OK Bye Now 2014

OK, so you probably thought I’d just given up writing this blog by now, right?

Yes, it’s been nearly three months since I put anything on here. But just because I haven’t been writing it doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you, ODHSNM.

It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been really busy at work. I forgot the login details. Plus, the world in 2014 is so ridiculous there’s very little I can add to it here. This picture – from the quaint North Yorkshire village of Hutton-Le-Hole – sums it up for me, pretty much.

I’ll do better next year, I promise. Assuming the world doesn’t come to an end or nuffink.

So, I will bid you farewell for this year my second photo summing up the year, from a kid’s playground in Wrose. Have a splendid Christmas you magnificent bastards!

Frozen Apart

I listened to Emma Watson’s speech to the UN about gender equality earlier this week, after having been made to watch Frozen on two consecutive days by my two sons.

Now, we went to the cinema to see Frozen – and my response at the end was to compare it to a Barbie movie. You know, the kind they show on Nick Jr.

It was a throwaway comment from a throwaway thought. I thought it was a bit girly.

But why did I think that? Because the main characters are female?

Both of our boys have been through a brief phase of strong aversion to “geeee-uurrrrls” and anything associated with them, but they now seem comfortable with them. Possibly because anything that is “for babies” is the current anathema.

Roger Jr and Tancred love Frozen and are seemingly oblivious to the gender of characters and their positions and roles with respect to one another. Roger Jr doesn’t like me belting out “Let it go” but that is probably because I only know three lines, and repeat them over and over again. 

I’d like them to stay oblivious. But will they? Can their innocence or lack of prejudice stand up to social conditioning?

The white one lays eggs, so must be a girl

Both kids love Angry Birds too. Apart from the birds’ often heavy eyebrows, I can’t see any evidence to suggest that they are all male. So why did Rovio feel the need to release Angry Birds Stella or – as it really ought to be called “Angry Birds For Girls”?

We thought the Lego Movie was great (I preferred it to Frozen). Lego has never seemed “gendered” to me. So why do we now have Lego Friends – or as it ought to be called “Lego For Girls”?

I don’t want my boys to grow up thinking that girls are aliens. Attitudes laid down in early childhood colour everything you come to think subsequently. Reinforcing the exclusivity of gender through toys and culture are the first step on the train towards not being able to speak to women as a teenager and beyond, terminating at the sort of hopelessly fucked-up attitudes displayed by the people who threatened to release naked pictures of Emma Watson for speaking out.

I’m a white, middle-aged, heterosexual man who is a father of two boys. The most valuable contribution I can make to feminism, I reckon, is to try and make sure my sons are kept off the kind of path that leads to being unable to comprehend, to fearing or to hating half the population (the more interesting half, I might add...).

Internet trolls and other species of arsehole are not created overnight. It takes a human being a long time of holding and being reinforced in deeply mistaken and unpleasant views to get to the point where they make rape threats on Twitter.

Everyone has their part to play, but parents – especially fathers of boys – have to do more to stop forcing kids to see the world in terms of gender “us” and gender “them”.

This isn’t something I think constantly about, but when I do I realise that I feel quite strongly about it. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and watch Frozen for the third time this week. Have a watch of this yourself if you haven't already. Then let it go...

http://www.heforshe.org/

You'll Take the High Road and I'll Take the Low Road

This Thursday, Scotland will have its long-awaited referendum on whether to become an independent country. A week or so ago, one single poll gave a tiny majority to those in favour – which has turned the Scottish question from a matter of purely local interest to the leading issue in British politics. For the moment.

The No Campaign, aka Better Together, has rightly taken a lot of stick for its abysmal campaign. Not only has it given nobody in Scotland a better reason to stay in the UK than the fear of something worse – missing the point entirely that the Yes Campaign’s principal appeal lies with the hope of something better.

Better Together’s hopelessness was funny until that poll last weekend startled the powers behind the campaign out of their complacency. The week just gone has seen, on the one hand the pitiful spectacle of the three main party leaders crawling up to Scotland to tell them how important the Scots are to Britain – after having treated the whole affair up to that point as having all the interest to them of a parish council by election. Too little, too late boys, although it was fun to see David Cameron talk about the “effing Tories”.

On the other hand, it has seen naked economic threats as various businesses based in Scotland (Standard Life) or doing a lot of business there  (BP) have “come out against independence”. As other people have pointed out, BP has no trouble doing business in countries like Russia and Zimbabwe, so quite what they’re afraid of happening in Scotland is unclear.

It’s depressing, isn’t it? The primary line of argument anyone was able to think of to keep the UK going started off as “think of all the things that could go wrong with your economy” and developed into “we will fuck your economy up if you don’t do what suits us”.

Scotland’s case is not really helped when some nutjob SNP types start calling for BP to be nationalised though. Nice one! That will bring the foreign investment flooding in!

If I was the sort of person who was able to develop a rational argument and see it through to a strong conclusion, I’d like to think I could have gone on to write something like this piece by Fintan O’Toole in the Guardian. Unfortunately, I am not that focused. So I’ll link to it instead and let you read it and be astonished at my perspicacity in having brought it to your attention...

For many people in Scotland, this may well be a matter of ethnic nationalism. Some of them may really hate “the English” and regard the 1707 Act of Union as colonisation.

For far more (I hope, at any rate), this is being seen as an opportunity to take back a stake in politics from a distant, uninterested Westminster. You don’t have to think Alex Salmond is any better than any of the other leaders to believe that decisions that affect you, your family and your friends should be made nearer to those people rather than further away.

That, I think, is what the British malaise about politics stems from – decisions that affect us are made far, far away from us. Geographically if you live in Scotland, but in all sorts of other respects as well.

It’s sharpened to an edge capable of cutting through only by the “national” fault line in the case of Scotland. As O’Toole says:

The Scottish independence referendum poses a very good question but suggests an inadequate answer. The question is: where does power lie? This is not a marginal problem to pose in a 21st century democracy. It cuts to the heart of a deep crisis in the relationship between people and politics. But the answer implied on the ballot paper is a geographical one: power lies in either London or Edinburgh. Most Scots – and most of the rest of us – know that while this choice is far from meaningless, it also rather misses the point.

Most people are still so bewitched by the 19^th century idea of the nation state that they can only imagine a group of people wanting to govern themselves, in their own interests, if they form a “national” group. Whether they acknowledge the legitimacy of that wish depends entirely on how they feel about that group (see, oh, I don’t know...the entire history of the 20^th century, for example).

One of the few things I remember from my political theory degree was a quote by a chap called Benedict Anderson, who called nationalities “imagined communities”.

That in turn made me think about all the people bleating last week about how their British identity was going to be harmed by the Scots becoming independent.

If they want to imagine another community, surely that’s up to them? And if it pains you so much, well, why not just carry on imagining that they’re still in your imaginary community? Are you still imaging the Irish in it too? Why don't we add some others? The Norwegians, perhaps. They're very tidy. 

That’s the psycho-cultural bit taken care of. If the Scots don’t feel like part of the same imagined community as us...well, that’s that really isn’t it? You can’t force them to imagine themselves as part of the same community as you.

SUBHEADING - It breaks up the text

But suppose they do still see themselves as British. Why does that HAVE TO entail being governed from Westminster under a single unitary state entity? It only does when you start assuming in mystical qualities about “proper” communities and their “natural” territories and (dare I say it) “god-given” rights.

The best reasons for Britain being governed by a single government are military reasons. This is an island, and a whole island is easy to defend. If someone else is in charge of part of the island, then you don’t have the natural advantages of being an island.

Britain being invaded is unimaginable. England being invaded with the connivance of a hostile Scotland is beyond unimaginable. We’re living in the 21^st century, FFS.

If anyone can tell me point out anything else that is ideally organised on the precise level of “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” (plus its various overseas territories) then I’d be astonished.

Hence, large areas of policy are governed at the European level – precisely because markets bigger than the UK are more profitable, a trading bloc bigger than the UK has more international clout, standards in goods and services that are heavily traded need to be common across areas bigger than the UK etc etc.

But things should only be managed in bigger blocs, further away from the people affected, when that is efficient.

That old EU chestnut “subsidiarity” should be the norm and it should start at home. Power should be exercised as close to the people as possible, and it should ONLY be moved upwards to more distant, larger institutions when smaller bodies are clearly unable to do a good job.

I don’t think that nation states have a special privileged position above supranational bodies and subnational bodies. They are not the fount from while all authority flows upwards and downwards.

The idea that Britain will lose its seat at the top table internationally without Scotland is equally ridiculous. First and foremost, I believe that governments and states are there to promote the welfare of the people who live in their jurisdictions – and so international clout is only a means to that end, nothing more. National prestige for its own sake is meaningless.

Secondly, are we still sitting at the top table? Or are we on a little card table extension the USA has shoved onto the end to save our embarrassment when we turned up uninvited?

The other Alex S

Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out that only defeat can really bring a country to terms with itself –

never having recognised itself as having been defeated, Britain has no sense of its real place in the world. If losing Scotland forces a reassessment of Britain’s idiot pretensions and forces it to look at itself, so much the better.

So, for all these reasons, I don’t think that Scotland being “another country” is a big deal at all. The trains will still go there, 300,000 Scots will still live in London, money will continue to flow north and south, and we’ll all feel the same about each other as we do now (ie general lack of interest) - but they will be running their affairs and we will be running ours.

How does that undermine anybody’s identity?

Whatever happens on Thursday – this whole process has opened up the kind of thinking and reflection you don’t often see in this country. If for no other reason, it will have done Britain some good because of that. 

Exposed: The Lines 'Better Together' Didn't Use

Crippling export duties to bring Scotland to its knees

Confidential documents from the Better Together campaign obtained exclusively by Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind. reveal some of the reasons considered as to why Scotland should reject independence in the upcoming referendum.

Although no spokesman for either side has yet commented on the leaked documents, ODHSNM believes it is its journalistic responsibility to publish them, just in case they are not completely made up. 

1. If Scotland votes for independence, everyone in England will refer to it as “Pooland”.
2. No more Buckfast for you.
3. Not only can you not keep the pound, but under cover of darkness on September 20^th, SAS units will steal all the proper sterling currency within Scottish territory and replace it with those crappy Scottish notes that no one accepts.
4. Prince Charles will cry and set fire to all of his kilts.
5. It is only the constant vigiliance of secret radar installations based in North Yorkshire that stop hordes of Loch Ness Monsters from bursting out of their watery lairs and overrunning the Highlands. They eat oil, too
6. MI5 will leak naked pictures of Alex Salmond. 
7. Independence has been shown to cause increase incidences of impetigo, dwarfism and homosexuality.
8. Masked men speaking with Russian accents have been noticed gathering around Aberdeen, while Vladimir Putin was recently spotted wearing a Tam O’Shanter and ginger wig.
9. You have to keep Gordon Brown.

"For real - I took this picture", Alistair Darling is quoted as saying

It is unknown why these lines were never used, however the documents had four words scrawled over them in red biro:

 “Yes, but: George Osborne”

There. You see: I can do satire. 

August betrays us again

April is the cruellest month, said TS Eliot in “The Wasteland”, but surely August has a good claim to being the most perennially disappointing.

Conditioned by the school calendar, we tend to think of the eighth month as the height of summer. And yet just look out of the window. It’s AUTUMN.

We’re in that weird little intermezzo when a brief glance at the populace reveals people clad in flip-flops and vests co-existing alongside people in coats and scarves. When people are kidding themselves that it’s still summer by reference to the date.

It’s rare that my blogs are inspired by other people, and even rarer for me to give credit when they are – but this one came from my wife, Elvira of Castille, who pointed out August’s treacherous qualities to me last week.

Like Steven Gerrard/Frank Lampard/Wayne Rooney in an England shirt, August lets you down every time. You know in your heart that it won’t deliver on its promise, but you can’t help but hope it’ll be different this time. Gradually, that hope turns into belief just in time to let you down painfully. 

Also, it never snows at Christmas. 

The Horn

​If your car does not have a properly functioning horn, it will fail its MOT.

I find this rather surprising, insofar as the only function a car horn has is to declare to the listening world that the driver sounding it is a wanker.

Let us consider the full range of situations in which any driver in the UK has ever used their horn:

Situation 1
Intended meaning: “You just behaved in a way which caused me a slight inconvenience and/or to caused me to turn my steering wheel/slow down when I didn’t want to – I am unreasonably angry about that”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker”

Situation 2
Intended meaning: “Someone is breaking into my car. Hopefully this noise will scare them off rather than encourage others to join in”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker”

Situation 3
Intended meaning: “The traffic lights have changed and you have not noticed it as quickly as me”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker”

Situation 4
Intended meaning: “I recognise you! Hello! Oh dear, you have had a heart attack”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker”

Situation 5
Intended meaning: "Get out of the way pigeon - no, THAT pigeon, not all of you in a 500 metre radius"
Meaning actually conveyed: "I am a wanker"

Situation 6
Intended meaning: “I am sitting outside your house. Come out, because I am not coming to the door”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker. And also a taxi driver”

Who was Roger of Sicily?

Generally, I shy away from writing about matters of fact. Not because I think – with Ronald Reagan – that facts are stupid things. Rather, it is because opinions are much easier to produce, being essentially incontrovertible. Even if all the premises are wrong, no one can say for definite that the conclusion is when it’s just a matter of opinion.

Furthermore, you may have noticed that ODHSNM house style directs that if a fact is to be stated, it will be phrased thus:

“So anyway, there was this...”

Thereby implicitly casting myself as an unreliable narrator (in the particular vein of a pub bore). In this way, I assume an ambiguously ironic stance to all statements of fact, getting myself off the hook for having to prove the veracity of anything I say. Does he mean it? Or not?

I am, in a sense, simply inviting you to consider (from the aesthetic point of view) the consequences of “what if” these things were true. It saves me a hell of a lot of time, which I would otherwise have to spend making sure that I’m not talking bollocks.

So anyway, there was this time called the Middle Ages with knights and dragons and shit.

We often think – isn’t it? – that the Middle Ages were a barbaric time, when life was nasty, brutish and short. To the extent that we think about it at all.

After the Romans, most people’s grasp of British history is basically (i) Saxons, (ii) some Vikings, (iii) 1066, (iv) “beard and crown” kings, (v) “bob and beret” kings until (vi) Henry VIII.

Beard kings

 And 1066 was “The Norman Conquest”. The Norman era lasted until the 1940s, whereupon the world’s parents decided never to name another child Norman again. FACT.

It may therefore surprise you to discover that the Normans’ story was not exhausted by the Battle of Hastings, keeping Robin Hood down and eventually becoming the English upper class. Oh no.

Bob kings

Turns out, there was this whole other arm of the family which did some rather more exciting stuff than building squat little round castles and churches and logging the contents of Britain in the Domesday Book. Not least in Sicily.

I have no fucking idea what happened in Britain in the 12^th century. Monasteries, or something? But from 1130 to 1154, there was this AWESOME Norman king ruling southern Italy, Sicily and a chunk of North Africa. And he was called Roger II.

Read the article is you are REALLY into facts. I came across Roger of Sicily when I was reading “The Middle Sea” by John Julius Norwich, also known as Viscount Norwich.

A viscount, for foreign readers, is a kind of lord here in the UK. Here is a full rundown of the British orders of nobility along with a handy system for remembering it:

6. Baron = Villain

5. Viscount = Biscuit

3=. Count = Vampire

3=. Earl = Hillbilly

2. Marquess = Tent

1. Duke = Alsatian

Anyway, this book is a history of the Mediterranean. I picked it up in an airport a few years ago. And a right rollicking good read it is too.  

And in it – meriting about 3 pages, which is a lot by Lord Biscuit’s standards (ancient Egypt gets about the same) – is this Roger II of Sicily.

He built up a giant kingdom (which I’d never heard of), faced down the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor and had the good sense never to go on a Crusade. More than that, he actually made his kingdom function properly and – to quote the Wikipedia article:

The king welcomed the learned, and he practiced toleration towards the several creeds, races and languages of his realm.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I took him on as my namesake. At a time when stupidity, thuggery and intolerance reigned here was a ruler who celebrated the life of the mind and didn’t care about the petty differences that divide people.

Showing you the life of the mind

So, at a time when stupidity, thuggery and intolerance reign, I think Roger II of Sicily is a ruler worth remembering. 

Why Talking About British Values Will Never Go Anywhere

The reason why nobody is able to define “British values” or “English values” without coming across as complete tit is as follows.

Great Britain came into being as a result of the Acts of Union of 1706 and 1707, combining England and Scotland – which had previously been separate states in personal union (ie with the same monarch) since 1603.

That became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland following a couple more Acts of Union in 1800. Ireland had been in personal union with England since 1542.

If “Britain” can be said to have values – in the sense of something that more or less united its people in pursuit of something or other – then that was global economic and political dominance, expressed as imperialism and colonialism. 

The primary beneficiaries of imperialism and colonialism were the aristocracy of wealth – not the British people as a whole. That is, of course, not to say that the British poor and working class didn’t do somewhat better out of colonialism than a lot of the colonised peoples. But I think it’s reasonable to say that the principal benefits they accrued were:

• Not being killed or formally enslaved
• A vicarious sense of being part of the biggest and best power in the world – much like the World Cup today

At the height of the imperial period, local elites in Edinburgh and Dublin started agitating for a bigger share of London’s power – and started developing ethno-cultural Scottish and Irish nationalism as counterforces opposing “Britain”.

Economic grievances in poor parts of England and Wales were no doubt comparable to some of the suffering experienced in Scotland and Ireland. But they have lacked voices capable of mobilising those grievances behind an articulation of “being different”.

That Britain has already lost its struggle. It lost it with decolonisation, which really began with the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland.

And so of course there is nothing we can say really represents “British values” – because in a postcolonial world, nothing that you could genuinely hold up as “British” is considered a virtue any more, other than instrumental virtues or means to ends we can’t talk about any more.

Why should “keep calm and carry on” be a virtue? Carry on doing what? Endure whatever shit you are being subjected to quietly, without questioning why you should be going through it in the first place?

Hence we make a virtue out of stoicism or quietism, no matter what use it is put to. Hence we make a virtue out of democracy, no matter how disgusted we are with what it leads to.  

These are just means to the sort of ends people can actually identify with.

In 1962 the American Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said:

Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

52 years later, it pathetically avoids finding a new role by clinging on to its absurd imperial dreams, buying aircraft carriers at the same time as closing hospitals; pretending there’s nothing wrong at home while threatening pointless wars abroad.

No wonder a hell of a lot of Scottish people want to leave. Because the hope of something better is the kind of motivator people can get behind, even when it’s irrational or even when that hope is forlorn.

It’s only in recent years that people have begun to think about “Englishness” at all, primarily as a result of recognising how moribund British identity is compared to those which have defined themselves in opposition to it.

Are English people really more selfish and right-wing than Scottish people? Or are English people really less hospitable and prone to romanticism than Irish people? I don’t think they are. I think these are attributes appropriated by cultural nationalists to distinguish the Scots, the Irish etc from cold, materialistic Britain – in the sense of the British Empire. And they’ve proved themselves on the right side of history by distancing themselves from that.

Trouble is, what does that leave the English to define themselves with? A whole host of “good” virtues and attributes pinched by various Celts, a load of “bad” virtues and attributes nobody sensible wants to associate themselves with any more or a load of thoroughly tedious virtues and attributes that no one gives a toss about?

We might as well be discussing “Ukrainian values” or “Iraqi values”. Or Austro-Hungarian values or Yugoslavian values. The people who live or lived in these places form multiple communities based on values, but those communities don't and never did coincide with the shapes marked on the maps going by those names. 

Only when the English let go of “Britain” will they be able to decide who they want to be. Once they’ve done that, maybe we’ll find that we’ve got more than we thought in common with all our fellow inhabitants of the British Isles. 

Is This The Most Awful Drink Ever?

This is Fernet Branca. You may recognise the label, having seen it in a dusty corner of a bar’s back shelf, among that plethora of liqueurs you’ve never seen anybody buy or drink but which nevertheless seem perennially to be stocked “just in case”.

I have, of late, being trying these concoctions wherever I can. This started off with my and Elvira’s 2011 trip to Prague, where I discovered Becherovka – which is right now my favourite drink in the universe (I am also, I think, the only British Campari drinker aged under 70).

So, I embarked upon a voyage of discovery into what the Teutons call “Kräuterlikör” and the Latins call “Amaro” – spirit-based liqueurs flavoured with herbs of an essentially bitter nature.

The first thing I discovered is that this is not a conventional British thing to drink or express an appetite for. The only such thing you are likely to come across in your local boozer is Jägermeister – and the only reasons I can see for its unique position is:

• Jägermeister’s (relatively) colossal advertising spending; and
• The Jägerbomb – which adds Red Bull to the equation, so as to combine ridiculous amounts of alcohol, sugar AND caffeine in a single gulp.

Indeed, I was recently on a works drinks evening, when some poor drunken subordinate suggested a round of Jägerbombs. As the boss-in-attendance, everyone was very keen that I should be included in this round – but I insisted that – as a parent – I would not drink Red Bull in the evening. I have to sleep, you know, and I observe a strict regimen of uppers in the morning and downers in the evening.

So I asked, to the bemusement of the barman and my colleagues, for my Jäger neat. And then we all necked everything in our glasses, so that nobody really tasted anything.

On another works occasion, I was told I was the only person my colleagues had ever seen to sip Jägermeister from a shot glass. They probably concluded that this is because I am a huge ponce who thinks he’s “oooh so continental” but is in fact just odd.

Anyway, I went from Jägermeister to Becherovka to Unicum to Kuemmerling to Rammazotti, eventually pitching up at Fernet Branca. Where I came to a grinding halt.

After a few mouthfuls I poured a big glass of it into a potted plant. The plant did not immediately wilt in an amusing manner, but it probably did not do it any good.

Now, whilst drinking these other drinks I have frequently been told by others that they are disgusting and that how I can possibly stomach them is incomprehensible.

That is how I felt about Fernet Branca – which is apparently popular in some parts of the world. The article linked to here describes is as tasting like “black licorice-flavored Listerine".

Certainly, my immediate thoughts were of oral hygiene:

• Firstly, because it tastes like toothpaste and generates the same burning sensation and unwillingness to swallow as mouthwash
• Secondly, because my panicked brain declared “oh my god what the hell have you just put in your mouth?”

Now, I know that everybody hates their first beer, their first cigarette, their first whisky, their first Becherovka – and some people then persist and come to acquire the taste by bloody-minded perseverence in the face of their body’s strenuous objections.

But this was different.

When I tasted this I assumed a joke was being played on me. Perhaps that bottle has lain there, untouched, since before the First World War and it has, in fact, gone very badly off.

Later, when I read the article I linked to earlier, I realised to my stark amazement that IT IS SUPPOSED TO TASTE LIKE THAT.

I presume it has an eagle on the logo because Fernet Branca tastes like the semi-digested carrion this noble bird regurgitates to feed its young. 

I thought I could drink anything. I was so wrong and felt suitably abashed. Everybody has a limit, and I found something that is WAAAAAY beyond mine. It was a lesson – and not one I shall quickly forget.

By the way, I must add that I would NEVER normally throw away a drink, even if I believed it to be disgusting and over a hundred years old. Fortunately, we were on an all-inclusive package holiday at the time – so I made an exception, poured the Fernet Branca into the poor, unsuspecting plant and washed the foul taste away with a free pint of Disaronno. 

Looking Inside Myself

It’s June and this is only the 11^th blog post I have written this year.

Long-term readers will perhaps have noticed a downward trend in the frequency of updates since the prolific days of 2011, when by June 2^nd I had racked up 28 posts.

Quantity is obviously not everything, and no doubt there are those (from whose number I do not automatically exclude myself) who think that the quality has deteriorated since then too, when I declaimed loudwise about the divinity of the sun, about dinosaurs and about Eurovision.

Monologues like that – whether intended to be funny, serious or whatever – just don’t seem to come to me complete and ready for compression into 1,500 words or so any more.

Perhaps I have exhausted the store of all the experiences, ideas and connections built up over my 38 years alive that seemed worth sharing. Perhaps I am running on the fumes of what occurs to me between posts.

I dunno.

Part of it is definitely work-related. It’s all got a bit more serious in the last couple of years, and so when I have mental free time it tends not to be spent on flights of fancy but on the tiresome matter of making money for somebody else. Not on purpose, obviously – but I used to quite enjoy waking up in the dead of night with a thought I couldn’t get out of my head, whereas I don’t really now.

Part of it is just sheer ennui.

He is perfectly capable of not pulling this stupid face

Yeah, I COULD write about UKIP but what’s the fucking point?

I’m not doing this to point out what other people have written or thought, or to provoke people into arguments. I’m doing this to express my views where they are different or new. And I seem to just have fewer views than ever before.

I could write about Eurovision again – which was won by a bearded lady this year. How shocking. Oh no, wait. Didn’t a transgender person win it in 1998? Wasn’t that more shocking? Or does the beard push it over the edge? Doesn’t it stop being shocking when you know it’s all being done purely with the intention to shock?

I haven’t watched Eurovision in years. The whole thing just feels like (i) an in-joke that everyone is in on and (ii) something that takes place solely for the reason of generating opinion pieces (or “ten ways to have a Eurovision party” articles). The Buzzfeedisation of everything makes me want to blow up the internet. But I still look at it. 

I could write about Ukraine, but OH MY GOD how much work would it be to actually form opinions based on some foundations of fact rather than “goodie/baddie” or “everybody baddie” narratives we are presented with? Ukraine won Eurovision in 2004, with Ruslana’s “Wild Dances”. Just Google it yourself – I don’t need to link to it, do I?

This is what I KNOW about Ukraine

I can’t believe some of the topics I wrote about in the past, insofar as I can’t believe I gave enough of a shit to spend the time writing about them – and being satisfied enough with what I’d written to give it a public airing.

Don’t worry by the way – I am not going to treat this like a cheap sitcom Xmas special, where we reminisce over a load of links to past posts. Do you remember Viktor Bout? (Fade to late 2010...switch on laughter track...)

I have long resisted the temptation to start reviewing TV programmes or films, but...but then, what would the point of doing that be? We already have the Radio Times.

Dear readers: would you rather see more or less on here? Would ODHSNM be better as a blog with a theme rather than just as a random assemblage of ephemera? Should I perhaps experiment with the possibilities of the blog as a literary form rather than ape the columnists of the dead tree press (complete with punning headline – BUT WHY?)?

Answers below please. Come on – I NEEEEED your validation so bad. 

Good Grammar? No Thing Cost!

I went to an English grammar school, but I don’t remember learning any English grammar while I was there.

Similarly, I have GCSEs in English Language and English Literature, but I don’t recall ever being really explicitly taught anything about the former. Just a lot of the latter.

I also did GCSE Latin, which is pretty much the only reason I know anything about grammar today. In retrospect, the modern languages we did at school covered a lot of grammar, but at the time I don’t think anyone really appreciated that that's what it was.

Now, before anyone loses their shit at me for despoiling their childhood, I’m not saying this is good or bad or even that this is what actually happened. This is just how I remember it 20+ years on.

What I am saying is that, on the internet these days, there seems to be a thing called being a “grammar snob” or even a “grammar Nazi” – which consists of sneering at other people’s ungainly efforts to express themselves, presumably from a position of knowing the “right” way to do it.  Or complaining about people who do that. Whatevs.

And I find this strange, because I find myself having – at best – an instinctive sense of what English grammar is and not an explicit understanding. I’m fairly well educated and I’ve made a living out of online content (not THIS! My real job!) for some years now. So I ought to know more than most, right?

I have found that it is only my vestigial knowledge of Latin (why does the stuff you learn at school stick around? “Then, first, before the rest and with a great accompanying crowd, Laocoon came blazing down from the citadel...”) and my subsequent attempts to learn German that have taught me what auxiliary verbs are and what “subjunctive” means. No English teacher ever did.

How many self-proclaimed grammar snobs can tell a gerund from a gerundive? I can’t. And how many of the tiny percentage who can say yes can only do so because they learned a different language?

Now, I don’t believe for one second that I have ever been unable to communicate with a fellow English speaker because of a lack of formal grammatical training. I suspect that one of the good things about this language is its openness to innovation (errors, if you prefer, snobs) and its flexibility.

Grammar snobs can piss off, telling people they are using language wrong. No - if you think language is a delicate flower that needs to be protected from use then you're wrong. The nail got knocked in whether you did it with a wrench or a hammer. When it comes to our own language (not your own), communication is what matters. 

But might our national problem with learning other languages not be ameliorated a little if all that conjugation and declension bollocks we got forcefed was treated as something we are already coping with just fine every time we speak or write? Something that is not completely new and alien, but just another way of doing something we’re doing all the time?

I certainly don’t want to be called a grammar snob, but a little grammar would surely help a lot.

Comments welcome below. First person who works in education to make a snidely predictable remark about Michael Gove wins a commemorative tea towel. 

Don't Stand So Close To Me

There are roughly 63 million people living in the UK, and its area is 243,610 square kilometres. That gives around 3867 square metres – or just under an acre – per person.

So why is that people choose to live in such uncomfortably close proximity to one another?

I looked out of the train window yesterday on my journey from London to Leeds – something I don’t normally bother doing very much – and saw vast tracts of farmland, derelict land, meadow land. And yet, I used to live in a flat where we could hear the people upstairs having sex (I can’t remember the bloke’s name, but his wife was called Unita – which I always remember, because it’s also the name of an Angolan paramilitary organisation).

It’s not like all that farmland is being used to grow crops for people to eat. In fact, god alone knows what farmers do with all those crops that appear to be just grass. At least in Lincolnshire you can tell what’s growing in the fields...

Pretty much everything we eat is imported from abroad. If that wasn’t the case, nobody would make a song and dance about “buying British”. I’m sure the Canadians don’t pay extra for “Canadian flour” – even if it does have selenium in it.

As you know, I live in Bradford. The specific bit we live in is constantly being targeted by the council for more and more housing developments, despite the glaring inadequacy of local facilities (see ODHSNM passim). This is in spite of the fact that, within the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council’s territory, vis to the west of the city, there is BUGGER ALL as far as Halifax.

Obviously the reason is that the bit we live in is very close to Leeds, which means houses built there can be sold for a lot more than houses built on a rain-soaked crag 10 miles further west.

I don't want to alarm my neighbours (who have been very understanding to date). But equally, I do - for example - sometimes want to go out into my back garden in my underpants without self-consciousness. 

I am English! I demand privacy! Privacy in which I will do weird things I want to keep secret!

I Was A Teenage Dungeon Master

A few blogs ago I referred to my shady past as a role playing games fanatic. I feel that it is now sufficiently far in the past that I can speak out about it.

Sufficiently far in the past and – I should add – sufficiently rehabilitated.

The world has come on a long way from believing that Dungeons and Dragons promoted Satanism – see Tom Hanks’ 1982 movie debut “Mazes and Monsters” for details.

It has even made it through the assumption that anybody who engages in such activities is a sad, lonely spree-killer in waiting who will never have sex with a human partner – thanks in large part to the triumph over the nerds over popular culture. The internet and video games have, in some way, made my wasted adolescence acceptable – nay, even avant-garde – in glorious retrospect.

Now, the weekends my friends and I squandered pretending to be wizards – in our own heads, FFS – or moving little lead men around bedroom floors in completely heavily carpet-distorted “battles” is deemed evidence of our “old skool” credentials rather than of our blatant social ineptitude and weirdness. 

Hell, we were in it long before every town had a Games Workshop. We had to get to Nottingham if we wanted goblins to paint.

I could have spent those five or six years learning something useful. Like how to speak to girls. Or how to enjoy physical exercise.

Or becoming an expert in anything – ANYTHING – other than the fighting statistics of imaginary monsters or lists of magic spells.

So I am not celebrating any après-la-lettre cultural vindication. Even if it's ok to like dragons now thanks to Game of Thrones, it was certainly NOT ok to like dragons back in the early 1990s. 

I still regard that period of my life as a very poor use of my finite lifetime. That’s not to say I didn’t have fun – I just had no appreciation of what other kinds of fun were out there.

Anyway, back to the title of the blog. Unless you were playing D&D – or rather Advanced D&D, because D&D was for thickos – the referee was a gamesmaster. I ran our group’s AD&D campaign though, so I was – formally – the dungeon master.

At the time, that was not a funny name to us. It denoted this guy:

Not this guy:

Being the dungeon master meant that I had to come up with the stories and challenges and whatnot, while my friends played characters in the world I had dreamed up – barbarians, clerics, assassins etc.

In retrospect, I can’t figure out why we just kept buying more and more of these different games – so as to play the same basic “swords and sorcery” scenario under yet another set of rules.

It’s always swords: anything involving guns had to confront the problem that getting shot usually results in swift death (or at best, immediate incapacitation) no matter how many experience points you have.

That’s why sci-fi is best suited to wargaming rather than role playing – because it doesn’t immediately mean you have to go home (or outdoors) if your little space marines or chaos squats in exo armour die in droves.

At least I got out in good time, thanks to the greater attractions offered by underage drinking and paid employment. It’s a slippery slope – one day you’re a teenage dungeon master, the next you’re a middle-aged English Civil War re-enactor. 

Seven Pieces of Folk Wisdom Debunked (that will blow your mind)

You must excuse my recent lack of blogging. I have mostly been working in the medium of Facebook status updates of late.

Today, I want to debunk, puncture and lampoon some bits of folk wisdom, which people continue to say, despite being manifestly and demonstrably untrue.

Why? I dunno. Attention maybe?

Muscle is heavier than fat

I have comforted myself with this for years. Whenever I start an exercise regime, and the immediate results are weight gain – I reassure myself that this is the reason.

It may be true for the same volumes of the two substances (look it up yourself – what do you think I am? Wikipedia?) but my problem is not a giant rubber ring of muscle around my abdomen.

He won’t get there any faster

I don’t know if real people actually say this or if it’s just something that old women in sitcoms say when someone overtakes them.

This is just wrong. All other things being equal, he will get there faster - because he’s going faster. There might be traffic lights ahead, but if he goes really fast, he’ll get through them before they go red.

Bullies are really cowards

Now, I know that this one has an educational or moralistic purpose behind it – but again, it’s just not true. Picking on someone weaker than oneself does not necessarily mean that you’re a coward.

It might mean you’re an arsehole, but that’s not the same as cowardice.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

Derived - I’m told - from Nietzsche, this has been debased into what “Loose Women” might deem philosophy. That is, it is bollocks that people repeat without thinking how completely false it is.

A life-threatening illness or injury will almost always leave you more susceptible to future ill-health. Nobody increases their resistance to bullets by shooting themselves.

Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight

While I have found that a red sky at night does indeed usually presage pleasant weather the following day, I think it is probably ascribing an unfairly restricted set of interests and concerns to shepherds to say – without qualification – that not getting rained on is a source of “delight”.

Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning

Shepherds are often up and out before sunrise and are therefore fully aware of weather conditions. No warning that comes too late is worthy of the name.

Also, very few people are shepherds. The amount of folk wisdom that applies directly to them is entirely disproportionate to their social, economic or demographic significance.

Don’t play with it or it’ll fall off

This is actually true. 

The Cat Who Let Himself Go

Rufus is our Maine Coon cat. He is nine years old. Or ten. I can never quite remember.

Anyway, he’s quite old by cat standards. Middle-aged at the very least.

Late last year, Rufus’ long-term companion Dudley died and we got a new cat, Simba.  

Dudley was of indeterminate but great age. He was fully grown when we got him and he lived for at least twelve more years. My wife may correct me on these details – the point is not the precise number. The point is, he was spectacularly old.

Anyway, imagining that (i) Rufus would be lonely and (ii) that this time (contrary to all previous experience) the kids would be interested in a new animal for more than a couple of days and that the new animal would not spend its entire life in hiding from the kids, we got Simba.

That was the name he came with, and the children insisted we keep it.

Anyway, Simba is now around two years old. So he’s a lot younger than Rufus.

New boy Simba

As you might expect, they do not get on brilliantly. Although they have settled into a tolerable routine, it is premised on Rufus bullying Simba whenever he gets the chance. He has even started to bully the dog a bit, sitting in her beds for pure wind-ups. 

At the same time as this new side has come out in Rufus, he has also pretty much DOUBLED his weight in the last six months. The long hair (semi-long hair, Elvira would correct me) in the picture above conceals it a bit - but it's basically the same thing as an enormously fat man wearing a even-more enormous football shirt to conceal his blobby contours. 

Rufus was never much of an athlete, and he still isn’t. So it’s not like he has stopped exercising.

The only thing it can be is that Rufus is eating EVERYTHING he gets the chance to eat.

The question is, is he doing this to intimidate Simba or to protect himself? Or, has he just decided, “Look at that young guy – I can’t keep up with him. And as I had my balls chopped off nine (or ten) years ago, what’s the point?”

I literally don't give a toss

David Bowie and his Opinions

“Scotland – stay with us”: so said David Bowie (via the medium of Kate Moss) at the Brit Awards earlier this week, causing a frenzy of online speculation over “what did he really mean?”, “how should we reassess his entire life and work in the light of that remark?” and “is it still ok to love him any more?” in the media.

You might as well be asking what David Bowie meant when he said “ha ha ha, hee hee hee, I’m a laughing gnome and you can’t catch me”.

Strange how “The Laughing Gnome” never seems to come up in the regular broadsheet Bowie wankfests.

I find the perplexity of apparently grown adults (men mostly) hearing an ageing pop star expressing a political opinion they disagree with pretty hilarious. Not as hilarious as Bowie’s performance in “Labyrinth”, but still pretty funny.

I don’t know why David Bowie supports the union, or for that matter why anyone would expect him to support Scottish independence. I suspect he wants Scotland to stay as part of the UK because he’s an old man and old men like things to stay the way they know them. Particularly old men who live abroad.

Surprise! Everyone has opinions. All the people of Scotland will have theirs too and those are the ones that matter. Well, the ones that bother to vote.

My opinion - which is worth precisely as little as David Bowie's - is here. 

Failing to Achieve Mindfulness

This weekend, I undertook an experiment: I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t muck about with my smartphone for two whole days.

The motivation came about on Friday evening, when I received a bunch of depressing work emails which I didn’t want to read. I knew, however, that I would not be able to resist doing so unless I took some dramatic action. So I declared to Elvira that I was going to “go without” until Monday.

By “go without” I naturally included a number of exceptions:

• Use as a music player was ok.
• People ringing me was ok.
• Amusing the children by showing them my photos was also ok.

Essentially, it was a matter of not using the internet.

What were the results of my experiment?

Well, I managed not to look at it all weekend.

I thought about looking at it a lot.

It’s the sort of thing one does at any empty moment. When you’re waiting for someone or something. When you’re bored and hoping something interesting might be there. When you’re in the middle of a conversation... and so on.

Did I learn anything from this experience?

No.

I’m afraid my life was not especially enriched. I didn’t discover new or wonderful vistas of anything that I was missing out on by not checking Facebook in every spare 30 seconds. The world didn’t end because I didn’t read the news. No new cat video went unshared. Nobody was deprived of important developments in my life. 

Maybe you have to do it for longer to achieve “mindfulness”. All I achieved was an inbox full of even more crap than it was on Friday evening. 

Calpol – The Miracle Drug

I have often wondered which medical speciality would be the quickest to learn, and whether other consultants look down upon their colleagues in the “easy” departments.

For many years, I presumed it would be something to do with feet. How much can go wrong with feet that you can’t blame on some other part of the body and make some other specialist responsible?

However, since becoming a parent I have come to the conclusion that training to be a paediatrician must be easier even than foot doctoring, because 95% of childhood health problems have one single cure – and that is Calpol.

For those of you not in the know, Calpol is paracetamol in a pink sugar solution. And it cures LITERALLY EVERYTHING.

When you are an adult, you wouldn’t dream of taking the same medicine for – say – a headache, an upset stomach, a cold, skin complaints, trench foot, hammer toe etc. And yet, Calpol sorts all of these out in children.

This is not just me saying this. I cannot remember a time taking our kids to the doctor (well,  a time of Elvira telling me about her taking the kids to the doctor) where Calpol has not been foremost amongst the medically-mandated remedies.

And kids bloody love it (admittedly, the white version does raise the occasional eyebrow, despite tasting exactly the same and having identical medicinal properties).

Granted, there may be some problems that Calpol can’t solve. But why is the top priority of the entire global pharmaceutical industry not the synthesis of an adult version of this miraculous wonder drug? 

Sometimes the best ideas are hiding in plain sight. 

Skylanders: Pester Force

My kids are obsessed with Skylanders. Your kids may be as well. Alternatively, you will have no idea what I am talking about.

Allow me to explain. “Skylanders” is, in the first instance, a series of computer games and, secondarily, a gigantic range of associated tat. There are seemingly hundreds of individual Skylander characters (some of whom are pictured above) and in the games, they run around doing quests, fighting, upgrading and buying stuff.

What – as far as I can see – makes this different is that to play any of these characters, you have to buy a figure of them.

A Skylander on a Portal of Power

The figures themselves are no great shakes. You can’t move their arms or legs and they appear to be of the same quality as something you’d get with a Happy Meal (despite being priced at £8.99 upwards...).

But, you stick this figure onto the “Portal of Power” – some sort of data-reading device that plugs into your

games console – and, hey presto, you are controlling that character on-screen.

Boys' infantile mania for collecting, listing and classification of made-up fantasy worlds has been successfully harnessed. Pokemon's "gotta buy 'em all" mantra has been successfully transferred to the physical world. My kids are five and three, but this has them completely hooked. For this week, anyway.

Now, I am not a “gamer”. When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum and a Commodore Amiga – and I played a lot of games on them, from Jet Set Willy to The Secret of Monkey Island. I did own a PlayStation One and the original Tomb Raider and subsequently a PlayStation Two and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. But I played the games I had when I had nothing better to do and had no desire to acquire any more or find out about acquiring any more.

My interest in gaming came to an end when I was unable to complete the “flying a ridiculously uncontrollable biplane through a bunch of hoops and then landing it safely in less than a minute” task about 2/3 of the way through San Andreas after about 100 attempts.

I wasted far more of my youth doing role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

So yes, I spent a lot of weekends as a dungeon master – go on, get it out of your system and we can move on. Finished?

Role playing games then were like computer games are like today, only in your head. In principle, you could choose whatever you wanted to do within the limits of your character’s abilities.

Freedom of choice, simplified

Computer games can now appear to do something similar because their memory capacities are so enormous as to give the illusion of freedom of choice, by storing so many different option-scenarios (rather than the “go left”, “go right” or “jump” options I am familiar with).

The whole matter of my RPGing teenage years and the damage it did to my ability to function as a 20-something are deserving of a blog in their own right.

The reason I mention these games is that, sooner or later, everyone who was into it got seduced into the matter of buying more and more supplementary bits and pieces – lead men or additional rule books or whatever – so that they didn’t have to imagine quite so much. It's hard work using your own imagination, whereas buying stuff is easy.

What I have to show for this today is three biscuit tins full of Space Orks in the garage and a well below average stock of interesting anecdotes from my mid-teenage years. 

To return to Skylanders. What the company responsible has done is genius – they have created a computer game that you have to keep buying more things for in order to get more out of it. Some bits, I am told, can only be accomplished using a character of the appropriate element (you know - earth, wind, fire etc). So if you don’t have one, you have to get one or you’re stuck.

Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets nor even fizzy drink manufacturers ever found a way of turning kids on their parents so effectively. You have to had it to Activision . They’ve come on a long way from the Spectrum version of “Ghostbusters” I used to play in the mid-1980s - complete with incomprehensible speech synthesis that mangled the word “ghostbusters” into something that sounded like “granny bastards” being shouted through a paper-and-comb.

Yes, I have to applaud this Machiavellian brilliance, even while I am disquieted by my three-year-old talking to me about “the undead”. I have to applaud it because I wish I’d thought of it.