Franklin’s Virtues Week 3- Justice
WEEK 3: Justice- Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Challenge: Fight crime
What do you reckon the first crime ever committed was? Fire theft? Mammoth rustling? Illegal file sharing of cave paintings? Murder? It was probably murder. It certainly is in the bible when Cain does it to Abel. Mind you, there's the whole thing in the Garden of Eden with the forbidden fruit so, now that I think about it, there's our actual answer to what the first crime was:
It was scrumping.
Since then, of course, humanity has left the Garden and moved on but crime still exists pretty much everywhere. On a positive note, after their inauscpicious start with the fruit, womankind has taken a bit of a back seat as the majority of crimes are now committed by men. Well done women. Nice to see you trying to put your house in order on that one.
The presence of crime necessitates those who fight it and protect the rest of us from it. These tend to take two forms:
a) The official authorities- whether they be police, military or some other organisation these can be recognised usually by the fact that they have matching uniforms or, if they're of the plain clothes variety, leather bound badges which they can flash at people when they meet them in order to establish who the cool one is in the upcoming exchange.
b) Unofficial crime fighters- these can be private investigators, who mostly seem to have once been grizzled men in big coats and who have apparently died out since the world stopped being in black and white; neighbourhood watch schemes, which are essentially a three way tie between Come Dine With Me, Crimewatch UK and the Halloween movies; and vigilantes who tend to come as either hairy Dog the Bounty Hunter style cliches, morally outraged groups of citizens who are usually mistakenly torching the car of a pediatrician or entirely fictional superheroes. These last ones, the superheroes, are the best types of crime fighters. That's why they're fictional. Cause the real world is a massive, crushing disappointment.
To be honest, as much as I enjoy reading about or watching their exploits, I've never really wanted to be a superhero. It seems like an awful lot of responsibility. Lots of people watch Smallville and think "I'd love to have superpowers". I watch it and think "I'd love to have a barn". But, my dedication to achieving the virtues of Benjamin Franklin meant that this week I've had to join them in the fight against crime.
Now, not being either an alien, a mutant or a billionaire with parent issues, I had little desire to stalk the streets at night battering the hell out of criminal masterminds. Therefore, I'd have to find another way to do battle with the forces of evil that threaten the very lives of decent, ordinary people like you (if you are decent and ordinary that is. Apparently I have a strong readership among the indecent, mentalist fraternity. God knows why.)
Training to join the Police force takes, it turns out, at least a fortnight so doing that in a week was out of the question. This left me with either vigilantism or private investigation as options. Both of these seemed dangerous as they involve dealing with criminals who, by dint of their chosen occupation and moral outlook, probably wouldn't think twice about attacking me very, very hard with their fists, a knife or a bazooka or something if I kindly asked them if they wouldn't mind awfully stopping being naughty. I'd be no good in a ruck to bring down some n'er do wells. To quote Dylan Moran; I'm not a fighter, I'm a bleeder.
The options seemed limited and to be honest, dear reader, I felt helpless. How is an ordinary citizen like me to do battle with the criminal fraternity when I'm not a member of the Police force, I don't have superpowers and my best chance in a fight would be to sit on someone? It felt like the criminals had won, like there was nothing I could do to grind their evil, diabolical schemes to a saintly halt.
It turned out that I was pondering how I could do my bit to prevent crime while I was driving down the M56 at 85mph, listening to the new Arcade Fire album downloaded from a Bittorrent on my way to a friends' house where we would watch TV shows not yet broadcast in this country.
And then it occurred to me who my criminal nemesis was- the Joker to my Batman, the Moriarty to my Holmes, the Boss Hog to my Duke Brothers.
It was me.
I swung into action and took the good fight to the world of crime. I slowed down, turned off the CD and went home.
Turns out fighting crime's a piece of piss. Not committing it, that's the hard part.
WEEK THREE RESULTS: JUSTICE- ACHIEVED.
COST: TURNS OUT I'M A CRIMINAL MASTERMIND
BENEFITS: TURNS OUT I'M A CRIMINAL MASTERMIND
Next week:
WEEK 4: Frugality- Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
Challenge: Don't waste anything
Franklin’s Virtues Week 1- Tranquility
Virtue No. 1: Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable
Challenge: Watch the news twice a day, as well as any other current affairs shows possible, and don't ever shout at the telly.
One day into following Franklin's virtues and something had become immediately apparent. Benjamin Franklin never sat down and watched the telly. If he had, he's surely have appreciated the difficulty of suggesting tranquility as an ideal state of mind in a world where that medium exists. TV is famously described as 'the opiate of the masses' which is almost exactly wrong. It's actually much more like whiskey that everyone likes the taste of.
Like the Scottish dram, television can, if administered in appropriate doses, turn anyone into a rambling, incoherent ball of ill-aimed rage. News in particular is great for this as it specialises in broadcasting the worse things in the world into our living rooms. That would be bad enough, but then it gets people, often politicans or leaden-brained proles, to pontificate about them at either interminable length or in short bursts which are barely enough time to form a coherent breath never mind a reasoned thought.
To go a week without yelling at the lighty-box in the corner of the room was clearly going to be a challenge (which is probably why I picked it). My timing, it turned out, couldn't have been worse- for on the first day of this task the dim-witted proclamations of idiots were not just bolted onto the news but were the central pillar of the headline story. As you're almost certainly aware, Facebook hosted, for a couple of days, a group called something like 'RIP Raoul Moat UR a Legend' in which the word 'legend' was apparently redefined further from it's previous mythical, heroic meaning and a little closer to the term 'gun wielding mentalist'.
Soon this group had 30,000 members- though a fair few of those were people who had joined especially to write on the wall that everyone who'd genuinely signed up was a twat. Naturally, the news went bananas about this and set about hounding the woman who'd set it up down and interrogating her to death. And, equally naturally, the anger began to rise and as the world turned red I prepared to unleash another volley of screaming hell at the telly.
The important thing here is the fact that as usual, it's not the actual story that was getting me upset but the coverage. If a prat wants to put a thing on a website proclaiming a murderer as a legend that's fine to be honest. We live in a country where opinions are allowed, even the really dumb ones. But do we really then have to tell everyone else about it? Like almost everyone else, I don't have to be told about the existence of this page to know it's little more than a tosser's playground but this page had already got thousands of followers thinking it was a good idea before it got flung all over every single bulletin. After that happened, the number of people who will have decided that it all sounded like a great laugh and who will have happily joined in with the lauding of Moat and sat in pubs or living rooms sounding off about him as a working class hero and a modern day Robin Hood ("He steals from the... no-one actually, just shoot ex-lovers and the police...') will have jumped towards the millions.
The news, by telling the story, will have done what it always does when it runs minor issues and makes them national crazes. It will have become a stupidity amplifier.
And that's pretty much what I wanted to holler at BBC 1 just after 6 last Wednesday. But I didn't. I twisted, I squirmed, I bit my lips clean off but I stayed silent. Technically, I was achieving tranquility. More accurately I was broadcasting tranquility into the world, which was just a little quieter as a whole than it would have been if I'd have been bellowing blue murder at Huw Edwards. I wasn't tranquil on the inside though. Inside my head sounded like an argument in a barrel falling down stairs made of drumskins. On fire.
It got easier though. After straining not to shout at the news for a couple of bulletins a wave of weary resignation replaced the now thwarted rage. As anyone who emerges shattered from their 20s to discover that they aren't even 1% of the way to achieving their lofty childhood ambitions will tell you, weary resignation is merely a step on the road to acceptance and, via more news bulletins, an eerily silent viewing of Question Time (on my part) and staggering self-discipline I soon arrived at a state of mind whereby I accepted that what was happening was happening and no amount of shouting on my part would help.
I've even managed to reach such a zen like peak of tranquility in front of the news that I've been able to sit through David Cameron's announcement of his 'Big Society' idea without merely slumping to the floor and weakly beating the floor like a wounded bear in a Russian zoo. The very thought that a moon-faced posho can tell the rest of us to improve the world by going and volunteering in museums or cleaning ponds should be as angering to me as it is bewildering and scary. It is, after all, yet another sign of the impending moment when society finally gives up and flings itself into oblivion. But I've learnt to accept that I can't change this and to take a more reflective view.
I've learned to be tranquil.
Then I got cocky. If I could learn to accept the gnawing dumbness of people on the news, surely I could go a full day without raising my voice even once. Easy, surely.
Then my new phone turned up. It's a new, sparkly, smartphone that's loaded with gadgetry and a big poncy touchscreen with a camera that could photograph a cockroach farting on Mars. And it shared the same basic feature that all smartphones seem to.
It doesn't work properly.
Oh sure it can store thousands of songs and I can download apps for it that make it sound like a vuvuzela or tell me where the nearest scuba diving centre is but can it go 10 minutes connected to a computer without deciding that the USB port has vanished into this air or that the computer is actually incompatible with it's drivers cause it's now a fruitcake? Course it bloody well can't. Does it consider me breathing on it to be actually a complex series of key touches commanding the phone to text my mum a series of consonants? Sure. Is it essentially a steaming pile of electronic twat? Yup.
Or at least it was. Until I threw it against the wall and it smashed into a million tiny little pieces, leaving me back with a phone that merely makes and recieves calls or can be used to text. A phone that wants to be nothing other than a phone.
And you know what? Now I feel tranquil. Well done Matt. You killed the phone. UR A LEGEND.
WEEK ONE RESULTS: TRANQUILITY- ACHIEVED.
COST: ONE PHONE, ABILITY TO KEEP ONCOMING APOCALYPSE IN PERSPECTIVE, EMOTIONAL RELEASE DURING NEWS BULLETINS.
BENEFITS: CAN NOW WATCH NEWS WITHOUT DEVELOPING HERNIA
WEEK 2: Sincerity- Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
Challenge: Don't tell a lie all week.
Results next week. Honest.
Franklin’s Virtues- The Challenge
What is it to be good? How do you lead a good life? What's right?
Most of the examples of being good that I look up to come from comics which makes achieving something similar difficult as I'm neither an orphaned alien with superpowers or a billionaire with parent issues and a burning sense of justice. Jesus was, by all accounts, a good man who lived a good life but he was the son of an all powerful deity which, to be frank, gave him something of a head-start. Martin Luther King and Ghandi are more recent examples of good men but they had a cause to fight for and were at the head of disenfranchised populations striving for their rights and beliefs. I'm a white bloke who lives in Cheshire who generally strives for nothing more than finding all 240 of the Riddler's secrets on Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Well, as of 2 days ago, I've found them all. Now what?
I want to be a good person. I want to live a good life. I'm also terminally confused by everything around me and hopelessly lost when it comes to having any sort of direction. I need help, a guru, someone or something to live up to.
Enter Benjamin Franklin. Put bluntly, Franklin got an awful lot done. For a start, he was an eminent sceintist who pioneered work on electricity, mostly famously due to his cavalier attitude to flying kites in thunderstorms, and also invented, amongst other things, bifocal lenses and the modern urinary catheter. He also figured out the existence of the Gulf Stream, came up with an enitrely new form of anti-counterfeiting measures for paper money, formed America's first firefighters and also one of it's first libraries.
Oh, and America itself. He helped invent that. Of the three main pieces of paper that helped form the United States (The Declaration of Independence, The US Constitution and The Treaty of Paris), there is only one signature that can be found on all three.
You can probably guess whose.
He was never actually President of the United States but his face is still on the $100 bill, meaning that even to this day his spirit is celebrated in Puff Daddy's 1998 hit 'All About The Benjamins'.
Everything that's about to happen is this bloke's fault
Luckily for the likes of me, Franklin also had the foresight to write down the virtues he felt were important for someone to possess to live a good and fruitful life. They were 13 in total and, touchingly, he was honest enough to admit that to live by all of them at once was both difficult and dull and therefore suggested trying to achieve one per week. Here they are as he put them:
Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
Therefore, inspired by other friends of mine attempting to better themselves, in order to become a better person and to live a good life- and because I've got nothing better to do and because neither Dave Gorman nor Danny Wallace have had a pop at this yet- I'm going to attempt to live by one of these virtues every week for the next 13 weeks. There's only two criteria here:
- For each virtue, I have to think of a suitable challenge or target to achieve in the week
- I can attempt them in any order I wish
So, to get us cracking- here's this week's Virtuous Challenge
Virtue No. 1: Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable
Challenge: Watch the news twice a day, as well as any other current affairs shows possible, and don't ever shout at the telly.
We're straight in with a biggie here. I love shouting at the news and it's one of the pursuits that me and the missus enjoy together. She's one of the most rabid anti-Tories on the planet and has spent pretty much every bulletin since Cameron got into No. 10 foaming at the mouth and bellowing at the TV at anything and everything they've done. I like to join in with this myself which basically means that any news programmes round at our place ends up like an extended version of the 2 Minute Hate from Orwell's 1984.
Well not this week. As she happily rages against the dying of the light I will sit in reflective silence and attempt to understand why the people on the box are saying what they are saying and doing what they are doing. I will be nice. I will be quiet. I will be tranquil.
Much like Franklin would have done if he'd invented the television which is actually one of the few things missing off his CV.
Next week- Tranquility: The Results and Virtue No. 2.
Beatherder
I went to a festival recently for the first time in a few years. Clearly it's taken that length of time for me to forget a very important point- I would happily kill 95% of people at any given festival. I'm sure they're all nice and lovely the rest of the time when their enagaged with normal grinding reality like the rest of us- but stick them in a field with a soundsystem, 48 cans of Stella and access to some industral strength ketamine and everything goes horribly, horribly wrong. They begin communicating at the sort of volume usually associated with a jumbo jet crashing on take-off and decide that 5am is the appropriate time to begin an interpetation of Massive Attack tunes on the bongos to impress a posh girl called something like Iffy.
And these are people I just paid £70 to spend a weekend camping with.
Incredibly, I still had a brilliant time. This is mainly due to the company of friends I don't see often enough who through a combination of humour, love and understanding managed to smooth the edges off the seething rage that festival people pump into the dense black gloop that's where my soul should be. Thanks for that guys. Appreciate it.
I was also helped by the fact that festival was everything that Glastonbury always promised to be. Impressive, really, considering that it was a festival called Beatherder I was at and not Glastonbury.
I've been down to the big one at Pilton a couple of times and it was great- although as an event it's so smug and in love with itself that, for one weekend per year, it briefly overtakes Manchester as the cockiest, most-likely-to-harp-on-about-it's-inherent-greatness place in the UK. If it could fellate itself, it would snap it's wonderful, oh-so-cool neck doing it.
Glastonbury is brilliant, no doubt, but it likes to present this image as an insane bacchanale of decadence and music where anything can happen. Rumours always ping around the festival like Twitter after it's received a blow to the head: "Paul McCartney and Neil Young are in the acoustic tent at 4pm!", "I've just seen Kurt Cobain eat a falafel during The White Lies set", "Glenn Miller's plane just crashed through a timehole- he's playing on the Pyramid Stage with Slash"- that sort of thing. The chinese whispers about what's going on in the awful, rubbish, not-at-Glastonbury outside world are even more insane. Apparently, when news spread about Michael Jackson's death last year it took about 30 minutes flat for the rumour to mutate into news of every single celebrity called Michael having passed away in the night; Barrymore, Buerk, Jordan, McIntyre, Portillo in a freak yachting tragedy etc, etc. And what really happens that's a surprise? Bugger all.
Oh, and those festival twats I mentioned earlier? There's 175,000 of the fuckers.
The truth about Glastonbury, and what actually makes it great, is that it's lots of bands you've heard of playing tightly scheduled sets to ensure they get some coverage on the BBC. That and the fact that Lauren Laverne's there.
Beatherder, this past weekend, meanwhile turned out to herald all the unexpected insanity that Glasto had to stop having when they let the BBC film it and had to put up a massive fence to stop every baghead in Europe from getting in and ransacking tents. Here's just three things I saw there this year:
- A stall honest enough to advertise that it sells 'Shit Cameras'
- A talent competition won by a human-beatboxer and judged by, among others, a drag queen and the woman who plays Janice Battersby on Coronation Street.
- A main stage guest appearance from GMTV's leotard-toting Mr Motivator which featured backing dancing by a friend of mine dressed as Bertie Bassett
This is what festivals are meant to do; remove us from everyday and let us experience a different reality for the weekend. One where there's lots of drinking, loads of live music and remarkably few consequences. Unfortunately, this also means experiencing the reality of life in a refugee camp for a few days, albeit a refugee camp where half the residents have gorged themselves on cheap speed and spend their time tripping over guy ropes and walking past tents fruitlessly yelling "DAZ!" at the top of their lungs in the hope of finding their friend who went off to have sex with that posh girl called Iffy because, disgracefully, in this alternate festival reality playing Massive Attack on the bongos in a drug induced stupor at 5am actually does get you laid.
And then instead of bongos you're listening to sweaty tent-rutting for 3 hours as Daz bangs away at Iffy with admirable tenacity yet few results as his substance-addled brain has forgotten to tell his testicles what to do and Iffy passed out in the early stages anyway. The fucking degenerate scum. Maybe one day he'll rut right through her pelvis and I'll be woken by the glorious sound of Daz charging round the campsite as his mind finally caves in with all the horror while Iffy flails around in muted agony looking for her severed legs. The shits. The absolute rotting shits.
Er... Anyway, I had a point, can't remember what it was now.
Um... yeah... I went to a festival this weekend. It was great. I'm just not sure why.
A Little Understanding
It recently occurred to me that I really don't understand anything. If I had to round up the amount of stuff in the world as a whole that I understand, to the nearest decimal point, it's probably about 0.001%. And that's being generous.
Take the foilbles of human behaviour for a kick off. For example, why do the sorts of people who get blacked out windows in their cars to protect their identities from prying eyes (footballers, club promoters, gangsters, bell-ends) also get personalised number plates? Do they actually stand in car dealerships having conversations like:
"Can I get the windows blacked out please- don't want everyone to know it's me driving by"
"And the license plate, sir?"
"Can I get R10 FERD please?"
If so, I really don't understand that. And that's just the little stuff. What about gravity? I know what it does; but why it does it or how? Nope, not a clue. Don't understand.
The problem is that when you start thinking like this then, much like spilled shampoo, you can't ever put your thoughts back in the bottle. Your perception is forever changed- much like losing your virginity or the first time you wake up next to a submachine gun with a blank hole in your memory where last night should be.
Start realising you don't understand anything and life is no longer something you can confidently skip through with cocky brio. Rather it suddenly becomes a parade of events, concepts and creatures that you can barely hope to even grasp onto the minutest comprehension of. There are plenty of people in the world who look at the average prole with arch superiority and think this level of flailing ignorance is how they exist on a daily basis. This is true, of course, but it's also true that even the smuggest, most knowing of folk are almost exactly the same in what they really know about anything. The only difference is that a dim person is never likely to realise that they actually know bugger all and will therefore remain in blissful unintellectual simplicity. They don't read stuff like this. You are doing. They win. Damn.
Let's move onto the economy. Now that he's safely installed in 11 Downing Street, alongside the panel saying "In Case of Emergency, Break Vince Cable", George Osbourne- the bloke in the Tory party that even David Cameron refers to as 'the posh one'- has to now stop the Government spending any money on anything. This is because the government has a huge national debt to deal with. As does pretty much every other nation on Earth. Some, like Greece, have had to borrow money off people so they can afford to pay them back some other money. This is generally the sort of behaviour associated with men who spend their entire lives in the bookies smelling of sweat and old string, rather than whole sovereign countries.
The thing I don't understand is this- in any situation where money is owed, there's usually a debtor, who does the owing, and a debtee who does the borrowing. However, it would appear that absolutely everyone on Earth at the moment is the debtee. Everyone owes someone some money. Lots of money. Now, who the hell do they owe it to? Who's waiting impatiently and sending out mardy final warning letters addressed to 'The People and Government of Spain, Spain'?
And if we can find out who this money is owed to, can't we just all ask them to shut up and wait a while longer? Or just ignore them? After all, I'm going to hazard a guess that there's more of us than there is of them. I'm pretty sure if we all actually knew who all this cash was owed to, that's what we'd do. But then again we don't know, do we? We don't understand- none of us.
Either that, or all the people in the world who run everything don't understand how basic economics work. And if that's the case, then never mind vanity plates and gravity, can you even begin to understand how that happened?
No, me neither.
It Takes Two…
So, what's been happening? I've not been on here for a while but, luckily, the world at large has been billowing tonne after tonne of grade-A terror and misery for us all to enjoy as civilisation slides happily into terminal oblivion. First of all, Iceland started spewing most of itself into the air over Europe meaning everyone had to suffer the indignity of an extended Easter holiday abroad. It's worth bearing in mind that Iceland is still trying to recover from almost going bankrupt last year and so has enough problems without slowly turning itself into an ash cloud. I can only speculate that, much as the monarchy is said to fall should the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, these are the sort of disasters legendarily forewarned to hit Iceland should Bjork go 5 years without making a decent album.
At least they can content themselves by now being world trend-setters in terms of catastrophe. Already BP have joined on to the end of the eruption conga and had one of their oil pipelines burst all over the southern United States. The good news here is that the US government for years has been talking about the country needing to find more oil and now everyone can get some of their own just by popping down to the beach with a bucket.
Over in Greece, meanwhile, Iceland's mantle of bankrupt nationhood has been taken up in spectaular fashion. Unlike those polite Icelanders thought, they've been rioting on the streets, setting fire to banks and asking the whole of Europe to look down the back of the sofa for a spare hundred billion Euros in unmarked bills. Now they're threatening to drag the rest of the continent down with them which means it's good for us in Blighty that this country has finally sorted out the tricky conundrum of whose running it.
We've ended up, due to the fact that in 2 millenia no-one even thought about writing our constitution down on so much as a fag packet, with a country being run by a diverse combination of a 43 year old posh bloke and a 43 year old posh bloke. For those of you struggling to tell the difference between them, Nick Clegg is the one who's disarmingly like Richard Madeley. The people of Britain seem to be strangely unsure what to make of this newly founded political double act at the controls of the country which is odd really because we've got a long history of embracing famous duos on this island.
Morecambe and Wise, Mainwaring and Wilson, Burke and Hare, Ant and Dec, Lennon and McCartney, Mick and Keef, Sooty and Sweep- we can't get enough of the unique relationship between two men indulged in a common pursuit- whether it be entertaining (Morecambe and Wise, Ant and Dec), songwriting (Lennon and McCartney, Mick and Keef) or grave robbing (Burke and Hare, Sooty and Sweep). Now we've got Cameron and Clegg to enjoy; though the uncertainty about how they'll pan out in practice may well be due to it not being clear yet which of the men will fill which role in the twosome.
Put simply, the roles in a great British duo are clearly defined and are thus:
- The pretentious, loveable buffoon (Mainwaring, Wise, Jagger, McCartney, Ant or Dec, Sweep)
- The knowing, sarcastic wit (Wilson, Morecambe, Richards, Lennon, Ant or Dec, Sooty)
The obvious answer would appear to be that Cameron is the former and Clegg is the latter though it really isn't that clear. Maybe this is why there is so much disquiet and worry about their prospects in the country at the moment. Well, this and the potentially incendiary consequences for our still unwritten constitution and the fact that we're sailing an untried political vessel into an apocalyptic financial storm, but ill-defined roles within the nation-helming two-hander can't help.
So I'm proposing this- when everything inevitably goes tits up they need to take one of the following leads from a great British double act:
1. Morecambe and Wise- they need to do that old Eric and Ernie skip up to a lectern in Downing Street to the strains of 'Bring Me Sunshine'. Then Cameron needs to say "What do you think of it so far?" before Clegg yells "RUBBISH!". Then they skip off into the distance. Everyone laughs and cheers up.
2. Sooty and Sweep- Clegg devlops a really squeaky voice, Cameron says nothing and they spend their time spraying William Hague in the face with a water pistol. Everyone laughs and cheers up.
3. Burke and Hare- They decide to take up grave robbing. We'll probably be so poor as a country soon we'll need to burn corpses for heat anyway.
or finally;
4. Lennon and McCartney- They are forced to decide between them who has to get shot dead and who has to marry Heather Mills. And we all thought the coalition negotiations were tough...
A Good Sport
2010's got off to a pretty awful start all things considered- Britain's been paralysed by some frozen water, those bankers who sent us to the brink of financial oblivion last year are getting gut-fuckingly huge bonuses for doing it, the Carribean has been ripped in two by an earthquake and Teddy Pendergrass has died.
So, I'm glad to report that I've got something pleasant and uplifting to tell you all. Finally, this year has something good going for it other than the fact than everyone ignoring Celebrity Big Brother.
The Doomsday Clock has gone back by a minute.
A quick sidebar for those who need it: The Doomsday Clock was set up in 1947 by a bunch of atomic scientists to both demonstrate how close they felt humanity was to smearing itself out of existence via auto-inflicted armageddon and to provide a neat narrative framing device for Alan Moore's 'Watchmen'. It was originally set at 7 minutes to midnight and has got as close as two minutes to when Russia and the US were indulging in one of their periodic Cold War atomic dick-swinging contests. By 1991 it had fallen back to 17 minutes to midnight but slowly crept up as close as 5 minutes to in 2007 thanks to the antics of North Korea's enjoyably unhinged Kim Jong Il.
However, owing to "leaders of nuclear weapons states cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material and for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable" it's been decided by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago- the chaps and ladies who run the clock- that we can all sleep a little easier, breathe deeper and get back to the noble pursuit of drinking till the screaming in our head stops- rather than because the planet outside the window is going to hell in a hovercraft. Accordingly the Doomsday Clock now reads 11:54.
With the threat of fiery nuclear destruction on the wane the World has needed something else to get all serious about and it seems that sport has decided to take up the mantle.
When you think about it, sport is very, very silly and we really shouldn't get all that bothered about it. Sport is of no real consequence. Sport should be a distraction. Sport shouldn't matter.
So why did the Togo football team find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun? Why do we care what Tiger Woods and John Terry do with their privates? Why is a 21 year old Georgian dead for misjudging a corner? Why have Canada, previously everyone's 2nd favourite nation, become so vilified for a few organisational issues at the Winter Olympics? Why am I sat up at 1am watching some women fling themselves face-first down an ice chute?
Clearly, sport is of some real consequence. Clearly, sport is more than a distraction. Clearly, sport matters.
Even curling- a activity which lies somewhere between bowls, shuffle-board, ice-skating and spring-cleaning. A game takes anything up to 2 and a half hours and, thanks to the BBC's brilliant compendium of delights on the Red Button, has filled most of my afternoons this week with more drama and tension than 'Diagnosis: Murder' and 'Doctors' could ever dream of. Quite an achievement for a sport which is, uniquely as far as I can figure out, mostly played with brushes.
Maybe, it's the fact that humans like a story and a competition; after all reality television works on the exact same principles and mechanisms as television sport coverage- only without the necessity for people who are actually good at something. In both we get to know competitors, we see them develop, we employ experts to analyse their performances and we dismantle them ourselves with forensic intensity. We shamelessly take sides and hope our favourites achieve the glory of a gold medal or winning the public vote.
And, for those sports or reality TV stars who survive in our conscience, we wait with relish for them to make the cock-up that proves their falability- such as being caught in a tawdry episode of adultery that threatens to detonate their career; or, even worse, recording and releasing '3 Words' featuring Will.I.Am.
Mind you, at least something which is genuinely serious such as causing the Doomsday Clock to move hasn't become the subject of a sport or a reality TV show.
Yet, that is. Yet.
HELP!
I was recently looking for something to read in the bookshop at Manchester University, which was a mistake really as it's a typical uni bookstore; i.e. the graphic novels section contains no Batman and 9 copies of fucking Maus. After fruitlessly trawling for something interesting I happened upon the self-help section and was quickly reminded of an anecdote borrowed from a friend of mine.
Four young men, for reasons known only to themselves, are sat in the front room of their shared house playing that old parlour game where someone has to hold the name of a celebrity up in front of their forehead for everyone else to see, then ask them questions to try to decipher who it is on the card.
On one particular turn, the questioner asks "Do I help people?"
"Yes", is the response.
"Do I have magical powers?"
"Yes" say the questionees.
"Am I often seen in the company of loyal followers?"
"YES!"
There's a contemplative pause
"Am I Jesus?" is the confident enquiry
"No." is the response. "You're Paul McKenna"
You can see the similarities though, can't you? After all, where people once turned to The Bible and Mr Christ's parables to guide them through their lives, now they've got the self-help missives of McKenna and co. In these books everything from losing weight, to quitting smoking, to getting a better job to becoming a more effective canoeist (probably) is explained to you in easy to understand (i.e. patronising), step-by-step (i.e. really patronising) guides by the World's leading experts (i.e. people who got their degrees by mail order from questionable institutions like The Guadalajara Institute of Food Sciences). This is the time of year when people are likely to take stock of their lives and recoil in horror at the sheer naked mess they've made of it and therefore it's boom time for the publishers who can lay off the pointless celebrity autobiographies for a few months (Justin Lee Collins? Really?) and set about helping people to help themselves.
Provided that help comes not from themselves but from the faintly creepy expert pictured on the cover, natch.
Here's a few of this year's biggest titles:
Joseph Stalin's Scorched Earth Diet
A team of military historians and dieticians at the University of Spartak Moscow have combined on this groundbreaking project to use Stalin's highly self-attritional tactics for halting the Nazi war machine to help shed those Christmas pounds and get you into that bikini this summer. By scoring different types of food according to 1940's German military hardware (1 tuna sandwich = 1 Panzer tank; 4 chocolate digestives = 2.3 Stuker dive bombers; 1 Dominos pizza = Colonel Walther von Reichenau) and suggesting different dietary techniques as 'Stalin's Orders' (only drink water today; make yourself sick, mash up all your food with a lethal dose of diuretic) you too can protect the Worker's Republic of You from fascist calories. WARNING: if diet is not strictly adhered to you will have to shoot yourself for the crime of cowardice.
Richard Littlejohn's Bigoted Way to Happiness
Britain's very own cross between Ann Coulter and Jabba the Hut shows you how to be happy simply by blaming everyone else for anything that makes you miserable. Why mope around doing a job you don't like when you can cheerily convince yourself that a cabal of Muslim lesbian extremists are at fault for forcing you to do it in the first place? Suffering through the death of a loved one? No you're not! You're just the victim of political correctness gone mad- in the old days people would be dead and continue to live for another 200-300 years! And they wouldn't need a hi-vis vest to do it. Are you struggling to overcome a crippling addiction to alcohol or drugs? It's not your fault- not since the EU introduced all those nasty new addictive substances when Britain had once become the Greatest Nation on Earth (tm) by having alcohol which did no damage whatsoever and crack cocaine which acitvely repulsed the user after every toot of the crackpipe! You couldn't make it up! Although, for this to work, you'll probably have to.
Quit Smoking With Bisto
Using pioneering psychological research, this guide will help you quit cigarettes for good using the hitherto untapped nicotine supressing properties of gravy. Everytime you feel a craving for a smoke just drink 3 pints of piping hot Bisto gravy and feel those urges slip away. This is part of the upcoming Bisto Better Life range, due to include such titles as 'Career Success with Chicken Stock', 'Find Love with Yorkshire Puddings' and 'Quit Heroin the Vegetable Broth Way'.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming- Not As Interesting or Sinister As It Sounds
This vaguely controversial approach to psychology and self-improvement is clearly and simply explained as not actually an awesome mind-control art that allows those who master it to have terrifying levels of power over all those they come across. It will help you to alter your behaviour to help you achieve your goals via considerations of the effect of language on self-actualisation and not by teaching you to subtly program all those around you to submit to your every whim and fantasy so that your goals become less about getting a promotion and more about achieving one long round of delirious sexual pleasure amongst people who readily except you as their Earth-bound emperor.
Better Living Through Genocide
If all else fails in your life, fuck it. Kill everyone. A worrying sign of the modern world is that this is currently number 4 in the UK book charts. Even more worryingly, the top 3 places are all taken up with books 'written' by Jordan.
Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow…
It's something of a cliche to suggest that we Brits spend all our time talking about the weather, at least when we aren't dealing with our other favourite topics i.e. health & safety, snooker or sentences that begin "I don't mean to sound racist but...". The irony of this is that, while we may be conversant in weather, we're head-bogglingly rubbish at dealing with it when it turns in any way slightly beyond what would be considered 'mild'- if you believe the news anyway.
In other parts of the world, people live in places such as Tornado Alley in the US where a good day in August is one where you come home from work to find your house in the same street you left it, or there's the monsoon lashed regions of Asia which can experience as much rain in an afternoon as Somerset would in the average lifetime.
Meanwhile we live in possibly the most temperate country on the face of the Earth. Thus we're depicted as being prone to either all dying of sunstroke if the mercury climbs over 80 in July or, as the last few days have demonstrated, getting hopelessly befuddled and often caught completely unawares when water freezes into snow and starts lazily billowing out of the sky. I've allegedly been practically housebound for the last 48 hours because, despite us now being in a year with a funky futuristic name, we can't manage to put salt- one of the most abundant substances anywhere- onto our roads and pavements to prevent us having to deal with the minor inconvenience of driving or walking on snow that has been compacted down into unending sheets of ice which lie in wait ready to make us skid or tumble and snap our necks with no warning.
How the would-be Brittanic members of the human race managed to get through ice ages that lasted for millenia is anyone's guess when all we get now is news bulletins booming that the cold snap is due to last "a few more days" with so much portent they might as well be saying it'll last "till the absolute end of all time". Reporters have been stationed up and down the country to tell us that everywhere has become 'snow-bound' and 'inaccessible', despite the fact that they've managed to get several hundred kilos of broadcast equipment there in the first place to tell us this.
I don't know about you though but, for all the tooth-gnashing horrorbastardism of the news reports on the snow, all I've seen is people collectively taking time off work and school to joyously, for want of a better phrase, dick about. Everyone's found their Christmas/New Year break unexpectedly lengthened by a couple of days and, in the case of my neighbourhood, set about building ever increasingly massive snowmen (there's a 9 footer round the corner), have snowball fights, drag each other round on sledges and, in a couple of magnificent cases, build igloos and have a picnic in them. The 9ft snowman has even had a huge snow living room built for him. And a trumpet put in his mouth.
Clearly, far from being bewildered by snow, we're better at dealing with it than any other nation. In a few weeks the Winter Olympics get underway in Vancouver and, no matter what events you may end up watching through the Games, I guarantee you won't see one snowman, one snowball fight and certainly no snow living rooms constructed by either spectators or competitors. If the Winter Olympics were held on these isles there'd be a packed Wembley Stadium watching nations throw snowballs against nations, the whole of Dartmoor stripped of snow during a snowman building contest that'll end up with an army of massive 50ft high creations straddling the South Downs, and all the skiing events replaced by the infinitely more tense British pastime of crowding round the radio first thing in the morning and waiting to see if your school's been closed.
And, for another guaranteed British medal, the newsreader biathlon- where they have to travel to a snowy village, then file a report about how it's impossible to travel to the same snowy village.
Obviously, over the next few days the snow will freeze into ice and then it'll turn slushy and things might be a bit unpleasant for a bit but, for a while, let's just enjoy the snow. The world's all pretty and white and fluffy, every footstep makes that crunchy snow noise, many of us have an extended holiday and- this is a fact, by the way- sitting in a pub is for some reason infinitely more satisfying when there's snow on the ground outside.
All of these are good things because, at a time like this, there's really no reason to stay indoors. For one thing, there's bugger all on the telly. Unless you like panicking reporters.
Or Labour simply handing the election to the fucking Tories 5 months early. This snow might be the best news we get all year.
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- Badpoo I also blog here about TV, films, books, comics, music and stuff alongside some of my oldest and dearest friends. Warning: may feature real ale and Batman
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