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
Wednesday 29 October 2008
Tuesday 26 August 2008
Travel Sickness
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.
Tuesday 15 July 2008
New Blog!!!
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.
Monday 14 July 2008
The Kids Aren't Alright
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.
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.
Tuesday 8 July 2008
Hairs and Graces
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.
Friday 27 June 2008
Impressionable Youth
"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.
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.
Monday 23 June 2008
Cycle Like You Mean It
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.
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.
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