Tuesday 21 April 2009

Let he who is without sin....

Casting the stone is a somewhat topical notion given that a few of them ended up in 'Fred the shred's' front room via a closed window recently. And only a few weeks ago, as i mooched around our great capital city i had met several people who had avoided wearing a 'suit' for fear of being mistaken for a banker and run the risk being stoned to death. Me, I'm not a banker. And, along with my 'wheat and dairy intolerance' I have a 'suit intolerance' also so I passed by unnoticed.

But as I'm basking in the post 'G20' experience and wondering what impact it will have longer term, I cant help feeling that its all a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. Don't get me wrong, like many of you, I'm as appalled at the next person at the situation regarding 'C' level remuneration, and there are posts here on this blog stating so. I mean, I did my very best to fail this year and did I get a penny in bonus and shares? Did I fuck.

However, there is no demand without supply as they say. Similarly there is not action without consequence. And we are all, in a small, but not insignificant way, guilty of having our noses in the trough too. I cant look at a sequinned top without getting an image of a 5 year old boy in India, sewing sequins onto that very garment, 12 hours a day for a wage of 50 pence or something similar. Computers now come free with other things. That, if you think about it, is not right. Things have to be paid for, and complicated financial and risk models are created to pay for them. Money is lent and borrowed, to have today what we used to wait until tomorrow for.

"Not me" I hear you say. Well I beg to differ. You have a discounted mortgage? Guilty. Waited until the sale to buy that item you wanted? Guilty. Picked a John Lewis salesman's brains for 45 minutes then promptly went and shopped on-line for his recommendation, denying him the sale? Guilty as charged.

A long time ago many of our global partners would cynically refer to us as a 'nation of shopkeepers' and in the years since we have puffed out our national chest and done everything we can to change from shopkeeper to international player. But where has it got us? At least back then we owned the shops and had cash stashed under the mattress to boot. Now, we are a nation of shoppers and home-owners who, ironically have no cash to shop with and who don't actually own our own homes.

The Jury is in, the verdict is guilty. I sentence you to 10 years hard labour.

Friday 3 April 2009

Burn them at the steak!

Well bugger me! Hot on the heels of my ramblings about our bigoted society comes the 'revelation' that nearly 20% of the professional therapists responsible for treating mental health issues think that being 'gay' is a disease to be 'cured'.

Actually, on a purely physical and scientific level they are probably right. No, no, stay with me here. You see, your brain is nothing more than a blob of physical matter, suspended in a hot chemically charged soup. That's it. Nothing more. Think of it like a wet cell battery, much like the one you have in your car. Somehow, the lump inside your skull combines with its broth and, magically, from nowhere, springs a whole host of unexplained things including your spirit, personality, imagination and desires.

So at a very simplistic level, according to behavioural averages and norms, some people's head broth hasn't quite mixed up into the expected soup of heterosexuality and that if we can just pop a bit of 'seasoning' in there somehow we can adjust the recipe and get you back to 'normal'. Get the neurons to behave differently.

Quite how they think they can address this issue though is beyond me. I imagine the scenario:

Therapist to male 'patient': "OK, men's bottoms equals baaaad, very bad. Womens vagina's gooood, very good."

Male 'Patient' to therapist: "What about women's bottoms?"

Therapist to patient:" Er..............."

I can't see it working can you? Clearly these taxpayer funded fatheads have a chemical brain imbalance of their own. The magic of the human being, for better or worse, is that we are one of the few examples where you can see the notion of 'greater than the sum of its parts' in action. Granted, we often abuse that gift, but in the main, we are quite literally a miracle to behold. But the fact that we turn out in a variety of shapes and sizes, thought patterns and preferences (including sexual) should be celebrated, not calibrated. Unfortunately, the worst aspect of human evolution is that some of us feel we know better than others.

Rather unwittingly, the NHS is clearly suffering from something that its been bleating on to the rest of us about for some time - morbid obesity. Time the NHS went on a controlled diet and got rid of its 'fat belly' of bigoted thinkers.