VHEMT

I did my recycling yesterday morning.

It’s one of my many Saturday chores, made necessary by living in a country which still clings to the quaint idea that Sunday should be a day of rest. In Switzerland nothing opens on a Sunday. Nothing at all and therefore anyone who actually works during the week has to make full use of the only day available to them.

The Swiss also like to recycle. Statistics show that Swiss recycle more than any other country in the world, some 52%. I am not sure what this statistic means. Is it of everything? Is it of stuff which can be recycled? Whatever it is it’s higher than all the other countries so it must be good.

My local recycling center (open Saturday 8am to midday) is a well-organized and surprisingly tidy looking affair. Specific containers for everything and anything. All well labeled and well presented. There is a crushing machine for cardboard, the usual colour coded bottle collecting bins, bins for metal, wood, plastic, fabric, cork and batteries. All of this you can find at any recycling center but the Swiss do go one step further with their bins for Alt Brot (old bread) and used Nespresso coffee pods.

The reality is, with the exception of human waste, the Swiss recycle pretty much everything. To maintain their status as the greenest of them all they have hiked up the price of the bin liners. At £2 per bag even the laziest of us are encouraged to go out of our way on a Saturday morning to save a polar bear or two.

The bags are ‘special’ bags, not your common or garden bin liner, they have a picture of a tree on them and tell you in no uncertain terms what can go inside. The word ‘STOP!’ is printed next to a picture of a battery and a bottle. I have not seen them myself but have heard if you decide to simply use a normal black bin liner and place your rubbish in the collection bins the Rubbish Police will swoop down. They will forensically examine the bag for any link to the perpetrator, a letter, a bill, a speck of DNA and once they have this the wrath of the Swiss police will be breaking down your door to shame you and then fine you.

The added benefit from all this regulation is that the Swiss walk a little taller. They know they are the greener than everyone else. I am sure they believe if Polar bears could travel, they would visit Switzerland, to eat cheese, to yodel, to ski a little and to say thank you.

How far can one take your green card carrying credentials though? You could install solar panels or a smelly seeping septic tank. You could fund a wind turbine, drive a Prius or actually pay the carbon offset when you fly. For me though if you really want to be the best and look down your nose at everyone else including the Swiss you should become a member of VHEMT.

VHEMT is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Basically their premise is that mankind is the problem, so eliminate the problem. Thankfully they aren’t proposing everyone lies down and takes poison en-mass. No, they are proposing that people abstain from reproduction to effect a gradual reduction of man from the earth.

Personally I like this. I like their logical approach to the problem as well as the almost unpalatable solution to it. It’s logical and unthinkable in equal measure and they use this shock tactic as a means to promote their ideology. They wouldn’t include the word ‘Extinction’ in their name if they didn’t want to shock. Think about it though, simple arithmetic shows that if we all decided to have one child per couple, in a generation the worlds population would half. Within 4 generations the worlds population which currently stands at 7 Billion would be reduced to 400 million.

It’s not a bad idea really, but then I have 3 children so it’s a little late for me to be signing up.

The movement was founded by the improbably named Les U Knight and with a name like that and an ideology based on voluntary extinction I would happily stand in line to listen to him speak.

You just know it’s going to be off the wall madness, probably in a Vegas convention center and I would be there, whooping and applauding at his every word. At the very least it would be the most fun anyone could have when discussing the death of 6.6 billion people.

But if wiping out mankind isn’t your bag where else could you turn?

Well there aren’t that many places really. There are of course the usual suspects: Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth but they are not very cool. I always found such groups extremely boring and, frankly, rather dull. I don’t quite know why this is but not ever having been a huge animal lover I find it quite hard to get worked up when I hear of some animals being used for testing drugs or some other life saving things. I understand make up and other non-essential things but drugs or surgical procedures I don’t really have an issue with.

I once spent an afternoon at a surgeon-training center in Hamburg. It was a brand new facility, state of the art, using virtual operations, computer generated 3D training and the like. Computers are good to a point but for a trainee surgeon to really appreciate how to carry out the procedure properly he or she needs to use a living thing, a real living thing. Cadaver’s work but saving the life of a cadaver is somewhat tricky and I would guess the success rate is on the low side. No, there is no substitute for the real thing or as close to the real thing as possible.

Now what would you prefer?

To be the first person thing this man has carried out this particular procedure on or to know that he or she has 100’s of hours under his belt practicing on the nearest thing to the human anatomy? The animal for whom nature has chosen to give an almost human anatomy is the pig and in this facility they would operate on live pigs.

They would sedate them, operate on them and then even if the operation was successful, put the animal to sleep. It was a little shocking but I can see why it was necessary. Also as a collateral benefit the bacon sandwiches in the canteen were the best I have ever had.

I like pigs, aside from Polar bears they are my favourite animal but I still find it hard to be enthused by a group of radicals screaming about their rights. I totally understand their point but what’s their solution?  

Would they be happy for their son or daughter to be cut open by a man or woman who had never actually done it for real? I doubt it. As much as I disliked the pig murdering facility in Hamburg I understood the necessity of it.

No, I will opt out of the Animal Liberation Front, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, The Earth Liberation Front and the brilliantly named Animal Right Militia. Also I am probably not going to be accepted into the VHEMT which is a disappointment, as I genuinely like their ideology.

I have just re-read this and realized I am coming across as someone who cares about nothing except for the £2 per bag I am forced to pay if I don’t recycle. This is not the case.

I just know that at the macro level people will not change unless they are forced to. Individually we can recycle everything in our house and fertilize our plants with human faeces if we like but this really isn’t going to change anything at all. Halving the population every generation would work but I think persuading the rest of the worlds population would be a struggle.

No the only real solution lies in finding solutions to allow people maintain their current lifestyles without them changing anything. We have our cars, central heating, Internet and toasters and will do anything we can to keep them. That includes damaging the planet beyond repair for generations to come.

Humans really are that selfish. We will continue on our path of convenient self-destruction rather than considering a restrictive alternative because it’s too much like hard work.

The political ruling classes know this as well and I safely predict legislation will never be introduced which forces us to act very differently. We won’t vote for it because lets be honest why should we, what have the polar bears, white rhinos or cute bottle nosed dolphins ever done for us?

When President Chirac gave President Bush a souvenir statue of the Eiffel Tower…President Bush looked at it and said ‘This is great! A little oil rig!’

I rest my case, whatever the hell that might be.

Blue Cheese & Sparta

As a child I didn’t like drinking Guinness.

I didn’t like smoking, hot spicy food nor did I like blue cheese. I did however like dilutable orange juice, sweets and my mother's home made potato soup.

Today it’s the opposite. Apart from the soup.

Since childhood my tastes have changed dramatically, in fact on the like/dislike swingometer a 180-degree swing has been registered.

This process has been going on all my life, I didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide I liked beer or Stilton. It was gradual change, like my eyesight getting worse or hair sprouting from every orifice - imperceptible and only really noticeable in retrospect. I can't remember the day I stopped looking at blue cheese thinking I would probably die if I ate the foul smelling lump of mould. I also imagine this process will continue the rest of my life, like my ears growing.

I can, with some certainty, predict that by the time I am 130years old I will be happily wolfing down brussel sprouts and have flappy Indian elephant sized ears.

It is the same for a lot of things, music, fashion, hobbies, hairstyles.

I read in the paper last week about Billy Connolly frumping off stage because a heckler decided to take him on. Seems in this instance the heckler won and I wonder why this is. What’s changed with Mr Connolly which made him think walking off stage like Elton John in a huff was a better option than standing there and verbally abusing the man in return?

Comedians, if you forgive the pun, are a funny breed.

I can’t think of a comedian who has lasted, that is continued to be funny throughout their life. I am sure I am wrong here but personally I can’t think of a single one.

Billy Connolly is a great example of someone who once was at the top of my list of funny people but has now joined the unfunny list alongside the likes of Jay Leno and Piers Morgan, neither of which I must add were ever on a funny list.

Why is this? Is it like I’m slowly outgrowing my glasses, I have grown out of Billy Connolly?

I don’t think so.

There are a lot of ‘old’ comedians which fit the same pattern. What about John Cleese? Or Robin Williams? Or worse still Lenny Henry? These men were all very funny at some point in time. Is it that the world around them has changed and they have stayed the same or have they changed and become less funny?

I have a theory….

The Spartans once used to be the most ferocious fighting race of people known to man. From birth, the men were trained exclusively to be warriors. They were so extreme that the Spartan leaders would examine every baby born and should there be a sign of abnormality or weakness they would kill the child there and then. These were the lengths they went to to be the best fighting force in the world.

Then they got soft.

Like every great civilisation, they reached the their zenith, beat everyone around them and then said ‘What now?’

Well they started partying a little too much. They softened up on the rules of entry, engaged in orgies and slept in. Got fat and watched too much daytime TV.

Pretty quickly, relatively speaking, they were defeated by the Thebans in 371bc and passed into history.

Sparta, to quote a mildly important document, had earned the right to go after the pursuit of happiness. In short, they became self-indulgent and lost their edge.

Why is this relevant to comedians?  Well there is a tenuous link coming so please bear with me.

One common denominator between Spike Milligan, Billy Connolly and John Cleese is they have all written biographies and they have all written them from a psychological perspective.

The books are analysing why they do what they do, where does the motivation come from and what is the driving force behind their need to be funny, in front of people. It’s this introspective step which I believe is the problem. It’s a bit like that awful Big Brother program. Within a day or so of entering the house, the occupants of the house go all Lord of the Flies and start eating themselves from the inside.

Whenever you stop and start wondering why you do what you do you run the risk of losing the thing that you do in the first place.

I liked Billy Connolly the edgy, offensive comedian. 

I don’t however find Billy Connolly the reflective, quiet, well-rounded person funny.

I am sure he is now comfortable with himself. I am positive his inner self is at peace with the abuse he suffered as a child. I am very happy for him that he has reconciled his mojo with his aura or whatever the fuck he has gone and done.

Self-analysis and an internal focus isn’t necessarily a good thing though. By discovering or conquering your inner demons you will probably become a different person. This does not necessarily mean you will become better person.

Stand up comedians are edgy, they need to be to be funny. Laid back, calm and at peace with the world are not traits I would immediately associate with stand up comedy. They should be angry, they should be opinionated and they need to be a little left of centre.

The Spartans became soft because they lost the desire to beat everything in front of them, like an up and coming boxer trying to fight his way out of the ghetto. What happens when there is no one in front of him and he has an awful lot of money in his back pocket? These comedians have followed a similar route, they reached the top, got a bucket load of cash and then started becoming self-indulgent.

I tuned into a television program the other night. It featured the new well balanced Mr Connolly touring around Canada. He would stop and look at some arts and crafts shops. He drank tea and ate scones at a local cafe. He then spent a day on a fishing boat and discussed in detail the demise of the fishing industry with the hard working common men.

All in all it was a television program about Canada, a dull, un-enlightening program about Canada and absolutely nothing more.

If this is what finding yourself does for you I would suggest we should all simply stay as we are.

If we do, we might be a little weird, a little damaged perhaps, but we will definitely be a lot more fun and I might not be able to find a barely perceptible link between Billy Connolly, Sparta and Blue Cheese.

Names, Places & Sport

In my last job, there was an online tool to search for someone’s telephone number, address, email. It was a tool to facilitate efficient communication, no time wasted scrabbling around trying to find someone’s address. Do a quick search on whole name, part of a name, nickname (appropriately titled ‘prefers to be called’) and in a second or two you are communicating efficiently. Given the company I worked for had over 100,000 employees it was a very necessary and useful tool.

It was also a lot of fun.

100,000 is a critical mass of people. I’m no statistician but would guess for a population size of 1,000 there would be a lot of John Smiths, some Brian Jones’s and perhaps a smattering of Gillian McKenzie’s. I can also guarantee there would also be at least one poor unfortunate soul with a ridiculous name. Princess Sebastian Adolf or Billy Bum-whole.

So it became a competition.

Who can find the stupidest name in the system? I won with Amy Analzone (a real, genuine, bonafide, no shit name). I sincerely hope she doesn’t stumble upon this entry, poor girl.

Imagine for a minute would you, going through life with such a name. Who in their right mind would choose to keep it? And given there is an Amy, there must be Amy’s mother and father. Assuming they are married, Amy’s mum, lets call her Silky, must have thought, yes I will take on his surname after we are married. 

Why oh why did you do that Silky?

Or it could have been Amy, perhaps it was she who married into the Analzone’s but the question still remains, what on earth convinced you this was a good idea?

Only if the Analzone’s are billionaires would I start to understand.

In any event there must be millions of people out there with such opportunity limiting names. Would you for example even consider dating Billy Bum-whole even if he did look like Brad Pitt or hiring a Princess?

Place names are the same, there are hundreds of examples of stupidly named places. But in some respect these are worse, at least when you are naming a place you can choose it in its entirety, you are not stuck with a surname as in poor Amy’s case.

‘Well at least we’ve given her a nice first name’ I can imagine her parents saying, trying to comfort themselves.

What the fuck were the people of Yorkshire thinking when they named the town WetWang?

Every country has countless examples but my favourites have to be in Pennsylvania. 

I was driving through the state a year or so ago and was so surprised at some of the place names on signs I ended up studying a map and and realized there are loads, the state is full of them. If there is a record for most stupid names in a state (and there should be) Pennsylvania would win it hands down.

Here are some examples:

Deposit. Climax. Lick Run. Walnut Bottom. Lover. Burnt Cabins. Blue Ball. Bottom. Big Beaver. Intercourse.

There is also a town called Jim Thorp, which would probably win the prize for laziest.

Scene: Forest and high mountains. Trees, boulders and snow cover the vertigenous landscape. It’s cold and sunny. We see 3 men all sat on horses, they are deep in conversation. Two are wearing uniforms which proudly proclaim Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

Jim Thorp, sits on his horse, squinting at the two men.

‘Why do we need a name?’ He spits tobacco into the snow as if to underline his distaste at their request.

‘Like I was saying Jim, the railroad is coming’. Replied the buttoned up railroad official.

‘I heard you but why do we need a name?’

‘Becaaaause Jim, when the railroad comes, it will bring mail and addresses, town names are needed for a postal system to work. We need a timetable and a map as well’ the impatience in his voice was clear.

Jim, scratches his head and replaces the sun-bleached hat on his head. ‘But no one has ever written to me’

The official smiles at Jim’s simplistic country ways, progress is coming and Jim is not ready for it.

‘That’s what I’m saying Jim, its because you don’t have an address and the railroad isn’t here yet, but when it is, you can get letters’ he pauses looking round at his clerk and smiling a salesman’s smile ‘wouldn’t you like that Jim?’

‘But no one knows where I live and I don’t know anyone who can write’ He is shaking his head as he speaks and then starts to remake his pipe, stuffing it with tobacco.

The official turns to his clerk and speaks quietly ‘fuck it, lets move to the next town’ he writes JIM THORP on the piece of paper and pulls his horse around touching his hat as he does so.

Jim nods in return.

As they trot off, he turns back shouting

‘Jim, how do we get to that place where all the shagging goes on?’

Place names are great. Here in Switzerland my favourite, without a shadow of doubt, has got to be ‘Wank’ - a leafy suburb of Bern. Every time I pass a road sign with Wank or Wank Dorf in it I giggle the same giggle I used during my sex education classes, aged 12. 

I am sure the good folks of Wank are very aware of how well this translates into English.

The Bern football stadium used to be called the Wankdorf Stadium. Thankfully someone had the foresight to change it before the Euro 2008 football competition. England were playing there, can you imagine the chants? It’s now the much less chant worthy, Stade de Suisse.

Australia is a good place for place names also: Dismal Swamp. Eggs and Bacon & Mount Buggery to name just three of what I would imagine is a very long and colourful list.

I like Australia generally. 

It’s an honest straightforward place and their place naming conventions reflect this. I am, for example, absolutely positive Dismal Swamp doesn’t have a nice lake and I shudder to think why Mount Buggery is named so but am sure it is appropriate.

I think the fact that beach volleyball was invented in Australia encapsulates all of this, it ignores feminism, equal rights, fairness and the like. It simply celebrates the female form and sport. It must be the only sport in the world which, as part of its rules, as accepted into the Olympics, stipulates exactly how high the leg has to be on the female swimwear.

Clearly it was invented by men, Aussie men.

Scene: Tin roofed bar somewhere in the outback. Flies and oppressive heat. The beer is warm and three men stand against a roughly made bar, each have a large glass half filled in front of them. The barman is not in sight.

George ‘I’m bored’

Jason ’Me too’

Phil ‘We need some women’

Long pause.

George ‘Lets invent a sport’

And so it went, beach volleyball was invented in that tin shed, probably, and I, like most men on earth, am eternally grateful to the hard work and creativity of George, Jason and Phil.

I also think the male version came out of this discussion but as I understand it men can play dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi should they wish, the rules are very loose according to the Olympic rule book.

Extract from the official Olympic beach volleyball rule book:

Dress code, article 24c, paragraph 57:

Rule 327 ……is shaved so no hairs are visible.

End Female dress code.

Male official dress:

Rule 1 : Doesn’t matter.

End Male dress code

Phenomenologist

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics.

My physics teacher at school was rumored to be an alcoholic, apparently he would drink vodka in a white painted milk bottle in class so everyone would think it was milk. This was my explanation for receiving the mark I did for Physics. It all seemed to make sense at the time, I couldn’t learn physics as a direct result of him being an alcoholic. He would say things to the class which I simply assumed to be the ramblings of a drunken man. It was a foreign language. He would scribble things on the blackboard, little symbols, small apostrophes, lots of X & Y’s with little numbers above them and then turn to the class.

 ‘Any questions?’

Hmmm, how about fuck yes?

Lets start at the top left hand corner of the board and explain to me what that little angled dash means, if its not just a piece of chalk dust settling on your vodka laced spit.

A good team moves at the speed of the slowest member and in Physics I always felt I was bringing up the rear. It didn’t help that I was sat next to a young boy who ended up lecturing the subject in one of the cloistered establishments down south. I felt inferior, inadequate, thick, stupid and simply blamed it on Mr drunken milkman.

Looking back now, it’s clear to me where the blame lies for my abject failure in Physics. To be clear I never once saw him drink from a milk bottle. 

I know the reason and find it quite frustrating when reading, multiple times, the first sentence of this entry as I still cannot understand a single thing they are saying. It is a constant frustration given I know, I absolutely know, that science is cool and that the work a lot of them are doing is unbelievably interesting. 

Understanding it first however is an important prerequisite to getting a job in a scientific discipline and I always fall at this early hurdle. I probably need to know what a massive elementary particle is first I think. I am assuming here that ‘massive’ is a relative adjective, given the use of particle after it. This, I think you will agree, is a problem, is the Higgs Bosun massive? Like Elephant massive? Or simply massive relative to other particles which are smaller than, well, everything?

The folks not far from here at CERN buried under Geneva are pushing the boundaries of science, finding shit out about stuff which mankind has been searching for years. Take the search for the illustrious God Particle (aka the Higgs bosun), I have absolutely no idea or even the slightest inkling or what it might be or look like but with a name like that…….come on, who doesn’t want to search for it? 

Even Indiana Jones would be tempted.

I just glaze over, ignorant from it all. I try to understand, I really do, but just cant. It’s like someone has built a heavy lead door between me and this knowledge.

Nowadays science is cool, it gets headlines in the papers and the men at the forefront of it aren’t the bearded, wooly jumper types of old, no they are young and good-looking. They like the things I do, football, women, drinking, outdoor stuff but they have the added cool factor of being at the diamond tipped cutting edge of knowledge creation. Had I known what I know now it would have been a close call between football player, rock star or particle physicist as my preferred career choices.

In short, they don’t learn stuff from others, they discover stuff. Going boldly where no man has gone before and I for one am insanely jealous of them.

Every morning I sit at my desk, turn on my computer with a mouthful of croissant and a cup of coffee. I check my agenda for the day and start dealing with mundane emails about mundane things.

They sit at their desks with a mouthful of croissant and coffee and wonder what particle, bosun or space worm hole they will discover today. They get to name stuff, important things like the building blocks of everything we know and can touch – they name the universe.

As I am wondering how to right align all my bullet points on a PowerPoint presentation they are discovering what black holes are made of. I am talking about financial statements and they are figuring out how the big bang happened.

A good proportion of the population believe in creation. They believe that god created everything and put man, in his image, on earth. Everything happens for a reason, normally because god wills it. This is simple and a nice story. I actually wish I had the faith to believe in something so simple and which helps explain everything which happens to me and to the people around me.

Science does not proclaim to have the ultimate answer and I like this. Its much more believable. For every theory developed another one comes along to try to prove it wrong. Its like a welcome competition, an evolving belief system to find the truth. 

Perhaps, ironically, at some point in the future it will become a new religion in itself.

I believe that anything which challenges the existent beliefs or thinking of its time has to be a good thing. Rock and roll did it, moving pictures did it, archeology has done it, the railways did it, Darwin certainly did it and science has always been doing it, it just seems to me to be doing it a lot more now. Or at least the people doing it look better.

Is science the new rock and roll?

Probably not but its not that far removed and looking back its close enough to wish I hadn’t giggled at my teachers drunken ramblings and took the time to work out what the little ç sign meant.

Then, and only then, would I even have stood a chance of understanding 'quantum chromodynamics' and maybe if I was really good I would be able to pronounce 'phenomenologist' correctly.

This is the one

Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Joy Division, Janice Joplin. Living fast and dying young, these musicians existed for a moment and then were gone, leaving only a starburst of happy memories for the people who were lucky enough to have witnessed them and a catalogue of wonderful music.

The Sex Pistols, The Rolling Stones, every 80’s band which existed and are now touring at Christmas, Status Quo, U2 and even, I hate to say it, Led Zeppelin. This group of illustrious musicians have all made that serious mistake of either not dying young or continuing well beyond their sell by date.  The ones which reform after a hiatus of far too many years are even worse still.

I was a huge fan of the Jesus & Mary Chain during the 1980s.

They wore leather trousers and boots, had wild hair and sang songs about sex and drugs. They got drunk in the Blue Peter garden – I challenge any 19year old boy at the time to have not liked them. I saw them performing on television last week, fat and balding and now when I think Jesus & Mary chain I don’t think, cool and rebellious anymore, I think sad, fat men desperately trying to recreate something which has long since gone – they have ruined it for me.

My advice, should they ask, would be - don’t do it and if you have done it to stop it immediately. Take Paul McCartney as an example - still sporting the tight clothes and that look of faint shock as he sings. This might have been endearing to the girls packing out the Cavern Paul, now its just crap.

Off the top of my head I can only think of two who have managed to do it well, that is The Who and Tom Jones. Now I will own up to a personal bias towards The Who but I have no time at all for Tom. I can however see how he has managed to stay up to speed and relevant, reveling in his age rather than trying to hide it behind makeup and personal trainers.

You will therefore understand my absolute dismay when I read about next year’s reunion of the Stone Roses.

This was a band which in my mind quite comfortably sit alongside the rock gods I have already mentioned. For a very short period in the late 1980s and part of the way into 1990 they ruled supreme with their anti-fashion and of course the music. 1990 was for some, the second summer of love and the Stone Roses provided the soundtrack. They were cool, young and didn’t give a fuck. Their 60’s inspired music was the perfect tonic for a generation of 18-25 year olds dying a slow musical death at the end of a musically dire decade. The whole Manchester scene came along and turned this on its head. In my opinion the 1990’s was a great period for music and the Stone Roses were the catalyst for this change.

I saw them in their last concert in 1990 on Glasgow Green. It was summer time and the air was thick with varying types of smoke. Inside a huge marquee the Roses blasted their way through their short musical repertoire, the atmosphere was electric. Nothing was going to stop this - this would last forever.

Of course, summer became autumn, the Roses split and we all got older, got jobs, stopped smoking and joined gyms. Their legacy was untouched, a legacy which remained intact. That is until last month.

I watched in absolute horror as four men sat giving a news conference to announce their reunion - we have unfinished business they told the packed room.

Each of them have aged very badly. Ian Brown 20 years ago had Jim Morrison-esq boyish good looks - now he looks like a mummified scrotum. The rest are the same, the only exception being Reni, the drummer – he looks like a normal 40 something man, because that’s exactly what he is. He gave up the rock thing when they split.

All in all it was a little embarrassing to watch. In fact Reni and John Squire looked like they would rather be anywhere else rather than sat facing the packed media scrum.

Only Ian Brown and Mani seemed to enjoy it. They walked in with a cocky swagger, full of themselves – look how great we are. Again, this works well in your 20's, aged 47 it’s just looks silly, or odd. Like a bearded man in a dress with a deep voice.

I am not sure how this reunion can have any upside at all, other than making millions for the four band members what’s the point? This is probably the only point.

From my perspective this can only be a lose-lose situation. Like Maradonna doing anything else in football again, or anything at all again for that matter. The only way is down.

They will not be able to recreate the sound - that I guarantee. Either they will rehearse too much and sound good (they weren’t noted for their live ability) or worse still, be bloody awful and in todays X-Factor world this will be a disaster.

Either way I am totally against it and will boycott it, I might even protest.

All I want is to be able to play the music to my children, tell them stories about how good they, and a lot of other bands, were. I want to be able to say it without running the risk of them saying ‘yeeeesss dad we saw them on the TV yesterday and they were fucking awful now please put One Direction back on would you?’

Please, please, please, please don’t do it.

Its easy to criticise

Everyone has the right to protest.
In fact the right to protest or simply disagree en-mass is one of the defining characteristics of a free society and I am 100% onboard with this - no argument at all.

Sometimes though, actually more often than sometimes I find myself questioning the logic and rational behind such protests.

What exactly do the protestors want to get out of such public displays of support or disagreement?

In my mind there are two types of protest, the safe type and the pointless type.

The safe ones are generally marches against things which no one really would disagree with or at the other extreme, for things which people absolutely disagree with. The key point here is neither are going to change anything, raise an eyebrow or even get a mention in the houses of commons. Examples of such protests or marches would be marching against racism or for racism, for and against Nazi’s, terrorism, cute dogs, violence against women/men/homosexuals etc etc, the list is never-ending. I say these are safe because the people marching through the streets know, they absolutely know, that regardless of their numbers nothing will change.

The pointless ones are a little bit worse in my mind because they ignore the basic rules of human nature, society, physics or facts. Examples of such are marching for world peace, for curing death, to make everyone happy or to eliminate corporate greed.

Which leads me to the point of this blog entry - the current ongoing, ‘Occupy’ protests taking place around the world.

These are, in my mind, a perfect example of a pointless protest and one which I freely admit I do not entirely understand.

Reading their blurb they are primarily against social and economic inequality and corporate greed and are going to camp out in various cities until…well that’s not entirely clear.

A better world, magically materialises perhaps?

My issue with this particular protest is not that their mission isn’t worthy – social inequality and corporate greed is very worthy, could probably only be trumped by sick kids or cute kittens. No, my problem is the tabloid dumbing down of the issues and the outcome they want, or I am guessing they want, because I am not 100% sure what it is that they want.

They hold banners claiming bankers to be the scum of the earth, the devils who brought us to the brink and companies are just as bad. Why should we, the tax payer, have bailed out the banks with impunity, dropping gazillions of Euros, dollars and pounds into the banking system with no return? We have no jobs whilst they pay themselves staggering bonuses.

No! No! No! - someone will pay - and we will sit here until they do.

Firstly my issue is this, without a society full of willing people the bankers simply wouldn’t have been able to sell their dirty, credit loaded, products. It’s a bit like a drug addict complaining about his dealer. Anyone who stupidly took credit, had a job or bought something during the last 20 years is partly to blame, not just the credit dealing bankers. We all fell for it. 125% mortgages, wide screen TV’s, holidays we couldn’t afford, designer clothes, SKY TV, the Premier League. Even if you didn’t have a loan or a stupidly oversized mortgage we still took advantage of an economy which was booming on, well credit. Directly or indirectly we are all complicit in this to a more or lessor degree.

Secondly the bailout. I too am annoyed that taxpayer’s funds were used to bail out these private companies but I don’t understand what exactly they would have done differently. I have no plan B?

Just let the banks fail?

Let’s think about that for just one second, what would happen if, say for example, one evening I looked online at my bank-statement and thought for even a second, I could not access the number shown on the screen, or worse still that it didn’t really actually exist? What would happen if the rest of the bank account holding population in the UK or the world for that matter had the same thought?

Can you envisage a society where everyone takes their pay in the form of cash and keeps this cash at home? Can you imagine a society where banks did not exist? Panic, disorder and the gossamer-thin belief system which underpins our society would fall away immediately and we would be on a fast track to becoming a barter society relying on pigs, beads and druids. In other words the UK, circa 527AD.

Ok I am exaggerating here but a run on the banks is something we want to avoid, even at its most basic level we would find out very quickly that the numbers on the computer screen were just that and nothing more.

This, in my humble, simplistic, Tory-boy view, is much, much, worse a scenario than the bailout which ensued, however much it sticks in the throat

The status quo is like a cold war, a mutually assured destruction and I would like to keep it that way.

The bonuses which are being paid are obscene, yes but the harsh realities of life are that if one bank or corporation stops them the staff will leave, or the talented one who can will. That’s just simple human nature, nothing more.

That’s just the banks, what about other corporations which are making billions hand over fist? Should we control them and stop them from feeding on people’s misery?

No, actually we shouldn’t.

Not unless, that is, we want the whole world to turn communist overnight. We can tinker at the edges, with legislation and we do but really, a company is just a vehicle to make money, nothing more and the ones which do it very well seem to be the ones targeted here.

All except Apple curiously.

The only way to bring the whole messy affair under control, stop large bonus’s, the migration of talent and make sure companies are basically good world citizens is do it in a well coordinated way across the globe.

Outside of creating a world government I would contend this is a bit of an ask and without wanting to sound fatalistic I am yet to be convinced that the appearance of a few bearded or bead wearing campers outside St Paul’s and Wall St is going to achieve this.

I know it’s easy to sit on ones backside, not take a stand and just criticize but its also easy to lash out and blame someone else, anyone other than yourself.

Unless these protestors become the catalyst for the creation of a world government, or society I cannot see them changing anything, anything other than, say, the toilet provision just outside of St Paul’s .

I will opt out and drop this protest into the ‘pointless’ category for now.

I will also continue to look at the numbers on my bank statement and kid myself that there actually is a money filled box somewhere in the vaults at Credit Suisse with my name on it just waiting for me to appear someday.

I sort of like it that way.