(no subject)
It's amazing where inspiration can come from. Sometimes a thought, a spark, a wee microcosm forms in the brain and an idea pops into existence; sometimes it nags away at the back of your mind for days on end before springing forth a well of creativity and sometimes, if you're Paul McCartney, you go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning with 'Yesterday' perfectly formed in your head all ready to earn you a few million more quid with which to pay off the crazy woman you only married to prove that John doesn't have the monopoly in dodgy Beatle wives.
And sometimes, you're sat in the pub and someone says "why don't you write about street entertainers".
And then you do. Kind of.
You see, I was born and raised in Blackburn, which has no tourists to speak of and therefore no need for drama school graduates to ruin your Saturday afternoon by juggling fire on the highstreet dressed in a loincloth. Street entertainment in my neck of the woods is provided by, and let's not by coy here, mentalists. There's a particularly good one in Blackburn who staggers around the centre and occasionally bashes into lamp-posts before offering them outside for a fight. This is stupid, of course, as the lamp-post is already outside. Actually, now I think about it, I haven't seen him for a while so he's either in care or he went down the wrong alley one night and was assaulted by a gang of particularly peeved street furniture
And since most of Britain is made up of places like Blackburn, there's no market for those poor drama graduates and their street act. Which is why, instead, they spend all their time on the streets of every town centre in the country dressed in a black suit asking you if you've had an accident in the last three years. It's got so bad in recent years that it's impossible to get from Picadilly Station in Manchester to any of the decent pubs on Whitworth Street without a squadron of black-clad teenagers descending on you to ask if you're the sort of cack-handed hypocrite who'll happily trip over a piece of raised paving then sue the council for money it would otherwise spend on improving said pavements.
It used to only be the Big Issue that you had to deal with and that was borderline acceptable. But now these bum-fluff-toting clipboard jockeys have reached epidemic levels and have become the Third Most Upsetting Thing In Britain Today. The Second Most Upsetting Thing In Britain Today is struggling to come up with even the most tenuous way to link two things you want to talk about in a LiveJournal entry together and the Most Upsetting Thing In Britain Today is, of course, 'Wife Swap'.
George Orwell is credited with predicting many facets of modern society when he jotted down '1984', but when he penned the line 'Hope lies in the proles' he might as well have scrawled something about goats flying to Mars in saucepans and been just as accurate about 21st Century life. Each show features the same ingredients- a family of common-as-crap trogladytes in matching England away shirts trading matriarchs with a 'unit' of grenola-munching Observer readers who use organic toilet paper and have a diet which has precluded them having a solid shit since 1997. It is a rule that the common wife will be lazy and the middle-class one will be a control freak that makes Bismark look like Bill and Ted. This week's effort was particularly good as the posh wife was in a wheel-chair and managed to use up all the sympathy for that affliction and become a hateful organ-sack inside a minute.
For these people to put themselves through the making of the show and it's inevitable bawling and shouting in the ice-white glare of a camera crew is idiotic enough; but almost all those involved have children- many of which are too young to really understand what's going on when either mummy is replaced by either a chav or a Lib Dem. And the reason they do it is for the attention, and the attention comes from otherwise intelligent people like my girlfriend who shows most signs of being a reasonably rounded human being but is content to piss this sort of thing into her eyeballs once a week.
Mind you, I've lost pretty much all faith in Amy since Saturday when I attended the annual ball of the British Pharmaceutical Students Association. Now, if I'd have fleshed out my earlier list of The Most Upsetting Things In Britain Today to a top 5- 'Students' and 'Pharmacists' would have plugged those final two gaps and so this particular event was never going to be the highlight of my social calendar. And, sure enough, I spent the early stages wondering just how so many people who had barely hit their twenties could have so many conversations about golf, traffic and networking. Could have been worse though, at last year's ball they'd hired street entertainers...
I was sat on the top table as Amy is the Vice President of this particular organisation and we were joined by the guests of honour (whose names and functions on this planet I immediately forgot) and were soon exchanging the kind of pleasantries that barely mask utter, soul-deep contempt. Then Amy started giving me funny looks and nodding at various bits of table furniture. It turns out that I was at in a seat that made it my duty to perform all sorts of tasks, from topping up wine and passing various plates, to juggling badgers in order to quell evil spirits (probably). I took most of this with good grace but when the guest of honour sighed disapprovingly cause the wine was being passed to the right and not the left I promptly lost control and asked her whether the two-thirds of the Earth's population that don't eat most days gave a toss whether the drink went anti-clockwise or not.
Needless to say, the otherwise reasonably intelligent Amy was firmly in the ettiquette camp and wasn't impressed at all with this.
Perhaps I could swap her...
And sometimes, you're sat in the pub and someone says "why don't you write about street entertainers".
And then you do. Kind of.
You see, I was born and raised in Blackburn, which has no tourists to speak of and therefore no need for drama school graduates to ruin your Saturday afternoon by juggling fire on the highstreet dressed in a loincloth. Street entertainment in my neck of the woods is provided by, and let's not by coy here, mentalists. There's a particularly good one in Blackburn who staggers around the centre and occasionally bashes into lamp-posts before offering them outside for a fight. This is stupid, of course, as the lamp-post is already outside. Actually, now I think about it, I haven't seen him for a while so he's either in care or he went down the wrong alley one night and was assaulted by a gang of particularly peeved street furniture
And since most of Britain is made up of places like Blackburn, there's no market for those poor drama graduates and their street act. Which is why, instead, they spend all their time on the streets of every town centre in the country dressed in a black suit asking you if you've had an accident in the last three years. It's got so bad in recent years that it's impossible to get from Picadilly Station in Manchester to any of the decent pubs on Whitworth Street without a squadron of black-clad teenagers descending on you to ask if you're the sort of cack-handed hypocrite who'll happily trip over a piece of raised paving then sue the council for money it would otherwise spend on improving said pavements.
It used to only be the Big Issue that you had to deal with and that was borderline acceptable. But now these bum-fluff-toting clipboard jockeys have reached epidemic levels and have become the Third Most Upsetting Thing In Britain Today. The Second Most Upsetting Thing In Britain Today is struggling to come up with even the most tenuous way to link two things you want to talk about in a LiveJournal entry together and the Most Upsetting Thing In Britain Today is, of course, 'Wife Swap'.
George Orwell is credited with predicting many facets of modern society when he jotted down '1984', but when he penned the line 'Hope lies in the proles' he might as well have scrawled something about goats flying to Mars in saucepans and been just as accurate about 21st Century life. Each show features the same ingredients- a family of common-as-crap trogladytes in matching England away shirts trading matriarchs with a 'unit' of grenola-munching Observer readers who use organic toilet paper and have a diet which has precluded them having a solid shit since 1997. It is a rule that the common wife will be lazy and the middle-class one will be a control freak that makes Bismark look like Bill and Ted. This week's effort was particularly good as the posh wife was in a wheel-chair and managed to use up all the sympathy for that affliction and become a hateful organ-sack inside a minute.
For these people to put themselves through the making of the show and it's inevitable bawling and shouting in the ice-white glare of a camera crew is idiotic enough; but almost all those involved have children- many of which are too young to really understand what's going on when either mummy is replaced by either a chav or a Lib Dem. And the reason they do it is for the attention, and the attention comes from otherwise intelligent people like my girlfriend who shows most signs of being a reasonably rounded human being but is content to piss this sort of thing into her eyeballs once a week.
Mind you, I've lost pretty much all faith in Amy since Saturday when I attended the annual ball of the British Pharmaceutical Students Association. Now, if I'd have fleshed out my earlier list of The Most Upsetting Things In Britain Today to a top 5- 'Students' and 'Pharmacists' would have plugged those final two gaps and so this particular event was never going to be the highlight of my social calendar. And, sure enough, I spent the early stages wondering just how so many people who had barely hit their twenties could have so many conversations about golf, traffic and networking. Could have been worse though, at last year's ball they'd hired street entertainers...
I was sat on the top table as Amy is the Vice President of this particular organisation and we were joined by the guests of honour (whose names and functions on this planet I immediately forgot) and were soon exchanging the kind of pleasantries that barely mask utter, soul-deep contempt. Then Amy started giving me funny looks and nodding at various bits of table furniture. It turns out that I was at in a seat that made it my duty to perform all sorts of tasks, from topping up wine and passing various plates, to juggling badgers in order to quell evil spirits (probably). I took most of this with good grace but when the guest of honour sighed disapprovingly cause the wine was being passed to the right and not the left I promptly lost control and asked her whether the two-thirds of the Earth's population that don't eat most days gave a toss whether the drink went anti-clockwise or not.
Needless to say, the otherwise reasonably intelligent Amy was firmly in the ettiquette camp and wasn't impressed at all with this.
Perhaps I could swap her...