SZR Feelings.

Dorothy and James now happily possess an MOT for another year. They and I become understandable nervous about their yearly check up. James’s psychosomatic stress for example brought on speedo failure a week before it and Dorothy though outwardly fit and healthy shed a CV joint boot clip. It’s all yet another subtle example of the arrogance of the human race in believing only we have feelings. Not so. Everything responds to fatigue and age in a similar way and to loving care and attention. My Yamaha SZR though never christened with a name goes merrily to hers and passes every time, a product no doubt of our love for each other. Being born in 1997 she’s now fifteen, which means next year after rowing with Mothermouse I’ll be able to flounce out with, “Screw you I’m spending the weekend with a sixteen year old!” Well I’ll enjoy it, until that is, she goes off and has under age sex with a sun bed. And ‘Sun-Dried-Tomato’, Woodseats premier tanning salon, will find three bulbs have blown for no apparent reason. No, everything has feelings. My ancient 28” Sony Trinitron for example, the size of a table and four chairs, is struggling on like a cantankerous ninety year old in a care home knowing that to show any slight infirmity will end in the crematorium. And if these inanimate mechanicals emote in these ways think of plants and animals. They’re brimming with emotions once we notice them. Our cat Domino for example is Dimitar Berbatov, slow, deliberate yet with a deep yearning for love that makes him mark his territory with smelly pee. Domino that is not Dimitar. So it’s true, we’re all in the tender arms of our loving recycler, destined to strut and shuffle this mortal coil till our on/off switch goes faulty. 

Maastricht Degrees.

Yeseee! You can now do a degree at Masstricht Universuty for £1,500 a year fees, a discount of 83% on UK FE. That’s £4,500 instead of £27,000 or a new Jaguar for the price of a second hand Citroen Picasso. Or putting it another way why pay the government’s youth extortion system the price of a new Jaguar for a second hand Citroen? Hopefully this is the tip of the iceberg and our youth will soon be travelling all over the world for their degrees thus depriving our government’s capacity to loan them enough money to sustain our economy. Empty halls of residence will make perfect homes for the hapless homeless, bankrupt landlords will release numerous houses to first time buyers and the middle class experts in their field will find that what they’ve been teaching for the past twenty years is grossly out of date. I dipped into the Edexcel website yesterday to find the criteria for the GCSE Maths and English syllabuses. They both contain literally hundreds of criteria items that a teacher must mark and keep track of to arrive at a student’s grade. A maths GCSE course requires, for a class of 30, nearly 8,000 marks to be taken down and manipulated. The bureaucracy is so appalling it must take at least a day a week to account for what you did in the other four. Its focus on minutia is like my friend giving me directions to Leicester: it took him 20 minutes of talking to get to the end of the street by which time I’d decided just drive around looking for road signs would be quicker. It’s QC gone mad, it’s crazy. Just do stuff and you’ll learn stuff, it’s not rocket science.

Taking the Piss

What indicators might one draw on a graph to help justify the rises in boardroom pay? I mean they live in the same world as everyone else and subject to the same constraints, so lets have a go over a ten year period..

Time: They may work longer so lets say 20%.

Capability: I doubt capability grows much but lets be generous, say 10%

Inflation: At 2% pa that 19%.

Footsy index: Well it’s gone up and down but it’s near where it was, 0%

Profitability: Very individual but overall it’s fairly stagnant, 0%.

Share holder income: Say 2% pa, again around 20%.

Workers pay: Again around 20%

So over ten years these average out at around 16%

OK in this time boardroom pay has increased by around 13% pa, so through the miracle of compound interest it has grown to 300% of its start point.

So irrespective of amounts this growth cannot be justified by any relevant criteria. It’s simply a case of if you can choose your own pay rise you’ll make it a big one.
Oops drawn it wrong. Lines should go through 100% not zero. Still due to the absurdity of the situation it makes f all difference.

Islamic Democracy.

So Tunisia is heading towards an Islamic democracy. It’s funny how we can accept the welding together of two conflicting concepts by just writing them next to each other in a sentence. Lets create a totalitarian meat pie for instance. Islam or any religion for that matter is in essence a dictatorship, what God says goes. God says wear a kebab and it’s ‘end of, speak to the paw sister.’ That’s why I’ve always fancied being God. Democracy on the other hand includes endless debates about where we should build a bypass round the third London airport. Yes it’s longwinded but it’s answerable to the people, and should your vengeful ex wife renege on your agreement vis the driver of a ten year old speeding fine you’ll be out of office by the end of the week. Conversely a religion is answerable to a deity who might for instance demand you wear a meat sandwich. So who is an Islamic democracy answerable to? Obviously those with the best wifi connection to religious conviction. So an Islamic democracy will have Islamic parties and possibly secular ones. Now once an Islamic party comes to power and, due to the vagaries of the democratic process, gets voted out in favour of a secular one what should they do? I mean with God on their side they’re hardly likely to devolve his almighty power to a bunch of agno upstarts who will just make things up as they go along. No God will dictate, or at least heavily suggest, that for the good of the country, the human race, the world and his kingdom they must resist this evil change, and, as the government has one army more than the people, they’ll win, if not in the game, on penalties because a modern well equipped fighting force is equal to Schmeichel in goal compared with an empty net at the other end. No, once they’re in they’ll stay in like Gaddafi. The only choice will be Islam or hyper Islam and it’s a good bet the latter will win. So here’s a message from God. ‘Observe the lilies of the field, they neither reap nor form Islamic democracies.

Acting Reality.

I’m currently doing acting workshops on Saturday afternoons 2 till 5 by Brilliantsteve. Brilliantsteve is a young whipper-snapper who doesn’t get any wider from his feet up, apart from his eyes, which seem like searchlights looking for planes. He is a beaver herding carthorses. His blissful unawareness that fetlocks get creaky and brains get slow from years in yokes makes us all regress to foals. The wonderful thing about thespians, which has to be an opening line from a Poo poem, is that they take care of each other, because basically acting is a marshal art for egos. By the strangest of paradoxes playing ourselves can become so hackneyed we sleepwalk through the role but playing another character requires such attention that acting becomes the greater reality. This week we are doing balance and imbalance. These are jolts in expectation; those moment when the dream of a fried egg sandwich is broken, like the egg, by the smell of Hydrogen sulphide. Our balanced trance is upended by recalcitrant reality and by fair means or foul we must make the best of it. When, for example we played a person welcoming but being ignored by a passing person Jo showed an understandable humiliation where as Maggie showed all the signs of an unspoken, “that bitch just blanked me!” We began simply by playing ‘when it’s your turn to say your name you forget where or who you are’, which I have to say I found surprisingly easy. After a good friend advised me on entering therapy training to, “forget expectations, just take yourself”, forgetting who and where I am have become all together too enjoyable, sometimes worryingly so. The upshot of all this ‘acting’ is proving our bodies speak louder than words, that the merest muscular inflection purveys some truth louder than our mealy mouths could ever hope to. Jo for example proved to be an amazing neck actress, an anatomical subsection I’d previously overlooked, but in the hands of a master, a remarkable expresser of numerous fleeting emotions. So do come along next week, Brilliantsteve is doing improvisation. Now what’s my…. Oh yes Stiffmouse.

Married 2 God.

In case you missed it last night, the Devadasi are Hindu girls married to God at puberty. Now on the face of it that sounds like nuns but you couldn’t be more wrong. These Devadasi girls being husbanded by a deity become the head of their own household and are afforded the rights of men in Hindu society. In a sense they are super feminists but that doesn’t get to the heart of it either. They’re prostitutes. They’re the coming together of and ancient religion with the oldest profession. Families, particularly mothers dedicate their daughters to God so they can live off their earnings. Now if I was God I’d be well peeved, but what a wonderful example of the distance between deity and humanity, of how our natural inclination is to contort religion to our own ends. God being as nebulous and speechless as an addled mute is perfectly placed for us to finish off his sentences and know what he would say if he could. This obviously leads to God saying lots of different things to different people so that in the name of peace and love we can “nuke the bastards” ‘cos God says so. There’s an unforeseen consequence if ever there was one. But then aren’t all unforeseen consequences the product of unrecognised intentions. So come on guys’ lets all pimp for our daughters. It’s not about the money, it’s because God says so.  

Ich Glaube Nicht, es.

Okie dokie boys and girls, more euro comedy gold. After the period where the Germans carried money around in water butts and hollowed out hippo carcasses they loved the stable Deutsche Mark. In the seventies even our gov was highly envious compared with our own British Blot. Inflation had been ground into the ground under the DM heel. They didn’t want to give it up for the euro so they insisted the euro have the same fiscal basis as the DM, i.e. DM mark 2. What followed was pure Coronation Street. The Gearmans’ lived in the large end of terrace with garage and central heating, a few had aspirational loft conversions and the rest still had outside loos and Ascot heaters. The Gearmans’ suggested they all go out for a meal together but insisted everyone must have enough money to pay their share. Mrs LoftConversions said, “I’m not getting pushed around by that swanky bitch”, but the Ascot heaters saw it as a possible leg-up in the world. Those who could afford it, France, Austria, Benelux etc were reticent about joining the euro but Spain, Portugal, Greece etc who couldn’t afford it because their tyrannical father had recently died, were hot to trot. Everyone discussed it behind closed doors. The Gearmans’ daren’t voice their opinion that their poorer neighbours couldn’t afford it, the LoftConversions daren’t comment on the Ascots’ propensity to squander money on booze and fags so they all set out for La Splendifico Italianos restaurant of dreams where the Gearmans’ ate seriously, the LoftConversions minded their P’s and Q’s and the Ascots got pissed and insisted on taking seventeen over-ordered meals home in doggy bags. At the end of the evening the bill arrived. And they all said, "I don't believe it!" (Ich Glaube Nicht, es.)