Behind Blue Eyes

I have a bit of a thing about people driving while using their mobile phone. Someone told me that it is as detrimental to a driver’s concentration as being over the alcohol limit. There is quite enough poor driving in London as it is without adding to it with mobile phone usage. Also, why are people so addicted to their mobile phones that their conversation cannot wait until they have stopped the car? How urgent is that request to pick up some salad on the way home? Once you get into the habit of looking, you notice quite how many people are a danger to themselves and others.

A while back I was out for a run and I was nearly run over by a Transport for London branded car. The driver had driven straight through a red light across a pedestrian crossing and on to a roundabout. The traffic was jammed ahead and I caught up with the driver and remonstrated with him. He could not have cared less. I told him that he had just gone through a red and could easily have hit me as I crossed. He carried on talking on the phone while also telling me to mind my own business, he even suggested that it was me who should be watching where I was going!

As soon as I got home I fired off an email to Transport for London detailing exactly what had happened, the number plate of the vehicle involved and a description of the driver. At first I did not even get an acknowledgement from the organisation which is responsible for the safety of the roads, buses and tubes in this city. After a bit of chasing I got a holding reply and then another email saying that the matter would be dealt with internally but that the result would be confidential. In other words they did not give a shit and no action would be taken. The driver would not be prosecuted or even disciplined and would carry on driving these cramped streets. The citizen taxpayer who had nearly been run down would have no redress.

This evening I was walking home when, looking both ways to cross a side street, I saw something which didn’t look quite right. There was a taxi approaching me towards the main road but I thought the street was one-way in the other direction. I did a double-take, then looked again at the street signs and I was right. The taxi swept past at a decent lick and onto the main road. The driver was gassing on his phone. Two or three minutes later the same taxi overtook me again having done a quick loop around the block. The driver was still on his phone.

If professional drivers in the form of TfL employees and black cab drivers are driving like idiots, what kind of example does that set to anyone else? How much faith can you put in the person who is driving you home at vast expense if he drives the wrong way up a street without even noticing? Who can we trust?

The other day I was at a training session. We were sitting around a table discussing an interesting and important subject (which is irrelevant for the purpose of this post). The chap leading the discussion used, perfectly in context, the word transsexual. Not a nanosecond had passed before someone in the class had piped up to object. She introduced herself and politely pointed out to the trainer that the word transsexual is no longer current terminology and that the preferred term is now transgender or, even better, trans.

I have to say I was a little bit surprised. After all, what could possibly be offensive about the word transsexual? It is surely just a description and has no derogatory or laudatory connotations whatsoever, any more than heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual have, any more than wet or Tuesday have. I do not understand how a statement of fact can be upsetting in that way. I really wanted to talk a bit more about this subject but the course was already being compressed to fit it into the available time, and I could see that the trainer felt embarrassed to have been caught red-handed by the political correctness fuzz.

This is not an isolated linguistical occurrence. We seem to have become scared of the word sex. In fact, transsexual is a much better use of the English language than transgender (so much so that my web spell-checker does not recognise the word transgender). Traditionally the word sex was used only to categorise male and female members of a species. Male or female, left or right, one or zero, blue or pink. Sex? still appears on forms, quite correctly. Yes please is not an appropriate answer, unless you have a bureaucrat fetish.

What we have seen is the sexualisation of the word sex. Lazy people have taken a sweet and innocent scientific word and corrupted it into something altogether more sleazy. Sex is now often used as a shortened form of sexual intercourse and we have had to invent the word gender to reclaim the less exotic meaning of the word. The word gender is, of course, purely a linguistic term. Some languages (thankfully not ours) have masculine and feminine nouns. Humans do not have a gender any more than we should be having sex. True Anglo-Saxons should, of course, be doing something rather more four-letterish.

So in a rather perverse and convoluted political culture of linguistic transmogrification and fear of speaking the truth we arrive at a situation where people who are not comfortable with the sex that they were born into are forced to de-sex and re-gender. It must be very confusing.

Who decides these things? Who decided that gender was more politically correct than sex? When did we become so shy about discussing our sex that we had to cloak it with linguistic bullshit? I am a male trapped in a horrible flabby fat man’s body. Everyone can see that and I can’t hide from it. If you are a man who would prefer to be a woman or vice versa there is nothing wrong with that. Nobody cares. Why wrap it up in a politically correct blanket of old nonsense?

Thinking back to my comments about Club UK I popped the words into Google and immediately found this quite interesting blog post about the place. I was too young and too uncool to have been to the place but I remember seeing the little blue water bottles at more exciting mates’ houses. The place certainly had good branding.

The dance music club scene was massive and expanding. I listened religiously to pirate radio stations which pumped out house and garage, techno, happy hardcore and drum and bass. You could get a “shout out” by phoning a pager or a mobile (pretty cutting edge in those days) and giving the name of the person you wanted to show respect to: shout out to the man like Tommy. There were even raves for under 18s! I went to one in summer ‘95. It seems very odd in retrospect, especially considering that there was no booze but many of the kids there were probably pilled up to the eyeballs. In my naivety I didn’t see any wrongdoing but it must have been a festival of MDMA. It took place at a huge venue in suburban Surrey. There were two massive rooms, one playing happy hardcore (my scene) and one concentrating on drum and bass. Rumour had it that the “vibe” in the D&B room was bad and there had been fighting whereas the mood in the happy hardcore room was, well, happy. A couple of my mates went shopping beforehand and bought workmen’s dayglo vests, white gloves and whistles. I wore my Global Hypercolor t-shirt.

By the late 1990s the superclubs were well-established. Cream, the Hacienda, Ministry of Sound. It was boom time for dance music. I am far too old for clubbing these days and have totally lost touch with it. Does Cream still have queues snaking through inner Liverpool’s decrepit streets on a Saturday night? Are there still make-shift warehouse squat raves in abandoned buildings in unfashionable parts of London? Do clubs still generate amazing flyers to advertise their events? I wouldn’t know how to find out.

UPDATE: A reader has just emailed me this link to a ’10s edition of the dance club apparently set up by the chaps behind Sanky’s Soap. He says “the location and timings mean you can get the train from Euston, arriving when it has opened and get the first train back to London when it has finished the next morning”. Sounds like somewhere to engage with to encourage my mid-life crisis… The web site is worth a click if only to see a pixelated white dove flickering across the screen.

(28 Jan 2010) Kate Hoey: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice if he will set out, with statistical evidence relating as closely as possible to Vauxhall constituency, the effects on the constituency of changes to his Department’s policies since 1997.

(25 Jan 2010) Kate Hoey: To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills if he will set out, with statistical evidence relating as closely as possible to Vauxhall constituency, the effects on the constituency of changes to his Department’s policies since 1997.

(19 Jan 2010) Kate Hoey: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government if he will set out, with statistical evidence relating as closely as possible to Vauxhall constituency, the effects on the constituency of changes to his Department’s policies since 1997.

(18 Jan 2010) Kate Hoey: To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will set out, with statistical evidence relating as closely as possible to Vauxhall constituency, the effects on the constituency of changes to his Department’s policies since 1997.

(18 Jan 2010) Kate Hoey: To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families if he will set out, with statistical evidence relating as closely as possible to Vauxhall constituency, the effects on the constituency of changes to his Department’s policies since 1997.

Answers on a pre-election “information” leaflet??

(via TheyWorkForYou.com)

I’m sure I have done this before but you know what? This is the ‘net and it’s no longer uncool to be a geek. In fact the consensus has now shifted and it’s the technophobes who don’t have iPhones and laptops who are out of step. Having a blog or a Twitter account is not just for chaps with no mates. My dad was a perpetual early adopter of tech kit because he always needed more processing power for his number-crunching work. Before home computers, if you wanted heavy calculations done you took punch-cards down to the nearest mainframe or, in later years, dialled into it remotely. So when personal computers started to appear on the horizon my Dad tried many of them to find something which could manage his work-load. The ones which didn’t suit him soon got junked and sent downstairs to be played with by us kids.

The first computer that I got to grips with was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

We had educational games to teach us spelling and arithmetic. The best one was a game where if you got the question right you got to blow up an enemy tank. At five or six years old it was very exciting. Of course software was stored as sound on audio tape in those days because disc drives took up whole rooms and were not for home computers. Sinclair and Acorn were in a huge battle to conquer the “cheap” home computer market. Most people nailed their colours to one or the other side, but we actually had both a Spectrum and a BBC B!

We used the BBC at school and so it made sense to have one at home. We had a teacher at primary school who was keen on getting us to learn about computers and my brothers and I took to it like ducks to water. Given how much DNA I share with my father, I doubt it took much persuasion that we should have one… He found a second-hand one and we loved it. My brother’s stellar career started with that machine.

The house was littered with kit. We had work slates especially imported from America, a Sirius (which made really meaty noises when accessing its disc drives) and a system which allowed a computer to operate a typewriter so as to be able to produce high-quality reports without the mortgage-sized cost of owning a laser printer.

Computer equipment was expensive on a scale that seems unbelievable in retrospect. I remember going to a computer shop to pick up the bleeding edge 33Mhz 486 PC that my dad had to warn his bank that he was about to buy. It cost thousands. I secretly installed Lemmings on it and crept into his office when he went out to meetings. It had Windows 3.1 but my dad never got used to the mouse, still preferring to use the command line.

At my mum’s office she had a Mac. An original Mac. I got hooked. A wealthy donor had given my school several Macs and we tested them to the limits.

I saved up and eventually I could afford my own computer and I plumped for a Performa 450 – such a good machine that there are now condoms named after it. Presumably it was a safe, long-lasting computer…

Some of my student loan went on one of these beauties, the Powerbook G3 (Wall Street). It was great. Our halls of residence had fast internet connections which were used purely for study (and maybe for setting up a website outlining our booze-fuelled antics in the city which if we had been canny could have pre-empted Facebook by several years…).

Unfortunately at some point I lent the laptop to my mum and it somehow “stopped working”. A bit of research revealed a power supply problem common to laptops that had been dropped in a particular way. I gave the G3 monster to a charity which collected broken computers in order to fix them up and send them to schools in Africa.

Shamefully my Mac history stops there. I switched to a borrowed PC and my current computer is this little gem:

It is still very much a decent computer even at three-and-a-half years old. I have no plans to replace the Samsung, I don’t need to. But come the summer, I have a slight suspicion that I will be investing in one of these.