Traffic

Strange exclusive concept - traffic. It’s always everyone else on the road that constitute traffic. How many times have  I heard the phrase "the traffic was dreadful”? Were you in a car? Were you in a queue with other cars? Hmmm … that dreadful traffic includes you!

Traffic takes on a life of its own when it reaches a certain density. There have been studies done of movement in traffic systems. Complex maths, chaos theories they've all been used to try and model traffic flow and the random nature of traffic jams. One factor they all have in common is that there is a critical mass beyond which the likelihood of a minor perturbation in flow at one point in the system will reverse propagate a wave of slowing and then stationary traffic. I really don’t care about the maths, I do care about the fact I can no longer make progress, even on my bike. 

If critical mass is one prerequiste to bring traffic to a standstill, channeling high volumes into confined spaces - i.e. towns & cities will precipitate the problem. Add a few roundabouts, traffic lights, traffic calming measures, busses, cyclists & pedestrians and traffic flow rapidly sets, like concrete. Anyone driving in town needs to have set out with expectation that their average progress may be barely faster than a nonagenarian picking their way along an uneven pavement with their zimmer frame.

Cars standing stationary when they really want to be moving guarantees random and sudden attempts to change lanes. Whilst this may make my life more exciting as I try and guess which vehicle might execute such as manoeuvre, I could do without the additional challenge. I’m already trying to ease a 250Kg motorbike balanced on a few square centimetres of rubber on an uneven surface at sub-walking speed through a queue of expensive metal boxes without scratching them or clipping wing mirrors.

Finally an added risk factor is boredom. Drivers read or text in their cars as they crawl onwards whilst they drift vaguely across lanes. Necessitating the sounding of horns alarming imminent contact to awake them to their peril. Who  can blame them? Cocooned in warmth, settled in comfortable seats, music playing so loud the door panels vibrate, isolated from reality - they could be at home on their sofas. Frankly, I wish they were, anywhere but sharing the same patch of road with me.

Traffic? Who? Me? 

Grad-u-aint

It’s a strange time of year. Packs of young people, ravenesque black gowns flapping, anachronistic headware in place, walking through town, filing into their collegiate halls. Parents and friends trailing on behind. The ceremony and speeches unchanged from last year, or the year before and probably several years before that, relying on the fact that reappearance at a such a ceremony is an unlikely occurrence. A short walk across stage, a handshake, the conferring of a simple slip of paper. Thus endeth student life.

The immediate realty is an unstructured life for most. No more lectures, studies, deadlines. Replaced by new urgencies; what to do next, how to do it, who with, where does the next cash injection come from? Polishing up the curriculum vitae, trying to write a convincing personal statement. So starts the the next phase. If they are lucky they will avoid the easy trap; the life of rat race bound wage slave. Is that really what it was all about? Perhaps for some that was the goal. But will others sidestep the confines of convention and carve their own path? And in so doing, hopefully drive onwards the boundaries of humanity. A new optimism? New views on old problems. Disruptive, but constructive. One can but hope so.

Cras

Have you ever wondered what is the difference between now and tomorrow? It’s not just twenty-four more hours. It’s not a petulant child’s cheeky “Tomorrow never comes” answerback to a task promised but never delivered. It’s the infinite scope for change. The endless potential of what might be. The paradox of tomorrow’s indeterminate possibilities is that they all begin with now. The choices I make now, walk or ride, my next step, deciding to be nicer to people, letting loose that sarcastic jibe, scribbling this article, they all determines my future. 

Leo Sayer sang "Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life”. This is procrastination. There is only one point in time that change can happen, that is now. Could I change my life tomorrow? Possibly. But, if really want to change my future, that change starts immediately. If the future is mutable and now is when change happens, then what of the that which has already occurred? The past has a vital place in our lives, it acts as a guide. Prior experiences provide the basis for current judgments, actions, reactions and outcomes. Being cognisant of the past and being aware of how it effects us in the present allows us to make a conscious choice about what happens next, about change.

Sometimes, though, the path to tomorrow is outside our conscious control. A relative dies and leaves an unexpected fortune, you boarded the wrong London bus on the 7th July 2005 or a myriad other events beyond calculation or prediction. But, having arrived at an unexpected future, how we adapt to it certainly can be within our influence.

If the only certainly in life is change. The corollary is skilfully summed up in Reinhold Niebuhr’s 'Serenity Prayer' 

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference."

A bit religious for my taste - but the essence, even in my secular world, holds an inescapable truth. Finally, lest there be any misapprehension that I have achieved a state of self awareness that would allow me to manage change in a sane & sensible fashion I quote my old Latin master who quipped “Today’s Latin scholar is tomorrow’s crass idiot”. He was a man with a fine eye for a pun and a solid pragmatism.

If You Can’t Stand the Heat

It’s been pretty warm here in the UK of late. On 1st July, we exceeded the previous warmest day on record reaching 36.7 °C (98.1°F). So, it was probably not my smartest decision to venture out on the bike for my daily commute in black heavyweight leathers. The ride in, early enough to be ahead of the heat,  just about tolerable even in traffic. Roads dry, warm and debris free so I was able to corner at speed. Quite a fun start to the journey. The latter half, picking a path on my bulky GSA through queuing traffic was less amusing. 

But the trip back, a different matter entirely. From the start, cars and trucks clogged routes. No easy way through at sufficient velocity to feel stable which necessitated paddling the bike through opposing wing mirrors. I may have mentioned that the handlebars and mirrors on the GSA are wider than the average bike, and higher. This combination is a pain in the proverbial now that the majority of vehicles appear to be either SUV, taxi, or man in a van. Swaying and twisting 250Kgs on tiptoes is a tedious means of making progress.

Thirty seconds after leaving the office I'd broken into a sweat. By the time I had reached the first set of lights I was overheating. A glance at the stationary traffic almost convinced me that air-conditioned transport, though it might be slower, could have some advantages. Reaching the Blackwall Tunnel took a further 20 tortuous minutes. Road junction? Red light. Empty pedestrian crossing? Red light.  I began to wonder, had I developed a perverse telekinetic power?

If I was expecting the traffic would be lighter once I was through the tunnel I was dismally wrong. Those expectations proved to be off the scale optimistic. Two lanes of slow moving tunnel opened out to three lanes of stutteringly stationary vehicles. Paranoia sets in, is it too much to ask that drivers don’t hog the white lines? Surely a deliberate ploy to prevent even motorcyclists from making progress. “If I can't move then neither will you!”. Progress is slower than slow and I start to feel perspiration pooling in my boots, putting a new perspective on paddling. Wonder how much wear I’m putting on my clutch? Grrrrr! Just to put myself in abetter frame of mind I consider alternative modes of getting back. Car? I’m passing plenty those even at these speeds. Tube & train? If it’s hot out here, wonder what it’s like down there packed close with sweaty bodies. Perhaps the train would be tolerable, but the tube …. that’s not an experience I’d relish.

At last, space! Out of first gear and making enough progress to make it worth lifting my boots back onto the pegs. An hour later, arriving back, I have to peel myself, squelching, from my portable sauna. I decide that sometimes there can be too much of a good thing, and today was definitely those few °C too far.

The Joy of Paper

Guilty pleasures are the best. Reading a paper,  a full broadsheet, is a rare luxury. I read the news, most of the time this is consumed via web sites, Twitter or various dedicated apps. If take the train I’ll pick up a Metro, it’s a desultory reading experience. Red Tops are equally dismal. I wonder about the quality of the journalists or the editors or the combination of both. These papers are visceral in their response to any event. Analysis and reason fly out of the window and all I get is bias and sensationalism. They are the news equivalent of drinking brackish water. I really rather wish I hadn’t, wonder what diseases I’ve contracted and need something to cleanse the unpleasant residual taste.

Broadsheets though ….there is something mightily decadent in spreading almost a square yard of paper open to absorb the contents. You can’t easily read one on a rush hour train, unless you hold a black belt in origami. But, at home, on the sofa or at the kitchen table, I can hog  space. Using the vast paper acreage to, ostrich like, shut out the rest of the world and immerse my head in the tiny black and white print.

The sheer weight of paper in some of the Sunday papers is amazing, I’m pretty sure Lord of The Rings weighs in lighter. Yet, unlike the latter, which, once read, will sit on the shelf awaiting the next time, this broadsheet and all its supplemental inserts and magazines will shortly be discarded - compost, barbecue lighter or just more landfill. 

Yes, reporting is biased, that is inevitable, but they forsake the rabid fervour, overt xenophobia and outright propagandist soapboxing of the Red Tops for a more measured argument. At least some evidence of reasoning here, some detail in the reporting, an appeal to use one’s brain rather than being bounced into rash conformist judgements. Once I have reconciled myself with the  sorrow of sacrificed trees, my proxied contribution to global warming, and the final disposal problems; at least its a good read, an intellectual challenge and, coffee in hand, a very civilised way to spend a Sunday morning.

I Am Rage

Awoke this morning ready to rip the head off anything that even slightly irked me. Exit wrong side of the bed? There are 4 sides to a bed and I doubt that any of them could have been the right side today. Some sides much worse than others obviously. Clambering over the headboard into the wall, definitely contraindicated. Sliding down the bed and escaping over the footboard also ill advised, much pain and multiple bruises. That just leaves two potential soft exit options, neither of those would have resulted in me being in a better mood.

Buddhism proposes that I am not my emotions. It is alright to feel the emotion, but it does not define who I am. That is so much easier said than done. Emotion takes over. If I am water and emotions are the ripples, waves and currents, then rage is a tsunami. It is loud and destructive. It takes over and the rational part of me is submerged and awash. It’s not as if it is just me and few inanimate objects effected, anyone in the vicinity gets the full benefit as the air turns a shade of blue when I fumble something. Fumbling is so much more probable, rage has a physical effect; tensing muscles, ragged breathing, pumping heart. All the fine motor skills are affected, I’m so much more likely to be clumsy. 

But, if emotion is a surface effect, and after it has passed you are able to observe yourself again, there is still the aftermath to deal with. Like that tsunami, there is probably a trail of emotional, or even physical, consequences to manage. I say probably, I could have been lucky and just vented my spleen in private, no one around to witness the outburst and nothing damaged. In this case can I claim ‘falling tree in forest’? No, not really, I was there, I witnessed it, I know it happened.

Is it necessary to understand the cause of my anger. The cause may be frustration, something that needs to be dealt with. If it is possible to change the environment then I should do it. Sometimes easy and straightforward, often a struggle, but even trying can be palliative. Maybe there is no solution, in which case acceptance of the true state of the world is the only effective path forward. Knowing the difference, well that requires a wiser person than me.  

This Buddhist ideal, to be at peace with yourself, what of it? It is a goal, something to aim for. To realise your mental state, to moderate it if necessary, to be self aware. It helps to be conscious of the external effects on people I care about. Being angry passes on in the same way as being happy. The old cliche of a candles and flames applies just as well to propagating anger as it does to happiness. Finally, this concept of not being your emotion is rather dependent on everyone else around  being equally aware of their transient nature. I would really rather not be known as ‘The Angry Man’,  even if, sometimes,  that is exactly what I am.
with apologies to 'Being Peace; Thich Nhat Hanh' (Parallax Press 2005: ISBN 09380770077)

Biker Interruptus

Finally, I’ve taken delivery of my R1200 GS Adventure, replacing the one stolen a few weeks ago (see Citychosis). Another pre-enjoyed bit of kit it’s every bit as large as the previous one, and came complete with a full quota of panniers. I’ll probably leave these on a shelf in the garage, they make the bike almost as a wide as a small car. In the close quarters commuting world I live in every centimetre counts. Any extra width would inhibit effective use of the bike lanes commonly denoted by dashed white lines between the queues of stationary cars. There is an old joke about ants scurrying along the tops of cornflake boxes. Why would they? Because it said ‘Tear along the dotted line’. There are some bikers who seem to have taken this philosophy off the top of the cereal pack and on to the road. Personally, I’m quite happy plodding along at a rate where I stand half a chance of stopping if some bod in a car executes a rapid lane swap to snatch a space in the other queue. Another impediment to rapid progress is that the height handlebars matches exactly the height of Transit and SUV mirrors. These massively reduce the width of the lane I have to manoeuvre in.

What is disconcerting is how out of practice and unsure I felt after a six week enforced break. Intellectually I know I can ride a bike. I know where all the controls are, how to make it go faster, how to slow it down and how to manoeuvre at very low speeds. All the physical skills necessary to safely negotiate the clotting morning traffic. But the reality is rather different, I need to regain that fine edge, that balance, that feel, to be able to competently execute my theoretical ability. That will probably take me a few rides, during which I will, again, look like novice.

It rather makes me wonder in which other capabilities I have lost that performance edge. Knowing the theory and being able to perform at a fine level are very different. This is evidently true for motor skills, but equally true of cognitive and emotional abilities too. Perhaps I’d better go through the dusty attic that is my mind and brush a few of them off whilst I still have the physical and mental health to be able to do so and start practising again.

A Head Rolls

A head rolls, but was it the right one? Timothy Hunt resigned his posts at UCL and the European Research Council. With a Nobel prize for his work, a distinguished and on-going scientific career what could be so important as to cause these sudden and immediate departures. Did he win the lottery and, with multiples of millions at his disposal, decide to give up working the domain he had held so dear? No, he made a self deprecating joke about women in the lab. Was it heinous, raucous or rude? Again, no. Along with saying he found women distracting, he said that if you criticised them they tended to cry. This may not have been particularly funny, nor in particularly good taste, but should this be a career terminating statement? The consensus of the comments on his utterances has been that he has just epitomised how entrenched sexism is in science. Multiple examples illustrating how badly women have been treated have been published showing how endemic this is. So, given the nature of my last post, do I think his comments justify the press furore and the subsequent outcome? Simply, no.

There exists a state of being in the scientific community where women are not given sufficient respect for their contributions. Their work is not properly valued. There is ample evidence of adverse bias in evaluating their performance. Tim Hunt’s ‘joke' may play to these concerns. Is his statement an expression of his disregard of womens’ scientific competence? Is there a history of him rating poor work by men above good work by women? As far as I can see, there has been no accusation against him for such practices. Or, has he been fair in his evaluations and given credit where credit is due regardless of the sex of the author? If the former, his subsequent pillorying is justified. However, if the latter, then a few poorly chosen words have wrought havoc far beyond their worth. Our obsession with political correctness has just claimed another poor innocent whilst leaving the guilty free to continue to exercise their prejudices unimpeded. 

This frenzied media response may have focussed attention on the issue for a short while, but the fact is that such bias needs to be addressed from within the disciplines. Tim Hunt’s guillotining by a baying feminist revolutionary mob for being a public relations incompetent does not address the core of the problem. To focus this level of attention on such a trivial episode distracts from the many serious instances of adverse sex bias that have so far passed, and continue to pass, unnoticed. 

What’s In A Name?

Names and name calling are far from innocent things. The hoary old chestnut “ Sticks & stone may break my bones ….” may have have idealistic ring to it, but the truth is far removed from the idyll it assumes. We only have to look at the current obsession for political correctness to see how sensitised society has become. Using the ’N’ word is a career terminating mistake. Describe an incline whilst the wrong nationality is on it and again that career terminating warning light starts blinking. So what is going on? It seems fine for one black skinned individual to refer to the other as ’niggah’ but a white one doing the same, that’s racism. And so it goes on. It’s not just restricted to ethnophauliisms.

Take the word ‘Gay’, time was it quite innocently referred to a mood. I even knew a girl called Gay in younger, merrier times. Then it became a slur reference to homosexuals and now it has been reclaimed by the self same group and used in their struggle for social, political and religious acceptance. Does anyone now use the word ‘gay’ in its archaic sense? No. In the same vein, how many boys are called ‘Adolf’ or ‘Hannibal’? The former, a pariah following the Second World War, the latter was quite acceptable ….. until ‘Silence of the Lambs’. A counterexample, names chosen by royalty for their children suddenly leap up the popularity stakes. Is a common child having the same name as a prince or princess is going to make their fortune in later life? I doubt it.

But name calling is subtle and pervasive. It is not just the person designated that is affected. It is the effect on the name caller and surrounding people that is as important. Choose a flattering name and the person goes up in the callers' estimation and those around them. It will most probably have a flattering and positive effect on the recipient too. Choose a derogatory name and the opposite happens. An extreme case; call someone ‘adulterer', a girl in Pakistan perhaps, and within minutes those sticks and stones will materialise, those bones will be broken. Normally the effects are less immediate and dramatic. Names and words have emotional loadings. Emotions influence opinions and vice versa. Both influence behaviours. If the name sticks, immediate meanings and then distant associations sink insidiously into the subconscious. Instanteous emotional responses come first. But, over time opinions form. emotional reactions embed. People typically seek evidence to support opinions; conscious realisation and reinforcement. Finally, we have manifestation in overt behaviours. Reification, that’s what’s in a name.

Coffee

It's morning, again. They crop up regularly but always catching me unawares. As I force myself out of bed, don a dressing gown and stagger downstairs there is only one thing that makes it worth while; coffee! There is a large lump of stainless steel lurking dark in the corner of the kitchen. Not the oven, not the microwave nor the kitchen sink - the coffee machine. It's pretty basic, 3 litre tank, 2.3 litre boiler and almost 3kW of power. Five minutes to heat the water in the boiler and a further fifteen  for the rest of the machine to come to temperature.
Making coffee is a performance art. An art I haven't quite mastered. Oh I can grind beans to powder, fill a portafilter and microfoam milk - but this barista cappuccino graphic is just beyond me. I've watched YouTube vids, read articles and carefully watched the masters at work. But pouring a heart, concentric forms, clever animals ..... fail! But, quite frankly, my dear, who gives a damn. What we are really about here is beans groaning as they are milled to fine powder, six ounces of steel tamping that dust to a compressed puck, the military precision with which portafilter engages the group head and the aroma of fresh coffee that permeates the air as near boiling water is forced through that puck at 12psi into the waiting cup below. Ahhh crema, syrupy brown foam guarding bitter delights below. Capucino art be dammed, quadruple espresso kick starts my day!

Silence

I did think that leaving a large empty space here would be appropriate. 

Silence in print. 

There is a lot of noise in my world - both auditory and visual. I suspect the same is true for many others. The definition of noise, like the definition of stress, is subjective. I sit on a train, a man is having a loud conversation with someone at the other end of his mobile connection. As far as I am concerned this conversation is noise, his perception may differ. Or, perhaps he is just pretending to have a conversation on his loud mobile to appear important in the eyes of his fellow travellers. I really can’t tell, I don't really care, it's just noise.

But this is just the beginning. Google, Apple, Samsung and their ilk would like us to use speech input rather than keyboards. ‘Hello Google …. NO!!!!!’ For goodness sakes, the last thing I need is to hear is everyones’ searches, Facebook and WhatsApp messages spoken rather than typed.  Imagine an open plan office with every office worker dictating their thoughts into their word documents. Dante’s 10th circle of Hell! When we get to direct brain input ‘Think to type’ then perhaps we’ll have arrived with a usable ‘alternative’ input modality. If noise is positively correlated with stress, and stress is linked to obesity, which in turn is linked to a premature demise then really, I should be jumping ship into the undertaking business and selling plus sized coffins.

How do I get silence? Death? Pretty final, and rather more drastic than I had in mind. Noise cancelling headphones and a blindfold enshrouding my head ? Almost gets the job done, but would impair my ability to function in any meaningful way. Perhaps the way forward is retaliation. More of the same! Useless and loud phone calls ….. that could be me. Painfully bad taste ties, loud shirts and tartan trousers - I can do that. Tinny music spilling out of cheap earphones …. no problem. Spawning acres of meaningless verbiage ……… oh..... hang on …… MUHAHAHaHaha!

Ephemera

I was listening to a band recently, Oi Va Voi. With a name like that, apparently some Jewish link. They produced a mere couple of albums and vanished without trace. Some may consider that a good thing, depends on your musical taste. More conceptually to the point is their transience. Stuff that exists, hangs around a while and then disappears back into the void. Music is one example, fashion another. But Nature is full of them; the bloom of a flower, the fragile windblown butterfly. Or, the life of an adult mayfly, the archetypical example of ephemeron. Imagine, just 24 hours - maturing from larva, mating and death. How intense a life is that? Talk about pressure - only a few short hours to find a mate, find a site, perpetuate a species. We humans have it so easy by comparison. Though I can think of a few people who might find the idea of a one night stand very appealing, knowing will be the only one ever may not be so great.

Does anthropomorphising the life of a mayfly make any sense? Measuring their lives by our timescales? What about mayflies as a species, how old are they. They pre-date humans by a good margin with a fossil record back into the Cretaceous period. With a lifecycle so short they evolve perfectly to their environment.  And so, whatever it is they do, however it is they live and die, it certainly works for them. Ephemera - it is not the thing and its passing, but what it signifies; change & adaptability. 'The one thing constant in life is change’ ; Francois de le Rochfoucauld; ephemera are the embodiment of that change. Maybe then briefly mourn their passing beauty, but embrace the circumstances that enabled it.

(Un)Helpfulness

Over the past few years and months and weeks and days there have been many opportunities for people to be helpful. And I am sure there will continue to be. I have nothing against being helpful. Even I have been known to helpful - though very probably not as frequently as I should. However, I really question the motives of some of these ‘helpful’ actions. There are the obvious ones that needed questioning - invading Iraq. Was that helpful? Yes - if you were an arms dealer, but evidently not so much for anyone else involved.

I heard recently about Investors suing Tesco for damaging the profitability of their shares. In amongst the various fines, investigations and acute competition from other high street retailers - namely Lidl and Aldi - in what sense is this activity helpful? Will the shareholders recover their losses? Will Tesco perform better? Will it even survive? Could this action prevent similar activities in any other company trying to protect it’s image? The answer to all of these questions is no. So who does it help? Actually, the only people likely to come out ahead on this one are the lawyers. Lawyers can fulfil a need, but this cynical action is mostly self serving and probably no benefit to anyone else.

On a more personal level it is surely necessary to examine our own motives when we intend being helpful, as much as we should carefully examine the possible consequences of our ‘helpfulness’. A recent Grauniad comment made the excellent point that flying out to help in Nepal was not necessarily any help at all. Unless they had certain specific and immediately useful skills, cluttering up the place with purposeless do-gooders exacerbated the problem. Unprepared, unqualified and finally useless they are a drain on much needed resources and divert attention from the most needy. So, this is merely an exercise in self gratification and self importance. 

In a similar vein, the amount of unsolicited ‘helpful’ advice flying around is astounding. Take a well tested example; divorce. Plenty of advice to be thrown around here. But really, if advice is not sought it should most probably not be offered. Friendship is not about growing our own egos at the cost of someone else's discomfort and pain. Who benefits here? The advisor or the person advised? There is an aphorism - “the empty vessel makes the most noise” - and when it comes to offering advice, my experience to date is that this is most frequently the case. Furthermore, walking away leaving a trail of chaos and destruction for someone else to manage whilst proclaiming “I was only trying to be helpful’ very keenly demonstrates how unhelpful those actions actually were.

So finally, on helpfulness, the key question is, and always should be, who benefits? After some thought, if the answer is not absolutely the person being offered help, then what is actually taking place is unhelpfulness. The world could certainly do with a whole lot less of that.

Oh no. Knot again!

Ever wondered why it’s impossible to coil earbuds up without getting the cable into a tangle. It would be easier to unravel the Gordian Knot than it is to try picking apart the bird’s nest that spontaneously appears out of a mere 1 metre of audio cable. One moment it is neatly coiled around three fingers and carefully placed into a pouch. Nothing much happens in the pouch …. probably. And yet, when extracted, my neat coil has metamorphosed into an amorphous, randomised mass of wire and plastic. The earbuds and jack, though obviously the endpoints, seemingly fused into the tangled mass that is the interconnecting segments of wire. No matter how I start, as I loosen one section, another tightens and makes the whole unpicking process that much more tedious.

Which end should I start from? The jack - only one of those. Or the earbuds — two of those and an awkward shape guaranteed to catch annoyingly with each loop they’re threaded through. No matter how I start, the process is lengthy and for short tube journeys, almost not worth the effort. Maybe I should follow another philosophy, just pull the ends out and tighten the knots. Then, if the music sounds a bit strangled off and choked, at least I’ll know why.

Election Blues

Conservatives on for an outright majority. Miliband loses his Balls and the confidence of the rest of the UK - so two Eds definitely not better than one. The SNP steal Scotland. Clegg’s LibDems, prophetic with their leader’s recent pose by Land’s End signpost, are one small step away from pitching entirely off the political map in the UK. What a joke this election has been. Polls suggesting a close run match, except in Scotland, right up to the start of voting, when suddenly the exit polls indicated a Conservative landslide. Wonder where Paddy Ashdown’s hat is now? I certainly don’t want to be anywhere nearby when it reappears.

What we have now is a more of a DisUK than a UK - grandiose optimistic intentions for one nation Toryism aside - Scotland have isolated themselves ideologically from the rest of the country, and the Democratic Unionists have almost achieved the same in Northern Ireland.

One ironic thought, when Cameron puts the EU referendum before the people his staunchest allies in campaigning to maintain the status quo will be his otherwise fiercest foes. UKIP and the Tory EU sceptics will have had their day, but it is unlikely that should they lose, and they probably will, they will accept that verdict. Expect years of carping and back biting to follow.

So now I await with 'bated breath the Queen’s speech with new business for this parliament. With such a narrow margin for governing, every bill will be a close fought battle with the opposition parties and the dissident rank in his party. Three line whips will be the order of the day, a single abstaining MP could be the downfall of any legislation. And, with all this whipping going on, will BDSM now become even more mainstream than since 50 Shades?

Citychosis

London really is a place to be wary of. I'm now minus my motorbike. It was parked in a public motorcycle bay, on a busy road, locked. It's 250Kg of bike, so not small. It wasn't sporty, it wasn't new and shiny, in fact well overdue for a proper wash and polish and heading for a set of new tyres to boot. And yet it vapourised. I'd not suspected a bike could evaporate so completely in full public view and yet it did. Needless to say I reported the evaporation of my vehicle to the police, it seems that this kind of event is pretty frequent, bikes evaporate all the time. Occasionally they even precipitate out in different parts of the country, I suspect this will not be the case with mine, more likely there will be a diffuse spread of motorbike parts over the next few months appearing sporadically in an eBay auction or Gumtree advert. RIP BMW.

More Of The Same

'Tis late at night and any sane individual would have hit the sack by now. Still, no-one has ever accused me of being sane. I'm thinking about earthquakes and deaths and how these are reported. Does it ever seem petty to focus on the few Brits that may have been caught up in this nightmare when several hundreds, if not thousands, of other souls have also perished or been injured? For those that did not die outright there is the subsequent devastation, the loss of family members and friends, houses, schools, offices destroyed, livelihoods lost and treasured belongings buried. And yet it seems our red tops constantly miss the bigger picture either centering their attention on some trivial local banality, or bypassing the greater tragedy to focus on a tiny few. It is these indications of introspective selfishness I find worrying, the Little Britain mentality. Pretending nothing much happened to anyone but a few unfortunate Britons trivialises these major events in the worst possible way.
Sorry, not much humour in this post, but somehow sarcasm seems a little inappropriate just now.

Election Ennui

After a break of some few years I've decided to pick up the keyboard and let my random musings loose on the world once more. Time has moved on since my previous posts and if anything I am more Unsapient now than I ever was. In the midst of the most monumentally boring general election the UK has ever seen, where the frightening likelihood of the SNP being the power broker is too close to reality, shining a cold cold light of cynicism, sarcasm on this dismal process is probably my only relief short of euthanising myself.
Why boring? I hear the screams of the political classes clamouring about how close the polls are, how exciting the counts will be. The teetering of the Swing-o-meter, or whatever they use these days to show the balance of party power, will have you gripping the edge of your seats and grinding your teeth in anticipation. Or, perhaps not. There is not single policy that excites, austerity measures necessarily hold sway and any party that ends up being prime will be stealing from Peter to pay Paul or vice versa. There are no winners, except in the figments of the febrile imaginations of the final occupants of the House of Commons and the press hounds sniffing around their random droppings.
Too bad then that this battle between Cameron, Miliband, Sturgeon, Farage and Clegg has no real meaning. The illusion of having any power over the destiny of this country is no more sane than the delirious ravings of a drunk believing he is dodging the faeries as he staggers down the street. Global industries, global markets, global investment, global poverty, global pollution are what really matter. And, without this global view, any insular attempt to resolve the problems of an economy so dependent upon the rest of the world for any semblance of stability is doomed to fail. It is precisely this global perspective that our candidates and parties appear to be missing. And so, this election is a mere sideshow on a sideshow on the global stage.