Oh Ken...

I’ve just written a fairly lengthy entry and then accidentally deleted it. I said “fuck” and “motherfuck” quite a lot of times, like a furry, confused Joe Pesci, and began to write it again. But it wasn’t very interesting, really. There was a thing about a seal that I thought was quite funny, but it’s now gone, lost to the ether. Anyway, and I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, today I’ve got rape on my mind. Not in a bad way though. Ken Clarke, the lardy old wheezing hoover-bag of a Justice Secretary, has been all over the news today for things he said about the prosecution of rape cases. He was on the Victoria Derbyshire show on 5 Live, and the topic of the interview turned to the sentencing of convinced rapists who, when caught, plead guilty immediately. This spares the justice system the expense of putting on a trial, and also the victim of having to give evidence about a horrible ordeal in front of a room full of strangers, they say.

                                           

It wasn’t an idea Clarke had come up with himself, but he’s been involved recently because, as The Sun points out here, judges have been calling for the proposal to be dropped. Graeme Wilson writes, “The Justice Secretary told MPs he will press ahead with the proposals to slash sentences for sex beasts and other criminals who plead guilty early”. “Sex beasts?” Are they a thing? If anything it sounds more like a compliment than an insult.

Anyway here’s a transcript of the interview, and the audio here. It all hots up when Clarke starts talking about there being different kinds of rape, and appeared to differentiate in seriousness between date rape, consenting teenagers, and ‘serious rape’. Y’know, good old fashioned British rape.

He’s since been all over the news and radio, clarifying and re-defining as fast as his little legs could carry him. And to be fair to him, I don’t think his intention this morning when he got up and lit his morning fag was to go out and deliberately offend rape victims. I think he just got into a muddle trying to be too specific to questions which required a far simpler answer. It was 5 Live after all. He also seems to have been pretty unprepared, the lazy bastard, and hoped to just be able to talk his way out of it.

“Derbyshire: Rape is rape, with respect.

  Clarke: No it's not, and if an 18-year-old has sex with a 15-year-old and she's perfectly willing, that is rape.That's 'cause she's underage, can't consent. Anybody has sex with a 15-year-old, it's rape.”


In this bit though he is definitely wrong – if you have sex with someone who’s under 13 it’s rape, but if they’re 13-16 it’s ‘unlawful sexual conduct’, and the Justice Secretary should really know that.

All this constant repetition of the word ‘rape’ – Clarke says it and its variants 34 times on his own – made me think of a Malcolm Tucker-esque communications director going mental as Ken said ‘rape’ over and over again. Rape rape rape rape rape. Ed Miliband called for Clarke to resign at Prime Minister’s Questions, and he may well do if given no other choice. If they can afford to get rid of him I can see the Tories using him as a sacrificial lamb, throwing him to the opposition to take the attention away from them and their evil ways. I’d like it if Labour picked bigger targets to attack, but it seems the role of the opposition is to act like a desperate child and snatch at anything which comes their way. Anyway I guess we’ll see what happens. I'm off to expunge my internet history of the last couple of hours’ searching.

Back Again

Crikey blimey O'reilly it's been a long time since I wrote anything on here. I have a legitimate excuse, before anyone gets all antsy about it. I've had no internet for about a month, and have only just got it back. And also, is 'antsy' a word? The spellchecker didn't recognise it. But then again it didn't recognise 'spellchecker' either, so it looks like it's got all sorts of issues. One of my housemates moved out, and in so doing cancelled his Sky contract. We didn't find out about this until too late, by which time the horrible realisation that I was to be without the internet had already dawned. And so weeks went by until finally a man from Plusnet - the Yorkshire Broadband company with these adverts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqxH9iXUDf0, featuring a man, a Yorkshire terrier, cobble stones, and Heaven 17.

Anyway it turns out that Plusnet is actually owned by BT, and is just operated as a subsidiary company. So it turns out it's just a cynical attempt to lure innocent Yorkshire folk into choosing an ISP because it comes from where they do. In our defence, we only chose them because they were cheap (another cunning ploy to snare the attention of people from Yorkshire), and could set it up the quickest. But does that mean that each county has its own region-specific internet provider, or did BT commission a focus group, asking them to find out the area from which the people of Britain would be most happy downloading their porn? And they came up with Yorkshire? It makes you wonder. Some places would definitely get a better band than Heaven 17.

So, what've I been up to? Again, and still, I'm unemployed. I'm back signing on and looking for work, but not getting too down-hearted. This is mainly because I've made a plan, more of which later. In the mean time, I've done some things.

About a month ago I went to the anti-Coalition protests outside Sheffield City Hall, and took a couple of photos. I planned then to go to the main one in London a couple of days later, which ended up attracting hundreds of thousands of people, but unfortunately I got too drunk the night before and slept in. Fight the power! There was a good atmosphere at the Friday protest, where, as I arrived, about 200 people were standing behind metal barriers, chanting and booing as Lib Dem members made their way inside. A mixture of students, grey-haired lefties, and office workers on their way home. Occasionally, when someone who looked like they might be important was going in, the boos got louder and people busted out their first-choice chants. One man, an MP who's name I didn't catch, was the only one to come and walk amongst us. He started talking to a couple of middle aged people holding placards, and I overheard him say 'but you see we're trying to improve things from the inside'. I walked off and didn't hear any more, but I don't think his arguments quite washed. Later that day I saw him on the news, surrounded by protesters, angrily shouting and waving his arms around.

I voted for Nick Clegg in the last general election, and genuinely thought he was a decent bloke. When I was at university I went to see him debate some toss-bag MEP from UKIP called Humphrey. Cleggers did well, but he didn't have to work that hard to compare favourably with his old, oleaginous opponent. But since becoming Deputy Prime Minister my opinion of him has quickly and spectacularly nose-dived. There's a lot of reasons for this, and I won't go into them all. The main one at the moment is university tuition fees. It just strikes me as incredibly evil for a government packed with people educated at our country's best universities, for free, paid for by the tax payer, to then pull away the ladder for everyone else. It's taxing people twice for aiming high, and it's wrong. But there you go.

And so I'm going to do what's referred to in immigration circles as a 'reverse Phil Collins', and get the fuck out of here. I'll be doing it a year late and made no pre-election promise to do so, but I don't care. I'm doing a reverse Phil Collins. At the end of June when my house contract in Sheffield expires, I'll be moving back to Leek, where I'll live rent-free for a bit, saving money, before eventually moving to Australia. I've got a few mates there already, and the prospect of facing another English winter unemployed and alone is really really wank. So yeah, I'm going to do that. That's not the most fleshed-out plan ever, so I need to do some work on. But it's exciting, and something to really look forward to, which I haven't had in a while. There's just been a week's worth of glorious sunshine, mixed in with a thunder storm and gigantic, plant-shredding hail; it's been great. Around this time of the year England, the countryside round here in particular, is at it's most glorious and welcoming. I'll try and keep these up.

Oh, also, in a shop the other day I found and bought a pot of Cock Flavoured Seasoning. Here's a photo:

Wahey!

The sun is out, the birds are tweeting - usually fairly mundane stuff about what worms they've been eating (haha! I did a joke!); there's a faint smell of cow manure in the air. Next door on a building site a dog frolicks in the long grass and comes out with a half-full bottle of coke in its mouth. It spills, and the dog begins to lap at the puddle. He seems pretty happy, this dog. It really feels like spring is coming, and then summer, but I'm not happy. I found out on Monday that the temp job I'm doing, y'know, the one I wrote about on Sunday, is coming to an end on Friday. This is much sooner than I thought it was going to be, and it threw me into a depressive funk for a couple of days. I don't think it's anything to do with me or my work - Charlotte the manager told me they just don't have the budget for another temp. But it felt like I'd been dumped and was being given the old 'It's not you, it's me' shtick. I'm not sure I want to ask her to be frank though, I'd rather not have it confirmed that I'm a total cunt.

So I'm back looking for work, and my plans have been ever so slightly thrown into disarray. But I'm going to try as best I can not to plunge headlong into despondency, as is my wont. I've taken a pretty decent look at myself over the last few months - I could draw my own navel from memory - and now have a better understanding of the shit I do. I spoke to my parents last night, and they were incredibly sympathetic and nice about it. My dad, with whom I have a warm but fairly distant relationship, even said to me, 'we love you very much' at the end of the call, which I can't remember him saying before. Certainly not in the last ten years anyway. But because it was at the end of the conversation and I was wrapping it up, it took me by surprise and I just said 'thank you' in reply, and hung up. Then I had a small, momentary cry, and went downstairs to watch the football.

I'm incredibly lucky to have the friends and family that I do.

Laaaaaaazy Sunday Afternoon.

Alright world, keeping well are we? I do hope so. Today is a sunny Sunday, and it's put me in a good mood. It's been tempered slightly cos our neighbour's just been round to complain about our drains, but I won't let it bum me out. Basically, whenever we use our washing machine the run off flows out of our pipes and into the clogged drains, and overflows into their yard next door. When it's cold, like at night time, it freezes and becomes a deadly slipping hazard for his tiny son. And it's fair enough: if I had a son I imagine I'd be a bit sad if he died. But we're sorting it out and Glenn the landlord is bringing his rods round next week.

In the last week or so the sun's been out more, and it's great. I've been working, getting home at half five, and generally feeling like a real human being again. It's nice. The other day I also played squash for the first time in about three months, fighting manfully back from 1-0 down  to take victory 3-2. One slight problem is that I used a load of thrusty, lunge muscles for the first time in ages, and so now I have a really sore arse and ankle. I think part of the trouble is that I have a fatter arse and ankle than your average man, so there's a lot of it to get sore. I'm playing again next week so we'll see how it goes.

In other news, I have no money. The new job pays monthly so I won't feel the sweet embrace of dosh until around the 30th March. So I've not really been up to anything, and won't be for the next few weeks. It's pretty annoying, and meant that I had to give up a ticket for the England - France game at Twickenham last week, but hey! It's better than dying, cracking your head on frozen washing machine run-off. And for that I should be forever thankful.

Lyme Regis

You know those adverts? The ones that are advertising just a country, a minute-long piece of fly paper trying to trap you and your holiday pounds. They consist of sometimes singing, always annoying groups of people, enjoying the wondrous activities available in their particular country, smiling their tits off, eyes wide with a heady blend of patriotism and emotional fulfilment. Y'know, those ones? They end with a catchy tag line like 'There's Nowhere Quite Like Lebanon' or 'Chad: Africa's Forehead'. I've just watched one of those for Australia and it featured all the usual stuff: Great Barrier Reef, Kangaroos, Opera House. Aboriginal Child Playing in Billabong. And it struck me that one of these things must surely exist for Britain. We need tourism as much as anyone, so it only follows that somewhere, in some far-flung corner of what is probably a former colony of ours, there is now showing an advert with lots of English people looking at nice English things, like the Houses of Parliament and Stone Henge, pointing and smiling. I imagine there's a lot of stately home action, and surely a dozen or so red London buses performing acrobatic stunts atop the white cliffs of Dover. Unfortunately I'm having to imagine all this, because I can't find a video on the internet. I haven't looked that hard, because early on I found this: the Lyme Regis tourism video, and I haven't been able to move on.

                                                                   

To a haunting three-and-a-half minute instrumental guitar track, it shows all that can be done in Lyme Regis. Lyme Regis, incidentally, is the Latin for 'King Lemon'. No one knows how a small seaside town on the Devon coast came to be named in such a way. If you're unwilling to sit through the whole video, that's fair enough - after the first minute the fun tails off a bit really. Lyme Regis, it would seem, is a place where old people go to walk along grey seafronts, and where pale families sit on stony, wind-swept beaches. There's a lot of grey in Lyme Regis. And a lighthouse. And some old men sitting on deckchairs. To be honest it looks pretty niche, maybe even boring if I'm being harsh, but oddly it's the first Youtube result when you search for 'UK tourism video', which I found odd. Come on Foreign Office, sort it out!

Anyway, I don't really have anything else to say about this video. Like an observational comedian, I've 'noticed' something and drawn it to your attention. I've said "what's that all about, ey?!" and moved on. But I feel hollow and disappointed; I'm no Michael Mcintyre, that's for sure.

I've got a job, right, and the sudden onset of actually working and getting up early has meant I've been too busy and tired to write one of these. A mistake I think, that, to use this platform to moan and simper when unemployed, only to sack it off when things are better. Soooo seeing as I'm here, how about a little update. Well, I've been working at the Sheffield University admissions department, on the road up from the West End pub. That pub, incidentally, is where I spent my first night in Sheffield when I came up in 2004. Depressingly, and I have to admit mainly through my insistence, we went there and did a quiz and played pool. We didn't even sodding win, and all the while the cool kids of Halifax Hall were partying as if t'were 1999 in their tiny, characterless student bar.

The job involves processing paperwork and dealing with uni applicants, and it looks like it's going to be absolutely fine. The pay's quite good for temp work, and I think it should last for a good few months, which is exactly what I need having been so skint for so long. I'm sitting next to my friend Amy. Me being there at all is entirely down to her word, so more than anything I owe it to her to try hard and do well. I'll let you know how it goes.

Aside from that, I've done what I usually do when I have no money: stay indoors watching downloaded TV series. In the last couple of weeks I've ploughed my way through the first series of Treme, the latest offering from dishevelled Mark Lawson lookalike David Simon, creator of The Wire and Generation Kill. It's fairly slow to get going, but is awesome, and rewards patient viewing with a fantastic array of characters. And music. Loads and loads of music. I've also watched the first series of Louie, a sitcom written and directed by Louis CK. It's a bit like Seinfeld and a bit like Curb Your Enthusiasm, in that it concerns the life of a stand up comedian and intersperses moments from it with clips of him performing. There's no laugh-track. It deals heavily with pretty bleak themes, like loneliness, depression and the crushing inevitability of death, but does so in an often hilarious way. There are some really touching moments, bits that made me well-up, but most of all there are lots of things in it which are piss-yourself funny. It's brilliant, and you should watch the arse off  it.

Friday 11th

I have a job. I may have a job. I'm 98% certain I have a job. OK, technically at the moment I don't have a job, but I'm told I probably will. My friend Amy, a lady of great beauty and poise, thinks she may have wangled me some employment in her team at Sheffield Uni. Apparently, I'm told, only the manager having a complete change of heart will stop me getting it. And that's ace, because I could feel myself slipping steadily into the pessimistic, miserable mindset that prompted the beginning of this blog. Tonight I will get drunk.

It was nice telling my mum on the phone, hearing the relief in her voice - she too, I suspect will get drunk tonight. My mum is a huge worrier, about every conceivable thing. Sometimes things that are completely out of her control. She once admitted to laying awake all night, concerned that her niece's rabbit was stuck outside in an uncomfortable hutch in the freezing cold. She comes down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, worried that she's locked the cat [below] out, when in fact she hasn't. But mostly, she worries about me, and I'd like one day to put an end to that.

The cat's called Oscar, and I think he's about 13. We got him when I was only just a teenager and for every minute since he's been a thoroughly outstanding cat. He doesn't squeak and miaow all the time, sits on your knee a lot, kills tiny creatures with aplomb, and has a permanently wet nose. As you can see, he's a massive ponce, and is thoroughly indulged, but I think that's one of the main reasons for having a pet: deep down, it's just nice to give another animal the best life it can possibly have.  He even chases ping-pong balls and torch-beams around the carpet in an insane fashion. What more could you ask for? Yes, we'd all like a pet monkey, but it's just not feasible.