Well we are now well out of Britain and sitting in the steaming heat of Penang. To be precise I’m sitting in air conditioning with the added boost of a ceiling fan until I can get the relative humidity down below 80%. The heat I can stand but the humidity is really the killer. I can’t imagine how I lived in this part of the world for so many years. But more of South East Asia later. I’ve had time to have a think about the longest continual time I’ve spent in London since finally leaving there in 1982.
I could no more go back to live in the United Kingdom than live on Venus. There are now sixty one million people in Britain and I reckon about half of them are on the M6 on a Friday afternoon. There eight lanes of motorway around Manchester and they still have gridlock for no apparent reason other than there are too many bloody cars on the road. And we won’t even start on the world’s largest car park the M25. We were planning avoiding this transport armageddon whilst still two hundred miles from it on our trip back to London. The fact that there are too many cars on Britain’s roads is, of course, a reflection that there are too many bloody people there full stop. And there seems no way of stopping it. Any citizen of the latest unheard of country to join the European Union apparently has the right of residence and every other right he can think of in the UK and the country is just flooded with people. There are just too many of them.
We’ve had a preliminary go at the damned surveillance cameras but after a couple of weeks they really started to get up my nose. I really don’t need this
Or his mate not twenty feet away:
every where I go.
Theses two were taken as I waited on Winchester station for the 10.07 to Waterloo. WInchester, as we are all aware is vying with Afghanistan as the world centre of terrorist training and general bearded and turbanned badness. Once the 10.07 arrives we settle into our seat and start reading the Metro, the free newspaper that is left on newspaper stands on every railway station in the environs of London until the five minutes it takes to read it has passed and it is dumped on a train seat. The paper is rubbish but the price is right. Glance up from the Metro and what do we see in the middle of the carriage roof?
Our old friend the camera placed for ‘my safety’.
Get off at Clapham Junction to change trains and we have this:
More information about cameras and a not so subtle reminder as to why they are there. We never turn ‘em off and if we find anything on the footage we can beat you with we bloody well will. Above the camera notice you will see, conveniently placed in the same location so as I don’t have to waste a picture snapping it, another thing that the UK has caught big time. I thought New Zealand had a bad attack of Safety Natzism. But we haven’t finished with cameras yet. I get to my destination, all presumably recorded on a hard drive some where, and I get into New Malden High Street and although I intended intended walking the mile or so home, I couldn’t help but glance at the bus stop on my way past.
They have gone past filming the citizenry doing nothing in a covert manner, they are now proud of it and are shouting about their exploits from the roof tops. I’ll be bound there’s a nerdy sort of a bloke sitting in an underground bunker fuming behind his Coke bottle glasses that the coverage of London buses with his cameras has only reached 80%. A pox on the lot of them, I really don’t want to live with all that sort of crap all around me.
The nice government looking after you at every turn. New Zealand had nine years of Helengrad to foist the state upon us. The UK has had twelve years of Blair and his successor Gordon Brown (who is about as popular as a cup of cold sick - and that is with his own supporters) to bend the British people to its similar ways. They appear to have escaped the lesbian and gay undertones we made a specialty du maison, but the result of the overall process is there for all to see.
All the pictures in this post were taken over the course of just a couple of hours whilst traveling from Winchester to New Malden, a couple of harmless and unremarkable towns in Southern England. If I had been more conscientious (?anal) and spent a couple of weeks taking pictures of intrusions of the State into the great unwashed’s lives I could have filled my hard disk and bored the pants off all. I hope I’ve given a flavour of the surveillance and we shall now move onto the central obsession with damned safety.
We’ve already seen the notice on Clapham Junction station advising us that if we don’t want to get bowled by 160 tonnes of suburban train (and remember there is the occasional unfortunate soul who does want to do this) you should stand away from the edge of the platform. No shit, Sherlock. They have even painted a yellow line on the platform to indicate to the slow learners where the edge might be.
I was unable to see a sign that asked people to be careful when walking in a straight line on the flat but the sign above was on a perfectly ordinary set of stairs leading away from the very dangerous platform we have just left. For God’s sake who needs a bloody sign advising caution on every set of stairs; these stairs of course have a yellow line painted on the edge of each tread to aid the dullards who can’t find the edge of anything. Stop it. I know how to use a set of stairs and they are not dangerous. Stairs have been around for centuries and they are not up there with the black death as a cause of whole civilizations coming to a sticky end. They are stairs and that is about it.
Safety has Britain in its grip. In just the sixteen days that I was in the UK Boy Scouts were banned from carrying pocket knives. Whittling is now a lost art and joins adventure playgrounds as a harmless pursuit that is closed off to the youth of Britain. There was also a bit of legislation passed that requires everyone who takes kids that aren’t their own anywhere in their car on a regular basis to have a police check. I am entirely serious. If you are on the roster to take the under-11s to soccer on a Saturday you are now assumed to be a kiddy fiddler until Plod has run through what ever he runs through and gives you an official sustificate to say that you are not. They estimate that this will affect upwards of 1.6 million people and the machinery to enforce it is already in place. Get that, already in place - before the law was introduced. Good communist stuff that. Speaking of which there are schemes where you can get financial reward for dobbing in your neighbours/relatives for something. I forget what the something was but it might have been carrying knives. They seem obsessed with the notion that everyone under the age of thirty wanders the streets with a switchblade secreted about their person.
The whole surveillance/safety/information thing appears to me to be a continuum. Each bit merges seamlessly into the next and it all appears to be leading to a state control of everything. They certainly are big on grabbing your money, if you have any, to finance all this. There are lots of people paying a top rate of tax of 50 pence in the pound (and a lot who should be who aren’t, if they have any sense) and a party at its Annual Conference (the Liberal Democrats I think) proposed, in all seriousness, a ‘Mansion Tax’ on those who have the temerity to live in houses worth over a million quid. I can assure you that a mill doesn’t buy you much, certainly not in London, and a ‘Mansion’ would hardly describe a lot of the dross that would set you back a million big ones.
I don’t know whether Britain’s seemingly total acceptance of anthropogenic global warming crap is a left wing media trick as you could hardly call The Sun a left wing rag and half the country have that as their only source of printed news input. However in the whole time I was there I heard nothing or nobody telling the real story. Nowhere was there anyone walking around pointing out that the emperor was stark naked. I suppose I didn’t listen to any talkback radio (I was on me hols for enjoument not to torture myself) or read any relevant UK blogs but it just seems a done deal that Bugatti Veyrons are the source of all men’s woes. Everything in the supermarkets is touted as ‘reducing your carbon footprint’ or if you buy this pound of sprouts you are ‘doing your bit to save the planet’. It is nauseating in the extreme. But the Great British Unwashed seems as happy with this bullshit as he is with having his every movement recorded on a hard disk somewhere.
Hand in glove with saving the world whilst doing the weekly grocery shopping you are assured on every aisle that what you are about to purchase comes from ‘sustainable’ sources and is ‘ethically produced’. Sustainable presumably means that if you plant the field with the same seeds again next year you will get more spuds. Ethically produced has me beat. The workers making your sneakers at US$1 a fortnight aren’t spoken to in a stern voice or looked at in a disrespectful manner? Bollocks the whole lot of it.
Of course there are bits of the UK that are still delightful. One of my mates lives in a chocolate box lid village in Hampshire that hasn't changed in centuries. Ticks all the boxes. Next door neighbour has a thatched roof (you wouldn’t want one of those though as the insurance premiums are astronomical being as they are so dangerous - high fire risk, you see), there is a village pub (very nice indeed), a church with a graveyard just crying for someone to sit in and compose an eulogy and a village store where you can buy smoked trout caught in the local river. I wonder if living in such an idyll would completely compensate for having to drive out into the overcrowded, overtaxed, surveillance ridden, safety nuts and ethically produced real world. I suspect it wouldn’t.
No, the Britain of today is a vastly different place to the Britain I left nearly thirty years ago. This is, of course, not unexpected. But I reckon the change is 99% bad and they can keep it. I’ll use the UK as place to go on golf tours with the best mates a bloke could have.
A final image from the trip from Winchester to New Malden just a week ago.
It is Autumn in the UK and leaves fall from the trees. Not too complicated, I trust? The fruits also fall from the horse chestnuts. Conkers. This is taken not ten feet from a bus stop that is outside a boys school. What is remarkable about this? The remarkable thing is that they are still there, lying on the ground. When I was a boy they wouldn’t even get to the ground. You threw sticks up into the tree to knock them down. And here in the age of the video game conkers are lying around outside a boys school unloved and unwanted. I saw many fine specimens that would make sixers easy, even without resorting to the oven or vinegar.
Britain is a sorry place when conkers go ungathered.
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