There’s no business like Snow Business

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
(Isiah 11:6)

At the ripe old age of 23 I like to think of myself, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a real, bona-fide grown-up. I can tie my own shoelaces, I always pay my phone bill on time and I generally make sure that I’ve got enough cash left in my pocket for a kebab after a particularly heavy night on the Cosmo’s.

I’m also a bit of a bastard. I’m not pre-occupied with rediscovering my inner child, since my outer child resembled a shaved baby chimpanzee and was usually dressed as some sort of epileptic scarecrow. It wasn't a good look for me.

Yet upon opening the curtains on Monday morning and finding that eight inches of all-my-Christmases-at-once had bountifully settled on bonny England, I was all-at-once struck by a peculiar sensation:

I wanted to be a kid again.

It had snowed. And not just snowed, but really, really snowed. So, despite being in possession of the least appropriate footwear the world has ever seen, I determined to go and make the most of it.

There’s something intrinsically magical about snow. Sure, it’s cold, slippy and uncomfortable, but it’s also fun, pretty and, dare I say it without sounding like a right girl, really quite romantic (the new squeeze and I enjoying what will go down in history as the smuggest walk in the snow ever). And despite essentially being the slightly harder sibling of rain, the snow gave London a much needed facelift. Even wheelie bins look utterly gorgeous with a generous dusting of the white stuff.

As a now-trained journalist, it ceaselessly causes me alarm that the industry I am trying so fervently to become a part of is undergoing a worrying transmogrification. What was once an industry driven by the unbiased report of world events is now an endlessly-negative misery-marathon, geared to suck the fun out of every aspect of our lives.

Many publications were quick to report that, according to estimates by the Federation of Small Businesses, almost 6.5million – that’s around a fifth of Britain’s workforce, fact fans - failed to turn up to work on Monday due to the snow. They also say that the three days of disruption caused by the snow will cost the UK economy around £3.5billion. Accusatory nods were, of course, made to those who had said they were snowed in, when in fact they were snowed out.

‘The worst snowfall in 18 years’ was the catch adopted by most reports of the snow. The worst? The bloody best more like! In all my life I have never seen such universal jollity, good feeling and sense of community.

I’ll exemplify: A posh woman nearly clocked me in the head with a snowball, while aiming for her husband. She was, naturally, mortified to have broken that last barrier of class division, physical attack. Did I happy slap her? Or sue her on the grounds of reckless endangerment? Of course I didn’t. I stooped, scooped and threw one back. Turns out all it takes is a well-placed ball of weaponised rain to ease social tension.

News bulletins were peppered with voxpops, broadcasting the malcontent grumbles of those who, unlike all normal people who had seen eight inches of snow as the perfect excuse to escape wage slavery and go outside and play, had struggled on across the tundra to complete meaningless jobs that benefit no one.

And of course, these grumbling whingesocks were utterly indignant at the lack of action from that ever blameable, faceless ‘they’. One grim-faced lady murmered sourly to ITV News that ‘they knew it was coming, but of course they didn’t do anything about it.’

Do what, exactly? Erect an enormous umbrella over London? Switch on every sunbed and kettle in unison in hope that the combined UV and steam power would be enough to thaw the city from its icy prison?

Because the stark reality of the situation is – this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, which goes some way to explaining why London doesn’t have a crack fleet of snowploughs, skidoos and husky-rescue teams on constant 24-hour standby.

And don’t even get me started on the outcry over closure of schools. For one, keeping children inside when there is something as rare and novel as actual, tangible snowfall in the South-east – proper, snowman-building, sledging, ride-down-a-hill-on-a-bin-lid snowfall – is nothing short of cruel, and more, it provided parents with the even rarer opportunity to bond with their rugrats.

There's nothing quite so unifying, it would seem, as seeing how much freezing, wet snow you can stuff down the back of your dad’s jumper.

Despite being a bit of a bastard, it gave me a warm fuzzy to see people so unabashedly enjoying themselves. There’s not a great deal to be jolly about in these grim, ambling times, so an unplanned icing-sugar-coated bank holiday was just the boost people needed to solider on through the humdrum dreariness of it all.

We’re all-too-often too quick to look on the gloomy side of things; our glasses are more and more frequently half empty, and clouds are less and less frequently in possession of that ubiquitous silver lining. So it’s a little disappointing to see the press, and the however-small proportion of the public throwing grit into Frosty the Snowman’s face.

Yes, the country coming to a standstill is irritating. But a snow day is also very rare, and, by and large, very, very fun. And, wanting to continue a trend for arse-achingly bad puns at the end of these rants, all that remains to say is… shouldn’t we all just chill out..?

[P.S - I realise I have been rather lax (read: shitty) in my updating of this blog. I promise to try harder this year... not including January, obviously... bugger...]

Photographs © Charlie Breslin 2009

Jump on the Brand-wagon

Oh, hello again!

You just caught me in the middle of writing a strongly-worded letter to Her Majesty the Queen, demanding that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand be immediately rounded up and locked in the Tower of London for crimes against comedy, England, HRH Andrew Sachs and the Very Rev. Georgina Baillie.

You see, I didn’t hear Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show when it was broadcast on 18th October, but, like the other 27,000 members of British society who have subsequently and retrospectively thought it fit to complain about Brand and Ross’s stupid and childish behaviour, my detachment from events comes as no obstacle to my fiery, wrathful rage. I’ve already sharpened my pitchfork, and once rent-a-mob turn up I’m off for a bit of burning and looting. You see, I am very offended, and I will not stop until I see justice blunderingly and knee-jerkingly done.

What’s most worrying about the ‘furore’ is that it represents head-burying at its absolute worst. I’m not saying what they did was ok, but having a go at them while the world goes to hell in a handcart seems like something of an overreaction.

While the world still (apparently) faces financial meltdown (the BBC must be shitting themselves, having wasted god-knows-how-much money on the new DownTurn logo which accompanies every financial scare story), fighting rages in the Congo and the US prepares to elect their new president, it is nice to see the British public, true to form, focusing on the grotesque pointlessness of celebrity. Even Gordon Brown has taken a timely break from saving the world economy to have his say on this diplomatic crisis shaking the country to its very core.

And the situation keeps getting worse and worse – heads rolling all over the shop. It’s like a particularly bad wedding reception round Henry the Eighth’s place. Brand has subsequently resigned from his Radio 2 job, and Jonathan Ross’s Friday night chat show, which presumably justifies the enormous £18million he costs the public each year, has been canned until further notice. Lesley Douglas, controller of BBC Radio has also handed her resignation, saying: “The events of the last two weeks happened on my watch. I believe it is right that I take responsibility for what has happened."

When celebrities do something wrong, we are very quick to complain that they don’t get treated in the same way that we do. Yet this situation has been allowed to quickly and dangerously spiral out of control, setting an ugly precedent for what can and cannot be broadcast and what can and cannot be done in the name of comedy. Because, hurtful or not, it is very important to remember that Brand and Ross’s behaviour was not malicious – stupid, certainly – but not malicious. The punishment has, in this instance, far outweighed the crime.

There were two, that’s TWO, complaints about the show following its immediate broadcast. The number quickly spiralled once the papers got their greasy hands on it and milked it for all its worth. The public, whether actually offended or not, realised that they perhaps ought to be and subsequently complained in their droves. After all, a national treasure has been humiliated on national radio (a national treasure, mind, and I apologise for being flippant, who is best known for taking the piss out of Spanish people and being knocked about by John Cleese). Complaining to OFCOM, the regulator of communications and broadcasting in the UK seems particularly rich, when the vast, vast majority of those complaining hadn’t heard the show in the first place. It’s the equivalent of deliberately searching for a nudey pic on the internet, only to then complain that the sight of nipples has offended you.

I understand why Andrew Sachs would be upset – what right-minded person wouldn’t be. But even his reaction to the entire affair has been, at best, sanctimonious and pious beyond all reason. Accepting their apology, tut-tutting and moving on would have been a far more dignified and appropriate way of dealing with the verbal wankery of two silly little men. And in the spirit of fairness, much of what they said was actually true, if Sachs’s fulsome granddaughter, Georgina Baillie’s delightful kiss-and-tell exclusives to The Sun are to be believed.

I, for one, would be able to take Georgina Baillie and her fame-hungry cleavage slightly more seriously were she not quite-so-obviously relishing every single moment. While I am sure that she is royally miffed that these two over-paid gonks have called her granddad and spilt details of her sex life messily onto his answering machine, it’s a bit rich that a self-styled ‘Satanic Slut’ (NSFW) has decided that she can and will take the moral high ground.

It must be amazingly difficult to look both offended and sensual at the exact same time, but Baillie has persevered; her expression like a porn star who’s just noticed her car’s been clamped in the middle of a double-penetration scene.

Calling yourself a slut and then parading around like the Madonna leaves something of a bitter taste in the mouth, and quite how the sight of her tits splashed across the pages of The Sun every day this week is less humiliating for her poor old granddad is an absolute mystery to me.

What we have witnessed is an act of childish stupidity. Prank calls are always annoying, often hurtful and occasionally frightening, but we must be cautious in considering what Ross and Brand have done, to use Miss Baillie’s own words, as ‘beyond contempt’. Her delight at their mutual suspensions in particular smacks more of gleeful hand-rubbing at the fact that they are being punished for airing the dirty laundry that she now takes such glory in. As we increasingly see these days, the media are becoming more and more proficient at not merely reflecting public opinion, but actively influencing it. Brand and Ross are shamed and deplorable, whereas Baillie’s Nazi-esque burlesque routine is branded ‘tongue-in-cheek’. Quite.

This farce has provided nothing more than a scandalous distraction against the constant impotent raging against the bigger issues facing the country today, and, frankly, while Ross, Brand and Douglas’s moral compass may have been somewhat skewed, I’d argue that it was the judgement of the British public that was altogether more Fawlty…

Mayo-Nay-Sayers

(Note: I wrote this the other week, and then forgot to actually post it – hence the slightly dated Doctor Who reference. But I didn’t have the heart to leave it unposted. So here it is...)

First things first, did anyone see last Saturday’s Doctor Who?

Bloody brilliant, wasn’t it? Slightly mind-bending, in a Sliding Doors meets The Butterfly Effect kind of way, but absolutely awesome nonetheless. The concept that an entire, post-apocalyptic universe could be created on the back of a single decision to turn either right, or left, is something that has the ability to challenge the way we view our own decisions, and the implications and impact of the things we do is brought shuddering to the forefront of our minds.

Now consider this; Doctor Who is aimed at a family audience, deemed suitable for viewing by children, despite the often weighty themes of loss, death, revenge and retribution. I like to think that the reason these themes are allowed to exist so heavily in a programme aimed primarily at geeks (like me) and ten-year-olds, is that the average ten-year-old is not actually that thick, and is sufficiently equipped to deal with such concepts and emotions. It is because of this that I am filled with such apoplectic rage at Heinz’s decision to pull the ads for their new Deli Mayonnaise.

The ad, pulled as a result of over 200 complaints to Heinz, depicts a ‘typical’ domestic morning; kids and husband getting ready for school and work, while ‘mum’, played here by a De Niro-lookalike in chef’s whites and a, frankly shocking, white paper hat, prepares the packed lunches using Heinz’s new ‘delicious’ mayonnaise. The ad concludes with ‘dad’ planting a split-second peck on the bestubbled lips of poor, downtrodden ‘mum’ before leaving for work. Steamy stuff! Pass the bloody smelling salts.

Complaints have ranged from deeming the advert ‘offensive’, to the even more bemusing ‘unsuitable to be seen by children’, claiming that it raises the difficult problem for parents having to resultantly explain the issue of same-sex relationships to children. Aside from being ludicrous and knee-jerk-reactionary, these complaints are displaying a startling lack of understanding of the story the advert is trying to tell.

Forgive me if I’ve completely misinterpreted the ad, but the New York Deli Man in question is not actually supposed to be a man at all – the children call ‘him’ mum, and the husband reacts to ‘him’ as though ‘he’ (I’ll stop with the inverted commas, now – it’s doing my head in) were his wife, not his civil partner. So why on Earth does the question of same-sex relationships even need apply. If the basic premise of the advert is that the mayonnaise is so good that it has transformed mum from a bog standard cheese-and-pickle-peddler to a sandwich savant, then it would be safe to assume that the two little darlings are not actually coming home to daddy and daddy. As a result, the ad can be explained as simply as; ‘that’s not really a man, little Timmy, the advert is making a joke about the mayonnaise tasting the same as mayonnaise in New York, so they have changed the mummy into a New York sandwich man.’ It’s not rocket science, and it’s about as offensive as Les Dawson, dressed as a woman, hoisting his enormous padded boobies over a fence.

Moreover, if anything, surely feminists and women should be getting their knickers in a twist over the ad; poor old mum enslaved in sandwich hell, while her precocious little shits demand extra ham and two different types of mayonnaise, and her hubby neglects even to give her a cursory peck on the way out of the house. It could just as easily be an advert for Prozac.

The ludicrous irony of the entire storm-in-a-teacup is that the advert was already deemed ex-kid, as it promotes a product that is high in salt and sugar. Though I personally can’t remember ever nagging my mum to pick up some caramelised onion flavoured mayo on the weekly shop around Tesco’s, at least it’s slightly more valid to protect children from the evils of fatty mayonnaise than it is to protect them from the evils of a 70’s throwback comedy sketch.

The ad’s a bloody double-edged sword; don’t let kids see the fatty mayonnaise! Don’t let kids see the innocuous same-sex kiss! Don’t let kids hear the word ‘sweetcheeks’ before the watershed! Don’t let kids stay up after the watershed! Good grief. It’s over-sensitive hand-wringing at its absolute worst. But what’s worst of all, is that it treats children like idiots; as if they are totally unable to work out that most basic of concepts, that one person is pretending to be someone else. It’s not rocket science, and it certainly isn’t ‘the difficult issue of same-sex relationships’ sneaking through the back door (ooh err missus, etc...). It’s a mum, masquerading as a New York deli man, transformed by the e-numbery goodness of Heinz’s Deli Mayonnaise.

If we can trust kids with the notions of tri-sexual immortal Captain Jack Harkness, universe-hopping Rose Tyler and the double-hearted Doctor, then why can’t we trust them with a little same-sex peck on the back of a dated joke? In an increasingly over-sensitive and easy-to-offend society, the last thing we need to be doing is tearing apart innocent adverts, finding sex where it isn’t and preaching puritan values where they are neither valuable nor necessary. Adverts are adverts, they’re not real life, they’re not the News at Ten. They’re simply tiny little mindfucks designed to convince you to buy something. And if you’re going to allow yourself to take them too seriously, well, I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t cut the mustard* with me.

*apologies – I was desperate to make at least one condiment pun… so there it is.

What’s the Magic Word?

‘Can I get a 1664, a Jerry and Coke and a white SoCo?’

Don’t worry if you’re a little confused, boys and girls, so was I. Despite sounding like something barked over the crash trolley of a hit-and-run victim on an episode of ER, the pin-headed dickwipe who had so woefully neglected his manners was actually demanding a pint of Kronenburg, a rum and coke and a Southern Comfort and Lemonade. I’d just started my summer job, and, horror of horrors, I’d found myself in politesse hell.

See, the other day I read I really, really scary story, and it didn’t have a happy ending. It was my bank statement. Weeks of unpaid work experience to boost my fledgling journalistic portfolio had left me with a balance that would have Little Nell throwing coppers into my begging bowl. So I bit the proverbial bullet and got myself a job. I thought that a bar job would be a glamorous, responsibility-free way to finance my summer, get the bank off my back and meet lots of trendy, fabulous new people. Instead, it appears to be an exercise in anger-management and code-breaking, peppered with cocks, cokeheads and braying, empty-headed money-wells armed only with smug slang and a distinct lack of English good manners.

Am I the only one who failed to notice drinks suddenly developing new, trendy nicknames? Without my knowledge or consent, they’ve become the alcoholic equivalent of J-Lo, P-Diddy and M-Dolla, and it makes a mockery of the entire bar service dynamic. You want speedy, efficient service? Then bloody ask for what you want! I don’t go into McDonalds and ask for a B-Macca, with P-chippies and a D-Coca, do I? Then why is it suddenly appropriate for you to ask for drinks in some sort of wankers’ code? Was there a committee? Some Berks’ Fellowship that decided that, given the bad press drinking alcohol has had of late, booze needed something of an image change? It’s not big, it’s not clever, and I don’t like it.

And what’s worse, this same Cocks’ Committee have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that these new, too-cool-for-school nicknames are so hip, so now, that they must be allowed to stand on their own in spoken sentences, unballasted by courtesy or politeness. It must have been around the time that Southern Comfort became SoCo that ‘may I have’ became ‘can I get’, and ‘please’ became ‘right fucking now’.

‘Can I get’ has oozed its way into the national voice in much the same way that ‘like’ has replaced ‘erm’, and what’s most ludicrous about it is that it doesn’t actually mean anything. The phrase turns me into a tooth-gnashing grammar-fascist because it is so bloody STUPID! ‘Can I get’ is contextually inaccurate when requesting something, as ‘can’ queries the ability to do something, and ‘get’ suggests the speaker actually getting something themselves. What these pseudo-American tossers are actually asking is if they have the physical ability to get themselves a drink. Quite possibly they can, but the service industry doesn’t work like that.

It’s easy to blame American TV for this dissolution of good manners; Friends introduced us to the notion of going for coffee in much the same way as it introduced us to the act of demanding it rudely. The difference with American and British manners, however, is that American courtesy doesn’t depend on the pleasantries, it depends on the pleasantness; the logic being that you don’t have to say please if you ask for something nicely. In London, we’ve seen the bastardisation of this concept; you don’t have to say please if you ask for something. Full stop. And it’s an idea that doesn’t hold with me: My mum is a big advocate for manners. Saying please and thank-you in so ingrained on my psyche that it is almost an involuntary nervous tic, like saying sorry to inanimate objects you bump into by mistake or to people who have stepped on your foot. She’s always in the back of my mind when I deal with people whose job it is to provide me with a service. I ask myself, what would she think if I spoke to someone like that in front of her. Or worse, what would I think if someone spoke to her like it?

After all, ‘Britishness’, for whatever the term is worth, is built on manners. A stiff upper lip and an pre-programmed inability to be rude. ‘Politeness at any cost’ is a dying concept, and I for one will mourn it.

If we’re going to assimilate American service culture into our own, then fair enough. I don’t like it, but I’m just one man, campaigning for pleases and thank-yous as politely and unintrusively as I possibly can. But if this trend for pseudo-rudeness is to continue, then could we at least take on the whole shebang – including the American propensity for tipping? At least then when you speak to me like I'm a piece of sticky chewing gum on the sole of your summer flip-flop, I know at least I’ll be getting 10% for the privilege.

So please, London, can I get some manners, right fucking now? Thanks. Sorry. Thanks…