Tired Attrition on the Long Road

I feel guilty. I was trying hard to follow the election but I crumbled sometime last week. Without an electronic connection to the vortex during the day I am lost...so as the campaigns limped along somewhere in the distance I lost sight of them behind a clump of trees on the horizon.

And then, and then...last night I hear about a humdinger of a debate on Question Time...all three candidates were grilled by the public and, unlike during Paxman’s point scoring encounters the other week, this programme actually managed to get them to account for themselves.

Paxman is an entertaining interviewer but his questions are fallacious. He savages the interviewee for not giving a straight answer but he does not give them a straight question to answer...his questions imply facts that are, in fact, opinion. Or a venomous insult, whichever gets his dick hardest.

Let us invent a question to illustrate his technique: “Why did you completely muck up your election campaign?”

The question explicitly states that the interviewee mucked up his campaign, despite this being a mere opinion. The interviewee cannot answer the question straight because this implies that he agrees that he mucked it up. But the question does not allow debate on this...it is given as Fact, and any attempt at challenging this is immediately labelled as avoiding the question. Well, in this cases, so what if they do avoid it? It is unanswerable.

Okay, so the slippery shit being grilled probably did muck up his campaign, but we are wallowing in wholesome pools of hypothetics here.

Meanwhile, in the school playground, little Timmy is confronted by big Johnny. No sniggering at the back.

“Hey look, it’s little Timmy!” says Johnny. “Oi Timmy, why do you smell of poo?”

“Well, Johnny,” says Timmy. “That is an unfair question and in context of what I have achieved in the arena of pulling legs off insects over the last two terms...”

“Sorry to interrupt, but you are not giving me a straight answer. Why do you smell of poo?”

“Look, Timmy, the school children of Britain have to face on a day to day basis the very real possibility of dogs roaming the school yard...”

“Get your hand off my arm. Why do you smell of poo, Johnny?”

“Over time I have washed myself every day and have been a stickler for not falling over in dogshit since year 3 and that unfortunate burning bag on the doorstep incident, and...”

Big Johnny chuckles slightly at this. “Now please, it’s a simple question, all I want is the reason why you smell of poo.”

“Little Dave smells of poo even more, you know. He’s over there feeling up little Suzie.”

Voooooom!

“Hello? Johhny? Hello?”

Hang on, we were talking about Question Time. I spoke to a work colleague earlier and she says that the candidate who came across best was Charles Kennedy; this would have been a surprise at the start of the campaign but his manner and constitution has toughened noticeably since then, despite a few mealy-mouthed blips.

When John Kerry and George Bush went head to head, Kerry won and received a solid bump in the polls for a short time. But those debates were weeks before the polling date; this time Kennedy has not only struck a blow with only a week to go, he has managed to get the war back in the mouths of the party leaders just in time for the war legality revelations last night – you know, the information Labour would have raped their own daughters to keep private that worked itself free in an orgy of media self-congratulation. So we all laugh when we hear that the official line is that the expose is a damp squib. Uh-huh. We’ll be the judge of that, you lying turd.

Anyway, Kennedy will poll well this year and perhaps will finally shrug off the curse that seems to leave him rooted to the same 21% he achieves no matter how many babies he saves from drowning or how many pussy cats he steps on. The trouble is his image. Blair and Howard both have precise images that get under the skin of supporter and enemies alike. Kennedy, though, constantly comes across as a Nice Guy. And nice never polls well, except when it comes to the question of “who would you like to share a drink with?” They also struggle in the tactical voting stakes, but this is another issue and I cannot be bothered to think today.

Right. Clearly I have nothing to say on the election and given that last night I missed the only thing that has put any fire under the thing, well...then it looks like the blade has already fallen. Fuck it.

But why would this be a surprise, anyway? What exactly have we seen in the last few weeks? The Tory party have been suicidally obsessed with an issue on which they have now discovered fewer people are thinking what they are thinking; their entire strategy was riddled with woodworm and has collapsed into rotten dust. The Labour campaign has been stuck in a static swamp for weeks whilst fighting the war of insult attrition...a war in which both camps have been wearing down the opposition with a battery of childish personal attacks, hoping the other side will hold up the white flag and announce that “we are above such personal attacks.” Hmm...that is a strange and telling phrase...a sure sign that they have either given up...or if spoken in the early stage of a campaign a sure sign that they are about to contradict themselves in a breathtaking orgy of hypocritical obnixiousness. The political equivalent of a sentence beginning “I’m not racist, but...”

Meanwhile, the media struggle to find a single interesting angle on this goddamn one-note election.

So it is true that I have nothing to say. But I am not alone in this...bollocks to all of us.

Actual Reality

Knightmare was a strange children’s programme and was notable mainly for its early use of computer graphics, which it used to immerse a bunch of confused children in a fantasy world of dungeons and whirring metal blades. I flicked on the television on Sunday and found myself face to face with a clip from the show; it was no surprise to find that the show has aged terribly.

But the idea of bringing the pizza-flecked world of computer games blinking into the moonlight of the real world...this is actual reality and it hurts my head. Let us exhume this concept with a range of increasingly pointless examples.

Halo Paintball

Hang on, Halo? Is this what we are after? Like many games of its ilk, Halo is a exaggerated reflection of reality in the first place, so holding up the mirror and bouncing it back into the real world seems absurd. Nobody wants to go to war for real, they just want to safely despatch a few foreigners with shiny hardware that creates big explosions.

But this is betting without the paintball.

Hardly the blood and guts, flying limbs and oh-the-humanity we would expect from a Halo actualisation, but who gives a damn when the most you are likely to be hurt is a paint pellet to the groin? In a couple of months I will be paintballing as part of a friend’s stag weekend, so this is one piece of actual reality I will be able to put into practice. Unlike...

Pac Man in the Park

Here we must be wary. There is a bad line that we would likely cross in pursuit of the wacka wacka gold. This valid experiment in game actualisation could easily turn into an unfunny stunt in the style of Dom Joly, in which a bunch of pensioners are filmed staring with an evident lack of interest at something vaguely surreal.

Only boring and middle-class students find these stunts funny. And it isn’t hard to confuse a pensioner. Seriously...the average high street shop changing into a different shop tends to blow their minds for upwards of a decade. So prancing around in Hyde Park in stupid costumes is not going to get you the Clever medal.

So this is a thing that must be done at night. This suits perfectly the stripped-down minimalism of blue on black of the original game, last seen huddled in the candy-floss smeared ambience of the eighties arcade. The dots would become shots of beer, and the power pills would be tabs of LSD. The benefit of the latter is that the second round would take place entirely in your imagination; cheap as hell and saves a lot of running around in hot furry costumes.

Or come to think of it, you could just take the acid first and stay at home. Then there would be no chance of bothering any pensioners, except perhaps Mrs Brown from the flat below when you hurtle past the window, stark naked and babbling about extra lives.

Robotron 2005

In the original game you were a happy hero who spent his time surrounded by huge waves of angry killers that homed relentlessly in on your position. You panicked the hell out of the joystick as you straddled a continual disaster curve armed with nothing but a laser gun.

A simple actualisation of this game would be to stand in the middle of the Vatican during the Pope’s address, slip on a condom and start making out with your gay friend whilst ordaining a female priest.

Then shout “yer mum!” at the Pope and run like hell.

Need for Speed: Underground

Ah. Here we find ourselves staring down the world of illegal street racing. This is not something we can take lightly and we would be drifting, in the words of Marwood, into the arena of the unwell. In this case, unwell means pale-faced 19 year olds with shit baseball caps and a handful of jewellery from Top Man’s range of My First Bling.

Across the car parks of dead supermarkets in London’s midnight, these people gather in their souped-up Novas, sound systems pumping out generic bad boy music, whilst neon blue lights mingle with sodium orange to bathe the tarmac in a liquid eeriness.

In one corner a scrawny heroin-addict lies on top of a mate’s car and watches a Cockney prick with a laughably macho nickname driving his car around in small screeching circles. Somewhere nearby a few police cars crawl past, hoping fervently that their presence stops the little bastards doing anything that would require paperwork to be filled in.

Soon enough, the adrenaline starts pumping through the veins that normally carry little else but a mixture of testosterone and cannabis. A few cars line up, engines revving like the thrust of a shagging rabbit. Needles flicker across the speedometer...the air fills with fumes. The expectation is painful, the future is uncertain...and the road ahead is empty.

Then the leader gets a call on his mobile. It’s his mother...they’re going to Aunty Beryl’s tomorrow and would Kev mind awfully coming home and ironing his Next shirt before bed?

Kev whispers “yes” into the phone, discreetly cuts her off and then shouts “screw you!” into the mouthpiece.

This week there would be no race...but let the world be put on notice...next week the Bad Boiz Kru will be tearing up da streetz of fuck knows where in their krazi motorz, and to hell with da highway code, er, providing it’s at night when there’s nobody around, like. Innit.

Meanwhile, somehow, the world continues to turn.

Street Fighter 2

Two words: New Cross.

God Bless our Dead Marines

Dead kids don’t get photographed,
God bless our dead marines.
-- A Silver Mt Zion

Well...on the strength of that quote I had better make it clear that we’re not about to embark on some weird and terrible blast of war vitriol ...this one is a music review maybe. That is something I rarely do, but after trudging through a copy of the Metro newspaper today I felt it was time to throw some words about.

Now, the Metro is a strange free newspaper that barely exists. It is insubstantial; the queasy shadow of a local newspaper crossed with a comic crossed with a gust of hot wind. Its angle is to turn the news into something that can be swallowed on the move and seems to be written by journalists desperate to move somewhere they think their talents wouldn’t be wasted.

Every so often, though, it has the capacity to surprise. Beyond the fast-food news and indifferent soundbites, there are several pages of reviews under the banner of Metro Life that work well and occasionally impress. Today I was startled and gratified to see a review of the Silver Mt Zion’s most recent album Horses in the Sky that came out a few weeks ago.

And what would the average commuter make of such an album? The hell I know...I have had the thing for weeks and still find it tough to sum up. The album is impressive, almost for the relentlessly vocal angle only previously hinted at. But mainly for its atmosphere of beautiful and stubborn resistance to a cold new world. Each Silver Mt Zion release takes a new direction (and frequently a new band name) and so far we have had the sparse lament of the first album, the fast and loose improvised feel of the second, the epic symphonic nature of the third and now the plaintive vocal album.

But the thread that runs through them all is the sense of reflection on the state of the world that comes across alternately as a powerful stench of despair and a glorious call-to-arms. Of course, what you get from the music is up to you...the atmosphere is something you have to make an effort to engage with. What we have here is something called post-rock, baby...it is not background music and has no catchy choruses, although it contains lyrics that echo in your head for days afterwards. At turns lonely, proud, isolated, sad, defiant, gentle and soaring...this feels like a genuine attempt to wrestle with the world’s fucked up nature rather than the all too common rent-an-emotion piano-and-strings wankery we are used to soundtracking dinner parties with. So the peaks are that much higher.

Whoops, this is all becoming a bit much. But what the hell. This is potent stuff and demands many, many listens as each layer reveals itself. Perhaps the new album is more straight forward that previous ones, its songs shorter and more vocal...but whatever direction they take you know that their heart beats stronger than ever.

And there is a real potency in the words they sing. One day I plan to drag a stereo system to the top of a hill and play the album at skull-crushing volume...beyond 11 into the realms of the vengeful and destructive. The message must be conveyed. Perhaps a few hundred people will be torn apart by the waves but it shall be worth it. Yes, that would be fun.

In summary, it good. Buy.

Salt Mine Diamond Mine Tin Mine

Every year or two I go to a fast food place because I cannot remember whether or not I enjoyed it the previous time. This morning I was hungry earlier than normal; usually I would buy some kind of salad from Marks and Spencer but today I needed something that goes squelch. I found a nearby McDonalds and bought a burger and fries.

Well. I now know why I never remember the last time...these burgers may contain nothing that is good but they do go straight for the salt and sugar tastebuds and give them a damn good thrashing. Once this is done then pop! The burger vanishes. Your mouthful of meat turns into some kind of swamp gas that lines the throat with the sensation of bad beef before evaporating to fuck knows where.

Ten minutes later the only evidence I had eaten was the lingering stench and a desperate need to gargle with TCP. I was still hungry. But the salt, the salt...damn it, salt is good. Any more than seven grammes and day and you’ll be torn limb from limb by some grotesque monster riding a giant fucked heart...yet you crave the stuff, you goddamn mineral lover. The aftertaste lingers on and begs to have its fire quenched, but like an itch you should not scratch you just keep on feeding the flames with more salt.

What I now crave is a good malt with a salty finish. Yeah, that would sort me out. This is an expensive cure and I understand why many people simply reach for a tasteless bag of crisps. In a way it is the most basic addiction of all. The only saving grace is that the craving only flares up once you have recently come into contact with the stuff...this is no early-morning scrabble for the fags before the alarm clock has had chance to cool down. And salt is not something we dream about. But hell, this shit is strong.

And sugar? Fuck sugar. I do not care for it on the whole and so I cannot and will not discuss its potency. So that’s that sketch knackered then.

Things are not too sweet on the campaign trail either... Ye gods, what a link! But what the hell, these jabberings are increasingly fast and loose these days and there seems little point in settling down.

Out there, out on the long road, both Howard and Blair are being buffeted by some bad winds. Whenever they step out of their bubbles into an approximation of the real world they are harangued by the disillusioned. Labour voters, whilst feeling deeply uncomfortable about the past four years, are nevertheless returning to the fold...Howard has cast himself as the wolf here and it is entirely his fault that his election campaign is preaching to the choir and alienating every other bastard in the land. His immigration schtick is coming unschtuck... perhaps the icy heart of middle England is not so cold after all.

Ah, but whilst Tony plays the shepherd he is unable to play the preacher, losing valuable voters to the trail of breadcrumbs laid by Charles Kennedy. For many people the Lib Dems are promising a happy deal that will keep them sweet...but I suspect the Lib Dem vote is an ideological one rather than a financial decision. And so 22 per cent they have and 22 per cent they continue to have.

The trouble both parties are having is that too many people now do not classify themselves as left or right leaning. This is not to say that people think of themselves as bang in the centre, but rather a wide grouping that averages near the centre. People who are comfortable with your basic high street capitalism but feel the world needs a few more groovy vibes. So the parties have to sandpaper off their rougher edges and find themselves differentiated less by politics and more by a game of emotional Top Trumps.

Hmm...whilst I work out if I actually have a point to make, I shall bail on the post and find something to eat that won’t kill me...at least, not as quickly.

The Stream Consisting Entirely of Eddies

So what’s going on, then? Prescott is arguing with local news reporters and newspapers are obsessed with polls and their accuracy. Nothing changes in our little island of bile and bilge, especially when the campaigns are lying dead on the shore like a school of beached whales. What is there left to say, to divine from the numbers and portents and silly CGI swingometers?

Most people are treating this election like one of those old Magic Eye pictures where if stared long enough you saw the outline of a sailboat, along with mysterious swirly patches that took hours to clear from your eyes. The theory here is that somewhere there is a narrative to find...an officially story of the election.

Is there? A thousand stories of local campaigning all swooping around and folding in on themselves...can they really be just the leaves on some great tree that can conveniently be condensed into a two-thousand word piece for your favourite broadsheet? Well...if there is no story then you can construct one. Using a hammer and a pair of scissors we can take the jigsaw and assemble it however we want. And if the picture of a postman ends up with three legs and an ear sticking out of his arse, then what the hell? It’s what the journalist calls a fresh perspective...and what Picasso called a living.

Back in November...or was it October? How time slips away from us. During the US election the narrative that began to dominate the reports was one spotted by the politicians and embraced by the media hungry for clarity...so there was an element of self-fulfilling prophecy about it. But the foundation has to be there in the first place...even the flimsiest premise must have its guy ropes otherwise it’ll be out of here on the first gust of wind into the nearest field of hungry cows. And Barbara Windsor would come running, bra clasped against her bosom, whilst Kenneth Williams gurns in shock on the sidelines.

Whoops. That meant nothing and I do not know why I wrote it.

The narrative of the US elections began to take shape once the floating voters were identified and flagged up. Once this was the case then the campaigns took a distinctly different flavour...and we are seeing this happen in the UK. This is not surprising. Elections are fought like advertising campaigns...indeed, great chunks of them are given over to advertising. Notice that the “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” is straight out of a lazy copyrighter’s book... and they should have been more careful given the ease with which it can be satirised. Still...once the battlegrounds were painted up many of the issues went by the wayside. Labour are concentrating on crime and the economy, the Tories on immigration and the Lib Dems on a handful of sweeteners such as the ditching of university tuition fees.

These killer issues are puffed up shamelessly at every turn. Sometimes in subtle ways...such as when Tony Blair was confronted by Angry Shouting Voter #94 in Leeds yesterday, his response was to bang on about how much Labour has achieved with the economy, and to hell with whatever Angry Shouting Voter was talking about. After all, campaigning is not an argument, it is an advertisement. He wasn’t talking to a voter, he was talking to the cameras and reporters.

The economy is a strange subject for the election. Most campaigning is an attempt to light bad rockets aimed at the rotund arses of the opposition. But this time Tony Blair has the chance to dazzle with a lovely, sparkly catherine wheel of an issue. If he can capitalise on an issue that inspires contentment...not joy or despair...then he is laughing. The trouble is that he is unsure how to turn the economy into a killer argument without coming across as arrogant and controlling. The trouble with catherine wheels is that they go nowhere...they are always outshone by the rockets, and these days people are tired of spin.

Indeed...I knew there was a reason for choosing fireworks as the silly metaphor du jour.

The subject of floating voters, which is what I was trying to focus on before that tangent about killer issues, produced a Guardian experiment last year in which they invited readers to write to a town in Ohio to encourage them to vote Democrat. Flash forward to a couple of days ago and the Guardian carried a letter...from Ohio, encouraging Britain to vote Labour.

All very amusing but the writer was taking it seriously and treated the idea without the contempt it clearly deserves. However...with this reversal, however slight, we can explore what we make of somebody from abroad attempting to persuade us to vote one way or the other?

Hmm. I find I do not care in the slightest. Who cares where the opinions come from? We invite them in all the time by switching on the television and taking the morning paper and putting the world to rights in the pub...so one more vampire biting on my neck does not make a difference. Of course, I am not a floating voter. I vote ideologically rather than tactically or on precise political goals (something I suspect I would drop like a vomiting cat if, say, I had previously voted Labour on the strength of its leftist credentials). Furthermore, I do not think we would get the full flavour of the Guardian’s experiment unless we had personalised airmail letters coming into our homes at whatever hour in the fucking afternoon Royal Mail can be fucked to deliver these days.

But even then I would not care tuppence unless the letter came from some American equivalent of one of the puffed-up nitwit famouses that took part in the original experiment. If an American Tom Paulin started tutting and shaking his head sadly at one of our parties, I would be straight on the phone to the nearest talk radio with words like “arrogant”, “yank” and “bastards” on my tongue.

But that’s entirely Tom Paulin’s fault and nothing to do with reasoned debate.

Goddamn it, again with the irrelevance. Right, let us look at a couple of arbitrary thoughts on this to tie it up. First, there is a wide gap at the heart of the election that seems curious and frightening. This is the gap between local and national voting...the one that...

I don’t know. That thought seems to collapse like a bad souffle as I try to pin it down. And what was the second thought I was going to wrestle to the floor? Shit. I lost my train of thought when the cleaner started polishing the desk around me, her lips thinning as I brazenly refused to leave. Well...for almost five seconds, anyway. Seriously...why the hell do they employ a cleaner to clean the office at 3.30 in the afternoon? Some of us are trying to avoid work here, goddamn it.

Well, that collapsed a little at the end, didn’t it? Hmm...I suspect I may be saying the same thing about the election on May 6th.

Spiked on a Fence of Guitars

This morning I woke up and immediately discovered that I had solved a clue for the crossword puzzle on which I had been stuck the previous day. “Artichoke!” I shouted, or whatever the hell it was. Remembering where I was, I shut off the alarm and leapt happily out of bed in a manner whose theme tune would almost certainly be along the lines of the Muppet Show:

It’s time to get on up
It’s time to get some food
It’s time to get some coffee and then fuck off to work...

This is a marked contrast to Sunday morning. That was not a morning on which Nico would croon softly over the Velvet Underground...I had a hangover you could photograph and my head felt like a Guns N Roses guitar solo falling down the stairs. But in my mangled state I still felt a strange sensation of disappointment and it took me a few cups of coffee to work this one out. Eventually I remembered what I had done the previous night.

Last year, Adam Buxton starred in a comedy-drama called The Last Chancers in which he played the frustrated lead singer of a band going nowhere. He gets the chance to pitch his band to the Industry, and he is determined to put across the fact that his band is full of original ideas. The dialogue went vaguely like this:

“So you’re full of unique musical ideas?”
“Oh yes.”
“What kind of music do you play?”
“Well, sort of spiky, angular guitar pop...”
“So just like everybody else, then.”

Indeed, and this is a lesson we have to learn. Now every nineteen year old in the country spends an hour each morning with a pot of hair gunk; their goal is to define themselves by copying a bunch of nitwit American musicians. This has always been so, but from a musical angle it is depressing to see that the high water mark for angular guitar pop has not yet been reached. The hair thing is merely part of it.

There is a feeling of malaise and making-do here. Many people come together at university because they want to be in a band and frequently they are bound together by the love of a particularly energising music. Currently this would be the bloodline said to begin at the Strokes – betting without, of course, their own influences. The problem is when this bloodline flows undiluted through the veins of the new generation, unsullied by any original ideas.

Many of us argue that this is the industry’s fault for clamouring to sign up clones of whoever is successful at the time, and this is true to a degree. But spend a week bouncing around the average student union and you will find a hell of a lot of average students, all playing average songs that tap into these ever-weakening bloodlines. This is what they want to play. Where the hell is the Good Stuff, the original ideas, the breath-taking punch to the ribs that takes your breath away and steals your soul? Being good or original is not uncommon. Being both is.

And so we arrive at last Saturday night, central London. A band whose name I cannot recall playing at a venue whose name I never learnt. In a world not polluted by NME blight this should have led to something positive, a wonderful and secret discovery of something Good and Hidden.

Instead, they played spiky, angular guitar pop.

They were cheerful and lively and announced that they were about to launch a single, which the played on the night. It was...hell, it was pleasant enough. But balls to pleasant enough. It was any port in the musical storm. This is why I rarely go to the gigs of guitar-based bands unless I know in advance that they are more than Any Good.

So what else can I say? The singer bounced around the small stage like Tigger in a pit full of snakes. The guitarists bobbed back and forth in that familiar and silly guitarist non-dance we have all seen a thousand times. The sweat-laden drummer thrashed about and watered the stage like a lawn sprinkler during the more energetic drumming sequences. Business as usual.

They are not a bad band, just a desperately familiar one...they are the pissed second cousin you do not remember at a wedding who spends the reception jabbering on about how much he is “not a racist but...”, before kissing you on the cheek and demanding your address so he can come and stay at your house next time he is in the area. You cannot quite put your finger on the problem until he throws up on your good shoes.

Still...groups like them are the bread and butter of the band scene and a hell of a lot of people bounce around to their music. And it would be remiss of me to ignore the fact that this band did had one great song that I believe would sit well in the weekday BBC 6 Music schedules.

But, crucially, this wasn’t the single and I have already forgotten how it goes. And, worst of all, the only chance I had at remembering the band’s name was a badge one of their ample-chested minions gave me that promptly fell through the hole in my pocket.

Hmm...one of these days I really must develop a short term memory.

Under the Sea, Under the Sea

Oh hell...writing has become impossible. I am too tired and there is no air in here. This is a mental slump in the afternoon in a mind already loaded down by the weariness with which I woke up. So this is not a good time to throw words at a page, although maybe it will clean my head of the accumulated shit.

The election? Today all I see are figures and I find myself cowering in their stupid shadow. They are noisy figures; millions here, billions there, and they explode like fireworks. All the cats and the dogs and all the other four-legged friends run for the basement and hide. The commentators try and make the best of it by reporting on the Other Side’s attempt at rubbishing the figures, but they are as loathed as I am to try to Understand.

But they are also saying that the Labour manifesto, launched on Wednesday, is something that we all should read. Within the pages of this thing are some genuine ideas, they say, buried somewhere in the twenty three thousand words. It is online somewhere. I may read it later between forcing myself to cook something Decent and ploughing through BBC radio online in search of Listen Again gold.

But even the thought of skimming the conclusions drawn by the newspapers fills me with lethargy. This is my fault and not the subject matter...my mind is willing to absorb the information but seems to be getting kicked in the balls by a siren who just wants to sing me lullabies. How much easier is it not to think about these things? Just to let the opinions take care of themselves...a kind of natural selection where only the best manage to imprint themselves in your consciousness, fighting for space amongst that all-important knowledge of Britney’s pregnancy and the lingering memory of yesterday’s delicious pasta dish. No...this would not let the fittest ideas survive, only the ones that rely on instant voter gratification; the emotional push-button issues, the lazy prejudices, the big tax cut figure.

If this is not making sense then it is in good company. A barrage of bizarre things has rained down on us in the course of the recent coverage. I cannot analyse them right now, so I will rate each thing on a comparison scale of sealife. Why not? It is about the most insightful thing I can offer today.

The Tories want more faith schools, and thousands of them. Whelk.

Labour are more insistent than ever on introducing identity cards that include biometric data. Conga eel.

Howard’s immigration strategy is actually driving disillusioned Labour voters back into Blair’s fold. Catfish.

Labour’s manifesto is missing even a vague solution to the pensions crisis. Tin of sardines in tomato sauce.

Charles Kennedy has been accused of exploiting his newborn for political advantage.A brick that fell off a trawler.

Okay, this sealife thing is a disaster and I suspect I am contravening some kind of international law. Can we change the subject now and get away with it?

But I fear a shadow has been cast over the post now. Look out of the window...the stillness is ominous and oppressive. An army of tumbleweeds is heading this way, blown in on a wind tinged with some exotic tragedy. Somewhere a church bell is ringing. ”Somewhere” being the church, I suppose. That would make sense. Like the words of the song...”tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town.” To which we all reply “the jail, perhaps?”

The Tories want to build more jails. I think I read that. I cannot hope to verify that without Internet access. That is a peril of this writing / posting offset of several hours with which I have to live. See? It is presently three in the afternoon, but I will throw it at the Internet sometime in the evening. Hardly seems worth it today. Bad jabbering and a spectacular lack of analysis. And I am too lethargic to edit any of it, but what the hell? It may provide a springboard for more thoughtful commentary on a later date.

It could also provide a reflection of the inner monologue that a carefully constructed argument never normally provides. Whether or not this is a Good Thing is another question.

On the journey to work this morning, for instance, I found my mind rambling around the subject of the lies we believe as children. Put simply, children are literal minded creatures and feeding them strange and curious metaphors is a minefield of confused interpretation. In particular, science is treated as subordinate to myth and fantasy. And why not? Perhaps it is to weave some kind of childlike wonder and innocence... or because the parent cannot remember back to their O Level science class as to how, say, thunder is produced.

The problem is that the more outrageous the fantasy, the more it will create more questions that it answers. And the last thing a parent wants is to hear the word Why. So why would god be moving his furniture so noisily – has the Almighty and Omnipotent Creator got a bit of a bad back? He can create a world in six days but is having trouble dragging his Chesterfield into the nook? Poppycock. Balderdash. (This is not how a child talks, but we are wandering around a mental landscape here full of faux-Victoriana and silly macho metaphors that involve animals that growl a lot, so what the hell.)

This can be summed up in one example, though. It is a dark and uncomfortable thought when you get right down to it... If babies are added to a family when they are found behind gooseberry bushes...what happened to the babies that don’t get found?

Brr. No wonder so many imaginative children grow up to be such tortured souls.

Ten Pin Policies

"Let the sunshine of hope break through the clouds of disappointment..." -- Michael Howard.

Jesus. The vampire jokes have started to write themselves now.

So. We have before us a summary list of Labour and Tory policies, courtesy of the Guardian. Direct comparisons are tricky due to the stench of bad rhetoric, so we must try and boil this thing down to the few genuine facts contained within.

The first thing we can get rid of are the numerical claims. "The party's school expansion fund will see 600,000 more school places created in the first term of a Tory government," for instance. These numbers, like all the numbers we have here, are groundless and empty.

We take a piece of charcoal to the policy and obliterate them with a toe-curling scrrrch, scrrrch... But we still have too much yapping. We can safely scratch out any policy that blatantly ignores common sense and instead barks up the political correctness tree, because these things are supposed to be political announcements and not a bunch of pissed up blokes on a righteous pub rant. So, "The Tories have also pledged to end the "politically correct" trend of sending children with special needs to mainstream schools...", that can go too. Scrrrch, scrrrch. And the entire asylum seekers debate can be erased until we have some difficult and meaningful political thought on the subject from someone...anyone.

Well, we have purged ourselves of much of the Tory detritus here, so we need to attack both main parties in one fell swoop. This is straight forward - all we do is scratch off the bribes. Both sides are rubbing the toes of the UK's pensioners with council tax deductions and rebates. Labour are promising flash-bang investments in the fashionable sciences, but we have already crossed this one out under our numerical claims rule. Also, "Teenagers are being offered up to £30 a week to stay on at school or college under the government's education maintenance allowance scheme." Bye bye brer bribe...scrrrch, scrrrch. If only the little bastards could vote, right?

Outrageously vague promises can be ignored. Pledging two hundred million billion pounds, or whatever the hell the figures are, to the NHS does nothing but prove that neither side still do not know how to maintain a working healthcare system. But it is worth noting that, unlike Labour, the Tories wish to scrap healthcare targets. This does not help a single dying patient and reeks of "so what would sound good to the voters and doesn't cost anything?", but is the Right thing to do nonetheless. Elsewhere, "The government says it can spend more on frontline services by cutting back on unnecessary bureaucracy." Goody! We all hate red tape!

Some of the policies overlap. As any schooboy knows, when you have two identical components on both sides of the equation, you cancel them out and -- provided the ADD pills haven't kicked in -- chuck them over a bunsen burner and frighten the girls in the corner. Maternity pay, environmental policy, ID cards, organised crime, pensions and war all have too many similarities for comfort, blurring the arguments at a low level and allowing only a few a-bomb policies to light up the sky. This is amounting to little more than a willy-waving firework display.

Okay...pick up your pieces of paper, dust off the excess charcoal and see what is left.

Anything?

Anything?

Huddling Round the Verbal Campfire

Right, this is important. This is your arbiter of ultimate truth demanding your attention... We are here to clear up some confusion some people have on the page and the screen with frequently used interjections, onomatopoeia, internet chat phrases and the like. Perhaps these things are a matter of opinion, but I do not Care.

Firstly, “Oh-oh!” is spelled “Uh-oh!” This should be obvious, given the broken phonetics of the first version.

“Hurray!” is spelled “Hooray!”, whilst “Hoorah!” is actually “Hurrah!”

These things make a difference. The latter, for instance, conveys the sheer medieval exuberance of the word brilliantly, whilst the misspelled version sounds more like an also-ran search engine.

“Hehe” is not a description of laughter in reaction to something you read on the Internet; it is an old man clearing his throat of accumulated tar.

“Leet” is complete gibberish.

“God damn it” and “goddamnit” are all very well, but “goddamn it” just looks more elegant, okay? And “Goddam it” is just wrong.

These are simple standards. Some, though, are worthy of debate. How, for instance, do you convey somebody throwing up in a word? Being sick is an experience that we all have experienced, but generally most of us hang our head over the bowl and quietly let the chunks be blown forth.

The only sound we can record is that of water hitting water and this is No Fun when it comes to the written word. Our vomiters must use their voices. And so “hurrgh!”, “raaaalph!”, “bleugh!”, “glaaaaarreerrrugh!” and “Good lord, this isn’t much fun, is it?” are some suggestions, but there must be more evocative renditions out there.

There was a scene in the first novel of the science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf in which one of protagonist Dave Lister’s friends throws up in long, drawn-out and carefully documented style. This was fairly evocative but only truly came to life on the audiobook...a brain-squashing sound narrated impeccably by Spitting Image veteran Chris Barrie. He is, after all, a Professional...to paraphrase the late Hunter S Thompson, who is soon due to leave his last mark on this earth at a ceremony in which his ashes will be shot into the air from a cannon in the shape of a massive Gonzo two-thumbed fist. Really.

Expressions of written low-level disgust are also varied. Their function is to express the humble tut in a more precise way. Thus we have “pff”, “pshaw”, “huh”, “grr”, “tch” and, for the more advanced and subtle writer, “fff”. This last one is the sound of vague annoyance deflating into a shrug and has been best exploited by author Mil Millington.

Shouts of exclamation, pain and disgust can be fun on the page. “Eek!”, “Argh!”, “urgh!” “yowser!”, “eugh!”, “ick!”, “yoiks!”, “oof!”, “blam!”, “ker-splat!”... Ah, but we appear to have strayed into Batman fighting terminology.

Indeed, them’s fighting words...and we can express a punch in the face in many ways, each subtlely different. “Wallop”, “whack”, “thunk”, “slap”, “bonk”, “donk” and “pop” to name but however many I just typed.

Even more varied is the ways we can express the sound of the sexual act in words.

Ye gods...is that the time already?

Stepping Back Onto the Long Road

Despite the budget gaining much favour with the grey vote and the recent disposal of Howard Flight, Labour’s lead was yesterday cut to three points. We have to ask the question...do these events affect what people think about the parties?

Hmm...of course the answer is yes, to some degree, so we have to be more precise here. How long term is the average voter’s memory? References to the war, a subject of overwhelming emotional response that at the time threatened to sink the government, seem now to be vague and concerned only with the fear of George Bush’s next move. So would Labour’s slim lead be any fatter if they had previously reigned in their chest-beating US bum-suckery?

But the political beast is a lot less compartmentalised than that. These events, these weapons that beat our leaders and are used by our leaders to beat the other side, are not some extraneous organ we can pluck out of the body and examine whilst the body carries on as normal. We cannot consider the heart without considering the blood it pumps through the brain.

Right. I have no idea what the hell that meant and I am pretty sure you don’t either. Let’s try and gather this into a ball... Okay. Here’s a fact. If Labour did not take us to war in the past, a basic understanding of alternate histories tells us that this would not translate into an instant n-point change here in the present. The wonderful world of what-ifs does not work like that because events are not discrete entities. They are interconnected in a swamp of infinite cause and effect. You cannot remove a meatball from underneath the spaghetti without disturbing the mozzarella.

Whoops...come back! I seem to need scraping off the bottom of some rotten science fiction barrel here...

Anyway, this is why many of us cannot help but follow every last swing of the Swingometer, despite being stricken with the apathy resulting from New Labour stripping us of any sense of us being able to control our environment, leaving us beaten and broken before the ballot box. The average election is a gambler’s wet dream and a nightmare rolled into one. I saw the odds yesterday, chalked onto some blackboard in a Guardian photograph. With Labour seen as a shoo-in, the Tories were riding on a generous 7-1. Hell, surely the Money is tempted to sniff around those odds, especially at this early stage.

Because the result is not going to be as obvious as has been anticipated for the last year. Since Labour are going to spend the election throwing around low-level fears based on the latter years of the last Tory government, this means a smart Tory front bench simply needs a couple of Fear-based H-bombs to set the agenda. An apocalyse of terror...rubbing together the right sticks to create a bad spark to light the fire that sends a mushroom cloud up to the heavens. It could be done, and the sky would be a little darker...put simply, if this scenario came to pass, Labour would not have lost the election, the Tories would have won it.

Meanwhile, our good friend Robert Kilroy-Silk appeared in a one-hour documentary in which he deigned to spend a week living within the gypsy society. He came across as we anticipated and the programme will not have changed anyone’s mind about the man.

Now, the rules for broadcasting political material states that a certain balance must be maintained when an election is called...Rory Bremner slipped under the wire last week to remind us of this fact , saying that from next week he couldn’t describe New Labour as a bunch of nasty, cynical and greedy sons of bitches...without applying the same labels to the other side.

So with Kilroy having spectacularly failed to prove himself as a Good Man whilst visiting a gypsy site, we must now have balance. True, Kilroy is an irrelevance. Furthermore, we have been here before, with politicians trying to play the media in a variety of silly Let’s Pretend scenarios (Michael Portillo living for a week as single mother, for example), but what have they done for us lately?

The answer is obvious. Blair must be filmed on an anti-war march. He must get his hands dirty repainting old For Sale signs, assembling at Hyde Park Corner and chanting slogans such as “Bollocks To Me”. It would be piece of television that would keep Channel Four Top 50 list shows in business for years. In the following excerpt Tony Blair meets a student, inevitably called Rupert.

Blair: And why are you here?

Rupert: Yeah, I’m here because I want to tell Blair that we are sick of him and his warmongering!

Blair: Go on then, I’m Tony Blair, and in a very real sense I’m listening.

Rupert: Ha ha! Yes, very good. But seriously mate, what a shoddy mask. What did you do, drop it in a vat of acid?

Blair: Mask?

Rupert looks closely at the guy and then performs a classic double take...leaping cartoon-like into the air, his back arching and his eyes extending to a yard in length in Blair’s direction whilst he screams like the girlie sidekick in a B-Movie. Then he picks up a shovel.

Elsewhere, Charles Kennedy could hold his nose and infiltrate the Daily Mail, while Micheel Howard could pop round for tea chez Van Helsing. And bored camera crews would follow them around and producers would lick their lips and viewers would scratch their balls and switch over to Footballers’ Wives. Trouble is, no matter how satisfying it would be for the Dear Leader to be seen toadying up to the peasants, we only watch these things when it stars some twisted jabbering idiot at whom we can laugh and point.

Newsnight was busy last night doing some laughing and pointing of their own. In an exciting new election strand about voter apathy, they spend three minutes sneering at some Nottingham Trent students who live in a house together. Laugh! At the first year student who makes his own clothes. Cry! As the students react to the ponderous line of questioning with clueless sub-Oxbridge opinions. Snigger! As some young people in the north talk in comical non-London accents...

Well, balls to Newsnight. This pisspoor “light-hearted” strand is obnoxious and condescending and consists mainly of intrusive shots of saucepans that Haven’t Been Washed for Days. This is not insight. This is pointless and smug and stinks up this normally respectable programme.

Why should I care? I have no idea, of course, but when good journalism starts to ditch insight for bad stereotyping you have to wonder what the hell is going on. Easy target, them students.

Ah well. There is lots of bad journalism to come, lots of simplistic graphics to dazzle us and lots of politicians trying to twist the reporting to their own benefit. Labour politicians will feature in tedious “What’s On Your iPod?” articles and will fail to give the only dignified answer “who fucking cares?”

But there will be plenty of good journalism too. Interesting analysis, entertaining commentary about desperate vote-grabbing, searing condemnations and thoughtful and useful interviews. And to this I say – to borrow a toe-curling Americanism – bring it on.

Life Cycle of the Common Temporary

Paperwork flies through the air like planes over Gatwick...swooping and darting from office to office, file to file, folder to folder. Hopefully some will land in the right place; there is an audit tomorrow and we need our ducks in a row, not squabbling over bread at an old woman’s feet.

There is much to sort out, but whenever I stand up ready to launch into a buerocratic shock and awe, I am overcome with weariness and fall back into the chair. The chair rolls backwards and rotates slowly like some rubbish ride at a grim travelling funfair. I end up facing the filing cabinets. Their sight does not inspire me and I let out a theatrical sigh.

By this time I am getting Funny Looks.

So I rifle through a briefing that needs to be put in the right folder and find the photocopy of an old article from the Evening Standard denouncing our station as the most dangerous in London (based on data supplied by the British Transport Police). I discover that you are fifty per cent more likely to be involved in an incident of violent crime here than at the second worst station.

This is unsurprising and provides us with the hard evidence behind the sense of unease in which I have previously indulged. Put simply, this whole place feels rotten. The people, the place, the job...all rotten. There is woodworm here and it has burrowed its way into all of our heads now.

Let’s see...I have been here somewhere around eleven weeks. Last Thursday was the first day I experienced that overwhelming force, the desire to get the hell out of this place that always creeps up on me while temping at any given place.

No...that’s not entirely true. There was that one other time a few weeks ago when I had that feeling, documented here, which soon passed when the catalyst for the situation was proven the next day to be Bollocks. But if we bet without such false alarms, Thursday was when I felt the bad force this time. So on Saturday I bought a bottle of Ardbeg single malt and drank a silent toast to my own ineptitude in being too gutless to quit.

The life cycle of any temporary administration job seems to be the same. It begins with a feeling of resentment that your period of resting between jobs is about to end. No more stolen weeks sitting cross-legged on the sofa, nibbling at a doughnut and drinking coffee whilst the latest edition of Your Property Is Not Painted A Fashionable Colour rumbles along in the background. You realise in some abstract way that you need the money, but your first thought is to turn the job down. Not near enough to home, or it involves too much phonework, or the hours are inconvenient...all masking the One True Reason. You know that the world should be paying you for idling around at home and tossing off the occasional bon mot over cocktails in the evening and generally being a tip-top charming epicurist, wit and gentleman of derring-do and high adventure. Generally by this time you have gone fucking nuts and need to be slapped back into reality.

Once you overcome this cabin fever you ring the agency back and meekly agree to your 37 hours a week.

The first few days go by fast and you feel Good. You learn a few names and find out who must be Avoided at all costs. You do not rock the boat and make waves, and instead concentrate on working out what all this new terminology means. What the hell is a SPAD? Is it an acronym or a verb? And why do all your passengers start screaming when you indulge in a furtive one? Ah...because that signal was at red for a reason. Whoops.

After the first week, the feelings sour as you fall into a routine and discover that you are inessential. This is crushing for many reasons. Chiefly, it is the mundanity of your role, the wretched pointlessness of your attendance, and the clinging darkness in which you exist as each tick of the clock tears into your soul like a knife, gouges out a generous chunk and tosses it out of the nearest window.

If your office even has a damn window, that is. But when your workload is light, or merely repetitive, you look at the clock every five minutes and discover that time has come to a grinding halt. This is an horrifying paradox...you are more aware than ever of the passage of time and indeed your life, but you are also cursing the fact that time has become stuck like an obese man in a water slide. How do you break this deadlock? What can kickstart reality and get it purring in a nice, safe medium gear?

Yes, it is time to rearrange your desk. Somewhere around the third week you rearrange like you have never rearranged before. You consider whether the scissors look best in that subsection of the stationery holder, or that one. You try and do like you have read on various job descriptions by “creating new procedures”, which means half-heartedly sorting the contents of your in-tray into different box files and then dumping them in somebody else’s office.

By this time you feel you have been working there for months, if not years. The calendar reveals you have been in the office for a total of fifteen days. You jaw drops so heavily it disappears through the carpet with an audible pop and brains a typist on the floor below.

At week six the thousand-mile stare appears. You are no longer conscious of your actions and begin to turn into Norman Stanley Fletcher, telling yourself you are just biding your time, my son, biding your time.

By week nine you have found a way to pass the time that looks like you are working. More weblogs start this way than for any other reason.

After three months you wake up from your stupor, look around in quiet desperation and realise that there is so much going on in the world and you are still raking around the same old coals. You find your hand flying to your mouth to suppress a scream. You begin jabbering to yourself, sweat beads on your forehead and you can no longer comprehend what the hell all this paper surrounding you is for.

Wiping away the sweat you grab the nearest thing from your in tray and realise it is something you have been putting off dealing with for weeks. Bug-eyed and grinning madly, you tear it up into tiny pieces and push it right to the bottom of the bin. Then you do it again, and again, until suddenly you have “dealt with” more work in ten minutes than the last month put together. Your colleagues begin to watch in confusion as you chuckle and mutter insanely to yourself, your face beginning to resemble Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther films when he hears that Inspector Clouseau has been assigned to the case.

By now you are on a downward slope and are no good to anyone. Then somebody asks you to do some typing...there is a job advertisement to write. You begin to read, and notice with twisted amusement that the job is similar to yours, only embellished into something that sounds useful. Then you realise this is your job; they are finding someone permanent to fill your post. And this was how they were letting you know you were no longer required. You silently wonder why the manager didn’t just pull a lever under his desk and catapult you out the window.

“Are you going to apply for it?” asks a colleague.

Instead of replying, you begin to giggle, gently at first, but soon building to a raging crescendo of broken mirth. Then your head slumps onto the desk as if you have been shot from behind.

“Jesus!” the colleague screams. “He’s gone into some kind of coma! Where’s the list of qualified first aiders? Who was supposed to type it up, laminate it and stick it up on the wall?”

For a moment a humourless smile plays around your lips as you lapse into blissful unconsciousness. The life cycle is over...

...only to begin again in a few weeks. One of these days you really will put in that application form to be an astronaut, but for now the agency will sort you out. They always do.