Hypocritical public, here is a band wagon, hop on.

It must be recognised that everything has probably been said regarding the MPs expenses issue. I am not here to bang on about the rights and wrongs, the moral dilemmas or the braking of the rules/not braking of the rules. It’s been done by the media already. They have created a bandwagon for the public of the U.K. to jump on and they have leapt into the arms of Fleet Street driver like a bluebottle into the blue neon glow of an electric fly zapper.

My gripe is not with the MPs, it is with the hypocrites of this nation, the adorable British public. Since the Telegraph have let trickle, on a daily basis, a new snippet of information regarding an other member of parliament who some editor or journo has ear marked for an ousting, there has been no shortage of outrage expressed by “the good old” tax paying public on television, radio, the written press and the blogosphere.

I, not for a moment, would agree that some of these claims are not morally questionable nor in some cases, as time will tell, fraudulent but will not sit and condemn the actions of MPs. Why? Because if I was a serving member of parliament, I would be claiming for the exact same types of “luxuries” permitted within the rules as the MPs have. The vast majority of the British people who say they wouldn’t are frankly, nothing more than lying scumbags.

As the speaker of the house is forced to resign, as a scapegoat, and in doing so is the first in 314 years to be booted from the chair, I as a member of his parliamentary constituency have to look around this area and laugh with much contempt at the vile hypocrisy I see before me. Do not be fooled, I in no way think that Speaker Martin, the man who is chuffer driven to Celtic park every other week at the tax payers expense, when I have to walk everywhere because I can’t afford the bus, is either a good speaker or reprehensive of his constituency. To be fair, I was over joyed to hear that not only is he sanding down as speaker but also as an MP, forcing a by election in Glasgow North East, my home, and restoring democracy to Springburn.

For those of you who have never voted in a constituency that is the home of the speaker, let me enlighten you to the voting procedure, the waste of a walk to the polling station, the denial of democracy that is Election Day in the speaker’s town. Unfortunately as the speaker is “suppose” to show no political bias, the main stream parties do not appose the re-election of the speaker. Thus the constituents are giving a voting slip, which most can’t tell the difference from a betting slip, which looks vaguely as this:

1. the speaker of the house seeking re-election
2. far right Nazis
3. extreme left communists and Marxists
4. tree huggers and woolly hat wearing party
5. None of the above, I am off back to the pub

A fine choice for the modern young voter, I must admit. Since Michael Martin has had the sheer good fortune of being a member for the Labour party, which is frankly woven into the fabric of this uneducated, alcoholic and drug abusing, non manifesto reading, can’t tell you why they vote labour apart from the fact the priest told them to constituency and with the benefit of no creditable opposition his re-election is assured. This leaves the constituents with an MP with no vote in parliament and us with no voice, the Commons with a speaker who knows not of procedure, is completely bias to the government in debate and treats the job as though he where a shop steward rather than the third most important person in the political landscape.

I am sure I have shown without constraint that I am no admirer of speaker Martin but what caused me to gag even more is the vile thieving constituents, crawling from the political wood work to slate the man. Let’s look at Springburn, home of what was once the greatest centre of railway manufacturing in Europe. Not any more because the “good” people of Springburn stole so much from the factories they were laid bare and forced to close. It was strongly believed around Springburn in the 80s, when Martin rose to power, that there was more British rail carpet in the homes of Springburn than there was in BR headquarters and waterloo station combined. Every where you went, some one knew a person who “worked in the Cali” which was the wheel turning plant. Every home in Springburn for 20 years had either BR or an intercity logo embroiled on something.

I say to you people of Springburn,

Look at form you filled in for your disability living allowance you neither need nor deserve. Those of you who are as disabled as an Olympic athlete and who lie and cheat your way to the cash because you are either bone idol or use it to supplement the undeclared scaffolding job you have. Look at the forms you fill in for your long term unemployment benefit. Is it truthful?, did you really apply for any jobs this week?, not a chance on earth, you lazy scrounger. Look at the form for your mobility car, do you really need a car because of that fake limp? No, you have that car because you are exploiting a system. Finally to you, my favourite of them all, the tax credit sucking leech that is the single parent. When you are drinking your tax credits in a night club rather than spending time with your child, when you are asking a sap of a man to move in to your paid for house/flat, are you going to declare this fact? Not a chance hypocrite. None of you have any right to censure the speaker or any other MPs until you actually start paying taxes and only then can you question what they are actually spent on.

My opinion is not confined to the people of Springburn, I say to you, the people next to the closed Rover factory, who have houses painted British racing green, the same. To the Fleet Street journo who asks the cabbie for a blank receipt so he/she can claim twice as much, the same thing. To the tradesmen who are sitting drinking beer with the difference made going to the cheaper hotel, when the boss thinks you’re in decent accommodation, the same.

Do not be hypocrites Britons, do not condemn what you would do and are doing and will do again until the day you die. See this scandal for what it really is, mega rich media tycoons ousting a government from power in vengeance for a recession that has lost them billions collectively. Step down from the band wagon.

Top Ten To Do’s Before You Die.

I often see lists or charts created by people listing the activities, tasks and places to visit before they die. More often than not these lists are totally ridiculous and down right unachievable.

1. Find cures for Cancer, H.I.V. and Ebola
2. Be the first person on Mars
3. Sail around the world solo on the back of a smokes packet
4. Score the winning hat-trick in the UEFA champions league final
5. Win 12 gold medals at an Olympic games (summer and winter)
6. Become King/Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth
7. Do a three year stint as secretary general of the United Nations
8. Bring a dinosaur back to life
9. Broker a lasting middle east peace deal
10. Save a whale/rhino/hippo/giant panda or other large mammal from extinction.

There is nothing like ambition. “If you aim for the moon, you may die on the way”. I think it is reasonable to have a list of worthwhile activities to achieve while on this rock but keep your ambition within the realm of sanity.

Investigating this subject, I find that there is a vast number of websites that are not only able to offer advice on things to do before you die but turn you upside down and shake the money from your pants in an attempt to organise it on your behalf. Take trifter.com as an example of flourishing ideas. My new friends at trifter have listed at number 1, “Go sky diving, Taking a leap-of-faith out of the cargo hold on a B90 King Air airplane at an altitude of approximately 30,000ft” this is a fine example of an ambition that is both affordable and achievable. Indeed, if you do it for charity you may be able to it free. A wise choice, if that’s the type of activity you believe you can proudly say you have done. So, all is well at trifter, until you see suggestion number 2. “Dock with the international space station” this is the type of unachievable dribble that is the watermark of modern day insanity. I am not saying that this can not be done if you have a spare £30 million and know a guy at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome but how many of us do. About eight people out of a population 6 billion.

Sporting activities are another stupid goal of the over ambitious nut. Listen, if you are not a professional sportsman in your chosen sport by the age of nineteen you never will be. Scoring the winning touch down at the Super Bowl or banging in that injury time headed winner at the world cup final is out of the question. Please do not waste the ink by including it on the list. The only exception, I can think of, to this is darts. You may wish to consider adding winning the Embassy World Darts Championship at the Lakeside Country Club. Let’s face it, what other sport can you participate in while drinking lager from a pint tumbler and polishing of two decks of free sponsor supplied smokes. It is, after all, sponsored by smokes and most former title holders are over weight, pie eating forty some things like my darts hero John “Jockey” Wilson in 1989. So if you wish to list “Win the Embassy World Darts Championship” to your chart, be my guest.

Try avoiding any political ambition or becoming a high ranking member of the monarchy. Kings and Queens are usually picked before birth by divine selection of god himself. It usually can be difficult to sway the decisions of the almighty himself after he has made his mind up. Being a monarch is over rated anyway, imagine having to pose for the drawings on stamps everyday and your subjects not wanting your passport any more as trading it in for an Irish equivalent usually means those subjects will be a the back of the queue for execution by Jihad terrorists on a hijacked plane. Also who wants to be treated like a princess by their boyfriend nowadays anyways? He gets pissed and crashes the car at 155mph in a tunnel, doesn’t sound like much fun to me. Monarchy ambitions are best left alone.

Obscure and weird things I do however endorse, when thinking of activities to add to the list. There was a weird program on, the ever fun, channel four in the United Kingdom called “99 things to do before you die”. These guys new exactly what they were doing. No wannabe astronauts or soccer stars here. One of the contenders from there list was “drink moonshine with American hillbillies”. Is that not a fantastic ambition? Let’s go into the Deep South and sit on a slack jawed, straw hat wearing hillbilly’s porch and booze up on his finest moonshine. I do think it would be wise to let a loved one know where you are going first though. There may be a danger of waking in the hillbilly’s basement bound and gagged and being renamed “Gimp boy”. The presenter, Welsh “Super Shagger”, Steve Jones actually did this, after hallucinating for several hours, Steve vomited and passed out, if I can recollect this correctly. My favourite from their list though, had to be, “model for an agony aunt photo story”. I am unsure if the agony aunt photo story is confined to the British tabloid but if you are unfamiliar with them I have include a photo for you benefit. I like this because it such an extraordinary idea and over weight, beetroot faced presenter Rob, actually did this and can keep the paper to show his grandchildren. Is that not what ambition and achievement is all about?

I also have a list of my own but no outlandish or ostentatious ambitions are included. Only some of the things I would like to do in my life before I myself depart.

1. Run a marathon: What is the most challenging thing about completing a twenty six mile run. Well apart from the year long, relentless and physically demanding exhaustion house of a training schedule, for me it’s where to participate. The obvious choice would be London. The most prestigious of marathons without doubt and would kill two birds with one stone (see below). For me that is a bit too cliché, “I ran the London Marathon” and there is the added danger of stepping in the waste of the women’s world record holder Paula “pooping” Radcliffe. No, I would rather run a more obscure choice of Marathon such as the Minsk Marathon. As well as being able to compete in the challenge of the marathon itself, it would also allow me so see the wonders of Belarus.
2. Visit London: You almost live there but you never visit. I really should go see London. It is after all only “Down the Road”. It must be amongst the most famous and historical cities in the world. Being so close I promise to visit before I die.
3. Get a boat: This may seem ridiculous to some but it is something I have always wanted. I don’t mean a large power cruiser or 300 ft pleasure boat or anything out of my price range, which is everything with my pending divorce, though, after a lottery win you couldn’t keep my arse out of Prossers. Just a little power/jet boat would do.
4. See the Great Pyramid of Giza: This is something that everyone needs to see including me. A massive stone building built by slaves 6,000 years ago must be worth the admission price.
5. Go to a world cup finals: Unfortunately, if my country doesn’t qualify it will be 12 years since they have and the prospects of them qualifying before I die will dwindle like my own centre forward ambitions. Though, I remain ever hopeful of attending to watch my own country participate, I will go, just to be apart from the spectacle and to “savour the atmosphere” which I have heard can be rather unsavoury around the fan camp site. My memories of France 98 and false memories of Argentina 78 are for ever imprinted in my mind and I would like to live that dream.
6. Get a motorcycle/motorcycle licence: I think everyone should be able to ride a motorcycle and have owned at least one motorcycle at some point in their life. I have unfortunately never owned a bike though have been on many as a child and gone on automatic scooters round the sunny roads of the Med countries and an island of the Aegean. Though the image of a large chopper enters the mind of most, I am more partial to a Japanese super bike and the paraphernalia that goes with it. The image, the helmet, the jacket, the boots and the women on the back.
7. Stand on and crush to death a venomous spider. I hate those things. Black widows, red backs, funnel webs the list goes on. I would like to stand on one and kill it. That way it could never climb into a sleeping baby’s bed and bite the infant to death. That way I would have saved a child’s live by proxy.
8. Get the tape of me on the “Untied Shoe Laces Show” filmed in 1984 from the BBC archives: I appeared on this show and was interviewed in some depth by man of the time “Tiger” Tim Stevens. Granted, I was 5 years old and dressed as Friar Tuck from Robin Hood but still regret everyday recording over the Betamax tape it was stored on.
9. Have an affair with an older woman: which subsequently has become with the progression of time, have an affair with a younger women. When this ambition was conceived I was nineteen and the older women was a 30 something mature stunner. Now I am thirty something, I want to go back to the nineteen year olds as I have discovered thirty somethings are just moans who “what a meaningful relationship” and struggle to keep the skin around the eyes from falling off the bone.
10. Have a look through one of those massive optical telescopes at the top of a hill: I must inform you that I am not an astronomer and I do not want to see an image from the telescope on a screen and I do not want to see a printed picture from the telescope. I want to put my eye against the big eye piece and actually look and point it at, what I want to look at. I would point it down the hill and watch extremely closely what the people in the local town were up to.

I hope you have enjoyed my list and I have in some way encouraged you to either run off and make a list of your own or go and tart up a list you already had before reading this blog.

this town aint big enough for the both of us

When driving through town, what irritates the modern day driver the most? Perhaps this is the pedestrian, oblivious to the road and its traffic, obviously living within a dimension that exists without road going vehicles, the suicidal Neanderthal with the “they always brake on time” mentality. Or could it be the Street Sweeper, coming towards you at 8mph “the wrong way” with it’s unsuccessful, forty something, failed drummer driver more interested in the sounds of the washed up rock and roll band he’d always aspired to emulate, coming out of his iPod headphones than the activities of the roads roundabout him. Could it be the weekend out of town driver, driving the city streets for the first time in ten years in a vain attempt to pick up her daughter/granddaughter from a night of clubbing? Stopping at every opportunity and blocking the road to reassure them self that not only are they completely lost and have no clue which lane they should be in at any given time and not giving normal, sane drivers the opportunity to get to where the need to be without missing every set of lights.

Well for me, none of the above. The scourge of the modern day city road is what the water rat was to the 19th century canals, the ostentatious, three quarter empty, black smoke producing, and politically correct monstrosity known as the bus. They come in two “Decker” sizes, single and double but cause an equally large amount of road related nastiness.

The endless start/stop, lane changing antics of the modern bus is undoubtedly the cause of most city centre congestion and non RTA related traffic jams. They drive in the outside lane until less then 5 yards until the next stop. Then without due care or attention, never mind a second thought for the motorist who is about to smash his brake pedal through the floor to avoid colliding with the bus in question, pull over to the inside and come to a sudden halt. A domino effect then ensues, following this inconsiderate and frankly dangerous manoeuvre. The lane in to which the bus has gone comes to a sudden halt for the best part of a quarter mile. The vehicles in that lane attempt to move into the outside lane to circumvent the offending double Decker. This with its “flashing off lights” “On you go, mate” antics then brings lane two to a stand still. Multiply this effect by the over abundant bus population throughout the city centre, what do you get? A gridlocked city.

The lane weaving is not the only transgression by the road whales. Lights at red, during peak times are re tuned by road traffic management experts to allow the maximum number of vehicles to pass at green. I ask you this. Did these men with their bow ties and bowler hats, carrying there oversized clip boards, take into consideration that when calculating the acceleration of the average vehicle to enter into their algorithm for calculating the timing of the lights, that not only are bus engines completely powerless and badly maintained but the idiot that was chosen at a line up rather than an interview is doing a crossword at the wheel or reading a porno mag. Thus will not notice the lights changing until they are back to amber, only giving him the opportunity to pass and leaving the rest of us to mull over, where we could be rather than still at the same red light. Again the congestion builds.

Who drives these things, at what point in your life do you say, “I know what I want to do, drive a bus”. I doubt that thought runs through any ones mind. I do however, believe that the bus companies have a recruiting agency, working round the clock, head hunting at the finest lunatic asylums in the land. Let’s face it, some of these idiots and so called human beings driving the buses have a sense of self esteem that is way below the foundations propping up rock bottom. Picture the scene, your driving along the light in front turns red. You are stopped, perfectly legally and within the rules of the road behind the stop line. Around comes a bus, with a similar turning circle to the Titanic’s crappy sister ship, and surprise, surprise he/she is unable to manoeuvre the bus around the corner without smashing your car to pieces. Then we get the volley of abusive language, the questioning of your parents marriage status at the time of your birth, the explicit accusations of the number of sexual partners your mother and wife have had and the questioning of your own sexual orientation and preferences. Lets look at what has just happened, the bus drivers face is turning purple and he/she is about to have an aneurism because his vehicle that is clearly unfit for purpose and is unmanoeuvrable on city roads can’t get by your car stopped in the place it is supposed to be. Here is my question to the bus driver. Mister bus driver, if you are paid by the hour, why are you getting yourself in to such an emotional state over this which is clearly your own fault? Surely if you are 6 minutes late, you are paid the same money for your unsatisfying job? My advice to you, relax, because if you don’t, you’ll be dead before you retire.

Who actually uses buses now? Though, I detest the bus, I can’t help conjuring up images of bright red London buses, the type with the open door at the back with a cheeky cockney conductor, the ringing of the stop bell, a happy collection of World War II styled passengers. A bus beaming with the type of gentlemen who are never caught without their hat or with a lit senior service in hand or mouth and all singing “pack up your troubles” Unfortunately, this is a time that has long since existed, in fact probably never existed. Another fantasy drilled in to my head by sitcoms and films my grandfather forced me to watch when I was off school as a child. The reality of the modern bus is much different, frequented by asylum seekers, unwilling to give up the seat they have rested their shopping on, for a 90 year old hero, who fought the Nazis on the beaches of Normandy. Alcoholics and drug addicts, who insist you give them “a shot of your phone” or “money for a coupe of tea” The seats unlike the pristine leather upholstered rest beds you would expect are actually kebab smeared, chewing gum ridden disasters.

So, to you, the city council, town hall, or mayor or the city do us all a favour, remove the buses from the city centre. I am not suggesting that buses are abolished but rather confined to the suburban routes were they belong. Leave the city centre transport to the Kings of the urban transportation system, the taxi drivers. Kill congestion in one swoop, make all our lives just that little bit easier because this town aint big enough for the both of us.