And What Is Wrong With Being Different Anyway?

     I just read a really nice story, linked to on Twitter, about the Krankies. You remember the Krankies, they were always on telly when I was a kid, and when I found out that Jimmy Krankie was really a woman, not only that, but a midget who was married to the chap playing her dad, my brain fried a little bit. Young brains are really not meant to endure such lines of thought. And so they passed out of time and mind until I read this report in the Daily Record. Apparently, if you don't want to read it, they were avid swingers for many years during their panto and TV careers. At first this made my young self pop up, already weirded out by the aforementioned thing about him being married to the small woman who dressed as a schoolboy and pretended to be his son, and do a passing imitation of Munch's Scream face as it went into meltdown. 

    After recovering from this, I then read the article again, and it was actually a gentle article, it passed no judgement on their swinging lifestyle, it was just a very frank interview. Ian even admitted to punching Paul Daniels in the mouth once, for which he is now one of the few people in my hall of heroes. I was impressed that this story dripped into a smallish paper with a nice, laid back story about a one-time celebrity couple who engaged in a swinging lifestyle. If the Mail or Express or the Sun had broken the story, I can't imagine how terrible it would be, how very judgemental. How damaging. Let's face it, these papers do not typically shy away from taking the moral high ground against anybody. Look at the way the Sun cried and pointed the finger at the Guardian over the phone hacking story when it was revealed that there wasn't enough evidence to say that the NOTW journalists had actually deleted Milly Dowler's messages. They sulked and pouted and cried that it was unfair reporting, including demanding that Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, should have been sacked for the story. That the NOTW had actually hacked the phone of a missing schoolgirl was irrelevant, morally. They had been hard done to and they demanded some recompense. Anne Diamond said it best to these wailing fucking babies on Newsnight; "Now you know how it feels, that sense of moral outrage."

   I digress, as I often do when an opportunity presents itself to plant a boot in the guts of the vile gutter press. My point really is that it is nice that in 2011 Britain, a former celebrity couple feel OK to come forward and say "Yeah, we had a swinging lifestyle. We had sex with lots of other people, and look at us. We're still together after 42 years." That is a nice reflection on how cool Britain is gradually becoming. As religion slowly fades into the background and it's high-horse moralising and finger wagging becomes more and more irrelevant to most Brits, we feel more comfortable every decade with alternative lifestyles. Even Facebook has an option for 'open relationship'. Whilst it is still seen by many as a taboo subject, I think the younger generation are more and more at ease with homosexuality, bisexuality (although bi people weirdly come in for a lot of stick from some in the gay community, as though sexuality is some kind of bipolar thing rather than a continuum), transgenderism, and polyamory. They see their parents getting divorced (current studies show that between 50 and 33% of marriages end in divorce) and realise that monogamy doesn't always work. In fact, doesn't often work. If marriage breaks down almost half the time, then marriage isn't working no matter how much the Tories would like to shoehorn couples into it.

    I believe that sex outside a relationship, with the permission and trust of the other person, can serve several very useful functions. Firstly, as a pressure valve. If the sex in the main relationship is getting stale or simply not happening enough to suit a highly sexed person, then going out and finding it elsewhere lets them get their rocks off and takes the pressure off the partner with the lower sex drive. Secondly, it takes away that feeling of the grass being greener on the other side that so often entices people away from their partners - you get to go roll around in that grass, have a good play in it, then think, actually, the grass was fine where I was, but this was fun. You can play the field *and* still have someone to share a long-term genuine love with. Finally, if pressures build up in the main relationship, having other lovers to talk to and spend good times with can help put those pressures into perspective rather than the usual closed system of the married pressure cooker. If a couple can challenge their own jealousies enough to do it, then I'd say do it. Maybe marriages would last longer if more people were like the Krankies. And, as more of these young, accepting folk with all of these alternative lifestyles mature, we'll see if I'm right, and maybe, as this generation comes to the fore and the older, Mail-reading, Tory voting generation die off, society will become a bit more accepting, a bit more open-minded, and a bit more of a lovely place. And then the USA, which by then will be a massive church-driven theocracy with Tea Partiers at the helm, will nuke us for being a godless, liberal bunch of stinking communists on welfare.

After a long Absence, I find Chaos

Goodness, it's been almost 2 years since I last blogged. Why? because I got a job. You'd think that the kind of job that could cause me to be so tired that I stopped blogging about politics, the nefariousness of the papers and the terrifying craptitude of the voting public would be some kind of megajob, where I get to jet around the country for squillions of quids. I wish. Instead, it was a minimum wage shop job that saw me out at work for 9 hours every day and utterly fucked at the end of them (and not in the good way). Now I've been made redundant - a sign of the times - I seem to have more time to read the news and get angry about what I see in it.


The strike seems to be the big thing that is looming up, #N30 on Twitter, the biggest strike since the seventies. If you don't already know, the government decided at some point to fuck over public sector workers' pensions, including messing around with money many had already paid into the system, so that they would now have to work longer, pay more, and get less at the end of it. That's basically it in a nutshell. 


Suddenly, phrases like 'gold-plated public sector pensions' start getting bandied about in the press, a phrase that gains momentum alongside fatuous comments about how private sectpr pensions are shit, so why should public sector workers, who are PAID BY THE TAXPAYER, get a better deal? This last is usually bellowed by some Mail reader with foam-flecked lips and swivelling eyes showing far too much white in the comments section of their favourite bullshit paper. Leaving aside the fact that private sector pensions are shit partly because of wealthy people stealing from them for years and undermining them to the point of uselessness, and partly because the private sector thinks it is clever to fuck over their workers completely and, after working them to death, doesn't believe they deserve the dignity of a pension, leaving all of that aside for now, figures emerged this week that show that the average civil servant on middle management wages (about £35k) will finish on a pension worth just £8k. An MP, who earns not even twice that salary ends with a pension of over £21k. Simple question that even the most rabid and fundementally stupid Express or Mail shouter can answer - which of those pension deals is the gold-plated one?  Are MPs taking a hit on their pensions? Are they fuck.


Equally hilarious (if it wasn't for the horrific consequences of dripfeeding bullshit to a willingly ignorant mass of readers) is the accusation that UNION BARONS FORCING STRIKE TO GO AHEAD, and NOTHING CAN STOP STRIKE NOW, all of this attributed to Brendan Barber, whose actual quote was, when asked if there was any chance that the strike would be averted, "Well, I think at this stage it's probably unlikely". So in that sentence we have "I think", "probably" and "unlikely", three words not often associated with the kind of decisive domineering that the media are trying to lay at the doors of FAT CAT UNION BARONS WITH GOLD-PLATED PENSIONS FALLING OUT OF THEIR ARSES. (The irony of Paul Dacre's Mail calling a £140k a year union boss a fat cat when Dacre banks over £2 million a year, and fuckwitted racist idiot Richard Littlejohn bags £750k for writing a couple of fetid, ill-informed rants a week does not escape me). In other words, this is the media blatantly lying in order to make Joe Public hate unions and hate strike action and hate public sector workers whose lives are so much better than theirs. 


The message the papers try to push is, basically, hate the person with the slightly better deal than you, don't dare to ask why you can't have a slightly better deal instead. No, drag everyone down to the lowest level so all workers are treated like shit, just like in the private sector. Add into this the way that the government is now in consultation about how best to strip workers of even more rights, including the right not to get sacked just because your employer doesn't like you, and the lot of the worker is about to get even worse.


 I say we get the private sector properly unionised, galvanise the low-paid, overworked workers. Strikes are pretty effective when done by public sector staff, but the effect of a strike in the private sector would be nothing short of apocalyptic - the economy would stand still if shops or banks closed for a day with only minimal staffing keeping them going. It would have the added bonus of hurting the real fat cats, the bloated company directors with seven figure salaries, where it hurts - in the profits. If you are a low paid private sector worker, go out now and join your union. Do it. Let's stop trying to drag down the public sector into the shit, let's try to rise up out of the shit and start forcing employers and the government to treat us with some fucking dignity. Don't accept the bollocks that the media try to feed you, read the facts, not the opinions.