An interesting bit of synchronicity in the last 24 hours - 1) an address from the Bishop of Rochester addressing -broadly speaking - a “moral vacuum” in society, and 2) a very watchable, twee BBC biopic on the late “clean-up-TV” campainger Mary Whitehouse.

Now then - a lot of what the Bishop is reported to have said made sense, and a lot of people, irrespective of their faith / lack thereof, would share his despair at the lack of morals in today’s society (although, of course, talking about a “lack of morals”, and indeed “society”, involves HUGELY broad, blunt sweeps though swathes of infinite shades of grey).

However - as evidenced by the follow-up phone in on BBC 5 this morning - as soon as you bring G(g)od(s) into it, you inevitably, and sadly, provoke an execrable “told you so, we’re right and you’re wrong” righteous reaction from Christians all over the land, which in turn provokes a vast raising of hackles on the part of non-Christians who consider themselves to be perfectly “moral” and massively resent a minority claiming some kind of high ground simply because they have an imaginary friend and go to a building with a high-vaulted roof once a week.

Tellingly, the BBC’s revisionist Mary Whitehouse documentary made very little reference to her strongly-held Christian beliefs, which she would routinely shove in the face of anyone who disagreed with her; instead portraying her (through the ever-loveable Julie Walters) primarily as a caring non-denominational traditional tea-and-cakes, village fete teacher / mother figure. Had the dramatists included any more of the overweening holier-than-thou preachiness which made Whitehouse so hated by so many moderate, intelligent people throughout the media and beyond, the programme would never have worked in a million years.

The lesson? Yes, there are problems with “morality” in society. But preaching explicitly Christian ideas of righteousness and godliness won’t ever and solve them alone - and in fact, in a largely secular society, any group which claims morality as their sole preserve will only succeed in creating more disagreements and divisions, to the further detriment of that society. Save it for Sundays.

Hurrah! After YEARS of obsolescence, finally a post involving the “Dumb and Meaningless Award of the Year Award” category - well, sort-of. More of a survey than an award, as such. But still dumb.

The Radio Times has conducted a survey (response: a massive 3000 people!) of Brit actors in US shows with the worst American accents, and amongst the nominees were Ian McShane (Deadwood), Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies), Hugh Laurie (House) and Michelle Ryan (Bionic Woman). Sorry, but aren’t these pretty much the only Brit actors using American accents in US TV shows? Next week, maybe they could have a “best American accent” category and just reverse the order…

Poor Michelle Ryan came last. Mind you, with dimples and bee-stung lips like hers, she could speak like a German dalek with laryngitis and I’d still be putty in her bionic hands…

As if by magic, to follow on from yesterday’s post, we’re seeing petrol price protests this morning on the M4. Typical bullying sod-the-rest-of-you attitude from the haulage industry; bollocks to the environment, I’ve got a chavvy wife, an aggressive bull mastiff and a 4-bed Barratt home in Kelvedon to maintain, and if I have to bring the country to a standstill to get my tax rebate, so be it.

Road haulage has grown massively over the last 10-20 years, and plenty of cowboys have made plenty of quick bucks from this dirty mode of transportation. It’s unsustainable, and there’s essentially nothing that the government can do about oil prices worldwide - so why on earth should haulage operators get any kind of rebate? Will the government have to provide petrol tax rebates to anyone professionally affected by the oil price rises; supermarkets? Travelling circuses? eBay traders?

Haulage spokesmen will no doubt complain that “the smaller guys are being driven to the wall first”; perhaps they could ponder the irony of that next time they bypass boarded-up shops in a town high street on their way to make a delivery at Tesco…

Gentle reader, I’m in a bit of a quandry. For the first time in about three years (with the obvious exception of LZ), I’m quite keen on a young lady, and I’m somewhat at a loss as to what to do about it.

The problems are manifold; 1) she’s an eco-warrior, living and working at the Brothers of the Soil Commune, Wales, England* (or something), and thus is far removed from my spheres of influence - or any of my other spheres. 2) She routinely ignores my “down with the kids” attempts to contact her via social networking sites, and 3) she’s already going out with someone, who seems very nice, and lives / works at the same place she does.

Despite all this, I suspect that I’m not entirely barking up the wrong tree… so what’s my next move? I thought about sending her a CD of a favourite suitably romantic album (I discounted “Number of the Beast” by Iron Maiden in favour of “Veedon Fleece” by Van Morrison, which I heartily recommend to everyone, by the way - a home compilation is another option)… on the one hand, this tactic has worked for me in the past; but on the other, it’s a risibly pathetic lower-sixth way to gain some kind of vicarious kudos for the “depth” of your “soul” through someone else’s artistic endeavour. Maybe I should just hire a sports car - oh, OK, a Toyota Prius or an electric scooter - drive up there, bundle her in the back and take her home to be my eco-wife? Or maybe I should stop being so precious, get myself down to Folkestone’s famous Club Indigo on Friday night, find someone else and stop bleating like a lovelorn New Kids on the Block fan?

One for the poll, I think…

(* - 20 VP points for anyone who gets the reference without recourse to google..)

A rather good article from Simon Jenkins in The Times yesterday on house prices and oil prices. Normally, the level of contribution to the debate I’d expect from Murdoch’s The-Sun-With-Long-Words “flagship” paper would be Jeremy Clarkson mewling that he can’t fill up his LamborPenis GT for less than £200 any more, and blaming Gordon Brown for the fact that more organic material wasn’t trapped between layers of sedimentary rock 300 million years ago.

But this one was genuinely interesting, making a strong case for the fact that the rises in oil prices and the fall in house prices are good things. That house prices needed to fall is fairly obvious; the market has been in a bubble for at least 5 years now, and it needed some deflating. This “credit crunch” thingummy, with its overseas provenance and with nasty banks so far being hit harder than human beings, is actually about the softest bump with which the housing market could have come down to earth. Some stupid people with 110% mortgages will suffer, but that’s entirely their own fault for having maxed out their brains as well as their credit cards. And they’ll still blame someone else.

But oil? Surely higher oil prices will lead inevitably to inflation, and a huge negative impact on society at large? Well, yes they will - and it’s an environmental imperative that they do. We in the West get everything too cheap at the moment. Air travel is often taken for granted, our cars and homes are massively wasteful, our supermarket shelves are groaning with air-freighted produce, much of which gets thrown away uneaten; living-rooms are rammed with millions upon millions of tonnes of short-term imported electronica which we use for 18 months and then throw away into vast underground cities of slowly-rotting landfill. (I need a new telly; why, is the old one broken? No, but the plasticky bit at the back isn’t flat enough…)

The environmental message has been propagated for 20 years or so in a nicey-nicey Sting-in-the-Amazon, Fern-Gully-kind-of-way - and as a result, people now recycle a bit. But that’s the only thing that’s changed for the better. We cram our lives with more and more polluting, expensively-imported, straight-to-landfill shite than ever. Even worse, style / travel / property pages, celebrity culture and environmental flat-earthers like the aforementioned Clarkson continue to sell us a lifestyle in which it’s COOL to over-consume shamelessly. And governments haven’t done much better; Gordon Brown’s fiscal “golden rule” #1 is that he desperately needs us to carry on spending our money on crap for the sake of the economy. Little else matters to the party in power. And besides, any serious attempt to get us to change our habits would be a one-way ticket to electoral oblivion, so they limit themselves to offering committment-neutral grants of £250 for solar panels on roofs, as long as the neighbours don’t object to the eyesore.

But the way to a man’s complicity is through his wallet. Oil prices doubling would force us to think about what food we buy, how and when we travel, and how much tat we consume. There’d be a groundswell of demand for different transport technologies and locally-produced food. I wouldn’t be surprised if the world’s shady long-term policymakers weren’t absolutely delighted with the current spike, and are hoping that it continues indefinitely - they may even be in partnership with OPEC to ensure that it does, for all I know…

To be honest, I couldn’t believe this when I read it; a teenager is being taken to court BY LONDON POLICE for displaying a placard saying that Scientology is a cult. It also emerges that the Scientology members have been bribing City of London police with free stress tests / gifts / money / the promise of being reincarnated as a giant space lizard (or whatever the fuck) for several years now.

What kind of world are we getting into? Man alive, you hear more offensive things said about “proper” religions in the media all the time; imagine if they all started buying favours from police forces around the country; Ian Hislop and Rory Bremner could join the dole queue for a start (so maybe it’d be no bad thing….) Seriously though; what if celebrities, politicians, businessmen - and members of the public - were allowed to call on similar police support in objecting to any word they found slightly pejorative? What if Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who obviously has similar objections to the word “backdate”, demanded police intervention against those who disagreed with her? (A little bit of politics there…)

Shami Chakrabarti, head of well-known of human rights organisation / London department store / world-famous statue Liberty, observed “After criminalising the use of the word ‘cult’, perhaps the next step is to ban the words ‘war’ and ‘tax’ from peaceful demonstrations?”. Don’t worry, Shami - I have a solution to the problem which would bypass the Scientologists’ concerns about the word and yet still provide an accurate description. From the letter “l”, move two to the left on your keyboard and then one down / left - there you go….

That’s about the bloody limit. I’ve endured 7 or 8 years of being 99.9% convinced that “Sex and the City” is utter shite, only to have to bite my tongue around female acquaintances, all of whom swear that it’s “really intelligent”, that it “completely sums up what it’s like to be a woman” and that “men wouldn’t understand”.

Well, I’ve seen extensive previews from the film - obviously I’m not going to watch the whole thing, but I have it on doctorial authority that the “plot” of the film is entirely given away in the trailers - and all I saw was a bunch of sad, wrinkly, weirdly-skinny massively unattractive harridans sitting around talking about sex in a completely artless, sexless and unfunny way. It was the equivalent of four middle-aged blokes sitting around over their beer-guts repeating “phwoarr, look at the tits on that”. What’s to “understand”, girls?

Oh, and the shoes, the shoes… ladies, why you so easy to sell to? Are (some of) you really so gullible that you fall for promises of happiness and empowerment on the basis of spunking hundreds of pounds on footwear? OK, ad-men might be able to get vast swathes of bloke-kind to buy beer, or sit in front of a telly watching football once or twice a week, but at least beer and (very occasionally) football have some intrinsic entertainment value. Try getting a man to say goodbye to a month’s wages for a pair of Pravdas, Manilow Barries or Timmy Shoos, and he’ll look at you blankly before going down to SportsDirect and paying £30 for a pair of perfectly serviceable third-world-orphan-stitched AdiBoks*. Which is how it should be.

So there - I’ve said it. “Sex and the City” isn’t just unappealing to men, it’s boring, plotless, dipshit-materialistic and far more patronising to women than any Bernard Manning joke.

(* - …apart from SJulk1 - or maybe that should be SJP1, who never pays less than £100 for shoes, and who only EVER buys Nike AirMax. No other Nikes, just AirMax. His days at work are spent in purgatory because AirMax don’t do a formal shoe. Happy birthday, SJulk…)

Some of you may remember the balanced, considered article which I penned regarding the election of hair-weave-sporting nitwit Silvio Berlusconi to the Italian presidency. Well, we’re about a month in and already we’re seeing the fruits - ethnic cleansing. 400 illegal immigrants were rounded up in Naples - which is a legitimate law and order action - but at the same time, a Roma gypsy encampment in the city was burnt to the ground by a vigilante mob whilst the police stood by watching.

This article from The Times gives the story in full. It’s a shocking story, but no less shocking is the response from the readers of this supposedly intelligent paper, which is more or less “well done Neapolitans!” en masse. Nobody is apparently distinguishing between what happened to the illegal immigrants and what happened to the Roma.

Anyone from Romania has a right to be in Italy. If local people don’t like it, they’re at liberty to call for a referendum to remove themselves from the EU and its laws - but if the forces of justice are standing idly by whilst the dwellings of people with every entitlement to be there are burnt to the ground, it’s an incredibly sinister development.

The reasons behind the Camorra arson attack on the Roma camp, the police inaction and the hordes of baying old women taunting the fire brigade are very little to do with immigration particularly, and a lot more to do with the fact that they simply don’t like “gippos”. These Neapolitans aren’t put-upon right-thinking people at the end of their tether because of the economic pressures of immigration, they’re racists, pure and simple. They think that all gypsies are thieves - but then they almost certainly also think all Brits are football hooligans, all black people are stupid, all Muslims are terrorists (etc etc).

The mob attack was apparently precipitated by rumours of a Roma girl trying to steal a baby from an apartment; very similar to the same way anti-Jewish pogroms throughout history have been started. Thus it’s incredibly worrying to see that Times readers are applauding from the sidelines; what would their reaction be, say, if the natives of Tuscany set about burning the homes of British expats? Would they have minded if some of the Roma had burned to death?

I don’t want to exaggerate, but this kind of thing is truly how Hitler got started. Right-wingers prey on poverty and fears over immigration, and work tirelessly to turn them into outright race-hate - that’s how fascism works. First they came for the gypsies…

Some of you may know that, as well as being a professional evil eBay profiteer (or “eBastard”), I’m also an evil buy-to-let landlord, thanks in no small part to the assistance of evil mortgage-procurer Chez. Currently, the flat is occupied by a perma-tanned receptionist aged 26 (approx) and a male gay couple, both in their early 20s. I must say that all are model tenants, especially the latter; they pay on time, I’ve had no complaints from neighbours about any rowdy Village People tribute parties and there’s not even the hint of a background odour of inappropriately-used vaseline / WD40 when I pop round to collect my dues.

In fact, the villain of the piece in landlord / tenant relations is usually me - my inability to think about the conversational expressions I use before actually employing them means that I invariably come across as some kind of rampant homophobe.

Eg. a window got broken the other week, and I needed to arrange a time to pop in to fix it (I did it on the cheap, thanks to the help of a table-tennis buddy). Whilst I can’t remember the exact nature of my opening gambit, it went something like this:

“Bit of a bummer (unfortunate expression, Michael…) about the window, lads… it’s been a bit of a pain in the arse (d’oh!) getting someone to fix it, and I’ll be buggered (AAAARGH!!) if I’m paying full whack - I’ll get a mate to do it. Unless there’s a huge cock-up (oh, for the love of….), he should be round next week. Erm, I mean… oh…. sorry….”

They both looked at me, ashen-faced, and I ran home quickly to adopt the foetal position with embarrasment. This wasn’t even a one-off, it happens pretty much every time I talk to either of them. They probably suspect me of being the Grand Wizard of the Folkestone Chapter of the Bernard Manning Fan Club or similar…

Slightly delayed, due to industrial action by my digital camera, here are two of the defining images of my trip to Slovenia. Firstly, if anyone can help me deduce what on EARTH this warning sign, found by the riverbank in Maribor, might possibly mean, then I’d be eternally in your debt:

And secondly, a “smoking cubicle” at Ljubljana Airport. It’s a glass construction with an extractor fan at the top, wherein evil smokers - no more than four, mind - can stand and practice their ghastly craven habit whilst the clean people outside point and laugh - here evidenced by SJulk1 and myself. SJulk and I were having quite a chuckle at first until a third smoker - a gruff, semi-bearded intangibly-threatening Slovenian hard-nut - joined the party, forcing us to shuffle nervously into a corner and smoke much faster. It’s possibly the most unappealing booth since Cherie.