August 2007

Driving down to France is an endurance test relieved only by the astonishment of how good food can be. Last year Sarah drove with the dogs and I flew with Tom and Isobel, arm still recovering from Al Ain hospital tomfoolery. That excuse wasn’t going to wash this year so I kept Sarah company on the long drive down and Irish Granny was responsible for our delightful children on the Easy jet route to Lyon. Some people love driving huge distances, others enjoy watching cricket, listening to the Archers, or eating at Pizza Hut. They are all nuts.

Our friends who live very nearby in France have worked miracles on the ruin with a budget you might replace two windows in England with. It now has working bathroom and kitchen with enough hot water to keep 13 guests happy … or at least fairly clean. It has beds with duvets. It has new floors, ceilings and stairs that don’t unexpectedly give way with rot. You can now walk around the house without the serious risk of plunging to your death, except one hangar where we occasionally had to keep dragging young children back from a lethal precipice onto the garden below. It even had a woodburning stove with a temporary chimney out of a window. This came in useful in the first week when we remembered how cold it can be at 950 metres above sea level in freezing mist. One night we watched an old (fabulous) Chaplin talkie called Limelight and my mother who was wearing four jumpers and a coat as the fire crackled pathetically at the other end of the house said how much our house reminded her of life in rural Ireland in the 1950s.

This was the week when we were a little spooked by the sound of large country rats on our roof at night, or the discovery of several beautifully patterned grass snakes in the wilderness of nettles that was our back garden. The children also had fun chasing bats from the upper galley at night. We soon made short work of the nettles with a few days working the scythe and we decided that the snakes would keep the mice and rat population at a manageable level. Our biggest job was the colossal pile of wood at the back of the house which we sorted into slightly less massive piles of good wood to keep for the fire and rotten wood to burn. In the third week - with the help of unsuspecting friends who thought they had come to France to relax - we had a monstrous bonfire and burned a wicker man (sounds more occult than burning a 'guy'). A large gaggle of wild haired and dirty children laughed demonically as the guy’s stripey black and white French style t shirt and twig ribs burned with an unearthly roar.

I have painted a slightly alarming picture here but we had a really good month especially after the first week when the weather got much better. Despite working continuously moving piles of wood and walking in the countryside we came back fat as ever from the delicious wine and cheese and other food delights. The kids had great fun and we saw lots of friends and family. It’s a great place for reunions because there is so much space and it is so secluded – the kids call yell away. So if you have the nerve for roughing it in the hills of the Auvergne in August with unlimited supplies of baguettes, goats cheese and Ricard and two overweight hosts, you know where to apply.

July 2007, I think

I'm writing this with the summer already disappearing from view like a speck on the horizon (in September), but if I recall correctly in July we decided that the only way to discipline our children was to set birds of prey upon them as the picture here shows.

It also stopped raining briefly enough for us to see a marvelous display of falconry at a local castle by a couple dressed in medieval costume.

What else happened in July? ...End of school events, like a Chinese dragon procession through the streets of Bradford and also a fine musical at the school with Tom playing a member of a jury. This is all an eternity ago so I'll just post some pictures instead...



Note the huge spooky owl in the middle.



This picture misses the lady's groovy platformed clogs.



Chinese dragon and, er, English flag waving event.
(Sarah reliably informs me this was in fact St. George's Day which is in April.)



Tom found God and then lost him again,
so he tried ringing..

June/July 2007

It has been the wettest May and June in England since 1738 - which is when records began, so it may in fact be the wettest May and June since the Cretaceous Era. The rain just hasn’t stopped falling out of the sky and half of England is underwater. Fortunately, we are on a big hill so we’ve been spared the horror of sewage flowing through our living rooms which has happened to thousands of people from the Cotswold’s to Hull. Friends on holiday from the UAE have grimaced and thought to themselves, ‘God I’m never coming back to this.’ We’re constantly apologizing to them for the rain, just like my mother does whenever we visit her in the west of Ireland (where it really does rain all the time).

Last week we spent a night at the Village Pump Folk Festival which is just two miles from our house on a farm by Farleigh Hungerford. The rain actually stopped for a few hours so we could put our tent up and wander across the lovely farm land to the performance area. There after getting the obligatory plastic wrist bands we enjoyed music by Martin Carthy, The Levellers and some very good local acts. Isobel and Tom danced to a 10 piece Madness style band until one in the morning and then we walked back to our tent just before the rain started again.

It rained all night and at 7 in the morning we decided to pack up before the fields turned into a Glastonbury-style disaster zone. We took down our fiendishly complicated tent around the sleeping children and then put them and the sodden canvas into the car and drovc gingerly out of the waterlogged fields. Later that day they had to use tractors to tow the cars out of the festival. The joys of summer.

In other news Tom was an extra for a day and dressed fetchingly as a 19^th century country yokel for a BBC production of Lark Rising to Candleford, so watch out for a glimpse of a long-haired bumpkin in a cloth cap amongst the crowd of villagers if it ever reaches your screens.

June 2007

I can just see the queues at Dubai and Abu Dhabi airport now, the overpowering smell of aftershave and perfume, the moment of tension as the border guard’s manicured hand taps your passport number onto the computer keyboard and the bored expression as s/he waves you through. And then the smile as you know you have six weeks, an exotic destination or two and a bank account full of money to spend. You lucky dogs. And then the thought – just two maybe three more years of this and I’ll have saved enough…. Just one more contract…..

We’ve been back almost a year now and the report card is looking ok – no-one has starved to death, our house has not been repossessed yet and the sun has shone on brief occasions in the last few weeks. Yes, even the odd flash of sunlight in between the heaviest rainfall in recorded history in Britain for June and devastating floods across the nation.

The things we still miss are friends, salary cheque, swimming pool, barbeques, camping, and Trudy’s parties. But these are balanced by… … er, balanced by what? The friends and family we left behind, English pubs, the seasons, countryside, culture, not biting your lip every time the latest psycho manager adds some new humiliation to your day; not having wankers flashing their lights in your rear mirror as they drive at 160 miles per hour two inches from your bumper; escaping the tedium of the 1,000 km long mall; ‘Freedom!!’ as Mel Gibson screams before his heart is ripped out in Braveheart.

After a year there is no profound advice to give except ‘save, save, save!’ It’s scary how much money you get through resettling. Money has been the only worry – obviously getting a job has been difficult but it can be done, if you are prepared to start on two hours a week at the local FE College, or work full time shovelling cement alongside Polish labourers.

We’re still not been getting out that much, but we did have a glorious day last weekend sailing on Sarah’s sister’s husband’s yacht down the river Ex from Topsham to Exmouth. The sun shone all day and we slept overnight on the yacht after mooring by a pub and drinking the local beers and ciders. West country cider, mmmmmm. As regards sailing - I love the bit where you sit on the deck with a glass of something, watching the light reflecting off the estuary. The stuff with all those ropes and sails seems a bit of a distraction from that side of things. Young Tom only seemed to like the ropes part of it – so hopefully he can be trained up and I can just snooze like a pensioner on a cruise ship if we ever get invited again.

This week TV continues to take up the best part of the evening after a hard day of walking the dogs, hanging out endless baskets of washing and reading Robin Day’s or some other overpaid BBC journalist’s turgid autobiography. Everyone moans about the telly but I think now is a golden age. There certainly is more rubbish than ever on the box, but if you are handy with a remote you can see all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff. When we left England 11 years ago there were just 4 channels so if you didn’t like Coronation Street, Eastenders or American sitcoms the chances are you were stuck watching the likes of Floyd getting drunk while cooking a delicacy in some sun-drenched corner of Europe (on a good night) which was no comfort in mid-February in Manchester when it had not stopped raining for two months.

Now there’s always something to pass the time. A film, a comedy, a reality TV programme, last night The History of the Barbarians by Terry Gilliam, Krapp’s Last Tape starring Harold Pinter, the Simpsons and Have I Got News for You – still going strong. Even the most mundane looking programme can be interesting and tell you a lot about living in Britain. For example Points West - a dull as ditchwater local news programme got an architect called George Ferguson to look at the multimillion pound regeneration of Gloucester Docks which is about an hour’s drive north of us. The docks only have a handful of visitors a day, despite having a ton of money thrown at it. So the architect went to the centre of two busy, successful port towns: Copenhagen and Amsterdam to see what made them tick. One of the first things Ferguson learnt from his Dutch and Danish peers was the importance of slowing everything down to human speed. In the old centres of both towns everyone either walks or cycles or perhaps gets a tram for the longer distances. Cars are very, very expensive to park and drive in the centre of town and are generally about as rare as a horse on the streets of London. The economies of Copenhagen and Amsterdam are thriving because people enjoy being out and about – chatting, having coffee, browsing in the market stalls, eating in pavement cafes and watching life go by. The old central dockside areas are peaceful, pleasant, pedestrianised areas to be in so people live there, eat there, meet there and spend their money there.

Gloucester by comparison is dominated by car-clogged roads so nobody walks or cycles anywhere or goes within a mile of the docks. So after doing his research the architect presented his ideas for regenerating the old port area to the local council worthies by showing a film of what he had learned in Denmark and Holland on a big screen at night by Gloucester dockside itself. He emphasised that you have to make it people friendly, have attractive spaces rather than concrete squares with the wind howling around about. This bring lots of small businesses, traditional crafts and market stalls to the area. He wanted to change the infrastructure to encourage cycling and walking so that people would stop and stay.

But he might as well have brought a wheelbarrow full of dog shit to the old duffers on the council who sat there with folded arms and sour faces. They didn’t believe that Gloucester had anything to learn from fancy European cities and whinged at him: ‘People may like walking and cycling in Amsterdam, but this is Gloucester and we do things differently.’ ‘Yes, you stupid old farts’ were the words hovering about his tightly pursed lips. I wanted him to grab them by their woollen sweaters and throw them into the dock.

Lets face it England is not and never will be a part of Europe. We love dirty, polluted and rubbish-strewn streets too much. We want our kids to lie around sniffing glue or dart about in hoods spraying graffiti on motorway underpasses. Better still they should learn to joyride cars expertly around faceless estates and then leave them burnt out in the deserted parks for younger kids to smoke crack in. If life was good in Britain what would people have to complain about? We don’t want the streets clogged up with people chatting or riding bicycles. We are a nation of Jeremy Clarksons who would rather sit in a thousand mile traffic jam and run down cyclists in enormous four-wheel drives at the traffic lights than actually stop and get out of our effing cars for a minute to smell the tulips. It won’t be long before we go the way of Los Angeles where you’re liable to be arrested for walking anywhere.

That New European Constitution

Today the EU are busy redrafting the European constitution and one suggestion that has been floated is to have a rotating administration where different countries take exclusive responsibilities for specific policy areas for a number of years each. Then after every country has had a go we’d know which countries do the best jobs and maybe make them permanently in charge of particular departments. The trouble is this could go very well for some years and really badly in other years. In a good year it could look something like this:

Country Area of Responsibility

England: Music and television

France: Food and wine

Italy: Fashion and design

Finland: Foreign relations

Switzerland: Banking and democracy

Germany: Engineering and train timetables

Sweden: Anti-corruption and social services

Norway: Energy and environment

Spain: Art and Nightlife

Czech Republic: Beer and jazz

Denmark: Health and the economy

Hungary: Steam baths and goulash

Holland: Transport and drugs

Scotland: Stand-up comedy and whisky

Ireland: Literature and Guinness

….but in a bad year it could look like this:

Country Area of Responsibility

England: Transport and foreign relations

France: Music and television

Italy: Anti-corruption and democracy

Finland: Nightlife and art

Switzerland: Stand up comedy and goulash

Germany: Food and jazz

Sweden: Beer and whisky

Norway: Whaling

Spain: Steam baths and engineering

Czech Republic: Energy and the environment

Denmark: Wine and literature

Hungary: Social services and environment

Holland: Guinness

Scotland: Drugs and Health

Ireland: Fashion and design

Any other suggestions? I’ve left out dozens of European countries, but what can you say about the likes of Macedonia and Portugal?

Write soon with your holiday news and all the goss.

David

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

A satisfied customer writes

13 Chestnut Grove
Upper Westwood
Wiltshire
March 2007


FAO: Customer Services Team
Freepost SWB40576
Plymouth
PL4 6ZZ


Dear Customer Services Team,

I am writing to congratulate your company on its ‘Travelling in Time’ First Great Western train experience. This service is a vividly realised recreation of the old diesel locomotive service of the 1950s that serviced now abandoned rural routes. The startlingly accurate post-war period detail really gives the impression that visitors have stepped back in time to a dilapidated public transport system in a ration-book Britain just recovering from the ravages of the Second World War.

I have enjoyed the experience so much that I have made the long, leisurely journey to the south coast a regular part of my week. It gives me plenty of time to enjoy the unspoilt Wiltshire countryside through authentically grime-stained windows, with the train sometimes approaching the speed of a cantering horse. Furthermore, the ugly livery of modern train services is always tastefully obscured by inches of mud so that passengers can more easily imagine themselves in the grey gloom of an earlier industrial age.

The station I travel from is blissfully calm by the river at 6.15am and this morning I appreciated the opportunity to spend an extra twenty-five minutes gazing at the moon through the mist and chatting with a fellow traveller about your famous ‘living museum’ tour service. I notice that the information point has been disconnected to enhance the sensation of returning to a bygone age, (when telephones were still something of a novelty) as the telephone number given to report a fault appears to be disconnected too.

On my return each evening, I also enjoy being crammed into two carriages at Southampton like some child evacuee from the Blitz. It definitely brings out the sense of community in people sadly lacking on other train lines, with Great Western commuters chatting about the novelty and surprises of their daily journeys. Have you ever thought about installing gas lights on your trains? Perhaps you should insist on period dress, or at least provide flat caps and bowlers for commuters to look the part. You could, I imagine, sell the whole package to foreign tourists, who often complain about the vanishing heritage of this country.

I have also enjoyed your steam service (at least I assume it was an early steam engine by the speed of the carriage) travelling up on the Weymouth line. As you know, the original Orient Express still passes along the line to Bristol from time to time, but the terrifying speed of that locomotive alarms many citizens in the West Country more used to the gentler pace of your trains.

Sadly, the Virgin or South West services from Southampton to Bournemouth rudely propels me into the late 20th century on the second leg of my journey. Please do not think of introducing such a vulgar, fast and timely service to the West Country. We have quite enough visitors as it is.

Kind regards,

A passenger