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So I switched on the news when I got up to find that they found a car bomb at Haymarket, in London. What makes this scary is when you look at where Haymarket is on a map. It runs parallel to Regent Street, and connects to Piccadilly Circus. Last Wednesday, Katy and I were on Regent Street.
They’ve apparently closed Piccadilly Circus tube station… the tube station I caught a train from only two days ago.
Scary shit. I mean, if you’re a Londoner reading, or perhaps Northern Irish or Iraqi, you’re probably thinking “Pffft, that’s nothing”, but y’know, I’d rather be as far away from a terrorist attack as possible.
So yeah, if you’ve watched the video below, and I hope you have done considering the sheer amount of toil involved, you probably know that yesterday I went with Katy to London, and watched a historic day in the history of History unfolding: the transfer of power from one Prime Minister to another.
If you had the 2560×1920 version of this, it’d be your desktop wallpaper too.
We tubed to Embankment station and walked down Whitehall to College Green. The plan was to get to Parliament and see if we could blag our way into the last Prime Ministers Questions. We were unsuccessful, unsurprisingly. But walking down Whitehall, who should we see heading towards Downing Street, but none-other than TV’s Huw Edwards. I’m not sure if he noticed me excitedly saying to Katy “Holy shit! It’s Huw Edwards… fucking hell! Huw Edwards!”, whilst wildly pointing at him. I hope he did.
Bizarrely, despite the old adage saying that the camera adds weight, he seemed to have a fatter face in real life than I remember from the TV. Rubbish geeky quip: maybe the BBC studio uses 2.35:1 ratio cameras and they squash the picture?
When we got to Parliament, we were told by a woman working there that there were no tickets available until “about 12:30″ (the time PMQs ends) - she seemed completely oblivious to the significance of the day.
It was like a village fete. I even saw a vicar walking about.
College Green was a hub of excitement - and according to Wikipedia - the roof of an underground car park. All of the news crews were there. You can tell its a big day when they’ve got the gazebos out. The BBC were there, Sky were there. ITN were probably there but they didn’t make themselves very visible. Even the Austrian national broadcaster, ORF were there.
Quentin Davies, a man who claimed the Tories had no principles, being interviewed. He jumped ship to Labour, presumably because he had, er, no Conservative principles either.
As we got in everyone’s way, we noticed a number of big names. There was Julie Etchingham (Newsround circa-1996) presenting live for Sky, Jon Sopel (a man who is fluent in French, unneccessary fact fans) presenting live on News 24. I was surprised to see Andrew Rawnsley there, not only because ITV seemed to have opted for broadcasting mindless bullshit in the form of This Morning, rather than covering the most important political event in ages, but because his jaw is even more massive in real life. I’m not sure why I keep judging celebrities on their faces.
Quentin Davies, the Tory defecator defector was there being interviewed too, as was Tessa Jowell. On watching the News 24 coverage when I got home I was impressed with her. When Jon Sopel interviews her if she thought she still had a job, the ultra-Blairite said that she’d love to stay in the cabinet, despite it being obvious that she was destined for the figurative rolled up carpet in the back of Brown’s figurative Mafia car. Knowing this, quite incredibly, she said “but that’s not what today is about”, religiously defending the incoming Brown regime. That’s pretty impressive, as if I were sacked, I wouldn’t religiously defend my former employer. But then, I don’t do anythingreligiously.
As PMQs drew to a close, we wandered down from College Green back to Whitehall, where by now crowds were starting to gather. There are some hinged barriers in front of the gates of Downing Street which are used to keep the proles back whenever people need to get in and out - despite the barriers being in use, as we were all standing in a big crowd waiting for Tony to fuck off, normal pedestrians, seemingly uninterested by the day’s festivities tried to push their way through the crowds carrying multiple bags of shopping from Tesco’s, only to get frustrated and turn back when they realise the barriers were in use.
Not being funny, but who goes and does their shopping, then on the most important and widely publicised political day of the year decides to go home via Whitehall? Would they just have walked past Downing Street without giving it a second thought? Is that how Londoner’s operate? “Oh, it’s only Downing Street, so what?”.
We witnessed Tony come back from PMQs as his car swept into Downing Street for one final time. After maybe half an hour the gates opened again and his car whisked him off to the Palace. It was a bit underwhelming in a way, as the whole car passing bit lasted maybe twelve seconds, and the windows were tinted so we couldn’t even see him.
Across the road were some anti-war protesters dressed as Guantanamo detainees - despite having the best viewing spot of everyone gathered there, they unfathomably decided to wear black bags over their heads so they couldn’t see what was going on. I’m all for staying in character, but this was history in the making, and they missed it.
Gordon Brown lightens the serious mood by walking like a robot.
After this, following a tip-off from the political blogs, we headed down to the Treasury, as we knew that’d be where Gordon Brown was leaving from before heading off to the Palace himself. Katy and I got a spectacular viewing position - if it weren’t for the hundreds of armed police officers in the vicinity, I could have easily happy-slapped Gordon Brown as he left. Take a look at the video to see for yourself.
Sky’s Jeremy Thompson (doing a pre-record, in which we were clearly visible in the background) and Jon Craig were there (doing a live), and the BBC’s Carol… someone or other was there. Michael Crick was there for Newsnight too.
Man gets into car, shock.
Again, this only lasted a few seconds after quite a long wait. Brown walked out, waved a bit, got into a Ministerial car and was off. The media were calling it a “limousine”, whereas Katy rightly pointed out it was a red Vauxhall of sorts… which doesn’t look or sound too fancy.
After this was over, we headed down Horseguards Road, round the back of Downing Street, heading towards the Mall. Excellently, parked up on Horseguard’s Parade were Tony Blair’s Removal Vans. Here’s a photo with me by them:
Worldwide relocation? Blair’s not moving to The Hague is he?
I could have been standing literally inches away from Tony Blair’s guitar or Cherie Blair’s juggling balls.
Yesterday, Katy and I went down to London to watch the big Prime Ministerial changeover. Here’s what happened in video form. Words and pictures to follow shortly:
Tomorrow (well, today at time of writing), I’m going down to London to watch politics in action. Katy and I are going to try and watch the changeover from a few hundred metres away in the flesh. And make stupid videos of me outside Parliament.
Keep an eye on the news tomorrow - look out for the twat in the background harassing politicians for photos and generally getting in the way. I’ll be the only person in Westminster who isn’t wearing a suit.
I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it - I bloody love London, and politics and the news media are excellent too. If I walk around London on a normal day I suddenly become so enthusiastic, I wouldn’t look out of place on Children’s TV - tomorrow it’ll (hopefully) be littered with A-list political celebrities, so its going to be the best thing ever. Hopefully they’ll be a blog post tomorrow with photos of London being typically exciting.
As tomorrow is a big day politically, I’m going to metaphorically throw my proverbial hat in the proverbial ring and make some uninformed political predictions, as that seems like the appropriate thing to do. A bit like New Years resolutions, if they weren’t about self improvement and more about baseless speculation about Brown’s imminent Premiership:
1) How the EU constitution deal goes down will determine whether Brown calls a general election or not. If the opposition get a referendum on the constitution treaty, I reckon there won’t be a general election until the end of the cycle (2009ish), but if Brown refuses a referendum, his authority will be undermined further, and he’ll call a general election in order to establish himself legitimately - and the Tories will frame it as a referendum on Europe. And lose.
2) Milliband will get something decent to satisfy the Blairites (Home secretary? Something like that).
3) I’d like to speculate on how Brown can think Jack Straw for being his “campaign manager”, but that must have been the easiest job in history, given his opponents. I dare-say that I’d have been pretty good at that job too. Rather than “Gordon Brown for Britain” for the slogan, I’d have gone with “Gordon Brown!”, merely adding an exclamation mark. Maybe he could be Deputy PM? But that’s a rubbish job unless you’ve got a portfolio of stuff to do to go with it. Maybe he’ll be back as the Foreign secretary? Chancellor and DPM? Stranger things have happened (whale in the Thames, for instance).
4) John Cruddas will get into the cabinet, but as something rubbish and inoffensive.
5) Brown won’t join in with the cruise-missiling of Iran, but will publicly say that he strongly supports America.
What’s that? Nobody asked for my opinions? Well alright, but if any of them are correct, I’ll be sure to link back here and look a bit smug.
I was shocked today when Harriet Harman somehow won the deputy leadership today. Not because it was her who won - she (was?) an easily forgettable political nobody who’s only memorable feature is her slightly unusual mouth. I was shocked because for the hour or so leading up to the announcement, Sky News, who’s coverage I was following, consistently claimed that Alan Johnson had won.
“Alan Johnson wins deputy leadership” was kept on screen until about ten minutes before the official announcement when it suddenly changed to “Sky Sources: Harriet Harmon wins deputy leadership”. Presumably “Sky Sources” were the BBC. If you were to flick channels you saw that BBC News 24 had on screen a still picture of Harman with the caption “Confirmation that Harman has won deputy leadership” or something like that.
I think its interesting that the Labour voting system uses the single transferable vote system. By “interesting” I mean, “I’m about to make a moderately interesting but unverifiable point, so quickly revise STV on the linked Wikipedia page to avoid looking stupid”. Er, basically, when you vote you rank the candidates you want 1, 2, 3, and so on, and the vote counting is done in rounds, so that for example, when Hazel Blears got the least number of votes out of the 6 candidates, the people who voted for her’s second choice are added on to the remaining contestants totals. And then the least popular of the remaining five is eliminated and their voter’s second choices are added on to the other candidates… and so on.
Why is this interesting? Well, unless my knowledge of statistics is at fault (likely), or my knowledge of politics is dodgy (pfffft!), then an STV system would surely mean that the most mediocre candidate is going to be elected? The person who is going to please everyone, but isn’t really anyone’s favourite, but may be everyone’s second third choice. Its like if there were an election of Britain’s favourite celebrity bar using the single transferable vote system and Gary Linkekar won. Nobody really hates him, but nobody really likes him either, so loads of people put him second after their more polarising choices of Jeremy Clarkson or Davina McCall or whoever.
This “theory” was actually demonstrated today after John Cruddas and his (sort of) radical left wing agenda were knocked out and his votes transferred.
I think this is bad because it surely means that there’s going to be boring people in power? I’d prefer it if we could either easily like or dislike someone, as long as they’re pushing for change. If the boring middle-ground candidate is elected then surely things are going to get stale? They know that if they suggest anything too radical, not everyone will like them, or will at least not be as indifferent towards them. I know this is the problem with democracy at large, but STV strikes me as something that would magnify this.
Look at that- I’ve almost made quite a good political point. The building blocks are there, I just can’t articulate the excellent point in my head.
Anyway, the person I feel sorry for at the end of this is Hazel Blears. Aside from being someone who must have to constantly crane her neck and suffer the embarrassment of asking for a booster seat to be installed in ministerial cars, not only failed to get a new job today, coming dead last in that, but unless I’m mistaken, was also sacked from her current job. In front of thousands of people.
Gordon Brown said today that the deputy leader will also be the Chair of the Labour Party… which is Hazel’s job, isn’t it? Way to add insult to injury, Gordon.
For some reason, the EU leaders are all faffing about at the moment trying to revive the ailing EU constitution (coverage on Mark Mardell’s excellent blog)- something that will be akin to putting anti-septic cream on a corpse if Poland get their way.
If it were a visual metaphor, would be a sheet of paper with arms and legs struggling to gain its composure, as leaders wrangle over what it looks like. The original constitution was shot down by France and the Netherlands a couple of years ago when after a referendum, they announced that it was “shit” (paraphrasing), so the new plan is to cut it down to something everyone can agree on.
Apparently the French got a bit removed that committed the Union to free-trade (wry comment: typical!), and Britain wouldn’t budge on the EU having its own foreign minister. But Britain are happy with having a High Representative - who will presumably have exactly the same powers as the proposed foreign minister, just not the name. If the name is all the fuss is about, then from the beginning they should have just given everything in the EU arbitrary names…
If they’d have called the foreign minister the official EU Wayne, then no one would have complained, yet Wayne could still travel around the world doing whatever it is that a foreign minister does. The same theory could be applied to other contentious areas of policy. The French might get on board dismantling the CAP if the plan were named Pierre.
It does concern me that they’ll dismantle the constitution (or “reform treaty” as Blair wants it to be called) so much then it’ll be practically worthless. I assume the final text will be something like:
Article 1: The European Union is a group of countries
Article 2: The European Union’s abbreviation is the ‘EU’ (or ‘UE’ in French…)
Article 3: Lets worry about all of the organisational stuff later, yeah?
Before all of that unpleasantness last night, I went to see Oceans 13 with JD on something of a whim. So now I’m going to attempt to review it. By “review”, I mean write a few unconnected sentences that are loosely about the film that I saw.
Back-story: I haven’t seen Ocean’s 12, and only have vague memories of Ocean’s 11. Which probably makes me the least qualified person to judge the film. I mean, other that George Clooney, who’s review would presumably “Excellent! Recommend it to all of your friends!”.
The film felt like an assault on my brain. Every second of the film was just an unrelenting forwarding of the plot. I realise this is how films tend to work, but there was a lot to keep up with. There was about fifty billion characters all of whom had a separate role in the plan, and the film kept jumping between them. And it was all packaged in a stylish, sickeningly brash way.
There weren’t any sort of action set-pieces either, which I’m not entirely used to. I was expecting at least a car chase or a shoot-out or something.
There was more humour than I was expecting, which was nice. (There’s the quote for your DVD cover, if you’re reading, Warner Bros)
My only concern with the film is the morals. I mean, are we supposed to sympathise with a bunch of people who are robbing a casino? I don’t get it.
And my only complaint is moderately tedious. A lot of the film hinges on the difficulties the gang face in planning the heist. “Oh no, we need to steal the diamonds too”, and so on. So it strikes me as odd that some problems earn screen time and elaborate ways of overcoming them, and other times they just magic stuff up from no where - like a helicopter. And how do you import a tunnel boring machine and get it under Vegas without anyone noticing? And how did the key people keep getting useful jobs in the casino? Surely they’d be on strict shift patterns as low paid drones and thus not be able to select to “clean” one very specific room and one very specific time?
But this didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film over all. Surprisingly good.
Last night I was driving home from seeing Oceans 13 (Review pending), and as I approached some traffic lights, they turned amber. As I was going 40mph, I thought that I wouldn’t be able to slow down in time, so I decided to retain my speed.
Unfortunately, as I sailed through the traffic lights they turned red.
Unfortunately, there was a police car in another lane at the traffic lights.
So as I continued along, I saw the blue lights kick into action. As I pulled up at the next set of traffic lights, the police car stopped beside me and mimicked to wind my window down. On doing so, the police officer told me to pull up on the kerb a bit further along. Shit.
I can safely say I’ve never been so scared in my life. Well, maybe. It was at least equally as scary as the time I was nearly mugged. I had to go and sit in the back of the police car.
They asked me my name, address and date of birth, and radioed in to check me out. Needless to say, I was apologising profusely and managed to adopt my “telephone voice” to try and reinforce my image of totally not being a boy racer. Which I’m not, and the two police officers knew because when asked if it was my car, I explained that it was my mum’s.
Apparently because it was a traffic offence, I’d get three points on my license - which is critical when you’re in your first two years of driving like I am, because if you get six points, you lose your license, as well as the respect of your peers. And there’s a sixty quid fine.
Thankfully, they were very nice police officers. They took the tone of being firm but fair in speaking to me, which is fair enough. They decided to let me off, which was nice of them. And they also gave me some advice about approaching traffic lights.
The whole encounter lasted maybe ten minutes, but it was the scariest thing ever. Let this be a lesson to you, kids, don’t take risks when driving. Especially when there’s police cars around, as it’s bloody terrifying.
I apologise for this being badly written - I’m not particularly enjoying recalling the event in my head in order to write about it. But at least now it has been transcribed to the internet.
Good news! I have passed my second year of university. This is good news, as it means that I’ve got at least another year of slacking, but with the prestige of being a student ahead of me. It also means that I can start looking for MA courses.
I realise this isn’t the most thrilling news in the world, but I feel obliged to provide some follow up news to yesterday’s post.
I got 64%, detail fans. This apparently converts to a 2:1 in degree terms, but it is just about plausible that I could push this up to a first if I work hard next year. Basically all I need to do is have a completely different work ethic.
I think the biggest surprise was in my globalisation module. I got 70% over all for that module - which is pretty spectacular when you consider that at the start of the year I didn’t know what globalisation was.
I’ve already got a strategy planned for passing my third year - and it’s marginally more exciting than, y’know “revise and read and shit”. I’m going to hope that my contribution to society will be such that I’ll be awarded an honourary degree, by some university, because of my contribution to society at large. I figure that earning it will be a lot less hassle than writing essays and taking exams. All I have to do is get someone to recognise my contribution to the field of cherrypicker research, or something.
As far as I can tell, an honourary degree course is quite short - seems to be one day long, and all you have to do is wear a mortarboard and get your photo taken with the university’s vice-chancellor. I think I can cope with that.
Tomorrow is going to be quite an important day - I get my university results, and find out whether or not the last year of my life has been worthwhile or not. If I pass, I will post here and say something happy - if I fail, this post will no doubt mysteriously disappear and after a couple of weeks of silence, I’ll post some sort of face-saving reasoning as to why I’m an awful failure. Some of the ideas (that’s a euphemism for ‘excuses’) for this face-saving are so far:
I spent the last year working 15 to 25 hours a week, which hurt my studying.
Despite any intellect that you might perceive after reading my blog, I am actually an idiot. A moron. A cretin.
I’m hoping it won’t come to having to use the last one.
I’m actually moderately confident that I’ll pass - I’m more concerned about whether there will be flying colours attached or not. Probably not. I’ve already passed two modules and only need 8% in another to cross the passing boundary. It’s just that in one of my modules, because of a terrible essay, I need to have got a decent grade in the exam (which I, er, didn’t really revise for) to pass.
One thing I’ve got less confidence in is the university’s, ahem, well thought out method of giving us our results. For some reason they’re insisting on putting the results online, so we can all login and see them at the same time. That’s right - tomorrow morning 20,000 students will be bombarding the server with page requests at 10:30am exactly.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out what happens next. Last year the servers were crippled on the big day, and for a number of days afterwards meaning that no one could get their results. I would put money on exactly the same happening this year.
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