Independent’s day, with pre-emptive strike on royal wedding overkill

I don’t have much time for its politics but hats off to The Independent for its defiance in keeping the royal wedding resolutely off its front page this Wednesday.

It would be naive to think journalistic principle was its motivation but hopefully others in the media will have taken note that opting for important stories over the easy one did not result in the sky caving in.

At a time when family and national budgets alike are creaking like a galleon in a force ten and where young troops are dying for the folly of politicians not fit to shine their boots, a royal wedding – even one that looks beyond the blue bloods for a mate – warrants only so much attention.

Not that you’ll hear that from the press, too many of whose members will see fairytale nuptials as the ideal excuse not to wear out their shoe leather hunting down real news stories between now and the big day.

Brace yourself, instead, for a string of puffery pieces based around musings of the kind of royal ‘insider’ so beautifully lampooned by Armstrong and Miller. Trite fodder for the masses that probably won’t even require a trip beyond Greater London.

So from this royalist, grudging thanks to one newspaper prepared to raise the bar just a little bit higher. For now, at any rate…

Bank holidays and ‘the done thing’

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Looking at the faces milling around us in Sheringham and Cromer yesterday, I suspect a survey is long overdue as to the number of people who loll around seaside resorts on Bank Holidays purely because they feel it’s expected of them.

Pompous Twerps of the Week award – we have a tie

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For a minute there, I thought Grampian police might have the stage to themselves.

Some Scottish sportswear retailer decides to put ‘Anyone but England’ World Cup shirts in his window and the next thing he knows, he’s got cops dropping by for a quiet word about offending racial sensitivities.

Things must be really quiet on the law enforcement front north of the border. Murders nil, rapes nil, drug traffickers nil – oh well, racism nit-picking it is then.

And remember the name Kirk Hemmings, PC in more ways than one. If he really is responsible for the following quote, then we’re looking at a nailed-on future chief constable:

“The Grampian area, in common with the rest of the country, has recorded incidents relating to nationality and we have a responsibility to do our best to ensure that incidents of this nature are kept to a minimum.

“The public expect no less of us.”

Have to love that last line. Nothing like a copper in tune with his public.

This just in, PC Hemmings: what the public do expect of you: a day so choc-a-bloc with making bad folks’ life a misery, you simply don’t have time for minutiae like this; a beat where hardened criminals quake at the very mention of the word ‘police’; a world where it’s the sheriff who rides around with the self-satisfied smile on his face, not the outlaws. You anywhere close to those targets yet?

Yes, the glory was so nearly yours and yours alone.

Then along came the International Olympic Committee.

Apparently Canada’s women did a terrible thing when they won gold for ice hockey. They came onto the ice afterwards brandishing champagne bottles, beer cans and cigars, in that irksome way people have when they’ve just registered one of the greatest days in their lives.

Now you’d think the IOC, like Scottish policemen, might have more pressing items on their agenda, given the Olympics’ perennial flirtation with the pharmaceutical industry and a history with more question marks against it than the Riddler‘s leotard.

But no, it seems we can’t have sportsmen letting their hair down a tad without rumblings – thankfully taken no further – of an IOC enquiry (and I’m not unsympathetic to one journalist’s suspicion that all this nonsense comes to down to some sexist dinosaur in a blazer).

Watching the scenes below, my own knee-jerk reaction was to think of Babe Ruth and Ian Botham. Baseball and cricket fans respectively won’t need me to remind them how those two ruined their sport for so many disappointed followers.

Thank goodness we can count on the true heroes at the IOC to remind us why we love games.

Ungrateful

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I thought it was perfect. New Year’s Day and then another two days off afterwards.

I was wrong. The weekend has been flat and anti-climactic, the festive season deflating painfully across 48 uncertain hours. A vague notion of needing to get ready again.

Better the cold-shower lurch from New Year’s day to working day than this slow dribble back to normality.

Women throw me

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Defining Men-are-from-Mars moment as we open Christmas presents on arrival at the in-laws’ house.

Watching her dad tear clumsily at his gift’s wrapping paper, my wife leans towards her mother and whispers with conspiratorial pride, “It’s a chenille throw…”

Finally, pops gets there, triumphantly holding his present high in front of him to take it all in.

“Oh lovely,” he declares. “A rug.”

Indeed. A true bloke: straight to the point.

As Jim Royle would doubtless have put it: “chenille throw my arse…”

Last day of term

Amid the festive excitement, a brief moment of sad remembrance last Friday.

“And what kind of day do you have ahead of you?” a radio presenter asked a junior school headmaster during a phone-in.

“Not too bad,” was the reply. “It’s the last day of term, so we’ll probably play a few games, show some DVDs…”

And suddenly I was transported back 40 years to the most magical day of the the school calendar. The end of Christmas term.

No DVDs back then, of course, but we brought games in to play while mellow teachers wrapped up their admin, we had Christmas lunch and were ushered into the hall to watch movies on cine film.

Reality was suspended and an eight-year-old kid was probably just one of many struggling to get his young head around the fact that life could be as gloriously, relentlessly happy as this.

If I often reflect on the past it’s usually merely as a yardstick – the realisation of how far away it is and how fast it’s travelling. Now and again, however, the reflection is tinged with hankering: the flickering, futile desire to step twice into the same river.

And this was one of those times. For just a few moments, I ached to go back.

[pic courtesy of hockadilly]

Social animals

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Son’s girlfriend visits for tea, in the course of which youthful conversation turns to bad taste Internet videos, a theme continued when they repair to the lounge afterwards.

Given such an occasion a hundred years ago, it occurs to me, we’d have gathered around a piano for a spot of Schubert. Someone, no doubt, would have attempted magic with a handkerchief and a walnut.

Today, we gather round YouTube to watch a cow having an abcess lanced.

Progress? You decide.

Morning after…

You know a nightclub’s bad when the people kicking off are the bar staff. With each other.

Flashed boobs, but this…?

Anticipation mounts ahead of tonight’s office party, except for one poor soul who’s mortified to learn that his wristband entitles him to just two free drinks at the bar.

“I might flash a bit of bollock at the door to try and wangle another wristband,” he muses out loud: the first time in my life I have heard a male couch bribery in such terms.

The gap between the sexes grows ever narrower.