CHRISTMAS TIME IN BRITAIN : AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW ON THE THEME OF MAKING WHOOPEE!

Christmas time in Britain is oh so very traditional. We’ve always seemed to have had two kinds of people and two kinds of situations around. Firstly the very sensible, self-satisfied folk who’ve rushed around buying all their food shopping and presents for days, weeks and even hours before December 25^th and can now sit comfortably at home while the big dinner’s being prepared in the kitchen before getting down to enjoy it, meanwhile smugly watching all those others on television who didn’t have the sense to do what they’re doing. Those bright clever people who decided to do something different this year! Yes, those who thought they’d be smart-arsed and take a break from it all. Go to Spain or Miami or the Caribbean, somewhere warm for a nice sunny Christmas! And look where they wound up. Stuck in a motorway traffic jam somewhere near Gatwick or Heathrow in blinding rain or on ice… or stuck in some airport lounge with no heating because all the flights have been cancelled. Yes, there’s been another instant baggage handlers’ strike or a big pile of snow outside the window and to make it all worse there’s ten toilets for ten thousand people and eight are blocked up with no-one to fix them because the maintenance men are quietly sitting at home with their families eating roast turkey while you are stuck on a floor somewhere with your wife and kids waiting for a flight that won’t happen till sometime in Easter! Alternatively you could be in a railway station with thousands of others because you decided to travel. Spend Christmas with a relative somewhere or maybe your boyfriend and you bought him cufflinks all special and now you might not see him till the New Year!

But then you could be caught in a flood. At Christmas time it’s traditional! Appalling freezing or wet weather and FLOODING. Flooding just about everywhere but especially where you are! Christ, not again! You went out and watched the river rising, with all those guests you’d invited coming by train all that way specially. So right now you’re fucked both ways. You don’t know whether they’ll get to wherever you are and you don’t know whether you’ll be completely flooded out and won’t have any lighting let alone any power to cook.  Yes, it’s all your fault! You decided to be adventurous for a change and invite people… You decided to drive with your family to the airport and spend Christmas abroad somewhere all warm and sunny… take to the roads in blinding rain, arrive at some terminal with thousands of others waiting there all ruing the day… Yes it was you who decided to sell your house somewhere safe on a hill and go and live on a flood plain close to a river… And it was you who never thought for one moment you might be on some BBC News program with your wife up to her neck in a river holding a turkey over her head. And then it gets into your head that there are millions of people out there ALL WATCHING YOU in an airport, railway lounge, motorway traffic jam, flooded kitchen, freezing community hall, with your kids shouting and your wife looking daggers, being served a bowl of Heinz soup over Christmas Day while everyone else is sitting at home chomping on turkey, listening to the Queen and feeling all smug!

Yes, it was YOU who branded all these stay-at- homes as unadventurous traditionalists!

Christmas in Britain is that traditionally cruel frost time of the year nicely divided between kings, pages and poor men. Royalty opens windows and looks about before calling for bread, wine and pine logs. Poor men, that’s you and me, go gathering fuel to save on our energy bills and if we’ve got any time left go hunting up presents. It’s a deep, crisp and even time for most of us though, whether it’s turkeys roasting in an oven or the municipal and energy supply services shoveling up snow or coming out to do reconnecting. Those who decided to be adventurous for a change suddenly had some advertisers bubble come into their heads, had a mental collapse and picked up a phone to make reservations and give the wife a surprise. Yes and for that all they got was a bollocking! For most people though it’s all snug at home, big or small arguments and Casablanca on television or Gone With The Wind. Alternatively for the intellectuals among us it’s the BBC’s version of all the year’s news.

So we sit there all soporific and pissed, hearing about the Liberal Democrats and how they want a million more East European immigrants a year living exactly where we are; and jug-head Nigel Farage going on about Europe while his mate Godfrey Bloom calls all the girls sluts; one desperate crisis after another all over the world with rape, murder and mayhem and charities asking us to put our hands in our pockets and fish out bundles of notes most of which they’ll stick in their own for ‘expenses’; Members of Parliament going to prison for fraudulent expense claims; coked up celebrity chefs; banking executives endlessly busy organising big bonuses, cheating and fraud; and then the police! Unleashed in a demoralized society, lying and abusing people all over the place. Just about anyone with money cheating, thieving and shagging while the Coalition Government attacks the standard of living of everyone else, depriving the needy and poor, especially young people of benefits. Yes, we can sit at home and watch all the unfortunates on television, feeling genuinely self-satisfied that we did what was needed, necessary and sensible!

Well actually that’s the alternative BBC News. The one you don’t get! What you actually get are the Royals going to church, British servicemen serving overseas, the weather and a few lousy films. Oh yes, I forgot! There’s always Brian Cox! The man who knows about everything and how it all works. Quite frankly I’m shocked. So far he hasn’t been on Strictly Come Dancing, East Enders, Masterchef or some other wretched cookery program telling us how to make soup! Anything to make you feel drowsy. Speaking for myself I’d like to see him in Coronation Street, working in Nick’s Bar or having it off with Gail! Now that would really be fun! But then there was Edward Snowden’s Alternative Christmas Message on Channel Four and his earnest concern about all of us being spied on by the British and American intelligence services. As though we’re not being spied on enough with police cameras on just about every street in town centres, these people are doing it all through every piece of electronic equipment we have. Perhaps they should tell us what they’re actually doing it for?   

Christmas is a time of year when so many suffer. It’s not just those we occasionally see from our sofas. It’s also the countless numbers we don’t see. Those who haven’t got a bed or a meal for the night. Who are separated or divorced and can’t be with their kids, who spend a freezing cold night in tears under a blanket in a shop corner full of longing and sadness and years of regrets, dirty, unshaved and unloved. And then spare a thought for the lonely, those without family, those who are old, who are sick. Those who couldn’t buy this or that for children they knew or know now let alone food for themselves while celebrity chefs cook for the rich. Every year this one single time comes to be the sharp apex point of our society. For some another jest at the table and counting up loot in their heads, for others a warm satisfaction that they never booked a flight out of Gatwick, got stuck in a railway or coach station or never took to the roads let alone bought a new house on a flood plain, then yet again for others a smothered cry of despair in their heads. For some its pure fun, for others plain satisfaction, and for others again simple plain misery. For just a few it’s a matter of conscience. What’s good and what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong.

Yes it’s a time for the churchmen to talk. About right and wrong, good and bad. Well if you’re concerned about people that much, I mean really concerned, well go sell off all your paintings, your gold and your silver, your precious gems and your commercial property. Go sell off the loot you’ve acquired down the last two thousand years in the name of a Jew that got stuck on a cross and go out and spend it on those who are needy rather than feel a need to mess with their heads. In Spain, Italy and Mexico alone we’re talking of trillions! Yeah Mister Churchman, time to stop squawking and get down to walking and actually looking around you rather than going on from somewhere high up in a pulpit.

Time to listen up for the Pope! Time to listen up for the Queen! Time to get down to your dinner. Time to get down to the end of a miserable sandwich and stay out of the rain, cap still out on the pavement, hoping someone will notice, somewhere, with all that wind, all that rain, all that cold on the streets. That’s Christmas in Britain. People don’t care so much about others since the time that Thatcher took over. There’s far less of a communal spirit, far more of a cold hard individuality. But then if it’s true why do we all make a such a fuss about Christmas? Heaven help us if we forget what it means to be human.  

NEWS OF THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS - NIGELLA : HOUSE OF LORDS RIP OFF : CONFLICT IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA : COLLAPSING THEATRES : BORIS JOHNSON

The jokes currently making the rounds about television celebrity chef Nigella Lawson preferring a Coke to a Pepsi are now wearing thin, same as they once did about George Michael loving cottage cheese. Celebrities in trouble seem to be fair game for all kinds of people. The unfortunate Nigella being no exception. Alas it simply didn’t help having the Prime Minister giving her his support while she was a witness in a trial after she’d admitted resorting to cocaine to help alleviate her domestic problems, but then who knows. She may have lost her case but at least she wasn’t raided by the police for being a user. Having her front door smashed in the way we see it in police programs on television and grilled about her supplier. The police have said that currently they’ll be taking no further action so maybe David Cameron’s intervention helped a bit after all. But then maybe that’s all part of another joke making the rounds about half the Tory Cabinet being on something or other. Drugs and the celebrity-rich and their problems are something quite outside the understanding of most people, ordinary people like you and I. The death of Nelson Mandela covered it all up for a while in the media then out it all came after the Mandela media-sickener subsided and there she was front page looking all sleepless and haggard.

Who knows what goes into all that food she’s been cooking, people will ask? Will they be able to associate her with anything else than the Grillo Sisters and coke while they’re watching her cooking program on television? So many stories, so much innuendo. Will the moralizing BBC continue allowing her to work on television or squeeze her out as a bad example to housewives? Who can say? She is after all the daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s once closest ally, Tory-Boy Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson who’s economic policies kicked off the financial ‘revolution’ from which we’re still suffering today, the rich excepted that is, while her husband until only recently Charles Saatchi ran the advertising agency which helped the lovely Margaret to power. Poor Nigella, caught up in a privileged life of endless credit card use, drugs, Tory politics and an unhappy marriage. A real nasty stew if there ever was one and nothing like those delectable little things she’ll rush up on telly, so far from the kitchen of most women who are, by necessity, into fish fingers or burgers and chips for their kids. Please don’t tell me you did all your shopping at Iceland my dear!

So England get thrashed by Australia three games in a row and lose the Ashes. Then a day or two later we see them on television having fun and laughing their heads off together in some light relief test driving. So that was your reward for a gross failure. For a casual unprofessional attitude and a total lack of commitment, being allowed to go out and have fun. For treating the game and your country with disrespect you needed rewarding! It’s all part of the attitude that pervades this country today. Lords and Ladies absolutely and deeply honorable Members of the House of Lords checking in for fifteen minutes and then checking out for three hundred quid, DAILY, FIVE DAYS A WEEK! Now please tell me and tens of millions of hard working people, millions of those who are unemployed, poor, homeless and destitute… IS THAT TAKING THE PISS OR ARE YOU LAZY BASTARDS JUST HAVING A LAUGH ON THE TAXPAYER… LIKE BANKERS OR DIRECTORS OF COMPANIES ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH TAX AVOIDANCE AND OTHER FORMS OF BLUE MURDER BY THE RASCALS AT THE INLAND REVENUE?

Are you members of the House of Lords just taking the piss? Fifteen hundred a week for seventy-five minutes work? Okay, I know it’s not what the jokers in the Premier League are getting so I know there are  some serious issues here, but then pissing on nurses, teachers, firemen, ambulance workers train drivers and dinner ladies for an hour and a quarter a week! And then you people being called Honorable and My Lord and making the laws of this country and all! I suppose you think you really deserve it, don’t you, your Lordships?

It’s alright then! A Chinese warship cuts directly across the bows of an armed American Missile Cruiser in the South China Seas without warning and it’s alright! Never mind that the American Government have described the incident as serious, as a provocative act, the response of Chinese officials was to state that the issue was resolved through formal procedures whatever that meant. What it actually means is nothing at all!  It means nothing, and it means everything! What it actually means is that the United States with Japan close behind are gearing up for naval conflict with China over small inlands territory in the South China Seas whose ownership is hotly disputed. Japan, China and even South Korea all claim the islands, now currently occupied by Japan and the clock is now running down. Inexorably ticking to conflict.

It all seems far from us now, however it’s not. In the last week Japan has announced a multi-billion dollar program to upgrade its military forces, manpower and equipment. China has now condemned this as a highly provocative act. The United States has begun moving serious naval power into the region with ships carrying nuclear armament. And what’s it all for? Truth to tell, a handful of tiny islands! What is its cause, truth to tell, China’s fast growing status as a regional power and hence an inevitable nationalism. The force driving the upcoming conflict is likewise the economic rivalry and competition between the two Asian powers being irrevocably played out on the world stage. The microcosm of the conflict, a handful of tiny islands, much the same as the assassination of one man in 1914 was the microcosm for a World War. The islands themselves actually mean nothing. It is their symbolic value that will focus the storm. This year has seen a growing military preparedness by the two interlocked players, stormy exchanges of words and near naval collisions. Next year might lead to matters altogether more serious.

The situation is complex! Washington is a key ally of Tokyo, yet Washington is in debt to Peking to the tune of trillions of dollars! If the Chinese call in the debt the US economy will sink. If the Americans don’t go to Tokyo’s aid in a conflict with China they will lose Japanese support in all things. Never mind! I feel quite confident that with William Hague at the helm of the British Foreign Office, Britain’s power and authority, coming through our lead in the Commonwealth, will prevail upon all powers involved in any such conflict to see the error of their ways and immediately desist!

Oh dear, oh dear! The plaster ceiling of the lovely heritage Apollo Theatre in Shaftsbury Avenue collapsed onto the balcony below throwing a large number of people who’d paid good money for their tickets down into the Stalls where they might have got a much better view of the play but for the fact that many were injured and the fact that the debris also fell on the actors themselves. Result, many theatre goers got the kind of participatory performance they’d never expected in something that came close to a farce never mind a serious tragedy. The sight of trembling bewildered people covered in blood outside the theatre in various transports heading for hospital was a sight straight out of a nightmare. Instead of a fun evening out in theatre land they got something quite unexpected and lo and behold, theatre owners and associated management bodies all hurriedly rushed to declare that their buildings were all safe as houses and this was an event quite out of keeping and character. Unfortunately, events over recent years have proved quite otherwise.

Their concerns are quite understandable. Filling the West End Theatres twice a day at this time of year with the prices of tickets quite serious money is an extremely lucrative business and the well publicised images of customers emerging from the Apollo covered in blood, and talk by Westminster City Council of concerns about safety, building inspections and regulations, along with similar talk of risk by the Fire Brigade isn’t likely to enhance reputation or takings. What it’s more likely to do is advance the cancellation of tickets during the key Christmas Season so it was therefore quite natural for the owners of these places to rush headlong into heavy assurance. If the televised sight of theatre goers looking like participants in Julius Caesar was to be somehow assuaged then guarantees and promises of security and safety had to be given.

One of the ongoing problems of London’s theatre land is the lack of financial investment for modernizing  many of these old and ornate buildings, particularly the facilities provided for customers. Many toilets, both men’s and women’s, are seriously outdated and look like something straight out the ark. Not quite like having to shit through a hole in the floor but not far short if you know what I mean and quite frankly disgraceful for the price you pay for a ticket. Dirty, unclean and out of date is the best way of describing the general situation making it all quite an experience for the fussy middle class customer. Theatres are a serious business with piles of loot for successfully packing bums on seats which is why newspaper theatre critics get to be given stacks of complimentary tickets for themselves, family and friends in the hope of RAVE REVIEWS for the all-important good publicity they might engender.

Complimentary tickets? Is that all one wonders! Yes, for the owners it’s a very serious business. Maybe someone ought to write a deadly black satire about what REALLY goes in in theatre-land with its implicit stack load of bitchiness. That would really pack all the cynics in but quite frankly it might spoil the party and would almost certainly never see daylight. Besides, people go to the theatre to have fun and be entertained and the truths that might emerge from any such dramatization of social reality might be too serious to contemplate and never be profitable.

Did anyone ever think that theatres were about conveying social and political truths to an audience? If so think again. Theatres first and foremost are about making loot. Still, I do think that some talented playwright ought to consider it. Written with truth in mind it might make a perfect subject for having a real belly laugh.

Boris Johnson’s been busy lately. Closing down fire stations in London and campaigning to build a dirty big island in the Thames Estuary on which he can plonk yet another airport for London. This public school Tory boy stalking horse of the Party’s visceral vicious right wing has suggested that most people in Britain have a low level IQ and in this he may be right, after all a majority of Londoners voted him mayor, but his striking up a pose of serious intelligence is quite frankly ludicrous as are most of his seeming strengths. I use the word ‘seeming’ because that is how they appear when set against the intelligence and capabilities of so many of his opponents. The man quite frankly is borderline dense but when set against the acumen of his opponents and critics he comes out sounding like Einstein. The question is how does he manage it? Well as I’ve suggested it’s undoubtedly the inferior qualities of others that magnifies his own, but more important perhaps is the pose he strikes up, invariably confronting challenge and criticism with a superb public school air of insouciant bluster that makes people think he simply must know what he’s talking about or else he’d be full of bullshit and he can’t be that, can he. After all he’s an ex-Eton public schoolboy and seems to know all the top Tories!

It’s those winking little piggy eyes of his and that genuine air of leery insouciance! Mix it all in with his well calculated bluster and you have the kind of comic book character that the British lower classes love and find sympathetic. He has all the air of a wayward bumbling blimp and to anyone seriously intelligent brings a refreshing touch of a wilfully anarchic idiocy onto the British political stage. Set this against the dour unfunny charm of Muslim fundamentalist friendly Ken Livingstone and he’ll come out smelling of roses time after time. He’s a British political jackanapes who understands his electorate with a well-manicured charm. Meanwhile he’s managing a city that’s been fast turning into an immigrant rat hole of countless East European illegals soon to be joined by numberless more. Under his command London has been turned into a duality of jack the lad financial rascals in the City and Dockland and a great sea of on the make begging, importuning, petty theft and East European gang controlled cheap labour day to day employment in a wide variety of unregulated off the books employment from the West End to Hammersmith and beyond. It’s a nasty little place with theatres and museums lodged at its center, cheek and jowl with islands of immense property wealth at Mayfair, Kensington and Chelsea. And right at its heart is the well-guarded holy of holies, Buckingham Palace.

These islands of wealth are already seeing charming incursions of Romanian beggars, mainly Roma women with dirty babies, doorstep sleepers and con artists against all of whom the powers of the police seem quite inadequate, instead being used against student demonstrators protesting against Tory welfare cuts, young people for whom Boris Johnson has entirely no sympathy! If the police are short of manpower as they claim the trick is to help recruit this whole army of East European illegals into the police and make them respectable! Then they can help guard all the palaces and officially patrol Kensington and Chelsea instead  of urinating in the doorways of all the rich émigré Russians! Make that your major achievement and your return to Westminster with a top job in David Cameron’s Government will be assured, namely as Minister for Pompous Insouciant Leery Bluster and Bullshit.   

WEEK’S NEWS: DECEMBER FIFTEEN

The death of Nelson Mandela may have wiped out the world for so many but it still continued to turn along with all its stories and news. Most of it nasty, slipping into oblivion under the weight of obsequious slushing and gushing. For some, one man’s demise was a treat, such as News International journalists up in the dock for phone hacking and other miscellaneous dirty deeds. Like others with the power of the press behind them along with powerful political friends they thought they were immune and perhaps they still are! Then there’s the family saga of a celebrity chef in all its misery, dragged into public view for everyone to sneer at. Poor Nigella, having to pay the price for the life of money and celebrity she chose. Never mind, there was always David Cameron to come to the rescue, drugs or no drugs. But then trawling through the dirt of the rich has always been a specialist subject for certain newspapers who know there’s an avid public out there ever ready to lap it all up.

Let’s leave them to swill at the trough. Other matters run deeper and are far more important. Yes, the police are at it again. Not content with now being officially allowed to decide what is right or what is wrong they’ve become semi-official arbiters of political correctness as well as public morality. True, they’ve missed a whole number of big tricks in recent times like Jimmy Savile, or being caught earning bundles of notes selling stories to journalists then coming up wanting over the Hillsborough Disaster let alone the demise of innocent bystanders, but now they have others well in their sights. They’re into politics all over again. Not content with their role in protecting fascist marches during the 1930’s, ‘dealing with’ the Print Workers Strike years not so far back on behalf of News International then the Miner’s Strike and lately doing in Tory politician Andrew Mitchell, they’re now busy with students. Having decided that it was quite lawful to detain and imprison them on the streets they’re now arresting them for occupying university premises demonstrating against social welfare cuts and increased tuition fees. Arresting them, taking them away in vans and locking them up with all that it means. The semi-literates attacking the literate and clearly enjoying the brutalizing of those who are decent and caring.

However it is entirely naïve for students to claim that the police are becoming political. The police would say that they’re only doing their job and quite rightly so. ‘Dealing’ with striking print workers and miners IS their job, same as it is arresting students occupying university premises. This is the job the State requires them to do and if necessary rough up participants, so no complaints please from the politically naïve if they think the police are acting out of hand.   

And if few people care, what does it say about Britain today, when so many are out shopping for Christmas, spending money they don’t actually have or working for wages that are pitiful at best? What kind of country are we living in when so many contribute hundreds of millions of pounds to alleviate natural disasters overseas and have no concern for their own basic rights here? Students, and there are so few of them nowadays that care about anything compared to the sixties, seventies and eighties, are at the very front line of the nation’s social conscience and having to deal with police who decide what they can say and exactly where or where not they can say it. On the other hand there are those who commit crimes ten a penny like cycling on pavements, being illegal immigrants, aggressively begging on the streets of Central London, or far better, defrauding the public of money through innumerable financial swindles and selling horsemeat for beef. No-one ever arrested or prosecuted for these things! Strange how the police see nothing wrong in such criminality! That it’s all somehow okay! What is not, however, are student demonstrators who believe in something worthwhile. No such ‘scruples’ for them. They’re just attacked, rounded up and locked away for a while! And for actually what? Yes, the police are busy again. Deciding on who may protest, how and why.

That’s the Liberal Democrats in Coalition Government for you. Betray their promises to students first then turn a blind eye to their protest after which put them in the hands of the police.

Some news from overseas that isn’t Mandela! It’s deep winter over parts of the Middle East. In Syria and the Lebanon the plight of refugees spilling out from the Civil War in Syria has been worsened by snow and sub-zero temperatures. In response, the Government of Israel has opened its northern border to accommodate and give refuge to many thousands of desperate people, supplying them with food, shelter and medical aid. And that is with both Syria and the Lebanon still technically at war with the Jewish State. So how has this great humanitarian gesture been reported by the television news channels, by the BBC, Sky and Channel Four. Answer, not a mention! Let’s be clear. Saudi Arabia and Dubai, two of the richest nations in the world with their territories close to the crisis HAVEN’T CONTRIBUTED A PENNY OR LIFTED A FINGER, but the Israelis have opened their border to help. But please don’t be critical of the BBC or Channel Four for keeping quiet. Friendly to the Jewish State they’re most definitely not and never have been!

The situation in the Ukraine is hotting up. Just consider recent events if you will. The Foreign Minister of the European Community, Baroness Ashton, went to Kiev the capital last week, met the leaders of anti-Government demonstrations in the streets and commended them for their actions! These actions, let it be said, are against the democratically elected President, Government and Parliament of the Ukraine for refusing to sign a trade treaty with the European Community!

So what does the EC do? It sends its Foreign Minister to that country to join the protesters and stir up as much trouble as possible with British and other Western news media all there in advance primed up ready and waiting! Talk about damnable cheek! This is such a flagrant example of interfering with the internal affairs of a sovereign state that it surely has the hands of United States Government agencies all over it, but then so what when most of its security apparatus, along with that of the United Kingdom, is busy spying on the population of Western Europe and not least its politicians like Angela Merkel. It’s actually quite fascinating. In recent years, British, American and European Community politicians have been getting up to some quite extraordinary mischief. Many, like David Cameron, seem to have entirely lost the plot being caught smiling a ‘selfie’ at the memorial ceremony of Nelson Mandela, added to which was his coming out in support of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson in the little matter of cocaine addiction. And Cameron such a Pepsi man and all.

Finally, hearty congratulations to China for successfully landing a spacecraft on the Moon, and then rolling  a Lunar rover called Jade Rabbit onto its surface. A really great achievement, made possible not only by its scientific community but all the many hundreds of millions of people round the world, particularly in the United States and Western Europe who avidly buy Chinese made products and other crap to give that country a fantastic financial trading surplus enabling it to afford such splendid ventures while leaving everyone in serious debt to mainland China. Particularly the United States whose economy is currently bankrolled by that country! Well done China for being so canny!

WHO, EXACTLY, BURIED NELSON MANDELA?

At first glance the question might seem preposterous. Yes, we all know who buried Nelson Mandela! It was his family and this wife or that. It was the ANC and the new so called Rainbow South African State. Yes, and it was all the world’s politicians and heads of state former and current… And then, to many of us here  in Britain watching the endless rolling eulogy from the BBC in hush toned sycophancy that blotted out everything else that happened in the world over the last week, all of us knew that it was this disgustingly obsequious organisation to which we’re forced to pay a license fee that actually buried Nelson. Albeit under a ton of bullshit and other verbal garbage.

There is much that has come out of the Nelson Mandela Show as it was turned into by the BBC. The man’s status has now been elevated from global political icon to super-hero. A person whose value and worth exceeds Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Abraham Lincoln and dare I say it even Bill Clinton, all rolled into one. Just about the greatest human who ever lived. And whoops, sorry, I forgot, The Virgin Mary and Leonardo da Vinci. Okay, let’s look at it closely. When his jailors took him off the 27 year cross at Robben Island Prison it wasn’t black South Africans who turned him into a hero but the white political regime that put him there along with all those white liberal intellectuals who’ve done time worshipping black political leaders because they think it showed cred. Same as they once adored Robert Mugabe! On his release the ‘forgiving’ figure of Mandela was not only a gift to them but to all those black and white political rascals who’ve been attending official ceremonies in South Africa today. Naturally at their taxpayers’ expense!

What honest or genuine questions did the BBC ask of itself before sinking into its endlessly idolizing hysteria. Hello? Did anyone there ever ask themselves who it was who ACTUALLY ended apartheid because one thing is for sure as historical fact, it wasn’t Nelson Mandela but F.W.de Klerk, South African Prime Minister at the time who freed him from jail and then worked with him in an inspirational partnership as Joint Presidents to get rid of the scourge when he could have just as easily turned the army on the ANC in a bloody race war. It was de Klerk who abolished apartheid as no longer tolerable,  not Nelson Mandela.

Right now it comes to mind that I’d better stop calling him Nelson because that’s no longer his name! Jacob Zuma, current ANC President of the Republic has rechristened him as someone entirely black for the whole nation, the world and for posterity! None of that white man Nelson stuff, he’s now simply Madiba, everyone’s Father. The BBC arse-crawlers could therefore no longer call him by the white Christian name his parents had chosen. No, black South Africa was running the show so it couldn’t permit a white hero’s name from a white colonialist past. The world’s greatest human being and political hero was black so his name had to be black through and through. None of this Nelson stuff, understand! And naturally every BBC reporter and journalist understood. After all, they were in on the greatest event in human history since the Resurrection, and a resurrection it was!

Shame none of them asked themselves or anyone they interviewed, singly or in the dancing crowds, what the man had actually done to improve their living conditions. What he’d done to make the circumstances of their lives better and more tolerable, during the ten years or more he’d been President. If asked many of them might have said that what was important was that he’d freed them spiritually. That he’d liberated their minds from oppression. True indeed perhaps, and in the circumstances of a new and changed nation very important… only politically naïve. Nothing more loved by the hard-nosed political rascals and dignitaries who attended those rites, rituals and political speeches. A revolution of spiritual liberation. Well praise Jesus and Hallelujah! From all the world’s liberals to black African dictators, from Selfie Obama to East European and South American thugs of the right, the one thing they all love to hear are matters of spiritual inspiration. It means they won’t have to do anything concrete to make people’s lives any better! Freedom? The Spirit? It all sounds like flower-power and hippies, straight out of sixties California, when you could live in the sun, man, and love was all free.

No wonder so many of the world’s political elite were in attendance. Mandela? Freedom? It was all a matter of spirit, of liberation. Meanwhile he and his Party had done little to nothing for their fellow black Africans  during that time, except of course, enrich themselves with fine new houses and gifts of land, same as everywhere else throughout Africa over the last fifty years. No, Mandela began a spiritual revolution and left it at that. That’s what all the politicians and dignitaries there in adoring attendance love him for. A spiritual revolution and sawn off at that because no revolution is complete unless it is, at the same time, a social revolution. Betterment of the social and economic conditions of life of the masses of people. In South Africa that meant both the poor blacks and the poor whites. Mandela came out of prison, allowed himself to be iconized, canonized if you will as leader of a spiritual revolution while the ANC took over the politics. As its leader he had the power to do anything for those living in poverty in the townships but instead he did nothing. Just rested on his world given status as inspirational spiritual icon.

If doing nothing is satisfactory to the liberal intelligentsia then it’s satisfactory for the world’s political leaders. These people spend their lives thinking up creative talk about future promises of prosperity. Only spiritual regeneration first if you will and betterment of people’s lives second. Always second! In Nelson Mandela politicians saw one of themselves. And if he’d held up a mirror they’d have seen their own faces. That in truth is why so many attended. To be among one of their own. Of the same political character and class. So how did the mass of black South Africans see it. I’ll tell you how. Forget about the BBC love-in with the carefully selected handful on the streets or the myriad of adoring ANC hangers on… when the crowds in the stadium in Soweto heard the speech of Jacob Zuma, current ANC President of the Republic and a Nelson Mandela successor they wholesomely jeered and booed. Shouted their anger and booed. Rolling waves of disapproval and booing in contrast to BBC and other world media adulation along with the adoring rolling adulation of all the political dignitaries. And if they could have done the same they’d have booed them too… for allowing European and American bankers and finance jockeys to swindle the people of their countries. For lowering their expectations and hopes and indeed doing sweet nothing for them while they enriched their own friends.

Politicians helping themselves on one side while doing nothing for anyone else. And the masses of people on the other, black or white, booing at them in derision. This is what the BBC chose not to hear, whether it was in a black South African township or closer to home. That was the reality of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. Booing! Not something the grinning President Obama or the plump jovial David Cameron or the buxom Prime Minister of Denmark all smiling a selfie would have wanted to hear! Booing? No they definitely weren’t there to hear that. Only to participate in all that was righteous!

The ANC legacy of Nelson Mandela was treated with rightful contempt. Not the man himself. The legacy alas had promised so much and provided so little for so many for so long. Whose fault was that? The man who was the inspirational force for their struggle or his successors who inherited it? Almost certainly something of both. The ANC inherited Mandela’s inspiration but quite frankly not much else. They were guided by inspiration alone but never by a clear set of principles, a worked out ideological view for creating a just and egalitarian society. A socialist perspective. So sad to disappoint the liberal intelligentsia who spent so many years frothing at the mouth with adulation at the mere mention of the man’s name but your hero was never a socialist. Same as Robert Mugabe and all the other black leaders who’d inherited a mantle of anti-colonial struggle and took it forward. None of these leaders were socialists. None of them ever believed in social equality or tribal fraternity as is evidenced in their own post-colonial struggles for personal tribal domination. There never was and never would be any unity between tribes as is evidenced all over Africa, let alone social equality between rich and poor. The tens of millions in South Africa’s post-apartheid black townships know all about that. After 20 years of ANC rule and freedom, no running water, no electricity and no sanitation for most. 

In short just about nothing! That was why Jacob Zuma was booed, but then it wasn’t his fault. The party political mantle he inherited from Nelson Mandela and others came without definitive principles. Sure, there were members of the ANC engaged in the struggle who were socialists or communists but they were white, and black nationalists have never regarded socialism, Marxism or communism as anything more than European. The faith they inherited, as is quite logically the case, was one of anti-colonialism, or as it was in South Africa, anti-racist. Interestingly enough it was the white minority Afrikaaner who also inherited an anti-racist struggle, theirs being against the British who regarded them as racially inferior until the time when they fought them in the Boer War! In short, despite all the wretched comical mumblings of the white liberals, and in South Africa they are certainly more disgusting than anywhere else, none of that can detract from the fact that every ideological honor they give to Mandela is plain wishful thinking.

Or is it? Not if we recognise that any socialism espoused by such liberals, social democrats or others is about as revolutionary as Gordon Brown. What all these people are is probably only what they like to think they are over a good meal in Chelsea. Their radical leftism is only a delusion, something given them by others in jest or flattery. The whole damned lot of them wouldn’t know a day’s work in a packing warehouse, a building site or underground in a mine if you showed it to them. They’re as far from a black laborer living in a South African township as Nelson Mandela was from Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin.

Given the intellectual poverty of his own heritage Nelson Mandela struggled to educate himself and to a fair degree was successful, but what he couldn’t overcome and probably would never have wished to overcome was the history of the struggle he came out of. A struggle for dignity and his own humanity along with that of millions of other South Africans denied basic rights. He didn’t come out of any kind of European tradition of class struggle. Struggle for a fair living wage or for trades union rights. He came out of a struggle of racial intolerance and exploitation that affected everyone. It made those who were nasty even nastier while in South Africa itself most white liberals continued enjoying a splendid lifestyle and were damnably complaisant.  It’s all going to get worse. Rainbow Nation of many colors? Quite frankly the phrase is a joke. Under ANC control a once successful economy based on farming and mining is going down the tubes fast. Those whites remaining will either be murdered, dispossessed or forced to emigrate with everything they own stolen or looted. It’s a processes that has repeated itself throughout decolonized Africa so why not there too?

And the logical consequence? When their economy becomes a basket case the ANC will turn to the EC for loans and after that China, ever hungry for minerals and gold. As for Mandela all that will remain will be a name out of memory and today’s adulation will seem like a myth. Time itself destroys all icons and legends. Men have their moments and moments degenerate. It was and is required that the youth of the townships be educated and given a future. Given the promise of a place in a prosperous and equal South Africa. The great legacy to come out of Mandela’s struggle was hope. With no promise to come out of the struggle for hope there is simply no legacy, just a betrayal of promise.

Who buried Nelson Mandela? Well right now they’re all burying him fast. All those heads of state there, politicians and presidents past and present on some tribal jamboree to bury one of their own. Made in their own image. Someone who promised everything and actually did nothing. His political party and the state they control can’t bury him fast enough, and the same goes for his family too, all hungry to take over a legend and sell it off piece by piece as mementoes . He may be dead but the Show must go on, with the BBC undoubtedly wanting to get in on the ground as stage managers.

LATEST NEWS : EARLY DECEMBER

MANDELA

The death of Nelson Mandela it seems has come as a gift for the entire fawning white liberal middle class intelligentsia along with the BBC, Channel Four and the entire world’s collective of politicians, heads of state and reigning monarchs all of whom claim to have known the man one way or another, giving them the opportunity to display the kind of adulation that can best be described as arse crawling creepy.

The man served a fair part of his time in a nasty little racist hell hole believing in justice and dignity, maybe for most of the people of the land that he lived in, not knowing at first how much time was on his side until it inevitably came. A brave man who might have now laughed at all the slush pouring out of so many mouths that did nothing for him and the cause he espoused over so many dark years in jail in the hands of the brutal and stupid.

Let’s call it for what it was then and for what it is now! The regime that sent him down was arrogant, vile  and seriously thick. The regime that replaced it is plain neglectful. The former was racist, the latter hardly much better. The black urban poor have benefitted little over the last decade. The black rural poor hardly at all. The only people who came out of it nicely were the political elite of the ANC and their myriad hangers on. Most whites who had any money or career prospects have left. Their future in the so called Rainbow Nation just about zero. Only the white poor and farming community remain and they’re fast being wiped out in the Rainbow world’s murder center. So much for a legacy of peace and reconciliation. Not that it matters much to the Rainbow Coalition of the world’s white liberal crawlers.

With these people particularly in mind let’s take an honest look. In the last year or more large numbers of black miners living in dreadful squalid shacks and filthy conditions under the control of South Africa’s giant and fabulously wealthy overseas controlled mining houses have gone on strike for better pay and better living facilities. In response the ANC Government with full company support sent in armed state police who together with company police shot and killed hundreds of striking miners in cold blood, many at point blank range, leaving their wives and families destitute. Here, state and company police acted together to break strikes on behalf of local company management and international company executives. This was mainly the work of the white liberals’ much adored new black African Government. That said, where was the voice of Nelson Mandela, the great hallowed Father of the Nation, now in retirement? Where was the voice of this man on behalf of these grievously oppressed black mining workers and the trade union that was fighting for them for a living wage. These were the people who voted for him and his ANC Party. These were among his greatest supporters. Why did he fail to stand up for them when his word would have carried such weight. Why did he fail to even open his mouth when his support would have counted for everything.

Only a deafening silence. The man was living in retirement in one of his many homes, from a mansion in the Johannesburg white suburb of Houghton to his sprawling spread in Soweto… Being endlessly visited by the world’s white and black political so called great and good and showered with every honor imaginable while black mine workers were being shot dead in their hundreds, and tens of thousands were living like animals in company slums. Where was his voice?

Nelson Mandela was never a man of religion but neither was he a socialist. Having become President of South Africa after his release from prison he sought to put his just anger aside in order to achieve some kind reconciliation between people in general. A nasty race war was on the cards in the process of black Africans taking political power and this he wanted to avoid. Under his guiding leadership the ANC achieved that end but that was just about it. Over the last decade little else happened. The African National Congress had never been committed to achieving social equality between white, black and coloured. The urban and rural black working class and peasantry were desperately poor. Most of them living in great slum townships without electricity and running water and toilet facilities and the poor whites weren’t much better off either. What did Nelson Mandela and his Party do over the last decade to raise the standard and quality of life for tens of millions of black people over this time? THE ANSWER QUITE FRANKLY IS LITTLE TO NOTHING. Little has changed. Black miners throughout the country fighting for a better wage and better living conditions are mercilessly put down in a gruesome massacre that easily rivals Sharpeville or the worst that the white nationalist apartheid Government ever did!

So let me ask then. With all this shooting and murder of black working people over the last year or so where was the voice of the world’s politicians, the voice of the white liberal intelligentsia, and all the musicians who organised concerts for freeing Mandela? Where was the wretched BBC and Channel Four? A few words and lines here and there from the whole puerile collective. Little more. Oh yes! I forgot! Where were the words of condemnation of the ANC from Ed Miliband and the Labour Party? From Nick Clegg and all the other scummy Liberal Democrats? From America’s President Obama? From the Clinton’s, bless their little whiter than white liberal cred socks? Where were the words from any of these when their favourite political party, the African National Congress sent in armed police to shoot dead hundreds of black miners? Not a word from the whole wretched lot. Instead they continued to play their favourite little white liberal game called kiss-kiss Nelson Mandela.

The truth is there, staring anyone plain in the face who cared to consider. From the moment Nelson Mandela was released from prison and ‘reconciliation’ officially on a roll, South Africa’s Mining houses that employed hundreds of thousands of men who worked hard underground for a pittance, many far from their families and homes, knew they had it made and that they, too, were on a roll. The ANC would give them carte blanche to act against their Union of Mineworkers. And it was the same for most other employers. Socialism and any struggle for social equality was NOT PART OF THE ANC STRUGGLE. Theirs was only a political struggle against white political rule. SOCIAL EQUALITY FOR BLACK PEOPLE AND THE POOREST WHITES WAS NEVER PART OF THEIR MANIFESTO.

Nelson Mandela never went any further than politics. His struggle was to free South Africa from white political rule. Nothing more. So the socio-economic status quo in the country stayed the same and all those people jiving around outside his houses today will go back to their slums and maybe, just maybe start thinking… Just what did Nelson Mandela do for us during his time of political leadership? Just what did he and his Government do to make life better for us? These are fair questions. They won’t of course, be asked by all those raucous overseas liberals, black or white. The kind of people who call you a Nazi if you disagree with ANYTHING they say! They will only be asked by the black or white working or unemployed poor, the people who the ANC turned their backs on to become one of the world’s most corrupt money and bribe taking gang of politicals.

These days Nelson  Mandela is being hailed as the greatest human being who ever lived in the Western liberal media. He was already iconized the minute he walked out of prison. Now he’s being deified! It’s fitting I suppose that a man who ACTUALLY did so little for so many should be turned into a God. Once it was the same for Roman Emperors. So what’s changed? As for the white liberals of today, quite frankly most are simply not worth pissing on. Remember, it wasn’t the so called liberal John F. Kennedy who gave civil rights to black African Americans but the hard headed southern conservative Lyndon Johnson who did this.

South Africa had to change. The white political regime released Mandela so it could change on the surface. Underneath it all it’s still much the same. Only different in one major respect. This time it’s black politicians responsible for shooting black workers… not white!

Was that what you served 27 years in prison for, Nelson Mandela?

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THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING: THE ANCIENT PRE-INCA LEGEND OF THE LOST CHORD

This story, as presented by me now, may seem to my readers somewhat fanciful, like something straight out the pages of a novel, or one of those tales of the silver screen portraying the exploits of an Indiana Jones. Well if you like that kind of thing, fine, but what I have to tell you here is nothing like that at all. It is more interesting perhaps. Perhaps more strange. Sure the facts are rooted in legend… A lost party of early Spanish explorers disappearing without trace high in the Bolivian Andes… A search party stumbling across a half crazed survivor clearly gone native many years later at the edge of the jungle… His fevered account of a great calamity that saw his friends cut off from civilisation forever.  All of it scarcely believable and with it too the horror of cannibalism. Words tumbling from the lips of a sick, dying man. Almost incoherent, as Joachim de Souza’s Journal recorded, except for that brief final light in his eyes and those words, rasped out for legend by someone who’d heard, someone who’d seen something special.

De Souza’s Journal is clear so we can now only wonder. THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING were the words that came from his lips! The young explorer then tells us how, startled by such seemingly incomprehensible revelation, he bent over the man only to find his arm powerfully gripped. Raising his head the man stared directly into his eyes, repeating the words with a force and power that came unexpected… THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING… before falling back dead on the matting inside his hut.

The Journal itself is stored in the archives of the Spanish-American Institute in Madrid and is available for consultation by researchers and scholars should the Director find such a request reasonable. Understanding it is relatively straightforward given that it is an account of his experiences given by the explorer himself. Even so, geographical location then was not at all that it is today and makes little sense set against the advances of our modern technology. What is undoubtedly puzzling, for it seems to come out of nowhere, is his account of meeting this individual and those singular almost magical words about crystal. What on earth does it mean? De Souza himself comments on their strangeness but makes no attempt to consider the matter in depth. From the perspective of an 18^th century Spanish explorer it’s all too simple enough. He writes down what he’s heard.  The man’s dead and cannot be questioned. Why bother then with any conjecture? Intriguing as the words seem speculation can only be pointless. Gold… silver… precious gems and territorial acquisition, these things he understands! Singing Crystal? Well the man was indeed feverish. Desperately sick.

Time perhaps for a little digression. Most of us know about the 16^th and 17^th century Spanish intrusion into central and South America and their conquest and despoliation of the civilisations they found there. We all remember those magical sounding names from our history lessons at school. The Aztecs and Incas, Pizarro, Cortes and Montezuma. The grim Conquistadores and the tribes and civilisations they laid waste in their Conquest and Colonisation of Latin America! Words and names we associated with another part of the planet known for its mighty rivers and jungles, giant snakes and spiders before we forgot them and went out with our mates for a lager! For many of us though those names and places came to mean something. Conjured up something else if you like. A single word describes it all… Adventure!

There were of course many expeditions into Central and South America besides those of the Cortes and Pizarro. Mostly of exploration and territorial discovery rather than plain simple conquest for loot. The school history books only recall the big names. Those that reconfigured the Continent in their image as they carved out Spain’s Imperial portfolio in brutality and blood. Others, equally interesting, are perhaps more the subject of scholarship than anything else. When I first became acquainted with Olivares’ weird muttering I wondered at first whether I’d heard right. De Souza’s Journal had recorded his search for the lost expedition of Manuel de Fraga that vanished in the high Andes somewhere near the border with Peru. After weeks spent traversing high plateau de Fraga found himself in a singularly barren region. The few Indians they came across barely co-existing with nature, speaking in a dialect that none of them knew. Gifts of food helped open a dialogue. Slow, laborious at first as he records, but gradually by signs and gestures they learned of a great earth tremor in a region of mountainous peaks not too far to the north. Travelling there proved tedious but it was only then that they learned for themselves. There far below was a vast scene of desolation. A whole series of gigantic landslips had engulfed dozens of valleys, burying them in a terrain of rock and ice and cutting them off forever from the outside world. Here then was how Manuel de Fraga’s men had met their end. Later, much further, on they’d encountered Olivares.     

Somehow he’d survived. Perhaps having been on a ridge somewhere as an out-rider he’d avoided the great cataclysm. Been left on the other side and avoided the fate of his comrades by descending eventually to the forests below.

THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING… I’d read De Souza’s account in Madrid but was left puzzled. Almost enthralled by the words. What did they mean? They sounded like the raving of a madman, that is until I thought further. The word CRYSTAL was used in the singular, Crystal, not crystals! This wasn’t some raving about crystals per se but crystal itself. Quartz Crystal perhaps or Rose Quartz. Some type of crystal but what? Interestingly enough this particular location in the Bolivia-Peru Andes region was never noted for containing any reserve of Rose Quartz or Quartz Crystal itself. Certainly not in any historical record through mining. Such reserves are to be found elsewhere, mainly Brazil which has in modern times produced large quantities of massive Rose Quartz but rarely in the form of crystals which are indeed classed as scarce. Quartz crystals on the other hand are commonplace in that country. Rock crystal however is another story altogether. It is comprehensively massive with no known crystal habit. Brazil possesses a certain amount but nothing compared to deposits found in the Peruvian high Andes and those of Bolivia as evidenced in the cultures of ancient civilisations found in those areas such as those who preceded the Incas, and in Mexico the Aztecs. Skulls carved from rock crystal not only feature in legend and form part of their history but have come down to us today as the modern products of artists and craftsmen. They were not simply features of legend but indeed formed part of ceremonial ritual.

Such ritual and ceremony is not a matter directly concerning us here. Its importance and the use made of rock crystal however points to the existence of such deposits available for use so that when I became aware of De Souza’s Journal and Olivares dying words the existence of the mineral in such abundance took on an added significance. THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING… I again tried to make sense of it all. Fortunately an extraordinary discovery came to my rescue. It is sometimes the case that those investigating and exploring the legends of ancient civilisations almost lost to our modern era can search for clues months even years on end without finding any connections or any real meaning until suddenly, purely by chance they come across something that seems insignificant and is almost put by then in a moment of unexpected inspiration a flash blinding intuition hits home and with it a real joy of insight.

It happens to all of us reader. To you and to so many others, and it happened to me. I’d been rummaging in the basement archives of the badly run down Museum of Ethnicity associated with one of the University departments in La Paz, the whole place covered in dust and many ancient tablets and manuscripts there long unattended. It was simply an old habit, fuelled by a deep personal curiosity, to thumb through just about everything. See what I could find as it were. Anything, anything might turn up. It was my own personal philosophy. Part of my character. I just didn’t know what I might find. It had of course happened to me before, time back when I’d been rummaging through some old packing crates in the basement of a warehouse in Bulawayo, South Central Africa that belonged to a friend. Suddenly I saw something and out of one I pulled a whole series of beautiful, perfectly crafted miniature axes and spears that I knew were important. They turned out to be the ceremonial regalia of the last King of the Malagasy. My friend needed dollars and let me have them for just a few hundred. There they’d been at the bottom of a crate. Something he’d got hold of and forgotten years back and was now only too glad to have the money like it was for free!

The same kind of thing happened in that dusty old basement in Bolivia. With the light not all that great I began going over the tablets pertaining to the old pre-Inca civilisations. What the hell they were doing there was a mystery. Obviously they’d all been collected many years earlier and dumped. There’d obviously been revolutionary changes of Government, curators of museums coming and going. Disappearing when new regimes put in their own people who couldn’t be bothered with the work of the old, so collections of yester-year were left to gather dust and be quietly forgotten. It was in such a situation that I found myself. A nice little gift in someone’s back pocket and there I was, sitting on a wooden crate like the curious gringo I was then unexpectedly the whole cultural history of a people in tablet and script! Great mountain peaks, valleys, displaced rock and boulder moraine along with the story of what hit me as an extraordinary legend recorded long, long before Christ, the Assyrians, Babylonians or anyone else!

Talk about staggering! It was like I’d had a rush of blood to my head, stepped out of the crease and hit the bowler for six right over the stand! There it all was! The great eruption and avalanche! The deep powerful rumbling from the bowels of the earth and the Legend of the Singing Rock Crystal! I could scarcely believe what I saw. Almost immediately Olivares’ words came to mind… the great earthquake and eruption and the lost expedition of Manuel de Fraga high in the Andes! The connection I’d chanced on was inescapable.

… The great tremor far back in time and the cataclysm so many centuries later were the same seismic phenomena. Passing through the rock crystal deposits it had created a wave which, when finally released, sounded an extraordinary almost magical chord. A singular note so powerful, so intense, that it seemed nothing human. A great cry as it were of the spirit, straight from the depths of the earth…

At first it seemed barely credible but the facts as they stood were irrefutable. Thanks to a dying man’s words and the clues from ancient pre-Inca tablets I had established a historical timeline linking Rock Crystal and the seismic activity of the region with the authentic musical note inherent in the culture of its people. A continuing Lost Chord like a voice into the past now rediscovered as the authentic note of its song. Olivares wasn’t so deluded after all. He’d escaped the great cataclysm of his time only to die in the jungle and in his last words he gave up the clue. The crystal was indeed singing and had he been with his comrades down in the valley he would never have survived to give up the secret that led to my discovery in legend.

As for myself I hope that one day I might have the good fortune to be somewhere up on those peaks, safe from any disaster, so that I might hear and likewise marvel at the deep wondrous sound of that ancient lost chord. It’s unlikely, but adventurer that I am I always like to think that there are possibilities!

NEWS AT THE END OF NOVEMBER

One of the most important news items of the week is that around 9 million Britons are in serious debt that they can’t see their way around paying with the population of half a dozen major cities involved such as Hull, Manchester and Nottingham. And what delight this must be to Tory Boy George Osborne and his Treasury who’ve just rushed to assure the British public that they have most definitely not made any kind of deal with the Big Six Energy Supply rascals cartel to lower energy prices now or in any foreseeable future. What music this must sound to the ears of price rise organizer in chief, Lib-Dem Secretary of State for Energy Ed Davey. Now at last hard pressed pensioners and the elderly know what their Lib-Dem protectors against Tory excesses in Coalition Government that they so hurriedly climbed into bed with are doing to help them out! Yes, you’ll know how concerned they are and what they’re doing to help you out when you’re shivering your balls off this coming Winter. Apart from that the news about all those millions of British people in debt must also be music to the rampant industry of loan sharks and usurers squeezing the life out of the payday loan poor. Why, if they’re in debt already they’ll have to come begging for more, especially with Christmas just round the corner.

Millions of people in desperate debt and millions of old people who can’t afford to keep warm in Winter. Sounds like Tory-Lib Dem Coalition Government on a genuine high, but never mind all of that, the Bath Christmas market has opened!

It used to be called a German style market because of all the little wooden chalet type retail outlets but actually they’re more like idealized little Swiss chalets. Maybe one hundred in all at the center of the City of Bath. All lit up and tasty looking for goggle-eyed punters to spend their end of November pay at. This market and these stalls are definitely worth visiting, but not for any sound, sensible  or commercial reasons. Not if you’ve got half a brain and are looking for something really nice, unusual, imaginative or reasonably priced to buy for family or friend. This downright conglomerate rip off will be thronging with people coming from far and wide over the next fortnight, desperate to find something worth giving and keeping that won’t end up in a charity shop early in January. Sorry! You can squeeze your way round with the merry throng of suckers but if you’ve got any real class you’ll end up wasting your time unless you’re desperate, that is, to say that you’ve bought that something in a nice carrier bag from the lovely City of Bath, joke-joke! Or unless just about any bit of unnecessary bit of overpriced crap will do because no-one turns down Christmas Gifts, do they?

Perfectly tasteless wooden ties, fanciful up their own arse little Christmas tree decorations, snowy tinsel and tree bark, loads of little home-made genuine farm-produce cheese outlets with tiny little cheesy-on-a stick liberal-democrat type tasters, chou-chou and roast chess-nut outlets run by seriously Romanian type vendors, the usual exceedingly exclusive olive oil mob, a few seriously diabolical jewelry outlets, others selling a desperate variety of bowls, all howling CRAFT at anyone deeply stupid. And then there are the wretched home-made relish and jam stalls with the usual bit of grease-proof wrapping to make them look so deadly authentic, (here another joke-joke). Many of the stalls this year are new. Traders over the last three or four having been so badly bitten by the swinging rent of Bath’s ever avaricious Council and the plain lack of trade, just not bothering to turn up any more. Not even the two or three Nepalese jewelry men who at least made an effort, or the few who sold amber or excellent sloe gin liquor or vodka, or the couple who sold some interesting tiles. Just not enough money to make it worthwhile coming back.

This year it’s mainly little cheese jobs, silly things made out of oily wood, the usual fabulously priced Christmas decorations crap and of course, the mulled cider, overpriced sausage and burgers and merry mulled wine crew. I’ve already seen people handing out notes for quite frankly Christ knows what and it’s his season after all, isn’t it? Seriously, was all the shit in the Bath Christmas market worth dying for because in all truth you’ve really got to be stupid or silly to buy anything there. There have been odd times in the past when you might have come across something nice, I mean really nice, but not anymore. I mean there are people and lights and burning meat smells and things to look at but a genuine market needs to be selling things that are really worth buying and the Bath Christmas market is endlessly full of plain crap, and none of it’s cheap either

Oh yes. There’s a stall selling homemade type beers with labels on bottles saying Old Man’s Fart, Arse Liquor, Cats Piss or Grumpy Old Sod. Now you’d really need to be wanting to buy that for someone as a gift at three for a tenner but sales were brisk as I watched. Many jolly fat-faced women indeed were dead keen, telling me it was fun and when I wondered whether the recipient might not have thought it insulting I was told I had no sense of humor! It was only then that I realised why so many people are so heavily in debt and walked away wondering for what! Nearby was a stall flogging designer figurine bottle stoppers, nudes and such like. It gives you a sense of the adolescent puerility of it all. No class and not even funny. Tasteless unfunny little gifts that reflect badly on the giver. Or do they? Well look at it this way. Why bother spending money there if your act of generosity might make you look like a jerk? Why indeed? I suggest you give it a miss unless you’re desperate that is. Or you’re the kind of woman who shovels baked beans down her gob by the shovel load or indeed thinks it’s a laugh watching her kids pulling the legs off spiders. To others, I suggest that you buy your cheese somewhere better like Lidl’s, or any pates, relishes and jams from nearby Waitrose. Honestly, they’re a much better deal.

There’s one good thing to be said for the Bath Christmas Market however. It’s only minutes away from the Real Italian Pizza Company where in my opinion they make the best pizza outside Naples and at an excellent price. I know because I’ve eaten pizza in Naples six times and it’s the world’s best! But the stuff in the Real Italian runs it a close second, especially The Four Seasons. And the Chocolate Dream sweet is to die for. The service by the way is superb.

Kindly excuse the digression but back to News of the Week! The Government have just sold off part the Student Loans Debt they held to a private company. That’s for all student loans prior to the nauseating trebling of fees to nine thousand quid. It’s calculated that by the mid 2020’s the loan debt will run to about £46 billion. That’s not millions I’m talking about but billions! Many student debtors have left the UK and gone untraced overseas but most in the UK are known. The problem is that after students lost their grants and were forced to pay fees it was believed that the extra money they’d earn by having such qualification would easily help them pay off the loan. Unfortunately having a degree has never guaranteed a much higher income and worse still, neither has it guaranteed them a job! Many in fact are employed in occupations having little to do with their degree courses and earning a poor wage besides, so the chance of them paying off their loan are minimal.

That said, the annual interest they have to pay on their student loan still keeps on going and their debt to Government is ever increasing.  That’s another feather in the cap for New Labour Government that abandoned free higher education which ultimately led to student loans being sold off to the debt sharks creating a nation of student debtors! Well done Dirty New Labour, friend of financial swindlers and bankers and enemy of students from poor working class backgrounds. Question is, how are all these student debtors ever going to pay back their loans. Worse, how are all the parents supporting the current generation of students paying £9000 a year these days in fees ever going to pay back this kind of debt? The only answer they’ll shortly discover is that they or their kids will be forced to sell off the houses they live in when the next Government flogs off the current student loans portfolio to the next round of sharks.

It explains why the last ten years of Government, whether it was New Labour or Coalition, was so hot to vastly increase student numbers. There are hundreds of thousands more students now than there were in the 1980’s. All lending money from Government. Most unable to pay back such loans in the future without suitable well paid employment! So why print all the money to hand out the loans? The answer’s simple enough. The whole tarted up promise to newly qualified students of easy better paid jobs was just a plain con. Just another big sell going nowhere in the face of endless recession, especially with universities now handing out degrees ten a penny. An undervalued degree in the face of unemployment is quite frankly worthless only somehow the loan must be repaid. And where do you think the money for that will come from?

A piece of international news barely considered but of real importance is the Ukraine refusing to sign a big Trade Treaty much trumpeted by the European Union. Such a ‘deal’ had been widely sought both by the EU along with the Americans only the Ukraine’s last minute refusal put a serious dent in their plans. Russian pressure, even blackmail by President Putin, was blamed and the President of the European Union and others were seriously pissed.

The Russians, unsurprisingly, put pressure on the Ukraine to abandon the deal which the EU intended they sign up to at a summit in Riga. Instead, despite putting pressure on the ex-Soviet Republic, they got the big heave ho. So what were the reasons? Firstly Russia is the Ukraine’s main trading partner. If the deal had gone through a great flood of cheap foreign goods from Asia by way of Europe would have flooded the Ukrainian  markets to the detriment of Russian exports. Seems reasonable enough until you scratch under the surface. Far more important, a Ukrainian Trade Deal with the EU would also have meant a tie up with NATO, in effect with the Americans. Ultimately such a tie up would have resulted in pressure on the Ukraine to station NATO i.e. American warplanes, on its territory just a short hop from Russia, Ukraine’s next door neighbor. The Trade Treaty sounded like a simple fair exchange of goods only it was far more devious than that. America with nuclear weapons on Russia’s doorstep? Sounds a bit like nuclear missiles in Cuba to me!

Just as devious as Obama, David Cameron and other European heads of state assuring the Israelis that the Iranians will definitely behave themselves and won’t go on producing more weapons grade uranium to make nuclear bombs if they give them lots of money. Then they’ll allow them to check how much of the stuff they’re really producing under the deal they worked out in Geneva! Problem is, now that everyone’s gone home with the Iranians laughing their heads off, this murderous gang of fanatics has said that reducing their production of uranium wasn’t part of the deal anyway! And far more important, it’s now clear that the United Nations Weapons Inspectorate won’t have any mechanism in place to check whether their friends in Tehran are keeping ANY PART OF THEIR PROMISE because they won’t be ready and able for another 6 months.    

The result is everything the Iranians along with their friends in the White House and Whitehall ever wanted. They’re not on good terms with Britain and the United States while the Jewish State of Israel is isolated and friendless. That’s quite okay really. Obama, John Kerry and William Hague were never genuine friends of the State of Israel and the Jewish people anyway so it’s good for them to know where they stand. And where is that? Basically exactly where they were in 1933 facing annihilation, only they didn’t quite know it then. The difference now with six million gassed is that they know exactly how it is.

Final item of news. For all England football fans, so it’s more important than anything else. The world famous Itaquerao football stadium in Sao Paulo that was hoped would host many games in the World Cup in Brazil next year has just partly collapsed. Oh dear!

BICYCLE THUGS

Unlike the great human drama of Bicycle Thieves, a story about a poor Italian worker and his bike told in one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neo-realist classic, Bicycle Thugs is a post about people who ride bikes in Britain today; who they are and their conduct on the streets of our cities, often foul and illegal.

Let me say immediately that not all cyclists behave illegally and are vile in their temper and conduct. Such behaviour only characterizes a minority. What I do say however is that it is not entirely exclusive to a minority but, like some psychological disease of the mind, break out at any time inflicting  itself on just  about anyone who rides a bike in the form of some random act of bad temper, illegality or violence. Such psychotic or paranoid behaviour is not a general attribute. Something that occurs all the time. It is a thing that may be best described as potential, always lurking below the surface and likely to erupt as an impetuous act of illegality such as going through a red traffic light, turning without signalling, jumping a curb or riding at speed along a pavement crowded with pedestrians.

The question is not whether such things are done but why cyclists do them. For one thing riding a bike on a pavement is illegal and dangerous to others while making a turn without signalling can have serious consequences. Worse still, jumping a red light against fast moving traffic in the vicinity can be potentially fatal, not only for the transgressor but for others forced to slap on emergency brakes. As said not all bike riders behave like this but many undoubtedly do. They take dangerous risks. Do things that are wrong and mostly with the knowledge that what they are doing is wrong yet still do it. The reason perhaps is not because they simply don’t care or are wilfully neglectful. Not at all. A more plausible explanation is that they adopt a certain degree of flexibility in their conduct in knowing what is right and what is or wrong. What they can do and can’t.

Right or wrong become bendable concepts, according to circumstances or mood or maybe both. Conduct then become a matter of judgement. Not what should or should not be done but what they can do safely or judge to have the least risk or element of danger. Ultimately such loose or flexible judgement becomes a habit, a kind of game. Playing dice if you will with their lives or those of others only they don’t see it like that. The game is theirs. They play it. It becomes who they are and the game therefore cannot be criticized. To criticize their conduct on road or pavement becomes a criticism of themselves because they and their conduct have become one and the same thing. If to others it seems they take risks and do crazy things it’s because they’ve become chancers. People who don’t give a damn.

Theirs is an exercise in freedom to do their own thing and their bike is the vehicle on which they ride their own psychic spontaneity. It becomes a means to create a new and unchecked Them. An agglomeration of judgements based on their control of a moving machine. Each rider is literally in their own individual saddle and if the bicycle is a means, the ‘ride’ they gain from it is either a confirmation of what they already are or a vehicle helping them to become something else. Riding a bicycle for many is liberating. True, it may only take them to work and back on the cheap or into the countryside along a canal or river towpath or give them a ride through town. Whatever the case such mobility can provide an innervating solitary freedom. A feeling of control and empowerment, especially facing a world of work within which they have no power and are personally visible as part of a team. In this sense time on a bike is a precious individuation they have to sacrifice the moment they go through the door. A preparation in the form of a psychological enhancement before they give up the wholeness of self. That journey into work each morning is a big deal and the ride home at the end even bigger.

While they’re on their bike though they can if they wish indulge in acts of spontaneity. Play occasional ‘tricks’. Take little liberties or short cuts deviating from sensibility. No harm doing this or that if it’s safe so they think! Throughout it all alas there’s always a big fly in the ointment. The existence of others! Those they must share the street or towpath with! Pedestrians on the pavement, bad enough, but then those dreaded swine on the road. Motorists! As said, all bike riders are hard wired for pathology, much the same as all human beings, yet on their bikes they can become potential problems, in conduct, temper and temperament. This is only logical as there is no real check or force to control it.

There are two fundamental differences between cyclists and other road users. Cyclists have no protection around them in the form of a metal structure and are therefore far more vulnerable to injury, added to which two wheels are a less balanced structure than four. Their often dangerous behaviour is then all the more surprising and foolhardy given the element of risk compounded by this lack of protection. Equally important however is the fact that cyclists are anonymous. Their vehicles carry no identification such as a number plate or any other official mark of registration. All other road using vehicles carry such registration, except electric mobility scooters that is. Their users are identifiable, cyclists are not. This gives the cyclist an unlimited license to behave in any manner they choose. They can indeed behave illegally without any fear of identification and apprehension. A privilege each has over all other road users. And while pedestrians carry no license they are nonetheless vulnerable because if hit or knocked over they are incapable of apprehending such a mobile assailant if the cyclist continues on their way at speed.

Cyclists on the other hand are able to identify and therefore complain about the conduct of other road users if they wish and increasing numbers are doing so it seems. Motorists however don’t have that luxury. Cyclists are thus empowered to complain and act against other road users and given the febrile climate in the national psychology which in the last decade has seen a sharp increase of false allegation and complaint made to the police, such an imbalance between cyclist and motorist has become one of the greatest dangers existing on British roads today. Cyclists, either by design or default, have been empowered to commit all forms of negative and dangerous conduct without question or check and many are only too well aware of their empowerment.

There is then what seems to be a genuine war taking place on the roads and pavements of our country. On one side is an anonymous brigade of what may best be described as two wheel vigilantes with neo-fascist tendencies who think they can behave as they please on our streets and roads without apprehension. On the other is the car or truck driver sick to death of the plastic helmeted lizard lickers regularly giving them two fingers for every slick and tricky in and out of moving vehicles that gives them regular palpitation close under the wheels only to see them emerge again giving them yet another big finger.

Let’s call it for what it is. The problem is men on bikes, not women. Women cyclists, research shows, reveal a far more equitable temperament both in relation to their machine and to the circumstances surrounding its use. This is primarily functional, centered around transport and pleasure. Both uses eminently practical. For men however the story is different. The main group of users fall between the age range thirty to fifty and fit neatly in the lower middle class. While those below this age range, mainly students, tend to speed they are less inclined to bother pedestrians on pavements. Those at the upper end of the larger group are more problematic and have entered popular culture as The Menopause Mob and not without reason. Believing themselves to be better cyclists than most they consider their conduct on our roads above criticism and can therefore be highly aggressive when taken to task. It is strongly recommended that they should not be approached  by members of the public if perceived to be acting in a dangerous manner.

This group in particular is visibly becoming a cult with a strong attachment to designer helmets, clothing and cycling gadgets. They race around London getting to work not because it’s cheap but because they like being seen. It’s a kind of Tory, Liberal-Democrat thing. Toe-rags on wheels if you like. And with Lib-Dems of course it’s doing their bit to save the planet or any other pathetic shit they can come up with. In recent days however, after an unusually high number of road accident fatalities involving cyclists, there has been an extensive police blitz in areas where some of these have occurred. These checks have resulted in many cyclists being cautioned for red light jumping along with other careless and unsafe conduct.

If motorists understand anything with respect to cyclists it’s the absolute need to drive with great care and safety. For financial reasons as much as anything else. All motor accidents cost. They result in higher insurance premiums, something that does not affect cyclists who are not required to insure themselves or their bikes . Quite frankly, absolving cyclists from insurance is ludicrous, especially in matters of third party liability. For example, if ever a cyclist is deemed responsible for causing an accident, they do not have to pay the person they knock over or injure for the damage they cause. So not only are cyclists and their bikes allowed anonymity, they are financially removed from insurance against accident liability. Wait, it gets even better! All motor vehicles are required to carry current certification of roadworthiness. Failure to do so while in use is deemed a criminal offence. Bikes however, while using the road, are not required to be roadworthy! Such as possessing adequately functioning brakes for example. Furthermore, in law, there is no requirement for any check on such roadworthiness! It’s quite okay to ride on a road surrounded by moving traffic without having any adequate means to suddenly stop! And what joy, the same applies on pavements, never mind babies in prams.

Talk about arses in the jam! No identification or vehicle registration… No requirement for insurance… No safety requirement for roadworthiness… Now all of this wouldn’t be too bad if they were just having fun whizzing up and down mountain tracks only we’re not talking weekend leisure here but daily use on public highways often full of large fast moving trucks and often in dangerous wet weather conditions to say nothing of ice. Consider the above factors then consider the circumstances within which cyclists operate, particularly without personal protection, and you’ll realise that there’s a strange lack of connectivity here. It’s like there’s a strict legal framework for one set of road users and absolutely none for another, both of whom share the same common ground.  

Another thing abundantly clear is that there’s absolutely no love lost between cyclist and motorist. Drivers of commercial vehicles such as delivery trucks use them for their work. They make up part of their job. Cyclists use their bikes as a preferred means of transportation. More often than not they don’t have to. There may be other options so using a bike is a matter of choice. It’s a luxury most motorists don’t have. Riding a bike then, in almost every way, is a luxury. On for which cyclists should be grateful. Yet there they go, hurtling along pavements giving the finger to people they only just miss and doing likewise to car owners and truck drivers before whizzing away thinking they’ve got one over on you. It all begs the question. Who the hell are these people who think they can do this?

Well we know who some of them are. There’s David Cameron and Boris Johnson for starters. Two Tory-boys who spend time posing on bikes because they think it makes them look popular. Well I have a message for you. If you think you’re being populist and blokey, think again. Your fellow cyclist electorate is detested by most British motorists for what they are allowed to get away with.

The solution to the whole cycling conundrum is simple. All owners of bicycles should be legally required to register them on a national database and carry such registration as a non-detachable number plate fixed to their vehicle. Such a registration would contain full personal details of ownership such as name, address and occupation of the owner. It would also include details of a compulsory annual check for roadworthiness to be paid for by the owner along with a fee for registration. Furthermore, all owners of bikes would be required to insure their vehicles against third party liability for accident. These requirements would provide a serious boost to the British economy both in revenue raised by the Treasury and in the growth of the insurance industry. And most important, it would give serious pdrotection both to cyclists and other road users along with pedestrians. Cyclists might even be compelled to pay some form of road tax to help maintain roads that they use just like everyone else. Such measures would certainly make Britain a more prosperous place.

David Cameron and George Osborne please note. Here is a way of raising billions for the Exchequer. It would help the country get over its financial crisis and part of the money raised could be used to fund apprenticeships and scholarships for young people. License and tax cyclists, and insist they’re insured. It will make you popular with millions!