Stop blaming the plasticine faced interchangeable publicity whores, and start a revolution

You will have had trouble avoiding this essay by Linda Tirado in the last few weeks, as it has been all over the place. And it is a really great piece which I wholeheartedly agree with. What surprised me about it was the backlash she received accusing her of not being qualified to write about poverty because of her background. This struck somewhat of a chord with me, as I have been known to receive similar treatment. For reference, let it be said that I was brought up very comfortably in a large house in Devon, went to a fee paying school and was afforded every opportunity available to a young white male growing up in the 1980s and 90s. I did not make good decisions, I spurned all those marvellous opportunities that were available at the time, and I found myself spending most of the 2000s living in a council house, being paid minimum wage and grabbing every gig I could play that paid a few pennies just to keep my head above water, and that was coming up a bit in the world from where I was as the millennium turned. So yes, I sympathise absolutely with Linda Tirado.

Let me be clear, I am not looking for sympathy (awwww, did the poor little rich boy fall off his silver spoon?) I am just trying to point out my fairly unusual viewpoint from the middle ground. I have worked with the proper poor working class grafters (underneath them mostly), I have been stoned with the long term unemployed who have no intention of ever working, and I have got drunk with velvet-clad fops called Rupert and Bertie at yacht clubs (no really, it was on the Isle of Wight). Many of my school mates have gone on to own small chunks of the country, and plenty of others have done even worse than me.

I have been pretty lucky really, but I can't make it much plainer, if it were not for my family I would not have done so well. Had I not inherited a not insignificant amount of money from my Grandparents, I would still be drowning in debts from ill-advised business ideas of the late 90s. Had I not had that expensive education, my employers would not have taken a chance on letting me leave the grunt work out in the warehouse and take up a better position fiddling with computers. Luck is everything in this life sadly. Unfortunately, there are others of my acquaintance who believe there success is all down to their own hard graft, and that the poor just aren't trying hard enough. Despite owing their positions entirely to the family they were born into, and the benefits that that brings (not actual benefits, you know what I mean).

Where we are all going wrong is that we are looking for scapegoats, people to blame for all our misfortunes. The idle rich, and the idle poor, one avoids paying taxes so we have to pay more, and the other takes all the taxes we are paying for doing nothing. Both are probably myths dreamed up by the media to give us something to fight about, rather than trying to actually sort out the mess and end all this inequality. The majority are still people who just want to earn a living doing something they either enjoy, or are good at, and be valued enough to get an actual living wage which does not need to be topped up by a benefit system that continually makes mistakes and scares people into paying back what is to the system, an infinitely small amount of money, but to the person who didn't realise they had been overpaid, an insurmountable and impossible amount to find. I am looking at you working tax credits. You suck.

I know of a couple who were hit with a repayment bill of over £6000 one year, due to a clerical error that they hadn't noticed, not everybody has the time or ability to scrutinise every bank statement and bit of paperwork that comes through their door. Compared to the supposed benefit frauds we read of in the Sun, and the tax dodging efforts of merchant bankers we hear of from the Guardian this is nothing. But to them, it was more than half a salary, and yes they were both working full time. If they could afford to pay it back, then they wouldn't have been claiming working tax credits in the first place.

Working tax credits should never have existed, if you're not earning enough to live on, you shouldn't be paying any tax in the first place, the whole system was nuts as soon as it came in. This is not a “friend of a friend” story, or something from a newspaper, these are real people, friends of mine, whose names I am leaving out of this from common decency, especially as they are still paying it off 6 years later and have vowed never to claim anything they are entitled to ever again, despite still having a little less than nothing left over at the end of the month to build up the debts a little more. This kind of penny pinching madness, from a department that needs to justify its own budget makes no sense at all. This article details a bit more about the unpleasantness, and I was unable to find a figure on how much it costs to run the privatised debt collectors who are contracted to collect the money.

With mountains like this to climb, how is anybody supposed to live? We are told to go out, get qualifications and improve our lot by getting a better job. But when we don't value those who serve our drinks, empty our bins, clean our hotel rooms, listen to our interminable moaning on telephone helplines and stack our shelves enough to even accept that they have real jobs. Then something is properly fucked. Most people in those careers (and they are careers) have to work more than one job to make ends meet, and are too tired after all the working to take a night course, even if they wanted to. But why should they have to? This whole “work ethic” thing is nuts, you are not valuable unless you are producing a thing that makes somebody money. This is not true, time is more important than money. The important thing is to make sure nobody is working for less money than they can live on. And why on earth does the market value footballers above barmen? Because the market has become a sentient monster out of human control perhaps? We could all work less hours, for the same money, and thus create more jobs, as more people are needed to come in and work the days that others are not any more. The more difficult your job, the less time you have to spend at it, and your team get a higher pay rate than those who have chosen to do easier and less stressful jobs. They would have to work more days as well. Then if you want more time and a little more money, you get the qualifications and improve your lot. Sadly the dividends paid to shareholders, and the gold plated CEO bonuses might have to go down a bit, but overall, this would not be a bad thing.

As to why work no longer pays, that is still down to the enormous cost of housing these days. The sky-high benefit bills you hear of are largely down to housing benefit going to commercial landlords (mostly MPs amusingly) if they are true at all, so when you have a job, and have to pay your own rent, suddenly you miss that little bit of money you didn't have to spend on rent before, and so the dole queue suddenly seems better. This is not the fault of the benefit system, this is the fault of the low paying jobs, and the madness of the property markets. We need to stop treating the laws of economics in the same way as the laws of Physics, economics is entirely made up by people and those laws can be broken and swept away as easy as you like. Really, change is possible if we all agree (although we never will).

(While I'm on economics, the other problem is that nobody seems to understand it at all. Budgeting for an entire country, when a lot of what you spend out results in more coming in, is not the same as budgeting for your household income, where everything that goes out, stays gone. Not paying the social security budget is not going to make sure you can pay back the national debt, and the less you pay public sector workers, the less they spend, and the less tax you take, it is a system that defies logic. It would seem that even George Osborne has trouble discerning the difference between macro-economics and micro-economics if you believe this article.)

The citizen's income argument is also very good, the Green Party are advocating a monthly income for EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the country, ensuring that we all have enough to live on regardless of where we come from, or what we do. If you want to have nice things and go on holiday, then you go out and work for it. It is an excellent idea, and would probably work. We do have a society that makes us need to buy things, and go to places. We are constantly bombarded with adverts for gadgets, cars, clothes, perfumes, aspirational slippers and emotion inducing foodstuffs that we simply must have. You are nobody without a mobile phone, a computer of some description, a TV, DVD player, a car and a cupboard filled with essential fennel and cracked black peppercorns these days. And a fortnight away somewhere sunny is a human right now isn't it? So people are going to do those zero hour contract minimum wage jobs to get the extra cash. Particularly when it will no longer affect their benefit payments.

Our current problem is that we are all looking to work out exactly what the problem is, and who we can blame for it, rather than just accepting that everything is not alright, and trying to redesign the whole system from the ground up. Everybody likes to blame the government, and shout that all the politicians are lying bastards, and they're all the same as each other. But nobody (except the incredibly wealthy, and casually racist Nigel Farage) is getting off their arses and standing for government. We live in a democracy, anybody can stand, if you want to change things, get involved, stop blaming the plasticine faced interchangeable publicity addicts, and start a fucking revolution. We get the politicians we deserve, if you are one of those who says “sack the lot of them” and shrug, you can sack them, you put them there, this is a democracy, your vote counts, use it, and use it well.

We've all got our heads in the sand, and nobody is admitting anything is their own fault, we blame economic forces, dodgy politicians, ruthless, faceless corporations, greedy bankers, fat lazy dole scroungers, nasty racist political parties, crazy leftie do-gooding liberals, and occasionally, kittens. The rich believe that by fighting for the rights of the corporations they are saving people's jobs, while those people whose jobs that they are saving, believe they are just lining their own pockets. We need more communication, better unions, and better employers. And that's just to start with, if we all started talking, and listening to both sides, we might have a chance in hell of getting better, but if we keep shouting, and blaming each other, then nothing will change, and eventually there will just be one person sitting on all the money wondering where the next bottle of Veuve-Clicquot is coming from, and who is going to clean up afterwards.

Electric Cigarettes, awful, irritating, ugly stupid things

I have so far remained pretty silent on the subject of e-cigarettes on both this blog, and the internet in general. Mostly because when I was using them, I didn't want to get into an argument about it, and since I have stopped using them, I have not really given them as much thought, and I still don't want to get into an argument about it either. Let it be said though, that without them I would almost certainly still be smoking twenty odd cigarettes a day (more at weekends) rather than occasionally blagging one when I am proper drunk. I am now a non-smoker, and without the electric fags, I would never have managed to quit. So they are good ok? That's my current position.

To briefly outline my story here, after turning 35, I had the chance to buy a house, and realised that my life was actually quite good, I was very happy with my wife, stepkids and menagerie of animals and prolonging my existence seemed a good idea. At which point I decided my original pension plan of drinking and smoking myself into an early grave was possibly a bit dumb, and began the process of trying to be a bit healthy. So as a smoker of some 20-something years standing, I thought I'd give the electric ones a try, as they were clearly going to be better for me than the real ones. I did, and they worked, I even preferred them to the real ones after a week or so, and stopped smoking proper fags entirely. With no willpower required, and no crazy mood swings and nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Also, I didn't have to go outside the pub anymore, so all was good. I had not given up smoking, but I had found a less deadly substitute for my addiction.

I carried on vaping (as they call it) for the next year and a bit, all the time being aware that I now had even more crap in my pockets than I had when I smoked, and half my reasoning behind wanting to give up was to have less crap in my pockets. Eventually, the irritating, dumb looking, leaky things that need constant charging and maintenance did my head in, and I thought I'd see how long I could go without taking a hit off one each day. It turned out that it was incredibly easy to not bother by this point, so I stopped. Just like that, back in march. Result. I do occasionally nick a real cigarette off somebody, or have a sneaky drag, but the odd smoke every now and then is not going to do anybody any harm is it? Well, certainly not add any new damage to that already inflicted by the aforementioned 20 odd years of 20 odd a day.

Having tried to give up the old fashioned way before, I was surprised how simple it was this time. A few years ago I cut down and stopped entirely, lasting for about 4 months of abject misery and mood swings before deciding to start smoking again anyway. So I am all in favour of the little shiny electrical vapourisers, and am sick of the awful smearing of them going on at the moment.

Let me counter the usual and obvious arguments I hear from reluctant smokers and crazy anti-everything types here.

1 – We just don't know what's in them.

Not true, they contain, propylene glycol, vegetable glycol, nicotine, and various flavourings, like you get in smoke machines, asthma inhalers, tomatoes, and cake. These are vaporised by the use of kanthal wires wrapped around silica wicks inside glass or plastic cylinders. We know exactly what is in them.

2- We don't know what the long term effects are yet

True, but on the other hand, we do know what the long term effects of cigarette smoking are. Being dead from lung cancer, heart disease or some other marvellously unpleasant smoking related illness. I think I'd rather take a punt on the unknown (up to a point, we know the effects of all the ingredients, just not what happens when inhaled regularly for a long period of time all together).

3 – It's not 100% safe

No, but then again, see above for the alternative for most people. It is categorically, definitely and very much proven to be a good deal safer than smoking cigarettes will ever be, so hoorah! A real alternative for long term nicotine addicts who don't want to give up really, but don't fancy the painful death. Nobody is claiming that they are worse than actual cigarettes, really, nobody.

4 – Kids and pets have died from drinking the liquid.

Not quite, there has apparently been just one death from liquid nicotine, in 2011, a suicide utilising injections. Also, it is sold in bottles with big orange warning labels, like bleach. Kids and pets have died from drinking that as well, but nobody's going to ban bleach. Keep your stuff away from kids and pets, they'll be fine, it's not for drinking.

Have a look at this for other comparative poisonings that weren't in the mainstream media.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-amy-fairchild/liquid-death-from-ecigare_b_5044145.html

Of course the utterly insane anti brigade are also claiming them to be a gateway to actual smoking, and that they normalise the act of smoking. This is proper nuts. Do diabetics normalise heroine addiction? Does drinking a whole pint of water in one go when you're thirsty normalise alcoholism/ binge drinking? No, of course not, and as to the idea that more kids will take up smoking in either form because of e-cigarettes, I put it to you that they are probably the same kids that would have taken up proper cigarettes anyway. I don't know any people of my generation that have never smoked, and I doubt it's changed much in the last twenty odd years either. Kids like to try stuff and push at the boundaries, 90% of people my age gave up when they left uni and got proper jobs. That probably won't change either. Don't check that statistic by the way, I just pulled it out of thin air and it is probably not accurate. The scare tactics are much the same as way back when dope was being called a gateway drug and everyone who smoked it would end up Oding on heroin. It is remarkable how many dope smokers I know who have never even tried the stuff, let alone shot it into their eyeballs with a cow insemination needle. See this yougov survey for actual figures and stuff http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/04/28/e-cigarettes-not-gateway-smoking/ it is baseless nonsense being put about by people who should know better.

The big problem here is still that much smeared and maligned thing, nicotine. Now yes, nicotine is a poison, but it is about as poisonous as caffeine, and nobody is screaming that we should ban coffee. The problem is that the original anti-smoking campaigns that we all grew up with at school used nicotine as the bad guy in tobacco products. Probably because he is easier to anthropormorphise than Carbon monoxide, benzene and cyanide. Nick O'Teen was a marvellous villain, and plants the seed that nicotine is the most dangerous part of the smoking experience. I reckon Ben Zeen might have been better, but less obvious. Nicotine is the addictive bit, but not the killer, otherwise the gums and sprays and patches would be less easily endorsed.

Now as to why the poor things are being smeared, I have no idea, the conspiracy theorists out there will tell you it is the big tobacco companies and big pharma companies worrying about lost income from smokers shifting to ecigs instead of buying the usual ineffective alternatives. It certainly sounds logical, but it is surprising how many otherwise sane and rational people are spouting the “normalising smoking” and “but they could be worse for you” lines.

To my mind, anything that saves lives, and moves people away from actual cigarettes is a good thing, and not to be sniffed at. Don't listen to the naysayers, these are good things, don't keep banning them in public, there is absolutely no danger from passive inhalation, it is water vapour, are you scared of passive fumes from your kettle? This constant banning of everything is a symptom of a society with no free choices, and makes me worry that free will is being eroded. I like to think I chose to give up smoking, but I suspect I am also a victim of the demonisation of a once acceptable habit. Though being conditioned not to slowly kill myself is not a bad thing, after all those years of being conditioned to think it was cool and brilliant by big tobacco companies and movies and rock and roll.

“It is very important to understand that any effort made to free oneself from one's conditioning is another form of conditioning.” - J. Krishnamurti

What if the festival fences are to keep the freaks in, rather than the freeloaders out?

Another festival season has come and gone, and I am not sure if it’s my age, or the fact that I am a lot more sober than I used to be, but there is suddenly a lot to question about the phenomenon of the music festival than there used to be. And not just the usual moans about the weather, everything being more commercial than it used to be, all modern music sounding the same, teenagers not pulling their trousers up properly, the drinks being too expensive, the fact that tents are horrible etc. etc. etc. although, to be fair, most of that is true, but that genuinely is just because I am getting old now.

I have recently come back from a double weekender of two very, very different festivals, both of which disturbed me in different ways. First off, I spent a slightly crazy day at Boomtown near Winchester. Truly a magnificent site/sight, take your pick on the spelling, both apply equally, the time and energy that has clearly been put in to making the stage sets was very well spent. There were mines, pirate ships, town squares and giant dancing robots (and a whole bunch of other cool stuff that we missed) all in what was essentially some fields with a wood in the middle. But the fantabulous surroundings were filled with groups of lads and lasses who would not look out of place strolling down the main streets of Magaluf. I’m all for inclusion and happy togetherness, so this is no tribalist attack on the humble chav, it just surprised me. I expect to see the airy-fairy-hippy-dippy-beardy-weirdy classic festival types and little else at these things, not the Inbetweeners. No offence meant to any inbetweeners out there you understand, particularly not those of you who packed out the little tent we played in at midnight, you beautiful onesie wearing freaks you.

The weekend afterwards, we were playing at Beautiful Days, nice and nearby in Devon. Also a lovely site, fairly decent music, might be reasonably priced, I don’t know, I refuse to pay more than twenty quid to go anywhere these days, so am no judge. However, this was a place dominated by yummy mummies and their solicitor husbands desperately trying to relive their youth, and dragging the kids along. Again, good for them, I suppose, but it seems a terrible idea to me. While the unexpected outfits of Boomtown were deck shoes, pedal pushers/clam diggers and superdry vests, at Beautiful Days the uniform of the weekend was definitely early 90s chic, as the 30/40 somethings tried to get back to those heady days of flowerpot hats and baggy checked shorts. 

Now, at this point you are probably going to ask what my bloody problem is right? These and all other people are entitled to go about their business and have a lovely time without some beardy hippy twat sneering at them, especially when he slots quite nicely into the '30 something trying to relive their youth' demographic. Except that I don’t really, I haven’t really stopped dicking about playing in bands since I was twelve. My mid-life crisis is looming nicely, and it appears to be manifesting itself by me stopping all the rock and roll stuff, and staying in more, I might even buy a jumper and get a nice haircut. I think this may have been my last festival season, particularly when I have never really liked the camping bit much anyway. 

What got me, is that I don’t remember the 'normal' people being there so much back in my youth. I may not have been paying attention to be honest, so they may have been there. But I remember the few festivals I made it to back then (not loads, they were too expensive then as well) mainly being filled with the young and the groovy, tye-dye and dreadlocks ahoy, certainly not the well-dressed about town types, and definitely not teachers, accountants and their kids. Although, as I said, I may just not have noticed, or been at the wrong places, that is entirely possible. There also didn’t used to be showers back then (or anything like as much hair product as was clearly in evidence this season) and if memory serves, the toilet facilities were planks over a pit, and a good sense of balance. It is also important to note that in 1991, my ticket for the Monsters of Rock festival cost me £25, this year, it was around that for the mandatory donation to an unnamed festival for the +1 tickets we got for the band. Inflation is a bitch, and even beer hasn’t gone up that much (A pint is approximately 3 times what it was in the early 90s, I estimate festival tickets have at least quadrupled, feel free to do your own maths). I put this down to it being more expensive to put stuff on now, due to the upside down nature of today’s music industry where the tours pay for the albums rather than vice versa.

I then thought harder, and went a little more tin foil hat over the whole thing than maybe I should. And apologies if the following sounds paranoid and crazy, but it is. What if those massive fences and watchtowers are not to keep the poor people who can’t afford tickets out, but to keep the freaks in? And what if all those lovely mind-altering substances that somehow can’t ever be kept out, are in fact being supplied to keep us all happy and docile? What if the entire festival scene has been designed by our Lizard overlords to keep anyone with an alternative viewpoint safely away from the rest of society when the weather is nice enough to maybe go and do some protesting? It’s a thought isn’t it? Particularly when the current drug of choice for the under-the-counter-culture is a horse tranquiliser sold by big pharmaceutical companies, so you are now very much helping ‘the man’ out.

If you thought you were somehow rebelling and sticking it to 'the man' by going to a large corporate event and spending a small fortune on camping gear, overpriced food and drink, wellington boots, even your ticket, and then taking a shed load of hallucinogenics until you can no longer think straight, then I am terribly sorry. Quite the opposite is true, you have been played, it has happened to every generation, and it will happen to you. The baby boomers were lured away from their Bob Dylan records and cries for freedom with cheap property and weak marijuana, some of them are still going to festivals, and singing along to Bob Dylan records while smoking cheap marijuana (you can’t find weak marijuana anymore apparently) but make no mistake, they are establishment now. The punks forgot the revolution part when the amphetamine took out their thoughts. The ravers got lost in Ecstasy and went off to buy shiny iThings from apple, and today’s ketamine kids are being played worse than anybody. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.

If you really want to stick it to the man, and be a part of the revolution, stay in your own head, do some thinking, write something revolutionary, start a group, start a club, start a movement, change the world. Don’t get sidetracked by the drugs and the fun, it is in your way. If you are just in it for the drugs and the fun, then excellent, enjoy and have a good time, all the time, but if you think by going to these things that you are part of the counter-culture and starting a revolution, then stop fooling yourself. These are concentration camps for the hippies, keeping us pacified and happy. Bread and circuses for the modern age, keep the long haired freaky people from this song away from society, and ensure they are too stoned to formulate any plans.

Apologies, I seem to have gone slightly off track, and may be angrier, and a great deal more tinfoil hatted than usual today. All of this is just conjecture, I don’t actually believe in the Lizard overlords, and I suspect the festival phenomenon is just the usual thing, corporations finding new and more inventive ways to make us part with our money, and ensuring it stays reassuringly expensive to put up some tents and listen to some music. I have nothing against you wanting to listen to music and stay in tents by the way, these are good things.

Choose a life, Choose a job, Choose a career, Choose a family, Choose a fucking big television (actually don’t, the TV is even more of the wonderful soma sent our way by those who would keep us down) or something. Choose what you like, but if you think you are making a difference and starting a revolution by dancing, make sure you’re not being sponsored by Richard Not-a-fucking-hippy-at-all Branson.

“If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution” – Emma Goldman

Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns

It is all very well me spouting off about how much I enjoy ignoring the rest of the world. And I have been advocating taking time away from the internet, and particularly news and facebook for quite some time. In fact, in my recent fortnight off work, I successfully ignored the entire online world for the whole time I was off. I liked it. And when I returned to work I was quite busy, and continued to not read online news, or mess about on facebook and twitter all day. I was also eating my breakfast, lunch and dinner out in the garden, away from the TV, and it left me all content and happy and marvellous inside.

All well and good you may say, well done you smug git, now leave us alone. But it turns out that if quite a large part of what you enjoy doing involves writing stuff about other stuff, you need to be in touch with the other stuff to have any ideas. Did any of that make sense? Probably not, but anyhow, I haven't so much as written a note down on the back of an old receipt for a thing I should write later on in nearly a month. Because I have been sitting about in the sunshine all content and happy. So, if you rely on being annoyed at other people either for a living, or just for a hobby (like what I do) then you may have to keep on scrolling down people's facebook feeds and being disappointed at the pictures from Britain First they are sharing, and hating their children and pets for being in your face all the time. Your children and pets are different of course, everybody loves seeing them, otherwise they wouldn't keep 'liking' them all the time would they? Point being that moderation is a fine thing in all aspects of one's life. Just as the odd drink won't do you any harm, have a squizz at the internet once a day, keep in the loop a bit, you'll be fine, the cat pictures are good.

Anyhow, none of this is really the point I wanted to make. It was more upsetting when I finally returned to looking at the internet, watching the news and reading the papers again, as the news hadn't changed. Israel and Palestine at it again (really not going to get into that right now) and government cuts to essential services, while giving tax breaks to the 'wealth creators' so they don't leave and join their off shore bank accounts. And then came the centenary of the first world war.

Let it be said from the off that the first world war was an almighty cock up from start to finish, and really there is nothing worth celebrating about any war. This one was the last great imperial land grab, nobody was fighting for anybody else's freedom and it is naïve at best to try and paint it that way. Even a hundred years later no two historians can agree on the cause of this disaster, let alone who managed to balls up the treaty at the end so completely.

Nothing at all was achieved as the old method of lining up two armies and making them run at each other turned out to not work as well as it used to before machine guns, tanks and aerial bombing raids. Most of Europe lost almost an entire generation, no real gains were made by any sides, and the treaty was cocked up so badly we had to go back and have a rematch again a scant twenty years later, wiping out the next generation as well. So excuse me if I think all the commemorations of 'heroism' are missing the point a bit. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars, but we have learned absolutely fuck all about anything in the hundred years since. Have a look at Gaza and Iraq if you aren't sure about that. Gaza is still suffering the fall out from the wars of the mid twentieth century and the ridiculousness of carving up land masses between different owners.

I can't help thinking that the money that is being spent on yet more monuments (every village and town in this country already has a war memorial in it already, we don't need more) might be better spent on putting back the services for the mentally and physically handicapped that we are systematically destroying. Ironically, those very heroes of 1914-18 that we are remembering would be left with nowhere to live and no help with the terrible mental and physical scarring that they were left with after their ordeals if they were living today. Much as they were at the time if they weren't independently wealthy.

As to the wonderful plan of only having one light on in your home between 10 and 11 on the very anniversary of the outbreak of war, in memoriam to Sir Edward Grey's enigmatic quote 'The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime' was another example of our current awful tendency to conspicuous, self-aggrandising displays of what good people we are. I suspect everybody that did it left the fucking Telly on as well, or sat and surfed the interwebs at the same time. Certainly my facebook feed was full of pictures of candles with 'remembrance' captions all over them. As I said, ego-stroking, conspicuous, look at me wankery of the crappest nature. I also worry that some godawful PR company got paid a ton of cash to come up with it, though I haven't checked, as I don't want to be right. Apologies to anybody who actually sat in front of a candle in quiet contemplation for an hour, I have no problem with you if it helped you, otherwise, I fail to see the point.

Obviously Britain first got their oars in with their poppy covered memes, taunting you to share their page and get them likes, by saying only 1% will do it. Awful, nasty, political posturing of the most shameful kind, and many people I like, who would have nothing to do with Britain First still shared that fucking picture, because they like the sentiment. I will not apologise for the many comments I left that merely said 'check your source and change your mind'.

I have no problem with remembering the victims of all wars, and am looking forward very much to next years centenaries of Agincourt and Waterloo, I will be lighting candles on St Crispins day, while quoting Shakespeare on Twitter. Oh, and singing along to Abba with my hand inside my coat and a funny hat on at my stepdaughter on her 22nd birthday. Except these centenaries aren't going to happen are they? Point is, that on armistice day, every year, we put aside everything, and stop and remember everyone who has ever been duped into doing the dirty work for the power-mongers and gotten themselves killed in the process. And that's a good thing, and also perhaps, enough. I can't take four more years of airbrushed history being forced down my throat in every 'news' bulletin. If the anniversary of a thing from a century ago is the top story when UN shelters are being bombed by a US sponsored democratic state, then something has gone very wrong.

There will always be somebody making a lot of money from wars, and as long as they keep fooling the common man (whoever he is) that the wars need fighting, then nothing is going to change. Learn the real lessons of the big bad wars of the twentieth century, and don't fight for anybody but yourself. Anybody who tells you the trenches of Belgium were the worst human suffering ever and that you are being disrespectful knows nothing of history. Napoleon's russian campaign was no fun for anyone, neither was Hitler's. And living in Aztec times was no fun at all, particularly when Cortez came along. You can't just pick one awful thing from history and keep on banging on about it, it will lose all impact.

“I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I ain’t a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns." ~ Woody Guthrie

Why some mornings I cry like a little girl for no good reason at all

Apologies for the long gap between blogs. I have been making money, and being on holiday, this is my only excuse, and it is the one I am sticking to. I hope it suffices. I am not really sure where this particular entry is heading, but humour me, I wish to talk about the phenomenon of mourning the end of summer. I admit this seems an odd thing to write about as we veer into august in the midst of blistering temperatures, and when I have not willingly worn socks for over a month now, but I was reminded of a thing on monday morning, and I shall try and describe it now.

What happened was this, I woke up and prepared for my return to work after a fortnight off. It has been about a decade since I last took a whole fortnight off, and so it had felt like a proper summer holiday, like you get when you're a kid, and the summer lasts forever. Well, not that good, but pretty great. After a fortnight of blistering temperatures, in which I had pottered about in flip flops and shorts, it was no fun to yank on a real pair of trousers and force my feet into shoes and socks. At this point some smart arse is going to point out that I regularly go to work in shorts and flip flops as well, and they are right, I do. However, on monday I woke up to the rain lashing away at my windows, and it looked to be a pretty awful day.

The rain almost lifted my spirits, as I figured I may as well be at work if the weather is going to turn back to standard devon summertime. However, I was thinking of the mornings I had spent on Jersey with my wife the week before, strolling through glorious sunshine and going to see marvellous and wonderful things. And then I realised I was going to have to drive to work, and wear a coat, as it was really proper raining by this point. I hate driving to work, it is a lovely walk, and it cheers me up to walk in the morning (well any time of day really) but this may be a subject for an entirely separate entry later on. Anyhow, I got into my car, and had left a lilac time album in the CD player, it played me this song.

Salvation Song (please follow the link, it's the most fragile and beautiful thing you are likely to hear today)

Now, I love this song, it is a beautiful and lovely piece of music which cannot fail to touch anybody who hears it. And on this occasion, it got me, I very nearly turned up to work in floods of tears as I was so unnecessarily emotional over the whole end of holiday, crappy rainy morning, beautiful love song thing I had just been through. Which reminded me of when I was a strange and unusual child, really.

Seriously, I had utterly forgotten this, but when I was a kid, pretty much every september without fail, I would find one morning on the bus to school in the first week back, my eyes would fill with tears, and I would be heartbroken over the death of the summer. At least that's what I put it down to, I might have just been overly emotional, or on the edge of a nervous breakdown (might be on one now as well, who can tell?) either way, I would pretty much cry in front of people for no good reason, and not be able to explain why (not the coolest thing for an awkward and geeky 12 year old with a serious Dr Who problem). This still happens if somebody plays the wrong song at me at the wrong time. I am old enough now to admit that it was Richard Marx on the school bus, one very shameful september. I have never liked that song, and I never will, but if I hear it at the wrong time, I will howl like a little girl with a kebab skewer through her foot.

My emotional instability aside, those long summers when I was a kid, when we'd go out and play in rivers, and just do nothing in bright sunshine for what felt like years, are really worth getting upset about when they're over. Even when it's just a fleeting fortnight in your thirties that felt a bit like the late 80s somehow. I am glad I can mourn the good and lovely things, and am not dead inside. Now pass me the flip flops, I'm having cider for lunch again.

The Ever Decreasing Circling Joy of Birthdays

I turned 37 last week. It is a thoroughly unremarkable birthday, 36 is no different, 38 is incredibly similar, in fact it may be the most utterly pointless birthday I have ever had. It only occurred to me a few days before, when I was listening to this song (which by the way, if you do not love, you are wrong, it belongs up there as one of the best track one side one songs ever, right next to Janie Jones)

Just how old I actually am now. Because I remembered my brother buying me this album for my sixteenth birthday, well, he bought me a dodgy tape from Bideford market, that almost certainly wasn't original, but I loved that album, and didn't care. Sixteen wasn't that long ago was it? Well, I then realised that 1993 was the very year of that album. I then remembered that my stepdaughter Rudi was born that year. And that it was also her 21st birthday the same week. Which makes that album 21 years old. That tape my brother bought me is now old enough to drink in the USA, and I suddenly found myself feeling a little ancient. For perspective, the gap between the Spin Doctors album and now, is larger than the gap between the spin doctors album and the first Clash Album with Janie Jones on it. And the same as the gap between it and Black Sabbath vol 4. Feeling old now?

I think after a certain age you should probably only celebrate your birthday every half a decade, or possibly only when there's a zero in your age. I realise that makes me sound a curmudgeonly old sod, and you'd be right there. I am very much a curmudgeonly old sod, as my wife and step-kids are wont to remind me. I did in fact have a lovely weekend, Rudi came all the way back from Falmouth especially to see me, my parents took me out for lunch, even my usually slack stepson, Adam came through with a card and a very decent bottle of wine (as well as the invention of the phrase multi-celebration Sunday). I was made to feel loved and special, which is always nice, but not entirely deserved I suspect.

Let me elucidate a bit, getting a year older is very easy, for most of one's life it requires very little effort. At the beginning and the end, it is something of an achievement, but at 37, it's just the mileometer clicking over, the inexorable slide towards forty is in full swing, and there is no way you can stop it now, unless you've got troubles, in which case celebrate all you can. I have always felt that on my birthday, I should buy my mum a present and take her out, after all, she did all the work that day, I don't even remember it. Dad also deserves some credit, as he did punch the windscreen out of his car on the fast lane of the M3, which is pretty bad ass. Either way, they should be celebrated a lot more than me, I did nothing except tie myself up in an umbilical cord and jump out a month early, causing all kinds of problems for everybody concerned.

Birthday celebrations for children, I suspect, go back to the days of high infant mortality, when your child remaining alive for another year was definitely something worth celebrating. Also, birthdays when you are a child, are just awesome, the best thing ever. You tell your family all the things you want, and they get you as many of them as they can. Well, they do now, when I was a kid, I told my mum and dad a bunch of things I wanted, and I got one. Or sometimes half, as if it was expensive, it got stretched out over birthday and christmas, which taught me a valuable lesson about the value of money, or stuff, or something, I forget. My gran on the other hand, got me pretty much everything I ever asked for, and my every whim would be indulged as she truly was brilliant, and I miss her every day. The point is, that when you are a child, your birthday is very much your day, and you get what you want.

As you get a bit older, birthdays become very much an excuse for a party. By the time I was in my late teens and early twenties, I did not care at all if there were any presents, as long as we were all drinking, and having a good time. Again, it was a day entirely for me, and I could indulge my every little whim without reproach. Until a few days later, when those around me would let me know what an arse I had been, and I would have to go and apologise to the multitudes of Bideford. But again, the point is, here you tell your loved ones what you want to do, and they do it.

After a while, the presents become thoroughly pointless, because you are a grown up, if there are moderately priced things you want, you can go out and buy them. This of course leads people to buy you novelty gifts. These are invariably pointless, and a bit shite, and you have to keep them, because you usually live with the people who bought them for you. Get some shelves, get lots of shelves, it never ends. You can hint as much as you like about the book or DVD that you really want, and not buy it in the run up to your birthday, but it will not be there, you can buy it the week afterwards. And enjoy the almost but not quite as good as you'd like gifts that you have been given. Don't even think that complicated musical equipment and other expensive specialist items are going to come your way, your friends and family do not understand your hobbies, and will not buy you vintage stratocasters. And you now have too many records, books and DVDs for any sane person to look through and check what you already have before picking something you might like and buying it for you. Welcome to adulthood, expect inappropriately stayed clothing as gifts (I am talking cardigans here).

Then you have your own family, and here it changes forever. As because it is your birthday, your children want to spend it with you, and make you happy. They are not going to get you drunk, they are not going to buy you a jet ski. They are going to want to spend the day with you, and they will want to do something they like as well. You may even get given something home made, do not under any circumstances ask what it is, tell them it is beautiful, and the best gift you could have had, and ask your significant other quietly what it is supposed to be. Chances are you won't even be lying about it being brilliant, as it genuinely is the thought that counts. But the dynamic has changed, your birthday is no longer about you, or what you want to do. It is about what the people who love you want to do, and you will have to share it.

I, for example, would like to spend every day sitting around in my dressing gown drinking cider and swearing at inanimate objects. I am not allowed to do this every day, as it is a stupid idea, and would alienate me from polite society. Even on my birthday I cannot do this, as it is still a stupid idea, which is a good thing. My family want to celebrate with me, and luckily, they are now all old enough to drink, so we do. We do get dressed, and we lay off the swearing at furniture, and they gently coax me into being happy, and having a good time, rather than being the miserable shite I am 90% of the time. And I am glad about that.

I have always pointed out that I don't like cake much, and would rather have a birthday pie. Occasionally this whim has been humoured, but generally, there is a cake instead, because other people like cake, particularly the kids. Equally, this year, I was told by my lovely wife that we were going out for the day, the day before my birthday, as my parents had already bagsied the actual birthday for a family meal, because my sister was unexpectedly in Devon (this worked out very nicely, it has been at least a decade since I was with my parents on my birthday, and as it was fathers day as well, both me my Dad, and my brother in law did quite well). Being the curmudgeonly old sod that I am, I kind of wanted to be left the hell alone for at least one day of the weekend, but as I said, birthdays when you are older are for the people who love you to let you know, not for you to indulge your own strangeness.

Equally, the saturday night (generally one which would be spent in the pub, where I would have been all day probably) was spent at a play, as all my current batch of local friends were going to this play as well. It was outdoors, and there was a bar, so my habitual drunkeness could be indulged, but again, I was feeling railroaded into doing what other people wanted. Of course, all this being forced into doing things other than sitting around drinking meant I had a far more pleasant and memorable weekend than I would have done had I been left to my own devices, or indulged like a seven year old. The very reason I love my wife so much is that she has a knack of knowing what I will actually enjoy a lot better than I do. And my stepkids are fast becoming the most pleasant drinking company I have ever known, so the future is looking bright.

I am sure one day, they will be too busy with their own families, and I will be lucky to get a phone call saying Happy Birthday, so if I were to waste these last few family birthdays in a scrumpy induced, misanthropic dressing gown clad daze, it truly would be a waste. For one day I will probably be sat in a stinky arm chair, with no idea who I am, and if I am lucky, once a year there will be a sofa full of scared looking grandchildren wondering why they have been made to come and sit with the weird old man on such a lovely sunny day, and why he is swearing at a cupboard.

 I apologise to my future grandchildren for the misery I am going to inflict on them, but I will anyway, as they need to learn the importance of family, so that one day they will have scared grandchildren in front of them.

So I finished the course, and I wrote a story :)

Yep, finished the creative writing course this week, and by ignoring all the advice I got from it, and just doing what I do anyway, I wrote this for the final piece, which had a 1000 word limit on it, that I also ignored.
It got very positive reviews from the other poor sods doing the course, I wrote it far too quickly, and thought it was okay. However, all this, and turning 37 have left me with very little time to write anything else this week, so I'm posting this due to extreme laziness taking over, enjoy, it is loosely based on a not anywhere near as interesting true story.

Sorry for the laziness, usual ranting will be resumed next week, when I will have a lot to say about birthdays when you're a grown up.

Just Because You're Paranoid...

'Excuse me,' came a voice from the car that had just reversed 200 metres back up the road, 'I know this sounds weird, but could I take your photograph?' Pete was taken aback, that did sound weird. But sometimes weird is good, and interesting, and if there was one thing Pete wasn't, it was impolite. And it would be tremendously impolite to refuse such a simple request, besides, he was only strolling out to the pub for the evening, he had time, and this did appeal to his vanity.

'Ok, why not.' Pete leaned into the window of the silver saloon car, pushed up his Aviator sunglasses, and grinned manically at its occupant. Inside he could see tripods, lights and all the assorted paraphernalia of the photographer's trade, which put his mind at rest on one count. This chap was a photographer, or at least had made sure his back story held up okay. Pete was cursed with an over-active imagination, and within the time it had taken for the car to reverse back up the road towards him, and his answer to the man inside, he had enacted five separate scenarios in his head, which all ended with him dead, and none of them were nice.

'Sorry to do this, it's just that you look really interesting, and it's a sort of hobby of mine, collecting photographs of interesting looking people. I'm not some kind of weirdo, honest,' the man chuckled nervously as he got out of the car. He was wearing a corporate uniform, blue jacket and matching trousers, with the logo of the energy company he represented emblazoned on the left breast. This reassured Pete a little more, the man would have to answer to his employers, a serial killer wouldn't have an ID badge casually hanging on a lanyard around his neck. Possibly he was just some kind of government spook, looking for subversive elements, and Pete had once been to a greenpeace meeting, that was pretty subversive. But it was true, Pete did look interesting, with his brothel creepers, midnight blue drape jacket, bootlace tie and quiff, you would swear it was still the '50s rather than the twenty first century.

'No, no, you're fine, to tell you the truth it's not the first time this has happened' Pete lied, he didn't know why he felt the need to lie, it was probably to put the man at his ease, though why he needed to put him at his ease evaded Pete completely. This encounter would either be over in less than two minutes, and they would never see each other again, or Pete would be knocking on the boot of his car and screaming at the top of his lungs to be let out. Either way, there was no need for the chap to be at his ease.

'I'm not surprised, you do have an enigmatic look about you, I'm Darren by the way, pleased to meet you,' said the stranger, smiling through a neatly trimmed beard, and he put out his hand in greeting to Pete, who shook it excessively firmly and vigorously, in a meaningless attempt to show his strength, in case Darren still turned out to be some kind of weirdo, also it might prevent Darren from injecting him with any kind of tracer or bugging devices, by increasing his blood pressure enough to spit it right out again.

'Pete, likewise.'

'Now, if you can just stand there, against that wall with the graffiti, I think that would make a really interesting backdrop,' Pete did as he was told, the wall was, he had to concede, a pretty good backdrop. Some street artist had sprayed a 10 foot high image of an electric guitar surrounded by stars on the electricity substation by the road. Pete dutifully stood in front of it, doing his best Elvis sneers, while Darren snapped away from every angle he could find.

'All done, thanks Pete, do you want copies of these shots? I can email them to you later if you want?'

'Yes please mate, that would be excellent,' Pete said, before he'd had time to think it through, and before he knew it he was writing his email address down on a scrap of paper for Darren. Why had he done that? You could use an email address to call up every bit of personal detail you needed on somebody nowadays couldn't you? He might have been following Pete for weeks, and just needed to confirm his email address to make sure he had the right guy. They could link this to PeteyRNR75 from all those Rock and Roll internet forums he hung out on. What had he said? Was he going to be locked up in some Orwellian nightmare for his strong views on period correct equipment for rockabilly bands, or laughing at the guy who's turn-ups had been half an inch too short? He awaited the knock on the back of the head, and resigned himself to being bundled into Darren's boot.

'Well, thanks for that, I'll send you the pictures once I've jiggled them about a bit, speak to you later!' and with that, Darren drove away into the hazy sunshine of an early June evening. Pete took a deep breath, and walked on to the pub. He managed to talk himself down, and realised that Darren was almost certainly  just a harmless eccentric with a photography project, just as he had said. He thought no more about it.

Later that night, having returned from an uneventful evening at the Three Pigeons, Pete found an email in his inbox with the photographs attached, they were good. They were really good, Pete looked fantastic, with the sunlight glinting off the sides of his Raybans, and his brylcreemed quiff shining majestically in front of that giant guitar in the background. He sent a quick reply, 'Thanks mate, look really good, I hope they help with your project. - Pete' and then went off to bed.

Outside, just past Pete's garden wall, Darren closed the email he had just received on his blackberry, nodded to himself and took out his little bag of lockpicks.