Pitch Mandible Stone

If I have been absent from blogging of late it has been for the best of reasons. I have been busy compiling material for no less than 3 books ready for e-publishing on Kindle.

The first of these is now ready and available for purchase at the un-princely sum of £1.36. I apologize to those of you who are boycotting Amazon for their tax avoidance practises and hope that you won't hold their malpractise against me. I don't think my sales are going to line their pockets overmuch... but you never know.

Pitch Mandible Stone is my first proper collection of poetry. I've had the odd poem published elsewhere over the years - 30 or so in small magazines and various UK small presses - but this is my first anthology that solely comprises all my own work.

Pitch Mandible Stone is made up of 18 poems that are a fair representation of my poetic repertoire. I'm hoping that enough of you good kind people will buy a copy that I might be able to buy myself a pint with the royalties. Even if poetry isn't your bag or you don't have a Kindle to download it to I am hoping you will at least follow the link and hit the "like" button.

It's always difficult to describe a collection of poetry so instead, as a show of good faith, I'm going to offer you a freebie. A free poem taken from the collection. If you like it or find it sufficiently interesting to want to read more, well, you know what you have to do. Thank you in advance.


The First Casualty Of War

They come ferreting through the bindweed
Dropping bobble hats and gloves in the rush;
A line of duffle coated warriors
Slogging over terrain rough as new landfill.

The cemetery erupts with the bold
Lung explosion of shrill voiced mortars
And invisible grenades. Right arms carried
Like automatics judder with school yard kick-back.

What foes there are drop by the thousand
But there are some who do not die easy.

Ranks of guanoed seraphim stand
Against the advance goading the crosshairs
To collect and dog them like midge flies.
One squaddie more astute in his brutality than the rest

Pistol-whips the neck of a submissive angel
With a club of wood. He is saving bullets.
There is a god shattering crack – real not voiced -
And every tongue stops.

What crows there are fester upward
And offer amused catcalls to the air.


Some are too wise to the ways of death.

The Bookkeeper's Husband Writes...

Some of you will know of the illness that has plagued my wife off-and-on for the last few years. After Karen endured a second hospital stay earlier this year which resulted in her being signed off from work longterm we both realized we had to instigate a major rethink into how we go out to work, finance ourselves, keep the roof over our head, food on the table and the wolves from our door.

Plans are now afoot - for us both. Ideas are being swirled around in the wine glass of opportunity. Most of them are them are still at the very faint bouquet stage. Most of them might not mature into anything very palatable at all. But some just might; some may have legs enough to actually go somewhere pretty decent.

If I could be paid to mix-metaphors all day I'd make a small fortune but until then my wife has taken the brave decision to resign from the accountant's where she has worked for the last 7 years and start up a work-from-home bookkeeping business. Provided we get some regular work it will be an ideal solution for her: she's highly qualified, very knowledgeable but needs to work at her own pace in a relatively stress-free environment. Working for herself is definitely the way to go.

To that end we have spent the last few days placing advertising, printing business cards and designing a web site: http://www.brighter-bookkeeping.co.uk.

By our reckoning we've got 12 months to make this venture work - and then it's a return to the drawing board if it all goes pear-shaped. Hopefully, we're onto a winner, albeit a slow grower... but slow and steady wins the race.

So, cutting to the chase, I am temporarily hijacking this blog to sling a bit of free, totally partisan, completely biased advertising out into the electronic ether.

Please take a look at my wife's web site. Please bear us in mind should you be in a position to require a first class bookkeeper. Please pass our details on to your family and friends and work associates should they be in that same position. Web sites and business cards are all very nice but it is word of mouth that reaps the biggest rewards and we'd appreciate your help.

Here ends the Pearl & Dean advertising. Your feature film will follow shortly.

I’m Going To Blow Up The Olympics

So Paul Chambers, the man who sparked a full-on security alert at Robin Hood airport (near Doncaster) when he Tweeted “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!” back in 2010 when the airport was temporarily shut during heavy snow has finally won his appeal against his conviction for “sending a menacing electronic communication” at the High Court in London.

I’m pleased for him in a kind of passive, passing, glad-somebody-finally-saw-sense kind of way. Mainly though I just feel hugely disgruntled at the amount of tax payer’s money that has been wasted bringing this case to trial, bringing it to appeal at a Crown Court only for that appeal to be initially quashed and then being brought to the High Court where it was eventually brought before someone with a brain cell who could finally see it for the ridiculously petty pile of shit that it actually was.

Apparently his initial appeal at the Crown Court was overturned because the judge said the Tweet was “clearly menacing”.

Clearly menacing? I’ve received begging letters from the RSPCA that were more menacing than that.

It is surely plain to everyone that the Tweet was a joke. A joke in poor taste admittedly and not even particularly funny but a joke nevertheless. The guy was cheesed off. His flight was delayed. It was snowing. He was stuck in Doncaster. It was an unthinking moment of heat and frustration. It was a little guy sounding off against a big corporate machine that had let him down. And can I just say again that he was stuck in Doncaster?

Even if he really had blown up the airport surely that alone would be a mitigating circumstance?

As it was, John Cooper QC last month said: “[the Tweet] was certainly not sent in the context of terrorism and it was wrong for the crown court to make such an association”.

Hallelujah.

Commonsense prevails at last. The Law is less of an ass than I thought it was.

But the staff at Robin Hood airport ought to hang their heads in shame along with all those who helped push this case along via the hard earned money of the likes of you and me.

Have we actually really reached an age where the average man on the street can’t cock a snoop at the big corporations with the only weapon available to him that is still free – i.e. his speech?

We have to accept here that there is a huge, clearly recognizable difference between “you have five minutes to evacuate, there is a bomb on your premises, die infidel pig-dog, the code word is kebab” and “your service is so crap you need a bomb put under you to get things to improve”. Real bomb threats are, after all, plainly not funny.

Real bomb hoaxes are also not funny. But “you've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high”, oh and by the way you can clearly identify me by my Twitter account and my 600 Followers is clearly not even in the same ballpark. That isn’t even remotely threatening. It’s someone throwing their rattle out of the pram and then having it taken to the police by a prat who then complains to the police that they felt frightened by the rattle - please lock them up Mr Policeman for I was very fwightened.

Honestly! Some people need to get a life.

Preferably before I blow them sky-high with the two tonnes of Semtex that I have rabidly secreted down my Y-fronts and packed into the hairy chambers of my armpits.

Go on. Complain about this fucking blog. I just dare you!

My finger is hovering over the button right now! One wrong move and you’re all going to die with the smoke of my singed underpants in your lungs!

8 Out Of 10 Cats Pay Their Tax The Hard Way

It is a measure of how much I detest the Tories when David Cameron's slating of the devil makes me instantly have sympathy with him.

Unless you've been living under a rock, on drugs or just in a different country for the last few days you can't fail to have heard or read about the big hoo-ha involving UK comedian, Jimmy Carr, and K2.

Yeah, that was my first thought too: he hasn't exactly got the physique of a mountaineer.

But it turns out K2 is some clever-clever, smarmy, rich man's tax dodge. I'm not sure of the ins and outs because whenever I read financial information all I hear in my head is farting noises but the basic premise seems to be that rich bastards pay their money into an account in Jersey and then the people running the account pay the money back out to them as "a loan". And because it is classed as a loan rather than a wage these mega-earners don't have to pay the statutory 50% tax rate on their stratospheric earnings.

All perfectly legal as Jimmy Carr and other K2 members have been desperate to point out.

So 'legally' the UK has missed out on something like £45bn per year on missed tax payments because of schemes like K2. Or £45mn. Or 45 drachma. One of those.

This is not funny when the likes of you and me are struggling to make ends meet and the government and tax office and the banks seem set on nobbling the poor, the middle wage earners and small business men in general.

K2 would be a great idea if we could all take advantage of it. The unfairness lies in the fact that it is a club that only the obscenely rich can join.

David Cameron (hardly short of a few bob himself) has condemned Jimmy Carr as "morally wrong".

Now up to that point I was bitterly disappointed with Jimmy Carr. I mean, how could he co-present such politically satirical programmes like 10 O'clock Live, lampooning the misdemeanours of others, when he himself was effectively ripping the entire country off?

But Cameron's condemnation just sticks in my craw worse than the whole K2 bunch. Are we to believe that Cameron knew nothing of this? That all our deeply respected politicians had no idea that such schemes existed and have done so for years and years? Are we to believe that they themselves have never partook of such perfectly legal tax dodging shenanigans?

It seems to me that Cameron's comdemnation comes only on the back of the recent media coverage. Up to then he was happy to have us all ignorant. Isn't that morally wrong too?

Jimmy Carr has today apologized for a "terrible error of judgement" over K2. He was asked by his financial advisor if he wanted to pay less tax without breaking the law. He said yes.

Well, bugger me, but who wouldn't?

The problem isn't Jimmy Carr or even K2 or it's directors (who are surely more morally repugnant than everybody?)... the problem is the long standing loophole in the law that allows such schemes to exist and to flourish. These schemes and loopholes are not new developments; they've been around for decades.

And whose fault is that?

The politicians and the bankers.

Frankie Boyle Tweeted this morning that if he'd been called "morally wrong" by Cameron he'd put it on his [tour] posters. I'd be tempted to put it on a T-shirt and wear it with pride.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

I wonder if my employer would care to loan me next month's wages rather than paying me...?

Trouble is, with my luck, they'd expect me to pay it back...

With interest.

Surf Tax

Australian retailer Kogan.com has introduced the world’s first ever tax on a web browser.

Users of the site who surf with Internet Explorer 7 are set to be charged 6.8% - 0.1% for every month since the IE7 launch. Kogan.com’s reasoning is that since redeveloping their web site their IT boffins have spent more time trying to make it backwards compatible with IE7 than they ever did getting it to work with Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

They say they’re not expecting anyone to cough up but instead are expecting users to upgrade their browsers (which can be done for free via the Microsoft web site)... the tax is merely an incentive for them to do so.

Hmm.

Am I the only person to feel uncomfortable about this?

If you want to incentivize people to upgrade their browser why not just abandon any idea of backwards compatibility when you redevelop your site? Save yourself the time and effort. If people want to shop on your site they’ll upgrade of their own accord in order to be able to continue doing so. But hitting them with a tax bill just seems rather mercenary and fundamentally unsavoury.

It is also, I suspect, the thin end of the wedge.

Next we’ll have web sites who favour Firefox taxing other browser users; Microsoft taxing every browser on the market including their own IE users and a host of online retailers jumping on a bandwagon which is getting more fat and bloated every day with the increase in web capable gadgetry that is currently on the market. iPhones, Androids, WAP phones, iPads, tablets, Kindles... how all these devices display web pages must surely be a consideration of any web design team? Are we all going to have to be taxed to help pay for that extra creative input? For something that should be an automatic part of the brief in the first place?

And, excuse me, but when we buy products from these places doesn’t our money go towards the upkeep of the vendor’s retail portal? If I buy something from a shop I don’t expect to be hit with another bill on top to help pay for the large text display in the window just because they’ve noticed I wear glasses and therefore they’ve had to cater for short-sighted people. Sod that. If the text is too small I’ll shop somewhere else and they can make a financial saving with their sign maker.

Taxing people over their choice of web browser is bullying. It is denying people their freedom and their freedom of choice.

Sod backwards compatibility if it’s too irksome. You’ll soon prune away those who are too in love with Windows 98 to move on. But don’t cater for their custom when they haven’t actually requested it and then try and get them to pay through the nose for it. And worse, then try and make out that you’re trying to be fair and helpful!

Because, to use tax parlance, that’s just a big act of fraud.

What’s The Scores, George Dawes?

Whilst on the subject of tax (as I was in my previous post... kind of) have you ever wondered where all your hard earned tax money goes...?

Ahem.

We had new doors fitted to the Gallery a couple of weeks ago. Not cheap MFI reconstituted pine doors. No. Fancy, remote-sensory, duel pump powered, automatic, DDA approved doors. In other words, doors with attitude and ruddy great knobs on (literally).

They cost someone a lot of money. My employers. The local authority (though not alas on doors).

Two weeks later there are still a number of problems with the doors.

Unconnected, exposed wiring is still hanging down either side of them. I’m trusting to luck that none of it is live or essential to the building services.

The door sensors are a bit “over zealous”. They open at the approach of visitors – fine. But when they come to close again one doors senses the other and opens again. And again. And again. In short we have flapping doors. Coming into the Art Gallery is akin to storming into the saloon bar at Tombstone, Arizona. The doors flap dramatically behind you as your order your firewater at the bar.

And lastly (though rather importantly for a security conscious art gallery), the key is impossible to turn in the lock. Honestly you need to have the strength of Geoff Capes (remember him?) to get in or out of the building. My key is now so twisted it looks like a Möbius strip.

The door men are having to come back again to put all of this right. This will be their third visit in three weeks.

Ker-ching. Thank you for your donation.

Saved By The Taxman

I must admit I’ve been feeling rather bleak of late. All down to interminable financial strain... not enough money to cover all our necessary outgoings and my attempts to alleviate this situation by acquiring a second job have all failed miserably.

But yesterday help came through the post from a very unexpected quarter.

It seems the tax office have calculated our child care benefit at a very reasonable £100 a week. This effectively covers the shortfall that we were experiencing due to Tom’s nursery fees.

Cue mega sighs of relief. We’re saved! At least for this year... Of course Karen and I can hardly believe our luck and are sure that the tax office must have miscalculated somehow... that they’re going to demand it all back at some unspecified and inconvenient point in the future.

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to bite their hands off accepting the money now. I can assure you it’s certainly much needed.

Mr Taxman, sir, you're a gent – I salute you.