In Scarborough, No One Can Hear You Scream

I had the pleasure, nay, privilage, of being on a Stag Weekend recently, and although I seem to have contracted the Norovirus from being exposed to the North Sea, it was a most enjoyable experience, vomiting yellow golfballs aside.

It isn't the first Stag Weekend I've ever been on, and I realize that people shouldn't talk about what goes on during the debauched male drinkathon, by some ancient unwritten rule. I also realize that few people actually genuinely care about what I have to say at the best of times, and that people quickly lose interest if I'm not screaming blue with rage by the end of the first paragraph, but it was good.

The idea here is not to do a summary of 'My Happy Weekend', or 'Things I did in Scarborough', since those fond memories are kind of boring if you weren't there. And I don't do fond. So instead, I'll express unholy amounts of gratitude to whatever deity - probably Odin, as we discussed on the train - ensured that I did not wake up with two dead prostitutes. Because that would have been really, really awkward.

Hail Allfather, we who are about to die salute you.

Although doubtless I have some brain damage from the amount of bludgeoning that went on into the early hours of the morning as we fought tooth and claw with every scrap of furniture the hotel room - I'm not sure why -  it went well. Better than that, actually. From the first second the local pigeons lapped up a skaghead's warm vomit to the last minute of being on a train with my former friend's lifeless cadaver, the whole thing was a masterpiece, balancing the right amount of alcohol, entertainment, and crushing despair* in equal measure. And we managed to do it without resorting to the following:

Drag, dehumanizing women, punching donkeys, driving tanks, stealing cars, fighting the police, copious amounts of drugs, or featuring in a newspaper column that ends with the phrase 'before turning the gun on himself'.

Oh God, not again!

I mean, the main thing is that the Stag had a good time, I suppose. I can't be one hundred percent on this. We buried him in the sand twice, almost crippling his legs, before sending him insane with headstroke. The last I remember is toasting to his swift demise on top of a cliff over the South Bay. Maybe Odin did betray us, after all.

*Crushing despair usually was because of the enormity of the cliffs, the crippling hangover and desperate search for bacon, or the realization that you may yet have to decapitate two of your friends with a table lamp because the Jagermonster said so.

Ode to Haw

Recently, I've found it very difficult to write this blog. Anytime something outrageously weird or funny happens, I'm no where near a computer, and I've forgotten it by the time I get to one. It's quite sad, and probably related to the copious amounts of alcohol I consume to block out the screaming in my head.

However, I will mention something that bugged me recently, and that was Brian Haw died.

Yes, Brian Haw. Peace campaigner and... advocate for peace - C'mon, did you really know anything else about him?

Well, he's kicked the bucket, and for a man who spent a decade outside parliament shouting through a megaphone, he passed on with little more than a rustle of centre-left newspaper pages. No one seemed to register, even through the wonderful medium of the internet, that old man Haw was gone. He'd become a fixture, albeit a well ignored one. We'd tuned out consciousness out, and he'd passed us by. Some put it down to the fact that Haw was a difficult man:

"He was clearly a damaged individual, obsessive, certainly off-centre and his anger was as unattractive as his living conditions." Writes the Financial Times.

Personally, there is something else about Brian I'd prefer to remember. His failure. Wait, what? No, bear with me.

Brian Haw, in the face of frequent harrasment and detention by the police, blistering ignorance from the public, and contempt from the state, never really abandoned Parliament Square. His protest didn't do a jot, save to win someone the Turner Prize and allow Blair to bring in new laws governing protest in the Square. It was vain, futile, and ultimately pointless. Haw achieved, in measurable terms, absolutely nothing.

But, there is something madly magnificent about it. And that is the fact that Haw never gave up. Rain or shine, Haw lived in Parliament Square, hurling platitudes from his megaphone and making a nest out of his 130ft of placards. One man, in an age of pleanty, chose to live in squalor for no reason other than that was the best he could do to show his discontent at his governments warmongering ways. He was reviled, imprisoned, harrassed. People thought him a nusience. In many respects, despite people sharing his convictions, in the lengths he endures he was in a field of his own. But he stuck to his guns, which is a rather ironic phrase, now I think about it.

And in that, there's something really quite beautiful.

I actually met Brian, once, briefly, when I was in London. We didn't really talk much, since he was getting dragged away by the coppers and I was just some Yorkshire lad on a sight seeing tour. But I won't ever forget the light that was burning in his eyes when he told me, a little aggressively for my liking, how messed up everything was.

So thanks, Brian Haw. For everything.

Women According to Billy Joel

Being recently reminded of the John Lewis advert that optimistically shows a young child rapidly aging until she's stood, windswept and ancient, in a field of corn, I decided to look up the backing song for it. Here it is: Always a Woman, by Billy Joel. This is the Fyfe Dangerfield version. I don't have to tell you why I picked Fyfe's version over Billy Joel, but if someone called Dangerfield told you to play his cover, you damn well would.

So, because it's always interesting to take a look at misogynism within the Arts, I will now attempt to categorise what I, as a young male, have learned about women from Billy Joel:

Always a Woman

She can kill with a smile, she can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies 

Jesus, we're off to a bad start
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child, but she's always a woman to me
She is dangerous, cautious, cowardly, childlike.

She can lead you to love, she can take you or leave you
She can ask for the truth, but she'll never believe you
And she'll take what you give her as long it's free
Yeah, She steals like a thief, but she's always a woman to me

She doesn't care about you, she won't listen, she's a skeptic, she's a Pikey, she's a thief.

CHORUS
Ohhh... she takes care of herself
She can wait if she wants, she's ahead of her time
Ohhh... and she never gives out
And she never gives in, she just changes her mind
She is independent (wow, positive), patient, strong willed, but also indecisive.

And she'll promise you more than the garden of Eden
Then she'll carelessly cut you and laugh while you're bleeding
But she'll bring out the best and the worst you can be
Blame it all on yourself 'cause she's always a woman to me
She makes exagerated promises. She is careless. She is violent. She mocks the weak. She encourages schizophrenia, and it's my fault.

She's frequently kind and she's suddenly cruel
She can do as she pleases, she's nobody's fool
And she can't be convicted, she's earned her degree
And the most she will do is throw shadows at you,
But she's always a woman to me

She will turn on you in a second. She is selfish, and maliciously cunning. She cannot go to prision, she has been to university. She manipulates light and darkness.

Basically, Women According to Billy Joel are pretty fucking dangerous, while somehow managing to also be miserable, wretched creatures. I wonder if anyone actually buys into this. It is unfathomable, and smacks of chauvinistic and chivarlous notions of vunerable and incomprehensible women-folk, and the hell they inflict on honest men.

I don't think I even need to go into why this is stupid. I'm not even sure I could.

Arcane Power

Recently, I had the misfortune of watching "Cutting Edge: My Kid is Psychic". For anyone who was lucky enough to miss this horrendous and definately 'non-judgemental' bit of TV hosted by the ever reliable Channel 4, let me break it down for you.

My Kid.

She's Psychic.

Mother of God!

So, for anyone wanting to go a little deeper, the TV show unfolds with a tedious sense of inevitability. It follows two mothers, both of which look like a punk version of characters from The Wicker Man, as they emotionally and psychologically inflict a special brand of torture on their young offspring. Less air-time, but no less infuratingly, it follows two children, a young boy called Oliver who can't be much more than 8, and a girl called Heather, about 15. These are psychic children, the vanguard of humanities next evolutionary step into a species of mind-crushing, force weilding, empathic ninjas with healing powers derived from crystals. More on that later.

Oliver, like the film Mercury Rising, sees dead people. Walking around like regular people, or something. I'm not quite sure, and this is part due to laziness of research, and partically because of the memory loss caused by repeatedly slamming my head off the coffee table while screaming "GET HELP!" like a novice Stockbroker on a particularly bad day.

Now, Oliver displays some definately psychic-related ability. He runs in circles, doesn't concentrate, and is disruptive at school. A medical practitioner diagnosed him with ADHD, and prescribed some Rittalin, but he's all knowing benevolent mother Simone has taken him off the drug. Because it's far easier to believe your child is the next Derren Brown than he has a treatable medical condition. In refusing to acknowledge her child has a minor mental health problem*, she doesn't do herself any favours by adopting a stance that is likely to get herself sectioned.

Maybe that is for the best. She is not only withholding treatment from a child, she is encouraging said child to believe that he is geuinely psychic. Sure, every parent wants their child to be gifted. But there's gifted, and theres gifted.

Oliver would later go on to save the known universe from an evil galactic Empire. Who knew?

 

Heather's mother, Nicola, is more than a little different from Simone. While Oliver's mother adopts the head-in-the-sand defence for mental behaviour, instead chalking it up to psychic and supernatural forces, Nicola is out and out batshit insane. Looking more Mad Max infulenced than the normal Simone, Nicola runs around with magic books and crystals, bringing children together into a sort of X-men academy of psychic kids. Using terms like Indigo and Cystral Children - which sounds like a dystopian future categorization of dangerous mutants - she runs a school where they can attune their powers.

Yeah, that's not normal.

Heather, the child in question, genuinely believes herself to be a psychic healer. Obviously, psychic powers don't fully manifest until sometime during puberty, so it's reassuring to know that these young children can work on their skills and be helped through the process in a New Age version of Waco. Now, if only I had someone to help me through puberty. It must be reassuring to know that the voice changes and rapid hair growth are down to your developing psychic potential. They mocked me when my voice broke, but rest assured, I shall crush their minds.

I'd do a summary, but the show doesn't actually go anywhere. I say it's a show, it's flaunted as a documentary, but it isn't. There is nothing to document, and no academic merit in it. These people have been professionally diagnoised as having an acute case of the fucking crazies. You can't argue with science, I'm afraid. Unless you're psychic, I guess, or just mental. The hour or so of prime video evidence - for when these people go on trial for child abuse - ends with the conclusion that, guess what, some people think their children might be pyschic, and we can't prove that they aren't.

Spooky.

The verdict:

How much rope does it take to hang two people who are deliverately psychologically scarring their offspring? However much it is, this show provides more than enough. I just feel sorry for the kids who will be sorely disappointed when lightning doesn't jump from their fingertips to incinerate those who callously mock their parents. Cutting Edge: My Child is Psychic, takes a bunch of geuinely delusional people to an Al Qaeda extreme. I eagerly await the next episode. Cutting Edge: My Dog is a Necromancer.


*Although I'm skeptical anyway. At 8 I ran in circles and disrupted class, and I turned out fine...

Wibble.

Monsters of Us All

So, it's been a slow news week. Well, it probably hasn't, but I'm too lazy to check on it, really, so we'll have to assume nothing particularly interesting has happened in the world lately.

Except for alcohol. Now, I've wanted to write a post about alcohol for quite some time. It is wondrous stuff. It's the kind of beverage that makes everything better. Maybe it makes everything worse. It depends on how much you drink, and what you're going for. At times, it's great to kick back with a pint and watch the birds soar through blue skies. Another evening might be spent in the foetal position, hugging a bottle of whisky and crying while Johnny Cash's 'Hurt' loops endlessly on repeat. A kind of emotional masochism, I suppose. Especially if it isn't on repeat, but you keep refreshing youtube so you can mourn for longer.

Anyway, booze. Wondrous booze, or the daemon drink? Well, personally, it's a matter of perspective. I was waiting at a bus stop on Thursday night, watching revellers fall over, vomit, fight, or canter down the road clip-clopping in heels like the charge of a heavily inebriated Light Brigade. Drunks to the left of them, drunks to the right, vomited and thundered. And so forth.

It was enough to put you off drinking, or at least, put you off watching other people drinking, because they turn into animals. It's like a weird form of lycanthropy. A few drinks under a full moon and you too can start a fight with your best friend, abuse a bus driver, fall over, or cry for no reason.

But drink has it's plus sides, too. Without becoming horrendously inebriated, I would have never learned some valuable lessons. I was going to list them, but after I'd typed '1) Kebabs are tasty, I decided that everything I've learned while drinking alcohol is better not shared with the general public, as it's either too embarrassing or concerns things that, without proper context, are trite and meaningless. You'll have your own lessons, no doubt, revelations like 'I simply cannot take Vladimir Putin', and 'How to successfully tell a bouncer that you are not trying to drown someone in a sink', would be two that spring to mind.

However, generally I've learned that, at the bottom of every bottle of Tequila, there is something that isn't a worm. It can be much worse than that. My point about alcohol lycanthropy stands. After too many drinks, we all do things we'd wish we hadn't, and we can all turn a little bit Cray-zee. So it's a cautionary tale from a Clockwork Lemon this week. I'd never be so hypocritical to suggest anyone does anything less than drink themselves into a stupor, but remember.

It makes monsters of us all.

Best Served Chilled

I bought a sandwich today. It said that it was 'best served chilled', although I can't imagine under any circumstance how it could have possibly been worse if it was warm. And considering I had to actually pluck it from the shelf myself, carry it to the checkout, and then scurry outside to eat it in shame, I'm not even sure about how it could served in any manner less convenient. Yes, I'm allowed to be a snob. Anyone who pays that much for a sandwich should have it delivered by an Angelic choir, wrapped in gold leaf and blessed by a saint. The merest nibble should cause you to die of estascy, only to be revived by the power of how awesome it tastes, before being left cold and alone, weeping as the last mouthful slides down.

Speaking of ambient produce, revenge is another dish that is best served cold. Apparently. Or possibly with some fava beans and a nice chianti. Nom nom.

Anyway, in a round about way, I've been thinking about justice. Yes, justice. That grand, abstract concept that we all know and love. No one wants to be the guy who argues against the course of justice. No one wants to be him. He's a prick.

Right, back. I'm at a work party, talking to someone I don't even know about crime and punishment. He describes himself as 'a little bit more Victorian' than me. If the Victorian's had Sharia Law, he'd know he'd been born too late. The conversation proceeds much like a slow motion car crash, ploughing fearlessly through topics that should not be discussed over beer, until it reaches the point where he condemns everyone to a burning lake of sulpher.

Forever.

They deserve to go down, down, down, to a burning ring of fire.

Now, this got me thinking about justice. Unless you wear a silly wig and work as a tool of an oppressive bourgeois regime, you are incapable of comprehending justice at all, apparently. I certainly don't know right from wrong. I was getting frisky with a dead cat the other day before someone told me that was messed up. Who would have known? It was still warm. And dressed provocatively.

In many respects is just as well, because most of us knuckle dragging primitive apes are in favour of a strange type of justice. This justice sees the wholesale slaughter of social deviants, the exile of miscreants, the destruction of all transgressors, and the execution of hungry people who steal loaves of bread while accidentally shooting someone in the face. Where's the sense in that?

The funny thing about justice, to me, is that it is not a real word. You can spell it, sure, but it has no meaning, because what is just and injust relies on a loose coalition of your intepretation societal norms, rehabilitation, law, and most importantly, revenge. Justice is not justice unless someone suffers for what they've done. It is not reformative to cut the hands off a theif, or gouge out the eyes of a stalker, or burn people alive in ovens because they transgressed against someone you don't even know, in circumstances you can't comprehend. But it is, at this moment in time, what people seem to want. So thank god we have all knowing judges, that's all I can say. Without their omnipotence, we'd surely be tearing out throats over things like littering.

Things have to be done a little more carefully than simply eliminating people who've somehow upset us, though. Life and death are big concepts, as Mr. Tolkien mused when he wrote that many people who deserve death are still alive, and many people who deserve to live are dead. Can you give life to those people? Don't be so quick to deal out death in judgement. And those words ring true for a lot of things, a lot of the time. Without getting into a moralistic quagmire, I'll just finish with an idea I've been mulling around. That is one of 'extreme justice'.

Extreme justice calls for ludicrious and unfair punishments of just about anyone, for any reason, all of the time. Next time you're on a lunch break with someone who says that X sentance for Y criminal is 'a slap on the wrist', advocate cutting off the lips of people who drop their crumbs on the floor. Defend it with complete deadpan seriousness. Point out that it is a major problem in society, that people should not be so inconsiderate, that it attracts vermin, looks disgusting, at that people should be raised in a manner whereby they can eat without throwing half their food on the pavement.


Trust me. What this country needs is harsher sentancing, for everyone, for anything. That'd get 'em thinking.