Ooh look, this blog is dead. Long live this (err, new) blog.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this blog is no more.

You can find me instead over here at notjustgaystuff.wordpress.com.

Ta,

Hxzx

13 Facts for 13 Miles

I’m training for the Cardiff Half Marathon for Cancer Research UK — see www.justgiving.com/hectorshalf and please donate! I thought I’d break up the pain of training by coming up with 13 fun facts about my limited experience of running any sort of distance so far…

1. Finding 13 flat miles is fine in Cardiff. It is goddamn impossible in Cornwall unless you count a mile on an 18% gradient as approaching flat.
2. Finding 13 (safe) miles of tarmacked road in Cardiff again does not prove the most difficult challenge. In the environs of Hayle, you should define “tarmacked” as including the following: lane, footpath, grass field, sand, dune and mud.
3. Wellingtons are my preferred item of footwear as a result of 2).
4. A sharp stick can be useful when jogging to either (a) fend off curious livestock (b) to lean on during breaks and (c) as a crude aid to the more mountainous stretches.
5. All dogs are allergic to the dayglo orange of my high-viz running vest (see 2) again re. lack of pavements in this county)
6. Cornwall is the sort of place where you should check the tide before going for a run.
7. My knees hurt when I run downhill — this is perhaps not the best sign.
8. Stopping drinking to train means I wake up properly in the morning. This is something of a novelty and something I might try and stick to.
9. 13 miles is the same as 20.92 km, 68620 metres, 823 680 inches,  and 20 921 472 millimeters.
10. The Zutons is the best band I’ve found (so far) to run to.
11. My ears glow a ridiculous red after even moderate exercise — expect traffic light sized glow on October 18th!
12. My next run is to Camborne, if I don’t come back then this blog stands as a memorial.
13. Embarassingly, I still drove the 1/2 mile to Co-Op today.

Work: The Good, The Bad And the Ugly

I love my job…No, don’t insert “sarcasm” inverted commas there, I really do. I also wish to keep it and avoid the blog-themed fiasco of last time I let “work” and “blog” meet (think rubidium in a thunderstorm and you’ll be about right), so I thought I’d take a comic look at some of the things that make Generic Shop such a great place to work. Oh, and because I’m feeling anal, I’m going to do it in a list style:

Meeting people.
All the time. Incessantly. That’ll be £2.50… is it raining? I hadn’t noticed, and no, the twelve people before you didn’t say the same thing… They thought it was effing sunny!

Meeting interesting people.
Technically a subcategory of the above, there are several subcategories here: the odd, the weird, the mad and the casually racist. For example, an elderly gentleman smelling of urine opined to me, whilst counting out two pence pieces exceptionally slowly to the sum of about £4.56 that this recession was pretty damn bad, wasn’t it? I returned my agreement.

He continued that there weren’t any jobs. I confirmed that this was an unfortunate side-effect of the current economic slump (he was at roughly the £2 mark now and had uncovered a £2 coin so I hoped this might be the end of our exchange). However, resorting to his limitless collection of (alarmingly sticky) 5ps, he told me that his son had been laid off from the factory (I didn’t enquire which). I offered the due condolences (and considered offering said son my job). He then continued, without a blink or a pause for breath, that there were Polish and black people with jobs and it made him sick…

I paused. Having assisted him with the counting I’d secured the £2 coin and so now only had to make up the fiddly pence. I gave him the special “I work here so can’t disagree openly with you you racist scum” look of doubt and said noncommitantly that it was certainly true that some people had jobs when others didn’t. With his £4.56 in my hands I thought this exchange was over and I could go back to being sardonic about the weather… But no, where’s the sodding queue when you need one?

He continued in a mildly racist tone — opining that his Polish neighbours had a job and they’d only been here for five years, and reiterated that both his son (and brother it now seemed) were without work. At points like this, I wish the Panic alarm under the till had a second  ”rescue from nutjob customer” alarm. Finally, my boss emerged with some task or other for me and I disengaged from racist-wee man, only for him to turn around and interupt my boss and begin the whole sorry story again. I slunk gratefully away and hid in the back…

Actually, discussing the weather is quite pleasant.

Occasional Devastatingly Pretty Men
Oh, and the 97.4% of unattractive types that make up the rest of the population. Most unfair.

Cryptic instructions on pieces of paper:
Personal favourite from a friend in a similar business being a cryptic note from the owner when out for the afternoon saying “don’t forget to stack the shelves.” Also entertaining is the archaeological treasure trove of the stockroom where pens and lists of stock needed at some previous juncture can accumulate.

Tills:
You think an electro-mechanical system for the taking and giving of money is unentertaining? Think again. Try a till which has an incomplete barcode database (and a list of non-scanning items as long as your arm stabled to it) and manufacturers of certain (confectionary) products who see fit to print barcodes either incomplete/missing completely or over the top of other text.

Being able to say “next please” and everyone around you move:
Usually.

All views included in the above are entirely personal and do not in any respect reflect the opinions I hold whilst at work (and being paid!) or those of my Employer or any other affiliated or interested party. Direct any comments/additions/complaints to the comments section below.

12 Interesting (ish) Facts From 24 Hours (ish)

Like a fajita in a can, this post pretty much does what it says on the tin. Basically its the lazy mans’ blog post where I list 12 interesting (and sometimes related) things that have occurred to me lately and hope the Universe gives a shit…

Feel free to re-post with your own if you’ve had a particularly exciting/dull day!

1. Caravans should be banned: I missed 2 service stations during my drive home as a result of the solid line of caravans, coaches and other boxes on wheels blocking the left-hand lane. Bah humbug. Feel like Jeremy Clarkson, and as a dirty hippie liberal I don’t often say that.
2. New record for the 212 miles (yep, I counted them) door-to-door from 7 Bev Cres, HYL to 111 Wy Rd, CDF: 3.5 hours. Got cut up by: 1 x caravan, 1 x peugeot, 1 x smart car and 1 x caravan towing a smart-car (God those people must’ve been cool. “Look dear, we’ve got a car that looks like a shoe. I know what’ll go well with it — a box! Shoe-box-shoe, geddit?!”
3. Wages confirmed for this season (probably) £6.20 SCORE!
4. Just been for my first jog back home and surprised to find Cardiff is more aesthetically pleasing to jog around than Cornwall (well, the shit bit I live in anyway)
5. Cornwall is probably the dullest place in the Universe. And yes, I’ve been to Swindon.
6. Tidied and rearranged my room(s)! I’m not really posh, I just live in the attic. Of a bungalow. Confused, you should be?
7. Well, that was the plan. Actually spent an evening reading old copies of the Beano/Dandy/Sparky when clearing out a cupboard and found my old box of about seven years of said comics. Woop-de-la-woop!
8. Beat chess computer (at chess!!!)
9. First episode of ISIHAC on BBC Radio 4 tonight and I am thus spiritually fulfilled. If you missed it, check it out on iPlayer!
10. Writing this to avoid writing any of the other, serious writing things I’m meant to be tackling at the moment.
11. Trying to decide whether I should either upgrade my Mac or car or both and how the hell I could afford either.
12. Er… I had salad for tea… OK, perhaps 12 is harder than it sounds…

Tory FAIL

I have hesitated a moment before this final “Big 3″ parties fail for two reasons. Firstly because it would be all too easy to trot out the usual series of problems with the Conservatives, something which would be unfair given the emphasis on contemporanaeity in the previous two posts. Secondly, there is the temptation to wait till after the EU parliamentary election results have been announced, or to foreshadow them in some way. However, as anyone with the time and patience can scroll through back issues of this blog or engage me in conversation to find out my views of the Tories over the langue duree, I am going to focus here primarily on their ostensible re-invention.

So, where do Cameron’s cuddly Conservatives stand on what is (miracles aside) the cusp of entering government? The Tories have never been the greenest party, this has not changed. The only green thing about them is their new logo which implies the environmental credentials absent from a party in the pocket of big business.

Their dedication to the free market (a position which they share with both other main parties) seems to remain undented despite the “unprecedented” economic circumstances. Indeed, Cameron’s criticism of the government, when not vapid rhetoric, seems to rest on the assumption that crass deregulation is a human right of bankers. And Cameron knows all about bankers. Whilst its unfair to paint a whole party with one brush, the attitude that us poor folks are jealous of the rich chaps with their big houses (that look a bit like Balmoral donchaknow) does persist in some parts of the party.

This is similarly latent in the leadership’s at best luke-warm attitude to social justice and human rights issues in general. In this respect the Tories have not out-grown or out-moded the “nasty party” label. Indeed, Cameron has suggested that, in the European Parliament at least, the Tories are closer “ideologically” to the loose conflagration of extreme right wing parties which cluster round a loose collection of ideologies ranging from skeptical Europhobia, homophobia, sexism, a variety of forms of racial supremacy to a fringe Latvian party which holds an annual celebration of Latvian collaboration with the Waffen-SS. Is this really the modern, forward looking, open image of Britain that we really wish to present to the world?

The Tories Europhobia places them at the rough centre of a more generalised British anxiety about the European Union (some of it misplaced, some of it justified). However, this loose far-right alliance is something very different. It suggests that the modern day new hug-a-hoodie Conservative is fundamentally uncertain as to whether bigotry in itself is unjustified.

Couple this with economic policies which implicitly sanction cutbacks of public services (something that “Call me Dave” Cameron has touted several times now) and Britain does not face a rosy future. After all, the implicit caveat of “public services” is not just the bowler-hatted (Brussels-bound) bureaucrat, its also teachers, nurses, firemen, and thats before we consider the various things that public money goes some way toward – cf. roads, railways, protection of the environment, electricity generation etc. Low taxes may appear like a good plan — we’d all like to think Nozick was right  a little bit — but in the end they will be taxing on the services which the worst off in society rely upon (Hurrah for Rawls!)

In short, Cameron has performed an image revolution and that is all.

Lib Dem FAIL

The Lib Dems have little reason to be chirpy. Not only do they continue to fail to deliver as the self-styled party of local government, finally it seems that the political mood is moving against them. Having lost their majorities in Cornwall, Devon and Somerset (the former being a new Unitary Authority, more on this later), the sickening yellow colour of the south-west looks like it might be, at long last, changing.

Although the Lib Dems are still the second largest party in Cornwall’s new Unitary Authority (UA), this is quite a fall given that they held sway over a large number of the district councils the UA has replaced and were the lone voice supporting the UA in the referendum several years ago. Tellingly, the referendum — which as is traditional in such matters in this country was non-binding — so the approximately 87% of Cornish people who voted against the Unitary Authority views’ counted for nothing.

So that’s what the Lib Dems mean when they claim to be the party of “local government” (if they do that at a local level, heaven forbid what they would be like if they got into government!) The Lib Dems have failed the people of Cornwall and have rightly lost control of the council. Their policy promises are vacuous, as their referendum on the UA showed.

If listening to the people is what the Lib Dems claim to be all about, they have singularly failed. There has been inaction on redevelopment of many towns (Hayle, my home town included) over the last 30 years, housing development has been entirely unsustainable and unsuited (with the interests of property developers trumping local interest — see the Lib Dems implausible claims to “sustainability” and look at the ludicrous new developments in many towns), major local developments are mired in council dawdling (cf. the various new councils, roads and shops which have been proposed over the years). This is not forgetting their singular failure to solve the perennial rural problems of seasonal unemployment (especially amongst the young), out-dated public transport (try getting anywhere by bus after about 9pm) and an infrastructure developed in a style which is often “surreal” (one Lib Dem candidate in Hayle made it his big manifesto promise to solve a huge traffic hump on a bend which his own party implemented on the old District council).

The Lib Dems like to blame all this on central government, happy in the knowledge that they will never be the party of central government. Yet if Lib Dems can do nothing in local government because of central government, it raises two questions: why do local authorities (or whatever type) exist? More importantly, is there any reason to vote the Lib Dems in?  The people of the south west have learnt the answer to this latter question slowly and painfully over the last ten or so years.

Labour FAIL

I feel like a Tory sometimes. There, I’ve said it. Before anyone requisitions a shredder to destroy my Labour Party membership card, give me ooh 500 or so words to explain why. The reason is simple. The media has suggested it (but owing to the fact that the telly journalists presume everyone watching has a minutely small attention span), they presume that events of 13 years ago can’t really compare to the Up To The Minute Drama of the unendingly tedious 24 hr news cycle. Basically, to return to the subject:

     We’re back in the chuffing 1990s.

Only the tables have thoroughly turned. We have traditional Labour voters disillusioned by the high sleaze and infighting of parliamentarians. We have a new, reinvigorated opposition which has successfully transformed its “nasty shit party” image into a potential future government, led by a potential future Prime Minister. Talking of PMs we have PM who makes John Major look both decisive and charismatic. We have a Cabinet of non-entities and the dregs of the last ten years of politics, including some that we had all mercifully hoped were long dead and gone (Mandelson). Furthermore, a reshuffle of the Cabinet throws up the same selection of uninteresting grey men who singularly fail to grab the public imagination and who are so riven by in-fighting that coherent government begins to look impossible. Add to that one of the worst economic crises in a decade!

Add to that the worst local election results for a party-in-government since Major’s final years and you can’t help my cynicism and vague sense of deja vu.

I  confidently predict that Labour will lose the next election. They will lose it not because the British people have gone off ideas of fairness, equality and social justice. They will lose it in part because in part, after three terms in government for any party, entropy and policy become co-terminous. They will lose it because the Tories have successfully seized the public imagination. They will lose it because the Tories have successfully appropriated the same agenda of fairness, equality, social justice and most importantly, good governance.

They have, in short, appropriated the image of a party of government. Something which isn’t at all unfamiliar to any Labour supporters around in 1997.

Back in 1995/6, this was a significant  concern in the dying days of Major’s Tory government. Similarly, no cohesive challenge on his leadership emerged during that torpid end-of-an-era year when an election could be called. The leadership of both parties seems to be in agreement that being let down slowly and gracefully is better than the inevitable absolute implosion (which, if the parallel proves true) will occur to both losing parties.

Just how bad Cameron’s Tories will be for the British people — and in some ways this isn’t the sort of question that anyone who is an active supporter of another political party can ever objectively answer — remains to be seen, especially as categories like “the British people” are so slippery. In my view, if this government wants  a chance of returning to government within a decade, they need to do only one thing: go to the country and seek a new mandate. Whether we win or not is not really the issue — this is the fair and just thing to do.

Good Ideas?

I am obviously procrastinating, three essays aren’t going to write themselves but I thought I really should blog something to celebrate the approximate 1st birthday of this benighted little corner of the internet that I call home… (well, not my actual homepage, that’s cardiff.ac.uk because I haven’t been arsed to change it since year 1, and not “home” as in where I sleep since sleeping on a website can be bad for your back…) I feel like I’ve digressed.

Here’s 10 Good Ideas that have occurred to me during the last 365 ish days…

1. Drinking, then not drinking, then alternating between the two
    It’d be really good to be able to say that the teetotal pledge which this blog started with persisted for all of the 365 days, unfortunately 65 would be a more accurate count.
2. Doing an MA
   A very expensive way to stay involved with student radio (and I don’t even get to put Dr before my name legitimately!)
3. Getting a new printer on my DSA allowance
    Previous experience should have confirmed to me that it is compulsory for the printers that the DSA survive to be as disabled as the person using them. This meant I acquired a dyspraxic borderline autistic printer which couldn’t quite grasp the notion of “black”
4. A selection of games for various consoles:
   Alas I can post nothing more than the title since high level talks are still in progress, suffice to say the game will be called “The Third Reich for the Wii” and will leave development hell sometime this millenium (never has a phrase been quite so appropriate)
5. Fajitas in a can — Faj-in-a-can, need I say more?
6. Much procrastination, most of it pointless
7. Several essays.
8. Errm… cooked a bit.
9. … …
10. God listing 10 productive things is hard…

Well, that year was worth it, wasn’t it? 

Now to see what 2009-10 will bring…

How do I work? (Do I work?!)

Quickie

After the post-literary socio-deconstruction of my last two posts, this one shall be the equivalent of your starter for ten. Imagine I’m on Mastermind, it might make it funny

 

And with me in the studio tonight, we have Mr Hector Benjamin Roddan, Student. And your hobbies include Doctor Who, student radio, Doctor Who and the Labour Party. For your specialist subject, you have chosen stress and other immunochemical reactions…. Starting now.

Q1. What …

A: Aaargh!

Time for bed I think.