I don’t often have patriotic moments, but my British heart swelled with pride when I read these words:
Figures from Mintel reveal that we eat a tonne of crisps every three minutes in the UK.
I think that’s a tremendous (multi-) national achievement. I’m not sure, however, that this is the reaction I’m supposed to be having.
Article about crisps in tehgrauniad. I recently reintroduced a steady supply of ready salted crisps into my diet, and I am a happier man as a consequence, although I don’t think you get quite as many crisps in a bag of Walker’s crisps as perhaps is ideal.
A good indicator of how crap a day it has been for me so far is that the highlight has been delivering Labour party election leaflets for half an hour this morning.
(This, incidentally, is the first time I have posted here while typing with a kitten balanced on the back of my neck, washing himself. Perhaps, in fact, this is the highlight of the day so far.)
According to the BBC, “Ministers had said vending machines could be excluded from a crackdown [on junkfood in schools], but they will now be banned from stocking sweets, crisps and high-sugar drinks.” So what will they vend? (I’m assuming they don’t dispense condoms or cigarettes.)
What with one thing and another, I’ve been in women’s clothes shops more often than usual in the last few days, which allows me to issue this Fashion Advisory.
Women of Britain! Save money by avoiding the grotesque pink and purple shades that seem to dominate this year’s Autumn collections. They’re really disgusting. Marks and Spencer and Laura Ashley appear to be particularly egregious offenders in this regard, but I think there are others, too.
Make quite sure you rinse the descaling solution out of the coffee machine very, very thoroughly before making yourself another cup. Despite following the written instructions more pedantically than usual and pumping a lot of fresh water through my Gaggia machine after yesterday’s descaling, the first mouthful this morning was the most disgusting thing I’ve tasted in a very long while.
The back of my throat has, fortunately, more or less recovered.
Can someone who knows more about retail than I do explain why there’s almost always a big sale of some kind going on at HMV? Is the whole selling CDs and DVDs business in perpetual crisis of some kind, or is this just a cunning (and successful) way of getting me to spend a lot of money in the shop, as I pick up things for around £5 per disc that are supposed to sell for a lot more than that?
So here’s another list of crap towns:
1-Luton
2-Windsor
3-Sunderland
4-Glasgow and Edinburgh
6-Clapham
7-Bath
8-Nottingham
9-Corby
10-Middlesbrough
What to make of this? I’m surprised to see Glasgow so high, which has always seemed to me to be a fine place, and I’ve always enjoyed visiting Nottingham, wihch I do about once a year, and which has very nice new trams these days. I dare say Edinburgh makes the list because the city pisses off significant groups of the kind of people who vote in this kind of poll rather than because it’s an all-things-considered crap town.The others are something of an unknown quantity to me, though I’ve heard bad things about Sunderland. (Can it be true, as has been alleged to me, that this city of 300,000 people doesn’t have a cinema? That seems very weird.) And I’m not sure that Clapham really counts as a town in its own right, though I’m happy to be corrected.
On my way back from my favourite nearby curryhouse this evening, I started thinking about what the Substantial Civilisational Advances in the UK have been since the war (1945, that is, not 2003).
And after ruminating over a few candidates — one-day cricket, BBC television, mass higher education, and so on — the two that seemed to me to stand out by quite a way were feminism on the one hand (and all that flows from that) and the widespread availability of pretty good Indian food on the other.
Is there anything comparable that I’m missing?
UPDATE [9.45pm]: Yes, yes, add “socialised medicine” to the above list to make a troika. Stupid of me, really. Feminism, Indian food and the NHS. What else?
As if there were any doubt. An entertaining headline, over at the BBC.
Well, we sort of had a plan to go and see the sun rise at Stonehenge tomorrow morning on Midsummer Day, just because a friend sort of offered us a lift. But that offer of a lift fell through, and it’s not going to happen, which may or may not be a shame. I don’t know.
I haven’t been to Stonehenge in a while. But I have been to Carhenge much more recently, in the Summer of 2000, and Carhenge is really quite something.
Just seen a traffic warden handing out some kind of ticket or other to a vehicle flying a St George Cross.
It’s probably wishful thinking to think that this is part of a deliberate campaign…
There’s a headline over at the BBC today which is underwhelming: “Sir Paul Reveals Beatles Drug Use“.
But it does contain the claim that one of John and Paul’s drugs was tea — which was something some of us had known about a long time ago…
So I telephone First Great Western yesterday to book a ticket on one of their trains, and they tell me that the train’s not yet open for booking, so why don’t I call back this morning? And I call back this morning, and they tell me that their booking system isn’t working right now, so why don’t I call back this afternoon? And I call back this afternoon, and they say they can’t do the booking because maybe the train doesn’t exist after all, and why don’t I check with National Rail Enquiries? So I check with National Rail Enquiries, and they tell me the train does exist and that they get their information, in any case, direct from First Great Western. So I call FGW Customer Relations and ask what they think might be going on, because this is not a little puzzling and not a little frustrating, and they tell me that, yes, the train does exist, and no, they don’t have any idea why telesales are unable to make the booking, so why don’t I call them back, and if I run into any difficulties, ask to speak to the supervisor? So I call FGW telesales again, and after keeping me on hold for a while, a supervisor is consulted, and the matter is looked into, and in the end I get told that the train does exist but that it’s not the kind of train you can make reservations on anyway, which they bloody well could have told me right at the start of the whole proceedings.
Grrrr.
I don’t often have much contact with hospitals, being a generally healthy person surrounded by other generally healthy people, and I haven’t been down to the John Radcliffe Hospital since going there to be hit on the knee with a rubber hammer late in 1993 after very mild concussion playing rugby, but I spent almost all of Friday night — from 12.30 to 5.30am — down there in A&E, and without exception all the doctors and nurses were entirely splendid, and possessed of that marvellous and somewhat morbid sense of humour that’s probably essential if you’re working amidst so much illness and injury. So hurrah for the NHS in general and the JR in particular. It’s a fine, fine hospital.
[I should add that I wasn't the one on the receiving end of the A, and the E is over and everything's basically fine, in order to forestall any potential friendly-but-concerned enquiries.]
Reading celebrity gossip magazine heat (as one does) on the bus on the way back from the airport yesterday, I was intrigued to read on p.13 of this week’s edition the results of an opinion poll, apparently commissioned by the Evening Standard, which claimed that 8% of my fellow citizens were of the opinion that David Beckham’s adultery has “totally changed” their “faith in marriage”. Eight per cent. That’s a lot. British marriage is a more fragile institution than I thought.
And I read on the plane in Wednesday’s Daily Mail — “Does tap water threaten Britain’s unborn?”, or somesuch: straight out of the Daily Mail-o-Matic — that whilst 94% of Glenda Linda Lee-Potter’s correspondents thought Posh deserved our compassion, 41% of the Standard’s sample blamed her — Posh, not Glenda Linda for the shenanigans. Both figures seem a little unreasonable, to say the least.
I keep coming across the word “muppet”, both in the conversation of undergraduates and on the internet. And it’s used in a pejorative sense; apparently, a muppet is something that it is a bad thing to be. This puzzles me, because a very large number of the muppets from the Muppet Show are clearly excellent things to be (though I wouldn’t want to be Professor Bunsen’s assistant Beaker). And from the variety of contexts in which I’ve come across the word, I can’t quite fix the meaning. It’s clearly not an abusive word, since people seem happy to call themselves muppets (e.g. “I’m being such a muppet”), but beyond that I’m not really sure. Any help gratefully consumed.
Marston’s Pedigree beer not very nice. Don’t buy again.
Over at Harry’s, Marcus has kicked off a discussion of Britishness, spinning out of this piece in today’s Guardian by the Britishness Tsar himself, the estimable scholar Bernard Crick.
Annoyingly enough, I can’t find my copy of the Parekh Report on multicultural Britain, in which I wanted to check a few things [disclosure: Bhikhu Parekh is one of my favourite human beings]. But I’ll just randomly make four comments here which seem to me possibly to be worth making, and which I’ll post here rather than in the comments at Harry’s for no terribly good reason.
The first is that it seems to me that the basic difference between Crick and Parekh is simply that they’re coming at a sort-of similar problem from very different angles: Parekh has post-colonial Britain and the experience of non-white immigrants in the UK closer to the forefront of his attention than Crick, who has been concerned for a while with the “Britain” chiefly composed of the different bits of England, Scotland, Wales, a chunk of Ireland, etc. And that if we think there’s a disagreement between them, we should probably just reflect on their different standpoints rather than hit one another on the head with misleading arguments about the history of demographics in these islands.
The second is that it still seems a bit strange (to me at least) to be launching something that purports (I think) to be a left discussion of Britishness as Marcus does, by focusing on legal and constitutional history and ignoring questions of class and economics. Boring hemi-demi-semi Marxist that I occasionally am, I tend to find it more helpful to think of “British” as a word referring specifically to the class alliance between lowland Scots elites and the dominant political and commercial classes in England: in return for (basically) surrendering their sovereignty, these Scots were given a privileged place in a transnational economic order (the emerging “British” empire). (From this point of view Sir Alec Douglas-Home is pretty much the definitive Brit.) And one reason why that’s an interesting story to stress today concerns the politics of the present: if the contemporary transnational economic order that matters is the EU, then the Scots can very sensibly reclaim sovereign self-government without making a severe economic sacrifice in doing so, and sometimes I wonder why they don’t. (Would you want to be shackled to England and the English in perpetuity?)
Third point: since it’s not unreasonable to see citizenship law as lying at the heart of any state, and since British citizenship law is so obviously racist (as any glance at the changing content of that law over the course of the 20th century reveals so clearly), I’m puzzled by Marcus’s confidence that “Britain is not a racist state”, and I’d like to hear more about why anyone can plausibly think that it isn’t.
The fourth, and not-entirely-frivolous point is that if we’re looking for a general overarching account of Britain, “Britishness”, etc., “a nation of emigrants” is as good as we’re going to get. These islands have almost always been a net exporter of population to the rest of the world, and when opinion polls ask people if they’d like to go and live abroad, quite high percentages tend to say yes.
And it’s not hard to think of reasons why.
Yes, I’ve linked to this before, but the London Riot Re-Enactment Society page still makes me laugh out loud, and it did again yesterday afternoon…
South Sea Bubble Riots, 1720
Hundreds of re-enactors dressed as failed investors will gather at the House of Commons to lobby MPs. When our pleas are ignored, re-enactors will then begin to attack individual MPs. We will only disperse after a third reading of the Riot Act.
The whole thing is brilliant. [Original tip-off from Simon, in his pre-silverdollarcircle days].
England’s, or, um, England’s? Take the Supporter or Deporter? quiz, and see if you can visually differentiate between patriotic supporters of our national football team and, er, a bunch of racist thugs.
I scored seven, with a fine streak coming to an end after bollocksing up the last two; Uninformed Jason managed all ten; and Sarah, from whom I’ve pinched the link, got six. More scores, please.
Over at Harry’s, a thread to discuss the worst political song of all time eventually flipped over to consider what might be the best. No one so far has mentioned the excellent Woody Guthrie/Martin Hoffman song “Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”, though it’s surely a very strong contender. Two nights ago, it was quite the highlight of Joan Baez’s fine set at the New Theatre here in Oxford, and yesterday’s grim news from the sands of Morecambe Bay brought it to mind once again, and for more than one reason.
The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They’re flying ‘em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back againGoodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”.My father’s own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”?
Good snippets on the song are over here; SIAW has the best discussion I’ve yet seen of the Morecambe drownings.UPDATE [8.2.2004]: Chris Bertram has also posted on Morecambe.
Chris Lightfoot has a good, inconclusive discussion of murder stats over on his blog.
Reading the details of Ian Huntley’s defence in the Soham murder trial, am I the only person to be reminded of Monty Python’s Prawn Salad sketch?
