For want of a Yorkshireman

I'll pay homage today to the great writer that gave me the title of this blog.

I think, as humans, we are not creatures of the glorious summer but denizens of the winter of discontent; yearning, restless, impatient and easily bored.

We rarely live in the now but rather in the then, in the there and with someone else; a better someone else, a more interesting someone else, a someone else altogether more suited to me in every way. This is the drive that took the species on the great voyages of discovery, my toddler on the great climb up the pantry cupboard to see if the there are better lollies on the top shelf, people to the highest mountains and into the almost endless reaches of space.

But it is also the instinct that drives the capitalist to build an ever larger and more destructive empire, earning ever greater profits at whatever expense to the world around them. It drives the emporers and kings to declare war to expand the territory under their control - just the Sudatenland and I'll be satisfied. It drives the obese, the alcoholic, the philanderer and the suicidally recklessly youthful as much as it drives the marathon runner, the evangelist and the scholar.

What makes us such denizens of discontent?

In a fit indulgence in preachy pop-psychology, I'll propose some possibilities.

We fear the passing of youth. The young person is forever growing, learning and becoming - constantly striving to be whatever they told people they were going to be when they grow up (I'll be sure to let you know when that happens). When we have grown up, do we fear the passing of this? Do we fear the sedation of middle age when our curiosity sags along with our waistlines and we start the slow, inevitable descent into dentures, arthritis and complaints about how unemployed minority groups have ruined the Utopia we've been striving for all these years? If we stay curious and restless, we will never senesce or sag.

Are we stupid enough to believe our own advertising? No one ever sold anything by allowing us to remain comfortable and satisfied. Your current state of dissatisfaction is a necessary pre-requisite to consumption; the replete don't eat. You have to be made to believe that someone with an otherwise perfectly clean home let their toilet get to a stage where even the bacteria were complaining to the Tenancy Board and that this is what your home looks like to strangers, right this minute. Then they can sell you contentment in the form of bleach in a bendy bottle. Of course, if this were true, we would only ever have bought one product in our lifetimes because that one thing would have made us socially admired and personally fulfilled. Advertising would no longer be necessary. Are we truly stupid enough to believe that fulfillment is just another dollar away?

Perhaps we fear irrelevance. That our lives will be nothing more than yet another hour, strutted and fretted upon the stage and heard of no more. We dread that we will be but a photo on Ancestry.com and a stone with two dates - the top end of a line that leads to our progeny. All that anyone will remember about us is that we managed to reproduce. Do we need to be more? To have a page in a book somewhere, a bridge named after us or our names in a hall of fame? If this is our measure of worth then the sad truth is that we will all fail. Relevance is subjective - subject to mattering to someone else. Once we are gone and those we affected are gone, most of us will not be of relevance to anyone. Of course, it's just possible that we will have our lives misrepresented in a gospel or our sayings quoted out of context in endless social media posts in the future. But probably not.

Or just maybe, I am too cynical. Maybe, for most of us, we need to be more so that we can give more. Becoming a parent, for example, forces you to become a bigger person; one whose boundary of protection and vision of the future must grow to encompass these wonderful little people. We must always grow and learn and develop to keep up with their needs and make sure they're set up to make their world a bigger and better place.

I hope I'm just too cynical.

In the meanwhile, does anyone have a spare Yorkshireman?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsGGjXZw1eQ


Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

Richard III

The war in the Middle East re-erupts

Concerns remain high tonight for the fate of non-combatants as the war in the Middle East of Australia (somewhere around Coffs Harbour) has re-erupted.

Our correspondents from the front report that hostilities, which had been simmering throughout the school holiday period, with mutually unfriendly tribes forced into close cohabitation for more than two days at a time, have exploded following some ill-advised intervention from the United Parents.

A peacekeeping mission was mounted after a resolution from the Security Council that the combatants be taken outside to get it out of their systems. The father in charge of the mission chose a large beach with ample space for all parties to run around and felt that, beyond a certain amount of rinsing afterwards, that the mission was as good as accomplished and that he could get on with a little light reading courtesy of the wonders of the modern smartphone.

However, the warring tribes did not disperse as expected but remained encamped near the Green Zone surrounding the peacekeepers, presumably because proximity provided a certain degree of protection and further the ability to have one's voice heard first with any allegations involving insertion of stones into ears, using of the s-h word or making mean faces at me.

Proximity being the mother of trouble, fighting soon erupted about priority rights to draw words in the sand and not have those same words defaced by the opposition who can't even spell because he's an idiot. It was at this point that the peacekeeping force made it's mistake: the officer in charge drew a line in the sand.

Now, any student of history will know that there is nothing more certain to start a protracted, pointless and trans-generational war than an imperial power drawing an arbitrary line to delineate two otherwise indistinguishable expanses of featureless sand.

And this was true in the case in question. No sooner had the line been drawn than heated negotiations - some at stick point - began about exactly where the line was, where it was meant to be, how far down the beach it extended and whether he had been rubbing it out and moving it more over to my side. Literally square inches of territory changed allegiances in a minute-by-minute tussle as lines were drawn and rubbed out, umbrage taken, sticks waved, sand thrown and lessons learned about the effect of a headwind on hurled handfulls of the landscape. The Red Cross was called at this point to remove the grit from the eye of wounded combatants.

Further tensions ensued as both parties realised that a nearby creek and bushland contained valuable cubby-house building resources and expeditions were mounted to retrieve them all because they're on my side of the line, you can see if you stand here.

While the armies were away,  a smaller, more mobile terrorist force moved in and started to sieze strategic military assets and territory from both sides indiscriminately; driven, apparently, by no greater desire than to create havoc and fill his underpants with sand.

A ceasefire was achieved by the United Parents' representative by the simple process of re-annexing the entire territory for the empire and declaring that no-one would be allowed to build any bloody cubbies and, indeed, could go home to bed unless the fighting stopped immediately.

So far the fragile peace is holding and the Security Council is fervent in their hope that the imminent return of school will put matters into abeyance for another few months

Working from home - an urgent report from the Productivity Commission

Dear Minister

As the chair of the Productivity Commission, I feel it is my duty to write to you urgently to ask you to immediately enact legislation to ban the process of working from home.

The Commission has been investigating working from home for the last six months and the findings are highly disturbing.

The levels of productivity in the Work from Homers (Homers) is alarmingly high. We had two of our staff work from home as part of our studies and most of them had done their actual work before 10.30 in the morning. One of them has just won a major prize for literature, having written a novel in the time he had left over while the other is now the proud owner of two extra bedrooms and a rumpus room for the kids.

When we investigated how this could be, we uncovered some appalling truths:

1. Up to a third of office time in spent in meetings. Mostly meetings that are of no relevance to the participants, called by people who confuse chairing a meeting with being of importance, and in which some goofball who couldn't otherwise hold someone's attention for more than ninety seconds will hog the floor and drone on about how things in this place aren't being done the way they should be. Homers can just put the mic on mute and get on with it, mocking the speaker with their facial expressions whenever they feel like it. Some of this behaviour has even started to creep into real meetings with laptops popping up all over the place and topless meetings never really catching on because they didn't turn out to be what we thought they'd be at all! For Homers this time is deducted from their day.

2. There is a 20% reduction in efficiency brought about by the office idiot. This person takes up people's time repeatedly asking the same questions, insisting on pedantic clarifications of obscure points in an effort to appear intelligent, and launching themselves at tasks with inspiring energy and tragic incompetence, leaving a "whale fell from the sky" sized debris field that everyone else has to clean up. Homers can dodge the falling cetacean and get on with the job at hand.

3. Bosses are the worst time wasters. Having the social skills of a solitary bull elephant, most bosses blunder through the workplace, dropping "assignments" on people from a great height and wandering off to trample someone's morale without really stopping to get involved.  Then, at some random future time, just as the remaining stench of the last piece of work is being removed, they'll charge across the floor again, intent on the tallest person they can find, ready to surprise them with another dollop of inspiration. Homers tend to get forgotten by the elephants and so avoid some of the more noisome parcels of management inspiration - meaning they don't have to spend large amounts of their day digging themselves out from under a pile of shit.

These are terrifying findings. The Australian economy cannot survive if it becomes widely known that, in spite of spending more hours at the office than a Japanese salaryman with a nagging wife, most people aren't actually doing anything very much. In fact, we could probably do without about half of the people currently consuming exquisitely conditioned air in most of our corporations and government agencies. How would we support this number of unemployed people? Much better that they waste five of their eight hours a day and go home stressed about the amount of work they haven't finished than take the red pill and realise that none of it is necessary.

Then there is the ancillary cost to the economy. Going to work costs money and someone is getting paid because of it.

More than 60% of the Homers surveyed, admitted to working in just their shorts or underwear. No suit. No tie. No snide little remarks from the supervisor about how the iron could have been used a trifle more competently. What of all the people making money designing torturously uncomfortable work-wear? What of all the salespeople, the tailors, the people in sweat-shops in Bangladesh. What would they do for a living?

And if we allow people to only come out of their homes to socialise with people that they actually liked spending time with, what would become of the restaurants and cafes in the city. Stripped of the forced jollity of the team's working lunch and the affected suaveness and cosmopolitanism of the executive coffee, these businesses would go out of business. What would become of the suppliers of those cut out letters that are mysteriously used to take up shelf space?

What of the people selling jam-jars with handles in an attempt to make a Cottees topping chocolate milkshake more chic than it really is?

Minister, we cannot allow Homers to continue. For the sake of the economy and our children's future, I beg you to outlaw the practice.

Yours faithfully

A long sleeved rashie

It's over! I've surrendered the last ditch and it's now all over; I've had to buy a long sleeved rashie.

For those not in Australia, a rashie (short for rash shirt) is a shirt you wear while riding a boogie board so that you don't get board rash in the surf. It's also worn by people swimming but not riding
to protect them from sunburn.

When you're young and well cut - or just well cut and wanting to convince the blithe spirits in bikinis that you are still the other - you wear it short sleeved and skin tight. A bit like a muscle shirt.

Now, even at my best, the only way you could describe me as well cut was to compare me to a well made string of paper dolls - symmetrical and skinny. My muscles were always about a half-tone flat and I didn't so much fill my clothes as provide a set of shoulders from which they could dangle in a respectably ironed way. But I was young and lean and, given that I had girlfriends, presumably attractive to someone.

Much as I hate to admit it, that was 20+ years ago now. These days, I do fill my clothes - very comfortably in fact. I am pleased to report that I am in no danger of my trousers falling down or anyone mistaking my inny belly-button for one of those weird outy ones. This is partly my own fault - I'm one of the Easter Bunny's greatest fans - and partly the gradual progress of the blithe spirit through the wearing of one's trousers rolled to the ultimate dying of the light.

My rashie is grey and very much a loose fit.

But I'm male. What is more important to a gently ageing male than the belief that he is still sexually attractive? We very happily delude ourselves that we've still got whatever it is that is abbreviated to "it", regardless of the migration of our hair from it's previous hilltop mansion to less salubrious neighbourhoods on the back, on the eyebrows, the ears and, ultimately, into the Great Nostril Retirement Home which is its ultimate destiny.

The world, however, is in a fight against us. And, believe me, we are at war.

The first victory is won against us by stealth. We have our first child and we are strapped into one of those Baby Bjorn style baby carriers. We take junior into the pouch and venture forth onto the highways and byways of the world. And we are mobbed by women. They come over and fawn all over us, smiling and simpering in ways we used to have to dream to enjoy. And doesn't it feel good! For about ten minutes. Then we realise that we've become honorary gay guys.

Gay people - don't take offence here. I am not using your sexual orientation in vain. I am just noting that women talk to you because they know that you're a safe bet; you really just want to be friends.

Men with baby carriers are honorary gay guys. Despite all the advances feminism has made over the last century or so, that baby still has to have been inside a woman somewhere and, given the fact that the guy has been entrusted with the offspring in public, it seems a pretty safe bet that not only was said guy responsible for putting junior in there in the first place but that he continues to have a relationship with the lady in question. You're a safe bet - it's like chatting to a gay guy.

One to the world and you didn't even see the assault coming. And down goes the manly index by a few points.

The next one you know is coming and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It's called a baby seat. They creep into the car and no amount of casually thrown clothing will disguise the fact that you're no longer going to be putting up your stall in the mating market on Friday nights.

And the man points go down even further when you have two seats and, even worse, when you have to buy a different car because there are only so many of the damn things that you can fit across the back seat of the sports car.

In my case, I was reduced a couple of years ago to defending the tiny amounts of territory that my manliness had left by the fact that I had to buy a bus. Yep. I drive a minivan.

And that's the end of my female fan base!

So my man points were at bare minimum, I maintained a flag and a parliament but really, I was a puppet king of a puppet state; the homage to my masculinity reduced to but a show. I no longer commanded the respect of princes and the hearts of princesses. I was the ageing ruler of a faded kingdom.

Then the final humiliation. The final dethronement. The final debasement to serfdom. I had to buy a long-sleeved rashy.

No longer are my priorities the tanned skin to set off my fashionable boardies and cutting sunglasses. Now it's responsible protection against skin cancer and setting a good example for the kids. It's long sleeved shirts, broad-brimmed hats and leaping up to be a lifever (that's a lifesaver without the SA) at the first hint that my kids are wandering into water more than ankle deep and frightening my wife.

Then I'll drive them all home in the bus.

What's in a pub?

I went to the pub last week (I think my American readers might call it a bar). For most people, this might not be something worth blogging about but, for me, it's something of an annual event. And I remain bewildered as to what people are getting out of it.

I think pubs are a bit like Christmas. Christmas celebrations are popularly blighted by stress and unwanted but must-invite relatives that you know are going to get drunk and start an argument over who got grandma's good cutlery. But we do them because every modern Christmas celebration evokes racial memories of that perfect gathering of yore in which the children were happy, the meal perfectly cooked, the presents interesting and distinctly lacking in sockishness and the fire delightful. Pubs are like this. We take with us to the pub the dim recollection of the perfect English pub where the company was excellent, the windows were little diamond patterns and the affable barman knew us and our order.

Modern pubs are strange menageries of humanity, each enclosure populated by distinct and incompatible sub-species, each in it's own world.

In one corner we have the Gollums. Denizens of the dark, huddling protectively over their gleaming precious as it teases them with dreams of wealth - if only the five rings of power would all line up and show a row of aces. And like their Tolkien-esqe forebear, they are deeply and unhealthily obsessed with their treasure; devoting their whole health and life to its possession.

Less disturbing but equally solitary are the Pretenders - the men, mostly men, who are sitting with their imaginary friends while they drink beer and watch sport on the television. It would have been a better experience in their lounge room - at least they could have heard the TV and the beer wouldn't have quite so ridiculously priced - but at the pub they can pretend they're not drinking alone.

Even a good percentage of those drinking with real, tangible people are apparently alone. There are always one or two in every group, underwhelmed by the behaviour of their spouse who is ignoring them or unable to hear a damn thing over the industrial levels of noise in the place - and therefore unable to participate in the conversation - who are sitting, sipping a large Designated-Driver-And-Bitters and staring off in to space.

Behind the bar, in the place of a rosy-cheeked man with a towel and a cheery greeting, are the harangued backpackers trying to juggle six glasses, three straws, a packet of chips and a chainsaw all at once and bleep their little wrist ID thing on the checkout at the same time, without spilling any or all of the above on their fellow cagemates. One cannot help but think that the female bar staff are tired of having the attributes for which they were almost certainly employed admired by punters - who have to keep reminding themselves to add "of beer" after their order of "jugs" - and that the male staff would really rather go and lay paving bricks in the rain than stay stuck behind the bar like dead deer up a tree; bait for cougars.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned cougars are stalking, camouflaged in tight jeans with waistbands well beyond their safe load limit, tottering precariously on glitter-clad stilts masquerading as high-heels as they carry ice-buckets containing bottles of the house white back to their little tables. At least if they go home alone again, they'll be drunk enough for it not to matter.

Even outside the misfits - and who less fitting than I, who less suited? - the pub seems to many to be an overpriced sofa from which to watch Race 5 at Randwick or the Melbourne under 15B football grand-final; anything to fill all those TV screens and give us another flickering, gleaming mesmeric that means we don't have to interact with our fellow human beings - even those sitting so close that we could spill the beer they bought us down their shirt sleeve.

But there is little choice. Between the TVs, the band, the juke box, the kids' playground, the poker machines, the kitchen noises, the drunken laughter and the bar staff screaming to be heard over the din you couldn't hold a conversation anyway. You'd be lucky to hear the fire alarm if it went off.

Yes, daddy took us to the zoo but we'll be lucky to stay an hour - let alone all day.

Atheism doesn't stand a chance

In a surprise press release earlier today, the Australian Association of Atheists - an organisation long suspected of just wanting to be the first entry in the Yellow Pages - threw in the towel and announced that they were disbanding.

Ms Rebecca Goodman from the AA of A explained to stunned journalists outside the organisation's headquarters in Melbourne:

"It's no good", she said, "people just want to believe. We've spent years giving them all the facts, doubting every pronouncement made by some bearded loon in a robe, trotting cool scientists like Dr Karl and Brian Cox out to explain things to people and it hasn't made a damn of difference."

"Like the good scientists we are, we have to accept the evidence in front of us; people are addicted to belief. And in the most unlikely things. There's little point in us continuing any more."

There is speculation that the straw that broke the camel's back was the latest opinion polls showing a shift in public sentiment to the opposition. Sources close to the board of the As report conversations between the members along the lines of,

"It's the same shite the politicians offered last year, and three years ago and before that. And for every election since the dawn of democracy. Lower taxes, more services (do the maths), a hard line on crime and a guarantee that the country will be full of people 'just like you'". Local members who pretend that they'll have the ability to do something about the state of the roads when they don't even know how to hold a shovel the right way round. It's unbelievable that it's believable to even the meanest intelligence."

And it would seem that the board's despair is well grounded in fact. Opinion polls do indeed strongly suggest that the public think that the opposition leader - despite having no power, no experience in government and a front bench made up of people whose collective thinking power couldn't come up with a better slogan than "Let's turn this country around" - is better placed than the Prime Minister to deliver lower taxes, more services and all the rest of the Santa Claus wish-list the board was heard going on about.

Mr Thomas Harrison, a former member of AAofA spoke to journalists from his home in some hippy commune up in the hills this morning:

"I gave up at suicide-bombing jihadists. At the point where you could get people to accept, based on nothing more than your say so and a few dodgy quotes from an ancient book, that if they blew themselves up then they would get eternal paradise and, for some strange reason, a whole lot of women who know nothing about sex, I realised that we weren't going to win. What's the return on that investment? Gamble everything, literally everything, in the faint hope of an extremely unlikely but sensational pay off - always assuming that eternity with a whole bunch of giggling young women is your idea of a sensation. The lotto's got nothing on these guys. I even despair at the notion of what paradise would be like for people who think like that."

And it seems that it's not even the more extreme forms of belief that have driven previously committed atheists to apostasy. Ms Bianca Dyce, a gold member of AAofA and three time winner of Sceptic of the Year, explains:

"It was kids that did it for me. I was in journalism and PR, trying to make a living writing blogs and articles and anything really for the cause. And it was increasingly desperate. You could have the best facts, the most recent research, the most sensational nature photos and David Attenborough to explain it all and people just didn't care. We were barely scraping by in the office; we'd sometimes go weeks without a salary. Then I had kids and had to find something that paid the bills, so I sold my soul to the credulous. Now I make six figures more or less selling snake-oil."

"Nothing will stop ageing. We will get older, our skin will wrinkle and our hair will grey. But people want to believe that they can stop it if only they spend hard enough. Tell them it's got a miracle ingredient - better yet make it sound pseudo-scientific and call it a pro-vitamin - and you'll sell it by the barrel. None of it works. It never has. There are thousands of acres of cemeteries out there as evidence, but it doesn't stop people smearing their face with slightly tinted Sorbolene at $250 a litre every morning. How can you remain Atheist in the face of that kind of evidence?"

The demise of the Association is the latest in what seems to be becoming a series of collapses of organisations devoted to facts, reason, thought and honesty. It is even said that the Australian Academy of Sciences has had to get in a new PR company to address this challenge; and to get over the disaster of the nude Professors of Science calendar from a couple of years ago.

We wish them all the best.