Uncategorized – Page 15 – Writer-insighter

The liberal consensus

I don’t know what the Liberal Party is about. I avoided running over Paddy Ashdown this week who seemed pleasantly surprised that a bicycle was stopping to let him cross on a crossing, and he seemed a straightforward-enough sort of person. Given the deranged style of riding of most cyclists I’ve encountered this week I’m not hugely surprised, the same way I’m not now when I hear about cyclists in London being killed, but that’s another story. Keep going through red lights, treat one-way streets as advisory, overtake up the inside and generally act like an arse might work in a car but sooner or later when you haven’t got a tonne of steel around you, you’re going to say ‘ouch’ just once. And not for very long before your brain gets squashed between your teeth.

Be that as it may, the liberal consensus was what people used to call pretty much anything they sort-of liked a bit. The liberal consensus is that not stealing stuff is a good thing. Not killing people. Not beating someone around the head because they contradicted you. Not going to work, not being paid for it and being sold to someone else without any say in where you live, what you’re paid or who you’re going to work for. The liberal consensus then was that the Human Rights Act, the thing the Tory government want banned in the UK, was alright. Obviously, it’s got to go. The campaign against it in The Sun will start within days.

A Good Thing.

human rights

These are the fundamentals of this evil, dangerous, subversive and ought-to-be-illegal thing. Let’s have a good look at how wicked it is. Starting at the start, obviously nobody should be allowed to live without the government’s say-so. That’s what a right to life means. Without the express approval of the government, you don’t have a right to be born or to carry on living without their approval.

As for torture, ha ha ha!!! Of course you shouldn’t have a right not to be tortured whenever the government feels like it! I mean, look at all those people in Guantanamo who were kidnapped, taken half-way around the world, tortured and gave us all that Grade A intel. Oh. Well ok, bad example, because they didn’t have any secrets to tell anyone and if someone says they’re going to kill you unless you start talking then you just start making stuff up. You see? The government said they were all liars anyway! OK, so over 90% of them hadn’t done anything against the law anywhere. But bad example or not, you obviously don’t have a right to walk down the street looking the way you do without the right to have a bag stuffed over your head, get bundled into a van and held down while someone pours water up your nose. Who the hell do you think you are?

Poundland is going to have to start paying people if you have a right to be free from forced labour, so that’s out of the window. You don’t need a right to liberty, because the government obviously wouldn’t lock you up without a good reason or at least one that suited them. Just the same way that the police wouldn’t have arrested you if you hadn’t done it, would they? Stands to reason, do you see? They’re very busy you know. They haven’t got time to make things up.

It's only funny on TV. — It’s only funny on TV.

As for Article seven, the right not to be punished for something which wasn’t against the law, that kind of hippy nonsense would stop decent, hardworking people like Ian Duncan Smith from retrospectively changing legislation.

You do not need a right to the government not being able to root through your Facebook account or your mobile phone records or your bank statements whenever they feel like seeing if you really do know that person or not and how often. Whoever they are, with or without the egg whisk.

You certainly do not need to able to think whatever you like, or decide whatever you think is best. There’s no limit to some people’s effrontery, is there? All this “I can think as I please” nonsense. You’ll think as you’re damned well told, and like it. That’s what the British media is for now.

I remember all that silly nonsense we used to have where people used to talk the most absurd nonsense. Some of them even had different opinions to the ones the government gave them. ISIS is good. David Cameron wants us to fight with them against the government of Syria. ISIS is bad. David Cameron has sent the RAF to blow up one of their jeeps. Which seems quite an expensive way of getting rid of a Toyota LandCruiser, but you have no right to that opinion, there are no contradictions here, Eastasia has always been at war with Eurasia and apart from Who’s That Girl nobody can remember anything they did anyway.

The right to freedom of assembly. No. Sorry. You may well have booked the Village Hall and paid the deposit, but you’re not coming in here talking about whatever you want without it being checked first. A what? An evening of people training their dogs? To do what exactly? No. They could be terrorists. The US Navy trained dolphins to carry bombs you know. I can see the connection even if you pretend you can’t. No, no and no.

Nobody needs the right to marry whoever they chose. If your uncle can’t find a decent person for you to marry then I’m sure the government can do it. Someone blond and Aryan and quiet, maybe.

The right not to be discriminated against? Don’t be disgusting. I’m trying to explain this sensibly, but if you’re just going to take this tone then I won’t bother. In a minute you’re going to say that people have a right for the government not to come along and take their things any time it suits them, aren’t you? Well?

You see, if you’d paid for an education to a school outside the evil clutches of the NUT then you might have a right to be educated. As it is, I’m sorry, but I can’t see any reason to believe that you’re entitled to send young, impressionable children, children for heaven’s sake, to be indoctrinated with the beleif that it’s perfectly normal for adults to wear beards and glasses, have leather patches on their sports jackets and say things like “Yes, there was homework – quiet!” or “it’s your own time you’re wasting.” You have no right to this at all.

I like a laugh as much as the next person and it always makes me chuckle when people talk about a right to a free election. It’s not as if ballot papers ever go missing, or the printing somehow forgets some of the main parties or the barcode isn’t on the back of the ballot papers so they’re invalid. Then that wretched Naomi Wolf woman starts banging on and what the Daily Mail is even thinking of repeating this nonsense I don’t know. If you do still have free elections it’s no thanks to Rupert Murdoch, who can tell you who to vote for if you still need to be told. Perhaps we’d better check your phone calls to find out.

As for the abolition of the death penalty, everyone knows they jolly well don’t do it again! Including the people who didn’t do anything in the first place.

Look. I’m trying to be reasonable about this. If you pay for a decent lawyer like a normal person none of this is going to be a problem for you, is it? Until then you can just shut up and do as you’re told. It’s not as if the government would ask you to do anything that wasn’t the right thing, is it?

The measure of days

I did a bad thing. I started using an electric sander instead of a heat gun, a scraper and a sanding block. Today I did all of the port or left-hand side of the hull above and below the waterline, as well as half the mahogany rails and the coachroof around the hatch which was blistering. It was unbelievably faster. A week’s work in a day.

Right-hand side done. It needs a soft brush to get the dust off it but maybe it'll be windy tonight. — Right-hand side done. It needs a soft brush to get the dust off it but maybe it’ll be windy tonight.

That isn’t to say it wasn’t tiring. I put about five hours in today and I ache. I wore a breathing mask to stop getting paint dust in my lungs, a wooly hat to keep my hair out of my eyes, safety glasses to keep them if something flew out from under the sander and ear defenders to damp down the noise. Despite wearing thick gloves there was nothing I could really do about the vibration and it’s still pretty cold being outside in the wind, mostly keeping fairly still for that length of time.

I’m getting back home, making a hot drink, having a hot shower and still by eight pm every move is accompanied by a grunt, like some parody of old age on an indifferent comedy show. Sometimes it’s better that I live on my own. It isn’t funny. I can hardly move or think or type. About all I can do is surf Facebook, which doesn’t actually progress any of the things on my To Do list, let alone the boat.

But it’s nearly, nearly done. The rest of the coachroof could have a rub over while I’ve still got the sander out and there is some more varnish that could be looked at. The Tonkinoise project was gone back a step because although I bought it the friend who was going to pick it up couldn’t find the place where it was and had to get her mother to the airport and she’s really sorry because she said she’d do it but luckily it wasn’t German Wings that flew into the Alps and sorry. Couldn’t be helped. These things happen. Would I like a swim and some breakfast tomorrow?

And if I can stop grunting when I move, yes. Yes I would. Maybe I can get the anti-foul on tomorrow before I catch the train to London so I can be at Heathrow to meet someone from Big Brother and take people to the theatre on Friday. It’s one of the things I do. I’m going to need some different clothes to the boat-painting kit though, I think.

Stripping it back

The thing about wooden boats is they’re wooden boats. They start rotting from the time the first bit of water touches the wood after the sap has stopped flowing. But they’re still a million miles better than floating Tupperware, because you can fix them.

Something odd has happened to this Folkboat of mine some time in the past. There is a hairline crack in the side of the cabin roof that lets water in and where water stays in it starts rotting, so I have to fix that. There’s another patch where someone has drilled a hole through the roof to secure the grab rail that makes going forward from the cockpit not quite so perilous, given there are no rails at the sides and it’s a nice eight foot drop to the ground that I really don’t want to do. The water is getting under the wooden grab rail because there’s nothing to stop it. Taking the rail off, putting a dob of Silkaflex (a kind of putty that never really dries out completely) and put the rail back on should fix that, and there are a couple of other joins that need filling in with the stuff too.

A little imperial relic, from the days when you could sail away somewhere out East, cut the trees down and paint your ship with the juice. Obviously get the natives to do it for you and burn thier huts if they won't. British foreign policy hasn't changed in many ways. — A little imperial relic.

Yesterday and today I spent scraping off old varnish. You can see where it needs to come off because although it’s still glossy it’s a yellowy white colour, which tells you air or water or both has got in under the varnish. This is one of the reasons I hate yacht varnish. It sits on top of the wood as a hard impermeable layer, like concrete and just like concrete, while it keeps water out it’s great and when it doesn’t it’s a nightmare, because it traps the water underneath the varnish where it starts eating your boat. I don’t know why more people don’t use Tonkinoise. It’s French, it’s been around for a hundred years or more and it goes into the wood rather than sitting on top of it. You can see the advantage straight away. The disadvantage is all the old varnish has to come off first. Which means getting the scrapers and the heat gun out.

I sat there for six hours yesterday and three and a half today, in a wooly hat, four layers of clothing, safety boots, gloves and a PVC smock, heating up old varnish in one hand and scraping it off with the other. I froze. I’m writing this sitting on my sofa at home ninety minutes later and I’m still cold, with the heating on, a cup of tea and a disgusting shop-bought so second-hand biscuit, not really able to think straight yet because I’m so cold. But it’s getting done.

I’m getting the feel of the boat, finding out what needs to be done. There’s an electrical thing in the battery compartment which got rained on for six months and that’s going to need bypassing or replacing. At the moment bypassing looks the best option because I don’t know what it is, but I might revise my opinion on that. Really, all it needs apart from the electrical thing, whatever it is (and it’s metal with fins on and one wire goes into it and about four wires come out of it if that makes any difference), all it needs is doing it. Just scraping and sanding and painting. Wooden boat stuff.

imag0275 — Making a start. The deck looks like teak but the varnish on the edges hasn’t worn well. I think someone just varnished over varnish, without taking the old stuff off first. Task One.

Practical meditation. It sends me into almost a trance state. It’s a great way to calm down and think. Except when it’s cold, when it stops you thinking long after you should have thought that it’s too cold to keep on doing this.

I spent six hours scraping old varnish off yesterday and another three and a half today. I’m getting better at it and it’s one of those things that improves with practice. I’d done just about a third of the deck now, and treated the wet rot around the windows inside. I have all the paint I need, the white paint for the hull and the black anti-foul and the Tonkinoise arrives on Tuesday. I have the brushes and the thinners and about enough sandpaper and all of this week to get this boat ready, if it doesn’t rain.

Years ago when I was learning to sail (me and Mr Dana, out of San Diego, obviously) I read one of those stupid folksy maybe-traditional sayings carved and burned into a plaque above a yacht club bar. It was empty, as they always are in the afternoon. A fly was buzzing at a window. The air was full of the scent of damp cotton drying in the sun with that special smell faded sailing it always has.

It was just a stupid motto:

A day spent sailing is not counted as part of your allotted span.

It was just a little sailing club on a lake by a dual carriageway. The woman at the next table finished organising her children. She looked at the sign, then at me, then she looked away across the lake as she said ‘A day on the water – sometimes it all feels like starting again.’

She didn’t mean learning. I knew exactly what she meant. Just that timeless thing about wooden boats and the water. Maybe it’s not part of your allotted span. Or maybe just days when you have the space to be on your own, doing something that needs doing that you can do, something you can work at and see the difference and think at the end of the day that maybe it isn’t completely fixed but you can finish it tomorrow, that you’re on top of this by just working at it, that you can work this out, maybe that’s what feels out of time.

Summer’s coming soon. And summer on the water is a special thing.

By the river

It's the red one. A 1992 Folkboat. And mine. — It’s the red one. A 1992 Folkboat. And mine.

I looked at boats to buy back in 2000. Somehow that was 15 years ago. It just flies by when you’re having fun. I was a different person then, with different dreams and expectations.

I wanted a house in Oxford, or maybe just outside it on the London side. I’d sold the house in Stow. I was trying to get an internet business off the ground but thanks to an accountant who didn’t do email and a vulture capitalist who thought I was going to give him half of the thing in return for working for him in deed, word and fact, that didn’t happen. Microsoft do the thing it did now. At least I got to be friendly with a six foot blond lesbian coder with a rubber dress. Not everybody can say that.

But the boat thing…we visited boat yards all over the East Coast. Stood on docks looking at horrible plastic boats with fins sticking out of them, stubbed toes on bits of things that nobody even knew what they were any more, so much so that in one of those yards up a creek in Essex someone now thinks they’ve found Darwin’s little ship, the one he sailed on to write the Origin of Species.

I wanted a wooden boat and I had about £10,000 to spend. It didn’t happen for all kinds of reasons then, but time goes on for the lucky ones. Yesterday I bought one. I didn’t pay anything like that. I first saw this lovely little boat in October or thereabouts. I’ve been going to this boatyard for years, thinking one day I might buy a boat there. Finally it’s happened. I’m just about to go down and see what needs to be done to get her ready for the water again.

I’ll just put a pen and a thermos flask in my bag and I’ll let you know.

Trotsky and me

Not really inconspicous. — Not really inconspicuous.

The only thing I learned about Trotsky was a mistake. I hardly learned anything in three years of Sociology at university, other than the fact that you can’t run a car and a Triumph 650 on a student grant and that if you move in with your girlfriend next door to an occasional girlfriend your life will be a lot louder and considerably less fun than the Austin Powers script you had imagined. I don’t know if Trotsky had that kind of stuff to deal with but he had his own problems.

Like living in Mexico. I went there once. The story of that Sunday and the unfortunate misunderstanding in Tijuana is familiar to a select few very close friends and not usually told to people I’ve only just met, in case they wash their hands after shaking mine and their womenfolk’s faces turn to stone as you close for the parting peck on the cheek. More than usual, anyway.

In some ways I wished I’d paid more attention now. After leading a failed struggle (it says in Wikipedia, which has certainly been more useful than nine terms at Bath) the against kindly Uncle Joe Stalin, whose propaganda machine was still creaking on even when I was an undergraduate, Leon Trotsky did some groovy stuff. He got himself deported from the USSR in 1929, for a start. He lead a thing called the Fourth International in Mexico, opposing Stalin and bureaucracy. He thought the Red Army should fight Hitler when Stalin didn’t think anything of the kind and opposed Stalin and Hitler’s Non-Aggression pact, all of which British Soviet fans had airbrushed out of history when I was at school.

Predictably enough, all this didn’t go down too well with Stalin, who ordered Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. With an ice-pick. This was the only bit I knew then. Because it was so ludicrous. I’ve read James Bond. I understand that sometimes when you want to murder someone the ideal tool for the job isn’t available. But I’d have thought that the chances of finding an ice pick in Mexico were fairly slim, especially compared with the rather high chance of someone saying “where on earth are you going with that ice pick, Ramon?”

And of course, it wasn’t like that. Trotsky really did get an ice-pick stuck in his head, but it was the kind you get in swanky hotels to break up the ice in the bucket behind the bar, not something you find near St Bernard dogs and chalet girls.

Last week I talked with someone who’d been shocked about someone else’s behaviour a quarter of a century ago and still regarded the other woman with awe if not admiration. Except I was able to tell her that actually, while all that may have happened it certainly didn’t to that person because I knew for a fact she was in another country at the time. She’d misunderstood something someone had said. A quarter of a century on she still believed it. I was sort of pleased to find it wasn’t just me.

Customer service

According to the papers, TFL or Transport for London (quite spectacularly a better, different, more millenial, utterly happening name than London Transport, with all it’s Ian Drury/Reg Varney gertcha ChipsnChippies associations, and that’ll be ooh, what, call it £150,000 in consultancy, no, no, not at all, but into the offshore account if you don’t mind. No VAT for cash, obviously) started closing ticket offices in London’s Tube stations.

It doesn’t matter that Boris Johnson has categorically said no Tube stations will lose their staff. Until the people who could do something about it can be bothered to get off their arses and go and vote then there’s no reason for a politician to keep to his word.

That Boris, eeza larf, innee? Back of my cab last week, very clever man. Sorry guv, I'm not going south of the river this time of night.... — That Boris, eeza larf, innee? Back of my cab last week, very clever man….

If the people it directly affects can’t be bothered, why should he? It doesn’t matter for so many reasons, like nobody expects a politician to keep to their word, or nobody expects many newspapers or TV or interviewers to remember the lie, or if you bring it up in press conference you’re ‘aggressive’ or ‘difficult’ or ‘confrontational’ and as we all know now, that’s about half a step away from being a terrorist, going round contradicting your betters like that, with stuff they’ve actually said. It’s not big, nor clever, and they know where you live. And your credit card number, along with your passport details.

So there won’t be anybody at the Tube to sell you a ticket. The machines will always work. If they don’t, nobody will get a penalty fare. Nobody will get mugged or fall ill on a train. And nobody will ever, ever, ever, become a victim of crime in a totally unmanned station. This is the new London. The one you can’t afford to live in. Rich people buying portfolio properties don’t go on the Tube anyway, so who cares what happens down there?

But I remember a different London, not a very, very long time ago. One where Angel Tube had a wooden lift shuttered with a steel lattice of doors and like something out of a film you can’t quite remember, or maybe it was a dream or something, it didn’t just have a lift. It had a lift man as well.

Wooden booths for the GPO's telephonic apparatus at Angel Tube. Not in an episode of Doctor Who, but in 1988. My Ray-Bans are just out of shot. — Wooden booths for the GPO’s telephonic apparatus at Angel Tube. Not in an episode of Doctor Who, but in 1988. My Ray-Bans are just out of shot. Along with Jack Reagan, Kaz, that girl with the armpit hair, Miguette (just OMG, Miguette, in so many ways….) and all of my other ghosts. Yes, I know it looks like something out of Passport To Pimlico. London used to.

He had a voice quite like mine and he sounded as if he’d drunk a lot in his time. I’m not sure that had stopped. He gave a running commentary of the passengers, the weather, the news, pretty female customers and anything else he thought of as he ran the lift up and down between the surface and the platforms.

Back in those days the platforms at Angel were something to be sensibly wary about. Nowadays it looks like any other Tube station platform; back then it had just one platform and tracks either side of it. Down at the far end they seemed to tail off and gave the impression it would be easy to find yourself on the tracks. I think someone did once, down there. It wasn’t a happy place at the far end of the platform.

It wasn’t a dream. I don’t like the new Angel Tube, but the past is another country and all that. And besides, London Transport got rid of the manned lift at Angel and probably got rid of the man as well over twenty-five years ago. He’s probably dead now, I think. I can remember his words as the steel doors screeched shut each night on my way home.

“Customer service, we’re supposed to provide. Customer disservice, I call it. Goodnight ladies and gentlemen. Goodnight.”

Who’s getting scared now?

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage with multi-culturalism. We didn’t have any when I was at school. We had precisely two black kids in the whole village. I went to a little hundred-year-old Gothic Church of England faith school, as it would be called now. Our religious indoctrination was limited to a Canon coming to visit about every six months to inspect the Headmaster’s soul. He was in The War as people used to call it then, bought a Volkswagen Beetle he kept in a locked shed, thought I might do ok if I concentrated and wished my Maths would improve; that’s about all I know about his soul. That and prayers at the beginning of the day. I don’t think we had them at going home time. Maybe we did but our lack of multi-culturalism wasn’t really due to that. We just didn’t have foreign people around.

Except looking back, we did. The sisters, for example. They were about my age. They lived in a little cottage with their parents down a quiet lane and they didn’t have to do prayers at school if they didn’t want to. They had prayers on Friday at home and they had some candles in their window. We just had candles at Christmas mostly, but they got them every week. They were very pale and they had very dark hair and kept to themselves, Miriam and Rebecca. So did their parents, Mr and Mrs Haas. I don’t think I ever saw their parents out in our little Wiltshire village. That’s all anyone knew about them. And yes, those are their real names, deliberately, because I never heard anything bad about them in any way, shape or form. Someone said something bad had happened to the parents, something to do with the war, but that’s all anyone said about it, whatever it was.

We knew the motorcycle shop was called Difazio and the ice-cream man Antonio and a kid at school was called Gino in a very non-Northern Soul kind of way, but nobody ever told us about the Italian PoW camp there used to be, fifteen miles away. They didn’t tell us about the Polish refugee camp there’d been up on Keevil airfield either, where we raced our FSIEs and Suzuki mopeds once we’d get them through the perimeter hedge, which accounted for the Koslowskis and Kalinkas at school, too.

We did multiculturalism by not knowing how not to. Which is always easier when there’s no obvious difference such as the colour of someone’s skin. Because we certainly did have race-based prejudice at school. One summer, two kids in particular started their own race-hate campaign. Legitimised by the TV show Love Thy Neighbour, all of a sudden two little boys suddenly started talking about jungle bunnies, coons and wogs. One of them cited the ultimate reference of his father, who knew for the usual fact that people with darker skins were taking all the jobs, not least in Bowyers the pork pie factory. These two boys, one of whom went on the London School of Economics and had a very fanciable sister who had her own car (she was nice, too, and didn’t have much truck with the instant racism her brother spewed up every time he made a sentence in public) got their ready-made chip on their shoulder from their fathers and from the TV.

This week people have been shot in an office. We’re supposed to believe Islam, cartoons, Al Q’uaeda, ISIS, Saladin, always someone else does bad things. We don’t. It’s not bad when we invade other countries. It’s not bad when we drop bombs over a city at random and pretend no civilians got hurt, it’s not bad when we kill journalists, or attack a news organisation with missiles, the way Al Jazeera’s offices have been targetted twice by the USAF, or when we cut off water or electricity to entire cities, or blockade a country so hundreds of thousands of civilians die. That’s ok. They should have done what we said, because we are Right and they are Wrong. Always. We are rational and moderate and wise. Always. We have a reason for our regrettable actions. They are fanatics. Little more than savages. Always. You can tell, just by looking at them.

And in case you haven’t got the media message, watch the news. You can see what they’re like, these people who can magically chop off people’s heads without drawing blood, who can shoot someone in the head from ten feet away leaving their head looking exactly the same as it was before. We never lie. You can see that too, when we talk about city blocks falling down when they’re very obviously still standing, behind the person saying it.

We never lie. Ever. Only other people do.

Who’s getting scared now?

Who’s getting scared now? Tell me?

Tell me, how does it feel?

Like a lot of people maybe (Would you? As we used to say? Would you like a lot of people? We were intolerable. But that was then.) I keep trying to get healthy. But it can be scary.

I stopped eating meat that had been to a slaughterhouse, because I don’t think it’s right. I stopped drinking milk for the same reason. I eat fruit and fish and vegetables and I don’t really eat potatoes apart from fish and chips on a Friday and maybe oven chips once in the week, I don’t eat lard or bacon or processed, manufactured food apart from baked beans, again maybe once a week, and the occasional biscuit, but really not very often at all.

But child of my times as I am, I keep thinking it’s not enough. But nobody told me getting a better diet could be so scary.

I remember going to Holland and seeing those odd loos they have in what seem like otherwise perfectly normal people’s houses, designed so that once you’ve gone to the bathroom you can inspect your own droppings and admire or otherwise the consistency, colour and presumably the overall presentation. “Darling, can you come in here a minute? There’s something I’d like you to take a look at.”

Sadly, it’s like a car crash, once you know it’s going to happen you can’t not watch. But here’s a tip. If you’re going to do that, don’t drink beetroot juice, the way I have every morning. It’s healthy, isn’t it? Full of antioxidants and stuff that combats free radicals, a colonic surge against the Taliban of hostile flora in your small intestine. It’s also supposed to reduce your blood pressure, but I can assure you it doesn’t.

It does at first, admittedly. You can feel yourself going light-headed and the blood drain from your face as you think just this once, it can’t do any harm can it? Just one quick look in the pan? You know, just in case there’s anything wrong inside? I mean obviously there won’t be, but better safe than sorry, no? Just a peek. It’s not as if I’m going to be selling tickets or anything. Just a quick look.

And then you stagger back from the pan, reaching out to the wall to steady yourself, jaw slack, and the word “omigodI’mgoingtodie” stillborn on your lips before you realise, no, think about it. If that was actually a pan full of blood from your insides you’d already be dead. It’s beetroot juice. That’s what it does to your wee.

I mean, they could have said, couldn’t they?

And dream of sheep

Except I didn’t. Anyone who knows anything about me knows about my thing with Kate Bush. I know. We don’t talk about it, but it’s always been there. Ever since I saw her in Laura Ashley in Bath with her mum, probably. I mean, it probably was her. It was like the

I mean, ANYONE would. Even the Pope would, probably.

time I saw Gerry Halliwell walking down the street with her mum in Berkhamstead, where Ed Reardon lives. I didn’t know it was Gerry Halliwell. She wasn’t particularly good looking or anything, and it was just when the Spice Girls were starting to be famous. There was something about her. But nothing like there was something about Kate Bush.

I really, really wanted to meet Kate Bush. Who wouldn’t? Although, as someone collapsed laughing on a beach in Greece once when I said that, as I stole her justified incredulity and put her words in Poppy’s mouth in Not Your Heart Away, ‘Meet her? MEET her? You mean shag her!?”

Well, um. sort of. Obviously. Ok, yes then. I really, really, wanted to do that. Who wouldn’t? As they used to say at the time, one in Kate Bush is worth two in the hand.

All this remembered shabbiness was prompted by talking about dreams. My best worst one ever was about Kate Bush. I’d gone home to my flat with someone nice I’d only just met and we went to bed. And later I dreamed.

I dreamed I’d gone home with Kate Bush, who’d quite sensibly said I was a bit pissed and she wanted it to be special so we’d both remember it. Someone actually did say that once, and it was. I won’t mention her name in case her husband reads this. Sort of sorry about that. But not really. But it was, anyway. Back with Kate the upshot was no go then, but in the morning. I said, as people did at that Kronenbourg 1664-fueled time, no, wait, that’s not fair, you have to. It’s practically the law. Kate acted as if, like most girls then, she’d heard this one before. She wasn’t going to be swayed on that one. In the morning.

As day follows night, the morning came. I woke up. The other side of the duvet is turned back. The other side of the bed is still warm. I can hear her in the bathroom, getting ready and this is going to be so utterly, utterly mega and the door opens and the poor girl I’d taken home is greeted as she walks through the doorway into my bedroom with the words….

“But you’re not Kate Bush.”

Look. I’m sorry. It could have happened to anyone. I didn’t mean anything bad. No, wait, look, I’ve got some croissants, I think…..

And so on. And utterly tragically, that’s a true story.

Ed Milliband’s Secret Diary, aged 13 3/4

I can’t stand Ed Milliband. This email he sent me – no, seriously, he really did, it’s in the first person after all, so it must have been him, he wouldn’t lie or anything – tells you exactly why.

People sometimes say that they don’t know what we — what I — stand for, so I’ll put this in the simplest terms I can, Carl Bennett. This country is too unequal, and we need to change it.

So here are the promises I’m making to you about the kind of Britain I will lead:

First, I will undo the damage the Tories have done to our country:

I will scrap the Bedroom Tax, which unfairly punishes the disabled and the vulnerable.
I will scrap the Health and Social Care Act, which damages and undermines our NHS
I will scrap the gagging law, which limits our freedom of speech and right to campaign
I will reverse the Tories’ £3bn tax cut for millionaires, so we get the deficit down but do it fairly

Some good points there Ed, but I can’t help wondering why when the bedroom tax was implemented in April 2013 it took you until September 2013 to even mention that you thought it was a really bad idea. It could have been because it was just before the Labour Party conference of course, not that you’d actually discovered a principle you cared about.

Second, I will take on the powerful vested interests that hold millions back:

I will force energy companies to freeze gas and electricity bills until 2017
I will give power back to those who rent their homes, by scrapping letting fees and stabilising tenancy agreements
I will raise money from tobacco companies, tax avoiders, and a mansion tax to fund doctors, nurses, careworkers and midwives for our NHS
I will reform our banks so that they properly support small businesses
I will stop recruitment agencies hiring only from abroad

I’m not sure how you’d go about scrapping letting fees in any way that wouldn’t see them replaced in 30 seconds by “administrative charges” or some other estate agent scam. And the thing is Ed, tenancy agreements are perfectly stable. They’re too short if you’re looking for long-term security, at six months and a month’s notice, but that’s not unstable. So what is it, as usual, you’re actually going to do to help? If you wanted to help the NHS you wouldn’t have helped to privatise it. You wouldn’t piss about with a mansion tax that’s going to raise not very much, pretty much in London only, affecting just people with big houses but no smarts and no accountants who could, for example, put the house in a company wrapper or something.

Given that you helped refinance the same banks that bankrupted the economy in the first place and given you did nothing whatsoever to get banks to help small businesses last time Labour were in power, I don’t believe you. Your old boss ‘reformed’ the banks. We’re living with that now.

And instead of waffling on about stopping recruitment agencies hiring abroad, like a budget version of Nigel Farage, how about enforcing the minimum wage and scrapping the opt-out farmers are allowed, so they can hire from abroad and pay lower wages? Do you think that might be an idea? Obviously not.

Third, I will start to rebuild a fairer, better Britain:

I will raise the minimum wage, to ensure that everyone that does a hard day’s work is properly rewarded
I will promote the living wage by giving tax breaks to companies that pay it
I will ban the damaging zero-hours contracts that exploit British workers
I will bring in a lower 10p income tax rate, cutting taxes for 24 million workers
I will support working parents with 25 hours of free childcare for three- and four-year-olds
I will help more young people get on the housing ladder by getting 200,000 homes built every year

A hard day’s work. Ed, one of the reasons I hate you so much is because almost every time David Cameron comes out with some patronising crap about workers and shirkers I see your little face the other side of the House of Commons and you always look as if you’re thinking ‘I wish I’d said that, first.’ When I hear you come out with this hard workers stuff, I know I’m not mistaken.

How will you ‘get’ 200,000 homes built every year, Ed? Will you build them? You don’t say you will. That would smack of socialism, wouldn’t it, and we certainly can’t have you talking like that. So why are the building companies going to build them for you, exactly? Another scabby little deal like PFI that another of your old bosses dreamed up, that suit the companies and scam everyone else? Like the NHS, for example?

But the biggest reason I hate you Ed, is you don’t know what words mean. I don’t think you remember our conversation on Twitter. You stopped taking part in it after all, when I pointed out to you that contrary to what Tony Blair and Tweedles Dee and Dum maintained, words actually do not mean anything you want them to and it does not depend who is the master, them or you. You’d been saying how very sad you were that a market researcher had died after he’d done so much for the Labour Party. He did loads of qualitative analysis to find ideas and identify themes. You were almost heartbroken that this pollster, as you called him, had polled his last.

Which was pathetic and dishonest, because you clearly didn’t even know what he did if you confused counting how many – polling – with finding out why, or qualitative, subjective research. Or of course, you didn’t know him or what he did at all. There’s always that possibility.

And then we have your insulting little list.

I want to know — is this the kind of Britain you want to see?

Tell me now which of my three promises is most important to you:

Undoing Tory damage

Taking on vested interests

Building a better Britain

– EdThank you.

No Ed, thank YOU! You want to know which of these vacuous catch-alls bothers me most. Undoing Tory damage? Just like the way your old boss Tony Blair increased and accelerated it, with Thatcher back in Number 10 as an advisor the week after she was voted out of it, the woman who was so pleased with what your old boss did to the Labour Party she claimed it as her proudest achievement? I don’t know. Let’s have a look at the others.

Taking on vested interests might be a good idea, except you don’t say what they are, or whether they include the banks, the Royal family, which as landowners are one of the very biggest vested interests in the UK today, along with the Duke of Westminster, or the Big Five accountancy companies, who your old boss Gordon Brown practically gave the running of UK plc over to last time he was Prime Minister. Maybe that one. Are you really going to do that? I’m impressed.

I quite like the idea of building a better Britain, but I can’t say that’s really the big thing, because once again, you don’t say what you mean and without doing that, it’s anything I want it to mean, isn’t it? If I was six I’d probably say building it out of Lego would be better. If I was a UKIP voter I’d pretend to say I wanted a fairer labour market when I actually meant no darkies, thank-you very much. Or one where Simon Dee was back on Saturday afternoons and it was illegal to call anyone Doctor Who that wasn’t properly Tom Baker. If I was a ludicrous romantic I’d say a better Britain was one with a real Labour Party, one that had principles instead of buzzwords. One that had a leader who didn’t look like a total freak. One that had a leader who hadn’t sat there silent for two years while the Tory boys got to do whatever they wanted while Matron wasn’t looking. One that had a leader who didn’t think having a laugh and joke with Nigel sodding Farage on television, you grinning and graciously conceding his point like the new boy sucking up to the school bully, the same way you do with Cameron in the Commons, was appropriate behaviour. Except it is, for you, isn’t it, Ed?

You want to be everything to everyone, because you aren’t anything. You don’t believe in anything except expediency. Just like your old boss. Which is why I tore up my Labour Party membership card. Which is why I joined the Green Party. They actually believe things. I do, too.