New police vehicles patrol Bristol

It rained here so much for the first half of May that it felt like being on the set of Blade Runner. It’s brightened up a bit in the last few days, but I need to get some bile out of my system now that may have been partly rain-induced.

One problem with living in an English speaking country is you cannot escape the political and advertising bullshit going on around you. It’s as if the Arab language suddenly became utterly clear to you, in all its nuances and you found yourself stuck in a maglis listening to an endless line of toadies singing the praises of their glorious leader, every day for the rest of your life.

A week ago Tony Blair announced his resignation date and the Gordon Brown band wagon trundled out like some fifty storey pig-iron horse on enormous splintering oak wheels. His first announcement was clearly made to counter the impression that the Labour government was a totalitarian monolith – a control freakish, media spinning monstrosity - centralizing power and removing civil liberties at any opportunity. This is what he said and I’m quoting verbatim:

"One of my first acts as prime minister would be to restore power to Parliament in order to build the trust of the British people in our democracy. Government must be more open and more accountable to Parliament - for example in decisions about peace and war, in public appointments and in a new ministerial code of conduct."

He also said:

"I want to lead a government humble enough to know its place - where I will always strive to be - and that is on people's side,"

Fine words which we can all agree on. Except that, without missing a beat, within two days his senior henchmen, the usual party lickspittles and the conservative big guns and backbench arselikains had all voted to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act and the need, for example, for details about their expenses to be made public. You had to be here to see how disgusting it all was. Only a few weeks before a handful of MPs had managed to talk this shameless bill out of the Commons. It was brought back in with unheard of speed (to the shock of all political journalists who said it was a dead duck) ahead of other more important legislation. Then hundreds of Labour and Conservatives zombie drones flooded into the usually empty chamber in a coordinated campaign from the highest levels of both parties to make sure no other troublemakers could talk it out again.

Then two days after that the government did away with the need for the usual planning permission for airports, motorways and nuclear power stations. From now on a quango will rubber stamp these kind of proposals and locals will be able to decide on the colour of the entrance gates if they are lucky. Mind you, if you want a small windfarm, you would still have to apply the usual way. This proposal was accompanied by a little provision that makes it easier for people to build house extensions so that it would be more easily swallowed by middle England.

What’s so depressing is the silence that has accompanied it all. The bill to exempt the British Parliament (not the Scottish or Welsh or N.Ireland Assembly I should add) hardly made the news at all. You had to be a bit of a political nerd to hear anything about it. Okay so I’m a bit nerdy but I don’t watch Question Time or know the names of 7/8ths of the Cabinet so I’m not that nerdy.

But the thing that really did it for me was last night watching television – there was an advert. An advert for a Golf car. The sound track? …..Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood. Cultural smash and grab of the most shameless form. Utterly depressing - and yet, follow the link below and you'll see the Guardian thinks its great!

http://media.guardian.co.uk/advertising/story/0,,2082220,00.html

Good old Guardian – can always be relied on to suck an advertiser’s crock before spitting out its progressive politics.

And the coup de grace today: MPs are coming to the aid of McDonalds who want OED to change their definition of McJob which is currently and quite correctly:

“An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.”

To something about how stimulating and worthwhile it is with marvelous career prospects.

So when you come back to have your iris scanned by the Department of Justice at Heathrow and pass eight thousand CCTV cameras to get to the countryside and find it has been bulldozed to make way for Sizewell C, D, E, F and G, a motorway service station and a teenager with a Prozac grin serving you fries at McDonalds and all the bees are dead because of mobile phone masts and mankind has only ‘five years’ (as the Bowie lyrics go) then don’t say I didn’t warn you.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/16/nbees16.xml

(check out the ad ad that goes with it is for Samsung mobile phones)

Flip Flopping

The seasons in England are wonderful. One minute you are shivering in a wet park amongst the wind blown daffodils – coat zipped up to your chin. The next everyone is wandering amongst the blossom in flip flops and t shirts. The weather has been weirdly hot on some days. Flying back from Ireland (where the temperature never rises above 15C) at the end of the Easter break, we found ourselves on a hot coach and then a desperately overcrowded train to get home where there was neither air conditioning nor openable windows. Women fanned themselves pathetically with scraps of paper and a baby started to overheat dangerously. Of course nobody complained. Except me that is. I am now funding every other train journey with train vouchers from the customer complaints department of First Great Western.

That was a few weeks ago. Now it’s the 2^nd of May but it already feels like midsummer. Young ladies are walking around wearing embarrassingly skimpy scraps of denim called ‘miniskirts’ and showing off sunburnt legs. I think ten years in the Middle East has sharpened by pornographic skills to tremendous levels. People in this country are WALKING AROUND IN THEIR UNDERWEAR! I need to invest in some prayer beads and grow my beard a little longer.

Unfortunately, everyone is in flip flops. Only a few people have nice enough toes to wear flip flops. I was embarrassed wearing them by the pool in Al Ain. Isobel still misses Al Ain, but it’s more along the lines of, ‘Why is my bedroom smaller than the bathroom in my old bedroom?’ By the way, that was the bedroom with thousands of huge electronic gadgets and toys made in sweat shops in China (brought by 'Father Christmas' and her friend’s harassed parents on her birthdays) as opposed to the bedroom where you literally can’t fit a full length bed in the room and has a cereal-box sized collection of cheap trinkets and small plastic dolls.

Oh yes and Isobel also wonders ‘Why is the pavement cool enough to walk on with bare feet?’ and more urgently ‘Where the hell is Primrose?’ Primrose is well but from the letters we get very keen to get out of Sri Lanka which sounds pretty scary around Trincomalee and back to the UAE to slave for another bunch of SPOILED BRATS. Oh, Isobel shall I iron your socks for you? Pah! As the ‘househusband’ round here I am all for the reintroduction of child labour in the local mines. Primrose is missed and I particularly kick myself for not videoing her making those amazing curries to find out her secrets. She told me a hundred times but I got as far as coconut powder something something and then my eyes glazed over and I turned into Homer Simpson smelling the food and unable to think clearly. Certainly my Asda cook in sauce curries just don’t compare.

Anything else? I bet you have all booked your holidays by now. Where to this year? Let me think…. Turkey, Australia, Argentina, Kenya, Switzerland? Oh I know, how about Staines’s famous Thorpe Park for an afternoon! No, fortunately that experience awaits other materially and spiritually ravaged Brits. We’re going back to the French ruin in progress in August thank God. We still have a few bourgeois pretensions to hang on there at least. When you lot come next summer you have to stock the cavernous concrete pit under the house with vintage wines. That way we can hitchhike down to France and live off bread, goats cheese and fine wines for a month, instead of scrabbling around for money behind the sofa to buy a 2.10 bottle of Spanish ‘table wine’ at Tesco. It's got so bad we even prostituted ourselves and our children, and our dogs, to advertise Winalot for 150 quid. If you don't believe me buy the June edition of Eve magazine and gaze on how how low we have fallen. Incidentally, the dogs have never had anything so luxurious as Winalot in their lives.

I'm not really being fair, it is utterly gorgeous here right now and we're not really that broke because Sarah is on full time hours! Whoohoo! She's knackered and I hardly see her but there is food on the table again. Furthermore my studies are going a treat. After a slightly worrying week when my tutors were muttering about scaring the pensioners of Bournemouth with my wild eyed political ravings and ultra-violent clips from current affairs coverage of Iraq at a lecture at a sleepy local hotel, they seem pacified by my written ‘initial review’ and I’m through to the next stage. This just shows that I have buckled to naked coercion and have made myself complicit in the very process of hegemonic compromise that I am describing. Doh!

Workers of the world unite!

Dave Spart

Collective of Househusbands and Forty Something Students (Westwood Branch)

Write with the news! xxx