Round the bend

Multi-tasking? Some days it is all I can do to watch the telly AND listen to it; I tend to drift off. As the old saw goes “Sometime, oi sits an’ oi thinks. Sometimes, oi jes’ sits...” And when it comes to driving, it’s a hard enough thing to do properly anyway, without added distractions such as scenery, passengers, other cars and the radio. The radio, you say, surely that’s not much of a distraction but, trust me, it’s tricky. I have often had to forego the details of a piece of radio drama, or a searing political analysis in order to concentrate on negotiating the new road layout around roadworks, or even to just creep forward, three yards at a time, in the regular snarl-ups that constitute motorway travel in Britain today.

When Britain’s first motorway, which later became the M6, opened in 1958 (as old as me and just as slow) people travelled out from Preston to wait on bridges and wave at the cars below. Such was the novelty. Today, people travel miles to avoid the clogged arteries of the wheezy old transport network. It’s a tedious drag, fraught with peril as lane-hoppers, tail-gaters and a mad procession of vehicular morons try to kill you as you’re trying to concentrate on the weather forecast and it’s not often I agree with the Daily Mirror but we are in the midst of a new epidemic of stupidity and selfishness and downright criminal negligence.

What is so novel about mobile communications that dribbling morons will queue for days to own a device that ultimately appears to own them? Some people are so attached to their electronic owner I suspect they rely on it to tell them when to breathe in and out. And even the sanest can find it next to impossible not to check their screen every few minutes. So it’s little wonder that there is a rising toll of death due to telephone on Britain’s roads. They are talking about bigger fines, but I’d suggest an on-the-spot day in a cell and your car impounded for a week... along with your phone.

The roads were dangerous enough with just British morons on them but down here in the southeast you are just as likely to be taken out by a Latvian as by a home-grown lunatic. You have to wonder whether the standard of their driving test is the equivalent of ours, not that the acquisition of a full licence necessarily says anything about competence, but we’ve all seen those Russian dashcam videos. Maybe everybody should follow the good example of a young Pole, Janusz, who recently applied for a UK driving licence.

As a pre-requisite he had to undertake a medical examination, including an eye test. In the consulting room the doctor dimmed the lights and on the opposite wall illuminated the eye test chart. “Read the top line for me, please.” Janusz was instructed, which he duly did with ease. Then with alternate eyes covered he was asked to read lower and smaller-font lines until the doc was satisfied. Finally, the doctor gave him a card with the tiny letters: 'C Z W I X N O S T A C Z.' “Can you read this?” he was asked. Janusz grinned and replied “Read it? He’s a friend of mine!”

Round the bend

Multi-tasking? Some days it is all I can do to watch the telly AND listen to it; I tend to drift off. As the old saw goes “Sometime, oi sits an’ oi thinks. Sometimes, oi jes’ sits...” And when it comes to driving, it’s a hard enough thing to do properly anyway, without added distractions such as scenery, passengers, other cars and the radio. The radio, you say, surely that’s not much of a distraction but, trust me, it’s tricky. I have often had to forego the details of a piece of radio drama, or a searing political analysis in order to concentrate on negotiating the new road layout around roadworks, or even to just creep forward, three yards at a time, in the regular snarl-ups that constitute motorway travel in Britain today.

When Britain’s first motorway, which later became the M6, opened in 1958 (as old as me and just as slow) people travelled out from Preston to wait on bridges and wave at the cars below. Such was the novelty. Today, people travel miles to avoid the clogged arteries of the wheezy old transport network. It’s a tedious drag, fraught with peril as lane-hoppers, tail-gaters and a mad procession of vehicular morons try to kill you as you’re trying to concentrate on the weather forecast and it’s not often I agree with the Daily Mirror but we are in the midst of a new epidemic of stupidity and selfishness and downright criminal negligence.

What is so novel about mobile communications that dribbling morons will queue for days to own a device that ultimately appears to own them? Some people are so attached to their electronic owner I suspect they rely on it to tell them when to breathe in and out. And even the sanest can find it next to impossible not to check their screen every few minutes. So it’s little wonder that there is a rising toll of death due to telephone on Britain’s roads. They are talking about bigger fines, but I’d suggest an on-the-spot day in a cell and your car impounded for a week... along with your phone.

The roads were dangerous enough with just British morons on them but down here in the southeast you are just as likely to be taken out by a Latvian as by a home-grown lunatic. You have to wonder whether the standard of their driving test is the equivalent of ours, not that the acquisition of a full licence necessarily says anything about competence, but we’ve all seen those Russian dashcam videos. Maybe everybody should follow the good example of a young Pole, Janusz, who recently applied for a UK driving licence.

As a pre-requisite he had to undertake a medical examination, including an eye test. In the consulting room the doctor dimmed the lights and on the opposite wall illuminated the eye test chart. “Read the top line for me, please.” Janusz was instructed, which he duly did with ease. Then with alternate eyes covered he was asked to read lower and smaller-font lines until the doc was satisfied. Finally, the doctor gave him a card with the tiny letters: 'C Z W I X N O S T A C Z.' “Can you read this?” he was asked. Janusz grinned and replied “Read it? He’s a friend of mine!”

Confirmed!

During the course of the last couple of days I have heard or read reports of some person or other, in respect of a healthy exchange of views, of ‘ripping them apart’ or, of ‘tearing them a new arsehole’. Invariably, when you click on the link and watch the events themselves – Prime Minister’s Questions, for instance – you wonder if you are actually watching the same thing as the poster of the link thought they saw. Did Jeremy Corbyn really ‘wipe the floor’ with Theresa May, or did he (and she, to some extent) simple slug out their time repeating the same old mantras, waiting for the end-of-round bell?

Every day on Twitter thousands of people claim to have won arguments on totally spurious grounds; ‘I win because you called me a bad name’ or, ‘No reply? That means I win!’ or, ‘I see you have your troll army wading in... you lose’ or, and this is always the best by far, by blocking anybody who disagrees, as if putting your fingers in your ears and singing “La-la-la-laaaah!” is the ultimate Socratic clincher. Incidentally, I keep a gallery of screenshots of those who block me as a sort of trophy wall. Today’s picture is made from some of those images... just because it amuses me.

Anyway, the principle of hearing in an argument only those aspects with which you agree is known as confirmation bias. It’s bad in science and it’s bad in society but unfortunately it is a built in ‘feature’ of humanity. It’s where we get political tribalism from and why morons call for Tony Blair to be dubbed a war criminal and for Iain Duncan Smith to be tried for murder. It’s why you keep the circle of acquaintances that you do and why it is sometimes so difficult to countenance the company of those with opposing views.

It’s almost certainly why I find lefties weedy and whiny and utterly incapable of understanding the true nature of humankind. Humans are clever(ish) opportunist monkeys with a central drive of self-preservation and greed. This incisive and accurate analysis is naturally why some lefties think of me as an unreconstructed Nazi who cannot be salvaged and therefore must be disposed of. I expect they would have me gassed if they could.

Every now and then, however, somebody surprises me and I stumble across a concord with another which goes beyond politics and life-view and in whose company entirely opposing dispositions go almost without comment. But such encounters are rare; we all tend to drift along on our own little raft of preconceptions and sooner or later I find the sanctimony of the worshippers at the holy church of the NHS gets too mawkish to bear.

No, really, this is all true!(link)

Anyway, I watched yesterday’s PMQs and it followed the same old script. JC managed to get in an email from an admirer and repeatedly bleated on about ‘segregation at eleven years old’ as if the proposal was to separate kids into barbed wire enclosed work camps (like they did when he was at grammar school!) and the PM reiterated the government intention to provide good school places for all. But if you think Jeremy Corbyn ‘wiped the floor’ with Theresa May yesterday, it just proves you are a dangerous, untrustworthy, gullible, communist fool!

PS: If you are a dangerous, untrustworthy, gullible, communist fool you may want to avail yourself of a dictionary and look up ‘irony’, ‘satire’ and ‘block’.

It’s Just Not British

What caught my eye yesterday was the you-couldn’t-make-it-up story about one Louise Raw who was angered by a pie. Yep, a pie. It seems pie are no longer just squared, they are also racist. Think about this for a moment; racist pie. What next, misogynist mousse, sexist soufflé? It can surely only be a matter of hours before it is all blamed on Brexit and the referendum results overturned, the Gregorian calendar returned to Julian and all the brown people relocated in their mud huts. Then and only then will the outrage brigade be satisfied. What am I saying; they will never be satisfied.

It’s only the frivolity of this idiotic offence-seeking that has taken the edge off the worst thing to happen to Britain in a generation. Yes, Bake Off is fucking off to Channel 4, minus its most important ingredients – Mel & Sue. Okay, I admit I’ve never watched it but ‘er indoors is actually incapable of functioning without it, as are millions of others. It can only be a matter of time before reports of various fragile conditions being triggered begin to overwhelm the emergency services. “Hello, ma’am, police here. What seems to be the problem? Not rising, you say? We’ll despatch an armed biscotti unit immediately.”

I’ve almost finished reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling, his affectionate follow up to Notes From a Small Island and even Bill, while still clearly in love with the dear old thing, knows that she’s lost the plot. The mostly calm, understated, stoic and tolerant land of just forty years ago has become a rabid, frothing extremist; a placard-wielding, social justice tribal warrior with the intellect of a slug, the energy of a slug and the charisma of... you get the picture. Vibrancy is one of those attractively-sounding attributes that turns out to just means noise. See also, multiculturalism

We British used to be fascinatingly dull on the surface with all the fervour buttoned up and hidden away; maybe this is how we were able to sneak up on history and ambush it so often. As small boys we were being trained for empire and those woggles, toggles and tabs in our Baden Powell socks hid a determination to succeed. Hell, we even openly carried knives, without any public outrage, so that come what may we were always prepared. No stick left un-whittled. But put all that enthusiasm on the surface and we’re no better than Johnny Foreigner, with all their public displays of emotion.

Remember, Remember Empire Day, the 24th of May

And today they are sticking the knife in David Cameron, a perfectly honourable man with honest intentions and a sense of humour, to boot. What happened to quietly and methodically eradicating all traces of your predecessor without drawing too much attention to it all? Nah, you can stuff your progress and your vibrancy where the sun never sets. Let’s resurrect Empire Day... because it is something to be proud of. Slice of pie, anybody?

Sweet Charity

When I was growing up it was all about Africa. Every other Blue Peter appeal to our generous, privileged, juvenile, western sensibilities was about a famine in some god-forsaken semi-desert hellhole. Pictures of the bloated bellies of malnourished infants from Biafra then Sahel then Ethiopia were broadcast to play on heartstrings, with the intention of capturing sympathy and pocket money. Parents berated English kids for not eating their greens with the oft-repeated “starving children in Africa would be glad of that broccoli...” I dare say it still happens today.

But sod that, I thought; I might have collected thousands of milk bottle tops to try and buy a guide dog for the blind, or recycled newspapers for some other domestic fund-raiser, but the more I heard about and saw of the situation in Africa, the less I really cared. As Gilbert O’Sullivan sang in 1971 “When I'm drinking my Bonaparte Shandy, eating more than enough apple pies, will I glance at my screen and see real human beings starve to death right in front of my eyes?” Yes, I thought, I very well may. But I’d have had to catch the Six o’clock News and not, like now, have it piped into my head, unbidden, via every conceivable medium, every minute of every day.

I may have been in danger of being converted, but I listened to what I was being told and learned that starving women can’t conceive... and therein lay their salvation. So, what did the do-goody-good west do? We prolonged their misery by feeding them, letting them carry on breeding and increasing their numbers so that the next famine affected far more. And by the time you’ve lived, vicariously, through three or four famines they cease to have any fascination except for the uneasy feeling that it might have been better to have let nature take its course first time round.

I’m pretty sure I’d got to this stage by the time I was around fifteen, at which point playing drums in a rock band took up all my emotional commitment. My pragmatism in deciding to fix my life before meddling in that of others only continued to harden. But here we are, knocking on for half a century later and what has changed? The same old deluded fools in the west, salving their consciences by interfering in other people’s problems, making them worse and then handing down the messy consequences to the next generation for them to deal with.

Back when I was a kid we sent money and maybe some volunteers, but it eventually turned out that the real issues were with them and their environment, their cultures, the way they dealt with their own destinies. It didn’t work. So now the ‘solution’ is to import them, their cultures and the way they deal with things into the west so that, what? So we can hope to dilute their destructive tendencies? Swamp their stupid genes with our gullible ones? From whatever honourable source the motives spring, this river is only ever going to flow in one inevitable direction; downhill. We are building our future society on the shifting sands of a cultural flood plain.

Please give generously - Alms for Islington

One day in the future will Black Blue Peter try and dip into the deep pockets of affluent African children to try and save a dying Europe from famine, war and pestilence? Will a resurgent dark continent once again become the cradle of civilisation and the salvation of the world? I don’t see it somehow, do you?