Wow. Just slowly gearing up for a busy Friday when the Guardian homepage drew my attention to the balancing artist Eskil Ronningsbakken.
As a sufferer of vertigo (I even get a rush of fear, nausea and exhileration if I drop something down the stairs!) these pictures caused me much discomfort and some amazement. I recommend a look.
From The Guardian
Returning late from dinner with family friends last night, Babyfather turned the radio on to find out the England cricket scores. Radio 5 live had been taken over with a live phone-in to discuss the ‘disgraceful’ behaviour of vice-captain Freddie Flintoff when he went out on the piss with a group of 5 other members of the England world cup squad. One woman phoned in and said that he clearly has an alcohol problem for which he should be punished, and when questioned on this, said that he had let us all down with his antics.
Freddie – likes a pint.
Firstly. I can’t be the only person to think that what happened was quite funny, can I?
Secondly, if he does (which I strongly believe not to be the case) have a drink problem then he should receive sympathy and support, and offered treatment, not censure. The comments on the show I heard and on online news sites this morning are horrid – treating alcoholism as a choice and a disgrace rather than a devastating illness which wrecks lives.
Thirdly. Since when did the nation’s sportsmen owe us something? Since when did they become accountable for a nation’s distress when they don’t perform to the best standard? I can assure the bizarrely misguided caller who I heard last night that Flintoff wants England to win the world cup a whole lot more than mere spectators, even fans so dedicated that they spend their lives and their money travelling round the world with the Barmy Army. As far as I am aware, my tax dollar does not fund the England cricket team, and much as I love to watch them and hope that they win, I don’t think it’s my right to have an Ashes/World Cup winning cricket team.
Fourthly. Since when did sportsmen become the pillars of morality which they seem to be expected to be now? A sample of comments on the Evening Standard’s website This is London read “Flintoff is a chav. The moment he appeared with a short sleeved T- shirt & tattoo’s in Australia it was clear he was unfit to lead England at cricket. So it has proved, he should be warned, shape up or ship out, drunken louts not required.” “All we hear about nowadays is sportsmen behaving badly. Before playing for your country was about pride but its all about the ‘celebrity’ side of it now. These sportsmen are role models to youngsters and should act responsibly not like drunken teenagers.”
Nonsense. All they want is to play cricket. They didn’t ask to be role models, and it is not their fault if the tabloid press use non-stories like these to illustrate their own thundering, (and hypocritical) morality. And anyway, what’s wrong with going out and getting drunk? Flintoff is 29 and world famous. Nasser Hussein may point to a drink problem in the team, but after the few months he’s had, wouldn’t anyone want a bit of a bender?
Finally. Cast your minds back to September 2005. We’d just won the ashes (I was there, at the Oval), and the lads had gone on a three day bender which included a grand parade on an open top bus, nights without sleep, interviews with the press which were barely coherent, and a visit to Downing Street where Freddie wasn’t the only one who admitted to being worse for wear. The players were offered tea and water, and after a quiet word the Prime Ministerial fridge was raided, and they were given beer and wine instead. Harmy was pictured with a beer on the children’s climbing frame. All the papers carried pictures of the victory parades, and glowing stories of their drunken antics. Here’s a report at the time, which starts with a snippet from a Vaughan interview
“Then, with a sly smile, he added: “It’s been a long night. We’ve celebrated in true English fashion.” One look at the players, smartly dressed but bleary-eyed after a late, late night, and still glugging down beer or flutes of champagne, told you that much was true.” Not that anyone cared. Two months ago, cricket was languishing in a peloton of sports behind football, now it’s sexy and cool. As Christine Simon from the Isle of Wight put it: “I don’t follow cricket usually, but this makes you feel proud to be British, it’s what the country needs. The atmosphere is marvellous.”
So what do we gather from this? That it’s ok to have a drink problem when the country is celebrating a win with you? That when you’ve won the Ashes you can take a break from the tabloid-imposed role model duties? Or just that the papers will make a story out of anything, and if Fletcher had had a quiet word, past captains hadn’t got on their sanctimonious high horse, and the media had accepted it was just a bit of fun, most of us wouldn’t have cared a toss about it, beyond it being a mildly amusing story?
I remember when I was not long out of University, when my career hadn’t really taken hold, and when, despite having had a couple of jobs I liked, I had, for one reason or another, not settled on what I wanted to do. As I had a year out, and then left the country for a year when I finished University, a lot of my friends had a two year career headstart on me, and I was daunted by the seeming ease of their success.
Looking back on it, what I was actually jealous of was the stability and purpose of these friends of mine who were seemingly very quickly conquering various worlds – the media, politics, the arts. What I remember being in awe of though was their salaries. One acquaintance, in their mid twenties, was working for a national broadsheet and already earning in the early £30 000s. I was living in Manchester, and when I finally graduated from an hourly temping rate, was on just about half that. I felt that my salary was part of what made up my worth, and felt demeaned by it.
I recognise now, of course, that I have friends who earn much less than me and those who earn much more, and that there are careers which have gone off-trajectory, and those which have succeeded despite the person’s not being as experienced or skilled as I believe I am. I recognise that there are trade-offs – those of my friends who work in the charity sector earn about three quarters of my salary, but don’t have to daily pit their morals in an argument against the hollowness of knowing that work they do ultimately has no benefit on anyone other than themselves and the capitalist system.
But the point of this little posting is the news this week about salaries in general – GPs, radio presenters and nannies having been under scrutiny in the press in the last few days. I believe we are obsessed as a nation with how much people earn, and that much as our obsession with property prices is based on insecurity, as I wrote about in a post over a year ago , so we find it easy to mentally value a person if we can quantify their income. I personally don’t think that GPs shouldn’t earn as much as MPs – I am certainly happier knowing that they are well paid than finding out what Jonathan Ross gets per hour on air for his weekly radio show, much as I like his work.
Anyway, in order to make some sense of the statistics, in a properly comparative manner, here is what some of the people in the headlines this week earn per hour, compared to some national averages, and some other high profile figures:
(All salaries are expressed annually, and then in hours, where an annual salary is divided by 52 to get a weekly figure, and then by 37.5 to get an hourly, except where, as in the case of Jonathan Ross, a different time commitment is known.)
2005 average national salary: £22,900; £11.74
Average national senior managers: £55,000; £28.21
Average national supervisor role: £24,000; £12.31
Average traditional labour jobs (such as foremen): £21,000; £10.77
Average national skilled labourer: £17,500; £8.97
Average national clerical staff: less than £15,000; £7.69
Jonathan Ross (just for his radio show): £530,000; £3397.44
Top earning GPs (according to tabloid press – 40 hour week): £250,000; £120.19
Average earning GPs (according to Patricia Hewitt – 52.5 hour week): £94,000; £45.19
Live-out nanny: up to £30,000; £15.38
Philip Green: £1.2bn; £615384.62
Elton John: £33m; £16923.077
David Beckham: £19.3m; £9897.44
Lucian Freud: £12m; £6153.85
Kate Moss: £11m; £5641.026
The Queen: £7.9m; £4051.28;
Jose Mourinho : £5.2m; £2666.67
Jamie Oliver : £3.75m; £1923.077
Natasha Kaplinsky : £475,000; £243.59
Barbara Windsor: £360,000; £184.62
Tony Blair: £277,928; £142.53
Cherie Booth: £250,000; £128.21
Sir Ian Blair: £215,000; £110.27
Ken Livingstone: £133,997; £68.72
I can’t be bothered to write anything about bird ‘flu (or to read any more about it, come to that) or, to give it its full Fleet Street name, “the deadly H5N1 virus”. As Babyfather commented last night, maybe if it had been given a cuddlier name it wouldn’t be such a virulent virus. We saw a picture of it on the news last night too, and it looks a bit like something out of Ricky Gervais’ Flannimals, which could explain its antisocial behaviour. Anyway, I am so bored of bird ‘flu that I am boring myself with these observations, and will give you an insight into the way I usually get inspiration for this blog.
In general, a piece of news will catch my eye and I will muse over it on the way to work/whilst lying awake at night wondering how I am going to turn over without my massive bump making me fall out of bed/whilst slipping into a trance like state in front of Deal or No Deal. I will then slowly form an opinion, edit out my more knee-jerk reactions, try and pretty-up any particularly thunderous or rabid responses it solicits in me, and engage myself in a somewhat masturbatory game of putting this opinion into phrases which I like to believe are beautifully turned, but still this side of pretentious.
My lunch hour at work will then unravel into a glorious afternoon of checking my computer rear view mirror for suspicious superiors or uppity juniors, who may find fault with my translating these thought processes into what you see before you, during work time.
Obviously this process changes from post to post, as some of them are just vacant ramblings and not news-based at all. But usually something will grab my attention enough to enter me into the process, and hold it enough for me to actually get me out of the process the other end. Call this an apology for laziness, if you will, but recently nothing has inspired me to write anything. I had a half-written piece on the Oscars, a few thoughts about writing something on the Estonian jam mountain (should that be lake?), and just today a half-arsed attempt at a post filled with wit and levity about the fact that Judas Iscariot has finally been given his right to reply in the press. But I got bored halfway through when I read about the caution with which the academic community is greeting the revelation. Apparently the text is from the second century and is therefore a second-hand gnostic interpretation of what happened. And it has something to do with The Da Vinci Code. I was almost comatose by the time I got to that bit – obviously inserted by the journalist in an attempt to make what was an interesting story which had become dull dull dull a bit more topical.
There is one piece of news out today that I love though, and that my imagination hasn’t stopped mulling over; and that is the delightful snippet which I saw on the beeb last night, and which is seemingly covered nowhere but on their website, detailing the fact that a policeman who put a youth in a bin in a Hackney park was cleared of charges. What’s not to like about this story? It was in Hackney, and although it doesn’t mention what park it was, if it was anything like the Hackney green spaces I know, the youth was almost certainly feral. The policeman got off, the father admitted that if the kid was being ‘lippy’ he should have been arrested, and the friend who filmed the whole thing on his mobile phone could be heard laughing throughout the video clip. At a time when Damilola Taylor’s parents are going to have to sit through another entire trial before having the chance of seeing their son’s killers brought to book, it is refreshing to see that a little kid who deserved a stern telling off by a responsible adult, can be given one without the world tearing its hair out.
Crikey. I sometimes scare myself with my reactionary sounding rhetoric. I can almost hear the words political correctness gone mad. Let me know your views – am I a closet Daily Express reader? I hope that actually, on reflection, the reason I enjoyed this story is because of the fact that the incident was caught on camera, and my reaction is good old fashioned laughing at another’s pain.
In the time I spent working as a copywriter for an advertising company, probably the most important thing I learnt was that every piece of work I produced had to speak for itself, and the clarity of the message was paramount. If I were to work on a campaign, it was vital that the different elements worked together to portray the same message.
So I am left confused at the recent discordant message being transmitted on issues of rape and female abuse. At the same time as a swishy ad campaign attempts to inject levity into an issue which is surely anything but frivolous, judges have called for a lightening of sentences for convicted rapists which would equate to almost 15%. The justification for this is that prison regimes are now harder than previously.
We must have all read the statistics which have been repeated across the various papers: only 1 in 20 reported rapes ends in a conviction; it is believed that this is an even smaller figure when compared with how many cases are actually reported. And these figures are brought to life by the stories which we are daily bombarded with – Mary Ann Leneghan’s brutal rape and murder, the teenager in Manchester who raped four girls aged between 7 and 12., the constant attacks by men on vulnerable women.
Now I am aware I am starting to sound tabloidy in my ranting, and that is not my intention. But until there is a clearer policy on rape I just don’t see that anything will change. So the horrendous results which Amnesty’s report last year yielded are not surprising when the people who uphold the law feel that cutting sentences back is acceptable. As a reminder, these are the findings: ‘one third of those surveyed believe that women who flirt are partly at fault if someone rapes them. A third see women as being “partially or wholly” responsible for being raped if they are intoxicated. Finally, more than a quarter of those interviewed think women invite rape to some extent if they wear seductive clothing.’
It has been widely reported in shocked tones that the ad campaign being run at the moment cost the government £400 000. This is a paltry budget, and it should be noted how it compares to other big news stories which featured advertising spends: Anderson’s rebrand to Accenture which cost £175 million in 2001; around £18 million spent by both the Tories and Labour in their bid to win the last election. Just this month, Teletext launched a £6 million advertising campaign to modernise itself. Jamie Oliver is thought to earn over £1 million per year for fronting Sainsbury’s. And you can be sure that all of the corporate campaigns which spend this much money have people both from the agency and the corporation who ensure that a company’s brand or proposition is communicated internally so that everything the company does is kept ‘on message’.
I think it is time that everyone involved in campaigning and legislating against rape gets together and makes sure they know what their message is. Because as a woman I could lay to one side my concern about the message of the campaign itself – that the responsibility in sex lies entirely with the man – if I felt that the result would be a reduction in rape. Instead it feels like a highly visible thing for the government to do, to be seen to be doing the right thing.