The Grand Opening Of The Shed

As a race our expectations of life must surely be the single biggest contributor to our general unhappiness.

As adults we are well acquainted with reality and yet we constantly expect and hope for far more than we know can ever be delivered. This is idiocy and arrogance. We know how the world works, how much it costs and how people like to cut corners. A little thought and a little logic would rein in our runaway dreams and ensure that we are never disappointed again. No more will we be glass-half-full or glass-half-empty people. We will just be a people grateful for having a glass.

Take the opening of The Shard during the week. London's newest, biggest building. In fact it is the tallest building in Western Europe. For the time being.

According to news reports the general feeling was that people - i.e. the hoi polloi, you and me and your mama too - were a tad disappointed by the opening ceremony. It was something of a let down.

I must admit I didn't watch it but just caught the highlights on Newsround (I have kids, OK, what scope do you think I have to watch News24 these days?) - enough in itself to remove the high and the light from any ceremony.

I saw light displays from within the building itself and a laser show from the extremeties of the building. Admittedly there were no fireworks (that I saw) but I dare say they are stockpiling those for the Olympics.

The opening ceremony seemed perfectly adequate to my mind. It's a building, for God's sake. What were people expecting it to do? Develop rocket thrusters Autobot style and blast off to the moon?

It's a building.

Back when I was a kid a new building was opened by having a local celeb cut a pink ribbon in front of the doors and then everyone downed a cheap glass of Liebfraumilch in the foyer and that was it. You counted yourself lucky if you were presented with a sausage and a pineapple chunk on a stick.

It's a building. It doesn't do anything but stand there and gradually fall into decay by the unstoppable effects of entropy.

Be grateful for the coloured lights and the lasers.

Even if they'd installed nude can-can dancers on the top floor no-one would have seen them.

At the end of the day this building is nothing more than an icon and a trophy for the rich and smug affluent enough to live and work there.

Personally I have already re-christened it The Shed and I do hope you will all assist my attempts to see that this new monicker soon catches on.

As for the aesthetics of the building itself... well, I've seen worse. At least it doesn't look like a car park.

One thing does worry me though.

I'm sure London's newest erection has a twin somewhere in Mordor.

Should we be worried?

Fuckwits

The anti spending cuts march in London on Saturday has left me feeling rather ambivalent though, I admit, I am leaning more towards the sour.

My own Union was well represented although I myself did not attend the march due to personal reasons. Ironically I joked to a colleague last week that I wasn’t going as, if I wanted to have my ribs smashed by a policeman’s truncheon, I could easily do that in my own hometown on a Saturday night merely by pissing on the windscreen of the police surveillance van (though the chances are they wouldn’t see me).

The legitimate portion of the march – the largest portion – was, I think, a success. A success in that it was well organized, peaceful and had something (if news reports can be believed) of a “carnival atmosphere”. (What? Bearded ladies? Fire eating dwarves?)

Not a success in what it achieved though. Some Government mouthpiece has dismissed the march and has said that no government would change its policies on the strength of a protest march – even one that keenly displays the vastness of public dissent. Really? This from the same Government that crowed with delight when Mubarak stepped down as Egyptian president due to public demand and who have gone to war (let’s call a spade a spade) in Libya to “defend the lives” of those protesting against their current government. Seems, we, the UK people, do not have the same rights or regard in the eyes of our own UK politicians. Our voices in the UK do not count.

Sadly, the side of the story that has claimed the most column inches is the disproportionately small element among the protestors who broke away from the main march to initiate their own agenda on the streets of London. Namely attacking buildings, smashing shop windows, letting loose industrial sized fireworks in crowds containing small children and grinding their stupid little crotches above the porticoes of high profile edifices when they knew the news teams were filming.

Twats. The lot of them.

One overriding image I have in my mind is watching some beleaguered news reporter trying to deliver his piece to camera while some cock in a hoodie danced in the background and waved his V’s in the air whilst shouting some guff about “revolution”.

Oh please. Not that old lame warhorse? I’m all for ideals and the hopeful aspirations of the young but really? Class war? Anarchy? Smash the system? Have people really not moved on from the 80’s, the 70’s, the 60’s ad infinitum? Plainly not. Because yet again here are the same half baked ideas being spouted and held up as justification for a good ruck with the coppers by the same dirty looking dickheads that have plagued every generation since the invention of the dick. The same flimsy political understanding being used as motivation to go on the rampage like giant 2 year olds and smash up some windows and lob a few bricks. British Bulldog anyone?

My first thought wasn’t, ooh that guy is protesting for my rights; he’s standing up for my freedoms. It was: great, there’s a stupid looking cock on my TV, wasting my license money, spouting the same hackneyed political garbage that used to infect the common room at my 6th form and only inspired the crusty looking dope-head in the corner who had joined the Socialist Worker party the year before and thought he was destined to be the next Karl Marx.

Twat. Twat. Twat.

These idiots have merely overturned all the good the legitimate march might have achieved. They’ve undercut the whole thing. Carnival atmosphere? A public grotesquery more like. A bestiary.

What also annoys me most is how blind these fools were in their targets. Some of the banking corporations they hit did not deserve the slander of these oafs. Some of them had actually been prudent and honourable throughout the current economic crisis and looked after their customer’s money. But no. These dunderheads were so high on the sound of their own primitivistic protest they didn’t care. They just wanted to smash and kick and destroy. And oh yes let’s lob a few humungous fireworks at the shoppers passing by and see if we can blind some of the children. Look, Mr Cameron! Look what you have made us do! Hulk smash!

You know what? I grew out of “anarchy” and “class war” about 3 hours after I first heard about it. I may not have been the brightest of teenagers but I could still tell a big steaming pile of shit by its smell.

And I can still tell a fuckwit by the faces he pulls in front of a BBC news camera crew.

And that includes you as well, Cameron.

Burn In Hell

I’m a curmudgeon. I freely admit to this. I even celebrate it.

Certain things in life will always trigger a curmudgeonly reaction in me. Music in cars so loud it shatters the tarmac and the eardrums of passersby. Mobility scooters travelling at 40mph on pavements. Student parties in the house next door. And fireworks to name but a few.

So, as you can imagine, this time of year sees me spewing so much bile I’m sweating vinegar.

Possibly it’s wrong this curmudgeonliness, but I really don’t care.

Because when the dickhead students who live next door to me decide to have a firework party at 10 o’clock at night I am so at one with my curmudgeonliness it is practically a karmic state that transcends the rest of reality and certainly everybody else’s opinion.

10 o’clock.

10 o-sodding-clock.

That’s bedtime for me on a normal night, big wuss that I am. On a night when I am bone tired and exhausted – as I was last night – it is even more my bedtime. It is desperately, essentially my bedtime. So much my bedtime it is listed in the minutes of the Geneva convention that to deny me my rightful bedtime is a gross act of torture and human rights violation on a par with the Nazi’s murdering half of Europe just to gain access to a beach.

It ain’t gonna garner a positive response from yours truly.

Now, I dislike fireworks with a passion anyway and have written about it here, here and here but even I can see – even in the midst of my curmudgeonly prowess – that people have a right to burn their own money if they want to and are brain-dead enough to do it.

But surely people should have the sense to pick a reasonable time? 6 o’clock. 7 o’clock. 8 at a push. But 10 a-bleedin’-clock?

Surely even some self-centred, doped up, away-from-home-for-the-first-time student can see that 10 o’clock is too late? That there might be other non-student people in the vicinity who unlike him who can lie in bed until 1.30pm the next day have to get up before 7am to go to work and get the kids to school? That people who lead a worthwhile, productive life need their sleep?

Not to mention the kids. My poor kids. They must have thought they’d gone to sleep in Leamington and woken up in Afghanistan. The fireworks, the window shattering detonations, the students guffawing and haw-hawing at the tops of their voices from their garden and even the roof of their kitchen extension were right outside my boys' bedroom window.

There was no escape.

Few things can engender temporary insanity more that lying down to sleep, so exhausted you physically can’t keep your eyes open but unable to drift off into the comforting slumber of unconsciousness because of noise and hullabaloo so loud it feels like the mob are actually in bed with you.

I fantasized acts of violence and retribution. Pulp Fiction style speeches just before I let rip with our hosepipe (after remembering to remove the sprinkler attachment). Maybe even a bloody nose or two to wake these student-types up to the real world of men and dominance of the strong.

I was so screwed up and desperate for sleep I even, Heaven forgive me, considered sneaking out to the front of their house and scratching words of damnation into the paintwork of their paid-for-by-mummy student cars.

LET US SLEEP!! -------------------------------------

And that long gouge ensuring the body work is ruined right down to the stupid pimped up tailfins.

But then I thought: no. That would give them a clue as to who their righteous persecutor was. I might be leaving myself open to reciprocal attacks. I would have to protect the identity of my bicycle.

So then I came up with an idea of utter genius. I would scratch their car but leave a message so misleading and cryptic they wouldn’t even connect the car scratching with their ill timed blitz recreation party.

LEAVE MABEL ALONE --------------------------------

I mean what could be more confusing to a student than that?

I felt good – evil but good – just thinking about it.

And then the party broke up at half past 10 and they all dispersed and went home and the street fell back into silence.

Bleedin’ lightweights.

It’s That Time Of Year Again

I’ve ranted about this before.

But like a poo that just won’t flush away it keeps coming back.

Fireworks.

I’m not trying to ban them. I’m not trying to make them Public Enemy no. 1. But I would, if I’m honest, like to see them more strictly controlled.

Now, I’m not a fun-puritan or a celebration-Nazi but it seems bizarre to me that a shop needs a license to sell fireworks but any idiot with a debit card or the cash can buy them.

Absolutely any idiot. Any idiot at all.

And they do. In droves. (Actually what is the collective noun for idiots? A pranite? A trough? A smear?)

We’re only half way through October but already we’ve had our evenings disturbed by the war in Afghanistan being reenacted outside and this nightly barrage will continue well into November as the shops who greedily stockpiled their weapons of mass disruption continue to offload them onto pyromaniacal youths with expensive Nike’s and cheap cigarette lighters in order to recoup their initial expenditure.

Where do these youths get the money from to buy all this gunpowder? I’m not talking about the odd bang every hour (hey – sounds like a great night in) but a whole orchestra of explosions and aerial eruptions. A veritable symphony of aural fire and destruction. And I’m not talking about little fizzes and popping noises either; I’m talking about the kind of detonations that could dissolve kidney stones if the sufferer was standing close enough.

The windows shake. The cable TV connection twitches. Pacemakers pause (literally) for a heartbeat.

The kids are disturbed. I’m disturbed. The TV is disturbed. And animals... well, animals just become disturbed.

And for what? Some pretty coloured lights in the sky. And that’s before we get onto the subject of burns, accidents, malicious damage (great name for a record company) and the number of deaths caused by unregulated firework usage in the UK alone.

I have personally witnessed youths launching fireworks horizontally down the middle of the road in a bid to prove how dumb and dumberer (great name for a film) they really are. Or worse still, throwing them – ignited – across a road. And then you read about the ones that launch fireworks through people’s letterboxes or light them inside a house or tie them to the tail of someone’s pet... on and on it goes. People who can’t be trusted with a bottle of Clearasil are being allowed to play with gunpowder at night on our own streets! It’s positively insane!

In my opinion it’s criminal.

So. I’m not saying “let’s ban fireworks”.

I’m saying let’s ban the sale of fireworks to individuals. Let’s have properly organized displays only. They’re safer. They’re more cost effective. They’re more entertaining. And, even better, they’re confined to a single night of the year.

Sorted.

So am I making sense? Or am I just an older banger with a short fuse?

Answers on a rocket to the usual address please...

The Fawke Off List

No.1) Dizzy whatever his name is talking to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight yesterday evening attributing Obama’s recent Presidential success solely to the far reaching, world harmonizing effects of “hip-hop music”.

Yeah right, cos like it was his fly rappin’ what won the election for ‘im, innit?

Now, I don’t doubt that having a young, black role model has encouraged young Americans (black and white) to get off their backsides and vote – contributing to one of the best voting turn outs America has seen for a long time – but I don’t recall hip-hop having much of a role in this.

Personally I put it down to worthy policies, intelligent strategies, uplifting rhetoric and the promise of much needed change from the top down after the long stagnation of the Bush (mis)administration. Not a predilection for a lickle bit of drum and bass.

Besides which Obama looks more like a Nat King Cole man than Dr. Dre.

Paxman just looked bemused by Dizzy’s stuttering schoolyard outpourings and I couldn’t help thinking that the show’s producers had merely asked Dizzy to take part simply because he was black and had street cred and not because he had anything intelligent to say.

Sorry to dis you, old chap, but that’s just how it is.

No.2) Fireworks. I hate them.

Call me a killjoy. Accuse me of not being down with the kids (what’s wrong with a lickle bit of Nat King Cole, eh bruv?) but if ever I got into a position of power I would ensure the nationwide ban of all firework sales to individuals.

Now I’m not saying they should be banned altogether. Properly organized displays are fine. They’re safer. Less damaging to the environment. And less damaging to the social well-being of local citizens.

But in the hands of individuals they are lethal.

I’m sick to death of being woken by idiots detonating atomic explosions at 1, 2 and 3 in the morning. I’m sick to death of seeing teen Neanderthals launching fireworks down roads towards occupied vehicles coming the other way.

Most of all I’m sick to death of hearing every year of some poor kid or animal that has been badly burnt by (a) rogue fireworks that have detonated by mistake (b) mindless individuals who use fireworks as novelty weapons or (c) hospitalized by makeshift bonfires that haven’t been properly tended or constructed or have been tampered with by local yobs.

One injury is one injury too many. End of.

Selling fireworks is selling gunpowder without a license to people who, with the best will in the world, don’t always have a brain.

OK. The soapbox is now put away.

Burn Your Money

Call me a misery guts but I hate bonfire night and would quite happily see the sale of fireworks nationally banned except for professionally organized displays.

As a nation we quite rightly worry about our kids carrying knives and guns but then are quite happy to let them purchase shedloads of gunpowder and explosives every year. Are we insane?

Yes, I’m sure most kids are sensible and trustworthy and mature enough to handle the responsibility of dealing with live explosives… but unfortunately there are always too many who patently aren’t. I’ve personally seen fireworks being thrown, had fireworks launched at me and know of people who’ve had lit fireworks stuffed through their letterboxes.

Every year – EVERY YEAR – people are injured by fireworks; usually children. It is never ever worth it.

And that’s before you tot up the financial costs involved. Fireworks cost a staggering fortune. Who has money to (literally) burn in this way? Plainly loads of us do. I had a friend who each year would spend over £200 on fireworks. I’d roll my eyes and make disparaging comments but at the end of the day he was right: it was his money to do with as he liked. My yearly offer to withdraw £200 from his bank account and burn it for him was always met with a stony silence. Can’t think why – I’d have saved him an entire evening of standing around in the freezing cold with a load of pewling, complaining infants. Cos at the end of the day, you see, he was doing all this for his kids.

Rubbish. What kid demands his parent forks out £200 on fireworks? The kind of kid that needs a huge kick up the backside and a reality check…

In my opinion, bonfire night has got out of hand. It’s big, big money and people feel pressurized to partake and to do it “even bigger than they did it last year”.

But look at the cost – and I’m not just talking about finances: polluted air for days, littered streets, terrified animals (my Nan had to practically anaesthetize her pet dog for the entire fortnight around bonfire night) and otherwise perfectly healthy people having to spend time in casualty with third degree burns or worse.

It just isn’t worth it.

Restricting the sale of fireworks to professional displays would mean a reduction in air pollution, costs that are spread between everyone who goes to watch such events (which would make the financial burden on everyone more manageable), the detonation of fireworks restricted to maybe one or two nights of the year instead of spread over the entire effing month and hopefully a large reduction in the number of fireworks related injuries.

Everybody’s happy.

Except of course for the people who make a fortune each year selling millions of pounds worth of fireworks to the easily manipulated…

But who gives a big sparkly shite about them? As far as I’m concerned they can all light their blue touch-papers and swivel…