What is there to say?

A lot, but I’m really too tired right now to think straight.

Those people who’ve voted ‘leave’ simply do not know what they’ve done.
I am not going to tell them.
I am simply going to blame them each and every step of the way when – WHEN – it goes shit.
And it’s what they wanted.

Already the Pound’s going off a cliff, and we’re going to lose our AAA credit rating, but the man of the moment’s talk is of ‘phased repatriation’. I don’t doubt the Brownshirts start really kicking in anyone in a niqab this weekend. This will embolden so many psychotics.

At least I see a consensus on my feed of friends on FB, one of genuine shock, horror, grief even. This is one profoundly bleak morning.

Swings of history, we’re just right now accelerating into a deep, dark trough.

We’re going to have to work our way out of it.

Because we deserve better than this.

We’re better than this.

We’re better than them.

Vile people

A little snippet from UKIP’s Facebook page, it says a lot I think …

(does Ralph Tarpey actually read the news?)

Farage and his crap friends were at the Sage tonight, the villain was marking out his territory on stage with a trail of piss seeped from his trousers. Meanwhile the missus and I went to see Eddie Izzard talk at Newcastle University, a small gathering of 30 people or so, only the other side of the river from the Sage but a world apart. God knows what Thursday’s vote will be, but a ‘victory’ for the Leave lot will give such a boon to so many people showing themselves to be the most mean-minded, nasty, violent bigots. Not all of them by any ways, but a large number, of real shits.
In this country, I’ve met so many people from Europe, migrants from all over the world, who live here, work here, study here, have all been fine folk, decent, human beings. I cannot think of one I’ve known who compares at all to the viciously bitter kind of Brit in Farage’s shitbin of a gang. And yet if the poison makers have their way, it’ll be these good folk who are bade to leave.

One could get depressed. Instead, read this from a UKIP poster:

Barbara Fowles i know a lot of foreigners are setting up there own business here, where do they get all the money from, if they are suppose to be poor, we have them in our town a few have not made it because there are too many shops, and some have closed when you only have a pound to spend, i have had some points from nectar to have if i buy an item of clothing, but i have plenty of clothes and they only smell fousty when not in use, so i am stuck now.

It is such magnificent nonsense.

Con

Pissabout health screening jobby for casual work, where private deets about your medical past are disclosed online for the world of hackers and their hacking jobs to intercept or dig out. BUT you go on the website and there’s this pic of sprightly young health professional ready to note down your answers to her questions.
Fine, fire away.
Except it’s a RUSE.
She’s not there at all.
It’s just a series of tickboxes to be digitally ticked.
Balls.

Meanwhile, it appears Putin’s far-right friends are helping to renovate and restore pride in Russia by coming to France and smashing the place up. Back home in the UK, any number of people are succumbing to Nigel Farage’s far-right lies about the benefits of Brexit. What people don’t get is it’ll fuck this place up all the more, and push more folks into his vile little hands. He’s an alcoholic tweed-Nazi, bent on smashing things up – had he been born in Russia he’d no doubt be being deported for smashing up Lille with Putin’s approval.
Indeed, Putin wants the UK out of the EU as well.

A liberal ontologist in Stoke

Had a few days in Paris, it was most odd. Much more polluted than I’d have thought, all those scooters, and everyone smokes. On the plus side everyone’s well dressed and pretty good looking for it, healthy looking – sans cigs, anyway.

A lot of it was closed due to the floods, about which shitty French TV reported to the exclusion of all else. Notre Dame, Musee d’Orsay, Louvre. The river was well up, high, swollen, gurgling swells and eddies whirling right up close to you, and the water under some bridge arches high enough to ram any boat going under, while we saw of one tour-boat jetty only the very top of the walk-through frame.
Went to some great cafes and restaurants, walked all round the city as is our wont, the locals sometimes played to type with their baseless arrogance, but we had a great time overall.

One thing we got to see was at the Musee l’Armee, a temporary exhibition of Napoleon on St Helena. I’d no idea he’d offered after Waterloo to take a backseat in the French govt, to which they said ‘furck urff!!’, so in pique he stormed off to the British, who took him to the UK first to a mass outpouring of gawping onlookers at Plymouth, then shipped him and his entourage of lackeys to the south Atlantic. I thought he’d spent his last years kicking stones alone around St. H, dying slowly of arsenic poisoning. In fact he had a gang of generals and bureaucrats, all hanging on his every word writing his history as he bade them do, most of them in a race to get out their memoirs ‘My last days with Boney’, ‘Naps and me: The Helena Years’, all these expose, kiss-n-tell memoirs, many while he was alive, as he himself sought to ‘keep the spirit alive!!’ when not winding up the governor (who only referred to him as a general, and not as emperor, pissing off Bones bigtime and their meetings always ended in shouting). When he ultimately died they then went to town on deifying him, one painting having him come out of his tomb, head aglow, really as ‘the second coming’. Utter messianic figure, a proto rockstar … who sought to take over Europe … Tony Blair … this warmongering dictator … entombed in the land of revolution in a manner that Kim Il Sung would applaud.

The last day we went back to Gare du Nord to take the train to CGD – total, fucking, chaos. The trains weren’t going from their usual platform, but (we found upon asking someone) two platforms two floors up –
accessed by a narrow stairwell down which people with suitcases were battering people coming up on crutches. Already you think this isn’t right or safe. The platforms were rammed, the trains were also rammed, people hanging out the doors til they closed, real pushing and shoving and shouting onto trains with most of a foot gap to fall into, no staff on hand to control passengers or give information, no departure boards giving information. Having had to wait so long to get close to the train doors we work out it’s one train in one platform, the other goes, is replaced, back and forth – until the train we get on (the fourth to leave), when we’re packed aboard, the driver says we’re in fact not going to CGD but to Mitray. Luckily we’d given it an extra hour to get to CGD but even so amid the chaos your pulse rises and you think ‘shit, we’ll not make it, it’s going to be a bitch of a rip-off taxi …’. We lambast British trains but I’ve never seen anything so shit in the UK. And apparently it’s like this all the time.

Since then I went to Stoke to do a NK talk, and it was lovely, just found it in time, small room, excellent questions. Wood gas! What we had in the war. Afterwards the host Chris regaled with his dissection of liberal ontology, as he hopes to explore with his MPhil. His delivery was very droll, one of these guys whose perceptive abilities are just up another level and are so much fun to behold.

Just to contrast with the subject matter of NK, at the (faded but impressive) North Stafford hotel I watched High Class Call Girls on Channel 4.

The lives people lead. You hope they’re happy.

Mais dis donc

Demain, moi et la missus voyagon au France pour un weekend – IF Air France and all else haven’t gone on a massive sympathy strike with the air traffic controllers, as some of the latter are striking this weekend. Even if our CityJet-ShittyJet-Merde-Air plane does leave, will it have anywhere to land a la France, or will we have to jump out SOE style?

I flew Air France to Beijing last time I went that way out, then on the return leg to Paris, and it’s an enjoyable flight, they run a good ship, but on landing and hoping to disembark there’s a problem getting the passenger walkway tube thing connected to the plane, and I have a connection in 45 minutes … which is missable, considering how big airports are, extra security, etc.

The captain talks over the tannoy and first and foremost reassures us the delay is NOT the fault of Air France, because deflecting blame is our primary interest as we stand clogging the aisles, brewing sweat, wanting to catch other planes to elsewhere, while he gives no time for how long we’ll be held up.
So I ask the security stewardess how far my connecting gate is from here.
‘Eh,’ she says tartly, ‘I have over 200 people on this plane making a connection, you are not the only one.’
‘Right. I’m not claiming I’m special, I’m wondering how long it’ll take to get from here to my gate.’
‘Show me your boarding pass!’ which I’d already offered her to see.’It is close. You will make it, stop panicking.’
‘I’m just asking, there’s no problem, thank you for your help.’
‘Eh! There is no problem!’
There is, we can’t get off, and you’re in some kind of mood. I hope you are, otherwise you’re like this all the time, eh?

Having just had a bag of wonderfully British chips I feel a rant brewing about the French and their weedy French Fries what we’ll to eat in Paris, fries buried under frogs-legs washed down with £20 pints of Stella, and how much we spend subsidising their economy so they can go on strike and wreck our holidays and how Brexit is actually a good thing, and we should retake Calais like Henry V or someone then knock it down to stop the Jungle lot coming over, in fact let’s blow up the tunnel, or some such essentially racially-motivated impotent statement of intent to commit violence/terrorism ‘cos I’m on some kind of carbo-jag.

PS: Apparentlement, Paris est ‘flooded’. Luckilyment, nous allons la avec Lufthansa:

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In other news, I gave Ben-dog a chip, which being blind he couldn’t see, so Ringo took it instead.
Ringo took food from an old, blind dog.
I admonished Ringo and he gave me this pitiful look, like ‘o the injustice’. He’s like Theon, does appalling things then feels sorry for himself.

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I’ve also found a wonderful track with which to herald my contender arrival into a boxing arena, ‘Trespassers will be eaten’ from Live And Let Die, recorded in 1973, perfect for my age and style, me coming in in my golden dressing gown, hood over my eyes, tassles flailing as I throw some hot shadow combinations, entourage of goons pushing back the screaming crowd, although they might not be heaving towards me, my squad are just pushing them back for effect, hence their screams.
Can’t upload the track, though.
Shit.