If you’ve got 34 minutes to spare you can listen too. It’s an everyday story of country folk, mostly, with some odd and debatably funny things in it.
Without giving away the ending, or the location of the Prime Minister’s tattoo (for security purposes, of course) it’s about a farmer and a celebrity chef. The funny things happened when I was writing it. I’d been thinking about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who screamingly funnily becomes Pew Farley-Toherstall for the purposes of the play. So far so so. But he really did go to school and then up to Oxford with David Cameron. And if not even David Cameron would be bonkers enough to make Jeremy Clarkson Minister for Transport, there were certainly very strong rumours that Kirsty Alsop was going to be offered a Ministerial post prior to 2010 and turned it down. And she really is Cath Kidston’s cousin. And her daddy really was chairman of Christies. So you can make your own judgement about her career progression dahn the auctions, as she almost certainly doesn’t say unless she’s very drunk indeed.
For me the funniest thing was the pin number on the Prime Minister’s emergency phone. I gave this script to several people to have a look at it before we recorded. A solicitor friend so that the caution was correct, when Tom is at the police station. An actual police sergeant, for some of the procedural stuff. She said she hadn’t been on a firearms job but it sounded about right. Funny. She liked it. Just one thing.
I hate it when a police person says ‘just one thing.’
‘How did you know about the PIN number?’
It’s not really officially secret, she said, but you’re not really supposed to know about it.
And the honest answer is, I didn’t. I made it up. It was the most ridiculous thing I could think of, the most British procedural thing I could imagine, the thing you’d be most likely to forget under stress, which would be the only time you’d need it.
So it’s a fair cop, guv. You’ve got me bang to rights. I’m done up like a kipper. But I ain’t got previous and it was the voices made me do it.
And as she said, in the best Jack Reagan tradition before I poured her some more wine: ‘Shut it.‘
Co-dependency isn’t fun. There used to be a form of duelling in America where the two contenders were tied together by one wrist and given a knife each. Presumably the knife hand was held until the time to start the duel. Usually, obviously enough, both of them died. It always reminded me of a certain kind of relationship.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I’d rather have nothing
If nothing means you.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Yes, I know it’s late. Well you didn’t give me one at all, so just don’t start on me, ok?
Despite the fact that it’s St Valentine’s Day and once again, I am officially Less Attractive Than Hitler (Hitler had a girlfriend), the kind of rejection I was thinking of or at least I was until I had to think about that was the kind of rejection that goes like this:
He was right up her strasse, apparently.
We received nearly 2900 scripts, (Why do so many people send us all this crap? I mean, honestly!)
and our team of readers have been working intensively to sift through all submissions. Like rarely, thanks for nothing, yah? We very nearly missed something interesting to do, rather than what we’re paid for every month.
Our readers were asked to consider what the opening of each script demonstrated about the writer’s voice and originality, their understanding of medium, form, genre and tone, and the strength of the world, story, characters and dialogue. Yours was obviously unoriginal and your world frankly isn‘t as good as ours.
Unfortunately, your script did not progress beyond the first 10-page sift which was the case with 85% of all submissions we received. Your unoriginal derivative pile of identikit characters, seen-it-before stories and less-than-credible dialogue was dumped along with all the stuff from all the other losers on the first read through .This means that your script will therefore not be considered further and will not receive any other feedback. This means your script was crap.
We hope you will not be too disappointed or discouraged; we appreciate it will be frustrating not to receive specific feedback. This does not mean that your script has no potential – rather, that the standard of the work that did progress was very high, yours wasn’t and we can only focus on the necessarily small proportion of work that most captured our attention and imagination. Maybe you could read it out at a village fete or something. Or a childrens party, so long as they’re not too old or discriminating.
It’s a rejection slip, or a rejection e-mail, anyway.
Compared to some of the non-Valentine rejections I’ve had in the past, quite mild. No throwing stuff. No slammed doors. No going around with that bloke I always had an idea about half an hour later. Nobody’s relations on the phone, no screamy phone calls and no silent weeping, on either side. In comparison there’s almost a thread of logic there, which is a refreshing change given the usual lack of anything apart from the central no-part-of-your-body-is-welcome-in-or-frankly-all-that-near-any-part-of-mine-notwithstanding-any-prior-events logic that accompanies the non-Valentine-type rejection. In my experience, anyway.
This one was from the BBC. I won the BBC Writers Room Screenplay competition last year (M/f as we used to say in journalist college. It means More Follows. I think you’re confusing it with something with more letters.) so I thought I’d send them No Batteries Required, written for radio.
It’s actually really rather good. Even people who take a very let’s say “objective” view of my charm, wit and sophistication say that. At volume, sometimes. The bits about my CW&S, at least.
But the BBC don’t want it. But they want submissions for The Show What You Wrote, their new BBC Radio 4’s comedy sketch show – written by you. Free, obviously.
“This is an opportunity for you to get involved in creating a show that sounds different from any other sketch show out there. The Show What You Wrote is open for anyone to enter, whatever your level of experience. If you have a good idea then write it up and send it to us.
The themes for each episode are:
1) Science and Nature
2) Geography
3) Art and Literature
4) Sport and Leisure
I would. I really would, but this rejection thing has made me wonder. I mean, the BBC comedy bar is set pretty high. It’s going to be pretty hard to beat the Today programme, putting Lord Lawson, whose scientific credentials include being a reporter for the Financial Times and er, that’s it really, against actual climate change scientists and saying that makes the programme balanced. It makes it the fat bloke in the subsidised bar four pints in against someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Although to be fair, while he doesn’t know any more about what makes it blow than anyone else, like a true Thatcherite daughter of her father Nigella Lawson certainly knows how much blow costs. And suddenly, I don’t mind that particular rejection at all.
The Less Attractive Than Hitler thing, that I do mind. Still. Shower, shave and get out there to do another open mic and another one on Sunday. It might work. Worth a shot, anyway.
Oh and the red type? That was revealed using my patented iMean™ app. I use it regularly. Want to borrow it?
I couldn’t sleep last night so at 7:15 I turned the radio on. The Bishop of Bath & Wells is moving out of the Palace he lives in, into a house outside the city. Good thing or not. Discuss. It’s Sunday morning Radio 4.
Something for Bishops.
The story rang a bell with me, because I’ve had dealings with the bishop before. Long long ago when if not the world then certainly I was young, and thought I was leaner (turns out I wasn’t, given the jacket I tried on in a shop this week was a bit loose despite being the same size I wore when I was 26) and had a Harley-Davidson, the last of a reasonably long line of Yamaha, Honda, Triumph, Norton, Triton, BMW and then the Sportster motorcycles (pronounced Arlo Guthrie stylee, to rhyme with pickles, as we young people say), I was romantic. In fact, I was incurably romantic and still am.
It’s something women say they want until they get it. Then they seem to find that what they really, really meant was planning a wedding reception at a Best Western, two bottles of Cava per head and a fortnight in Ibiza rather than anything I had in mind, so far as I can tell.
Orchardleigh, under a West Country sky that put a permanent crease in my forehead by the time I was twenty.
My idea for a wedding venue started when I was about fourteen, the first time I went to Orchardleigh. I don’t know why I went. It was just something we did a couple of times a year. It was an old family estate and no, of course it wasn’t my family’s. Ours was called Sycamore Grove, which isn’t really the same thing at all.
Orchrdleigh had a not very attractive early Victorian house, loads of rolling fields, a plaque saying how the house used to be one side of the lake until years and years ago the owners had grown sufficiently rich and more than sufficiently bored with their old house to tear it down and start again the other side of the lake. But where did they live while they did that? No-one could tell me. Thinking about it now they probably built the new house first, but I didn’t think like that then. Still don’t, all the time.
It had an oak tree with a heart carved into the bark of the trunk and a date and two sets of initials. I can’t remember the letters, but the date was 1805. It was almost always sunny when we went to Orchardleigh, except, perhaps predictably, the time I was attacked by a swan. No, it didn’t break my arm. But also no, there was no warning I could see or hear and I didn’t know what had happened, it happened so fast. I don’t think I’m really cut-out for fighting swans, even now. Luckily I’ve planned things so it’s not something I have to do in my life.
We had an old book in the car in those days, an Arthur Mee The Kings England, written in the 1930s, listing the towns and villages of England with a few lines about each. About Orchardleigh there was something about an old war horse living out his days in a field a long way from Flanders. I don’t know now whether it was true or not, given how many horses the Army killed rather than feed them once the war was over. I thought it was true then.
There was a grave by the lake, one of the last owners, with a recent headstone.
And sleep at last
Among the fields of home.
I’m tired as I write this, really tired after just three hours of sleep last night, propped up in bed and about to turn in, but even reading the inscription that’s stuck in my head I feel the same way I always felt when I saw it that time ago, and it’s nearly half my life away that I last went to the lake at Orchardleigh. Moved, respectful, a little something in my eye, just a speck I think, probably. And envious, envious that someone, somewhere, tried to make sure that the person under the headstone was at peace, however fatuously, in a way I’ve never been able to imagine anyone ever doing for me.
A beginning and an ending.
As if that wasn’t enough for one place it had a Bath stone Georgian boathouse on the lake, an island and a tiny church on it. Orchardleigh has loads of high trumps and it plays to flush them all out on the table right from the start. Back when I was fourteen I decided I’d get married in that church, if I ever did. And because that’s what I was going to do I didn’t take any girlfriends to Orchardleigh ever, until I met someone I thought I’d like to marry.
We rode down there on the Harley one early summer morning and parked the bike by the gatehouse, then walked up the drive and found the tree, eventually, still there fifteen years after I first saw it. The boathouse was still there and the lake and the plaque and the grave and the house. And of course, the island and the little church. It all sort-of looked like it was working.
We rode back to London at the end of that week and I started trying to find out what you do to get married somewhere you don’t live. I knew Orchardleigh was in the diocese of the Bishop of Bath & Wells and I’d heard about bans and people having to live where the bans are read or something, although I had a feeling that might just be in Hardy or Thackeray. Phone the Bishop’s office, I thought. They’ll know.
The first issue was that Directory Enquiries had just changed from being a nationalised utility staffed by stiff and imperious crisply-spoken authority figures to the Del Boy gertcha customer service model that everything in England has become, where it’s all the pretence of saying ‘sir’ and no service of any kind. The other difference, obviously, is you pay a lot more for the new, rubbish model. Unbelievably and utterly rubbishly, Directory Enquiries pretended (after they’d taken my money of course) that there was no number for the Bishop of Bath & Wells.
Not. Going. To. Happen. I can tell.
I pointed out that the bishopric was 800 years old and although they probably hadn’t had a phone for all of that time, I was pretty sure they had one now. Despite that, Del Boy’s Directories couldn’t give me the number
They had a number for Bishop of Bath though. I took that.
Ring out, wild bells
I was quite impressed when the bishop answered the phone himself on the third ring. More impressed, if a bit disconcerted, to find they’d picked a local man to do the job, judging by the sheepy noises he made bleating ‘Bishop of Bath.’ You have to have heard it to know how that sounds. I could do it now but it wouldn’t help you, reading this. Sorry.
I told the bishop what the problem was, that I wanted to get married at Orchardleigh, that it was in his diocese (‘if you say so’) and the bans and residency qualifications and how long and what was it all going to cost and could it be done at all. And stuff.
Don’t know, the bishop said. He could see the problem and he’d like to help, but he got three calls like this a week.
I thought that even for a busy bishop this wasn’t actually the most helpful thing I’d ever heard.
Me: How come?
BoB: ‘Cuz Bishop of Bath has been a motorcycle shop since 1926.
Tis a sign and/or a portent, I think. I only proposed to one other person. None of the three people I ever talked to about getting married ever took me up on it. I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Looking at this, I don’t think it’s supposed to.
Well, the night before, anyway. My very, very first paid-for stand-up poetry gig was at Justine de Meirre’s Tapas & Tales event at the Old Mariner in Woodbridge. Ok, it wasn’t much, just petrol money, but something of a landmark event, the first time anyone’s put their hand in their pocket and said ‘here, that was worth my money.’
Which isn’t why I do it, but it’s nice, despite the monetisation of something I’m not quite sure what it is. There’s a good, edgy feeling before you go on. I kicked it off with All Of Your S**t, the one that started it all, the one that gets the audience wondering if they’re allowed to laugh.
I need to put more theatricality into the delivery, I think. I’ve always resisted that ‘this is my stage voice’ thing, the booming Brian Blessed oration and now I’m up on a stage doing it I can see exactly why it’s done. I talk as if it’s late and everyone’s had a couple of drinks and we’re relaxed and sitting on a sofa and I’m not at all sure that totally works as a delivery to a room full of people. Let’s face it, it doesn’t always work on a sofa, depending on your definition of ‘works’, of course. There have been some memorable sofas, it must be said. But it’s not that kind of show.
Songs without music
Back To Ourselvesfollowed up, which is a bit Hugo Williams but I like Hugo Williams anyway. It’s a little bit about the end of the summer holidays, which is to say that of course it really isn’t at all. Then In Silence, and then the one that really does silence, When The Phone Rings.
That poem, if these are poems and I’m not at all sure about the definition, so I call them songs without music as I can’t sing and play a guitar at the same time, doesn’t just silence the entire room every time I do it. People come up to me and touch my arm afterwards. Always my left arm, just above the elbow. Men, women, always the same reaction. This time I recorded it and there are even people saying ‘oh!’ at the end.
I don’t know whether it’s ‘oh that was so moving’ or ‘oh god, poor you,’ or both, but it seems to speak to people. So I really ought not to canter through it because I’ve heard it so many times, and I also really ought to remember that not everybody has and although the more impressionable women might go for that whispered in their ear, the person at the bar can’t actually hear it unless I BrianlyBlessedly boom it out a bit. Which is a performance in itself, because first of all it’s quite a despairing, non-shouty, sensitive piece and also because when I put some volume into my voice it cuts across every conversation in a pub, which was quite useful in places like the Sloaney Pony (oh come on, the White Horse on Parsons Green, you do know, rarely…) in the ’80s, when girls wore a single string of pearls outside the turned-up collar of their borrowed stripey shirt under a tight jumper, and jeans, blazer, a rugby shirt, RayBans and Topsiders were actually cool (what do you mean, they aren’t now?), it does sound a bit as if I practice scaring Labradors across three fields.
So some work on the delivery needed. But a night when other story tellers told me they liked my stuff, when the monetisation didn’t matter, when you get through the pre-stage nerves (there’s a simple cure, just tell yourself ‘ok, if you feel like that just don’t do it, just don’t get up there. You don’t have to. Nobody’s going to make you do it.’ That cures it), when you feel genuinely that we’re all in this together, that like Bronze Age people, we’re huddled here out of the storm in this little pool of light and we’re telling the tales of our tribe, sharing what it is to feel in all the different ways there are.
And I felt ‘this is what I do.’ Just such a pity the person who helped me do it wasn’t there. So all that after last night. At least nobody said ‘we need to talk.’ Even though we all did. I do, anyway.
I wrote this this week and performed it for its first time out today at The Anchor in Woodbridge. It seemed to go down ok. In fact, it went down pretty well. With women especially. I like that.
When The Phone Rings
I hate it when the phone rings
Just in case it’s you.
I don’t want to remember
A bright crisp day
Not too long ago but
Somehow far too far away
To get back there now
When all we could do was light a fire
And sit holding hands that afternoon
Talking almost in whispers,
Feeding logs into the stove.
You should have been at work.
And I had things to do,
Both forgetting that this spell
Would break, as all spells have to.
That afternoon shone with promises
While the winter sun bleached
Our hearts clear and new.
And then the phone rings.
And maybe it’s you.
Have I thought again about life insurance?
You wanted to insure your car for me
And I wanted to insure my life for you;
It’s who we are. Or more properly
That’s who we were.
Maybe you never knew.
I so much wanted that for you.
That’s how we were,
When if I’d died I’d have wanted you
Quite rich if I couldn’t want you
Any more. It was all I could think
To give you. Apart from me.
So no, actually, I mean I have,
But all things considered
And I don’t really want to go into this
Too much on the phone
With a stranger somehow
But I feel as if all I have left
Is being polite right now,
Being English.
So I don’t really need
My life insured. Thanks.
Or not for you, anyway. Not now.
Make some more tea
And now you’re not here
It seems I don’t really need
To wash the cup clean.
There’s a missed call on my phone
But it’s not your number.
It never is now.
And no-one there anyway.
Especially not you.
It never will be somehow.
I’ll be ok, you know? I’ll be ok.
But just for a while,
Until I can forget the logs
And the stove and the bright sun
And your dog and all
Of the glory we could see
That afternoon so full of crystal light
So cold; you held my hand
And told me over and again:
“It’ll be alright”;
Just until then I hate it
When the phone rings.
Just in case it’s you.
And yes, of course it’s about a real person. And no, she wasn’t there and hasn’t heard it. A pity.
Update:
It’s not quite as in-your-face as this violinist’s reaction to a phone ringing. My stuff was described once as making me ‘the king of passive aggression’ but I think Lukas Kmit must be the emperor. Oh, and she still hasn’t heard it, so far as I know.
Roger Lloyd-Pack died of pancreatic cancer today. According to Cancer Research UK, sometimes it’s caused by drinking too much. Or by smoking. Or by gum disease. But as the man who played Trigger in Only Fools and Horses had long been elevated to the status of National Treasure don’t expect that to be discussed in the press any time soon. The Sun’s front page was taken-up not just with the headline Bonjour Trigger but also by the helpful explanation that Bonjour doesn’t mean goodbye except in a TV comedy show that last aired in 1991. That’s how funny the headline was. The sound of barrels being scraped is something everyone’s familiar with now, but this was above average scraping. We can get back to hating immigrants and trying to start a war with whoever shouldn’t be running Syria tomorrow.
Roger Lloyd-Peck, in character as Trigger.
Every paper I saw had the same nonsense in it, amusingly gauche things Trigger said. For years I went to the same pub as someone who worked with Roger Lloyd-Peck and said he was a lovely bloke. I’ve no reason to doubt it. What’s bugging me is the Guardian’s survey of writer’s earnings, which actually does have quite a lot to do with the sad news, or at least, with the way it’s being handled.
Apparently the average writer in the UK earns just £600 per year. This from the newspaper that pays £85 for an online piece and £285 for something they run in the paper version. As Claude Rains said in Casablanca when he shut Rick’s bar for illegal gambling and just before he was handed his winnings, I’m shocked. Shocked!
Every newspaper I saw continued in the same vein about Roger Lloyd-Peck. Apart from the Soaraway Scum through the Telegraph and the East Anglian Daily Times, the same stuff. “The world according to Trigger – some of his best moments.” Then a little bit of filler regurgitating the hilarious malapropisms and plain wrong phrasing an actor spoke in a show that hasn’t been on for nearly a quarter century.
This is Funny. That’s Official
During a conversation about their schooldays the boys probe Trigger about his time at school when he banged his head on a sign which read ‘Mind Your Head.’ Trig answers with all the eloquence and rationality the viewers came to expect from him.
Uncle Albert: How did you walk into a mind your head sign? Didn’t you see it?
Trigger: Of course I saw it. But in those days I couldn’t read.
Oh my sides. The first time it was on TV it was funny. The script was so good that the fifth time you saw it it was still funny, delivered by good actors at home with the material they were using. But that’s what it was. A script. Delivered by actors. Not written by them, but by a man called John Sullivan, who died in 2011, who wrote the show along with Citizen Smith, a pseudo-Marxist revolutionary whose catchphrase was ‘power to the people.’ Sullivan liked a laugh, obviously.
Citizen Smith, played by Robert Lindsay.
Roger Lloyd-Pack was by all I’ve heard, a nice bloke. I liked his politics too. Roger Lloyd-Peck didn’t come up with these sayings any more than Bogart wrote ‘Play it, Sam.” But the avalanche of Triggerisms an actor’s death er, triggered doesn’t just miss the point. It confuses reality with fantasy, the substance with the delivery. The spin, the acting, with what went before.
Which seems to be the main purpose of media today including the newspaper which pretends to give it to you straight, the Guradina. At £85 a go comment isn’t quite free. But it’s pretty close.
The stand-up poetry gig went well, but the reason I’ll remember it will be a combination of things. None of them really connected to what I was doing but somehow all of them connected too.
I drove down to Aldeburgh, which is about nine miles from where I live. The moon was up and although it’s been rainy the sky was clear and the road was empty.
Robert Plant. Still exactly what rock stars should look like. And I’m sorry but if you disagree then you’re simply wrong. And actually I’m not really sorry. Just English It’s what we say when we’re being assertive.
I wasn’t playing it about anyone or anything, even if most of my stand-up act is a thinly-disguised catalogue of the emotional train-wrecks which seemed to comprise my relationships. It’s just a nice song.
Actually, it’s more than a nice song. I know it’s probably just my age, but some songs, they’ve just got everything. And that’s one that has.
Proving that parents always know less than nothing at all, that song, like a lot of the songs of that time, had the lot.
Guitar. Slow bits. Pomp. Screaming. Moodiness.
What else do you want in music for teenagers? What else just is there for those years?
Well? I’m waiting. It’s your own time you’re wasting. I get paid to stand here (cont.)
A brilliant night. Like the moon that evening with the road stretching away in front of me, bright and round, with almost no cloud at all.
This is a new poem that came to me yesterday morning, checking my email, seeing who’s email that was once there a lot wasn’t there any more. A pity. So this one’s for you.
The only thing I have altered in this exchange is my thick-fingered spelling. All of the rest of it is depressingly true. If you want to know why Bradley Manning et al are pilloried for telling the truth it’s not ‘national security’ that’s to blame. It’s the 1984 don’t-argue-it-won’t-make-any-difference culture that’s been sucked up and embraced wholesale. Was this the point of mass education? Please someone tell me it wasn’t.
Kieran Sears 20:48:24
Hello and welcome to eBay Live Help, my name is Kieran. How may I assist you?
yoxfordcafedeli 20:49:58
Hello, I wanted to bid on some cutlery. Ebay is insisting it does not know how old I am .
yoxfordcafedeli 20:50:16
and wants age verification by credit card. I do not possess a credit card.
Ebay demands age verification if you want to buy a knife. Including a knife and fork. But obviously, not all the time. Only when eBay feels like it. But anyway, let’s go with that for the moment.
yoxfordcafedeli 20:50:52
I do not believe in credit cards. I tried to give my VISA debit card details but Ebay claims it cannot recognise the card number.
Kieran Sears 20:53:25
Thank you for sharing your query. In this case you can use any other credit card, if your family members have it or a friends, if they are with you.
Any credit card other than the one I said I didn’t have, obviously.
Kieran Sears 20:55:01
If you have no access od Credit cards at all, in tha case, you can contact the seller and then ask them to provide you with any alternate payment method, so that you are able to pay for the item , however as perebay policies on UK, you have to put a Credit Card on file for the age verification, to bid or purchase a cutlery item
yoxfordcafedeli 20:56:43
So I can’t bid on it.
(And let’s ignore the fact eBay already has my age on file from other transactions in the past. But presumably they would pretend “Data Protection” wouldn’t let them use that information again, in more made-upness). yoxfordcafedeli 20:57:13
Because Ebay demands I have a credit card.
Kieran Sears 20:57:36
If you can use any other credit card then you can bid any family members debit card will do
Kieran Sears 20:58:08
Ebay in accordance with policies of UK, in many other countries there is no such policy, an example can be Germany
yoxfordcafedeli 20:58:44
WHAT policy in the UK demands that I have a credit card, exactly?
yoxfordcafedeli 20:59:02
There is NO such policy.
yoxfordcafedeli 20:59:07
Except Ebay’s own.
yoxfordcafedeli 21:00:12
Let me get this right. You have just said I can use ‘any family member’s credit card.” You said this, not me. HOW will that verify MY age?
Kieran Sears 21:00:45
The system , will accept it , as it had happened with our members
yoxfordcafedeli 21:01:41
That does not answer my question. How will using someone else’s credit card verify my age?
Kieran Sears 21:04:05
This will, we give this workaround to our members so as to facilitate the buying , when it works then our members are able to purchase the cutlery items, there is no logic to it
yoxfordcafedeli 21:05:32
So why does Ebay have this policy?
Kieran Sears 21:06:30
eBay as per the norms of UK (under their influence) have this policy, let me give you a link of the same ‘
yoxfordcafedeli 21:07:27
No, I know Ebay has this policy. I asked why.
Kieran Sears 21:07:58
Carl, I request you to please try by ading other Credit Card, discussing about the policy wont help here, if you have to purchase the item, then you can wirk on this solution, wont it be good to be able to purchase the item
yoxfordcafedeli 21:11:46
Yes it would, if I could bid on a cutlery set so I could eat my dinner without being made to go and get someone else’s credit card. Ebay’s idea of customer service is a joke. I asked a simple question. You can’t give me the answer and instead say discussing it won’t do any good. I am not discussing anything. I asked what law says I have to have a credit card and you just talk about ‘the norms of the UK’ which is totally meaningless. You then suggest I can validate my age by using someone else’s card and when I ask how that validates it you can’t answer that either. I am really looking forward to the email transcript of this. It will make a brilliant blog post.
System21:11:48
The chat session is being wrapped up.
System21:11:48
The chat session has ended.
System21:11:48
This chat was on 01/10/2014. All times in the above transcript are in the following time zone: (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London
Kieran speaks an interesting version of English. It’s almost as if his name is totally made-up and fictional. So now you know. Verification is meaningless. Debate is useless. Questions are an irrelevance. Make-up a rule and call it the law and pretend it’s totally normal, inevitable and inescapable. Above all, don’t argue. Resistance is useless.
In the year when we’re about to celebrate millions of people being killed for ‘freedom,’ this is the kind of freedom we’ve embraced. The freedom to do exactly what we’re told. Oh brave new world.
