the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Yesterday I had my haircut. Dispiriting isn’t the word. Not that any blame for this should be inferred as being the fault of my hairdresser, the frankly wonderful Julie, who is actually my support worker, but handily for me has some hairdressing skills.

No. In fact the blame doesn’t lay with anyone at all, but instead with one of life’s greatest misfortunes, one that is as cruel as it is inevitable. Ageing, getting older with every passing second. The fact that we can do nothing whatsoever to alter that fact only adds to the tragedy. Compounding this is another fact, the folly of youth, which never once gives us cause to consider that we may not always be young. One of the ironies of youth is that even as one is enjoying it, it is being used up, and that that we are too busy using it up to notice it’s passing.

Which is where hair comes in. When I was young there were many follicle follies in my youth. The perm, the wedge, the highlights, to name but three. Granted nothing was bad as the skinheads my mum made told the barber to give us when we were both at primary school, just weeks before there was a spate of tabloid articles denouncing skinheads as the most dangerous of public menaces until the next one. But whatever, I was safe in the knowledge that my hair would grow back, just as thick and plentiful as it always had. Sure, it’d take time, but being young, time wasn’t something I ever thought about. My hair would grow back, the seasons would change, and the sun would set in the west. All was good with the world.

Until, that is, things started to change. Imperceptibly so to begin with, as changes often do, so for a while I didn’t notice that changes were afoot.Then I began to notice what was falling into the cape the hairdresser would wrap me in. Or to be exact what wasn’t falling into the cape. There would always be slightly less and what there was, wasn’t as thick as it was. And it was starting to change colour. Again, imperceptibly at first, but unmistakeable once I began to look for it, bits of grey here and there, but ‘speckled’ is a euphemism for ‘starting to to go grey, and once it starts it doesn’t stop.

Losing one’s hair is one of natures the practical joke that awaits all of us, one that is as as inescapable as it as so blindingly obvious such that no-one ever mentions it. Well, certainly not when you’re young anyway. In the same way that no male relative ever took me to one side and said, “Look, you may not believe this, but one day your testicles will drop. They may like two apples wrapped up tightly in a bag now, but one day the’ll look like the pendulums on a grandfather clock. It will happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.” It’s almost as if there’s a conspiracy of silence, an on-going and mean one, whereby no-one ever tells the young that this will happen, a sort of ‘well it happened to me and no-one ever told me about it, so why should I tell you?’ mindset. I confess to being not only amazed and appalled by this sudden turn of events, but also fascinated, so much so that I invite my house-mate to bear witness to this. “They’ve collapsed, look at them!”, I exclaim, just as intrigued by this as I am by her frankly insulting lack of disinterest. I hasten to add we were once more than house-mates a long time ago, almost as long as my elastic gonads are.

And if it’s happening to men, it follows that it must be happening to women. But everyone else is well, other people. I’m me and this is happening to me! Me!

So I wonder what other japes no-one has told me about, what other ‘delights’ getting older has in store for me?

Perhaps my pubic hair will turn grey. Wouldn’t surprise me, way things are going.

The various strikes that have happened over recent weeks, are taking place today and are planned for later this week could easily have been the the latest in example of the worrying modern phenomena of Meism. Meism is the unhealthy delusion afflicting large swathes of the population whereby everything is viewed through the prism of individual self-interest. Of how a particular thing affects me, how I feel about it. No matter how far removed from someone’s actual lived experience – or in fact precisely how far removed it is – the more people appear to want to make it all about them.

It could have, were it not for the fact that millions of working Britons, who depend on tax credits and food banks to survive, are themselves facing the same higher prices and lower wages that the strikers are striking over. They recognise that one day in the near future it might be them, and they won’t want people crossing picket lines. That the strikers are just like them, face the same challenges they face, have to cope with the same privations they do, want the same change they do. But as Basil Fawlty said, “It’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope.”

Which brings us neatly on to Stinking Richy and Liz unTrustworthy. During a quick-fire round of questions on the televised debate on Monday, both were asked if they’d ban strikes on ‘essential public services’ Without hesitation they both said “Yes”, so at the very we can expect the definition of ‘essential public services’ to be massively widened to include nanny’s and massage       ’therapists’, to name but two. Why this should come as a shock – although not to massage ‘therapists’ – to anyone who’s been paying attention to governmental introducing legislation to better suit their aims is a mystery.

In 2015, the Conservatives passed a law that for a strike to be legal, not only would 50% of the unions electorate have to have voted, but of those that did, 40%would have had to voted for strike action. Of course, it wasn’t seen as brazen hypocrisy that a government that had only managed to secure the support of 36.9% of those that had voted, were keen to hold others to a higher standard than they had failed to meet. Remember the quote used about Hitler that as relevant to Thatcher? Using the letter of the law to subvert it? No surprise then, when faced with growing unrest amongst public sector workers because of derisory pay offers well below the rate of inflation and a cost of living crisis, the government recently introduced legislation which made it easier for employers to hire scab labour agency staff.

Actually, it isn’t a cost of living crisis. That’s just something that the media have concocted, which newspaper editors and TV bosses can commission earnest and sincere articles and programmes about, safe in the knowledge that their comfortable salary’s will protect them from the reality that their stories unearth. No, it’s a cost of existing nightmare, not a cost of living crisis, because no-one who depends on food banks and goes without meals so their children can eat, buys their clothes from charity shops and can’t afford to pay the bills, is living are they?

So good luck the rail workers that are going on strike. Here’s hoping it causes travel chaos on the railways, resulting in loads of empty seats at the Commonwealth Games, long delays in getting to and from work and generally inconveniences as many people as possible. No-one goes on strike hoping that things will continue as before, that nobody notices. What’d be the point of that? The only people who don’t agree with strikes are those that will never have to go one.

In my last post I made the bold claim that most of the ills that beset our country now have their origins in the pursuit of free market economics, not just pursued by Mrs Thatchers Conservative governments, but caught and accelerated past easily. Here, I’ll try and convince of that proposition. Successive governments have, to varying degree’s followed her example, but without her example would they have?

Or, if Thatcher had lost the Falklands War and then the 1983 general election, would Britain have been a less divisive place? Not just rich/poor, but North/South, black/white, a country where everyone felt that they were part of a much larger whole, not merely stuck in a hole that was not only getting deeper but fuller with people just like them.

In his magisterial biography of Hitler, “ Hitler: A Study in Tyranny”, Alan Bullock used a line to describe Hitler, which I’ve never forgotten because it neatly summed up what Thatcher was doing to the unions in the 1980’s. “He used the letter of the law to subvert the law’.  Thatcher changed laws to better suit her political aims, then engineered a situation – the miners strike of 1984 – where she could use them. Anyway, here are but two of the  ills that plague modern Britain, and I’ve used them to illustrate how Thatcherism has lead to this sorry state.

Higher fuel prices? The crushing of the miners, de-regulation of the  energy market under the Conservative chimera of ‘competition’ which lead inexorably to the privatisation of energy companies eventually resulting in foreign ownership, increased bills and ever increasing profits. OK, a war in Ukraine didn’t exactly help matters, but the groundwork, the heavy lifting, had been done under Thatcher decades earlier.

Low wages, zero hour contracts and the gig economy? Using legislation to not only weaken the power of the unions but also strengthen the hand of the employers, using the fear of unemployment to induce workers to accept lower wages, longer hours, and worse conditions. Again, Thatcher.

Are you beginning to spot a pattern here? Change the law – especially labour laws – in favour of business by suggesting that the government is ‘cutting red tape and encouraging innovation’. Or ‘giving businesses the best possible chance to succeed’ Minimise state participation while extending the involvement of the private sector. Proof that Mrs. Thatcher was the worst thing to happen to Britain since the creation of the workhouse.

In my last post I I called Rishi Sunak ‘Richie Sunak’ This was my mistake and I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused.

It should, of course, have been Stinking Richy. 

Here’s one of my problems with both Richie Sunak and Liz unTrsustwothy. I didn’t need to watch the head to head debate last night because was neatly summed up at Penny Merde’s campaign launch, as she sought to win the support of Conservative M.P.”s. 

Essentially, she compared her plans for plans for tax, the economy and the state in general with Paul McCartneys recent headlining set at Glastonbury, where he played loads of newer songs, but what we wanted were the old favourites we new and loved and could sing along to. Those were what the crowd wanted, she said, and if her leadership bid was successful, that’s what she’d give them. Simply by giving her their vote, their support, she’d return  the favour by turning back the clock by giving them the old Conservative greatest hits; reduce taxes and reduce state spending, support the economy by reducing red tape and helping business, tackling inflation…the same old same old.

Yes, there was some lip-service paid to the now, but it was a bit like getting a huge pile of poo, chucking it into a cake mould, before covering it in sprinkles, frosting, hundreds and thousands and vermacelli, and telling people it wasn’t the same load of old crap. But the thing is, much as the Conservative M.P’s she sought to enthuse wished it, we are not in the 1980’s. The highly divisive economic policies that Thatcher pursued, could it be fairly argued, led us to exactly where we are now. 

Indeed, most of the social ills that beset our country now have their origins in her ideological illogicality. A bold claim, you might think, to which I say read my next blog where I try to back that up.

We don’t need a return to what didn’t work for all in our nightmare past. The challenges we face now aren’t going to be solved by a right-wing wet dream. They need fresh innovative thinking to come up with bold and ambitious ideas to solve them. Were Richie Sunak or Liz unTrustworthy in an alternative universe for the last fortnight? One where the climate wasn’t a bit warmer than usual? One where the income disparity between the richest and poorest has never been wider? One where politicians are unwilling to tell the electorate the truth about the challenges of an ageing society. Indeed one in which there was no such thing as society?

Hello and good morning from 0438 am. I woke up about an hour ago, lay in bed with nothing but my thoughts for company and one persisted for so long that I was gripped by an overwhelming desire to share it.

Just a quick recap before though. For all of this year, I’ve been averaging roughly 3 hours sleep a night, and when I write roughly, I mean roughly. When I wake up, that’s it, I never go back to sleep, just lay there thinking until I fitfully drowse some time later. For the last few nights, being determined to break the cycle, I’ve forced myself to get up at 10am and tough it out until midnight and then go to bed. Sadly, while the mind may well be willing, the flesh is weak and wakes up at what-the-fuck-o’clock. So now you’re up to speed.

Yesterday I saw a headline on the BBC that was as inevitable as it was indicative of the times in which we live in now.

Google has threatened to remove its search engine from Australia over the nation’s attempt to make the tech giant share royalties with news publishers.

Australia is introducing a world-first law to make Google, Facebook and potentially other tech companies pay media outlets for their news content.

But the US firms have fought back, warning the law would make them withdraw some of their services.

Tech firms have faced increasing pressure to pay for news content in other countries, including France, where Google struck a landmark deal with media outlets on Thursday.

In Australia, the proposed news code would tie Google and Facebook to mediated negotiations with publishers over the value of news content, if no agreement could be reached first.

The article then goes on to point out blah, blah and blah, with Google bleating on about this that. It occurred to me that google are nothing more than the digital worlds equivalent of tobacco firms; they get people hooked on their product, make money hand over fist, but when lawmakers threaten regulatory action, get all stroppy and threaten to take their ball away.

Google believes in free speech all right, but free as in free to make money from the content that others have paid to generate in the first place. The irony that I’ve copied and pasted from a BBC news article about paying for content that I haven’t, isn’t lost on me.

I’m thinking of the ‘Morecambe and Wise’ Christmas Special of 1971. You know, back when Christmas Specials were actually special. Anyway they had Andre Previn on, the world famous conductor, taking time off from his normal bus route to appear on the show. Ostensibly there to conduct an ornestra in a rendition of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, with Morecambe on piano. Previn halts proceedings when he accuses Morecambe of playing all the wrong notes.

To which Morecambe replies ‘I am playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order.’ That’s how my sleep has been over the last few days. The right amount of hours to be sure, but at the wrong time of day. Seven hours of sleep might be what one aims for, but if you start that seven hours at seven in the morning, like I did last night refreshed you are not.

And the worst thing is, that when you do wake up, you feel so knackered, so tired and so utterly butterly, that all you want to do is stay in bed. But you know that if you do that, then you’ll have another late one.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised last year when I heard to original version of this. Until that moment, I had no idea that the version I’d always assumed was the original, wasn’t.

You know that feeling you get when something you’ve been looking forward to, only for it to massively disappoint you? Netflix’s ‘A History of Swear Words’ gave me that feeling yesterday.

‘A History of Swear Words’ is a six episode series with each episode focusing on one swear word per episode, and the first one exploring the word ‘fuck’  Or f**k, as the programme description has it, adding that fuck ‘ is the silly putty of the English Language, our most malleable swear word can refer to sex, rage, confusion, excitement and whole lot more.’ They stressed repeatedly how fuck was the most offensive of swear words, in a classic case trying to convince us of something we know to be patently untrue. We know what the most offensive swear word is, and it’s so offensive that by ignoring it, the series only highlights this fact.

The rest of the series focuses on ‘sh*t’, ’bitch, d**k, Pu**y and damn. Fucking hell! Is damn a swear word? Are they taking the piss? Clearly, as piss isn’t even mentioned and neither is arse. Additionally, they only focus on English swear words, which is a shame, because other languages have much more wonderfully descriptive and offensive swear words. I went to a Catholic boys school, which means I can – or could before my brain injury fucked my speech – call your mother a whore and worse in Polish, question your fathers sexuality in Greek, your sisters dubious morals in Nigerian and your brothers flagrant opportunism in Turkish. The most offensive swear word I’ve ever used – well two actually – is Italian and I never thought that bad until, that is, I used it in an argument with an Italian. It was the verbal equivalent of throwing a hand grenade into proceedings, which would’ve been useful for me to know before I casually pulled the pin. Big mistake.   

‘A History of Swear Words’ is billed as a comedy, but with pretensions towards being a serious documentary, complete with academics on hand to provide some spurious credibility to proceedings. I had intended to watch it with the sound off and the subtitles on, to see how they’d cope, thinking that’d be the funniest thing. But the biggest joke of all was how they managed to avoid mentioning the most offensive swear word of all.

Which is what I thought the proramme makers were a bunch of.

There could only be one choice clip to accompany this post, couldn’t there. The first time I heard this, I was fifteen, had just bought the album, thought I was alone in the house, had it on full blast, went to the toilet, only for it suddenly to be turned off. Mum had arrived back. Comedy genius’s or not, swearing was swearing but this was off the scale..

Well that was certainly an unexpected turn of events, unexpected that is, to anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to politics since they were born. I refer of course to the news that in the US, senior Republican’s have tuned on Trump, reversing their previous defence of the President against impeachment proceedings.

Their sudden realization that the result of cross-fertilizing a bad tempered orangutan with Arthur Daley had somehow become the president had nothing whatsoever with them calculating he’d become the political equivalent of Heineken. In 2016, Trump managed the seemingly impossible, and convinced large swathes of the politically marignalised to vote for him. How exactly this billionaire hoodwinked the disenfranchised to vote for him is an enduring mystery, but vote for him they did, and so, like Heineken, he revived a largely ignored increasingly dismissed electoral base. Of course he did,, Trump represented the best voice they’d heard in years of elections, years when they hadn’t voted – hell years when them not voting was seen as confirming just how right the political establishment was in ignoring them in them. Trump beating Hilary Clinton in 2016 was yet another example of people voting the wrong way, people acting without first reading the script.

But like Heineken, his time passed, and in the same way as someone who’s had too much Heineken, he became increasingly unstable and therefore a political liability to others. One has to ask then, when did these same senior Republicans who are withdrawing their support for Trump decide the game was up? What changed? Only a cynic of the very highest order would suggest that their sudden commitment to democratic norms has anything to do with him having a week left in office anyway? And that if .the impeachment process does find him guilty, he’ll be unable to run for President in 2024.

Like so many other political leaders before him, once he was seen a political liability rather than an asset, the inevitable happens. The sharks smell blood in the water; move in for kill and a feeding frenzy begins.  

As bizarre circumstance would have it, I started watching ‘House of Cards’ yesterday, the Netflix version. It rather bears out the political truism that everyone is expedient, that everyone can – and ultimately will – be replaced. As soon as Kevin Spacey was seen as toxic, ratings kryptonite, he was dropped.

However, lets move away from such tawdry business and instead enjoy the Euro-Disco bubblegum pop that is ‘Dolce Vita’ by Ryan Paris. I hadn’t realised how cheap and rank the video is, made in a time when that sort of thing, filming as many attractive girls as you could to hide the fact you only had two days to shot the video, was considered viable optionActually, it sums up Trump perfectly; crass, sexist, and hopefully, a one hit wonder.

Nosferatu read my post of yesterday and suggested that the only person feeling any worse from my late night/early morning navel gazing was me and to this end, for today’s post, I’m going to deal with something altogether more cheery.

Deaths from COVID.

I’m not being flippant or deliberately provocative here. But logical reasoning, analytical deduction and comparative analysis, make any other interpretation of the data sheer nonsense, if not a deliberate falsehood. Yes, I think COVID is real, and a real threat to life, the two notions sit quite comfortably together in my head. Just because I think that the data has been misinterpreted, it doesn’t therefore follow that I think the whole COVID thing is a hoax.

But the incidence of deaths from COVID, relative to the amount of tests carried out and the subsequent number of positive test results from them, are good news. More than good actually, bloody fantastic!

As of Monday 11^th of January, the last time any new data was uploaded onto https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details the amount of coronavirus tests carried out was just over 56,000,000. Of those, just under 3,200,000 were positive.

Or about 6%. But it gets even better. Or worse, depending on your point of view, but for now, I’m going to go with better.

Because of that 6%, guess how many die? Come on, were all adults here, no place for wishy-washy sentimentality here, how many? Just under 82,000. So if we take that 6% and turn it into 100%, that 82,00 becomes 2.6%.

So naturally enough, I then ask myself what’s the percentage of deaths relative to the total amount of tests carried out? And what does that give us?  Less than 0.25%  Yup, for a virus that has in little over a year managed to completely overturn everything we took for granted in our old lives and at the same time, cost the UK government nearly as much as the financial crisis of 2008, it hasn’t killed that many people, has it?

Actually, it may be less than that, less than 2.6% or 82,000 or 0.25% or whatever number we choose. Because that’s…..another post. Of course every death is a tragedy and one feels for the bereaved, but sympathy shouldn’t inhibit our ability to look at the data as just numbers.  Numbers don’t lie – unless that number is £350 million painted on the side of a coach – but emotions do, sentimentality does, Before I go, I’ll just leave you with what I consider to be one best movie endings ever.

Well hello from what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-awake-o’clock, or as its better known, 6.07 am. I really did go to bed at just after midnight and just as with last night – is last night actually last night – and those preceding it, my mind was bedeviled by thoughts. As I wrote yesterday, the older one gets, the more one has to think about; what you should’ve done, what you shouldn’t have done, what might’ve happened had you, what might not have happened had you, that sort of thing. Except this time, I had my own ball of string to help me navigate my way back through the labyrinth ,well not back exactly but back to when it all started to go wrong, the moment when I chose the path which has by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, led me here.

I was ten’ish and it was time to chose which secondary school I’d be going to. In the usual course of events, one’s parents would see it as their solemn duty, nee privilege, to be entrusted so important an undertaking. Well, the problem was that my childhood didn’t follow the usual course of events. For all the interest my parents took, I’d have been better off hiring a firm of undertakers to help me. It was left down to me. I had to badger and cajole my mum to take me along to the local schools opening evenings. I was the child who asked all the questions, I was the child who would wander off to find the places they didn’t want you to see, I was the child who the pupils who’d been specially chosen to show the school in a good light hated. I was the one who studied and compared the prospectuses.

So how then did I get it so catastrophically wrong? Why then did I think that choosing a secondary school that no-one from my primary school was going to, indeed had ever been to, was a good idea? Why didn’t anyone point out the potential – which were soon to become all too real – pitfalls of such a choice? What was more pressing, more urgent, more deserving of their time to address? In what universe could anyone think ‘Sure, he’s only a child, but he’s always been a bit, y’know…so I’m sure it’ll all work out’

Looking back, that’s when it started to go wrong. The first decision I can remember taking about what direction I wanted my life to head in, was a complete disaster. Mind you, its not as if I’m the only person to have had these thoughts – or ones similar to them – at shitting-crikey o’clock.

Time for some music, methinks. I think this fits the mood rather nicely.