Mystery Pants

As a dog-walker, I spend a lot of time looking at the ground. On the one hand, I am trying to avoid stepping in anything unpleasant. On the other, I am trying to avoid tripping over a deranged, half-blind, half-deaf whippet who is unable (or unwilling) to walk in a straight line.

This means that I see a lot of litter. And dog shit.

Better to see it than not to see it.

But I never cease to be surprised at how many discarded items of clothing I see.

Right now, from my office, I can see a lost glove on the street. Yawn. Everybody loses gloves. That’s just carelessness or bad luck.

For someone to lose a pair of underpants (pictured) there must be a real story.

Whose pants were they?
How did they come off?
Why did they get left behind?

Here’s another pair I found on the same road.

These are not worn grey emergency pants. These are prestigious, name-brand pants (the ones at the top are Calvin Kleins, in case the waistband is unreadable). What fall from grace led to their being cast adrift?

Abandoned single shoes are commonplace in city centres. Staggering screechy lady-drunks lose them falling off kerbs. Bellowing violent man-drunks lose them misplacing a wild kick at a prone rival’s head.

But here is a woman’s leopard print top – the pattern is still just about discernible. Actually I think that's what it is. It could be another pair of pants. Possibly belonging to Tarzan. 

Whatever it is, this has been sat in the gutter at the top of a residential street I often pass along for months. 

What is the history of this lonely garment? How did it end up cast out on the street, never to be returned for? Is that the face of Jesus at the bottom right?

Oh, but that these pants could talk - the stories they would tell us. 

Waiting...

A few days ago, I spent eight hours waiting.

I was waiting for the words of a wise man – a very busy wise man, who walked past me and glanced at me several times during that eight long long hours.

Eventually, the wise man came to me, poked me, muttered a few trite words – which I could have told him some eight hours earlier – and sent me on my way.

Can you guess where I was?

An NHS hospital ward of course. Long story, but basically some stitches I had got a week earlier fell out, so I went to A&E.

Always a depressing experience among the sick and the lame, this was only brightened by the presence of a terrified researcher from the Discovery Channel asking the various inmates if they were there by virtue of an “amusing mishap” and if so, whether they wished to be featured on a programme called “Bizarre ER”.

I don’t think she found anybody whose symptoms or circumstances were funny, or who wanted the world to perceive them as such.

Had I simply been battered in a drunken brawl, I would have been stitched back up and sent on my way – but because this was a “post operative complication” I was sent upstairs to the surgery ward after about an hour.

And that was when my ordeal really began.

I arrived at 12.45pm – I left at around 9pm. In that time, I was continually assured that the “senior doctor” would be there any moment and that without his say-so, nobody could do anything. In that time I was given (i) two cups of coffee and (ii) a sandwich, at 7.30pm when I went and told the nurses I thought I was going to pass out.

I am convinced I left that hospital in a much worse state of health than I arrived in. I was certainly in a much worse mood.

Now, I could take this opportunity to blast the NHS, but why bother? I don’t want a better NHS – I just want to never have to use it again. It would be nice if doctors treated patients like human beings rather than infected gobbets of blood-flecked mucus and hair they have found smeared on a door handle, but I guess you have to pay cash for that.

No, dear friends – it is the waiting I want to talk about.

I hate waiting anyway. I value my time and I value other people’s time, so I always try to minimise the time anyone spends waiting for me, and I like that courtesy to be reciprocated. I take being kept waiting (unnecessarily) by someone as an explicit statement that they believe their time is more valuable than mine – and I take that as an insult.

But if you know that what you are waiting for is not going to turn up for, say, 30 minutes, an hour, eight hours – then that is a different matter. You can do something with that time. You know what is going on and you are in possession of yourself.

It is the imminent anticipation of something being always about to happen right now, that makes waiting unbearable. You daren’t do anything else, in case you miss it or – god forbid – keep them waiting for you.

Waiting is boring, and being bored is an affront to life. We have only so much time in this life. To waste it by choice is stupid, but at least it’s your own decision. To have it wasted by others is an offence.

That eight hours I spent in a dingy little cubicle being ignored has taught me the value of time and the evil of boredom.

Mayan Apocalypse Liveblog - Half-Time Analysis

T-175: Whooo-ooo, we’re halfway there! 175 days have elapsed since I started liveblogging the run up to the end of the world, and 175 days remain.

Let’s review the main portents so far:

 - Wettest June on record – check

 - Imminent collapse of global economic and social fabric – check

 - Nadal out of Wimbledon – check

If there’s anything left in this world you want to do or see, you’d really better get on with it. Look how quickly the first half of all the time that remains to us flew by! And with 25 Sundays between now and then, that's a mere 150 shopping days. 

What is Britain for?

An awful lot of democratic states seem to be facing crises of legitimacy at the moment.

Greece is the extreme example with Italy close behind – the EU and global finance deemed their democratically-elected governments unfit to manage the task of paying back their debts, and so economists were installed in their stead.  

A risky move, you might think, in countries where democratic roots are so shallow (Greece only got rid of its military government in 1974, just seven years before it joined that bastion of democracy-on-paper, the EU).

At the same time, the year-old Arab Spring and every-growing protests in Russia show that it’s not just democratic governments that have a problem. Dictators are having a hard time of it as well.

Then look at the USA, where Obama can’t get anything done at all thanks to an increasingly bonkers opposition who appear to think he’s a communist (showing just how far in the world they must have travelled). Each side is delegitimising their political system by – in essence – talking so much shite about the other.

Even here in the UK, we have a few issues beyond the usual matters of no-one giving enough of a toss to vote or take part in the political process themselves.

First of all, after the massive bender that was the post-war socioeconomic settlement, we’re facing a hangover of epic proportions in which real sacrifices are going to be demanded of the citizenry.

Secondly, that is coinciding with Scotland staging a referendum on independence, in a bid to become the new Slovakia.

Both of these seriously threaten to upset the ideas that our way of life, place in the world and sense of who (or whatever) are written in stone, god-given gifts which could never be changed, no matter what the silly foreigners may get up to.

The idea of a permanent retreat of the welfare state and Scottish nationalism both challenge whatever it is that holds this society together, and start to beg the question “what is Britain for”?

I can see how the idea of a “nation state” helps you to get round that problem by giving a specious rationale to the idea that these people, here, somehow ought to have a common state and a common government.

But isn’t that all rather quaint 18^th century coffee-house chitchat which – when people started taking it a bit too seriously – ended up reaching its logical bloody conclusion in the first half of the 20^th century?

Although he’s leading an ostensibly “nationalist” party, I think it’s a fair bet that Alex Salmond is not envisaging a “Blut und Boden” idea of Scottishness. Boden maybe, Blut no thanks.

Like most sane politicians, Salmond recognises that national identity today can’t be a question of shared ethnicity – real or imaginary. When you acknowledge the reality of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity that exist in almost every country in Europe, ultimately I don’t think it is possible to avoid the idea of that the nation state (in this sense) must distill down into some kind of racism. I hope it’s unnecessary, dear readers, to add the final term of that argument – that racism is BAD.

The SNP can avoid getting too far into the mire of what “Scottish” means by defining their national struggle as one of liberation from the Westminster government – and playing on all the historic hostilities that arouses. And that’s fair enough. It is, of course, much easier to stir people up on the basis of what you’re against than to spell out exactly what you are for. And you’ll only get the chance to show what you’re for – and to work it out for yourself – by stirring the people up enough to take power.

Neither Scotland nor whatever the post-independence UK might turn out to be called (if they keep the Queen, maybe we can call it the Disunited Kingdom or DK?) can – in my humble opinion – rely on an exclusive idea of national identity to legitimate itself.

Not just because it is ultimately incompatible with democratic values in a multicultural age, but because pretty much every example in history of multiethnic states that tried to enforce the hegemony of one group – or pretend that their values were everyone’s values – failed dismally, and more often than not bloodily.

Whether it’s Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia or the Roman goddam Empire they ended up the same. And that’s why I find “developments” like this so depressing. Presumably, all those other historical exemplars failed because they were whacky, barbaric foreigners who get far too excited about things.

So the government is going to make immigrants speak proper English, learn British history and take pride in British values is it? One might suggest that it should perhaps take a look at the native population and ask itself whether its priorities are right.

Oh, it would be all too easy to go off on a rant about the ghastly poor and thick people we - the favoured - have to share our island with.

But what I am wondering today is rather what exactly the British values “we” are supposed to be teaching “them” are.

Hold that thought, and let me turn to what’s left of the economy.

Let me suggest unto you, dear readers, that up until the end of the Second World War – the last time we realised that we had no money left at all – the UK could command a degree of loyalty from its subjects on the basis of its self-appointed mission to civilise the world through the values of rapacious capitalist exploitation, tempered with slightly more Christian-infused pity for the victims than most other colonial powers. It was great to be British because it meant you were better than everyone else, and Britain had a purpose which was to share its awesomeness with everyone else, no matter how reluctant they might be about it. And we were winning, so we must have been right – right?

Since then and since decolonisation, that mission is obviously gone. And what has taken its place? I suggest that all it is, is the idea of guaranteed, state-underwritten rising living standards. Losing an empire was compensated for by fridges, TVs and cars for everyone. Economic growth gradually took the place of civilisation as the “British mission”. And while we were winning, we were still right.

Now what though?

If you and your family getting steadily richer and more comfortable was the only reason you acquiesced in the social, political and economic shenanigans of the last 70 years – and finally, I get to my point - why the hell would anyone be prepared to accept the long-term sacrifices now demanded for the sake of governments and their credit ratings?

Why would the Greeks beggar themselves, their children and their grandchildren to rescue something that fucked up so badly the one thing (in their eyes) it had to do?

“Because they only benefited for so long on credit, and now they have to pay it back?” you may say. That argument might work if one accepts that I can owe something for bad decisions someone else took, that “we are all in this together”, or that my suffering doesn’t matter so long as my country recovers its former glory.

Who thinks like that today? Not many people, in my opinion – and most of them, I suspect, are no longer paying tax.

While I don’t feel it myself, I can understand the nationalist answer to that question. If you are part of a “tribe” or a family, you naturally feel like to you owe that group something at a visceral, pre-rational level. And so “national pride” or a “national idea” can sustain a society through adversity.

But our societies are not “nations” and our states are not “nation states” any more, and there’s no point wishing that they were.

I just read a book called The New Society by Walther Rathenau - painted here by Edvard Munch. The Scream guy. Rathenau was the foreign minister of Germany shortly after the First World War, when that country had lost everything – not only total economic collapse but also a collapse of faith in what it was for. A few years after writing that book, he was murdered by proto-Nazis, who had a pretty clear idea of what they thought Germany was for and didn’t like his alternative.

Rathenau recognised that narrow economic interest wasn’t enough to hold a society together, but while he was a nationalist he hated the chauvinism that he held responsible for Germany’s collapse. He then went off into some romantic idea of a spiritual mission, which I must confess to not really understanding.

But I reckon he was onto something. It’s only with a sense of common identity and common values that we can accept our individual subordination to the interests of the group. And private gain and indifference to one another is not enough to secure that. Without knowing what it’s for, the British won’t tolerate the economic demands that Britain’s future (apparently) requires.

I just hope that a new, inclusive sense of identity and shared values can be found – not the sterile multiculturalism of the last 20 years but something that has the power to unite diverse people substantively – before the age-old answer of retreat into narrow nationalistic paranoia rears its ugly head again with a new, respectable mask.

Because right now, there are no British values to teach that are worth the trouble.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m out of touch. If you think so, tell me below. Just don’t think it couldn’t ever happen here.

T-303, by the way. 

Dear Amazon...

I only received one email on Christmas Day, and that was from my dear friends at Amazon.co.uk, telling me about all the Boxing Day bargains they were offering.

This seemed the height of optimism, considering all the millions of parcels Amazon had failed to deliver prior to Christmas, thanks to the completely unprecedented combination of bad weather and a rise in usage of postal services during December.

Whether the backlog is cleared now, I suppose we'll never know as the media tends not to follow problems up once they start to be resolved.

And while I was grateful for that lonely Christmas Day email – having dropped my phone down a toilet on Christmas Eve, I was delighted to see that it was still working – I must admit to getting a bit sick of Amazon's endless torrent of spam into my inbox.

Where they get the idea that I am interested in pet carriers, Brita water filters or Evans Lichfield cushions – just a selection of today's offers - I don't know.

And are Kindles really that popular? Amazon seems awfully keen on them. Oh hang on, they manufacture them as well as selling them.

I used to think Amazon was awesome for its ability to recognise visitors and make intelligent recommendations, but like the rest of the internet – especially Google – its clamouring for attention just makes less inclined to visit.

Entropy and the takeaway menu

It has been quite cold lately. You might expect that I would follow on from that observation to bemoan the UK's risible state of unpreparedness for a phenomenon (winter) that happens once a year, frequently lasting for several months.

But no. My scale is considerably smaller and pettier than that.

Living, as I do, on a cliffside, snow and ice tend to render my road inaccessible to road traffic. In previous years, this has led to uncollected rubbish piling up in the street – the only thing keeping the giant Bradford rats from it being the fact that it has frozen solid.

Fortunately this year, the bin men got here just before the snow really set in, although the recycling lorry did not, meaning my house is rapidly piling up with empty bottles of Innis and Gunn.

It also means that the postman doesn't often deliver. No doubt because he's down at the Idle Working Men's Club debating what Lenin meant when he called the state an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class.

They are put to shame by one indefatigable group whose members will endure any hardship, any personal discomfort to make sure that their precious cargo gets through.

I am talking, of course, about the takeaway menu distributors. Come rain, shine, flood, ice, tsunami or hail of frogs, I can rest assured in the knowledge that I will get upwards of 15 menus for practically identical Chinese, Indian and the peculiarly Bradford pizza/kebab/curry/chip outlet every week.

Worried that there's been a change to the menu and you might not know about it? Maybe the price of the mysterious "OK sauce" has gone fractionally down? Don't panic! As soon as there's a change, you'll be the first to know. And if there isn't, they'll put your mind at ease by posting you a new menu every week, so that you can compare it to the last one and be sure that you're 100% on top of what's going on at Wok Wok.

However, I come not to praise the takeaway menu delivery men, but to bury them.

It's cold. I have the heating on to try and warm my house. If you're going to stick these damn things through my letterbox, PUSH THEM ALL THE WAY IN SO THE LETTERBOX FLAP CLOSES.

I don't leave my windows open in this weather. I don't leave the doors open. That's because I am only trying to warm the interior of my house, not the whole street and (indeed) the yawning void of space beyond it. I don't know a lot about physics, entropy and the eventual inevitable heat-death awaiting the universe, but I do know that when you shove a menu into my letterbox and leave it in there, the house gets bloody cold and my gas bill goes up.

In these times of selfish individualism, it's hard to put oneself into the position of another to appreciate their point of view. It's something we're no longer used to. So, I propose a little demonstration. Menu people – next time you're about to jam some spam into my letterbox and leave it open, why not try shoving up your own arse instead? Not all the way, mind. See how uncomfortable it is? Then there you are.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is called empathy.

Postscript:

Thanks to my mum - the only person in the world who (I think) has read everything on this blog - for the picture of the snowman she and Roger Jr built last week. Should my mum need to be referred to again in the course of future writings, she will be known as Adelaide del Vasto.