Teenage kicks

Channel 4’s Skins finished last night, with all the characters if not killed off, certainly dispersed for ever. I know I’m not the demographic that’s supposed to be watching it, but I think it’s genius – ridiculous and poignant at the same time.

I’m also pretty sure that a lot of the cultural references are wasted on me. But substitute Special Brew for the pills, 80’s metal for the trance, and obviously all the fashion, and essentially it’s me and my friends aged 18.

It captures that brief window when everything seems possible, it’s all still to be discovered and the whole world centres around your friends – a kind of intensity that will never come again. The human tragedy is probably that we forget so quickly how it is to feel that way - and lose something in the process.

Which is why it should be compulsory viewing for every 40-something, especially if they are a parent. And it’s bloody funny too.

Trade unions - initials & names

My trade union (Unite) has spoken out about bullying in the workplace – of clergymen by their parishioners. I’m a bit taken aback by this. As an ex-Catholic I can’t really think of clergymen as a part of the labour movement. And I was amazed to find that I am now in the same union as them.

I joined the print industry in the days of the closed shop and of jealousy and rivalry between the unions. In my naïve enthusiasm I initially joined the wrong union - SOGAT (Society Of Graphic Allied Trades). Trying to move to the correct one for my actual area of work, the NGA (National Graphical Association) was ludicrously difficult and achieved with only slightly less hassle than re-partition after a civil war.

But even when this was done I found that we didn’t really consider ourselves part of the NGA at all. We had merged only a few years before and still thought of ourselves as SLADE (the gloriously named Society of Lithographic Artists, Engravers & Process Workers). Not to be confused with the ex-ASLP (Amalgamated Society of Lithographic Printers) and definitely not with ex-NATSOPA (National Society of Operative Printers & Assistants).

All of which convinced me that craft unions were basically bollocks. Whilst everyone was arguing about differentials and giving archaic craft designations to new technologies, employers like Murdoch were busting the unions. And a new generation of people were coming in to the industry from design and IT backgrounds who the craft unions wouldn’t let in and who didn’t see the point of joining anyway.

For a too short time we had what had always made sense; a single (more or less) union for the printing / graphics industry - the GPMU (Graphic Paper & Media Union). But it was too late and financial pressures meant that we got swallowed up in a series of mergers with super-unions. Accordingly we traded initials and acronyms for vague and silly names – firstly Amicus and now Unite. Meanwhile fewer and fewer people see the relevance of being in a union – in fact the main benefits of memberships are cited as legal support, insurance and financial services.

I’m pretty sure I’d be hard pressed to find a fellow member of Unite any more who had a clue what my job was or what companies like mine do. That’s a pretty good acid test. Industry based unions made sense but I’m not sure that super-unions do – there seem to inevitably become lobbying groups rather than workplace-based.

And I wish the clergymen would just bugger off and form their own ARSE (Association of Religious & Spiritual Employees).

Ink & Iron

With a taste of Spring in the air I fancied a ride up to Birmingham on Sunday to the annual Ink & Iron show at the NEC. Custom bikes, tattoos and a ride in (short spells) of sun – what’s not to like?

So I was thoroughly pissed-off to find that the show has been canceled at short notice. Apparently the West Midlands police have advised that they couldn’t guarantee public safety. This of course is in the context of the supposed escalation of the ‘biker war’ between the Hells Angels MC and the Outlaws MC. Allegedly.

With the murder of Gerry Tobin last August, and the attack at Birmingham airport in January there is clearly some serious shit brewing. But I have no insights into these events to offer - and neither I suspect does anybody else outside the two clubs, whatever the self-appointed experts are saying in the tabloids.

The clubs are effectively a closed world that has nothing at all to do with ordinary bikers. And whatever you might think about their antics, no outsiders have been involved in any of these incidents – the general biking public are not at risk.

What this is about is a massive over reaction on the police’s part, fueled by media hysteria. Remember we are not talking about suicide bombers walking into the NEC – a small but visible police presence at the event would be enough to assure that any business the clubs might want to conduct is done elsewhere. But obviously a simple stewarding operation at an event that merely affects a minority sub-culture is not a priority.

Imagine the outcry if a football match was canceled on similar grounds.

Put that light out

I was surprised to learn that like so much of the Olympics, the whole torch carrying thing was a modern intervention. Apparently it was first used at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Fantastic, you really couldn't make this stuff up ...

I'm a bit slow off the blocks on this one - but just how marvelous were those scenes from London and Paris as the Olympic torch was assailed by demonstrators ?

It's not often that protesters face a win-win situation. But here it is for once. If the torch is extinguished it's a propaganda coup and if the authorities crack the protesters' heads - then the image that goes around the world is that of the repression of legitimate protest.

Hopefully by the time the torch eventually gets to Beijing the the credibility of the Chinese government will have taken a bit more of a battering at each city it passes through.

Bike DIY

Motorcycle Storehouse, the mail order supplier of all things custom and performance for Harleys has a slogan: 'A biker's work is never done'. It certainly isn't when you are a complusive tinkereer like me.

I've experienced what is euphemistically known as the oil blow-by phenomenon. This is a peverse peculiarity of Harley Evolution engines that vent the oil breather into the air filter. The idea is that oil is sucked into the carb and burnt off. Only it doesn't work - there's more oil mist than the carb can handle so it just collects in the oil filter and then drops onto the engine casing or your boot and scares the shit out of you that you have an oil leak. It gets worse if you have a performance air filter. And worse again if you have the 1200cc re-bore. I've got both - so I thought I'd better do something about it.

So I picked up an oil breather kit from Ebay. This weekend I'd thought I would fit it.Last night I took the air filter off. Or tried to, but I stopped as I realised that I was fast rounding off the original recessed breather bolts that held it on. A quick trip to Halfords before it shut to see if I could get a better socket was a non-starter. Asking for an imperial rather than a metric tool is guaranteed to get a blank stare. Trying to explain that I wanted a six point rather than a twelve point socket (that's what had done the damage) was even more so. Next morning I took the tube to Buck & Ryan the mecca of obscure tools in Holborn, and got the 9/16" deep walled six point socket I wanted. Except it still couldn't get a grip on the fucking bolts.

I took a deep breath and phoned the nice man at the local bike shop. He took one of his own sockets and put it onto a lathe to get rid of the lip at the end so as to get better purchase on the damaged bolts. Happily this worked. I returned home expecting to now finish the job in about half an hour. But instead I found that the breather kit wouldn't actually fit with the air filter. The plastic backing plate required drilling new mounting holes, sealing up old mounting holes, and recutting away some of the moulding. Thankfully my other half's jewellery making Dremell came to the rescue for that. The coast should have been clear to now fit the bloody thing - except the bolts supplied were too big and wouldn't fit the new mounting arrangement. So back to Halfords for some smaller (metric but sod it) bolts to hold it all together. Finally I got the fucking thing on - the best part of 24 hours after starting an half hour job.

The oil breather kit was only about £35. The new socket was £5 (plus as I'm a tool fetishist I also brought several other sockets also at £5 just in case). I gave the nice man at the bike shop £20 for his trouble and ruining one of his sockets. The new bolts from Halfords came in some ridiculous multi-part blister that cost £10. And the tube fare was another £5 or so. In total about £50 worth of buggering about in addition to the cost of the original part.

From long experinece that's a fairly typical bit of bike DIY.

Stupid but smug

To protect our kids apparently anyone with an e.mail address such as a.nonce@pedophiles.com will find themselves banished forever from social networking sites.

That’s pretty much the drift of the governments’ proposals to tackle convicted predatory abusers who contact children online. Oh yes - and if they give a false email address when they register with the police on their release, then they face five years imprisonment.

Have the fuck-wits who came up with this ever actually used the internet – do they have the slightest idea how easy it is to get an email address ?

It’s the same kind of thinking behind the debate about taking cannabis up to Class B status. People living in some kind of unworldly cocoon can feel sanctimonious and smug in making glib and hollow proposals that will have no impact on real problems, to the applause of an ignorant baying mob.

Welcome to dumbed down Britain.

Finest Hour ?

It’s the 90th birthday of the Royal Air Force.

Inevitably there will be talk of ‘the few’ and of Spitfires and Hurricanes. Rightly so - the achievement of the Battle of Britain pilots was a heroic and vital contribution to the war against Nazism.

But it’s worth remembering that the origins of the RAF do not lie in its ‘finest hour.’In fact they're downright ugly, and chillingly close to the new world order.

The emergence of a separate air force, as opposed to the Flying Corps of the army or the Air Service of the navy, lay in the theories of a new type of warfare that emerged at the end of the First World War. The Italian theorist Douhet and the visionary HG Wells predicted a form of strategic bombing that would target cities and civilian populations. Wars would end swiftly and decisively, rather than in the attritional slog of the trenches.

The theories were adopted by Trenchard, the founder of the RAF and were summed up with the slogan ‘the bomber will always get through’. Inter-service politics played a part too – if the RAF was to concentrate purely on battlefield ground targets, reconnaissance and dominance of the airspace over the trenches, it might just as well stay a part of the army.

After the First World War the British armed services reverted to their peacetime role of policing the empire. Ironically two of the trouble spots were Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the North West Frontier (Afghanistan). And the newly formed RAF formed a cost effective alternative to traditional troops on the ground. In the 1920’s it was estimated that it would take 105,000 British and Indian troops to conventionally police the revolt in Iraq. With the presence of the RAF it was actually achieved with a force of only 14,000. This was made possible by a campaign of terror bombing – the punitive incendiary bombing of villages that harboured insurgents and the use of chemical weapons – mustard gas was dropped on Kurdish and Shia rebels.

Arthur “Bomber’ Harris the architect of Dresden and Hamburg’s destruction was a squadron leader in Iraq. And Winston Churchill was an early advocate of these new efficient methods:“I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes to spread a lively terror”.

None of this need diminish the memory of aircrew, including some of my own family, who gave their lives in 1939-45. But in these times it does seem appropriate to remember exactly how we got to have an air force.

Cool or pseud ?

There’s a row going on over at The Guardian on-line about one of their columnists singing the praise of the Moleskine notebook. Of course the Guardian’s art, design and architecture blog is a pretty easy target if you want to take the piss out of people who wear black roll-necks (I have several by the way). Fair enough up to a point.

But I like Moleskine diaries. I also like Converse Chuck T’s. And Apple Macs. And Harley Dvaidsons. And Jack Daniels. Maybe this just makes me a sad wanker because, as comments on the blog make clear, there are always cheaper, better 'value', utilitarian versions available of just about any iconic item you can think of. Usually from Tesco.

But the trouble with that argument is that if you take it to its logical conclusion you deny the existence of quality. (Quality that is in the abstract sense of the word as Pirsig uses it in ‘Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance'). A world without it would be a totally grey dis-utopia. With no design or art.

Of course it’s highly personal and we all apply a concept of quality only to those things that matter to us personally. So for me, yes when it comes to bikes it’s a Harley, a BMW, a Guzzi or a Triumph rather than a better performing or better value Japanese clone. But when it comes to clothes – who gives a shit ? – it’s £10 M&S jeans rather than £100 on the designer equivalent. Go figure. It’s a matter of taste.

Carla fever

What’s with the national obsession with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy ? Sure she’s easier on the eye than the queen or Camilla, but then let’s face it that’s setting the bar pretty low.

The press seem to be whipping themselves in to a frenzy that she’s the next Lady Di / Jackie Onasis / Queen Of Hearts. But apart from being photogenic, what else is there to say about her ? Well she certainly didn’t let her professed left-wing sympathies get in the way of becoming the missus of a French tory leader (apparently she supported Sarkozy’s socialist rival Segone Royal, and she's been linked with former socialist premier Laurent Fabius).

Coming from one of Italy’s wealthiest families, and having been a top earning supermodel you couldn’t really call her a gold-digger, but from her impressive list of famous ex’s she is some sort of power-digger: Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Kevin Costner and Donald Trump. For all her left-bank chic there's not too many struggling artists or impoverished intellectuals there. One story going around relates to her having seen Sarkozy on TV and saying "I want to have a man who has nuclear power." Nice. Rather more WAG than Simone de Beauvoir.

But the most telling image of the visit is not of Carla in one of her Dior suits – it’s this shot of her feet alongside Sarkozy's. Never trust a short bloke who wears high heels to compensate. Even Napoleon didn’t do that.

Boycott Beijing

The spectacle of the England football team giving the Nazi salute at the 1936 Berlin Olympics sends a shudder of revulsion down our spines today. I wonder what we will think in seventy years time about images of the 2008 forthcoming Beijing Olympics.

Which begs the question: Bearing in mind the suppression of protest in Tibet, the continuing sale of arms to the Sudanese in Darfur, civil engineering projects of unimaginable environmental damage, the suppression of ethnic and religious groups, an appalling criminal justice system and a litany of human rights abuses against dissidents .... why was it considered reasonable to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan , apartheid South Africa or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, but not China ?

The only reason that I can see for these double standrads is that none of those countries were/are emerging economies on the global stage. Meanwhile China is fast becoming the manufacturing sweat shop of the world, and pissing them off is bad for business.

Wandering in the snow

Braved freak snow flurries to make the annual Spring shakedown run to Southend on Easter Monday. I thought I’d wear the full-face helmet to get a bit of wind protection but hadn’t bargained for it freezing up on the inside as well as the out – with the visor up I’d have been better off wearing the trusty open-face with goggles.

Southend itself never fails to disappoint - so it was a quick once up and down the seafront to check out the bikes (unsurprisingly fewer than previous years); some very second-rate fish’n’chips; a half of Guinness to catch a set from a Rockabilly band and then head for home again.

One particular bike caught me eye; a stunning old Triumph in a Metisse frame although in a street scrambler style rather than the usual café racer, but still with the alloy tank and loads of polished stainless. It was immaculately clean but details like the hand-plaited bright wiring, modern foam grips and Hagon shocks would have all pissed off the classic-bike purists. I was happy that it was clearly ridden and looked-after rather than just restored and polished.

Riding home my mind wandered as it tends to when you have an open road and aren’t in any particular hurry.

The snow made me think of the Battle of Towton, fought in the middle of another freak Easter snowstorm in 1461. Visibility was so bad that the two armies stood toe-to-toe and hacked away at each other for hours. Officially it was the bloodiest battle on British soil – something like 1% of the total population perished in a single day.

How did I get there?: Well I bet a few of them wished they’d had a full-face helmet that day.

Happy Eostra

Everybody's making noises about Easter coming early this year. Few seem to be aware why this is so: It's because, in simple terms, the date of Easter is calculated around the lunar calendar and the first full moon of Spring. It is not you'll notice an anniversary based on Roman records of the date of the crucifixion of a certain Jesus of Nazareth.

Hmmm. Maybe there's a clue there to its origins ?

(Just to spell it out for the hard of thinking: Eostra was a pagan Germanic fertility goddess. Her name provides the derivation of Oestrogen. Hence the whole Easter egg thing).

Which reminds me of I read a nice story about a child being asked to describe the Easter story: Apparently it's when the Easter bunny hatches out of a chocolate egg and then goes to heaven.

Makes as much sense as some stuff I've heard. Whatever. Enjoy the break ...

No sense of history..or irony

Here's one of those quirkly stories about obsolete laws that are still on the statute books – stuff like being able to urinate on the back wheels of a hackney carriage or shoot a Scotsman on a Sunday in Carlise. Apparently a whole number of such laws are being repealed at the moment.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw, a man I expect whose sense of humour is matched only by his passion for civil liberties, came out with the following piece of unconscious irony:
"Laws on turnpikes, workhouses, and the Peterloo Massacre are rightly of interest to historians, but there is no need to retain them on the statute book.”

He maybe being a bit hasty there:

• Turnpikes – well we have PFI, privatised railways and toll roads so why not turnpikes?

• Workhouses – with the concept of 'workfare' and social housing reforms to evict those not actively seeking work, workhouses seem like a reasonable option.

• The Peterloo Massacre – a legitimate and peaceful protest brutally dispersed amidst hysteria about revolutionary ‘outrages’. Dare I mention the current anti-terrorism laws or the regular over reaction of the the police whenever there is a public order incident?

I’m just off to piss on the back of a taxi now…

'Bloody do-gooders'

I was having a discussion with a few colleagues at work about identity cards and asylum seekers, and I got called a ‘do-gooder’.

It’s a strange form of abuse when you think about it . Do-gooder as opposed to what ? A ‘do-bollocks to them all-er’ or a ‘do-don’t give a shit about anyone else-er’ or a ‘do -not in my backyard-er’ ?

Of course I knew what they meant. When I was a bit more doctrinaire I would use ‘liberal’ in the same way – as in petty-bourgeois liberal who fails to understand the correct Marxist perspective.

But after years of dealing with real reactionaries, I’ve woken up to the fact that there are worse things than being a liberal. Things like being a xenophobic racist cunt.

A depressing story

This isn’t a story about bringing back capital punishment. Or about ending anonymity for juvenile offenders. Or about stiffer sentences and ‘life meaning life’. Or about holding parents responsible for out of control kids. Or about chavs and hoodies. But it's nonetheless FUCKING DEPRESSING.

The on-going trial of the killers of Sophie Lancaster: Last year she was kicked to death in a park in Lancashire by a gang of kids who also managed to put her boyfriend into a coma which has left him with brain damage. The reason, apparently was that they were Goths and the kids didn’t like the look of them.

Racist attacks and gay-bashing has been around for a long time. Nowadays they’re classified as ‘hate crimes’ - which perhaps is progress of sorts. There’s all kinds of social, economic and psychological reasons for racism and homophobia. Knowing these reasons doesn’t mitigate the crimes - but it just might put things into a political context, where something can be done to address them.

But kicking someone to death because you don’t like their eyeliner – where the fuck does that come from? There’s always been a thing with kids and tribes – as a teenager I got into several fights with ‘casuals’ for having long hair and being a ‘headbanger’. But that was always ritualized and a bit half hearted - this kind of vehement hatred and intolerance is something else. And profoundly bloody depressing.

A week in the life …

I don’t usually blog about work. Not because of any sort of professional discretion but because this blog is meant to be an antidote to work.

But three things this week illustrate what I end up stressing over most of my waking hours. These may or not be typical of people running small/medium sized business (I think SME is the jargon). Actually, they’re probably typical only of Trotskyists who find themselves as company directors, with an under-used education, in a former craft industry that has been decimated by technology, and now continually reinvents itself.

(As background the industry of graphic arts/ pre-press is an odd little world – a mixture of creativity and manufacturing - and because of the type of businesses we sell our services to, we rub alongside the bollock-speak arena of corporate marketing).

But anyway here’s the three things that have dominated my week:

• I had to sack an incompetent member of staff; a horrible process that I have been through (very rarely) before. It was done (I think) fairly and legally but it's still not what I ever imagined myself doing. It’s a difficult process – as it should be - and because I’m something of a reluctant boss it was made more difficult because I let the situation fester longer than I should. In fact until the individual’s colleagues were clamouring for me to take action. But enough already - I’m not going to come out with any ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’ bullshit. It obviously didn’t, and I’m still here, but only a complete wanker would be unaffected.

• Two of our trainees finished their apprenticeships. In the not so old-days they would have gone through a rite-of-passage ceremony of being ‘banged out’. This involved getting covered in ink and flour and all sorts of other horrible shit and dragged through the streets. Nowadays they just get an NVQ certificate. For about a decade we had no apprentice scheme at all – the result of new technology and union-busting. But I took the decision to introduce the NVQs and bring back an updated version of the old system. It’s one of the few things I can actually take some pride in.

• The rest of the time has been devoted to pulling together a pitch for our most important client who are re-tendering the services we have supplied to them for the past 12 years. There’s a new regime there who are excited about the idea of ‘global sourcing’. In reality it’s got fuck all to do with our services but I have to defend the fact that we don’t off-shore our work and we’re not part of some multinational group with offices in every sweat-shop zone in the world. Oh yes - and also still demonstrate how we can reduce our prices and be more productive. Needless to say, if I can’t convince them, the future doesn’t look too bright …

That’s it – the bad, the good and the increasingly ugly - welcome to my world. I won’t be talking about it again soon.

We don't need no (monarchist) education

Public displays of patriotism fill me with dread. When they involve children, even more so. It seems like a slippery slope to the worst kind of nationalism – exactly what we don’t want to pass on to new generations.

Which is why I couldn’t believe that Lord Goldsmith (now there’s a name to conjure with for a politician in a supposed democracy) suggested that the oath of allegiance is introduced into schools. It all stems from some twisted New Labour concept of citizenship and civic pride. I’ve covered this before – it’s a complete fabrication – we are subjects not citizens - you’ll only find citizens in a republic.

Ironic isn’t it that in this country you can opt out of acknowledging god but not the monarchy ? For official and legal purposes, atheists can choose to affirm rather than swear. But there’s no such option for republicans, democrats, socialists, anarchists etc. Or anyone else who isn't happy to bend the knee like a medieval vassal. We can't choose to pledge loyalty to the parliament and the constitution rather than the crown (well not since Cromwell’s day).

White tribes ?

It’s a debate that comes round from time to time: ‘who speaks for the white working class ?’.

There’s been a survey of the former mining town of Easington in County Durham which apparently is the whitest place in England, and with the colliery gone and the steelworks gone, life is unsurprisingly fucking grim. And there’s a BBC series coming up – something along the lines of ‘the lost white tribes of Britain’.

I got suspicious when I hear the question asked because it’s usually a rhetorical device for the BNP and other fascists to jump in and answer ‘we do’. Or it’s asked by whinging Little Englanders who sometime way back in the Eighties decided that they weren’t working class anymore and embraced the Thatcherite dream. What they really mean is ‘who speaks for the white bigots ?’ And of course the answer is the BNP again. And Jeremy Clarkson and the Daily Mail.

Undeniably communities like Easington have been disenfranchised. It’s not because they’re white though – it’s because they are working class – the Tories declared war on them and then New Labour deserted them. If they came down to Hackney, Tottenham or Brent, they’d find that life for the Black or Asian working class isn’t too peachy these days either. And all the bollocks about preferential housing etc for ethnic minorities is precisely that: Bollocks.

It’s not fashionable to say so, but class is more important than race as far as ‘life chances’ go. The fascists don’t want to hear that and neither do the small and very much exaggerated Black or Asian middle class.

And whilst we're at it; being abandoned and disenfranchised is one thing, but building an isolated ghetto of ignorance and small mindedness is another. Every society has it's rednecks - and it's possible to choose not to be one.

Binge drinking Britain: a history

Hysteria about 24-hour drinking everywhere at the moment. (Strange I must have missed the decree that we had to drink for 24 hours. Much as I haven’t yet found anywhere that actually does serve alcohol round the clock).

What we are talking about is really just a slightly more relaxed attitude to bar opening times (as opposed to the draconian restrictions put into place in the First World War to keep munitions workers sober and in the factory). It’s said that the liberalisation brings us into line with the rest of Europe – although I haven’t yet found anywhere where we can get a breakfast beer, as you can in Germany and the Netherlands.

The disapproving hysteria about the new laws opening the floodgates to binge drinking is just sanctimonious bollocks.

Maybe it’s the climate, something genetic or our cultural history but, for better or worse the British are, and always have been, a nation (or nations) of drinkers.

The Romans exploited the fact that the Ancient Britons would pretty much sell their own grannies for an amphora of Mediterranean wine and used it as a tool of colonial oppression, much as Europeans did to Native Americans.

For the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, social life centred on the mead-hall. The ability to hold your drink was one of the warrior virtues. It was even embodied in religion – an average day in Valhalla consisted of fighting all day, being revived by the Valkeyires and then embarking on an all night orgy and piss up in the mead-hall.

In the middle ages, the yeoman English longbowmen were feared throughout Europe not just for their prowess as mercenary archers that threatened to destabilise the knightly class, but also for their propensity for drunkenness, looting and brawling.

In the eighteenth century, as the working class took to the urban centres, binge drinking reached an epidemic much as heroin has blighted many inner city estates today. Hogarth exposed and satirised it as ‘gin alley’.

Poe-faced Victorian middle class reformers used alcohol as the dividing line between the deserving and un-deserving poor, seeing it as the curse of the working class and led ‘temperance’ crusades.

And that is exactly the point of the current hysteria, behind the sanctimony there is a common thread of the ruling and middle class disapproving of the antics of their inferiors:

Yes ‘binge drinking’ can fuck up both individual lives and city centres. Yes we should have a more mature attitude to alcohol – and develop better tastes than chemically lagers and alco-pops.

But the fact remains that if you knock back eight pints of Stella in Middlesbrough you are a disgraceful yob - have a couple of bottles of Pinot Grigiot at a dinner party in Islington and you’re just being bohemian.

Harry the hero

Unsurprisingly, I’ve managed to resist the Harry fever that’s sweeping the country.

Fair play, on a personal basis as rugger-bugger toffs go, Harry doesn’t come across too badly. At least he had the balls to go on the front-line. Unlike George Dubya he didn’t elect an easy form of service. Like defending Texan air-space with the National Guard from incursions by the Viet Cong. (I guess the equivalent would be defending Boujis with the territorial army from Taliban attack ).

But amidst the euphoria of Harry’s return the larger issues have been lost.

Channel 4’s Jon Snow has been crucified by the press for daring to criticize the media embargo. But it’s a fair question – just why did the Western media agree to keep silent ? Surely it is not their role to be conscripted into the war effort. Therein lies a very slippery slope.

Of course it’s naïve to imagine that there is no censorship in war - but Harry’s presence in the theatre wasn’t an operational secret. And can we rationally argue that his life is any more precious than that of any other young squaddie?

As it stands though Harry has become the poster boy for the war. Army recruitment will doubtless get a boost. And fresh life has been breathed into an increasingly irrelevant and unpopular monarchy. PR mission accomplished.

Martial arts: check up and maintenace.

I’ve been getting fairly frustrated with my training recently. Inevitably after so many years the learning curve is going to flatten out. But I’ve often come away with the feeling that I’m actually getting worse. This may or may not be true but it isn’t a good feeling.

But last night I had a session where I felt as if I had progressed more in a half hour than I had in the previous three months.

One of my problems is that as a supposed ‘senior’, I tend to spend a lot of my training time teaching less experienced people. Doing so is a blessing in many ways because you don’t really get to understand something until you have to deconstruct it and explain it to someone else. But is has a downside too: If you don’t want to be the kind of bullying teacher who beats up on his students, you can end up with some bad habits. Like letting your opponents into openings so they can try moves out, or over-elaborating your moves so that you can demonstrate things, or breaking your flow to explain something.

Which are exactly the traps I seem to have fallen into. And it only took a half hour with my Sihing (elder brother) to point this out. Of course it’s going to take a lot longer to eradicate ingrained bad habits but at least I now know the cause of my frustrations.

It makes me quite realise how lucky I am to have found the school that I have: small private and old-skool with a high student retention rate. At most ‘McMartial Arts franchises’ I would long ago have been pushed out to teach my own students. But at our place, even though my own teacher (Sifu)is no longer around, with sixteen years training behind me, I still have maybe five or six Sihings who train regularly. And that keeps me (or gets me back) on course.

And it does make me wonder about all those ‘black belts’ that you will find running martial arts classes at just about every sports-hall in the country. If they are not regularly checked out and stretched by their seniors at best they are going stagnate, or worse, if they are not honest with themselves, develop some serious ego problems.

Plastic bags make strange bed fellows

My front yard is a magnet for a particular variety of bright blue plastic bags that are given away with EVERY purchase from the Turkish general stores we have in either direction on our street.

Cans of Special Brew and cheap imported Polish lager are the most common purchases - consumed pretty much on the spot and the unnecessary wrappers discarded almost instantly – into my hedge and yard.

Indoors we also seem to have accumulated more than a lifetime’s supply of plastic bags. I’m not sure if my partner is just an obsessive hoarder, or if she is making an environmental statement, but we never throw the fucking things away. And of course the council’s re-cycling service aren’t interested in them. We used to have one of those long sausage bags to store and dispense them – but we’ve long outgrown that and the unwanted plastic bags now leap out at us whenever we open a cupboard door.

So all of this, along obviously with the sea life being killed by the millions of bags dumped into our oceans, leads me to support the anti-plastic bag campaign of the Daily Mail. And M&S’s initiative to charge their customers for plastic bags. Now there’s something I never thought I’d see myself writing. Bloody hell.

Whatever happened to those brown papers bags and sacks that we see in the movies but never have in real life in this country ?

Opiate for the star struck

Is it just me or is there more than the usual amount of bollocks about the Oscars this year? When I turned on the TV before going to work this morning it was actually the lead item on the BBC breakfast news.

Possible explanations for this unjustified hype:

• Something serious is really going on in the world and this is just a diversion before we hear tomorrow that the invasion of Iran had begun.

• It’s part of a well orchestrated PR campaign by the film industry to down play the effect of the screen-writers’ strike.

• We have become a generation of morons: Celebrity is the new aristocracy and star–gazing the new religion.

I like films. But I don’t give a shit about stars or their industry awards or what they are wearing on the red carpet. Much as I don’t imagine they are too bothered about the packaging design or pre-press awards.

(I’m not in a good mood today).

Unfortunate tattoos

I don’t flaunt my tattoos at work but I don’t particularly hide them either. Consequently people tend to come up and talk to me about tattooing.

One guy recently proudly showed off some Kanji characters that he’d had on his bicep. Apparently they spelt out his daughter's name – Sharon. I tried to show a sort of non-committal politeness and conceal my feelings that it was total bollocks.

I’ve never heard of any Asian girls called Sharon so I’m guessing that it is spelt out pseudo-phonetically. Which of course is nonsense and liable to produce the kind of comic ambiguities that ended up recently with one girl being tattooed with what was dangerously similar to the name of a Hong Kong supermarket chain (which is actually funnier than simply the word ‘supermarket’ as reported by the BBC).

Having something tattooed that you can’t actually read just seems like a recipe for disaster. From my martial arts experience I know the huge arguments (and actual fights) that have raged for years over differing interpretations of the characters that represent my chosen style of Wing Chun – ‘Forever Spring’ or ‘Praise Spring’ or ‘Beautiful Spring’. And this is between people who can actually speak the language but where context is everything and interpretation is not literal but contextual.

There also seems something inherently disrespectful about appropriating an aspect of another culture and then using it out of context. Ironically there is a beautiful and fascinating tradition of Japanese tattooing (horimono) going back for centuries, and none of it, to my knowledge, uses characters.

Come to think of it, I’m really not convinced about any sort of lettering as the basis of a tattoo, even if you do understand the language. As a means of commemorating a loved one it shows a distinct lack of imagination, or maybe it just means that you’re not good with names and feel the need for a memory-aid.

A tale of two diaries

For the past four years I’ve been using a Molskine diary. Not in a Samuel Pepys sort of way, just as a practical organiser; I carry it everywhere because my memory is like a sieve.

Also, because I’m a bit sad that way, I keep the old ones in my desk at work in case I need to check back on the date of a meeting or something. Most of the time I don’t – which is why I only just remembered that they were there this morning. Flicking through them got me thinking:

I usually go for the version of the diary that has a week on one side and a blank page for notes opposite. Most of the stuff on the left hand (diary) side consists of the times of various meetings, deadlines for projects and domestic arrangements. On the right hand (notes) side the entries are titles of books and CDs I want to remind myself to buy, websites I want to remember, Harley Davidson parts numbers of stuff I need to order, little nuggets of information I have picked up whilst surfing at work – usually bikes, martial arts, politics or history – often they end up getting regurgitated in this blog.

What does it say about me that re-reading the right hand pages fills with memories and ideas, whilst reading the left hand side just makes me want to groan ? To paraphrase John Lennon: “Life happens when you’re busy not working”

Politicians with bottle

Politicians often talk about taking up a fight against something or other. But generally they’re a pretty wimpy bunch and don’t really mean it.

Which is why I loved the story about Obama-supporting Democrat congressman Jesse Jackson Junior (pictured here). After a row in the House with geeky conservative Republican Lee Terry, Jackson suggested that the pair of them ‘take it outside’.

Washington-insiders seem unanimous in the view that Jackson, a martial arts practitioner, would have kicked Terry’s ass.

Nice to see a return to principled, confrontational politics.

Bloody scooters

I find myself developing a loathing of scooters and their riders.

I don’t mean that in a mods and rockers kind of way. Funnily enough proper scooterists, the guys who run old Lambrettas and Vespas, and bikers rub along quite happily these days.

They even turn up at the same rallies and shows, we pass them on the roads to the coast, playing a kind of group leap-frog as they pull over at the roadside one breakdown after another. There is a kind of respect for their perversity in choosing a vehicle that is so mechanically unsuitable for long distance riding.

The scooter riders I loathe are the hoards of non-riders in London who have taken to two wheels to avoid the congestion charge and the horrors of public transport.

On the road they are a liability. Perhaps because they are supposedly easy to ride ‘twist and go’ machines, it is assumed that no training or skill is required. Or fucking common-sense either. So I constantly find them overtaking on the inside, cutting me up and generally entrenching the already homicidal feelings of four wheel users towards anyone on two.

It gets worse when they come to park.

Despite the massive increase in scooters, the London boroughs have not increased the number of bike-parks as this would mean turning over car parking spaces and losing revenue. So bikes and scooters are jammed in solid next to each other in the few bike-parks available. The scooters have no prop stands, and this along and with the engine over the rear-wheel, means they often can take up as much width as the heaviest touring bike.

The riders have no sense of biking etiquette or camaraderie: Four times now I’ve come back to my bike to find it damaged by scooters jammed in solid alongside it. I’ve had my speedo smashed, a mirror cracked, my number-plate broken in half and now scratches put down the side of my exhaust. And never once a note of apology or contact details left. On the other-hand I damaged a bike I was parked alongside last year. I felt mortified and obligated to do the right the thing. It cost me about £200 and a bottle of Jack Daniels, but I would expect any other biker to do the same in return.

Why don’t these tossers just learn to ride and get themselves a little trail bike for the city? Or better still, stay on the bus?

Sun ...& simple pleasures.

We are simple creatures at heart – well at least I am – and a bit of sunshine this weekend, a ‘false spring’ in fact, was all it took to put a smile on my face.

I had Friday off work to get my bike through the MOT test. For some reason every year I feel inexplicably nervous about my baby being examined. It passed, with an advisory note about the loud exhaust, the small number-plate and the solo seat fitted with pillion pegs. This is a very English ritual – the shop knows it’s bullshit – I know it’s bullshit – but it covers their arse if I get pulled over on my way back from the test.

I celebrated the fine weather and legal status by heading off to Cambridge. Had lunch in the Eagle and wondered around for a short while – always strange to return to somewhere you used to live and find that it has managed to carry on quite well without you. For a few minutes I am seduced by its charm and I get nostalgia for being student, then I hear a few braying voices and their uniquely penetrating irritation and I remember everything I hated about those students when I was one.

Saturday - off to the tattooist for the next part of my half-sleeve. It’s developing slowly bit by bit as I find suitable images from pieces of Celtic-Norse-Pictish-Saxon archaeology: Not only do the pieces have to appeal to me, they have to be suitable for tattooing and be able to fit together. They also have to avoid any of the associations with Aryan Brotherhood/neo-fascism which seems to has taken over much of this iconography.

It may be a form of masochism, but I love the whole process of being tattooed – the anticipation waiting around whilst the drawing and stencil is done, then the permanent design being applied, even the small talk whilst in the chair. And the after-glow of having acquired a new bit of personal art. Extra entertainment was provided this Saturday when the two very slight female staff cleared out half a dozen pissed-up football fans who weren’t happy to be told that they couldn’t turn up for an appointment in a drunken state. They handled the situation wonderfully, and I suspect that if it had been a bloke who had turned them away the whole situation would have turned ugly …

Sunday and I was on the bike again to see my parents down in Kent - open face helmet, shades, and a smile again.

See – it only takes a bit of sun.

Return to the tied-cottage & workhouse.

Housing Minister Caroline Flint wants to kick claimants out of social housing if they are able to work but not actively seeking employment. More compassionate ‘social justice’ from New Labour.

Before the Daily Mail digs up a story about some family with 12 kids who are caning the welfare system and make Shameless look like the Archers, I have to accept that such people do exist. And I wouldn’t fancy living next door to them. But I don’t see how making them homeless is going to improve the situation.

It’s not as if social housing is a charitable venture; only available to the deserving poor who if they misbehave forfeit their rights. Well actually that’s exactly how New Labour see it – and whether you call it ‘work-fare’ or whatever else, it is a return to the Victorian politics of the workhouse.

There’s a couple of very obvious reasons why much social housing has been turned into sink-estates for the poorest and most troubled sections of society. Housing benefit tends to be accepted only by councils and the very worst private landlords. And ever since we had the right-to-buy and the myth of the property owning democracy, the better off sections of the working class have moved away from social housing.

The vision of the sixties planners that council estates could provide a model for living (a mechanism of social justice in today’s bollock-speak) is now universally derided. But it was not the concept that was doomed to fail, housing and education can provide progressive social engineering (now there’s an apparently dirty word) but the vision failed because pro-market politicians chose to sabotage it.

Caroline Flint is tipped as a future rising star of New Labour. She’s definitely more photogenic than pudding-faced Brown. I remember her from Labour Students as an earnest and joyless Kinnock-ite careerist zealot. With her current Thatcherism and disregard for the most vulnerable I’m sure she’ll go far.

Grindhouse: DeathProof

Watched Tarantino’s Grindhouse feature DeathProof last night.

Su-fucking-perb.

Simply cannot understand how it hasn't been as well received as his previous offerings.

Of course it’s ridiculously self-indulgent. That’s the whole point. Not only is Tarantino referencing all those cult B-movies he watched as a clerk in a video store, he’s now referencing his own previous movies as well.

In the early 80’s I used to frequent what I imagine was a pretty similar video store. It was a couple of miles out of town, at the end of an unpaved track in a builder’s yard and over a 24hour mini-cab office, entered by a steel fire escape. It didn’t open until the evening and then it seemed to be open all night, I’m fairly sure it was a front for something else, but I never found out what. In fact I can’t even remember how we found out about it in the first place. But having joined, you felt like you were a member of some underground club that was in the know.

The choice of films was pretty limited, not helped by the fact that the stock was doubled up with Betamax as well as VHS. So we got to see Death Race 2000, Assault on Precinct 13, Dawn of the Dead, The Warriors, Escape From New York etc again and again. Come to thing of it, Tarantino could well have been the nerdy clerk working there. (He probably never lived in East Anglia though)

McEducation ?

Working for McDonalds seems to have taken the place of national service for a new generation.

Something along the lines of ‘well it might be shit but at least it taught me a thing or two about life’.

News that McDonalds will be able to award qualifications that are the equivalent of A-levels has not been greeted with the derision that I would expect. People are rallying to the defense of vocational education and branding those who joke about degrees in hamburger flipping as intellectual snobs.

I know a thing or two about this: I've introduced a vocational qualification scheme into my workplace; the Level 3 NVQ Advanced Modern Apprenticeship , which is also supposedly the equivalent of an A Level. And I’ve also been occasionally accused of being an intellectual snob because I believe in learning for learning’s sake.

The apprenticeship scheme is not perfect by any means; the self-development side of it seems to come from the back of a second-rate self-help book, and the technical side of it is out of step with current technology and practice. BUT it does give new entrants some sort of career structure and a sense that they are entering a skilled trade. And for a whole period of ten years, between the old craft apprenticeships being obsolete and the present scheme being adopted, this was not clear and many youngsters fell by the wayside.

It’s proper vocational training and it’s a good thing. So why don’t McDonalds just do the same? And why are the government recognising their home-grown scheme ?

Maybe because:

• Making hamburgers is not a skilled trade and doesn’t merit a full apprenticeship – the whole slick McDonalds operation is down to standardisation and de-skilling so that their burgers are the same everywhere – that’s actually the precise opposite of what a proper catering apprenticeship would be about.

• An apprenticeship teaches a general skill or trade rather than simply how to do specific tasks. But a large part of McDonalds' ‘training’ pride itself on learning to do things the McDonalds way. Or corporate brain-washing. Not really the kind of thing that City & Guilds is able to teach or evaluate.

• Muddled thinking on education and training: Vocational and non-vocational education are both good and should have equal status. But trying to come up with a system of equivalency will tie us in knots - hence the BA in Hamburger-Studies joke. The muddle can be seen in the fact that firms can't get funding for graduates to do an apprenticeship. Because degrees are deemed to be the equivalent of a Level 5 NVQ ! The idea that a graduate might want to pursue a skilled trade apparently just doesn’t compute – (that one jars with me personally).

• The new consensus that public bad / private good means that businesses are creeping more and more into education. We’ve already got city/technical academies – and before we realise it, commercially ‘useless' subjects will be unavailable to all but the most privileged.

But we can still at least all get a BA (McD).

Britannia ... or Boudica ?

A bit of consternation in Little Britain that Britannia is to be removed from the 50p coin.

Apparently it's 'political correctness gone mad again' and an attack on British values. Tory historian, Churchill hagiographer and British Empire cheerleader Andrew Roberts has lent some intellectual gravitas to the cause.

But why the fuss ?

Britannia was the invention of a repressive superpower who gave the name to these islands when we were a far flung colony, and created a quasi-goddesss as its personification. (I’m talking of course about the Romans not the Americans, they are far less colourful and prefer to call us simply ‘Yuurp’).

She then fell into disuse for a long time until it was politically expedient in the seventeenth century to find something to tie together the new and far from united kingdoms of England and Scotland. So one of Charles II’s mistresses posed for the design that was used on the farthing coin. Ironically once things had gone full circle for Britain, from Roman colony to world superpower, ‘Rule Britannia’ became the theme tune for our own brand of imperialism.

Over the years she may have become confused in the national psyche with Boudica, a confusion that the Romans would have found highly ironic. But in Boudica there really is a genuine national icon worthy of commemoration.

A female war leader who took ferocious revenge against injustice and came close to driving out a tyrannical empire. A proto-femminist with wild red hair and probably tattoos as well. I suspect that Andrew Roberts and company would not have approved of her at all.

Tribute to Tower Colliery

The Tower Colliery closes today – the last deep mine in Wales and possibly the longest operating mine of this kind in the world - a poignant footnote to the death of the British mining industry.

It’s now easy to see that when Thatcher embarked on her programme of pit closures her motivation came from a sense of revenge for the NUM bringing down the Tories in 1974, and a strategy to take on the strongest section of the labour movement as the first stage in a general campaign to break the power of the unions. But at the time the Great Lie was perpetuated that mining was no longer economically viable, and that those who questioned this were dinosaurs refusing to acknowledge the march of progress.

So when the Tower Colliery was up for closure in 1994 and the miners pooled their redundancy money to buy the pit from British Coal, and then managed the mine profitably for the next thirteen years, the Great Lie was exposed. And the workers-run mine became something of a symbol of pride and an inspiration. Now the mine is finally worked-out and truly uneconomical. Happily it appears that those miners who wish to continue in the industry are going to be working on two nearby open cast collieries.

Only those of us who never had to endure the danger and hardship of working underground can afford the luxury of sentimentality about the end of an era. But having lived through the miners’ strike and had the privilege at that time to meet striking miners from Wales, the closure brought a lump to my throat; The same sense of sadness and pride as when the miners marched back to work in 1985, defeated but defiant behind their banners and bands.

Judged by the company you keep ?

This is delicious.

I can't count the number of times that a legitimate protest has been undermined by the police and the media.

Demonstrations are portrayed as an excuse for 'rent-a-mob' and other assorted malcontents to block the streets at great inconvenience, expense and even danger to the general public. (The general public by the way are obviously a completely separate body of people who NEVER want to demonstrate about anything.)

Yesterday we were inconvenienced here in the capital by the police pay demonstration. I believe that the demonstration passed off peacefully - but this was despite the presence of a hardcore of troublemakers.

The bloke circled in the picture is none other than Richard Barnbrook - the BNP's mayoral candidate for London. He represents the 'acceptable metropolitan' face of the fascists; he is a sculptor and film director, and his partner is the fascist ballerina who caused such a stir a few years ago. So what the FUCK was he doing on the march and why was his presence tolerated ?

Ironically I can remember a few years ago a group of us tried to kick the fascists off a Remembrance Day parade - and were violently prevented from doing by - you've guessed it - the police. Hmmm.

Smith out of touch on the streets

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says that walking around the streets of Hackney late at night is not ‘a thing that people do’ and that she wouldn’t feel safe. Tory Shadow Home Secretary David Davis says you can walk around the streets of other capital cities but not London.

What planet do these people live on?

Certainly not the same one as most of us. We have to walk around the streets of the cities at night: because we fucking LIVE HERE. And how else are we going to get back from the tube or pop out to the off-licence or grab a late night kebab or experience any other of the many joys of city-living denied to those in small towns and shires ?

Is it more dangerous here than any where else ? I grew up in the suburbs and can remember that walking home around closing time I had the choice of how many fights I could get into - and quite a few where I didn’t have any choice at all.

Is it more dangerous now than at any other time in the past ? Not when we had real Victorian values and the Whitechapel murders, or when we had the ‘spirit of the blitz’ and a crime-spree in the blackout.

Where did the most horrific spate of murders in recent times take place ? Not in Hackney, Brixton, Toxteth or Mosside but in the East Anglian backwater of Ipswich.

Sherlock Holmes actually has a better handle on it than our current politicians:

‘…the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside… The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser."

The N-Word

No - not the racist one (regardless of how it’s spelt). The one that New Labour have such a problem with, and which they find so deeply embarrassing whenever anyone else mentions it: Nationalisation.

Instead, they've come up with a convoluted solution to bail out Northern Rock: A scheme which if I’ve understood it correctly (and I could be forgiven if I hadn’t) creates government bonds out of the money so far loaned to prop up the bank, until such time that a private sale can be arranged. The important thing though is that it is intended to protect shareholders – and this seems to have worked because the shares have gone up 42%.

But these shareholders are not little old ladies who have poured their life’s savings into Northern Rock. 80% of the shareholders are hedge funds who only brought into Northern Rock after it got into trouble in the hope that they would make some easy money out of the government’s rescue scheme (obviously they were right).

So in the space of a few months public opinion has swung from sympathy for savers and a feeling that the government should do something to protect them, to resentment that public money is being used to bail out an unprofitable business just because it’s a bank.

It wouldn’t have been too difficult to have set a threshold that protected individual savers and kept the big investors out. Remember the old slogan of ‘nationalism with compensation only in cases of proven need' ? Very much Old Labour of course.

New Labour is so afraid of the n-word that it never featured as a possible solution; same as it doesn’t with the railways, the water companies, the energy companies, healthcare …

Japanese Whaling

Much to my whale and dolphin - loving daughter’s dismay, one side of my family comes from Whitby where for generations they were fishermen, seamen … and whalers.

I haven’t been there for a long time, but a focal point of civic pride, along with a statue of Captain Cook and the cliff-top abbey, is this giant jaw-bone of a whale. I have a sense of history so I can understand pride in the men who did a tough and dangerous job. I also know that in a pre-petrochemical age whale oil was a multi-purpose raw material - and that the techniques of whaling at that time did not threaten extinction. I'm also not a vegetarian or militant tree-hugger. All of which is why I don’t really have a problem with the small-scale whaling of indigenous peoples like the Inuit in Canada.

BUT: The Japanese whaling industry threatens to exterminate whole species, seriously damage the ecological balance of the oceans, and uses inhumane practices of killing (explosive harpoons).

Whether or not what they are currently doing is actually in breach of international agreements is a moot point - and largely irrelevant; the IWC has always been more concerned with industry regulation than the underlying ethics.

But legal or not, international opinion is now overwhelming against Japanese whaling. Which begs the question why the fuck do they carry on ?The Japanese give two answers:

• Whale meat is a traditional delicacy in Japan – so was swan in England at one time but we managed to get over it.
• Scientific research – a smokescreen; no international body has ever commissioned any project from the Japanese scientific institute responsible.

Remember the ‘Cod War’ of the 1970s when the Royal Navy, would cut the lines of Icelandic fishing boats operating in contested waters ? It would be nice to see an international task force doing the same with the Japanese whalers. It isn’t going to happen of course - so until then, good luck to the Greenpeace and SeaShepherd.