. Tap the swollen belly of the wife while giving a knowing smile that is only slightly sleazy to the husband, while the last bubbles of breath from your suffocating friend pop to the surface.

9 – Why do you want to be an estate agent?

A – I don’t really.
B – I think I would make a great estate agent, I have good communication skills, am an adept liar and have good knowledge of the various districts of the city.
C – I was not born in a hospital, but instead found in a skip by a pack of wolves who then raised me. Mother Wolf was a vicious creature, and regularly I would go on hunts around the New Forest watching her wrench apart the bones of young mammals that fell victim to her jaws. She did often say terrible things to me, and often saw in my naked unwolf-like skin the beginnings of her own failings in life. Mother Wolf often liked to say things like, “You are rotten to the core, not like us”. In time I distanced myself from her, becoming more independent and hanging with a bad crowd of wolves from the other side of Partickhill. I learned to call like a wolf, and even started growing mass quantities of fur in unspeakable places. I like nothing better than the thrill of the chase, grabbing a young rabbit between my teeth and feeling the trickle of its warm blood as it flows down over my neck and leaves a wine-dark stain on the soil. I received an OBE for services to wolvery in 2006. Um, what was the question again?

How did you do?

Mostly A’s: Sorry, you are not estate agent material. You would be better off as a human being. Could we interest you in a lovely three-bedroom semi-detached house that burned down last week?

Mostly B’s: With a bit of work, you just might make it. Shed those last fragments of moralistic nature within you, fill your bathtub with mammals and then take the test again next year.

Mostly C’s: Heartiest congratulations, you are Bastard & Swindle’s newest employee. Your contract asks only for 85 hours a week, and you may take up to three days unpaid leave each year. Our salary and pension options are very competitive. Here is your gun and badge.

The Security of Failure

2007-11-12T17:17:00.000Z

Utter failure is the sturdiest seat around.

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing” said George Bernard Shaw. That is a nice quote because it gives everyone hope. And also because it was easily findable by searching on Google. There, there, don’t be evil.

You were warned earlier in the week about this post, and here it is in all its putrid foulsome glory. Get a waft of that freshly microwaved-stench.

The history books are filled with failures, and it is often these that are the most interesting, story-wise. I think it could even be more interesting to examine the failed petering out of famous characters than their heady ascendancy to fame. And we Brits love a failure. Only out of the hideous mediocrity of an endlessly dripping climate can real failure flourish. The Darwin Awards stand testament to our obsession with failure. And that is great, because it is far far less to live up to.

Just as water always trickles to the lowest point and then reaches a state of total stability, or let’s call it peace, so could we say that the same applies to us? Reaching the pinnacle of success, the height of ambition, is like being tethered to the top of a building from a burning thread. You can enjoy the view while it lasts.

But more tellingly, you could probably enjoy the fall as well. I’m fairly certain that there is a perverse pleasure in failure of your own making, that makes you want to wave on the way down as the blinking windows cascade past. Unless some blue-suited, red-underpanted twat flies under and scoops you into his arms and plops you in front of a television camera so that you can wear an expression of disbelief and hopelessness that wouldn’t look out of place on the face of a government spokesman who has just publicly shat himself while describing the delicate details of foreign policy and military spending to a roomful of respected and revered journalists such as Kate Adie, all the while being live-streamed onto the BBC and Al Jazeera, and knowing that the public shitting story will be inserted respectfully in between that Diana special on faulty motorway underpasses and a human interest story on the effects of the Common Agricultural Policy on Joe, a farmer in Shropshire whose turnips were publicly burnt in the car park of the parliament building in Strasbourg for tasting natural. Actually joking aside, elements of the Common Agricultural Policy are disgusting but this isn’t really the time to go into that.

Maybe reveling in failure is some form of masochism, a self-inflicted wound that you take pleasure in opening and salting, much like those crisps you used to have to add salt to – and incidentally, what happened to them? Somehow that need to balance along the edge of a precipice, that tightly grasped balancing pole as your placebo aid to posture, is only made worth it by the sideways glance of the massive drop.

On a related note, have you ever got butterflies while sitting on a sledge on the edge of what appears to be an infinite drop in the snow? No matter that you are just in an abandoned college car park, the only thing you can fixate on is the target, be that a brick wall, your little sister, or a small but highly unstable nuclear power plant. These are in ascending order of entertainment value to yourself. That is the other point, the failure is made more or less tasty by the benchmark that you are working to.

Enough though. The insides can rot if left out the fridge too long, and there are some things, like the bullshit above, that are best left frozen. Anyway, if failure is your default mode of thinking, then it seems pertinent to choose a profession that is created for failure. I don’t mean a profession in which it is possible to fail – that must be almost all of them – but one which is almost defined by failure.

I am talking, of course, of alchemy. Alchemy is the science of turning base metals, like lead, into gold. It is fairly famous, and people used to attempt to practice this art based on the proximity of lead to gold in the periodic table. Except that to successfully do that, you need to fuck with the nucleus. I failed my A-level chemistry practical (I thought a strip of litmus paper was chewing gum or something) but even I know that no amount of jiggery pokery possible in a test tube will achieve this. That didn’t stop all manner of drop-outs, dreamers and madmen from singing their eyebrows, undergoing accidental and rapid exfoliation, melting themselves into smouldering heaps or twisting the roofs of their houses through ninety degrees and generally allowing their mischief to lead to messy divorces. Really messy I mean – have you seen a pool of liquified human try to sign a form and extract a ring from a screaming woman’s finger?

Still, as part of my ongoing predicament, I have turned to the dark side and now entertain alchemy as the way forward. Though I am going to put a 21^st century twist on it. I have more value for life, notions on failure aside, than to practice this deathly art myself. I intend to become an Alchemy Consultant instead. This is what will happen:

I will rent myself a portakabin and set this up in Kelvingrove Park. Though I would hate to become a lackey for the capitalist pig-dog empire (err, only joking there sir), I realise the success of any business is self-promotion, and will do this by giving out vouchers for free lemonade, which I will distribute at street corners around this city. Once the punters arrive for their sugary fix, I will extoll the virtues of alchemy and what it can achieve, though only with my help. I intend to circulate a leaflet, called “The Midas Touch”, and specially gold-plated ladles as proof of what is possible. At £200 per hour, I should be able to comfortably make back my overheads. Thus making profit from our collective failure. It is a beautiful plan, and could allow me to increase my intake to two haggis suppers per day with all the money. A three-foot long ginger beard should allow me to remain anonymous and stop me from being stabbed 16 times in the face by a disgruntled entre-preneur while enjoying a pint of Guinness (I think a few people have ‘expired’ this way round here).

Don’t say I’m not trying to do something useful with my life now, Mr Shaw.

No, not another unnecessary third person bit, but an important link:

That’s right. Here be a link to Lauren’s blog, Credible Witness and a worthy read it is too. And she has pictures and things. I’ll get round to it here in good time…

Glasgow’s Games

2007-11-09T15:13:00.000Z

This post was going to be about failure, but that can wait until another time because the momentous occasion of Glasgow’s successful bid for the 2014 Commonwealth Games has just been announced. Also, I was going to post the other post yesterday but my sister abducted me, blindfolded me and drove me into the suburbs, where I was deposited in a place halfway between American Beauty and Desperate Housewives. Lovely. I did admire the privet hedges and the occasional squirrel though. They take me right back. An anonymous quote says something along the lines of, “suburbs are places where they cut down all of the trees and name the streets after the trees they cut down.”

I’m going to embark on a slightly schizophrenic rant about this.
What I am about to say may go against this assertion, but I am quietly happy that Glasgow won. It will raise the profile of the city, and that can only be a good thing. It shouldn’t be forgotten that raising the profile of a place does not necessarily mean highlighting its good points, but it can also (arguably more importantly) highlight the existing problems and be an agent for change. In a more extreme example, the coming Olympic Games to China has managed to shine a torchlight on the problems of that country and has made it more aware that it must keep its teeth clean – at least for the next year or so. The agent of change is limited though. I was naively hopeful that Chinese intervention would save Myanmar but it never came.

Glasgow is of course not as bad as its reputation suggests. The violent city that people elsewhere have indelibly seared into their minds mostly died decades ago. The gangs that are supposed to be over-running the streets seem to be teenagers filming their adolescent fights for YouTube, and similar things could be witnessed in any town around the UK. Putting Glasgow under the spotlight may do something to justifiably weaken that reputation. But there are still serious problems, and while it is not immediately obvious while walking down the cosmetically overhauled Buchanan Street, it is the statistics (related to health and poverty in particular) that bear out the facts. And need it be mentioned that by far the ugliest and most venomous thing about this city is ostensibly sport-related and must be addressed if it is not to taint the whole spectacle. I dare not touch on that particular subject any further though.

It is difficult to take the temperature of a city, and it is even more difficult to measure concrete change and its causes. It may be that Glasgow is a far more prosperous place in seven years time than it is now, but it will be difficult to determine the effects the Games have on this improvement. Also, the age-old argument exists that money should be pumped more directly into where the problems are, such as improving housing and resolving unemployment, rather than only indirectly through building costly sporting venues. Also, I really hope that it benefits all of Glasgow, not just the east end. The east end is especially deserving of economic relief, but so are many other parts of the city and it would be a great shame for these to be overlooked. I am far from an expert though, and soon I will be waving my arms for help as if drowning in a corn silo (it happens), so soon I will get on to lighter things. Still, I have reason for optimism. There is an energy here that will get this city to the long overdue goal that it deserves, even if not by means of the Games.

2014 is a long long long time away though, and I doubt we have the momentum in our blood to continue celebrating for another seven years. But we’ll give it a shot. I say ‘we’, but by this time I will be safely inhabiting a rocking chair, as my hair greys and thins, while smoking illicit substances for medicinal purposes, you understand, by means of a suitably dour-looking foot-long pipe, and the smell of my own urine rises comforting around me, and my tweed jacket hosts all manner of fauna, including moths and cockroaches (which hate cucumbers apparently), all the while hoping that my kindly neighbour will come round and top up the card in my electricity meter and feed me a hearty broth of distilled buffalo getting very intimately acquainted with various root vegetables. Except that might not happen, because by then the neighbouring building will have been demolished to make way for a harmonica-hurling arena, or whatever.

The people interviewed in the build-up to the announcement were amazingly self-assured, there was a real sense that everyone knew Glasgow had it in the bag. All the while there was the usual hype of the extreme economic benefits and the intense promotion of sport that would result. Facts were toted about the problems of obesity and the curing prospects that lay ahead. I doubt many fish and chip shop owners are filing for bankruptcy just yet mind you. What was really interesting, both before and after the announcement, was the universal similarity between the opinions.

The typical ‘before’ opinion went: “It would be such a boost not only to Glasgow, but to Scotland. There really has been terrific spirit behind this bid, and Glasgow deserve to win it. This will boost jobs and help regenerate a run down area of the city. We have produced the better technical submission. Did I mention what a boost it would be to Glasgow and to Scotland as a whole? Um, I want to become a woman.”

Well perhaps not all of those were said by all parties but you get the gist. The ‘after’ opinion was basically the above but with the tenses changed. There was however one inspired comment about the fact that no games have ever had a lasting positive impact on the host city after the event, at least not without a continual injection of money and maintenance for years afterwards. A sound point.

Then they played the Proclaimers and they also had Deacon Blue representing Scotland. I can’t help thinking that a more contemporary display of talent would be the band my flatmate is in, Go Go Fiasco, and their “Robot Song”. It speaks volumes about the evils of our times and the slippery slope that results from having a circuit-board installed in your head so that you can play heads-up “Mind Tetris” at whim. Or it should.

In general, the winning of the games is a great thing for Glasgow, provided there is no pretence about the reasons that it is good...

Anyway, good on Glasgow, but you can’t help feeling sorry for Abuja in Nigeria, which simultaneously found out that they had lost. I also can’t help feeling that the Nigerians should have put forward Lagos instead. It would have been a riot. I have a strange fixation with Lagos as part of my occasional quest to find the most chaotic city in the world.

Lagos, it has been quoted, is a city of 16 million people and four traffic lights. This is most certainly a lie, as most of the photographs I have seen have many traffic lights. But the place seems genuinely exciting with that added pinch of danger that puts hair on your chest and turns your toe-nails blue and makes your hands shake with adrenalin as you hand over your wallet. In common with Glasgow, they seem to have a great sense of black humour as well: they call their buses Molues and Danfos, the local words for “mobile morgues” and “flying coffins”. I’m sure the corruption adds another playful twist to things. The “From Our Correspondent” section of the BBC News website had a great story a few months ago, in which their correspondent tried to make a journey between two Nigerian cities without handing over any bribes to the police. He was stopped by a policeman at a checkpoint with the familiar expression, “Anything for the boys?” and refused to pay. The policeman then looked about the vehicle, found something spuriously wrong with it (like a mismatching engine number, or something) and fined him a far greater amount. I still want to go though. I once met someone who grew up there and he sold it to me. I’m going to need some serious cash and a Coffin Pass though.

Enough, I have been inspired to forego my haggis supper for a nice bowl of muesli, after which I will triple-jump across the Bells Bridge.

A poncey “third person bit” that makes Kiran feel like an actual columnist not just an opinionated sap sitting on a sofa with frozen feet and a geriatric laptop:

This week, week two of the great job hunt, Kiran pounded the streets with his CV yet again – staying optimistic and feeling like he is getting closer. He watched “Casino” which did not inspire him to commit any acts of brutality, thus proving once and for all that violent films do not inspire violence. Except that horrific thing he did to the toaster with a baseball bat after it started singing about those business deals like a canary. He also watched “The Genius of Photography” on BBC4 which was fucking genius. Reviewing TV is not his forte.

Extreme Taxi Driving

2007-11-07T00:33:00.000Z

Let’s go on to an important and politically significant topic. Taxis. My brief fitful obsession with Martin Scorsese’s excellent film of that name ceased a while ago, but not before I had had the pleasure of visiting our local taxi licencing office. This was nothing like I expected, it had smiling friendly people and carpets and nice cornicing around the walls. No “you’re not here to bust my chops are you?” greeting, instead it was more cosy and cave-like and much warmer than the permafrozen streets all round. That was the airlock part anyway. The other part, which I shall call the control desk, was a little different. I entered a bleak room with security glass along one face, imprisoning two poor women. I stumbled around as if I had been lamped with a deckchair (a double calamity as they fold on you and entrap vital bits of body in their evil grip), and then looked thoughtfully at the list of business and licence rates on the wall. It was with wonderment that I noted that it was possible to purchase a licence from Glasgow City Council to sell venison. Best get the JCB rolling. It has been customised with a javelin pole on the front with which to harpoon deer, though sadly it can only attain 4 mph due to the terminal rust in its axles. And I’m not allowed to keep it in my third floor flat. A shame, as one deer can make over six gallons of soap. They are good at stirring.

At the counter, an obese woman was raising hell and pounding on the glass. It appeared she had been asked to sign something that she really didn’t want to sign. Perhaps the form in front of her was in fact a two-dimensional papier-mache version of her arse, and I defy anyone not to fly off the handle when being told to sign their own arse. Or else, she was supposed to sear her signature into the form with the venom of a stillborn cobra. Though they are in short supply since that shop in Maryhill shut down.

I was being eyed suspiciously by the other counter-woman who wasn’t being abused, so I made my way nonchalantly, and with the utmost of dignity (only tripping once), to the other side of the room, grabbing all the random forms that I could and stuffing them in my rucksack. Pulling off my best non-suspicious walk that I could, (lunging, chin in air like an interior designer), I grunted my goodbye to the nice secretary outside. The forms weren’t quite what I wanted unfortunately. I am no nearer becoming a taxi driver but I am now the proud owner of seven TV licences and a large rotating form-holding rack. The way the moonlight glistens off it as it spins in the night is quite moving, if you’ll excuse the pun. I plan to stock it with “Happy Divorce” cards, which are easy to make. Simply get on the tube in London and photograph the omnipresent pissed-off looking people and mount the photos in coupled male-female combinations on a black background. Ahhh.

But I digress. I was meant to keep this from being too ‘first-person’. And also this was supposed to be about taxis. Therefore, children, please turn to page one of your Evening Times (yesterday, 6 Nov) and you will see an outstanding headline about a taxi driver kidnapping a passenger for not having quite enough money for his fare. In a nutshell: Australian bloke works as chef in centre of Glasgow. Gets wrong bus home in the middle of the night and so ends up in Partick instead of Kelvinbridge, where he lives. Hails cab which drives him the one mile to his flat, but he is one pound short of the £5 (yes, £5 for one mile) fare. Driver locks all the doors and drives him into the pitch black wilderness north of the city some six miles away near Stepps, then gives him a heartfelt death threat and leaves him there to be eaten by wolves. Only the random car that picked him up and drove him to the police station was luckily not being driven by a wolf, and so he lives to tell the tale.

Frayed nerves all round methinks. But also a near-fatal dose of disbelief. If you want to get rid of Australians, this is not an efficient method. As everyone knows, Australians can see in the dark, and round corners. And they always pay their way in a round at the pub so we mustn’t get rid of them. Also, it must have cost a fair bit of diesel to drive someone out to the badlands up north, and it was therefore completely counter-productive. And finally, this driver will be caught. Scour the cameras of Byres Road, Great Western Road and the M8, and the death-cab will be found, in all its raging glory, number plate and all.

So why then? Well the only conclusion must be this: insanity. In particular the red-eyed kind that hides behind the frontal lobes of every driver. Every blinking brake light hides a demon inches away from falling from the tight-rope of civilised behaviour, seconds away from shoving a screwdriver into the face of a fellow lane-sharer. The cross-head kind does more damage, probably. As an experiment: put a live rattlesnake that has been subjected to watching X-Factor repeats in a jam-jar and shake vigorously. No need to use those Clockwork Orange-style eye-opening clamps, as snakes have no eyelids. They even sleep with their eyes open, the devious little satans. Now add a liberal dose of cayenne pepper, and a small tub of salsa. Shake once again. Finally, add a tasty-looking mouse that has been encased in a protective mini-suit of chain mail, just as a final torment. Imagine yourself as the rattlesnake. Now you get the jist of the mood that driving all day can put you in. I have only done this once, in truth, a 14 hour almost non-stop rebound journey from Glasgow to London and back, but by the time I got home I was hallucinating lane markings and wondering how comfortably that motorcyclist on the M6 would fit in my toastie-maker. I even thought about how I better butter both sides of him first so he doesn’t stick. Bastard.

But much has been written on road rage I realise, so I will not go too much further on this, except to say that this particular strain of taxi-hostage-rage is a little more scary. I knew there was a reason I didn’t get in them. You can jump out a rickshaw, the passengers on a bus can submit a hijacking driver to mob justice, and in a train the opportunities are fairly limited. No amount of coercion is going to force the 17:22 Waterloo to Bournemouth train to go to Tel Aviv. A taxi, however, is built for hijacking. Door locks, no rails, one-on-one, and anywhere tarmacked is your oyster.

I suppose I better include one cursory fact about taxis, or you will think you have wasted a terrible few minutes of your life on this hopeless rant. The first ever taxi cab was built in 1897 by Gottlieb Daimler. It was made from soda bread, which contracts as it soaks up water. On finding out the destination, the assistant of the taxi driver, known as a Pathmoistenmonger, would wet the chosen route from a special bucket shaped like a vase and the bread vehicle would then leech slowly along the water path before disintegrating at its destination. Only in the seventies was the combination of metal, wheels and engine considered a suitable replacement.

A last word on hijacking though: About the worst thing to hijack is an underground train. Even worse than Sandra Bullock-endorsed cruise ship hijacking. The film, “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3”, focused on an evil hijacker (no, he had not been influenced by love and affectation for his fellow man) who drove away a subway train at full speed with its terrified passengers as hostages. In fairness, this was the New York City Subway in the 1970’s so being terrified was fairly normal. Among the elements used to spice up the action was someone committing suicide by standing on the electrified rail. This was both intriguing and disappointing. Intriguing as the electricutee seemed to stand there with a grimace solidified on his face, while steam issued from various parts of his upper body. I fancy there would also have been some gurgling and groaning which would have completed the illusion that Japanese businessmen were having a karaoke party in a miniature sauna in his stomach after a long day in the office. And disappointing because it would have been better if he had gone off like a firework, ricocheting off the tunnel wall sides while laughing maniacally as his nerve-endings became infused with sparks of electrical wit.

I’m sure Martin Scorsese could have pulled that off.

Switch the Brain to Binary

2007-11-06T22:39:00.000Z

“Welcome, be seated, and put this non-intrusive head-pan electrode mind-blender upon your bonce.” Or words to that effect. Bless her and her clipboard. The electrodes turn your mind to mush, preparing you for a dour world that is the exploratory equivalent of pot-holing without a light.

“Do not fear monotony, it is only there that you may thrive”, squeaked that really annoying other-personality on my shoulder. The one that, one day, damn it, I am going to poison with weedkiller. “Yes”, she continued, in the voice of a Prozac-addled housewife, gesturing with a rolling pin, curlers in hair, apron on the front, primary-schoolteacher look etched on her scolding face, “Was it not Alexander Solza-wossname that wrote a best-selling novel from within the Gulag? Squeak?” I didn’t answer. Firstly, it seems like ill-respect to compare anything, let alone the perfectly dignified process of data entry, to the Gulag, and secondly, this is a voice in my head. You don’t answer voices in your head out loud, it makes you mental. Not until you get one of those mobile phone ear-pieces and then you can pretend you are talking to a real-life human being through that.

After today I can tell you for a fact that Miss Jane Hurley lives in Marshall Street, Marylebone, London, and that her postcode is NW1 6SE and that she earns £15000 a year. This was a useful thing to know as it meant not having to glance at the bit of paper that I was now tasked with knocking into the hazy screen in front of me as part of my data entry test. I won’t go into how the hell she is expected to live in Marylebone on £15000, because I would be there now if I had the key to that mystery. It certainly doesn’t conform to the hasty number juggling including the 37.5 times table that has been going around my head in the penny-calculating days since my mid-twenties crisis. Perhaps Jane – we’re on first name terms - uses some Imaginary Numbers Tax Credit scheme that kind Mr Brown has guaranteed to people whose ages won’t square root satisfactorily. Apologies for that geek-joke that will alienate me from 99% of my audience. It’s just you and me now, little disembodied fingernail reader. Don’t give up on me fingernail, it’s things like you that keep the world turning.

Sorry, ANYWAY, a while later, still sat in front of the computer, I noticed a gurgling sound. This was seriously disrupting my already knotted fingers, and appeared to stem from a small rodent emerging from the disk drive under the desk. I say appeared, but my eyes need testing, I should probably have mentioned that. I think aiming a large laser at my eye, as is the future of microwave technology might I add, may solve the problem. At £500 per eye, this is probably the most expensive on-off switch ever devised, but I digress. The gurgling sound was in fact muffled instructions issuing from the pair of headphones that I had neglected to notice on the desk in front of me. These had been blurting instructions for all of 15 minutes now. Balls. Looking around me at the watchful waiting room, I waited until no one was looking then grasped noisily at the headphones, ensuring that all eyes turned suddenly in my direction. Fantastic. Someone working there scribbled something. Paranoia set in. It’s fragrant juices set about my veins, warning all my organs to seize up and do something irrational. My pancreas successfully created nuclear fusion, my liver briefly synthesised an enzyme that could have jump-started the cure for leukaemia. My brain simply fucked off and went for a walk, paying due attention to the Green Cross Code.

What now? Jumping out a first floor window onto spiked victorian railings did not seem like an attractive way to escape / die, though it would have looked good in a novel.
Never mind, keep typing. Why the hell does everyone in this pseudo-data live in Milton Keynes? Are they trying to tell me something? Are they trying to warn me that this bleak un-ambitioned existence will end with me slumped, company-branded manacle round my neck, on the island of some retail park mini-roundabout, while planes fly a few feet overhead dropping tonne after tonne of blue ice on my rapidly decaying corpse? And despite taking the test in Scotland, every address was in England. I would like to think that the English version of the data entry test had a few treats like Tighnabruich, Crianlarich, Auchenshuggle and another fourteen-letter place not typeable on normal keyboards because it uses secret characters discovered by a fisherman that were inscribed on the underside of a wooden bridge by morals-obssessed trolls near the source of the River Dee and is pronounced “Ugh”. Go to the keyboard settings and select “Gaelic Moral Troll Mindfuck Helvetica”, font size 12. I’m writing a play about it called “Gone With the Sinned”.

I found my brain, ice cream in lobe, at the corner of St Vincent Street and Wellington Street where it was gleefully misdirecting a tourist couple towards the motorway footbridge with no end. I pulled the electrodes out and gave it a stern telling off before collapsing from the blood loss in my crater-like head. I woke up on the floor of my flat a short time ago in a daze and started typing. So excuse any grammatical inaccuracies.

What now?

2007-11-03T10:22:00.000Z

Hello, whoever you are,

There is no bugle for the first post, only for the last. In any case this is an experiment, and it would not seem right to introduce musical instruments at this stage. Even the oboe would seem a little flamboyant.

Firstly, I should thank Lauren of Angel in London for dragging me kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century and telling me that this is undoubtedly the way forward. It still feels like the parchment from my nineteenth century endeavours is still wet from ink. In any case, that printing shop in Fleet Street closed and became an orphanage, a tannery and finally a home for retired newts, and is therefore of little use to me.

You should go and read Lauren's blog, Credible Witness, which I will link to when my decrepit brain finds out what button to push, or whatever. It has a video of Sweep drumming, among other things, and it is essential to know about such things if we are to arm ourselves adequately for the challenges ahead in these capricious times.

So why do I have a blog then? Is it some egotistical method of throwing myself into the public domain, with all the exhibitionism of a wildly gesticulating man, hanging by one hand from the bridge parapet? Perhaps. Though this assumes that there is an audience in the first place. But enough of this bullshit pseudo-philosophy. I'm sure the real reasons will come out in due course. I suppose I better do something vaguely creative, and so here is a 'poem'. I promise never to do something like this again:

"Maybe the paradox is that,
To touch the highest heights,
We must find the deepest edge.

Maybe the paradox is that,
To be truly good,
We must have suffered.

Maybe the paradox is that,
Though there appears to be no reason for life,
We must live it virtuously.

I caught a fish yesterday,
It was this big."

Now stick two fingers down your throat and waggle those droopy bits until the retch reaction has been invoked. Ah, doesn't that feel better?

In the last few weeks, the mantra, "follow your dreams", has been slowly replaced by a more realistic, "know your limits" - for me anyway. In this vein, I have moved out of the Big Smoke, for the greyer surroundings of Glasgow, land of perennial rain and fried foods. Who knows what will happen next, it is all an adventure, and the least that can be said for it is that a change is as good as a rest. People who know me will testify that I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact in a drawer full of knives, I am probably more like a lone chopstick. Not to say that a lone chopstick is entirely useless. For one thing, it is very good for extracting marrow from the bone of a lamb, but I did always hope that my life would amount to something more than marrow-poking.

Enough, as the first real post, I have felt it acceptable to set down some completely subjective information. Of no use to anyone but myself. Of course, this is the written equivalent of dribbling porridge out both sides of your mouth and it is not the intended purpose of this blog. Hopefully you will forgive me one introductory indulgence before we get down to business.

Talking of which, I had a business idea. We all know of the age-old problem of anti-social neighbours. You know, the ones who practice dentistry next door with industrial jack-hammers, while shooting skag into their disintegrating, pulsing veins and lighting small fires on the floorboards to keep warm, having ripped out all of the heating system's copper piping in their flat to pay for said skag, performing excorcisms with gongs, crucifying llamas (they die noisily), chain-sawing light fittings, hanging pets from windows and hitting them with carpet beaters (where the hell do they buy them from? I haven't seen them in the Argos catalogue), and all the while managing to enter your subconscious thoughts during the six minutes of sleep you manage to salvage as pig-tailed demons wielding vacuum cleaners. I know you fellow city-dwellers have all experienced the same.

The answer is a revolutionary new sound-insulation product called ASBOstos. Whack that up all your walls and you need never worry about the bastards next door again. Until they drill through the partition wall, your head-board, and finally the soft lumpy material that separates your brain from the vigours of the outside world. It should buy you some time. I am too inept to run a business though, sadly, so will stick purely to manufacture. It will be made from cotton wool, peanut butter, metal gauze and the eye of a newt. Perhaps that place in Fleet Street has a purpose after all.

Anyway, better go and continue the search for a job. I am thinking, "town crier". So if you see me chained to the front of the City Chambers in Glasgow with shell-suit clad youths throwing dog excrement my way, you will know I gave it a shot. If not you will know what you always suspected, that these are only words.

"Eleven o'clock, and all's well."