There’s no point me harping on about this, you know full well my assumption is that it will be a disaster best avoided. That said, I am prepared to let someone else have their say and Dave Kellett summed it up rather nicely in today’s Sheldon Comic.
‘Nuff said.

For once, the British Government has impressed me. It’s not much but it’s so rare I thought it worth a mention.

Their new training site is called “Train to Gain” and of course, given my general despair of the world as it is today, I would have assumed they’d have named the website “train2gain.gov.uk”. But no! It’s actually called “traintogain.gov.uk”.

Well done that department! Credit where it’s due.

I read the most amazing article today about McDonalds admitting it was adding milk and wheat to their french fries. (Can we call them chips now please? This is an English Weblog - In fact were I come from they fry them in beef fat anyway).

Admittedly, I find it a tad strange that McDs are adding such things to their chips but that’s not my problem with the article. My problem is with comments such as:

“I am vegan. I have eaten their vegetable burger with fries for many years. I will never do it again. I really hope their vegetable burgers were animal free.” 

What? What fucking retarded vegan would eat at McDonalds anyway? I can understand if they were forced in there once and had to eat something to be social or because they were starving but come on, this one has eaten there “for many years” and not had the nouse to actually check with McDonalds that their stuff was animal free? This is McDonalds, not some trendy vegan restaraunt in Covent Garden.

Then it struck me… Half way down the article there is a quote:

“Nadia Sugich, a vegan, is also suing McDonald’s. Vegans do not eat any animal products at all (vegetarians include dairy and eggs in their diet, vegans don’t). Had she known the product contained milk she would not have touched them.”

Silly me - How did I miss that? It’s just an excuse to sue somebody. Obviously these people expected a certain duty of care and dedication to their high standards of vegan care FROM A FUCKING HAMBURGER SHOP!

Well I am sorry and I have no issue with most vegans, but in this case I hope the courts force them to pay costs and tell them to fuck off and get a life.

I used to consider myself something of a nationalist. Not in the jack-booted send home all the blacks and “The Empire could do no wrong” sense, but certainly in the sense that deep down I believed that as a nation, The British are generally pretty cool. Admittedly, this is somewhat hard to defend given our history of invasion, genocide and miscellaneous rights abuses but even with all of these things against us, I would like to believe that there were at all times people in the county actively working against these things and ultimately correcting them.

Of all the people in the world unlikely to lose faith in Britain I would have put myself pretty high on the list; somewhere between Churchill and Thatcher maybe. So why do I want to leave? People keep asking me this so I started thinking of the reasons myself.

It’s not been a sudden decision although the last 10 years has hurried it a lot. So let’s think of some utterly random and disordered thoughts. This will be long, it will ramble, it will be rather typical of my weblog postings. As ever, you don’t have to read it. I am not forcing you to.

I remember cameras being one of the first things that pissed me off. When I was being trained in Surveillance one of the things we had to do was to start to be aware of who was watching us. I learned to look for cameras; this was a mistake. In 2006 there were over 4.2 million surveillance cameras in Britain, that was one for every 14 people. There are no statistics for the current number, but it has certainly increased. A report by Privacy International says that Britain is the worst Western Democracy at protecting individual privacy, in fact, in the world the only two countries worse than Britain are Malaysia and China. The cameras and other means of surveillance are there for various reasons including the often overlooked “US Security Operations”- Yup, the US is monitoring Britain on our own soil. Of course, whilst we are at this I was stopped and searched under the prevention of terrorism act a couple of years ago for taking photographs of Menwith Hill, a US surveillance station in the North of England which used to be a Cold War listening post and now spies on Europe for US commercial means. I should point out that taking photos of this place is not hard, it is visible from miles away, it is enormous and has been growing at a vast rate since the end of the Cold War when everybody assumed it would simply be closed.

They are not the only cameras I have issues with. Speed cameras are now a growing parasite on our roads. These things are operated by local police forces ostensibly as a safety measure but that myth has been debunked so many times that everybody knows it’s not true at all. They don’t add any safety, research shows that they actually have a tendency to make people speed more anyway and all they do is to make the police a fortune in fines. I have heard a theory that the Speed Camera is the single largest thing which has put a barrier between the police and the people in modern Britian. They make everybody a criminal, they make a majority of people hate and distrust the police and they make people subconsciously less willing to operate with a police force that seems to concentrate more on getting money from motorists than actually dealing with any crime at all. Of course, the modern British police force seems to be able to get away with shooting an unarmed man 8 times with no comeback on them so maybe it is good that we don’t trust them any more.

So I don’t trust the police… What about the rest of the authorities who run these surveillance operations. New legislation launched under the umbrella of making us safer from terrorists (of which much more later) is now being used by local authorities to spy on the general public for absolutely non terrorist activities. This came to light when Dorset Council admitted to spending more than 2 weeks spying on a family they suspected of lying on a school application form. The new surveillance powers granted by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 give local authorities access to things such as phone records, email information and monitor what web sites somebody is visiting as well as the right to mount on-the-ground physical surveillance against them. Needless to say, this act wasn’t ever created to allow this but what the hell, hey?

All of this makes the fact I do actually trust the British Security Services somewhat a moot point. I just thought since I was ranting about the misuse of such powers I’d actually carry on my fairly consistent defence of that lot. I also still have some respect for the higher judges, unfortunately this isn’t true of the lower court rabble.

Of course, the 2-type legal system is something else that annoys me although this has always been a problem so I can’t claim it to be any particular reason that I am leaving. We have, however, embraced the EU human rights convention and part of this is the right to a fair trial and the assumption that you are innocent until proven guilty. The British Criminal court system does operate on this assumption but the Civil Courts certainly don’t. Anybody can take somebody to Civil Court and it’s up to you to prove that you are innocent. In any case, the chances are you will end up paying a fortune in costs, win or lose.

The monarchy is one of the things often cited as a reason that Britain is so great. The relationship between the Crown and Government is a complicated one and much of it is governed by convention rather than actual laws. Maybe I am made more naive because I have more knowledge of how these conventions work than most but one of the things I always thought would happen when the government started to behave tyrannically and went against the will of the people in an overwhelming way (such as entering into an illegal war) was that the Crown would step in and do something about it. I would think that this is not only the right, but the very raison d’etre of the Queen. This is why we pay for them to live a life of opulence and luxury. When Blair invaded Iraq in 2003 (an act which we now know was based on lies to Parliament) an overwhelming majority of the British people opposed this blatantly illegal act and yet the Queen still allowed her seal to be used to send her armed forces to invade another country. This shouldn’t happen, this shouldn’t happen on so many levels. Of course, to add insult to injury on this matter, Tony Blair has never been taken to account for his various lies and his various crimes. He’s happily swanning around the world making a fortune on the lecture circuit without a care in the world. There are lots of groups trying to have him called to account but frankly, they seem to be pathetic and somewhat shit. If that’s all there is then he doesn’t have much to worry about at all.

Do I even need to talk about the fact that Parliament has now allowed the police to hold terror suspects for 42 days, without charge. The Magna Carta? The Bill of Rights? May as well just sell them all to Americans as pretty things to go into picture frames. Oh sorry, I forgot we already did that. Talking of the Magna Carta I note that the government is still trying to push ahead with its id card scheme. Europeans and Americans don’t really understand my objection to this but it’s quite important in that it does remove a very basic right given to us in the Magna Carta all those hundreds of years ago. We still have a presumption of innocence, we still have the right to be nameless and identyless in general life. If the police want to know who we are, they have to show good reason. An identity card will lose our right to anonymity, it will shift the power slightly further towards a state where we have to show our right to be here rather than the state assuming that right by default. I am ignoring the fact that as soon as we do get an identity card, the security will be cracked, the Russian Mafia will be selling fake ones for a few thousand a piece and the government will lose all the details on a train to Waterloo or post them on a DVD to somebody. We know this will happen, it’s just how these things go. I would start talking about this all being more steps towards Corpus Juris at this point but I don’t want to sound like a nutter from the UK Independence Party, I love Europe still though I am still not sure Britain should be part of it. I just have very different reasons for my beliefs than they do.

And now, we couldn’t avoid it could we. The climate of fear.

I don’t kid myself that I am much more clever than the average Brit and the only advantage I can think of is that my post graduation background was in social psychology with my PhD being in controlling people. Don’t get me wrong, I am as susceptible to control as anybody, I go out and buy Fox’s biscuits every time that damned panda on my TV tells me to. I am an advertisers dream; I fall for all the tricks and it’s made worse by the fact that I know it too. The thing is, I think that deep down most people know they are being manipulated and like me they don’t much care as long as it doesn’t play too much havock with their lives. Unfortunately, the latest big lies seem to be playing havock with mine, and everybody elses.

That odd chap Joseph Goebbels once wrote:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

And so we come to The War On Terror. My government tells me that we are living in very dangerous times and that my personal rights and liberties should be forfeit little by little to help them fight it.

Bollocks.

My government tells me that this is the most dangerous time ever and my very life and existence and freedom is at stake through the threat of Terrorism.

Bollocks to the first bit. I will concede to the last bit - But the threat is not from Terrorists.

My government tells me that invading Afghanistan and Iraq is something they had to do because we are at war with Terrorists.

What the fuck?

I started to come of political awareness in the early 80’s. I am product of that time. At that time and for the next decade or so, there were lots of bombs all over Britain, planted by the IRA and paid for by the Americans. Do Americans know that as short a time ago as 1996, the IRA bombed England’s biggest skyscrapers? Do most people outside this country know that almost every day in London there were bomb scares, train, bus and tube disruptions and general upheaval because of bombs or the threat of bombs. I don’t know how many people lost their lives through IRA bombs, I don’t know how many bombs there were. The reported numbers almost certainly don’t match the reality because the government and the press rather sensibly co-operated to keep a lot of the incidents quiet so as not to give publicity to terrorists. That is how a country with a lot of experience of terrorists works, they realise that terrorism feeds off publicity and taking that away from them helps to damage its impact. Our new enemy (which apparently now has a name, it is militant Islam) has, in the last few years made what amounts to a pathetically small impact on the country in terms of actual bombs and lives lost and yet we never hear anything else! Liberties are lost every month as we do more and more to fight this new thing, Terrorism. Have I missed something here? New thing? Terrorists in Britain? Get real!

In the early 80’s I didn’t think we’d make it to the year 2000 and I very much doubt I was alone. We were having leaflets posted through the door of every house in the country telling us how to survive in the aftermath of a Nuclear War and it was a time when films like When The Wind Blows and Threads were able to change British public opinion on the whole nuclear warfare issue. We slowly started to realise that we probably wouldn’t survive global nuclear war but these still seemed to be a greater than 50% chance that it would happen. My government tell me that I am at greater risk now from a bunch of disorganised terrorists?

HA FUCKING HA!

The weird thing is that like Goebbels great lies, it doesn’t seem to be global. It seems to be rather restricted to Britain and the USA. Its an excuse to go to war to further commercial interests abroad, it’s an excuse to step closer to that Governmental Holy Grail, a total and legal control of the people.  The two are Hand in hand, this is a dangerous situation for us to be in and I don’t like it. This “war” is costing us hundreds of billions of pounds and although I realise it’s cliche to count this in how many hospitals we could have built with the money it is worth pointing out that Britain’s filthy hospitals and the superbug epidemic are causing far far more deaths in this country than any terrorist activity ever will.

The other great lie is to do with Global Warming. Don’t switch off, don’t sneer at me. I am not saying that Global Warming is a lie, it’s not. There are differences of opinion as to what is causing Global Warming and I doubt you agree with me but even so, Global Warming has become a bandwagon to impose even more taxes and controls on the people and as I have ranted about in the past; the people it is hurting most are the poor. I foresee more and more happening in the name of global warming; I foresee more and more silly laws and restrictions and less and less useful action. Global warming will be used as an excuse to sell more and more protected land to companies to exploit and sell more and more overpriced houses to people. The poor will stay in the lowland floodable areas and will end up uninsurable and like New Orleans but on a grander scale we’ll probably end up with refugees in Mainland Britain in a decade or two. Adding more and more tax to plane travel and fuel isn’t going to help this. Putting some of those billions of pounds we are spending to protect our freedom is. Global Warming is inevitable. Taxes aren’t going to stop it. Preventing it isn’t going to work. We should be doing something about it, and doing something about it now, not later. It’s a big lie. We all know this why aren’t we doing anything about it?

Leigh visited England from Canada a few weeks ago and said that one of the things she noticed most about this country was the press. I have to admit I had barely noticed this but now it’s been pointed out to me I see the point. I am not sure what has happened to it, it’s not a press any more it is just popularist celebrity drivel interspersed with bigoted opinion. I don’t read newspapers any more so I hadn’t really noticed. and whilst I can’t use this as a reason for leaving I can still mourn its passing.

The BBC still sits on the sidelines as the only party of opposition; uncomfortably though it relies on the government for funding so its subversion is probably rather less than one would hope. I view it as some sort of ineffectual superhero that still tries hard. By day, it broadcasts endless mind numbing gobshite devoted to cookery, decorating, selling all your crap to buy new crap and buying new houses - All the things we as new-age sheep seem to like. By night, it allows platform to some quite cutting satire and the occasional excellent documentary that says much the same as I am saying here only in a less self-obsessed way. The other channels generally broadcast cheap and easy to make crap and reality TV. It’s depressing really and if this is the opium of my nation then I demand a new pusher.

And now for the punchline. None of this is why I want to leave…

The country has had messes before, England and Britain have a long history and throughout it, lots of shit has happened. But as I said at the start of this post; I have always felt that behind the scenes there were competent people working to mend things. Of course, the English have a history of being quite pathetic and resistant to change, our history of revolution is pitiful; from the rather pathetic Peasants Revolt which ended with a single blow to the Civil War which simply annoyed a bunch of people before sending everything back to how it was before as soon as the leaders realised they didn’t have anything to do once they’d won. There’s no spirit left in this country any more. Nobody cares; the people aren’t stupid, they know what is happening as well as I do but they don’t seem to care any more. Even the few who do can’t do much. Armed revolution is conveniently illegal and political revolution is, as I see it, impossible. Maybe it has always been that way, maybe this is something I have missed.

The only useful things that the Brits have ever really done to create change is to leave. For the first couple of centuries at least I don’t think we did so badly in America. Australia looks pretty to me and I think we have done pretty well in Canada, all things considered. Maybe it will be interesting to see how the Colonies have fared instead of constantly whining about what the Motherland has become.

Will the last one to leave the country please turn out the lights? Global Warming, don’t you know.

Some links - I didn’t want them in the main text because I am odd that way:

• Britain is ’surveillance society’
• Police shot Brazilian eight times
• Council Spy Cases hit 1000 a month
• The Magna Carta
• The Bill of Rights
• 42 Days later…
• UKIP on Corpus Juris
• The BBC’s The Power of Nightmares - You really should watch it here.

“Mr Twit never went really hungry. By sticking out his tongue and curling is sideways to explore the hairy jungle around his mouth, he was always able to find a tasty morsel here and there to nibble on.” (Roald Dahl)

For those of you who haven’t experienced Twitter I ask you to stop reading now. I offer no definitions, no useful information and no links. You don’t need to read this posting, get on with your life and ignore it. A life without Twitter is a richer life indeed.

A few days ago, Leigh explained Twitter to me and made it all a little more clear to me. Some of what she said made sense, I could see some small merit in micro-blogging and as a 55-word story writer, I obviously have a sense that small can often be a lot more beautiful. I don’t object to the concept of Twitter per-se, I object to how people seem to use it. Twitter originally came into my field of annoyance because of its interface to Facebook; now unfortunately it seems to be infecting everything. Twitter updates the Facebook statuses of people so I would get a feed somewhat like this.

• “Pillock is waiting for a train.”

• “Pillock has been waiting for 5 minutes, the train is now late.”

• “Pillock wonders where the train is, and goes to get coffee.”

• “Pillock thinks the coffee is horrible but at least the train is coming soon.”

• “Pillock finally sees the train.”

• “Pillock is getting on the train now.”

• “Pillock doesn’t seem to be able to get a seat, damn train company.”

I will stop now… Unfortunately, this endless microglimpse into somebody’s tedious existence won’t. So why do people do it? I could probably come up with all sorts of theories; some of which would be pretty sound but ultimately it all boils down to the fact they do it because they are obviously quite deranged. Is anybody interested in this? Isn’t there enough quality literature in the world for people to read without them sitting there all day reading this constant stream of dirge? Apparently you can get people’s Twitter feeds sent to your mobile phone - What the fuck? WHY?

Maybe part of the problem is that it seems to be acceptable in the modern work place to be connected to garbage like this. When I was at BT, it used to be a particular bugbear of one of our security people that if people got into work and sat down and read the newspaper for the first 4 hours, they’d probably be sacked but that people seemed to think it was quite acceptable to sit reading random stuff on the Interwebs all day, playing on Facebook and the like. Is it a way that office people can escape work that is more acceptable than sitting in the garden reading Treasure Island? I pity what society will become if it is. On that matter, I find it somewhat ironic that I used to effectively twitter for a living. People used to have to pay $3.00 for each of my 140 word messages but then they were sad wankers, with no other friends than the imaginary people at the other end of their phone. Oh… Wait a minute… Ummm.

Maybe it is part of the new instant news society. As news consumers we seem to expect second by second updates but they aren’t useful, they aren’t healthy and they often do nothing more than confuse the whole situation. The average person isn’t trained as an intelligence analyst and the average person’s mind isn’t quite that fucked up enough to want to be. Nicholas Taleb writes quite well on the subject of the psychological effect of constant streams of updated information in his book “Fooled by randomness” - If you can ever drag yourself away from reading inane twitter messages, weblog postings and RSS feeds full of online comics; I suggest you give it a read.

A few of the armies of the world still employ War Artists; Australia and Britian being two of the key ones. The theory is that a painting can take in all the events of a day, of a battle, of a campaign and merge them all into one single, well thought out visual statement. It can do this far better than a single photograph, a single video clip, a single report. Whilst I don’t argue that very occasionally a potographer or film cameraman does capture an iconic image of war; I do agree with history that the painting does it far better. What’s wrong with people noting their thoughts down in a little notepad, a camera or an electronic organiser and summarising their day later? They could even use Twitter to do it and write something like “Late Trian, Crap Coffee, No Seat - But Long John Silver whisked me away and saved me. Thanks Robert.”

I quite like Giolla’s Livejournal. He occasionally posts a small Haiku that summarises his week which seems like a perfect use for Twitter - Maybe people could learn a lesson from that but they won’t will they. They will continue to think that people are interested in every breath they take. Sting was wrong. We aren’t.

The pheasant situation is starting to become silly. For those of you lucky enough not to have heard me rant in person; we seem to have a whole colony of pheasants living in the garden. I have nothing against pheasants when they are timid little things that fly away when you approach them - In fact, I think pheasants are very pretty birds generally deserving of not being shot. These ones, on the other hand, are starting to get just a little too comfortable.

For a start, they scare the cats. My cats are not easily scared, they bring me rats, squirrels, small wolves… But the pheasants just completely ignore them, in fact a few days ago, I caught Poggin inside the house, looking out of the patio doors looking oddly uncomfortable. I followed her gaze and there was a huge fat pheasant standing face against the glass, staring back at her and me.  He didn’t go away; in fact when I later returned with a camera, I swear he posed.

The other problem is the noise! Pheasants are noisy little fuckers. As I am typing this, at the opposite side of a large house, all I can hear is that bloody bird squawking about something or other. I suspect the something or other is the fact I haven’t put food out for them. I shall go and check…

Um, no, apparently the squawking was actually squeaking, and it was Tink torturing a mouse. Now I have to deal with that too. I went out to try and record you pheasant noises but I got sidetracked taking pictures of the manhole full of poo.

Anyway, this post was just an excuse to procrastinate a little and to post some pheasant photos, so here you are:

And if you want the rest, then click on the little “Read more” thingumy. Read more »

This morning, as I have increasingly found myself doing, I logged into Facebook to see who had invited me to groups that I will never join and who had invited me to add applications that I will never use. There was nothing - Soooo, being slightly bored and random I found myself looking at my own profile. There was a box on it which asked people to click whether they were interested in me or not (although it didn’t say interested in what way… Which is odd in itself). I investigated this further, but in order to proceed I had to invite some friends to join the application, 10 to appear on something or other and at least 20 to appear on listings. At the cost of not appearing on any searches I eventually found a skip button and found the bits which would tell me whether any of my friends were interested in me. They weren’t. For a brief moment there my self-esteem levels dropped and I felt a little miffed that not a single one of my 148 friends found me in any way interesting.

There is another bit that I had never seen before too, though where do these boxes come from? I am sure I ignore and block most applications I am invited to join. The other section was something called “Compare People” in which your friends compare you with their other friends, in order to produce league tables.

The top of this section told me the rankings of lots of my friends in categories such as Hottest (Laura), Smartest (Johanna), Most Desirable (Johanna), Best Personality (Johanna) and Best To Work With (Johanna). In case you were wondering, it also tells me that this apparent all around Goddess called Johanna is also the most organized and the most punctual. It doesn’t tell me that she is the most likely to be mistaken for an 8 year old Munchkin which is where I would list her (Nothing personal Johanna, I love you, but you won’t ever have to pay an adult fare until you are about 30).

This unusually large section now moves onto “Where do I fit?” and proceeds to give me rankings that my friends have given me.

This is where my friends ranked me:
Pos Category win%
1st is more confident 100%
1st is a better listener 85%
1st is funnier 83%
1st is more famous 100%
1st has a better profile picture 100%

3rd is more likely to win in a fight 83%

Right! I object! I can accept “More Famous” (though I would correct it to infamous) and I can feel flattered by some of the other ones but what is this 3rd “Is more likely to win in a fight”? Which of my friends couldn’t I beat in a fight? Why do my friends think I would lose these fights? WHAT ARE THEY THINKING? I SHOULD CORRECT THEM AT ONCE!

Aaah, and here’s the rub… I am falling for the psychological hooks of social networking, something that Facebook are very quickly mastering and overtaking Myspace in leaps and bounds with (Oi, leave my trailing prepositions alone). I am starting to compare myself to other people on the site and being tempted to do something about it - Next I will be writing about it in a weblog, and urging more people to vote for me or something and then I will be part of the whole social networking avalanche and heading quickly towards the shitty coloured pile at the bottom of the mountain.

I have found the “hide box” button, I no longer see the application and I am no longer tempted to go deeper into its bowels to see a full breakdown of who has placed me where, and why; nor am I tempted to rank my friends or be mean to the ones who ranked me differently to how I would have liked.

Facebook… You can have my intimate personal details but for now, at least, you can’t have my soul.

No don’t worry, I haven’t gone completely mad. The title was meant to be somewhat sarcastic.

Somebody commented that I didn’t update my weblog very much so I thought I would respond. I don’t update my weblog very much because I don’t really have anything of much interest to babble about that seems to fit into a weblog. I don’t want to go all Stephen Fry and write undoubtedly interesting articles (he calls them blessays I think) which are simply too long to read and I don’t want to write 10 posts a day describing every bowel and bladder movement I have like a lot of other bloggers seem to. After all, I use IRC for that.

Mostly I write something when I feel I have something to say that may interest my regular audience of 3 or 4 readers or the few random people that the search-engines pull in after a few weeks. I don’t write it immediately - I wait a few days and if I haven’t forgotten about it then there is a possibility that it may actually be worth a few minutes writing it down and maybe worth a minute for somebody to read. This isn’t to say that every post will be interesting but hey, I try.

To try and add some value and interest to this post, I think I will add some things that wouldn’t really have warranted a post of their own…

Firstly - I was wrong, and the controller of Radio 2 was right. When he announced that Chris Evans would be taking over the afternoon drive-time slot I was one of those grouchy folks who said that they’d never listen to it again. The controller chap told us to give him a chance and we may be surprised but nooo, I didn’t believe him. In the end, I forgot it was Evans presenting the show and accidentally listened to it and, amazingly, I carried on doing so. I am never going to become a Chris Evans fan but I have to say I don’t hate him and he really does do a very good show.

Oh yea, and since I am babbling - I am reading all these things about Microsoft and Vista’s “Kill Switch” for unlicenced copies with amusement. Every one of my copies of Vista is licenced and legal and this is a novelty to me. It’s almost become a slightly perverse hobby watching people complain at Microsoft getting more and more evil while I sit in my little cloud of smug, legal self-satisfaction at it not being my problem at all. It’s rather nice not having to keep up to date on all the little cracks and workarounds to stop Microsoft breaking my computer any more than they already have.

Right! That’s it… Shoo now, get back to whatever you were doing, don’t let me get in your way.

I don’t see myself as a Luddite but something about the obsession for accuracy these days is starting to piss me off. When I was being educated, on the occasional times I deigned to attend that is, there was always some bright spark who could quote Pi to god knows how many decimal places. To my mind, Pi is generally 3.14 - Usually, I am more than happy with Pi being 3.

Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

It’s all the fault of the sodding electronic calculator. See back when I was younger than I ever really was, there were slide rules, and a slide rule looked like this:

I appreciate that many people reading this won’t have ever used a slide rule in anger, but the principal behind them is that most of the time, you more or less guess the answer, as opposed to have it displayed to 9 decimal places in monocolour LCD lettering. Look up a little from here… See the third scale down? Just to the right of the 3? There’s Pi marked. It’s marked roughly between 3.1 and 3.2 - It’s about 3.15 in fact. If you want to multiply Pi by 3 you pop the two numbers together on the correct scales and read off about 9.45 on the result scale; if you want to multiply it by 30, you add multiply that by 10 in your head… If you want to multiply it by 3 million, you do the same only with more zeroes and your error rate has gone up considerably, but it doesn’t matter much really, does it?

Why is this annoying me? Apart from the fact that I want to shoot people who can quote Pi to more than 6 places? Well it’s the post office, that’s what it is. They have digital scales now, and when the parcel you are posting weighs 501 grammes, they charge you for over 500 grammes. Generally speaking by that point, I just rip a corner off and make them re-weigh it but even so, when did we become so obsessed with this “down the nearest gramme” accuracy? I don’t like it. Make them stop. I am not even going to start ranting about their new letter size measurement devices which very much depend on the operator’s skill at getting parcels through a little plastic measuring slot - Well I am not going to rant YET, at any rate.

I want markets back where they plonked stuff on scales and weighed it in pounds. If it was 4.4 pounds, and cost 30p a pound, they’d charge you about £1. 30 because that was roughly what 4.4 * 30 is (a slide rule would confirm this to you, if you were to ask it, especially a W.H.Smiths one with the little clear slider thing missing like most of them are these days). These days they pop things on digital scales, tell the scales that the things you want cost 78p per 100 grammes, and when it weighs 264.5g it prints a label that says £2.08 (yes, the bastards round it up too).

I blame the Common Market.

As an Englishman from the North of the country; I have been raised in the secure knowledge that the pinnacle of human achievement was reached with the invention of the shed. Men need sheds as much as they need air, water and Marmite - It’s as simple as that. A shed gives men independence, freedom, and a place to sit, drink tea and watch the world go round.

Having been raised in this belief, I would consider it sacrilege for somebody to suggest that there may be something better and more practical than the shed. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? Well far be it for me to try and improve on the shed, but I do think I have found a possible contender for the next generation of shed. The Ambulance!

Before you scoff, think about it! It’s a huge shed, with lots of twiddly things in it, loads of cupboards, built in seats, and and and… AN ENGINE AND WHEELS!

You can drive it away and have your shed somewhere else. Think about that! Ok, so now the more naive of you may be asking “Why an Ambulance? Why not just get a camper van?”. Camper vans are gay, that’s why. People who have camper vans are generally utter knobends who should be banned from the road and then shot. Ambulances on the other hand… Well, you can tell people you got it because it’s a big van, whilst secretly dreading the idea of ever actually having to use up all that space in there. When you get really bored, you can hunt for the sirens, and work out how to reconnect the blue lights. You can try and work out what all the data cabling is for, you can even try and work out why the interior lights only work sometimes. AND THERE ARE BUTTONS! LOTS OF BUTTONS!

Trust me on this one any Northern Men out there… Before you go out to the Shed Shop to look for a new hideaway; have a look in Autotrader and see if there are any old ambulances for sale first. You will thank me.

Oh yes. Here’s one I made earlier: http://lorry.org/Misc/Ambulance/