A lefty, multicultural and crap blog.

The other day there was a thing in London. I don't know if you heard about it, but Danny Boyle put on a little, quiet, unassuming thing to celebrate the opening of the Olympics. It was possible you blinked and you missed it. LOL JK (as cool people and Harry Potter fans say). It was the biggest, loudest, most over the top international show since World War Two. Lady Gaga might even have tweeted "Bit OTT isn't it little monsters?" about it, so crazy and big was it. It started, not with a shout, but with a whisper. A nod to all things British. Glatonbury was not on this year, because Danny Boyle had stolen their hill and put it at one end of the stadium, while the Proms (yeah, they're still going on at the moment, been a tad upstaged though) happened at the other end. Sadly there were no great battles between them on the telly. There were sheep and cricket and clouds. Then it kicked off properly. I don't want to go into too much detail of it here, because I checked and my Twitter feed for the three hours of the opening ceremony takes up 31 pages of A4. But quickly: after a little bit of farming, some people dressed as Abraham Lincoln (or Isambard Kingdom Brunel - doing an impression of Abe Lincoln for a fancy dress party) came on and the industrial revolution happened. Chimneys rose out of the ground and the Olympic rings were forged and launched high into the sky, taking with them 7 years of cultivated British cynicism. As we all had to admit, that's a damn good opening titles sequence. Then the Queen turned the whole country into royalists, by proving she has excellent comic timing and is very up for a laugh - God bless ya ma'am.

Then Mike Oldfield's tubular bells started up and some kids in hospital beds appeared in the arena. As the nation moved behind their sofa's fearing that the kid's heads would start turning round in a mass recreation of The Exorcist a tribute to the glory of the NHS started on TV. Volunteering nurses and kids performed a brilliant choreographed dance sequence including JK Rowling reading to kids as a giant Voldermort - if you fear the name, you've already lost really - rose up and creepy dark creatures stalked between the kiddies beds. It turns out that these were Death Eaters and not as I thought, a representation of MRSA. Luckily, Danny Boyle was prepared to fight them off - well, after He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named disrupted the Quidditch World Cup and Triwizard Tournament a few years ago, did you think we wouldn't come up with a contingency plan? In a wonderful move a fleet of Mary Poppinseses were air-dropped into the stadium to fight them off. A wonderful tribute to the NHS, and Britain's Children's charities. Who could fail to be moved by that?

Well, it turns out the Daily Mail. Yes, I'm as surprised as you that they are grumpy. Thing is, I'd been reading lots of Olympics stuff in the Guardian (yes, I read the Guardian, I also turn off lights when I leave the room, wash my clothes on 30 and regret voting Lib Dem - I'm what the Mail refer to as a 'stupid c**t') and trying to write a script, but because I write best when I'm angry and because I always want to get a fair balance, I thought I'd check out the Daily Mail's, for want of a better word, "thoughts" on the Olympics so far. Frankly what I read would have made Jim Davidson blush. "What did they make of this celebration of the NHS?" I hear you ask like you already know the answer but are humouring me. Well naturally it was appalling. Because did you know someone once died in an NHS hospital? How dare the Olympics include a tribute to the NHS? they raged, "what would Kane Gorny's family think?" Kane Gorny was a man who tragically, horrifically and entirely wrongly died in an NHS hospital bed when nurses failed to get him a glass of water for so long that he eventually dialled 999 from his hospital bed to get help, but was still denied it. It's a genuinely horrible case and not something I'm making light of here, but it was one case. The Mail are basing the fact that the NHS should not be celebrated and is immoral, incompetent and should be shut down (they don't say that, but it's implicit in everything the Daily Mail stands for) on one case where some nurses in one hospital massively and horribly fucked up. Nobody, not even Danny Boyle, is saying that the NHS is perfect. I can't have been the only person to have tweeted the MRSA joke when the Death Eaters arrived, but these are a few incidents that don't stop the philosophy behind the NHS - free healthcare to those who need it - or the majority of the work the NHS does being brilliant, worthwhile, worth celebrating (the rest of the world aren't so lucky. Even with the progress of the Obamacare bill the world's biggest nation are still a long way off).

All of which is frankly preamble, the Daily Mail used it as a way into something else. Let's be honest, there are currently more foreign visitors in our country then ever before, and more nations represented, so it would be a real shame if the Daily Mail didn't rise to the occasion and put their long practised racism skills to some good use. But I get distracted back to that legendary opening ceremony.

Next up we have Tim Berners-Lee. The man who invented the fucking internet is there! That's so awesome. Well, I thought it was. A lot of people didn't know who it was, including the American commentators who said: "Don't know who that is," "Google him." If that had been ironic, it would have been funny. I'm not expecting for everybody to know who Tim Berners-Lee is. I don't think I learnt his name at school, I think I should have, but I didn't. But you'd think maybe the people hired to comment professionally on an event he's part of might have read up on him at least. Especially as NBC waited until the ceremony was over to start showing it. It's not like they couldn't have known what was coming up. But they had an attitude of "We don't know who this guy is, so he's not important," a view I think the British should adopt to Mitt Romney from now on.

Next up, a tribute to the music of Britain since the 1960s. As we see a multi-cultural family evolve over time. Remember when I mentioned the Daily Mail being racist? It's now. "This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England, but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up." Right...everything about this really. It's wrong. I mean this event is happening in East London, I think it would be a greater challenge for the organisers to avoid finding a happy multi-racial family. But certainly an "educated white mother" wouldn't marry a "[note the lack of the word educated, can they read?] black father," no she'd have read up on them and know that black fathers are no good because of er...well that thing er....they all do it.....er..... I hope how massively sarcastic I'm being here is coming across. What utter bollocks. They're just making shit up.

They went onto complain about a celebration of grime music "(a form of awful electronic music popular among black youths)" well, let's look at that:
1) The inclusion of that implies your readers don't know what grime music is and, as good as, tells them they shouldn't check it out for themselves. "Meh...don't listen to it, you wont like it. Here's an opinion about it I can force on you with no evidence. No need to thank me."
2) "awful" is your opinion - and now your uneducated readers' opinions - and that doesn't mean everyone hates it or that it isn't culturally significant to thousands of people.
3) The gist of this sentence is basically "in my day you could hear all the words." It seems the Mail would prefer a tribute to Britain's musical heritage and development that stopped at We'll Meet Again because they just don't understand this modern rubbish and therefore surely nobody else can.
4) "Popular among black youths." Blimey! It's like Eminem and Elvis never happened in your world isn't it? In my experience, white youths love a bit of grime too. I have done no research into this (it always feels to me that doing research to fight the Daily Mail is unsporting. You wouldn't battle a man with a pointy twig using the Trident Nuclear Defence system) but even without research, I would believe that grime music is probably more popular among black youths than white. It's themes and those who make it being from the same ethnic group, it's bound to have more resonance with some than others. But that doesn't make it any less part of Britain's culture. That doesn't make it exclusive to only black people and even if it did, it turns out Daily Mail, that they're just like us and a bit of musical diversity and inventiveness is worth celebrating and embracing. Who would have thunk it?
5) Frank Turner, Mike Oldfield, The Jam, Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Millie, The Kinks, The Beatles, Mud, The Specials, David Bowie, Queen, The Sex Pistols, New Order, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Eurythmics, The Prodigy, West Ham Fans, Blue, Dizzee Rascal, Amy Winehouse, Muse, Tinie Tempah, the London Symphony Orchestra ft. Mr Bean, Arctic Monkeys, Sir Paul McCartney, various classical musicians, tell me again what one type of music was it all about? Because I'm struggling to pick out one specific genre and if I did, it would be rock. Don't just pick one song you hate and use that as a basis to say that the ceremony is hateful because it happens to include things popular with groups you hate.

Germany arrive thinking it's fancy dress

But fear not foreigners, the Daily Mail wouldn't forget you. Because when it came to your turn to walk into the stadium the Mail complained that we were made to sit through hours of teams walking into a stadium from "banana republics" (just when you think they could get no more vile) that we'd neither heard of nor care about. I'm not saying that section didn't drag, my God it dragged. I'd been and made 10 cups of tea during countries starting with A alone and I don't even like tea. By the time Team GB entered the stadium the teams from Afghanistan (good ol' Welwyn boys it turns out) had all ready finished the sports and were starting the closing ceremony! But it did matter, people did care. This is a global televisual event. People from those countries were watching and cheering on their athletes. Their athletes who'd spent at least the last four years, probably their whole lives, training to be there to represent their nation, the least we could do is watch them - or listen to it from the kitchen while we grab another snack. Why not do what me and majority the lefty scum I follow on Twitter did, and listen to the commentary and try and learn some trivia about these places so we know who they are in Brazil next time. Like NBC and their Tim Berners-Lee gaff, the Mail assumes that if we don't know them, and we don't own them any more, then what's the point of them. They don't care and they don't want to and they're the rag that millions of Britons trust every day to keep them informed. I have no punchline, that in itself is a punchline, a joke so horrid if it was on the BBC they'd call for it to be shut down.

I read that article the other day, and it worked, I was angry enough to write 8 minutes worth of a pretty decent script. I didn't feel the need to channel my anger into a blog that would be very angry and political, but then today my friend Luke tweeted at me to tell me the article had been taken off the Mail's website. Maybe, just maybe, this is because they got so many complaints about it and had a change of heart, but in my opinion it was a "lets hide it and pretend it didn't happen and it's not what we really think, coz some of those Guardianistas are kicking up a right fuss," and frankly, I'm just not sure I want to let them get away with it. This blog may not have the most views, but at least somewhere there is a record of what they Daily Mail thought, and definitely continue to think.

I say definitely continue to think, because you don't have to look far for other hints. Jan "He died of gayness" Moir chipped in yesterday with her comments on the pressure put on Team GB, and it started relatively sane and interesting. She suggested that the pressure on Team GB is probably made worse by every news reporter and interviewer banging on about the pressure we put on Team GB. Of course she was unaware of the irony of theorising that in an article about how we probably all talk too much about the pressure put on Team GB, but I can forgive her that. She talks about the pressure on Zara Phillips in particular who "nevertheless still contrives to sound like a bored Essex under-manicurist despite being a) royal and b) taking part in the poshest Olympic sport." It's almost like she only brought up Zara to have a go at her dead-common sounding voice. How dare she sound normal! Not that the rest of us were even in danger of hearing her voice and mistaking it for that of Amy Childs. Especially as sounding bored, implies that frankly she's not feeling the pressure as much as your article about everyone feeling the pressure too much world like us to believe. After a brief section bitching about the face of one of the commentators (careful, Jan, you're no Sam Brick yourself), she goes on to report on Lizzie Armitstead's effort in her cycling event, where maybe the pressure put on Team GB did play a hand in it because she came second to that Dutch rider, what was her name? It's completely slipped my mind. I'll just look at Jan Moir's article to find out. Oh yes "some bitch from Holland." Yeah, stupid bitch, "snatching" a medal from Team GB, we paid for this event....well us and lots of cooperate sponsors, the least you could do is let us win. Fucking Dutch bitch, how unsporting.

The Daily Mail website is good for one thing, and one thing alone. If you want to watch porn but have content restrictions imposed on your computer, you can always find pictures of celebrities in Bikinis disguised as news KATY PERRY SHOWS OFF HER CURVES IN GREEN BIKINI THIS TIME or HER OFF TOWIE WENT ON HOLIDAY, LOOK YOU CAN ALMOST SEE SOME FANNY or of course they always have pictures of Samantha Brick.

Ah go on then, just for you: 

By the way, Marianne Vos, because I do have the respect to find out her name. Well done Holland.

Wiff-Waff's Coming Home!

The Olympics is just around the corner - actually a short train journey away - as they've been saying for the last two years, so it's time for a blog in which I misunderstand a sport...again.

But first, let me take you back. Back to 2005. A world before TOWIE. A better and happier place. On 6/7/2005 Britain and France both waited tensely to find out who would be hosting the 2012 Olympics. To my young, uneducated mind there was no question about it, it should definitely be Ant & Dec. Alas, I had misunderstood for comedy purposes, it was to decide what country was to host the Olympics. For those who don't want to know the result look away now: We won. Queue footage of Seb Coe jumping up and down shouting "IN YOUR FACE!" at some Frenchies - is there anything more British? Even I can appreciate a good thrashing of the French. The best bit though is that, due to every company in the world wanting to associate themselves with the Olympics brand, EDF is now a major sponsor. So brilliantly, we won it but the French are still having to pay for it (EDF standing for Energy Du French or something, look you do the research, you're the one who cares about sport). In a way, we've all ready won.

But how did we defeat the French to the bid? Well, it seems by saying the word "legacy" more times than they did. The committee (hereafter referred to as Coe and co.) proved that London 2012 would have an impact long after the games and repeats of the games during rain intervals in the cricket have faded away. They hoped it would help with the ever-expanding obesity crisis by promoting sport and physical activity. Something at odds with the Olympics' other commitments to promoting McDonald's and Coca-Cola. Take it from a guy who used to work in Harvester, a sixteenth of an apple in a little bag is not a salad and while I love that McDonald's have never really committed to the whole healthy living thing (because nobody really wants them to) it does seem massively stupid for them to be sponsoring the world's biggest sporting event. The Olympics conjures up images of great sporting achievement, of great power, of history, of legacy (oh God, I'm becoming one of them), of human strength and power and brilliance, the official restaurant of that should, at the very least, be somewhere you have to book in advance, have table service and where the staff don't look at you like you've just shat on the table if you ask to see the wine list. McDonald's is delicious - up there on my list of favourite restaurants - but I wouldn't take thousands of visiting athletes and sports fans there if they came over to visit, we'd probably splash out on a curry or Chinese, something properly British.

Before we could have our Olympics, the Chinese had to hold their Beijing 2008 games. Annoyingly for us, it went incredibly well and the closing ceremony was just amazing. It ended with the most amazing fireworks ever. But a lot of people in London have recently been forced, against their wishes, to have a load of ground (well roof) to air missiles installed on their roof for the Olympics, so if that doesn't top Beijing's fireworks, I don't know what will.

Then, like the "19 Years Later" bit of the final Harry Potter film, the brilliance and beauty of the final instalment of the games was ruined by an unwanted, unneeded, badly performed little add on. Boris Johnson. He turned up to give a speech about Wiff-waff and about wanting to see men carrying oxen through the Olympic stadium, killing them with their bare hands and eating them. All the time Lord Coe stood behind him regretting being so damn successful at outbidding the French while Gordon Brown tried to keep his face out of shot. To my mind, the best bit of the Olympics.

Because the TV news, advertising industry, newspapers, pre-existing clocks or our memory wasn't going to be doing it constantly over the next few years, a big clock was built in Trafalgar square to count down to the opening ceremony, and almost straight away the clock stopped and someone had to be sent to find some AA batteries. Just in case you were thinking that I was making it up or describing the plot of brilliant comedy series Twenty Twelve...You'd be right...but by incompetent coincidence:

That sitcom/mockumentary also featured an hilarious episode where a bus transporting Olympic officials got lost in London's new Olympic transport system and took a whole four hours to arrive at the Olympic stadium so some of it is obviously just farcical and over the top.

From Kerron Clement, the American hurdler's, Twitter

Also, in  the news today: in the hotel where the German relay team were staying a Moose's head fell onto the proprietor's head and after a disastrous fire drill left him concussed he became very racist towards the German team despite his protestations that they started it.

So the stadiums have been built and sold to various football clubs to use after the Olympics, because, as a country, we're like kids at Christmas demanding the very expensive thing that cool ol' China's got, but we know we'll play on it once and then wont use it again, but it'll be nice to say we had it. Team GB have taken time out from their busy advert-filming schedules to do some training and we're nearly ready to go. Time then for the Olympic flame to be sent all the way from Greece. We did try and tell them that we all ready have fire over here (in fact some young people demonstrated this clearly on the streets of London about this time last year) but they said it had to be lit by the sun traditionally and we said "yeah, we don't have that." So they sent us some of their fire for people to carry around the UK on the end of a stick. The best of British, the formerly horrifically ill and Will.I.Am carried it. People who had an impact on British culture, great musicians, actors, television personalities or people who'd bravely overcome some kind of crippling illness ran about the country with it. I went to see the flame being carried past a second hand shop in Cheltenham. First up was a Coca-Cola bus full of people getting the crowd going and handing out free bottles of Coca-Cola or in my case, disappointingly, Coke Zero. Next up was a Panasonic bus, after the Coca-Cola one I was hopeful of people giving out free TVs, but instead I got a paper flag. Deeply upsetting, but not quite so bad as being given Coke Zero. Then a bus of other torch carriers came through and we politely wooped and waved our flags so they would think we knew who they were. Next up was a crew of skateboarders (I checked my watch, but it wasn't the 90s) who skated in formation along the route. They were very good, I thought, I sensed a lot of preparation had gone into this bit. Just goes to show that I know nothing about the Olympics, because they were shortly escorted off the road by the police and given slapped wrists all round. Finally, it was Samsung quad bikes (cool), Police motor bikes (cool), and a lady carrying the torch (warm - it's a torch!!). More woops and flag waving and then off to Nandos before going home to try and buy the Torch off ebay.

Interesting fact: the Torch relay is a relatively new tradition launched in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The most controversial Olympics ever maybe, but you can bet they didn't have the problems with security we've been reading about in the last week. So this Friday is when it all kicks off and one day you'll be able to tell your grandchildren "I was there!" or if you work for G4S "I wasn't there." Danny Boyle has put together an opening ceremony that promises to be very British, worrying as the last image of Britain he created was set on the drug fuelled council estates of Glasgow. Possibly the only time in games history where urine tests will be done for the opening ceremony. Probably the only bit I will watch is in fact the opening ceremony. Danny Boyle has promised that it will be typically British and will feature clouds and real grass, so that's something to look forward to. Especially if this clip from rehearsals showing David Cameron and the disembodied voice of Boris Johnson is anything to go buy. The Olympics will light up London, if only they hadn't bought energy saving lightbulbs:

"Ping-pong is coming home!"-Boris Johnson
"So no basically, it's all good"-Ian Fletcher, Head Of Deliverance 2012.

If you're wondering why I haven't mentioned this Olympic logo/random bit of graffiti, it's because...where do you start? 

Homecoming

I really don't like the way blogspot writes the number of posts I do each month/year next to this, because it constantly reminds me that I do bugger all writing. I'm trying to fix this now though, since I've moved back to Welwyn Garden City. After spending four years living in Cheltenham (3 years of university and 1 year to watch The Sopranos boxset) I've finally had to come home. University never felt like the real world - well it did at the start of course, I'm living on my own, doing my own shopping and drinking legally like what grown-ups do, but when the government are giving you money to go out and buy vodka it's hard to see that as the real world. So, in my third year, when I received an e-mail asking what my plans were for the following year ("er....they're....I'm going to be a world famous writer!...nevermind how! they'll read my blog and give me a novel deal....shut up!") and if I fancied staying in Cheltenham, I jumped at the chance. It was a way to continue getting drunk and I saw it as a "gap-year," albiet one where I didn't travel the world, see China or help build a school in Africa. The closest I got to travelling the globe and trying new experiences was accidentally walking into a gay bar in Gloucester.

But I could pretend to still be a student and spend as much time as possible drunk and that was a good enough excuse to avoid doing anything proper/scary career-wise and, more importantly, watch The Sopranos. I even went out for the first night of Fresher's. That was fucking weird. It makes you realise what a dick you were back then. It was most of these kid's first night's away from home and they went mental! I forgot there was a time when you were genuinely excited about a man throwing glow-sticks at the crowd. Most of these people had never been given a glow-stick by someone at this stage in their life. Their days had been made. It was quite moving to see.

To be perfectly honest, Welwyn Garden City is definitely far less of the real world than Cheltenham. If a major reality check is what you're avoiding (and let's be honest, it was) then a place that calls itself a city when it's barely even a town is the place to be. By the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary a city has to have a cathedral and by my personal definition, it's not a real town if it doesn't have, at least, a reasonably sized HMV. Two things worried me on the day I moved back home 1) Where was I going to put my DVD collection (approx. 500 DVDs... every time I've come to count them something has distracted me before I finished). 2) Where the hell was I going to buy my DVDs from now on? I'm used to having CEX and HMV a short walk away. If ever I was bored or needed a new DVD because I didn't fancy any of the 500 I own, or just needed to walk off a hangover, I could just nip out and buy one. Here I have to take the bloody day off if I want to waste my money. And if I want a good selection of DVDs I have to visit Stevenage *shudders*.

Welwyn Village is nowhere near reality. It's like living in an episode of Midsomer Murders but without the excitement of murders, or a strict adherence to a white-people-only casting policy, despite the wishes of some of the older people who live here. Sadly, I returned a little bit after Welwyn Festival Week, which is a wonderful display of bunting, street markets, history of Welwyn talks, open gardens (why not go and sit in someone else's garden for an afternoon? - there's usually cake), tombola's, a village fete and not-to-forget the headlining event: the 47th Annual Welwyn Duck Race. Oh, the Annual Welwyn Duck Race, it's no lie or sarcasm to say it really is the talk of the town. God himself tried to stop us one year when the river dried up in the midst of a drought, but we merely called in the fire brigade who used their hoses to force the ducks along the path where the river once ran. It is not known how many people died or treasured heirlooms were ravaged by fire during this time or how that squares with a national hosepipe ban, but Goddamnit, you don't mess with our duck race!

It's sweet that the Welwyn Festival is a chance for the whole community to come together and do something and get excited by rubber (oh yes, they're not even real!) ducks floating down the river that runs through the village. Maybe it's due to the lack of DVD shops, book shops, cinemas, any venue open later than 10pm (even the streetlights pack up for the night and turn themselves off at midnight), that there is a proper sense of community in Welwyn. It's the kind of place where everybody knows each other. I'm constantly bumping into people who I kind of know from ages ago, or whose face I kinda remember or whose son/daughter went to school with me. I'm constantly getting into conversations that begin:
THEM: "You don't remember me do you?" SUBTEXT: I'm saying this to put you at your ease so you don't feel awkward about admitting that.
ME: "Yeah. I do. 'Course I do" SUBTEXT: You're right, I don't remember you, but I'm worried that you'll be offended if I say that. And you massively overestimate how supremely awkward I am around strangers or people I barely know or my close personal friends.
THEM: "How are you?" SUBTEXT: I'm flaterred you remember me.
ME: "Oh, fine. Same old. Same old. You?" SUBTEXT: Please respond with something like "same old...still teaching year 6 at St. Marys Primary School where you went all those years ago."
There are a few elderly dog walkers on my street who I regularly keep up-to-date with my university shenanigans, because if I talk about myself for long enough the dogs will get restless before I have to ask about their lives. It's not rudeness it's just I'm pretty sure I don't actually know who these people are. One day, one of them stopped me and offered his sympathy following my dad's stroke and hoped I'd pass on his good-will...wait a minute...you don't know me either?! My dad hasn't had a stroke. I'd describe Welwyn as a place where everybody knows everybody else, but I think it's something infinitely more beautiful than that, it's a place where nobody knows anyone else, but everyone is to awkward to admit this. That's a wonderful society.

That said, we do need to sort something out right now, people of Welwyn. Smiling. It's the kind of place where people smile politely when they pass and while I can see that this is a terribly civilised way to go about, we need to develop a system of signalling - a smile that means "hey! I'm just smiling," a smile that means "I'm smiling because I know you and we should chat," and a smile that means "I'm mental." - because I'm tired of pulling my earphones out and looking like a moron, or leaving them in and saying "hi" with no idea how loud it was.

I'm not sure how comfortable I am living in a friendly place. It's the kind of place where David Cameron's Big Society could genuinely work. Lot's of middle class people all volunteering and being communal. It's lovely. But lets consider this: do we want to let David Cameron's Big Society work? Surely any time David Cameron wins is regrettable. And everyone helping organise the duck race should never lead to "meh...get people to run their own schools, save us some money" thinking in the government.

In Welwyn's defence: That's the view from the shopping centre.

The local newspaper is shared with the next town along Hatfield. The Welwyn Hatfield Times concisely sums up the differences between these two towns. A game I like to play (because I'm sad and bored) is "Hatfield or Welwyn?" Two example headlines might be HORRIFIC MURDER! and FLOWER SHOW A SUCCESS. (If you said 1. Hatfield. 2. Welwyn, give yourself 2 points. Well played). In my first week back they printed the gripping story "BUSINESS AS USUAL AT WATER FIRM" and on the letters page it's all kicking off about the parking situation on Knightsfield let me tell you! There was a story about the Bowls team being on fire, but that turned out to be more metaphorical and less amusing than I first thought. It's a quality local paper - one that's even printed my picture a few times - it does good work and good reporting for the community but it's not always the most exciting place to be doing it. And it'll never beat the Gloucestershire Echo's single greatest headline of all time

And here is my picture from the Welwyn Hatfield Times getting my A-Level results...

unfortunately for Welwyn capturing the joy of the moment I discovered I would be leaving.

Welwyn and Cheltenham are similar in some ways. They're both quite posh. Every comedian who I saw in Cheltenham went on and on about how posh it was. I lived in St. Paul's, I had no idea what they were on about. Whenever anyone visits Cheltenham they would kick our bit of the town under a giant sofa in Pittville Park and distract the visitors with cake and fine cutlery. Both places are literally full of big, nice, expensive houses that I will eventually buy once I've become a successful writer (when is that happening by the way?). Which I guess means, now that I'm home with nothing to do except write and walk around looking at nice houses I should own, I guess I should probably do some writing. It's free from distractions. It takes 20 minutes to walk to my nearest friend's house instead of...well living in my nearest friend's house. So I moved back in, unpacked my DVDs and books, and immediately set about writing, ok I watched all 3 series of Community in 4 days. (WATCH IT! It's amazing. You have to watch it online or it's on the Sony channel (?) on Sky). But then I set about writing. Well, I opened Word - Look it's not my fault the youtube machine and the important-future-career-ensuring machine are the same thing. But, over the last week, I've been trying to dedicate a bit of time every single day to writing (it's a 5/7 success. I couldn't be bothered on Tuesday. Tuesdays are boring.) and that's not including this. This is just mucking about and a bit of practice for the old fingers. So I'm definitely not going to try and keep this blog up and regular (every time I say that I will, I write three more then piss off for six months). 

Now, I just need stuff to write about. Sport probably. I've probably got to mention the Olympics, I believe it's the law that everyone has to mention it in everything they write at the moment. I did try and get into sport a bit over the summer, I saw some of the Euros (They're not as bad as everything I'd read about them beforehand. I thought Spain and Italy were meant to be fucked...maybe I got confused) and I watched British Scottish hopeful Andy Murray in his Tennis final. Wimbledon is about Pimms, Strawberrys and Maria Sharapova's legs, in theory I should love it. But...I think the rain ruined it a bit. It took far too long to put the roof on, for those who don't know the sport, that's because they have to lower the umpire's chair first or his head gets stuck in it. If the players just wore a colour that didn't go see through when wet, there'd be no need for any of that song-and-dance. I don't really understand the scores either. There were three numbers at the top: I assume one is the number of points they've got, one is the number of sets they've won and the third is the number of celebrities they've spotted in the crowd. That seemed to be the most important bit judging by the BBC coverage.

Anyway, I'm off to write or look at youtube now. One last note about Welwyn's community spirit. Here is a photo taken at the Welwyn Festival (I think) in 2000 to celebrate the millenium. Loads of people turned up and I'm right near the front. It's the only copy I could find online so it's not particularly clear, but I am the one wearing a cap (? I know!) and - no word of a lie - picking my nose in this delightful record of Welwyn's history.

(By the way: The cap says "Been There. Done That." That's how I'm commemorated in a piece of my village's history)

And now, the weather

It’s been a while since I last wrote a blog so I figure I should, but I don’t really have anything to talk about. So er....lovely weather for the time of year innit?

Oh yeah, it’s summer. Not quite sure how it happened but it’s been summer this week. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s something to do with changing to British Summer Time last Sunday. Everyone changing their clocks forward an hour so that between 1 and 2am didn’t exist. This fucking around with time can only end badly. We’re not Timelords! We can’t just go altering time because we don’t want to go to work in the dark. I’ve seen Back To The Future what if people start fading away? Think of all the babies that should have been born during that hour who now wont be born! Think what if, during that hour, someone had come up with the solution to world peace, but we just deleted that whole hour. Think, most importantly, of the poor bastard who had a meeting at work at 9am and hadn’t got much sleep! Well, I couldn’t go to bed before 1am because – despite it happening once every six months – no one is ever quite sure if theirphone changes automatically and by the time I’d confirmed that it did, it was all ready 2am.

So it’s summer now and the park behind my house is full of people chilling and playing games, while I sit in my room writing blogs and cursing the eejit builder who put the bathroom window that overlooks the park in the actual bloody shower. There’s always the downstairs shower, but it’s impossible to stand up straight in that tiny room, last time I used it (because some work men were retiling and playing bloody Radio 2 in the good one) I wacked my head repeatedly on the ceiling and had to bend over meaning my arse was poking out of the shower curtain – in prisons I believe that’s known as a target.

Cheltenham: Twinned with Ibiza, Miami beach and Put-a-fucking-shirt-on-on-sea.

I do try and get out and about when I can though if it’s sunny. I go to the park and play football, well stand around by the side of the pitch while the bigger boys play football. I’m not a fan of exercise, I always like there to be odd numbers at a football game because it means I get to sit down. I just like sitting around in the sun to be honest. Most of the time I read a book or wait for any girls who came out (who all got picked for the football teams before me) to start playing Frisbee – I am so Will from the Inbetweeners it’s horrible.

It’s not all good though. The thing is the Sun is a bit like a guy who does really terrible farts all day even when it goes away its effects still linger. It’s night, there’s not even any sun, but yet I’m still getting an interrupted night of sleep and waking up all sticky – and not in the good way. It’s easy to warm yourself up in the winter, but it’s so hard to cool yourself down in the summer. There are rules about the minimum temperature at which you can work, but no maximum, that’s sick!

The people I feel most sorry for are the weather forecasters. These days what with climate change, the weather seems to go between the extremes of really cold winters and really hot summers with not much inbetween weather. As a result the weatherman kinda has his thunder stolen (pun intended, though I am still a bit ashamed) by the newsreader. A lot of the time the news these days is reporting that it is the hottest/coldest day since records began. Every damn year! Are you sure they’re not just mislaying all these records? Or using a magnifying glass as a paper weight? “The records are on fire!! Well at least we know it’s hot, someone tell the news.”

When Huw Edwards hands over to the weatherman, the weatherman must so badly want to say, “You bastard! You utter wanker! I wanted to report on the snow! Weather is my job! You don’t hear me banging on about Syria do you!?! Yeah, it’s snowing. What’s the point of me saying that now, after you’ve interviewed all the dickwads stuck at the airport! ‘Oh it’s terrible...one little bit of snow and the country grinds to a...it’s not like this at the north pole, they’re prepared for snow.’ You imbecile!! Of course they are, they’re bloody made of it!! ‘Oh no, it’s terrible, we’re stranded abroad!’ Yeah ON HOLIDAY, being stranded at the top of Everest or the north pole is fair enough...I’m just saying it doesn’t count as ‘stranded’ if there’s a pool, you know what I mean Huw? Anyway since Huw has already told you what the weather is like, here’s some pictures you sent in. That’s right we’re actually showing pictures you sent in! We’re calling this part of the news but it’s clearly little more than Springwatch and The One Show combined and condensed down to a minute and a half. Look here’s a car with some snow on it sent in by Ben in Harrogate, and here’s a field covered in snow, sent in by the same person who will send a picture of the same field with a vaguely seasonal bird in it come the spring. This photo of a lady lying in the snow was sent in by Lucy in South Hampton making a snow angel, and this photo of a lady lying in the snow was sent in by Detective constable Thomas Bramble who says if anybody saw anything it would be most helpful, she’s been dead for quite some time now. SEE! Don’t like it when I do the news do you Huw! So before you go showing any of those video reports in the summer where the camera man focuses on a lady in a bikini for as long as he can get away with it. I want to show those pictures! Anyway, in Scotland there will be terrible storms and so...Huw? Did you steal my thunder symbol? I’ll be back at around midnight with that special weather report where I tell you what the weather is like in Switzerland for a reason no one at the BBC is sure of. I think they just put it on to keep me at work longer than I need to be on pointless tasks.”

I imagine that’s the kind of thing they want to say, it’s all in the subtext of that awful forced laugh they do in response to the newsreaders banter. It’s thanks to an outburst like this that Carol from BBC breakfast was banned from the studio and now has to stand in the coldest or hottest place they can find.

By the way, here's a blog from about a year ago about British Summer Time: http://danvine.tumblr.com/post/3593755865/only-a-matter-of-time

Wind Up Toy

Ok, here’s the thing Blogger. I’m reasonably happy with my choices in life. On the whole. I make decisions, pick favourites and stick by them. Most of my decisions in this area have made me happier and certainly I now surround myself with more cheery things. But recently, I’ve started to doubt it, just recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my former love Alice. It’s Madness, of course it is, Madness, total divine Madness all the way, but still….Alice.

I should make clear at this point, rather than later on, that I am talking about music here and not revealing some sordid secrets of my love life - I just wanted an opening that misled you into wanting to read what I have to say. The Alice in question is not beautiful, smiley, funny with lovely smelling hair and boobs. In fact he’s ragged and old and wrinkly with messy hair and a giant albino boa constrictor called Katrina, he is Alice Cooper. Yes, you do know him, he did “Schools Out for summer!!”

Anyway, my point is this. Just recently, I have been listening to a lot of Alice Cooper, as you probably all ready know because Spotify now tells Facebook everything - I can never listen to a cheeky bit of S Club again without it grassing me up to all my friends, wanker.

(Er…I don’t do that)

This is all kinda interesting to me and literally no one else, because the other day, I was wondering into town listening to my iPod and in between all the ska, Weird Al, clips from Radio 4 comedy and classic rock that make me feel varied, random and interesting when I shuffle all my tastes, this insignificant Alice Cooper album track tucked away at the end of his 1991, Top 47 bothering album Hey Stoopid came on.

For no adequately answerable reason, I hadn’t heard that song in fucking years. It’s one of my few very favourite songs, I don’t listen to on a weekly or, at least, monthly basis. So I’m having a little walk, thinking about this song, what it means and all the clever little tricks and bits of post-production he uses to make it creepy. All stuff that I think makes me appear deep, analytical and clever. It actually makes me look like a fool who isn’t paying attention to where he’s going and keeps tripping over loose paving slabs or walking into lamp-posts and shoppers. But as I tripped and stumbled into town, it occurred to me that this was the first rock song I can ever remember hearing.

It certainly wasn’t the first rock song I heard. At the moment of my birth, I’m informed that Bohemian Rhapsody was playing - I have a lot of love and respect for my mother for bringing me into this world and more for my dad for not saying “keep it down, I like this one” and letting go of her hand to air guitar to the loud bit. Also, it’s the last track on the album, so there isn’t a chance in hell that it’s the first rock song I heard! But what can I say? Memory can be a fucker.

Bear in mind, I was aged somewhere between 8 and 10 I’d guess, and my music taste up until this point had been largely the fare of school discos and the nightclubs at Haven Holiday Camps(or “singing and dancing” as my young very literal child’s brain called them. I probably called pubs “drinking and puking” too). Now it goes without say that after some Blue slushpuppy (coz it’s obviously the best) and an overdose of Panda Pops, I’ll jump around to any old shite. I think BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! I WANT YOU IN MY ROOM. LETS SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER FROM NOW UNTIL FOREVER was my favourite song for a while. Back in the days when you were too young to know if a song was about sex - I guess it’s the “until forever” bit that’s confusing but then “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom, I want you in my room for about 5 minutes then I just want to not fall asleep in the damp patch” was never gonna chart.

Any rock I had listened to from my parents collection was more of the “safe” (that’s a terrible word to describe it, I apologise for my lackadaisical attitude to finding pertinent synonyms) more pop-py stuff. So when I got bored of my pop mix CD and went looking in my dad’s CD collection I found Hey Stoopid and listened to Wind Up Toy for the first time. It elicited a reaction I didn’t know music could. It scared me. At that stage I was pretty much scared of everything by the way: the noise the pipes made in our house at night, the big cupboard in the corner of my room I rarely looked in but once saw a spider when I did, being told off by Mrs. Witchell, the millennium bug. But this song kinda got to me, it was weird and creepy. But it was also kinda exciting and loud and had lots of good words (this is me trying to express the thoughts I had when I was 9, not just being a shite writer). Instead of ignoring it, I decided to listen to it over and over again a hundred times, which was how I responded to anything exciting as a child. I watched new Postman Pat videos until I could quote it. I would slide the CD off the shelf and try not to look at the cover, I couldn’t articulate really how it made me feel, partly coz fear is a really primal, deep and affecting emotion, but also coz at that age nobody had yet taught me the phrase “That is some fucked up shit.”

Then I grabbed some big 90s headphones, plugged them into the big 90s stereo, slid the CD into the drawer between the tape-deck and turntable…look what I’m trying to say is this happened in the past! Before I could do this kinda thing on my computer in the comfort of my own bedroom. Back in primary school I thought I was pretty clever coz Mr Hutton the computer teacher let me help him fix machines coz I knew them, it now occurs to me that computers were just stupid. So in those days where Windows 98 ruled, I would sit in the corner of the living room listening to this album. Sometimes skipping straight to track 12 or stopping at track 8 which is also fantastic.

As the 00s raged and computers grew up - remember the days when the internet was so small Askjeeves was an effective search engine? - I started looking up this Alice Cooper bloke. I’d probably listened to a few of his albums that my dad had by then. His 2003 albumThe Eyes Of Alice Cooper is the first album I ever bought…I say bought, but I pestered my dad for the money. I ended up reading about this stone-cold-sober reformed alcoholic Christian golf-playing old man. Ok, a golf-player who goes on stage every night with a sword and a snake and has his head cut off, but a golf-player nonetheless. Not very rock and roll is it? I think I prefer him for that though, the fact it’s all an act it’s so much more impressive. In terms of his big over-the-top live shows I guess Lady Gaga is the current equivalent (she’s even cited Alice as an influence), and I think I would have a lot more time for her if she could confine her weirdness to a stage between the hours of 7 and 10, and didn’t turn up on Jonathan Ross with a phone on her head. To be fair, back in his youth Alice basically lived the life of his on-stage persona (with less murder and more drinking) until it all but killed him (his From The Inside album partly written while he was in an asylum recovering is phenomenal and blows away every image you might have of his music from his reputation).

This wasn’t my thinking at the time, but what with now wanting to be a writer it seems that I probably like it more that it’s all a story. I don’t particularly like horror in rock, I also love Pink Floyd and went through a Lordi phase after the 2006 Eurovision song contest, but mostly I don’t listen to horror rock. I like lots of it, but nowhere near as much as I like Alice. As I said at the start, I’m more a lighthearted happy ska man. But with Alice, every album tells a story, but better than that, every song tells a story in it’s own right as well. That’s incredibly clever. If you asked me to compile a list of the most underrated writers of all time (and even if you don’t I’ll definitely write a blog about it soon) he’d be up there. His narratives and ideas are so good that in 2011 he released an amazing sequel to his 1975 masterpiece Welcome To My Nightmare. All through his discography are subtle ballads and slow songs and works of beauty too.

These days he’s not seen as the hardest, edgiest rocker, just in the same way The Beatles don’t seem quite so ground breaking because rock has evolved and moved on since, but they started it. I guess these days screemo is the new hardest rock, most of those bands were influenced by Alice, but it’s not the same for me. Screemo is like car horns, the Daily Mail letters page, and the comments on tripadvisor.com: an angry, inarticulate noise. It’s like “Ok, I get that you’re angry. Just calm down. Chill out. Stop shouting and write me a song that tells me why.” Alice’s songs also have a fantastic sense of humour to them, and a lot of it is tongue-in-cheek which I massively love. There is nothing worse than music that takes itself too seriously.

So there you go, I recommend you check out some Alice Cooper for sophisticated, good rock and story telling. I also recommend you check out my friend Lee’s blog for more proper music reviews that aren’t secretly all about me and my adolescence: http://unacclaimedmusicfan.blogspot.com/2012/02/44-and-angels-airwaves.html

And finally to reward you for sticking through my chat about me and Alice Cooper, here is a more mainstream Alice hit and a video with boobies in it. Enjoy

“The world needed bad guys and music. We needed the ultimate rock’n’roll villain…Enter the Coop…the original punk…and the original goth, glam, shock rocker”-Rob Zombie

“When Alice comes on the stage, it’s like a mythical character. He’s still my favourite rock star.”-Vincent Furnier