Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Kids shooting each other.
Ambulances bricked.
Random street violence. 

If the UK was a person - he’d be an anti-social drunk.

A politician just said on BBC Radio 2 that the UK was the ’sick child’ of Europe. I forget who it was (politicians aren’t worthy of names) but he was sadly right. The rest of Europe does indeed look at our drunken anti-social behaviour and shudders.

The gun culture which seems to be on the increase is nothing new. Look at America. What happens in America usually effects the rest of us sooner or later. As our cities and communities grow in size, you get problems like this.

Modern living is to blame. People think they can do what they like - dads think they can have kids and walk away. Mums think they can raise a family with no money and no husband. Children think they own the streets in gangs because if they don’t fit in they’ll be bullied and trampled on for the rest of their lives. God knows how they think they can get away with gun crime, but they usually do (12 months in a hotel inspired young offenders institute with their Playstaion 3 at the worst).

Even in normal everyday life away from the guns an underclass of chavs is emerging. Witness the usual fights, fat women pissing in the street (in Buxton of all places), and general drunkenness. The Italians (sat on their sun drenched patios) look at the average British night out and puke in between fits of laughter. Why is it that we feel the need to go out to a hellish night club, and pay a fortune to get as out of our heads as possible. Why is this shite culture suddenly so widespread in England but not on the continent.

CULT OF THE STRANGER

My Taiwanese flat mate Mia moans about England a lot, having lived in France for a year. She says if you walk down the street in France, people say ‘hello’. There is none of this spirit in England, we keep ourselves to ourselves like a huge community of Morrissey clones. This is one of the many reason’s we’ve got so many social problems in this country. If all around you are strangers, you don’t feel any responsibility toward them. You don’t worry about offending your friends, because you’re neighbours are just faceless ‘bastards’.

That is an extreme example, but I also recently read about an Englishman who moved to Italy. It may be a cliché but he became sick of the London rat race and due to his high blood pressure he decided to take early retirement and move to Italy. What he found was constant sunshine, houses which are better value for money - he moved into a villa overlooking Lake Como for half of what he sold his house in England for. His neighbours now include George Clooney but it is important to remember what attracted the rich and famous to Lake Como in the first place - this was not a rich neighbourhood when the retired Englishman moved in, but a beautiful and friendly one. Does such a thing exist in England? Even in small country villages there are class wars between chavs and middle class Daily Mail readers. Both do their utmost to antagonise each other as often as possible. In Italy, they don’t have this problem. Why?

ASBO - THE NEW BUZZ WORD

The media certainly fans the flames. Everywhere you look, the positive aspects of life in England is whitewashed by negative news stories. Neighbours from hell, hoodies shooting 11 year old kids in the face, random knife robberies at ATM machines, gang wars in every neighbourhood, rich or poor.

If you hear about something often enough, soon you start to believe it. This negativity consumes your mood. Gun culture in England is worrying but it is nowhere near as bad as in America. The shootings are still very unusual rare incidents - which is why the reach the national news in the first place. When something disappears from the news that is when you should really worry. For example suicide bombings in Iraq have become so frequent they’re no longer newsworthy. It’s good to see we still like to spread our new British Empire far and wide.

UK VERSUS CONTINENTAL SOCIAL LIVES

I believe this is where the most worrying problems are. We work harder, we have awful weather and we get the shortest holidays of all western Europe, so when we do actually get a chance to live, what do we do? We spend all our money trying to find a shag in a nightclub. After we hit 30 we become desperate, stay in watching TV on our own and realise we’re probably going to be alone for the rest of our lives. For those that managed to hit it off in their 20’s we’ll spend the rest of our lives in a miserable marriage, bring up some spoilt little brats for whom no amount of money or wisdom is good enough for them - they’ll still be so weak as to let unruly ASBO kids influence them to the point of complete and utter destruction. Drugs, crime, joblessness, you name it - have bad friends and you will end up a bad person…and the effect on society goes up in a non-linear fashion - like population explosions caused by excessive breeding. STOP BREEDING CHAVS!

We have got to rid ourselves of the drunken nightclub culture. Why don’t we stay in and invite the neighbours round for once? Well, I know the answer to that, after years of living at home. Maybe because our kids still live in the suffocating family home until their mid 20’s…and the idea of socialising with their parents (or even their younger neighbours in front of their parents) seems so un-natural. It is. But the problem is our young people can’t afford to buy their own home until their mid 20’s. See - social breakdown is not just not as simple as one variable, there are hundreds of reasons why our social lives are awful.

We need cheaper, better quality housing for our young people.
We need teachers with some backbone and inspiration.
We need fathers to stick around and help bring up their kids even if they continually regret the moment they met ‘that slag in the nightclub’.
We need to stop getting so pissed and stop going to nightclubs so much.

Maybe the grass isn’t always greener - but I’m sure when I travel round Europe next month it’ll be an eye-opener.

Au-revoir!

On a bargain bloodhound adventure I sniffed out an 80GB Video iPod for £119 at Cash Generator. For those that have never plummed the depths Cash Generator is a pawn shop where the criminals of Manchester off load their fancy goods. This iPod goes for £200 on eBay, so off it goes to some unsuspecting ‘customer’ of CommanderSpike. At least, that was the plan…

But when I got it out of the box I held it like I never wanted to be parted from it. She is black and silver, like a piece of jewelry. The sound quality made my ears bend. I was so happy with my new gadget I even forgot I was still alive.

I got the sleek white cable out that connects it to my PC. Then, the troubles began and life continued.

Evidently, PCs and iPods don’t get on. At least, my PC and iPods don’t get on. Maybe it is still suffering from the painful break up with my previous MP3 player.

I installed iTunes - that program everybody raves about like it’s revolutionising mankind. It took a very long time to load for just a music player. And a shit one at that.

Then, connecting my iPod turned the elegant piece of jewelry into a chav’s bent golden ear ring. The screen, rather than displaying something useful, like your music on your PC for instance, just flashes up a big NO ENTRY sign saying ‘Do not disconnect!’. If that’s not scary enough you should see how long I had to wait for iTunes to show my player, named ‘iSpike’ in it’s revolutionary ‘box which shows your connected iPod’. This stuff will change the world.

So, I just want to copy some music to my iPod…a bit of Sex Pistols, a sprinkling of The Killers…too much to ask? God save the iPod!

Endless desk thumping later, I now have zero videos, and 12 songs on my Video iPod. It has space for 19,988 more according to the box. By the time it gets full I’ll be dead.

THE LEISURE CENTRE TRIP

Last night Wenny, Mia and I decided to play badminton so we found a leisure centre on Google maps in Manchester. Wenny was curious as she’d “before never played badminton”. The distance from the city centre looked quite small on Google Maps, but maybe I should have zoomed out because when we got on the bus space and time bent.

1 hour later we arrived at the badminton court 40 minutes late. The receptionist took pitty on the Chinese girls having to suffer the stupidity of an Englishman so she said we could stay on for the full hour.

2 hours later and Wenny was thumping the shuttlecock into the ground beneath my feet like a lightening bolt. I was crawling along the floor like an injured beetle.

The Taiwanese certainly have a way with these things and not just on the Nintendo Wii.

I am off. And like all bad fruit, I am being exported from England to Europe.

I’ll be shipped to Strasbourg in France, then hop through border controls to Austria, where I’ll be assaulted by a bear. Following that experience, which will be blogging extensively from an Austrian hotel room (Bourne Identity style) I’ll go deep into the German forests, settling in Munich before catching an Chavjet back to Manchester.

It was all Wenny’s friend Mia’s idea. Mia who is living under Wenny’s bed in my apartment, likes travelling and being shot at by estranged French men.

At first the prospect of being shot in France didn’t appeal to me, but then I decided to buy a new camera…a stylish bit of a kit not out of place in a spy thriller such as The Bourne Ultimatum.

With this thing round my neck, I’ll leg it around Europe taking spy photos of attractive French girls. This sealed the deal.

In between shots, I’ll visit some continental towns, drink continental beer and watch American movies at the cinema.

The flight to Strasbourg doesn’t seem to show up on the Internet, but one to Nice is a nice price - £1 plus £25 tax, plus £10 luggage fee, plus £10 check in fee, plus a bonus of £5 to keep the pilot stocked up in Baileys.

Mia is currently trying to arrange a train trip from Strasbourg to Vienna but when we rang the French train hotline set up for English people, it spouted off something in French and hung up on us. So the train from France to Austria costs £15 and thunders through border control under the cover of darkness, and that - in a Bourne Supremacy kind of way really appeals to me.

We’re planning to set off on 15th September and return 10 days later, with lots of cheap wine and photos of forests.

Who knows what we’ll encounter out there, in euroland?

Well I have a slight idea…French people, Austrian people and Germans. These are people who can drink but still be peaceful, who make the best food in the word, best cars in the world and buy all our English businesses. In Austria they even invented Red Bull and that has to count for something, even though the French banned it.

Meanwhile, Wenny flys out alone to Taiwan…The end.