Cat flaps and cardboard boxes

Life has been untypically kind recently and I'd like to give thanks.

It started three years ago, and I'd just called my boss a cunt. The truth is I owe him. Owe him, but I don't like him still; he always was and is and will always be a cunt. But cherish the cunt. It took an almighty cunt to make me realise I shouldn't be working for a bunch of cunts employing a cunt to make my life miserable.

Message ends.
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Location:Trentside,Beeston,United Kingdom

Horse, Andrew Neil and my cats.

Today is a sunny day, still cold, but bright.  I feel the greatest reward will be to the plants.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, just.  PMQ’s today was missable.  The Daily Politics quite watchable, only because of the nice lady from Holland, Sophie.  What I enjoyed most was how normal she seemed, a normal lady, casually discussing European lifestyles, the global decline of natural resources, and a crisis not of currencies but of leadership.  She was pretty fit, too. 

Her counter-punching guest was some grey-haired stuff-n-nonsense UKIP type – a real twat – going on about foreigners telling him what to do.  He interrupted Sophie more than once, and she told him politely not to speak while she was speaking, which seemed fair and reasonable.  Then I realised that just about any figure in British political life could have sat opposite Sophie and seemed at least as ridiculous; it’s a type, and of this type we have a lot.

I know this because I was one.  An argumentative only-child, in a single-parent family.  I don’t suppose all single-parent only-children are argumentative, but I was. I started as a child whose mother voted Conservative and spoke only English, of a northern sort.  Her family, being northern, all voted Labour.  They were Trades Unionists, and caught buses for a very long and unfashionable time.

It was unfashionable being a Tory at school, but I was one, and probably the poorest Tory boy in the school.  But I was one.  I made up for my isolation by being opinionated and attention-seeking, regrettably racist and in favour of hanging.  “I’ll hang him myself” I said to a group of six-formers.

How do I live with that? Man. 

I put it down to being misguided.  Nowadays we ought to call it bad parenting.  We are biologically at least half of all we are.  Not just the stuff, but the memories you have of having things done to you, and being unable to stop them happening.  For at least a decade. Then a decade or two of rejection.  The last decade something of an acceptance, I suppose.  At least a healing. 

I parted with some DNA that become independently sustaining.

I concede, I have to think a lot harder than I used to, but I understand that the harder you think about something, the better the results will be.  It can be difficult to consider many things together.  So much of what is expected is invasive, alien and brutal, and so many of the things we do are affected by what is expected of us: you must choose a gas and electricity supplier, for example.  For fuck’s sake. 

It’s not only my money that pays for the bombs to support our economic franchise. 

I have to think about what’s best for my cats.  We might casually expect to find horse in cat food, I for one would not mind. I’ve eaten ready meals.  If they were able, my cats would choose to live in a world where they won’t get fried in an atomic holocaust.  Cat’s can be choosy animals at best, but you can forgive them for not believing there’s goodness in most pet food.  We don’t ask.  We eat ready meals.

I used to eat chips cooked in refried lard. If my mother had been Polly Toynbee, I might’ve had Herefordshire Lard.  There’s nothing I can do about that, now. 

“I shouldn’t be surprised, Smith, if there’s any meat in this at all.”

And of course, ‘you are what you eat.’ 

Maybe Britons would be better off eating horse.  Anything but shit.

Apple Maps (I can't believe how bad it is)

I used Apple Maps in the beta days, and it's always been awful. You take a bit of rough with the smooth, though, using beta products, and there was enough positivity amongst bloggers that things would get better before the final release, so not to worry.

For a start, this is where I live:





Pretty grey, huh? Actually, I don't live next to a river of liquid mercury; that's the river trent snaking across the nature reserve at Attenborough, a designated SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), frequented by bird watchers, fishermen, ramblers and often British Trust Conservation Volunteers. In the summer many people come and walk their dogs here, or families take their bikes down the towpath. It's a beautiful place, and if you use iOS 6 Maps, you'd hardly even know about it.

Still, a thing don't need to be pretty, so long as you can get from A to B, which is the raison d'être of a Maps app. Yeah, about that ...

Right, like many people I don't own a car. The public transport in the Nottingham area is pretty good, and I can commute to Nottingham on the train, or catch a bus into Beeston town centre for shopping. On Google Maps it was always pretty straight forward to get bus or train times, and they were always accurate. Not so with Apple's Map app.

Lets say I want a bus to Beeston: there's a bus stop a minute's walk away, so lets look for bus times:




Right, it can't do that. And all the apps (another app within the app?) it suggests don't work either. So I need a different maps app.

Ok, let's suppose I actually did have a car. I need petrol. I ask Siri to take me to the nearest petrol station. Here's what I get:




County Stores - where it is taking me to - is a small grocery store. It sells bread, beer, fags, sweets. It has never ever been a petrol station. I reported this fail to Apple 13 days ago, and nothing has changed. I guess they got bigger fish to fry.

Derby road is about 2 miles from me. It has one petrol station. According to the Apple maps app, the petrol station doesn't exist. What's more, it thinks two others do exist on the same road. One has never been a petrol station, the other has been closed for over ten years.

It thinks The Brown Cow is a public house in Beeston - it's been closed for the last five years, and for last year it has been a petrol station. You couldn't make it up.

It's unaware of the train station in Beeston - it was opened in 1839. It's unaware of the train station in Nottingham, which has a population of 690,000 people.

We have no 3D buildings in Beeston, and I can live with that. But there is nothing of substance that's useful in Apple's Maps application to give me any confidence in using it. I can't believe how awful it is. I can't get past how arrogant Apple were to remove the perfectly good Google Maps app on iOS 5. I feel angry every time I think about it, and I honestly think that in Cupertino they couldn't give a crap about me. It's almost like the Maps app shouldn't be that much of a useful part of my phone, that it doesn't matter so much if it's completely unusable.

Or perhaps I should give up on public transport, buy a car that doesn't need petrol, and live with my vision always being in the dark.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Sick cats and accidents

I have come to regard it as a plain matter of truth in recent years, that as one gets older one feels less young and less energetic. The body starts to play up from time to time, it takes a little longer to remember things that have happened, and I am a great deal more cautious when meeting new people. I like to think I'm wiser, but evidence points contrarily. I'd like to think I should have fewer accidents, though again my track record points to there being more of those, and not fewer.

Let's start my anus horriblis by recounting a recent accident, which happened on a friend's birthday drink in the town of Leicester. I fell down some stairs in the wet, and injured my bottom and brain.




There are no pictures of my bruised brain I'm afraid, but suffice to say I was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome, and it hurt for a little over a month every bit as much as my bottom did.

The pain has now gone, and sufficiently not aware of morbidness enough my cat Edward then had a turn which required three appointments with the vet, and cost £284. He had a cat equivalent of a UTI. The vet was uncertain as to whether he would hallucinate, as humans do. As indeed HRH Phil - the nation's favourite racist - perhaps has recently.

Older and now wiser in the ways of insurance, falls and alcohol-related injuries, I thought I should take a moment to set down my recent bleakness. Though heaven knows I have five diaries I can never bring myself to read, tainted with embarrassment as I am and always have been.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Jake Rd,Beeston,United Kingdom

My home, the moon

The air in the bedroom tastes different.  To my imagination, it is the staleness of air
found in a seldom-used storage module on a space station, and it is cold
too.  The cargo is simply not worth
keeping warm.  The air is saturated with
water particles, causing untold damage to the equipment keeping me alive.  Here in my space, no-one can hear you scream,
as you get out of the bathroom, dancing involuntarily because my muscles are
trying to keep me warm, drying quickly on a towel before it becomes frozen stiff,
in a freezing cold storage module, in Beeston, alas. 

The tea I’m drinking is at least not recycled urine, and the
door outside if left slightly ajar won’t depressurize the van, boiling my blood
and sucking out my rather worthless possessions for the most part, out into the
street, which is not space itself but the retirement homes of 10% well-respected
old folk, and 90% others. 

Though this could be life on the moon.  I mean, you could chuck my van on the moon
and inside it would feel little different. 
I might appreciate the houseplants a little more, and get rather fewer
visitors.  There would be no crows on the
moon to peck on the roof at five in the morning, and no one to take away the
rubbish on a Wednesday.  But there are
plenty of craters on the moon to hide rubbish in.  I’d want a more substantial roof, of
course.  And a decent Internet
connection.  So, yeah, where do I sign?

What an escape to imagine.  In New Beeston (you can insert here all the
things you wouldn’t miss about life on earth), about 14 hours of the day would
remain unchanged.  

Cake

Last week I sat next to the bed of a dying woman.  Today I spoke on the phone to another dying woman, tearful she was.  Speaking as someone who finds it difficult/inconvenient to have ‘normal’ relationships with other human beings, I was all the same moved to sympathy.  To any empathic-minded individual, or Buddhist, The Moment when all life’s energies on earth come to the fore makes other stuff seem somehow immaterial.  We all know this, and yet we plod along in life pained to ignore such moments as if they are never going to happen.

Likewise is our ‘global’ economy administrated as if the very worst or least probable estimates of economists, business types and so forth, are so unthinkable we choose to ignore them; they are inconvenient truths best not thought about really.  We borrow off the magical new equity in our homes, and borrow to the very maximum of our credit ratings, to purchase what I shall describe as a dumb-Hollywood lifestyle of blissful ignorance that anything is about to go wrong.  I myself am paying off debts of about five thousand pounds, for things I no longer own or use, things which in the past provided some utility, and helped our economy to grow, and kept Chinese people in work.  Perhaps if I hadn’t those same Chinese people –sick off their communist lot – might have overthrown their peculiar democracy, and the world would have been a better place?

Anyhow, what I’m moved to write about this evening is the idea of responsibility.  Those of you who know me well have all heard my ranting about our peculiar Democracy, and how foolish it is to let idiots have the vote.  We debate who are the idiots, of course, and I have generally concluded how much life would be better if we were governed by an infallible computer program.  But it seems to me that our progress is only real if it is sustainable, otherwise we’re all back in the shithouse eating dung, and swatting off corrupt and drunken landowners whilst feeding a family of illiterate dung foragers.  Ours is a life as fragile of the few miles thick bit of atmosphere that prevents all life on earth vaporising into space, and I wonder how much this new economic and political crisis has really made the human race think about their actions, their future and their own responsibility.

It is why I salute the #occupy protestors, even though they remind me that too much conspiracy over-complicates the simplest message they have too echo: there is a moral dimension to money, and the human condition – greed in particular – is one which must be regulated beyond our instincts.  Consider the gift of security alongside the very real fact of dying, do it every minute of every day, be mindful of it.  The sickness of selfishness – perhaps product of upbringing and probably little else – should be treated in the same way as paedophiles should be treated, diseased and disregarded folk that they are.  It’s time to take collective responsibility for the actions we as individuals are responsible for, and to empathise with every other person we don’t know and understand.  For me, that means trying to understand why bankers love money, why politicians love authority and status, and how the Queen looks when she’s wiping her arse.  And more besides.

My point, I think, is that so much is missing from the many important decisions taken on earth because our societies are unused to the consideration of others, and nowhere is this more apparent than in economics and politics.  We have a massive slice of cake, flavoured with saccharine, we love it and want more and yet fundamentally it is disgusting. 

Of all the decisions I have to make tomorrow, number one is that I want no more cake.