Runway success

So to the Methodist Central Hall for a rally against the proposed third runway at Heathrow. What was I, practically a lynchpin of the apatheterati, doing there amongst the angry and strident? I can only plead fraternity: I was there because a friend was on the abundant list of speakers, and I was working nearby. I remember rallies from the old days, when there was a left-wing to speak of, but this was quite a revelation. The place was full, but it was more of a Methodist congregation than a rabble awaiting rousing – well-heeled, well behaved and predominantly old. I would have been unsurprised to see Saga leafleting outside alongside the Green party. I lost count of the number of full-length coats and fur-trimmed accessories floating about, not to mention the good number of craggy visages topped with gleaming pates (and that was just the women). I wondered if it wasn't just the same left-wing protesters as used to go to rallies all those years ago, older and better off, or whether it really was the new breed of Tory protester, of the kind we first saw marching – marching! - for hunting when Blair was just out the traps. In fact this issue has a cross-party consensus – which sounds good until you remember that the last cross party consensus was for the war on Iraq, but never mind – so we had Tories and lefties and, to judge from the speaker panel, a preponderance of Liberals. Lacking any obvious markers to try and gainsay the scope of the political spectrum represented in the packed hall, I divvied up the greys by counting ties against beards, and came up with a slight leaning to the right. This was somewhat confirmed by one of the early speakers who said of the government: “I don't know who they think they are, and really I don't think they know who we are!” giving the impression that this is all a gigantic mistake which will be put right as soon as the government cottons on to the plethora of Daily Mail readers it is aggravating.

Before the speakers we were treated to a band who played the sort of MOR tune that brought to mind driving out on the M4 listening to Magic FM, so I suppose was suitable. But the lyrics were relevant, if a little gauche. The chorus even included the line “stand up to the powers that be”, something I've not heard for quite a few years. After the band finished playing the song, they quickly reprised it and tried to get everyone standing up and singing along, which was not an overwhelming success.

A lot of MPs queued up to speak with varying degrees of competence, including the Lib Dem leader, who only reinforced the idea that nowadays politicians are geared towards telly, and flounder hopelessly when asked to work a room. Many of the politicians betrayed their lack of mastery, painfully repeating the same facts and lines that previous speakers had iterated, while the crowd grew less and less keen on clapping endlessly as the evening wore on. Susan Kramer did a short speech which was memorable because she said something along the lines of: “There's a lot of people who are not here because they think nothing can be done, well now we can tell them, yes it can.” This, I think, should be said before every public meeting about anything, anywhere.

Much later we had a video message from Boris, which gave the impression that he'd just worked out how to turn the video camera on. He leant into the camera alarmingly, so that his forehead was cut off by the top of the screen, and spoke into it in a haphazard way, from a dowdy looking office with the blinds all drawn, as though he'd been using the video for much more entertaining purposes moments before. The film resembled nothing so much as a poor webcam blog made by a complete idiot, which I suppose is what it was. Boris's act of being a chump seems to have rubbed off on the other Tories; the next one to speak could hardly help himself fluffing his lines in that buffon-charm way that tries to give the idea that “hey, i'm a bit of clown, a fun guy, what possible harm can it do to give me loads of power!”

Despite most people leaving long before the epic list of speakers had been trawled through, the speakers did (generally) get better as things went on, John McDonnell particularly good and Geraldine Nicholson showing the rest what passion, humour and commitment actually look like packaged in a speech.

Speaking personally, I'm not too keen on rallies. Being a contrary type, I tend to find that if I listen to two hours of people stating one point of view, I tend to end up thinking that there must be something pretty good about the opposing view, or they wouldn't be hiding it. That's not to say that the campaign is wrong: the government have undoubtably cheated and lied their way to get this runway which only a tiny group of corporate power players want or stand to gain from. And rallies are also useful for a few other things, one being that you can tell a lot about what is going on by what people clap the loudest. What they clapped the loudest tonight was the statement that the Department of Transport are in bed with the aviation industry.

Afterwards I met a few of the campaigners I knew. Chatting to them was an middle-aged guy, the sort they used to call soap-dodgers, who looked like he'd just come from a tree camp. He made the blue-blazered security nervous. “He's not one of them activists, is he?” one asked.

There goes the childhood

“I'm fed up with these kids, growing up, taking our jobs,” he says. “Have you seen how they go on? They're all crazy, bringing all these drugs and gang fighting, graffiti, violence, this used to be a nice area.”
But weren't you a kid once yourself, I ask.
“Yeah, but I've grown up,” he says. “I've fitted in, become an adult, these kids now they can't do that, you can see, they're just not civilised. My father, OK, he had kids, he was forced to, by unforseen circumstance, but he always made clear we had to be adults and fit in with adults. These kids now, how can they fit in with our adult society? Its in danger of losing its adultness.
So you just want to pull the drawbridge up behind you?
“Look, I'm not against kids, don't get me wrong, but they should stay where they belong and not spoil a perfectly good society.”
Aren't kids good for the economy, I ask. Aren't they going to pay his pension?
“Well, that maybe so, but it doesn't stop it being wrong. We need to Save our Society, Kick the Kids Out!”

The Noble Savage

For the last few weeks I’ve been regularly reading Dan Savage’s advice column in the Stranger, “Seattle’s Only Newspaper”. Well what do I know? It turns out that Savage is America’s most popular advice columnist and has been banging out his brand of bolshy, frank, pro-sex counsel to the coitus concerned of America since 1991. It’s as though I’d just found out about a really funny show called Friends (this is a hypothetically funny show called Friends, btw). Not that it matters because, unlike Friends, Dan Savage remains year after year, dare I say it, savagely funny and his advice is spot on more far often than not.

Tunnel Rat

The rat looked up as he heard the tube train clattering up the tunnel.
“I’m getting old now,” he thought. “That noise ain’t doing me no good.”
He continued gnawing on a long juicy snake he’d found lying away from the wall.
“That’s funny,” he had thought. “Don’t get many of these down here normally.”
The track rattled as the train approached, knocking his tail off the metal.
“I’m too old for this game. All this noise. I need some peace and quiet. I fancy a move to the country. Maybe I’ll try St Albans.”
He nibbled a bit more of the leathery snake, which hummed with the vibration of the oncoming train.
“Cor, I need this. I haven’t had any protein for days.”
The noise was deafening. The train was almost upon him.
“Rats!” he thought. “I’ll have to leave it till later. That bloody Benedict will probably get it.”
If he didn’t leave it now he’d be in danger of getting crushed. But he was still getting through the tough skin; a few more nibbles and he’d get into the meat.
The wind was getting right up now, the screaming of the wheels as the train braked for the corner shimmered in the air.
A nibble, a nibble, another nibble. The lights of the train shone off the wall from around the corner.
“I can see the meat,” thought the rat, eyes gleaming in the new light. He sunk his teeth deep into the electric cable. The arc of the electricity sent him flying, fur burning, straight into the path of the tube train. The last thing the driver saw before the train came to a sudden halt and the lights went out was a flaming rodent splattered across his windscreen, cooked through, practically falling off the bone, the crazed gleam in his eyes still evident to the shocked driver.
Not as shocked as the rat though, obviously.

A poem by Loxley

I'm about to slit my wrists
I'm going to die
That's the end of me
Bye

Orange Bastards

I had problems with my new Orange phone. Specifically that they won't unbar it until I fax them proof of my address. However, the next day, when I ring the call centre in Bangalore to get my phone put on, there is a problem. So begins three days of growing rage, magnified somehow by the fact of it being focussed into such a small area as a phone. Obviously, sending the phone to my address is no proof at all, but neither is apparently a British Gas bill (Don't ask. I asked about 100 times [post goes on at long, dribbling length] ... Orange[bastards]'s stringent 'policies' ... Oh yeah, I thought, that's helpful ... Orange bastards ... And I have to fight this battle so I can... give them loads of money. Hmmmm. Time to call up the contract cancellation department. I hate to think how much worse this is going to get.

Things I have learnt this week: everyone has a big company phone line horror story; one of the drawbacks of finding someone to let off steam to is that you have to reciprocally listen to their equally torturous tale, which was probably bad enough at the time and gains nothing in the retelling. Rather like other people's dreams, and other people's travel stories, other people's call centre hell tales belong in the huge lead-lined box that we're going to fire up into outer-space; along with all the call centres.

Life's leaving

My beautiful cousin was the latest eligible female to bemoan her unattached status. “What am I going to do?” she asked me, “I'm going to die alone.”
I told her: “everybody dies alone. If you don't die alone it means there's been some sort of a disaster.”

Compare & Contrast

Hmmmm...

Bill goes Virago

I told him “I’m pregnant.”
He said, “Congratulations! Who’s the father?”
There was a long silence.
“You bastard,” I whispered.
“Oh,” he said.



She told me: "I'm pregnant."
I said: "Congratulations! Who's the father?"
There was a long silence.
"You bastard," she whispered.
"Oh," I said.

Public Life

Saturday morning, after one Friday night too many, I end up outside Public Life, a bar/club situated in a renovated public toilet outside Christ Church, Spitalfields. It was inevitable really; there are so many toilets masquerading as bars in Hoxton, it was only a matter of time before somebody went the whole bog hog. I couldn't even muster the indignation to say they are taking the piss. Of course there was a huge queue outside - this at 8 in the morning - and I'd imagine spending a penny wouldn't get you very far in there, so I put my tail between my legs and went and took a slash up Brick Lane.

The Cat with only one life

The question of Schroedinger's cat, which has consumed top-level physicists and very stoned geeks over the past 100 years has reared its ugly head once again. The question Schroedinger raised states in essence that if a scenario exists where a cat could be isolated from external interference (decoherence), the state of the cat can only be known as a superposition (combination) of possible rest states (eigenstates) because finding out (measuring the state) cannot be done without the observer interfering with the experiment — the measurement system (the observer) is entagled with the experiment.

The thought experiment serves to illustrate the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. The idea of a particle existing in a superposition of possible states, while a fact of quantum mechanics, is a concept that does not scale to large systems (like cats), which are not indeterminably probabilistic in nature. courtesy of Wikipedia

Or in other words, if you put a cat in a box it could be dead or it could be alive and until you find out, you don't know it could be both or it could be neither.

But the question of whether the cat is dead or alive was finally answered today by physioveterinarian Mark Fowells, who in a groundbreaking study published in Nature, pointed out that regardless of the action of the atomic-based poison gas release system indicated in the experiment, after three days or so the cat is pretty much dead.

Fucking hell

Its Tom Lehrer!

Flood and guts

The full under-stated beauty of the British stiff upper lip has been on display as the floods have wrecked middle England. An old couple were taken by a news crew to see the remains of their house, half of which has fallen into the fast-flowing river. They can see most of their bedroom, where a dressing gown still hangs on the door. “How do you feel?” asks the reporter. “Not brilliant,” the old dear tells him.

Ron Jonson

I’m reading the paper on Saturday morning. “Cor!” I think, “This Jon Ronson’s quite good. I think I’d like to write something like him.” I wonder if I should write to Jon and tell him about my idea. “Hang on!” I think, “perhaps Jon won’t like that. Perhaps Jon will think ‘there’s only room for one person to write off-the-cuff, insubstantial fluff cunningly concealing real, genuine insight into one life’s merry masquerade.’ Perhaps, he’ll even take it as an attack.”

I wouldn’t like to attack Jon. I think he’s great. How do I tell him that I think he’s great without looking like I’m trying to attack him?

My boy Noel comes into the room. “Dad,” he says, “Can we go out and play in the pond today.”

I sigh loudly. My wife, down the hall in the bathroom hears me. “Ron!” she shouts, “take him to the pond. Stop obsessing about Jon Ronson.”

Later on, after I’ve wiped the flakes of mud off my glasses and out of my hair, I reflect that life must be really hard for Jon Ronson. “All those people writing to him the whole time, expecting things from him. I wouldn’t like that at all.” I decide I’ll definitely not write to him.

My wife is unimpressed and tells me that if I don’t stop watching Secret Rulers of the World again she’s going to go to her mother’s for the rest of the weekend.

Hmmm, I think. How does he do it? How does he transmogrify his dull everyday meanderings into comic nuggets of gold?

“I can’t stand the way he uses his family in his pieces,” my wife always says when we discuss Jon. I have always agreed with her. I decide to steer clear of anything like that and just report objectively on the things people want to know about, using my charming neurotic persona to smooth out any suspicion that I’m a grasping, malevolent journalist. I wonder what I should have as my first topic.

“How about conspiracy theories?” says my neighbour Dan, who’s come round to borrow the paper. “I can’t,” I say, “Jon’s already done that.” I point to a copy of Them, which sits on my shelf next to the Secret Rulers DVD. “Oh,” says Dan. He takes the paper and goes back next door.

I pause, stare out of the window, and clean my glasses. “I know. I won’t tackle any really big things at all, at least not at first. Instead I’ll just sort of write about what I’m thinking and the conversations I have.”

I stare out of the window a bit more. Then I have a very significant thought: “It’ll be sort of like an episode of Seinfeld.”

Bruce Molsky, Magpie’s Nest

Some people are so accomplished, they defy you to shrink them into language. Instead of piling inadequate superlatives upon them, you are left only able to give them a single, particular word; par example Bruce Molsky. The Bronx-born master of fiddle, guitar and banjo is nothing less than an all-encapsulating definition of the word ‘talent’. Molsky plays the fiddle as though charming an upturned, rapidly emptying bottle of wine. However it is that he plays something, it is how it is meant to be played. He plays accurate, smooth and as lively as a firecracker. Every now and then he jerks some new and unexpected sounds from his instrument, as though waking up spirits that are dozing inside. But the music, American old-time, is not so much mystical, instead practical and rational. It is not spirits, but pure joy that he jerks from his violin, a gift to all who hear it.

Blackwall Tunnel

Drivers are up in arms after the Transport for London authority closed the 30-year old 'tidal flow' rush-hour management of traffic in the Blackwall Tunnel, escalating many-fold the already terrible congestion at the tunnel approaches. There are talks of drivers leading a protest. Some sort of 'drive slow' perhaps?

The lazy do the work

I live in a small flat. Cramped. Cluttered. I do have a washing machine, which is mainly a good thing and only slightly a problem because of where to hang the clothes. I could shell out for a washer-drier, I suppose, but I am either far too piously environmental for that, or just too cheap. For many years I had a very cheap plastic triangular rack which, despite being some way short of commodious enough for the inundation of my laundry, managed to air hundreds of washes in any case. Then, at a friends, I spotted a multi-triangular affair, reminiscent of the spacecraft in Close Encounters of a Third Kind, able to accommodate a veritable bonanza of soggy Mr Byrite products. After some sine qua non procrastination I located and bought a similar one. Two full loads of washing hung from its eaves, plus you could hang towels and sheets over the top. My airing pile-up crises were over. The original puny triangle rack lay against my bookshelves. I twice considered throwing it out. I meant to. I even began to, but it somehow remained, leaning languidly against the shelves, like a too-cool teenager who knows something you don’t.

And then today I was putting up a blind and I rested it on the triple-decker alien spaceship washing hanger, momentarily. It folded up flat on the floor, the way it would be if I ever got round to taking the clothes off it before I’d washed a new load, which is never. After I put up the blind I tried to restore the structure to its full architectural glory but I soon realised that something had gone very wrong. Further inspection revealed all. The fleeting stress of the blind’s weight had caused the chrome effect bars to shear apart, destroying entirely the carefully plotted equilibrium and leaving the entire edifice limp and flat and completely worthless. I briefly wondered if I’d bought it from a reputable store like John Lewis, from where I could never bother to go and claim a refund, but thankfully I think it was probably from the cheapo hardware store down the road. It lies in a heap on my bedroom floor. The cheap white plastic triangle still leans against the bookshelves, coolly smoking a cigarette.

Life's bitter conundrum

I was feeling bored, like, like I was a really boring person and I hadn’t done nothing interesting ever more or less so I got a gun and I shot a couple of strangers, thinking now this is fucking interesting isn’t it and they came and arrested me and now I’m in prison and I’m bored again.

The Times is streets ahead

Accurate forecasts of the weather in individual streets are likely to be available within five years, meterorologists predict.

Today I got run over

Sometimes I feel like crying
I feel like that a lot
Sometimes I have a reason
but mostly I have not