Under an orange sky

The sky turned orange.  Was this Armageddon?  Was it the result of Brexit, or the fault of the orange buffoon squatting in the White House, as these are the two Modern Social Evils most often linked with catastrophe, usually for good reason?

No, it was the result of storm force winds picking up dust from the Sahara and the wildfires on the Iberian Peninsular.  Thanks to Google, everyone knew this, and so there wasn’t the sort of low level weather anxiety that we would have enjoyed twenty years ago, religious awe that we would have experienced a hundred years ago or primal anxiety and possibly the sacrifice of the Most Unpopular Member Of The Tribe that would have been the result a few thousand years ago.  And in some ways we should mourn the passing of those simpler, if not happier, times, before the Internet spoiled wonder, awe and a primal fear of clouds.

Just because we knew the cause didn’t make things less impressive.  From about two o’clock onwards, the sky did start to go a very odd colour, normally only found in the 80s action films of directors who loved a bit of a tobacco filter.  By three o’clock, it was unusually dark and cars were driving along with their lights on.  It was not unlike that sort of sickly yellow light you occasionally get before a thunderstorm, or in any city where the regime in charge think a climate accord is just another way for the rich nations to oppress developing countries.

It was actually very impressive.  Everyone loves an unusual weather event and even if this one didn’t result in an alien invasion or a rain of badgers, or rain of rain for that matter, it was still odd enough to be unsettling in that creepy fun way when you know the reason for something, but the part of your brain that’s not that long out of the cave is thinking that if this doesn’t end soon, we might have to sacrifice Darren from Accounts to appease the gods and make the sun shine again.

The 4x4 Conflict Scale

I’ve previously suggested that the service a 4x4 is being pressed into is a fairly good indication of the level of conflict, or lack thereof, in a particular location.

It’s a theory I’m developing (as I drink/write this) and I’m fairly sure it’s just a refined version of a wider picture.  If the most sophisticated vehicle in your village is the bicycle that the district nurse uses for her visits, then there is probably going to be little to distract you from your everyday life of goat herding and plotting how to get the fuck out of this place.  If your experience of automobiles is a Morris Minor Traveller then either you live in Halcyon, are a Vicar, or restore classic cars, or all three.  If, like some in the Commonwealth when the Queen used to cruise her dominion on Britannia, your first experience of a car was a Rolls Royce with a lady wearing a crown sitting in the back then yes, everything after this is going to be a disappointment.

4x4s.  If you live in the country, they are a good idea.  If you live in the city, you are obviously worried (some would say unnecessarily) about being charged by a rhino in the Waitrose car park.

Half tracks and tanks.  Remember the days when all we had to worry about was being charged by a rhino in the Waitrose car park?

It occurs to me though that 4x4s are actually a pretty good indication of how peaceful or otherwise a location might be.

The 4x4 Conflict scale

1.  Pristine Landie in a Waitrose car park.  All is well, owner will hesitate to move it for fear of having to find such a good parking space ever again.

2.  Filthy ancient Defender used as all purpose farm vehicle.  All is well.

3.  Ancient pickup with half an inch of loam, some building supplies and two dogs in the back.  All is well.  Also, fishing invite imminent.

4.  4x4 on school run, double parked, morning.  Could be trouble if mummy gets stressed.

5.  4x4 on school run, afternoon.  Could be big trouble if mummy has been drinking at lunch, or if that bitch Jointy parps her horn one more time and I think Simon is fucking his secretary and it’s all so fucking, fucking intolerable.

6.  Pristine Land Rover on a shoot.  Trouble for the other guns, owner may not know what he is doing and possibly got his money, and his invite, because of his proficiency with a shotgun in other circumstances.

7.  Filthy Land Rover on a shoot, back of Landie looks like two working gundogs live there.  They do.  No trouble at all, unless you are a game bird.

8.  BMW 4x4.  Drug dealer.  Beware.

9.  Convoy of 4x4s heading towards the airport at speed.  The President-For-Life is fleeing the country.  So is the contents of the Treasury.  Beware rebels/freedom fighters/glorious liberators.

10.  Pickup with two hound dogs in the back and a bumper sticker expressing forthright opinions about race/religion/abortion or showing support for FOX news.  Fuck!

11.  White 4x4 with UN written on side.  Fuck!  Fuck!  Also, alien invasion!

12.  Red pickup with a heavy machine gun welded into position in the back, manned by teenage boys not in uniform, one sporting a Manchester United shirt, parked near a Land Rover with BBC on the side, both taking fire from an abandoned cement factory nearby.  There goes the neighbourhood, and probably the country.  Bloody Civil War.

Finally.

13.  Like 12, but the kid’s wearing a Chelsea shirt.  Worse.  Failed State.

Some attach importance to what they drive.  Back in the day if you said ‘penis extension’ to somebody they would think you were making a comment about a man owning a sports car, whereas now the internet has ruined the ability for us to feel superior to a man who own a Porche.

Certainly we have the proliferation of metal boxes with wheels to thank for ‘Top Gear’, a show that started out reviewing cars but ended up as, essentially, a 60 minute long aftershave commercial, if every episode had concluded with Clarkson shoving a bottle into the camera and shouting ‘Bloke!  For men!’.

Boxes of Delight

Red telephone boxes are as much a part of the national landscape, mental and physical, as power pylons or steeples, or at least they used to be.  They used to be a ubiquitous and pleasing feature of cities, towns, villages, hamlets, crossroads and random stretches of ‘road’ in places so rural you’d wonder that Christianity had reached that far, never mind telephony.

Originating in an age when it was far from the norm to have a telephone in the home unless your surname was ‘Bell’, or you were a character in a costume drama, the original function of these architectural and technological delights was to allow people to telephone other people.  But barely had the bright red paint dried before the role of these local landmarks evolved.

The first step in the evolution of the telephone box was its emergence as a dramatic character.  A person goes into a telephone box and rings another person.  So far, so normal.  But an empty telephone box with a ringing ‘phone?  That’s the start of the sort of plot only rivalled by somebody stepping off on to a deserted railway platform to be informed by a ‘suitably’ ‘characterful’ ‘station master’ that no train has stopped here for twenty years.

As more and more homes got more and more ‘phones, the telephone box moved from being the place you went to to make a telephone call to being the place that you went to to make a private telephone call (you could tell an adulterer in times past because they always had lots of loose change), ironic considering that they were constructed out of steel…and glass, and illuminated. 

As technology advanced, telephone boxes took on roles unconnected with calls, booty or otherwise.  The normal place for displaying business cards is, of course, the newsagents’ window, but thanks to the advancement in printing technology and in particular to business card printing machines being made available in service stations and other haunts of lorry drivers and travelling salesmen, and hence by extension to their service sector, prozzers were able to create professional looking business cards cheaply and in volume, and distribute them around telephone boxes.  Telephone boxes took on something of a festive atmosphere, if your idea of festive is a business-card blizzard of smutty invitations, as the interiors of telephone boxes began to look a little like top shelves, festooned with graphic graphics.  Accordingly, a trip to a red call box could resemble a visit to a red light district.

These temples of communication also provided other sorts of relief in times of extremis.  Many a chap, decent chaps, honest chaps, the sort of chap who would shudder to relieve themselves against a tree, well, an oak, well, a listed oak, would of an evening be profoundly glad to happen across a telephone box to answer not a ringing handset but the call of nature.

There was, of course, a protocol to be observed in such cases.  Firstly, one always avoided any tramp that might have taken up residence overnight in a traditional telephone box.  (BT (Bastard Telecom) modified the design of telephone boxes in the 80s, changing them into telephone ‘kiosks’ in a move which perfectly encapsulated a shift from a public service GPO monument to humanity that would serve not only as a tool of communication but shelter from the storm, to a profit-driven monster, putting into service a plexiglazz monstrosity that had a gap all the way around the bottom, presumably to allow the elements to penetrate and so discourage overnight guests.  Or possibly to provide adequate drainage.)  The protocols, famously illustrated by a small sign illustrated by none other than Quinten Blake that used to delight, inform and repulse in equal measure, were that if one was relieving oneself in a telephone box, one always faced away from any observer(s), and always held the handset firmly and confidently gripped in the unemployed hand.  Just a chap, making a call, and if you happen to notice that a chap has his chap (or indeed his penis) in his other hand, then any shocked observer could take comfort in the certainty that urinating is just about the least offensive thing that the occupant of the telephone box can be doing in such a pose.

The telephone box has so often doubled up as a crisis WC that rumour has it that in the days when telephone boxes had telephone directories in them (a forerunner of today’s telephone box libraries, though exclusively stocked with books with lots of characters and not much plot), serious thought was given to printing the directories on soft paper, possible perforated.

The rise in the increase of mobile ‘phone ownership coincided with a decline in courtesy to others and of inhibitions about sharing private details with total strangers.  People making a telephone call no longer sought a soundproof booth but instead favoured busy public transport or hitherto quiet and peaceful spots to make their telephone calls.

So it was that the telephone box fell into disuse.

As a telephone box.

They ceased making money because even though nobody was using them, they still had to be cleaned and occasionally de-tramped.  Slowly telephone boxes started to disappear, airbrushed out of the landscape.  (Sadly, not everyone thought to check to see if mobile ‘phone coverage extended to all the sites now marked not with a proud, glittering. Illuminated, slightly pee-smelling red box, but with a square of concrete.)

Of course, if there were any justice in the world, a succession of small plaques would be sunk into the otherwise anonymous concrete squares that, like the footsteps of telephony prehysteria, now dot the land.  A small plaque to commemorate a huge event, for instance that such-and-such a person ‘phoned their mother and father to inform them they had become grandparents from this site in 1965; that Debbi Broke Up With Darren using this ‘phone box in 1984, that in the same year, Darren confirmed to Debbi’s best friend Mandy that Debbi was a right slag anyway, and did Mandy want to go to out with him? And that in 1993, a profoundly relieved Jeff profoundly relieved himself on this very site.

The ‘problem’ with traditional red telephone boxes is that they have more individual panes of glass in them than the average cathedral, and so are devilish hard to clean, even if not be-tramped.  Naturally, as soon as Bloody Terrible stopped cleansing telephone receivers and started cleansing the landscape of character, the nation revolted.  Anyone who produced rural postcards of a sheep standing by a dry stone wall next to a red telephone box realised that sheep and stone alone just don’t do it.  The middle class mobilised.  In 4x4s.

As a result, many villages have successfully held on to their red telephone boxes (usually the same places that have held on to village greens).  Of course, they may not have managed to hold on to their indigenous population or village youth that has been priced out of the place by second home buyers, but at least the centre of the village still has its crimson totem to modernity.

Now though, more than ever, we know that telephone boxes can fulfil duel functions.

Telephone boxes have, famously, become village libraries, a phenomenon that started in 1994 when a lady in Masham left three copies of Catherine Cookson on a shelf by mistake, started a national trend, and has been too embarrassed to ask for them back since.

And there are yet more modern social uses.  Because it’s not just the internet that’s slow in rural areas. Ambulance response times being what they are in the countryside, there’s been a couple of reactions.  The first is a very practical approach to dealing with any accident involving threshing machinery.  Following the screams and panicked shut down, people pack anything still twitching in frozen peas and then hey ho for the nearest hospital.  Everyone then gathers at the local pub to wait for an update on successful re-attachment.  The first time anyone mentions ‘micro-surgery’ it is the law that somebody must say ‘was it his cock that got cut off’?  Followed by ‘I don’t make the rules’.

The second reaction is the most modern incarnation.  Village defibrillator.

On the face of it, this is a great idea.  With more and more people having more and more unrealistic expectations of their ability to do stuff, like running marathons, staying upright on a bar stool or enduring another fucking day on public transport, it’s a wonder that everyone doesn’t carry around their own defibrillator, like an evacuee carrying around a box on a piece of string that he or she imagines contains a gas mask bust in fact only contains an apologetic note from their mum explaining that their mask has in fact been sold for gin.

Defibrillators are appearing in more and more places.  Like pubs.  And surely that can’t be healthy.  Naturally, if a beloved boozer keels over and pegs it half way down a pint of what the landlord laughingly refers to as his best, then this will lead not just to blokes reading about the demise thinking ‘that’s the way to go’, or indeed the regulars all doing the sort of mental calculation that would boggle Turing to determine when would be the decent time to take up residence on Fatty’s recently vacated bar stool.  It leads to a few charity nights and the proud purchase of a defibrillator for the pub.  Of course, it’s only a short jolt to think that once the locals work out that the thing is rechargeable, they can incorporate it into their evening with, in descending order of idiocy, options including: 1) answering pub quiz questions after having paddles applied to both temples and being ‘zapped’, 2) playing ‘how high can you go’ on the voltage charge, noting that some wag has written ‘Frankenstein’ on one of the settings; 3) playing ‘Jason Statham’ by trying to improvise an anti-bad guy weapon and propel other people across the room by paddling their nipples with electricity; 4) playing doctor by bellowing ‘clear’ and then zapping an unsuspecting drinker in the arse and, of course, the winner, 5) the ‘electric boogie’: suck a lime, tequila shot, lick salt off of a live paddle.

But the latest incarnation of the telephone box as a home for the village defibrillator is something else.  Especially when you consider that only people trained in the use of the defibrillator may use it.  That’s probably a good thing, the last thing you need to see is some idiot spitting on some paddles for improved connectivity and electrocuting himself.

However.  Village life is interesting.  It is easy to start an argument (I refuse to use the term feud, we’re not, as Ross Kemp remarked in ‘Ultimate Force’, Americans) in an English village.  Defibrillators are expensive kit, so presumably only accessed by trained community members, these are the people you do not want to piss off, especially if you are lardy.  So.  It’s important to keep those keymasters trained to use the defibrillator and trusted with a key to its cabinet, on side.  The last thing you need to do if you like your beer, fags and lining your arteries with cheese is to forget to return those pinking shears you borrowed off the stuck up bloke who lives in ‘the Old Rectory’ and which you secretly used to trim your toenails.

It’s right that what was once an electronically powered beating heart of the village should once again be an electronically powered beating heart restarter of the village.

As to what’s next for the village telephone box?  It’s either going to be the recharging point, take off and landing pad for the village delivery drone, or home to the village three dee printer that will print your grocery order for you using protein goo and dye.

And, of course, it’s the perfect shape to operate as the village teleport kiosk once that technology is perfected, it’s even got the dial mechanism to enter the co-ordinates.

Tits Oot

Breasts, and womens’ breasts in particular, are once again the subject of vigerous, if not mass, debate.  Let’s be frank, there is a section of society where womens’ breasts are frequently a matter of debate, that section of society being males.  The question that has arisen recently though is not so much concerning breasts, but what is attached to them.  In short, breastfeeding.

If the question is ‘when is breastfeeding appropriate?’ then the answer is ‘whenever there is a hungry infant and a nursing mother’.

Simply put, and there’s no denying it, infants are poor at preparing their own food.  Give a newborn a can opener and a tin of tuna and they will be completely unable to open the can.  Utterly useless.  And they are no better with pouches or jars, or bottles, whether screw top or cork.

Breastfeeding is an excellent idea, not least because the mother deals with the removal of any packaging before commencing feeding, even on the bus.

However, some are not in agreement.

There is, for instance, discussion about breastfeeding in the workplace.  An interesting conversation to be sure, but surely the conversation should be about infants in the workplace?

There may be workplaces where it is not a huge distraction introducing the baby into the environment, for instance a crèche.  I can think of few others.  Just as playing death metal at ear shattering volume is not conducive to a productive day so an infant, even a well behaved one, is a disruption.  This is based on my experience of children on public transport, where one can be sat in a train carriage, oblivious to a whelp of mass distraction, until it goes off.  This is normally a noise far out of proportion with the size of the being generating it, more akin to some sort of city wide early warning system than a simple signal of hunger, or pooping.

While infants are possibly not suitable for the workplace, for instance on an oil rig or aircraft flight deck, breastfeeding of an infant in the workplace should not be an issue, and anyone thinking it offensive is invited to look at their fucking work and not the chest of their colleague.  Breasts are, of course, appropriate in the workplace, especially if that workplace has a name concluding with ‘Club’ or ‘A Go Go’.

There was also recently discussion about whether breastfeeding is appropriate in restaurants.

Once again, the question might more simply be are infants acceptable in restaurants?  The answer is ‘not near me’ but I concede that there are many, many restaurants that I do not patronise on a regular basis, in fact that’s the vast majority of them, so let’s take a more general view.

What, really, can be the objection?  Is the patron concerned that a punter is getting a free meal?  I hardly think that an infant having a feed is quite the same as some chancer rocking up, ordering a glass of tap water, then proceeding to unpack several cool bags and decant various thermoses while uncorking a few bottles they have brought, of home brew to neatly complete the example.  Will it offend other diners?  Again, what are those other diners doing looking at the chest of somebody at a different table?  I may not be an expert on etiquette, but even I know that staring at the breasts of a woman at another table has three likely outcomes, the first is your girlfriend storming out of the restaurant after catching you ogling, possibly covering you in today’s special as she goes.  The second is the lady’s dining partner thumping you, probably while your girlfriend holds you down, the third is a restraining order coupled with a lifetime ban from the entire chain, and that’s a long time to go without KFC.

Anyone who has seen breastfeeding will know that you don’t actually see breast, just the back of a baby’s head.  So what’s the objection?

The sooner children learn how to behave in a restaurant the better.  Of course, an infant can’t send a boob back, but they can learn at an early age that dining with family is one of the great pleasures in life.

UKIP if you want to

There’s something or other that bit different about the United Kingdom Independence Party.  I say ‘something or other’ because one senses that to use the conversational French expression for that phrase would be inappropriate, and might provoke something of an Anglo Saxon response from any UKIP member.

And what is the right title for a UKIP party member?  ‘UKIPper’ sounds a bit too upbeat for a collection of people that, whenever they appear on the telly, appear furious about something, usually about having a camera pointed at them come to think of it.  ‘Kipper’ then?  ‘Kipper’ sounds about right as, if they are anything like their fuming Beloved Leader, they are no strangers to smoking.

So what is it that’s just that bit different about Kippers?  Well, they are probably not alone in starting sentences at dinner parties with ‘I’m not a racist but…’ but they are probably alone in having conversations like that before the first course is uncorked, and talking about that sort of thing to the exclusion of everything else.

These are the sort of people who make it very clear that they get on very well with foreigners, and make a point of telling you that they know the name of the lady who cleans their office, and she’s foreign.  One presumes.  Never spoken to her but she wears a headscarf.

The Kipper worldview is that things were a lot better in the 1950s.  This is, of course, utter tosh and if anyone wants to argue, I advise them to first pop back to the mid-50s in the time machine of their choice and try to stream Netflix.

By the way, the time machine of choice is always the Time Machine from the classic film of the same title.  Blue police boxes are fine, as are gullwing sports cars, but any time traveller who decides to fling themselves into an uncertain future at a rate greater than the standard one second per second, and does so in a machine built around a comfy armchair, deserves huge respect.  Indeed, a comfy armchair is a reliable way to travel into the future in the conventional way, meaning you arrive at your destination, say lunchtime or when the pub opens, refreshed and ready for action.

To the media, the Kippers are an amusing distraction posing no real threat.  Unlike conventional far right political movements that shave their heads and beat up ethnic minorities, Kippers are usually sedate right up to the point when they say something so unbelievably racist your arse clenches so hard it squeaks.  Then they keep on talking as if nothing had happened.

There is a school of thought that Kippers are not racist at all, and that they just consider that the EU is a failed project that the UK would be better off out of.  Judging by what’s reported however, that’s far too sophisticated a school of thought.  The school of thought occupied by UKIP is not one, one feels, that would be highly rated by Ofstead.  More likely, Kippers consider that the EU is a failed experiment of the type usually devised by mad foreign scientists in old Universal movies and the UK, or more precisely the paler parts of the UK, would be much better off out of it.  It would mean we could pass our own laws, eat whatever cheese we wanted, and birch homos without some jumped up foreign judge who has never touched cheddar in his life.

The media bloody love Kippers but I’m not sure what’s more dangerous, taking them seriously or not taking them seriously?  A sixty minute programme about the economic impacts of EU policies on, say, fish, would hardly make for riveting viewing, but a slightly overweight woman with views even more worrying than her hairstyle, who is not afraid to express those views?  Now we’re talking, usually about forigners.

The interesting thing is that all the mainstream political parties dislike UKIP, either because it poses a threat to their share of the vote or because their policies are repugnant.  Part of the English national character is to side with the underdog, and maybe that’s part of the appeal of being a Kipper, and proud.

Every little yelps

In a week where Sainsbury’s ejected a couple from their store for kissing, Tesco proved that when it comes to corporate fuck-ups, they’re still the nation’s number one, by behaving like number twos.  Tesco is changing its business model, from constructing the sort of out of town gigasouks that suck all commerce from the nation’s charming high streets to forsaken industrial centres on the edge of town, to opening shops on formally charming high streets.  This allows them to sell crisps at artificially low prices, and so unfairly compete with the local shops, and put them all out of business that way. 

This includes opening stores in petrol stations.

This is handy for two reasons.

Firstly, it is the law to buy fruit and nut whenever you fill up. 

But secondly and far more importantly, the proximity of Tesco and a plentiful supply of four-star is very convenient as, after hearing a news story about Tesco this week, I no longer wanted to boycott Tesco (a normal reaction for the usual reasons; that it is a social evil, and that the sort of people who shop there go there to shout at their kids or have marital disputes), I wanted to burn every fucking store to the ground.

So, what was it that made me want to turn that purveyor of tampons and Pot Noodle into a barbeque pit?

Well, apparently, a woman with a guide dog was ejected from a Tesco store this week, because the staff objected to her dog being in the store.

Her. Guide dog.

And apparently, while this trio of twats were harassing a blind woman, another customer was pointing out, er, actually, you can’t really do that.

That is one of the three acceptable reactions of a bystander.  The other is to use the distraction to shoplift as much confectionery as possible.  The third is to pop out, and return a short time later with a sloshing jerrycan and a Zippo.

So let’s examine just how fucking utterly detestable this Tesco staff were.  You might want to simply punch a Tesco member of staff hard in the face when they ask you for the millionth time if you have a Club Card, but witnessing them hassling a blind woman would, I think, send any right thinking Englishman running to aisle three (sporting goods), to return with a cricket bat, in each hand.

But wait, let’s be fair.  Maybe it was an isolated incident with some staff newly arrived from…another fucking dimension I presume, if they have managed to go through life without encountering guide dogs.  I mean, did they not bother with any training?  Lesson twelve, dogs: if a skinny man with lots of tattoos, no shirt and few teeth comes into the shop to buy Rizzla and has a snarling weapon dog, not on a lead, with him, then politely ask him to tether his dog outside (go on, do just that, and please note that when the nurse gives you your tetanus shot, she doesn’t ask if you’ve got a fucking Club Card). 

If the dog is a Labrador, has a harness on and is being held on to by a blind person, you approach and ask if you can offer any assistance.

It’s good to see that the fuck-wittage of Tesco floor staff and training staff is actually outshone by the cack-handed stupidity of their customer service staff because, after the woman rightly complained about the incident, Tesco offered her a twenty quid voucher.

Two things here.  Firstly, twenty quid is an insult and, er, why in the name of a blue and white striped fuck would the lady in question ever shop at Tesco again?

Then, apparently, somebody said something to somebody and suddenly the story was all over the papers (rightly trumping the other commercial clangers of the week).  This is possibly because people like to have a go at the heartless giant that is Tesco, but mainly because this is a total fucking outrage.

Apparently Tesco have promised to make a sizable donation to a charity of the woman’s choice.

Presumably the staff have been sent for ‘reeducation’.

This sort of thing would never happen at Waitrose.

English eccentricity

If there’s a standard scale for sanity, and there probably is but who wants a search history that can be used against them in court as a result of their looking up ‘am I normal?’ on Google so I’m not going to attempt to find out, then, like metric and imperial, there will be one scale for the rich and another for the rest of them…I mean us.

Let’s call the scale of sanity for the ordinary man in the street, or indeed Jasper Carrott’s nutter on the bus, the Metric scale.  A reading of zero means that you can pass for ordinary, you don’t twitch or drool and you don’t feel the need to perform a cleansing ritual after meeting a gypsy.  At the top end of the scale, 100, are people who are so insane they occupy positions of power, or kill people, or indeed both.  It’s around the 60 to 70 range that things get interesting, that’s where your, let’s face it, more amusing mental health issues are pitched, like believing what you read in the Daily Mail.  Tracking back towards zero we pass through the superstitious range, which encompasses everything from paying actual money for a palm reading ‘you are very gullible’, to wearing your lucky shirt on match day.  Oh, and by the way, one day you will realise that because you always clean and iron your lucky pulling shirt, those actions make it your lucky pulling shirt.

For the rich, the Imperial scale covers three main ranges.  Firstly, there is fucked up, which is what happens to an eighteen year old when they come into a trust fund.  They spend the fund initially on drugs and booze, and thereafter on trying to quit drugs and booze, possible solutions including therapy, The Priory, or a cult.  Secondly, there is inbred.  If you can inherit the family chin, stands to reason you can also inherit the family kinks in the cognitive reasoning, including the firm belief that it is still acceptable to use the term ‘darkie’ if you lower your voice while doing so.

Then at the top of the scale we have eccentricity.

Madness plus money equals eccentricity.  If you wanted to marry a goat you would be, depending on the community you lived in, laughed out of town or stoned to death.  Regrettably, there are also some corners of geography inhabited by people that would probably apportion some of the blame to the goat.  These are the same sort of people who, in conversations about women’s rights, make the sort of comments that give you the distinct sensation that your arse is clenching into your hat.  If you have a title, an estate and, and this is the important bit, some say over who gets to be vicar in the parish you own, the one with a charming Norman church, a rather lovely rectory and no knife crime at all, then it’s pretty likely that the bans will shortly be posted for the forthcoming nuptials of the Earl of Kinkey and Miss Willamina Goat.

Let’s be clear, being eccentric is fabulous, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in, for instance, your scientific experiments largely involving melons, you’re beloved.

Ever had a day, a whole day, when you have not got out of your pyjamas?  You have moved from bed to sofa to fridge to sofa to bed in one glorious relaxed manner, and you’re not even ill?  Fabulous, isn’t it.  Now imagine not getting out of bed for a week because you can’t be arsed.  That’s eccentric.

Working class and in Tesco in your jim jams?  Out, you fucking scum!  Titled and in Fortnum and Mason in a dressing gown?  Of course you are, you don’t need a wallet, you’ve got an account at the place.

The English tolerate eccentricity because, by and large, it’s more entertaining than harmful.  An aristocrat with a thing for trains may indulge his obsession by building his own railway, miniature or, my preference, full sized, on his estate.

Eccentricity is not madness, it is more refined.  It is the state of mind that causes one to be entertaining and harmless, and leads to one being fondly admired.

Workplace of heroes

‘Netflix’ is astonishing.  Looking at the billboards across town advertising the US remake of ‘House of Cards’ you would think that Netflix is all about original (or nearly original) high-quality programming.  And it is, the US remake of ‘House of cards’ is so glossy that if it were a magazine, the ads would be so incredibly discreet that you would be left wondering if they were for mineral water of watches.  Of course, Netflix has no ads, just a monthly subscription charge.  And one of the selling points of ‘House of cards’ was that all episodes for a season were released on-line in one go.

Because original programming aside, Netfix is actually all about the binge watching.

How to describe Netflix?  Simple.  It’s like somebody driving a warehouse of box sets up to your front door.

It’s a binge bonanza and ideally suited to those with no real discipline (‘OK, just one more episode before bed’) and real patience (‘OK, apparently it only starts getting good half way through season two, but you have to watch the whole first season to really appreciate it’) and real time to indulge, or a real ability to ignore a very real need to do anything that involves going outside.

It also allows you to rediscover shows that you stopped watching because either they were on too late or you just missed them or because, at the time, you thought they were a bit shit.  Because thanks to the internet many a cancelled show has been reappraised and it turns out there wasn’t a problem with the show, but rather it was those jerks at the network who didn’t give it enough of a chance, or kept moving the timeslot and killed it off.  Also, since you’re paying for it anyway, you may as well give it a try, because the internet says I should like it and the internet is hardly ever wrong about cultural stuff.

The odd thing is, you’re more likely to dip back into something you stopped watching than you are to start watching something new.  It’s telly, it’s nostalgia, it’s instant, it’s more fun than jet-washing the patio, what more do you want?

It also let’s you determine consistent themes that appear across different shows.

A few years ago, there used to be a programme on teevee called ‘Reaper’.  It was about a seemingly ordinary bloke who worked at a huge DIY store called the ‘Work Bench’ but who turned out to be a bounty hunter for Satan, with responsibility not just for flogging automatic toilet roll dispensers or whatever, but also for dragging escaped souls back to Hell.

Then there was ‘Chuck’.  Chuck worked in an enormous electrical store called the ‘Buy More’.  Chuck wasn’t just a guy who could sell you a digital toilet roll dispenser or whatever, he was also the unwilling repository of ‘the intersect’, which sees all of the American government’s most secret secrets implanted in his head, yadda yadda yadda.

Obviously, there’s a format here.  If you want to cast an unlikely hero in an everyman occupation, it needs to be something that requires him to wear and apron and a name tag.  Buy not a hair net, as fry guy at maccydees was obviously an invitation to litigation, and so peon at huge store was the occupation of choice.

That much makes sense, as it would explain why there is never anybody around in the fucking timber section at my local DIYosausous to help you out when you need something cut to size, that size being short enough to fit lengthwise in your car so that you don’t have to transport a fencepost home vertically, which can result in your driving under some low electric cables and transforming your car into an enormous, impromptu, spontaneous dodgem, or under a bridge, transforming it into an impromptu convertible.

So far, so sustainable.  What doesn’t ring true is that in both cases, insanely hot, but also charming, women work with our heroes.  In the Reaper’s case, in the store and in Chuck’s case, at the sausage shack next door, in the same retail park.

Now, I am the last person to make personal comments about the sort of people who work at B&Q/Homebase/Retail Park ‘Restaurants’, but if pressed, I’d remark that in terms of looks I think you’re less likely to think ‘hottie’ and more likely to think ‘somewhere, there’s a bridge unattended with goats just skipping on over it’.

‘Reaper’ actually makes quite a decent fist of locating their extraordinary Joe in such a mundane location and to be honest, the lovable misfits goofing around in the store is a lot more enjoyable than the segments when he is forced to do battle with budget CGI effects.  ‘Chuck’ is more of a straightforward spy thriller but you get the sense that the fan base for both of these shows were the sort of men who have a job involving a name badge.  No doubt knowledge of this demographic emerging had something to do with no season three onwards being available for either series.

Village Life - the Charter Fair

Wooly decorations adorning the village on Charter Market day.

Many years ago, so long ago in fact that it was before the world was in black and white, possibly as far back as when the world was woodcut-coloured (predominantly black and white, but with the occasional full page of dazzling colour, with a giant letter somewhere in the landscape), some bloke with probably a beard and almost certainly a crown granted the village it's charter.
A charter for a village back in Ye Olde Days was a very big thing, as it was all about status.  The village went from being a collection of shacks at a muddy crossroads with a tavern where weary travellers could be waylaid and their bodies conveniently disposed of in the parsnip fields, to being a collection of shacks at a muddy crossroads with a tavern and a town hall, where decisions like taxing travellers could be taken, meaning you got to take money off them on a regular basis.  It didn't matter that the tavern had a hygiene rating of no stars, this was an age when everything had a hygiene rating of no stars.
Having a charter meant status, the ability to legally burn witches and, depending which way the ecclesiastical breeze was blowing, Catholics or Protestants and, most important of all, having something over on those bastards from the next 'village' along, which was just a collection of shacks at a muddy cross roads with a tavern.  Ha, losers.
Village rivalry a few hundred years ago was settled with the occasional pitched battle (well, 'battle' may be exaggerating things slightly, as it probably consisted of a couple of dozen peasants with assorted clubs).  Then it became all about who had the most peasants left standing after the plague hit town, then who had the biggest church, and so on.  There was a brief return to basics when, in the heyday of football hooliganism, things were settled once again by a battle, this time on the pitch.  In these much more civilised times, rivalries are settled by where beats where in the regional heat of 'Britain in Bloom', which is not to say that local pride does not occasionally result in action being taken in the dead of night with step-ladders and weed-killer resulting in mysterious blight in the neighbouring village's hanging baskets.
Local pride is very much alive and well in the village.  This was clearly exhibited a few years ago when the Post Office, in a misguided move, decided to give the village the same postal address as the nearest town.  The villagers sprang into action; sod 'Save our hospital', this was 'Save our house values'.  The villagers fought long and hard and eventually decided simply to ignore the Post Office, who subsequently also decided to ignore their own advice.  Honour was satisfied.
The crowning glory though was a couple of years ago when a Little Waitrose opened in the village.  Forget having the biggest church, and forget that the village already had an independent butcher, green grocers and bakery, this meant free coffee.  Yes, you heard, free coffee.
So villagers are proud of their village, and fiercely protective of it, including being protective of the charter that gives it it's status.
One of the requirements of the charter is that the village should have an annual charter market.  Back in the middle ages this would no doubt have been quite special, featuring tradesmen selling ribbons, hog roasts and possibly even a witch burning.  Today, it's still a big deal, and rather special in that as well as tradesmen, local people can have their own stalls, in their own front gardens.  It's like a cross between the biggest yard sale ever and the reaction to the council advising that for one day only they will come and pick up all the old crap you've been meaning to take to the dump for years.  Attics and garages are plundered and hugely optimistic price tags are attached to one-step-from-landfill items.
If nothing else, it provides a valuable insight into the mentality of your neighbours, especially the ones that think there's a market for VHS tapes, even one marked 'Derek & Anthea's Sex Tape', and included by mistake.

What the hell...is 'water cooler television'?

Micro docs (not, as the phrase might imply, a reference to the number of health care professionals likely to be left working in the NHS after Capita get a hold of the health service, nor dwarf GPs, but an entirely new concept in educating the attentionally spanned impoverished and the subject of last Saturday’s blog post) are, possibly, a breakthrough in water-cooler friendly television. 
Whatever that is.
Ten minutes on the internet turns up LOADS of porn, but also that ‘water cooler television is an outdated cultural reference to television that people talk about when they gather around the water cooler, rather than television featuring water coolers nor television programming for water coolers.  Although, if you want the sort of people who spend a lot of time hanging around the water cooler discussing your programming, then lots of programmes about water coolers, including a soap set in the room or corner of the office where the water cooler is located, is not a bad idea and, for those who are really frequent visitors to the water cooler, a sister channel about toilets.
Thinking about it for a couple of seconds, which is a couple of seconds too long, who the fuck wants water cooler loiterers talking about their programmes anyway?  If your aspiration is to have your body of work watched and then criticised by the sort of people who use hydration as an excuse to hang around a large bottle of H2O in the hope the pretty girl on work experience has to come by to change the paper in the bottom draw of the nearby photocopier (because you arrived early to empty the tray to engineer such a visit), then aim higher. 
What does success look like? 
It looks like a BAFTA award.
But also, well, on a commercial channel it looks like people watching your programme, then talking about it down the pub, then coming home drunk and instead of playing on-line poker until they have to put their kidneys on eBay to cover their debts going on line with a credit card and purchasing whatever crap was advertised during the commercial breaks in your programme.  In other words, 50 Malibu Barbie’s arriving at the home of a man with no idea why the fuck he ordered them, delivered by a man who is already thinking ‘peado’. 
On the BBC, success looks like people watching your programme, then talking about it down the pub, then coming home drunk and instead of playing on-line poker until they have to put their kidneys on eBay to cover their debts going on line with a credit card and purchasing the same jacket your lead character was wearing in a crucial scene after visiting the sort of web site that gives that sort of information.  In other words, a North Face parka arriving at the home of a man with no idea why the fuck he ordered it, in July, but, as it’s a North face parka, is really pleased and practically has to wrestle it away from delivery guy.
Fuck the water cooler tribe, they don’t even pay for their drink, we want the pub people.
So, what do people talk about down the pub.  Teevee obviously and, because the pub is the parliament of the people and hence a place where you want to always appear smarter than everyone else, you talk about the documentary you saw last night on some diverting subject, rather than the afternoon you spent watching back-to-back Ballamorys in your pants working your way through a Pot Noodle three for the price of two pack you bought on a whim that was supposed to last you a month.
Hence the need for micro docs.  You can’t get cooler telly.

A dusting of weather

Saaaannnnnnnndddddstooooooooooorrrrrrmmmmmmm!  Sandstorm.  Sandstorm!  Sandstorm.  The Red Death is upon us!
Well, it is if you believe the newspapers.  Apparently the good people of England have awoken to find strange deposits on their cars.  Hardly a novelty if you habitually park underneath a tree, but in this case it’s a thin film of dust.  And not just any dust.  African dust.
Luckily, since the inexorable rise of the UKIP, Daily Mail readers have been trained how to react, instinctively and without thinking, to any threat originating from overseas.  And this is the worst kind of overseas threat, a threat from Africa that has travelled through Europe and crossed the channel to arrive in England, possibly simply to settle on the cars of hard working families, but possibly to claim benefits, or even possibly both.
Apparently the wind (already, along with his villainous cohort the rain, an element as unwelcome in England as a fox turd in the fondue) has picked up some of the Sahara, blown it across Europe and evenly distributed it across the Home Counties. 
Now the English, by and large, know how to react to sand being blown about the place.  Christ knows, any English holidaymaker who has spent time on an English beach is used to eating sandwiches that are at least 7% mineral deposit thanks to the summer ‘breeze’ whipping along the beach.  The correct reaction to a sandstorm is to erect a brightly coloured windbreak, hunker down and drink flask tea until it’s time to go to the pub.
Reality, of course, fell a little short of the full-on award-winning CGI FX that people were secretly hoping for (after this winter’s storms, England has become a nation of not so much storm chasers, but people who are chased by storms and have a smartphone and a desire to get their footage on Sky, the BBC or at least YouHooTube with the tag ‘weather fail’).  As it transpired, this was hardly the sort of weather event that caused the arse of even the most nervous camel to snap shut.
As a weather event, it did give one a sense of perspective, billions of grains of sand blown across two continents, before ending its journey on the windscreen of a VW in Essex.
And it did indeed result in a thin film of dust on many a car, so resulting in many an Englishman taking his car to the local Romanian hand car wash – a foreign import the English are happy not to moan about.

Let's get wed!

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

Village people

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

An Englishman's garden

The English have a particular relationship with their garden that perhaps nobody else in the world shares apart from the Arabs. In a desert climate, greenery and water are signs of luxury. Sharing your garden is, in an inhospitable climate, a sign of hospitality. How wonderful to spend the day underneath a tree, shaded from the sun, listening to water flow while pondering if one was sitting on vast reserves of oil.

So too, for the Englishman, the garden is intrinsic to his ideas about hospitality, and water is at the centre of all he does. This is not a trait shared by the Scots, who mainly cultivate heathers of different colours and creatures that can graze heather which can then be deep fried. Nor the Welsh, who due to their climate are expert at growing two types of flora: those that look good when shaped by a prevailing wind and so are better at growing horizontally rather than vertically, and mould.

In the late nineties and early part of this century, a conspiracy between the BBC and those that owned 90% of the world’s supply of decking introduced the garden makeover programme and with it the idea that your garden could be just like another room in your house. For the English, a race particularly fond of getting as far away from members of their immediate family as possible, this seemed like a great idea, even if it essentially meant decking a two foot square at the top of the garden and retiring up there with a chair and some beer.

It was odd that this love of gardening ever needed reintroducing. The English have always loved to tame nature, especially if they show off by ripping up the landscape and then replanting it to look ‘natural’. Or just show off, with naughty topiary, or knot gardens (presumably beloved of Elizabethan sailors). In terms of hospitality and gardens, nobody does it better than the English, by adopting the practice of digging a bloody huge trench in your garden and filling it with water. It is an accepted convention that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and if that means a moat to deter double glazing salesmen and boiling oil for carollers, then what could be more English?

While the majority of houses are today tragically un-moated, it’s also true that the majority of houses with gardens are inhabited by those whose attitude towards hospitality is ‘come safely to my place of rest and eat a burger that will, in four hours, make you just shit your kidneys’. The barbeque, very much an outdoor event, allows the Englishman to combine beer and naked flame, two things for which he has both a fascination for, and no control over. Cowslip, new mown grass, petrichor – these are all the smells of an English summer but are any of them as representative as the smell of lighter fluid and charcoal as the inpatient chef commences combustion on another marinated masterpiece?

While fire may be the measure of the hospitality of the English host, water is at the centre of the world of any English gardener. The interesting thing about a water butt is that it is absolutely no bloody use at all when it is full, because filling it requires the heavens to open. And after a few days of dry weather, it’s empty, unless one is the sort of gardener who is able to make Sophie’s choice about which of your thirsty plants are going to get a drink today.

The reason that the English react so badly to hosepipe bans is not because they like to wash their cars themselves. In this age of metered water it is now actually cheaper to go to a municipal car park where half of the bloody spaces have been taken over by some blokes with a shitload of fairy liquid and a jet wash and have them do it for you, but rather because they genuinely cannot fathom why, when rain seems to fall, for free, out of the sky every single fucking day, water companies can’t hold on to some. Have these incompetent arseholes tried putting out some buckets? No? Why not?

Postcard from Norfolk - Yarn Bombing is a sunny Hunny delight

Hunstantion is getting posher. It still maintains its kiss-me-quick sensibility, but that co-exists very happily alongside skinny lattes. It is also presently the home to an event known as ‘yarn bombing’.

This essentially consists of tree cosies, that is, finding a suitable spinny, knitting like a fiend and then draping the knitted product round the trees and branches. The effect was enchanting. There were scarfs, waistcoats, bunting and even dolls (one of which is of the type from the label of a popular jam!).


But it doesn’t stop there, in the town the parking signs and various poles of officialdom that conspire to tell us what to do, where and when had also been yarn bombed. Somehow a ‘no stopping’ sign seems much more reasonable when the pole supporting it is covered in a purple knitted wrapper.


It’s quite a sight to see something so indoorsy and fragile, and obviously made with so much care, placed in an open air environment against rough nature or a rougher town centre. Maybe it’s this contrast that provides the charm, but I suspect that the charm is more the love and care in every stich of something made for the public to enjoy.

And The Ship at Brancaster fully redeemed itself after the whole tricky ‘not serving dinner yet’ episode earlier in the week. Overhearing an ill-informed but as usually fully opinionated discussion at our dinner table about just what constituted a ‘flat white’ coffee (latte we know is mostly milk and froth and a bit of coffee, cappuccino is the same, but with the froth mostly on top and added chocolate, but what the hell is a flat white?) our waiter turned up with a flat white and the girl who had made to explain how she makes it. It was sampled and proclaimed very delicious and on concluding her explanation, the waiter remarked to his colleague that ‘that’s not what it says on the instructions in the kitchen’. ‘I know, but that’s how I make it for the owner’ was all the reply needed.

So, if you are in the ship at Brancaster and Sara is available, get her to make you a flat white – it’s delicious.

A change of scene - clubs

While some strive to make the world a better place, others strive for a perfect world, a select few strive for their perfect world and the realists strive to make a part of the world a better place. And if that part is their part, so much the better! The realists establish clubs.

Clubs are areas of the universe where your rules, or at least the rules of you and people like you, well, rule. They establish a set of parameters for your universe, like no women, no pooches, or no people from whatever ethnic group fell out of favour during your formative years or possibly had an affair with your mother, or 'other nanny' as you may have called her.

Let's not get all snobbish about clubs. They start in tree houses and tents where kids brave septicaemia and dishonour by using a pen knife to swear eternal brotherhood to the person with the gash in their palm rapidly going very pale.

Clubs like initiation ceremonies. They are like gangs in that regard. The essential difference is this; if somebody is trying to insert something into you, you are joining a club. If you are tying to insert something into something, you are joining a gang. If you are doing either while wearing a blindfold, you are joining a society.

It's a simple enough proposition. Within four walls, or a set of rooms, or a cellar, you create what you consider to be a restful environment. Where you can relax after a hard day. If you consider that the leather in question might be, for instance, the wallpaper, or attached to shackles, or simply fashioned into a gimp suit, then certainly, that sort of club has its place, possibly in the aforementioned cellar, more usually and depressingly in the converted back bedroom of a semi in a dormitory town with excellent connections to the motorway and a population leaning towards middle management and intolerance of gypsies.

If, however, you consider that the best use for leather is to cover very comfy armchairs and provide the binding for collected back issues of 'Country Life', then that's much closer to what a real club should be. A real club serves two purposes - oh it allows for rest, relaxation and a place to retreat from the cares of the world, such as hustle, bustle, and family, but there's more to it than that. The two purposes a club serves are firstly to allow one to gather together with people of similar interests, be it political, recreational or vocational. The second purpose, almost more important, is to deny anyone who does not share your views membership. Essentially, you want any conversation to be minimal and agreeable, along the lines of;

"I say, this man Cameron. He's an absolute shit!"
"Quite so."

And that's that.

Yes, a gentleman's club is where you make your own universe, a bit like glue sniffing but with more leather and servants. A good club should be a place where one can get a decent drink, tolerable food and your view of the world reinforced whenever needed, all from the comfort of an overstuffed armchair.

Hashtag trouble

Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham, I wonder to myself, could life ever be the same again?

Well it sure as hell wasn’t the same as it was before. In a week where civil unrest came to the shittier boroughs of our cities, the media and other commentators were left flummoxed by an apparent paradigm shift in civil disorder away from people being violent in order to make a point towards people being violent in order to make off with a new 42 inch plasma telly.

The one thing that stayed the same was that people chose to riot on their own doorsteps. Bloody hell, where do these people think they are going to be able to hang about if they torch the Tennessee Fried Chicken shop?

While the media took a few days to start using the term ‘underclass’, in a concerned tone, others were ready to tag the looters as ‘chav scum’ and move on. Were it not for the fact that they started looting in the daylight hours, I’d have just tagged them as ‘Morlocks’.

The politicians took a surprisingly long time to realise that it does not look great to be on holiday at your luxury villa in Tuscany while people are rioting every night. So they came home and everyone told them they were a complete waste of space and largely responsible for all this. You could see certain politicians standing there thinking ‘yesterday I was lolling by the pool, drinking wine that cost three euros a bottle and tasted great and working on my tan. Today I am in a neighbourhood with a post code I can’t pronounce and some woman is shouting at me while a bloody news team film the whole thing.’

While everyone was looking for The Cause Of All This Unrest (probably a complicated mix of a material society, people being told they should have certain things, unreasonable aspirations driven by television talent shows, a lack of realistic aspirations, a lack of education and a lack of enough coppers to administer a bloody good beating on the first night), it was interesting to monitor the social networks, Twitter in particular.

I’ve never really looked at it before, but Twitter is a microcosm of the internet, it informs and disinforms, because tweets appear as print they have the appearance of authority but can be unsupported by any evidence, there’s a lot of good stuff on there, there’s a lot of bad stuff on there and there is a hell of a lot of dull stuff on there, but there’s also the irreverent humour that the internet does so well. How long is the appropriate delay between an event and the first jokes about that event? With Twitter, that no longer applies because the jokes are being made while the event is still happening. Best example – ‘Greggs torched, hot pies in ten minutes’.

It was also the case that rolling news couldn’t really keep up with events, they were moving so quickly. Not as quickly as the police though, who by by Thursday were moving very quickly indeed to kick chav arse.

In the end, as with so much civil unrest, it was the rain, and a few thousand extra police, that sorted the problem. Good job the chavs were too busy looting trainers to bother with the umbrella shops.

Graffiti

Back in the 1980’s there was a baffling popular series of books by, I think, Nigel Rees, about graffiti. This was not some collection of academic tomes explaining why people feel the urge to daub their thoughts, names or marks on the public landscape, like dogs marking their territory, but rather a collection of amusing thoughts or phrases that had been left on the world in marker pen and spray pen.

So they avoided the sort of low-rent low-brow stuff you might see in urban areas, such as ‘(insert minority group here)s out’ and instead recorded things like ‘beware the dreaded limbo dancer’. The graffiti was shown in a series of cartoons and illustrations, the phrase in question being recorded at the bottom of a toilet door in a gent’s toilet (for those unfamiliar with public loos, in certain styles of toilet the door does not fit flush to the floor, rather a gap of a few inches is left. This is either designed to prevent dossers spending the night curled up on the floor of a cosy cubical or facilitate the easy passage of toilet roll from one stall to another should need press, I never quite worked out which).

With the benefit of hindsight, one can speculate if the entire contents of the book was indeed the result of painstaking research, with Mr Rees wandering the toilets of the land with pad and pen in hand. My recollection of graffiti in public toilets in the 80’s is rather less ‘don’t throw cigarette butts in the urinal, it makes them soggy and difficult to light’ and rather more ‘young cock wanted, be here at three o’clock next Tuesday’.

Graffiti has changed for sure. What used to be a simple message, showing dedication to a football team or fascist cause became a colourful expression of territory with the advent of tagging, and then the use of stencils as vandals restyled (resprayed?) themselves as artists.

At its heart though, graffiti is still about defacing something, changing it and leaving a message. That’s why the endless repetitive tags are so boring, why the self regarding social comment of a tosser with a stencil and a spray can is so bland and why something like this, a speed sign near a school defaced with a stencilled grenade at least genuinely begs the question – why did whoever did this do this and do they know that behaviour like this resulted in paperback books about graffiti moving out of the ‘humour’ section of bookshops and becoming coffee table tomes sitting shrink wrapped in the ‘art’ area?

Social network mobility

A few years ago the BBC did a series of programmes about foster parents. One foster mum featured explained that the longest period she had fostered a child for was something like twelve years, while the shortest was one night, when she had fostered a toddler overnight while his mum went into hospital.

Christ, can you imagine, being so alone that nobody can look after your kid for you for one night.

I think that's what annoys me so about social networking on sites that use the term 'friend' so loosely. Not that I have a problem with social networking generally, I like the idea of common interests and sharing achievements and having others comment on your thoughts and all that, I like the idea of sharing tips and passing on reviews. What I don't like is that by clicking on a name you can designate somebody as your friend.

Let's be clear, the only time you are likely to have more than a dozen friends is when you're at school, and that's only because you share a common interest in Top Trumps and chocolate with so many of your peers.

But I guess it would be too complicated to rename all those 'friend' buttons, and 'that girl you wanted to shag when you were both teenagers reunited.com' is too long a URL.

But why no 'enemy' button. Social networking sites seem to draw the line at 'ignore'. Again, totally useless in real life. They should at least have a 'bloody huge irritant' button. Obviously, this and a 'friend' button cannot be mutually exclusive, as somebody can easily occupy both categories through the simple purchase of an iPhone and the desire to tell you all about it.

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.