We do not condone violence.

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.....

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

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.

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.

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

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

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%

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

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

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.

A note:

It's almost five years since I wrote the post below; some people loved it, others thought it disgusting, and after the passing of five years, I've become largely indifferent to it. I regret the infamy it earned me, but must admit to being more embarrassed at the clumsiness and tone of the writing, rather than the core of the sentiments expressed. I wrote the post some days after my return, still in a state of shock at the sudden transition from life on the road, back to the city of London. I wouldn't plead any sort of temporary insanity, but it'd be wrong to suggest I wasn't affected by the change.

In 2009 I was typified as an 'angry, young man'. In 2014, I'm still angry at lots of things, though more calmly, and with any luck more productively, too. 

I also still believe that the 23 year olds of the world should be angry, and often furious, at many unfairnesses in the world they will inherit. Where they are not, the world will be a poorer place for it.

My book, Life Cycles, is published on June 2nd 2014. You can order it anywhere online, but I'd be happiest if you bought it from a book shop.

I leave this post untouched, however much I'd like to delete it, and in order to allow others make up their own minds. I think Life Cycles a far better reflection on the ride itself, and the reasons for which I once broke a record for a circumnavigation by bicycle.

All the best

Julian Sayarer

April 2014

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 my hometown, 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.







Life Cycles is released on June 2nd 2014

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...

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.