Expenses! - the musical

It seems to me that we have a West End hit in the making - a cast of hundreds, opulent stage sets (courtesy of John Lewis) and plenty of drama - so here's the first big chorus number...

With grateful thanks and apologies to Weird Al Yankovic ('Ebay')

(It's all on) Expenses

A new worktop counter,
A milk chocolate Santa,
A packet of biscuits,
A sackful of horse shit.

A flat screen and Cable,
A new dining table,
A pouffe and a loo seat,
It's all there on the receipt.

Tell me why our taxes paid for Geoff Hoon
(Tell me why) to decorate his bathroom,
Tell me what exactly his defence is
For claiming it on expenses.

A plastic ice-cube tray,
A tea-set from E-bay,
A wine rack, some house bricks
And Dick Timney’s skinflicks.

Tell me why a mirror for your make-up,
Tell me why so many brews at Starbucks,
Tell me why a drill to mend your fences
All claimed on expenses.

Tell me why a packet of Maltesers,
Tell me why two tins of chicken Cesar,
Tell me why you took leave of your senses
And claimed it all on expenses.
(Yes, it's all on expenses.)

H/T to the grauniad via Counting Cats in Zanzibar.
For more details, see the Telegraph - but you already knew that.

Tinky-Winky, Spiderman and Oompa-Loompa in Punch-up

'People dressed as an Oompa-Loompa, Spiderman and the Teletubby character Tinky Winky were among 10 held after a drunken brawl at a holiday camp over the bank holiday weekend.'
Those readers who habitually browse the well-tended acres of the broadsheets for news may well have missed this little gem. Initially reported by the Sun and gradually working its way up the journalistic food-chain, it has now arrived at the Telegraph online where it has been filed in Politics. Politics?

It seems that the story concerns Law and Order, and is therefore a political item (while the enforced smoking quotas of Gong'an Province appears under Weird News (subtitle 'How About That?)). Surely someone got their wires crossed here.

Although, come to think of it, given the farcical nature of recent political scandals and in-fighting, perhaps the headline isn't all that inappropriate for the politics section after all.

Bring On the Morlocks...

Want a recession-proof business idea? Then take a lesson from Pets at Home – pre-tax profits up 29% in the year to March – who are planning to open another 20 stores this year. It seems customers are buying toys and treats for their pets, but that’s not all:

Sales of fashion lines, such as dog clothing, have also risen as owners, faced with spending more time with their animals, try to spruce up their image, the company said.

Read it and weep! Even in the current financial climate, there are people out there prepared to spend their (presumably) hard-earned cash procuring the product of a third-world sweatshop to decorate a dog.

There’s a depressing symmetry here; the RSPCA recently reported that pets are being abandoned in ever-increasing numbers – up 25% on last year. The cost of pet ownership is surely a factor but:

The RSPCA is concerned that people are ready to give up their pets for the most bizarre reasons. One owner told an inspector: “My cat doesn’t match my new carpet.” Another said: “I’ve just bought a new leather sofa and I don’t want the cat to scratch it.”

The general picture is a depressing one; treating an animal as a fashion accessory, dressing it up for amusement or abandoning it for completely selfish reasons are the acts of a child, unreasoning and irresponsible. Britain is full of them, and retail power is now in their hands.

Will the last grown-up to leave the country please turn out the lights?

Trash TV and Karen Matthews

Trawl through the Daily Mirror and you’re likely to feel in need of a shower, particularly after reading this. A depressing late-night ‘broken Britain’ conversation led to discovering Karen Matthews’ description of life behind bars:

"It's great here. We've got a pool table. I even have my own cell.... We've a wide-screen TV in the lounge." When asked what she missed, she quickly replied: "Sex, shopping and coffee at my neighbour's house." She never once suggested she pined for her seven children.

There’s something particularly depressing in her description of watching her own case being discussed on a chat show – ‘Jumping up and down in excitement on her chair, she said: "We were watching it in my cell. There were six of us. The audience were a*******s."

So this deluded and uneducated woman has daily access to hours of television, including the sort of chat shows that gleefully air the dark underbelly of society. And presumably the choice of evening entertainment on the communal wide-screen TV is hardly going to be what one might call edifying.

Matthews is herself a product of the chat show generation; shallow, immature, self-centred, lecherous and voyeuristic. What a waste, then, to allow her and her like to spend years absorbing yet more of the hypnotic sensationalism that has helped create their distorted values and moral standards.

Or is it now an inalienable human right for prisoners to watch trash TV?

Put Out More Fags*

All over Gong’an County in China’s Hubei Province, state employees are puffing away as if their lives depended on it, or at least their careers.

In what must be one of the oddest state directives ever – and China’s had some pretty odd ones in the past – civil servants and teachers have been set a consumption target of 230,000 packs a year of locally produced cigarettes to boost the local economy.

Of course, state reliance on tobacco-generated tax income is nothing new – see Peter Taylor’s ‘The Smoke Ring’ (1984) for details – but few governments have gone to the lengths of rummaging through bins for incriminating rival butts or fining those who don’t smoke enough.

Even schools have been issued with a smoking quota for teachers, with inspections by a ‘special taskforce’ to ensure compliance. It seem the lure of vast tax revenues is irresistible - the tail is wagging the dog to an alarming extent; of all the resources for a state to rely on for its income, this is surely one of the least prudent.

But before we point an accusing finger or see this as third-world eccentricity – the Telegraph put this story in its ‘weird news’ section – consider the tax revenue from cigarette sales in the UK; perhaps we should take a good look at the windows surrounding us and put our stones down again.

*British joke - apologies to readers of an American persuasion

Going for a Thong

By a happy concidence, I came across this (Telegraph Gallery) the same morning as JuliaM's diverting post on a paramedic who stripped down to a thong in Tesco after staff refused to serve him because he was in uniform.

Since he was trying to buy a bottle of wine, I suppose their refusal is understandable - consider the damage a drunken paramedic on duty could cause - but it seems a little harsh that any uniformed worker has to change their clothes before popping in for a bottle of Cabernet on the way home from work.

One has to wonder whether the thong in question is the paramedic's usual attire (rather uncomfortable wear for an 8-hour shift, I'd have thought), or whether, aware of Tesco's policy, he set up the confrontation to make a point - the recent TV screening of 'The Full Monty' being something of a coincidence.

Still, it made someone's day; eye-witness Rachael happily told the Mail,

'I couldn't believe my eyes. Normally people would pay to see a man in uniform strip but we got a free show.'

My thanks to JuliaM at Ambush Predator

Cometh the hour...

Health Secretary Alan Johnson told the BBC that Mr Brown was "a man for these times".

Swine flu and economic crisis and society going to the dogs, a public disillusioned beyond repair (46,236 signatures and counting) and rumblings among the party faithful; something of a backhanded compliment here, perhaps.

But what better figurehead for a nation plunging into recession than the man whose unshakable belief in the myth of his genius led to hubristic economic policies? Who better to represent the morass of NuLab’s gravy-train cronyism than a clannish Scotsman, walled in behind his privileged coterie of attack dogs?

Or perhaps it's an allusion to goverment by text-message and YouTube, and Brown's attempts to ingratiate himself with that NuLab target audience 'Yungpeeple' - I'm still having nightmares about the funeral-home makeup and creepy smile from that webcast.

Still, you’ve got to hand it to Johnson for standing by his man while the rest of NuLab jostle for positions in the lifeboats, or, to quote UK Commentators, the ship deserts the sinking rat.

Atishoo! Atishoo! We All Fall Down

Thanks to MATT in the Telegraph

Plenty of fixes this week for the news-addicted with the media response to swine flu. 24-hour rolling news coverage, sneeze-by-sneeze analysis and the BBC’s Q&A page and interactive map (or 'use this map to explore the Swine flu outbreak in pictures, audio, video and text') combine with slightly disturbing enthusiasm to offer an unprecedented voyeuristic experience as we wait for the axe to fall.

For the conspiracy theorists (and smug vegetarians) there is rich material for speculation on the Hubris that is intensive farming. The Times reports that the first recorded cases occurred in an area blighted by slurry lagoons from a massive feedlot or, euphemistically, Confined Animal Feeding Operation (See ‘Fast Food Nation’ for elucidation) that raises almost 1 million animals a year.

If there is a connection – and 60% of the local inhabitants falling sick looks pretty conclusive – then Swine Flu will join nvCJD and e-coli in the rogues’ gallery of diseases linked to modern intensive farming and production methods.

As a character in ‘The Day of the Triffids’ points out, we’ve been walking for years along a tight-rope of our own making, our eyes deliberately closed to the depths beneath us; the wonder is not that we are now falling, but that we managed somehow to balance as long as we did.

John Humphrys' Crystal Balls

Dear Today programme,

This morning you gave details of Prince Charles' audience with the Pope, (a short lads-only chat before allowing the Duchess and retinue in) even though it had not yet taken place. On several recent occasions, you have announced what such-and-such a politician 'will say in a speech later today'.

Since these events have yet to happen, please explain the clairvoyant devices you employ to be so certain that nothing will prevent, alter or postpone them. Granted, you have a copy of the Prince's itinerary, or the politician's press release, but how do you know? The royals might get stuck in traffic, the MP could pull a sickie, an asteroid might impact and end the world as we know it.

Oh, and while we're about it, please try to do something about your habit of spinning out news headlines, as in 'The teenager missing for three weeks following a coach crash during a school trip to the Australian outback which resulted in three deaths has been found....'

'No man is an island'; by the time you get round to telling me whether the child is alive or dead, I've been holding my breath for 30 seconds. Forget this Germanic obsession with placing the verb at the end of the sentence; for goodness' sake, put yourselves in the position of the listener, and give us the crucial information as soon as possible!

Thank you, that feels a lot better.

Songs from the Dentist's Chair

For the past week, thanks to my recent root canal work, I've had a particular song running through my head. By a sad coincidence we learned yesterday of the death of one of its authors Duke D'Mond (aka Richard Palmer), lead singer of the Barron Knights, kings of British pop parody.

I think it deserves not to be forgotten, if only as a form of distraction from what's going on in your mouth. (At least it stops me thinking of 'Dentist!' from 'Little Shop of Horrors'.)

All together now....

"There's a dentist in Birmingham
He fixed my crown..."

Suggestions for other suitable songs welcome - I have a follow-up appointment next week.

Misery Memoirs and a Trip to Tyburn

As regular readers may have noticed, it’s been a bit quiet around here recently, largely due to a week in which the terms overtime, root canal and budget have been bandied about too frequently for peace of mind. In need of cheering up, I visited my local bookshop today – the one with a slightly eccentric notion of classification.

Since my last visit, a new category has sprung into being; a shelf label now proudly announces ‘Unfortunate Lives’. Under this, a handwritten card bears the following description: ‘A special feature showcasing lives of individuals struggling with adversity.’

Showcasing? Showcasing? Why not just go the whole hog and call it ‘Let’s have a good old vicarious wallow in someone else’s misery while congratulating ourselves on how caring we are'? And someone not only thought the term appropriate for these horrible books, but thought so for long enough to write it out neatly on a card and tape it to the shelf.

Since Mis. Lit. was publicly embraced by Oprah Winfrey – no stranger herself to lucrative abuse memoirs – as ‘life-affirming’ and ultimately uplifting redemptive therapy, the floodgates have opened. In imitation of the sainted Winfrey, Britain’s Richard and Judy ran a sort of ‘more abused than thou’ phone-in competition, giving viewers 2 minutes to pitch their harrowing real-life stories - the prize, a publishing contract worth £25,000.

There have been efforts to resist this revolting trend – the Observer lifted its voice, Cassandra-like, three years ago to warn of the rapid development of the genre, asking plaintively, "Whatever happened to, say, ‘Little Women’ or ‘Cider With Rosie’?” With supreme irony, a google ad at the end of the online article invites you to ‘sell your story for CASH’.

Which brings me neatly to the market for this kind of thing. Who is buying it in such quantities that publishers are churning it out at unprecedented speed? What do they hope to gain from reading of repellently sadistic acts? Are they really any different from the crowds who once flocked avidly to bear-baitings or the public hangings at Tyburn?

A clue, perhaps, can be found in the Sun’s report of a 12-year-old girl’s mistreatment of a dog, filmed by a ‘sickened’ neighbour for 13 minutes (hat tip to Unenlightened Commentary), and more specifically in the way that the Sun’s website helpfully included the footage so ‘readers’ could appreciate it for themselves.

Iannuci the prophet

Life has been particularly busy imitating Art this week, as the doings of the McBride/Draper menagerie come to light - 'they looked from pig to man, and from man to pig again....but already it was impossible to say which was which' - and this is set to continue with the imminent release of Armando Iannuci's 'In the Loop'.

Iannuci, whose prescient e-mail storyline from 'The Thick of It' has become compulsory - and compulsive - YouTube viewing this week, said on the Today programme that the current political furore is the result of a culture of the end justifying the means that has sprung up over the past ten to fifteen years.

He obviously moved in more scrupulous circles than I did during the 80's if he thinks it's that recent (see Confessions of a Former Labour Acolyte vol 1 and vol 2), since some of the embryonic NuLab advisors were even then justifying some very dubious means like nobody's business. It's just taken them 25 years to reach the top of a very greasy pole (or to float up to the surface, if you prefer).

When 'In the Loop' appears and the inevitable comparisons are drawn with our glorious leaders, I hope Iannuci comes up with a disclaimer as good as Heinrich Boll's ('The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum'); any resemblance between a real newspaper and the obscene, muck-raking gutter publication he describes in his book, he says, is 'neither deliberate nor accidental, but simply unavoidable.'