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

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?

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

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.

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.

However, on one small point I agree with some of his detractors. It is vital that aid and debt relief do not go to countries where bad governance mean that the finances stop with corrupt government officials. In Ghana, one of the 18 countries which has secured debt relief, everyone I spoke to said that World Bank, UN and IMF reports which hold the country up as a model of development and progress belie the reality of corruption which still exists there. These comments are borne out by Transparency International’s latest Global Corruption Barometer

I strongly believe that countries like America and the UK would do well to stop hypocritically condemning countries where their methods of corruption are not as sophisticated, and are therefore more easily exposed. And I think that Make Poverty History and Live8’s messages of getting the money in regardless of the bad example of a few African leaders is the right message to be preaching. However I think that there is a pressing need to ensure that in countries where aid is being given and debt cancelled, the right people benefit, and unless corruption is tackled throughout Africa and the developing world, this cannot be effectively targeted. This needs to be done concurrently with, not before, such initiatives as Make Poverty History, because the lifting of the burden of desperate and unnecessary poverty that Make Poverty History is trying to tackle is critical and needs to begin now.

Of course, the extreme of this corruption and bad governance is seen in Zimbabwe, which has unfortunately been back in the news these last few weeks. People I have spoken to there say that the situation is worse than ever – the people have had their human and basic civic rights taken away from them already, and now their homes and businesses are being decimated.

Make Tyranny History is a website set up by Zimbabwean human rights campaigners which shows 4 simple different ways that you can help the people of Zimbabwe restore dignity and democracy to their lives. Please check the site out, and forward it to your contacts.

I am a bit of a fan of Magic FM, often tuning it in on a Sunday morning, or when I am having a relaxing evening bath, or other occasions when the frenetic pace of Xfm, with their playlists of The Kaiser Chiefs et al seems inappropriate, or the calming drone of ‘Women’s Hour’ a tad soporific. I am not a fan, however, of dull, forced conversations, and have been known to spend a whole two hours glowering from under my fringe at hairdressers attempting to strike up a conversation with me with such original gems as ‘Are you going anywhere nice on your holidays?’, ‘Got any plans for the weekend?’ and ‘Weather looks like its going to turn out nice.’

I tried to let her outpouring of banality wash over me (under normal circumstances I would have been digging my finger nails into my palms in exasperation), and was struggling to contort my face into something resembling friendly attentiveness, when she commented on a Bryan Ferry song, saying ‘Now, play your average Will Young song in 25 years time and no one will feel this sort of nostalgia’. As she paused for breath, the song came to an end to be replaced by an ad for that little twat of a Crazy Frog.

I took the opportunity to vent some of the spleen and spume some of the bile her wittering had caused to build up, by directing it instead at the television, commenting that while I didn’t know how the cacophony could have outsold Coldplay four to one, I didn’t think much to Coldplay’s offering anyway. Her response caused me to have to exercise such control over my facial expression that my hands shook with laughter, and I still have a little chip mark in my otherwise immaculate ‘Notting Hill’ coloured nails.

‘It’s because most of our youngsters are listening to this that they’re all on ASBOs’, she said. ‘Take those kids who hung [sic] that boy up in Yorkshire….’ I blocked out her voice by paying full attention to the amphibian oddity.

I am so glad to see that, despite being bombarded with such music, my technician has managed to keep her powers of reasoning intact. The moral fabric of our society is safe.

The link between these two events is that aviation pollution is responsible for the highest rising levels of carbon emissions in the UK, and the surge in global air travel is thus having a huge impact on speeding up climate change. In amongst all the worries I had over the elections and who I could possibly vote for with a clear conscience, my main concern was that in the end, none of the policies will matter if we don’t get environmental policies working first. And I think that one of the biggest problems with getting people to change their behaviour with environmental issues is that not only is the government not forcing us to make sounder choices, making them isn’t even made that easy – which, coupled with an apathetic and uninformed attitude from the public, means that being ‘green’ is still regarded by many as the choice of lesbians, vegetarians, social workers and other left-field members of society.

Consider it: in my house, we prefer to use less damaging household products. We all cycle as our primary form of transport. We collect and re-use our plastic bags (as we all cycle, we will often fill our panniers up without using plastic bags at all). We recycle weekly. We tend to all shop locally, especially at the weekly farmers market on Broadway Market, which sells predominantly British grown food. But it isn’t always easy to do these things. When our Ecover washing liquid ran out, I used a less environmentally friendly one which was lying around, and a stain which had been on a t-shirt of mine for a couple of months disappeared. The Ecover had never managed to shift it, and I have stopped using it. In our excellent council run recycling scheme, we get a small box to fill up with our weeks’ recycling. It isn’t big enough. My weekend papers alone fill it up. And if we leave it outside once it has been emptied, it tends to get nicked very quickly.

I am a firm believer that it isn’t enough to provide schemes for people to opt in to on a voluntary basis. Even people like me who do believe that it is one of the most important issues facing us, will get affected by apathy. And I was therefore delighted to read of a proposal for an EU wide scheme introducing carbon cards, whereby each government within the EU will give 40% of its carbon emission quota equally to individuals, with the rest being auctioned to business and industry.

The beauty of the scheme is that individuals would then be able to sell on anything they managed to save on their allowance. So for people like me, who never drive, I would almost certainly have points left over. I could then choose to ’spend’ these on such things as the long-haul travel I tend to take more than most, to visit my family in various places around the world. Conversely, if I were a four by four driver, I could create a well insulated home which requires less fuel consumption to run, and have more to use on my gas-guzzling monster. And if I am a paragon of environmental virtue, I will have credits left to sell on to individuals.

This is precisely the kind of scheme to grab the public’s interest. It is fair. Unlike proposed taxations on fuel emissions, which will add more to the bills of lower income households, it isn’t punitive, and offers the possibility of extra income to careful consumers. It gives people the choice of how they want to reduce their own personal emissions. And it highlights the fact that everyone needs to take responsibility for these emissions. It completely sidesteps the ‘it’s not down to me’ attitude that plagues the movement towards a more environmentally sustainable world.

At the moment, it seems like it is only a notion on the agenda. Perhaps it is self-interest which motivates my wanting it implemented – after all, as a cyclist, I have greater sympathies with those sticking guerrilla stickers on SUVs than those driving them, and I am top of the list of those likely to benefit from such a scheme. I sincerely hope that it could be implemented, and even go further, making people use credits on goods they buy which travel long distances such as vegetables from the other side of the world which have to be flown in refrigerated conditions to reach our tables within days of picking. Or clothes which have been made on the other side of the world. A reduction in the purchase of goods like this could even have the knock on effect of stopping companies using sweat shop labour in far-flung countries, the stranglehold of multinationals on small-scale farmers.

So Bluewater, that out-of-town mega-retail-outlet, has decided to ban the wearing of hoodies within its premises. As a cyclist living in Hackney, having read of at least 15 violent attacks on cyclists within 5 minutes’ walk of my house in the last year alone, I am one of those people who, on seeing a group of boys of a certain age, will automatically assume that their presence indicates trouble. And if they are wearing hooded tops, hiding their faces, increasing the sense of unknown, the indication is heightened, even more sinisiter.

Yesterday I cycled at 10.00am along the Canal towards Islington. A short distance from where I got on the tow path, and on a stretch that was completely deserted, I saw up ahead, cycling very slowly, two teenagers on bikes that were the wrong size for them (always an indication that they have been misappropriated – although one of them was on a bike that was way too big, the other on one slightly too small, for him. Why didn’t they just swap?). They stopped to allow me to pass, one of them flashing me a knowing grin as I went past, desperately trying to pick up speed as I went. I was concerned when about half a mile later I came to a barrier across the path, with a red sign saying ‘tow path closed’, and a large set of temporary stairs leading up into an estate. I started up the stairs, and they rounded the corner, now cycling much faster than they had been when I was cycling behind them.

Of course, I made it up the stairs, worked out where the diversion went, and zoomed off to safety. I have no doubt that the boys deliberately allowed me past, with the intention of ambushing me further down the canal. Attacks on the canal, especially on cyclists, are commonplace, and often quite brutal.

The point of that story is that I cannot say for certain whether the boys were wearing hoodies, but in my mental image of them, they certainly were. Although one of them might have had a Burberry cap. The cartoonish image of ‘generic yoof thug’ is so entrenched in my mind, that I forget that there was a time, in the late ninetees and early noughties (and just for the record, I hate that word, but no one has yet to come up with an alternative) when I owned several hooded tops myself.

With predictable promptness, and with moral standards flying high, our national and local press has jumped on the news to highlight the fact that the very fabric of society is being ripped apart by young thugs intent on operating outside of societal laws, norms, and mores.

Of course, it would be naive not to attach any blame to the perpetrators of youth crime, to the gangs like the 800 strong ‘London Fields Gang’ who are responsible for so many of the attacks round my way. But, without being too much of a bleeding heart liberal, I would like to propose that we look instead at rectifying the causes of youth violence and crime. The social exclusion, poverty and disillusionment. The education system, the moral torpitude bred by a government which chose to engage in an illegal and unethical war, the listlessness of the inner city. To stop blaming the youth for so much, to accept the failings of the modern world to look after them, to stop making them feel alienated, peripheral to society. Because as long as they feel like that, then the rules which we all look to for our security will mean nothing to them, and the only way of affirming their identity will be to flout them.

Now if you will just excuse me. I am going to phone up outlets of Gap, Next and Nike at Bluewater, to see if they stock hooded tops…

UPDATE:

Thanks to my friend who read this entry and suggested this alternative to my softly-softly approach. And, having thought about Blonde’s response in the comments, and remembered all the times I echoed her sentiments when I have felt threatened, or been the victim of the little brats – most often when I have had bikes nicked by them, I now wholeheartedly endorse the product below, and a vigilante approach to dealing with this problem!

My thinking process during the whole election ran something like that on sitting down at a restaurant where you have a favourite dish. You peruse the menu and decide that instead of the carbonara, you are going to go for a zucchini fettuccine. The bonuses of the new dish are clear, you have made your mind up, but when the waiter comes to take your order, you find yourself asking for the same old thing.

In the polling booth, I took two deep breaths, and put my cross next to Hugh Bayliss, Lib Dem, noting as I did so that he lives a couple of minutes away from me on a road on which I would very much like to buy a house. I surprised myself when my hand didn’t inadvertently wander to the Labour box, and I felt enormously pleased with myself for voting for the party which I feel most closely represents my beliefs and convictions.

Back to the pub. Where he is saying to her ‘I can’t believe you voted for that awful man’, and she is beginning to doubt what she has done. But as the evening wears on and we see the first seats won by Labour, but with a swing to the Tories, both he and I begin to wonder what we have done… Was Tony’s warning not to split the left vote bizarrely prescient, rather than a mere trickery to guilt left wing voters into voting for a party that has betrayed them? I leave after four seats are declared, with her shouts of ‘What have you two done? It’s all going to be your fault’ ringing in my guilty guilty ears.

I get into bed, still glued to the telly, and fall asleep to the news that Mr George ‘Human Rights for Iraqi despots’ Galloway has almost certainly won Bethnal Green and Bow.

Wake up this morning and lie in bed for fifteen minutes before summoning up the courage to even think about it. Wander into the kitchen, where Bloke and Blonde are having a cup of coffee. I ask for news, and she says ‘I am too nervous to check’. Back into bedroom, telly on, and its clear that Labour have won a majority pretty much on a par with both the expectations of the pundits, and the exit polls, but that the Liberal Democrats haven’t gained as much as was expected, or as I had hoped. Huge sigh of relief as I look on Ceefax for Hackney figures, to see that Labour dropped about 2500 votes from last time, almost all of which were accounted for by Lib Dem gains, and little change in the Conservative figures. Also pleased to see Green coming in fourth.

My stomach does a churning lurch that can’t just be down to the excess of Leffe drunk last night, as Tony Blair talks of having been given a mandate from the people for a third term in office. Almost pleased to see that idiot Ferry staging his feeble protest. If one more person says ‘secures an historic third term’ or mentions the fact that it is the smug bastard’s birthday today, I may not be able to control the churning any longer. Bring on the taciturn Scot, I think to myself.

Grumpy (Bethnal Green and Bow) texts me to say ‘By George. Have RESPECT. Bye bye Oona.’ I start to plan my strategy of derision and mockery for having such a rubbish MP. He voted for the Green party candidate because he fancies him.