Why I love Flickr

When not pontificating on how sore my rear end is going to be after six years of corrupt Olympic-related spending and bullshit, I have been pleasuring myself with a few choice Internet links, including:

• That story about those surfer dude pilots who crashed their plane – ‘We don’t have any engines dude. You’ve got to be kidding me …’
  
• Listening to, and watching, sheep singing William Blake’s Jerusalem
  
• Finding out what a Cleveland Steamer and Rusty Trombone are in urbandictionary (look, they’re both gross and sexual, you were warned)
  
• Looking at pictures of geeks wearing DIY Chris Walken masks
  
• Enjoying American Motel signs
  
• And, above all, spending time on Flickr

What happened to Flickr? Its initial appeal was as a cheap photo hosting service for folks like me who take loads of pictures and wanted somewhere to store them on the Net. Then the social interactivity thing took off in a big way. For many people, the photography side of things seems almost incidental and some of the most active Flickr participants barely upload any photos at all.

Don’t misunderstand me. The interactive side of Flickr is a big plus. I’ve been particularly amused by coming across folks like Andy, Clive, David, Kevo and many others. I’ve been amused partly by their (occasional) wit ;-) but mostly by the thought that there so many other people walking exactly the same ground as Ian and I do, doing exactly the same thing. Sometimes, I’ll be standing in front of a particular piece of graffiti or interesting-shaped door knob in London somewhere and think to myself ‘If I wait here for 1/2 hour someone I know from Flickr will stop and photograph this as well’. At that point I usually scurry off in case that is what happens and someone I know from Flickr discovers that I am, in reality, only three foot tall and that I cross-dress.

Not that it would matter though. Not in the World of Flickr. A passing interest in cross-dressing/ tv is the least of many users’ problems. I’ve never encountered so many people with mental health issues anywhere else, ever, and believe me that’s saying something. It’s quite normal to browse into a users’ photostream and see a picture entitled ‘My Meds’ of them proudly displaying hands filled with pills.

Thanks to Kevo, a user called Quiplash rapidly passed into Flickr legend and became immortalised as a widely-used Flickr verb less than a day after posting this, out of the blue, after he received some criticism on a discussion thread he was administering…

Listen to me.
I take enough antidepressant medication to keep a small village happy, and I am still recovering from a suicide attept last October.
I cannot please everyopne. Every time I make a decision in order to try and appease everybody I get a shitstorm.
I am leaving Flickr.
I hate all of you for heaping more shit on me.

It’s getting to a point where you have to check someone’s profile extensively before saying anything to them in case you turn out to be that final straw that leads them to snap. I’m not sure that this is what I signed up for and, in my more reflective moments, I do feel sad for all those damaged people out there; reaching out for human contact and compassion through whatever medium that comes to hand.

However, I haven’t been feeling too reflective lately but I still keeping watching because I find the whole thing bizarrely compelling. It’s a bit like watching a soap. Only with a soap you don’t have the option to toy with the characters’ fragile minds by stepping in with a choice comment every now and again.

F*ck me, I've just had an idea for a television show ...

Thank You Tony

Mmmmm, I’ve had a few hours to reflect on the news about London wining the 2012 bid. And maybe all those people being paid to fill the Internet with a positive spin on the story are right after all. Maybe a New Era has dawned. And if it has, there’s one person we all have to thank for that. Yes …

Tony Blair

In just the last couple of months Tony has:

• Secured an historic third term for a political party with the word ‘Labour’ in its name
• Initiated fundamental and necessary reform of the European Union
• Taken the necessary steps to abolish global poverty
• Put measures in place that will ultimately save humanity from the threat of global warming
  
• Maintained the coalition that is bringing democracy to the Islamic World
• Bagged the 2012 Olympics for London, solely through the power of his charisma.
• Generally brought the UK ever-nearer to becoming the New Eden

And, I must confess, until today I’ve been blind to all of this and of all Tony’s other achievements. I am a jaded, negative person whose only hope may lie in painful electrotherapy, self-flagellation and extensive drug taking; though that’s what may have got me this way in the first place.

I have thought of a way to achieve redemption though. A quick Google search indicates that nobody has yet had the sense to set up a Tony Blair Appreciation Society. I may be still able to make amends by getting one going, call it something like ToBASco and put together a member’s pack including a Tony badge, Tony wall poster and a quarterly Tony Fanzine. He deserves it ...

(category: political stuff)

It's official - 2012 will be the year of the pants

Artists impression of London 2012 Olympic Village

Perusing the feedback section of the BBC website it was interesting to see readers’ comments on London Winning the 2012 bid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4655235.stm

Readers from all over the World are congratulating London on winning the Olympics. The majority of people who actually live in London are pissed off …

Congratulations to our friends in the UK on winning the 2012 Olympic Bid. I could not be happier with the result! Best wishes to all!
John Rafanello, Philadelphia, USA

Fantastic news. Ignore the moaners. Let's all have a party.
Jeremy, Trinidad

versus

This is a disaster for the citizens of London. We can now look forward to thirty years of extra taxes to pay off a one-month jamboree whose events most of us won't be able to pay to get into. The promised infrastructure improvements should have been done anyway - and are far too late in the day. If London's record of infrastructure project management is anything to go by, the Olympics will end up late and over budget (e.g. Millennium Dome and Jubilee Line extension)
Vernon Marriott, London, UK

Most of the people in Trafalgar Square don't live in London, no wonder they are so happy! Why should Londoners have to pay for it? I never watch the Olympics, never have never will, yet I am expected to give my hard earned money to pay for it. Hope the Olympic athletes enjoy their Olympic village, which I understand is to be situated in one of the roughest areas of the East End of London, perhaps I should bid for the security contract, that's going to be worth a few million!
Jennifer Purcell, London

No doubt the Prime Minister’s Office will be calling the BBC to get their impartial feedback forum 100% back ‘on message’ before the day is done.

A few Londoners do appear to be happy with the result though, including:

It's fantastic news, I'm still in shock! I wonder how much I can rent my East London home out for during the Games......!
Jane, East London

Well done everyone, this is great news for London and the UK - I'm happy to pay more council tax for such an amazing privilege!
B, London, UK

Fantastic news. Now everyone should quit carping and unite behind the games to show the rest of the world why we are called Great Britain. Congratulations to the bid team and thanks for all your hard work.
G, London

Interesting that so many of the ‘happy’ ‘Londoners’ chose to give only a single initial. If someone tried to do a parody of people paid to boost the bid under assumed names they couldn't do better than that stuff.

If it wasn’t so serious it would almost be funny.

Excuse me now whilst I go outside and join in with the enormous celebratory street carnival that's spontaneously erupted on the streets of South London. It's like Rio out there ...

(Francis, I told you we'd 'win' and that you should never underestimate Fate's sense of humour. You ill-informed French toe-rag)

London wins 2012 Olympic bid

Oh bollocks …

London's 2012 Olympic bid - don't you just love it?

This useless pile of crap might be getting some new friends soon …

Tomorrow’s an exciting day

Tomorrow’s the day I’m going to find out if I’m going to help fund the 2012 Olympics.

It might cost me hundreds of pounds. It might cost me a few thousand.

I really don’t know. Nobody really knows.

The International Olympic Committee are voting in Singapore to decide which city gets the ‘honour’ of hosting the games. Will it be New York, Paris, Moscow, Madrid or London?

It’s so exciting.

Top marks to the New York bid team for having a sense of humour though. Those boys must be a real laugh, thinking anyone's going to stage an international anything in America in the current World Climate. Well, maybe the occasional arms fair. Sorry guys, you'll just have to content yourselves with continued hosting of World Series' attended by American-only teams for the foreseeable future.

We’ve been told that if London wins the bid, whole chunks of the city will get desperately needed new housing and improved transport infrastructure.

Like, wow

It must be such fun being part of a team of 116 unelected, unaccountable people voting on the location of an international sporting event, and incidentally getting to decide the socio-economic destiny of entire cities along the way.

And the fringe benefits can be significant. Apparently, I was also going to help bribe, sorry, offer incentives to IOC members to help in the decision making process.

I was chatting with a friend in France today about the likely outcome of the vote. He reckons that enough hints have been put out to suggest that Paris will win the bid. I’m more sceptical. Tony Blair’s been working his charm in Singapore over the last few days and the IOC members might be sorely tempted to give London the games just to punish us for electing him.

That would seem fair. Besides, we should never underestimate God's martini-dry sense of irony.

Being a connoisseur of woefulness, I’ve always savoured the impact hosting an Olympics has had on other people’s cities. My personal favourites are Sydney (Tracy enjoyed her tour of derelict Olympic stadiums immensely), Montreal (they can’t still be paying for the 1976 games can they?) and Athens (5% of a country’s GDP expended on a two week sporting event – hmmm, impressive)

It’s significantly less funny when there’s a chance your own city might be on the chopping block.

I suppose it’s a bit of a shame that I didn’t get a chance to vote on whether I wanted to help pay for a gigantic, corrupt, multibillion pound fuck-up. Mind you, it probably wouldn’t have mattered much. My local MP, the former Sports Minister, thinks the London 2012 Olympic licks donkey balls as well and she hasn’t had much joy either.

Olympic bids are very much like wars. You have a dumb powerless bunch of bozos and a significantly smaller group of more powerful bozos, spending the first group’s money on promoting something huge, disastrous and woeful. If the promotion is successful, Group B can continue to rob Group A blind for a decade or more.

Democracy is wonderful thing. I just wish I had some in my life.

-

PS Earlier today I was reading up on my local MP, an outspoken critic of the London bid and I came across this extract in Wikipedia ...

... She was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office from 1998 to 1999, and Minister of Sport in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport from 1998 to 2001. She continues to be active in promoting Olympics 2012 in London and sport in schools, as well as gun politics in the UK...

So, some of my money also seems to be being spent on buggering up the Internet in support of the London bid. Marvellous.

I’ve just popped a wee note off to her office …

The psychology of cat terror pt2

So, there I was reading about Sophie the Cat's unfortunate demise.

Being a poorly wired kind of person, several disparate thoughts flashed through my brain in rapid sequence as I caught up on this latest local feline news:

Disgust

Fairly obvious where I was coming from on that one.

A bizarre sense of appreciation of the cat-killer’s methodology

Initially, I asked myself what was the sense in mutilating the cat. It seemed plain evil. Then I thought about it some more and realised that the mutilation might actually give the cat’s death added meaning. Simply killing the cat might leave the owner with the impression that its demise was accidental. Chopping it up a little but afterwards left the owner in no doubt that some aspect of the cat’s, or the owner’s, behaviour had resulted in a third party having some issues that they wished to be addressed.

Similar logic can be applied to atrocities committed in parts of the World even less pleasant than Lambeth. Simply writing off the perpetrators of apparently mindless acts as being nutters can sometimes be too simplistic an approach. Maybe George Bush and Tony Blair should live in The Oval / Kennington for a while, and bring their pets with them.

Having said that. Mr Kitty Killer might just be a straightforward nutter

A sense of sadness for the cat’s owner

Not because her cat had been killed. Cats die. I felt sad for her because, and I’m revisiting old ground here, urban life in the 21^st century has impoverished her life to a point where she clearly equated her cat with a real person.

I’m sorry, what’s … Sophie 31.10.2002 – 26.06.2005 …all about? Now you can either think, as I do, that there is a clear difference between animals and people or believe that animals and people are all part of a graded spectrum of life. If you believe the latter and start treating cats as semi-people, where’s the sense or compassion in holding them in higher esteem than any other creature? Or is Sophie’s owner in the habit of plastering up epitaphs around her neighbourhood every time she has a roast dinner?

Larry the Lamb 31.3.2004 – 30.6.2005 – Sadly missed but delicious with roast potatoes

I’m not standing up for the Kitten Killer here. Cruelty is cruelty. Even if you believe animals to be dumb, soulless lumps of meat, you’ve still got to have issues with a person committing cruel acts and wonder what nasty part of their psyche they are nurturing doing the things they do.

Contempt for the cat’s owner

The line ‘Unfortunately, the police are not interested in this matter’ struck a chord.

First off, I remembered that old joke about the cat with the bandaged arm riding into Tombstone ‘looking for the man who shot his paw’, then a mental image of a police wanted poster featuring a sparrow with a broadsword came to mind, then another picture of what the chalk marks around the dismembered cat’s body would look like, then I thought ‘well, if they get the same people in who investigated David Kelly’s death it’s a dead cert the verdict is going to be suicide’.

If this seems like callous thinking on my part look at it from my point of view.

I live in Lambeth. Lambeth is not a very nice place. We’ve got so much gun crime, drug addicts, sexual assaults and muggings that it’s just not funny any more.

Twenty minutes before I saw Sophie’s memorial I was standing in a bank queue in the Elephant and Castle. An unlikely couple were standing in front of me in the line. An emaciated woman somewhere between her early forties and mid sixties, it’s always difficult to tell with junkies, accompanied by a young well-dressed man in his early twenties. They seemed an ill-matched couple partly because of the difference in age and dress, partly because of their colour difference but mostly because she was shaking and looked terrified. The guy looked the opposite of terrified and had his arm round her, not in a nice way. When her turn came, the woman went to the counter whilst the man slouched on a chair and glared at her. She withdrew a very large amount of money and reacquired her escort, who shoved her roughly out of the bank. Outside she handed the money over to the guy, burst into hysterical tears and slumped to the ground.

After I finished my own business I left the bank, walked past the pair of them without a second glance and fucked off home.

And saw the cat poster.

-

So, what’s the moral of this tale and this post?

I’m not 100% sure.

First off, I was pretty depressed by the fact that even though it was full, absolutely no-one else in the bank noticed that there was something horrible going on. And make no mistake it was horrible. It’s not that people did as I did and kept their nose outside of someone else’s business. They really didn’t notice.

Second off, I came home with my head full of disgust at my own impotence and the sheer amount of vice and misery that passes unnoticed all around us. I came home to a poster moaning about some frickin cat, grumbling that the police who preside over this world of shit weren’t interested in the fate of that frickin’ cat.

The moral I think is that people are dissonant. They see without seeing. Their problems are the most important problems in the world and, when you get down to it, fuck everyone else. Genuine empathy is a truly scarce commodity.

Dissonance, on the other hand, is an integral part of being human and will always be there. Smokers will keep believing their addicton won’t kill them. Atheists will still get out of bed in the morning. Elton John will keep appearing at anti poverty concerts whilst spanking £100k a year on flowers. People will keep thinking their problems are worse than everyone else’s and pet owners in Lambeth will keep expecting the police, up to their necks in hardcore mayhem, to investigate the death of their cat.

So, tell me. If it ever really came to the crunch, how many of those people out there who think Live 8 and Global Poverty Relief and all those other noble causes are such great things, if they really had to choose between their own comfort and the well being of others, how many of those people would really give a damn?

The psychology of cat terror pt1

Following neatly from my rant that I live in a society with screwed up values, where people feed their pets foiled wrapped ‘tender Turkey Pasta & Carrots’ luxury meals whilst human beings starve, I came home to find this tied to a lamp-post outside my front door today…

Warning Cat Owners!

Our beautiful much beloved Bengal cat Sophie went missing on Sunday 26^th June and was found the next day. Her head and tail had been removed and were missing. We have heard some other cats in the area have gone missing. We would like to warn all other cat owners in the area to be vigilant. Unfortunately, the police are not interested in this matter. However if you have any information please inform the RSPCA and you think you might know anything about Sophie’s case, please call us

Sophie 31.10.2002 – 26.06.2005

So, the Kennington Cat Wars have taken on a sinister, more deadly slant.

It's getting to a point where we're running short of available local lamp-post space - Wolfie, Seamus, and now Sophie. They've all shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to that big pile of kitty litter in the sky. Apparently, it would now seem, with some assistance. Elvis, the loveable old scamp, is still cheerfully doing his thing in my back yard, though not for much longer at this rate.

Some time ago I was half thinking about launching a campaign that involved me shitting on local cat owners' doorsteps, kicking their flower pots over and popping sparrow chunks into their letterboxes. However, someone else has clearly beaten me to it and taken their response level straight to Defcon 1 without pissing around with 5, 4, 3 or 2 first.

It's either that or Sophie never really existed and the poster is part of a cunning campaign to terrorise cat owners into keeping their pets indoors. Mmmmm, CIA-style psywar techniques being deployed by an aggrieved South London gardener or bird lover, now that would be intriguing...

Live 8 - I'm mad for it

OK, maybe the last post was a little on the long side for a quick read. So here’s an abbreviated version presented by way of a couple of links:

1. Stars see album sales soar after Live 8 gigs

2. Anti poverty bracelets produced by abused Chinese people working for 9p hour

I’ve posted that second link here before and elsewhere but it says so much about the convergence of the ways charities and multinationals approach their ‘business’ - from the marketing tricks they employ, through to sourcing product from the skankiest places possible.

Training shoes or compassion? What’s the difference? It’s getting hard to tell these days.

-

Extract from an email exchange today between my girlfriend and someone who works in her firm’s Moscow office

Mrs StefZ: ‘Following the media coverage of Live 8 over here .. was the one in Moscow a bomb? I ask because they quoted attendance figures from every other concert except Moscow. I guess there are enough poor people in Russia without them turning out to promote poor people in Africa!’

Moscow Person: The concert has been hailed as a success although the attendance figures were low. The reason for this, I think, is that they only organised it a few days before it was held (the story goes that Sir Bob forgot Russia were in the G8) and so people didn't know if was happening. The other reason might have been that the weather was crap.

Shows you how much I know really. I only twigged that Live 8 concerts were held in G8 member states after reading this email. I guess the concert in Jo’burg was tossed in as a concession to the existence of Africa. I'll stand by my comments about South America and elsewhere in my earlier posting. Wot no poverty in Latin America? Don't get a look in because they're not part of the G8 or African? Mmmmm, so much for all that 'the whole world unites' horse manure.

Top rumour about the quality of the minds behind Live 8 though. I can just picture the scene sometime during the middle of last week...

Bob's PA: Bob, are you sure there are only 7 countries in the G8 ... ?

Geldolf: Oh f$%^*&* ....

Live 8 - Utter, utter pants

The whole World unites behind Emma Thompson - well, the whole World except for
Latin America, China, Russia, India ... and a miserable old scrotum in South London

Clever title for this post, uh?

Come on, let’s get it over with…

-

I was watching TV last week when I saw a commercial that I first mistook for the latest GAP ad.

Honestly

Well, it looked like a GAP ad.

Eventually the penny dropped and I realised it was something to do with global poverty relief…

Click

Every three seconds a child dies

Click

I’m going to say something negative about this aren’t I? I’m one of those people who is nauseated by millionaire celebrities, and Emma Thompson, baring their tortured virtue on the global television, urging us to be as saintly as they are, aren’t I?

Yes, yes I am.

As an exercise in self-indulgent, fatuous cynicism this ad really takes the biscuit. Apparently, the ad was put together in the belief that people who aren’t moved by the thought of needless death WILL be moved by actors, fashion models and pop singers posturing and pouting as if they’re advertising designer T shirts.

I was so ‘moved’ by the ad that I visited the Make Poverty History web site to see what I could do to alleviate global poverty. Their call to action consisted of…

1. Read their blog
   
2. Send an email to Tony Blair
   

F*ck me, the forces of global exploitation must be quaking in their boots.

As an exercise in commoditising compassion, packaging it and serving it up for dumb, passive consumption this is cutting edge stuff.

It’s either that or a massive parody.

Mmmmm, make people aware of the impact of the unequal distribution of wealth and globalisation by showing an ad featuring people who are disproportionately wealthy, made in the style of a globalised corporate ad campaign...

Rib-tickling stuff indeed.

Let’s not f*ck about here. Celebrities and corporations get involved in these things as much for publicity as for any other reason.

A friend of mine sent me an extract from an intra-office email he received at work last week…

"......employees will receive the MAKE POVERTY HISTORY official booklet and wrist band. They will also be eligible to enter a contest in order to win prizes related to ending global poverty."

He works for a company that sells cable TV porn.

That quote is now up there with my previous favourite example of heartfelt corporate emailed compassion that a friend sent me after the Tsunami (Tsunami? What Tsunami?) six months ago…

Dear Client,

Happy New Year! We start off each new year by inviting all of you to give us direct feedback on your market research needs ... This year we will be making a contribution to the American Red Cross for the victims of the tsunami for each completed survey...

There is the argument that motivations are irrelevant when it comes to campaigns such as this one. Only the ends are important.

Total crap.

Campaigns like ‘Make Poverty History’ subvert and misdirect the debate. They act as a salve to our collective conscience. Their message is that the solutions to the World’s ills are simple and non-threatening. They help people kid themselves that the World can be saved without a fundamental change to their own lifestyles.

And, as I said a couple of days ago, the big companies just fucking love them.

And then, yesterday, we had the concerts.

Oh dear. Oh dear Oh dear Oh dear.

The BBC estimated that 5.5bn people watched them. That’s 85% of every man, woman and child on this Earth.

Hmmm, no bullshit there then.

I was one of the 15% of the global population who didn’t watch the concerts. The prospect of viewing a succession of celebrities giving each other hand jobs on stage and preaching to the World was just too much to bear.

I did however encounter the occasional highlight on news programmes. From those fragments I managed to learn several things:

• Given the deafening silence from South America, I must conclude that there are no longer any poor people or corporate exploitation going on there. Presumably the populace of Rio’s former slums were sitting in front of their plasma screen TVs, tucking into their filet mignon and rocking away with the rest of the developed world.

• Bob Geldof scored a notable double, and followed on from his gushing endorsement of Tony Blair’s divinity on MTV last week, by shaking Bill Gates’ hand in front of 5.5bn people and saying what a good bloke he was. Nice one Bob.

• The Moscow concert didn’t exactly go down a storm. Not surprising in a country where a quarter of its population is living at, or below, subsistence levels. Not much coverage of that concert dying on its knees from the BBC.

• Paul McCartney has spent enough money on laughable plastic surgery to supply a medium-sized African state with antivirals for quite a long time.

I reached musical maturity in the late 1970’s/ early 1980’s. So forgive me for being appalled at the bland, asinine, and insincere state of music today. Lyrics like…

You choose your leaders and place your trust

As their lies wash you down and their promises rust

You'll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns

And the public wants what the public gets

But I don't get what this society wants

… have even more edge and relevance than they did back then. And nobody’s coming up with any new ones.

The bands I idolised as a teenager would have spat on millionaires and politicians, not licked their arses on global television. And for God’s sake, Paul McCartney was an irrelevant, old, rich bastard back in 1980. What does that make him 25 years later?

OK, I’m being a cynical, negative old scrotum but surely some of the people in the crowd yesterday must have felt uncomfortable at the sight of a smug, self-satisfied Bill Gates and thought…

‘Hang on a minute. That’s the richest man in the World up there telling me what I should do to relieve World poverty. What kind of a stupid c*nt does he think I am?’

Quite a large one actually.

And the irony of all of this, of the whole global poverty issue, is this…

We don’t need our ‘wealth’; quite the opposite.

We’re choking on our own effluent. Our food is giving us brain tumours and heart disease. We have material comfort but we’re lonely. We’re brainwashed into wanting more yet never being satisfied. The developed world, particularly the US and the UK, is fat, flatulent, spiritually dead and depressed.

Give it to the Africans. Please. It's killing us

But can our self-appointed, saintly spokespeople bring themselves to say this?

How can they? They’re suffering from the same sickness as the rest of us. Only worse.

Click

Every three seconds Bill Gates, U2 and Paul McCartney earn a shit load of money

Click

And they’re mad for it

Click

On top of that, aside from the fact that we’re all insanely suicidal consumption junkies, there’s also the small wee issue that, collectively, we don’t really give that much of a shit. Not really. We still live in a World where the fate of one White Boy is much more important than a couple of thousand brown people.

Too harsh? Just wait a few days for the next big disaster, wherever it may be, and watch the coverage on the same channels that were uncritically pumping out yesterday’s offal. Listen out for that old favourite line...

‘The total death toll has now reached 3,000, including four Britons’

That one always cracks me up

Remember, the UK spends £1m on ‘defence’ every 13 minutes. This country is home to people who’ll spend three quid on a cup of coffee without blinking and treat their dogs to ‘something a little bit special’ that two thirds of the World’s human population could only dream of getting down their necks.

The good ship Global Fuckup is still well and truly on course to its final destination and this week’s nonsense hasn’t changed things one little bit. No, on second thoughts, it might have made things slightly worse.

You fu coff-ee?

I visited my brother’s cafe today.

I like cafes.

Which is just as well, given that I grew up over one.

My family have been running cafes in the same part of London since the mid 1930’s, and for another twenty years before that in a different part of London.

It’s in the blood.

My grandfather opened a place on Stamford Street just before the last War. Given that he was of Italian extraction, he was drafted to drive supply trucks rather than go into combat when the War started. Though I never asked him whilst he was alive, I’m sure that he wasn’t too torn up by that.

Anyway, he drove supply trucks whilst my gran kept the cafe open throughout the War. There probably was a connection. And when they retired and sold-up in the 1960s, my Dad opened a smaller place a few streets away. My brother runs it now.

My brother is the last of the line. I don’t think we’re going to make our centenary. The glory days of the London owner-operated cafe are long past.

Which is a shame.

In their heyday London was dotted with hundreds of them. Each a small kingdom, ruled by a deranged moustachioed Saddam Hussein look-like, dispensing fried breakfasts, individualistic behaviour and bizarre dialogue in equal measure.

Every cafe owner had his own favourite humorous catch phrase which would be repeated time and time again until the luckless recipient finally got the joke or, at least, smiled weakly and pretended to. My parents’ own personal favourites included:

‘Are you having it here or having it away?’

and the timeless

‘You fu coff-ee?’

and so on.

My own favourite catch phrase comes from another London cafe where the owner still asks unsuspecting punters…

‘Do you want butch chips or bitch chips with that?’

It even took me a while to figure out that he was talking about thick cut and French fried, so pity the poor hapless tourist, fresh into town.

Pity also to those customers who challenge the divine authority of the cafe owner.

Years ago my Dad went to mail a parcel at the post office round the corner from his cafe. He was served by a new member of staff who pushed the parcel back to him with the stamps. Accustomed as he was to courteous service from post office staff who were also his own customers, my Dad was a little put out...

Dad: ‘Why are you giving me the parcel back?’

Clerk: ‘So you can put the stamps on it’

Dad: ‘Why can't you do that?’

Clerk: ‘You might have an infectious disease or something’

Dad: ‘*@~#£%&?&!!!’

Fate was kind to my father. A couple of days later the very same clerk came into his cafe and ordered a take-away sandwich. My father put two pieces of bread, a thick slice of cheese and a knob of butter on a plate and shoved it across the counter to his latest customer

Clerk: ‘What's that?’

Dad: ‘A cheese sandwich’

Clerk: ‘What am I supposed to do with that?’

Dad: ‘Make it yourself and if you don't like it, well, why don't you just FUCK OFF!!!’

Which was most entertaining to everyone else in the shop at the time, including me; as none of us had the faintest idea what was going on.

No sirree, you just don't get that level of autonomy and job satisfaction working for Starbucks.

But cafes weren’t about passing trade. Cafes were about regulars coming in to have their usual in a place where everyone knew your name. Like the bar in Cheers but with tea.

-

A couple of years before he finally retired, my Dad confided to me in one of his more pensive moments...

'I'm not up to this anymore. It's a young man's game. I can't handle all this new technology and new-fangled stuff. I don't know what people want anymore.'

He wasn't referring to installing a WiFi point on his premises or anything like that. He was talking about putting avocados in his sandwiches.

Times changed. Tastes changed, or rather were changed. The old generation of cafe owners got older and more out of touch with the times, and their shop decor, painted when Al Pacino was young and David Bowie was in the charts, aged with them.

And then Starbucks, and all those Starbucks clones appeared.

Credit where credit is due though. I wish my Dad had figured out a way to con people into paying three quid for a cup of coffee - I’d be typing this on yacht somewhere warm now.

And what does buying ludicrously expensive cups of coffee get us?

Thousands and thousands of identical stores; same furniture, same product, same minimum-waged, bitch-slapped staff.

They have the profit margins, the marketing, the economies of scale and the infrastructure to sweep the board clean of all opposition. My poor brother in his poxy little shop hasn’t a hope – taxes have gone up, regulation has increased and the overall level of bullshit required for one person to run a small business in this city is verging on the insurmountable. The game is weighted in favour of the big companies and that didn’t happen by accident.

It’s not just cafes though is it? And it’s not just other types of small businesses either. The days of the McTeacher, the McNurse and the McPoliceman are at hand and nobody seems to be doing very much to stop it.

And who benefits from the growth of the big at the expense of the small and individual? It’s certainly not the employees. The customers don’t do so well out of the deal either (three quid for a coffee???) and the suppliers get rogered wholesale.

Well, it must be the shareholders then.

Have you seen the kind of dividends those big companies pay out?

They’re not very large

And, if you fancy a giggle, buy a few shares in the company of your choice then see if you’re allowed access to company property or honest information about the company you supposedly part-own.

Nope. The tiniest handful of people benefits from all of this creeping gigantism. That tiny, self-selecting minority of people who manage those vile, cancerous organisations, and we are all their bitches.

And that's why I F*CKING HATE GLOBALISATION

-

"...and if you walk to the end of the block, there sits a Starbucks. And directly across the street -- in the exact same building as that Starbucks -- there is... another Starbucks. There is a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks! And ladies and gentlemen, THAT is the end of the universe." - Lewis Black

(category: other stuff)