This morning, on the School Run, I had the music on my phone playing on shuffle through my car stereo via Bluetooth rather than listening to the radio and Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” came on. As the intro faded into the angst-ridden first verse I said to my son, “One of the best songs ever written this.” “It’s not the best song ever,” he said. “It’s rubbish. I can’t even hear what he’s singing.” “I didn’t say the best one ever, I said one of the best ever. If you asked one hundred people who know about music to compile an all-time top one hundred greatest songs, this song would be in most of the lists. Ninety percent of them or something.” “What’s percent mean?” I gave him a ‘look’, because that’s a conversation we’ve had more than once on the way to school. He knows what ‘per cent’ means. Anyway, we listened to the song and he said towards the end, “Nah, it’s rubbish. It’s just noise.” He’s only nine. I’ll forgive him for that. After all, he’s only nine. But it got me thinking—why is “Smells like Teen Spirit” a great song? And how do you explain why it’s great to a nine year old? The thing about it is that most of the lyrics are pretty much nonsense – even when you can make out just what the hell Cobain is actually singing. I mean, look… Load up on guns Bring your friends It’s fun to lose and to pretend She’s overboard, self assured Oh no I know, a dirty word With the lights out, it’s less dangerous Here we are now, entertain us I feel stupid and contagious Here we are now, entertain us A mulatto An Albino A mosquito My libido Yay Hey Yay And I forget just why I taste Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile I found it hard, it was hard to find Oh well, whatever, nevermind They are nonsense, right? What is this song actually about? It hit me when I was trying to work out how to explain the importance of this song and what makes it great to my son—there is literally no way for him to understand. Yet. This is a song about the angst of a teenage boy and about the anger he feels at the world. It’s about that angst and anger continuing into young adulthood. It’s about the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. From the opening riff that powers into life as the drums kick in, to the droning verse and hook into that amazingly powerful chorus. It’s up. It’s down. It’s up again. The drum beat is angry. The lyrics make no sense, but it’s not what they are that matters so much as how they are sung. They whole thing is an expression of what it means to be a teenager in the modern, western world—or at least, the western world of the early-mid nineties. And I might be in my forties now but the world can’t have changed so much that this song doesn’t speak to today’s teenagers the way it spoke to us, can it? In short, it’s about a whole bunch of emotions that, as a parent, I hope like hell my nine year old has not yet felt and won’t feel for a good few years yet. “Don’t worry,” I said to him. “You’ll get it in five or six years. You’ll understand how great this song is then.” At which point I was horrified. My own father had something similar to me at a similar age about the songs of Slade. I’m turning into my Dad! Actually, that’s not a bad thing. I mean, he was right about Slade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxFHTxI_dzs
Ook! A Personal Tribute to Sir Terry Pratchett
When I was around 15, I picked out a book by some author I’d never heard of with this funny, cartoon-ish cover.
That book changed my life.
Terry Pratchett is the reason I write today. I can pay him no higher tribute than that.
Is it any Wonder People Think the System is Broken.
This article in the Left leaning New Statesman rules out any cooperation between what are likely to be the two parties the largest number of MPs after the next election. But for me, the quote from it that sums up all that is wrong with the British political system is this… “If on May 8 you had a position where Labour had more seats than the Tories but not enough to form a government – but the Tories had more votes than Labour …..” What kind of messed up political system allows for the possibility that a party that wins the most votes in an election, doesn’t get the most seats in the resultant representative body. It’s madness. It comes about, of course, because of the nature of the “First Past the Post” system and the fact that in this country we elect a single member of parliament to represent a single constituency, to whom he or she is directly accountable to. We DO NOT vote for a party. We DO NOT vote for a Prime Minister. We vote for a person to represent our local voice in The House. And because of that, we don’t have local electorates that are all the same size. Most of the constituencies are between fifty and seventy thousand voters in size – and while that itself seems to me like a missive difference in size, there are seats in Parliament that represent as few as twenty-one thousand and as many as one-hundred and ten thousand voters. And the way that the system works is that for each seat, the candidate that wins the most votes—regardless of the size of his majority or, indeed, the percentage turnout of voters—wins the seat. So even if every single voter who is able came out vote and all voted for the same candidate, you could still end up with the party with the most seats having not won the most seats. But that’s not how things work, is it? Not everyone votes that those that do sure as hell don’t all vote for the same person. A candidate that gets a massive majority on a high turnout in a seat with a large electorate, only gets the same number of seats, ONE, as a candidate who gets a slim majority on a tiny turnout in a seat with a much smaller electorate. With that in mind, it’s easy to imagine a situation where over just four seats, one party could win three on small majorities of small electorates and the other only win one seat, but because it’s a large electorate and it’s won with a huge majority, that party then ends up with more overall votes than the party with those three seats. And do you know what’s the worst thing about this? We in Britain had a chance to change it. In 2011 we had a referendum (in which less than half of the electorate voted) to change this bizarre and nonsensical system. And we rejected it. In fact, the Tories campaigned against changing the system. So if we do end up in a situation come May as described above—I’m sorry, but David Cameron only has himself to blame when he has to move out of Downing Street.
100 Days to Go #GE2015
Today represents 100 days until the UK General Election of 2015. Which means we still have three months of this sort of cringe-worthy political squirming as seen when Andrew Neil interviewed Natalie Bennett, leader of the Greens on his Sunday Politics show yesterday Actually, it’s worth watching even if you’re not interested in British Politics simply to view a masterful interviewer’s performance from Neil. He essentially questioned the Party’s policies (which are, for the most part, bonkers), then tackled the inevitable evasions by quoting her own policy documents back at Ms Bennett. I had started to respect the Greens. Not agree with them, but respect them. They had started to come across as a party with genuine principles that was prepared to stand on and stand by those principles in the coming election. But this interview shows they are just as slippery and evasive as all the rest. I’m not going to discuss the Green’s policies here. If you’ve watched the video I shouldn’t need to tell you quite how “out there” they are. But I do want to discuss something that troubles me—and that’s the hypocrisy of “The Green Serge” in British politics compared to The Establishment’s reaction to the Greek General Election this weekend. The surge of support for the Greens—they now have well over 40,000 members, a similar number to UKIP and not that far behind the Lib Dems—is seen as a “good thing” in British politics. Voter engagement is one reason that is cited for this. And yet, when you examine their policies, they are pretty much “far left”—proper ‘old school’ socialist stuff. And yet at the same time, when a ‘far left’ party is actually elected to power in Greece, the very same commenters who are so in praise of the “The Green Surge” are telling us it could be disastrous for Greece and indeed for the whole of Europe. So what, pray tell, is the difference? The difference is that the Greens are currently seen as a bit “Cuddly”. After all, they’re trying to save the planet don’t you know. And that cuts them a lot of slack. In Greece, on the other hand, Syriza are seen as ‘nationalist’—and we all know that that’s a bad thing, don’t we? How dare a political party stand up and say they are going to make things better for their fellow countrymen at the expense of the European Project. I’m being facetious, of course. The rise of Syriza in Greece and other ‘Nationalist’ parties across Europe is quite worrying if only because History teaches us that once countries start to look inward rather than to the wider world, Bad Things tend to happen. But anyway, back to The Green Surge. To me, it’s symptomatic of a wider problem in British Politics. It speaks to something of a ‘Leadership Void’ we have in this country. A lack of someone the public can look to and say, “that’s someone who stands for something”. Someone the public can either love or loathe. There is no-one like that in the three “mainstream” parties—which possibly explains the rise of UKIP under Nigel Farage. David Cameron, Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg all appear to be too scared of saying the wrong thing that they won’t risk saying what could possibly be the right thing. They are so scared of alienating some voters that they fail to inspire any voters. Compare and contrast all three of these career politicians with, say, Thatcher. She was loved and hated in equal measure by the two sides of the political divide, but My God you knew, without a shadow of a doubt, exactly what she believed in and what she stood for. Can anyone tell me what David, Ed or Nick actually believe in or what they actually stand for? No, didn’t think so.
There’s Nothing So British as a Charity Nude Calender
Ever since the Calender Girls of a branch of the Women’s Institute in Yorkshire stripped off to raise money for Cancer Research via a tasteful nude calender in 1999, the whole nude calender thing has become a bit of a British Tradition – and 2015 is no exception. Below are a few pictures from a selection of this years charity nude calenders – most of them by various university clubs. Enjoy. (And then go out and buy one) There are bunch more at this Photobucket Slideshow
The End of Page 3? Nope, Not Yet #page3isback
Well, it looks like The Sun played a huge joke on the rest of The Media and the #nomorepage3 campaign. This was tweeted earlier this evening. https://twitter.com/TheSunNewspaper/status/558031936653111296 Well, you know what they say, no publicity is bad publicity – that 2nd pic showing a close-up of the text underneath “Nicole 22 from Bournmouth” says it all really.
4 Months of This…
I saw this, frankly, brilliant meme on twitter yesterday. it pretty much sums up what the next four months are going to be like for us Brits. I feel really quite depressed about the following sentence. I’m not looking forward to this election campaign one little bit. This how I feel. I can’t help it and it disturbs me. Because our democracy is one of the most precious things we have. And it might be broken, but we should still cherish it. But for the first time since I’ve been able to vote, I’m actually seriously considering not bothering. I’m wondering if it’ll make a damn bit of difference if I vote or not. I’m wondering if any of the potential leaders of this country are up to the job. Political commentators are shouting “This is the most exciting, most unpredictable election in years.” Well, they might think it’s exciting—all those that live and work in “The Westminister Bubble”—but as for the rest of us. We just want to get the damn thing out of the way and hope to God we don’t end up with an unresolvable hung parliament that means we have to do it all over again in the Autumn.
I’m Being Watched
I was walking back to the car at the end of the work day yesterday, scrolling though some of the notifications on my phone when I found this… It seems that I either have a fan in a very high place, or I’m on a very dangerous watchlist. I really do hope it’s the former. I suppose the question is….. Should I follow @ExoticCarList back? 😉
The End of Page 3 #nomorepage3
So it looks like The Sun’s Page 3 has gone the way of the dodo. And to be honest, I don’t know how I feel about it. First thing’s first, I don’t read The Sun. I don’t even look at the pictures. My dad still buys it every day, and for a while in my twenties I followed suit, but I haven’t bought a printed newspaper for seven or eight years—The Sun or any other paper, which itself says a lot about the newspaper industry. I’m of an age that should be a newspaper’s target market. So, because I’m not a Sun reader, I feel somewhat uncomfortable about having an opinion about what should and should not be in the newspaper. But since that doesn’t stop other people, I’m not going to let it stop me either. Page 3 is (or was) an anachronism. It’s a relic of the seventies and eighties and its passing will doubtless be mourned by very, very few. Let’s face it, you can see many, many more boobies with a simple Google search. Where once teenage boys would have huddled around The Sun in the school yard, they are now sharing much more explicit images on their phones. But something about it annoys me and that’s the way in which a group of ‘feminists’—who also profess to not read the newspaper—have campaigned for the feature;s removal and are now celebrating a “great victory”. The Sun has a daily circulation of around 2 million, making it the UK’s best-selling newspaper. That’s down from its height of around 4 million in the eighties. And yet, the #nomorepage3 twitter campaign has around 40,000 twitter followers and an online petition has around 220,000 signatures (that’s the figure quoted in the media today). So a petition of around one tenth of the size of the newspaper’s readership—and I’m guessing most of the signatories almost certainly don’t even read the paper—have apparently dictated what the people who actually buy the paper can see in it. The other issue is, of course, that “feminists” are supposed to be about increasing opportunities for woman and by campaigning against Page 3 they have shut down an opportunity for a group of women who made their careers from it. But then, we all know that some people who call themselves feminists are all in favour of Freedom of Choice—as long as you don’t choose something they disagree with. (Yes, I know not all feminists are like that, but you cannot deny that some of them very much are.) The whole thing is grossly unfair. Or at least, it would be if it were true. Which it’s not. Make no mistake, the demise of Page 3 has almost nothing to do with hashtag campaigns and online petitions and everything thing to do with one Rupert Murdoch. If the boss of News Corp had wanted Page 3 to remain, it would have remained. Make no mistake about that. Was he influenced by the campaigns? Possibly. But it’s probably got as much to do with the closure of The News of the World and the reasons for it, than it has to do with #nomorepage3 Murdoch is an astute business man. It’s no coincidence that The Sun has a tendency to back the right horse come a General Election—Murdoch can read the mood of a nation and he’s read that Page 3 has had its time. Or has it? Page 3 will continue online behind a pay-wall. Will is thrive in this new format? Get bigger? Or maybe it’ll just earn Murdoch more money that way? Let’s be clear, I will not miss Page 3. It has had no impact on my life since I was at school and used to sneak into the library with some other boys to get a quick look at Sam Fox’s knockers. But bare breasts will still appear in another newspaper, namely The Star. And it will be interesting to see what happens to the circulation of the two newspapers in the coming months. That could say an awful lot about “how far we’ve come” and “how far we still have to go”.
What “Freedom of Speech” Means to Me
Those of you who know me know that I’m not reactionary by nature. I may have a fiery temper, but I’ve learned to keep it pretty much in check. Lots of things about the world we live in annoy the proverbial f*ck out of me, but I generally let it boil just under the surface and then mouth off about it to anyone who will listen. This is the reason that this piece comes almost two weeks after the Terror Attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris which so shocked the Western World. This piece is, I hope, a measured response. A Personal response. My response. And it’s not about religion—although it so easily could be. Believe me, I have no beef with most “religious people”, if their faith sustains them through daily life then all power to them. But I do have a serious problem with “Organised Religion”, which to me is a completely different thing. As I said to my son shortly after the attacks, Organised Religion is nothing more than an instrument of Control. But that’s a post for a different day. Today, I want to talk about the thing that we the West perceived the Charlie Hebdo shootings as being an attack upon—our Freedom of Speech. I suppose that Freedom of Speech (or Freedom of Expression) is most associated in most people’s minds with the United States. It’s not that they came up with the concept, but they do tend to shout the loudest about it. It’s the First Amendment of US Constitution after all. Although, it’s worth pointing out that the most notable absence from the great “Freedom of Speech March” in Paris was one Barrack Obama. Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights says that, Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers Here in the UK we have a “Negative Right” to freedom of Expression under Common Law—that is, the right not to have our expression curtailed by the Government. This right was incorporated in the 1998 Human Rights Act under article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. But… In the UK, Freedom of Expression is not absolute. There are exceptions for threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour. Exceptions for harassment or the cause of alarm, distress or a breach of the peace. Indecent or grossly offensive material which it likely to cause distress or anxiety is banned. And there are strict laws on incitement, be it incitement to racial or religious hatred or incitement to terrorism. So, those who say “I have the right to say what I want, when I want” actually mean, “I have the right to say what I want when I want as long as [insert all the exceptions above here]” Which to be honest is absolutely fine with me. I don’t particularly want to do any of those things. I don’t want to threaten, abuse or insult. I don’t want to harass or cause alarm, distress or anxiety. And I certainly don’t want to incite anyone to do anything. But I do want to express myself. That’s why I write. And I know full well that some of the things I write are going to upset people for whatever reason. It may cause offence. But here’s where things get tricky. I want to be able to write what I want to write, subject to the exceptions in law stated above, but the reader who’s going to be offended by it wants the right to not be offended. And those two “rights” are incompatible. But here’s the kicker. The “right” to not be offended, isn’t in fact a right at all. What you’re actually saying when you’re offended is that whatever you read/saw/heard hurt your feelings. And because, by their nature, feelings are subjective, they change from person to person, it is impossible to account for them in a legal system that is objective in nature. The second you start taking account of people’s feelings the law become subjective. How is one person, say a member of a jury, supposed to know how another person¸ say an alleged victim, felt on the day of the alleged crime—or any other day for that matter. And if they can’t know for certain how someone felt how can they account for it when passing judgement on someone who’s liberty is at stake. You can’t. And nor should you. The law deals in FACTS, not feelings. This is where the saying “offence is taken, not given” comes from. I could say, what is to me, the most innocuous thing imaginable and say it with no intent to cause harm or offence to anyone. But someone, somewhere might be upset or offended by it. So does that mean I shouldn’t say it? Of course not. That would be ludicrous. It would mean nobody ever said anything for fear of causing offence. Nothing would ever be written. There would be no art. No culture of any kind. So after a rather rambling piece, here’s my message to those who find anything that I write upsetting or offensive. DON’T READ IT. Don’t read it, because that is your right. No-one forces you to read/listen to/watch anything. You choose to. And you can also choose not to. It’s quite simple. Point your browser at another website. Load another book into your Kindle. Unfriend me on Facebook. Unfollow me on twitter. Your sense of being offended is your problem, not mine. So you deal with it.
