Ban This Sick Filth

When I was a kid, I read comics like the Beano.

Before I get started, I have a confession. Once, I told people at my school that I had had a letter published in the Beano about dressing up as a ghost and frightening my family. That was a lie and I am sorry to everyone I misled. I don’t know why I lied about it – especially when it could so easily have been disproven by reference to back issues. I have been carrying that around with me for over 30 years now, and I feel a lot better getting it off my chest.

Anyway, my kids Roger Junior and Tancred also read comics. They are 8 and 6 years old, respectively. It seems like only yesterday I was telling you about how boring new-born babies are, about potty training, about pieces of rubbish found in nursery gardens. It’s like you, me, them and Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.  are all growing up together, isn’t it? It’s kind of like a Bildungsroman, only longer and without anyone ever really learning anything.

Dr Strange-Bean is not even a pun

I was glancing through Tancred’s copy of the latest issue of Mega! comic. You may not be familiar with this periodical. You may (on browsing it in your local newsagent perhaps) believe that by mistake you have picked up a 30-page advert for Lego.

The whole thing reeks of "will this do?" And I should know. 

It is not, however, my purpose today to complain about the bombardment of young children with marketing messages for Mario, Skylanders, Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog and whatever Marvel character happens to be being whored all over the place at any given time.

It’s not even my aim to draw attention to what appears to be the laziest photo feature I have ever seen

– this one, where Mr Bean’s face is superimposed on various pop culture figures familiar to children and a weakly punning name (involving the word “Bean”) added.

No, what I would like to draw your attention to is this cartoon strip, entitled “The Poo Crew”.

This concerns the adventures of a group of anthropomorphic stools. There they all are:

• Colonel Kernel - So called, I presume, because of the oft-remarked indigestibility of sweetcorn kernels
• MC Plopz and Big L.O.G - Some kind of faecal hip-hop collective.
• iFloat – Not really sure what iFloat’s deal is as he doesn’t seem to feature in the story. I can only surmise that he is buoyant.
• Dumpo – A kind of everyman turd, from whose perspective the story appears to be told. 
• Runny Ronnie – This name is fairly self-explanatory.

Now, this is very much the sort of thing I would have made up as a teenager. Indeed, my sons find few things in life as amusing as toilet functions. The magazine also came with a small plastic toy version of MC Plopz.

This all appeals to my non-parental side in a way, and yet I find it a little shocking. Back in the 80s or 90s, Spitting Image produced a sketch called “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds”, but that was in a late-night show for adults. This is in a comic for young kids. 

I would also like to draw your attention to the liberal use of the word “fart”. When I was young, this was deemed a rude word.

Anyway, as is often the case with these things, the story made no sense at all – in the end Big L.O.G saved the day by pouring a tin of beans over himself. This frightened off the rat and snake antagonists of the strip (I didn’t catch their names) for whom a living, speaking, bespectacled shit covered in beans is infinitely more disturbing than one that is not.

Oh and before anyone asks, I am claiming the right to reproduce these images under the Fair Use terms of the Copyright, Designs andPatents Act 1988 (as amended) – specifically Section 30 (for the purposes of criticism or review) and 30a (for the purposes of caricature, parody or pastiche), as well as the common law public interest defence – re the fact that parents are probably unaware of the contents of the comics they buy their kids and might be somewhat surprised to learn of them. So any lawyers reading this – go fuck yourselves.

Shocked by what I had seen, I put down Tancred’s copy of Mega! and had a look at Roger Jr’s copy of Toxic, wherein I began to read Team Toxic’s adventures in “Day of the Bottoms”.

Look at that - I got to the end of a post without mentioning Brexit or fascism. 

The Old Is Dying And The New Cannot Be Born

So...Brexit then... I have to say (along with everyone else in the universe) I did not expect that.

I admit that the last four blogs I wrote on this topic were penned (fingered?) firm in the certainty that Remain was going to win and that the status quo ex ante would soon reassert itself like it always does.

Except it didn’t.

Brexit as it has come to pass is an abomination. I didn’t have to be, but it is. There is seemingly no plan for what to do now, despite the Eurosceptics having had 30 years since the passage of the Single European Act to prepare for this moment.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear

He was funny in American Pie

So said the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who would surely have interpreted Brexit as a “morbid symptom” like fascism was in the aftermath of the First World War.

Oh, there he goes - how far did we get before he mentioned fascism again?

But I think that it’s a valid comparison at the sociological level (if not the practical political YET) because this vote is only a vote FOR the UK leaving the EU on the surface. Its true nature is not a vote FOR anything, but a vote AGAINST everything. It is a vast NO - a howl of rage, frustration and anguish at the perceived state of our society from a whole host of different and often incompatible perspectives.

In the brutal light of hindsight, it was entirely rational – if utterly cynical – of the Leave campaign to avoid putting forward any visionof what a post-Brexit UK would look like. Not as cynical as admitting within hours of the result that they had no intention of keeping the promises that were made, but getting there.

Only as a purely destructive force, an instinctive lashing-out could Leave have won. Any positive programme would have given the game away and alienated a part of their angry brigade into making a more-or-less rational choice between commensurable options, instead of just putting on a Halloween party for the collective Id.

But here we are.

Well, ok Leavers – you’ve smashed the system. You’re in charge now. What are we going to do?

Perhaps this will release the pent-up energies of that half of the British population who have been excluded and downtrodden by the EU and the political elite. Perhaps we will see a flourishing of creativity as we, the people, take the initiative and start to forge a new destiny.

Or perhaps not.

I fear not. Ever experience to date suggests that - rather than being capable of rising to the challenge it has set itself - the British public is like a toddler who has (i) been denied a second packet of crisps, and (ii) has then shat in his hands, (iii) wiped it on his face and the furniture and (iv) is screaming “MUMMY CLEAN ME UP NOW!”

I feel it’s only fair to point out that this scenario has never happened with my kids – in all of its details.

Who do they expect to make everything better? Who exactly is going to run this country you’ve taken back?

Postwar consumerism and our collective inability to realise that the party is over have generated such a sense of entitlement that we take for granted everything we have and see everything we don’t have as a conspiracy against us.

And when it doesn’t get better – because Vote Leave don’t deliver any of the things the Brexiters voted for; because the immigrants are still here, offending you by speaking Polish; because there are even fewer jobs to go round; because all the hospital staff have left to work in Germany – who will be the first to cry “betrayal”?

Even if Brexit doesn’t end in disaster, it will get worse before it gets better.

I might manage to be constructive about this next time and think about how we can all pull together to make the best of it - because there are opportunities alongside the risks and at the end of the day we are all stuck with each other for better or worse. Part of me wants to look be constructive, part of me wants to take the piss out of the tantruming Remainers who are now ironically keen on overturning democracy - and part of me wants to entitle this blog "I For One Welcome Our New Dipshit Overlords". I guess this is my compromise.

For now, as we prepare to turn London in the Pyongyang of Europe, I will leave you with these thoughts from 19th Century constitutionalist Walter Bagehot:

A people never hears censure of itself. No one will tell it that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more wisely than it governs. A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Shitshow That Never Ends...

A week certainly is a long time, in anti-politics just as much as in politics.

I wrote one version of this post last Wednesday and planned to publish it on Thursday or Friday. Then someone murdered an MP, allegedly shouting “Britain First” and then (on court record) giving his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain”.

Suddenly, the warnings I had jotted down that neither losing side would accept the result of Thursday’s referendum – such was the corrosion of commitment to democratic compromise and conspiratorialism the campaign had exposed – looked like truisms hardly worth stating.

Can the liver of British society filter out all this venom, or will it succumb to cirrhosis? Both sides have already got their respective Dolchstosslegendes to blame the stupid or “confused” voters or the establishment and the experts in its pockets ready, and are no doubt preparing their respective Werwolf Organisations to carry on stay-behind operations in future enemy territory.

If anything, the whole shitshow has demonstrated how thin the veneer of commitment to democratic and liberal values – when the chips are really down - is among large parts of the British public.

Well, to hell with you all:

• To hell with the Remainers who think that people who don’t agree with them are too thick to be allowed to vote.
• To hell with the Brexiters who are so irresponsible that they will cynically whip up a latent racism that their leaders (probably) don’t even believe in for votes
• AND to hell with the smirking abstainers, making their impotence a badge of honour, who would rather preserve their immaculate lack of responsibility for anything than have to make a serious choice.

A place for sanctimonious posturing, more like

It’s clear to me (now) that political apathy and the lack of difference between the parties are the only reasons we don’t have to endure this sort of theatre of hate every five years. I suppose Scotland gave us some hints of what would happen – where plenty of ultras are still denying the validity of the result two years on. We should do more to foster apathy and to lower the stakes in future.

But this time, the stakes are really high.

If you don’t stand up for what you have or what you want, then what you get is what you deserve.  

I have voted Remain for reasons relating to me and my family. You may disagree, and that’s your right. If you disagree, use what leverage you have to bring about your favoured outcome. I can respect people who vote Leave, even if they’re voting for reasons I think are bad reasons. I have no respect for people who stand by and dodge responsibility. So I will say it again:

If you don’t stand up for what you have or what you want, then what you get is what you deserve.  

I Decided To Vote Remain

I voted Remain, despite the referendum still being over a week away. “How is that possible?” I hear you ask.

Well, I have a standing postal vote – meaning that I get all my ballot papers a couple of weeks in advance and send them in, by means of an extremely complicated but nevertheless freepost envelope. 

I know that this offends some people’s sensibilities – did our forefathers fight and die so that I could avoid having to walk to a local primary school after work once every five years?

LOL his name is funny

Well, for anyone who holds postal voters in disdain, let me remind you that were it not for postal votes Austria would have a rebranded neo-Nazi as president. What’s more, it now has a man whose name sounds almost exactly like “bell end”, which I regard very much as a successful killing of two birds with one stone.

I genuinely agonised over the decision, and weirdly it was my own previous blog that convinced me more than anything. Yes, I am THAT GOOD.

The process of sorting my thoughts out to a point where I was roughly satisfied enough with them to put them in front of you, dear readers, showed me that I had to choose between the two options that are ACTUALLY in front of me, not the options I might like.

Firstly, as someone who runs a business, it is in my interests to avoid economic instability. If companies stop investing or start leaving the UK, me and my employees and shareholders will suffer. End of. The UK might be able to negotiate trade deals with the EU and the rest of the world, but in the meantime, the businesses that I trade with will have stopped spending money while they wait and see what happens.

That is a totally pragmatic argument, based on economic self-interest. GDP statistics and headline figures are irrelevant to me. You might disagree.

Secondly, for me, the Brexit campaign has squandered whatever merit its arguments might have had by pandering to and stoking anti-immigrant racism. You can’t vote for Brexit without implicitly supporting that agenda, because a vote for Brexit will lead to people coming to power who draw whatever legitimacy they have from THAT impulse.

A clean and noble Brexit option is not on the table – in THIS referendum, the one that is ACTUALLY HAPPENING, leaving the EU is inextricably entwined with social authoritarianism and nativism. 

That is, with the first steps on the road to fascism. Before you lose your minds, let me clarify: a vote for Brexit is not a vote for fascism. BUT it's a vote which makes it more likely and predictably so. 

Because when the UK is out of the EU and finds that it still can’t stop large scale legal or illegal immigration, what then? The inevitable next step will be to turn on people who are already here. And where will that lead? 

I live in Bradford, by the way, before anyone says I don't know what the effects of native and immigrant communities refusing to communicate are really like. 

So that is a “values” argument – about the sort of country I want to live in. I am sad that Brexit has ended up meaning what it does. But it does. I don’t want to be complicit in handing power to people who will make everything worse. I am not voting for THAT.

The alternative

The EU may be shit, but the alternative is even shitter. 

I’m voting for the status quo because the alternative will almost certainly make life horrible. If that’s just a vote “against” Iain Duncan Smithism and not a vote “for” anything, well I accept the charge of week-on-week inconsistency.

That’s what I think. If you think I’m wrong, that’s fine. I don’t think you’re stupid or malicious because you disagree with me - and I'm sorry if I called anyone who isn't one a fascist. I hope we can still be friends afterwards.

Just one more of these EU referendum posts to come next week and then that’s it!

Don't Make Me Think!

Along with “when is ODHSNM coming back?” and “what are you doing behind those bushes?”, the question I have been asked most in recent months is “how should I vote in the EU referendum?”

Long-time readers will recall that this blog has been on the wrong side of every major political controversy of recent years – from proportional representation, through Scottish independence, to Albania’s 2011 Eurovision entry.

As such, the hordes of journalists, pundits and other halfwit gobshites that make up “the media” have been clamouring (so far fruitlessly) to elicit the views of Roger of Sicily – knowing, of course, that whatever he says will be precisely that thing which fails to come to pass. Like the political inverse of Paul the psychic octopus.  

My molluscular counterpart

Well, before I give you your instructions, let me talk about the two campaigns for a moment. Last year, I said that the 2015 general election campaign was depressing, but never have I seen a more dismal spectacle than both sides of this EU referendum debate.

Remain appears not to have a positive case to put for EU membership, or if they do they are afraid to make it, and so fall back on increasingly laughable and outlandish claims about how terrible the consequences of not voting for them will be.

Leave, in turn, seems to have gone beyond making any sort of argument for its point of view and just wants to stamp its feet and shout about how everything is unfair – like a surly five-year-old up long past his bedtime.  

Both campaigns – like the Donald Trump phenomenon in the USA – show how we are now in a post-factual political culture. I’m not claiming that coinage – I got it from this article, but it’s probably been around for ages. As Ronald Reagan said (or maybe he didn’t) “facts are stupid things”.

To the partisans of both sides, facts are only facts to the extent that they support their particular point of view. Claims of fact that contradict it are not simply mistaken – they are wilful, deliberate lies put forth by the selfish (if not outright evil) opposition to manipulate you, you poor innocent dupe.

There are good arguments to be made for staying in the EU. And there are good arguments to be made for leaving the EU. Some of those arguments - on both sides – are based on true facts about the world. Some of them are based on value-judgments, which I don’t believe can ever be true or false. I’m kinda old fashioned in believing that the world we live in is a mixture of facts and values, that aren’t always compatible with one another.  

There are good arguments on both sides of his referendum debate, but no one appears to be making them. We seem to have reached a point where every genuine point of disagreement devolves into “culture war”, which is an infantile kind of politics. It comes from the same place as the ever-growing enthusiasm for conspiracy theories – and that place is simply intellectual laziness.

It’s laziness that’s the problem with “the public” – it’s not stupidity.

Because it’s hard to deal with a situation where both sides can be partly right and partly wrong, and you have to choose between options that aren’t simply black and white, isn’t it? And it’s even harder to take responsibility for your choice!

It’s a lot easier to say that you are right because your heart is in the right place; that facts that don’t fit are lies; and that people who disagree with you are not just wrong but also bad.

Not the answer

Just like it’s a lot easier to say that everything is controlled by corporations or the Jews or space lizards than it is to admit that the world is complicated and maybe – just maybe – you don’t actually understand all of it.

Just like it’s so much easier to say “they’re all the same” than it is to listen to what the differences are and take the responsibility of judging and justifying your judgement.

What depresses me the most is how this line of argument (if you can call it that) has been taken up by ordinary people. My Facebook news feed (for example) is full of people I otherwise like and respect, on both sides, making the most ridiculous claims – not about the merits of their own opinions, but of the malign intentions of anyone who holds the opposing view. Again and again, I see the opinion-cart put in front of the fact-horse, without regard to the stable door of complex, imperfect reality.

I’m as bad as any of you. I’m sitting here behind my ironic facade – does he really mean it? Or is he joking? Who will be the first to pose the immortal question “U OK hun?”

No, I’m not going to tell you how to vote. I don’t know how I’m going to vote, and when I do, I will take responsibility for it.  Just vote however you’re going to vote for the right reasons. Don’t vote against anyone. Vote for something.

It's Not You - It's Me

“In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve,” said Joseph de Maistre. He didn’t mean it in a good way.

I have lived through quite a few general election campaigns and paid good deal of attention to the last few. I have never witnessed one this depressing.

It has, however, at least given us something new – alongside the traditional all-you-can-eat dogshit buffet – in the form of parties campaigning on the basis of who a vote for them would exclude from a future coalition government.

That the political parties and the media have utter, naked contempt for us – the voters – is not new.

But in the past, the voters have always at least been allowed the “king for a day, fool for a lifetime” privilege of being treated as though it was them who choose the government. Not this time. Now we are being treated to the spectacle of post-election coalition wrangling before any ballots have even been cast.

As anyone who voted Lib Dem or Conservative in 2010 – and cared – will have noticed, you can’t be sure that what it says on the tin bears even the scantest resemblance to what’s inside any more. Not, of course, that you ever could, I suppose. It was a “coalition” of a different sort that inflicted the Iraq War on the world.

I'd much rather have than one of these than a school for my kids

It’s a common lament that the political media focuses too much on personalities and not enough on policies. That’s true up to a point: apart from being pretty sure that whoever wins, taxpayers like me will be expected to stump up £100 billion for Trident (the most expensive sock stuffed down the underpants in human history), I have very little idea what else the various parties are offering. Or rather are pretending to offer right now in the hope of fooling enough of us peasants into putting them in power so that – much like Charles I – they can do whatever the fuck they like without reference to us for five more years.

OK, so the political class despises us and we despise them. But considering how many needy neurotics the British public is clearly made up of, it surprises me how rarely anyone seems to wonder “what if it’s not everyone else – what if it’s me?”

What if the public gets held in contempt because it never disproves that it is WORTHY of contempt? In the past, people could kid themselves that it was the papers shoving “who is the best-dressed leader’s wife?” articles down their throats – now the analytics will prove that THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT, if they have to have politics at all.

So what’s the answer? Well, clearly not voting isn’t it.

A year or so ago (back when I used to blog regularly...) I wrote in praise of Russell Brand and his anti-voting point of view. Actually, it was less a blog about Russell Brand and more of an opportunity to quote long passages from HG Wells, with whom I was then obsessed.

Over a hundred years ago – A HUNDRED YEARS AGO! - Wells said that democratic elections give ordinary people “an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control”.

All that’s changed is the number of party organisations.

Best-dressed party leader, 1922

Churchill said:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

I sympathise a bit with the idea of refusing to participate in a charade of democracy. But then I have no doubt whatsoever that the people who make it most frequently and loudly are precisely those who would shirk the responsibility of an active, participatory democracy most vigorously.

It IS much easier to criticise than to come up with a constructive alternative - and it's even easier to parrot criticisms other people have thought up for you. 

That doesn’t mean that your criticisms should be ignored just because you don’t have all the answers. But if all the carping about politicians all being the same etc was put to some constructive use – who knows? – maybe an alternative that doesn’t equate everything that is not precisely what we have now with totalitarianism or dictatorship could be figured out.

We get bland mannequins like Cameron and Miliband because we demand them. We have earned them. 90% of government is administration and the remaining 10% is presentation (mostly making out that the other is Hitler or Mao or whatever).

Come on! The difference between “destroying the NHS” and “saving the NHS” is a fractional difference in budget and private sector involvement AND YOU KNOW that any promise made on these points will be treated as negotiable in future. What we are seeing on a large scale is the narcissism of small differences literally played out in all its tribal idiocy.

They don’t believe it. You don’t believe it. So why are we doing this at all?

How to Win School Appeals – part 1

It's a minefield...

Roger Jr has been at school for 7 days now at our first choice primary school. Getting him there, however, has been a battle – which only now do I feel philosophical enough to tell the tale of and make light of.

It all started back in November 2011, when we got a bundle of forms from the local authority asking us to declare our five choices of primary schools for Roger Jr to go to.

Fast-forward two months, and a couple of nights before the deadline, we took a look at them and jotted down (i) the local school which all the other kids up our road went to and (ii) a handful of others.

You may well say that not doing piles of research, bribing councillors and vicars and taking long-lens photographs of headmistresses in compromising positions was the first place we went wrong. You may be right – but what reason did we have to doubt that Roger Jr would get into the same school as all the other children who lived up the same road and therefore at more or less exactly the same distance from the school?

Before I continue, let me explain a couple of things. This may not be how it is everywhere else – and for that reason, I would recommend that you read the paperwork you get sent thoroughly and often – but in Bradford straight-line distance from door of dwelling to door of school is the main determinant of priority for admission. Kids in care and siblings of kids already at the school get first dibs (and to the latter, we will return in due course), but then the school’s favour beams outward like a light and blesses the first cohort of nippers it touches.

Cohort? Yes, we have enrolled Roger Jr in a Roman Legionary school. Discipline first, eh?

No, what I mean is that – thanks to Tony Blair – primary schools have to take in reception kids in batches of 30. The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 says that in the first two years of school, the ratio of pupils to teacher must not exceed 30:1. This – as a parent appealing against an admissions authority decision – is your primary enemy.

Already, you can perhaps see that this is an area best not left to chance.

Anyway, back to our story. Time passes and soon it’s April. We get a letter through from the council and it says that Roger Jr has not been offered a place at any of the five schools we applied for. Instead, he has been given one at a school we have never heard of, in a place best characterised as “a demilitarised zone”.

You see, when you are told that as a parent you have a “choice” of schools, this is not what you are being given at all. You are being asked for preferences so that, in the unlikely event of your child being eligible for admission to more than one of those schools, the council has a tie-breaker. That is all your views count for here.

You see, it turns out that there had been a glut of births in Roger Jr’s school year. And as such, the blessed light emitted by our school of choice (or preference) was guttering like a candle in an airtight room, reducing its circumference from over 0.6 miles to a mere 0.45 miles.

That is, there were so many kids of school age apparently living closer to that school than us (and we will return to that “apparently” later on) that we didn’t qualify - for our number one choice or indeed for any of the five we had named.

And so, because we didn’t live close enough to the school 0.6 miles away, Roger Jr was to be shipped off to a school some 2.5 miles away – a triumph of bureaucratic logic.

It looked alright, but not right for us

Now, I don’t wish to slag off the school Roger Jr was given a place at too much. They’re doing the best they can given their location. And they seem to have nice facilities – schools that have been in special measures often do. They had very nice, big playing fields around the school, although I suspect that large areas were probably heavily mined to deter burglary. The staff seemed pleasant enough, and the head was very good about it when we told her that we intended to fight tooth and nail to ensure that our son didn’t go to her school.

So we appealed.

Now, friends and readers of a socialistic bent may disapprove of our having done this.

If every middle class parent whose kids get sent to a “bad” school exploits their special powers of pushiness (a little middle class secret – you get sent on a course where they teach you all that stuff as soon as you start paying 40% tax), then only poor kids will go to the bad schools and rich kids to good schools.

And that, they will tell you (in a bit of reasoning whose rather disturbing premises they are rarely keen to examine more closely) guarantees that bad schools stay bad and good schools stay good.

Well, let me take on my detractors. You are, of course, entitled to your opinions. However, unless you have children of your own, in this case they are worth precisely NOTHING SO SHUT UP.

Not only do I challenge any parent to admit that they are prepared to accept an inferior start in life because of their political views – I also accuse them of mistreating their children. I see no difference between that and, say, forcing your four-year-old to be a vegan because of your views.  

Sorry, but all abstract positions about what is right or just for everyone go out of the window when it’s your own children involved.

Ask me if my preference is for a fair society or for my kids to get on - I don’t have to research my answer to that.

Coming up in Part 2! I might actually explain “how to win school appeals”!

London – Not as bad as expected

A few weeks ago, I scoffed at the thought of going to London during the Olympics. And right now, I am on my way home after having done so.

Like most people whose sole window on reality is what they see on TV and read on the internet, I had expected something resembling all-day Tokyo rush hour supervised by the Army with corporate blackshirts snatching anyone who looked out of place through secret doors - an early glimpse of the UK’s inevitable descent into dystopian, totalitarian nightmare.  

However, it wasn’t like that at all. It was much like any other day in London. That’s not saying much, but it certainly wasn’t 1984.

To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed not to see a single missile launcher or have to dive out of the way of a speeding dignitary in a Zil Lane. Indeed, the number of people in tracksuits I saw was no higher than a typical day’s viewing in Leeds.

I even saw a little shop with a set of Olympic rings in the window. I took a picture – no doubt scaring the shit out of the owner, taking me for a LOCOG goon – but I thought twice about sticking it on here. Let it never be said that Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind. is a snitch. Bloggers and social media are already doing more than their fair share of turning the whole populace against the idea of freedom of speech.

Well, here’s my own little marketing ambush:

If you like the London 2012 Olympic Games, give me some of your money.

If you don’t hear from me again, assume I have been disappeared into the back of a migraine-inducing purple van.

From my experience today - apart from the splashes of lurid magenta besmeared across everything -  you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole event was actually being produced on a sound stage at Pinewood or in Pixar’s studios and that the entire idea of the Olympics actually “taking place” in London was some elaborate Baudrillardian joke.

While controversy surrounding the Games has focused on the cost and the restrictions on Londoners’ freedoms, for me there are some major issues that have not been given due attention:

1. Barbarians are allowed to take part – this is in clear breach of the Olympic spirit. Was their Greek even tested?

2. Competitors are also not naked

3. Total lack of chariot-based events

4. No oxen were sacrificed at all during the opening ceremony. Like myself, the gods are likely to have found Trevor Nelson’s commentary a poor substitute

Seriously LOCOG, Zeus is a volatile deity at the best of times. 

He has “enforcement officers” of his own, and I’d hate to see Paul McCartney get struck by lightning.  

Thierry Ennui

God, I hate football. Well, allow me to clarify slightly. Football itself is ok as far as it goes I suppose.  I’m not completely averse to the attractions of kicking a ball. What I hate is as follows (in Miss World order):

3. Professional football.

2. People talking about professional football.

1. People talking about professional football like in a way that supposes it is any more important than – say - what happened on Coronation Street last night.

It's not.

Listen - talking about football and footballers is no different from talking about wrestling and The Undertaker. Having pictures of footballers in and amongst your personal effects is no different from having a poster of Edward Cullen on your wall.

It IS a soap opera. Have you noticed that the media spends more time reporting on managers' complaints about referees' decisions, "will he won't he" transfer stories and the humorous off-field escapades of "characters" than the actual results of matches?

There’s nothing that makes me want to chop off a nut more than the prospect of going into a pub that says “Big screen Sky Sports” on the outside. 

Here’s a little suggestion for newspaper sports editors. Why not rename your football supplement “Shouting Men”? That is invariably what you are going to put a picture of on the front of it.

Oh, and here’s a second suggestion – next time you think about how to make a pun using the word “Roo”, why not throw yourself in front of a train instead? 

Remember, remember what actually happened

The demand that x, y or z "should be banned" is regularly heard these days – generally directed at things or ways of behaving that the demander personally doesn't like.

No matter how liberal, libertarian or laissez-faire an individual is most of the time, pick on something they subjectively object to and you can generally rely on the fascist within to surface and call for the coercive power of the state to be thrown behind the removal of other people's freedoms to do, be or have something they disapprove of.

So it is not without some trepidation and discomfort that I ask "why in god's name doesn't the government ban the public sale of fireworks?"

From now until around early December, every night is Bonfire Night for someone. As soon as it gets dark until around 11pm, someone somewhere within earshot of your house is going to be setting off small incendiary bombs for their own amusement without regard to the welfare of you, your kids, your pets, farm animals etc etc.

No doubt some of them will be maimed or killed – as they are every year – and a load of buildings will be burned down, either by stupidity or intentional malice or the combination of both that appears to be the hallmark of 21st century Britain.

It seems crazy to me that, when pretty much every other way of behaving anti-socially or self-destructively is on the Nanny State's agenda for eradication, the selling of explosives to children and drunks for use in their own homes is not higher up the list.

At the moment though, it's not just fireworks that are dragging out the whole Bonfire Night misery over an ever-growing stretch of the year. Disaffected middle class people the world over seem to have adopted the image of Guy Fawkes from the film V for Vendetta as in some way symbolic of their tiresome festival/holiday/protests against capitalism.

Never mind that every V mask purchased profits Time Warner (Dow Jones – TWX; current market capitalisation - around $35 billion; preferred economic system – capitalism). Guy Fawkes is a pretty crap symbol of anti-authoritarianism.

When he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I in 1605, Fawkes and his pals were emphatically NOT doing it in the name of democracy, freedom, socialism, organic wind farms or anything else that our protesting friends would believe in.

He was, in fact, trying to kill a Protestant king in order to put a Catholic monarch on the throne. I've got nothing against Catholics TODAY, but the experience of sectarian strife under the last two explicitly Catholic British monarchs – Mary and James II – suggests this would have led to the destruction of any nascent democratic stirrings in a torrent of blood and burning heretics.

That's not to say, of course, that the Protestant royals of the time were any less inclined towards violent repression on religious grounds. The main problem, I reckon, was perhaps more that back then rulers felt that political power implied a right to slaughter not only anyone who didn't DO what they wanted them to do, but also didn't THINK what they wanted them to think.

Nevertheless, I think if you look at the history of Protestant countries and Catholic countries in Europe from the 1600s onwards, it seems reasonable to conclude that the former ended up rather more liberal and democratic a lot more quickly than the latter. That's just what happened in history, innit?

Anyway - in the same way that pseudo radicals are content to forget that dear old Che Guevara ordered the execution of civilians because he looks good on a T shirt, only someone who didn't really have a clue what Guy Fawkes was trying to achieve would adopt him as a democratic icon. 

Safety first!

Here's a picture I recently took out of a car window on the M25.

It is a Honda Accord - maybe a Civic, I don't know - in the back of a Luton van coming up to the Dartford crossing (southbound).

As you can see, it is securely fastened in place by a piece of rope holding the tailgate up.

No doubt the thoughtful driver also put the handbrake on to make doubly sure that nothing could possibly go wrong with this little arrangement.

Feel free to rip this picture off and stick "Epic Fail" across it if you so wish.

Unrelatedly, I feel it is only right and proper that I provide you with material evidence to back up all this "moustache big talk" I've been engaging in recently. Well here it is:

A riot of my own

It would undoubtedly be far too cynical to suggest that the London riots came at just the right time for the Metropolitan Police.

In the wake of the phone hacking scandal – and its subsidiary, rather more important corollary, the "exposure of massive corruption in public authorities" scandal – the Met's reputation was not so much in the toilet as round the U-bend, through the pipes and gently pullulating in a big circular tank somewhere in the countryside.

And yet, just a couple of weeks later, the country is united behind it, thanks to the capital's very own tracksuit-clad lumpenproletariat. There's nothing like a threat to property to remind you who your friends are, eh?

Still, at least the London rioters had some vague notion of a pretext (the shooting of Mark Duggan by Met officers).

Their provincial brethren haven't even bothered, unless you are still accepting "errr...the cuts?" as a remotely valid or remotely sincere excuse for any and every kind of nihilistic stupidity.

You know how I plan on showing my opposition to the closure of local libraries? By stealing luxury luggage from Louis Vuitton and burning a bus. You know why I pooed in my pants, rubbed it on my face and threw what was left at a passer-by? The cuts. Oh, and no one listens to me.

Pleasingly, not even the Guardian seems to maintain that what's been going on for the last few nights is in any sense a "protest" – although there are plenty still plugging away with "root causes" explanations out there. Oh, it's all because the poor dears get stop-and-searched a bit. Boo hoo. It's all because that nasty posh man wants to take away their table tennis club. My heart bleeds. I prefer this explanation.

Bradford has been remarkably quiet throughout the current events so far – probably for reasons implied in the photo above. After all, where's the profit in looting a pound shop?