A good friend of ours lost his family, his job and his home recently. He stayed on our sofa for a few days with the few posessions he could grab before moving on to stay somewhere else. It isn’t fair and would bring the strongest person to despair. From my position in a marriage, with a steady job, a place to live and a potentially stable future it could have made me feel thankful and relaxed. But it didn’t. It just made me feel angry and unstable. Even the most civilised society is only three meals away from revolution. While we can look back with pity at all of the historical bollocks-ups we’ve made, we still can’t feel comfortable that we won’t make the same mistakes again – in fact it’s almost a certainy. It doesn’t matter what you do, you still live on a razor edge. It could be due to capitalism, madness, stupidity, or nature, but you could loose it all instantly. When a species has developed enough to be able to produce its own complete destruction then perhaps it’s time to call it a day. We’ve had our chance, let’s just leave it to the next lot.

Hmm – what a load of maudlin crap. Sorry. The guy I was talking about will end up winning again, and I’m sure there are many more happy-days to go before I croak. But surely it’s not a bad idea to occasionally go full-on with the paranoia, depression and mean waves from time to time ?
No this is all wrong – this was supposed to have been an “up” blog entry that went on about what a piece of brilliance the first series of “The Office” was and it’s turned into some sort of Joycean stream of consciousness from the arse of the world’s most miserable bastard.
Sorry. Here are some reasons to be cheerful:

• It was quite nice out for part of the day
• This wine isn’t bad considering it only cost 2.50
• Tomorrow is friday and then there’s a bank holiday weekend
• Epitonic
• The Iraqis are fighting back against the fascists
• Adrian is getting married this month

Today is my birthday and also the birthday of Saddam Hussein. All of this time I thought I was against the war simply because it was a violent way of protecting the U.S.’s oil interests, when in fact it turns out that it’s just because Saddam and I are both Taurian.

It should be illegal to go straight back to work the day after not being in. They should give us a day’s grace at least…:(

Well I went along, and there was a pathetic number of people on the anti-fascist side of the fence. Luckily there was an equally shit turn out from the NF. The winners were the Police who managed to muster about 2×10^100 coppers, and they did a sterling job of seperating us from each other. In fact there were more coppers between the two groups than people in the groups themselves. We did a fair amount of shouting at the flags and bald-heads we could just about see through the, rather thick, thin blue line…but it wasn’t really a show of strength. The police obviously liked the look of us, because they seemed very keen to make some home movies – how sweet. They didn’t film the NF, but then who’d want to watch those ugly fuckers ?
It really pisses me off when people slag off the ANL – who cares if they’re involved with the SWP ? They were there today and that’s what matters. Jesus christ I wish the left would stick together a bit more.

Ah well it was nice to meet some likeminded people anyway. I came back home via Everest sri-lankan take-away where I bought a spicy fish steak, and a fish-curry with hard-boiled egg roll. Super-yum. Now the rest of the day to mess about with some video capture, and a rediscovered interest in MAME.

Now and again it’s good to do absolutely bugger all. Good friday is normally a very dull day where nothing happens, so go with it and deliberately do nothing. Nice. So apart from going down the road to buy 4 bottles of revolting “wine” (2 for a fiver – I don’t care what it tastes like) I’ve not left the house all day. Nathan and Connor (a couple of the kids from down the road) totally soaked me with water pistols as I was coming back in….so I will soon be buying the most powerful water gun in the world and rewenge will be mine Muwahahahahaaha!

How cheery to see the people of Baghdad (quite a few of them in fact) demonstrating against Americas invasion of their land. It seems that outside of Iraq people don’t realise that Iraqis are actually as real and normal as everyone else. Anyone should object to being taken over in such a cynical way, even in the person they were taking over from is a bastard. They know, just as well as Wanker and Blair, that Chalabi is just as much of a shit as Saddam. In fact the only difference is that he gets on well with the U.S. state. Very much like Saddam was in the 1960s
Tim has spent a long while on my knee today. He’d be there still if I didn’t get achey and need to stand up. Lovely bird.

The fucking NF are planning to march in Bermondsey this saturday…almost ten years to the day that Steven Lawrence was murdered.

The ANL poster is here:
http://www.anl.org.uk/resources/stop_nf_bermondsey_190403.pdf
In a nutshell – assemble 1pm South Bermondsey rail station.
Having those thickheads marching is like them dancing on that man’s grave. It’s disgusting.

What a long time between blogs…how crap is that ?
And after all that time, this entry is really tedious. Sorry.
Last saturday I, together with a surprisingly large number of people went on the anti-war demo. It was a beautiful day and great to see Tony and Emmanuelle who’d come over from France. After a quick couple of pints they came back to our house and we ordered a curry.
Tim obviously felt left out with all of us sitting on the carpet eating, and so performed a beautiful dive from the top of his cage, right into Tony’s vegetable curry. He was covered – Neelam, if you read this then I’m so sorry…Our biggest worry was that he might have a heart attack when he tried to preen due to the firey nature of the sauce. So we “asked a cockatiel expert” (the Internet really is the dog’s bollocks) and apparently they love chilli and even eat them down to the seeds.
The other problem was the huge yellow stain on his belly. We couldn’t get near enough to wipe it and so just hoped he would sort it out himself. It’s taken a few days but he’s managed it. Being a vein bird, he wasn’t happy with it as it did taint his colour scheme, and became a little more reserved. But his back to his usual extovert self now and all is well.
We had my mum and dad over for dinner on sunday, partly so my mum could meet the bird – Michele did her yummy middle-eastern chicken and date thing…mmmm..
Apart from that I’ve been working. Managed to get FreeBSD 5.0 support into NoCat – which sounds very dull…well I suppose it is if you’re not into such things, but it cheered me up.
Thanks to the slackness of the public sector, we have a nice 6 day holiday after today to celebrate either

• The murder of an outspoken jewish bloke by the Romans
• The ancient spring festival of regeneration and fertility
• A nice time of year to sit around doing nothing

depending on your particular beliefs.
Oh yes, I discovered this rather groovy site that is a great way for old farts like me to beef up their mp3 collections and at the same time embarrass themselves by listing to what the younger generation are listening to. It’s got a good beat…

The struggle to produce an original reality-TV show was becoming increasingly difficult for the BBC. They took Big Brother, crossed it with Popstars and got Fame Academy…which didn’t really cut it. They added celebrities….but still. After that where do you go ?
Thank Bush then for the Iraq Conflict! What could be better than 24/7 footage of real shooting, and real dead bodies. Not even Endemol (the creators of big brother and just about every other realityfest) could swing a snuff series – but thanks to the free market, we now have one! Not only that, but one where the main characters can get seriously wounded, or even killed. They must have been dancing fucking jigs in television centre when war was declared. Like that episode from “The Day Today”, the graphics, sets, and speeches were all ready for action as soon as the shells started exploding.
They even have the big brother style “day number” on screen. All that’s missing is a geordie voiceover:
“Day 18, and John simpson is in the diary room after the daily challenge, when Kamaran was blown to pieces by friendly fire.”

I’ve fallen in love with a male parrot.
This is very scary as it means I’m a gay bestiophilic adulterer…

Michele is feeling much better BTW.