Somebody at Jamie Oliver’s publisher emailed a word document of his new book to a friend. The friend sent it to someone else, now it’s everywhere. I got my copy today. Poor old Jamie.
Note: As Karen has just pointed out in her comment, this is a three year old hoax (and I’m a schmuck).
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My children saw their first dead person today.
As we were coming out of school an Air Ambulance was circling lower and lower overhead, looking for somewhere to land. By the time we got out of the school gates it looked as though it was coming down just up the road so we went up to see it land, but it dramatically veered away at the last minute. By that time though we could see the blue lights from an ordinary ambulance and a police car so we carried on walking, actually the kids I was with were running ahead, very excited.
When I caught up with them at the police line we could all see what had happened. A man was lying on the road with no shoes on, a paramedic was trying to resuscitate him, his motorcycle helmet was lying beside him. A little way down the road there was a load of debris and a blue car with a big dent in its wing.
After a couple on minutes the air ambulance people walked up from where they had landed but it soon became obvious that they weren’t in a hurry any more. Someone got out a defibrillator and then put it away again. People started to drift away.
The kids I was with weren’t as freaked out as I thought they would be. One of them said that she felt sorry for the man, even though she didn’t know him, then she said the idea of him lying there dead made her feel a bit sick. Another said she thought she knew who owned the car that the bike had ended up underneath. We all talked about how careful you should be, even on quiet roads like that one. My oldest daughter didn’t think it was ironic that she was carrying a death mask that she made this week in her Tutankhamun project. As we walked home they soon started to talk about other things and hardly noticed the air ambulance as it flew off again on its way to the next pitiful engagement.
I love many things about the US and I often feel sorry for those people, including several of my cousins, who live there. Because the media is so tightly controlled by the interests of advertisers their democracy is unable to protect the interests of most ordinary people. I think that’s why they still have such a primitive and brutal penal system, a health care system that could have been dreamed up by a 19 century mill owner and a level of public debate that would embarrass even the semiliterate inhabitants of the worst public housing projects in Paris.
I have always had the feeling that they only had themselves to blame for this situation, but watching The State Within on television this week I started to realise that the United Kingdom might have more to gain from, and should possibly take more responsibility for, the plight of the US than I had previously thought. After all, we benefit a great deal from a mighty economy full of eager consumers who all happen to speak the language of our ancestors.
Americans work much harder than British workers and they get shorter holidays. Their social conditions could be said to be harsher than those over here, that’s why their law enforcement needs to be so much more repressive. Americans have been forced to give up many freedoms that we enjoy, in particular those relating to Unions and striking, that’s why their working lives are so much harder. In fact, you could argue that 1776 didn’t change things as dramatically as might have first appeared. You’ve still got the colonists toiling away while those back home have it easy. No wonder they dislike us so much, no wonder the villains in films are always British. You can’t really blame them.
At last. Today I finally got to try out my new Fare’s Fair approach to train tickets. Let me explain…
I generally travel to work by train. The railway company has a penalty fare scheme which means that if you get caught without a ticket by one of the roaming ticket inspectors you have to pay a penalty of £15. This means that if you arrive at the station and the ticket office is understaffed, causing a huge long queue, you have to miss your train or risk paying a penalty. So you are obliged to arrive at the station early, just in case. However, if your train is late, as long as it’s less than 30 minutes late, you get no compensation at all. I think this is unfair because it demands utter punctuality from you but only vague punctuality from the train operators.
Because I thought the system was unfair I devised a compensation scheme of my own. If a train was delayed I wouldn’t buy a ticket on my next journey. If a ticket inspector happened to turn up I would happily pay the penalty fare and then get the money back by not buying tickets on future jouneys until I was even again. It worked because you only get a ticket inspector about once a week, but some of my friends felt that it was wrong for me to be fare-dodging so often and I wasn’t completely comfortable lumping myself in with the hard-core elements who never buy a ticket, so I came up with a new scheme.
What I decided to do was to pass any delays on to the ticket inspectors. So if a train is delayed by three minutes then the ticket inspector should have to wait for three minutes before he can see my ticket. I know it seems petty but it makes me feel much more relaxed about problems if I don’t feel completely powerless. Unfortunately every delayed train I’ve been on lately has not had an inspector on it, until today.
The 06:40 didn’t arrive until 06:43 and just after I’d sat down the inspector came along. I felt nervous but I knew I had to go through with it. I told him that I did have a ticket but I couldn’t show it to him immediately because the train was delayed. He looked annoyed straight away. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that he was going to have to wait three minutes. He told me that he had the power to chuck me off the train at the next stop. I hadn’t thought of that. I prevaricated, he said that he was going to ask me one last time. “I’m going to show you my ticket” I squeaked and got out the huge pile of old tickets I’ve got in my coat pocket. As I nervously fumbled through them, as slowly as I could in a last tiny act of defiance, I realised that my hands were really shaking. It was much more scary than I imagined it would be.
Have I gone soft? I’m sure I never used to find confronting authority figures so difficult. I hope I get a chance to do it again soon. Next time I don’t think I’ll tell him why there’s a delay, they do that to me often enough.
An X-Ray of the ailing former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko has shown up several small objects in his intestines, one of them the size of a 2p coin and possibly hollow. Isn’t it obvious what’s going on? Does the name Fantastic Voyage ring any bells? It’s one of those things where once you know what’s happening it seems so obvious.
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I’m listening to the new Beatles compilation album – Love. It’s depressing not because it’s badly done but because it is so very tame and polite. The tracks have been a bit remixed, a bit remastered, some little things have been added here and there but it’s really just a greatest hits album and it suffers from the same empty feeling that all such compilations have. Alexis Petridis at the Guardian loves it but I’d buy virtually any of their original releases rather than this, even if they do sound “tinny and desperately malnourished”. Maybe that’s because I like my rock stars unhealthy and angry rather than plump and self-satisfied.
Are you planning on becoming a sub-postmaster? Have you always dreamed of running a little cottage Post Office with roses around the door? Well watch out! According to postofficevictims.org.uk the whole thing is a massive, scandalous fraud that has been covered up “at the highest levels”, with “hefty bonuses for those in charge, not dissimilar to the robber barons of old”. You have been warned.
(0)Laura St. Claire, the ‘journalist’ who wrote a blog about her road-trip across the US parking only in Wal-Mart car parks, but kept secret the fact that the trip was paid for by Wal-Mart, has now written a whiney defence of what she did. I’m not convinced, what do you think? Wal-Marting Across America
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Our washing machine stopped working at the weekend. It did everything that is was supposed to, the water ran in and out again, but the clothes never got washed.
A washing machine doesn’t look dangerous so I felt that I should be able to mend it. I carefully laid it on its front and unscrewed the back. Inside there were wires and pipes, an electronic thing, a big wheel and a little wheel. The big wheel was attached to the drum where my wife puts the washing and there was a large elastic band between it and the little wheel. The little wheel was on the front of a complicated thing. The complicated thing had electrical wires going it to it but no pipes. Everything inside the washing machine was covered in black dust.
I could tell that the complicated thing (I call it the convertor) must be the device that caused the washing to happen because it had the most black dust. I removed it from the machine by undoing some big bolts.
When I had it on the kitchen table I discovered how washing machines work. The convertor has two channels leading into it, each containing a stick of very, very concentrated dirty black stuff which is driven by a spring into the mechanism. Obviously the black dust corresponds to the cleanness that the machine imparts to the clothes. The convertor uses the rotation of the washing to change the dirtyness of the black stuff into electrical cleanness which is then fed into the clothes by the rest of the machine. I’m surprised that the manufacturer doesn’t provide a receptacle in which the dirtiness can be collected, it must be a cost-saving measure.
I looked on the interweb and found a shop that sells suitable sticks of black stuff. They only cost £15 for a pair! They describe them as brushes because they ‘brush’ the clothes clean. I suppose they have to use these quaint old-fashoned names because most of their customers don’t have my technical bent.
The washing machine is now working perfectly. My next project will be the microwave oven, which seems to have nearly used up all its microwaves. I have a plan to replenish them using some tin-foil, a load of old batteries and the buzzer from a Goblin Teasmade.
Now that Ivor Cutler’s dead, Mairead Byrne is my favourite living poet. Here’s one of her shorter ones -
LUDDITE
I’m no Luddite.
I just like saying Luddite.
See, it’s great isn’t it? Read more at http://www.maireadbyrne.blogspot.com/
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