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!