Further to my last: a small black car with something peculiar on the roof has just driven past, heading towards the sheep field, the junction at the end of Valley Bottom and the road across the featureless Redneckshire steppe to the surprisingly repellent village of Bleak.

I do hope they have enough resolution to read Mrs. Underclass’ poster. Unfortunately this probably means that I am too late to persuade anyone to steal their car, language barrier notwithstanding (as an old technical author I am naturally fascinated by the idea of a pointy-talky book so highly developed that it can convey, correctly and completely, the concept of stealing only small black cars with something peculiar on the roof).

Mrs. Underclass has made up and attached to the front window a multi-coloured poster which says:

Private. Google does not have permission to film my House.

Apparently there are reports of a Google Street View car being seen around the town. Mrs. Underclass takes particular exception to Google Street View, with whom she has crossed swords before (I just wonder how it is that they, a foreign company, are allowed to film all the things which we, citizens of the country in question, are not).

Of more concern to the massed tourist-fleecers of the town is the onset of what appears to be a gang of professional thieves.

Yesterday they had £200 in cash off the counter of one of the shops, right under the nose of the kid on the computer. It seems to have taken about three seconds.

Also yesterday I was training a new charity volunteer. The place had got quite busy, and we were trying to close. There was a furtive-looking foreign geezer hanging about in the corner, clearly trying to look inconspicuous. When I looked again, he had gone. When the new volunteer looked a few minutes later, so had his wallet.

Naturally mortified at this start to the poor fellow’s introduction, I was further embarrassed by the arrival of his wife and their three children, all of whose financial resources were in the said wallet.

Eventually they hurried away to see the bank about cancelling cards and so forth. Since they had no cash at all, and apparently rather little in the way of food for the next week or so, I felt obliged to lend the poor fellow our sole surviving £20 note, with which I had been entrusted earlier by Mrs. Underclass, who does not like me going to the town without the B-52 survival kit from ‘Dr. Strangelove’ (“One hundred dollars in roubles. One hundred dollars in gold. One miniature combined Russian phrasebook and Bible.”).

In the inevitable financial emergency meeting later Mrs. Underclass mentioned that a friend of hers, who habitually works as a security guard at those big summer pop festivals, told her that the Eastern European litter-pickers hired en-masse by some festival organisers this year appear to be tea-leaves of the first order, to the extent that everyone else wanted to be off the sites before they arrived, resulting in an unseemly Land-Rover panic and mass exodus in each case.

The obvious conclusion is that, the festivals being long over, this bunch of ne’er-do-wells has now elected to establish itself somewhere round here.

I wonder if any of them speak any English? The point I’d like to get across to them is that for a swift and impressive profit they could hardly do better than to steal the Google Street View car.

There seems to be general agreement that Enough is Enough. leg-iron:

It’s not just MPs who are the targets now. Simmering resentment for all manner of official lunacy has been brought to a head by the expenses revelations. There are many things that people have put up with for a long time because it’s not British to make a fuss, but once the fuss is under way then all of the other irritants come to the surface too.

Dick Puddlecote:

It is akin to a hypnotist clicking his fingers and us all wondering what we were doing by eating that onion. It’s us and them now, there is no middle ground, they are hated by every political persuasion for a variety of differing reasons… it’s the first time in living memory that left and right are united in protesting about the whole lot of them. They have abused their power and dumped on every single one of us. We may disagree about which aspects we dislike, but all are in unison that their positions are untenable.

leg-iron again:

Despite what the politicians and the press might say, people will notice the difference. They will see that what OH is doing is not motivated by personal gain but by anger. They will see that they can do it too.

Old Holborn:

I ask you to join me on June 1st 2009 at 9am outside the gates of Parliament to do your duty as an English Citizen (law only applies in England) and perform the arrest of those MPs who have admitted their guilt by repaying their thefts. You may use reasonable force. Before you think “I can’t do that!”, may I remind you that you can and SHOULD. It is OUR Parliament and they are self confessed thieves.

I am no mathematician but this has to me every appearance of being something to do with catastrophe theory. It’s the sudden flip from State I to State II that’s so persuasive.

If it is catastrophe theory, then I’m open to correction but I believe that a considerable excursion along one of the axes is usually required before State II flips back to State I.

On this basis one might reasonably expect it to be impossible for the massed ranks of the Establishment (typified by the terrified bleatings of the BBC) to suppress public wrath before It Is Too Late and the whole unlikely and indefensible edifice collapses.

Off out now to practice overthrowing (“cars, buses, governments; anything on four wheels.” [Adolf Kilroy]).

[Sellar & Yeatman]

I used to be very fond of cycling, before I caught this wretched disease and they made me stop.

Not, I hasten to add, modern cycling.

For one thing, I had (and still have) a real bicycle. It is black all over, including the wheel-rims. It has dropped handlebars, a slender high-tensile frame and French gears. All of its stickers and identifying marks have been removed or painted over. It is called ‘Unidentified’. It is very fast indeed; so fast that I have never been able to find a hooter loud enough to get people (and their bloody kick-dogs on the end of those extending lead things) out of my path, finding it more effective in the end to have no make-weight audible warning device at all, but instead to scream “Banzai, banzai!” at appropriate moments.

This bicycle was my substitute for the black BMW (Better Make Way), only a hell of a lot quieter and cheaper to run. On it I could literally run rings around people riding these ridiculous, noisy, inefficient ‘mountain bikes’, cheap but ludicrously heavy steel imitations of very, very expensive light-alloy bikes used only for a form of downhill racing.

I have never owned a cycling helmet (“Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.” [Erik the Red]). My customary cycling costume was a rather sharp blue pinstripe double-breasted suit, without the slightest hint of shoot-me yellow.

I have always held in contempt those who use cycling as a kind of social rounders bat with which morally to beat those using other kinds of transport. I always used cycle paths whenever possible (it being far more difficult there for the police to pull one for speeding, as has happened to me), and despised those who dressed up as iced lollies and rode five abreast in the road, in order to annoy car drivers.

So I have no sympathy whatsoever for high-visibility prats who demand not only exemption from all traffic laws but also the pre-emptive use of public roads in order that they might more easily demonstrate their moral superiority by aping the French.

The Independent reports that the people of Perthshire, having had quite enough of their rural lives being disrupted by competitive, self-advertising modern cyclists, have taken to the application of tin-tacks to selected roads, with what seems to have been a satisfactorily high return on investment.

Much huffing and puffing from celebrity cyclist. Claims of a ‘positive line of enquiry’ from the police.

I have spent quite a lot of time in Perthshire and the people there are all quite nice. This is fortunate for the cyclists; had I been on the sabotage job there would have been a body-count.

Depressing though it is to be deprived of the adrenalin-soaked services of Unidentified, I have thought a few times about having a tricycle instead. I couldn’t fall off that. Unfortunately I am now too poor to afford one.

This morning the Telegraph reports that the controversial Glooge Street View burglary-target surveillance service is now going to use tricycles to capture images in private areas to which their cars have no access.

One does not discuss one’s plans on the internet, but the fact remains that I still have the scarily-left-to-the-imagination lethal measures from paragraph 9, and also the moral rounders bat from paragraph 6.

The camera gear would have to go, though. Too heavy, and the centre of gravity too high.

Obliged to Dicky at the Adur Brewery for reference to this story in the Daily Mail (caveat lector), which suggests that it is possible for pubs to avoid the smoking ban by becoming smoking research centres.

Obviously the loophole is to be closed forthwith. Dicky says:

We suspect The Government (in their wisdom) has it in for the English Pub and centre of community, and wish to fracture what community we have; next perhaps we will have retina scans to enter places where one may enjoy oneself so only ‘registered self-indulgers’ can frequent…

I share this suspicion. In fact what happened was, I believe, not retinal scans but CCTV so installed as to register the face of everyone entering, upon which the police were insisting before refraining from objecting to the renewal of pub licences (story in The Register).

Pubs, as I keep mentioning, are full of people having conversations which are very difficult to bug, many of these being about transactions which are very difficult to tax. Pubs are the only places where people still meet and converse with those they already know (rather than merely emote as a randomly-assembled and choreographed mass), and are therefore a substantial threat to state security.

A nonsensical campaign by an apparently American animal-rights outfit, which is outraged that people should consider eating guinea-pigs, reported by Metro.

On Wikipedia it says:

They originated in the Andes, and studies based on biochemistry and hybridization suggest they are domesticated descendants of a closely related species of cavy such as Cavia aperea, C. fulgida or C. tschudii, and therefore do not exist naturally in the wild.[1][2] The guinea pig plays an important role in the folk culture of many Indigenous South American groups, especially as a food source, but also in folk medicine and in community religious ceremonies.[3] Since the 1960s, efforts have been made to increase consumption of the animal outside South America.

I can’t follow this at all. Why is it OK for millions and millions of cattle to be made into hamburgers, and OK for the French to eat frogs’ legs, and OK for people to shoot far more grouse than they can personally consume, but Not-OK for people (even those of recent Andean extraction) to eat guinea-pigs?

Could it be simply because guinea-pigs are cute?

Personally I think they’re as boring as any other subspecies bred since time immemorial for food; little furry Holsten-Frisians, that’s what they are. They are rotten pets because they are so desperately dim and irretrievably tedious.

If one wants a rodent as a pet (they have advantages and disadvantages) then I’d recommend a rat. They’re alert, intelligent and can be trained to do all kinds of things (a friend of mine, recently given a litter of 9-day-old orphan rats by the council’s workmen, who found them in a rat-bunker under the car-park they were remaking and couldn’t bring themselves to kill them, is hoping, once they are able to feed themselves and he can get some sleep, to train them to retrieve guitar plectrums from underneath furniture).

The other advantage of a pet rat is that only a starving 18th-century naval midshipman is ever likely to want to eat it.

“Stupid boy.”

Apocalypse Nowish sees the silver lining in the Pirate Bay cloud:

We have not only seen a theatre, a spectacle and a very funny ruling, we have also seen, in one stroke, something that has done more for liberty in Sweden that anything else I can think off. Almost an entire generation have gone over to the “dark” side of the force, starting to mistrust laws and political institutions. Now we can hope these people also realize the consequence of this mistrust and take the next logical step over to liberty, equality and justice. One step is missing in order to finalize former gullible people’s transformation into true believers of a free world.

I do hope he’s right. He so often is.

There is, of course, a 100% reliable prophylactic against having your life ruined by a bunch of Hollywood greedheads: Don’t watch their rotten films in the first place. You gain: lots of time, the money that would otherwise have been spent on playback hardware, DVDs, paid downloads, etc., and the gradual recovery of your critical faculty. They lose sales, money and power over you.

The point is not that you can watch their tedious self-referential prolefeed for nothing, but that you do not need to watch it at all. If, like me, you are somewhat addicted to thespianism (can we still say that on the internet?) then you can spend both the time and the money on being involved with an amateur dramatic company, which you will find a great deal more amusing than any of that Hollywood drivel, which will be a great deal better for your fitness and morale than sitting in front of yet another screen, and which will doubtless make you some interesting and diverse enemies (and, with luck, a few friends who will hold them while you hit them, screaming “Don’t talk to me about Ayckbourn*, you bastard!”).

Exactly the same goes for music. Rather than spending your life in front of a computer trying to obtain free copies of the latest computer-generated pop song (regardless of which talentless haircuts have been paid to mime to it), learn a musical instrument (some are easier than others) and, by means of the traditional card in the music shop, get into a band of some kind (or, should you be the tie-and-tails type, an orchestra). You will find that the entire musical experience acquires an wholly new depth and scope, and provides more insight into the tragedy of the human condition than any soap-opera. Lugging your instrument around will make you much fitter than any amount of TV viewing (this effect varies in its intensity from ‘piccolo’ to ‘Sequencer-complemented Zoukra Moog III-C synthesizer’). You will have the opportunity to experiment with drugs, unless you are in the brass section of an orchestra, in which case you will never be sober enough to notice the difference. You can, whatever genre you adopt, make any number of amusing friends with whom you can later have ‘musical differences’.

Not only does self-reliance in art defy the exploiters and their friends in government but it also tends to maintain genuine personal contact with like-minded people, which is something else militated strongly against by the utter passivity of the viewer, which can be motivated to rise from its sofa only by the prospect of a free dose of soma.

Of course, if you utterly insist on staying in front of your computer (perhaps because all your limbs have atrophied, or because you are in fact a brain in a box, able to communicate with the world only by FireWire) then you could turn to literature, and write something. Like a blog, perhaps. It’s very much easier than it looks.

Why people allegedly intelligent enough to operate computers need to have anything at all to do with Hollywood’s output, the sole purposes of which have always been to maintain the ’star system’ which America uses instead of a royal family, and to put bums on seats in the Mid-West (where cinematic criticism is evidently a little-exercised faculty), is rather beyond me.

* Replace with ‘Pinter’, ‘Strindberg’ or ‘Shakespeare’ as required.

As I may have mentioned before, I am about as lapsed an Anglican as it is possible to be without converting to Sufism, shall we say, or then again it might be Zen Buddhism (it isn’t. Though it might be. If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is there to hear it, does anyone give a damn?).

So I have little use for Easter, a time when traditionally all sensible people abandon the use of all forms of transport and stay at home; perhaps, if convenient, making a small excursion on foot to the nearest motorway cutting to sell Mars bars and small bottles of water for three-figure sums to the trapped, starving and desperate would-be motor tourists.

And since I can take chocolate or leave it alone I have hardly any use for Easter eggs, though a week or two after Easter they can be often be had for a relatively trivial consideration. Even this is hardly worthwhile because they consist nowadays almost entirely of packaging.

This has been noticed by a ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrat’ MP called Swinson, who is reported by the Independent as having said that Easter eggs are ’still too profligate of resources’.

The only correct solution to this, evidently not apparent to Ms. Swinson, is not to buy the wretched things at all.

The price of an Easter egg would of course be far better spent at that fine if peculiar foreign supermarket LIDL on their someone-else’s-own-brand Fruit and Nut; a rough calculation suggests that one might well obtain between five to ten times as much chocolate thereby, possibly more.

If people are stupid enough to buy for high prices products that consist of little but glittery cardboard (one cannot help but consider the greetings-card industry) then one can hardly blame manufacturers and retailers for attempting to take advantage of what is known in retailing as ‘a high money-to-sense ratio’.

It is absurd to suppose that simple domestic economics of this kind, well within the capabilities of a Victorian shop-girl (or the holder of a modern A-level in mathematics), should require the intervention of politicians.

From the photograph published by the Independent it might seem to the uncharitable that Ms. Swinson is no stranger to chocolate herself, which does little to enhance her credibility in this respect.

For pity’s sake, what will these wretched parasites think of to micro-manage next? The world is full of shabby, silly, wasteful products, and the way we let their manufacturers know what we think of this is by not buying them. We don’t need protecting from our own childish greed and profligacy by the likes of Ms. Swinson. End, as we used to say once upon a time in the computer business, of file.

Apparently first at Frank Owen’s Paintbrush, then elsewhere (would have provided link trail had not Vienna crashed again, losing the lot), my favourite (and almost certainly the rarest) G20 protest picture, that of a small, graphically-challenged but courageous wunch of bankers:

Now as a photographer of some antiquity I can’t help trying to analyse pictures like this.

That is a wig, isn’t it, that the guy on the right is wearing?

Why?

It says in The Independent that

Nearly one in three children admit to having carried a knife or a gun…

To which is appended the woolly-liberal hand-wringing customary in this newspaper, and demands from someone with the temerity to describe himself using the words ‘liberal’ and ‘democrat’, who, predictably, is demanding

…hot-spot policing, intelligence-led stop and search…

and so forth in response to this.

Has everyone in this country been reduced to the 30-second attention span which for so long has been recognised by TV advertisers?

Can nobody remember what it was like to commit ‘the atrocious crime of being a young man’ [Pitt]?

Some adult, right, some grown-up, some square, comes up to me and says “We don’t need your name or anything, and there’ll be no comeback, but we need to know whether or not you’re dangerous.”
I tip my shades up my nose, blow some smoke in his eyes and do the shoulders thing, you know.
“I’m fcuking dangerous all right.”
“Have you ever carried a gun?”
“Got one now.”
“Can I see it?”
“No.”
“Have you ever carried a knife?”
“Got three of those.”
“Can I see them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Gang law. Never show your hardware to squares.”
“Oh, so it’s cultural?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Have you got a drug problem?”
“No. I can afford ‘em.”

Result: six box-ticks on the adult’s clipboard, my personal status enhanced, and my piece of string, crown cork, matchbox containing beetle and ‘Owzthat!’ pocket cricket set defiantly unconfiscated.

Why does anyone believe this poppycock? Nobody believes younger children when they claim to be Batman; why believe the older ones when they claim to be Carlos the Jackal?

Is it perhaps because what one is really interested in is ‘hot-spot policing’ and ‘intelligence-led stop and search’?