Do Stef's dream of electric chefs?

http://www.uri-geller.com/gallery/galframe.html

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I'm the kind of guy who constantly sees suggestive symbolism in the world around him; pepper grinders, Nelson's column, my coffee mug tree (photo another time), maypoles, displays of fresh fruit in supermarkets, that box of things under the bed …
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Sometimes my condition is so extreme I cannot finish eating a particularly suggestive chocolate bar without collapsing into a fit of giggles
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This is partly due to the fact that, since time immemorial, people have been crafting objects to look like genitalia, partly because British humour rests upon a solid bedrock of double entendre, but mostly because I have a dirty mind.
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I also think poo is funny.
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All things considered I'm probably well on my way to being a confirmed Freudian. I also hold more or less Freudian beliefs about the significance of dreams. My own personal experience suggests that dreams are usually a subconscious reordering of observations, thoughts and feelings from the day before. What makes dreams interesting is the often wildly different emphasis or interpretation placed by my subconscious on those observations, thoughts and feelings. For example, I may be consciously aware of a certain problem or issue in my life that I have consciously decided is of little concern. Yet that same problem could very well become the centrepiece of a really, really scary nightmare. Suggesting to me that I'm a lot more worried about that problem than I would choose to believe. Sometimes I'm not even consciously aware of issues that crop up in the dreams but, after experiencing them, I realise that, yes, they are bothering me.
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Some people believe that dreams may have a predictive quality. That fits in with my own personal dreamview easily enough. Two things could be going on: 1) You've subconsciously reasoned a likely turn of events in your mind during the day or 2) If you believe in such things, you’ve intuitively become aware of a future happening during the day.
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Anyway, on to the reason for this post.
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I woke up several times this morning in a cold sweat after a series of peculiar dreams. I can remember two of them:
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Dream 1. Spending a weekend away in Prague with Ainsley Harriot
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Nothing untoward happened during our laughter-filled two days together but I am deeply troubled as to what's taking place in my mind. If I was prey to a subconscious longing for a covert and bijou weekend holiday with a member of the same sex, why wouldn't I select Russell Crowe or Gabriel Byrne; choosing a chunky, hairless TV celebrity chef instead? I have no answers.
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(during my search for a good picture of Ainsley I came across Uri Geller's personal homepage which includes a section entitled 'Uri and famous celebrities and scientists'. For some, probably non-Freudian, reason it made me laugh )
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Dream 2. The Temptation of Stef
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My last period of employment came to the end as the result of severe, and unwarranted, shafting by three particularly unctuous, revolting people. On my last day, each of the three of them held out a hand and wished me good luck for my future. To my eternal regret I shook all three of them by the hand, when what I should have done was spit on them and launch into a speech along the lines of 'one day, it might not be tomorrow, or next week, but one day, we'll meet again, somewhere dark'.
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This hand-shaking experience was one of the most traumatic of my adult life and I have dreamt about it several times since.
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Last night's variant of the dream was different. Last night one of them offered me a job, a very well-paid job. The reason why I woke up in a cold sweat after that baby was that I actually thought about it.
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I thought about it.
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Just as worrying was the fact that I woke up with the sense that I had somehow been testing myself, had only just scraped a weak pass and that a minor punishment was in order. I have been found guilty of a thought crime by myself and sentence is pending.
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I'm due to go on a photo taking stroll and sup a few beers with some friends later on today. I may have grounds to be a little nervous. My subconscious mind is uncompromising in the standards it sets and Biblical in its wrath when these standards are not met. What kind of punishment is my id going to mete out to me today? An accidental fall perhaps? A dangerously placed slip of the tongue? A wet fart maybe?
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It really doesn’t bear thinking about.
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Ladies and Gentlemen choose your London mythos

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I've been far too grumpy about living in London lately. Here I am, moaning away about the place, yet, for some reason, countless thousands of people are pouring into this city.

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London clearly has something going for it.

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And, for several reasons, I'm stuck here for the foreseeable future. So, I've decided to make the best of it. I've decided that the most constructive things I can do to make the best of my remaining time here are:

1. Get rich
2. Create a lucrative London mythos that romanticises the city, makes me feel better about the place AND helps me to achieve Objective #1

For anyone coming across this post, not familiar with the concept of a mythos, a mythos is merely the term used to describe a collection of myths. More powerful than the concept of a mere genre, a really good mythos can both entertain us and act as a useful vehicle for self-delusion; fairy stories for adults if you like.

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We're surrounded by countless examples. The first few that come to mind include:

• The myth of Ireland. An oppressed, yet happy, island filled with spunky flame-haired girls clad in shawls and white horses galloping through Dublin council estates. The home of 'The Crack' and wily old men supping Guinness in ancient pubs. The land of The Commitments, Riverdance and Roddy Doyle. Somewhere in the background, old Clannad albums are playing constantly.
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• The myth of the Highlands. A harsh, yet beautiful land, also filled with flame-haired beauties. Noble warrior-poets tramp the heather, righting wrongs committed by the perfidious English. A land filled with kilts, tartans, fiddles, swords and lots and lots of whisky.
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• Sometimes the Irish, Scottish and Welsh mythos' are merged into a mushy Celtic super-mythos; the key features of which are drinking a lot, fighting and whining like bitches.
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• The England of Constable paintings and Vaughn Williams' Tallis Fantasia. Just chock-full of sturdy, contented peasants manoeuvring noble shire horses around an exceptionally twee, non-threatening landscape.
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• Lord of the Rings World
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• Jane Austin World
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  etc

Personal favourite mythos' include 'Western, Spaghetti' and 'South, Deep'. Yes, all it takes is to overhear a few bars of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, Ry Cooder slide guitar number or a snatch of Delta Blues and I am mentally transported to mythical lands; far, far away from a cold and crappy Lambeth in January. Marvellous. I watch O Brother Where Art Thou? frequently.

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There's actually no reason to restrict yourself to an off-the-shelf mythos. It's really quite easy to make your own or adapt a pre-existing one. A few Arthurian novels here, a couple of Enya CDs there, an aromatheraphy kit, healing crystal and handful of candles somewhere else and away you go.

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Intriguingly, different mythos' can also occupy the same point in space and time. Alien v. Predators was recently turned into a movie but how about the Man with No Name v. John Wayne? Or Woody Allen meets Taxi Driver?

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The power of a mythos to distort reality can be significant. Having visited both Almeria, in Spain, where the first spaghetti westerns were filmed and much of the Southwest of the US I was initially troubled by the fact that Almeria looked more like my spaghetti western-fed vision of the Old West than the Real McCoy. I've long since dumped those concerns, realising that it's all bollocks anyway and trying to connect a fantasy to reality is a silly thing to do.

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My other half, Tracy, experienced a similar epiphany when she first visited Italy. Brought up by films and television to expect a land of brightly dressed peasants, singing opera in the streets and sitting at tables laden with huge amounts of tomato based products, set outside on a terrace bathed in perpetual bright sunshine, the reality came as quite a shock. She's over it now.

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On a creative level, once a mythos has been successfully lodged into the public psyche the author / film maker / advertising executive has access to a wide variety of characters, clichés and backdrops to call upon. When the cowboy rides into town there's no need to explain the rules of his world and you can also recycle material and sets left over from the last production. Yes, a really good mythos is both lucrative and cost-efficient.

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Lucrative and cost-efficient but in no sense real. Unless you’re one of those people who entertains the possibility of an infinite number of parallel universes, meaning all scenarios are possible. On the plus side, a good mythos sometimes encourages people to delve into the reality behind the myth; many archaeologists, historians, authors and film-makers have been drawn to and inspired to create non fiction works off the back of fantasies.

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A good mythos can be frequently be translated into political strength and is usually a prerequisite for any successful nationalistic movement. As such, the risk of a powerful mythos being harnessed to support extremist behaviour is high. On the bright side, and more relevant to my current line of thought, a good mythos can also be used to sell an awful lot of sh*t; music, books, movies, clothes, food, paintings, home furnishings, tourism. The power of properly crafted bullshit and fantasy can be converted directly into cold, hard cash.

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and London is just gagging for a new mythos.

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There have been stabs in the past. There's Richard Curtis World; the land of Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral. There's Guy Richie World; the realm of Lock Stock and Snatch. But these efforts have been deeply flawed; if for no other reason than being intensely parochial. These past mythos' have been limited in their scope and have totally failed to adequately embrace those qualities that make London the city that it is; the ethnic diversity, the extremes between rich and poor, the vast array of subcultures, the sheer depth of the hidden side. The best efforts that I can recall date back to the days of 1960's Michael Caine films or Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday. Both now well-past their sell by dates.

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When it comes to weaving a web of myths around a city, New York is the Daddy. Woodie Allen and Martin Scorsese have based long and lucrative careers on churning-out countless homages to the Big Apple. These directors draw from their own, long-established creative pools; containing the same actors, the same locations, the same music, and the same dialogue. And we've been lapping it up for decades.

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For some reason, London hasn’t benefited from anything like similar treatment. Sure, we've got phone boxes, double-decker buses and guardsmen wearing furry hats, but we've never had a Scorsese, an Allen, a Gershwin or a Copland.

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New York does not nurture a superior mythology because it's better than London in any significant way. What it does possess is better myth makers; in abundance. Think about it. New York film makers have even managed to romanticise the act of buying hot dogs from roadside barrow vendors. We have such things in London but Who in their right mind would ever dream of buying food from one? let alone glorifying the purchase in celluloid. So rubbish are we in London at sustaining myths that the temptation to portray Al Pacino pooing his guts out and suffering from a severe dose of gastroenteritis in the next scene would probably prove irresistible. 'I'll have that with extra mustard'. Yeah, right.

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New York is supplied complete with iconic images of heroes standing with their hands held in the air crying out 'I love this city!!!', framed by brightly lit fountains playing up and down in time to Rhapsody in Blue, all in front of a silhouette of the Manhattan Skyline ...

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In the London, the best we can do is some fat man in a wig, who's been dead for 200 years, saying

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"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

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That was back in 1777; no big band in the background, no fountains, no dramatic skyline.

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What is wrong with this town? Why is it no-one gets up in the morning saying to themselves 'This place is great. I'm going to write a tribute symphony'? I know why I don't. I have no musical talent and I stopped loving this city years ago. It changed too quickly and became too alien to me; so quickly that I can't even pin-point when it actually happened. But why hasn’t anyone else come up with something?

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Anyway, this post is far too long already so I'll get to the point. After a boozy chat with a mate in a pub yesterday, I've decided to lay down the framework for a new London mythos. The idea being to kick-start the process by coming up with:

1. An iconic soundtrack
2. A list of interesting London locations; iconic but not cliched
3. A cast of characters; larger than life but still representative of people who live here

in that order. The plan is that, with a list of music, locations and people, ideas for a definitive London screenplay or novel will just come leaping out. I will become the godfather of a commercially cynical new movement that glorifies and romanticises this city and become rich, rich I tell you, in the process.

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We didn't get much past the initial concept last night. Only so far as agreeing that the soundtrack should feature some Clash, some Jam, probably a cover of Waterloo Sunset, some Reggae, some R&B, and no music that has been used in glossy, cobblers car adverts; so, scratch M People and Morcheeba then.
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Anyway, anyone who's read this far please feel free to contribute your thoughts on what could be included in the London mythos soundtrack, or ideas for people or places; by comment or email. If they're any good you might even get a piece of the action.

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Tall tales and mobile phones

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A interesting news story on Yahoo today ...
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BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Airbus and SITA, an in-flight communications specialist, have won permission from the European Commission to create a joint venture that will enable travellers to make calls and send text messages, email and use the Internet during flights.
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The venture, OnAir, will be jointly controlled by Dutch-registered SITA and Airbus, the European Union executive said in a statement.
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The creation of OnAir was announced in July, 2004, and the aim was to allow passengers to use their own mobile phones, laptops and personal digital assistants in flight and to be billed through their normal operator.
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Which kind of begs the question 'If new technology is required to enable the use of cell phones in aircraft how did the passengers on Flight 93 on 9/11 manage to make all those calls to family and friends?'
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Cell Phone Article

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Ah well, not to worry
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Reichstag fire anyone?

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A little while after writing the previous entry, about how London Buses was planning to recruit Snake Plisskin to hunt down fare evaders, I got chatting with Tracy about the London 2012 Olympic bid.

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She had only seen the promotional video for the first time a few days before, on the shuttle back from Heathrow Airport. Her first reaction to the video was 'Wow! I want to live in that London!'.

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Don’t we all.

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The conscience-stricken film makers have placed subtle clues in the video to let us know that it's a deranged fantasy. One shot shows David Beckham with a half-completed crossword with a pen in his hand pretending that he was responsible and I could swear I saw a group of drunken unicorns dancing in the background in another scene.

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Later, in the taxi on the way home from Paddington Station, Tracy was talking with a taxi driver about the Olympic bid and he said to her, in a perplexed tone, 'Have you met anyone who actually supports the bid?'. The answer was, of course, 'no', which is strange given that the impression exuded by the media is that we're all gagging for it.

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Last night we caught the current Government-sponsored ad for teacher recruitment. Filmed in the same high-contrast, glossy world as the Olympic bid video, the ad portrays a teaching environment packed full of well-scrubbed, immaculately turned-out kids listening attentively, staring in awe and laughing politely at appropriate moments as their cool, with-it teacher does his stuff. At the end of the ad, the inspiring backing tracks fades back and the voice-over says 'The rewards of teaching. Become a teacher and start on no less than eighteen k a year'.

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Nobody, least of all the teachers I know, believe that this ad has any connection with reality and few people would have the cheek to describe £18k pa as a 'reward' for working in a British inner city school. An insult maybe but not a reward.

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Long, long ago government paid-for advertising was strictly limited to low-cost public information ads. The kind of ads that advised you not to lock yourself in a fridge then throw yourself into a canal, to unplug the tele before going to bed and not to trust strange men, unless they were standing at road crossings dressed as super-heroes complete with bulge-hugging tights.

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The British government is now the biggest buyer of advertising in the UK. As of old, the ads are ostensibly aired to inform the public but their hidden agenda is to portray a bright, modern, successful Britain that is at peace with itself. Unlike the grimy canal-side world of the old ads, the new ones are set exclusively in a bizarre Britain that's as mythical as the Land of King Arthur. It's propaganda. The only difference between this stuff and the material Goebbels and Stalin put out is that it is not, usually, made in black and white and it doesn’t feature tractor production figures.

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Anyway, I was in this particular mindset when I watched our Home Secretary being interviewed on the news last night.

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Apparently, our government has accepted that detaining foreign nationals in prison indefinitely without charge or trial is both discriminatory against foreign nationals and a clear case of illegal imprisonment. So, brilliantly, our government will change the legislation. It will no longer be discriminatory because it will apply to British citizens as well as foreign nationals and it will no longer be illegal imprisonment because people will be locked-up indefinitely in private houses, Burma-style, rather than in proper jails.

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What particularly chilled my blood was the language used to justify this action. The Home Secretary used expressions like 'enemy within', 'unprecedented public emergency', 'necessary to defend our way of life', and 'the life of the nation is at risk'.

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This is exactly, and I mean exactly, the same language that Hitler used. For a few seconds in front of the tele last night I had a spooky feeling that this was exactly the same path Germany followed 70 years ago. I felt scared. Really.

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I grew up at a time when totalitarian regimes seemed to be a thing of the past and people believed that the future would be better. Not any more. Now, I find myself living through an interactive history lesson. If I was ever curious to know how the German people could stand by and and even support the invasion of Czechoslovakia or Poland or allow the demonisation of an entire race based on an illusory terror threat or believe the drivel they were fed by Goebbels and his mates, all I have to do is turn on the television or read a newspaper. It's not a nice feeling.

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Sounds too extreme?

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Consider what has been imposed on us since 911 …

• proliferation of armed police and other security staff
• massive increases in funding for the secret police, sorry, intelligence services
• massive, unannounced increase in surveillance of private individuals
• hundreds of unwarranted arrests
• provision for indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial
• limitations on right to travel and free movement
• unprovoked, illegal, pre-emptive attacks on other nation states
• compulsory identity cards on their way
• provision for centralised national police service

All justified on the basis of a lie. And remember, all of these measures have been set in place indefinitely. Truly democratic politicians, as opposed to fascists, would attach time-limits to the legislation such that it would require regular renewal.

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I appreciate that I'm in a minority in my disbelief of the 911 story. After all, it's perfectly reasonable for three enormous offices buildings to collapse neatly into their own footprint. Yes, don’t forget WTC7 which spontaneously fell down even though it wasn't hit by anything. It happens all the time. And yes, these were very special building collapses, which spared hijackers' passports but destroyed all four of the aircraft black boxes ...

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But even if you believe that 911 happened as you've been told, the question of the motivation of the terrorists is still deliberately obscured. The terrorists don't 'hate us for our freedoms', they don't represent 'a threat to our nation'. They have neither the inclination nor the capacity to threaten us to anything like the scale our scumbag politicians are claiming. The terrorists want us and our proxies to clear out of their Holy Places; Jerusalem (Israel), Mecca and Medina (Saudi) and Karbala and Najaf (Iraq). They'd also be quite pleased if we stopped cluster-bombing their wives and children as well.

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But that's not an option is it?

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"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."—Martin Niemöller (1945)

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Competition for London's most violent bus route hots up

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It's been a fabulous week for London news and it's only Wednesday.
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Yesterday the Evening Standard published a list of London's most dangerous bus routes. Highlights included …
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Route: 9 - Violent Incidents: 4 / 16 - 7 / 18 - 13 / 25 - 23 / 28 - 3 / 29 - 37 / 32 - 11 / 38 - 20 / 53 - 14 / 57 - 19 / 82 - 13 / 86 - 13 / 109 - 16 / 137 - 12 / 149 - 18 / 159 - 16 / 168 - 8 / 185 - 7 / 207 - 50 / 253 - 18 / 279 - 18 / 436 - 13
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The figures are for reported violent incidents over a one month period at the end of last year. It's a strong showing for North East London where particularly over-enthusiastic locals appear to have taken to assaulting visitors before they even arrive. Sadly, my own local routes, such as the 159 and 436, are not amongst the highest scorers but, credit where credit is due, Tottenham is a worse cr*p hole than Lambeth.
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Apparently, much of the trouble on the 436 is caused by the fact that the route is served by the new bendy buses. I am on record as not being a fan of the new style bus. They are so unfeasibly long they can't manoeuvre properly in crowded London streets and the driver does not collect payment or check tickets. In theory you are supposed to buy a ticket before boarding the bus. If you buy bus tickets from a local newsagent that don't have a date on, rather than from a machine, you can pretty much use them forever on 436's, Willy Wonka style. I'm thinking about getting my one laminated. Some people don’t even bother to buy one of the magic everlasting tickets, as indicated in the Evening Standard yesterday …
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One of the five ticket inspectors suspended for refusing to work on the "bendy buses", saying they are too dangerous, spoke out today. The inspector, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "We are frightened to get on the buses to check tickets. I have been punched and assaulted - we all have. "You get an army of people who just refuse to pay. You ask them for their ticket and they just look at you and say 'f*** off, it's a free bus". Transport for London suspended the five for disobeying "reasonable management instruction" to work in pairs after previously working in groups or five or six, sometimes backed by police.
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Hands up anyone who knows of any other city in the world where bus ticket inspectors operate in platoon-sized units supported by police wearing body armour. Maybe they should go the whole hog and soften up the passengers with preliminary artillery and air strikes.
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But the good news didn’t stop there. Metropolitan Police figures released this week show a jump in violent offences from 180,000 to 200,000 from 2003 to 2004. An 11% rise. The Met's Deputy Assistant Commissioner was quoted as saying 'There is a problem and it looks like it is getting worse' but then wrote-off most of the rises being 'due to improved recording procedures'. Strangely, he did not dismiss the fall in some non-violent categories of crime over the same period as being due to 'worsened recording procedures'.
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But wait, there's more. Yesterday, the Mayor's transport chief Bob Kiley today unveiled a proposal to extend the congestion charging scheme from central areas out to the London suburbs. Yes, pay a fiver every time you use a car or get on the bus and receive a complimentary kicking instead.
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But, hey, there's always the Tube isn’t there? But, wait, Ken Livingstone today announced he would raise tube and bus fares for the second time this year, in the Summer, if he wasn't allowed to raise money for pet projects through an above inflation rise in local property taxes.
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Fantabulosa!
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Like I said, it's only Wednesday. I wonder what wonderful London-based news tomorrow will bring?
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PS My mate Ian sent me an email this morning about buses and an adventure he had last night on the way home …
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Since I had some shopping with me I thought it might be quite nice to get the bus home for a change, which I did, so I chose my usual nutter/ dangerous gang of teenagers escape seat right next to the door, which was good since a violent maniac got on the bus halfway down King’s Road, was quiet to start off with and eventually started saying things like ‘I’ll smash the lot of yers’ and ‘I’ll rip you apart like there’s no tomorrow, I’m from Battersea, that’s my f**cking manor’. Loads of people got off fairly quickly, then he said ‘ I’m getting off at the next stop, anyone who gets off at the next stop I’m going to f**cking smash you on the pavement’, so no-one got off at the next stop (the first stop south of the Bridge, where tons of people always get off). He then said ‘No-one got off then, I wonder why’ and finally, ‘This is Battersea. Trust me. I’m not stupid’.
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Ha Ha Gotcha ya loser!

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post bemoaning the fact that the only way to drum up traffic through my blog was to make posts with words like iPod, porno and megajugs in their titles ...

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Glancing through the Sitemeter web stats for this blog just now, guess what I came up with as my 5th most recent referring URL?
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An MSN search for 'megajugs'.
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Our intrepid explorer didn't stay on my blog for very long.
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There are some really, really desperately sad, sad people out there.
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Polari for dummies

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Lately, I've been toying with ideas for making my blog an altogether more hip and trendy kind of place to be.
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The latest scheme is to start writing it in Polari.
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For anyone reading this blog who doesn’t know, Polari is a form of slang that was popular in London, particularly Soho, in the 1950's and 1960's. Its roots stretch further back, right through to the start of the century and maybe before.
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Polari is a mixture of Italian / Yiddish / Polish / Romany / Backslang / Rhyming Slang and was most commonly used between homosexuals who didn't want to be overheard by the police; back in the days when such things were totally illegal.
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As such, Polari would have been a strong contender for the much-coveted, annual 'Language least likely to be spoken by members of the KKK' award 1948-1968. If such an award had ever existed.
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Actually, Polari was not just used to conceal homosexual banter from police. It was also a handy way of broadcasting one's sexuality. For example, if you found yourself in a social group that included someone who would regularly cry out 'Bona!' or refer to last night's 'Trade', you could be pretty certain that he was gay as a coot and plan the rest of your evening accordingly.
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Polari glossaries are available on the web and many Polari words have crept into common use. Personal favourites include:
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Trade = sex
Trolling = walking (esp. looking for trade)
Bona = good
Cod = bad
Nada = nothing
Chicken = Young Man
Palaver = Argument
Ponce = Pimp
Cottage = public lavatory
Shyckle = Wig
Vada = See
Mince = walk effeminately
Drag = clothes / to dress
Scarper = run away
Naff = not very good (Normal as F*ck / Not available for F*cking)
Bijou = Small
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So, an expression such as 'I went trolling around Dilly, dragged-up like a ponce, trying to vada some bona trade and all I could find was a naff chicken who didn’t fancy a spot of cottaging' is actually quite rude.
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There are many, many more Polari words out there, most of them of Italian extraction, but they have fallen out of use and sound fake and affected to modern ears.
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Connoisseurs of such dated entertainment as The Carry On Movies, anything featuring Kenneth Williams, Porridge, Minder and Jamie Oliver cookery programmes will be on familiar ground here.
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Polari died out in the 1970's, partly because homosexuality was made legal, partly because London ethnic demographics changed and partly because it sounded too Queeny, even for the London gay scene. The odd word is still occasionally used in gay circles, bona and fantabulosa come to mind, but usually in an ironic, jokey kind of way. Some Polari was still in use in the London theatre scene when I worked in the West End as a teen in the late 1970's early 1980's.
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Polari reached the peak of its fame round about 1965 when it was used heavily in a popular radio show called Round the Horne. Round the Horne featured two astronomically camp characters called Julian and Sandy who would lisp away to each other in hardcore Polari.
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This was back in the days when people still sat at home listening to the radio, dressed in a shirt and tie, smoking pipes, reading enormous newspapers and or doing the knitting. On a small table, next to the radio sat a brown teapot covered in a custom-made woollen jumper to keep the tea warm. Yet somehow, this most conservative of national audiences lapped-up Julian and Sandy's camp dialogue, not knowing for a second what they were talking about.
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Quite strange.
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If you listen to old tapes of Round the Horne, and there are many in circulation, particularly in Brighton, you can hear two layers of laughter from the studio audience. 90% of the laughter comes from people laughing at the funny men with silly voices. 10% of the laughter comes from people who understand what they are actually saying.
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As a slight aside, I was chatting with Tracy a few nights ago about just how conservative Britain was in 1965 and the subject of the Michael Caine movie, The Ipcress File, came up.
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There are some scenes in old movies that caused a big stir at the time but pass unnoticed to later audiences. The classic example is Clark Gable removing his shirt to reveal that he wasn't wearing a vest in It Happened One Night, 1934. Undershirt sales plummeted. TV's first inter-racial kiss in Star Trek also comes to mind. A similar example is Michael Caine's cooking scene in The Ipcress File. At one point in the film Caine demonstrates his New Man credentials by offering to cook his young lady 'the best meal she's ever eaten'. He then takes her back to his flat and makes her an omelette. After which they shag furiously like bunnies, just to prove that Caine isn’t in fact a woman. So challenging was the cooking scene to Caine that a stunt double had to be brought in for the close-up egg-cracking and frying shots.
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An omelette! Yes, I can just see that working in 2005.
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'You've made me an omelette'
'Yes'
'You said you were going to cook me the best meal I'd ever eaten! You've dragged me back to your flat halfway across London to cook me an omelette'
'Yes, and here it is'
'Twat'
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Yes, Britain in 1965. The Britain I was born into. A Britain where no real man could crack an egg and little old ladies doing crochet would laugh at the camp goings on of two radio characters hinting at casual anal sex in public lavatories.
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A strange time.
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Anyway, Polari is ripe for a come back. The manager at Madame Jo Jo's night-club in Soho recently issued his staff with printed Polari glossaries as a bit of fun and other establishments may follow suit.
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I might just join them.
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Crowded

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I occasionally submit photos to on an on-line photo web challenge called Photo Friday, here ...
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http://photofriday.com/
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I mention this as an explanation for my occasional Blog picture posts without text.
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This week's Photofriday challenge was the word 'Crowded'. As it happens, even though I live in London I haven't taken many crowded pictures as I usually do my best to avoid crowds.
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There is this one, however, which I took in Mayfair. There was obviously some kind of funeral going on, which involved wrapping the deceased in a body bag and manhandling the bag around the the crowd. One section of the crowd, which was entirely male, stripped themselves to the waist and started beating themselves with whips to drum beats.
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Curious to know the symbolism of what was taking place, I turned to a dark-skinned man watching the ceremony next to me and said 'Excuse me do you know what this is all about?'
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And, in a very broad, and unmistakenly British East London accent he replied ...
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'Search me mate. They must be Sunni's or something like that. I haven't the faintest. It's a bit strange 'innit'
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and the moral of the story boys and girls? You got it ...
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Never judge a book, or a person come to think of it, by its cover
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The economics of compassion and death

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A tsunami relief concert was held in Cardiff this weekend. Stars like Eric Clapton, Elton John and Rod Stewart entertained 60,000 people and raised £1.25m for tsunami relief
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Umm, wow.
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As an exercise in curiosity, I fiddled with my pocket calculator and worked out roughly how long it took the UK to spend £1.25m on 'defence' …
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Sixteen minutes
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About the length of an Eric Clapton guitar solo.
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And how long does it take for the US to spend £1.25m on 'defence'?
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88 seconds
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The whole concert exercise is reminiscent of those little old ladies who sell jam or hang around railway stations collecting money in buckets for hospitals. You read about them occasionally in local newspapers 'Grannies raise £617.21 for local children's ward. Doctors say 'ooh, thanks'.
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Don’t those old dears have any conception of how much it costs to run a hospital? The sums they raise would barely keep a medium size hospital in toilet roll for a week.
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Ditto for raising money to alleviate world suffering. The sums required are huge. What sounds like a lot of money to us is small change on a national scale. So what are that tsunami relief concert and jam sales all about?
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Well, partly about self-righteous publicity for the performers, partly as a Band-Aid for our collective conscience, partly a distraction from the structural issues associated with world suffering and, yes, partly about misdirected compassion.
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Our national governments just love events like this concert and Band Aid before it. People give a little money, sleep comfortably in their beds and never get round to questioning where all the big bucks are really being spent.
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Remember, the UK spends £1.25m on guns, tanks and death every 16 minutes. If we reduced 'defence' spending by the equivalent of one day that would be equal to ninety tsunami relief concerts, about £112m. If we stopped paying for death for two days, the sum saved would exceed all the contributions to tsunami relief made by the British public. Plus no-one would need ever listen to a live Rod Stewart performance ever again.
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And, no, we don't need to spend the money we do on defence. Where is it written that Britain has to be the second most interventionist nation in the World after the US? How much more favourably would the World look upon us and our business interests if we were chucking around £40bn a year on constructive aid programs? And, no, customer loyalty cards, money off vouchers and credit notes for purchases from UK arms businesses do not count as constructive aid.
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And, sorry, I do question the motives of the performers.
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I stopped attending pop concerts, charitable or non charitable, years ago. I was lucky enough to reach musical maturity in the early 1980's when most UK acts visiting London would play the Hammersmith Palais (c.2,500 people). If they were really big, and I'm talking Queen here, they would play the Hammersmith Odeon (c.4,500 people). Tickets were reasonably priced and the dedicated could be pretty confident of getting within spitting distance of their idols. Concerts were seen as publicity vehicles for record sales. That changed in the 1980s and they became money-makers in their own right. I remember attending one concert in the mid 1980s, paying through the nose, thinking I should have brought binoculars and watching the performance on an enormous video screen as the band was so far away. That's when I stopped going to mainstream concerts.
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Anyway, some time after I stopped attending concerts, a friend of mine, a long-standing Genesis fan, was grumbling about a Phil Collins concert, he had attended. I think it was at Wembley, though I could be wrong. The non-inflation adjusted grumble went something along the lines of …
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'I paid twenty quid for a ticket, fifteen quid for a T shirt, four quid for a hamburger, eight quid for a programme, then at the end of the concert he sang a song about homeless teenagers and told us to put money in the collection buckets that were being passed round'
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Kind of gets you right there doesn’t it.
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Is it me or isn't there something just a teensy weensy bit obscene about pampered, multi-millionaire coke-heads prancing around on stage, demonstrating to us how virtuous they are and people just lapping it up. Elton John's a superb example. Have you seen how much he spends on shoes?
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Bono, Elton, Phil, Eric and Rod; if you're listening guys here's an invitation. You swop my lifestyle with yours and let's see who gives a bigger percentage of their income to charity.
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Conservatives promise mass slaughter of kittens after next election

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Groans from me over breakfast as the Conservative Party announced the next item in the list of things it will do if voted in at the next General Election …

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'Place a cap on the number political asylum seekers admitted into the country every year'

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This comes on top of last week's promise to
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'Increase spending on health, education and the police AND cut taxes'

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And this is all on top of their long standing support for the attack on Iraq, implementation of ID cards and all the b*llshit War on Terror legislation.
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Most people, particularly those who live with the consequences, agree that some controls need to be put on immigration. Many tax payers are also concerned that taxation has increased greatly and a lot of that extra money has been wasted. A lot of people are against the War and the erosion of civil liberties.
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And the Tories keep f*cking it up. I've lost count of how many political open goals they've missed. Asylum claims are a fraction of the total annual migration figures and their proposed tax cuts are tiny. So, why on earth are they wording their proposed policies in such a way as to leave them open to scorn and ridicule? The tax cut proposal was met with

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'Tories pretend they can cut taxes and increase spending. Look, there are some flying pigs'

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And tomorrow the headlines will read
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'Tories will refuse asylum to babies fleeing death camps'

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Muppets. They really don’t deserve to get in. But what does the lack of a credible political opposition mean for the rest of us? Actually, maybe rather than being very, very stupid they're being very, very clever. Maybe they don’t want to take over governing the country. I wouldn't.
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One of the cruellest jokes of politics is taking over a country just before your predecessors' incompetence and corruption starts having an obvious negative effect. I personally suffered from the reverse effect in my last job. I'd worked with a sick company for a year or so and just as all my measures had started cutting-in a new guy came aboard. As far as the rest of the World was concerned it looked like he had a fantastic impact within weeks of taking post. Strangely, he felt no need to correct any incorrect perceptions and even worked quite hard at restricting the amount of good news, so that it looked liked he was responsible for a steady improvement in the company's fortunes. Our current Labour government played a similar trick with the surpluses it inherited from the previous Conservative government.
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Those surpluses ran out a few years ago and over the next few years we in the UK can look forward to big tax rises, rising unemployment, the popping of the personal debt bubble, a nightmare in Iraq and maybe a collapse in the housing market thrown in. What kind of idiots would want to take over the government just before all that was about to happen?
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The situation in Iraq will go South first. They're going to have elections there in a few days time. Along with the 'hand over' to the interim Iraqi administration last June and the assault on Fallujah a couple of months ago, these elections are the most recent in a succession of initiatives; each of which was going to finally stabilise the situation.
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Mmmmm
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The security situation in large parts of Iraq is now so dire that the police hide their identity behind masks and the insurgents make no attempt to disguise themselves, even in the capital city in broad daylight. Most of the election candidates are standing anonymously and God knows how anyone could have done any campaigning over the last few months. I just can't believe that there has been much in the way of political rallies, or door to door canvassing, or any kind of serious political activity. Many of us in the West would like to strangle some of our politicians. The Iraqis probably do.
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But, hey, Tony Blair told us last week that 14 out 18 provinces in Iraq are stable enough to hold elections. Shame that the missing 4 provinces are home to half the total population. Thanks Tony, for never failing to disappoint by never ever telling the honest truth about any given issue.
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Nope, the Iraqi elections won’t work and even if they did that doesn’t mean UK or US troops are ever going to pull out. In the Presidential debates last year Kerry mentioned that the US was building 14 permanent bases in Iraq. No-one contradicted him during or after the debate. The US is there to stay. Forever. Full spectrum dominance of the Middle East and 'Stan' republics requires no less. And there's everyone in the US and UK believing, wanting to believe, that there will be an end-point to the nightmare.
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Settle in boys and girls, the holocaust in Iraq is going to continue for a very long time indeed. It was always meant to. Your leaders aren't incompetent as you would like to believe. No, they're wickeder. Which, as we all know, is worse.
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So, anyway, Iraq's going to go South. Later on, UK taxes will rise to pay for the massive increases in wasted public expenditure and people will start to choke on and default on the £1,000,000,000,000 of personal debt we've managed to run up in the UK. What has particularly impressed me is the huge number of fellow citizens who've significantly increased their mortgages to pay for such investment essentials as long haul holidays and plasma TV sets. Sadly, sniff sniff, the time will soon come when people will no longer be able to buy imported electrical cr*p from Dixons or employ Latina cleaning ladies or East European builders to improve their houses. The retail and service sector will wither and unemployment will rise. Tax receipts will fall and then public sector cuts will follow. And so on. The question is not IF this will happen it's just a matter of when. Britain is long due what is euphemistically called a 'correction' and the longer it is delayed the worse it will be.
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So, putting myself in the Conservative Party's position, would I want to return to government before, or after this happens? Mmmm, tough call. However on reflection, if I was in the Conservative leadership I'd start promising the reintroduction of child labour, the right of doit de seigneur for local Conservative MPs and the state execution of cute kittens and hold back my less extreme policies for the next time around.
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Anyway, I'm laughing. My girlfriend has a New Zealand passport and I can speak Italian. What about the rest of you?
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I can do whatever the f*ck I like

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Whilst watching George Bush's inaugural address the other night something dawned on me for the first time. The answer to a question that's been niggling me for a couple of years now …
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Why didn’t the US or UK intelligence services plant some WMDs in Iraq?
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It's not like we haven’t got any spare ones knocking around. And Saddam bought his original stock off us in the first place, so our guys wouldn’t even have to do much in the way of changing the labels, list of ingredients or dietary information.
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My problem is that I've been slow on the uptake. Dubya, Blair and Co. did not order the planting of WMDs because they didn’t need to. They've got their countries buttoned-down so well they can do whatever the f*ck they like.
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And planting WMDs would have run the risk of exposure. Short of sending Donald Rumsfeld over in a white van loaded with anthrax, they would have had to bring some people in on the act and that can get messy.
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Long gone are they days when there were any serious threats to the establishment plan. The media is more or less totally controlled, the general public is artfully misdirected and weighed-down with too much money, too little money or drugs, and its collective intellect suppressed with a nicely degraded education system.
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It's not the 1960's any more. Back in those days it was necessary to deal with threats by shooting them in the face. Unlike JFK, RFK or MLK, contemporary anti-establishment figures pose no threat whatsoever. Why bother to arrange for Michael Moore to be accidentally strangled in a bizarre baseball cap related accident? Just let the guy talk. He's a wanker anyway.
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Nope, apathy rules supreme and there are no icons to inspire us, no alternatives to turn to. In that kind of environment Tony Blair or George Bush could be found covered in cocaine dust, in bed with a disembowelled prostitute deliriously chanting 'The bitch was asking for it. The bitch was asking for it'.
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and still get re-elected.
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Bush and Blair did half-heartedly attempt to explain away the lack of WMDs by saying that regime change was really the goal. Regime change was necessary because, in their words, 'Sadam Hussein Is The Weapon of Mass Destruction'. So, they trundled out the SHITWMD explanation for a while but they didn’t really care too much. Who are the rest of us going to call now that we finally, derr, realise we've been lied to? What are we going to do about it?
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Biff.
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At times like these I find myself turning to the teachings of one of the great political and social commentators of recent times; Paul Verhoven, director of Showgirls and Basic Instinct.
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When not making films about lapdancers and lethal shags or directing 1970's softcore Dutch flicks, featuring a youthful Rutger Hauer, Verhoven spends part of his time making sci-fi films. The beauty of sci-fi, or course, is that fact that you can say pretty extreme and cutting things about the world around you today, provided you also feature some really enormous man-eating insects to distract the morons who make up 70-80% of our populations. Besides, I don’t consider myself a moron and I still think enormous man-eating insects are cool.
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And so Verhoven gave us Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. The three of them, together, say pretty much everything that needs to be said about contemporary US and UK society. From executives blowing each other up in the promotion race, the privatisation of public infrastructure and the sacrifice of individuality on the altar of technology in Robocop, through to the rise of a fascist superstate, taking its brainwashed population to unnecessary war in Starship Troopers. It's all there.
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And you thought Starship Troopers was just The Sands of Iwo Jima meets Zulu meets Star Wars meets some Nazi wet dream propaganda flick, when all along it was biting social commentary. Yeah, and Russ Meyer movies were just about women with enormous breasts.
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One of my many favourite lines from Verhoven movies is spoken by the Cohagen character in Total Recall …
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It's because I have the greatest job in the solar system … I can do anything I want. ANYTHING. And I fear that if the rebels win, it all might end. AND YOU'RE FUCKING MAKING IT HAPPEN!
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And little later on, the same character is asked if the air supply should be reconnected to a group of suffocating people in his colony, his world if you would. His reply?
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'Fuck 'em'
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It's about time Verhoven gets the recognition he deserves and his films studied alongside the works of Plato or Marx. They're a lot more relevant and include much better chase scenes; plus heaps of Verhoven trademark gratuitous nudity and mutilation.
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Unfortunately, whilst comprehensively cataloguing the issues facing individuals today, Verhoven offers little in the way of solutions. Maybe he's saying that there are none. The hero in Robocop is destined to a life of excrutiatingly poor sequels, the happy ending in Total Recall could possibly be the result of a deranged fantasy induced by brain damage and Starship Troopers finishes with a recruitment film that suggests the war will last pretty much forever. Thanks Paul, you're not really making yourself part of the solution are you.
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and, OK, Russ Meyer films were mostly about women with enormous breasts ...
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Supper with the Stars

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A highly recommended link if you are a) British and b) Older than 30 ...
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http://www.supperwiththestars.co.uk/mainFRAMES.htm

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Yes, for prices ranging from £300 to £5,000 you can share an evening meal with any of your choice from a wide variety of ex soap stars, 80's pop acts, retired sportsmen and gameshow presenters. Reading through their resumes holds the same fascination as staring at the aftermath of a particularly horrific car accident as you drive slowly by. For example ...
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Limahl will talk extensively about his experiences in the music industry and perform many of hit hits in a karaoke style. He will also take part in after dinner party games.
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As the band's (Spandau Ballet) lead singer, Tony still enjoys work as a vocalist and will deliver a medley of hits after dinner to make your party Gold!.
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Keith likes to appears on his own, but for an additional fee, will bring along either Orville or Cuddles.
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Nick will chat about his career at length.
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etc etc
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Based on my own personal experience of actors and other performing folk I'd be willing to pay £5,000 to have them NOT sit opposite me at a dinner table and run though their favourite stories. However, the temptation to reach into my life's savings and book one of these guys to share a fava bean on toast dinner with just me, a bottle of Italian red wine and an uncovered lightbulb and have me tell THEM stories, in my best Hannibal Lecter voice, is mighty powerful.
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If Supper with the Stars' prices are too high why not consider booking one of the outstanding celebrity lookalikes on offer here ...
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http://www.splitting-images.com/celebrity_list.html

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Given how so unlike many of these people are to the celebrities they are impersonating I reckon they don't get much work and would be grateful for a free meal and a fiver. Even better, book five or six at the same time and instruct them to stay in character throughout the evening. How about ...

Sharon Stone / Gillian Anderson / Kylie Minogue / Liz Hurley / Lara Croft / Audrey Hepburn

and invite your friends around for after dinner coffee. There again, maybe not, the available Lara Crofts aren't that hot. One of the Audrey Hepburns isn't too bad though and, like the original, could do with a couple of quarter pounders inside her. Ooops, better say cheeseburger to avoid the unintended double entendre.

or

Mr Spock / Colombo / Albert Einstein / Clint Eastwood

and you could all solve a crime together in the basement after pudding

or

Bono / David Bowie / Diana Ross / Victoria Beckham

and host your own charity fund raising concert.

No, wait, even better. Book one real celebrity from the first website and two or three fake ones from the second site and have them all round at the same time and see if any of them notice what you're up to.
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I need to think about this a lot more
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London 2012 bid - 'we have to destroy the environment in order to regenerate it'

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Whilst strolling around and taking pictures in East London last week I came across a series of stickers publicising the following site:
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http://www.nolondon2012.org/

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It's a page, supported by East London community groups, devoted to opposing London's bid to host the 2012 Olympics.
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I'm all for that.
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Without rehashing an earlier post of mine I am fervently anti-bid for zillions of reasons, including:

• the cost, which will undoubtedly spiral out of control, will be borne entirely by Londoners
• London's transport infrastructure is falling apart already
• Based on recent London projects, from The Dome to the Diana Fountain to the new Wembley Stadium, implementation of a successful bid would be a disaster
• Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone support it enthusiastically so it must be cr*p. Really, really cr*p

After checking out the anti-bid site I have picked up another reason to despise the bid.
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The bid plan includes a proposal to turn Hackney Marshes into a paved coach park.
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People unfamiliar with East London won’t understand the importance of Hackney Marshes. We're talking about a large open area that has existed since the year dot. On Sundays you can watch literally dozens of amateur football matches taking place simultaneously on the geometric layout of grass pictures. For much of the rest of the week it is a green haven of peace and tranquillity, home to all sorts of local sporting activities and local festivals and events.
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… and some fecker wants to cover it in concrete to service a bloated sporting event that will last for about a fortnight. Bloody criminal.
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According to the official 'Back the Bid' website, 75% of people in the UK and Londoners want the Olympics to be staged in London. Well that's an outright lie for a start. No-one I know wants the Games here and they certainly don’t want to pay for them. There's also a give away in the line 'people in the UK and Londoners'. Given that Londoners live in the UK I can only conclude they've used this particular phrasing to mask the fact that Londoners aren’t happy with the idea. I've no doubt people in the rest of the UK are cool with a London Olympics as they won’t have to pay for it or live with the other consequences. Anyway, why would the Powers That Be be spending thirty, forty, fifty million pounds of our money on a Back The Bid campaign if we were already sold on idea.
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Apparently, a group of IOC officials are visiting East London in the middle of February to get a feel for local support for the bid and pick up their official London 2012 bribes and promotional call-girl action. I for one will do my best to be there to moon them and generally be as rude and offensive as possible.
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and remember, crime is YOUR fault

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There's been a spate of burglaries along my street recently. Fortunately Lambeth Council and the Metropolitan Police are on the case and have struck back hard. They've paid someone to put up a series of laminate posters telling householders that the burglaries are their fault because, apparently, we leave our doors and windows wide open. Which is quite rich given that most of us have more or less nailed or welded them permanently closed some time ago.

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I'm only posting these pictures up because it's so typical of life in New Britain. Our government tells us that crime is falling and that hospitals and schools are wonderful yet everything seems to be worse rather than better. All we receive in exchange for higher taxes is a regime of signs and fines (directed at regular citizens rather than criminals). We have more CCTV cameras per head of population than anywhere else on Earth and record numbers of police. Yet, somehow, burglars can happily work a street, house by house day by day, with little fear of being caught and little prospect of any jail time even if they are. It's just a matter of time, and not much time, before someone does my place.

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What's galling is that the problem could be solved with a few days surveillance but our police are too busy hanging around in groups of thirty protecting buildings from bullsh*t terror threats to waste their time on anything so mundane as catching criminals. Bizarrely, the War in Iraq and douche bags breaking into flats in Lambeth ARE directly connected in this, our wonderful Culture of Fear.
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It's hard to explain just how angry and impotent I feel with our present government; incompetent at home, stained with blood overseas. And there's biff all I can do about it. I know I'm supposed to be living in a democracy but it doesn't feel like it. The problem is, of course, the matter of choice. Who do you vote for when all the candidates are w*nkers?

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PS Here's an email from my chum Ian in response to me sending him these pictures

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... not only is it your fault, even though you haven't done anything wrong (yet, in their eyes), it's your fault in advance, regardless of whether anything will happen or not. You should turn yourself in now.
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Last night in the pictures, I was accused, by the screen, of possibly wanting to drive too fast and knock motorcyclists down, not paying my tv licence and deserving a fine, and wanting to record Meet the Fockers on portable video equipment and deserving to go to jail.
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In addition I am guilty already in advance for not filling my tax return out in time (unless I actually do fill it in) and not paying my congestion charge in time and needing a terse reminder, even though I do not have a car.
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Reading adverts is shit enough all the time but I am reminded now that I am (probably) a criminal unless I keep track of all this shit. Was it like this 10 years ago ?

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The short answer is, no it wasn't like this ten years ago ..

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The fine art of criticism

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Three weeks ago I wrote a blog posting that included one of my semi-weekly swipes at the Da Vinci code.
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I've deliberately held back from laying into that book recently as I was patently becoming a bore on the subject. Yes, I have tried to show restraint. Even after my recent trip to Hungary when I witnessed literally dozens of people staring with glazed, bored-sh*tless eyes at Dan Brown books, written in a variety of languages, in airport lobbies, train stations and bus stops on the journey to and from here and Budapest.
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Anyway, in my most recent shot at the Da Vinci code I mentioned that Dan Brown had patently stolen all of his material, including the plot and all of his 'meticulous research', from The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and another book called The Da Vinci Legacy by a guy called Lewis Perdue. I also mentioned that The Da Vinci Legacy wasn't that crash-hot a novel. Not bad as such, just not brilliant.
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Poop blog entry

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Lewis Perdue left a comment on my blog a few days ago.
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Ooops.
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Lewis is clearly a sport and included the line 'For what it's worth, Da Vinci Legacy is not my best book ... fortunately I write better than I did 21 years ago. If you have some time, try Daughter of God or Slatewiper ... both a lot better.'
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I probably will pick up a copy of one of his later books to make amends. After all, he's published. I'm not. The guy clearly is more committed than I am and/or writes better than I do. Sorry Lewis.
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He also left a link to the latest on his plagiary case against Dan Brown
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http://www.davincilegacy.com/Infringement/

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Fingers crossed on that one. Brown and his publishing house deserve to be gutted like fishes.
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This is the second time something like this has happened to me recently. A few months ago a famous photographer, Bill Eggleston, wrote to me in response to a page that I had written that included the word 'Eggleston', 'Photographs' and 'Sh*t' in the same sentence. He too proved to be a good sport and left me feeling that I didn’t have a skin tough enough to become a literary or art critic. Bill even went so far as to invite me for a drink over Christmas time but then stopped writing a little before then; possibly because I stopped saying how rubbish his pictures were. Nobody likes a toady.
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Anyway, I've learned that, when writing web pages, it's worth remembering that artists and other public figures have feelings too and some of them appear to have time enough on their hands to do Google searches on their own names. So, don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to their faces. Well, I'm still on safe ground writing stuff like this then …

• Dan Brown's books are so terrible they leave me questioning the value of human existence
• Tony Blair is a lying, blood-stained lunatic who will burn in Hell
• Bono and his luvvy mates should dip their hands into their own pockets a bit more for a change and lay-off thinking that being pop stars makes their opinions more worthy of a showcase than anyone else's

I even thought about writing something negative about a public figure I want to meet in the hope that they would be lured, Perdue and Eggleston style, into contacting me. Sadly, I couldn’t come up with anyone. Anyone alive that is. So, unless someone finds a way to wire the Internet into the Afterlife I'll give up on that plan for now. Actually, that's not strictly true. I did toy with the idea of writing a post entitled 'Cameron Diaz - that ugly old trout' but I'm a happily unmarried man who would certainly choke if presented with a naked movie goddess saying 'Take me! Take me! Abuse me more you bounder!'; so I gave up on that idea as well.
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Who needs censorship when you can do it yourself

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A few days ago I was reading another Blog that was taking about censorship in the UK. This was written off the back of recent stories about Sikhs closing down a play, the Prince Harry uniform thing and last week's broadcast of 'Jerry Springer - The Opera' on BBC2.
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Very understandably and laudably, the Blog makes the point that these are examples of censorship by minority groups and that the right to free speech must be defended. On a larger scale, the news media took a similar line with these stories and held them up as examples of attacks on our otherwise noble tradition of freedom of thought.
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B*llocks.
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There's no such thing as free speech in this or any other country. There never was and what little expressive freedoms we did have are being eroded by the minute.
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Sure, it's not right for minority groups to attack free speech but there is also widespread censorship through exclusion and bias as well. The people producing plays / documentaries / news stories are absolutely not representative of the general population and their concerns or beliefs at all. These people are also mindful of the requirements of their paymasters - be they politicians or conglomerate owners.
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Stories like the recent ones about Jerry Springer et al. are ramped up in the media to give Joe Public the impression that censorship is the exception rather than the rule and also to misguide us all as to where the true censors of our thoughts lie. Freedom of speech is 100% useless if it is only directed towards useless things and, by and large, that's pretty much what is happening.
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I have several personal favourite areas of exclusion. First off there's the whole Iraq thing, symptomatic of the way our political thoughts are controlled. Here's a site filled with hundreds of pictures of dead and wounded Iraqis that never made it into the Western media
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http://www.einswine.com/atrocities/iraq/

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You might think that these have been kept from us for reasons of decency and respect. You'd be wrong. That didn't seem to get in the way when that Russian school was blown up last year.
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Another personal pet peeve is the entire 9/11 thing. 9/11 has been used to justify wars and monstrous erosions of civil liberties. A globla police state is one stop nearer. The problem is that the 9/11 story, as told, just isn’t right. No-one in the media has taken up the glaring inconsistencies in the accounts of what happened and this task has been left to the tinfoil underpants brigade on the Internet, with all the flaws that go with that
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http://www.biscuitgame.com/world/911/911.htm

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http://www.serendipity.li/wtc13.htm

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http://www.911review.org/

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A final example. A recurring theme of mine is the growth of science as a new religion and the moral despair in the West that has gone with it. Science is always portrayed as being all-knowing and religion as all-loony. A recent example was the widely reported discovery of a new human ancestor a few months ago, dubbed 'Hobbit Man' so that us stupid people would take an interest. What wasn't so widely reported was a follow-up story a couple of months later about recent research that shows that ALL supposed human fossil ancestors lay within the range of accepted physical human variation; Neanderthals, 'Lucy', Java Man and Hobbit Man, all just as human as Eskimos and pygmies. When the Hobbit Man story broke, the Sunday supplements were full of flatulent articles criticising religious belief. When the follow-up story appeared there was nothing, nada.
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torygraph hominid story

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Of course, media figures would argue that they have a responsibility to filter-out stories that are inaccurate, hateful, irrelevant or insane. But who decides? Who put them in charge? I certainly didn’t vote for them. Occasionally, we will be treated to a news item or documentary that apparently challenges some of the lies we are told. The usual deal is to present the 'anti' case in a skewed way; either by vicious editing of footage if the advocate is too strong or selecting an incompetent loony to make the case in the first place. Sometimes the production teams are really blatant and light up their interviewees with harsh, Vincent Price style lighting, placed somewhere just beneath their victim's chin. This kind of behaviour occurs with depressing regularity.
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Arts and drama are no freer from bias than 'hard news'. How far would I get televising a drama that say featured:

• The life and times of a super-rich media tycoon, manipulating people on a national scale with a daily diet of fear and porn.
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• A risqué play about the hypocrisy of supposedly compassionate media executives and celebrities lecturing the World about how it should behave, whilst themselves living a cocooned lifestyle of privilege and obscene conspicuous consumption.
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• A senior politician calmly sacrificing the lives of a few thousand citizens in order to pursue an agenda of self-glorification.
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• A central character driven to despair and anti-depressants by a pointless working life, living in an empty, consumerist world and a daily diet of soul-destroying mindshit in the media. The last lonely act of his life played out in an old people's home modelled on Belsen; his kids waiting impatiently for him to die so they can get on with tossing his cremated remains onto a flower bed and selling his house to pay for a new car and family holiday to Disneyland.

And so on.

(As an aside there has been some talk of enacting pro-euthanasia legislation in the UK recently. Funnily enough the last time right to die laws crept to the top of the headlines was at the end of the last property boom. Trying to grow old in a time of rapidly rising house prices really can be a pisser)
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And finally, on top of all the manipulation and censorship that is performed on us we, as individuals, administer the final coup de grace to any possibility of free thinking by suppressing those trickles of free speech that somehow manage to reach us.
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We censor ourselves.
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That's the beauty of thought control. After a few years of indoctrination we do all the hard work for our politicians and multinationals anyway. Like McDonalds subsidising Happy Meals and kiddies playgrounds, if you catch people early enough they're yours for life.
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Human beings really hate bad news and will go to great lengths to filter it out from their lives. We choose newspapers that match our political views, we select non challenging books and television and dismiss those we disagree with as being insane or misguided.
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When was the last time you, or any other human being, voluntarily bought a newspaper or book or consumed any other kind of media that they knew would fundamentally contradict their beliefs about how the World works?
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Don’t be silly.
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And then there's the issue of attention spans. Life is far too exciting and packed with reality TV and visits to IKEA to spend any longer than 30 seconds contemplating any single issue. There's just so much great stuff to do and see.
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Yup, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and people get the style of government they deserve. We're not particularly vigilant and we don’t deserve very much. So, it looks like those two old adages have stood up pretty well to the test of time.
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Fame at last

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Ian just emailed to tell me that some of my pictures have appeared on the BBC London site ...
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BBC London Gallery

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A few factors kind of take the edge off this particular achievement

• they resized the pictures such that they look all fuzzy and nasty
• 95% of the numerous other pictures on the site are really rubbish
• the BBC hasn't back-linked to my own London site that goes into great detail describing how horrible large swathes of the City have become. Funny that
• most of my pictures have been placed in Gallery 13. My Easy Jet boarding pass yesterday was ... no 13. I opened a pack of Hungarian Jaffa Cakes this morning and it contained ... 13 East European Jaffa Cakes. Brrr, scary.

Budapest for dummies

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Mmmm, Budapest
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Well, it was cold. Probably too cold for general tourism. In fact, I came back home with only 10 pictures which, for me, is unheard of.
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On my first morning there I popped out for a stroll at 6.00am, as is my way, just to get a feel for what the City is like when it wakes up. Rather stupidly, I had a quick shower just before leaving and didn't dry my hair before exiting the hotel. Even more stupidly, I didn’t have a hat with me. The back of my head was frozen with ice within ten minutes.
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I think that qualifies as cold. Anyway, it warmed up later in the day, to about -8C.
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To be honest, I was quite under-whelmed with the place. There's nothing actually wrong with Budapest at all really. It's just that I've seen it all before …
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Tracy was travelling to Bratislava the day I returned home and the Hungarian woman she was working with said 'Oh Bratislava is lovely. There's a beautiful river, and a castle and a cathedral, and lovely squares …'. I don’t think she understood why Tracy started giggling. The problem is, to us jaded Britlanders, all East European capitals look exactly the same. Basically, anyone proposing to construct a new East European capital city needs to choose as many items as possible from the following list:

• An enormous castle
• A huge river prone to severe and frequent flooding
• Not enough bridges across said river
• A parliament building the size of Cuba; inversely proportional in size to the country's democratic tradition
• Two cathedrals
• An opera house
• Huge, poorly built civil service buildings made from crumbly concrete dating from the 1940s
• Enormous abstract monuments commemorating a seemingly endless series of National Independence days dating from 1815 to 1993
• Countless statues of moustachioed sword-wielding men on prancing horses
• Busts of bearded, pipe-smoking poets and intellectuals.
• Swathes of enormous Victorian-era apartment blocks suitable for ambushing German tanks from and Stalingrad-style street fighting
• Two enormous draughty museums
• Crypt-style basement restaurants, bars and cafes

... all built to an absolutely gigantic, mock classical and emotionally cold, scale. Vienna is probably the worst offender and is absolutely stuffed full of enormous public buildings that possibly would be appropriate for the capital of country maybe 20 times the size of Austria. England controlled something like a 1/3 of the World at one point but never saw fit to model its capital in such a way.
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When you visit cities like this your first feeling is of awe but that is soon replaced by a sense of ennui; a profound feeling of boredom, almost despair, right to the core of your soul. 'Yeah yeah big opera house yeah yeah Disney style castle yeah yeah statue of some king with a moustache bored now'.
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What these city centres and their buildings lack above all is a sense of a human touch. I've said this before, but I grew up in a city that had no need for defensive fortifications for 500 years and a rule of law which meant no despot could tear down your house just to build a wide avenue, enormous statues and a mock Roman palace just to glorify his name. I like that. That's the kind of pride in our nation's history that's quite deliberately not taught in school's any more. Cities like Budapest are the result of multiple doses of despotic building behaviour - the Hapsburgs, the Communists and now the big hotel chains. Ugh. It's really not difficult to understand why East Europeans have such a hard-on for visiting Italy or the UK. Sure, Italy and the UK have their share of architectural giganticism but they feel a lot different. The other thing to bear in mind is that you're standing in the middle of a country surrounded on all sides by lots of other, similar, countries. Having grown up in the UK, it's quite claustrophobic when you think about it.
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On the plus side, the Hungarians themselves seem largely to be a sturdy, hobbity people; keen on eating prodigious quantities of meat and, when younger, lots of rough shagging after, or during, evenings spent in extreme night clubs. Presumably, the Hungarians also get up to other activities when it's warmer; playing gypsy fiddle music and persecuting Turks like their Great Great Great Grandparents did (bet the Hungarians are looking forward to further EU enlargement), but in January I get the distinct impression that they just eat meat stew and screw 'cos there's nothing else to do.
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Cool.
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Yes, Budapest should definitely be top of the 'Must Visit' list for any intrepid traveller with a meat fetish. Lots of people can be seen walking their dogs around town throughout the day. At first, I thought they were pets but, after visiting a couple of Hungarian restaurants, I realised that they were more likely to be an emergency reserve snack just in case the locals get caught short of meat for any length of time. When you order a leg of pork that is indeed what you receive. As in Austria, waiters will plonk down a large tea tray laden with a dozen hunks of schnitzel with a smile that says 'see if you can eat all of that you soft Western bastard'. And it's reasonably priced too.
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That's not to say everything in Budapest is a bargain. Tracy's colleague, Shane, went cruising for action on his own one night and spent part of the next morning extolling the virtues of how cheap the night life was. After a few minutes of discussion it became clear that, under the influence of alcohol, he had mistaken the currency exchange rate when drawing money from a cash machine by a factor of ten. This meant that he had been paying £10 a time to visit a series of night clubs and had tipped a barman £15. He then spent much of the remainder of the day worrying about his overdraft.
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And yes, I laughed.
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