Drew Foley's Wheel of Rape

It cannot have escaped anyone's attention that the NHS is currently being dismantled by a government we didn't elect. The greatest single invention Britain has ever come up with. Providing universal healthcare for it's people (before you right wing “death to anyone who isn't poor or me” apologists all start, yes I know we fucking pay for it. It's not the point I'm making here. You think when Cameron gets rid of the NHS he's going to stop us paying a chunk of Tax and National Insurance? Get real, fucktards). People say the first duty of government is to protect it's citizens. I think that it's specifically to keep it's citizens healthy, because a healthy citizen can achieve anything. For good or bad.

Now I've noticed a trend over Twitter in the last few weeks. It's that men are to be feared. Not only feared, but actively avoided. Every five minutes a post has cropped up saying that people are being raped. Whilst there are a lot of poor women (and men, which seems to have been glossed over) who are being raped, there is a much worse situation on the horizon. We are all about to be raped.

Guess what. Our rapist isn't going to be a dodgy bloke following us home with a packet of butter in his pocket for lube. He isn't going to be wearing a balaclava as a mask and walking around with a long coat to disguise the fact he is naked underneath. He isn't even going to look at you. Our rapist is wearing a suit, and a tie, and has a serious air of respectability,

So, with that in mind, who is raping the us over the NHS the most?

Welcome to Drew Foley's Wheel of Rape

Spin the Wheel, there are six suspects

1. The Voting System

OK, so this one isn't a person, but it was devised by people and has been long used as an excuse. It still amazes me how few very intelligent people actually understand our voting system. It is not fit for purpose and hasn't been for years. It also fucked us over in a way you wouldn't guess unless it was explained to you.

The main thing to point out is that, no matter how much the media want you to believe it, you are not voting for the leader of a party. This fact seems to get lost, but it's true. I supported the leader debates because they were an opportunity to showcase the main policies of each party, but it's a fact that these may differ at local level. Not that that is ever made clear to you.

You are told your vote counts. Well, it does, you should vote. If you don't, then quite frankly, you have no fucking right to complain about anything that every happens because you didn't do anything about it. You didn't register your opinion. You don't care enough, therefore, you are saying that you don't matter. You are a pawn to be played with by the major political parties who can use you as a beating stick or an oppressed mass, whichever they see fit.

You should register your opinion. However, herein lies the problem. Every constituency votes for it's own MP. There are 650 MP's, meaning that there are 650 different constituencies in Britain. This means that how much your vote matters depends on where you live.

For example, where I live, you could put a red rose on a turd and it would get in, for the simple reason, it's the strongest part that isn't Tory. That is the case in a massive number or inner city wards. I decided that I wasn't so ecstatic about Labour this time round so I voted Liberal Democrat . However, it didn't matter. Labour got in by a landslide where I live. As they generally do in urban areas. On the other side of this, if you are a Tory, I could forgive you for wondering why you aren't in control of 70% of the country, when you look at the electoral map. Most of the country is blue. That's because people who live in the sticks generally vote Tory, for reasons best known to themselves.

The problem is that our electoral system is designed for a two party election. In a two party election, it works. We aren't a two party state. In 2010, there were 50 different parties. That is a lot of different parties in all the different wards. In fact, if you have enough money, you can put yourself up. Martin Bell did it against Neil Hamilton to great success. However, you aren't properly represented. Our system is so daft, that the Lib Dem's seats went down, but their share of the vote went up? How the fuck does that work? Even stupider is this...

The Liberal Democrats polled 23.3% of the popular vote, which is a quarter of the country, but only took 8.77% of the seats in parliament. To put this in context, the popular vote is all the individual votes counted together and divided.

I'm not defending the Lib Dem's. Quite frankly, if they survive the next election with more than 10 MP's I'll be shocked. They conned the fuck out of us. They sold their soul to the blue side. I'm just pointing out that a party that has nearly a quarter of the votes of all the people in the country, has about a twelfth of the seats in parliament.

That's fucking wrong. End of story.

Our electoral system is outdated, outmoded, confusing and presented to us in an Americanised way which is designed to make us believe that we are voting for a specific man, when we're not. You thought you were voting for Cameron, Clegg and Brown.

Well, you weren't.

You were voting for someone in your area who may well have been completely at odds with your views, but you didn't realise, because you were conned.

For the record, I'm really sorry about voting Lib Dem. I actually wrote to the electoral commission to ask for my vote back, even though it didn't matter shit. Fuck, I still felt dirty after what happened.

This voting system needs to change to Proportional Representation. However, it won't. For one very simple reason. To quote Sir Humphrey Appleby,

“No Government is going to change the system that got it into power”

So we're all fucked.

2. Andrew Lansley – Secretary of State for Health

This is an obvious choice. Lansley came up with the bill (well, his name is on it), and he has been trying to sell it to us, he has been Operation Human Shield. to all the hospitals, to take all the shit from the entire country.

Even his Wikipedia photo is sinister, like he's a Bond villain planning to annex Scotland. Mainly because there are no Tory voters there.

We may as well gloss over the donations he has received from private healthcare operators while he was in opposition, and in government.

Actually, lets not.

He took donations from Care UK, who just happen to provide private healthcare for older people to PCT's and councils. No conflict there. I mean, why would he want to farm out NHS services? How about General Healthcare Group? Adrian Fawcett, otherwise known as the COE of GHG only shared a stage with Lansley at an event that GHG sponsored (albeit, indirectly)

Just to confirm, this is a conglomerate that sees the NHS as “one of the largest and most attractive healthcare markets globally”

Let's just take this in. Why the flying fuck is the NHS an attractive healthcare market? Why are people looking at it as an investment opportunity? There is no way that the NHS should be a market. It should be a not for profit organisation. The NHS exists to provide healthcare to the citizens of Britain. It shouldn't exist to provide competition

Andrew Lansley may be a sacrificial lamb. However, he still has a vested interest in the abolition of the NHS. How he sleeps at night is anyone's guess.

3. David Cameron

Cameron is the Prime Minister. Leader of the Conservative party and lead candidate for next political assassination. Seriously, this man is pure evil. He has obviously made a check-list that Thatcher couldn't finish, and he is going through it. His policy record confirms that he simply doesn't care what happens to the country as long as he and his friends are OK. This is obvious in many policies, not limited to road privatisation, bombing Libya (while we were apparently broke), relaunch of the right to buy policy and his crazy idea of antagonising the Falklands.

The fact he lives very close to Rebecca Brooks, who just happened to be the editor of one of the biggest newspapers in the country. Yup, when she wasn't beating up Ross Kemp, she was in charge of the News of the World, (2000 – 2003) and The Sun (2003 – 2009), before finally becoming Chief Executive Officer of News International (2009 – 2011).

Do you know where she is at the time of writing? She is on bail, after being arrested in the phone hacking scandal. Yes, that's right. Our Prime Minister, the man who is representing us on the world stage, is close friends and neighbours with a women who is currently on trial for hacking into innocent people's phones to print news stories

This is the same man who is desperate to to privatise everything we have. He is evil beyond belief. He doesn't want to pay for anything because he doesn't realise how the real world works. He's never had to live in it.

The main question here, is how does he have any integrity left?

4. Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg was the most powerful man in British Politics for a short time.

That is no exaggeration. That time was, in fact, from 6 May 2010 until the 12 May 2010.

There was a hung parliament. There was no overall majority. The Tories had the most seats, and the biggest percentage in parliament. They didn't have enough however, to make a government. They needed another one of the big parties. It wasn't going to be Labour, obviously, and a coalition of all the small parties wouldn't work either, so it could only be the Liberal Democrats.

Let's consider this. In the situation the country was in, the Tories could only get a working majority by going in with the Liberal Democrats. If the Liberal Democrats were to go in with Labour, the seats would be 314 to 306, which is not enough for a strong government, on account of the fact that only 9 people need to rebel and everything is fucked.

Let's look at Clegg though, and the Liberals in general. The liberals lean to the left. There is no doubt about this. They always have and always will. Clegg leans to the left. They don't go for everything Labour go for, but they do lean to the left. So why did they jump into bed and suck the right wing cock? Swallowing all that right wing policy. They are swallowing the cum, thinking that they are in power because they're sat on the government side.

The reason is this. Nick Clegg didn't think of the country He thought of himself, and his party. On the face of it, he had no choice. The fact of the matter is that the Liberal Democrats are finished whatever happens. In a way, he had no choice. So he went with the Tories in the hope that they, as the Liberal Democrats, could temper the policies of the Tory Party.

No chance. Not only have the Tories sent their smear masters against all the Lib Dem's in power, they have got nearly everything through. Basically, Clegg has rolled over. He's being tickled on the belly. Meanwhile. Cameron, is fucking us over. Vince Cable is the only man who has stood up to anyone.

The Tories played the Lib Dem's like the political masters the Tories are. Next election, the Tories are planning to all but wipe out the Lib Dem's by changing the boundaries.

I'm aware that he couldn't have gone with Labour. A majority of 8 isn't enough.

What Nick Clegg should have done is forced another election. Under our ridiculous system, he would have been entitled to do it. He didn't do it because he would have brought the destruction of his party forward 5 years.

So Clegg has won a Pyrrhic victory. He brought power to his party, at the expense of having it with the Tories, and Cameron has fucked him over. Nick Clegg will be going to bed every night feeling the bleeding from his arse. He knows how much he was fucked and if he has any humility, he will shoot himself in the face in front of Parliament.

I know he won't, but that's not the point.

5. The British Voter

The British worker, fundamentally lazy, wants something for nothing.

“This is worse than Afghanistan” shouted one women in Didsbury. She shouted this after half past nine whilst she was in a large queue still to vote She ended up not voting.

The average British voter, can be a parasite on society.

29,650,011 people voted in the 2010 election. This is out of a total of 45,844,691. That's 65% of the potential electorate. Are you seriously telling me that only 65% of the electorate would turn out if they knew that their public services were going to be sold off to the lowest bidder? The simple fact is, that they wouldn't. Some polls put support of a rethink of the NHS bill at 85.2%.

I'm aware that the British public is full of disenfranchised voters, thinking that their vote won't make a difference. You know what, maybe it's for the first time ever, but next time round. MY FUCKING GOD IT WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Now, this government has passed a law which means that they can be in power for five years, Cameron has basically put himself in charge for long enough to line is good friends pockets.

Maybe if the British voter knew that they were being led back to the 1980's. Maybe if they knew they were being fucked every day of their life, they might vote. However, our government wants to keep them stupid.

The sad thing is, that many people will still think that their vote won't matter,

We're going to try. Jesus Christ we're going to try. We need to push to get this cancer out.

6. Tony Blair

I won't deny. Tony Blair kicked this off. Apparently, he was a socialist at one point. A direct enemy of Anne Widdecombe. Tony Blair was great for the country in 1997 (even though he picked the wrong band). The fact that National Health Service don't appear on any achievements of his explain his attitude towards the NHS. He was a Labour Prime Minister, and he didn't give a shit.

Who the fuck are we supposed to trust?

You know what the biggest problem with the NHS is?

It's simple. The biggest problem is the private sector.

People sought to bring Private Sector ethics into the NHS. Now, the top of the NHS is filled with people who earn salaries in massive excess of the published highest wage. According to NHS employers, the highest wage you can receive is £97,478. Derek Smith, of Dorset County Hospital, earned £387,220 for the 141 days work in 2010 to 2011. This equates to £1,002,378.01 a year. Are you telling me that no other NHS trusts are employing people at such daft salaries?

The argument is that you can only attract the best people if you pay the best wages. Maybe that's true, but in this case, he was an interim. To take a typical example, a Nurse applying for a job at  Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust (sic) can expect a starting wage of £25,528.

So, what we're saying here is that a head of a hospital can earn the equivalent of 35.4 nurses?. While I imagine this is a generally isolated case, I refuse to believe that it is on it's own.

We need to rid the NHS of the private sector. The simple fact is that the NHS should be a not for profit company. We pay for it to provide healthcare for everybody. We are happy to pay in for years, in the knowledge that one day, when we need it, it will be there for us. Generally speaking, the United Kingdom is an country that is happy to pay to do this.

The NHS has people at the top who want to rape the NHS of all of it's money. Soon, we'll be paying these motherfuckers to rape us. Better start saving now. For me, diabetes is just around the corner.

Waiting for Whitney to Cark It

Is anyone else sick of this Whitney Houston thing yet? Yes, she’s dead; she died, in a hotel, in a bath, pumped full of alcohol and drugs. 3 American television channels cancelled all their programming for round the clock coverage of her death. There was a report in the Manchester Evening News. There are people all over the world crying their eyes out for this person they've never met, or even know.

She is frequently cited as one of the most influential musicians of any generation. She won over 400 different awards for various things and has sold 170 million records.

I can't jump on this bandwagon.

In her entire studio album career, spanning 6 albums (3 of which had practically the same fucking name, she’s as imaginative as a fucking carrot that one), and 2 soundtrack albums, she wrote 2 songs. 2 fucking songs, so apparently she’s a fucking songwriter. She also did vocal arrangements, which basically means she decided where to sing, or to put it another way, she listened to the songwriter then filled every song with that warble-y shite that female vocalists seem to love. Musicians would call it a trill, vocalists call it vibrato, and I call it a fucking abomination. She chose who she wanted to produce an album, so she's a producer. By this logic, I'm a vocalist, backing vocalist, vocal arranger, transposer, guitarist, guitar tech, bassist, bass tech, percussionist, drummer, songwriter, arranger, transcriber, studio tech, producer, mixer, runner, audio engineer, mastering engineer, A&R, marketing, artist, liaison, and sales, as well as a band member.

It's official. I'm the greatest man who ever lived.

She also never played an instrument, so I’m struggling to see how she can be classed as a musician if she can’t read music or play an instrument. I get sick of the attitude towards vocalists. There are very few bands in which the singer was the best part. If they are writing their own lyrics, then there is something to hook onto but these overblown divas? They are little more than puppets. The songs they sing are traded from singer to singer based on what their management want to push next, all the time being told they are quite literally gods gift. They are overexposed and over-loved, this leads to the fawning attitude.

I fucking hate the fawning. She must have had one of the cleanest arses in America. The amount of tongues up there must have been sickening for the poor mare. You’re so brave Whitney, you’re so beautiful Whitney, you’ll get through it Whitney, We understand you Whitney. It’s a shame they don’t say the same things to people who have real problems. Whitney Houston was, for years, a crack-head of immense proportions, whilst raising her children on the fucking television in a car crash for all of us to see. This I don’t understand. Why are people on the street addicted to crack vilified but somehow Whitney is OK because she’s Whitney.

Michael Jackson was the same, he basically got off all the charges because parents in America didn’t want to believe that Michael Jackson wanted to put wine in a coke can, call it Jesus Juice, get their kids drunk and then fuck them. That was all he was doing. The words “I never had a childhood” is not a defense open to the common man.

There were people looking up to this wreck, all because in 1987 she had a voice and a cheeky smile. An interview she gave in 2009 was billed as “The most anticipated music interview of the decade”. The fucking decade? Jesus Christ. You know what she said in this interview? She said she'd been using copious amounts of drugs, for years and years. Really? I had to wait a whole decade for that pearl of fucking wisdom. I knew that in 1996. It's not like all these signs weren't there. She was relying on technology to keep her voice in check, she had been fired from musicals and performances for “erratic behavior” and she was taking every substance she could get her hands on. She couldn't see the line because it had gone up her nose.

The thing that really annoys me is that her voice isn't really all that good. I find it quite weak. I think that when she is really pushing it, she straddles that line between feedback and strangled cat. She never wants to hold a note. She just wants to move around it. It makes her sound totally indecisive. It's not an attractive type of singing. The absolute worse thing is the plethora of amateurs who then try it. They sound even worse. At least the studio magic keeps Whitney's voice on a note that kind of makes sense. Karaoke nights are full of wannabe girls machete their way through these soft pop ballads all being sold the same fucking dream.

Whitney Houston could have been replaced by anybody. It's quite simple. She was lucky, she happened to be singing in the nightclub Clive Davis happened to walk into. There were hundreds of others, some were probably in the night club next door, but Whitney happened to be chosen. It's the dream. Comes from nothing because of this “special” talent. Our music industry, press, venues, and everything else are part of a machine selling us this dream because it's cheap. They are shitting on us from a great height and loving it. Rags to riches. With as little work and effort as possible. It makes you wonder why you fucking bother.

And you know she isn't going away. There will be literally hundreds of recordings that have been kept back. RCA have been waiting for Whitney to cark it. The amount of re-releases in time for Christmas will be totally sickening. Then, when that's all died down, someone will have been searching in the vaults and will have found something that's never been heard by anyone. Something that was lost in 1987 and has honestly not been kept in the warehouse in the future obituary section, alongside Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Barbara Streisand and Justin Bieber.

Dealers in dreams and death.

I'd say good riddance, but there's always another one around the corner.

Review: Ren Harvieu - "Through the Night"

There's a heron in the music video and her online biography is funny: Ren Harvieu

Ren Harvieu has a single out - Through the Night. It has singing and drums and a promotional video shot using the instagram app for iPhone. I think it is the sort of thing the cast of (new) Dr Who would listen to in-between takes. Here is Matt Smith sitting on a hollow plastic gravestone listening to Ren Harvieu on the radio; once again he is trying to find the courage to be eccentric in a way the Americans will enjoy, in a way they will think of as quintessentially British. The red-haired sidekick woman creeps up behind him wearing a cyberman mask. She grabs his shoulder. Matt jumps. In a robot voice she says: 'straighten that bow-tie you cunt, we've got a scene in five minutes.' She drops the mask and falls about laughing. Matt Smith watches her with a set expression. There was a time when he found her attractive...

One remarkable thing about 'Through the Night' is, there's a heron in the music video.

If you want to see the heron, but don't want watch Ren having a sexual epiphany in the shadows, the only apparent stimulus being the sound of her own singing voice, skip to 53 seconds, then press stop at 55 seconds. Remember to press stop at 55 seconds.

I give the song 5 herons out of 10 (herons), and at least two of those herons are down to heron in the music video. To put that score in context, I only gave Florence and the Machine's last single 2 herons. Some people said 2 herons was harsh, but what those people didn't realise is, that review was only out of 3 herons.

I used to know someone whose surname was Heron.

 

This is the end of my music review.

This is the beginning of my review of Ren Harvieu's biography - her snivelling, portentous biography - which you can read here.

It is very funny.

At the top of the page, there are two quotes from selected press reviews:

“A voice to die for“ Grazia

“She reveals her remarkable voice, a tender and muscular organ, that evokes some of the great divas of bygone years.” The Observer

Whoever wrote '...tender and muscular organ...' had porn open in another window.

The biography is too long to go over line by line (which is funny  in itself), so, for ease of slyness, I have identified four broad categories of things to pick fun at. The categories are as follows:

1. Assertions that Ren is down-to-earth.
2. Lines so hokey, it's hard to believe they weren't intended to be funny. 
3. Cynical and repeated evocation of back injury. 
4. Claims on the supernatural/that Ren is exceptional/that the hand of god is at work.

There is also an informal fifth category: things that can only have been written by Alan Partridge. I will highlight these as they arise by underlining them.

Here are five examples from each category (my comments are in [] brackets):

1. Assertions that Ren is down-to-earth

1. ...her manner as down-to-earth as the streets of Broughton in Salford, which is where she was born [what a stroke of luck to be born in the exact place you just happen to be as down to earth as. I'm as down to earth as Donetsk in the Ukraine, but I was born in Bristol]...
2. ...schooled in dusty youth club contests rather than star-spangled pop schools...
3. Although Ren loved music, she wasn’t a diva in the slightest. She just wasn’t arsed, she laughs [it's a strange thing, not being arsed to be a diva].
4. She was happier in lock-ins with friends than out in the spotlight.
5. She’ll remember her Dad’s stories, his old lessons in stagecraft: ‘back against the wall, chest out, hit ‘em’. She’ll remember the teachers who told her she couldn’t sing, who have recently tried to befriend her on Facebook – she clicks ignore when she sees them, and beams broadly as she does so [needless to say, Ren had the last laugh].

2. Lines so hokey, it's hard to believe they weren't intended to be funny.

1. So here she still is – and how she sings.
2. her voice transports us to a place where youthfulness becomes yearning, where dreams become dramas, and music aches longingly, full of beauty and power.
3. [This whole paragraph] Her first song was Through The Night, and she still hears a shy girl in its old-fashioned swing [what?]. In Twist The Knife, she hears a young soul too, but also a mood starting to reach out to the ears beyond the room [what?]. Once the mood reaches you, you will hear something extraordinary [what?]. In Tonight, a new soundtrack queen finds her feet [w...]. In Do Right By Me, a country soul is set free [no]. In Forever In Blue, we return to a time of Autumn Leaves, sentimental journeys, flying to the moon [WHAT!?]. We hear an effortless vocal with no flounces or fuss, stunning us every time it soars [gnuuuuuuffffffgghhh].
4. Protective friends were told she was now like the Bionic Woman, a girl with metal in her spine, even more iron in her will.
5. Then Ren will open her mouth, and start to sing; as she does, a new angel of the North will ascend.

3. Repeated, cynical evocation of back injury.

[Now, it really does sound like a terrible accident, but I think the author has chosen to present it in a cynical manner. Ren is being sold to us as 'the girl who recovered from a back injury' just as much as she is 'the singer with talent'. The story has been drawn out to a morbid extent and it has a kind of sinister, ingratiating tone...which is quite funny. It's basically one of those x-factor back (no pun intended) stories.]

1. ...only four months after she thought she would never walk again, she is walking back to us.
2. How close these came to these being her first and only recordings; how close she came to these being her legacies.
3. She remembers every moment: the voices around her, the lack of feeling in her legs, the sensation that this was it, this is how it ends.
4. In this specialist unit, she had the worst injury on the ward, and many of her fellow patients had been told they would never walk again. 
5. Ren’s brush with death has given her life so much more depth, she says. She was determined before; just imagine how much she is now [when I try to imagine, I just see  herons].

4. Claims on the supernatural/that Ren is exceptional/that the hand of god is at work. 

1. She had no idea why she kept performing; something kept her going [this 'she did not know why' stuff crops up several times throughout the biography, and, interestingly, as a lyric in Through the Night – which makes me think Ren herself is the author].
2. She was shy as a child, observing everyone while the world whirled around her [I hear it was the same with Leonardo Da Vinci], soaking up the music she loved like a sponge [sponges soak up water, not music].
3. By a miracle, she calls it – her first one, before the huge one [meaning her recovery] – manager Paul Harrison chanced upon her page, falling in love with her lovely young blues [' lovely young...soft, yielding, boob-– BLUES'].
4. She was a strange one, she knew that [Ren uploads bathroom mirror shot to facebook. The caption: I'm a strange one].
5. [The night the accident happened] It felt strange from the start, she says; as if something was going to happen.
6. But somehow, Ren could feel things. Doctors kept asking if she had any sensations; one day she was able to move her legs like she was cycling. After six weeks, she wheelchaired [WHEELCHAIRED] herself into the kitchen to make a cup of tea; her doctors shaking their heads, not knowing how this was happening [the kettle wasn't even plugged in]. The day she washed her hair by herself, she knew she would be alright. She left the hospital in August, walking with a cane; she is now getting better, slowly but surely, every day.

There needed to be six in that last one.

The biography puts me in mind of Darth Vader's hypothetical bum flap. On the one hand, it has been designed to look all sleek and stern, painted a particularly evil shade of black by a team of grim-faced Imperial engineers with British accents, but on the other hand it's a bum flap. And bum flaps are funny.

Imagine Darth Vader's changeless facial expression, that sick, raspy breathing. At last he is alone. His gloved hand creeps toward his chest plate. He fingers the glowing red button, the one that nobody is allowed to ask about – it's the bum flap release. He presses it. The bum flap falls open behind him. More laboured, mechanical breathing. A bloodless Sith bottom marked by strange scars and dead veins protrudes through the newly opened orifice. It seems tentatively to sniff the air: an uncertain badger on the cusp of twilight. He's been needing this dump for ages.

Rockport : Faith, Shoes and Charity

Rockport have given you a brief to design 8 pieces for their new range. Yes, Rockport - the shoe people.
It's not so much knitwear at this point, but casual menswear, predominantly shirts and t-shirts.

Clothes must designed with the following "target market" in mind:

• 18-32 years old
• Reads "Lads' Mags" such as "Nuts", "Zoo and "FHM"
• Works for the weekend
• Trend Driven
• Is a follower, rather than a leader
• Likes girls, sports and beer

God, that marketing is scary, it's like describing the 6 pillars of Scallydom, maybe it's a religion and Rockport is it's God...

Possibly...

But maybe they are trying to get me, and convert me. Maybe they know I'm between 18 and 32, and that I'm partial to girls, sports and beer, and that I have glanced at a lads' mag, (even though I thought it was too big for it's ideal purpose).
Maybe I'll get people coming 'round the door knocking on quoting their misprinted version of Corinthians "Faith, Shoes and Charity; and the greatest of these is Shoes".
Giving me little booklets about how I should place my Rockports higher than any other shoe in the house, and always treat them with respect, polishing every bit I can three times a day and making sure to kiss the shoe before I kick some poor child's head in with it.
About how Rockports can solve all my life's problems, they can help me to lose weight by making me run, they can help me to attract a mate (to make little Rockport babies, dressed head to toe in Rockport, and baptised in the traditional mix of blood, petrol, rubber, vodka, Stella and melted down bling).

By making me irresistible to anyone who follows the age old trend of walking around with their head pointed at the floor, they can solve confidence problems by having you wear your shoes on your head.

Then they start encouraging me to come to church where we all stand united under 2 flags, 1 of England and 1 of Rockport. Singing such classics as "These Boots were Made for Walking, and Kicking People to Death", and "The Ballad of the Rockport Strangler", whilst we all worship the Pope Shoe; the most expensive and beautiful rockport ever made. Its jewel-encrusted sides glistening with Littlewoods cygnet rings, Argos gold chains - more than 2 inches in thickness, and oversized hoop earrings bought from a market in Whitechapel.
Its soles made of glow-sticks and Marlboro packets, stuck together with a mix of Stella and 3rd time home abortion debris. Its laces made of the hair you have to shave off to be ordained in the first place, and it's leather, fashioned from the corpses of all those who have gone before it, their "soles" departed to heaven - which looks unnervingly like Salford... where people run around stealing each others property, setting fire to cars and attacking defencless old women for a few pence...

or maybe not, maybe I'm just a bit bored today.

Impressions of Manchester: A Transcendental Perspective

I have never physically been to Manchester, but one evening, meditating on the reflection of a candle flame in a bowl of Sasquatch milk, I believe my consciousness went there.

[You can replicate the experience by following this procedure:

• Prepare strong black coffee
• Spread poo over signed photograph of Jack Duckworth
• Get into lotus position
• Place dirty photograph on knee
• Hold breath for three minutes
• Exhale like affected spiritualist
• Quickly drink coffee
• Look up at light bulb (>80w)
• Sneeze
• Do candle/sasquatch milk meditation (see Fig. 1) 
• Make up lies about consciousness going to Manchester]

Fig. 1

 At first there was a kind of infinite nothing, only not a perfect nothing because it smelt like a catered holiday to Majorca – a mix of super-sweet orange  juice, sun tan lotion spread over fat backs, and pale slabs of veal bleeding under heat lamps – then I was in Manchester. It was pretty weird.

There were lots of red brick houses all squashed up into long rows, and each house had a look of defilement on its face, as though it didn't like being touched by the other houses. The roofs of the houses were hippopotamus-grey and seemed to sweat...like hippopotamuses. In the distance, there were tall blocks of flats that looked like strips of yellowing graph paper, complete with rubbed-out pencil marks where someone had messed up the scale for the y-axis more than once.

I floated in for a closer look.

Every flat had a balcony for drying wet Manchester United towels and storing deflated footballs, and people came out and stood on them to shout WANKER at me, even though all I was doing was astral projection and a bit of shimmering. There was a scary pugnacity about the balcony people (see fig. 2), like cheekiness turned sour by repetition. I thought I could identify myself as a friend by shouting out that my favourite player was Dave Beckman, but this only seemed to anger them further.

Fig. 2

The air was a bit like church air after a long sermon on Satan's minions, and it smelt faintly of burning coal dust. The birds didn't want to fly in it, so they lined up on walls and telephone wires looking slightly irradiated but quite well fed. There was a young boy just staring up at the birds, and that young boy was Bez – a bit of time travel must have happened because Bez isn't a young boy (physiologically) at the time of writing this.

Milkmen were delivering milk, and along with the milkmen there were men delivering bread. Such a thing as a 'bread round' existed, and it was existing right in front of my disembodied eyeballs. Other men delivered pieces of scrap metal for uncles to tinker with. There were a lot of uncles in Manchester, and they all used cologne-scented talcum powder instead of lynx - despite having tried lynx last Christmas when their daughter-in-laws gave them some as part of a festive gift pack that also included shower gel and shampoo. Most of the uncles preferred lynx to talcum powder, but simply had no idea about where one might go to buy it.

Then I possessed a woodlouse and did some spying. What were ostensibly conversations between husband and wife over breakfast were, in fact, two parallel monologues on unrelated matters. The men talked about how much they hated flamboyancy, whilst the women dissected the merits of cheese and onion crisps, why the snack is good, but also bad, but also good, etc. The expressions and phrases used were creative and funny: precise, frank language is reserved only for combat.

Bez's mother comes outside. She's holding a rolling pin with bits of yellow dough stuck to it. 'You have to choose between being introspective or being a brute,' she says. Bez laughs and starts doing the Bez dance. She lets him off, again.

The Smiths are being chased by Oasis down an alleyway. Andy Rourke clatters into some bins, falls. Noel leaps on top of him, straddling Rourke in a way that looks something like the cowgirl sex position. Noel has never actually punched a man before, and he's feeling uneasy about the proximity of the craven bassist's willy to his bum hole.
''it 'im our Kid,' demands Liam in a Mancunian accent because he's from Manchester.
Noel can't do it. Instead he screams like a snapped nerd and rains down a thousand indecisive pats to Rourke's head. It looks like he's playing the fucking bongos, thinks Liam. Rourke thinks it's worse thing that's ever happened.
Morrissey escapes, though, and writes 'This Night Has Opened My Eyes'.
Then I went back to the infinite nothing. It still smelt of a catered holiday to Majorca, but now there was music – Manchester-type music. The musicians had character and humanity and the male ones made it seem okay to be male. They seemed authentic, like blues players who'd decided pop was the real thing, or punk, or post punk, or whatever. Oasis were also playing.

I came back into my body and noticed that the Sasquatch milk had turned into Sasquatch cheese. I had an erection. My mother came in – she sort of knocked and turned the handle at the same time, which was annoying.
'What's all that over your face?' She asked.
I felt my face. It was Sasquatch cheese.
'It's Sasquatch cheese,' I said.
Nothing happened; then something made me look down at my erection. She followed my eyes down and flinched when she saw it.
'Mum, I...'
'Get a job.'

But I didn't get a job: I waited until she'd left the room, then put the radio on. The DJ was using the word 'new' too much. He interviewed a band from (and by 'from' I mean 'living in') Manchester that sounded full of cheery earnestness; they were happy to be alive in a world that was treating them well. They did a song: the singer's voice was all squelchy with sham emotion and the band had used four tonnes of flashing electronic equipment to produce something that sounded like a muzak take on a bad Paul McCartney song. The DJ said 'new' a few more times, then did another little bit of interviewing. The band talked about their new music video, how it was filmed on a beach and had some CGI in it. The drummer seemed to have less soul power than the average deal or no deal audience member. My erection disappeared. It all felt bit like a New Labour party conference, somehow; the psychic landscape was the same.

Then I ate an apple and thought about the backlash.

This is Sir Ian Morgan's inaugural post for The Mancunia - he's positively our favourite non-Mancunian music writer.

"A Scally-Glastonbury" : The Manchester 'Riots'

TUESDAY               AUGUST                 9th                   2011                      15:38

There's an ominous* hum emanating from the imperceptible vibration of the nervous girls that last night piped-up thinking they could see smoke plumes erupting in Gorton from their City Centre flats as London burned, when cockeyed racist potato Nick Griffin aped mate Jeremy Clarkson by Twitter-predicting Salford was scheduling a descent into Hell. The famously endearing, absurd-sounding Manchester Evening News sandwich board posters are bizarrely generic this afternoon.

Where ordinarily they would read something like:

TRAFFORD MAN'S

BANANA PLANS

HIT SKIDS

Or

LEVENSHULME

PENSIONER'S

HEDGEHOG

ADVENTURES

They today matter-of-factly say:

2 FOR 1

AT

CHILL FACTOR-E

and

FANTASTIC

10 PAGE

SPORTS

PULL-OUT

Like some sort of offering to the looming Manchester Scally-Kraken.

Mancunian Twitter users are rocking in the corner, chanting the mantra that 'it won't happen here', or quoting Tony Wilson’s edict that ‘we do things differently’.

Mark Duggan did NOT fire at police. "If he did have a gun – which I don't know – Mark would run. Mark is a runner. He would run rather than firing and that's coming from the bottom of my heart" say his family who are understandably really upset and maybe a bit biased. Bringing to mind the kind of time a gyppo-kid drives his hotwired joyride into a motorway tunnel wall because he can't see over the steering wheel, and his family say he was 'no Angel' but had a heart of gold (cue slow-zoom into image of kid frowning over his shoulder in some rain slicked November Car Park with flames behind him and a tyre-smoke Halo crowning his slowly grinning face.)

But none of this matters. None among the bikeriding Nike Ninjas swarming on the City Centre know who the fuck Mark Duggan was - or his best friend, 23-year-old rapper Kelvin Easton, known as 'Smegz', for that matter, who died a similarly ignominious death being stabbed by a Champagne bottle in a Club earlier this year - they've just been bombarded with images of their scum-buzzard southern brothers helping themselves to their blackened-heart's desire and have decided they fancy a bit of that.

When I was in my first year of High School, I remember pathetically attempting to remove the swoosh from some expired Nike's in order to lash them onto the pair of unbranded 'market-movers' my Mum had procured me for PE, so I could survive High School.

On a Market Street corner, sovereign-ringed fingers cradle a virulent knacker-sack in tracky pants, while the other hand's thumb flicks the mounting ash off the end of a B&H.

It's always been hard explaining irony to a scally. Even when they're calling YOU a tramp while trying to take your money or stuff.

"Drop us a dollar, Yo?".

Grafts

They aspire to that skewed view of the American dream, leap-frogging work in pursuance of the wealth society denies. Stood on a train platform after the riots, a friend of mine said he overheard some scallies discussing the ‘riots’ and referred to the various acts of scavengery as ‘graft’.

The night of my 18th Birthday, we're sitting in the corner of the football field of my old High School smoking weed at 11pm when three figures gradually materialise through the blackness. Two years earlier in the alley that ran behind us, a couple of my school friends had been pummeled onto crutches passing a gang of scallies (then ‘Townies’), the hereditary enemy of us ‘Moshers’. After an animosity stand-off, we all relax and begin "chatting bare maca" apparently. Their leader reveals an admiration for Pink Floyd, and espouses a belief that we cultural sub-divisions are basically all the same - just going about it in different ways. After about an hour’s good natured maca-chatting, one of his companions slips into an unguarded-account of how his cousin suffered the fairly unprecedented misfortune of an inguinal hernia at just 8 years old. In his limited physiological knowledge, he misinterpreted the ruptured stomach-muscle’s protrudence as an ascended testicle, and when talk turned to how he’d given it a curious squeeze - all hell broke loose.

Leader leaps to his feet and punches testicle-toucher, sat cross-legged, backwards into grass. Testicle-toucher does all he can to stand before getting kicked, trainer full in his face, a dew-soaked rubber sole squeaking off his teeth sending the amateur abdominal examiner backwards into black, while his leader anticipates and follows his trajectory, landing a few more merciless kicks thudding a hollow ‘THWOMP’ into his ribcage and a final sole-imprinting stomp onto his once-capped head.

Leader turns around and sits back down with us, seeming slightly embarrassed, and holds up his hands while looking down in his lap. Leader apologises, saying:

“I’m sorry about that…

I’m not a violent man.”

–      causing uproarious laughter: half of us genuinely driven into fits, the other sickened beyond THC appeasing.

He was the nicest scally I ever met.

Words come through all fluhmplubbled 100 yards away as a defiant whimper limps through profusely bleeding teeth…or at least the spaces where they used to be. Leader immediately drops his skins and legs it after defiant punch-bag, sending him fleeing completely.

The demographic of Negative Alchemists: those who manage to maketh Gold the most scrubberish-looking substance on earth. They’re the ground-up chum of the upperclass. They’re Jonesing for your sports goods, athletically debasing their incongruously resilient, fertile bodies, and breaking all the rules no one bothered to set out for them. They're your bedrock, and you need them to stand upon to keep your head above the crud.

Look at the stores that were looted (NOT the stores that were damaged - in most cases they just saw glass and smashed it) no one was looting Grant Morrison's 'The Invisibles' from ‘Travelling Man’.

What happens in X Factor’s absence

And fuck Liam Gallagher's ‘Pretty Green’ - that sort of pandering to white trash aspiration is only slightly evolved from what motivated the looters.

It's undeniable there was a valid flashpoint, and an equal and opposite reaction, but everything that rippled northward was opportunistic Commercial rape.

Millionaire ex-pat Hollywood-ponce Russell Brand looked-on from Beverley Hills, then wrote a stirring account of a time he used to exorcise his Middle Class guilt by getting involved in protests, squaring up to his Riot-Geared peers.

Their power was illusory. They convened on Cities just as they knew everyone else was leaving, knowing there was zero chance of succeeding with the general populace around lest they found themselves on the receiving end of a bloody good ear-clipping. They would have been totally outnumbered. A clusterfuck for the Police, and a social and moral hierarchical bukkake for the average man, who would no doubt have fought back. It comes down to freewill. There's no Devil to punish you at the end of it. If you so desire you can take the bag off a bleeding geek’s back, but heaven or not we all intrinsically know it isn’t necessarily fucking ‘soul’ to do so. It's up to us whether we adhere to what we have universally decided to be right and best for everyone, meaning 'fuck-with not, lest ye be fucked-with'.

Clearly these kids have been brought up with the greedy creed: 'Do unto others, before they do unto you'.

While hand-wringing social commentators seek a measured explanation, the Ghosts of the Peterloo dead watch these gluttonous opportunists run amok.

Its important we apportion our disdain some free-reign, otherwise how else are we going to be motivated to change the cause of it?

*= Point at which I lost my target audience.