Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

For the last 6 months a man called Dave has been trying to organise a communal party in my flat.

On his Facebook group and A4 poster ads stuck around the lift entrance, he calls for the community to come together like they did when our grandparents were young.

Spare a thought for those people now they’re in their 80’s. Most of them now live alone and are largely ignored.

Anyway, Dave got his way at Halloween, with 4 friends and his wife turning up in the court yard. To give him credit, he did a good job with the lights and costumes. I am sure poor Dave was not oblivious to a hundred warmly lit faces peering out toward his socially embarrassing fail of a party, but the fact that 50% of the residents chose to stay in the warmth of their own living rooms rather than socialise in the cold of the court yard cannot be understated. The other 50% visited the dark piss swept landscape of Manchester for a knees up, where danger lurks on every corner, where there are shadowy Albanians selling fluffy bunny ears and there are roving knife equipped teenagers stabbing you for no reason at all.

So clearly comfort was not an issue. But why wasn’t the allure of building bridges with a set of complete strangers at Halloween whilst dressed as a witch not so appealing to 100% of the residents in The Linx?

Well, in the olden days of our grandmothers, they lived on terraced streets.

Now we live inside contemporary art installations or battery cells which power local government offices like a hamster wheel.

Purely by design, there is no chance community spirit is coming to The Linx. I once walked up 4 flights of stairs to avoid someone in a lift.

Stepping into the silver metal box must have seemed like being in a David Bowie space rocket inspired music video for our grandparents. For us, it is a 5 second conversation initiation machine. Our grandparents, when not cheering on spitfires, did not have to shout ‘hey up’ at their neighbour only for two giant steel doors to separate them moments later. So now I have taken to bring completely silent in the lift. It is a far cry from when I visited my friend at the top of a tower block in Crewe populated almost entirely by people over 90.

He did, I admit, live on the 10th floor, which gave us more time to talk, but there was a genuine warmth of conversation and a genuine pleasure in interacting with an old person who smelt of piss. There wasn’t the same self conscious ’shall i say anything…nah’ feeling you get in a modern apartment lift. You’d simply mention the weather and feel happy. But now most people in The Linx lift of doom are pretty morose anyway, like they’ve just come home from work. If I rode the lift up and down 7 times completely naked I doubt it would elicit much of a reaction from somebody if they’d just been numbed by slowly reading emails and Facebook for 8 hours solid.

But things are getting a bit dicey in the Western World. The collapsed economy combined with the fact that I keep dropping the hard drive which stores the last 10 years of my life has taken the fun out of everyday life.

We need some way of bringing back some semblance of being human. Because at the moment, I feel like a set of fingers and a big arse with a seat welded to it. Soon I might even feel completely at one with the wheels on my office chair and start taking it for rides down the street, or adopt it like a dog and fling it around on a lead.

Dave has clearly been driven mad as well. He prints his self important Facebook posters with a reference number in red ink at the bottom. Why? So he can track his operation like a communications department would coordinate the election of an US president?

In the olden days we also used to have a relationship with the postman. And I don’t just mean in terms of next door’s MILF sucking his cock. If you had that impression from ‘relationship’ than I’m afraid you’ve been using the internet too much. There is nothing wrong with having a relationship with the postman.

Unfortunately my postman changes so often, the last time I answered the door I shuck my head from side to side and went ‘bububububububa’.

For a few days we also had a postman who looked like Bin Laden delivering small bombs. He scared me so much I once refused to let him in when he appeared on the video intercom like an impromptu News24 statement from Al Qaeda, despite the fact he had the reassuring Royal Mail crown behind him on his van, it looked more like an Afghan flag with crossed swords.  There was something about his demeanour that made it almost certain that he would one day run into an airport terminal on fire.

Our grandparents didn’t have to put up with frightening characters like this, with a whole news story driven backstory attached to their faces like the imaginings of a rambling paranoid schizophrenic xenophobe.

When the milk bottles were delivered by a Pakistani, they didn’t have to worry that he was part of a terrorist cell in East Germany. They said hello and began a conversation about the weather. Then over the next 30 years the Pakistani milkman had a family who were subject to constant racial abuse and the innocence faded from his immigration experience.

And now Muslims are being tarnished with the brush used to paint the backdrop to the Al Qaeda videos.  Ironically, any sense of patriotism to the UK is being tarnished with a brush held by Nick Griffin. When the US were attacked on 9/11 they salvaged the scrap metal from the twin towers and built a warship called USS New York from it. When the UK was attacked with bombs on the London transport network, we shot a Mexican electrician.

None of this makes sense. And with the disintegration of the state comes the breakup of Coronation Street.

Life has become to resemble the buildings built to accommodate it.

We each have our own little box and as long as it’s alright, the box next door could be on fire and we wouldn’t care.

Dave is depicted as a looser when in actual fact he’s fighting like Braveheart for what he believes in.

And you haven’t seen the half of the battle yet. Human-kind isn’t going to drown under a sea of concrete, junk and computer screens without a fight.

Or, for that matter, a quick stop and chat about the weather.

There was a man in American who believed that God would cure his sick daughter.

Unfortunately, he was so steadfast in this belief that he failed to call the doctor, and she died.

A wake up call swings like a wreaking ball into his belief in the healing power of Our Kind Lord. Or not.

He ended up in court, where the judge sentenced him to 25 years in jail for murder. The man is seen smiling as the verdict is read out, thinking that ‘God is really testing him this year’.

The next day, another man arrived in court accused of downloading 30 songs from the Internet. The music industry lawyers had decided to make an example of him, in the belief that he had committed $14 million worth of damages. The judge ‘took a lenient line’ and decided only to fine the man $700,000. If the verdict stands after his appeal, he will file for bankruptcy. He is accused of downloading songs by the Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day, one of whose albums is called American Idiot.

The guy was listening to the lyrics of American Idiot, while a lawyer filed the case against him on behalf of the multi billion pound music industry he’d so damaged.

Don’t want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It’s calling out to idiot America.

And so the previous generation wallows in failure and wilts in the white heat of technology, and the new generation seems pathetically trapped in the wreckage.

False choices abound, from the fleeting moments spent with your girlfriend on holiday watching the blood red sun sink into the cool blue ocean before your morning flight back to nowhereland, and a shadowy existence spent chained to a chair behind a desk, prostituting your brain and your slowly deteriorating fattening body for the financial gain of a few.

False choices, like democratically elected governments who are all the same and who rule between themselves as the decades pass by with not so much a flicker of real change or freedom.

False choices, like the weekends littered with drunks and drinking, pointless shopping unwittingly feeding the machine which traps us here in the first place just for the sake of a moment’s entertainment, for the lack of anything meaningful to do.

False choices, like going to work or staying at home. The false choice of too much Western freedom.

Furrowing my brow I thought… there must be something in each one of us which is waiting to get out and run free, something not exploitable for financial or political gain. Something pure and innocent. Something so incredible that others can only look on and enjoy what we have to offer.

So I watched a film called with Joey about a typical Japanese family, who have two son’s one a young boy aged 11 and an older 18 year old. The father loses his job but doesn’t tell anybody, and pretends to go to work each day. There he meets a friend from school, whom is doing exactly the same. Meanwhile, the young son runs through the compact twisting Tokyo streets and he spots an old keyboard in the junk at the side of the road under a railway bridge. He brings it home and plugs it in but no sound emanates from the speaker-less Roland MIDI synthesiser. Inspired, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, he goes to take piano lessons whilst his family on one single day collapses around him, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand.

4 months later, and the young son is at a music school and performs a sonata in an exam, watched by his parents. He’s a musical genius and the crowd gathers around as the sonata concludes, there is only silence, wet eyes and open mouths.

The little genius then trots off with his dysfunctional family.

I downloaded this film via Bit Torrent.

Come and find me, you stupid fucking American, British, French, Belgian, Swiss, Chinese, African, Argentine Idiots.

You can hear it in the beat they march to
And you can feel the earth shake when they start to dance
You can tell by the way they move you
It’s not murder, it’s an act of faith, baby.

Joey is reading a magazine called ppaper, and she tells me about an article about Facebook and Google, and the Internet and how it should tie us altogether to be closer, but it goes onto say that it just isn’t happening.

After the latest awful redesign Facebook has now officially become rubbish. The holy water is just not there any more.

Socialising and friendship has become a TV show. There is something not quite real about this brave new world of passive virtual friendships, and I am completely sick of Facebook and Twitter. They should bring people closer together, but Twitter is only popular because it has a few candid celebrities on it.

Why be passive when you can be actively involved in your friendships? Why just sit back and watch like a voyeur would watch a porno?

Most people have no choice. Whilst at work, maybe you have a boring moment and maybe check Facebook for a few seconds. You pet your virtual dog, post something you think is witty, browse some photos of your friends getting drunk in a dark room, then you leave work late and don’t have any time to spend with your real dog or your real friends and family. I don’t like the way this use of technology is going.

The blame doesn’t lie at our door, it’s just the way the world is going. It’s quite scary really, how it’s taken advantage of our nature.

Rather than broadening and enriching our lives, some things are starting to eat away at it. Rather than meeting face to face we’re trapped on the end of a cable, and whilst Joey and I use it as a life line until I go to Taiwan in May, the surprising thing is the much shorter cable between one side of a town and the other splits the neighbourhood, empties the pubs and flats and sucks any debate or social interaction into electronic oblivion.

I am glad I have met a girlfriend who sees the world as clearly and as logically as I do.

The world may be in trouble, but we’re okay. We are now freed.

4AM, Swire’s voice begins to shake as he tries to counter the argument. “No, it’s not true… it’s not fair to suggest that I…”

But his friend is impertinent as he stomps past the window, his head pointed always directly in Swire’s direction. “Yes!” he would shout with more stomping around in between. “Yes. Yes. Yes”. By now, Swire regrets offering his deranged acquaintance whisky during their night long conversation.

Swire sits in a powerless hunch and waits to see where the ‘conversation’ goes next. Not forgetting of course, to thumb the security button under the table several times.

His mad friend continues: “Walking around the block watching steamy windows in China town. Lights flash and then go out, just as memories of her do. Climbing barefoot on the hill - watching the clouds on the horizon pulling in still - sunbeams flash and then go out, just as memories of her do…strolling to meet her outside the club and she is there reading her book, concert lights go out and then fade in just as memories of my love do!…”

Suddenly - security guards knock down the locked drawing room door and still Swire’s friend continues:

“Now travelling into some future time, like a journey which will come to nil.”

He’s pulled to the ground.

“I will return to speak to you, Swire! I will return! I will return for you Swire!”

A relieved Swire smiles uneasily as his friend is dragged from the room, still yelling.

Its 4am by now but Swire isn’t ready to sleep, instead he gets into his sports car and travels down through the city, past stubbornly monolithic warehouses and living quarters. He parks his car outside the giant silver tower, a food bank of which he is president.

As the lift rises through the lower decks on it’s way to the top floor, Swire blows circles of smoke from his cigar. One, two, three.

The building is empty, but for Swire, as he strolls to his office. On his desk is a glowing screen, and he sits down on his dark green leather executive chair, with crocodile skin arms.

He counts to himself - one, two three. And presses 3 times on his keyboard adding 3 zeroes to the end of his bank account, before exiting the room and driving calmly back through the city.

The bright lights of his car illuminate a strange object on the road near a bridge over which runs a silent disused train line, he can’t quite make out what it is.

Suddenly it rises like a ghostly spectre, the misty outline of a human.

Some silver ambulances pass Swire in the opposite direction.

Swire slows to a halt and stares in wonder at what he thinks he sees. In a trance like state he slowly opens his drivers door, he steps out and stands with his bewlidered body pointed at the ghost, head hung slightly lower than normal struggling with the bright reflection of his car headlights.

The ghost speaks.

“Mr Swire…”

And Swire recognises the voice even though it’s heavily distorted and low in pitch, slowly he also begins to recognise the misty face.

“I’m not free. Help me Swire…. I’m trapped.”

Lunch time, a busy day at the (house arrest) office, and I pop out to pick up a penguin (parcel). From the wrong branch of the post office. So after going half way to Rochdale I went back into the city centre and to Newton Street, to a post office I didn’t know existed, to pick up my penguin.

In the cue was a dear old lady clutching her credit card. She wanted to pay for her 30 pence stamp with her Visa. She put the card in the wrong way up in the card PIN machine, and then when instructed otherwise put the card into the slot at a wonky angle and less than half way in. She didn’t appear to be very fussed about it, she just looked at the machine assuming it would work, or somehow suck the card in with it’s cheeks, before doffing it’s hat and bidding her good day.

Well, 20 minutes later the spectacle was truly unfolding, as she struggled gamely to put the card into the slot straight and all the way.

Now look - I know that the dear old generation of yesteryear has had to put up with some huge changes in the world…but if all that the frightening new technology I have to deal with in 2050 consists of is a keypad and a slot, I can’t see myself struggling.

If it was a giant robot with arms trying to prod my eyeballs to the back of my skull with big flashing lights on it’s belly to distract me, then fair enough - I might, as an elderly gentleman of 70, struggle a little. But in the post office of 2008 there are no such technological challenges - just a machine with a slot in it for a plastic card.

Call me cruel, call me insensitive, but I feel she should have done better.

It’s not a new thing, I’m sure in the flushes of youth as a toddler she was gamely putting round pegs in round holes, and telling her teacher all about the day she tried putting the triangle block in the square hole and made it fit with a hammer.

Maybe that’s what the elderly need to be equipped with. Not an instruction book or a new brain, but with hammers.

When encountering a unit of machinery that annoys them, they’d simply get out their hammer and mash it in.

It’d be the start of a fight back against technology, elderly mankind against the shiny new machine-race. (Or would that be unacceptable and machin-ist?)

Why only today I had the urge to gather my massive penny jar, take it to the spangly new HSBC at St Ann’s Square, stride up to the brilliant new automatic note scanning paying in bucket machines with a giant smile on my face whilst opening it’s little plastic mouth and pouring my jar of penny’s into the delicate laser guided note dispenser, whilst shouting STUFF THAT IN YOUR GOB YOU FAT LITTLE BASTARD!

Footnote: the parcel wasn’t at the post office after all that. They’ve lost it. I asked the poor foreign postal worker sarcastically if ‘I’d find it on the moon’ but she too me seriously and said no, it was more likely to be back at the sorting office for redelivery.

I recently read Jeremy Clarkson’s blog about how these days you’re not allowed to do anything without getting told off for it. Jeremy, you see, is a bit bitter about having been bollocked several times, most recently for having a drink in a car at the North Pole.

Presumably the health and saftey twits were worried he might run over some school children on their way to the great Ice Palace in their imagination.

I get a constant feeling of dread while alive. Generally it involves the feeling that there is a little munchkin paired with a keyboard sat behind the scenes, collecting data about your every move, ready to pounce when you step out of line.

It’s a bit like the recent thing with Virgin Broadband, snooping on what people download and then sending them a snotty letter in the post saying they risk ending up in jail for downloading an episode of the Two Ronnies.

I have a tip for the media industry: if you leave the door open to your warehouse, don’t expect your stuff not to be nicked. Furthermore if you prevent the sale of your stuff online, through sheer laziness and yesterday’s thinking, don’t expect people to pop down to HMV rather than download it for free in the comfort of their own homes.

In the old days people used to make mix tapes and share them. I imagine this will soon be off limits as well. Not that it won’t be allowed. Here’s the thing… The Man will allow it to happen as the days and weeks pass, but be secretly collecting data in the background. Once he has all the names and addresses of your friends, he’ll arrive at the door with two burley security guards and take you off to jail where you will be bent over a chair and have episodes of Friends rammed up your arse until you bleed. You will never lend Friends episode 12 ‘The One Where Big Brother Shot Me In The Mouth’ to Dave ever again.

It’s a bit like Jeremy Beadle, gluing a £20 note to the pavement outside Woolworths, and laughing as people try to ‘nick’ it. When it finally comes unstuck, rather than reveal himself from behind a wall wearing a mustash and gently prodding and teasing the ‘victim’ in a light hearted Saturday night TV manner, Jeremy instead stays hidden behind the wall, wanking. He then turns into the world’s worse phscyhopath, and follows you home. He puts hidden cameras in your living room and bathroom and the next day, video tape in hand, gives the footage to the police. Then he follows you to McDonalds with an axe, and just as you are about to spend the ‘lucky find’, leaps up behind you with a scream, slicing your skull open.

He then picks up the £20 from the pool of blood, puts your skull on a stick, hammers it into the ground, and warns all the shocked onlookers that stealing £20 from the pavement is just the same as stealing it from a till in the shop.

The police arrive and they all go to lunch together.

If you would like to live in a society like this, just carry on as you are…

Next Monday CSS release their new album Donkey. In a vain belief that some of my money will get to the band, I will happily trot down to Fopp and by the album, jewel case art work and all. I do this for all the bands I admire. R.E.M, Air, Radiohead (via a small donation, because they’re already rich). Recently I even downloaded REM Live in London from iTunes, actually paying £4.99! But these were but a treasured few purchases. Here is a trick the music industry can use.

Rather than rely on a few fans to buy a few CDs every month, why not give every single band’s music away for free. Then, when it comes to people paying their monthly broadband bills, just add £2 on top of every single person’s bill.

Then, when it comes to merchandise, t-shirts, posters, live gigs, etc. watch yet more money come flooding in.

When will the music industry wake up to the fact that selling expensive CDs to only a few thousand fans is the wrong approach in the digital age, and that most people could not care less about most bands, other than a treasured few. And then there is another issue… 

In order to hear the amount of music I want to explore I simply can’t afford to buy 20 CDs a month at a grand total of nearly £200, to fund a music industry whereby 70% of the general public hardly ever buys music. If everyone in the country paid a small amount toward it via their telecommunications bill, wouldn’t this be more productive? Plus, downloading for free allows me to select what my new favourites are from a huge range of bands and so the industry gets back 10x what it would ever make from me buying the occasional £9.99 CD when I buy merchandise and gig tickets for Radiohead, MGMT, REM, The Editors, CSS, etc, etc. Hell, even CSS endorsed milkshakes and rollerskates would be pretty high on my list. It’s the brand effect personified, and I feel closer to a band than I ever would a Puma or Apple.

For the enjoyment CSS and REM give me, I’d happily cough up. To download (without any album artwork) simply some MP3s does not do proper justice to your passion, especially when you wait 3 years in between albums in the case of REM. Some things will always be worthy of my heart and soul, my affection, time and money.

The business interests of out-dated record companies will never be one of these things. 

Do bank staff get annoyed at themselves when they need to use the bank?

Do they have to cue for 50 minutes before they can speak to themselves about loans, credit cards, insurance or soul sales?

A new branch of my bank has opened in Manchester, replacing the old one. It looks suspiciously like the new Barclays on Market St, another new branch in Manchester. A sparkling glass testicle of chandeliers, rounded edges and generally full of piss. Gone are the days when the foyer of a bank was literally full of piss, from homeless people. These new branches are going with the times - they’re now just metaphorically full of piss (and shit).

One of the ‘floor mongs’ walked over to me, pissing as he went. ‘Hello Sir what can I do for you today’, he said in a raspy pissy piss tone. I said I wanted to speak to someone about my credit card interest rate, which has been charging me every month for the past 9 for some money I took out of an ATM in Germany. I said I wanted it back.

Then he brought up the Twat Console. This was like something off a spaceship dashboard (Starshit Enterprick?) and out came the dreaded ticket. First experienced at Vodafone, these twat tickets are basically a corporation’s way of showing what you’re worth. You’re worth a thin bit of paper with 50 minutes stamped on it in cheap ink.

Beforehand, when the bank was a run down palace of plywood and piss, you just walked up to a person and began talking. Now the staff have been given ’self worth’ they sit up stairs in a fancy office playing Snake.

I told him that I wasn’t going to wait 50 minutes, so he went and fetched a woman. The woman stomped over like she was going to be very generous - and spare 5 seconds. I had barely a chance to pause between one sentence and the next when she was walked off, thinking I’d finished. The outcome of that encounter was me sat in front of a phone kiosk with a card in front of me about insurance which I thought had the number for a credit card department on it.

She did at least admit that my interest rate ‘didn’t sound right’.

Oh baby, it sounds right to me. It’s just another day light robbery con trick rip off, the sort the banks do every second of the day* (*apart from Saturday & Sunday). 

Back in September I got my travel money stolen while in Munich, and so got 300 euros out of an ATM in a zoo. I should have paid more attention to the monkeys at the time, waving frantically at me with looks of horror on their faces as I walked over to the machine. The giraffe craned it’s neck over the wall and wailed ‘nooooooo!’. But I did it any way.

Already I had a debt of £2000 on the credit card from buying two cameras to sell on eBay for a profit of £700 each. But for various reasons since those 9 months ago I have never quite coaxed the credit card to zero, never quite strangled it’s neck so it stops breathing, never quite let out all of it’s blood until it shrivels away. Now - despite having paid off around £7000 since then, I have got into the habit of using my credit card as a debit card whenever my bank account is at it’s wits end toward pay day. So for various reasons I’ve probably spent the same amount on it since then, and abracadabra - the debt now sits at £2000.

At the bottom of that stash sits my 300 euros - untouched by the 9000 euros paid off it over 9 months like a crazed dieter who avoids Jaffa Cakes but piles back on the pounds with truffles.

Not only that, but the 300 euros has a much higher rate of interest than the purchases, haunting the card like a bad version of Slimer from Ghost Busters. It just won’t go away.

I had no idea I was creating an invincible ghost when I used that ATM - of course, the banks don’t tell you what will happen, they simply make it up as they go along.

Back to the spangly testicle I went, and this time a man greeted me, who (through some kind of 6th sense) believed the twat ticket console to be ‘wrong’. He said it’s not 50 minutes this time, it’s 35 minutes. “Come back later and bring your ticket code with you”. So I went shopping.

Later I returned. Exactly 30 minutes later with 5 to spare. “Hello, I would like to see The Man”. But apparently I had missed my place. Apparently because I didn’t suffer the torture of staring at grey carpets and pot plants for 30 minutes, I was no longer worthy even of my demeaning twat ticket.

Upstairs I had to go regardless - as they told me to - like a naughty child. I waited and waited and got so impatient I came back down. A different floor mong was there this time. He told me I had lost my place. In the lost place cue.

But he told me to go up again.

Yet another man was up there with a clip board this time. He was checking people’s tickets. He checked mine and said I had lost my place in the lost place lost place cue, and please would I stop shouting and go back down stairs.

I stomped back down and told the man downstairs to go upstairs himself, and explain to the clipboard cretin what was going on. By this point I had wasted an hour out of my day. He came back down and told me to go up. I spoke to the clipboard man and he didn’t know what to do. So I explained everything I’ve just written in this blog….and left.

I am going to have to ring the call centre to ask about my evil credit card shenanigans. After all that, I suspect they won’t give an inch. I also suspect that the reason you have to wait 50 minutes to be served in a branch twice the size as the old one, with twice the staff, is because 80% of the staff are serving Premier Customers who give blow jobs to their bank manager (and pay a monthly fee) while the remaining 20% are standing at the door with clipboards.

Meanwhile the twat ticket console whirrs. 

Anyone yearning to rip up the asphalt and tower blocks replacing it all with shrubbery and grass might be overjoyed to hear that their horticultural dream has just shimmied one step closer.

A scientific model has been created to predict the future of civilisation. It collapses.

Badly.

Not only that but the results seem to tally with known science - facts no less - about how complex systems behave.

In a nutshell it goes like this - a simple society of old would have many separate structures in place, i.e villages, each self sufficient. Very quickly in the last 100 years or so we’ve made a lot of progress since the industrial revolution and are just about to cross the boundary point of where a ‘hybrid’ society changes into a ‘networked’ one. This makes the system so complex and fragile, if any point on the network fails, the whole thing could come crashing down. Our global civilisation now resembles an animal. Randomly chopping off any part of the sheep effects the whole sheep. Depending on how important the part is that you cut off, you might even kill it altogether.

Looking at civilisation like a wounded sheep maybe fun but the following theory isn’t fun at all.

Complexity theory.

Out to give us another kick in the teeth, it deals with energy and the transfer of information around a complex system - like as in our civilisation. The industrial era gave rise to industrialised farming. It’s aim was and still is to increase food production. In turn because it creates a lot of food it supports a much larger growth in population than usual, which in turn requires ever more advanced ways of increasing food production to support the growth. A unsustainable vicious circle but that’s not all…

The larger the population the more you need to improve infrastructure and services as well - which uses yet more food energy. For example if crops fail because rain is patchy build irrigation canals. When they fail through time organise for them to be repaired. When there are too many channels for ad hoc repairs install a management bureaucracy and tax people to pay for it. When they complain invent tax inspectors…and so on. Tax inspectors have to eat their bacon butties at lunch time. The hungry highway men who burn calories maintaining our roads have to replenish their energy by eating too. It’s not rocket science yet the grubby bastards still won’t stop breeding*

If this sounds a lot like modern civilisation you’d be right. For every layer of complexity there is a huge price in energy to pay for it. Sooner or later, as I long suspected would happen, all our energy will be spent simply trying to maintain civilisation’s existing level of complexity - civilisation and the machines end up feeding off us rather than us off them. It’s not science fiction - it’s simply the law of diminishing returns. For all the effort which goes into maintaining food supplies and infrastructure (like roads, oil supplies, factories etc.) there is less energy left over for people to actually live their lives by because you have to feed the system more than it can supply us in return!

Recently there have been a number of signs that we are well on our way to some kind of ‘heat death’ of civilisation. Oil is running out, petrol prices are sky high, global warming is scaring everybody witless and people are becoming less and less satisfied with the way they live their lives in these materialistic and bureaucratic modern times.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to go back to living in mud huts after all. However if you think you’re going to survive the collapse, think again. For while the computer model predicted 90% of the Earth’s population would perish under the rubble of civilisation for some people the living conditions might actually improve.

No longer bothered by tax inspectors or Tesco, farmers might actually get a good nights sleep for once. Maybe the meek really will inherit the Earth.

All it takes to set the collapse in motion is a change in ‘the normal range of conditions’ say the scientists. Sadly they reveal, we have plenty of candidates for that. Terrorism and the war on terror (very energy consuming). The financial / debt crisis. Global warming (and measures attempted to prevent it). Dwindling oil supplies and our reliance on it. The list goes on…but sadly not our shiny modern civilisation.

Goodbye!

* Humour 

There’s a song that goes:

#Everything was going perfectly until
It backfired at the disco#

Well for some it backfired at birth. Gordon Brown reminds me of one such person.

I wouldn’t trust Gordon Brown to operate a door handle, never mind run the country. Having said that, I wouldn’t trust the Tories to protect us from the terrorists any more than I’d trust Basil Brush.

Yet in the midst of all this Punch and Judy political theatre both sides actually have a point. Have you been watching the news recently? If so then read on…

Labour want to protect us from the terrorists by wrapping us up in so much red tape stripping us of so much privacy that we’re no longer targettable - just hollow floating spectres.

The Conservatives quite rightly argue (at least they ’say’ they mean it) about maintaining our basic privacy and freedom but you wonder sometimes if they haven’t yet woken up from the 1960s into the modern world and maybe it’s better to be wrapped in red tape 1984 style rather than in shrapnel, Bloody Sunday style.

Meanwhile the government leaves secret papers and personal data here there and everywhere. Most of them can’t even be trusted to pick up their belongings after getting off the tube, let alone post a USB stick securely. To think they’re going to introduce ID cards and databases makes me shudder. In a futuristic post-human world 200 years from now they’ll be carrying us about on USB sticks and keep dropping people down drains or still leaving our entire ‘being’ on a tube seat. That’s if I’m not getting all confused and in 100 years it’s actually the governors who are going to be USB sticks not the populace. Most of them already have IQs similar to floppy disks…

Whilst that makes me scared, another thing makes me angry. Why should the government snoop on us anyway and who every alowed them to turn England into a big brother house?

I wish they’d all just come clean. Labour are so apt at making me angry and so bad at explaining the facts, while the Conservative party are so good at arguing their cause yet so bad at the science.

Do we need the 42 day detention law, yes or no? Will it help terrorists or just piss everyone off? If we’re going to have a big brother society with a CCTV camera in every bedroom it better be for a reason, or is it better just to be blown up on occasion? In fact, is it better (and cheaper) simply to ignore the terrorists for a few years, stop annoying them with wars and George Bush, and hope they go away?

There is a dire difficulty here - one of civil liberties versus safety and security but at the moment I feel distinctly as if the government is acting like a spying parent present at the playground when they should really be leaving the kids to get on with enjoying themselves, while doing something more important like having dinner ready on the table for when they return.

If Labour is mummy and the Tories are daddy then daddy has gone mental.

He’s talking to himself in the shed at the back of the garden, like Gollum in Lord of The Rings fighting two opinions - one of protecting the public from evil and one of stopping his nasty wife and her spies from entering the shed.

He’s building a big war machine in there that once ready to break out will not only trample over wifey but destroy the entire house and kill the kids.

I find it a repulsive idea that as adults we’ll have all our private communications and data stored on mummy’s laptop.

But I certainly don’t trust daddy to fix it.

I have made a film about the last woman alive. Hilary Clinton is beginning to resemble that character. Rambling to imaginary friends, she drags out the US presidential nominee contest with the more talented Barack Obama to breaking point. It’s a split in the Democrat party, a civil war. Which leads me to Max Mosley who has won his vote of confidence today.

Here is a decision based on common sense, a victory for humanity, a snub to the politically correct corporate machines which put profit before people. Yet the irony is the decision is wrong for the sport, wrong for safety and wrong for all kinds of political & business reasons despite being a victory for common sense over politics.

I refer of course to the world motorsport senate’s vote following their leader’s sex scandal involving 5 prostitutes, the wife of an MI5 agent, a bra-cam and lots of sexy Nazi role playing.

Any one of those ingredients would be enough to base a feature length film on it, but when you have all 4 together it’s no surprise that the sport takes a back-seat in the public imagination, especially considering that the sporting side of F1 2008 mostly revolves around whether or not a ‘flexible-bridge-wing’ counts as a ‘movable-aerodynamic-device’. That’s enough to make a narcoleptic go full circle and stay permanently awake, while everybody else looks on with the wide eyed demeanor of sheer bemusement etched across their faces.

Formula One motor racing used to be about the bravery of the drivers, overtaking on the track, magnificent skill in battle and a host of super fast heroic personalities smoking and drinking their way into the beds of even faster women. Now it’s about who optimises their race-day strategy and car setup best out of 3 drivers. The rest don’t even have a chance because their cars are slower. The end.

So back to the politics - it’s far more interesting. What will happen now that the world motorsport has a Nazi role playing pervert as their figure-head?

First of all, it will spin itself into civil war for no good reasons and lose sponsors. Fained disgust will gush out from the taps of political correctness. The money will drain out of the sport and the car manufacturers will follow. Bernie Ecclestone will have a coronary and the sport will return to a brutal he-who-dares-wins scenario out on primitive tracks. Off it, without the corporate sponsors to schmooze, the drivers will do and say what they like. It will be sheer bliss.

All credit to Max Mosley and his orgy.

In all seriousness, it is admirable that this man had the strength to fight his detractors for justice, common sense - and most of all - safety (not to be confused with political safety - that of saying nothing interesting while smoozing sponsors). Those who seek to undermine him have all ulterior motives for doing so. The American Automobile Association and especially the German motoring body, whom I forget the name of out of sheer disgust (ACDC or something), simply want more power. They see the scandal as a way to legitimately stab Caesar in the back. Their fumbling attempts with the knife having failed, they will now sulk off (the German body has already left the building), put people’s lives in danger (the FIA is responsible for car manufacturers, including those in Germany like BMW, participating in the NCAP road car safety tests) and then attempt to form a break-away group.

In F1’s recent chequered political past, which is more chequered than a chequered flag, it was first the car manufacturers from Japan, America, France and Germany who formed a break away group, threatening to withdraw their teams from F1 leaving just Ferrari competing against a team run by a mouse with technology borrowed from Matchbox cars. The FIA (made up of motoring groups) were on the other-side, persuading the teams to stay and work for the future of F1, because there can only be one F1.

Now that storm has blown over, it’s ironic that the car manufacturers have so many stooges installed within the FIA that they’ve split it in half. Maybe they have got their wish after all and will see their plans come together. Their plans which involve:

a) Turning the world into a giant metal robot where people are cogs in a giant corporate machine
b) Destroying the greatest sport in the world in the vain belief that they can do things better themselves while earning double the money from it (that is to say - ALL the money).

Money and power - will the world ever go back to being ruled by common sense and humanity?

I’m off to play cricket.