The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now, named in honour of that great man Richard Hoggart, will be a collection of absurdities to which I encourage all to contribute.

Any contributions must:
- be true
- have been witnessed by you or related to you by a trusted person
- only be embellished to enhance the original effect, and only if the urge is irresistible
- be linked to a wider theory of why we're all going to hell in a handcart
 

Here's my starter

Scene: a British supermarket (my legal team's advice is that I shouldn't name it, so its initials are M-O-R-R-I-S-O-N-S).

Customer: "I see that your organisation is presently offering to dry-clean 4 items of clothing for what, I must say, is the distinctly reasonable price of £16.00 - that's just £4 an item!"

Deskbound institutionalised automaton jobsworth: "Indeed we are, Madam, and may I say we are proud to do so as a gesture to our customers!"

Customer: "Then I am delighted, for that very purpose and in the spirit you so generously evince, to reciprocate by vouchsafing the requisite number of articles unto your keeping."

DIAJ: "Thank you. Madam ... Ah, I'm afraid that one of them is silken in nature, of material inappropriate."

C: "I quite understand, and thank you for saving me future sartorial empurplement: just the three items then!"

D: "Certainly, Madam! That'll be £17.50."

C: "I beg your pardon?"

D: "That'll be seventeen pounds and fifty pee, please."

C: "Alright, cut the crap: how come it's £16 for 4 and £17.50 for 3?"

D: "The offer is for 4 items, Madam. You only have three."

C: "So you mean you're charging me more for giving you less work?"

D: "The special price is for 4 items, Madam, as our literature clearly explains."

C: “Thank you, and so it does. BUT DO YOU MEAN YOU WANT TO CHARGE ME MORE FOR GIVING YOU LESS WORK?"

D: "Well, Madam, I ..."

C: "Dry-clean THIS, sucker!"

etc. etc.

 

Cut the Deficit!

When I trained to be a youth worker about 15 years ago, I was warned against what was called "the deficit model of youth". This was held by governments, officials, teachers, parents and park keepers everywhere. I always took that to mean that we shouldn't pigeon-hole the young.

Today it seems to me that there is nothing more ... deficitful than, on the one hand, our obsession with young people's apparent low self esteem and, on the other, only working with them because they accord to certain definitions, for example being "at risk of offending" (a condition more often suffered by their potential victims, I'd have thought) or "at risk of abusing alcohol" (by occasionally experimenting with it, as we have done for centuries) or "at risk of having unsafe sex" (as if having "safe" sex weren't dangerous enough these days, as anyone who has ever had it with me will testify).

But such targeted work - and very little else - is what youth services around the UK, including mine, are being told to do in order to safeguard their very existence. I thought we had social workers, youth offending teams and health services to do just that. They are welcome to recruit or contract youth workers to help, but they, not we, are the experts.

Youth work is different and almost unique (there may still be a few educators among the teachers out there) in that firstly, it doesn't select but is open to all who wish to have access to it and secondly, it's developmental, not least of young people as moral agents and creative, curious personalities.

If it is remedial, that is a by-product of this work, not its prime purpose. We should try to keep it that way in case, by the time the recession is over, we've forgotten altogether.

Too Hot to Handle

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2013/09/10/mb-hot-tea-coffee-burns-winnipeg-iteam.html?cmp=fbtl
 
If you are going to drink a hot drink it needs to be hot, PROPERLY hot, just like ice lollies need to be frozen and meringues avoided like the plague. Unfortunately this means hot enough to scald anyone over whom it may be spilled.

It follows that it's not a good idea to drive a car with a hot drink in a position where it might go all over you. I and many people - including this lady - do it, and I'm sure many of you do it too. But that doesn't make it sensible, or this lady right.

I say this because, while she may not be as mad as the American woman who sued McDonalds because she stuck a cup of their take-away coffee between her legs (well, you didn't expect her to DRINK the muck, did you?), she is asking - I presume on behalf of the rest of us sillies - for legislation to set take-away drink temperatures far lower than they are now.

While undoubtedly well-meaning, I think she is wrong.

I'm not a dermatologist but I suggest that any coffee or tea that is too cool to scald will also be too unpleasant to drink.

In fact, if I may speak as a confirmed silly and therefore among the majority she wants to save, I have enough problems with lukewarm Costa and Starbucks coffee as it is and don't want tepidity made compulsory for me and other hot beverage lovers on account of my and your stupidity. In short, it is we and not the law who need reforming, and good coffee should be left alone for both fools and the wise to enjoy.

That said, I intend to continue to drive while drinking hot coffee, and to be fully responsible and red of both face and groin if I get scalded as a result.

But I won't be suing anyone, and I won't be asking the government to do my thinking for me either.

On Telephone Banking: a Rant

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Richard Dawkins's 'The God Delusion': Religiosity is too widespread to be pinned on believers.

In ‘The God Delusion’ Richard Dawkins makes a good scientific case for rejecting the existence of God. He argues that He would have to be infinitely more complex than the universe He is supposed to have created, so where (the Hell) did He come from in the first place? He also sets out (Dawkins that is, not God) – if at an unheavenly length – the many foul acts that besmirch the Bible and other holy books, and that have since been perpetrated by religious fundamentalists down the centuries. He also makes a great case for science and scientists, who by and large are able to change their views when evidence contradicts them.

Some reservations, though:

Dawkins is convincing about the matter of the genesis and development of life but not about the genesis of matter, which this scientifically dense but otherwise literate reader can’t recall him addressing (in this book at least), or about the development of the human race, which in my view has pretty effectively rewritten most of the books about evolution that even Dawkins has read, to the extent that some of his attempts to reconcile human peculiarities with natural selection appear a bit ... guessy and unscientific.

In chapter 7, ‘The ‘Good’ Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist’, Dawkins addresses the common counter-argument that the greatest crimes have been committed not by religious bigots but by atheist regimes (he mentions Hitler and Stalin and not Mao or Pol Pot, but what’s a few million?). He makes a weak attempt to paint Hitler as a religious man and the worship of Stalin as analagous to faith in Christ, ignoring the fact that Nazi racism was based as much on bad (but paradigmatic) science as on blaming Jews for the murder of Christ, and not only that Stalin’s dogma was explicitly atheist but that some of the most persecuted and obdurate of those he incarcerated and murdered were believers who both retained their faith and were living (and dying) human examples to many others who had none. Highlighting Hitler’s Catholic upbringing and selected quotations from speeches from the early 1920s is no good if you ignore both the fact that Hitler was a supreme political liar and his own statement (in ‘Mein Kampf’ - so far more likely to be true) that he actually had no problem with Jews until he actually met one, which says a lot more about something else in the man and about a cultural racism which had long moved beyond the religious.

Nor, given Hitler, Stalin and the rest, is it possible to believe Dawkins’ assertion that there is a consistent, if sometimes erratic, historical direction in the 'Zeitgeist' - a term he uses horribly freely - towards greater liberalism. Perhaps some readings in discourse theory might have come in useful here: have these Zeitgeists not been ... exorcised? In fact the 20^th century is unique both for the number of innocents who were murdered and for the bogus justifications that were made for the carnage, few of which had anything but the most vestigial remnants of religious underpinning. Surprisingly, there is little mention of the real professional murderers but only the blip in this liberal teleology represented by American religious conservatives and the Taliban, who appear to share the same bed even if they rarely break sweat together. That's not good history.

When, Dawkins asks, has anyone ever murdered people in the name of atheism? That's not the point.

Christmas Newsletter 2012

Fuck me, has it come around again already?

Jeez!

Leap Before You Look

Dear Bell’s Scotch Whisky,

Several times during the build-up to Christmas I've heard your radio advert on Tawk Spawt: "You can raise money for charity by abseiling down a cliff, or bungee jumping off a bridge ... or drinking a glass of Bell's! 10p from every bottle sold goes to Help for Heroes."

You appear heavily to suggest that the last method of raising money is the one we should go for. But something isn't quite right.

Let's say that I could raise £100 (at a very conservative estimate), net of associated outgoings, for taking part in the above-mentioned precipitative activities, with about a month spent fund-raising plus about half a day hanging off Beachy Head.

However, if I'm to follow the fund-raising course you recommend, in order to make the same amount I'd need to drink 1000 bottles of your product at give or take 15 quid a go and at an unredeemable total cost of about £15,000 . If I chose the same period of a month, though on doing the maths I probably wouldn't, I'd need to drink 30 bottles every day.

I mention this because you conclude the advert with a second recommendation: that I enjoy your product responsibly.

I don’t want in any way to suggest that you cynically abuse people's desire to help wounded ex-soldiers and bereaved families so that you can make a quick buck during this season of goodwill, or that you think that we are all stupid.

But others might - if they’re not already pissed.

Yours abstemiously,

Peter Roberts