Tips for retailers - taken from my autobiography 'That Boogie Beat Damn Killed My Soul'
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March 27, 2009
…the poor customer is however not completely without resources. In shops up and down the country, any day of the week, you will hear the same duel being played out between customer and salesman. Retailers have, of course, worked out many ripostes to combat the various lies, gambits, schemes and scams attempted by customers in order to obtain a lower price. Playing one retailer off against another is one of the favourite ways of getting a lower price. A customer will say ''How much can you do an Okai Kokai 2000 for?''
The first rule for shops hoping to make a sale is never, under any circumstances answer this question, except with any other question, like...
''Why is that important to you, sir?'' The conversation will continue,
''Well, because I might want to buy one of course, you idiot...''
(The actual subject of the question does not matter a jot. He could just as easily ask the customer if he has any children named Damien or who won the 1953 FA Cup; it doesn't matter what he asks and it doesn't matter what the customer answers either, because all he wants to do is to throw the customer out of his stride and take the initiative himself on the first exchange - in tennis-speak, to take service. I'm pretty sure it was Bolton Wanderers...no, it was Blackpool; Stan Mortenson got a hatrick...)
Then the retailer says, ''When do you want to buy it?''
If the customer says anything else but 'right now' there is a long choice of responses, which I'll not go into here, but if the first answer is 'right now', the immediate next question is...
''Ok, then sir...'', rustling a piece of paper to sound like an invoice book, ''let's write it up; Visa ok?''
If the customer replies 'not now' and will not answer the 'when?' question, the retailer knows from experience that any further comment, apart from to giving a quick, glowing advert for his shop, is a complete waste of his time, so he will say...
''Ok then, when you do want buy it, we will definitely be the cheapest... goodbye Ken!' quickly hanging up the phone. Any further comments that the retailer makes, will do damage and must be avoided at all costs. The worst thing he can say is...
''Yeah... I used to have one of those things myself; I found it a bit limited, to tell you the truth'' or ''Yeah, why don't you come in the shop for a demo; I'll show you all its weak points''.
That word tr...tr...trtrtru...I'm really sorry, I just can't get it out! (Brain to mouth..brain to mouth..engage now!) Of course, has no place at all in the retail or any other business.
By the way, he will know the customer's name and address; what he had for breakfast; the colour of his bathroom curtains and his inside leg measurement or with whom she had slept the previous weekend, because that would have been established, together with his or her phone number and if he is really good, the poor, unsuspecting bloke's or bird's card number as well, during the innocent pre-exchange of questions. This routine is known in the trade as 'good qualification'. If the retailer is busy and somehow a new, inexperienced wally-salesman escapes from his cage and manages to get to the phone first, before an experienced salesman can snatch it out of his hand, the 'wally', being completely unaware of how good some customers are at this game and the breathtaking scope of some of their tactics he might innocently reply to the first question...
''Ok, we'll do it for £999...''
The customer will come back, quick as a flash with ''Oh God man! I thought you said you were the cheapest! Oh, forget it then...I'll leave it, thanks. I know I can get it for £899...''
At this point the customer is clearly winning the debate, but the retailer, if he's awake, will see that the 'new boy' has just dropped the ball and is about get himself creamed; a recovery is called for and just as the customer is about to say 'goodbye...', he will grab the phone and say, with a hand half over the phone...
''Eric, you know perfectly well that maintenance staff shouldn't speak to customers; now go out to the car park with your bucket and clean my bloody car...yes, it's the Skoda... I'm sorry sir. Now, you were about to say where you'd been quoted that price...?''
(The retailer's car is not and has never been, of course, a Skoda; there are no Skodas is retail. In fact it is a brand new Ferrari, but it's never a good thing to give customers any sort of clue as to how much money you're making off them.)
Now, the customer can choose not to answer this question and simply say 'I'm not going to tell you!' and immediately push home his advantage, in which case he will certainly end up getting the thing for less than £899, because further retreat is the only ploy the retailer now has in order to save a sale, but most customers do not do this. Instead, they will say triumphantly...
''Widgets 'R' Us! say they'll do it for £899'' Unable to conceal their delight at thinking they've just got one over on the retailer.
The retailer will then say ''Huh huh... have Widgets 'R' Us! got it in stock?''
The customer replies, ''No, they haven't got it in stock...''
The retailer replies, ''Well, if you phone back when we haven't got it in stock, we'll do it for less than £799!''
The panic is over and the conversation goes back to the top of the page, but the initiative has now returned to the retailer, who stands there shaking his head for a second and says under his breath ''Tch ...punters!'' Before turning to one of his bods, or 'senior sales personnel', as the Dept. of Employment insists that they must now be called, and saying in his normal voice ''Oi, Bill or Jill or whatever your name is...get us another black coffee... Well? Don't just stand there looking at it...fill the sodding machine up again! There's the bloody kettle...no, you're right; there IS no steam coming out of it currently. Well? Fill it up; plug it in....come on! Chop chop! Christ...PLEASE tell me it's nearly six o'clock...''
The retailer knows also that even as the customer puts the phone down, rings back Widgets 'R' Us and tries to re-negotiate the price on the basis of someone doing it for less than £799; which is, incidentally, impossible, he will immediately be told to 'go forth and multiply' amid roars of laughter, and will come back on the phone within the next 10 or 15 minutes, when he will be told that the £799 batch have all been sold and he should have bought one of them at that low, unrepeatable price when he had the chance! So what is the point of all this? Is it to sell product? No, not really. From the retailer's point of view, the real point is to gain a small victory in the perpetual war that has been raging between the retail trade and the 'dark forces from the world below'; between extremes of good and evil; between the ancient realm of men, with hearts good and true, and the creatures from that 'other world'; of vampires, werewolves and all the other atrociously evil blood-sucking fiends, that would steal all our stock; put us all out of business; would see our children die of hunger on the streets and enslave our souls - or 'customers', as they have taken to calling themselves in recent eons. This war has continued since the beginning of time and knows no end; no quarter and no mercy. It will end one day - when retailers just give their stock away for nothing and give everyone a free lunch. Until that terrible day, the battle for the future of mankind will go on.
December 31, 2008
Premier League? You’re having a laugh…
The Pound is down to 105 against the Euro on its plummet towards parity and beyond. It was more like 150 six months ago. This represents a 30% fall in value so that a person from France, Germany, Ireland or any other of the EU Euro countries can come to what used to be England and buy a £300,000 house for £210,000 – plus a big discount on account of the fact nobody is buying property at the moment because they can't get a mortgage, say 10% if you're lucky; so your £300,000 house is now going for £180,000 while the market is in the tank.
Why should this be? Why should the people of the UK be experiencing a collapse of their currency when other nations of the world are not? Don’t let them tell you that it is the same everywhere – it is not. Even in the USA, where we’ve been told they are having the mother of all recessions and the thieves, shysters and con-men who are apparently running Wall Street and between themselves have stolen billions from the American public, channelling vast sums of money into overseas accounts and criminal levels of personal consumption, the Dollar, which this year fell to record lows against major currencies in world exchanges, has still gained 33% in value since the beginning of the year, when compared to the pound. This would indicate that no matter how bad econonic circumstances have become in the USA, it must be far worse in Britain.
Amazingly, a recent poll found that 94% of the British population was still opposed to scrapping the Pound and dead set against introducing the Euro. Why? To what level does the Pound have to fall before they stop listening to the likes of William Haig, who is still beating his ‘keep the pound’ drum? Will they still want the pound when it has sunk to parity with the Turkish lire or the Zimbabwean dollar?
Of course, it’s too late now to do anything constructive at all. If we took the Euro it would be at well less than parity, given that the Pound is continuing to slide and the Euro is continuing to climb; why should Europe even consider cutting the British a break? Our leaders took Britain into an un-holy alliance with the Americans over the Iraq war which put us at odds with most of Europe and predictably the US has now cut the UK adrift. The anti-Europe crowd in Britain have got what they wanted and now we find ourselves alone and right up the creek. Europe can afford to say ‘Non’ until there are £10 or £100 to the Euro and foreigners can come to Britain and buy whatever they want for Euro chump-change. Added to the prospect of our collapsing currency, we still have all the other benefits of a global recession to contend with; rising unemployment, industrial stagnation and with the projected increase in UK population of 20 million people before the mid-century and having to provide homes, energy, services and space for them all; the prospect of certain civil unrest.
It is almost as though a foreign power had inserted it's agents at the highest level of the British goverment and establishment and have conducted a very long campaign to firstly destroy the English as a race then to degrade and impoverish them by taking economic and political decisions designed to do damage, frustrate and infuriate the British people, rather than try and make their lives more reasonable and more liveable.
Out of gas...
The Western media makes me sick. Back in the last century I decided that I was paying too much for my gas. I rang North Thames Gas and said ‘Your gas is too expensive; put your price down or I won’t pay’ the operative told me ‘that is not advisable, sir, because you will fall foul of our credit control department; will be liable to legal proceedings for recovery of any debt and will almost certainly have your gas supply cut off’. The upshot of it was that I didn’t pay my gas bill and had my gas cut off!
Yet, when the Ukraine refuses to pay for its gas and will not accept an agreement covering future gas supplies, Russia is expected to carry on supplying gas, regardless of there being no sign of payment. Perhaps in a perfect Communistic society, where health care, social benefits, education and a minimum level of wellbeing is provided by the state, utilities such as gas would be distributed subject to the customer’s need and circumstances, but in the corporate capitalist nightmare of monstrous greed and criminal fraud, which now pertains in the world and to which Russia is now fully a paid up member and where every single facet of human activity is no more than a potential profit centre for the money-men, why shouldn’t the Russians withdraw their gas if the Ukrainians refuse to pay for it? Russia did try to run its economy along different lines after the Revolution and although they never managed to complete that brave experiment, they were derided, hated and feared and eventually forced to comply with the capitalist model practiced in the West.
Ukraine complains that it is being treated unfairly, compared to say, Belarus, which continues to receive gas at a preferential rate. Belarus and Russia do have an accord, however, and Belarus is not yet treating Russia as an enemy by inviting US forces in NATO disguise onto its territory, bringing the threat to Russia’s borders. The Ukraine also gave verbal support to Georgia, who it seems to me at any rate, was to blame for the recent war with Russia by conducting a reckless adventure in the pro-Russian regions of South Ossetia and Abkazia. Millions of Russian soldiers died as a result of clearing the Nazi forces out of the Ukraine in the last war and if the Ukraine wants to be treated like a friend by Russia, it should stop acting like an ungrateful enemy. The stalemate with the Ukraine could be sorted out easily and all the nonsense I am hearing about a Russian plot to overthrow the West and send Europe crashing back to the dark ages because it has decided to suspend gas supplies to the Ukraine can stop. All it needs is for the West to say five words to the Ukraine – pay your bloody gas bill!
A racing certainty...
November 2, 2008
I must admit I don't like Lewis Hamilton much. I can't deny that he's a good driver, but I can't get caught up in the near-hysteria sweeping Britain at the moment, where he is being hailed as 'our first black F1 World Champion'. He is not 'our first black champion' in the same way that Barack Obama is not their first black president. I am certainly not a racist; I am entranced by Barack Obama and hope he wins by a land-slide. I also wish him only good on behalf of the World in his new job, God willing. It makes as much sense to refer to both these gentlemen as 'the first black champion/president' as it does to call them 'the first white champion/president as they do have something in common - white mothers! If the media must keep harping on and on about colour, then why not refer to them as 'mixed race'?
Apart from being truly a Fernando Alonso fan, I was also happy to see Kimi Raikkonen win it last year. Lewis Hamilton is too political for my liking; he has also demonstrated that he will do just about anything to win; including unnecessarily aggressive driving tactics and catching poor old Alonso out with various sneaky tricks and then looking whiter-than-white in front of the cameras, when they were team mates at McLaren last year.
...and whilst we're on the subject...
November 1, 2008
Silvio Berlesconi, the Italian prime minister recently said when in a meeting with Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin something to the effect of ‘My congratulations to Barack Obama, who is young, handsome and has an even tan’. This was obviously said light-heartedly and with smiles all round; there was nothing disparaging or insulting in the words – even Mr. Putin managed to laugh! Predictably the race-relations industry instantly sprung into life with a vehemence usually reserved for Serbian war criminals, censuring Mr. Berlesconi as though he’d just told the US President-Elect to go forth and multiply. This to my mind is yet more of the outrageous pettiness and humourless ‘gotchaism’ that typifies the hypocritical and hysterical morons that run the race relations industry. There was, after all, nothing inaccurate about any part of the characterisation contained in Mr. Berlesconi’s remarks and the sense I got from them was they were the kind of remarks that an older man, who goes to considerable trouble and expense to preserve his own appearance and maximise his own presentation, might make when complimenting a younger man, who has after much hard work and determination reached a comparable level of success and notoriety as Mr. Berlusconi himself and continues to looks great - in the way that a father might compliment his son after he has just got his degree or at age 23, won his first World F1 Championship.
It is interesting that the media, who serve very largely as ‘enforcers’ for the race relations fascists, continually refer to Lewis Hamilton as ‘the first black F1 Champion’, which he isn’t; and Barack Obama as ‘the first black president’, which he also isn’t. What is the difference between saying that someone has ‘an even tan’, which Mr. Berlesconi just wishes he had himself and calling somebody ‘black’ over and over again, as though we are all stupid or blind – sorry, visually impaired and haven’t yet determined for ourselves the way both these exceptional men – sorry, people, look. These two remarkable men do not need qualification or description from the race relations industry or the media and can both stand on their own achievements unassisted by meaningless labels.
I'm talking rubbish...
October 11, 2008
I heard a very funny story last week. You know how in the UK we now have to separate our rubbish, so that green paper has to go into the green bag and then on to the black bin and the red plastic bottles have to go into a black bag then to the grey bin and the tin cans have to go into the blue bag inside the brown bin…? And if you don’t do it right, you’ll be picked up by the spy satellites, which, I’m told now have face recognition software and see, hear and smell everything. You’ll then be immediately visited by the 'rubbish police', who'll arrive in black body armour, 'Darth Vadar' hats and infra-red goggles, carelessly parking their matt-black, missile-armed attack helicopters on your lawn, releasing their sniffer dogs, then arresting everybody in a mile radius.
They will then re-bag every scrap of rubbish and take it away for forensic testing, to determine its exact status and composition. You'll then be dragged into court, where you'll be named and shamed, sacked from your job and have your credit cards suspended, before being made to sign the 'rubbish abusers' register. Your children will then be taken away and put into care. Your dog will face summary execution. Your cat, if he's got any sense, will still be out...
Meanwhile, the rubbish is taken away by a big green-painted rubbish collection vehicle, which delivers it to one of our nation’s many re-cycling centers, from which it is then transferred to a fleet of anonymous looking lorries in the middle of the night, taken to an un-named port and put aboard a large ship, which is touted as a sort of floating re-cycling facility, painted overall in green, of course and then sailed half way round the world to a secret location, where it is all unloaded in it’s original, by now festering state, taken to a mountainous, stinking rubbish tip, not too far from a hospital and right opposite the local nursery school, where it is then raked over by the local people, when best part of it is taken away for further use.
They can make our problem go away for a fraction of the cost of re-cycling, you see?
This story is probably not true and is no doubt another of those pernicious urban myths that comes up on the net from time to time…
Stop monkeying around...
September 29, 2008
The England football team recently played Croatia away and during the match, which I think we won 4 – 1, (not that that is of any importance), the England striker Emil Heskey was insulted by a section of the Croatian fans, which resulted in the Croatian foot-balling authorities being fined £28,000 for 'racism'. The insult was judged by people who judge such incidents and presumably it wasn’t the referee or any of the match officials, though the referee may have submitted a statement of the facts as he saw them to the powers that be. The nature of the insult was that the Croatian fans made ‘monkey chants’ directed at Heskey – imitations of the noises associated with monkeys; ‘Oo oo’ etc, whilst scratching an armpit with one arm elevated above one’s head and pulling a lip in the manner of a monkey, I expect. The complaint just mentioned 'monkey chants' and I've added the 'face' myself, together with the other components of trying to look like a monkey; the armpit scratching etc. I've done this because, lets face it, I could walk down Oxford Street going 'Oo oo oo' and without the appropriate actions I dare say I could easily be mistaken for some poor man with a terrible stutter trying to tell a passing lady 'you...you...you've dropped your purse!'
This activity, it was determined, constituted an insult to Emil Heskey and by implication all black people by insinuating that black people are inferior to white people because they look or act like monkeys and white people do not. That is a bit of a leap to make. There are of course other explanations for the fans behaviour. Firstly, it could have been a personal insult aimed only at Heskey, as he had recently fouled the captain of the Croatian team and so provoked the Croatian fans ire. It need not have been directed at an entire race of people, all of whom they seem to identify with Heskey, because I can’t believe all those Croatian fans can have had issues with the entire Negro race; they don't know them all, for one thing... Or maybe they thought it would put Heskey off his game by making him annoyed and distracted. Fans will do that! Incidentally, one word that is sometimes used to describe Emil Heskey is black. One word that is used to describe your average monkey is hardly ever black. People don’t seem to think of colour when taking about monkeys; I don’t anyway; it just doesn’t seem to be relevant. Monkeys are just monkeys, I thought. Anyway, what's wrong with being compared to a monkey? Are not monkeys God's creatures too? Monkeys all over the world have probably complained bitterly about this obvious 'monkeyist' behaviour and it's not their fault that we humans don't speak or understand 'monkey' and are therefore oblivious to the possibility that complaints could have been made.
Emil Heskey himself characterised the offending fans as ‘ignorant people’, which I believe falls short of describing the true situation. For instance, they are not too ignorant to have heard perhaps that the entire human race and all the other primates - monkeys, regardless of skin colour, is believed to have descended from common ancestors in more simple times many millions of years ago and for reasons of geography, climate and other considerations, such as whether they began their development in a mountain range or a tropical forest, a grassland, a desert or at the bottom of the sea, in fact wherever they tried to establish themselves, their environment would have affected their evolution. The different groups would have grown in different ways at different rates, depending on their environment.
There are other reasons for divergence in their development. Sociological factors, such as how warlike and brutal a particular group of creatures were and the ease or difficulty of finding, hunting or growing an adequate food supply or gaining access to an adequate supply of water. Providing shelter for the group would have been another factor, whether in a cave, up a tree or wherever they could thrive and produce enough offspring to guarantee their group's survival. The different solutions found by these creatures for these and other problems led to the natural splitting of the whole into groups or tribes, which settled in different regions of the planet and evolved in different circumstances. Over a great period of time these circumstances caused slight physiological differences to be amplified, so that a tribe which had a plentifull supply of food growing on trees or food-animals that could be caught and eaten, would have had no need to discover agriculture so wouldn’t have had to develop the physiologies and skill sets pertinent to planting and harvesting fields full of grain. Instead, they would develop the attributes necessary for hunting antelopes.
At some point in our shared history men and monkeys entirely split into separate groups and sub-groups, and as we’re all still here, alive and well, after all this time, we all must be doing something right! Unlike the dinosaurs, the dodo and other extinct species that for some reason did not seem to adapt so well.
I like to think that all living creatures are basically all part of the same entity. There is nothing that separates humans and monkeys from each other or indeed from the other creatures of this or any other planet except for the factors that they have to adjust and adapt to. Every creature and every object in existence is made of the same ‘cosmic stuff’. Even the extinct creatures aren’t really extinct; they’ve just turned into some other creature for reasons of viability. For instance, dinosaurs held sway on Earth for millions of years, then for reasons of survival that they of course were not even aware of, over time have evolved into birds.
There are obvious advantages to being a bird as opposed to a dinosaur. The glaringly obvious one is that you get to fly. This is a very big advantage when trying to avoid being eaten by a passing dinosaur or tiger; however it’s of little comfort when one is being hunted by one of your own kind that is bigger, meaner and can fly faster than you!
Humanity currently leads a complicated, convoluted existence. We have developed politics, law, religion, medicine, commerce, industry and a host of other self-defeating mechanisms to further our survival as a species through competition; each field of activity is just another battlefield; another venue for the on-going competition. 'Race Relations' is but another way in which we can establish hierarchy and create space between ourselves. The race relations industry is just another game show; the employees of the industry being the hosts and judges of the show and the people of the world, the cannon-fodder; the consumables; the contestants of the show.
It is just another name for the game that we humans like to play the most - 'gotcha!' Competition and contention – it’s what makes the world go round.
Our basic propensity for war, violence, nihilism and competition is still very much in evidence. We are arguably closer to making ourselves extinct than at any time in our history. Human law has led to repressed violence and a sense of injustice that sometimes threatens to overwhelm us; medicine and agriculture has led to over-population that will probably see us out in a few hundred years; religion has caused more wars and more discord in our lives than probably any other factor and commerce and industry have led to greed, pollution of the planet and climatic changes that will probably subject us and every other species on Earth to a series of natural disasters and probably an extinction-level event in the near future. We know this to be true and yet we are still hell-bent on pursuing the same way of life that has led us to the brink.
Meanwhile, the other primates, our cousins; the noble, ancient apes and monkeys, who have survived on this planet as long as we have and who are just trying to survive now in a world owned and ran by arrogant humans; humans who are busy destroying their habitats and chopping down their forests just so they can get their greedy hands on yet another fashionable coffee table or the latest exotic hardwood fitted kitchen, or fuel to fill their tanks. All the other creatures of Earth are reduced to standing on the sidelines, watching in awe, just waiting for the bulldozers to arrive.
So, the race relations industry is yet another of those mechanisms that we humans believe will help our chances of survival. It is run by a generally well-meaning group of individuals; probably mostly white, liberal, middle-class professionals, who nonetheless have a vested interest in not pursuing their avowed aim of 'stopping racism' too ardently, but of protecting their industry’s continued existence. They must do this because they earn their corn, not by hunting antelope or by planting seeds as their ancestors did, but by sitting in their offices busily thinking up more ways of defining ‘racism’ - which is the science of discriminating between one human being or one group of human beings and another for the purpose of disadvantaging one group or another - and even more draconian penalties for those of us who transgress. The most visible tool of their trade is skin colour, only because it the most obvious. What they do in life is to invent ever more sophisticated generations of trip-wires for the rest of us to fall over and every time that happens the transgressor loses points in the game and the industry picks them up; it's just more competition.
The amount of sunlight a particular region attracts used to be the sole reason why some people are black and some are white. The sunnier it is, the blacker you get. Nowadays, the world’s population has been shaken up and now basically anybody can live anywhere, but the determination of how black or how white a person becomes is due to one simple thing. Nature provides people with a chemical sun-blocker, melanin, which inhibits the sun’s rays so preventing sun-burn. The amount of melanin in the skin determines whether one is black, white or whatever colour we are, usually a shade of brown. No rational, objective judgment can be made on the intelligence, righteousness, criminality or one’s worth as a human being by measuring the amount of melanin one has in one’s skin.
It is therefore my judgment that racism exists only in the minds and machinations of the people who rely on it to provide them with a worthwhile career; namely, the race relations industry. I’m not saying that in human affairs there is no tribalism or that different cultures do not exist; of course they do and they always will. Our entire existence is predicated on competing tribes and cultures; that is something that runs through the nature of all living entities. That is what we do; that is who we are. That is part of being alive; that is why we compete, why we have wars and fights. Races fight. Nations fight. Families fight. Children fight. And it’s not just us, but monkeys too – and elephants, lions, tigers, grains of rice, trees, AIDS viruses… every living thing fights for its own personal survival and that of its species. That, indeed, is why England and Croatia were playing football in the first place! What other way is there to establish hierarchy? All right, I suppose you could give us all a ball and award goals democratically, in strict order of sequence and not by merit, but I think the PC crowd tried that in the seventies in the schools and all it led to was a generation of passive kids who sat on their hands all day; their ‘get up and go’ having just got up and gone!
So, I feel insulted that the described insulting behaviour to Emil Heskey did not include me and by implication, white people generally. This, I feel, is a racially-motivated slight that I have been subjected to. Are they saying that only a representative of the Negro race is worthy of being compared to the monkey? Am I not also a human being and as such share common ancestry with the monkey? Are they trying to deprive me of my birthright? Are they implying that I’m less than human?
Governor Sarah Palin...
September 16, 2008
Look, I think you should all give the lady a chance. She’s far better looking than that other guy, Joe Biden, anyway.
The way some segments of the media are running her down constantly and accusing her not knowing the first thing about the Bush strategy and the finer points of foreign policy and who actually was responsible for the 911 outrage, (well, it certainly wasn’t Saddam and the Iraqis) is anything but fair and balanced.
Some people have even raised concerns about the speech in which she seemed to say that the Americans were doing 'God’s task' in attacking certain countries that US intelligence agencies believe do not agree with this or that US policy and therefore pose a clear threat to US’s interests. Despite the efforts of Fox News to conduct a frantic ‘damage limitation’ operation on her speech and to stretch and distort what she actually said in their usual fair and balanced way, it still sounds to me like she was saying that ‘I think we are doing God’s task’. Even if we accept that what she meant was ‘I pray that we are doing God’s task’. What value does she place on prayer? Does she think it works all the time or just sometimes? If she thinks it works all the time, then what difference does it make whether she said A or B? Why is it that important anyway? So she believes in God; so do millions of other people.
I just can’t help wondering though, as an Evangelical Christian, what she thinks about the origins of the Universe. Does she believe that it all started about 13 billion years ago with the Big Bang, or one week, 6 thousand years ago, as the Bible says. Is she keeping up with the work that CERN are doing in Europe in trying to find the source and nature of matter and trying to express more accurately what must have occurred a millionth of a second after the Big Bang? Or does she hold to the biblical account that God created it all in 7 days; that the first people on our wonderfull planet, which had the moon and stars, which God also created that week, fixed in the sky above it, were Adam and Eve and in the Garden of Eden, where everything was perfect, Adam was tempted by the Serpent, who was really the devil, with his famous apple, so condemning humanity to a lifetime of sin, until we were saved by Jesus...?
If I was an American voter, I would be very keen to know which version she had taught her children and which version she would wish to see installed in American schools, if she were in a position to move the issue one way or the other. Either what it says in the bible or modern and developing scientific theory? Tell us please...
She also apparently contacted her pastor for some appropriate quotations from the bible to help her through the difficult and demanding new situation in which she now finds herself. I think it’s important for the American people to be told whether she accepts some or all of biblical scripture and having sorted that question out, exactly which bits she does believe and which bits she does not.
She does not believe in abortion. I don’t think that anybody actually believes abortion is a good thing, but is it that she just believes in no abortion for American women? If not, how does she square being pro-life with being pro-war? So called ‘terrorist families’, who have lots of children, produce the very offspring whom she would send US forces overseas to kill, so would she not be helping to do God’s work if she was pro-life for American women and pro-choice for everybody else?
What is so special anyway about being terminated at 12 weeks as opposed to being incinerated by space-age weaponry in Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, as thousands of people of those countries obviously are? (Or are increasingly likely to be.)
As a mother of five children, she probably disagrees with the ‘one child only policy’ currently supported in China. Does she think that many of the world problems are linked to over-population or not? Does she think that maybe it would be a good idea if Chinese families each had 5 children? If that were the case, of course the Chinese population would grow exponentially, does she or does she not think that would be a good thing?
Or does she think that maybe American families should be entitled to have as many children as they like and if America runs out of oil or food or space, then they should be entitled to take somebody else’s?
I do not ask these questions because I am biased one way or the other as far as the US election is concerned. I have no axe to grind. I am a foreigner; an outsider. Sarah Palin is probably a good person who believes passionately that she is doing the right thing. But if I were an American, I would certainly not vote for the Republicans. They frighten me. What they are doing to the world frightens me and the things that they would do, given another 4 years frighten me more.
I think I will start a campaign for the vote to ensure that not only people born in the US, but all the rest of us as well get a say in the US elections. By this action we would ensure that the Republicans were banished to the pages of history. If the whole world were to be allowed to vote in the American elections, then by a ratio of 4 to 1 they would not vote Republican, according to a recent BBC survey.
Ridiculous? Why? Ok, we might not live there, like the Americans don't live in all our back gardens...? But The US has put itself forward as ‘the leader of the free world’ for the last 50 years and if you’re not a member of the ‘free world’, then apparently you’re asking for serious trouble! We can assume that Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Russia, China, Somalia and the Yemen among others, are not yet members of the free world. I, as a Brit, belong to a nation that is ‘part of the free world’ and therefore tolerated by the US - for now anyway - as is the rest of Europe, more or less.
My point is, that as America’s reach is global, economically, culturally and above all militarily and whilst they insist on being the Exceptional Ones and whilst they insist on throwing their weight around in the world, as if they owned it and particularly whilst their leaders, especially the likes of Governor Sarah Palin – and given an eight year term in office for McCain/Palin, it becomes more than a remote possibility she will be their leader one day – have a hand on not only the nuclear trigger, but on the whole panoply of US space-age weaponry, then all of us non-Americans should get to vote in the American elections. Otherwise we are all in a situation of ensuing ‘Incineration without Representation’ and that, I submit, is most un-democratic!
Oh Mikki!
September 2, 2008
The Bush family cat, Mikki, eager to obey its masters, loyal, but not exactly bursting with O Levels, one day, when the world was occupied watching the Olympic games, dragged a small piece of brown fur, which he earnestly believed to be a little mouse, into the house and dropped it at his master’s feet in front of the TV, where his master was watching John Wayne in The Green Beret for the 28th time. He often in his dreams had toyed with the little mice in the field and thought nothing of wreaking mayhem on them, much to his master’s delight. It was then that to his horror he found that the innocent piece of brown fur was in fact the tip of an ear belonging to a big, angry brown bear, which he had found asleep under a tree in a field in a land far away across the sea and to the north of the big white house in which the master and his friends, who were not usually seen during the hours of sunlight, lived and where he was usually adored and given lots of toys to play with, some of which were very noisy indeed!
The poor cat, realising his terrible mistake, wibbled and wobbled, flustered and blustered and tried to explain to the master why he had brought into the house a very angry bear, now wide awake and snarling and growling, salivating through bared teeth, tearing the drapes down with open claws and now even defecating on the master's favourite sofa!
Aw Mikki! Bad boy! Couldn’t you wait?
Oh dear....
August 14, 2008
I listened to US republican presidential hopeful, John McCain, addressing an audience last night on the subject of Vladimir Putin, prime minister of Russia. George Bush had earlier reportedly said something along the lines of looking into Mr. Putin's eyes and seeing his soul.
McCain said, incredibly, 'When I look into Putin's eyes, I see only three letters - KGB'.
My questions are these. Is this the comment of a serious, sane man, who is being sold to the American public as someone with mature good judgment, umpteen years of experience in foreign affairs and the safest pair of hands on the nuclear button? Is this a comment someone who hopes to lead the World in the 21st century makes about a serving world leader of Mr. Putin's stature?
It sounds to me as though it comes from a bitter, crazy old coot, stuck in a world of cold-war rhetoric and out-of-date labels, who can't wait to get to the finishing post, just so he can 'get even with the commies' and knows bugger all, except how to rub people up the wrong way. God help the planet if he actually wins the election!
Thanks for opening my eyes Fox...
August 5, 2008
Here in Thailand I get access to all the major news channels in the World. I particularly like Al jazzier for their fair and un-biased style and the international flavour of their news coverage, but BBC World and CNN, which I get on satellite, are also good, apart from that stupid, puerile, oh-so-modern bloody music that the BBC use for their links. As soon as they start playing it, I grab the remote and hurriedly switch over to CNN!
I know from experience that after the military take-over in Thailand and the controversy involving Mr. Thaksin, the British media in some cases were of the opinion that Thailand was now a military dictatorship and not too far off of having tanks in the streets. Personally, I have seen very little difference made to every-day life in Thailand by the current government and they seem to have the interests of the country very much in mind. The Thai police are the same as they’ve always been, the town hall runs the same way and there are not troops on the streets or any draconian changes in the law being made, unlike in Britain.
T he coverage of the American election is obviously taking centre stage on all the news channels currently and the impression I get from the news media is that Barrack Obama is out in front. Certainly, from what he has said so far and the general way he is conducting himself, I personally would feel very comfortable with Barrack Obama winning the election. I share the feeling displayed in Germany last week, where he gave a speech and the 200,000 waving and cheering Germans, who came to see him, hailed him as their saviour.
As one of his opponents pointed out on American TV, that is fine, but the Germans do not have a vote in the US election! I would say that they may not, but like myself and many other people in the UK, they have a very great interest in who wins the US election as the US, for the last 50 years, has put itself forward as ‘the leader of the Free World’, which I hope I am part of, so why shouldn’t I be concerned with the result of the US election?
I must admit, I started off supporting Hillary Clinton, but as it turned out, she was robbed and motivated by something more than hatred, fear and loathing for Bush and the way his administration is currently screwing the planet, I transferred my support to Obama and have kept up with the news of his success so far.
That is until my satellite system crashed and I had to watch the local cable station, which although has Chinese, French, Japanese and Korean news channels, the only English Channel I could find was Fox News.
First of all, Fox claims to be the only American international news channel; I didn’t know that. Well, I’d better stop watching CNN... Secondly, my thanks to Fox for providing me with, as they say, ‘fair and balanced news coverage’ and thanks also for ‘providing the facts and letting you decide’. That is certainly good to know, especially the facts about Barrack Obama.
I gained the impression from some Fox contributors that Barrack Obama’s real name is Black O’Bomber, a former Irish terrorist who was brought up as a Moslem extremist, which he obviously denies. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And did you know the fact that he is known widely by his nickname, Osama, outside of the U.S.? Worse still, a shock connection between Osama and Adolf Hitler, the well known Nazi, has been discovered.
He apparently ran over a Dachshund, the Nazi’s national dog, in his car 7 years ago whilst being chauffeured to a fund-raiser. Ok, so he wasn’t actually driving, but we all know there’s no smoke without fire!
And information is now coming to light that shows clearly that Barrack Obama, as he now styles himself, is a lying, cheating, back-stabbing, bottom-dealing, terrorist-funding horse thief and cattle rustling, racist flip-flopper and not the saviour of the World, as we’re being told by all the other media organisations. That is because, like Obama, the other news organisations are all Communists, gooks, limey-freaks, wackos and extreme left-wing liberals who are plotting the destruction of America's economy by denying tax cuts to the big oil companies and also the end of the World as we know it and we should be trusting the ‘Big Oil’ companies, our only true friends and the only ones who have all the people's best interests at heart.
Thanks Fox, for showing me the true path. I will definitely start supporting that great patriot and defender of the nation, John McCain, now I’ve learned the truth from you guys…
It's enough to make you sick...
July 25, 2008
I read that the CIA has a new interrogation technique. It is to roll 'suspected terrorists', or as the rest of the world calls them, non-Americans, around in large quantities of other peoples vomit. I expect it is a very successful technique as I for one would sell my own family, betray my own mother and admit to being Bin Ladin himself in order to avoid such a disgusting display of disrespect for other human beings and, after all, that's the idea, isn't it? To make SOMEBODY confess to SOMETHING!
If you had a big dog that bit you in the arse very hard, you might want to kick it in the nuts or throw a bucket of water over it, but I still don't think that a normal, rational person would resort to rolling it in vomit. I would not personally submit your average cock-roach to such barbarity, not even if I suspected it was linked with Al Qaeda! True, I might well stomp it, but I think that would at least be a quick, honourable way to die. I would do it the service of letting it go out of this life on its shield.
It could be that so called 'intelligence services' the world over do this sort of thing routinely and I just need to get out more. Perhaps only the Americans are big enough and open enough to admit to these things. We know the British armed forces have been known to have shoved a few heads down the latrines, including that of one poor bugger who choked to death as a result.
Still, Freedom and Democracy have their cost, as they say, especially for those of us who are rolled in vomit or have shit forced down our throats. Again, given the choice of my own demise, I think I would prefer to blown up by terrorists than suffer these outrages.
The thought occurred to me that obtaining enough vomit to make the operation economical and worthwhile must be quite difficult. I mean, you can hardly send out a 'sick demand' like it was a tax return form. Probably, they get 100,000 or so foreigners gathered in a football stadium somewhere, put a giant 'Stars and Stripes' over the whole area of the field, then secure the services of Oprah Winfrey, Donny and Marie Ozzman, Brittney Spears, David Beckham and Paris Hilton to stand in the middle of the field and sing Amazing Grace or The Star Spangled Banner until everyone in the audience is uncontrollably and violently sick. You could get them all going with a couple of tons of Big Macs and Large Fries and a few gallons of Coke each.
All that is required now is that they bring in several hundred British actors, who are between gigs at the moment, as roles as 'The English butler' or 'The World's most evil baby-eating, terrorist-funding criminal scumbag', which are the only roles that British actors seem to get in Hollywood, don't grow on trees. They obviously can't use American actors for such roles as, as everybody knows, real skivvies and real super criminal scumbags don't exist among indigenous Americans, which is why if there's a 'real bastard scumbag' role in an American film, chances are that he speaks with an exaggerated English, German, Arab, or Afrikaans accent and always attacks defenceless US woman and children as part of his evil-doing.
Better still, I had occasion to watch the Hollywood sci-fi hit Babylon 5 the other day. The episode was about the destruction of Earth, the home planet of Humanity, by the Norvads or Varigons or some other disgusting alien race that looked like radio-active, ugly, slimy, slug-like lizards. The thing that gave it all away was that the representatives of hard-pressed humanity were all obviously Americans, whilst the alien slimy lizards all had heavy French accents and said things like 'Zair position is 'opeless, shall oui blue up zair feelthy planet now, mon Capitaine?' Hahaha...
Back in the stadium, they then issue buckets and mops to the hapless Brits and give the instruction 'Come on you suckers, clear up this mess, so we can get on with the job of making the world a safer place for Freedom, Democracy, Justice and the Rule of Law!'
Strictly for the birds...
July 3, 2008
Couple of funny things I thought worthy of a mention...
I went to MK (a big Chinese restaurant in Pattaya) the other day, where everybody uses chopsticks except me, (with chopsticks, you just can't stuff the food down your throat fast enough). So I did what I usually do and ordered a 'chon som' - fork and spoon. No problem. I looked at the menu and decided to have some green noodles with my honey duck, so I also asked for a knife; 'chon som kup mete' - fork, spoon and knife. I haven't got the time to sit there like a clutz winding noodles round my fork, while my girlfriend looks on admiringly and with a little smile thinks to herself 'There's a good boy; see? Not so difficult, is it?' But being an uncouth Farang (European), I like to cut it all up then shovel it down, with Thais on nearby tables looking at me in disgust and thinking 'Oich...what a buffalo...'.
When the waiter heard my request for the hardware, he looked first at me then turned to my girlfriend, Honey with a concerned look, then went away without another word. A few seconds later, a smart young man, whom I took to be the under manager, came to our table and had several earnest words in Thai with Honey. When he left I asked 'what was all that about?'
She replied 'Before they gave you a knife, he wanted to make sure that you knew what you were doing with it and as they don't usually get such requests and don't keep knives out in the restaurant; they will have to get one out of the kitchen'
He also asked Honey if I knew that knives were very sharp and could, in the wrong hands, be extremely dangerous! She replied 'It's ok; I THINK he's used one before once or twice'.
I feel like I should tell the Thais that due to their persistent refusal to master the concept of eating with a knife and fork, they have forfeited any possibility of ever having an overseas empire, like many of the European nations have in their histories.
If you order a steak here, they bring up a fork and spoon, although how they expect you to eat a steak with a friggin spoon is beyond me. Several times, when in this predicament, I have mimed across the room an action intended to be me cutting up my steak - and they have brought up an extra big spoon!
The other thing is we have a bird which looks a bit like a starling. I've been hearing it tweeting for years and it suddenly occurred to me what to call it. It makes a four syllable tweet, of the same cadence and tonal inflection as a neurotic and distraught woman saying the words 'Don't lie to me..!' and then repeats the phrase exactly 3 times, each time slightly higher in pitch and slightly more fraught-sounding than the previous time. So, you end up with 'Don't lie to me..! DON'T lie to me..!! DON'T LIE TO ME!!!
I call it the Thai Anxiety Bird.
Time just flies...
March 10, 2008
I must apologize for my non-participation for several months. You see, this is Thailand and there are so many things to do and I'm not getting any younger
I read with some disgust that the UK Government is to start rolling out the identification card scam on the British public. The excuse is 'in order to prevent terrorism' or as the minister-for-the-whatever was blathering on about in the usual 'gov-speak' on the TV from her up-market Islington home the other day...
'Look, everybody in the country needs to know who they are with both safety and security. I mean, how can anybody be expected to know whether they are a terrorist or not unless we tell them? Without the new scheme, the police, who already have their hands full forcing millions of cars off of the overcrowded UK roads, will have an increasingly difficult job to do, making millions of arrests and conducting thousands of roadside interrogations, some of which may well prove to be fruitless. Know who you are! Get a card! If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have NOTHING to fear! You KNOW it makes sense!
Let me help you. I know who I am, thank you very much. I don't need a plastic card with my biometrics, financial information, political affiliations, voting record, inside leg measurements and whatever other private and personal details you wish to know about me. I KNOW that I'm not a terrorist or a criminal at this moment and you'll just have to take my word for it. That is not to say that you couldn't keep adding to the law and making it even more intrusive and oppressive and at some point make me one, but by that time, I'd think of myself as a freedom fighter.
I've decided that I will not have one of your ID cards thrust upon me and no threats you make against me or my family will induce me to have one. You will have to drag me backwards, kicking and screaming all the way to Belmarsh Prison instead.
The reason? Because I do not believe the reasons you have given for requiring me to carry an ID card. I think it has nothing to do with preventing terrorism and everything to do with extending the 24 hour, round-the-clock surveillance of every single person in the UK, snooping on all the phone calls and all the emails sent to by everybody and studiously recording their movements and activities and trying to hi-jack their civil rights for dark reasons that we can only speculate about. I would say that extending the UK Government's control over our lives to the point where it is total is a good bet...
This is certainly not the freedom and democracy that I am currently signed up for.
More bits from 'That Boogie Beat..'
Thinking of old Stan helps me to remember the nights some years afterwards, when we were earnest, enthusiastic young men. Stan and I would wash up at the Dell Gray Sunday club at the Red House pub, on the Redbridge roundabout. I would turn up in my brand new, yellow Lotus Élan S4 SE and Stan, who by then was a very successful motor dealer, would bring one of a series of seriously credible super-cars of the time; a metallic red Aston Martin DB4, which he’d subsequently re-sprayed mustard yellow. He wrote that one off which off at the roundabout that used to be at the Raleigh Weir pub, on the A127 Southend Rd. He was coming back from Southend with his girlfriend in the car and just crashed straight into the roundabout, hitting the foot-high parapet wall which surrounded the roundabout and more or less destroying the front underside of the car. Stan was a very good driver and I think he must have been distracted in some way, if you take my drift.
Next up on Stan's catwalk was a dark metallic red Aston Martin DB5, without the James Bond paraphernalia, followed by a silver-grey Maseratti that he got from his uncle Stan, who used to own Maylands golf course on the A12, one of the main roads out of east London. His uncle Stan was a tax exile living in Jersey, so he obviously had a few bob. The Maseratti was almost impossible to sit in because of the horrendous driving position The impossibly heavy clutch pedal required a driver to be double-jointed as well as being possessed of a bionic leg. As Stan was (and still is, so I hear) 6’ 5’’ tall and is a big man, it must have been like sitting in a dodgem car at the fairground for him and so the Masserati, as flash and sought after as it was, didn't last long. There then followed a Jensen Interceptor, which was a bit more comfy and several Jags. I've not seen him for years and I expect he’s now a full member of the Mercedes mafia. When I sold my bright yellow Élan in 1974, it was bought by a young couple called Merle and Melina Mercuri from Sepulveda in Los Angeles, who had come to England specifically for the purpose of buying themselves a British sports car and were both over the moon about acquiring a genuine British motor racing legend, which my Élan was and if they had any sense they would have cherished and maintained it because today it would be worth a fortune.
Every week, Stan and I would walk in the door of the Dell Gray and proceed to the dark places at the sides of the club, the place reserved for us and all the other losers. We had usually done ourselves up to the nines and stunk of about a gallon of Marc Vardi aftershave lotion or one of its equally evil smelling competitors and set about doing our usual convincing impersonation of a couple of smelly wall-flowers. We’d just stand there all night, eyes darting from right to left repeatedly, as if we were watching a game of tennis as all the birds walked past, this way and that, the silence broken only by the regulation comments...
“There are...! What do reckon on them two?”
“Nah... Too fat.”
“What about them two?”
“Nah... Too thin.”
“....Them?”
“Don't like yours...”
“Right. Neither do I.”
“Want another drink?”
“Yeah. V & T, ta.”
“Want a snout...?” Flashing a new packet of Bensons...
“Nah... Go on, have one of mine...”
“Nah... ‘E’ ‘are; don't be a hero! I’ve got them out now...”
“Ta...”
And so it went on, week after week. We’d stand at the side of the dance floor and just watch all the birds dancing round their handbags, set in a ragged little heap in the middle of the floor, whilst the girls danced round them like a group of Red Indians dancing round a totem pole. The trouble was, we both thought we looked like James blinking Bond and sooner or later a couple of absolute darlings would see us and sweep us off our feet and whisk us both away to the Jules Verne restaurant on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower in gay Paris, which, in our dreams, we’d be able to afford…no problem! And where we’d order champagne cocktails all round and a plate full of prawn nibbles. Then we'd go on up to that big penthouse in the sky, turn the lights down low, put on some smoochy music, maybe dance a little... This is more like it! ...But then we’d both wake up. Back in the real world, when we were five minutes into injury time and they'd started switching on the “Right! We've had your money, now bugger off!” lights and our two mysterious princesses had still not arrived - again - and all there was left in the club were a few fat, ugly, old ‘10 Pinters’ and we'd just missed ‘last orders’, so there was no more V & T to lose ourselves in, we'd look disconsolately at each other and say
“That's it... I've bloody had it with this place”
“Yeah... Right. See you next week?”
“Yeah... I'll see you next week.”
We'd then commence the ‘long walk of shame’ back to the car park, or the ‘krap rac’, as we miscalled it, back to our beloved cars, a single young man’s only true friend and companion. The night’s comedy of errors and total failure to pull anything remotely female would just serve to put us both in the right mood for another of our trademark burn-ups down the Southend Arterial Rd., once again putting our lives and more importantly our licences in immediate peril. It was no wonder I hardly ever pulled anything. I had a particular problem with shyness - I absolutely would NOT ask a girl to dance, no matter what the inducement and I used to dream up all the excuses under the sun for not doing so - I wrote the song ‘I won't dance’ to commemorate this fact. Thank goodness the shyness problem is all behind me now. At last I've got some confidence and self-assurance. I ask all the girls to dance these days and most of them say...
“In your dreams, fatty!”
My next book will be called ‘A young man growing up in East London - How I learned to cope with rejection’
Back to Stan’s impromptu rendition of the ‘Peter Gunn’ theme on his Hofner. It was no surprise that he should have cottoned on to this tune. Stan had always had a liking for American private-eye type shows on the TV. I'd known him since my time at Parkhill primary school when he, like me, had been one of eleven pupils in the ‘B’ stream in the last year who passed the 11-plus exam and would go on to West Hatch Technical High School. We went on holidays together and did some outrageous things, obviously unbeknown to our parents and had some very illuminating and hilarious times together. We were thus both saved from the prospect of a life without light and enlightenment in the gloomy, grinding underground world of the British factory system, for this was the reality of the government's education policy in the 1960s. Stan had always seemed to me to be about six months in front of me in the growing-up stakes. Style wise, he was the first one of the crowd to have a shiny grey, mohair suit, which came with a card that you were suppose to plonk in the top pocket, which had three white folded cotton points stuck to it to resemble a cleverly folded handkerchief. You could get these items at John Walton or Tony Man, both fashionable men's clothes shop in Ilford High Street.
Stan was the first to wear button-down collars and knitted silk narrow-width ties and the first to have a lightweight, beige Mac with the collar turned up, ideal for standing under street lamps alone in the dead of night, smoking a Strand cigarette and looking for the entire world like Philip Marlow, the American private-eye. On a Sunday afternoon we’d go to the Wimpy Bar in Gants Hill. I would aways have ten bob, which my mum sent me away with. I'd take the 167 bus from Chigwell station or jump on a Central Line train; they both cost 1s 2d - about 5 cents - and we’d meet up at the bus stop at Gants Hill or in Gants Hill Underground station, then spend a couple of bob on a wimpy or a cheeseburger and a cup or two of the Wimpy’s atrocious frothy coffee, before walking over to the Odeon cinema and getting our seats in the ‘one and nines’. When the week’s film - and of course, there was only one and a ‘B’ movie - had finished, we'd go to the dark, smoky and slightly intimidating Circus coffee bar opposite, on the other side of Gants Hill roundabout. As soon as we got in the Circus, we felt like we had moved up a notch or two; we had moved into the big league; we were walking on the wild side. It was populated by many of the shady characters that we’d just seen in the movie! We'd sometimes meet up with our friend, a lad called Barry Tyson, who also wore a lightweight, beige Mac with the collar turned up, and we'd sit there for a couple of hours talking about motors, guns, birds, or whatever the riveting topic de jour was, drinking coffee and smoking our Strands, like we were three tough-guy private dicks taking a break from the grizzly murder case we were working that night...
Most controversially, Stan was the first one to get a pair of Denson Pointers, which were pointed-toe, Italian style winkle-picker shoes. They were generally frowned upon by our parents generation, not because they looked ridiculous and were completely impractical, which they clearly were, but because of the type of boys who wore them, who were perceived to be wayward and disruptive and were generally called Johnny. For this reason, together with the fact that he was always a foot taller than me and therefore looked older, my mum thought he was a precocious young man and although she liked Stan, I think that she suspected that he was a bad influence on me; not true of course.
I remember the row that I had with her when Stan appeared in his Denson Pointers one evening. I mentioned in conversation that I thought Stan’s new shoes looked really great and didn't she think that I’d look good in a pair too? Mum said something along the lines of...
“Don't even think about it. They look bloody ridiculous. Do you want to look like you’ve got clowns feet? You'll be wanting to wear a black shirt next! What would your father say? Don't you realise that we are in business in the area?”
“Can I take that as a yes?”
“No you bloody well can't take that as a yes! Now, get on with your homework and turn that bloody music down; were trying to watch a program in here!”
When I eventually got her cornered in Baskin's, the shoe shop and home of Denson pointed shoes in Barkingside high street a month later, we had protracted negotiations which covered degrees and extremes of teddy boy behaviour, what constituted a point and what constituted a slight point and actually agreed that the Turks, who were clearly not all teddy boys, sometimes wore pointy toe shoes. Thankfully, the conversation stopped short of us both needing to seek professional opinion and that day I was obliged to settle for a slightly less pointy pair of shoes that sadly weren’t Denson's. This small victory in fact constituted a fair and balanced political solution to what was essentially an issue of whether I should be allowed to have stylish footwear or not. Somehow, it had managed to get itself blown up into the proportions of an issue of similar resonance as whether Turkish women should or should not be made to wear the veil at some point in the future and whether the Turks can now be trusted not to try and capture Vienna again and can now take their place alongside the people of Austria as good Europeans, regardless of their dodgy footwear.