Blogging a Dead Horse

New serious blog (hence the lack of exclamation marks)

2008-10-29T19:46:00.002Z

As a student journalist, I have been encouraged to work on my 'online presence'. Apparently anyone can see what a pillock I am by looking at this blog, even potential employers.

With this in mind, I have my new, authoritative and utterly serious blog. Check it out here.

I will, fear not, continue to sporadically post on this blog - it has a small but loyal following and I would like to keep them interested.

Perhaps from now on I'll hide the names of people I disparage. Charlie.

http://patrickgaley.wordpress.com

Travel Sickness

2008-08-26T10:07:00.004+01:00

No one would derive even a modicum of pleasure by saying, "I told you so".

It is probably nothing more than my own neurosis regarding manned flight that leaves me with the sense that not a day passes without some sort of apocalyptic incident in the sky.

This is, of course, firstly untrue and secondly skirting dangerously close to repeating myself. So I'll leave the problems with flying where they belong, save for one final validation.

A review of Freakonomics, a book dedicated to exploding 'conventional wisdom' by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner summarises on such misconception as follows:

While it's true that many more people die annually in car accidents than in plane crashes, it's often overlooked that the dramatic difference in number of deaths is largely due to the amount of time the average person spends in an automobile in comparison to the relatively small number of hours spent in flight. Levitt goes on to show the per hour death rate of driving to be about equal to that of flying.

As I harbour such a completely rational fear of being rendered airborne in a twenty year old flying sarcophagus manufactured by the lowest bidder, I recently took the train around Europe. With such a limited period of time and the speed of most Eastern trains being marginally less than walking pace, I was naturally disappointed to find that train travel is not as safe as it's cracked up to be.

First, there was the time in Zagreb when I wandered wearily to the end of the carriage to see a thirty tonne engine careering towards us with no intention of stopping. The impact, although slow, was enough to catapult me toward the open doors and it was nothing other than my clawing grasp of the frame that prevented me from being innocuously crushed.

Then there was the almost incident involving a newly acquired Dutch friend and a track side signal post. A gruff carriage attendant had neglected to close the side doors, leaving up to trundle into the night with two potentially lethal holes in the wagon. Being young, impressionable and lubricated with a fair amount of Romanian wine, the Dutchman was foolishly hanging out the open doors when a friend exclaimed,

"Schtop Jip! There'sch a poscht comink!"

Or words to that effect. Had he not turned round in the nick of time, he would have lost his bonce.

These are tangible dangers, great clunking heaps of metal that threaten to take your life by smashing it out your skull. I reckon the real dangers with trains come in less obvious guises. For example, there must be some sort of bio hazard contained within the squalid, squat toilets situated at either end of your wagon like some sort of AIDS-ridden book-ends.

If you thought the main difficulty with a stationary squatter was purely psychological, it's nothing compared with the physical difficulty of finding stable purchase as your loo rockets along rickety tracks.

Dehydration is another silent train killer. Probably. On some of the longer legs (Bucharest to Istanbul, 26hrs) there are no restaurant cars. So, if you didn't fancy lumping litres of water on board as you depart, you'll arrive at your destination looking like this. The only way I staved off such wrinkling was to barter my Bulgarian money for tepid beer with one of the 1st class wagon attendants. I'd have paid in other ways too, so thirsty was I.

Thieves/muggers/bum-rapists are another constant danger, particularly when you are angrily forced from your plasterboard bed in the middle of the night for the pleasure of having a moustachioed neanderthal stamp your passport with his hairy knuckled claws.

There are continually shifty-looking men loitering around stations and along the side of tracks. I have heard stories of men dressing as carriage attendants on the way from Prague before rifling through passengers' bags and helping themselves to their juicy valuables.

Madmen. Or, more specifically, one madman named Jonah, of no fixed abode, who was convinced he foresaw the 7/7 bombings in a cryptic dream and has pulled out his front teeth as the government is spying on him through radio waves. He didn't hurt me, but I'm not entirely sure that he wouldn't if he could.

There are, in short, myriad ways of hurting yourself on the trains - I trapped my finger in a rusty window and narrowly avoided being bitten by a rabid dog that had jumped on board and slobbered everywhere. The trick is to look after number one.

If there are passport checks, don't wake up anyone until you've had yours stamped. If you find out there is an old woman three compartments down selling water and fresh fruit, but the whole bleeding stock, sell them on at a profit.

Long distance train travel can be a Darwinian endeavour. Take Herman, the egomaniacal German who didn't wake up in time for the customs checks at the Turkish border. He should have set an alarm, as I did. Had he, he would have avoided being removed from the train and kept at the border guards pleasure.

I don't feel guilty about this; it's a dog eat dog means of travel wherein you'll happily see teenage girls sit forlornly in the aisle because you want to put your feet up for a while.

I like to think of it as a metaphor for the modern world; not ideal, sometimes seemingly pointless, always vacillating between new-fangled coldness and old-fashioned good manners.

There's politics on trains. Do you offer your seat? Do you share your food, knowing how little money you have left? Do you bother waking up someone you actively dislike when approaching their stop?

Do you hell. If they had the chance, they'd probably steal your clothes as you slept. On a plane, your all in it together. On a train, it's every man for himself. And I love it.

New Blog!!!

2008-07-15T16:16:00.003+01:00

Following the success of 2007's Asia blog - at which literally tens of you looked - I have a brand spanking new blog, so new it comes with its warning labels still attached and a bag of silica gel.

I shall be traveling with Claire, from London to Istanbul. We shall shirk the plane and inter rail our way Eastwards, avoiding military coups and missile shields in the process.

Our choice of transport is in no way related to fact that planes reduce me to a quivering, thumb-sucking wreck, blocking the emergency exits in a gently-rocking foetal pose.

There shall be commentary, interviews and photos aplenty as we get to grips with some of Europe's hidden treasures, including Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and, er Belgium.

Don't miss: visit http://traintoturkey.blogspot.com or subscribe here.

The Kids Aren't Alright

2008-07-14T22:42:00.003+01:00

Anyone remember the good old days? You know, those sepia-tinged days where children acted their age and respected their elders? No? Oh.

According to Dave - the opposition leader, not the re-branded light entertainment channel and home of witty banter - society is broken. Without citing anything more specific than the recent spate of knife offences among young people, Dave was able to plausibly argue that the country, under twelve years of Labour misrule, has gone to pot.

Knife crime is a worrying phenomenon among the youths of today and, although murder rates from knives have stayed more or less the same, in recent years the ages of its victims has dramatically plummeted. But don't take my word for it, listen instead to the muse of our time and all-round media scrubber Lily Allen for her uniquely subtle take on the media sensationalisation of knife crime in the UK.

Knives aside, children in the UK are now less employable, more pregnant and more depressed than ever in recent memory.

But to say that such worrying trends are completely unprecedented is untrue, no matter how tempting it may be.

We read more about knife crime and social dislocation because newspapers and TV have shifted from the information posts of the upper and middle classes to be inclusive of every facet of society. Publications such as the Guardian (who put the artisan in partisan) now launch impressively researched social trend campaigns, interviewing members of gangs and parents who fear for their lives amid the apparent glamorisation of violence in which they feel immersed.

Differing social classes have always had differing views on the world; this is logical as environment, to a lesser or greater extent, hews the individual and their opinions.

To say society is broken is, aside from being a rather apt political catalyst for governmental upheaval, too simplistic. It views 'society' as one homogeneous mass which is fundamentally fissured. At the very least, it assumes an uncomfortable intermingling of different social groups, as if they should all just be tolerant of each other.

This hasn't happened historically, and doesn't happen in any major city on earth today. There are always tensions, conflicts of interests and subsequent trouble.

What reporting teams such as the Guardian's are attempting to do is give voices to those people who have been traditionally omitted from previous institutionalised debates on social cohesion.

All voices need to have a platform for themselves to be heard. If not you get jingoistic and ill-informed cross-class presumptions such as this or this. (It is possible that MPs find it difficult to talk to young knife offenders; a conviction of murder is sleaze that is likely to rear its head at least once during their time at Westminster. What I'd really like to know is how Rowenna Davis can understand them. She is either displaying unspeakably champagne-socialist arrogance or has previously stabbed someone. In which case I don't really want to listen.)

I am fed up with commentators and MPs blaming social mechanisms for teenage disaffection and discontent. Blame the government, blame peer-pressure, blame your absent father-figure. Blame anyone but yourself.

The world may have forgotten about these disaffected youths, but that doesn't mean society is broken. What it means is that social norms of civility, respect and mutual tolerance are not being adequately outlined to permeate the grottiest high rises in Elephant and Castle.

It doesn't require a broken social message to foster adolescent ill-feeling and anger, it just takes people to either not be able to, or not want to hear it.

Speaking of messages, Jacqui Smith marauded into the debate with a plan that appeared to have been hurriedly scribbled on the back of a packet of pork scratchings. A plan, incidentally that was hastily withdrawn after universal derision:

Show young offenders the consequences of their actions. Show them other stab victims struggling to survive on hospital beds. Show them how the big kid with a gangsta drawl on their estate turns into a weeping girl crying out for his Mum when he's stabbed. Show them that knives actually do hurt people. That'll teach them.

Young people are not idiots, no matter how many times they choose to show themselves in such a light with childish bouts of fitful aggression and violence. They know that when they stab/mug/intimidate someone it will hurt them. That's precisely why they do it.

It could be argued that one way in which society has altered in the last generation is the age at which children 'grow up'. With more absent families and unorthodox parental situations, many children who haven't received the right to loving support from a close group are forced to grow up quicker than they would like. This happens in all social strata - for example when a parent needs caring for - but it happens far more in lower classes.

Many children grow up fast and start acting like adults. They take on adult personas of gangsters or dealers and perpetrate adult issues such as respect, loyalty and retribution. Carrying a weapon, either with intent or self defence is the action of an adult. Problem being, it often has the mental motivation of childish emotions such as anger, intolerance and selfishness.

Another overwhelmingly adult issue, depression, should never happen to a child or young person. (Do you remember the good old days, when you'd come home crying and shouting at your parents because they didn't understand you - no one did!)

All adolescents experience moments of emotional isolation; they feel that the world doesn't get them and doesn't care for them. This is part of growing up. You learn to temper your aggression or loathing and realise that you have the strength of character to overcome such fleeting moments of despair.

Depression should only exist in adults for whom their is no gloss left on life's facade. They have truly seen (or foreboding anticipate) life's rock bottom and cannot find a way back from it. Children and adolescents who feel premature pangs of this debilitating condition should attempt to remember how old they are. They should not concern themselves with issues of adulthood before they are emotionally ready. If they do, then take responsibility.

Adulthood is about empowerment, freedom of choice and, most crucially, the responsibility that comes from having these. Children cannot claim to be able to look after themselves, to meet out justice in their own way and then proceed to not be accountable.

Young people who are not inherently bad can destroy lives with one moment of utter short-sightedness. They can destroy themselves and those around them with an immediacy of emotion. They may dress these up as the trials and tribulations of adulthood, when they are, in fact petty but escalated situations that an adult brain should be able to deal with from a distance.

This goes for all youths; from the poor kid in Peckham who is angry at life stabbing a rival gang member, to the rich white girl in Hampstead who turns to self-harm because her parents don't understand her. These result from a hot-headedness which is dissipated the older we get. These are the actions of children, and should be treated as such, at least emotionally speaking.

As I've already said, all voices, including the young, should have a platform on which to be heard. But that doesn't mean we need to listen.

Many programmes now, including a recent Question Time offer young people the opportunity to say what they think. OK. But is what they think and apply to general life informed by social trends, elongated education and balanced viewpoints derived from cumulative experience? Of course not. They are either self-orientated or idealistic.

Niether of these motivations are necessarily bad, but they offer little help for us as adults who are having to live with the consquences of there actions.

Too often we allow children to talk as if they are adults, to offer insight into their lives and to suggest to us how we can make them better or more comfortable. Do we need to do this, for fear of offending and segregating youngsters? No.

We can ill afford to listen to these views without following them to their logical conclusion. You want to speak with the grown-ups? You want to be treated like a grown-up? Good, then act like one. This inculdes taking responsibility for your actions.

Adults more than ever need to tell children what to do. We need to be forceful. We need to be sympathetic to young people's perception of their worlds, but we don't need to accommodate them. We were young once. We know what it feels like to be disenchanted and scared. (I admit that the little I went through as a youngster pales into total insignificance compared to the problems some young people today have to deal with. But there are adults now who have experienced similar hardship when young.)

We (the adults) have been rash and acted stupidly, they (the young) have not seen their actions and situations at a distance, in perspective. We have been young and naive, they have not been old and worldly-wise.

We don't need to patronise them by suggesting that what they say matters to us. This wrongly empowers them; it lets the children feel like adults when they are not. They already selectively act like adults - verbally, physically and illegally.

What many young people fail to reconcile is that respect needs to be earned, knowledge needs to be acquired and loyalty needs to be proven. These ideas are often cited as motivation for impetuous fits of violence and disobedience among the young. But true respect, knowledge and loyalty are adult states and need to be meditated upon, built up over time and developed
through experience.

We don't need to listen to children more about their problems. We need to speak to them and let them know that we know what they are going through. We understand how they feel, how they want to be treated as adults, how they want to feel safe and how they see the world through quick and judgemental eyes.

But we also need to tell them that they should act their age. Be a child and learn to be an adult. Learn that stabbing/cutting/mugging and stealing have consquences.

Increased punitive measures for young offenders should be introduced to encourage one of the justice system's cruxes: time to reflect and deal with consequences.

Be a child but learn that being treated like an adult is scary and as far from glamourous as is possible. Discipline needs to be available and administered by adults, not by other children.

Be a child and learn that acting like an adult doesn't mean dishing out violence and disception, free from consequence.

Be a child and learn responsibility. Be afraid of becoming an adult.

Growing up consists of a series of moral choices, directly dependent on circumstance. Some circumstances are harder than others and these circumscribe choice to a certain extent. But there are still choices young people can take to show that they are still learning. Acceptance and tolerance shows a patience beyond their years. Not being too proud to ask for help is another way of being adult, but still maintaining the less pressurized state of the young.

Getting angry, depressed and disruptive is not mature - it's the epitome of childishness.

Hairs and Graces

2008-07-08T10:00:00.003+01:00

You might have guessed this by looking at my pixelated visage, but I hate haircuts. They are an activity that makes filling in a tax return feel like a naked fire-walking party.

You count the forty-six rings it takes an overworked receptionist to be jolted out of her hairspray-induced stupor and answer as you call up to book "an appointment". It sounds like an STD check-up.

"Sorry," she says, sounding as if she's got a clothes peg on her nose, "We've only got a slot with Gemma at 7.30 on Wednesday." This is the least convenient time imaginable for a haircut, as you have to reckon with an oestrogen drenched mood bag eager to enjoy her day's first chilled rose and sixtieth cigarette.

At this time of night, they have ceased to care if you leave looking like Michael Score; they want only to deprive you of your glossy locks before prodding you out the shop with a pair of clippers.

You arrive, hair embarrassingly windswept and get sat down in the chair. The "stylist" asks what you want. At this point, the resolve you possessed when you left the house to go for a "radical summer do" has withered like a two-day old party balloon. You end up sheepishly muttering something about "tidying up the sides" as they look around the room like a startled meerkat, not remotely listening.

You then go for the wash, where a tiny and improbably strong lady forces your neck into the bowl, bringing back memories of primary school "flushings" at the hands of sweating bullies.

You're asked: "How's the temperature?" Whether the water freezes solid upon contact with your skin or it is so hot that your scalp blisters off like a Chenobyl fireman, the answer to this question is always, inevitably: "Yeah, it's fine."

Why do they ask us such questions if they know they will unfailingly get a dishonest and nondescript answer? The same occurs at the end of the ordeal, when they show you the back of your head (a deeply unsettling view, akin to a fume-induced out of body experience) and vaguely enquire: "How's that for you?"

They could have shaved off all your hair without your permission. They may have dyed a black swastika on your forehead. They may have well replaced your eyebrows with stickers saying "fuck Bush" and you still would be unable to muster anything more eloquent than:

"Yeah, that's great thanks."

What? Surely, if these scissor-wielding waifs are being paid to ensure you can walk in public without a paper-bag covering your crown, then they shouldn't have to ask for your approval? It is their job. They should know it's bloody OK; they are the ones who have been staring stupidly at the back of your poor head for the last hour (or four).

No matter how it looks like they've poked at your barnet with the jaws-of-life, you'll never tell them. You, like me, will just stare disbelievingly in the mirror at the bird's nest that used to be your hair and vacantly confirm that no, I wasn't being sarcastic when I asked for a tidy-up.

We say nothing because we wish to avoid hurting their clearly fragile feelings. We say nothing because we want to get out of the chair in which we've spent our recent history scrutinising our unpleasant face in an unflattering mirror. We say nothing because, obviously, they have a sharp, lethal instrument clutched in their painted claws.

You need to put a tremendous about of trust in your hairdresser; not to make your hair look trendy, but for them not to sneeze and slice your ear off.

Judging (probably unfairly) from the type of men and women who end up as hairdressers, they are not the kind of people who won every event on sports day. They are clearly unco-ordinated.

My haircut two before last was administered by an Italian woman who's gesticulations during the story of her trip to Thailand were performed while swishing her scissors dangerously close to my jugular. I didn't care about the cut, and I did little to disguise my relief in surviving the ordeal with all my facial outcrops still attached as I practically shouted: "Yeah that's really great thanks."

Not only are they potentially dangerous, hairdressers are unforgivably boring.

A friend has suggested the opening of a "Silent Salon," in which the hairdressers are forbidden to speak to the customers and vice-versa. This may result in some hilariously mis-judged and unasked for cuts, but it would alleviate that terrible anxiety you experience in desperately racking your brains for things to say.

I have nothing in common with hairdressers. I am not better than them, nor more intelligent. But I cannot abide small talk, especially when there is no way of you escaping the forced conversation. It would be impractical to get up and talk to someone else with half of your head shaved. You are there at their pleasure. You will leave, and these inane dialogues will end, when the hairdresser says so. Not a minute before.

Another friend claimed to have once spent four and a half hours sat helplessly in the chair of a Vidal Sassoon academy, only for his hair to look utterly uncut. It was as if the trainee had placed a huge beehive wig on his head and proceeded to snip airily away at it for the best part of an afternoon. These four hours shall never be relived or better spent, destined to belong to this wisp with a pair of misguided scissors forever. How dare he.

I was curious as to how these pair of men filled the relentless minutes with speech. Apparently, not much more than the weather and each other's favourite shirts were discussed.

You shouldn't be forced into conversing with someone performing a service. It would be like your taxi-driver wanting to talk to you about your taste in Lebanese Restaurants, or being pinned down by the plumber and having to listen to tales of his Benidorm booze-cruise.

During my last haircut (I don't mean ever, unfortunately) I was in and out in half an hour; Gemma was clearly eager to teeter on her heels across the road for a Babycham. In between my instructions and my timid approval not a word was spoken. It was fantastic - so much so, I didn't even care that Gemma had plainly ignored my advice to "not take too much off" and had instead done whatever she fancied.

The only other people you pay to stand uncomfortably close behind you for over half an hour are prostitutes and private investigators. And it's normally best not to speak to them.

Impressionable Youth

2008-06-27T08:08:00.002+01:00

"The trouble with first impressions," someone once smugged, "Is that you only get to make one."

The irony here, of course, is that any swan-necked debutante who happened to waft within earshot when this epigram gushed forth would have formed the first impression of its provider being a nob. (Incidentally, who do you think came up with this maxim, sharper than lemon eye drops? Oscar Wilde? Stephen Fry? Nope, it was a character from that generational moral compass, The Simpsons.)

As the hot-headed hue of youth fades to pale grey resignation of the terribly boring twenties, I feel my intolerance for other people fading like a backstreet tattoo. Bombarded by nostalgia pangs and reunion invites, I am starting to reassess those people I may have been a teensy bit hasty in labelling tossers.

At primary school, I hated a girl called Jessica Necci. She was horrid, with tightly coiled hazelnut hair delicately piled atop her porcelain face. Her milky skin, cheeks blushed with a tinge of Botichellian pink, tenderly dusted with demerera brown freckles. Like I said, horrid. I was very mean to Jessica; I used to call her 'Jessica Smelly' (not one of my best,) chase her in the playground with wet sticks and generally do things that would nowadays be tantamount to harassment.

You see, I didn't hate Jessica at all - I was hopelessly and completely in love with her. But you're not supposed to show it at that age. It's called 'playing really hard and rather roughly to get'. The first impression Jessica gave me was on of being both gorgeous and not interested. This immediately damned my fragile heart to years of lonely exile as the girl of my dreams played hopscotch with my best mate.

Since that fateful jilting I have never paid too close attention to first impressions; the more I do, the more I see that they not only matter, but they are nearly always erroneous.

Your very first impression of someone can come in a variety of ways. You could meet them face to face, receive an email from them, or hear from them on the phone - you could wake up lying next to them in a stuffy haze of Neurofen and regret.

The old-fashioned, visual way of summarising and judging a person by what they look like and what they wear serves only to compartmentalise the diversity of the human race - and usher forth stereotyped ideas. For example, categories could exist such as 'fat', 'ugly', 'hot', 'stylish', 'fleet-footed' or 'grotesque and offensive to all five senses'. Within the category of, say, 'fat', we have sub-categories such as 'jolly', 'self-loathing' or 'on the rebound'. All this unauthorised categorization is done instantaneously, with each of us having utter conviction that the lump we see wobbling before us is the very embodiment of our pre-judgement.

These prejudices go on to temper our opinion of every person we meet. First impressions from a nice fat person will be different from a nice, skinny and stunning one. We expect the fat person to be nice: they are fat, they need to be. We expect the skinny one to be a bitch and when he or she isn't, our first impressions of 'mmm, good looking' are compounded by a pleasant peripetaia of expectation.

Visual first impressions don't just count apply to people. Every metallic blue Porsche that roars past depicts to us not a finely-tuned harmony of German engineering verve, but a hollow shell of a man on his way from the place where he leaves his integrity at night to a Cristal party where he snorts drugs off a midget's head before collapsing in the foetal postition and lamenting the loss of his soul while gently rocking and sucking his thumb.

Even website impressions are made within the blink of an eye. So please don't be put off by my blog's colour scheme, chosen by Robert Mugabe's wardrobe stylist. If appearence matters, it matters instantly.

Why have these expectations derived from appearence at all? We, as busy and immensely important people need a way of rapidly differentiating people from the faceless human masses, even if first visual impressions only serve to provide a rather insular sub-category.

But such first impressions are usually wrong; that a person is fat doesn't make them any more or less likely to be a bastard or a flirt.

(As I write, I hear myself sounding more and more like a Chakrabartian limpet, extolling the tired argument that their is inherent good in everyone, regardless of appearance. That's not what I mean. Judge people on their looks by all means. And use that judgement to inform your subsequent interaction. The important thing to prevent that becoming irreversible.)

It is a good thing that first impressions are wrong. As our expectations are confounded, we feel the electric thrill of surprise. We smile at the downright quirkiness of the situation. I have been guilty of sticking doggedly to first impressions of people I know (formed, admittedly, from interaction and not just visual factors,) even when they are proved by many others to be woefully misguided.

So I am slowly beginning to reassess and question my first impressions of people I have reviled since I first laid disparaging eyes on them. The first came yesterday, when meeting up with someone who, at a push, could be termed an acquaintance if I really needed a favour. I spent time with this man, and he was charming, fun, effervescent. I'd never given him a chance - so blinded was I by a first impression of idiocy and narcicissm. He also has a peirced ear which, to my uninitiated prejudice, proved he was either gay or a criminal.

He was neither. He is nice. I was wrong.

Of course, this reappraisal of friends and enemies is a two-way thing. Just as I am beginning to enjoy the company of people I've held nothing but disdain for, I could conceivably start spontaneously hating my friends.

So be nice. I'm impressionable, after all.

Cycle Like You Mean It

2008-06-23T18:27:00.003+01:00

There can be few things more exhilarating than cycling hopefully to work each morning.

Beaming with the full promise of a productive day, giggling to yourself as you think of those poor colleagues with their faces pressed into a tramp's armpit by the sheer weight of commuters, you are rewarded with fresh air and an eco-smugness that can only be otherwise achieved by wearing pants made out of hemp (the chafing is probably similar).

Cycling back from the Cambridge News today, fresh from hearing that the local council has shelved a planned congestion charging zone, I felt far less fulfilled than usual. I felt isolated, as if everyone else on the road and in offices were idiots for not seeing the obvious physical (and irrefutably environmentally friendly) benefits of riding a bike everywhere.

Please don't assume that I'm some green paragon of virtue, pontificating about how good for the environment bikes are. I'm not. If I could afford to own a car, I would, even if it were only to travel outside of London, because traveling by train is marginally more expensive than being held upside-down by the ankles and vigorously shaken. It's just that bikes are quicker and I feel the need to extol them, as should motorists.

Those pudgy, wheezing millions sitting themselves and three empty seats in a noxious jam for two hours every morning and night shouldn't shake their jowly heads disapprovingly as some young whippersnapper whizzes by on a bike. They should welcome them and ask for more. Not only would more cyclists force a re-think in carbon neutral urban infrastructure, but it would take more cars off the road. This would, in turn, make it easier for the most stubborn and miserable of drivers to actually move whilst listening to the Five Live phone-in.

Traffic jams would be a thing of the past, so those people who need a car for their job (only farmers, plumbers and racing drivers, off the top of my head) could work better and more efficiently. Everyone's a winner. Except the Government, who would face a huge windfall in taxes and would inevitably invent a novel way of taxing bikes on top of VAT - some sort of 'high visibility helmet tax'.

Still, most of the Shadow Cabinet are cyclists, and we all know what they'll be doing in three years time.

For all the government initiatives, high-profile cyclists and that Queen video, cycling anywhere in any town is still unspeakably inconvenient.

Cambridge, one of the most bike-friendly towns in the UK, is a prime example of cyclists being treated as an afterthought, riding in spite (not because) of infrastructure. There are not enough cycle lanes (any that exist are continually clogged with buses and parked cars,) the road surfaces are pockmarked like Dean Gaffney's face and exhaust fumes mean that even the briefest two-wheel jaunt leaves one with lungs like Amy Winehouse.

But there are more fundamental reasons that not enough people cycle. For a start, it's incredibly dangerous. In the unspoken hierarchy of vehicle pecking orders, it roughly goes: lorry, bus, limo, van, car, motorbike, horse, mule, bendy bus. Bicycles are somewhere down there between magic carpet and Smart car. Drivers of lorries and vans are so concerned with hooting and laddishly ogling pedestrians, that they contrive not to see the cyclist that's just been smeared across their dashboard.

Someone - possibly a cyclist - told me that it is statistically safer to not stop at traffic lights than it is to stop. If by 'statistically', he means 'anecdotally', then he could be on to something. But it doesn't sound awfully plausible, even in view of how dangerous traffic lights can be for cyclists. It's a contentious issue, with many motorists growing apoplectic at cyclists nipping through on an orange. They'd do it if they could get away with it, mark my words.

Motorists and cyclists shouldn't hate each other, they should see them as friends who could help one another get from A to B quicker and without dying - either from obesity or impact.

Until all commuters become more accepting to different (and superior) means of traveling, cyclists will have to endure angry drivers, unsuspecting pedestrians and some really quite steep hills. Such dangers and annoyances are enough to make you scream loudly at passing buses like the homeless lady who sometimes dines out in your bins. It's driving me cyclepathic.

Staggering Behaviour

2008-06-10T10:26:00.005+01:00

On Saturday night, I should have been drunk. I should have been riding a Tesco trolley chariot bedecked with a traffic cone helmet. I should have been laughing at a friend fending off the advances of a creaky stripper with hernia-inducing alacrity. But I wasn't.

I wasn't indulging in any such cliche because, although I was on a stag night for a very dear friend of mine, I wasn't having very much fun at all.

Stag nights, that last bastion of debauched overindulgence and questionable moral behaviour, blurring the line between manly bonding and legal perversion, can go one of two ways - they either fizzle out in a blaze of nudity and men taking turns to roast a crumpet between the stag's goose-pimpled buttocks, or fizzle out in a whimper of yawns and muffled excuses.

This one, for all the valiant intent of the best man and self-imposed fiscal constraints of the groom, was unequivocally the latter. For in the space of sixteen measly, unchallenging hours, our party went from twenty-five, to just seven willing souls, two of whom were very much over the age where mailing someone to John O'Groats with their VISA card cellotaped to their back is still funny.

The sad, depressing fact is that eighteen supposed 'mates' cancelled on the day of the stag night, ladened with affected apologies, anaemic excuses and promises of future liver-damaging forays into public drunkenness. Yes, when the stag becomes the groom, he's bound to want to wee through a police station letter box. Obviously, that's going to happen.

But it's easier to cajole and seduce a disappointed 'buddy' than succumb to the inevitable truth: friendship doesn't matter to friends any more.

I awoke to scudding grey clouds. A fine drizzle carpeted the grass with opaque dew and it did not look like a good day to be dicking about on a golf course with a dodgy back. (We had arranged for a drunken round of 18, before heading off into our adolescent nobbing ground, Loughborough, for the obligatory spiced ethnic food and fizzy lager. All of us, that is, not just seven that made it.)

But, buoyed by the promise of seeing several friends that I had either gone months without seeing or lost contact with altogether, I trudged into what promised to be a day and a night of laddishness, japes and casual innuendo.

As soon as I arrived, I was greeted by the stag, who cheerily informed me that one of our oldest friends was not attending. He had a job interview. On Monday.

Not having been to a huge amount, I'm not certain that job interviews usually give such short notice. It would prove counterproductive to choose an employee on the basis of their speed of preparation; you may as well organise a candidate footrace, whereby the victor takes the job, leaving fellow applicants flailing in his dusty wake as they limp to the the job centre and limber up for the next round of interviews.

This would not be a productive means of appointment, but could go some way to explaining how Seb Coe managed to hurdle his way onto the Olympics Committee. I digress.

I have no doubt that our friend had an interview the coming Monday and so deemed drinking his own body weight in cider before boarding a freightship to Macau to be unsympathetic to his job prospects.

However, I find it hard to shallow that he was only informed, with staggering inconvenience, of said interview on the morning of the stag do. It's just that such a short-noticed pull-out would give the stag very little space to ruminate on what a shower of shite his friend was, for fear of ruining what is supposed to be his last taste of the single life.

Another, even closer friend didn't even manage to muster an external or prior commitment as he bowed disgracefully out of proceedings. He "would, but [was] absolutely knackered". There are several responses to that. "Well, sleep in tomorrow then," would have sufficed. As would, "I don't really think that's a legitimate reason for not showing your support in my last official night of single life. I will interpret this either as a rebuffal of our long and dear (at least to me) friendship or a tacit disapproval as to my choice of bride and course in life." Equally effective would have been a curt, "So, what?"

There are certain occasions that 'friends' can, I believe, legitimately duck out of, if they genuinely have a more important task to be performing. Birthdays are one.

It might seem impolite to ditch your friend amid the mountains of wrapping paper and cards from confused relatives; but in reality your friend wont mind. He will (hopefully) have a few more birthdays in his life, some of which you wont be able to think of an excuse to miss.

Assuming you've not been at the Liza Minelli book of commitment, you only get married once. One ceremony, one engagement, one preparation and one stag-do per lifetime. So friends, who either wish to be considered as such or believe that in this ever accelerating and increasingly superficial world of Facebook, mobile phone rejections and disparate personal encounters, there needs to be some things that actually mean something, should make a cocking effort.

I'm struggling to remember a night when I was so depressed, save for the time Fabianne Way ignored me walking on my hands in a bid to impress her at her sixth birthday party, so I just sat cross-legged in the corner of the bouncy castle and wept hot, salty tears into my Strawberry jelly and ice-cream. I was also six at the time, before you ask.

When did life get in the way of relationships? It can't have happened immediately upon leaving college/school/the dole queue. Every cancelled night out, every last minute text explaining your recently installed headache, every time you favour a night in front of the telly instead of a night nourishing the acquaintances that nourished you when you were growing up, unencumbered by dress-down Fridays and council tax bills - every time you choose convenience over friendship, you miss out.

Friends can inspire, infuriate and motivate you. You have to listen to your stupid head all day long. You have every opportunity to say what you think throughout the long computer days and TV-dinner nights, but you never have as good a chance to listen as when you are with like-minded individuals. Friends, to you and me.

So put down your pen, stop watching that sixty-fifth series of Grand Designs (you'll never afford it anyway) and go and see someone, talk to them, laugh with them, discuss the last series of Grand Designs with them, if you must. But most of all, please, let them mean something to you. Because, if last Saturday is indicative of the state of our friendships, you've already started meaning a little less to them.

Time Sates For No Man

2008-06-02T19:28:00.006+01:00

I have recently retired. Not retired in the post 65 year-old sense of the word; I've not already embarked on an ever decelerating cycle of Littlewoods catalogues, Werther's Original wrappers and calling my Grandson by his brother's/sister's/the dog's name. I mean I've left paid employment and shall soon be back to the gratification-free world of work experience.

It's a world of making tea, inputing data and trudging home after a week of what is essentially modern-day slavery (except without the overcrowded ships and Cat-o-nine tails,) devoid even of the satisfaction of opening your wallet and pulling out a crumpled tenner, before having it whipped out of your hand by a gelled barman.

However - and this will sound like stating the blindingly obvious - it's better than doing nothing. But, is doing nothing better than going to work?

I've been looking forward to finishing for the past few weeks, building up in my head rapturous images of walking into a sunset of unencumbered freedom, inflatable lylo in one hand and a strawberry daiquiri in the other.

Such thoughts of hedonism arose partly from my own MTV ravaged brain's inadequacy to conjure up anything more original than a sepiarised Hollywood replication of freedom, and partly from the the utter lack of alternative stimuli my office had to offer.

The monotony that simmers as your eyes sear ever hotter into your ancient computer screen arouses thoughts of something, anything else. You spend so long lumped behind your workstation that your silhouette becomes burned on the back of your chair.

Again, the colleague who insists on singing along to every track on the office jukebox, even the unattainably high noted sequences, helps precipitate a 'grass is always greener' mindset. Nervous looks are exchanged and eyebrows patronisingly raised, but no-one ever has the heart to tell him to keep his fat mouth closed and his prepubescent voice to himself. I found myself faced with the choice of silently imagining better times, or inducing a keyboard-throwing office holocaust.

This boredom is not unique to my erstwhile workplace - every office is, by definition, not a fun place to spend your days. You are there to work, not play naked Twister. People who say they enjoy their job are either lying or secretly employed as a roller coaster tester.

Going to a work essentially joyless. If you're lucky in the office, you'll either get a window out of which you can forlornly stare, or nab a monitor positioned so no-one can see what you're looking at. I had neither.

Since being handed a painting of a Spitfire and my P45, I've realised that free time can be just as uninspiring and, more worryingly, far more formless. This second point is particularly tender for me.

I have a genetic inability to do nothing all day. Like a lovingly treated petty criminal, I crave structure and (some forms of) discipline. Even when I'm as free as Sharon Stone's agent's diary, I find myself setting-up artificial time-limits.

My free time is represented by a conflict between that which I should do and that which I would love to do, but am afraid of how I'll hate myself if I do it. The paradox is that free time isn't free, there are still rules, still more dos and do nots than the list of guidelines given to you whenever you receive a lap dance. (Which is never, Mum.)

For example, you must get at least five items of fruit and veg, 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and less than four units of alcohol a day. That's fine. This is health advice and, however spurious and mollycoddling it may seem, it's probably a good idea to stick to it. You don't have to be happy about it though.

Then there are more abstract mantras that have become unwritten rules of free time. You shouldn't get up late, or you're a bum. You shouldn't sit on your unmotivated behind and play computer games all day. Or watch daytime television. Society's general consensus is fairly disparaging toward this kind of profligate behaviour. The body public looks down on sitting on your sofa in your pants eating last night's fried chicken. But this comes from a body that, overwhelmingly, has their time organised for them, by bosses with thick-framed glasses and questionable halitosis.

You go to work to earn money; you only earn money if you go to work. So you can't spend two hours a day reading the paper in the bath, or stay in bed till lunchtime, or even watch the entire second season of The Cosby Show back to back. It's easy not to do these things when circumstances make them impossible. It's much harder to not work, to empty your day of commitment and then attempt to fill it with productive activity.

To fill the arid days until my work experience begins again, I'll do some writing (a good thing, given that sitting at an office desk is akin to being slowly lobotomised; I feel I've lost much of my...er...*) and some exercise. I won't drink during the day, or on my own. Or in the shower. I will eat lots of fruit and vegetables. I will essentially live to a structured timetable, as if I were at work, somehow destroying the very notion of Adornoesque free time.

But. That's not to say I shan't be acting pretty damn naughtily at some points. For example, I'll definitely shower with the door open this morning. And I'll listen to music at a volume akin to a Christian rock concert, free from unwanted accompaniment from the singing workmate. I'll play computer games if I like and I won't feel guilty, not even when running over innocent pedestrians in GTA IV.

All such activities need to be rigorously timetabled however, to prevent the risk of me looking down on myself as a social subservient, like a self-loathing City banker on a cocaine hangover. I'll be lazy, gluttonous or downright unhygienic, but not for longer than I'm being 'productive'.

This structuralism/non-conformity is preferable to going to work; things are better when they're your choice: like voting, or sex. I never would, but it's comforting to know that I could drink milk out of the carton or beer before lunch and watch replays of Gladiators if the urge ever took me. Which it does. All day long.

*perspicacity, thanks dictionary.com.

The Knives Are Out

2008-05-27T10:40:00.002+01:00

Apparently the correct way to a) deal with a dispute or b) settle a score with an individual/the society that has betrayed you is to stab someone. With 29 teenagers murdered in London alone this year, the press is covering the alarming rise of knife crime with typical sensationalising alacrity.

Some have already argued that the media's graphic reports of such incidents will only perpetuate the problem; that the articles somehow become self-fulfilling prophecies. This is not the case. With such thorough coverage, the media is not instigating the cause but reacting to the effect of knife crime. Such reporting is both moral and desirable. The public has a right to know what is going on and to choose to interpret whether or not it affects them.

When it comes to knife crime, there are two things that need scrutinising. Why do young people feel compelled to use a weapon on another - often unknown - individual? And what can be done to stop them?

An article in the Independent interviews Camila Batmanghelidjh, who blames the spate of attacks on two factors. In a somewhat formulaic approach, she attests that, "social and emotional deprivation" + "the absence of a functioning parental figure"= inevitable crime.

Batmanghelidjh's initiative, Kids Company has opened, amongst others, a walk-in centre in Camberwell, where young, disaffected people can go and get an evening meal, shelter and varying degrees of psychotherapy. They are often victims of domestic violence and neglect. Although her intent may be laudable, the idea that these are the exact demographic who are killing fellow teenagers is not as axiomatic as Batmanghelidgh would like to think.

It is not always the case that a teenager who carries a knife is a victim of fragmented upbringing. And, since society is not always to blame for the woes of such individuals, it is not fair, nor even logical, that society has to feel their discontent.

People carry a knife for a number of reasons - protection, status, bravado. But they do not always do it because of an absent father or a drug-addicted mother.

Batmanghelidjh tells of such fear and defenselessness that the adoption of knives for many is the only option. But the attacks receiving such a frenzied media coverage are not acts of self-defence or (so far as we know) gang-related retribution. These are meaningless and erroneously challenged acts of cowardly violence. Youths who perpetrate such acts are bullies, often a result of being bullied themselves. Jimmy Mizen and Robert Knox stood up bravely to the bully, and they paid with their lives when other, less valiant individuals would have taken flight and survived.

Stabbings are a socially manifested result of the confidence and feeling of superiority that comes with carrying a weapon. Youths recognise they are beyond legal reproach (figures show that although 1,226 under-18s were arrested for possession in 2006, a meager 72 were arrested) and so they take this feeling of invincibility into other encounters. If they don't get what they feel they have a right to get, by virtue of being armed, they dispose of human life. This is not brave, this is not tragic, and it certainly not a result of social neglect. It is a result of a lack of disciplinary or pedagogical intervention with youths, or even a lack of individual motivation to accept such intervention.

If we can't generalise over the type of person who carries a knife, we can at least identify some possible reasons for such a widespread practice. Most young people are more inclined to carry a knife because, currently at least, the punishments for doing so do not amount to a sufficient deterrent.

Today's Guardian leader implies that knife carrying youths are "a monstrous by-product of mounting inequality". It is perfectly natural to feel revulsion and cowardice towards the individuals who have wronged you, but to equate those emotions with the wider public - and innocent bystanders - is hopelessly and needlessly wrong.

Listening to this, youths who stab lack structure, solace and solitude. Prison would give them that, but only if the government and their idiotic 'Children's Tsar' realise that stop and search, harder punitive measures and a zero-tolerance policy on carrying a weapon is not demonizing the guilty. It is preventing the innocent from victimhood.

The risk of causing offence should not come into the legislative opposition to knife crime. At an immediate legal level, carrying a knife should imply an intent to use it. Whilst it doesn't follow that if someone carries a knife they will inevitably use it, it is true that if they don't, they won't.

A government-funded report offers the earth-shattering insight that, "knife carrying can be a precursor to knife use in crime and is thus a matter for concern". Good. But then it goes on to deny the correlative link between carrying a knife and using one:

"knife carrying and knife use rarely result in stabbing".

The two are not mutually exclusive, and shouldn't be so in law. Murder charges are tough (some say) but to be caught carrying a knife and getting away with it only increases the likelihood of a knife being carried again, and then used.

But, as the Mayor is continually telling us, we need to tackle the causes of the problem, which surely means involvement and intervention much earlier in an individual's upbringing? Or at least an educational, community based initiative which extols the virtue of not taking a career in crime. It's foolish to deny that there are teenagers beaten, undernourished and abused in London. But it's also foolish to suggest that all of them turn to crime. It might help to show would be murderers that there are other routes of progression from a tough start in life.

In the sense of targeting causes, increased social and educational measures could be employed to inform youths that knives are not the inevitable consequence of any sort of toughness in early life, whether that be society's fault or not. A proactive - instead of a reactive - process of intervention would reverse the perception that society is always to blame and so should pay. It might be the case that society is doing enough to help youths, but too quietly and reactionarily.

I am not usually one to accept the intervention of the Government in personal lives. I'd argue you should be able to do more or less what you like, so long as nobody else is affected. It's selfish, but a ruling party cannot and should not aim to change a personality, only its social ramifications.

The Government is resisting pressure to be tougher on knife crime in a legal and absolutist sense. It doesn't sit well with calls from think tanks and charities who argue that these children who murder need love, not more negativity. Here arises a false dichotomy between preventative and reactionary discipline.

Were there powers to intervene much earlier in the downward spiral of an individual's development, it would be easier to wean them off the route of violence. In a similar way, if there were tougher powers to prevent the crime of carrying a weapon, we wouldn't need to worry ourselves with how we are going to punish or hope to prevent the murders they cause.

You can't expect every disaffected youth to be saved and turn away from crime. Nor can you sympathise with all knife-wielders as society's mistakes. Early governmental and social intervention might help ease the problem for future generations. In the immediate term, however, we need tougher action to prevent people carrying knives. If they don't carry one they can't use it, and then no-one gets murdered over a petty dispute. Now there's a novel idea.

War Of Words

2008-05-21T15:31:00.009+01:00

If you see me parading around my bedroom wearing an elaborately over sized pair of mirrored aviators, smoking a huge cigar and bedecked in camouflaged underwear, please don't be alarmed. This is merely my get-up for a new and noble campaign.

I hereby declare war on poor spelling, grammar and pronunciation. Such a triumvirate of enemies may seem insurmountable at a time when our brave, barrel-chested, lion-hearted armed forces are stretched to breaking point around the world. But I believe this is a just war, and a necessary one, especially considering how easy it is to win.

My opening skirmish is aimed at pronunciation. Pronunciation changes: from "Oh aye" in the North to "Ooh arr" in the South, people say things differently. Dialects are not just existent, they are desirable; their ingenuity perfectly exemplifies the malleability and adaptability of the Queen's English.

However, there are people out there who pronounce things wrongly, and I don't just mean the names of French wines on a Menu.

A friend of mine, who's surname is often party to a bit of mispronunciation, says 'Ya' instead of 'Yeah'. I know that 'yeah' is not a grammatically correct way of indicating the affirmative, but this little discrepancy, for me, may as well be a CIA torture technique. It makes him sound pretentious, something which he genuinely isn't. Whenever he does it - solely for the purpose of annoying me, I'm sure - I feel like punching him in the Adam's apple, before inviting him to repeat what he just said as he fights for his last wheezing breath.
My war's first operation could be some sort of real-time pronunciation penalisation system, wherein anybody who pronounces a word like a deaf Northern Irishman with a lisp is fined on the spot. Gordon Brown would be the first to empty his Murray Mint wrapper-lined pockets.

That man is impossibly bad at pronouncing words. During the last PMQs session, he insisted on pronouncing 'al Qaida' (or al Qaeda), 'al Keyada'. My reconnaissance suggests he does it deliberately; he not-so-subtly avoids sound bytes of him broaching salient topics by making up words, so he cannot be quoted as decisive. "Och nae," he could respond, "I said I didn't actually care about the 'poower', not the poor."

To add to Brown's idiosyncratic artillery, we have his pronunciations of 'Bournemouth' as 'Born Mouth', 'The Liberal Democrats' as 'The Lib'ral Partee', and 'Burma' as 'Mee-AN-mar'. At least Thatcher could still speak her way around that plum in her throat.

Next on the invasion and Clintonesque 'annihilation' list comes grammar. Poor grammar is extolled all around us. Round the corner is a greasy-spoon called 'Macs Cafe'. Who's? Assuming that it is, in fact, the property of Mac, (which I happen to know it is: he's Italian and can't be making a penny, but money laundering allegations will hardly reduce the price of my already-discounted bacon sandwiches) then surely an apostrophe should feature somewhere?

Rudimentary espionage work also points to a sign at Hammersmith Underground Station that reads: "Caution walk, don't run". That's not a sentence. The correlative link between two motional infinitives doesn't exist with the precursive 'caution', and so should not be clausally linked. It's an instruction, not an exercise in hypertaxis.
Misused apostrophes are the WMDs of the conflict - and they are spreading like anthrax. It seems that even Britain's greatest minds cannot get it right.

Finally, the battle over superfluity. People, myself included, say phrases laced with superfluity all the time. Example: is it necessary to say "any time soon," given that all it really means is "soon"? The 'any time' is as redundant as a Northern Rock Cashier.
As Charlie Sheen taught us in Hotshots, war can be funny. Similarly, the misuse of language need not always result in exasperation, as Lee and Herring masterfully demonstrate above.

During the long, dark nights of our final year at University, my roommate and I would eagerly anticipate the comic relief the latest issue of TCS would afford us - not for its woefully inane investigative journalism, but for Sarah Hope's column. She was a theatre 'critic', who simply could not speak English. I don't mean that in a Enoch Powell sense - she was English - but she still, at the age of 19, hadn't mastered even the rudiments of our language. Her mistakes were so numerous and her sentences so tautological that we would both end up in cramping fits of laughter, still in the dark as to what play she apparently sat through.

Her worst crime - one that made Slobodan Milosevic look like a Christian Aid worker - was her latent misuse of the word "literally". As in, "You could literally hear a pin drop," or "The audience literally exploded with laughter." The audience didn't explode. If they had, they may have created a a slightly more newsworthy article. They may have figuratively or metaphorically exploded, but not "literally". That's just silly.
There is no need for the word 'literally' to exist. You are either talking figuratively, - in which case its usage would be erroneous - or you are talking on the simple level of reality - in which case you don't need to say it at all; it's implied that you are talking on a literal level of occurrence, or else we'd all have to clarify after every sentence or observation that we weren't referring to a dream we had.

This might not be a grammar issue at all, but it is one which grates on me like a new pair of sandals.
As I put my feet up on my oak-panelled desk (before realising it's in fact a very uncomfortable way to sit) and sipped a victorious single-malt, reflecting on an effective campaign, I read an article drenched in liquid irony about the correct usage of the much marginalised semicolon.

Bombarding a writer for succumbing to the kind of carelessness he is vilifying isn't a productive route to take (I refer the reader to the several mistakes they will doubtless spot during the course of this post). Sgt Sam Roberts tried to act as a bastion of pedantry and meticulousness, barricading himself against lazy writing and signing. The fact that ended up being killed in a friendly fire incident is by the by.

I shall return to England, not doubt to public antipathy on the grounds that no-one voted for the war, and pin a medal made out of a busted Blue Peter badge upon my gushingly proud lapel. There are no winners in war but, if I have managed to make just one person get their hyphens in the right gaps, I'll consider myself a victor.

Appellation Contrôlée...

2008-05-19T15:53:00.008+01:00

The other day, I did that thing that everyone has done, but no one dare admit, for fear of being labeled narcissistic. I Googled myself.

That's not entirely fair - I Googled the name of my blog in order to stimulate its appearance on the landing pages. Although from an outsider's perspective, it might appear as some form of digital self-gratitude, this actually serves a purpose, but there's no way I'll convince anyone of that - just as explaining you were trying to kill a spider that has crawled into your pants is not an oft-accepted excuse for getting caught interfering with yourself.

But I did it. And I came across a plethora of similarly wittily-entitled blogs. I had thought that the terrible pun I chose to splash across my blog's header was a tad too obvious to be unique, rather like claiming to have invented the question mark.

I found several blogs with a shared title, including 'Canada's number one equine-themed politics blog'. Such a dubious honour must be tongue-in-cheek; it's like me calling mine 'The world's number one blog written by a 21 year old named Patrick Galey with a small, egg-shaped birthmark above his right hip.' Which it is. Hopefully.

There's also something to do with wine. Why would wine-drinking enthusiasts feel compelled to use this name? Is it just that, like me, they have commandeered a pleasant sounding but essentially meaningless piece of aural manipulation?

There's a minimalist and unsettlingly neurotic blog. But not neurotic in a charmingly befuddled sense. This is what a stalker would write, if their preferred medium wasn't a letter handwritten in blood.

And then there is this. I wont patronise by saying it's actually quite entertaining but, since this blogger is clearly an enemy diametrically challenging my autonomy as a writer with a frivolous title, I would like to invite conjecture on the grounds that he lures children into his gingerbread house.

Given that it is nigh on impossible to copyright a title, authors often change them (or have them changed by judicious editors,) is my fixation on appellation a bit strong? Could I continue to write with any form of enthusiasm if my blog was called something even more cringe worthy, say "Write Of Way", "Just A Blog In The Machine" or "Raining @s and Blogs"?

The fact that I chose the title pun as an act of self-scrutinising metonymy, meditating on the repetitive and over-proliferated nature of regurgitative blogging will no doubt count for little in this battlefield of bad names. (That was going to be my sub-title, but I considered it a little less catchy, even though it was guaranteed to be peerless). I also wouldn't dream of being such a pillock as to suggest I named my blog for any reason other than it was the first thing that came to mind.

I am now faced with the dilemma of keeping my blog's somewhat obvious title and running the risk of having it submerged in a sea of retarded punctuation and bad poetry, or bowing to the draw of individualism and changing it.

Maybe in the choking smog being created by millions of bloggers, convinced that a) their opinion matters and b) anyone actually reads it, I'll have to make do with maintaining the 'number one blog called 'Blogging A Dead Horse''. Written by me, that is.

Ad Nausuem

2008-05-13T22:16:00.008+01:00

"OK, so we start with a close-up of the gorilla playing the drums-"
"Sorry, er...what?"
"The gorilla. Didn't... did you not get the fax I sent? With the script. The advert script?"
"What? Was that the one scrawled on the back of a Cutter's Choice packet? What has a gorilla playing the drums-"
"Actually it's a man in a gorilla suit."
"Whatever. What does it have to do with chocolate?"
"It doesn't have to have anything to do with chocolate John."
"Yeah John."
"Stay out of this."
"Sorry."

It was George Orwell, with one of his less pleasant images, who said 'Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.' It's testament to Orwell's sardonic grasp that such a bristling medium be described with so much opacity, but the great man's cynicism overlooked the trick that advertising is 'a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.' Thanks to the splendidly named Northrop Frye for that one.

Adverts either show you how you want to be, or how you could be with the advertised brand or service. They tell you you are intelligent and deserve to be entertained; cleverly cajoled into wanting merchandise. They must never assume to know more than you, like a precocious child, but appear as the friend who always bats off the ladies with his rippling, Tag-clad forearms: better than you, but not unattainably so.

There have always been good and bad adverts. What amazes me is how some companies can, in the quest for that perfect sales-pitch, produce adverts of such woeful inconsistency.

Cadbury, chocolate sellers since 1905, have an annual turnover the size of Chad and should be able to produce effective and (ideally) entertaining ads. And it has, on occasion. Indeed their drumming gorilla caused quite a stir (as it should; it's produced by Fallon Worldwide, the company behind the Sony Balls). It's even come up with its own in house advertising company, as if it's the paragon of innovative branding.

This comes from the same company that led a friend (not unaccompanied by a large percentage of Britain) to totally boycott Cadbury's chocolate in protest of the raging shitfest that was the 'Your Happiness Loves Cadbury' series. Such discrepancy shows how mercurial an art advertising is. One moment you're a genius for identifying a need the consumer didn't know they had with an image they would never have thought of, the next, you're singlehandedly boosting the national circulation of Mars Bars. The latest reel to be effortlessly tossed on Cadbury's 'miss' project pile should remind itself that it is selling a chocolate bar, not a cure for cancer.

It's true that strong bands can withstand bad ads. 'Why can't all the good things in life come without down sides? Like girlfriends, without the four-year plan. Or like bras, without the fumbling.' Or, indeed, like adverts, without typecasting the entire male demographic as skinny twenty something lads with straightened hair. The question is why they bother. If a product is good enough, or the brand sufficiently recognisable, there is little point in rehashing a trite and tenuous ad campaign.

There are some things that you never see advertised. Imagine a celebrity endorsed advert for pencils. It would be the worst advert since this pigswill. No one advertises apples, or ceilings. Tetrapak, the chairman of whom is the richest man in Britain, rarely need to force innovation in advertising. And they seem to be doing pretty well.

The hypocrisy of adverts can sometimes be arresting. As I write, a hook-nosed Gabby Logan is marauding a trolley down a Morrison's reduced to clear aisle, telling me how much she loves fending off tracksuited single mums during her weekly shop. Gabby Logan doesn't shop at Morrisons, nor do people who find the rugby-player felater palatable. Not even her servant shops in that dive. Equally, when pressed, executives do have a habit of producing (or plagiarising) toss.

The Peugeot 206 claims to be 'inspired by nature'. A car. Inspired by nature. In the same way that China's CO2 emissions are inspired by nature.

Adverts are getting more cinematic; more expensive. But they are not getting uniformly better. With increased budgets, one would hope to see increasingly effective ideas at work. One consistently brilliant company is Guinness, who must have a human-ideas juicing section to their factory on St Jame's Gate - disposing of young and promising media execs who have been lobotomized by Guinness' 'inspiration pump' in the murky green water of the Liffey.

The old 'ad'age that people don't buy a drill for the drill, but for the hole it creates should be born in mind when coming up with adverts. It would be nice to see a bit more parity between the product advertised and its advert's content. It would also be nice to never have to see Michael Winner on television again. But, you know what those ad executives say. Sex sells.

Something God Only Knows...

2008-05-09T17:32:00.004+01:00

Yesterday, the world's most Irishly named man, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, did a Rowan Williams and got his foot lodged clumsily in his mouth. Defending atheists (as if they are so beleaguered in this increasingly secular society) Mr Leprechaun O'Potato didn't stop short of having a very thinly-veiled dig.

In full-on patronising mode, O'Guinness outrageously claimed that atheism is just a "distorted kind of Christianity." In the same as Zoroastrians, who believe that when you die your soul is carried heavenward by scavenging birds, are really kind of Christians - they just don't know it.

Why do atheists need defending when there has been a 40% decline in the number of churchgoers within a generation? Surely it is Christians who need to defend their beliefs in a society increasingly adverse to outward displays of religiosity?

Graciously accepting your counterparts may well come across as inclusive and open-minded. In actual fact, the attempt by O'Fields of Athenry to show that he understands these godless masses only serves to show how woefully out of touch he is with society's spiritual health. Atheists are not really Christians, they have taken an informed (and invariably logical) decision to shun the belief in the existence of a higher being.

27% of people living in England (and Ireland) today are comfortable enough with these little, insignificant religious spasms to define themselves as Catholics. Cardinal Baileys is in a minority and, as such, doesn't get to speak on society's behalf any more.

O'Shergar has not only displayed a staggering amount of arrogance in his presumption that Catholicism is the only correct way of leading a spiritual life, he has also defeated his very argument that society needs to be more universally accepting of religion. You can't say, "We should all be free to express our beliefs," and then follow it up with, "As long as those beliefs match my own." You can't have your potato cake and eat it.

Something Bad Has Happened: Help Us!

2008-05-08T14:46:00.002+01:00

Many Westerners awoke on Sunday to hear the news that Cyclone Nargis was threatening to empty their pockets of small change. The storm devastated villages across Burma's south coast and, at the time of writing, estimates of 100,000 dead are not being dismissed.

It put me in mind of Boxing Day 2004 when, like a lecherous uncle, a tsunami came over and ruined everyone's Christmas. This was followed in the space of a few months by George Bush's bothersome Hurricane Katrina (which I take to have had the best celebrity endorsement, thanks Kanye West) and the Kashmir Earthquake.

It seemed, for a few, desperate and increasingly foreboding weeks that the earth was about to implode in on itself.

But, thankfully, the four horsemen never materialised, we were not struck like stone by the sounding of the rapture and beleaguered office underlings didn't call up their arrogant bosses and tell them exactly where they can shove their filing jobs.

What did happen was a lot less spectacular. Aid agencies and charities applied delicate pressure on the public to give generously to those unfortunate souls caught in a natural disaster. These were victims not of human error or conflict, but of something that could only be put down to divine providence. These disasters could happen virtually anywhere in the world; it is a cruel irony that they normally seem to occur where inhabitants are already struggling to get by. Or, rather, these are the ones that dominate the pages of Western newspapers.

As I awoke to the news of the Cyclone, I couldn't help guessing how long it would be before I'd be asked to help.

Within hours the appeals were rolling in, telling us how bad we'd feel if we didn't send a nominal amount of aid ("for just 1p a year, you could stop this litter of babies from being eaten by their mother", that sort of thing.) I am not averse to giving to charitable causes, but charities have become rather presumptuous of late.

Firstly, we help already. European and American leaders have pledged to give between $4 and $10million of immediate aid to the victims in Burma. Where does that come from? Why us, of course. And we don't have a choice; taxation sees this process occur completely separate from individual motivation.

Secondly, people in the UK and other developed countries are beginning to feel the pinch, what with rising fuel/food/Heat! subscription costs. Research has proved that, as people find themselves with less disposable income, they begin to forget about charity. "I know there are people dying of thirst in Sudan, but I've just had to pay £1.68 for little Gregory's organic yoghurt," middle-class Mums can be heard pontificating at the checkout of their local Waitrose. "We've all got problems," they invariably add.

Thirdly, if people do give to charity, they usually like to see where their money is being spent, or they may as well throw their piggy bank into the local canal. Apparently, Donkey sanctuaries are receiving more money than many supporting abused women - much to the concern of many obtuse philanthropists. It's not that we wouldn't rather help a woman than a donkey, it's just that we would rather receive press-release emails of fluffy animals than healing black-eyes.

Charity is an essentially selfish pursuit. Yes, you are helping people (or donkeys) less fortunate than yourself, but your doing so makes you feel better. Go on. Admit it. To misquote Matt Le Blanc, "There's no such thing as a selfless good deed". We don't actually want to make a difference: if we did, we might do a little more than occasionally delving begrudgingly into our pockets and pulling out a crumpled fiver to assuage a street-stalking volunteer with green hair and a pierced lip. We'd do some research. We might volunteer to work for a charity, or even go there and get stuck into the problems ourselves.

But we don't care that much. Just so long as we can go home, complete with fully-laden shopping bags and know that we've given (not too) generously to those poor, starving, desperately ill donkeys- sorry, humans - we are able to derive smug pleasure from charity.

The final and most obvious problem with charities and their campaigns to stop us being such bilious, self-obsessive consumerist slugs ("just 2p will ensure that little Michael will grow up to be the chairman of a successful, multi-national manufacturing conglomerate. Otherwise, he will be raped.") and that's competition. If we donated to every charity who had a witty or affecting billboard campaign, we would very quickly be in need of aid ourselves. Natural disasters occur, crops fail, earthquakes happen and domestic violence abounds. As a giver to charity, you need to be able to prioritise.

This is no different to the way that charities and newspapers tend to prioritise various causes and not others. A cyclone in poor Burma is more newsworthy than the recent earthquake in affluent Japan. Columnists have been plumping the concept of overlooking politics in the name of a humanitarian effort, but what hope have they - or anyone else who doesn't happen to have the surname Militarycommanderofburma, for that matter - of getting through where it matters? Such comments are no doubt well-intentioned, but it is not the democratic and English speaking West who need to listen, it is Burma's own Junta. They listen about as well as a deaf pensioner wearing noise-canceling headphones.

Equally, governments will jump upon the chance to give to the Burmese authorities, as there is something in it for them. With Burma's autocratic rulers refusing to budge and overcome personal grudges to accept badly needed aid, Western governments can appear magnanimous whilst promoting their brand of democratic administration.

Not giving to charity doesn't make you a bad person, but this is what charities will make you like as they yank on your heartstrings like a kite in a storm. Neither does giving to charity make you any more of a good person. But, by God, you'll feel better.

So go and give that tramp round the corner some money just for sitting there. 50p should be just about enough to set him up in a basically-paid office job and see him work his way off the streets.

The first supplies of UN food aid are only now beginning to trickle through to Rangoon, five whole days after the disaster. That is not the kind of instant satisfaction I'm after from a charity. I'm off to save some donkeys.

Some Things Are Hard To Find...

2008-05-06T11:30:00.003+01:00

Bank holiday weekends normally follow a familiar pattern. They consist of an alcohol tinged cycle of replacement bus services, eight-hour marathon lunches with the in laws and unwittingly getting sunburnt. Their sole purpose - certainly for those unfortunate enough to inhabit that formless and unforgiving world of work - is to diminish the working week by 20%. For many, myself included, the best part of the Bank Holiday is going into work on Tuesday having already completed the worst day of the week.

This May Day however, I decided to throw caution and boredom to the wind in search of the best England's fecund rurality had to offer. Accompanied by my skeptical but ever-enthusiastic girlfriend, I trundled off to the Cambridgeshire village of Stilton to indulge in the perfectly idiosyncratic May Day tradition of cheese rolling. This basically involves some inebriated locals dressing up and embarrassing their children by competitively hurling replica Stilton's down a shallow slope. A simple premise, and one which was sure to reinforce the futility of doing anything whatsoever of consequence on a Bank Holiday.

The day was bright blue, the sun keenly getting back to work after its recent six-month sabbatical. We arrived at the village through a maze of incandescent yellow rapeseed fields and sinewy country paths, and were greeted by several excited residents, skins faded and bloated to resemble a family of boiled eggs, waddling to the centre of town where the frivolities were being nonchalantly set in motion.

The event itself was underwhelming; the highlight undoubtedly being the winning team of pock-marked teenagers, apparently in some sort of band. They were the kind of youths who are too big for their frames, and so are always awkwardly stooping, lanky arms stuffed in pockets like Rodney Trotter. In the ultimate competition of uncool, these beanpoles received some serious credibility damaging press as their prize of a whole Stilton cheese was drawlingly presented amid villagers' guttural cheers by a midget named Warwick.

Interspersed with some ferret-racing, maypole-dancing and general country knee-slapping, the festival for me represented a quintessential English fixation with tradition. Although the event itself is now redundant as a spectacle, it is the adherence to custom that brings people out into the glaring sunshine and draws them together as a hastily composed community.

Such a percievably anachronistic practice is bound to attract two kinds of reaction from city-dwellers. The first - and least condescending - is the view that such behavior from rural England is quaint, if not a little stagnant in terms of an event.

The second - and I would venture that many people secretly hold this point of view - sees such behaviour as a backwards, even toffish celebration of prosperous country folk; the villagers are so smugly content with a life free from hardship and fractiousness that they have the time to dick about with dairy products.

This goes hand in hand with the assumption that city life, due to its inherent industrial, technological and infrastructural proficiency, is slicker, quicker and hence more enlightened than the slow-paced countryside. Outgoing Mayor Ken Livingstone would periodically extol London's enviable 'multiculturalism', like an intermittent bout of populist wind. In London, where knife crime is soaring and different ethnic groups are becoming increasingly secularised, there seems to be little of the communal cohesion that any politician worth his salt will claim to believe in.

That is not to say that the villagers of Stilton finished the day's celebrations by holding hand and dancing peacefully round a campfire. There were still various and conflicting demographics at work and, in the balmy afternoon air awaft with hot dog smoke and candyfloss vapour, these seemed to concentrate to form a caricature of society. From my vantage point at the corner of the coconut shy, I could see single mothers struggling to shield their overweight babies from the sear of natural light. There were teenage pregnancies being paraded around with all the selfish abandon of a toddler giving her doll a haircut. There were binge-drinking and (shock and indeed horror) drug-taking teenagers dressed in their gravy stained tracksuits, causing trouble and giving some elderly residents light verbal intimidation. These crystallised fragments of society were all coexisting, but not in the Utopian sense of feeding one another grapes. They caused friction and argued, but made up without any aggression. There just wasn't any point in ruining a perfectly innocuous day. They lived together on an exceptional day, and they would have to live together in the quotidian ones that were to follow.

Villages and towns have identity, and it is an identity that their inhabitants can largely relate to. You are either born in or chose to move to a town or village, normally in search of a better quality of life. Few people who live in London originally come from London, and this, coupled with the poorly integrated native and immigrant populations make it difficult to see the capital as any one's spiritual home. What's more, those in power seem intent on pushing this panacea of multiculturalism to the annihilation of any sense of locality. If London represents the world - as it apparently should do - then where in the world do you come from? Community spirit is not sufficient motivation to get on with one another; there are enough other people around who you don't know, don't want to know, so why should you make an effort to get to know?

May Day celebrations such as in Stilton attest that, rurally at least, a great deal of national pride abounds alongside a sense of social cohesion. All classes, races and ages were in the village centre that day, no doubt the type of integration that many ministers claim to strive towards on a daily basis.

I fully realise that it is neither helpful or practical to compare a village with the country's most populous city, but part of the problem with London's divisiveness comes from it's own snobbishness and self importance. It is the biggest, arguably the best and that all too often precipitates its inhabitants into carrying with them a sense of superiority over their neighbour. Rather than sharing any common ground, Londoners prefer to keep it to themselves.

Stilton wasn't being backwards for rolling its eponymous produce. It was being progressive on a day of social inclusiveness and cohesion. London could do well from adopting the village's mentality of a sense of belonging - the fact that you have something in common with your neighbour, not through a shared skin colour, class or age, but simply by merit of them being your neighbour. They need to recognise that provincialism isn't parochialism.

With a full and happy weekend behind me I wearily boarded by replacement bus service back to the capital. As I alighted and set off down Blackstock Road to my house, I nearly inadvertently picked a fight with two separate men - just by looking at them. How foolish of me. How progressive and informed it is to insight rage through not looking sheepishly at the ground in response to a display of male brutishness. As I drudged home through the city of aggressive strangers, I missed the country, where I could look people in the eye without getting punched. How backward can you get?

Something Not Worth Thinking About...

2008-05-02T09:38:00.002+01:00

Forget Brown vs. Cameron, Red Ken vs. Snooty Lord Boris or even Obama vs. Hilary. May's real, almighty, life-altering tussle is between Leicester City and Southampton.

Both former Premier League clubs have fallen messily from grace and are teetering on the edge of oblivion, faced with relegation to League One and joining the ranks of fallen angels such as Leeds United and Nottingham Forest.

Southampton play Sheffield United at Home on Saturday, whereas Leicester take the bumpy, pottery-strewn A50 up to promotion candidates Stoke City. Should Southampton beat the Blades, Leicester could be faced with having to beat Stoke in order to send their newly-forged south coast rivals flailing toward eternal hellfire.

As a lifelong Leicester fan, I have endured my fair share of dizzying highs, terrifying lows and creamy in-betweens. I remember the heady days of Martin O'Neil, when we won the Milk/Worthington/Carling/League/Littler Cup not once, but twice at Wembley. I remember when giants such as Gerry Taggart and housewife's favourite Ian Walker stalked the earth. I remember when we were all but guaranteed a scrappy goal courtesy of players' wife-bothering Steve Walsh's hoofed clearance, a knock down header from 'heeeerrrrrrm' Ian Marshall and a well placed shin from workmanlike Steve 'Stevie' Claridge.

But those days are gone, possibly forever. I also remember the train-wreck that was Peter Taylor administration. I remember the time he set off on the over-night ferry to Nigeria in a van containing five-million pound coins and returned two days later with a scared-looking sprinter named Adi Akinbiyi. I remember when attempts to teach this plucky runner the rudiments of football failed spectacularly resulting in Leicester's elimination from the top tier.

I have long forsaken the pursuit of deriving any pleasure form supporting Leicester. I don't live there anymore and don't have the money (nor inclination) to clamber aboard a train to watch City lose every Saturday. Whenever I mistakenly tune into Final Score, only to see Leicester have pulled off another scrappy victory, I am not happy; Leicester should win away at Scunthorpe, but they shouldn't even be in the bloody division. To hear our manager, Ian 'Honest Ollie' Holloway spout in his West Country drawl how proud/heart-broken he is - the script alternates week on week - would be unspeakably depressing were I now not so perfectly apathetic to the fate of the club. Trust me, it's easier this way.

Play-Doh faced presenter Adrian Chiles, in his book We Don't Know What We're Doing, claims "It's not the fear, but the hope that destroys you." I have long since lost hope that Leicester can play a part in bringing joy to my life.

I have to say, living with two Manchester United fans doesn't help. My sister (born Leicester, raised Leicester) and her boyfriend (born Sydney, raised Wycombe) are forever donning their unmuddied red jerseys before settling down in front of a match and waiting to be entertained. Their idea of a bad season is one in which they just sneak the double on goal difference after having to penalties awarded against them in consecutive months. They cannot lose.

When Chelsea deservedly beat the Red Devils last weekend, Man Utd players fought with ground staff, fabricated racist provocations and kicked an innocent stewardess, leaving her with what is, on all accounts, a rather nasty bruise. It is no doubt to this bloody-minded allergy to losing that has got brandy-stained Alex and his merry band of millionaires so far in footballing terms. As respectable and graceful individuals, however, they lack humility like a best-in-show Toy Poodle.

My sole, insufficient and irksomely petty consolation is that, in the cosmically unlikely event that Leicester kick, claw and knee their way to victory at Stoke, they will send Southampton down.

I spent two years of my University life living with an avid Saints fan. We always used our mutual disappointment to comfort each other; together we were fans who, although consistently deflated, still harbored delusions that our clubs would claw back the bastions of defensive mundaness they once were. We convinced ourselves incessantly that our clubs were too good to be in the Championship.

Fissured by graduation and various commitments, our friendship is still haunted by the concept that this weekend, one of our clubs will prove too bad to play in the Championship.

So it comes down to the Stoke game, especially televised by Ruthless Rupert on Sky Sports in order to maximize potential grief. If Leicester win, and Southampton are relegated, I shall magnanimously call my friend and offer him the chance to switch his allegiance (and encyclopedic early-nineties team sheet knowledge) to the foxes. He will refuse, of course, but then proceed to get misty-eyed about how good Matt Le Tissier once was.

If however, the footballing gods fail to delivery favour upon Leicester and the racing certainty of our relegation is confirmed, I shall not gurn. I shall not throw myself to the floor and curse the day that Milan Mandaric ever considered hiring an Bristolian as manager who he thought was honest by virtue of his open and slightly sardonic accent. I probably won't even care.

Some things Never Change...

2008-04-28T13:41:00.004+01:00

This weekend saw 50,000 (definitely non-fascist) music lovers descend upon Victoria Park as part of the Thirtieth anniversary of 'Rock Against Racism', the festival that united disparate social groups and raised awareness of racism through the medium of rock music. And I am trying very hard not to be totally cynical about its re-enactment.

1978 Britain was quite a lot different from how it is now. I have no way of knowing this authoritatively; when those rock giants such as The Specials and The Clash were sultrily stalking the stage I was no more than a glint in my father's eye. But I can imagine that race was a thorny issue, or else to 'rock against' it would have been slightly superfluous.

I am not naive or idealistic enough to claim that race is no longer an issue in Britain. People are still discriminated against for the colour of their skin or for their religious beliefs. This practice is both ignorant and abhorrent. But we have come a long way since 1978.

30 years ago racial tensions were far less civilized than today. Discrimination was institutionalized - if not openly admitted - and many facets of society routinely gave people different to themselves an unnecessarily hard time. 'Rock Against Racism' was a festival that sought to raise the point that racism was idiotic, and that just because it was commonplace, it needn't have been excusable.

The less catchily-titled 'Love Music, Hate Racism' festival last weekend seemed to me to be an overly nostalgic harking back to the seventies, when music was seen as a vehicle for ideological change. The world has moved on, The Clash's Paul Simonon has fewer hairs and people are infinitely more accepting and predisposed to social integration 'than back in the day'. Music's role in popular culture has also altered.

Philanthropist and musical visionary Damon Albarn argued that the concert proved music was "still a very cohesive force" in the fight against racism. But what is he hoping to achieve by reminding us what music once achieved? It seems a very backward route for progress.

Racism has altered from being a frowned upon social practice to being simply unacceptable. Any new attempt to root it out will not change the fact that there are always going to be pockets of society who are racist. If these idiotic minority will not change their mind in the face of common decency, social pressure or legal legislation, they are unlikely to alter their warped ways after listening to rock music.

You cannot seek to change indoctrinated and socially chastised individuals through popular culture. Racist individuals are subversive and, in adopting a position so at odds with social acceptability, make it clear that they don't care what people say publicly - indeed, they seek to contradict it.

Yet this doesn't stop moral paragons such as actors and musicians from attempting to change people's minds, from trying to save poor, unpopular people from their own sensibilities. Why not 'Rock Against Rape'? Or any number of social evils?

Like Ricky Gervais' pinpoint remark at Live8 a few summers ago, you can't make racism 'history'. It will always exist, just as poverty will. That is not to say that we shouldn't continue to fight against it. It's just that wheeling out some more hackneyed, self-aggrandising musician to re-enact a concert that made the headlines in the past is a fairly unoriginal way of doing it.

This new concert has succeeded only in reminding us that racism is still an unnecessary evil. In the same way that murder is. No one is under any impression that racism in not a very bad thing, even those people who perpetrate it. Events like this will not shake a racist's long-held beliefs.

By it's very nature, the concert would have attracted non-racist individuals, who support the idea of anti-fascism. It will not have reached any of the people whose ideas need altering. "Don't be racist guys." "Yeah, we know". It's just not a revolutionary discourse.

This back-slapping performance of social inclusiveness may have been spectacular, but trying to change oppositional views by inviting along a load of supporters is futile.

Perhaps we would do better to accept that there will always be a thankfully small minority who harbour racist views, and no regurgitation of punk's greatest hits can change that. But that wouldn't sell as many albums, would it?

Something Saintly...

2008-04-23T12:04:00.003+01:00

What's more English than a Turkish Knight and a fire-breathing, flying lizard? St. George, that paragon on English feistiness, is also the Patron Saint of countries such as Canada, Montenegro, Palestine, Portugal, Russia and Serbia. Yet the dragon slayer still stands as a catalyst for expressing quintessential Englishness.

For the first time ever, under instruction from a Scot as dour as an Oatcake, the St. George's Cross will today fly alongside the Union Jack at Number 10 and other parliamentary buildings.

Pubs are said to be going crazy for the celebrations of St. George, and the cynics have been out in force, berating the efforts as commercial pursuits as they languidly sip their pineapple juice. Apparently, sales of 'St. George's Day packs' - whatever they are - have risen 50% on last year and, for the first time ever, are outselling St. Patrick's Day packs. So put away your novelty sized inflatable Guiness glass - it wasn't funny on March 17th.

Of course pubs see it as a commercial opportunity; the smoking ban has taken its toll, ol' eyebrows has already whacked four pence on the price of a pint and there shall be no rush to the bar when Euro 2008 kicks off without the lion-hearted, barrell-chested England team. They need to recoup their losses somewhere down the line.

But this initiave needn't be exclusive to patriotism. The fact that you're going to make a profit from other people's onece-a-year national pride doesn't make you any less of a patriot - it makes you a businessman.

Some bosses have answered unofficial calls to make St. George's Day a national holiday, giving their beleaguered work forces a chance to forget their sorrows for one day, and then sit unproductively remembering them the next.

The whole new and seemingly more zealous approach to St. George's Day is, to me, indicative of the attempt to force national pride into the public's consciousness. Just as, miraculously, everyone has an Irish cousin on St. Paddy's night, so people will go out today and be extra specially English. They will lose at cricket. They will wait patiently, but not happily, for a train. They will ride on horseback into battle with the uncivilised Scots over the wall. Well, maybe not that one.

I have a slight contention with Brian Patten - who was commissioned by English Heritage to write a St George's Day poem - who asserted that, "There is no country more beautiful than England in April". He obviously didn't get the steamed-up 73 bus to work this morning.

Whether or not this token Englishness is a sentiment felt sufficiently strongly to necessitate the writing of a poem (a medium which the OED describes as a piece of structured writing "to express an intensely imaginative interpretation of the subject,") is a debate for another time. What it does show is that we are incapable of spontaneously taking pride in Englishness.

English Heritage has produced a booklet advising people how to celebrate St. George's Day. We've already covered how to be cynical about the whole, corporately orchestrated day. We know how to go out and get foolishly drunk in the name of a country, we do that every St. Patrick's Day. Pray, what other ways are there to celebrate, O most English trust?

The advent of the European Union has apparently residually damaged the notion of Englishness, and people, sniff, are becoming less comfortable with the fact they were born, unrequested in between Berwick-Upon-Tweed and the English Channel. Furthermore, perpetuated by the misappropriation of English sympathy by the horrid BNP, the image of the English patriot is less an Edwardian fop than a Northern skinhead.

The idea of a 'national identity' commonly felt across such a varied and changable demographic is ludicrous. If you are proud of your roots - which anyone without the surname 'Hitler' usually is - then you should hold their values close to you in everday life. These will form what type of person you are naturally and ancestrally. There is, however, no need to go and proclaim them to everyone who didn't ask.

Spouting yobbishly, "Yeah, I'm English and bloody proud mate. We won the war," isn't being English, it's being a cock. Any number of migrants, who may well consider themselves English but whose heritage comes from elsewhere can be just as party to a sense of belonging to a country. This is really where pride in a nation comes from.

What is great, and what should be celebrated about England can be seen and experienced on the other 364 days there are a year. While the motivation behind the big St. George's day push, and the Government's encouragement of national identity is admirable in that it essentially gets us to act with greater respect and social tolerance, it shouldn't force the issue.

If you are proud of being English, then great, but be proud everyday and put up with this country's numerous shortcomings in the English style of grinning and bearing it. England isn't as great as it seems on St. George's day, but if this token day helps us to remember what is good about it, then let's all have a drink for the Turkish knight who made his fortune selling bacon. Let's drink to St. George!

Something In The Air...

2008-04-22T17:48:00.002+01:00

"In Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." Not my words, but those of the confusingly named Alfred Lord Tennyson. (That's like being called Margaret Baroness Thatcher or Patrick Mister Galey; my middle name is Richard). But I digress.

Every day, I walk to Manor House tube, bracing myself against the chilling wind, cursing silently to myself as to when this neverending Winter shall cease. Last week saw the start of the County Cricket season coincide with snow-showers - an indication that the wintry weather is really milking it. It's late April for goodness sake.

I know it's so British to moan about the weather, and I have decried enough climatic cliches in previous posts, but it's something that's so fundamentally affecting to all of us. Tennyson's pathetic fallacy is grounded in essential truth.

What comfort to the soul it was therefore, to walk out of the house today and be greeted by a pleasantly temperate breeze. Admittedly it smelt of exhaust fumes and burnt rubber, but it was nice all the same. If you spend anytime at all outside, you'll know that it's far less of an arduous pursuit if the weather is nice.

Equally, if you spend a lot of time cooped up inside, it's uplifting to know that there is infinite space into which you can burst at the end of the day - liberated, exultant and warm.

Somehow Spring air has a different smell to it. Be it pollen particles, or the odor of cut grass and cigarette smoke, the atmosphere palpably changes during the transition to Summer. Tennyson may have had the right sentiment in "Locksley Hall", but he was rather vague in his execution.

In Spring, a young man's fancy may take a Romantic turn, but it is not necessarily channeled into thoughts of love. You approach life with a renewed vigour, a hope in the promise of long forgotten experiences - late nights in the park, al fresco drinking and sunny afternoon walks.

Your attention turns from rushing indoors and barricading the locks to getting outside and seeing the world, reminding yourself that you're not the only one who has, over the darker months, gradually turned a shade of pale grey.

My fancy is never far from thoughts of love. This Spring, it shall lightly turn to thoughts of a lovely tan.

Something's Gotta Give...

2008-04-21T22:21:00.002+01:00

Oxford Street is like a clogged artery in London's already strained circulatory system. I've recently been doing some writing for a popular men's magazine, the offices of which are situated just off the capital's consumerist centre. With the affluence of Fitzrovia to the North and Soho's achingly cool underbelly to the South, it should be the ultimate location for a young man. But I cannot stand it.

Every time I alight my commute, I am greeted by a seething wall of flaring nostrils, obtrusive backpacks and squawking shoppers. Walking 2oo metres takes a good five minutes; on a clear street I could make the distance walking on my hands in that time. No matter how relaxed I feel before, I am always a bulldozing maniac after I get to Oxford street.

It's not just the volume of people that feels oppressive, it's the fact that nearly every one of them doesn't look where they are going. The Oxford Street shopper is too busy gazing, dewy-eyed at window displays in Topshop to notice another dogged human being careering toward them. There are those (and, sorry, but they are nearly always women) who flit their gaze from one peripheral distraction to the next with utter disregard to the oncoming problem that is me in a pushy mood. I have taken to standing still, like a furious statue, in front of these folk, until they literally walk into me. So amazed, so taken aback are they that there is another form blocking their air headed meander, that they apologise profusely, before floating their glazed optics upward to shopping heaven once more.

The pedestrian on Oxford Street may be infuriating, but they are merely the cross-eyed figurehead of a city that is fundamentally overpopulated.

As of last year, London is home to an estimated 7.5 million souls. That makes it the most populous city in the European Union. There are too many people who live in, visit or commute to London.

I am not about to take a leaf out of everyone's favourite social commentator, Morrisey's book, and be misquoted as saying there are too many foreigners in London. I grew up in rural Leicestershire, so I can hardly call myself a Londoner born and bred. What I am saying is that London's infrastructure is essentially the same as it was in post-war Britain, when large chunks of the capital were rebuilt in the destructive wake of the Blitz.

London's population at that time was actually larger than it is now, but far less clustered. London today, in the shadow of the City's profligate spending, is characterized by an increasingly large gulf between where people can afford to live and where they choose to spend their time. Londoner's gravitate towards certain areas just as much as tourists to, and Oxford Street is one of those areas.

What's to be done? Oxford Street is already closed to all traffic but taxis and buses (and the odd, anachronistic rickshaw,) yet the place is still packed. Perhaps we could implement a similar restrictiveness on people. If you are too large to occupy the surface area of an average human, or too inattentive to avoid the oncoming public, you cannot walk along Oxford Street. Maybe department stores could confuse shoppers by, after enticing gullible consumers in with bright flashing lights and shiny materials, siphoning them off into a different area of London. Provided their goldfish attention span was indulged with garish SALE signs, they wouldn't even notice.

This would clear the way for those grumpy sods, such as myself, who use the pavement as a medium for promenaded transport from one place to another, to actually walk somewhere without pushing overweight bargain hunters under the wheels of a bendy bus.

If Oxford street keeps burgeoning under the strain of too many people, something will snap. And I'm worried it might be my a vein somewhere in my temple.

Something I've forgotten...

2008-04-11T14:51:00.003+01:00

Wallet? Check. Phone? Check. Oyster card? Check. Off I maraud into the great big toy box of the world.

What more do you need to explore the turbulent city than a sensible pair of trainers and a sense of adventure? Oh, yeah: you need your keys.

My weekly meet with two friends was smattered with conjecture on what goes through your head when you forget your keys. Do you assume it will be as easy to get into your deadlocked and retina-scanning door as it was to get out? Do you, not content with the initiative test of the commute to work, plan on an elaborate break-in, using nothing more than a paper clip and a Tesco clubcard? Are you trying to irk your gassy flatmate into moving out?

What goes through your head? The answer is as curt as it is problematic: nothing.

Taking your belongings with you is a mechanical response, so practiced and repeated that it becomes deeply embedded in the subconscious. You don't need to think about it, your body ensures it gets done. It's easier to leave the house without wearing trousers, as you need to activate and direct your conscious in order to clad your milk-white thighs.

It isn't your fault if you don't remember to bring your keys. In quotidian reality, no one remembers; the manual action of picking them up is somnolent.

All this, of course, comes as little comfort when you've forgotten the blasted things.

I had just finished laughing at friend A's tale of how his parents refused to let him in the house after he had left his keys in a different pair of jeans, when friend B's usual mouldy yoghurt complexion dipped another shade. He had left his keys in his house.

(Mildly pedantic aside: when people say "Balls, I've forgotten my keys," they haven't. They've remembered them. They probably forgot them several hours ago.)

"How can you forget your keys?" I cried in indignation. He cried in humiliation.

The fact that twenty minutes later he was back, up one set of keys but down a window and any hope of a cordial relationship with Mrs Atkinson from flat 4, was of little consequence to me.

But yesterday, amid celebratory drinks, it happened.

I remembered my keys. They were in my bag, snugly locked inside my office.

It's never the inconvenience that gets to me (as it does the neighbours,) it's the sheer confidence-shattering embarrassment of how perfectly vacant my head can be.

If my body neglected to shift my hairy, floor-scraping knuckles into my bag to forage for my keys, what else am I not doing? Do I ever forget to breath? Drink water?

The one quantum of insufficient solace comes in my friends proving I am not alone in these helium-headed moments. It must happen to everyone at some low and humiliating point in their lives, even locksmiths.

Something Squishy...

2008-04-06T18:09:00.003+01:00

I was rudely awaken this morning by a friend letting himself into my room and putting snow in my bed.

There are many uncouth aspects to this seemingly frivolous action. Not only had he entered my private space without having the grace to knock (I could have been doing anything). He also made my bed wet, which is just not on. Only I have the authority to wet my own bed.

But the cruelest part of this prank was not the breaking and entering, nor the soiling of my mattress - it was the false hope it gave.

Since moving to London, I have not seen so much as one measly flake of the white stuff. Childhood memories of rosy-cheeks, plastic sleds and impromptu snowball fights have faded, supplanted by hazy visions of my bus going past in London's smoggy pea-soupers.

But, at this 8am this morning, there was actually snow falling in the city.

I was undeniably excited about this; I almost got up and went outside to play. I would have ran into the alley around the back of my house and made a exultant snow-angel, were it not a minefield of used condoms and hypodermic needles.

I stayed in bed, secure in the knowledge that a few more hours sleep would give me enough energy to enjoy the snow.

And, of course, three hours later the snow had gone, my heart gently wasting away with the melt water.

Why doesn't snow settle anymore? It's still snow, but "without any of the inherent fun of snow", as a friend would say. Like alcohol-free beer or a porn-free newsagent.

I felt this morning, for the first time in ages, the thrill of seeing snow on the ground. I felt like I wanted to chase Andrew King, the class fat kid, around the playground before stuffing snow down the back of his wheezing neck. That fizz of pure glee that can only be felt when your hands, face and ears have all gone numb - the anaesthetic thrill of a snowy air.

But no. All that happened today - with no remaining snow on the ground - was that my football practice got cancelled and I my fingers went numb on back from to Sainsbury's.

Like puddles. One time, the smallest pool of murky rainwater would be rendered enthralling simply by jumping into it. If I did that nowadays I'd have wet socks for the rest of the day and would probably have to machine wash by shoes to get the dirt out of the laces.

Weather is just snow fun anymore.

Something Unpredictable...

2008-04-05T14:51:00.005+01:00

I'm nervous. It's the Grand National today, and I have picked the winner for the last five years. I say this with no pride or boastfulness, but with caution.

I see this ritual as a sure way of using up all of my betting luck for the year to come.

Were I not to win this afternoon, I'll be tempted to strew my cash across a variety of sporting events throughout the year. And lose it all.

The first bet I ever took, shiny new Maestro card in hand - a plastic facade fronting a dearth of funds, was £10 on Leicester drawing with Coventry when they were playing grown-ups with those 'overpaid pansies' in the Premier League. Giants such as Matt Elliot and Gerry Taggart still stalked the earth, and I knew the score would be 0-0.

It was such an bloody certainty, I didn't even check the score before collecting my winnings. It could have been the worst thing that ever happened to me.

"This is amazing", I remember thinking, "So they actually just give you money for working out the blindingly obvious?".

The next week, again compelled by an unshakable conviction that Leicester would lose, this time 1-0 at Arsenal, I wagered another well-earned (read borrowed) tenner.

All was well until substitute Craig Hignett spawnily shinned in an Andrew Impey cross to level the scores. It finished 1-1, and I realized that this betting lark would take a lifetime - and a small fortune - to master.

I owe much to Craig Hignett. (Nothing football related, I might add. Hignett's sole contribution to Leicester's relegation was to deny me my winnings).

Had he not fluked that equalizer, however, I could easily now be in a hole of debt. I am not a lucky person, but I am a stubborn one, often convinced I'm right - even when I'm clearly not. I use these two truths to limit my betting throughout the year.

I now only bet on Horse Racing and Boxing. Without wishing to inflate that bloke-who-played-Finchey-in-the-Office's ego any further, sport does "matter more when there's money on it". I like gambling a little on things, the result of which doesn't concern me.

I also like getting the better of those flavour-of-the-week 'experts'. Those people who, upon receiving a call in the bookies, loudly regurgitate some obscure tip they've just read in the Racing Post over someone's shoulder whilst waiting for the bus, before putting £2 on the favourite - you know, just in case.

I want to win more than those people because, like them, I know very little about Horse Racing. Unlike them, I don't consider sitting around a lino-topped table strewn with playing chips and Dorito's dip, gumming on cheap cigars and taking money off mates a good way to spend a Saturday night. (I mean Poker players, not Cabinet Ministers).

Betting is dangerous. It's risky when you're bad at it and haven't the finances to cover your losses. It's even more risky if you start out good and assume your luck will last forever.

I am content to confine my little bit of luck to one or two days a year, confident that all my annual bad luck will pass when I don't stand to lose money.

Something In The Way She Moves...

2008-04-03T20:38:00.002+01:00

Heather Mills bashing has become a craze bigger than yo-yos, so it's nice to see her getting some words of support for a change.

They come in the form of that old, wise sage Yoko Ono, who admittedly knows a thing or two about being disliked.

Sporting a Panama hat tipped coquettishly to the side like the Man from Del Monte's mistress, Ms Ono suggested that loving a Beatle was a thankless task. As indeed is marrying one and trying to steal all his money after a very public divorce.

Being defended by Yoko Ono is like receiving an babysitting reference from Mira Hyndley.

"I think all the wives did suffer, and I think silently suffer," croaked Yoko in an interview with Sky News. "Suffer but endured, I would actually say," she added.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of listening to her contribution to "Double Fantasy" will beg to differ. As Yoko wails her way through 'Kiss Kiss Kiss', sounding like a baby being hit with a cat, one begins to wish her suffering was a little more silent.

She certainly sounds like she's in pain when she sings.

Heather Mills, face puckered like a balloon kno- No. I'm doing it again. No Mills bashing, no matter how fun or perspicacious can may be.

Both Heather Mills and Yoko Ono have clearly suffered. If, as the latter today suggested, they both remain silent and 'endure', maybe we wouldn't have to share it with them.

Something Sticky...

2008-04-02T12:04:00.002+01:00

I've been doing some work experience at a national paper and recently had the good fortune to attend the morning's leader conference.

I was struck by the encyclopedic knowledge of these men and women. I know that they have spent a lifetime in the industry, and it's their job to keep abreast of world affairs, but there doesn't seem to be a topic on which at least one is not an authority.

But this was not my main concern during the hour-long discussion. What really affected, indeed irked me, was the fact that I hadn't brought along a tissue - and the reaction I received when I did something about it.

I was nursing a thoroughly-installed cold, complete with soggy head, fuzzy throat and gushing nostrils. I should have thought ahead and forklifted in with me an industrial pack of Kleenex.

But no. I had, doe-eyed and submissive, like a naughty child being marched off the playground, followed the leader writers into the editor's office intent on contributing to a conversation which rapidly sailed over my bunged-up head...

How long is this meeting? I need a tissue - WHY didn't I bring a tissue?

I can feel the globule slither down my nasal canal, pulled earthward by gravity. Glassy mucus - snot - is an indicator of ill-health, an external sign of the acute viral nasopharynitis multiplying within me, filling my head with flem. I mustn't let them see it.

If I had a tissue, I'd be fine. Somehow, parping like a fog-horn until you evacuate your sinuses onto a piece of recycled tree-bark, before stuffing the whole slimy, flaky mess back into your pocket is deemed less of a faux-pas than sniffing. Braying like a donkey: good, sniffling: bad.

But I have to sniff, I know I'm only delaying the inevitable. I can feel the viscous advance reach the threshold of my nostril. They are talking excitedly about the situation in Zimbabwe. All I am thinking about is choosing the right moment to commit the most uncivilized of acts.

Here goes.

I sniff in the most effete manner imaginable and a female leader instantly shifts her icy gaze towards me. She rolls her eyes heavenward to relocate her moral high ground. I have deeply offended her with my sniffle.

After a lifetime in what is probably the rudest profession, I would have expected the lady to have slightly thicker skin. (It looks about the depth and consistency of a leather belt).

Why am I being silently reprimanded for sniffling? All I have essentially done is taken action to prevent the excretion of a bodily fluid. Would I be similarly judged for not weeing myself?

I am not so uncouth as to suggest that sniffing is polite, particularly in a quiet, serious atmosphere such as this. But I shouldn't be made to feel like a leper for not possessing a tissue. No one wants to look at the glistening snot smeared like a slug-trail across my upper lip. I have saved this paragon of virtue such a sight, so she needn't frown at me with those muddy irises.

I shall continue to sniff because I never remember to bring a tissue. I shall even - before checking that no-one is looking, obviously - wipe my nose on my sleeve. Trust me, it's better than the alternative.

Something Silly, Really...

2008-03-27T11:45:00.003Z

When people talk about irrational fears, they involve things like plasticine, squirrels or Pete Waterman. They are irrational because, barring a rabid attack from a grey rodent in a park, these things will not hurt you.

I've never seen a death-certificate marked "cause of death: Play-Doh" and I'll venture there are few sinister skeletons in Waterman's closet. (It's probably full of One True Voice EPs foraged from a BP bargain-bucket.)

I have one major fear, and there is nothing irrational about it. I am afraid of flying.

Taking off from Luton in Friday's increasingly heavy winds was, to the majority of passengers aboard flight ZB033 bound for Gibraltar, no more terrifying than the chief stewardess' make-up. For me it was hell.

It doesn't matter if it's the smoothest flight imaginable: I am still a nervous wreck when aboard a plane. Every subtle lull in engine noise is a precursor to total power failure. Every beep of the call button is by a vigilant passenger calmly informing the cabin crew that the starboard wing has fallen off.

I perspire, knuckles turning pallid as they desperately grip the polyester seat and I feel the acid burn of fear bleed throughout my heaving chest. I gulp in the recirculated air and pray for a safe end to my ordeal.

As any commuter will languidly inform you, "flying is the safest way to travel", but this doesn't cut it for me. It's not the safest way to travel, any more than on top of a flagpole is the safest place to do a handstand. It's the most dangerous way to travel.

What, I ask, is safe about hurtling through oxygen-free air at 500mph, at 35,000 ft, in a crackpot invention resembling a child model of a papier-mache bird?

If you listen to statistical evidence, you are very unlikely to die in a plane crash. If you listen to common-sense, it is a miracle you don't crash every time.

"It's because you're not in control", explains my Mother, with all the maternal compassion of Fiona Mackeown.

I'm not in control of the Victoria Line's planned engineering works, but my heart doesn't beat so hard I get a headache whenever I encounter them.

So what's the solution? Can I give up flying? I have an Uncle who, due mainly to environmental conscientiousness, always takes the train when he goes abroad. It's more expensive, takes longer and is probably no safer than a plane. But it sure as hell feels it. He crosses the channel by ferry - again, no less dangerous than a flight to Paris. However, I can swim. I can't fly.

I will have to come to terms with my phobia, and fast - I fly back to England tomorrow.

Something New...

2008-03-20T11:54:00.002Z

Alright, it's not a competition. Were it a competition, I would lose; I don't even know the rules. Are defamatory comments allowed? Conjecture on a rival's sexual persuasion? No.

Inspired by a close friend (not a rival) I have revived my blogging career, blowing away the thick carpeting of sediment from inside my skull and grinding my poorly lubricated brain into something resembling locomotion. Please forgive a bit of squeaking in the first few posts.

His blog is very good - but it's not a competition. Its writer is, like me, a budding journalist, a bleeding heart and an infallible judge of current affairs. Kind of. This blog, like millions of others, will be a platform for my thoughts and feelings on a variety of issues, hopefully focusing on daily news items - like a broken leader writer, sitting forlornly on the newspaper steps, bedraggled and slurring his hopelessly ill-informed view of the world to an audience who didn't ask for it.

Only I've not been made redundant, my wife hasn't left me and I have no delusions of influence over anyone. But I think its good to write nonetheless - it's nice to feel you have some outlet for thought, some way of manifesting your daily anger, amusement or apathy.

I'm going on holiday tomorrow, after having tenderly nurtured a fear of flying over the last few months. If I make it to my destination I shall, drunk on adrenaline, write an exultant carpe diem, extolling the virtues of life as fast as my frantic fingers will allow. My heart knocks against my hollow chest in anticipation. And fear.