... and why we need to have a beer and a little chat about things is the topic of today's column over at the Daily Mirror which you can read here.
Cheers!
Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Save us.
REMEMBER this?
No, not the airbrushing. The promise - that the greatest social benefit and political achievement of any British government for centuries would, at all costs, be protected.
We had no money, the banks had taken the lot, things were going to be tough, belts needed to be tightened, cloth would be cut to suit and so on. A lot of gruel would be dished up for the masses in times of austerity, but the beloved, vital, life-saving and unbiased National Health Service would be sacrosanct.
The Government said it would "stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care", and did this by way of launching a top-down reorganisation of the NHS abolishing health authorities, primary care trusts and the NHS executive and making GPs, whether they like it or not, engage in 'increased competition' and buy in services from private providers.
A document detailing the ways in which patients might suffer was produced, withheld, debated, vetoed and only finally published after being heavily edited as to what, exactly, the suffering might involve.
In September the King's Fund revealed 'trolley waits' as they are known are 'an emerging upward trend' since the time of the 2010 General Election.
Last month the Care Quality Commission revealed a third of patients it polled had spent more than four hours waiting to be treated in Accident & Emergency - the worst figure since 2004.
Yesterday the medical director of the NHS admitted sight-saving cataract operations were being rationed across half the country.
In the House of Commons less than 24 hours ago, health minister Dan Poulter - himself a part-time NHS doctor - was forced to apologise to his Labour oppo after he accused him of lies.
Six thousand nurses have 'disappeared'. Waiting times for treatment have risen. There are 18,000 fewer administrative staff most of whom are not the reviled 'NHS managers' but consist of low-paid receptionists, record-keepers, porters and clerks. Seventeen hospitals are said to have unsafe staff levels and, entirely coincidentally, the whole organisation has been told to save £20billion by 2015.
My local hospital is bankrupt, and another is facing the closure of good A&E and maternity units to pay the debt of its neighbour.
So what are they doing about it? Today in the House of Commons the Prime Minister was told the NHS was "being taken back to the 1980s". He responded: "The NHS is improving every day under this government."
At the same time the Health Secretary, a startled meerkat who goes by the name of Jeremy Hunt, has leaked details of a speech in which he says the NHS should be entirely paperless by 2018 to save £4.4billion.
So that's every doctor and nurse filling in forms on an iPad rather than a bit of paper, in order to save money.
That's every medical record of 66million people stored on a giant database which someone would have to invent, in order to save money.
That's repeating, pretty much, the last failed attempt to digitise the NHS which took 10 years, cost £11.4bn, and ended up being scrapped because it didn't work and was a waste of cash, in order to save money.
It doesn't matter what your politics are, or who you blame for the country's economic woes - we will all need the NHS at some point. Even the fabulously wealthy need it when they have car accidents or their helicopters crash, when their children crack their heads open or the nanny breaks a finger.
Most of us need it now and again, when we're ill, or scared, or just a little bit worried. We need it when our parents need looking after, we need it to help us have our children, patch up our mistakes, and to hold our hands when the whole world comes tumbling down around us.
My local, broken, indebted hospital has for me, in the past four years, dealt with two cancer scares, a skiing injury and an emergency admission.
The National Health Service is not a luxury. It is not an indulgent bit of bubble bath, or organic beef burgers you spend more on in order to be sure they don't contain horse. It's like your backbone - a damn useful thing you'd be pretty stuck without.
Backbones occasionally need surgery, but of a very delicate and careful kind because the slightest slip paralyses the patient for life. One moment of thoughtlessness and suddenly someone perfectly healthy is looking at sixty years of colostomy bags and widened doorways.
Backbones are not something you tinker with. You especially don't tinker with them if you're an idiot, or even worse a large group of idiots.
It's true of course that belts can be tightened a lot more if there is no backbone at all. But what you are left with is a strange, floppy thing which inevitably someone is going to suggest would be better off put out of its misery. And it's not as though we have too much good health and are using hospitals for frivolous things we can do without - cataracts might not kill, but losing your sight can.
Which is a strange place to end up from having promised to protect the NHS at all costs only two years ago, and from people who probably, in all honesty, thought they were doing something helpful and had no intention of breaking the thing they were twiddling with.
But twiddle they have. And break it, one day, they will, for the simple reason that the people concerned look upon the NHS as something which needs to be fixed rather than the thing which can fix them.
They think 'saving' is the same as 'cutting', and it's not.
No, not the airbrushing. The promise - that the greatest social benefit and political achievement of any British government for centuries would, at all costs, be protected.
We had no money, the banks had taken the lot, things were going to be tough, belts needed to be tightened, cloth would be cut to suit and so on. A lot of gruel would be dished up for the masses in times of austerity, but the beloved, vital, life-saving and unbiased National Health Service would be sacrosanct.
The Government said it would "stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care", and did this by way of launching a top-down reorganisation of the NHS abolishing health authorities, primary care trusts and the NHS executive and making GPs, whether they like it or not, engage in 'increased competition' and buy in services from private providers.
A document detailing the ways in which patients might suffer was produced, withheld, debated, vetoed and only finally published after being heavily edited as to what, exactly, the suffering might involve.
In September the King's Fund revealed 'trolley waits' as they are known are 'an emerging upward trend' since the time of the 2010 General Election.
Last month the Care Quality Commission revealed a third of patients it polled had spent more than four hours waiting to be treated in Accident & Emergency - the worst figure since 2004.
Yesterday the medical director of the NHS admitted sight-saving cataract operations were being rationed across half the country.
In the House of Commons less than 24 hours ago, health minister Dan Poulter - himself a part-time NHS doctor - was forced to apologise to his Labour oppo after he accused him of lies.
Six thousand nurses have 'disappeared'. Waiting times for treatment have risen. There are 18,000 fewer administrative staff most of whom are not the reviled 'NHS managers' but consist of low-paid receptionists, record-keepers, porters and clerks. Seventeen hospitals are said to have unsafe staff levels and, entirely coincidentally, the whole organisation has been told to save £20billion by 2015.
My local hospital is bankrupt, and another is facing the closure of good A&E and maternity units to pay the debt of its neighbour.
So what are they doing about it? Today in the House of Commons the Prime Minister was told the NHS was "being taken back to the 1980s". He responded: "The NHS is improving every day under this government."
At the same time the Health Secretary, a startled meerkat who goes by the name of Jeremy Hunt, has leaked details of a speech in which he says the NHS should be entirely paperless by 2018 to save £4.4billion.
So that's every doctor and nurse filling in forms on an iPad rather than a bit of paper, in order to save money.
That's every medical record of 66million people stored on a giant database which someone would have to invent, in order to save money.
That's repeating, pretty much, the last failed attempt to digitise the NHS which took 10 years, cost £11.4bn, and ended up being scrapped because it didn't work and was a waste of cash, in order to save money.
It doesn't matter what your politics are, or who you blame for the country's economic woes - we will all need the NHS at some point. Even the fabulously wealthy need it when they have car accidents or their helicopters crash, when their children crack their heads open or the nanny breaks a finger.
Most of us need it now and again, when we're ill, or scared, or just a little bit worried. We need it when our parents need looking after, we need it to help us have our children, patch up our mistakes, and to hold our hands when the whole world comes tumbling down around us.
My local, broken, indebted hospital has for me, in the past four years, dealt with two cancer scares, a skiing injury and an emergency admission.
The National Health Service is not a luxury. It is not an indulgent bit of bubble bath, or organic beef burgers you spend more on in order to be sure they don't contain horse. It's like your backbone - a damn useful thing you'd be pretty stuck without.
Backbones occasionally need surgery, but of a very delicate and careful kind because the slightest slip paralyses the patient for life. One moment of thoughtlessness and suddenly someone perfectly healthy is looking at sixty years of colostomy bags and widened doorways.
Backbones are not something you tinker with. You especially don't tinker with them if you're an idiot, or even worse a large group of idiots.
It's true of course that belts can be tightened a lot more if there is no backbone at all. But what you are left with is a strange, floppy thing which inevitably someone is going to suggest would be better off put out of its misery. And it's not as though we have too much good health and are using hospitals for frivolous things we can do without - cataracts might not kill, but losing your sight can.
Which is a strange place to end up from having promised to protect the NHS at all costs only two years ago, and from people who probably, in all honesty, thought they were doing something helpful and had no intention of breaking the thing they were twiddling with.
But twiddle they have. And break it, one day, they will, for the simple reason that the people concerned look upon the NHS as something which needs to be fixed rather than the thing which can fix them.
They think 'saving' is the same as 'cutting', and it's not.
You promised.
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Reform (vb.): Change in order to improve.
IN a few weeks' time there is going to be an election.
You won't have heard about it, which is strange because it is an election to find someone who will argue, amend, or defend legislation which will directly affect your life.
If you're over 18, you have a vote about who to send to Westminster to make your laws. This is a democracy, right?
The vote is for a seat in the House of Lords, something which probably sounds like a great idea. A vote is always a good thing, and if we're electing people to a Parliamentary chamber where all its members used to inherit their seat along with a peerage well, that's fabulous, isn't it?
Not if you look at the small print, it's not.
Because this is a kind of election invented very recently - 1999, in fact - and was called a 'reform'. Reform is a word used to describe a thing you are changing slightly for the worse while making it sound like it's better; it very rarely indicates improvement.
The reform in question is that there is a vote, but not for you.
The House of Lords used to be the most powerful part of Parliament, with the plebeian House of Commons merely being there to offer advice on laws. With time and Civil War the Commons grew stronger and the Lords weaker, and these days laws are set by MPs in the 'lower house' with them being amended or argued over by peers in the 'upper house'.
It is, in theory, a reasonable way of ensuring the government of the day doesn't always get its way. But the Lords remains a place of privilege and entitlement which naturally leans on the conservative side.
So in 1999, with a series of Labour bills thrown back at him, Tony Blair announced a bill to reform the House of Lords. People born to a title were not due a say in legislation, he said, and the upper house should be elected.
Its first clause states: "No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage."
You can imagine how that went down with the 75th Baron of Lower Diddling, confronted with the prospect of spending his life with the baroness of Lower Diddling rather than snoozing gently on a leather bench and enjoying subsidised claret.
So the Lords threatened to throw back every bill Blair sent their way, so to buy them off he allowed 90-odd hereditary peers to remain, along with 25 Lords Spiritual made up of church bishops and a remaining 700 or so being those given a life peerage.
In theory, this meant most of the people in the upper house were experts after a long career in a chosen field and after much hard work in public life they would be elevated to the Lords where their wisdom could benefit the whole nation.
In practice, we got John Prescott back. We also have the bloke who wrote Downton Abbey and a chap who heard Jimmy Savile rumours when he ran the BBC but didn't do much about them.
So what's this vote for? Well, when a hereditary peer shuffles off to the great big comfy chair in the sky there is a by-election for his place on the red benches.
Who can stand for election? Other hereditary peers - in particular, those already thrown out by Blair's 1999 act.
Who can vote for them? You'll like this - it's other hereditary peers.
So when a person born to a title dies, his place gets taken by a person born to a title who is chosen by other people born to a title. This somehow seems worse, and certainly more expensive, than just letting them sit there without any type of selection beyond that of Mother Nature in the first place.
And it's not just a futile and nationally embarrassing waste of time. In fact, this next vote is working up to be as shocking an example of undemocratic chicanery as you might normally expect from Robert Mugabe, Joe Stalin, or even that old tyrant Tony Blair himself.
Because among the 27 people standing for an election you have no say in is a chap called Viscount Hailsham. It might mean more if I tell you he was known as Douglas Hogg while agriculture minister under John Major and as the disgusting little oinker who wanted us to pay for his moat to be cleared in the 2009 expenses scandal.
At the time he was a backbencher, moonlighting profitably in his second job as a well-paid barrister, but who nevertheless felt it necessary to ask the taxpayer to pay £18,000 for his gardener, £1,000 to mow his lawn, £671 for a mole catcher, £40 to tune his piano, £200 to maintain his Aga and a whopping £2,115 to have the moat around his medieval manor house cleared.
He insisted all was reasonable, of course, but he managed to avoid finding out if the voters felt the same by standing down at the last general election, thereby removing his snout before he could be punched in it by the proles.
Two years on, he reapproaches the trough from another direction and asks his fellow poshos to let him into the Lords, where he can expect a daily allowance of up to £300 plus travel, subsistence, subsidised food and drink, travel expenses for his wife and the occasional paid-for, foreign junket.
And who decides whether he gets the gig? A few dozen other Tory peers, and probably the Tory Prime Minister will be listened to if he quietly asks them to back or drop a candidate. Which makes the whole thing a bit of a farce not much different to the PM just appointing a chum in the first place.
So the 'reforms' we've got involve the rich, white man in charge telling rich, white men who to vote for among a narrow field of rich, white men not one of whom, were he to seek the approval of the people whose laws he will be making, would get many votes.
There was an attempt to reform the Lords last year, but it failed for the simple reason that the people making the decision were MPs and most of them are unlikely to vote for the end of a MPs' retirement home where they hoped to coast to a halt on £300 a day and two-hour lunches.
Plus, the plans were full of holes. Nick Clegg wanted the peers to serve 15-year terms and who in their right mind agrees to do any job for that long? He was also prepared to let a fifth of the Lords be appointed by politicians, which still means the government of the day could sway crucial votes with their placemen.
Unfortunately since then he and David Cameron appointed another 80 life peers - their personal picks of people guaranteed to do as they're told - which means the Lords now has 900 members and is second in size only to the upper chamber of the Chinese parliament.
Most of them do not even bother to turn up to work most days. Lord Coe's spoken only three times since 2009.
There are two ways to reform the House of Lords and ensure oinking viscounts, ex-ministers and celebrities don't get to pollute the national pond of public life long after they last added anything useful to it.
The first is to have the upper house entirely elected, in the middle of a government term so that opposition is at its greatest, and to have those candidates chosen entirely outside the party political system. Every single Lord and Lady would be an independent, voted in by people who thought they'd be good at scrutinising the government rather than toeing anyone's line.
I'd quite happily pay £300 a day for that, plus travel and junkets. Some people reckon the costs would rise, but then again so might the usefulness.
The second is six tons of gunpowder in the basement.
You won't have heard about it, which is strange because it is an election to find someone who will argue, amend, or defend legislation which will directly affect your life.
If you're over 18, you have a vote about who to send to Westminster to make your laws. This is a democracy, right?
The vote is for a seat in the House of Lords, something which probably sounds like a great idea. A vote is always a good thing, and if we're electing people to a Parliamentary chamber where all its members used to inherit their seat along with a peerage well, that's fabulous, isn't it?
Not if you look at the small print, it's not.
Because this is a kind of election invented very recently - 1999, in fact - and was called a 'reform'. Reform is a word used to describe a thing you are changing slightly for the worse while making it sound like it's better; it very rarely indicates improvement.
The reform in question is that there is a vote, but not for you.
The House of Lords used to be the most powerful part of Parliament, with the plebeian House of Commons merely being there to offer advice on laws. With time and Civil War the Commons grew stronger and the Lords weaker, and these days laws are set by MPs in the 'lower house' with them being amended or argued over by peers in the 'upper house'.
It is, in theory, a reasonable way of ensuring the government of the day doesn't always get its way. But the Lords remains a place of privilege and entitlement which naturally leans on the conservative side.
So in 1999, with a series of Labour bills thrown back at him, Tony Blair announced a bill to reform the House of Lords. People born to a title were not due a say in legislation, he said, and the upper house should be elected.
Its first clause states: "No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage."
You can imagine how that went down with the 75th Baron of Lower Diddling, confronted with the prospect of spending his life with the baroness of Lower Diddling rather than snoozing gently on a leather bench and enjoying subsidised claret.
So the Lords threatened to throw back every bill Blair sent their way, so to buy them off he allowed 90-odd hereditary peers to remain, along with 25 Lords Spiritual made up of church bishops and a remaining 700 or so being those given a life peerage.
In theory, this meant most of the people in the upper house were experts after a long career in a chosen field and after much hard work in public life they would be elevated to the Lords where their wisdom could benefit the whole nation.
In practice, we got John Prescott back. We also have the bloke who wrote Downton Abbey and a chap who heard Jimmy Savile rumours when he ran the BBC but didn't do much about them.
So what's this vote for? Well, when a hereditary peer shuffles off to the great big comfy chair in the sky there is a by-election for his place on the red benches.
Who can stand for election? Other hereditary peers - in particular, those already thrown out by Blair's 1999 act.
Who can vote for them? You'll like this - it's other hereditary peers.
So when a person born to a title dies, his place gets taken by a person born to a title who is chosen by other people born to a title. This somehow seems worse, and certainly more expensive, than just letting them sit there without any type of selection beyond that of Mother Nature in the first place.
And it's not just a futile and nationally embarrassing waste of time. In fact, this next vote is working up to be as shocking an example of undemocratic chicanery as you might normally expect from Robert Mugabe, Joe Stalin, or even that old tyrant Tony Blair himself.
Because among the 27 people standing for an election you have no say in is a chap called Viscount Hailsham. It might mean more if I tell you he was known as Douglas Hogg while agriculture minister under John Major and as the disgusting little oinker who wanted us to pay for his moat to be cleared in the 2009 expenses scandal.
At the time he was a backbencher, moonlighting profitably in his second job as a well-paid barrister, but who nevertheless felt it necessary to ask the taxpayer to pay £18,000 for his gardener, £1,000 to mow his lawn, £671 for a mole catcher, £40 to tune his piano, £200 to maintain his Aga and a whopping £2,115 to have the moat around his medieval manor house cleared.
He insisted all was reasonable, of course, but he managed to avoid finding out if the voters felt the same by standing down at the last general election, thereby removing his snout before he could be punched in it by the proles.
Two years on, he reapproaches the trough from another direction and asks his fellow poshos to let him into the Lords, where he can expect a daily allowance of up to £300 plus travel, subsistence, subsidised food and drink, travel expenses for his wife and the occasional paid-for, foreign junket.
And who decides whether he gets the gig? A few dozen other Tory peers, and probably the Tory Prime Minister will be listened to if he quietly asks them to back or drop a candidate. Which makes the whole thing a bit of a farce not much different to the PM just appointing a chum in the first place.
So the 'reforms' we've got involve the rich, white man in charge telling rich, white men who to vote for among a narrow field of rich, white men not one of whom, were he to seek the approval of the people whose laws he will be making, would get many votes.
There was an attempt to reform the Lords last year, but it failed for the simple reason that the people making the decision were MPs and most of them are unlikely to vote for the end of a MPs' retirement home where they hoped to coast to a halt on £300 a day and two-hour lunches.
Plus, the plans were full of holes. Nick Clegg wanted the peers to serve 15-year terms and who in their right mind agrees to do any job for that long? He was also prepared to let a fifth of the Lords be appointed by politicians, which still means the government of the day could sway crucial votes with their placemen.
Unfortunately since then he and David Cameron appointed another 80 life peers - their personal picks of people guaranteed to do as they're told - which means the Lords now has 900 members and is second in size only to the upper chamber of the Chinese parliament.
Most of them do not even bother to turn up to work most days. Lord Coe's spoken only three times since 2009.
There are two ways to reform the House of Lords and ensure oinking viscounts, ex-ministers and celebrities don't get to pollute the national pond of public life long after they last added anything useful to it.
The first is to have the upper house entirely elected, in the middle of a government term so that opposition is at its greatest, and to have those candidates chosen entirely outside the party political system. Every single Lord and Lady would be an independent, voted in by people who thought they'd be good at scrutinising the government rather than toeing anyone's line.
I'd quite happily pay £300 a day for that, plus travel and junkets. Some people reckon the costs would rise, but then again so might the usefulness.
The second is six tons of gunpowder in the basement.
Let's ask the hogs which they'd prefer.
Friday, 11 January 2013
There's a second...
... column from me today for the Daily Mirror on what the Jimmy Savile reports really ought to say.
You can read it here.
You can read it here.
The most bloated...
... scrounging, greedy, shirking bit of the public sector is detailed in full for the Daily Mirror today here.
Have a nice weekend. If you want me, I shall be on the barricades.
Have a nice weekend. If you want me, I shall be on the barricades.
Thursday, 10 January 2013
Change the blame.
IT is a rule of modern human existence that if there is something you don't like, you must blame someone for it.
There is no thought that the thing you don't like might be a source of joy to others, or that you might be in the wrong. Nor do people stop to think that if they don't like something they ought to do something to change it.
No, it's just pointing the finger, usually while sitting down.
Hence racing presenter John McCririck blames ageism for his contract not being renewed by Channel 4, which he intends to sue for £3m. It's why we have Silvio Berlusconi blaming "feminists and communists" for the fact he has to pay his ex-wife alimony, why freak weather is being blamed in Australia for bush fires and in Britain for it being a bit chilly.
The French are blaming us for a lack of scallops, Tories and Labour are blaming each other for the economic crisis, everyone's blaming Nick Clegg for something and for some reason the only person to escape is Michael McIntyre, who's made £21m out of being bland and is therefore somehow blamed by edgy comedians for being too blameless.
It surely can't be long until someone blames Andrew Marr's stroke on his failed super-injunction, interrogating politicians about their medical history, or the ears.
Well, we've had quite enough of that. It's a fruitless, miserable way to go on for the simple reason that it doesn't make the least bit of difference. Finger pointing gets dismissed a politics, or scare-mongering, or stupidity, and no-one bothers to look at the real reason these things happen and then figure out how to avoid or get used to it next time.
So, John McCririck blames ageism for losing his job. Seeing as it's television and a lot of it depends on being pleasant, the chances are he's lost it because he's an unapologetic pillock with the habits of a farmyard animal and probably the body odour to suit. He refers to his wife as The Booby and the only thing of note he seems to have done is irritate Edwina Currie.
In a showbiz world where image is everything, this fat bemoobed misogynist could only ever lose out to Olympic national treasure Clare Balding. If he wants to blame someone for the end of his career, he should start with whichever idiot thought it was a good idea to show us the real McCririck on Celebrity Big Brother.
There are many things Silvio Berlusconi can blame other people for, not least his bandana advisor, but if he's wondering who's at fault for having to fork out £29m a year to his ex-wife he needs to have a long talk with his crotch.
Hopefully his man junk will have enough residual sense to point out that, as a man worth £5bn whose wife of 11 years is mother to three of his children, he should count himself lucky not to have lost half of everything.
Seeing as many people in his life apparently need paying to endure his company he probably ought to try psychotherapy, and steer clear of the Blairs.
Now to Australia. For the first time weather maps have needed new colours to show temperatures of more than 50 degrees, which have contributed to the bush fires being so widespread and vicious this year.
But you know what? There'd be fires without the freak weather, because this is AUSTRALIA. Bush fires are a natural phenomenon to which its wildlife has not only adapted but now finds vital, and the only shocking bit about it is that humans are surprised by them every year. If terrifying fires jumping between tree tops and rampaging across miles of countryside are not your thing, move.
As for worry about Snowmageddon bringing Britain to its knees - it's JANUARY. It's supposed to be cold. I know we all like discussing the weather because it's much more interesting and do-able than emotions, but in all honesty it will be worth mentioning only when Hogmanay is as hot as hell, and not before.
Next time somebody says "Well, I blame..." or "it's all because of..." listen with both ears rather than just one, and you'll probably notice they're pointing the finger at something which they are incapable of changing. The weather, politics, the bleeding obvious.
They do it because not changing anything thus becomes a reasonable response to a problem, exonerating all of us from having to get off the arses we're sat on while we apportion blame like slices of cake.
Imagine what we could apportion, and achieve, if we blamed the things we could do something about. Why, all humans would live in places protected from flood and fire, the economy might actually get fixed by someone, John McCririck would go away and Nick Clegg's onesie would be burned in a wicker man.
Humanity might just become a slightly more productive and less idiotic species as well.
There is no thought that the thing you don't like might be a source of joy to others, or that you might be in the wrong. Nor do people stop to think that if they don't like something they ought to do something to change it.
No, it's just pointing the finger, usually while sitting down.
Hence racing presenter John McCririck blames ageism for his contract not being renewed by Channel 4, which he intends to sue for £3m. It's why we have Silvio Berlusconi blaming "feminists and communists" for the fact he has to pay his ex-wife alimony, why freak weather is being blamed in Australia for bush fires and in Britain for it being a bit chilly.
The French are blaming us for a lack of scallops, Tories and Labour are blaming each other for the economic crisis, everyone's blaming Nick Clegg for something and for some reason the only person to escape is Michael McIntyre, who's made £21m out of being bland and is therefore somehow blamed by edgy comedians for being too blameless.
It surely can't be long until someone blames Andrew Marr's stroke on his failed super-injunction, interrogating politicians about their medical history, or the ears.
Well, we've had quite enough of that. It's a fruitless, miserable way to go on for the simple reason that it doesn't make the least bit of difference. Finger pointing gets dismissed a politics, or scare-mongering, or stupidity, and no-one bothers to look at the real reason these things happen and then figure out how to avoid or get used to it next time.
So, John McCririck blames ageism for losing his job. Seeing as it's television and a lot of it depends on being pleasant, the chances are he's lost it because he's an unapologetic pillock with the habits of a farmyard animal and probably the body odour to suit. He refers to his wife as The Booby and the only thing of note he seems to have done is irritate Edwina Currie.
In a showbiz world where image is everything, this fat bemoobed misogynist could only ever lose out to Olympic national treasure Clare Balding. If he wants to blame someone for the end of his career, he should start with whichever idiot thought it was a good idea to show us the real McCririck on Celebrity Big Brother.
There are many things Silvio Berlusconi can blame other people for, not least his bandana advisor, but if he's wondering who's at fault for having to fork out £29m a year to his ex-wife he needs to have a long talk with his crotch.
Hopefully his man junk will have enough residual sense to point out that, as a man worth £5bn whose wife of 11 years is mother to three of his children, he should count himself lucky not to have lost half of everything.
Seeing as many people in his life apparently need paying to endure his company he probably ought to try psychotherapy, and steer clear of the Blairs.
Now to Australia. For the first time weather maps have needed new colours to show temperatures of more than 50 degrees, which have contributed to the bush fires being so widespread and vicious this year.
But you know what? There'd be fires without the freak weather, because this is AUSTRALIA. Bush fires are a natural phenomenon to which its wildlife has not only adapted but now finds vital, and the only shocking bit about it is that humans are surprised by them every year. If terrifying fires jumping between tree tops and rampaging across miles of countryside are not your thing, move.
As for worry about Snowmageddon bringing Britain to its knees - it's JANUARY. It's supposed to be cold. I know we all like discussing the weather because it's much more interesting and do-able than emotions, but in all honesty it will be worth mentioning only when Hogmanay is as hot as hell, and not before.
Next time somebody says "Well, I blame..." or "it's all because of..." listen with both ears rather than just one, and you'll probably notice they're pointing the finger at something which they are incapable of changing. The weather, politics, the bleeding obvious.
They do it because not changing anything thus becomes a reasonable response to a problem, exonerating all of us from having to get off the arses we're sat on while we apportion blame like slices of cake.
Imagine what we could apportion, and achieve, if we blamed the things we could do something about. Why, all humans would live in places protected from flood and fire, the economy might actually get fixed by someone, John McCririck would go away and Nick Clegg's onesie would be burned in a wicker man.
Humanity might just become a slightly more productive and less idiotic species as well.
But probably not.
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
We can steal time.
THERE are some things that shouldn't be allowed.
Adding dried fruit to chocolate bars, for example, should be punishable by death. If I wanted manky fruit I'd eat some, but I don't, and worse still you've removed chocolate in order to give me grapes that have been on the floor. To the wall with you quick-smart, and no moaning.
Then there's people who just stand there. Whether they've got a pram or bags of shopping or just nowhere they need to be, they stand in doorways, at the tops of stairs, on the left of escalators and lurk against corners in order to catch people unawares. They have no idea of the people they block, they're having a nice natter or a gaze off into the middle distance oblivious to the bottlenecks they are creating in the normal ebb and flow of life.
These people should firstly be regularly kettled in order to save the human race from the effects of the low-grade frustration and anger they cause, and secondly they should never be allowed to drive.
But even worse than these things is a crime against the soul, such as when you turn on the telly and see Iggy Pop selling car insurance.
The most dangerous, dodgy, dirty, mostly-naked man in the world, the most interesting drummer there has ever been, urging teenagers to spend their savings on insurance? You might as well just give up, change your name back to James Newell Osterberg Junior and admit the whole thing was a farce.
Semi-naked protopunks taking their trousers off while bawling out Lust for Life do not do insurance. The man who said "If I don't terrorise, I am not Pop" does not give an arse for third party, fire and theft.
The angry, insecure and bookish teenager inside me may never have been able to be like Iggy but my adolescence was more bearable because there was an Iggy, somewhere, doing Iggy things that were exciting and edgy and different.
Seeing him sell car insurance is like visiting your childhood home and seeing it's smaller than you remember. It's looking at the massive hill you used to scream down on your bike and realising it's a gentle slope. It's like suddenly being told you were adopted - it makes you wonder what, exactly, you can still hold on to.
The Sex Pistols? Sid's long gone and Johnny sells butter. The Beatles? Best ones have karked it and Macca's done nothing I want to listen to since 1973. The Stones? They want every last penny your possess, but at least they're not flogging stairlifts.
Yet.
It's our fault, of course. As teenagers we invest our hopes and dreams in the people who make the soundtrack of our lives, so that song at the school dance, that hit which keeps playing on the radio while you dither at second base, the star you read about in the music press, becomes part of your personal playlist.
The song might be rubbish, it might have three chord changes and the lyrics were dashed off on the back of an envelope because their A&R man said "you owe your drug dealer", the people behind it might be utterly horrible, but teens don't care about that.
It's about the music, and the moment, and when something years later happens to tarnish that memory we have to face the fact we're grown up now, and if sleeve notes weren't a thing of the past we'd need glasses to read them.
They say don't meet your heroes, but they should add that your heroes should have the grace not to come and find you later. Some things improve with age, like wine (and writers, ha!) but singers always fade, artists run out of ideas, and David Bowie, I'm afraid, has got boring.
Yesterday his birthday coincided with the release of his first single in a decade, an event so momentous it needed to be covered by the Today programme, the BBC 10 o'clock news, and virtually every other bulletin in the Western world.
This is the man who changed the face of pop. He almost invented celebrity, gave the PR rules a good kicking, he had his own cult and just because its members are now, well, older than they were they are no less fervent in their worship of him.
And the song was pants.
The voice is thin, these days. The lyrics are as daft as ever, but for an innovative musician whose every creation is treated with the reverence of tablets of stone carved by God his first song in ages should blast us away, and instead we got a self-indulgent 4mins 34secs of mournful wail about Berlin.
All he has innovated this time is boredom, disappointment, and the sad realisation that he was more interesting when he was off his bonce on coke and smack. The cult won't like anyone saying it, any more than Scientologists let us laugh about lizard people and Tom Cruise, but had that dirge been produced by anyone else it would be laughed out of town.
Still, let's not be down. It's just the first single of a new album and there might be something amazing on the rest of it. There might be a song about frogs, or butter, or car insurance...
And even if that's rubbish too, well, we've still got everything else. All the songs we grew up with, snogged to, argued over, treasured, or turned up louder every time dad yelled at us to turn it down.
When you listen to the music that mattered to you then, you can steal back time and return to your youth, when they were heroes rather than faded old men whose mortality makes you feel cheated out of something.
Heroes simply shouldn't be allowed to get old, or sell out, or produce music that no-one can be bothered to ban any more.
Few people ever point it out, but heroes are just for one day.
Adding dried fruit to chocolate bars, for example, should be punishable by death. If I wanted manky fruit I'd eat some, but I don't, and worse still you've removed chocolate in order to give me grapes that have been on the floor. To the wall with you quick-smart, and no moaning.
Then there's people who just stand there. Whether they've got a pram or bags of shopping or just nowhere they need to be, they stand in doorways, at the tops of stairs, on the left of escalators and lurk against corners in order to catch people unawares. They have no idea of the people they block, they're having a nice natter or a gaze off into the middle distance oblivious to the bottlenecks they are creating in the normal ebb and flow of life.
These people should firstly be regularly kettled in order to save the human race from the effects of the low-grade frustration and anger they cause, and secondly they should never be allowed to drive.
But even worse than these things is a crime against the soul, such as when you turn on the telly and see Iggy Pop selling car insurance.
The most dangerous, dodgy, dirty, mostly-naked man in the world, the most interesting drummer there has ever been, urging teenagers to spend their savings on insurance? You might as well just give up, change your name back to James Newell Osterberg Junior and admit the whole thing was a farce.
Semi-naked protopunks taking their trousers off while bawling out Lust for Life do not do insurance. The man who said "If I don't terrorise, I am not Pop" does not give an arse for third party, fire and theft.
The angry, insecure and bookish teenager inside me may never have been able to be like Iggy but my adolescence was more bearable because there was an Iggy, somewhere, doing Iggy things that were exciting and edgy and different.
Seeing him sell car insurance is like visiting your childhood home and seeing it's smaller than you remember. It's looking at the massive hill you used to scream down on your bike and realising it's a gentle slope. It's like suddenly being told you were adopted - it makes you wonder what, exactly, you can still hold on to.
The Sex Pistols? Sid's long gone and Johnny sells butter. The Beatles? Best ones have karked it and Macca's done nothing I want to listen to since 1973. The Stones? They want every last penny your possess, but at least they're not flogging stairlifts.
Yet.
It's our fault, of course. As teenagers we invest our hopes and dreams in the people who make the soundtrack of our lives, so that song at the school dance, that hit which keeps playing on the radio while you dither at second base, the star you read about in the music press, becomes part of your personal playlist.
The song might be rubbish, it might have three chord changes and the lyrics were dashed off on the back of an envelope because their A&R man said "you owe your drug dealer", the people behind it might be utterly horrible, but teens don't care about that.
It's about the music, and the moment, and when something years later happens to tarnish that memory we have to face the fact we're grown up now, and if sleeve notes weren't a thing of the past we'd need glasses to read them.
They say don't meet your heroes, but they should add that your heroes should have the grace not to come and find you later. Some things improve with age, like wine (and writers, ha!) but singers always fade, artists run out of ideas, and David Bowie, I'm afraid, has got boring.
Yesterday his birthday coincided with the release of his first single in a decade, an event so momentous it needed to be covered by the Today programme, the BBC 10 o'clock news, and virtually every other bulletin in the Western world.
This is the man who changed the face of pop. He almost invented celebrity, gave the PR rules a good kicking, he had his own cult and just because its members are now, well, older than they were they are no less fervent in their worship of him.
And the song was pants.
The voice is thin, these days. The lyrics are as daft as ever, but for an innovative musician whose every creation is treated with the reverence of tablets of stone carved by God his first song in ages should blast us away, and instead we got a self-indulgent 4mins 34secs of mournful wail about Berlin.
All he has innovated this time is boredom, disappointment, and the sad realisation that he was more interesting when he was off his bonce on coke and smack. The cult won't like anyone saying it, any more than Scientologists let us laugh about lizard people and Tom Cruise, but had that dirge been produced by anyone else it would be laughed out of town.
Still, let's not be down. It's just the first single of a new album and there might be something amazing on the rest of it. There might be a song about frogs, or butter, or car insurance...
And even if that's rubbish too, well, we've still got everything else. All the songs we grew up with, snogged to, argued over, treasured, or turned up louder every time dad yelled at us to turn it down.
When you listen to the music that mattered to you then, you can steal back time and return to your youth, when they were heroes rather than faded old men whose mortality makes you feel cheated out of something.
Heroes simply shouldn't be allowed to get old, or sell out, or produce music that no-one can be bothered to ban any more.
Few people ever point it out, but heroes are just for one day.
Car insurance lasts longer.
Tuesday, 8 January 2013
Jyoti Singh Pandey...
... and why India's record on rape is not so different to everywhere else in the world is the topic of today's column, which you can read on the Daily Mirror website here.
Think on.
Think on.
Thursday, 3 January 2013
Dear Argentina...
NOW look. You've been whining about this since 1767 and it's starting to get on my wick.
I've ignored you until now, because you're very silly and your greatest cheerleader is Sean Penn, a man who pretends to be things he is not and once hit his then-wife Madonna with a baseball bat, tied her up for nine hours and abused her.
If he is on your side, it's not a good side to be on.
But today you've written to Prime Minister Dishface demanding he enter negotiations to 'return' the islands we call the Falklands and you call Malvinas, 180 years after we cruelly stole them from you with our jackbooted naval officers of totalitarianism.
You were 'forcibly stripped' of these jewels in the South Atlantic and your people were 'expelled'.
Only, that's not quite what happened, is it Argentina? Someone obviously needs to remind you, and probably Mr Penn too, of the facts.
Allow me to start by saying there are probably things we can all agree on. War is bad, for example, and colonialism - aside from the roads, aqueducts, education, health reforms, economic development, culture, food, integration and innovation - tends to be a bad thing too.
We could probably avoid an argument over the fact that the Falkland Islands, in and of themselves, aren't exactly pretty. There are no hanging gardens, no waterfalls, no exotic wildlife. They're a windy bunch of rocks a long way from anywhere, although I grant they're nearer to you than they are to us.
Which begs the question about why, exactly, you never bothered to settle them.
When they were first discovered by a Dutchman in 1600 there was nothing there but seabirds. No people, no cultural heritage for anyone to trample over. Just a windy bunch of rocks.
Ninety years later a British sailor was blown off course and sailed through a bit of water he named Falkland Sound, and 74 years after that the French turned up to form a colony.
WAIT! I hear you cry. The French colonised the Falklands?
Why yes, and 18th century email being what it was the British turned up two years later and built a settlement on another one of the islands and claimed the whole lot for the Crown, unaware the Frenchies were already in residence.
The French sold out to the Spaniards a year after that, who put the colony - containing French people - under control of a governor in Buenos Aires.
Three years later the Spanish picked a fight with the Brits, kicked them out and after a peace treaty let us back in. In 1774 the Brits, overstretched by the Americans kicking off, withdrew and left a plaque behind asserting their claim. Thirty two years later the Spaniards departed too, leaving another plaque, and in 1811 the last settlers threw in the towel.
We were back to empty, windy rocks known only to whalers and sealing ships, and two memorial plaques.
In 1820 an American pirate called David Jewett took shelter there, and finding the place deserted promptly claimed the islands for a union of South American provinces which later became Argentina.
You lot didn't realise this for a year, but still didn't settle the islands. Instead a German who pretended to be French called Luis Vernet came along, asked the Argentines and the Brits politely if they minded, and founded a little colony of his own.
It took him a few goes, but eventually he established a settlement, you named him governor and gave him the right to kill all the seals. This quite hacked off the Brits, who wanted some seals for themselves, but Vernet placated us by asking for our military protection.
It all got a bit hairy in 1831, when Vernet found some American seal ships, arrested their crews and sparked an international incident. The Americans sent a warship, blew up the settlement, and hot-headedly sent the most senior settlers to the mainland for trial for piracy.
The Argentines sent a new governor to establish a penal settlement, but he was killed in a mutiny the day he arrived. The Brits, quite reasonably, decided the whole thing was a dog's breakfast.
And now we get to the bit you're unhappy about Argentina, the invasion and forced expulsion.
The Brits arrived two months after this mutiny, and wrote to the chap in charge of the small Argentine garrison. The letter said:
Now, there are many ways people can be oppressed, forced, compelled and abused - just ask Sean Penn - but a polite note is not one of them.
The Argentine in charge thought briefly about resisting, but he didn't have many soldiers and besides, most of them were British mercenaries who refused to fight. So on January 3, 1833 you left, Argentina, with wounded pride and your nose in the air.
You had never settled the islands. Never established a colony of your own. Never guarded it with a garrison of your own soldiers. They had never, ever, been yours.
And now to the matter of that expulsion. The log of an Argentine ship present at the time records the settlers were encouraged to stay, and those that left did so of their own free will and generally because they were fed up with living on some boring, windy rocks.
Eleven people left - four Argentines, three 'foreigners', one prisoner, a Brit and two Americans.
Twenty-two people remained - 12 Argentinians, four Uruguay Indians, two Brits, two Germans, a Frenchman and a Jamaican.
As the imposition of colonial power on an indigenous population goes, that takes some beating. And for the sake of clarity I should point out that a human melting pot like that makes the place about as British as you can be.
A few months later HMS Beagle, taking Charles Darwin to the Galapagos for a long think, popped in and found the settlement half-ruined and the residents lawless. There were several murders, some looting, and in 1834 the exasperated British sent Lieutenant Henry Smith to run the place.
The islands have been ours ever since, and is now home to almost 3,000 people descended from settlers who came from Britain, France, Scandinavia, Gibraltar, St Helena and Chile. At the same time, you went on to fight wars with most of South America and colonise provinces with indigenous populations by killing or pushing them out.
When your government was broke and facing strong opposition in the 1980s, you invaded them to divert attention of the voters with the cost of 907 lives, and it cannot be unrelated to your letter that in a few weeks you face being ejected by the International Monetary Fund for lying over your economic figures.
At around the same time, the people who now live on these boring, windy rocks in the middle of nowhere are having a referendum about who they would like to govern them. You will ignore this, because you believe they do not have a right to make up their own minds and have repeatedly refused to talk to the islanders about your claims.
So allow me to make a couple of things clear. Firstly, the history of these windy rocks is an utter mess but someone had to take charge, and you weren't up to the job. We did it pretty nicely, considering our record in other places.
Secondly, only jackbooted colonial scumbags refuse to listen to the democratic voice of the people who live somewhere, so you really ought to wind your hypocritical warmongering necks in.
And thirdly - well done with the wine, and the beef's pretty good, but if you want to negotiate let's start with you taking back your Total Wipeout, because as cultural imperialism goes it's pretty offensive, and you might want to think about handing Patagonia back to its people as well.
After that we are quite prepared to let you come and holiday on these windy rocks, where you will be invited to pitch a tent anywhere you like within the 13 square kilometres where you left 19,000 landmines last time you visited.
We know they're a long way away. We know there's not much to the rocks, and there might be oil and it might give someone a claim to Antarctica.
But we also know something you don't - which is that a well-run, law-abiding and happy bunch of rocks is the best bunch of rocks you can hope to have. You're no more up to that job now than you have ever been.
In case our position is still not clear, the above could be summed up as: No.
Yours sincerely,
Blighty
I've ignored you until now, because you're very silly and your greatest cheerleader is Sean Penn, a man who pretends to be things he is not and once hit his then-wife Madonna with a baseball bat, tied her up for nine hours and abused her.
If he is on your side, it's not a good side to be on.
But today you've written to Prime Minister Dishface demanding he enter negotiations to 'return' the islands we call the Falklands and you call Malvinas, 180 years after we cruelly stole them from you with our jackbooted naval officers of totalitarianism.
You were 'forcibly stripped' of these jewels in the South Atlantic and your people were 'expelled'.
Only, that's not quite what happened, is it Argentina? Someone obviously needs to remind you, and probably Mr Penn too, of the facts.
Allow me to start by saying there are probably things we can all agree on. War is bad, for example, and colonialism - aside from the roads, aqueducts, education, health reforms, economic development, culture, food, integration and innovation - tends to be a bad thing too.
We could probably avoid an argument over the fact that the Falkland Islands, in and of themselves, aren't exactly pretty. There are no hanging gardens, no waterfalls, no exotic wildlife. They're a windy bunch of rocks a long way from anywhere, although I grant they're nearer to you than they are to us.
Which begs the question about why, exactly, you never bothered to settle them.
 |
| De facto control over the Falkland Islands |
When they were first discovered by a Dutchman in 1600 there was nothing there but seabirds. No people, no cultural heritage for anyone to trample over. Just a windy bunch of rocks.
Ninety years later a British sailor was blown off course and sailed through a bit of water he named Falkland Sound, and 74 years after that the French turned up to form a colony.
WAIT! I hear you cry. The French colonised the Falklands?
Why yes, and 18th century email being what it was the British turned up two years later and built a settlement on another one of the islands and claimed the whole lot for the Crown, unaware the Frenchies were already in residence.
The French sold out to the Spaniards a year after that, who put the colony - containing French people - under control of a governor in Buenos Aires.
Three years later the Spanish picked a fight with the Brits, kicked them out and after a peace treaty let us back in. In 1774 the Brits, overstretched by the Americans kicking off, withdrew and left a plaque behind asserting their claim. Thirty two years later the Spaniards departed too, leaving another plaque, and in 1811 the last settlers threw in the towel.
We were back to empty, windy rocks known only to whalers and sealing ships, and two memorial plaques.
In 1820 an American pirate called David Jewett took shelter there, and finding the place deserted promptly claimed the islands for a union of South American provinces which later became Argentina.
You lot didn't realise this for a year, but still didn't settle the islands. Instead a German who pretended to be French called Luis Vernet came along, asked the Argentines and the Brits politely if they minded, and founded a little colony of his own.
It took him a few goes, but eventually he established a settlement, you named him governor and gave him the right to kill all the seals. This quite hacked off the Brits, who wanted some seals for themselves, but Vernet placated us by asking for our military protection.
It all got a bit hairy in 1831, when Vernet found some American seal ships, arrested their crews and sparked an international incident. The Americans sent a warship, blew up the settlement, and hot-headedly sent the most senior settlers to the mainland for trial for piracy.
The Argentines sent a new governor to establish a penal settlement, but he was killed in a mutiny the day he arrived. The Brits, quite reasonably, decided the whole thing was a dog's breakfast.
And now we get to the bit you're unhappy about Argentina, the invasion and forced expulsion.
The Brits arrived two months after this mutiny, and wrote to the chap in charge of the small Argentine garrison. The letter said:
"I have to direct you that I have received directions from His Excellency and Commander-in-Chief of His Britannic Majesty's ships and vessels of war, South America station, in the name of His Britannic Majesty, to exercise the rights of sovereignty over these Islands.
It is my intention to hoist to-morrow the national flag of Great Britain on shore when I request you will be pleased to haul down your flag on shore and withdraw your force, taking all stores belonging to your Government."
Now, there are many ways people can be oppressed, forced, compelled and abused - just ask Sean Penn - but a polite note is not one of them.
The Argentine in charge thought briefly about resisting, but he didn't have many soldiers and besides, most of them were British mercenaries who refused to fight. So on January 3, 1833 you left, Argentina, with wounded pride and your nose in the air.
You had never settled the islands. Never established a colony of your own. Never guarded it with a garrison of your own soldiers. They had never, ever, been yours.
And now to the matter of that expulsion. The log of an Argentine ship present at the time records the settlers were encouraged to stay, and those that left did so of their own free will and generally because they were fed up with living on some boring, windy rocks.
Eleven people left - four Argentines, three 'foreigners', one prisoner, a Brit and two Americans.
Twenty-two people remained - 12 Argentinians, four Uruguay Indians, two Brits, two Germans, a Frenchman and a Jamaican.
As the imposition of colonial power on an indigenous population goes, that takes some beating. And for the sake of clarity I should point out that a human melting pot like that makes the place about as British as you can be.
A few months later HMS Beagle, taking Charles Darwin to the Galapagos for a long think, popped in and found the settlement half-ruined and the residents lawless. There were several murders, some looting, and in 1834 the exasperated British sent Lieutenant Henry Smith to run the place.
The islands have been ours ever since, and is now home to almost 3,000 people descended from settlers who came from Britain, France, Scandinavia, Gibraltar, St Helena and Chile. At the same time, you went on to fight wars with most of South America and colonise provinces with indigenous populations by killing or pushing them out.
When your government was broke and facing strong opposition in the 1980s, you invaded them to divert attention of the voters with the cost of 907 lives, and it cannot be unrelated to your letter that in a few weeks you face being ejected by the International Monetary Fund for lying over your economic figures.
At around the same time, the people who now live on these boring, windy rocks in the middle of nowhere are having a referendum about who they would like to govern them. You will ignore this, because you believe they do not have a right to make up their own minds and have repeatedly refused to talk to the islanders about your claims.
So allow me to make a couple of things clear. Firstly, the history of these windy rocks is an utter mess but someone had to take charge, and you weren't up to the job. We did it pretty nicely, considering our record in other places.
Secondly, only jackbooted colonial scumbags refuse to listen to the democratic voice of the people who live somewhere, so you really ought to wind your hypocritical warmongering necks in.
And thirdly - well done with the wine, and the beef's pretty good, but if you want to negotiate let's start with you taking back your Total Wipeout, because as cultural imperialism goes it's pretty offensive, and you might want to think about handing Patagonia back to its people as well.
After that we are quite prepared to let you come and holiday on these windy rocks, where you will be invited to pitch a tent anywhere you like within the 13 square kilometres where you left 19,000 landmines last time you visited.
We know they're a long way away. We know there's not much to the rocks, and there might be oil and it might give someone a claim to Antarctica.
But we also know something you don't - which is that a well-run, law-abiding and happy bunch of rocks is the best bunch of rocks you can hope to have. You're no more up to that job now than you have ever been.
In case our position is still not clear, the above could be summed up as: No.
Yours sincerely,
Blighty
PS Can we interest you in Julian Assange?
Friday, 21 December 2012
You have a choice...
... between reading my verdict on the Leveson Inquiry for Press Gazette, or remembering the dark side of Christmas for the Daily Mirror.
Alternatively you can read both; it's not like you're busy, after all.
Have a good Christmas and I'll speak to you soon.
Alternatively you can read both; it's not like you're busy, after all.
Have a good Christmas and I'll speak to you soon.
Thursday, 20 December 2012
We're watching you.
I WAS on a mini-roundabout in Plymouth when my phone beeped.
The traffic was jammed so I looked at the text message, which said that Nasty Nick had left the Big Brother house.
Even though it was twelve years ago, even though it was utterly trivial, that news seemed so momentous at the time that I can still remember where I was, what I was doing, and how I pulled over to excitedly ring my friend and find out what she knew.
That was the first series of Big Brother, when those taking part had no idea anyone might be watching them and it felt like half the nation was fascinated by Nasty Nick's underhand voting tactics, Melanie's flirtations with Andrew and Tom, Darren's terror of the chickens, lesbian ex-nun Anna (A lesbian! On telly!) and scouser Craig doing it all to raise money for a cousin with Down's Syndrome.
For those who have forgotten, the events of that series were splashed on by the country's most popular newspapers almost every day. Even though no-one had seen such a thing before, it had phenomenal ratings and 10million people tuned in to the final.
This was the start of modern celebrity, and they didn't all like it. Andrew emigrated to Australia, where I walked into a wall when I spotted him in a Sydney street about a year later. Darren disappeared, Sada reportedly turned to waitressing, Melanie did some presenting and naked body-painter Nichola released a single and is, well, keeping busy (NSFW).
In the years that followed, the contestants were of such interest to the public they could guarantee newspaper sales spikes. When a girl famed for saying "I love blinking, I do", left the second series the bidding war for her first interview hit £200,000.
That's not done for fun - it was because the newspapers and magazines bidding expected to make more than that in extra sales and advertising. Agents and publicists pile in and drive it as high as they can, and editors weigh up the bid with what they get out of it.
Not any more. A while ago a friend told me how they answered the newsdesk phone on a national paper to find the latest Big Brother evictee on the other end, asking politely if they were interested in his story for £200.
"Sorry mate, you'd need to pay us," he was told. "Who are you again?"
Big Brother today is not something anyone is going to excitedly text me about, much less make me remember where I was when it landed. It doesn't provoke newspaper bidding wars, is seen mainly as a vehicle for the mentally-frail and fame-hungry, and draws less than a million viewers.
Earlier this week it was reported the latest series was Ofcom's most-complained about TV programme of the entire year. This stopped me in my tracks, because whatever it had done I hadn't noticed even though it had pushed Philip Schofield's use of Google into second place.
It turned out a contestant called Conor McIntyre had threatened to punch and sexually assault a female housemate, Deana Uppal, sparking more than a thousand complaints. In all 2,088 complaints were lodged against the show, which when it is watched by so few is quite an achievement.
Now, that's obviously a shocking bit of telly, and worth complaining about. But had it happened in an earlier series it would be national news - today, few of us know anything about the people involved and care even less.
The one part of the brand which still commands some interest - and a couple of million viewers - is the celebrity version, because mentally-frail fame-hungry wannabes are easier to loathe when they made their Faustian pact decades earlier.
We've had Vanessa's meltdown, Les Dennis looking sad, George Galloway in a leotard, Jade Goody horrifying everyone, Sly Stallone's mum and Vinnie Jones. It's never done much to reinvigorate a failing showbiz career, but it has given one or two people a slower descent into obscurity.
In recent weeks there has been much talk of convicted domestic abuser Justin Lee Collins being offered and then turning down a place on the show, which sparked a fair bit of anger, an online petition from relatives of the woman he harassed, and some much-needed publicity for the show.
But it's now clear he didn't have a cat in hell's chance of appearing, not because he was an aggressive, bullying abuser recently notorious for being convicted of the same, but because the show's producers had someone else in mind.
Step forward Jim Davidson, a comedian who in his heyday made Bernard Manning look thoughtful and, if his third wife Alison Holloway is to be believed, would make Conan the Barbarian look like a pussycat.
Her claims were quite devastating, and the man recently apologised for his racist and homophobic jokes and admitted his abuse of drugs and booze as part of an effort to reinvent himself.
He's got a right to do that, if he wants to. People are allowed to change their ways. He's not been convicted of abusing Alison, so we need to be nicer to him than to Lee Collins who was accused of doing less physical damage.
But that doesn't mean we have to like him. There are plenty of people who, despite the absence of a criminal record, consider him and his views beyond the pale, and it's unlikely many of the mainly-young CBB audience will warm to a fat, middle-aged old git even if they're ignorant of his reputation.
That he's on the television at all leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, but there is one positive to be gained from this washed-up old toad entering the Big Brother house, aside from the possibility they might just lock the door once he's in and call it a day.
It is that, in the absence of any woman taking him to court, of any rumours being proven to be true, or of him saying something of the kind he used to and getting arrested for it, it might just be possible to savour the deserved demise of an unpleasant showbusiness career and see it finally nailed into its coffin.
When there has not been any other kind of justice, the sort where a once-national star is reduced to a less-than-popular show and ringing up newspapers offering his own story for a handful of tenners is the best that we are left with.
Big Brother has turned from widespread and innocent fascination with human behaviour into the minority sport of malicious celebrity schadenfreude. It is a shame we cannot watch people without wishing them ill, but if we have to watch anyone then people who deserve a bit of ill are, I suppose, the best contestants.
So I will watch, and if it all ends badly for him I will not bother to remember where I was when I heard about it.
The traffic was jammed so I looked at the text message, which said that Nasty Nick had left the Big Brother house.
Even though it was twelve years ago, even though it was utterly trivial, that news seemed so momentous at the time that I can still remember where I was, what I was doing, and how I pulled over to excitedly ring my friend and find out what she knew.
That was the first series of Big Brother, when those taking part had no idea anyone might be watching them and it felt like half the nation was fascinated by Nasty Nick's underhand voting tactics, Melanie's flirtations with Andrew and Tom, Darren's terror of the chickens, lesbian ex-nun Anna (A lesbian! On telly!) and scouser Craig doing it all to raise money for a cousin with Down's Syndrome.
For those who have forgotten, the events of that series were splashed on by the country's most popular newspapers almost every day. Even though no-one had seen such a thing before, it had phenomenal ratings and 10million people tuned in to the final.
This was the start of modern celebrity, and they didn't all like it. Andrew emigrated to Australia, where I walked into a wall when I spotted him in a Sydney street about a year later. Darren disappeared, Sada reportedly turned to waitressing, Melanie did some presenting and naked body-painter Nichola released a single and is, well, keeping busy (NSFW).
In the years that followed, the contestants were of such interest to the public they could guarantee newspaper sales spikes. When a girl famed for saying "I love blinking, I do", left the second series the bidding war for her first interview hit £200,000.
That's not done for fun - it was because the newspapers and magazines bidding expected to make more than that in extra sales and advertising. Agents and publicists pile in and drive it as high as they can, and editors weigh up the bid with what they get out of it.
Not any more. A while ago a friend told me how they answered the newsdesk phone on a national paper to find the latest Big Brother evictee on the other end, asking politely if they were interested in his story for £200.
"Sorry mate, you'd need to pay us," he was told. "Who are you again?"
Big Brother today is not something anyone is going to excitedly text me about, much less make me remember where I was when it landed. It doesn't provoke newspaper bidding wars, is seen mainly as a vehicle for the mentally-frail and fame-hungry, and draws less than a million viewers.
Earlier this week it was reported the latest series was Ofcom's most-complained about TV programme of the entire year. This stopped me in my tracks, because whatever it had done I hadn't noticed even though it had pushed Philip Schofield's use of Google into second place.
It turned out a contestant called Conor McIntyre had threatened to punch and sexually assault a female housemate, Deana Uppal, sparking more than a thousand complaints. In all 2,088 complaints were lodged against the show, which when it is watched by so few is quite an achievement.
Now, that's obviously a shocking bit of telly, and worth complaining about. But had it happened in an earlier series it would be national news - today, few of us know anything about the people involved and care even less.
The one part of the brand which still commands some interest - and a couple of million viewers - is the celebrity version, because mentally-frail fame-hungry wannabes are easier to loathe when they made their Faustian pact decades earlier.
We've had Vanessa's meltdown, Les Dennis looking sad, George Galloway in a leotard, Jade Goody horrifying everyone, Sly Stallone's mum and Vinnie Jones. It's never done much to reinvigorate a failing showbiz career, but it has given one or two people a slower descent into obscurity.
In recent weeks there has been much talk of convicted domestic abuser Justin Lee Collins being offered and then turning down a place on the show, which sparked a fair bit of anger, an online petition from relatives of the woman he harassed, and some much-needed publicity for the show.
But it's now clear he didn't have a cat in hell's chance of appearing, not because he was an aggressive, bullying abuser recently notorious for being convicted of the same, but because the show's producers had someone else in mind.
Step forward Jim Davidson, a comedian who in his heyday made Bernard Manning look thoughtful and, if his third wife Alison Holloway is to be believed, would make Conan the Barbarian look like a pussycat.
Her claims were quite devastating, and the man recently apologised for his racist and homophobic jokes and admitted his abuse of drugs and booze as part of an effort to reinvent himself.
He's got a right to do that, if he wants to. People are allowed to change their ways. He's not been convicted of abusing Alison, so we need to be nicer to him than to Lee Collins who was accused of doing less physical damage.
But that doesn't mean we have to like him. There are plenty of people who, despite the absence of a criminal record, consider him and his views beyond the pale, and it's unlikely many of the mainly-young CBB audience will warm to a fat, middle-aged old git even if they're ignorant of his reputation.
That he's on the television at all leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, but there is one positive to be gained from this washed-up old toad entering the Big Brother house, aside from the possibility they might just lock the door once he's in and call it a day.
It is that, in the absence of any woman taking him to court, of any rumours being proven to be true, or of him saying something of the kind he used to and getting arrested for it, it might just be possible to savour the deserved demise of an unpleasant showbusiness career and see it finally nailed into its coffin.
When there has not been any other kind of justice, the sort where a once-national star is reduced to a less-than-popular show and ringing up newspapers offering his own story for a handful of tenners is the best that we are left with.
Big Brother has turned from widespread and innocent fascination with human behaviour into the minority sport of malicious celebrity schadenfreude. It is a shame we cannot watch people without wishing them ill, but if we have to watch anyone then people who deserve a bit of ill are, I suppose, the best contestants.
So I will watch, and if it all ends badly for him I will not bother to remember where I was when I heard about it.
More phut-phut than boom-boom, sunshine.
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
Silly (adj.): Absurd, ridiculous, irrational.
WELL, I'm confused.
I knew where I was when we were plebs. I was quite happy to be one of the proles, a peasant, a pain in the posh boys' backside.
Whether we like it or not humans do want to know their place. That's why newspapers use the ages, jobs, and a description of the houses and cars of people they write about - so that The Reader can label the person, and slot them into the 'Just Like Me', 'Just Like My Sister' or 'Just Annoying' categories we don't like to admit we all have.
Knowing your place doesn't mean you're happy with it, or that your place is better or worse than someone else's. It's just a mechanism for working out who we do and don't like, and the Plebgate scandal did that quite nicely.
When Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell left work in September and got angry with police officers who wouldn't open the Downing Street main gates for his bicycle, there weren't many people on his side.
An uppity cyclist is easy to dislike. A suited man in bicycle clips is a pleasure to mock. Anyone other than a witch with a basket on the front of their bike is frankly a joy to poke fun at.
On top of that this was a top Tory, a rich, privately-educated millionaire ex-banker, angry at being made to follow the rules everyone else has to abide by. For us plebs, this was karma at work in the land.
He effed and blinded at the officers guarding the gate, and two days later parts of the police log of the incident were released reporting he had called them "f***ing plebs", said "you don't run this f***ing government", "best you learn your f***ing place", and finally "I'll have your f***ing job for this".
Well. It was already brilliant but when they heard those details, both the peasants and the papers rubbed their hands and waited for his inevitable, and highly pleasurable, fall from grace.
He handled it badly, gave a carefully-worded apology, admitting swearing but denying use of the word pleb, and hoped it would all die down.
It didn't, for the simple reason that after years of opposition and then government by people from very privileged backgrounds and public sector cuts we all felt like they thought we were plebs. It fit into our categories for people.
The PM called in the CCTV footage of the incident, and pronounced it inconclusive. Then a few days after the incident an email from a member of the public appeared to back up the police claims, and Thrasher Mitchell's demise became merely a matter of time.
He hung on for a while, but when the MPs he was supposed to discipline rebelled, his position became untenable. Some even said they had been victim to similar, sweary tirades.
And now Mr Mitchell says the whole thing was rot.
He has been able to get the CCTV footage, journalists have tracked down the 'member of the public' who now appears to be a serving police officer, and someone's been arrested. All, it is clear, is not quite as it seemed.
So where does that leave us plebs? Adrift, to be frank. We no longer know for sure whether or not we are plebs, or whether 'they' think we are plebs, and whether we ought to like the posh banker boy. There is even the unpalatable possibility that we plebs ought to say sorry to the chap with the bicycle, and that he's actually been quite hard done-by.
But one part of that story falling down does not erase the rest of it, any more than a tile slipping off a roof makes your house collapse. Sometimes it could be a sign the whole thing is shoddy, and other times it is just one, easily-fixed tile.
Mr Mitchell still admits swearing at police officers. That's still something most of us would get nicked for, if we did it.
The CCTV doesn't look like a serious confrontation, but we all know it's possible to have an argument by hissing and Mr Mitchell seems the sort of buttoned-up individual who would huff and swear rather than scuffle or gesticulate. The video is, as it always was, inconclusive.
It does prove bits of the police log were wrong - there were no "members of the public" who were "visibly shocked", in fact there seems to be just one bloke who was mildly interested. It makes you wonder how much of it was embellished in a similar way, but at the same time coppers aren't the best writers. Logs are all about proceeding northwards and Caucasian males, and an officious plod might well decide that one earwigging tourist constitutes a shocked member of the public.
The corroborating email seems to be fiction, but it's more than likely it and its writer will be examined in court in due course and that's the only place where we'll find out why and how it was written. If it gets to trial he's entitled to a fair one, even if police and politicians are leaking about it for their own ends, and just because it is false does not mean the central accusation is as well.
The truly damaging thing about the Plebgate scandal is not the detail of what was said - although of course, without that, it's the Gategate scandal - but the way it was handled.
Mr Mitchell admitted swearing at policemen as though it were acceptable, and it's not. He fudged an apology while looking as apologetic as an irate duke who's caught a serf touching his boot, and just as as livid. People have demanded he get his job back but he's still a silly, angry, uptight man who refused to walk his bike through a gate and swore at a copper - that's the basic reason he lost his job, and it hasn't changed.
The CCTV doesn't show a damn thing more now than it did then, and the government had this email and spoke to the person who wrote it at the time, without finding out he was apparently a policeman.
Let me say that again - the GOVERNMENT couldn't find that out, and they employ him! Did it not cross their minds to put his name into the computer? Does this mean they don't have a computer? Could I write a letter and pretend to be the Queen and they wouldn't know any different?
It's really easy to spot a copper. They tuck their shirts in, and have short hair and shiny faces. I can spot one twenty foot away in a darkened bar when I'm hammered. If the people running the country can't do better then I wouldn't trust them to run a tap.
Policeman are not really a political bunch, either. Rank and file officers regard politicians as something they'd rather avoid, like a week of night shifts, and the chances of some bothering to conceive a conspiracy in order to "toxify the Conservative party" as Mr Mitchell dramatically claims are slim at best.
Which leaves us with the conclusion that something distasteful and pleb-like probably happened, was more a hissy fit than a rant, got backed up by someone who should have stayed out of it, and people on all sides are using it to score points. The police have wound up arguing with the government, and that's always messy, especially when the Prime Minister's chums are due to stand trial soon.
And it's all embellishment, really - everything here is decoration on top of the main point, which is that a silly man did a silly thing and was made to look too silly to do his job. That hasn't changed.
It might not have happened to the rest of us, but then the good thing about being a pleb is that you can get away with being silly.
If you run the country, on the other hand... well. You can argue the point, but once silliness sets in the more you fight it the sillier you look, like a businessman who slips on a banana skin and then slips on it repeatedly every time he tries to get up.
Let the courts and time clear Mr Mitchell's name, if needs be. He'll never get to the truth for the simple reason he won't want to see it - which is that he'd be a lot happier if he was a pleb, just like us.
I knew where I was when we were plebs. I was quite happy to be one of the proles, a peasant, a pain in the posh boys' backside.
Whether we like it or not humans do want to know their place. That's why newspapers use the ages, jobs, and a description of the houses and cars of people they write about - so that The Reader can label the person, and slot them into the 'Just Like Me', 'Just Like My Sister' or 'Just Annoying' categories we don't like to admit we all have.
Knowing your place doesn't mean you're happy with it, or that your place is better or worse than someone else's. It's just a mechanism for working out who we do and don't like, and the Plebgate scandal did that quite nicely.
When Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell left work in September and got angry with police officers who wouldn't open the Downing Street main gates for his bicycle, there weren't many people on his side.
An uppity cyclist is easy to dislike. A suited man in bicycle clips is a pleasure to mock. Anyone other than a witch with a basket on the front of their bike is frankly a joy to poke fun at.
On top of that this was a top Tory, a rich, privately-educated millionaire ex-banker, angry at being made to follow the rules everyone else has to abide by. For us plebs, this was karma at work in the land.
He effed and blinded at the officers guarding the gate, and two days later parts of the police log of the incident were released reporting he had called them "f***ing plebs", said "you don't run this f***ing government", "best you learn your f***ing place", and finally "I'll have your f***ing job for this".
Well. It was already brilliant but when they heard those details, both the peasants and the papers rubbed their hands and waited for his inevitable, and highly pleasurable, fall from grace.
He handled it badly, gave a carefully-worded apology, admitting swearing but denying use of the word pleb, and hoped it would all die down.
It didn't, for the simple reason that after years of opposition and then government by people from very privileged backgrounds and public sector cuts we all felt like they thought we were plebs. It fit into our categories for people.
The PM called in the CCTV footage of the incident, and pronounced it inconclusive. Then a few days after the incident an email from a member of the public appeared to back up the police claims, and Thrasher Mitchell's demise became merely a matter of time.
He hung on for a while, but when the MPs he was supposed to discipline rebelled, his position became untenable. Some even said they had been victim to similar, sweary tirades.
And now Mr Mitchell says the whole thing was rot.
He has been able to get the CCTV footage, journalists have tracked down the 'member of the public' who now appears to be a serving police officer, and someone's been arrested. All, it is clear, is not quite as it seemed.
So where does that leave us plebs? Adrift, to be frank. We no longer know for sure whether or not we are plebs, or whether 'they' think we are plebs, and whether we ought to like the posh banker boy. There is even the unpalatable possibility that we plebs ought to say sorry to the chap with the bicycle, and that he's actually been quite hard done-by.
But one part of that story falling down does not erase the rest of it, any more than a tile slipping off a roof makes your house collapse. Sometimes it could be a sign the whole thing is shoddy, and other times it is just one, easily-fixed tile.
Mr Mitchell still admits swearing at police officers. That's still something most of us would get nicked for, if we did it.
The CCTV doesn't look like a serious confrontation, but we all know it's possible to have an argument by hissing and Mr Mitchell seems the sort of buttoned-up individual who would huff and swear rather than scuffle or gesticulate. The video is, as it always was, inconclusive.
It does prove bits of the police log were wrong - there were no "members of the public" who were "visibly shocked", in fact there seems to be just one bloke who was mildly interested. It makes you wonder how much of it was embellished in a similar way, but at the same time coppers aren't the best writers. Logs are all about proceeding northwards and Caucasian males, and an officious plod might well decide that one earwigging tourist constitutes a shocked member of the public.
The corroborating email seems to be fiction, but it's more than likely it and its writer will be examined in court in due course and that's the only place where we'll find out why and how it was written. If it gets to trial he's entitled to a fair one, even if police and politicians are leaking about it for their own ends, and just because it is false does not mean the central accusation is as well.
The truly damaging thing about the Plebgate scandal is not the detail of what was said - although of course, without that, it's the Gategate scandal - but the way it was handled.
Mr Mitchell admitted swearing at policemen as though it were acceptable, and it's not. He fudged an apology while looking as apologetic as an irate duke who's caught a serf touching his boot, and just as as livid. People have demanded he get his job back but he's still a silly, angry, uptight man who refused to walk his bike through a gate and swore at a copper - that's the basic reason he lost his job, and it hasn't changed.
The CCTV doesn't show a damn thing more now than it did then, and the government had this email and spoke to the person who wrote it at the time, without finding out he was apparently a policeman.
Let me say that again - the GOVERNMENT couldn't find that out, and they employ him! Did it not cross their minds to put his name into the computer? Does this mean they don't have a computer? Could I write a letter and pretend to be the Queen and they wouldn't know any different?
It's really easy to spot a copper. They tuck their shirts in, and have short hair and shiny faces. I can spot one twenty foot away in a darkened bar when I'm hammered. If the people running the country can't do better then I wouldn't trust them to run a tap.
Policeman are not really a political bunch, either. Rank and file officers regard politicians as something they'd rather avoid, like a week of night shifts, and the chances of some bothering to conceive a conspiracy in order to "toxify the Conservative party" as Mr Mitchell dramatically claims are slim at best.
Which leaves us with the conclusion that something distasteful and pleb-like probably happened, was more a hissy fit than a rant, got backed up by someone who should have stayed out of it, and people on all sides are using it to score points. The police have wound up arguing with the government, and that's always messy, especially when the Prime Minister's chums are due to stand trial soon.
And it's all embellishment, really - everything here is decoration on top of the main point, which is that a silly man did a silly thing and was made to look too silly to do his job. That hasn't changed.
It might not have happened to the rest of us, but then the good thing about being a pleb is that you can get away with being silly.
If you run the country, on the other hand... well. You can argue the point, but once silliness sets in the more you fight it the sillier you look, like a businessman who slips on a banana skin and then slips on it repeatedly every time he tries to get up.
Let the courts and time clear Mr Mitchell's name, if needs be. He'll never get to the truth for the simple reason he won't want to see it - which is that he'd be a lot happier if he was a pleb, just like us.
It's only an insult if you mind.
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
Setting the world to rights.
THE Queen attended a Cabinet meeting today, and promptly dissolved the Government.
Her Majesty announced a return to an absolute monarchy with herself in control of all the arms of state, saying: "Anything is better than this shower."
Her first move was to order social services to place Romeo Beckham in care after it transpired his parents had allowed the 10-year-old to take part in an international modelling campaign wearing specially-adapted adult clothes to make him look like a proto-Declan Donnelly.
She said: "Even I've heard about Macaulay Culkin. It can't end well, get the poor mite out of there."
The Queen listened to a long lecture on the economy, the right track, the wrong track, deficits and borrowings from her Chancellor Gideon Osborne before growing exasperated and sending him to his room without any tea.
In his place she installed personal finance expert Martin Lewis, who issued every citizen with a series of money-off vouchers and pledged to make the banks pay annual bonuses to each customer. The move was greeted by an influx of people opening new bank accounts and was given a cautious welcome by the City as a result.
Pippa Middleton's bum was granted Grade-II listed status and declared a national monument, while Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins was installed as Minister for Drinking Culture, Media and Sport.
Prince Philip suggested marrying Pippa to grandson Prince Harry "to keep it in the family and distract the plebs", and the Queen is believed to be considering the match.
Gay marriage was outlawed in case Prince Edward had any bright ideas, the police officer arrested over leaking details of the Plebgate scandal was made an OBE, and Universal Credit reforms were extended to include a slice of cake for all the poor people once a week.
A group of ne'er do wells was rounded up by vicious corgis and loaded into a container for shipment to America, in order to cement the special relationship and provide target practice for disaffected youths.
Abu Qatada and Ian Brady joined domestic abusers Jim Davidson, Dennis Waterman and Justin Lee Collins for the long and inevitably fatal sea voyage, while the likes of Helen Flanagan, Keith Vaz, and Geri Halliwell were placed in internment camps for re-education. Gary Barlow was told to be quiet.
The Queen immediately cancelled a contract allowing disgraced Olympic security firm G4S to run a phone line helping to explain benefit reforms, and called a halt to plans to charge people who run out of money to use 'budgeting products' designed by the private sector.
Her Majesty went on to make a public address, saying: "I've put up with this crap for long enough.
"I didn't mind Churchill. I tolerated Eden. And don't get me started on Wilson and Blair.
"But in recent weeks it has come to my attention that things are entirely posterior-about-face. First they showed me all my gold, and then they took it away.
"Next I was invited to a Cabinet meeting and as a token of their regard I was given some place mats.
"I told them that I have entertained heads of state for 60 years and I have banqueting accessories coming out of my bloody ears. I said never mind the last queen got India and the one before her had America, never mind I am used to getting diamonds and racehorses, but if they couldn't manage that a simple pair of gloves would at least be useful. They said I could have a bit of Antarctica, and looked at me like I was the idiot!
"To add insult to injury they simpered about changing the laws of succession so Wills' daughter could claim the throne, without apparently noticing firstly a woman was already their boss and secondly without me there were 21 men and two women at the table and it's them who need to change.
"What a bunch of cretins. We're better orf without them. Happy Christmas to all in my Commonwealth. It's mine! ALL MINE!"
Her Majesty announced a return to an absolute monarchy with herself in control of all the arms of state, saying: "Anything is better than this shower."
Her first move was to order social services to place Romeo Beckham in care after it transpired his parents had allowed the 10-year-old to take part in an international modelling campaign wearing specially-adapted adult clothes to make him look like a proto-Declan Donnelly.
She said: "Even I've heard about Macaulay Culkin. It can't end well, get the poor mite out of there."
The Queen listened to a long lecture on the economy, the right track, the wrong track, deficits and borrowings from her Chancellor Gideon Osborne before growing exasperated and sending him to his room without any tea.
In his place she installed personal finance expert Martin Lewis, who issued every citizen with a series of money-off vouchers and pledged to make the banks pay annual bonuses to each customer. The move was greeted by an influx of people opening new bank accounts and was given a cautious welcome by the City as a result.
Pippa Middleton's bum was granted Grade-II listed status and declared a national monument, while Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins was installed as Minister for Drinking Culture, Media and Sport.
Prince Philip suggested marrying Pippa to grandson Prince Harry "to keep it in the family and distract the plebs", and the Queen is believed to be considering the match.
Gay marriage was outlawed in case Prince Edward had any bright ideas, the police officer arrested over leaking details of the Plebgate scandal was made an OBE, and Universal Credit reforms were extended to include a slice of cake for all the poor people once a week.
A group of ne'er do wells was rounded up by vicious corgis and loaded into a container for shipment to America, in order to cement the special relationship and provide target practice for disaffected youths.
Abu Qatada and Ian Brady joined domestic abusers Jim Davidson, Dennis Waterman and Justin Lee Collins for the long and inevitably fatal sea voyage, while the likes of Helen Flanagan, Keith Vaz, and Geri Halliwell were placed in internment camps for re-education. Gary Barlow was told to be quiet.
The Queen immediately cancelled a contract allowing disgraced Olympic security firm G4S to run a phone line helping to explain benefit reforms, and called a halt to plans to charge people who run out of money to use 'budgeting products' designed by the private sector.
Her Majesty went on to make a public address, saying: "I've put up with this crap for long enough.
"I didn't mind Churchill. I tolerated Eden. And don't get me started on Wilson and Blair.
"But in recent weeks it has come to my attention that things are entirely posterior-about-face. First they showed me all my gold, and then they took it away.
"Next I was invited to a Cabinet meeting and as a token of their regard I was given some place mats.
"I told them that I have entertained heads of state for 60 years and I have banqueting accessories coming out of my bloody ears. I said never mind the last queen got India and the one before her had America, never mind I am used to getting diamonds and racehorses, but if they couldn't manage that a simple pair of gloves would at least be useful. They said I could have a bit of Antarctica, and looked at me like I was the idiot!
"To add insult to injury they simpered about changing the laws of succession so Wills' daughter could claim the throne, without apparently noticing firstly a woman was already their boss and secondly without me there were 21 men and two women at the table and it's them who need to change.
"What a bunch of cretins. We're better orf without them. Happy Christmas to all in my Commonwealth. It's mine! ALL MINE!"
"Dave. This is my house now."
Monday, 17 December 2012
Friday, 14 December 2012
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
A Tory Christmas Carol.
'TWAS the night before Christmas, when all through the flat
Not a creature was stirring, because they can't afford gas;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care
In hopes that some presents would simply appear;
The children slept benefit-free in their beds
While visions of sexting danced in their heads;
And mamma in her onesie and I with cheap booze
Had just settled down for a long winter's snooze,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter
I sprang from the sofa to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Fell over the tree and smashed my head on the sash.
The moon shining down on the cold icy ground
Showed the six recycling bins 'pon which I frowned
Then, what should my starry eyes see,
But a miniature Bentley, and eight bitching MPs,
With a publicly-funded driver armed with a stick,
I knew in a moment it was Iain Duncan Smith.
More rapid than eagles his outriders they came,
And he whistled and shouted, and called them by name:
"Rant THRASHER! Rave DORRIES! Gnash, GOVE and GIDEON!
Smear, GRAYLING! Lie, STUPID! Spin, BONE and PICKLES!
To the top of the stairwell! To the top of their wall!
Now smash away! Smash away! Smash away all!"
Like publicly-funded gravy trains can fly,
And if meet with objection do rant live on Sky,
So up to the rooftop the MPs they flew,
With the car full of that damned Duncan Smith too.
And then in a twinkling I heard on the roof
Their prancing and pawing and a series of 'OOF's.
As I drew in my head and was turning around,
Down the cold chimney IBS came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all garnished in diamonds and loot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a millionaire, which he was for a fact.
His eyes - how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up in a grin,
A happier rich git you never have seen.
I was hungry and tired, so gritted my teeth,
And stopped myself killing him with our Lidl Christmas wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was self-righteous and plump, a right annoying sight,
And snuck out some figures on a cold Monday night;
He said that to help people like us more,
He was taking £137 a month from the hard-working poor;
He spoke not a word but went straight to his work,
Took all the stockings and taxed my beer, what a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up our dead chimney he rose;
He sprang to his Bentley, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like they'd sat on a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight:
"Universal Credit will help you be more independent,
And will simplify the benefits system by making it redundant,
Paying fewer people less with one simple move,
Teaching you all that there's nothing you can prove,
"If you're sick, sacked or caring, I don't give a toss,
If you're part-time or parents or widowed - you're dross;
I'll stop all your money, disabled or not,
And if you don't die I'll just let you rot.
"You should be rich, don't you see,
Because then just like loan sharks you'd be totally free!
No taxes, no trouble, and an unmandated right
To shout: 'STUFF CHRISTMAS YOU PLEBS, AND HAVE A GOOD NIGHT!
Not a creature was stirring, because they can't afford gas;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care
In hopes that some presents would simply appear;
The children slept benefit-free in their beds
While visions of sexting danced in their heads;
And mamma in her onesie and I with cheap booze
Had just settled down for a long winter's snooze,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter
I sprang from the sofa to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Fell over the tree and smashed my head on the sash.
The moon shining down on the cold icy ground
Showed the six recycling bins 'pon which I frowned
Then, what should my starry eyes see,
But a miniature Bentley, and eight bitching MPs,
With a publicly-funded driver armed with a stick,
I knew in a moment it was Iain Duncan Smith.
More rapid than eagles his outriders they came,
And he whistled and shouted, and called them by name:
"Rant THRASHER! Rave DORRIES! Gnash, GOVE and GIDEON!
Smear, GRAYLING! Lie, STUPID! Spin, BONE and PICKLES!
To the top of the stairwell! To the top of their wall!
Now smash away! Smash away! Smash away all!"
Like publicly-funded gravy trains can fly,
And if meet with objection do rant live on Sky,
So up to the rooftop the MPs they flew,
With the car full of that damned Duncan Smith too.
And then in a twinkling I heard on the roof
Their prancing and pawing and a series of 'OOF's.
As I drew in my head and was turning around,
Down the cold chimney IBS came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all garnished in diamonds and loot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a millionaire, which he was for a fact.
His eyes - how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up in a grin,
A happier rich git you never have seen.
I was hungry and tired, so gritted my teeth,
And stopped myself killing him with our Lidl Christmas wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was self-righteous and plump, a right annoying sight,
And snuck out some figures on a cold Monday night;
He said that to help people like us more,
He was taking £137 a month from the hard-working poor;
He spoke not a word but went straight to his work,
Took all the stockings and taxed my beer, what a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up our dead chimney he rose;
He sprang to his Bentley, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like they'd sat on a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight:
"Universal Credit will help you be more independent,
And will simplify the benefits system by making it redundant,
Paying fewer people less with one simple move,
Teaching you all that there's nothing you can prove,
"If you're sick, sacked or caring, I don't give a toss,
If you're part-time or parents or widowed - you're dross;
I'll stop all your money, disabled or not,
And if you don't die I'll just let you rot.
"You should be rich, don't you see,
Because then just like loan sharks you'd be totally free!
No taxes, no trouble, and an unmandated right
To shout: 'STUFF CHRISTMAS YOU PLEBS, AND HAVE A GOOD NIGHT!
Balls to you all.
Tuesday, 11 December 2012
Time waits for no man.
IT'S so easy to forget the date sometimes.
I mean, you always know what day of the week it is, or at least roughly which bit of the week you're in. Even if you wake up face down in a field wearing a clown costume you can tell this must be the weekend, or a Monday morning because Monday mornings are always bad.
But if in the future someone invented time travel and misprogrammed the flux capacitor so that they found themselves in Reigate right now, they wouldn't know what year it was.
They could wander around and work out from the temperature it was winter, and from the clothes it was some point after petticoats went out of fashion, but if they picked up a newspaper (completely ignoring the date printed on the front) and had a little read they wouldn't know when they were.
On the one hand it seems to be the 1970s, with football hooligans wreaking havoc, tossing coins at mixed race football players, being racist and generally making the beautiful game the kind of war zone we all thought was long past.
Elsewhere it looks like some time before Magna Carta, because a man convicted of rape who served his sentence and should have been released in 2002 has, instead, been in jail ever since. Stuff Habeas Corpus, we now lock up people for the crime of being from a country we think we're too nice to send them back to.
Then we've got children playing the age-old game of 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine' apparently infected by something not unlike the plague of 1348 with an epidemic of sexting sweeping the nations' schools and perverting everyone under the age of 12.
On top of all that the ruling class are lining their own pockets and writing their own rules about how that is allowed while at the same time demanding everyone else be open, transparent, genuinely accountable and independently regulated.
The government are trying to bring in a spy network that would have made Elizabeth I raise her eyebrows while outlawing the poor in a way she'd have been quite impressed by. Gropey men who may have earned slap from a grown woman in 1982 are being investigated by police probing a paedophile scandal no-one, but no-one, has yet been able to explain.
A Muslim man who's not been convicted of anything has been forced to leave his home, new census data is going to be used to herald the end of Britain as we know it and there seems to be serious discussion about whether gays are human beings.
I get confused about what year we're in all the time, so heaven knows what a misdirected time traveller would think. I suppose if you take an average it's probably somewhere in the 17th century, although whether it's before we revolted or after we decided to cancel all the fun I couldn't hazard a guess.
But then if we're feeling the effects of Puritanism before we've had the Civil War that would mean we're going backwards through time, which would at least explain Ashley Cole.
Unfortunately Einstein's not here to explain how that would work, and as we've long reversed past the time of his birth he's not about to reappear and help us figure it out. In fact science-wise we're probably about to start relying on plants.
So what do we do? Give up, and drift about on the sands of time as history endlessly repeats itself, pundits reheat the outrage they first served up a decade ago, and people wail and wheel from one disaster to another like peasants unable to scratch their own name in the dirt?
It's a radical thought but we could always tell ourselves it's the 21st century, and wise the hell up.
We could decide that if our children need mobile phones it's up to their parents to turn off picture messaging on the account which they're in charge of. Sexting's only an epidemic if children are paying their own bills; until then, it's just parents being inept.
We could wonder why children talk about sex earlier than they used to, and perhaps the answer would be because the adults all talk about it more as well. If you want the offspring not to look at porn, ask for or send pictures or treat each other as objects then it might be an idea to see how much of that seems to be normal to adults, and whether it is quietly noted by smaller people.
We could start acting like football is a fairly simple game, that it's not for racist, stupid, drunken, coin-throwing, pitch-invading, swearing and abusive idiots and that it would, frankly, be better without a lot of the footballers, too.
We could prosecute MPs whose actions seem to most people to constitute fraud, only lock up criminals proved beyond all reasonable doubt to deserve it, chillax about skin colour and realise that the definition of marriage has changed significantly over the years along with procreation. By law churches have to marry anyone who asks, with the right to opt out in cases such as divorced couples, and gay marriage would be no different. If they want to marry and the vicar wants to do it no-one from the 21st century gives much of a toss.
But then all that would involve acting like grown-ups, travelling in a forward motion, evolving as a result of our mistakes and getting wiser every day.
The fact we've been doing that quite successfully for millions of years appears to be no reason to continue, even though as a direct result we have fountain pens and Hob Nobs and drugs that stop cancer.
There may be some things about the modern world you don't like, humanity, but the trouble with going backwards is that eventually you reverse into the swamp on your hands and knees.
I mean, you always know what day of the week it is, or at least roughly which bit of the week you're in. Even if you wake up face down in a field wearing a clown costume you can tell this must be the weekend, or a Monday morning because Monday mornings are always bad.
But if in the future someone invented time travel and misprogrammed the flux capacitor so that they found themselves in Reigate right now, they wouldn't know what year it was.
They could wander around and work out from the temperature it was winter, and from the clothes it was some point after petticoats went out of fashion, but if they picked up a newspaper (completely ignoring the date printed on the front) and had a little read they wouldn't know when they were.
On the one hand it seems to be the 1970s, with football hooligans wreaking havoc, tossing coins at mixed race football players, being racist and generally making the beautiful game the kind of war zone we all thought was long past.
Elsewhere it looks like some time before Magna Carta, because a man convicted of rape who served his sentence and should have been released in 2002 has, instead, been in jail ever since. Stuff Habeas Corpus, we now lock up people for the crime of being from a country we think we're too nice to send them back to.
Then we've got children playing the age-old game of 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine' apparently infected by something not unlike the plague of 1348 with an epidemic of sexting sweeping the nations' schools and perverting everyone under the age of 12.
On top of all that the ruling class are lining their own pockets and writing their own rules about how that is allowed while at the same time demanding everyone else be open, transparent, genuinely accountable and independently regulated.
The government are trying to bring in a spy network that would have made Elizabeth I raise her eyebrows while outlawing the poor in a way she'd have been quite impressed by. Gropey men who may have earned slap from a grown woman in 1982 are being investigated by police probing a paedophile scandal no-one, but no-one, has yet been able to explain.
A Muslim man who's not been convicted of anything has been forced to leave his home, new census data is going to be used to herald the end of Britain as we know it and there seems to be serious discussion about whether gays are human beings.
I get confused about what year we're in all the time, so heaven knows what a misdirected time traveller would think. I suppose if you take an average it's probably somewhere in the 17th century, although whether it's before we revolted or after we decided to cancel all the fun I couldn't hazard a guess.
But then if we're feeling the effects of Puritanism before we've had the Civil War that would mean we're going backwards through time, which would at least explain Ashley Cole.
Unfortunately Einstein's not here to explain how that would work, and as we've long reversed past the time of his birth he's not about to reappear and help us figure it out. In fact science-wise we're probably about to start relying on plants.
So what do we do? Give up, and drift about on the sands of time as history endlessly repeats itself, pundits reheat the outrage they first served up a decade ago, and people wail and wheel from one disaster to another like peasants unable to scratch their own name in the dirt?
It's a radical thought but we could always tell ourselves it's the 21st century, and wise the hell up.
We could decide that if our children need mobile phones it's up to their parents to turn off picture messaging on the account which they're in charge of. Sexting's only an epidemic if children are paying their own bills; until then, it's just parents being inept.
We could wonder why children talk about sex earlier than they used to, and perhaps the answer would be because the adults all talk about it more as well. If you want the offspring not to look at porn, ask for or send pictures or treat each other as objects then it might be an idea to see how much of that seems to be normal to adults, and whether it is quietly noted by smaller people.
We could start acting like football is a fairly simple game, that it's not for racist, stupid, drunken, coin-throwing, pitch-invading, swearing and abusive idiots and that it would, frankly, be better without a lot of the footballers, too.
We could prosecute MPs whose actions seem to most people to constitute fraud, only lock up criminals proved beyond all reasonable doubt to deserve it, chillax about skin colour and realise that the definition of marriage has changed significantly over the years along with procreation. By law churches have to marry anyone who asks, with the right to opt out in cases such as divorced couples, and gay marriage would be no different. If they want to marry and the vicar wants to do it no-one from the 21st century gives much of a toss.
But then all that would involve acting like grown-ups, travelling in a forward motion, evolving as a result of our mistakes and getting wiser every day.
The fact we've been doing that quite successfully for millions of years appears to be no reason to continue, even though as a direct result we have fountain pens and Hob Nobs and drugs that stop cancer.
There may be some things about the modern world you don't like, humanity, but the trouble with going backwards is that eventually you reverse into the swamp on your hands and knees.
Rather you than me.
Monday, 10 December 2012
My guide on how to survive...
... the Christmas party season, using science and eggs and Olympic-style training techniques, can be read on the Daily Mirror website here.
Remember to limber up first!
Remember to limber up first!
Thursday, 6 December 2012
Today's blog...
... is about why wealth and fame are not all they're cracked up to be, and can be read on the Daily Mirror website here.
Sweet dreams x
Sweet dreams x
Wednesday, 5 December 2012
I'm a Royal - Get Me Out Of Here!
IT'S TWINS!
It's a boy! It's a girl! She's eight weeks, six weeks, ten weeks gone! He's tense, he wears trainers, he smiles. It'll last for two weeks or the whole pregnancy, she doesn't want an army of nannies but might have one or two, newspapers have chosen the godparents and bookies have picked the name!
We've known Kate is pregnant for about five minutes and despite the fact the embryo has fewer cells than Lewisham nick it's already driven the planet dotty.
Several people have announced they knew she was pregnant when she cut her hair. Others presume that Kate would want or appreciate the congratulations of convicted girl band thugs. And apparently her greatest challenge won't be the vomiting or the childbirth, it will be what to wear for the next eight months.
I'm sure we can all imagine her, propped up in a hospital bed on a drip but with still-glossy hair, flicking casually through swatches and planning her wardrobe, with occasional breaks for a ladylike retch into a silver spittoon held by a bewigged footman.
COME ON. She's green at the gills, terrified and no-one's done her hair for a week! She can't keep water down, is barely used to the idea of being pregnant herself and if she's managed to focus one eye out the window to see the TV cameras outside is probably coming to terms with the fact that her plumbing will be a matter of international fascination for the duration.
In her shoes I'd be weighing up hysterectomies and running off to live in a cave somewhere.
And don't go blaming all this bonkersness on newspapers. Yes, there's been more words written about something which hasn't even drawn breath yet than are probably in all of Shakespeare's plays, and yes a fair number of them are barking mad, calling for Charles to step aside, predicting what the 22nd century will be like and agonising over who gets to pick the heir if it's twins and there's a Caesarean.
But stick your head into any pub, coffee shop or office and much the same insane speculation is going on. Have a look at the internet, if you dare, where chat forums and comment boards which at the best of times are a psychoanalyst's nightmare have managed, somehow, to get more mad.
This is a nation which, by and large, disdains the idea that one person can be born better than others. Black or white, rich or poor, the British prefer a spot of equality, the right to speak and be heard, and think those who rise above the common herd need to earn it.
Yet here you all are getting feverish about a baby which if it survives will be the scion of a German-Dutch ruling dynasty which genuinely believes, if you read the small print, to have been chosen by God, enjoys immense unearned privilege, and that they own all the swans.
If you want mad, that's a reasonable definition right there. Another would be a nation of grown-ups going along with the whole thing, and a third would be arguing that we should pick the most suitable member of the family to wear the crown because the next one in line isn't pretty enough. Monarchies don't work that way!
At the same time a man of quite reasonable privilege himself is going to stand up in the House of Commons today and announce more spending cuts because he's got his sums wrong. We'll be told that people who don't work and live off the state are abhorrent while at the same time the Duchess of Cambridge should be applauded for producing someone who's going to spend their whole life on benefits.
Now, let's not be mean. Good luck to the little sprat because it's going to need it. Maybe the monarchy will implode before it gets to rule and maybe he or she will be the greatest figurehead our nation's ever known. Kate's a sweet enough girl, although I wish like hell she'd had a job and a life and an opinion or two to call her own.
No the problem here is billions of people - not just Britain but all over the planet - thinking this is firstly wonderful, and secondly part of their own lives.
It's not wonderful a woman without any obvious character traits - positive or negative - is held up as an example for others to follow. It's not amazing the only thing people can think of to write about her is what she will wear or do with her hair. It's sad, it's depressing, it's teaching young girls that what they do and think doesn't matter.
And while it's understandable other expectant couples, or parents who've had the same worry at such early stages, would identify with a high-profile pair experiencing the same gut-churning fear it doesn't mean you know them.
It's the fact people identified so closely with, and took to their hearts, the young Princess Elizabeth when she became queen at 25 that meant her family was seen as our family, with all the attention and gossip about private matters which comes with it. Her coronation was the first to be televised, she speaks to us all at Christmas, we got invited to her children's weddings and watched their divorces unfold.
There were daughters-in-law we liked and some we didn't, there are grandchildren who seem more worthwhile than the others, and with a Royal Family treated like a soap opera not just by newspapers but on television, at their own public appearances and by millions of obsessed fans all over the planet we have created modern celebrities from an outdated system of, face it, tyranny.
That celebrity, and the crazed flower-chucking, name-squealing, fainting delight that it brings to many, is probably the only reason we still have kings and queens at all. We would no more choose to get rid of the shiny-haired, white-toothed rich people we enjoy imagining we have something in common with than we would have decommissioned Dallas had that decision been ours to make.
Kate is no different to Pam Barnes - seen as being a bit common and upstart by the family of oil barons she married into, but from a pretty wealthy family herself well above the common herd, and more importantly a sweet heroine until you wonder why she was so thick as to get involved with the Ewings in the first place.
The difference is that a real soap opera can be turned off, we can obsess about the actors who play the parts in the knowledge they have sought and exploited fame, and they can't do us any harm. A royal family consists of people who don't always appreciate the attention and who didn't all choose it, and they can't turn it off any more than we can.
They talk to prime ministers, fire off letters to members of the Cabinet, and manage to send half the planet mad with a wave of their hand.
Perhaps that's all fine if they're overseen by a kind Miss Ellie but anyone who gave JR that kind of power would have to be insane.
And the thing with babies - and monarchs - is that you don't get to choose.
It's a boy! It's a girl! She's eight weeks, six weeks, ten weeks gone! He's tense, he wears trainers, he smiles. It'll last for two weeks or the whole pregnancy, she doesn't want an army of nannies but might have one or two, newspapers have chosen the godparents and bookies have picked the name!
We've known Kate is pregnant for about five minutes and despite the fact the embryo has fewer cells than Lewisham nick it's already driven the planet dotty.
Several people have announced they knew she was pregnant when she cut her hair. Others presume that Kate would want or appreciate the congratulations of convicted girl band thugs. And apparently her greatest challenge won't be the vomiting or the childbirth, it will be what to wear for the next eight months.
I'm sure we can all imagine her, propped up in a hospital bed on a drip but with still-glossy hair, flicking casually through swatches and planning her wardrobe, with occasional breaks for a ladylike retch into a silver spittoon held by a bewigged footman.
COME ON. She's green at the gills, terrified and no-one's done her hair for a week! She can't keep water down, is barely used to the idea of being pregnant herself and if she's managed to focus one eye out the window to see the TV cameras outside is probably coming to terms with the fact that her plumbing will be a matter of international fascination for the duration.
In her shoes I'd be weighing up hysterectomies and running off to live in a cave somewhere.
And don't go blaming all this bonkersness on newspapers. Yes, there's been more words written about something which hasn't even drawn breath yet than are probably in all of Shakespeare's plays, and yes a fair number of them are barking mad, calling for Charles to step aside, predicting what the 22nd century will be like and agonising over who gets to pick the heir if it's twins and there's a Caesarean.
But stick your head into any pub, coffee shop or office and much the same insane speculation is going on. Have a look at the internet, if you dare, where chat forums and comment boards which at the best of times are a psychoanalyst's nightmare have managed, somehow, to get more mad.
This is a nation which, by and large, disdains the idea that one person can be born better than others. Black or white, rich or poor, the British prefer a spot of equality, the right to speak and be heard, and think those who rise above the common herd need to earn it.
Yet here you all are getting feverish about a baby which if it survives will be the scion of a German-Dutch ruling dynasty which genuinely believes, if you read the small print, to have been chosen by God, enjoys immense unearned privilege, and that they own all the swans.
If you want mad, that's a reasonable definition right there. Another would be a nation of grown-ups going along with the whole thing, and a third would be arguing that we should pick the most suitable member of the family to wear the crown because the next one in line isn't pretty enough. Monarchies don't work that way!
At the same time a man of quite reasonable privilege himself is going to stand up in the House of Commons today and announce more spending cuts because he's got his sums wrong. We'll be told that people who don't work and live off the state are abhorrent while at the same time the Duchess of Cambridge should be applauded for producing someone who's going to spend their whole life on benefits.
Now, let's not be mean. Good luck to the little sprat because it's going to need it. Maybe the monarchy will implode before it gets to rule and maybe he or she will be the greatest figurehead our nation's ever known. Kate's a sweet enough girl, although I wish like hell she'd had a job and a life and an opinion or two to call her own.
No the problem here is billions of people - not just Britain but all over the planet - thinking this is firstly wonderful, and secondly part of their own lives.
It's not wonderful a woman without any obvious character traits - positive or negative - is held up as an example for others to follow. It's not amazing the only thing people can think of to write about her is what she will wear or do with her hair. It's sad, it's depressing, it's teaching young girls that what they do and think doesn't matter.
And while it's understandable other expectant couples, or parents who've had the same worry at such early stages, would identify with a high-profile pair experiencing the same gut-churning fear it doesn't mean you know them.
It's the fact people identified so closely with, and took to their hearts, the young Princess Elizabeth when she became queen at 25 that meant her family was seen as our family, with all the attention and gossip about private matters which comes with it. Her coronation was the first to be televised, she speaks to us all at Christmas, we got invited to her children's weddings and watched their divorces unfold.
There were daughters-in-law we liked and some we didn't, there are grandchildren who seem more worthwhile than the others, and with a Royal Family treated like a soap opera not just by newspapers but on television, at their own public appearances and by millions of obsessed fans all over the planet we have created modern celebrities from an outdated system of, face it, tyranny.
That celebrity, and the crazed flower-chucking, name-squealing, fainting delight that it brings to many, is probably the only reason we still have kings and queens at all. We would no more choose to get rid of the shiny-haired, white-toothed rich people we enjoy imagining we have something in common with than we would have decommissioned Dallas had that decision been ours to make.
Kate is no different to Pam Barnes - seen as being a bit common and upstart by the family of oil barons she married into, but from a pretty wealthy family herself well above the common herd, and more importantly a sweet heroine until you wonder why she was so thick as to get involved with the Ewings in the first place.
The difference is that a real soap opera can be turned off, we can obsess about the actors who play the parts in the knowledge they have sought and exploited fame, and they can't do us any harm. A royal family consists of people who don't always appreciate the attention and who didn't all choose it, and they can't turn it off any more than we can.
They talk to prime ministers, fire off letters to members of the Cabinet, and manage to send half the planet mad with a wave of their hand.
Perhaps that's all fine if they're overseen by a kind Miss Ellie but anyone who gave JR that kind of power would have to be insane.
And the thing with babies - and monarchs - is that you don't get to choose.
You get what you're given.