Ding Dong the Witch has Gone

Gosh I’m such a rebel aren’t I?

I downloaded ‘Ding Dong the Witch has Gone’ in the anarchistic manner of a teenager, my older self-wondering if it was distasteful and churlish or about as imaginative as being a sociopathic twitter user.

But you know it’s good.

Imagine if there was not a campaign to get this song to the top of the UK charts in time for her funeral, and all history had to remember her by were the simpering superlatives left just after her death – would it be right that the amount of disharmony she is responsible for should be fuzzed over with day upon day of wistful, twee rhetoric in the blanket coverage and systematic news orgy that has followed, where even supposedly charming anecdotes about this old battle axe seemed laced with a disturbing undercurrent of the Machiavellian.

Here is one such story that a gay Conservative told of the time he sought an audience with her which I think we are supposed to find charming yet…well, you tell me.

He was hoping to talk with her in regards the number of gay Conservatives in the cabinet and that there were a large proportion of Conservative voters who felt the party stance on homosexuality was un-clear – or more to the point seemed quite homophobic.

When she finally turned up to this appointment she dominated the conversation with other political business and it seemed there was little opportunity for this very nervous MP to get a word in.

Eventually as the time was running down she realised that her twitchy guest had not yet spoken of what was on his mind and the purpose of the meeting.

‘Oh my goodness, listen to me’ she said ‘Here I am wittering on all this time and I’m none the wiser as to why you brought me here…please do speak.’

At this point, our story teller realised the enormity of what he had to say to this formidable woman, and became aware of the implications of his subject matter and how un-predictable her reaction might be.

So he began (paraphrased) ‘Prime Minister – I am a homosexual man and it is my feeling and the feeling of others in the party that we should be seen to be more tolerant of the gay community; there are many Conservative voters who may be put off by the present image presented to those who have alternative lifestyles.’

A silence falls.

Eventually she got up and leaned over to him – laid a gloved hand on his and looking him straight in the eye said quietly ‘That must have been very difficult for you to say.’

And then she left.

This generally seems to be the level of warmth in all the anecdotes I have recently had to endure listening to. Not exactly re-affirming her cuddliness, nor amusing.

Personally I found this story chilling – as if with a subsequent covert nod to one of her henchmen the guy would be invited for a ride in the Prime Ministers special armour plated, bomb proof (scream proof), limousine round the back streets of parliament; where he would be engaged in cheerful banter with his two escorts, before the un-familiar sensation of a cold screwdriver violently entered the back of his neck.

Margaret Thatcher was extraordinarily cold – you could argue that it is this coldness that was required to remove power from the Trade Unions, to sink the General Belgrano or to cull the non-viable jobs and services that the British tax payer was over paying for.

You could argue that she was wonderfully stoic and old school, that her actions made Britain great once again and that under any other leader (a human being with blood rather than acid in their veins for example), we would be burying our own dead and eating our children, where life would be as lethargic and as grim as if we had crawled into the Sky box and were forced to spend eternity, physically expressing the creative content of the Gold channel.

We are told that without her brute forcefulness we might have actually devolved to the economic gloom of Britain as it was just after the second world war; with it’s never ending austerity, poverty, minimal social mobility and a prolonged recession; that sounds horrible doesn’t it?

I found another anecdote recounting her charm from Margaret’s long term loyal and trusted driver, a man she probably shared the most of her intimate moments with while driving from appointment to appointment.

For one we learned that she never listened to music and asked if he had ever attempted to share a joke with her, he promptly replied that he had but that he had found her to be completely humourless.

I think it’s always good advice to be wary of people who do not take pleasure in music or humour, since these are two things that help us to connect and understand each other.

Without the capacity to enjoy either you wonder where a person can learn empathy or find an outlet for difficult to conceptualise inner tensions.  

It’s possible this driver liked pop acts such as Rick Astley or was a rotten comedian but I choose to believe that Margaret Thatcher was in fact; a psychopath, one who had failed to assimilate appreciation of emotive rhythm or the benefit of laughing at oneself into her human façade.

Just as in retrospect Jimmy Savile couldn’t appear more like a sex offender than if he had wandered around with a trio of gagged, prepubescent teenagers attached to him by a leather studded chain, Margaret Thatcher will one day similarly be acknowledged for being a violent psychotic acting out her psychosis on miners, trade unionists and Argentinians.

Suddenly all those inhuman decisions that cost millions of people their jobs, their families and in some cases their lives will clearly have been the act of a person who in any other walk of life would have the bones of her victims hidden under her patio – actually, that’s an interesting idea I think we should explore.

Margaret Thatcher is often regarded as an extraordinary woman who single handedly, rescued this country from ruin, when actually all she did was create a vast amount of quick money by selling everything off to a few people who were in the right place at the right time to exploit it.

That’s not particularly astute thinking, since I could tomorrow ebay the entire contents of my home and live like a North Korean dictator for perhaps 3 months, yet once the money was gone I would have to hang myself or starve. Did she never read Aesops Fables? I appreciate that our Goose at the time was not so much laying golden eggs as tin, but it was the only goose we had and Maggie slaughtered it with a spectacular relish and dis-regard for the future implications.

The right to buy our homes is a popular but ultimately flawed idea for example. An approach that was only good for the generation of people who were lucky enough to live in council houses at the time. This has proven not to be so good for the incumbent lower working class who have no access to affordable housing, in part because this transformed humble council house tenants in to despotic, greedy landlords and the fact the money from the sales were not put back into creating more subsidised housing.

The 1980’s was gravy for those who could afford to buy shares in British Gas, British Rail and anything else she chose to sell off, but once that was done, if you were not holding shares you were destined to be enslaved and powerless to protest about astronomical train fare rises, or unsustainable heating bills.

Margaret Thatcher’s legacy has been to create an illusion of prosperity while beneath the surface create great division; the division of those who are in a position to capitalise and those who have lost any real power to protest. It was her that brought about the Fat Cat CEO’s; those people who game-changed salaries from very well paid to that in line with wages awarded to movie stars or premier division footballers, she freed up the banking sector so that it could trade aggressively and without as much accountability, leading to the gambling with pension funds and a bloated unchecked arrogance we are paying for today.

We have her to thank for the destruction of communities and the natural goodwill we once had for our neighbours –her actions and the climate she massaged into position created the era of self-protectionism, the zealous, paranoid opportunists that we are today.

In short if we are at all wealthier for it -which is clearly debateable – trust and goodwill has been the cost.

Therefore, what Margaret Thatcher might be able to stake a claim on accomplishment wise, was to perhaps… make London appear very rich for a very short-time.

The country as a whole has not benefited so much, unless you count those that did well out of Londoners entering peaceful hamlets and buying up all those affordable homes that subsequently shot up in value and drove out the young families, simultaneously destroying the support networks and lifeblood of communities; replacing traditional forms of childcare and help for the aged with amoral, margin conscious corporations. Meanwhile the independent, community dependent high streets falter, clearing the way for chain stores and franchises to then go on to employ these lost, poorly educated, un-represented, modern day wandering gypsies for minimum wage.

Ding Dong - Rejoice, for another dictator is dead.

America Plans to Murder some Goths

Its official, America has gone insane, yes it can actually happen, feed enough of the population a salty diet of religion, fast food, corruption, hypocrisy and shattered dreams, and you’ll drive the bulk of them into first confusion and then lunacy.

Nothing demonstrates this more succinctly than the extraordinarily misguided idea that in an attempt to avoid the horror of the Connecticut massacre happening again in the future, more guns will be needed. The rest of the world wakes to the news that several US schools and kindergartens, are now proactive in training and arming its teachers to be able to take down some lithium crazed spotty Herbert, who has slipped into a Matrix delusion.

It looks as though President Obama has lost the race to secure public opinion and that the gun lobby has seized the initiative, Obama has not capitalized on the strength of emotion that was made available to him just after the last round of slaughter, while the National Rifle Association; perhaps momentarily caught in the headlights and for a nano-second ever so slightly vulnerable, or like a boxer sucker punched and drunk, has made it to the bell and in this next round has come out fighting harder than ever. In fact it would seem ingeniously turned this horror story into a business opportunity.

It feels a lot like the devil just scored heavy and maybe about to secure the United States descent into its own mini-apocalypse.  Therefore we are reminded of the prophecy first decreed in Warner Brothers cartoons, or parodied in The Walking Dead, where ultimately an over armed world will eventually destroy itself or in the case of zombie tv shows feast on each other.

The thing about insanity is that to the insane you are acutely sober and sure of your reality meanwhile you’re jabbering on about how Jesus wants you to take out an island of Socialist children enjoying summer camp or are tempted to fly a commercial aeroplane into an office block.

We are then, presented with footage of maths teachers being taught how to fire handguns at menacing bogeymen effigies or get to see the government’s health and safety videos on surviving a massacre attempt by either; killing first, hiding or battering the offender about the head with a school chair.

The fact that there even needs to be a health and safety video of this kind for kids who go to an American school, should be evidence enough that the United States has a giant blind spot it needs to pull focus on, but if the NRA gets its way it will prefer to enrage it’s people and proliferate paranoia bloating ignorance, cleverly boosting the profit margins of weapon making manufacturers and securing its long term future.

It seems that America is so convinced that fire should be met with fire that few compelling arguments for a more rational approach are likely to be heard.

An obvious one to me would have to be the misguided assumption that dangerous barking mad mass murderers are easy to identify, that one could safely plunge a few rounds into the chest of any young male acne troubled goth with a decent success rate for averting a potential slaughter. This will not be the case in practice and probably several innocent weirdo’s will die at the hand of jittery school staff.

It’s rather naive to believe that spotting psychopaths is easy at all since these are the most focused and professional people on earth, who take what they do very seriously and with a cold, calculated precision matched only by hedge fund managers and politicians.

Think you know psychopaths? Well you probably don’t, they only look like psychopaths in the police station mug shots after they have been on a psychotic episode and are no longer able to hide their mental disability.

A psychopath intent on creating hell on earth is impressively resourceful and cunning with a peculiar ability to hypnotise its victims or camouflage themselves in banality, i.e the next most likely mass murderer a few years from now won’t be the painfully shy, athletically challenged geek who reads too many graphic novels or listens to whatever progressive metal, death doom folk they are into, but a teacher.

The story will emerge sooner or later of a bullied, spectacled, geology support teacher who filled with growing resentment at the lack of respect from his pupils, with an image of his wife riding the football coach once when he came home too early still burning into his cerebellum, has been stockpiling hand guns in the staff room until finally he breaks and goes completely berserk.

Probably this will be the cue then for children to carry pepper spray or perhaps modest sized hunting knives so they can stave off such an attack until the SWAT team arrives.

A short toddler friendly instructional video on garrotting with piano wire or possibly a few hints on how to apply torture without the subject losing consciousness may also be handy.

Mind you if I was forced to live in the States I might take a different stance and be far more pro-gun myself. Gone are the day’s I used to think America must be cool because of Han Solo and McDonalds, I’ve rather recoiled from it lately, much how passengers on a bus edge away from an over excited, clearly agitated drunk who you suspect might accidently kill you while having a violent, public mental breakdown.

These days the place scares the living shit out of me and not just because of the gun lust but rather a general bonkers look in the eye of people who seem largely like fat stunted 7 year olds wobbling around supermarkets reaching for boxes of syrupy breakfast pancakes with giant flapping arms and beefy hands.

Of course I know this is not all Americans and many are decent, sober – sometimes slim, but mostly it seems that the sprawling centre bit that is not New York or California has a very high percentage of unhealthy people for whom the living has been so easy and so rich it has turned their brain to liver pate.

So long as they have a job, a house and a fridge they have nothing left to fear except fear itself and without a strong alternative spiritual message beyond that of accumulation and protecting yourself with money, (should you ever be so human as to fall sick or become un-employed), it figures that the most likely solution to issues you can’t be bothered to understand, would be the one that sounds easiest; shooting people.

Shooting people you see is far less demanding than getting to know the real enemy, far less complicated than learning why it is that otherwise healthy young people so disenfranchised with American life are willing to go on suicide missions without conscience.

Also, you can shoot people dead from your arm chair.

Clipping Bankers Bonuses

The EU is trying to get a policy through that clips the high bonuses of bankers, it goes that their awards should be no greater than the base rate salary they take.

Apparently this is not a good thing, especially if you happen to be David Cameron, Boris Johnson or a banker.

The concern is that our banking talent will leave in droves, that Britain will no longer be in possession of its last great manufacturing base – or in this case a sort of brokerage factory that gleans off a tidy sum for every transaction that passes via the financial district of London.

Probably the reasons that France and Germany particularly like this are that they might be seeking a taste for themselves, reducing bankers bonuses there by neutering London, or at any rate removing one of its balls, might mean their own banking districts could become more powerful and profitable.

The greatest concern from the UK perspective would be that without sickening levels of bonuses where each and every one of them is akin to a skip filled with barf – representing the scale of public distaste, that our economy is doomed.

Right now it seems (if you believe the political rhetoric) that bankers have emergency suitcases packed with loot and a first class ticket to Singapore for the moment they cannot afford to buy a Surrey pile or enough for a small town to retire on with their Christmas bonus.

Not sure I believe that.

There are after all a few things to consider.

I think quite overlooked might be the limited number of international jobs available for starters, I mean are we entirely confident that a British banker could easily walk into a job on the other side of the world without the ability to speak Japanese or Chinese or Mandarin, who can effortlessly shove aside the hardworking loyal employees or citizens who have proven themselves to be good, submissive communists and who might ordinarily be in line for promotion?

Secondly, are all bankers complete sociopaths? Do they not have hearts or a sense of place? Does money remove from the brain all need for a sense of identity, a need to recognise ones surroundings or to be embraced by familiar faces and the culture of home?

While there may well be a greater number of mavericks in the pursuit of obscene pay packets in the financial industries than others, surely some of them are married with children in education who would not want to leave, surely some might wish to bring their children up so they might know their grandparents or extended families or be educated in a school without fear they might be indoctrinated with Totalitarianism. Perhaps maybe they would miss the aesthetic and charm of Britain, the unique quality of London and the ancient pagan countryside…failing this at least you can get rip roaring pissed in Britain without landing in prison or having your hands cut off. There are some reasons for staying here for more than just the amount of cash you can make.

Thirdly, and this is really important – if such people were so mercenary and insensitive to the place they live, we should be happy that they would go. Basically to want them here would be a bit like asking a gonorrhoea infected lothario to stay with you on your Spanish island with the hope he will marry one of your daughters when in fact, quite the opposite is most likely to happen – that is he’ll bang them all and clear off leaving a wake of un-happy, possibly pregnant and definitely diseased women behind. There is plenty of historical evidence that tells us when a man (or woman) is on foreign soil and has no allegiance to the land or the culture; he is freed of inhibitions and in turn responsibility.

I have checked in with my view on this several times and all things considered I would be surprised if too many other countries would even want them, after all the track record of these highly paid individuals is not at all good, in fact they are unemployable if your approach to hiring someone is to ask of their achievements. Bringing down the economy of a single country would be bad enough but the entire world?

If there was an equivalent metaphor I could use in say plumbing, it would essentially mean that your approach to fixing leaks was by hammering nails into water pipes.

I think this is where certain people are most confused when they say that we need to keep  this talent, they are confusing the vast amount of wealth that was created by them from the mid-80s to 2006 as having actually been real.

What these people actually achieved was to create the most spectacular magical illusion in which for a time we thought we had defeated the very nature of mathematics, that 1+1 could equal 3 if you looked at it through squinty eyed logic.

While this is indeed a remarkable talent of sorts it’s clearly better suited to Bonzos Touring Finance Show (a bit like the Circus of Horrors but only really, really dull) it is a skillset much like David Blaine the hovering street magician deploys, who, while it may seem that he can transform $10 bills into $100 bills, he cannot because if he was actually conjuring real money from thin air he would be executed.

Somehow though we chose to believe that this is what these geniuses were managing to do and it was such an amazing and feel good hypnotic trick that we fell for it. We can be excused for being fooled once in this way, but let’s not get sucker punched a second time and lets not entertain the fear of losing them that they might hold us to ransom and rinse us further.

Personally who I want to look after my finances is not the base jumping, cocaine addicted, academic adrenalin junkie who has been favoured these last couple of decades, but a super boring, bowler hat wearing 50 year old with no life whatsoever, the kind of guy who works out his utility bills before the bills actually arrive and who always makes sure there is enough to get the Jaguar serviced once every three months.

Afterall, for hundreds of years this seemed to work out ok – boring people to do the boring work; we need that back – that’s the kind of talent I want. This other stuff is just like Nike branding, the idea that if it looks dynamic and exciting it must be better somehow; even if the results suggest it’s just all a bit shit. It is of concern to me that people like David Cameron are not above this with his first class education background, that even he loses his common sense when a pair of plastic boobies are jiggled in his face.

The problem is that excitement and dynamism on this occasion has caused un-told damage to society, the future is horribly uncertain; genuinely apocalyptic if the fuel bills get much higher and earning power remains as it is.

In many ways the only great achievement from this generation of financial wizards would be to have increased the net worth of already very rich people, fluffed the cushions of some of the comfortable upper middle classes but absolutely slaughtered everyone else – the vast majority of the population have lost out.

Anyway, what’s so hard about running a bank?

The Bank of Dave, a local bank concept masterminded by Burnley millionaire ‘Dave Fishwick’ has proven that the practice of running a profitable, traditional banking model is very simple, very effective and has returned £1,000,000 bucks back to the economy in its first year, while rewarding his savers with 5% interest. Dave had no prior experience with finance, in fact I suspect the real skills needed for making a go of it beyond the maths is just the ability to put in a 10 hour day and a will to make it succeed - there are plenty of us working crappy jobs for longer hours and for less pay who would appreciate the opportunity, and who would work for a sensible pay packet.

In fact I would go one step further and suggest that down to earth people who are used to having to balance the books, and who can empathise with their local community are just what we need right now.

Honestly when Stephen Hester CEO for Royal Bank of Scotland goes to work he does the same thing any half intelligent person with a half intelligent job does, he sits in his chair, breaks wind when he thinks he can get away with it, looks through his emails and diary, attends some meetings and suggests ideas for improving things much the same as does any department head be they nurse or firefighter.

You might need to learn how to use power point or a word processor but one thing anyone over the age of 35 knows is that all things considered, a job is a job you just have to get on with and find a way to do. Few jobs have skills beyond the reach of an enthusiastic, bright person with a will to learn; the bankers who vacate Britain will not be missed, let them go - good people will fill their posts.

Horse

I’ll be honest, I am not in the slightest bit bothered by the Horsemeat scandal, in fact it strikes me as typically British not to be able to appreciate a good bit of fortune.

Afterall horsemeat is good eating, its quality – like having a bit of steak thrown in your shepherds pie and its healthier too, it’s not as if its road kill; squirrel, rat or drunken vagrant. As far as I’m concerned so long as the food itself has been processed to the same standard as our other meats, who cares?

Well, apparently the media seems to, quite a bit and is doing the usual rounds of fattening up a story of bare consequence – ok so the real story is that large Supermarkets are no doubt turning a blind eye to practices starting in Eastern Europe and entering the food chain via France and Germany – it is a story of deception and fraud, so someone must hang.

You know the way I look at it, if the French are eating it, then it’s good enough for me. The French, regardless of what you think about their penchant for snails and frogs know food – if I was looking for specialist insider knowledge of paedophilia I’d ask a Roman Catholic Priest, if I want assurance about what I’m eating I’d look to the French, the idea that we Brits could be any serious judge of what constitutes a decent meal is shadowy and uncertain, I mean I ate in what was really the equivalent of a French pub a few years ago and I literally had an out of body experience, I could see that I was in danger of creating a scene since my eyes must have been rolling about in my head and my jaws slavering with uncontrollable pleasure, every other mouthful I had to let out an orgasmic approving grunt with a mono syllabic superlative attached to it.

It occurred to me the staff may have started watching me with a certain curiosity which makes sense since for them it was surely the equivalent of a foreigner becoming violenty aroused after chowing down on a steak and kidney pudding in a Wetherspoons pub.

That must surely act as some sort of measure of just how crap the majority of food is that we eat over here. We may be very proud and talk with fervent enthusiasm of our fish and chips, the French have even been known to visit us just to taste this incredible delicacy on the strength of that passion, only to then be uncontrollably sick over the nearest fruit machine, which is not surprising since being able to handle a massive surge of indigestible fat, salt and a gallon of malt vinegar takes generations of burned out, ulcer scarred stomach linings before it is of a suitable iron clad quality and just as long to transform the precision tooling of taste buds into little more than blisters.   

Us Brits take pleasure in berating the Scots for the fact they will deep fry a pack of butter in a mars bar sandwich but this is little more than a rapist feeling morally superior to the nonce in the cell next door. Even if we are not the worst place to eat in the world these days and even if there are modern pretenders to the crown for most turgid eating experience such as in Russia or Outa Mongolia, lets not get too ahead of ourselves here, let’s not allow our po-faced media machine to inflate our indignation out of proportion, you can still confidently feed a Brit on an intestine sack filled with lips and labia and extract an approving compliment.

Let’s then feel slightly pleased that we are more continental than we at first thought, more liberal and modern, impulsive and able to accommodate exotic flavours, so the Americans might say those crazy Brits them eat Horse!

Let’s take this further I say and import fish fingers from China stuffed full of dolphin and puffin (obviously line caught for ecological reasons) or burgers all the way from Korea with more than 60% German Shepherd.

Let me ask you, do you…really care – I mean since the British are generally in the aftermath of some alcohol or drugs binge there are already plenty of outlets servicing the needs of salt and saturated fat addicted populous with entire parades dedicated to compacted tombs of spit roasted protein.

I’ve eaten out of some troughs in my time after a few pints and I can tell you honestly if the only thing on offer on a cold walk back home were heavily seasoned still-born foetuses with the eyes still in their sockets I’d order mine with extra burger sauce and chips.

There is of course a whole other side to this which I find particularly compelling – can we afford to be such fussy eaters? I mean we throw away or discard so much valuable eating, turn our nose up at a fish because it has a funny look in its eye, even the mere mention of offal has us dry retching and complaining as if we were medieval peasants being broken on the wheel, yet if you believe the scientists our very existence as the supposed alpha species on the planet is traced to the pursuit, cooking and ingestion of snow leopards and panda bears.

I believe that restricting your meat intake to just cow or chicken and only then the most media approved, camera friendly cuts must be like reducing the gene pool. Without a constant variety of meats being eaten 3 times a day surely we are guilty of a kind of possible protein inbreeding which is probably why we all get Alzheimer’s and Cancer these days or are compelled to think that ‘Take Me Out’ is reasonable quality Saturday night viewing.

I don’t think that most people actually realise how demanding of the environment the growing and then harvesting of cattle is or that in times gone meat was a luxury that was exclusive to Feudal Lords, that just 100 years ago it was calculated there was not enough land mass to feed the British so science had to come up with the various pesticides and soil treatments that allow it to yield more product. Even just 25 years or so ago eating any kind of chicken was out of the reach of low income families, for Sunday lunch my mum used to buy a reformed roll of chicken aura or salt and water soaked sawdust that had once had a chicken sit down on it, the 20^th century equivalent of a gin rag for us to suck on and ease our pains. The only reason why chicken has become so inexpensive today is because of the drugs and intense processing used to create them, as for how much like quality meat they are I guess we will find out in forthcoming generations, but I’m not sure that steroid injected, floppy, ill looking and miserable poultry bodes well. However if horse is in the offering as an alternative, give me that! Its hard to stuff such a large animal in a gerbil cage and in all likelihood it will have had a good long life, outdoors, working the land – you can’t afford not to exploit a beast such as this, this thing will have done more miles than an ex-rental Toyota Yaris and as a result yield primo grade muscle fibre – might be a bit tougher, but cook it for longer, get Romanian orphans to  manipulate and massage it long enough and you get a great tin of bolognaise.

Ok, so that’s something for you to chew over, in the meantime with all this talk of meat I’m getting a raging appetite and there are several warm blooded creatures  I could easily overpower nearby, I’d better go and grill some toast.

Goonism

A show started on BBC3 last night with the captivating title ‘A Year of Making Love’ which was enough to make me turn over and see if there was any explicit sex on offer, all the while knowing that this was bound to be some disappointing word play, which it was.

It claims to be a documentary, a scientific process of selecting compatible couples, pairing them up and I am guessing then following them for a year – to see what tedious soap opera unfolds, what the science involved was is not clear but basically seemed to revolve around a trio of tv execs pointing at a screen and then proclaiming a match. Initially the show gets off to a promising start in that people seem to be being matched  surprisingly well and for an anxious moment you actually worry life might be about to become so much horribly worse as we learn we are nothing more than binary routines toyed with by nature which is itself a big CPU located at the centre of the earth. Of course thankfully, I think, this was pretty much put to bed early as while the initial rhetoric from the predictable post match interviews, interspersed with footage of the couples smiling, cooing and physically all touchy feely with each other, might have suggested love could blossom based on nothing more than cold analysis, the reality was more reassuring.

The blokes who had earlier fawned over their prize and presented tokens of love or piggybacked them joyfully off the stage in not contrived at all spontaneity soon cleared off and were either never heard of again or got off with the girl on the other table.

In short any science that could possibly have existed was soon lost in the noise of the results which more or less would be the same if you had just got 500 people in a room and picked their matches from a hat.

One particularly depressing saga unfolded which followed the result of one match; a stunning girl with what seemed to be a sweet personality most people would have married on the spot, matched with a weight twirling beefcake, who then proved himself to be a complete an utter cliché – by romancing her into bed and then never calling her, twice.

His loss – he will never get the same opportunity ever in his goon infested life, his treatment of her was miserable, inexcusable and shallow…unless of course she had a spotty arse or a stubbly moustache.

Here then is where we really get to the meat of today’s topic…goons.

Perhaps I am about to show my age, much like the people who I vowed I would never want to become when I was in my 20’s, back when I groaned inwardly as some Nazi red top 50 year old columnist would comment on the lack of musicality in dance music or mount campaigns against expletive lyrics in metal music, who would regard all long haired people with tattoos as morons or who would apply sweeping generalisations on a subject without knowing the subtlety of a healthy sub-culture.

However ‘Goonism’ doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a complex culture born out of rebellion, curiosity and intelligence but rather is what happens if you create a narcissistic society by constantly enforcing the notion that if you can attain the aesthetic; money and sex will follow.    

We had hair gelled, aftershave drenched racer boys back in my day of course and so I’m not ignorant that the heritage reaches back many generations in varying forms, but there has of late become what I regard as a depressing surge in the number of vacant, body obsessed males who fuck for sport.

I call it sport because I really honestly cannot believe they have the imagination to be able to appreciate any erotic nature of sex beyond that of ‘Ug, big tits feel nice in my hand, me want blow job coz it make my winkie tingle.’ In fact if ever they were thrown some over ripe fruit and a teaspoon I’m pretty sure they would have reached the peak of their sexual, erotic maturity and would be as content as ever they would be having sex with watermelons.

That would be except for the other strand of depth to this culture which would be the accumulation of numbers, as in the number of ‘birds they have shagged’ – the higher the better regardless of whether this enabled any true liberation of the spirit, any richness of experience or contained poetic, romantic life affirming moments.

It seems that the primary achievement for a goon is simply get these numbers up as high as possible seemingly because the more you have the more of a man you must be.

Obviously though the kind of ‘man’ we’re talking about is not one who is independently minded with a charming curiosity and a cheeky spark in the eye, but rather a boring, self-obsessed, waxed and plucked, gym-becile with the aesthetic appeal of a swollen, pink sausage bursting out of its skin. Also, it seems all proper man goons must dispose of the dignity and understated elegance of a natural walk and instead seek to develop a comedy, muscle restricted waddle that can be enhanced further by wearing inappropriate clothing such as skinny jeans from All Saints, which is a crazy misunderstanding of fashion laws since All Saints gear is ultimately for weedy, fey indie kids in danger of passing out from a lack of meat in their diet.

What this really demonstrates is that there is no creative talent or an eye for form, merely an externally programmed mind-set that believes the more commercially endorsed boxes they can tick the more attractive they must be, so for example never settle for a single hairstyle when you can have three fashionable ones simultaneously taking up different zones of real estate on your peanut proportioned head. Clearly a goon is  a danger to himself unless he restricted to pumping iron and sticking his appendage in a hole.

Now don’t get me wrong I respect a person who takes care of him or herself, I’m not anti-gyms especially or against people who want to create a nice physical shape for themselves, this shows presence and effort where the opposite is to passively ingest endless amounts of fat and sugar and become addicted to the sensation of laying down - but without an eye for form we get the peculiar look of the ‘Geordie Shore’ generation torso, which is neither healthy looking or has the tight pleasing lines of say…The Elephant Man.

I may not be speaking as a nutritionist or a body guru but  it seems clear to me that there is no respect for their physique at all just a dumb connection they made with the pursuit of sex numbers and the existence of a six pack.

I feel sorry for this generation of women who seem to have to like these boys because as there are so many of them popping up on T.V. it suggests this might be the new celeb gravy train – the must have boyfriend of 2013 who has the cartoon dimensions and dress sense of Banana Man and the charm of a misogynistic washing up bowl.  Hardly surprising then that generally the type of women these boys manage to bed are of a similar impoverished eroticism and are broadly mean drunks who have lost all sensation of self-respect.

What this means is that while a Goon may be proud of his 1000+ sex tally in reality it is a result born out of hanging with large numbers of unhappy, intoxicated insecure girls rather than a master class in sophisticated smooth talk or the flexing of an irresistible physique, I mean say your goal in life was to put your finger up the bums of as many cows in your life as possible, the fact that you always choose to hang out in fields full of cows and the fact that they couldn't care less if you did this to them or not could hardly be considered an achievement.

  

  

Dictator

God I’m getting sick of all the bullshit – are you?

I mean it’s on the increase isn’t it – the erosion of civil liberties, restrictions closing in – bureaucracy funnelling us this way and that towards the image it seems of little more than the dystopic grey tunic wearing automaton, living in an illusion of great wealth and equality while our spirits wither away with a slow burning sensation like a slug crawling along the edge of a razor blade.

We are on the one hand encouraged to be adventurous, unique and imaginative, yet reprimanded if we step out of line or say anything too challenging or are ever out of synch with the great plan of capitalism.

We are destined to go completely insane with such conflicting messages, we are bombarded by the promise of control, of love and spiritual contentment typically in exchange for our hard earned cash, yet meanwhile the non-empathetic injustices pile up – innocently forgetting to pay your congestion charge or getting hauled over the coals for some tedious misdemeanour –Increasingly I’d have to refer here to certain website forums all those ‘free’ social network sites and supposedly laid back commercial adventures that seem to thrive on bitch slapping you if you are not entirely complicit in their etiquette which more and more seems to basically mean that you should be in constant servitude to the proliferation of its philosophy, here you must never actually be creative or controversial because that runs the risk of shattering some kind of atmosphere and product these days is all about the atmosphere. It seems that for some websites or products anything less than an evangelical level of dedication is met with immediate expulsion or retraction of support despite the fact you might actually have paid money to them. It’s a new and exciting level of arrogance that seems to piss is in the face of the traditional role of business which I always thought was about them courting and loving us, not letting us pursue them like a desperately ill puppy who keeps going back for more even though they stub cigarettes out on us or leave us to sleep in a shit filled basket.      

Who exactly is it that’s having a super great time that might bear any relation whatsoever to the perversely content and self-satisfied images that slew into our living rooms with such regularity, or who has ever found themselves suddenly becoming aware that they are actually the living embodiment of a glossy photo demonstrating the harmony that a slab of technology can bring?

I personally have never experienced sharing a coffee with two of my closest most beautiful wide mouthed, model grade, chunky knit wearing, Caucasian and afro Caribbean buddies, seemingly intimate with such a united sense of wonder that it causes us to smile in the most curious way, it is the ‘advertisers’ smile, one splattered throughout the known universe like some transmission from the wastebasket of reality, for it’s never a particularly humorous guffaw with teeth and spittle and suggestive of a seriously funny and pant peeing, politically inappropriate joke or following the enthusiastic jettison of trapped wind, but something far more efficient, composition friendly,  well behaved, complacent and compliant to the kind of person the PR company wants us to aspire. Basically the only things that delight here is how simple it is to call up a spread-sheet or simply select one of the preset formulas for an instant report on the least efficient department member you can fire. In fact you can now use an ingenious new app that removes the inconvenience or guilt of personal interaction and fires them in a digitally formulated dream, they wake to a jobless, futureless world with their P45 chundering out of their wireless printer.  Oh my goodness! And to think I used to use a mouse for that! What a silly luddite I am!

The truth is that when it comes to the technology featured the actual experience is rarely about effortless interaction or an enabler of some new sophisticated hobby (e.g. geology- a sufficiently well rounded interest as opposed to say enhanced HD 3D streaming of donkey porn) but rather wrestling with upgrades, software issues, slow boot-ups, hardware failures and un-helpful or extraordinarily expensive technical support.

Shortly after you make your purchase and are still reeling from the cost you’ll find that a whole host of mini other expenses will be made apparent to you, accompanied by a call centre firewall that needs to be conquered like an end of level beast from an early 90’s games console. 

This is why I cannot enjoy giant blockbuster movies such as Batman or some such superhero who relies heavily on technology, considering how much of an arse it is sometimes just to locate a file on Windows 7, or sit and endure the painfully slow rigmoral of synching an iphone with itunes. I think the last thing I’d want to do after wasting hours on a call to customer support or tearing my hair out trying to get a wireless connection is crowbar myself into a carbon fibre suit and head out on the town doing something profoundly decent.

It’s why programs such as Strictly Come Dancing exist, by the time you’ve lost all will to live, you’ll just want to heave yourself onto a sofa and eat crisps and look at bums in stupid gaudy costumes. Such shows are like morphine for a brain no longer capable of speech.

Anyway it’s not just the computer hardware and sexy efficient graphics that defies all sense of believability just general maintenance of a ridiculously ostentatious life would be way too much – I baulk these days even at the idea of too much vacuuming - in Batman’s case assuming  it is just him and his 80 year old butler I am frequently distracted by the enormity and improbable amounts of maintenance; the backdrop of ceiling lights which reach off into the immediate future and wonder who it was that installed them – I’m assuming it was probably down to Alfred and considering the ambitions and dimensions of Bruce’s home one can only conclude that life for Alfred must be one of a subservient hell, constantly up ladders, constructing scaffolding or Googling for a company that makes ridiculously oversized off-road military tyres – all this while doing the cooking, cleaning and pressing Bruce Wayne’s pyjamas.

If this depiction of vigilante life were to be more believable it would have to show Bruce regularly pissed off struggling to remember a lost password or trying  to hurry the boot-up time on his computer by yelling expletives at it or of him bawling out Alfred for forgetting to replace the black ink cartridge in his printer.

None of this features ever in a movie such as this and likewise never appears in adverts either, technology adverts seem to exist in a perpetual utopia of free time, lottery grade salaries and well-manicured hands that flick self satisfactorily through pleasantness.

No worries for these people exist, their homes are never untidy or out of sorts their minds never pre-occupied with debt and frustration or concerns that their partner might be knobbing the milkman, nope – life is just drifting with outstretched arms while piles of money fall into their smiling orifices, dressed in their self-ironing never shapeless cashmere sweaters and never thrown out of the meditation by a bitter cup of coffee or by a massive anxiety attack that stops them getting into lifts.

How to be Famous?

Most of the time I’m far too preoccupied with real things, deluded by a sense of meaningful purpose as I choose paint colours for the spare bedroom or source a tube screamer on Ebay, in this microcosmic experience of life I am some kind of a God, life makes sense.

But sometimes I am lured into a space I wish to forget about, I am crept up on by a particularly spiteful run of events and find myself engaged either in some rock and roll documentary or fascinating portrayal of a great American writer. Sometimes it’s from a completely unexpected source such as a skateboarding drum and bass creating producer or a groovy CEO who makes capitalism seem sexy and essential.

The powerful fallout of media that spills into the living room is mopped up by my eyes and sets about hypnotising my ears; on screen is the unmistakeable charisma of fame.

It takes a certain sort of fame to get me feeling insecure and a total failure in life, it won’t likely be Jordon or some hapless wilting lily from the X-Factor over-coming a speech impediment but an important mix of determination, fearless character and of course extraordinary talent. Typically featuring more in the side wing but in many ways just as important is the story of decades long friendships that survive near death adversity groomed into a tattooed grizzly but surprisingly youthful physique. The killer is that everyone looks so radiant and could pass for mid-20s under the right lighting despite being 50 something,

When this comes together it is to me the most beautiful thing to behold and leaves me wondering what the hell happened?

Has anyone seen John Frusciante the guitarist for The Red Hot Chili Peppers? He’s 42, a bit older than me but he looks like 18, and I don’t mean he looks stupid or sad, he just is – I don’t mind saying this as an appreciative red blooded male but google some images of him – beautiful, dreamy, sexy and cool, he has incredible ability for the guitar and a mind-boggling foot pedal board for crafting all kinds of beautiful, dreamy, sexy and cool kaleidoscopic soundscapes. He is part of an unbelievably magnetic band where the average age of its members is 50, none of whom seem to have lost any passion for the art of making music nor do they seem tired and cynical with each other, rather they are as right in the same room as low cut sofas and chairs nestled on a Persian rug.

So this is what happens when a successful band stays together for long enough – eventually when those that have to die have died, when the re-habs have been successful, when the solo projects have failed and the realisation that these egos don’t work outside of the band, a conformity or retiring of some destructive force is replaced with what I can only call a form of love. A path of communication has been walked, talked, fought over, widened, re-tarmacked, painted, burned and crashed upon so many times that words are no longer even needed, just a moment of eye contact, or a thumbing of an idea will charge the air with possibility, discussion and outcome.

One senses the fur flies at times but long gone are the days when this is ever taken particularly seriously, much like nuns they are married to God come what may, they are subservient to their combined power as a group and give thanks every day for the privilege.

Genuinely it’s hard to spend time in such company like having to sit in the home of those who have found a special person to complete them, watching how the complimentary element makes them grow and blossom from achievement to glorious achievement, liberated from doubt, immune to yearning and not feel as though you’re wasting possibly the one life you have to experience.

That’s probably why I pretended that fame and great success were not what it was cracked up to be, that all famous people were bored millionaires who secretly want to kill themselves at all times, meanwhile I enjoy just ordinary pleasures, my family, some close friends, my partner and walking the dog – cashmere jumpers and closing the doors and curtains against the cold.

Odd then that I’m living miles from anyone with the power to help me feel that, mostly existing in a sustained meditation, counting the clock down distracted by possibly meaningless hobbies and stuttering attempts to change my fortunes, meanwhile concerns of how to pay for a workless future loom horribly close as I enter what could be the last 20 years of good health. It’s occurred to me that this person I was expecting to become has never actually transpired - instead the ghosts of my family genes are jangling their chains and I recall grumpy Grandpa’s resigned to slumping in cheap furniture under the threat of a ceiling cave in should the construction of scaffold pole and beer mat ever fail. Rather than ever transform into butterflies our family history is a tale of underachievement, bad decision making and death dealing disease. The fact is that far from finding the right medium for my peculiar, complex talents, I’m perhaps a tad un-motivated and maybe even just outright working class dumb. The worst part in many ways is to be deluded enough to think otherwise for if my future was only ever to be a follower and admirer of far greater talents and charisma, I could at least be enjoying that rather than finding fault with it all.

So most of the time, unlike in my youth I honestly rarely think about being famous, it’s inconvenient to my obscurity even though I know it is no guarantee of happiness whatsoever and that very few people with great talent are well represented in other areas, that healthy relationships are mostly unavailable to people who might move in a crowd of ambitious, attention seeking, money orientated personalities.

Crazy fame the kind that One Direction maybe experiencing I honestly would never wish for, for me it would be horribly claustrophobic and stressful, how anyone can deal with that level of scrutiny, to be on a train destined to leave a trail of dead, mentality ill, drug addicted or simply struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome where rather than the bombs or bullets of a war, instead you are left with a hunger for the drug of constant excitement – where the reality of most of the demobbed, bloated, older pop stars is to have to live with hideous ordinariness, quite possibly with the promise of a life of luxury fading with every failing attempt to  write a decent solo album or getting a lame reality show off the ground.

No thanks, this is a kind of manufactured fame that is wholly reliant on the goodwill of twitter, the harnessing of sympathetic tabloids and of course without fail these will first make you and then flame you in a relentless soul-destroying manner that even a child killer would frown on.

But just think for a moment if you had managed to milk only the very best out of the fame experience, that somehow you had managed to edit out the less pleasant, built a loyal fan base from a steady flow of quality well received material be it paintings, music, movies or  humorous tales of a past destructive living. Imagine if along the way you had made good friends of the Dalia Lama, Beyonce and Jay Z are in the contacts of your iPhone, you’ve visited the homes of a Rolling Stone and went to Paul McCartney’s wedding, were Godparents to Hunter S Thompson’s secret children, found yourself playing at Wembley in an England strip for charity in front of 80,000 appreciative fans, Richard Branson has offered you his island if ever you wanted to get away from things for a bit.

Sometimes the perks of fame are hard to argue with and while the experience of love and children and adventures are achievable and available outside of fame, no other career can quite finance it in the same way, provide the healthcare, the education, the bizarre opportunities and sheer variety. I’m not suggesting that the creative glitterati are forever chartering private planes or floating around the med in a luxurious yacht but most of them probably have at some time and likely regularly enjoy high quality housing with space, cleaners and cooks, a plethora of flights of fancy from motorbikes to fantasy Jacuzzis set back from their own private lake.

If combined with stimulating conversation with other artists, philosophers, political elite and leading specialists in every type of field, life should never get boring. If you need relationship therapy to keep your marriage alive, no need to trawl the yellow pages looking for any ordinary shrink, get  John Gray of Men are From Mars Women are From Venus fame to visit the house once a fortnight – his fee won’t phase you but probably he’ll do it for free if you let his daughter sit in on your next recording session. Got a book idea while you’re caught between projects? No problem, even with a modicum of ability to string words together with the help of your good publisher friend and booker prize winning ghost writer you can experience the life as authentically as if you were Hemingway himself.

Your day job as a sexy front man for a rock band is demanding but actually is ideal for when you need to get away from the family: a much needed ego boost, or an opportunity for a crafty life affirming blowjob when the wife and children are not around, hangout with some of the worlds finest musicians and either create masterpieces in the most spectacular of studio spaces or play them to loving audiences. You travel the world, you eat things people didn’t even know existed, you are immune to large swathes of the law, and even if you do get caught you can avoid jail if you hire OJ Simpsons law team.

Ultimately where does all this extraordinary living lead you if you are savvy enough to get the balance right?

Well it would seem that those who are prepared to live it in permanent moment to moment awareness, who soak up every drop of insight and experience are destined to die fulfilled and spiritually content knowing they could not have lived life anymore to the full than they did.

They leave the planet revered as wise old Shamen not looking a day over 42 and physically, were it not for them actually being dead, still in the kind of nick most of us would struggle to achieve in our 20s.

Meanwhile your final wish that you’re ashes are shot out of a cannon while the cast of the great and the good sing one of your most poignant tear jerking ballads, is a send off I’ll likely never have.