Jumping the snark

Some years ago, I wrote on G&P of my decision to stop reading ‘The Guardian’ newspaper.  This was, for the avoidance of doubt, the newspaper formally known as ‘The Manchester Guardian’, a publication beloved of liberals, lefties, vegetarians and the sort of people who criticise your lifestyle choices as if you were Cruella DeVille rather than a bloke in a shop contemplating the purchase of a pot noodle.  I read The Guardian back in the day because, before the launch of iPlayer, Netflix  and digital downloads for programmes like ‘Game of Thrones’ meant all we had to do to enjoy ourselves was watch teevee, I enjoyed its arts coverage and being informed about what books I should, and would fail to, read, what moving and improving foreign language films I would decide to see the latest instalment of the ‘Transformers’ franchise instead of, and particularly what new video games were coming out.  The newspaper was also the only thing in print with anything like a social conscience.

Something, however, changed for the worse.  Always somewhat self centered, the tone of the newspaper became smug and it was soon spouting claptrap in a manner that defied challenge in the same way the right wing tabloids, or a mate who has given up drinking and insists on joining you in the pub straight from the squash court with racquets protruding from a kit bag and opinions on the benefits of sobriety protruding from his gob instead of joining in conventional discussion in the bloke’s salon such as naming all the principal characters in ‘Bergerac’.

And so I stopped reading it, preferring instead to get my news from the BBC website, and Twitter.

The exception is Saturday when, because the newspaper, sports business and lifestyle sections come with the only teevee guide you can rely on not to have a picture of Danny Dyer gurning like a simpleton passing a satisfying stool gracing the front cover, is the teevee guide and so newspaper of choice.

Selective reading ensures incredulity and outrage at the breakfast table is kept to a minimum, like flipping channels when an upsetting story appears on the BBC News, or hitting the ‘mute’ button on the remote whenever Boris Johnson appears on television, allowing one to do the voices yourself as when one watches Crufts, or pretend that one is watching an ill-conceived spin-off of ‘The Muppet Show’ where the puppets are grotesque rather than lovable, or a play about one of those ugly but anatomically correct dolls they get kids to use when describing sex offenders, come to life, not so much dressed as a human as rolled around in a donations bag left outside a middle class charity shop, and decided to use its magic powers for evil.

But even a straightforward teevee guide is not safe from the tone of the newspaper as a whole.

Teevee listings should be a straightforward publication.  I want to know what is on and when, and I want anything related to ‘Doctor Who’ featured heavily.  Not much to ask.

For a while now though, the back page has featured a snarky regular feature about ‘when good teevee goes bad’ titled ‘Jump the Shark’.  In this feature, a writer or writers I’ve never bothered to check, briefly discuss the pivotal point where a hitherto beloved telly programme went shit.  The title is taken from the internet, which documents that it was the eponymous episode of ‘Happy Days’ where that show went from being cool to, well, not quite so cool.  As the internet is never wrong about anything, though I have yet to see a piano playing cat in reality, we must accept this as fact.

‘The Guardian’ have taken a half-arsed opinion and weaponised it.

The trouble is, of course, that the shows that jumped the shark number one, ‘Happy Days’.  This would make for a very short series in a teevee guide, and one that bore a tremendously close resemblance to the Wikipedia entry for ‘Jump the shark’.  The solution, if you are a hack unafraid of flogging the greasy spot where the format used to be, is to randomly pick beloved or obscure television shows and explain why they stopped being good.

The sense of regret that one experiences on reading one of these snarkly spiteful pieces is not even offset by the overwhelming realisation that you made the right decision swearing off this newspaper many moons ago.  There is a shame to not seeing that commitment through, not unlike the shame of falling off the wagon, of an illicit fag ten years after giving up, of murdering a badger with a hammer, of in the performing of an act of self pollution realising, at what should be the moment of unconfined joy, that one has Googled, safesearch off, an indecent image not of Katie Price, but of Katie Hopkins.  The shame and the self loathing rise as the bitter tears of regret begin to flow.

Ironically, this series of affronts will never itself jump the shark.  To do so requires a thing to be good before it can go bad, and this sad affair was never that.  Essentially, what we have here is the result one can only presume of somebody attending one of those meetings where ‘there are no bad ideas’ but missing the crucial point that yes, there are.  Do Walls do a Cornetto with fox shit in the bottom of the cone?  No, because that would be a bad idea.

Maybe be I should switch to ‘The Sun’?  Clarkson writes for it I understand.  Bet he wouldn’t criticise ‘Happy Days’.

Open letter to 'The Guardian'

Dear 'The Guardian',

It's not me, it's you.

I'm leaving you.

There's no easy way to say it (actually there is, it's 'I'm leaving you', three simple words that economically convey an important message but which you would no doubt spin out to a five page splash in your weekend magazine or a themed special supplement or, even more likely, a recipe special featuring comfort food, meals for one and a way to make pot noodle using tears - and that's part of the problem), but there it is. Recently I've felt that we have less and less in common.

We used to have a lot of shared interests: incisive reporting, informed comment, Posy Simmonds. I'm still interested in all of those things but you appear obsessed with speculation, 'lifestyle', oh-so-funny columns, recipes and fucking, fucking, fucking Will Self.

There's something else you should know. For quite a while now I've been seeing 'The Telegraph'. We kept bumping into one another at friends' houses and it seemed that we had more and more in common.

Of course, we disagree about a lot of things, and at times I'm not at all sure if The Telegraph's views are sincere or ironic or simply intended to provoke reaction (usually spluttering disbelief) but The Telegraph has kept up to date with current events, knows what is going on in the world beyond a few South London post codes, and is more likely to print a story about rising tensions in the Trossachs than, say, a review of a DVD box-set of a tee vee show from the eighties that concludes that it was not as good as you remembered. Really? Well hold the fucking front page.

(I just want to make clear that I've never been with The Times. Well, a couple of occasions. But I never paid for it, it was derived free with my groceries. And it was overpriced.)

So I've been seeing another newspaper. But you've hardly been an innocent party in this yourself, have you?

Over the last few years you've had all sorts between your sheets. I could understand when they had something interesting to say, but when it became meaningless, that really hurt. 

As for your friends. Jesus Christ, I've seen the letters that they write to you. I thought that the columnists you hung out with we're spectacularly devoid of something to say, but the letters page is breathtaking - especially when a chain of correspondence involving bad puns runs over a number of days, or weeks. It's like being trapped in a car on an interminable motorway journey to hell where somebody has invented the shittest car game ever and you don't know whether to lunge for the door handle, the steering wheel or the gin.

But that's as nothing compared with 'Comment is free'. Three categories: people out to make a point about how clever they are; people who are happy at last that they have a place to leave uninformed political comments without being challenged; and the sort of person who thinks that white bread leads to global warming.

So that's it. You remain on the newsagent shelf and you have been deleted from the 'favourites' on my browser.

And here's the reason why. Even when, a couple of years ago, you published a column with no apparent trace of irony by somebody who said that they would push somebody under a train for eating a burger or something - the week after a woman was pushed under a train - I was prepared to overlook such behaviour. But last weekend you published an interview with a man who, after buying a too-tight pair of shoes, wears them painfully but does not walk in them, calling them his 'barstool shoes'. That's right, instead of throwing a bucket of shit over him and screaming 'REALLY?', you publicised what can only be described as twattery on a grand scale.

This is what Richard Littlejohn is talking about when he refers to 'Guardianistas' as being self-regarding twats. You made Littlejohn right! Fuck you!

Goodbye.

 PS. I would try to get custody of Steve Bell, but I don't want to take him away from his home.

Croydon Tours - on the other hand

Every town should have a tour. Every village, hamlet, postcode and tree should have a tour. When a country like Great Britain gets to be the age it is, something interesting has happened in just about every square yard and if an area is so dull that nothing has ever happened there, then it is likely to be the birthplace of somebody famous, who left at the first opportunity because the place is so dull.

I love guided tours around towns, and the more obscure the better. That's why there are so very few straightforward city tours. The benefit of city tours is that so much has happened on more or less the same spot that it's essentially multi-story history and you can enjoy a fifty minute lecture about the varied history of an area, roman to space age, without having to walk more than about twelve yards. Also, most major historical events in cities are chronicled in guide books or plaques on walls, leaving little room for the guide to make stuff up, surely the only reason to be a guide. That's why alternative tours tend to take place in cities, like ghost walks, or pub crawls. These allow one to actually see something of the city while learning unusual things, such as what pickled egg is actually made of.

Tours of towns are a different proposition. More intimate, one suspects that any tour of a town will contain about 30% fact, 30% folklore and, depending on how much attention the out of work actor taking the tour paid during maths class, 40 to 70% bullshit or, as it's been rebranded recently, civic pride.

And I love the idea of actually having to turn up in person to take a tour of a town. Anyone who has ever seen 'The Rough Guide' on BBC2 would probably agree that that there is a place for a travel programme presented by hopeless fact and talent deprived armatures and I'd love to see a Youhoo channel where folk upload shorts about their favourite street, car park, post-box or building which are then stitched together into a wee documentary about a place. Eventually, no village no matter how small would be without a tiny tourist information video with some chap in a blazer (what else?) standing in front of a road sign and explaining how in the thirties it was turned round to confuse the Nazis, then revolved again to confuse the tourists, then again to baffle the immigrants and most recently to place Doubt in the minds of those who follow sat-navs unquestioningly.

If the BBC can continue to use the same piece of landscape as the backdrop to slightly different programmes, for instance 'Coast' and that new one with the bloke from 'Outnumbered' for people who find 'Coast' too difficult to follow, then it stands to reason that the same town can support more than one tour. So the history tour starts at six, the ghost tour starts at six thirty, the alternative tour starts at seven and the 'they film some of Morse here' tours run all day.

Surely, Croydon can support more than one tour. For a start, there's the unexpected Croydon tour, where people are led along leafy side streets and quiet residential areas, marvelling that somewhere like this can exist so close to a city centre that is now forever linked in the national consciousness as the eye of the riot storm of 2011. The only drawback to taking this tour is that when stepping backwards to take any photographs you have to take great are not to be creamed off by a passing tram that also, against all reason, appears to trundle down leafy side-streets.

For the more adventurous, there is the city centre tour. What a lot of people overlook is that Croydon actually has a busy and quite built up town centre. It has the UK headquarters of Nestlé foods and their office block is easy to spot as its the one with the giant flaming eye at the top of it.
I would dearly love to do a ghost tour of Croydon. OK, there would be initial problems because that staple of ghost tours - violent death - is not in short supply but basically boils down to shot, savaged by dog and hit by tram (make sure you get the right era, was it last week or last century) and so some inventiveness is called for - poisoning is always good (the day e coli came to Tennessee Fried Chicken) as is death as result of tragic romantic misunderstanding (Darren got a txt intended for Wayne and as a result went out, got a tat proclaiming his true love for Kristie and their son/daughter 'name to be added' and contracted septicaemia. How often have we heard that sad tale).

It's easy to knock. And if the rest of that sentence was 'Croydon down with a bulldozer' then the world may indeed be a better place but it it certainly a better place when the sort of person who is running Croydon Tours actually has enough faith in being able to make the town interesting that he's willing to put his job seekers allowance at risk and make a go of spreading the word about the delights of Croydon. Eight quid for five minutes though, is that not a bit steep?

Croydon Tours

Croydon has, for many years, closely resembled downtown Kabul after a heavy night on the bombing. Driving a tram link through an already deeply unlovely environment left the place littered with the sort of water and twisted metal filled craters that one expects as the result of a laser-guided MK 12 'beardbuster' warhead, not the installation of a light rail link. Now that the dirt has settled and the tram is actually in place, Croydon still resembles downtown Kabul due to the large number of unemployed people milling about, the amputees (the tram link runs along the street and the locals have yet to learn how to dodge) and the violence, looting and burned-out buildings.

Tough to say when the rot set in, after all, the used to be an aerodrome here, the last word in glamour and being a target for the Luftwaffe, but even flying Nazis couldn't do as much damage as the council, who sealed the fate of the place when they removed all of the trees from the town centre and replaced them with a howling sense of hopeless desolation.

Put it this way, the crushing negative energy of Croydon is such that even M&S can't escape it's pull. Croydon is the home to rather a large M&S and, usually, such stores are a place to purchase a prawn sandwich and restore ones sense of equilibrium. If, on a shopping trip anywhere, one is feeling buffeted by the winds of fashion, typhoons of commerce or just struggling with the suspicion that the store has fitted a web cam in the changing cubicle to prevent shoplifting and provide the staff with hysterical footage of 'really I am a size twelve' women trying to struggle into a pair of size twelve jeans without the aid of thigh corsets, magic or being slathered in lard, then you can always pop into M&S to regulate your breathing while stocking up on sensible pants.

Not so in Croydon. The best way of describing the M&S in Croydon is to liken it to one of those KFC wannabe places, a fried chicken shop that can't quite meet the the exacting standards of KFC ('never more than 30% beak') but wants to attach itself to the idea of a brand (see also, any drink with the word 'cola' in it, and yes, I mean you Pepsi, you real deal wannabe you - the acid test: who ever asked for a rum and Pepsi?) so that drunk people will wander in by mistake. The M&S in Croydon is like a flagship experiment by a company that specialises in a homogenised brand dedicating at least 30% of their marketing, signage and shop floor look to reflect the locality, instead of the usual M&S shop design strategy (copy John Lewis). Unfortunately, the local look is 'Croydon', and so the store is shabby, crowded and overrun with morlocks.

H G Wells lived in South London and the influence of the area is plain to see in his works. Who has not returned from a trip to Croydon and not thought that it could really benefit from being levelled by a Martian heat ray? Croydon 2012 is pretty much all the evidence you need that H G Wells did actually possess a time machine, travelled forward in time to M&S, took one look at the creatures shambling around in the gloom, jumped back on his chrono-cycle, pedalled for home like Victoria Pendleton when she has forgotten to set the video to record 'come dine with me' (she's a massive fan, that's Victoria's secret) and started writing. It's a testament to his creative skill that after a visit to Croydon 2012 he wrote an entire novel and not just the word 'fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkk!' stretched over 200 pages.

That somebody is offering tours is heartening. After all, they do Jack the Ripper tours in the East End, and ghost tours in York (and why, if ghost tours are so bloody authentic, do they never go through walls?), why not tours of Croydon? Directions to the station where trains leave for London every twenty minutes must be worth eight quid of anyone's money.

Comment on: There's not much of the NHS left to cut

Comment on:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/16/lucy-mangan-nhs-frontline-cuts

The proposed NHS reforms have created more concerned quacks than were heard from the village duckpond when news got round that the Droitwich duckfucker had broken out of Dudley nick and was heading home to indulge his foul fowl habit.

But, really, what did you expect? A new Government gets in and makes changes to the NHS, that’s what Governments do. Political parties rarely give the priorities in their manifestos as standardising the membership regulations for gargoyle fancier societies, bringing back sweets in jars and resurrecting betamax as the video format of choice. No, a new Government decides that they will put the country back on its feet and an essential part of that strategy is reducing the availability of beds. In hospitals.

It’s easy to have a go at the NHS managers, because nobody likes a bloke in a suit who tumesces every time he hears the term ‘vision statement’.

Nurses? Nurses we like. Nurses with their starched uniforms and dedication. Moreover, men of a certain age get a faraway look in their eye and go all unnecessary in the trouser department whenever they hear the theme tune to ‘Angels’. See also: ‘Carry on’.

Surgeons? Surgeons we admire because anyone who has ever tried to put together an Airfix Harrier Jump Jet (buy them now before the Government axe the 1/32 scale armed forces as well kids) and has ended up with a glue-smeared canopy and more bits of the kit stuck to their fingers than are stuck together, or who has tried to fix something by taking the back off it and faffing around with a screwdriver, only to have parts left over when you’ve finished the job, respects anyone who can poke wet, wild and wobbly things and still have a breathing patient and shoes free of bloodstains at the end of it all.

Want to save the NHS some money? Easy. Here’s three ways to make a start.

People responsible for their own injuries have to pay for their own treatment. If you have the money to indulge in a ‘sport’ that involves making a bungee jump using a rope that’s past its twang-by date, you have the money to have your feet sewn back on to your ankles, and you have the money to pay the bonus to get a surgeon who knows the difference between L and R. This measure specifically excludes smokers and drinkers, who paid the tax that built the very hospital that they are being treated in. In fact…if you don’t drink and smoke you should have to pay a National Insurance premium, because others are bravely doing more than their fair share to pay for your iron supplements because you are a bloody vegetarian or something.

Replace the entire ambulance fleet with Toyota pick-up trucks. Is anyone still using these for the purpose they were actually intended for; letting builders, serial killers, illegal immigrant smugglers and sheep rustlers move stuff around under a tarpaulin? So many folk in Libya are using them as mobile machine gun platforms that I’m wondering if the latest versions come with an iPod dock, sat nav and a mount for an M2 Browning.

Look, if somebody can get tossed into the back of one of these things and get driven to a field hospital after being on the wrong end of some horrific atrocity, then surely we could use them in cases where somebody needs to be taken to hospital because they have a headache in their tummy following an ill-judged experiment involving ‘prawn surprise’.

People who believe in homeopathy don’t get any real drugs. Ever. So, you have some hard to diagnose complaint that conventional medicine doesn’t understand…like ennui? Luckily, your local aromatherapy store has just the thing, and a few drops of essential oils in your bath later you are feeling better and, bonus, are irresistible to foxes.

Great, waste your own money, but not mine, and certainly don’t bed block the bloke who has just had a lapse of concentration at his lathe. The bonus is that this can save a shedload of money, because you can extend it to people who have a belief in the healing power of prayer (‘I’m going to prey really hard that your arse reattaches itself after that hunting accident…no luck? Oh dear.’).

Finally – people who appear on the Jeremy Kyle show have their organs harvested. No? Oh, OK, people that appear on Bargain Hunt and Cash in the Attic are on the compulsory pre-mortality register as well.

Comment on: 'Dearly beloved...fight'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/09/arguments-over-wills-lucy-mangan

Wills are a sort of socially acceptable bribery, giving people things so that they might remember you fondly. Or at all. Because let's face it, for many people their greatest achievement is that at least they were never successfully prosecuted for engaging in an act of self-pollution in front of the wet fish counter at Morrisons.

Leaving vast sums to good causes is seen as eccentric, and The English admire eccentricity. God alone knows there's little enough to be proud of if you're English these days, so that's the way to play it, be proud of the little things. The problem is one of prohibitions on pride; one is not allowed to be proud of the things that made England great, like toil, a rigid class system, heavy machinery, the smell of swarfega and the simple application of a water cooled, belt fed machine shotgun to quell a civil disturbance. Now, essentially, one has to rely on made up stuff, like Marmite. Reading about somebody giving away money you had no chance of inheriting has exactly the same comforting sensation as dissolving a rollo under your tongue.

And it's rare, because arranging Revenge From Beyond The Grave is well beyond the capabilities of most people. (Unless you're Doctor Phibes, or Major Gander C.B., T.D.)

Folk have enough trouble organising their lives on a day by day basis, even when they are there to make informed decisions in real time, so for the majority of people death is a disadvantage bordering on disability. Part of the problem may be a sense of perspective, if you are the sort of person who displays grief of operatic proportions just because your supermarket no longer stocks your favourite flavour of packet soup, then chances are you are unlikely to maintain the focus needed to be able to devise a fittingly fiendish plot against anyone you consider ever even slightly slighted you.

And that is what a great will is all about - not the simple option of working out what your grasping relatives really, really don't like, then leaving all your money to the society for the advancement of vegetarianism or something equally bloody pointless and, when the will is read to them, having a photograph of their shocked and sick faces taken and e mailed to you at your.name@afterlife.co.uk (look, if God is an Englishman, it stands to reason that heaven will have a .co.uk address, right?) because hey, you never know, and what fun to see the disappointed faces, like the ultimate satisfying Antiques Roadshow moments, when prim and greedy people are told that their priceless po that Queen Victoria was said to have tinkled in is obviously a fake - but something sweetly complex.

A great will should set a series of tasks and labours for your feckless relatives through which they will learn lessons about life, each other, the true nature of what is valuable and that you can't put a price on happiness, the true test of which will be whether they stab the solicitor to death with his own fountain pen in a spite-fuelled explosion of rage when, with a smile, he reveals that yes, they now inherit...but that all your wealth was spent on financing the quirky tasks recently performed and that the sum total of the estate is now a single saucy seaside postcard found at the back of your desk.

Wills can be a tricky thing, as can making one. Possibly that's why a made up statistic of people who should have wills have yet to make them. It could be that they don't know how to divide their spoils; for instance you want to be fair and hence divide your collection of classic seventies porn mags evenly between your three nieces, but at the same time hate the idea of breaking up the collection. Much more likely is you just think you're immortal. That's why 'make a will...NOW' posters should be placed prominently at places where we have a brush with mortality and death can feel nearer than normal, like a doctor's waiting room, an aeroplane encountering turbulence or the check out line at Ikea.

Comment on: 'The UK census, it's just a big box of ticks'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/lucy-mangan-uk-census-politics

As anyone who, after a simple misunderstanding, has had their binoculars confiscated by a magistrate can attest, the English are peculiar about their privacy. At the start of the century it was predicted that the largest single issue facing the on-line community was going to be privacy. And that prediction was right, but in exactly the opposite way that the bearded social scientist crossed with Mystic Meg making it intended. Instead of us all jealously guarding our privacy, there seems to be a rush by certain people to push the details of their private lives at anyone that will pay attention or, to give it its technical name, Facebook.

The Government could save a fortune by getting Facebook to undertake the census rather than Lockheed Martin (a company more recognised for delivering ballistic missiles than forms that allow you to consider yourself quite the wit by listing your religion as 'Jedi'). Not only would this allow everyone to list their personal details, but to make the exercise self financing this information could then be sold on to marketing companies the next time Facebook updated its privacy settings and all the users ticked the 'I accept these terms and conditions - even the one about using my photographs as 'before' images in adverts for weight loss pills, face creams or self help books on fashion and grooming' box, without reading them first.

Not only that but social networking gets into a lot more detail than: 'How many VHS box sets of 'Buffy the vampire slayer' do you still have knocking around?' or whatever else they are asking in the census this time round, and in real time too. If the Government wants to know how many people are: 'in a relationship, but increasingly irritated at my partner's habit of sucking Quavers until they dissolve while watching telly, and building up to Do Something about it', right now, then social networking can deliver.

Of course, while people are quite happy to share their snapshots, opinions, thoughts and details of their relationship status with the world, they are rightly reticent to share any personal details, at all, with the Government. This is for two reasons. The first is the fear that the data will somehow fall into the hands of an twisted megalomanic and be used for evil. This is an entirely reasonable fear if you substitute the treasury for the undersea volcano base that said twisted megalomaniac resides in. The second reason is that the government will collate the name and address of everyone in Britain in a handy DVD form that can be left on a train, where it will be found by somebody who works in marketing and, as a result, you will spend the rest if your life receiving direct mail about yoghurt.

The biggest problem with the census in it's current form though is that it has no feature that allows you to include a photograph, or even a simple line drawing, of yourself. This ironically neatly illustrates the gulf of understanding that exists between the snoopers and the public. The government values a census because it provides data on who lives where and so on. The public values a census because it not only gives middle class people who are researching their family tree hours of fun and an excuse to use the internet for reasons other than download money-off coupons for biscuits but, vitally, is key to producing that moment in every episode of 'who do you think you are' where a well spoken but slightly irritating thespian discovers that they are directly descended not from Latvian nobility as they always believed, but a instead from somebody who was common as muck and who spent a spell banged up in Strangeways for Lurking Near Duckponds.

Such a moment is always accompanied by a grainy snapshot of some cross eyed rickets riddled bloke in a battered hat and disgrace boots and that's what the census lacks, a chance for us to record now for posterity the images that might pop up centuries hence to mortify our ancestors. And if you can sport a huge stove hat and whiskers while doing so, then so much the better.

Comment on: 'We're in a right state'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/12/disability-britain-society-lucy-mangan?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

Partial repost.

Society ascribes a sliding scale of deference to illness and infirmity. If your inability to rise from your bed is caused by, for instance, that genius idea you had at half nine the previous night to switch to shorts, and your symptoms include headache, nausea, 40% proof perspiration and the nagging thought that you did something dreadful in your left shoe last night, you are unlikely to get much sympathy. Consideration for others should, however, be extended to those who have trouble getting about, ranging from those struggling with three bags or more of rebellious shopping, through those with sticks or crutches and wheelchairs, all the way up to speeding ambulances or creeping hearses.

The possible exception is when one sees a tanned, fit looking sort with a colourful cast on his foot and you briefly wonder how deserving of sympathy is somebody who may have just stubbed their toe when pissed out their skull on schnapps during their recent skiing holiday.

Social attitudes towards illness and infirmity have changed significantly over time. A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale; standard-issue ‘healthy’ was upright and able-bodied, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look funny, or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you, or in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.

If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.

‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers, spinning flanges, swooping sharp bits and, of course, flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch not just extremities but bonnets, frilly shirts and other stunningly impractical clothing of the age.

Luckily, we now have advances not just in health and safety, but tight clothing and, of course, medication. But even the cure can be tricky. For instance, not long ago I decided to treat a sniffle by trying an allegedly ‘non-drowsy’ berry-flavoured drink. What I remember is a sensation of hot ribena and then waking up at two in the afternoon feeling a bit queer and not at all surprised that housewives get hooked on painkillers, it makes the dull bit of the afternoon go quicker than two sherries and an episode of ‘antiques roadshow’.

But at least it was a proper chemical cure. When faced with a complex problem or illness there’s nothing worse than these quack cures that homoeopathists peddle - shoving a banana up your arse to cure a headache or whatever (peel it first - you don’t want to look stupid). The purveyors of quack cures should, at least, be honest in their trade, possibly by ditching the white lab coat and simply rolling into town in a horse-drawn wagon, pulling up in the town square and putting on a medicine show flogging ‘Professor McTeeths all-nachural-snakebite-liniment’, a patent cure-all for warts, coughs, lost limbs, teenage boys playing with themselves and, if you drink the stuff, sobriety.

Of course there is a school of thought that you can treat just about anything with alcohol. For instance the belief that a ‘hot toddy’ can have a positive benefit on a cold is so widespread that it’s a wonder you can’t get Glenfiddich on the NHS. Certainly there’s a time and a place for alcohol in the treatment of illness; having a drink to celebrate your hangover dissipating or knocking back an enormous gin while you tell your friends the tale of how you came to lose your arm, while standing on your brand-new tiger skin rug.

(Painful pelvis sounds like a right pain in the arse…and hip, and whole pelvisish region. Hope you are once more able to frolic like a spring lamb on speed soon).

The international day of: Insert Name Here

International days are a fine idea, international days celebrating something are a great idea, international days castigating or berating something or someone? Less of a great idea.

In truth, days where something is berated rather than celebrated tend to be on a national rather than international level, examples including Denmark’s annual ‘the-Goons-weren’t-actually-that-funny’ day, Argentina’s annual ‘No! to broccoli’ day and of course our very own forthcoming national ‘I do not fully understand Alternative Voting, but I don’t like it. Is it European?’ day (May 5th). Indeed just about the only international day of condemnation is: ‘is it just me, or is ‘Black Swan’ a bit over-rated?’ day (37 countries signed up so far (on Facebook at least) and counting).

As a species, we like to celebrate things. It brings us closer as a community, and by a community I of course mean as a collection of people who like a drink. That’s the great thing about The World, everyone in it likes a drink; I don’t care if you are in the desert or at the Poles, somebody somewhere will find a way to ferment their way to a fun time and invent a national beverage, even if it means adding clear spirit normally used to clean your snowmobile spark plugs to reindeer piss (known locally as a ‘vodka Red Nose’).

Of course, for real disagreements you have to go ultra local. Look, the fact that an individual can be undecided about something as simple as the purchase of a pair of purple socks (Don’t! the scarf was a mistake, let’s not compound things), essentially having an argument with themselves means that humans can have an argument at, basically, the cellular level. This is what allows two rational people to have a falling out about who’s turn it is to load the dishwasher and share the same bed while still seething with principles (but, importantly, not stabbing one another with cutlery…well, not until it’s clean).

Siblings and spouses can argue, as can villages; a few years ago there was a case of keen competition between two neighbouring villages for the regional title of ‘Britain in Bloom’. One morning, the villages of Little Twatting (or whatever) came out to find their blooms blighted. Skulduggery was suspected and, although nothing was ever proved, the subsequent success of Great Twatting (or whatever) coupled with the fact that the B&Q at Great Twatting (or whatever) had totally sold out of weedkiller the week before cast rather a shadow over what had, up until then, been a rather jolly affair.

Organised fun is no fun at all. Just look at ‘The Wicker Man’. That’s why the calendar if stuffed with Saints days and feast days and other forgotten religious festivals, mostly observed by only the most pious and an increasingly bitter clergy, who want their flock to understand the message of St Fistima (feast day 17th March, message: Romans have no sense of humour whatsoever about their gods).

If you want to have your local, regional, national or international day observed and celebrated, you’ve got to have a gimmick. You don’t even need alcohol, although it helps. You can mark a day of celebration with a pancake, or chasing a fast cheese down a steep slope (and if that doesn’t mark St John’s day, it should). It also helps if you can get the card and confectionary markets on side. In my more heretical moments I often wonder of Christianity was a scam cooked up by Cadbury’s and Hallmark to shift some product at an otherwise quiet time of year. And the initial launch went so well they decided to repeat the whole thing in a few months later and call it Easter. Proof positive will come when they announce that in addition to his birth and death, the church have decided to mark that other important rite of passage in a bloke’s life and that henceforth, 17 September shall be ‘Christ’s First Pint’ day.

It’s good to celebrate something positive. It was world book day this week and I celebrated the world flavour of this by reading a Chinese book. Untranslated. Didn’t understand a bloody word (pictogram, whatever) but I rather hope that somewhere in Liang Shang Po province some farmer stopped killing snakes in his paddy field long enough to read a P G Wodehouse short story, also untranslated…but then laugh half way down page two anyway. Some things really are universal and cross the language divide, and your valet disproving of your choice of cravat is one of them.

Choices, choices

Selling has been with us for as long as there has been more mammoth meat than the tribe needed that day and some bloke painted a really, really, luscious drawing of a mammoth on the cave wall. This would ultimately lead to disappointment when the world’s first fast food customer looked inside their styrofoam (STILL not decomposed) container and wondered a) what relationship the slightly damp and manky contents within bore to the plump and delightful illustration on the wall and b) what the hell a gerkin was.

Selling an idea has been with us for a slightly shorter time, this required blokes in robes with questionable facial hair and a shedload of wine. Initially many of these ideas were quite straightforward and useful, dealing as they did with issues of mathmatics, geometry and so forth and would result in nothing more than ensuring the future employment of slightly lanky men who would make a living tutoring algebra and making the inventor of the protractor one of the wealthiest men on the planet.

However, it wasn’t long before the greybeards started coming up with ideas like democracy and freedom of expression and, what’s more, tried to persuade others that their ideas were good ones.

Government trying to sell something is not as straightforward as a campaign selling, say, pickle onion flavoured monster munch. One is trying to sell you something cooked up by evil trolls that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and is not at all good for you, the other is a delicious snack remembered with fond nostalgia. (But, let’s be honest, was probably cooked up by evil trolls, left a nasty taste in the mouth, was not at all good for you AND left you with chemically induced halitosis) (and a slightly dirty feeling that you’d not experience again until your first illicit shag) (and even then not with the same intensity).

Previous Government ad campaigns have basically fallen into two categories.

The first tried to terrify you. The one about not bonking icebergs or whatever was a good example and had a profound effect on me, to the extent that not only icebergs but penguins, pemmican and the even the cresta run are all safe from my sexual attention. And there was ‘protect and survive’, where the Voice Of Doom explained that if you hid in airing cupboard, you’d be safe from a thermonuclear blast. Whether this was followed by a further film giving recipes for radioactive rat I don’t know, I was busy changing out of damp pants.

But they were as nothing compared with that cartoon about the kid who decided to wander onto the thin ice, which concluded with a shot of the flickering lights of an ambulance in the chill dusk as the bowed figures carried a shape on a stretcher. A decade on and anyone watching a soft focus artfully shot cartoon about a wintry scene was emptied of all emotion except harrowing dread. That’s why I cry when I watch ‘The Snowman’, whimsy be damned.

The other type of Government advertising is when they sold you something you already owned, like utilities. ‘If you see Sid, tell him…that in a decade all his gas will come from politically unstable Eastern European states which previously we had feared because they had sheds full of rusting nuclear weapons or, worse, empty sheds where rusting nuclear weapons should be prior to being sold to terrorists, but who can now hold the nation to ransom by turning off the tap the next time there’s a cold snap’.

Wisdom of the policy aside, I would have liked to see the ad campaign selling off the forests. Question, who would you get to front it, a celeb or a chirpy CGI squirrel called Terry Nutkins who would blether on about how being given the chance to buy his own tree would give him a foot on the property ladder? Or an Ewok?

Selling two conflicting ideas though? Easy. Crisp makers have campaigns to ‘support’ a particular flavour. Result: you just end up buying more of something that’s the same thing really, you think you’ve exercised choice, and you have a nasty taste in your mouth.

Stuff

I read recently that some supermarket is going to start 'offering' (that is, charging for) a dating service whereby they set you up with a potential partner based on the contents of your respective baskets.

Personally I don't think it's the greatest idea in the world to match people with similar purchasing habits, as nothing puts a strain on a relationship quite like the bitter resentment that stems from your partner eating the last bag of quavers, while people who buy quorn should simply not be allowed to breed.

At the value end of the dating service, it's probably nothing more sophisticated than making sure that people who bulk-buy marmite are not matched with those who do not, while, supermarkets being supermarkets, there's probably a luxury end where blokes can not only be set up with women, but can be informed when they are likely to be ovulating and so time their approach to coincide with a time their prospective partner is craving sperm and hence not too picky.

Of course the idea is not new, people have been checking each other out at the check out for years. Indeed it’s quite acceptable to load your basket with the sort of stuff that would make you attractive to the opposite sex, like the keys to your villa in Italy and plenty of single portion ready meals. Try to avoid a dozen cans of cheap, super-strength cider and a DVD featuring Jeremy Clarkson though.

The service is predicated on the assumption that we are defined by what we consume and, certainly, our stuff gives a clue as to our personality. For instance, if a bloke has shelves full of action figures still in their boxes, he’s likely to be a reasonable sort and the body parts in his freezer will be neatly stacked. However, if a young woman has shelves full of My Little Pony, out of their boxes and showing clear signs of grooming, run! Use the window, not the door, it’s quicker. Never mind the drop, just do it man!

Men have, of course, been storing their tat off-site in bespoke stuff-deposit structures for many years and a glimpse into a chap’s shed is truly a glimpse into his soul, except with more homebrew and well-thumbed porn. That people now have so much stuff they don’t have a place for it all and have spent so much on it they can’t afford to move to a bigger home has not gone unnoticed by business, hence those self-storage places that have sprung up round the country, allowing couples who are moving in together a place to hide, sorry to store all his hideous furniture and framed movie posters until she can eBay the lot or simply torch the place.

By the way, if a female colleague mentions in passing that she is moving at the weekend and putting some of her stuff in storage, remarking that it’ll transform the inside of the storage unit into something resembling a typical female’s front room, don’t on Monday morning ask her if she had a hard time stuffing her ladycave at the weekend. The resulting tribunal won’t result in you being sacked, but you will be tagged as ‘insensitive’ by HR. Like I care.

I’ve always thought that if my personality was wiped as the result of some medical experiment gone wrong, conspiracy or, more likely, trying to fork a muffin out of the toaster while wearing a hat made of tin-foil, I could construct it by re-reading all the books I own, being in the lucky position of not having an original thought in my head and having cobbled together what passes for a personality from a collection of fiction and the odd reference book about cheese. Umberto Eco wrote about this process in ‘The mysterious flame of Queen Loana’ so it turns out that even that idea’s not original. I mean, I thought of it first, but just because he wrote it down he gets all the credit.

But he didn’t take it to its logical conclusion, just like putting fresh fruit in your shopping basket because you know nobody wholesome is going to strike up a conversation with you if it contained your actual dietary staples of pot noodle and mars bars, you could load your reading matter to tailor your reconstructed personality to something, well, a little less freakish.

And the place to start if your teenage diaries. That’s why I’m currently bidding on eBay for a blank Letts diary for my teen years. I’ll then be able to substitute this for my actual diary and convince myself that I was in fact a stylish, confident and happy teen, rather than the shambling collection of grease and neuroses that was actually the case. Hence, for instance, replacing this not untypical entry: ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball today. Made me feel funny. Went home, touched myself. Watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed.’ with the rather more erudite ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball. She is beauty poise and elegance and my heart swells with yearning, a divine ache every time I see her. Went home, masturbated to the point of dehydration, watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed’.

Big Society and Dystopia repost

Growing up, those twin essential devices from stopping healthy developmental play in the fresh air; foxed-to-the-point-of-badgered library books and terrifying BBC children’s drama, provided essential preparation for what to expect from the dystopian future.

If you read the books of John Christopher, dystopia came in the form of some sort of disaster that set technology levels back to those of the dark ages (alien invasion, mankind tinkering with nature, everyone on the planet simultaneously joining Civil War re-enactment societies, that sort of thing), while the BBC’s Bleak Future was essentially far muddier then the present, being a place where the appearance of a steam engine was greeted with exactly the sort of slack-jawed mixture of fear and awe currently on the faces of the kiddies being traumatised by this tea-time apocalyptic drama, filmed in the West Midlands to save money.

The drama conveyed to kiddies with some style that when they grew up there would be more chance of them being a subsistence farmer than a spaceman* and, most brutally of all, ‘Angel Delight’ would no longer existed.

What was never predicted (along with mobile ‘phone ring tones so irritating it makes you wonder if perhaps the plot of some of these stories: that advanced technology is jealously guarded by a social elite or at least people with taste, is not in fact a good idea) was the solution proposed by politicians to head off a future where the fabric of society is as ragged as a pair of Primark pants after a boil wash: the Big Society.

The Big Society is not, as you might think, Brobdingnag, but rather a model for the future of community services. Essentially funding is slashed for supporting council services and the people who rely on those services are told to ‘get on with it’, much in the way the same phrase is used when you are locked in your study with a bottle of scotch and a service revolver after you have lost a rather important battle or, worse still, committed social suicide by tonguing an unsuitable minor royal.

The Big Society suffered a set-back this week when Liverpool Council announced that they didn’t want to be considered part of the pilot for an idea thought up by posh boys, but instead were quite content to continue to be considered as a city of lovable rogues, chirpy female flatmates or, of course, lesbian patio-layers (might be getting that last one a bit confused).

A ‘pilot’ by the way is where you don't have enough confidence to roll out an ill-conceived scheme nationally and so do it in a few backwater areas. So, when it bombs like a fat kid jumping into a swimming pool, you can explain that either the idea needs work or the bloody yokels in charge of the pilot couldn't be trusted to run a car boot stall, never mind a complex social experiment and anyway, next time the posters will be better).

The gist of the Big Society is that English people, who by tradition would all like to live in castles with moats far from any neighbours and by practice only really talk to their neighbours if they are caught dumping their garden waste over the fence, are supposed to take a community approach and look after things like keeping the streets tidy and, no doubt when the cuts to public services really start to bite, other jobs currently undertaken by trained professionals including; maintaining parks (we can graze our sheep on them when we're all reduced to subsistence farming), health care (who needs doctors now we have the internet - what's easier, seven years at medical school or Googling 'tickly cough'?), or air traffic control.

What certainly won’t be needed are civic poo scoopers. This is thanks to the invention of the doggie bag. Certainly not to be confused with a device used to transport expensive leftovers from a restaurant (itself an alien concept to anyone brought up to believe that not scraping the plate at the Berni Inn until the last morsel of food, and quite a lot of the pattern, was removed was a sin), but a bag full of Scoobie Poo. Thanks to resilient, hole-free (and that’s important), plastic bags, owners of defecating hounds can now swoop with the speed of a cockle-picker racing the tide and simultaneously bag the unthinkable and make a mental note to stop feeding Fido leftover masala.

*Ironically, this is true, if by subsistence level farmer you mean owner of a boutique farm in the Cotswolds producing some sort of organic cheese and pork scratching smoothie concoction that is perversely popular in Japan, sells for a fortune at farmers’ markets and has just been picked up for national distribution by Waitrose.

A class act

Ah, class. It used to be that everyone knew where they stood in the class system, you were either Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker or John Cleese. What class you were was determined, back when the world was black and white, by height, apparently.

It used to be much simpler, back when the world was colourful, but two dimensional. You were either a monarch, somebody who owned a castle, or a peasant. Class in those days was largely a matter of how filthy you were and how largely root vegetables featured in your diet. If you ended the day covered in pig-shit and looking forward to a hearty meal of a parsnip, you were a serf. If however you owned your own castle, had a selection of falcons and dined off hunks of things that only featured parsnip as something to help soak up the gravy, then congratulations, you can look forward to dying of the pox or in a crusade but until then, enjoy yourself!

Things became complicated with the introduction of the printing press, the artisan class and merchants, leading to people without castles having more money than people with castles, a situation that continues today, largely because of the cost of maintaining a castle (and also of course to that particular condition that afflicts the landed gentry: their bitter resentment of any member of the National Trust). Moats, as anyone who has scrutinised MPs expenses will know, are expensive to clean out. Must be all the pike-men and bits of siege equipment that presumably get stuck in the filters.

Britain is to class what Catholicism is to religion, taking a very simple concept and wildly complicating it. Other countries react differently to class. The French decapitated all of their aristocracy and hence now have no class at all, while in the rest of Europe the upper classes seem slightly embarrassed about having wealth and power and so reside in large residences far from commoners. The American system is slightly different and can best be described, as I read somewhere, by the following: if your name is on a building, you’re doing very well, if your name is on a desk, you’re doing OK and if your name is on a badge pinned to a shirt that features a corporate logo, you’re fucked.

Now we have not just your basic classes of; aristocracy, gentry, upper class, middle class, working class, lower class and underclass, but many sub-categories of class. And while the British are very good at identifying what class other people are (‘posh idiot’, ‘chav scum’ or ‘foreign’ for instance), they are less well able to categorise themselves, and terrified of asking in case somebody actually tells them.

The problem with Brits is that they consider that there is social mobility inside the class structure. Worse still is that those folk most acutely aware of the class structure are often the most uncomfortable when speaking to people from outside their own class. For instance, when speaking to tradesman, a middle class person will, if they have prepared properly for the occasion, have a variety of conversational gambits, usually sport related. This is partly because middle class people like to believe they can ‘get on’ with anyone, but mostly because they are trying to avoid the 30% middle-class surcharge that they secretly believe tradesmen apply to anyone who drives an audi.

They’re wrong of course, it’s actually 33%.

Gentry of course just treat everyone exactly the same. Unfortunately they do this by being universally ghastly.

This does not stop middle class people wanting to access the world of the upper classes and recently great steps have been taken to achieve this. Prior to the broadcast of ‘Downton Abby’ however, the sole guide to how to behave at a country house party was the writing of P G Wodehouse or Agatha Christie. Hence, if one were to be invited to spend the weekend at a country house, one would reasonably expect to spend one’s time either attempting to steal cow creamers and involving oneself in hi-jinks in the shrubbery, or beating the host to death with a candlestick in the library.

Hold on, isn’t that Cluedo? Boardgames, how very middle-class.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/23/tricycle-christiania-trikes-eco-transport

After the frustrations of the weekly commute, travel by bicycle at the weekend is a real tonic, be it bunny-hopping from bonnet to bonnet of trapped cars in a traffic jam with a cheeky wave; using your pump, specially lead-weighted for the purpose, to swipe at the passing wing-mirror of a car that has nearly forced you off the road - or the simple joy of negotiating a crowded pavement at high speed to avoid riding in traffic.

While happy to spend a reasonable amount modifying my bicycle (plastic bottle containing drink can be obtained for less than a quid in most supermarkets, so I suppose that having to stump up three quid for an empty plastic bottle has to be justified by the bike shop describing it as an ‘in-motion hydration system’), I do find that most trikes are ruinously expensive for what you get. How can the addition of an extra wheel result in adding an extra zero to the price tag?

There are obvious drawbacks to riding a trike. All of the usual hazards of the road are there (such as the idiot youth who has decided to finance the ‘mods’ to his Clio by selling off any sort of intelligence to the highest bidder in what I can only assume is some fort of ‘common-sense offset’ scheme*) but there are other hazards too, such as people diving out in front of you and attempting to buy an ice cream from you. Trikes are uncommon and there’s nothing like a trio of tyre-tracks across the startled face of a wailing toddler to bring trouble, and the rozzers, to your door.

The selling point of this trike is the ability, apparently, to take your children with you. Fantastic, this means that instead of the sullen little sods refusing to come out on a family bike-ride, they can sulk in comfort in the front basket, texting their friends and probably social services about this abuse.

How long, indeed, before those with ‘pimp-my-ride’ ambitions but a ‘pimp-my-bike’ budget latch onto this. When I were a laddo, the ultimate bike mod was a playing card through the spokes. This made a satisfying ‘brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ noise. With all that space in the front, might not some anti-social git decide it’s just big enough to fit in a sub-woofer that sets off earthquake warnings.

The bicycle is about freedom, not about being tied down – that’s why you are discouraged from attaching bikes to so many railings. More than one person on a bike? That’s what a tandem is for (that and for testing relationships to destruction, oh - ‘is she actually bloody peddling back there’ - you bitter, bitter thought). Or giving your mate a backie (which come to think of it sounds like a deviant practice). Two wheels are good, the world is your playground (well, the solid bits are). Three wheels and a kid in the front? Sounds like responsibility, not fun.

* This is an offshoot of the ‘rage offset’ scheme, already in use in many walks of life and especially in the media. Some issues cause far too much rage for one person to safely handle. So, the journalist writes an article about, say, foreign people and that rage is offset by literally dozens of people who read the Daily Mail.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/23/television-nudity-recession-credit-crunch

When things are tough, the proles need distracting. Sorry, entertaining. Originally, this took the form of bread and circuses, an idea that was updated to glitzy cinema in the Great Depression and titillating telly now, because in a modern context there is nothing entertaining about watching a poppy seed topped artisan baked granary bloomer being fought over by a couple of clowns. Although if the recession keeps up and ticket sales continue to fall at Boppo’s Circus, we may well end up being confronted with this spectacle, after they’ve eaten all the circus animals, and the weaker of the acrobats.

Entertainment keeps the proles in their seats cheering (or out of their seats cheering if they are watching ‘Clown Fight’, a new show I have just invented) when they might usefully be doing something else, like turning into an angry, jeering mob and marching on some seat of power. Removing your undies might be empowering, but I bet it’s not a patch on lynching a Fat Cat.

Television is certainly doing a very good job of tacking the various issues that cause, and stem from, a global economic downturn with programmes that are about as substantial as the froth from a fwapachino sold by a coffee chain who’s business model is predicated on people not wanting change from a fiver for a paper cup full of warm milk. This includes the news, where efforts to kick-start the economy have been made by the graphics department submitting their overtime forms. No item about the current economic conditions is complete without a graphic featuring more arrows than were seen at Little Big Horn.

And just what is the correct term for the slowdown that turned into a downturn that turned into a credit crunch that turned into a recession that is turning into a depression that will eventually end up as…what? We need a new term, a term for the catastrophic financial situation we find ourselves in. It has to be a new term you see because, like everything else that has happened before but is happening again now, it’s more important this time round because it’s happening to us!

That’s where television is failing us. On the news, the current economic climate could be better summed up by a correspondent crying and screaming while he soils himself and then sets himself on fire than a computer generated arrow. As for entertainment, surely what we need now is one of those shows that used to be so popular in the seventies, where society has collapsed and people live a grim existence in an isolated farmhouse fending off feral neighbours an worrying about the reappearance of the Plague. I remember this sort of thing fondly because it used to be on on a Sunday tea-time because it was considered appropriate kiddies’ programming. This was because it raised themes of subverting authority which caused kids to consider how they might fare in a world that was 99% depopulated but also because it was incredibly cheap to make, because by way of props all you needed was a land rover and a shotgun. Well, it certainly prepared me for the dystopian present, I know that all you need to survive when civilization implodes is access to a farm house, flares (trousers, not distress) and an ill tempered old fellow who, nevertheless, is the only bloke left who knows how to make petrol from stoats.

This is probably the format of the next Big Brother.

We don’t need nudity. We need a programme called ‘who’s to blame’ where every week an angry mob of clowns try, convict and lynch somebody who may have had something to do with the recession (‘Clown Court’?) because, let’s stop being distracted by the pink wrinkly bits on show after the watershed, somebody out there is responsible for making the high street resemble a post apocalyptic scene where a finance smart bomb has destroyed all the shops with a poor business model. Mind you, I see that a bag of pick ‘n’ mix went for twelve grand at action last week; maybe if Woolies had managed to sustain that sort of business, they’d still be trading.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/16/walkers-crisps-new-flavours-brooker

‘In these health-conscious times, potato crisps have a bad reputation. Gone are the days when you could walk down the street cheerfully snuffling through a pack of Smokey Bacon.’

Ah yes, I recall that Posy Simmons cartoon about a couple of ‘foodyobs’ shopping at a lone olde fashioned shoppe and topping up on proper crispy type crisps, then breathing them all over the macrobiotic organic hand-knitted foodinistas on the pavement outside. But that was the 80’s…

…now, thanks to the eradication of manners and standards by the sort of people who eat with their fingers, think a knife is for stabbing other hoodies and think a fork is something that you do to your biatch, it’s perfectly acceptable to consume the convenience food of your choice while meandering along, dropping onion slices to the left, fries to the right and curses and ringtones fore and aft. Crisps? Crisps? Eating a bag of crisps is the equivalent of fine dining.

More than that, it’s fun to have the full crisp experience near burger-schlorping trolls. You open your bag and then rustle it, simulating the sound of autumnal leaves and confusing the troll into thinking that winter is approaching (watch them eat faster in an attempt to put on weight for their winter hibernation). Then carefully extract one crisp after another and consume delicately, showing the troll how snacks should be snacked, masticating carefully and avoiding the scattergun approach the troll employs that so often results in the partial consumption of the carton. Finally, blow up the bag, stand behind the troll and bring your hands together in a mighty clap that simultaneously bursts the bag and the bowels of the troll as he thinks it’s all kicking off. It’s a well known fact that a bag of crisps burst in a bus shelter sounds exactly like a converted .33 starting pistol, making the troll think he is the victim of an assassination attempt by the bloke that used to start the egg-and-spoon race at his primary school.

There have always been experiments with crisps; anyone who remembers ‘bones’ or ‘fangs’ or even ‘space invaders’ will know that when it comes to being inventive, the manufacturers of artificially flavored puffed corn snacks have a taste for novelty exceeding the sort of person who spend their spare time nailing owls to clocks.

There are certain base states of crisp that will always be with us. Salt and vinegar is salt and vinegar even when it’s called maldon sea scab and sarson dripping. Indeed half the fun of buying artisan crisps is trying to decode the flavours; is ‘congealed lactate and flatlander root’ cheese and onion or cause to take yourself off to the doctors?

Then there are the classics. Cheese puff corn snack. These always taste better abroad because the EU banned the stuff that makes them really orange and really cheesy and now you can only get the good stuff in countries that border on rogue food states that take a relaxed attitude to using the same colouring that goes into flourescent jackets and traffic cones in a snack.

The Walkers exercise is, while fun, somewhat redundant. The acme of food science and snack has already been reached. Pickled Onion flavoured Monster Munch. As a child, I recall that these, and some orange squash, put me in a state of excitement that it would now be hard to reproduce even using a combination of class A narcotics, horse liniment and skydiving. Any snack that actually makes your eyeballs itch and your mouth taste like the sort of site Greenpeace protest at the establishment of is not just good, it’s great.

But voting? What a waste of time. Voting gives us mediocrity. What you need is a food dictatorship, that’s why chefs come off as tinpot Nazis, because too many cooks really do spoil the lark tongue and stoat ear soufflé and in a kitchen you need a free range git calling the shots. What you need for crisp flavours is a group of food scientists with no morals, stained orange lab coats and a permanent tangy fur on their tongue, and it’s that tangy fur that’s the next great flavour.

Farewell Eddie, Becca and Jack

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2285538,00.html

What do you think?

Since it began, Living with Teenagers has provoked a storm of interest from readers who have loved - and loathed - it. Tell us what it has meant to you and we will publish a selection of your responses next week. Email family@guardian.co.uk, putting Living with Teenagers in the subject field

First and foremost – hats off to the editor who pulled ‘living with teenagers’. I am tempted to start a social networking site just so I can organise a parade in his/her honour.

Secondly, a big thank you for the formal invitation to submit thoughts and comments about this column. I’m not sure how to translate what are basically chilling animal howls of inarticulate frustrated rage, but I’ll do my best.

In terms of finding objectionable things in your newspaper, this column was on a par with Burchill at her worst, Littlejohn at his ‘best’, Bushell at all, or fox shit.

So why read it at all? Why not just skip it? Three reasons. One, I’ve paid for it. Second, like a gruesome karaoke performance, sometimes you just can’t NOT look. Finally, there was always the slim chance that the column might improve.

I think my problem with the column was twofold. The first was that I just didn’t believe it. I was not convinced that a family that dysfunctional could actually exist, or rather, the writer didn’t make me believe that THAT dysfunctional family existed. I thought that it crossed the line from exaggeration into fantasy far too many times. Secondly, if a family like that does exist, then I wasn’t remotely interested in reading about them. The children were vile and the parents useless. If this is an accurate representation of that family, then a big thanks to the parents for raising three such anti-social, selfish people – I have to share a planet with these people!

Inspired by the right to reply in ‘comment is free’ I often thought of going further and setting up a blog, the premise of which would be to take each Saturday’s article and duplicate it to a certain point, where a more sensible reaction to some teen outrage would replace the usual parental reaction of sobbing and hugs. The problem was that I never got beyond line three before I had to describe in detail beating a teen to a puree with a cricket bat.

How to follow this column? How about living with monkeys, where primates screech at one another and fling their own excrement at one another and anyone who observes them. Too samey?

Packaging is murder

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2065214,00.html

This busted my WTF-o-meter so thoroughly that it actually invalidated the warranty.

The Observer Food Monthly is supposed to serve two purposes. Firstly, it is supposed to throw up the occasional interesting recipe, secondly, it is supposed to make Observer readers a bit more secure about paying exorbitant sums for ethically reared, hand-washed, home-knitted food by explaining that it’s really rather lovely, when we all know that if you want true taste sensation you have six pints of lager - after that you’ll think a Pot Noodle is the best thing you’ve ever tasted.

So what in the name of Greek buggery was a six page ad for ready meals doing there?

The perils of vegetarianism.

Vegetarians are morally repugnant. They claim to be concerned about animals, so that’s why they don’t eat meat. Bullocks! I love meat and I’ve done more than they ever have to ensure the ethical treatment of animals. Why? Because I make sure that I eat outdoor-reared (assume they can come in out of the rain though) meat that has been free to frolic, gambol, root, scratch, sniff, rut or do whatever it is that animals like to do - to have led a lovely pastoral and stress-free existence…right up to the point where somebody brains it with a seven pound lump hammer and starts cutting it up. I pay good money for my meat, money that’s invested in, oh, I don’t know…sheep dogs or something.

Cheap meat is raised in sheds and barns and probably forced to sew Nike trainers before being brutally murdered. So, if vegetationists don’t even buy meat at all, where is the investment to keep the ethical people afloat going to come from?

The only reason not to eat something is if you have a medical condition. (And I mean a real one. Interesting to see how long somebody with a peanut allergy pissed and whined about it if their jet crashed on a desert island and all there was to eat was a lifetimes supply of catering packs of KP).

Religious nutters are even worse. Why do so many people have it in for the pig? The monumental arrogance, in a world where people are starving, of actually not eating something ‘on principal’.

I was going to bang on about ‘the rule at my house is…’ but none of my friends have any kind of hang up about food, at all. Indeed, the trick when feeding some of them is to get your hands out of the way really quickly after you put the plate down.

And as for Lynda McCartney - she’d still be alive today is she’d had the occasional pork pie.

The McCartney/McCarthy meat witch hunt

Quite a few things struck me about the article. The first was how fucking miserable the McCartney’s looked. I can understand it, on the one hand, you’re going to have your tea cooked for you by Nigel Slater (great!) but, on the other, it’s fucking veg again (Agh!).

The second is that Heather Mills stood absolutely no chance at all of being happy. Usually it’s innocent kids and a wicked stepmother - this time the roles were reversed.
Cheer up love, you'd be quite pretty if you smiled once in a while...and ate properly

Tolitarian vegetarian and miserable - it’s like having the Taliban at the table.

This weeks recipe: pierce lid and heat for 2 minutes

It was the reference to ready meals that really got on my knob. Ready. Fucking. Meals.

Let’s not beat around the bush. Ready meals are designed for those people who can suspend belief that a plastic tray full of goo and chemicals didn’t start its life in a factory in Walsall, but rather each one is hand crafted in a cottage kitchen somewhere.

I admit, I buy them occasionally - they are great for pulling out of the freezer and putting into the microwave. Usually It’s curry. Actually, it’s always curry. And it’s always the same curry - Chicken Tikka Masala. And that’s my point - ready meals are designed for people who lack imagination.

But vegetarian ready meals? WTF? What the hell can you do to a vegetable that is so complicated? I tell you what you can do, you can add a load of packaging, you know, rather than the stuff that comes wrapped around a vegetable that you can compost - and you can make a fortune.

In this case the market is clear - vegetarian ready meals are suitable for easily led (vegetarian) food faddists (vegetarians) who don’t have the energy to cook a decent dinner for themselves. (Can you guess?).

I am now going to eat a pork pie.