Who Will Expose This Evil In Our Midst?

A lot has been said about the facist evils of the BNP, but what about the SNP (Scottish National Party)? It seems to me that with their insidious 'Tartan is Right!' chant and blatant agenda to force every man, woman and child in the UK to become Scottish, this party is getting off any cricitism Scot-free!

Now I'm as liberal as the next person and some of my best friends are Scottish, but I'll be damned if anyone forces me to speak in a funny accent, use funny money and eat fried mars bars. And their plan to convert all British church bells to the bagpipes is outrageous!

And frankly who needs better schools, more caring hospitals and fairer justice in the Courts system, not to mention an end to gazumping in the property market and Rabbie Burns day? Not me.













As for putting a stop to the further climb of the BNP's Nick Griffin. Easy peasy. Aside from the impossibility of taking a man who looks like Humpty Dumpty seriously, one could easily complete the look and ensure he never reaches higher office by swapping his shampoo for hair removing cream (history demonstrates that the electorate seldom votes in the bald guy - even if they actually give a toss about the politics).

Post-Feminist

According to Lily Allen's latest hit '22', if a female reaches 29 and hasn't yet found the man of her dreams to define her, 'society says her life is already over'.

You can download this cheerful ditty (full lyrics below) as a ringtone too.

Personally, as a female slightly over 29 who never tried the romantic tactic of piling it high to sell it cheap (aka did the one-night stand thing), but who still never got whisked off to a castle in the air by a straight Prince Charming before her 29-year shelf life elapsed, I'm just off to jump off a cliff...

Ms Allen is 24 years old (only another 5 years to go then. Shame really. Think how much more evolved her lyrics might have had to become as a thirtysomething.)

I know... miaow! But what is life without a little celeb-baiting? Hare coursing is now banned.

When she was 22 the future looked bright
But she's nearly 30 now and she's out every night
I see that look in her face she's got that look in her eye
She's thinking how did I get here and wondering why

It's sad but it's true how society says
Her life is already over
There's nothing to do and there's nothing to say
Til the man of her dreams comes along picks her up and puts her over his shoulder
It seems so unlikely in this day and age

She's got an alright job but it's not a career
Wherever she thinks about it, it brings her to tears
Cause all she wants is a boyfriend
She gets one-night stands
She's thinking how did I get here
I'm doing all that I can

It's sad but it's true how society says
Her life is already over
There's nothing to do and there's nothing to say
Til the man of her dreams comes along picks her up and puts her over his shoulder
It seems so unlikely in this day and age

It's sad but it's true how society says
Her life is already over
There's nothing to do and there's nothing to say
Til the man of her dreams comes along picks her up and puts her over his shoulder
It seems so unlikely in this day and age

[Copyright Lily Allen. Lyrics from www.songlyrics.com]

Roadkill

Conscientious driver that I am, twice this week have I been forced to slam on the anchors to avoid mowing down a couple of wheat ears among the latest crop of students who specialise in stepping off the pavement straight in front of moving vehicles without looking - relying on that infallible immortality of theirs - the second without even an iPod glued to its ears as excuse.

Whether or not all the 'Drink Yourself To Death For A Fiver!' leaflets the Freshers are bombarded with by local bars the moment they come up had anything to do with either incident, it struck me that just as more and more youngsters are apparently starting primary school without being toilet-trained or able to speak more than a handful of baby words, an increasing number of students are turning up at University without the ability to even cross the road, much though you learn to expect (in my line of work) many won't be able to make toast without activating the fire alarm or use the washing machine without an engineer being required to mop up the aftermath.

I then mused whether Society is in effect, going backwards, possibly trailing evolution not far behind in its wake.

My thoughts turned to the poor and dare I say, increasingly haggard-looking, parents re-mortgaging their homes in order to afford to send their offspring to University, particularly in a recession, only to risk their investment being run over and all that money wasted for want of a Green Cross Code man.

Perhaps Freshers' Week needs to become 'Basic Lifeskills' week rather than an orgy of mindless drinking and pointless dungeon and dragon societies.

If this makes me a killjoy, how much less fun if joy ends up on a slab because it isn't capable of assuming even the slightest young adult responsiblity for itself, whether through 'whatever' lackadaisical nature or a negligent lack of parental nuture.

If only history were still taught, more youngsters might realise how hard many of their predecessors once fought to be educated and then to vote and how the powers that be were terrified of the idea of educated voting peasantry and working classes, contriving accordingly to keep them ignorant and therefore controllable for as long as possible.

They would then also know that religion and cheap drink were historically employed as opiates for the masses, where bread and circuses proved insufficient. Now religion has lost it hold, bread and circuses are passe and drink has become even cheaper and available 24/7, to be joined by drug highs for less than the cost of a cappucino. Worse still, acting dumbly and bragging about it has become fashionable, and even aspirational behaviour.

How reassuring it would be to see a 'Wake Up And Smell The Coffee Dudes! Society' at next year's Freshers' Fair.

Meanwhile I might look into whether there is such a thing as a 'student chaser' available to bolt onto the front of the car. Or invent one, if there isn't.

Save the Human!

This is the sort of town I would like to live in.






Sadly far more towns look something like this..




Sometimes I wonder if housing is built by people for people at all. Or if people can only dream of being listened to when it comes to their own housing.

I guess it's called 'progress'

Let's stand in the way everyone. Let's say a big fat 'No!' to Brutalism. And battery cage homes for humans, with anything but the space and light we all claim to want, let alone room to get our furniture in. Let's demand that all 'progress' be in a forwardly direction, and preferably with posterity attached to help our era mean something.

Slow Down Unless You're A Banker (in which case honk!)

Last week saw the start of a new half-cocked (undemocratically elected) scheme to grind Oxford's traffic to a fume-farting halt by imposing a 20 mph speed limit on various sections of the city centre and residential streets.
Now narrow residential streets with cars parked on both sides with their multitude of hazards such as possible small boys running across the road in-between parked cars I understand, but MAIN roads which already have a plethora of crossings, traffic islands, lights and speed cameras to slow the motorist down? Where is the logic in reducing these to 20?
It feels as if we sensible drivers (and whatever my green sympathies, I am required to drive around the city quite a lot as part of my new job) are being penalised for the drink and drug-addled minority who commit the moronic acts such as cutting up or overtaking on a 30mph stretch and swinging out of corners at high speed minus signals - offences they continue to commit if not more so under the new more-restrictive regime, surprise surprise. Now if the REAL dangerous drivers such as these, not forgetting the latest breed who TWEET about how clever and badass they are to post to Twitter whilst driving faced stiffer penalties such as losing their licence for 10 years if caught, rather than a slap on the wrist, a life ban if they killed or mained anyone, THAT would be be more sensible and effective than this ridiculous money squandering scheme where it is 30 miles an hour one minute and 20 the next with no particular rhyme or reason attached to which section of road is which, bar the obvious side streets. And don't get me started on dangerous cyclists or lemming pedestrians who seem to rate listening to their iPods above looking before they pull out or cross! Don't they deserve a penalty or two? Or doesn't the Highway Code apply to them?
Cars are not going to go away after all. Though perhaps they might be drastically reduced at least if truly radical schemes such as the reintroduction of trams or the provision of continuous cycle lanes were considered, so what is the point of deliberately creating obstacles for cars, thereby promoting the mass pollution of idling engines?

Meanwhile on Radio 4's Today programme this week, a city finance chief was challenged about the fact that huge bonuses continue to be paid to bankers, despite the recession, and performance regardless - even in the cases where banks have been bailed out by the government via our taxpayer's money to stay afloat.

His reply was that they had to continue to pay large bonuses as our banking talent would otherwise be lost abroad.

What a brilliant strategical tactic, I thought! Kill the bonuses so they go abroad and destabilise somone else's economy with foolish risk taking whilst our own country has a chance to recover and fight back.

And do they leave us any alternative when no financial institution will seemingly hear of bonuses being performance-related, or at the very least, paid after tax, and after profit margins have been factored in? It now even emerges that a handful of cheeky bankers are suing for not receiving the obscene bonuses they expected.

Let Them Eat Leaves

The Hungry Caterpillar

Fourteen days from larvae to caterpillar
Then I ate and I ate 'til I was a fatterpillar
I ate and I ate 'til I began to pupate
Becoming a butterfly would be worth the wait
Not to mention save a fortune in fur and Jimmy Choos
I was ready for my time in the sun, ready to hit the news
But first, I was trapped in a chrysalis!
Waiting for my supermodel miracle catalyst
Suppose my shell refused to shed
Suppose a sparrow ate me for a mcsnack instead
Or I became a mutant ninja caterpillar with a caterpillar track
How could I take the cat(erpillar) walk by storm with that?
Luckily I emerged and my wings unfurled to reveal…a Red Admirable
The Royalty of the flutterby world
So it's rose petal red carpets all the way
Heading the butterfly parade at the break of each day
The sweetest nectar, the most potent pollen
I almost binged 'til I was swollen
Before remembering I was the supermodel of stick-insect kind
And snorting sherbet instead.

©LS King 2009

This was my contribution to an open air reading with Back Room Poets in Oxford's Botanic Gardens today on the theme of The Hungry Caterpillar. As you can see I am a poet in crysalis. Who knows what I will hatch into. If only I hadn't ate all that cake instead of boring leaves...

Pride and Progress

This is Caversham Court in Reading, a former Rectory to nearby St Peter's Church and one of the second grandest houses in the Parish dating back to the early 1800s.

In 1933 it was razed to the ground by Reading Council to make way for a road which was never built.

Thanks to the tireless endeavours of several local citizen's action groups and charities, Caversham Court is now somewhat redeemed as a newly-restored riverside public park, and you can walk around the outline of where the grand house used to stand.

















Below is
Christchurch Meadow in Oxford, surely one of the most stunning vistas to be found in England and the stuff of Brideshead Revisited with the rivers Thames (aka Isis) and Cherwell bordering two sides of it and Oxford Colleges, the third, not to mention the Botanic Gardens invading a corner, and steeped in about as much history as it's possible to find, including early balloon landings and mediaeval settlements. In the 1950s a city councillor thought it would be a great idea to build a road straight through it. Luckily he didn't get away with it as doughty Oxford citizens fought back.

Makes you wonder what we have lost elsewhere though. What other country is as short-sighted as England so often is about carving up its towns and cities in the name of 'Progress' (but more often mere sacrifice to the greater glory of the combustion engine and its continued sales and movement). And I speak as the possessor of a driving licence who happily uses alternative transport wherever it exists.

Artistic Yearnings

I have always wished I could paint but it is amazing the effects you can get with a cheap out-of-focus digital camera. This was Port Meadow in Oxford this morning doing a good job of pretending to be 1909.





















Don't you just love the way the animals are all lined up like those Britains plastic farm animals?




















You never know. This could be a latter-day Haywain. Which reminds me I must get back to penning my forthcoming best-seller 'The Constable Code' solving the mystery of why so many thousands of people bought that print to hang above the mantelpiece on their living room walls. I am sure there must be some complicated mathematical equation behind it all. Not to mention Opus Dei.





A strange bird I found in my garden. I think it might be related to the Magpie family.






I haven't been able to afford a holiday this year, but these are some snaps I took on a weekend in Brighton for a family reunion in May to celebrate my mother's 70th.

Things to Do in Oxfordshire Before You're Dead

Quite a random piecemeal posting from me this week I'm afraid.

You've just got to love our local newspaper where the traditional and highbrow vie with the lurid.'Didcot Man Cuts Off Own Penis' was a particularly memorable recent headline, as if the town and the gesture were somehow interconnected. Foolish man I thought, to cut off one of his only sources of entertainment in that godforsaken outpost with only bingo, a power station, Didcot Parkway and alcoholism to offer. As for The Oxford Times Letters pages, they must count as among the only in the country where arguments about bus routes and theosophical debates about the existence of God rage side by side. One thing that startles when you read it for any length of time though are the high volume of both kiddie fiddlers and suicides we appear to have in Oxfordshire. And cancer. Not to mention opera. Only recently tabloidised, it retains its pretentious dinosaur food critic (if he didn't exist, you would have to invent him) but has funked itself up with wonderful photography and maintains high production values with a real bias towards the Arts and few 'Shed Fire!''s creeping in. Friends of mine appear in it and its magazines with worrying regularity with their latest artistic or green triumphs. And it still carries proper Obituary columns to aspire to at lifes' end.







The Sue Ryder charity shop in Abingdon specialises in dolls houses and furniture.








Nice touch in the Cornish Pasty shop of smuggler decor. Someone had smuggled all the flavour out of the pasties though.










Inedible crisps.
















You don't say. If they're free, I'm having a dozen!













They've had the feedback forms from Future Generations and it's official - Future Generations want a state-of-the art modern museum that gets down with da kids man. None of this musty antiquated stuff. Except for the Mummy obviously. No museum is complete without a Mummy.












Cherwell Valley Service Station - Every essential for the modern motorist...



















Unauthorised golf - a growing menace in Oxford parks...













Actually toddlers are often better parkers than their parents.

Stay in Oxford and See the World!

Well it's that time of the year where you can hardly move for the tourist melee in the centre of Oxford.

Each year it becomes more of a battle to negotiate the narrow mediaeval pavements with large tourist groups steaming along or stopping en mass suddenly in front of you and spilling out onto the road, seemingly oblivious to the buses thundering towards them down The High. TEFL students are particularly lemming-like and street unwise and I am amazed we do not see more serious injuries and fatalities to mar their overseas trips as they walk both in the road and across the road without looking.

Now don't get me wrong - Oxford is very definitely a special place that ought to be shared and many of our foreign visitors are charming and lovely, (not to mention much needed economically). However I can't help wishing there were some means by which they could be taught a bit of road sense and general cultural etiquette before disembarking from coaches and being let loose by language schools. Walking along in an orderly 'crocodile' of not more than 2-3 abreast with one chaperone per 20, particularly for our younger visitors would be a great start, short of pedestrian lights, mirrors and indicators! And some cultural pointers such as 'How to queue', when to say 'Please' and 'Thank you' and how not to talk at the top of their voices all the time, bounce balls off shop windows and to turn their mobiles off in libraries and museums would also greatly enhance their experience of Oxford and Oxford's experience of them.

Though of course it is hard to instill British cultural values into visitors when they are bound to observe our own locals showing complete disrespect/disregard/ignorance of same!

Narrow streets aside, Oxford does suffer some serious drawbacks in catering for such large groups of people, no matter that it should be a past master at such.

1. Very few restaurants/cafes/pubs are equipped to cope with groups of more than 10 without prior booking so you invariably see groups of aimless and disappointed overseas visitors traipsing from one to another in the evenings trying to find a space where they can all sit, eat and share their day together.
2. There is no decent large open space in the city centre where they can be dropped off by coaches to mill around and wait for tour guides with plenty of seats, loos and other useful facilities.
3. There is no left luggage facility for the day visitor (which I find extraordinary, considering at least 50% of visitors are day visitors).
4. Our public toilets (bar those in the Town Hall only open when the Town Hall is) are squalid and a disgrace for a city of international repute.

So many international cities have addressed these basics, I shudder to think what visitors must make of Oxford. And don't get me started on the hideous architecture they have to behold in the midst of the beautiful dreaming spire stuff they have really come to see. And to think Hitler purposefully didn't bomb Oxford in WWII as he loved historic buildings so much. Sadly our 1960/70s planners proved far more ruthless in this regard.

Whatever the disadvantages of so much life teeming through our streets every summer though, tourists certainly bring vibrancy, buzz and colour to the city and I doubt we would have two fabulous 24 hr coach London services and exotic eateries springing up all over the place were it were not for their influence.

When asked about my own travels, I often reply; 'well there's really no need to, sooner or later the world comes to Oxford to save me the job!' And I do have a pet theory that at least 80% of the world's population-with-passports will probably pass through this cosmopolitan mecca at some point in their lives.

Some people take the fear that other cultures might 'take over' a little too far though...

Who will buy my luvverly useless mobile?

I saw this on a noticeboard the other day and was immediately suspicious when I recalled the advice given to me by 3 (ie if your phone does not work, why not sell the rest of your contract to a friend or relation?). I can imagine this desperate 3 mobile owner will be rapidly disowned by all, in addition to evidently having been dis-phoned by 3! Distressingly I realised I do not possess one single friend or relation I hate enough to sell my contract to and the only selling points I can think of to tempt anyone else to invest in a phone that cuts out at every opportunity if it rings at all is 'reduces mobile bills - and brain tumours'
Amusingly the uselessness of 3 coverage even cropped up as a comedy topic on the Alan Carr show the other day! Talking of which do please sign my online petition No coverage? No contract! against mobile phone companies committing this superhighway robbery of making customers pay for their entire contract length despite getting no signal! And outrageously this practice is currently entirely legal. I've also been lobbying BBC's Watchdog into an anti mobile-phone company abuse campaign too. What other company is allowed to charge for a service they cannot provide, after all?

Other news: My local radio station is currently running a series of 'Happy Scrappy!' ads on how if your car is over 10 years old and you have owned it for over a year, you can trade it in for scrap against a £3k discount on a new car. How green, I thought, appalled, giving my little 11 year old racing red Felicia a reassuring tap. Googling the scheme, apparently it is all about boosting the flaccid car industry rather than the Government honouring its own hollow green rhetoric, but whose car industry, since the vast majority of cars are no longer British-made?

Oh, and I have a new job, hence have been away from the blogosphere for a while, learning the ropes. Things going ok so far and my new colleagues seem nice. It is certainly a relief to have got something to pay the bills in the middle of a recession anyway (albeit after a great deal of trying). It's still in the educational sector, but since this blog is not meant to be about work...

Creative things have kind of been on the back burner a bit lately anyway, not to mention blogging, although I did enjoy a most congenial evening with my fellow Oxford writers at Mostly Books where we led a round table discussion on how we achieved our short story book success and options for new authors generally, to a packed house. Furthermore we seemed to have inspired the birth of a new writer's group in Abingdon, which is nice! Mark was the sort of friendly, enthusiastic, switched-on independent bookshop owner who gladdens the heart and really ought to be cloned. He had thought of everything, not least choosing suitably shaped premises in which to host events in the first place. Anyone who despairs of the future of independent bookselling ought to go and see what he is trying to achieve at his fine establishment, not to mention all his 'outreach work' organising author and reader events at festivals and schools as well as in his shop.

On a visit to Peterborough at the weekend, I was surprised at how seriously they seem to be taking the swine flu outbreak











And how blatantly they celebrate their medieaval scandals...
















En route to Peterborough we witnessed a smouldering burned out lorry and several burned out mangled lumps of metal which only hours before had presumably been cars on the closed opposite lane of the A14 attended by a plethora of emergency vehicles. Not a sausage on the news that night though, or to be found on the internet. Has anyone else noticed this disturbing trend of unreported major happenings? A couple of years ago my former line manager witnessed a young boy run out to be killed by a car on the ringroad from the bus he was travelling in, but it too never reached the news that night or the newspapers next day.

And on that cheerful note, I look forward to catching up with you all in the next few days. It seems a long time.

Michael Jackson's Killer

Michael Jackson's last album was in 2005 and it flopped.
His last live performance was in 2002.
He was in financial ruin after defending himself against child molestation allegations in 2005 (he won his innocence but lost his fortune) and forays into business and real estate were not amounting to much.

His management had just admitted to him that his forthcoming final curtain tour would involve 50 dates and not the 10 he had previously agreed to.
He was addicted to painkillers.
He had a dodgy cardiologist living on his premises who seemingly did not realise the dangers of heart drugs or drug combining. Or perhaps he just couldn't say no to a patient clearly panicking about a massive tour he was highly unlikely to be up to after a 7 year break from performing and all the emotional angst of having to defend himself against another set of parents happy to 'pimp' their young son out to his companionship, doubtless in hope of a massive payout, regardless of the innocence of their child's encounter with the star (and frankly I find it more likely that Mr Jackson was verging on the asexual than a bona fide kiddie fiddler).

I recently met someone who spent much of their professional life working as close personal bodyguard for one famous rock star and actress after another. He told me that they grow entirely dependent on their management whom it often suits to have them believe they can trust no one in the world except them, and then go on to begin controlling every aspect of the star's life, to the extent of even persuading them to marry a fellow star if they think it will be beneficial to their career. If the star is not intellectually very bright, or has a drug dependancy problem, they will often encourage this to further keep them under the thumb/their own parasitic gravy train going. Not that it is Michael Jackson's fault he was not intellectually gifted - being a child star from the age of 5, he had scarcely received an education.

But musical genius aside, I think it is highly likely Michael Jackson would have been classed as a 'vulnerable adult' in the real world and been offered the appropriate help. Of course the one thing his Management couldn't control was his mental instability and liability to blurt out naive ill-considered comments in public which might reflect badly on him, despite the beatific smile.

'Colonel Parker' apparently had a hand in Elvis' slow demise. Dylan Thomas was aided to his own premature death. Now Michael Jackson. Have 'they' accidentally killed their golden goose yet again?

RIP Mr Jackson. At least no one can torment you any more. And thanks for all the memories (though I think we all wish you hadn't gone to such pains to look like the love child of Elizabeth Taylor and Kirk Douglas, probably even you eventually, when it led to such cosmetic problems for you. I therefore attach some photos of you looking magnificant just the way you were - and the way most of us treasured you most.)

Advantages of the Recession

1. We all become greener-by-default as we economise to save money. And grounded too, now we can't afford flights!
2. The renaissance of the Dunkirk Spirit as adversity brings out the best in everyone and they lend each other cups of sugar and sing 'Knees Up Mother Brown' in the street round the old Joanna.
3. The resurgence of more spiritual values as we realise materialism isn't everything (now that we can't afford it)

Perhaps you can think of a few more while I cheer myself by fantasising about what manner of pad I'd like when I'm wealthy enough. Yes, I have decided to allow my name to be put forward for the directorship of a failing bank. I reckon for £609m I can offer real VfM by throwing in a free Poet-in-Residence role too. And funnily enough I did used to work for Royal Bank of Scotland many moons ago. For £3.69 an hour. Though to be fair we were issued with free teabags and a bright blue and green tartan uniform which glowed in the dark. I wonder if they will make their new appointee wear one. I do hope so.