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The Political Compass

Just a bit of fun....

Ever wondered exactly where you stand politically? Then have a go at this test. It's free, but you can purchase a Certificate at the end if you want to (got mine framed and hanging in the loo!) showing where you stand against many other famous and infamous politicians, leaders and thinkers. I ended up in the middle of Kropotkin's beard... which is somewhere to the left of Gandhi's sandal! I guess I'm happy with that!

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Currently playing: Street Life - The Crusaders
Current mood: Rebellious!


Phew....

Back in the land of the virtual living at last! Hope everyone's okay.

The computer arrived back yesterday, after 3 weeks, with a new motherboard, upgraded memory and new hard drive. £300 for all that, but still cheaper than buying a new system. And blimey, it goes like the clappers (touchwood).

Anyway... I've decided I'm paying too much now for all my phone and broadband packages and am looking to change. I'm currently on Option 2 with BT for the landline, which is costing me £22 per month, plus £18 a month to Orange for broadband. I've been checking out the opposition and the best deal I can see is the TalkTalk 2 package:

* £5.89 per month for unlimited free evening and weekend calls to landline numbers (excluding premium rate numbers), with a daytime call rate of 3p per minute.

* £10.50 per month line rental

* Free 8 megs a month broadband (my Orange deal gives me 2 megs).

So.... £16.39 a month against my current £40.00! Sounds too good to be true to me. I've read through the Terms and Conditions and can't see any real catches. I've also spoken to TalkTalk and have gone through a few potential catches with them, but it all checks out fine.

Does anyone else use TalkTalk? I'd be interested (and grateful) to hear your views.

Catch you all later,

Al

Currently playing: Abbey Road - The Beatles
Current mood: Relieved


Still stranded...

...out here beyond Internetland.  I finally got the computer back yesterday - after 2 weeks - and eagerly restored all my settings and got my programs up and running.  All going fine... until it came to re-establishing my internet connection.  I loaded the software, got the modem installed, clicked the magic button, and.... nowt!  An error message saying 'Could not gain entry'.  I checked all the port settings, ran a diagnostic on the modem - all okay.  But still nothing.  Further investigation revealed something to stump the logicians who design these things - a contradiction on the system!  When I check the Properties on the modem, it says 'Modem not plugged in' - but when I check connections in Control Panel, it says the modem is installed and running normally.  The modem certainly seems to be running normally, too: all the correct lights are on.

So, what do you make of that one?  A computer that has recognised the device and set it up and says it's running normally - but at the same time says it's not plugged in!  (the port works, by the way... checked it out with other devices).  Any techies out there ever come across that one before?  All suggestions very gratefully received.

Meantime, it's in the library again.  Can't seem to get access to my e-mails, either.  I reckon there must be about 1,200 by now.  Hold on, people.... I'll be in touch as soon as I can....

Currently playing: OK Computer (hah!!)
Current mood: Fed up


Popping out for a while...

Just need to take some time out, folks.

Take care... and see you all soon.

Al

xxx

A C*ck and Bull Story...

I nearly choked on my breakfast this morning when I read this snippet in 'The Week':

"The RSPB has banned the use of the word 'cock' to mean male bird, lest it cause embarrassment or offence. A contributor to the charity's online forum was amazed to find his reference to a 'cock' blackbird replaced by a row of asterisks. 'It is not political correctness,' insisted an RSPB spokesman, but 'we should not forget that the RSPB website has a massive viewing from children. It is better to be safe than sorry."

I thought it was a joke, but I checked the website, and sure enough....

Well... I just had to adopt a nom de plume (no pun intended) and fire off a little e-mail to them:

 

Dear RSPB,

May I be among the first to congratulate you on your entirely proper decision to disguise the word ‘c*ck' when it is used by any of your on-line forum contributors in referring to a male bird. I completely agree with your point that such censorship is necessary on a site which is viewed by children.

When I first started teaching botany in a secondary school, my lessons on birds were frequently the cause of laughter and embarrassment for this very reason - until I learned to drop the offending word altogether and simply refer to a ‘male' bird. The problems didn't end there, though - as I discovered when I got on to discussing particular species of songbird: namely, the parids blue t*t, coal t*t, crested t*t, and great t*t. The lesson ended in complete uproar, and I eventually had to ask the headmaster to come in and restore order. His enquiry as to the cause of the disturbance compounded my embarrassment as I had to admit - there was no other way to say it - that I was teaching the class about the various sizes and shapes of t*ts. From that day forwards, I took to using the less provocative New World term ‘chickadee' in referring to such birds.

Still my travails weren't over. My lesson on the woodpecker elicited hoots of laughter from a certain young American pupil, who also happened to be of the Rastafari persuasion. When I enquired as to the source of his amusement, I was informed that both ‘wood' and ‘pecker' are common slang terms for a certain part of the male anatomy. "I think Mr Phillips (who was the school's English master) would call it a tautology, miss," he went on. But this was as nothing to the mortifying embarrassment I suffered after teaching a lesson on one of my most favourite birds, the crested parrot - only to hear a pupil afterwards say to her father, who was collecting her, "Miss told us she's quite fond of a cockatoo."

Once again, congratulations on your action. I wish such sensitivity could be shown by other groups and authorities. I once undertook a field trip with a class to Cumbria, and our visit to the town of C*ckermouth - with its clear allusion to a particularly lewd and disgusting form of sexual congress - left the group in complete hysterical disarray. Similarly, our trip to Brown Willy on Bodmin Moor.

Your example has inspired me. I shall now be writing to all water authorities in the land to ask them if they would kindly refrain from the use of the term ‘stop c*ck' when referring to what is, under anyone else's definition, clearly a ‘valve.'

Yours most sincerely,

Dr Fanny O. Balls (Miss)

 

Currently playing: I Like Birds - Eels
Current mood: Chirpy


What's My Line?

In a week when the OED is being urged to change its definition of ‘McJob’ to protect the feelings of service sector workers, I’ve been thinking about similar ways in which we refer to ourselves and the jobs we do.

A gardener along the road is, according to the sign on his van, a ‘Garden Technician’. Similarly, a firm of builders working on a pub in the town are ‘Contract Installation Agents.’ And there’s an employment agency nearby which currently has adverts up for ‘Telesales Executives’ and ‘Insurance Technicians’. Orwell would have been amused – or maybe not – at these examples of pretentious language: something quite ordinary being made to sound like something extremely grand. We’ve all heard of ‘Refuse Disposal Operatives’, for instance.

It makes me wonder where this need comes from to make ourselves sound more important than we are – or, at least, than we perceive we are. Builders are important. Gardeners, too. Perhaps there’s a feeling, though, that the titles don’t carry enough cachet, or intimations of status – not, at least, in the same way that ‘barrister’ or ‘doctor’ or ‘accountant’ do. And perhaps that’s something to do with the way we tend to have stereotyped images of the people who are attached to these titles. We see the word ‘barrister’ and we might think of a whole weight of association: huge fees, expensive suits, wigs, red tape, pompous and sophisticated language, etc; and barristers don’t work in offices, but ‘chambers’ – even though, literally, that only means ‘rooms’. We see the word ‘builder’, though, and it often brings up another – often negative – set of associations: bums hanging out of trousers, mugs of tea, bodge jobs, sharp intakes of breath at a perusal of your roof, copies of The Sun on the van’s dashboard. Many of these associations may be true. Many, though, are completely false. None of us can be that conveniently pigeon-holed. It’s something we humans like to do, though: generalise. It saves complications.

I work in care – a pretty lowly, or at least under-rated area of work in terms of perceived status and actual income. But I can’t think of an alternative way of referring to myself apart from ‘Care Worker’. Perhaps it’s the ‘care’ thing that carries a connotation that somehow makes it seem more important than if I just said ‘House Keeper’ – which is, actually, an essential part of the job. ‘Choice and Opportunity Facilitator’, perhaps? ‘Lifestyle Maximisation Engineer’? Sounds more like one of those overpaid people Hollywood stars employ to help them get through their hectic between-shoot schedules. Care Worker will do. It’s accurate enough.

When I was an Admin Officer in the Family Section (Divorce) at the County Court, I used to jokingly refer to myself as a ‘Marriage Dissolution Facilitation Engineer’ – until it occurred to me that it made me sound like an adulterer! When I was a shelf filler and check-out operator at a local healthfood shop, I was a ‘Bulk Store Operative’! At least, that’s what my boss told me I was.

What’s the best one you’ve heard?

Currently playing: Ommadawn - Mike Oldfield
Current mood: Not bad


Good on yer, mate...

Here's a story that made me smile today.

20 years ago, Harry Hallowes (above), an unemployed labourer, set up home in a derelict outbuilding on the edge of Hampstead Heath. He only intended stopping for one weekend... but he liked it so much that he stayed and stayed...

"I'm used to rough conditions," he said. "I camped a lot in the Boy Scouts."

Two years ago, when a property company tried to develop the site, Harry claimed squatter's rights - and last week, the Land Registry finally awarded him the title deeds to the 65 ft by 131 ft plot: a piece of prime real estate worth £2,000,000. But he's not selling:

"No fear. I am determined to stay here. And now it's mine, I'm doubly determined."

He hates developers - "They ride roughshod over fine estates and properties." (and people, too - Broadway Market in Hackney comes to mind).

He doesn't need the money, anyway. "It's not as if I've had millions and am used to millions. When you've had nothing, are used to nothing, and can live here - well, that's something special."

It's so refreshing, I think, to see someone who isn't motivated by money - who'll turn down a fortune, in fact, for something more important.

Very definitely a man after my own heart.

Currently playing: Battle of the Beanfield - The Levellers
Current mood: Cheerful


Get yer kit off and get on yer bike!

Anyone else up for it? I'm doing the London one on June 9th. Anything for an all-over tan, eh?

More details here if anyone's interested: http://www.worldnakedbikeride.org/uk/

Currently playing: Bicycle Race/Fat-Bottomed Girls - Queen
Current mood: Fine


Home is...

 

Got the first draft of a new story just about wrapped up before lunch today. Now comes the pleasurable bit – going back through, changing this and that, finding out what the thing’s really ‘about’, seeing if it hangs together. Then, when it’s as good as I can make it, comes the really hard part: trying to find a magazine or journal that might be interested. ‘Write for yourself first’ Stephen King booms from his excellent book On Writing. Well… I do, Steve. Be nice to make some money as well, though.

After a quick lunch and a listen to the news, I take a short walk into town. Books back to the library, a couple of bits from the health food shop, some apples and carrots from the greengrocer’s. Then, the weather being so hot and still, I nip in the Pound Shop for a cold can of ginger beer and sit for a few minutes in the pedestrian area to drink it. It’s one of the best parts of town – a bit like a piazza, and about the closest we’ve got to a café society atmosphere: buskers, stalls, tables and chairs set up outside pubs and coffee shops. People lounging over a beer or a capuccino – doing nothing in particular, dressed for the Med or the back-garden barby. No traffic either, which is always a bonus. People pass me, having in-depth conversations with their mobiles. I sit with my back to the crowds, with the sun on my neck, facing along a short lane between a pub and a second-hand shop. At the end of the lane, blocking my view to the sea, stands a residential home where dad spent a couple of his last years – the two happiest years he had over the difficult final ten-year period of his life. He had 2 rooms there in that time: the first on the top floor, overlooking this part of town; the second downstairs, on the same side – taken when his legs could no longer manage the stairs so well. It was a shame he couldn’t have stayed there, but there were complications between him and the management. The woman running the place turned out to be a tyrant and the care standards weren’t high – and dad, unlike the other residents, still had the faculties to challenge it. He made himself unpopular, so they gave him notice. We finally managed to find him somewhere else – further away, unfortunately. Not long afterwards, the woman was done for something and the place was shut down.

And shut down it’s remained – for the last two years or so. There it sits now, this huge, rambling, 18-bedroomed seafront edifice – empty and desolate, like a bombed-out mansion in a war zone. The downstairs windows are boarded up and a wire mesh fence has been strung around the perimeter. Where the washing used to hang, now stands a skip full of junk. The back yard is weedstrewn and graffitied. Dad’s second room, which was under the fire escape, and from where he could look out towards the pub and the milling crowds – to me if he’d still been there – has been blinded by a plywood board. A tattered rope dangles to the ground from the first level of the fire escape, which is blocked off at ground level. The place looks haunted. For me, it certainly would be.

I sit there looking at it, remembering the times I used to visit dad in that room and yarn away a couple of hours with him over a few cans of beer (not the ginger variety!) It wasn’t so long ago, really – yet the decrepitude of the place makes it seem like half a lifetime… like the time-traveller’s house in The Time Machine.

And as I’m looking – getting down my can and half-wishing it was the real stuff – something odd happens. A man steps into view by the home’s perimeter fence. He stops, puts down a bag he’s been carrying… then lies down on his back on the pavement. He’s about 80 yards away, but it’s close enough for me to see that he looks pretty healthy and respectable: dressed in smart casuals, neat hair-cut, 40-ish. At first I think he’s been overcome by the heat and is taking an impromptu (if eccentric) rest. But then I notice he’s moving… shuffling himself sideways. He then stands up again – and I realise he’d been wriggling under the fence and is now on the other side. He dusts himself down a bit, then reaches back under, grabs his bag, and pulls it through. If he was a teenager, I’d suspect a bit of a game was going on – but all I can think in the circumstances, and given his age and appearance, is that he’s a workman or someone from the Council: a surveyor, perhaps, who’s left the gate keys in the office.

Things soon become clearer, though. He walks over to the fire escape, then grabs the end of the rope and threads it through the handles on his bag and ties a knot. Then he goes to the back of the fire escape – by dad’s blind window – and clambers up it, agile as a monkey, to the first level. He then reaches over the railing, grabs the rope and hauls his bag up. Now I see. Ingenious. Once he’s untied his bag, he drops the rope back over the side and lets himself in a hidden window. All done in a couple of minutes, in broad daylight, with people walking by – paying it about as much attention as they would to someone walking down the road wearing a funny hat: something to look at briefly, perhaps with slight amusement, then carry on as usual.

I don’t take a hard-line attitude to squatting, simply because - like so many other social issues - it’s not something that can be generalised about. Squatters aren’t all the feckless, drug-taking, smash-it-up anarchists of tabloid newspaper fancy. Sure, I’ve heard some horror stories – we all have – and I’d never condone that sort of behaviour. But if a place is empty and unused and falling into ruin – like that old home – and providing it’s not trashed, and no one’s being harmed, and the squatters leave when they’re asked to, then I don’t have a problem. When I did voluntary work with the homeless a few years ago, I was often amazed at the people who sought refuge at the hostels: professionals, sometimes, whose lives had been blighted by drink or debt or job loss; people who’d run away from abuse; elderly people with no families; people with health problems, who’d slipped through the net and who literally had nowhere else to go.

I’ve no idea what this chap’s story is – though I might be interested to find out. I do wonder, though, which room he’s taken for his own. Whether it’s dad’s old room on the top floor. And if it is, whether he sits there of a night wondering about the former occupants. He can doubtless smell the stale, sourish taint of cigarettes – always so strong in any room dad ever lived in because he smoked so much. Maybe he can pick up a faint vibration, too – a sense of a past life, imbued in the wood and brickwork. A whisper in the night, perhaps. A banging door. Some dust settling. A draught along the hallways. An odd murmur of something somewhere – a rumble in the pipework… or the fading embers of an ancient conversation, trapped like air in a capsule, echoing around the walls forever after. A conversation between an old man and his son, it could be… punctuated by the the chuff of beer cans opening, the click of a lighter, the match-strike catch of a cough or a laugh – rising and fading constantly over time, like that other tide just over the road.

I finish my can and get up to leave, thinking I may pop back later, after dark, and see if I can see a candle flame or a gas lamp glimmering somewhere inside that mouldering pile.

On second thoughts, maybe I won’t.

Maybe I’ll let it lie.

Currently playing: These Words - New Model Army
Current mood: Getting thirsty


200 WORDS

 

Once upon a time…

 

I needed a job.

I see a sign: VACANCIES. I go in.

Slice of beef jerky in a suit, sitting at a desk.

“Type of vacancies you got?”

He looks at me the way they do.

“Plenty for the right people.”

“Who are they?”

“Can you write?”

“Sure.”

“People like you.”

Okay.

“What’s the pay?”

“$20.”

“An hour?”

“A piece.”

“What’s the piece?”

He lights a cigarette, sits back.

“A story.”

“Story?”

“You got it.”

“What… like reporting?”

“Uh-uh. None of that stuff. You gotta make it up. Fiction. Two hunnerd word stories. Dime a word.”

The fuck?

“What kinda stories?”

“You know. Stories. Beginning, middle, end.”

Beginning, middle, end. Stories. Sonofabitch.

“Who’s the stories for?”

“That ain’t your worry. You just write ‘em.”

200 word stories. That’s it.

“Whadda ya say? Give it a try?”

What have I got to lose?

“Sure.”

He gets up.

“Follow me.”

We go through a door in back. A room with a desk, a typewriter, a stack of paper.

“All yours.”

I sit at the desk. I roll in a sheet of paper. I stare at it for a long time.

Then I begin typing

 

Once upon a time…

 

 

Currently playing: Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out - Big Joe Williams
Current mood: Alright

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