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This blog has moved to pastures new. Please check out our new home at www.samparker.org for all of the articles on this blog plus lots of new material.

Many thanks!

Choices.

I’m sure someone has said once that choice equals freedom but I’d argue that in many cases they equal the opposite.

Trying to buy a bottle of shampoo for example staves any sense of ‘freedom’ from my mind like a drunken sheriff patrolling the perimeter on a penny-farthing firing crazy pistols of doubt and rage: Boots has three shelves of the stuff each boasting a separate magic quality and all assuming knowledge of my scalp I don’t have.

Last time I ran out I popped down the street for five minutes and ended up squandering my entire lunch break stood in the ‘hair products’ aisle with a bottle of Pantene Pro-V for Greasy Hair in one hand and a bottle of Herbal Essences for Straight Hair in the other shaking them like a pair of maracas. To anyone watching I must have resembled a Mexican street entertainer lost in the dreadful realization I had shamed my heritage to chase the tourist dollar moments from finally snapping and impaling myself with them to salvage some spiritual honour.

"Your hair is straight and greasy. Straight AND greasy. And what’s this? I have to consider dandruff too…!?"

In the end I just left. The choice had defeated me.

This is not an isolated example. Smug proclamations are something of a speciality of mine, and those with the dubious honour of being in my company regularly will be familiar with a cycle of worn bullshit that reappears whenever there is some new company I want to impress. One such turgid lump is ‘I’ve never bought a CD in 5 years because the internet lets me listen to whatever I want for free.’

A true post-modern grand narrative that: the internet has revolutionized music, removed the power from the dark corridors of the record companies, made art free, etc., etc. And it’s true: flick on the laptop and straddle the holy trinity of spotify, myspace and youtube and there are very few pieces of recorded music you can’t access.

But where does this boundless universe of choice most regularly lead me? Open-mouthed, frantic-brained paralysis, that's where, a glistening orb of drool formulating beneath eyes fixed on a blank search box. Presented with the option of anything the human mind settles very quickly on nothing.

We need limitations on our choices in order to make them - that is how we work. That’s why we take glee in dwindling our options by process of elimination when presented with a free Sunday afternoon:

‘What shall we do today love?’

‘Well let’s see, transforming into birds of prey and tearing holes through clouds in the midday sun is out, so is travelling back in time to witness the look in Man’s eye at the first accidental spark of fire – come to think of it, I’m pretty skint, how about just a walk in the park??’

Now I’m not advocating a switch to North Korean-style limitations on personal freedom. But it is interesting to reflect that the countries in the world with the worse mental health problems – depression, anxiety, OCD, eating disorders – are also the most ‘developed’ of Western democracies strapped into the rollercoaster of free market capitalism. American rhetoric during the Bush administration and indeed Western dogma since colonial times has been build around another grand narrative: that what would be best for the rest of the world is to become more like us. In most cases, this would mean having more choices.

Now choices like having access to quality health care and education are no-brainers, but does the developing world really envy our hundreds upon hundreds of trainers, or mobile phones, or television evangelists?

In our lip-licking, hand-rubbing sprint to expand our set of choices about what we can buy to wear and eat and been seen with, we’ve trampled on the things that used to matter and that still do in countries we perceive as behind us in history’s long story. Religion, family, community are now unfashionable, marginalized and scorned. We have so much choice about what spiritual path we walk, how much responsibility we take for our families, how we interact with our community that we usually end up doing nothing about them at all. And yet the statistics don’t bear out the idea that we’re happier for it, they suggest that as a population, we’re suffering from deep-set ills of the mind and soul.

I’m hardly the first agitated Westerner to ponder this: a curious solution was put forward by the author George Cockcroft in his cult novel ‘The Dice Man’. The premise is of a doctor who decides one day to make all of his choices by the random will of a dice, thus limiting his options to six at a time and alleviating him of having to make choices. The book descends fairly quickly into a sexual farce but the frustration at the heart of the text is worth paying attention to. Next time I’m buying some shampoo or a t-shirt or some other distraction I may well assign six of them a number, collapse into a lotus position and start rolling out the dice.

I might get escorted out for appearing like a mad man. But then I suspect that’s where all these choices are leading me anyway.

A Quick One

'Beach' Break Live the video is still in production - turns out, cutting a two hour-footage pie into a neat ten minute slice takes longer than I thought. Do bear with me though.

For those of you not here to see yourself in my video-journalism debut, do please scroll down or pick a blog from the list on the right of the page. I truly 'aint one of these irritating, post-some-boring-crap-about-your-day types. My entries are usually carefully crafted symphonies with nice pictures and everything.

x

Live from 'Beach' Break 3

If you're one of the many excellent beach breakers we met over the past few days: fear not.  We were a genuine (if amateur) outfit and the video diary featuring your drunken impressions of the festival will be posted here within a few days.  Keep checking back!

As well as vox popping some cool people, we managed to capture some great bands performing and grab a word with them afterwards, including The Vintones, The Moulettes and Ed Sherman. As soon as I can can get in the editing studio and remove all the bits of myself rambling (since when did I have a voice like Darth Vader with false teeth?) I'll post the vid here and on my new blogging home, http://www.internationallife.tv

As for the festival, well myself and camera man had a great time, and not just sticking 'www.samparker.org' stickers in all the port-a-loos either.  Meeting Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip a few hours before their set was amazing (if brief) and the actual gig was one of the best I have seen in a long time.  Pip's lyrics and delivery were exhilarating, Dan's mixing top-notch and the tracks of the new album suggested the pair have a lot more to offer after 'Angles'.  

Overall, the best way I can think to describe Beach Break Live is as being a bit like a typical student in their second year (as Beach Break indeed is): disorganized, chaotic, a bit uncertain what exactly it's meant to be... but resourceful (switching sites in three days!), fun-loving and wonderfully open to new ideas.  

It may attract the odd sneer from seasoned-festival goers with their memories of Glastonbury, Glade, Secret Garden et al but as a student-friendly alternative that costs half the price, I reckon the founders of Beach Break are onto a winner.  Let's hope next year they make it back on the beach where they belong.  Just one more thing though guys, please leave the rugby balls back at home next time...

Love, 

Your intrepid reporters, SamParker.org and John 'I think I'll get into this Kopenburg like' Teedge 

x

Live from 'Beach' Break #2

Day one is behind us down in Kent: the safari park has digested its first 24 hours of live music, floating burger wrappers and determined student tom-foolery. Music highlights thus far have included a euphoric midday set by Red Light Company and Krafty Kuts filling the dance tent in time for Chase and Status.

We're beginning to suspect that the animals have been locked away in a slightly ominous looking grey shed situated about four fields away. Can only assume that the lions have killed off the other animals by now and are currently trying to dig their way out under the walls. Tactics for how to handle their eventual escape have varied: the best suggestion so far seems to be to clamour up the pillars holding up one of the stages, although 'not before raiding the bar' according to John Teedge...

We've managed to capture a good cross section of the festival's partiers and aspiring musicians, including the ever-excellent Moulettes and another four piece that sound like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs having a better day out somewhere. Today we're mostly excited about seeing sardonic rap/breaks duo Dan Le Sac V Scroobius Pip, and hopefully interviewing the pair for as long as they can bear our considerable festival smell...

More later.

Live from 'Beach' Break Live... #1

For the first time I'm going to blog here 'ad hoc' and in brief, rather then agonizing for a week on theme, structure, etc...

John Teedge (guest blogger and cameraman) and I are down here in a safari park in Kent, where the UKs only 'student' festival has been relocated (from a stunning beach in Cornwall...) due to some grumpy councilors. They've thrown it all together with about two days to go so kudos for that.

Thus far the sun is egging us on - it's rather like an egg yolk actually - as we make our soon-to-be-posted-on-samparker.org video diary. My presenting skills aren't quite going to have the producers of T4 knocking on my door but I think we're getting the jist over fairly well...

Later on we'll be allowed to stand on stage and film a few songs - going to try my best not to accidently pull out a guitar lead or trip up one of Dizzee Rascal's entourage.

Haven't seen any lions, tigers or monkeys yet. Certainly haven't seen any giraffes which, as some of you may know, I refuse to believe actually exist until I witness with my own two eyes. They're too ridiculous - I think it's all a scam.

Will pop back later with more.

Squatters.

Introducing samparker.org's first ever 'guest blogger', Mr. John Teedge...

Normal service shall be resumed shortly. For now, enjoy JT's account of what happens when squatters move in next door...

Midnight, Friday. Eyeballing a weeping crack user out of my bedroom window who looked like a cross between Willow and Jonas Gutierrez, I had to wonder where it all went wrong.

It all started a few months ago with a fairly innocuous three foot hole in the front window of the empty house two doors down. Then the drum and bass started. Pimped-up alloy rides came and went and then we noticed the cleaning products in the kitchen window. The squatters had undoubtedly moved in.

Seasons came and seasons uneventfully passed bar the odd vacuous disco glare at the bus stop.
Then the night of my twenty-fifth birthday arrived. Friends talking party shite over break beats and swapping jokes, jibes and amateur cocktails. The next morning, as we basked in the afterglow of the party, Rich came back from his van to report it had been ‘’pimped’’ with a six-inch gash to the back off-side tyre.

Ignoring the obvious and blaming the pavement, we left it at that and carried on with our sardined existence in a terrace house designed for a miner and his stunted chimney sweep kids, not five fecktrosexual twentysomething Geordies.

Last week the first summer sun drew our sofas into the yard and we toasted ourselves in what felt like the presence of an old friend. The capricious kind, inspiring and full of tales from lands afar that you promised yourself you would emulate when you eventually pay off that credit card.
A pleasant delusion that was soon shattered by the squatters fending off a brick-wielding assailant, probably irked by some scrawny bag of rat poison or vitamin C, come-on-thens and hes-not-worth-its rapping over our soundtrack from ‘The Harder they Come.’

Like the shark in ‘The Beach’ it was a precursor of further bad shit.

This is where we came in.

As I sat smoking out of the window of my basement room trying to look cool, getting to know an exciting and beautiful woman over half a bottle of Strongbow I became aware of an intermittent scuttling noise. At first I thought it was a rat, then my dickhead flatmate. But this was much worse.

As I stuck my head out to investigate I disturbed the midget Jonas on his hands and knees in the litter I hadn’t been arsed to tidy up. Startled, the exchange went something like this:

‘’What the F*CKING HELL are you doing?’’

‘’Ah..erm…sorry mate…there’s been a raid…’’

‘’Get the F*CK out of my yard, right now.’’

‘’Mate, you don’t understand…I’m a drug user…there’s been a raid-‘’

‘’Get out of here!’’

‘’But…I chucked it down here somewhere…I’ve got to get it back. I need a torch…’’

Midget Jonas was eye to eye with me in the darkness, the romance burning out with the fag-end, me controlling the situation like Gordon Brown, as my fingers hovered over the hammer in the drawer. Midget Jonas started to cry. The stand-off was like a nurse-patient argument over dinnertime gruel in the psychiatric wing. He evidently wasn’t going anywhere though. So I passed him a lighter and he ducked back out of sight. Seconds later he returned, his street-hardened grimy mits brandishing a crack-rock the size of the blood diamond.

‘’I’ve got it! I’ve fucking got it mate! Look I wasn’t lying! Awww I could hug you!’’

‘’Don’t.’’

‘’Matematematemate how can I pay you back?!’’

‘’Give me my lighter and f*ck off.’’

And with that he skipped away giggling with all the poise and psychosis of Wastey, the ostracised eighth dwarf who stole Doc’s silver pieces while the rest were out down the quarry, leaving me to ponder being able to listen to Tupac’s ‘’Changes’’ with that bit more moral authority.

I didn’t realise that our area of Leeds is colloquially known as the ‘War Zone’ by my social worker colleagues and with three more weeks to go on the tenancy from hell, I’m beginning to get it. If heaven is a place on earth, then surely hell must be too. Either that or the state of mind that finds you in Burley, on purpose, at night-time, scratching around desperately in a stranger’s beer cans and fag-ends risking everything for that crystalline relief.

As for the squatters, I suppose stealing a house so easily must give you a feeling of invulnerability. But to paraphrase Homer Simpson, there’s such a fine line between invulnerable and stupid.

John Teedge helps run a charity that supports disadvantaged people in Uganda: check out his blog for more information www.spoweuganda.org/

Glastonbury: The Prelude

I was on the front cover of the Guardian once.

I’d love to say it was in the by-line of an article that brought down the government, or in a photo linking arms with Scarlett Johansson, but alas: it was the tip of my £20 tent peering above a sea of sewage and shit, 3 inches of material cowering beneath the lashing rain, bewildered as a camel on an ice-cap.

The location was Glastonbury festival and the year was 2005: the one where the rain ‘really’ came. June’s entire average annual rainfall burst from the heavens that morning like the impossible tears of a cuckolded teenager, coating Pilton in grief inside one small hour. The images were beamed out across the nation of the worst affected corner of the camp sites: the school-boy-error spot at the bottom of a hill we had chosen in the previous day’s deceitful sunlight. In the foreground of the shots, someone with a comic’s sense of preparation was captured floating by in a canoe.

I remember being coaxed in and out of sleep that morning by the thudding pitter-patter above, brain reeling from excess and vaguely registering the water seeping the in the edges of my hot little hovel, body curling into a smaller and smaller ball in meek defiance. I suppose for the hour or so it took me to realise what was going on it was a little like regressing back to the womb. If so, my subsequent ‘birth’ was the kind mothers must have nightmares about.

We all emerged from our tents and stood dumbly for a second, mouths open like sallow fish as the rising tide of sewage swallowed our festival from the feet up. I remember my friend Kimmy fumbling down for his car keys, shoulder-length hair floating in the water like dead weeds along a river bank. The source of the smell became apparent: the nearby toilets were over-flowing and carrying with it the unspeakable detritus of drug-addled arseholes, casually coating what in a blink of an eye ago was a scene of pastoral innocence: guitars poised on backpacks, disposable barbeques dying gracefully in the sun, polite bags of rubbish nestled between cans of lager…

It felt biblical. Unreal. We trudged to the edge of the flood with what little we could salvage and watched chaos lick its way through the narrow passageways between our tents, consuming our entire Glastonbury - my first - like a snake. Shivering, soaking, stunned, we slapped our way through the mud to the nearest shelter and stood sharing cigarettes. For about half an hour of teeth-chattering, it seemed the only option was probably to go home.

Then someone threw on ‘Nice Weather For Ducks’ by Lemon Jelly. Suddenly, a crumb of sunlight landed obscenely on a puddle a few feet away. We all began to laugh. Someone began to dance. What followed, via a trip to an emergency refugee camp set up by the Eavies farmhouse, free jam sandwiches, cups of tea and second-hand clothes provided by the good people at Oxfam, were three of the best days of my life. Being stripped of your possessions, it transpired, was the best possible preparation for Glastonbury. For me at least, it meant racing through the next few days feeling more care-free than an adult has any right to.

And there’s the point. The need to save money looks set to keep me from attending any music festivals this summer, and yet my year will be poorer for it. There is something Wordsworth says in The Prelude about looking over the countryside where he once roamed as a boy, knowing that he can never rediscover the essential and instinctive rhythms of freedom that propelled him at that age to explore, climb and leap through the woodlands. In adulthood it is not possible, he says, to enjoy the world in same carefree way again.

Perhaps if Wordsworth had been able to convince Coleridge to split the petrol and drive to a field somewhere that summer, struggle through the gates of a music festival with three crates of Strongbow and plonk down in a field for four days of drinking, wandering, listening, learning to play the bongos and taking free yoga classes, chatting to strangers and stumbling between burger vans, he’d have forgotten for a moment the pressures of iambic pentameter, the Lake District rent and Dorothy’s gout and relaxed.

There has to be a good reason that thousands of us spent hundreds and hundreds of pounds each year simply to be allowed to sit in a muddle of our own rubbish, unable to wash or defecate comfortably, rain poised like the sword of Damocles above our heads. Put simply: it unshackles us from everything that makes the rest of year so wearisome. It allows us to be children again.

Glastonbury 2005 demonstrated to me like no other festival quite how true this is. In relative terms, our homes were completely destroyed, and in real terms, we woke up in a river made up party of sewage and human waste. Yet still the good times rolled. So to those people lucky enough to be off watching Springsteen and Blur while I’m glumly counting out my £200 – good luck to you.

I hope it absolutely pisses down.

for a review of Newcastle's very own answer to Glastonbury by yours truly, check this out: http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/index.php?section=1&category=7&page=1658

and for an interview with Dizzee Rascal in which I try my best to be cool, see here: http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/index.php?section=1&category=9&page=1659

Michael White, PMQs and the Gordon-gasp: a day in Westminster

The sky was generously clear as I strode out of Westminster tube station on Wednesday morning, a slightly-too-large suit on my back and a pleasant soup of anticipation and nerves in my stomach. I was on my way to meet a true heavyweight of British journalism, the man whose stern face has looked out at the nation from pages of The Guardian for the past 30 years - former political editor and CiF blogger, Mr. Michael White.

Even more exciting was where Mike had proposed to take me - into the heart of power, the Houses of Parliament, to witness the weekly Punch and Judy show that is Prime Minister’s Questions.

There has always been something about Gordon Brown that puts the creeps up me, and perched up in the press gallery of the House of Commons (it’s rather like being in the upper reaches of a church, complete with intermittent sunlight cascading through ornate glass-work), I finally figured out what it is.

It’s the ‘Gordon-gasp’ – an unhelpful mannerism that in all but our most high-profile of public servants would be indecorous to mention, an open-mouthed chin-wobble that appears at the end of his every sentence as though the man is momentarily aghast at the very words that have tumbled out of his mouth.

Opposite, of course, was Cameron – a man-child with whom I share a poverty of facial hair (if precious little else). It’s hard to be taken seriously when your complexion is like the inside of an egg-shell.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when the leader of the opposition used up his entire quota of questions to make the same futile request:

“Will the right honourable gentlemen please explain what he meant, when he said calling a general election now would bring about ‘chaos’?!”

The Gordon-gasp centred its self so the PM could counter: “Well a Tory government in power would certainly bring about chaos for this country!”

That familiar Commons laughter – not false exactly, but putting unnecessary strain on the diaphragm – rippled through the backbenches.

“Ah-ha!” retorted the shimmering chin, “So the right honourable gentleman finally admits he would probably lose a general election!”

As Mr. White informed me, this sort of baiting is the standard behaviour from an opposition on the front foot. Certainly of all the main leaders, Cameron has emerged the slightly-less sullied of the three having last week been first to strongly condemn his own MPs for their roles in the ongoing expenses scandal.

Nick Clegg on the other hand had led the mob in sharpening their pitch-forks for Michael Martin, the now lame-duck Speaker – making his Q to the PM something of a dramatic highlight. His attempt to pay tribute to the beleaguered Scot (Martin, not Brown) was met with a predictable chorus of jeers. In either a demonstration of the incompetency many feel has characterised his stewardship or a wily sense of revenge, the Speaker then appeared to forget to allow Clegg his supplementary question, much to everyone’s amusement. It helped break some of the tension that seemed to grip the House, rather like the affectionate teasing a parent might indulge in to rescue the atmosphere after a family row.

After PMQs, my first work experience experience (unless you count a week photocopying at Morpeth Council aged 13) continued apace. At one point I sat in The Guardian’s backstage office with several of Mr. White’s colleagues (listening to the equally formidable Simon Hoggart lampoon senior politicians live felt rather like seeing David Beckham practise his free-kicks in his backyard) attempting to strike that fine balance between being helpful and not getting in the way. It reminded me of our own little newspaper office here at The Courier, only I wasn’t in charge and no one was blasting rap music from youtube on any of the computers.

In the afternoon I was whisked off to the House of Lords – a rather more opulent and sedate version of the Commons, in which rows and rows of elderly politicians (average age: 69) are cocooned in preparation for retirement. They were caught up in the same rare moment of contrite introspection that had subdued the green benches next door, but the real thrill for me was in following Mike through the corridors of power on the way there, watching him navigate the labyrinth of Westminster like it was his home, stopping occasionally to exact details from lobbyists or subtly mine MPs for their insights. It was surreally reminiscent of the scenes in the West Wing in which one of the characters storms through the hallways of the White House firing on all cylinders with their secretary taking notes by their side, only rather than engaging him in witty banter I focused squarely on trying not to trip over or accidently shut any door behind me in some Right Honourable face.

To round the day off I accompanied Mike to the studios of Sky News where, with barely a glance at the briefing, he went live on air to millions in order to answer questions about the day’s events. While the public and journalists alike are losing their heads a little about the ‘quiet revolution’ currently taking place in British politics (Jonathan Freeland ought to have worn a beret for his comment piece in The Guardian earlier this week), Mike is consistently less excitable about what I guess after thirty years in the game doesn’t seem quite as extraordinary as it may to the rest of us. He quickly dispensed of a colleague Sky had drafted in from another studio who got a bit carried away about Labour ‘losing one MP for every day the election is delayed’, as I, inches off-shot to his right, could only really look on and marvel.

Back outside, and after a handshake and a goodbye, I was left strolling along the Thames reflecting on a day in which I had glimpsed both professional heroes (personally speaking) and professional villains (nationally speaking) in the bowels of building that has dictated life in Britain since the Middle Ages.

The Times politely rejected me today for a place on their graduate scheme so my own route into ‘proper journalism’ remains stubbornly, exhilaratingly, obscured. What a day in Westminster has ensured is that no matter how arduous the next few years prove to be, the motivation to carry on will be that bit easier to find. It was a vision of what I am striving for rendered in real time, rather than abstraction.

For very different reasons indeed, I expect aspiring politicians (if there are any left) can look at this week of accumulating scandal and say the exact same thing. Whether inspired to emulate or antithesize, let's hope we all get to where we're trying to go - and do a good job, once we do.

Chanting from the Brink

As I sit here on the precipice of the unthinkable, 90 minutes away from football’s equivalent of the Armageddon, the peak of St. James Park is only a brief shard woven into my view of the sky-line. I can see a single glistening jut of its metallic upper tendons, but like the tip of an iceberg, the sight betrays far more than that.

Built beneath is an endangered colossus that first took my breath away 15 years ago. Walking out into the belly of football, I expected to see it first but you never do – you feel it, a smack in the face. Air-shorn lungs bellowing tides of anticipation, rippling across and through you from every angle as you take dizzily to your seat. The awesome spectacle of uniformity, and in those days, Keegan’s heroes appearing as an echo of them all, minature men you’d pretended to be in the park.

A girlfriend asked me once: why do you bother with something that makes you so upset? She’d come along after the golden years, after The Entertainers, after even Sir Bobby’s fleeting renaissance. And I could see it through her eyes: the dejected slump, the bitter rebukes, the Sunday spoilt by melodrama. What a futile cause.

But football is and always has been a futile cause for all but the lucky few whose birth (or insincerity) gives them Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal. The Premier League is a microcosm of the fucked-up world we inhabit in which all the wealth, all the power and all the happiness has been distributed among a disproportionate few who have developed insurmountable methods of protecting it. Manchester United are America (quite literally now, of course): on top, out front, smug in their greatness and loathed for it across the world, while the remaining three might constitute the jostling superpowers of Europe. So what does that make Newcastle FC? A shell-seasoned and cowering corner of the Middle East, pulling its self to pieces while the rest of the world grows.

By the end of the day, relegation may have finally been all but conceded by the slowest, flattest, most dim-spirited Newcastle side of at least the last twenty years, in a stadium that is still the fourth biggest in the country. Another question bemused outsiders ask is simply: how did it get to this? Even they remember vaguely a period in the 90s when the club were England’s Girls Aloud rather than its Pete Docherty.

Pin-pointing the exact moment when we became an injured moth declining deliriously toward the relegation carpet is difficult: some would cite Bobby Robson’s unceremonious departure, some Kenny Daglish dismantling the squad before him, some would even go as far back to say it was King Kev himself doing away with our youth team and teasing us with false economy-glory.

For me, the rot truly set the moment, in the middle of a build-up toward the Aston Villa goal, Lee Bowyer’s fist connected with Keiron Dyer’s face in front of an astonished St. James’ Park in 2005. Two team mates brawling mid-match. The national press have been poking us in the ribs and laughing ever since, and who can blame them.

So why bother with an interest that for almost a decade has been a merry-go-round stopping alternately at shame, disappointment, anger and, at times, sheer horror?

Because your football club is, in many ways, your oldest friend. You’ve known it for longer than you can quite remember and you’re loyal to it, even when it’s acting like an insufferable twat. When something is so entwined with your sense of self and history, there’s very little it could actually do that would make you wash your hands of them. This is the humanity from which football’s vultures tear their lumps: loyalty vitiated by a £40 shirt.

But beyond that, football and sport in general offer humankind something wonderfully unique. It is a world in which we can revel in the excesses of irrational emotion, joys greater than joys and sorrows deeper than sorrows, because ultimately, it is a game with no real bearing on our health, our families, or our futures. It is a world in which a good result is a good result, plain and untainted by the grey tones of life in which both a blessing and a curse are manifest somewhere in every event. For every hammer blow like relegation, there is a moment even in a bad performance, a well-timed pass or a neat one-two, than momentarily illuminates the sublime, a fleck of art amidst a chaos of movement that reminds you precisely why you bother. And most importantly, even for those of us struggling in football’s developing world, there is hope. Against the odds, despite the run of play, in football you never quite lose that little part of you that believes that this could be our match, our season.

Bill Shankley is claimed to have said once that football isn’t a matter of life or death – it’s much more important than that. Perhaps his point was that what matters more than our mortality is what we do with our lives – the bit in between that is so easy to let pass us by. Strange though it might seem to the rational outsider, the dizzy heights and choking lows of football feed directly into an essential appetite for life, and make it taste, if not better, then stronger.

Let’s hope the boys manage to put on a spread for us tonight, and keep the hope alive a little longer.

St. Georges Day.

"Do ee kna what’s gan ern here?”

Asked a woman in the crowd as we looked out between the gang of rabid, Union Jack-waving white men and the five or six students nervously handing out Socialist Worker leaflets opposite them.

“I’ve got a rough idea, yeah.”

The woman frowned as the melodious mantras of the Glastonbury-survivors on one side continued to be drowned out by thundering chants of ‘EN-GER-LAND EN-GER-LAND’ of the Real Working Class TM on the other.

“Do them lot wanna ban St. Georges’ Day like?” she continued, pointing at the hippies.

Ah, St. George. Patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal and Russia and the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut, Caceres, Genoa, Ferrara, Freiburg, Ljublijana, Gozo, Pomorie, Qormi and Moscow. Oh, and England.

“No no, I think they just object to the other lot, the National Front, on the grounds that they’re a bit racist.” I replied, but she’d gone.

Facebook was also alive that day with mentions of St. George, the Roman solider who never really killed a dragon (but if he did so today would almost certainly be locked up for hunting an endangered species). The status of many seemed to be calling for the introduction of a national holiday to mark St. Georges Day – a noble enough aim, getting an extra day off work – but then I wondered how many of them also shared the sentiments of the 365,642 members of the ‘STOP our Government from killing off ST Georges Day because it may offend!’ facebook group, the same sentiment peddled between belches and jeers by the intimating posse of sheared clichés that commandeered Grey’s Monument in Newcastle City Centre, April 23rd.

The question I ask of everyone who propagates this idea is simply: who? Who is ‘offended’ by St. Georges’ Day? The Left? The Attenboroughs? The Sci-Fi enthusiasts with a penchant for The Never Ending Story?

No no, of course we’re talking about immigrants. The ‘others’. The people who come to our country, take our jobs, resist our ways and refuse to flash any tit on a summers day. Them lot.

Has anyone ever actually heard an immigrant in this country say they’re object to St. Georges Day, or the English flag, or crumpets or Wimbledon or cups of tea or anything we’ve decided is ‘English’ for that matter? Obviously we can discount any that have came from Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Russia et al because, hey, he’s their saint too, so why on earth would they object?

The answer is always no and that’s because it’s a myth, a tall-tale perpetuated by the far-right to stoke up the trembling nationalism that is their life-blood.

No body ‘objects’ to St. Georges Day, to the flag, or to the kind of innocent patriotism that - for example - the World Cup brings out in most people, it wouldn’t make any sense to. But what we should all object to is that St. Georges Day, the pride we want to feel in our place of birth, is being hi-jacked – not by immigrants who have probably never even thought about it but by fascists who want to exploit our disillusioned national self-image.

For me, it’s a symptom of post-colonial blues. England ruled the world and the seven seas once - we pillaged and pilfered from across the globe, constructing an identity that is at it’s very core multicultural, a good-old-cup-of-tea from China, a chicken tikka masala from India, three lions from the African plains – and now, in a blink of history’s weary eye, it has all gone. We aren’t England the Great anymore, we’re England the puny, the politically subservient, the lost empire. And with it, our sense of identity has evaporated.

Like a cuckolded man emerging from the debris of his once great romance, we are a sucker-punched nation, binge-drinking our way from one unprotected fumble to the next, reeling self-consciously around a diminished sense of worth. Some of us want to find reasons to object to the quiet, studious, self-respecting races of people who enter our shores and who, by any rational statistic, present no real threat to our way of life, because their behaviour shows us up as what we are: the drunken, STI-ridden, leary joke of Europe who once ruled the world.

For all I despair of (and contribute to) our social ills, I love England. I love our cultural brilliance, our contributions to art and music and literature. I love our national character: modest, resilient, good-humoured. I love our country-side in a way that, when I stop and look at it, overwhelms a place so innate I can’t touch it, something I can only suppose is my silly, simpering human soul.

But loving Britain is loving diversity. We’re a mongrel race and always have been, invaded more times than Paris Hilton’s knickers, a melting pot of Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Romans. By either accident or design, we are a nation that has absorbed its trademarks and traditions from other places and amalgamated them into something unique and this is our strength, not our weakness.

If St. George were alive today, and did indeed have to protect a princess of this country by slaying a dragon, the princess would be our tolerance and compassion, and the dragon would be the looming monster of fascism – each scale a freshy-suited skin-head – that inflames communities and takes as a sacrifice new, disillusioned youth each day. A dragon that, in the forth-coming European elections, could take a seat of real power to punish us for our apathy.

I didn’t see the woman again, but there were plenty there that day at Monument, trying to decipher whether they agreed with those shouting far out on the right or those shouting far out on the left.

All the while, in the space in the middle of them both, on their way to work or to the shops, from all manners of backgrounds and beliefs, passed the people of England.

The Problem With The Polis

So as new camera-phone footage of various police brutalities from the G20 protests continue to flow past the soggy remains of the flood-gates and onto our global news channels, my thoughts have turned to my own feelings about the police.

Small-town rozzers are no joke as any fellow small-towner will tell you – ‘they’ll do you for anything mate’ is the opinion I grew up with. The theory we often whined from the rain-drizzled cocoons of our adolescence was that - to quote Shakespeare - ‘tis grand to have a giants strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant’ - in other words, give a man the power of a policeman but nothing really to police and he’ll soon start stamping on the little people just because he can.

Over the course of our tribal years stalking the streets of Alnwick with nothing but sullen glances, greasy hair and pretentious asides about music we thought no one else understood, my friends and I were regularly arrested (or at least accosted) for the tiniest of misdemeanours. My old pal Dillon spent a night in the cells once just for pissing behind a wheelie bin – although to be fair, he had chosen inexplicably to pull his jeans and pants right down to his ankles to do so, thus landing himself with an indecent exposure charge to boot. Looking back, I’m fairly sure it was the reflection of the moon’s sombre glow on the pimply crescent of his arse that alerted the copper in the first place.

I myself reached my nadir one regrettable night staggering home while polishing off a bottle of Happy Shopper merlot. Last drop of acidic bile duly sunk, I placed the bottle beneath a parked car next to me so I could continue up the road with my profound thoughts when, from no where, a police car stopped and told me to pick it up – something I obliged to do with a slurred grumble.
Once they’d pulled away again, I sat the bottle back under another car with all the smugness Ronnie Briggs must have felt as the Great Train became a Tiny Dot in his wing mirror - only difference was, I got caught. The copper saw it happen, reversed back up the road and told me to pick it up again.

With muted outrage, I proceeded to inform the policeman how incongruous I felt his actions to be in the context of our fine town where not four streets away, fights were likely to be breaking out as people left the pubs – how, as a tax-paying young citizen with a clean public record and a bright future ahead of me, I resented being ‘nannied’ by the state or indeed any of it’s front-line employees.

Six months later, when preparing for my court appearance, the policeman’s report described the incident more like this:

“AT APPROX 02:12 AM, THE DEFENDANT WAS SPOTTED LITTERING IN THE STREET AND WAS ASKED TO PICK ITEM UP. DEFENDANT OBLIGED THEN REPEATED THE OFFENCE A SECOND TIME. WHEN ASKED TO PICK IT UP AGAIN DEFENDANT SAID ‘LOOK MAN FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY DON’T YOU GO DO SOME REAL WORK?'. WHEN TOLD ONCE AGAIN TO PICK ITEM UP DEFENDANT SAID ‘FINE FOR FUCK’S SAKE THERE LOOK I HAVE IT – CAN’T EVEN WALK HOME WITHOUT YOU GIVING ME SHIT CAN I?’” Etc. etc.

I’ll never quite forget the mixture of mirth and shame on my Mum’s face as her only son pleaded ‘guilty’ to littering in a patch-work suit of old school uniforms one chilly morning in November. The subsequent paragraph in the Alnwick Gazette was, incidentally, my debut in print.

So small-town police can be petty in their approach to their job, but then small-town people can be petty in their approach to their lives full stop. The policeman could have let it go and not charged me but then I could have just carried the bottle to my front door and no been so petulant – his churlishness and mine formed a symbiotic circle of frustrated behaviour, two parts of the same grim condition. Having grown a little wiser and travelled a little further, I’ve realised that the police are a bit like God in that you’ll scoff at the thought of them but then, in the most desperate of circumstances, you don’t half find yourself wishing they’d show up somehow.

But what about the masked figure who took a baton to the back of Ian Tomlinson's head, the anonymous architect of the bewildered fall which has proven so emblematic of reckless policing, as well as a chilling precursor to a father’s pointless death?

Behind the yellow jacket and the scary mask, it’s easy to imagine a frightened young officer whose training has led him down. Confronted with a mob of protesters to whom you embody the general antithesis of their aims, sprit and conviction, what would you do?

Would you keep it cool, stand your ground, try to reason? Or would you lash out in fear?

I’ll never know, mainly because I’ve got about much chance of becoming a policeman as I do of becoming Barrack Obama’s second pet dog. But I do think it’s worth bearing in mind that grace under pressure is a tall order as well as a fine concept. Perhaps the person behind the riot gear was stood there wishing, against all logic, that somehow the police would show up and make everything safe for him.

Like everyone else in Britain, the wake of the G20 protests has done much to shake my faith in the police, just as listening to N.W.A's 'Fuck Tha Police' did much to shape my default antipathy toward them all those years ago, and I sincerely hope that lessons are learnt by all. In the mean time, I'll just be doing my best to avoid getting into situations where I find myself praying for a man in blue: and watching where I leave my wine bottles, of course.

The Three Great Unmentionables #1 - Religion

Staggering hung-over through the musky folds of the internet brought me, for once, to a pure and happy place this morning.

Karen Armstrong - a religious scholar who I won’t pretend to have known about before my accidental (or perhaps divinely intervened) divergence from alternating between pages of football gossip and blue-tinted voyeurism, has articulated brilliantly what I have always felt but never had the brain cells to say about that flaming potato, religion.

Far from seeing God-stuff as force for evil simply because it’s been misappropriated over our bloody history to aid various political objectives, Armstrong views it as having the potential to help achieve global harmony. She’s called for a ‘Charter for Compassion’ to be drafted up between all the world’s major religions – a document that keeps at its centre what her study has shown her to be the ‘golden rule’ or the principle that underpins all religious teachings, from the chilled out vibes of The Buddha to the seriously out-of-fashion orders of Allah to our own beardy, Bush-bothering JC.

Weirdly the principle – ‘don’t do unto others anything you wouldn’t want done unto you’ – is something my dear old Mum used to drop surreptitiously around the edges of my Lego sessions and generally proffer as good guidance through life. Clearly this means She harbours the combined wisdom of all mankind’s prophets from Confucius onwards, and that maybe I should do a little less eye-rolling when she speaks and little more sitting cross-legged in attentive silence with candles.

In any case, I find Armstrong’s view of religion a lot more palatable and interesting than the Nu-Atheists currently sneering at religion from the sides of buses. For me there was always something uncomfortably smug about the Atheist Bus Campaign which saw the message ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ scrawled across the body of Number 32s all over Europe.

It’s not the idea of atheists being allowed to say their piece that bothers me but the line they went with – ‘stop worrying and enjoy your life’ – like Richard Dawkins and his followers hop, skip and jump through their care free existences tipping their bowler hats at bemused strangers and out-whistling the song-birds all because they’ve decided there’s no God.

Frankly, I think religion is self-made whether you worship Satan, yoga, the music of Marvin Gaye or the whisper of Autumn leaves cradled in the wind – whatever gives people meaning and some inner-peace through this sometimes weary toil.

But what Armstrong points out is that in the case of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism and Buddhism – proper, big religions – ‘belief’ isn’t a state you can be in or a possession you can have, it’s an action you have to perform. Reminds me of the start of that Massive Attack song where she harks: ‘Love, love is a verb / Love is a doing word’. Religion teaches that divinity and enlightenment – or the ‘light’ that atheists snigger at – is reached through actions and discipline, and the central endeavour to these actions and disciplines is the concept of compassion – putting others first. It is in this dethroning of the self from the centre of our own worlds, religion teaches, that divinity is achieved. And we all know how fucking difficult that can be.

The problem with religion then isn’t that it ‘causes war’ or breeds intolerance but that people can’t be arsed to learn about or follow it properly – if they did, things’d be hunky-dory. A bit like Communism, if only the pesky aspects of human nature – greed, selfishness, malice – didn’t blinker us all then religion would have a lot of the answers we need.

My personal ambivalence on the subject stems from an early childhood in which, when troubled, I would lie awake at night and whisper to what school, my Mum and Sunday mornings had told me was an all-loving, ever-listening God - a best friend. From the portal that was my duvet, flanked in soft, cuddly versions of things that would eat me in real life, I would order my thoughts and pray; for situations at school to be resolved and the survival of my parents and sisters and a nightmare-less sleep and all the other things that preoccupy a young mind.

Now of course I never contact God unless I’m exasperated or accidently trodden-on, but I do remember the comfort of faith and so hate the dogmatic over-simplification that characterises many people’s attitudes to religion. When scriptures are followed, rather than manipulated or preached, you usually end up with a good person trying to do good things, and no – you don’t need religion to be a moral or decent person, but then why object to people who let it help them out?

Ultimately of course defending or finding a place for religion in our modern world is a task too great for my mediocre intellect or probably even that of Richard Darkins or Karen Armstrong. No, best as ever to leave life’s greatest conundrums to life’s wisest TV show: The Simpsons. And which character is happiest in that..?

Diddly.

Twitter In Schools? When Will They Learn...

So the Guardian announced today that a new shake up in Primary school curriculum will teach children how to master Twitter and Wikipedia. Isn’t that rather like teaching High School kids how to source tobacco pipes, or toss off to sepia stills of half-revealed Victorian breasts?

The little nippers will ‘get’ simple interfaces like Twitter as instinctively as they’ll understand how to smear chocolate on walls, and besides, by the time this legislation comes into practise Twitter will be yesterday’s fad (my Dad has a cautionary tale about assuming things will be ‘yesterday’s fad’ and that’s Madonna, but I think it’s safe to say Twitter won’t be still ‘reinventing’ it’s self in 50 years time, dancing around younger websites in a grotesque, air-brushed bid to remain relevant – it’s just not the way the web works).


Even if they replace Twitter with whatever comes next, I still think it’ll resemble that scene in Good Will Hunting when the teacher, all long-scarfed and learned-browed, gets himself into a right tizz trying to work out a blackboard equation when Matt Damon’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks genius blurts out ‘Do you have any idea how easy this shit is for me?’ and storms off, leaving the professor a crumpled, impotent mess. I imagine five year olds across the country doing the same: flinging their mouse across the classroom with contempt and telling their doddering custodians: ‘This is a piece of piss: don’t you REALISE you need to download the latest Java Script here?!’

The second money-shot in the Guardian’s report is that news that the Second World War and Victorians will no long be compulsory – outrageous! you may cry - but it goes on to explain that this is to prevent ‘duplication’ with secondary school education in which WW2 is covered extensively.

I remember with great poignancy being taken on that school trip everyone goes on to Belgium: the one where they show you the rows and rows of perfectly lined white grave stones and make you listen to the old bloke play the bugle at the same time every day to honour the fallen. Deeply moving that, tracing the engravings with your puffy little finger tips, trying to locate your own surname in the endless deaths sprawled out before you in the brittle stone… I remember looking out over the sea of graves and stumbling down the remains of the trenches with a lump in my stomach, over-awed with feelings of empathy and guilt and pity that I couldn’t quite understand... I also remember seeing my first vagina after Matthew Brown bought a porn mag from a dodgy Belgian newsagents and spending all my travel money getting vaguely dizzy on cans of lager from a vending machine outside the hotel – the point is, none of these experiences should be denied tomorrow’s youth by a right-on liberal curriculum, so it’s good news ole’ WWII is still on there.

Other proposals put forward by former Oftsed chief Jim Rose – a man with a name so rounded, wholesome and cheerful you’d probably nod warmly if he tried to introduce sadomasochism and bull-fighting onto the national curriculum – are apparently to teach children to “use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.”…

Does anyone else see the folly in this? It’s like showing them how to ‘use the answer sheet to a math test alongside how to pass without cheating’, or how to ‘cleverly smuggle a playback device in your pocket and mime during recorder practice alongside how to play the instrument with discipline’. Presumably in P.E. they’ll be showing them how to inject steroids into their thighs before getting the hula-hoops and bean-bags out, with the optional knowledge of how to train to develop geniune hand-eye co-ordination. At worst they’ll produce a generation of Dwain Chambers and at best a generation of me, who long ago decided learning to spell properly was pointless because the spell check does it all for you.

Finally, and perhaps most perplexing of all, the report contains a single line bullet point that frankly couldn’t be more incongruous, either in level of detail or in general spirit:

“Less emphasis on the use of calculators than in the current curriculum.”

What an anomaly! What a strange, dull note to sound in the midst of this hip melody of progressive reforms. ‘Less emphasis on calculators’, with no clear indication of what will be used instead: presumably just an abacus and a cane. It’s as though some aggravated conservative nipped into Jim Rose’s office the night before this report came out, heard the mounting footsteps of a security guard and hastily scribbled into the margins the first thing his fusty brain could think of before ducking out again. ‘Less calculators! They won’t have calculators when they’re buying their tights and dripping in the shop!’ Well they will, actually, on their touch-screen mobiles, but never mind…
All in all and taken into context, the full curriculum shake-up sounds like a good thing. I just wonder why when putting together these reports, the government includes such silly lines like ‘teaching them to use Twitter’, inviting off-focus headlines in papers and easy lampoonings from members of the public like me so that the essence of what they’re saying gets lost.

Perhaps the reality that politicians reluctantly face up to these days is that without inserting these ready made headlines and mild controversies, no one in the media would give a shit and award any coverage to their hard work at all. Maybe they ought to start releasing their important papers with an appendix of naked celebrities - now there might be a way to politicise an apathetic generation - they'd just have to make sure it's someone like Chanelle from Big Brother, and not a chubby 1860's burlesque model.

London.

I've often heard people talk about the 'Comfort Zone'.

You know, as in:

‘A family trip to Alton Towers? Hmm… you know how Granddad doesn’t like to be out of his Comfort Zone…’

For me the term conjures visions of some fluffy alternative universe where you can come to no harm – a world where the clouds have fallen to buffer the roads in moist cotton, and the buildings are all bouncy castles minus the deadbeat dropping coins into a bumbag, and sheep lollop in ‘Z’ formations in the rosy hue of a constantly setting sun.

Actually though, the ‘Comfort Zone’ is not another dimension but an abstract concept pertaining to personal boundaries of security and confidence. And the place where I step outside of mine, it would seem, is London.

Now I love London. It fascinates and excites me in a way that it probably always fascinates and excites wide-eyed kids from Northumbrian bog lands. I reckon if you went to Piccadilly Circus right now you could probably find an earnest Northumbrian runaway trying to explain to a policemen why they have a pick axe with them, a puzzled glint in the corner of their malnourished eye as they look down and wonder how gold can be so dirty and dull in real life.

The sense of purpose and activity in the air is intoxicating in London, whereas up North it tends to only be the intoxicants that are intoxicating. But despite all of this, I still feel out of my comfort zone because I take my Northern tendencies there with me.

When someone charges rudely into my shoulder, knocking me a foot backwards before striding ignorantly onto the tube, I instinctively stutter into a series of grovelling apologies that stops only inches short of choking on my own teary snots and promising them things can be different next time.

Even when I manage to traverse the ‘Underground’ with reasonable confidence, remembering to keep to the right and pausing all but imperceptibly to consult the maps, I feel like everyone around me knows I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing – an impression rarely rectified by referring to it accidently as ‘the Metro’… (Note to self: the Newcastle Metro is a twee little chug-a-long in a rickety old yellow cart, the London Underground is a white-knuckle ride on the inside of a bullet headed for Satan’s heart. There is really no excuse for getting them mixed up.)

I feel intimidated too by the sheer size of the thing. Trying to contemplate how big London is and how long it would take to learn your way around it all is like one of those hypothetical exercises people dream up when they either need a metaphor for impossibility or they’ve taken too many magic mushrooms: ‘counting every grain of sand on a beach’, or ‘reading every book ever written’ or ‘accepting the Pope’s point about not using condoms to combat HIV in Africa’ – you just can’t do it, not unless there is something very wrong with you.

Despite these discomforting characteristics, London is where I want to take myself next in this jaunt we call our ‘youff’, and I think it’s because trying to expand your ‘comfort zone’ is a natural thing.

My Granddad may not fancy a trip to Alton Towers these days but he sailed the seven seas as a young man, his comfort zone encompassing the four corners of the globe and the humbling, treacherous blue depths that weave across the continents between them. I fancy he’s earned the right not be bothered from the greenhouse, because he took his comfort zone and spread it as far as he could while his youth allowed him.

I’ll bear that in mind when I finally get to London, and try to stop yearning for the lolloping sheep.

Money, Vanity & The Dentist

I’ve never handed over hundreds of pounds for anything as saddening or defeatist as a new television, or a sofa, or a deluxe latte maker simply because I cling churlishly to the Marxist dogma that material wealth does not equate to happiness. Well, that and the fact I have no where to put anything.

Instead, on the odd occasions that the God of Chaos stumbles drunkenly into the game of my life, rolls a hazy six and I end up with expendable money (as the God of Grinding Fiscal Normality storms off in a huff) I’ve always proudly squandered the coins on ‘experience’.

‘Experience’, of course, adds up to little more than getting drunk somewhere different to normal – at a music festival, or in a Cuban youth hostel, or between the prickly thighs of a nameless prostitute on a bed of desecrated tulips in a Turkish graveyard (never again…).

A wreck less, selfish bout of sententious whimsy comes over me whenever I receive a windfall – I always want to defy the significance of having money by immediately blowing it, not on something tangible and practical, but on something I romanticize as being ‘better’ or ‘more important in life’ than the dough itself. It’s the same idiotic rebellion that causes me to stuff fivers in charity boxes when I know I’m approaching the end of my bank balance - I think I try and defy money because I’m afraid of it ever controlling my life, a high-minded notion I hope I outgrow long before I come to reproduce.

How exactly this daft relationship with money applies to today’s visit to the dentist is something I’ve been pondering, mouth in hand, ever since I left the sour-faced receptionist counting out my two-hundred sheets onto the tabletop of her unfulfilled, Formica-studded life.

I’ve had a dead tooth in the front of my smile that’s been bugging me for years – winking at me in the mirror and gate crashing flash photographs and making me look, to all intents and purposes, like I’m chewing a dead wasp. It’s ground me down, over time, and so it was vanity, simple vanity, that lead me to spend such a princely sum on what can be considered a ‘commodity’ for the very first time in my short, shabby life.

God knows, lying back in the dentist’s chair as a pair of distant eyes ground my front tooth to a sharp spike ready for its new ‘cap’, I knew that for once I hadn’t paid for ‘an experience’ – unless the experience was the novelty of getting a woman that close to your mouth without first listening wide-eyed to her hopes for the future and subtly plying her with Chardonnay.

As an experience, it was vile – as a commodity, it will function to make me feel more complete and attractive as human being. A shiny new tooth. Is it really any different to purchasing alloys for my (non-existent) car, or a touch-screen mobile phone, or a pair of sunglasses with Somebody’s initials built authentically into the frame?

Where do I go from here, now I’ve entered the murky waters of cosmetic improvement? When Chaos next kicks me some money, will I find myself cruising the aisles of a nose supermarket, or flicking woozily through a penis-enlargement catalogue? What happened to the man who has been previously so resistant to aesthetic improvement that he’d bought no new clothes in two years, and regularly denounced bars of soap as part of the ‘beauty industry conspiracy’?

Maybe it’s the first step in developing a mature relationship with money. Now, rather than impulsively spunking any I have on the slippery notion of living a life worth living, I’ll use my new tooth as a building block to bigger and better things.

‘Things’ being the operative word. As shaky recollections of unremarkable hedonism dwindles, tangible wealth will sprout up around me like the well-kept blades of safely fenced lawn.

Food blenders, and digital cameras and nice suits will keep me indoors to bask in their warming presence. As the digits in my annual salary steadily roll upwards they’ll unfurl an infinity of glistening trinkets to sooth the natural impatience of my soul.

And at the centre of this circus of objects, I’ll be grinning, with my two hundred pound tooth wedged firmly in my big, empty head, as the Gods roll 6, 6, 6...

The Ambivalent Agony of the Fashion Show Gawker

If the ratio of beautiful to average-looking people that existed in the basement of our student’s union the other night (80:20) were to somehow ripple in sultry waves out of the doors and spread to the real world, we as a population would be sentenced to years of ugly civil violence within a generation.

While the lucky majority who would suddenly resemble the attendees of the Fashion Rocks fashion show on Thursday night rejoiced, allowing industry to grind to a forgotten halt as they fawned over each other and masturbated furiously in hastily-arranged rooms of fresh mirrors, the 20% left without shapely noses, straightened hair or adequately rimmed sunglasses would be driven underground like the proles in 1984 (I mean the ones from the book, not miners) to squander a decade in confused self-loathing before a unifying average-looking leader (later played by Mel Gibson) emerged to lead them to a bloody coup. The beautiful people would provide resistance by their number but ultimately capitulate via their reluctance to blemish their perfect faces with sweat. Beautiful heads would roll.

Stood in a £2 Primark t-shirt (with a shandy stain on the left sleeve) I contemplated this dystopia and my probable role in it as before me, on the ‘cat-walk’, another 9-foot monument to mankind’s aesthetic potential strutted and pouted in some sort of dress I was vaguely aware I was supposed to notice.

On one of those evolutionary scales that shows a monkey gradually getting his shit together and becoming a man, this girl would occupy a space six places to the right of the first straight-backed one, two spaces to the left of a great swirling orb of transcendental purity so beautiful and true it can only be seen by babies in the first 30 seconds after they emerge from the labia. ‘She’s hot’ was my dry-mouthed observation – as adequate a summation of a person as it would have been to tell Hitler: ‘you’re a bit of a tinker Adolf, aren’t you…’

There is no ambivalence quite like that which afflicts a man when he is confronted by a woman so unattainable she might as be perched on top of a 300 foot high greased pole, boxed in a force field of searing agony and orbited by angry crows.

Far be it for me to reduce people to merely the sum of their looks, but when seen for the first time from an unassailable distance that is precisely what people are - and so perhaps it is not too trite to compare a beautiful man or woman to a wave breaking on rock dappled by the first ascending shadow of dawn, or a summer breeze snaking through the tips of a corn field, or a really, really nice tree. They all make the same eloquent case for a God, after all.

The problem for men is that in the case of seeing the beautiful woman (rather than the wave or the wind or the tree) is that seeing is not enough: the compulsion to ‘capture’ resonates suddenly in your core with an aching jolt. Herein lies the ambivalence. You never feel simultaneously more alive or more dead than at the sight of a woman you know wouldn’t give you any more than a bemused smile if you ever hiccupped your way over to talk to her.

This isn’t because she’s shallow, unapproachable or even necessarily that put off by the fact you obviously only own one pair of jeans. It’s because the sheer disparity between her physical beauty and yours would manifest its self in negative ways: in my case, most likely, a cringing effort to over-compensate with abstract gags and lots of animated shuffling, like a tearful crab trying to make its self walk like all the other animals.

Best not to try. Best to stand in the basement of the union, a crude chip of slate strewn upon a glistening infinity of bright, colourful pebbles, washing back the ambivalence with a plastic cup of beer, gazing up in a suspended sigh at beautiful impossibility, silently thankful that the ratio is the freak, not you.

Roller-skating: another one for life's two great lists...

They tell you the world’s your oyster and you think - great, they must mean life is a merry jaunt beset with luxurious possibilities. They don’t. They mean it’s a never ending sequence of anticlimaxes slurped from empty shells in which you can always see your own, crying reflection.

Don’t get me wrong - I enjoyed the Roller Disco last night tremendously, it’s just here I am, reaching with an arm both black and blue for that eternal list of things that I’m rubbish at, ready to add yet another entry. And yet - I was so sure I’d be good at it. I mean, why wouldn't I be?

I tied up my roller shoes and approached the skate rink with all the surly confidence a boozed up moron enjoys, only to witness my legs flay out in front and behind of me like the spindly pins of a newly born giraffe, who would have at least have had simultaneously becoming aware of its own empirical consciousness as a sort of excuse -

‘Fair play Spotty - you might have been gash at skating but you were experiencing experience for the very first time, so you’ll hear no more on the matter from us, son. That daft student with half a mullet on the other hand had no fucking excuse…’.

Not matter what combination of leg-pushing, weight-shifting or composed launching I tried, I either startled forward like a horse you’d just prodded up arse or wobbled out for half a yard like a toddler playing in a pair of its Mum’s high-heels.

Occasionally, in the waves of fluid motion that had formed like a jeering carousel around me, I’d pick out a friendly face and latch to them like a tragic middle-aged divorcee who’d entered the desperate final third of a night out on the lash.

Like her, I wanted answers – answers to why life is so cruel, why it is so hard, why you can give and give so much and get so little in return – but it wasn’t love or even a kebab that I was after, it was simple motion. To experience, just for a brief moment, a successful glide across the floor, to fan the beads of sweat from my face in a breeze created by my own ability to cascade.

Instead, I’d generally bring them tumbling down with me. That was the only move I perfected in two hours.

And so as my stubborn, outraged mind tried to get its self around the concept of being monumentally shit at something an entire room of people were performing with general competency, I began to cling to the thought.

The thought that while spinning around on the spot, leaping off stuff or just going quite fast are impressive aesthetic feats in the world of drunken roller-skating, there is another, somehow more honourable move in the reportire that I could hold my head up high and say I was good at.

Falling on your arse is easy, but managing to get back up quickly, and to not seriously injure anyone or yourself on the way is certainly not.

And so while I must have spent at least 20% of my time clinging on at the sides – in the line up of the shamed that is the roller disco’s equivalent to the queue at the GUM clinic – the other 80% was spent honing the art of the relatively painless tumble in which remarkably few people were up-ended by my pathetic flailing.

So although I may well be reaching for that list of things I’m shit at to add yet another of life’s simple activities, the list a fragile ego keeps to console a simple man is only ever just folded up somewhere in another pocket, ready to restore your faith in yourself - and in a world of oysters, if needs be.

The One Entirely Recession Proof Industry. Being Broke.

I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying the Credit Crunch tremendously.

I have no savings – never had. Once I collected a King’s ransom in fifty pence and pound coins for the NSPCC by taking my cherubic visage door-to-door (risking exposure to paedophiles whilst raising money for children was an irony lost on me at the time) but that money was never my own - although I must confess - and please don’t judge too harshly – I dipped into it from time to time to aid my Arthurian quest to find the Newcastle United shiner in a packet of football stickers (the only conspiracy theory I fully believe is that Merlin deliberately distributed the David Ginolas and Phillipe Alberts South of the great divide and sent the Klinsmanns and Viallis in other direction to ensure 10 year old boys kept spending, charity fraud or no charity fraud).

I have no assets – never had. I don’t mean anatomically, where girly eye-lashes and a chopping-board stomach serve me reasonably well, but in terms of tangible things like property, or cars or signed first prints of any Harry Potter novels. I got so far once as to photograph odd bits of junk that lay around my room (a pocket calculator, a book on palm reading, an Our Lady Peace album) to sell on Ebay, caught in a similar rush of capitalist fervour that falls over people when playing Monopoly, only to be overcome swiftly by a crippling existential numbness as I contemplated the prospect of actually posting the silly things to Norwich all to make a couple of quid. It was too depressing, so I left the site and have never returned since, though I suspect my approval rating is the one area in which George W. Bush and I could empathise with one another.

I don’t drive so the price of fuel doesn’t bother me, don’t play the stock market so Sesame Street still seems more pertinent than Wall Street in my eyes (incidentally, I wonder how The Count is dealing with the downturn…). ‘When you aint got nothing, you got nothing to lose’ said Bob Dylan, presumably referring to the period before he was given the responsibility of embodying liberal social protest, something he’s seemed keen to try and shake off ever since. Well I still stumble through the final days of each month borrowing tenners from tolerant friends and have absolutely no mythical status as the embodiment of anything – I wonder if old Bob is jealous, in his own private way.

I have, however, adopted the parlance of the Credit Crunch, much like people who normally don’t have a clue which football club Wayne Rooney plays for suddenly had a line or two about his metatarsal and enduring significance to the England set up during the last World Cup.

I’ve been spraying banal conversations with the same guff about ‘things being as they are’ and ‘everyone being affected by it at the minute’ as everyone else (bollock by the way: I’m not affected, the Queen’s not affected, that bloke who wears newspaper for trousers and pushes a shopping trolley down Northumberland Street isn’t affected…), all delivered in that peculiar cadence that seeks to imitate a world-weary global businessman, rather than someone to whom the ‘FTSE Index’ sounds more like a brochure for frottage aficionados than something to do with finance.

If anything, the whole palaver seems like a good thing for my current situation. One thing I do find interesting is the concept of ‘this only happening once in a life-time’ – gives the whole thing a glossy touch, does that, like a nice quote on the front of a DVD. If it only happens once in a lifetime, then I’d rather it happened now before I have any dosh, assuming I ever manage to sell the novel I’m planning to write this summer (boy meets boy, boy loves girl, girl sleeps with other boy, boy cries) and see it turned into a moderately entertaining British film (starring Martin Clunes as my Dad – sorry, the Dad – sorry, Dad).

The person I feel most sorry for is all Barack Obama, who seemingly couldn’t have a worse shit-storm to enter for his first term as the sexiest, coolest (and certainly blackest) American president of all time.

Well, best of luck to him, and best of luck to all of you. For me it’s just another day whistling cheerfully, wading through my own rubbish bin.