White poppies from the Peace Pledge Union

It has reached – hopefully – its zenith this year with an argument with FIFA about whether British football players would be allowed to have some poppies embroidered onto their football shirts during international football games over the next few days. Even though there has never been any desire on the part of British football players to do this before, even though to do so is clearly against the FIFA kit rules, and even though no other nation which observes Remembrance Day has been clamouring to do this, all of a sudden the wearing of a poppy has become An Historic National Tradition, the initial refusal to allow it was Political Correctness Gone Mad, and the compromise which has been reached with FIFA is a Victory For Common Sense.

Apart from my early years in primary school (when I didn’t understand what the whole thing was about, and when I was basically intrigued by the actual physical product) I’ve never worn a poppy, and I’ve never actively participated in Remembrance Day activity. Usually when 11 November falls on a work day, out of respect to the 99% of my colleagues who do wish to observe the two minutes silence I usually absent myself to the toilet around that time rather than ostentatiously sit there carrying on working, but this year it’s probably fortunate that I’m actually off on leave on that day because, the level that poppy fascism has now reached, I might end up saying or doing something somebody else might regret.

Why do I feel this way?

There are a number of reasons for it, but many of them can be summed up in one succinct phrase.

Because it’s bullshit.

The message of Remembrance Day as it was conceived was supposed to be Lest We Forget; it was instigated in the aftermath of The War To End All Wars to honour the millions who gave their lives – or rather, were forced at gunpoint to give their lives by their so-called class superiors – in what was humanity’s biggest act of utterly pointless industrial slaughter ever. In its early years it was a noble tradition, but sadly even then probably not truly believed in by those responsible for that slaughter.

But now? Lest We Forget has nothing to do with it; we Remember for precisely four minutes every year (or only two minutes if 11 November happens to fall on a Sunday). We barely Remember in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, and at precisely 11:02, after we’ve done our Remembering, we immediately Forget. The killing continues, the political grandstanding continues, and nobody in any position to actually do something about stopping the killing does anything about doing anything to stop it; our media and political class publicly and ostentatiously mourns every one of Our Boys announced to have died, whilst publicly and ostentatiously celebrating the deaths of The Baddies. And similarly the other way round; in their own communities jihaddi terrorists are fêted as Heroes Of The Revolution, whose deaths at the hands of the kafirs will be avenged, regardless of the number of children of those kafirs who were liquidised by the bomb planted on the bus or outside the pavement cafe.

Rarely does anybody stand out from the crowd to say Enough! Rarely do we hear anybody call for the madness to stop; the few who do, and the few who refuse to play the game, who refuse to stand up in a sham token of respect, are pilloried by the media and their peers.

Whilst the original meaning of Remembrance Day was about Remembering those who had given their lives in defence of Freedom, it has mutated into being about showing visible support for Our soldiers who are engaged in State-sponsored killing overseas; to question that support is framed as being unpatriotic, and of Spitting On The Graves Of Those Who Died That I Might Spit; the meaning of Remembrance Day is no longer a moment of private reflection, but instead has become a When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife? question.

But apart from anything else, why are only soldiers given a special day to be Remembered anyway? Why do we have no Remembrance Day for firefighters who’ve died saving lives? Or police officers? Or paramedics? Or accident and emergency nurses? They too risk their lives in the line of duty, but we have no special symbol or special day to remember their sacrifice. Our soldiers are acting under their own consciences on the orders of our government – but so are Their soldiers. It is patently ridiculous to assert that Our soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Right and Their soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Wrong – so whilst Remembering Our soldiers who have been killed in action, why can we not also remember Their soldiers who Our soldiers have killed? As the throwaway line in Austin Powers goes, “henchmen have families too you know”.

Some people often suggest that I might sport a white poppy instead; it’s an attractive suggestion, but actually I see it as a bit of a cop-out – whilst it promotes a conversation, it’s still buying in to the whole attitude that for the first two weeks of the year people must display their support.

Now, whilst I fit into the wider set of people called ‘pacifist’, I’m not a naïve one – I do agree that regrettably there are indeed Bad People in the world, who end up running countries, who manage to inspire other people to kill on their behalf, who cannot be stopped with strong language and the promise of a trip to the seaside if they promise to be good, and that We need soldiers to stop them. I’m the kind of pacifist who accepts that whenever a situation reaches the state of armed conflict, then armed conflict is the inevitable consequence – but that the seeds of the next conflict are always sown in the aftermath of the ending of the last one. I accept that sometimes there’s no reasoning with Bad People – but I do wonder if some Bad People might turn out to be not so Bad after all if our media and politicians were willing to make just that little bit more effort to reason with them.

Don’t get me wrong – I accept, respect, and support right of you, the 99%, to hold your Remembrance Day commemorations. Why do so many of you have such difficulty in accepting my right to dissent from them?

(Further reading: Adrian Short on the crass commercialisation of the Poppy Appeal, and Dan Slee recounts a moving personal family tale)

The item mainly talked about how rubbish as a car it is, going on to become an item about what kind of car you could get on the second hand market for that kind of cash.

Coincidently, this lunchtime I called into the bike shop to get some new tyres for my bike, the current ones needing replacing partly because off-road tyres are a bit silly for somebody who never goes off-road, but mostly because they’re getting a bit ripped to shreds on the sides. Seeing the cheapest tyres that were any good came to £20 I did that sharp intake of breath thing, deciding that i didn’t feel like ponying up £40 at once instead getting just one tyre, to replace the other one next month.

Standing by the till waiting to be served, I saw this bike in the rack for sale:

I did manage to stop myself from saying out loud that for that price, I’d expect it to come with an engine attached.

Photo credit: Jerrold

This year, I’ve decided not to buy any Christmas cards. Instead all the money which I would have spent on them will instead be put into a special fund which will be kept until the end of the year, and then I’ll go down to BoozeBusters with the lot and get as many bottles of Diamond White as the money will stretch to, and get absolutely papered on it on New Year’s Eve.

Oh yes, and I’m also not buying any Christmas presents either; I’ve got a fair number of family and friends to not buy Christmas presents for, so all in all by selflessly not showing my generosity towards them I’ll be able to go out and buy that iPad in the Apple store I’ve had my eye on for the last few months.

Of course, that isn’t really true; I will of course as with every year try to send some Christmas cards to my friends who I won’t have seen for at least a few weeks beforehand, and as many of my Christmas presents as feasible will be bought from the We Are Birmingham shop.

I do get fair irritated every year though when my friends give presents of A Goat For Africa. I consider this the ultimate in tight-wad charity donation, and middle-class guilt salving; it’s tight-wadded to the charity concerned, and it’s tight-wadded to one’s friends – and the ostentatious nature of it flies completely in the face of the spirit of charitable giving. If you want to give a goat to Africa, just give a goat to Africa – don’t give a goat to Africa on my behalf – I might not want to give a goat to Africa. The particular African nation you’re giving a goat to might have particular human rights policies which I find totally abhorrent – how dare you ‘force’ me to support that regime by ‘giving me’ such a gift? I might have preferred to have received a water well for Afghanistan for all you know. Or, indeed, a new MRI scanner for Selly Oak Hospital. But not the military wing.

If you don’t want to buy me a present, or give me a Christmas card – for whatever reason – well hey, that’s cool, really; I’m honestly not expecting anything off you, I don’t sit there every Christmas Eve night making a list of all the presents and cards I’ve received ticking them off against all the names of people I might have sent out, in order to decide who to send or not send to next year; I, like most people, stopped thinking in those terms when I left primary school.

In a similar box I put the “let’s not spend a great deal of money on proper presents, let’s just give each other token ‘fun presents’, in order to demonstrate our opting out of the gross commercialisation of a religious festival and to help Save The Planet” attitudes. No! I only want to give proper presents (and a proper present doesn’t have to cost an awful lot of money – there’s plenty of fine art and craft work available for under £10 at the We Are Birmingham shop), presents which I’ve thought about and which I hope the recipient will appreciate. A ‘token fun present’ isn’t a rejection of commercialisation, it’s the complete opposite – to buy a lot of nasty plastic tat from  B&M Bargains or Wilkinsons, which probably won’t even work and almost certainly even if the Santa With The Big Cock does work will end up in the bin three hours later is about as buying in to commercialisation as it’s possible to get; it’s buying unnecessary rubbish which has cost more in its environmental impact than its price, and has nothing to do with the loving spirit of giving that lies at the heart of winter festivals the last 10,000 years.

So please – if you want to give to charity this Christmas, then by all means give to charity. But don’t pretend you are giving to your friends in the process. Why not give to charity and give to your friends, and show how truly generous of spirit you are?

It had a good innings – nobody can complain about a run of 856 years and it being curtailed; I remember when plans to demolish the 1960′s market and shopping centre area were being consulted on how most of the traders predicted the market wouldn’t survive, but – the soul having been ripped out of the place notwithstanding – most of the stalls made it through that redevelopment.

Then there are the current fears that the move of the Wholesale Markets from right next to the Bullring Market will cause major hassle – Jon Bounds has commented on the silliness of the image of traders wheeling trolleys full of cabbages half way across town half way through the trading day, but there’s the very real concern of how produce will be then transported, coupled with the new uncertainty surrounding when the move will actually happen.

But to me, what has finally killed the market is the combination of the serious drop in quality of the produce on sale, combined with the scourge of the man from the weights and the measures, the Poundabowl.

Now don’t get me entirely wrong – where the typical shopper might think more in terms of a number of items rather than a weight of items, there’s nothing wrong with it; but it still makes price comparisons difficult, because you don’t know how much you’re getting for your pound from different traders – you may well even be getting a different amount from the same trader each time you buy!

Until recently, produce from the market always tended to have what supermarket fruit and veg well and truly lacked – flavour. I still remember like it was yesterday my reintroduction to the market (after being horrified by reading Felicity Lawrence’s supermarket exposé, Not on the Label) and rediscovering that an onion is an actual real vegetable with a texture and a flavour, rather than some white thing which goes in the dinner for I’m-not-really-sure-what-it’s-adding. The market produce was the blemished, funny shaped stuff which the supermarket bland-o-matic rejected as being Not Possible To Bland.

But of late I’ve noticed that the flavour is less noticeably different from the supermarket, but more critically, the quality has gone right down the pan. It’s no use buying four or five peppers for a pound rather than three or four peppers for £1.50 if you only get to actually use two of them because the rest have become a putrifying blob of mush after a couple of days. I already decided a couple of weeks ago to stop getting my onions from the market because basically half of them were rotten even on the day I bought them.

Today, when I went to my usual stall for getting peppers, I was saddened to see they too have gone over to poundabowl. Rather than hand-picking the precise peppers I wanted (ie, the ones which looked the least off) I would have been forced to accept the ones in the bowl. I usually get a mix of colours, but these bowls were all monochrome – when I asked the assistant for a mix, her reply was “no, I’m not allowed to do that”. So I walked away and found another stall.

The other stall was also poundabowl, but at least when I asked if he could do a mix he said yes. When I checked in the bag to see how mixed he’d done it (just one red to five greens – I wanted three reds and three greens), I saw that two of the peppers were a putrifying blob of mush already.

If I can’t even rely on what I buy being of merchantable quality on the day I buy it, I’m not sure I can be bothered going all the way down there to buy in the first place. So for that reason, I’m out.

I decided I wanted to do something different on this occasion, so my first thought was to ask on Twitter – expecting just a couple of answers.

• @isemann suggested bobotjie,
• @iskandarv and @ladyspooks suggested enchiladas,
• @pureartifice suggested Thai noodles with beef mince and lemon grass and lime leaves and chilli,
• @dianebrewster suggested with mushroom, vegetables, tomato, paprika, served with rice and yoghurt – and calling it Hungarian,
• @theaardvark suggested Yuk Sung,
• @bryonyevens suggested Shah Pilaf – onion, mince, raisins, orange zest, and rice,
• @pezholio, @natmandu, and @andyderrickmus suggested cottage pie,
• @mikelcu suggested mousaka, lasagne, and shepherd’s pie,
• @graphiquillan suggested stuffed peppers,
• and I’ve also thought of meat and potato pie.

Who would have thought there were so many possibilities of how to cook mince!

It’s also the phase where traditionally England always loses, because the game always ends the first 90 minutes with a draw, then ends the 30 minutes of extra time still with a draw, then ends with England losing because whoever is the current star striker misses one more crucial penalty than the other side.

Notwithstanding the fact that I don’t care about the football, I’ve always thought the penalty shoot out to be an unfair method of resolving an unresolved game where a decisive end is necessary. Nobody ‘wins’ on penalties, the losing team only loses on them. The winners don’t win because they’re a better team, and the losers don’t win because they’re a worse one – it’s nothing more than a matter of luck which striker or goalie happens to make the first mistake first. They might just as fairly settle the issue by tossing a coin.

I’ve always thought they should take a leaf out of the world of pinball.

Photo by ktpupp on Flickr

I love pinball – even though I’ve never been able to properly see the balls, it’s something that – whilst I’ve never been very good at – I’m not a total disaster at. I like the way it’s an analogue game, with real physics, and intrigued by the variety of games possible with just a table, a steel ball, some flippers, and some boingy things.

I think the world of football, when it has reached deadlock at the end of extra time, should introduce multiball:

Image based on a picture by lillith-ivory on Flickr

What they could do after the 30 minutes extra time has elapsed is just keep playing as normal, and chuck an extra ball on to the pitch. Every five minutes, they chuck another one on, and just keep on playing until the first team scores.

I think that would be a much better test of the skill of the players – of all of the players, both attack and defence, than the current penalty shoot-out method. It’d be much more fun to watch, too!

Has anybody got Sepp Blatter’s email address?

I’m writing to complain to you in the strongest possible terms about the lack of gritting along the towpath of the Farmer’s Bridge lock flight, Birmingham City Centre.

This morning, between the top lock and lock number seven (where I disembark) walking along it to work I slipped and fell over not once but four times; I was reduced to descending the lock ramps by squatting & sliding myself down with my hands behind me for balance. You can imagine I’m sure the dangers inherent in slipping on the ice next to a lock, especially if one fell into the frozen lock itself.

I appreciate that British Waterways can control neither the weather nor the temperature, and that there’s little you can do to ensure passage for boats when the canal itself freezes over. However, you can control the pedestrian environment, with the application of salt / grit to ensure key strategic pedestrian routes such as this are safe for the people who use them regularly; the nature of that section of towpath route is such that once one has started going that way you are pretty much committed, as leaving the towpath to take a different route isn’t so simple. Once I reached the normal pavement – which the council is responsible for – my passage was completely fine, so if the council manages to grit the pavement, how can British Waterways not manage to grit the city centre towpath ?

Fortunately neither myself nor my laptop and phone were damaged in my four falls due to British Waterways’ negligence in failing to make the towpath safe, however be assured that had anything been damaged, I would be holding you liable. In this age of no-win-no-fee personal accident law firms advertising on television, I urge you to arrange for the key strategic pedestrian routes in Birmingham to be gritted and made safe as soon as possible, before another member of the public has a more serious accident, and my British Waterways licence money has to be used to pay out on a hefty compensation claim rather than its proper use of paying for the maintenance of the network.

in Friendship,

In the greenwash department, this carton of Sainsbury’s apple juice speaks for itself, really.