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

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.

Typewriter 2.0

I am once again in a hotel, and I am once again thinking about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.

It’s a rather pleasant hotel.  It’s in the centre of London, with a view out over the docks to the city (and there is almost everything you need to know about London, if you wrote that on the back of a postcard from the past anywhere else in the world, you would have the mental image of a place of transit smelling of desperation and mackerel, populated by wanton types with earrings, and that’s just the sailors.  The only boats bobbing in the dock here are Sunseekers and the city is the City, proud to leave all the lights on in their huge office blocks to create the impression that everyone is still hard at it after dark, shouting into telephones, Like In The Movies).

The air conditioning is hidden and efficient, there is no lazily rotating ceiling fan that can cross fade to become the rotating blades of a helicopter.  Maybe it’s stealth?

Nevertheless, there’s something about being in a hotel and not being on holiday that makes me think about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.  I’d like to say it’s the mutual incompatibility of pool toys and AK47s that make any holiday hotel a haven, but sadly that’s no longer true.

So on the strength of my previous post about ambient soundtracks, I should probably be putting together the faux war correspondent soundtrack, era by era.  Let’s start with the 1970s.  Busy traffic, foreign murmuring, farting scooters, the occasional mooing of an ox, the whup whup whup of a Huey passing overhead and the clackity clack (‘don’t talk back!’) of the typewriter.

Vietnam was, I have read, the first televised war.

There have been plenty since.  I remember ITV reporting Afghanistan.  Film reports of Sandy Gall sitting in a cave somewhere in Afgan, breaking (unleavened) bread with the Taliban, who were off to beat back the Russians. 

And of course the Falklands.  ‘I counted them all out, I counted them all back’.  A Union Flag waving from the top of an aerial as a squaddie yomped to Port Stanley and Victory.

Gulf War I and Gulf War II.  Gulf War I was night vision cameras on tanks streaking across the desert.  Gulf War II took things to the next level, that next level being vertical as we were treated to footage of the nosecone cam of a bunker buster.  Not to mention the ‘shock and awe-shit there goes that little place that does great falafel’ of the opening night bombardment.

Gulf War II was the last television war.  Now, conflict plays out on snapchat and Twitter, barbarism on Youtube.

What the medium of the next Big One will be I’m not sure.  Possibly when the nukes start flying, the next war will be recorded by the cave paintings of the survivors but actually I think a more realistic prospect will be that the next major conflict will be reported by ABC when it’s a throw down between the Red and the Blue, rather than the Grey and the Blue.  I think Blue won last time?

Vietnam was certainly a reporters’ war.  It also produced memoirs and collections of reportage and, of course, a load of great movies (although the greatest war movie ever made is ‘Where Eagles Dare’, followed by ‘The Eagle Has Landed”, followed by ‘Heartbreak Ridge’.  Basically, if it has ‘Eagle or Clint, it’s all good).

As previously reported from the front line in Salisbury, I’m pretty sure that my ancient Powerbook could stop a .303 round that would take down a Decepticon, but I would rather like it if the keyboard sounds could be set to different themes.  Obviously ‘space’ and ‘rainforest’ or similar would be popular, but I’m attracted to the idea of ‘quill’ and, of course ‘Imperial typewriter’.

For the (written) record, I once owned an electric typewriter, a Brother, once plugged in and placed upon a table, typing generated a report like a fucking artillery barrage.  Hardly the sort of thing to write tender love poetry upon, that ladies could then read, and frot themselves senseless to.

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’.

Write on Beer II

I’m writing this in a hotel room.

It occurs to me that in my 2014 blog entry about writing on beer, I described the fiction writing process.  If I recall correctly, drinking ‘wifebeater’, as Stella is loving known, in a pub in the daytime drove me to outline a not-entirely-original idea of a series of books based on a martial family.  The idea has, ahem, never got beyond development stage.

But it did make me think that I was unjust in entirely overlooking a class of writers who drink, and drink beer.  Journalists, particularly, war correspondents.

This may not be entirely unconnected with the fact that I am currently drinking warm beer from a bottle in a hotel that is in a place I have never visited before and which I arrived at after dark.  If I had arrived in a Hercules transport firing off flares to distract surface-to-air missiles and then jumped from the tailgate thingy to a dusty desert airstrip, the picture could not have been more complete.  I am even toting my laptop, an ageing Apple Powerbook G4 that weighs about as much as a fucking manual typewriter (maybe even less because although those old Imperials may have been made out of steel and gravity, they didn’t have batteries that are apparently constructed from the same stuff they make black holes out of), in an canvas camera case.

An Imperial is probably better at stopping a WWII sniper round (other ballistic armour includes a notebook, but nothing beats a Bible) but I’m betting my Powerbook could be used to swat away incoming up to an including depleted uranium rounds.

As it is, I’m in Salisbury, but can assure you I am very much on the front line of civil unrest, as the town had its Christmas festival thingie tonight and there are loads of road closures and angry motorists.  Nobody has let rip a burst of AK47 fire from the back of their Toyota pickup, yet, but I noticed some pretty serious tutting going on in at least one Range Rover, which might sound innocent enough but to those in the know is as sure an indication that things are about to kick off as that fuse opening credit sequence in Mission Impossible.

Anyway, drinking warm beer (‘Brooklyn Lager’, got hooked on the stuff in NYC), is redolent of foreign correspondents.  That and secretly despising the locals, the warm beer selling fuckers.  Not really, big shout out to Salisbury, woo hoo! love your Tesco Metro).

Bars, back in the day before wars moved to places where the combatants don’t drink alcohol (hence, you know: wars), were places where you went to speak to the generals, the gun runners, the generals selling guns to the gun runners, also freedom fighters, terrorists, and other journalists.

Especially journalists.  Especially the Wall Street Journal correspondent shagging the local consulate girl, because he had great local information and because he was always, always, C.I.A. and hence could always afford to get a round in.

Also, anyone freshly arrived off the ‘plane who had British or American cigarettes.

Of course, that was back in the days when journalists stole stories off of one another and fact checked by getting in a jeep, and thought nothing of driving three days through swamp and minefields, rather than getting their stories off Twitter and their ‘fact’ ‘check’ off of Wikipedia.

A lazily rotating ceiling fan, so much like the rotor blades of a Huey, curling cigarette smoke (Christ, those were the days), cigar smoke, pipe smoke (Telegraph correspondent) and booze, and sweat.  Because the great thing about war in the tropics is that you sweat the stuff out as fast as you can drink it.  You could sit in the bar at the Choi Choi Mai from lunchtime to deadline and never have to go to the loo, thanks to the climate.

Not like now, tweeting ‘being shot at, LOL’ from the front while running like hell for the rear.

If being shot at in a war zone is an occupational hazard, but you are not a soldier and are hence allowed to booze, then who wouldn’t reach for a beer or two with lunch?

Who's that girl...or is it a bloke?

Depending on your status as a celebrity and your relationship with the media, if you are famous you can expect to see pictures of yourself in the paper either smiling on some red carpet somewhere or reeling drunk in the gutter showing your knickers.

If you are famous you probably have your own file in the newspaper vault. If you are lucky this has pictures of you in clean, ironed clothes. If you are unlucky this has pictures of your cellulite. If you are really unlucky this has your police mug-shot and if dame fortune has crapped on you after embarking on a high-fibre diet, this will contain those ‘glamour’ shots you did at the start of your career.

Ordinary people pictured in the paper used to fall into three categories. You either looked startled as you walked to court and some snapper papped you, or you looked happy as you lifted some sort of trophy aloft, or you had a blanket over your head and the caption described you as ‘the accused’ or, possibly ‘the beast’.

The saddest photographs on front pages were those posed school photographs. You felt your heart drop into your shoes because you knew that the picture of the smiling child was not on the front page because it was a slow news day and the kid was related to the editor. When you saw a picture of an entire class, with nobody ringed, it was time to reach for the bottle. I guess class photographs were used because these were the ones most available to the journos, either from the parents or an underpaid school caretaker.

The internet has changed all that though. Recently, high-school gunmen have taken to putting their declarations of insanity on YouTube and so that’s where newspapers go for video grabs – although to be honest they could just have been using the same shot of some acne ridden git in a ‘slipknot’ hoodie, as that’s what all these kids look like.

Worse, they have started to comb social networking sites like MyFace for pictures of missing teens, tragic teens or teens that may well have done something nasty to other teens. This is why one should be careful about the photographs one puts into the public domain. Do you really want, next to the headline ‘suspect held in gnome theft case’, a picture of you simulating sex with a soft toy, because you thought it was a laugh to have it on your home page.

Worse still, do you want to rely on a lazy, pissed up journo getting the right image? The last thing you need is to have a name close to that of a notorious donkey shagger so that on his arrest you see that photograph of yourself taken last Christmas when you were playing twister after getting pissed and the caption ‘mule molester busted’.

So one should be careful what one posts, and what one does, and what one is pictured doing. Or simply emboss all pictures of yourself with the watermark: ‘in my defence, I had been drinking’.

Hugh Meanz Biznezz

A rather belated post here - I should have posted this a few weeks ago, when I had the idea for my Hero of the Week or Villain of the Week.

The Hero of the Week was Hugh Grant. The floppy haired ponce may have previously only barely cut it as the lead in a rom-com or two, but when he hurled those baked beans at that pap, he elevated his status to action hero.

There is something about gutter photographers that make you want to shove their cameras up their arses and hit the ‘zoom’ button. It used to be like organised crime, with a few paps sleazing their way around London, paying off bellboys and doormen to know who was staying where, eating where and sleeping where and with whom or what.

This was because you had one page in the paper that was to do with ‘showbiz’ and two magazines obsessed with celebrity, ‘Hello’ and ‘OK’.

Not any more. The papers are full of pages of photographs (well, maybe photograph is stretching it, grainy images is closer to the mark, I think we’re actually one step away from simply using Google Earth images of Madonna’s back garden and putting a red circle round the collection of shadows that might be her mowing the grass) of celebs.

Now it’s more like crimes of opportunity - photographic muggings. The photograph of choice a few months ago was the low level shot of women getting out of cabs. And the reaction…criticism that they were not wearing knickers. Have I missed something? Is not the reaction ‘hold on, who’s the pervert taking upskirt photographs. I’d like to see him try that on a crowded train.

That’s why the pictures are always grainy - because the celebs have stopped playing ball and are now playing ‘catch the tin can…in your teeth’.

Not that I read any of these papers or mags myself - it’s just that everyone on my train does and you occasionally can’t help but notice a shoddy picture of somebody you don’t recognise from some soap you don’t watch doing their shopping or something - that’s right, they have pictures of people shopping. The new low though is a mag I noticed that has, on the front cover, a promise to pay you for any celeb snaps you send in!

On the one hand I’m tempted to just go to Madam Tausaurds and make a fortune by putting a carrier bag in the hand of each waxwork (Madonna shops at Spar, Queen with a hold-all from Ann Summers). But I’m just as tempted to find out where the offices of the mag are and burn it down.

What I don’t like is this perversion of the role of the Citizen Journalist. It’s good that we all have mobiles with cameras, it’s bad that they can be used to photograph assaults on people in bus-stops or take pictures of shopping celebs.

If I’m ever shopping and see Hugh Grant lurking in the aisles, pondering what to have for tea, he may rest assured that I will not be pestering him for a photograph. Nor will I ask him to pass me the beans.