Pramping in St Paul's

It's Occupied London are, I suppose, protesting about the dire dearth of decent public loos in the capital, and quite right too. It's bad enough that public loos are few and far between, with those super-loo monstrosities dotted around the place like, literally, a shit TARDIS, but one can't even be assured of a decent loo if one employs the popular tactic of dodging into a pub, pretending to be a customer and using the facilities. Even perfectly decent boozers seem seem unable to maintain a perfectly decent gent's. In the case of the place I was in last week, going to the gent's was like wandering into a coastal cave at low tide, it was gloomy, the floor was wet and there was a prominent odour.

Of course, there is also I believe a faction within the protesters who represent Occupy London. Like their hipster brethren across the Atlantic in New York, they are protesting that the banks have all the money and won't give it to people like them to, presumably, buy bigger tents. They are angry, but not as angry as the people who think that the architectural and spiritual magnificence of St Paul's cathedral is really not improved by being surrounded by quite a lot of nylon in jolly primary colours.

The prampers outside St Paul's cathedral are doing a fantastic job of drawing attention to how crap the Church of England are at taking a hard line on using a holy water cannon to wash the protesting scum off the streets, while at the same time neatly deflecting attention away from the bankers down the street who are fucking up the economy through their trademarked working methods of greed, stupidity and spending the afternoon wandering round in a coked-up daze after doing a couple of lines off of a sweaty hookers arse in the company car park during lunch.

The media has made much of the prampers. Apparently they go home in the evening, leaving their tents behind. I trust that the local homeless population are aware that a load of comfy middle class tents, presumably with iPod docks and cool boxes full of sustaining snacks and indifferent wines, are available for occupation at St Paul's. Let's see if the protestors are quite so happy to occupy a tent that has been used overnight by Dosser Dave and his incontinent dog Digger. And I hope that when the protestors do eventually pack up and leave, they check the tents first. Nothing would put a crimp in your first day at the Glastonbury festival quite like shaking out your two-man 'Mountain Master 4000' and discovering a desiccated tramp. And his dog.

Whatever you think of people who camp in the centre of the city, they are bloody irritating. The council, police and church all appear powerless to get rid of the tents. In my experience, the best way to remove campers is to start charging them exorbitant rents for their pitches. All St Paul's needs to do is become a National Trust property and it's problem solved.

The other way to remove tents is of course for the weather to turn bad, although I expect that foul weather in England in November is too much to ask for (and the ongoing mild weather could be taken as a sign that the protest has some sort of higher approval). Maybe they need an act of God. A few days of rain and I don't care how committed the protestors are, they'll soon beat the twat singing Coldplay to death with his own lute and buggered off to the nearest decent pub.

Protest camping...Pramping?

Camping. It’s very popular, apparently. Of course, it’s always been popular with outdoorsy types, and poor people. But as the recession has bitten deeper, it’s also become popular with families who have worked out that the airport tax that it costs to get their three kids onto a flight to somewhere sunny will keep the parents in enough decent chardonnay to numb the pain of having to spend two weeks in a field with a dozen other families all coming to terms with the fact that in order to be able to help their kids with university fees, they are going to be spending less time sunning themselves and more time wondering why the shower block doesn’t have complimentary Molton Brown toiletries, and trying to out-do one another with barbeque marinades (my tip…lard, simple, elegant, and nothing says ‘campsite feast’ quite like the smell of frying lard).

By 2010, a holiday under canvas could be categorized thus:

Camping. Heavy canvas tents, featured in ‘Carry On’ movies, tents with a sense of history, the sorts of tents that the Empire pitched in jungles and artic wastes, the sort of tents a scout master was disgraced in, with guy ropes that are set like booby traps to trip the unwary. In recent years, advances in camping technology mean that entire tents are now made out of the same material that cagools used to be made out of, making them light, waterproof and ensuring that the inside of the tent usually has the same smell that the inside of a cagool.

Wild camping, used to be called trespassing, different to camping because while it still takes place in a farmer’s field, there's no stand pipe in the corner, just a cattle trough. (Nearby salt lick likely to deter middle class families on low sodium diets).

Glamping, a recreation favoured by middle class parents who can no longer afford to take their children abroad or the even more expensive alternative: centre parcs. Glamping offers the promise of a stay in a decent B&B or a boutique hotel. This is, of course, complete bollocks as, even if you stay at a Travelodge, your stay is unlikely to feature you treading in cow-shit as you make your way to a stinking toilet block in the dead of night. A tent is a tent, deal with it, be honest with yourself and embrace camping – it’s easy, just strike up a conversation with your camp-site neighbour about your journey to the site, sustaining a conversation about the perils of this countrys’ A roads for three hours before drinking enough wine to allow you to sleep despite your wife’s muffled sobbing and your eldest child’s stubborn refusal to exit the car. At all.

Festival camping - does not really count. Camping is all about pitching your tent, fetching your water, cooking your dinner and brushing your teeth in a communal toilet block next to a bloke who you are pretty sure sneaks looks at your wife’s breasts when he thinks nobody’s looking. It’s also about waking at dawn in the countryside far from the cares and distractions of the pantomime that passes for real life and having a cup of tea in complete silence before the business of the day – a punch up with your lusting neighbour and trying to tempt your kid out of the car – begins. It is not spending ten seconds sproinging your pop-up tent into existence, hoisting one of those fluttery pennants above it so that you can find your way back, realizing that every other bugger has a pennant just like yours and so fixing your position using GPS on your smart phone, then going and getting wasted for three days, doing all your sleeping in hedges or the St John’s Ambulance recovery tent/chill out lounge.

Previously, those were your choices. Let me add another:

Pramping - protest camping.

The tented village on Parliament Square has been forced from the grass on to the pavement. This, I suppose, tests the convictions of the protesters as it's one thing to camp on grass, but a different proposition entirely to pitch your tent on paving slabs six inches away from a bloody big bus belching diesel fumes. Also, it's harder to dig a latrine pit through concrete. I have always been perversely proud of the peace camp outside parliament, when it was a single bloke but bloody hell, a whole village?

One can’t help but have the sneaking suspicion that while Brian Haw was a committed protestor who embodied much that was great about England – taking a stand, commitment to a cause he considered just, defiance of authority – and while his presence there was a living embodiment of the other great English values – tolerance and fair play (can you imagine a protestor trying that in North Korea, or Italy? At least when they turned the water cannon on it would put out the flames from the burning encampment), I can’t help but wonder if any of the other campers are not so much there to protest but rather saving on a hotel room and spending their money on tickets for Madam Tussauds and the Phantom of the Opera.

I walked past the other day and there were so many tents I was wondering if there was some sort of festival on.

Pramping is, I think, here to stay. And I’d like to see more of it. We have many gorgeous civic buildings in this country, seats of power crafted by Victorian architects. But what those tall towers, high windows and splendid cornices need to set them off is a little village of tents in primary colours outside each one. Pissed off with your council cutting libraries? Pramp! Annoyed that your parish council have chosen to ignore your plea for a bus shelter with a roof for the third year running? Pramp! And why draw the line at democratic institutions? Who the fuck organises ‘Britain in bloom’ and why has your village never won? Pramp! Camelot…every week you buy a ticket but have you ever won? Ever had a sniff? No? Pramp!

And as for the ticket prices at Glastonbury…actually, no, your protest would, I’m pretty sure, go unnoticed.

The answer to climate change...take a flight to somewhere warm?

I’m confused about climate change. I thought that we were all supposed to be concerned about global warming. Global warming was, apparently, going to result in the UK being like the Mediterranean. On the one hand, I like the idea of doing f**k all work in the afternoons and tapas, on the other hand it might mean that our cars get smaller and women get hairier.

Looking out of the window on this August evening, I don’t see many olive groves sprouting. Indeed it’s pretty hard to see anything, what with the wind lashing the rain against the window like that.

Now, this is not global warming, but climate change. Climate change results in severe weather events like rain in summer. Frankly, anyone who’s had experience of the British summer might consider that rain in August is situation normal and the only emissions we should be worried about are people talking out of their arse about climate change.

So hand-knitted home-made hats off to the climate change protesters at Heathrow who have set up camp to try and raise awareness about the dangers of air travel. Well done them for tying up police time and public money with quite the most pointless bloody protest since I staged a sit-in for extra ribena at play-school.

‘Deluded’ is the word that springs to mind. Looking at these tossers on the news I was a little shocked to see that what I had assumed to be a cagouled troll was in fact a person, who was spouting off about air travel being bad and who was ‘demanding to be heard’.

Okay. 1. Stand as an MP. 2. Get elected. 3. Vote against air travel. 4. Get enough of your mates to do the same and end the problem. Or…spend the weekend in a damp camp pooing lentil curry into a latrine you’ve had to dig yourself, getting pissed on home-brewed scrumpy and wearing a sweater you’ve never washed with detergent in order to save the environment.

The truth is that the best we can do is manage air travel and that nobody is interested in direct action tossers. The last big protests, marches through London and so on to do with airports were when airport expansion was being mooted. Lots of middle-class people saw the threat of large reductions in the value of their properties and the possibility of tyre-marks on their roof if the pilot came in for a low-landing and they rebelled. Result - no new runway.

You want to see people truly exercised about air-travel? Ask anyone who lives on a flightpath or who has ever had a cube of blue-ice the size of a fridge land like a meteorite in their greenhouse (tip – get rid of it before it melts!).

And if you want to be taken seriously, get a shave a suit and a job.

A professional protestor in uniform – you know love, you’d be quite pretty if you washed your hair, used some make-up, dropped a stone and wore a nice dress. How on earth does she think she’s going to attract a bloke like that?

Precipitation and Cocktails

Strolling around Parliament Square yesterday I see that the tented village on the green has expanded, no doubt some revellers from Glasto stopping off for some shopping at Harvey Nicks before buggering off home. If these types want to treat the place like a camp site, then surely the council should too.

If a farmer expects to charge campers a tenner a night to camp in a soggy field where facilities begin and end with a stand pipe and which still shows signs of its being a location of the pyre formally known as his herd until the foot n’ mouth epidemic, then I think that a hundred quid a night is a reasonable price to charge campers in London.

Either that or re-designate their tents as ‘facilities for use by the public’. Believe me, those campers in the Blair Witch Project would be considered having got off lightly compared to some pissed-up reveller crashing into a camper’s tent in the wee small hours after several cocktails too many and thinking the place was a superloo.

It started to rain as Fat Andy and I wandered round the Square on our way to cocktails, I was minded to dodge under canvas and wait it out but Andy did the impossible and flagged down a cab for hire. Ten minutes later we were sitting in the Royal Festival Hall’s new bar ‘Skylon’, watching ballet dancers doing their warm-ups, disconcerted that the waitresses were wearing retro sci-fi uniforms and deciding which exotic beer to try first.

There were cocktails that night, mixed with verve and style in the unlikely setting of a pub. It looked like the sort of place where they consider a lager top to be a cocktail but this place had a shaker, tequila and an impassioned bar staff.

After that things got a bit hazy, but suffice to say it was a last train home situation and a breakfast this morning of paracetamol and temperance thoughts.