Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

 Can you think of something so typically English as this? (Apart from maybe drunk fat girls stumbling around at 3am in the morning).

The BBC has won back F1 coverage from ITV in a deal rumoured to be worth £40 million. They’ve saved the sport from the jaws of Sky and made sure the millions of passionate F1 fans in the UK can watch the sport, rich or poor. Oh, and uninterrupted by adverts.

Yet the government is having a big moan.Here in England we’re very sensitive about wasting public money. I don’t see why we’re so sensitive about it because thanks to our Dear Government we should be numb to it by now. However, because we pay £140 to watch Dale Winton and Graham Norton on the BBC we tend to get a bit upset when the BBC spends a lot of money…put simply, we don’t trust it.However, what the BBC has always done best - without a shadow of a doubt - is sport. F1 is well worth 40 Jonathan Ross’s

Put simply, there is a reason for why when there is the same World Cup football match on the BBC and ITV, 20 million choose to watch it on the BBC and seven watch it on ITV (and they’re all drunk).

Likewise, I am very glad the greatest sport in the world is coming back to the BBC. After 12 years of domination by German and Spanish drivers on ITV the sport is now on the verge of Lewis Hamilton becoming the most dominant driver in F1’s history, ITV have decided to give it up. That says as much about the logic which goes on behind the scenes at ITV as it does about Bernie Ecclestone’s desire to keep the sport out of the hands of Sky. The lifeblood of F1 is the television exposure granted to sponsors - Bernie Ecclestone does not want audiences of 1.2 million on Sky Box Office.

F1 is also a motorsport business and is the crown jewels of one of the few global industries that the UK dominates. Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire are the carbon-fibre valley of the motorsport industry. The governments of emmerging supernations such as India, China and Singapore want to pay billions to be part of it, and pay millions to an already cash-rich sport for the privilage of holding grand prixs in their cities. It puts their country on the map.

When the government is asked to cough up 50p to keep the ferris wheel at Silverstone oiled, it coughs and splutters with indignation not seen since the US was asked to stop killing people in Iraq. To the UK government, to pay an already cash-rich sport actual money to ‘bail it out’ (as it uniquely sees the situation) is the height of cheek. It thinks the grand prix can pay for itself and it thinks ITV can afford to show F1 for as long as it likes.

The reality is - the demand and the benefit to the countries it graces is so high, the market rate for F1 coverage and races is as high as Bernie wants it to be. Why should the UK have something for free, when there are many other countries trying to snatch the crown jewels of motorsport away from us? If the English government would finally wake up to the fact that in order to keep something precious it has to be treated well, we might yet see a future for the British Grand Prix and a celebratory stance towards the BBC’s brave decision to take up the F1 television rights by the horns, creating a innovative schedule involving unparraelled internet coverage, interactive digital TV coverage and the kind of commentary and uninterrupted live race footage Murray Walker would have been proud about.

Dear Government. £40 million is less than £1 per person for 4 years of F1 coverage. I am much less angry about this £1 which allows me to follow the sport I love closer than ever before, than I am about the £400 you take out of my pay packet every single month of the year, for the rest of my life.Dear Government F1 is not free, F1 feeds a multi-billion pound motorsport industry of which England is at the centre of - if you want to keep it (and the tax) then fucking shut up.

And to all those MP’s who have as much foresight as a jewish willy (or am I thinking of something else? When it comes to MP’s its hard not to think of dicks) - try thinking about the £400 a month I hand over just to live and breath, before threatening by enjoyment of the greatest passion of my life for the sake of £1 over 4 years.

Dear Government know your place. You have bigger things to get right than castrating the BBC’s spending - how about removing the chavs from our street and fixing our hospitals and schools for a start.

James’s heart is eating him out. Jealous thoughts and only brick and plaster to express them too. He smashed his fist on the wall so hard it cracked his bones. The pain still hadn’t gone so he butted his head on the wall once more and it made no difference. He tried to intellectualise it. The more he thought about it the more his head hurt to the point where finally the physical pain overtook the heart pain.

In a fit of anger one day he took out his car and drove it down a twisty road in the dark, and he was going so fast that the tyre burst and he juddered to a stop in a brick wall, knocking himself unconscious. When he awoke a ghost from the past was staring at him through the twilight, and approached him.

“James…stop”

The ghost asked James what he was doing and why he hurt so much but James couldn’t say why. So the ghost lifted the twilight and took James back to a moment some time ago where he was a young lad in a night club. James was drunk (or maybe dazed from his car crash) but out of the blurry corner of his eye he saw his friend dancing with two girls, so he went to dance too and in what seemed like seconds later he was walking down the street away from the night club talking to her. They talked about their favourite places and a shared love of Joy Division. The ghostly presence of James and his phantom guide looked on from behind at the two figures walking off into the night.

The ghost asked James who the girl was, but he couldn’t remember. So the ghost moved 2 weeks into the future where James sat in his local pub watching his beloved football club on the TV. She walked in and glanced at James, but she didn’t seem as interested before - texting on her mobile for most of the time, while James concentrated on the football. But James looks on and remembers he felt disappointment. Then the ghost withdrew slightly from Jame’s side, and to his horror a man he recognised as a friend arrived to greet her, and they were clearly close - already.

James was now alone, watching his past self sit passively. James shouted at his past self, willing him to move and to intervene but he did nothing but watch the football. He jumped up and cheered as his team scored. The present day James sank into his seat dejected, and at that moment the ghost appeared holding a beer.

“Here have this”

The ghost advised James to cheer up and that it all just didn’t matter. “Why?” said James, irritably. “Because at this point you didn’t even love her that much, don’t you remember?” It seemed strange now, but James agreed. Then a door at the back of the pub opened up and the ghost led James out into a cold winters night. Around them were drunk men, some of them in gangs and shouting at the top of their lungs. “What has caused all this?” asked James, and the ghost said “unrequited love”.

Then the rain fell, and all around the streets became quiet. Then the ghost pointed toward a bus stop on the other side of the street. “Look, James”

James looked on, his sad eyes digesting the scene before him. She was embracing the other man.

James was badly shocked and took his anger out on the ghost. But his punches just flailed through his misty spectre, and James fell to his feet and sobbed. “I didn’t even have a chance to get to know her!”

“Of course you did”, said the ghost. And as if time had speeded up they now stood outside a gig. James heard the familiar music of Joy Division from inside the hall, and he looked toward the entrance watching the ghost slip inside through security without a ticket. To the right, she was there. His friend, at least for tonight.

The ghost sat backstage with Ian Curtis and talked about the afterlife. While James watched his past self eagerly awaiting the band to play. She chatted to him and he laughed at her sense of humour, and at all the same moments present James smiled too - but with a slightly sadder heart.

Ian Curtis entered the stage and just as his hand touched the mic, everything faded to black. The ghost was now back by the side of Jame’s crashed car…

And James was bent over the steering wheel, dead.

I went out to get some tea after work today, with only one glove on. About 1 hour later in Tesco I thought I’d lost one of my gloves in a shop or something. So I tracked back through the shops asking if they’d seen a black and yellow glove. What a waste of time.

In one of the shops I bought a DVD starring Helen Mirren. It was a film I’d already owned but I liked it so much I decided to by the two disc version with new extras. I pulled it out of the shelf and noticed it’d been signed by Helen Mirren, in felt tip pen. Not a waste of time that find! The staff had a laugh, saying they’d seen it as well but didn’t know if it was real. The felt tip pen is real, it overlaps some of the embossed text and a bit of the paint is scratched off where she signed it. It must be worth more than £6 on eBay. It just about makes up for the glove thing because I’d be damned if I was going to accept losing a £4 H&M gloves as a matter of course. It’s my jewish blood.

On Saturday I met up with my French friend Anna which was great, then the next day met Juliette for a Spanish film at the corner house which was also very good. Not a waste of time.

I haven’t seen Kristina for a while, she’s probably walking around the Peak District with Dan.

I’ve been doing a bit of eBay lately. eBay Tip Number 12 - never do deals with Stevie Wonder. I had bought all sorts of stuff, some to sell at a profit. But when is life ever that simple in the world of me? All in all there is £3810 worth of equipment, let me now list their faults:

On the Sony FX1 camcorder the next morning after picking it up a huge splodge of dust appeared INSIDE the vacuum sealed lens effecting the picture.
On the Sony PD170 camcorder the tape door doesn’t open when commanded to, it just clicks and you have to peel it open with a finger nail.
On the Sony PD150 camcorder the tape head needs a service because its FUCKED
On the MacBook Pro the battery causes the computer to randomly shut down after about 2 minutes when running on a full battery charge

So first, to the bloke who sold me the Sony FX1. I find it hard to believe that aliens deposited moon powder in a sealed lens on the morning after I bought it. I find it even harder to believe that he didn’t spot the dust when he was using it and thought *gosh* I better find some mug to buy my camera before it gets even worse and obvious to spot. And so to the bloke who sold me the MacBook Pro, “who only ever used it to watch DVD’s”, I can first recommend to you that the next time you feel like spending £1700 on a DVD player, Tesco sell some awfully nice portable DVD screens for £70. Secondly, if you ever bother to unplug your £1700 laptop and use it as a portable computer, like it was designed to be, you may notice it is knackered. Don’t sell it to me.

Oh, the list goes on. Cash Generator is a shop where the testing staff are so blind I once bought a camcorder from them for £70 which I later realised was completely broken. They refused to refund it so a week later I sold it back to them for £80. A week after that I went in and there it was in the cabinet. Well, I have a tip for Cash Generator too. When you have a camcorder worth £1300 in your possession don’t under-value it so much that you end up selling it for £700, and if you do at least point out to your customer the fact that it is about to fall apart at any moment - much like your business. They wouldn’t recognise a diamond if it hit them on their heads, sharp side first. They wouldn’t recognise an expensive camcorder if it was brought in fresh off the set of the latest Spielberg production. And likewise they wouldn’t recognise a fault in one of their items if it was brought in by a chain-saw wielding zombie clutching the blood splattered remains of a Hi-Fi.

Me - well, I’m just unlucky. I seem to have a fetish for faulty products. Why, even last night in the middle of the night at 4am a large piece of massonary fell off the beautiful office building next to my bedroom window making such a large crash it woke me up. I assumed it was my TV falling through it’s glass stand and proceeded to worry about this all night which prevented me getting back to sleep. Until 3pm the next day I still hadn’t been in my lounge for fear of finding a £600 plasma screen lying face down on my floor with liquid crystal oozing out around it, like a murder scene from an Eastenders episode.

I have a writers bug at the moment. Well - thats a horrible term to describe a talent…let’s call it an outburst of genius. You will soon see, when I release my story about wolves to the world. I have also written a song, about time wasters.

As I look out of the window there are cones and banners around the pile of rubble now. As I look out of the window I notice it fell where noisy smokers often gather. I lucky escape for them I feel, it’s shame they won’t be so lucky when it comes to the cancer.

Or buying on eBay for that matter.

Now, if anyone knows any more blind people with 10 days left to live - I’d be happy to sell them my cameras along with my signed Helen Mirren DVD.

I am the time waster
I’ll waste your time and time is money
I’ll waste that too

Money is energy
And energy cannot be destroyed
Just reproduced for somebody else

How they use it
Oh that really depends
On how much they spend

I am the time waster
I’ll waste your time and time is money
I’ll waste that too

#She’s gonna play you for a fool - she’s just a little tease - she’s a femme fetal#

Or, when sheer greed is facilitated and encouraged by society. A rant by Andrew Reid. First you have the banks where a billion quid just isn’t good enough. They want £2 billion in profits and then they want to double that and triple it every year, and that means taking huge risks. So then they take huge risks and fuck us ALL up the arse.

Then there is Heather McCartney. It’s ironic that there is a Beatles song called Taxman…back in their 20’s they were more concerned about the government taking all their money, I’m pretty sure they didn’t see their girlfriends in quite such a negative light. How things have changed for Paul McCartney!

Apparently, since marrying millionaire Paul McCartney and having a daughter, Heather’s become accustomed to living like a millionaire - even though it was Paul McCartney who was the millionaire, not Heather. Because lest we forget Paul was in a band called the Beatles and Heather is famous for having one leg.

Thats a big discrepancy but the judge seems to think she deserves a £25 million divorce settlement so she can continue living like a millionaire. Oh no I’m sorry, my mistake - it’s to bring up a 4 year old girl who needs to be a millionaire as well. So it’s not enough for this little girl to have just one millionaire parent, she has to have two! What is she going to do - eat golden rusks? Watch Nickelodeon on a 108 inch Plasma screen? Maybe the money will help soften the blow of realising that due to her mum being a gold digger, her parents will hate each other for the rest of her life.

But unlike Heather Mills, the banks don’t just take from one rich old millionaire who sang “All you need is love” and “There’s one for you, nineteen for me. ‘Cause I’m the divorcée”

They take from us all and then they piss the money up the wall!

When the sun is shining they’ll be quite happy to give you lots of money, along with a polite note saying…”just pay it back when you can, it’s OK no rush!” But when the clouds move in and the sun dips behind the black mountains, the banks turn into self-serving psychopaths with backs of bloodhounds sent out across the land to get back what they’re owed with interest. The hounds of debt will sink their teeth into your flesh until you have none left. And if you’re lucky enough to afford the food to replenish the flesh on your vulture ravaged back, as soon as you manage to stagger to your feet again they’ll declare that you no longer have a job because the world’s economy has gone up the shitter.

Before it all gets out of hand I suggest the banks are put under stricter controls for lending to cretins who can’t afford to pay back the money, and I suggest tighter controls to protect millionaire musicians from the grasping claws of femme fatales with spoilt daughters to bring up in the lap of luxury.

If I was Prime Minister I’d put it through right now. But it’d be too late to save Paul McCartney and the rest of the world’s population from greedy people.

*Cut*

It’s 2028 and Heather Mills is having dinner with her daughter. Outside there are riots and people stealing bread, and on the radio crackles an old Beatles song. Taxman. Over the noise, the daughter peers across the table to Heather and says “You know, it’s been 20 years and I never once saw you together with my dad, and now he’s dead.” And Heather replies: “Shut up…if it wasn’t for my hard work in court you’d be living with the paupers outside, scratting around for food!”

I am no longer the man I used to be. I am turning to God.

There are many things about the world we live in today that drain our spirituality and dampen our spirits. And due to so many people having lost their spirituality already, when the world crashes down around my ears at least I’ll have God by my side.

When someone as wise as Bob Dylan can admit to a minister in the 1970’s that “Yes he did in fact want Christ in His life” then we all must give in sooner or later. The sooner the better.

Being a strong believer in science I have often questioned the likelihood of the universe being created by God. I wondered why Christianity is still such a powerful force with so many followers, after all it dates back 2008 years which is a long time for any culture to stay relevant. Not even The Beatles have been around for longer than half a century, but Jesus has been with us since year zero. I wondered what happened to all the non-believers, and thought back to my understanding of evolution. They’re all dead.

Struck down with sexually transmitted diseases, struck by lightening, hit with bubonic plague, starved to death or crushed with broken hearts. The survivors survived for a reason and the reason was religion.

Religion hasn’t changed for 2000 years but neither has human nature. What’s to prevent a similar massacre or revolution happening today? Already you see the genesis of it, everywhere. But mainly in “God’s kitchen” - Africa. Disease, corruption, immorality and broken families. The last time this happened religion was created to intervene and it helped those who believed in it and followed it to ride out the storm. Left to our own devices we’d soon end up in the ditch.

With my newfound belief I already feel older and wiser. I want the humanity to come flooding back in!

Ring ring. Heeelo. This is a automated vooice maaail message for Andreeereid. Please call 0870-it’s-a-rip-off urgently to pay your council tax. (Sound of shotgun cocking) Or we’ll come and evict you.

Some people are rock stars. Some people are fighter pilots. Some people are astronauts. I am a person who gets annoyed by automated phone lines.

At this rate I’ll be on Watchdog filmed in my living room, winging and whining about how difficult it is to pay my postal orders into the bank because all the staff have been replaced by Windows ‘95 PCs on caterpillar tracks. But moan I will - this is my therapy. If I didn’t write a blog I’d be rampaging around Manchester City Council HQ setting fireworks off on people’s desks while they work.

So in the name of ‘efficiency and optimisation strategies’ it has finally come to pass. The line of command to those in positions of power within the companies who are in a position of power over YOU is now so long it stretches out of the door, across several fields and as far as a giant perimeter fence manned by machines featuring lasers for eyes….bleeping ominously and asking you kindly to ‘press 3′.

At least this was the experience today when I wanted to query a few things regarding the whereabouts of all-me-money. You see, some people had taken it and I didn’t like it. So first of all I rang the council and asked where my money had gone. The robot phone system didn’t know. It just kept telling me to press 3. The real actual living human didn’t know either. She thought her boss might have it but wasn’t sure because she was being outwitted by an abacus. She asked her ’supervisor’ but she didn’t know and the supervisor’s boss was in fact just a big beige box on an intranet network. Meanwhile upstairs the architect of all this sat in his penthouse overlooking the Manchester sky line, sipping his champaign in blissful stress free silence and clarity.

Meanwhile over at eBay apparently I owed them £54 quid. Turns out I hadn’t paid my sellers fees on an account I don’t use. In fact said account had been bleeping at me electronically for the past 2 months but being human I hadn’t noticed it. I at least expected the courtesy of a phone call. Apparently, it took a whole debt recovery company with 6000 staff to make that leap of contact with me and even then it was with me-mum.

She pointed me in the direction of a phone number and when I rang it I got so annoyed at the person on the other end she hung up on me. So I had to ring back and apparently I also had to pay £16 for the privilege of the nice debt recoverer recovering eBay’s money that I didn’t owe them from MY wallet. And because this was written in some terms & conditions stated in silent Morse Code nested within a 12 thousand page document at a secret link on the eBay site I had “already agreed” to pay the £16 on top of the £54 I already owed. Maybe I was drunk when I agreed, or maybe I dreamt it and sleep walked out of the door, down the M6 and left into Surrey where I signed a piece of paper in my own blood stating that “If anyone wants to rip me off royally then please go ahead”.

Surely it can’t all be good for business, this pissing people off constantly with moronic humans and even more moronic robots?

Well I went into my bank HSBC the other day. I say a bank, it was more like a hen farm with a bemused scarecrow perched upright in the middle of it directing the hens to the correct cage by virtue of spinning on the spot. Cluck cluck! Not wanting to bundle a wedge of £500 in £20 notes into a metal box that looked like a fridge from the moon in Wallace and Gromit I decided I wanted to give the money to a PERSON. And so my quest began, to boldly go where no amount of £60 per month interest rates on your outstanding credit card balance can get you. To FIND A CASHIER.

When I arrived at the other branch two of the cashiers had been bricked up, plastered over and a life-size advert hung there - of a man smiling. I didn’t realise it wasn’t a real man until I had my nose pressed against the wall waffling innately into the middle distance about wanting to give the bank £500. It was with much embarrassment that I finally joined the cue only to find that the remaining cashiers were serving about one person every leap year, and then only on February 29th. Behind them was a hive of activity, people everywhere I swear! They were all filing papers and operating machines.

30 minutes later and I was so angry I felt like plugging my iPod into the ears of the man in front of him and playing Tina Tuner at full blast while gently licking the back of his neck in order to progress. Eventually I got to the front of the cue and had previously considered jacking it in at the last minute and striding up to a paying-in machine, sending my £500 into a dark oblivion of flashing red lights and a trap door that shuts so violently it makes the till from Open All Hours look like a Venus fly trap.

I handed my £500 to the cashier and she said I hadn’t filled the date in on the paying in slip. Apparently I had to do this before she could take my money and put it in her pocket. So I did this and she counted the money and then said that in fact I had £10 less than I thought I did and would I mind writing ‘I AM A THICK PILLOCK WHO CAN’T ADD UP’ on the back of the paying in slip before signing it with the blood of an ox sacrificed on the 5th Sunday of lent by pagan virgins in a remote village called Gohard.

Sometime later, after having missed an hour of work for the pleasure, I turned on my screen to see that HSBC had announced their profits were up from $22 billion to $24 billion but oops they’d lost $17 billion down the back of the sofa but never mind because we’re still $2 billion up from last year despite the banking sector being awfully impoverished and malnutritioned because of those silly rednecks in Ohio not keeping up with the mortgage payments on their trailer park trailer made out of rusty coke cans.

There is something seriously wrong with this world.

Overactive imagination? Well try this for size:

In order to avoid refurbishing the Twin Towers of 9/11 a plot was hatched to destroy the towers instead. So to avoid the expense of fitting new carpets, desks from Ikea and new water dispensers the owners conspired with the US government to fly two planes into the towers, with people in the planes, and 5000 people in the buildings.

No this isn’t something that a mad tramp just shouted at me, it was the actress Marion Cotillard who has just won an Oscar. Make of that what you will.

In the words of Oasis “get a grip on yourself it don’t cost much!!”

—————

Sketch City is an urban street art gathering, where artists in Manchester come together under one big beer fuelled umbrella every month at Contact, to draw, paint and drink beer. Whilst this happens excellent music from talented DJs ricochets out all around them. My mate Sam and I have been filming the events to create promotional videos for Sketch City’s three events this month…

Sketch City (February 17th)
Hoya Hoya (the Sketch City club night)
Upperspace Galllery (Opening Night!)

…the biggest and busiest month in it’s history. While all the stuff is being edited here is our first promo video filmed at Sketch City on 17th February. World famous DJ Scruff put in an appearance but I have no idea if the DJ in our video is in fact DJ Scruff or if we missed him due to getting too pissed up and dropping our cameras.

Links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2wC9BOBVsU | www.sketchcity.co.uk | www.mrscruff.com