[I do not own a single keyboard where all the keys work – excuse missing letters. I’d buy a new one but hey – this is a Sun keyboard!]
For most of my twenties I was very cynical about..well..just about everything. I’d sneer at people going on demos, been there, done that, people still voted Tory. People trying to help the environment – wasting their time – no point trying to help the environment while the world is frothing with capitalism – a clean environment just isn’t cost effetive.

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine bought me a copy of “Reasons to be cheerful” by Mark Steel and it really caused me to reconsider the cynicism – I can’t really explain why, you’ll have to read it, but one important point that comes out of it is that cynical is what they want you to be. And didn’t the FoE save Oxleas wood from distrution ? So I’ve been on a lot of demos recently, and I’ve been arguing with Sun readers…something I never used to bother with.

However, I’m currently experiencing what the god-botherers call a “crisis of faith”.
<digression>
We know someone who was clearly clinially depressed. He went to see his vicar who told him not to worry – Jesus was still there for him even though he was having a “crisis of faith”. Reassured and comforted by this helpful advice the guy went out got in his car, and shot himself in the head. As I’ve said before, God must be a bit of a bastard.
</digression>

750,000 people turned up in Central London on a monday, in the cold, to celebrate a few blokes who managed to move a leather ball into the correct part of a field more times than another bunch of blokes. St George’s crosses everywhere. The news was/is choc full of footage, anecdotes and whimsy about the event. How many times do we have to hear about the joy of simple, honest patriotism. How great it is that people can feel proud to be English again. Look up the word “pride” in the dictionary to see why I find the whole concept of pride in a nation utterly bizarre and offensive. Look back at what acts of genocide, torture and destruction were commited under the shadow of our glorious flag and then we can start arguing about why I am utterly opposed to all forms of nationalism, jingoism and patriotism: three words for the same thing.

So – which way now ? Cynical ? Cop out totally, wear a suit and earn a fortune. Let the proles eat cake. Give them football, drugs and a police state to keep them happy and obedient while we sip the red wine in comfort with the rest of the inner party ?

Or carry on, going on massive demos that get almost no press attention and rarely, if ever, change anything. Living on the edge of an overdraft while working really hard. Help.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it
–George Bernard Shaw

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
— Albert Einstein (1875-1955)

Last night we watched a ropey cam job of Love Actually complete with bad colour, audience noise and occasional fiddling with the camera. I know it got crap reviews but I’ve got this strange loyalty to Richard Curtis, the Vicar of Dibley notwithstanding. And as you’d expect it was a frothy, lighthearted tale of affluent middle class folk, including the prime minister, getting in dreadful pickles and awkward situations. Full to the brim with schmulz (sp?), cute kids who are wise beyond their years, and beautiful people, it should by rights have made me want to puke but, despite a couple of emetic scenes including a school nativity play, I loved it. There was a cynical undercurrent and a few really insightful ideas that I couldn’t possibly describe without risking an entry in pseuds corner. The opening scene is at Heathrow with a voiceover about how much love there is all around. OK, trite, but Michele and I have often talked about what emotional places airports are. In the back of both of our minds was the occasion when I had to wave good-bye to Michele when her visa was up, not knowing when or if I’d ever see her again. All around us were people overjoyed, or equally miserable with there own reasons for being there…and, of course, a load of blokes in suits looking round for their name on a bit of card so they can get driven to see another bunch of blokes in suits and smarm away while they burn lots of expenses on keeping the economy going…how this works I don’t know.
Bill Nighy was in it too – which is enough to make me go and see a film.

Friday evening we ended up in the SU chatting to a psychology student. He bestowed a few pieces of anecdotal information that, if true, indicate some serious problems in college infrastructure. Now, anyone that knows me will know that I can be ever so slightly cynical on the subect of contemporary Higher Eduction, but even I was amazed by some of this stuff. One thing that UBS has shown me is that the managerial problems in my particular workplace are not exclusive, in fact I doubt there’s an educational establishment in the country that isn’t permanently on the verge of ignoble collapse. But it’s obviously worse than I thought.

The postman rang the doorbell, woke us up and terrified the birds all at the same time this morning. Just before I woke up I was at a concert hosted by the little chipmunk looking one out of Hearsay. He introduced Kym Marsh who, after asking the audience how they were, decided not to sing and instead waved off her backing group, went over to some shelves and started filing books.

Madness on the radio this morning – I can’t remember all of the outrageous rubbish, but two stay in mind:

• Some barmy woman who thinks smoking should be a criminal offence. No matter how much of a smoker or anti-smoker you are, it should be blindingly obvious that this is the most useless idea since the cavemen formed their first “blue sky thinking” commitee. Ever heard of prohibition ? Even if you haven’t, the idea of removing the massive amount of tax generated by fags and spending even more on enforcing another pointless law and filling up our prisons with yet more harmless people should really sound like a bad idea.
• The Zimbabwe minister for foreign relations. It’s pure fascism.

But work was pretty nice so that’s alright then. Nice drink at lunchtime and a nice chat with a student called Alex who had all kinds of scandalous info about the college management. Humph went into Tim’s cage today….little meanie…

The Staff Ball^H^H^H^Hparty was early this year. Early by normal work standards, late by capitalist standards. The joyless misery of “so here it is merry christmas”, “simply having a wonderful christmas time” and “ho ho ho it’s a magical snowy christmas wonderland for charity” being played in the opressivly brightly lit warehouse stores, has been with us for about 6 months now. But this year’s ball^H^H^H^Hparty was the best for years. There was a lot of speculation about why this should have been the case but it seems pretty obvious to me; it can’t be a coincidence that this was the first christmas party for years where they gave everyone a glass of “champagne” at the door.

Anyway – good fun. Dan and I walked home and realised that the best plan would be to lie down in the mud in hilly fields for a while and call Rakesh. Luckily he was awake, otherwise our demented chatter would have been recorded by his voicemail, encoded as MP3 and distributed all over the Internet by now.

Ooh – Humph is on his way out of the cage. I suspect he wants to go over and hassle Tim. Earlier on he caused a right kerfuffle(tm) and I was a bit pissed off with him. But after an evening of Tim eek, eek, bloody eeeking, I’m tempted to stand on his cage and crap….

Also – the word “property” should be banned from television. I thought makeover shows were bad but fucking bloody fucking property bastard bloody Daily Mail property programmes DIE DIE DIE.

It’s been a turbulent 36 hours. The fact that our supply of anti-depressants ran out a week ago doesn’t help. Zap, a new recruit to the army of prescription-junkies, remarked on Friday that I had become more agressive and short tempered. This is an interesting state of affairs. Firstly, he was right, and I hadn’t even noticed. Secondly he only noticed because he has recently started to take his prescription pills and, as far as I and everyone that knows and cares about him is concerned, is a lot better for it. Less unhappy, less uptight and less agressive. It’s a shock when someone turns it round – especially when they’re right.
Thursday and Friday were particularly hard because several significant bugs in my coding of commercial web systems came to light, that I can’t deny are my fault. I’d fixed and patched everything by 5pm today – and it’s a weight off my mind…and my arse.

Anyway – last night, uptight, and in need of R & R, I went out for a delicious Thai meal with Michele, Syd, Rach, Ian and Mod. It was so nice to spend time with people I like. Sadly Michele had yet another recurrence of her gut rot and we had to leave. It irritates me but as it’s not her fault, I can’t find anyone to be angry at apart from her gut…and it doesn’t even react to anger. Pity.

When we got in I went straight to bed – 9pm with no shame. I was knackered. Several hours later I woke up, got up, took my clothes off, and went back to bed. Then at 2am the phone rang. Michele told me to answer it, so I did and passed it over to her; my brain was way too sleepy to deal with talking to people. It was a friend of ours. She was pissed, crying and generally very upset. She was also on the verge of suicide. Again. The story is a long one but at this point all you need to know is that she’d lost her mobile on the anniversay of her brother’s death – two weeks after her parents kicked her out of home…and got her arrested at the same time. To simplify matters I should say that her, Tim her parrot, Michele, Humphrey and I are all in our front room now, and she’s much, much happier than before. Tim the parrot is going to stay with us for a while until our friend finds somewhere to live. It’s quite nice actually because she understands our obsession with parrots. The only person/being who maybe slightly dischuffed with the situation is Humphrey; he is preening like a maniac to show us how much nicer he is than Tim. Sad, because Tim just wants to be friends.
Night folks.

It’s nice to see that even in the smallest, most insignificant, places, there are still great people to be found. Here are a few that have been in our house, via various media, in the past couple of hours:

• Margaret Cho
• Ben Zephaniah – for everything he’s ever said and done – especially turning down an OBE
• Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – for telling national television that Ben Zephaniah’s refusal to accept his OBE made her feel guilty for accepting her MBE.
• Tony Benn – ever watched him go up against Ali G ? I know it’s not very important, but it does demonstrate how committed he is to his ideals
• John Humphreys and Jim Naughtie – for being able to make minced-meat out of the most determined jaded political scumbag.
• Mark Thomas and Mark Steel – for remaining funny, clever and righteous for at least all the years that I’ve known you

There’s only one thing worse than advertising, and that’s advertsing that pretends to be as cynical as you. Adverts that obviously want you to sit sneering at the set going “Yeah, huh, yeah, I hate those sort of situations too…OK I’ll buy a packet of Tunes and demonstrate how cynical I am to the world”

Advertisers achieve this with varying degrees of success ranging from hopeless ineptitude to shocking cluelessness.

However successful any advertising agency is, they are all toejam.

I’m currently being attacked by one, or possibly more, of these 21st centrury viruses. These days you don’t just get a cold one day, spend a day or so in bed and then get better. Viruses are getting cleverer – makes sense I suppose, evolution and all that. They creep up slowly over a period of several weeks so your immune system never gets a chance to get into full swing. As a result they get progressively worse by stealth. By the time your immune system switches on it’s all over the place. So, I’m off work in an attempt to kick start my own immune system by giving it what it likes: sleep and relaxation.

After the demo on thursday – you know the one, the biggest weekday demonstration in Britain EVER ? Feeling pretty content that so many hundreds and thousands of people share our opinions on George Bush and the rest of the right-wing capitalistas, I sat in front of the telly and watched the news coverage which was very short compared to the other news items, but nonetheless longer than usual for such a piece of real news. It was all going so well. Even John Simpson sounded impressed by the days events. And then I made a dreadful mistake.

Question Time

No no no – why did I do it ? Clive James. Clive Bloody James. Clive “Smug Overprivileged Unfunny Traitor” James. The bit I saw before I threw the remote control across the room consisted of Clive Boy, a tory and a few Eltham Nazis in the audience verbally abuse Vanessa Redgrave and some inept LibDem woman using the words “Terrorism”, “Democracy” and “Dictator” as if they knew what they meant and as if they had any relevance to the current oil wars.

It was particularly irritating seeing Clive James, smugly chucking out these cliches. I read half a book of his once and there were some funny bits in it. It was about coming to England from Australia in his youth and occasionally he made me laugh which on reflection makes me feel slightly violated.. [ have you any idea how difficult it is to type a blog with a parakeet pecking and typing on the keyboard ? ] But I got fed up with the book because it contained several, irritating, themes:

• I used to be a socialist in my foolish youth
• I didn’t have a job because I was trying to do something more worthy like becoming a writer but the money my parents sent me kept running out
• I had wealthy friends in high places who pulled strings for me
• I had sex with lots of attractive women
• I’m cleverer than you, and most of the people I meet

Clive now prefers to be referred to as a “Poet”. Yes Clive – whatever you say. I can think of other words beginning with ‘P’ that would describe you more accurately so why not write a nice poem with these: pointless, parasite, portly, polled, pillock, pedantic, purulent, pratt, painful, primadonna, pustule, penis, punani, pack-of-shit, pube, privileged, pinheaded, pukeworthy, priggish, pompous, plain, petty, pugnacious, ponce.

Question time has the knack of bringing me right down and making me think the world is doomed. Luckily Charlie Brooker, Jeremy Hardy, and Rich Hall managed to cheer me up and remind me that there are some people in the world who can think clearly. I wish I could.

In the old days, the organizers of a demo would claim between 2 and 10 times more people attended than the police. Today they seemed to agree with plod that between 100,000 and 200,000 were protesters. Oddly, I and several other marchers estimated between 500,000 and a million. Admittedly we’re not experts at counting crowds, but on the other hand we have been on plenty of demos in the past and heard what the coppers and the organisers have said about numbers on those occasions. Believe me, there were far, far more than 100,000 people there. And it was great.

Michele was holding a banner that read “Proud of my Country. Shamed by my ‘president'”. She added the quote marks around “president” and stuck lots of stars and stripes all over it. As a result she had her photo taken about 20 times, and even got interviewed by a reporter from “London Student”!

We got some great photos, met up with Zap, Anna, Matt and Adam, and went for a drink in the Salisbury where we met a spectacularly cynical American called “Ismail” who was only too happy to argue with us. Matt, Michele and I also managed to do some very enjoyable bluejacking 🙂

Bush, Blair, Straw and the Police must have been shitting their pants about this massive demo…but this morning a horrific event in Istanbul proved they were right to invade Iraq, beyond any doubt, and consequently found us demonstrators to be, in Tone’s own words, “bizarre”. Well Tony, if I was a cynical person, which of course I’m not, I’d have to wonder about the timing of this bomb.