Socialist Networking
September 25th, 2008 at 15:05

Yesterday whilst walking through my university I spotted a poster up from the Socialist Workers Party. Usually I’d just ignore them as fringe crackpots, as the closest thing to an imminent revolution that I could see was someone approaching the nearby revolving doors. But something caught my eye: the speaker. It was billed as a talk by Mark Thomas – and that set off a “London celebrity alert” in my head. He’s one of my favourite comedians, so I had a dilemma.

I wanted to see a celebrity, one who I’ve in fact paid to see before (I realise this is a capitalist concept), but to do so, I had to risk encountering the finest nutters my university has to offer. In the end, I decided to go for it – though made a point of turning up only a couple of minutes before the meeting started, so as not to get cornered by some socialists – who in my experience, are not familiar with the concept of shutting up, and seem to go on at great length.

Standing outside the basement lecture theatre, there were a few other people standing around outside, and none of them were overtly wearing Che Guevera t-shirts and the like, so I decided to check I was in the right place. “This is the Mark Thomas thing, right?” – it was. But as the queue wasn’t huge and there was no sign of a familiar celebrity face, I decided to throw caution into the wind , asking “This is the celebrity comedian Mark Thomas, right?”. The guy I was talking to, who happened to be the socialist leader, looked at me and said “er…”, before the man in the queue behind me introduced himself as Mark Thomas.

Gah. Gutted. There can’t really be too left-wing personalities named Mark Thomas, could there? Socialists are practically non-existant these days – I’m sure Richard Dawkins would question whether they actually still exist, due to the lack of evidence. I had to console myself that at least there weren’t two men named Mark and Thomas speaking. That would have been even more embarassing.

You can imagine what went through my mind here, after I screamed “Nooooo!” inside my head. Here I was having to make a joke of mistaken identities, hide my disappointment and pretend to be interested on the socialist perspective on the world economy, which is what the talk was about. Both Mark and I put on a brave face as he pretended to not be offended and I pretended to not be there merely at the promise of celebrity. I believe only asterixes and capital letters can truly accurately illustrate the atmosphere in the corridor: *AWKWARD*.

It turned out that this Mark Thomas owns a socialist bookshop near the British Museum. I assume it doesn’t make much money – not because profit is a capitalist concept, though, but because I can’t imagine who’d want to read obscure Marxist literature.

So out of politeness, I ended up sitting in on an SWP society meeting. As you might have expected, they had a rather interesting take on the credit crunch, with at least one member of the audience suggesting that the crunch was a deliberate move by the powers that control the earth to gain control of the banks – that the deregulation of the banking sector in the late 80s was part of a plan to make the banks fail twenty years later so that they could be nationalised and power concentrated in the hands of the few. It was at points like this that it felt like it was one illuminati-namedrop away from being in a 9/11 truthers meeting.

At the end of the meeting I ran away, quickly.

Comments(2)

Hugging Bankers
September 23rd, 2008 at 21:00

At the time of writing, Britain still has a banking system – though whether any banks will be left by the time you’re reading this, I don’t know. It’s funny really, I mean, if you find thousands of job losses and major economic turmoil hilarious. Just a couple of years ago the government would proudly boast about the unprecedented period of economic growth and give off the perception that you can’t lose in business – they did the same thing in 1929, only then it was called “ye olde stock exchange” rather than “the stock exchange”. But now, in the space of a week or two, we’ve lost Halifax from the high street and learnt that both the Lehman Brothers exist and have seen them turn to dust.

You have to feel sorry for the bankers – it must be difficult living a decadent cocaine-fueled, sports-car driving life of pushing money around and keeping the wealth within the top tier of society. This solidarity with their plight is why I’d like to publicly offer to give them all a hug, as a tangible expression to show that we care and feel sorry for them, and we don’t blame them, even if they are sort of the architects of their own downfall after recklessly lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back, which is what started all of these problems in the first place.

Actually, I’ve just had a better idea – as leading Gotham City entrepreneur The Joker points out in The Dark Knight, “if you’re good at something, never do it for free” – I’ll charge money for hugs instead. Bankers (used to) have a lot of money, so they’re used to paying for things. And when you think about it, I don’t have “unlimited” hugs to dish out – I’m not some sort of robot, and need to sleep and work and so on, so can’t spend all of my time hugging bankers. So really, I should probably try to regulate demand for hugs by varying the price of a hug based on how many bankers want one.

But then if I’m going to do all of this… why don’t I take things one step further? Why don’t I sell the bankers the promise of a hug in the future? Then if they decide they don’t want it, they can sell it on to others, and maybe even make a profit on it? This short selling could be a completely fool-proof way of making money, with absolutely no potential negative consequences whatsoever.

The only way this could possibly fail is if they lose confidence in me and my ability to honour all of the hugs. I am horrendously unreliable (I don’t even like hugging people), but that never seemed to stop the bankers when they were dealing with money – trouble is if I default on the hugs, they’ll lose all of their value, and become worthless. Which could cause even more economic turmoil. And that would presumably mean my hugs would become not empathy but a black-hearted nothing.

I think I might avoid this after all, hugs are too volatile in the current climate.

Comments(0)

Day 4
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:48

I’ve been living in London for four days now, and contrary to my experiences almost exactly three years ago when I spent a couple of days in halls before embarassingly bailing out, things seem to be going pretty excellently. My housemates are all excellent – I was for a time worried that I might end up living with someone really irritating, but it has since dawned on me that in all likelihood, I’m going to be the irritating one – and that won’t bother me, at least.

The worst thing so far has been the hideous lack of internet – I’ve been having to use my phone to connect, and I’ve spent the past couple of days using the free wifi at uni. When I ordered the dire Virgin Media on Monday, it turns out that we’ve got to wait sixteen days for a connection. So I’ve started chalking the days on my bedroom wall as I wait, isolated from LOLCats and YouTube videos of animals fighting.

Though so far, it hasn’t been as bad as I’ve feared, as I’ve had plenty to do, even though my lectures don’t start until Friday. On Saturday night, my housemates and I discovered our local pub – which is very, very Irish, to the extent that most of the other patrons don’t so much talk as make an incoherent noise. On Sunday, I met my friend Tom and a couple of his friends, who I’d only previously known for a few weeks on the internet, and yesterday after a hard day’s working for TechDigest, and winding up some Americans on there, and meeting up with my friend Dan who was in London too, went to a free comedy gig, with Richard Herring of “off the telly” fame headlining.

It’s all been rather good really. Sorry there’s no twist or anything, just felt like I should probably update on what’s going on because my parents read this. I think I’m losing my “edge”.

Comments(2)

In praise of: Transport for London
September 15th, 2008 at 19:38

I’ve decided to write this post now, whilst I’m still a London n00b, and am still awed and amazed by the bright lights and bendy buses of the capital – if the look on the faces of nearly every other commuter are anything to go by, I’ll presumably go through a period of soul crushing disappointments and will soon enough be cursing the day that Ken and his cronies were ever left in charge.

See, I’m really liking London Transport. The tube, the buses, the “proper” trains, and hell, even the riverboat services on the Thames all work as one beautiful machine. Unlike the small town where I grew up, there are train stations every few streets, and bus stops every few hundred metres, meaning that public transport and consequentially access to the rest of London are only a short walk away. Near my house, I have a tube station and an overground station within about five minutes walk. If I walk a little further, I can get to even more stations on a wide variety of lines. Hell, rather than walk, I could take the bus – along most big roads there are bus stops up and down, meaning in a lot of cases, because of the frequency of the buses (literally every four or five minutes, it seems), it could be easier to catch the bus down the road. But then, maybe I’m just incredibly easy.

I’ve owned an Oyster card for some time now – for those oblivious (ie: those north of Watford), Oyster cards are little smartcards that replace tickets, and you can top them up similar to how you do mobile phones. And brilliantly, all of London Transport is compatible with it. This means that today I’ve managed to catch a regular suburban commuter train, then a bus, and later I’ll be catching a tube, all without changing ticket. Brilliant.

Compared to what I’m used to all, this is almost science fiction – there used to be only two trains north and two trains south an hour from the one train station, and buses were so ineptly operated that the paltry four buses an hour in either direction were usually over an hour late.

What makes this all work so well is the TfL website’s journey planner. It’s genuinely brilliant. Put in any two locations in London, down to postal address level, and it’ll tell you exactly how to get there using public transport, and will break the journey down into stages, telling you how long it will take – it will even take walking into account, and it’ll play off different modes of transportation against each other. The reason I took the national rail train earlier rather than the tube was because the journey planner reckoned it’d be faster – even if the Tube Map suggests otherwise (it doesn’t even have national rail stations marked on it).

So I guess my message is: London is brilliant. No surprises there, then. Now I’m off to the South Bank. Excellent.

Comments(0)

London Calling
September 15th, 2008 at 01:51

On Saturday I’ll be moving to London – initially the plan was to study for an Masters degree and seek my fortune, but after a feasibility study, I’ve had to reign in my aspirations and merely study for Masters degree, and instead accept that certainty of living in crippling debt for at least the next decade.

This has meant that I’ve spent a large slice of my time in London looking for somewhere to live. I got over the first hurdle of actually having people to live with with ease – I found some lovely flatmates through a university matching thing (I said I had a “GSOH” and liked “long walks on the beach”). The slightly trickier part has been finding an actual flat to be mates in.

Things started well – we found a lovely flat in the trendy bit of East London on Brick Lane, which seems to style itself as “Camden for the pragmatic” – there’s still a distinctly “independent” “vibe” given off by the lack of chain stores in the immediate vicinity, but it’s helpfully marginally more affordable. We put down a holding deposit and departed London on Friday thinking we’d got it all sorted – and in the nick of time too, as my course starts next week.

Then on Saturday morning, the landlord decided that he was going to be a twat, and move his extended family in instead of us. I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking it too: “What a wanker, putting his family ahead of strangers”.

So a string of expletives later, and it was Monday (it was a long string), and we were back in London back on square 2. We organised a few viewings and hoped for the best. “Hoped” being perhaps the key word in that sentence.

We headed to Edgware Road to an estate agents. It wasn’t a lovely area, but then compared to a rural market town, anywhere short of South Kensington is pretty poor in comparison, so I decided to give it a chance. It turned out that the estate agents was on the first floor of a row of shops, up a dishevelled staircase. This immediately set off my middle-class alarm bells as usually I’ve found estate agents to be a rather posh affair where they offer you free drinks and stuff (making their money back by selling you a house). Instead, this estate agent’s sign was a printed A4 sheet sellotaped to an internal window and their phone number was a mobile. But no, maybe it’d be fine – what sort of self-styled punk after all would complain about a “DIY”attitude? Who says you need licensing and accreditation in order to legally let property? The Man, that’s who.

After waiting for a few minutes, an old woman led us and some other prospective tenants down the road to a tower block. A brutalist 60s “who cares about aestetics?” sort of structure – the type of place you’d go to murder Damilola Taylor. After having a cursory look around, we all collectively said “Noooooo”.

So we left London on Monday on a low, feeling deflated, not knowing where we’d live. But decided to head back in on Tuesday to start the search again.

By contrast, Tuesday was much more successful. By which I mean, we found a lovely house in Kilburn. It’s pretty damn swish – not only do I have a massive room, but I’ve got a balcony. There’s no furniture in there yet, but I’m assured I’ll have a bed to sleep on by Saturday.

Kilburn is lovely to. It doesn’t seem too murderous, even if a decapitated corpse was found scarily near to my house. Thanks to the wonders of globalisation, the high street has all of the chain stores you could ask for, and better still, seems to have plenty of places to go for live music.

Kilburn is apparently a big area of Irish immigration too, so hopefully I’ll fit in pretty well, given that I’ve got a name with apostrophy in, and something like my grandad’s grandad was Irish, so if discussion of the irish potato famine comes up, I can probably claim to be vaguely related some Irish people who were around at the time maybe. (BBC: If you want a low-rent celebrity for Who Do You Think You?, get me on as I can’t be arsed to research this sort of thing on my own).

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be blogging my experiences in moving to London, and moving out beyond my parent’s tyrannical authoritarian regime for the first time, as well as the start of my Masters degree – so it’ll be an exciting new experience for both you the reader, and me. Expect a video of me failing to use a washing machine soon.

Comments(0)

Musical map of London
September 12th, 2008 at 01:06

I’m moving to London in a week or so, and I’m damn excited about it. You see, I bloody love London, so I’ve “mashed up” this Wikipedia page of songs about London with the magical Google Maps. It only contains songs that have London place names in their titles, otherwise you could get all sorts of obscure stuff. Proper “places” are in blue, whereas areas/boroughs/districts/etc are in green.

There’s quite a nice spread of music around central London – with Soho and the West End getting the most attention. Primrose Hill, which as far as I can tell is just a small road in The City has about fifty billion songs about it rather inexplicably, and Chelsea is a popular place to write songs about too. I’m delighted to learn there’s a Flogging Molly song about Kilburn High Road, which is close to where I’ll be living in two weeks time!

Are any songs based near to you? Why not tell us in the comments?

Comments(2)

Snorting some hat
September 9th, 2008 at 17:51

A few days ago I was in Camden town, the trendy area of London where everyone is either a hip musician or, by the look of it, a drugs user. I don’t think these two groups are entirely mutually exclusive.

Whilst in Camden, I did something that I’ve never done before. I was a bit nervous about it as I wasn’t exactly familiar with the culture, but the man wearing a long coat who was selling it to me assured me it would be okay, maybe even fun and enjoyable. So after a few seconds of dithering and a high-pressure sell, I bit the figurative bullet and paid his high prices and experienced this new sensation: I was now the owner of a hat.

I glanced around nervously, wondering if anyone would see me trying the hat on, but then I realised “I’m in Camden now, everybody does it”, and placed the hat on my head… It seemed to make me look moderately trendy – this hat was powerful stuff indeed. The hat itself was a trilby, the sort “ska” types like The Specials used to wear, and it seemed to give me more street cred than I’ve ever had – people will look at me now and no longer think I’m a total square, but they’ll say things like “That James O’Malley is a bit of a character… he knows where it’s at!”, and invite me to all of the coolest parties.

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve never encountered hats before. Whilst some of my friends have been hat users for years, I’ve managed to steer clear of fashion accessories like this without any problems. I mean, obviously I’ve used hats that have been prescribed to me – I’ve worn hard hats on school trips to building sites and the like, but I’d never bought a hat off the street before. I’d previously claimed I didn’t need hats, I was too good for hats, that I didn’t need a hat to enjoy myself, and even actively mocked friends and warned them about what a hat does to them. Maybe, after all of this time, I have to admit that I was wrong?

When I was out with my friends on Saturday night, we were having some good fun as we usually do, but there was an element of danger and mystery added to the mix, as I took along my hat. They were drinking, so as time went on and as decision making skills became increasingly impaired, my hat and the hat that one of my friends has brought with him, began to be passed around the group – everyone were sharing the hats with wreckless abandon.

So now I seem to have entered a whole new world, a new subculture. When I’m not wearing my hat, and thinking rationally, it scares me: I don’t know where the hat will take me, what it will make me do or whether I’ll have any trouble with the fashion police, but when I’m wearing my hat, none of this seems to matter – I feel more at ease with myself and the world, and this could be very dangerous indeed. Just say no, kids.

Comments(2)

Russia Vs Georgia: Who Wins? You Decide.
September 1st, 2008 at 23:47

One of the most complex news stories I’ve encountered recently has been in the on-going conflict in Georgia. Unlike, say, the US Presidential Election, it isn’t just a black and white affair – there are more shades of grey than you would have thought were available on the pallet. I simply don’t know who’s side to cheer on.

On the one hand, it seems obvious to take the Russian side. After all, it was the Georgian government who decided to send the tanks into the previously stable breakaway provinces and they were the ones actively doing the whole war thing, but on the other hand, Russia did over-react massively, and it’s claims to be “supporting Russian nationals” in South Ossetia slightly undermined by the fact that there were Russian nationals there because the Russians have spent the last couple of years handing out Russian passports. Not to mention the Russian hypocrisy a few miles away in Grozny, capital of breakaway Chechnya.

But this war was never really a proper war – Russia have always had the military advantage on account of actually being visible on a world map and Georgia being the sort of country where you’d have to print its name by the side and draw an arrow to to identify it. The war on the ground is moot – where the battle is being fought right now is in the media. Both sides want to win the hearts and minds of other countries, who have their own leverage to exercise and at the end of the day will decide the international reaction to the conflict – for example, the west are simultaneously the west is Russia’s biggest customer and Georgia’s biggest backer, so it’s within both side’s interests to get the west on their side.

If you’ve watched any of the BBC News channel or any of the more exotic news channels on satellite recently, you surely can’t have failed to spot Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvilli giving yet another TV interview live via satellite. He’s done so many it’s got to the point where he’s trying to muscle in on Peter Snow’s job and has a map by him to draw on and point things out on – quite a turnaround for the man who launched the initial attack of South Ossetia to coincide with the Olympic opening ceremony in order to provide a distraction. It has essentially got to the point where he may as well say “Back to the studio” at the end of his report. Presumably if his media-whoring goes any further we’ll see him stumbling out of a Tbilisi nightclub on the front cover of HEAT magazine.

This is quite a clever thing to do – not only is he guaranteed to get airtime to advocate Georgia’s side in the conflict (what sort of editor would refuse an interview with the President?), it also gives him something to do other than twiddle his thumbs after he’s given orders to Georgia’s army of four tanks, six bicycles and a goat with pointy horns.

By comparison, Russia’s media strategy of (allegedly) bumping off undesirable dissident journalists is much less media-savvy. But I don’t think it has to stay this way – Russia could easily match Georgia in the media stakes. All it takes is a secret weapon: celebrity endorsements.

Far from being a spurious expression of society’s contempt for knowledge and the pursuit of ignorance, an arsenal of the right celebrity endorsements could turn the war in either side’s favour, in the fickle minds of the west, at least. It works too – last winter, Mike Huckabee’s American Presidential campaign was propped up almost entirely by Chuck Norris appearing in his adverts. All Russia needs to do is to get someone zeitgeisty… say, Michael Phelps to endorse the Russian occupation of another sovereign nation’s soil, and immediately, it sounds more palatable. I mean, the world’s greatest Olympian is a fan of a resurgent Russia pursuing a policy of neo-imperialistic expansion, and he’s got tonnes of gold medals, so it must have something going for it.

Better still, the politicians themselves could win our favour by becoming more traditional celebrities, just like how the nation warmed to George Galloway after he spent a week dressed as a cat rather than representing his constituents. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev could star in a re-make of Gerry Anderson’s marionette series Captain Scarlet where every week he fights the Mysterons using polonium (ex-President Putin could be the puppeteer). Or maybe Russian culture could be popularised using computer games, like cossack-dancing simulator Dance Dance October Revolution.

I guess the simplest solution though would be to… not fight with each other? Participate in finding multi-lateral solutions to complex problems using dialogue and international institutions? Sound like a plan? Nah, thought they wouldn’t like it.

Comments(0)

Yet another re-design
September 1st, 2008 at 23:14

I’ve gone and done something I should have done long ago, and tweaked my blog’s CSS to make it look slightly more palatable. There’s still a lot of work to do – I’m going to tidy up the sidebar and stuff, but I’m going to wait and consult my mate who’s a web designer for free CSS advice (his CSS skillz are better than they may appear on his website).

Let me know what you think, and that.

Comments(1)