Year in Refutile

Oh come, all ye fanciful...

It's one of the strange Christmas paradoxes (along with being 30 years old and watching 6 straight hours of Pixaardman cartoons or gut bubblingly awful episodes of some shit cake, money felch, cocktease game show because the word 'Christmas' has been dumped in front of the title and a bit of tinsel is draped across the studio. Come to think of it, there's something paradoxically dreary about good old shiny tinsel. It reminds me of a sort of enforced, Daily Mail Campaign underdoggery that forces us to clap along with the 'superdooperousness' of Christmas while costing 18 pounds a yard and looking a bit shit as a background to annual misery and passive aggressive family bickering) that at this time of year, my perception of the world both opens up and contracts at the same time, like a sea anemone with a personality crisis.

As I am reminded of the increasing size of my family due to apparently unceasing embryo production and also put in mind of the dismal size of the problems in the world (normally by cynically heartbreaking TV ads encouraging us to give 2 pounds a month instead of pushing obscene quantities of spun sugar into our cavernous head holes) in the same instance, I also feel the world closing in and my range of understanding contract. What's going on outside the realm of oven times, nibble quantities and the best time to put out the ruddy cheese cake because I hate it when it ends up going all mushy, seems a distant nightmare of sight and sound that I can barely make out in the middle distance, allowing me to bob my head back under the water and become soothed by the muffled screams of the lifeguards.

As I spent most of 2011 working in another country, returning to England in early December thrust me immediately into the clunking 'review of the year' hand wringing of newspapers, 4 hour talking head list shows (containing the absurd insights of mysterious comedians) and online photo gallery 2011 obituaries, which, rather than bring me pleasingly up to date, actually added to my sense of disconnection. As Noel Gallagher Version 101 once said; "The more I see the less I know, the more I know the less I understand" which sounds like a grim epitaph for society in general (or it would if we weren't too busy giggling at Royal arses or watching omnipresent perfume adverts that make you want to fall on your knees and pray for the apocalypse).

List shows are pretty anonymous and exist merely to fill your time with soundbite guff, but it's now essential for every channel or digital output medium to scratch around like they're CSI investigators, looking for that last crumb of insight or reduction to capture the feeling of the nation as though it would lead to some sort of glorious event horizon where all meaning is condensed into the single, one sentence opinion from Alan Whothefuckisthatguy from off the tellybox and all races, languages, opinions and facts deemed superfluous so at last we can all go home and I'm left free to establish my Empire (I think that's what they're doing...).

But it's not true. I feel absolutely fine not being able to reduce the London riots into 3 sentences. I actually feel quite satisfied that I have no ability to reconcile the cigar blowing, backslapping pandemonium surrounding the killing of Bin Laden and Gaddafi, whilst simultaneously condemning their own murderous lives. I'm glad I can't put my finger on the pulse of why we both stare through our electrical eye boxes, snickering into our elbows like five year olds, at the death of Kim Jong Il whilst looking the other way as North Korea starve their own people. I feel fine not weeping over the bubbling stew of a year, pleading for it to reduce into the kind of flavoursome jus that would delight the podgy faced, talking egg, greengrocer man from Masterchef.

Perhaps it's a symbol of a struggle to cope with the everyday problems and failures I encounter (failing to retain the receipt for overly snug trousers, suspicious breath tests, tasering strangers and murder charges) that there's a cold but intoxicating comfort in 'rounding up' the year into a drop down menu of 5 minute nostalgia fixes recounted by awkwardly haircutted giggle merchants collecting cash in return for reducing existence to less than 140 characters. Having seen uprisings, fighting, natural disasters of inconceivable power, hacking, humping, injunctions and Royal functions, a never ending picture postcard slideshow of the 'best and worst' of the year seems vastly superior to the horrors of actually having to live through it.

So here's my best of and worst of list of 2011:

Best thing: All of it

Worst thing: All of it.... and Piers Morgan. Obviously.

Cheerio my lovelies, see you for tea and sandwiches on the next episode of Life:The Movie. I've seen the trailer and it looks crap and brilliant all at the same time. Must be a paradox.

IcantstanditIknowyouplanneditI'mgonnasetitstraightthiswatergate xxxx

National Fail

Deck the halls with boughs of folly....

Here's a jolly festive quiz for you: What does this blog, the career trajectory of Tinie Tempah, the continuing TV presence of Tess Daley and Nation Rail Travel all have in common? Time's ticking... tick, tick, tick. (Adopts patronising, student baiting Paxman voice) "Come on, let's have your answer now..."

The answer is that they are far more incomprehensible than they have any right to be. (Oh yes. that really is the best I could come up with to start off the blog, but they can't all be winners can they?) Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Nation Rail Enquiries Help Line is some sort of sideways glancing, Shakespearean aside to the continuing farce of my life. The name 'help line' is itself a textbook example of knockabout comedy, consisting as it does of a useless voice recognition system which has no ability to understand a single word you're saying unless you bellow like a mental lost in a wood or speak so slowly and clearly that passers by think you're trying to instruct an elderly relative how to manoeuvre themselves to the toilet by mobile phone.

For example, the simple act of finding a train from York to Birmingham went as follows:

Help line: Welcome to National Rail Enquiries. So, which station are you travelling from?

Me: York.

HL: (continuing, oblivious) For example, if you want to travel from Leicester, say Leicester.

Me: York.

HL: I'm sorry, was that "Dunstable"?

Me: No.

HL: If you want to travel from Dunstable, say "Yes"

Me: NO.

HL: OK, where are you travelling from?

Me: York.

HL: OK, I'll look for trains from Liverpool Lime Street.

Me: NOOOOOOO

(How is that even possible? York is a monosyllabic city in the North East of England. There's 3 different words in Liverpool Lime Street!!!)

HL: (2 second pause) Can you repeat that?

Me: Listen to me my robot friend, I do not wish to travel from Liverpool or anywhere even near Liverpool and, in addition, I'd like to find the actor who supplied the voice for this pitiful system, go to his house, murder everyone in his family, then use the sharpened edge of a SPAM tin to cut his stomach open and spill his dinner into the bath like a student after a heavy night out puking up her guts into a handbag.

HL: OK, that's great. I'll look for services from York....

Me: (No words, just the sound of me opening up my jugular with my own coat zipper)

My attempts to use this service and potentially discover the exact time a train will miraculously and arbitrarily appear became so ball crushingly infuriating that I decided to throw caution to the wind and rock up at the station, sans ticket, sans hope, sans everything. I became a soldier of fortune, bravely facing up to potential random ticket inspection and irritating little barriers that, although cutting you off at the waist (and thus being as effective a barrier against ticket dodging as whistling is to a prolonged nuclear assault) appear to be a forcefield of terrifying strength and mystical power.

I'm no bean counter or right wing social crusader but I'm pretty sure that infinite half bearded, Adidas promoting, slack faced cornholes before me have been absolutely fine with not buying a ticket and probably travelled uninhibited to their chosen destination (casino / dog track / crown court) mainlining Carling and uttering unintelligible profane slurs. I felt it was about my time for a slice of the action, as only a middle class champagne socialist could think that not paying for a train ticket is in any way 'action'.

I hopped on a waiting train with a lump of adrenaline in my veins like gristle and a slice of non-conformist pie in my belly, only to be immediately confronted by a planet arsed, humourless ticket inspector with the look of a Bulgarian shot-putter about her and murder in her eyes. As it became clear from my embarrassed shuffling and sorrowful mutterings to the tune of "can I buy a ticket from you..." she didn't exactly have a hardened criminal on her hands and as such spoke to me like I was a five year old who'd waited too long at the Tesco's checkout to tell mummy I had to 'do a toilet' and had dumped a wad of filth into my dungarees.

I managed to purchase the ticket from her and immediately became self conscious of looking like some scumbag who'd tried to cheat the same system everyone else was obediently conforming to. In my head, they had me pegged as the reason travel prices were on the rise; I was the type of junkyard punk who rioted in the streets and caused some corporate office literally 0.2% of diminished returns; I was to be hated, feared and cast out of the window immediately. Needless to say, I didn't consider that I was in any way responsible for my own ridiculousness. That would have been the easy way out, of course. That ticket inspector was now my enemy. Nemesis.

Of course, my feelings subsided and I remembered that I was in fact a massive idiot-o-bot who equated the failure of a simple enquiry system to my own decision not to buy a ticket and subsequently look like a bit of a tit. By immediately creating a 'bad guy' I gave myself an easy excuse which allowed me to differ my own guilt long enough to scoff down the rest of my chicken pasty and look at my reflection in the window without wanting to hurl it all back up and write 'cock eyes' in the chickeny spew with my forefinger, like any sane person would have done.

It worries me that there was something comforting in creating an enemy to pin my failures on, as we seem to do it readily when dealing with larger scale events. Rioters on the streets of London? - it's common looking thugs not cultural inequalities and youth disenfranchisement. Can't find anyone to shoot for attacking us? - it's evil Saddam, not spoilt brattish oil gathering and distraction mongering. Economy falling in around our ears like the conclusion of an Indiana Jones film? - it's (booooo) Fred Goodwin, not a house of cards monetary system that makes pyramid selling look like Wall Street's wet dream. Someone's always to blame, but that someone is conveniently never us.

It suits our desire to feel secure to deflect guilt onto a nemesis, but dooms us to remain insulated from uncomfortable or difficult truths. Luckily, creating a comedy 'Satan' onto which our fears can be projected is something the media jumps all over the chance to do for us, which is handy. All the while, it becomes harder and harder to render an informed debate, regardless of your opinions, because lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) are around every corner and behind every tree. Eventually every issue and newsworthy event will be reduced to 'goodies' and 'baddies' and we're forced to sit impotently booing and cheering on command, like red necks at a wrestling match.

As a result, I have decided to give up on hatred and become the hated by spending my mornings pushing razor blades into birds nests, placing soft toys slightly out of the reach of babies and eating panda hearts. I prefer things on this side of the nemesis equation. As Calvin once said, "virtue definitely needs some cheaper thrills".

We'llmeetagaindontknowwheredontknowwhen xxx

Euro Trash

Don't look blog in anger...

Did those feet in ancient times walk across England's mountains green? I seriously doubt it, as the owner of the feet in question is a potentially fictional 30 year old male born in Palestine 2000 years ago, a time noted for being notoriously difficult to obtain cheap air fares or quality budget coach travel due to substandard Holy Land broadband. Mr Of Nazareth had no desire to spend hours on Expedia, for it was written, he had little tolerance for pop up adds and was easily distracted by CountenanceBook.

Despite containing enough historical inaccuracy to make Braveheart look like a Simon Schama 98 part documentary on the history of lambing in Wales, the stirring words of Jerusalem inspire nationalistic chest pumping and eye reddening, Union Jack humping fervour until you feel ready to munch down a Yorkshire pudding sandwich and invade France, brandishing a cutlass from the back of a milk float.

It makes me wonder if David Whatamaroon had accidentally flicked his iPod on shuffle this week and spent 2 hours listening to Margaret Thatcher's Hymntime Karaoke Songbook with Jerusalem on repeat, before landing in Brussels and making a bit of a spectacle out of himself in the best traditions of a man so consumed by self promotion and wax faced posturing that, like a 14 year old farting during school assembly, felt the need to turn all the attention on 'me, me, me' in the hope of appearing vaguely relevant, a notion which flies in the face of public and political perception.

The effect of DC comic exercising his veto at the Euro Summit has been seen by some as a mere gesture of independence from a Eurozone crisis that is outside our remit due to the UK's none participation in the single currency. This shields us from two key points that have short and longer term significance for us and Europe. The first is that by turning the meeting into a crisis of the European Union, the political debate surrounding how the Euro can be saved was pushed to the sidelines and turned into a row between 'us and them'. The Euro remains precarious, as Germany and France are now essentially guard dogs and CCTV bullies checking the homework of profligate nations who failed to balance their books. However, as stated in the Guardian's Editorial;

"that founding economic analysis is of only limited relevance to Greece – and no help at all in dealing with Spain and Ireland, both of whose slumps stem from housing and lending bubbles"

It appears that the cracks in the currency are being papered over by the big guns of Europe rather than providing a solution to the long term issues facing a single currency tripping balls, throwing a whitey and sitting on the floor of the cubical trying to regain it's equilibrium before the bouncers wade in and chuck it out. There is still no central bank for the Euro and no treaty in place to form one, leaving the big economies free to rule the roost, dish out sanctions to over-spenders, but doomed to scratch their heads should the fault lie elsewhere.

The second problem with viewing this as 'not our fight' is that it's easy to overlook the significance of our old chum Dave bringing the Euro sceptic dinosaurs a prezzie back from his holiday to stop them grumbling over having to share the Government canteen with the Lib Dems. The country suddenly becomes even more insular, isolated and bitter, essentially locking ourselves in our bedroom and listening to Marilyn Manson records dreaming of a time when we can trade with ourselves and ignore those Europeans who 'just don't understand'.

It all makes me wonder how long the Liberal Democrats will sit quietly like castrated puppies or if they've actually morphed into some sort of post-modern art installation, commenting on modern life by expressing everything and nothing simultaneously in a bewildering volley of comment without content. In fact, the coalition appears to be experimenting in a breed of anti-politics where the opposing concepts of power and dissent are gradually removed from the political process, leaving a silent and turgid hegemony which lacks the brazen wrongness of totalitarianism in favour of an impotent perma-government.

None of this is particularly relevant at street level, where the dark satanic mills of civil unrest, riot hangovers, pension cuts and an inequalities gap the size of Bournemouth are of more immediate concern. But it makes me wonder how long we're going to be stuck with a non-government, more concerned with sellotaping itself together than actually identifying a strategy to haul us out of this economic bum pit.

At least we can count on big Dave to fight for Britain at home, as well as on the European stage. Unless of course, the whole meeting turned out to be a bit of a 'damp squib'. Oh well...

Imissyourface xx

Blog To The Future

Hiya, what's this...? Blogging again...? Jeeeeeeezus

When the scientists who first dreamed up the large hadron collider at CERN first got together around the kitchen table (do scientists who build large hadron colliders - or even mini colliders - get together around kitchen tables? I like to think of them sitting around their in-house bars, on stools shaped like beer barrels, dipping their wispy beards into mugs of foamy home brew, whilst giggling about smashing stuff together and using words beyond my comprehension like 'science', 'collide' and 'achievement'. Am I getting off the point a bit? Sorry) did they realise then that their discussions and the ramifications of those ale infused chats would in time lead to incomprehensibly important discoveries that open up new and exciting frontiers in a phenomenally boring way?

One would imagine so, as science is the study of cause, effect and observation. Each step taken on the road which started with the discovery of fire has led inevitably to each new horizon as the blinkers of ignorance are trumped. The men and women working on the colliderscopeotron had achieved all they could on paper and the time had come to build a massive thingy to test it all out. This in turn will lead to decades of people sitting around kitchen tables, using what their predecessors observed at CERN to make their own innumerable fag packet calculations and figure out the next big thingy they have to make (please let it be cooler next time - is using a DeLorean really so hard?).

My point is that these people have purpose. Those who went before them laid down their discoveries on paper for the next generation to pick up and carry forwards, unrestricted by the technology of the past. Einstein wrote a bit and had funny hair, meaning that the bloke from D:Ream could write a bit more and have slightly better hair. They had vision, purpose and despite being isolated on the cliff face of discovery and battered by the winds of conformity, they were driven to excel. They have vocation, they have ambition, they have a selection of delicious cheesy snacks to get them through late night sessions trying to make X = something giddy.

I have returned to England from the comfort, guaranteed income and hedonism of living in Saigon this week and face a challenge to build my own metaphorical CERN. Coming home gives rise to the usual ponderings, especially when faced with the big question: "So, what are you doing now?". Frankly my dears, I don't have a clue. If I was a welder, I'd start welding things together. If I was a plumber, I'd plumb things. If I was a drug dealer, I'd move to Rugby. But I'm not, and I wont (although option 3 is always a possibility - it's a sellers market).

As it is, I'm part of a generation of lost little puppies who are on the cusp of larking about and getting their shit together. Overeducated and underemployed, we wonder the bedroom harvesting opinions from Guardian blogs and posting artistic mish mash scavenged from YouLube in an attempt to appear 'connected' and not at all hollow eyed insomniacs suckling at the internet crack pipe, jealously 'Icoulddothat'ing at all the smart arses getting rich off blogging or actually achieving things while we silently stare at a luminous laptop screen waiting for our Pot Noodles to cool down.

Still, I've only been back a week and a half, so it's not time for panic just yet. I'm still feeling the cold and people are still honestly asking and appearing to be interested in my Saigon adventures. But it can't be long before a single mention of 'noodle soup' at a restaurant will cause my mates to leap across the table and use a funnel to force lighter fluid into my windpipe before setting my vocal chords on fire until they pop like pork fat under a hot grill. Actually, my pals are so polite it will probably go the other way and they'll smile and nod while secretly pushing steak knives into their thighs in an attempt to stave off the narcolepsy.

I'm glad to be home, I'm glad to see seasons again and not be the walking freak show who's twelve feet taller than everybody in the country. Now if I could just channel this into something productive I'd be a'OK. The time for talking is over. It's action stations. It's Countdown.... oooooo.

Th'Th'Th'Th'Thatsallfolks xx