The northlondonhippy

Archive for January 22nd, 2006

I spent most of Sat­ur­day glued to my television.

I’m nearly always glued to a tv some­where, I was super­glued to one as a child and haven’t been able to become unstuck since. It’s just another of my many addictions.

Silly as this may sound, I was watch­ing the efforts to save that North­ern Bot­tlenosed Whale in the Thames as was appar­ently, most of the world.

Ok, I’m a sucker for sen­ti­men­tal­ity, but in our empty, mean­ing­less lives, aren’t we all? Wasn’t every­one root­ing for the whale?

I spent hours watch­ing the live cov­er­age on SKY NEWS, who seemed to have all angles cov­ered as res­cuers attempted to save the stricken whale.

It popped up in cen­tral Lon­don on Fri­day, swim­ming past many Lon­don land­marks, attract­ing crowds and the media. They hinted that the whale might have been injured or sick, but kept our hopes high for that happy ending.

On Sat­ur­day, they actu­ally tried to do some­thing. They caught it, tested it and tried to trans­port it to the open sea. It died on a ship, on the way, around 7pm.

I had a feel­ing it wasn’t going to be good news from the jour­ney, so I put on movie instead. “Capote”, was the film and it was a dodgy pirate copy given to me by some­one. I don’t think it’s out yet here in the UK.

Good film, excel­lent per­for­mance by Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man in the cen­tral role. He should win some awards. It’s about the late author, Tru­man Capote and his four-years spent writ­ing “In Cold Blood”. “In Cold Blood” tells the story of the mur­ders of four fam­ily mem­bers in the Amer­i­can mid-west, at a time in soci­ety when events like this still held some shock value.

They don’t anymore.

It’s a clas­sic book and is required read­ing for any­one who is inter­ested in the decline of mod­ern soci­ety. Some might argue that Capote high­lighted a point, an event that marked the begin­ning of this down­ward spiral.

When I fin­ished the film and returned to satel­lite tele­vi­sion, the big red ban­ner on SKY NEWS said the whale had died. This upset me far more deeply than it should have.

Why?

Because I’m a hard, heart­less bas­tard most of the time; at least I try to be. Life is too full of pain and hurt and bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment to be any­thing else.

So why did the whale’s sad tale effect me as it did?

It all comes back to our sad and empty lives, which we all strug­gle to fill with mean­ing. Thank­fully mod­ern life throws up all sorts of dis­trac­tions and diver­sions to pre­vent us from dwelling on these facts for too long.

I’ve got my con­sumer elec­tron­ics and tv chan­nels up the wazoo. I’ve got the inter­net, but so do you, or you wouldn’t be wast­ing your valu­able surf­ing time on my blog.

And by waste, of course I mean life-enhancing experience!

And let’s not for­get that dynamic duo of drugs and alco­hol. Actu­ally, it’s not a duo, as alco­hol is a drug too, any fool knows that. And you can trust me, as I’m any fool!

What made the cov­er­age of the whale’s death more bear­able was that another domes­tic story broke just min­utes after the whale’s demise was con­firmed. It was a good, old-fashioned polit­i­cal sex scandal!

And this one had all the ele­ments that make a British polit­i­cal sex scan­dal par­tic­u­larly enter­tain­ing; a high pro­file res­ig­na­tion from senior party post, a with­drawal from a lead­er­ship con­test, a wife, 2 chil­dren and gay sex for money! Who could ask for any­thing more?

Not the News of the World, a Sun­day tabloid news­pa­per, which sniffed out the story. Here, read it for your­selves, it’s a TABLOID CLASSIC!

The one sur­pris­ing thing in this story of the polit­i­cal party involved, nor­mally it’s the Tories, but I guess since David “let’s legalise drugs and be the hippy’s polit­i­cal hero” Cameron took over, all that’s behind them!

No, this time it was the Lib­eral Democ­rats, though I think they are push­ing the lib­eral part just a bit far this time!

Mark Oaten is the MP involved and he was in a senior role in the party, the Home Affairs spokesper­son. Or should I say Home Extra-Marital Affairs spokesman, because Homo Affairs spokesper­son would just be a cheap shot!

And one last obser­va­tion on this whole sor­did affair; isn’t the term “rent boy’ a bit pejorative?

In these wildly PC times we live in, should we really be refer­ring to 23-year old man as a “rent boy”? Isn’t it insulting?

Every news­pa­per and media out­let, tv, radio, you name it, has all called the young man a “rent boy” and that can’t be right?

Cer­tainly in these enlight­ened times, where 65% OF RESPONDENTS IN A RECENT SEX POLL, said that pros­ti­tu­tion should be legal, we should be using more socially accept­able language.

Might I sug­gest in future, we call them “male pros­ti­tutes” or “gay sex indus­try work­ers”. It’s only right.

Hey, you know what, I think my new blog is doing the trick. I’m back to my old self already!

So if you’re a first time vis­i­tor or an old-school hip­py­fan, thanks for stop­ping by! You’ve dis­cov­ered one of the coolest undis­cov­ered web­sites on the inter­net; it’s not that I’m not pop­u­lar, I pre­fer to see it as I’m still under­ground! It won’t be long before the main­stream media is suck­ing my hip­py­cock! They will be beg­ging me to come play in their tra­di­tional media world!

But back to you! Well done for find­ing me and join­ing my exclu­sive club. Book­mark me; or bet­ter yet, grab one of my many syn­di­ca­tion feeds! You know it’s the right thing to do!

Until next time, my beloved hip­py­fans and fuck­ers alike, I’ve got spliffs to smoke and piz­zas to order!