Organised stupidity

A friend of mine has a house with a garden behind it. At the bottom of his garden is a fence. Beyond this is a kind of lush green no-mans land of overgrown thicket, bramble, fox-shit and numberless footballs, tennis balls, Frisbees and shuttlecocks that his kids have kicked, thrown and generally twatted over that fence. Then another fence and then an alleyway before more houses, streets and so on start. So, Houses, gardens, ribbon of fence, ribbon of green inhabited by overgrown undergrowth, abandoned athletic equipment and probably the occasional cat corpse, next ribbon of fence, alleyway and so on.

The fence between the green space and the alley is useful. It provides much-needed security, basically it’s an anti-scally measure and means that the sort of people who use alleys have to scale it if they want to gain access to the Lost World, allowing them the opportunity to sidle up to my mate’s garden fence and, oh, I don’t know, touch themselves while watching him barbeque, or poke their winkies through a knot-hole and pee on his hardy perennials.

So my mate was quite surprised to see council workmen removing this perfectly good fence. So much so he asked them what the fucking fuck they fucking thought they were fucking doing.

The workmen did not a) speak Tourettes or b) know, so my mate was directed to the council offices. There, some poor drone really earned their council-tax funded wage, as he wrung out of them that it was being removed to ‘increase security’.

This did not go down well. But he was powerless to reverse the decision, trapped in a web of fuck-wittery like a foul-mouthed Kafka character.

The punchline comes a month later when, it being council election time, a fuckwit councillor rings his doorbell and asks if she can rely on his vote. Apparently he made Paxman look like Parkie as he grilled her on the doorstep about the fence and enquired if the missing panels had been put to use anywhere else, like her back garden?

‘Of course not!’ Came the reply,
‘Pity, there was graffiti on one that said ‘cunt’. Good day.’
SLAM
‘And I’m voting bloody green!’

In praise of...J.K.Rowling

The sad death of Alaistair Cook some years ago deprived Britain of a fine diplomat, the world of a fine communicator and the BBC of not just a fine broadcaster but the presenter of a programme that was as much a fixture of Radio 4’s Friday night schedule as the Shipping Forecast – ‘letter from America’.

Cook’s distinctive style and voice have been replaced with the same sort of opinion pieces from others – last night it was the turn of Clive James, the amiable Aussie semi-professional fattie to talk to the nation. I only heard the last five minutes of his show but it was gripping – a discussion about how the deserved success of J.K. Rowling was a slap in the face to any aspiring writer who complained that they did not have success. The point, I think, was that inspiration and talent and hard work will out – so stop winging about the perceived success of what are considered to be pot-boiler authors and get writing, or stop moaning.

He was, of course, right.

Spoilers – go no further if you have not read the Harry Potter books and want to one day.

I’ve just finished ‘Deathly Hallows’ and thought it was a great book – it gave the fans what they wanted and it gave this fan EXACTLY what he wanted – Snape redeemed, Hogwarts finally used as a castle in the true sense and, best of all, Neville Longbottom revealed as the truly kick-arse superpowerful magician that he was hinted to be in the earlier books. And the epilogue is a fine touch.

Spoilers end

I thought the writing was great. I know that the cycle of books is finished, but think that there are still stories to be told about Harry Potter at Hogwarts – for me, the magic of the early books especially was the introduction of the wizarding world. It would be good to see some short stories from J.K., dipping into different years at Hogwarts, with Harry as the central or even tangential character – a stylistic trick pulled off with some panache by Terry Practchett in the books where Sam Vimes of Ahnk-Morpork city watch is not the main protagonist as in the early books but is seen through the eyes of others.

I’ve seen J.K. interviewed a couple of times and she always struck me as a serious woman. I guess that creative people are serious, and defensive about their art – their creations, as others are about their children.

Artists, writers and some musicians have this approach – those that are inspired and conjure something from nothing. Few actors do I think, relying as they do on everyone from the writer to tell them what to say to sound good, through the director to tell them how to feel so that can appear normal and finally, possibly most importantly, the lighting guy so they can look ten years younger and not quite so addicted to crack, fags and late nights shagging groupies in dingy night-clubs.

The latest Harry Potter book was, to understate, much anticipated – I think fans are already starting to anticipate J.K.s next book. I think the question is not will she write one, I think the question is, when?

Line two, what's your answer?

There must be people (I imagine, I’m not going to waste one second actually conducting research when I can just throw out an opinion the way a fat kid throws away a McDs wrapper) who are slow to anger, who go through life neither blowing their stack on a regular basis nor, for that matter, burst into tears of joy when shopping for ‘sorry you’re leaving’ cards and find just the perfect one. People, in other words, whom have their emotional thermostats set at room temperature.

I don’t think I’m one of them…not even when I’m sober.

I came close to suspecting I might be one last week. Two stories emerged that, if you believe the media, rock the very fabric of society and, if you believe the opinion of everyone else, not only fit into the slot neatly occupied by such headlines as ‘sky is blue’ and ‘water is wet shock’, but enshrined forever the principle that what is important in one village (in this case the media village and the Westminster village), is not important in that other village known as ‘the rest of the world’. Like local fame, shagging goats in one village does not make you a celebrity across the entire county…unless you take your goat-shagging act on the road and stump up a substantial advertising budget.

The first story was about ‘phone votes and ‘phone-in competitions on the BBC being rigged. Weeks ago the commercial channels had been exposed as rigging votes like bastards. As this was happening on the same channel that ‘Pop Idol’ airs on and everyone remembers it was won by a fat lass last year, so vote-rigging was a surprise to only a few people in a secure ward.

But the BBC. Christ alive! Could we believe anything that they said ever again – because it appears that a couple of competitions were rigged! This cast doubt over everything else…was the news coverage of the Gulf War fair? Was that vase on Antiques Roadshow genuine ming? Is Dawn French really that fat?

The outrage, I guess, is based on the idea that as licence fee payers we are supporting our own rip off, but worse than that, the BBC had compromised their integrity, which they swiftly attempted to make up for in an act of self-immolation worthy of some of the stranger web-sites available. Every news bulletin broadcast by the BBC carried the fiasco as their top story. There was no need, as all the Murdoch ‘press’ were already putting the boot in – though why the papers and news don’t just have ‘watch Sky’ printed in the top right hand corner of the page and screen is beyond me. Too subtle?

Personally, I couldn’t give a toss. Nor, I think, could anyone else. If this had been something that somebody had cared about, like rigging the national lottery, then the only thing to do would be to get down Television centre with some spuds wrapped in foil and cook them in the embers of whatever was left of the building.

The only thing I’ve voted in and cared about the result was ‘restoration’ – posh persons Pop Idol where you vote to save a building. Oh, and ‘any dream will do’. I voted for Lee, he won the part of Joseph and my wife is watching him on stage tonight in the show. So…where’s the rip-off (apart from £50 a ticket for an old show!).

Oh, and the other thing? No prosecutions in cash for honours. Police criticised for investigating but not prosecuting…possibly by the sort of people that think that a police investigation should take two hours, take place in a picturesque part of England and end up with the conviction of the one you suspected right from the start, because she used to be in that sit-com.

Who is Kaiser Soeze?

Like it, loath it or remain indifferent to it, it’s generally accepted that the Harry Potter books are a publishing phenomenon. Speaking as somebody who started reading them before the hype really started (I read about them in The Guardian, the point of the article being that Bloomsbury had taken the unusual step of publishing this book with child and adult covers), I was quite pleased to see them become more and more popular and think that the midnight release thing is quite cool.

After a night on the toot, I was passing Tesco at midnight on the night of the last book’s release and called in, with all the other children high on sleep deprivation and excitement, to pick up my copy. What was fun about it was that the security guard at the store, no doubt used to wrestling people trying to shoplift frozen chickens to the ground for his £5.52 an hour, was standing beside the carton he had no doubt just ripped open with the style of the Queen unveiling a plaque on a new school, smiling and looking pleased as punch. The whole episode was quite charming.

The problem was always going to be the embargo and avoiding spoilers with the last book - with Bloomsbury unable to threaten a Howler or, worse, no access to the following volumes in the series, on anyone who released plot details and so on. The news reports that reviews of the book released ahead of its publication include spoilers, the question is…why?

The answer is, because the people who do this sort of thing are shits. There has always been the sort of people who take their seat in the cinema for a performance of a movie that hangs on a plot twist, and stage whispers that twist it to a friend - from Psycho to the 6th sense, I firmly hope that such people were battered to death with clubs crudely fashioned from popcorn containers and the legs of cinema chairs.

The collection of news to print in newspapers costs money, you have to send journalists to many pubs where they ply informants with drinks until the story comes out (trade secret - shorthand isn’t actually shorthand, it’s just a collection of indecipherable squiggles penned while pissed). So much easier just to flip to the last chapter of a book, piss all over the expectations and excitement of children and go down the pub.

I speak with authority, as the man who told his nephew, on Christmas Day, that Santa did not exist (oops!), that this sort of spoiler is a crass act. Whatever else the HP books may be, they are entertaining for kids. I can, however, understand why certain types would want to spoil that - it’s because the same defective character trait that led them to be the sort of journalist that hates the rest of the world, yet doesn’t realise how much more the rest of the world now hates them, and thinks they have scored a point. By spoiling things for children.

Do you know what they do to that sort of person in prison?

"Your Issue Here"

Sometimes it seems as though modern life contrives to irritate the hell out of one. Irritations, I think, are governed by the same sort of immutable laws that govern physics, but without smart arses like Einstein or heroes like Scotty around to challenge them.

One of the laws is that irritations become more irritating at a rate somewhere between cumulatively and exponentially - at a rate that could be dubbed the catastrophe curve. For instance, an annoying ring tone may be a minor irritation, but coming on top of a stubbed toe, a fatuous remark by a deejay, playing ‘hunt the housekeys’ and a sprint for the train, the theme tune to ‘sex and the city’ ringing out loudly could well see the owner of the mobile being pitched out the train window - no mean feat as they don’t actually open.

The second law of irritation is that things become irritating if you put them in inverted commas.

(Not, you understand, that anything in inverted commas can ever be as irritating as those people who actually PUT things in inverted commas when they are talking to you. Anyone mining punctuation near me is in great danger of my miming my own particular band of kung-fu grammar I call punchuation, not least because they are usually saying things like ‘and just because I put up a poster of Hitler in the office, apparently I’m some sort of [mime] racist [unmime]’.)

For instance, at the moment, it’s Summer. More precisely, it’s “Summer.” Summer is fishing the parasol out of the shed and using the barbeque for cooking for three weeks in a row. “Summer” is the sort of weather we are currently experiencing and is heralded by the ritual of chanting ‘are you f**king kidding!’ every time the weather forecast comes on.

The only thing more irritating than the use of inverted commas where they are not required is not using them when they should be - case in point, the front cover of glossy magazine promising celebrity photographs. This should actually read “celebrity*” “photographs**” where * is ‘some woman off a soap’ and ** means ‘fuzzy long-lens grainy images of a woman, yes, yes we’re pretty sure it’s a woman, in a bikini, well, half of a bikini - at least we’re pretty sure she’s topless, could just be the way the shadow is falling.’ Indeed, one could say that these “magazines” are shite - no inverted commas required.

The exception that proves this rule. Occasionally I enjoy leaving the office and meeting a colleague for “lunch”. Lunch means a sandwich, snack or soup. “Lunch” involves a relaxed examination of the brewers art. Oddly, I now refer to such excursions as lunch, the dropping of the inverted commas lending the impromptu trip to the pub a much needed respectability I feel.

Bring on Puss in Boots for God’s sake!

The widening of the media funnel, to allow more effluent than ever to wash up in our front rooms, like King Augeas' stables or, you know, a Sheffield sitting-room, has had the effect of democratizing celebrity to the extent that anyone can be a celebrity. Now, we need classification of celebrity, A list, B list and, er, the rest.

It probably didn’t used to be like that. Either you were famous, or you weren’t. If your fame went beyond your village, then your fame was probably deserved. Famous in your own village = a reputation for lifting cows or buggering ducks. Famous beyond your own village = sank an enemy fleet, with your breath.

Now, you have people who are famous, people who are ‘famous’, people who are stars, superstars, megastars and so on. I guess what it boils down to is this – if your name is above the title, or bigger on the book jacket than the title of the book – you’re famous. Anything else, you’re a celebrity, whether it means you act in a soap or did something amusing with marmite on a reality tee vee programme.

There’s nothing odd with people wanting to be famous – what is odd is that people appear to set their sights low these days and see real currency in being a celebrity. It’s shocking – people have realized that there is no way they can be Jack Nicholson (and let’s face it, it must be pretty hard being the sort of ageing, fat actor who’s finest moment was gurning like a drooling fool through a doorframe) so they want to be the sort of celebrity pictured dismounting from a limo with no knickers on – and that’s just the blokes.

The currency of celebrity of being spent at present by Boris ‘tosser’ Johnson, the shambling idiot that occasionally breaks cover as an MP long enough to make tactless remarks about grief while bending lithesome colleagues across his desk at the rag he ‘edits’. Many a journo has worried about being ‘spiked’ by Boris. Apparently he thinks that bumbling loonery and the occasional appearance on telly is enough for him to be considered a candidate as mayor of London.

Mayor…of London. So, Boris, what would your reaction be to a terrorist outrage in the capital? Getting a f**king haircut would be a start.

Boris is an excellent example of the media saying something so often: in this case – ‘he’s really clever’, that the addled twat must believe it himself. The problem is that we will now be subject to his deranged rantings during the election.

Still, I bet the media are loving it. Shame for Londoners – Ken will be re-elected no doubt, but it would be good to see the opposition parties put up a decent candidate, Dick Wittington’s cat, for instance?

RHS Hampton Court 2007 - the cocktail!

There’s no doubt that all the gardens, show and otherwise, at the RHS show at Hampton Court were immaculate. Some were spectacular, some beautiful, some more than others. And some had bars!

"Waiters start to worry what will happen when the booze runs out."

There’s a lot you can do with a smallish plot, and one of the common themes this year appeared to be sticking a bar in the corner of it and giving away booze in the hope of a) securing the ‘people’s choice’ prize through outright bribery or b) getting one of the increasingly schloshed crowd to sign up to buying a crate of whatever it was you were giving away in thimble-full glasses.

From a drinking point of view – the day went well, starting at the Gran-marnier garden with the established tactic of ‘one for me, one for my friend’, then on through sherry, onto Australian reds, whites and sparkling before a soft landing at the excellent Torres garden and some robust Spanish red.

"Olives are delicious...obviously somebody must come up with some way of making alcohol from them!"

Remarking to a couple of welly-sporting women in front of me at the booze queue at one of the gardens ‘I believe there are plants here too’, they fixed me with a look and replied ‘really? We only come for the clothes.’. Obviously they are refugees from the Country Living tent.

There was a lot that was remarkable about this year’s show. I loved the many ‘drought resistant’ gardens, especially those being pumped out given the constant rain in the last months. I loved the ‘conservative values’ garden, the Oak, the bedding plants shaped like a British fields, the tree that doubles as a lynching post for asylum seekers and the secueters that can be used to castrate crims – but best of all the thick hedges for upper class tories to have sex with call-girls behind.

"Ah, a grove of metal trees...what was in that last gin?"

The day ended very well at the Country Living tent with the purchase of sausages and organic Gin. Not only was this gin good for me, it was good for the environment and the economy of the organic world, I was helping pandas and polar bears by buying gin….or something. One thing is for sure, the guy on the stall made the greatest small gin and tonics – the sample glasses are lilliputan and are normally filled with neat gin (they are the size of a shot glass). I insisted he make me a gin and tonic and I could see that he was glad that he’s had the request, as he profusely apologised for having no lime. I cursed him for a barbarian and drank my gin.

When one tired of helping penguins, one could redress the balance and visit the British Airways stall. Here were two club class seats and, judging by the number of people having their photograph taken in them, reclining with their bottles of gin (or was that just me?), I think BA profits are set to rise, even if, because of security scares, their aeroplanes do not.


"This year's Gold Medal for fricking creepy stall...stone children! Aggghhhhhh, Aggghhhh! Stone children! Children that have been petrified by the witch at the end of the village! No? Just me? Well, the stall owner looked like some sort of ciramic peado!"

Tropical Downpour? Call Al Gore!

Surrey has been experiencing what Government scaremongers are pleased to call ‘an extreme weather event’, the rest of us call rain and I call ‘a f**king downpour’. You know that scene when Gene Kelley stands under that downspout during the wonderful ‘singing in the rain’ sequence from the eponymous film (gay test: worried your son likes musicals more than hunting? Show him ‘singing in the rain’ and ask him his opinion. If he rates it as anything less than ‘fantastic’, shoot him – better a poof than somebody with no taste, as my Uncle Janice used to say), it was just like that. Gutters overflowed and you could see the rain sheeting off the roof tiles.

We got about a weeks’ rain in ten minutes. The reaction to this is a useful measure of where you are on the civilization scale. If your thoughts run along the lines of ‘This will do the grazing in the lower paddock no end of good’, then essentially, you don’t have to worry. If you think ‘shit, that sounds like a mud slide – I wonder if my hut wall will hold it back?’ – then you should really look to moving to high ground and a first world country with an economy that’s not based on anything you put in a mug and stir.

Most of us probably fall somewhere in between (I was worried about my recently planted tomato plants on my allotment), but all of us are, I hope, agreed on one thing, getting caught in the rain leading to jumping about and grinning only happens in Hollywood films written, and acted, by people so stoned off their tits that the most common form of dampness they experience is when they pee themselves when high and don’t notice until they come to on the floor of their home if they are lucky or the cell they now share with ‘Bubba’ if they are not.

So while I can admire the power of nature, I’m of an age now where the sensation of wet clothing sticking to my body is like that moment when you brush up against a wet shower curtain and it sticks to you – but all over. That scene in the shower in Psycho – those screams were real, Hitch pushed a wet clammy shower curtain up against Janet Leigh again and again and again. The only good time for the heavens to open is when somebody suggests returning to the office after this lunchtime pint, or when the commentator says ‘England surely hoping that something happens here that will force the draw.’

In praise of...Alan Johnson

What I loved about this chap was ther when he had to do the YouTube video address to camera while surrounded by sticks of dynamite...he did it as if he was filing a BBC report.

I almost expected him to end it with 'now back to Moira in the studio'.

Craporism

This entry brought to you courtesy of four pints of Badger, one pint of Hancock’s and one pint of some organic stuff.

There’s only one thing worse than a terrorist threat, and that’s a crap terrorist threat.

Seriously, some mad-arse with a grudge against god knows what tried to let off a car bomb outside Tiger Tiger. I’ve drunk in Tiger Tiger mate and, here’s the news flash, the ground floor (where your bomb would have done the most damage) consists of a coat-check and a coke vending machine.

The bars are all upstairs. For instance, the last time I was up there I was drinking on the fifth floor. The windows were like slits in a Medieval castle and the walls are Edwardian two foot thick jobs - good luck cracking that one. If you want to let off a bomb, make sure you do it off-beat so we notice.

There were two great moments in the Great Glasgow Bombing. The first was when the tosser who decided to fill his car with 4-star and drive with his head poking out the sunroof and 200 gallons of unleaded swilling around in the car heard the cigar lighter go ‘ping’ and just had time to think ‘oh shi’ before he was rolling on the floor and thanking the nice policeman putting him out. But the second was when the same bloke was PROFOUNDLY grateful for being surrounded by police when 800 Easyjet customers on their way to a stag do in Prague realised they had been delayed by the crisped tosser in the jeep and had to be held back from giving him a fast-track to ‘martyrdom’, if that includes death by kicking.

Certainly, these arseholes are worthy of our contempt and once again I wonder if the correct response to middle-class terrorism is for anyone wronged by them (flight delays, singing etc.) to see if they can’t just get compensation in the form of their house or off their home insurance. I mean, I think I’ve got some sort of insurance cover for my accidently hurting somebody, so surely it’d be pretty hard to deny a claim where your client rammed a jeep into your building.

Oh, and while we’re talking about this - if it had been a Land Rover, there would have been none of this. Okay, so it would have exploded through the terminal building and so on, but if the petrol HAD gone off, the blast would have been contained inside the car. Unless the windows were down.

I can’t stand the rain…

Okay, it’s time to break out the snorkel and check the new-born for webbed fingers. I know it’s Wimbledon-time but this is taking the piss. It’s raining!

No, I mean it’s like St Swithen and Noah looking out and saying ‘better take an umbrella’. It’s wet. But the wet is coming in ten minute packages. And it’s a week’s wet! It’s so wet I was draining my rain-barrel into the drain. It’s so wet I was battling ants who were driven by the water into my house (so far the winner appears to be me and my mastic gun sealing every micro-crack at the back of the house, but they are sneaky bastards).

It’s so wet that I almost, almost, regret putting lawn feed on my lawn a couple of weeks ago, when it started raining. One word: meadow.

Bald patches, moss, clover, bare patches, those patches where I hammered the gazebo into last summer…all gone. Fertiliser and a LOT of water = knee high grass.