“things we could care less about day”

Enough, just enough of this weird and morbid pantomime already.  I am thoroughly ashamed that so many sadsacks in this country really feel that their individual life has changed in some way because some bulimic posh bird who frequently got a hard time from the tabloid rags she liked to manipulate, pegged it ten years ago. 

No death should go unmourned, and yes there’s a shock in realising that the seemingly untouchable are in fact mortal, but this is just embarrassing.  It was ridiculous at the time, and we should all be over it by now.  We should have been over it as soon as the service was over, were we big enough saps to feel grief for a perfect stranger in the first place.

This is not a state occasion, the woman apparently took great delight in flipping the Royals the bird when it suited her, and the way she was going she was just another ‘it’ girl, albeit the most famous of them all.  She brought it on herself, nobody forced her to marry into the circus that she did.

Why not focus instead on genuine and avoidable tragedies, the senseless death and destruction in Darfur, Iraq, or Afghanistan might be good places to start if you’re stuck for inspiration.  Perhaps the ‘great’ British public might be more amenable to some sobbing and garment-rending if the victims of those conflicts had well-meaning tat peddlers to churn out some memorial mugs and tea towels, eh?

“…the death penalty experiment has failed.”

This horrifies me in a very real way. Sure, it’s none of my business: not my country, not my state. I’m sure nobody in Texas is waiting with bated breath for little old me to weigh in on their judicial system.

But how in the name of ANYTHING can people claim this is right, just or in any way fair? Ridiculous. I accept that accessories to the crime do deserve punishment, as often they are involved in the planning or more importantly assist in the execution of a crime. Is driving the getaway car the same as pulling the trigger? Isn’t there some room for doubt that while Kenneth Foster was driving the car and committing other crimes, he didn’t realistically expect his accomplice trying to rob someone would end in a fatality? Of course, anything is possible, but are we really to be punished for every theoretical outcome of a situation. The case seems shaky at best, and yet here it is in its final throes. Why not commute the sentence to life imprisonment since Foster himself did not take a life directly. The man who did has paid with his life, so surely the pro-death penalty thinkers ought to be satisfied with that?

Yet it seems to be about more than settling a score or making things even on the cosmic balance sheet, it’s about vengeance and as with any bloodthirsty act, the greed and power of it get too much. I cannot claim to be any kind of legal scholar, but the shocking enthusiasm of Texas courts for this kind of legal ruling is well documented without my tuppence worth. It’s all part of that peculiar “red state” mindset so confusing to us, the lily-livered liberals of Europe (and I’m not really a liberal). Now nothing involving David E. Kelley and lawyer characters is exactly the most credible of sources, but watching the season 1 finale of Boston Legal with James Spader and Kerry Washington railing ineffectually against the dramatised immovability of the Texas courts and their apparent love of the death penalty, I could have shouted myself at the injustice of it.

This is such a permanent step. I’m against the death penalty generally because there is no going back. Every system is fallible, in courts and police departments that are overworked and underfunded, perhaps corrupt or simply negligent, we have not as yet managed to resurrect anyone outside of a fairy story. Life imprisonment is at least something that can be halted should new evidence come to light. Time may be lost, but a prisoner may be compensated for that, imperfect a solution as that might be. You can apologise and make reparations for an incorrect prison sentence; the same cannot be done with a corpse. For a system of law based so firmly on checks and balances, only the frankly remote possibility of a gubernatorial or presidential pardon can halt this after appeals have failed, and that can only be a failure of what the constitution set out to do. Can they not allow that prosecutors and police officers and judges might just be imperfect at times too? Of course not, the same people can’t understand that the Second Amendment and it’s gun-toting proviso was intended for a time before regulated armies and police departments, so what hope have we here?

I’m no fan of religion, but when it’s pretty much universal in all of them that only God has the right to take life, and many of the people baying for inmate blood identify themselves as Christians, surely this disparity ought to be seized upon? Again no, the rules are flexible for believers on this, and not when it comes to a life-ruining unwanted pregnancy.

I despair, I really do. There are few people I know more openly pro-American than I, but issues like this make me fervently glad to be on this side of the Atlantic.

“a big red bus that’s packed so tight, disappears in a trail of light”

What are you all up to right now?  Just tipping out of the pub into the staleness of a not-quite-summer night?  Curled up in your comfiest pyjamas promising yourself one more chapter before you put the light out and let your stinging eyes have some respite?  Well I just got to work, and I’m surprisingly happy about it.

I love night shift – the permissible sleeping for most of the day, the quietness of precious few calls, the batshit craziness of the customers, all suiting me perfectly.  I think I’ll try to stay on this as long as possible before I get to start as a driver.

Speaking of which, I finally had the dreaded medical today.  It wasn’t really dreaded, so much as I had a paranoid fear that they’d make me do the chicken dance in my underwear.  I didn’t say I was rational, did I?

Thankfully the worst I was subjected to was a terminally bored male nurse who seemed intent on making me hop around the room like I was demented.  Suffice to say I won that particular battle of wills, but only because he had died of apathy.

If ever there’s a situation requiring comedy, it’s the legally fraught situation of providing a urine sample.  My much more pleasant female nurse and I struck up an instant rapport, and the jokes were flowing much easier than anything else (despite half a litre of water ingested, come on!).  I suggested we form a comedy duo and take on the Fringe next year.  She agreed it was particularly good timing when I pointed out that French and Saunders have oh so recently divorced.

All is well, even the disorienting and downright weird audiometry testing.  I’ll be hearing high-pitched beeps that aren’t actually there for the next week or so.  On which note, here is this week’s PSA:

Watch your bloody hearing.  My ipod over tube rattle is a desperately unsafe level, and much more of it will cause significant decline over the next five years.  So much so that at my refresher medical of that particular milestone, I would most likely fail by falling out of the acceptable range.  Terrifying, quite frankly.  I love my music, but I love my hearing more.  From now on I’ll be listening to my music when I can actually hear it at a reasonable level, rather than making my skull vibrate to hear it over that really bloody loud bit between Cally Road and Kings X St P.

I’ve passed almost everything, only my already suspect blood pressure let me down.  I’ll see my GP this week to sort that out, which should get me cleared in the next couple of weeks, though it may mean long-term medication.  Since pretty much everyone in my family has suffered from hypertension at some point, it’s unlikely mine will standardise just by frequent swimming and rien de salt on my chips.  Not that I’m allowing myself to eat chips ever again, but you catch my point.  I’d like to not drop dead, and I’d really like to double my current salary.  So, needs must I suppose.

“pour myself a cup of ambition”

It’s really just as well that I’m one medical appointment away from a promotion, especially on a day like today.

I blithely inform people of engineering works most weekends without caring how it really affects them.  If you cared about every delay or inconvenience in a city the size of London you’d crack up entirely.  This weekend karma is biting me in the ass with works on the Piccadilly line, severe delays and intermittent station closures along the way.  People accept it so calmly, they know at least that complaining to station staff won’t make part of the line re-open, but there’s a hubbub of irritated sighs and muttering in their little groups.  I almost want to brandish my staff ID and say, hey, it affects us too.  It’s not something we do just out of spite or for our own amusement.  So my journey in took me an hour and half, though I had a weird book and more Barbra Streisand on my iPod than can possibly be sane.

Of course, it’s carnival weekend.  So here I am, on a glorious day tacked on to weeks of drizzle and cold, directing utter eejits to a huge and crazy event that I myself will never go back to.  You’d think if your entire weekend was shaped around attending this event a person might check how to get there before trundling past closed tube stations, wouldn’t you?

No matter, this happens all the time.  Like the road closures for the Tour de France, when residents of South East London claimed in their droves that they didn’t know their roads would be closed despite advance warnings and notices in a publicity campaign that would have made Julian Clary seem subtle by comparison.

People irritate me beyond belief, so it’s really pretty masochistic to have placed myself in so many “customer-focused” roles, or whatever the current managementspeak for that sort of thing is.  It’s not even the tourists, who have driven me batty in previous jobs; when they ask me for advice now they openly admit they don’t know what they’re dealing with, they’re usually quite grateful for my help.

But Londoners (and those on the periphery who think they’re Londoners: if you live in Hertford you DON’T LIVE IN LONDON SO SHUTTIT) are a different kettle of fish.  People who don’t know any of London bar the walk from the tube station to their office, who are outraged when you suggest they walk from Kings Cross to Euston; cheeky chappy types who ring up for bus information when they already know their convoluted route through the murkiest reaches of the East End and just want to contradict everything you say.  

My absolute gear-grinding, tinfoil on a filling ones though are the people who don’t know where they are.  Or should I say, they do know exactly where they are, but delight in being vague.  They can go from Woolwich, or Blackheath, or Maze Hill, or Lewisham etc, and even after you tell them that you need an A to B journey to plan, they won’t narrow it down.  So you make a best guess, spend ages working it out and explaining it and then they say “ah well, I’ll just drive”.  GRR SMASH THROW THINGS!

I do like that I know more about London though, I can do lots of bus routes in my head which is a little freaky.  But I’ll never be stuck for ways to get around, so I suppose I don’t mind.

Allow me some footballism

Fernando Torres:

TE QUIERO

TE QUIERO

TE QUIERO

Mwah!    

“call me good, call me bad, call me anything you want to baby”

Is it wrong that I find this both hilarious and actually tempting?  I now have a back-up plan should I *not* give birth to triplets (obviously to be named Alvin, Simon and Theodore – gender be damned!)

Moments like these are probably why nature saw fit to make me a lesbian.

“she gave you all she had, she wasn’t in your contract”

I honestly can’t imagine what it must be like to really suffer with anxiety before a job interview.  Even with the stakes as high as they were for me today, my only concern was making a good impression, but I was far from worried about it.  Today’s myriad role plays and psychological grilling, not to mention a good half hour of talking in HR buzz phrases was pretty draining, but to feel nervous on top of that?  How on earth do normal people get anything done?

So when I treated myself to Pimms at 11:30am, it really was quite well-deserved.  I felt like a bit of a lush, to be fair, but it was a lovely way to kill an hour with a good book.  Or at least, a semi-decent book that indulges my high school nostalgia (yes, this little blogger is one of those freaks who actively enjoyed high school).

Liverpool are winning, the cats are vying for space on my lap, and there’s nothing I need to do between now and lunchtime tomorrow.  The tedium of the new academic year’s paperwork can wait until work (why not take advantage of the boredom?) and I’m feeling oddly content.  I must have been running on silent adrenaline, as I crashed right after my alcohol breakfast, but now that I’ve eaten and traded a stifling suit for pyjamas the contentment is undeniable.  I may get this perfect job, I may not.  In the meantime there are far worse ways to live than this.

“screw myself with that inscrutable pout”

I’m having a strange ‘bored of the internet’ phase, whereby I know there are new and interesting things to read out there, but I stick to my usual routine of newspapers, LJ and friends’ blogs despite the stretches of sheer inactivity at work.  So consider this an open forum to recommend vaguely work-safe sites and blogs where I can while away the seemingly endless eight hour shifts I’m stuck here for.

Part of my blogging laziness is rooted in this lack of fresh stimulation.  I’m absorbing news passively, not having much to shout about at the moment.  For example, my only reaction to the new Foot and Mouth outbreak is simply one of resigned “how did this happen again?” and sadness at all those poor animals being slaughtered en masse (although since they’re on a farm, that’s probably going to happen eventually anyway).  A dramatic recution in tourism might be bad for the economy, but would reduce my daily workload.  In saying that, tourists are actually much easier to direct than London residents when it comes to travel advice, so maybe I don’t care at all.

Nor can I get worked up about Obama’s naivete, because invading allies seems even more ridiculous than invading Iraq and this from Mr Supposedly Antiwar?  I guess if you’re going to nuke everything you see it’s a bit too one-sided to be a war.  Oh, I know that’s an utterly hyperbolic interpretation, but what he said was pretty dumb and I’m thoroughly glad that Hillary is picking up on it.

This notion of him being the great new hope is still irritating me, but that’s because I find Democrats to be pretty stupid when it comes to electable politicians.  Bill Clinton didn’t win by being the uber-liberal, he won by moving to the centre (and um, the Ross Perot thing, plus Bush sr. being a numpty).  Hillary is doing the same thing, and although she would obviously be my choice, it’s the smart thing to do in a country so sharply and rantingly divided as America.  It’s just in countries like Britain that your political manifesto doesn’t really matter.

Still, at least the Premiership is back this weekend.  I’m utterly confused about this Sky/Setanta thing about what matches are where, and is the BBC pretty much out of the equation?  Will there still be Match of the Day?  Oh my wee head.