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Hubris and Nemesis
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Jun. 30th, 2008 @ 07:29 pm
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 Commentators reflecting on the massacres committed by the communist regimes of the 20th century were fond of quoting the 16th century proverb ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. What is true of Marxist genocide is also true of plastic pot plants. Whoever masterminded the decoration of the lobby of the contemptible 1960s office building I work in was in all probability motivated by feelings of human solidarity and desired to create something that would infuse the buildings inhabitants with something akin to a state of spiritual nirvana. This, they reasoned, could best be achieved by creating a display of fauna in the entrance hall that would bring Mother Nature’s wonders to an otherwise soulless patch of concrete. Something was lost in the execution. Instead, following a series of compromises, the space was populated with a series of grotesque plastic trees, which resemble cast-off props from ‘Day of the Triffids’. Over the years the dust has accumulated so that this ghastly spectacle has even lost its kitsch appeal. Far from attracting onlookers towards its beauty and away from the boxy architecture of the building its blackened forms present themselves as a forest of death. The ghastly display fulfils the same role as the decaying victims of medieval hangings, chilling onlookers with its spectacle of decay and forcing them to reflect on the transience of existence.
 Recent events have forced me to reflect on the plausibility of robot sex slaves. If, like me you follow the scientific press with a sort of horrified fascination, you can hardly have failed to notice the surge in wildly speculative literature regarding the imminent symbiosis between man and machine. This trend is best embodied by the figure of David Levy, author of such titles as ‘Love + Sex with Robots’ who claims that by 2050, machines will be able to serve as human like lovers and ‘not just mechanical sex slaves’!?!. He predicts that within the next four years advanced robots will be sold as sex toys and will possess sensors and electronic speech abilities to make them seem real, when a human touches their ‘sensitive zones’. All this gives you some idea of what St Augustine was talking about when he spoke of ‘the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible’ from which arises ‘incitements to vice and, indeed, vicious desires’. Leaving ethics to one side for the moment, I find myself worrying that the introduction of this additional household appliance might result in a number of nightmare scenarios, such as returning home to find your mechanical husband embedded in your fridge in an act of ill-conceived copulation. It also requires a tremendous leap of faith just to trust a computer to take care of my sales proposals let alone let it in close proximity to my genitalia; especially if it is running Vista. Another commentator, Kevin Warwick of the university of Reading has gone in a slightly different direction, claiming in his book ‘The March of Machines’ that by 2050, if current progress continues, the robots will have taken us over. Presumably in this scenario, the tables will have turned and the remains of humanity will be subjugated and bred as sex slaves to the robots, thus leaving David Levy with egg on his face. These are the consequences of hubris.
Happily the current state of play in artificial intelligence gives one no reason to worry about such alarming predictions. In the preface of Mark Tilden’s book ‘Junkbots, Bugbots & Bots on Wheels’ he recalls the story of his attempt to make a robot butler for his household. Having designed such a complicated and expensive machine he was bemused to discover on returning home that it had been outwitted by his pet cat which had walled it in with play furniture and left it spinning hopelessly in circles. If this anecdote is any indication, the robot menace of the future will more resemble the Daleks than Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘The Terminator’, with our mechanical counterparts capable of unspeakable evil but unable to climb the stairs without falling over. It also proves the maxim that if you really want to create artificial intelligence you would be better off having kids than fiddling with wiring and AND gates.
And so big brother has returned to our screens, a show I affectionately refer to as ‘chewing gum for the eyes’. Many people elucidate a sort of dripping elitist contempt when they hear that this programme has returned for its latest season. This I think is misconceived. Television never has been and never will be intellectually stimulating and long may it be so. Having said this, I am slightly concerned about the values it promotes, or perhaps brings to the surface. For example, it has become clear to me that amongst Big Brother contestants, being rude to someone’s face when you don’t like them or ‘telling it like it is’ is considered a virtuous act. Whilst talking behind someone’s back is considered shameful, actively confronting the object of your displease and lecturing them on faults in their personality is the height of good manners. Things have obviously moved on since Lady Troubridge’s rules of etiquette.
 Once you accept this as a guiding moral principle, Adolf Hitler begins to look positively virtuous. His 1926 work Mein Kampf - or to give its original title ‘Four and a half years of struggle against lies stupidity and cowardice’ - is a perfect illustration of how one should ‘tell it like it is’, detailing his intentions to overthrow the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles, wage war against France and destroy the ‘Judeo Bolsehvik’ regime in the east to create the desired living space for the Aryan master race. No room for ambiguity there. This book by the way was not the publishing flop of folklaw. It sold over 10 million copies by 1945 was translated into many languages including Braille; it also caused alarm in 2005 by topping the bestseller list in Turkey following a flurry of sales. Despite these explicit intentions Stalin remained convinced that the Nazis would remain pre-occupied with the west and even admired Hitler for his brutality, remarking ‘What a great fellow! How well he pulled this off!’, when news came of the night of the long knives. Hitler for his part described Stalin as ‘one of the greatest human beings since , if only through the harshest compulsion he has succeeded in welding a state out of this Slavic rabbit family (Kaninchenfamilie)’. Its strange to contemplate that in another reality these guys could have been drinking buddies. |
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The rotten fruits of progress
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Jun. 28th, 2008 @ 02:54 pm
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 ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ wrote Dylan Thomas while contemplating the slow decline and death of his father, ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’; but the bard was guilty of failing to practice what he so eloquently preached. The man who famously declared that ‘An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do’ stumbled into the Chelsea Hotel in New York on the 3rd of November 1953, uttered the immortal words ‘I've had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that is a new record!’ and expired at the tender age of 39. Reciting poetry boisterously in the pub and drinking yourself to death strikes me as a singularly ill conceived method of halting the dying of the light, in fact, its more akin to replacing every light fixture in your abode with Tesco ‘energy saving’ bulbs and then grumbling incredulously as one by one they fizzle into impotence. I tried this the other day in a brief moment of eco-religiosity and was subsequently returned to the dark ages as the purchased lightbulbs burned with the kind of feeble effervescence one would associate with manufactures assembled by downtrodden wage slaves in some god forsaken corner of the Orient. As a result of this, the eighty watt bulbs have been returned to their fittings where they will remain proudly until the day of revelation when the prophesies of Al Gore, Lord Stern and the IPCC will be fulfilled and the earth’s population will be purged for its eco-sins. The world may be engulfed in floods, tidal waves, swarms of insects and whatever new cataclysm is cooked up in the tabloid-esque pages of ‘The New Scientist’ but at least I will be able to find my pants in the dark recesses of my bedroom.
 If like me, you were brought up on comic strips from the 50s like Dan Dare pilot of the future, where men in spaceships with improbably geometric chins did battle with the Mekon of Mekonta and travelled to faraway galaxies in search of adventure, you will probably feel more than a little twinge of disappointment at the news that our latest step in the march of progress is to send a flimsy robot to Mars equipped with a drill – not to conquer the Martian microbes in some glorious neo-colonial escapade but for the unglamorous task of looking for ice. Aside from the prospect of using this minuscule portion of the Martian Ice sheet to create the world’s most expensive dry martini, this story has nothing of the high drama and epic adventure which earlier writers expected of the 21st century. Even browsing the science journals merely hastens the onset of disillusionment. ‘Enlightened’ 18th century philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot scorned the medieval scholastics of the Middle Ages for their turgid debates on the nature of the trinity and the number of angels that could feasibly dance on the end of a pin - and yet, among the most popular scientific theories at the dawn of the 21st century are that our universe is part of an infinite multiverse in which multiple copies of Elvis exist, that human beings are ‘nothing more than’ blindly programmed sex robots infected with mind viruses and, amusingly, that the universe is shaped like a doughnut, and will presumably meet its apocalypse when it is finally spotted by a universe shaped like Homer Simpson. All these make the metaphysical musings of figures like St Thomas Aquinas look positively sane and one is tempted to reach in disgust for Occam’s Machete.
According to the over enthusiastic science fiction writers of yesteryear such as Issac Assimov this was to be the time when machines finally achieved human like properties, acting as our trusted servants and making the course of our lives effortless. Well here we are in the 21st century and the closest object I have which resembles this vision is my Wii Fit and accompanying balance board. This rather paternalistic object mocks my portly frame, labels me as obese and make me insert pre-programmed excuses into my ‘weight chart’ when I consume one two many bevies at my local. Its rather like inviting a 17th century Puritan into your house and then having him chastise you while your perform sit-ups. As a result I am racked with guilt when I over indulge in life pleasures. My customary pint of Stella and accompanying packet of salted peanuts on a Friday night turns to ashes in my mouth when I reflect that the following morning, ‘the machine’ will reprimand me for my gluttony and instigate an overly harsh weight loss program. Such are the rotten fruits of progress.
When the word ‘balderdash’ is mentioned to me it conjures an image in my imagination of an elderly and eccentric character from a P.G Wodlehouse novel, who might possibly use it in the context of an unusually heated discussion at the dinner table or perhaps a dispute with his gardener. It is a quaint and seldom used expression, a remnant of Olde England, I certainly wouldn’t have expected it to be used by the world’s most unhinged oriental despotism. And yet, last month the North Korean ‘news’ agency released this gem of a statement:
“…the U.S. let loose a spate of balderdash against the DPRK, terming it "closed" and "highly militarized society" and "dictatorship." The U.S. had the impudence to find fault with the supreme headquarters of the DPRK and slander the Korean-style socialist system centered on the popular masses”
It is gratifying to see that whilst in the country we insist on polluting our own language with vulgarities, the international appeal of English is such that words which fall out of favour here are being resurrected on the other side of the planet, albeit by the axis of evil.
I was amused to see that there is a new book out written by the last surviving member of Hitler’s bunker entourage. According to the book, Hitler was always playing humorous japes on his colleagues. His favourite victim was Herman Goering, who was notoriously fond of awarding himself medals and designing his own uniforms. Hitler was fond of recounting how Mrs Goering found her husband waving his Field Marshall’s baton over his underwear in the bedroom and asked him what he was doing. "He replied: "I am promoting my underpants to OVERpants!". Evidently Hitler was so proud of this joke that he had medals made from gold and silver paper for Goering to wear on his pyjamas.
Reviews of this new contribution to our understanding of the great dictator were far from impressed by his sense of humour, but its worth recalling that Hitler was a comic genius compared to Lenin. In 1920 the pompous British Philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell spent five weeks in Bolshevik Russia as part of a Labour party delegation. The delegation naively expected to find a socialist utopia brimming with milk and honey and with contented workers spontaneously breaking into choruses of the Internationale. Russell first realised all was not well when a ragged group of what he presumed were beggars turned out to be distinguished mathematicians keen to pay homage. Lenin granted Russell an audience as he posed for a portrait sculptor. At first Russell thought how friendly and jolly he was. But a question cropped up about Communism and agriculture. Lenin described with gusto how he brought about a vast improvement in agricultural practices by inciting the poorer peasants to murder the richer ones – “and soon” added Lenin “the poorer peasants hanged the richer ones from the nearest tree. Ha Ha Ha!”. He then broke out into a fit of ghoulish laughter, oblivious to the fact he had just committed something of a public relations faux pas. Russell returned home in disgust to denounce communism in his ‘Theory and Practice of Bolshevism’, perhaps reflecting that on the whole it is not a good idea to meet ones heroes in the flesh. |
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Tidal Waves and Eco Towns
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Nov. 10th, 2007 @ 07:51 pm
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 Like many of Suffolk’s native-born sons I was secretly hoping that the apocalyptic tidal wave approaching Norfolk’s east coast last week would perform the same function as the biblical flood, sweeping our rivals to the north into the icy waters of the North Sea as punishment for their many vices. The tsunami approaching the East Anglian coastline we were told, would be a ‘deadly tidal wave’, ‘bring the worst flooding in 50 years’ and cause ‘extreme damage to life and property’. In the event all we were left with were a few small puddles on the landward side of our flood defences, not to mention a chorus of angry voices in the media, demanding to know why East Anglia had not been annihilated as advertised. Perhaps they should adhere to the ‘Michael Fish’ rule, which is that when the media predicts a disaster, it rarely happens. It is only in cases where the onset of disaster is overlooked, such as before hurricane Katrina and the 1987 hurricane that events seem to unfold to their worst potential. Instead of doing this, the worlds press and the public at large adopt the scattergun approach, so that a new disaster is predicted daily in practically every newspaper column and water cooler conversation. The explosion of Yellowstone park, the rupture of the San Andreas fault, the submergence of most of England due to sea level rise and, most chilling of all for the general public, the prediction that house prices might actually fall to fair and realistic levels. Possibly the most entertaining of these predictions was contained in Gary Blevin’s book ‘666 the final warning’ in which he claims that Ronald Reagan was the Anti-Christ and will return to cast us all into the lake of fire, aided in this task by the Aliens, super computers, free masons, and barcodes. Implausible perhaps, but far more entertaining than ‘The Stern Review’ and less self-righteous than the ‘IPCC report on climate change’. At least he got the Ronald Reagan bit right. The scientist’s reaction to last weeks non-catastrophe was to proclaim that we had been extremely lucky and that more of these types of events to come over the next century. If by ‘these types of events’ they mean massive media hype followed by a less than damp quib, then I’m inclined to agree. I won’t be shelling out for a wetsuit just yet, unless of course it’s to protect myself from all the psuedo-scientific dribble in the media.
I believe it was Winston Churchill who said that it was a sad day for humanity when we swapped the horse and cart for the motor car. I can’t help thinking that western civilisation suffered a similar blow when we stopped building things in factories and switched to an economy, which, when you break it down, is based on typing utter gibberish to each one another in the form of memos, meeting minutes, sales proposals and tenders. Certainly we are better off, more prosperous and happier than we were during the days of the industrial revolution, but whilst there was honour and nobility in chipping away at a coalface or spinning cotton, there is little or no nobility in trying to discuss your organisations attitude to ‘change management’ or outlining your ‘Prince 2’ influenced approach to project management in a series of confused and long winded sentences.
So who to blame for the fact that linguistic atrocities are now not only acceptable but crucial if you want to get ahead?. For my part I blame modern philosophy, in particular existentialism, for if you attack the whole concept of meaning you rehabilitate the meaningless and allow it to become acceptable, in fact the very boundaries of acceptability are stretched to breaking point. An ill-conceived Olympic logo that looks like Lisa Simpson performing oral sex on a hoodie becomes “unexpectedly bold, deliberately spirited and unexpectedly dissonant, echoing London's qualities as a modern, diverse and vibrant city….inclusive ... for everyone, regardless of age, culture and language". A repellently ugly disused brutallist car park in Gateshead becomes ‘an incredible sustainable structure…an iconic cultural and architectural landmark’. And then, in one of the 21st centuries great ironies, the previously discredited new town movement returns as ‘eco towns’; ‘family friendly’, ‘carbon neutral’ dwellings, ‘built using timber, solar thermal panels, double glazing, insulation and biomass boilers that do not use fossil fuels’. Of course, reading all this you might have thought that these new settlements the government are planning would be designed to recreate the old settlements of England such as Cavendish, the village I grew up in. Timber framed houses, close knit buildings, shops within walking distance and all designed using the wonderful and varied vernacular architecture of Britain. Wrong. A cursory glance at the website of the firm which is building ‘Northstowe’, the first ‘eco town’ in Cambridgeshire, reveals that these new settlements will have more in common with the dreadfully designed new towns and London overspill estates of the 1960s and 70s than any vision of olde Albion. To add insult to injury, this town will be built in the middle of rolling countryside, since disused airfields seem to count as brownfield sites. What’s more disturbing its that by the looks of the architectural renderings you will have to be a lobotomised cardboard cut-out to actually live there. A look at the planned Cranbrook settlement in Devon reveals similar architectural folly, with the public buildings looking as if they have been designed by an artistically challenged toddler..jpg) So if I do have an apocalyptic vision for the future it is this. Future settlements in the UK will look like they came straight out of an Ikea catalogue, they are unlikely to be carbon neutral as people will still have to drive to get into work and the whole thing will be one expensive disaster, a deformed and hideous sacrifice to the New Labour god of ‘eco-sustainability’. Our one hope is that the predicted East Anglian tidal wave finally makes an appearance and washes the whole ghastly mess into the ocean. |
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The wonderous animal kingdom
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Nov. 7th, 2007 @ 11:01 pm
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 One of the worst features of the modern age, and something I have touched upon in some of my most recent posts, is the relentless rise of scientism. This is the process whereby scientists wearing white coats, and with a long list of impressive sounding letters after their names, periodically emerge from their academic institutions in an attempt to quash the superstitious notions we hold about this world of ours. Of course this is understandable. Spending the majority of your life staring at the reproductive activities of microbes is apt to produce a cynical and materialist attitude in most people, but what gets my blood boiling is the sheer arrogance with which these self-proclaimed know-it-alls come to their conclusions and then issue an incredibly patronising press release. This in turn is treated as gospel by an uncritical media and splattered all over my early morning copy of the Metro.
In 2005, for example, a Mr Steve Morris of the university of Bristol decided to try and quash all rumours that elephants are fond of getting drunk. In the March/April 2005 issue of the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, Morris wrote that there was nothing in the biology of the elephant to support the stories from both Asia and Africa of elephants getting tanked in the wild. "People just want to believe in drunken elephants," Morris concluded. Oh really!. In October 1999 the BBC reported that elephants had run amok in the Indian province of Assan drinking a villages entire store of rice beer and killing four people in the process. A one off perhaps, or perhaps not. Last month, according to officials, a group of delinquent elephants entered a village in Meghalaya, uprooted several huts and drank the locals rice beer. Having got well and truly steaming on the stolen booze, they then electrocuted themselves to death during an inebriated attempt to topple an electricity pylon. One can’t help thinking that perhaps the cause of preventing the Asiatic elephant’s extinction would be better off if they were exposed to the BBC’s new hard-hitting "Alcohol makes you feel invincible when you are most vulnerable" campaign which is currently polluting my television set and disturbing highly-strung individuals the length and breadth of the country. Another inescapable conclusion is that when considering the drinking habits of elephants it is probably better to ask one of the locals in the remote parts of the subcontinent than a stuffy academic from Bristol with a chip on his shoulder.
Of course it is all to easy to anthropromorphise our cousins in the animal kingdom, but its hard to ignore the fact that in a series of bizarre incidents which I intend to document, animals have proved themselves akin to, and even superior to humans. In 2004 a black bear was found in a drunken stupor near a campsite in Washington State surrounded by empty beer cans. He had apparently broken into the camper’s cooler boxes and used his teeth and claws to pry open the beer cans. This in itself is not unusual, what was remarkable about the incident was that the bear had only drunk the local Rainer brand of beer and had rejected the mass market Busch beer, which is, I am reliably informed by my American spouse, a beverage barely fit for consumption, akin to Carling or Fosters. Interesting then that, whilst much of the general population of this country prefers to drink mass produced rubbish than good honest bitter, a bear’s tastes are significantly more refined and they would doubtless be more at home at a Campaign for Real Ale gathering than a piss up on cheap lager at the students union.
 Cause for comfort then when observing the bears of the Pacific Northwest. Less so, I’m afraid when considering the recent activities of monkeys, which seem to be more keen on emulating the activities of Liverpudlian yobs than sticking to their normal habits of grooming and tree climbing. "Can the [tourism] minister deploy game rangers ... to deal with the monkey menace?" pleaded local representative Paul Muite in Kenya's national parliament last month, "These creatures have clearly shown that they have no respect for women". In Kenya the harassment of women by Monkeys is becoming so bad that they have been forced to dress like men. Upon seeing women or children the monkeys will habitually approach them and make obscene gestures, pointing at them lewdly and touching their private parts. Thing are no better in Delhi where encroaching development has disturbed the local monkey population to such an extent that they ‘assassinated’ the deputy mayor. In other incidents over the past few years the monkey have run riot in government departments, ripping open files and attacking bureaucrats, even killing people with flowerpots. One can understand their anger, a monkey’s views are rarely taken into account during planning applications. I believe it was Jean Paul Sartre who reprehensively said after Black September that “terrorism is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others." Presumably then the same principles apply to monkeys as the poor blighters have no weapons besides the occasional hurled stone, the odd flowerpot and the ability to gesticulate offensively at their own member.
In some ways then, animals act better than humans, in some instances worse and in others their experience mirrors ours to an uncanny degree. In early 1999, the combination of a television set and the late arrival of a series of wildlife tapes caused a family breakdown amongst a group of Orang Utangs. The TV was installed in the Leningrad Zoo in Russia so that the apes could learn their native skills. Sadly the tape arrived late, and in the interim the father of the group became addicted to dubbed American soap operas and pop videos. "Before the TV appeared, Rabu never took his eyes off his lady," explained Lena Goroshenkova, a zoologist at the ape house "But then they put up the TV and he's been glued to the screen ever since." The normally raucous feeding time was been transformed into a quiet television dinner and even the frantic swinging around of Rabu's mate Monika did not distract him from the set. It just goes to show, sadly, that with the impressive attributes of intelligence, deep emotions, linguistic ability, and self-awareness also comes the ability to waste the aforementioned attributes in mindless pursuits such as watching reruns of ‘Sex in the City’ and ‘The Fabulous Life of Celebrities’ on TMF. Somewhere in the distance, creation weeps. |
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On Wine and Scientific Committees
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Oct. 28th, 2007 @ 03:55 pm
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One of the principle faculties you are expected to possess in order to claim membership of the upper middle class is an ability to pick out a fine wine. Unfortunately, I am decidedly ignorant on the subject, but I do have a better than average grasp of human history. Hence when I am despatched by my spouse to Londis to pick out some red wine for the evening ahead I invariably stick to familiar ground and plump for a bottle from the country with the worst record of human rights abuses. For someone like me who is woefully uninformed when it comes down to understanding the complex soil and climate variations that combine to produce a decent bottle of merlot, this approach has serious merits. Having shifted the logic of purchase, those once incomprehensible rows of bottles arrange themselves into some kind of order. Should I pick out a Chilean red because of the crimes of General Pinochet?, or are these outweighed by the apartheid era embroiled in the South African cape wine or the Aboriginal genocide encapsulated in the fruity Australian red?. Or perhaps I shouldn’t be drinking anything at all seeing as I am already over my recommended weekly limit of 21 units.
Last weeks news that this recommended safe units of alcohol limit was a purely random figure plucked out the air by a pompous scientific committee comes as no surprise. My science teachers at school were some of the most loathsome human beings I have encountered, and their illustrious counterparts in the research labs and universities seem to follow this pattern. So far, in my lifetime, these kill joys have proclaimed the non-existence of God, launched into dire tirades concerning the evils of alcohol, tobacco and obesity and, as the pièce de résistance, demonised us for destroying the world with our gas guzzling motorcars, our resource wasting refrigerators and our callous abuse of our TV’s standby function. They remind me of the 19th century lay preacher who decries his congregation every Sunday for their rampant sinfulness and vice. Strange how, despite our supposedly post-theistic modern perspective, the old Christian concepts continue to re-emerge. The capital vices of lust, gluttony, sloth and greed continue to be denounced -although this time for scientific reasons and for the good of our decaying health service- and the concepts of the carbon footprint and carbon offsetting closely mirror the Calvinist concept of original sin and the pre-reformation practice of paying money to the church in exchange for the forgiveness of sins. The worst of the scientists currently whore-ing themselves out the media is probably the odious Richard Dawkins, Darwin-fundamentalist and the author of ‘The God Delusion’, a man so obnoxious that he makes even a committed atheist like myself want to convert to Catholicism at the next opportunity and spend the rest of my life burning bread in the toaster in an effort to create a visage of the Virgin Mary.
 Often it is not the evidence itself that is the problem, it is the way that evidence is assembled into a self serving conclusion and packaged for the media in a series of simplistic sound bites. Take last Friday’s Times for example which led with a huge image of earth and a series of apocalyptic headlines. ‘Humanity's very survival' is at risk, says UN’ read the header although beneath it was the intriguing fact that the ‘the world’s population has grown by 34% to 6.7 billion in 20 years’. In my experience these pronouncements from the UN are usually about as objective and reliable as a North Korean press release. If the iguana population were to surge by 34% we would in all likelihood describe them as thriving and not be suggesting they were on the brink of extinction. This preceded an ‘Earth Audit’ section in which dire facts such as ‘Ten million children under 10 die’ (global infant mortality has actually halved since 1960) sat somewhat uneasily alongside such titbits as ‘Annual income per head has grown by 40% to US$8,162’ and ‘Farmers produce 39% more from their land than in the 1980s’. The overall message however, was of doom and gloom accompanied by, thanks to the new internet enabled feature whereby readers can comment on newspaper articles, the usual displays of panic, outspoken ignorance and unbridled joy from those who don’t particularly like being Homo Sapiens and would prefer it if they, their relatives and the rest of the species faded into extinction. Under the online version of the article a sub-literate commentator, Mr John Hanson of Cairns had written
“Know doubt, Darwin's theory of evolution, is correct, perhaps homo sapiens, if they dont adapt to a very different world, will need to go the way of the Dodo like many other species, that have gone before……when homo sapiens eventually die out , perhaps some new form of life on Earth, will be slightly more cleverer.”
Whatever the state of human evolution, it certainly appears to be lagging in Queensland. |
| » Decline and Fall |
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As I stood in my front room clutching my Wii remote and throwing punches ineffectually into the air I couldn't help reflecting that while technology liberates us, it ultimately emasculates us. In Victorian times strapping young chaps like me would have manfully strode down to the coal face and spent the day chipping away at it with a giant pick axe. We would have undertaken this task for the vast majority of our lives before suffering an excruciating but dignified death from tuberculosis. This was known as the nobility of labour. Sadly there seems to be little nobility in slumped Internet browsing, deleting penis enlargement emails from your inbox and writing long boring sales proposals. In old Victorian prints, the man of the house sits at the head of the table, the adoring eyes of his family fixed upon him as he contemplates a letter. When I get home, I stand at the head of the television set and contemplate how best to defeat my e-adversary, the perfidious 'Eric'; a character in Wii boxing who bears more than a passing resemblance to Admiral Tojo. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, the Wii is the latest games console from Nintendo. Instead of just pressing buttons on a normal controller you have to actually perform the 'real world' action, swinging the remote like a tennis racket for example, or jabbing with it to throw punches. The trouble with Wii boxing is it is seriously hard work and only a couple of rounds is enough to build up a healthy sweat. Vanquishing virtual opponents takes at least half of the effort of normal boxing but produces none of the street credibility, as I have discovered on those occasions when I have boasted to my colleagues at work. There may come a time when achieving a record breaking time on Super Monkey Ball hurdles is seen as great an achievement as running the London marathon but that time is assuredly not now, unless of course you live in South Korea.
I believe it was Samuel Johnston who said “If you are tired of London, you are tired of life”, a soundbite that has been echoed many times since by the London Tourist board. Of course such quotations must always be seen in their socio-historical context. In the London of Samuel Johnson’s day there were public executions to entertain the masses, barber’s shops doubled up as brothels and the average worker drank eight pints of beer or more during his shift. Nowadays the beer is vastly over priced, the barbers shops have all become trendy salons and the kind of people you used to execute in the olden days are all living off dole money in Hackney. Even if these miscreants were to be rounded up and executed for the public’s viewing pleasure there would no doubt be a hefty entrance fee for the venue, and the organisors would charge extortionate prices for front row seating and glossy programs to cover “budget over-runs“ during the construction of the scaffold.
Katie and I’s recent excursion to the United States roughly coincided with the latest terrorist attacks on the U.K. Whilst this led to lengthy delays at the airport it did at least afford me the opportunity to spout stoic Churchillian rhetoric from a safe distance. I can help thinking that what with Comical Ali, the detonating doctors and the hate preaching mouse of Hamas this country is faced with the most unhinged adversaries since the days of the Mad Mullah. Of these, Farfour the mouse has proved to be the most entertaining. As someone with an overactive imagination I have often wondered what would happen if Islamic fundamentalists were to take over Cbeebies. Luckily Hamas have set up an experimental TV station called ‘Al-Aqsa’ which broadcasts in the Gaza strip and shows programs such as ‘Tomorrows Pioneers’, a show in which a Micky Mouse lookalike with a squeaky voice preaches hatred of Israel and the America to small children. It’s also true that the BBC news preaches hate against Israel and the US on a regular basis, but at least it is aimed at a more mature audience and doesn’t suggest that resistance with AK-47s and grenades is a wholesome activity for young children. In the past, other Palestinian children's programs have used the Mickey Mouse image to incite radical activities and praise suicide attacks. Unsurprisingly Walt Disney has been too timid to sue for copyright infringement. Having appeared in six episodes of the program, the writers clearly made a creative decision that they had taken the character of Farfour as far as they could and in the last episode he was martyred by a land grabbing Israeli official. Hamas has recently revealed Fafour’s replacement, a six foot tall jihadist bee on string called Nahoul. By the sounds of it, they hired the same voice artist. To me this highlights the problem with fiction; some of the most interesting things in the real world are simply too crazy to make up.
The green contingent has been attempting to bring about the downfall of many things recently, among them my budget flights to the U.S to see the in-laws, my electric kettle and the standby button on my TV. They are now beginning to get their teeth into bottled water, a largely useless product which is sold by spreading paranoia about the domestic supply, rebranding it as a valuable lifestyle accessory with trendy sounding names like ‘Dansai’ and ‘Volvic, and by making unsubstantiated claims of purity. Last month the green party representative in the London Assembly urged the city to give up bottled water saying “Selling water in bottles and burning massive quantities of fossil fuels for its transportation does not make economic or environmental sense.....it's about your mindset and understanding your carbon footprint”. I have been attempting to understand my carbon footprint over the past few weeks and have come to the realisation that whatever steps I take to make my lifestyle carbon neutral, they will always be counter balanced by carbon atrocities such as my wife leaving the iron on for 12 hours yesterday, Live Earth acts taking long haul flights between gigs, or those 10,000 trees which the band Coldplay planted in India to offset the production of their album and which died shortly afterwards turning into carbon emitters.
It came as great amusement therefore to see that the recent flooding in this country and accompanying disruption to the water supply has caused bottled water to fly off supermarket shelves at unprecedented levels. If the recent weather can be attributed to global warming then it seems that this most recent green drive was thwarted by the climate itself. Good to know Gaia has a sense of humor after all.
Jul. 23rd, 2007 @ 05:10 pm
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| » Various Grumblings |
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‘If I was going to kill myself why would I need the shampoo?’ I asked the store clerk quizzically. It seemed the obvious question. I was on my daily stroll down to the local shopping mall to buy some painkillers. Having dodged the inevitable hordes of charity muggers, Sky TV salesmen and old ladies armed with shopping carts I had dived into the local Boots to pick up three packs of nurofen and some shampoo. When I reached the checkout I was told that it is now illegal to buy more than two packs of nurofen, presumably as a precautionary measure in case I had had a stressful morning at the office and was planning on topping myself on my lunch break. To me this stinks of hypocrisy. Throughout the average day I am bombarded with pessimistic messages designed to cripple me with self-loathing. I am told that my carbon footprint is too big, that I am destroying the planet, that the world is suffering from overpopulation, and that, in some sort of gross parody of chaos theory, by leaving the TV on standby I have set off a sequence of environmental catastrophes, which will lead to the deaths of countless millions of people on the coastal plains of Bangladesh in the near future. The decent thing to do would be to end my life as soon as feasibly possible but society won’t let me buy enough painkillers to do it successfully.
Another problem with society is its fostering of unrealistic expectations in children. This is most aptly demonstrated by the contestants on X-factor, who usually reveal to the judges that they have craved fame and stardom from an early age and that appearing on the show is the fulfilment of their childhood dream. My childhood dream was to dig a large hole in the ground, cover it with sticks and ensnare someone in it. This fantasy was the product of many a happy hour spent reading a weighty tome entitled ‘Forts and Fortresses’, whose latter pages depicted Vietnamese soldiers busily constructing traps for Americans to fall into. I’m glad to say I was able to construct a system of booby traps in the ground of Melford Hall which the Viet Cong themselves would have been proud of, and that I was able to ensnare one of my friends sisters with one strategically placed hole. Setting your aspirations at this level is advantageous, firstly because they are more likely to be fulfilled and secondly because if this country were ever occupied I would have the experience necessary to take part in a guerrilla insurgency.
Work continues to go extremely well, to such an extent in fact that I need to consider getting on the property ladder. Sadly the property market is such that it doesn’t really represent a ladder anymore. It’s more of a long greasy pole, made all the more impossible to mount because those above you keep greasing the section below them. For example, a revolting mock-Tudor semi in Basingstoke, which twenty years ago would have been a candidate for immediate demolition, is now so ridiculously overvalued that it would set you back a lifetimes income just to enter the bidding. Those who own a property can sit smugly in their repulsive accommodation, safe in the knowledge that their concrete hovel has tripled in value in the last year. Those of us not on the ladder, the modern landless peasantry, stare glumly at the raft of property shows on television as Britain’s new generation of self proclaimed ‘property entrepreneurs’ set about pricing us out of the market. I turn to my history books for comfort and find solace in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Perhaps the housing market will collapse as some experts predict it will. Imagine the scene. People will be hanging themselves from their loft conversions, jumping from their ‘contemporary’ extensions in despair and gassing themselves in their conservatories. It’s a pleasing vision but one unlikely to be fulfilled.
Movies are often guilty of glorifying their subject matter. A prime example of this is recruitment. In movies like Oceans Eleven it looks so glamorous. The protagonists travel to a series of exotic locations to assemble a crack team of specialists. One by one they win the more reluctant individuals over to their point of view and off they head to plan and orchestrate some grand scheme. Compare and contrast that to the poor buggers who reach me over the company switchboard, attempting to convince me that the woefully untalented administrators on their books are logistical masterminds on a par with Fredrick the Great. Compare it with the tedious process of wading through sub-literate CVs, chasing obnoxious candidates and fending off the ubiquitous employment agencies who home in on your job advertisements like sharks to a bleeding carcass. Makes one long for the days of the press gang when recruitment was a simple matter of heading to the nearest bar in the city, plying the occupants with alcohol and delivering a swift blow to the head.
I note with amusement that the bill for the Olympics continues to escalate rapidly. We seem to have collectively sleepwalked into subsidising the ‘regeneration’ of East London, although this is something of a misnomer. Regeneration in my experience consists of marginalizing the local inhabitants, putting up row after row of identical yuppie housing and obliterating any trace of culture. New Labour is intent on building a London that looks like those blurry architectural drawings you get on the side of new developments; of lobotomised young professionals drifting listlessly through heavily idealised neighbourhoods of yellow brick and glass. Were IKEA contracted to design hell, it would look a lot like this.
Take the example of Oriental City, a magical place down the road from me which acts as a conduit for London’s Chinese community. They flock there to enjoy its reasonably priced shops, its amazing variety of oriental cuisine and its community events. Unsurprising then, that Brent council is intent on knocking it down and replacing it with a B and Q, after all what this borough really needs is another DIY store. When the Olympic bill is criticised, the responsible minister usually stands up and comes out with some rot like ‘before making these cynical accusations you should consider the hopes and dreams of this country’s children who are so looking forward to this wonderful event’. She then returns to her seat in a flurry of self righteous indignation, as if her comment has single-handedly settled the argument. Of course, seasoned observers will recognise this as the ‘For the children’ fallacy. The reasoning goes like this; ‘P is good for children; children are good; therefore, anything related to children is good; therefore, P is good. It can be used to justify a variety of ludicrous measures, including the flushing away of £9 billion on a glorified school sports day at the expense of the National Trust’s lottery funding. Of course it may be true that the children of this fair city are all awash with excitement at the prospect of the 2012 Olympiad and are busily training to become athletes but I can’t see it happening, unless of course shooting, stabbing, looting and smoking crack are Olympic events.
Mar. 24th, 2007 @ 03:59 pm
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| » Corporate personas and Cab drivers |
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Certain companies adopt the corporate persona of what I like to call ‘the friendly face of capitalism’. My DVD rental service ‘Love Film’ for example, likes to portray itself as an amiable friend; the kind who knocks on your door and asks you if there is anything you need and, by the way, would you like the spare toaster they keep in their apartment?. Love Film is always sending me bubbly emails telling me things like ‘not to be a bad santa’ this Christmas whilst helpfully offering me free vouchers, informing me of DVDs I might like to watch and generously offering me discounts. In contrast, my gas and electricity company ‘Southern Electric’ has clearly modelled itself on the rampaging hordes of Genghis Khan. Much like the peaceful townsfolk of medieval Muscovy one is sitting there quite happily minding your own business when a nasty demand for tribute deposits itself through the letterbox. If it is not paid, reads the notice, my gas and electricity will be ruthlessly cut off, my assets abruptly seized and Barnet County Court will sue my remains for good measure. I wouldn’t mind so much but the impertinent bastards at Southern Electric never send me a bill in the first place, instead they choose the ‘zero tolerance approach’ and send me a final demand notice. I had thought that to be ‘final’ by definition, the demand should be been preceded by other demands, but then I’m a stickler for detail. My life would be so much simpler if I simply blocked up my letterbox with pollyfilla. I wouldn’t be able to receive dvd rentals from Lovefilm but it would be worth it for the peace of mind.
In November I was given an interesting lesson in what happens when you attempt to cut corners and economise. It was the day Katie was due to leave for the U.S and we were preparing to leave the flat for Heathrow airport. Traditionally these occasions are a bit fraught to say the least. We tend to leave packing till its almost too late, pile a bunch of stuff in a suitcase at the last minute and wing our merry way to the tube stop weighed down by our worldly possessions like a couple of Kurdish refugees. We were on our way out the door, about to repeat this onerous process when Katie glanced at the sideboard next to the door and noticed a card advertising a mini cab service to the airport for the unbelievable sum of £20. Mini cabs are something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand they are ridiculously cheap. On the other, if you use one you run the risk of being robbed, sexually slaughtered or forced to wear a tasteless orange jumpsuit and ritually slaughtered in an Islamic Fundamentalist’s home video. We decided to ring the number and sure enough a swarthy looking chap showed up on the doorstep and gestured us over to his vehicle. I tentatively climbed into the back seat and was confronted by a repulsive odour, the kind of smell one can only achieve by getting a dog to bathe in its own manure for a full day and spend the night in the back of your car having ingested large quantities of baked beans and chickpeas.
We climbed in and sure enough as soon as we were sitting comfortably, the chap got out of the car and ran off behind my neighbour’s property. I tensed up for a bit; this kind of thing only happens in assassination thrillers when a bomb is planted in the target’s vehicle and his driver is in on the plot. We sat there bemused for about ten minutes before the mini cab driver returned. He was apologetic, sweating profusely and suspiciously doing up his trousers. To my horror and disgust I realised he must have been caught short and had defecated behind the neighbouring block of flats. There was no mistaking the way he had sprinted off; it was the run of a man who has dined well on curry and beer without being mindful of the consequences. Aside from that, the ride was moderately pleasant, interspersed by the odd moment of terror. The car occasionally gave up in disgust and stalled, leaving us stranded in angry traffic. On the road into Heathrow we were inches away from being hit by a car. The ride was cheap, but as happens so often in life, you get what you pay for (although this maxim is often used as a justification for downright extortion).
And so it was on the ride back from the airport, having been in the States for a while we decided to take a good old-fashioned London Cabby home to Hendon. Sadly good old-fashioned cabs do not charge good old-fashioned prices and we were stung to the tune of 70 quid. So often life only offers you a series of bad options to choose from. Either a cab driver shits all over you neighbour’s property or he shits all over your bank balance; there is no happy medium.
Jan. 12th, 2007 @ 12:38 pm
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| » Resurrection of the blog |
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If you’ve been in London for the past six months you’ll probably be aware that the coming of the 2012 Olympics is being heralded by greedy property developers and over-optimistic government officials as an event akin to the second coming of Christ. The XXX Olympiad, so we are told, will lead to an unprecedented renaissance in east london, transforming the deprived boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Stratford and Tower Hamlets into an urban utophia of smart new flats, hard working yuppies and wholesome young familes. Of course anyone who had the misfortune to travel past Canning Town on the DLR will know that these areas barely qualify as habitable; the architect who designed most of this bleak concrete wilderness clearly took his inspiration from the surface of the Death Star. Both are despicably ugly, but East London’s sci-fi doppleganger has one overwhelming advantage, the lack of a breathable atmosphere which prevents crowds of happy-slapping, workshy youths from concregating and causing trouble. These areas of London would benefit more from a well delivered A-bomb than a glorified school sports day which lasts less than a month but costs 4 billion.
It appears that, much like Scott of the Antarctic, I have miserably failed to keep up a diary. Yet while Captain Scott had the excuse of having frozen to death in the middle of the Antarctic circle in a flimsy tent, my reasons for failing to write up the day to day discourses of my life are far more tenuous. So what was the cause of this long silence, did Nottingham City Council finally catch up with me and force me to eat my own words?. This is a terrifying prospect for me since my words are in digital format and therefore infinitely re-printable. Interestingly enough, there is a historical precedent for this. In the seventeenth century a Swedish author rashly decided to write a particularly scathing thesis on the subject of the Danish occupation. The authorities caught up with him and he was offered the choice between the death penalty and eating his own book. It’s a fate I would very much like to see meted out to Jeffrey Archer, Andy Mcnab and in particular Chris Ryan, author of such masterpieces as ‘Alpha Force One’, ‘Zero Force One’ and ‘The Ultimate Weapon’. In the old days war heroes manfully accepted their medals and settled into a quiet retirement; their deeds only coming to light many years later in the Obituary column. Now they get leapt on by publishers who sign them up to extensive book deals and have them produce volume after volume of literary crap for infantile young men with too much testosterone.
In fact there were numerous mitigating circumstances. Katie accidentally spilt gin and tonic over my keyboard causing my long-suffering machine to emit dada-esque rubbish every time I tried to type something. The struggle of attempting to live in two cities at the same time made contributing to my little corner of cyberspace tremendously difficult. But really the main reason for the demise of my blog has been sheer laziness; I still have plenty of things to moan about.
Life is full of what I like to term ‘delicious little ironies’. For example, on a daily basis I am continually bombarded by enviro-guilt literature informing me that I need to be conscious of my desecration of the environment and must religiously recycle every product I use. I am willing to do so, but where are the recycling bins?; at Brent Cross, conveniently located across a murderous mass of dual carriageways. So to be a good citizen of the earth and recycle I need to own a car, a vehicle which emits around 4.3 tonnes of CO2 a year. Not that this bothers me too much. This idea of every human being having some sort of ‘carbon footprint’ sounds spookily similar to the Calvinist idea that we are all born with original sin of which I am similarly sceptical. I must say it is good to see that the government is now tackling green issues with the stunningly original idea of putting more taxes on us. Unsurprising really since taxation has been the government’s response to every problem since the sixteenth century. I used to look back on the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as a bunch of self righteous tax dodging so and sos but in the light of the taxation fetish in this country they look remarkably far sighted.
In my business we talk about ‘life events’; those seminal moments in someone’s existence where major changes occur such as getting married, buying a house or having your first child. For me seeing how much tax comes out of your first meaningful payslip has to be up there with them. When the state first begins to whisk vast quantities of your income out of your bank account, a sea change occurs in your outlook. Suddenly the society at large becomes an endless source of annoyance. The country transforms itself into a vast caricature of dole scroungers, idle public sector bureaucrats and illegal immigrants and your political beliefs slide alarmingly from the left wing to somewhere to the right of General Pinochet.
Now as my eyes flit from article to article in the morning’s metro I find it hard to keep my anger hidden as I see the myriad of ways in which my tax money is being idly squandered; everything from Welsh devolution to bumper compensation payouts for prisoners who experience stress when their drugs are taken away from them in jail. I do miss the comfy leftie notions of student life but right wing irritation is somewhat invigorating.
Dec. 18th, 2006 @ 09:59 pm
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| » Is it Art? |
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"Am I being a bit too cynical?", I puzzled to myself as I stared incredulously at the sculpture in front of me. The work of modern art insulting my gaze seemed comprehensively devoid of any merit whatsoever. And yet, I reflected, underapreciation of art has been an unhealthy characteristic of mankind for centuries. Perhaps if the rowdy regiments of The Holy Roman Emporer Charles V had taken a course in art history they might have been a little less eager to sack Rome in 1547. If the merciless hordes of Attila the Hun had held more of an interest in fine art and less of a facination with the contents of their trousers, the Dark Ages might well have been a little brighter. In view of this, one must always endevour to place the work of art within its proper context, to see things from the artists perspective and to shed ones stuffy traditional perspective. This proved decidedly difficult. The artist in question had apparently attempted to replicate Tracey Island from Thunderbirds, and yet its most commendable features such as the sliding swimming pool and the avenue of collapsing palm trees were conspiciously absent.
I decided to delve into the art gallery brochure to discover what the artist had intended; this is what I read.
'Sioban Hapaska's sculptures often hover between abstraction and hyper-real figuration. Her installation 'beach of the restless' presents all the clichés of paradise. However, the glow of sunshine on a white sandy beach, palm trees and the sound of waves gently breaking on the shore construct an Eden that is not as it seems. Her simulation of a tropical island is a synthetic anti paradise. In the centre a fibreglass monstrosity with an LCD screen for a face stands sentinel over a glass cube filled with sand and coconuts. The coconuts gaze warily at the screen, which depicts their kin being violently smashed open on an endless production line of destruction, like victims of state terror.’
In the Baroque period, works of art were enormous oil paintings depicting epic encounters between armour plated Trojan warriors and scantily clad, swooning maidens; all with a sinister Turk lurking in the background for good measure.
Now one can simply throw together a bunch of dirty socks, a used condom and a collection of empty Pritt-sticks and claim this sordid collection "challenges the flawed but alluring tabula rasa of modernism and creates an atmosphere of pathos". Art has ceased to be about the work itself and more about the waffle that accompanies it. Take this rubbish by way of illustration
'Marcus Coates’s work documents his attempts to connect with - or even become- an animal. In 'Finfolk' he emerges out of the freezing north sea in ill fitting Adidas sportswear and clip on shades, his idea of what a seal would be like if it were human'
Surely becoming a seal involves substantially more effort than this, living off a diet of raw fish for example or balancing a toy ball on the end of your whiskered nose. In any case it is highly unwise to imitate seals as you are liable to be clubbed to death by a group of passing Norwegians. In this country clubbing involves donning a shirt, consuming large quantities of alcohol and stumbling around a poorly lit cellar full of scantily clad women for the duration of the evening. In Norway clubbing means sauntering down to the rocks with your buddies and chewing tobacco while you mercilessly whack seals over the head with a sturdy wooden bat. As the HSBC advert says ‘Local knowledge is important’; although in my experience, the only local knowledge HSBC actually possesses is 'Indians callcentres will work for peanuts'.
I couldn’t help reflecting as I paced this dreadful collection of exhibits that the majority of these artists would have failed GCSE art have they submitted them as their final piece. I got an ill deserved B grade in art but I struggled throughout my short-lived artistic career due to a chronic lack of talent. For a while I enrolled in an after school activity group and for long hours at weekends I would sit in pottery class churning out clay sculptures which were then placed all over the family home by my dutiful parents as mantelpiece ornaments. For some reason it is commonly seen as one of the responsibilities of parenthood to highlight the achievements of ones offspring, no matter how dreadful. As I discovered when I was packed off to boarding school, this mantra only goes so far.
The one ‘work’ of mine I remember the best was a clay model I sculpted of the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth. Inspired by the class nativity play, I spent a good couple of hours marking out the bricks and then arranging them into a miniature dwelling complete with a flat middle eastern roof, tiny windows and rustic doorway. When I proudly brought this home my father dubbed it ‘Saddam Hussein’s Mud Hut’ and it was quietly relegated from the Annex Bedroom mantelpiece to the electricity cupboard when I wasn’t looking. Every time I returned for the holidays I would find that another of my clay sculptures had been accidentally ‘destroyed’ by my parents. Some were dropped when mother was dusting, some disappeared without a trace during spring-cleaning; Saddam Hussein’s mud-hut finally met its maker when it was stepped on during a power cut.
As I was leaving the gallery with Katie I pointed to an electrical powerpoint on the wall and jokily asked “Is this an exhibit”. To my horror one of the exhibition staff thought I was being serious and interjected saying ‘No sir, I’m afraid that isn’t an exhibit, the installations are all clearly labelled’. I failed to take this in and stammered something as my face went an unhealthy shade of pink. Instead of cheerily informing her that I was joking I had succeeded in making myself look completely stupid. I had mocked modern art and modern art had wreaked a terrible vengeance.
May. 9th, 2006 @ 06:58 pm
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| » History and Condom machines |
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For centuries London has acted as the great corrupter. Agents of history, untainted by the risqué values of this great metropolis have arrived through its gates and left with a collection of moral vices and, no doubt, a corresponding quantity of venereal diseases. The young Benjamin Franklin left the shores of America in 1724 to buy a printing press in England; upon arriving in London he quickly realised that his backers had deserted him and that he would have to pay his own way. In his later biographies, Franklin wrote that he had indulged in many ‘foolish intrigues with low women’. By ‘low women’ he of course meant prostitutes, who were described by a contemporary chronicler as ‘lechery-layers of around a guinea purchase’. At the time prostitutes were to be mainly found sitting in hairdressers shops, which were ‘seldom to be found without a whore as a bookseller’s shop in St Paul’s churchyard without a parson’. Presumably the consumers of the time could get a ‘foolish intrigue’ thrown in with their short back and sides.
Upon taking his first job he became disgusted at the habits of his fellow workers who believed that hard work required strong beer. Workers of the time typically drank a pint of beer before breakfast, a pint with breakfast, a pint at midmorning, a pint with the midday meal, a pint in the afternoon and a pint at days end. When Franklin refused to contribute to the beer tab at his workplace he was ostracised by his colleagues who irritated him immensely by inserting errors into his work at every opportunity. When he confronted them about these activities they feigned innocence and claimed it was the fault of the company ghost.
As I write this, I recall a laughable debate about a year ago concerning the implementation of 24 hour licensing. This act by the government, hysterical authorities claimed, would bring about the fall of civilisation as we know it. Such assumptions fail to take account of the fact that throughout our glorious history some of our most important figures have been raging alcoholics. By way of illustration, Prime Minister William Pitt the younger was in the habit of drinking six bottles of port, two bottles of Madeira and a half bottle of claret everyday. He would often appear in the House of Commons drunk and would sometimes disappear behind the speakers chair in mid debate to throw up. Some attributed this to ‘nervousness’ but a quick analysis of his daily alcohol intake gives me cause for scepticism.
Those who moan about the worst excesses of bad taste television should take a look at what passed for entertainment back in the early eighteenth century. A handbill from the time which was displayed at Hockley in the Hole reads:
‘This is to give notice to all gentlemen, gamesters, and others, that on this present Monday is a match to be fought by two dogs, one from Newgate market, against one from Honylane market… Likewise a green bull to be baited which was never baited before; and a bull to be turned loose with fireworks all over him; also a mad ass to be baited, with a variety of bull baiting and bear baiting, and a dog to be drawn up with fireworks. Beginning exactly at three of the clock’
Venereal disease has been a problem throughout the centuries and casting my eye over the pages of the metro on my morning commute I discovered another historical gem. Correspondence released at the National Archives in Kew shows that "a good deal of trouble" was caused by the girls in the West End of London during the second world war. Officials wanted to bring the girls, aged 15 to 17 and from approved schools - a type of care home - under control. A total of 37 were arrested between May 1942 and April 1943 and a Home Office letter to police noted that many girls "frequented undesirable cafes” where they could strike up acquaintances with American soldiers who had plenty of money. These American soldiers passed the girls on to their friends and in a very short time, any one girl could be responsible for infecting a considerable number of people." The letters between the Ministry of Health, the Home Office, police and local authorities show there were 116 recorded cases of gonorrhoea and syphilis among the girls. It quickly became standard practice to check absconded girls for VD as soon as they arrived back at the care home.
Of course such matters remain a problem in this day and age and I can help but think that much of this is due to the impracticality of condom dispensing machines. These contraptions should, in a well-ordered universe, be designed to reflect the situation of purchase. I, as the consumer, merely wish to buy the confounded objects in as quickly and as secretive a manner as possible without incurring too much embarrassment. The other day I visited the pub with the sole intention of using one of these bloody things and was left staring at it for what seemed like an age because I found the instructions for use on the front of the machine to be utterly incomprehensible. The Byzantine set of directions stated that levers had to be pulled, coins inserted and buttons pushed in, all in the correct sequential order as if it were a nuclear detonation device. Having roughly worked out what I was supposed to do, I then reached into my pocket and discovered I did not have enough change to be able to make my purchase. I decided to get some change at the bar and ordered a half of Stowford Press, a most excellent cider. Since the cider was largely superfluous to the original purpose of my visit and I was anxious to get home, I downed the liquid and prepared to head back to the facilities. ‘You drank that quick’ said the barmaid with a air of reproach in her voice. She must now think I am some kind of alcoholic. ‘I’m in a hurry’ I said and left the room to revisit the machine. When I got there I realised with horror that the infernal contraption only took one pound coins and categorically refused to take any other form of remuneration. For a moment I toyed with the idea of asking the barmaid to exchange the two-pound coin she has given me for two one pound coins but eventually thought better of it. Like Alexander the Great, one must occasionally accept that destiny often stands in the way of personal ambition. To fight against it is foolish and one must accept the ruling of the fates.
Apr. 9th, 2006 @ 03:24 pm
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| » The Retreat from Moscow |
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About a fortnight ago I wandered into WH.Smiths in search of a suitable book to read on the tube. I headed straight for the history section and cast my eyes over the limited selection available. Two books grabbed my attention. The first was ‘1812, the story of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow’. The other was some tome about the First Crusade whose name for the moment escapes me. I weighed the two books in my head, trying to reach some conclusion as to which I should part with my hard earned cash for. In the end I decided on ‘1812, the story of Napoleons retreat from Moscow’ because, as I reflected, ‘more people get killed in this one’. I paused for a second. I had been confronted by one of those moments when a thought enters your head that are so morally reprehensible that it’s hard to understand where they have erupted from. It reminded me of that infamous occasion in 2003 when I completely lost my sense of empathy and supported the Iraq war because ‘there was nothing on T.V’.
I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as having a skewed system of ethics, and yet a cursory glance over my bookshelf would give you the impression I was some kind of a homicidal maniac. The books I own detail the deaths of millions of my fellow human beings; some froze to death in the icy wastes of Russia, some met a nasty end from the black death, others were sent off to war on the promise of glory and ended up decorating the barbed wire in front of the German trenches. These people weren’t the product of fiction, they lived real lives and died grisly deaths; and now the story of their untimely demise is my single source of entertainment during my commute to work. By chapter seven, Napoleon’s army had marched off into the Russian wilderness. Although winter had not yet begun its icy grip, the multinational army had already begun to drop like flies. In the present conflict our soldiers rightly complain when they have to pay for their own body amour. In Napoleon’s grand armee the soldiers were not issued enough rations to survive and the poor buggers in the cavalry had to routinely stick their hands inside their horse’s anal passage to remove blockages; in light of this, perhaps grappling with the photocopier isn’t so bad an occupation. By chapter ten, a few bloody battles had occurred and Napoleon had taken the questionable decision to sit tight in Moscow and dawdle while his army fell to pieces around him. The last third of the book was an almost pornographic orgy of death misery and violence as Napoleon marched his army through subzero temperatures back to Poland. Most of them had perished by the final chapters and, bravely, Napoleon buggers off back to Paris in a warm sled leaving the remnants of his depleted force to freeze to death.
It’s always comforting when a supposed military genius makes infantile errors of judgement such as this. Its also interesting that at the top of an organisation, one can make terrible mistakes that result in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people and yet be hailed as one of the greatest leaders of all time. Contrast this with being an admin assistant where you become labelled as an incompetent moron for the entire course of your employment if you so much as book a meeting room at the wrong time. At the other end of the scale, you can go drastically over budget, waste vast quantities of taxpayers money on an online database system that doesn’t work properly and expend resources recruiting ‘learning champions’ to promote the value of education in Nottingham’s poorest areas, only to find subsequently that most of them are in fact illiterate. This you can do with no threat of retribution whatsoever, whereas those at the bottom with little or no power must live on a knife-edge between public sector drudgery and redundancy. This raises an interesting question, why did those of the Grand Armee who had suffered such torment and hardship at Napoloeon’s account hold him in such high esteem. The answer lies in the memoirs of his soldiers that are littered with anecdotes about the great man. He visited their campfires, he rode up and down their battle-lines, he even kept a candle burning in his window every night to show his troops that he was up and working on their behalf into the dead of night. In return they loved him and died in his service. It’s a lesson that those in positions of power now would do well to heed. The style of leadership in vogue nowadays seem to involve sealing yourself off in an office, treating those under you with distain, keeping them at an aloof distance and writing them patronising emails telling them they need to be ‘more diverse’ and ‘goal focused’.
I completed ‘1812’ in record time and I have now started on the new biography of Stalin by Robert Service. The book is full of fantastic phrases such as ‘As a little boy, Stalin would play with his childhood friend Vassily. In an ironic twist, Vassily was later to be mown down by Stalin’s death squads during the purges of the nineteen thirties. I’m sure Vassily appreciated the irony.
One of the greatest aspects of my new job is the effect my re-branding has had on the way people interact with me. As an Admin Assistant, people in senior positions rarely bothered to learn my name. Instead they referred to me and fellow sufferers collectively as ‘the admin’ as if we both belonged to some servile tribe that had been enslaved to perform routine and monotonous tasks. Now I am a ‘Business Development Manager’ people ask me for my business card and go out of their way to speak to me. I am the same individual I was back in December, but as with everything in the workplace, the over inflated job title you give yourself is the single thing people take notice of. I have gone from the bottom of an organisation to the top of an organisation and now I get to see the cut-throat nature of business in its entirety. It’s a fascinating Machiavellian universe and I have picked up quite a few interesting terms. One of the best is ‘second mortgage fodder’. These are the poor blighters that will buy anything and everything, plunging themselves into vast amounts of debt and taking on financial commitments they cannot possibly fulfil. If someone takes out a second mortgage and fail to tick the right box their details are passed on to any number of sales and marketing organisations who plug as many products to them as possible. It is more than a little alarming to see that modern society is structured around driving people into as much debt as possible though credit cards, crippling interest rates and aggressive marketing. Still, that’s the system we all signed up for and we are just going to have to live with it.
The best thing I can say about East London is that last areas of it are scheduled for demolition. At then end of this month I shall be moving to a flat in Hendon amongst the quiet suburbs of north London. I shall miss the Indian chap in the local Costcutter with whom I have had a good rapport. I shall also miss the gangs of bored teenagers who stalk the streets outside the George V tube stop and with whom I am involved in a constant game of cat and mouse. According to the lady who owns the local chippy, they are partial to the odd ‘happy slap’ and like to prey on unsuspecting yuppies.
I shall also miss the tube now that I will be taking the bus instead. A lot of people unfairly stereotype London as an unfriendly city because they based their impression on their experience of our third world transport system. It’s a place that brings out the worst in humanity. Take thousands of highly stressed commuters, stick them in the kind of cramped conditions you would commonly associate with the black hole of Calcutta, hit them with a barrage of delays and patronising service announcements and watch as people’s moral fibre disintegrates under the pressure. I’ve seen yuppies in expensive suits shoulder barge old women out of the way in their efforts to make it up the escalator. I’ve seen small children pushed aside by rampant commuters as they struggle to make it into the office for nine o clock. As the doors of the northern line service open at Bank open the over-optimistic announcement comes over the tannoy system; “Thank you for standing aside and letting people off the train before you embark”. It’s a fantastically naïve statement, as if pre-empting peoples natural desire to act selfishly can somehow avert the impeding chaos. It soon becomes clear that the single-minded people on the platform have no such intention. Over the next few minutes a violent struggle erupts between the people on the train trying to get out and the people on the platform trying to get in before the doors close. The tannoy bursts into life again; “THANKYOU FOR STANDING ASIDE AND LETTING PEOPLE OUT OF THE TRAIN BEFORE YOU BOARD”. The voice has become imperative, the tone is that of a familiar annoyance. Clearly expecting people to stand aside on the tube is about as realistic as expecting the last remaining passengers on the Titanic to form an orderly queue for the lifeboats.
The struggle to get on the trains has been well documented. Another lesser known skirmish on the tube system is the battle to acquire decent reading material. When people reach their stop they usually leave their copy of the Metro by their seat. For someone like me who usually forgets to bring a book with them, these moments are gold-dust. I sit there studying the commuter like a hunter observing his prey. When he puts his metro down on the seat and gets up to leave my body is already coiled like a serpent, ready to grab the newspaper before anyone else can get their hands on it. Copys of the metro are the lesser prizes of the tube, on a good journey I aim to grab today’s issues of the Times or the Independent, though these are much harder to acquire. Many is the time that I have been thwarted by another commuter who has swooped at the last moment to grab the Evening Standard I observed when boarding the carriage. On these occasions I content myself with swearing at them beneath my breath. Such are the pleasures of the rat race.
Feb. 13th, 2006 @ 06:51 pm
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| » I should update this damn thing. |
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As readers of this journal of mine may or may not have realised, I have headed south to join the rat race in the big city. Previously my commute to work took about 10 minutes on a Nottingham City Transport bus. Having handed over my £1.20 to the driver I was usually faced with the traditionally dismal choice of seat partner. On one of my final excursions to the council buildings, I had the option to either share my seat with an intimidating young whippersnapper decked out in a puffer jacket and baseball cap, presumably on his way to be sentenced in the juvenile court, or alternatively, a decrepit looking chap with a bright red nose. I chose the latter option, and upon taking my seat was met by the unmistakable stench of urine. The bright red nose was obviously not due to the festiveness of the season and was more likely the result of chronic alcohol abuse. In my opinion such people should not be allowed on public transport. On another occasion some old woman spent the whole journey lecturing me for standing at the entrance to the bus. The aforementioned bus was tightly packed with bodies and there was no earthly chance of me being able to make my way further down the vehicle without causing someone an injury, but of course it’s tricky to explain these things to the older generation. ‘It used to be, in my day’ she said, recalling some imaginary golden age, ‘people would move down the other end of the bus so people could get off’. Having marked me out as a ‘wrong un’ she fixed me with a disapproving stare. It on occasions like this that you realise why god invented death.
Now my commute takes me along the Docklands light railway and the London tube and I’m treated to the entertaining spectacle of hyper stressed commuters struggling to get on overcrowded tube trains. Veins bulge on the heads of these suited zombies as they stare ahead of them with a look of blank depression; they look as if they are crying out for a terrorist attack to put them out of their misery. The rules of the tube are simple, stare ahead of you for the entire duration of the journey, avoiding eye contact and trying to look miserable and dejected, as if you were on the way to Stalg-Luft III rather than Kings Cross. Occasionally someone breaks the monotony by turning the volume on their I-pod up full blast and inflicting their appalling musical tastes on the rest of the carriage. I enjoy these moments because they demonstrate how human beings can work together despite having no ties of kin or community. Gradually the tidal wave of disapproval builds. People begin to find common cause in hating the scurrilous I-pod owner and finally appoint a representative to tell him to turn the damn thing down. Peace restored, the newly bonded occupants of the carriage turn back to staring at the adverts.
The part of the docklands my friend lives in is a curious place; a semi apocalyptic landscape in which decaying concrete tower blocks sit uneasily alongside sterile yuppie developments. The surrounding area is interspersed with areas of barren wasteland, once imposing areas of wharves and warehouses, now dismal pastures of earth and rubble waiting for the next batch of starter homes. The whole neighbourhood around the George V railway stop stinks like Satan’s cesspit and resembles a set from Blade Runner with its dilapidated high-rise buildings, graffiti and boarded up buildings. The young professionals from the surrounding developments speed-walk uncomfortably through this area in the early hours of the morning, no doubt expecting to be on the receiving end of a vicious multi-ethnic mugging should they linger too long. This is the edge of the ‘regeneration’ zone, and by the looks of it, the wreaking ball can’t come soon enough.
The job itself is even better than I thought it was going to be. It’s hard not to get caught up in the energetic and frantic atmosphere of a dot-com that is finally beginning to close important deals and go places. From now on in I’ll be attending important meetings with potential clients, working directly with the CEOs and doing a diverse range of work within the organisation. The company operates a flat management structure and I’m encouraged to be outspoken when I think one of my bosses has come up with a shit idea. This could be problematic. I’m also treated with vastly more respect than I deserve. I half expect someone to come up to me any minute with a load of pointless photocopying to do, or for some unpleasant specimen of Nottingham’s inner city to ring my phone to ask what freebies they get for attending our pre-employment training courses. Being a public servant isn’t very fulfilling when you hate the public.
Jan. 9th, 2006 @ 05:35 pm
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| » Performance Development Review |
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Today I received the following communication from someone in the organisation with the rather grand title of ‘Deputy Chief Executive’.
‘I would like to remind all staff that their six-monthly PDR review is now
due. Some of you will already have appointments with your manager to
discuss this; if not, you should be hearing from them soon. If you do not
receive any communication from your manager in the next few days then
please remind them. It is in your interests to understand your level of
performance and to know that the objectives you have agreed are helping the
Council to achieve its aims and vision.
P.D.R (Performance Development Review), for those of you who are not familiar with ‘bullshit speak’, is the process whereby members of staff are interviewed individually by their line manager. Having answered a series of questions, the manager will produce a patronising two-page document telling them what areas they can improve on. Usually this consists of fatuous comments such as ‘Antony needs to be better organised in preparing his workload’. It never ceases to amaze me how the powers that be insist on treating fully grown adults like children at every opportunity. Since this is my last week at Nottingham City Council, I have produced my own Performance Review and saved it in the relevant folder, thus saving my manager the trouble of producing one.
Name: Humphrey Clarke Position: Badly Paid Temp
1) How well did you meet your individual and team objectives? (Refer back to the original Objectives Setting sheet). Give examples of particular successes.
This is the first (and hopefully the last) PDR for Humphrey
Humphrey started working at the city council in July and has grown progressively more lazy and cynical as his employment has gone on.
His single success at Nottingham Works has been to create an unnecessarily large and picture heavy B.M.E guide, which crashes Word every time it is loaded. Since then he has mostly sat around looking at the BBC News website, delivering sarcastic comments and printing out pictures of Lord Kitchener to hang above his desk. It is questionable whether this activity is compatible with the aims of this organisation.
2) Which aspects of past performance were less successful than expected? Why?
Humphrey is both the most highly qualified, and the worst Admin Assistant in the organisation. He suffers from a crippling lack of motivation because a third of his wages are stolen each week by the evil -and improbably happy- temping agency he works for. When asked to do work for members of staff he commonly responds with an existentialist comment such as ‘what does it matter anyway’ or ‘its all futile’. Furthermore, as an over-privileged aristocratic bastard who hates the lower classes, his suitability for administering pre-employment training courses has to be strongly questioned.
3) Which parts of your work have given you the most satisfaction/enjoyment? Why? What are you most skilled at?
Humphrey’s only skill is the ability to turn up to work when he has a full-blown hangover. He is largely useless when he finally gets there, so this really isn’t much of a boast. Since his job mainly consists of tiresome mail merges and dealing with Neanderthal morons on the telephone his job satisfaction could be said to be terminal. The only other ability he possesses is to ‘tell it like it is’, but this could be alternately interpreted as rudeness.
What have you enjoyed the least? What aspects do you feel least skilled in?
In his own words, Humphrey feels that ‘his soul has died’ over the course of his employment. The prospect of another battle with the photocopier compels him to obtain a shotgun, blast the errant machine with both barrels and then turn the weapon on himself. This is troubling because, although the member of staff is expendable, such an action would breach health and safety regulations.
Manager’s comments on performance (team and individual)
Sack immediately and refer to mental health clinic.
Dec. 13th, 2005 @ 12:29 pm
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| » Priapus |
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Over the past six months I have come to the conclusion that there are certain things a man needs if he is to achieve a modicum of contentedness. These are, in no particular order, a good woman, a well-stocked liquor cabinet and a job title that makes it sounds as if he has enormous genitalia. From January my official job title will be ‘Business Development and Sales Officer’ a label that makes it sound like I have the kind of reproductive organs which the Roman god Priapus once used to scare small children in orchards.
Things at the council have gone from bad to downright lame. Currently my office is suffering from an infestation of fruit flies, this serves only to add to the atmosphere of misery and decay. Right now, the working day consists of a battle of wits between me and the net nanny as I desperately seek to access sites it –rather arbitrarily- brands as ‘tasteless’ and ‘pornographic’. And yet, I can sit at my desk with a degree of smugness because my future is looking a great deal rosier than it was a month ago.
I don’t know how people managed to afford a cocaine habit; right now I can barely afford a tic-tac habit. The measly wages the council pays me are further degraded by the greedy –and improbably cheerful- recruitment agency that employs me. Not content with subjecting me to patronising rules and regulations, the recruitment consultants at Kelly Services siphon off the pitiful sums I accrue at the end of the working week, presumably to fund their crack addictions. Sadly my attempts at job hunting proved strategically flawed. As Katie pointed out, I need to actually follow up newspaper ads rather than simply circling them in biro. About two months ago, a glorious piece of good fortune came my way, a friend of the family steered me towards a company in North London who were looking for a young graduate. I was slightly put off because the advertisement stressed a ‘need for excellence’. ‘Excellence’, as my father will be quick to point out, is not a word normally associated with me. My single role in the Clarke household to date was when my dad appointed me ‘Toilet roll monitor’, not so much because I had shown any sort of merit in that direction, but more because he needed someone to shout at when we ran out of bog-roll. Needless to say, I was utterly hopeless.
In the past year or so, all my adolescent misconceptions have suddenly evaporated. The ‘world of work’, which I used to view with a mixture of dread and awe, I now find to consist of varying degrees of bullshit, stupidity, meaningless jargon and clock watching. The trick seems to be to learn some meaningless piece of management jargon such as ‘strategic task initiative’ and then to drop it into every conversation in order to seem as if you know what you are talking about. Another council scam is to constantly go on ‘personal development’ courses. No only does this cut out a large chunk of the working day but it also allows you to put large numbers of letters after your name. Some of these courses are outright useless. Many a council employee has done a course in using Microsoft Project, only to realise subsequently that it would cost something in the region of £200 to obtain the licence to actually use it.
The New Year will see me starting at Epoq Group in Edgware and saying goodbye to the unwashed hordes of Rottingham-on-Trent. My unsuccessful flirtation with socialism is at an end and I’m now ready to get stuck in to cold-blooded capitalism. I’m now on a pretty hefty salary and the prospect of working hard and actually having something to show for it is an enticing one. Having accidentally left the oven on for twenty-four hours on two occasions this month, it’s going to take a graduate salary just to pay the gas bill.
In the meantime I’m still enjoying my current stint in the dilapidated offices of local government. The latest bit of waste I’ve heard about is that one of our illustrious senior managers went on a trip to Las Vegas at the taxpayer’s expense. No doubt there was a perfectly good reason for this and my cynicism is completely unjustified. Back in the Sixties, councillors went on trips like this the whole time as part of the infamous ‘twinning’ initiatives. For those of you who are not familiar with this particular scam, twinning was the policy whereby the local government of various towns and cities would ‘twin’ themselves with a foreign municipality and then go on numerous expensive ‘goodwill trips’. In the most infamous of these, a councillor of some small English town visited its ‘twin’ in France and, having mixed up his verbs, told the inhabitants in his opening speech that he was intent on having sex with all their women. To me twinning doesn’t seem a wholly pointless initiative. In my opinion Nottingham should twin with Baghdad, a city with which we share many characteristics such as chronic unemployment, endemic corruption and gun crime. The fledgling government of Baghdad has a lot to learn from us. For instance if they followed our current traffic policy - the now infamous ‘turning point scheme’- suicide bombers would not longer be able to drive their vehicles into crowded areas and would simply be diverted into catastrophic traffic jams on the ring road. Baghdad could also take a similar approach to city regeneration to that adopted in Britain. Simply build an expensive new shopping centre, put in an overly trendy and unnecessary ‘waterfront’ development and move in the yuppies. Having priced the proletariat out of the housing market and moved them to run down estates on the city periphery the process is complete. All that’s left is to name the conurbation, ‘European City of Culture’ or some other meaningless phrase.
The only other item on the agenda is that I am ill at the moment. Last night started with me cooking a couple of salmon fillets and ended like a scene from the Exorcist. Despite the feelings of nausia and downright discomfort, this has provided an ideal opportunity to catch up on some property porn and bargain hunting shows. Ah ‘Homes under the hammer’, how I have missed thee.
Dec. 7th, 2005 @ 12:03 pm
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| » Diverse Dealings |
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This week I’ve been frantically trying to fix the multitude of errors in our online database. We operate an ‘issue tracking’ system whereby I can communicate with the creators of the system and inform them of what exactly the problems are with the interface. The people behind Angry Fish offer further proof –if proof were needed- that one must be wary of the I.T-geek crowd. They may look harmless and unassuming but in reality they are like the Borg, cold calculating and utterly ruthless. They possess the ability to blind you with technical terms and bore you to tears with long-winded jargon; this provides the smoke screen they need to sucker you in to an uneven business deal. Even if our I.T phobic staff actually used the system, it probably wouldn’t work. Right now, for instance, the database reporting system is saying that all the unemployed people we got into work in the first quarter of 2005 were all disabled and from ethnic minorities. If this state of affairs were actually the case, it would be the equality and diversity department’s wet dream. However, I feel I’m justified in viewing these statistics with a hefty degree of scepticism.
I decided to get my haircut a couple of days ago. I say ‘I decided’, in fact these decisions are made for me by ‘she who must be obeyed’. When my hair gets to a certain length she begins a carefully planned programme of ridicule, humiliation and rebuke, until finally I overcome my traditional fear of hairdresser and head down to the cheapest barbers. Funnily enough, the cheapest barbers is just round the corner from me, a rather run down looking establishment known as ‘Khizar’s Cuts’. As I walked in the customers looked slightly startled. I was a little taken aback by this reaction, but sauntered over to the nearest chair and buried my head in a morbidly unexciting issue of ‘Autotrader’. Eventually it was my turn for a trim and I walked over and sat down in the chair. The barber grinned welcomingly at me, his English wasn’t too good and it took some considerable discourse before he understood that I wanted a short back and sides.
‘You first guy….look like you come in shop’ he eventually said, after what had been a slightly uncomfortable silence. ‘really’, I replied, not quite understanding what he meant. ‘yes…..only brothers in here’ he added. Having paid him and exchanged pleasantries I left the shop and walked back to my humble abode. It was then that I realised that he had been trying to tell me that I was the first white guy who had ever been in his shop. I had gone for a haircut and accidentally become an unwitting cultural ambassador. From now on, I’ll always be getting my hair cut there, not because I am interested in building cross-community links, but because he does a damn good haircut at a reasonable price.
There comes a point in a man’s life when he must abandon his socialist principles and stick his greedy snout into the trough of capitalism. With that in mind, I have been applying to various companies in a bid to get on the first rung of the corporate ladder. One rule I have learnt over the years is that when attending a job interview, you must aim to get there around two hours in advance; this is because things inevitably go wrong. A few days ago, I stepped out of the Edgware road tube station and discovered that the map I had earlier printed out from the Internet bore absolutely no relation to my immediate surroundings. Feeling a little confused, I decided to seek some assistance from the locals.
I soon discovered that asking for directions in London is very much like trying to fund-raise for Al-Quaeda on the streets of Manhattan. When you greet the average passer by with a cheery ‘excuse me’ they state back with a look of contempt and quicken their pace as if you are suffering from leprosy. Eventually one good Samaritan responded to me and informed me in no uncertain terms that I was at the wrong Edgware and that the place I wanted was on completely the opposite side of the city. Luckily I had sufficient time to hightail it to North London via the morbidly incompetent Northern Line. I had heard bad things about this service, and these were confirmed when our train reached Golders Green and the driver informed us that we all had to get out because the train was ‘terminating here’. After an interval of about half an hour, I and the rest of the hyper-stressed passengers were told that there had been a mistake and the service wasn’t ‘terminating’ at all. As we shuffled angrily back onto the train I began to understand the pain of the average London commuter.
At the end of the eventual interview I was told that I had ‘ticked a lot of boxes’. If these boxes are labelled ‘team-player’, ‘well spoken’ and ‘self starter’, then I’m in with a shout. If the boxes read, ‘sub-human’,‘sweats profusely when answering questions’, and ‘comprehensively obnoxious’, then I’m going to be checking brio invoices for a good while longer.
Nov. 9th, 2005 @ 10:41 pm
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| » Blame and Fame |
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I think it was Issac Asamov that claimed ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent’. If he had bothered to develop this thesis further, he would have discovered that the first refuge is Rottingham City Council. It’s a culture that not only encourages incompetence, but also rewards it. For example, there’s a chap in the next door office who has been working for the council for most of his adult life, eventually reaching the higher echelons of service manager. He was made redundant in a previous ‘reorganisation’ and was placed on the Council redeployment register. This is a wonderful device whereby an employee who is axed is placed in a different role when it becomes available. The great thing is, this drop in status isn’t accompanied by any drop in wages. Hence this guy is now getting paid £40,000 a year for a job that should technically pay around £20,000. Whenever I walk in he is sitting contentedly at his computer playing hearts. It’s a pleasing sight that leaves me with the hope that there is a gravy train at the end of it all.
Sitting at my desk in this poorly ventilated building, I cast my eyes fervently around searching for sources of blame. Should we accuse our impotent senior manager, who sits at his desk fiddling with himself while Rome burns around him?. Sun-Tzu, writing in 500 B.C said that the principle elements of leadership were intelligence, humanity, courage, credibility and discipline. Now leadership seems to be based on shifting blame, passing your work off onto other people and writing dull memos to your colleagues as a means of camouflaging your inactivity.
Should we blame the staff of our regional partners, a group of people whose collective I.T literacy is roughly equivalent to that of a pack of mentally retarded Neanderthals?. No doubt the cold, hard eye of the external audit will discover the real perpetrators, but by then they will probably have jumped ship into different jobs.
Rottingham suffers from the same problems as any large post-industrial city, a vast pool of unskilled labour with few qualifications, completely unsuited to fill the jobs that are on offer. The purpose of this project was to approach companies, discover what skills they required in their applicants, and to train our clients to this standard so they could reach employment. My office acts as a central hub for the organisation. We send out information about our courses, the clients read this material and go into the regional offices, the regional offices then send us the application forms and we then enter the clients on the courses. The trouble is, since this is a trial project, and this is public money we are dealing with, every action needs to be recorded accurately in a | |
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