Let's get wed!

This morning, shambling back through the park after a Saturday morning run, sweating chablis, we wandered past the park’s popular wedding reception venue and, being nosy buggers, nebbed through the windows to see if it was set for a do.  The bright March sunlight reflected back from snow-white tablecloths and made pleasingly large wine glasses twinkle.  The colour scheme, it would appear, was purple. 
This caused some debate with references to pensioners, Jenny Joseph and Bridget Jones.  Who, we wondered, had a marriage with a whiff of lavender?  One of our party snapped their fingers and announced ‘Gays.  It’s the village’s first gay wedding’.
Parking possibly offensive sexual stereotyping, discussion moved straight to universal surprise that gay marriage should finally become a reality under a conservative government, and not only a tory government, but under a prime minister so Maggiesque that some suspect him of being whipped up in a lab, cultured from a greasy bit of Thatcher’s handbag.
The introduction of gay marriage was, of course, David Cameron’s big idea to de-toxify the image of the Conservative party, and I am sure that Dave is pleased as punch that this has happened in the same week that the very same Conservative party have banned toddlers sending their parents home-made birthday cards if mum or dad are in prison, a move so despicable that it led the Taliban to issue a rare press release, simply stating ‘steady on’, possibly.
Gay marriage is very welcome, but of course is also a safe policy to introduce, as if you answer to the question ‘should people be discriminated against simply because of their sexual orientation?’ ‘yes’ then that puts you on the same spectrum as people who don’t think girls should be educated, an UKIP.
The news was full of midnight weddings, including one glorious clip of a couple of chaps who had just got hitched, with one confessing he couldn’t remember it clearly as it was all a ‘blur’.  Every single husband in the world listening to that clip interpreted the moment of silence that followed that statement as the bloke’s new husband thinking ‘wait ‘till I get you home!’.  Welcome to married life chaps.
Of course, there are those who are not in favour of gay marriage, such as that UKIP buffoon who claimed that the Prime Minister’s plans to introduce gay marriage caused the floods.  I understand that UKIP are climate change deniers but this was taking things to a whole new level and, if one wanted to enter the whole gay marriage/meteorological effect debate, one might remark that 29 March 2014 sees England in glorious sunshine and, even if it had rained, chances are there would have been a rainbow somewhere, which would have been appropriate too.
Of course, what drove the tories might have been the realisation that marriage is good for the economy.  By that, I don’t mean that the institution of marriage leads to the sort of stability that economists like, but that it costs a fucking fortune to get hitched.  From the rings to the bummymoon, the gay marriage boom will be a welcome shot in the arse for business from jewellers to travel agents and, from the look of it this morning, manufacturers of purple food dye.
Apparently there are a few religious types who aren’t very keen on gay marriage, considering that the proper place for a same-sex relationship is between a catholic priest and choirboy.  Luckily, as I heard somebody say in sentence that killed any further debate stone dead, marriage is a function of the state, not of the church.  Anyone about to argue differently suddenly had anyone who got hitched in a registry office quietly cough behind them, and that was that.  I strongly suspect that, ironically, anyone suggesting that a couple who were not married in church are not married in the eyes of god would feel some spectacular Old Testament wrath, or at the very least, some Church of England indifference.  At the end of the day, it probably only matters if you are married in the eyes of the people you love, who have your John Lewis gift-list.  Oh, and probably the tax man too.  And Ikea.

Hard time, no Hard Times

Pickled predators and bisected bovines do not impress me, nor do unmade tents or embroidered beds.  I am not a fan of the YBAs who are, if not yet quite OAPBAs, certainly now MORBAs.
Nor am I a fan of VYBAs, a group who, denied conventional gallery space, appear to exhibit their work on the partitions of open plan office veal crates, countless fridge doors and occasionally framed on the wall in the home of indulgent to the point of misguided middle class parents.
Apparently the best selling reproduction of an artwork (that's 'postcard' for those of you not fluent in bollocks), unjustly unseating that poster of that bird playing tennis scratching her arse, is that one of the butler and the dancing couple on the beach.  But I'm not so sure.  Based on personal observation the most popular artwork in the homes of, certainly couples aged twenty five to forty, is a dun-coloured splodge of paint radiating a few spidery lines with the word 'Dady' crudely crayoned in the corner.
Denied a traditional commercial foothold in the art world, it's surprising that VYBAs appear to be responsible for such a large amount of the output of the greeting card sector.  Possibly this is because it is considered charming, and socially acceptable, for a child to labour over a piece of folded A4 with some paint and glitter, the result bringing a tear to the eye of many an affected relative, possibly encouraged by their third breakfast birthday sherry of the morning.  A cynic might remark that if the little sod hadn't spunked their pocket money on Haribo, they might have been able to spring for a decent, shop bought card, possibly featuring a beloved syndicated cartoon cat or a vintage photograph with a humorous caption.
What's undeniable is that the are occasions when a hand-made card featuring splodges, glitter and ill-spelled words of affection are of incalculable value (maybe that's why the work of VYBAs does not appear in galleries, the owners find it hard to calculate their commission of affection), most importantly when a parent is separated from their child.  A child can't write you a two-thousand word letter with news from home like your mother, or send you racy poleroids of themselves in their scanties like your partner, but when it comes to communicating love across distance, a little bit of glitter of a bit of folded coloured card goes a long way to letting you know you're being thought of on your birthday when you are far from home, or worse, far from a Greggs.
Which is why the Government's policy of preventing prisoners receiving home-made cards would appear to be actual, calculated, wickedness.
Prisoners are possibly the one group in this country that the Government can penalise even more freely than public sector workers, who at least have a union to speak for them.  The latest announcement from the Home Office (once described by Armando Iannucci as 'twinned with Mordor', a joke far too good not to repeat here and often) is that prisoners may no longer receive books as presents from the outside world.  Apparently they have to work in the salt mines or whatever to earn the cash to buy such 'luxuries' (good to see the policies of the Department for Education, which has long considered books in state schools luxuries, spreading, like a shitty tide).  Que outraged Bleats on Blather from outraged authors, and not just the ones popular in prison like Jeff Archer, condemning this, Bleats which also revealed that this policy extends to packages containing underwear and, wait for it, home-made birthday cards.
In a masterclass of evasiveness, twisting like a sweating peado in a vigilant's head-lock, the prisons minister, when interviewed on BBC Radio 4s Toady programme, managed to not answer any questions about withholding literature, banning pants and penalising small children squarely.  In this, it's fair to say, he was ably assisted by the presenter who missed the most obvious question, the question the listening nation was shouting in a collective cloud of teadrops, toast crumbs and marmite fumes, which was 'what the actual fuck?'.
Apparently, the news from the Home Office is that searching packages going into prisons takes resource.  Yes, yes it does.  But that's why you have people in prisons who aren't prisoners.
I don't, thank goodness, know much about prisons.  But I do know that you have to check stuff.  Cakes, they have to be X-rayed to ensure that there are no files in them.  Outgoing laundry trucks have to be searched or, if time is precious, randomly stabbed with a pitchfork.  Vaulting horses have to be looked under in exercise yards.  You even have to check the attic from time to time for evidence of glider.
All these are sensible measures, but banning children's cards to their parent is just cruel.  What the fuck is the danger, are they afraid the con is going to sniff the glue securing the glitter?
The underwear thing is ridiculous too.  Unless the state is going to provide fresh undies for everyone.  One Bleat from a woman was making the point that if you stop gifts of underwear, you have to rely on the state for scanties.  Municipal pants sound about as grim as it gets, but not as grim as having to rely on municipal bras.  As we have seen, anyone relying on this administration for support of any kind if fucked.
The book ban is even more sinister than it is ignorant, and that's going some.  Apparently inmates can buy 'approved' books from a 'catalogue'.
I am so appalled by the idea I can barely type.
But...
What the fuck!  Who is choosing what people can and cannot read?  Possibly the only fucking benefit to society of incarcerating somebody other than getting wrong-un's off the streets and seeing justice done is to have somebody come out of prison a better person than they went in, and I don't see a restricted reading list helping that?  And what's in the catalogue?  Government approved books.  Is this fucking North Korea?
I'm no fan of this government, but this really is the lowest sort of unjustifiable, petty, vindictive and short-sighted unmitigated bollocks.

Village people

There are many good reasons to read Dickens.  His novels are a tremendous source of fabulous names, any of which are useful as an alias during that tricky time at the start of a relationship when you don’t want to commit too much, like giving your real name, such a period usually lasting between three weeks and five years.  Ironically, given the names Dickens usually ascribed his characters, if you do find a girl who is apparently willing to hook up with you and chance going through life as ‘Mrs Fizzyclotter’, then that gal’s a keeper.
Another reason is to see the changes that have happened to England, for instance the description of a walk from the centre of London, across some fields, to reach the village of Camden.  My understanding is that there are now no fields between the centre of London and Camden now, although there are apparently a shedload of 4x4s, despite that lack of agriculture.
The march towards modernity has seen suburbs swell to encapsulate villages and it’s a curious phenomenon when new neighbourhoods flow around an established village, leaving it untouched.
A standard issue village comes with a church, pub, post office and an idiot.  Ducking stool and pond are optional, but essential is the villager mentality, typified by rightly despising anyone who lives beyond the speed limit and ‘Britain in bloom’ signs that mark the village borders.  This is a mind-set that, if we’re being generous, we could say originated in the age of the Plague, when anyone from outside the village was treated with suspicion and a stranger with a cough was stoned to death on the spot, with disinfected rocks.
Villagers jealously guard their status, which is why the latest missive from the Post Office, or post office inc. or post office ltd. or whatever the hell it’s now called, was an interesting and provocaative proposal to grant the name of the village to the wider area.  We are assured that this will not have any effect on post codes or the actual postal address, it’s just that we can all, officially, add another line to our address, but that line is the name of the local village.
Mainly, those that don’t live in the village view this as a good thing as it means a couple of things; a posher address and a couple of grand on your house value. 
For the villagers, it’s most probably seen as the dilution of identity. 
For anyone who lives outside the village who has aspirations of one day living in the village itself, it’s nothing short of an outrage, as the correct way to obtain a village address is to, you know, actually move there, rather than tick a box.
I’ve lived in villages, proper villages, they have a pub at each end, a church in the middle, a small store with a post office counter at the back and a green.  (Never saw an idiot though, although my neighbours at the time did mention one).  They also have fields at the end of the road between you and a farm and the next village, which you never visit, because those plague-carrying bastards can’t be trusted.
There are also hamlets.  Typically a few houses that have sort of huddled together for company, these are communities that once simultaneously aspired to village status but didn’t want to spoil the ‘character’ of the place but now, like everyone, just want broadband.
The vote will most probably swing in the direction of granting the name of the village to the surrounding postal area, through the simple mechanics that one only takes action, that is, fills out a form, if one objects. 
It’s one thing to object, it’s another to act on that objection, and it’s another thing entirely to, as is required, put that objection in words.  The only people with the confidence to scrawl ‘they’re just not our sort!’ on a post card and send it off are the villagers, who are of course outnumbered by those who want to be villagers, or who can’t be arsed.
By the way, if you can’t be arsed about the name of where you live, you’re not a villager.

Post haste

Pub quiz question.  What was the biggest Post Office robbery in history? 
Answer: when the government flogged it for far less than it was worth.
The Post Office used to occupy not just a special place on the high street, but also a special place in the British psyche, in particular, in that peculiar part of the psyche dedicated to nostalgia, which appears to be a substantial part judging by, for instance, the amount of telly programming time and endless bloody internet space given over to, for instance, recollections about kids programming in the seventies (both sweet and, more recently, sinister) and on-line conversations about some shared imagined past, most of it revolving around crisps (which is ridiculous, there was more to the seventies and Monster Munch, there were also the delicious ‘bones’, a salt ‘n’ vinegar flavoured corn snack so intense it made you feel odd).
Anyone looking at images of the seventies, documented on early video and Polaroid film, might come away thinking that the decade was mostly a brownish yellow, like the sepia of nostalgia for the man-made age.  Having lived through the seventies I can confirm that, brilliant blue skies of scorching summers apart, they were mostly brown and yellow, the exception being food in colours not found in nature, resulting in the sort of hyperactivity in kids that surely contributed to the popularity of disco and ‘the double deckers.’
Rural sub-post offices of the era were usually staffed by the sort of woman with a book of first class stamps under the counter to her left, and a double-barrelled shotgun under the counter to her right.  One of the benefits of the man made fabrics so popular at the time, and in particular the municipal carpets that typified the age, is that after an attempted stick-up, they were easy to scrape bits of villain off, as well as being remarkably stain-resistant.
The true age of nostalgia for the post office is further back, black and white rather than corduroy sepia, and of course centres around ‘Night Mail’, the film featuring poetry by Betjeman and, of course, iconic images such as steaming trains, shrieking whistles, and a carriage that was a mobile sorting office, with post office workers standing up busily sorting letters, wondering when the hell post codes are going to be invented or at least decent penmanship made mandatory in schools, and the mail bags being swung out for collection or dispatch from the moving train. 
These days of course standing on trains is a result of overcrowding rather than occupation, and the practice of collecting a sack full of letters from a pole at 80mph spectacularly fails every health and safety standard known to modern man.  And in the age of colour film, we communicate by electronic means and the importance of the mail is perhaps diminished. 
Maybe that’s why there was barely a murmur of dissent when the Post Office was sold.  Possibly it could only ever be privatised in the age of Farcebook and Blether.
There remains an affection for the postie him or herself, because you can’t help but admire anyone who struggles through the snow to deliver your Boden catalogue.  Of course, the last great act of public affection for the Post Office was the reaction to their painting certain post boxes gold in recognition of Olympic success in 2012. 
The new, privatised Post Office has declined to repeat this for the athletes who won gold in the 2014 winter Olympics, the predictable result being the guerrilla golding of certain post boxes by proud locals. 
Quite right too. 
The Post Office may no longer belong to the people, but our environment does and if some company wants to have part of its infrastructure stuck on our streets, it should show some respect and get gilding.

The Great Walls

Remember that moment in Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong’ when you thought ‘oh oh, I think this movie might be a bit shit’?  You know, the bit just after the BBFC certificate vanished and just before the theatre lights came up? 
A much better ‘King Kong’ was the one featuring Kurt Russell.  That version made sure that you didn’t even see the monster until half way through, meaning that the suspense was such that you were by that point chewing the fingernails of the person in the seat next to you, having run out of your own.  That movie had some flaws, sure, in particular the giant ape hand that I suppose looked realistic as a giant leather mit, but also reminded one of those huge oversized boxing glove seats.  The best feature was The Wall.  It was clear that it was ancient, but regularly repaired, and anyone driven to engineer on that scale was shit scared of whatever was on the other side.
The best King Kong, of course, is the original (movie, not actual creature).  It scared the shit out of me when I first saw it, so it must have blown the minds of the original audience.
Walls, especially big ones, are iconic. 
When the Chinese decided that a fence just wasn’t going to cut it, they didn’t fuck about.  One can just imagine the tender process, with the Emperor being presented with ‘The Big Wall’, ‘The Huge, Fuck-Off Wall’ and, of course, ‘The Great Wall’.  The Great Wall was the most reasonable priced, and the rest is non-sweary history.
Hadrian, in a move that is probably retrospectively supported more by English people then even the most fervent ‘Yes’ supporter in the forthcoming Scottish independence referendum (have they decided on the question yet?  If it’s ‘Do you agree that Scotland should remain part of the Union’, some people are going to be busy swapping badges) famously walled off Scotland from Roman occupied Europe, in a move that even today means there are few straight walls north of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
A wall is a statement.  Build one round your estate and you are making a very definite statement.  And that statement is ‘poachers will be shot’.
Domestically, walls around property boundary lines tend to be low, ornamental.  It’s more a suggestion of ‘this is mine and…actually, this is mine, fuck off’.  It’s the sort of statement that used to be made by mounting an enemy’s head on a pole, the sort of provocative move that is now only equalled in suburbia by any instruction starting with the words ‘polite notice’, before going on to say something about ethnic minorities not being welcome.
Come the big blow over Christmas, it was all about fences.  Traditionally, these wooden dividers of garden boundaries are to be found marking the edges of property lines.  After Christmas, quite a number of them were no longer strictly aligned with the property line.  Some weren’t even aligned with their original postcode.
Well maintained fence panels and posts held firm, or went over as one.  Well maintained panels acted like spinnakers when attached to weaker posts and sailed into the distance.  My panels were approaching heritage status and so it was a case of storm 1 – fence 0.
Between Christmas and the New Year a common sight in any DIY store parking lot was a stream of people exiting with one or more new fence panels.  Not owning the sort of working class vehicle capable of transporting panels, and worried that any attempt to attach a panel to a roof rack, given the weather, would result in the car turning into a glider, I had mine delivered.
I did, however, treat myself to an electric screwdriver.  Like any bloke issued with kit that looks a little like a gun, I immediately held it at hip height and made ‘bang bang’ noises.  One wonders if when soldiers are issued with their sidearms, they pretend to put up shelves.
Even though non-sonic, it was the bloody business.  Turned a chore into a joy and the new fence is a joy to behold.  Not sure if it’s giant ape proof, but it’s rather more attractive than a head on a stick.

Daytime telly

Daytime television is special.

Back in the day, when television was steam powered and ‘pages from Ceefax’ actually appeared in the TV listings as late night programming (given the choice of that or ‘Babestation’, I know what I’d rather watch), daytime television required careful programming.  There were only so many channels and you had to programme for a specific audience, which included children.  That’s why you had awesome kids telly, made by stoners for stoners or by ridiculously gifted artists who were masters of stop motion and with a few bits of card, some crayons, limitless talent and, yes, a shed, produced shows that induce an element of nostalgia so profound in adults of a certain age that there is talk of adding it to the periodic table.

There have been two major changes to daytime television.

The first was the forced resettlement of all children’s programming to their dedicated digital channels, meaning that BBC1 for instance is no longer home to ‘Blue Peter’, the sort of statement that, for some of us, has a ‘ravens leaving the Tower of London’ level of profundity about it.  However, it’s a move that makes perfect sense and not even the most nylon jumper wearing, monster munch eating, chopper riding, developmentally arrested adult would argue that, because those very same adults must remember occasionally tuning in to get their lunchtime fix of Play School only to be confronted with some bald old man in an ill fitting suit spouting Bolshevik nonsense, because back in the day, kids tee vee was regularly bumped so that the BBC could show live and uninterrupted footage of the TUC conference, or the conference of some sort of political party.  It was like the red button for badly dressed adults wanting to spout crap and foam at the mouth – never mind the plight of the workers, where’s Ivor the Engine you bastards?

The second development is the proliferation of digital channels meaning that these need filling.  This means resorting to imports, usually American.  Of all the channels, the most promising and ultimately the most disappointing has to be E4 which, during the day, promises back to back sitcoms.  The reality is somewhat different.  Regular viewing will in fact reveal that the programmers for E4 appear to have obtained their imported sitcoms not in a deal hammered out in the slick boardrooms of New York, but as a result of purchasing a VHS box set in a charity shop.  This is the only explanation for the channel airing seemingly random episodes of a series, and mixing up the seasons when they show double bills of a sitcom.  This is, however, kind of fun, and an insight into what it must be like to be a time traveller, because you get to see the actors as they were a few years ago, and then recently.  Long story short – we all get fat.

The worst thing about daytime television has to be the adverts.  These are targeted at the audience most likely to be watching at the time and so the adverts are, well, they’re, well…  Put it this way, you know how you get KFC, and then you get those wannabe chicken joints, like ‘Tennessee Fried Chicken’, because the guys who run it couldn’t pass the KFC franchise entrance exam or something?  Well, adverts on daytime telly are a lot like that.  So you get adverts for things not available in the shops.  For a reason.

As a nation, we are supposed to be turning to timeslip television, where we pick the best shows, and ones about gypsies, and watch them when we want, without wading through the endless dross out there to get to them. 

Daytime television turns that premise on its head, you can turn it on and just leave it running.  The sitcoms are so samey that the only way you can tell what season it is is the BMI of the leading lady and the ads are trite to the point of dreadful, but it does exert a soporific effect, weakening ones resolve to reach for the off-switch and a decent hardback in that order.

It makes one look forward to the TUC conference.

For chutney's sake

This post is about profanity.  Naturally, I have no wish to cause offence unintentionally and so have decided on a simple substitution system to keep things just the right side of filthy.

So, for the ‘F’ word, I shall be using the term ‘chutney’.  For the ‘C’ word, the term ‘pillow’ will be employed.

For the milder profanities, I have come up with something I think is quite ingenious.  ‘Bugger’ will be used for ‘bloody’, ‘bloody’ will be used for ‘bastard’ and ‘bastard’ will be used for ‘wanker’.  Hence, using the term ‘bloody bastarding wanker’ makes it a grammatical nonsense, robs it of its potency and rather neatly defuses the chance of somebody taking offence once the whole profanity substitution thing has been properly explained, probably in court.

The development of profanity has, by and large, been stagnant since the Middle Ages when a short life of miserable toil interspersed by war and plague provided all the inspiration one needed when one needed to find expression through expletive.  Today, an office drone may reach for the swear box when their database crashes, but the word they use was probably coined by some Anglo Saxon type who had just dropped a newly completed cathedral on their toe, or been careless with their scythe.  The latest addition to the lewd lexicon, the ‘M’ word (we’ll use, let’s see…’pantomime horse’), was coined in Viet Nam, I think.  At least, it was certainly used in a lot of films about the Viet Nam war, and as war movies are like documentaries for lazy people, that’s all the authority I require. 

Viet Nam was the right place for a whole new profanity to be coined, because the draft ensured that people who did not want to be there, often from rural communities so having a rich heritage of swearing around cheeky threshing machines, were put into an extreme situation, involving shooting.

If you have even played Medal of Honour on your console with the ‘team talk’ option enabled, you will know that nothing gets young men more excited in a sweary way than combat, and that’s just sofa combat, where the worst thing that will happen to you is picking up a DVT from all the sitting your backside is doing.  Still, it allows people from all over the world to scream obscenities at one another and indulge in the sort of homophobic abuse rarely seen outside the Premiership.

Why do people swear?  Chutney knows.  English is the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Churchill. There are, and I went on Wikipedia so I’m fairly sure about this, well over a thousand words in the English language, so why is it that when reacting to pressure we reach not for the magnificent cathedral of expression to express our emotions, but simply reach into the shed of profanity for something juicy kept on a metaphorical high shelf out of the reach of children?

Possibly it’s because of the importance of the right tool for the right job and sometimes that tool is a blunt, simple one.  Want to stir paint before decorating?  You don’t reach for your blender, you reach for a stick.  If you are a bloke, this will be a stick you have kept, in your shed, for this specific purpose.  It is simple, it is blunt and it does the job, a bit like an F bomb.

I have recently graduated from swearing at the television whenever the news or ‘Antiques Roadshow’ (chutnying how much?’) is on to swearing at the radio.  In my defence, I was being sorely provoked, as the Jeremy Vine show was on.  This is a show that somehow manages to contrive to be more offensive than me, even though I am the one screaming ‘you chutnying pantomimehorse’ at an innocent little box with sound coming out of it.

F Bombing is called F Bombing for a reason.  Profanities, like munitions, should only be used by a responsible adult who knows what they are doing and who has had training, or an over-excited X Box wielding teen, crazed on Red Bull, Haribo, or occasionally by over-excited X Box wielding adults.

Commuting with nature

It’s becoming obvious that commuters have not got the sense that God gave a goldfish and that their memory span must be about the same as that apocryphally attributed to that piscine pet.

I base this deduction on two incidences of observed behaviour.

First, the carriage crowd.  This is the little knot of people that form on the platform at the point where, once the train has stopped, the carriage door will open.  This allows them to spring lithely from platform to carriage and thence to seat, the better to spread their enormous, pale, office chair shaped arse cheeks onto a vacant seat rather than what must, given their imperative to do this, be the alternative – finding themselves standing at a point equidistant to two carriage doors and, unable to decide which one will offer the better chance of getting a seat, scuttling crab-like from side to side until the doors close leaving them on the platform in a lather of indecision.

It’s fascinating and alarming that the crowd can remember, every morning, at which point on the platform the carriage doors will open but cannot remember, every morning, that people will be wanting to get off the train.

If you are on the train and getting off at any station short of the train’s destination, you will be faced with a wall of people.  It is the closest an unfamous person will ever get to exiting the stage door and finding a crowd there, except they don’t want either your autograph, or their money back, they just want to get on.

The carriage crowd are not, let me be clear, wholly without an understanding for the needs of the emerging passenger.  They do grudgingly leave a gap narrow enough for you to pass through, if you can convert yourself into a stream of anorexic particles, or a Rizzla paper.  Your alternatives are to slather yourself in Vaseline and apologetically slither your way out, or do what I do and stick your leg out and then follow it with the entire weight of your body, just like Indiana Jones does when he takes the ‘leap of faith’ in ‘Last Crusade’.

The second type of behaviour exhibited is when the carriage crowd try to get on an already full carriage.  If you fill a glass with water, and then very very carefully slightly overfill it, then surface tension will mean that you can have a few micrometres of water above the level of the glass.  That’s how full commuter carriages get, but that doesn’t stop people trying to join them.

This is achieved by two methods.  The first is waiting until the breathing of everyone in the carriage is synchronised and everyone is breathing in, before flinging yourself on and hoping that the carriage doors shut before everyone breaths out and you are catapulted back onto the platform.  If the doors close, you are mashed against the glass like the world’s ugliest Garfield doll but hey, at least you’ll be at your desk on time.  The second is to bellow ‘can you move down please’ because fuck, yea, the people wallowing in all that prairie-like space wouldn’t think of doing that themselves.

What’s amazing is that nobody bellows back ‘no, can you not just get the next train?’ but instead everyone collectively shuffles a micron and makes room.

This is the twenty first century.  Let’s put aside that by now, by rights, we should be commuting by jet pack.  The commute should be relaxed, ideally completed sitting at a table while you are served a hot breakfast that concludes with a cigarette, coffee and an early morning digestif to take the edge off.  At least, given the price of the fucking fares, that’s what I think commuters should be entitled to.

Perhaps the commuters are not to blame after all and what is happening here is the suppression of uncomfortable memories, but on a daily basis rather than those adults who can’t watch one of those clip shows about seventies television without getting an unexplained twinge in their bottom.  It would explain an awful lot, starting with why they never think that getting an earlier train might be an idea.

Nature Notes Special - Floody Hell!

Water used to be our friend, our playmate.  We shower in the stuff, we add bubbles to it and bath in it, sometimes with candles.  We add bubbles to it and we drink the stuff, sometimes with a slice of lemon.  We water our plants with it, we water ourselves with it, we fill big pools and swim in it, we fill slightly smaller pools and communally bath in it after rugby games.  We even swim with dolphins in it, we like water so much that we can stop thinking 'fish poo' for long enough to splash about with Flipper in it.
Recently though, water has become the implacable foe, the slow creeping menace that inches towards the nation's doorsteps, or the rushing torrent, the same brown as the underwear of anyone unlucky enough to be caught in it.  The floods have come, and come, and come.
It is now, officially, beyond a joke.  What started before Christmas as the 'storm surge' turned to filthy weather at Christmas, leaving people with no power, a big raw turkey and realising that KFC for your Christmas dinner isn't really all that bad, as it means no sprouts and extra chips all round.  Ironically there was an advert doing the rounds over the festive season that posed the question 'can you barbecue a turkey?'.  Yes, you can is the answer, but you'd only know that if you had a telly, meaning you had power, in which case, you wouldn't be wrestling a reluctant barbecue from the back of the shed where it's become entangled with hose pipe, bicycles, cobwebs and the other Summer paraphernalia, but instead sitting snug getting hammered on red and waiting for the oven timer to ping before forgetting to put the scouts on, like any civilised person.
For future reference, yes, you can barbecue a turkey.  A mate of mine did it one year, even though he didn't have to.  A Webber kettle barbecue is best, lots of coals that are well banked for a constant heat, then drink red wine until its ready and you are pissed enough not to notice you've barbecue a turkey.  As with most cooking, it's all in the preparation, in this case, uncorking breakfast.
As the days turned to weeks, the rain continued to fall.  The television showed spectacular pictures of huge waves crashing over sea defences and nightly heart-rending images of flooded front rooms.  There was nothing to be done, it would appear.

Then Prince Charles visited a flooded village.
Several things then happened, very quickly indeed.
The first was that question 'what use is the monarchy in the twenty first century?' was answered, as the Prince got blanket TV coverage and sympathised with the plight of the flooded villagers.  He then, one imagined, 'phoned the prime minister and gave him a Royal bollocking.  Because the next day the prime minister was chairing the government's emergency committee after which the army was deployed.
Following Prince Charles's example, politicians unwisely began popping up in wellies in villages.  Unlike the Prince, they were bollocked by very angry villagers who wondered what the fucking fuck they had been doing for the last few weeks.  Hint: if the answer was not 'filling sandbags' they you looked like a prize tool.
The other question that was answered was 'Is there more to UKIP than racism?'.  Yes, yes there is.  There's stupidity too.  UKIP's leader, Nigel Farage, was seen dressed in what one imagines a repressed country squire might look like, in suspiciously new wax jacket and wellies, droning on about how we should cut the foreign aid budget and use it for flood defences.  The BBC bloke then asked what he was doing to get relief money from Europe, which is available.  The answer - f**k all, Mr Farage apparently believing that the entire structure of the European Union closes down on a Sunday.  Next item on the news, EU officials making a statement about some ruling or other, on a Sunday.
As with many disasters, this adversity has brought out the best in people.  Communities coming together to help one another, the British Army doing their usual spectacular job in crap conditions, and monarchy leading.