blog 164. I Don’t Like this Ad...

Whether it’s a printer with a cash-back option or  Myleene Klass smirking smugly in another frock your mum would like or boiler cover from ‘just’ £10 per month, it’s impossible to get rid of them.

No matter how often the ‘I don’t like this ad’ red cross is clicked, another one pops up almost immediately. It’s like being involved in a permanent survey of things that really really really piss you off. And if I go the next step and tick a reason why I don’t like this add they thank me for helping them improve the experience then the same one will pop up again anyway as if to say you think we really give a ---?

When I first turn on my Yahoo email (other providers do it though Yahoo is possibly the worst) the little time circle of dots swirls around and my mail wont load until someone I don’t know and will never meet manages to load their gush onto my private e-mail, while my life ticks away. I cannot get rid of this constant invasion unless I PAY.

Spam is the same. No matter how many times you report it the same stuff keeps right on returning. But the ads are in your face. They don’t default to somewhere you can’t see them until you check the folder to see which bank wants your password or who wants to sell you some medication – usually Viagra. And now that the US company that makes Viagra has married the Irish company that makes Botox in order to avoid tax, it won’t be long before we are getting joint ads for paralysed faces and budget erections...

It’s like someone letting their dog piss up your leg and saying ‘I will get him to stop if you pay me’.

And you can’t ignore the bloody things.

So I am trying to email my mum and find out how her pepperpot went on Wednesday and my eyes are drawn to a message that takes up about 1/3 of the type space asking ‘Should you be selling your stocks?’ I only own vegetable stock cubes. Who would want them?

Someone called Ken wants me to download his report about a retirement plan. Ken, honey, we won’t need retirement plans, they are gonna legalise euthanasia for ordinary people.

Then BT want me to get their TV. The face of the woman in the ad says it all. She looks horrified and dismayed – she clearly hasn’t been botoxed. That is how I would look if I ever had to have anything at all to do with BT ever again - ever.

Then there are the ads containing items I recently searched for on the web making me feel like Yahoo is stalking me. It’s creepy. The stalking ad is followed, paradoxically, by an ad for human rights. Oh the irony.

A gymnasium wants me to pay £19.99 per month for membership. Almost £20 to exercise indoors with other people’s carbon dioxide, sweat and body odour and, worse, all the bloody horrible chemicals they use to suppress the b.o. – why? Get rid of your car. Instant exercise on tap every day AND you double save the price of running a car and the gym membership.

Hey – you know what – never mind Ken it’s me who should be giving financial advice.

Then there are banks offering credit cards. Presumably to pay for all the tat these ads pressure you into wanting that you didn’t know you wanted until you logged into your e-mail to try to contact your mum.

Then there is an ad for half price Sky movies showing pics of flicks I wouldn’t go to see if THEY paid ME.

Then more BT this time offering a sport app.

And I still haven’t finished the e-mail to my mum.

So I am going to advertise my new paperback book that I just managed to get OUT THERE. I nearly had a cataclysmic personal implosion dealing with all the IT stuff but I’m sure it’s good for my character. Anyway Maybe I’m not a Pigeon is ready in paperback for you or your mum, aunt, sister, cousin to fill that quirky, fun, stocking filler gap. Then you can cosy up with it on Boxing Day while everyone else looks at shit in the sales and diet products on the internet. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/151924729X

If you don’t want to see my ad just pay me some money every month for the next year.

blog 163. Irony & Misery

This will be a very short blog as there is only one thing to write about and little that hasn’t already been said about the horror and the sadness.

Ironically, harking back to last week’s blog I was asking why we can’t remember the lessons of the so called ‘great’ wars more than once a year and then Paris...  Just the latest dreadful example of how badly we’ve let down the next generation.

I hope if one good thing comes out of the hideous tragedy in the French capital it will be a sense of time for unity. I am not a fan of out of control bureaucracy or multi-layered governmental control. However, let’s hope that the current madness of our PM trying to appease the nasties and the right-wingers and the xenophobes will cease. Let’s hope everyone realises that this is NOT the time to attack or try to destabilise the European Union.

blog 162. Remembrance Day v Political Amnesia.

Maybe it’s the effect of the poppies but this government seems to have severe, selective amnesia.

Just last week I was aghast listening to a story of a London organisation that vacuums up single homeless men and puts them in homes fit for rats. It does this in order to make a profit by cashing in on housing benefit. As we all know, ex-servicemen are disproportionately represented among the homeless. This is immoral but not, apparently, illegal. All while the government are making a crusade out of cutting benefits to the vulnerable.

Despite their significance from 1915, it was not until the 1920s that the Flanders poppy became an established remembrance symbol of the unimaginable suffering and loss of WWI. But an idea that took on more immediacy was that of homes fit for heroes. One wonders what Lloyd George would have made of the above scenario or the bedroom tax or the attempted cuts in tax credit that currently keep many working families in the UK just above the bread line.

Move to WWII and yet again the idea of a better life for those who sacrificed so much was the order of the day. Of the 1m houses built by Attlee’s post war Labour government 80% were council houses and many built to replace those destroyed by Hitler. The selloff of those properties by Margaret Thatcher – a policy endorsed by the current administration – has done more than any other to put the low paid at the mercy of the worst elements of the private rented sector and exacerbate the problems of homelessness.

An NHS free at the point of use was another Attlee vision, not one that has become an underfunded postcode lottery with many sections made vulnerable to profiteering.

The working classes were to be offered a decent education; one that would give them a chance to compete with the well-heeled. In 2015 in the UK we know that a child’s circumstances at birth will influence its life chances more than any other single factor. The time when those at the bottom could rise according to their abilities was a brief flowering of egalitarianism, quickly stamped out by the establishment. The introduction of tuition fees is part of the same pattern and a recent announcement stated that even the grants made to the very worst off students are now to be converted into loans - debt.

As I battled on Sunday through the Remembrance Day crowds in Edinburgh to a service at my own church I was chilled by more than just the rain and the wind. Just what has happened to our hopes and dreams of a fairer society since the guns fell silent on the Western Front in WWI?  Woodrow Wilson called it a war to end all wars but 1939 saw the dawn of a second ‘great’ war. At the end of each, the hope for a fairer, more peaceful world was great.

But in this country the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown exponentially since the 90s into a vast chasm.

Instead of a fighting force engaged in security measures we are enmeshed in the global aftermath of one of the most stupid, testosterone fuelled bits of international madness any government ever engaged in to the point where we are morally constipated. We make embarrassing overtures to the Egyptian leader in the hope that he will help sit on ISIS while ignoring any number of human rights abuses in the attempt to make the sticking plaster of risible international diplomacy stick. (I already covered our embarrassing slavering to the Chinese a couple of weeks ago).

We managed D-day but couldn’t repatriate a few hundred holiday makers from sharm-el-sheikh. In WWII we (belatedly) took in Jewish refugees without complaining about school places or benefits. However, having failed to stop Assad’s apocalypse we bellyache about taking in Syrian refugees. People had so much less then. Is that maybe why they were more willing to share?

We defeated Hitler and Mussolini but there was an embracing of Farage and his watery nastiness at all levels that made good people nauseous.

Why do we remember the lessons of the two great wars for just one day a year?

Give us an administration that cares all year and remembers the hopes and dreams of those who survived the horrors. We’ve no use for a poppy-one-day-a-year government, shafting ordinary people the other 364 days.

If this government want to truly honour the war dead and the sacrifices they made for freedom and a better life, let’s see more fairness. Let’s see better schools, better health care and let’s see the very comfortably off (and eye-wateringly wealthy) friends of those in power paying their bloody taxes.

blog 161. If you’ve ever wondered...

...what it might be like to be a young black mother in the white / male dominated fiefdom of the UK capital of the North in the 1980s / 90s?

I may be able to tell you.

In yet another departure from my global apocalypse ramblings, I have done battle with my IT demons and produced my first straight-to-e-book book in a literary experiment that cost me at least half a dozen more grey hairs.

Albeit that I piddled about with the text post proof-read, introducing new typos AND that the process of uploading the damn thing – which should have taken 20 minutes - took me three days.... it is done. And it is available. And here is the obligatory blurb.

‘Maybe I’m not a Pigeon !’  

(My Lives & Me in Ten Houses)

by Amanda Baker

In 1988 the capital of the North elected its first black woman councillor. Now, after a stint in law (without much order) she has produced this genre bending, humorous, sortofanautobiography. Bizarre memoirs wrestle for space with amusing anecdotes. Painful revelations, apocalyptic short stories, satirical blog posts, flash fiction and other extracts from her published writing are marshalled to serve up this appetizing offering.

WARNING

You may get dizzy as you ricochet from a creepy encounter with pre PM Tony Blair wearing can-you-really-walk-in-those tight trousers to a near death toilet experience. Hang on as you are flung from hitchhiking with a ginger tom cat on a lead, to accidentally becoming a stand up comedian via child~prefers~pear~to~Nelson~Mandela shame.

There is love, loss, and a house renovation that makes Grand Design look like a Lego project, finally splat landing in the congealed spaghetti of the fostering process. All in an off the map literary mashup from this mixed-race, mixed up, Brown Girl Outside the Ring.

 “...it was the shape of things to come. I’d been elected to Newcastle City Council despite having no political aspiration. In the future I was to be a finalist in a national BBC sitcom writing competition despite not owning a television, a quarter-finalist and finalist in two separate national Stand-Up-Comedy competitions, despite not being a comedian. In 2014 I voted SNP in the referendum even though I am neither a Nationalist nor a Scot.

The thing is never to let logic get in the way of the unexplored path...”

Welcome.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B017BKM93C

blog 160. One Day Opt Out, Sanity Survival Guide.

Following on from the Polylanna blog last week, which was in turn a response to claims of an especially dour run of posts, I am again going to offer perky positives. This week I’ll provide my dear bleaders with a one day emergency guide to surviving reality with your sanity intact.

Turning away from the need and mess is not edifying or moral behaviour. If we can’t help we have a duty to ‘know’. But I’m working on a papal dispensation for what will be just one day of respite where the lucky ones (those not trying to cross the Med in a sieve, survive a corrupt dictatorship, feed a starving family or endure environmental disaster) but wracked with guilt and helplessness, can plug out for 12 hours. So, for example, in this country you may wish to switch off from the Tories' full on attack on the low waged. If you live in America I would say try not to think about just how many people of unstable mind are, right now, armed with sufficient weaponry to give an entire town a really bad day. If you care about the planet try not to focus on the increasing backlash from Nature as we scorch the earth and so on and so forth. And here is a guide on how to spend that day.

Firstly, if you’ve not already given up on the box at least turn it off. There is no point having it on but avoiding the news because the alternatives are morons on game shows, programmes about high maintenance gardens and poor quality freak shows masquerading as reality TV. And in this country, despite it being 2015, black representation in the publically funded broadcast channel has actually significantly decreased rather than increased. So just turn it off.

If you have £2 to spare go to the co-op (or equivalent outside the UK) and buy their own brand cheesecake. It’s not as good as homemade but it’s pretty nice and a real budget treat. And frankly – though the food industry is working so hard to hasten our untimely and unpleasant demise - more than just about any other global force – this aint the time for a tofu salad.

Then get yourself a DVD collection of old Columbo episodes or if you are more modern than me download them. I can highly recommend Candidate for Crime, Prescription for Murder, Suitable for Framing. The importance of this choice is that you can spend a couple of hours fantasising that the application of logic, decency and hard work will always triumph over corruption, egotism, narcissism and criminality. Plus you get GREAT dialogue, fully drawn characters and subtle humour.

Paint the walls of your house orange and brown and wear a flowered kaftan and pretend it’s the 1970s because although it was not a good era for music, fashion, sexism, racism and there were lots of paedophiles operating with impunity in our institutions, at least back then we were still in a position to save the planet.

I wouldn’t recommend trying to become self sufficient in a day or even in a hurry. I started with an apple tree. The pesky squirrels got most of them, the magpies pecked a couple (I didn’t even know magpies ate apples) and the wind just blew the last one down. Although I rescued it from the slugs it wouldn’t keep us fed through the breakdown of law and order, crop failure and Armageddon.

I do suggest that you keep a copy of Anna Karenina to hand and just glance at it during the day off and bear in mind that if martial law is declared and you can’t leave your house, there is a book that can be read and re-read and re-re-read.

And lastly, if you live in the UK, move to Scotland. Oh! I already did that, though it did take longer than a day...

blog 159. China’s steel grip on UK nuclear power will be happy, jolly, super duper, smiley, happy, funny fun, fun.

A few times – and especially after my last post - I’ve been told that my blogs can be a wee bit dark. Even the humour is dark. Personally I think humour is like chocolate – the darker the better, but ok. Even though my mate Elayne and I, when we are putting the world to rights, invariably conclude that if you aren’t worried you are not paying attention, I am going to redress the balance this week. Here goes with this week’s happy, jolly bloggy.

So – I understand that the idiot box is showing lots of lovely programmes about baking which, let’s face it, couldn’t possible fail to make everyone happy and realise just what a world of fluffiness we live in where there is nowt more to consider than who has the best muffins. And even if you don’t watch, you wont miss out on the glorious chirpy happiness because some of these baking shows make their way onto the radio as ‘news’ items and they are all over the covers of magazines in the shops.

And, talking of magazines, in the supermarket the other day, I stopped and stared at the glossies. No shortage of vacant women simpering at the reader from behind their photo-shopped, made-up, soft focused covers. And they are all so so so happy they just can’t wait to tell you how they fitted into THAT dress or how the way they look is completely natural and all achieved by drinking gluten free water and eating air and mung bean fritters fried in mermaid oil. They did look happy.

Next to them were magazines with expensive cars that probably use no fossil fuel at all and more magazines about people in soap operas who don’t really exist. Leading me to see that life is one long fun filled fantasy.

And there are lots of pretty women who can’t afford any clothes at all just thin bits of gauze stuck to their tits and fannies but some nice people occasionally provide a red carpet for them to walk on which is so kind.

In the UK Parliament, the wealthy elite who have always had things their own way still do. And who doesn’t like a bit of tradition. It’s only a shame they did away with other traditions such as little boys working up chimneys and women not being able to vote.

Talking of tradition, a friend of mine who is searching for a job applied for a driver’s position. The employers have a really quaint system where anyone wanting a job turns up at 7.30am. The man in charge tells a few lucky ones they can work and they get to hang around until 11am with no pay and the others all get to go home without any work. It must be like getting to play the can-I-afford-my-rent lottery for free EVERY DAY. How cool. And it certainly brings to mind stories from those halcyon days when unions didn’t ruin everyone’s fun by insisting on a fare wage for a day’s work.

And as I’ve blathered on about tediously on this blog – even though we’ve not got effective medicines for some of the really horrible diseases on this planet at least we have Viagra so that Western men can have sex whenever they want. It’s something the planet should really worry about – men not shagging enough.

The UK government continues to sell Britain off to the highest bidder but at least the nuclear industry is going to the Chinese – who – let’s face it – by dumping steel on the global market did SUCH a fantastic job of giving lots of workers in Britain lots and LOTS of future leisure time. And now, if there is a nuclear catastrophe we won’t be told about it so worry about potential mass horrible deaths, which would be no fun at all, will not be added to potential mass horrible deaths.

Some disingenuous sorts still bang on about inequalities in education meaning that the richest rather than the brightest get ahead. And still more complain that tuition fees have exacerbated that situation. Folk whine on about universities acting more like supermarkets and students have scary financial obligations but decreasingly valuable degrees. Well – what I say to that is – at least no unpleasant shocks in later life.

And it all goes to prove that if you just look hard enough everything really is jolly and happy and completely super duper.

This week just call me Pollyanna.

blog 158. Global Danse Macabre...

The Walking Dead may be the current teen sensation but it’s also us. Listen carefully and you can hear the slow, slow, quick, quick, slow of the global Danse Macabre...

As the boys get out their war toys again and the dispossessed are on the march again and we poison the air we breathe, the water we drink and the ground we need to survive, you can feel the rhythm.  The 1% still squirreling away ill gotten billions in tax havens and offshore accounts don’t hear it. But as those – for example the British elite that sit on inherited (unearned) wealth - join forces with those who have more recently become obscenely rich by ravaging the resources of struggling nations that do not have the infrastructure to stop them, the music gets louder the movements more exaggerated.

The Danse Macabre was an artistic vision of mediaeval times. Long before Saint Saens’ music, DM was a depiction of the dead dancing to their graves. The point was to show the elite with their crowns and sceptres and gold alongside the poor and ragged of the earth all jigging towards their burial places in a last desperate darkly joyful moment – levelled by Death.

Yes – you may say – those were times when war, famine and disease could wipe out significant proportions of the earth’s populous without warning and with frightening speed. That was then, you may say, this is now. Then I will come back to you with this. Have you already forgotten Ebola? I know we ignored it for years because it was just the darkies who got it but we know it’s breaking out of its viral comfort zone. Haven’t you heard, way before we’ve found cures for some of the deadliest diseases on the planet, the medicines we’ve relied on this side of WWII are no longer playing ball.

Each sect with a new End of Days prophecy is spot lit and ridiculed by the mass media. The really bad joke is that we are at the End of Days; it is an ongoing event that we are speeding up alarmingly. With every thoughtless action, with every decision made for profit instead of people, with ever pound or dollar we spend on war instead of security, with every act of excess instead of restraint, we dance faster towards Earth Zero. And if you are reading this behind the comfort of your scepticism remember – I accurately predicted the 2015 election results. It’s past time to be uncomfortable. The period when we could, in all reasonable hope, turn things around passed early in my lifetime.

Unlike our 14^th Century forebears we are simply not facing up to reality; with humour or at all. Maybe that is why you’ll hear on the ‘news’ a cursory account of how the corals around the planet are crumbling as sea temperatures rise followed by lengthy detailed reports about which bunch of blokes kicked or hit or ran with, various different shaped and sized balls... I listened with incredulity this morning as Sainsbury, a major supermarket chain here in the UK, encouraged people to get in their cars for some extra journeys this month in their ad for discount fuel.

Since we succeeded in destabilising the Middle East – again – the rupture, the crack in the thin veneer of civilisation has been growing and no sticking plaster is now big enough to cover it. History tells us that social breakdown, mass exodus and planetary pandemics follow.

Hospitals, if you are lucky enough to have them, are over burdened and underfunded and we are short on compassion. In this country our basic infrastructure has been sold off to the highest bidder and nothing can now stand in the way of the profit juggernaut. Perhaps the most blatant recent example of this is the Volkswagen debacle. In the face of even the flimsy laws attempting to limit air pollution, human beings (who also need to breathe this air I presume) have spent time, money, and ingenuity creating and fitting technology to get round that legislation.

It’s like we’re all clinging to the outer branch of a very old, tired tree and the people in charge are making big piles of sawdust for themselves by sawing away at the part of the branch that connects us to the trunk – and we are all just watching...

Time spent developing drugs to ensure a bloke can shag when he wants equates to time that has not been spent keeping Malaria drugs up to date or educating the population on the use of medicines that have become essential to us such as antibiotics (see blog 97. Viagra – Yes. Effective Cure for Malaria – No!). There is no excuse; the Chinese had medicines for Malaria 2000 years ago.

One of the elements the DM deals with is the human desperation for a final fling, last dance, last hysterically elated act. On this blog I’ve often decried silly, superficial, consumer mad triviality in the face of human suffering and real anguish. But maybe those determinedly drinking / drugging / gambling / gorging themselves to death or spending themselves into oblivion or flaying themselves for attention on social media are doing just that - taking part in the Global Danse Macabre...