London's Burning

I thought long and hard about whether to write about the riots, not least because they were a week ago and it’s kind of late to be jumping on the bandwagon but also because I’m not sure what my opinion is. I’ve found it strange/amusing that over the last week every politician that’s been interviewed has said ‘Can I start by saying that I completely condemn these activities’ as if we were all sitting at home thinking: “Now I wonder what David Cameron thinks of these savage and unprecedented attacks on our country? I bet he’s all for it” .

There seems to be two views emerging. One that these are all little bastards who should be stamped on and beaten and have all their benefits and housing taken away and then set fire to; and the other view that these are poor delicate flowers who had no other option that to loot Curry’s as our society is so evil. I think like everyone else I am somewhere in between. Some of them are deprived, some are not: either way – setting fire to people’s homes is not the answer. The big question is where do we go from here. Here’s what I think:

Bring Back Grammar Schools
Brightness and intelligence is not related to class or wealth. However with school fees for public schools costing thousands of pounds a year their attendance is the preserve of the rich. Attendance of state schools is based on location so at the moment if you live in a deprived area then you’re going to go to a struggling school and not get the education you deserve. Grammar schools would enable those with academic abilities to be with others learning at the same rate and give them access to more qualifications. It would also encourage social mobility and mean that good jobs are not restricted to those that have had a private education. Which isn’t to say that those who are not academic would be abandoned, they would be able to learn in classes with others working at the same speed and not feel left behind or different. Which leads me to my next point.

Stop constant tests and the thought that everyone needs to go to university
We’re not all good at everything. How many of us have sat in a Maths class (or my personal nemesis– chemistry) not having a clue what is going on and knowing full well that we’re not going to use this in our real lives. Now let’s face it, most of us aren’t going to use these things in everyday life. Now I’m not saying abandon learning all together and there is a strong argument of learning for learnings sake but it’s not for everyone. So give everyone a solid grounding then let people specialise. Those that want to be academic can continue on that path, those that aren’t led to that area could have training in vocational subjects. Everyone needs a skill and a job and all should be equally valued and catered for. It’s not fair that we only concentrate on academia. We also need to limit the numbers that go to university. Not everyone needs to go. Many degrees are worthless. If we cut the numbers of those that need to attend then tuition fees could come down and then those who are academically gifted could attend and not be held back by their financial circumstances.

Value
We need to glorifying people because of their status. We need to value everyone’s contribution to society and stop glorifying people based on their wealth. No more articles in magazines about WAGs, no more Jeremy Kyle. We need to stop viewing success as fame and fortune but instead value it on what contribution you make to the world.

Make it worth your while to work
There are people growing up in households where 3 generations haven’t worked. Yes, we need to help the vulnerable in society, yes we should be proud of our strong social security system but we need to make it worth peoples while to work. Raise the minimum wage, tax breaks for those on low salaries – it should not be easier to be on benefits.

Rights without responsibility
Respect needs to be earned not just given. If you want people to give you respect than behave in a way that earns it. And this is not reserved for children. Parents too. Too many children are bought up in homes where parents have absolved all responsibility for their children. If you’re a bad parent then yeah, I’ll judge you – man up and take responsibility.

Repopulate town and city centres and change our culture
If you walk around city centres in the continent then often you’ll see friends catching up over coffee until the early hours. Admittedly we don’t really have the climate for pavement dining but if coffee shops etc were open till the early hours then there would be more people on the streets and more importantly, more people on the streets not fuelled by alcohol. On the same note if there were more residential buildings in town and city centres then cities wouldn’t become no-go areas at nights and groups couldn’t congregate to the same extent.

Punishment.
All of the above is well and good but sometimes bad stuff happens. In that case the full force of the law should come down on you. We work together for the common good. Not for the promotion of the individual.

We have to accept that we are all in this together. We have to value everyone’s contribution to society, so many of these kids have been made to feel like they don’t matter and have responded accordingly. We need to react against the 80s – there is such a thing as society and it’s up to us to make it as good as it can be, no man left behind

Magazines

I rarely find myself spurred in to action. I don't have a quick temper, I slowly build myself in to epic tantrums and then thirty seconds in to the tantrum realise I'm being a bit of a knob and simmer down. I get over myself pretty quickly. However sometimes the rage likes to direct itself in to letter writing and now so many companies have little links on their website encouraging me to 'contact us' I occasionally write overblown emails. Many is the time I have come home to find letters from companies apologising for stuff. I can rarely remember what I wrote and can never remember what prompted such fits of rage. They are usually directed at train companies, power companies and makers of substandard eye liners. However this week I took on a new giant - magazines.

Let me be clear. I love magazines. I've worked at a few and although I don't buy as many as I once did I still dip in to one or two of the weekly gossip ones. It's worth noting that this isn't directed at monthy women's magazines. I have issues with them but they are normally along the 'who spends £700 on a pair of trousers' type issues. Anyway. A couple of months ago I stopped buying Heat. I've read it pretty much weekly for ten years and I found it quite amusing. Not as amusing as they find themselves but I'd still buy it. Then one day I was reading the tv reviews and I can't remember what the programme was (I think it was Derren Brown but I can't be sure) but the review, written by Boyd Hilton, said something along the lines of 'blah blah takes on religion, this should be quite easy as God doesn't exist'. I found that quite astonishingly rude. He's entitled to his opinion, he can think what he wants (that's his God given right, boom boom) but to casually disregard thousands of people's beliefs in a smug and patronising way I found pathetic. So I stopped buying it.

And I started buying New! instead. Drawn in by it's optimistic exclamation mark and cheap price tag. It's not a taxing read and it kept me amused on the commute, it's always interesting to get Peter Andre's take on world events. However, little did I know that it was to lead me to my next campaign. They have a page called 'celebrity shame' or something. Basically it's pictures of celebrities not looking their best with the offending articles helpfully ringed in red so we can really know how they've screwed up. Such things as having their flies undone, a horrible top and the like are all ringed. So far so asinine. Each misdemenour is accompanied by a bit of text ridiculing the said celebrity. It's not nice but I usually imagine that the celeb in question couldn't really give a monkeys.

However on Tuesday I took a look and there was a picture of Penny Lancaster. I literally have no opinion on this woman. None. However New! magazine had ringed her boobs in red and entitled it 'Penny's massive nipples'. Then followed a blurb ridiculing her for the afore mentioned transgression and (this is the bit that got me) saying that she should get a personalised number plate that said B1G N1P3. I actually said out loud 'Oh for fucks sake'. This had the benefits of slightly relieving my frustration and giving me a bit more room on the train as people backed away from me. I never thought I would have a reaction to Penny Lancaster but seriously. Ridiculing a woman for something she has no control over (by the way, in the picture she looked fine), she has also recently given birth and is probably still breast feeding and now she's getting mocked in public. It annoyed me that this is acceptable. That it's someone's job to sit there pulling people apart and writing bitchy copy about some poor woman who's just getting on with her life. It's not fair and I don't want a part of it. So I'm not buying New! anymore. And I wrote them an email telling them to grow up.

So that's been my week. I started my own cultural revolution based around Penny Lancaster's breasts. Not a sentance I ever thought I'd write.

Tea and Sympathy

I was ill last week. I don't wish to overplay it but I'm fairly convinced it was dysentery. Some of sort of 24 hour dysentery. Either way I exploded for 12 hours non stop and then spent 12 hours laying around softly moaning. The next day I was fine and merrily tucked in to piles of toast whilst at work while people around me muttered to themselves 'wasn't she off sick yesterday? Doesn't seem very ill to me'. I didn't like to rid them of their illusions and tell them that it was possibly one of the most violent episodes I had every had the misfortune to be a part of. Instead I smiled and said 'bit of an upset stomach, all better now'. Luckily I work with people who have the same approach to illness as myself. That is: check the person is better and then tell them not to give it to you. I just can't be doing with over sympathetic people.

If I'm throwing up I want the nearest person to me to be in Wales. I don't want you holding my hair back, I don't want you banging on my door to see if I'm OK, I want to be left alone to deal with this by myself. If I'm having to get up fifteen times in one night to empty myself then I have enough issues. I don't want to have to worry about making conversation at the same time. I'll be in touch when it's all over.

It was the next day I really wanted someone around. I was knackered and everytime I lifted my head I was so overwhelmed by the need to throw up that I decided not to move for three hours which led to some serious dehydration. I lay there and I wondered who I could text to come in and get me a drink. There were a few options but as I lay there, phone in hand, I remembered that I had locked the front door so I would have to get up and let them in anyway. So I rolled out of bed and then slid down the stairs on my back. By the time I got downstairs I was so tired I couldn't be bothered to get a drink.

All the same I was relieved there was no one there. I wasn't longing for company, I was longing for a drinks dispenser. I don't deal with the milk of human kindness very well. Which is why I was relieved to be greeted with these kind words on my return to work. 'You been vomming? Urgh'.

An advert for London

Hey You
Yes You
Do you own an enormous rucksack? Do you have the ability to come to a sudden halt with no warning at all? Do you like to stop immediately after ticket gates to put your travelcard away? And most importantly have you devoted your entire life to standing on the LEFT of escalators?
Then why not come to London? In particular why not time all your journeys to take place in rush hour and then stand in the doorways of tubes looking slightly shell shocked and panicked as commuters surge past you and expect you to stand in spaces you assumed were too small for ants to congregate on.
Of course I welcome tourists to our glorious capital city and appreciate the revenue they create. This doesn't stop me for wanting a tourist free fast lane on all pavements and a ban on them using the tube to go one stop at the height of rush hour.
Oh I know that I've mucked around in foreign cities and sat on buses at 5-30 merrily moving my shopping as a thousand people try to cram on. I too have also taken forty five minute train journeys in to the arse end of hell as I attempted to navigate a subway system to take a journey which would have been a maximum of a three minute walk (New York I'm talking to you). But that was different, that was me and I have never, ever, decided it would be a good idea to meet up with forty language students on the busiest thoroughfare I can think of. I have some limits.
Oh such petty annoyances clutter my life. I need to rise above it, there's just infuriating about being stuffed in to a carriage with a thousand other people whilst people who have clearly spent the day at the zoo rather than at work look at each other and go 'gosh I couldn't do this every day'. Well then don't do it anyday. Leave the zoo at 4 or hang on till 7. I don't have those options. I leave at 6. We haven't got round to staggering our office hours yet, we all leave at the same time.
Given the option I would commute to work by bike or a nice walk. Unless I want to get up at 3am I can't do this. So until then I need to get on with it. I resolve to get on with it about 6 times a week. Then I spend the journey home sat in a luggage rack and I'm back to square one.

Tanning

I am back from a very pleasant holiday in Greece. We had no access to a themometre (or a clock, which led to some strange meal times) but in our estimation it was ‘very hot’. Conversation with everyone you met centred around two topics. The first was the heat. You heard various tales of how hot it was. Stories of ’47 degrees in the shade were heard’, given that I wasn’t dead I didn’t believe those stories but like I say –very hot. The other conversation was mosquitoes. They were insane. I have been bitten over 30 times and I was one of the lucky ones. I am rocking some particularly beautiful ones which have bruised around the bite. My dream of returning bronzed and glowing with health are dashed. I have returned looking like someone you wouldn’t sit next to on the bus in case you got scabies. My dream of returning bronzed from a holiday is a dream that just won’t die. I am 31 years old. I am ginger. I have freckles and no discernable eyebrows or eyelashes. I have had to receive actual medical advice regarding the severity of burns that I got from merely walking to the shops. Yet still every holiday I go on there’s a voice in my head that says ‘this could be the year, you could go brown, you could have an amazing tan, you just need to let it build up gradually’. This theory is slightly flawed given that I lived in Australia for a year and returned paler than when I left- just how gradually am I planning on building this tan? Still I once again decided that this would be the holiday of brownness. But in the spirit of letting things build gradually I slapped on the factor 40 and kept to the shade. However this time there was the complication of the mosquitoes. By the time I had suncream and bug cream on this created some kind of reaction which made me erupt in to a disgusting rash and my skin take on the texture of gravel. Which meant I had to forgo the bug spray and get bitten a lot. I was still pale though. Then I fell asleep and burnt my back.

So I resorted to my default sun bathing position- in the shade with every inch of me swathed in towels. A bit like I'd died but no one wanted to interupt their holiday to deal with it so they'd fashioned me a shroud out of luridly coloured beach towels. Just waiting for it to get a bit chilly before they take me fishing and generally recreate 'Weekend at Bernie's'. So I return. Bitten, red and with some weird bubbly skin thing going on. Not really what I was aiming for. Great holiday though. I think my favourite bit was being told by a waiter that the reason Greek people weren't being bitten was because they drank ouzo - so we dutifully downed a couple of shots each night. When we told another waiter this theory he merely shook his head and said 'a man told you that right? I don't want to know how this story ends'

Film idea

I have a radical idea for a film. I think it could spark a new genre and a mass spin off market. Following in the steps of Twilight, Step Up, Street Dance, Street Dance 3D it’s a film for teenagers who can’t be bothered to develop any tastes of their own and so rely on the media to tell them what they like.

So my teen film: it’s about a posh teenager who for some reason has to leave their private school and attend a run down, horribly terrifying school/prison which is entirely inhabited by all the children of the Sylvia Young Theatre school doing ‘tough cockney’. Why the posh child can’t attend a normal comprehensive with a mixture of people in it is not clear but also unimportant, Tarquin (as posh child shall be known) is flung in to this new environment. But here’s the revolutionary twist – Tarquin CAN’T street dance. He can’t even do any old fashioned dancing that he would have learnt at his posh school like ballet or morris dancing which he would have fused with street dance in an amazing new fashion leaving his peers breathless with respect and waving their fingers around and saying ‘hey yo that posh guy he is off the hook innit’. Instead Tarquin is forced to make friends and influence people by getting to know them and talking to them about a variety of topics. At some point he may do something utterly radical like go to the cinema with them hang out in a shopping centre rather than go to an illegal night club and have a dance off with a terrifying street gang who express themselves through skipping and speaking threateningly without ever swearing. At the end of the film Tarquin realises that if he just keeps his head down for a few years, makes some decent friends and then goes off in to real life rather than thinking that high school is the most important part of your time on earth and the best time for your life to peak is at age 15.

It’s radical but it might just work.

Technology

I had to go to the bank this lunch time. To get there I had to navigate the joys of Oxford Street. This meant I not only dealt with the weather in July (rain/sun/rain/sun/hail/sub tropical cyclone/snow) but I was also wearing flip flops which meant that every so often I lurched sideways and nearly head butted some scaffolding. I also dealt with tourists who walk insanely slowly and suddenly and without warning stop dead. I got called a rude word by one for over taking. But hey, you can’t be too down when there’s coffee available on every corner and you work in the centre of one of the greatest cities on earth. Besides I was to have a real treat this lunch time. My mind was about to be blown.

I encountered the whizziest paying in machine I have ever seen. I had cash to pay in and so I trudged in, filled out a form and was looking around for an envelope to put it in when I realised things had changed (I don’t really pay in too often, I’m more of a taking out kinda girl). Envelopes and even paying in slips have gone, replaced by a machine which you just fling cash in to, it counts it and adds it to your account instantly. I did it bit by bit just so I could watch the little trap door open and hear it count the money.

Ahh technology. It’s great isn’t it. Makes paying in money that little bit more fun. I am also enamoured with the sparkling water tap we have here. I am easily pleased. But as I sit here drinking sparkling water and marvelling at paying in machines I am also quite angry. The emergency debate on phone hacking is taking place and it just staggers me to see what’s been going on.

Personally I think the people who sanctioned it should be called to account. Those that did it should be called to account and the whole sorry episode should be blown wide open and everyone involved should be exposed. But at a lower level, why did no-one ever question it? I watched the news this morning and there were journalists and friends of journalists talking about the pressure of the job and it was used as a justification for the acts. I know it’s easy to get caught up in a job. I know the feeling that it’s the most important thing in the world and then with a couple of months hind sight you think ‘Wow, I totally lost perspective there’. But seriously, as someone was hacking a dead girls voicemail and deleting messages did they never think – ‘you know what, I don’t think this is what I should be doing. No job is important enough.’ I fail to see how someone’s moral compass can be so off that they could do that. But they did. And as people higher up refuse to resign and say they knew nothing about it the problem continues. It doesn’t matter if they did or didn’t know. Someone needs to take responsibility. Someone needs to say ‘This simply isn’t right and it happened on my watch’. The more they cling to the wreckage the more they are causing damage to the families of the victims. They are also causing harm to themselves. They have lost their grip of reality and morality and need to walk away from the place they are in whereby they think these acts are acceptable. They need to hack in to their sense of decency.