The way of the world

I normally have little time for the whackjob conspiracy theorists.  Knowing as many civil servants as I do I fully believe that the Government's power for cockup knows no bounds (sorry civil servant friends!).  But when you start to see the decisions being made that have been made in recent times, or that have come to light in recent times, it makes me wonder just what on earth is going on.

We have a person who stole a bottle of water from Aldi.  Sent to prison.  We have a person who made a nasty joke about a footballer on the internet.  Sent to prison.  We have a person who made a nasty joke about a (presumed) dead little girl on the internet.  Sent to prison.  We have a man who liked looking at pictures of gay men performing kinky sex acts on each other.  Thankfully was in front of a sensible jury, but he had his whole private life splashed across every single newspaper.

And then on the other hand we have a man who has allegedly sexually abused tens, if not hundreds, of little girls.  No further action taken against him.  Everything hushed up.  We have a man who called his partner every name under the sun and systematically beat her and abused her for seven months.  Punished by spending a little over one working week picking up litter.  A senior public official who stole £30,000 in fraudulent expenses.  He was asked to pay it back and no more was said about it.

Either these people have been protected because of who they know (or what they know about who they know), or they have been protected because raping little girls, or stealing taxpayers money, or beating the living crap out of your girlfriend doesn't matter.  And I honestly can't decide what's worse.  In some ways I hope the whackjob conspiracy theorists are right about funny handshakes, because the alternative- that the people who have appointed themselves as protectors of society- don't give a monkey's about the poor, the weak, the vulnerable.  The alternative quite simply is that the self-appointed guardians don't care about guarding those who cannot defend themselves.

The depressing truth is that I don't believe in the conspiracy theories, I believe that the vulnerable are simply ignored in this "democratic" country of ours.  They are dismissed when they allege they've been abused, sent packing with a flea in their ear and stories of how they must have liked it really.  They have what little income and possessions they have taken from them.  And if they lash out in the only way they know how- a bit of petty theft here, a tasteless joke there- then they're locked in a cage in the blinking of an eye.  It doesn't matter, they're not really people.  Or so say our all-knowing masters.

Maybe I'm getting softer now I'm a father, maybe I've always been a wet lefty liberal (much to the chagrin of my Thatcher-loving mother).  But I see what is happening in this country and I really don't like it.  Not one little bit.  The question is, what do we do about it?

It's easy to slate the Tories- and I do, all the time- but Labour are just as bad, if not worse.  It was a Labour government that gave ATOS the contracts with demands to kick people off benefits.  It was a Labour government who "reformed" disability benefits by making it harder to get any.  It was a Labour government that privatised our hospitals.  It was a Labour government who locked people in cages for months despite having no evidence they'd done anything wrong.  It was a Labour government who taxed the poor more and the rich less.  Labour, the party set up to protect the vulnerable, just carried on the Thatcherite kicking spree.  Bizarrely enough, in a lot of ways we can trust the Conservatives more: at least they're honest about screwing the poor and lining their own pockets instead. 

So politics is clearly not the solution.  I don't just mean votes either.  I mean protesting, demonstrating.  Labour ignored a million people and turned Iraq into glass anyway.  We can't trust them. 

Answers on a postcard I think.  I'd leave the country and move somewhere else if a) I had a job I could take with me and b) the countries I could move to were any better.

Gone Swimming

It's been a funny week or two, all in all.

Nothing- absolutely nothing- ever happens in the village on the outskirts of Newcastle where I live.  It's the sort of place where a broken down bus brings a crowd.  So when it was a little bit soggy last week I didn't think much of it.  I was away in Yorkshire visiting my parents and it was moderately moist, and that was about it.

Imagine my surprise to come back to the village to this:

My house is about a quarter of a mile away from here, possibly even closer to the river Tyne than these flats are.  Luckily my house wasn't built on top of a culvert by a disused mine, but still.  It's been a strange week for where I live; the only way from one side of the village to the other has been on the old railway line, now a cycle path.

So that's what I've been doing.

I live in Newcastle and work in Durham and normally the commute is a joy to behold: a smelly unreliable Stagecoach bus, a crappy CrossCountry train and then a walk in the rain to work.  It beats trying to drive along the A1 Gateshead Bypass along with the rest of Tyneside, but not by much (at least on the train I can drown my sorrows in gin).  The buses can't get through the village and whatever semblance of a timetable they once had has completely gone out of the window.  So after taking 90 minutes to get from my house to Newcastle station, a distance of about six miles, I decided it was time for a change.  And to finally use that bike properly.

And well, commuting by bike is better than I thought it would be.  Riding from work to the station in Durham is a traffic snarled nightmare, and I can only take a bike on EastCoast if I book a fortnight in advance, but the ride along the river home is splendid.  So much nicer than sitting on that bus, full of farting sixth form schoolboys drenched in Lynx, and if I'm going to be in the rain I'd rather be moving than standing around swearing about Brian Souter.  It's been a genuine pleasure to be doing it and I know that it's a good way of turning back into a normal shape after a few weeks of too many beers and pies.  Even if I did "accidentally" stop off at the Free Trade Inn during a ride last weekend:

And then also accidentally go and see the Smoke Fairies as well:

The only flaw in my plan so far has been Freshers' Fair.  It's too busy to be able to lounge around with a nice healthy lunch (or indeed any lunch at all) but this year was slightly better than most.  Domino's Pizza had a stall, as did Krispy Kreme donuts, and despite liking neither they beat having nothing to eat at all.  And yes, I didn't have to take an entire box of donuts back to the office (even if the sabbs nicked most of them), but they were offering them.  I'm from Yorkshire and can't say no to freebies or bargains.

So the "change back from being a blimp" plan isn't going quite as well as anticipated.  And I'm off to meet my dad tonight to consume a few hop-based beverages too, so there goes that plan for another week.

Just remind me I'm supposed to be training for a marathon, yeah?