Monday, May 10, 2004

Thank Blog for small mercies

Oh, on the very evening that I look to my blog for its nurturing warm reassuring comforting arms. Sad indeed, but so it is if you're single, or coupled with a lousy partner for that matter. Blogger has at last been Googled! Beautiful new interface. There is a Blog in heaven after all!

My aching shoulders have been straining from carrying grocery bags on London's shitty streets, and on London's shitty transport system. Those lucky sods who were born with shoulder parts that fit like a BMW engine! Until very old age they will never understand their good fortune. Size itself does not matter, for I have met men twice my size who struggle with carrying weights. Imagine a 4 x 4 that has a crank that does not perfectly meet its shaft, and compare that with a Mini whose engine runs smoothly on small but well-fitting moving parts.

The insult of today's tribulations comes from a pain in the arch of my foot, which was triggered after I went out yesterday in a pair of shoes I rarely wear. Being of mostly flatfooted "ethnic" heritage (some charmingly naive people actually only understand classifications by skin colour, shallow, shallow, shallow!), this weakness has arisen before, and consistently has been in conjunction with an impending general systematic immune failure, such as a flu or a herpes attack.

So walking is troublesome and cycling is out of the question, and without wheels, I am tempted to bitterness. Can't help thinking of my useless Ex, who despite being blessed with good fitting genes, (enough to be able to go trekking up Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya last summer), nonetheless through his "disability" gets a car and an orange badge courtesy of what is left of Britain's welfare state.

Who would think that the architecture of the human foot was of any critical importance? In a once Christian civilization that propagated the notion, "All men are born equal", in order to control the destructive force of that most human of emotions - envy.

I recall a school mate of mine once admiring a girl's foot, and complimenting her with controlled sexual desire, "You have a good arch". The arch in a foot is the physical characteristic that ensures the ability of our species of ape to stand up on two legs. His instinctive sexual attraction to a fine structural example of this desirable physical feature reflects how our ape species semi-consciously breeds for the perpetuation of advantageous genes. In other words, there is more complexity operating in the selection of a breeding mate than the usual trite feature of big tits.

The insult of having to fork out £3.80 for a simple journey in London, to travel amongst mostly ugly people on ugly trains is undoubtedly a feeling that tourists take home to warn their countrymen. £3.80 would buy 3 pints of real ale at a Wetherspoons pub, even if it would scarcely buy 1 and a half pints of machine piss sold in a gay pub, or a trendy "young" bar. The most expensive transport system in the world. What a privelege, is London!

Then to arrive at my college, only to find once again that there will be no lesson today. Instead, the announcement that all the engineering departments at the City and Islington college are to be closed down after July. I am not surprised, as I detected a distinct lack of organisational unity in the department, despite the efforts of individuals such as my tutor. What angers me though, is that the announcement was sudden and without warning, whereas a decision like this must have been in consideration at the start of the academic year. A bit like being shown pictures of Iraqis being tortured: you know by the time it's been made public, it must have been going on for at least 6 months. My tutor is not entirely happy, since his redundancy is 2 or 3 years earlier than he wanted it, and in his late Fifties, he would be hard pressed to find another job.

My fellow college students varied from being nonplussed to being irate. One guy who usually is demure, was berating the £370 of fees that we have paid, and how the college could spring its customers into such a ditch. I mentioned to him that although we paid our rightful fees, asylum seekers and benefit claimants pay only £10, and real foreign students pay over £1000. This launched him into a bitter soliloquy about how fucked over he feels, since he pays everything out of his own pocket, and never asks for anything. It turned out he was Romanian, although I had thought he was Spanish, and very soon he volunteered his opinion that "England is Crap".

Thousands of such ambassadors work and study in this country. Some of them pay thousands of pounds to study in dubious back street private colleges, let alone the official government educational institutuions, for the mere cachet of a "British" qualification that decreasingly carries any reputation in Third World countries. They sweep the streets, they clean the toilets, they clean the offices, they work as parking attendants, they work in warehouses, they cut the grass, they work in McDonalds, Kebab shops, and in the kitchens of fancy restaurants, while England basks complacently in the health of Gordon Brown's "economy".

London of course is empty still. A survey of the West End (Soho and surrounds) on a warm Sunday evening once again confirmed a sickly city centre. Although not entirely dead, I have never seen it this quiet since the IRA last did a terrorist bombing here. It was so quiet that I was for the first time in a decade, reminded of Sundays when they were a day for church going and roast dinners. The girl at the patisserie where I stopped, was complaining to her colleague how many cakes they still had left unsold.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Blogger is a bit sneaky here.

When you wish to post a comment anonymously, it says "This blog does not allow anonymous comments" which is untrue in this case. Nonetheless you can click on the "Or Post Anonymously" link to get here.

Of course, they are inviting you to register with Blogger and post as a Blogger user, in preference to posting anonymously.

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