Blind Hate, Bad Faith
The BBC’s reporting of the British Airways strike has been unbelievably biased.
Starting with a very hostile interview on Five Live by Peter Allen with the UNITE union leader on Tuesday, it was followed by a very sympathetic turn with the head of BA, and since then the focus has been on the “million or so” passengers whose holiday travel plans have been disrupted (by the UNION) and BA’s attempt to use the courts to declare the overwhelming vote in favour of the strike illegal.
Meanwhile, over in Copenhagen, the talks are (quelle fucking surprise) going very badly indeed.
Some joined-up thinking might notice that a million people were planning frivolous and unnecessary journeys in order to escape Christmas (you see, I’m not the only one who hates it – people will go to great lengths to get away from their families) at a time when delegates in Copenhagen are attempting to come up with ways to reduce carbon emissions. Instead of heaping sympathy on these potential passengers and blaming the union (who aren’t the ones trying to get a judge to cancel the strike instead of negotiating in good faith), the BBC could be pointing out that if a few more airlines went bust, it might be good for the planet.
And there’s the rub. No matter how seriously they pretend to take anthropogenic global warming, nobody really tries to do anything about it. It would be a tiny step to make it punishingly expensive to drive, say, a Range Rover or a VW Touareg; or to fly away for Xmas; or to transport millions of electronic gadgets from China to the West so that teenagers could obsessively play with them in my classroom; but nobody takes that step.
Which is why Copenhagen was always going to be a farce, and a(nother) waste of aircraft fuel.
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Makes you proud to be British
These fucking shitbird pretend plods should be whipped and forced to eat their pretend uniforms.
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The blog that time forgot
I’e been mildly motivated to blog recently, keep thinking of things I might blog about, but then don’t bother.
I’ve got so many useful applications on my Mac these days that I end up not doing anything.
I’ve 90% revised the NaNoWriMo novel, but it probably needs a further pass before I waste money on Lulu.com. I enjoyed the experience, especially as I knew/virtually knew a few people who were also doing it. What I don’t like about it is the constant nagging to donate, especially to the “young writers” programme. Why? Running young writers’ programmes only encourages them. We live in a world in which the tools to be creative in a variety of fields have never been cheaper or more accessible, so people can fucking well do things for themselves.
Mostly, I’ve spent the past week in apoplectic rage at the various slights visited upon the British people by the ones in charge.
There’s the fucked-up economy, which was wilfully fucked up in order to protect shareholders in the banks, who are now pissing in our faces in gratitude. Letting the vulnerable banks collapse would have been better for society and the environment, in all probability.
Then there are the MPs and their expenses and the constant reminders that, while we in the teaching profession are being told cheerful things like, “No more biscuits at after-school meetings” (or not being paid for taking on extra responsibilities), the MPs are (almost all) claiming for Kit Kats and takeaways to the tune of (the maximum) £400 per month. Do you know how many after-school biscuits that would buy for sugar-deprived teachers?
Then there are the too-frequent stories of photographers being hassled by Plod on the streets of the UK. The use of anti-terror laws against the British people is the most unforgivable thing this government has done. It’s not just that they hassle photographers for having a camera out in the street. It’s that they then involve you in a wilderness of pain if you dare to stand up for your rights. The same thing happens at our ports and airports, of course, if you happen to get tetchy about being searched. Again.
The prospect of a general election next year is depressing, isn’t it? To go through the motions of democracy when you know we’re fucked for the next ten years and there’s nothing we can do about it, because of all the stupid decisions that have been made for the last 10 years. The most depressing thing of all is that, throughout modern history, whenever there has been a labour government, the economy ends up in the toilet, and everyone bleats on about how all the “talent” will leave the country if the tax rate gets too high. As if they need to: only the rich can afford tax avoidance accountants.
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Socialite
One of our daughters plays with their daughter, though they don’t go to the same school. We live next door to the local primary, which is a very, very good school, and they live about 100 metres down the road, but they send their daughter to some fee-paying school because they are better than us.
They’re the family who have had the extension built, work which seemed to drag on for well over a year.
BMW 5-series on the drive. Could be his, could be hers. She’s an architect, he’s been between jobs for a while. The other car is a small 4×4.
They invite us for mulled wine. If you’d invited me to drink sheep shit dissolved in anti-freeze, I couldn’t find it less enticing. My wife jumps at the chance to do some proper socialising, having not realised when she met me just how happy I would be to never, ever, go to parties.
(I was in what is now called Year 7 when I went to my first teenage party. I yearned hopelessly after some girl for the whole evening but somehow ended up snogging the birthday girl. This was not a situation I enjoyed. It involved social embarrassment and having to talk to someone I didn’t know or care about. I have never once enjoyed myself at a party, and only once or twice did an evening in a pub with more than one other person turn into a good night.)
Drink doesn’t make me lose my inhibitions. It loosens my tongue, so that I am even ruder than I usually am, but it doesn’t make me more able to converse, dance, or have “fun”. The drunker people get, the less “fun” I have.
We arrived at the door 15 minutes after the invitation said. I knew we would be the first. My wife has a thing about being on time for things. It’s a disease. Others arrived even as we were removing our coats, clearly having twitched the curtains to see when people were turning up.
The house is an ordinary house on an ordinary 70s housing estate. With an extension. But they’ve spent some money inside. The whole of the entrance hall is covered in doormat. Nevertheless, we were required to remove our shoes before entering the main house. I’d never seen the husband before. He’s a thin, weaselly-looking man with thin hair and teeth too big for his mouth. He makes a face like I’ve brought dog shit into the house with me.
In the living room they have the same make of woodburning stove as us, but it’s the model above, the more expensive one.
The other day in John Lewis, when we were buying the new cooker, I was admiring what we laughingly called “the kitchen of the future”, which is all shiny glass/ceramic surfaces with glossy surfaces. I often laugh about kitchen brochures and advertising, aware as I am that most people have to cope with much smaller spaces than those portrayed. Our own kitchen is a hopeless corridor, without enough room for the dishwasher at the point where the plumbing is. One end of it used to be a built-in garage. To improve it, the place would have to be gutted and the floors ripped out. I have often suggested that we convert the living room to the kitchen and watch telly in the poky space where the kitchen currently is.
These people, who think their kid is too good to go to school with our kid, had a kitchen the size of the one in the brochures. The doors are burgundy gloss, there’s a huge granite-topped island in the middle, and a quadruple oven unit. There’s so much space that it doesn’t need to be wall-to-wall cupboards. There’s a huge window out onto the garden, and beneath the window an enormous L-shaped sofa.
Their kitchen is bigger than our (relatively large) open-plan living room. It’s the kitchen of dreams.
I feel like I’ve arrived at the door, been sneeringly advised to remove my shoes, and then had £20 notes rubbed in my face.
I drink the non-alcoholic punch, not trusting myself not to get very, very chippy and obnoxious should any alcohol pass my lips.
We stay two hours. It feels longer.
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Bob’s Crazy New Football Rules
As FIFA struggle to come to terms with the fact that EVERYONE CHEATS in professional football and that TV technology could be used to identify this, I think it’s time for some radical overhauls to the rules of Association Football in the interests of fairness and entertainment.
New rules:
1. All teams with over 30 players in their squad can and will be forced to play simultaneous games in different competitions in order to alleviate fixture congestion.
2. All teams with over 10 foreign national players in their squad can be forced to play games even while their players are on international duty.
3. The team ahead at half-time gets a point, no matter what the final result.
4. Teams lose a point for a 0-0 draw.
5. League Cup to be renamed Youth Cup – only under 25s eligible to play.
6. Alex Ferguson no longer allowed to speak to any media, including MUTV.
7. During penalty shootouts, both goalkeeper and penalty taker should be blindfolded.
8. Graham Taylor and David Pleat banned from working in media
9. Alan Green forced to take elocution lessons so he can pronounce the words “penalty” and “area” correctly.
10. All players who execute the two-footed studs-up sliding tackle forced to write ‘I was going for the ball’ is not a valid excuse 1000 times before being allowed back on the pitch.
That is all.
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Money Money Moany
VAT goes up in January, which is no reason to go spending loads of money, but it seems to be what we’ve been doing anyway.
Today the new oven was delivered. One of these. It’s a horribly complicated beast, with touch controls, multiple functions and programmes, including a bread setting, a pizza setting, and an oven chips setting (not really).
What do I actually use my oven for? Bread and pizza, tuna bake, baked potatoes, and, er, fish and chips. Nothing very complicated, really. But now I’ve got to learn a complex programming language in order to bake a spud. Why did we feel a need to get a new one? Because neither of us wanted to clean the old one. I’m looking forward to trying the pizza and bread settings and will report back after the weekend.
Anyway, what did we save in VAT by buying it now? About £57.
For unrelated reasons (i.e. not to do with cleaning), we have also ordered a new sofa/chaise combo, which is now in stock and which we paid for today, saving another £85 in VAT. This makes a total VAT saving of £142, which I suppose is kind of worth it.
According to Wikipedia, 142 is a number between 141 and 143. Not many people know that.
We have two Ekornes leather two-seater sofas to get rid of now. One of them, the one I’ve mainly sat on, is shagged (because I am too big for it and therefore do horrible things to the fastenings); the other one is pretty much good as new. Our house is too small to contain all these sofas.
I have a yen for a new Le Creuset casserole, 28cm size. I was looking at them in John Lewis tonight when we went in to pay or the sofa. My current casserole we’ve had since before we had kids and it’s really too small for the stew and the dumplings, if you know what I mean. The price in John Lewis for one of these? £140. Coincidentally, almost exactly the VAT saving. Smells like a rationale to me. (Of course, they’re much cheaper on Amazon.)
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James May’s Toy Stories
It’s a shame the BBC are holding back the final two episodes of Toy Stories for Festivus, when I will be out of the country, because I’ve really enjoyed them.
James May thrives away from Top Gear. He was quoted in the Guardian last week (in a story that was bizarrely reprinted in the Daily Hate yesterday) as saying that if he’d known how popular TG would be, he wouldn’t have done it. But he can’t mean that because TG has opened so many doors for him, and allowed him to make these kind of programmes, which are both fun, educational, and magical.
There’s something about all of these projects that takes us back to a bygone era of course, which is the intention, but it is nostalgia for more than mere playthings. It’s nostalgia for kids running around in the street for a whole magical summer, or for long-gone British industries, for a Britain which was a kinder, gentler place, with a slower pace of life.
Airfix, Plasticine, Meccano, Scalextric. Said slowly, repeatedly, this mantra might take you back to the days of short trousers, of knowing your neighbours, of hours spent patiently building something or painting it, of the days before our attention spans were shot to pieces.
Of course there are elements of the standard TV show formula: the artificial deadlines, the is-it-all-going-to-go-wrong-oh-no-it-isn’t jerking around, but aside from this, you get a real sense of people getting involved with each other: fathers with their fathers, professionals with amateurs, neighbours with neighbours. It’s just nice, in the end, which for some people is a dirty word; but niceness has its place.
Last night’s Scalextric episode was about more than what-toys-used-to-be-like. It was a community project which broke down barriers, crossed fences, introduced people to each other, generating a sense of excitement and achievement. It wasn’t about setting a new world record; it was about those little kids running across the open-plan gardens of their 90s housing estate, treading on the hallowed lawns, as they chased little cars along a ginormous track. Hopefully, those kids will forever cherish the memory of the the summer that James May came to town and created some magic.
Filed under: Entertainment, Nostalgia, TV, Television, summer | 2 Comments
And we’re done
With a little help from a constantly refreshing playlist of Brad Paisley, Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd, and Faith Hill (all the four- and five-star tracks for each artist, limited to 50 songs, automatically updated by least-often played), I managed to write twice as quickly as I was meant to do, and finished my NaNoWriMo project this morning. I’ll be uploading chapters for a few days yet, as we’re only up to Chapt 27 online and the final thing runs to 36 chapters, plus Prologue and Epilogue. I haven’t included the Prologue in the online version, because I didn’t write it till over halfway through.
I’ve managed to write 90,633 words since the 13th of October, which is probably going some, even for someone as habitual as I.
One tool I’ve been using, which surprised me by being absolutely perfect for the task, is Scrivener, a piece of software from Literature and Latte, that enables you to keep working, counting words, and referring to notes in one seamless interface. When I first learned of it, via the NaNoWriMo web site, I assumed it would be like a lot of these things, a piece of software that if you took the time to learn it might prove useful but that you’d never have time to learn it.
But one whizz through the interactive tutorial was all I needed. I decided to give it a go, and within a couple of days I was really enjoying it. It does so many little jobs so well, and it encourages you to work in a really organised and focused way. Above you can see the “corkboard” view of my entire novel, and here below is the “corkboard” view of the various notes I was keeping track of. Once you’re editing, you can quickly refer to a note, to a previous chapter, or even refer to both at the same time by splitting the window. The search feature is useful, too, allowing you to quickly find a word or phrase you’ve used earlier, even in multiple locations.
As you can see, the notes section allows you to keep text files, images, and even web pages (simply drag the URL into the sidebar, and the entire page is saved, as it appeared in your browser).
As a text editor, it does exactly what you need it to do without any distractions, and I’m now looking forward to revising the novel in the same software.
My plan now is to let The Obald settle for a bit, then do some revisions before self-publishing on Lulu or similar.
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Tags: nanowrimo
It’s 1983…
Having decided to set the first half of my NaNoWriMo novel in 1983, I’ve been recalling things to mind. It was a big year for me, anyway, and I remember the soundtrack to the office Christmas party very well (Karma Chameleon, Let’s Dance, Every Breath You Take, Uptown Girl… I could go on), but I didn’t like any of that stuff myself. In fact, I was a little bit buried under a rock at the time, and wasn’t aware of what was happening in what turned out to be my kind of music… yet.
It was a few years later that a friend introduced me to what was then being called New Country (christ knows how he found out about it) by lending me a tape with The Judds, Dwight Yoakam, and Randy Travis on it). But I wondered, what if my lead character is (even) hipper than me, and is into country music in 1983 — what would there be? No Steve Earle, no Dwight, no Randy, no Mary Chapin Carpenter, but what would there be?
So I looked into things, and came up with a 90-minute mix-tape, of stuff released in ‘82, ‘83, and a couple of years before that. There would be more interesting stuff, but (criminally) it’s really hard to get hold of – for example – early 80s John Prine stuff, or the Pure Prairie League with Vince Gill (you can get them without Vince Gill easily enough), so it’s a bit like stepping back in time in itself when you try to find these things.
I’ve compiled at as two iMixes – approx 45 mins each. Interestingly, none of it sounds terribly dated. I’ve always loved that timeless feeling you get with country music. Surprisingly, I think, the most lively and up-to-date songs on the 1983 Country Mix Tape are the Nanci Griffith songs, which come from her album Poet in My Window. Sounds to me like it could have been released yesterday.
It all sounds very much like it sounded three years later, the so-called “break-through” year of 1986, and yet a lot of this stuff was blown away by the likes of Guitar Town, Storms of Life, and Guitars, Cadillacs Etc. Etc. Which seems unfair, when you listen to this. I know that for a lot of people these artists (particularly Emmylou Harris) never really went away, and a lot of people never got into the 1990s wave of new stuff, which in its turn blew Randy Travis (for one) away. Funnily enough, George Strait (who I never warmed to) just went on doing his thing, and picking up CMA awards, while the world was pulled down and reconstructed around him again and again. That’s what wearing the hat is all about, I think. It’s probably a hard hat.
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Blogging Hiatus
Not retiring, or committing blog suicide, but doing NaNoWriMo for month of November, and because I actually hope to write more than the 50,000 word target, am starting early.
Work in progress can be found here for time being: The Obald
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Tags: nanowrimo
