Fixtures Day! And a visit from Mick Channon's old crew to kick the whole thing off. As it happens, I picked up a 1982 Shoot annual from the North London Hospice charity shop (75p!) over the weekend. I flicked through the entire thing before finally lighting on a picture of a City player - on the inside back cover.His name was Dave Bennett, holding off Martin Buchan, with neither player sporting a logo on their shirts.
In any case, other than who City will be playing when, who knows what the coming season will bring? Will the Abu Dhabi billions be sufficient insulation against Mervyn King's 'storms', and will King ever use a metaphor which isn't maritime related? How many more clubs - like Southampton's Solent neighbours - will go bankrupt this season? And while we're on the subject, how does it make any sense that Real Madrid and Barcelona (for example) can continue splurging millions and millions of Euros in transfer fees and wages while the mighty nation of Spain continues to circle slowly around the toilet bowl?
Though the passion for football doesn't surprise me, the ability of people to continue coughing up the season ticket dosh is a constant source of amazement.
Germany versus Greece becomes a more resonant fixture by the day.
A debate on 5 Live the other day focused on the lack of interest in England's tilt at the European Championships in Poland and the Ukraine this time around. As ever, all thoughtful comment was edited out, only to be replaced with the dimwitted foghorning of some idiot who was 100% sure that there was 'plenty of money about' and that the poor showing was all down to the incompetence of the FA. I'm no fan of the gentlemen from Lancaster Gate, don't get me wrong, and there are many things relating to the decline in the game in this country which I would squarely lay at their door. However, the fact that your average (insane, surely? I mean, where do they get their money from?) travelling England supporter is less likely to fork out thousands of pounds for a ticket to the latest circus is not one of them. More importantly, will there even be any sort of infrastructure left in Europe by the time the damn tournament comes round anyway?
That said, what are my thoughts on Roy's team selection? Ferdinand is no surprise - perhaps a mixture of pusillanimity over the racism issue (a disgrace) and pragmatism due to the fact that he's well and truly past it. Terry is also past it, and is - at the very least - a thug, so I find it hard to condone his inclusion in the squad. Richards' exclusion is difficult to fathom perhaps. Although he has been something of a second choice at City in the latter part of the season, he is still among the quickest and most powerful defenders in an admittedly strong field of defenders.
It's up front where I think we will struggle. Carroll. Defoe. Welbeck. Pube Head. Nuff said.
Ah well. This blog reaches its 5th birthday towards the end of June, and my avowed intent is still to reach 500 posts by then. I will need some help to do that, and am hopeful that there will be some guest bloggers on here in the coming days to help me out.
Surprising thrashing of Wolves in the week, with the fixture (kind of) reversed for Saturday, and a harder fought battle. Tevez fully supported by his union (didn't Gordon Taylor sound like a geek on the radio the other day?) with his punishment reduced by their sterling efforts on his behalf. I'm all for unions (as I may have said before) but the modern footballer - certainly in the higher echelons - is surely one of the least deserving of all workers for union support? Maybe I'm wrong, and we would, by removing the protection from Carlos (why can't he just say sorry?) et al, be opening a can of worms which would spew their noxious guts all over the poor bastards who turn up for Wrexham week in week out? Who knows? Anyway, the sheikh has agreed to pay Mancini's legal bills out of his own pocket, and Bobby himself I believe has signed, or is about to sign, a new four year, £22million contract. Good for him, I suppose.
In the real world, the economy is worse than that bus at the end of The Italian Job, teetering over a precipitous drop while Merkel and Sarkozy do their Michael Caine impressions and tell Lord Snooty to shut up, piss off, die horribly, etc. As we watch the bullion swinging back and forth over the cliff, the pay of FTSE executives has increased by 49 fucking %!
And there really is surprise over the fact that people are putting up tents all over the place? For fuck's sake! There is no sanity. Linked to this crazy bullshit, almost the entire hierarchy of the Church of England has resigned over the tents outside St. Paul's cathedral. Looking towards the Archbishop of Canterbury for leadership has been - unsurprisingly - rather a waste of time, but this whole episode has started what could be an extremely interesting dialectic about the role of the church in political life, and could even forge a strange new alliance between the anarchists and the men of god. Let's see.
Anyway, it seems there's enough dosh in the Abu Dhabi kitty to finance a flight to Spain for the boys, and let's hope we can do something to stay in touch in Europe.
I think it will be a tough call, and fear a draw at best. At least it's on ITV1.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons - uploaded (as far as I can tell) by someone called Patrick Gijsbers in 2007
It's all falling apart, isn't it?
Just finished William Leith's book of a similar name, and he really says it all, writing as he was from the viewpoint of a man only a year older than I am. Ironically, given that its theme is (partly at least) decrepitude, I took the book to the park with the kids at the weekend (intending to read it a little later on the bus, just in case you might think I would read in the park with the kids. Perish the thought! I actually played cricket with them. And won, as it happens) and ended up leaving it on a bench there, not realising until we had walked the 15 minutes or so up to the high road. If it hadn't have been a library book, I might well have left it lying where it was, but I didn't want the hassle or expense of buying a new one.
So I deposited the kids in McDonald's with milkshakes and started to lope/jog back down to the park, feeling fairly confident that the book would not have been half-inched in the meantime - due mostly to the inclement weather. William Leith says he could probably run half a mile if pushed, and I guess that the 15 minute walk (I feel I must debunk the old chestnut of walking speed being 4mph, especially when there are two kids walking with you) would be equal to about that. Let's just say that, though I wasn't suitably dressed for running, I didn't actually manage to make it all the way to the park before running out of puff. Since then, I have been feeling rather old, what with the lump on my foot and a pain in the kidneys; perennially blocked sinuses; occasional toilet problems, etc...
Though rather frightening, and sadly looking to be always topical, the other theme of interest in the book is the state of the global economy. Leith uses the cod as an analogy of the way in which our system is doomed to certain failure. Cod - he says - have a survival strategy of, well, just getting really big. This works pretty well in the prime of their lives as their sheer magnitude protects them from most predators (humans - as always - excepted) and they grow quickly to become fierce hunters of the sea. In the end, though, their size works against them, causing them to become unable to survive. Or something. This mirrors the edifice of global capitalism, which continues to rush into its own destruction in pell-mell fashion. Style of thing. In any case, I was seduced by the argument, like Winston Smith I suppose, enjoying most the books which tell me what I already know. It is self-evident - despite the profit announced by Apple - that year-on-year growth is simply not achievable, and the flimsy facade of promises looks perilously close to crashing down on all our heads. This argument is given added resonance of course because of the decimation of cod stocks across the world.
With the United States on the brink of being unable to pay its soldiers, with countries like Italy and Spain all but financially collapsed, with the UK establishment daily being further exposed as a stinking cess-pit of corruption and cronyism, it will be a wonder if we make it through to August 7th and the Community Shield, where Agűero will probably line up alongside Tevez and JÔ's name will not be on the team sheet.
I mentioned Greece in a previous post, and now the economic crisis there seems to be reaching some sort of denouement (though what this actually means seems to be anyone's guess. As far as I can make out, the French banks are going to make the sovereign debt disappear for 30 years - provided Greece shuts its mouth and takes its medicine). I'm mightily sick, by the way, of the forced references to Greek drama being employed everywhere. Last night really took the souvlaki though, when Jeremy Paxman sat there toing and froing with some twat in Athens and used the word 'catharsis' with a smirk on his smug face. Prior to this, I could scarcely believe my ears when he introduced the piece along the lines of: '... the Greek people are sitting in a rancid swamp of their own making, a result of their fecklessness and irresponsibility...'
I paraphrase, and can't honestly be sure, attending with half an ear as I was, whether he was a) quoting, or b) employing irony, rather than expressing his opinion in a surprisingly un-BBC sort of way, but the rest of the piece was revolting in its kow-towing to the ludicrous party line. The line that the 'austerity measures' are somehow going to fix the ills of the world economy. As if, by forcing people out of work and cutting all benefits, removing any vestiges of a welfare state by slashing spending on education and health, AND forcing those in work to accept less pay for more hours, while working longer into life. Somehow or other, this will turn Greece into a net exporter of goods and get it on its feet again. Clearly, the private sector which will emerge as a result of the dismantling of every single public service will gorge itself on this detritus, becoming bloated like a huge maggot, pumping its ichor into the country's GDP. Or something. In any case, this is such a good plan that every country in Europe is going to follow suit.
Some woman who has been brought in from the World Bank to sell the IMF's torture plan to the Greek people was saying that those opposed to the measures were simply angry (she may even have used the word 'annoyed', which does seem a trifle mild for a description of rampaging anarchists hurling petrol bombs, but there you go) and did not have any alternatives to offer.
In which, I think she may be wrong. It could be that those opposed to the cuts would wish to see a little less of the conspicuous, growing and shameful gulf between rich and poor. They might be keen on having somewhere to live, or a job, or somewhere to send their kids to school or their sick relative for care when taken ill. They could propose doing this by sharing some of the wealth clustered at the top of the tree a little more fairly. Type of thing. But this - needless to say - was hardly touched on by the 'economics journalist' who was reporting (quite light-heartedly, I thought) on the situation in Athens, and interviewing this tough cookie of a Greek politician with exaggerated deference.
I have always thought Paxo more a style man than a substance one (compare and contrast with the excellent Jon Snow, if you would) but I understand that telly people need some sort of gimmick, and actually didn't mind him terribly on University Challenge, but what I saw last night pissed me off I have to say. Not just him, but the crooked knee of the media establishment to the whole terrible lie of current economic models, and the fantasy that it's actually going to make any difference.
AV = yes (though I must re-iterate my total lack of faith in organised politics of any kind. I don't assume that having AV will suddenly make things all better, but there are two compelling reasons I've heard today: 1. Thatcher would never have made it to power if AV was in place in 79 [thanks Michael] and 2. Anything which causes those in power to get so worked up must be worth doing [thanks qwghlm]. This does not mean I will be casting a vote)
OBL = stinks to high heaven. The groans of the Bullingdon Club boys in the Commons the other day when challenged about flouting the supposedly sacrosanct Rule of Law say it all for me. You can't just go around shooting people in the face - I mean head - just because you say they are murderous scum. There aren't many apologists for Bin Laden, yet what do we actually know about him? What do we actually know about anything, really? Only what we're told, and we can see from the way this whole Geronimo thing is developing that that ain't much more than a sack of shit. Xeni Jardin has been tweeting about Guatemala, and the tendency of the government there to dump bodies in the ocean when faced with the inconvenience of requests for basic human rights, and I for one find it all very chilling. Is Barack still guided by the shining hand of God? Is he still striving for an America that is all it can be?
Eurozone bailouts = holy shit! Looking at Greece and Portugal, how can Gideon continue to pursue the austerity plan he is so set on? The swingeing cuts (at least for the Greeks) have done nothing to reduce the deficit, and - duh! - the squeeze is actually making things worse by rendering the economy so uncompetitive that it may never have a chance to pay back the money borrowed. Yet here we are relentlessly pushing forward, laying off coppers and then asking them back as unpaid Specials, slashing nurses and teachers and flying priceless hardware over Libyan air space. What can we do but despair?
On top of that, an easy bye for the Rags against the pliant Schalke 04s, but a glimmer of hope that they will be utterly destroyed at Wembley. Fergie at his usual 'best' yesterday when talking about the tribalism of the Premier League. He mentioned 'Yorkshire teams' (such as? Leeds? Bradford? Barnsley? Rotherham? York? Get to fuck, Sir Alex) and London teams and Liverpool teams and of course studiously avoided mentioning the only true Manchester team. I myself was challenged the other day:
"Who do you support, then?"
"Man City."
"Oh right... Are you a Mancunian?"
"No."
Maybe, in days gone by, or if there hadn't been quite so loud a Bob Dylan duo playing, I would have gone on and blathered about Oswestry and TNS and Shrewsbury and Wrexham... But I didn't.
I was surprised to hear from Gideon on the radio this morning that we (the UK, that is) export more to Ireland than we do to Brazil, Greenland, Burkina Faso and New Caledonia (or something like that) put together. I still find it difficult to understand why nobody can foresee these crises until it’s too late. We’re clever people, with very fast computers, and yet we seem to fall prey to one financial disaster after another, stumbling forward like Stone Age men into a bog. Looks like it will be a fine festive season in the Emerald Isle this year. The Celtic Tiger will be chopped up and – somewhat fittingly in the land of poets – its rather mangy flesh and brittle bones will be used in place of peat to fuel the meagre cottage fires of the peasants.
What this all means for the rest of us is really anyone’s guess, isn’t it? Across the sea, one of the old havens of emigrating Paddies is lurching from one cash injection to the next, while its counterpart down under is slowly but surely catching up with the rest of the world and realising that the boom won’t last forever. The Eurozone is staggering under the virtual weight of yet another sovereign debt crisis, fearful of the ‘contagion’ which is our modern day leprosy – a disease which disfigures those who catch it – marking them out as unclean, or downgraded several notches by Standard & Poor’s.
In the Far East, while the two Koreas begin to slug it out again, Japan somehow keeps going, perhaps saved by its proximity to the mighty Chinese kraken, stirring from its rice paddy (maybe China could be another emigration option?) slumber to emerge blinging into the car-owning light. Having just somehow squirmed my way into my first ‘permanent’ role in over 3 years, I can see it all crashing spectacularly down, if not before Christmas, then certainly in the 3 months after it. Here, with the correct number of letters (full version) is the 4Chan summary of the situation:
Well, what can you say about this fucking shower? "We're in shit street," says Lord Snooty, "So you tell us which particular part of this 'society' you would like us to decimate."
It's politics and economics a la Simon shitbag Cowell, and I really don't know how I'm supposed to respond to it. Another Simon (Jenkins as it goes,who, I have to say, can sometimes write up a storm, whatever I - or anyone else - may think of him) advocates cutting the entire defence budget at a stroke, and it would be hard to argue with that if it didn't involve removing the ONLY jobs in most parts of this godforsaken shithole (I do love it so. Don't get me wrong) of a country. Not that I am in any way advocating war, I just think that the economic reality of removing those helicopter parts for Indonesia or Saudi Arabia will directly and adversely affect a large number of people in cul-de-sacs across the UK. Believe me, I have ridden the roller-coaster of the M57 and I know.
But digression, on this the eve of the World Cup, is hardly the thing, so I will press on with my thesis.
Are we supposed to decide which particular public service we like (or dislike) the most? Will there be heart-rending back stories of amputated Paras, cancer-ridden grannies, impoverished teachers providing their own chalk, or (a long shot this one, I know) displaced refugee children about to board a plane back to their homeland of murder and torture? Or perhaps a phone vote (premium rate, naturally) and a panel of irritating fuckwits to decide the outcome? I can just see Amanda Holden shedding tears all over her dress as she takes in the pleas of a fisherman from Grimsby (I'm struggling here...) while Simon smirks knowingly at her right shoulder...
We are in the middle of the bursting of the Southsea bubble. Sorry...
After what can only be described as a routine victory over the Trotters, what more is there to say about the state of the game? On a day when Portsmouth were thrown a temporary lifeline before what appears to be certain doom, I remember a commentator saying at the Pompey game recently that City could be described as perhaps the only club in the Premier League who are not facing financial crisis. One could have reasonably riposted the 'prudent' Arsenal, I suppose, but with mine own eyes I have seen the pitiful state of affairs at Stadium Developments. I will say no more.
Poor Chester City, as we have heard, are on their last legs, having been docked 25 points for going into administration, sitting rank bottom of the Blue Square, and now suffering their players refusing to get on the team coach for an away game because they haven't been paid for months. Casting aside the fact that they might possibly fare better without their players, it's sobering to think that things have come to this pass. Having been out of work myself for a while now, I can only begin to imagine how the lads at such an outfit could possibly survive for any period of time. Neither are they (Chester City, I mean) alone. Cardiff and Southend have both been up before the money beak, and both granted a short-term stay of execution. We are all painfully aware of the situation at Liverpool, and even the mighty Rags - with all their successes (and this is surely what all the money is about?) of recent years - are but a hop and a skip away from melt-down. City are cocooned for the nonce of course, shielded by the money of the only solvent sovereign state (China has a good credit rating, which is not quite the same thing) in the world, but - for how long?
On the pitch, there's not a huge amount to cheer about - Adam Johnson excepted - and a team less toothless than Bolton (say, Hull City, for example) would certainly have turned us over. His goal aside, Adebayor looked fairly ordinary. No touch, little understanding of space around him, and far too easily dispossessed. Toure is a liability, far too slow and poor distribution. Zabaleta looked OK (for once) and De Jong was as determined as ever. Tevez continues to win my respect, but got just a touch lucky with the penalty. Bridge - very poor; Kompany - solid but lumpen; Barry - disappointing (as always - solid enough, but woefully lacking in imagination); SWP - kicked off the park; Given (unusually) - shaky; Vieira - poor (as expected) and inexplicable as to why he has been signed. Sylvinho didn't get enough of the game to be able to judge (especially from my vantage point of Iraq Goals, which kept freezing every 10 minutes - most notably, just before Tevez took the penalty and about 5 minutes before the final whistle, from where I couldn't be arsed trying to restart the stream) and the overall performance was something of a disappointment. But, a win's a win for all that, and it looks as if we should just about avoid relegation.
So, as they say up at the Deva, could be worse, eh?
St. Andrew (BTW, some of the ads in that link are pretty egregious. Two paragraphs of text and then it's straight into the 'St. Andrew charms and bracelets for sale' schtick. Jeez Louise!) lived in Jesus Land.
The shape of the famous Scottish saltire is said to be derived from the fact that Andrew elected to be crucified on a cross designed in the shape of an 'X' as opposed to the traditional Jesus hook. This was done because - it is said - Andrew did not feel worthy to die on the same type cross as the saviour. Which is of course very admirable, and no doubt illustrates clearly his character as a highly principled and devoted follower of the Lord. That the jockos should have chosen him as their patron saint is I suppose slightly ironic - and I'm being no more racist than Frankie Boyle when I say that, thank you very much.
Thanks to my Jocko friend - Toppski - for the image!
Well, by the time this post goes live, we will be in the white heat of the Christmas cauldron. What could be termed the climax of the day, with the Queen's Speech and all that jazz. It hasn't been a bad one so far for me, with one bottle of port sunk already and another warming up. Only two mince pies have been consumed (up to now) and one cracker has been pulled. I will have my mother for additional company, and that should be good, and will be scratching my head trying to work out how to set up the new XBox.
I actually prefer the period between Christmas and New Year, because the footy is on (and we have a prettycrazyfixture calendarthis year, thank fuck) and there's a feeling of the country waking up from some torpor, shaking itself a bit and getting back to business again. How much business, in these times of financial crisis, remains to be seen. But we must always be optimistic, for life goes on, and those of with children have an innate duty to say that the future's bright, the future's not shite. So on with the show.
Preaching as far afield as Ethiopia, or so it is said, the Apostle Matthew (Christians insist that the Gospel writer and the companion of Jesus are the same person, although some dispute this, based on the likelihood of languages a typical tax collector might have been familiar with,and the language in which the Gospel was written. Whatever) has been adopted as the patron saint of the money men.
I thought it appropriate then to base this post on him, what with the continuing brouhaha around the economy, and especially in light of the alarming news about Greece and Ireland. As far as the green republic, everyone seems aghast that the once mighty Celtic Tiger economy has fallen so far so fast, but an interesting point was made on the Today Programme this morning, to the effect that things weren't exactly a bed of roses for the Irish poor during the great boom time of Dublin stag parties, luxury golf courses, and whatever the hell else fed the beast. Something along the lines of double the amount of people losing their homes and double the number falling below the poverty line. Jaysus himself knows what kind of unholy mess the place is in now. Those who work the hardest, and deliver the most value, are of course the ones most at threat, facing further job cuts and reductions in salary, while the Taoiseach and his cronies (I think we all know that Irish politics has long led the way in delivering graft to the people) continue to have the craic with abandon.
And the first republic (I do like those 'how much can I borrow?' ads embedded in the Grauniad stories - they display real sensitivity, don't you think?) as I guess it could be called, they say is suffering as a result of EU membership, forcing harsh decisions on the ministers as they skulk around Athens in their Mercedes, dodging the barricades and braziers. The dire warnings are of course that the suffering endured and about to be endured in these two places (not to mention Iceland and Dubai) will soon be heading our way. Dire days indeed.
Watching Joan Ruddock on the telly the other morning made me realise how far things have come, and how far they have yet to go. Smack bang in the middle of Corrie is an ad featuring (I think) Nigel from Eastenders about the crimes of carbon production. "Does it have a happy ending?" the nauseatingly cute girl asks Nige. Well I doubt it my dear, but let's wait and see. I have dutifully searched online for Act On CO2 and have become enormously embiggened by the whole cromulent process.
Joan is of course relatively close to my heart, along with Ed, and the other cronies who have made such sterling efforts to contribute to carbon reduction measures over the past year. Also close to my heart has been the Climate Camp, embroiled as I was in the protests at Whitehall Place a month or so ago. I was - to all intents and purposes - on the wrong side of the fence, facing the crusties as they sat in their canoes and chanted their slogans, while I fretted about the creature comforts of the SCS and the contract lead. I am following them on Twitter - even to mobile device level - but this is largely so that I can prepare to defend against, rather than mobilising the tent and the Special Brew so that I can join in another swoop. What can I say? I am a whore, like the rest of them. That includes you, by the way.
If we talk about sustainability (for what else is there when asking about climate change?) then we must take a holistic view. We have all (now, I guess anyways) seen the plantations of palm trees replacing the indigenous flora, partly to satisfy our insatiable need for recycled packaging, but mostly to feed our even more vampiric desire to defy the natural processes of life - i.e., ageing. If we can't accept the fact that we as humans are not sustainable, but that life itself must ultimately be so, then we are in big trouble.
The malaise spreads far and wide. Countless millions of tiny plastic bottles, made from a myriad of different oil-derived materials, line our shelves. Waitrose remove the word 'REDUCE' from the sustainable triangle, and even a hint of a drop in production levels causes unprecedented global panic in the 'money markets'.
Wherein, needless to say, lies the rub. While Cameron and Brown fall over themselves (actually, Brown probably falls over himself more - slap me!) to crow about their cuts, pay rates at executive level continue to be 'sky rockets in flight'. None of us can swallow that.
And now the end has been reached. The final act of a full season has been played out and the stars can all book their tickets for the Seychelles or wherever it is they go for a summer break. United didn't win 'Treble at least, though they did get the title, and now those lovely boys from Chelsea have the FA Cup in their clammy grasp. that Barcelona won the Champions League feels a little like natural justice, though I was disappointed in the match. I feel sorry for Shrewsbury, and oddly happy about Burnley - largely because one of my uncles is a life-long fan, and despite the large contingent of BNP supporters in that particular corner of Lancashire. On that note, the uncle in question, who lives near Wrexham, told me that he had seen an Asian canvassing for the BNP in that town on the day I saw him last week. He thought it was rather amusing.
Back to footy, there's no sign of an end yet to the Big 4 monopoly, nor of any end to the crazy distinction between the world of soccer and the real world, with its failing businesses and rapidly increasing unemployment levels. I find it difficult to comprehend that in the same newspaper on the same day we can read about the bankruptcy of General Motors, with thousands at risk of losing their livelihoods all over the world, and on another page, that the fabled green shoots of recovery are evident because of another rise in house prices.
It struck me the other day that I haven't been out of work for about 20 years, but it remains to be seen how many more weeks that state of affairs will last. I ended up in an extremely deep conversation with the cousin of a friend of mine outside the pub last night, in the warmth of an early summer evening supping overpriced under-strength lager. It was the first time in many weeks that I have been able to lift my head out of the cloud of fear and depression that has dogged my footsteps since around the beginning of April. I won't go into detail, but I was advised to go into teaching English, as it was felt that I would be good at that. I remain unconvinced, but was interested nevertheless to hear from a different perspective views on life, work and self-confidence. I have (kind of) made a decision about what I am (or not) going to do, but have suddenly started to think that I (might possibly) have made the wrong (sort of) decision after all.
Ah well, here comes summer at least. Maybe not being involved in FM will allow me to enjoy the good weather for a change and stop worrying about sodding air handling units and listening to people ceaselessly whingeing about their office environment. It sure is an enticing prospect.
Well, I've had a stonking few days away. Chester is, I think, an excellent place to visit, with a compact centre and a lively but not too aggressive social scene. The medieval setting of the centre seems to help a great deal, as does the fact that there appear to be several thousand pubs serving nice beer at reasonable prices. We went to a Samuel Smith hostelry called The Falcon, which was packed, though this was hardly surprising as we obtained five pints of some real ale or other for the princely sum of £7.15. That works out less than £1.50 per pint. Needless to say, too much alcohol was consumed and not enough sleep was obtained - especially as I lost my bearings on the way back to the hotel and ended up walking around in circles for about an hour until I could retrace my steps sufficiently to navigate my way back. But it was a 40th birthday celebration, so that's OK. Among the topics of conversation was the correct pronunciation of margarine - which we were told confidently should be with a hard 'g' because the word derives from the Ancient Greek for 'pearl-like' and the aforesaid Greeks would have pronounced it that way. We remain unconvinced.
We also discussed the phenomenon of the disappearing white dog shit. Something which used to be commonplace in the 70s and 80s is no longer seen anywhere (though we were informed that it does still exit [sic] in Manilla) and several bad science explanations (such as dogs eat less bones, so their excrement does not turn white in the way that it used to) were laughed out of court, and we think we reached consensus that the disappearance is simply down to better poop collection, and that the stuff is not allowed to bleach anymore. I still have some minor issues with this, but am prepared to go along with it for now. We also played travel Ker-Plunk. The hotel I stayed in was a time warp sort of place, friendly enough, cheap enough, quiet enough and clean enough, though one of the towels was frayed. And it was hard to find after drinking 12 pints of real ale.
Oswestry - where my mini holiday started - has been hard hit by the credit crunch as I've said before, but it was incredibly depressing to walk around the town on Good Friday with what seemed like every other shop closed down. The indoor market could almost have been a pisstake of what an economic collapse would look like, and even the Scope charity shop had gone out of business. Nonetheless, I was as always buoyed by the humour and craziness of the people (those I know and those I don't) and enjoyed some good beer time and excellent weather. There was a fire (or gas leak, or something) at the old Woolies and the streets were all cordoned off, though nobody seemed to notice.
Of course, whatever bubble of joy I was in was instantly popped when I got back to the Smoke by fucking City screwing up again. To cap it all, that bastard Clempsey bagged a brace. Fuck City. Up the arse.
Two more days and it's back to work, and it looks like I picked the wrong economic cycle to re-consider my career path, but I can feel a crunch of my own coming on. Maybe I should take up football management.
I grew up in pubs. My nan was a cleaner in the Barley Mow; my mum started work in a rum & coffee (really!) house in the halcyon days of the beast market in Oswestry, collecting the glasses before progressing to that most holy position of barkeep. When I was young, I would be taken with her to the Bear Hotel, The Butcher's Arms, The Woodlands, and ultimately The Queens, where I was at last - just before my 18th birthday - blooded with a stint serving the punters.
What days they were! Early memories are of playing with my cars while Match Of The Day was on (in the days when you used to get a smidgin of the lower divisions towards the end) the smell of yeast and fags, the taste of crisps and cheese and onion rolls in cling film, the sound of barrels rumbling below, collecting beer mats and bottle tops, playing tick and hide-and-seek in a deserted lounge bar with Kevin Hopkins - the lights of the bandit flashing and free credits on the juke box.
I progressed to holding the fort at The Huntsman on Wilmslow Road (just around the corner from Platt Lane and the mighty Kippax of course) while hordes of funeral-attended Irishmen and women clamoured for service and I was forced to take the Bells off the optic and pour it freehand until the landlady returned from her meal out to rescue me. Where last orders would mean 4 pints of Chinese (BTW, I'm finding it hard to trace this famous Manc mix on the net, though I know I could try harder...) each, and worked my way through Christmas Eves and Days, New Year's Eves and Days, and all manner of smashed bottle affairs. Sitting on an upturned crate at half past eleven with the sweetest half of bitter you ever tasted, sparking up a fag at the end of the bar. Aaahhh!
I became at the same time a more than willing participant in the punter side of pub-going, and remain to this day a loyal devotee of a dying art.
It's a genuine tragedy - IMHO - that (if true, and I have no doubt that it is, based on the evidence I see before me...) thirty-nine pubs a week are going bust in England. Those that remain open are in many instances, I have to say, not what a pub should be. Wetherspoons is perhaps the most egregious example of the modern evisceration of pub culture, with gastro wank at the opposite end of the spectrum. There's still the odd nugget to be found, but they are few and far between, and there aren't that many places left (in fact, probably none...) where you could happily spend a Saturday teatime laughing at the fixed odds choices you made at ten in the morning, surrounded by empty glasses and overspilling ashtrays, listening to the click of the pool balls and thinking about a bag of chips on the way home.
For once, I actually enjoyed TFTD this morning. I normally reach over at lighting speed to switch off the set when it comes on, especially if its Rabbi Lionel Blue, or even worse that dreadful Ann Atkins woman. Today though, it was some woman from St. Paul's cathedral talking about the spiritual dearth in our lives brought on by this hectic rush we're all in. She used the metaphor of light, and how our cities have thrown the natural rhythms of the world upside-down, so that a poor confused blackbird trills loudly at 3am in February, thinking he is greeting the rising sun, but is in fact (like a poor relation to Oscar Wilde's nightingale) flogging a dead horse. There was also a nice comparison with the enervated City trader, sitting up through the night to catch the latest on the foreign markets, stealing a march on those less able to stand the intensity of a 24/7 lifestyle.
Overall, as I said, it was a good piece, well crafted and thoughtful, but I wonder what was really at the root of it? It was one of those soft Christian things (so soft that you might even struggle to discern a religious message in it at all) and the fact that a female member of the clergy delivered it only served to emphasise this softness. But (as any good semioligist kno) what is not said is as important as the words which are uttered. And of course, she was saying, we are all lost in this brave new world, where god has been taken from us, leaving a huge vacuum in our souls. If we took a little time to listen to the message of god in our hearts, we might go some way to making the world a better place. There is also a harking back in this message to the arcadian days of 100% church attendance, a time of true faith, when we were all far less confused because our moral compasses were all fixed firmly on magnetic north. Now all we get are disparate groups slugging it out sloganeering on the sides of buses.
Given that there were far fewer surveys asking children if they were feeling generally content in the middle ages, I think it's difficult to say. I think she has something to say about disruption of the natural rhythms of day and night, summer and winter, though. No good will come of it, and as I've said before, the world can only be a better place without a 24 hour Tesco or a McDonalds (like the one at the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street) which - ridiculously - closes for 45 minutes a day.
That's my thought for the day. Now I'm going to listen to us giving that nice young man Gareth Southgate a much needed fillip. Bless you all!
After another astonishingly shit display against the 10 cloggers of the Potteries, I despair, I really do. Can there be a lower low to which one could sink (apologies to Michael... Match underway, I wish you luck)? With one obvious exception, I think not.
It doesn't help that the papers are all full of the bloody Rags and their sodding defensive record, with van der Sar's big equine Dutch boat all over the place, while we can't hit the proverbial farm building portal with the proverbial traditional stringed instrument.
To prevent myself from thinking about the dire situation at Eastlands, I propose a solution to the global credit crisis, one which stems from my youth in rural Shropshire. It's a simple answer, and one which may not be immediately obvious to the economic boffins at HMT. I propose that we re-instate half-day closing.
The Honda factory in Swindon commenced a four month closure on Monday, and though this is perhaps a little excessive, it does push all the right buttons as far as I'm concerned. These days, everything is 24/7. We expect to be able to go to a supermarket at any time of the day or night and buy whatever it is we want (as long as we can afford it of course) to buy. But, are we better off as a result? I think you know the answer. No matter how many new niches are discovered, no matter how innovative the marketing men are in pushing their products on to us at every opportunity, we are still in Shit Street. I have noticed the frenzy that seems to grip everyone on those increasingly rare occasions when the supermarkets are set to close for just one day. Surely, if we extended this idea, demand would increase, and we wouldn't all be wondering what the hell's going to happen next.
Every Thursday used to be half-day closing in Oswestry, and the town, which was admittedly hardly ever the life and soul of the party (with the possible exception of Saturday night at Gibbo's) would be closed completely from around lunchtime. I can remember my heart sinking when Thursday came around, because the rigor mortis would worsen, and there would be less than sod-all to do all day. Of course, in those days the pubs used to close at 3.00, re-open at 7.00, and close for the night at 10.30, so the news wasn't all good.
But it's got to be worth a try, surely? Let everyone take Tuesday afternoons off (say), and declare it a weekly bit of dossing about. No football matches, no telly, no bloody shops, just a half-day to listen to your favourite music, draw some pictures, make love, read a book - anything to recharge the batteries and prepare for the remainder of the working week. Who will join me in this campaign?
On the off chance that anyone's interested, the previous post was a little experiment with Plinky, which is quite neat in a way, but also a little spooky and irritating. I may partake further. Let's wait and see.
I'm really sorry to bang on about this, but it really is the most pressing issue of our time, I feel, and I believe we are on the verge of some form of revolution.
Reading Zoe Williams in today's Gruaniad, I for once felt very happy that my readership was not much wider. She's taken a proper mauling for trying to write what I'm sure she felt was a nice lightweight bit of humour on the global crdeit crisis, and the mystification she feels at explanations for it offered by so-called experts. In a way, she only has herself to blame, and has laid herself open to the usual anti-Graun sneers by opening the piece with the following words:
"God knows I'm no stranger to not knowing what I'm talking about..."
However, the gist of the piece, poorly penned though it may be, is that it is difficult to see the reality of the crisis we are in when it is passed through the lens of the media pundits, and occasionally the sheer scale of the numbers is bewildering in itself. A commenter on the piece did manage to provide an illustration - in diagram form - which certainly helped to clarify things for me. As it is under a creative commons licence on Wikipedia, I can publish it here.
What it does illustrate is that it looks as if we are in deeper shit than I thought. Much or all of the lending of the last few years has essentially been underpinned by property values - Mortgage Backed Security as it is known, and now that the bottom is continually dropping out of this nice little earner, the whole thing is falling to bits.
To back up the lovely Ms. Williams to an extent, it might be helpful if that little twat Peston made some effort to explain these things instead of puffing up his own irritating schtick.
I've recently had the misfortune to see the latest incarnation of the Müller ad campaign on TV, prominently featuring Shropshire as some kind of bucolic heaven where everywhere has vaseline smeared on the lens and smiling kids with gaps in their teeth and summer dresses laze around in meadows. I had intended to post something snidey about the good folk of the county being as far from this idealised bollocks as possible, with their Superkings and their Poundstretchers and scollops, but I feel a little differently now that the piece has evolved.
Clearly, the company has carried out extensive research which shows that the great British public somehow identify the county of Salop with the honesty and wholesomeness of some bullshit idea of the countryside which never really existed in any case. I mean, have these people never watched the Thomas Hardy serialisations on Sunday nights? Are they unaware of the grinding poverty, virulent disease, widespread illiteracy and random violence? And things were even worse in the old days...
At the risk of getting a person into trouble, I will say that I know someone who works - if not in a dairy - then in a dairy packing plant (the place is actually known as The Dairy, but this is I think a misnomer) where all forms of lactose related products destined for the supermarket shelves are picked and packed 24x7. I don't know if Müller products are packed there, but what tales of woe are told, what a Dante-esque picture of hell is conjured up when describing the working conditions. Here are some examples:
The company provided an occupational health visit for the staff, as a result of which one older worker was found to have cataracts in both eyes. He was - naturally - told to get these sorted out as soon as possible. I didn't know this, but it makes perfect sense, that when cataracts are present in both eyes, two separate visits for operations are necessary to remove them. On his return to work, the man was issued with a verbal warning for taking two sickness periods in a given time frame.
A younger worker with breathing difficulties (I believe asthma related) was struggling for breath while on his 12 hour packing shift. Despite the pleas of the other men on the shift, the supervisor insisted that the man finish his work, even though he was barely able to breathe at the end of it. He was hospitalised almost immediately, and made a recovery, but was again issued with a verbal warning on his return to work.
The management of the place seem to be able to act with total disregard for employment law, or even basic respect for human dignity, which is startling in this day and age. But, a job's a job they say, and that has never been so true as it is now. So, when I see the Müller ad, I feel genuinely sick for the poor bastards working in this place, and doubtless many others around the country, and I now look at the cheese in the chiller cabinets at Waitrose in an entirely different light.
And that's without even getting into the whole vegan thing.
I'm heartily sick, I have to tell you, of these mass market explainers, like the dreadful City Boy of the incredibly irritating Martin Lewis, who patronisingly explain to us dumb fucks on our morning commute why we are all deeply embedded in a puddle of excrement on Shit Street.
On the shite theme, does anyone really buy this bullshit about the whole credit crunch (I have been trying to avoid using this trite cliche, but had to admit defeat in the end) thing being caused by bad mortgage loans in the USA? It all seems a bit too convenient for my liking. In the febrile run-up to the festive season, the Madoff story broke - relatively quietly it has to be said - and I couldn't help but smell a rat. I mean, I know the USA is helluva big, with a motherfucker of a population, but surely there can't have been that many bad loans made - to lead to the virtual collapse (watch this space) of the entire world economy? Where were all these so-called experts and economists when one august institution after another crumbled into so much dust?
Where are they now that Adams (crap shops anyway, if you ask me. It's also intriguing that their website has no reference whatsoever to the stores going into administration) joins Woolies, Zavvi (the major disappointment for me on this one is that that twat Branson seems to have managed to worm his way out of trouble. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than the vultures of Fleet Street being able to let loose a Branson Pickle headline) Whittard and the others on the scrap-heap of the global economic slump?
Aside from the huge holes in the country's high streets (thank god for that, some might say - especially the good people of Exeter) there is of course the impact on the jobs market and the slow death of so many smaller communities to think about. I know, from experience of Oswestry, that life is hard out there, and it ain't getting any easier. For a lot of people, those few hours' work in the shops would have made the crucial difference to their lives.
So far, incredibly, the coffee chains seem to have been relatively unscathed by the whole process. I am of course aware that Starbucks has been struggling, but this is in relative terms to the retailers mentioned above, and there still seem to be new coffee shops opening up all over the place. I am as guilty as anyone else of (over)indulging in the overpriced stuff they peddle, but there surely must come a time when it all falls down?
Meanwhile, in an alternative universe, the football continues. And may god help us all.
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