Intresting times, Francis, intresting times…

Wotcha.

I’ve been asked to put the word out about this, so I do so without an excess of further comment:

At 12 noon, tomorrow, Wednesday 10th May, there’s a protest outside the Old College in regard to the continued Industrial Action by the AUT & the consequent lack of assessment of student work.

For those of you who have minimal cause to visit the Guild website, I’d also suggest an examination of former Guild President Bec Corn’s resignation speech, which she made at the Guild GM last night.

(That, incidentally, might well explain the e-mail from Pro Vice-Chancellor Dr. John Harries, in which he declares “The situation remains very changeable and may be resolved at any time.”) Incidentally, do look out for further statements from UWA; I’m told the Press Officer is putting something together for release this afternoon.

So, yeah:

• Protest, Old College, 12 Noon Tomorrow
• Bec Corn resigns from Guild.
• Theme of Protest is “Back to the Table,” or so I’m told.
• Go on, turn up.

People not in Aber, of course, probably don’t care about this too much, and anyway, can’t make the protest. Everyone else, I’m expecting to see you there; it’s rare that Guild Politics contrives to be adrenaline-rushingly interesting; when it does we should make the most of it.

Hence: Noon tomorrow, Old College. Protest.

‘In China, I understand, it’s a curse to live in interesting times…’

Bam!

Here’s a little aside for, er.

*counts*
Mansbridge, who’s read up to book eight.
Statto, who may’ve read book two.
Uh. Possibly-Katherine-Bryne not that I think she knows I even have a blog, who read a few, I think…

Today’s ‘Home on the Strange’, featuring a toptastic dig at Robert ‘If I describe every leaf in the tree it’s literature’ Jordan. Ray!

(It’s entirely true, incidentally; I bailed out around book Five. I think he’s on ten now).

I wish I never have to fix a plug again!…

…screams the man in the “Electricity, our faithful friend” information film. And Lo! Out jumps Pluggy, an anthropomorphic three-pin plug.

“So you don’t like electricity, eh?” he squeaks, in the manner of a soprano made yet more tiresome by helium inhalation “OK then, mister, I’ll fix it so you get your wish!”

And so all the power goes out. Joy. Presently, usually within another three minutes of film, the all-American berk who wished for all electricity to go away has realised that his radio doesn’t work, that all the food in his fridge has gone off and that murderers, racists, and blacks from Texas aren’t being executed because there’s no power.

“Noooo Electric!” Pluggy warbles repeatedly, until the man gives up and takes back his wish.

This style of film, it turns out, was desperately common in the USA, at one point, to the extent that the Simpsons makes a passing reference to it, and MST3K gets to have a go at an especially lousy specimen in ‘Squirm’.

The point there, however, is that the people involved in such films bring it on themselves. Or rather, Pluggy brings it on them in order to satisfy his own disgusting personal kinks, but the effect is much the same.

Residents of Hafan, on the other hand, have their very own Pluggy, in the form of the management committee of Cwrt Mawr, Rosser and Trefloyne. At this point, really, I should point out that I don’t exactly object to their carrying out essential maintainance on the Hafan sub-station all day today, but it is a bit of a pain. Especially since, it turns out, it’s a bigger job than they expected, and they’re shutting us down again at 0800-1700 tomorrow.

The major drawbacks of this, of course, are no working computers, no working consoles (and no TV, but that’s fairly naff anyway, unless you’re piping games through it) and no kettle to boil water with. OK, you can do it on the gas hob, hooray, but the same can’t be said for the coffee maker. Opening the fridge becomes likewise risky, especially on hot days like today, and – for no logical reason I can see at all – it becomes impossible to get hot water from the taps, despite the fact that to all outward appearances, the gas boiler oughtn’t give a toss what it’s streamlined electic cousin is doing, shut off or no.

Still, it should, I trust, be over by tomorrow, and I can get back to stumbling through Knights of the Old Republic II, and ripping stray CDs recently retrived from Colburn.

I heard from a taxi driver that the University were keen to scrap the Hafan vans. This, it would seem, is something of an untruth, especially since someone came into the van whilst we were away, accepted our coffee grinder from the postman (thus saving me a trip into town to collect it when we get back) and changed the bathroom light from a normal fixture to an ugly clinical strip-light-in-a-plastic-pie-dish affair, which is deeply unpleasant and hurts my eyes.

From this and the mammoth eighteen-hour maintainance work that’s ended up happening today and tomorrow on the sub-station thingy, I conclude they’re not, in fact, going to scrap the vans at all, which is very pleasing. I like Hafan; it’s stupidly roomy in contrast to PJM (never mind Penbyrn) and it’s got grass around it and is generally much more pleasant than you’d normally expect for accommodation on the top of the hill. The lack of electric is a predictable pain in the neck, but hey, it’s mostly in a good cause, and it keeps the money in circulation, which is probably a good thing.

Big ol’ rambling post their; apologies. But I couldn’t just write “The electric is off in Hafan today and now, it turns out, tomorrow,” because a) that’d be dull, b) I’m killing time waiting for Dan & Claire and people to turn up and c) I’m paying myself by the word for my blog entries from now on, and I want to save up to buy a Lear Jet.

Enjoy…

Three trains, six car journeys and and a couple of short wanderings on foot later…

…Ruth and I are back in Aber, after being exiled by the lack of cash brought about by the ponces at the council. Apologies for the total lack of blogging in that time (assuming, of course, that you’re the sort of person who stops by here or Abnib all the time looking for more of this stuff); my access to the ‘Net has been fairly minimal throughout Easter, ranging from token broadband but too tired to use it at home, to pay-as-you-run-desperately-through-the-net-to-cost-not-lots narrowband in Colburn.

So… Stuff happened.

I turned 21, which is fantastic, being as I’m now able to vote, own my own keys to the house, inherit anything that may have been left to me and so on. Yeah, OK, so turning 21 has got rather less impressive since 1970, but still, it was marginally interesting, especially since I got a whole bundle of cash with which to slope off and go internet shopping. Not quite enough to replace my digicam, but enough to get me an iRiver, and a whole bundle of other goodies, which is fine by me.

And on top of that, Ruth bought me a signet ring, with my cheery little logo on it (the one on the right of the two logos at KTAB (full history of the logos can be found here, should you really care), which is nice and toptastic, as well as being shiny.

Then we hauled off up North, and went to see Tom and Judith in Mauld’s Meaburn, which was nice, although it didn’t last long…

Er. Then things went a bit ad-lib, for reasons which Ruth explains, so we ended up in Cambridge, and then dived back to Newport in a bit of a flurry.

And then we managed to get ourselves back to Aber yesterday, and here we are.

Not especially informative stuff, I suppose, but other things, like going to a Quaker wedding, which was fun and interesting for me (not least because I got to catch up with everyone from Meeting) probably aren’t intesting to anyone else, and whilst it’s your choice to read my blog or not, it still seems a bit daft to take up your time with things about people you don’t know, when you could be off doing something much more useful to the world in general.

Have fun!

They didn’t like me! They never liked me!

Bloody council.

Er, so yeah.

Way back in January, the people in the offices I clean complained about me for not doing a good enough job, and said I only went in and emptied the bins and left again. Which wasn’t true, but I had indeed been skimping a bit on the dusting and polishing.

So I got a vaguely friendly visit from Shaun, yonder Area supervisor, or something, and it al got sorted out OK, and I started making sure I even polished the fairly pointless things, like the banisters, at least once a week (no, this isn’t a nice building, it’s a fairly yuck one with a cheapo set of banisters, none of the good-quality oak you get in the County Offices, or any of that).

Monday, however, I got called by the Council contracts manager, Jasmine Wilson, who said the plebs down in the offices had complained about me again. Which I thought wasn’t really on, since I had been doing the job properly, but it was probably nothing that couldn’t be sorted out with a bit of explaining where I was supposed to have gone wrong.

So on Monday I had a meeting with the aforementioned Jasmine (who’s at least a full level of authority above Shaun, himself two above where I am) and, despite the fact she was gearing up to sack me for the whole of the meeting, she agreed to move me to somewhere else, which was fine by me, since there was obviously some issue going on in the background that I wasn’t aware of…

Brilliantly, not only had the people I work with (who obviously had some issue they never told me, although exactly how or why they’d come to dislike me enough to care I’m not sure, since I hardly ever saw any of them) said I wasn’t doing the job, a cleaner had gone in to replace me some time I’d taken the night off, and they, apparently, had told the council workers in the building (or possibly Jasmine or Shaun, or someone, I wasn’t quite clear which) that the building wasn’t tidy.

Er. Now if I’m charitable here, I could assume that Jasmine meant it wasn’t tidy in such a way as meant I was the cause of that, such as a load of torn-up receipts with my name on them lying all over the floor, or something, but nevertheless, I think that’s fairly shoddy grounds for sulking…

“I went in to clean a building that needed cleaning after people had used it, and it was a mess.”

…doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it? Ah well.

Didn’t matter, since there was some problem of some sort noody was telling me about; I’ve never had complaints anywhere else I’ve been a cleaner, and nor in any other building for the council, so I assume there was something they wanted doing that I either wasn’t doing or (which is equally possible) wasn’t doing on a sufficiently regular basis for them to be happy about.

So, anyway, a wee bit of Dark-side active listening later (because it’s really hard to tell someone off if they keep nodding and saying “of course” every time you point out their faults) I was due to be moved to a new building at the start of next week, and then on Tuesday I get an ansaphone message telling me they’ve not recived my proof of ID for my police record check, and they can’t move me to another building after all, so they’re going to sack me anyway.

Bastards. How very annoying and vaguely indicative of people being got at behind the scenes of them.

So I’ve now not got a job, nor any actual money. This is infuriating.

Whats more, little prospect of getting another job before money runs out horribly. Which rather means I have to go home for Easter because I can’t afford to stay in Aber and buy food. This also is infuriating. Now I have to negotiate the logistics of taking a computer back on the train. Tedium.

*sigh*

Much preffer Aber to home; don’t get expected to achieve things here, let alone clear out sheds and soforth.

Ah well. Sounds like Paul has arrived at the Flat. Zelda Four Swords Adventures time, I suspect.

[slouches off in an unemployed huff]

Just in case you missed it on Dan’s blog…

Go check out the post he’s made about the joys of Darkside Active Listening.

Kudos to Dan for putting more thought into the background mechanics of it, too; whilst I’m not entirely sure it’s a compliment to have my pet “force deliberately mishearing” tactic described as ‘something truly bitter and twisted’ (heh. Actually yeah, that rocks) I’m well impressed to find out the reason it *works* is because they move on in their mental script…

…And there was me just abusing the force by feel.

I now feel enormously cruel and evil. It’s fun.

Also enormous desire to play SW JK 3: Jedi Academy, only I’ve no idea where the damn game’s gone; it went AWOL about the same time as my ‘Kind Hearts & Coronets’ DVD, I think… Don’t suppose Dan’s got an .iso or two kicking about?

Everyone loves overly complicated memes.

I did another meme. Apologies. Feel free to skip it.

Hoy. Always with the money…

L’Oreal have bought out the Body Shop.

*sigh*

Lush, anyone?

Hooray! UWA killed XuQa access!

If you’re not getting online from a terminal within the UWA firewall, you’ll be able to find XuQa (pronounced, apparently “ZooKah,” rather than “ex you ku wah…” cretins…) at www.xuqa.com. Infuriatingly, the www appears to be essential.

However, it turns out UWA have blocked it – see here, because it was a totally unmoderated forum. So, obviously, everyone started to use it for hate mail, and similar predictable rubbish, and generally breaking the law.

I hate ’em, they’re wankers. Forwhy? Because they kept spamming my AberNet account and telling me to join, whilst spoofing the “from” address to look like someone from inside Aber (except, of course, it didn’t show up when I checked it in the directory.

Not only this, but they were too thick to properly restrict to actual UWA users. Really, that can’t be too hard. Facebook – a similar (although marginally less crappy) effort currently bouncing round Oxford and annoying people – at least had the wit to make sure users were *at* Oxford…

…even I can see that saying “please use your college e-mail address to create your account. If your college hasn’t supplied you with an e-mail account, then…” yeah, you can use whatever the Hell you want. Old, dead, anonymous Hotmail and Yahoo! accounts, for example. Or something at DodgeIt.com.

…and then you’re all set to cause trouble.

The blind incompetence of that, plus the fact that you couldn’t *find* anything on there put me right off.

It’s a shame, in a way; it could’ve been a good service, properly looked at and restricted. As it was, they launched it with spam, and without any sensible membership rules, and it unsurprisingly went bang. Well, no – it’s still there; you just can’t get to it from inside UWA.

It’s not exactly that I’ve got a problem with things like Facebook, nor even with XuQa, blatantly stupid name or no… It’s just if you’re going to to that sort of thing, then you should at least have the wit to do it sensibly.

Sensibly in this case would’ve been not pissing off IS by using evil darkside spamming techniques, and consulting with UWA first. Not telling people what you’re doing, with somethign like this, is just plain stupid, because the first time you do something to annoy ’em, they’ll pull the plug. Establish a dialogue first, and you’re half-way home. That, and some half-way sensible techs, and it’d’ve been a good, searchable service that’d last oooh… a year and a bit before stagnating and becoming dull?

As it is, it’s been predicable kicked out of the IT rooms. Screw ye not with a genuine legal problem, wallies.

Still, I ought to be out of the IT rooms, myself; Ruth isn’t feeling too great; I really should go see she’s alright…

You have been warned, boys & girls…

…I’m inexplicably a deeply fed up bunny. I apologise in advance for biting your heads off without any prior warning, because I sure as Hell won’t want to apologise if it happens.

Haven’t posted in ages. Obligatory insincere apology goes here. Fuck off, I haven’t got the internet, and I haven’t felt like writing anything anyway.

General discontent, usual stuff. Feeling increasingly malevolent and bile-filled, for some reason, can’t seem to shake it off, grumping at everything with or without a valid reason to do so…

…keep falling asleep during ‘play for today,’ can’t stop thinking about sex, can’t start doing anything about sex, never seem to finishe the Times crossword like I used to…

Asprin inexplicably hard to get hold of, Ibruprofen not helping.

Desperate urge to strangle people for the entirely innocuous crime of being stupid wastrel cretins, which I’ve never really had before, especially since I’ve suddenly started feeling so towards people who aren’t really stupid wastrel cretins, but have simply said unforgivably stupid things, such as something that annoys me for no real reason.

I blame being ill; I had flu last week and ended up stuck in bed not moving much and getting very little done. ‘s given me an imbalance of humours, I shouldn’t wonder, hence being so choleric.

Should be in a lecture now, but it’s just a video of ‘Look Back In Anger,’ and I reckon I didn’t ought to be watching other people having rants just at the moment, or I’ll haul off and thump something, and bust a knuckle, and jump up and down and swear.

Stuff this, I’m away back to Hafan.

Once again…

…a bunch of cretins have run about causing a fuss and doing no end of damage to their own cause.

That’s not especially surprising, people are like that. You’d think, however, what with all the bad press Muslims are getting these days, they’d be a bit slower to have a go at papers for publishing cartoons of Mohammed because they’d had a go at another paper who published cartoons of Mohammed.

Really, don’t make death threats against the press; they publish them and you look like dicks.

I’d never have known about these cartoons but for the Carder-like blind outrage shown by (as far as I can tell) a minority of Muslims, and (less explicably) the Saudi government. As it was, I saw this, and immediately ran a Google image search for “Mohammed Cartoon”. Wouldn’t you? You see a fuss and you immediately want to know what it’s about.

There’s a slightly hard-to-understand site (mainly, I think, because I can’t read Arabic, nor semi-Arabic) which is here for reference, and the word that first comes to mind to describe it is “stroppy.”

That probably sounds like I’m trying to deliberately wind people up, but really… You don’t, by and large, see the CoE running about demanding people retract cartoons of Jesus. The one time they tried, which was with Life of Brian, they looked like dicks. But at least they didn’t burn flags or make armed assaults on people.

I don’t, really, have a problem with Islam saying “Do not do cartoons of the Prophet, pbuh,” but if they say that because “it’s disrespectful to do so” and then say “and to show you we want you to apologise, we’re burning your flag, and you’re all a bunch of arses” I don’t see how that works. You cannot, if you wish to be taken seriously, demand that people respect your views and then refuse to listen to anyone else’s. The world just doesn’t work like that.

On the aforementioned stroppy website, a fairly sensible-sounding Dane has made a comment, which follows:

I’m another Dane, and the questions below have been nagging me.

• Why do people who believe in gods feel that they have a greater right to be offended than us people who mainly believe in humans?
• Why do some people think that the Danish government (and indeed the Danish nation and every danish citizen) have anything to do with this? Let alone have the power to apologize for these drawings, if apologies should be issued?
• Someone (Moslems, I guess) has burned the Danish flag on the West Bank. Is it okay if we say that this offends me to no end, and so we’re even? Or should the Palestinian government apologize to Danish patriots everywhere?
• What if Jyllands-Posten comes out and says “nah nah, fooled you, that wasn’t Mohammed, it was drawings of the Taoist deity Lao Tzu”? Or: “Yes it was a guy named Mohammed, but not the prophet”?
• What if there’s a religion somewhere that worships the Half-Moon, and has a rule that a drawing of the Half-Moon is a blasphemy?
• I’m a believer. I believe strongly in equal rights for the sexes. Sex-based discrimination offends me. Should the Saudi government apologize to me?
• Why hit on Jyllands-Posten – have you ever tried to google “prophet mohammed”? There’s loads of material out there to get you offended, if you get off on being offended.
• What should be done to the Danish artist who, ten years ago, made a movie portraying Jesus getting drunk and having wild sex?
• yup… maybe Jyllands-Posten didn’t need to print those drawings, and you shouldn’t provoke anybody for no good reason, and we should all just get along, and etc etc. But will the offended Moslems please calm down and start acting like grown-ups? If Allah is really displeased with Jyllands-Postens editors, he will punish them in the after-life, right?

Published By Nikolaj Nielsen – January 30 1:55:09 PM

Which pretty much sums it up in a nutshell.

I mean, really, in a world in which large numbers of addle-brained Yanks are firmly under the impression that Terrorism is a) a bigger threat than global warming, and b) All done by Muslims who are scary and intolerant and c) Not fun now it’s happened to them so they’ve stopped funding the IRA, senior members of the Muslim community are having a pop at non-muslims, who, being non-Muslims, probably don’t give a stuff what the Q’ran says, having as they do, no reason to care at all, and burning flags and causing trouble.

Now one thing I do know is that America loves to pretend it’s a free and liberal country in which people can say whatever they want, as long as it isn’t Anti-American. Having a go at newspapers for publishing things as “freedom of speech” which you find offensive isn’t going to go down well in the USA, because the average American will soon have Fox and CNN telling him the trouble is that these papers are allowed to publish whatever they want.

Yes, it’s something Islam doesn’t like, but Denmark isn’t an Islamic country. Do we expect Denmark to stop serving alcohol in case that offends Muslims as well? No we don’t, but I’m sure some muslims are offended by it. If this were a Saudi paper, or even one in a country with a moderate Muslim population, I’d probably understand the fuss a bit better, but really.. Just because Islam exists in the world doesn’t mean papers which aren’t subject to Islamic law or convention should abide by it’s rulings. If they did, they’d have to abide by the rulings of every other religion as well, and then (presumably) Muslims would be pissed off because the paper was celebrating days sacred to the Hindu gods, of which there are rather more than one.

Bloody extremists. The one thing that’s certain to piss me off more than anything else is people being intolerant, mainly because it’s really not hard to shut the fuck up and accept that some people don’t think the way you do, and trying to bully them into it isn’t going to work.

Bloody humans. Still, give it another hundred years or so and current society will be screwed anyway, and then we can have done with it and go back to anarchic tribalism and barter. Hooray.

I Passed my driving theory test yesterday…

I passed the gay-ass DSA one, as well, which is marginally unimpressive, since I did bum all revision for any of it, and failed a Hazard perception clip for clicking too many times when a lorry suddenly pulled out, mainly because it was a rapidly developing hazard, so I reacted by clicking rapidly – mostly a result of my “Left Mouse Button = fire, truck = threat, react fast, shoot it, played too many PC games” reflexes, I think.

The DSA don’t like you reacting quickly to hazardous bloody great trucks, especially not ones that you’ve been able to see are going to shoot out of the layby in second gear since the start of the clip.

Still, it’s done now, and assuming I pass the real thing by January 2008, I won’t have to do it again, and I can go back to my ususal HazPerp style of “Anything on the road is a potential hazard, and the DSA are knobs to pretend there’s only one risk per 10 seconds of driving”…

Four Things Meme…

Four jobs I’ve had:

• Cleaner for Ceredigion Council
• Till monkey in Spar
• Chocolate Packer for Halo Foods, Tywyn
• Cleaner for Newport Police Station

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• South Park: BLU
• Kind Hearts & Coronets
• Flashback
• Casablanca

Four places I’ve lived:

• Hadley, Telford
• Newport, Shropshire
• Hafan, Aberystwyth
• Er, Colburn, N. Yorks, at a pinch…

Four TV shows I love to watch:

• Midsommer Murders
• Futurama
• House of Cards
• Our Friends In The North

Four places I’ve been on vacation:

• Paris
• Cairo
• Crete
• Prestatyn

Four of my favorite dishes:

• Fish n Chips
• Cafe All Spice Shajadhi Gusht
• Full English Breakfast
• Sweet & Sour Chicken

Four sites I visit daily:

• Gmail
• Legend of the Green Dragon
• KTAB News
• Abnib

Four places I’d rather be right now:

• Somewhere warmer
• Somewhere with Ruth
• Back in Hafan watching Lovejoy DVDs
• In bed

Four bloggers I’m tagging

• Dan
• Ruth
• Statto, mostly because he doesn’t like memes
• Jen

Christ, I need a car.

Also to pass my driving test, but I’m going one thing at a time here, OK.

Tomorrow I have a dentists appointment in Shrewsbury, at 11.
To get there I’m going to have to get up at half past bloody six, to catch the 7:30 train, to get me to Shrewsbury at half nine. Because if I get the 9:30 out of Aber, I won’t be in Shrewsbury until half an hour after the stupid appointment.

Reliance on public transport is possibly the most debilitating thing you can come up against, short of having something actually wrong with you, like a broken leg or something.

Arse.

Good God…

…Does Abnib 3.0 not look like the pits of the Earth?

‘s bloody horrible, man! Stop the bubbly over-yellow yuckness!

Missing: one Work Ethic (his name is William). REWARD if found…

O dear.
Tomorrow, at 0930h, I have an exam. And I know for a fact I’m going to fail it, because – as a result of the Famous Housing Crisis of 2005, I was too busy stressing, hiding from bastardy housemates, looking for a new place to live and moving boxes to go to any of the lectures or seminars I had in the November-onwards part of last term.

All things considered, that’s still pretty much my fault; if I’d had the guts to actually put aside the rest of the trouble I was in at that time, and make it to the lectures, then I’d not be in the fix I am now. But I didn’t, so here I am, less than 24-hours to go, and I know that I will not be able to answer any question on the paper in anything looking like a meaningful way.

Strictly speaking, therefore, the proper course of action for me to be taking is the one in which I panic, and try to cram furiously.

Can I work up enough enthusiasm to do that effectively? Can I bollocks. Hell, I know I’m going to fail pretty much whatever happens; there’s no way I can get up to speed in time. So why stress about it?

If I were, for example, Sundeep, and had got myself into this situation, then I’m pretty sure I’d be staying up all night getting as much reading as possible done before it’s absolutely too late. Probably, that’s what I ought to be doing myself, but I’m just feeling no motivation whatsoever now.

Thing is, I cannot get nervous about exams. Despite the fact that, in the rest of my life, I’m a total wuss, and I stress about Ruth going off to work in case she’s knocked down by a lorry and killed, I can’t make myself get interested by exams.

Partly, I think, that’s because I cannot revise. Name a method of revision, and I’m betting you that I’ve tried it, and got nothing out of it. Re-reading? No use. Making lots of notes and condensing and condensing them until I’ve killed off a whole Big Mac’s worth of Amazonian rainforest? I should be so lucky. Making crackly tapes of things I need to learn and playing them in my sleep? I slept really badly, butI didn’t learn a bean.

There’s precisely one exam I ever got nervous about in my entire life, and that was the 11-plus I did to get into AGS. And mostly I was nervous about that because I was taking it at the school (I ended up in S7, actually) and I’d never been there before, which was unnerving.

That’s it. GCSEs? Yeah, I did ’em. But I was never worried about doing them. I wasn’t even worried afterwards, because, once you’ve done the exam, the result you get is what you get. It’s even less use stressing over that than it is stressing over the exam in the first place.

A-levels… Just didn’t bother me. Even Biology which I knew I was going to make a mess of, because Coff and Ben Michael lured me away from the lessons, I wasn’t really bothered.

O, sure, sometimes, up to a fortnight or so before the actual exam, I’ll worry that I’ll make a mess of it, but never for long enough to make me actually do anything about it. And in this case, not even that, really.

I know that I will never pass this exam. In the summer, I will have to re-sit it, and that will be a phenomenal pain in the arse, and will probably be both costly and a logistical nightmare. Tomorrow, I’m going to go and sit in the Great Hall, make a total cock-up of the whole thing, and go back to Hafan and have a cup of tea, because, really, what else is there to do?

Nothing can change the fact that at the point last term went down the tubes, I stopped going to lectures. As a result, I just don’t have the base of information on which to construct a realistic argument, even under the lack-of-critics-happy friendly environment of a closed-book exam.

But I just can’t work up any real interest in it. I’m going to fail, which is a fact. If I don’t, then it’s a bloody miracle, but it won’t be down to a late surge on my part, because, firstly, my brain doesn’t work like that, and rejects and attempt at self-induced knowledge in favour of someone better qualified telling me and me scribbling it down furiously in A12, and, secondly, I have not got, and possibly never have had, the sort of personality that allows me to get excited about exams, or deadlines, or work in general.

It’s a major, major failing. Most people who know me fairly well are probably aware that I’m capable of pouring as much energy and effort as I can muster into something just as long as it’s something that’s either captured my interest or which I’ve reason to care about, and that, I think, is probably a good quality.

Where it goes arse-over-tit, however, is when I try to make myself have an interest in something – like, say, doing an essay. My brain’s not that stupid, it can tell when I’m trying to put one over on it, and I just get dispirited with the whole thing and lose the will to do anything at all. That is most certainly a very bad quality…

…But it doesn’t appear to be one I can do anything about, and I don’t know why. I’m just not built right. Ruth, somehow, is not only able of getting involved with pretty much any bit of work she’s got to do, but feels bad about it if she hands it in and feels she’s not put as much effort into doing it as she could have. I don’t know how she does it, but I wish I was able to do it as well.

I am, basically, an incredibly lazy person, and tomorrow I will fail an exam, and will that teach me a lesson about doing more work in future, and always going to lectures regardless of other issues?

Don’t be so naive. I wish it would, but it won’t. I’m lazy and pretty much usless when it comes to work, and for all my life would be much easier if I only had a bloody work ethic, I haven’t got one, and I don’t know where to get one. Bollocks.

Still… I wonder if hypnotherapy could fix me up?

101 Ways To Start 2006, #29: Get Thrown Out of a Caravan.

Well, more or less. Strictly speaking, I’m only being thrown into a very similar caravan a hundred yards away, but even so…

[Wobbly effect to denote flashback]
Returned New Year’s eve to find boiler dead. Lone porter left on duty (covering Cwrt Mawr, Rosser, Trefloyne, Hafan, Llanbadarn Campus, Pantycelyn &c) finds me small electric radiator to keep token suggestion of heat in van. Promises to get gas man out ASAP.

Gas man arrives Tuesday, delayed by Bank Holiday, which fair enough. Opens boiler, notes rust, points out where boiler has leaked onto pump and buggered it. Notes boiler 24 years old. Spare parts for said boiler no longer made or in stock. Condemns boiler, cuts off gas. Suggests new boiler will arrive. Goes to tell Accommodation Office.

Wednesday starts with me dreaming I’ve fallen over and had a pile of earth fall on me. Wake as result of conviction I can’t breathe. Knock on door: Porter. “We don’t know if we’re going to replace the boiler at all. Move into another van”. Boiler in new van just as old as the old one. No landline socket in new van. Annoying promise of no cheap calls to landlines. Prospect of having to redirect letters and such all over again. Ah crap. Porter later explains new boiler would be £1,000. This unlikely, as Hafan past it’s servicable life anyway. Phonecall from mother: Sister fallen down stairs, probably has concussion, had trouble with vision, was sick, was sick again later, is eventually taken to A & E.

[Wobbliness again]

And so we come to now, when I’m sat in Llandinam feeling thoroughly sick to the teeth with the lot of it. Spent most of week huddled up to little radiator in thick jumper watching DVDs of the second series of Lovejoy and drinking large quantities of ale.

That’s about it, really.

Stupid sodding boiler.

What I did at Christmas.

At Christmas I gotta lift home to Newport with Owen, who is Ruth’s brother, and Robion, who is also Ruth’s brother. But Robin is Ruth’s yunger brother, and cannot drive like her older brother Owen can.

And that is what I did for Christmas.

No, really. But it is actually very sensible that we’ve done that, because at current rates I’m at home something like one week in fifty-two, so there’s been a whole room designated as “my bedroom” that wasn’t being used as such, and wasn’t being used as anything else either. Making it a box room, therefore, is actually fairly sensible, which is why I said we should do it. And then on the rare occasions when I am home, I can kip on the sofa bed.

Just thought I’d give a vague update, there, since we now have sluggish 2.2 Mbp/s broadband at home (courtesy of the slightly suspicious people at Wanadoo, who told my mother that “You can only go online with Internet Explorer if you’re using Broadband”. Er, no. No, fuck off… No… There we go, Firefox. Or Opera. I’m not too fussy, I just want something good.). Also, of course, my mother now has my old PC which, though sluggish and old, is still ten million times faster that the knackered e-machines box aimed at users who’ll never even take the cover off, or show file extensions, so using the PC here isn’t as punishing as once it was.

Now, however, I’m for bed, because I’ve got a bloody horrible cold, and a sore throat, and I’m totally exhausted.

Happy New Year, since I’m unlikely to blog again before then!

Wotcha all. Christmas time is here again…

…And, at some point, I trust I’ll start feeling like it is. Mostly, I don’t feel like it’s nearly Christmas because every time I go into a shop, I hear the same bloody December music I’ve been hearing all month – Winter Wonderland, and Santa Claus is Coming, and so on and suchlike.

At some point several years back, that probably did make me feel like it was Christmas, but we’re talking over a decade, here, and people with ages still in single figures tend to get excited by the mere mention of stockings, so…

…Hmm. Stockings, you say?

OK, bad example. How about:

…excited by the mere mention of advent calendars, which is something I can’t say I’ve done for some time. Christmas carols make me feel like it’s Christmas, and, paradoxically, so does Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody,” but I think that’s because I generally only hear carols in the last week or so of Advent, and we used to sing Slade as in the final assembly of the Autumn term back at AGS.

Everything else, on the other hand, gets shoved down my throat from November onwards, with the result that I don’t associate it with Christmas anymore. But, never mind, eh?

Cheers to everyone who turned up yesterday evening, it went, though I say so myself, rather well, despite Lidl’s stupidly running out of Gluhwein.

O, and following on vaguely from the conversation we had about Interactive Fiction, and suchlike, I do recommend people faintly interested go to Adam Cardre’s website and download some – Phototopia is very good, in a linear way, but it probably a good introduction, if you’ve not done much in the way of IF before.

Also I highly recommend Varicella, which is fantastically Machiavellian – proper House of Cards stuff, in places – although I’ve found it pretty hard – for God’s sake, make a map ASAP… and if you want a proper confusing time of it, ‘Shrapnel’ is brilliant, and turns your brains out rather better than Ian Banks’ ‘Walking on Glass,’ which is fairly impressive of it.

Should be going off to work now (Portland Road isn’t going to clean itself, especially not with the real bloody Christmas tree they’ve gone and put in it) and I need to come back and sort out the washing so it has a chance to dry off before Ruth heads off to Northampton and I hitch a lift as far as Newport. All the fun of the festive season, huh?

O – and thanks to Dan & Claire for the spare monitor. It’s currently perched on a stool, and has made the DOS-box far more useable, now I don’t have to fiddle about swapping cables over before firing it up.

‘Ray, work… Still, it gets me money, which I can promptly throw away to bribe Orange to keep me connected…

Week Ending… (or “that was the week that sucked…”)

Well, care or naff off to some other ego-boosting website, bitch.

Autumn, rarely my favourite time of year, being, as it is, too long for Dick and too short for Richard, with it’s not-quite-summer-heat and not-quite-winter-frosts was OK, although a bit naff on and off, especially since my mother came down with sciatica (sp?) in September and it still hasn’t cleared up yet, which isn’t great, and then came November, and things just went from gay to intolerant fundamentalist bigot…

First there was the trouble at 72, when we realised that the housemates there weren’t too keen on us, and decided it would be better all round if we left them to it.

Then, PJM let us move my room over to house 119c, with a view to moving Ruth’s room to 119d when the girl in there moved out.

119c was great, and the housemates there were all very nice and friendly, and all was going well until I got a worrying letter from the PJM warden. After that things just collapsed faster then a Guild exec meeting, when I discovered what the Warden wanted, which was about the same time I realised that what I wanted was a Lee Enfield (it’s the only type of gun for which I have any amunition whatsoever) and a sniper’s nest overlooking the front door.

At that point, I came to the conclusion that life was just getting too stressful and that, whilst I could devote the rest of my year here to making the lives of the dicks at 119 a total bloody misery, it would have the negative effect of forcing me to stay there whilst they made my life a misery as well. So on Wednesday, Ruth & I went into town and looked around all the estate agents in Aberystwyth (except for ALP Property Management, because they’re terrible (see link).

It was looking fairly promising, with a couple of things we hoped to get viewings for, including a nice-sounding attic flat on North Parade, at about £70 p/w, plus bills. So we were feeling good and cheered up, and headed back for an early night’s sleep at 119 on the Wednesday. And, as I’ve explained that really didn’t work. Evil little bastards. At 0115 Thursday, just after I made that entry, I rang Dan, who was an absolute saint, reacting to my close-to-tears “could we come and stay at the flat, tonight, please” with a spot-on “Yes, I’ll make sure the door’s open and we’ll see you in a bit,” which neatly avoided any silly questions like “Why?” or “What’s happened?” until we were in a better position to explain about it without bursting into tears at him.

On the way to the flat we stopped at the PJM amenities block to tell the porter who’d just been round with the warden that we were down the hill for the rest of the night, and if he got called out again, he needn’t bother going. The fact that I was in floods at this point seemed to un-nerve him (grown men with beards not being the type of people you expect to come and weep at you right after you’ve been round to tell them off for the loud music they’re supposed to be playing), and he kept telling us he’d only been round because he had to, and did we want him to get the warden again, and we said no, because how could it help, and he made a helpless face, and looked worried.

Thursday morning, we woke on the sofa bed at the flat (I now realise why Dan claims it was designed by someone who neither slept nor sat down) and Ruth told me about the dream she’d just had, which was mildly amusing. Then we went round the estate agents again, to listen to the depressing news that, although there were places, there weren’t many, and we couldn’t get viewings until at least next Wednesday.

So we went back to the Flat, and met Dan & Claire, who had just found a place to live, and Claire gave us a lift up the hill to see Eileen Watkin in the Accommodation Office.

More or less to her credit, she didn’t automatically take our side, although since Ruth was in tears again at this point, I’d’ve taken a softer line. She did, however, ring the PJM Amenities block, and spoke to Heather Morgan up there, and got rather more sympathetic after she’d done so (I’ve a sneaking suspicion the porter must’ve put a note in their log to say “Er, the noisy people just came and sobbed at me for five minutes, and now they’re going to sleep on someone’s floor so they can’t get complained about again…”, which would explain why she suddenly stopped asking questions about whether we were sure we’d not done anything to annoy them) and said she’d got a solution.

That solution turned out to be Hafan, the University’s collection of static caravans, somewhere round the back of the Arts Centre. It would, she explained, be cheaper than PJM – in fact it’s about £80 p/w inc, for the pair of us, which is half what we were paying in PJM, and she suggested we go and take a look at it. So, we went up to Cwrt Mawr reception, and got the keys to the caravan, and went out there to have a look. By this point, I was already very enthusiastic, although Ruth wasn’t so sure, and was still too nervous to notice that I kept saying “well, I think we should take it unless there’s something really wrong with it,” at five-minute intervals.

As it was, we got in there, and were immediately struck by the fact that the sitting room of the, uh, caravan, was bigger than the PJM rooms, and there was still the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom and the spare bedroom to go. Also, there was a gas cooker, which just about sold Ruth…

…Since then, there’s been a mad rush to empty the houses in PJM – many, many thanks to everyone who helped with that, especially Paul, who was an absolute saint, helping us shift shopping trolleys full of our stuff to the caravan (yes, yes, make yer damn Gypsy jokes and have done with it), and also to Bec Corn (in the incredibly unlikely event that she’s reading this) for seeing me and Paul with our over-filled trolleys on the final trip, stopping her Union van, and getting out of it to say “Can I help? Only I notice I’ve got a van, and you’ve got a load of stuff in some trolleys”. OK, earlier that day would’ve been better, but it was still a nice gesture of general good-will.

So, now we live in a caravan. Yes indeed. And it’s stupidly vast. (Well, compared to a normal “study bedroom”, at least). Only downside is that it doesn’t have Ethernet access, but we’re hoping to get onto the Wireless point at Brynamlwg (sp?), which Paul thinks is a fair chance, so we can then turn the spare bedroom into a study, and hook up from there. At some point.

Horrible week, all things considered, and probably the second worst of my scarred and fucked-uip life, but things are looking up now, and my personal tutor’s given my an extension for my essay which would otherwise be due in on Monday. This is good, because we’ve not even properly unpacked yet, never mind had chance to look at notes.

Better now…

O fuck an evil-minded cunting BRICK

We’ve been asleep for an hour and a half.

We just got woken up by7 the assistant warden with a noise complaint because we’ve been moving furniture andf playing really loud music.

I honsetly can’t cope with this, it’s ridiculous.

The tem,ptation to haul off and thump someone is, remarkably for a situation like this, whe’re I’m being blatantly obviously got at, nowhere near as strong as the tempation to crawl under the duvet and hide for the rest of the year.

Shit shitty crap.

Well today was a wee bit better…

…We’ve started looking for a few flats, and there’s a couple that look pretty decent. Going to try and sort out a few more viewings tomorrow.

Have also booked an appointment with Caryl Davies, the Deputy director of student support, on Monday. Hopefully she’ll see there’s a problem and let us out of the bloody housing contracts, and then we can go and get somewhere nice.

Incidentally, today I came back from my seminar to get confronted by the girl in the room next to us – apparently “someone” has ripped the pull-cord for the light in the downstairs bathroom right out of the socket (I checked; they have) and the cord itself has gone missing. “Everyone else” in the house appears to be swearing blind that they haven’t done it, and it’s pretty clear she was hoping to blame it on us.

The only snag there is that, like everything else they accuse us of doing, we didn’t do it. I had a shower yesterday, and the light was fine, but that’s about all I know. What I find really strange is that the cord has actually gone, which suggests it wasn’t just that someone caught it on a dressing gown and it snapped by accident – someone’s gone to the trouble of removing the cord. Now OK, it could just be that nobody wants to get stuck with paying for it out of their deposit, but given that they made up all that other shit about us, is it implausible to think they may’ve done it with a view to making another complaint about us?

Honest to God; the sooner we’re out of there, the better.

Jesus Christ, this term just gets worse and worse…

Well I just went to see the Senior Resident. Ruth couldn’t come in… Apparently the entire band of new housmates went to see him last night and complained about us for a whole bunch of the following:

We play music too loud (although we got asked to turn it down once and have kept it down ever since).

We come in really late at night and bang about in a drunken way (I’m especially impressed by my this, given that I don’t drink)

We put shelves in the bathroom (this one we did, because it saves us covering the shelf at the end of the bath with shampoo)

Our “friends” (we don’t know who) keep coming in when we’re away and the housemates “suspect” them of taking their food.

Once when Ruth & I were out “someone” came round with a take-away, found we weren’t in, and sat in our room and ate it. (How this can’ve happened is frankly beyond me…)

O, and apparently we don’t flush the toilets. Hm.

Personally, I’m getting strong “We’ve made this up because we liked having a house with an empty room in it” vibes, but I’m going to go and see someone called… *checks paper* O, yes, Caryl Davies in the morning.

Fucking marvelous.

Well now I’m just *filled* with confidence, huh?

When I gotthis e-mail from the PJM Senior Resident, I sent one back to him explaining that I can’t actually be there at 6:30, because I have to be elsewhere. That was at noon.

So at 16:15 I sent him the following:
ear Dr. Stoker,
Sorry about the uselessness of the last e-mail, I suspect it wasn’t actually as helpful as it needed to be.

Many thanks,
JTA

And what did I just get?

“Dear James,

I will be there at 5.45pm

David Stoker”

Yeah, fucking marvellous. Who the pissing Hell is James, then?

Not shaping up too well, is it?

Can I just point out that I’m still waiting for my stressed and feeling crappy mood to pass properly, and this isn’t helping…

…Especially since I’m now too afraid to leave my room, because I don’t know what I’m doing wrong:

Here’s a letter from the senior resident – rarely a good thing –

Subject: House 119
Dear Mr Trevor-Allen,
Your housemates came to see me last night to complain of the behaviour of yourself and your friends in the house. Please would you come to see me at the Amenity Block this evening at 6.30pm to discuss this matter.
David Stoker

I particularly admire the way he doesn’t even tell me what time last night, which makes the entire thing next to useless. All I know is that at some point after about 5pm-ish yesterday (and presumably by appointment) the people in 119 – that’s the *good* house – all got togehter and went to see him to complain about something. Does he tell me what?

Nope.

For fucks’ sake I’;ve had it with this, I’m practically desperate to get myself into private just at the moment simply to be able to check my e-mails without feeling sick…

Ah, November 27th. Only another 29 days ’till Christmas.

November 27th, huh?

Shit. That’ll be the November 27th that happens 24 hours before my essay’s due in, then.

Nuts.

Still feeling astonishingly drained & listless, which has been bogging me down since the start of October. Very annoying, and I can’t work out how to shift it.

(The letter to the housemates…)

Pinned this up on the noticeboard in 72 about 1pm today. By 3 it had been randomly taken down. Guess it pissed them off… Lovely the damage you can do with a kind word, innit?

“Hey guys,
Well, now, this just isn’t working, is it? It’s pretty obvious that you find our not doing the washing up just as irritating as we find your leaving half-done washing up in a sink full of cold water, and I guess you might even find it slightly more annoying than we do.

Trouble is, Ruth’s got one Hell of a lot of work (yes, yes, we all have a lot of work, we know, but “lot” remains a relative term…) and as a result she doesn’t have much in the way of spare time, after allowing for doing all the projects and assignments she has to get handed in, doing her job on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and attempting to get a half-way reasonable amount of sleep

Meanwhile, I’m in my final year and supposed to be doing huge quantities of reading of critical texts and studies and getting essays and seminars done, as well as working for two hours every evening, and getting a good degree is something I count above having shiny clean plates.

So, no, we haven’t done the washing up, although I do feel at least vaguely entitled to claim a misunderstanding there – sometime back in September, when we were still all new and interesting to each other, you guys put it in a pile in the corner, which to me sends the message “Keep this out of the way until it’s done, please.” Evidently you thought the message was something different, but at this stage, who’s still bothered enough to care about that?

Anyway, this whole ‘in the same house’ plan is pretty obviously dead in the water, so we’re doing our best to clear out of here; staying certainly driving us nuts, and I’d put a very little money on the bet you guys feel the same. Certainly I can’t put up with this for the rest of the year; I’ll just become an antagonistic bastard towards the lot of you, which won’t look good to anyone.

Uni accommodation being what it is, we can’t shift out entirely just yet, however; we’ll still have Room D until another room opens up elsewhere in the village, and we’ll be round to shift things over to our new place on a regularish basis, but by and large we’ll be out of one another’s way, which saves all the hassle of one of us braining one of the others with an unwashed frying pan… You should have a wee bit more space in the kitchen once we’ve hauled all our stuff out of there, too.

Ah well.

I’ll be surprised if you’ve bothered to read all this, but you might do, if you’re waiting for the tea to brew, and if you have, thanks, at least, for letting us point out we haven’t just run off in a huff.

No doubt you’ll get some new housemates moving in, in due course, and with any luck they’ll have less intensive courses, or be more inclined to wash up in the gap before cooking the food and eating it. Ah, but you’re right, we did leave some of it there for a while, when nobody had emptied the cold water out of the sink. That’s me edging towards being antagonistic, I know, and I apologise for saying it.

Still, no point fussing over any of it now, especially since you seem thoroughly disinclined to accept how busy we are.

Good luck with (and to) the new people, and with your courses in general; I’m sure you’d wish the same to us. And thanks again for reading this. We may yet run into you again over the next few weeks, but you don’t have to go losing sleep over it.

Have fun!”

So that was good. Still needing help moving stuff, mark you, but it’s all looking up, and maybe life will get a bit cheerier now we’re not stuck with those wankers…

Things moved fast in Cork…

…So, then, who wants to help us move? The dudes in the PJM Amenities block are toptastic people, and when I went to them and said “I’m looking to move out of the house I’m in” they said “119 C’s free,” without even asking why. This is good. Asking why would’ve made me sound like a whingey git, as I’m pretty sure it did last night, but then, of course, I couldn’t actually do anything, which isn’t nearly as good.

Temporarily, therefore, we’ll have 119C and 72D, until (at some point) the girl who’s in 119E and wants to move to a house with Freshers does so, and leaves another room free there, into which we can move the rest of our stuff…

Meanwhile, therefore, we’ll have two houses, so there’s no huge rush to move things (which is good, because my legs are bloody killing me – see a later post…) , but help shifting essentials (PC, monitor, TV, PS2 &, like, probably some bedding…) would still be good…

And, yeah, we’re taking a risk that the next housemates will be dicks as well, but at least there’s a chance they’ll make an effort back when we try to be friendly to them…

So, yeah. Off to re-jigger the TV lisence and show Ruth the new place.

Brief note:

Not sure how many of you this still applies to, but for those of you in Aber, and up for Troma, we’ve got some films lined up. The theme is ‘Rebels,’ and we’re planning to watch

Flashback
The Mark of Zorro (1940 version)
High Noon.

So, er, yeah.
Flat, 8, etc.

Gunpowder, Treason & Plot…

Well, now. Went and gave blood, today, which has left me with a slight headache and a raging apetite, which I plan to sate with bacon, and possibly some form of carbohydrate, in the near future. The room is finally getting nice and toasty, after being freezing all day, when the heating kicked in.

I discovered that the heating was on by jamming my bare foot against the radiator pipe that runs along the back of my desk and getting burnt. So then I dug out the pliers on my penknife, and sat for a full minute with air hissing out of the stone-cold radiator, until it actually bled water (or at least black, oily sludge).

Tomorrow, happily, is Bonfire Night, a cheery festival commemorating what’s probably the UKs most famous terrorist attack, which is all the more impressive when you consider that it was an attack that didn’t actually work…

…I feel there’s something deep and intelligent to say about that, but, frankly, I’m not sure many people would listen, these days. I still can’t understand why, post September 11th, the entire world suddenly woke up and went “Wow, a guy on a plane just invented terrorism! Cool, we can all panic!” when it’s actually been going on for centuries. OK, the bit with the planes was new, and more people died than in your average attempt, but that’s mostly because modern society is very keen on putting lots of people in pug-ugly skyscrapers, which tend to be short on viable exits after the third floor…

And then, suddenly, the entire world is panicking. Now that’s stupid. I can see why New York and Washington would be panicking, because terrorist attacks in your immediate location are likely to scare you (it’s what they’re for, after all). To an extent, I can understand why the rest of the US was scared, too – OK, most of it is a stupidly long way from the places that got attacked, but by and large America seems to have got off lightly, in terms of previous terrorist attacks, probably because it’s so isolated.

The bit I don’t really get is why everyone in the UK suddenly got scared because, on the morning of the 12th of September 2001, we really weren’t relevant to anything. We’d been there, and had an empire, and lost it, and got another one, and generally enjoyed the Great Game for a hundred years or so, and then, after a couple of enormous wars we’d lost the men and the money to maintain an empire (and we had to give India back anyway, because that was the deal we’d made in exchange for their fighting for us) and so we all came home and sank into the quiet obscurity enjoyed by most of Europe, caught between the Communist-hating USA, and the risk-of-another-invasion-of-Russia paranoid USSR, hoping that neither side would get bored of Vietnam and wipe us all out.

And over the next few decades we settled back into normal domestic peacetime status, with major cities occasionally getting targetted by the IRA, and we did what Britain always does when that sort of thing happens which is, effectively, to say “O for goodness sake, can’t those people keep the noise down,” and then offer cups of tea to survivors sheltering in the local school gym. And as a result of that, nobody outside the UK & Eire gave a damn.

Then suddenly, a bunch of planes hit things several thousand miles away, lots of British people get killed, along with proportionally more Americans, and just as we’re thinking “That’s a bugger, that is, I’d better take an extra tin of biscuits and a spare teapot when I head over to the school,” the Government has suddenly upped and said “Woo, U.S.A! U.S.A!!” and before we can finish muttering the usual comments of “Tch! 1917? What time d’you call this, then?” and “Never on time for anything, are they?” we’re suddenly back on the world stage shouting about how much we’d like to be next, please, if that’s not too much trouble, because, hey, you know, we’re kind and considerate, and we’re suddenly going to go to war in Iraq.

Er.

That was a bit quick, wasn’t it? Think I missed something there… Wind it back a minute… No, no, stop, that’s Nuremburg, you’ve gone too far… Yeah, right, Russians march into Berlin… forwards… Yalta, yeah, right… Beatles, there we go, yep, Carry On films, keep going… Harold Wilson, Brighton bomb, end of the Cold War, Manchester bomb, Tories lose the ’97 election, hysteria about the millenium bug, Sepember 11th, everyone’s really shocked, America suddenly gets cross… advert break… America still cross, nobody can find Osama Bin Laden… everyone says we shouldn’t go to war, lots of protests… we go to war anyway… er… OK, normal play again… er… we go to war anyway… Bugger, we suddenly look important.

Hm. And then there were those divvies on the London Underground, and things got a bit more back to normal, in that we knew where we stood, then, ie, people were blowing other people up, and we know how to deal with that. (“Better make it chocolate digestives, love, not everybody likes hob-nobs. There’s a spare box of Tetley in the back of the cupboard, it was on offer in Tescos…”)

But there was still that really weird bit between 2001 & 2003 or so when the entire country seemed shit-scared, and the Government was saying “tear up the Magna Carta and everything will be just great,” and everyone seemed to be running about saying “Yeah, OK, then, because we’re scared!”

Scared of what, exactly? Getting killed by terrorists, I assume, or the risk that your friends and family might get killed. Which is fair enough, God knows I worry about Ruth all the bloody time, although that’s probably more to do with my own past than terrorists, but why did everyone suddenly panic? I just don’t get that…

…And nor do I really understand why it took a bunch of explosions on the underground to snap everyone out of it. All I can really think is that September 11th made everyone panic because it was new, so the attacks on the 7th of July were like seeing a repeat on the telly – you might not want to see episode nine of “Porridge” for the tenth time, but at least it isn’t another gritty serial-killer drama with a female detective who hasn’t got the decency to cover herself up properly, and keeps using words like “Bastard” before nine o’ clock.

If it’s strange that it took bombings in London to wake people up to the reality that terrorism isn’t anything new, it’s just plain surreal the way the USA reacted to it – not only did they try and shut down the metro in New York (because even terrorists can take the wrong turning at the roundabout, and one underground system looks very much like another when all your wearing is a belt of C4) but they started mass-producing junk mousemats and T-shirts with the London Underground logo on them and slogans like “London Stands”.

Well duh. Three bombs aren’t going to level London, now, are they? Frankly, if the Luftwaffe didn’t manage it, and the Zeppelins didn’t manage it, and Napoleon didn’t manage it either, a few radical Islamists aren’t going to manage it all in one day.

I don’t believe anyone in the UK bought one of those things, but apparently they were really popular in the US, presumably because a large number of people wanted to show how very supportive they were being of the UK in it’s own “9/11” (which is stupid in itself, because, as I’ve said before, quite a lot of British people were in the WTC when it collapsed). I’ve a sneaking suspicion that several of the people who wandered round the US wearing “London Stands” T-shirts will be associated with the people who spent the previous 30 years wandering round the US and helping to fund the IRA who were setting bombs in London, but I imagine it doesn’t feel like that if you’re a few steps removed from the actual detonator, so maybe they don’t spot the irony there.

And yet, a few hundred years after the failing of a terrorist attempt that would’ve serverely fucked up the politics of the UK for a very long time, we’re getting ready to set off a bunch of fireworks, and burn comedy effigies of the guy they caught trying to set the fuse, and tortured until he confessed. Which is fine by me, really – Bonfire night is there to celebrate the fact we’re capable of defending our own democratic freedoms, which we’ve been carving out of the laws for the last eight hundred years…

…And at the same time we’re gaily sitting down and not paying attention whilst a bunch of goons keep suggesting we get ID cards, continue to allow detention without trial and start accepting evidence obtained by torture again?

That’s not the Government rallying round with tea and biscuits, that’s the Government acting like a bunch of panicky toddlers because we had to up and boast about how we were joining Bush and his stupid “crusade” and suddenly a lot of people are looking at us like it’s the middle of the third act of Othello, and our mobile phone’s just started playing the stupid Nokia Tune on full volume…

Better lock ’em up, then.

I think I’m getting increasingly jaded by all this, and it’s coming across in my NaNoWriMo efforts – I suddenly found I’d created a totally dystopian backdrop to the main action, which I’d not really considered when I first started. But then, the whole thing is completely stupid, so I don’t see too much of a problem with showing it’s logical extreme.

Words written: 4061 / target: 50000

so far. I really ought to stop going back and re-adjusting paragraphs and just get on with it…