TO HEL(MAND) AND BACK

I recently came back from a weekend away feeling a little run down and last night had a kiler sore throat so I was up in the middle of the night consulting WHO guidelines on swine flu symptoms. The array of very general advice that has been posted by UK government agencies led me to start thinking..

Who Do I Believe?

So, I've got a sore throat, losing my voice, woke up in the night hotter than usual and a bit achy.

The government's Swine Flu website tells me that these are all potential signs of an onset, although the sore throat element is not usual but has occurred, in some cases.. helpfully vague. Then I notice a link titled 'current emergency situations - find your local authority. Sounds like they are gearing up for a flood of emergencies nationwide - which is worrying given the downplaying of the whole issue generally. I am asked to put in my postcode (not bloody likely - I've seen Survivors and 28 Days Later and the sound of boots and loaded MP5's on my doorstep isn't one I want to experience!) or my local authority area, which I did. This redirects me to my helpfully-absent-of-any-obvious-link homepage of ABC Council.. Great. They're taking it seriously then.

Another link yielded an NHS site with a hopefully titled 'NHS Flu Symptom Checker.' Trouble is, I clicked and answered two questions, the second being have you a swelling in your throat (which is clearly true given I'm losing my voice). The next page flashes up in red and tells me to dial 999 immediately?? By the time you read this I'll either be dead of some rare emergency case sore throat disease, or the throat will just be subsiding? Either way, I'm not the type to call for an ambulance and waste your tax money on a minor irritating illness. Lesson is if you do use the NHS tool, you are quite likely going to convince yourself you have early onset signs..

So..

Do I Believe?

flu pandemic. scaremongering the population. restriction of travel? I hope not. It didn't work for the Soviets when they tried it to stop the exchange of ideas and a flu virus is more easily exchanged with another human being than an idea I believe? It seems to me that a lot of what's been going on with flu news has been to keep the population focused on other things than the fact that the UK along with many other countries isn't as well endowed in the research and medical containment departments as we might like to believe. Great Britain is no longer as Great as it was. We all know that. Why do some politicans, noticeably at present one particular (Scottish) one with ill fitting suits, still act as if it is?

..which neatly brings me to that other politically driven news item..

Constant shelling and bombing offshore and at some unknown distant location. Continual reports of deaths of 'our people'. Incitement of hate among a population against an enemy that has never really been witnessed by them. Sorry, I've read this somewhere before? George Orwell's 1984 happens to be one of my favourite books, having had to read it first for my O Level English way back when. It has become the most worn out well-leafed book in my library since that time and I must have read it around 10 times in my adult life.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no conspiracy theory loving ignoramous, I'm not easily sold on sinister plots, but I don't believe everything that I see coming out that three foot tube in the corner of the room (ok, I know most people have flatscreens these days and they're a lot bigger than 3 foot and, just to kill this thread off, tube technology is well and truly out.. but hey! indulge this child of the 80s a little).

I Believe..

There's a lot of evil and sorry shit going on along the 3,550 mile long black line in the pic below, but the one thing I firmly believe is..


..there's a whole heap of shit happening at one end of it. Now I'm not a big military type (unless you count my near addiction to Call of Duty 4 on Playstation 3) but my thoughts are increasingly with the people over in Helmand. When will it end? Hopefully soon as if you look at the stats and what's happened in other 'escalations of activity' (that could only be a politicians phrase), the rate of deaths is growing very fast indeed.

Believe.

* footnote. Don't think I'm that clever! The scaling down in this blog's subtitles from Who Do I Believe... to Believe.. is not my clever literary invention. If you want to know more google 'Heaven 17 Do I Believe' and consult their excellent lyrics. A track from their Bigger Than America CD.

MEMORIES..

Mrs Polko was out the other night so I settled in to watch a lads movie.. not that Mrs Polko has any particular problem with watching this stuff either.. but I've been casting my mind back a bit lately and wondering what other of life's paths I might have found myself on..

So.. I dug out my copy of The Football Factory and watched it. In another time and in a very different phase of my life I used to run with a load of lads in a northern town not far from here. The clothes remain, thankfully the attitude to violence has - shall we say - been tempered. Life re-focuses you in all sorts of ways.

Anyway, my favourite scene for comedy value as much as bringing back memories is this one, set the morning after Danny Dyer and his mate have pulled two girls in a London nightclub..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NHfyWxyTbg

I don't miss those days but I do look back and smile from time to time, but then from where I am now I can afford to. Things could have worked out different. Very different indeed.

THANK CREDIT CRUNCH IT'S FRIDAY

..and so it is. The end of another relatively flat working week. But, at least Polko's got some work to do? Feel more sorry for the investment bankers that are now sat at home twiddling their thumbs. Or don't, as the case may be.

I was sent a bunch of Friday jokes (joke emails are constrained to Friday's in Polko's office - if you send me them any other time of the week, they get binned instantly!). Some are worth setting down in this blog for longevity.

Q: What's the capital of Iceland?
A: About £3.50

Q: Why have estate agents stopped looking out of the window in the morning?
A: Because otherwise they'd have nothing to do in the afternoon

This second one brings me neatly to an observation I made last night. There was nothing on TV, nothing at all. Quite a feat given we have Sky TV and about a zillion channels to choose from. As I flicked through high number channels (don't ask me why we have Sky as we tend to stick to the first 6 channels or so anyway - that way you don't wear out your thumb on the remote?) I noticed two channels called..

Real Estate TV & Real Estate TV+1 (Sky 262 and 263 if you're sad enough to be interested)

Now come on, I know there's been a fair bit of interest in property in the UK in the last five years or so - a lot of it by misguided individuals who call themselves 'property developers' because they've bought or have been left a second house to rent out - they should meet some of my clients. The ones buying up 100+ acre sites or blocks of city and town centres to build billion pound shopping centres and office parks - you know, property developers... get it? I don't think some of you do...

Anyway, I digress. Now, I'm not in TV but if ever there was a flawed business model in the media world it has to be to start a digital TV channel specialising in property, or 'real estate' as they seem to want to call it (it'll never catch on in the UK?), at around the time of peak property prices, over-inflated loan to value deals, rising re-possessions, increasing unemployment/uncertainty in the jobs market and zero liquidity in the financial system?

A quick browse to their website reveals that this so called TV company is just another part of the investment scam that has been driving the market in the past few years - the only real content on there is a search engine for finding property for sale - and this appears to be pretty much tied to major new build developments with explanations such as, "Hot new apartments at Celsius, Bracknell's new landmark development". Who are they trying to kid, £180,000 for a 1 bedroom apartment (and note that's from £180,000). On the old model (3.5 times your salary lending) that would need an income of £51,250 (and I am assuming a 100% mortgage here too). Which first time buyer is going to be earning that then?

Of course, in the real world (away from Real Estate TV's domain) new build developments are full of such stupidity - developers have been paying crazy money per acre for their land, the cost of materials has been rising rapidly and therefore end prices have been on an upwards spiral since 2000. We all know this. Yet, many people have jumped in and bought houses on new developments to try and rent them out and become 'property developers' - thus falling unfairly and squarely into the waiting hands of the real developers who've cashed in, closed out most remaining residential schemes and are sat waiting for the next circus to hit town. If I see it coming down the road I'm sorely tempted to change profession and become a ringmaster. Watch this space.

..and so to finish on a high note, another one of those Friday jokes..

Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson are flying to a world economic summit. Peter looks at Alistair and chuckles: 'You know, I could throw a £50 note out of the window right now and make one person very happy.'

Alistair shrugs his shoulders and says: 'Well, I could throw five £10 notes out of the window and make five people very happy.' Gordon says: 'Of course, but I could throw ten £5 notes out of the window and make ten people very happy.'

The pilot rolls his eyes, looks at all of them, and says: 'I could throw all of you out of the window and make the whole country happy.'

Here. Here.

HOW DID YOU FEEL? (aka DECADE DREAMING)

In the middle of the 80's I used to buy the Sunday Times religously. This might not be strange in itself given it was a Sunday when I did it. Nothing special there you might think? Only, I was 16 or 17 years old and I guess it's not the usual thing you'd expect someone of that age to settle down to read. Especially given that I wasn't a nerdy 6th former type at the time (not me - not then, not now, not ever!). On the Saturday night you'd usually have found me dancing around to the latest synth-pop electronic music at my local nightclub, driving around the town with my mates eyeing up women or, a year or so later, taking my girlfriend out.

So, what was I doing with the Times on my knee each Sunday afternoon. Tucked up happily in a suburban house somewhere, essentially nowhere (but that's open to debate) in the east of the country?

In fact, after a quick read through a news section or two (back then the Sunday Times was even bigger and heavier than it is now.. or maybe my hands are bigger?), I used to spend most of my time browsing the Jobs pages, focused mainly on City of London type jobs, and the Cars and Houses pages stuffed full of ads for Bentley's, exotic Italian sports cars and Thames-side apartments that were going for £100,000... imagine that £100,000! (I'll have 3 of those these days). I used to amaze myself at what some people were selling - not becuase of the fact that it was a real life Lamborghini like I'd grown up with on my bedroom wall, but more because I realised that some people were on the other side of the transaction and had the sort of money that most people could never ever dream of having (back then credit wasn't thrown at you like in recent times and if you drove a nice car you were not leasing it). I even set myself a target of being a millionaire by the time I was 30 and driving a Porsche 928S. Don't ask me where that particular dream went, but come and go it certainly did despite a move to London and a really well paid job for a while - I think I know what happened along the way but that's for another blog post..

Hmmm... What brought this retro-rant on you might ask? Last week I was completing some work for a client listening to The Pet Shop Boys 'Please' and the various 12 inches associated with it in the background. Listening to Opportunities or Love Comes Quickly brought back a feint whiff of my mindset and aspirations at the time. Like a lot of kids in the 80s I did have the Lamborghini Countach poster on the wall alongside Debbie Harry wrapped provocatively in a plastic sheet (focus, Polko, focus!). So, mine was a typical UK upbringing of glorification of material items and money-making and Thatcher was in power and people were indeed making lot's of money.. some people anyway, and my world was touching on that little group through girlfriends and family businesses so what did I know of others in Merseyside or elsewhere that were actually not making anything at all.? That was to be changed a few years later in the episode where Polko ventures west from his home town.


Nothing wrong with a bit of dreaming though if you ask me. People were still social, people still talked to each other. These days almost everyone is unable to talk sensibly to you as they are tapping away at the text keys of the latest mobile gizmo - a disease that started sometime in the 90s and has subsequently come into its horrible own in the first ten years of the 21st century. Even if they did start a conversation today it would probably be about some minor celebrity on tv last night, their latest BMW 3-series lease car, football or some other drivel wholly unrelated to how they were really feeling or thinking. Almost certainly not the state of the Middle East or about something with a little more meaning than kicking around a piece of leather that is meant to symbolise a pigs stomach for some unknown reason.

Give me the 80s any day - to (mis-)quote Depeche Mode, back then People Were People...

...oh, and the winning Euromillions Lottery numbers this week would come in handy to buy some of those things I used to look at too. I'd still drive that white Lamborghini Countach (if only to disgust my current girlfriend!) but might pass on the London flat for something a little more rural, and a little more French.. with horses darling!

Dream on.

THE BENEFITS OF SLOWING DOWN..

Benefit #1
So, today I have woken up to snow all around and the sight of my neghbours trying to get to work on a snowbound, 1-in-3 hill with bends! This makes me very happy that Polko and Mrs Polko decided to sloooow the f*ck down a few years ago, get sensible and restructure the way we lived (moving from town to country and working from home). Once they've all slivered their way down and off to their various concrete towers of babel to chatter incessantly into telephones about things that don't really matter to them we will have a whole hillside and dozens of acres to go out and have a massive snowball fight in. Cool.

Benefit #2
The slowdown has reduced our new work flow (though not ceased it altogether happily). So, the phones are not ringing so often and emails arriving at a slightly reduced pace. Giving me the time to get on my PS3 and Call of Duty: World At War having bought it and played it intensively for a week then finding myself swapping back to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare online - hits the mark with me more than stomping around Russia or Japan as part of the WWII effort!

Benefit #3
Related to the time I currently have - there are now signs that NASN television may well be starting to feature some of the better NHL team games on their channel, having attempted to buy in cheaper games by lesser teams than the Montreal Canadiens, NY Rangers and Islanders, Toronto Mapleleafs etc. So, I have more quality ice hockey to watch... and soon they promise they will even put Hockey Night in Canada back on each week. yay-hey!

Benefit #4
This came in the BBC News home page load-up this morning: Sales growth slows down at Tesco!

What a wonderful piece of news! Apparently like for like (which means they strip out the effects of opening new stores and extending existing ones in the last year) quarterly sales have grown by only 2% against 4.8% in the same period last year. Tesco are relatively exposed to swings in demand as they sell not only staple foodstuffs but also a large range of 'other items', luxury and spur of the moment purchases such as electronics, DVDs and clothing.

Factor in the effects that Woolworths keeping hold of their vast stocks of DVDs/CDs and other media to sell off at whatever price they can get for them this year (Woolworths are the largest distributors of said products to the supermarket chains and their administrators know that this stock is going to help them maximise cash in their winding up process) and things might just test the management Board at Tesco and the like a little more than they have been doing for the past five/six years or more. My guess is that some Directors of larger companies may well be asking themselves if slowing their life a little is in order in the coming few months. My advice would be: take the bonuses and golden pay-off's and get the hell out, learn to grow your own food, keep your own animals, reduce your consumption a little and regain some basic skills of being human. Anyone with a manual can operate a Blackberry, not everyone can grow them or make a Blackberry Trifle.

Which final thought reminds me of one of my favourite lines in a Braintax rap, when talking about a future world where energy lines break down and people are forced back into a simpler and more skilled way of living..

..holed up in the woods with my trusty rifle,
the rains rusted it up,
so now I'm living on snow and berry trifle.

Which then moves my mind onto Survivors - on TV tonight at 9p.m. Yay-hey times ten!

INTERNATIONAL BUY NOTHING DAY ??

Today is International Buy Nothing Day apparently. An honourable enough cause - see www.buynothingday.co.uk - but one that many will I guess choose to ignore...

..or maybe not?

In these harder times (notice the relative 'harder' as economic conditions still cannot really be described in an absolute sense of Hard Times a la Dickens, great depression, etc?) people might just decide to spend less today than they have been doing in the past few years..

Credit crunch, mortgage woes - lower interest rates are one thing, but many people are having to stump up severe penalties by way of higher loan to value and arrangement fees on mortgages that are at or above 100% of their homes values and these translate to expensive fees when mortgaged out over the twenty or so year mortgage horizon as people add fees to mortgages instead of paying for them with shorter term loans - job losses looming in several areas of retail and manufacturing let alone the rationalisation of banking that is about to occur in the first half of 2009. All these factors are bearing down hard on most people's spending habits.

All good then, and in my opinion it's about time people generally stopped trying to live way above their incomes, buying newer and more expensive cars on bubble loan schemes - worse still consolidating the last loan with a new one and buying a new vehicle, borrowing against inflated property values to spend on depreciating assets and generally acting like the people they see on the telly. Who'd want to be a celebrity anyway? In the UK recently it would sadly seem plenty of people do.

Hold that thought while I slip back into obscurity for another day - and maybe go and spend some (non-borrowed) money in my nearest city to help Woolies out a bit!

INVISIBLE INFLUENCERS

or the blog that should be titled Ross, Brand and the News That Shouldn’t Have Been News At All..

So a phone call was made, somebody commented on how an ugly 23 year old lap dancer wasn’t particularly good looking and was a bit of a dog and perhaps a regretable lay.. hey! Worse things have been said about me to my face and my Dad didn’t go and get 30,000 people to complain a week later???

Jonathan Ross lays low, head firmly under the parapets and, if anything, doing his own image some damage. Weak, jelly spined and shitting it in case his mega-salary should be compromised. Maybe? But then he has a heck of a lot more to lose than Russelll Brand given he's on a £6m salary deal.. which might also be the reason why so many people have complained. Jealousy manifests in so very many ways.

As for Russell Brand, a firm favourite entertainer/celeb/artist(?) of mine, once the next week or so have passed I think you’ll find that all the media furore has served to do is increase his own brand value.. pun intended. Watch him migrate to better paid fields than the BBC (actually, his new series Ponderland is beginning on Channel 4 in an hours time as I write this). As Malcolm McLaren once famously said, any publicity is good publicity.

Someone I don’t particularly like is Noel Gallagher. But, he made a telling remark on Irish radio today about the whole Brand-Ross-Sachs saga. Gallagher said he was "outraged" that columnists in the press had "dictated the tone and are telling people how to behave". "It's so typical of the English in general - 10,000 people get outraged, but only five days after it has happened.” "You know what? There's now a massive divide. Them and us," he added.

Here, here to that Noel. First sensible thing I’ve heard you say in a long time. The world is going grey. And, again in Noel's words, then there’s us. Thankfully.

With that, I’m off to call a few has-been shite comedians and abuse ‘em.

Good night.