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.

Brekkin the law! Brekkin the law!

About an hour ago, 234 elected MPs voted to break the law. They were opposed by just 22. The vote concerned prisoner voting. For a bit of context: The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that there cannot be a blanket ban on giving votes to prisoners. As it currently stands, all prisoners in British prisons do not have the right, which places us in contravention of the law.  The ruling handed down does not say that all prisoners should be able to vote, just that there should not be a total ban, and that each case should be taken on it's merits. Ace legal blogger David Allen Green, who knows infinitely more about this than I do, which may make it a bad idea to link to him, writes that there is a similarity between this and bail. He says, 'There is no general ban on an arrested or convicted person applying for bail. It may well be refused, and it usually is in respect of serious offences, but there is no blanket prohibition'. And the same should apply here. The lib dems, who I bloody voted for, had prisoner voting in their manifesto but I suppose that doesn't really count for much these days.


What riles me most is the sheer arrogance of the idea that the government, if it doesn't like one of the rulings to which they are legally bound, can just vote against it in the Commons and hope it will go away. It won't. If they continue to impose a blanket ban, each prisoner will be able to sue the government for infringing upon their human rights. Would they prefer that? It's easy to imagine what the press would make of rapists and paedophiles getting compensation because the loony European Court says so. But it wouldn't be Strasbourg's fault, it would be the fault of the MPs from all parties who, in trying to prevent lawbreakers from voting, have broken the law themselves..


Anyway, enough of that. In other news, I still have no job, which I imagine is becoming less newsworthy with each blog. But hey ho, never mind, I'll get one eventually. It's the waiting that blows.


In my copious spare moments I've been reading Bill Bryson's new book - At Home. It's really really good, like the Brief History of Nearly Everything he did, but based around domesticity and the home. He'll start talking about hallways, then branch off into a huge tract of history and biography. Capability Brown seems like a really cool dude, and I'd only vaguely heard of him before reading this. It's a trivia-addict's dream.

Revolution!

So I'm still unemployed, and haven't yet heard anything back about the reporter job in Congleton. It's too early to get disheartened. The editor, when replying to my application, said that the job was going to be advertised for another week, which I think brings it up to about now. So hopefully in the next few days I'll at least hear something back. He said that most applications are rejected first because of spelling mistakes. I've also applied for a fairly promising-looking postgraduate coordinator job at Sheffield Uni, along with probably 500 other people. That closed today, so fingers crossed. One of the most depressing things about being out of work is not hearing anything back at all from employers. Some applications take HOURS to do, taking into consideration the allotted amount of procrastination, and when you don't even get a reply back, whether you've been successful or not, is a massive kick in my balls. My two, unemployed balls.

I  read this very informative '20 reasons why it's kicking off everywhere' piece by Newsnight reporter Paul Mason, and you should too. He writes about the why and how of the recent unrest in North Africa, France and Britain, the catalyst for this tumult being a new demographic: the unemployed graduate with no future. In Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia there are now a sizable number of educated young people with more access to information at the touch of a button than at any time in history. The same applies for France and Britain, where people are able to call 'Bullshit!' quicker than ever before, and distribute information to thousands of people in seconds. The difference between here and North Africa though is the middle-class elites - doctors, teachers, lawyers - who here are placated but there are fucking pissed off. When they begin to take to the streets in protest, the government is in trouble.

In other news, I went to Bakewell the other day. Home of the magnificent egg-based pudding and lots of shops that sell hiking equipment, it's a lovely place to spend a day walking around.  And walk around we did. We walked to the church, which was founded in the 12th Century, and had a look at the graves. As you do. Then we walked to a little British Legion memorial garden set away in a quiet spot near a primary school. Then we walked along the river, scaring ducks, to the cricket and football pitches. We played on the kids' playground, which was a bit too fun, then retired to a pub for a bit. It was really nice, and only about £4 on the bus, which is one of the ace things about living in Sheffield. It's a big city, with a Mcdonalds and everything, but is within 20 minutes drive of some absolutely amazing countryside.

Right, must dash, got some stuff to do innit.

Boardwalk Empire

Nooky?

One of the good things about being lonely and alone is that you get to watch good TV. For ages it's baffled me how perfectly ordinary, discerning friends of mine watch things which they know are completely awful. I'm talking, of course, about Deal or No Deal, Total Wipeout, Strictly Come Dancing, Big Brother, What's That Thing? and People Dancing On Ice. If I wanted to watch Dominic Cork shuffling awkwardly, unsure of what to do with himself I'd invent a time machine and travel back to Derbyhire County Cricket Ground, circa 1996. Wahey! One for the cricket fans there. What I didn't understand was that people watch these programmes, or at least claim to watch them, in a kind of ironic way. I can sort of understand it. Most of these shows are hyperbolic and drawn out, and regularly have people on them who say hilariously stupid things. Or they fall in the water. But it's not worth it; nothing, no matter how funny, is worth sitting through Noel Edmonds talking bullshit to mawkish contestants who look as if they would dive in front of a bolting horse to save their bearded leader. And then there's The Cube. The Cube is presented by silver marmot Philip Schofield, and involves people throwing balls into a box while standing inside a big cube. There are other events, like the one where the contestant tries to halt a stop-watch on exactly 10 seconds. They fail, you both go 'ohhhh what a prick!', and realise that it's nice not to be alone in the world.

So I watch good stuff. Pure, highgrade, HBO shit. There now follows a list of American series on which my free time has been pissed away. I've watched Deadwood, The Wire, The Sopranos, Generation Kill, The Event, Heroes, Dexter, and two series of Mad Men before getting sick of it. And now, most recently, I've watched Boardwalk Empire (online, like some kind of buccaneering e-pirate).

Boardwalk Empire, if you don't know already, is a new series set in prohibition-era Atlantic City, which is as we all know in the state of New Joyzey. It's exec-prodded by Martin Scorcese (he also directs the pilot), and stars Steve Buscemi as Enoch 'Nooky' Thompson, the county treasurer. It also has Stephen Graham, who plays Combo in This Is England. One of the most fascinating things about the show is that all the main characters are based on real people, who lived during an incredibly turbulent time in American history. Prohibition lead directly to a massive surge in organised crime, and a few of Boardwalk Empires character's did pretty well out of it. Like Al Capone, and Arnold Rothstein who, scholarly readers will rejoice to know, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's inspiration for the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Y'know, the one with all the 'gonnegtions'. He fixed the World Series, the brute, and became a pariah. Boardwalk Empire, like all the good HBO dramas are, is about how powerful men wield their influence.

The best thing about it though is Steve Buscemi. Although County Treasurer sounds like a fairly innocuous job, it seems to have brought with it the keys to the city, and Thompson treats Atlantic City like his own fiefdom. It's fascinating to watch Buscemi, who looks like he could be beaten up by Mark Owen, because his character says and does some horrible things and yet he manages to also portray a man with a lot of heart. It's absolutely brilliant, and starts on Sky Atlantic at 9pm tonight, a new channel which looks like it's going to be pretty awesome. If you have a subscription it's free until the end of August, so get watching and improve your life.

I've been back home for a couple of days to have another wisdom tooth out. While there I applied for a job at a newspaper in Congleton, which would mean leaving Sheffield if I got it. I don't really want to do this, as I only know a few people back home these days, but I've got a career to be getting on with and needs must. Henderson's Relish do deliveries, right? Because in the land of the oatcake, one needs a superior brewed condiment.

And that's about all I have to say on that. Bye!

Friday

On Friday I did a day's work at The Doncaster Free Press, and gee mom, it was fun. It was unpaid. But that's not the end of the world it's just, I'm told, that the job market is very difficult at the moment. And it is: the newspaper industry isn't in the rudest of health these days, and the newsroom is often the place where cuts are first made, which is daft. But work experience is the only thing that's going to get me a job, so I need as much of it as possible. Plus, I'd never been to Doncaster before, and, as my mother always used to tell me: "Doncaster, Nick, is a magical world, an emerald floating in murky South Yorkshire, where the streets are paved with opportunity and the buildings all made from diamond. My mum sometimes lets her imagination run away with her.

I had to be there for 9 O'clock on Friday morning. The train left at about a quarter to eight, which meant waking up at quarter to seven. This was going to be a bit of a problem because I'm not very good at getting up very early when it's not part of a routine, and I wasn't in much of a routine. In the end, I had a bit of a mare and got about an hour's sleep, which wasn't the best preparation. A lot of the fault for my shitty night's sleep should be laid at the tiny feet of next door's baby, who cried loudly once an hour 'til 5am, the little arsehole. But also I find it very hard to get to sleep whatever the situation, so it's not all the baby's fault. I do still, though, bear it a strong grudge that will be hard to shake. But anyway, sleeping. Sleeping has never been my forté. It runs in the family; and often on occasions where I'm with my mum and brother, we all talk about how hard we find it to get to sleep, how it's such a massive pain in the arse, and swap techniques on how to conquer our nightly foe. These include tried and tested classics, such as doing "A to Zs". "A to Zs" are mum's favourite, and involve going through the alphabet thinking of one of a 'thing' for each letter. You pick a topic, like English footballers or something, and begin. It's like a really long, slow, tedious game of Scattergories.

The intention of the "A to Z" is I think to bore yourself to sleep, in the hope that the monotony of the activity will eventually send you off the land of nod without you noticing. But I really like trivia, in all in many wondrous forms, so this technique often just feels like revision, and I end up agonising over it for ages, stuck on thinking of a British sitcom character beginning with G. Up to that point [Arnold Rimmer, Blackadder, Cybil Fawlty, Dave Lister ( 2 red Dwarf characters, naughty naughty), Edward Elizabeth Hitler, Frank Spencer] has been easy. But then I got stuck on G, which often happens. I leant over and had a drink of water, turned over the pillow so my head was on the cold bit, and lay there, thinking. This is the part where you're meant to fall asleep. But I never fall asleep at this point. Instead, I lie there repeating names beginning with G in an internal monologue, which, were to it to be written down, would sound absolutely fucking mental. And look like this.

"Graham Graham Graham Graham...Glenn Glenn Glenn Glenn Glenn...Glenn Parsons? There's definitely not a sitcom character called Glenn Parsons. Geoff, Geoff, Geoff from Byker Grove? Not allowed, don't know his surname. And he's from Byker Grove. Gary..? Gary. Gary! Gary Sparrow!

And then I think about Nicholas Lyndhurst in all his many, hilarious guises, for what seems like half an hour, before suddenly snapping back into the room. How long have I just been thinking about Nicholas Lyndhurst for? For fuck's sake! Right, sitcom characters beginning with H...

It continued like that until about 5am, having originally got into bed at about midnight. It had got to the stage where I was almost resigned to getting no sleep whatsoever. If I fell asleep now, I wouldn't be happy at being woken up again an hour and a half later. At best, I'd be very grouchy. After a while though, after my sub-conscious had finally decided to shut up, I nodded off. An hour and a half later, very grouchily I woke up to the foul-mouthed Scottish voice of James Naughtie, managing not to call anyone a cunt as he read the news.

I got Doncaster at 8.20 and decided to have a little wander around. The night before, harnessing the magical wizzardry of Google Maps, I'd sat and sorted out the route, and drawn a little map in my notebook. In possession of a terrible sense of direction, hunches and imagined shortcuts frequently lead to disaster. So I wandered around. And Doncaster's nice, like a bigger, more prosperous Rotherham. After walking through the town centre for half an hour, I didn't see one boarded up shop, or fight, and the streets had a pleasant busyness.

After being let into the newspaper office, and shown around a bit, I got introduced to around a dozen of the staff, whose names I forgot almost straight away. This made getting their attention difficult later on in the day, as I had nothing to call to them which wouldn't sound rude. I hardly ever call anyone mate; it just feels forced when I do. Taxi drivers, shop keepers, and youths on the street sometimes, but not always. Anyway, it didn't matter, as I had some work to do. I interviewed seven new recruits to the army who'd just signed up to the local regiment, and wrote an article about it, before doing two 'nibs' about a charity thing and an MP visiting a pharmacy. I enjoyed every minute of it, despite being knackered, and after all the temp jobs, it felt good to be being asked to do jobs that play to my limited strengths. I have a personality that makes me feel constantly out of my depth, like an imposter, and I need to learn to ignore it.

I've had a few people saying they read this rambling bollocks, including, I'm informed, at least one Belgian. This is nice, and makes me want to make it good.

It's my dad's 62nd birthday coming up and I need to go and buy him some squash balls, so I think I'll leave it at that.

Wait! One other thing. I need to find a new quiz to go to in Sheffield. If you're in the very narrow Sheffield-based, quiz-going readers, tell me one, because the Lescar Tuesday nighter is becoming increasingly difficult to win.

Got them Short Round Blues.

As I sit, eating peanuts and watching Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom, cursing the evil imagination which came up with Short Round, the wise-cracking little arsehole, I feel it's time for another entry. I don't especially have much to say or anything particularly pressing on my mind, so I don't think it'll be very long. But hey! Good things come in disappointingly inadequate packages. Incidentally, I bloody love Indiana Jones films, they're the genius of Spielberg in full flow. But Temple of Doom is often pretty lame and frequently a wee bit racist. Chilled monkey brains, anyone?

This last week I've been applying for jobs and signing on, increasing the burden on our shitty state. I used to feel nervous and guilty about claiming jobseekers allowance, worried that one of the friendly staff would stand up and  expose my soft, middle class underbelly to the baying scroungers who prowl the Cavendish Court Job Centre. But that was a stupid, exaggerated assumption and one that I've grown out of. Everyone there just wants some help, and Britain's wellfare state is a universally wonderful thing, no matter what the right-wing press say. The guarantee of financial assistance to the unemployed gives people a sense of respect and, more importantly, stops people having to resort to crime for money. The Coalition's cuts policy is going create hundreds of thousands of more unemployed in the next couple of years, who will have to go somewhere. A lot of them will go to Cavendish Court.

This policy, parroted in the Mail, will also make it easier for companies to sack employees - introducing a mandatory fee to bring a case to an employment tribunal, as well as doubling the length of time a person needs to be employed there if they wish to do so. With each new policy this government further injures its own people, under the bullshit auspice of cutting red tape.

On Friday I'm off to Doncaster to work for their newspaper for a day. I have no idea what I'll be doing yet, but I'm really excited about it, if a little worried I'm going to balls it up. I'll let you know how it goes.

Begin and begin again

And so, cowed, eyes to the floor, shuffling back in ungainly novelty Christmas slippers, I blog once more. It's been a while since I last had the urge to commit any thoughts, anywhere at all really, let alone online. I started this blog as an attempt to poke myself into productivity and perhaps to give me a better understanding of my own, deeply unhelpful subconscious. But it didn't quite work like that. Distractions appeared, waving with shiny excitement for me to come and play. Xbox, weed, and arrival of my housemate Anna ensured that there was always something else to do, something more easy to commit to.

Left to its own devices, my brain cannibalises itself with criticism and insults. I look in the mirror and see a fat, unemployable cunt with no future, and stare blankly into eyes that were once happy. I don't think this is a particularly new thing, I've always seen the hurdles rather than the finishing line, giving up at things before I've even got started. But is the answer not to look in the mirror, to ignore your problems and muddle on? Of course not, if I carry on doing that before I know it I'll be 30, bitter and alone. So I'll write, and I'll earn a living, and I'll leave that miserable bastard of a subconscious behind.

One of the reasons I stopped doing this was because I thought no one at all was reading it, that I was just solipsistically whining to an empty space. But then, on new years, a strange chap called Ryan, in his quaintly aggressive way, said he'd been reading my blog in the past and that he was a little disappointed that it had ground to a halt. He's a charming man, and had recently been bitten in the face by a dog. This came as a surprise and an encouragement, and showed me that even if only one person is reading, no matter how foolish and incomprehensible he is, that's more than enough. So thank you Ryan, you may have saved my life. He hasn't, and that's an overly dramatic thing to say about a drunken conversation, but I felt this paragraph was lacking pep and so I decided to take some artistic licence.

What is true and not an exaggeration is that since Christmas I've lost 7 lbs and am tantalisingly close to dipping under the 15 stone barrier for the first time since I was a teenager. And, I've got a shift coming up at the Doncaster Free Press, a proper, actual newspaper read by genuine people with their fingers and hands. Though it is Doncaster so maybe not the usual quota of fingers, but it's a bloody start, right? It's an opportunity I have to grasp, like any good murderer with tell you, with both hands and not let go. Even if it's only a very short opportunity, it's in the profession I've chosen and not as part of some debilitating, mundane temporary assignment from a job agency.

So here's to new starts and positivity, yeah? Yeah!

Undiplomatic Cable

The Daily Telegraph has gone too far with it's latest piece of sparkling undercover journalism, and the editor and reporters concerned should think deeply about where their paper is heading.


If you're not familiar with the story then allow me, dear reader, to fill you in. As it were. So, over several days the Telegraph sent a pair of female reporters to a string of Lib Dem constituency surgeries, posing as single mothers facing difficulties with benefits. Hours of conversations were recorded, and the resulting sting has stung the arses of leading MPs - Deputy Leader of the House David Heath, Business Secretary Vince Cable, and Transport Minister Norman Baker, to name three. The quotes which the reporters eventually managed to glean, presumably after sieving through swathes of uninteresting bullshit, have cost Cable some of his already limited responsibilities; the others were forced into either apologies or denials.


Very good, congratulations Telegraph. This is almost as big as the expenses shitstorm you created, after being handed all the evidence.


I think this is different, though. For two reasons. The first lies in the paper's reaction to the recent Wikileaks disclosure of American War documents and ambassadorial cables. In these articles the paper has wheeled out a pair of its more bizarre looking journalists to call Wikileaks 'delinquent' and undemocratic, as well as snidily referring to Julian Assange as a 'glamorous hero', but only until people get sick of him. Of course, there is a difference between what Wikileaks does and the greasy tactics the Telegraph employed in stinging Vince Cable. The latter is certainly more dishonest. But to carp madly on about Wikileaks being undemocratic, providing mainly conjecture and gossamer-thin, we-knew-all-this-shit-already reasons for the criticism is a nonsense.


Then, in the 11th paragraph, the crux of my beef:


"Private conversations, even when they are not at the level of the diplomatic communiqué, are generally considered to be no-go areas for journalists, because it is recognised that professional life of any kind would be virtually unsustainable without the possibility of confidential communication."


Too bloody right!


The second objection I have concerns the nature of their sting. These undercover reporters were posing as constituents at an MP's surgery, a place where beleaguered Lib Dem MPs would be seeking to regain some popularity from their voters after all the messiness of the Coalition agreements. The headlines they generated - breathtaking incites such as George Osbourne not being in touch with problems of the common man - did nothing but cover up and distract people from the absolute shit-tonne of bad press that should be heading the way of the Conservatives.


Undercover reporting, according to Bob Steele of Poynter Online "can support substantive, compelling journalism that serves citizens and society", but this is not the case with the Telegraph's sting on Vince Cable. The information they recovered, which amounts to little more than bitching, serves no public interest. If the reporters suspected Cable would let slip that the coalition planned to renege on their promise not to raise university tuition fees, or that under new proposals the entire stock of Britain's forest land could be sold to foreign multinationals in a massive landgrab, then there would have been some point to it. 


But this was nothing, it was an insignificant drop in the ocean of contempt already felt for our MPs, and will probably stop them being at all candid in even the safest of circumstances, and that can only be a bad thing.