clanging chimes of doom...

I caught the last fifteen minutes of Simon Reeves' programme on the Mediterranean the other day: he was in northern Corsica, admiring a beautiful marine reserve where fishing is banned and where you cannot dive without a special scientific permit. Reeve spent the day in the reserve with a ranger, and as well as admiring the diversity of life, they spent the day chasing around after people in huge yachts who were illegally landing on the beaches, using banned jet skis and generally ignoring all of the rules that were designed to help life wildlife thrive.

It made me sad.

At the beginning of September, we spent a week in Sardinia, just an hour or so by boat south of where Reeve was in Corsica. We were there to dive the marine protection area off the North of the island. The Mediterranean is famously a bounteous ocean that has been teeming with life since ancient times. I have to say that this isn't my experience. Although the volcanic topography over and under the water makes this a stunning place to dive, the water isn't exactly teeming with life. Why? Well, perhaps some insight into that comes from the owner of the agriturismo where we were staying: he was a lovely, jovial man, but he told us that the dive shop who were taking us out each day didn't really like him or his friends because they would come diving to hunt grouper. The fact that fishing was forbidden in these protected waters clearly wasn't a problem for him. As Simon Reeve said in his programme on Sunday night, groupers are the top of the food chain in these waters, and their presence indicates that the ecosystem was healthy. I saw one solitary grouper when we were in Sardinia. The waters are increasingly barren.

To be fair, it was a little better when we made the trip one morning to dive off Corsica. Fishing isn't banned here, and we saw incongruously huge drag nets under the water, but there are quotas. Unlike in Italy, the French clearly respect these quotas and there was noticeably more life under the water, including several grouper. I've dived in the med a few times now: off Sardinia, off the Aeolian islands down by Sicily and off Malta, and it's basically been the same story each time... beautiful water and very little marine life.

I learned to dive off Cairns on the Great Barrier Reef in 2010. This is so extraordinarily beautiful, that it probably ruins you for diving anywhere else. It breaks my heart to think that subsequent global warming means that many of those dive sites are probably now filled with bleached coral and a catastrophic decline in marine diversity.

I've read in the news this week that humanity has wiped out 60% of all animal life since 1970. Just think about that for a moment. The human equivalent of that level of de-population would be to empty North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania.

And yet we frack and we deny the impact of climate change and we threaten to build walls against the waves of humanity trying to escape famine and war.

Humanity really is a plague species; a virus on the face of the earth.

think think about it....

I found myself shouting at the radio yesterday morning. I was up slightly later than normal, so when I turned the radio on in the bathroom, it was a phone-in rather than the usual breakfast news programme.  The show had obviously been on for a little while, and the debate was already well underway.  As I started to listen, I quickly gathered that the subject under discussion was Labour's shift in policy position on Britain's exit from the European Union: in a clear change of direction, the party announced on Sunday that Labour would support full participation in the EU single market and customs union during a lengthy “transitional period” that it believes could last between two and four years after the day of Britain's departure from the EU [read all about it here].

In case you hadn't noticed over the course of the fourteen months or so since the referendum, Britain's exit from the EU is a subject that continues to divide the nation.  Rarely has so much ignorance been so loudly displayed by so many people (on both sides of the debate) over such a long period of time.  Unfortunately for me, I was in the shower long enough to hear several callers give the listening audience the benefit of their opinions on the subject.

I realise that the station was actively selecting the people they put on the air and were well aware of their views and what they were likely to say, but even so, I was found it infuriating.  The callers all sounded at the older end of the station's demographic, and they all, without exception, were very firmly of the view that this change in direction seemed specifically designed to somehow sabotage the democratic will of the people to break every single possible tie to Europe.  Those Europeans have been holding us back, you see.  We've stood alone for centuries, but in the last sixty years, these people have been slowly emasculating us and robbing us of our greatness.  We need to stand alone and stand proud; people are queuing up to do trade deals with us! Obama said we would be at the back of the queue, but now Donald Trump says we will be at the front! The Ivory Coast has said what a favourable deal we could get on cocoa! We could single-handedly save the economy of Africa! (seriously... someone did actually make that point about the enormous potential of a cocoa deal with the Ivory Coast).

Ignoring the entirety of human experience for a moment, how can people be so certain in their views when they seem to know so little about the subject?

Look: I understand that more people voted to leave the EU in the referendum than voted to stay. Although I think this is an act of wilful self-harm, I'm not one of those people who thinks we should ignore the result of the vote entirely.  In fact, listening to these callers rather reinforced my view that, even if we were to stage the referendum again now, I think the leave vote would be even larger second time around.

It's just that people have read far more into the result than was on the ballot paper.

We weren't asked for our views on immigration or on the single market or the customs union or on the European Court of Justice....just on whether we wanted to be in or out of the European Union.  The fact that these are separate things is a distinction lost on most, not that this stops people sounding off about it.  Or, indeed, most of our elected politicians washing their hands of taking any real responsibility for this bloody mess.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions of course, but that doesn't mean that I have to believe that all opinions are created equal.  At least try and present a cogent, reasoned argument.  Or, come to that, present an emotional one, but don't try and dress it up with absolute nonsense. Don't talk to me about how democracy has spoken; don't tell me that my Brexit must be 'hard'  and that the people have spoken; and above all, don't trumpet your ignorance on a national radio phone-in when I'm showering. I can accept that people have different opinions to me, but try and think about them at least a little bit, eh?

You made me shout at the radio and definitely harshed my bank holiday mellow.

Ugh. What's wrong with people?

no education...

Just another normal weekend in Nottingham.

I don't care what everyone says: I think that there's nothing wrong with Britian. Education is important, but fulfilling Britians (it hurts just to type it) E-Cigarette needs is clearly importanter.

C's argument was that this shop is Danish.  I'm not sure the smiley face at the end is quite enough to cover up for that little horror.  It went down like a damp squid with me, let me tell you...

*deep sigh*.

They've actually had this sign professionally made, you know.  Sidebar: are they going to specialise in news on JME when they open?  Also, will they still take DHL parcels like the last one?  It's just around the corner from us, so that would be pretty handy.

Maybe all of these shops are owned by European immigrants living it large at this country's expense? VOTE BREXIT SO OUR SHOPS HAVE SIGNS THAT ARE GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT.

That is the main thrust of their campaign, isn't it? Although I suppose it's possible that I've missed some nuances.

of when we were young...

Young People.

A conversation at work today:

"Oh, you know that guy who looks like that tennis player?"
"The guy that looks like that tennis player? Which tennis player?"
"You know, the one who wins everything"
"Novak Djokovic?  You mean Steve? Steve doesn't really look like Novak Djokovic does he?"
"I think he does"
[we google]
"Well, look - he's shorter and hairier.  If anything, he's a cross between Djokovic and Pete Sampras."
"Who's Pete Sampras?"

Needless to say, the person who brought tennis into the conversation also had no idea who Steffi Graf, Andre Agassi, Boris Becker or Martina Navratilova were either.  Being born in the 1990s isn't an excuse for being so amazingly ignorant, is it?  Becker is in Djokovic's coaching team, for goodness sake.

In an attempt to mount a defence, he said that there are undoubtedly loads of people he could name that I wouldn't know.  I didn't disagree:

"But if they're like Miley Cyrus, you can keep them"

....at this point he brought a framed picture of Justin Bieber out of his desk drawer, and I decided that all was probably lost, made my excuses and left.

doomed to repeat...

With his son about to vote in favour of bombing Syria, now seems like a good time to remind ourselves of a couple of quotes by the late Tony Benn.

"I was born about a quarter of a mile from where we are sitting now and I was here in London during the Blitz. And every night I went down into the shelter. 500 people killed, my brother was killed, my friends were killed. And when the Charter of the UN was read to me, I was a pilot coming home in a troop ship: ‘We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.’ That was the pledge my generation gave to the younger generation and you tore it up. And it’s a war crime that’s been committed in Iraq, because there is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons."

And

"If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people"

I was lucky enough to seem him speak a few times at Glastonbury, and he was an inspiration.

I don't actually bear any ill-will towards Hilary Benn: he's entitled to his own sincerely-held views and I think that Corbyn is right to allow the members of the Parliamentary Labour Party to vote with their consciences on this issue.  What I do take issue with is when the Prime Minster of this country calls the people holding a different view to his own "terrorist sympathisers".  He's refused to apologise for the remark too, and he's demeaning the office he holds with every day he continues to hold it.

Did you see that some of the bombs we might well drop onto Syria cost nearly £800,000 each, not counting the cost of getting them them to the Middle East and then into the air on a Tornado? The cost of just one of those Storm Shadow missiles would apparently provide temporary accommodation over Christmas for all of London's rough sleepers.

The cost of a two Tornado strike mission? Well, Sky News say:

"According to a Ministry of Defence report to Parliament in 2010, each Tornado flight costs £35,000 per hour. Typically, two Tornados fly each mission, lasting anywhere between four and eight hours. So let's land somewhere in the middle: a six-hour mission costs a basic £210,000. Then we have to consider the cost of the missiles. The expected payload would be four Paveway bombs, £22,000 each, and two Brimstone missiles, £105,000 per unit. So let's say that's £508,000 per aircraft in total, just a smidgen over £1m per mission. If they carry Storm Shadows at £800,000 a pop, then the cost rises considerably...."

This is austerity Britain, remember.

"If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people"

You'd think, wouldn't you?

Flagellation, regulation, integrations, Meditations, United Nations, Congratulations....

There are lots of strange things happening in British politics at the moment, but perhaps the most remarkable is the fact that those members of the Labour Parliamentary Party who are in favour of airstrikes on Syria are being described as "moderates", and those who are urging caution are being described as "radicals".

If you can step away from all the hysteria of the British media coverage -- including, sad to say, the Guardian and the BBC - then is Jeremy Corbyn actually saying anything particularly controversial on this subject?

Here's his statement, made after David Cameron made the case of airstrikes last week:

“The Prime Minister made a Statement to the House today making the case for a UK bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria. A copy of my response has already been circulated.We have all been horrified by the despicable attacks in Paris and are determined to see the defeat of ISIS.

“Our first priority must be the security of Britain and the safety of the British people. The issue now is whether what the Prime Minister is proposing strengthens, or undermines, our national security.

“I do not believe that the Prime Minister today made a convincing case that extending UK bombing to Syria would meet that crucial test. Nor did it satisfactorily answer the questions raised by us and the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

“In particular, the Prime Minister did not set out a coherent strategy, coordinated through the United Nations, for the defeat of ISIS. Nor has he been able to explain what credible and acceptable ground forces could retake and hold territory freed from ISIS control by an intensified air campaign.

“In my view, the Prime Minister has been unable to explain the contribution of additional UK bombing to a comprehensive negotiated political settlement of the Syrian civil war, or its likely impact on the threat of terrorist attacks in the UK.

“For these and other reasons, I do not believe the Prime Minister’s current proposal for air strikes in Syria will protect our security and therefore cannot support it."

Which part of that seems radical or unreasonable to you?

We've been down this road before, time and time again, and where has it got us?  Well.... it's got us to here.

Whilst it might be understandable for Francois Hollande to be talking of wiping the evil of ISIS from the face of the planet, I've yet to hear him explain in any detail how he plans to do this beyond throwing ordinance onto the ground indiscriminately.  I don't think there's anyone who really thinks that airstrikes are the answer, particularly not when many of the terrorists attacking us are citizens of our own countries.  How does bombing Syria address that problem? How is it not like lopping one head off the hydra only for two more to spring up in their place?

Jeremy Corbyn has come under an extraordinary amount of flak for all sorts of things since he became leader of the Labour party: not singing the national anthem, not bowing low enough at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, wearing a shell suit.... but I can't be the only one who finds it refreshing that we have someone in politics who has principles and is prepared to stick by them under sometimes intolerable seeming pressure, much of it from his own party.

I'm saying that's a Bob Dylan hat, btw.... 

Exactly what do you find in his statements on Syria that you find so disagreeable? Or perhaps you think David Cameron really has presented a compelling case.....?

You also have to admire the fact that he doesn't fall into the trap of all-too-many politicians in talking about European deaths as though they are somehow worth more than other deaths. It took a brave man to criticise the lack of media focus on the bombings in Beirut that killed at least 40 people the day before 129 people died in the Paris attacks. “Our media needs to be able to report things that happen outside Europe as well as inside Europe. A life is a life,” Surely it's hard to disagree with that?

When Corbyn declared that Britain ‘must not be drawn into responses that feed the cycle of violence and hate’, he really did sound like Obi Wan Kenobi too.

Don't get sucked into the media narrative: use your own ears and your own judgement.

I'll be gone and you'll forget...

I had my bike stolen this week.

At some point between going to bed at midnight on Monday night and coming downstairs a little before 7am the next morning, someone came into our garden, ripped the hasp of the padlock off the shed and stole our bikes. It was a pretty clean job: nothing else seemed to be missing and I couldn’t even find the screws they’d pulled out of the door to get around the padlock. They’d just come in through the back gate and probably left a couple of minutes later with our bikes. Job done. They would have clicked on the security light as they passed, but my bedroom is on the other side of the house, and I doubt I would have seen or heard a thing anyway. For all I know, my cat might have popped by for a tickle from them, the floozie.

Unfortunately, these things happen. I’ve been told that I seem remarkably phlegmatic about the theft, but to be honest, what can you do? Far better that someone breaks into my shed and nicks the bikes than tries to break into my house and nick some stuff that isn't as easily replaceable. It’s not very nice to know that someone has helped themselves to my stuff, for sure, but it feels somehow far less personal that they only went in the shed. The bikes were insured, so it’s mostly about the inconvenience.

Thanks to this burglary, and because my bike is the main vehicle for my commute, I was forced to drive to work for a couple of days this week, and I have been reminded quite how much I hate it. It’s not just the traffic, either (although it is that too: I left work on Monday night at exactly the same time as a 50-odd year old guy who rides a bike as though he’s riding a penny farthing. As I was sat in a queue of traffic at the last set of lights before I turn off the main road for home, he cycled serenely past me. So, apart from anything else, it’s just quicker on a bike, even when there isn't much congestion). I miss getting up in the morning and feeling first-hand what the day is doing. Having that fifteen-or-so minute gap between home and the office or between the office and home, when the simple act of pedalling seems to clear the mind and relieve stress. I might not exactly feel the wind in my hair, but I do get to see the turning seasons and the baby bunnies and things like that. It just felt wrong coming to work wearing a proper jacket rather than my bike stuff. Maybe I’m just a creature of habit and hated the change to my routine (showering at home in the morning? What fresh hell is this?).

Luckily for me, I had another bike in storage: the road bike that I used to use for triathlons and decided was a bit too lightweight for a daily commute. It was locked up in the storage facility with C’s really expensive bike. Last night, when C. got back from Turkey and was able to let me into the storage, I picked up that bike, pumped up the tyres and was happy to get back in my normal routine this morning. Then it becomes about the smaller inconveniences: I still have my bike lights, but the brackets they sit in were on the bike; my D-lock was attached to the bike... stuff like that, and because I got the bike on a cycle-to-work scheme, I have to inform my employer of the theft, but they clearly haven’t built a process to handle that….. ugh.

The police have told me to keep an eye on sites like eBay and Gumtree, as stolen bikes apparently often turn up on there and they don’t hold out all that much hope of catching the culprits otherwise (it happens a lot round here, I'm told.... so perhaps I'm lucky that, in all the years we've lived here, this is the first time for us.  For ages, I actually used to keep my bike under a cover outdoors, for goodness sake.

If I do see our bikes listed, it will be interesting to see how much they’re asking. I’m not sure a fairly heavily-used and very dirty commuting workhorse that you need to be a giant to ride will be worth all that much.

What a shame if it turns out to be barely worth the trouble stealing it.

land of confusion....

Some of the younger members of my team had a board game night yesterday. They came into the office clutching bags filled with games like “Settlers of Catan”, “Dead of Winter” and “Would I Lie to You?” ready for the evening ahead of them (doesn’t anybody play “The Game of Life” anymore?).

Inevitably, they ended up playing “Cards Against Humanity”

They came back into the office this morning telling stories of their night. Amongst the guests were a bunch of guys who are on the graduate training scheme. It seems that Cards Against Humanity is a bit of a struggle for your average 23 year-old graduate: apparently one of the other players had absolutely no idea what “Auschwitz” might be, didn’t know what “dysentery” was (or how to pronounce it) and was also stumped by the word “solace”

Now, I know that this game isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, and you need to be a little careful who you play with in case anyone is easily offended (although, in my experience, the person you think would like the game the least is often the one who runs away with it)…. But you’d expect most reasonably intelligent people to at least be able to understand all of the words, wouldn’t you?

Apparently not.

How is it possible to come all the way through our higher education system without even a passing knowledge of the most infamous concentration camp of them all? Isn’t that exactly the kind of stuff we should be teaching our children? Aren't we supposed to be never forgetting that sort of thing? What exactly are we teaching them? Don’t they have any intellectual curiosity, damnit?

This, remember, is the carefully selected talent that will one day be running the business and perhaps the world.

We’re doomed. No really: we’re doomed.

Children are the future, my arse.

just litter on the breeze....

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, one of the things that makes me most angry is when I cycle down the Victoria Embankment by the river Trent on my way to work and see all the litter left lying around there. This is a pleasant curve of quiet road that has the river on one side and a park on the other side. It has an adventure playground, a café and a paddling pool. It’s used for various festivals and fairs over the course of the year, and it’s a pretty nice public space (I use it every Wednesday for interval training, and I've probably run the loop around here more than anywhere else in the world).

..At least it would be nice if people didn’t park up their cars here to eat their drive-thru takeaways and then dump their rubbish out of their car windows. There are bins all the way down this road, but many people simply can’t be arsed and just toss their trash and drive off. As I cycle past it all, often within a few metres of a rubbish bin, it makes me so cross.

Grrr.

Things like this make my father-in-law cross too, and back in the day, if he saw someone dropping litter, he would pick it up and tap them on the shoulder with an “Excuse me, you’ve dropped something”. Apparently, most people were so shocked by this that they just meekly take the rubbish without a word. To be honest, I’d be worried that if you tried something like that now, the best you could hope for is to be jeered at, and the worst would probably be a smack in the face.

What’s wrong with people? Is it that they’re expecting someone else to pick it up, or that they genuinely don’t care what happens to it once they’ve discarded it? Apparently, the Highways Agency cleans up more than 180,000 sacks of litter from motorways and 'A' roads every year. Fly-tipping on land owned by Network Rail costs around £2.3 million a year to clean up and local authorities in England spend close to a billion pounds a year picking up litter. A billion pounds! To put that money into context, that money could fund 38,633 social care workers, pay the running costs of 4,400 libraries, or pay for 33,200 additional nurses (although, presumably if they did, the litter pickers would be out of work... so it's swings and roundabouts, eh?)

With Glastonbury in a couple of weeks, and before we make any social judgments about the kind of person who might dump their McDonalds drive through rubbish out of the window of their parked car, it’s probably also worth remembering that this is something that also blights something that generally prides itself on being a really green festival (and which generally has a very middle-class clientele, many of whom wouldn't dream of eating anything that came from a drive-thru).

 Festival goers at Glastonbury are constantly exhorted to “love the farm, leave no trace” and there’s a real focus on sustainability, with Green Police around to make sure you don't pee in the hedges and upset the water table. They're trying to eliminate plastic bottles from the site, and even the cutlery you get from the food outlets is made of wood rather than plastic. Clearly, the festival isn’t populated by the hippies of legend any more (far from it, it’s practically part of the social circuit now). Every year we go sees people embracing more and more culture of disposability: everything is so cheap, so why would you bother to bring it home? People dump their tents, their bags, their wellies, their clothes… pretty much anything you can think of… because they just can’t be arsed to take it home and have the hassle of washing it; it was cheap enough that they just leave it on the farm.

You can see this in the litter: there are (beautifully painted) bins everywhere, but even before the weekend has really started, the whole site is swimming in litter. Apparently, every single thing, down to the last butt end, is picked up before the cows are allowed back out onto their pasture, but some 2000 tonnes of rubbish are left behind when the festival-goers leave the site: condoms, beer cans, nitrous oxide canisters… you name it. In 2009, about 400 gazebos, 9,500 roll mats, 5,500 tents, 6,500 sleeping bags, 3,500 airbeds and 2,200 chairs were abandoned. 9,500 roll mats out of a total of around 135,000 people at the festival is a pretty damn big percentage of people leaving that stuff behind, wouldn't you say?  It makes for a sad and depressing sight on a Monday morning as you hike out to your car, That's for sure.  But, to be honest, wading through all that rubbish is depressing long before then too.

And don't get me started on all those plastic bottles that covered those remote Pacific desert islands in The Island with Bear Grylls either.... horrifying.

Ugh.  We don't deserve this planet.

---

I also found out today that our national forum reps at work, the guys who are elected in to represent employees across the country in front of the executive, decided to use their time with the leaders of the business to moan about the people who cycle to work.  Yes, because it's the bike users who cause all the damn problems in the business.  I'm sure that they're somehow responsible for the full car-parks, the congestion in and out of site and probably for global warming too.  It's because of the people who don't drive to work that car drivers are having to pay a bigger share of the workplace parking levy too.......  Honestly.  Really?  REALLY?  AND they sacked Jeremy Clarkson too.  Poor, persecuted lambs.  It must be very hard.

they do it over there but we don't do it here....

Last Friday, I went to watch some cricket at Trent Bridge. The timings of the 20:20 games this year mean that they are almost all on Friday evenings and start at 18:30, giving people a reasonable chance of getting in from work and spending the first three hours or so of their weekend having a few beers and watching a crash-bang game of hit-and-giggle cricket. Sitting immediately behind us was a group of lads in their mid-to-late twenties. There were about six of them, and they were enjoying the game and enjoying a bit of bantz over a few pints. They were mostly drinking Rekorderlig, but dubious taste in overly-sweet, coloured ciders aside, they were just like any other bunch of mates watching a game of cricket and shooting the breeze at the start of the weekend.

Except….except…. what has happened to men? Somewhere along the way, we seem to have hopelessly lost our way. I think it might be David Beckham’s fault. These guys were at a game of cricket with their mates; not, you would imagine, an occasion to get tarted up. These guys were wearing moccasins with no socks, close-fitting harem pants with the bottoms turned up over their ankles; they were wearing open collared shirts with blazers…and worst of all, they were all primped and preened to within an inch of their lives. They had neatly trimmed beards (as best as they could manage, anyway) and perfectly gelled hair. But oh my goodness, the eyebrows. The eyebrows! I understand that a thick mono-brow may not be ideal, but why on earth do men get them sharpened and plucked to the point where they look like Ken dolls from the planet Vulcan. It’s bizarre. Do guys look at other guys who have had this done and decide that this is the look they wanted? Do they think this is what women find desirable in a man? Is this what women find desirable in a man?

Perhaps I’m so old now that I’ll never understand… but what’s Andy Burnham’s excuse?

He’s 45 years old and his eyebrows are so hopelessly over-manicured that you can clearly see the natural brow line where they should be sitting; hell, you can practically see the 5 o’clock shadow. They look so fake that they might as well have been painted on. Never mind that he's an MP, he’s also from Liverpool, for goodness sake!

Is this something I should be looking into? Did I miss the man-memo? I’m not against a bit of manscaping per-se, but things are getting out of hand and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

respect....

We had a team away day today.  We were away from the office and in the genteel surroundings of the Trent Bridge Inn.  Wetherspoons pubs may be many things, but this one has the distinct advantage of at least being within short walking distance of my house.  In any case, since Wetherspoons took it over a few years ago, I think it's fair to say that it's never looked so good.

Anyway.  Amongst the things we did, we spent an hour or so either side of lunch walking along the Embankment in two teams devising (and then doing) a treasure hunt.  My team was wandering around the riverside looking for interesting things we could use as clues.  There's a war memorial here, and we paused to see what we could find.  I was transfixed and moved by a little wooden cross with a poppy on it that had clearly been fixed to the gates of the memorial on Remembrance Sunday.  It was only a humble little thing, but in faded writing on the wood of the cross was an inscription commemorating a 19 year old Able Seaman called Sidney who had lost his life at Omaha beach on D-Day.  The cross had been left by his sister, and I was touched at a devotion from an elderly lady who was remembering a brother who had died some seventy years ago.  I find things like this profoundly and quietly moving.

My contemplation was interrupted, however, by one of the members of my team coming up in front of me on the other side of the gates holding a poppy wreath.
"I found this on the floor over there"
"That's a memorial wreath.  Please put it back."
"It was over there.  Someone had just chucked it on the floor."
"It wasn't chucked on the floor, it was laid there during Remembrance Sunday last November.  Please put it back."

At this point, this 25 year old stropped off and hurled the wreath back in the general direction of where she had found it, muttering about how there was no need for me to make such a big deal about it and basically behaving like a stroppy teenager.  I could have chastised her to show some respect, but I simply explained what it was and asked her to put it back. Fair to say, I wasn't terribly impressed by her reaction.

I'm fifteen years older than this girl, but it seems to be a long fifteen years.  The Second World War ended only 29 years before I was born, but that means it was over for the best part of half a century by the time she was born, and was that much more faded from living memory.  I grew up around people who had experienced at least one World War first hand; people in my own family. This girl isn't an idiot, but the memory of the sacrifice of people like this nineteen year old sailor on D-Day and the quiet dignity of those remaining who remember them just seems somehow less relevant to her.

It's a shame.  Remembering is probably a vital part of making sure that it never happens again.  As Harry Patch said (about World War One) before he died in 2009, "It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands."

As the last veterans of these wars die, we need to keep the memories of them and the sacrifices they made alive so that it never happens again. At the going down of the sun and in the morning. We will remember them.

That's not too much to ask is it?

older...

It's my birthday on Saturday, but I'm on holiday tomorrow and so I came back from a meeting at lunchtime today to discover that my team had decorated my desk.  Balloons. Lots of balloons.  Cake. Banners. A large package in Hello Kitty wrapping paper that turned out to contain a hamper of goodies from a fantastic deli in town: parkin biscuits, chutney, piccalilli, Gentlemen's Relish, artisinal popcorn, a chocolate cigar, snacking salami.... a pretty good haul by anyone's standards.  In addition, there was plenty of cake.

And they sang me Happy Birthday.

My team joke all the time about how I'm impossibly old. Well, they are mostly in their early twenties, and as far as they're concerned, I'm old and I'm only getting older and older.  But I love the fact that they went to so much trouble.  They made a real fuss of me when I turned 40 last year, and this year they've spent the last few weeks colluding with my wife to find out what to put in the hamper they were putting together for me.  It's kind of touching, don't you think? I love my team!

The balloons turned out to be controversial.  Apparently the building police came round whilst I was in a meeting and popped the helium balloons with a pair of scissors.  They say that it's something to do with the smoke detectors in the atriums that would trigger the sprinklers if an out-of-control balloon happened to float past them... but they're not fooling anyone.  They're just killjoys and we all know it.  To be honest, I'm surprised they're allowed to use scissors.  I came back to find the popped balloons still attached sadly to their strings, which was a bit of a downer.  You think they'd be more worried about the mouse infestation in the building, to be honest.

What times are these where we can't celebrate peoples' birthdays with balloons?

O tempora!  O mores!

I predict a riot....

At some point on Friday evening, there was an explosion and a burst of fire from a manhole cover underneath a West Bridgford street.  Shortly after that, Virgin Media lost coverage across this part of town.  For us, that meant we lost internet.

Service wasn't restored until around 10pm on Sunday evening.  That meant a whole weekend without broadband.  I know.... how did we survive, right?  It wasn't so bad when my phone had a 4G signal, but when service degraded to GPRS, it was like living in the Dark Ages.  I was a bit annoyed when Virgin updated their online status this morning to say that everything had been fixed, when clearly it had not.  I rang them to see what was going on and was immediately given a £5 credit to cover the loss of service... compensation that apparently I would not have received if I hadn't rung them up.  But, you know, these things happen.  There's not a lot even the best prepared company could do to counter an underground explosion that takes out their service right?  That might take a while to fix, no?

Apparently not everyone in this leafy, affluent suburb is as understanding as me.  Apparently, the engineers working on the problem were being abused in the street as they tried to restore service.  This was no laughing matter, according to commentators on a local newswire:

Mike Buckley said – “For those thinking this isn’t a big deal, you don’t have a house full of moaning kids or rely on the internet for work, or in my case both. Virgin have been appalling dealing with this and while I’ll not bash the engineers I can see why people are frustrated. I’ll be cancelling ASAP.”

Well, thanks for that insight, Mike Buckley.

1) Middle class problem.
2) Abusing engineers working on the issue doesn't help anyone
3) Really, what could Virgin do? How would Sky or someone else have been any different in the same circumstances?  This is actually the first sustained outage from Virgin I can remember in years.

Honestly, I know that it's annoying to lose internet and things for a couple of days, but really it just shows how much we all take the service for granted that we just expect it to be there.  I'm always reminded how good our fibreoptic broadband service is when I visit my parents in Northamptonshire or my friends in Oxford.  We have it pretty good.

How thin our veneer of civilisation is: all it takes is a broadband outage or a fuel shortage or something like that and within hours people are reaching for their pitchforks and flaming torches and forming lynch mobs.

Pathetic.

That said, A WHOLE WEEKEND WITHOUT INTERNET!  ARGGGHHHHH!

Coverage has been restored, and the good people of West Bridgford have resumed the on-demand downloading of their favourite television programmes, but I don't think things cab ever be quite the same again.

children of the future....

Overheard in the gents toilets at the Rescue Rooms quiz this evening:

"Women or beer?"

"Oh, that's an easy one.  Beer.  Every time"

"Oh, it's easy to say beer now, but what about at the end of the night?"

"Beer.  A quick shag is all well and good, but beer will be there forever...."

And people say that pandas are too stupid to breed.

The future of humanity couldn't be in better hands.

space age, road rage, fast lane....

I've been cycling to work for about ten months now.  It's only four miles to work, give or take, but it soon adds up, and I've already got something like 1,500 miles on the clock already.  When you put it like that, it suddenly seems so much more worthwhile that I pulled my finger out and stopped driving to work.  Not to mention the thousands of additional calories that I've burned that I don't really need to burn.....

I enjoy it in the main, even if the vicissitudes of the British climate mean that I have got wetter in the last few weeks than I did throughout the whole of winter.

I have noticed that motorists don't really like cyclists, though.

Most of my commute is actually on cycle paths and away from roads, but it's not at all unusual to be abused by a car driver.  In the last seven days alone, I've been sworn at twice:  the first time was a driver swearing and gesticulating at me as I patiently waited for him to work his way through a section of roadworks that had closed one half of the road.  My light had turned green some time before, but as there was a queue of cars jumping the lights at the other end, I had no real option but to wait for them to get through.  This guy was the very last in the queue of about five who ran the red light, and he was clearly annoyed an embarrassed that everyone in front of him had filtered through so slowly, exposing him as a light-jumping idiot of the highest order. To conceal his embarrassment, he decided to swear vociferously at me through his windscreen, waving his hands wildly.  I stared at him impassively.

The second time was just yesterday: I was in the right hand lane at a set of lights at a junction.  The lights there are sequenced so the left hand lane has a filter that allows them to set off before the lights for the right hand lane change.  I was sat patiently waiting for my light to change, about eight cars down the queue.  I glanced over my shoulder briefly when a huge truck zoomed about six inches past me in the other lane, and I think the car behind that assumed I was about to jump out of my lane and into theirs.  That's the only thing I can think of that might have upset them.  Whatever she thought I was doing, as she drove past me, waiting at the lights, the driver leaned out of her window and shouted "TWAT" at me.

Charming, right?

It's not just car drivers either.  I had a cyclist come past me the other day muttering swear words under her breath in my general direction, apparently irritated that I had inconvenienced her by being on the path where she wanted to be as she swung round a corner, even though I was on my side of the track.

Some people, eh?

To quote Roger the Shrubber, "Oh, what sad times are these when passing ruffians can say Ni at will to old ladies. There is a pestilence upon this land, nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history".

Why can't we all just get along?

reflector or director?

I watched Game of Thrones last night.  I've tried hard to make what follows spoiler free, but if you're following the programme and you're not right up to date, then please approach with caution.

Still with me?  OK.

I watched the latest episode, "The Viper and the Mountain".  Then, as I usually do, I headed over to the Guardian's series blog for GoT to have a look at what other fans of the show thought.  The show airs on Sunday night in the US, and the blog usually goes up straight after that, but as we only get to see the show on a Monday night, there's already been a few hours to get the discussion started and there's already a lot to catch up on.  It's one of those blogs where, if you can read between the trolls and the smug book readers wanting to discuss things that haven't happened yet, the readers are as interesting as the author.

Pretty early in the discussion, DMcCool had this to say:

"I have to admit this was the point where I finally "got" Game of Thrones message, the Red Wedding had enough clues in it here they really rammed the message home. A horrendously bleak and grotesque view of humanity and an obsession with everything gruesome and ugly.The level of gore and constant brutal deaths for every sympathetic character carries GoT over into the realm of the SAW films. After coming close at the end of the last season, I think this was enough for me, I'm finally off the ride. I don't want to spend any more time in this joyless and cruel world. The saving grace of this episode (and in my opinion the best scene this season by a mile) was surely the conversation between Tyrion and Jaime, and the flashes of actual friendship there, but it is far too rare a thing in Westeros; everyone is either a psychopath or a bleating victim. It's just a horribly nasty view of humanity; it's humanity stripped of humanness with just the dull statistics "so and so killed so and so for such a political reason" left. [plot point redacted to avoid spoiler], but then GRRM has to play his one trick again and kill [a] character in the most gruesome and horrible way he can think of. It's getting old, and I can see where this story is going. I finally committed viewer suicide and spoilered myself to kill off any curiosity, freeing me from this joyless and depressing fantasy world."

You know what?  I actually kind of agree with him.  I'm not a prude and I have been known to enjoy 18 certificate films from time to time.  I'm not going to stop watching the show, but last night's episode really excelled itself in the utterly gratuitous amount of violence and gore displayed on the screen.  I knew what was coming because I've read the books, but I was actually still shocked by what I saw depicted on the screen.  These images didn't just flash up on the screen, the camera lingered lovingly on them the way that it sometimes lingers on the also-fairly-gratuitous (mostly female) nudity.

Listen, I know that G.R.R.Martin is portraying a world based loosely upon Wars of the Roses era England, and that war in the period was horrific: people died horrible deaths and were literally cut to pieces by swords and other pointy objects or bludgeoned to death by blunt objects;  people were tortured; people were and raped.  I get it.  Martin was actually forced to come out and defend scenes of rape in a previous episode in this season.  His defence was that it would be dishonest to back away from that side of war.

Hmm.

I don't like watching films in 3-D.  The reason that I give is that I don't believe it adds enough to the viewing experience.  I read books and I'm perfectly capable of using my imagination.  I don't need to see objects appearing to come out of a cinema screen to believe that I'm watching a 3-D world and not a projection on a flat screen.  I feel much the same way about the massive use of CGI in films.  Just because you can make it look like an entire city has been laid waste doesn't necessarily mean that you should always lay waste to a city.  Sometimes less is more.

This week's Game of Thrones did not depart massively from the book, and the most upsetting scene in particular is pretty clearly laid out there too over a couple of sentences.  It's horrible in the book too.... but somehow it's so much worse seeing the whole thing laid out lovingly and lingeringly in high definition.  I'm positive they could have achieved exactly the same shocking effect without such a gratuitous display of blood and gore.

This is a good show, and I'm going to tune in again next week, obviously.... but so graphic was the violence that I have at least asked myself the question as to why I'm still watching and you can't help but wonder what kind of impact exposure to these kind of images may have on some people.  It can't be healthy, can it?  What does it say about us that this is how we like to be entertained? The Romans liked seeing people being butchered in the arena, and it's widely agreed that this was a symptom of a sick, brutalised society.  The magic of television means that no one actually died to bring me this episode of Game of Thrones, but although I might be entertained, I'm hardly edified by the experience.

As the song said way back in 1992:

Because a child watches 1500 murders before he's
twelve years old and we wonder why we've created
a Jason generation that learns to laugh
rather than to abhor the horror

Television... breeding ignorance and feeding radiation for the best part of a century.

Are you not entertained?

elected, elected, respected, elected

I live in a safe Conservative seat.  Ken Clarke is a Tory grandee and has been our MP since June 1970.  His office is just down the end of the street, he lives in the area and I often see him around and about the place.  He's a decent constituency MP and he actually responded with a three page typewritten missive to the letter I sent him about the war in Iraq, addressing each point in turn and making no attempt to defend the invasion.  I've never voted for him myself, and he's the primary reason why every vote I have cast in this constituency has been a waste of time, but he seems a good sort and is famous for long being unfashionably pro-European... at least for a Conservative.

It's European election day today, and it's rarely felt more important to get out and to vote, nor so depressing to look down the list of names on my ballot paper.

An Independence from Europe "UK Independence Now"
British National Party "Because we can make Britain better"
Conservative Party "For real change in Europe"
English Democrats "I'm English, NOT British, NOT EUropean"
Green Party
Harmony Party "Zero immigration, Anti-EU, Pro-jobs"
Labour Party
Liberal Democrats
UK Independence Party (UKIP)

All bar the Harmony Party were putting up the full five candidates, and most were relatively local (Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire).  The Harmony Party had one guy from East Sussex.  Go figure.

Isn't that a depressing shower of crap?  It makes me feel ashamed, embarrassed and scared to think that it has come to this. I received an election flyer through the post from the Conservatives the other day.  At the time, I was horrified both that I was on their mailing list and that they were so obviously targeting the UKIP target market.

Looking at the other candidates on the ballot paper, you can understand why they have chosen this tactic (although, for the record, they sent my wife a flyer detailing their economic policies.  Make of that what you will....)

You know what's even more depressing than the list of candidates?  When they crossed my name off the page from the electoral roll, only five other people - including my wife - had been to vote and had their names crossed off the list.  There were two hours still to go before polls close, but there must have been coming on a hundred other names on that page still to cast their vote.  Turnout looks very, very low.

You may not like the candidates and you may feel disenfranchised by the whole system, but if you don't cast your vote then the extremists and idiots creep in around the edges.  I have no love for the mainstream parties, but do you really think it will be funny to have UKIP (or worse) representing us in Europe?  I do not.

I hope you voted.

you and me babe, how about it?

As you know, thanks to my team at work, I've had something of a crash course in online dating over the last few months.  Because people apparently don't meet organically any more, several of the beautiful, intelligent women in my team are putting themselves through the wringer of dating websites.  One is very happy and several weeks into a promising relationship, but the other is still wading her way through hundreds of hopeful/hopeless profiles online.

Yesterday, I was introduced to Tinder.

Look, I've been happily loved up with C. for more than fifteen years now, so this is all pretty new and alien to me.... but I'll try to explain.  Basically, the way this works is that you load up a few pictures of yourself and a tiny bit of information, and you then select your preferences and how far a radius you're prepared to go for a date, and then you're off.  You flick through profiles, hitting yes or no.  Everyone else does the same.  If two people both like each other, then you get in touch and start exchanging messages.  Simple.  A little lacking in subtlety, perhaps, but it's a start.

My colleague handed me her phone and had me flicking through profiles on her behalf for a while.

No.  No.  No.  No. No.

After about ten minutes, I was in a state of despair at the future of humanity.  Pretty much every single guy on the system seems to have uploaded selfies that show one or all of the following things:

•  a gym shot, wearing a muscle vest and gazing lovingly into a mirror and flexing his guns
•  a topless shot, probably in a grubby bathroom, flexing his guns
•  several shots cheek-to-cheek with various females.  Ex-girlfriends?
•  bromance shots, up close and personal with your best buddies.  Drinking lager and probably topless.
• pictures of the amusing jape you get up to when pissed
• gangsta shot, perhaps in a fast car, wearing shades and an over-sized baseball cap.  Possibly topless.
• naked in a bathroom with a sock over your cock

Ugh.  Horrific.

I can't decide what's worse, that guys apparently think this is the kind of thing that girls are looking for in a man, or that these may actually be the things that girls are looking for in a guy.  Either way, we're doomed.

My colleague told me that she had a match the other day and the guy sent her a message.
"Do you want sex?"  That was it.
Who said romance was dead?

I think I was a lot more choosy than she generally is.  I basically clicked "No" to everybody.  I did click  "Yes" to the guy with long, wavy hair holding a cello, but that was because I was so busy laughing that  I was looking for more photos of him and I hit the wrong button.

This, my friends, is how young people find love.  Well, sex, anyway.

The bastards.

bad apple....

No.

I went to the gym this evening for a swim.  I arrived feeling smug already after cycling past enormous queues of people stuck in traffic on their way out of the office.  I find cycling therapeutic at the best of times, but it's been fairly mild this week, and it's definitely getting lighter in the mornings and staying lighter for longer in the evenings.  This makes me feel pretty good, and the ride along the canal to the gym this evening was excellent.  I was feeling pretty tired, but my mood was good and I was slightly surprised to find that the gym was quiet as apparently most of the New Year's Resolution crowd have now given it up for another year.  Excellent.

The swim was okay too, but my sense of karmic wellbeing was soon to be totally shattered.  I've grown  sadly accustomed over the years to seeing young men preening in front of the floor length mirrors; I don't like it, but there it is.  Apparently some people need to style their hair both before and after exercising.  It's not something I've ever felt the need to do, even when I had hair, but there you go.  Each to their own.  O tempora, O mores and all that.

Look, I use moisturiser; I wear fragrance from time to time, I trim my beard.... although that's clearly not going the full Beckham, I think that makes me sensibly metrosexual.  I don't have my eyebrows plucked or shaped because I have no desire to look (more) like a Vulcan, but I won't deny that I have occasionally attended to hairs located elsewhere on my body.  Not in public, mind.

There are limits.

So when I walked past the mirrors in the gym this evening, I was somewhat perturbed to see a young man hunched right up against the mirror, meticulously setting about his - not very long - fringe with a set of straightening tongs.  His portable set, obviously.  Small enough to pack into his gym bag, but powerful enough to get the job done.  As he worked at his hair, the rest of the world seemed to have disappeared, so rapt was he in his task.  Somehow, it seemed, he had forgotten that he was standing in the middle of a public changing room at the gym in full sight of everyone else there... and that it was a Wednesday night, that he didn't really have all that much hair in the first place AND THAT HE WAS A MAN.

What has happened to us?  I'm hardly nostalgic for a time when men were men and never spoke of their feelings.....well, not too much..... but how did it become essential for a man to remember to put his straightening tongs into his gym bag with his towel, padlock and trainers?  I might be talking out of turn here, but that's not essential packing for most women, is it?

a normal man, yesterday.

I'm saddened this evening, friends.  Saddened and disappointed in my sex*.  I've had to come home and shower using a bar of Imperial Leather, splash my cheeks with Brut aftershave, pour myself a pint of mild and settle down in front of One Man and his Dog, but I just can't rid myself of that shocking image.  One bad apple, it seems, can spoil the whole darn bunch.

It's just one bad apple, right?  No other man does that, right?  Not in public, anyway....

* Sex, that is, rather than gender.... gender is a construct, innit.

windowlicker....

The guys in my team at work are so young - mostly in their early 20s - that they simply do not have the same frame of reference as me and frequently look at me as though I have beamed down from another planet or - more likely - have somehow been transported into their lives from the distant past.

I'll give you an example: I mentioned in passing the other day that we used to get ice on the inside of windows when I was a kid.  I thought it was an innocent enough remark, but I looked up to find everyone gawking at me with open astonishment.  They just could not believe that such a thing could ever be possible.  Of course, they all grew up in a world where everyone has double-glazing.  Why should they imagine anything different?  I wonder if they even know how to open a sash window?  Until I was about 7, I didn't have a duvet either!  Imagine that!  These kids haven't generally experienced much of foreign cultures either, choosing instead to holiday in sheltered resorts on all-inclusive deals.  Another colleague told me the other day that she felt she had "done" Egypt now.  She's been to Red Sea resorts twice and has never seen the Pyramids or Cairo or anything like that.  Well, once you've sunbathed at the hotel pool and gone quad biking in the desert, what else can Egypt offer you?  Best head to Greece to not visit the Parthenon, eh?  I remember another colleague telling me about how she went on an "off-resort" trip on an all-inclusive holiday to Caribbean.  They visited some locals and she just could not get over the fact that the hut they visited didn't even have a carpet.  Wide-eyed she looked at me and asked me to imagine being so poor that I couldn't even afford a carpet!

I decided to play around with them a bit.
"But, you know, we didn't have electricity when I was at school either"
They believed that too.  Without even a single bloody question.
"Well", said Chloe (23) when I said electricity was becoming common in the late nineteenth century, "I just assumed you went to a very rural primary school".
**sigh**.

A scene from my childhood.

I swear these incurious bloody children think I come from Dickensian London or something.