12Nov05 — 9

“Hello, Am I Through To Customer Services?”

Last night a Master’s student (whom I have never taught) phoned me to vent her justified frustration with one of her lecturers’ chronic incompetence. This keen and bright individual had done everything she could and should about the situation and complained through the correct channels. As usual in these situations she wasn’t the only member of her cohort suffering from one individual’s inability to do the job she is paid to do, and the failing teacher’s shortcomings were well known to those responsible for running the course. Also, as usual, bugger all is being done about it.

Norm cites a piece in the US Chronicle of Higher Education about candidates for posts at an American community college being tested for their teaching ability. I wonder how many candidates for a university lectureship in the UK are required to give a practical demonstration like this.

Also as usual, it’s all about incentives. As a UK higher education institution you are funded on the basis of your publication output, not according to the quality of your student supervision. As an academic you have nothing to gain from devoting valuable research time and effort to teaching. (It’s worse than that: once you acquire a reputation for being conscientious you will end up sorting out your colleagues’ students’ problems too.) As a graduate you will be better off in the jobs market with a degree from a university with a good reputation for research than you will with a degree from one with a good reputation for teaching. Most importantly, as a home student you are rarely handing over your own money in return for the service you are supposed to be getting, but money from other people who work for a living and pay tax. You can bet that once that changes in this country—and it will—there’ll be a lot more teaching tests at British academic job interviews.

Yesterday I was in Tesco, stocking up with food, and I wanted a microwave oven. So I bought one. They had a choice! Unprompted, the (Eastern European-sounding) woman on the till asked an (Asian-looking) woman to help me take my other items in a separate trolley into the car park where it was cold and raining. Despite being completely unsuitably dressed for the conditions, she wouldn’t leave me until I told her that I’d be fine loading up my car.

When I had my own MPhil viva a couple of years ago, the academic registry responsible asked me in advance to tell them what equipment I required to make my presentation. They failed to provide a single one of the specified items. They failed to remind the external examiner of the time and place of the exam. Despite being a full professor and having a secretary, the examiner himself failed to check with her when he was supposed to be there. He failed to turn up. He did at least do me the courtesy of critically reading my dissertation.

Sitting at a desk with the other examiners and pointing to the screen of my notebook PC with my own laser pointer (which I had brought because I didn’t trust the registry) and writing on a hastily located flipchart with pens I had brought myself (because I didn’t trust the registry), I passed.

For this level of uselessness—plus sending me an ethnic monitoring form every year, presumably to check that I hadn’t done a Michael Jackson—I think the registry charged the Medical Research Council something like £400 a year. This didn’t come out of my pocket of course.

My Tesco microwave oven cost me about fifty quid. It has a 900W output and a built-in grill.

11Nov05 — 7

Niggaz In Da Hood

Yesterday, the guy who runs the Internet caff where I have become a regular introduced me to Jay, The Only Black Man In Hove. The proprietor thought that I should meet him because Jay makes his living writing and remixing pop. Coming from Hove though, “Jay” turns out to be short for “Justin St Clair Thomas” and he used to work for Microsoft. We chatted and exchanged mobile numbers and MP3s. Damian Counsell, formerly of the Medical Research Council, and Justin St Clair Thomas, formerly of Microsoft; we’s like the Brighton & Hove massive, innit?

10Nov05 — 6

At Least I Didn’t End Up Supporting Crystal Palace

I was thinking of ‘Blogging Marcel Berlins’ explanation of why he supports Aston Villa Football Club before Norm tagged me about it. It contains possibly the ultimate middle-class football fan anecdote. 10 years old and fresh off the boat from France in South Africa, the lawyer-to-be chose to support Aston Villa because:

“I knew what a villa was. Friends of my parents had a small one near Marseille.”

My own story has at least one similarity. I was, like Berlins, confused by the exotic words in the names of the football teams that the other infants school boys supported. I assumed that “West Bromwich Albion” was, for example, some remote South American nation.

The name “Aston Villa” appealed to me because I had seen a picture in, I think, a Richard Scarry book. I vaguely remember there being a double page spread in it depicting lots of anthropomorphed dogs and cats wandering around an ancient Roman villa dressed in togas and imagined that perhaps this was the kind of environment in which Aston Villa played their games. Supposedly, the actual “Villa” wasn’t in South America, but, according to the other boys, really close by. Also, given the dress code, it was probably quite warm; Britain was bloody freezing. I’d never seen a real villa, but that big space in the middle of Scarry’s seemed like an excellent place to kick a ball around so I signed up.

D’oh.

09Nov05 — 18

Sorry, We Don’t Do Business With Negroes

Soon it’ll be time to renew my car insurance. When I investigated, I was disappointed to discover that I don’t qualify for cover from Whitey’s Wheels, the new company that only insures Anglo-Saxon drivers. For some time now, actuaries have recognized that white people make fewer and smaller claims on their car insurance than black and coloured people. Whites tend not to drive hot hatches or tuned-up Beemers or have expensive stereos fitted to their vehicles; they generally drive more cautiously (lower testosterone, you see); and they are less likely to live in areas where theft and vandalism is rife. Also, at night, the police find it easier to recognize white faces behind the wheel. Because of these statistics most insurance companies offer a discount to drivers willing to describe themselves as “white” on their application forms.

Whitey’s Wheels is the first insurance company to specialise in providing low-cost cover for non-blacks. They have an excellent advertising campaign too, in which Lenny Henry attempts to wangle his way to a lower premium by imitating the ways of white people, but is caught out at the last minute by, for example, lapsing into syncopated swaying at a rehearsal for an amateur production of Handel’s Messiah.

Ah well, I suppose I’ll have to continue my direct debit payments to Clive Lloyd’s of London.

08Nov05 — 13

The Man In The Unfurnished Flat

I’ve put all my bedroom furniture together now, and my bedtime reading over the past few days has been Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle. [Typically, Penguin publishes the book inside two different tarted-up covers, but with the same nasty old typesetting inside.] As “what if the Axis won the War?” novels go it’s not as frightening or convincing as Robert Harris’s Fatherland, (one of the finest thrillers I have ever read as well as being genuinely moving) but so far it is excellent—and particularly thoughtful about some of the subtler social and ethnic consequences of Japan and Germany carving up the World between them.

Fatherland was made into a terrible film, but Bladerunner is famous for being one of those rare adaptations that improves on the original: Dick’s story Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?. Look at this list of films based on his work* and wonder at Dick’s extraordinary imagination. Sadly, his prose often lapses into a special kind of awful. A few years back I made it through most of his collected short stories [I only link to the first volume] before stumbling on his unevenness and/or being repelled by his chronic sexism. Despite them, there is a wild, genre-creating inventiveness about his stories that gave me the same sort of thrill I got when I worked my way through Poe as a boy. I can also remember the first time I read P K Dick: I bought a collection including Second Variety and Variable Man in a book remainder shop when I was on holiday with my parents in Blackpool. It was so much more interesting than most of the shlocky, 50s-style science fiction I had read up until then that it might as well have been in a different language.

I am half way through The Man In The High Castle now and, completely atypically, this is the first time Dick has referred to a woman’s breast. (It belongs to an actress and is being fondled by Göring in the imagination of a German officer stationed in America.)

*The list doesn’t include Terminator or Alien, inspired by Second Variety and Beyond Lies The Wub respectively.

05Nov05 — 3

One Use For A Dead Cat

Pooter with beard and menacing look

Your meagre anecdotes insult Bast, Perfumed Protector, Cat Goddess. The one you call “Little Mo” has paid the ultimate price for your failure to show sufficient respect. Until all households of the Infidel West are part of the Catiphate our martyrdom operations will continue. Until the sacred lands of the desert again flow with milk and catnip the blood of a million moggies will be upon the radials of the Unbelievers!

04Nov05 — 8

Tell Me Your Stories Or I Start The Engine

Relatively new ‘Blogger Gloria Salt of Apropos of Nothing emailed me the other day to ask me what was with all the photos of cats on ‘Blogs. I explained that catblogging was something of a tradition of the medium, to the extent that even male Oxford academic Chris Brooke had a “Thursday Kitten Blogging” feature.

I have never knowingly catblogged. In fact, in the dark days of my hand-coding my ‘Blog in static HTML (when it wasn’t even called “PooterGeek”), it might well have carried the tagline “Guaranteed Cat-Free”. Today I change all that.

ginger cat perched foolishly on a tyre inside a car wheelarch
Little Mo has been gaffer-taped to a Bridgestone and eagerly awaits your contributions

[click image to enlarge]

It’s content-free Friday here at PooterGeek. It’s up to you to fill the comments with your own stories about animals (especially your own pets) doing recklessly stupid things but surviving. (Failing that, any jokes about animals will do.) If you entertain me sufficiently then Little Mo will live.

03Nov05 — 1

Girlz In The Hoodie

No time to ‘Blog properly today. [Insert your own joke about the current quality of PooterGeek here.] So I’ll just make one observation about the Guardian, because it’s a quick and easy way of filling space. There’s a piece (in G2?) today about how the Women’s Institute is shedding its mumsy, Home Counties, jam-making image to become a young and funky campaigning organisation. One of the photographs illustrating it is of a WI/Greenpeace demo in a park in the shadow of the London Eye, with a bunch of white-clad eco-warriors forming a spiral pattern and, beneath it, spelling out what is supposed to be the slogan “STOP CLIMATE CHAOS”. I only know this because of the accompanying text. When I read it at first, I honestly thought it said “STOP CLIMATE CHAVS”.

02Nov05 — 9

Dis-missive

In a cunning flanking move, The Guardian responds to my post yesterday by publishing a letter from my Old Labour dad today. How can I sustain my free-thinking, post-Thatcherite, Left libertarian, public-private agnostic, open source-advocating online persona when my rellies are wandering around wearing metaphorical “Save Clause Four” T-shirts?:

Maybe I’m naive, but what kind of socialist buys shares (Blunkett faces new conflict of interest claims, November 1)?
Greg Counsell
Tamworth, Staffs

Why can’t he just dance badly at wedding discos like other people’s dads? I suppose I’ve got it easier than Hilary Benn; my father can spot a murdering fascist bastard when he sees one.

In other news, Blunkett has just left his ministerial portfolio to spend more time with his share portfolio.

(I note also there are three other letters from the north Midlands on the same page, including another one from Tamworth. Two of these reminisce warmly about Manchester. Remember: there’s one question to ask of Professional Northerners Down South: “If it’s so good Oop North, why don’t you live there any more?”)

01Nov05 — 10

Coming Soon

I have been feeling so cut off without broadband that I’ve been paying to read The Guardian recently. By way of atonement I have once-again applied PooterGeek’s patented Future News technology to bring you the best of next week’s editions of that proud organ—so you don’t need to buy it.

The Silencing Of The Damned

Madeline Bunting goes behind Hollywood’s demonisation to meet the man and paint an intimate portrait of scholar and gourmet Hannibal Lecter. In our homogenized, franchised, fast food world, just what is the neo-conservative beef with the centuries-old, alternative lifestyle choice that is cannibalism? Are our ethnocentric objections to this traditional and ecologically aware practice simply an echo of our missionary past?

Kellymandering

We reveal shocking suppressed government statistics showing that, because of the improved inner-city educational environment in the government’s so-called City Academies, previously working-class children are gaining entry to better universities and graduating to become middle-class Conservative voters—in the process often displacing the home-tutored offspring of Guardian readers working in oversubscribed Hampshire state schools, as well as those of other Lib Dem-voting public service employees. Are these new Cons the new neo-cons?

Giulianistan

Gary Younge is mugged by a person of colour in New York, begs on his knees not to be shot, and then asks if black-on-black, American-on-English violent streetcrime is the ultimate ground-level expression of Blair’s submission to the apartheid neo-con project.

Nnnhm, Nnnhm, Mnn, Mnnh!

Following her record-breaking series of columns in which she has welded her own unsupported assertions to snippets of House of Commons’ gossip and Guardianista givens without ever once resorting to facts, reason, or independently verifiable data of any kind to make her case, Jackie Ashley is handed a vibrator by Seumas Milne, who then simply transcribes the sounds she makes while masturbating.

Death-Roy

Having ingested one final waffer-thin sliver of bitterness at the continuing march of the New Labour project and its leaders’ concomitant indifference to his incoherent carping thereon, Roy Hattersley explodes. Peter Preston asks, “Why are only nations who, like Britain, have signed up fully to the neo-con agenda permitted by the United States to develop exploding politician technology?”

A New Korea In Journalism

Ian Mayes, the Readers’ Editor, takes the tally in our ongoing “neo-con” versus “neocon” poll and continues to wade through your flood of letters about our new regular opinion columnist Kim Jong-Il. Should his by-line refer to him as “Dear Leader” or “Supreme Commander”?

31Oct05 — 2

Yet Another Apology

As I’ve mentioned before, I won’t have Net access from home until the end of November and neither will I have a landline. I am now down to 20 minutes of talk time with Orange and they won’t let me upgrade (even temporarily) until the 19th. According to the advertised tariff, every minute I’m on the phone beyond my quota for the month will cost me one of my corneas. So, sorry for my continuing quietness.

It’s still morning and there is a small boy dressed as Count Dracula (with raised-purple-velvet-collared cloak and full make-up) standing outside the door of this Internet caff. [I’d take a photograph for you guys, but, in these enlightened times, I’d probably be arrested.] He has now been joined by two girls: a witch and Catwoman. This is going to be a long day.

Happy Hallowe’en everyone.

30Oct05 — 12

What Do You Give The Man Who Has Everything For His Twenty-First Birthday?

He’s educated, rich, famous, good looking, second in line to the throne of the fourth largest economy on the planet, and a large proportion of the female population under the age of forty would like to sleep with him. So naturally you buy him an Aston Villa season ticket. That’ll teach him the meaning of chronic disappointment. Yes, Wills is a Villan.

(Mind you, he hasn’t got a proper job and he is almost certain to go prematurely bald, but I think those can also be desirable qualities in a man.)

28Oct05 — 16

Not So Simply

UPDATE: Here’s a picture of Kate’s excellent hair (Freya in the foreground, Richard in the background):

Kate looking windswept with her family

[click to enlarge]
My friend and musical collaborator Richard and his missus Kate had me round for dinner the other evening and we got into a conversation about the recent Observer Music Monthly list of “larger-than-life” performers (i.e. fat rockstars). We were trying to decide if the article was itself fattist. Richard pointed out that the musicians concerned (Elvis, Luther Vandross, Tiny of Ultrasound) had nothing in common apart from walk-in fridges full of dairy produce. I replied that no one would object to a top ten of gingers in rock, but then we couldn’t even come up with a top five of those. Perhaps the music industry discriminates even more harshly against redheads than it does against lardbutts. Even with the help of Kate, who is a strawberry blonde Celt, the best we could manage was:

  • Mick Hucknall of Simply Red
  • Bonnie Raitt
  • Carol Decker from T’Pau
  • er, one other that I can’t remember now

Any suggestions? If the list gets long enough I might even submit ito Wikipedia as the definitive catalogue of ginger rockers.

27Oct05 — 10

Or You Could Go To The Tate And Look At The Boxes

I could have chosen one of hundreds of quotes from various Whedon interviews over the years to set this brief (and somewhat random) rant off, but this is particularly apt:

“I love genre. I love fantasy. I love science fiction. I love horror. I love musicals. I love finding a different way to express what I want to say. And I think, ultimately, it works best for me—because otherwise, it would be boring and didactic and I wouldn’t know what the hell I was doing. Genre helps me with structure, and structure helps me get through the day.”
— Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly”

It says a lot about the state of the arts and of intellectual life in the West that, in the past couple of years, two of the most powerful critiques of the Bush doctrine have been campy space operas: The Chronicles of Riddick, which I reviewed back here and Serenity, which I recommend you watch after having seen the DVDs of the cancelled TV series upon which it is based. The latter I saw a week or so before I left Cambridge and was the best fun I’d had at the cinema in ages and—unlike most of the stuff that claims to do so—it really does make you think. As a writer for the screen Joss Whedon is up there with Billy Wilder and David Mamet—and I am not exaggerating. (Apparently Whedon is the third generation of scriptwriters in his family.)

Interestingly, Salon.com’s review of Serenity (cheekily reproduced from behind a pay-only barrier here) describes the TV show (as opposed to the movie) as being like a good novel. Current metropolitan opinion of what constitutes a good novel is John Banville’s The Sea and, unusually, I think if I read it I would agree. Even now, years afterwards, I think The Book Of Evidence is one of the finest contemporary novels I have ever read. I suspect this one is even better. But it’s so rare that I agree with “current metropolitan opinion” on any assessment it makes of what is “good” art. So much about the serious novel, or “fine” art, or contemporary music or art-house cinema isn’t just bad, it’s monumentally stupid. Why is high art so dumb these days and low art so exhilaratingly smart? Does the talent follow the money? Or are the offspring of the rich and dull who tend to make (0r decide what qualifies as) the former just congenitally slow?

26Oct05 — 16

Pedantry/IKEA Update

There’s a title to set your pants ablaze. Thanks firstly to Hot Wheels for correcting my spectacular error with the twenty-four-hour clock in my IKEA post. Thanks secondly to Tomodachi at Susurration for drawing his readers’ attention to the ‘Blogrollicity of two of us on his list simultaneously losing it in the aforementioned shop. Despite Random Acts of Reality being run by a manly, panic-proof paramedic/ambulance man, its proprietor had to take his mum along. Mind you, he is a cockney.

Further to Norm’s question a while back, yes, my use of an apostrophe and a capital letter at the front end of “‘Blog” is pretty pedantic, but ‘Blogging is, believe it or not, still a minority pursuit and I want to help the innocent with the term by at least giving them a clue to its etymology. I am absolute stickler for capitalizing “Web”—of which there is one—to distinguish from “web”, of which there are many (including one inside the windscreen of my car). “Weblog” begins with a capital “Web”. “Quaint” this may be, but I am not afraid of quaint. When I’m not at a keyboard, I write with a fountain pen, albeit a transparent plastic fountain pen. I have only recently started dropping the apostrophe from the beginning of “phone” and still occasionally put one in front of “plane” (as in “aeroplane”). At least I don’t put a diaeresis (not umlaut) in “cöoperate”.

Now don’t start picking faults with this post because I don’t have time to spellcheck or proof it: I’ve got to go home to meet the IKEA delivery lorry.

25Oct05 — 15

A Long Way For A Bad Joke

[The image jitters, there is a thump as the sound comes on, and a haggard, hair-covered face fills the frame. Veils of windswept snow crystals twist and drift across the view.]

SIR RANULPH FIENNES [for it is he]: Bally thing’s playing silly buggers again. Hello! Hello! Michael!

MIKE IN THE STUDIO: Sir Ranulph! Can you hear me?

[A snow hare is hopping through a drift in the background, using its footprints to spell out the words “Hello Mum”.]

RANULPH: Call me “Ruffers”. Everyone else does.

MIKE: Er, “Ruffers”, we understand that your record attempt is going through something of a difficult phase. You’ve already suffered frostbite?

RANULPH: Nothing serious: just a couple of toes.

MIKE: And, apparently your pet Arctic tern, Jeremy, has died?

RANULPH: [Waving rigid feathered corpse in front of camera] Poor blighter copped it as we went over the last rise. It was inevitable there’d be casualties on a mission like this.

[RANULPH is wearing a badge sponsored by ICELAND. As he speaks, its scrolling dot-matrix display is showing this week’s exciting offers on Bird’s Eye sweet chilli flavour hash browns.]

MIKE: And you’ve found a way to deal with the tragedy?

RANULPH: We didn’t build an empire on sentimentality, young man. I put some notches in Jeremy’s beak and used the serrated edge to saw off my dead toes. Waste not want not.

MIKE: After the loss of part of your foot within the first week would you say that this—your attempt to become the first man walk across Siberia, dragging a frozen mammoth on a microscooter—is turning out to be your greatest challenge to date?

RANULPH: Bladdy hell, no! That would be my 2001 expedition to be the first man to shop at the Lakeside IKEA without a female guide. Drizzle on the M23 like I’ve never seen. Fully laden Citroen aquaplaning like a duck on a frozen pond. They thought it couldn’t be done—and it certainly got a bit ugly in the Pick Up Zone—but I proved ’em wrong. Cost me an arm and a leg though.

I thank yew.

But seriously folks, I never thought I’d turn into the sort of bore who blithered on about the awfulness of IKEA, but here I am. I set off 14:30hrs Monday and got back home at 00:30hrs today. Admittedly this included an unwanted excursion to Bluewater. When people said, “You should go to the IKEA next to Bluewater”, they meant “next to” in the sense of “the other side of the Dartford Crossing”.

Admittedly I did eat there, and there were hours of nervous driving in the rain and gloom and lots of loading and unloading, but I had no idea it was possible to spend so much time shopping—not even “fun”, frivolous shopping, but functional, frightening shopping, surrounded by twenty-times-lifesize images of Scandinavians who probably wear their black polo necks to weddings and, when they aren’t gazing out at eternal vistas of slate grey sky, design folding kitchen tables with names like Star Wars characters. As for the real people in the shop, yes, IKEA is a great place to meet good-looking women, but they are all walking around in sensible shoes with Gavin from Personnel and fall into one of three stages of life: pregnant, recently pregnant, and post-menopausal.

My main piece of advice to anyone contemplating similar foolishness: never, never find yourself at the checkout near the ten o’clock closedown. I witnessed a shocking scene of IKEA rage at about eleven when one guy (unknowingly, I think) parked his car in a loading bay that two women already had lined up for themselves. The guy started an attempt at an apology, but gave up immediately and joined in the abuse when the women went from nought to nuclear in a single step. Nasty.

Favourite IKEA moment? An American couple in front of me in the queue for the home delivery service had three flat-bed trollies loaded with furniture. Mr America was pleading in exasperation at a poor dispatcher because he had told him it was only possible for him to have next-day delivery. I think this might be the first documented sighting of citizens of the USA complaining about overly prompt customer service in a retail establishment on British soil. At that point I was close to emotional collapse. This was enough to push me into hysterical giggling and the woman next to me in the equally long queue for Customer Services desk said: “I’m glad someone thinks it’s funny.”

Mind you, I’ll probably be back next week: they’d sold out of the bathroom cabinet I wanted, my rug is the wrong size, and I didn’t get any placemats and napkins. Serviettes for me then.

I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: my sharing these boring details with thousands of people across the globe or the suspicion that, within a matter of hours, this post will attract more than the average number of comments from people sharing the trauma of their own IKEA flashbacks.

24Oct05 — 6

Continuing Deprivation

According to NTL, “DunGeekin”, my new home by the sea, won’t have a landline or broadband connection until the end of November. That means half-baked anecdotes about life in Brighton & Hove until December for you lot, not that my recent boring content seems to have inhibited your commenting here.

Today, I’ll mostly be buying knives and forks.

23Oct05 — 5

Senior Moment

In a way, I’m glad I don’t have proper Internet access. The BBC radio news yesterday evening was apocalyptically depressing. How much global death, disaster, and destruction is it possible to fit into one broadcast? Pakistan, Mexico, South-East Asia. The latest Economist—a journal not normally known for “quagmire” rhetoric—welcomes the Iraqi people’s recent vote on their constitution by making Iraq sound like ‘Nam. Brum is burning. And, er, Villa managed to lose at home to Wigan.

Meanwhile, I am sitting in a sleazy Internet Caff in Hove. For you, dear reader, I have been walking the mean streets of Retirement-Ville. It’s ugly. On a seafront wall I found evidence of a Saturday night of Grey Power excess: an empty screwtop miniature of Macon-Villages Chardonnay, tucked carefully upright against the trimmed privet. At every step I wonder if a former colonel will leap out from an alleyway, smash me over the head with his shooting stick, and steal my wallet to feed his Sanatogen habit. The local bowls club is having a recruitment drive and is draped with a banner declaring “ALL AGES WELCOME”. Who dares me to join up?

22Oct05 — 23

Unmarried Bliss

I bought a bed (well, two futon-sofas) yesterday. I haven’t put it together yet, but even sleeping on the mattress alone was a huge improvement on sleeping on the floor, where I developed a serious neckache and dreamt, amongst other strange things, about driving Santa’s sleigh—pulled by the usual reindeer, plus a fox.

While I was wrestling with option anxiety in the bed shop—if I see another fabric swatch I will have a seizure—I suggested to the nice young woman serving me that what the world needed was some kind of matchmaking agency to fix up people like me, (mainly men, I suspect) who find homemaking as interesting as grading gravel, with people who really cared about co-ordinating soft furnishings (probably mostly women). There wouldn’t be any sexual interaction between the parties; members of group 1 would simply hand over their chequebooks, a floorplan, and some Polaroids of the carpets to the respective members of group 2. It’d be like getting an interior designer in, but cheap. She rather liked this idea and was only too happy to pick out cushions in complementary shades while I figured out how I was going to fit everything in my poxy little hatchback.

Please email me if you are interested in helping me select dining room furniture, cutlery, napkins, and placemats because I could care less whether the motif on the knife-handles picks out the embossing on the blinds.

(Did you know that there’s a shop in Hove where all the bathroom cabinets on display are over £400 and the cheapest one they sell is £255? And they don’t even come round and fit the things! IKEA here I come.)

My God, this ‘Blog’s getting dull.

20Oct05 — 9

Go, Joan!

I wish I had the access time to weigh in detail over the Joan Rivers vs Darcus Howe fight on BBC Radio 4, especially as I have also encountered this annoying inverted racism from black people who object to my not referring to myself as “black” (or, indeed, “white”) and then accuse me of having a problem with “black”. (I‘m not the one with the problem; I know exactly who I am.) Darcus Howe and his lucrative, middle-class, pseudo-intellectual, “is it because I is black?” schtick make me want to throw. Roll on the day when no one is interested in his putting it about any more. I suppose it’s difficult to put a condom over it when you are all dick.

20Oct05 — 0

Move Along

As usual during this ongoing PooterGeek Net access famine you won’t find much from me to entertain you here today. You could follow some of the “Most Recent Comments” links over on the right. What is it with you people and pasta? Or you could read this item over at Harry’s Place which has already accumulated some of the funniest and most surreal discussion I’ve read in ages.

19Oct05 — 2

Laddered

They came to install my broadband connection yesterday and the news was bad. Apparently the main cable is too far away and they’re going to have to “get Construction in” to move the access point nearer to the building and bring a link up to my flat—two weeks minimum before I’m back online properly. Sorry, folks. I’m going to try to get some kind of season ticket from the local Internet café.

The most interesting part of the visit was that one of the two NTL workies—the one who looked fifteen years old rather than the one who looked thirteen—answered my lame question “So how long have you been in this game then?” as follows:

“Nine months. But I’m getting into property. After we’ve finished this I’m going round to look at a bungalow in Worthing. You can get 850 a month in rent on a bungalow. I own my own flat, but I’m probably going to get this other place and build up from there…”

At that moment, for some strange reason, this historic event popped into my head:

“Joseph Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s father, sold before the 1929 stock market crash and kept millions in profit. Kennedy decided to sell because he overheard shoeshine boys and other novices speculating on stocks.”

I know, I know: it’s snobbery and envy because I’m missing out on my last big chance to get into property before house prices are completely out of my reach forever. Ho hum.

Mind you, I’ve heard there’s money in working for yourself selling water softening systems. You become part of a team, each level of the scheme passing on expertise to the one below and benefiting from a share of profits in return. The more you believe in yourself, the harder you sell, the more you can earn. It’s amazing and it’s not Multi-Level Marketing; it’s a Genuine Earning Opportunity.

18Oct05 — 1

Blanket Apology

For anyone who’s waiting for an email reply from me or even evidence that I am still alive, please accept my apologies and this ‘Blog post. I was unloading my belongings until 2:00 am this morning and have been sleeping on the floor for the past couple of days. I’ll be back to something like normal next week, I hope. Then I’ll attempt to catch up with the communications backlog in batch mode.

This town is crawling with sprogs. I realise it’s not a novel observation, but Brighton really is where Londoners come to breed. What a strange town: gays and breeders; hippies and suits; students and geezers…

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