Andrew Oldham

ARCHIVE: Edwardian Man – Waste of Space

What in the world do the big emporiums think they are doing? Why do they continue to waste packaging? Take a trip in any automobile to these places and you will see aisle after aisle of goods all packaging that makes the buying of those goods redundant. Take apples, do apples fall from the tree in plastic bags, or worst still, sweet confectionary that is sold to small children, who have neither the brain power or the capacity to understand recycling. So, what do the confectioners do to circumnavigate this problem? They produce packaging that CANNOT be recycled! This is a waste, this is morally repugnant to teach small children that recycling is NOT important. Why throw things away, cans, yes cans should be used in the garden as cheap flower pots, they work wonders for tropical type plants, such as tomatoes. Why do we have plastic? Paper is so much better, a paper bag from any emporium can be reused time after time or can easily be shredded, pulped and made into something else. Why in my youth, my Mother used to cut these bags into small squares and give them to the servants to use in their toilet. There is nothing more English than paper squares hanging from a nail in a water closet. Then there is shrink wrapping, yet again, one must ask do our vegetables emerge from the earth like this? Gone is the ability to touch them, to select the ripe, to discard the rotten for pigs and the poor. There was a time, when a young gentleman, hard up due to bad business dealings, could go to any market at the end of a day and pick up enough cheap, past their best, vegetables to make a broth for him and his colleagues. One could send the parlour maid or the kitchen boy to the market to purchase the finest vegetables for the table, the best pineapple for showing, and still have enough money left over to buy the scraps for those below stairs. This is another reason that the class system has collapsed, this is the middle classes run wild with their desire to shrink wrap and partition everything, look what the middle class administrators did to India.

Tags: Edwardian Man

ARCHIVE: Edwardian Man – Gardening

The season is upon us and the garden is coming into bloom, here is a photo from the Modern Edwardian’s Garden (once a car parking space but no more!). As you can see we hark back to that country cottage feel. It always worries me when I see garden after garden paved over, or when gardens are referred to as outside rooms. Not only is it bad for wildlife that we lose our gardens to concrete but it’s bad for us. A garden is a place to relax, to stop and stare, to just sit, to just sit and think. A garden is as good as the amount of time you put into it. There shall be no reference to the low maintenance garden here. The low maintenance garden is for those low of brains and ability to read a book. Learn to garden you lazy oafs! Even a few bulbs like this can put a smile on your face. Don’t moan and say you have no time, or you have children, get them involved, spend an hour in the garden, switch off the television. To give you an idea, all this planting on this photo took an hour for the entire garden. In that hour, I did not think about the stresses of life. I enjoyed the fun of just being in the open, taking in the air and now I have this. I can sit amongst the flowers on my chair, take in the blooms, the scents and smells, and at no point do I think, let’s have a barbeque. Really, they are just a vulgar excuse to stink out the entire neighbourhood and annoy everyone.

Tags: Edwardian Man

ARCHIVE: Edwardian Man – Rubbish

Will the streets ever been clean? Back in the cobbled days, the streets were free of fast food wrappers, discarded cigarette packs from oafs lips. Yes, I say oafs, we have all seen them on the corners, bottles and cans in hand jeering at ladies and gents. Really, did their family never beat manners into them? What is the excitement of hanging around in street corners when one can be at home playing bridge? There is no contest, a warm fire, a pair of slippers, a brewing pipe and the love of a the green baize and cards. More oafs should be trained to play bridge or take up the broom. If they want to spend their nights on street corners, then give them purpose, give them a broom. Let them clean the streets, give them purpose, a job and the pride that they have kept our country clean.

Tags: Edwardian Man

ARCHIVE: Edwardian Man – The Death of the Letter

The world has gone slightly more crazy since yesterday morning when I sat down to my breakfast. In twenty four hours we have seen the decline of morality in politics and worst still we are neither one thing or the other. We have no defined boundaries. We are all told to get on the web (and yes, I appreciate the irony of telling you in this medium but one must make a pact with Devil to safe the lost and reinforce the class system). We are told technology is great, mobile phones, radioactive cookers and lycra. Yet technology cannot withstand or save us from pointless meetings with inferior types who haven’t got the etiquette to print out name places or even set the table for some tiffin. The horrible thing is that most of these so called meetings can be done over the web or via the infernal contraption known as the phone. We are doomed though to spend the afternoon of summer in endless rounds of meetings without even a crumpet of scone as people (who really shouldn’t be given anything more taxing than a broom and dust bucket) point at screens full of powerpoint displays going nowhere. Then they get over excited and tell us that things are great and one spends the rest of the day phoning around the asylums trying to get them in. We then go home to the dead warmth of our television screens. There we find the news full of powerpoint presentations and foam like presenters who call each other by their first names, no respect.

So, here at the Modern Edwardians we have a simple solution, instead of upgrading, why don’t we downgrade? Switch on the radio, get out your writing slope and write a letter. Come on, when is the last time you wrote a letter? We are the Modern Edwardians write letters after breakfast and lunch, it’s the done thing. Without letters the Royal Mail has slid down the slippy slope of apathy, cutting corners and hiring temporary workers. This lack of respect for the written word is the real reason our postal service is just plain awful. Sure, we can all blame crooked owners and profit margins but we’re to blame. We have allowed our beloved Royal Mail to become the bastion of ad mongers, hawkers and fast food outlets selling credit cards to imbeciles who should be told better or given a broom and sent out into the streets to clean up (that’s for another day). Let’s claim back our Royal Mail today, tomorrow and forever, sit down and write, send a letter to a friend, a family member or your boss. Tell them you miss them, you love them, you resign (in the right order, one can’t really resign from a family or a friend – it’s not the done thing). The more letters we send, the prouder we can be of what was once the greatest service and a letter is more fun to read over a full breakfast than an email or a powerpoint presentation.

Tags: Death of the Letter, Edwardian Man

Edwardian Man

In 2009 I did a series of columns for the Edwardian Man, a short lived blog. It was a blog with the running joke of how we stereotype our ancestors, who would comment on modern waste – a personal bug bear. It gave me a chance to vent and write in another voice, sometimes that voice made me feel uncomfortable, sometimes it made me laugh and sometimes I saw the logic in the rant, especially in the column on rubbish. In August, some of these columns will be reproduced here. They may offend, they may make you laugh but they were done with tongue firmly in cheek.

- Andrew Oldham 06/09/2010

Tags: Edwardian Man

ARCHIVE: Why One is a Magic Number Editorial

Okay, Battlestar Galactica is over. I have to get over that but when something you love ends, the tendency is to turn to extremes. So, welcome to the Violence issue. One editor’s way of getting over what was one of the best television drama in years and yes it was science fiction. Do you want to make something of it?

Fist raising aside. It comes as no surprise that BSG was one of the first programmes to deal with the often violent invasion and occupation of Iraq. Let’s not call it a war because let’s face the facts, we’re the bad guys and all of the world knows it.

It is wonderful that television has at last remembered that they can hold up a mirror to society and say in beautiful images of storytelling, look this is what you have done, don’t you feel like an ass that you perpetuate these cycles of violence?. Don’t believe me?

Let’s take the twentieth century, one continuous act of violence. Even the hippie movement ended up being kicked to death by the Hell’s Angels as the Rolling Stones looked on.

So, how do we break the cycle of violence? Well, first let’s not do it with guns or religion and call it peace keeping. Peace keeping is letting people come to the decision they should shake hands without a jackboot in the base of their spine.

The problem is, we love violence. Everyone runs outside during a hot summer if a really good thunder storm rolls in. Come on, I’m not the only one that does it. I’ve seen you all. It’s the release of tension. If you don’t believe me, go to any city centre on a Friday or Saturday nights and watch the boys who didn’t get the girls beat the living daylights out of anyone they can find. They could have gone home and masturbated, this would have released the tension.

And that’s why world peace can only be solved by going to another physical extreme. Pleasure.

So, my solution to violence is compulsory masturbation. Let’s face it, anyone after good sex will agree to anything. If the USA and the UK had been wanking frantically for the last five hundred years, everyone would be much more happier. There would never have been any desire for colonialism. There would be no arguments about who owns what and no one would invade anything. As now, day time talk shows would be peppered full of facts on how to please your partners or who was caught masturbating in Regent’s Park. So some things wouldn’t change but it’s a small price for world piece.

It would break the cycle in a very sticky way but who’d want fire a gun made by someone who wanks? Of course, world hunger would also be a problem. Ready meals would never have been invented. But at least and at last, we could with hand on heart say all our politicians where wankers. Anti-social members of the community would be put to work, wanking for a better tomorow, and no one would hand out an ASBO without wondering where it had been. I could look out my window and everywhere across this green land people would be smiling. Hate work? Stay at home and wank. You’re supporting a peaceful tomorrow. Hate your friend? Wank. Make peace. Not done your work? Wank. It relaxes the body, frees up the mind, cures headaches and staves of cancer. That’s a fact, it was on television. God bless television, it gave us BSG and guilt free wanking.

Sure, no one would want to imagine their parents wanking or even their friends but imagine the result. We could create rooms at work, designated wanking zones. Come on, they’ve killed smoking and taken away the only upside of smoking, the smoking room. We could have the wanking room, it could be sponsored by Kleenex or wet wipes.

Okay, you may all have just gone, that’s gross. You make think that that’s not on. It’s not savoury but I would take a nation of wankers over any army.

If wanking was compulsory, I’d bet that unwanted childbirths, anti-social kids and pissed off people would be consigned to history. So, join with me, raise your free hand to the storm overhead and wank for a better tomorrow.

Tags: ASBO, Battlestar Galactica, One, USA, Wanking, War

ARCHIVE: From Pulp to Aylett Interview

Andrew interviewed Steve Aylett twice in the last five years, this second interview appeared in 2008. ‘I admire Steve’s work,’ says Andrew, ‘Interviewing him though is a strange experience because you can never predict what Steve is going to do next. I love that about him’.

From Pulp to Aylett. Interview by Andrew Oldham

Certainly in the design and content of your new book, Lint, there is a feel that Pulp Fiction of the 20th Century has had an imposing effect on your work. But what does Pulp mean to you as a reader and a writer?

‘The colourful and kitsch presentation is definitely there.  But in terms of pulp writing I tend to think of it as writing quite quickly and disposably, neither of which are me. And a concentration on narrative rather than ideas, maybe. Again, not like my writing – there’ll be a lot of story in my books but it’s mainly something for the ideas and gags to live in. LINT was a great housing for thousands of ideas because it contains hundreds of books in summary plus what was said about them, and the stupid things the author got up to. So there are several juicy idea-shapes on every page. It’s interesting to start with a familiar-looking genre and take it somewhere else immediately. A lot of people have done their own take on the hardboiled detective genre, for instance, and used it for their own various purposes. Even Bukowski did it, with PULP.  SF pulp stories were a bit more idea-oriented than the crime stuff but would tend to have only one idea per story, and they were still written at quite a rush – and, as I said in LINT, many of them really were written to fit an already-painted cover image. So it would be, ‘We’ve got a cover picture of a green kangaroo emerging from a storm drain holding some sort of thermos – write a story for it.’ Then – as writing teacher Natalie Goldberg would say – go!  But that’s not how I do it’.  

Which writers did you admire when you first set out to write your first novel?

‘JP Donleavy, Voltaire, Kerouac, Greg Egan, Dostoevsky, Brautigan, Raymond Chandler, Robert Crais, Billy Childish, Ray Bradbury, Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut, Rudy Rucker, John Wyndham, Bruno Schultz. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for expression or therapy rather than real creativity, but it’ll almost certainly have been said before by someone, so it’s like inadvertent duplication. And that stuff does get published by the bucket load, unfortunately’.

What piece of advice would you give someone who wanted to write a novel?

‘I’d suggest that they write something original, but that would be a cruel thing to tell them if they’re hoping to get published. Publishers tend to publish the sort of thing that’s been published before, unless someone gets in by fluke or masquerade, as I’ve done. Real creativity is originality. By definition creativity is the making of something which didn’t exist before you produced it. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for expression or therapy rather than real creativity, but it’ll almost certainly have been said before by someone, so it’s like inadvertent duplication. And that stuff does get published by the bucket load, unfortunately. Originality, though, is gold dust. I’m sure I can’t be the only person in the world who’s into it. I’m still clinging to the hope that there are enough people into genuine originality to make a market for it’.

LINT is your present novel, concerning Jeff Lint, ‘author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical SF of the twentieth century’. Where did this character come from and what does SF mean to Steve Aylett and why did you choose to create a character akin to Phillip K. Dick?

‘Jeff Lint more or less arrived fully-formed, as this obliviously creative character. He’s the sort of vividly rampaging author I wished existed. I could put hundreds of book and story ideas into the book. In the other Lint book I did, “And Your Point Is?” I finally wrote a story that had been in a holding pattern for a long time, called “The Retrial”. It was done as a critical review of Jeff Lint’s story ‘The Retrial’, which we get to see through my ‘essay’. The same thing with ‘Rise of the Swans’. They’re beautiful Voltairian satire, really juicy with controlled, justified resentment.  Books and stories want to be a certain way, and it’s good to be patient until you see what that is, so that you can make them that way. Sometimes it’s even a case of waiting until you’re a better writer. Speaking of which, Alan Moore wrote a blurby thing for the back of LINT and mentioned a writer called Harry Stephen Keeler, who I hadn’t heard of. I asked him who this was and he told me about Keeler. It turns out he was a prolific pulp author in the 20s-50s, and very like Jeff Lint, though a worse writer I had portrayed Lint to be. Keeler actually had brilliant ideas for stories, but his execution was usually terrible. He didn’t know what to leave out, so he just included everything. He was obsessed with skulls, clowns and midgets. One of his books was called ‘The Skull of the Waltzing Clown’. Another was ‘The Riddle of the Travelling Skull.’  Loads of these things got published somehow, and he kept writing them even when the publishers stopped publishing him. I can’t read Keeler’s stuff, but I like the idea that he existed, as a figure. The New York Times said about him: “We are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy.”  That’s beautiful isn’t it? That oblivious, unstoppable quality’.  

The worlds you create in your books are often alternative and I’m thinking of David Barett’s early quote on your work in the New Statesman, that, “Steve Aylett’s distorting lenses are crueller than most”. How much do you feel this is true of you now and why do you think your books often look at the surreal, cruel side of life?

‘I don’t think I ‘distort’ at all. But I don’t see the point of writing something that just ‘blends in’ with life either, because that’s like doing nothing at all. I’ll tend to enhance and heighten things, exaggerate and take things to their natural conclusion. It’s easy to see the hole in an argument and then use that hole to worry it in half – but satire will tend to use a mechanism of sort of disingenuously taking the argument seriously and running it to its conclusion, leading to surreal absurdities. It’s extreme stress-testing of the position. Also when presented with a justification you can reverse the equation and see if you wind up at the first cause that people claim. Most often you’ll either arrive at a different origin of motivation or go down a false trail that doesn’t honestly reconnect. I write a lot about power manipulation, right up to’Rebel at the End of Time’ which I finished recently. If you’re good at pattern recognition as regards power and powerlessness, it’s like watching people going around with unencrypted motivations. Especially people who are powerless, and the amazing contortions they go through to avoid admitting they’ve been screwed over. The tendency to deny the reality of victimhood is a widespread coping mechanism, and it prevents real justice. I said somewhere that ‘You should be careful when asking people to repay their debt to society: you invite revenge’. Culture usually levels out at fairly dull and mediocre but especially so at times like this ‘1980s Part 2’ period that we’re living in at the moment, and it’s good to make something that’s its opposite. A sort of gleeful density like a drug’.

What draws you to writing this kind of material?

‘I’m writing the sort of books I want to read but couldn’t find anywhere’.

How do your ideas start?

‘They show up whole & entire, the whole book, as a sort of colourful mind sculpture with a particular feeling and flavour, which can be used as a schematic for the book. I then create the book that has that shape when extruded up into 3D or 4D. It may take time for the detail to gather that will make that shape. I think this is the way most writers get their ideas, but because I’m a bit synaesthetic I’m probably a bit more conscious of the strange mechanism of it’.

Where do you see yourself in the tradition of English Literature or do you feel yourself to be something new? A new kind of writer and if so, how and why?

‘The main tradition would be as a real old-time satirist, sneaking little mind-bombs into people the way Voltaire did. That alone would make something like Casey Maddox’s brilliant “The Day Philosophy Dies”. But I also have a tendency toward a very concentrated colourfulness, a specific-rich thing, which comes from not wanting to waste people’s time for even a moment and also to provide an antidote to the general vacuum of the times. Culture usually levels out at fairly dull and mediocre but especially so at times like this ‘1980s Part 2’ period that we’re living in at the moment, and it’s good to make something that’s its opposite. A sort of gleeful density like a drug. Also as you go through the book the pages previously read don’t rot down and so the effect is cumulative. Because my writing is a lot more than just narrative and description it’s more or less the opposite of pulp, in fact. But it’s fun to use pulp fixtures and fittings. I don’t know what category this kind of writing will be called when people work it out but so far it’s been called Slipstream, Offbeat, Chemical Gen, Bizarro, and so on’.

You seem to be a prolific writer but what drives you to write?

‘See above, and writing the kind of books I’d like to find in bookshops etc. But I don’t think I’m prolific. I’m a very slow writer’.

Where will Steve Aylett be in another ten years?

‘I will have finished the four books I’ve decided to focus on next – the first couple won’t be so difficult, but then there’s two difficult ones that really challenge what I can do, what I’m able to do – that’s why I’m allowing them time to pull together. I’m not a good enough writer to do them yet. So anyway, that’ll be 20 or so books out there, finally, and I’ll either withdraw and basically disappear at that point or, depending on the way the world goes, become more visible but in a different capacity. And hopefully I would have got the hell out of England, obviously. This is all assuming I’m still alive and haven’t done myself in or died in a dismal fireball with the rest of the human race’.

What does Steve Aylett the writer mean to you, Steve Aylett, the average man in the street?

‘Steve Aylett the man in the street is just this thing that walks around like a wishbone in a coat, looking gormless. You wouldn’t think it was a genius, and you’d be right’.

In the tradition of Pulp lazy assed journalism that frequented many of the magazines in the 80s and 90s. If I would only allow you to have five things on a desert island, what would they be?

‘I’d probably be hysterical with happiness at the absence of people. Then lonely at the absence of female people. I’d only need a few basics though, plus maybe some music. I probably wouldn’t last long but I’d die fairly happy’.

Now, what would they be if you were in a housing estate in 2011, Boris Johnson has just banned all participants of the Olympics and London had been overrun by cats with bad attitude?

‘In the long run I try not to be swerved too much by arbitrary circumstance – meaning circumstance decided by other people – so I’d be doing what I’d already planned to do at that point – writing, resenting, weeping, eating, sleeping. So, again, I’d need just a few basics’.

What’s your favourite pulp?

‘I don’t know whether he qualifies as pulp except in regard to his publishing history, but the SF/fantasy writer Jack Vance is an amazing thing. There’s a very particular flavour to his books, and people who are into him will know what I mean. There’s a humour and intelligence there, a sort of sensible individuality, and amazing worlds he describes. His aliens are, for the most part, genuinely alien and unknowable. Most of his books – including some of the best ones – are out of print, and there are seemingly hundreds of the damn things’.

There is no one else in UK Literature who blends the cyber-surreal with a distinctly British humour. What the hell did this to you? 

‘It was probably growing up in that vacuum I mentioned, and wanting to generate an antidote to it for myself to feed on, because that vacuum is just nightmarish. So, richness in the face of vacuity, meaning in the face of incoherence, honesty in the face of wall-to-wall lies and evasion, real humour in the face of crap jokes. The result, when it works, is this rich surreal satire. And it’s nice to do something really stupid occasionally, too, so long as it’s still colourful and interesting. I once wrote a book that didn’t mean anything, ‘The Inflatable Volunteer’, which I think is hilarious. And I recently made a comic called ‘Get That Thing Away From Me’, about a pig who feels generally overwhelmed. Also it’s great to do stuff in the wrong order, disengaged from time and fashion. Why wait until a world event happens before writing about it? These things are pretty obvious several years ahead, so long as you don’t have any motivation not to see them, such as optimism’.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Pulp, Steve Aylett

ARCHIVE: Editorial on Pulp

I’ve just purchased forty-eight battered and bruised SF magazines from a dotty old woman who spent twenty minutes looking for them before wheeling them out before me in an old M & S shopping trolley. She was soon joined by an equally barmy old man who declared that they where worth between $1 and $7.50 each – I don’t know where the odd latter price comes from but it always seems to be the kind of numbers that volunteers pull out of the hat in every charity shop I visit. I offer them £20 for the lot and confusion reins as they try to load the magazines along with the shopping trolley into my car. I try to tell them that I don’t want it and another forty minutes of bartering ensue and now I’m a proud owner of a shopping trolley and they own my car. I got $7.50 for it. So, now I’m sat in my lounge and the rain has returned to the world beyond my window and I am dancing as I have found a Napoleonic coin amongst the pages of Weird Tales.

Amazing Stories surfaces from the pile of old magazines, there amongst the musty pages that gleam with bright artwork is a name I’ve not seen in print for a long while, Poul Anderson. Then other names drift up, Burroughs, Bradbury, Asimov, Leigh and for a moment, my guilty secret threatens to erupt as the child inside me giggles. These are the names that kept me sane as a child, that gave me hope and taught me to dream and to make that impossible leap into the great void of SF. Back then I did not know or care about the fact that they were classed as Pulp. For God sakes, I watched A Team and Magnum PI on television, was forced to sit down on a Saturday evening and watch Metal Mickey with the family – the gayest robot ever to come out of the 80s – there was no surprise that I took great joy in staring at those brash SF covers that promised horror, danger and worlds of mystery. Metal Mickey merely gave us a man in a dustbin and ALF was surely a alcoholic by season two.

Many of the Amazing Stories and Weird Tales are adorned with gruesome aliens, buxom women fainting and men who stare wistfully at the horizon. Even in the magazines, men were escaping and so were women. They were a world away from the drab streets of my childhood, the cold winters, the wet days and the tiresome rehashing of Star Wars on TV and in film. These magazines were my escape, my guilty secret whilst my friends ran around playing army and football, I kept them in my duffel coat pocket, under the maths book in my desk and dreamt of a gateway to Mars, shining red and dangerous in the dark.

As I grew older, the cover art of many of these magazine where seen as inferior or sexist, and ultimately as a distraction to real Literature. A term I have never understood, writers do not write Literature, they tell stories and it is beyond me why anyone would want to use that term – Literature can kill a good book dead, I have seen many reviewers toss books into bins when they are told that it is the next great Literary work of the twenty-first century. I have seen writers paralysed with fear when they think they have to produce a tome to hold up the word ‘Literature’. An example is Margaret Atwood, is she (a) A Feminist Writer? (b) A Literary Writer? Or; (c) A Fiction writer who tells stories and doesn’t care what they are? I plump for the latter, The Handmaid’s Tale, is SF and so is Oryx and Crake and in some way all her work touches on Fantasy but I doubt she’d give a damn about the word ‘Literature’. Yet, Margaret is classed under the A’s in the Literary section and SF is tucked away and anything that resembles Pulp is shipped out to dusty areas around the shop. Poul Anderson should be in the A’s alongside Margaret but poor old Poul is relugated to a distant land called SF, Jeff Noon should be in the N’s but is also sent to the back of the class for not being Literary and poor old, misunderstood Mickey Spillane should be in S’s but he is somewhere in crime. In a shop in Cambridge I found poor old Mickey in the comedy section and the shop keeper just sneered at me and said, “Well, it’s not exactly great Literature”. ‘Literature’ a buzz word that is the kiss of death for any great story. Pulp is at the other end of the spectrum, it kills too.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Editorial, Jeff Noon, Literature, Margaret Atwood, Mickey Spillane, Poul Anderson, Pulp, SF

ARCHIVE: Editorial on Travel

I abhor travel. Maybe that is a little harsh but trust me when you’ve landed sideways in an air plane at O’Hare, buffeted by one of the worst hurricanes the USA has ever seen, it tends to put you off the act of travelling. I love to go places though, so I am in a Catch 22 situation. Many of us now baulk as we face the new guru catch word – carbon footprint; a catchphrase dreamt up in some PR company, to make us all feel guilty that the planet is indeed warming up, whilst human compassion, trust and love amongst fellow men and women is distinctly dropping down the temperature scale. Let’s face it, we’re stuffed.

So, how big is your carbon footprint? Is it so big that you can now actively brag to male friends about it? Is it big enough to make even China go weak at the knees? Let’s face it, this is how the whole travel problem is being pitched at us – we are being made to feel incredibly stupid and guilty but there is no real mention of the companies that are also to blame or even the governments.

Yet, our lust for travel and the throwaway lifestyle is contagious. Come on, who hasn’t amongst you told friends that you went to somewhere warm and sat by the pool for a fortnight, drinking bad wine and reading equally bad literature? And felt good about it? Openly braggedabout fucking up the country you holidayed in? And we all do it, we go to gems hidden amongst the lapping waves of some undiscovered place. These solitary hideaways where we find ourselves, find peace, discover beauty and feel at one with the world. And, a fortnight after returning home, we have told all our friends, family, colleagues, lovers and any passing stranger or old school friend what a great place we’ve just holidayed in. What do they do? They go there! The cheek. The sheer bravado! What happens then? They tell all their friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances of their pets about a great place they’ve just been too. Oh, the beaches! Oh, the people! The culture, the food, the warmth! – LOOK AT OUR TANS – and what happens then? They go! And then more people go there, then actually live there. Four years later, you meet the first person you recommended the gem to and say quite calmly and in that innocent voice, “I went back on holiday there, but I wouldn’t go again – it’s so commercial, there’s no culture left. There was even a burger bar next to a temple! The people have sold out”

What do you expect? You waved great fistfuls of dirty money in their faces. Sure, beauty is wonderful, empty tranquil beaches that stretch off to the blue horizon are great but you don’t live there all the time. You don’t realise how poor some of these countries are and how much the humble tourist has them over a barrel. Money or poverty? Money or starvation? The irony is though, that England too is becoming a tourist trap. It’s the fastest growing market in the UK at the moment. Will we adapt though to being the one’s accepting the money and bending backwards over a barrel to do it? Could we, after so many decades of package holidays, shouting for food in slow and clear English in the Costa del Sol, Lyon, Delhi, Rhodes and Paris actually welcome the same back? Package holidays are coming back to roost, and I wait with baited breath for the first Spanish Man to shout slow and clear in some greasy spoon, in Spanish of course, that he wants paella.

Tags: Act on CO2, Andrew Oldham, Carbon footprint, Catch 22, Editorial, Package holiday, Travel

ARCHIVE: Sex Editorial

You switch on the television, sex, you open the pages of a newspaper, sex, you tune into the Archers, sex. It seems that Benny Hill became so ingrained in our minds in the 1980s that his ghost has risen from the grave and he is being chased through every medium accompanied by a bevvy of scantily clad women. And now men are getting in on the act. Once there was the bimbo, now there is the himbo and years from now they will have populated the planet with good looking chavs. I know that last one is hard to imagine but trust me, they have devolved to a point where they can only go up or else dig holes in the ground and changed their names to Morlock. Which makes the rest of us the Eloi. For those of you unaware of H.G. Wells classic, The Time Machine, the Eloi where the good looking ones who fed from the Earth. They where apathetic, watched others drown as they sat on the perfect bums on a perfect riverbank and ate fruit. God, that sounds awfully familiar, does it remind anyone of celebrity culture? Where vacuous talentless Z list stars, whose only claim to fame is being racist or so talentless that they’ve come out the otherside in a post ironic thingy that they don’t understand but ain’t their Mum a bitch? And look at the new boobs they gave her. Ten grand they cost, so they can’t be a racist, can they? I pray for one of the new hybrid cars to run them over. At least it will cut down on polution. It angers me that they spill their pointless philosophy (which they could write on the side of a match) to every tabloid that can hold a crayon. I’m digressing, in fact it’s not a good idea to think of celebrity culture.

Really, when did putting people in a house for several weeks, with little food, little chance to wash their clothes become sexy? It wasn’t when you flat shared. We should just take ALL Big Brother contestants (they’re not stars) and just shit them into space. Brian and the twins could boldly go and piss off. Poor Davina, her soul has been sucked dry by endless line of mincemeat and suckers.

And that’s what sex is really about. At its essence, sex in the media is making a fool our of you. It preys on your base instincts, from every ad to every soap – come on, Hollyoaks, you didn’t think it was written? It’s just a group of images for frustrated teens – turn the sound off and you’ll see it’s just top shelf fodder not very well disguised.

But why shouldn’t we revel in sex? Let’s face it, it’s programmed into our DNA. I tell you all those stars who have been caught over the years, all those wives and husbands, and partners couldn’t help it. It’s bad enough that it’s our primal drive but when they start putting it on the back of buses and on mobile phones and in music videos, who stands a chance?

Tags: bums and tums, Editorial, Eloi, HG Wells, Sex, The Time Machine