Blog 136 ‘Catastrophic Consequences’

‘Catastrophic Consequences’

This was the phrase that jarred me awake as my radio clicked on last Thursday morning. Clearly it was the end of a sentence I will never know the start of. But it is a global sentence for sure. 

In the post election fug – what better than to speculate about what may have preceded the declaration of calamitous cataclysmic ruin (I do like tautologies).

Had there been another earthquake or had a ‘fashion icon’ gone for the wrong hairstyle / dress / shade of nail varnish.

Was it a general statement about the West’s failure to step up to its global responsibilities, had there been an outbreak of another virus that might affect white people (see blog 105 Ebola – What’s really gruesome).

Maybe a celebrity had shown her boobs at a celebrity event in front of other celebrities and was now pictured in celebrity magazines being gawped at by people who give a shit about celebrities.

Had another cover-up of child abuse / tax evasion / political corruption been uncovered.

Had a famous couple had another baby / tattoo / row/wedding/divorce.

Perhaps the queen had a nightmare about the country being run by someone NOT from Eton?

Are the icecaps melting faster than ever – sea-life struggling to survive in warming, polluted oceans, are people dying in their thousands on open waters in un-seaworthy boats having been taken advantage of by people traffickers or did some guy, being paid more per week than the economy of a small town, fail to kick a bit of leather into a net.

Did the press forget to spend pages and air hours ‘breaking’ stories that were on the internet three days ago.

Or did someone who is in magazines a lot kiss ‘n tell.

The real irony is that we are living a Cataclysmic Catastrophe and the Consequences are starting to show. (see bog 12 Armageddon will not be televised) No hyperbole required.

Blog 135 Kim Kardashian & UK elections – I TOLD you...

I wanted to write about the RIDICULOUS parade known as the Met Gala after a friend emailed me some pics. But then I thought – as I blogged about this result months ago – it’s only polite to tip a nod to the UK election.

But I can have my cake and eat it, which is always good. There is a parallel. There were, at the US freak show, women without proper clothes on and here in our general election were a whole bunch of people who wouldn't acknowledge that the emperor was wearing no clothes. (OK it’s tenuous.)

Lots of non-pollsters including yours truly saw it coming. See – for example - blogs

50. Ed Miliband – Political Semolina

88. Off with their Eds

107. Labour’s gift to the Tories (with BGOTR equations for the avoidance of doubt)

But everyone in the media was surprised.

So – to the Met. Usually I am spared these flesh fests as I don’t have TV don’t buy magazines and don’t follow celebrity ‘news’ but in the interests of humour and feminist despair a friend sent images. Wohooow. And there before me – grown women dressed like Christmas trees in outfits that looked as if they were designed by demented three-year-olds gone crazy with a glitter pen and the contents of the bottom of the craft drawer.

And somehow there seemed to be lots of glitz and gauze and spangle and dazzle but without, in some cases, leaving much flesh actually covered. Some feat.

Put some flippin clothes on for heaven’s sake. From one brown girl to another –have some self respect.

Ok – I get that Kim is just there to be gawped at but Beyonce honey you can SING. WHY?

I don’t see the guys parading about in gold lame jock straps.

And that is what we get with politics. Lots of flashy statement and nothing to hide the desperation underneath. Sound bites while having no core, no principles no backbone is like having the sequins and gauze without the tits the arse or the voice.

OK – politically – what I am saying is we want the tits and arse not just the sequins... So that analogy fell apart spectacularly. Hey ho.

Clegg got what he deserved. Hopefully his party, as well as the electorate, now despise him. The Labour party got what they were always going to get but in the process let the British people down so badly. Farage not getting elected was way less than he deserved but hey – pushing someone in a pile of dog crap and letting the flies at him is possibly illegal?

But re the election results I have to say (and it is never elegant to do so) -

 I told you so.

I TOLD YOU so several times on this blog. And I don’t get what was so difficult to work out.

So if you want my advice (and why would you), Kim and Beyonce PUT SOME CLOTHES ON. Labour party – if ever there was a time to stop trying to dance to the media tune its now. Let Harriet give everyone milk and cookies and don’t play into the hands of sensationalist journalism by holding a leadership contest immediately. Let folk have their time of mea culpa and set a date for a leadership ‘event’ in 18 months time. Some surprising options may occur. Who knows, Chuka Umunna may grow a personality, the membership may come up with some good ideas. Chill.

And would someone PLEASE shut Mandelson up or hit him with a large, wet, slightly warm, dead, rancid, mackerel.

Blog 134. When Royals Have Sex...

When royals have sex we pay

In deference to the constitution

What an ingenious genteel form

Of privilege prostitution

This poem is by me – just in case you thought it was by Andrew Motion or Carol Ann Duffy.

In honour of the Baby News - see last week’s blog - I am reviving this piece. It was originally posted on 25:09:12 (Amanda’s Royal Rejection by Richard Maidley).

Waste not, want not!

Blog 133. Famous Fannies - Fashion Focus!

When did who goes in and what comes out of famous fannies become a ‘C’ list celebrity fashion frenzy?

There’s only one thing worse than Baby News and that’s Celebrity Baby News. Surely the fact that reproduction is done by lots of people all the time means it’s not NEWS. Baby NEWS worth reading is rare and would be - for example - the 4 month old baby pulled alive and well from the Nepal earthquake after 22 hours under rubble.

You notice it’s never ‘News of my idyllic teenager’. ‘My 14 year old (who either doesn’t wash or spends 4 hours at a time in the bathroom) is sooooo adorable’.

And any mother of a teen hoping to bask in the glow of wow comments about her ‘bikini body’ will be pretty sharply brought down to earth. If the hormonal offspring catches sight of bulges through a bathroom door not properly shut - god help you. Rebuild your self esteem after she’s sneered with contempt at your latest outfit which, judging from her expression, you may as well have cobbled together out of old bits of rope, cat sick and fag ends.

I know the royal bump is making folk crazier than ever BUT -as I was atrophying in a supermarket queue recently – there seemed to be nothing on the cover of the glossies other than gurning, over-made-up women claiming they desperately want babies – are worried about their figures / relationships (not sure what was most important) or have just delivered and are in heaven and full make-up. Or they had babies last week and have a fitness regime to tell you about. No haemorrhoids, no stitches – no cracked nipples?

But none of them say they want CHILDREN and especially not teenagers. Don’t they realise these critters are going to GROW?

It’s become another albatross round women’s necks – you have to be magazine gorgeous even during and immediately after pregnancy.Babies have long been fashion accessories but now it seems that women’s fertility and reproduction are overtly part of the whole ghastly circus.

Lying awake on a bottom bunk having cracked my head again getting into the unfamiliar bed, I’ve time to think about this. Above me is my 14 yr old (we are temporary roommates while the last in a litany of DIY horrors is completed on my flat).

Apart from feeling she is entitled to pass any opinion on my person at any time - physical appearance, dress sense, inability to appreciate the right kind of music – she also ricochets from high moods to low. This means that glowering murderously under her fringe (a la Manga chic) can suddenly be replaced by hurling herself at me for hugs and kisses and climbing on top of me on the sofa. She forgets she is taller than me and full of bones... The result is that as well as being verbally mangled I am often bruised and mauled.

She is absolutely wonderful, (I think this a lot when she is at school) but I couldn’t imagine how this would play out on the cover of a magazine. I would most likely be captured bleary, dishevelled and possibly weary and wary. She would be sneering or smirking or making a gesture to camera that would be far from OK.

Never having been a teenager, I was pretty floored by my first daughter’s teen escapades but managed the second without too much collateral damage. Third time round I can appreciate that - if I was not the mother – the roller coaster that is TEEN is kinda crazy and scary but cool and amazing as you watch the human metamorphosis happen right before your eyes. And teens are certainly more interesting than the poor unfortunates in designer dungarees absorbing the neediness and frenetic, desperate desire for attention of the latest celebrity breeders.

Couldn’t these folk go back to buying ridiculous handbags and silly cars?

Blog 132. BEST MANIFESTO

We’ll sort out the porn plague, dog crap crisis, car carnage and epidemic of on-line kitten videos – would be a manifesto worth reading.

Most folk in the UK live in open air dog toilets (we call them towns and cities). People are surrounded by roads that deliver annual motorised massacre and carcinogenic fumes, linked up to T.V. (a sewer pipe into your brain?) and the internet with its plague of porn and mind numbing epidemic of kitten videos.

Why are party leaders spending so much time and energy promising to sort out stuff they can’t sort out and know they won’t sort out (see last week’s blog)? They could actually positively influence lives by dealing with some or all of the above...

One doesn’t want to be extreme but surely rounding up the people who let their dogs foul up the pavements, walkways, parks etc selling off everything they own and using their mortal remains as fertilizer would not be too outlandish. Maybe I’ll feel less like a foot-fouled fascist when the memory of my latest stroll through the dog excrement has faded.

I like to walk. I walk early. That means I step out each morning onto a pavement where the rivulets of dog urine running from hedge to curb are mere feet apart and punctuated by piles of dog pooh. (Some look like T-rex turds) As the weather warms up the stench is choking, if I try to hold my breath past the worst bits, the buzz of frenzied flies gives it away. Obviously not in the very centre of Edinburgh. The ‘bits that show’ are kept nice.

If you are squeamish and think grinding down the bones of these arsehole dog owners is too unkind then let’s get biblical. Send them to hell. Hell being a lead lined room smeared with dog turds – no vents - and containing Jeremy Clarkson, Nigel Farage and Katy Hopkins (like I said – a room full of turds).

Politicians of all persuasions have been bleating on about the NHS because they know lazy disaffected members of the populous are relying on the poor creaking monolith to save them from their bad habits. It can’t.

Ban cigarettes – I mean just do it. Then all those third world countries growing tobacco to kill people (cheaply over there – expensively over here) could grow FOOOOOOOD.

In terms of a better deal for the young, let’s ban advertising which suggests that compressed guts and eyelids with salt, held together by fat is a Mac-treat. Parents sending their children to boarding schools to be brought up by strangers get a social worker each.

Treble the price of petrol for cars. Cut the price of public transport by two thirds with regular compulsory bus services to all rural areas

Block pornography so the guys actually have to WORK/PAY to get it rather than tripping over it every time they switch on (I think if we can land space probes on comets we can DO this) Then their actual real sex lives may recover and they wouldn’t be sluggish, depressed and vile.

Also – stop all the ridiculous soft focus ads claiming we are going to cure everything. Tell people the truth that they actually have to look after themselves.

Oh and obviously renationalise ALL the national resources and infrastructure from public transport to water.

Basically pass laws that mean we stop poisoning the population mentally, physically, spiritually, psychologically, morally and actually – and the rest will follow.

If you are young (under 40) do recommend this manifesto or ‘link’ it to stuff. On the other hand if you think this post just shows that I have finally imploded – send me some chocolate – it’s my birthday today.

Ok - I’m going to go and lie down now...

Blog 131. Cameron promises blood...

Yes – the blood of a unicorn foal for breakfast, for everyone over the age of 63 ¾ born in a crop circle on a Wednesday.

Miliband pledges to make a job for everyone under 35 with his toenail clippings and Miriam promises to show us how to sauté Nick’s cojones.

If you wondered why the electoral promises are sliding off political tongues like manure off a hot shovel or a bad production of Romeo and Juliet - it’s the coalition stupid.

Clegg proved (see last week’s blog) that faced with the possibility of government without a majority you can say whatever you bloody well like. Even the most clear and obvious statements of political commitment can be ditched later on the basis that you want to be in power.

Simple.

So Cameron attempted to top trump the others by claiming everyone would be allowed 3 days off a year to volunteer – contributing to his BIG SOCIETY. BS(!) is a Tory marketing term thrown out to counteract Maggie’s curse that there’s no such thing as society (for you younger bleaders) which was tantamount to claiming that human beings have no humanity.

Having not switched off the radio quickly enough I heard a bit of the blather on Question Time. The Tory wheeled out to defend this ridiculous notion claimed that people would feel better about themselves and the cost of – for example – losing a million working days, from nurses alone, in the NHS would be balanced by less sick leave. SERIOUSLY that was what was said. They would feel better about themselves because they would be contributing to society and helping people. Most of us think that is what nurses are supposed to do within hard-pressed hospitals anyway. Maybe they spend their shifts playing roulette and no one told us.

I half expect to turn on the radio and find that Cameron has promised to paint the sky turquoise every other Sunday and Miliband is going to make manna blow in from the sea. Clegg is going to make the birds sing at precisely 7am every morning but just at a level to sooth you and not so loud as to wake you up if you are having a lie in.

Politics was never a straightforward business but the smoke and mirrors are working overtime in the absence of anyone with a spine.

Osborne’s fatuous claim that we are doing great and are better off yada yada yada – just doesn't equate with the world most of us live in. I can, for example, count a handful of close acquaintances (and I really don’t know that many people and don’t do any modern social media) who have had to apply for their OWN JOBS at least three times in the last 5 years. They are made to feel ‘lucky’ to still have a job albeit with more responsibility for less pay.

Recently it was revealed that a significant proportion of supermarket workers have to claim benefits to live. So all that cheap produce that makes us feel we’re managing is actually being subsidised by the tax payer. You may be able to get a pint of milk for less than a bottle of water but it is being paid for elsewhere.

Bankers et al, who wrecked the economy, quietly re-grouped having never been punished for putting us all in the mire. Meanwhile, the acid clamour against immigrants and benefit claimants gets louder and more entrenched. Challenges are not made where they ought to be (blog111.)

It’s the conjurers, con-men and cojone exhibitors who have us by the short and curlies.

Blog 130. Getting ‘Clegged’.

Mischa Barton knows how if feels I suspect...

Weirdly Clegg still doesn't get why he is a pariah and the Liberals will be nothing and nowhere on May 8th.

Here let me explain.

‘Clegging’ will become slang for blighting youth or conning the young for personal gain. So for example a father found to have drunk the money gran left his son will be said to have ‘Clegged’ him. Ms Barton is apparently suing her ma for spending her childhood acting earnings.

Other than demonstrating the pointlessness of the TV debate, Nick’s defining Cleggacy will be that he epitomises the betrayal of a generation. His post-election treachery simply defines how tomorrow’s people are flung into a swamp with weights round their necks and told to swim. It also demonstrates why those least likely to vote are the ones who must. (So c'mon guys - get your faces out of fb and get involved in LIFE).

Clegg did not start the trend. That would be crediting him with too much colour.

I recall the 80s ditty “Thatcher Thatcher – milk snatcher” which evoked the essence of a leadership that ended the post-war ideology of caring for the vulnerable by stopping free milk for school children. The floodgates were open to an era of shamelessly levering up the living standards of the comfortably off at the expense of those at the bottom of society. Ironic that Clegg should grab onto the idea of free lunches for primary school children as a sop to young parents whose adult lives will be overshadowed by debt they had no choice in acquiring.

Thatcher gave us decimated mining communities, council tax (which helps fuel current housing inequalities) selling off council houses (so now in many areas there is no decent stock of social housing for those starting out in life) and orgiastic privatisation. For those too young to remember – gas, electricity and water etc used to BELONG TO US. But all subsequent governments have failed to climb out of the trench she dug Britain into.

Never mind religious conflict between Christians and Muslims – the God of Mammon is in the ascendancy – just in case you wondered why immigration is daily in the media stocks and the bankers/financiers who actually wrecked the economy got a tap on the wrist.

The thing that is lacking overall is humility, (may I suggest reading blog 4?)

Blair gave us entrenched and damaging PFI in the NHS (oh yeah – and Armageddon), Brown was soft on financial regulation. Cameron has just carried on mopping up what Thatcher didn't get round to and Clegg wiggled into power on the back of a promise so straightforward that even the disenfranchised young could understand it. Then he crapped on them.

I can only assume Clegg is a G.B. Shaw fan and literally believes that “youth is wasted on the young. Youngsters now emerge from university – however useless the course – with the kind of debt my generation only got when purchasing a house.

Government has failed to protect youngsters in ordinary families from the ravages of targeted advertising, pornography, cigarettes, pollution, debt, the effects of endemic gambling, toxic food and so on and so forth. We are leaving a legacy of decreasing living standards for the majority, greater disparity between the haves and the have-nots, lack of security, global conflict and global warming. But politicians still think they are worth their pay packets - and some think they deserve more besides...

To this generation of politicians I say ‘shame on you’.

To young people I say – ‘for god’s sake vote’. Then renationalise everything that used to actually belong to the people of Britain and introduce euthanasia for tax avoiders.