Another Url, Another Planet

I received some customer feedback.

A Welsh reader writes:

You disgust me!

I’m not at all shocked or surprised. I disgust myself, frequently. Thanks for validating my experience.

A Mr Tim Savage of Stratford Jobcentre writes:

Get a job!

I wasn’t at all shocked or surprised. My doctor had been signing me off sick (not fit for work) for a while. So long, in fact, that my ex-employer, quite rightly, gave up on me ever returning to ‘my’ hot desk. In employment legalese, I was dismissed through being incapable of work. Meanwhile, Big Tim had helpfully been sending me enough money to live on every two weeks for a while, and in return I kept sending him my sick notes from my doctor. But I guess Tim’s goodwill was running out. He asked me to fill in a questionnaire about my health and asked me to visit Norman, a nurse, so that two months after losing my job because I was incapable of work due to ill health, Norman could assess my capability for work. Norman asked me lots of questions and asked me to move my arms about as if I was directing small aircraft in to land. He was ever so nice about it. It felt a bit like being interviewed by that very nice SS-Standartenführer Hans Landa chap off the telly, except no one came rushing in afterwards to brutally machine gun to death the people downstairs after we were done. Which was nice.

Anyway. As a result of Norman’s niceness and despite me failing to safely land any aircraft due to my two frozen shoulders, Tim decided that I was capable of work after all, and told me so. And although Tim recognised that I have an illness or disability, he wasn’t going to send me any more money to live on unless I appealed, actively started looking for work, or appealed. All of this made me feel rather like a terrible burden on society and that society might be just a whole lot better off without me around dragging it down. And I had been feeling really pretty suboptimal anyway. So I went back to my doctor, who signed me off sick again and gave me some anti-depressants and painkillers, and decided that of the three options given to me - appeal, look for work, or appeal - I would like to appeal. Tim wrote back straight away saying that he would send me some more money to live on as long as I send him my sick notes from my doctor. Seems fair enough.

It’s quite a difficult juggling act. On the one hand trying to get better, to get well again. On the other, remaining ill enough to be eligible for handouts. The last few months I’ve been rapidly deteriorating, hitting a new low, barely able to speak to anyone even online. Most of the time, I simply don’t feel like I have anything to say. That said, I have some good days, and I have now almost completed my assessments for psychotherapy and expect to start in a group sometime in the new year. At my last session, the therapist said it seemed like I’d been depressed all my life, but only now (well, two years ago) asked for help. Thanks for validating my experience.

I had a good day yesterday, a good morning, at least, and decided to put it to use. So I carefully crafted for you, my dear reader, a veritable Christmas cracker of a musical podcast. Perhaps a cracker that doesn’t crack and contains no party hat or plastic toy, but only a lame joke, but a cracker nonetheless. And here, containing my best charidee radio DJ voice, it is:

Just A Ride, Episode 1: Xmas Stocking Filler (29:15)

Eggnogg version (90.7 MB)

Absinthe version (may not be legal in some countries) (70.2 MB)

Sorry, couldn't be arsed with show notes. Here's the playlist instead.

Merry Xmas everyone. That is all.

On Saturday night, I shared a bonfire - in honour of the last person to enter the UK Parliament with honest intentions - with three Bolivians (all of whom have jobs, and at least one of whom has a cat), a Pole, a Catalan, an Irishman, several English people (one of Asian extraction and one born in Africa), a Roman candle or two, a Chinese lantern, twelve Lincolnshire sausages, some French’s American mustard, a large bag of pomme de terres of Peruvian ancestry, and a guy that looked like Frank Sidebottom.

Oh, and - long-time readers of my blog who have not yet required a psychotherapeutic intervention will be pleased to note - some onions.

The onions went down particularly well. I fried them myself. They were so good, people asked me ‘How did you make them?’. ‘I fried them,’ I said. Did I sweat them, or cook them slowly? Not deliberately. There was a lot of them. No, I have never made French onion soup.

I also cooked the sausages. All I did was put them under the grill and turn them over occasionally, in between supping hot mulled wine in our neighbours’ garden and nipping back across the close to knock back some warm English ale and make sure our house wasn’t on fire. Unfortunately, that's also when they burned FrankGuy. So, sorry, no pics. (I also conducted a thought experiment about making a vegetarian alternative to sausages.)

One of the Bolivians wrapped the pomme de terres in tin foil and buried them in the burning embers of the bonfire to cook while a committee of English people tried to work out how to set the Chinese lantern alight. The token environmental activist present complained that setting a Chinese lantern alight wasn’t very environmentally friendly, and to be honest, I had some sympathy with her. Still, we were getting drunk, and this Chinese lantern was going up, one way or another. And up it went.

Perhaps the launching committee might have considered the location of the launchpad - well, actually, they did. ‘There’s a park five minutes walk from here,’ I said. ‘We’re not going there,’ they said. So, finally, we lit and launched the lantern in the close, and it rose up and up. Up and straight into the tree. Where it stayed, burning away in amongst the damp Autumn leaves. It’s still there now.

We burned some more pallets on the fire and then dug out the apples of the earth with a spade. The foil came off some of them in the process, to reveal glowing red potato coals within. Someone expertly cut the spuds in half and applied butter to the hot flesh, and passed them around with napkins and spoons. It was the best tasting potato I've ever had.

If they hadn't given away a two goal lead at Fulham, Manchester City would have a perfect start to this season's Premier League, ten wins out of ten, reminiscent of Big Ron Atkinson's last full season with Manchester United. Then, United's Captain Marvel, Bryan Robson, got injured and the rest is history: United's results tailed off badly, Atkinson was sacked the following October, and Lord Alex Ferguson began his twenty-five year reign of uninterrupted glory (if you discount his first six seasons).

A lot has changed since those days. While United still rely on a talismanic Wayne Rooney to be fit and firing on all cylinders, City have assembled a squad of players the envy of pretty much every other team in the Premier League. They have replaced their talisman of the last two seasons, Carlos Tevez, with Sergio 'Kun' Aguero, who looks fitter, faster and equally, if not more, capable of scoring against anyone and everyone. David Silva already looks like the player of the season.

Then there's Yaya Toure, Mario Balotelli and Edin Dzeko, all of whom look genuinely class acts. Micah Richards, James Milner and Gareth Barry look to have rediscovered some decent form and Adam Johnson continues to look like changing games in City's favour whenever he plays. Gael Clichy and Aleksandar Kolarov look better than Wayne Bridge. And while Kompany and Hart don't look quite as accomplished in defence and goal as they did last season, they're solid enough alongside Lescott or the returning Kolo Toure. Add to them, Nasri and de Jong, Zabaleta and Hargreaves, and City appear to have an incredibly strong first team squad.

In addition to their freak 6-1 win at Old Trafford, City mauled a well-below-par Spurs 5-1 at the Lane and thrashed woeful Blackburn 4-0 at Ewood Park. They also beat newly-promoted Swansea by the same score in their opening fixture at the Council House, after being outplayed for an hour, and saw off relegation certainties Wigan 3-0 in their second home game. Everton's traditional miserable season start continued with a 2-0 defeat at Wastelands and Aston Villa offered little resistance succumbing 4-1. Wolves looked like they might take advantage of City's ten men in their last game, but ended up losing 3-1. Similarly, abysmal Bolton briefly looked like staging a comeback before losing 3-2 earlier in the season.

Perhaps tellingly, City have struggled so far in their first season in the Champions League, drawing at home to an impressive-looking Napoli, losing so poorly in Munich that Tevez refused to play and luckily scraping a last-second winner at home to Villareal. The return with Villareal is tonight, followed by a potentially awkward trip to QPR Saturday tea-time. However much I'd love to see Gabriel 'The New Ronaldo' Obertan score the winner, I don't expect Newcastle to continue their unbeaten run at City the weekend after that, but I do expect Liverpool and Chelsea to at least get a point each in their upcoming home games against them, and who knows what Arsenal will do when they visit?

So City have done almost as well as could be expected of a team costing several hundred million pounds, but can they sustain their often brilliant start in tougher fixtures to come, and for the rest of the season when the winter kicks in and when the really difficult games come thick and fast? God, I hope not. And history tells us that City will find a way to fuck it all up again, somewhere along the line.

As for United, a freak 8-2 win at home to Arsenal, an easy 3-0 win over well-below-par Spurs, a somewhat lucky 3-1 victory against Chelsea and a 5-0 stroll at abysmal Bolton aside, United have ground out wins at West Brom and Everton and at home to Norwich, and draws at Stoke and Liverpool. United's upcoming fixtures look relatively straightforward on paper, assuming that we can at least continue with our tendency to win even when not playing particularly well. Crunch time, as usual (I hope), will be in late January and early February, which could well lead to a title decider in the return fixture with City scheduled for the last weekend in April.

Chelsea are clearly a team in transition and seem to be blowing hot and cold. I think they've blown their chances this season already and could find themselves in a fight for a Champions League place by the season's end. That fight will, of course, be with Spurs, Liverpool and Arsenal, and it will be a fight to see who can be the least crap on a consistent basis. My money's on Spurs and Arsenal to finish third and fourth.

As for the rest, it's either mid-table mediocrity or a relegation dogfight to keep the fans entertained. Wigan, Bolton and Blackburn already look doomed, but I expect Wolves, QPR and Swansea to give the Lancashire clubs' fans some hope for most of the season. But you could pretty much pick any one from Norwich, Sunderland and West Brom to join them in a season of struggle.

'Whatever happened to The Gaddafi Brothers?' asked my brother. 'If only they'd kept at it,' he said, 'they might have made a name for themselves.' I checked with Ronnie: 'They played one gig at Caistor Youth Club and split up.' This is a picture of a typical audience member:

Suitably inspired, Ronnie went on to play bass in GAS-S! 'We played three gigs, made an unnerving, feedback-drenched, god awful sound and bowed out, unknown.'

In later years, Ronnie and me would play in a number of equally forlorn bands together. But The Gaddafi Brothers and their honorary father's demise reminded me of my own earlier claim to fame.

Back in 1985, instead of studying hard for my A-Levels so that I could go to university, I was watching Stardust and dreaming of becoming a rock star with my mates. We played one gig outside our small home town, supporting Ghost Dance at Cleethorpes' Submarine, opposite the pier, and left for London shortly afterwards in a Toyota Hiace converted to hold our guitars and amps as well as sleep the three of us. We arrived in Poplar in the East End and met up with Dunc, who we knew from school, and who was now an anarchist. Dunc had told us on a previous recce that he could get us fixed up with a squat to live in.

I remember one gig we played at a pub nearby (The Buccaneer?) where the audience totalled the barman and a couple of people playing pool in the room next door. I also have a memory of spending the day recording our demo tape in a studio only to come home and find all our stuff in black bin bags outside as we'd been evicted. Still, we got a much nicer place by the canal instead.

By far our biggest gig, however, was at the Libyan People's Bureau, which a bunch of anarcho-punks had occupied as it was empty following the shooting of Yvonne Fletcher. I don't remember much about it, other than feeling quite terrified after soundchecking with our cover of The Jesus And Mary Chain's The Hardest Walk and one of the friendly new inhabitants warned us 'If you play that song tonight, we're gonna kill you!' And the stage was built out of Green Books. Listening to the thrash punk the DJ was playing, we decided to play everything quite a bit louder and faster and make a run for it as soon as we finished our set.

We escaped with our lives and our guitars, and it can't have been long after that we decided we weren't really cut out to be rock stars after all and headed back up north to the relative safety of home.

The Jesus & Mary Chain - The Hardest Walk from teokalz on Vimeo.

I never thought that this day would ever come
When your words and your touch just struck me numb
Oh and it's plain to see that it's dead
The thing swims in blood and it's cold stoney dead
It's so hard not to feel ashamed
Of the loving living games we play
Each day

And I'm stuck in a shack
Down the back of the sea
Oh and I'm alive and I'm alone
Inside a sick sick dream
Oh is it me?
Is it me that feels so weak?
I cannot deceive but I find it hard to speak

The hardest walk you could ever take
Is the walk you take from A to B to C

I walk
Oh honey I talk
Don't want you to want me
Don't want you to need me
Don't want you to need me
Don't want you to need me

And I walk

The worst result in my lifetime.

And yet, I had a feeling that we would be humiliated. I didn't say anything before the game because I didn't want to give expression to my negativity, as if it might influence the outcome. If that was true, United would be in the Northern Premier League by now. But I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking we had it coming.

You have to give credit where it's due. City took us apart like we have taken so many other teams apart over the years, particularly away from home. Stunning, unstoppable counter-attacks, soaking up pressure and giving little if anything away at the back.

While United's formation was unusually rigid and static all over the pitch, City's midfield, especially, was fluid. Fletcher and Anderson were, unsurprisingly, completely overrun by Toure, Barry, Milner and Silva. On the rare occasions we did get Nani and Young on the ball out wide, Barry and Milner were usually doubling up on them (not that the impressive Micah Richards needed much help). We created almost nothing of any threat. Although Fletcher's goal was simply sublime, it encouraged our ten men to push on even more in search of another goal - and if we had scored another, well, you never know. But it left us even more hopelessly exposed at the back than we were already and City exploited it ruthlessly in added time.

It's a funny old game. For most of the first half, certainly up until Balotelli's perfectly placed opening goal, we controlled the game. One-nil down at half time was far from perfect, but never insurmountable. Then right after the restart, Jonny Evans - who in my opinion, has been our best defender this season - had a moment of indecision as Balotelli turned him and got away, and then madness trying to rectify his mistake by pulling Balotelli back on the edge of the area. Evans also slipped when trying to block the first goal, and his performance yesterday was sadly typical of last season's. I hope it doesn't affect him or the crowd's perception of him too much, because those terrible forty-seven minutes aside, he has been our rock this season.

Despite having Evans sent off at the start of the second half, United never gave up and continued to take the game to City. I thought Fletcher's performance showed glimpses of a return to the level he was at a couple of season's ago and Smalling and De Gea (despite picking the ball out of the net six times) had decent games. But we seem to have forgotten how to defend as a unit, which has been a problem all season long, and camouflaged only by luck, De Gea's mostly brilliant shot-stopping and our previously joyful attacking play.

We've had heavy and humiliating defeats quite a few times before during Fergie's tenure - 0-5s at Chelsea and Newcastle spring to mind, as well as the more recent 1-4 loss at home to Liverpool a couple of seasons ago. United have always bounced back and I expect we will again. I'm just thankful I don't have to face anyone at school or work and I don't have any City-supporting mates to rub it in.