Tories + Lib-Dems = ?

Post-Election Coalition: Blue and yellow makes...? So, after almost a week of electoral wrangling, unelected puppet masters twanging strings and a confused populace trying to understand the election result, we the voters have ended up with a newly-formed British Government that now takes the shape of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. Obviously this is a political compromise of gigantic proportions, with a fragile balance to be undertaken by all concerned under the repeated media mantra of “It’s for the good of the country” to paper over the cracks that exist on the left-of-centre and the right-of-centre of both parties; an experimental aegis granted which, fingers crossed, can at least attempt to stem Britannia’s monetary haemorrhaging and halt our national deficit (thanks for the last 13 years, Gordon and all the best, mate!).

Walking and Dogs: ready for a workout?

Now we have some better weather across the UK, due to spring whistling in and pushing out the worst winter of the last thirty years, and so with this warmer arrival, I’ve decided to take advantage and embark upon daily walks to my workplace rather than use my bike. As I usually whizz along some farm lanes to save time and cut the frenetic early morning cycling to a minimum, having a nice leisurely stroll along these lanes - which skirt a local country park called Tandle Hills - with my camera in tow to capture the awakening flora and fauna seemed like the perfect addition to creating a stress-free day. Well, this was the original idea but in practice things haven’t really panned out as intended and that’s all down to our canine friends and their many forms: whether that form takes the appearance of small and cuddly or huge and f**king frightening, there’s one constant I’m sure of; I despise all shapes and sizes of every barking, bleeding dog.

Halifax Bank's Radio Station: feeling a little queasy

I’ve been feeling peculiar recently and it has taken some time to pinpoint the cause of my unsettled equilibrium due to untimely oral and rectal emissions intruding into my life. The symptoms appeared to come and go at random: from waves of nausea accompanied with rises of sickly bile, through intense bowel excavations of rumbling wind, to hot fevers that rendered me void of energy and coated in a sheen of fop sweat. I was at a loss to find a common denominator for these instigated troubles until, by chance, one day while watching TV, I found these feelings washing over my being during an ad break. So, I waited for the next showing of what I thought was the culprit and lo and behold, another viewing resulted in my body being wracked once again with violent upheaval and I’d found the cause of my televisual discomfort: it was all the fault of Halifax Bank’s latest set of TV ads, churning out their aural dross and banal flummery in hope hilarity ensures (it doesn't).

Obama Bin Laden? Welcome to the Mail Online's Typo...

Noticed this name error last weekend (it’s dated the 16th April), while reading the online version of the UK paper The Daily Mail; basically the headline created a confused amalgam of the USA’s first black President’s Christian name and the USA’s number one Al-Qaeda terrorist’s surname name. Feeling helpful and noticing the story had only just been put online, I decided to inform the cretin who'd written the piece by submitting the first comment to the story:

The General Election: a Red turning Blue?

Across the UK, we are now within the final countdown to the 2010 governmental General Election - which will take place on May the 7th - and we all get to flex our democratic choices by using our five-yearly voting extravaganza to usher in a real change in policy in the form of red, blue or, in the event of a long shot, yellow. So, either it’ll be the same old garbage we’ve just had or a new set of morons to destroy our hopes and aspirations for the foreseeable future; either way, nothing’s going to change, we’re all going to carry on complaining about lack of money, lack of jobs and lack of freedom within our rule-restrictive society, so why even bother to vote?

A tale of two Bicycles

As mentioned in previous blog entries (see "Cycling..." for more details) I have for now - over the last 6 months at any rate - been cycling to my place of work in what I like to refer to as an “enforced fitness regime”: this phrase basically means having to use a bicycle for a ten mile round commute into my job and thus enduring a physical workout I actually have no say in. Now, please don’t get the wrong idea and think I’m complaining about pedalling hardships without gaining some benefit from all this cycling; now I’m half a year into this perpetual sloggery, at an age where the good times are long gone and my belly's future does indeed appear bleak, I’ve noticed my once slack shape has tightened somewhat and I do feel quite fit, although not quite as a fiddle.

HSBC's "Integrity" & "Responsibility": What a load of old Bank...

With the vast corruption and continual bonus-greed rife within the Banking world during the last couple of years, our Capitalist masters have now decided to give themselves a publicity makeover in the hope of garnering our lost confidence. This development can only mean one thing: our weary eyes assaulted on a daily basis by newly-devised TV adverts, keen to sell us the same old themes of trust, assurance and dependability, only with a fresh lick of monetary sheen in order to divert our gaze from the real issues. Yes, it’s just another imagining of the old street-corner “cup and ball” trickster routine from eons ago, their hands swirling in a blur to confuse and fleece us of our hard-earned cash, regardless of whether we are aware of this illusion or not. Accompanying this brazen financial deception is the now socially-acceptable mantra, “Greed is good”: uttered by the main protagonist, Gordon Gecko, in Oliver Stone’s masterful Wall Street (1987), we all have these words ringing in our ears on a daily basis now as we’ve become governed by wanton thrusting, jealous grasping and unbridled selfishness, all unavoidable side-effects from stoking the insatiable furnace of Capitalism.

Our Un-Natural Selection

I am a great wildlife lover and advocate of being able to observe our flying little feathered things and cuddly little furry things in their natural environs, which in the UK means either flying above our heads in the sky or trotting about fields, moorland and hedgerows for our enjoyment. Most people in our animal-loving country appreciate and get pleasure from the little inter-species interaction we can garner during our high-powered, stress-filled, post-modern lifestyles. Whether this contact is taking the dog for a walk, stroking their lazy cat or putting nuts and seeds out for the birds – and thieving squirrels – that frequent their back gardens is a moot point to most of us: any dealings with the animals which surround us taps into and feeds our lost sense of belonging within the natural world, a world we seem to have separated from in our developed societies via technological advancement and obsession with monetary gain.

A trip to the Doctors... Pt 2

I’m now a few blog entries on from when I first visited my local NHS surgery due to feeling slightly unwell with my grotesquely swollen Parotid glands - see "A trip to the Doctors... pt 1" for more details - and where my Doctor issued ultra-strong antibiotics along with scattergun, tablet-taking instructions which I strived to follow to the best of my ability: however, this proved harder than I originally thought it would be due to the baffled state of my everyday thought processes. This memory confusion arose within just one day of ingesting the small, red-coated Milpharm tablets and almost immediately they reduced me to a gibbering, sweat-soaked sociopath liable to instantly explode in an antibiotic-induced fury of magnificent proportions.

Youth of today? Give me yesterday's childhood anytime

The youth of today and the death of tomorrow. Is this an accurate hypothesis or am I speaking after the fact; indeed, as I’ve had and enjoyed my early years, am I justified in not equating anything I see in today’s culture as being worthy for tomorrow’s foundation due to looking back in anger across my wasted years that started half a century ago in the middle of the 1980s? We all go through teenage rebellion and we can always pinpoint particular incidences that spoke to us, helped create who we have become, for good or bad, and to recall these memorable learning curves is a fascinating experience in trying to understand your former self through post-analysis.