Revolutionary Rants

New Labour has been holding its annual conference in Brighton this week, as you could not have failed to notice if you’ve had the telly on for even a few minutes!

It is a strange irony that Bush cannot save Americans from the horrors that followed hurricane Katrina; and perhaps an even greater irony that Britain can go to war to give freedom and democracy to a nation and then manhandle an 82 year old man - who has been a party member for some 50 years - from their conference for heckling Jack Straw with the word ‘nonsense’…

This has started a riot of coverage enquiring if we really do have freedom of speech in Britain.

Besides this, I can’t help but thinking there is another irony in this story: it is a Nixon-esque paranoia in the government that they feel that they need to behave in this bizarre way. In actual fact, just like Tricky Dicky, the main opposition are completely laughable and currently hurtling towards another Iain Duncan-Smith situation, the third party will never be much bigger than they are now because of the British system. Who can touch them? Even after Iraq their are our government so why make themselves look like the totalitarians they supposedly despise by punishing an old man for expressing an opinion?

Get real New Labour.

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Things are quiet up here in Huddersfield. The weather can’t quite decide what it is doing, Chicken is getting back into his university classes and I am doing bits of reading for my course and generally pottling about.

Today I am dividing my time between Marxism, the Hegelian dialectic and Rawl’s ‘Theory of Justice’. Oh, and filling out an application form for working in the council!

Maybe things are busier than I thought.

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Today I was in Huddersfield town centre, looking for small gifts for my niece and nephew, when I overheard to young lads chatting about the Euro.

‘I wish we were in the Euro’ offered one baseball capped youth; ‘why aren’t we?’

To which his friend replied ‘Dunno, it’s gay, innit?’

And to think that debate almost destroyed the Tories…

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I was thinking about this yesterday, that perhaps one reason I found unemployment so hard was that I have always been good at what I do, always been able to float around and feel just that little bit superior.

I suppose I always wanted to be Orson Welles - almost a genius in my field but, oh, just that little bit arrogant. More specifically I wanted to be - a somewhat less evil - Harry Lime. I mean, how can you top

‘Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgia’s they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’

Just imagine it: coming out with those lines, commanding the whole film for a few minutes of screen time, have someone love you so much that they walk past - totally blanking - the good guy.

Sadly, I have the arrogance, but not the genius!

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I went to see the all new film of the classic Jane Austen book last weekend. After - like everyone else in the country - loving the 1995 version (although this had nothing to do with Colin Firth, I preferred Wickham, to be honest!!!) I was quite sceptical.

But, I absolutely loved it! It was even better than the telly version, in my view. It seemed more economic, more real; the Bennets seemed ‘poor’, Darcy seemed filthy rich, there was mud and animals. Most of all, unlike the TV versions Firth and Jennifer Ehle, you could see the love in Darcy and the change in Elizabeth. Keira Knightley was altogether brilliant, a perfect, feisty and somewhat scruffy Lizzie; much more how I had imagined her than the perfect curls, bonnets and bodice of Ehle’s portrayal.
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On Monday we journeyed almost 300 miles from Devon to West Yorkshire. We returned to Huddersfield, Chicken for his final year, and me for my MA.

We are mostly settled in now, with our bedroom now a room rather than a space containing a large number of boxes, bags and general dirt from the previous occupier. The house was rather filthy (although our first arriving housemates had the worst of it) so I had a nasty hour cleaning out the little bathroom, and brought a fancy mop to do the floors.

Needless to say, we both slept as our heads hit the pillows! But we are back, where we started out, in the North.

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We are back in the UK. Took a long time; up at 6:30 French time (5:30 in England…), flight to Standsted, train to Liverpool Street, lunch, tube trip (including 10 minute stoppage), coffee and Paddington to Tiverton Parkway. Then the drive home, arriving back here at about 19:00.

Nice.

So, this weekend is time to relax before another big journey (with my poor Dad driving) back up to Yorkshire.

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Well, the sun has been out for the last few days of our stay here in Tourrette. On Monday afternoon, Chicken and I were given a lift to spend an hour or so in Cannes (the one place, other than Grasse, still on my ‘tourist list’ of places yet to visit). We walked along the promenade to look at the scary brown ladies and posh hotels before going to the Palais des Festivals (home to the film festival annually) and viewing the hand prints of the likes of Gregory Peck and Ken Loach. Like Monaco, Cannes is good to visit but a bit strange, over-tanned and over priced!

Nice is much nicer, and that is where we went yesterday. We caught the bus down, which took an unusually long time (nearly an hour and a half) although the Promenade des Anglais was surprisingly empty!
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A band I am rediscovering at the moment is the Divine Comedy. I say ‘rediscovering’, but truth be told when I first met Chris - when I was undertaking a university ‘work placement’ in near by Wakefield, meaning I had a 30 minute train journey each way morning and evening, plus another half hour of walking to get home (although I was usually met by my Prince charming at the station in the evening) - I had nothing on my little old Walkman but Neil Hannon and Co’s ‘Greatest Hits’.

Their whole repertoire has memories of my bedroom of adolescence - in Ireland - listening to late night 2FM (a hideous Irish national radio station employing many shite old DJs, and one very good one - Uaneen Fitzsimons - who was killed in a car crash). They are about as different from the Manics as you can get, but I love their middle-class musings and orchestra based pomp and splendor all the same!

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Ah, the Tories. What fun they give us these days (almost payment back for the misery of the 1980s, although not quite). Two little tidbits of news were floating around in the Sunday news regarding the old dinosaur party: that Mr Clarke may lead but that will do them no good against Brown and New Labour anyway; and, furthermore, that they need more female MPs.

The latter suggestion was made by Theresa May - herself a possible leadership candidate, according to some sources - who pointed out that only 9% of the CPC is female at present. Lets hope she hasn’t voiced this opinion to her fellow woman Tory Ann Widdecombe, who claimed that female MPs experiences of sexism in Parliament were just them being ‘over sensitive’. Probably not something which Miss Widdecombe could be accused of herself, I am sure. But then, one must wonder whether ‘human’ can be similarly applied to the Widdy one, at times… I mean, just take a look at her site. Nuff said.

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