Hut movement: Pricey

I'm all for preserving our nation's heritage, be it a famous building, a tree where gravity was supposedly discovered or the chair in which a TV executive first pitched the notion of Big Brother. Such artefacts are a part of our national identity, intrinsically sewn into our culture and as much a part of us as looting and sleeping with Ryan Giggs.

What I do object to though is well-to-do families bursting into tears and begging for public money to help preserve something which is very much within their moral and financial remit to protect.

This week, Roald Dahl's family have asked for a £500,000 donation to move his writing hut from the bottom of his garden into the museum built in his honour to preserve it. Now, if they were on the bones of their arse, I'm sure we could come to some arrangement to preserve such an important piece of history, but his granddaughter Sophie has to be worth a few quid from her modelling and pouting exploits, plus she could pull rank on her titchy husband Jamie Cullum, who must have a few notes stuffed under his car seat, if only to raise it slightly.

Lest we forget that the Roald Dahl estate must be coining it as well. He was a world-reknowned singer songwriter, and certainly to my mind the greatest exponent of bluegrass music in the Western world*, so I'd be amazed if they couldn't scrape at least a percentage of the sum together to preserve his beloved hut.

There's been a reasonable public outcry at this request, presumably along the same lines as my attitude. In these times of austerity and iPad purchasing we can't afford to be giving money to a wealthy upper-class bunch to move a garage from one place to another. I'm sure in the fullness of time they'll stump up, but you've got to admire their balls at chancing it. What next - the Queen asks to borrow a million quid to wallpaper the guest bedroom? I'll be in my cold, cold grave before that happens - there is no guest bedroom at Buckingham Palace.

* I'm joking of course. Dahl was a straight-up rhythm 'n' blues aficionado.

Death + Protest = HD TV

I've waited and waited before commenting on this rioting hoopla simply because the story has been moving that fast that there was a real chance that any blog I wrote would be out of date and old-fashioned within minutes. There's a first time for everything I suppose.

As you're probably aware by now, some dude recently got shot in London, resulting in his family marching on the local police station in a peaceful manner, demanding answers and what-have-you about why he was shot. Having not received satisfactory responses from the Feds, some factions of the protesters decided the natural next step was to start chucking stuff around, setting fire to buses and giving it large whilst wearing masks. A nation looked on, tutted, then got back to whatever it does of a Saturday evening.

Then a strange thing happened. Clearly moved by the plight of this poor chap being killed, some of the fruitier elements of the social underclass decided that they too should take to the streets, sling a few home-made explosive devices and loot anything they could from their local retailers. Now, it would have been bad enough if this had occurred in Tottenham where the original bother occurred, but this lot were talking about their own backyards, namely West Bromwich, Wolverhampton and Manchester. For the next 24 hours, we saw wall-to-wall footage of infants in hoods charging about helping themselves to all manner of unrequited goods. I tend not to scare easily but I have to admit I was feeling a bit anxious for the correspondents who were following the baddies as they ransacked countless clothing stores and set fire to shit.

This is what's weird about this though. When you think of rioters, you think of bloodshed, murders even, but the majority of the scum's ire seems to be directed at shops and buses. Don't get me wrong, there have been a handful of merciless killings which put this trouble into a much more racially-motivated sphere, but it seems to me that most of them saw that the coppers were more or less letting them get on with it, so put their hood up, grabbed a carrier with good handles and set off for a night of looting. That the majority of the perpetrators were youngsters and they fled at the first mention of heavy-handed policing tells me that they weren't trying to make some kind of statement. They just wanted to nick some new trainers.

Now, you may be surprised to learn that my opinions of these ne'er-do-wells isn't exactly positive. If I had my way, the cops would be steaming in beating eight shades of shit out of them, let alone seven. Quite why they were told to stand back and let them get on with it is anyone's guess, and I'd wager that the soft tactics employed initially are what inspired hooligans in other cities to chance their arm in their neck of the woods. If they'd seen limbs being snapped and heads coming off, they might have thought twice about having a crack at Top Shop in the first place.

It's more or less settled down now, and the hand-wringing has begun in earnest. Personally I think the various bodies charged with deconstructing this and coming up with solutions are missing the point when they talk about moral degradation and the like. At any time in any society, there will always be folk who will take things without consent given the opportunity. There will also be those who can be influenced and coerced into doing the same. If there wasn't, we wouldn't need a police force in the first place. So next time, coppers, instead of sitting back cos you might not have enough numbers, wade in,bang a few heads together and the majority of the baddies might just realise it's not worth the risk.

There's only one way to settle this - Twight!

Barely a day seems to go by these days without two people loosely related to today's celebrity culture having a right old pop at each other via the medium of the Twitter.

Back in the good old days - pre-2006 to be precise - if two people had issues with each other they would meet in a predetermined location, strip to the waist and fight to the death. Now though, it's the done thing to pick on each other online, while your myriad sycophantic followers gorge on the festival of misspellings and name-calling. We've had Kelly Osbourne's ex taking the piss out of her while she was at Wino's funeral, Rory McIlroy and a golf correspondent trading e-blows, and Sir Alan apparently having a go at just about anyone who dares to disagree with him.

Don't get me wrong, if someone brings your integrity or sexual orientation into question over that Internet, you've every right to tell them to bog off, but is this really what the creator of Twitter had in mind when he set it up? I can imagine the planning meeting:


"I've got a right idea"

"Go on"

"What?"

"Tell us about your idea"

"Oh yeah. How about a place to write a short message about what you're up to, or your opinion of the latest celebrity death, and people can subscribe to it to get real-time updates to their mobile phone when they should be working?"

"Sounds wank"

"Yeah, well I'm doing it anyway. How else will we know what Amanda Holden thinks of the Libyan crisis?"


It seems to be another one of those Internet fads which starts under a blaze of glory, with Stephen Fry endorsing it, then it all gets a bit boring, as someone uses it to catch their spouse shagging around, or a company finds out their prospective employer likes ear sex and Nazis. After a year or so, it becomes embedded in the day-to-day rituals of people who say 'aks' instead of 'ask' and people over the age of 30 are condemned for likening it to Ceefax.

At the end of the day, people are always going to disagree. Some of the greatest inventions known to man came from two people with opposing views striving to prove the other wrong (probably). Quite why we're supposed to give a shit about it though is anyone's guess, but then if you're ill enough to want to follow Fearne Cotton's online existence, you haven't really got any cause for complaint if you ask me. And I know you will.

She probably should have said "Yes"

It's genuinely sad to see Amy Winehouse die at the age of 27. She was an undoubted talent, but as is to often the case in this country, her off-mic antics dominated the tabloid press and changed the nation's opinions of her. In the last last couple of months of her life she was filmed performing whilst clearly under the influence of Christ-knows-what, and it was a right old shambles. Yet nobody said anything or stepped in or offered to help her. Me included - this ain't no high horse, brother.

Step forward to now and she's been found dead in an unexplained manner. The press have gone mad with suggestions, ranging from drugs all the way to alcohol as to what killed her, and the mourning has begun. What gets my goat though is the number of people who've come out now saying it's a disgrace that she was allowed to perform when she was clearly incapable of doing so, and that someone close to her should have been looking after her and advising her better. Mica Paris went on record saying as much, being such a well-known champion of Wino's health before he untimely demise. Er, Mica, what was stopping you going public and saying that before she carked it? You could've quite easily piped up yonks ago, but it's obviously much easier to have a go at folk after the event. Such finger-pointing is helping no one, not least her family who are now picking up the pieces.

A slightly more chilling aside has been the frequent mentioning of The 27 Club. Apparently a few high-profile rock types (Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Dustin Gee) have met their maker at the ripe old age of 27, which somehow has become a badge of honour of the 'live fast, die young' mantra which some people seem seduced by. If I'd died at 27 I'd be livid, not least because I would have missed at least 4 series of New Tricks. And the 2010 World Cup. Every cloud, I suppose.

At the end of the day, we have to remember a person has died here, regardless of the circumstances. It's all too easy to get bogged down in the infamous life she led, that epic dickhead of a husband and ultimately the wasting of a supreme singing talent. Sadly though, as long as the press have a holes in their arses, the likes of Winehouse will be used to sell papers when they're living, and a hell of a lot more when they stop. And if that's not enough to close a newspaper down, I don't know what it.

What's that? Phone hacking? Sorry, I've no idea what you're talking about...

What a planker! (Insert canned laughter here)

Yo-yo's, Global Hypercolour T-shirts, luminous snapping wristbands. All fads. All shite.

Throughout the ages, various odd practices and items have become famous for five minutes as people latch onto them as the latest craze. Tamagochi, for example, or adding alcohol to beverages, and for a few months it's all you hear about. Dusty middle-aged news reporters in sensible suits talk about them and are encouraged to participate with utterly hilarious results, and normal-thinking folk like myself fail to understand what all the fuss is about and end up crying in confusion.

The latest of these crazes is 'planking' and quite frankly, it's fantastic.

The premise is to lay face-down, arms by your sides, completely still and be photographed. No, that's it. That's all you have to do. Apparently the trick is to do it in as unusual a place as possible, then upload your antics to that Internet for people to look at. Now I've seen and heard of some stupid shit in my time, but this one puts the tin lid on it.

Often, such fads and crazes are easily suffixed with "But what's the point?", but this opens up a new can of pointless wormery. I never fully understood the RickRolling business (linking to Rick Astley footage under the pretence of a genuine link) so I was unlikely to get planking, but where's the fun in it? Where's the prestige? Where's the beef?

At the end of the day, it doesn't appear to be doing any harm (save for a couple of lads who've fallen off balconies for their art) and to be quite honest I couldn't give a shit what today's youth get up to, but it's a poor do when lying perfectly still outside of your local Oddbins passes as entertainment. Give me a diablo and some Pogs any day.

Ich bin got E.coli

Far be it from me to cast sweeping jingoistic generalisations across entire nations of people.

But...

Can you think of another country more likely to blame others for an E.coli outbreak before realising it was actually their own products than Germany?

A couple of weeks ago, E.coli broke out in the Fatherland and killed 29 people. In a developed nation such as Germany that is a lot of folk, and they were quick to pin the blame on some innocent imported cucumbers, which were minding their own business waiting to be in rude films. Much stock was destroyed and bans imposed to curb the bother, while nobody noticed that the countries from where the produce was exported remained suspiciously death-free.

Skip forward to today and they've now decided to 'fess up that it might actually have been home-grown beans sprouts causing the carnage in the first place. A fabulously-named Mr. Burger has admitted as much today, although an apology to the nations who had the Jihad put on them is conspicuous by it's absence. I can hardly say I'm surprised. Someone I know works with German colleagues regularly and has noted that when they believe any blame can be laid at your door, they don't hang around in telling you. When, however, it's actually their fault that the scheisse has hit das fan, they go all quiet and pretend they're in meetings to avoid having to be pleasant or diplomatic.

Not for a minute am I suggesting that all Germans act in this way, so get off your high horse, but can anybody suggest a country more likely to blame others for it's terrible plight before looking closer to home for the cause of their ills?

Us lot in the UK? Er, yeah. Good point.

Wanted: Half a chance to see the clean 'n' jerk

Imagine a supermarket where you could browse the myriad products available through that Internet and select which ones you so desired. Upon choosing your stuff, you submit your request and sit back, possibly to suck on a sweet, sweet cigar.

The supermarket tells you not to worry about payment right away; just make sure you've got enough brass in your account and within the next 6-8 weeks, we'll take a random amount, depending on how much of the stuff you wanted is actually available in stock.

But wait! After waiting the required time for your stuff, you don't actually have it. Instead, all you have is an email saying 'you've got some of the stuff you asked for, squire' and a hole in your bank balance with no reference to the products you've ended up with.

Skip forward a few more weeks and you finally receive your goods. But what's this? Where you asked for toilet paper, you have soap. Where you asked for a roast chicken, you have a single stock cube. Where you asked for a £15 bottle of Merlot, you have half a bottle of Lambrini with the lid missing.

'Shambolique', as the French definitely say.

OK, so such a supermarket probably doesn't exist, but this analogy more or less reflects the way in which tickets for the 2012 Olympics have been allocated. Put simply, you request all the possible tickets you might want, make sure you've got enough money to cover them all, then sit back and wait for fuck all to turn up. If you are one of the lucky ones, you get an email saying "Well done there, you have tickets" and your bank balance is shorn of the necessary funds. But they don't tell you what you've ended up with (almost certainly because you requested the 100 metres final and ended up with diving heats) so you have to wait until they turn up to find out how much of a swizz it was.

Surely there was a better way of handling this? Why did you have to put all your eggs in one basket and have enough money to cover every eventuality? Why couldn't you have a ranking system, where you put a 1, 2 or 3 against the tickets in the order of preference, and they tried to allocated priority 1 tickets first, then 2, then 3, instead of giving you everything available and assuming you've got the money to cover it? Most people cottoned on to the fact that the chances of getting anything were slim so requested just about everything, leaving them open to the possibility of tens of thousands of pounds being withdrawn, although naturally, that never happened.

For a games which has been touted as the greenest, as well as being ahead of schedule (although nowhere near budget) I find this element of the process pitiful. The organisers seem to have come up with the easiest possible system for them (to get rid of the tickets as quickly as possible) without actually considering the people behind the requests. Alright, there are 50-odd million of us in this country, but surely there could have been a better way of distributing them than this? You might as well have just stood on top of Nelson's Column, chucked all of the tickets into the air and shouted 'Scramble!'. At least there would have been a modicum of chance involved then. Shysters.

How super injunctions (don't) work

There's a story doing the rounds at the moment about a Premier League footballer who's had an affair with some classless bint keen to tell everybody about it. Using the legal power of the super injunction (like a normal injunction except it's mild mannered and wears glasses when it isn't called upon), said player has kept his name out of the popular press to avoid his wife cottoning on and the whole bally lot going up like a tinderbox.

There's a small problem however. Some blabbermouth politician used his legal right to mention that Ryan Giggs was the footballer in question. The speaker of the house went up the wall, as it may have been legal, but it was a bit on the snidey side, not least because of the whole super injunction caper. But his chagrin was too late, as the press went into absolute meltdown.

The politician's outburst gave them the loophole they were looking for, as they could now say that Giggs' name had been linked with the scandal, rather than holding their tongue when everybody knew who it was anyway. Thanks to the Scottish Sunday Herald publishing a laughably poor censored photo of Giggs (using the fact they were Scottish to get around the England-only injunction), the rumours which first circulated on Twitter last week took on a whole new level, as people could stop guessing (and finding a player's name to fit into the redacted black boxes on the various tweets) and start passing judgment on the Welsh wonder.

I personally think it's a real shame, as Giggs has been a fine ambassador for the game and good role model for most of the 20 years he's been a player. Yes he had dalliances with the likes of Dani Behr in his youth, but he was a single and much sought-after young man due to the explosion in popularity of top-flight football thanks to the Premier League's inception. Alex Ferguson kept his hand on the tiller with Giggs in a way that no other superstar had been controlled before, drip-feeding him to the press and ensuring his playing career was the only thing in the public eye. And given the fact Giggs just picked up his 12th league medal at the age of 37, you can probably argue that he had a point at the time.

Skip forward and now Giggs has been pursuing some nice-looking if morally misguided piece of crumpet, who couldn't wait to start gobbing off (no pun intended) to the press, although he got to the court in time to shield his name. He probably thought that was the end of it, but the dynamic in news consumption has altered a lot in recent years, and the Twitter feeds caught fire with suggestions who the player might be. As his name appeared more and more frequently, the press starting picking up on it, bringing the story to the attention of the masses without actually mentioning who it was. More and more rumours abounded, with various tweeters making thinly disguised references to him, safe in the knowledge that the law hadn't caught up with social networking yet, so they could say what they liked without fear of reprisal.

So where next? Giggs' arse is in the chopper at the moment, not least with his wife I should imagine, and we might see a Tiger-esque fall from grace in terms of sponsorship deals and general consensus. You probably know my opinion on adultery, so anything which happens to him now serves him right. All this after he had the cheek to parade his kids round Old Trafford during the end-of-season ceremony. The bigger story concerns Twitter though, and how to police it, when nobody appears legally liable for the stuff people put out there. Nobody has been censured or even banned from Twitter for naming names, and Twitter aren't about to carry the can. At this stage it looks like a better bet to approach every single famous person in the world to ask them politely to keep it in their drawers. Either that or shag someone who isn't looking for fame off the back of it. There must be someone like that out there somewhere...

Put it this way: I wouldn't stand behind them in a scrap

Just last week, US Navy Seals (like the ones in movies who are retired but still retain all of their rad skills for the unlikely attempt on their life they inevitably suffer in suburbia) stormed a Pakistani house, found our old friend Osama and shot his shit up. In doing so, I don't think it's particularly outlandish to label the Seals as 'brave'.

On an unrelated note, there's a programme (in literally the broadest sense imaginable) called "The only way is Essex" which I am told is a quasi-soap opera, in which real, albeit slightly odd people are recorded in predetermined situations for our amusement. They're not actors (believe me) but are encouraged to work through a particular situation on film for the amusement of them orange lasses who wear furry boots to the shops.

Naturally, the people chosen to be in this programme aren't exactly hanging. Since its inception, several articles and column inches have been dedicated to showing them off in their undercrackers, as if we haven't got anything better to do than perv over top-heavy lovelies on that Internet. In addition, their every waking moment is recorded by the paparazzi and splashed across the red-tops quicker than you can say "I couldn't give a fuck what colour her shoes are, squire".

Now, fast-forward a few months and yet another article has been dreamt up by some braindead arsehat with too much time on their hands, in which said lovelies are shorn of make-up and photographed, under the premise that they are brave for doing so. So in their world, not putting some blusher on is the same as preventing terrorism.

Fuck. Off.

Don't get me wrong, they're not trying to draw that comparison (that I can see), but the meaning of the word 'brave' can only be stretched so far before it becomes a laughing stock, and labelling anyone bored enough to have their photo taken before putting lipstick on ain't brave. Pointless, maybe. Minging, certainly. But brave? No.

I've seen this kind of thing developing in the press for a while now, where we're in a position that our physical appearance has become so important to our worth that certain people really do think that going make-up free is a brave act. If that's the case, I'm Casey fucking Ryback in a polo shirt.

Splashing: Erotic

There are many things used by movie moguls and executives to make their latest blockbuster a right old hoot. For example, creating a scenario where the key protagonist is put in difficult or unusual situations for our amusement. Dropping a 3-dimensional black trapezoid bearing the logo '10 tonnes' onto some poor sap's head is also a favourite. Employing Jonah Hill to be fat and socially awkward isn't without it's charms either.

However, chief among all of these is that great bastion of hilarity, cross-dressing. Get an actor (nearly always a bloke), stick him in a dress and ill-fitting syrup and that, my friends, is money in the bank. Never mind that it's been done before, and that it's actually slightly unpleasant and creepy; Man + Dress = Cha-ching!

However, when the more eccentric of our great nation's inhabitants decide to follow suit and re-enact their favourite scene from Tootsie of Big Momma's House 2, they're arrested before you can say "These heels are killing me, brother". That's a bit unfair, isn't it? We're always being told that the media influences today's youth into copycat acts, so how come it isn't those fat cats chewing on cigars in the film equivalent of City Hall being put in front of the beak? It's yet another example of one rule for one and one for another.

It was reported in the press recently that a young masters student was apprehended and stuck on the sex offender's register because he put on a rubber mask of a female face, topped it off with a jet-black wig, and wandered into the ladies bogs at Birmingham University and The Bullring to record audio of them having a wee. As you do.

It turned out that he'd been at it for ages, and it was only when a women reported a strange mannequin-like figure in the loo that the blag went tits up. There he was, bold as brass, listening to women shaking the lettuce and recording it for posterity. What gets me is that the mask and wig combo makes you look at best an understudy in a low-budget horror movie, and at worst a fucking freak, so how he'd got away with it for so long is a mystery. He was credited as being intelligent in court by the judge, but unless his degree is the study of urinal acoustics, I doubt he's anything of the sort.

I'm not condoning such acts, but he wasn't hurting anyone, so putting him on the register is a bit harsh I think. If he started touching himself or other folk, by all means chuck away the key, but surely he could be put on some kind of programme where he wears a blindfold and someone pours water into a bucket to desensitise him to the extremely unerotic act of having a piss? If it turns up on ITV1 on a Saturday evening, shoehorned into some kind of game show, don't say I didn't warn you.