The dumbest guys in the room want a word with you

In case you've missed the obscure rustlings in the Tory undergrowth, there's a new and only fitfully literate manifesto out from the Forty Group. These are the forty Tories in the most marginal seats - the mediocrities not expected to win last time and destined for a watery grave in 2015 barring the government giving us all everlasting-life pills and flying cars between now and then.

It's a fascinating read. It's the product of people who appear to have been imprisoned in the basement of a think-tank since the Suez Crisis. Everything has passed them by: racial equality, the EU, the crashes of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, sexual liberation and equality, the end of Empire: the lot. It's like the company directors of Barnes' satirical England, England, or the near-future Tory government of McEwan's A Child In Time: fuelled by paranoia and sexual damage. All you need to heal the country is to hand it over to Big Business and sterilise the poor and the young. You think I'm joking? Read on…

Needless to say, my egregious, poisonous, dishonest and vacuous MP Mr Paul Uppal is one of the conspirators, never having met a short-sighted, reactionary and revanchist idea he hasn't liked. Not that he contributed any of the ideas, of course: his grey matter is too busy inventing evidence for Parliamentary speeches. One of life's sidekicks, our Uppal. He's the Richard Hammond to the government's Clarkson: he enjoys the cruelty but doesn't have the imagination or wit to do anything more than cheer it on.

So let's have a look at these intellectual adventurers' solutions to the country's ills:

1. “Excessive regulation is the biggest brake on our business
expansion."

This sets the tone for the entire document. The innocuous tone of this assertion belies a total absence of fact (who says? one-third of Chambers of Commerce survey respondents: not exactly clinching), and in particular ignores the biggest credit crunch and recession since the Weimar Republic, which I would consider a greater drag on business than 'excessive regulation'. This is simply imported American small-state ideology unconvincingly dressed up as fact. Surely nobody could object to 'excessive' regulation? But what do they mean by 'excessive' and 'regulation'? Easy: they're free-market ideologues (in theory: Uppal wants tax breaks for commercial landlords like, er, him). To them, all 'regulation' is excessive. And what they mean by 'regulation' is things like pollution restrictions, the minimum wage, unfair dismissal protection, the right to organise, to be protected from sexual or racial harassment, to a working life that takes into account family needs. It also – explicitly in this manifesto – means exempting small companies from contributing to employees' pensions. The result? Either they starve or the costs are passed on to the state.

What these people want is the capitalist dystopia of Back to the Future II before Marty goes back and saves the day from Biff Tannen. The problem with the Forty Group is that given a choice between Democracy and the Triumph of the Market, they plump for the market every time – because they've benefited from both markets and (though they'd deny it) democracy and the state. The experiences of those they're meant to represent are far less important than the Hayek and Pinochet they cream over in private. The Market is what needs appeasing: not the humans for whom (they forget) politics serves.

Big idea No 2 is 'more female entrepreneurs'. And celebrating the ones we have. Not exactly a policy, and again, it leaves unquestioned the notion of entrepreneurship, which is far less economically important than the discourse around it suggests. All 60 million of us can't be entrepreneurs, nor can all 30 million women. The glaring absence of any actual ideas suggests that 'women' as a concept are fairly alien to the authors and not at all a priority.

Moving on to number 3, we discover that discredited, dystopian, Ballardian notion of handing over Town Centres to private businesses, neatly ensuring that Consumers (we're no longer citizens) aren't impeded by unproductive drones: people taking the air, holding protests, chatting or otherwise subverting the Business of Business. The dreaded Portas is invoked in the course of a plea to turn over our towns to cars and shopkeepers: physically and legally. It's a bleak vision but a profitable one for someone who'd directly profit from this policy.

The next bit wounds me deeply:

“Universities offer a perfect environment for fledging businesses.”

Actually, universities offer a perfect environment for critiquing and comprehending the status quo, including capitalism. The problem is that these guys are spiritually poor: like Gradgrind, they can't see further than the balance sheet (and certainly don't want to address capitalism's manifest failures: another advantage of ignoring recent history).

The plot here is to make universities become profit centres, mini-industrial estates, the butlers of businesses, entirely subservient to the (often short-sighted) demands of businesses, which would – surprise – get another tax break. In case you've forgotten, universities are about new ideas and not simply reinforcing the prejudices of the hegemony (which is why Mr Gove hates us so much).

No. 5 proposes encouraging more people to start their own business. Hard to object, though it's marginal at best: most people work in, and want to work in, stable established businesses. The meat of the idea, if we're being kind, is to suffuse schooling and higher education with capitalist propaganda: this isn't policy, it's a naked attempt to turn Britons into a nation of alienated privateers, a programme already advanced by the wholesale abandonment of secondary education to the tender mercies of the very shady businessmen currently 'sponsoring' academies. The result will be a country of obedient conformists in a nation safe for exploiters, polluters and rent-seekers.  

The same is true of the next section: elevating 'workplace skills' rather than merely 'intellectual skills'. Presumably this will include Advanced Loyalty, Total Submission and Shutting Up. Then we're back to free-market capitalists' demands for more taxpayers' money. The State is evil, unless it's bankrolling these Tories' friends:

A state-backed Enterprise Bank could be a permanent solution to the lending gap and would lend to any company

The next section continues the theme: it namechecks Germany's industrial success without mentioning the employee-union-owner structure. Instead, industrial success depends (brace yourself) on handing over the State to business:

More must be done to address politicians’ knowledge gap of industry through better cooperation and collaboration with industry itself. This means having those who have served in the sector taking more prominent roles in the relevant departments of BIS and the Treasury and more policies that actively promote manufacturing. 

This is a tacit admittance that these politicians are anti-politics. They don't negotiate the competing requirements of the people: they just want to hand the state over to their mates. They also don't want to address economic matters. To them, manufacturing is held back by whinging lefties, not macro-economic factors. Once we 'free' children to stitch footballs, we'll all get rich. And once we unblock those outflow pipes:

Policies that are aimed at tackling climate change have their heart in the right place but are stifling industry.

They also want us to fly everywhere too.

The global trade section is particularly backward looking, to the League of Empire Loyalists. Instead of trading with those perfidious Europeans, the UK should demand that those disloyal Commonwealth johnnies should show some gratitude and shovel their dinero Britain's way. You know Godwin's Law? That the first person to mention the Nazis in pursuit of an argument, has lost. Voila:

World War Two demonstrated the extent to which we need countries like Australia and New Zealand to overcome obstacles and challenges, and in present times the Commonwealth could provide the key to our part in the global economic recovery… Traditional links should be at the forefront of any anti-trade barrier argument and there is nothing wrong with playing on old sympathies

And then we get to another nasty little surprise: the 'logistics friendly' government, i.e. one which encourages more and bigger lorries onto the road while ignoring mass transit such as rail. Less a policy, more a present for their mates. But this is just a warmup for the real nastiness: energy policy. Dig, drill, burn and rape with no regard for environmentalism – particularly fracking. The Big Idea is in fact Deny and Defer.

This gas should be used to replace coal and oil in our power stations, producing a reduction in our carbon emissions on an order of magnitude greater than anything achieved to date by wind or solar.

This is offensively dishonest: shale gas is a fossil fuel. It's better than coal, but there's no way on earth it'll be used as a temporary stopgap on the way to a carbon-free future. It's just a greedy, selfish fuck-you to our descendants. The only think climate change is good for is making money: the unspoken assumption is that it's all a big hoax:

let the market take its course. The plethora of artificial incentives, such as feed in tariffs and renewables obligations, should be phased out…

Though they are deeply interested in geothermal energy, which I had no idea was or could be a major player in UK generation. Presumably one of their donors has some hot water going cold without subsidy.

But we need to give projects like this greater government support.

To help geothermal companies attract private investment we need to create the right financial incentives using the Strike Price and the Renewable Heat Incentive. At the moment less technologically proven and cost effective renewable energy technologies receive larger incentives. 

But now we're getting close to these guys' hearts. Having spent an awful lot of our imaginary money subsidising their mates' businesses, they address tax. And guess what? They're not keen. The magic word here is 'simplification', by which they mean 'less tax for corporations and the rich'. But they don't say so. Embarrassingly, the policy doesn't have a single word to say about income tax, corporation tax, artificial vehicles, off-shoring, evasion or avoidance. Instead, they propose that public servants' tax returns be made public. And that's it.

But when we turn to property, we're reminded strongly that this is the manifesto of the 1%. The pressing issue is apparently too much taxation on property sales. Not the massive gap between salaries and property prices. Instead, they want to reinstate the Property Madness which condemned most of to mouldy flats and the extortion practiced by landlords like Uppal.

The housing market is in need of a tax neutral nudge in the right direction to make it more buoyant and fair. 

Ah yes, the 'nudge theory'. Who needs to bother the populus's pretty little heads with ideas? And what to we onlookers get as a reward for tolerating gimcrack developments thrown up willy-nilly?

Maybe a playground for local children, maybe the renovation of the Parish Hall. The sums will be minor

Even the most naked attacks on our collective decisions are dressed spuriously in the language of liberation. Everything our local authorities do, it's assumed, is repressive and incompetent. We busy people are to be freed… but only to choose a different corporate interest:

the localism act introduced a ‘community right to challenge’ clause which gives community and voluntary groups a ‘right’ to challenge a local authority for the services they provide.
The clause is limited in that it merely provides for a local authority to trigger a procurement process which may mean that the challenging group is not successful in being commissioned to provide the service.
There is a need to create much more diversity of provision at the local level which harnesses the expertise, skill and knowledge of a the community and voluntary sector. 

Yes, it's illiterate, but you have to look at the discourse as well as the typing. Elected local government = Stalinist Monster. 'Diversity of provision' sounds lovely.

Local groups should also be encouraged and similarly incentivised to challenge as consortia which would enable a consortia of local groups the ability to challenge for a range of services. For example a consortia of local groups currently providing youth services outside of that which is provided by the local authority could come together to put in a joint bid for the whole of a local authorities youth provision. Local authorities should actively encourage and facilitate these local consortia.

It took me a while to get the hang of this illiterate garbage, but I think what they're really saying is this:

We all like diversity. But really it means public services sold off to offshore, tax-evading, profit-increasing, service-reducing, unaccountable, wage-lowering exploiters.

Only they think these are positive terms.

You can have a small prize if you can explain this sentence:

we need to write the independence of local government into our unwritten constitutional arrangements.

Er…how?

Apparently Local Government is going to be freed from the Tyranny of Central Government through establishing a Decentralisation Committee. Excellent. Where's it going to be located? 10 Downing Street! Who's going to head it? The Prime Minister. Glad that's clear.

Another example of the group's faux niceness is the section on Community Hospitals. They're for them, and opposed to the centralisation of specialities in mega-hospitals. Medical madness, of course: you want your child's heart surgery done by a doctor who does these ops every day, not one who gets one every few years. But there are no votes in closing down St. Teacosy's down the road. Perhaps, though, they have in mind the Cuban polyclinic initiatives, which are hugely successful.

Er, no. They just want to close the NHS:

Community hospitals also need to be freed from the central control of the NHS. They should be free to own their own buildings and service users and employees should be encouraged to develop new ownership models based on mutual, cooperative or social enterprise models where that would maintain or enhance existing community services. 

But more positively, their plan for transforming Britain – in the depths of a serious recession, mass unemployment, failing services, overworked hospitals, environmental apocalypse etc – come in Idea Number 30: Cleaner Beaches. You want detail? They've got detail! They're going to test the water a few times a year rather than just in the summer. Seriously, these Tory kids are blowing my mind with their wacky, zany ideas!

Is all this affecting your mental health? Don't fret: they've a policy idea to treat your aching brainpan! You'll never guess what it is…

GPs should to be encouraged to look beyond traditional approaches whether through drugs or short term psychological therapies so that patients do have a viable range of choices appropriate to their condition. Commissioning should be opened up to allow therapists operating in private practice, in longer term therapies, to be able to bid for services within the NHS. 

So that's a) homeopathy on the state and b) more privatisation. 

I feel better already.

And in case you're thinking 'at least they care about my children's mental health even if they're deluded about the solution, let's see why they want you to get better:

Increased levels of achievement, education and productivity on an individual level that will translate to an increased ability to contribute to the state. 

They don't care why you're ill. Causes are irrelevant. They just want you back up that chimney and paying your taxes (not you, Mr Vodafone, you're excused) because someone's got to subsidise those corporate taxes and let's face it: you'd have to be mad to go along with this stuff.

But some citizens are Just Not Playing The Game, and Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us. The bankers? Guess again. Corrupt MPs? Nope. News International? Keep trying. Google, Starbucks, Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail? No, no no and no. It should be obvious.

Teenage mothers. 

If it wasn't for those greedy bastards, we'd all be living in Easy Street right now. The banks would be solvent, the job centres empty, the Volvos full and the kiddies dancing round maypoles spontaneously erected from Walthamstow to Moss Side.

Take access to housing benefit, for example. 16-17 year olds are currently entitled to claim housing benefit if they “have a good reason for not living at home.” Some teenagers may view this, quite incorrectly, as an automatic right to free housing, encouraging them to have a child. 

Evidence? Oh really, what planet's political discourse have you been engaged with recently? We all know teenage mums have caused a) the credit crunch b) SARS c) 9/11 d) Charles Saatchi's violent behaviour d) Jimmy Savile and e) the decline of Channel 4's credibility, to name just a few of their crimes against humanity. So what if there's no evidence? Mr Duncan Smith made it very clear in his radio interview yesterday: evidence schmevidence, it's what he believes that matters.

All benefits to teenage mothers should be made on the condition of them living with their parents or in supervised hostel accommodation

So what if some of this very tiny number of people are fleeing abusive and neglectful homes? They need punishment. They might be old enough to join the army, kill people, be killed and pay taxes, but the female youngsters are still the property of their parents. If they're not forced back into the home with their little one, or locked up in a Home For Shamefully Disgusting Incontinent Little Slappers Who Are No Better Than They Ought To Be and taught to Know Their Places, how are they ever going to learn that female abstinence unless within the boundaries of a middle-class heterosexual official marriage is the cornerstone of Western Civilisation. Or more simply, ladies of a teenage persuasion: keep your legs crossed or the terrorists win. And the fathers? No mention. Presumably they're just 'sowing their wild oats'. Boys will be boys!

Note the sheer, despicable cowardice here:

The public perception of these policies adds to the general view that many teenagers are having children to attain benefits and subsidised housing, creating a great deal of resentment and unease. 

There's no attempt to ascertain any facts. Instead, they're nakedly endorsing 'the general view', 'resentment and unease' generated by… well, by them and their friends at the Mail.

Teenagers will be left in no doubt that teenage motherhood will not lead to an automatic right to subsidised housing and other benefits, while the general public can be assured that a teenager’s motivations for having a child are not related to housing access. 

They've found a victim, the lynch mob's waiting and these Tory scumbags are knotting the nooses for a very profitable hanging. And people wonder why they make me angry.

And then it gets really sinister. Under the guise of 'contraception efficiency', these Tories have decided that abortions have got to go. Especially for women who've had more than one. Yes, they're extended CCTV and GCHQ's activities to the final frontier: the uterus.

The Government should, for example, consider the merits of allowing agencies to check in with women post abortion, ensuring that they are continuing to use contraception provided to them.

Can you imagine the conditions and content of these 'checks'? Present yourself at the DSS for a Paupers' Duff-Upping Prevention Swab? Perhaps an RFID tab on your pill box. Or simply a two-way TV screen through which the Leader (in this case, Jeremy Hunt) conducts a uterine inspection before work on Monday morning. Free membership of the Primrose League for any C2DE who volunteers for sterilisation!

Marriage, of course, is key. What's stopping people having a proper (i.e. religious) marriage? The 1753 Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage, which bans religious marriages in any random location. Spot on, Tories! That's why marriages have been declining. And not a widespread perception that it's not appropriate for the range of sexual and romantic dispositions now available. Thank heavens you've got to the root of the matter.

But what if some feckless oiks slip through the net, have some kids, and can't make them go to school for their daily class in (Significant Dates in Conservative Party) History? Can't pay the fine?

fines should be taken directly from child benefit payments… It might just give the most dysfunctional family the incentive to get their child to school.

Starve them into submission. That's the ticket! It's not as if truancy and other social problems are at all complicated. It's the poor kids who are to blame:

Pupils on free school meals are around three times more likely to play truant than their counterparts. 

I'm too depressed even to bother presenting you with Idea 37: male role models in schools. Apparently all engineers, fire-fighters and soldiers are men. And we should be getting trained killers into school to give the boys something to which to aspire. 

Still, at least they're tackling the Timebomb of Obesity. Which could be very messy if we don't defuse it. But don't worry, it's easy to fix. Just abolish the 'risk-averse culture' and it'll all be fine. Anybody who mentions the pervasiveness of fat-laden food and the massive sell-offs of school playing fields will be sent to the Coca-Cola-sponsored naughty step.

And now we're back to education. One of the Forty, Paul Uppal, has a large university in his constituency. A university which finds itself repeatedly victimised by a government determined to restrict funding, research and high-achieving students to a small band of élite universities. A university which is doing its best to make ends meet by providing a decent education to overseas students. 

What does Paul want to do about this state of affairs? 

The permanent cap on non-EU workers has been a success and should now be extended to include some of our universities. We must be unashamed in our policy of only wanting to attract the very brightest and best students to come to the UK and so our top universities would be allowed to continue to enrol all students on an unlimited basis as they do now. 

That's right! He wants to deport all our non-EU students. They didn't get in to Oxford or Cambridge, so they must be thick (because obviously all universities offer the same courses) and they're just scrounging, even if they do pay massive fees which subsidise the EU students. For Christ's sake. 

And there we have it. Forty fag-packet ideas to keep the UKIP wolf from the Tory door. A rag-bag of cruelty, prejudice, hysteria, pandering, reaction, hypocrisy, bare-faced lies, omissions, distortions and fantasies. Many of them are dignified by the name 'idea': they're mere wisps, dispersed on the lightest intellectual breeze. All concerned should be ashamed and embarrassed. 

If I was Labour, I'd buy a million copies and send them to every household in these MPs' marginal constituencies. IF you thought Hunt et al. are vapid, this lot need the attentions of a mortician. Certainly there's no detectable cerebral activity. They're dead men (and 8 women) walking. If this is the best the Conservative Party can do, they're history. Let's make sure. 

I must be 'owling mad

This particular Monday is more painful than most: I celebrated my 38th birthday yesterday by pretending I was still young and fit enough to don four layers of protective clothing (one of them made of metal) and go toe-to-toe in the relentless searing heat with a succession of lean, hungry youngsters eager for glory in the Much Wenlock Olympian Games fencing event. The Games have been running since 1850, and were one of the inspirations for the upstart international event: Pierre de Coubertin visited Wenlock Games to see what was possible. It's a brilliant mix of serious events (triathlon, fencing) and fun ones: bean-bag throwing and the Vintage Bicycle Race, spread over the beautiful Shropshire countryside.

I've tried to compete in the fencing every year, though last year's London Olympics and a succession of weddings on this weekend have sometimes interrupted my attendance. I turn up the day before and help set up the event, stay with friends and drink cold beers (essential to any champion's training regime), then lose badly the next day. This time I stayed with my coaches' neighbour in her rambling, comfortable, lovely country house. Books of the kind I work with everywhere, and decor/furnishing from the age before disposable fashion. It was like the country house in The Box of Delights or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: quirky, unpredictable, surprising and loved. And so quiet: woken by the humming of bees.

This time wasn't too bad. A mediocre showing in the poles (not helped by some refereeing slips) placed me 17th, then I miraculously beat a higher-ranked fencer in the knock-out stages, largely by bullying him rather than through pure skill. My reward was meeting the No. 1 seed, a humourless but talented young man. He beat me - handsomely - but I made him work seriously hard for it, which for me is a very satisfying result. After that, I refereed the kids' team matches (so young, so energetic, so much more ability than I'll every have) and went home exhausted, aching everywhere, and bearing an Olympian Games jug and a bottle of wine. Oh, and a birthday card from all my fencing chums.

The best thing was that my friend Matthew, who has a terminal cancer, came up for the weekend to spend it amongst all his oldest friends in the fencing world - sharing a convivial dinner, getting stuck in to the habitual gossip and (most characteristically of all) wittily abusing my fencing, win or lose.

A couple of days before, I actually took an afternoon off (the power kept going down at work so I didn't miss much). My mother and I visited the Saddest Zoo In The World, then went for a random drive and a pub dinner. The perfect day. The Zoo is really an animal sanctuary which takes in abandoned and unsuitable pets: there's a wolf, some lemurs, raccoons, wild cats and loads of owls and other birds of prey.

Here are a few of my favourite shots (click to enlarge): the rest are here.

Harrier hawk?

I feel like this when I'm hunting plagiarists

The academic spots the crumb of funding, just out of reach

Self-portrait in an owl's eye

'A Man of Mystery and Strength'. No, really!

Morning all. It's been a morning of books for me - some good, some, well, interesting. The good books that have turned up in the post are two more Library of Wales reprints, Brenda Chamberlain's The Water-castle and WH Davies' The Autobiography of a Supertramp. I read Davies' book when I was a teenager and remember only being slightly bored but that might be because I was ill in bed and probably not quite mature enough for Davies' tale of destitution in Britain and the US. At that time I was reading a lot of SF (still am) which infuriated my parents, and any book on which I could get my hands. Having 4 sisters amongst the six siblings, this meant that I was way too familiar with the worlds of Malory Towers and other girl-oriented material. So I'm quite looking forward to having another go at WH.

Chamberlain's novel is a classic of that post-war genre, 'literary fiction'. Perhaps 'literary fiction' is wrong: quite a lot of it wasn't literary as in concerning literature, just wordy It's still going, but the readership is tiny and for me it reeks of smugness and self-regard, founded not in anything positive, but in a rejection of genre. This isn't fair, but it's because I read a lot of Iris Murdoch in my twenties. Every novel stuffed with indistinguishable upper-middle-class types undergoing existential crises over the sherry bottle or bridge table, or swapping Oxbridge High Table gossip as though it mattered. There's a good deal of admirable technique and thought, but there's very little interest in the world outside a very narrow social sphere.

Chamberlain's a bit different: her canvas was the wider world and social change, though I do worry that a novel about the travails of a Welsh artist and poet (they say 'write about what you know') travelling Europe with her French husband to meet her aristocratic German ex-lover is going to be a mite insular. That said, Chamberlain's an unjustly neglected stylist, so there's going to be a great deal of pleasure in immersing myself in her language and structure. She was an artist, printer and poet of considerable talent and it's about time she was read again.

The 'interesting' book I was alerted to is a 'paranormal romance' starring a feisty female half-banshee American 'tec and her sexy, smouldering counterpart from the vampire world. Said sexy, smouldering etc. amusingly shares my own meatspace forename and surname, which is pretty rare outside Ireland. Obviously I can't direct you to this work of art as my cover would be blown (though it would take about 0.3 seconds for you to find the text), but suffice to say that the fans are pretty damn enamoured of my fictional doppelgänger:

While the killer eludes her, she does discover handsome Plashing Vole, an investigative counterpart from the enigmatic Otherworlder Enforcement Agency. Mac typically runs her investigations fast and hard, but with Plashing at her side, she’s running this one “hot” as well. But Plashing knows more than he’s letting on—something that could shatter their blazing romance and add Mac to the killer’s growing body count…

And he's just like me:

A man—or something that looked like one anyway—sat at the oak table. He was reading a book. He set the book down and smiled at me. It was one heck of a smile on one heck of a face. A strong jaw covered in five o’clock shadow, dark eyes, and a head of messy black hair set on a very fit, long body.

“Ah, Kiera McLoughlin, I presume?” I thought I detected a slight Irish lilt to his voice, but if he had an accent, it was subtle.

And he runs his literature classes in the same way:

His smile turned into a full-on flirtatious grin. “Why don’t you put your gun away so we can talk? About your interesting taste in books, perhaps.”

I pushed down the temptation to glance at Plashing. Something about the man drew my gaze and made me very aware of how much time had passed since my last date.

Purely for egotistical purposes, I'd be tempted to buy a copy, but this literary feat is only available as an e-book and frankly I can't be bothered. If it's not worth chopping trees down for, it's not worth peering at a tiny screen for. But the fans like it (or me):

Vole was hot and charming

And the hero...well...I loved him from the beginning. The charming grin. The dark hair and blue eyes. His concern for Mac's well being. Everything about him enticed me. Plashing is a man of mystery and strength--two of my favorite things. Oh, and he's uber hot in bed. Love that.

Anyway, after all that excitement I must cool down with a solid bout of re-sit marking. It's not much fun this year, I can tell you.

A marker's cry for help.

The relentless searing heat is not conducive to the calm, dispassionate and rational state of mind required to fairly mark (screw you, split infinitive weirdos) re-submitted essays by students who failed the first time round.

And yet here we are and it's not going well. Some have actually managed to perform worse. Others have replaced poor but original work with plagiarised stuff.

For instance: if you're going to plonk in a beautifully modulated, sophisticated sentence amidst standard-to-poor first year work, expect me to Google it. What do you think I'm going to do if I find that the source is Plagiarist.com? What should you have learned from that site's title? For Christ's sake, students, try a little bit harder even at cheating. And while we're at it, if you continuously get the books' titles and protagonists' names wrong, you're not going to thrive.

Oh dear. I am getting a little tetchy. It's either time for a little lie-down or time for another meeting, the second of the day. And some calming music. Here's some Klaus Wunderlich.



I have quite a lot of Wunderlich albums on vinyl. Not in any spirit of postmodern irony. I just like Hammond organs and Klaus Wunderlich. They all cost about 10p in charity shops.

In other music news, I've just bought the 80s Indie compilation Scared To Get Happy. I've already got about half the tracks on the 5 CDs, and I'm quite surprised at the absence of certain bands, like The Field Mice, but it's good fun. It's weird looking across the office to see one of the featured musicians working away: I share a room with The Nightingales' guitarist. Some of the liner notes describe other bands as 'like The Nightingales crossed with X' and I laugh and ask Alan what he reckons. He usually laughs scornfully but it must be weird to be a critical influence on people. Especially a critical influence who gets no royalties!

The other intriguing LP I bought this week is Unreal, by Hebronix, and produced by Neil Hagerty of much-missed Royal Trux, whom Allmusic describe as a 'dissonant junkie nightmare'. It turns out that Hebronix is actually Daniel Blumberg of defunct indie-popsters Yuck. Which surprised me because I saw Hebronix peform recently, supporting Low. As I said at the time, it felt like watching someone having a nervous breakdown with gentle musical accompaniment. I'd have bet serious money that the man on stage had never performed to anyone other than his hamster before, so painfully withdrawn was he. And now it turns out he's a professional musician and the album's been reviewed in all the hip mags.

Is it any good? Yes. It's shoegaze with a bit of laudanum-infused pop. It's interior without being self-regarding or solipsistic, and really rather lovely.



OK. I'm in a slightly more serene state of mind now. Time to get back to the marking.

Droit de seigneur

This is an 'interesting' legal judgement which illustrates the knots tied in the messy and unwritten British constitutional settlement. You got rid of the executive monarchy with a Civil War (well done, English yokels), allowing (sadly, in my view) the re-establishment of a constitutional monarchy on the strict understanding – honoured far more in the breach than in the observance – that the royals would shut up, smile for the engraver and later paparazzi and keep their inbred noses out of government, in return for a string of castles, a massive pile of doubloons, deference, flummery and an unbelievable amount of snobbery. A pretty sweet deal, you'd think, though one might easily view it as a gilded cage for some very well-dressed monkeys.

The problem is that the royals are far from normal and some of them believe that they have a right to by-pass the institutions of democracy by pestering government. The state has a legal duty to consult them on any legislation that might affect them, which is pretty much everything: a duty kept secret until recently, because it's such an affront to democracy. Worse, Prince Charles appears to spend rather a lot of time writing angry letters in green ink to government ministers ('it really is appalling'). Being craven, snobbish and power-hungry, ministers from all parties make toe-curling comments about the privilege of receiving said missives, though I suspect their departments issue forth a collective groan whenever a fresh one arrives, replete with a miniature portrait of Mummy in the top right corner of the envelope (or more likely delivered by a flunkey in a tailcoat). But you can guarantee a minister reads and replies to these letters, unlike those we send: they go straight into the circular file that sits under every civil servant's desk.

It breaches the settlement that separated the symbolic power of monarchy from the executive authorities of government which issue de facto from election victories, though de jure from the monarchy. Like any Tory party moneybags, Prince Charles has a direct line to decision makers denied to the rest of us. We're not even allowed to see what he's writing about, despite the strong suspicion that we'll be on the receiving end of whatever conclusions are reached.

So the Guardian made a Freedom of Information request to view the letters. After much legal argument, the Information Tribunal ruled that we do have a right to know what's going on. The government promptly invoked a little-known law that trumps the Freedom of Information Act, a loophole which presumably means that the rule of law – and of a legitimately-established court – means nothing compared with the interests of the powerful. Just the same as when Tony Blair personally halted a police inquiry into British Aerospace bribery because it might upset the customers, Saudi Arabia.

Why are Chuck's letters exempt? Well, here we go down the logical rabbit-hole.

The attorney general said there was a risk that the prince would not be seen to be politically neutral by the public if the letters were published.

So it doesn't matter that Prince Charmless isn't politically neutral, so long as the fact is hidden. The government really believes that it would rather have the heir to the throne secretly lobbying for his pet beliefs (such as homeopathy and terrible architecture) than admit to the public that he bombards them with mad letters. Let's be clear: this is a formal attempt to delude the public.

"This risk will arise if, through these letters, the Prince of Wales was viewed by others as disagreeing with government policy. Any such perception would be seriously damaging to his role as future monarch because if he forfeits his position of political neutrality as heir to the throne, he cannot easily recover it when he is king," Grieve had said.

The government wants us to believe that the prince is 'politically neutral' even though they – and we – know that he isn't. It's all about the narrative, rather than the facts: Grieve's case is that even though the Prince frequently forfeits his neutrality, it's only bad if we oiks find out about it. The courts are being used as part of an elaborate and farcical exercise in make-believe, in which the needs of the population (those of us not protected by high walls, palaces, deference and capacious treasure chests) are entirely ignored.

Even the judges who ruled in the government's favour seem a bit baffled. First they agreed with Grieve:

On Tuesday, the lord chief justice, accompanied by Lord Justice Davis and Mr Justice Globe, dismissed the challenge, finding that Grieve had acted in the public interest in a "proper and rational way".

Which seems bonkers enough: apparently it's in the 'public interest' to retail a fiction to 'the public' about the heir to the throne's interference in government. What's next? Legislation to ban mean parents from doubting the existence of Santa and the Tooth Fairy in the presence of their children? I can see how it's in the Prince's interest to hide the evidence of his ill-informed and arrogant interference, and even in the government's interest to hide the extent to which they'll go to accommodate the demands of the unaccountable hereditary crown, but to describe this as 'in the public interest' demonstrates a hitherto unsuspected talent for satire on the part of the judiciary. 

But then the judges made an interesting observation:

"The possibility that a minister of the crown may lawfully override the decision of a superior court of record involves what appears to be a constitutional aberration," he said. "It is an understatement to describe the situation as unusual," he wrote, adding that barristers could find no equivalent in any other British law. "It is not quite a pernicious 'Henry VIII' clause, which enables a minister to override statute, but unconstrained it would have the same damaging effect on the rule of law."

But it's OK because there's a vague possibility of a court hearing an appeal over ministers single-handedly defying the law to protect those with most of the power, social capital and wealth already. There literally is one law for us, and one for the rulers.

Now run away and play, and don't worry your pretty little heads about what Charlie's whispering into the ears of our elected governments. You just keep tugging those forelocks and everything's going to be alright.  

The beauty of… Stoke?

I may be slightly guilty of exaggerating Stoke-on-Trent's reputation as an unmitigated urban hellhole, just by taking pictures like these. But there's beauty there too, such as at Trentham Gardens, formerly the seat of some posh exploitative aristocratic mine-owners, and now a private pleasure gardens complete with a 'Monkey Forest'. Spotting the occasional depressed-looking simian huddled up against the fence, I find it hard to remember which is the most miserable.

But yesterday I took a stroll in the relentless searing heat and took pretty pictures: of flowers and trees and herons. See them all here, or click to enlarge these favourites.

A trout in the Trent!

Terrapins

Gosling feeding

Self-portrait

Turned out nice again!

Those of you with any semblance at all will recognise my title as one of George Formby's catchphrases. I don't need any excuse to quote George, a man whom I deeply admire (his wife Beryl too: anyone who tells Malan, the architect of apartheid to 'piss off' because he is a 'horrible little man' deserves our cheers). But it's especially relevant this week because not only has it turned out nice again – though far too hot for me – but because I visited Formby this weekend. George wasn't actually from there, but his music-hall star father adopted the town's name for his stage act, and lots of George's songs are about saucy goings-on in places like Formby and Blackpool. (It also turned out nice because Dan Martin rode a superb race to win Ireland's first Tour de France stage since Sean Kelly in 1992). Murray who?



Formby itself is like all the Mersey/Lancashire towns: half classic seaside fun, half UKIP-loving retirement town. The beaches are enormous, the dunes high and the red squirrels cavort in the pines. But Formby has something special: lots of Anthony Gormley statues dotted about the beach and immersed in the waves. They're all casts of Gormley's naked body (George would have approved: half his songs are about being spotted naked, or spying on other naked people) in the same pose, but they've aged differently depending on whether the sea or the wind has got to them, and what the locals have done. On their own, it's like a slightly creepy suicide cult. They all stare out to sea, perhaps watching the subaquatic statues' last moments, or admiring the wind farm built subsequently. Gulls perch (and poo) on them; people have painted and dressed them. Lichen festoons them and rust has pitted them, so that they're now individual works of art as well as collective. I like them as statuary and I like the way people have interacted them: giggling at the cast-iron penis, adding a bow tie, having their photos taken.

Here are a few pictures I took (click to enlarge): the rest are here.

I like the effect over-exposure gives here

With this one, I saturated and vignetted to give the effect of using lurid Velvia film like it's 1976

James Bond meets Iron Man

Spotted the heron?

Top quality graffiti: a donkey demanding more ketamine (which was originally an equine drug)

What DO you do between May and October?

'What do you do with those long holidays?' is a question asked by friends, family and even our students, every year. If I had £1 for every time this or similar comments were sent my way, I'd go off on a long holiday for real.

But I don't. Because what we really do is:

• Write as many of next year's lectures as we can (no, we don't make them up on the spot. Not always. The moving bits on Powerpoint and Keynote are quite tricky). 
• Re-read the primary texts. Shamefully realise you didn't get it first time round. 
• Look for new and exciting texts. Contemplate whether students are more or less likely to read them.
• Read critical work in the field to keep up. Or to sharpen one's sense of worthlessness. 
• Do some research and/or academic writing. This mostly involves procrastination, frustration, shame and self-loathing. But then, 'being asleep' is the only thing I do which doesn't involve procrastination, frustration, shame and self-loathing. 
• Go to conferences to test ideas (ours and other academics'). Try to beat your current record of not speaking to anyone at a conference for three entire days. 
• Keep meeting MA and PhD students who don't get holidays. 
• Tidy my desk (this takes quite a long time, and comes under the heading 'Self-managed Research and Scholarly Activity). This involves taking several short courses on Stress Management and Handling Bulky Objects. Plus some rudimentary working knowledge of fungal cultures.  
• Pointlessly drooling over the Moulton website and wondering how many colleagues I'd have to push down the stairs before I got promoted high enough to spend that much on a bike without noticing (currently: I'd have to be a Deputy VC at a minimum)
• Fill in forms detailing Self-Managed Research and Scholarly Activity.
• Try to work out how colleagues' Workload Allocation numbers came out at X and mine came out at Y. 
• Meet the Business Development Unit and KTP staff to sit there dumbfounded while they ask you how you can 'monetise' your friends, 'contacts' and activity. I tell them that I sell my labour to the university which extracts surplus value by charging fees to students. Apparently this is called Not Entering Into The Spirit Of Things. 
• Write to Print Services, three administrators, a Dean, an Associate Dean and two senior colleagues in search of a scanner or administrator help that will allow me to upload my colleagues' REF output to the HEFCE site. Much of this activity is, fittingly, conducted on Kafka's birthday. 
• Contact all the people we'd like to give visiting lectures. This is the easy part: they all say yes even when I explain that the only payment will be in the form of Saag Aloo. Negotiating with Rooming while avoiding a Referral to some other department which specialises in Making Things Difficult is the hard part. 
• Attend the Board of Governors meeting. Yes, I'm now a governor. It's fascinating but I'm not sure I'll get the hang of it before my term of office is over. On the bright side, I may manage to crash the university before then too. 
• Union casework. Once the constant activity of teaching stops, all the stress is unbottled and people ask for support. If they're very unlucky, they get me ('You think you've got problems…?').
• Staring at the unread book piles (3 office bookcases, 4 bookcases at home) then checking actuarial websites to see whether I'll live long enough to read them. Then wondering whether I've accidentally bought anything rare enough to substitute for the pension contributions I didn't make in my 20s. (I haven't). 
• Going to the canteen to play Guess The Vegetable.
• Occasionally check in on the tumbleweed blowing about my rarely-updated blog, Plashing Vole. 
• Go for training meetings to organise the UK School Games (Sheffield, September: plenty of tickets available). Plus the county and regional fencing committee meetings. 
• Attend committees. They don't stop for summer. They expand into the teaching space. 
• Attend Clearing training. Do Clearing, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.. This isn't until mid-August. You get a free lollipop and one-to-one tuition for every 10 UCAS points. And valet service on your car during lectures. 
• Obsessively follow the Tour de France. Acquire technical terminology ('he's off the back of the bus and will be in the broom wagon if he doesn't up his cadence') which will vanish by August 1st.
• Write references for students. Some will be a pleasure. Others involve looking up said applicant, checking the photograph and wondering whether you've ever met. 
• Playing odd music loudly on the computer. My office friends are usually tolerant of my choices, but summer's great because they're never here. Something about 'having a life'?
• Coping with summer heat by flicking through the snowstorm photos I took… in late March!
• Advise re-sitting students that introducing new primary texts into a failed dissertation 3 days before the re-sit due date is probably not a good idea. 
• Marking resits and deferred work. I've just read a superb dissertation, on cultural theory of domestic space. One page cites both Lemony Snicket and Heidegger. Bolder than I ever was at undergraduate level. 
• Read all the books I've allowed people to believe I'm already familiar with. 
• Finally do some ironing and work out what exactly is living at the bottom of the sink. 
• Clean the office mugs. Preferably with the aid of UV lights and one of those boxes with sleeves/gloves they use to handle radioactive material. 
• Throw away those 2003 second-year essays currently hibernating under the desk. 
• Fix the bike so that you can think guiltily about going out for a ride rather than dismiss the notion safe in the knowledge that it needs some maintenance first.
• Update the weakly-humorous satirical postcards and quotes posted on my office door in a laughable attempt to differentiate myself from my fellow shaved monkeys.
• Answer emails from family, friends and students explaining that no, just because teaching has stopped, we aren't having a massive holiday and can't 'get a last-minute flight to Ibiza this afternoon'.  

OK, so it beats most people's jobs. But you've got to admit: it's not lazing by the pool laughing at the rest of the world as it labours! By the end of summer, I'll need a little rest.

Democracy, Army Style

So the Egyptian military has overthrown the democratically-elected government of Mohammed Morsi, arrested the President and many of his senior supporters, suspended the constitution and taken control of the state, supposedly in response to the cries of the people whose revolution has been betrayed by the government.

I guess this is what counts as complicated. Morsi's government was democratically elected, but wasn't behaving in a particularly democratic way, if like me you believe that democracy is more than elections allowing the majority to impose its will on minorities. It's true, too, that the Morsi government was very keen on locking up journalists and very poor at fixing the economy. One of its lesser-remarked failures, however, was its total refusal to deal with the army's massive economic role: it apparently controls at least 15% of the economy through a network of businesses, and certainly wasn't going to countenance the suggestion that armies are the servants of the people embodied in the state.

The other problem with the Egyptian army is that it's a creation and client not of the Egyptian people, but of the United States, which provides it with massive amounts of money and materiel. As usual, the Western powers talk a lot about democracy but never, ever, mean it, particularly with regard to the Arab and Eastern worlds. What the West wanted in years gone by was anti-communist dictatorships which kept the oil flowing to the West and stopped the Arab man in the street from declaring all-out war on Israel. The anti-communist bit has been dropped but the rest remains central to global realpolitik. In pursuit of these aims, the democratic impulses of the East, the rights of women, religious minorities and ethnic minorities have been deliberately ignored. Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi (sometimes), Assad and many others were the beneficiaries of a policy which traded human rights for geopolitical aims. I remember Tony Blair making a stirring speech about bringing democracy to the East, as part of the build-up to war. So I wrote to my MP asking when we started bombing Saudi Arabia, which had a far worse human rights and democratic record than Iraq (it still does). The reply was a contemptuous brush-off.

So anyway, my feeling is that the Western states are very happy to see this coup. They'll have advised the Egyptian army to employ some rudimentary PR: a few populist gestures here and there, some journalists released, some bread subsidies, perhaps unmask a few convenient Islamist Terrorist Plots so it looks like the aims of the Egyptian street and that of the army are aligned, but the shine will tarnish pretty quickly. The army doesn't want democracy for the same reasons as the West: it assumes that Egyptians are religious zealots, and it doesn't want to destabilise the cosy global order, or lose its privileges.

So I think the people of Egypt are deluded if they see an army coup as a necessary stage in the pursuit of democracy. Morsi was a bad president but he wasn't a dictator. The demonstrators should sup with a very long spoon: supporting a coup against someone you don't like tacitly authorises the next coup, which might be against someone you do like.

Ask yourself this: how many times have military coups lead to democratic governments? I can think of very few indeed, though I'm hoping that you can provide some more. The oldest example is one that didn't really happen. In the aftermath of what's erroneously called the English Civil War, the Army began to feel that the Parliamentary leadership wasn't nearly radical enough (they'd even tried to settle with Charles I rather than overthrow the monarchy) , and in fact wanted to establish a Republic of the Squirearchy rather than a true, levelled democracy. They held a series of debates (including the Putney Debates), published pamphlets and proposals, and moved menacingly close to London, until Charles I's escape, coupled with a Cromwellian crackdown and the payment of wage arrears, closed down the rebellion, very sadly in my view.

The only recent democratic military coup was the Carnation Revolution of April 25th 1974, in which the Portuguese Army, radicalised by a cadre of leftwing, anti-colonial officers, peacefully overthrew the 40-year dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, Portugal's manifestation of Francoist fascism. The people flooded the streets in support of the Army, symbolised by handing them red carnations (for communism), and the Secret Police's resistance was quickly ended. Democracy was established within two years and Portugal's colonies set free.

Is this the glorious future which awaits Egypt? Don't hold your breath.

The commodification of rebellion

Remember Bill Hicks ranting on quite profanely about marketers' identifying even the anti-marketing demographic?

Just to jog your memory:



I don't disagree. In fact it's got worse. As dissent has moved into social media, counter-hegemonic forces are more dependent on the very structures and corporations we oppose than ever. That awful waste of organs Louise Mensch reckoned that any leftwinger who drinks coffee and uses an iPhone is a hypocrite: here's the clip, followed by Ian Hislop's very sensible rejoinder and Jeremy Hardy's very funny riposte to that level of thinking:





It's a commonplace that twentieth-century protest has largely been the preserve of the affluent classes, particularly students and the bourgeoisie. The same criticism has been levelled at the Brazilian protests this week.

And yet… I was given one of these masks.

Maybe you have one too. They're seen at every protest rally in the world now: as a signifier, they're a huge success. Wearing a Guy Fawkes mask signifies your solidarity with the oppressed anywhere in the world, against the machinations of repressive governments, vampiric corporations and sinister cults. But what are the mask's origins? It's actually graphic novelist Alan Moore's second semiotic hit: he adapted the yellow Smiley Face from American advertising campaigns for Watchmen, and its un-nerving blandness came to represent Ecstasy culture and the Summer of Love which so threatened the UK Government. 

The Fawkes mask first appeared in Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta, designed by illustrator David Lloyd, in which a libertarian hero sows the seeds of rebellion in a cowed populus by committing stylish acts of terrorism from behind the mask. Finally, he uses the quality services of parcel delivery companies to get Fawkes masks and costumes to every household in the country. Emboldened by the subversive message and the safety of anonymity, they congregate to watch the Houses of Commons destroyed by V in his last, self-sacrificing act. There's no space for individual heroes in the new country: instead, everyone behind the masks must become their own heroes. As the fireworks soar and Parliament explodes, the people take off their costumes and take charge of their own destinies. 

And there it would have rested, had not Anonymous decided that public face of their decentralised, libertarian actions against surveillance, secrecy and litigiousness should be the Fawkes mask. Which is OK, really. The battle against state and corporate power is fought on an uneven battlefield (Snowden's revelations about the NSA and GCHQ have proven that), and anonymity is a vanishingly rare possibility. From there, the use of the mask spread from the virtual to the actual. 

But it's not that simple. The comics world is notoriously cut-throat and litigious. Alan Moore long ago disassociated himself from the films of his work and refused to accept any money. The rights to the comics are tied up in perpetuity with DC, as long as they keep them in print, however tiny the print run. Which throws up interesting questions, such where do the masks come from? Who makes them? Who profits from the growth of this revolutionary product? 

The simple answer is that every time a revolutionary buys a Fawkes mask, a near-slave in China or Brazil makes them for Rubies Costume Company and Warner Brothers/DC profits from them. While the mask symbolically promotes resistance, the purchase of the mask reinforces the status quo. And it's not just 'V' masks. A few years ago, I was given a 'Commie' costume: a stick-on goatee and moustache. It's available on all monolithic online retailers' sites.

Because I read every word I can get my hands on, I looked at the small print. Made in China. As are the Anti-Establishmints made by the Unemployed Philosophers' Guild apparently to promote the values of 1789:

They're very tasty. And the 'tache and beard transform my pasty fat face into that of a hardened defender of the proletariat. And yet, and yet. I have this image of a Chinese peasant corralled into a factory by a state which at least retains the discourse though not the practice of Communism, to spend her life churning out products which actively mock the ideals for which people have shed their blood in their millions. The V mask is a mass-produced piece of plastic which reduces the specific aspirations of millions into a generic statement of vague dissent. The Commie Mustache and Beard turns the complexity of Lenin or the murderousness of Stalin into a throwaway gag, dependent on the exploited labour of those who have been sold by communists into the hands of capitalists. The Anti-Establish Mints don't extend Liberté, Fraternité and Égalité to all: they turn those sentiments into a post-modern joke at the unseen expense of the real proletariat. It's a smug and reactionary product. I suck one on the way to Revolution, the Cuban-themed bar owned by a former Tory MP who'd be horrified by an actual revolution. 

It's a truism that all youth movements are quickly appropriated by capitalism: both Beatles Moptop wigs and Punk Mohican wigs were on sale within weeks of the scenes' popularity reaching a peak: arguably the moment was over once you could buy a stick-on Mohican. Perhaps it's just particularly galling that the signs of anti-capitalist resistance are so easily appropriated, hollowed-out of meaning and re-sold back to the movement. I don't know: perhaps I should just relax and assume that the multiplicity of meanings immanent in these objects keeps them meaningful. But I know I'd rather everyone thought up their own devices rather than allow the market to shape the discourse, even though I happen to think the Guy Fawkes masks are beautiful. 

If the enemy controls the ways in which dissent is communicated, then there is no meaningful dissent. 

Hot Air for Uppal

I wrote to my MP about the UK Government's 'relaxed' attitude to environmental emissions and climate change, asking him to vote for a legally binding carbon target as part of the Energy Bill. As expected, he sent me a long, disingenuous letter which claimed that The Market Will Provide.

New stats are out. UK emissions rose by 4.5% last year, even in the depths of a recession, and without counting emissions outsourced to China and other manufacturing centres. We've missed our 2011 renewable energy commitment and have no chance of meeting our 2020 targets.

Cue another weary letter to Mr Uppal, complete with statistical sources, with no serious expectation of a meaningful response.

Dear Mr Uppal,thank you for your reply to my letter about the legally binding carbon targets.
Could you reflect again on this issue, given that the UK's emissions actually rose by 4.5% in 2012 (without counting 'outsourced' emissions), and the assessment that the UK is 25th of 27 EU member states in renewables contributions, is the only country which failed to meet its interim targets, and is calculated to miss its 2020 target set out in the 2009/28/EC Directive, otherwise known as the RES Directive?

What specific steps will the government take to address these two failures?
Hugs and Kisses,Plashing Vole.

Despite this - can I ask you all to write to your MPs along the same lines?

Oh yes: here's his latest Parliamentary humbug:

The hon. Gentleman is making some partisan points, so I want to add balance to the debate. I have been poor—dirt poor. I used to share my bedroom with my siblings and cousins. By modern descriptions, I would have been classified as homeless. His main argument is about foreign capital coming to the UK and London. Does he not think that that is symptomatic of people recognising that we have a Government who are making credible decisions and creating financial stability?

Not sure whether I should weep or laugh. 'Credible'? With borrowing sky-high, deficit reductions postponed to 2018 and the poor getting poorer and poorer, under a government determined to evict anyone with a box room and clear London of the labouring classes, while reducing taxes for the millionaires (he's too modest to mention that he's a millionaire, from property speculation). He is utterly despicable.  

Oh happy day!

You might be surprised, given the Eeyore-ish tone of Plashing Vole (and the dystopian nature of the world at the moment), that I'm in a thoroughly good mood. 

'Why so happy?', I hear you ask?

Well, the weekend was good. I went to hear the CBSO and CBSO Chorus under Andris Nelsons perform Beethoven's 8th and 9th Symphonies. The 8th is pretty, the 9th is the one you can all hum and perhaps even sing. Because it was the CBSO and Chorus, it was beyond magnificent: they really are amongst the very best in the world. I don't think this was their greatest performance, but that's only because I saw them perform the Britten War Requiem recently and came away thinking that I'll never see a more consummate performance of that or any other piece. 

After that, I had the pleasure of ignoring the Rolling Stones and Mumford and Sons at Glastonbury, tuning in instead to Public Enemy, who really haven't aged gracefully, for which they deserve our admiration. While the Stones churn out songs written before I was born, like a particularly charmless jukebox, PE are still righteous. 

Mumford and Sons depressed me beyond words: imagine giving your band a corporate name and then churning out music which is – at best  – unobjectionable. I remember a few years ago the NME dubbing a bunch of bands 'The New Boring': Turin Brakes and Co. And they were: pretty tunes, competent musicians, sensitive lyrics, but absolutely nothing to get the hormones racing. 

Compared to Mumford and Sons, The New Boring band were death metallers. Compared to Mumford and Sons, The Weavers sound like Slayer. I found myself wondering how the line-up was constructed. In the end, I decided that the schedulers channelled the spirit of David Cameron or Michael Gove and asked themselves who their PR advisors would tell them to pick on Desert Island Discs: nothing offensive, but a nod to 'classic' rock, someone female and a young cool band. Remember Gordon Brown claiming to like Arctic Monkeys? 

I'm 37 and yet I can now claim quite seriously that I'm too young for Glastonbury. It's only to be expected: only the Stones' generation can afford Glasto tickets now. It's not for the likes of us.

But I digress: I avoided them all and stayed happy. And then Sunday saw the start of the real summer: the Tour de France. I like cricket. A five day match with no firm conclusion is fine by me. So a three week orgy of tactical battles, backstabbing, team orders, injuries, duels and maddened spectators is basically my idea of heaven. Oh yes, and amazing bikes for me to drool over. The opening stages in Corsica this weekend were brilliant: organisational chaos and strategic errors led to unheralded riders winning, the unlovely Sky juggernaut getting badly caught out, and lots of doomed-but-noble breakaways. Sporting perfection, even if lots of them are still on drugs. 

The last element contributing to my good mood is today's event: our school's Staff Research Conference. It's one of the best days of the year: lots of my colleagues getting together to share what we've been getting up to (or not) over the course of the year. It's relaxed, friendly and intellectually searching. I've been to papers today on the Seren Books series retelling the Mabinogion medieval Welsh myths (which I've taught with some success to students here); a Foucauldian critique of my own university's pedagogic unit's critical approach; a presentation of doctoral research into HE academics' resistance to 'technopedagogy' (very weird seeing quotes from my own interview on screen under an assumed name). Then I presented with my colleague a chapter we wrote on the presentation of jazz and masculinity in some contemporary novels: Jackie Kay's Trumpet, Jim Crace's All That Follows and Alan Plater's the Beiderbecke Trilogy. 

I've never done a joint paper before, and really enjoyed it. Very good questions too, mostly jazz fans denying that their particular sub-genres count as jazz in the ways we mean. After us, Polly gave a fully illustrated talk on 'Naked Masculinity: Fear, Freedom and Eroticism' which was, well, eye-opening. Now I'm in the politics section: one colleague gave a fascinating philosophical analysis on theories of loyalty in politics, and Eamonn's finishing with an archive-driven examination of the secret back-channels between the IRA and the UK Government between the 1970s and the late 1990s. It's fascinating: naming names and showing us historic documents such as the famous hand-written note to the UK state announcing that the conflict was over and the IRA needed help ending the war. It was used by UKG as the 'start' of the peace process (until forced to admit that negotiations had been going on for two years). McGuinness says it's a fake and he never sent it, but it seems that the note was a summary by Dennis Bradley of more general discussions, with the plea for help added. Are there multiple notes? The note has a '4' at the top: was this Draft 4 or part 4: if so, what were parts 1-3? Additionally, the Link personalities seem to have been adding things to what the Republican movement said, much to the displeasure of the Republicans when they find out what the Link people are up to. Murky, fascinating stuff. 

And to top it all off: wine reception next!

Result: a Vole in a sunny disposition. It won't last…