If you’re planning a visit to England and are keen to experience English culture then now would be a perfect time! Look at all of the oh-so-England things you can experience at this special time of year:

• Weeks and weeks of football everywhere you look, every tv programme, every commercial, every pub, every newspaper. Football, football, football, football, football, football, football.
• British summer! Yes that uncomfortably muggy moist feeling, coupled with a grey-tainted appearance of the sun from behind a cloud yielding a truly gloomy feeling that overcomes your entire being.
• Ladettes on every TV channel, desperately trying to demonstrate how into ‘the footy’ they are. As a result of these morons there is even more football football football on the footballing telly and every footballing other footballing place you footballing turn.
• Baddiel and Skinner is on! Yes, two blokes, one sofa, no script, just loads more fucking football.
• Football, football, football, football, football, football, football, football,football, football, football, football, football, football, football, football, football, football
• The Traditional English Boozer! Recently refitted of course and without any character and with outrageously expensive drinks and with a massive 10ft screen showing non-stop football, football, football over and over again with no stopping, and where there’s no football then the highlights and the results and football, football, football bloody football…that permanent crowd sound sapping every bit of creativity and inspiration from every cell in your body…the tedious monotonic monologues from the commentators…the stillness in an otherwise lively place as hundreds of identical-looking short-haired blokes and their brainless ovine girlfriends all stand motionless in their overpriced synthetic football tops watching 22 blokes kicking a piece of leather about on a strip of grass. When it’s not eerily quiet, it’s so loud your eardrums ache as everyone leaps into the air screaming for joy, because one of the 22 blokes has managed to convey the piece of leather into a specific part of the grass strip.
• Fighting! What English saturday night would be complete without a fight that ends in hospitalisation! Usually the fights are related to drinking too much (whilst watching the football, football, football). For extra special violence then try pubs near football grounds! Just go in there wearing the wrong overpriced synthetic football strip and they’ll happily adorn you with a blood-shirt.
• The JUBILEE! What joy as everyone in Britain celebrates the outsanding achievement the queen has made by being a queen for a while! There’ll be awkward parties in the streets, bored children, uninterested millions, hours and hours of TV voxpop interviews (inbetween the endless hours of football football football) with insane arseholes who like to sleep outside someone else’s house.
• More football! So much football that you can’t believe that its all real.
• Award winning tv adverts featuring lifestyles that you will never achieve and loads more football, football football
• News about the middle-east, the rise of fascism in europe and more importanly football, football, football

You think England have got a chance then ? Yeah I reckon they have yeah. Did you see the footy last night ? I love football, I really fucking love it. I could watch it all day every day for the rest of my life which is really fortunate because I won’t have a choice…

What a choice! Five alternative ways to get really angry and swear at your telly. At least The Big Breakfast used to be able to induce the odd laugh…

BT have announced large profits, two days after I received a bill for 80 quid, 47 of which came under the non-specific heading of “service charges” – what a co-incidence!

George Bush has announced that he knew of Al-Qaeda’s plans to hijack planes before september the 11th. Obviously he didn’t think it necessary to tell anyone about this beforehand because it was such an insignificant piece of info.
It becomes slightly more significant when you read this article.

The best noise in the world:
The metallic rasp of the lid of a whiskey bottle as you unscrew it, before pouring the golden liquid into a glass.

Broadcasting house had an interesting discussion about employment and retirement. It would seem that people my age who are not millionaires will not be able to retire.

So obviously the solution is to enjoy your work more! sounds obvious doesn’t it ? Why didn’t we think of it before….oh sorry…my supervisor has just given me a written warning for blogging when I should be working….

Dear BH,

It’s a tough enough call just to turn-up in the morning and do your
job, without being asked to try and enjoy it – let alone introduce some
creative essence into it. How do you do that in a call center when every
time you crack a smile your supervisor interjects because she thinks you
must be slacking off.

Yes it would be nice to downshift, and change our culture so that work
becomes more enjoyable. But there is a very simple, fundamental problem
with this; We live in a capitalist world. The *only* job of a board of
directors is to increase profits. After you have ‘downsized’ and
‘streamlined’ and ‘relocated to Indonisia, sacking all of your previous
staff’ there will come a time when you run out of resources to exploit –
then what ? Well, perhaps the staff are spending too much time
‘excercising their creativity’ and not sewing trainers ?
If we are really serious about making life generally better for people in
the world before they die, I think we need to do more than have group-
hugs, footballs in the office and regular staff bowling trips.

So if we can agree that any change a single company can make to make
it’s employee’s lives richer is only avoiding the real problem, then there
is something that would help in the short term:

Working from home.
Someone mentioned it, but it was passed over.
What would happen in London if a third of the employees worked half of
their weeks at home ?
* The transport problems would be solved.
* Pollution would decrease.
* People don’t have the stress of getting to and from work and so would
work more effectively.
* People could have ‘true’ flexitime – being able to spend their days as
they wish – as long as the work gets done who cares ?
* People would be more effective and more relaxed when *at* work.
The technology to do this exists and is affordable. Even more affordable
if the government gave incentives for companies to allow their staff to
work at home.

Well the may day celebrations turned ugly in the end. The pictures of police smashing unarmed people over the heads with riot sheilds will doubtless not be shown again.

On the way home from work, three fully-stuffed riot vans and 3 unmarked cars shot up the A2 – what is the point of an unmarked car when they’re putting a blue flashing light on the top and sounding a siren so loud that milk bottles were smashing as they went past ?

A few years ago I would have said that the ‘few bad apples that spoiled an otherwise peaceful day’ were bad. Now I think “good!”. They’ve got the fact that people feel strongly about anti-capitalism, on the news. Five years ago you never heard the word “capitalism” anywhere…even if you went to left wing rallies. It was a “bad word”, much like “cunt”. Now, thanks to the thoughtless, goodfornothing violent, hardcore anarchists its on the news every night. GOOD. People need to know that there are some who disagree with what we are taught is the norm.
Capitalism is optional providing you are given the full list of options. The times that pro-capitalists have said to me, after a bitter pub-argument, “so what do you propose instead”. This implies that they are only supporting capitalism because there is not better alternative! Well there is – but you don’t want to listen when people talk about it. Even if there wasn’t an alternative, wouldn’t you prefer to try and construct one rather than defend a system which you agree is flawed ? Perhaps you wouldn’t, but then a lot of pro-capitalists are very, very stupid.

http://www.ourmayday.org.uk/

It’s may day and the sun’s out. The may-day celebrations are already making news with talk of hardcore anarchists intent on violence and destruction.
Don’t believe the hype. The URL above is worth a look – it’s got a pretty good history of what MayDay means and addresses a lot of the ill-informed criticism by the Police, the press and the MPs.

….and I’m not going…have fun anyway.

What better way to start your 31st birthday than with a nice bit of house-breaking.
About half-two this morning we got woken up by a pretty heavy scene outside our window. Hayley, the girl downstairs, and some mates were outside trying to get in. Her bag had been nicked in a pub in Lewisham (buncha savages in this town…) Poor girl was distraught. In her bag were all her cards, her phone (including phone book) and just about everything you need to deal with life in 2002…
so we spent a pleasant hour trying to break in. I’m sad to say that my lock picking skills really need honing. A really old, crap, badly installed Yale proved too much for me and my kit. The two guys in the group were very keen on the idea of kicking the door open….which surely would have worked…but the carpentry involved in rectifying matters would be a bit of a nightmare.
Eventually we put a ladder through the back window so that Haley and a friend could climb down and try one of the back windows.In the past a few of us successfully managed to get in through a window down there when we were looking to squat the place so it had to be possible. And it was. One of the guys, who looked way too big to be crwaling through tiny windows, crawled through a tiny window above the back door.. Good lad him.
You ever want to know how good your security is ? Try breaking in. You’ll be amazed.

People don’t understand why I don’t read my mail and experience confusion at the massive pile of the stuff in our hallway. Well here’s why:
It’s always bad news
Bills, letters from the bastards at the estate agents about rent increases/inspection,threatening letters from the bank/credit card companies…
Other than that we receive several tonnes a week of pizza menus and money-off vouchers from dire local Indian takeaways with the occasional advert from some church or other that, in an attempt to increase the size of their congregation, will be featuring a dodgy religous gimmick. My favourite gimmicks so far are:

• Use will be made of a large coloured chart!
• Come and receive the anointing with the Holy Olive Oil from Jerusalem

(Seriously!).

Anyway, yesterday we got a phone call. 9:30 saturday morning while I was indulging in a nice long bath. Michele, my wife, got the phone. The call went something like this:
Michele: Hello
Caller: Hello is Martin there
Michele: Who is this
Caller: It’s Michelle
Michele: Michelle who ?
Michelle: Its a personal call…
Michele: Well he’s not going to ring you back if he doesn’t know who you are.
Michelle: I’m from MBNA [credit card bastards].

This is a tactic of all debt collectors. They pretend to be a friend of the victim so that he or she answers the phone. In America this practice is also common, but thanks to the FDCPA it’s illegal.
She called back later and after offerring me several convenient and easy methods of payment, which I refused on account of not wanting to pay anything, I asked her to make a note on my file that said never to call me again ever… she wouldn’t. I asked why they hadn’t mentioned who they were on the initial call and she said ‘because of data protection’….oh fuck off.
Finally she tried to explain to me why they call people at home and I had to point out that I wasn’t interested, repeated that I won’t take kindly to any more calls and hung up.
Then I went down to the tower of mail in the hall and dug out the MBNA letters.

Included in the package of shit which they sent me along with my bill, notification of late payment charges and implicit threats was an envelope that I could use to send in my payment.Not pre-pay of course – they’re not a fucking charity…and to show what a caring, kind, ex-hippy, love-in type company they really are underneath the harsh spikey exterior, they have drawn some nice daffodils on the envelope.
“Hey man, we’re not all heavy bread-head’s here. Groove with us baby and we’ll all skip down to the meadows toegther and dig the nature scene man and maybe drop some tabs – just pay your fucking bill or we’ll send a couple of really nasty bastards round to nick your furniture man.”

Ho hum – the end of another week.
This week:

• Anti-fascists were outnumbered by fascist-scum on an NF march to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthay in Bermondsey.
• The French managed to totally bollocks-up the election by letting the FN get second-place with only three percent difference to the corrupt tories which knocked the left out of the picture… There are now posters in France saying “Vote for the crook not the Nazi”.
• Margaret Thatcher still isn’t dead! – come on Ma’am, pop your clogs, there’s a good wicked-old-bag.

But It’s my birthday on sunday and excuse to spend some money on a nice meal out with my wife. So thats all right then.

Well, time to go up the pub, burn some brain-cells and some cash and generally forget how many wankers there are in the world.

Estate Agents now occupy pole position in the race to have their backs thrown against the wall when the revolution comes.
My wife had a bad day on monday this week;lots of upsetting things happenned but the thing that sticks out in both of our minds was a call from the bastards who manage the flat we rent.
“Your landlady wants to put the rent up by 30 quid…”
she was told. Bad news, especially as I’ve just managed to save 20 quid a month on ADSL but at least it could have been worse – we could be getting turfed out. The bit that stuck in our craws was coming next:
“…which I think is reasonable.”
Oh do you ? Well perhaps you’d like to pay it for us ?
Does she really think we want to know her opinion on this matter or any matter at all come to that ? Thanks, but when I want your advice I’ll be going insane.

Her justification for the assertion that a 30 quid increase in rent was a bargain was that now most flats in this area would be rented for much, much more than we pay. Why is that I wonder ?
It’s because the bastard estate agents have made it that way. Damn when we moved in here I thought the rent was extortionate. Now you can’t get a 1-bedroom toilet in Lewisham (not exactly Beverly Hills) for that rate and everyone just accepts this! People think that it’s just a normal part of life. It isn’t, it’s purely about greedy people, especially estate agents who encourage greed in others thus making the world a crappier place.