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.
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.
Some extraordinary things have been happening lately. I’ve noticed over the past few weeks that when everything looks particularly hopeless and awful, something good happens. The last couple of months haven’t exactly fit my life plan, but the past few days have seen some really rather good things happen.
About a month ago I stupidly managed to kill my iPhone by leaving it on the boot of the car then driving half an hour in the rain and leaving it in the rain overnight. It was no consolation proving I drive carefully. I missed a phone call I needed and had to go and buy a phone which although good, obviously isn’t an iPhone, and so it almost synchronises with my MacBook but not completely.
I lost touch with someone for reasons that were unclear to me at the time and also missed out on walking some dogs, as well as separately coming to the end of a work contract and not having a new one lined up. But two days ago the new phone rang very unexpectedly at 2 am and I spent the whole day yesterday walking with dogs, as I did again today, in the Suffolk countryside, as well as enjoying the company of someone I didn’t think I would be talking to again.
In a minor but important vein I made some really rather wonderful red pepper and sweet potato soup with herb dumplings and even if I did forget to put any baking soda in, it was an unexpectedly good supper.
A phone call this morning suggested a new work contract at more than double the fee for the last one, I was able to help someone, I got a six mile walk in today and just before throwing it in the bin when I checked the iPhone one last time after leaving it in a sealed plastic box with some rice and those gel sachets you get in new shoes, it started accepting a charge and after 20 minutes of being force fed electricity starting to reboot. Early days for that, but we’ll see.
I’ve been trying to start a new book and found through talking to someone that how it starts is obvious now.
I found the full text of the ‘For whom the bell tolls’ quote too. I first paid attention to it a long time ago, but I re-found it just recently. It’s here:
It tolls for thee…
Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I knowt. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me, for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me. All mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. . . .
John Donne, from Meditation 17
Maybe everything is connected. Today, although a lot of the afternoon was spent on my own rather than being involved in mankind except on Facebook, which probably isn’t what John Donne had in mind, I’m getting that feeling. Any man’s death diminishes me. And life is an odd and today a quietly happy and thankful thing.
When I was at school I had a brilliant friend called Philip. There were three of us, in fact, not due to split personalities but because we both had this other brilliant friend called Marcia. We’d play with words and try to make them dance for us. Sometimes they did. Sometimes it must have sounded like a collection of nervous ticks. Others, it must have just sounded like three kids who didn’t like sports.
English bikes for English weather.
Back then and still now I liked riding my bicycle. That was more difficult sometimes then because my fantastic bike got stolen. It was a metal-flake lime green Carlton Continental, hand-made in Birmingham as bikes were in those days. It was the best bike I’d ever had. Back then lights were a problem. They were big, they were heavy and they didn’t put out much light. That applied to almost every light you ever saw, in those days, but almost every battery light would fit every bicycle. Front lights had a slot that you slid over a metal tongue that was part of the bike, either just above the front mudguard or on the side of the forks. Back lights were usually bolted to the right hand side of the frame as high as you could get them without your coat covering them when you rode.
Times change. Lights are cheap, light and bright now. But they don’t fit everything. I’ve had to replace a lot of lights simply because they don’t fit the little plastic bracket on the bike, leftover from another lighting idea. It’s a waste, but unless you reach for the gaffa tape there isn’t a solution. It can’t be beyond the wit of lights manufacturers to make one standard bracket that fits everything. But who cares, apart from pinko cycling people who niggle about the environment?
The thing is, lights don’t always work. I’ve just read about a man who was run down by a van on his way home from work, 17:10 in Dorset one December day. He said his bike was ‘lit up like a Christmas tree.’ Philip, like Peter Cook before him but I didn’t know that then, would have immediately said ‘no thanks, I’ve just had one.” But then, Phil had a Saturday job in a record shop, so he could get all that stuff on a staff discount.
I nearly got in a bike accident when I was lit up like a Christmas tree too. It still doesn’t make any sense to me, more than accidents usually don’t. I was cycling to Orford, going to the Jolly Sailor five miles away one December night. It was cold and it was very, very dark and it’s not the busiest road. In fact it’s out in the middle of the nowheres, half of it pine forest, the other half an original medieval landscape, broadleaved trees and open heathland, a pretty little church, hardly any houses, deer roaming free. No streetlights and certainly no road drains. The only street furniture out there is a single red pillar-box on a post at the crossroads, with the letters E11R on it, from a time in the current Queen’s reign when investment in public services was obviously more affordable than it’s supposed to be now.
I had two armbands on, one on each arm, flashing red lights inside yellow reflective plastic so that any car at a junction could see which way I was turning. I had a yellow hi-visability vest on too, which I don’t often wear but I did that night. One yellow reflective bicycle clip because back then I didn’t have a Hebie chainguard. A flashing back light. One flashing front light and a steady front light too.
I wanted to make sure if anyone ran me down they couldn’t stand there in court and be believed when they came out with the traditional ‘I didn’t see him.’ Obviously, experience says that they’d then have added ‘anyway, it was only a bike, your Honour’ and been acquitted and probably reimbursed for their inconvenience, but that’s something else.
It was pitch black, no cars, just me and the flash of the lighthouse out on Orford Ness three miles away, just over to the right in front of me. That’s when I heard the clicking. Then more of it.
It was odd. It wasn’t anything metal. But there was a lot of it. Then something dark moved, right at the edge of where my front light was shining. It wasn’t human.
I mean, it really wasn’t human. I stopped the bike, because I knew it was. Despite all the lights, a little herd of deer had wandered across the road just as I got there. Now they were all around me, about ten of them. I stopped because I’ve seen them run and once one of them does they all do. I didn’t want three hundredweight of deer running into me, then nine more of them running over me with their sharp hooves. That’s what was making the clicking on the road.
Somehow I’ve mixed up brackets and lights again, so it’s time to have to get a whole new light. I’m going into town later so I’ll have a look at what’s around, the old fashioned way first before I go on Amazon or eBay because that’s how I am. I’ll still be lit up like a Christmas tree again. And hopefully the deer still won’t care.
This is how Christmas should be. Like this. Or it’s just rubbish and it’s all your fault. Especially if you can’t be bothered to look like this first thing on Christmas morning. Oh it just doesn’t matter, does it? No. Don’t you worry about it. It’s probably too much trouble, isn’t it? Nothing. I said nothing, alright? Jeez…
I didn’tused to like Christmas. Mostly because it was nothing like the Christmases I liked, to paraphrase the old song. It wasn’t just because Christmases were hardly ever white; where I grew up in Wiltshire they were mostly damp and muddy along with cold, a time of runny
I mean maybe it’s me, but I just can’t see how it’s very, you know, Christmassy, somehow…
noses and sore nostrils in way that doesn’t happen with colds now. I haven’t given much thought to why, except not using cotton hankies might have quite a lot to do with it. Christmas always got like this quite quickly. Boxing Day was moderately worse. It wasn’t just that everything was shut but we’d have to go and follow a hunt somewhere. Which was rubbish because we didn’t even ride, let alone hunt. I never knew why we were there at all.
When I say we didn’t ride, we did. A bit. Once a week I had to go to Jenny Dyke’s riding school at Brokerswood. Look, I didn’t give her that name, ok? And I’m sure she was a perfectly nice, well-balanced girl with an active and mixed social life. Albeit one with quite a lot of horses in it.
Riding aside, there were lots of odd things like that about my childhood. We were flat broke. Seriously broke. When one of our succession of rubbish cars broke down once we got £1 for it. So I’m still not sure how come when twice before I left home I needed a suit I was sent to a tailor and a suit was made for me. Seriously. I still don’t understand that, really.
But Christmas was weird. Two films were always on, neither of them anything to do with Christmas. The Great Escape and The Blue Max. Every Christmas. One was about Steve McQueen jumping a motorbike over a hill to not escape from Germany in the Second World War (except it obviously wasn’t and the acting was rubbish). The other was about German pilots stitching each other up in and after the First World War. A sort of NotVery Great Waldo Pepper mit Schnitzel. With that bloke who was in the A Team. Peppard. An easy mistake to make.
It was the one on the right, apparently.
There were presents, obviously. The one I remember best was the Suzi Quatro album. I was told it was just a phase I was going through, although it doesn’t show much sign of wearing off.
The back cover was the same picture but faded. For a while there that Christmas dawn I thought my eyesight had suffered.
I did a milk round one Christmas eve, getting up improbably early. That was really good. A brilliantly sunny morning even if it was cold. I can remember the bang of the gearbox on the electric motor as the milk float started off. That and the smell of milk from the bottles people didn’t wash. That was how we judged what people were like, on the milk float. Did they wash their bottles? It wasn’t a social class proxy, even if we’d known what one of those was. It was much more fundamental. It showed whether or not people gave a damn about anybody else.
One summer I saw Holiday Inn. And no, White Christmas was the name of the song, not the film. I loved everything about it. But more so, It’s A Wonderful Life. The older I get the more truthful that film becomes. It could just be the sherry, obviously, but the mix of the very dark side of Jimmy Stewart (oh, you didn’t know he flew in a bombing raid in Vietnam then?) and his character, combined with the moral of the tale, that you have to try to be a good person and if you try to do that then you’ve done a good thing in itself works for me. Something in me reacted to the sheer nightmarish terror when Jimmy Stewart got his wish, that he’d never been born, trapped seeing the world that would have been, unable to do anything to make it better because that was what he’d asked for, the total abnegation of self. Or as I said, it could have been the sherry.
Shut up. You’ll spoil it.
So here’s my ideal Christmas. And I don’t want to hear any happy holidays or crimble or festive season or any other crap. It’s Christmas. December 25th. If you want to talk about other festivals, please do. I hope they’re great. I’m talking about Christmas. Christmas eve and good company and a fire. Midnight mass.
Carols. Proper carols, all about death and cold and the dark and just the smallest glimmer of hope. Ok, you can get all that at home but there’s something about going to church at Christmas.There just is, ok? It’s only once a year.
Preferably somewhere like Blythburgh, some fantastic medieval place either in the middle of nowhere or Norwich Cathedral, in the middle of everything. Either way, a decent choir and a fabulous building. And a driver. Except when I was 18 I used to like driving those midnight black roads, not drinking, just the engine running and no-one around. This is a fantasy Christmas, after all, so both of those things can happen at the same time.
Preferably somewhere like Blythburgh, some fantastic medieval place either in the middle of nowhere or Norwich Cathedral, in the middle of everything. Either way, a decent choir and a fabulous building. And a driver. Except when I was 18 I used to like driving those midnight black roads, not drinking, just the engine running and no-one around. This is a fantasy Christmas, after all, so both of those things can happen at the same time.
Given that, it’s easy to arrange that at midnight I go to check to see if the animals talk, the way that in my family we say they do, remembering a stable. And of course they do. What kind of stupid question is that? Nobody ever said they have to talk with a human voice. Then bed. Then waking up with a stocking filled with presents.
Look, it doesn’t have to be a big stocking, but it has to be one. Or a big sock. And it has to have a satsuma, which I don’t really like, a sugar mouse and a walnut, apart from anything else. Because it does or it’s not Christmas and you’re RUINING IT.
Breakfast, ideally coffee, good bread, gravadlax and of course, as it’s Christmas, chocolate. On the plate, thank-you. Proper chocolate, that’s never been anywhere near a Cadbury’s factory, because they don’t make chocolate, they make chocolate-type confectionary. Even those Belgian sea-shell things from Lidl are better than Cadbury’s. At least they’re chocolate. Maybe, if it’s fine, a walk. Maybe Southwold beach. Could be Aldeburgh. White Lion afterwards if it is. Snape Golden Key if I’m allowed on the way back.
Lunch. The best one ever was a huge cold seafood table my girlfriend of the time did a couple of years back. Apart from the strain of keeping the cat off it, that was the best eat-what-you like-when-you-like Christmas dinners I can remember. It wasn’t quite in the same quantities as Stenna Line used to do on the Newcastle-Kristiansand run, but it was close. And better company.
And a point-to-point meeting on Boxing Day, in a new coat, with rooks calling somewhere and frost on the grass. And friends in the pub afterwards. Friends above all. That’s really what Christmas is about, as we huddle round the fire, just past the shortest day, pretending that even now you can tell the days are getting longer, and in just a few weeks you don’t have to pretend that any more, as we welcome back the Spring.
It’ll happen one day. All of it. I’ll just keep watching stuff like Love Actually until it does.
UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage has apparently called for the de-criminalisation of handguns, to allow people to apply for a licence and own them legally. The way they did in the UK until 1996, when the government banned them after the Dunblane massacre. To be fair, they got close to it before, after the Hungerford shootings in 1988. It’s not as if it’s a Party political thing in the UK. Apart from at UKIP, where Farage has called the handgun ban ‘ludicrous.’
I have to declare an interest. I’m against people making up facts. I’m against gibberish. And I used to shoot. Legally. According to Keith Vaz, that means I encouraged the criminal use of firearms.
This is my true confession. I warn you, it’s pretty….dull.
From the age of 14 I went every Thursday night to the local Territorial Army centre, a big stone barrack block in the middle of Bythesea Road. Which was odd, as it’s an hour’s drive to the sea from there. There was a six-wheeled armoured personal carrier in a shed around the back of the building, which you could see through a gap in the wooden door that people might think an odd thing in a county town now, but we didn’t at the time, close to the Army training ranges on Salisbury Plain and the School of Infantry at Warminster, eight miles away.
A man called Lord Roberts probably had a lot to do with me shooting. Back at the time of the Boer War the British Army got severely mauled by rebel farmers in South Africa, who armed with German Mauser rifles had grand sport shooting British soldiers the same way they’d been shooting game on the veldt – accurately, quickly, from a long way off.
Lord Roberts had these drill halls built all over England. Judging by the smell of the kapok matts we still had most of the original equipment.
I used a BSA Martini-action rifle that belonged to the club, paid my subs and bought the single box of .22 bullets that lasted the evening, not to be taken off the premises, and put on my shooting jacket with the padded elbows and shoulders, adjusted the sling on the fore-end of the rifle so it ran tight, cinched around my left wrist and back around my left bicep to steady the weapon, then went onto the range when we were told it was clear, showed clear, opening the breech to prove there was nothing at all in the firing chamber, laid the weapon down and on the command Walk Forward we all trooped up the range to fix our targets to the wooden frames in front of the six feet of sand and railway sleepers that acted as the backstop.
When we’d done that we walked back to the firing point together and when we were told we could by the Range Officer, only then loaded a bullet into the single-shot rifles, closed the bolt and settled down to get our breathing right.
BSA Martini MkV. Not exactly looking like a concealable terror weapon, is it?
Prone, you aim a rifle with your body, not your arms. Close your eyes, take a breath and when you breath out open them. See where the sights are. If they’re say, left and low then you move your feet to the left and back a little. Close your eyes, breath, open them and see where the sights are now. If you try to hold the gun on target with your hands you’ll almost certainly miss, because once you’ve pulled the trigger you’ll relax. The rifle will drift off to where your body pointed it in the fraction of a second between the cartridge firing and the bullet leaving the end of the barrel. And you’ll miss. With a target pistol it’s a lot more difficult, because you only use one hand and you’ve nothing to brace it on without a sling. Britain won the Olympic shooting event in 1960 in Tokyo. After 1996 the British Olympic team was unable to practice in the UK.
It doesn’t sound very irresponsible or criminal so far, does it? I’d say that if anything, it taught teenage boys self-control, because if they didn’t exercise any they missed the target and no amount of bravado can argue anything different. You missed. The end. If someone was shooting back at you, you’d be dead.
As a club we were ok, I suppose. It was a bit boring sometimes. The old blokes who knew a lot were mostly deaf, because they’d spent a lifetime shooting without the ear defenders we all wore. After about six months it wasn’t that great on the range, not because the mats had never been cleaned in the 70 years they’d been there but because in a pre-air-conditioning age the stench of fired nitro-cellulose and lead shavings in the air got a bit much, especially in summer before the butts were emptied and the sand taken away to be melted down to recover the scrap lead.
After that I went to Bisley and qualified as an adult Marksman at fifteen, then I took up pistol shooting at 20 and taught shooting on summer camp when I was 24. In 1996 the government decided everybody who shot legally should have their guns taken away from them and offered me £170 for a Colt 19911A1 I had spent over £400 customising to suit me. I wrote to the Home Office asking why. They wrote and said something had to be seen to be done.
What puzzles me is why the debate, such as it is, is even more infantile than usual in the UK.
Keith Vaz, the chair of the home affairs committee, said Britain has the toughest gun laws in the world and strong action had been needed following the “horrific tragedy” at Dunblaine.
He added: “The logical consequence of relaxing gun laws, as suggested by Mr Farage, is an increase in gun use which should be discouraged rather than encouraged. Any change could possibly act as a green light for an increase in criminality.
Which should be discouraged. Let’s leave this aside, notwithstanding that this opinion is being presented as a fact. The ‘fact’ that follows is nonsensical.
According to Keith Vaz, changing the law, making something legal which is not currently legal, could increase illegal acts. Exactly how isn’t clear. What is, is that Mr Vaz is reading off the same page of gibberish as Peter Squires, professor of criminology at Brighton University and a member of Association of Police Officer’s advisory group on the criminal use of fire arms, who said legalising handguns “…will generate a demand, it will generate illegal traffic around that demand – the problem with hand guns is that they are small and concealable and they are already the weapon of choice of gangs members and criminals.”
So just to be clear, making something legal will generate a demand for something that is illegal. This is the same logic that says that buying a car legally makes people want stolen cars, except car owners don’t have the police coming round to their house checking that their car is kept in a locked steel box bolted to the wall when it isn’t in use, nor demand that the petrol isn’t kept in it or in the same place except when you’re driving it. But who cares? Car killings are an acceptable part of life. They outnumber firearms deaths by a factor of N. There is never any serious call to ban cars for any reason at all.
But the logic still escapes me. The ACPO advisor says handguns are already the weapon of choice for gangs and criminals. Not would be. Are. And again ‘it will generate” is opinion presented as fact.
I’m not that happy I agree with something Nigel Farage says. About anything. But I don’t accept I contributed to gun culture, whatever that’s supposed to be outside the ravings of the Daily Mail. I don’t accept that I encouraged criminality when I cycled back from Bythesea Road and worried myself sick one week when I discovered a single .22 round left in the pocket of my shooting jacket. That was illegal. The rest of it wasn’t. And we didn’t talk rubbish about it.
According to the Guardian today a man driving a black BMW ran down and killed two cyclists. He had to be cut out his car. One of the dead men was Kris Jarvis. According to the Guardian again, a friend of his said this:
“Kris always said he’d die on his bike, such was his love for cycling! None of his loving family or friends could ever imagine that this would be the way he would’ve expected it to happen. Such was his love for cycling.”
Really? Did he? Did he seriously really?
I can’t imagine anyone at all, ever, saying ‘such was his love for cycling.’ It’s the kind of phrase you only ever see written down and even then in one of those sports books with lots of pictures, remaindered from £25 to £1.99 in a shop piled high with travel games and maps of Basingstoke, next to a kebab shop in a rainy suburb somewhere off the north end of the A3.
Even Martin Amis must have blushed when he wrote much the same stuff as a parody about darts in London Fields. But the stupid doesn’t stop there.
He always said he’d die on his bike. No-one could have thought he’d expect it to happen. Well, yes actually. That’s exactly what he did. If the family friend meant ‘he can’t have expected to be killed by a selfish maniac in a car,’ then the family friend can’t have cycled much in the UK.
We have a culture here which is based on selfishness. It would be easy to just say ‘Thatcher’ in the manner of a 1980s alternative comedian and leave it at that, but I don’t know if the attitude pre-dated her. Films such as I’m Alright Jack suggest it did and that she simply tapped into a particularly British vein of homicidal conceit.
But evil dead politicians aside, anyone who cycles regularly in Britain knows perfectly well that there are car drivers who feel for their own reasons that Thatcher’s Great Car Economy would be better off with no bicycles around at all, and certainly none in front of their great car. It’s the reason it’s safer to cycle in the middle of the lane rather than at the side. They might still try to ride you down or crowd you deliberately into the side of the road for daring to be in their sacred way, but they aren’t going to be able to pretend they didn’t see you, or it was an accident, or they didn’t quite realise how close they were when they rode you into the verge.
Sometimes it’s still going to happen. Nobody who cycles thinks it can’t.
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.
