Tuesday 30 March 2010

I stood on the shoulders of giants...

Explain this...

I go to the Manor Street swimming baths in Chelsea. There are no individual changing rooms so everyone changes in public, individual men as well as crowds of school boys, mostly private schoolboys. Everyone has to change in the same open area.

Here's the thing. Most of the men and I mean a distinct majority, do not change from clothes to swim suit and back quickly or surreptitiously but rather pointedly take time off to parade around naked, usually talking loudly and animatedly to each other in poses that say, 'I'm so used to being naked in public that I don't notice that I'm doing it now'.

This fairly shrieks at you but the funny things is that they do it more when there's kids about.

Now if they were all universally well endowed there might be an obvious motive - but they are mostly not...and I don't think its latent paedophilia, there's just too many of them doing this, so why do they do it...?

Time to go to the barricades...

From Blair, so pathetically in thrall to a near moronic American president that he could follow him to war, while showing breathtaking contempt for the rest of us. We were dust beneath their wheels. So contemptious, they lifted their main argument for the war, the 45 minute claim, from a students blog while ignoring the biggest protest in British history, when over a million people turned out in London against it. This contemp seeps down from the top to be found in the detail of public life. Take the obscure case of Jeremy Bamber who has now served 25 years for murders the police framed him for...it was common knowledge, the prevasive rot is everywhere.

The political classes behave with complete impunity (Mandelson's history of bribe taking for e.g.) while the only people who go to prison are the whistle blowers. Our useless, corrupt police and public services only excel in excuses - while no one else in our rotten governing elite are ever culpable or arraigned - except maybe before John Humphries or Jeremy Paxman.

Awful as the idea is - we badly need a second Committee of Public Safety...

Getting old - I love it..!

I'm enjoying myself more in my seventies than I think in any decade except possibly my thirties - but it's a lot to do with stopping drinking (and so smoking). Not being hungover the next morning means that you can do all the stuff you like doing without the secret voice telling you that you only have to hang on until one o'clock and its okay to have a drink. 
And this was funny because it wasn't other people you were behaving for but that old slave driver, the protestant work ethic...How can anyone have a three hour lunch with the PWE. 
I remember when I went to California and was nominally living with a girl I'd met at the airpot (I think, I've no idea of her name but have no reason to suppose she didn't have one. She was from one of the desert states).
 After a couple of months nodding at her as she was getting up and I was going to bed, I suggested we should get to know each other better and so would come down to wherever she worked to have lunch - two or three hours and a few bottles of wine.
She was adamant, said it wasn't possible - she only got thirty eight minutes for lunch! On hearing this I decided, there and then, to go back to Europe - I didn't want to live in a society where people had thirty eight minutes for lunch. 
Because you can turn forty minutes into an hour and then two hours but thirty eight was the outcome of bargaining and calculation and so stayed thirty eight minutes...I went back to Europe.