Quite Random

On the A1 today…

Get your motor runnin’…

War in Haifa

The only thing I do know about the current escalation of conflict in the Middle East is that I don’t know enough. It goes back too far for me to know all the facts, is too involved for me to know what to say. Strictly speaking, it’s none of my business, and all a very long way from here. I can quite easily throw in remarks about the lamentable contribution the US and the UK have so far made to cooling everything down, or the hypocrisy and absurdity of the US getting involved in yet another international security situation when they themselves are happily selling arms to the combatants… Whoops, there, I said them. Counts for nothing, because everyone has an opinion on this it seems, and mine is worth not a great deal at all.

I met Hadas, an Israeli, last year in India. Hell, who hasn’t met an Israeli in India – the difference from the stereotype is, Hadas was great company, very friendly, and not obsessed with falafel, trance parties and sitting sullenly around playing guitar. In fact, she makes the best chocolate brownies I’ve ever eaten. I asked her just recently whether she had been affected by the recent conflict – she has. Her younger brother and boyfriend are both fighting at the border, the school she works at is closed because it is in nearby Haifa, and alarms are sounding on a regular basis. The Israelis have had a lot of criticism for the ‘disproportionate response’ to the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, but Hadas tells me her side of the story, which is that “we are victims of Nasralla who intentionally tries to hurt the Israeli civilians”. So between the news coverage, Bush’s ever-so-helpful suggestion that Hezbollah “stop doing this shit”, and an e-mail from a friend in Israel, I’m no further forward than I was before, other than knowing that it’s a crappy situation I wouldn’t want to be in the middle of.

Hadas sent me these photos of Haifa:

Heatwave

Christ on a bike, this heatwave is boring.

Armpits constantly fostering the ideal conditions for the cultivation of mushrooms, no energy, stinking drains, yellow grass, and salads, salads, I’m getting really bored of eating salads. Everyone’s looking really cheesed off with the heatwave now, so it looks like the novelty of sunshine has finally worn off.

That still didn’t stop that gormless Scottish bint on BBC Breakfast yesterday morning describing the weather as beautiful about seven times. It’s not beautiful or lovely. It’s just weather. It’s actually a pain in the neck for gardeners, farmers, and anybody who prefers starting cold and wrapping up to constantly battling to keep cool. Why these bloody weather people actually think anyone wants to hear them add their opinions to the weather forecast is beyond me. Don’t tell me it’s beautiful. Tell me whether it’s hot or cold, wet or dry, rainy or cloudy. And absolutely don’t you dare tell me I should be wrapping up warm. Save it for your kids, don’t insult my intelligence. Talk about talking a job up, weather presenters take the biscuit.

I’m ABS – Anything But Summer. Give me crisp cool mornings, clear ionised air, rain, brown leaves littering the ground, seeing my own breath mist before me, bonfires, extra layers. Keep your orange tan, aged skin, overheated trains and dead plants. Summers are going to get hotter and hotter, people are going to suffer. It’s serious. The time is rapidly approaching when people will suffer summers and look forward to the sanctuary of winter. I’m already there.

What good are you to anyone?

Dear George,

I get the impression sometimes that even you can’t believe you’re president of the United States. How did that happen? You’ve never been the brightest or best, and I’m sorry that you’ve had the drink problems and the failed business ventures in the past, but yes, everyone deserves a second chance for success. Even you, however, must surely have known just how far beyond your capabilities you were reaching when you became the leader of the free world. This is, after all, a job which surely requires wisdom, intelligence, common sense and rationality – if there is a job description. You don’t have any of them though, do you?

So what can you, even you, do to improve things? Not starting a war in the Middle East which has destabilised the entire region? Ummm… OK. Never mind, it’ll all be over in fifty or a hundred years, it’s just a bunch of towel heads, and according to you, solutions can be as simple as “get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over”. Nothing like keeping it simple eh? Mind you, when our Prime Minister doesn’t even have the bollocks to question your retarded opinions in private, you must actually think that you’re right about everything.

How about signing up to Kyoto, or at least pretending to give a toss about your country being the largest producer of CO2 on Earth? Oh. Oh well. The rest of the world is all abroad, not that you know where most of the countries your policies affect are, so who cares?

So, what else… how about not getting in the way of congress, and allowing government funding for stem cell research? How about not using your first ever veto to prevent something like that, even in the face of overwhelming public support?

Ah. So… what use are you?

Yours hoping you contract a degenerative condition whose cure you yourself prevented, and are some fine day put on trial for the things you have done or failed to do, you stupid, arrogant waste of space.

Crinkly-faced bastard

I’m in Leeds, hung over, blogging in Virgin Megastore on a coin-operated computer. We went out to celebrate Nick’s birthday last night, and it was a remarkably restrained affair - we didn’t end up stumbling in to any one of the usual places I remember from when I lived here, so the night was all the better for it. On top of that I didn’t break anything this time - last time I went out in Leeds I ended up with a spiral fracture in one of my fingers, which caused it to point 45 degrees in the wrong direction when I closed my fist. Luckily a nice girl called Christine fashioned a splint from a hair band, a cocktail stirrer, and a length of toilet roll - highly effective.

It must have been a quiet night in Leeds last night - I only saw two hen parties.

I’ve been wandering around town, thinking how I would be perfectly happy were I to live here again - Leeds is a very familiar place, and seems to get better and better all the time. I had breakfast in the Corn Exchange, which is full of shops that sell things that are just bordering on completely useless, but which are at least not homogeneous chain-store crap. I bought a clock for my kitchen, a giant fried egg with a bacon pendulum.

The subject line is down to Gordon Ramsey. I meandered into Waterstone’s a minute ago and was confronted by his crinkly face on the cover of his latest book of recipes. It’s ironic that I now have all the time in the world for Jamie Oliver, who I used to think was a smug fat lipped bastard, but I now have a developing hatred for Gordon ‘fuck this, fuck that, fuck you’ Ramsey. When did chefs become more important than the food, or has it always been this way? Was Fanny Craddock the reason people tuned in, not her cakes? Ramsey’s latest book has not food on the cover, but his smirking face. There’s something wrong with that.

Soundtracks

A nerdy confession this may be, but I think a lot of people do it.

Sat on the train this morning, the commuters stood with hangdog expressions, maybe dreading the inevitable crush to get on the tube at Victoria. No-one was talking and everyone looked sort of lonely, or at least in their own world. How appropriate then that Queen’s ‘Somebody to Love’ came up on my MP3 player – all of a sudden a mundane train journey became a tragi-comic music video, and the expression in the face of the girl sat across from me became yearning, not gormlessness.

Crawling up a hill in Peru at three thousand meters, I was beginning to flag quite seriously, my pace slowing, my knees sore. Santana’s ‘Migra’ came on, and I practically sprinted the rest of the way, the tribal drums and chanting lyrics propelling me along as if I had all the wind in the valley blowing right up behind me.

Driving through deep troughs of sand on Fraser Island, winding through the inland forest, without much of an idea where we were going, Talking Heads’ ‘Road to Nowhere’ came on, again randomly, and a slightly bewildering meander became a devil-may-care adventure into the unknown.

Music’s good like that. I can see why commuters always have headphones on – a good song can put a gloss over the mundane. When the crescendo of a song breaking out coincides perfectly with the sun hitting your face as you walk off the train, it allows you to feel, just for a moment, that you could be in a film of your life.

Kerrrr-pow! Zing! Vroom! Brain Rot!

I’ve just got super-fast broadband from Be - it’s very impressive. It downloads so fast that you’ve often got a page loaded up before you even thought of looking for it, and you’ve checked the weather, answered your e-mails and read a blog or two in the morning before you’ve even woken up. Small problem – there’s still bugger all worth looking at on the Internet a lot of the time, and broadband won’t kick me out of bed or make me a coffee. It’s a bit like buying the nicest, newest, spankiest telly and there being nothing good on, or getting the sportiest, fastest, shiniest car, and then only being able to drive it round the car park at Sainsbury’s. Movie trailers, hell, entire movies, downloaded at breakneck pace. Music streaming. Videos of talking dogs. All of these are available in no time at all – but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s healthier not to turn your computer on in the first place and get outside instead, or that you are forced to share the Internet with people who write things like “That is so lame lol wtf die die die”. I’m not even getting in to online gaming – I’d be found months after disappearing from society, crouched before my screen, stewing in my own juices, muscles wasted, skin white as a sheet, a Boo Radley for the new millennium.

Where will it stop? The alarming pace of technological development is such that we will soon have breathalysers in our mobile phones to tell us we’re too drunk to call our ex (really), access to the Internet from absolutely anywhere via laptop or the new bluetooth tooth, phones in our nostrils, TV in our retinas, a USB port in our brains, and wireless access points up our bottoms (though why eludes me at the moment). We’ll want so much information and entertainment that sandwiches will double as MP3 players and laptops will double as pets or furniture. More information is being piled onto us all the time, TV programs getting more and more frenetic, entertainment becoming interactive whether we like it or not, red dots left, right and centre asking us to participate in the news, pulling us in to some hive mind. Doctor Who recently featured a story where the people of London were brought, entranced by messages through their earpieces, to have their brains removed by machines and entombed in the metal bodies of the Cybermen – how far off are we, when the white headphone cords of iPods dangle from every other ear and catatonic, glazed expressions greet you every morning on the train in to work?

We are becoming the Eloi. Cast off your earphones and smell the flowers!