The Door That Hits Your Arse

"My boss was an alcoholic drug dealer who at times kept his loaded .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol on his desk, in full view of anyone walking through the area. Two of his friends recently died while snorting cocaine with him. My boss, unfortunately, lived." -- from toxicboss.com.

But before we get to that, we have some other business to which we must attend, because now is the time to yield a sigh and say "So, farewell then, Candyman."

Indeed, Danny Baker has broadcast his final show...for now, at least. The man named Disk Jockey of the Year at the Sony Awards this year has sailed away for the beaches of Florida, where he will work on what he describes as a film script for Channel 5.

Well...them's the facts...and let us leave that behind and start bellowing loudly at the radio for a station to give us a breakfast presenter who is even half as any good as the Baker.

This is not going to happen. We all know why, there is no need to jabber on here. It's not a question of demographics, of moronic laddish shite or twisted committee-based thinking...the simple fact is that, out there in the grim prairie land of talk-based radio, there is nobody else who is slightly Good Enough.

Christ...this is hard work. Ever try writing while following a football match? The words tumble and collapse like dominos and resist any attempt to prop them up into lines of sense.

To hell with it. This has been a strange weekend of highs and lows and I am still unsure what to make of it all. My throat is sore and thick clouds have hung low across the sky all day, yet I feel good right now. And I will feel better soon once I tell my boss where to stick his job...something to which I was alluding in my previous post in head-scratchingly oblique fashion.

I will not quit in spectacular fashion because they already know I will be leaving. But it will be made harder because I have already been offered a couple of thousand extra to stay...but I find that there is no part of me that cares about the money in this case. The job stinks.

Other people have quit their jobs in a more entertaining fashion.

In the Seinfeld episode "The Revenge" George quits his job.

"That's it. This is it. I'm done. Through. It's over. I'm gone. Finished. Over. I will never work for you again. Look at you. You think you're an important man? Is that what you think? You are a laughing stock. You are a joke. These people are laughing at you. You're nothing! You have no brains, no ability, nothing! I quit!"

Now that's good quitting. This is the dream of every man in every job out there.

And I look around now and find that a large amount of people leave their job entirely because of their boss. That is not why I am going to leave...but a new boss came in recently and has sent me into a bad tailspin from which my attitude in this job can never recover.

Ah, but this is useless bellyaching - other people have it much worse. The example I used at the start of this thing is worrying enough, but the Internet bleeds profusely with stories of this nature. Degredation, power, sex-craziness and sleaze all coagulate into a bad substance that stalks the factory floor and leaps down the throat of anyone who dares go into full-time employment.

Let us wallow in a couple of examples.

"About my sister, who was dying of cancer, [he said] 'God, it's taking your sister so long to die!'" -- from npr.org

My first day, I showed up in a suit and heels. The atmosphere was very formal; everybody called each other "Mr." and "Ms." When I met my boss (the president's wife), the first thing out of her mouth after "Hello" was "You talked so proper on the phone, I thought you were white." -- from etiquettehell.com.

And so on.

Well...the light outside is beginning to fade, I have been picking at this post for an eternity and my eyes are burning with some rotten strain...once again I will come to a close before coming to any kind of conclusion, but what the hell, eh?

These Are Truly the Last Days

"Sometimes it's important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it's essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow." -- Douglas Pagels

Soon, my friend, soon.

Apple Blossoms Fall Under Endless Sky

Carrot and cashew nuts for a mid-morning snack? Has it come to this?

These days I rarely snack on junk food. Sure, this is betting without the recent run of nasty McDonalds I recently ate, but I had an excuse...I had vouchers. If the burger is free it doesn’t contain any calories, right?

Certain foods have an unusual property. Just as a song can take you back to the place you first heard it, food can catapult you back in time to your childhood when sweets were Good and all drinks were carbonated. These sensory trips to childhood are few and far between because I how differently I now eat; in fact I have changed my habits substantially even over the last couple of months. So it is worth swimming about in this subject for a while...examine a few of the catalysts that would be required for one of these sensory trips.

Hmm...having decided to write about it I realise that this is what Nigel Slater did in his Toast autobiography. This is one of the very few autobiographies I have enjoyed. The hazy, almost woozy sense of a childhood being one long hot summer of apple blossom and wild grass and strange encounters in the wood...few people can genuinely claim to have this memory. But we all have a soft spot for that atmosphere and this book wallows in the stuff.

Nigel writes about his childhood here through the lens of food, taking a particular dish for each chapter and spinning his stories around that theme. It sounds like an irritating conceit but in practice this turns out to be as good as any way of finding one’s way into the psyche. So Toast becomes a wonderful dirty little book full of little pleasures, sexual fumblings and lost vagueness. There is an sense of hunger on every page with many sensory explorations of the food, but what really comes alive is the sense of innocence...at turns charming, sad and naughty.

Indeed...but I am being sidetracked here. Let us force some memories onto the page.

One combination of food that conjures up memories is a glass of Coke and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. This takes me back to the beer garden of a pub in Lincolnshire...a garden of picnic tables, swings and endless grass. The concept of pub to me at that young age was not the adult one of the charming provider of the Good Juice...it was the imperious building you never went inside that had a place to play outside. We visited the place frequently in the summer at weekends away from Sheffield...but if I ever returned I would discover a place of rotten beer surrounding by a crappy little enclosure full of repulsive screaming lungs on legs.

Sherbert Fountains take me back to playing strange games in the woods; jumping over ditches on a rope swing and swapping tales of abandoned car hulks and secret fields. Hmm...strange how there was always this field somewhere nearby that nobody could find anymore, and if it was found it would be better than discovering Atlantis. But it was only a field. What would we have done had we found it? Would there have been fireworks as we frolicked and gambolled like sheep? More likely we would have stood and picked our noses whilst waiting for someone to invent Playstations. It was the mystery that captivated us more than anything.

What else? Mushy peas remind me of old Christmasses. Back then, the good television seemed to go on forever, as did the snacks and fizzy grape juice, the photo albums and grandmotherly stories, and my father’s political arguments with my great Aunt. She relished a good debate. She never had an agenda, a political point to prove; she did it for fun. I would listen in wonder how she could end a debate putting forward precisely the opposite of the one with which she had started without letting you think you were ever right.

You do have to be careful with this kind of thing. It is a minefield for the lazy nostalgia freak; for every ten people who remember buying sweets by the quarter from proper sweet shops every day, only one person actually ever did this. This is entirely the fault of second-hand nostalgia that bombards us from television. After being told for the tenth time that a particular talking head thought that Battle of the Planets was the best cartoon ever, we begin to believe we saw every episode and even begin to conjure false memories of sitting down every Saturday to watch it. It was the same with Doctor Who – the new series of which is impressive and fun – I nod sagely at every reference to our shared memories of how good the Tom Baker years were, but fuck only knows whether I watched it or not. If I did, I do not remember any of it. The power of suggestion...

Well, I have finished the carrot and cashew nuts now and I am still hungry. To hell with childhood food. All I want now is a nice grown up lunch.

Please Don’t Show Me Your Panties

You know what? We don’t care who was the first to print a Sudoku puzzle, we don’t care what’s on your iPod, we don’t care what Pete Doherty does in his free time, we don’t care that you feel strongly about Britain’s negative attitude towards Eurovision, we don’t care how much earlier you got into a band than we did and we don’t care that some famous people are contributing to a weblog.

We don’t care that you think the working or middle or upper classes are unfairly maligned, we don’t care that you believe first time buyers should “pull themselves together”, we don’t care that you do not understand why a band is so underrated, we don’t care how much cheaper you bought something because you “shopped around”, we don’t care whether a joke is politically incorrect or not and we don’t care that you were in fact “secretly a little pro-war.”

We don’t care how “loaded” the latest DVD is with extras, we don’t care that you think “happy slapping” is something more valid than common assault, we don’t care which celebrities turned up to watch a new film, we don’t care about your psychological theories about randomised playlists, we don’t care what either Gallagher brother thinks about the state of modern music and we don’t care how you resemble a character from whatever women’s show is presently fashionable.

We don’t care how naughty you were last night with regards to your diet, we don’t care that you believe you have the angle on something because you prefix it with “so-called”, we don’t care for your views on whether or not adults should play computer games, we don’t care if something is live and exclusive and we don’t care that you add a sneer to your voice every time you refer to “foodies”.

We don’t care whether we have a choice of hospitals, we don’t care what jokes you were forwarded in your email, we don't care that you believe the world should bend over backwards to provide choice for fussy eaters, we don’t care that another washed-up hack wishes to defend “chav” culture, we don’t care to read a re-worded press release disguised as a news story and we don’t care that you finish a sentence with “in my opinion” as if this somehow validates your ill-thought out crap.

But why should you care?

Sit down, You're Safe Now

The room was hazy with collective depression...bad vibes had struck everyone independently and soon the fog became thick enough to slice up and chuck out the window at passers-by. Nobody knows why the week tumbled into such a rotten place...hell, newspaper reports were claiming that today was the best day of the year. Shit...If that was the best day, I’m off for a walk in the woods with my revolver.

Unpleasant situations were cropping up all over the office. For three hours this morning the place was made useless and deafening by a series of fire alarm tests. It was hellish...many silent screams of frustration were overheard by the telepathists today, who went scuttling off in shock to the nearest monastery and will need to spend the next year hiding under the bed before they are able to claw back their sanity. The smart money is on the Piano Man having spent the last few years working in our office.

But whatever the reason, when the bad planets align the only thing to do is grimace and bear it.

Through the gloom, then, came the sound of a CD player. And what son of a bitch chose this elevator music? This is wrong, wrong, wrong, goddamn it. This is King Wrong, Lord of the Wrongs, Wrongford, Valley of the Wrongs, Wrong Kong Phooey, the Book of Five Wrongs, the Hunchback of Notre Wrong, the Postman Only Wrongs Twice...it’s just wrong. The only explanation is somebody has brought in a CD of Ceefax music, the type of diseased lounge music they play at night when BBC2 is too weary to broadcast real programmes. Either that or a bunch of Satanists are spooling a cassette of lift music backwards through some kind of fire-damaged, urine-soaked tape deck.

Lift music of course has been derided by every half-arsed comedian in the last twenty years. Perhaps it is part of the ongoing campaign by the service industry to fill up our lives with a barrage of noise and information. Nowhere should be safe, they decide...wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you must be shouted at, you must be informed that a new product is out, you must be played across the room like a fucking chat show guest... no space is sacred.

So if we are going to be fucked over this way for the rest of our lives, can we not at least take control over the content of such bad noise? Lift music should be less ambient for a start. Music must only ever take one of three forms...stuff to listen to, stuff to dance to and stuff to get high to. Anything else is a waste of scales. So we cannot have lifts being filled with the kind of crap with no beginning, no end and no balls. We need a jukebox of some kind...

The songs must be short, ideally the length of the lift ride...although this could prove impractical in your average busy skyscraper when the lift stops at every floor. But very short songs do exist, and They Might Be Giants formulated a series of such songs near the end of their Apollo 18 album under the Fingertips banner...generally one or two lines of lyrics, lasting on average ten seconds. This would be ideal but perhaps a little disconcerting for the nervous travellers when their lift begins to sing “everything is catching on fire” to them in a cheerful tone.

Any jukebox has the potential to cause arguments, and in such an enclosed space this would prove lethal. So the simple solution would be to create a mix tape of songs with appropriate lyrics...”The Only Way is Up” by Yazz would be suitable, although it may distress anyone getting in on the top floor. And everyone else, to be honest. “Get Higher” by Black Grape, “Welcome to the Machine” by Pink Floyd and “To the Moon and Back” by Savage Garden would all work well.

Some songs must be avoided. “The Man Who Fell To Earth” by David Bowie, “Sink to the Bottom” by Fountains of Wayne and “Metal Machine Music” by Lou Reed should all be avoided because they would frighten people or, in the latter case, because it is shit.

But I would rather the music in a lift simply provided a little sanctuary, a tiny box of sanity in a world of turmoil. We need to provide an atmosphere of beauty without lapsing into blank dinner party ambience. Being in a lift is one of the few times strangers are forced to share such an intimate space without being kinky, so we must make the situation as relaxing as possible without actually having to talk to one other...after all, we do have standards. Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain album would be ideal, as would anything by Nightmares on Wax or the early Massive Attack. And did Brian Eno ever do a Music for Lifts?

Well, whatever. The only trouble is that if we provide such spaces of wonder and togetherness then people will never want to leave...everybody will be late for work. So perhaps it is for the best that we want to get the hell out of that infernal box before the music drives us to the inevitable belly full of Jack Daniels and paracetamol. Or perhaps that is one rationalisation too far.

On the other hand, you could always walk, you lazy bastard.

Darwin Rolls His Eyes

Last week there were dinosaurs prowling the station as part of a godawful advertising promotion for Microsoft. What the hell? Do they still do this kind of dressing up box marketing, illustrated eloquently on the Simpsons with Barney Gumble handing out pamphlets in a nappy?

Apparently so. A bunch of paunchy men in suits and a plastic monster head, unable to speak and dying a little inside every time a passing schoolchild kicks them in the shins. Ye gods. It was like Mr Benn had been twisted inside out and fucked over by the shopkeeper’s malevolent twin brother from a bad dimension. For the most part they stood there with arms outstretched and being ignored by commuters who, it must be pointed out, would wander through a field of pink elephants without batting an eyelid if it were on the route to work. But these dinosaurs had a point to make and a handful of leaflets with which to convince us. We are being told that if we use software that came out more than ten minutes ago we are all going to die in a massive meteor attack, or whatever.

Well, balls to them. I refuse to be leafletted by a bloody metaphor. Their point is lost in a blizzard of red tape and cheap companies...the full Office package is used by, well, offices. The expense is astronomical; your Everyman walking through the station is not going to hand over a bundle of notes for such a bag of bad plastic, and if by a stroke of fortune they attracted the attention of an IT buyer...well, Brer Geek would already know the score on the software front and will have already been slapped down by the man in charge of the budget anyway.

Their campaign is flawed in general. This morning I saw that they are advertising on the tube. This is done with a story told through pictures and speech bubbles containing text roughly half the size of the small print in the neighbouring insurance advert. The adverts highlight a manner of working in the modern office that is now outdated...fucking up replying to one’s email, having to wait for a response email...all that kind of stuff. This is small beer and will sell no “product”. A few puffed-up rights management features do not highlight the supposed gulf of understand between your lumbering dinosaur and your jacked-in techno-sorcerer (or whatever bollocks the smug technophile writers are calling the seven or eight people in the world these days who bother keeping up with computing).

The campaign is based on the concept of progress. They forget that this is exactly the same message implicit in every advert ever...you need this new thing because it’s new. We are wise to this message and discern between products based on more than its age. At least we should do, and if we do not we deserve to have our wallets picked by these arseholes.

Microsoft is not sure which image they wish to promote. Here they want to project an image of being thoroughly modern, but do not notice that everyone feels that the company are themselves lumbering...too big, too slow to change and frankly too able to frighten the shit out of anyone who tries to escape their clutches. There is much bad publicity in the files and they hope that most of it flew past us all unnoticed. They are wrong because if they wish to monopolise our hard drives then they can only ever be the Necessary Evil at which we have been lashing out for years.

And they often wish to be seen as achingly hip...a company of goatee-bearded Silicon Valley posse of informal friends who just happen to be collaborating on Something Frightfully Cool. But Apple promote this cynical image far better, partially because of Steve Jobs’ embarrassing posturing and partially because they realise that many people are stupid enough to think that buying something pretty and shiny makes them more Tuned In, Stylish and Discerning than the general public. Hmm...which goes against our earlier point about the wisdom of consumers. Perhaps these campaigns are not flawed; they are, in fact, successfully turning our weaknesses against us. A result of the fashionable concept of status anxiety.

Hmm...these are strange waters of pop psychology and I think I should swim for the shore. I don’t know. This may be bitterness; I am still wrestling with Windows 95 at work and every time I see somebody with anything newer I can’t help but turning into an ugly Cockney washerwoman and sneering “Oooh, ‘ark at Mr Fancypants in his flash new motor.”

What a thought. Time to shake the weird images from my head and find something to eat.

What The Bleep We Do Know

“Most surprisingly, photographs of water crystals published by Masaru Emoto of Japan are shown as evidence that the structure of water can be changed by good or bad thoughts.” – The Guardian, in an article about the film What The Bleep Do We Know?!

Well...having just re-read that sentence, the water in my cup should be turning the colour of horse shit right about now. But this rotten and false science highlighted by the Guardian is not a harmless distraction; this kind of gibberish is becoming a political issue.

Oh, really? When examining the differences between left and right, the subject that comes up most is the concept of the free market and capitalism in general. Most of us feel uneasy with the dark facets of humanity that capitalism lets us glimpse through its twisted prism, but if it acts as a mirror then we cannot assign it blame. We are the ones being reflected; the system we have is the system we have grown to need.

So capitalism does not actively change us; we change it to suit ourselves. So we have to examine it without recourse to criticisms of the left and right, who both exist in an eternal yearning to change mankind into something that reflects their own viewpoint.

Or at least, somebody else has to examine it. I have a note from my mother. Because the one political division that seems to be affecting people’s minds more than anything else is the division between those who dismiss the kind of crap quoted up at the top and those who base policy on such things.

Issues such as evolution being taught in schools as fact and the Catholic church’s teachings on condoms highlight the reason why we should be concerned. Namely, the way in which these things are used by people to further their agendas to dangerous extremes. Tolerance of ideas and beliefs incompatible with science only goes so far into the realm of the positive; when the Other Side takes science and pervert it to prop up a pile of idiotic and frequently profitable drivel, then we must get mad and punish these liars. Politicians hate the truth because it allows people to challenge them. And science provides people with that truth. So by spinning gibberish they are able promote their most cherished beliefs that in an enlightened society would be laughed out onto the street before you can say Gillian McKeith.

Ah, but before I jabber on any more, I shall retire to the stands and let the proper scientists quoted in the Guardian article speak for themselves about why What The Bleep Do We Know is rotten to the core.

’...It is full of half-truths and misleading analogies, and some of its so-called scientific claims are downright lies...The water experiment is junk pseudo-science of the worst kind and has never been replicated by a mainstream scientist.’ – Simon Singh, PhD.

’One can see how the current US political situation came to exist (Ban guns to cut crime? Nah...just say “Om”)...and one can also understand why the political status quo has such a vested interest in suppressing quality education for the masses.’ – Dr Joao Migueijo.

’This film is even more pretentious than it is boring. And it is stupifyingly boring – unless, of course, you are fooled by its New Age fakery, in which case it might indeed be – as many innocent dupes have started – “Life changing”’. – Richard Dawkins.

Lives changed through the power of lies; a concept that sends shivers running down the spine. Of course, these scientists would not be so riled if the film did not have such pretension to scientific fact. We cannot let this “New Age fakery” take the place of genuine science...we need to arm ourselves and destroy this shit for good before our brains, as one, dribble out of our ears and down the nearest drain. Let entertainment do its thing, but lies are one thing we must never tolerate.

Harold Pinter's Crazy Cathedral of Wonder

The new Harold Pinter poetry collection, Don't Talk To Me About War, is finally out. He's a very good playwright, you see, so he has more insight than you. You do not agree?

(pause)

Then you had better fuck off, you phillistine. The rest of us shall prostrate ourselves before him as he presents this little sampler of the book, which contains his latest four thousand poems, lavishly illustrated with a biro and a photograph of Pinter's collection of very big cheques from the Guardian for every time he sits down for a couple of minutes to write his latest searing insight into the modern world. He's a very good playwright, you see.

War by Harold Pinter, the very good playwright.

war
broken bones lie in shit
bombs falls all around
like the cunts they are

god i am against war
i am you know
really

Truth by Harold Pinter, the very good playwright.

truth
is an elusive
master
yet that does not alter
the fact that you are
fat

bitch

Tanks by Harold Pinter, the very good playwright.

tanks
oooh, they make my blood boil
they are death machines on wheels
except they're not wheels
er...

did i mention how much i hate Bush?

Beauty by Harold Pinter, the very good playwright.

if i
had a nose like yours
i would
slash my head off
with a razor

happy birthday

Conclusion

If you do not buy this book, then you are no better than They are, you bloody terrorist.

Gone to Ground

A dark cloud rode in from the shore in the days after the election. Charles Kennedy, Michael Howard and the Dear Leader himself...they were all feeling fearful and bruised after the campaign, only for a hearse full of fresh hell to descend.

There is paranoia in the trenches. The public is no longer to be trusted...although, for once, the exit polls were. How the hell can they understand us now? Blair put his faith in us and we Let Him Down by having our own opinion on the war. And we were a tricky nettle to grasp from Howard’s perspective...he never did find out exactly what we were thinking.

But Charles Kennedy is the most cheerful of the three. His party did well, but he will be brooding more than ever about what the party would have achieved under proportional representation. The Independent’s front page today is concerned with this, which is more than the Liberals gave the impression of doing during their campaign – a calculated omission to stop the public twirling their index fingers at their temples and muttering “oh no, not again”.

Tony Blair, though, is nursing a bad headache; he sits in his office surrounded by election detritus – a ripped poster here, an unconscious PA on the sofa there – and believes that the world is out to get him. He is worried because he fought a campaign focusing on what the party has achieved and how the Tories would shat on it. This was their strategy, to avoid focusing on Blair...and now the strategy takes its revenge. He is the lonely king on his throne who escaped the battlefield only to find all his subjects have been slain...or, indeed, have found other flags to worship.

A quick head massage and an encouraging pat upon the rump from Peter Mandelson will cure his headache. And once that has passed his choices are stark. He will either turn his grimace up to 11 and dig in for a few years until a few local elections yank the rug out from the party’s demeanour, whereupon he will disappear like a rat down a drainpipe. Or he will flick a nervous glance over the Atlantic and wonder whether George Bush can keep his signature away from the more military documents...perhaps he will realise he cannot tread the same tightrope of legality as last time now that the whole country is throwing stones. He will then heave a sigh and let Brown have his day.

The latter is unlikely because he feels he is Right, and the world is Wrong. His response over Iraq bears this out. New Labour is his party, and along with his inner circle he has controlled every nuance, every facial tic of the government for the last 8 years. To leave now would not be the actions of such a man; he needs his legacy, even if the hand of history on his shoulder is executing a Vulcan nerve pinch.

The Tories, though, have bigger problems. Michael Howard’s leaky boat has finally sprung a massive leak; Oliver Letwin, Nicolas “Fatty” Soames and Tim Yeo have all resigned, with Howard himself deciding to step down once they work out how the hell a successor can be elected.

Howard is too dejected to keep bailing and this means, according to Tory donors and senior figures, that he is failing to capitalise on the government’s post-election “moment of weakness” (the Guardian). In fact nobody wishes to lift their head above the parapet right now and this is no surprise...Blair has nothing to say about his rivals because they both were successful in acquiring votes from Labour. Kennedy and Howard have nothing to say about each other because the results show how little voters moved between the two parties...their paths barely crossed in the end. And they do not attack Blair because, after all, he won.

The remaining parties are irrelevant...even Galloway, who won in Bethnal Green & Bow, exposed himself as the minnow he is by “doing a Kilroy”, sabotaging his interview with a series of silly playground responses that he believed was in some way standing up to the dreaded Paxman. Paxman, of course, gave him very short shrift and then, bored with Galloway’s non-answers, turned away and started to talk to someone else.

But we were talking about Howard. He is presently confused over whether his immigration campaign was fundamentally flawed or not; tales from the doorstep suggest that he was wrong to back down on immigration towards the end of the campaign. But he has also realised that many non-core voters were alienated by the immigration stance. So what is a poor bigoted immigrant leader to do? Well... we already know the answer to that. Follow Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague down into the needle-strewn alley down behind Tory headquarters where all the bloodied and beaten souls gather, the ones who took on Blair’s overwhelming and omnipotent Chaos Engine only to be drowned out by the thumping of pistons and the broadcasting of endless sound and fury.

Despite sleek metal blades and pipes belching thick smoke, this machine is a harvester more than a thing of war. It is able to pull voters up from neighbouring fields and claim them as its own. People who would vote Tory but have the nagging feeling that Labour is achieving their dirty little agendas better than the real party of the right. Tactical voters who dislike the Tories and centre left voters who would vote Lib Dem if only they thought they had a chance. Pragmatists who haven’t seen anything Evil escape from the machine’s sights to feel they need to cast a more extreme vote.

Above all, the machine has been efficient...but its insurance policy has a brutal force majeure clause that kicked in over Iraq and ever since the party has had difficulty in rebuilding the damaged components. The engine blew a few gaskets too once the blueprints began to circulate...the public began to understand the arts used by Labour to control its environment, and felt uneasy when they saw how they were being manipulated.

Hmm. A strange metaphor and one that deserved to be worked at sometime, if only for the elegance of the Victorian steampunk imagery. But all I have now is flights of fantasy; I missed the weekend papers and so I was unable to soak up the immediate aftermath of the election. I do not know how the media reacted except for the 3am edition of the Guardian on the morning after. Some of the writers were filing stories as late as 2am, which meant the paper was able to treat the election as over bar the shouting. The trouble is that the media used up all the interesting analysis during the campaign. With all the what-ifs already explored, they now have little to do but dig around in the dirt for any meagre new facts about the figures.

From my perspective, I discovered the most important result on Friday night whilst sat in a blues bar in Amsterdam. When all the votes were counted, Wild Turkey beat Jim Beam by a considerable margin...although there was interference by a group of 50 year old women from Nottinghamshire who bothered the returning officer with requests to hold their cardigans whilst they go and dance to a calypso version of Hotel California.

Hurdy ho. Of course there are other stories about Amsterdam but I realise that most people have exactly the same stories, so it seems pointless to rake over those coals. After the fiftieth anecdote about space cakes the audience begin to defocus somewhat... All I need say is that the Bulldog is a fine hostel with an admirable 24 hour policy and a staff who know precisely what its clients want from a weekend in Amsterdam. And we will leave it at that.

A Secret Fuel Tank Appears

Jenson Button is a man who drives cars a lot. After the San Marino grand prix the other day it was discovered his car had a secret second fuel tank...and officials gathered round in a circle and thrashed Button with sticks until he gave them him wallet.

This is all tied up with his car being underweight when drained of fuel, but this is all bad gibberish in a sport that is nothing but a thousand page rulebook growing fatter by the day. As far as I can see the future of Formula One is going to be identical cars driven by clones and raced on giant Scalextric tracks at constant speeds. The winner would be decided by whoever has raised the most sponsorship cash. Trebles all round!

The idea of a secret fuel tank is intriguing, however, and has a future now as a dubious political metaphor. Labour would not have fitted one. Many people suggest that it was in Labour’s interest to play the election as low key as possible, stirring up apathy to prevent any potential protest voting. The last thing they wanted is for the oppositions to whip up the country into a nation of banshees, screaming for Tony Blair at every turn. But the Conservatives were unable to strike any such chords with their shrieking and empty campaign. So Labour could coast to victory; they would not need a reserve fuel supply to keep them going later on with unexpected revelations and promises. Even doddering ex-satirists agree...David Frost said today that William Whitelaw once told him that “the Labour Party is stirring up apathy all over this country.” Nice phrase.

The subject of the war was the Liberal Democrat’s secret fuel tank, and when they began pumping that gas they were able to build on their burgeoning visibility and, along with the serendipitous Goldsmith revelations, were soon tearing down the straight and burning sweet rubber on the trickier corners.

And what of the Conservatives? Well...they ran out of gas after the first couple of weeks and went skidding off into the hay. Even now Michael Howard is being hosed down with water as he throws his helmet to the ground in disgust and self-pity.

Ah, if only the real election had been so arresting.

Hold on, hold on...something doesn’t feel right. We have been nodding and tapping our noses knowingly for weeks now about how this election campaign is a writhing hell of tedium stretched to breaking point by lacklustre campaigning and cynical name-calling. But we are taking this to mean far more than it does, as if a “boring” election means the politicans are failing somehow to campaign properly. What the hell do we expect? The greatest show on earth with fire-breathing monkeys, a glittering parade of celebrities stripping off and a thousand elephants?

The implication we see here is that there have not been spectacles, fights, confrontations. But these things should not be engineered. Bear in mind that both main parties have much in common, a large overlap somewhere around the centre right. It may not be the campaigns themselves but the fact that many aspects of the election feel worn and second hand. The strange rumblings over postal vote fraud feels tiresome because this was the key theme of the US elections. Furthermore the fact that we are on a slow march towards a Labour victory – a predicted tiny majority that last time became a respectable landslide – also bores us. This is hardly a stick with which to beat the parties. And why are we trying to find fault here anyway? Local politicians are campaigning the usual way, whilst the government put out posters and make speeches designed to catch the leering eye of the news. It is not the politics that is creating a vacuum...it is simply where we are today, the confluence of society, media, demographics and recent history.

We have been heading this way for a while. Just as religion in England began to fade in the latter half of the twentieth century, so did the division between right and left. No...that’s not quite right. It is more the way the popular right and left have needed to compromise to achieve success. People no longer consciously place themselves on the left or the right, so the parties have adapted to this more pragmatic frame of mind. Extremism always peters out in the long run.

Or perhaps the attitude conveyed in the popular media has rubbed off on the public...if they say it is boring, we agree. Our perception of the election is generally governed by the media, and so the luxury of their seen-it-all-before ennui becomes our dinner party argument.

Meanwhile, we keep hearing that we should vote to give Blair a bloody nose. Balls. What happened to voting for or against an actual party? If you disagree with how Labour run the country, vote them out. Voting for or against Blair is ridiculous...why vote against Blair despite wanting Labour to stay in? It is nonsense and practically academic since the smart money is on Blair only staying around for a couple more years.

Okay, that’s it. No more sound and fury on the long road left to holler into the void. Another drunken swim across the surface of a strange pond, with no direction and no purpose. I do not care. I was unable to go in any deeper this time because of circumstance. So let us leave it at that. Tomorrow I will be abroad and I would consider it a great favour if I could get to the airport without finding out who won. That shit can wait until next week.

Too Drunk to Think of a Title

I was all set to cast an eye over a strange recurrence in this election – the one in which we are told time and again that we are voting for or against Tony Blair rather than his party – but I have spent the last hour brooding over my own future and this has left me drained of the will to concentrate. I spunked the rest of my energy away on office matters. All I am broadcasting now is static and silence; the afternoon is not my strong point.

Okay...so I make a decision whether to continue. I have already examined the day’s election coverage and I have forgotten it all. Something about Labour’s brittle lead in the polls and Boris Johnson borrowing a car. Perhaps all the journalistic puddle-stomping over the issue of tactical voting has dulled my senses. This is not an avenue I can go down today.

Besides, the campaigns that I pronounced dead so many weeks ago have not been resurrected. Despite all the jokes about vampires, being undead would be a promotion for Michael Howard right now. So to hell with the election; it will not come into my orbit again until next week now that I have cast my postal vote. I will be playing poker on election night and then I will flee the country the next morning, possibly ending up on a plane and screaming “move over, tubby!” at a dumb-struck Tony Blair. I return from Amsterdam on Sunday night into the cold and prickly atmosphere of an election comedown.

Ah, hell. I cannot speak a word of Dutch and I know little about Amsterdam. And I am likely to be boarding the plane on Friday with a hangover you could photograph, buffeted by winds of bad nausea and thumping brain hammers. I am grateful that I am a Good flyer, otherwise that morning would see me being chopped into tiny pieces by grinning razorblades of circumstance. But that is a story that will be told at a later date, perhaps as evidence at an obscenity trial... For now we will treat this post as a write-off and go back to wishing the day away.

Hold on, though, instead of putting out this weird drone about bad energy, perhaps I need to use this time to construct a thought or two from the hurricane’s eye. Nail down precisely what the hell is afflicting me.

But that is simple. This is a tiny airless office with no windows and an air conditioning unit that pumps out fast food grease instead of fresh air. At the end of the day I feel like the inside of a chip pan...last week it took me three hours to pick the lumps of batter out of my hair.

And I naturally concentrate more in the morning. At university, during the exam season, I would wake up and spend an hour in bed working. Nobody else would be around and the bar would not be open for hours. Then, after a brief trip to the library mid-morning, I spent the rest of the day guilt-free. I would dance across the campus singing “hullo birds, hullo sky”, throwing freshly picked flowers at those who spent seven hours in the library in that blind panic that convinces you that staring at the same page for five hours is somehow Working. I do not know how my strategy worked so well, but it worked all the same. Except when they threw things back at me.

The gift I have, on reflection, is to know precisely how much work is enough, and then proceed calmly and swiftly. And once I hit that mark I toss the files into the fire and go play on the swings. On the night before my last ever two exams, I went out, had a curry and got blind drunk. And I passed...nothing spectacular, but I know that the worst thing I could have done was to have stayed at home that night trying to cram whilst sweating like a pig. And my overall mark for the whole of the degree was precisely enough and no more to get a 2.1. If I had written one more bad word or doodled one more smartarse comment on the page marked “this is a blank page”, I may have slipped down a classification.

But a fat fucking lot of good a 2.1 has done me since.

Something bothers me about receiving a good degree, though, since I could not have written down a single original thought during my time there. In a nutshell, I paraphrased and summarised my way to modest success. I look back now and wish I had engaged more with the subject matter, spent good time ploughing through the book list and constructing new and possibly ridiculous arguments...anything, so long as I was creating something new.

And that seems to be the bottom line. I want to create, but I have been in this swamp of inactivity so long that the mud has got into the fuel line...every time I try and engage the engine it splutters and dies.

So that’s it. With phrases such as “vicious circle” and “self-inflicted” circling my head all I can do now is wait until the day I finally give myself the kick up the arse I sorely need.