The Madding Crowd

If you want an example of how irrational mobs can be, or of the effects of peer pressure on the unthinking masses, you need look no further than ‘the big non-event’ of yesterday as the multitudes offered prayers and good wishes for the recovery of Fabrice Muamba, a young man they do not know, will never meet and who has probably already earned more than they will in a lifetime. (Where did ‘soak the rich’ go, all of a sudden?)

To make matters worse, several people attracted opprobrium on social networks, in some cases extending to death threats, for voicing their lack of concern. Okay, I suppose it’s never clever to say you hope somebody dies, but to have outrage directed at you for saying you just don’t care is utterly ridiculous.

At around 124,000 heart attacks per year (from British Heart foundation 2010 Stats), the lucky Mr Muamba is the only one I heard about yesterday. Lucky? Of course, he had his in front of a crowd with full medical support available. I wonder how many lonely bodies will be discovered in empty houses over the next few days?

But that’s the problem with a mob. (Hitler and Scargill both exploited crowd psychology.) They cease to behave as individuals and adopt a single, thoughtless mind. Like drunks in a brawl they convince themselves that whatever they are baying about is now the single most important issue facing mankind. It’s not. Whatever it is, it’s never that. They use words like ‘solidarity’, whereas ‘brainwashing’ is far more accurate. Crowds never exercise reason; in fact they always demonstrate the loss of it.

Take the student march yesterday – yes there actually was some other news – a rabble roused by rhetoric; children protesting about things they really don’t understand. Student walkout? Who would notice? A good illustration, however, of how youthful vigour is wasted on the young. Education, kiddies, just as with other public sector services, has to earn its place. If you get funding for an extended childhood, how many others will have their lives cut shorter by lack of medical care?

It’s the perennial budgetary balancing act and Labour’s apparent faith in somehow, magicking up money from thin air to pay for nationalised dependency is nothing other than opportunity politics, playing to an unthinking crowd and relying on mob mentality to bellow out the slogans.

When I was a kid, I didn’t get the Superman logo – I couldn’t see the big, red ‘S’ and instead tried to make sense of the yellow bits. Somebody had spent time and effort in creating that symbol and here I was, unable to recognise what it represented.

The Super Mum logo

I'm like that about a lot of things, I don’t accept them at face value, so I spend time working them out – and usually I find I actually missed nothing important. Maybe that’s why I rarely empathise with a crowd. Maybe that’s why I despise the huddled masses, with their hands ever out for succour and their voices raised, using words they don’t know the meaning of.

What’s keeping you enslaved, masses, is not The State, but your own state of sleepwalking helplessness. So, it’s time to wake up, stand on your own two feet and stop seeking the largesse of others. Tie your own shoe laces, brothers and sisters. Stand together and stand tall. Repeat after me, “We are all individuals! We are all equally worthless!” Now, piss off out of it and be nice to your mothers.

The cost of kindness

In the spirit of being the bloody nice bloke I really am, I've just been over the road to sort out a little electrical job. All free, gratis and for nothing, naturally, because that is what neighbours do. Before anybody starts getting ideas, I am not a charity and it's only because I accidentally answered my front door, expecting a delivery, that any of this happened. I'm just not good at saying 'no', which is yet another, damned good reason to avoid any contact with you needy humans. (Plus, you don't need to shit on your own doorstep - who knows who they know?)

It was about eleven in the morning, the heating was full on, despite being practically tee-shirt weather, the 'lady of the house was still in a dressing gown and the kids were all sitting round the telly. (I took no pleasure at all in turning off the power.) When I say 'all' in reference to the kids, I only mean all that were there. It turns out there are six sprogs altogether. I don't know how they afford it. Or, rather, I don't know how they would be able to afford it if they had to pay for them. But of course, it's you and I, the taxpayers who pick up the tab.

And yes, it was all there. Enormous flat-screen telly, all manner of X-boy-play-game-station-thingies, Blu-Ray, huge leather suite, range cooker, computers in every room. Not bad for an occasional cash-in-hand roofer. Couldn't work full-time, of course, otherwise they'd be too tired to have stand-up rows in the street at three in the morning on a bi-weekly basis. Bless.

To be fair, they are not horrible people, as such and I suppose it's not their fault that they exist and subsist in the way they do. But it is somebody's fault and people who serve no useful purpose should simply not exist in a responsible, civilised society.

Actually, they did offer to pay me, but I am a genuinely decent cove and graciously declined. Besides, I worked out I'd have to work longer hours at my own job in order to pay enough tax to cover the costs. I reckon £20 in their pockets probably represents at least a couple of hundred out of ours, by the time you've paid for the bloated excesses of all involved in the game of stealing from the not-rich in order to give to the not-poor.

Of course, to be liable for two hundred squids-worth of tax I'd have to earn a grand - at basic rate. Jesus, I'm glad I didn't accept anything - it would have cost me a fortune!

Meet the neighbours

Twitter Buggers

So, earlier today I received an unsolicited tweet from a cyclist. I’d followed him because, well, he’s a cyclist and i own a bike or three. I don’t recall actually having any form of intercourse with him, but I’d read his blog and all that good Twitter community stuff you do and I’m not certain, but the fact that he replied to me kind of implies that he must have followed me back, at least for a while.

Well, I’ve been having a touch of the Twitterbugs of late and noticed that, quite frequently, I appear to have ‘unfollowed’ somebody without any intent on my part and I know that others have experienced the same thing. It’s a recognised issue with the site and leads to much furrowing of brows and wringing of hands. Followers are a bit like pets and it’s always a bugger when you have to start sticking flyers on lampposts.

Twitter seems to be quite even-handed about its auto-unfollow ‘feature’ because recently my account has been operating a nightclub bouncer policy of one-in, one-out. That is, as I steadily gain followers (yes, I know, some people are so naïve and easily pleased!) nonetheless my total rises at a much slower rate. Typically I get four or five on board and lose three over the side over a couple of days.

Obviously, you lose followers all the time; Twitter’s a funny old place, brimming with those on the lookout for a good bit of offence-taking and it doesn’t take a lot of provocation to flick that switch. I’m sure there are some Tweeters who’s entire raison d’etre is outrage – often on behalf of unknown others. But when they leave it’s usually with a flounce and a pout and announced to the Twitterverse with a flourish and a well-placed and witty 'fuck off!'.

Anyway, this morning, quite early, I tweeted to nobody in particular about the seeming randomness of the unfollow actions. Pretty quickly my ex-pet cyclist hit me with a terse [quote] “There is nothing random about people unfollowing you.” No squabble, no follow-up (pun intended), no ‘gotcha’. Thinking I might have misinterpreted a jolly jape – oh what wags we are on Twitter - I asked if I’d done/said anything to upset him and quick as a flash he came back with… no reply.

If he had ever followed me he was following me no longer. (I say, ‘he’ he could be a granny in Kilmarnock for all I know!) Anyway, I couldn’t help myself. Given that he had unfollowed me and therefore was no longer my bestest buddy and all that, I felt I could finally say something I’d held back for fear of causing umbrage. The penis (again, pun intended) mightier than the sword indeed. I alerted him to a spelling mistake on his profile. Oh, sweet victory

And although I never heard from 'Karl' again, I know s/he read my tweet because that profile is now all spelled-up, proper like. By the way, I’m still following; That’ll teach her as she cycles home to Kilmarnock!

They seek him here...

The problem with The Scarlet Pimpernel is nobody expects The Scarlet Pimpernel...  

Oh, wait. Wrong historical farce. I’ll come in again.

They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek him… you get the picture. I was asked yesterday why I hide behind a pseudonym. Am I afraid of being revealed? Why anonymity? I say, why not? Ask Reg Dwight, Roy Harold Scherer Jr. Marion Morrison and Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. 

My inquisitor declared that hiding behind a pseudonym was common amongst right-wing tweeters. I say there’s a conspiracy theory lurking within every personal agenda and I’m sure, if I bothered to look, I’d find exactly the same phenomenon amongst left-wing tweeters. (Or just tweeters in general.) But I can’t be bothered to look because, in the main, I’d rather chat to people I can have a rational exchange with.

And there’s your problem, right there, mate. Yeah, wot it is, right, it’s like, we’ve already, like, decided, innit? There is little point in a Left arguing with a Right as both are ideologically opposed. As open-minded as I believe I am, there are some left-wing beliefs that leave me gape-mawed in astonishment. There’s as much chance of finding agreement between Muslims and Jews, or between chimps and wombats.

Which brings us back to Batsby. Once upon a time, many years ago, I adopted the forum name of ‘dingbat’. It wasn’t sinister – everybody had forum names. I used it to register on the multitude of sites which require a user name and I set up a similarly anonymous email address to deal with any spam. On one such site, the name dingbat was already taken, so I ended up with Batsby, from which, as I lived in West Yorkshire at the time, my pen-name of Bryan Battersby not so much evolved as ‘arrived’.

For the record, I rarely use my real name online, I don’t own any loyalty cards and I pay for my shopping in cash; I have no interest in telling Tesco how to target me. I use different email addresses for different types of interaction and I don’t answer the door or the phone to cold-callers. I have nothing to hide, but neither have I anything to gain from standing naked in public.

I don’t believe that spy satellites follow my every move and I don’t really own a tinfoil hat, although the Bacofoil is near at hand, just in case. I write what I believe – or what I think is funny or entertaining - you are free to agree, reject, applaud, ignore or block me (like Billy Bragg just did). There is no point in busting a gut to hate me or the people I find agreeable company. (Incidentally, I loathe extremists at all points of the compass.)

But, in the interest of transparency I’m going to finally come clean. I’m not actually a balding, greying, middle-aged loser… I am, in fact, a fourteen-year-old girl called J’anice Beaver, hoping to lure in balding, greying middle-aged losers for fun and frolics. And cash.

Skype me!

Hulk Hoseban

It’s mid March, we’ve had a dry winter and already there’s a hosepipe ban in some regions. For fuck’s sake, there are barren, desert locations, where it hasn’t rained for generations, with better water management. I imagine a colony on the planet Mercury would cope immeasurably better than Britain. And even the horrors of Hades don't extend to not being able to water your geraniums.

When I write ‘Britain’ I do of course exclude Caledonia, whose internationally renowned wateriness is second only to standing under Niagara Falls for ten minutes every day... twice. They say Scotland has two kinds of weather – ‘raining’ and ‘about to rain’. This is somewhat unfair and untrue: I once visited Scotland and it never rained at all. (It was a Monday. 1976)

Asking people to save water by thinking about it and being sensible and abstemious – shower, rather than bath, turn off taps, stop washing your kids tee-shirt every bloody time he takes it off, etc – is about as effective as asking people to only spend what money they actually have; to save for a rainy day (okay, bad example). Nobody thinks they are part of the problem. 

And of course, people will ignore a hosepipe ban the way they ignore any rules if they think they won’t get caught and nobody will get hurt. If imposing bans was an effective course of action then we could have simply banned crime, sickness, thickness and Socialism and our Albion would indeed be a green and pleasant land, albeit with some dry, brown patches.

But here in the United Dingdom we take rules seriously and to that end I shall immediately desist from bathing, flush once a day, save up my pee for the garden, wear my underpants for two days (two days more than usual, that is), never wash the car or the windows (like I ever do either!), drink only cold drinks - all that wasted steam - and save up my bitter tears for desalination and re-absorption/seasoning later.

Oh yes, I’m doing my bit all right; come this summer's traditional riot season it certainly won’t be my fault if the police water cannon runs dry.