Zen & the art of biking...

One of the nicer aspects of the chunky and primitive engineering of Harleys is that it is a bit easier for the ham-fisted amateur to work on them than hi-tech Japanese technology.

But precisely because I am that ham-fisted amateur, I thought it worth getting the bike shop to do a thorough 10,000 mile service if for no other reason than to get everything checked out.

I picked my bike up at the weekend but didn’t really have a chance to feel the benefit of it on my short run to work until yesterday when I took it for a late night spin around Epping Forest.

If you don’t ride than you’ll probably have no idea what I am talking about, but there is something very special about riding through the woods in the dark when everything feels just right: No body else around, just the smell of the trees and the purring of the engine. I first had the feeling as a kid when I rode my moped in the dark through Windsor Great Park, and every now and then it comes back to remind me just what it's all really about.

If I haven’t lost you already, then I probably will now by quoting Steve Earle’s ‘The Other Kind.’ Like the sticker that I once saw on a bike said; 'if I have to explain, you wouldn’t understand:’

"I woke up this morning and I took a look around at all that I got
These days I've been lookin' in the mirror and wondering if that's me lookin' back or not
I'm still the apple of my mama's eye
I'm my daddy's worst fears realized
Here of late all this real estate don't seem all that real to me sometimes

Chorus:
I'm back out on that road again
Turn this beast into the wind
There are those that break and bend
I'm the other kind, I'm the other kind

Now my old buddy, what's his name, says, "Man what the hell are you thinkin' 'bout
You got two of everything, but you hang your head like you was down and out"
And I'm damn sure not suffering from a lack of love
There's plenty more where that came from
But leave it up to me to say something wrong and hurt someone before I'm done

You see it used to be I was really free
I didn't need no gasoline to run
Before you could say Jack Kerouac you'd turn your back and I'd be gone
Yeah nowadays I got me two good wheels and I seek refuge in aluminum and steel
It takes me out there for just a little while
And the years fall away with every mile'

The CofE and shoot 'em ups.

Sony are getting some flak for including Manchester Cathedral as one of the back drops for the new PS3 game "Resistance'.

Apparently there are general objections to portraying a distorted view of reality, characters having unrealistic powers, promoting violence and encouraging people not to take responsibility for their actions. But that's enough about Christianity.(Sorry that was just too easy).

There are also specific objections that permission wasn't sought. But I don't suppose TS Elliot asked the archbishop for permission before writing "Murder In The Cathedral' either.

It's also raised that the setting of the game is insensitive because Manchester is a centre for gun crime. The game is about resistance to an alien invasion for fuck's sake! You could more credibly argue that this is insensitive to aliens, who if they do exist, (and the evidence is no worse than that for God) are always stereotyped as violent aggressors.

It all looks too familiar to me - yet another religious organisation bleating for some sort of special treatment again.

Tom Paine

The anniversary today of the death of Thomas Paine in 1809.

Which takes us (strangely enough) to that seventies cult classic Death Race 2000. Wonderfully cheap and tacky production values, but like much Sci-Fi, a serious message underlies it.

In the wake of global economic collapse the USA is run by a fascist government. In order to keep the citizenry happy and distracted, and to cull society of its weaker members, the government televises a Death Race across the country. The objective is not just speed but to accumulate points for running over the public – with maximum points for a kill on the elderly or children. (If this all seemed far fetched in the seventies it now seems like a possible new project for Endemol).

Significantly the leader of the resistance movement which plans to disrupt the race, assassinate the Fascist president and restore freedom to the USA, is Thomasina Paine. And hence the connection to today’s anniversary.

Tom Paine, a true working class hero. Originally apprenticed as a corset maker, he failed in pretty much every job he tried his hand at, and this forced him to emigrate to the American colonies. Largely self-educated, he was an inventor and scientist but above all a political philosopher who provided in three short works a democratic and radical ideology that inspired revolutionaries in America (Common Sense) and France (The Rights Of Man) and rational opposition to religion (The Age Of Reason). He was imprisoned in France during the Jacobin Terror but never wavered in his support for the revolution and returned to the US only when Napoleon replaced the republic with the empire.

In our own age when the US stands as a reactionary superpower he is a reminder of where it all came from. The Republicans and Democrats today would do well to re-acquaint themselves with somebody who was truly both these things.

We need to understand this

The internet is over-populated with opinions about the Middle East – so I’ll make this short. The fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War has received surprisingly little attention this week (maybe Big Brother has eclipsed everything else in the media).

Surprising, because the resulting Israeli occupation of the Gazza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem is one of the defining moments of our age.

A while back Cherie Blair, not someone I usually have much time for, got herself into trouble when on a visit to Israel she said that she could understand the desperation of a Palestinian suicide bomber. Sadly in these times of rampant chest banging, seeking to understand rather than empty rhetoric about the ‘war on terror’, is not going to make you popular.

I’m not interested in trading nationalisms and competing claims to the land. The Native American gem comes to mind that people arguing over land is like fleas arguing over who owns the dog they happen to find themselves on. But there is no stronger motivation than having nothing left to lose. And that must be exactly what it feels like to be a second-generation refuge in what was once your own country, abandoned by your former allies and the international community.

To understand what the injustice in Israel/Palestine means in human terms I would recommend Joe Sacco’s comic- book ‘Palestine’. Like Art Spiegelman’s comic-book of the Holocaust ‘Maus’, it more effectively conveys a complex message than many more weighty tomes. Both should be standard texts in every school.

Some stuff never leaves you.

As a teenager, music was pretty much everything. Musical tastes defined not just what you listened to, but what you wore, your attitude to life and even what kind of beer you drank. This kind of tribalism is I think very much a male phenomenon; no woman I have spoken to remembers it the same way. And if it gripped you hard enough as a kid, it will stay with you forever.

Which is why at the moment I can’t stop playing Southern Rock Opera by the Drive-By Truckers. It’s an alt-country / Southern Rock concept album about the experience of growing up in late seventies Alabama as blue-collar liberals and Lynyrd Skynrd fans. The album is their own adolescent story, with Lynyrd Skynyrd as the heroes, and the racist five-times governor of Alabama, George Wallace as the villain.

I never got to see Led Zeppelin at Knebworth in 1979 although my mate did. But I can remember when John Bonham died; sneaking in to the local biker pub and drowning our sorrows in Carlsberg Special Brew. Listening to the tributes on Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show on the radio whilst we crashed out for the night in the pub car park. And I still have the Led Zeppelin back-catalogue on vinyl, cassette and CD. And I still wear the t-shirt. And last year I saw Robert Plant twice.

If reading any of this makes sense, check out Southern Rock Opera. Here's a taster ...

Dropped acid, Blue Oyster Cult concert, fourteen years old,

And I thought them lasers were a spider chasing me.
On my way home, got pulled over in Rogersville Alabama, with a half-ounce of weed and a case of Sterling Big Mouth.
My buddy Gene was driving, he just barely turned sixteen.
And I'd like to say, "I'm sorry", but we lived to tell about it
And we lived to do a whole lot more crazy, stupid, shit.

And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet
With 38 Special and the Johnny Van Zant Band.

One night when I was seventeen, I drank a fifth of vodka, on an empty stomach, then drove over to a friend's house. And I backed my car between his parent's Cadillac's without a scratch.
Then crawled to the back door and slithered threw the key hole, and sneaked up the stares
And puked in the toilet.
I passed out and nearly drowned but his sister, DD, pulled me out.

And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet
And the band that I was in played "The Boy's are Back in Town".

Skynyrd was set to play Huntsville, Alabama, in the spring of 77, I had a ticket but it got cancelled.
So, the show, it was rescheduled for the "Street Survivors Tour".
And the rest, as they say, is history.

So I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Ozzy Osbourne with Randy Rhoads in 82
Right before that plane crash.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw AC/DC
With Bon Scott singing, "Let There Be Rock Tour".

With Bon Scott singing, LET THERE BE ROCK!

Cardinal's opinion not welcome.

If some ‘Mad Mullah’ called on his flock not to vote for any candidate who supported the war and occupation in Iraq, the Little Englanders would be up in arms. And smug that they don’t live in a theocracy.

Meanwhile, Cardinal O’Brien, primate of Scotland has called on Catholic voters not to support ‘pro-abortion’ candidates. He’s also going to deny communion to those Catholic politicians who don’t come out against abortion. (By the way, I’ve yet to meet anyone who is ‘pro-abortion’; though quite a few believe that there should be a right to abortion).

And this from a bloke who has taken a vow of celibacy, has no family and absolutely fuck-all experience of relationships or bringing up children. He has absolutely no business expressing an opinion on women’s reproductive rights. Or using the 'authority' of the church to intervene in how people vote.

Mind you this is the same guy who a few years ago denounced sex education as "state-sponsored sexual abuse" of children. Hold up there Your Eminence – I think your church might be on rather dodgy ground on that particular subject !

Personally I’m as tolerant of religion as the next guy: Just so long as it’s kept between consenting adults and behind closed doors.

ie: Don’t take it as your right to indoctrinate your children in faith schools, and stay out of the political process.

Biking Renaisance Man Remembered

The anniversary today of the death in 2000 of Dr Maz Harris: PR officer of the Hells Angels MC, academic and journalist.

Back in the 80’s, the magazine Back Street Heroes helped define the British biker scene. Along with events like the HA’s Kent Custom Show, it developed an identity that encompassed outlaw-types right through to anyone who wasn’t interested in sports bikes and to whom biking was something more than just practical transport.

BSH was very different from most of the US imported magazines around at that time that focused on biker-babes draped over glitzy Arlen Ness style professionally commissioned bikes. BSH had something of the fanzine about it, and Maz’s regular column Radical Times was an essential part of this.

Radical Times was effectively a printed precursor of the blogging phenomenon. Maz's personalised rants came from the perspective of a biker with a passion for civil liberties and widely-read enough to back it up.

Writing in the Thatcher years, Maz's rants covered the Criminal Justice Act, the abuse of police powers, the British presence in Northern Ireland, the poll tax, racism and the health service. Dispelling the prejudices of the middle-class PC brigade who would regard bikers as reactionary Neanderthals, these rants were invariably from a progressive point of view.

Now it seems that every other celebrity has commissioned an Orange County Chopper. Thanks to the Discovery Channel and born again HOG-tyes, bikers have been embraced by the mainstream, and the idea of a counter culture has been eroded.

Sadly BSH, which still survives albeit under new ownership, now reflects this trend; but back in the day - Maz was the real deal.

Why we need juries.

The British 'justice' system is a funny thing. There's a lot that's very wrong with it - but its one saving grace is the jury system.

In a trial little reported in the press, the system has endorsed the actions of two anti-war activists in Oxfordshire tried for criminal damage to B-52 bombers at an RAF base.

Faced with a possible jail sentence of up to ten years, they used the defence that their actions were justified because they were attempting to prevent criminal acts; war crimes in bombing civilians in Iraq and criminal damage to Iraqi property.

The judge permitted them to use thie defence but not to argue that the war itself was illegal. That argument is not legally possible because of the old chestnut of Crown prerogative - the war was initiated using Crown prerogative and all prosecutions are in the name of the Crown.

But the fact that the defence was accepted by the jury is a stinging indictment of the legitimacy of the government's actions over Iraq.

All of which underlines the duality of our legal system. On the one hand, the quasi-feudal bollocks that evokes the Queen and with it all the silly wigs and other nonsense, and on the other hand the jury system, which endorses the supremacy of ordinary people's commonsense.

It also underlines the importance of fiercely defending the jury system from those frequent attempts to 'reform' it by illiberal governments for whom such commonsense is a an inconvenience.

A Bit Of Un-American History.

I'm reading the autobiography of Johnny Cash at the moment. There's a line in it which drew my attention to a relatively unknown piece of US history; recalling his childhood he says that he 'grew up under socialism'.

Like many farming families, the depression of the 30's tipped Cash's family over the edge from poverty into destitution. At one point his father was reduced to riding the rails 'hobbo' style to pick up casual work.

Under FDR's New Deal, in 1934, the Emergency Relief Administration came up with a program whereby poor farmers could buy 20 acres of uncultivated land, with no deposit and nothing to pay until the first harvest. 46 'colonies' were set up in the Mid-West, to be run on a co-operative basis. The farmers were given a house and a barn (all identical), a mule and a cow. Their crop would go into a farmer's co-operative to secure the best market price, and each family was given a stake in the cotton gin and grocery store, with a share in the profits.

By all accounts the life was unbelievably hard - no electricity, no running water and the land had to be cleared from wilderness by hand before any planting could be done. It wasn't socialism and it certainly wasn't idyllic.

Even so it's pretty amazing that it happened at all, and unthinkable in today's political climate. Hard to credit that some victims of Hurricane Katrina are still in shanty towns and the glorified refugee camps that you'd associate with a developing country not the richest in the world. And Hilary Clinton is denounced as a dangerous 'un-American' socialist.

Sobering and humbling ...

This blogging business is very much a mixed blessing. I've heard it said that it is a democratising way of expressing free speech. But let's face it - it's also a self-indulgent and self-important way of sounding off at no great risk or inconvenience to the author. Or in other words, a masturbatory vehicle for smart-arses. Yes guilty.

I used to be much more of an activist, but as the years have passed, although my ideals haven't essentially changed, my focus has shifted a bit from marching stridently through life to treading carefully and trying to minimise the damage done along the way ... Nowadays I go to a few meetings for various causes, and every few weeks send out some letters on behalf of Amnesty International. Every now and then one particular campaign gets to you.

It's not a new campaign, the guy has been on death row for decades for fuck's sake, but somehow until now, the case of Gary Tyler has passed me by. It's all too familiar - convicted as a juvenile in the seventies in Louisiana in the wake of racial battles over school integration, he was convicted on very questionable evidence by an all-white jury and defended by an incompetent defender. He has been repeatedly denied appeals and pardons because of his unapologetic and militant stance. So much so that Amnesty have adopted him as a political prisoner.

I might have salved my conscience with a letter that took no more than ten minutes to write and the cost of stamp - but check out the work of Reprieve, an organisation who do this on a full time basis. The term 'do-gooder' gets thrown around as one of abuse. But I can guarantee that you can't help but feel a bit humbled when you read about people like this.

'Bussiness/ office dress'

I had to attend some ghastly trade show last week at the NEC.

Everyone attending has to wear a badge with their company name and title. Largely this is so that those working the stands can tell if it's worth their time to talk to you. I revel in their confusion when they read 'Director' on my badge and then see how I am dressed. I also enjoy turning up for meetings and being mistaken for a bike courier.

Possibly childish I know, but there's something absurd about the concept of 'business dress'.

Why are certain uniforms expected in business ? I can maybe understand why doctors wear white coats - it arguably reassures their patients. But I don't feel reassured when I see some middle manager wearing the obligatory 'proper' trousers and a crisp white shirt. It doesn't tell me that he/she takes pride in their appearance, or is being 'professional', or is showing 'respect' etc etc. It just tells me that he/she doesn't have any fucking imagination or personality.

I could come out with some cheesy line about not judging a book by the cover. But it just wouldn't be true; we all do, it's just that we don't all see the same things. I recently was interviewing candidates and my own prejudices inevitably came into play; anyone in bland business dress was at a distinct disadvantage.

We all wear uniform to some extent. I know very few people who genuinely don't care what they wear. But let's at least wear the uniforms of our own choosing. If I'd wanted to be told how to dress I would have joined the sodding army.

All of which serves as a long preamble to this link, looking at tattooed 'professionals' and executives.

Why democarcies must be republics ..

So I was wrong. Apparently Prince Harry isn't expendable and he won't now be going to Iraq, even with a desk job.

The army have said that if anything happened to him it would be a 'disaster for the country'. Not sure how this is to be taken by the families of the other 150 odd British service people killed in Iraq to date. Presumably in comparison, these deaths were obviously a bit of bugger but not actually a disaster as such.

The army have also said if Harry were to go it would endanger the lives of his colleagues. You could say that it's bit late now to start worrying about the unnecessary risking of lives after embarking on an illegal war with no exit strategy.

It really does look like one rule for the nobs and another for the rest of us.

And in a similar vein:

The Diana inquest is foundering on the problems of crown immunity. It has been suggested that the queen should be questioned as part of the proceedings, but of course there is no constitutional basis for this. In fact the last time anybody tried to do this we had a civil war and a king ended up on the scaffold.

Just supposing for a moment that Mohamed Al-Fayed isn't the fantasist that he appears to be, and that the royal family did have a part in Diana's death, or more probably, that they had some influence in a cover-up of embarrassing details. Is it acceptable that there is no mechanism for holding them to account ?

There is a deep strain of inequality and privilege in this country, and the monarchy is at the centre of this in both a symbolic and also very real way.

Even in nations for whose governments I have little regard, there are not the ridiculous anomalies and fundamental injustices of a hereditary monarchy. In the US, heads of state have (and in recent times) been held to public account. In Israel, can you imagine the son of a politician being exempted from active service with the IDF ?

Perhaps it is no accident that both nations have a much more deep rooted concept of 'citizenship' than we do in the UK with one foot still in the middle ages.

Biking chronicles

For no particular reason it popped into my head that this month, I think this week to be exact, marks the 25th anniversary of me riding bikes. So also for no particular reason, here are my bike riding chronicles:

• The prequel
Aged 11, a mate's dad had an enormous (well it seemed that way at the time) 500cc Husquava Moto-crosser. The mate's dad was a bit of a nutter - with a large back garden. So he encouraged us to have a go, which I did and promptly rode it into ( in fact straight through) his rotten wooden shed. Far from being deterred, I was hooked.

• Yamaha 50cc moped -thing.
My first legal bike.I can't remember the model, but it doesn't matter they were pretty ubiquitous. All mopeds were restricted to 30mph, unless you whacked a spike up he exhaust to de-restrict them. I do remember having to regularly de-coke the 2-stroke exhaust using bicarbonate of soda, which had a radical effect on performance. But most of all I remember that the bike meant freedom. No more getting lifts from parents or waiting for buses, and for the first time I acquired the habit of riding around for the sheer hell of it without any destination.

• Yamaha RSX125.
When I left home to go and be a student I abandoned the moped. There was some medieval university statute that banned students from having motor transport. Like a fool I believed this and it wasn't until my second year that I got a bike again. In the meantime the laws about learner bikes had been changed with the restriction going down from 250 to 125cc. This was provoked by the likes of my boy-racer mates who had stayed at home and were all tearing around on the RD250LC that could burn off 'super bikes' three times their size. I was pissed off at having to stay with a 125cc until I passed my test, but on the other hand two of those mates were killed on the road whilst I was off studying ...

• Jawa 350.
Unquestionably the biggest pile of automotive shit I have ever owned. It was Czech and cheap. That's about all that can be said. The build quality and engineering, even to a socialist like myself, made a compelling argument for western capitalism. When it wasn't in bits, I think that I did more mileage pushing it than I ever did riding it. In the student houses that I shared this, and the carcasses of other failed mechanical projects, made the gardens look like breakers' yards, medieval statutes not withstanding.

• Honda CX500.
My first proper bike, and one that actually worked. Much loved by London dispatch riders because of its longevity it was also famed for its ugliness and was known as the plastic maggot. For reasons that made perfect sense at the time (too many Mad Max movies) I re-sprayed mine matt black and put hi-bars onto it. I thought it looked pretty good until, within a year the rattling cam-chain devoured the engine on our way to a wedding.

• BMW R75/5.
I still get dewy-eyed at the thought of this. It was more or less a classic when I got it. I ditched the police style fairing and put on a sidecar for the sake of my pillion-hating other half. On this we toured all over Europe. provoking startled responses from villagers who had last seen something like it when the Wehrmacht came to town. We even got to East Germany on the re-unification night, and took it the mother ship, the BMW museum in Munich. I had the bike for almost 15 years, but it finally made its age felt in the reliability of the electrics and for the last ten of these it was in pieces in the garage. Sadly the awaited restoration never happened and I ended up giving the bike away. I just wanted to see it go to a good home - hopefully it has now been fully restored.

• Suzuki GS850.
This was only meant to be practical transport, but I ended up keeping it on the road for nine years. At one point it I wrote it off in a slide, and brought it back from the insurers. I got it fixed up cheaply as a basic custom job; drag bars, plain black paint, mini-clocks and lowered seat etc. It just kept going and going, enduring neglect, commuting and touring. Finally it needed a bottom end rebuild that would have cost more than it was worth , and it had to go.

• Yamaha XV1100 Virago.
I had hankered after a Harley for years. When it got to the point that I could I afford one, I didn't do it. I allowed horror stories about their practicality, and their adoption by middle life crisis riddled yuppies to put me off. There was nothing wrong with the Virago except that it wasn't a Harley and yet it tried so desperately to be one. The engine was fine, it was the styling that the Japanese couldn't get right. Way,way too much chrome, even chrome on top of plastic. And what really bugged me, 'false' features - like dummy exhausts and air filters trying to look like the real thing. Whilst most Virago owners were working out how to bling up their bikes, I seriously considered spraying mine matt black.

• Harley Davidson Sportster.
I finally succumbed a couple of years ago. I found that it wasn't essential to be a wannabe "wild hog" to own one. But the brutal simplicity of the engineering and styling had me hooked. There are bikes that are more practical to ride every day; there are bikes that require less looking after; even some that don't cost a fortune every time something goes wrong. None of that however is the point - as they say when was the last time you saw someone with 'Honda' tattooed on their arm ?

Blair goes - but little to cheer about.

So he's off. Probably. Well sort of, in seven weeks.

I grew up politically in the '80s, with the chanting of Maggie, Maggie, Maggie - Out,Out, Out ringing in my ears. When she stood down in 1990 I went down to Trafalgar Square for an impromptu demonstration/street party - like many on the Left, and particularly those in the Anti-Poll Tax Movement, I felt some small personal part in her downfall.

But by the time of the New Labour landslide of 1997, I had no part of the euphoria that swept the country. I and the Labour Party had parted company by the time that Blair and his cronies completed the work begun by Kinnock in riding the party of embarrassing socialist ideas.

So I can't claim that I felt particularly betrayed by Blair - I had no expectations in the first place.

However many did, both inside and outside the Labour Party. People like my parents - Labour activists not driven by ideology but by a sense of fairness and what George Orwell called 'common decency'. Their idea of socialism draws on the experience of growing up in the war years and the 1945 Labour government. Asked for a defining philosophy they would probably reference something like the old Clause IV of the Labour constitution.

In rejecting this and adopting the Thatcher agenda of privatisation, anti-trade union laws, and authoritarianism, Blair has gone further than other previous Labour leaders such as Gaitskill, who have tried to take the party to the right. He has managed to make the process irreversible by constitutional changes that have killed off democracy and accountability.

In the not-so brave New Labour world, my parents are now branded as hard-Left dinosaurs. They will have hopes today that a Meacher or a McDonnell will emerge as a viable leadership challenger. I am sad to say that they are wrong.

Sarkozy wins - merde !

There hasn't been much international solidarity shown by the socialist parties of Europe since 1914. Even so it was still galling to hear that New Labour were rooting for a Sarkozy victory in the French election. I shouldn't be surprised. After all, a platform of neo-liberal economic reform and a pro-US foreign policy are all very close to the Blair/Brown project.

But politics aside, I am particularly saddened by the presidential result because I am a bit of a Francophile:

Not that France is any sort of workers' paradise, just talk to the North African communities in the Paris suburbs, but I have always thought that France managed to retain something that the UK lost post-Thacherism.

The French resisted many of the worst features of modern Britain. Such as an American work ethic that takes the balance out of life/work balance. And a misplaced idea of consumerism that emphasises 'choice' at the expense of quality - 57 varieties of sandwich at Subway that all actually taste the same. A mantra of private=good and public=bad that denationalizes everything in sight.

And so the UK is rapidly becoming a pale imitation of the American mid-west; dowdy shopping malls full of chain retailers selling identical products. Whilst the French kept the 35hour week, trade unions that are more or less allowed to operate within the law, and small towns with farmer's markets and artisan shops.

And perhaps connected to this, a population unlike the UK that has not yet been disillusioned by and disenfranchised from politics, seen in an 85% turnout in the elections.

All this could be about to change. The 'socialist' Royale ironically ran a campaign that would not have been out of tune with New Labour. And Sarkozy represents a new 'un-French' departure with a declared aim of making France more Anglo-Saxon.

Local Elections

As the local election results start to come in, it looks like the political map of Britain is returning to that of the early nineties. A sea of blue with some red enclaves.

I've ranted against New Labour often in this blog. I despise Blairism for its betrayal of the Labour Party and for its disenfranchisement of those who wanted an alternative vision of how society might be run. But I take no pleasure in the Tory revival.

For those taken in by posh-boy Cameron's charm let's never forget that the Conservatives are the party of Thatchersism; that period of almost twenty years that fucked up the social and political fabric of this country more profoundly than six years of fighting Hitler.

And also let's not forget that Tory landslides are only possible when the working class majority votes that way. Working in the print industry, I've rubbed alongside working class Tories for years. Ironic really, given that printworkers only owed their relatively privileged position due to the strength of the labour movement and the unique situation of the pre-entry closed shop - a fact that has still only partly sunk in after the Wapping dispute.

Working class Toryism is a depressing phenomenon. I can only put it down to:

• Deference - amazing but many people still believe that Old Etonians constitute an officer-class that is born to lead.

• Greed - better paid workers who resent taxes subsidising the less fortunate; All those ex-print workers who looked down on the un-skilled and who are now driving minicabs are a classic reminder of how fragile these distinctions are.

• Small-mindedness - the classic call of the white-trash Little Englander; 'I might not have much but at least I'm not Black or Asian or Eastern European etc' - insert the bigotry of your choice.

In some ways, we are back to the period at the turn of the last century. The vast majority of people in this country don't have their interests represented by the Tories or by New Labour, and need to be reminded of this.

The basic arguments for socialism and for class-based politics need to be made again. We should be dusting off those old copies of The Ragged Trousered Philantrophists.

Harry Goes To War.

So it's official, Prince Harry is off to Iraq.

This can never really have been in doubt. What kind of message would be sent out otherwise - it's OK for the sons (and daughters) of the rest of us to die pointlessly in an illegal war but not for the royal family ?

I haven't got anything personal against Harry. No more so than I have against any other over-privileged, over-bearing and under-talented hooray-henry. At least he hasn't tried to duck out of going, but then again neither have thousands of other servicemen and women who didn't get the choice.

In fact I could almost feel sorry for him. Let's face it, he is utterly expendable. Unless James Hewitt insists on a paternity test, he is still only third in line to the throne. As with Uncle Andrew in the Falklands war, a tragic and heroic end would be fantastic PR for an increasingly unpopular monarchy.

Older brother William however will never see active service. Like his Dad there will be plenty of photo-opportunities of him in various uniforms like a a kind of human Action Man, and on the strength of this he will become the patron of various military units. But he won't be put at any actual risk.

It was not always so when monarchy really meant something. Our Celtic and Saxon fore-bears didn't have purely hereditary kings; the numero uno alpha male would be chosen from amongst the noble warriors on the strength of his leadership in the line of battle. Go and see '300' and watch Leonidas to see how it should be done. Even up to the Wars Of The Roses, it didn't matter who your mum and dad were, if you didn't come up to the mark as a military leader you were pretty quickly dispatched in favour of a relative who did.

The needs of a society in the Third Millennium AD are a little different. And the association of the royals as 'chocolate box soldiers' with the armed forces today, is a metaphor for the ridiculous and anachronistic nature of a monarchy in a modern society.

Pictish Tattoo

More ink at the weekend, and so to pre-empt the inevitable question: Why ?

The look of it. There is something about spirals that draw you in and mezmorises: which is why I suppose that these patterns are so widespread in different cultures. My tattooist first assumed that this was a Maori pattern, having worked for a while in New Zealand.

The Pictish connection. Of the Celtic peoples of Britain, it was the Picts who most effectively avoided Roman-isation. Little is known of them, even whether they formed a single ethnic group. The were defined by their love of body-art and the name comes from the Roman description of them as 'the painted people' or Pictii. As in Polynesian cultures, tattooing was a mark of status, and to be unmarked was effectively to be a non-person or slave.

The next question. What is it ? Nobody is sure, but it is one of the most common Pictish symbols found carved in stones all over Scotland. It has been alternatively interpreted as a protective motif showing a spear breaking on a shield, or as a horizon bisected by the rising and setting sun. In any case it crops up everywhere, possibly as a kind of graffiti tag. The period from the fourth to the ninth century AD was one of pretty much constant conflict between a patchwork of Pictish, Saxon, Romano-British, Irish Gaelic and Norse enclaves. It is quite probable that the tag was used to mark territory after a victory in battle or maybe a raid.

And finally, just to address the idea that tattooing is some sort of macho thing: The design comes from the library of Pat Fish, a female tattooist in California who is one of the leading practitioners of Celtic body art and I had the tattoo done by a woman in an all-female studio. Oh yes, and the Picts were a matriarchal society.

So there you have it.

Kids don't need a nanny-state.

Some puritan busy-bodies at Alcohol Concern have decided that our licensing laws do not go far enough, and that to protect children, it should be made possible to prosecute parents for serving children alcohol in their own homes.

What the fuck is the matter with these people?

There are plenty of shocking problems that face children. A recent report, based on various health, economic and educational indices, showed that the UK was the worst country in which to be a child in Western Europe.

My own borough is London is apparently the third worst place to be a child in the UK.

Here are some random stats from the Child Poverty Action Group:
• In 2006 12.7 million people were defined as 'income poor' (less than 60% of median income after housing costs).
• 49% of single parent households are income poor.
• 8% of single-parent families could not afford to eat vegetables most days.
• 60% of children who receive free school meals fail to obtain 5 or more GCSE grades at A to C.
• Children in the lowest socio-economic class are 5 times more likely than other children to die in an accident and 15 times more likely to die in a fire.

THIS is a scandal in a supposedly advanced western country.

Me introducing my own kids to responsible drinking with the occasional sip ISN'T.

Tommy Sheridan on You Tube

I have said here before that I have mixed feelings about the whole Tommy Sheridan thing.

But check out the Solidarity Election broadcast on You Tube.

It is quite simply one of the best in-your-face arguments for change.

Watch it till the end to catch the punch line - a politician who is prepared to take the the piss out of himself.

Yelstin's legacy.

The state funeral today of Boris Yeltsin. Inevitably, several myths are being propagated:

• He was the liberator of his people from Communism. Actually he was not some persecuted dissident under the Soviet regime, but an unquestioning career bureaucrat with an eye for the main chance when the regime started to fall apart under Gorbachev.

• He was the father of modern democratic Russia. Really he was an expert in political brinkmanship who used any means necessary to ensure popular support. When it suited his own purposes he was quite prepared in 1993 to (literally) turn the tanks on his own parliament.

• He was a strong charismatic leader in times of crisis. But his only consistent ideology was nationalism, he is on record as saying that democracry is alien to Russia. This is the same nationalism that took his country into a brutal war of repression in Chechnya.

• He saved the faltering economy. The Soviet system was falling apart under the crushing weight of bureaucracy, what has replaced it though is a bizarre quasi-medieval mess throughout Eastern Europe. Coca-Cola and McDonalds might now be in the shops but corruption is institutionalised and forms a new kind of bureaucracy, organised crime is ingrained into the economy and in some parts of the region warlords make up a de-facto alternative government.

• He was a lovable rogue with a human side . A euphimism. He was a chronic alcoholic given to buffonery unfit to have his finger on the button of one of the world's superpowers.

Why are these myths being propagated in the West?

Modern Russia by most standards would be considered a 'pariah state' - imagine if an Islamic country had assassinated one of their dissidents in London, had the same record on human rights as Russia does in Chechnya, or so brazenly displayed weapons of mass destruction.

The fact is the new order in the East gives the promise of a new lease of life for the older Western economies. Markets and resources denied to the West by the cold war are now open more or less for exploitation and development. There is a clear parallel with the scramble for empire at the end of the nineteenth century.

On the road again.

Thanks to the help of my local indie-Harley shop, my bike is back on the road again.

I don't think I could have taken much more of travelling on the tube. Maybe it's the weather getting warmer, or maybe I have an overly-heightened sense of personal space, but I am stunned at the sheer bloody rudeness of people on public transport. The last straw was being shoulder barged at the doors by some stuck-up, middle-aged secretarial bitch who appeared outraged when I asked '...what the fuck ? '. Amazing how 'office dress' bestows a misplaced air of superiority.

The nice people at the bike shop were embarrassed at the price for my repair. They had kept their own costs down, but it came down to the ridiculous cost of Harley parts. I am just stunned how Harley prices in Europe can be justified that are over double their equivalent in the US.

This is not just because of exchange rates. I'm convinced that this is a deliberate marketing ploy on the MoCo's part to position themselves as a luxury plaything over here, whilst they are 'blue collar transportation' in the US. Even worse, the huge industry in aftermarket parts frequently provides alternatives that are not just cheaper but actually often better.

Still, before anybody tells me that there are more practical forms of transport, motorcycling haven't been about practical transport since the 1960's. If I wanted practical I'd be riding a Honda C90 or a scooter. God forbid.

St George's Day.

St George's day - and the campaign to have a patron saint's day to match St Patrick's, David's and Andrew's. Because let's face it, if there is one thing that the world needs right now, it's a bit more nationalism.

The campaign ignores the difference between the nationalism of the 'celtic-fringe' nations, denied nationhood and that of one of the largest empires the world has seen. Which is why the flag of St George is associated with the Far Right in this country, whilst on the other hand, the daffodil is not an emblem of Welsh fascists.

Like most aspects of patriotism, the whole St George thing is based pretty much on ignorance. What little that is known of St George is that he was an officer in the army of the Eastern Roman Empire in the 3rd century AD who was martyred for his Christianity. He came from Cappadocia; and so depending on your point of view he was either Turkish or Greek. The whole dragon-slaying thing it goes without saying, is undocumented. Unsurprisingly he is big in Eastern Orthodox countries like Serbia, Georgia and Armenia.

As to why the cult of St George came to England at all - you have to look at the crusades. The idea of a warrior saint was particularly appropriate for that blood thirsty period, and was brought west by returning crusaders who got it from the Byzantines. Before then the patron saint of England had been either Edmund, martyred by the Vikings or Edward the Confessor, the saint-king. The trouble with both of these was that they were unmistakably Anglo-Saxon, and this was politically inconvenient for the new Anglo-Norman monarchs and aristocracy.

Since the reformation the Anglican church, oscillating between Anglo-Catholicism and Protestantism, has been a bit shaky on the status of saints. On the other hand the Catholic church is a bit more vigorous in its dealings. Which is why in 1893 Pope Leo ruled that George fell into the category of saints about whom we didn't have enough evidence and could simply be myths. He was demoted to the second division, and as far as Roman Catholics were concerned, St Peter was made the official patron saint of England.

So what are we left with ? - A Turkish bloke who isn't a proper saint and whose flag has become a rallying point for racists and fascists.

If we want a bank holiday in April, and I'm all for as many public holidays as possible, why not keep April 23rd as Shakespeare's birthday? The date is questionable and he may turn out to really have been Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon, but at least he represents something positive and lasting that England has contributed to the world. And I'd love to see all those red-faced chavs running around in Shakespeare t-shirts getting pissed up and quoting sonnets.

Looking mean doesn't really help.

News saturation about the Virgina Tech shootings.

Notice how in every report there appear to be dozens and dozens of cops lounging about in the background, supposedly 'securing the area' ? Just about every law enforcement agency is represented. Chewing gum, and wearing mirror shades they look well hard. But hasn't anyone pointed out to the SWAT teams that they are over 24hours too late ?

Sadly a small percentage of the cops now assembled could have been more fruitfully deployed on the day of the shootings, after the first wave and before the second two hours later. (As opposed to issuing an email warning to the students at 7:30 am to be cautious).

Trouble is this kind of misplaced machismo is at the root of the whole gun culture problem. (And dare I say militaristic foreign policy as well). Not that anyone is going to make themselves popular by raising any questions about this. In fact to date no US politician has even mentioned the words 'gun control'.

And lest we in the UK get too smug, we're not immune from such posturing here - remember the tanks patrolling the perimeter at Heathrow after 9/11 ? Presumably they were poised to pursue any terrorists boarding a plane with a box-cutter.

The trouble with posturing is that it leads you into situations that you can't back away from and that spiral out of control. And I speak from personal experience here; if we had the ready access here to guns that they have in the US, road rage could well have landed me dead or serving time.

Guns don't kill people, they just make it (too) easy

33 dead at Virginia Tech. The 19th killing spree at a US educational establishment in 19 years.Gun control in the US is back on the agenda.

I used to find something appealing about the notion of the right to bear arms. Like many aspects of the US constitution it implies a nation formed by the consent of free individuals. But this is not 1776 and we are not talking about a government of free-thinking frontier settlers but a complex modern society with all the issues that go with it.

As Michael More showed in 'Bowling For Columbine', it isn't just about access to the guns; look at Canada and Switzerland. But access to guns doesn't half help. And so does a deeply fucked up society in a continual state of paranoia. Paranoia of islamo-terrorists or of the dark skinned youths that live in the projects.

Guns of themselves don't kill people, but there is something peculiar about how they make killing possible. The Greeks despised the Persians because they fought with bows and arrows rather than hand-to-hand. They felt that this was unmanly as it required no courage to kill a an enemy who you ran no risk from yourself. Similarly, it's just too easy to kill someone with a device that can magically transform the bullied class nerd looking for payback into a killing machine.

Guns don't of themselves kill people, but they do provide one hell of a fatal outlet for otherwise suppressed anger.

Nazi chic.

Maybe it's a generational thing, but I feel that rock music should represent some kind of counter-culture. That's probably what keeps me loyal to much ridiculed trance-metal pyschic-guerillas Hawkwind.

By now I should have become used to rock musicians espousing the views of Middle England, moaning about high taxation, rising immigration, doing benefits for the Tories and accepting knighthoods. But I do draw the line when they start singing the praises of Nazi Germany: this from Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music:

"My god, the Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves. "Leni Riefenstahl's movies and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass parades and the flags - just amazing. Really beautiful."

I know Roxy Music, the grandaddies of the New Romantics, were always about image as much as music, but for fuck's sake !

Ferry's agent had defended him saying some of his critics are unable to separate the aesthetic from the politics. So, what are we saying, the Holocaust was a bit out of order, but those Nazis did have some really fabulous uniforms ?

Ferry's son Ottis (?!?) also made a name for himself a few years ago when he stormed parliament to protest in defence of hunting. Maybe I'm missing some aesthetic nuance here, but I can't help feeling that the Ferry family are just a bunch of over-privileged arseholes.

Blair says it's a black thing.

Blair has been lecturing black community leaders on how they need to sort out a youth culture of violence that has led to some tragic and highly publicised fatal stabbings in London this month.

What the fuck ? Does he really think that the black community hasn't noticed these deaths ? Did he miss the demonstrations in London after the killings ?

Blair may like to think that he knows all about multi-cultural North London because he has a home in Islington. Truth is he is one postcode but a million miles away from the inner city part of North London where I live. In my area the large black community can hardly miss the yellow police incident borders that are a permanent fixture on our streets. Not so I imagine in Tony's Cannonbury Square.

Blair speaks as if gangsta-culture is the only voice heard in the the black community. If he took a bit more time to get to know what was happening on his door step, he would know that there is a very conservative part of Caribbean culture that promotes church and family values that would not be out of place in the US religious Right.

The fundamental problem is not race or culture, it is POVERTY.

ALL kids now experience a video-game culture of instant violence without consequences. White kids in Ali-G fashion aspire to the gangsta style. But none of this addresses the real question - a map of the most violent areas of Britain coincides with that of the poorest areas.

Perhaps the best example is (overwhelmingly white but poor) Glasgow - murder capital of Europe with what police have called an epidemic of youth stabbings.

Joys & woes of biking.

A bank holiday for me dominated by bikes.

Briefly interupted by some bible-bashers who knocked on my door to ask about Jesus's message for Easter. I told them that I was a pagan and my mesage was that we had it first and that the bloody Christians (with the help of those bastard Romans) had nicked OUR festival of Aeosta. (It's easier than telling them you're an atheist and then trying to reason with them).

Anyway, Good Friday to the Ace Cafe - there is a hog roast and some sort of promotional nonsense going on for the new 'Wild Hogs' film coming out this week. There is a large attendance from the weekend-badass mid-life crisis brigade that seem to be missing the point that the film is primarily taking the piss out of them. Still, its a sunny day with plenty of nice bikes to look at.(Just as footnote to this, I find it hilarious that the Hells Angels MC are suing Walt Disney for infringement of copyright in the authorised use of their logo in the film).

Saturday I turn up for an Easter Egg Run to a kids centre from the local indie Harley shop. I find that it was last week. Feeling a bit of a prat I sit around the shop for an hour drinking tea and bullshitting before riding round to the Ace again and doing the same there.

Easter Monday is the annual ride out to Southend. A glorious day of sunshine and thousands of bikes make the run, for a brief moment you think that the A127 is route 66 and the flatlands of Essex the plains of the Mid-West. Southend never fails to disappoint though - the British seaside at its very worst, a shrine to the god of Chav. I catch a couple of numbers from a rock-a-billy band , soak up some sun and then beat a hasty retreat home.

Then this morning I got the bike out to go to work and the drive belt snapped. Bollocks. And double-bollocks.

Hostages freed & hypocrisy

So the hostage crisis has been resolved and the sailors and marines are on their way back to Britain.

On a human basis the only appropriate response is a sigh of relief for the families of the young service people involved. And on a political basis, a sigh of relief that an escalation of the war in the Middle East has been averted. Or at least postponed for the moment. Looking at the papers today, nobody seems sure if this is a triumph of British softly-softly diplomacy or a triumph of Iranian PR. I don't really care, either way it is a retreat from a dangerous game of brinkmanship by two regimes that don't speak for me.

Curiously, much has been made by The Sun of the fact that the hostages were released not in their service uniforms but in ill-fitting suits. This hardly seems like inhumane and humiliating treatment. After all the Iranians could have used orange jump-suits and shackled and hooded the prisoners. Or kept them in lock-down for twenty-two hours a day. Or imprisoned them for five years without trial or charge. All these points are made (with rather more humour) by Terry Jones in The Guardian.

To get all biblical on this one: Before the West can get sanctimonious about the capture and treatment of the hostages it needs to take the splinter out of its own eye - the splinter labelled Guantanamo.

Iranian conspiracies.

• The second gunman on the grassy knoll
• The Apollo moon landings in a television studio
• Diana's car crash
• The planes and the twin towers
• Alien autopsies at Roswell
• The Illumentanti / Freemasons / Opus Dei
etc etc etc

The internet abounds with plots concocted by paranoid geeks who haven't seen natural daylight for years, but I' m not a fan of conspiracy theories.

I'm pretty sure that the powers-that-be often do sinister things that they would rather keep quiet. Our so called leaders and representatives are often corrupt. They also fuck up and do very stupid things that they then want to cover up. But I don't think that behind every news story there is a Dr Evil stroking a cat on a swivel chair chuckling at his devilish cunning.

The trouble with all this is that conspiracy theories actually make governments and rulers appear more powerful than they really are, and the rest of us mere pawns left to marvel at their abilities of deception. In fact the truth is at the same time both more simple and more complex.

Governments blunder around from incompetence to incompetence and then lie or 're-spin' the truth to make it look like it was planned all along. Of course they are capable of well thought out and sinister agendas, but they are usually able to carry these out quite openly by cleverly manipulating consensus.

Look at the road to the Gulf War. Through some deft sleight of hand we were 'persuaded' in increments that there was a link and logical causality between the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban, Sadam's regime and now Iran. And so some sort of consensus, certainly in the USA, was created that gave political legitimacy to what any sober analyst could see was a war for western control of the world's oil producing zone. No ninjas were required to assassinate anyone and no evidence was planted to 'prove' that Sadam had weapons of mass destruction. In fact when Hans Blix's UN inspection showed that he didn't, the concenus for war still survived.

I don't believe that the Royal Navy deliberately trespassed into Iranian territorial waters as part of a conspiracy to provoke war. Almost as strongly as I believe that the US and UK have no business being in the Middle East in the first place. In fact I believe that Blair (and Bush if he cares) probably don't have a clue what to do about the 15 hapless sailors and marines that have the misfortune to be caught up in this. The allies have created a political momentum that makes it difficult for them to back track on the road to war with Iran. But the fact remains that they have so underestimated the problems of occupying Iraq that militarily another war is now a venture too far.