Saturday 29 October 2011

The Late, Great Jimmy Saville.

Jimmy Saville has died, aged only 84, in Roundhay, Leeds.
I would see him jogging along the Ring Road in the environs of Roundhay Park, where his penthouse flat was located.

He lived there before I ever came to Leeds, and after I left.

Jimmy worked most famously in Leeds as a voluntary Hospital Porter at Leeds General Infirmary. Seeing his sad passing on the news has brought back to me memories of the great city Leeds is, the general friendliness and warmth of the whole city like a welcome shelter from the hostile world.

Obviously Leeds has it's quota of outright bastards, life-forms and danger, but when you're in you're in with a crowd that welcomes you as a brother; I am reminded of my time at the Yorkshire Evening Post, a three hundred year old newspaper, where I was privileged to see the last days of traditional newspaper production.

I was in transport, and sometimes we would all be standing around cracking jokes and drinking coffee because somebody really did shout 'stop the presses!'.

We worked together day and night, like a secret island in the middle of the cyclic life of the city. We knew everything and everybody. The lads could get you anything from a pound of sausages to a 9 mm, all on the sly of course.

I was taught how to make a homemade grenade, and where to get the ingredients, all legally, in case my neighbours turned really nasty; I was told how to buy properly sorted cars on auction from the company.
I learned the code of the road that meant I broke records on the Scarborough run at 2 am for two and a half years without getting stopped by the police even once.

I learned most of the newsagents' locations in Leeds, and a good part of the private paper rounds for kids making a penny.
We worked together, sang together, drank together. I didn't go to casinos, but many of the lads turned a profit gambling as well.

They were great days. And I even worked at the LGI as a hospital porter.
Leeds was a super little city. Long may it remain so, and I'm sorry to see Jimmy go.

Sunday 23 October 2011

It's Crap, Jim...

But not like the G&M.
It's worse than that, it's still shit. But there is some sign of improvement, if only in layout.
The experiment continues. I'll be staying with the National Post for the time-being.
If it doesn't work out, I'll try another new one, possibly whatever rag they have in Edmonton.

Failing that, the only Canadian representative will be the Sun.

Friday 21 October 2011

Tryout

I got to be disgusted with the establishment fawning of the Globe & Mail, so I'm trialling the National Post.
It may be that it is less foul, more hard news, although it does carry a pretty disgusting description of a tax-increasing politician as 'brave'.
We'll give it a few days and see where it goes.

Monday 17 October 2011

Society? Does It Matter?

Having sat in an office all day where backbiting is on the rise, I am returned once again to the realisation that the average Englishman is little different to a flea or a worm.

After a year with 'decent blokes', I now find incursions from the sort of scum which is more typical of any other organisation in this lousy country.

Item- the coughing, choking and snivelling of just four incomers sitting in the cubicle adjacent to software is turning the office day into a marathon in Hell for everybody else.
They start their antics early and continue all day.
They wear shirts, ties and are clean-shaven to make themselves 'above reproach'; they sit and watch everybody else as a team and put in the needle with the chronic enthusiasm of the schizophrenic who believes that outcomes will change if he just keeps 'asserting' all day.

They do anything except what they are paid for, which is work.

Their leader started on me, as his favourite meal for the week, as soon as I arrived this morning, so I told him quietly to 'fuck off'.

Obviously they all found this fascinating and devoted their working day to generating repetition.

I did not oblige. I have expressed myself. I just got on with my job. Very well actually.

But this sort of trash infests every waking moment that they can get near me. In the street, at work, at the doctors, at the supermarket. This is apparently what it means to be British.
But they don't get me at home. I've got that sorted. If they can't see or hear you, they can't attack you, not even on spec.
I have no neighbours.

And with subhuman bags of crap like that, who would want them?

What Is Your Problem?

As the occupation begins and the Union of Streamlined Soviet Republics rises across the world, ushered in by hundreds of once-human turkeys gobbling messages in rippling unison, I have to tell you it ain't so.

Here I go.

I remember the 80's, because I was there, in the crucible, in the City Of London, a witness to the trading revolution.
I remember mourning the passing of the Port Of London under the jackboot heel of generic office developers; at a time when more and more 'trade' was being done, nothing actually went anywhere, because there wasn't anything being produced that could actually be sent anywhere.

All around, the cheerleaders for this movement were shouting to the wind that this was 'Capitalism'.

It wasn't.
It was a generation of young people entering the world of banking and thinking, due to the cultural influences of the 60's, the State Corporatists, the BBC, and any number of jabbering heads, that if governments applying force equations to people was wrong, it would be somehow right to do this privately, under the guise of market forces.

The problem isn't that Capitalism was released.
The problem is that the markets were used as a more perfect application of Democracy.

And Democracy is what is being applied ever more forcefully by state and business alike, every drunken lurch like the fluid sloshing around the flooded bilge of a foundering world.

It's not Capitalism which the problem. It is Democracy. Without limits. Without property. Without rights.

And like the lunatics currently trying to use increased credit to reflate the burst balloon of credit debt, the 'Occupy' movement is trying to reflate the Democratic bubble with a drunken binge of mob demands, all the while claiming that their malice is actually concern for justice.