Two posts masquerading as one ...

Nunhead Cemetery

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… and what an amusing day today has been
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I've haven't had so much public exposure since that identikit picture looking like me was shown on Crimestoppers a few years back.
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Come to think of it, it's probably safe to stop wearing these glasses now.
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Thanks to that referral in Boing Boing, something like 21,000 people visited the Lite version of my London photo gallery on Flickr. Fair play to Flickr and their free account, it served up those 21,000 pages over a two day period without choking. Part of me is a little disappointed though as I thought this would be the moment I would taste the bittersweet joy of a 'bandwidth exceeded' message on one of my web pages.
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And, of course, Life being what it is this spurt of traffic came completely out of the blue and my web presence was in no way configured to benefit from it in any way whatsoever; no pictures for sale, no professional looking presentations, no scintillating, darkly humorous writing suitable for filming or publication. I had 21,000 visitors round to my virtual house and what they saw, for the most part, was the virtual equivalent of half-eaten fast food containers lying around the virtual equivalent of my front room.
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I had my chance and I blew it.
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Ho Ho
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I've had my 15 Megapixels of fame, may as well never take another photo or never write anything again and retire to a fortified compound in the South Western United States, with just a moderate cache of firearms for company.
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Of course, what the listing in Boing Boing and the fair number of favourable comments I've received on Flickr do suggest is that there is a market for London imagery that is more 'real' and less affected than the usual, cliched fare. This suggestion is in keeping with my lukewarm project about writing for a new London Mythos, that I will probably dust off and finally get stuck into sometime this week.
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Anyway, today's post wasn't supposed to be about all that stuff, no. I was hoping today that I could write praising the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for finally awarding an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar to one of the greatest actors or our time, Bill Paxton.
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Every year I watch the Oscars with bated breath and every year I'm disappointed. This year was no exception.
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For men of a certain age, my age, a significant proportion of our ever-dimming memories of the period 1985-1995 involve sitting in front of the television, surrounded by other men, beer and pizza, watching videos of Michael Biehn and Bill Paxton trying to save the world and normally getting killed in the process; particularly Bill. From Terminator through to Aliens, Navy SEALs and Tombstone you could always rely on Bill Paxton to deliver some memorably spineless lines, then find his inner courage just before being torn apart by some nameless horror.
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Bill has died nobly for our entertainment; many, many times, and the least we could do is make sure he gets the recognition he deserves and receives a fricking Oscar. Time to start a campaign methinks …
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The three most interesting Bill Paxton facts I can think of off the top of my head at the moment:

• Along with Lance Henrikson, Bill is the only actor to have been slaughtered on screen by a Terminator, a Predator and an Alien (that should be worthy of some kind of award in itself)
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• Surprisingly, Bill has never worn a red sweater and beamed down to a planet surface as part of a Star Trek 'Away Team'
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• As well as appearing in Apollo 13, Bill Paxton has also travelled on a number 13 London bus; upon which, the story goes, he first met his wife. Disappointingly, the No.13 bus route itself is not as scary as its Apollo namesake or its number would suggest, travelling as it does between Golders Green and Aldwych via Baker Street. Personally, I think that the No. 13 route number should be swapped with something like the 88 which, whilst being a lucky number in Chinese, is far from fortunate for anyone boarding or alighting in the Stockwell area.

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Fame at last #2

Wifi Point Peckham

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Woke up this afternoon and noticed a mass of trade on my Flickr account of London photos. It turns out that I received a favourable mention on this site
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http://boingboing.net/

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This is the Internet equivalent of getting a plug on a major talk show. I should be chuffed at the compliment.
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A fair bit of traffic has spilled over onto this blog as a consequence. Just in time to catch an 'interesting' stream of posts, including an account of me getting my crown jewels trapped in the bath and an extended anti science tract that presents me as some kind of Amish style luddite.
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Timing, as they say, is everything.
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Right, I'm off to write a blog entry that would have made Hunter S Thompson and Ernest Hemingway shoot themselves with envy then, afterwards, I might post some of my good London pictures on Flickr, rather than some tatty old rejects ;-) ...
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(PS Thanks for the plug JenH, whoever and wherever you might be)

Jurassic Westworld

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OK I've made one post about lacerated nads and another having a pop at John Prescott. I think I can indulge myself with a heavy, longish one now; for variety's sake if nothing else.

Here's an interesting read for anyone interested in the role played by science in politics today …
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http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html

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It's a speech by Michael Crichton and though on the long side it is rather good and worth ten minutes of any thinking person's time.
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The speech was made a couple of years ago and received a mixed reception, particularly as it implied that a lot of the supposed science surrounding such hot current issues as Global Warming is not really science. Much of the criticism went along the lines of 'anyone who speaks out against the reality of global warming must be in league with the oil companies'. Maybe he is, I don’t know, but I have never been a great fan of shooting, or smearing, the messenger. Better to read the message and decide if it makes sense or not.
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Michael Crichton does have some Green credentials however. He clearly supports recycling, as evidenced by him using exactly the same story line for both Westworld and Jurassic Park; Cowboys AND Dinosaurs, this man is one shrewd dude.
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Once upon a time I was a great fan of modern science. Thirteen years of Catholic schooling will do that to you. I remember the reaction from the priest who ran my secondary school when I told him that I was off to start a geology degree. He wasn't that impressed. All those fossils and extended timescales tend to get in the way of a literal belief in the Bible. But, hey, I thought I was an atheist at the time, so what the f*ck.
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Since then I have learned a few things. Or rather I learned to interpret a few things in a different way. For the sake of keeping this post brief(ish) I'll restrict myself to a few bullet points:

• Science and religion are completely compatible
• Most scientific discoveries are accidental and often come as quite a surprise to the people making them as they are normally looking for something else. And that's why you can spend forty years and countless billions on, say, atomic fusion research and come up with, erm, no practical applications for atomic fusion.
• The scientific method, in its pure form, is indeed a noble thing
• However, scientists are people and are subject to exactly the same vices as the rest of us; jealously, ambition, pride, greed, insecurity, mendacity ...

To cap it all, much popular science has been hijacked by individuals who are just as dogmatic and narrow minded as the most extreme religious fundamentalists. Instead of liberating us from the supposed restrictions of religion they've just replaced them with new ones

• Belief in God = Belief in chance / probability
• Priests = Scientists
• Sacred objects = fossils, particularly of human ancestors
• Saints = Darwin / Einstein / Newton etc.
• Rituals = The experimental method
• Sacred Books = Scientific Journals
• Churches = Museums
• Cathedrals = BIG Science research sites e.g. CERN
• Seminaries = Universities
• Sacred Vestments = White Coats
• Prophecy = Modelling
• Sacred Dogma = BIG theories such as Evolution / Big Bang
• Superstitions = Smaller theories such as Global Warming / Extraterrestrial Life

And so on. I could make the list more comprehensive but I hope I've made my point. Science is a religion.
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Really.
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What makes this all so ludicrous is just how inadequate a tool modern science has become. We kid ourselves that we understand how the universe works yet we truly haven’t the faintest idea. If this seems harsh, ask yourself a few test questions:

• Given the choice would you be the first passenger on a rocket plane a) built solely on the basis of scientific theory with no practical testing, or b) built solely on a practical trial and error basis, by someone with no scientific background whatsoever?
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• Do you believe that scientists conducting genetic experiments are a) formulating experiments based on a thorough understanding of genetics, or b) just doing lots of sick twisted shit at random and seeing what comes out
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• Do you have the faintest idea what electricity is? Or light? Do you really think anyone else does?
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• Hand on heart, and head, do you really believe that you, your own self-awareness, is merely the product of instinct, acquired behaviour, a little chemistry and gene-powered self delusion?

A critical understanding of the limitations of science is more important today than it ever was. Scientists, as well as politicians, are increasingly aware that it is much easier to manipulate us with fear than dreams. They tried dreams for a while but fear pays better.
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A good contemporary example is the whole Global Warming issue. I am old enough to remember the days before Global Warming. Back then we were told to be scared of other things; Global Freezing, over population, resource depletion. You don’t hear much about those kiddies these days. Global Freezing didn’t work out as planned, resource depletion is a nonsense because we just find other ways of doing things, and human population will level off long before we run out of ways to make food production more efficient. In Europe we're actually paying farmers NOT to grow food. People are starving, sure, but that's 100% to do with politics and nothing to do with carrying capacity.
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So, all these chimeras were quietly dropped and Global Warming was edged to centre stage. This post is too long already to launch a polemic on that particular scientific superstition; let's just say the case for a human impact on global temperature isn't as cast iron as many people would have us believe. I will however chuck out a few parting thoughts on the subject

• Peak global oil production is likely to take place within 10-20 years, so how can those models that talk about the impact of fossil fuel usage in 50 to 100 years time make any sense? Or the whole Kyoto thing, come to think of it.
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• I can’t even get an accurate weather forecast for tomorrow morning so why should I have any faith in models that reach out 10, 20, 50, 100 years?
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• Variation in climate occurs naturally anyway. Londoners held markets and fairs on the frozen Thames 500 years ago. The Romans were growing Mediterranean crops in England 2,000 years ago. Desert regions in the Middle East were fertile 10,000 years ago. It happens.
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• We all avoid thinking about the the realities of our existence, pretty much on a constant basis but, for the record, we are sitting on a spinning ball of molten rock, hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour. Our planet is constantly bathed by deadly radiation given off by an enormous nuclear furnace. The space around our planet is filled with thousands of chunks of rock, all capable of stripping our world of its wafer thin atmosphere. Countless millions of species of defunct life forms have already existed on this planet before passing into extinction.
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  You've got two choices on this issue; either we're here as a fluke and could get snuffed out at any moment in the blink of an eye, or someone or something is looking after us. Either way, do you really think sorting out your rubbish into separate piles is going to change anything?

The very lovely John Prescott

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This one's been doing the rounds for a few days now ...

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If you do a Google search for 'f*ckwit' the first result takes you to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's biography on the official Number Ten web site.

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and there was me moaning the other day about how rubbish Google had become lately and how you now had to plough through to the fourth or fifth page of results before finding what you were looking for.

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Google I have wronged thee.

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Now the question that is niggling me is 'How?'. Given that the link is directly to the Number 10 site, surely that means Prescott's official biography actually has the term 'f*ckwit' hidden in the html somewhere?

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Now who says everything that comes out of Downing Street is a lie

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Finding Nemo's ballsack

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Trains of thought are strange, convoluted things. Sherlock Holmes believed that he could follow them just by observing a person's gestures, the outwards manifestations of what they were thinking.
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What would he have made of me in the bath this morning?

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A few key features of my bathroom need to be described first.

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My bathroom is the size of most people's bedrooms (conversely, my bedroom is the size of most people's bathrooms). As it stands, my bathroom was commissioned by the gay couple who owned my flat before me. It was installed by the guy who painted the flat for them. He was not chosen on the basis of any previous plumbing skills, he had none, but mostly because he looked good working in faded jeans and a ripped T shirt. Yes, life was just one long rollicking Diet Coke ad for the boys over the several months he took to complete his work.

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Sadly for me, moving in shortly after he 'finished', the resulting bathroom was a poorly-plumbed deathtrap including such unique fittings as:

• Huge 120lb chipboard cupboard doors, held in place by tiny hinges. The doors periodically break free and attempt to decapitate whoever's in the bathroom at the time
• A pair of matching wash basins, side by side, that just scream out gay to any visiting Christian Fundamentalists
• A bath the size of the Queen Mary, large enough to accommodate a couple of snuggly cohabitants and, in their dreams, a criminally useless odd job man armed solely with his toolbox and a thong. Sadly, the standard sized hot water tank only holds enough hot water to fill the bath by a few inches
• And this is the most important bit, the bath plug hole is located in the centre of the bath. The hole was originally covered by a mechanically-linked rising plug which broke almost straight away. The hole is now filled with a normal, in and out, plug.

This is the kind of thing that can happen when you let your sexuality spill over into non sexual areas of your life. I wouldn't select a plumber or mechanic solely on the basis that she looked like Milla Jovovich or chose to work in a bikini, that would be plain daft

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... mmmmm, well, OK, maybe I would

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Anyway, back to my chain of though this morning …

1. Had a soak in a lukewarm bath
2. Searched for shampoo. Shampoo all gone
3. Thought back to my father and his long-standing habit of washing his hair with dish washing detergent. Also remembered that he used to bathe in his underpants, wring them out afterward and leave them to dry out on the towel rail for use the next morning (more on these and other amusing habits another time)
4. Lay back in the bath. Decided to get out. Reached between my legs and pulled plug out
5. Testicles sucked straight into plug hole, hard enough to form a watertight seal
6. Ouch
7. Testicles continue in their determined bid to escape to the Thames and freedom
8. Images of deleted scenes from Finding Nemo flash through my pain-wracked brain. Scenes featuring brightly coloured fish swimming around the Barrier Reef, accompanied by my smiling, animated ball sack
9. Still nailed firmly to bottom of bath.
10. Eyes watering now
11. Eventually managed to yank nads out of plug hole by using tip of little finger to first break the seal
12. Realised the true reason why my father bathed in his underwear. Kind of upset with him for not telling me on my 18th.

Ghostly?

Kensal Green, NW London

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(Photofriday submission http://photofriday.com/ )

You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips

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For reasons that escape me now, I was perusing a variety of horoscopes a few days ago. Well-versed as I am in the more traditional Dark Arts I didn't even bother looking into my Western-version horoscope, I'm an Aquarius, but moved straight onto the Chinese stuff.

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In the Chinese Zodiac I qualify as a wooden snake.

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Per an American website that follows the time honoured tradition of all horoscope commentaries of never saying anything bad about peoples' personalities ...

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Snake people enter a room and there is Music, Music, Joy! Everyone dances! Such high spirit! The Snake is so intense and passionate, just as likely to take out the castanets as to climb mountains of snow. Snake year people are charming and romantic, often planning delightful hideaway surprises. Possessing tremendous wisdom, they are deep, quiet thinkers, calm by nature, but most intense. They often get involved in great causes, bigger than life, and often serve as mentors to the young. To paraphrase Confucius, they have a kind of inner beauty that arises, hovers, then comes to nest. They will have an abundance of good fortune and a long and prosperous life.
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Well that's me down to the tip of my fingernails. More worrying was this snippet at the end of the gushing snake eulogy ...
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Famous Snake People: Mao Tse-tong, Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Ferdinand Marcos, Abraham Lincoln, Lady Pamela Mountbatten, Martin Luther King, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, Edgar Allen Poe, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bob Dylan

This is not a good list. Not only does it include evil tyrants such as Mao, Marcos and Blair, it also features far too many people who were shot in the head.

So, I decided to start a new branch of astrology/ divination. One that would deliver the kind of results I wanted to hear. One based on the musical charts at the time you were born. And so, armed with the country and date of my birth, I was able to refer to this site
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http://www.rockmine.music.co.uk/Lists/Charts.html

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and establish that I was born in the week of 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' by The Righteous Bros.
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That's more like it!
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Sadly, I couldn't calculate Tracy's birthchart as New Zealand Singles Charts from three decades back are as hard to find as Shakespeare First Folios. However, if she had been born in the UK she would be under the sign of Black Night by Deep Purple; also not a bad record. If she had been delivered six months premature though she would have caught the original Spirit in the Sky which would certainly have been worth aiming for.
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Right, I'm off to start a whole new science of personality profiling and prediction; including compatability charts, careers advice and discussion of the influence of B sides, 12 inch and import versions:
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'Those born whilst Novelty Christmas Singles were playing on the radio will not find true love with those born under the influence of Hendrix.'
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'There appears to be some remixing in your chart. That is not good.'
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'You lie in the House of Whigfield, you are therefore eleven years old and too young to be a policeman.'
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I'm sure this will catch on. I'll be rich I tell you. Rich!
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Jamie's School Dinners

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Caught the first episode of Jamie's School Dinners earlier tonight. Fantastic. Watching our hero attempt to cook meals for 1,000 scutter and chav children brought a smile to my otherwise drab life. Favourite scenes included …

• Kids scraping vegetable garnishes and anything else of nutritional merit off their donkey burgers and fries before eating them
• Jamie attempting to hide fresh vegetables in his pizzas by covering them with melted cheese
• The chief dinner lady asking incredulously 'Do you taste everything you cook before serving it to people?'
• Watching 200 kids walk right by Jamie's green chicken curry and courgette focaccia, selecting sausages made from pigs' lips and chunks of reconstituted potato shaped like smiley faces instead.

This vision of our nation's future choosing a processed meal costing 37p in preference to fresh food prepared by a famous chef that would cost between £15-20 in his trendy East London restaurant was profoundly amusing. He is so onto a loser. There's more next week and I can hardly wait.
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At this point I could launch into a polemic about the folly and short-sightedness of feeding inner city schoolkids meals that cannot cost no more than 37p each whilst we spend billions pursuing unjust foreign wars but Jamie's doing that already, sort of.
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No, that's not why I've written this post. I was just thankful for any opportunity to reproduce the now legendary publicity photo for Jamie's 2004 Calendar, as featured in the Boots 2003 Christmas catalogue. And I took it.
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Getting Old and Giving Up Pt.2

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In my previous post I praised Hunter S. Thompson for not selling out even after success and fame came his way ...

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He was a rare individual.
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There are others out there. John Lydon comes to mind for some reason. His individuality has a half-life approaching that of plutonium. So, even though he's mellowed in the 25+ years since his Sex Pistols days, he's still a bit of a card. I won't list any others. Let's just say for every Hunter S. Thompson or John Lydon there are ten Ben Eltons or Bonos.

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One of the penalties of getting old is living long enough to see all your heroes tarnish themselves. It's an almost inescapable fact of life that if you and your icon both live through to their middle years, you'll wake up one day and realise that he is a dick, and might even have been a dick all along.

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This is down to all sorts of factors; the cynicism that comes with age, the fact that your icon shot his load years back or, worse of all, he was a fraud from the beginning and sold-out as soon as he possibly could.

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And then, in the UK, we have an additional icon-tarnishing factor …

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Tony Blair won the general election in 1997.
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In the years leading up to that election, just about every representative of young, and not so young, music, literary and comedy culture sided with Labour. After the victory we were treated to news clips of contemporary musicians, comedians and writers being entertained by Tony at parties in No. 10. Yes sireee, a new day had dawned. The evils of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party were cast into the dustbin of history and everything was going to be just greeeeeat.

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And then Tony and his mates spoiled it all by turning out to be utter, utter tools.
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In fact, they are even worse than their Conservative predecessors, not that most us would like to admit it. New Labour has taken political arrogance and corruption to new levels. They've started wars, lied as a matter of course, sold themselves to the highest bidder and are working hard, very hard, to establish a police state.

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And what comment from the legions of cultural icons who helped make this happen?
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Not a bloody squeak.

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So here we are run by a government that's turned out to be plain nasty. Where's the backlash from our singers, comedians and writers? Well, they've bollocksed themselves haven’t they. How many would be prepared to admit they were fooled back in 1997? After years of preaching to people that Labour was the only compassionate choice who's going to say something different?

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Actually, that's not fair. George Michael, a former New Labour supporter, made a song and a video criticising Tony Blair, but it wasn't very good. As for the others, and any UK reader of this post knows the people I'm talking about, they've largely withdrawn from political comment and spend their time doing TV voice-over work, writing boring junk and eating in expensive restaurants. In a few years time they'll be advertising over 50s saving bonds and hearing aids. You pathetic f*cking scumbags. Hang your heads low in shame.

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We've all lived to see realisation of the dream of a Labour government coming to power and, now that has turned out to be awful, everyone seems a bit stuck on what to do next. Yes, New Labour's battle cry for the next election …

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'Vote for us. True, we're bastards but if you believe what we're telling you, you might possibly think we're not a bad as the alternative'
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'Workers of the World unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains' this is not.

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And look at the effect this is having on kids today. Twenty plus years ago youth culture; the music, the comedy, was angry and politicised. When a kid said 'Go f*ck yourself' there was meaning. Now when a kid tells you to GFY he's just telling you to GFY. Contemporary youth culture has been infiltrated wholesale by clothing and media companies. The future is portrayed as one filled with nightmares, fear and insecurity. There are no social or political alternatives on offer. Everything is just pants.

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No one's cracking any jokes or singing songs about that.

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No wonder kids are drinking more

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… over 40, tired now …

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Getting Old and Giving Up Pt.1 (aka My Nan the Orgasm Addict)

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So, no more Hunter S. Thompson.

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Shame.

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I can just imagine the turmoil and anguish he must have gone through before doing the deed. Pacing up and down. His mind wracked with confusion and doubt, and always that question ringing between his ears …

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Which of his twenty-two available, fully-loaded and meticulously maintained firearms was he going to use to blow his brains out?

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I am a fan of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I was also, and still remain, a fan of Hunter S. Thompson. Admittedly, everything he wrote after Fear and Loathing was rubbish but he is that rare example of a subversive figure who maintained his edge, even after he had achieved success and fame.

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OK, he was too smacked out of his face for the last thirty years to write anything worthwhile, but he did withdraw to a compound filled with peacocks, vulture statues, drugs, hard liquor, dynamite and firearms. He didn't die young but he did the next best thing. Big time.

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Nope, no toilet paper commercial voice-overs, game show presenting or celebrity telethons for Hunter.

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Hunter S. Thompson I salute you.

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It's hard to retain the fire of youth as you get older. Years ago I did some voluntarily work with disabled grannies. We would take them away on holiday for a few weeks and give their family carers a well-deserved break. We wouldn’t actually take the grannies very far from home. We would drive round in a long loop for a couple of hours and put them up in specially equipped residential facilities, usually no more than 10 miles from where we first collected them. But they were none the wiser. Bless …

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The reason why I mention this is that the sitting rooms in these places were always well-stocked with ancient, granny favourite records suitable for group sing alongs; after dinner and a small glass of sherry all round. Even by the admittedly sedate standards of the 1940s these records were dull; dull and slow. I would often wonder what my generation would be like when it was their turn. Would our tastes change as we got older? Would we want to listen to increasingly easy listening music as our eardrums, brains and bladders rotted with age? Or would we still be singing along to the punk and new wave hits of the 1970s and 1980s, jiggling away on our commodes whilst the kids looking after us were nodding away from the sheer tedium of it all …

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'Here you are Stef, shall I put on a record? Would you like to listen to some Stranglers? How about Bring on the Nubiles? You like that don’t you? I know. Let's listen to Orgasm Addict. That's your favourite. Come on everybody, sing along …'
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Well you tried it out for once,

found it alright for kicks.

but then you found out

it's a habit that sticks

you're an orgasm addict

you're an orgasm addict

sneakin' in the back door with dirty magazines

and your mother wants to know

what are those stains on your jeans

you're an orgasm addict

you're an orgasm addict
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Twenty years later, I and many others, still like the hard-edged, thrashy records we liked back then. Nope, rather than my record tastes atrophying over the years it would appear to be the popular music industry that is dying on its arse. Records made fifteen or twenty years ago still stand up well against more recent competition and, perversely, often sound fresher and more original than a lot of the stuff being sold today.

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When those grannies of old used to complain about modern music being rubbish, their opinion was based on a lifetime of listening almost exclusively to Mafia-connected crooners wurbling to a big band backing. Now some years later, with the benefit of almost 50 years of rock, pop, blues, reggae, ska, funk, techno and all the rest to call upon, a more objective opinion can be reached. Most contemporary music really is crap. And so dull that even my old stable of grannies could probably listen to it without having heart attacks. That's if any of them were still alive that is.

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A curious role reversal seems to be taking place. I can quite easily picture a time in the future when 80 year old pensioners, sitting in bacofoil covered anti-gravity wheelchairs, are slagging off their grandchildren for listening to records that are slow, tedious and rubbish and begging them to put on something with a stronger base line.

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But more of that a little later …
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Accenture-ate the negative

Deptford Highway Patrol

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… whilst on the subject of IOC inspectors and London's bid for the 2012 Olympics I have to confess that I didn’t, as intended, attend any of the anti-bid demonstrations last week. Some demonstrations did take place but, as far as I could tell, the inspectors were kept well away from the demonstrators, or any local residents at all come to think of it. For most of last week it would have been easier to locate nuclear submarines sailing under the Arctic ice cap than to pinpoint the IOC inspection team.
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The comparison with a staged school inspection really is very strong. At one point, the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell went on air to tell people who are against the bid not to demonstrate whilst the inspectors were here in case they 'spoiled things for everyone else'. She forgot to tell us not to run down the stairs or fool about with scissors but the bossy, psycho headmistress tone came across loud and clear. I really haven't heard language like that since I left school and it was particularly rich coming from an elected public servant.

Fuck off Tessa. I didn't vote for you or any of your mates you old trout.
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One clue as to the reason why the Labour party and certain businesses have a hard-on for the Olympics can be found in the following little snippet …
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Accenture, the Management Consultancy firm formerly known as Andersens (renamed so that we wouldn’t confuse them with their corrupt, thieving sister company Arthur Andersens) is one of the biggest sponsors of the London 2012 bid and has chipped more than £1m into the pot.
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Amusingly, Andersens are also sponsoring the Paris, New York and Madrid bids. Top quote from Accenture UK spokesperson:

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"I can assure you that the Accenture UK team are passionate about securing the 2012 Olympics for London. The team in France is passionate about Paris and the team in Spain is passionate about Madrid."

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Sadly for Accenture's Russian team, however passionate they may be about their city's bid, their firm hasn’t chipped any money there because everyone knows Moscow is going to lose.
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Naturally, Accenture's sponsorship is purely altruistic and nothing at all to do with snagging a fat chunk of the billions that will be spent by the winning city.
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Any third party who has ever had any dealings with Accenture style management consultants is painfully aware they have an appetitie for money and a capacity to destroy value that is second to none. And they are so good at what they do it is truly scary. It's easier to shake a rutting puppy off your trouser leg than get shot of management consultants once they get a foot in the door .
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Verily it is said 'He who avoids any major project endorsed by both Tony Blair and Accenture will live a longer and more prosperous life.'
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London Underground - giving its customers a thorough servicing

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We spent most of yesterday on mammoth walk across South and South East London; starting from the oval, through Camberwell, Peckham, Nunhead, New Cross, Deptford and up to North Greenwich.

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I haven’t been through Peckham Rye for quite a while and was impressed with the condition of the residential streets to the West of Rye Lane. Lots of houses have been renovated and we even walked by a couple of bijou, French style coffee bars doing a roaring trade. For a short while I even half expected Rye Lane itself to have undergone a similar transformation. No worries though. About 100 yards before we reached Rye Lane, we passed through whatever wormhole we had stumbled through earlier on and we were back in the South London I know and love. Within the space of 60 seconds, we passed a staggering drunk, a lunatic, then another staggering drunk wobbling their way down the street. The lunatic was particularly entertaining as he gave us a jaunty welcoming salute as we passed by. The fact that he was dribbling extensively didn’t detract from the warmth of his smile one little bit.

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It was just after 1.00pm.

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Rye Lane is the still the bizarre, heaving Mecca of open-fronted 3rd world food shops, pound stores and evangelical Christianity centres that it has been for long years past. The shops stock a more diverse range of goods now. Most of them, from hairdressers through to impressively over-staffed butchers, supplement their turnover by selling international phone cards, money transfer facilities and mobile phone fascias based on the National flags of a variety of East African countries. We were particularly taken by one Halal butcher that was offering a phone sim card unlocking service as well as meat. One of the staff, complete with blood-stained apron, was actually working on a customer's phone at the counter as we passed. If you’re looking to buy half a Koran-friendly sheep carcass (£27.50) and reactivating that cell-phone you've just 'acquired' (£5-10), without the fuss of visiting more than one shop, Rye Lane is THE place to be.

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Anyway, we eventually fetched up at the Dome. This is the second time we've been then in a couple of weeks. We're mad for it. There's something perversely attractive about the whole huge empty Dome, enormous, barely used, Tube and Bus station combo that draws us to the place. There's a lot of expensive infrastructure that would be awfully useful anywhere else but there. Gazing in awe at the line of empty buses and the overgrown car parks you cannot help but be impressed by the sheer demented folly of the entire exercise. Nice one Tony.

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And then down to the Tube. Much effort had been expended earlier in the week to keep the Underground going long enough to allow the Olympic inspectors to travel two stops on their own personal train. The strain had clearly proven too much as about half the Tube was now out of service.

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When I die I want there to be really such a thing as reincarnation and I want to come back as an IOC inspector.

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It would be heartening to believe that the IOC wouldn’t be so dumb as to rely solely on a carefully controlled, well-lubricated inspection of London to decide whether we should get the Olympics or not. Sadly, the World is rarely that sensible.

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But it is nice to fantasise that one day the IOC inspectors will return, dressed as humble pilgrims to walk amongst us mere mortals and see what things are really like. Afterwards, the Chief Inspector would tear away his cloak to reveal the five sacred rings of office. We would fall to our knees and cry out 'My liege you have returned to save us' and all would be well once more in Merrie Englande.

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Or maybe I've just watched Ivanhoe one too many times.

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Though, on thinking about it, it might be a good laugh to dress us as a medieval pilgrim, complete with trusty staff, and see what kind of reception you’d get in South London cafes and pubs. It might be fun to plonk down a purse of money and say something like 'Landlord. We have travelled many leagues, our throats are parched and we wish for ale, stables for our mounts, a flank of mutton and an clip-on Eritrean cell phone fascia. Get to it my man'.

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Well, they'd be no problem with that order in Peckham …

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Gritty urban street art by pussies for pussies

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I posted several pictures on the Flickr photo hosting service a few days ago. One of the pictures was the photo of Park Street, in my beloved Borough, that I posted on this blog earlier in the month. In the bottom corner of the picture there's some stencilled graffiti, saying 'This is Not a Photo Opportunity'.
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As a quick aside, I grew up on the margins of Borough, near Blackfriars Bridge. To me, it was easily the most character-packed part of London. All wharves and Georgian / Victoria shops and houses. I could wax lyrical for ages about the history of the place. Until a few years ago, hardly anyone from outside Borough knew it was there.

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Nothing lasts forever and Borough underwent a period of gentrification over the 1990's through to today. Several tourist attractions were built and opened; based on real or imagined aspects of the area's history. Those old buildings that weren't knocked down were renovated and priced beyond the dreams of mere mortals. The Mary Rose, sorry Globe, theatre 're-opened'. Borough Market went up-market. And the likes of Jamie Oliver, Bridget Jones and the characters from Lock Stock pretended they lived and worked around there. I could vom.

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I've been on sightseeing boat tours around Manhattan Island and through Chicago. My abiding memory of both is how most of the commentary related to what films had been made at various points along the routes 'To the right we can see the famous Corncob Towers made famous by the car chase in Steve McQueen's The Hunter', The Hunter?, 'If you could see past that skyscraper over there you would see the park bench Woody Allen sat on in Annie Hall'. Contrary to popular European belief, Americans actually have a lot of real history at their disposal but they are much more comfortable, and familiar with, the movie stuff; so that's what they get. My guess is that right now, there are tourist walking tours through Borough highlighting the same sort of 'history'.

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One of my greatest regrets is that I didn’t take a lot more pictures of Borough when I was younger before the changes came. My family sold-up a few years ago and I moved a short distance to nearby Lambeth. Lambeth smells. I miss home, but that was another time and another place.

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http://www.flickr.com/groups/lambeth/pool/

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http://www.flickr.com/groups/southwark/pool/

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But I digress.
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After I posted the picture with the stencilled graffiti on it, someone left a comment and a link. The link was to this site here …
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http://www.banksy.co.uk/menu.html

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On visiting the site a light bulb switched-on in my head. Over the last couple of years, I've noticed stencilled graffiti popping up all round London. Sometimes it's words, sometimes it's silhouettes. In fact, several pictures on this blog feature this stuff. Due to some peculiar mental blockage it never dawned on me that there might be some kind of movement behind all this. Shortly after looking at the Banksy site I stumbled onto a small Banksy Group on Flikr via someone else's blog.
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http://www.flickr.com/groups/banksy/pool/

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I am an active London street photographer and all this has passed me by. Am I slow or what?
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Well, maybe just old and out of touch. Christ, at this rate I'll be listening to Perry Como, well more Perry Como, and mentally pricing things in old money.
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I'm not too sure about how I feel about this stencil thing. True, I have been presented with some excellent photo ops and, by and large, the graffiti is non destructive (though the one at Park Street is pushing it). In honesty, most of the stuff I've seen I like.
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However, it's all a little pretentious for my tastes. Most of the stencil graffiti I've seen is restricted to 'safe' parts of town or places like Shoreditch, Borough and Brick Lane that may seem a little edgy but are mostly colonised by pink, middle-class twenty somethings from the Home Counties. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about pink, middle-class somethings from the Home Counties but, to me with my background, there is something a little affected and false about life in their little enclaves; surrounded by a wilderness of tower blocks, inhabited by people considerably less pink or middle class. One group knows they'll be moving somewhere nicer one day. The other group are stuck in their urban sh*tholes for life.
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I have seen little stencil street art in the really rough parts of town and certainly not in competition with any of the more purposeful 'tagging' you see in these less salubrious neighbourhoods. I have to conclude that the guys responsible for this stuff are essentially pussies.
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However, so am I. They clearly feel comfortable doing their work is exactly the same places that I feel comfortable whipping out my camera equipment. So, even though my purist streak draws me towards more hardcore, 'real' graffiti, I guess our paths will continue to cross for a good while yet.

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Sorry about that ...

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Bugger. I've relapsed and just made another overly heavy post.
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I'll try harder in future and only load my magazines with 'heavy' every third round or so.
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To make amends for that last post here's a picture of a Hello Kitty crop circle which probably had more to do with Japan than Alpha Centauri and, and this is a corker, a link to Internet Tennis - The Game of Kings
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http://kclements.members.beeb.net/internet_tennis.htm

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if you haven't played Internet Tennis before this comes highly recommended and it consumes little or no system resources. Suitable for one or two player action.
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What's the point?

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It's been a pretty gruelling week in front of the television. There's so much going on out there that I know to be wrong; so many porkies being told, so much all-round naughtiness taking place.

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So what?

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I won’t even list the events that have upset me so. What's the point of tossing a few hundred more sterile words into the ether, to join all those acres of newsprint and countless hours of television talk.

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It won’t change anything.

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Most of us are born with a desire to contribute to, and interact with, a better World. I personally believe that contributing to, and interacting with, a better world is a key requirement of a fulfilled life. However, and this did not happen by accident, most of us now believe that we can't change anything, so there is no point in getting out there and trying is there?

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There's plenty of evidence to support this apathy. Millions of people protested against an attack on Iraq. It still happened. Nobody wants GM food. We're still eating it.

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The forces that shape our World are obviously outside our control. So, the best we can do as individuals is to scratch the best burrow that we can, watch a lot of light entertainment and hope we won’t get bitten in the arse before we die. Anyway, we're all so weighed down with long working hours, debt, anxiety and stress that we don’t have time to make the World a better place do we?

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That describes most of us doesn’t it?

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In my experience, the single greatest cause of stress is being stuck in a negative situation where you believe there is nothing you can do about that situation. Now, how much stress and despair must be caused by us living in societies that we increasingly believe we have little or no impact on? Sit there, shut up and take it. Not exactly the recipe for a mellow life.

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Actually, the situation is even worse than that. Even when we do think we're supporting a noble cause and doing our bit, the cause is almost never as clear-cut as we'd like to believe.

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A personal favourite example of a good cause with an ulterior motive took place the Royal Navy drove slavery off the seas in the 1800s. Did that happen because the British people were morally opposed to slavery, as many were, or was it because Britain was the first country to industrialise and didn't need slaves any more? A similar question applies to the US Civil War. Was it about the morality of slavery or was it about the Industrialised North dominating the Rural South? Not many people in the North seemed to give a stuff about all those freed slaves, or their descendants, for 100 years or more after the war was won.

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More recently, the Kyoto Treaty is in the news this week. Is Kyoto all about an attempt to head-off global warming or is it the start of an attempt by the West to prevent future industrialisation and development in India and China?

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The War of Terror? Is the threat real or has it been puffed-up to suit the purposes of politicians and big business?

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It's all quite confusing really. You name a good cause and I can name a dishonest special interest group boosting that cause and making money off the back of it. From the current London Olympic Bid through to stem cell research, there's always a someone making a greasy buck behind a façade of good intentions.

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There are zillions of good and deserving causes out there. Which cause is or isn't in the newspapers on any particular day is decided by politicians and business. They, not us, decide what tugs at our heartstrings and when.

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What to do? Shutting yourself off from what's going on around you and focusing solely on your immediate day to day needs, as most of us do, is one solution but then you only live half a life. Taking on the people and organisations that manipulate us like dumb sheep is virtually impossible. They run the media. They make the law. When they do let us get together to support a cause, how can we be sure that we're not being manipulated to suit some hidden purpose? What are we, as individuals, to do?
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I'm f**ked if I know the answer.
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Rimming a Beaver

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One of the several displacement activities that enable me not to get round to writing a book is the fact that I'm trying to give up smoking. I haven’t given up fully as yet. I'm not in the right frame of mind to do that. But I have cut down significantly. It hurts. Without tobacco I'm like Popeye without his spinach. My super-powers of having something to do with my hands and not feeling vulnerable when in public places on my own are fading. I have nothing to do at bus stops. If I was still at work I would have no excuse to flee from the horror four or five times day.

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However, it dawned on me recently that, as a smoker, it would be a reasonable life investment to devote an entire year to kicking the habit. I could just sit in a cell doing biff all else, aside from not smoking ciggies for 365 days, and I'd come out on top. Provided I don't forget how to cross the road and get hit by a bus on my first day out.

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Anyway, earlier on today I made myself a cup of camomile tea in the vain hope that it would mask the withdrawal pangs.

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I was first introduced to the joys of camomile tea by my maternal grandmother. My mum's family come from a dirt-poor, remote village in one of the rougher parts of Italy. Surrounded as they were by copious quantities of indigestible weeds, and little else, my ancestors made the most of their lot and set about finding a use for each and every weed that God, in his infinite generosity, had blessed them with. This process was powered partly by desperation but also by a strong Catholic belief that everything had been set on this Earth for a reason. They were successful. Back in the days when my Great Grandparents generation was still around, you could pull out just about any manky looking plant and some old dear in a shawl would explain that you could ferment, chew, stew or brew that plant to some useful purpose.

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And this process has taken place all over the World for countless generations. At a picnic near Voronesz in Russia a few years ago our host explained, complete with appropriate and exaggerated hand gestures, that tomatoes prevent heart disease, parsley was more effective than Viagra and that vodka good for everything else. I remember thinking that things had turned out quite well for the population of Voronesz then; as vodka, parsley and tomatoes seemed to be the only things they possessed in relative abundance (in that order).

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Anyway, there I was savouring the calming effects of my cup of dead flower heads; enjoying one of the benefits of countless years of practical field testing. I thought how grateful I was for the legacy of those unnamed heroes who, amongst many other things, discovered that garlic wards off colds and that hemlock doesn't make a good salad leaf; they didn't writhe in vain. Admittedly, some of their discoveries were not particularly useful. For example, my grandmother once told me that dandelion leaves make you pee a lot. In the 32 years since I've learned this snippet I've encountered many situations where an anti-dandelion would have been handy but I have never thought 'Gosh, I really wish I could wee more, right here, right now. Look! Some dandelion leaves! Bona!'.

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And, mostly, I can understand how people came upon this knowledge. You will chew just about anything to hand when you have a migraine or a toothache, country people will attempt to ferment whatever they can lay their hands on and, sometimes, nature gives little hints; dock leaves are a cure for nettle stings and frequently grow near to nettles for example.

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But then we get onto the less explicable knowledge. From the plant world, my personal favourite is Celandine; famed as Wordworth's favourite flower and also known as Pilewort. It is called Pilewort because the bruised leaves, when mixed with lard and applied to the anus, are a traditional cure for haemorrhoids. This remedy is also known in Italy. So, I have to ask:

• Why would anyone think about mashing up Celandine leaves with animal fat, apply the mix to their haemorrhoids and keep it there long enough to see if it would have a beneficial effect?
• Having done this how would they go about explaining what they had done to other people?
• Given that this cure was known by peasant people in at least two different countries, could it be that more than one person did this?

My conclusion is that people are strange, very strange. And I haven't even mentioned Castoreum yet. Castoreum is bitter orange-brown oil, with strong, penetrating odour, found in two sacs between the anus and external genitals of beavers. Castoreum was a traditional Native American cure for headaches and spasms. It is also happens to be non kosher. Even more so than with the Celandine, I have to ask:

• Who was the first person to lick a beaver's butt whilst suffering from spasms or a headache and what was he thinking while he was doing it?
• How did he go about explaining his new discovery to his friends?

One unanticipated benefit of his discovery was, however, the fact that hundreds of years later I could title this post 'Rimming a Beaver' rather than 'The Wisdom of the Ancients' and thus set a childish trap for people surfing blog titles for smut; which was pretty much the sole purpose of writing this entry in the first place.

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Filthy, sorry looking pony underneath an underpass in White City

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...per comment made on previous post

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Which reminds me of another example of dated slang trivia; back from the days when I was young, hip, cool and out on the street.

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The use and subsequent misuse of the word nightmare.

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Back in medieval times, round about 1985. Cool people would describe a bad experience as a 'nightmare'. Realising that this was too mainstream, the expression was eventually shortened to 'mare'. A slang arms race ensued and new expressions, reliant on increasingly tenuous connections to 'nightmare', were rolled out. I can't remember many of them now (but I bet you can Ian - comment please) but I do remember encountering a small tribe of students who had taken to using the word 'Whittington'; as in 'Dick Whittington, Three Times Lord Mare of London'. Things were clearly getting out of hand. I gave up on the whole deal at that point and reverted to using the word crap from them on.
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Interestingly, Cockney Rhyming Slang for crap is 'Pony and Trap', or 'Pony'. So, I pretty much finished-up round about where I started.
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The man for whom nothing is written

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Ho hum

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I keep starting to write a novel.
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I keep stopping.

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This is all quite galling. I appear to have all the necessary tools:

• Me
• MS Word
• London, and a London myth as a background (thanks to those who chipped-in)
• A few story ideas (thanks Cormac)
• The inclination

But something is missing. Probably some kind of cure for my innate procrastinatory instinct and the static that fills my brain.

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I was chatting about this with a friend, Viera, a couple of weeks ago. We hadn’t met for several months and she asked me how the book was coming along. She didn’t seem at all surprised when I told her the answer.

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I explained that, as far as I was concerned, all literary novels follow a similar arc, basically remind the reader that she/he will die one day and conclude that Life either does or does not have meaning. I defended my ineffectiveness to date on the basis that it seemed pointless to me to write 500 pages of guff just to deliver the author's philosophy of life when that could be achieved more efficiently on a single side of double-spaced A4. Why bother to wade through The Catcher in the Rye when you could just read this instead …

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"In our sleep, pain which we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

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Alternatively, you could read this gem I picked up from a blog a few days ago which neatly echoes thoughts that pass through my mind every time a relative dies

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"I believe that my dead grandmother watches me with great disappointment every time I masturbate."
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Very rightly, Viera made the point that a good novel has the power convey the author's message in such a way that it will stay in the mind of the reader for the rest of their life. Most of us instinctively know what literature is telling us, we just want to be told in interesting and inspiring ways.

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I'm not sure if I'm up to the task. Sure, I have a message I wish to convey. Over the years I have developed an internally consistent philosophy of life that does recognise meaning and purpose. It would be good to throw that out as a small squeak against the roar of voices telling us otherwise. However, by my own standards I am failing Life's quest; I am not using all the skills I was given. In that respect I am no different to most of the rest of humanity but I am more aware of my failure than others. Writing a book might enable me to self-actualise but I can’t shake the feeling that this would be somehow dishonest. It would be kind of like those guys who advertise 'Send me £10 and I'll tell you how to become a millionaire!'. You send them £10 and they write back telling you to put out ads saying 'Send me £10 and I'll tell you how to become a millionaire!'.

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In one of my favourite movies, Lawrence of Arabia, Anthony Quinn plays a character called Auda abu Tayi. Every time Lawrence and Co. knock off a Turkish train Quinn can be seen looting the train and looking pretty pissed off with his spoils. In one scene he's kicking a grandfather clock in the desert yelling 'This is not honourable. This is not honourable!'. However, a little later on in the film he manages to snag a brace of beautiful white stallions. He looks much happier and cries out 'Now this IS honourable' and he fucks off home.

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Auda abu Tayi is a pet hero of mine but there was always the risk that he was never going to find any stallions. And, maybe, he might have walked right passed them without noticing a few years back. And what if he had found the stallions in his early twenties, rather than his middle years, what would he have done with the rest of his life? How would he have felt in the second half of his life if he hadn’t found his stallions and he was aware that the chances of ever doing so were receding with each passing year?
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You get the idea.

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Bugger this. I'm going to stop writing this post and go for a nice photo walk into town. I'll see how I feel when I get back. If I get my skates on I might make it in time to catch all those non-self actualised commuters pouring over London Bridge from The City into the station. I can throw buns at them and giggle. Now that's honourable.

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Getting a little nervous now ...

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Mmmmm, someone spent 121 minutes on this blog today and accessed 33 pages.

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Yesterday, a different PC spent 23 minutes on this blog and accessed 44 pages.

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For some reason, I feel nervous rather than flattered.

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A word or two on nonces

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Someobody asked me the other day what I meant by the term nonce, as used in an earlier post.
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For those who don't know, nonce is short for the term 'Non Specified Offender' as used in the Her Majesty's Prison Service.
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The idea being that child molesters are frequently murdered in jail so, to save their grubby little lives, all their paperwork included the term 'Non Specified Offender', rather than 'Kiddie Fiddler' or whatever.
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As far as I can tell, this practice has now been abandoned as the term 'Non Specified Offender' was only ever applied to sex criminals so they got cut up anyway ...
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NB As well as being used in it's strict, literal sense, nonce was also occasionally used to describe homosexuals. Unlike the contemporary, one size fits all, use of the word gay to describe all homosexuals, Londoners of Old applied a gradated scale of terminology that reflected their respective level of approval or disapproval of the homosexual in question:

10. Nonce / F***ing queer
9. Shirtlifter / Brown Hatter
8. Poove
7. Homo / Bent (as a nine bob note)
6. Gayboy / Poof
5. Ginger (Beer)
4. Duke of Kent
3. Camp (as a row of tents)
2. Seems like a nice boy
1. A bit artistic

Anything larger than 5. and you were in the Red Zone. So, if you were in an East End pub and someone referred to you as being Duke of Kent you were probably on safe ground and could finish your spritzer in relative safety. However, if words like poove, nonce, homo or gayboy were being bandied around it really would have been advisable to sup up your beer and collect your fags and scarper sharpish.
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Naturally, I really do not condone the prejudices of the past. Everyone now realises that most London queer bashers were really repressed homosexuals anyway. Life is a whole lot better now that they can work out their urges with like-minded, leather-clad individuals in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, rather than wandering around hitting people they feel attracted to.
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NB2 The terms poof / poove should not be confused with the endearingly child-like expression 'puff', which was East End speak for blOw, Mary Jane, reefer. Hence, your new cell mate saying 'I got banged up for blowing a little puff' would be no real cause for concern, or delight. Sorry.
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NB3 Some plastic Cockneys our there maintain that the expression 'scarper' is derived from rhyming slang, Scapa Flow = Go. This is incorrect. Scarper is actually Polari and derived from the the Italian verb scappare = to escape.
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Right, that's more than enough London etymology for one day
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Longevity and Creativity

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A friend just sent me an interesting academic paper on the subject of 'Longevity and Creativity'. I've archived a copy here ...
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http://www.biscuitgame.com/vault/longevity.htm

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The paper includes some statistics that demonstrate that the earlier you retire the longer you live and concludes with ...
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The most precious, creative and innovative period in your life is the 10-year period around the age of 32. Plan your career path to use this precious 10-year period wisely and effectively to produce your greatest achievements in your life.
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The pace of innovations and technology advances is getting faster and faster and is forcing everybody to compete fiercely at the Internet speed on the information super-highways. The highly productive and highly efficient workplace in USA is a pressure-cooker and a high-speed battleground for highly creative and dynamic young people to compete and to flourish.
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However, when you get older, you should plan your career path and financial matter so that you can retire comfortably at the age of 55 or earlier to enjoy your long, happy and leisure retirement life into your golden age of 80s and beyond. In retirement, you can still enjoy some fun work of great interest to you and of great values to the society and the community, but at a part-time leisure pace on your own term.
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On the other hand, if you are not able to get out of the pressure-cooker or the high-speed battleground at the age of 55 and "have" to keep on working very hard until the age of 65 or older before your retirement, then you probably will die within 18 months of retirement. By working very hard in the pressure cooker for 10 more years beyond the age of 55, you give up at least 20 years of your life span on average.
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Thanks Raj. Now why would you send me something like that just after my 40th birthday and whilst I am unemployed? You're a real CLINT. Hang on, I didn't type that properly ...
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Into the valley of the Ultra Lagers

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As a nice semi-synchronistic touch, shortly after making reference to Single Can of Lager Man in an earlier post I came across the following line in another blog …

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"it's strange ... ... that the favourite drink of homeless people is called Tenants..."

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A good line, which was already borrowed from another blog by the time I read it.
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It's been borrowed twice now.
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Ever since I can remember, the Get Pissed Cheap market has been dominated by the Twin Titans - Carlsberg Special Brew ('Special Brew') and Tennent's Super ('T Super'). Other brands have tried to muscle in on the action, I recall something called Kestrel Super briefly flitting onto the market but it didn’t have a snowball in Hell's chance of dislodging the Classics.

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Both brands are favoured by Single Can of Lager Man who appreciates them both for their unparalleled cost-effectiveness and impressive intoxication:volume ratio. Why take four cans into the local park when one will do?
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More background info on the hard fought Super-Lager market can be found at these incredibly excellent sites
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http://www.superlager.com/

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http://gk007a0336.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

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For any non-UK readers not familiar with the cult of the Superstrong Lager, we are basically talking canned lager formulated to push the technical envelope of what can legitimately described as beer. Imagine the intoxicating beverage equivalent of Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in the Bell X1 in 1947 and you get the gist. Human endeavour and the quest for The Ultimate have many manifestations. Some men strive for speed. Other, no less talented individuals, strive for getting as pissed as possible below a recommended retail unit price of £1.

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Tennent's Super is sweeter than Special Brew which tastes pretty much like a liquefied fart, particularly at near room temperatures. Obviously Special Brew is not really liquefied fermented fart juice; if it was it would become gas at body temperatures. It doesn’t do that, it just tastes worse than when it's cold. I presume that Carlsberg have just somehow managed to find a way to capture the very essence of the true fart taste without resorting to super-cooling or high-pressure containment.

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Special Brew does, however, make excellent snakebites, particularly when combined with scrumpy cider. Mixed with right brands of cider, I recommend Long Ashton, it actually forms a thick analgesic gel that can be used in surgical procedures. Adding a shot of blackcurrant cordial after the gellification process is complete creates a pleasing marbled effect to the final beverage that means that you can usually get away without using a cocktail umbrella.

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Hovering around the 9% alcohol by volume mark these beers are, to all intents and purposes, wine. The only difference being that they are fizzy, taste foul and are administered in chunky 500cc doses. Also, I'm no biochemist but I have no doubt that these beers include additional toxins and alcohol groups not present in other drinks. After necking a couple of cans you find yourself feeling as if you've been poisoned as well as being intoxicated. It's normally advisable to vomit at some point later in the evening.
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Public consumption of these beverages says one of two things about the consumer:

• I am a tramp
• I am very serious about getting pissed

The colossal number of discarded, empty cans of Tennents and Carlsberg, sporting their distinctive purple and gold livery, blanketing the streets of British cities, suggests that an awfully large number of people fit into these two categories.

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I still fondly recall my first ever field trip with my old geology department. A group of us fresh, young first years had taken daypacks filled with notebooks, field guides, rock hammers and clinometers in the minibus with us on the trip to Dorset. A group of accompanying second and third year students paternally emptied our rucksacks into a box at the back of the bus, explained that weight was a critical factor and that no superfluous items could be permitted. They then issued us with standard-issue Birmingham University Geology Department bastard-strength lager instead. Our first morning was spent, clambering around seaweed covered rocks near Lulworth Cove, severely hungover, lead by a group of second years sipping warm cans of Tennents Super. That was twenty years ago and I am still awed by the memory. Look! I am drinking T Super for breakfast. How hard am I you wankers!'. The myth of T Super has real power.

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Sadly, most of those second and third years graduated and took up jobs as sales reps for confectionery companies or became trainee accountants. Several appeared in suits in corporate recruitment brochures whilst we were still students; so the myth is tarnished a little.

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We run things

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Tony Blair was on TV last night. He was making a heartfelt speech about how his relationship with the British electorate was like a stormy marriage and how, yes, he had appeared arrogant at times but it was a marriage based on love, a marriage that worked and a marriage that deserved another chance.

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Most media commentators described this as a brave, honest and deeply personal appeal to the electorate.

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Personally, it sounded to me like he was telling us that we were all his bitches.

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I cringed throughout. The spectacle of a man speaking with rock-solid insincerity was almost unbearable. And how could he have the cheek to include the Iraq War in his marriage analogy?. 'That's the second time you've forgotten our anniversary. I'll show you. I'm going to get some mates together and slaughter a few towel heads'.

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There I was watching him speak; half-fantasising about Harrison Ford leaping onto the stage, blasting Blair with a ray gun, revealing circuit boards and voice chips in a shower of sparks, but no. No such luck.

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Tony Blair and his compadres are privy to a secret. The key to the secret is partly chaos theory, partly an understanding of Brownian motion and partly human psychology.

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The secret is that large groups of human beings can never agree on anything. When asked a question, provided that question is general enough and woolly enough, a group of human beings will always break roughly into one of four camps:

• 30% Won’t care
• 30% For
• 30% Against
• 10% Undecided

A smart political player will always target the undecided group. Though smallest in numbers they carry the balance of power and are the most fickle and easily duped.

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Take the last UK General Election in 2001 for example. Roughly two thirds of people bothered to vote. Out of 659 available seats, The Labour party won 413 seats with 40.7% of the vote and the Conservatives won 166 seats with 31.7%.

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In effect, 9% of the total vote decided the outcome of 247 seats. If those dickheads had their own party it would easily be the largest in the House of Commons. Yet, in the same election the Liberal Party won 18.3% of the total vote and only secured 52 seats. A dickhead vote secures roughly 10 times more seats than a vote for the Liberal Democrats.

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Contrary to what we are told, we are not all equal.

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Where am I going with this? Simple, the fate of our lives and the lives of people in places like Iraq are decided by the tiniest, and most easily influenced, of minorities. This minority is composed of the kind of people who live under a government for eight years and still haven’t managed to form an opinion as to whether to vote for them or not. The kind of people who are swayed by last minute lies and publicity stunts in the few weeks leading up to an election. The kind of people who call telephone polls to register an undecided vote. In a word, dickheads.

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And Tony Blair and every other successful politician know it.

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That's why they unashamedly go out of their way to be nice to babies, talk to Black people and generally act like they give a sh*t for three months out of every five years.

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And that's why, even though 70% of us might twist and cringe when listening to him, Tony still manages to win through, and win through big. He's got the dickhead vote sewn up good and proper.

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Bottom line. Sixty or seventy percent of us want good, honest government and leaders, just like we see in the movies, but we are split on what form that government should take. Ten percent of us are dickheads and they're the ones who decide what we actually get. This is sometimes referred to as democracy.

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I remember a few years ago, the BBC covered an election in one of the new Stan republics. The reporter was sniggering because one of the presidential candidates was offering every voter a free mobile phone if he was elected. Me, I couldn’t help thinking that we were looking at a particularly savvy electorate who clearly had the potential to realise that a new cell phone was tangibly better than a political manifesto filled with broken promises. The BBC guy wasn't thinking along these lines and it was all he could do to avoid wetting himself with smug merriment. Muppet.

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You could improve the current UK voting system easily enough. A simple quiz, with a vote as the prize, would do the job. The questions wouldn’t have to be too taxing. Something like:

1. Can you read this question?
2. Is this statement true or false; 'I always lie'?
3. Have you ever taken out an extended warranty on an electrical item?

But voter selection will never happen. If the dickhead vote were neutralised, politicians would have to play a very different game indeed. Most of us, whatever our political beliefs, have learned to mistrust their spout and, without the support of voting dickheads, they'd have to start telling to truth, avoid talking too much bollocks, that sort of thing.

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