Compass Rose

Compass Rose is moving!!

2008-05-18T00:29:00.002Z

That’s right folks, after two and a half years of happy blogging with blogger everything is moving! Everything on this site has been shipped to http://athenia1939.wordpress.com/. This brings all four of my current blogs under one roof and allows for better access and navigation to all my wonderfully exciting thoughts and opinions.

I hope you’ll join me over at the new site and continue to flatter my sense of self worth.

Many Thanks,

Nakizo x

Wha - !?

2008-05-14T12:50:00.001Z

I’m a bloody Conservative! When the hell did that happen? It just struck me as I was browsing through the Tory website for like the tenth time today – I’m a Tory! Give me a ballot paper and I’ll tick their box. Hell, give me an innovative campaign like Boris Johnson’s was, and I’ll even give them money!

Cont…

Fifteen frightening months

2008-05-12T16:27:00.001Z

When things aren’t going anywhere I sit around bored to tears and convince myself that I am capable of so much more. And yet when things do finally start grinding forwards I am filled with terror because I am convinced that I am actually incapable of any of it.

Cont…

The 8.57 to Leeds

2008-05-03T10:14:00.000Z

So I'm on the train heading down to Leeds. Me and my old house mate have tickets for Elland Road to see the last game of the season against Gillingham. Oddly enough I was at Elland Road for the last end of season game too. As I remember rightly a certain Ipswich centre forward scored a last minute goal to send them down to League 1. This was shortly followed by the unsightly spectacle of the entire Ipswich Town football squad running for their lives as ten thousand very angry yorkshiremen pursued them off the pitch. I have to say that if our central defenders had utilised the pace they demonstrated in that occasion during the rest of season perhaps we wouldn't have finished in mid table obscurity.

Cont...

Decelerating a decline

2008-04-26T11:55:00.004Z

It is immensely frustrating to be bad at something simple. To make matters worse I seem to be especially bad at doing simple things when under observation. The minute an authority figure or an examining body shows up I seem to fall to pieces. I desperately wish I were one of those individuals who thrive on pressure and who only perform when in the presence of someone worth performing for. Alas I am not like that, I am most certainly something of a slow burner. Never any good at first impressions I like to think I am someone that grows on people. As it is with people so it is with jobs. Three weeks in and I am still a complete liability to my fellow ‘baristas’. On the surface it sounds simple. I make people coffee.

The bourgeois of the Low Lands shunt and clatter their way into Edinburgh’s West End every morning in a frightful mood. These caffeine deprived, expensively dressed, SNP voting graduates are doubtlessly yet more despondent for having noted the continued nosedive of their investment accounts in the morning papers. By the time they reach me, dressed like a clown and huddled behind a large metallic espresso machine, they seem ready to unleash hell.

“Triple Tall Skinny Decaf Vanilla Extra Hot Mocha, No Whip” they growl. And then they come, one after the other in a high paced cascade of customisable caffeine. For someone like me, who for the past six years has been used to seeing his subject matter progress no faster than the rate at which he could read through musty and faded history books in musty and faded libraries, the change of pace comes as something of a shock. I panic, skinny drinks come out as skimmed, extra hot drinks come out so hot they appear to melt the plastic lids and when someone orders a blasted Frappuccino then that’s it, all manufacturing operations cease for a good five minutes as I negotiate the unfamiliar terrain of blended ice and vanilla syrup. And I live in the perpetual fear of mixing up my soy and dairy products and inadvertently sending someone into a lactose intolerant coma.

Yet things are improving, albeit slowly and with lots of relapses. I remember what I was like a Little Chef when I first began – a complete nightmare quickly loathed by the more experienced staff for single handily running aground their tightly run ship. I also remember how, as I came to understand the ins and outs of the job, I built strong and lasting relationships with these very same people who initially feared the sight of my name coinciding with their own on the weeks rota. I hope the same will be true of this job and I suspect it will be, although there will be many more miserable shifts to endure before these broad, sunlit uplands are reached.

In the meantime another unsettling development has been gathering momentum. My financial parachute, so generously offered by my grandmother for the purposes of my degree, has ran its course and I appear to have hit the ground with an all mighty thump. Given my hourly pay and the woefully inadequate number of shifts allocated to me per week it appears that after rent and food bills I am actually losing money. Month on month I go deeper into the (full interest paying) red with only the occasional pay cheque from Her Majesty’s Armed Forces to temporarily drag me up above the waterline. I am experiencing financial waterboarding.

Given that I intend to save money for a teaching degree this situation is one that I really can’t afford to endure for much longer. Either my hours need to increase or I need to once again begin the soul-destroying process of job searching. I fear my residency within this limbo zone, between education and life, shall continue to be a tumultuous one.

Incoherent and unfiltered.

2008-04-06T12:42:00.000Z

Whenever I seriously ask myself what it is I want to do in this life the answer is almost always the same. Save the Earth and conquer the Moon. Or possibly Mars.

Is that so much to ask?

Cont… (and then some)

2008-03-18T23:19:00.003Z

"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the sort one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative"
1917 - 2008

blueprints

2008-03-14T17:48:00.005Z

These are uncertain times.

This is the grey zone between university and life. Some of the more switched on among us saw this day coming and have for years been building up their CVs, applying for jobs and rigorously pursuing employable skills. Some have even been buying property with an eye to the future! I was not one of them and now I have a bit of making up to do.

Over the last few months my future plans have slowly (far too slowly) been falling into place and I think now is the time to present them, as flawed and incomplete as they maybe. If this route turns out to be a dead end or doesn't produce the dividends I hope it will, then it matters little. With a spot of luck we will all live to a ripe old age and we can each hope to enjoy a handful of different careers. World economic collapse aside I certainly hope and expect to be economically buoyant enough throughout my life to comfortably switch paths multiple times, regardless of any home owning or family commitments. This may turn out to be a flawed assumption and reality may yet hit harder then I expect – but it is an optimistic note on which to embark the journey.

I have come to realise how the mental static of uncertainty can paralyse my system, how it can force me to stay in bed and to turn away from the world. And so some future guidelines are required to help combat that sinking feeling of hopelessness. Accurate or not, having some fixed reference points should prove incredibly useful. So as mechanical and heartless as it may seem I will now set out the framework for my next four years. Please remember this is for my career ambitions and personal interests only. My private life does not appear here and by its very nature could never be segregated into a year-by-year plan (I'm not that cold).

2008/2009: To get an office job. The past few months have taught me that you are effectively worthless without "office experience" and while I strongly disagree with that statement it is the game that I must play. Once I've broken into the world of office jobs it will be a heck of a lot easier to advance and will provide me with a more employable portfolio. To complete my MTO training. The Navy Reserves have been fantastic to me so far and I am desperate to complete my specialisation training and enjoy the skills, experience, friends and confidence that will come with it. To set and meet demanding physical targets. Raleigh was my motivation for getting fit, and now having achieved a modest level of physical competence I need to continue to set goals to push myself. My next one is to complete the Edinburgh ¼ marathon in May. To begin writing regular essays. Believe it or not I studied history at degree level because I absolutely love it. The prospect of one day embarking on another Masters degree or even on a PhD fills me with excitement and I would be lying if I told you that I didn't see 'history professor' as being one of my many career ambitions. Therefore the regular reading and writing up on issues that interest me should keep me sharp. History will finally become my hobby, which is perhaps where it should have been all along. Obtain teaching experience. As the next year will reveal there is a strong need for me to secure as much voluntary teaching work as possible. To begin learning French. I see learning a language as a huge time commitment that will not be achieved over night, but is something I should begin now (I have already been attending evening classes).

2009/2010: Complete a teaching course. Whether it be primary of secondary teaching I have yet to decide, and hopefully the teaching experience I will do will assist in that decision. I would like to do this teaching qualification in Scotland, either here in Edinburgh or possibly across in Glasgow. Although I am leaning towards Glasgow. Having this qualification should set me up nicely with an employable backbone that I can take with me anywhere in the world. Whether I end up in China, Canada or Ipswich I will have a skill that I can fall back on to secure a reliable income. Complete my AB1 training. This involves taking all the weapon handling and sea survival courses necessary to qualify myself for immediate deployment with the Reserves. To continue pursing previously mentioned interests.

2010/2011: Spend a full year teaching as a NQT. Every Newly Qualified Teacher has to spend a year on probation and that is what I will need to aim to complete during this time. To continue pursing previously mentioned interests.

2011/2012: A tour of active duty. At the end of my NQT year I will be a fully qualified teacher so it would make sense for me to use this landmark to take a break from that career and offer up six months or so to the Royal Navy. The Reserves are excellent at finding willing volunteers some active duty, and I will obviously serve wherever I am needed for anything up to a year. To be confident in conversational French. I've given myself four years by this point, more than enough to have learnt the rotten tongue. Move abroad. This is the big one that I have been building up to. North America beckons or maybe somewhere in Europe. I simply refuse to spend my entire life living in Britain. My teaching qualification will enable me to put down roots anywhere – or maybe I could use it as a means of travel, taking up teaching posts for six months at a time as I move around the world. Who knows. Obviously my private life will have a large role to play here, but I tend to go for the more international girls but if at this point I am anchored to a native then she'll just have to either come with me or lump it.

So there you have it, a blueprint for my life up until the age of 27. Cold, brutal and calculating. It is perhaps odd that I would be so open and methodical about my plans but I hope you can understand why it helps to have a mental framework in place. Of course it takes only a matter of seconds for events to change your life forever, but being unable to account for such occurrences I think this is a good start.

I best get cracking.

Kendal High Street

2008-02-23T11:07:00.001Z

The day before I leave. I'm in Kendal, Cumbria. A five hour train journey awaits before getting home, packing my stuff, checking it, rechecking it and then grabbing a few hours sleep before tomorrow's eleven hour train journey down to Plymouth.

So I arrive at the station early. An hour and a half early to be precise. The taxi driver on the way here did something I've never before seen done, he tried to undercharge me. I had the same guy yesterday and he tried the same trick then. Unusual people around these parts.

Yet things got stranger when I ventured into the town centre in search of breakfast. Kendal is a beautiful old town in the heart of the Lake District with cobbled streets and boasts the oldest surviving church in Britain, dating from the 1200s. So I was expecting to find a local little cafe where I could put down my bag and get a coffee. Walking down the high street however I stumbled across a McDonalds restaurant, and with nothing else apparently open I went in. After all McDonalds do some incredible coffee. But this was a Maccy D's like no other. On the surface it was the same, it had obviously recently been refurbished in that oriental style that seems to be in with the Mcbig-wigs, but it was the people that made this place.

All the staff appeared to be old women, and when I arrived they broke off their Cumbrian natter and seemed genuinely thrilled to see me. I made my order and a voice politely asked Dora behind the shoot to prepare me an egg McMuffin.
'Right you are' came the cheerful reply and the grannies swung into motion. Still nattering.

An old man came in behind me and was received with a 'Morning Graham, tea is it? Ill bring it right over'.
'Thanks Jan' he said as he gave a wave to those working in the kitchen. What a player.

But it dawned on me that all the customers were old men and they were all drinking tea as they studied the pages of the FT. Just what was going on here? This was McDonalds. Where were the disillusioned teenagers? Where was the atmosphere of utter indifference that is one of the franchise's saving graces?

As I ate more men came in and were met with the same service. Old women in their McDonalds baseball caps lent on their brooms and exchanged gossip with their flat cap wearing customers. Amongst all this one man got up and left, he clearly wasn't local and he had left a lot of his food. The old girl that went to clear the table quickly alerted the others to the situation and soon a large committee had assembled by the abandoned egg and bacon roll, discussing what to do.

'Do you think he'll come back for it?'
'How long has he been gone?'
'Did he get a phone call?'
'Perhaps it was an emergency'
'I hope he's alright'.

In the end they decided to take it round the back and keep it warm in case he came back. I could only look on in disbelief. The only familiar sight was a police poster pinned to the wall warning against anti-social behaviour. Though I was beginning to wonder what exactly passed for anti-social behaviour in Kendal.

I finished my breakfast, downed the coffee and made a show of clearing away my tray before heading back to the station. People moan a lot about cloned high streets and the McDonaldisation of Britain. However in Kendal I think the fast food giant has met its match. Mcdonalds, it would appear, has fallen victim to Kendalisation.

Born to be

2008-02-21T15:33:00.003Z

I’m not much very good at any one thing. I think that’s a given. I’m not charismatic, I’m not confident and I don’t have a natural gift for numbers. I read a lot but am far from ‘widely read’ and couldn’t last two minutes discussing classical literature. I have a masters degree in history and wrote what I consider to be an interesting if a somewhat unremarkable dissertation about RAF Coastal Command. That is the one and only field in which I would consider myself an expert. And as I’m sure you can tell, it isn’t one of the most in demand subject areas right now.

I’m unemployed with only a basic background in frying up English breakfasts to decorate my CV. I have no employable skills whatsoever. Worse than that, the one field in which I assumed I could simply fall into, is proving far more difficult than I ever imagined. Teaching – it is what you do when you run out of options right? It is the butt of countless (very funny) jokes, particularly in the recent “Armstrong and Miller show” – ‘Good enough to get a degree but not good enough to get a job? -Teach’. How very true.

Therefore it is a rude awakening for me to realise that I can’t even do that. I could apply to be a History teacher but two reality checks await. Firstly all history training posts are massively over subscribed so the chances of getting on to any program, let alone the one I want, are slim. Secondly even if successful becoming qualified as a history teacher is almost as useless as having a history degree in the first place. No one wants history teachers. Jobs for history teachers are very few and far between. The thought of spending a further year and further money to end up in the same economically redundant situation does not appeal in the slightest. Yet teaching retains its appeal and after a discussion with a friend of a friend the thought of primary school teaching suddenly became a viable option. Primary schools are crying out for male teachers, desperate in fact – a whole generation of kids are growing up without any male role models at all and I for one believe that this can cause some problems. And wouldn’t it be great if I were trained in a profession that actually wanted me? How cool would that be? To actually be valued.

But no. I can’t even teach six year olds to glue their hands together because I didn’t get a B Grade in my GCSE Maths when I was 16. Instead I got a C grade and that means that MSc or not I’m not eligible to apply. Unbelievable. Not only that but before a teaching school will even look at you it is vital that you can demonstrate a ton of voluntary work in the school environment and that you have the glowing references that follow from this.

My assumption that teaching was my easy, fallback option appears to have been way off the mark. I am redundant in every sense of the word. You see, things aren’t helped by the fact that I really do not know what it is I want to do. I look at the jobs in the papers and online and there is nothing that jumps out at me as being wonderful. For example I looked at applying for the graduate training schemes at some banks and at the graduate training scheme in Marketing run by the Post Office. I mean – ugh. Firstly I would never even get on them because they require you to attend a hundred different interviews and compete against other unfortunate sods in various simulated exercises and debates. The thought of being constantly assessed as I present a pretend proposal to a room of potential employers makes me sick with dread.

And for the ultimate kick in the teeth I can’t even get a basic service sector job. Even Starbucks demands years of experience in serving coffee and that you be fluent in Italian coffee varieties before they fork out the minimum wage for you. If you happened to be unfortunate enough to have a degree then you’re done for, you’re application will almost certainly be put to the bottom of the pile because they are worried you might show some sort of aspiration to better yourself. Friends of mine have been told by job agencies to remove their degree from their CVs altogether and pretend they did something more productive during those three years.

So I am in something of a pickle. At the edges of my existence at the moment I am still soldering on with the Reserves and am making a very poor attempt at learning French. In fact this weekend I disappear with the Reserves for two weeks of basic training. I am excited and terrified by this in equal measure and hope to God that I pass (and earn myself a photo wearing a funny hat).

But then sometimes this state of semi-pessimism (this isn’t full blown pessimism - trust me) evaporates and I am overcome with a sense of just how awesome we all are and how I, just like everyone else, is capable of anything we put our minds too. Regrettably these spurts of enthusiasm for life tend to be short lived but they propel me through my day.

But why shouldn’t I be capable of doing anything I want? While I don’t know what I want – I don’t see why I should limit the infinite possibilities that lie in front of me. I mean, what would be cool? A diplomat. That would be neat. Working in a foreign embassy, speaking the native lingo, attending dinner parties of local dignitaries and smoking cigars. And of course occasionally being called upon to wake up my host countries President at 4am to gravely inform him that HMS Elizabeth II is sitting cosy off his coastline and that I suggest he sign the armistice now, before he upsets Her Majesty’s Government any further. Or something to that effect.

Or working as the operations officer for a NGO. Sorting out the transportation of construction materials through the dangerous tribal regions of central Asia before assembling the local labour to build a new school or orphanage. That would be neat too.

How about being the public relations officer for Virgin Galactic? Keeping the press up to date about our achievements and future price cuts. Or why couldn’t I work as the campaign manager for a political party or election candidate?. The West Wing in real life, with me as one of the main characters. I would love that.

I could go on. But the point is I honestly don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to do any of these things, or even why I shouldn’t be capable of achieving a handful of them. What I do know is that life is unpredictable and there is no telling where I will end up or what I will end up doing – and that is exciting just as it is frustratingly difficult to plan for.

So anyway. I’m young, I’m healthy and I have an education which while not preparing me for the world, has at least taught me of its existence. Time is on my side and given that we are all going to live until at least 120 years of age I shouldn’t feel rushed. But at the same time I shouldn’t hesitate to get stuck in to a career. Breaking into an industry takes time, a few years even, especially when building from such a low base, but it is possible and only strengthens you when you change directions again at a later stage.

Life is an exciting business.

So I want to be a teacher in Scotland. I want to teach overseas and I want to use my teaching skills to travel around the world, teaching as I go. I want to work for a political party and campaign during an election. I want to advise governments and businesses in sustainable economic practices. I want to run my own renewables company. I also want to help in someway to propel human civilisation into the heavens. I want to freely travel the globe and drink cocktails with my small diaspora of international friends. I want to be a global citizen. I want to go into space and I want to see the Earth from outside. I’d like to step on the moon. I want to allow as many people as possible to share that experience with me, because I believe it would act as an enormous injection of perspective. Like Arthur C Clarke once said, flags do not wave in space. Oh, and I want to have kids. Well, I’m thinking that adoption would actually be the best way of doing things (and get me kudos green points), but we’ll see. I want a little feller to take to football practice and see grow up. But that’s a long way off as yet. If push comes to shove I can wait until I’m 50 and then find some desperate whore of a 20 year old to adopt as mother to my children and as a humanitarian side project. I’m thinking I’d like to climb some high mountains and spend weeks at a time trekking through jungles and deserts. I’d like to work for the UN and the EU, and accordingly I’d like to speak at least five languages fluently. At least. I want to be a junior officer in the Royal Navy or if possible in some other nations armed forces, just because I think it represents a fantastic achievement to join the ranks of this incredibly diverse but extremely capable bunch of young people. I want to write academic studies and advise government policy.

And I think that, as with everything else, once you’ve done one of these things, the others become a lot easier. Perhaps I need to work hard at cracking just one and hope that a domino effect kicks in. Of course I will achieve none of the above, but I could potentially achieve a few other things, which while not on the list are just as exciting.

So here’s hoping. What I actually meant to say today was this. From now on I think I’ll keep this blog as the site for all my human posts. Posts about me and funny things I notice in other people. More of an autobiographical set of accounts and I’ll begin to put things like book reviews and political thoughts in my Athenia 1939 blog. That way there is a clear distinction between the two, which also caters nicely to my audience. As far as I can tell I actually have two relatively frequent readers and three others who I would call seasonal readers, who check in on my blog about once every three months or so. The seasonal readers have no desire to hear about my racist and arrogant opinions on stuff that I really don’t have a clue about, so I think they will gain more from not seeing them. But really, anyone that reads this stuff has to consider themselves a pretty privileged individual now, don’t they?

But as ever, this blog, and indeed most blogs are merely designed to be a form of self therapy, helping me get things off my chest and allowing me to reflect on how things are going. It is nothing more and nothing less.

But to return to my earlier theme of what the future holds. So this is what I shall do. My immediate objectives, my three-year plan if you will, is to become a qualified teacher, to learn French and to advance my part time career with the Royal Navy up to a level where I’m in a position to comfortably request some real operational tours of duty. I think this provides a pretty sound base from which to then branch out into other careers and quests. Three years may sound like a long time to me right now, but it’s really not. If it all goes to plan than I’ll be twenty six by the time this is all done, which isn’t at all bad. So, that’s the plan then. I’ll have to make sure I stick to it and create perhaps some mini objectives in between, and maybe a few additional ones around the fringes, just to keep me interesting. Who knows? Anyway. Thanks for reading.

PP4: Troops to Teachers

2008-02-16T10:43:00.000Z

I just read about this on the bbc website (I'm on a 12 hour coach journey atm and have time to spare) and thought it sounded great. Troops to Teachers is a US scheme in which service personal with a degree and more than ten years experience are re-trained as teachers. Results so far are said to be impressive and they have a higher rentention rate than your average teacher too (although this is probably just because they already on to their second career).

In an age where school discipline is said to be sliding, and knife and drug use are almost certainly on the increase, there is a case to be made for their presence. Experience with dealing with unruly teens and that self confidence that is drummed into all recruits should do wonders for Britain's fatherless youth. I think strong male (and female) role models can and will make a difference. Perhaps the scheme should be broadend to include former members of the emergency services too.

Some might worry our kids will be led astray by war hungry monsters bent on indoctrinating the next wave of soldiers. This shouldn't be a concern, after ten years in the services I would happily bet that many of them are just as pink as their union loving commie colleages will be.

I have long thought that teachers could do with a dose of reality before entering the profession. How can a teacher prepare a child for the world if they themselves have gone straight from student to teacher, bypassing reality all together?

I'll admit that I myself am now considering taking up teaching and find myself in that exact situation. In defense I see it as a skill I can acquire now and rely on to always find me work, where ever I end up. But my plan is to then leave the profession and do what I was REALLY born to do!(?) Before returning and helping shape the next generation in my image when I'm old and grey.

But no, a similar Troops to Teachers scheme in the UK would work well I feel (and give some of our troops a viable future). Thankfully the Conservatives have already backed the plan and hopefully it will crop up in a manifesto near you.

America has all the best ideas.

PP3: Barack’s Bursary

2008-02-13T23:24:00.002Z

In Arkansas I was always impressed with the professional and focussed attitude of the students I met. Unlike the poetry reading, pot smoking and shot downing inhabitants of any British campus – these guys actually wanted to get things done. They even maintained that attitude while growing their hair long and wearing sandals. A truly remarkable feat.

Yet the reason they were so focussed was because their college scholarships required certain minimum grades of them – drop below a certain level and lose the funding – and lose college. That’s quite an incentive. Yet their scholarships didn’t just require academic success, they asked for more than that. They stipulated that the students must put in so many hours of community service or do so many credits in other subjects, or provide tuition to other groups.

Listening to Obama’s latest impressive oratory display he mentioned his own policy of providing government scholarships that required a certain commitment on behalf of the student to put in extra hours in community projects and extra curriculum activities. “We invest in you, you invest in your country and together we will move America forward” – is what I think he said.

Perhaps deep down it is because I hate my own inactivity and wish I had done so much more with my time as a student, but I genuinely think British students need a kick to get them going. Lazing around in bed all day might seem like a noble and much admired tradition, but there is a whole world out there that our drunken sarcasm will never touch. Why are we so content to make wry commentary and yet never to get our hands dirty?

So why not introduce a similar bursary scheme in Britain? Hike up the cost of University but introduce scholarships for everyone that are obtainable only by demonstrating a commitment to your community and to the general welfare of your neighbour. Going hand in hand with Cameron’s ‘National Citizenship Service’ this sort of scheme would surely inject some life into our down and out liberal art students.

PP2: Bugging Britain

2008-02-13T19:35:00.002Z

Britain ranks bottom of the EU nations when it comes to respecting its citizen’s privacy and internationally is on the same level as those bulwarks of liberty, Russia and Singapore. If proof was needed it has now emerged that the Metropolitan police have been regularly bugging meetings between lawyers and their clients for years. This of course comes on top of us being the most watched nation on earth, with some ridiculous figure 4.2 million cameras operating in Britain, and that doesn’t include the ones that actually talk to you. The average Brit appears on camera 300 times a day. I really didn’t think we were that interesting.

This is all very strange for a country with a tradition of safeguarding its privacy. It is perhaps something the Conservatives might want to consider conserving. David Cameron should propose strict new laws to protect British liberties – something to go hand in hand with a strong move against the increased number of days that High Chancellor Brown wants to incarcerate people without charge.

Once again playing on the totalitarian image that Brown seems bent on painting for himself.

Policy Proposal 1: Mosquito Buzz

2008-02-13T00:11:00.002Z

I heard about his a few years ago and actually thought it was a joke. But no, a device that emits a high pitched tone audible only to those under the age of 25 exists and is apparently already in use (with 3500 in England alone!!). I find it difficult to understand how this even slipped through the net and became law, but today the government said it stands by its legality.

What!? What sort of message does this send out to our youths? To me! This isn’t even youths we are talking about, is the government even aware that many lawyers, nurses, policemen and women, firefighters etc etc are under 25?

Are they willing to mess us about because we don’t vote as much as those with poor hearing? Is the ability to hear properly and a persons voting tendency inversely connected? What does that say about society?

I suspect the Liberal Democrats have come out against this but what would be really great is if David Cameron and his Conservatives came out against it too. Sure he would upset the vast majority of his party who hate having to see young people hanging around the newsagent when they pop in to buy their copy of the Daily Mail, but so what? There is a much bigger prize to win in opposing this.

Make the argument that indiscriminate harassment of young men and women is no message to be sending out to the generation in charge of Britain’s future. That respect goes both ways. The people targeted are the same men and women who will have completed Dave’s ‘National Citizenship Service’, they will be the ones raising families and saving up to buy their own homes. What ever happened to hug a hoodie? Dave needs to oppose this and attack Brown from the left. Gordon is already busy cultivating his Stalinist principles with the ID Card; Cameron should not hesitate to expose this trait.

I’m glad to say that in Scotland a law banning this device is already gaining momentum and looks likely to succeed. But let’s not let the Scots have all the good ideas, alright? That’s just embarrassing.

2008-02-06T23:55:00.001Z

The more I speak to people, the more I learn, the more I realise that Lizzy is a complete babe.
Rule Britannia.

An American revival?

2008-02-04T18:12:00.001Z

On the surface it is something of a paradox that when members of a radical Islamic terrorist group slammed jumbo jets full of innocent civilians into buildings full of other innocent civilians on September 11th, 2001 it should become America that became the big evil. Of course it was the devastating wave of nationalism, totalitarianism and war mongering that the world’s last remaining super power unleashed upon an unsuspecting world that really turned global opinion against America. That this was all sanctioned by a resolute, yet apparently dim-witted President, made matters all the worse.

Educated classes all over the world flocked to their wine parties and vied to out do one another when it came to condemning the actions of the greatest democracy on earth. In Britain it reached the stage where American tourists were advised to wear Canadian badges in an attempt to avoid the inevitable hail of abuse whenever their high-pitched voices cut through the din of London tube stations and restaurants. The second largest rally in British history (which I attended) was held when President Bush came for tea with the Queen. In fact it was the one thing that you knew you had in common with other people. It has been quite a comfort actually over the past five years to know that when meeting someone for the first time there was little worry of the conversation ever running dry, you could always count on a mutual loathing of all things involving stars and stripes.

This bizarre international unity created some unlikely bedfellows. In Britain the ‘Respect Party’ was probably the most obvious example of how two opposing trends, that of rainbow coloured liberalism and socially conservative Islam, began to join forces in order to better rubbish America. Further more I would argue that on some level this common enemy of ours has done wonders for cultural integration in Britain. Suddenly it became cool to be a Muslim, or to at least to know one and agree with everything they said. Mosques became symbols of rebellion and the television pictures of illiterate and RPG armed followers of Muhammad became quite romantic. Britain’s creaky multi-cultural system will probably now survive at least a decade or two more than it otherwise would have.

Deep down however there was always that uncomfortable feeling that this really was all a bit of a show, and that this marriage of convenience was never destined to last. America, with all its freedoms, initiative and wild diversity had a depth and resilience that the frantic and seemingly aggressive shouting of Arabic verse could simply never match. It made little sense that British kids would forever watch documentaries like ‘Jesus Camp’ and gasp at the ignorance of misguided southerners while down the road the local mosque was holding one of its regular Madrassas in which young children sat on pillows, swaying back and forth as they chanted verses from the Koran. Indeed the whole idea that it was more shocking to see rich, white Americans saying stupid things than it was to see poor brown folk doing so was in itself a view that, if not racist, than was at least culturally elitist. Why should white Americans know better?

Then came the Democratic and Republican primaries. The world’s media has been hooked on this race. Praise has been near universal for this awesome display of democratic selection. America it would appear has come to its senses and by having a black man and a white women as two of the three most likely people to become the world’s most powerful person, Europe has once again fallen in love with America. What’s more Europe is even quite fond of McCain. He is the sort of Republican we can admire, a real individual with real life experiences and policies rooted in the concept that America can only thrive when everyone else is doing so. Of course all these candidates really can’t go wrong in the eyes of Europe, anyone that isn’t George Bush simply cannot help but be a hero. Indeed if given the choice Europe in its infinite wisdom would probably quite happily have replaced Bush with someone more to its liking, like Saddam Hussein or a Saudi Prince, long ago. Yet regardless of Bush’s legacy the three candidates genuinely are good ones and at this juncture, one day before ‘Super Tuesday’ it appears America really can’t do any wrong. Only the unwelcome victory of Mitt Romney in tomorrows primaries could really detract from what is shaping up to be a hugely inspiring period in American history.

What’s more (and I write this, somewhat awkwardly, with my fingers crossed) it appears that the worst has been and gone in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed young and fragile democracies (albeit highly corrupt like all such democracies) now exist where there was once nothing but totalitarianism and oppression. While we in Europe congratulated ourselves at being wonderfully inactive America was busy safeguarding and promoting the values that when pushed, Europeans pretend to cherish above all others. It seems that Bush and his cronies have done the dirty work and, much like we did with Reagan and Thatcher, we can now all sit back and criticise them at will, while silently enjoying the benefits of their hard work.

This sudden realisation that America might not be so bad after all is still in its infancy and could still be set back by several years should some bright spark in the Pentagon suggest so much as to build a conservatory on the back of Guantanamo. However I believe the world is finally beginning to get over its obsessive America bashing. That can only be a good thing for a world in which democracy, human rights and environmental protection face so many challenges.

The unholy alliance between European liberalism and conservative Islam is also on its way out, the Respect Party has already split due to infighting, and I am afraid to say that a lot more work needs to be done at cultural integration if Britain is not to suffer serious problems in the near future. Newspapers are already picking up on stories of widespread forced marriage and abortion within Muslim communities. Without the support of the wine drinking classes I predict Islam in Britain faces an uncomfortable future.

On the whole however I think there is finally reason to be hopeful. America is busy being brilliant, as it has always done, and Europe is beginning to sober up to that reality. So all that is left to ask is, is this change we can believe in? Ha.

Barack Obama South Carolina Victory Speech Part 1

2008-01-27T13:44:00.001Z

For those of you that have the time to spare the second part of his speech can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBdRdIEa7AM

I’m still a little worried that if he were to win the thing overall he might pull the rug from underneath a shaky but recovering Iraq, and his protectionist policies could lead us all into another depression. But. This guy is starting to grow on me. They recon that 50% of white Democrats between 18 and 29 voted for this guy in South Carolina and most of them that did held university degrees. I’m starting to actually think there might be something in his rhetoric of a ‘change we can believe in’.

Not only that but he can actually talk. I know the clip below is of a very poor quality – but I watched this live on CNN as he said it and I must admit, a slight shiver went down my spine. Hilary has never done that. This guy really is a good thing. I have been reluctant to support him against Hilary because I am sure America is still a century away from electing a black man. Because if you’d heard even a portion of the conversations I heard bright, young college students in Arkansas have – you’d be surprised they even let the guy talk. Let alone run for president.

While I still have a soft spot for McCain, I actually want Obama to win the Democratic nomination, and not only that – I want him to become the next President. Sad as it is George Bush’s reputation has blinded the world to the good things he has actually done (regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, the defection of Libya into the Western camp and tough action on Aids for example). So again, sad as it is, merely the act of electing this young black man to the top office would do wonders at restoring America’s reputation.

And I believe right now the world needs a more likable America more than it needs one which has sensible policies on Iraq and the economy. Then once he has worked his charm on the world you can ditch him and get in a Republican to actually get on with running the world.

But until then, Obama’s my man.

The sunset years

2008-01-22T02:21:00.000Z

So this will be news to nobody, but it is something that has become increasingly apparent to me in the last few weeks.

‘The West’ is losing at its own game. People have been saying for years that ‘The East’ will run the future. America’s days as the unchallenged world power are over.

Take a look at what is going on. We in Europe, with all our fancy Art History degrees and cappuccinos are sitting back and watching the initiative slip away from us. Indian engineers are developing the $1000 car and politicians in oil rich Dhabi are beginning the worlds largest alternative energy program and thereby ensuring their economic success stretches beyond the oil age. Malaysia is putting satellites up in orbit almost as quickly as China is practicing shooting them down. New Delhi has built itself an air condition subway system while London falls over its own red tape and labour unions when it tries to even tinker with the edges of its. India churns out engineering and science graduates like Ford used to produce Model T’s. Young students in Paris go on the warpath when a mildly reformist president suggests that perhaps it shouldn’t be a birth right for rich white kids to receive rich white kid jobs upon graduation.

Having fought fascism in Europe and communism in Asia the West (or America more accurately) has done more than anyone to gift ‘The East’ its opportunity.

Now they are not just playing our game, they are beating us at it.

How we respond will be the most important question of the next century. Will we be like the kid who having invited his neighbour round to play, knocks the table over when he begins to lose? Or will we take it on the chin, shake hands and gracefully admit defeat and promise to try much harder next time?

The power of sin

2008-01-16T15:02:00.001Z

I have stumbled upon a new justification for excessive altruism. Jealousy. By going above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that everyone we know, both our friends and our enemies, maximise their own potential we can create the conditions for stirring jealousy within ourselves.

Now jealousy happens, it’s human and no amount of bible bashing is ever going to make it go away. I personally get jealous all the time. If someone I happen to consider a complete berk achieves something that has long eluded me, or I hear rumours that someone I’m not overly keen on is doing well – I get jealous. It even happens with my best friends. If a best friend lands a fantastic job that involves travelling around the world, fighting poverty, speaking a thousand different languages and getting paid an hourly wage equivalent to several small villas in Florida – I am of course going to be thrilled for them. I’ll buy them a drink, wish them well and genuinely be happy. But there will always be a little voice in the back of my head, which while in no way detracting from heart felt happiness for them, will always say, ‘heck – why aren’t I doing that well?’

Now I am not going to comment on the morality of all this, but I happen to find that little voice quite motivating. Far from going home and having a good old-fashioned cry that I have committed sin simply by being human I tend to go home, clear my desk and redouble my efforts. I don’t think this is as a malicious or destructive a motivating force as it seems, nor do I think a mild bout of jealousy from time to time is destined to forever make a person unhappy. In my darkest hours when nothing seems worth it and throwing in the towel seems like the only way out, I often find myself drawing on this force to drive me onwards. The mental image of wiping the smile off my rivals smug, fat little face can do wonders for my motivation levels.

So well in fact that it becomes helpful to assist these smug little fat fellers in doing well, just so it gives me a target to aim for myself.

It’s not something I’m particularly proud of. But I can see it doing no harm to anyone.

I guess assisting others just so I can aim to overtake them at a later date doesn’t actually qualify as altruism at all now does it? Oh well.

I’m happy being a bastard.

Democratic suicide

2008-01-08T02:37:00.000Z

Please dear God, don’t let Obama win the New Hampshire Primary.

I have little or no preference between Obama or Hillary, all I know is that if the Democrats are dumb enough to choose a black man as their representative then the next eight years of world history will be dictated by a Republican. And as huggable and funny as Huckabee is, I really don’t want his religious dogma to get yet more Brits killed as we run around trying to patch up the cracks in the western world.

So here’s hoping.

Come on Hilary x

2008-01-04T14:16:00.000Z

I am so angry. Huckabee!? - HUCKABEE!?!?

What the - ?

Not content with making the first eight years of the 21st century some of the most shameful in human history, the Americans decide to vote for a christian fascist who makes Bush look like a moderate. Evolution? What's that? Black folk? Curse of ham for them once again.

Unbelievable. Totally unbelievable.

The British Betrayal of Basra

2007-12-19T00:35:00.000Z

I have been thinking about how best to write this post for a few days now I can’t seem to find a good way of doing it. Partly because it is such a large topic, and partly because for me it is such an emotive one that any attempt at coherent argument is bound to end in farce.

I have attempted to keep it brief but unfortunately it isn't, so for those of you brave enough to read on you can find the majority of it in the comments section. I think it should be read though, if I may say so myself. I’d like to know what you think, fellow countrymen and Atlantic cousins alike.

--

I think Britain has betrayed the people of Basra, Iraq and our Coalition allies. A few weeks ago we withdrew what few troops we had left and isolated ourselves in an airport come fortress on the outskirts of the city. Before this we had effectively barricaded ourselves into Basra Palace and achieved little more than absorbing significant numbers of hostile bullets and mortar rounds. On Sunday we handed power back to the Iraqi security and police forces. Mission Accomplished!

Well no, far from it in fact. This was a retreat. The proud British army has failed in its task of restoring stability to the area. Paramilitary organisations, many with strong connections to the weak police and security forces have stepped into fill the power vacuum. These militias continue to fight one another and persecute the innocent civilians of Basra. Women are brutally murdered and their bodies put on pubic display for failing to wear their burqa correctly or for being caught wearing makeup. Shop owners are beaten to death in the street for daring to sell alcohol. Men that used to work for the British have been forced to flee. We have done little but overseen a transition from the organised tyranny of Saddam to the chaotic tyranny of religious and ethnic cleansing.

Is this what we fought for? Is this what men died for?

Cont…

Battle Cry!!!

2007-12-16T14:31:00.000Z

This morning got off to a great start. A spot of Match of the Day before watching the brilliant Sunday AM. Then I did something silly. I pressed 'tv guide' followed by '0' for 'other options' and then pressed '3' for 'religion'.

On these channels you can witness lots of black Americans shouting at each other from pulpits. A perfect demonstration that religion really is for the oppressed. Every white man in America must chuckle to themselves when they see these things, we can screw them over for generations - and how do they cope with it? They channel their anger and frustrations into our own European based methods of control! - giggle.

But then something far more worrying appears. There is a lot about 'Battle Cry', which from what I have read before is some sort of cult that is taking the public preaching of the gospel, a long established tradition of the south, into the 21st centry. Hordes of teenagers attend these rallies to pledge their alliegence to the organisation's handsome televangical frontman, Ron Luce. All a bit weird pehaps.

But then I am once again introduced to something even more unsettling - Christian rock. I know, this is a well established genre in the American south. But I like to think that it is still a highly bizarre concept to us Europeans. Rock is surely the ultimate cultural manifestation of anti-authoritarianism, its about . . .

You know what. I can't be bothered.

It's absurd.

"Hey, my name's Megan. I was teased in high school for being fat and I had no friends. But then I found Battle Cry, they preyed on my weaknesses and I have now found happiness through adopting their fascist lie, I love you Jesus, Prince of Peace! Thank you so much Battle Cry!"

The most enlightened and wealthy generation in history and you do THAT?

You sick. .

Arghh!

Death to you all for ruining my Sunday morning.

The roaring nineties

2007-12-12T01:08:00.000Z

I wish I had grown up in the nineties.

Now before you say anything – I mean I wish I had really grown up in the nineties. I wish I had ‘come of age’ during the nineties. I wish I had been born in 1974 and not 1984. I wish it were currently 1997.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. CompuServe, dial-up connections and Playstation. Clunky mobile phones reserved only for flashy businessmen. You’re also thinking really bad boy bands, haircuts and tracksuits.

But I’m thinking that it was a golden age. I mean it. A real golden age. Growing material wealth went hand in hand with almost limitless hope. Global Warming? Terrorism? – These things were trivial, fringe interests. Communism had fallen. Western democracy was the bee-knees and things simply couldn’t get any better. Didn’t the machines in the ‘Matrix’ choose to replicate the year 2000 as the pinnacle of human civilisation? Aren’t the compilation CD’s I still have from that year some of the happiest and upbeat music I own? It was a time when anti-globalisation rallies attracted hundreds of thousands and when America’s youth, however naively, could comfortably rebel and bring tear gas to the streets of Seattle. Good times. Innocent times. Hopeful times.

Take TV for example, what do we have today? 24, The Unit, Battle Star Galatica, Heroes, Lost. As great as they are, they're all about moral dilemmas with large doses of hero/nationalistic worship thrown in for good measure.

Now look at the 90’s: Seinfeld, The X-Files and Buffy.

The X-Files! Just for a split second consider the sort of world that could spawn the X-Files - A world in which America simply couldn’t think of anyone that would wish them harm! They had to delve into the realms of the supernatural to find bad guys back then! How incredible is that? Just how great a world was it if ghosts and ghouls were all that people were afraid of?

While American audiences have come to accept that Jack Bauer has no choice but to disregard the Geneva Convention in the pursuit of justice – when did you ever see Fox Mulder suggest prolonged torture as a perfectly viable means of discovering the truth? No. In the 1990’s the biggest threat to America (if TV is to be believed) was the cigarette smoking man. The threat came from within their own untrustworthy government! And today? The government is nothing less than a beacon of divine justice in a hellish world of atheists and heathens.

Damn Al-Queda!

And damn the decade of distorted western culture for which they are responsible.

beanscene

2007-12-06T00:43:00.001Z

I want to write something but I'm not sure I have anything to say. My inflated sense of self-importance usually lends itself to something. But not today perhaps.

I have just finished reading Snow Crash (despite starting it in August!). It's quite simply brilliant and is my nomination for this book swap thingy that some people seem interested in doing.

I'm in another coffee shop near Holyrood. Behind me some men with jobs talk loudly about some business of other, I think it’s biotech. A lot of talk about lab results, testosterone and market share. Perhaps I could become a corporate spy. Spend my days hoping from coffee shop to coffee shop where influential people re likely to be, eaves dropping on business meetings. Seems like a good life. Lots of time in fancy hotels and expanding cities. I have a young face and the shabby appearance of a liberal arts student. No one would be suspicious.

I began thinking the other day that I should look into becoming an academic. See what happens? I experience real life for about three days and I'm already running back to the safety of a uni campus. But no seriously. Ludology - the study of play (or video games actually) is rapidly expanding. I get the sense that the bandwagon has already started rolling but there may still be some room for me in the back. Amazon is full of books on the topic. And I am sure far more of the Amazon will soon be sacrificed to make way for more on the subject. But I'd say there are only about fifty books at most that are actually worth mention. Fifty! That's nothing. I could realistically read the lot of them in a year or so - and I'd be an expert in the field, right?

Well, whatever. A Muslim women walks past holding the hand of her young son. Britain's future. Opposite the shop a coach has pulled up with 'Skye tolls: Justice' painted along one side. A bunch of hippies get out, mill around for a bit and then one of them, the one with the longest beard, seems to take control and leads them down towards the Parliament. The result of another pfi scheme gone wrong. A well intended but poorly written policy that will leave that young Muslim paying national debts for decades to come.

Single use sachets of sugar and 'sweeteners' sit on the table. Men and women walk past carrying their single use take away coffee cups. This is one coffee shop amongst maybe a hundred or so in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is one city amongst thousands. And this level of waste has been going on for decades. And people tell me investment in space travel is a waste of money. Ha. I’ll send you a postcard from Mars, before voting along with the other Martians to put strict limits on the number of refugees coming from Earth.

I went to a Green Party meeting the other week. It wasn't very inspiring. They made lots of cheap jokes at the expense of the Tories. Bastard hippies. It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't despise each other so much. I subscribe to the local email debates the Greens here have. Hilarious stuff. The local green councillor voted against a scheme to expand the sidewalks of some road somewhere because it would have cost an absolute fortune. The three Greens who happen to live on that road sent a flurry of angry emails to her before promptly leaving the party. Brilliant.

Anyway. I apologise. That was about four posts in one there.

Fernando

2007-12-01T12:28:00.000Z

Aha. Well then. November 30th 2007. Benjamin Nakizo, as he likes to be called on these occasions sits in his shop on South Clerk Street. Surrounded by chickpeas, apple tea and Turkish delight he cradles his digital radio and allows jazz fm to sooth his woes. Occasionally he serves customers. Recently he appeared to break the heart of one young man who asked if he still stocked those olives that "reminded him of his youth". Nakizo replied that he no longer did and could swear he heard the tinkle of heart fragments as the man got his answer.

Benjamin wishes he had so few problems as that gentleman. Two things are keeping him in the beautiful national capital he has come to inhabit. One is his ambition of pursuing a military career at the same time as a civilian one. The second is his relationship with a pretty young girl from the colonies.

Both are proving a lot tougher than he ever expected. This is placing great strain on his morale and appears to have led to a state of semi-depression, which has manifested itself in a bizarre condition that causes him to forget everything. Keys, berets, coats, jumpers, tickets, phones, graduation certificates and yet more keys. Benjamin believes that his brain is consuming so much energy in avoiding the mental static of stress and worry that some basic functions are being forgotten.

Cont...

2007-11-19T10:44:00.001Z

I know, I know. And it's ok. Really. It's perfectly fine.
You can be jealous.

2007-11-13T00:54:00.000Z

Non, je ne regretted rein

I am beginning to fall in love with this song.

It is becoming the perfect soundtrack to the beginning of the 21st century.

Re: Comment on Queen's Speech

2007-11-07T16:03:00.000Z

I'm not really in the mood to write this, a whole series of small calamaties has left me rather shaken. I am holding out till sunday moring by which time I should have endured the hellish consequences of my carelesness. However I am currently bored to tears on another ten hour shift so really cannot resist a small challenge set to me by a stalin-sympothising friend of mine. So here it is, you lucky people you - my thoughts on this years Queen's Speech.

Policies aside for a moment I would like to make a quick comment on the nature of politics. What fascinates me most about this, the second oldest profesion, is not that those involved hold the power to shape our futures. In fact I find sleeping at nights a lot easier when I put this to the back of my mind. No, politics becomes far more interesting if you look at it as a sport.

In many ways politics is like the Formula 1 of the PR world. A high profile showcase where the generations top marketing gurus get to exhibit their wares. The political leaders themselves therefore are little more than the drivers of expertly crafted election machines. And as in F1 the real magic goes on beneath the bonet.

For fans of this sport the past few months have seen a real change. For a decade now the House of Commons has been the scene of repeated massacres as Tony Blair effortlessly danced and twisted his way around opponents before delivering killer blows so fast that it took everyone a few moments to realise he had even done it. To continue with the sporting analogy he was the manchester united of politics. Love them or loath them you still tune in to marvel at just how damn good they are.

Unfortunately the record breaking Blair has now retired from the professional game. Yet in his wake the Commons has become much more of an open affair. When Brown and Cameron meet it is less a massacre and more of a dogfight, with biting and growling, in a contest that could go either way. While in a different wa,y this contest is just as entertaining to watch as Blair used to be.

Yesterday Brown delivered, or rather had the monarch deliver, his first Queen's Speech. And on first impressions it sounded petty dull and boring. It was typical sleep inducing Brown rhetoric introducing policies we already know about. But to please my guardian reading friend I had better say a few words about the actual policies.

Brown paves the way for a new generation of nuclear power stations, he keeps kids in some form of education until they 18 and he is looking to force people applying for citizenship to jump through more hoops - all well and goodl. He also wants to adopt a number of draconian and self-defeating laws designed to lock up all people of colour as and when see fit - which is not so good. Then it would appear that he wants to create a quality care commision, a homes and planning agency and a personal accounts delivery authority to regulate and monitor health, housing and pensions respectively. What's wrong with that you might ask? Ill tell you.

Britain is already sinking under the weight of red tape and adding yet another layer of costly, guardian reading, union supporting and latte drinking civil servents is only going to complicate matters. What should be done is what the tory's propose - and what Blair was struggling to do - which is to devolve power to the individual hospitals, schools and local authorities and allow them to compete against one another. Obviously don't go privatising the damn things entirely but at least create an internal state market for the provision of these services. The reason being that market forces regulate practice and distribute resources far better than any government institution ever will. Adam Smith's invisible hand is not just invisible - but also entirely free, naturally resulting from a systems open structure.

Free up public services and the need for extensive regulation will vanish. In one respect at least the Queen's Speech did promise to grant local authorities more powers to experiment with their public transport policies - which is encouraging, but far more needs to be done. Unfortunately it simply is not in Brown's nature to 'let go' and he cannot resist the temptation to meddle, tinker and micro manage everything that comes across his desk. This is why he will lose the war of ideas.

However. To say this does not mean that Brown is done for, far from it. What I didn't notice at the time, but which was pointed out to me in a newspaper article later, was the carefully hidden trap Brown has laid for his cocky Tory opponents. At the moment Europe is a tricky question for Brown because he has back tracked on Labour's promise to hold a referundum on the EU constitution. And with everyone in the world except Brown saying the old constitution and the new treaty (which intends to adopt) are identical, the British people are rightly annoyed that Brown lied to them.

The tories in turn are loving every second of it as the British public, hurt by Browns betrayal rally around Cameron. However, tricky times lie ahead. The British public are not nearly as anti-Europe as the rank and file tory party are and the tories would be mistaken to believe this surge in support suggests otherwise.

In a brilliant move Brown has conceeded upto three months in the Commons to debate the EU treaty. What looks like a Prime Minister caving in to public pressure is actually a PM cunningly providing the tories with enough rope to hang themselves. Three months of debate. Three months for tory MP's to slip up and betray their true feelings for Europe. Three months for them to say something stupid like gipsies ere eating our dogs, three months for them to shout and bicker about how johnny foreigner are stealing all the best grades in our schools and three months for them to alienate themselves from the British public. Those guardian reading, union supporting and latte drinking classes I spoke of before are what you might call the swing vote. By appealing to their trust funds, skiing holidays and real estate Cameron has temporarily won them over. A return to tory xenophobia could quickly undo all of "Dave's" hard work.

Will the tories take the bait? Will Cameron be able to instill discipline in his anti-European MP's? Who will break rank first?

This will be a real test for the Tories. Survive this and they will have demonstrated the professionalism required to form a decent government. Fail and we can look forward to more economy sapping state jobs designed to supervise other economy sapping state jobs, and so on and so forth until Brown has stripped us of every right and freedom we posses and he finally tells the Queen she need not bother turning up for future speeches.

Kiva Crazy

2007-11-04T17:56:00.000Z

So here is what I am about to do. I have promised myself that I will put aside enough money to pay for the Latitude festival next summer. I haven’t done so yet because I wasn’t sure how I could effectively designate a set sum of money in my account as for being for that purpose. Sure I could simply remember – but I’m no good at that sort of thing and what with it all being in the same pot I am sure I would simply forget and spend it.

And then it struck me! Whalla! Send the money abroad for six months!! That will keep it out of harms way until I need it to buy my tickets!

I will therefore use www.kiva.org to leave my Latitude money in the capable of hands of an assortment of entrepreneurs around the world until April when the tickets go on sale! By then they will all have paid me back and I can go and purchase my ticket! What good is that capital doing lying in my account? How much interest will I lose out on? A pound? Five pound? That’s just boring!

My money deserves much better – so ill send it off on a little adventure – if I can’t go on a tour of Eastern Europe I see no reason why I should stop my money from doing so!

2007-11-03T22:48:00.000Z

Exhausted and drained I collapsed onto the seat in the bus shelter. It was one of the main streets in Edinburgh and people began to push past me as they followed the diversion signs that took them round some nearby building works. I was in everyone’s way but this was the only seat free. I didn't care. It was late and I had a ton of things to do at home before I could go to bed. I had just missed the number 31 and it would be a full twenty minutes before the next one. I fully intended to remain welded to that seat until it came.

Only something truly exceptional would make me move.

A few minutes in to my occupancy a gaggle of young girls, maybe around 16 years old assembled at the far end of the shelter. Finding a relatively quiet corner they plonked themselves down on the floor and began passing round a two-litre bottle of cheap cider. Long blonde hair, tight jeans, thick make up and big boots. Typical Scottish lasses and nothing out of the ordinary for a Saturday night.

Only they weren't typical Scottish lasses at all. If I had been paying more attention then their waste lines alone could have told me that. Rather it took a while before I realised something was different. Over the din of departing busses and rowdy Saturday night partygoers I caught the odd word or two of the girls conversation. That I didn't understand a word is not entirely unusual for me in Scotland, but something about the order in which they deployed their syllables was unfamiliar. If it wasn't English they were speaking then . . .could it be?

I immediately stood up and began to fake interest in the bus timetable so as to best over hear them. And yes! It was confirmed. Polish they were!

Ignore the scare stories, cultural integration is in full swing my friends!

Cameron in California

2007-10-31T23:55:00.000Z

Now I am sure that this 30 minute long talk by David Cameron will have absolutely no relevance towards any of you. But this is the most ideologically inspired, hip hop and happening, new age speech I have ever heard him deliver. He and his speech writers are certainly on the ball with this one. They appear to have adopted the language and ideals of the most recent sociological/political/management trend of ‘bottom up’ systems and ‘mass collaboration’, the sort of junk that my book shelf (and bizarrely my ipod) are full of.

He even throws up a few ideas that I have never heard him talk about when addressing the British electorate (in this he is addressing the Zeitgeist conference run by Google – an event where the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley get together to congratulate themselves on being so brilliant). Stuff like a website where all central and local government expenditure can be viewed and a (comparatively) intelligent argument for increased corporate responsibility programs (e.g. if government scales back then you guys need to scale up).

Ok, so it is far from an intellectual tour de force or anything and he still talks with that irritating primary school teacher mannerism, but it is refreshing to hear him talk to people he believes can handle ideas beyond ‘immigrants are bad’ and ‘lower taxes are good’.

I had no idea until now just how much he talks down to us. Damn Oxford types.

Harry deconstructed

2007-10-27T10:53:00.000Z

I am going to be lazy here and simply link to an article from the Telegraph's website. It is all about a French philosopher and his ideas on Harry Potters true meaning. I like this kind of stuff - although nothing will ever compare to the 'true' meaning behind the Matrix - this one is still worth a look.

so here it is: "Harry Potter lives in Thatcher's Britain"

Negotiating a truce

2007-10-19T13:39:00.000Z

So it was bound to happen. I once again made someone cry during a heated discussion about religion. She wasn't even religious. She was merely defending the right for someone to be a bigot, and I snapped. She was upset and told me to stop swearing about it, so I turned on her and near enough shouted 'there are no words severe enough to condemn this utter evil' and proceeded to claim that it was a 'human duty to attack religion wherever it was found and on all levels'.

While I would of course be lying if I said that those words don't still make me chuckle I have decided that I am probably in need of some anger therapy. Nothing gets me more worked up than the sight of bright young people falling victim to an institution which is designed solely to prey on the desperate. 'I was bullied in high school for being fat and I found comfort by adopting a doctrine of evil' How selfish are they? How weak!? How blind!?!' - is something else I may have said.

It was all because I bought this new book, 'microtrends' written by the devil himself, Mark Penn (a devil because he is contracted to work for Hillary Clinton's election team). In it he quotes a study that says since 1960 the number of women in America graduating from theology schools and entering the clergy has increased dramatically. Meanwhile, over that same period, ALL churches that have allowed women clergy have rapidly declined in popularity, while those that ban them have seen a rapid increase. This fact immediately made me think about all those smart young girls in Arkansas that every sunday and wednesday pledged their allegiance to an institution that regarded them as utterly inferior and good for nothing but rearing the next generation of southern bigots. The blood started to boil, the heart started thumping and I got that warm feeling of pure rage in my stomach.

I know this is not healthy for me. I also know that it is not based on entirely correct assumptions. I can not deny that religion can have a good side. When not preaching hatred churches occasionally raise money for good causes, they can provide support for drug users and in the devastating aftermath of hurricane Katrina, many took the opposing view of their government, and decided to help out (even if it was mostly a case of white churches helping other branches of their white franchise). Better still, HOPE international which works around the world is a micro-finance group working with kiva.org - founded by a church from Pennsylvania. They are currently investing my $25 in a woman who sells bras. So churches really can be supportive.

Accordingly I can often justify the existence of organised religion on the grounds that it is often the lesser of evils. Here in the UK it is disgustingly common to see people abusing alcohol and drugs. Broken families spawn children that disrupt classes and steal your wallet, then go on to gobble up generous amounts of tax payers money by getting themselves in jail. Walking the streets of Scotland and witnessing the native heathen population tear itself apart while the Catholics from Poland, and the Muslims from Asia, get on with the job of bettering the country is often an uncomfortable sight.

If only their parents felt shame at the concept of divorce and had decided to stay together in a vicious cycle of domestic abuse, then the kid would have had double the amount of adult guidance when growing up. If only the kid was Catholic and was desperate to embark on a condom stealing 'mission' to Africa, then he would shun the life of crime and devote his energies to learning a new language. If only he was afraid of divine retribution for losing his virginity before marriage, then he would have ensured that he and his girlfriend remained firmly within the boundaries of fellatio and anal sex, so the kid he didn't want and can't afford would never have been born.

See? It can do good. So, accordingly I have decided that I need to join a church, perhaps getting to know the enemy a second time will be better for me than Arkansas was. I need a church that throws the bible right out of the window and treats women, gays and blacks (no curse of ham nonsense for me thank you very much) as fellow human beings. Fortunately my own Anglican church provides just that.

Perhaps it is worth another look. Because if the post-Christian world of Europe has taught us anything, it is that without employing dogma and fairy tales it is very hard to control people.

2007-10-16T22:08:00.001Z

At the risk of sounding American I want to indulge in a little patriotic military worship. The Royal Anglian Regiment has just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan where they are said to have experienced some of the toughest fighting in the regiment’s history.

Six hundred men and women went in, nine were killed and fifty-seven were wounded.

If I am looking for signs of hope in East Anglia then here I have it. Teenagers and young adults from Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire travelled half way around the world to fight in one of the most important wars of recent decades. It is surely no exaggeration to say that the whole future of the world depends on the success of the west in its efforts to rebuild Afghanistan and to cleanse it of an evil like no other. That people my own age from Ipswich and the local area were involved in such an endeavour makes me immensely proud and restores my faith in all that we stand for.

This is a war worth winning.

That's what I wanted to do!

2007-10-13T22:58:00.001Z

I mean it. This was my new idea. I saw it first. Hands off.

But since he has done such a good job writing about it, i best let this BBC reporter speak about it in his own words. Anyone out there with $20,000,000 to invest in me?

That is after I have invested in that water desalination plant in West Africa. And the company that sells reusable energy generators to farmers (who can use their fat CAP payments to invest in their futures - cos when I lead the 'Neo-Green' party into Parliament the CAP will be the first thing to go).

Blog turns two

2007-10-11T15:58:00.000Z

Kingussie (two weeks ago)

2007-10-08T20:25:00.000Z

I sit in a very plush hotel bar in the tiny Scottish town of Kingussie. I am waiting for the last train to take me back to Edinburgh and this was the nearest warm place I could find. The place is empty except for a barman who is flirting with two girls at the bar. A moment ago a scotsman was here, dressed in traditional costume and playing the bag pipes to the delight of the two girls. It is one of their birthdays and in between ear shattering renditions of highland anthems he was buying them drinks and trying to get the girls to have a go on the pipes. If it had worked then I would have refused to believe that there was ever any justice in the world.

But it didn't. The scotsman left and the two girls have now turned to chat to the barman, in Polish. Or what I think is Polish. It could be anything, but it doesn't sound west European. I think the girls work here as maids and he is obviously the barman.

I'm sipping ice cold coke in a remote highland town watching a Polish barman succeeded where a pipe weilding scotsman failed. On friday I take the bus down to London for the weekend to meet Kristina. A Bulgarian I met in Arkansas who has come to study international relations at UCL. She is able to do so thanks to an 'open society' scholarship from George Soros, the american billionaire. Up the road from here my Canadian girlfriend is being briefed on a future trip to Norway with her classmates who come from all over the developed world.

In front of me sits a book called 'war of the world', a history of the twentieth century. It argues that in 1907 the world was the most globalised, integrated and wealthy it ever has been, a period matched only by our world today. A hundred years ago a happy, educated and prosperous developed world descended into fifty years of brutal bloodshed which in both size and substance has never been matched.

No one saw it coming. Many thought that European and American dominace of the world would last forever and that history was effectively over.

Throughout its long and illustrious history Europe has never been so prosperous or so united as it is now. At the same its nations have never been so ethnically diverse or subject to such large peacetime migrations.

So to finish on a hyperbolic high:
I ask you - What would it take to unpick this tapastry of progress? And is Europe mature enough to survive the 21st century?

Single to Inverkeithing

2007-10-07T16:17:00.000Z

On my way back from the unfortunately named 'Big Bang' weekend at Garelochhead. A small training establishment set in some of the most beautiful Scotish countryside I have yet to see. It is also uphill from Faslane and in and amongst the vast rolling hillside and blue lakes and rivers one has a commanding view of Her Majesties nuclear arsenal.

A hippy camp sits just down the road and during the school holidays or during postal strikes their numbers swell and hordes of commies descend on the camp. Chaining themselves to fences and making human road blocks by locking hands in tubing. It seems a lot of effort just to make sure the MOD police, a spirited bunch of scotsmen, can indulge in their favourite pasttime - bashing pretty rich girls from England over the head and forecably removing their pot smoking, never had a job, swampy boyfriends while they kick and scream and shout humorous things like 'capitalist pigs' and 'warmongers'.

It is heartening to know that I have friends who have been arrested outside this naval base only very recently doing just that. Heartening even more to know that I still harbour an interest in spending a week or two in the camp, purely out of interest. Tho don't get me wrong I'm not anti-nuke. Why on earth would anyone be against the sole technology that keeps the world at peace? Nutters.

Anyway. I'm liking this RNR lark more and more. No other organisation that I can think of is so progressive. By this I mean that if regarded as a sector of civil society it outclasses every competitor. It has the social aspect of a fantastic drinking club, it does charity work equilivent to a good (non-arkansas) church and it has self-improvement credentials better than any evening class or weight watchers programme could ever provide. And it pays too.

Its brilliant. If I was to dream up an institution that provided maximum benefit to both its members and the wider community, the reserves would be it. Many remarkable people consistently doing many remarkable things.

Having said that it is worrying at times to think they may have to one day actually fight a war or respond to an emergency, because judging from my experience the team is far from working, at least on shore. Errors in admin and organisation have plagued the weekend, as it normally does. Thankfully in my limited experience these bureacratic confusions are only evident in shore operations. The ships themselves are incredible. No where else will you find 100 plus men and women working so in tune with a specialist piece of machinery. We can sell Saudi Arabia all the fighter jets and frigates she asks for, but her services will never rival those of an established military, purely because of a lower stock in human capital. Sailors drink hard, talk crudely and have little or no sense of decorum when out together in town. But they are only letting off steam stored up by weeks and months of focussed concentration and awareness. Highly professional people are what win wars and they cannot be so easily bought or sold.

I passed the fitness test except for the multi task gym test which I failed almost immediately for being 'out of time with the beebs'. The PTI doing it all had a reputation for being a bastard. And a much deserved one too. But I'm glad I passed everything else, especially because I haven't really been able to practice recently. I overcame the military swim test with some ease and defeated one of my phobias in the process, (which was being a crap swimmer and caving underpressure). So of that I'm glad.

And when the rumbling bureacracy of the MOD gets itself sorted and I finally get paid for all this, I'll be glader still.

Man, I'm tired.

Night Bus

2007-09-30T23:18:00.000Z

So. I'm on the night bus back from london. The trip down was a horribly uncomfortable experience, hopefully this time it will be different. but it doesn't look that way. The american guy in front of me with his expensice surf flip flops and expertly crafted shaggy hair absolutely reeks. He must be backpacking or something cos there is no way he has seen a shower of late. Bizarely this is not hampering his flirtation with the cute kiwi girls in front who seem to be warming to his screechy voiced advances. I am reminded of a recent stand up set I saw on utube by dylan moran. In reference to the pitch, tone and gross over confidence of our american cousins he says 'when was the last time you had to say to an american, 'sorry? What was that? I didn't quite hear you'.

Having said that the scottish guy next me is belching and farting in a fashion that would make his kinsmen proud. But with his head drunkenly tilted to one side it appears to the casual observer that these horrific bowl antics can only be attributed to me. In these cramped quarters the combined efforts of the american and the scot are producing a near lethal aroma. There is a reason the night coach is the cheapest method of travel.

I'm listening to the arcade fire's new album. Truly exceptional. I had very high expectations and was almost certain I would be disappointed. But to my delight the boys from canada have retained their magic. Thanks to scoggs for posting it my way. Apparently they are also one of the best live acts around at the moment. I haven't been lucky enough to find out first hand. Not yet.

So, a bit of catch up about my general situation: I have ditched the german. With sarkozy as bait and the promise of an easy resource in Cat I have taken up french. If I ever try to use it in france i will probably only be met with raised eyebrows and perfect english replies, or if I try in Quebec then ill probably be spat on, but hey ho. It is still the most pretentious of languages going. So accordingly I have signed up to evening classes.
I have a part time job now, three days a week working in a turkish foods store. It is not a kebab shop, but the owner does have one of those too. My friend Cemil recently became manager of a number of turkish shops in the city and has kindly offered me a job. So that gives me the income to pay rent with a bit left over. This should extend my edinburgh life for many more months, but its not a permanent solution. It gives me the breathing space to apply for really groovy jobs. The RNR is begining to take shape as seven others have joined me in my new entry class. Things are finally beginning to move and I have a tough fitness test at the weekend at faslane. My preperations have been hampered by a pulled calf muscle.

I have also joined the scottish green party and in a satisfying reflection on my 'neo-green' world view I have been receiving email invitations to attend the nuclear naval base at faslane from two sources. The greens who want me to protest outside and the RNR who want to offer me training inside. Neither party know about the other although from what I have seen it is the greens who would be most intolerant. Since when do you have to be a commie to care about the environment? Once again I find myself backing horses that are only very roughly going in the direction I wish to travel.

I was in london this weekend to see Kristina who I first met in arkansas. She is an exceptional person haunted by her own high standards. She is from Bulgaria and about to begin a masters course at UCL. Eastern european talent enriching a dynamic london. I couldn't have scripted a better scenario. My high hopes for our collective future rest on people like her. Not to add to her burdens or anything.

The american seems to have given up and the kiwi girls have lost any of the 'cute' they may have once held by descending into an endless chatter about past boyfriends. Why do so many girls do that? Why define yourself by your time spent with the other sex? Surely such talk only reinforces the biologically backed inbalance.

Ha! I'm such an ass. As an american might say.

Blogging on the go

2007-09-28T14:51:00.000Z

Many of my blog entries are written on scraps of paper or on the backs of napkins as I aimlessly wonder around my world and am suddenly overcome with rage at someone or something I see. Then, once home I reread what I wrote and like some highly strung artist I rip it all up, cursing myself for being so foolish.

Last week however something happened that will forever change things. On a whim I dropped in at a 02 store and asked how long I had left on my contract before I was due for an update. It turned out that was actually overdue for a new phone and that I could pick one out of the store there and then. The world of handheld communications suddenly became my oyster. And I just couldn't help myself. Sitting at the end of the display case sat a Blackbury 8300. I had to have it.

And so here I sit. In a coffee shop on Princes Street. Blogging from my armchair.

Napkins the world over are sighing a breath of relief. The english language is trembling in anticipation of unspell checked choas.

Here's hoping I don't make to big an idiot of myself.

When I was a kid...

2007-09-23T22:28:00.000Z

When I was a kid capitalism was bad. I’d sit in my free periods at sixth form leafing through the Marxist manifesto, rereading the archaic passages until they resembled a shape I could digest. I used to browse socialist websites, fantasize about 19th century workers movements and I even bunked off school to attend a rally.

I believe I was a typical and healthy middle class child. Only real tyrants (or Americans) fail to begin life as communists. Of course, it made perfect sense. Everyone is equal, right? Hence it is surely only logical that everyone be given the same opportunities – and for that everyone needs access to the same education and the same material benefits, right?

Haha. Wrong.

Boy, it’s funny what a university education does to you. “Red Essex” turned me bluer than blue. A framed painting of Lady Thatcher now hangs above my bed, rows of Tory biographies line my bookshelf and the cheeky features of Mr Cameron greet me most mornings via the magic of rss.

Yet while I outwardly portray a seething contempt for everyone and everything I am at heart still a nice, cuddly and warm-hearted kind of guy. I am a reformed communist. Which is really all a capitalist is. A capitalist is a communist who has realised that greed is the only real motivating force, and that greed is not really a vice at all, because of course greed is really another way of saying ambition. And ambition is what drives all great ventures.

And so it is that these days when I daydream what actually pops into my head is not the factory workers of Tajik-e-waka-stan unionising and toppling their government, but rather their government sending ministers to the World Bank. Their corrupt government has a bright spark who buys them all new suits and coaches them in what to say on their arrival in Washington. Their well put together policy proposals that introduce market liberalisation and protect human rights convinces the Bank to give them a loan which allows Tajik-e-waka-stan to double its standards of living every year for the next twenty. And capitalism marches on over the blazing cornfields singing “M.I.C – K.E.Y – M.O.U.S.E” and leaves hundreds of millions of people better off in its wake.

Cont…

Sarkozy rolls up his sleeves

2007-09-20T00:24:00.000Z

My man Sarkozy recently announced a series of much needed reforms. 22,000 public sector workers are not to be replaced. 500,000 train drivers and electricity workers are to have their special benefits revoked. A pledge “to not waste a single euro in public funds” and to reform the 35 hour working week which does nothing but penalise the aspiring poor. And to top it all off his foreign minister has said the world should be preparing for war with Iran.

The unions are angry, last time someone tried to meddle with the public sector pensions France came to a halt for three weeks. They vote on strike action next month. In a sickening display during 2005 French students marched in order to protect the sheltered public sector jobs they all crave –only weeks after the suburbs of Paris had exploded in violence because primarily of restrictive employment laws that had left hundreds of thousands outside the system.

Reactionary France is about to clash with Progressive France - the fate of Europe hangs in the balance.

With my hero Blair removed from the political scene, and with the Conservative Party breaking rank, I am seriously considering jumping across the Channel for a few months just to ride the next wave of European reform.

Invite the friends round, order in the pizza and beer – this is going to be one heck of a show.

Sar – Koz – Eee! Sar – Koz – Eee! Sar – Koz – Eee!

July 18th, 1969

2007-09-18T16:11:00.000Z

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

State of the Union

2007-09-16T16:28:00.000Z

Well, this is new. Unemployment. In fairness I only finished my dissertation two weeks ago, and in that time I have found a new flat and moved in. It’s a nice flat with nice flatmates. Two Scots, a Kiwi and an Irish girl. I’m the youngest again. The others are 31, 45, 23 and 28 respectively. All employed and with their own commitments so they don’t tend to be around much. A completely different feel to a student flat, it is still friendly, but just a little more focussed, and a heck of a lot cleaner.

Cat is back and beginning her new course in outdoor education, which involves skydiving into waterfalls – or something. I think the idea is that trouble kids can’t actually sit still for more than 3 seconds so they learn maths much better by being given adventure holidays – or something equally liberal. Makes me bitter. I am still angry about all the high school days lost by teachers instructing us to throw crap out of windows because all the retards spawned by single parents couldn’t comprehend the simple statement “gravity pulls shit down”. Or something equally illiberal.

I’m almost all moved in, just a few items left to ferry over. I went to Ikea the other day to get a few items; did you know they do a full English breakfast for 95p? Magnificent. I now have a coffee table next to my mini sofa chair. From there I can read my books, sip green tea and enjoy my bedrooms view of the Pentlands. Hopefully this will ensure a future full of sheltered and clueless worldviews.

All this is fortunate because reading is about all I am doing right now. With no job and an attack of anxiety whenever I think about what I could the future it is comforting to pretend that I can spare a few weeks to attack my mountain of unread books. But the truth is that with a high rent and my monetary reserves all but gone I need to find an income asap. God knows what I could do. I remember a few years ago I used to pride myself in being totally fearless when it came to the unknown. Why fear what you cannot know? For example roller coasters never scared me on the first go, only on the second, when I knew how horrible the experience was did I get nervous.

Cont…

I’m Feeling Lucky

2007-09-15T09:55:00.000Z

I read this book a while back called ‘Longitude’ by Dava Sobel. Her book was all about clocks, and it was the best book about clocks I have ever read. You see apparently for hundreds of years it had been difficult and dangerous to conduct long sea voyages because no accurate method of calculating your correct longitude existed. This had led to many disasters and amusing misdirections throughout the years. One group of people however who did not think it was very funny was the British Navy who had seen many a fleet go astray. With ambitions of empire this simply wouldn’t do and so the King established a prize fund for the first person to invent a clock that would remain accurate regardless of its location. While we all carry such devices on our wrists these days, back then (the 18th Century) it was not so simple. You see if you held such a device then through some mathematical trick involving time zones and star charts you could accurately (and quickly) calculate your longitude and hence location. The story progresses from there with the hero being a simple and comparatively uneducated mechanic called John Harrison who went up against all the leading scientific figures and establishments to finally claim the prize and revolutionise seafaring.

It used to be a common thing for the King to set up challenges such as these to stimulate competition and innovation. Regrettably that tradition has been lost and I can only dream of how fantastic it would be if it was reinvented today, but hey ho. Instead what we have today is the X-Prize Foundation.

In 2004 the first X-Prize, called the ‘Ansari X-Prize’ was won by Burt Rutan for piloting his privately funded air/spacecraft into orbit twice in two weeks. Rutan was funded by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame and the technology is now being used by Richard Branson to start ‘Virgin Galactic’. Many groups competed for this prize and while there was only one winner the technologies developed by the other groups are still in use and still being developed to compete in the new space tourist industry which the Ansari prize almost single handily created.

Other prizes have been established since with the newest being quite possibly the most exciting. The ‘Google Lunar X-Prize’ was announced two days ago and will offer $20,000,0000 to the first group to safely land a rover on the moon and have it travel at least 500 meters and transmit high definition video. There are further cash incentives for other features, such as a further $5,000,000 if it can capture images of other man-made objects on the moon. Perhaps they will find the filming studio that Neil Armstrong used.

Anyway, I love all this stuff. I think offering cash incentives for innovation is a top-notch idea. As the Soviets found out to their detriment, humans are only ever motivated by riches, and we should always look for ways to tap the potential of human greed. It is after all our most progressive quality. I think it should be taught at school. Greed coaching. Would make for a far better world – it’s true!

To hell with the commies.

Innovative Ipswich IV

2007-09-13T19:15:00.001Z

In order to continue my search for reasons to be hopeful about my hometown I have dug into the archives of the Economist for an article I remembered recently. It was about Ipswich doing something rather exciting with its new housing estates. You see Britain, like most of the world throughout the past decade, has been subject to a massive period of growth. Accordingly the green plains of the English countryside have been gobbled up by countless new estates.

Ipswich has been no exception and the population of its ‘greater metropolitan area’ has surely multiplied many times over in the last few years. What is perhaps exciting about the new homes in Ipswich is that some of them have been pioneering a new type of architecture and street planning. The Ravenswood estate is the one mentioned in the article but I know for a fact that Grange Farm has also been involved. Both estates have looked to the American ‘New Urbanist’ movement that enjoyed a limited period of success in the 1980’s for inspiration. The defining features of this movement being “traditional architecture, densely packed houses, geometric street plans and the attempt to create communities” as opposed to soulless tracts of homes. And as the Economist goes on to say, “The results are occasionally weird. In Ipswich, brick houses abut wooden-sided cottages that could have been lifted from a New England fishing village. In the next street, the dominant style is vaguely Scandinavian. That opens into a Parisian-style boulevard; turn left, and you are in a Victorian main street.”

The idea of all this is that by brining people into closer proximity with one another you help create more open and connected neighbourhoods. People can no longer hide behind hedgerows and driveways. By housing a higher ratio of people to land it also means less precious countryside gets paved over.

All this makes me quite excited and as an enthusiast of architecture in general the idea of designing more sociable spaces seems appealing. Britain’s cities are littered with the ugly, needle strewn remains of 60’s and 70’s building projects that were similarly designed to usher in a new age of social harmony and personal wealth. But I still have faith in the notion that you can effectively change behaviour through design. Perhaps David Cameron should give a few lines in his new manifesto on the importance of community design in combating anti-social behaviour. Or perhaps this would make his crusade more bizarre than it already is. Either way, I quite like the new designs and I though it warranted a new pro-Ipswich post.

Of course the true motivation lies in the fact that I have a very nasty Ipswich bashing post in the pipeline. And can anyone think of a suitably negative word beginning with ‘I’ that can go before ‘Ipswich’ as a basis for my anti-Ipswich posts?

Potter Puppet Pals

2007-09-11T22:10:00.001Z

The Cameron Calamity

2007-09-06T10:37:00.000Z

Why? Why Cameron? What are you doing!? Don’t say that! Please don’t say that. You didn’t mean it. Take it back. It’s all a joke. Please go back to hugging hoodies and planting trees. Go on… No, don’t listen to the right of your party, you don’t need them and you don’t want them! Be brave Mr Cameron. Brave like I hoped you would be. Let the senile folk vote for UKIP if they want, the clever ones will still begrudgingly vote for you anyway. Stick with the reforms Mr Cameron.

It’s ok, have a conservative social policy, that’s alright by me, the liberal agenda has done wonders for the UK but it also meant we just sat tight and watched the white underclass grow and grow. Opportunity is key, but so is responsibilty.

Come on Cam’s. Stop this now, you’re far to pretty to being saying such dirty things, and no… don’t… you did… oh my god. You just said it…. Citizen Service!? National Bloody Service!!! What is this, The 50’s?

Cameron you buffoon!! What the hell are you thinking!? Did you actually give up smoking weed in Eton or was that all just a ruse?? National - !? What the hell!!

Cameron. You break my heart.

--

Further Reading:
http://www.webcameron.org.uk/532 --> Check out the first comment :D

So here’s the deal:

2007-08-30T10:09:00.001Z

American house prices fall. American consumers find their assets reduced so stop borrowing. They stop borrowing they stop spending. They stop spending and the Chinese find themselves with no buyers. No buyers for the Chinese means an economic recession in China. Economic recession in china undermines the Communist Party whose legitimacy is only sustained because they deliver economic growth. A threatened Communist Party looks for a way to win over its people again. China goes for the same option every government does when times are hard – it stirs patriotism by picking a fight with someone. If China picks a fight it will be with Taiwan. China sets foot on the island and Taiwan activates its alliance with America. America has pledged to defend Taiwan regardless.

America fights China.

The world ends.

Which sucks, I was hoping to make old age.

2007-08-27T16:02:00.001Z

An itunes huffle!?

Ha. Oh dear. I don't even remember posting that last one up on here. LAst night was such a mess I hadn't slept for so long got that drunk with fatigue feeling. Just thing what I might have actually put in my dissertation!

God help us. well, me at least.

So here I am enjoying my 'reward' for getting it all done - my rented copy of the west wing series 3 sits on the desk :) Just watched the first episode. Man. I love the West Wing.

So just in case you didn't get me when I said it last time - I'll say it again.

West Wing rocks :D

And if you haven't seen it yet, well then, you're a jerk.

2007-08-27T04:10:00.000Z

From the depths of dissertation writing dispair my itunes huffle picks out something that blows me away and fills my head with the scene you see above.

What a film! haha!

The 89th minute

2007-08-24T14:54:00.000Z

In 1990 Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait on its national holiday when most of its soldiers were at home having BBQ’s. In the United States determined Senators stand up and read from the phone book in order filibuster laws. In the UK, Tories sneak their MP’s into Westminster backrooms before key votes to fool the Labour whips into thinking there is no need to round up their own guys. In courts all over the world lawyers invoke unheard of and antiquated laws to get their clients off the hook. In Tony Blair’s election campaign of 1997 he flew to Australia to meet Rupert Murdoch and shortly afterwards ‘The Sun’ switched sides. In football, players will fake an injury to waste time and deny the opposing team a chance of equalising. George Bush ruined America’s reputation – but also circumnavigated the Geneva Convention – when he dreamt up the term ‘enemy combatant’. The Labour government eradicated hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants over night by reclassifying them as something else. In 2001 Jo Moore, a British government spin-doctor was distastefully honest when she advised her colleagues that September 11th was a good day to bury bad news. GCSE’s, A-Levels and University exams all follow a set pattern - learn the rules of the game and you can always pass, regardless of your actual ability. A while ago some fellers built a giant wooden horse and played on an old convention of warfare to trick their way to victory. And of course Americans today defend an outdated constitutional law that allows them to form militias against the British so they can continue to butcher their fellow citizens.

What I am trying to say is that laws are meant to be sidestepped, stretched and rewritten. But never broken.

This morning I referred to a single paragraph in a rarely read pamphlet in order to sidestep my responsibilities for a further 48 hours. I abused a law that only really exists for retards and disabled kids but has to be applied to everyone for fear of injustice.

I didn’t cheat but I simply played the system. I feel cheap and dirty for it.

I am trying to remind myself that this is the way the world works. But it still doesn’t make me feel any more noble.

I want do something nerdy in the extreme. But who cares.

2007-08-17T13:05:00.000Z

I know of a book that I think if everybody were to have read, then the world would be a much better place. Now, I also know that you, dear blog reader, know of a similar book.

I want to know what it is. And if I agree to read it then in exchange you will agree to read my choice. That way we both get to read things that we might never otherwise come across and we both benefit. There is no time limit in which we must read the book. But we must get round to it eventually.

There is no limit to the number of people that can participate. If you want to be economically and environmentally friendly we can swap the books to save us buying new copies.

Is anyone interested?

The West Wing

2007-08-17T09:55:00.001Z

Ok, so I know I’m a little late coming to this one. Eight years behind everyone else in fact. But, I mean. Wow. America does it again. If there is one thing they do well, it is making television drama. And this has got to be one of the best. I can’t explain why. I mean – it’s actually quite a subtle production. I know! I didn’t think they knew what the word meant either. But here it is, and it’s brilliant. At a guess I would say it is its ‘smooth’ directing (if such a thing exists) and very, erm, … engrossing character development that draws you in most. Even the cringe worthy ‘all hail the fatherland!’ bits are actually done with something approaching grace. Incredible.

And will someone please tell me how the chap that plays Sam Seaborn (bottom left), who is apparently called Rob Lowe, isn’t the same guy that plays Will from Will and Grace. They have to be brothers.

The Meaning of the 21st Century

2007-08-15T07:33:00.001Z

This is not a good book. It is poorly written and has little or no structure. The author often sounds like a delusional old man and his rhetoric is cringe worthy in the extreme. James Martin became famous for his 1978 book ‘The Wired Society’ in which he successfully predicted the impact the Internet would have on society. Ever since the 1990’s proved him correct he has been on something of an egotistical high. Things were not helped when Oxford University recently gave him his own department called the James Martin 21st Century School, which basically only has one agenda – saving the world.

His latest book, ‘The Meaning of the 21st Century’ therefore aims to predict the main challenges and opportunities that await mankind in the remaining ninety-three years of the twenty first century. It is an ambitious task to say the least.

Yet you see, I really like this book. Beyond all the stylistic errors and the authors own hypocrisy (he spends a chapter ranting and raving about ways to avert global warming only then to admit than he owns his own island with its own airstrip), all of which occasionally make it a painful read, there are actually some really, really good ideas.

Cont...

3F1 55 S. Clerk St

2007-08-13T21:36:00.000Z

I’m feeling a little sad. I only have fifteen or so days left in my flat on South Clerk Street. My flatmates, Christophe, Dominik, Sabine, Seymour, Sarah, Flo and Dario are all milling around in a strange sort of atmosphere. It’s too early to pack but it’s also too late to start doing anything new. We’re all in limbo for the next week and a half. Well some of us, me and Seymour should be scrambling to finish our dissertations before the 24th. A not entirely welcome distraction.

It’s been a funny old year, but a hugely enjoyable one and I wouldn’t change it for the world. You see, I like it here. I like my room and I like the people and the view and the comfort and freedom that comes with living here. I am very glad that I have decided to stay here for a further year – possibly more. Although I don’t get to keep the room, I have to find myself new lodgings, real ones for real people with real lives and real money. I'm sure the future can't be all that bad, and in fact, so long as I keep my head screwed on and my ears open, the future looks rather bright for little old me.

Yet looking around I once again have this astonishing sense that this room and this building has been the scene of a massive missed opportunity. My first instinct seems to be to remember all the things that I meant to do, but didn’t, rather than all the things that I did actually do. This applies to my whole life and when I think back to various stages of it, I always seem to feel regret first. I assume this is natural.

If I pay attention and think about what I have actually done – I’m actually quite pleased with myself. Lots of personal demons were conquered and I now feel more or less ready to have a go at the real world. I feel much more comfortable in accepting that my student days are now over than I ever did thirteen or fourteen months ago. My modest achievements have been far from perfect and in fact everything I think back to as a positive came as the result of an all mighty muddle. But I think the most important point is that I have become willing to seek out these muddles and put myself into them. Doing this has not always been enjoyable, in fact it has never been, and I have suffered, and continue to suffer for it.

Yet as the sun sets once more on this beautiful city I am quietly very happy that I have something to feel sad about.

2007-08-05T07:13:00.000Z

I’ll spare you too much analysis. But May 06 was when I received regular use of the Internet. I suffered a turbulent bump in July 2006, went travelling in August, and then on arrival in Edinburgh plunged into a state of semi-depression for the rest of the year. Things improved rapidly in the first half of this year but very recently my dissertation worries, combined with uncertainty concerning my housing and employment situation, have perhaps led me to rely more on this mode of therapy than I otherwise would.

Sad, huh?

Innovative Ipswich III: A history of innovation?

2007-08-04T17:18:00.001Z

This post is a pathetic attempt to offset my last, rather unkind, rant against the humble inhabitants of Ipswich. It has just occurred to me that Ipswich and its surrounding area can actually make quite a surprising boast. For nearly a century now it has been the centre of many scientific and technological discoveries. So please bare with me as I try to do a bit of history. Or just skip it entirely if you have lives to lead.

Firstly, the 1920’s saw Felixstowe (which is a large sea port just down the road) used by the Royal Navy Air Service (and later the Royal Air Force) to develop and test new types of seaplanes. These aircraft were seen to be the future and were initially prized more highly than their land-based cousins. Remember that aircraft themselves were still relatively new at this time, and the sight of these strange looking creatures, plunging into the sea before then gracefully floating back up into the heavens, must have been quite a spectacular, and inspiring one, to the locals.

cont...

Nakizo dons his Tory hat and has a good long moan and proves, to his own amusement, that he really does hate everyone - and everything.

2007-08-03T19:05:00.001Z

The train network in Britain has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years. Passenger numbers have rarely been higher and investment is pouring into this long neglected industry. However, this does not mean that the actual customer experience has got any better, oh no. It has got worse, much, much worse. With under provisioned stations, inadequate numbers of carriages and bottlenecks up and down the country, the experience of travelling by train in the UK is something approaching hell. Recently things have been even worse for us poor souls living in East Anglia. A few months back a freight train derailed itself on the line between Ipswich and Peterborough. Peterborough is the central station where East Anglia hooks up to the rest of the UK, and through which everyone must pass if they are to escape this strangely flat province.

Cont... and then some...

putting the world to right

2007-08-02T00:07:00.000Z

This is a bit juvenile, and I apologise. But, without further ado, here I am indulging in that oldest of past times, putting the world to right.

Many of these ideas are as surprising to me, as they will be to you. I didn't realise I had become such a hawkish born again Christian. Who knew?

I am in favour of the Government’s ID Card scheme
I am horribly pro Europe
I am pro Trident
I am pro family
I am horribly pro anything to do with genetic engineering
I am cautiously pro religion
I am Green
I want to see a massive reworking of the UK education system
People who give a certain share of their income to charity really should be entitled to tax breaks, and that should apply to businesses to
Rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan should be the priority of America and the EU
Prostitution should be legalised.
I am pro intervention.
Iran cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Ever.

If you're really excited, check out the even longer version in the feedback section!

"You don't belong in Australia!" said the white man.

2007-08-01T12:38:00.001Z

Catholic priests doing what Catholic priests do best.
No - not that. The other thing they do best.
Shame he got suspended for it.

- Skateboarders rule.

Lego Pacman

2007-07-27T13:58:00.001Z

Siham Palmer

2007-07-22T17:52:00.001Z

I’ll try to make this brief. I’m not very good at doing brief. But I’ll try.

I’m cleaning my room out, sorting stuff into recycling piles, and parting ways with tons of magazines that I had previously been reluctant to throw away. So many memories… …

Meanwhile I logged on to Second Life and took a seat in the corner of my favourite place in the whole wide metaverse. Jade’s Jazz Bar. As I was sitting there a live performance by the French singer Siham Palmer began. I’m not sure how she was doing it. Likely from her own home or studio – she clearly had the dance floor on screen in front of her because she took requests and interacted with the packed club. It really was packed. My super fast computer at home struggled with the frame rate of having so many people on screen at once and I had to fly up to the top balcany just to find room.

Anyway, she is a truly amazing singer and I promptly added her to myspace (she is found at www.myspace.com/sisicool93). But to top off a perfect Sunday afternoon she actually said my name in her lush French accent. I gave her a L$300 tip, as many others were doing, and she said “Merci Benjeyman Na-siko”.

Magic.

Sir Tom Hunter

2007-07-17T23:13:00.000Z

The sexy chap you see pictured on the right has today announced that he is to give £1 billion to charity. It will be he single biggest philanthropic act in British history.

Sir Tom Hunter is estimated to be worth £1.05 billion and is the first self-made billionaire in Scotland. Whether his announcement was designed to coincide with the Rowntree Foundation’s report on Britain’s growing inequality is not clear, but he has said that he intends for the money to be spent mostly on tackling this problem.

But did you notice the significance of the figures?

He has committed himself to handing away practically his entire fortune. Sure £0.05 billion is usually enough for most people to live on, but I wonder how many other billionaires have ever taken it upon themselves to give away so much, as a percentage, of their actual wealth?

Innovative Ipswich II: a long ramble about how Christians in my hometown deserve some credit

2007-07-15T23:57:00.001Z

As you can tell from the title, I’m not going to enjoy this blog entry. It goes against all I hold to be dear and true. Yet I know it’s right. So begrudgingly, and with all manner of grammatical errors, here it is.

--

I disappear to Edinburgh for a year – just twelve months - and what do I see when I return!? Christians! Bloody Christians! Openly walking the streets. Openly! Without shame or fear. In Britain! In my home town of all places! Calling themselves ‘Town Pastors’ they weaved through the streets of Ipswich, preying on the weak and vulnerable left in the wake of a damn decent night out in town.

I was aghast. What next? Would we soon be banning women from talking? Would we soon see extremists firebombing abortion centres? Would we soon see civil rights destroyed? Would we soon all be getting married at 19? Would we stop teaching science? And worse of all, would we develop a southern drawl?

Just what was going on? I had to find out – and with a vengeance. I dare not say anything to Americans – after all – they don’t know any better. But British people! They deserved everything they got! My full fury. Everything. The bastards.

And get it they did. And disagree with everything they stand for I still do. And respond with typical Christian bullshit they did “but if you open your heart to the LORD…” – “Answer the bloody question you fool!”. I threw the book at them. Their own damn book. I’ve read the best bits of the bible. I’ve read guides in theology. I’ve spent months in Gods own Kingdom. I’ve argued and fought the issues over in my mind my whole life. I’ve read Dan Brown. I knew my stuff.

Convert me - they did not.

But I came away unsure as to who had actually won the debate. Loath the very concept of their existence, I did no longer. Impressed that they actually had the balls to stand up, dress up and risk utter humiliation on a Friday night? I most certainly was.

Cont...

Secondary Functions

2007-07-13T11:41:00.000Z

I'm not going anywhere this Summer. I'm too busy you see. Job hunting, house hunting and working on my dissertation ask too much of me. Regretably I can't fit in a carbon chugging flight to far away lands - not even up to Glasgow to walk the West Highland Way as planned.

Yet I don't think I have done too badly so far this summer.

Firstly, I made a couple of new friends. Met them in the lobby of the Swedish embassy, they have invited me to a film showing in a few weeks time - I hope there will be subtitles. They then introduced me to Jade's Jazz Bar. Great little place with a fantastic view of the sea - and some of the best music I have known. Great place to just kick back and chill. And to think it was right under my nose all that time and I never saw it.

Cont...

Richmond, Kew and the National Archives.

2007-07-04T19:49:00.001Z

It’s Monday and I am alone in Richmond, South London in a pretty expensive ‘budget’ bed and breakfast. I am here for four nights, starting yesterday. So far it’s been - nice.

Before leaving I heard on the news that Richmond has the highest rate of council tax in the UK. And I can see why. On arriving Sunday evening I set out in search of a kebab shop. A simple task in 21st century Britain, or so you would have thought.

No. I couldn’t find a single fast food outlet anywhere, not even ones that had closed early. They just simply didn’t exist. However, if at 8pm on a Sunday I had wanted to dine in a fish market/restaurant, or buy Belgian chocolates, or fine pastries, or relax in a specialty wine bar, then I would have been spoilt for choice! Richmond is a very classy place.

Yet it is not pretentious. This is the original article, when a town becomes pretentious it is because they pretend to be like Richmond, and fail. Richmond doesn’t try. It just is. The architecture here just oozes style (and money). Residential roads are lined with large, yet compact houses, and are complemented by a pleasantly surprising array of modest cars (Mercedes, BM’s and Audis etc). While the town centre is a series of small twisty pedestrianised roads with clean tarmac and tasteful storefronts. Internet cafés selling fair trade coffee exist in an unusually high number, as do lots of fashionably trendy people reading the FT. My long held conviction that intelligence and looking good were two mutually exclusive things may have to be revised. The girls here are pretty amazing too. I don’t know why, but there seems to be something in the male psyche that makes every town, except his own, appear to bristle with extremely tasteful young people. Yet on this occasion I don’t think it is just my psyche talking. Class, true class, brings a certain attractive elegance – and I dare any socialist to disprove it. This brief experience has made me add yet another bullet point to my ‘to do before I die list’. So now when I am a rich and successful postman I shall, among other things, be buying a property in Richmond.

Cont….

One last effort

2007-06-23T19:58:00.001Z

My (full time) academic career is now drawing to a close. One last hurdle remains, my dissertation. I have so far shied away from thinking about it, despite knowing that the others on my course have had their heads buried deep inside in the library and archives for months already.

Once again I seem unable to motivate myself for something I am foolishly confident I can bodge in the final hour in order to scrape past the finish line. As usual. I was grossly disgusted when my first essays passed with near flying colours after having thrown them together the same day they were due. This massive injustice, albeit in my favour, did nothing to implant the correct work ethic in my mind. I needed to fail those essays. I needed that wake up call. But it never came.

What is perhaps more ridiculous is that despite seeming to know this, I am still unable to appreciate my position. Unable to take that lifeline.

This could potentially be the last academic ‘action’ of my life. The deadline is August 24th (regrettable three days before the end of the Fringe Festival).

I suppose I should buckle down, as they say.

Wish me luck.

summer breaks

2007-06-23T14:36:00.000Z

Coming from someone who is convinced they suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder during the darker months of the year it is worrying that this summer is shaping up to be just like the last, and by that I mean highly stressful.

Fortunately escape is always at hand and allows for the temporary replacement of my anxieties with an overflowing sense of elation. I find some of the best summer escapes come in the form of concerts. Gigs where thousands of wildly optimistic and arrogant middle class teenagers don their finest black eye liner and baggy jeans in order to descend upon muddy fields to drink, shout and occasionally listen to their favourite bands play music.

I get a crushing sense of anti-climax at the beginning of these events. It stems from a sense of loathing for my fellow middle class white man. Something about this rebellious lot smacks of conformity, especially when they all eagerly line up outside the main sponsors tent to download the most recent ring tones to their Sony Ericsson’s. When did rock concerts become corporate trade shows?

However, this disillusionment swiftly falls away and is replaced by an overpowering sense of hope. Now, this might be the drink talking, but I doubt it – I rarely drink at such events since I always feel that after having paid over £100 for the privilege of being there it might not be best to then scramble my short term memory functions of what actually took place. But that’s not to say I don’t indulge in the odd branded larger or two.

But I am losing myself here, what is important is that these gigs always make me feel pretty damn incredible and a lot happier about both my future, and that of the collective. I soon start to ask myself how such an overly educated, tolerant and sexy looking bunch of people could possibly lead the world to ruin?

Once you get them all bouncing up and down, shouting in chorus and embracing strangers in a strange explosion of ecstasy, there does seem to be this aura of pure energy that is hard not to appreciate.

About the actual music itself two things are worth nothing. One, an upcoming band called ‘Scouting for girls’, with a brilliantly charismatic front man, are well worth looking out for. Secondly, Muse confirmed what I already knew, and that is that they are by far the most entertaining band to see live in Britain today. (Even without the extra funding their stage crew clearly had when planning what was in fact New Wembley’s first ever sell-out gig).

All in all these gigs have once again proven to be excellent save points in a summer full of potential pitfalls.

2007-06-17T21:54:00.000Z

What do you want to know, Gaia? - Hmm, I’m going to call you that from now on.

How I’ve been? What I’ve been doing? What am I planning?

Or how it feels to be in the presence of your infinite beauty, with just limited time?

Whose idea was that one?

Hmm, it’s been some while since I’ve spoken like that. This time last year in fact, was when I started. Which is funny, because I am beginning to feel exactly the same as I did then.

Stress, anxiety. A constant mental static interspersed with soul soothing moments of bliss. Or some such nonsense.

There’s a lot going on Gaia. The dissertation, the reserves, the accommodation and job search, and of course the constant part time quest for enlightenment (ha).

Going away soon, South London for four nights on my own. Hopefully I will find something their in the distant past to drag forwards, something to shore up my shaky academic status.

Swiftly after that I’m walking my way through Scotland on the West Highland Way. A much looked forward to extended break from the straight jacket of responsibility. Like Vancouver last year, a whole peaceful week without a mobile. Wireless in the original sense. Space to think.

I'm writing off the back of a corporate sponsored rock concert and then, two days later one of Britain’s most entertaining rock bands in Britain’s newest venue. Good escapes. Good save points in this, the next level.

Responsibility beckons once more.

Goodnight Gaia.

Rubbish

2007-06-11T00:51:00.000Z

Why is there not a tax on plastic bags in the UK?

Ireland introduced such a scheme in 2002 and they have seen a significant drop in the numbers used and interestingly, despite their newly acquired importance, a large increase in the numbers sent for recycling.

Tesco in the UK almost singly handedly destroyed the momentum for a similar law here in the UK after introducing its ‘green points’ scheme for reusing plastic bags. The Scottish executive was considering bringing the law into Scotland but has unfortunately since stalled. The Scottish Parliament can be of great use when it tries out semi-controversial ideas like this one since if they can prove a policies effectiveness in Scotland there is little reason it should not be introduced in the rest of Britain either (i.e. the smoking ban which has been in full operation for more than a year now in Scotland).

I’m not suggesting a plastic bag tax will save the earth, because it simply won’t do that, however I am still caught up in this idea that the public are hugely affected by their immediate environmental factors (like in the tipping point theory). I think this plastic bag tax could be a tipping point in boosting recycling throughout the UK, in all areas, not just plastic bags. The minute people are forced to start thinking about the need to re-use plastic bags on a daily basis then I think they will soon extend that thinking to other items, plastic bottles, glass, paper etc.

I’m not a fan of the nanny state but I don’t think this simple and subtle change represents to great an intrusion on people’s lives. Indeed, by retaining consumer choice I believe this law would have a far more positive net effect on ‘green’ habits that an outright ban would have.

Of course, I could be wrong – but there is little to lose in giving it a go.

The miracle of New York

2007-05-30T11:42:00.000Z

It appears that the remarkable reversal in New York cities crime rates at the beginning of the 1990’s has become something of a political tennis ball, battered back and forth between various politicians and professors at an impressive tempo. Any social theorist worth his salt in the last decade has attempted to squeeze this vastly complicated phenomena into the cramped confides of their life work. I remember myself thinking it bizarre when I visited the city a few years ago to be told by my friend that the bright and busy street we were then walking through had until recently been an area in which even the police hadn't dared to enter.

I forgot about all this until the theme came about in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘The Tipping Point’, and I was smitten with his idea that it owed a lot to the theory of ‘broken window’ crime prevention that was adopted by the new police chief in the 1980’s. This idea assumes that by cracking down hard on things like petty vandalism and fare dodging an aura of social ‘respect’ (sound familiar?) begins to prevail which eventually brings even the most hardened criminals into line. The underlying notion being that it is ones immediate environment that causes one to sin, not necessarily ones upbringing. I don’t think this was Gladwell’s idea in the first place but it was certainly the first place that I read about it.

So I was totally convinced by this until I read ‘Freakonomics’ in which Steven Levitt attributes the reversal in crime rates to a law passed nearly twenty years earlier in the landmark ‘Roe vs Wade’ supreme court ruling. This was the law that made abortion legal throughout the United States. Levitt’s attractive argument, put simply, was that this ruling prevented criminals being born. Statistically it is children from young, single parent families that are more likely to turn to crime. Roe vs Wade dramatically reduced this social category and hence, twenty years later when the children of the 70’s were reaching the peak of their crime committing capacity – not a lot happened. Once again I was smitten.

So today when I saw the Edinburgh Evening News running with the shocking headline that on average ‘One City Teenage Girl A Day Has Abortion’, I cracked a morbid smile. While this probably represents more a lack of education and/or access to contraception I still think it’s encouraging to see young girls exercising their right to commit murder in the name of convenience (and future social harmony).

Now if we can just clear away some of the litter and patch up a few buildings here and there, utopia is finally within reach – right?

2007-05-28T19:43:00.000Z

I am slowly catching up with my lost university years. sit com by sit com.
After storming my way through 'black books' I have at (long last) embarked upon the delight that is 'spaced'.

God bless you alluc.org

Webcameron

2007-05-28T10:53:00.000Z

Whilst Labour has been handling its inevitable transfer of power the Tory leader has spent the last month or so being a first rate video blogger. Or is that vlogger?

True to form Cameron’s marketing master plan has stuck to its guns, stuck to its plodding pace and in my opinion continues to gather momentum. In a series of photo op’s Cameron has spent four days with a Muslim family in Birmingham, two days as a teaching assistant in Hull and has just finished two days with the Welsh police. Now I know you’re all thinking that this is merely a shameless display of political positioning – and you’d be right. But say what you like about him he is so genuine in his shamelessness that it is very hard, if not to like him outright, then at least to appreciate what he's doing. There is something perversely satisfying in watching someone move around the country saying all the right things, shaking the right hands and ticking all the right boxes (especially when they have an Eton accent). Once you accept that politics is nothing but a dishonest game, then it becomes a matter of who can play that game with the most skill. Cameron scores highly on that count.

Regardless of what you think of the man, his webcameron site has to be visited and a few minutes have to be spent browsing through his video dairies. Politics aside they still make for good viewing, simply from a human interest stand point. Few other people can blog on such a wide variety of things or blog on such a regular basis. Given my addiction to anything with an rss feed webcameron has become a predominant character in my blogosphere. Sad as it is to admit.

2007-05-26T11:02:00.001Z

This is the first time that I have read book, enjoyed it, and then seriously considered burning it. I’m not sure how I really feel about it. I mean, it was a good read, but my mind is now all over the place. I don’t really feel anything about it, but that’s not to say I’m neutral. I’m just more numb. The content of the book represents such a nasty theoretical shape that my mind simply doesn’t know where to begin in digesting it. It is sort of floating around the top of my mind like oil on water. I hope it never settles.

My first task for this morning is to get rid of it. I don’t want it on my bookshelf. I don’t want to remind myself that I have read it. I would not recommend this book to anyone that I actually liked.

I’m now going to read another one of his novels. Hopefully it will not be so … disturbing. Having robbed me of my faith in humanity, it is now only Iain Banks who can restore it.

I’m not so sure that he will.

2007-05-21T23:22:00.001Z

Saw it in a second hand store.
Time to grow my hair long and start chain smoking.

do you ever whistle, just for the fun of it?

2007-05-21T11:50:00.000Z

Whilst browsing around online a few days ago I happened to stumble across the BBC Panorama special on Scientology – with the now almost infamous scene of John Sweeny, after days of harassment by the group, finally losing his rag. From there I naturally went in search of the fantastic South Park episode ‘in the closet’ which led to the departure of ‘Chef’ from the program. Then a You-tube search gave me the official Scientology version of events depicted in Panorama. Interestingly the rest of the You-tube community in response went on to expose how the Scientologists ‘doctored’ the audio track at one part to make it appear that Sweeny injected some national rivalry into his investigations. Truly bizarre that they should do such a thing, although I suspect that by making Sweeny subtly make a comparison between the US and Europe they won over a large proportion of the hyper-nationalist American audience.

Documentary or no documentary it has been clear for a long time that the Scientology craze has been a little bit – strange. I’d love to do some sort of cultural analysis and trace its roots to an American society built upon ancient European superstitions. But I wont.

Anyway, the point is that yesterday whilst meandering back towards home I stumbled across the Edinburgh office of Scientology – which were offering free personality tests that day! – Ha.

Cont…

nostalgia payments

2007-05-14T19:26:00.000Z

I just got an email from the Development and Alumni Relationships department of the University of Essex. They were asking alumni if they would be willing to make a monthly donation to an ‘opportunities fund’ for current and future students. I never really got on with the University administration or the Students Union whilst I was there, both being exercises in how to lose independent initiative in endless corridors of bureaucracy.

Yet a few weekends ago I was invited back to a alumni weekend at Essex. If you successfully navigated your way through the ridiculously complicated check they had in place to ensure you were indeed a former student (and make you pay handsomely for each and every step of this check), then the end product was actually a reasonably good weekend. SX burgers, the stifling heat and smells of the Underground (or Sub-Zero if you prefer), and an abysmal display of 5 a side football all brought back fond memories. So I guess it wasn’t all bad.

So rather than being disgusted at the organised begging of my former university I am actually rather impressed with it. I remember that the University of Arkansas was almost entirely paid for by rich individuals and companies that had some sort of connection with the institution. And despite getting peanuts from the federal authorities the University was lavish with new buildings and facilities which put the drab concrete buildings and worn out classrooms of Essex to shame. So perhaps it is about time we started putting our money where our mouth is and started caring for our former institutions. The money they want will go directly into providing bursaries and scholarships for poorer students – both of which will become more important as our universities continue to hike up tuition prices to compete with the United States.

When I can afford it, I think i'll sign up.

Possibly.

Tony Blair félicite Nicolas Sarkozy

2007-05-11T14:38:00.001Z

Blair used youtube to send his regards to the new French President
Show off
Now I have to ask Cat what his saying

tyranny of choice

2007-05-11T14:11:00.000Z

I have to begin work on my dissertation now, which for those of you who are interested, is to be on that fascinating topic of Liberator Bombers in the Battle of the Atlantic. I know, I’m an anorak. But really – it is so interesting – did you know that with the introduction of only 40 of these bombers into the Atlantic theatre at the end of 1942 the whole balance of the campaign swung in the Allies favour. Which allowed them to seriously consider landings in France. Which led to the downfall of Hitler (or at least prevented the Soviets from doing it by themselves).

Thousands of ships, Tens of thousands of deaths, and millions of tons in supplies lost, a lethal war of attrition fought for nearly three years with little hope that it would change - and then - hey presto!. Forty planes reallocated from a to b. Problem solved. War won.

A ‘tipping point’ if ever I saw one. Malcolm Gladwell would be proud of me. Possibly.

Cont...

2007-05-08T23:36:00.000Z

Another hero of mine.
He talks the talk.
But does he walk the walk?

2007-05-02T10:28:00.000Z

my hero

Innovative Ipswich

2007-05-01T00:14:00.000Z

I have just bowed down before the closest thing I have to a religion, namely Ipswich Town Football Club, and have pledged to forever abide by the following:

a) Thou shall not boil more water in the kettle than one needs.

b) Thou shall not leave ones appliances on standby.

c) Thou shall always unplug ones mobile phone charger when not in use (because the dastardly things still drain 90% of their operating power even when not in use).

Strange thing to pledge to a sports team hey? But apparently by going to www.saveyourenergyfortheblues.com and making these, and other more hefty commitments, I can help my team become the UK’s first carbon neutral football club. And in doing so also earning the team a healthy addition to its transfer budget. Cont...

Scottish Elections

2007-04-30T23:35:00.000Z

Today I posted off my ballot paper for the Edinburgh Council elections and the Scottish Parliament. SNP are ahead in the polls but they will need to form a coalition with someone if they win, and volunteers for this dishonorable task are nervously keeping quiet. Although the Liberal Democrats, wishy washy as usual, look most likely to betray the Union. They have been spouting some weak nonsense on wanting to work with the SNP but yet being against independence.

I stayed true to my former party in the Council elections and voted Green.

But I wont tell you who I voted for in the Scottish Parliament - it would only make you angry. But trust me, there is some strategic calculation behind my madness.

Did you also know that EU citizens can vote in our regional elections – and Commonwealth citizens can vote in both our regional and national? I think that’s ace.

2007-04-30T13:21:00.000Z

Hugo and Nebula award winner. It’s a bit like Harry Potter in space. Only written in the 70’s. And way better.

Embracing the Lord. Spitefully.

2007-04-26T22:28:00.000Z

Despite my wickedly incessant condemnation of all things Christian, I have to reluctantly confess that there may be some areas where I agree with the teeming masses of rich white kids who make up God’s chosen few.

And I’m not talking about the bits we obviously agree on. Just like any child of God I naturally see that women are inferior to men – and certainly should not be allowed to actually address a church congregation – that’s best left to their 21 year old husbands. And of course it goes without saying that if you get aids, you clearly deserve aids, and if you hadn’t been bumming around you wouldn’t have got it in the first place – no amount of contraceptives would have saved you on that one – so very sorry Africa but the Pope’s got it right. God simply enjoys watching you die. Painfully. And as for science? Please! No ****** loving lefty is going to teach that Darwin filth to my children. No way, at least not while I’m still paying my NRA subscriptions.

No, no, no. I’m not talking about that at all! I’m talking about the family.

Core family values. Nuclear families. Brilliant little things. Just perfect for the incubation of peace loving and friendly little people that can go on and build a better world. I think it’s all a matter of psychology, economics and tuition. See it’s all about the parents. Two (relatively) happy parents makes for relatively happy children in my opinion. It also makes for a household with a stable income – vital for sending the brats to college. And of course – it makes it twice as likely that the children will be able to find a parent with the time to do their homework for them. So everyone’s a winner. Families rule. And by the way – this is not a gender specific thing – two guys or two girls are just as capable of doing the same job. My only hesitation with this is the small issue of what happens when the kids go to school and meet a Christian for the first time? They will soon find out that “treat thy neighbour as you would treat yourself” is of course a load of bollox when it comes to the billions of earth’s citizens on God’s ‘Axis of Evil’ hit list.

But other than that – nuclear families are ace. And an important ingredient to any stable society. So there you have it. My conservative edge laid bare for all to see.

Peace brothers, Jesus is with us. If believing in a document written a couple of thousand years ago by some (Arab) ex-convict called Paul helps you stay together with your partner, and does not include the simple suppression of domestic abuse (Don’t lie to me – I know the rubbish that goes on behind Christian doors when the wife is simply to ashamed to get divorced) – then by all means – go for it. I’m with you. Let’s get down to some worshipping.

And if you could also find it in your heart to realise that God’s green earth gets a little bit less green every time you jump into your SUV on a Sunday to go praise his holy creation – then I really think we could be mates. Just.

Walk with the prophets my friends.

I said WALK.

Moondust

2007-04-18T14:21:00.000Z

I do not intend to keep you all informed about every book I read but this one needs a mention. It is ‘Moon Dust’ by Andrew Smith. And it has once again made me want to become an astronaut. Which, given the authors sceptical approach to his investigations into Apollo is perhaps surprising. The book sets the Apollo program in the context of the betrayed hope of the Sixties and this makes it far more interesting read than a straight account of technical achievements. He puts space where it should be, in the public’s eye and not tucked away in some obscure technical text. The book is like a set of mini-biographies of the Moon walkers, only nine of whom remain, strung together by the personal voyage of the author who is critically testing the realities of the Apollo program against his boyhood fantasies. The author is British but spent his childhood in America before returning and this gives him a great perspective on US culture and allows him to see the ironies that totally escape the natives of that former super power. The book includes many interesting snippets, about which I was unaware, the pick of the bunch are as follows:

The man behind Apollo was a German by the name of Wernher von Braun, a Nazi rocket engineer who employed thousands of slave labourers in underground bunkers towards the end of the war building his V2 rockets to bring death to the people of London. Operation Paperclip picked him up and hurried him back to America. And it was this Nazi that would take America to the Moon.

Cont…

Seeing what you want to see

2007-04-11T22:09:00.000Z

What follows is a triumphantly overdramatic account of a simple train journey through East Anglia. It is punctuated with big fluffy words with which I am not entirely comfortable, some awful alliteration and plenty of unnecessary over analysis. I also had to write it out as a long text message owing to a lack of writing materials and the rather awkward position of being hemmed into my seat by a grotesquely obese middle aged man. Who snored.

East Anglia, my home region, is notoriously flat and as such has in the past made for good farming grounds and in the future will make it the first casualty of rising sea levels. It is a land of far horizons and lush fields, especially in spring. Littering these green and yellow plains are old, broken down relics from a time when the unknown frightened us more than it encouraged us. They have been abandoned for centuries by a people who over hundreds of years learnt the painfully lessons of organised faith.

To my left comes one of many brand new housing estates of loud red bricks and sharp grey tiles. New Renaults in blues and silver line their drive ways and small black discs bolted to their sides look knowingly up to the heavens. This small island is becoming ever more crowded. The train then pulls into a Victorian era railway station. It’s grand imperial architecture marred now by dirt and mould. Yet it still stands testimony to a time when the railways were the conduits of empire and the kings of Europe ruled the world.

Continued in comments…

EU/USA Class Wars

2007-04-10T02:41:00.000Z

The recent pagan festival of spring (called Easter in Christian mythology) got me thinking. It got me thinking about America and about my time in Arkansas. It got me thinking of this simply because of the down right fascist views that were spouted from the pulpit of the church I regularly attended and the truly terrifying manner in which young and otherwise intelligent Arkansans gobbled up such tripe every Sunday morning - and evening. And Wednesday evenings. And weekends when they embarked on their misguided mini-mission trips to go convert the heathens and build new churches for poor black folk.

From here my thoughts expanded to include the University of Arkansas as a whole, and from there to comparing it to my experiences at the University of Essex. (Which is in the UK, e.g. Britain, e.g. Europe)

And you know what? I am thoroughly unhappy with both. In my room I have a slightly awkward photo of myself wearing a ridiculous cloak and mortarboard while holding a plastic scroll. I spent three years studying history and walked away with a good degree. And yet I know next to nothing about history. And what’s more, what little I do remember, was almost all learnt in Arkansas. Needless to say this truth fits rather uneasily with my easily enthusiastic anti-Arkansan rhetoric.

Why? I’ll tell you why. Because despite paradoxically having a heavier work load in Arkansas than I did in Essex the problem was that Essex was trying to hard, and Arkansas was not trying hard enough.

Continued in the comments section…

2007-04-09T12:59:00.000Z

Never has such a pessimistic view of the future seemed so attractive

Mono-logue

2007-04-06T22:39:00.000Z

This is a post without a purpose. Usually they all have a purpose. In fact I have developed a rule whereby I never write anything unless I find myself gripped by the moment or enraged by someone wearing a crucifix.

This is not one of those moments. This is going to be quite conventional. Almost like a diary entry, or so I’d wager.

Benjamin Nakizo has been ill for the past month or so. Glandular Fever, ‘Mono’, or the ‘Kissing disease’ depending on your preference. Although Nakizo for the life of him can’t think of whom he may have been kissing.

Regardless it was most unpleasant and came at exactly the right time to screw Nakizo over for all the deadlines he had to meet. He is now up a creek with a very unreliable looking paddle. This is far worse than being stuck without a paddle because at least then you have the perfect excuse, and you can even relax as the currents of fate move you along. But not this time. This time he has to work his way out. Which sucks. To say the least.

Benjamin has also been looking into extending his stay in Edinburgh for a further year. Nakizo has sent off important papers to a merciless bureaucracy and has everything crossed that they will accept him. Should the acceptance be forthcoming Benjamin will begin a year long experience that should really test him. It may be a test he fails. But that is the point. Benjamin wants to know. And he also wants you to know. Today Benjamin bought new trainers in anticipation.

Benjamin has also realised he has no money and that this may scupper his aforementioned plan. That comfortable savings account set up when he was a wee nipper has been run dry by his constant thirst for take away meals and books he will never read. Benjamin is considering selling his car. It is a nice car and Benjamin does not want to. But he likes the significant symbolism involved in such a sacrifice. Heaven forbid, it might even motivate him. Little else does.

Benjamin has also just read that a friend of his is having the time of her life being shot at in Palestine. He knew she voted Lib Dem but did not believe her capable of this. He believes there are other ways she could satisfy her middle class roots. But Benjamin is nonetheless very impressed.

Benjamin has lost a lot of weight during his recent illness. And anyone that knows Benjamin will tell you there is precious little of that to lose. So in the next few weeks expect to see Benjamin eating pizza and fat shakes until he pops. He has to restore that masculine exterior somehow. To compensate, Benjamin has grown a beard in recent weeks. Hence the picture.

Notice how the author was unable to actually talk about his real life so referred to himself in third person throughout. Magic.

Invasion of the Vorticons

2007-03-31T01:53:00.000Z

I just stumbled across a rare internet treasure. A site that provides you with countless classic video games, for free. I went there originally to satisfy my demand for world conquest via the majestically educational Civilisation II (which should be made compulsory for all secondary school students). But what else did I find? None other than my childhood favourite, and yet almost completely forgotten about, Commander Keen. I used to play this game on the Commodore 64 when I was about seven or eight. I remember my dad taking me down to the local hardware store to buy the games on cassette tape. It was rare that we would get a new one but always magical when we did. Rushing home with it. Taking it out the case. Hurridly ramming it in the tape deck. Hitting play.

Then waiting for forty minutes. The tape had to slowly run from start to finish as the Commodore loaded up all the information it needed before finally it bleeped it action. And in the simple days of my childhood, before girls and social awareness had cast their ugly shadow on my thoughts, these words were all that were true to me:

BILLY BLAZE, EIGHT YEAR-OLD GENIUS, WORKING DILIGENTLY IN HIS BACKYARD CLUBHOUSE HAS CREATED AN INSTELLER STARSHIP FROM OLD SOUP CANS, RUBBER CEMENT AND PLASTIC TUBING. WHILE HIS FOLKS ARE OUT ON THE TOWN AND THE BABYSTIIER HAS FALLEN ASLEEP, BILLY TRAVELS INTO HIS BACKYARD WORKSHOP DONS HIS BROTHERS FOOTBALL HELMET AND TRANSFORMS INTO…

COMMANDER KEEN: DEFENDER OF EARTH

IN HIS SHIP, THE BEAN AND BACON MEGA ROCKET, KEEN DISPENSES GALACTIC JUSTICE WITH AN IRON HAND!

America's disease begins to spread

2007-03-30T21:49:00.000Z

I do enjoy a good riot. For starts they make great television and every May 1st I hope some misguided punk will give a copper a good smashing just so I can watch the ensuing fight. But I’m a little twisted like that. Bizarrely what I most tend to admire about such events is when the authorities win out. Unlike the spineless French who give in to a few thousands pot smoking students with placards, here in Britain we have a few more draconian laws in favour of the police and we never let the people get their way. If nothing else riots keep the authorities on their toes. Keeps them thinking and earning their wages. Plus they can be of even greater benefit too. We must never forgot how Margaret Thatcher, by depriving a few hundred thousands miners and their families of a future, was able to immeasurably make the whole country richer. And, loath him as I might, Rupert Murdoch played a cruelly cunning trick on the powerful printing unions by secretly building an automated press that came online at the exact same moment that he sacked all his overpaid union workers from their jobs printing ‘The Sun’.

So as I was flicking through the newspaper and saw that in Copenhagen up to 700 so called ‘leftists’ had been arrested after a weekend of frenzied violence I paid attention. Typical Europe I thought, full of lefties still waiting for the USSR to come liberate them from the Imperial powers of old Europe. But this riot came with an interesting twist.

The riots were in reaction to the closure of a local youth centre, which had become the seat of leftwing activism in the Danish capital. First opened to the public in 1982 to keep folk off the streets it also became a hot venue for street music and culture. All of which seem like healthy developments and of which I am in favour. I think such institutions add character to a place and disagree as I might on their finer points of philosophy such places still retain a ‘cool’ factor. But this one was being closed.

And why? Had the government had enough? Was it looking to squash this movement in its infancy? After all these would be perfectly understandable reasons and indeed typical behaviour for many a government. But no. Armed police conducted a morning raid to oust the men and women from the centre because the building had a new buyer.

A buyer by the name of Ruth Eversen. And Eversen had purchased the site because God had told her to. Oh joy. God had instructed her to ‘return’ Denmark to its righteous path of Christian ‘love’ and ‘charity’ - and other such shamefully spiteful words hijacked by organised religion. God had told her specifically to start with the part of town in which the youth centre was based. God must enjoy picking fights because it is also the same part of town in which Copenhagen’s large Muslim community is based.

Good old born again Christian bigots. It seems the disease is spreading out from its American heartland.

Let it be known that should there ever be a riot in which either left or right faced a religious opponent – count me in. And my old offer still stands. In anticipation of the day of reckoning when the Christians take over I am still looking for partisans to come live with me in the mountains from where we shall conduct lighting raids on churches to install condom machines in their bathrooms and distribute scissor sister records under the pews.

Solidarity my brothers, solidarity.

The morality of carphone warehouse

2007-03-08T14:21:00.000Z

Now I’m not a huge fan of Big Brother. Sure I, like most people, have been hooked in the past and on one level I do appreciate the neat social experiment it represents. I usually like to think myself above such pursuits as idle gossip about people I don’t know. Then again, I am insanely interested in politics, which in fairness is probably more sinister.

The recent ‘racist’ allegations have however sparked my interest. From what I have gathered from various websites and newspapers I think I have struck upon an ingenious explanation, which quite helpfully, slots in perfectly with my all to class-conscious world view. I fear that what happened in celebrity Big Brother might well have been a microcosm of Britain in the near future.

Jade Goody has been cast as the ringleader of the racist attacks against Shilpa Shetty. Now, I am inclined to believe that Goody’s comments were indeed racist, if only because my idol Dave Gorman is quoted on youtube as saying as such. So why? Why would a celebrity, obviously conscious of her own reputation and her own brand name, commit career suicide by saying the things she did?

I think she did it because this was not initially about race. It was about class.

What we saw was a working class and uneducated white female, albiet plucked from obscurity by her big mouth and appearance on a reality television show. While she might be a millionaire for producing work out videos for equally obnoxious and ‘plump’ women; she still holds working class values and is still from a working class family (as we also all saw).

Shilpa Shetty on the other hand is a moderately slim and attractive actress who grew up with values firmly rooted in the upper echelons of society. She also happens to be Asian.

What occurred between Shilpa and Jade was a clash of values. Goody was at odds with the bizarre and pompous ways of the born into affluence Shilpa. So Jade, perhaps also feeling threatened or jealous of someone far more attractive than she – looked for a means to strike back. And she found it in race.

This is my worry. If as I previously stated, globalisation is making the rich richer and the poor poorer we can rightly expect to see a little bit of class conflict occurring. It is only to be expected and in many respects is entirely valid. Yet Britain has dealt with this sort of internal strife before right? We usually solve it by stirring up patriotism with a few good wars and then eventually placating people’s demands by throwing some new social policies at them. Yet I feel any future class conflict will be different, because Britain is now different.

Many of the upper to middle classes in 21st century Britain are not ethnically Anglo-Saxon. They are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the children of children of immigrants and most seem to embrace a work ethos far in excess to anything to be seen on the council estates of provincial Britain. This has enabled many of them to climb the social ladder with astonishing speed. Yet their success has also opened up a new dimension in class conflicts.

For when grasping for a means to undermine the higher classes will people be tempted to do a ‘Goody’ and embrace racist rhetoric as a means of unsettling the established order? Possibly.

Note: Please excuse my snobbish arrogance. Again.

Cardboard Coloured Dreams

2007-03-07T23:33:00.000Z

So a flurry of posting is now underway, which can mean only one thing! Deadlines loom. But for the next ten minutes, loom I shall let them, because I want to tell you about my new favourite band:

You see, I have always longed to be cool enough to listen to obscure bands that know one else really knew about, but alas (alack), I never have been. Always a child of the mainstream. But wait. Last summer someone introduced me to the Rumble Strips. A band from Tavistock. Which is somewhere in the south west of England so I am told, although they are really based in London. And they rock.

I was introduced to them because a friend and fan of the band was insanely jealous that I was off to the Reading festival (where they were playing), and she was not. So after familiarising myself with their style on their Myspace account some weeks previous I went down to the dusty little cow shed that was the Carling Stage. They had secured themselves an illustrious 11am slot on this renowned stage. A stage with a habit of breaking successful new acts. They played in front of no more than about a hundred to a hundred and fifty people. But they rocked. But not in the ‘woo this rocks!’ sense, but in the far more mature ‘woo, this rocks!’ kind of way.

They play an upbeat, yet mellow, sort of Indy music with the saxophone, trumpet and keyboard being just as central to their songs as the usual guitar and drums. Following their Reading gig I sort of became hooked on their progress.

And I have stunning news. Not only do I have tickets to see them on April 2nd when they come to Cabaret Voltaire in Edinburgh (I know – stunning isn’t it). But they also have a full album release for the summer of this year! Previously their only release had been a couple of singles and a cardboard clad EP of only four songs. But now they have a full album, produced by none other than the same chap behind both the Kooks and the Fratellis. I am never sure who in the musical world does the ‘tipping’, but ‘tipped’ they have been - these guys are the next summer sensation. Personally I think their unique style probably excludes them from the mega successes of the former two bands but they still certainly deserve their share of time in the limelight.

So consider this me officially jumping on their bandwagon. Before they get big. So I can say that I was there. At the beginning (sort of).

Here’s hoping.

Desalinising Dreams

2007-03-06T02:00:00.001Z

This is an obscure post that will undoubtedly offend the faint hearted and those with little appreciation for ‘boring’ subject matter. I apologise now.

Today I’m feeling good about myself. I just bagged up two loads of empty plastic bottles and carted them off to the local recycling bin. Feeling environmentally smug I then proceeded to go for the double, because I then used the same two plastic bags the bottles were in to take my shopping home. How brilliant am I?

Not very it would seem. I’m sitting here now doing my reading, sipping periodically from my bottle of chilled Evian. Not wishing to tame my wondering mind I got thinking about this bottle of Evian. Water. Mineral water. From France. In a plastic bottle. Transported here. And I’m drinking it.

I am not so much concerned with the carbon footprint of this bottle as I am with what it contains. Water from a finite fresh water source. I am sure that the company behind Evian ensures that it extracts a sufficient amount to keep its profits rolling at a sustainable level for a good number of years, but I doubt it is fully sustainable in the long run nor do I suspect it is entirely safe from even slight variations in rainfall that might be caused as part of global climate change. But they are not the only ones tapping their water from shrinking freshwater sources. Most of the world is facing a fresh water shortage of some sort and I even read somewhere that many people predict that wars in the future will be predominately fought either directly or indirectly over water supply.

This seems incredible when you consider that the other danger facing mankind is a rise in sea levels – too much water – that is threatening hundreds of millions of people in low lying areas. Surely a growth industry over the next one hundred years will be the treatment of salt water into fresh drinking water. A process known as desalination.

The technology is incredibly expensive (and has one or two environmental hitches, but none that are not overcome with a little preplanning) and requires massive upfront investment with only long term pay back prospects. Yet it does happen, and predictably it happens most in areas with a hotter climate, Saudi Arabia, for example produces 24% of the world’s desalinated water.

This has got me excited. I sense another way in which someone might help save the world and get rich at the same time. As a lonely fourteen year old I drew out elaborate plans to create my own ‘solar’ company. Now I feel that I missed the boat, any such company established in … what would have been 1998, could surely be sold on now, in an atmosphere of alternative energy frenzy, at a fair old sum – with or without evidence of much profit.

Now I once again feel I have stumbled across a misguided path to morally satisfying riches. If anyone wants to go halves on a fifty million pound (solar?) desalination plant off the coast of Africa somewhere – the output of which could be cleverly bottled and marketed towards the western ‘consumer conscious’ market – let me know.

Apollo

2007-03-04T01:49:00.000Z

I hope most of you saw the lunar eclipse tonight. I personally went half way up Arthur’s seat to watch it unfold over the city. As did most of Edinburgh by the looks of things, there was a great atmosphere up there. Very pretty.

While the magic of the moment lasted only a split second before it became almost normal to have a reddish coloured moon hanging in the sky, it was a particularly magical split second.

It was sort of strange to see our collective shadow fall over another body in the solar system, even if it was our own satellite. It must have been quite a show for the lunar people too. I’d love to have been there.

Come on people. We can’t live on this lonely rock forever. Can we?

Colonising the seas

2007-03-02T19:55:00.000Z

This is a story taken straight from BBC News but it has pressed all the right buttons and got me all giddy. So here’s the deal:

A Dutch company has invented a type of floating house which, while stationary, is able to rise and fall with the sea levels up to a height of four meters. The idea being that the Netherlands will be one of the first victims of global warming and answers are needed fast if life is to be allowed to continue in any way close to normality. Apparently officials from New Orleans have expressed an interest in the new designs and hopefully these sorts of homes will catch on around the globe.

It is simply not enough to pass legalisation saying that Europe and the US will cut carbon emissions. Firstly the situation is so desperate that it will take a complete revolution in lifestyle habits in the rich world – which if it happens at all is going to take decades to phase in. Secondly China and India are going to be hard to tame. And thirdly even if everyone suddenly became a green fanatic tomorrow I believe it would still be too late. Events have been put in motion that we cannot reverse. Ice is going to melt. Global climate is going to change. Millions of people will lose their homes.

It is time we accepted this all to likely outcome and began planning for it now. The Netherlands is taking an understandable lead in this (what with their very existence depending on it), but so should Britain. We have plenty of low-lying areas; indeed my very own East Anglia is more or less the mirror image of the Netherlands itself. I can envisage a row of these sorts of homes selling for good prices along the Norfolk and Suffolk coast. Londoners with a conscience and a fascination for the new might be easily persuaded to part with their hard earned cash. Anyone want to lend me a couple of million to begin construction?

On the flip side it is interesting to note that there might be some perverse justice in mother nature exacting its revenge, first on the Netherlands and then Britain. Both of which were of course the first two modern capitalist nations and perhaps therefore have a lot to answer for.

Link:

February 2002

2007-03-02T02:27:00.000Z

"The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green grass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night. And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flowerpots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamour to cover the silence that came from outside the door and shaded window.

In six months a dozen small towns had been laid down upon the naked planet, filled with sizzling neon tubes and yellow electric bulbs. In all, some ninety thousand people came to Mars, and more, on Earth, were packing their grips…"