Haven't posted for a couple of weeks. Began with having nothing in particular to say, and then progressed via general idleness.
Principal events - making the out-of-court settlement stick with my ex-wife, giving raise to huge relief and jubilation. Going to London to see Enormous Oaf 1, the aspiring actor, star in a show - and bloody good he was too. Looking likely to get Enormous Oaf 2 to study up here in the North-West in September. All this involving a fun trip to the Great Wen, which is still horrible, but it's always nice to be reminded of the thousand ways in which it is.
Staying with friends in Sudbury, in the general direction of Harrow. My friend warned me that the Piccadilly Line was buggered for the weekend, and so was the District Line, and so I'd have to get the Bakerloo and a bus from Wembley Central. OK, an extra quid on my Oyster Card, but what the hell, life's too short. On the Sunday, however, an extra ingredient was added to the mix; the Bakerloo was closed as well, due to "a person on the line". First thought: people who are selfish enough to top themselves by diving onto a Tube line should be warned that their bodies will be desecrated by having their quarters hung up at the market cross as in medieval times; second thought: how long does it take to get a sodding corpse off the line? If they really wanted they could have normal service resumed within the hour, which would be an even better deterrent to suicidal glory-hunters. But it seems that the delights of fucking London transport up reign absolutely supreme.
Meanwhile Enormous Oaf 2, meeting me in the centre to see his brother's play, dutifully bought a train ticket to find that his train wasn't running. Great.
What seriously worries me is how Londoners put up with all this. Well, given that Londoners habitually do 10 or more hours of unpaid overtime a week to please their bosses, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. Why are we so fucking servile?
Part of the same question is, as I've asked before, why do we put up with bankers? It's clear that there's been another disaster, caused by people who have too much money to be properly regulated and still expect to be bailed out by government; are they going to come under proper control, or are we going to have to go and lynch them?
Monday, 17 March 2008
Sunday, 2 March 2008
Why I am not a Catholic....
Largely because of their obsession with temporal as opposed to spiritual power, complete unscrupulousness in maintaining their power and influence, as best shown by giving complete support to General Franco in 1936 with his policy of murdering everyone to the left of David Cameron, in order to secure complete control of education. Not to mention the other policies; whereas Christ on the Cross said that He could have summoned twelve legions of angels to protect Him, but didn’t, Franco brought in twelve legions of Moroccan rapists to ensure the Church’s side won. Also because of their half-baked doctrine of marriage, which serves no useful purpose except to give Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh a peg to hang plots on.
More recently, see the crap-hole a Brit in the Philippines has got himself into by fathering a child on a Filipina who was not yet free of her abusive husband: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=517821&in_page_id=1879
The Church is falling over itself to protect the rights of the so-called husband. As Laurence Sterne wrote of a typical Catholic, “His priests have got the keeping of his conscience”, whereas the priests have a rule-book where their conscience ought to be.
More recently, see the crap-hole a Brit in the Philippines has got himself into by fathering a child on a Filipina who was not yet free of her abusive husband: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=517821&in_page_id=1879
The Church is falling over itself to protect the rights of the so-called husband. As Laurence Sterne wrote of a typical Catholic, “His priests have got the keeping of his conscience”, whereas the priests have a rule-book where their conscience ought to be.
Saturday, 1 March 2008
Good old Iceland
On the whole I think it's a good idea that Northern Rock has been nationalised. Firstly because there obviously wasn't a private buyer who wouldn't have demanded so much unchallengeable money up front as to make the whole thing unmanageable. Secondly because something needs to happen to break the taboo about nationalisation - which was the main reason the establishment, including (or especially) NuLab, was so much against it. Sorry, chaps, the idea may be here to stay now.
Thirdly, because we might be needing a nationalised bank. The existing cartel of cut-throats are currently saying that they must be allowed to charge people what they like for the occasional overdraft (illegal though the current charges are), otherwise they may have to charge everybody for having an account at all. Now this isn't on. We don't "choose" to have a bank account, we effing well have to, because employers won't pay our wages in any other way. A few years ago, when working in the public service, I enquired, not entirely seriously, whether I could have my monthly salary in cash in a brown envelope. Not that I was really on for paying my leccy and phone bills personally in cash, but still. If the bastard banks are going to charge us by the month for running our accounts, there needs to be a simple alternative, no doubt with a limited service and possibly without overdrafts, which will do what 90% of us want for free. Why can't Northern Rock be that?
George Trefgarne, writing in this week's Spectator, disagrees with me. The government bail-out of Northern Rock, he says, has created "moral hazard", which means encouraging other banks to behave just as irresponsibly in the knowledge that the government can't really let them swing in the wind. "The bosses of every high-street bank comparable to Northern Rock now know that however bad their decisions, however risky their speculations, they will be bailed out by the government. If things go wrong they can simply resign, having amassed millions in bonuses and share options over the years, as Adam Applegarth, the ex-Northern Rock chief executive, did before Christmas."
Trefgarne, though a Tory, is dead right. The cunt's got clean away with it. And we all know that the main reason for the run on the bank was that everyone assumed, no doubt rightly, that if things went tits up then Applegarth and his cronies would have grabbed all the remaining money and told the depositors "sorry, nothing left for you!"
It is here that my thoughts drift off to the ancient Icelandic legal system, whereby people who behaved like that were sentenced by a popular assembly to outlawry, i.e. anybody who had suffered at their hands could go and knock them off without legal penalty.
In the same cultural context, I am reminded of an episode in the Icelandic saga of Njàl, where the house of Njàl and his delinquent sons is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and burnt down over their heads. I think that there is a connection here to Adam Applegarth. I hope I find out his address one day.
Thirdly, because we might be needing a nationalised bank. The existing cartel of cut-throats are currently saying that they must be allowed to charge people what they like for the occasional overdraft (illegal though the current charges are), otherwise they may have to charge everybody for having an account at all. Now this isn't on. We don't "choose" to have a bank account, we effing well have to, because employers won't pay our wages in any other way. A few years ago, when working in the public service, I enquired, not entirely seriously, whether I could have my monthly salary in cash in a brown envelope. Not that I was really on for paying my leccy and phone bills personally in cash, but still. If the bastard banks are going to charge us by the month for running our accounts, there needs to be a simple alternative, no doubt with a limited service and possibly without overdrafts, which will do what 90% of us want for free. Why can't Northern Rock be that?
George Trefgarne, writing in this week's Spectator, disagrees with me. The government bail-out of Northern Rock, he says, has created "moral hazard", which means encouraging other banks to behave just as irresponsibly in the knowledge that the government can't really let them swing in the wind. "The bosses of every high-street bank comparable to Northern Rock now know that however bad their decisions, however risky their speculations, they will be bailed out by the government. If things go wrong they can simply resign, having amassed millions in bonuses and share options over the years, as Adam Applegarth, the ex-Northern Rock chief executive, did before Christmas."
Trefgarne, though a Tory, is dead right. The cunt's got clean away with it. And we all know that the main reason for the run on the bank was that everyone assumed, no doubt rightly, that if things went tits up then Applegarth and his cronies would have grabbed all the remaining money and told the depositors "sorry, nothing left for you!"
It is here that my thoughts drift off to the ancient Icelandic legal system, whereby people who behaved like that were sentenced by a popular assembly to outlawry, i.e. anybody who had suffered at their hands could go and knock them off without legal penalty.
In the same cultural context, I am reminded of an episode in the Icelandic saga of Njàl, where the house of Njàl and his delinquent sons is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and burnt down over their heads. I think that there is a connection here to Adam Applegarth. I hope I find out his address one day.
Friday, 29 February 2008
A Centenary
Today we have a surprisingly significant literary centenary. If I had prepared myself a little better for the heavier reviews, I would have cleaned up.
In Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", the hero Hans Castorp, who has originally gone up to the TB sanatorium in Davos to visit his cousin for three weeks and has found himself stuck there, because he has fallen in love with a Russian female inmate, finally gets to go to bed with the latter for the first and only time. He is thus symbolically condemned to seven years in the sanatorium, with an illness he cannot get rid of and, it is suggested, wouldn't even if he could. He only gets out in order to fight in World War I, which it is suggested he does not survive. Apart from the fact that poor old Hans is described as having grown up in the very street in Hamburg in which I used to live, the central seduction is described as occurring on 29th February 1908, which happened coincidentally to be Shrove Tuesday.
Nor sure what the relevance of this is, but feel it ought to be mentioed somewhere. After all, it is almost certain that this very evening someone somewhere is being seduced, to his of her eternal salvation or perdition...
In Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", the hero Hans Castorp, who has originally gone up to the TB sanatorium in Davos to visit his cousin for three weeks and has found himself stuck there, because he has fallen in love with a Russian female inmate, finally gets to go to bed with the latter for the first and only time. He is thus symbolically condemned to seven years in the sanatorium, with an illness he cannot get rid of and, it is suggested, wouldn't even if he could. He only gets out in order to fight in World War I, which it is suggested he does not survive. Apart from the fact that poor old Hans is described as having grown up in the very street in Hamburg in which I used to live, the central seduction is described as occurring on 29th February 1908, which happened coincidentally to be Shrove Tuesday.
Nor sure what the relevance of this is, but feel it ought to be mentioed somewhere. After all, it is almost certain that this very evening someone somewhere is being seduced, to his of her eternal salvation or perdition...
February the 29th...
And a very happy ninth birthday to my dear friend Cathy, a mother of two. In fact, if I had been born 13 days early instead of eight days late, I’d be celebrating my twelfth myself.
I noticed that the BBC website was promoting a harmlessly humorous debate of who owns the 29th of Feb. As an entirely gratuitous extra day, should we have the benefit of it or our employers? If the former, shouldn’t we get the day off? After all, we aren’t getting paid any more than last February, which only contained 28 days.
A BBC correspondent called “Claire” took the following view:
“Why is everyone always looking for something free? Those of us who get paid monthly get the same amount each month whether that month contains 30 or 31 days or in February just 28 days - I never hear anyone say oh aren't I lucky that I get extra pay every day in February and just one year in four this is slightly less than the others or one year in four I get slightly less pay for each day but three out of the four I could look at it as getting slightly more. It is about time people counted "their blessings" and stopped this constant moaning and joining the ME ME ME society we are developing into!”
Well, why are employers always looking for something free? And if those of us in work were to “count our blessings” might we not find them rather less than those of the bosses who get their enhanced “blessings” win, lose or draw? And is the so-called ME ME ME society any worse than the THEM THEM THEM society most of us are in fact living in?
I understand why people have to work, but why they have to be so fucking servile I will never grasp.
And, if we start thinking about who owns February 29th, perhaps we should start thinking about who owns the rest of our lives.
I noticed that the BBC website was promoting a harmlessly humorous debate of who owns the 29th of Feb. As an entirely gratuitous extra day, should we have the benefit of it or our employers? If the former, shouldn’t we get the day off? After all, we aren’t getting paid any more than last February, which only contained 28 days.
A BBC correspondent called “Claire” took the following view:
“Why is everyone always looking for something free? Those of us who get paid monthly get the same amount each month whether that month contains 30 or 31 days or in February just 28 days - I never hear anyone say oh aren't I lucky that I get extra pay every day in February and just one year in four this is slightly less than the others or one year in four I get slightly less pay for each day but three out of the four I could look at it as getting slightly more. It is about time people counted "their blessings" and stopped this constant moaning and joining the ME ME ME society we are developing into!”
Well, why are employers always looking for something free? And if those of us in work were to “count our blessings” might we not find them rather less than those of the bosses who get their enhanced “blessings” win, lose or draw? And is the so-called ME ME ME society any worse than the THEM THEM THEM society most of us are in fact living in?
I understand why people have to work, but why they have to be so fucking servile I will never grasp.
And, if we start thinking about who owns February 29th, perhaps we should start thinking about who owns the rest of our lives.
Thursday, 28 February 2008
I always hated scrambled Egg...
About a month ago, I read with some concern that the Egg Bank was peremptorily cancelling the credit cards of 161,000 of its customers, on the grounds that they represented an unacceptable credit risk, or looked likely to become one in the future. Well, that’s me buggered, I said to myself, and braced myself for an ugly letter through the mailbox (well, to be precise, looked carefully through my large pile of post which I had not yet opened as it looked too frightening). Nothing. Sigh of relief, but native wariness caused me to get on with acquiring a back-up credit card without delay.
Then, of course, came the litany of complaints from aggrieved Egg customers; hundreds of them wrote to the papers and the BBC to say that they had been ideal customers, paragons of sensible financial behaviour never missing a payment. In many cases Egg had agreed that the customer’s behaviour could not be faulted, but refused to go back on their decision. The official explanation was that “while some customers in that group may be up to date with their payments and have a good record with credit reference agencies and so on, the probability of them becoming a higher-risk customer in the future is higher than we wish to accept."
Cynics, however, suspected that it was precisely the “good” customers Egg were trying to drive away, as they are not making enough money out of them. As it happens I am in a position to provide supporting evidence for this view. Not only have many “good” customers been targeted, but the “bad” ones have not. I have heard nothing from the customer-sacking branch of Egg, although I am a disastrously imprudent manager of personal finances. I have no regular income, miss payments, max out at inappropriate times and am generally rather a naughty boy. Egg have already refused me a loan once. I get regular correspondence from them, each time thinking that the axe will now fall, but it is always to remind me to set up a Direct Debit to pay their bills. I don’t like to inform them that my bank will no longer let me do Direct Debits, such is my delinquency. My brother-in-law is also an Egg customer, and also an extremely dilatory one in most of the same respects. Neither of us have had any trouble.
So I think it can be regarded as proven that Egg is only trying to get rid of the line-toeing, regular-paying brigade while giving the feckless and imprudent the run of the place. And, as has been often pointed out, a bank is allowed to choose its customers at whim if it wants. The poor people shut out have no legal grounds for complaint. Why the insulting hypocrisy, though? Why can’t Egg just stand up and advertise itself as the bank for the irresponsible swashbuckler, and change its name to Vanity Fair or something? I might respect that.
In the meantime, why are bankers still allowed to walk our streets unmolested, without even feeling compelled to don false moustaches, burqas etc. to conceal their identity? Why do they feel so safe? I saw a Class War slogan in London recently: “The rich only sleep at night because we let them”. Why do we do that? Why?
In the meantime, let us hope that the 161,000 customers so basely excluded by Egg all default on their outstanding balances. Thing is, they’re probably not the type.
Then, of course, came the litany of complaints from aggrieved Egg customers; hundreds of them wrote to the papers and the BBC to say that they had been ideal customers, paragons of sensible financial behaviour never missing a payment. In many cases Egg had agreed that the customer’s behaviour could not be faulted, but refused to go back on their decision. The official explanation was that “while some customers in that group may be up to date with their payments and have a good record with credit reference agencies and so on, the probability of them becoming a higher-risk customer in the future is higher than we wish to accept."
Cynics, however, suspected that it was precisely the “good” customers Egg were trying to drive away, as they are not making enough money out of them. As it happens I am in a position to provide supporting evidence for this view. Not only have many “good” customers been targeted, but the “bad” ones have not. I have heard nothing from the customer-sacking branch of Egg, although I am a disastrously imprudent manager of personal finances. I have no regular income, miss payments, max out at inappropriate times and am generally rather a naughty boy. Egg have already refused me a loan once. I get regular correspondence from them, each time thinking that the axe will now fall, but it is always to remind me to set up a Direct Debit to pay their bills. I don’t like to inform them that my bank will no longer let me do Direct Debits, such is my delinquency. My brother-in-law is also an Egg customer, and also an extremely dilatory one in most of the same respects. Neither of us have had any trouble.
So I think it can be regarded as proven that Egg is only trying to get rid of the line-toeing, regular-paying brigade while giving the feckless and imprudent the run of the place. And, as has been often pointed out, a bank is allowed to choose its customers at whim if it wants. The poor people shut out have no legal grounds for complaint. Why the insulting hypocrisy, though? Why can’t Egg just stand up and advertise itself as the bank for the irresponsible swashbuckler, and change its name to Vanity Fair or something? I might respect that.
In the meantime, why are bankers still allowed to walk our streets unmolested, without even feeling compelled to don false moustaches, burqas etc. to conceal their identity? Why do they feel so safe? I saw a Class War slogan in London recently: “The rich only sleep at night because we let them”. Why do we do that? Why?
In the meantime, let us hope that the 161,000 customers so basely excluded by Egg all default on their outstanding balances. Thing is, they’re probably not the type.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
So-called benefit reforms
I see the latest government initiative is all about forcing people on benefits to take jobs. I don't doubt that quite a few people have been utterly demoralised by unemployment and might be helped by being given a job to go to - trouble is it would probably be a rather pointless one. And if they try the same trick on the hundreds of thousands who find themselves in the penumbra of mental illness, what is going to happen? Most workplaces these days are totally devoted to the idea of high-pressure long-hours I've-done-more-than-you crap, and how is someone fragile going to survive in that? These vulnerable people are all going to run away or get sacked in weeks. If we had proper government and union monitoring of working hours and conditions people might survive. That means eight hours maximum (and seven for preference). If you want to keep the ultra-competitive workplace, you'll have to accept three million on benefits. And counting. A lot of us can't cope, and don't want to.
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