This is not for Charity

Inflation and religious economics

2012-01-01T21:48:00.003Z

Happy new year everyone, as an early treat for 2012, I've put forward a little of the political thinking behind our current 5% rate of inflation. It's the most significant thing not being talked about in politics, and basically, it means in simple terms that you're going to have to work harder to afford the same stuff. It also means that your wages, savings and pensions are losing value even as you read this, so hurry up,

Anyway... have a look and see what you think.

The Library - A final post for 2011

2011-12-19T22:21:00.008Z

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my local library recently. I’ve got few bad words to say about libraries… they’re a public service, and they’re full of books. I believe in the value of both of these things, and I doubt many will be surprised by my saying as much. There are, however, two types of opinion in this world. The first type is an opinion based on principles that sound morally persuasive, largely rational, and in keeping with the rest of our views. The second type is more a conviction than an opinion, you find it in your gut and think little more about its meaning thereafter, you simply believe in it. The second type is infinitely superior, it makes me think of the words of the eighteenth-century philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, “A man lives by believing in something, not by arguing and debating about many things.”

Almost all of my political beliefs come from my gut. Sometimes they could use a bit of moderation, but that’s the only place from which I believe they should rightly originate. I grew-up in a town where half the young people have nothing to do but ruin their lives with drugs, they have no employment prospects, and the formal politics of this country trundles along seemingly oblivious to this inconvenient fact. This experience of growing-up underpins my politics. My position on libraries, on the other hand, I must confess has generally, until my recent visits, come more from out of my head than anywhere else. It’s only since spending regular time in a library that the conviction has made the journey south into my guts.

Each time I go there I see a man with holes in his jumper and a woollen hat sitting on top of his head. A satchel from an adult learning college rests against his chair and beside his workboots. He rolls his jaw forwards, setting eyes on dense diagrams in a book concerning the study of plumbing. Fair enough, I might be giving you a heart string tugging stereotype here, I might even be romanticising the (non) working-poor, but I don’t care, because that stereotype exists, and in him is everything that is noble in a human. You have a man in one of the poorest areas in London, seeking self-improvement so as to earn a livelihood for himself, and if you can’t esteem a man like that then who can you esteem? Rather than assisting him in his endeavour, the council see fit to close the library, limit its opening hours, or put it under the stewardship of unemployed volunteers such as himself, because of course none of us have (increasingly expensive) livings to earn, and it’s not as if anybody is paying any taxes after all.

I could give all kinds of examples for the value of libraries. I could talk about after-school clubs for children who might not have any other safe place to go to. I could give the hypothetical author who fell in love with books in a library at a young age, could give the old man who walks in and collapses from his walking stick into a chair to sit and read a newspaper. I’ll lay off the heart strings though, and stick to my man studying plumbing.

I don’t like Winston Churchill. He’s a racist, his views on Islam are embarrassing, the worst examples of a British ability to take pride in its bigotry. As a military politician he is overrated, and as a civilian politician he’s a blue-blooded aristocrat with contempt for the working man. That said, there is one anecdote-come-quotation of his that I am happy to hold in high regard. In discussing where to make savings to fund the war, Churchill was encouraged to cut the arts. His apocryphal response to this was one of outright refusal, Churchill arguing that “if we cut the arts, then what are we fighting for anyway?”

A society takes its value from its pinnacles, its most sacred entities, not from the median points and bog-standard mediocrities by which it slopes along through one more orbit of the sun. Our modern politics believes that if things are ongoing, if life continues, then all is well, like life expectancy as a measure of quality of life. In the rational, emotionless eye of modern politics, if people are still alive then things are already a success. The institutions on which our society might once have prided itself, because they were more than just the bare minimum, are no longer sustainable. Pinnacles are an excess, and society is healthy so long as you are breathing and Warner Brothers and EMI are taking-care of the pride, ambition and joy.

Let me tell you. A library is a pinnacle. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s full of knowledge, and people go there to learn. If any politician believed in economic recovery (and they don’t) rather than short-term self-preservation and lip service (which they do), then they would not even consider jeopardising the future of something so integral to education. Unless we’re envisaging UK sweatshops as a means to economic growth (and, who knows, we might be) productivity is based on education. Everything that damages education will likewise damage economic productivity. Not only that, but social cohesion also depends on education, because education is the only thing that allows people to genuinely perceive that there is more to their life than the number of decimal places that they don’t have in their bank account, the brand of trainers they don’t have on their feet, and the car they don’t have in their driveway. To put that into the context of modern Britain, education will help people perceive that there is more to their lives than the number of decimal places that they used to have in their bank account, the brand of trainers that was on their feet, and the car that they used to have in their driveway but recently had to sell.

Anyway, with all that said and done, I’ll leave you once again, hopefully with the value of libraries consolidated that bit more in your heads. In order to really see what I mean, in order to get that feeling down into your gut where it belongs, I recommend stopping-in for a visit next time you’re on the high street.

On the subject of books, my own has attracted a good amount of publishing interest lately, and I hope to be talking about the follow-up this time next year.

Festive tidings to you all... keep your wits about you.

St Paul's and Slavery

2011-11-08T13:19:00.005Z

Greetings from a London turning grey for winter. I’ve been away a while, hanging-out with mortality and reflecting on whether there is any point making efforts at writing journalism. In conclusion, the answer is probably no, and though I might give it a whirl again at some point in the future, that won’t make the occupation any less of a waste of time. Journalism is only the profession of forming opinions for others to dispense as their own, and whatever the craft involved, or the value of this service, world-changing it ain’t.

I’ve been down at St Paul’s Cathedral a fair amount recently, chatting to protesters in the occupation and seeing what’s going on. They’re good people doing a good thing, and I suppose that, though less negative than often is so, a few familiar things have stuck-out in my impressions of the coverage of it all. Firstly, I’ve enjoyed the familiar media habit of focussing on the class background of the protesters, in particular the fact that they are largely middle-class and educated. It amuses me that when riff-raff start smashing-up their community it isn’t political because all they’re doing is vandalism and looting, and then when middle-class people start protesting against economic injustice it is somehow less political because they’re middle class. Clearly the only way to be political in modern society is to run along and vote nicely twice a decade, and then get back to work because, fear not, we have professional politicians taking care of the politics. I’ve also enjoyed the irony that it is a serious political statement when somebody is prepared to live in a tent in central London to demonstrate their beliefs, the only problem is that once you’ve started living in a tent in central London to demonstrate your beliefs, nobody will ever take you seriously again. Most enjoyable amongst the negativity is the criticism that the protesters generally seem to be a happy bunch, a definite flaw, for indeed, who would ever listen to a happy person, and indeed, what do happy people know about the world anyway? If they’re not miserable then they’re obviously not aware of what life’s supposed to be about.

What else has been good… property laws?... that was a good one, the property laws and lawyers that float backstage, waiting to remove the protesters from outside the cathedral. In Syria it’s the Assad family, in Bahrain the Sunni royals, and in Britain we have the great and faceless god of property laws to move the people along in orderly fashion. Whatever the method, the net result is no different… shut-up, shove-off and do what you’re told before we baton-charge you. I love the fact that we have laws in this country that will stop people protesting in Parliament Square outside the seat of our democracy, and outside the seat of our economy at the Stock Exchange (to avoid splitting hairs we’ll pretend for a moment that the Stock Exchange is not also the seat of our democracy). We do not, however, have any law that stops every vacant property on an impoverished high street from being filled by a pawnbroker, a payday loan company, and at least three betting agencies.

Which might as well be the crux of this… and I hate to break it to you… but… well… we’ve been screwed. Let me just say that again. We’ve been screwed. We have been screwed for a long time, we’re being screwed right now, and – boy oh boy – we’re going to get screwed so much harder before this is out. Acceptance is the first step, if we can get more people saying that we’ve been screwed, admitting to the truth of things, then perhaps we can get screwed a little less hard, or perhaps maybe we can even unscrew things a little. That’s the problem… we’re all too damn weak. Your average citizen will sooner spend his time defending the very system that betrays him, than swallowing pride and admitting that they have been screwed, and that they have been screwed each day of their life. Come on… let’s try it together now, as one… we’ve been screwed, we’ve been screwed, we’ve been screwed… it gets easier the more you say it, because that’s the thing, we’re all slaves together at the end of the day. You might have all the music you want for just £10 a month courtesy of Spotify, you might have bought a wetsuit and taken-up river swimming, you might have ridden your bicycle through a desert and over a mountain range, but once you get out of the river and off of the bike, make no mistake, you are only a slave.

Every living expense in your daily life is more expensive because it is purchased in direct competition with a financial machine that buys commodities for no purpose beyond making money out of another’s legitimate need. Every pound that you earn for those purchases is going to be worth 95 pence in a year’s time, and only 75 pence in five year’s time (assuming, optimistically, that inflation doesn’t rise) because a gaggle of politicians devalued your money to keep that same financial system in business. People would be wise to pay attention to the eviction of the traveller community at Dale Farm in Essex, because whatever the whys and wherefores of the case, make no mistake, the underlying message is clear. This system owns you, and alternatives are unacceptable. Against that, don’t doubt that it must be so much easier for politicians to do nothing when all the little people are lining-up obediently to say that the system works. Just you wait, just you wait for the day that you start seeing payments to the Chinese government in the ‘deductions’ column of your salary, just you wait for a Russian estate managements firm to buy-up that seaside town where you had your childhood holidays, just you wait for a crack-head to snatch your laptop from outside the café because his care worker was laid-off. Oh it’s going to be fun all right, at last life will be more exciting than Facebook again.

A couple of things to remember as the insanity mounts. The RMT-member train driver who gets however many tens of thousands a year… is not your enemy. The teacher with a generous-sounding pension… is not your enemy. The Somali immigrant is certainly not your enemy, the buy-to-let landlord (who may well be a scoundrel and a scumbag) is not your enemy. Even the bankers, the suit-wearing banker who takes home a few tens of thousands and feels smug about his work address, still he is only small fry and not your enemy. Even the police… even the god damn police are not your enemy (we can only hope that they realise as much too). Your enemy is not even the 1%, it is the 0.1% and the government that was mandated to deliver a healthy and just society, and goes about a day-by-day failure in that task with the same assurance as if they were doing the job well.

What is really needed… let me tell you now… at a whisper so as not to cause alarm. What is really needed… is a war! Yep, that’s right, and none of that class war claptrap either… we need a good, old-fashioned war… spilled innards and missing limbs (!!)… if you don’t believe me just look at the reforms and social welfare policies of the post-Second World War period. Sadly, really, this is so sad… but the truth is that in order for people to realise that this is their society and that they are entitled to a fair piece of it, what really needs to happen is for people’s husbands, fathers and sons to be killed by the tens of thousands in the name of the country. Only then, after the bleeding has stopped, will people finally recognise that they live their lives as part of a nation, and are thus entitled to a part of that nation. I really hope that it doesn’t come to that, but with the government ratcheting up plans to start dropping bombs on Persia in the name of world peace (Persia, incidentally, hasn’t invaded anyone for over 800 years)… well… perhaps it might.

In the meantime, if you’re in London, take a trip to St Paul’s… as I said, they’re good people with a good cause. When you arrive there, reflect on who it is you give forty-hours of your life to each week… those hours are precious. At the camp, be sure to put your prejudices against appearance aside, enjoy listening to people playing music, enjoy being given a meal and asked nothing in return, enjoy it when someone says ‘hello’ without a thought of what they can gain from you, but only because you’re another human being. After all, isn’t that what society was supposed to be about?

Dismal Science and speed limits

2011-10-01T13:54:00.007+01:00

After a couple of months away from reading news or writing blogs, the Department for Transport's planned increase to the national speed limit seems amusing enough to warrant some words. Having held but not enforced a 70mph speed limit since 1965, the proposal will see a new limit of 80mph not being enforced from 2013.

Most tragic of all has been the speech of Transport Minister, Phillip Hammond, who remarked that motorways should be 'the arteries of a healthy economy'. Hammond continued to demonstrate fearlessness in the face of metaphors, adding that it was 'time to put Britain back in the fast-lane of global economies.' The extra 10mph will apparently equate to 'hundreds of millions' of pounds for us all to share, and solve all of our problems apart from the serious matter of politicians giving cringeworthy speeches. There are currently no proposals aimed at addressing this second concern.

The vague optimism of this economic forecast reminded me of comments made by Mervyn King in February. Explaining what to do about Britain's 5% rate of inflation, King cited keeping our fingers crossed as a key component of monetary policy. This led me to ponder, once again, just how the discipline of economics maintains such a veneer of science, finger-crossing not normally being held as a reliable means of securing an outcome.

Anyway, to give a cursory look at Hammond's 'hundreds of millions' bonanza. A 2003 report by the Department of Transport put the total cost of traffic accidents at £18billion. £13billion of this is owing to personal injury, and £5billion to damage of property and vehicles. The cost to the economy of a fatality is £1,492,910, whilst serious injuries rack-up £174,520 a pop. Research by the European Road Safety Observatory reckons that for every 1km/h increase in speed, there is typically a 3% increase in accidents. With 10mph equating to 16km/h, we can anticipate significant increases in accidents where the new speed limit is applicable, the economic disadvantages of which will hopefully be offset by the social gains of improved population control. Further to the cost of accidents, consideration should be given to the fact that an engine is approximately 10% more efficient at 70mph than at 80mph, and with the cost of oil only likely to move in one direction, this will make engines 10% more expensive in return for those extra ten miles travelled in an hour. Whatever the maxims about time is money, that much time is unlikely to be worth that much money.

The Department for Transport has also offered justification for the increase with the argument that it will align UK speed limits with the rest of Europe. True though this may be, a 75mph speed limit has obviously done little to stop Ireland developing a national debt 96% of its total economic output, whilst Portugal, also at 75mph, has only managed to achieve 93%. Elsewhere in Europe, at 80mph, the Italians have a debt 119% the size of their economy, and the notorious Greeks, also at 80mph, have racked-up a pile of debt 142% the size of their economy, which is shrinking at 5.5% as you read this.

Further north, the Norwegians, with a budget surplus of 12%, inflation down at 1.3%, and one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, persist with a 62mph speed limit, and any driver caught speeding above 85mph is faced with an unconditional 18-day prison sentence. Of course the consistently strong German economy dispels any hard-and-fast correlations, Germany having no speed limit on its autobahns.

All of which is only a complicated examination of what anybody with an ounce of sense will have realised instinctively. Speed limits have no bearing on national economic performance, and the problems of the UK economy are more significant than 10mph. We await government directives encouraging people to chew their food less and walk quicker, alongside simultaneous measures prohibiting reading on the toilet, an inefficiency that costs the economy hundreds of millions of hours/pounds in lost output every year.

Anyway, until next time, stay sane... your country needs you.

Quick thoughts on Rioting

2011-08-12T19:39:00.010+01:00

Well, as everybody else in media or internet circles has given their own particular view on what rioting means to them, it’d be a shame to miss out on the opportunity. Also, I’m about to spend ten days away from the UK, quite long enough for the media to find a new tyrant in a desert, a woman dumping a cat into a wheelie bin, or increase the volume on the economic meltdown story that is, at present, bubbling nicely on the rear hob. In a nutshell then.

Riots and/or looting, are both political statements. Our entire social model is based on the sanctity of private property, when people do not respect private property, and are happy to risk criminal proceedings in not doing so, they have essentially stated that they do not believe in our politics. Society and politicians need to understand that it does not take a genius to feel that something is unfair, nor does it take a genius to perceive that your future isn’t looking too rosy. A youth smashing a window has the same meaning regardless of whether or not he calls himself a Marxist, has a university education, and has read Das Kapital. The window is still smashed, and if you don’t like broken glass all over the street, you need to figure out why the window got smashed. If you are only prepared to listen to ideas from the articulate and educated, you are going to wind-up ignoring an awful lot of people, in fact, most people.

People need to take a more mature view of politics, of social harmony as an act of bribery, a balance in which people have to feel their interests are represented. It is commonly-held that unrest in Arabia has been a product of demographic changes, an increasingly young population who are not represented by an old social order. I’m not sure why it is hard to grasp the concept of similar circumstances in the UK. The form that unrest takes is determined by cultural factors, if youths steal televisions and trainers, then (I know this is obvious) that is a reflection of our entire society. Similarly, if politicians are so unimaginative and cowardly to be unable to look beyond finger-wagging and where are their parents(?), then that too is only a reflection of our society. Some windows might have been broken, some buildings burnt down, but all we are seeing is a very real playing-out of all the traits that anybody with their eyes open would have perceived to have been present in society beforehand anyway. As citizens, as a population as a whole, we are constantly being violated by our government. In bailed-out banks, MPs expenses, rising tuition fees, and privatisation plans that did not appear on an election manifesto, our liberties and integrity are constantly flouted. A very wealthy minority of the population have done very well out of this, 1.5million people also got a buy-to-let mortgage in return for buying into it, 70% of people have got their own roof under which to be shafted, and public pensions have bought-off a few more million. If you fall into any of these brackets, you have a reason to shut-up and stomach the injustices for your decades on earth. If you don’t, then why would you? People can condemn mindless youths and thugs, but the fact is that you still have to live with them. A braver goal would be to help them become more productive citizens, after all, no number of judgments will alter the reality that you’re sharing your streets and society with these people.

As far as policing goes. Britain already spends, as a proportion of GDP, more on domestic policing than any other developed nation, having overtaken the USA sometime during the nineties. If fear compels people to interpret the riots as a case against cuts to the police, that is only one more step in a policy that has no end anyway. Police do not prevent crime, they deal with criminality. The best way to prevent crime is to give people a social and moral code that they value. The Japanese do not stockpile shovels and wheelbarrows to deal with earthquakes, they (endeavour to) build earthquake-proof structures.

Some blindingly obvious observations. The banking system stole a hundred billion from the taxpayer, left us liable for many more of their future losses, and still largely maintain the veneer of a respectable profession. Teenagers steal trainers and are immediately depicted as swines for doing so. MP David Laws embezzled £40,000 from the taxpayer to give to his boyfriend in rent, David Cameron accepted his resignation (which was over the revelation of his sexuality, rather than expenses fraud) as that of ‘a good, honourable man.’ It is deeply patronising (like most of our formal politics) to suggest that anybody, no matter how conventionally stupid, could miss the fact that this is not quite fair. There have been 937 deaths in police custody since 1990, a quarter of them at the hands of the Metropolitan police. That needs to be broken down into more than just a statistic. Almost a thousand people, since 1990, have been taken-in by the guardians of law and justice... and then died, were never again seen alive. When that happens in Uzbekistan or Saudi Arabia we see it as horrifying, a cause for Amnesty International, whilst in Britain it can be accepted as part of normalcy. Each of those corpses had family, friends, and was part of a community of other people who once knew them. Again, you don't have to be a genius or a politics student to figure out that something's not quite going as it should be.

The government (of all political colours), meanwhile, really must be applauded for their largely successful ability to evade almost all criticism. As an institution, the government has authority over education, finances, employment, housing, transportation and just about every other field of our existences. It is mind-numbing to think that the government could be responsible for almost everything that touches our daily life, and yet be responsible for absolutely nothing once society goes belly-up. Our lives have been given to/appropriated by Westminster to control and order, and when things go wrong they can do nothing more than blame the parents and tell the children to get back indoors. If Westminster had any meaning or nobility in it, right now would be a time for deep soul-searching, self-reflection, and guilt. If Westminster is just a charade of political legitimacy, 650 good-jobs and a talking-shop for ambitious people who can string sentences together, then we’ll be hearing more about police, zero-tolerance, and the word ‘tough’.

In the meantime, might I suggest this, and this, as the best way that we, as decent individuals, can deal with the fine mess into which we have been led. If you're sticking around, and are passionate about doing something positive in society, might I recommend doing it yourself, rather than paying somebody else to do it for you. If you care about your community at all, might I suggest walking around it, rather than watching it on a screen in the corner of the living room, it's never quite as bad as they like to make out.

Peace and love to you all, we're going to need it.

The cost of renting and the cost of living

2011-07-16T14:05:00.003+01:00

I recently wrote an article for the website, openDemocracy. It's a bit more academically rigorous (well, quite a lot more actually) than much of what I write on my blog, but I'm quite happy with it. The subject is a look at how to make hardship a little less hard, and whether we should increase wages for poor people, or do something to reduce the rents that poor people pay out to landlords... my argument is that reducing rents is by some way the more meaningful of the two approaches, see what you think.

Crime fighting and Revolution via smartphone

2011-07-05T19:37:00.007+01:00

The internet and its associated technology continues to take steps towards making the world a better place. Already this year we have witnessed Vodafone single-handedly toppling Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, whilst Twitter, Facebook and live blogging have enabled western comrades to experience freedom fighting (sic) in the Libyan desert from the safety of their desks.

Online heroics reached new heights this week, however, when an intrepid and innovative member of the public, seeing two youths stealing a bicycle outside a busy pub, took a photo of the theft using their smartphone. The photo has since been circulated through Twitter, a perfect example of how modern technology allows us to pool our collective will into an unstoppable, but also convenient, social force.

With the image of the thieves now viewed by some tens of thousand of people, it is plain to see that this approach to crime fighting, using smart phones and Twitter, works much better than old-fashioned, twentieth-century methods, which included an archaic practice known as 'stopping it' or 'doing something' when faced by somebody stealing a bicycle right in front of you.

With great excitement we await the next contribution of smart phones to social justice.

The stolen bicycle remains stolen.

Scoundrels, patriotism, the Union Jack and sliced bread

2011-06-18T12:10:00.015+01:00

Things are getting worse. I’ve known this for a long time, but now I’m really starting to worry. There’s no point reading articles or keeping abreast of events in politics, the truth reveals itself in fashions more mundane. It started a year ago. A Lebanese man, working from a premises that doubled as an internet café, had been making me falafel most lunchtimes for about six months. It was good stuff, chopped parsley and raw onion, ripe tomatoes, and at only £2, on Cavendish Square, a minute’s walk from Oxford Circus, lunch in central London didn’t get much better. We always exchanged banter about his business, his face always miserable, dark bags under his eyes, a hooked nose and lips that sneered a smile as he told me the amount of money he paid in rent, and the amount of money he actually made. He was from Beirut, his English fine but far from fluent… the fewer words people command in a language, the more truthful and pointed those words are likely to be. Each time we met, he told me that soon he would return to Lebanon, where life would be better. I remember the afternoon when he summed-up three post-financial crisis (!!!) years of sensational headlines and supposedly sophisticated economic analysis. He turned to me, dark eyes levelled my way, that hooked nose and those thin lips as he drew out his fist, rotated it downwards with a large, plump thumb pointing at the ground, and he said to me.

‘In England… you cannot make any money.’

And a few months later, he was gone. None of that, however, was very much more than boringly predictable in modern Britain. It is only in recent months that I have been made better aware of just how bad things are getting, the rotten seat of the latrine above which we teeter, just waiting to plunge down into twenty-one centuries of shit. It was the advertising that told me, for adverts will explain the state and concerns of the nation better than any politician or journalist ever manages. You might get some outliers that fall wide of the mark, but in the main, marketing spots the direction in which things are headed.

It is with growing alarm, therefore, that I keep seeing advertising and packaging enlisting the services of Union Jack. Weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems, were very much ahead of the game in this respect, and for the best part of three years, they have had Union Jacked black cabs going around central London under the title ‘BAE Systems: A big plus for the UK’ (which, undeniably, reads much better than ‘BAE Systems: A big problem for innocent civilians all over the world’). The fashion has recently gone into overdrive, however, with Pimm’s Union Jacking their bottle, Hovis Union Jacking their bread, Vodafone Union Jacking black cabs all of their very own (rather than actually paying its £6billion tax bill to the country), and Cheryl Cole advertising shampoo beside a Union Jack rug whilst talking about ‘British hair’, obviously different to other hair in ways previously unbeknown. The middle classes have not been neglected by the clamour, and for those too refined for the vulgar euphoria of red-white-blue, the Festival of Britain is being celebrated on London’s South Bank. It is no coincidence that the original festival, sixty years ago in 1951, was intended as a ‘tonic for the nation’, still rebuilding after the Second World War. The Hayward Gallery and Festival Hall area has been duly adorned with photos of British inventors, a giant fox made from straw (they omitted the chasing hounds and aristocrats), recordings of seagulls, and photos of British troops in Helmand, Afghanistan. There is, after all, nothing better than tastefully-shot images printed on aluminium to help soften middle class views of an expensive war, especially one that has decimated a poor country for shoddy reasons increasingly forgotten and forgiven.

Be that as it may, the bottom line in all this British bluster is that, in short, we’re fucked. It brings back memories of riding through the south of Romania, where each town has the blue-yellow-red of the national flag fluttering over it, and apart from that an awful lot of poverty, begging gypsies, derelict factories and rutted roads for the entire five hundred mile stretch below. Don’t mistake me, many of the people there are living happy and fulfilled lives, but it is in spite, rather than because, of anything that the nation has ever done for them. When people start encouraging you to get excited about the piece of rock you live on, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.

So where does this leave us? Well, first of all, we’re all going to have to learn to appreciate the finer, non-material things in life. If the flag doesn’t work for you then I recommend reading, but buy your books quickly, before a publishing model premised on whether a book can be marketed, rather than whether it is any good, makes storytelling and good writing extinct in not so very long at all. As a rule of thumb, I suggest only reading authors who are already dead, which serves me well as a literary filter.

On the matter of learning to live harmoniously with one another, we will need a lot more love and understanding. All those born earlier than 1975 need to understand the burden that has fallen on all those born since, it’s hard work to muster goodwill with prospects limited to no career, no pension, and in the interim a life of paying other people’s buy-to-let mortgages for them. As for those of us born since 1975, we need to extend love and compassion to those born prior, they are to be screwed by the very same alliance of business and government that will slowly destroy us all, the only difference is that they were afforded the luxury of being screwed under their own roofs. We must all extend compassion to those born since the millennium, who will plumb new depths of meaning for the word ‘doomed’, and it is surely only a matter of time before the termination of all new pregnancies is made compulsory.

What is to be done? I suggest that all concerned members of society must, with immediate effect, stop socialising, and especially breeding, with anybody associated with either the financial sector or the three major political parties. By such means might we peacefully exterminate their grubby and self-serving DNA from the gene pool, or at the very least limit their opportunities for reproduction. If this fails then we will all have to put our faith in social mobility, which was proven to be alive and well in the marriage of common Catherine Middleton to royal Prince William. The wedding showed that if you want to move up the social ladder then you absolutely can, but first you better persuade someone with more money and standing to let you into their bedroom and fumble with their genitals. If that doesn’t prove fruitful then I advise making yourself comfortable in the rut that you’re in… for you’re going nowhere.

*With thanks to Flaubert. A more scholarly version of some of the issues here discussed will soon (we hope) be completed for OpenDemocracy, my own book (we hope) by the end of the year.

Blackfriars Bridge, J.G. Ballard and the Bicycle

2011-06-07T20:25:00.030+01:00

In 1973, British author, J. G. Ballard wrote the book ‘Crash’. In 1996, director David Cronenberg turned the book into a film, the general response to which was widespread confusion at a plot based on couples that have made car accidents a part of their sex lives. Admittedly unconventional, Ballard’s achievement was to take the mundane notion of road safety, and turn it into something artistically brilliant. The book’s anti-hero becomes obsessed with killing himself in a head-on collision that will take the life of Elizabeth Taylor, and though that is but one thread in the story, the general trend is to show a society fundamentally selfish in its desire for gratification, and to show humans prone to attaching their most animalistic desires, their love and lust, to contraptions of steel and synthetics otherwise known as motorcars.

I think of Crash often, I think of it every time a driver jeopardises my life to shave five seconds from his journey, when a driver accelerates dangerously to overtake, just so that he can wait behind another motorcar rather than my puny, engineless bicycle. I think of it when I see cars decked in aerodynamic flourishes and neon tints, the driver with his thumping stereo a regular pharaoh of our automotive age. Ballard was highly-regarded as an author, though brushed aside politically and filed under 'science-fiction', a label he rejected for the manner in which it allowed people ignore the reality of his subject matter. Anyone who might question the central thrust of Crash, the idea that cars can transform humans into emotionally numb murderers, need only refer to the Critical Mass event in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where an irate motorist accelerated his car through the middle of a group of cyclists. Alternatively, ask any regular bicycle commuter in a British city.

Crash has been in my thoughts a lot already this week. First of all came the preliminary results of a UK study investigating the idea that the nation, spurred by increasing costs of car ownership, is nearing a tipping-point at which everyone starts cycling and we suddenly wake-up in Amsterdam. The initial findings suggest that this is categorically not the case, and that amongst the many cultural attitudes behind Britain’s lack of affinity for the bicycle, fear is far and away the main reason keeping people off two wheels. Which is hardly surprising, nobody is likely to value quality of life or lower living costs when the ‘life’ component of those two statistics seems to be in danger each time you pull into the centre of the road to turn right. No matter how remote the possibility of dying on a bicycle, constant reminders of that possibility are not about to encourage cycling growth, moreover, if people are afraid, then it’s insufficient to simply tell them that they shouldn’t be.

As ever, the foremost word in response to this fear is ‘segregation’, and both the academics and Transport minister, Norman Baker, have emphasised the value of keeping bicycles and cars separate, a philosophy as inadequate for the protection of cyclists as it is insulting to conscientious motorists. Aside from the idea that cars should inhabit a barbaric territory unfit for bicycles, it raises the question of what happens when, eventually and inevitably, a motorist has to coexist in civilised fashion with cyclists they have been permitted to believe belong in a separate infrastructure. A look at footage of rush hour in Copenhagen is all it takes to see that, yes, believe it or not, bicycles and cars can use the same spaces harmoniously, and where they do, more people are inclined to cycle anyway.

The second reason for my Crash preoccupation is a vote in the London Assembly on Wednesday 8 June. In spite of his confusing title of ‘cycling mayor’, Boris Johnson has rejected the continuation of a 20mph speed limit across central London’s Blackfriars Bridge. The mayor has instead enabled a new limit of 30mph, because, let’s face it, there’s no freedom quite like accelerating for 400metres before stopping at the next set of lights. The majority of the London Assembly opposes Johnson’s decision, the City of London Corporation (the city’s central borough) is already seeking to impose a 20mph speed limit across the square mile, and a range of cycling advocacy groups have mobilised their memberships to lobby against the mayor’s imposition. What we have been left with is a classic case of the Big Society, where the very bodies charged with making our lives easier start making them harder, and everyday people are left fighting just to maintain a pretty shabby status quo. Cyclists are twice as common as private cars on Blackfriars Bridge during morning rush hour, and prioritising a motorist’s burst of acceleration over the safety of a cycling majority is further evidence of authorities prepared to champion cycling without actually taking cyclists seriously.

It is at this point that my two recent grievances suffer a head-on collision, with the number-one fatality being the ‘cultural shift’ that ministers seem to believe is in the offing. Both the Blackfriars speed limit and the segregationist thinking are typical of a delusion wherein decision-makers anticipate exponential cycling growth, without first doing anything to temper the habits and speeds of motor vehicles.

Boris Johnson has made a sound bite out of ‘smoothing traffic flow’, an agreeable title for the car-focussed reduction of pedestrian crossings, and complete removal of the western extension to the congestion charging zone. Despite 14,000 street light features in the City of London, a cyclist is expected to dress like a fluorescent lollipop if they wish to be seen by motorists, all of whom are supposed to have healthy eyesight and their own working headlamps. London cyclists continue to struggle with the fatal problem of lorries in the city, however, efforts from the Metropolitan Police and Transport for London have focussed amusingly on raising awareness about the potentially lethal threat, rather than actually doing anything to reduce the incidence of that threat. Initiatives in mainland Europe have established out-of-town distribution centres where long-haul freight is dropped and moved into cities using smaller vehicles. Coordination of deliveries means that one lorry will serve two separate addresses if they are nearby. Britain, meanwhile, remains crippled by the lack of imagination that blights much of our politics, and lorries in London remain one further example of an accepted culture of dangerous roads that cyclists must learn to survive within. The last four years have seen 26 London cyclists die under lorries, and that these tragedies have given such little impetus to the process of change underlines the horrifying reality, as espoused in Crash, that a broken transport model is actually more precious to us than human life.

I often think that a group of cyclists in London can sound like war veterans swapping stories, we have all been involved in an accident, if not then we know and love others who have. We know of drivers who have nudged us with their 1000kg vehicles, shunting us either to teach us a lesson or when nosing towards the front of a line of traffic. All too often our community is required to mourn somebody who has died prematurely and needlessly, and though cycle advocacy groups are loath to encourage an even higher degree of fear on the part of prospective cyclists, it’s inadequate merely to sweep the dangers under the carpet, the dangers need to be addressed. The police must penalise motorists according to the law, and not show lenience according to their empathy as drivers. The law must treat motor vehicles as a potentially deadly innovation that move things from A to B, not as an extension of our living room, office, or ego. Our cities need to be made into better living spaces for us all, and for that they must be made, genuinely, into better places to cycle.

Twilight of the Idols - The coming fall of Lance Armstrong

2011-05-22T12:23:00.015+01:00

“He can’t have been doping, that would mean we were living a lie.” That was the message my friend and old cycling partner sent me amid increasingly firm allegations that seven-time Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong, was likely to have all along been using performance-enhancing drugs.

As teenagers we had watched, transfixed, as Armstrong tackled the mountains of Europe, leaving us to emulate his feats on the rather more modest roads of Leicestershire. In 2001, on the famous slopes of Alpe d’Huez, we watched Armstrong feign weakness at the back of a lead group containing his long-standing rival, Jan Ullrich. All day he pretended to suffer, let the German’s Telekom team set the pace, and then, approaching the base of that final climb, Armstrong dropped the act and pulled to the front. He looked round at a struggling Ullrich, fixed a stare upon him, a hard stare that came to be known as only ‘the look’, and a moment that has since entered into cycling folklore. Armstrong opened-up, began to spin his famous cadence against the 7.9% average gradient of the mountain, and a little under forty minutes later he had destroyed the threat of Ullrich and set the fourth-fastest recorded ascent of Alpe d’Huez, thirty-eight minutes and one second.

In 2003, descending from the Alps to a stage finish in the town of Gap, Armstrong raced downwards, neck-and-neck with the main contender for his yellow jersey, the Spaniard, Joseba Beloki. With the summer heat melting the bitumen in an old road surface, and the two diving for a hairpin bend, Beloki’s front tyre snatched from under his wheel, leaving Beloki in tears upon the tarmac with a broken pelvis, and Armstrong taking the only available option other than a crash. At breakneck speed he rode through a field, dismounted, jumped over a ditch, and regained the road to finish in a competitive time. There are countless instances of the natural ability and stunning determination that has seen Armstrong spend a decade giving goosebumps to cycling fans and neutrals around the world. He has achieved so much since recovering from cancer in his twenties, when doctors felt that his career, if not his life, was over, that the recovery is now a footnote rather than the main reason for the respect he commands as an athlete. When you know how it feels to train hard for an average speed of 20mph, it becomes incomprehensible to think that professional riders average 25mph through three weeks, two mountain ranges, and 2,500 miles. When we saw what Armstrong was capable of inflicting on his rivals, when we saw the force with which it was done, it was impossible not to be mesmerised.

In a television interview due to air in the US on Sunday night, Armstrong’s former lieutenant, Tyler Hamilton, has confirmed his own history of doping, also saying he saw Armstrong injecting erythropoietin, the hormone known infamously in cycling as EPO. Used to boost the production of red blood cells, the drug improves recovery after major exertion, and has never been far from the doping scandals of cycling’s recent history. Hamilton himself forms part of my complicated relationship with cycling, his own fall from grace beginning with a two-year doping suspension in 2005, after he was found with someone else’s blood in his body. Hamilton spent years pleading innocence, and I was not alone in wanting to believe the claims he made. Three years earlier, at the 2002 Giro d’Italia, Hamilton crashed in the early stages, breaking his shoulder but riding on to finish second overall. Come the end of the race, after three weeks clenching his jaw in pain, Hamilton underwent dental work on the surfaces of eleven teeth that he had ground away. Life can be tough as a fan of professional cycling, where revelations periodically oblige you to accept that moments you believed testament to the human spirit were in fact made possible in a laboratory, and facilitated by the rider’s emotional weakness rather than his human strength.

Accusations against Armstrong are nothing new, and though the Texan commonly points to a record of 500 drug tests all returned negative, his former teammate, Floyd Landis, has dismissed this defence, stating that “500 tests that come back negative are meaningless because the tests don’t work.” Landis himself, disgraced after his 2006 Tour de France victory was annulled for unnaturally high testosterone levels, alleged in 2010 that doping had been rife at Armstrong’s US Postal Service cycling team. In response to Hamilton’s confession, Landis has said, “we just doubled the number of people telling the truth.” With Hamilton having suffered from depression since his downfall, there appears to be a sense of relief on the part of two riders who have over the years been painted as villains rather than sadly typical.

It is the Postal Service connection that has transformed long-standing accusations into a formal case against Armstrong. What was a cycling issue has grown into the prospect that a US public body was sponsoring an outfit involved with illegal drugs, trafficking those drugs, and obscuring the payments through which they were purchased. The federal Foods and Drugs Agency has become involved, and the timing of Hamilton’s confession is the result of his being called before a grand jury to give evidence. His emotions are evident in a letter to family and friends, in which he says of the experience, "I told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And I felt a sense of relief I'd never felt before.” A big-money legal and PR campaign, trademarks in Armstrong’s often venomous defence of his name, has already accused Hamilton of courting publicity for a forthcoming book release. Whatever the accuracy of such a charge, it must be said that self-promotion and the truth are not necessarily incompatible, and having long-ago tarnished his reputation, it is hard to imagine Hamilton risking criminal proceedings by lying in a federal investigation.

How all this fits into the history of cycling is a difficult issue, in some ways cheating is a chapter in the legend of the sport. The 1904 Tour winner, Maurice Garin, was disqualified amid accusations that he caught a train through one of the stages. The early history of grand tours is littered with anecdotes of poison slipped into drinks by rival riders, felled trees and tacks being laid across roads by rival supporters. In 1967, English rider Tom Simpson died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux with a performance-enhancing cocktail of amphetamine and alcohol inside him. The spectre of this early-day doping has not stopped Simpson’s dying words of “put me back on the bike” taking their own special place in cycling mythology.

And yet, however intriguing we might find moral collapse in the face of human ambition, systematic doping can never be permitted to become institutionalised in a sport that desires to be taken seriously. I do not fear for the sport of road cycling, sponsors and stars will come and go, but I have faith that pure-spirited people will always be compelled to ride and race bikes together. Our sport has earned a bad reputation that brings with it great shame, but has also generated a determination to be rid of drugs, and a self-reflection, of which to be proud.

What happens next is key to the short-term future of professional cycling. Sadistic though it might be, if Armstrong is finally found guilty, the completeness with which his image, myth and brand is destroyed will be directly proportionate to the good of cycling. The whole affair teaches us the perils associated with the taking of heroes. We must experience greatness ourselves, the highest beauty of the bicycle is that it allows us to do so, with our own legs, and in our own lives.

Elderly man gunned-down at mountain home, body dumped in ocean.

2011-05-02T17:30:00.004+01:00

The death of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan has prompted a range of reactions from across the political world. UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, congratulated those responsible for Bin Laden’s killing, saying he was relieved to hear that the infamous upstart was finally dead. A press release from Downing Street declared that Bin Laden’s brand of international terrorism had seriously undermined the role of central governments in making a mess of people’s lives and striking fear into the hearts of decent, ordinary folk. The statement reads,

“Whilst recognising the cost-effective value of terrorism as a means of destroying lives and nations, it must be recognised that governments alone have been given the mandate to perform this task, in an orderly fashion, and within the ever-changing context of the law.”

Former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, issued his own statement, praising the value of Bin Laden’s tireless work in politics. Welcoming news of the death, Blair stated that it must nevertheless be appreciated that the man, with his gigantic beard and wild eyes, had provided an excellent means of distracting the population from all of the harm performed by governments during the past ten years…

“Without Osama it would have been far harder to underwrite a trillion pounds of bad debt in the banking sector, privatise higher-education, and continue the process of making Britain into a measly, little tax haven. We must thank him for his commitment and quickly go about finding a successor.”

It is this question to which the world now turns, and with The Guardian having dubbed Bin Laden, “the planet’s most wanted man”, the task is no small matter. Early betting has Moammar Gaddafi as the favourite to become a short-term stand-in, though advisor’s to Nick Clegg have not ruled-out the possibility of a bid from the Deputy Prime Minister. A clamour of ambitious Al-Qaeda lieutenants have argued against a break with tradition and believe that the title should remain in Wahabi hands.

There is, however, a growing belief in the efficiency-savings to be had from outsourcing the role of “planet’s most wanted man” to a different planet. Speaking via a satellite link-up with the Death Star, Darth Vader said he felt it regrettable that his own services to evil had been overlooked by giving Bin Laden such a title in the first place. A spokeswoman from Mordor communicated a message on behalf of Sauron, lord of darkness, though the words are hard to distinguish against a background of inferno-like roaring thought to be an enormous, burning eye.

As far as responsibility for the death is concerned, a joint-statement from Buckingham Palace and the Metropolitan Police has denied involvement, amid rumours that the killing had been “brought-forward” so as to prevent possible disruption to the royal honeymoon of Prince William and the arch social-climber, Kate Middleton. Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Paul Stephenson, also moved to play-down speculation that Bin Laden had been shot in the mistaken belief that he was a Brazilian electrician.

Ai Wei Wei and anti-dandruff shampoo

2011-04-10T16:39:00.017+01:00

The artistically discerning international community remains concerned about the plight of Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, detained by the Chinese authorities when attempting to board a flight to Hong Kong last week. Ai Weiwei is best-known for his work in the Tate's Unilever Series, and currently has a hundred million imitation sunflower seeds, made from porcelain, strewn across the floor of the Tate Modern on London's South Bank.

The Tate are said to be, "dismayed by developments that again threaten Weiwei's right to speak freely as an artist", and the gallery recently illuminated "Release Ai Weiwei" on the side of the building, overlooking the river Thames.

Back inside the gallery, protesters today entered Unilever's 'Sunflower Seeds' exhibit, distributing the names of incarcerated dissidents who have not had the good fortune of being made into household names whose welfare is worth troubling over.

Meanwhile, don't expect to hear much out of the Tate's corporate partners at Unilever on the subject. A 2008 report, entitled "outpacing the market" talks of Unilever's aim for a sustainable 20% growth in China. As far as social problems go, the corporation's research found nothing more profound than the fact that 70% of Chinese require a shampoo to address dandruff concerns, and that Guang Dong province represents China's largest shower gel market.

As for the Tate's other corporate partners, the Swiss bank UBS represents the largest foreign banking presence in China, aiming to double its revenue over the coming years, and BP remains "deeply committed to growing its business in China". None of which interfered with Tate's ability to associate its "iconic brand " with these, and any other corporate sponsors prepared to stump up the necessary cash.

The result is 9% economic growth to bankroll a repressive Chinese state, and corporate responsibility substituted for a logo on a prestigious gallery wall. It already seems to have been accepted that art loses none of its soul through association with big business, and the only surprise is the Tate's sudden discovery of a moral compass, which we can only imagine will quieten down again next time a sponsorship opportunity comes knocking.

Anyway, enough out of me, just as the old saying goes, words speak louder than actions.

The forest sell-off revisited... for openDemocracy

2011-04-03T13:08:00.002+01:00

I brushed-up my blog post about the privatisation of England's remaining public forests. I made it a little more scholarly, expounded some ideas with more detail, and submitted it to the website openDemocracy. They're perhaps a little more avowedly leftist than I am, with a few populist streaks thrown-in.

That said, they are also home to some really good journalism and independent thinking, and so I'm happy to say that they've published the article, and it can now be found in their ourKingdom section.

Japanese tsunami stops Libyan revolution

2011-03-09T11:00:00.029Z

A few weeks ago, Libyan rebels were portrayed as being on the cusp of ousting the tyrant, Muammar Gaddafi. With the western world having since gone Libya-gaga, rebel forces have now been portrayed as pegged-back into their Benghazi stronghold, and the portrayed prospect of a new regime appears to be deadening in the water.

All of which seems like an awfully inclement situation for the British government, who had hoped to sell military equipment to a new regime, the French government, who had hoped to find a new regime in Africa that might be encouraged to speak French and bolster France's long-dwindling portfolio of empire, and the US government, slowly coming-round to the idea of a Libyan no-fly zone, the implementation of which would require bombing Libyan airforce installations that could be rebuilt at a later date by Bechtel and Halliburton. Elsewhere, the passionate freedom fighters at the Arab League have denounced Gaddafi as an enemy of his people, and simultaneously sent Saudi Arabian forces to fight against Bahrainian people engaged in their own display of political agitation.

Meanwhile, out of the desert and into the western world, the liberal throng has continued recalibrating their conceptions of Arab states, updating the previous black-box understanding of politically neutral (plus camels) to politically angry (no camels after all) and repressed. With everybody so bored by online news pages that can't be updated frequently enough, and Facebook pages less fun than they used to be, the population at large has become excited about events in Libya, interpreting the present rush of blood as a concern that is deep-seated within our collective value systems.

Down in Westminster, the coalition government of David Cameron have also got pretty hot-under-the-collar about the injustices of the Gaddafi regime. After immediately mooting ideas to arm the opposition, Cameron and his foreign secretary, William Hague, are now throwing their weight behind the no-fly zone, and indeed seem to be doing everything in their power to agitate on behalf of a rebel movement that nobody knows anything about. Not that such is especially surprising, a mock-up of freedom in Libya is a better interest for whimsical liberals back home than his own government (yawn!), the effective privatisation of higher education (borring!), and coalition reluctance to pass the Bribery Act or regulate the fictions of the banking industry (enough!). Indeed, Britain's political left is perhaps only about another nine months from aspiring for no better than a Labour government (but they were so much better!) as the pinnacle of progressive politics. In such a context, political engagement becomes much easier when it involves only nominal support of a foreign man defending a town with a name you don't have to remember, and then voting for Ed Milliband four years down the line.

All of which is now old news anyway. Though derided at the time, Colonel Gadaffi has made-good on rambling promises to deliver an apocalypse should his overthrow be sought. After briefly removing himself from the media spotlight with an earthquake against Christchurch, Gadaffi finished the job on March 11, summoning a second earthquake off the north-eastern coast of Japan, and with a force of impact measuring an enormous 8.9 on the Richter scale. The ensuing tsunami has devastated lives and property all along the Japanese coast, with media retailers refusing to rule-out an eventual death toll in excess of 10,000 people, and journalists keeping their fingers crossed that the damaged Fukushima nuclear facility might yet go the way of Chernobyl and cause countless more miseries besides. All of which leaves perhaps another fortnight before events draw to their obvious conclusion ...

'Muammar who?'

Selling a forest

2011-02-19T10:47:00.014Z

The UK government has this week performed a widely-publicised U-turn in plans to sell the 18% of Britain's forests that are not already privately owned. The decision came after a somewhat unexpected backlash in which over half a million people petitioned against the privatisation, with funds being donated to pay for opinion polls and adverts in national media. The movement focussed on fears that privatisation would lead to forests being exploited for the cultivation of wood-based biofuels, resort developments, and also to the neglect of visitor centres, footpaths and other facilities that allow the public to actually access forests.

More telling, however, seems to be the romantic and symbolic attachment that people have given to the remaining publicly-owned woodland, the right-wing Daily Telegraph have called our forests a "precious asset" that are too sacred to leave to the free market (unlike almost anything else in life), and a letter signed by politicians, fashion designers, chefs, the editor of men's magazine, GQ, and the archbishop of Canterbury approached the matter with;

"We who love, use and share the English forests believe that such a sale would be misguided and shortsighted. Only 18% of English woodland remains under state protection for the benefit of the public. It is our national heritage. We are an island nation yet more people escape to the forest than to the seaside. We have relied on them since time immemorial, yet we are only a heartbeat in their history."

All of which is very nice, and whilst I approve unreservedly, I think that the whole affair raises some interesting curiosities. Firstly, the sense of a threat to our national entitlements as a people has obviously been raised more acutely in the instance of forest privatisation than in the instances of our access to higher education or public libraries. Secondly, given that we are talking about preserving less than one-fifth of our forests as publicly owned, and celebrating so enthusiastically the "people power" that has ensured they will remain so for the time being, evident is the extent to which we have already become beggars for the crumbs of our own table.

What intrigues me most of all, however, is the symbolic dialogue that has been raised, specifically the notion that the forest is actually ours, naturally and inviolably so, and not to be sold into private hands. Whereas it's easy to think of any number of business concerns that might be thought to morally belong to the people of the nation, the most obvious comparison would seem to be the ownership of land itself, with or without a significant number of trees upon it.

Which is, essentially, the almost entirely ignored concept that is central to domestic social-politics. You have to wonder whether the archbishop of Canterbury would feel so spiritually generous in his regard for who has moral claim upon 120,000 rural acres that are owned by the Church of England, or the £19million that the church has made from selling hundred-year leases on central London parking spaces. Elsewhere, Oxford University (est. circa 12th century) reported combined assets of £1.6 billion in 2004, including £55million-worth of residential and commercial property in Oxford. Cambridge University (est. 13th century) owns much of its host city, and in 2009 spent £24million in adding a stake in the Millennium Dome/O2 Arena to its property portfolio. Most galling of all is perhaps the 300 acres (most) of London's Mayfair and Belgravia that 'belongs' to the Grosvenor Estate/Duke of Westminster, along with commercial properties and other rural holdings in Britain and abroad. The central London estate is the backbone of the Grosvenor Group, and the current Duke of Westminster is Britain's third richest man, with an estimated value of nearly £7billion. The inappropriate and outdated absurdity of our social economy being built on such structures is nicely illustrated in the fact that the Grosvenor Estate dates back to 1677, when Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies and inherited the lands of the latter. Mary Davies, at the time of the marriage, was 12 years old, and so the third-biggest fortune in Britain can be traced back to what would, in modern thinking, constitute child abuse.

Anyway, enough of the history, back into the future and the real world, where scum like us have to measure the land beneath our feet in square metres. The average new dwelling in Britain totals at just 76 square metres, the Netherlands manages 115 square metres in spite of having an extra 150 people per square kilometre of population density. The notoriously squashed Japanese still manage to afford an average 92 square metres.

Needless to say that a land tax could do an awful lot to redress these injustices, premised on the fact that, just as with the forests, the land ought really to be seen as a common asset of the people of a nation. Whereas it takes a stretch of imagination to see what right a government has to take money earned by endeavour or innovation, it isn't so inconceivable to suggest that land is the one thing a state can lay legitimate claim to. Of course, you'll get an awful lot of people calling you a communist for suggesting such a thing, although not the arch-free market governments of Singapore or Hong Kong where, in the case of the latter, 40% of state revenue is generated through land tax. Needless to say that it's a lot simpler to collect and a lot harder to avoid than other taxes, and it implicitly removes the burden of taxation from the dispossessed.

All in all, it's a highly capitalistic tax, in the sense that it mitigates against the likes of the Duke of Westminster and a host of buy-to-let scoundrels making money out of nothing but the fact that they have money to start with. It would also be a disincentive to a bunch of petroleum-rich parasites buying-up the ground beneath our feet and the buildings above our heads, in fact, by removing people from a bondage to property, the dispossessed would be better-placed to realise their potential, and those with capital would have to use it in a more enterprising fashion than simply buying a roof and then charging the earth for someone to live beneath it.

So... that's what capitalism would actually look like, what we have is a sort of socialism for the rich, a feudal society with wi-fi.

Throwing Ideas... with Stephen Fry and Hosni Mubarak

2011-01-30T13:23:00.021Z

Britain's jack-of-all-intellectual-trades, Stephen Fry, was this week presented with an honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex, receiving his fourth such accolade amidst fierce mutual congratulation. As Fry praised the Sussex establishment that he "couldn't be prouder" to have been made a part of, the Sussex establishment duly fell about itself in rapture at their proximity to Fry.

With the ceremonial shenanigans now over, both parties return to their normal business, which Fry described, in the case of Sussex, to be "showing us how the world could be." True to this mandate, Sussex maintain a policy of winding-down research in political economy, linguistics, and a highly-regarded chemistry department, and have instead started focussing their energies towards courses called 'international business studies'. The university also presses ahead with policies to reduce its student support services, whilst building houses all over the village of Falmer, in order to let them to undergraduates at inflated prices.

Fry, meanwhile, returns to his work of reading other people's stories for audiobooks, writing about his love of the iphone, and posting his every second thought on Twitter. When not busy with such pastimes and part-time social do-gooding, Fry lends his voice to banks, insurance companies, multinational breweries, telephone companies and numerous other business interests prepared to pay for it.

All of which, of course, goes without saying in a world of corporate endorsements and the need for institutions of higher education to balance their books.

However, what caught my attention was one sentence from Fry's graduation speech, in which he urged that, "we can change the world not by throwing stones but by throwing ideas."

This entertained me on three levels. The first being the fact that Sussex University and Stephen Fry seem to have entered into some sort of shared amnesia, one that mistakes warm sentiments about reason and learning for a belief that they are bettering the world, and not actually partaking in some of its most socially negligent pastimes.

It also entertained me for the fact that Stephen Fry, as a homosexual and avowed atheist, would not be such a respected member of society were it not that many before him were of a mind to try and change society's regressive tendencies. Indeed, stones have often been thrown to show that people actually believed in their ideas as more than just word formations.

Finally, it entertained me in its similarity to the words of embattled Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, in his televised address this week. With approximately one hundred protesters having been killed during demonstrations against the de-facto dictator of thirty years, Mubarak declared that,

"It is not by setting fire and by attacking private and public property that we achieve the aspirations of Egypt and its sons, but they will be achieved through dialogue, awareness and effort."

All of which is just heart-warming from a man who rules his country under emergency law, has arrested, outlawed and disappeared his political opposition, confiscating their assets and subjecting them to strict censorship. Of particular interest to Fry, a vocal proponent of gay activism, will be Mubarak's systematic persecution of homosexuals, a political strategy designed to appease Islamic opponents to his rule.

With the sons of Egypt still on the streets and throwing stones and other articles in demands for a fairer society, along with Stephen Fry and Hosni Mubarak, I urge them to get back inside, obey their curfews, and start "throwing ideas" at their most reasonable and dialogue-loving despot, who will certainly bow before progressive reasoning if only we can throw enough ideas at him.

Or perhaps there is a grey area on Fry's stone/idea-throwing continuum. Perhaps nations with lots of sand, Arabic and poverty are expected to throw stones, whereas nations with iphones, zebra crossings, and frappuccinos have reached a pinnacle at which now all that remains to be thrown are ideas.

This is for charity

2010-12-30T12:59:00.004Z

Quick to capitalise on festive cheer and generosity, the government yesterday published a green paper discussing how their pet-project of a ‘Big Society’ can be supported, financially and otherwise, by everybody other than the government itself.

In a wide-ranging discussion, the green paper proposes ways in which individuals might give time to volunteering after they’ve finished the 1652 hours of work the average Briton annually undertakes, a figure 300 hours higher than is found in Germany, France, Sweden and a host of other nations that rank consistently above our little island in indexes evaluating quality of life.

Aside from the giving of time, the green paper also looks, inevitably, at how people can be encouraged to give more of their money to charities, the suggestion being that these private-sector companies need more revenue to help running services and protecting the socially marginalised, a responsibility that – puzzlingly – has always in the past been the very thing a government was mandated and funded to perform. Having raised capital gains tax, resolved to take 20% of VAT from the value of almost every purchase conducted in the UK, and decided that the treasury is in such fine shape that Vodafone could be excused a £5.2bn slice of its tax bill, it is mysterious that the government would now look to the apparently hard-up individual member of society to start making donations, additional to their taxes, in order to pay for the welfare state.

Ways in which this could be done are believed to include charitable donations appearing as options on cash machines, whilst the government has also identified that, as things stand, only 9% of the value of UK legacies are left to charities after people die, with 91% of the value being bequeathed, bizarrely enough, to family and friends. The green paper is quick to note that this leaves great potential for increased revenue.

On other points, the government seems quieter. The paper overlooks the nature of current donations, with almost three-quarters of the total value being given to medical research (32%), overseas aid (24%) and animal welfare (14%). In recognition of the slim overlap between these causes and the remit of the welfare state, it would appear that ‘Big Society’ depends on people donating not only more money, but also to charities most likely to plug the holes in the state, rather than those they have traditionally supported. None of this should be taken as a defence of central government over local, grassroots action, however, it does raise the question of whether the taxpayer achieves value for money from its rather expensive central government.

Another point scarcely touched-upon in the report is that the UK already gives a relatively high percentage of its income to charity. At 0.73% of GDP (approximately £10.6bn), UK giving is the second-highest rate amongst the developed world, behind only the USA on 1.7%. The size of the UK figure must be weighed against the fact that we pay significantly less tax than our European neighbours, but nevertheless, in 2005 Germany gave 0.22% and the French gave 0.14%. Up in Scandinavia, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark donate still less than 0.14% of GDP to charity, and yet still manage to wipe the floor with the UK on all indexes of social health. Indeed, amongst a host of Scandinavian social accolades, you can typically expect to find the average UK citizen less happy, less ‘satisfied with life’, and less likely to have received a high level of education. Enough about what we have less of however, the average UK citizen can expect an awful lot more in the way of mental health problems, discrimination in the workplace, and that lovely thing called poverty.

Charity… a symptom of the disease, somehow mistaken for its remedy.

We are London

2010-12-06T22:23:00.016Z

With students set to take to the streets in protest again this week, the sports manufacturer, Adidas, is offering a glimmer of hope for the future of London’s youth, and providing them with the support needed in such troubled times as ours. ‘We are London’ is the title of the brand’s new campaign, an effort to recognise the efforts of a generation that is “going places and making its own luck”, qualities that will be of increasing use in a generation widely perceived to be going nowhere and in need of an awful lot of luck just to get a half-decent job.

As university education and graduate jobs recede into the realm of pipe dreams, Adidas have proposed that youths instead stand-around on London’s railway bridges and benches, stuffing their hands into the pockets of any garment of Adidas clothing they can come by. Pastimes once vilified by the mainstream media and criminalised by a decade of anti-social behaviour orders, Adidas propose that sitting about with seemingly nothing to do might henceforth be regarded instead as an act of empowerment and urban belonging.

Whether or not the ruse works remains to be seen, and indeed statistics show no strong correlations between Adidas and social success. Wider society might also feel concerned at what will happen when the next generation of Londoners are not all of them able to make a success of themselves as hip-hop acts, and are forced to take-up jobs at Tesco. Tesco have recently threatened to create 10,000 new jobs in 2011… a proposition that begs the question of just who the unlucky 10,000 will be.

Regardless of all this, “We are London” certainly seems to have struck a chord with its target audience. The campaign’s Facebook group is already “liked” by approximately 6,300,000 people, a figure rising at a rate of about seven every three seconds and soon to eclipse the 6,800,000 “likes” that the Liberal Democrats polled at the last election. It being safe to assume that the Liberal Democrats are now considerably less popular than they were on election day, we can anticipate “We are London” superseding Clegg et al. in popularity come the end of the week, and taking the mantle of third-party should a snap-election be called imminently.

Meanwhile in Westminster, where the average MP remains fifty-years-old, our 650 elected representatives are angry at having spent only £3.1million of taxpayers money in the four months following the election. The figure compares unfavourably with £96million in the entirety of last year, and breaks-down to only £5,000 of expenses each during the four month period, on top of a £65,000p/a minimum salary. MPs have set-about bemoaning the complexity of the new scheme to monitor expenses spending, with some claiming to have been left “out of pocket”. Never prepared to stand idly by as the nation is threatened by inefficiencies of any sort, MPs have given a four month notice period to the independent body responsible for overseeing expenses, demanding that it become "more effective and more efficient”.

We await news of whether four months will become the statutory waiting period for ills effecting the remainder of the population to be put-right.

Happy Anniversary

2010-12-04T11:15:00.008Z

Well... this very time a year ago I was riding east with about seventy-something miles to go to Rouen, my Rohloff stuck in its tenth gear, myself freezing cold and sleep deprived. It's strange to think that a year has passed, the 4th of each month has had a certain poignance ever since returning, I feel happy that I'm no longer so painfully aware as I once was that another month has crept by.

The world around seems to go on changing in the minutest of ways, ways that will only ever seem significant for the shortest imaginable periods of time. Sky News was this week screening high-definition images from a helicopter hovering in a snowstorm... that's right... a snowstorm in high definition... such progress would have been all-but inconceivable a year ago.

To recognise the anniversary I'm putting-up a recording of a talk that I gave last month at the University of Sussex. The talk forms a brief glance at the world of London that I left and returned to, and also aims to provide a political discussion of the nations and regions that I travelled through. Some of the above photos I have uploaded to previous posts, however, I am including them again as they were featured on a slide show during the talk.

I continue to write my book, and feel that things are progressing favourably with it. I'm arranging an exhibition of photography and writing that will appear in the cycling stronghold that is the Look Mum No Hands cafe in Clerkenwell, London. The exhibit will be up for two weeks or so from a launch on the evening of January 6th... more details closer the time, but needless to say that one and all will be welcome. The exhibit will be accompanied by a small publication of words and photos, a light-touch endeavour to chronicle the episodes of my trip as they appear to me now with the passing of time. Copies of the collection will be on-show in the cafe, and will soon be available online through Blurb publishing. A larger collection of photography is a plan I have for some way down the line, all depending on the reception this first offering receives.

We do not condone violence.

2010-11-11T09:55:00.020Z

London's student protests turned violent yesterday, as angry demonstrators destroyed the lobby of the Millbank Centre, Westminster home of the Tory Party. The unrest was the culmination of a 50,000-strong march against government plans to introduce a trebling of university tuition fees, an escalation that would leave them at £9000 per-year.

As law-abiding folk around the capital lodged their dismay at the scenes of broken glass and graffiti, London's libertarian mayor, Boris Johnson, was moved to remark that he was "appalled that a small minority have shamefully abused their right to protest." Johnson echoed the sentiments of media commentators with good jobs and mortgages nationwide, in condemning the violently angry behaviour of youths who have spent the last two years being told that "the good times are over", that graduate unemployment is at its highest rate for two decades, and that they'll never be able to afford a house of their own in which to consider the fine mess they're in. Moreover, one could be mistaken for believing that these viscious, little swines have completely overlooked the "Big Society" solidarity that can be found in these gloomy times. It's almost as if they didn't hear David Cameron's stirring words that "we're all in this together."... that's right folks, the son of a millionaire stockbroker who went to university for free, and with a state grant too, is right in the thick of the action with the everyday Joe currently at university for £3000 a year, and right there alongside the everyday Joanne who will be paying £9000 a year come 2016. It's all about pulling-together at times like these.

And pulling-together should never involve violence, as has been reiterated by Labour Party member and National Union of Students leader, Aaron Porter. Porter labelled scenes from inside the Millbank Centre as "despicable" and lamented yesterday that "a minority of idiots tried to undermine 50,000 who came to make a peaceful protest". Indeed, that violent minority of idiots ought be educated in the history of protest in Great Britain, with attentions drawn specifically to the great anti-war demonstrations of February 2003, when a million people took to the streets of London to peacefully proclaim their opposition to bombing Iraq back into the stone-age. Overwhelmed by this huge display of popular opinion, the government of the day, with supporting votes from MP Boris Johnson of Henley, and MP David Cameron of Witney, did at the last minute abstain from their war path and resolve instead to uphold the values of democracy and international law. Or something like that.

Elsewhere, in similarly misguided attempts at violent protest, Roshonora Choudhry of east London was this week sentenced to at least 15 years imprisonment for stabbing her MP, Stephen Timms. The attack was carried-out by Choudhry as "revenge" on behalf of the people of Iraq, who Timms voted to bomb back into the stone-age in 2003. When asked by the judge what she had hoped to achieve by her actions, she replied that it had been a 'punishment'. This attitude in particular seems to have caused rancour in the media response to Choudhry, with commentators of the distinct opinion that a 21 year-old girl stabbing her MP within five miles of three NHS hospitals is an act more cowardly than hundreds of apparently educated men and women ignoring the wishes of their electorate in resolving to drop 1700 bombs on the people of Iraq in one night alone. The wounds that ensue from an MP being stabbed by a carving knife are also said to be more grave than having to gather-up the scattered legs and hands of your offspring, after a cruise missile lands in your Baghdad apartment building.

As much a cause for conversation as the attack itself has been the context of Choudhry's prolific educational accolades. Expected to attain first-class honours at London's King's University, and already the winner of academic scholarships and prizes, Choudhry is said to be fluent in English, French, Arabic and Bengali, a raft of attributes that has led to lamentations that such a "glittering" future could be thrown-away so easily. As Timms himself remarked, "my real worry about it all is that a very bright young woman with everything to live for would reach the conclusion that she should throw it all away'. Indeed, with her university education, Choudhry would have made an excellent candidate for unpaid internships, and might even have gone-on to obtain a post as a PA or office administrator. It is all-but unthinkable that such heady achievements might have been sacrificed in pursuit of Choudhry's convictions, and for goals that didn't correspond to materialistic enrichment - these are not the values upon which our thriving society is built.

Enough of all this pacifism though... readers will be pleased to hear that Scotland Yard is planning to extend the use of guns within the Metropolitan Police. Areas of Hackney and Brixton are to be patrolled by officers with machine guns, as part of a directive to reduce the spectre of fear caused by an increase of guns on the streets. The patrols will be undertaken by the infamous firearms division of the Metropolitan Police, C019, who in 2005 were responsible for shooting-dead Jean Charles de Menezes on suspicion of wearing a bulky jacket whilst using the London Underground.

Tories losing their marbles.....

2010-10-30T18:57:00.018+01:00

In 1948, the Genocide Convention was signed in Paris, committing signatories to preventing acts of genocide. During the 1990s, eager to avoid the commitment of preventing acts of genocide in Yugoslavia and then Rwanda, the traditional do-gooders of the international community began using the non-legally-binding expression 'ethnic cleansing', in order to describe thousands of people being murdered on the basis of their racial background.

Despite 'cleansing' being a process performed ordinarily on colons rather than ethnic groups, the term somehow seemed to stick, and Boris Johnson, the charismatic London mayor easily-confused with a pillock, this week suggested that Tory plans to reduce housing benefits would prompt a "Kosovo-style social-cleansing" of central London, leaving poor people unable to afford their rent. The fact that rents might be so high in the first instance is of lesser concern to Johnson, as is the morality of taxpayer's money paying the mortgages of private landlords. Be that as it may, the somewhat extreme Kosovo analogy has drawn stark reproach from Prime Minister, David Cameron, whilst Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, announced that the comparison was "deeply insensitive to those who have witnessed ethnic cleansing." Clegg is thought to have been so outspoken about ethnic cleansing having been assured that the coalition government has no existing plans to undertake any acts of ethnic cleansing. Clegg now begins an anxious wait, hoping not to be called-upon to explain why ethnic-cleansing always seemed like a horrendous prospect, but is in fact the only means with which to deal with the realities of being in government.

Given this appetite for the drawing of brusque comparisons, Johnson might perhaps wish to reconsider the appointment of his long-standing friend, Veronica Wadley, as chair of the London Arts Council. With her artistic credentials no more than working as editor to Vogue magazine and the Evening Standard, Wadley's qualification for the job was questioned by members of the selection panel, who also raised the point that Johnson's interventions on Wadley's behalf were in breach of rules on political interference in appointments. All to no avail, Wadley was appointed in June to the £6500/30-day a year position, and Boris Johnson, evidently brushing-up on his history at present, might want to reflect on Hitler's appointment of his friend, Joseph Goebbels, to oversee artwork in Nazi Germany.

In other news... with the Tory party so riled by Johnson's Kosovo hyperbole, it went entirely unnoticed that former Tory MP, Norman Tebitt, this week suggested that an increase in British contributions to the European Union budget would constitute a "Vichy-style" capitulation. In 1940, after the German defeat of the French army, the Vichy regime of Philippe Petain entered into collaboration with the German Nazi party. The relationship saw the opening of internment camps in which Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other undesirables were kept for transit to concentration camps in Germany, the relationship saw French soldiers and gendarmerie round-up such undesirables for despatch to Auschwitz, the relationship saw foreigners forced to work on Nazi labour projects. The proposed increase to the EU budget is 0000000002.9%.

Enough of all these Nazis and doom-harbinging however, in lighter news, the Work and Pensions Secretary, Ian Duncan Smith, this week advised that unemployed people ought "get on a bus" and go looking for work. The suggestion marks a turnaround from Duncan Smith's position in May, when he stated, on joining the cabinet, that: "I am here because I want this to be the most reforming government on benefits for a generation. I think we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity". His rediscovered conservatism is particularly quaint for its similarity to Tory advice from 1981, when Norman Tebitt famously suggested that the unemployed should "get on their bike and look for work". In a prediction of things to come, I foresee the 2038 secretary for work and pensions, also an Oxford graduate, urging the unemployed to "get on their spaceships and look for work".

Human history is nothing but the invention of new technology.

Deportations and Bicycles

2010-10-16T14:45:00.014+01:00

Having remarked in July 2008 that absent fathers are key to explaining the failings of the black community, Prime Minister David Cameron will be disappointed to hear that the five children of Jimmy Mubenga now have an absent father all of their very own. Mubenga, of Ilford in east London, was in the process of being forcibly removed back to Angola on Thursday September 14th, when it transpired that he had been inadvertently killed by the security guards responsible for his deportation.

Witnesses aboard the British Airways flight describe a fifteen minute skirmish in which the handcuffed Mubenga was restrained by three employees from private security firm, G4S. The captive is said to have consistently called-out such puzzling statements as "help me" and, "I can't breathe", before eventually dropping dead in the aisle of the plane. The episode raises questions about a Home Office policy in which individuals are deported by hired goons, employees whose only qualification for serving as representatives of UK immigration is that they applied for a job with G4S, and who are then free to manhandle deportees in front of tourists, businessmen, and other paying customers aboard commercial flights.

Rest assured that a political clamour is well underway, with Liberal Democrat, Julian Huppert, calling for a "wide-ranging independent inquiry" into the event. Onlookers wait patiently for the mandatory week to elapse before it can be ascertained whether the Liberal Democrat in question actually meant what he said, or whether the case of Mubenga is one more misfortune that must be tolerated as part of the "growing-up" process of being in government.

G4S are not the only firm in the private sector making a fist of things of late, as Serco continue to demonstrate that they are less adept at running London's cycle hire scheme than locking-up asylum seekers at their £900,000 a month, money-spinning detention centre, Yarl's Wood. The £140million cycle scheme began on 30th July with a one-month delay before casual, non-registered individuals could make use of the facilities. With two and a half months now passed, Londoners are being told to wait for 2011 before the scheme is up-and-running in its promised fashion. The result of this has been an excess of bicycles in some areas, and absences in others, a logistical problem blamed upon the fact that casual users, including tourists, are unable to use the scheme and thereby redistribute the bicycles naturally between twice-daily peaks in registered users commuting to and from offices.

The delay is at the heart of questions about whether or not Transport for London (TfL) and the taxpayer have received value for money from the contract. Since winning the £140million deal (£23,000 for each of the 6,000 bikes put into circulation) to undertake the cycle hire scheme, Serco have subcontracted Canada's Bixi to provide the bicycles and docking stations, subcontracted FM Conway to dig-up the roads and pavements where the docking stations are installed, and subcontracted Logica to provide the technology for the scheme's payment system, all of which begs the question of why it was that TfL, with an annual budget of £9.2billion, were unable simply to give one of their near 20,000 employees a copy of the Yellow Pages and instruct them to call Bixi, Logica and FM Conway directly.

Naysaying aside, the scheme's sponsors and instigators continue to brand it a riproaring success that is revolutionising travel in London. Less has been said about when the scheme's boundary will be extended beyond the areas of those hard-up folk in central London, where residents of Mayfair and Belgravia (etc.) need not walk more than five minutes to reach a docking station. Outside of central London, in Hackney, Holloway, Camberwell, Brixton and other areas of densely-populated rabble, residents will still have to catch a bus in order to reach their nearest revolutionary cycle hire opportunity.

Aside from the practical failings of the scheme, it remains a moot point that TfL were unable to badge their project as anything more inspiring than 'Barclays Cycle Hire'. The name is a homage to the £25million paid by Barclays bank to have their name appear six times on each one of 6,000 bicycles, have the scheme livery altered to represent their own corporate colours, have every street in central London flooded with mobile advertising, and have the name of the bank as one-third of the scheme's title in return for less than one-fifth of the scheme's funding. The triumph of this as a piece of cheap advertising is compounded by every tourist in London now having their photo taken alongside a dock of Barclay's Cycle Hire bicycles, those venturing into central London being condemned to seeing the name 783 times a day, and television coverage from the capital frequently capturing one of the bicycles ride by. All of which is a far-cry from the much-praised Parisian counterpart of Barclay's Cycle Hire, Velib, a title formed from contracting the words 'velo' (bicycle) and 'liberte' (liberty). Elsewhere in France, Aix En Provence named their cycle scheme V'hello! as a contraction of 'velo' and 'hello', Lyon's was named Velo'v ('velo' and 'love') and Dijon's VeloDI as a melodic contraction of 'velo' and the city name.

None of which seems to concern the insipid, fluorescent mouthpiece of the cycling community, too enthral with anything on two wheels to even consider suggesting that maybe, just maybe, it might have been something so much better.

Anyway... enough of all that grumbling... welcome to the new world of 'more for less'... where we all pay that much more and get that much less in return.

Hurrah!

Graduate Tax and Guinness records.

2010-10-03T14:44:00.005+01:00

With the finances of universities nationwide becoming ever-gloomier, UK business secretary, Vince Cable, is continuing to attract heavy fire for his proposed 'graduate-tax'. The scheme outlines a model in which financially successful graduates would pay higher rates of tax on their salaries, rather than students across the board facing the possibility of tuition fees doubling to an annual £7000.

Business group, The Institute of Directors (IOD), are the latest opponents to the tax, arguing that it will see the most successful students financially penalised for their endeavours, whilst also driving a 'brain drain' scenario in which Britain's brightest minds will graduate, only to seek employment overseas. The assertion is the latest in a long line from free-market, centre-right thinkers convinced that Britain is such an overwhelmingly diabolical place in which to live and do business that unless corporations, bankers, and graduates are given generous compensation for choosing to locate themselves on our island, they will all leave instantly and start more prosperous lives elsewhere.

Be that as it may... the IOD, right-wing media, Confederation of British Industry and a bunch of other doom harbingers will be pleased to read "Gifted Children are Failures", a Sunday Times article from September 26th. The article (which none of you can now read without paying Rupert Murdoch a subscription fee) posits that gifted children are likely to become misfits rather than Mozarts, and cites research showing that of children who demonstrate considerable ability and intelligence throughout their schooling, only a very small number go on to amount to anything conventionally 'successful'. All of which is good news for those in fear of Cable's graduate tax, suggesting as it does that society actually has a large and unused surplus of highly talented individuals who go-on to perform jobs that could be perceived as falling-short of their actual capabilities.

This consideration, alongside the notion of a graduate tax, raises questions about the philosophy of tax as a whole. Contrary to traditional thinking, we are here presented with the idea that the most financially successful in society do not attain their positions by virtue of merit and the necessity of their employment, but rather as part and parcel of a social model that requires and permits a certain number of better-remunerated individuals, if only to preserve nominal notions of success and merit. In a pure meritocracy the graduate tax might be seen as wrong-headed and downright abysmal, but in our quasi-fictitious social roleplay, corresponding as it does to all-but nothing rational and mutually-benefitial... then indeed why not tax those who have merely inherited the lucrative role of what a 'successful' person ought resemble?

Anyway... enough of that bullshit... I also write to inform you all happily that Guinness recently acknowledged and ratified my record for a circumnavigation by bicycle. Sincere and deepest thanks to all those who believed in me and supported me regardless... and sincere and deepest apologies to all those who would have rather seen Guinness throw me out as the mean-spirited cheat and grumbling fuckwit that I am. Of course I knew all along that I had done nothing outside the spirit of the record, and that therefore it was a moral and personal achievement regardless of a piece of paper from Guinness... however, I'm not a big enough person to have actually felt that way, even if I knew it to be true... and so I have to say that I do actually quite like my piece of paper from Guinness, which will be invaluable to the CV once I draw a line under this life as a socially-conscientious pauper and start scouting around for jobs in private-equity.

The one about a builder, a policeman and a bank.

2010-07-29T20:36:00.004+01:00

Government spending cuts have this week seen the social housing contractor, Connaught, plunged close to administration. A near 80% fall in its share price has followed a profit warning and a request for additional cash. Connaught, valued at approximately just £45million, has had additional funds made available to it by a banking syndicate of RBS (80% taxpayer-owned), Barclays and Lloyds (40% taxpayer-owned), and now expects to exceed a £200million debt threshold, up from £120million, by the end of the year. Although a level of debt four times higher than earnings would be seen as ill-advised in an individual, and certainly not likely to secure the £15million overdraft just granted by the banking syndicate, it does not stop Connaught shares from trading in the FTSE250, along with Britain's other most reputable companies.

What happens next at Connaught is anybody's guess. A sale of part of the group's assets has been mooted, whilst the economic sages at the Financial Times have been quick to murmur about the need for a "debt-for-equity swap", a thing that financial ignoramus such as you and I might refer to, more colloquially as, "borrowing money". The accountancy firm, Deloitte, drafted-in to offer an independent review of the situation, have advised that additional funds be made available to Connaught, who need additional funds to pay Deloitte for their independent review of the situation. Connaught's existing accountants, PricewaterhouseCoopers, who failed to notice, as an accountant might be expected to, the gaping hole in Connaught's books, have declined to comment. One man not at all caught-out by the falling value of shares was the currently suspended director, Peter Jones, who is said to have made £265,000 by selling stock prior to an initial profit-warning issued by Connaught in June. All part and parcel of a financial sector served by five banks, three accountancy firms, two credit-ratings agencies, and a government without a conviction in sight.

Another matter without a conviction in sight is the case of PC Simon Harwood, best known for killing newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, at the G20 protests a year ago in London. Harwood, who was dismissed from the Metropolitan Police during the nineties for an off-duty incident of road rage, and then investigated in 2003 by Surrey Police for the use of excessive force, was caught on video striking Tomlinson with a baton, before pushing him to the ground. Tomlinson collapsed and died soon after, and his case returned to the media this week, with the Crown Prosecution Service reckoning that no grounds existed to form a criminal case against Harwood, who had concealed both his officer's name and number, and his face, whilst on-duty at the protest.

Crucial to the CPS' decision not to press charges was the Home Office's appointed pathologist, quack-doctor Freddy Patel, whose post-mortem concluded that Tomlinson died of a heart attack, but failed to detect the abdominal haemorrhaging found in subsequent post-mortems. Patel, who is currently on trial for twenty-six counts of misconduct, has an impressive catalogue of gaffes to his name, ranging from false claims that a man who died in police custody was a user of crack-cocaine, to an about-turn in which he first claimed that 21 year-old Maja Trajkovic was killed by opiate poisoning, only to later change his mind to asphyxiation. Patel also stands accused of failing to measure heights and weights during post-mortems, and of neglecting to perform X-rays. Now faced with being struck-off the register at the British Medical Council, and presently suspended from conducting forensic post-mortems, it is clear that Patel was just the man for the job in assessing Ian Tomlinson's likely cause of death.

Misgivings may also be arising from the decision of Lloyds banking group to sell a 70% stake in its private equity division, an exercise that has generated £332million, but is nevertheless thought to represent a loss of about half the figure Lloyds initially paid for shares in cinemas, waste management services and health and fitness clubs. Although Lloyds appear happy that the sale represents part of the transformation to a "smaller, wiser company", the decision to take the loss might be regarded a worrying omen for what will eventually become of the government's 80% holding in Royal Bank of Scotland. A springtime 'investigation' by the Guardian newspaper illustrated a 75% increase in the share value of RBS since the government bailout, gains that corresponded to a £7.4billion profit for the taxpayer, if the government were to cash-in its holdings in the beleaguered bank. Former chancellor, Alistair Darling, and current business secretary, Vince Cable, have both spoken of the fiscal wisdom in acquiring shares in debt-ridden high street banks, however, the Lloyds case, and the loss suffered, arguably represents the value of shares once they are no-longer guaranteed by the taxpayer, and are required to be economically viable as a private-sector concern actively seeking a buyer.

Not all, however, is doom and gloom in UK politics, with pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline, pocketing an £800million windfall from last year's government order of 60million vaccinations against swine flu. Even more cheering than that, however, was the recent release of an independent report that has been happy to inform the public that the £1.2billion response to swine flu was in fact, "proportionate and effective". The report, chaired by Dame Deidre Hine of the House of Lords, which has nothing at all to do with the government, claimed that it was wrong to suggest that there was an over-reaction to the threat of swine flu, because we could not be certain how many "very precious lives" (not to be confused with the life of Ian Tomlinson) had been saved by the government response. No thoughts were offered as to the fact that, whereas swine flu caused 457 UK deaths in 2009, conventional flu is reckoned to typically lead-to between 3000 and 4000 annual fatalities. Further to this, the government might be troubled to hear that a "proportionate and effective" approach to saving the "very precious lives" of the 3000 people who die each year on Britain's roads, will cost £8billion every single year.

Keep on rockin' in the free world.

More news from nowhere

2010-06-16T10:14:00.003+01:00

The Deepwater Horizon spillage in the Gulf of Mexico continues to dominate the UK media, with President Obama having moved to suggest that the catastrophe will forevermore change the way people think about the environment.

In accordance with such significance, the US government has this week raised demands that BP ring-fence a sum of $20,000,000,000, in order to clean-up wildlife and compensate victims of the disaster. It has also been suggested that BP compensate workers on other offshore oil rigs, who have been made redundant by the Obama administration's six-month drilling moratorium. The US Treasury, with a debt in excess of $13,000,000,000,000, are refusing to rule-out the possibility of levying such demands against other foreign corporations, in efforts at regaining a handle on their own deficit obligations.

BP, their share-price now half what it was on the day of the explosion, have railed against such claims upon their culpability, and are said to be enlisting the services of the UK anti-Bullying Alliance. Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, left a press conference in tears having taken great pains to highlight that the Deepwater Horizon rig was jointly owned by BP alongside US firms, Halliburton, and the world's largest oil-rig contractor, Transocean. Hayward and the BP top brass are said to be losing hope of a Bhopal-style settlement, invoking the precedent of the 1984 disaster in Madyah Pradesh, India, where at least twenty thousand people lost their lives after an explosion at the factory of US chemicals company, Union Carbide. Compensation paid-out in lieu of the Bhopal disaster to-date represents approximately 32pence per fatality, an amount that BP said they were prepared to treble in compensation for the eleven lives lost in the initial blast upon Deepwater Horizon. Shareholders were thought to have been happy with the £10.56 proposed settlement.

Following the US administration's throwing-out of such an offer as 'deeply insensitive to the lives effected by the tragedy', market analysts have been moved to suggest that BP might curtail their own financial catastrophe by rebranding themselves as American Petroleum, or considering a sale of all operations to US operators, with both Chevron and Exxon rumoured to be interested. The Obama administration acknowledged that such an arrangement "may prove satisfactory".

Back in England, the coalition government have not remained silent concerning the future of one of the FTSEs much-vaunted, 'blue-chip' corporations. Prime Minister David Cameron released the following statement three and a half weeks after the first explosion.

"Whilst we recognise the massive damage being caused by incidents in the Gulf of Mexico, we must recognise the value of BP to the British economy, and recognise the need stand firmly behind this well-recognised company of ours. Whilst we recognise the value of BP to the British economy, we must also recognise the value of this country's special relationship with the United States, which has given many young British men and women the opportunity to see parts of the Middle-East and Hindu Kush that they could never have otherwise hoped to experience. Recognising both of these facts, I rest my case".

Returning from Afghanistan, new Tory Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, has caused insult to the government and people of Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, by suggesting that the country was reminiscent of the feudal age. Fox referred to Afghanistan as a "broken, medieval state from the thirteenth-century", comments which led Karzai to brand the remarks as evidence that Britain remains a "colonial, orientalist and racist country". Apologising for any offence caused, Fox revealed that his presence in Afghanistan formed part of a research trip on behalf of the new coalition government, the purpose being to investigate ways in which Britain could be strengthened in the model of a feudal state from the thirteenth century. With no offence intended, Fox stressed his great admiration for what Karzai, the Taliban and NATO forces are presiding over in Afghanistan, and looks-forward to the day that such a social model can be rolled-out by Westminster.

The future of the UK economy may well be illustrated by events currently unfolding in Greece. In the first good news to hit the beleaguered state for some time, Chinese delegates are this week present in Athens to sign export deals and contracts for infrastructure ownership. Although export of olive oil to China has been heralded as central to the deal, more telling seem to be the sale of rights to develop shopping-centres and airports in traditionally popular tourist destinations such as Crete. These concessions augment existing Chinese ownership of cargo management in the major shipping port of Piraeus, a contract rumoured to be worth approximately a billion Euros to the Greeks. Tory Chancellor, George Osborne, who presides over a budget deficit of 12% of GDP (the Greek budget deficit is only 9.3%), is said to be keeping a close eye on developments, and is rumoured to be considering an offer to the Chinese of as many amenities and services as they will buy, plus all the cheddar cheese they can eat.

In lighter news, and showing brave resistance to any talk of economic gloom, London is currently whispering about the prospect that the as-yet unbuilt olympic stadium may have to be demolised after the games have been completed. The 2012 Olympics, dubbed 'The Sustainable Games' are yet to find a new owner for the £525million stadium, a quandry that presents either the need for demolition, or taxpayer-funded upkeep of the stadium once its Olympic use is over. Although low-lying football team, Leyton Orient, have expressed an interest in taking-on the venue as their own stadium, Olympic organisers, who have always championed the "legacy of the games" in a deprived, East London district, envisage a venue that retains facilities for athletics events. Prime Minister Cameron hailed the half-billion pound uncertainty as resounding evidence that the British economy remained buoyant and the British taxpayer possessed of boundless wealth.

It's getting strange in here.- News from the Island

2010-06-03T09:54:00.005+01:00

Spring is turning summery in London, and with temperatures starting to rise, the wider climate is getting curiouser and curiouser.

Leading the headlines this week has been the resignation of Liberal Democrat MP, David Laws, from his Treasury position in charge of spending cuts. Laws, a continuing multimillionaire and former banker with JP Morgan, has stepped-down from his cabinet post amid revelations by the Daily Telegraph that he gave his boyfriend £40,000 of taxpayer's money for sharing his London home whilst attending Parliament. Laws, who was so determined to keep his sexuality secret he felt compelled to give £40,000 of taxpayer's money to his boyfriend, seems to be in quite a spot of personal bother about the issue, stating that he is now going to miss-out on vital budgetary works that he feels "his entire life has prepared him for".

Laws is not the only one upset about the whole affair, David Cameron having grudgingly accepted the resignation of this "good and honourable man", and Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, getting all flush in stating that it was as if Laws had been "put on earth" to do his job at the Treasury. The praise did not stop there, with another minister stating that "David Laws has a capacity to consume information and process it in a logical way that very few people have" ... Asked what would happen next at the Treasury, the minister scratched his head and asked for the question to be repeated.

Perhaps more telling than the loss of what seems to have been Westminster's only intelligent MP, have been revelations that Laws was previously claiming £200 a month for his utilities costs, an amount that fell to just £37 once it became mandatory that MPs submit receipts for such expenses. This begs the question as to why a multimillionaire would ever bother wasting half an hour of his time to lodge the paperwork for claiming thirty-seven quid.

British Petroleum are currently faced with the loss of far less trifling sums of money, their share-price having plummeted by around £15billion on account of the leaking oil well, Deepwater Horizon, off the Louisianna coast. Last week, in a failed attempt to make less of a mess of the ocean, the oil giant implemented a bizarre policy of dumping tons of mud and golf balls and used tyres onto the seabed, all in the hope of stopping the pollution. It would appear that having since tried to block the rupture with some old garden furniture, a large VHS collection, two used mattresses, and a microwave that Lord Brown no longer had use for, BP have abandoned what was being called a "top-kill" strategy, and are hoping instead merely to contain the growing disaster.

Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, whose wife again denied allegations that her husband is crying himself to sleep each night, has tabled one possible solution involving bananas. Hayward revealed to reporters that in his kitchen he has a fruit bowl with an elevated hook that holds bananas above other fruits. This design is intended to separate bananas from the other fruits, because bananas contain an active enzyme that facilitates decomposition in other matter. Hayward has thus tabled the idea of dropping ten million bananas into the Gulf of Mexico, in order to facilitate the decomposition of the gathering oil. A spokesman for Chiquita welcomed the proposal.

The finances of the royal family are looking murkier than a bayou these days, with the Queen herself facing increasing hardship, and forced into the ignoble position of pleading with parliament for a £6million rise in her pocket-money. The royal family, which costs the taxpayer in excess of £40million each year, is said to be at the end of a dwindling reserve-fund that has been paying for the upkeep of palaces and the throwing of garden parties. A Royal spokesman said that the impending crisis, befitting of tough fiscal times, showed just how in-touch the monarchy are with the situation faced by the everyday man and woman of Britain, who are also going about the process of imminenet belt-tightening. Unless the government can provide the extra cash, the Queen has remarked tearfully that "she just doesn't know what she'll do".

One area of spending not yet feeling the pinch is cycling provisions, and Transport for London (TfL) this month announced commencement of a scheme of Cycle Superhighways. The Superhighways, which will cost the taxpayer £116million, and are part-sponsored by the good people at Barclay's Capital, will take cyclists along a direct route, painted in blue, from outer-London areas and into the city itself.

The project is proving controversial on the basis of cost, with advocacy groups pointing to the existence of a network of predominantly smooth, black surfaces that are rumoured to connect every home, amenity, railway station and workplace on the entire Island. An average 7metres across, it has been argued that these sprawling, mythical beasts, known only as Roads, might actually be wide enough for cars and bicycles to use concurrently. Transport for London has promised to set-up a commission to investigate the proposal, but with London mayor, Boris Johnson, known to be a supporter of the Cycle Superhighways, it is doubtful that the proposals will be reversed. Johnson, partially autistic, is known to hold fond visions of a fleet of new, red buses driving alongside new, blue superhighways.

An aide at the Mayor's Office, responding to questions about the cost-effectiveness of the scheme, said that "although cycling offers excellent value for money as a means of transport with few infrastructure requirements, the Mayor and TfL feel that there is nevertheless potential to make cycling policy as expensive and convoluted as possible. Only then can the bicycle fulfil its role in the London transport mix".

In breaking news, disgruntled taxi driver, Derrick Bird, yesterday drove (in his taxi) to eleven different locations around Cumbria, proceeded to shoot-dead twelve people, and then himself, in a killing-spree that has left dozens injured (though rumours are circulating that a Daily Telegraph reporter was responsible for shooting the 24th and final victim... "dozens" undeniably sounding much better than "23"). The news has delighted the media, who have arrived en masse to document the minutiae of an episode with less national relevance than anything else that occurred this week. Also out in force are the Cumbria police, who showed themselves to be amongst the best in the world for showing-up in a host of vehicles and securing roads with blue-and-white tape shortly after events of any magnitude have already taken place. With the taxi driver having driven to an array of different locations, this has left the police with their work cut-out, and over 100 detectives are covering a 150km area to conduct 33 separate investigations at the site of each shooting.

In preliminary press conferences, the point has been raised that Britain does not use kilometres as a unit of measurement, and that many people were clueless as to the actual distance that 150km represents. A police spokeswoman replied that 150km was chosen as a more imposing total than 92.3miles, and one that was therefore more representative of the tragedy at hand. It was regrettable, she continued, that Mr Bird had not driven a further 7.8miles before taking his own life. Asked whether the police were treating the number 7.8 as in any way suspicious, it was said that no possibilities were being excluded at this stage. Although detectives were eager to stress that the 193 separate investigations were in their infancy, initial findings seem to suggest that a taxi driver drove, in his taxi, between eleven different locations, shot-dead twelve people, and then took his own life in wooded areas. The investigation continues.

27300%

2010-04-22T10:55:00.003+01:00

A professor by the name of Dorling, from Sheffield University, has just released a book concerning inequality in our great nation. His book seems to have given the media some impetus to talk about the subject, which is probably the best way of ensuring that nobody actually does anything about the subject, but has nonetheless served to see a few statistics batted in my direction.

The book suggests that London is the singlemost unequal city in the entire developed world, with the richest 10% earning 273 times that which the poorest 10% are left with, a fairly sizable 27300% more. I'll let that figure speak for itself, although it probably won't, and instead cut straight to a piece of shameless self-promotion, a sort of serialisation if you will, of what I've been writing of late, which was my own, non-statistical view of what Dorling is, I believe, trying to say.

The Poverty... of all its attributes the Poverty was the greatest in the entire city. It was stunning, magnificent, spectacularly achieved and with meticulous attention to detail. I will never see a poverty so complete as that which I have witnessed in London. There were the department stores with their own horse and traps to take the rich for rides in the parkland, there were the hotel fronts with gentlemen in cravattes and top hats, holding open the doors of Italian sportscars so that their owners need not trouble with doing so. Behind the revolving doors the lobbies of those hotels held violinists, svelte, little Scandinavians in cocktail dresses, and even, in one instance, some old strumpet plucking at a harp with her jeweled fingers. The carpets were plush, so very full, velvetine... it was like walking upon a trampoline as I crossed to the concierge with my deliveries. The toilets, they were something else, with a man in a waistcoat and a towel on his arm calling people 'Sir' as they passed him by. The urinal trough, one of those that runs all the way to the floor and along the length of a wall, they had positioned a visor, at a 45-degree angle, for your shoes to fit neatly beneath and save their being splashed by any piss that sprayed back out of the porcelain. The toilet itself... oh my... but that was a stroke of genius, for the shute went straight down, and then sloped backwards rather than forwards, so that the affluent need not see the banal smear of their own shit trickling down the bowl on its way to a sewer. There must come a point at which a fellow's status makes it hard to accept that his innards contain a digestive tract much the same as any other.

There were shops... shops with locked doors, guarded from within, and with windows that glistened like the Milky Way. I knew of other shops that paid humans to work as mannequins, and I once had to deliver some negligé of the most delicate lacework that would have cost, I was told, a full seven hundred pounds of currency. Seven hundred pounds I tell you... to half-conceal a pair of titties and a cunt. There were the shops that sold yachts, that sold claret, sold port, that sold cigars...the thick smoke chugging on the wind back up St James' Street. There were shops selling cufflinks that cost my month's wages, shops selling villas and islands in the sun, that chartered jets and vintage cars. There were the restaurants too, restaurants with their tables all decked in flutes and three separate sets of cutleries, with embroidered cusions upon the seats and some of the most well-fed and positively delighted-looking folk upon the cusions... I would watch them through the windows, their silent laughter that could not reach me through the glass as they rocked back-and-forth in their voyage of glee. There were auction houses, auction houses with their record-breaking sales, all seven figures of them, announced in the windows... there were commercial galleries asking half a million for the amateur paintings of a professional musician. There were the salons that quaffed the hair of cats and dogs, and there were the universities, amongst the most prestigious on earth, where the children gathered like the prettiest and most delicate of orchards, dressed marvellously in their parents' wealth, clutching at folders of other people's words, and excitedly arranging their evenings without cares in the world. Up at St. Pancras the old station was being refurbished, and they could not help themselves in proclaiming the ten million pound penthouse sitting at the top. Down on Knightstbridge there was a new developement by Hyde Park Corner, it promised to take luxury to new heights, and I believed them.

It was sensational... stupendous, because after seeing all that, I was left to count my deliveries for the day... to get to the bottom of whether or not I had earned the fifty daily pounds that I had come to treat as some sort of watershed of satisfaction. I would count my deliveries, deduct the amount of money I had eaten, and there, right there waiting, after all that I had seen, that was poverty... the most spectacular poverty imaginable, for it could not have been more acute. That awareness of all I did not have.

Perhaps I had no license to complain, for there were certainly others below me, and I could have chosen differently, had my time fairly well-remunerated in any number of companies. But what sort of choice was that? To choose either deprivation or something I loathed... something I loathed but which promised to make it worthwhile during one transaction a month, to all be over in forty years time.

Well... there you have it... latest scribblings. Feel free to either enjoy or disparage it, or else do something more productive entirely than leaving comments on the internet.

Amongst all my pessimism, there is some good news from the capital, where only last weekend there were fourteen incidents of stabbings in a mere forty-eight hours. All being well, I foresee that once the economy goes entirely to pot we'll be able to subsist by exporting television programmes called 'Horror on the Streets', a venture that will recoup all the money that libertarian fools would suggest is being wasted on CCTV.

Anyway, good luck to us all ... a society that knows how to value nothing but money, and yet stands to have increasingly less of it.

A new blog

2010-03-10T18:11:00.004Z

I've written a blog for somebody else's website, all about the social value of anger. Feel free to go and give it a read at http://thenextchallenge.org/2010/03/angry-young-man/

Over and above that... life in London remains generally a harder undertaking than cycling around the world, though I would like to think that it is maybe getting easier... I now deliver flowers in a tricycle rather than letters and documents for offices... it would seem that pedalling a two-metre contraption full of hundreds of pounds worth of floral arrangements is one way of getting people to smile at strangers, even in a big city, which is good to know.

I continue to wait for Guinness to respond to me with verification of my record ... they are generally entirely within their rights to take as long as they like if the record attemptee does not pay £300 to have their claim fast-tracked.

I continue to scribble away at my embryonic book.

By Unpopular Demand.... An Apology

2009-12-15T17:51:00.009Z

I would like to begin by apologising for my previous blog, an outburst owing to the mistaken belief that Mark Beaumont was an ambassador for a major multinational bank, when in actual fact he is not actually an ambassador for a major multinational bank at all, but only, in reality, an ambassador for a major multinational bank. This confusion of mine, all centred around a misunderstanding of the word 'ambassador', made a few people quite upset, and for this I can only apologise, it being wholly unforgivable of me to ever have dreamt of saying anything that might have upset anybody.

Put simply, I was wrong. I believed that it would be some sort of symbol to "take on the big companies" (as one critic suggested I do) by making an attempt at the record of a man who had been sponsored by the big companies, displayed the logos of big companies throughout his ride, and rounded it off nicely by announcing that he was proud to be an ambassador of the biggest of his big companies. Again, I can only apologise for my old-fashioned misunderstanding that when someone takes money to serve as the ambassador of a certain entity or institution, they become - in some respects - embroiled in the undertakings of that body, and - to some extent - answerable to some of the criticisms that might be raised against that body.

But that's old ground already. I'm not denying that my last blog was unsophisticated and pretty artless, it was also not in the least bit cordial, but it was honest, and I felt that it was important to blurt it out when I did, when I was still fresh from the sort of experience that allows you to reflect on the world for what it is, and before returning to a modern society that is already more-than swamped with moderate thought, trivialities and the making of excuses. I'm not concerned if a little ire sets me apart from a gaggle of adventurers, I don't see myself as an adventurer anyway, just someone who enjoys travel and loves riding a bicycle. I'm not concerned if a lack of bonhomie is not in the mould of a Ranulph Fiennes, I've only in the last five minutes clarified that he was not the lead actor in The English Patient. I don't mind if someone thinks I give cyclists a bad name... the bicycle is an excellent mode of transport for reasons of environment, society, economy and health - the more its usage increases, the less realistic it is to think of cyclists as an identical group of matching people and ideas. One of the best things about the increase of cycling in London is the diversity of people now getting-about on bikes - I'm not a BMX-riding vegan or a tweed-wearing Tory Boy ... nor am I obliged to empathise with, or even to like, either one of these hypothetical individuals. They both ride bikes, I think that a good thing, and that's enough.

I get the feeling that a good many people didn't read my previous blog in its entirety, or that they didn't read it carefully. On both counts, this is my fault, as decent writing shouldn't turn people off in such a way. That said, we live in an age where 122 minutes in a cinema can transport people into heroic battles for the universe and the free world, all set to a nicely emotive score that floods the endocrine system with adrenaline and the head with thoughts of "that's what I'd do"... I can't compete with that kind of entertainment, and it's unfair to expect people to take time with 1000 words of social-political nonsense when such alternatives are just a few buttons away.

Finally, I want to stress that my feelings for Beaumont are in no-way based on chest-beating machismo; I genuinely respect his time of a 193-day circumnavigation. In terms of physical undertakings, it was a great ride... as for my own accomplishment, I'm still torn about whether the experience would have been better at 80miles- a-day, with a few tours of some Californian vineyards thrown in for recreation ... I'm not so competitive a person to believe that anyone's achievements are made lesser or greater on the basis of speed.

But what else... Just as I was confused about the word 'ambassador', so too am I now uncertain about the word 'cynical'. It would appear that mentioning the failings of our political system is nowadays regarded as cynicism, where it might once have been called realism or honesty. On the other hand, to speculate that someone holds his beliefs, not through conviction, but through resentment of another's monetary success, or to garner publicity, is actually not a cynical belief, rather, it is merely good hack-work and psychology. Has it really been so long since people encountered a person not overly motivated by money? Similarly, in the old vocabulary, to make a profit from adventure and human emotion might be regarded as a cynical piece of business... but that's the old vocabulary.

I've noticed also that there seems to be a good deal of disappointment that I did not grow up or learn anything whilst riding around the world... It's a shame that people think this, for I believe I learned many things... firstly, in a row of public toilets, you should always walk to the furthest cubicle, for there it is always the cleanest... over and above that, though far less important, I learned too that I believe in the strength of my convictions. In the deserts I felt at peace, I felt deeply touched by hospitalities I received all over the world, and in my own society I feel angry because there is all-too-much that betrays the beauty of humanity as I experienced it all over the world. I'm sorry if that disappoints anybody in their prefabricated, drip-fed, Lonely-Planet notions of what travelling ought constitute. It strikes me that Mark Beaumont is not held to account for failing to learn that some experiences should be respected as sacred, or at the very least not sold to each and every willing bidder. I suppose he came back with a nice grin though... Our society will criticise no action that minds its Ps and Qs and has a nice grin... Nice grins are the backbone of twenty-first century decency.

As for growing-up... It saddens and amuses me that as children we're encouraged to learn to share, to be nice to one another, to know that happiness is more important than money... all of these lovely moral trinkets get thrown around, and then the mark of becoming an adult is just how many you can throw off, and how quickly, in order to get on the property ladder... You're respected for making a packet, by just about any means, and you're painted as some quixotic fool if you actually think all that morality-schooling was supposed to mean anything. It's compounded by the idea that modern society either has to be the farce that it currently is, or something far worse. Somehow it's come to pass that a political creed essentially cowardly, selfish and paranoid represents right-thinking austerity... the whole fiasco is guarded, moreover, by an impressive and resilient vocabulary, so that no matter how long a government wants to lock people up without trial, and no matter how much money is given in subsidy to inept business models managed by the schoolfriends of politicians ... the system as a whole retains its title of a 'liberal-capitalist democracy'. All of which are very impressive and noble words, even if modern Britain has about as much in common with them as the most contrived of socialisms.

Charity... it's alarming how much difficulty people have in grasping the title of my ride, so here's a clear explanation. What I propose is this. Rather than a multitude of tiny organisations, each with their own administrative structures, funding requirements and the need for a sentimental handle on their targeted populations, we could have a single, larger and unified organisation, staffed by the most upstanding and able of the citizenry, and responsible for leading society in a responsible and mutually advantageous direction. For simplicity's sake, we could call this institution, I don't know, a Guveurnment ... But of course this Guveurnment will need funding, so we could take a little bit of money from across the entire population, with more perhaps taken from those that are getting a lip-smacking deal out of the whole society thing, and more taken from the most useless purchases that people are making... We could call this funding Tacks, and the able people in the Guveurnment, with all their good intentions, would ensure that the Tacks were being well-invested and not simply squandered. Trippy, isn't it?

So anyway... that's more than enough of all that... Sorry... I'm a politics student at heart... just like Mark Beaumont.

Congratulations to all those who made it to the end... all those who have just wasted still more of their time on my words, and are planning to waste even more in telling me that I'm a piece of talking genitalia, may I instead recommend that you visit www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc where Blue Peter have many excellent ideas on how you can make old toilet rolls into spaceships.

Yes I do have the record... And now for a spelling lesson.

2009-12-08T12:22:00.005Z

Well... I'm home.... After getting that record stuff over and done with, a couple of houses in the Normandy countryside were then the venue for an attempt at the most beautiful people ever assembled under a single roof, and the rest of the weekend passed in a mist of not sleeping enough and drinking too much. All of which was exactly as it should have been. I'm now back in London, this morning had the joy of riding a fixed gear track bike once again, without any bags in sight, and I suppose that things will slowly start to become normal again. I suppose.

I don't really know what to talk about, what to say... It was amazing, it was beautiful, it was a joy. For the final month I must have been averaging close to 150 miles a day, it wasn't as leisurely as I would have liked it to have been, it still wasn't going to 'hell and back', as one guy said Mark Beaumont had done... If Mark Beaumont did go to hell and back, then he was doing it all wrong.

There are a few practical concerns that I wish to stress. Between broken wheels, brakes being broken by Iberia airlines, and a crank arm snapping, I lost a total of about 6 whole days not going anywhere... I don't want to use that as an "I could have done it quicker' platform, but I do want to stress that I was riding only a Tout Terrain frame, which performed magnificently throughout. The wheels, the cranks, the brakes, none of those components were supplied by Tout Terrain, are not representative of the quality of the components that the guys in Freiburg use, and I would be devastated if people were to interpret my mechanical mishaps as the fault of a really excellent business that sells really excellent bikes. The problems were a combination of misfortune and my perhaps all-too cavalier attitude to certain things, but still, it made things interesting.

As for myself and my plans... I'm going to defer a return to the world of bicycle couriering for as long as I can afford to, which is perhaps about another ten days... Once I am back on the streets, I work for Excel couriers, and if you want your packages delivered by a world record holder, just ask for Kilo22. I am prepared to relay anecdotes from the road, though it will be charged as waiting time, and at a rate of £6 an hour... which is really very cheap, I can't imagine you'd get Marketing Beaumont talking to you at such a price. Over and above that, I'll be giving a talk at Stanfords, Covent Garden, sometime in the New Year, based around the themes of Travel, Adventure and Society ... If I fail to come up with a more imaginative title than 'Travel, Adventure and Society', then I ask you not to hold it against me, I'm sure I tried. There is an exhibition (though I don't particularly like that word) of writing and photos to be held, but I have the pleasant difficulty of not being sure of which offered venue I'm going to hold it in, so more news as and when. My main goal, and a challenge that holds far more meaning to me than any world record, is to write a book that at least I am satisfied with the merit of ... this process is already well underway, with the magnificent working title of 'Celine was Betrayed'. Don't expect some drab, motivational, sports monologue telling you that on day 71 I had 38 punctures, but cunningly managed to fix them all with the skin of a dead squirrel I found beside the road...a valuable lesson, no less applicable to the corporate sector, of how one can overcome difficulties and still cycle 93 miles on the day in question. On the contrary, you can expect some drab, depressing story, for that's what I want to write, a story, rather than just an account. We'll see how it goes. I'm not sure of what to do with things like my blog, whether or not to write the occassional thing, but all significant developments and events will be broadcast through Twitter, the Facebook group, and the website, in some form or another.

So now for what I want to say. A part of it is directly from me, a part of it is a response to some things that have been posted as comments on my blog over the past six months.

What I want to say concerns Mark Beaumont, and completing that all-but meaningless record was motivated, more than anything, by earning my license, having done exactly as he did, to say exactly what I thought of him. I have no respect for him. I regard him as a lifeform some way inferior to the dead skin that accumulates in the seat of my crotch after three weeks of cycling a desert without washing. We're the same age, we're both politics graduates, and so I feel sufficiently close to a part of his demographic that I feel no desire to make excuses or allowances for him that I would never make for myself.

His style of media reminds me of Where's Wally with a bicycle twist thrown in, his self-aggrandising titles of THE MAN WHO cycled the world, who cycled the Americas, display no honesty or humility to the fact that the likes of 74-year-old Ian Hibell, killed tragically by a Greek hit-and-run driver last year, had already cycled the world a handful of times when THE MAN, Mark Beaumont, was still suckling his mother and shitting in his pants.

But all that bombast is forgivable, it's pretty human stuff really... what I can't get over is the wholesale corporate sellout, and these few days I'm moved more than ever by the notion that it could ever be possible to complete an experience as beautiful as mine was, and as beautiful as I expect Beaumont's was, and that a person could be moved so little by that experience that they would commodify it as an asset to sell to a bank. To a fucking bank. I suppose Beaumont, 'the adventurer' ... had actually sold his adventure to a bank, an investment fund, and a hotel group, before he even left, so it wasn't really anything new to him... He throws around the word 'adventure' an awful lot, but if adventure has a spirit and a meaning over and above going to obscure places on a bicycle, Beaumont has none of it. I met a man in New Mexico, at the foot of a pass, Mike, from Montana. His wife cleared out and left him years back, and he just decided to hit the road, riding to where it's warmer for the winter, riding to where he can find some labouring work to pay for him to keep going. He loves his life, he loves riding. That's adventure... to have no fear of all the uncertainty, Mark Beaumont isn't an adventurer, he's a travelling pragmatist... Someone told me that, for his round-the-world adventure, he had a £25000 budget with which to help adventure his way through all the uncertainty life could throw at him. What a hero.

I had sponsors too, and I have a confession to make... Madison, who supply bike stores up and down the country, were bought a few years ago by a PLC whose name I forget... Anyway, that PLC also own the company that manufactures those little, Christmas tree-shaped air freshners that hang from car mirrors and smell so unpleasantly perfumed. I know, I know, I'm a shameless sellout too, but they offered me £300 of clothing for extreme weather conditions, and in return I didn't have to endorse them as saviours of humanity or principled pillars of the world economy... I know... I know... I'm a hypocrite.

But what else... Someone said, with reference to this point, that they saw no wrong in Beaumont accepting money from Orange or from Lloyds TSB in order to fund his next trip. I do. Travelling is, in reality, a pretty selfish thing, a pretty decadent thing too... you go out there, on your own, and see beautiful things, and you remove yourself from the society you actually came from in the first place. And, you know, if I were to weigh the challenge and the adventure of staying in my own society, and trying to make a positive difference to that sad place, against the challenge and the adventure of pedalling my beloved bicycle in beautiful places, with a GPS system on my bicycle in case of emergencies, and a credit card in my wallet for the greatest hardships... well, I know which I perceive to be the greater adventure, and certainly the greater challenge. If someone is prepared to make travelling their life, and is prepared to endorse the most unscrupulous of businesses in order to fund that life, is prepared to lend them the beauty of his adventure to disguise the ugliness of their business... personally, I couldn't think of anything more selfish than that, and I may have called myself 'not for charity' rather than the innocuous 'pedalling around', but I'm motivated to make a positive difference in society, not just to enjoy myself on my bicycle at all costs. I have no time for this self-congratulatory culture of 'the adventurer', and when those adventurers are prepared to shack-up with Lloyds TSB, to me they represent nothing but the white, middle-class, boy, in all of the worst aspects of that stereotype. No amount of pedalling the world can change that fact, and indeed, it actually makes it worse.

But of course, I'm forgetting, Beaumont wasn't in it for himself. He was doing it for charity, and he apparently raised in the region of a whole £20,000. Marvellous. In the modern economy, is it only me who is fully aware of how useless £20,000 actually is? He raised £20,000 for good causes, and I don't deny that they're good causes, but then he said that he was proud, PROUD, to be a corporate ambassador for Lloyds TSB, who represent a multi-trillion pound economic normalcy that destroys the planet and the societies Beaumont's charities aim to protect.

The other month I saw that he was in Nicaragua, lamenting on behalf of a farmer who would get only a handful of bucks for his lettuce harvest. And yet he is a PROUD ambassador of a bank that represents Davos, that represents the Washington Consensus, that represents an agricultural mega-company like Monsanto, who engineer sterile seeds so that Beaumont's Nicaraguan lettuce farmer has to buy a new round of seeds from Monsanto, rather than the traditional method of collecting seeds from the best plants of his crop. Monsanto, hard workers that they are, turn over about $5billion of profit a year.

There's too much reticence in our society when it comes to saying 'I'm sorry, but what you are doing is shit, and that, sir, makes you a cunt' ... And I may have just used the word cunt (again), but Mark Beaumont is a proud ambassador of Lloyds TSB, and they've got £700,000,000 invested in the UK arms industry alone, with links to the manufacture of cluster munitions, and if you want to Google an image search for cluster bombs, and what they do to people, or read-up on it at the Handicap International website. I know which I think is worse. Even with that, I'm not giving straightforward condemnation of the arms trade, it employs a lot of people, gives them their livelihoods, but it shouldn't be endorsed using the beauty of cycling around the world. There's nothing in common.

I know many talented and brilliant individuals, they work with refugees, with art, with music, with organic farming, architecture with recycled materials, who work in policy concerning climate change, in designing sustainable transport models, who develop green spaces in urban areas, who work with photovoltaic and solar technologies. It's unfair, and it's greatly handicapping of true social progress, that all of those selfless people can have their work impeded by socio-economic orthodoxy, as endorsed by Mark Beaumont, and for that endorsee not to be called a wanker for his behaviour. Am I being harsh? I certainly thought more about what it truly meant to endorse Lloyds TSB than Mark Beaumont did, I suppose he had cashing a cheque to consider, but that's part of the problem, society does not hold people to account because society dictates that it's acceptable to trade just about anything for monetary gain.

I could say so much more... But I shan't... There are three further comments I wanted to address.

One man, in the very early days, had the decency to descend from his throne on Mount Parnassus to pronounce that 'I write with promise, but with a Fight-Club-esque, angry, young man ethos.' Now, I'm not sure what I think of a writer I've never heard of, who uses 'Fight Club' as an adjective, and qualifies his compliments so heavily, but still, psychology being what it is, I took immediate umbrage at someone saying this of me, and it took about two months to fully comprehend that that is exactly what I am, an angry young man, and without any shame or regret at this fact. I don't like the creed of modern liberalism, whereby political radicalism is substituted for listening to the music of wailing Icelanders, and mixing your own muesli, using pumpkin seeds, for the selenium. Nobody turned on the Roundheads and criticised them for being 'angry, young men' ... nor the Chartists, nor those who rioted in Hyde Park to secure the Second Reform Act... We live in an age of decreasing social mobility, of increasing social inequality, increasing monopolisation of power and wealth, a world where anti-depressants are now being prescribed to children whilst a pharmaceutical giant like Pfizer turns over more than $10billion annually. The IT contract for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs was renewed with CapGemini and Fujitsu, even though their prior performance overran and went over-budget, but perhaps because CapGemini and Fujitsu lavished hospitality upon the HMRC decision maker, with dinners at the Eiffel Tower and Berkley Square amongst the itinerary. Now, we have an anti-corruption act that prohibits 'excessive hospitality', but obviously that doesn't mean an awful lot in reality. And then there's my friend, Steve, who was forced by building regulations to use steel joists for his attic conversion, when timber would have comfortably sufficed... but rules are rules, and so four of us lifted three girders into the attic on a Saturday afternoon, because rules are rules. Unless of course you're Tesco, and you get planning permission for a store of 9,000 square metres, but build one 20% bigger, at 11,000 square metres, because that's the size you wanted. Those who don't think that there are good reasons for anger in modern society should go for a long and adventurous walk in the desert.

And what more, I promise I'm winding things up, and I don't mind if you stop reading. One chap said that my ideas, implemented, would just sentence everyone to an equal misery. Aside from the fact that I don't know exactly what 'my ideas' are, still less how the chap in question discovered them all, I reject the notion that our society is so full of joy, lacking in misery, as things stand. Last I checked, we had overpopulated prisons and a government whose only response to this was building more prisons to lock-up more people, we had big money being made from looking after our degenerative elderly, we had 270,000 registered addicts of class-A drugs (which actually means that there are a lot more than 270,000 addicts of class-A drugs), we had obesity and adverts reminding people to exercise, and young people, bless-em, had come to feel so excluded by society and it's norms, goals and values that they were taking to stabbing one another at the weekends. Just as I was leaving, the authorities of London had responded to this grave problem using a good old-fashioned poster, with a bunch of kids, with different skin pigments and eye-dimensions, dressed in dungarees and striped jumpers, holding up the letters to spell-out 'It's our city too'... perhaps that brilliant piece of policymaking had worked by the time the comments were made.

The final remark I want to address was 'it's a shame that such an epic adventure should be motivated by 'this is not for charity', or in other words 'this is not for love'. If not for love, then is anger, cynicism and hate the best way to view life?'

My ride was purely for love; for love of cycling, for love of the beautiful experiences I've had whilst travelling on my bicycle. It genuinely enraged me, from the start, to see Mark Beaumont doing what he did with his undertaking... he could just as easily have ridden under 'this is not for charity'... he's not a James Bowthorpe, who has a cause that he cares deeply for and is giving his life too, I have only respect for that. Some people don't see cycling in the same way that I do, and thus don't understand my message at all... it can't be helped. For the record, I did actually put up links to four non-profit organisations on my website; if you were too miserly to give to them, it's not my fault. If your sense of compassion is so lethargic that you need photos of starving children to think that something is wrong in the world, that's not my fault either.

Had I undertaken the ride under the banner of one charity in particular, it would have been one working with drug abuse. I know so many people who have been touched by drugs, and so many of them are involved with them precisely because they're inquisitive and creative people growing up in a mainstream culture that becomes increasingly homogenised and restrictive. On my bike I thought often of a guy called Wayne, from Earl Shilton, my sister's best friend... such a gentle guy, so kind, such life in him... he died from a heroin overdose when he was about the age that I am now... I cried my little fucking eyes out, thinking of Wayne as I rode out of the Chinese mountains... I don't like slapping my heart onto my sleeve, for dawes to peck at, but it'd be nice for people to understand. I don't want someone to give £5 to a charity for substance abuse and then to have DONE THEIR BIT and go and vote for the damn Tory party anyway... and I don't see what good a charity can do when society is run according to a formula that will only churn out sadness after sadness anyway. I'm cynical alright... my cynicism is absolutely caustic, but you have to care a lot to work-up a cynicism this potent... As for hate... I love the world in so many ways, but there are people in this world who obviously don't, and they use words like 'ambition' to cloak what is actually such despicable behaviour. They evoke hatred in me, it's not my fault.

Believe it or not, I could still say so much more

To the Happy Few.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...

2009-10-20T05:51:00.001+01:00

It was America. It was America... I didn't have the right voice for it, the right voice had smoked thirty a day through his two divorces, drank too much cheap bourbon, long ago shouted himself hoarse. I didn't have the right voice for it, the right voice would have thought me a faggot, or maybe just a faggit, with my bicycle, and a set of lycra warmers keeping my knees warm. Be that as it may.

It wasn't subtle.. It was there on the toilet door, days after arriving, the fly swat and the rhetorical question;

What do we do with flys? We squash 'em and kill 'em... We don't catch 'em and let 'em go. And that was in the liberal heartland of Washington, blue country... you come to learn that all liberals are Democrats, but not all Democrats are liberals. It wasn't subtle.. it was everywhere, big sleeves with hearts blazed all up and down them... Placards at the roadside 'a fair wage is a strong economy', 'abortion is murder' .. the churches had it going-on too, 'the bible is not yours to take and choose what to defy'.. Then there were the billboards 'Big lifestyle? skiing, hiking, mountain biking, friends, parties, kids, computers? You need a Big House' ... Money was everywhere, the country was painted green... Car dealerships took the trucks the owners could no longer afford repayments on, they weren't afraid to say as much 'we welcome bankruptcies'... Pawnbrokers worked hard into the night, under the sign 'anything of value'... You could get your bail bonds in a fast and friendly service, available 24hours.

It was America... it was the free world, the free market... that thing, invioable and true, pure as life itself... It sought out the greatest efficiencies and answers. You saw it up and down the highways... Adopt-A-Highway... Businesses paid out cash to have their brand on a signpost, and they got advertising, and the highways got cleaned.. it was perfect, perfect equilibrium. It worked in other ways too... A woman had caught cancer, and the free market allowed her to go with her didgeridoo to the farmers market, to play that didgeridoo, receive donations. Regrettably, she was pretty shit on that didgeridoo, but the free market had also provided didgeridoo lessons, so that she might improve, receive more donations, and eventually save up enough money to give to a giant insurance company in return for treatment, and the CEO of that company would take his fair share of the profits and pay a Mexican two bucks an hour to cut back the roses with his teeth and scrub the pool with his fingernails... those Mexicans, they were ruining America.

And so everyone got rich, trickle-down economics... soon enough they'd have to change the name to drip-down, so that people didn't start getting their hopes up... The problem was that nobody had any patience anymore.. It had taken the best part of three centuries for 3% of America, led by a handful of families, to accumulate half of the national wealth... three centuries, and now people wanted it to happen overnight.. it just wasn't realistic, it wasn't America, the American Dream, where you were long-suffering but eventually squeezed through into the money-lined fields of Elysium, where you hit the big-time and got to join that 3% who owned half of the national wealth. That'd be sweet, that'd be swell, and everyone wanted in on it, that 3%... but the problem was that, mathematically, only so many people could fit inside 3% before it became 4%, and even with 4% there would be a lot of people still wanting to reach the top and strike gold.... But that just wasn't it, that wasn't America, that was the beginning of a slippery slope, where one day you might even find 50% of the nation owning 50% of the wealth, and that was madness, a trade of the American Dream for the Socialist Nightmare. I wanted no part in it, and neither did the Americans. They wanted small government, and the social-welfare could be taken care of by Christina Aguilera, who was promising blowjobs, dressed in scarlet lipstick, to all those who gave a dollar to help turn hunger into hope.

But all that was skewed... America wasn't only about money, the Free Market.. America had values too, a notion of values that sat above the importance of any monetary or material asset. They had kinship, brotherhood, friendship, the helping of those friends, sticking together, thick-or-thin, to achieve the best possible results. And it worked too, the FINANCIAL CRISIS (!!!) showed as much.... Hank Paulson, former US Secretary of the Treasury was former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Timothy Geithner, new US Secretary of the Treasury had appointed former Goldman Sachs lobbyists as his Chief of Staff, as his advisers, a whole coterie of the fellows.. And it worked, sticking together like that, even when times got tough... Goldman Sachs had performed better than all their rivals in the face of economic downturn, their large rival, Lehman Brothers, had bitten the dust, a state-negotiated bailout of AIG had included funds that went directly to the repayment of a debt to Goldman Sachs... It was friendship, and you can't subvert something so special as friendship to the free-market, and it didn't pay to do so.

That was the city, or part of it at least, and then you hit the country, and you've seen everything once you've seen a roadsign that has one metal arrow upon it, pointing towards the primary school, and a second one, just beneath it, heading in the same direction, but towards the shooting range. Then there's the unfortunate coincidence, at the turn-off of 101, somewhere in northern California, where you get one sign for the animal shelter, and another, down the same trail, for the juvenile correction facility. It must have been convenient that way.

It was America, and it was the land of prohibition, of Prohibition... they still had a thing for the old prohibition stuff, it was all down the roadside. Private Property: No Tresspassing: Hunting and fishing prohibited... Parking Prohibited... Camping Prohibited... Photography Prohibited... Entry Prohibited, prohibited, prohibitedprohibited... If only some poor Iraqi had thought to put up a little sign saying 'bombing prohibited' ... or... 'It is prohibited to drop 20megatons of explosion upon civilians'... The Americans... they loved history, all down the coast, every bridge, a little sign 'historic bridge #47 - 1935' ... historic bridge #47 was made of concrete, with some little effort at a balustrade, but in general about as utilitarian as Jeremy Bentham reusing his tea bag... Still, it was historic, and that was what counted, for The Americans loved the history, the history of America, the seventy year old bridge made of concrete... over in Mesopotamia they'd come across history too, five millenia old, cuneiform tablets, the earliest forms of written communication. Bang. Looters. Gone. But they loved their history, the historic bridges of the coast.

I rode down that coast, through Washington, through Oregon, through Oregon, through Oregon. I want to ride through Oregon every day for the rest of my life, down that coast. You climb up into the redwood forest. Climb up. Climb up. The road sweeps round, hugs the cliffs, hugs the side of the hills, runs under the cover of the forest, and then you reach the top, and you pick up speed, lots of it, and you pick up more, and then you're sweeping back down the hillside, and ahead the dark of the forest is giving way to the light of the sun, and you sweep out of the forest, and the sun hits everything at once, and the trees are emeralds and the Pacific is sapphire, and it all glows white in the sun, and the Pacific is sapphire, and my god, the Pacific, it's such a fucking good name for an ocean, rocking and fluttering and sparkling away down there, like pages of books and stories and tales and gossamer yarns, and the sand is white, but not as white as the dusty trunks of driftwood, tossed upon the beach like dinosaur remains and whale skeletons. I would ride down those hillsides, and my head would fall to one side, and my nose and the corner of my mouth would lift in inquiry, my eyes would narrow a little. Really? Huh? I think there must be some sort of mistake. I died about five times a day, for a whole week, down the coast of Oregon.

And you hit California... you hit Garberville. Garberville happens all over the world, but it doesn't work the same in any other place. You get them everywhere, in towns and cities around the developed world.. They don't wash their hair, they mess their head with psychedelics, they wear sandals and thrift store clothes, talk in MAN, SAFE, PEACE, DOOOD... but they're standing on a pavement, outside a supermarket, waiting for the bus, they're waiting on the student loan company to refloat their bank's account, or waiting to get round to call their parents in search of the same service. Or they're past all that, and they're waiting on job-seekers allowances to do the same thing instead. I'm not judging, there's good people amongst that brood, but they're living a fiction, and it's obvious. Then there's Garberville... and you come out of the redwoods, and onto the street through town, one street, 250metres, and in the warm evening a couple of guys outside a bar are playing guitar and singing You are my Sunshine, and there's a kid playing sax, and there's an old movie theatre, and a noticeboard with the photo of some local felon with a tattoo on his chest, it reads, 'enjoying it was a good enough reason'.

I got a sandwich at the deli... there's a girl, driving down from Bellingham, needs to raise $500 to buy the car she's taken, or drive it back to Bellingham. There's a guy from Vancouver, was out at Black Rock, Burning Man festival, one week in the desert, dust storms, people walking up to one another in aviator sunglasses and masks over their nose and mouth, Mad Max, acid everywhere. Needs to raise the money to get back to Vancouver. There's a guy from Portland, left town when some propane explosion blew up a house and the marijuana harvest... Needs to raise the money for starting up down in Colorado, where the state just passed a bill on medical usage of marijuana. There's going to be good money to be had. And they're all in Garberville, Humboldt County, where people call one another cats, where it's an epicentre of US weed, local law-enforcement is in on it, and where the harvest needs to have the leaves trimmed off the bud. And so we're sitting around, talking, eating our sandwiches, and some kid comes by, and he's got a pile of thick hair tangling upwards, and he's got cocoa skin and a pair of jeans that are jumping off of his pubis, and he's got a girl in one hand, and in the other he's got a lead that leads up to his shoulder and winds around the neck of a feline that sits up there.. and he carried on his shoulder a siamese cat, and I know where he got that idea.

He asked what we were doing that evening. One of the guys answered

'Just chillin''
'Good... because when you got nothin else to do, there's nothin better than chillin' ... and sometimes, even when you have got other things to be doin'... there's still nothin' better than chillin''

And that was Garberville, and if it was fiction then it was certainly a convincing one.

Some plugs, some pictures, and a date of return.

2009-10-15T06:32:00.004+01:00

Good evening people... a kindly Californian cyclist happened across me on the road this evening, invited me home for dinner with the family, and a couple of glasses of really brilliant local red wine later, I'm sleeping in the cottage in the garden, which even has a bottle of Guiness in the fridge.

This is not actually a blog entry in the sense that I'm going to write much of what has been going on, I'm aiming to do that later in the week, and am vaguely planning to write something more akin to the writing that I do as I ride, rather than the functional tone required of this particular post.

So I might as well start by mentioning the photos... we have a diner in the forest, flags of the confederacy and the northwest all about the place, it's the sort of haunt in which I've been taking my meals, and that particular one was run by an Indian fellow who had been adopted by hillbilly folk from Tennesse.. said that he was raised on biscuits and gravy and believes that many of the Indians are snobs who think that the world owes them something... he was also a fan of our monarchy... there's a photo of me up above the redwood forest of northern california... a dope capital of the US.. I've never been anywhere so chilled... Two photos of the Oregon coast... the most beautiful place in the world... don't go there... it'll ruin the rest of your life by making everything else seem bland, stale and ugly. We also have me in conversations with a giant redwood... he said he was 1300 years old and over 100 metres tall, with a life expectancy of another millenium... I said that I was 24 years old and trying to cycle 18000 miles as fast as possible... He said he couldn't understand why, but wished me well regardless.

And so the practicalities... I've had this in mind for some time, but someone asked me what I thought of my Tout Terrain bike, and so this has prompted me to mentioning some of the stuff that I'm riding with (some of which was sponsored, some of which wasn't).

Starting with the ToutTerrain frame... simply... it's sensational. If you ever want to ride a Rohloff hub then the frame is already designed with components that will accommodate the hub without need of a bundle of additional components. The steel frame is bombproof, and weight isn't an issue... once you load up a touring bike with 25kg of luggage then it's never going to be light, so you might as well get the added strength... The inbuilt rear-rack is a masterpiece... Americans call it 'bitchin'', and will think you very cool.. To be honest, they're right.. I've never known anyone to remove their pannier rack from their bike, so building it in makes perfect sense, improves the comfort of riding with the load, and strengthens the frame too. The masterpiece, in my mind, is a tiny collar that stops the handlebars swinging 360degrees and tearing at all of your cables if the bike falls over... As well as being really practical, this just sums up the way in which the bike was designed by people who know about riding and the many eventualities that can arise on the road... If all that still leaves you in doubt, there is also the fact that the bike is produced by a small firm, with manufacturing in Europe, and close contact with their pretty select band of dealers... In the UK, none other than Bikefix.

So what else then... my GPS tracker, from Donald at Adventure Trading Post, the UK distributor. It's called Spot, and, to be honest, it's brilliant... there's no pointless, high-definition screen to drain batteries (I've only had to change them once), the thing is indestructible and waterproof, it continues to work even when the Chinese sever your mobile phone, and for a modicum of communication it's absolutely everything you need, and no tedium over and above that.

Tyres.... Schwalbe... Jesus... I've had about 10 punctures... however... five of them, in the space of one morning, were due to a Chinese puncture repair kit that must have been using PVA glue, a further two were caused, I believe, by a burr of metal on my rim that snagged the tube as I was putting it in. This means that in 12000 miles, loaded with weight, one set of Schwalbe Marathon Pluses were only breached on three occassions by punctures, and one of those was a nail that would have punctured anything. 12000 miles! 3 punctures! That's a puncture every 4thousand miles! They're brilliant, and will save much roadside anguish. Together with the Schwalbes are my Mavic rims... Mavic make wheels for 500quid, or for around 70, and they're always brilliant.. Baker Street in Brighton built mine for me, as they have done all my wheels, be they for couriering or touring... I once had an articulated truck roll backwards onto my front wheel, and it punctured immediately, but the rim didn't buckle... With wheels you have the option of either spending 25quid a time for shit quality, or forking out more money for a wheel that will still be good after five crap ones have started flapping about like kippers out of water.

Ok... think that's that.... My return... is set... yes... I am coming home...My flight from Boston to Lisbon has been rescheduled for November 22nd, which means that I should stop drinking this bottle of Guiness, stop talking to attractive young women in bars, stop talking to cycling hobos at the roadside, and stop doing just about everything that makes travelling enjoyable... I suppose it's not all that bad... I'm looking forward to mixing it up with the deserts again, and there will, naturally, be fewer distractions that way, and the requisite of a different headspace that I expect to enjoy just as much, albeit differently. Reaching Boston on the 22nd should knock a further 8days off my ride time, putting me in Rouen, outside the Cathedral, at around noon on Friday December 4th....a total of around 165days for my troubles. Record breaking aside, I'm as bankrupt as the UK economy right now, and there's nowt like financial necessity to hurry me back to Europe and the wonders of 50quid a day as a London courier.

As my motley crew of followers is comprised largely of retirees, self-employed, unemployed and good-for-nothing students, I expect a good turnout, and if we could have a choir singing La Marseillaise then I would be most cheered and grateful to you all. Let it be noted that Rouen is a very beautiful city, an ideal venue for annual acquisitons of low-cost wines, and also home to a number of grand churches that look a little like Cathedrals... THE cathedral is opposite the (I believe, only) tourist information office, but just check with google maps beforehand perhaps.

Should you be interested in coming along... A few folk are riding there... Brighton to Newhaven is 10miles, it's 20quid for the crossing, and the ride from Dieppe to Rouen is about 25miles and very flat and easy... my brother undertook the task with a fractured forearm and a shit bike, and will testify to its ease. Alternatively, that same ferry crossing of course accommodates cars, there is the option of a Eurostar to Paris and a train to Rouen... Eurostar tickets can be purchased in advance for around 50quid return, and if you should fancy a combination of transport modes, they takes bicycles, with a very efficient service, for a price of 20quid. I am, as yet, unsure about a celebratory shindig in honour of my return, there's only so much centre-of-attention stuff that I can handle in one six month period... and I'm not very used to crowds these days, that said, if people think that it's a good idea, and it probably is, then leave comments in the blog or on facebook noting as much.

So yeah... I now feel a touch drowsy from this here alcohol and that there wine... but, to recapitulate, Friday 4th December, Rouen Cathedral, around noon ... There's a good bakery and cafe just across the way....

Perdition catch my soul but I will be there, and if I am there not, then chaos has come again.

The Western World

2009-10-01T03:13:00.005+01:00

Well... I'm back in the land of English... feeling quite strange about it all to be honest, not quite as euphoric as I'd expected. The people of New Zealand are an amazing lot, I'd like to think that it's not just down to the fact that there's only 4million of them in a pretty large area, and that people here are simply a bit more in touch with, and trusting of, human decency, certainly moreso than can be said of a place like London... not that that would be hard, London's about as attuned to human decency as a meeting of the interahamwe ... but anyway.

It's quite probable that my uncertainty about being back in the West was clouded somewhat by the weather. In general I went from humidity and monkeys to snow and winds from Antarctica, which was actually fine, as those winds and I were going the same way... that then seemed to change, however, to no snow (which is quite pretty, especially with red berries dotted amongst it) and plenty of rain, wind going the other direction, and blowing generally any way possible so long as it was in my face. I've ridden over some of the most cragged terrain of the whole route, and realised half-way over it that I'd been doing so with my rear brake-pad hitting the disc every rotation... I'm also losing my fingers to the delights of carpal tunnel syndrome, so it feels like someone else's hand is on the end of my wrist, a thing only very seldom useful and almost always discomforting. One way or another, it's been tough, but that's cool, it was never supposed to be wholly easy.

Possibly the biggest single change has been the food, and after the initial pleasures of finding a mediocre Indian restaurant on my first night, and a sensational fish and chips at Lockie's of Hampden (highway 1, south island, purple sign, right-hand side) ... it's generally just been really disappointing to realise that curries, stews and stir-frys, made with fresh vegetables, right in front of me, have been replaced by sausage roll a la plastique and steak and cheese pie a la plastique ... There's also a McDonald's, Subway or KFC at every turn, and, as testament to this healthy diet of us westerners, there are these humungous creatures walking around, and they look partly human, but they've got a great, bubbling bulge that leads them around, and a great, bubbling bulge that follows them around, and they shuffle from side to side in order to move forward, with their facial features obscured by slumping tubes of fat... I haven't seen anything of the like in 16,000km, and think that perhaps it might be some underevolved sea creature that has come upon the land.

This initial woe at the state of my balanced diet turned (with the help of the weather) into a bit of a general gloom about western society. Because in all of the poor countries I've been trapsing through, people seemed to have more time to mill around, people seemed to be happier (I'm sure that there's a complex causative relation between these two points, just can't quite put my finger on the econometrics), people are certainly healthier, more relaxed, it's still warm when it rains, and old people aren't left standing in shops waiting for someone to wipe away the dribble that's rolling down their chin. In the west we've traded all of this for... I'm not quite sure... road safety rules, when driving however you fancy must be quite fun anyway... and not dropping litter, which would often be quite convenient... It's a raw deal for certain.

The kazakhs had a good t-shirt being worn around Almaty, it said 'no money, no crisis' ... and indeed, roll on poverty is what I say, all we have to do is sit back and watch the food improve, and as the governments of the western world have entrusted economic resurrection to the same stellar crop of bankers that have obviously performed so well in recent times, I'm quietly confident that we'll see menus picking-up within five to ten years.

I was also thinking a fair amount about westerners and our peculiar mentality as I rode through the hills, in the wind and rain, feeling about as comfortable as a calf in a veal crate. In short, it was definitely closer to suffering than anything in the miles up to now... it made me think of a guy I saw in China, when the desert threw up some hills and mountains for variety. In China they have a sort of three-wheeled scooter, with a big crate on the back, so that the thing becomes a little like a cart. Some unfortunate chap had had his three-wheeled scooter-cart break down on him, and as I rode by the fellow, who would have been thinking about going to collect his pension had he been born a bit further west, was pulling it up a hill, with his hands on the handlebars, and a strap tied to the cart portion of the vehicle and strapped high around his chest. The poor bastard had a face that looked like it wished it was dead, and an excitable vein in each temple that looked like it might well make his wishes come true come the top of the hill. But anyway, I rode by him, preparing to ride my 100 daily miles through a desert, making my life infinitely more difficult than it would ever need to be, for the sake of pretty intangible things, while that old chap just got on with what was his daily life anyway. There's definitely nothing more weird than a westerner.

How Do I Feel?

2009-09-18T04:50:00.009+01:00

So... I'm in Singapore, namesake of a very fine Tom Waits song, home to ASEANs highest per-capita GDP, and four million people on an island about a quarter of the size of Leicestershire... How does a nation fit four million people on an island a quarter of the size of Leicestershire? It's easy, you just remove all of the character and personality, build flats and tower blocks, and imagine what George Orwell had in mind whilst writing 1984... Fill 1984 with Chinese, Malay, and Indian faces (and in that order of importance too), and you have Singapore.

But how do I feel about being in Singapore? Well... I feel that I just had a bowl of muesli, with thick, creamy yoghurt, a little honey, and fruit salad, and I feel that I followed that with a normal bowl

of cereal covered in lovely, cold milk, and that I accompanied both of those things with cups of tea, suffixed two poached eggs on toast to them, and crowned it all off with an espresso - brought to me by the very good people at illy - and a slice of toast with nutella and butter all over it. I did all of that after sleeping for 14hours on wonderful, fresh sheets, and having a couple of really good showers. So that is how I'm feeling, and it feels good.

I don't know how closely you lot follow my day-to-day progress, but, having found a guy in Singapore who could fix the gremlins rattling in my Rohloff hub gear, and having found that this guy was to leave for Thailand in a little over forty-eight hours, fate set me the challenge of riding what transpired to be over 400miles/660kilometres in a little under 48hours...And I'm grateful for that challenge, because it was, all in all, great fun... a wonderful piece of limit-testing, exercising of my focus, and a nice little adventure within an adventure... I'd probably have felt less positive about the experience had all not worked out, but as it did, I'm smiling.

I rode throughout two nights, took a trio of well-timed power naps at intervals dictated by a combination of necessity and the desire to avoid midday heat/humidity, ate ice cream at every petrol station, made myself drink coca-cola even though I hate the stuff, and over the last 200km I ate a bunch (literally, ten) of bananas given to me by a Muslim lady putting about the goodwill for Ramadan. For all that, the whole thing didn't tire me out too much, not in my muscles anyway. What was really interesting to behold was the collapse of my skin-condition into nasty, oily spots across my thighs and forearms, and a pernicious sweat-rash under my arms... again, this seems more interesting now that it's gone, but it's incredible the way that those fourteen hours of sleep were all it took to address the problem, and for my body to go about its repair. One of my favourite things about riding is the opportunity it gives to witness just what a machine a body is, it's pure mechanics, but of such an intricate level that it's amazing... bananas in particular are fantastic, within minutes of eating one you can actually feel the energy being combusted out of it and suffusing into the body.. Equally amazing is the way people can overlook this so entirely in normal life when all the resources we need are abundantly available.

The final part of my high spirits is that Paul Moir, the excellent soul with whom I spent yesterday afternoon working on my bike, the same excellent soul who then went to Thailand for a team adventure race (mountain biking, trail-running, kayaking... sounds cool, doesn't it?) told me that I would be welcome to stay at his house while he's away, which is what I'm now doing...I've not been given sole trust of Paul's house, there's a maid here too, and last night the maid made fried rice, and now she's just rustled up a fine bowl of noodles... Even without having someone cooking for me, it feels so much more comfortable than being in a hotel, I'm going to finish writing this and then finish changing the oil in my hub, replace the parts of my drive train that we couldn't replace yesterday, and then I'm going to have another shower and spend some time oggling Paul's pretty beautiful collection of bicycles. Travelling with a bicycle really is fantastic, in a million different ways, but also because it puts you immediately in touch with a whole community of people all over the world.

Anyway, the ride from Bangkok to Singapore was, pretty much, a breeze. I was confronted by such enormous difficulties as selecting between a red or a green Thai curry, and whether I wanted shrimp or chicken in my pad thai. Another great challenge was learning to wipe my arse with one hand whilst directing a hosepipe accurately with the other, and mustering just enough moral fortitude to resist being lured into lobbies, illuminated in pink, and with a concierge of pretty pretty women offering their massages and glowing smiles for sums of money that scarcely exist once exchange rates are considered. Part of the allure here was that I'm not entirely sure what a Thai massage consists of... see, if part of a traditional Thai massage involves being rubbed by a pair of oiled breasts, well, I wouldn't want to be the sort of xenophobe who would shirk from new and culturally enlightening experiences such as these ... prostitution though... even if the prostitues don't seem too unhappy at their job... for all my bad language, I'm a soppy wimp and useless romantic deep down, and I've got a mother and sister and unborn daughters to weigh on my conscience, so I walked-on back to my own hotel, less-exciting and more modest though it was... Hurrah! A good, Christian ending!

The other feature of Thailand and Malaysia was that it really made me think about how much I disliked much of Chinese culture... I don't know if the term, Sinophobe, exists, but in my head it certainly does now... On an anthropological level, the attitudes of the Chinese towards foreigners is fascinating, on an everyday level, it just makes me think 'why can't you be a tiny bit nicer?'... Which is exactly what the situation is in Thailand and Malaysia.. only they're much nicer, and in some regions it's explained by the familiarity brought about by tourism, and in others, where there aren't tourists, the folk are still really warm and opening and welcome. And they're relaxed too, people would walk up to me, we'd shake hands, and have a conversation using the relevant place-names in my journey... and it was great to return to having interactions with people who didn't think me a circus exhibit or a harbinger of evil spirits. Anyway, that's enough bad blood for one blog.

For now.... I fly to New Zealand on the 20th, arrive there on the 21st. Henceforth there will be no unbearable heat, no high humidity to give me calluses, I'll be able to start taking it for granted that I can buy everything that I eat back home at the same relative prices as back home, and I'm going to ask for directions, in English, and understand answers, in English, at every opportunity life affords, and even in some needless situations, just because I can.

The record... Apart from my pre-departure statements of 18000 miles in 180 days, I've never set any targets, or even spoken of beating the record as if it were a certainty. James Bowthorpe of GlobeCycle is about to beat the record of Mark Beaumont PLC, so a huge congratulations to him, not least because he has done what I set out to do; beat the record, by some margin, and without all the corporate fanfare and bullshit factor of the Beaumont ride... for those of you that might be interested, James is to be at Hyde Park at 18:30 on Saturday 19th September, and is meeting other riders on the road from Portsmouth so as to get a bit of a procession going. Better details than that can doubtless be found through www.globecycle.org

James is likely to ride in between 170-175days, so my 180 days goes out of the window on account of that anyway. That said, even if I didn't accelerate from this point onwards, but maintained 100mile days as the goal, I've already made enough time to get me in around day 170. On the ride up to Auckland I'm going to consider it hard, and crunch some numbers, and put a definite day and date for my being back at Rouen Cathedral. I think 160days is the minimum I'm aiming for, 150days would be cool, not least for knocking a month and a half off of Beaumont and his train of corporate rot... 149 tempts me for being sub-150. We'll see, but it'll be big.

Pictures... I should put this paragraph at the beginning for all those who probably get bored by reading the entire blog entry... Anyway, we have one of Thailand's rather odd, big-eared cow, we have a coconut plantation, we have flies at the watering hole, a Thai beach, a monkey headed for a delicious-looking bag of rubbish, another monkey showing exactly what he thinks of westerners and their cameras, and me at Singapore airport, trying to figure out what had happened to 400miles...

Out of China

2009-09-08T03:37:00.005+01:00

Well... after a long, enforced absence I now return to you from Thailand... where they paint the trucks like fairground rides, the people are warm, and a small company called Tesco is making brave forays into the local market with its very own 'Lotus Express'

Anyway... Rumour has it that the Chinese state caught wind of a nebulous but potent political form, riding in from the west and identifying itself only, somewhat cryptically, as This Is Not For Charity... accordingly, they saw fit to censor me along with all of the nation's other censored bloggers. All of which was a bit sensitive of them, but I'm looking on the bright side and imagining myself as some sort of dangerous, literary radical... an illusion that lasts about as long as it takes to discover that China also censored the incendiary literary content that is Facebook, and Twitter too. Nobody has told them that Facebook is actually the perfect way to get a nation completely disengaged from all meaningful, critical activities, and completely enthralled with taking photos of themselves at arm's length, or looking at others who have taken photos of themselves at arm's length, on the nights of the week that they try hardest to appear a little less ugly

So... where were we... an internet cafe in Shymkent I believe, the start of my time along the Silk Road, with an Azeri's family restaurant across the road and well-stocked with Turkic stews to satisfy the appetite of a hungry cyclist. China has been an entirely different world to Kazakhstan... not least in respect of the fact that I really loved being in Kazakhstan, desert and all, whilst China has been bloody hard work and something of a mental onslaught... amazingly so, fascinatingly so, and not least because I don't believe that the Chinese are ever being rude when they behave in fashions that I find infuriatingly so.... there's no denying that the whole thing feels more amazing and more fascinating once sitting comfortably in Shanghai and preparing to get out. Fortunately, on account of having lived a year in rural Vietnam, I wasn't quite as battered by the whole experience as I might otherwise have been, which is a scary thought, because it felt pretty battering regardless... Basically, Chinese culture is a million miles away from western culture, but it's also 950,000miles away from Slavic, Arabic or Turkic cultures too... people are free to stand and peer over your shoulder as you send an email, a text message or write in your notepad, people are free to point at you, they are free to call you as if you were their goat, they are free to stare at you, and stare at you, and stare at you, and sometimes they will stare right at you, from only a metre away, and not even respond when you give them a nod or a wave or a smile of acknowledgement... People are free to laugh at you, right in your face, and when you ask for something, they will shout the only word of English they learned, NO, and in the most awful accent too, and then they will burst out laughing at the fact that they are completely disinterested in helping a stranger in their country who is standing with a map at a crossroads and really isn't about to ask anything too complicated, or anything that they couldn't quite easily help with.... People will call after you... HELLO!... as you ride by, and sometimes I would forget what this was the precursor unto, and I would shout HELLO back at them, at which they rolled around laughing; because they said a word and the foreigner replied with the appropriate word? Because lingual communication really works? Because they tricked the foreigner into thinking they were offering a greeting when actually they just wanted to laugh at him opening his stupid, foreign mouth?

I don't know... all I know is that it's weird and strange and it often feels like a pretty trying environment... Of course it's part cultural... Chinese people do call one another as if they were goats too, and it doesn't mean that they think of you as only a goat, it just means that they're not as eager as a westerner to fall over themselves for the sake of nicety... But then again it isn't just culture, because there are, in China, people who treated me respectfully, listened patiently, and then understood as I made my awful pronunciation of the place-name 10km in the direction I was pointing, who have smiled and waved when I have done so, and who have respected my space and treated me in a warm and welcoming manner... For quite some time it seemed that these people were invariably Taiwanese, Uyghur, Kazakh, Mongolian or of various mountain tribes, but come Shanghai even the Han had learned a little bit of decorum, and I am inclined to believe there are decent folk amongst their number too. Of course there is the consideration that I had been riding 100miles a day through China, often having to work quite hard to do so, and thereby putting a strain on relations with the population ... this seems like a valid point, but there again I was riding the same distances, in tougher conditions, through Kazakhstan, and the same distances, on a much less pleasing diet, through Russia and the Ukraine, and in those places I never experienced even half the antipathy that I have done at times in China.

The best way to summarise how China left me feeling is that I would become enraged by the sullen, stubborn, childish, moronic and downright ridiculous behaviour of people I encountered, and then I would ride on, thinking all kinds of horrible, hateful, bilious filth, and then I would meet someone kind and good and decent, which would leave me feeling ashamed and foolish for all my hate ... to be honest, I'm not even unhappy with that balance... I almost find it pretty natural, I'd like to think that the fact that I kept on having good encounters was testament to the fact that I always treated every interaction as a new one with a new human being, and left whatever previous illfeeling at the door.... In short, I was cycling through a different culture, as a westerner... I'll never get a fair and accurate reflection of that culture, because as soon as I raise my little, white face I completely change the dynamic of their normal behaviour... and sometimes that behaviour isn't so gracious, and sometimes my response isn't either... I'm not doing this ride as some sort of global ambassador for humanity, I'll leave that to those with the honest integrity of a Tony Blair, or the down-to-earth normalcy of Angelina Jolie.

So on all the cultural stuff I'm now feeling pretty mellow, but then there's the patriotism.... And patriotism really is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but it's alright, because the scoundrel also has the company of the halfwit and the dumbfuck and the braindead down there in his refuge.... and China is just full of patriots... and not the good strand of patriotism either, the one that values a nation as a community of interconnected people bound by ideals and hopes and mutual care for their fellow brothers and sisters, the strand that is often quite saddened by the manner in which the nation and community is sold down the river with patriotism passed-off as the reason why people should shut-up and watch quietly... Nope, Chinese patriotism is having a whale of a time, what with the fact that the country gets richer and richer (even if half the country are still grape and tomato farmers, and even if the country is just a bowl of smog and fumes) and with having a bigger and bigger army to assist in filming the music videos, that you can see in motorway service stations, where some hot Chinese chick in a military uniform gets hold of a gun and starts shooting it into the ranks of the enemy, the good old flag fluttering in the background, and the entire restaurant watching this brilliant piece of music-come-filmmaking ... So yeah, I found the patriotism hard too... It's hard to think that, even meeting nice people, I'm meeting people in love with a political entity that I find revolting... very much like meeting Tories back home.... of course it's largely down to miseducation and misinformation, but still, it's hard

This was exacerbated by arriving in Uyghur so close to a period of unrest, with my mobile phone cut and police and soldiers crawling all over the province, constantly asking for my passport, wasting literally hours of my time in questionings, writing down my details, and generally setting me off on a bit of a bad foot with China. Not least because I have a great deal of sympathy for the cause of the Uyghur people... To be crude, Uyghur is the same as Tibet, a different region appropriated by Han China with no regard for the people living there, or the brutality required to incorporate it into the Chinese state... it's complicated, I doubt that Uyghur would come to much as an entirely independent nation, that said, equally undeniable is the need for China's better-recognition of the rights of Uyghurs to be Uyghurs, rather than secondary citizens in a Han China. To be cynical, Uyghur is different to Tibet... aside from sitting to its north, it's also full of rotten, Muslim terrorists.... sorry, that was fallacious of me, not all rotten Muslims are terrorists, but they are certainly a lot less fashionable than those nice, orange Buddhists, chilling out, all cute and cuddly, down there in Tibet. And so, whilst Uyghur and Tibet face a very similar quandary, you won't be finding any of those tasty, size-8, brunette bohemians wearing a FREE UYGHUR t-shirt outside the Chinese embassy, and you won't be finding quite so many Guardian journalists falling over themselves to get on the plane to Urumchi. There has, of late, actually been a small twitch from the western media in reporting on issues in Uyghur... it's coincided with Uyghurs burning cars and attacking the Han migrants, which just goes to show, violence is never the answer.

All of which must sound a bit negative... which would be unfortunate, because riding through China was, with the exception of all the horns, fantastic... A beautiful country with fantastic food that comes at sensational prices in excellent quantity... furthermore, with 1.3billion Chinese, if only by random probability and laws of averages, there were always going to be plenty of nice folk to meet along the road... There were more camels, more black, snow-topped mountains, all frozen above me in my desert, there was the epic Turfan depression, the second-lowest point on the earth's surface at 125metres below sea level, hot as fire as the Chinese name titles it, and home to a soil of legendary fertility... when I rode through it was spewing out field after field of the greenest grapevines against the orange sands all about. I rode high into the mountains, where the skies turn blue blue, where the cows get hairier as you ride upwards on hour and a half long climbs that require such beautiful and meditative patience, and then you descend like a bird, swooping in and out of hairpins at 40kmh for the best part of an hour... It's cool. After the mountains there came the hills, the terracing cut into the sides from centuries of farming, it's pretty green there too. And then there were the names... I rode by the southern reaches of the Gobi, I followed the Yangtze valley, and I rode through China, through China I tell you!

I thought often of year 5, at primary school in Leicestershire, aged 10 I would have been... to be honest I think often of the place I grew up, every time I'm in a place that feels so overwhelmingly of another world ...an hour talking to Zulhar under his truck, the only shade in a Kazakh desert... drifting in and out of sleep beneath the caravan that some peasant had pulled to a junction in the beginnings of that same desert, a junction where he was starting his barbecue business ... whenever I'm in such a place I'm just bowled-over by the fact that I have existed in two such radically different moments.

But anyway... year 5, aged 10... We were probably having some sort of geography lesson, all of us sitting cross-legged on the carpet... teacher wanted to know who was the first person to travel from Europe to China... though it had always struck me as odd to suggest that there was one person to do this FIRST, I knew that the answer was meant to be Marco Polo (funny that Mr and Mrs Polo named their kid after a suitcase manufacturer) ... I remember the moment because on that day, I decided to try a different tack and, rather than know the answer and get hassled for being clever (this was long before the days when people respected intelligence and some strange girls were even prepared to sleep with you on account of it) I just kept quiet and didn't raise my hand... And I remember that that damn teacher, when nobody else came up with the answer, came round to me, and asked if I knew, and I said no, and then she asked the question again, directly at me, and looked at me hard... so I gave her her stupid bloody Marco Polo, and everything was able to continue as normal for the smart kid that the dumb kids liked to hassle. Ahh... Woe is me ... Anyway, point being that fifteen years later, riding my bike through China, I've thought of that moment on a carpet in an Earl Shilton primary school, and saying that Marco Polo had travelled to China... and now I've done the same, with my legs and heart and lungs, and without a single hotel, and washing in rivers and eating in the ramshackle joints at deserted roadsides.

And that feels pretty fucking cool.

Well... wouldn't that have been a nice note on which to end a blog entry... but, no, we have a bathos-load of photos too... those adorable photos that we all know and love.... What do we have... some train carriage abandoned in a desert... a yurt beside Sayram Hu, a lake, 3000 metres up, on the Chinese-Kazakh border ... we have the effects of a bicycle and a westerner showing up in rural China.. it's the only way to stop them working, if enough westerners come to China on bicycles then maybe we could slow their economic growth and the world won't have to be ruled by a foul tyrant of a nation...come on, I've done my bit.... there's a photo of me standing on the surface of the moon, and we also have me, in black and white no less, looking adventurous ... and me, in black-and-white colour looking like a chimney sweep... I hadn't rolled around in the muck, I just cycled through 60miles of mining valley, and that is what it covered me in... You might also notice a ridiculous, triangulated beard in this photo... A wonderful Taiwanese guy (it was so nice to meet others who disliked the Chinese state when in China) leant me a clean razor, but I blunted it before the chin came... the damage has since been rectified you will be pleased t0 hear.

Some questions that I noticed amongst my comments... the Shanghai-Bangkok distance, yep, it was against the direction I have been travelling, which is why it was flown rather than ridden, as I had originally wished... the police... yep... we do kinda need some such force, which is why criticism is absolutely necessary in order that they be improved ... I have no inherent distaste for the police as an institution, and their founder, Sir Robert Peel (the very reason they are called Rozzers, Peelers and Bobbies) is actually my political hero were I compelled to choose such a figure... A man prepared to sacrifice his own political career for the sake of legislation that was good and proper, and a man who would not let party lines stand in the way of pragmatism and the best interest of the nation....

Sweet jesus... what happened to politics?

Police, Sacha Baron Cohen, Stuff....

2009-07-26T09:23:00.011+01:00

Well... I'm going to attempt to blog in a slightly different fashion, because it always just comes out dull when I try and tell you what I've been doing and eaten for breakfast.

A quick narration of events. Kazakhstan remains great, were it not for the fact that Kazakhstan and Kazakhs remain great, I might well have thrown myself on a pitchfork a week ago. The place has been punishing, truly and beautifully punishing... A gzillion little upsets have occurred that, when put together, have formed quite a big upset, an upset that could well have got me upset. Spokes have broken, valves have broken, in order to make a lovely, new road the Kazakhs had to totally annihilate the old one, just as I was needing it... which left me with 250km to travel through the toughest cycling I've ever done, and with no money... the expiration of my funds, I'll add, was not entirely reckless on my part... I could have made it to the nearest cashpoint in a day... it was the death of the road that made for two days, and that was also why I took the unprecedented measure of asking a guy in a nice and newly buffed Toyota Land Cruiser for a loan... he obliged, and I'll repay my debts in Almaty... It wasn't a particularly proud moment, however, I wasn't going to be looking too dapper after two days of eating and drinking principles in the desert. As for the word 'desert' ... I always prefer to err on the understated side, I will generally call a mountain a hill, and I was wondering whether or not I was being dramatic using the D word... however... the number of camels, come the end of it, would definitely suggest a desert... the dead camel I spied was himself not holding-up so well, and I met a bunch of anglophone kazakhs at a roadside cafe, and they addressed me, outright, with the question.

'What are you doing in the middle of this desert?'

To which I could only reply, with my bicycle upside down once again, 'I don't know.' And I didn't.

Another entertaining, but at the time quite crummy, upset almost saw me in a fight with a security guard at a petrol station... Basically... I was at the counter, waiting to pay for my orange juice, but drinking said orange juice, much to the alarm of Mrs Cashier, who screamed for Mr Boulder to come barrelling out of his locker-room, Mr Boulder rolls with his knuckles facing forwards, he's one of those, and he had an audition for his shoving abilities before he was given the job... Anyway, he shoved me, good and proper, a good few times, until I was in the forecourt, almost thrown onto the bonnet of an arriving car, watching the air in front of me for the arrival of his fist, and then shouting, in Turkish, RAHAT ... which.. to be honest, kinda translates, in my head, as 'at ease' (in the 'be at ease' sense, not the militant sense) .. but, could equally be translated more literally as, comfortable. So yeah, either shouting COMFORTABLE!!! worked, a thought that continues to make me laugh, or he just got bored of shoving me... anyway. The next mirror I arrived at explained things a little... I'd cut holes in my vest a few days beforehand, to let out the heat... I've been having nosebleeds, pretty heavy ones, every day since Russia... My nose has always had a thing for bleeding, and heat has never been good for it, but, to be honest, I think it's more about the hours of dust and exhaust that accumulate up there... every morning I have to blow a load of shit out of there or I have to breathe through my mouth, anyway, that day's nosebleed was still a little on my snout, I'd also had a puncture that morning, and, with oil on my hands, must have removed some sleep from my eyes, leaving a nice black eye, and, with my tangled hair, I did probably look like more of a brawler than I actually am. Anyway, once it had been established that I was actually a rich westerner, and not an Uzbek, he came over all diplomatic and convivial. Either way, further confirmation that the BBC would have got a much better piece of drama from my rather ramshackle adventuring

But anyway... some rants..... Sacha Baron Cohen and his Borat film... Every passing day I hate that man more... Ok... So, his career has consisted of taking the piss out of black urban culture, and once he had truly done that to death, he moved on to taking the piss out of Kazakhs. Not in a particularly imaginative way, just incest jibes, and old women held before the camera with Cohen saying 'she's only 28' ... anyway, a riproaring success it amounted to, and Cohen is now a multimillionaire many times over. Hurrah. First thing that agitates me is the idea that it's fine and funny to take the piss out of poverty in the Caucasus... I don't know if it it's because Kazakhs are largely Muslim, or because it's a Turkic culture, but for some reason the entire media establishment seemed to think that what Cohen was doing was fine. In Africa (sorry, I know that Africa is many nations, but so is Europe, and I still call it Europe), the king of Swaziland has over 100 wives, 20 Lear jets, and one of the world's poorest countries, the former South African president thought that you could catch AIDS by chopping an onion vertically instead of horizontally, in Egypt there's a good chance that, as a girl, you'll have your labia sewn up with gorse, and if you're the unfortunate woman that gets raped in Nigeria then they might well call you a hussy, bury you up to your neck, and throw stones at your head.

Now, I'm not saying that any one of those beliefs/practices is, in itself, wrong, however, poverty in Africa seems to have some sacred sentimentality to it (one that is, generally, a bit demeaning to Westerners and Africans alike), which leaves me wondering what the poor folk in the Caucasus did wrong to deserve such ridicule. More than this, however, I get agitated by Cohen's whole anti-semitism inferences, suggesting that Kazakhs have nothing better to do than abuse and loathe Jews. The fact of the matter is that Kazakhs are really decent, warm, hard working people, who don't really seem to have the time of day to go around torching synagogues... Furthermore, if Cohen, as a Jew, had really wanted to do something intelligent concerning anti-semitic problems in the former USSR, rather than propogating some sort of *nobody likes us, everybody hates us* dirge, he should have gone there, with his funding, and his university education, and researched and criticised, as a Jew, the fact that the entire and considerable wealth of the Soviet Union was sold off to a band of oligarchs, many of whom happened to be Jewish. I know that the presence of Jews amongst the Soviet oligarchs is a non-straightforward thing, and that anti-semitism in this part of the world goes further back than 1990... but still, it's a two-way misfortune that such an injustice might, on the one-hand, reinforce old prejudices, and, on the other, be entirely overlooked by an apparently intelligent individual.

OK... well I'm sure that that was already more than enough to get me called an anti-semite, so I'll move on to talking about the police instead. The Kazakhs that asked what I was doing in the desert.... we got talking about the police, and they said, the 'kazakh police.... they.... are not the best' ... And it's so nice to hear people saying that the police are shit, because the Turkish dislike their police, the Italians dislike their police, the French dislike their police, the Kazakhs evidently dislike theirs... and in Britain everyone mills around saying 'they do a difficult job' ... well, so do brain surgeons, but nobody's going to start making excuses for Mr Brain Surgeon if s/he accidentally leaves peanut shells in the cranium.

I was in Serbia, on one of the country's major roads, which made it about 10 metres wide, with ten cars an hour... some farmers were going along the gravel at the side of the road, with their cart full of hay, and the police pulled them over and were telling them to leave the road. In Romania, I was leaving the city of Giurgiu, and the police were pulling over every cyclist that wasn't wearing a hi-vis jacket... which meant that they were pulling over every cyclist. OBLIGATION OBLIGATION the po-faced anus shouted at me, and it was a joyous moment when I was able to retrieve my own hi-vis jacket from the depths of my panniers and grin at him... but, be that as it may, this officer of the law was only doing his job - that is, inconveniencing perfectly decent people in the undertaking of their daily life, whilst the Romanian government continues to suffer from the greatest corruption anywhere in Europe...

Same story in Britain, where our leading banks lose hundreds of billions of quid through dealings that were, in reality, no better than mass fraud, and the police make their number one priorities the targeting of cyclists on pavements and the poor bastards that make twenty quid a day selling caramelised peanuts on Waterloo Bridge. Meanwhile, people mill about defending the force by invoking the example of their family friend, the police officer, who says nothing when people bring out the weed at the end of the party... or the one police officer that they know, who's a really nice guy... These people doubtless exist, but they don't justify an entire insitution of ineptitude.

I worked with a volunteer police officer once, an accountant by day, he loved the 'adrenaline' and the 'buzz' of his other job, then one night he got lumbered with a suicidal Romanian and Monday morning he was saying what a boring night it had been. Police... it's just another word for cunt in any language under the sun... the problem in Britain is that we feel obliged to defend anything that's ours, no matter how pathetic... it's the same mentality that led to a decade of Tim Henman being worshipped as a hero, and for not even managing to be a runner-up.

I will now stop that particular rant, because, believe it or not, I'm actually being very restrained on the subject. Actually... no... I can't quite bring myself to end the tirade without saying that the British police force spends 39,000,000 pounds, a year, on PR campaigns and media advisers.... that is, of course, 39million smackeroos of public money, and, needless to say that if it takes 39million quid to try and convince people you're doing a good job.... well... you're not doing a good job.

OK... enough.... Saw a sign for Almaty as just shy of 700km away, which means I want China in a week's time... I got hills to ride however, so we'll see how it goes. This part of Kazakhstan is cooler I hear, and with more shade and greenery and places to buy water... so we'll see how it goes.

The photos.... You have Besimgale in his yurt... it's a great thing to point to a Kazakh's yurt and say 'ah! Mongolian!' ... Besimgale half-rescued me from a desert, then I had lunch in his front room with his family, and then we all fell asleep on the floor, which seems quite a typical Kazakh thing... You should also have the horses... I'm a sucker for those horses, beautiful things... think I've put up some camels too, a little bit of landscape, the sand dune in which I camped a night, just beside where the Aral sea is/used to be... you also have Fatma, posing with her wallpaper, the same wallpaper that adorns the hallway of a flat in Dolapdere, Istanbul, for which I have a great deal of fondness.

Well comrades, until next time.... to thine own self be true.

2009-07-26T08:29:00.004+01:00

OK... here, with any luck, will be the photos that didn't want to upload themselves last time round, I am now writing a blog update, and, with more luck, will put some photos in that one too. It's all about the photos here... travelling places would be so crummy without them.

You will see... me in my lovely, red desert attire ... me and the sea biscuit, the most ridiculously monotonous thing upon this earth, put a red tie on it and you could call it Gordon. Poor Gordon.

And to Kazakhstan

2009-07-13T18:01:00.002+01:00

Well... I'm now in Kazakhstan, and feeling pretty happy with life too. Russians and Russia are both pretty cool, but even before the imbeciles at the border made me unpack all of my belongings prior to LEAVING the country, I was looking forward to getting here... Kazkhstan and northwest China are the two places I've been most looking forward to in this first part of the trip... the heat is madness... it is, by and large, a desert out here, and the towns, presently, are an average of about 60-70miles apart, with some much further.. so it's quite tough logisitically... I'll probably be starting to ride later and start earlier sometime soon, the wind also seems to drop at the day's extremities... I had wanted to try riding 200miles tomorrow, to mark Bastille Day, which is always a big day in the ongoing Tour de France... anyway, I'm going to shelve that plan for the moment, Kazkahstan would eat me alive if I tried it... there's just not enough water and too much heat to be had.

Anyway, the people are warm, it's amazing every time I get to communicate with an Azeri or a Tartar or a Kazakh using the (to an extent) mutually understandable language of Turkish... with better Turkish it would probably overlap a good amount more, but still.

Countryside definitely rules over anything resembling towns... I ride through miles and miles of nothing, and eventually come to some odd, ramshackle cafe, with rusting tankers and railway sleepers and sleeping dogs piled up outside... And I go in, eat some borsch, watch the road, do some writing..sit about with truckers... and there's just something very nice and straightforward about it all.... In towns, on the other hand, I have my bank card blocked, eat substandard pizza at inflated prices, and continue in my ever-failing quest to find an Irish person in an Irish Pub in some second-world city. That was the case in Russia at least, I have three weeks of Kazakh wilderness in front of me, so a little bit of the urban might not come off quite so bad now and then.

OK... my photographic offering for this update... I have, as I twittered a couple of days ago, taken to wearing long sleeves and a turban, which was an excellent idea that I should have embarked upon a while ago. Rather fortuitously, the turban I bought some years ago in Morrocco is a shade of red not entirely dissimilar to that of my merino wool top, and so I don't even have to trudge into Kazakh headwinds looking totally uncoordinated.... The other photo was one of my first sights in Kazakhstan this morning, some old fellow, in a baseball cap and a heavy jumper, riding over the hill with his herd of horses in front of him... amazing animals, they all looked so much healthier than Romanian horses... I'm not going to endeavour to do it justice in words in an internet cafe, with little streetkids shouting their English obscenities in my ear, but it was a pretty awesome sight...... Finally... I bring to you the Biscuit... I ate three kilos of these in three days in Russia.... and never before has something so mundane-looking come to appear so loathsome... at first it was ok, they weren't squelchy, had some sugar in them, once even some raisins, a little crust, and they gave me energy and sustenance... To emphasise the humility of this little biscuit, I even photographed it next to rocks on the roadside.... see how well it fits in? Anyway... somewhere round about the second kilo things fall apart, I got desperate for a little texture, some flavour, some succulence ... only to find shops full of fat with salami on it, grey cheese, and margerine that you can taste the vegetable oil in... Slavic lands have grim dinnertables.

Welll.... as usual, a week of blog writing in my head has materialised as something entirely different in the blog, which is fine... you'll all just have to buy whatever book comes out of this affair.

Not sure from where I'll next write... Almaty is about two and a bit weeks away, but there is also a possibility that the Kazakh youth, in the nation's smaller cities, have the internet amongst their favourite pastimes... Killing terrorists and exploding aliens, how quaint.

And the images didn't even work.... oh the irony.

From Poltava...

2009-07-04T16:18:00.004+01:00

I'm not even sure how long it's been since I last wrote anything here, perhaps around ten days, perhaps a little less... I am certain, however, that Romania came in between now and then, and Romania feels like a very long time all of its own... I think it must have been French nonchalance, British sarcasm and a German practical joke that got them into the EU, and now that they're in, it seems not much has changed since three years ago.

It's strange, because I actually really quite like Romania, and I certainly find the place fascinating, and I met quite alot of really nice people there, that said, I spent almost the whole time looking forward to leaving.. which will always slow things down... I think there are a lot of arts and social-science students who could benefit from a trip there; the poverty is just as good as India, you'll get some really good black-white photos of crumbling huts and kids in rags, save carbon by flying half the distance, and get chased by dogs... which is about as authentic and life-affirming as cultural experiences get. It's wrong of me to be so glib, but it's dark in the internet cafe, and sunny outside, so I'll save cultural appraisal for another time.

The last few days, since Romania, have been great. This has been, in part, because I was worried that my Romanian blues might have been just the beginning of what my deprivation was going to feel like, so it's great to be in the Ukraine, with even more deprivation, and a big smile. I don't know why I like it so much here... The place is beautiful... it's enormous, just wheat field after wheat field, no longer the bread basked of the Soviet Union, but still quite a bread basket nonetheless.. everything seems to grow so well, the trees are so damn green, sunflowers, wildflowers, fruits, etc. etc.... use your imaginations.

This morning, packing up my tent, some old Russian fellow came creeping towards me from beneath a tree... A little alarmed at first, he transpired to be Anatoly, and once he had moved aside, I saw a bicycle beside him. We talked for about fifteen minutes, him in Russian, me in English... he is riding a thousand mile trip around Russia and the Ukraine.. his bike is nothing flash, none of this Rohloff nonsense that I have going on, and he's riding it for a thousand miles around the countryside... And he's 72!!!! He recoiled in disbelief, hand clasped to forehead, pissing himself laughing, when he figured out that he's thrice my age... He then slapped his saddle, told me it was Italian... I slapped mine, told him it was English... and he said "DA!!! Brooks!" .. which were about the only two words we both understood in our whole exchange (I didn't trouble him with the fact that Brooks are now also Italian on account of a buyout by Selle Royal... not sure that the language barrier would have stretched so far.)

Either way, it was great to discover that this old, traditional English name in the saddle world had made it all the way to Russia... I have a particular affinity for Brooks because they started in my local town, Hinckley, in the nineteenth century, before moving to a bigger location in Stratford. It's funny, because Brooks are now turning-out really stylish, prestigious, world-reknowned saddles..... and Hinckley is not much more than a bit of a dump really... A friend went into officer training with the Navy a few years ago (he left after a month, incidentally) and in all England, Hinckley came 4th on a list of towns officers should steer clear of in order to avoid violent confrontations. There simply isn't anything in the town; homogenised highstreet, wetherspoons pubs, vomit in the streets on Friday night... Real England.... It's not glamourous deprivation, just deprivation... Jamie Oliver won't be starting a restaurant there to give opportunities to youngters, and Barack Obama's wife won't be visiting the primary schools... Still, at least Comic Relief had a good year.

OK... enough rancour... The bicycle.... Is feeling amazing... I raised my saddle by about an inch yesterday, which I had been reluctant to do for fear of overextending the ligaments/tendons (whichever part it is that sometimes hurts behind my knees)... Either way, I should have done it ages ago.. I'm not getting any pain, and I think I've increased the efficiency of my pedal stroke by a really noticable proportion... This whole world record malarky... I don't really look at it as a race... Is it possible to race for 6months? I don't know, basically, my mileage will be the greater, not from thrashing it, but from enjoying sitting on the bike... Raising my saddle is perhaps giving me a little bit more in speed, and it's giving me a lot more in enjoyment... so I'm feeling good, and feeling very in control of my speed

So much so that I'm even considering some madness... for Bastille Day... July 14... The French riders will all be going for a stage win in the Tour... I'll try and do something impressive, in homage to a little bit of Revolutionary ardour... I've always wanted to do a 200mile day... 170 is my current best.... The time would be right.

Photos... the Danube in Romania, by dusk and by sunset ... It really is a stunning place, whatever mood it leaves me with... I've also photographed one of Romania's many village-sized failed factories... Go and read up on Ceaucescu if you get bored moments online... a fascinating crackpot. Also pictured are the little filing cabinets that they fill full of bees that then fill the cabinets full of honey... Also pictured is me, with the Ukrainian border sign, and, just incase any of you were doubting the sex appeal of This Is Not For Charity, I am proudly displaying my not inconsiderable farmers tan for all to see. You also see me bundled up, in spite of hot, humid evening, with a healthy tick-fear that I have since gotten over... the statistics are in my favour.

Not sure when I'll next be blogging... I'm in Russia tomorrow, and there for about 10days before Kazakhstan, from whence I have no idea what the availability of internet will be like.

Today I found something in a little Ukrainian store, very much like a bad eccles cake, and whilst I'm no advocate of bad eccles cakes, a bad eccles cake is, surely, a far better predicament than no eccles cake at all, so i brought a kilo of the things, and will be dipping them in my Pooh-bear sized honeypot. I want all of you eating great food on my behalf tonight. With warmth

Continuing Eastwards...

2009-06-23T14:22:00.004+01:00

Well... as I expected I have nothing in my head to write just as soon as I get opportunity to write anything. I'm in Serbia for a couple of days now, and then I head into the flats of Romanian Danube territory, a place in which (unless a lot has changed) I will find dogs chasing after me (unceasingly unnerving, no matter how much you know its going to happen), lots of gypsies, mosquitoes, food not entirely to my liking, and no internet... so I'm taking advantage of the facilities of Subotica.

The whole journeying thing continues to progress healthily... I'm on target, not that a target means much at such an early stage, but still, it's better than being behind target. Entered Serbia this morning, and the roads got slightly worse, but I was prepared for as much, and they are not that bad... it's really a bit of a western misconception that every other society in the world makes do with bumbling up and down dirt tracks as a means of linking the nation.. I generally avoid country lanes out here, but the main highways are pretty good, and the courtesy of Hungarian truckers throughout yesterday was absolutely mesmerising... Gents the lot of them.

I've done pretty well on company of late also, met a couple of guys from Kent, 60years old going-on 25... they were cycling the length of Austria to Budapest, had me on the ragged edge all day in spite of their seniority, and very much attest to the idiocy of the school of thought that cycling distance is something to fear rather than relish. Also bumped into Luis, a Peruvian who has been riding all over the Balkans and Southern Europe, headed for France, an amazing guy and an excellent companion for a multiple-hour breakfast of coffee, nutella, jam, more coffee, more nutella, more jam, and an armful of baked goods. Less pleasant company was the carcass of a snake in the road.. I know that there are snakes out this way, and have seen them before, but prefer not to be reminded of the fact... it would have been nicer, furthermore, had the snake been a touch smaller... ideally it would have just been a hedgehog, but I suppose I cant have everything my way.

The other day, I was riding into Vienna, and left the flatflatflat Danube path for a climb into the city, and there's nothing like a climb to get the passions all fired up. Anyway, I thought then that I would like, not to renege, but to clarify, something I said a few posts back about Mark Beaumont's record, the record that I aim to beat.

I said that I had great respect for his achievement, and I do, to not do so would be impertinent and foolish on my own part... however, I sounded too diplomatic for my own tastes, and as this is my own blog, and not some BBC apologies page, I'm going to stand by my convictions a little more.

In short, though I respect Beaumont's achievement, I respect very little of that which I know him to have done with it. In my mind, the man represents an awful lot of that which is wrong with the world, i.e. a perfectly decent and likable fellow, cosied-up with people neither decent nor likable, for the perfectly reasonable reason of making one's life that bit more comfortable.... In particular I've thought of his advert for Orange, the one that says that I AM EVERYONE (but I am not the text message the woman was reading as she walked under the bus, the brain tumour in the businessman's brain,etc)...

anyway... the advert... which can be found on YouTube, says that our fellow is the man of the Nullarbor who gave him water when he needed it most... and, as I cycled up over that climb before Vienna, it really made me sick to think that some chap in the Nullarbor gave water, something presumably quite precious out there, to a stranger in need, and that that stranger then went on to sell the sanctity of that act to a bloody telephone company. Moreover, I'm sure that somewhere in the LloydsTSB investment portfolio, that which Mark is proud to be an ambassador of, there is some extraction industry or another blowing craters into the plains that are home to aboriginal communities... It's fine, I don't mind people making their lives a bit easier, earning some money, it's just a bit shit when it's dressed up in some saccharine bollocks that suggests all is lovely... As for my own diplomatic disavowal of my angst, I renege on it in the respect that, if people compromise morals, and nobody even takes them to task for doing so, then eventually we lose the standards by which people should be held to account.

In short, Mark Beaumont completed his excellent achievement, and then he sold it, which means that he received a good wedge of cash, and that was the price he received in return for having his moralities and affiliations questioned. Over and above all that, the next 6months/year will attest to whether I hold any moral highground, and whether or not I am just some embittered fuckwit who couldn't better his accomplishment anyway.

As for the idea that we need 6000calories a day to survive, I have worked out my own, highly scientific, equation, and am simply eating shitloads, and as much of it as I can keep down. As for the use of having tubes stuffed down your throat, I really don't know what use this is in touring distances on a bike, it really sounds quite inconvenient to me, and, having discussed the matter with Luis, John and Karlsen over the past few days, indeed it transpired that none of us had anything inserted into any of our bodily orifices prior to departure. Which can only be a good thing.

I attach a few more photos... my hands after a day of riding in the rain, don't know if the photo fully conveys the shrivel.. Tesco continue their domination into Hungary, this, in fact, is the very store in which I was caught trying to steal a nectarine three years ago... The photo fails it, but Vienna is beautiful, and has such a great feeling of liveliness and space going on.... cities really are so much better when people actually live in them, rather than just working there 9-5 in funeral attire ... photo of me... this is so we can all wait eagerly to see my changing appearance, I've been told through Austria that I'm skinny, which will never be how I see myself.... Also one of the Danube, and the cycle path along it.. leisurely is not the word... a great holiday route for any recreational cyclist; no cars, many camping facilities, beautiful scenery, bars and restaurants.

Anyway... enough... and Ill write again anon.

Four days in... I think

2009-06-13T21:57:00.004+01:00

Well, that was a good start, certainly the best I could have hoped for. I had fretted about the chances of doing 100mile days right from the off, but it all went pretty swimmingly really, and the GPS statistic on the map, calculated using an aggregate, is actually a little way behind the on-the-ground reading of my speedo.

There is no precise way of summarising all that has been going on, in truth, it probably isnt even all that eventful; Im having twinges from my left knee, dealing with that using a combination of sympathy and *you are my knee and will turn painlessly if I want you to* ... the single toughest things to have occured are the typical dilemmas of how to invest my monies at the boulangerie, and also the task of using a squat toilet, in a pair of carbon fibre cycling shoes, whilst trying to read a map and hold my shorts out of the way. Today was comfortably the toughest day as far as terrain is concerned, I passed by the foothills of the Vosges mountains, which is just about as close to gradient as we circumnavigating pussies seem inclined to venture... After 105miles I was well ready to stop, and between then and the 35mile mark I was cursing the bastard whose directions sent me deeper into the hills... Just goes to show that one really can never trust a stranger.

Apart from, that is, the wondrous souls who have taken me in the past couple of nights... My wood shed and hay loft have left me remarkably well-rested, and my hosts have left me stumped, as ever, at how the world can get to seem so wrong when there are so many great people all around... Shall save that sort of ranting for another time... In the meanwhile I attach a few photos to show you all what you are missing out on by not cycling in France this week...

A big thank you to all of my sponsors

2009-06-01T22:58:00.003+01:00

I'm writing this partly as something I meant to do anyway, and partly in response to a couple of fair points raised as comments upon my dearly beloved blog.

First of all... a genuine thanks to each and every company that has given me anything. For a long time I received not an iota, for a rather too stressful period I was forced to suggest that things were getting moving when, in reality, they were not, and then - in a rather successful period - I named potential sponsors as confirmed sponsors when approaching new sponsors, which resulted in the actual acquisition of confirmed sponsors, and just goes to show that honesty is not really anything like the best policy where trying to muster up a bit of commitment is concerned. As for my sponsors as they now appear... I give especial thanks to Donald at Adventure Trading Post, an outright great bloke who pledged sponsorship of my GPS before anyone else even seemed close to considering me, and who has since invested his time and efforts in trying to help me get a whole host of logistics off the ground. I'm also delighted to have met Shaun, at the London Copy Centre, who printed my posters for free, who also prints posters for his local church and school, and who chuckled as he told me, with confused frankness "I don't make a lot of money, to be honest".

Over and above those human encounters... None of my supporting businesses are in any way compromising my very high moral principles... I even researched the ones that I suspected might be doing so. Others amongst them are paid-up members of do-gooding, wholesome bohemia, and others amongst them are just straight-down-the-line independent businesses, working hard to make honest livings. I urge you to give patronage to such businesses... and with particular relevance to bike shops, I can only suggest that you deserve the shoddy and half-arsed treatment that you'll receive, should you venture, in a non-emergency situation, into one of the soulless warehouses that are becoming too prominent in the cycle trade.

So... this is my self-defence I suppose... I'm aware that sponsors and my pitch might not sit perfectly together, so let me just clarify that I am not at all anti-business, or even anti the free market... accordingly, should any reader of this wish to pay me to stand next to a wind turbine with a big grin then I'll happily do so.. and, beyond that, I reserve the right to feel that I have not sold-out on anything until my website boasts a banner of "Wheels - £50 - Ice Cream 70p - Shorts £20 - Sunset on the Black Sea - Priceless ... for everything else there's Mastercard"

At that point I will deserve all criticism, and encourage people to heap it upon me... In the meantime, I nevertheless welcome all criticism in the name of that delightful thing that is *getting people talking*, and though I would profess a difference between my own sponsors and major investment funds, it is of course the prerogative of individuals to see matters as they wish. To counter any ideas that notforcharity is its own brand of nihilism, I direct people to the websites on my Friends page, and suggest that the values there expressed are those that I seek to represent.

This will probably be my final blog entry before I leave, and so I will end it with a sincere nod of respect to Mark Beaumont. I respect his ambition, his industry, the scale of his achievement, and I respect, most of all, the moment in his documentary in which he states that it's no big deal to ride 100miles a day, just a case of routine.

And now enough of all that.

Perhaps too much of a Guardian article

2009-05-21T11:20:00.003+01:00

I'm posting up an article that I submitted to the Guardian newspaper, part of my ongoing efforts to get someone other than myself to write about me and the ride...

I submitted the piece to the travel section, but it has also got a quintessential Guardian element to it... that sentimental melodrama that is found throughout the paper... how much the Muslim girl cried when she removed her headscarf and felt sunlight on her follicles for the first time... the man with the stutter who one day hopes not to have to struggle with "I l-lo-love you s-s-s-son"... It's perhaps written in that tone that sounds like it's drifting to you from the bottom of a long, miserable tunnel, but is somehow tinged with a little bit of loveliness that's supposed to make you feel hopeful.

Anyway, I have now forewarned you of this fact, and so you have only yourselves to blame if you find me mawkish.

********************************

We live an existence of finished products; bread is bought from supermarkets without the need to think of how it was baked, communication arrives simultaneously of being sent, without even time for anticipation of delivery to begin, people arrive at their workplace by virtue of a combustion engine that enables them to move through the world from the comfort of an armchair and remoteness of a windscreen. Humans are being removed, every where I look, from the processes that give meaning to actions, and this brings about a state of many meaningless actions.

Travel is no exception, in fact it's a classic example, and that's a sad thing when it has, historically, embodied all that is most intrepid in a society. We can now buy exotic destinations from the high street, next to the shop in which we buy our socks, and not necessarily with any greater requisite of thought. We pay our money, board a plane, pass through the atmosphere, high above that world passing below, we land, and one of those vaccuum-hose tunnels sucks us from our steel hull, into an airport, and then on to the destination we paid our money to acquire. It's ironic that we still call it 'travelling', even after the actual travelling, the movement, has been cleansed of all event or adventure. We might now term it, more accurately, as just 'amassing'.

There is, growing as I write, a movement away from this brand of tourism... it is being proclaimed that the journey is more important than the destination, which is refreshing, as refreshing as it is unfortunate that people could have overlooked this consdieration in the first place. Even with this changing conception, however, scant attention is paid to the idea, one step further back, that travelling is not just the journey and destination, but also the place from which we depart on our travels. The marketing of travel is no different to all the other social experiences and emotions that are cheapened as they are sold back to us.

I'm cycling around the world, aiming to break a world record for doing so. To me it doesn't seem a thing so remarkable... I love cycling, and for a person as cycnical and reserved as I feel I've become, it says alot that I will still say, open and unreserved, that I love cycling. Last year a new world record was set for the accomplishment of a circumnavigation by bicycle. I respect the rider that achieved this feat, and I pass no judgment on a man needing to make his own way in a difficult world, but I came to hate much of what his accomplishment went on to stand for. A BBC documentary serialised the adventure, they commissioned laboratory testing upon the rider, stuffing tubes down his throat to measure his lungs. They found a dietician to pronounce that less than 6000 daily calories would spell disaster. They appointed some dour larynx to sound woebegone and prophesise doom at every opportunity the documentary afforded.

The achievement did not go unnoticed... Orange decided to use it to sell more phones, to tell the world of our oneness under their panoply, united by the magnificent endeavour of someone else. Lloyds TSB were so touched that they made the rider a corporate ambassador for the bank, finally bringing together the eternally interconnected concerns of cycling and adventure on the one hand, and - on the other - the arms industry, petrochemicals, and aggressively targeting poor people with the promotion of high-interest loans.

I had nothing against the rider, but I could not stand to see my passions sold off thus, and so I went about the launch of a retrieval. It wasn't for charity, it was to make something that bit more sacred again... I failed to see the virtue of charity if it were only to provide mitigation for a deterioration in the wider world. As I have said, it doesn't seem so remarkable, to ride a bicycle for a cause I believe in... What is left in this world if we can't bring ourselves to do things we love for reasons close to our hearts?

My mind is littered with beauties from the roadside. From France, riding up the Col du Lautaret for an hour and a half, with my senses registering only the clanking of cow bells and a magnificent, silent stillness all around. From Albania, where an Albanian who lives most the year in Tottenham did stop to give me enough local currency to reach the nearest town, then proceeded to invite me home for dinner with his family. I remember the deserted stretch that separates Spain from Portugal, with no lights on the ground to dim the stars in the sky as they shone, so big and so impossibly bright. I lay there with a rock for a pillow and a head of 19-year-old fears of scorpions and strangers. I remember the brilliant terror that rose in me as the huge, antlered silhouette of a stag appeared above the ditch where I lay, then bolted back to the night as I recoiled in fear.

I wanted to share these experiences, I wanted to encourage others to go out and experience all this and more for themselves. I wanted, most of all, to wrest back these moments, the essence they contained of something better, from the corporations that had purchased my litter of beauty from the roadside, quite in spite of having not a single thing in common with it. That, in short, is why I set out to circumnavigate the world by bicycle, aiming to break a world record for doing so.

Sponsorship...

2009-05-10T23:20:00.004+01:00

Sponsorship is something I've been mentioning in fairly vague terms for a little while now, in general because there was an awful lot of the stuff that was in embryonic stages, and an awful little that was actually concrete and dependable...Round about the middle of last week, in an effort to remedy this problem and generate some interest, I toyed briefly with rebranding myself as the Jade Goody Memorial Ride, but things seem to have started coming good of their own accord anyway.

The sponsors page is still awaiting a few logos before it accurately reflects contributions, and I'm awaiting a few final decisions before I can confirm who is providing me with which parts of my (all-important) bicycle, but in general things have fallen towards place, if not entirely into it as yet.

All of the legwork that has gone into this eventuality made me think of Ewan McGregor, that well-known Scottish actor who starred in a few great films before relocating to Hollywood and starring in lots of bad ones. Amongst all that starring, McGregor also found time to hire people to organise him a trip around the world by motorbike, a trip he duly undertook in the company of a long-standing friend, a camera man, a security guard, a cook, a tent pole erector, a mechanic, and many other people that you wouldn't necessarily expect to find in the sort of adventure that his BMW advert was dishing-up. Since returning, McGregor has also found his way into the corridors of the perfumerie, Davidoff, who created for him a nice little fragrance, entitled simply as, Adventure. Now either Davidoff's perfume smells awful, or Ewan McGregor's Adventure had very little in common with an actual adventure, but the aroma apparently captures the essence of being somewhat rugged. None of that, however, is actually what I'm driving at here.

I bought McGregor's book - a chronicle of his aromatic adventures - for my brother... it was a Christmas present some years ago, and he read about two chapters before discarding it along with all of the other crummy Christmas presents that were probably discarded around the globe that Christmas. Before he put the thing down for good, my brother shared with me one excerpt in which McGregor talked of a director buying him a Ducati superbike as a gift, before then speaking in the next pages of his adventure needing to find a sponsor... or perhaps being rendered financially unviable. This leaves me to wander whether Ewan McGregor was perhaps ripped off at minimum-wage for his role in the Star Wars films... Perhaps nobody told our gullable Scot that he was starring in one of history's biggest film franchises. Or perhaps he was just doing that fairly archetypal thing whereby the rich learn how to feign monetary concerns so as to seem that little bit more normal... Either way, that particular episode has been in my head as I've scrabbled about for my own sponsorship, my heart bleeding and bubbling like a fountain for poor, dear Ewan.

A bit of a realisation...

2009-04-30T23:09:00.002+01:00

It's dawned on me that I can't expect people to remain as interested in this whole undertaking as I am, unless I start sharing a little of it. This has left me, as I type, in the position of feeling that I'm about to start a blog, that thing synonymous with the world I forever ridicule, where people socialise on the internet, meet on the internet, live secondary lives on the internet and air their thoughts on the internet because, in the real world, nobody is going to give time of day to all the trivial and introspective musings you find in a blog. So here I am, writing my blog.

On practical terms, things continue to take shape... The Russian visa is now in my passport, meaning only the Chinese one remains to be acquired before I will be legally entitled to passage along my route. Sponsorship is an ongoing struggle, but not a fruitless one, with an all-but complete bicycle, camping equipment and GPS gear all having come my way, and awaiting only some final clarifications... A few things remain outstanding, and I'm considering asking a travel clinic to sponsor me a booster for Japanese encephalitis, but things seem generally under control.

I've been couriering all week in London... for a while I was working with friends in Brighton, not cycling all day for a living, and the effects were noticeable when I tried to ride my bike fast, only to feel my stamina draining more rapidly than I'd have expected or wanted. Today was the first time I noticed, on one of London's approximately two hills, that I was getting quicker again, which is probably good timing. At midnight, in about ten minutes, it'll be May, and I'll be leaving next month, which is of course utterly meaningless, but at the same time exactly the sort of thing I'm inclined to lend significance.

This evening I found a message in my blog (any one of you can do it!), asking about food for endurance events. I'm hardly a nutritionist, but have always done well with a philosophy of eating lots, having a square meal with masses of carbohydrate in the evening, and as much sugar-rich anything as I can bare to eat throughout the day... I've eaten jars of watery jam at breakfast, swallowing it as medicine, and once encountered a pot of honey with vegetable oil amongst the ingredients. Last year, in a pretty rural part of the Ukraine, I still found Snickers bars in every shop I came to... I grew quickly sick of Snickers at a rate of five-a-day, but it got me by, and eventually I returned to lands where eating became enjoyable again...

Progress

2009-04-26T16:27:00.001+01:00

I think we're at approximately the one-and-a-half months to go mark... My passport is going in and out of embassies, coming back out with visas in, money is being parted with for the flights between legs, my entrance into the world of the internet is continuing and offers of sponsorship are picking up.... Still so much to do and a busy weekend is planned, mainly comprising the approach of more sponsors.... Compared to all this planning June 10 will be the start of the easier stuff.

Welcome to my blog

2009-04-22T14:12:00.002+01:00

This is where I will be posting photos and more in depth news about my travels, as and when I have access to the internet. Please follow me on twitter (updated from my mobile phone) for more regular updates.