Presidential?

It should come as no surprise that some parts of the media* are reporting that Jeremy Corbyn was in attendance at the now infamous Presidents’ Club gala dinner and gropefest.  Corbyn, for all the work that has been done by the mighty machinery of Labour and the momentum movement, looks like the sort of person who would sexually harass a young woman, and then get caught.  It’s the beard, which simultaneously makes him resemble a disgraced former lecturer at a polytechnic who was ‘let go’ after unfortunate incidents with a number of female students described as ‘brave’ in left leaning newspapers and ‘attractive’ in all the others and is now on a register of some kind, and also just the sort of allotment keeper who, despite the ounces of organic loam permanently residing in the turn-ups of his suspiciously ironed jeans, keeps the real filth in his shed.

The dinner in question is now the subject of extensive reporting, none of which has yet posed the question ‘who, the actual fuck, thought it was a good idea at the height of a rebalancing of gender inequality relating to harassment and remuneration, thought it was a good idea to have a men only dinner of financiers?’.

There is so much wrong with what happened at the Dorchester that night that it’s difficult to know where to begin.  Or actually, where to stop.

So let’s start with the sexism.  Why were there no male waiters?  What sort of organisation can get away with hiring staff based solely on their gender?  Or maybe there were male waiters, but they were not harassed.

And yes, it’s ‘waiters’.  It’s not ‘hostess’.  A hostess is a female who hosts a party.  Or invents a trolly with an integrated hotplate.  Somebody who brings drinks to your table is a waiter or a waitress.  Hostess is one step away from describing yourself as an ‘entertainment event facilitator’.  It’s pure snobbery, what the fuck is wrong with being a waiter or waitress?

The sexism on display from the arseholes (let’s not dignify them with the term ‘men’, a man, a real man, is a gentleman.  I know what makes a gentleman, take a look at the fucking title of the blog if you don’t believe me.  I don’t claim to be one, but I can recognise the virtue in others.  The clue, by the way, is in the way the word itself is constructed) was staggering.  What sort of person touches another person without first being invited to, unless pushing them out of the way of an oncoming crazed badger or similar?  Sticking your hands on somebody uninvited is, er, assault, is it not?  Let’s examine it this way, all of the descriptions of the tactile goings on, let’s substitute all of those with this image, a bloke wets his finger and inserts it into the ear of another person.

How.  Fucking.  Creepy.  Is.  That.

‘Socially unacceptable’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.  It’s the sort of thing that would result in any sensible person reaching for their cigar cutter and indulging in a bit of digital decoupling.

Apparently, the women were all asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.  Now, I may not know much about the catering business, but apart from the very reasonable contractual obligation of senior KFC staff not to reveal the Colonel’s secret recipe, I don’t understand why the catering trade should require a secrecy pact, it’s taking a few glasses of plonk from the kitchen to a table, not serving snacks on Air Force One.

The dress code was a bit interesting too.  The industry standard for waiting staff is black trousers or skirt and white top.  The white top suggests clean hygiene, the black trousers suggest infrequent laundering.  Apparently the defining characteristic required of the waitresses was that they were sexy.  Let me tell you, the defining characteristic of anyone waiting on tables is that they should be prompt with the food and booze.

The company that set all this up ‘Pimper Events’ or something, appears to have got off lightly, considering that they appear to be auditioning for a move into the exciting commercial opportunity of trafficking if their instructions to their employees are anything to go by.

All in all, it’s pretty bloody horrible.  Women have been treated as objects, again, arseholes have proved themselves to be arseholes, and got away with it, again and Jeremy Corbyn, a man with a proven record of discourteous behaviour towards women (every Wednesday afternoon) has yet to deny he took part in the proceedings.

*RT, Twitter bots geotagged in North Korea and Chipping Norton, DailyMailOnline

Man up

Dave Barry, the straight man’s David Sedaris, once wrote about the ‘Martian Death Flu’*.  A funny column I seem to recall, and an excellent example of the gender that does not have to give birth hugely over-reacting to minor health inconveniences.

Documentation of illness has, naturally enough, evolved over the years, like germs developing a resistance to Lucozade, a bubbling coppery liquid guzzled by wan tots in my youth and, if my colleague who told me this the other day is to be believed, loaded with caffeine, which would explain its restorative effect on the metabolism of a seven year old in 1970, if nothing else.

Dickens wrote movingly of poxes and ailments.  Operas trade in consumptive maids, oddly able to sing about their condition for three hours at a stretch.  In the 1970s there were a lot of films like ‘Love Story’, where a happy, handsome couple started a new life together, until he or she got something cinematic.  Luckily this trend ended with a bang in the 80’s when family members were killed not by a virus but by terrorists, enabling 110 minutes of bloody retribution by the Slow One, the Austrian One or the Balding One.

Journalism has cultivated a reputation for sensitively chronicling illness, and anyone that does so is to be applauded and rewarded, by getting better.  This is because when you feel under the weather, the last thing you feel like being is creative.  I’ve had a cold for the last two days and the only thing I have crated is a mound of crumpled tissues next to my bed that would put the floor of a bedroom of a teenager in a house with no parental controls on the internet to shame.

In the age of social media, people are able to share their experiences of being ill in the short, medium and long term and get support and sympathy.  A word of warning though, if you start reading any post titled ‘does this look normal?’ think twice before scrolling down.  Then don’t.

One of the worst things about being ill is that one cannot enjoy it.  Normally if somebody were to suggest to you that you should spend a few days in bed watching TV† and being brought sustaining broths, you might show an interest.  However, if the quid pro quo is a tickly cough that really gets going a few minutes after you want to get to sleep, you might be wondering if finally getting to see every season of ‘Will & Grace’ is actually worth the cost.

It’s not.  When you have a cold you suffer the double whammy of feeling ill, but not having the flu, the one everyone takes seriously.  Even the name ‘Common’, means that it’s undistinguished.  Best thing to do is hunker down and plot vile revenge upon all those bastards who still insist on soldiering on into work, on public transport, your public transport, instead of taking a couple of days to get better.

And frankly, anyone with the fortitude to successfully write about, photograph, paint, draw, etch, stain glass window or otherwise document their ailment deserves plaudits for being able to condense a cohesive thought in a medicated mind, even if that medication is simply caffeine and about 800% of the RDA of sugar for an adult, courtesy of ‘Lockets’.  This on top of the disturbance to the mental processes brought about by the constant consideration you are giving to spraying your hands with sanitiser, and the face of anyone who sneezes near you with CS gas, the next time you leave the house.

Having learned never to Google symptoms, the internet is, I suppose, a decent place for the snotty and the coughy to exchange supportive messages and a sure sign of mankinds’ advancement to a point beyond issuing anyone afflicted with anything with a pot of paint to mark their door and a bell to ring to advise others of their condition.  Insert topical joke about underfunding of NHS here.

Ironically, it marks a healthy relationship with illness that is very British, such as is not exhibited by tourists you see wearing surgical masks on London’s streets.  Not many haiku about snot.

* Don’t know where he wrote this originally** and for those who have not read the rest of the blog post before skipping to this footnote, can’t be arsed to research it.  However, I can tell you that it’s collected in the Pan paperback ‘Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits’.  This was published in 1988 when the only way to access transatlantic written humour was to go to the US or to buy collections such as this one, lovingly put together by an editor.  This was before the internet, and meant there was a lot of quality control.  The two conditions may not be entirely unrelated.

** Miami Herald most likely, just looked at the introduction to the book.

† Or as it’s known these days, ‘Netflix’.  Being in bed for a couple of days offered an excellent opportunity to catch up on all those documentaries that I have taped‡ and had hoped to catch up on when I had the time.  However, I have discovered that the perfect sickbed viewing is actually horror, specifically anything with a zombie in it.  I love a gory special effect as much as the next man, but nothing I’ve seen on screen compares to the contents of my tissue bin when it comes to biohazard.

‡ Should this be recorded?  Fuck it, I’m going to carry on using ‘taped’ until everyone stops using ‘dialled’.

Trump dumped

Much is made in mainstream media (you know, that part of the media that is accountable, reports fact and does not consider a racist rant or a picture of a kitten ‘content’ (although also the media that reports misinformation and hacks the telephones of schoolgirls, so pretty creepy all round, if you want quality journalism, stick with ‘Look and Learn’ ‘Blue Peter’)) that Li’ll Donnie is not going to visit London to check out the new US Embassy.  The prize goes to the London Evening Standard for their headline ‘Trump won’t go south of the river’.

You can slice this story a number of ways.  It’s either a snub to the UK, or Don Trump is, sensibly, not keen to visit a city where his presence is likely to be met my protesters who are protesting not about his policies, but because he is, apparently, just a terrible human being.

Either that or he has a report on his desk about the likely cost of getting the limo clean afterwards.

Who won the Ashes, really?

Who won the 2017/2018 Ashes series?

(The Ashes, for those who don’t know, is possibly the most famous sporting contest on the planet.  It is a competition taking place every two years between England and Australia.  The game in question is cricket.  For those unfamiliar with cricket, please press the backspace icon a few times and Google ‘Kardashians’, this will be a far better use of your time than reading the following).

Of course, there are those that will say that Australia won the Ashes.  There are those also that will say that England lost the Ashes.  There is, after all, an important difference between the two matters.

What is undoubtedly true is that England’s tour Down Under was trouble-prone.  There were players that could not join because they had got into a spot of bother back home (famous sports stars get into ‘a spot of bother’ rather than being ‘charged for assault’ just like middle class students involved in vandalism are involved in ‘high spirits’ or if you go to a decent public school; ‘japes’.) and the performance on the pitch was not great.  Hovering over all of this was the unique cricket pastime of ‘sledging’ or as non-cricketing types call it ‘abuse’.  Any cricket fan will recognise the title of this Blog (although it is named G&P for quite different reasons) and will have drawn their own conclusions about which category certain Aussie and English players.

So, Australia retained the Ashes.

But BBC Radio 5 Live won the Ashes.

Here’s why.

The coverage was magnificent.  There is nothing like Test Match Special.  Arguably, the best thing to ever happen to TMS was for the BBC to lose the rights to televise cricket and then for digital radio to come along.  This meant live and uninterrupted coverage of play in Australia throughout the night, bookended by anticipation and analysis.

The BBC rightly committed programming time to exploring the phenomenon of nocturnal radio.  But it boils down to this:

If you are watching television through the night there will come a point about three in the morning when your entire body craves sleep and you feel as if somebody has replaced certain parts of you with grit.  You trek up to bed late/early and get up a few hours later feeling shocking.

Not so with radio.  One places the radio by the bed, turned down low because distractions are falling away as the midnight hour advances, and then you listen throughout the night.

Of course you don’t.  You are soundly asleep by 12:05 but occasionally stir as you subconsciously process the fall of wickets and any streakers.

You awake refreshed and ready for the day.

Radio coverage is far, far better than television coverage because the quality of the commentary is so much better.  TMS is an institution and can afford to only accept the greatest talents.  Ideally, one should apprentice until one is about 80, and then one may consider oneself a TMS fixture.

The thing about TMS is it knows that it is shepherding souls through the darkness half a world away, and it takes this privilege and responsibility seriously.

On this tour, with the performance of the England team, there was an element of pastoral care to be considered, as the commentary team did not want to wreak untold psychic damage to the unconscious subconscious attentive minds.

Moreover, this was happening over the Christmas period.  The best Christmas present that the TMS team gave the listening public back in England at the commencement of the Boxing Day test was hope.

A foreign correspondent, in my own country

Previous, fanciful, blog posts have referenced the role of the foreign correspondent in general, and the war correspondent in particular.  The musings have been on the correspondent abroad, the foreign being the country in question being other than the UK, rather than a foreign correspondent visiting the UK.  This despite all those posts being written in the UK.

The posts in question are usually stimulated by my staying in a hotel, and the mini bar.  My residence in hotels is an infrequent occurrence and still an occasion of a sense of novelty.  I adore miniature toiletries almost as much as I adore mini sauces, an adoration well documented in this blog.  Who cannot find a tiny bottle of shampoo or body wash charming, and who could fail to be thrilled by using a tiny bar of soap, a tiny bar of soap that starts out being the size of a bar of soap that most bars of soap end up being at home before they are discarded as being impractical?

My affinity with foreign correspondents probably begins and ends with sitting in a hotel room banging out words.  There are other, definitive, measures of a foreign correspondent, none of which I comply with.  Putting aside any kind of talent, experience or journalistic rigor, the hotels I stay at rarely, if ever, have helicopters landing on the roof, journalists and generals in the bar and militiamen sitting in pick up trucks in the lobby.  Nor do I sit round campfires getting interviews with, depending on your point of view, terrorists or freedom fighters, enjoying a supper of an animal that, back in the UK, would be the lead character in a popular cartoon programme for younger viewers.

Following the Brexit referendum though, there is a whiff of something unsavoury in my own country.

Arguably, the only platform that bigots should be permitted one with a trapdoor that swings open to a shark pool.  Following the Brexit referendum however, it would appear that the sort of people who previously confined their views to themselves, their ‘journal’ (also home to their conspiracy theories), a ‘group of like minded patriots’, or the internet consider that they have license to take a tilt at those whose opinions do not exactly align with their own.  This used to be foreigners, now it’s those who did not vote their way in the referendum.

The remainers consider those who voted leave to be a bunch of ignorant, racist, xenophobic, bigoted, narrow-minded little Englanders.  They are confident of espousing this view not just because they are right, but also because the remainers are in the minority.  They are the plucky underdog, facing down fear, ignorance and the rise of politicians who were merely ‘characters’ before the referendum when they had little or no power, but are now auditioning for despotism.

The leavers also consider themselves the plucky underdogs, the patriots who against all the odds defied the political establishment to throw off the shackles of oppression.  They think that this is the time for bold, decisive action and if that means expelling the immigrants who keep our social services running, so be it.

The battleground is social media and the airwaves.

The language is increasingly of division.  Students of history are probably awaiting somebody, probably a Tory, declaring himself (it’s always a bloke) the Lord Protector just to put the civil war on a formal footing.  Certainly, Brexit has divided families, communities and the country like no other crisis since somebody who wasn’t white won ‘Bake Off’.

Foreign correspondents are used to filing copy from the bars of hotels that, before the disputed result of a vote, used to serve the best cocktails on that continent and are now the last place with booze and electricity in a country where the leader is in hiding and the opposition has seized control of the national broadcaster.

We’re not quite at the point where combat boots, one of those Middle-Eastern scarf things, and a laptop are now the accepted dress code at the bar of the Athenaeum, but judging by the content of teevee, radio and the papers, extremists from both sides may have already seized control of the national media.