Feeding Fires Elsewhere

Over at The What & The Why, I'm talking about Russia, Syria and the American response and you can still read my piece about American and British satire over at The Spectator. Today, I intend to write about guns, Goldsmith, and/or the Peeple app, two of which I'm not entirely convinced are real. I also have a cartoon to finish, though finite hours in the day might restrict myself to getting only two of these things done.

I also want to write about the plight of Liverpool Football Club but I think it might hurt too much. It would turn into a 2000 word rant about Brendan Rodgers who is slowly destroying the club and also destroying the faith I originally had in John W. Henry and FSG. Thankfully, I've largely stopped watching football to save myself the pain. Last night's match was supposedly terrible to watch and I'm glad I saved myself the trouble by doing something else. I can handle bad results. Losing is as much a part of football life as winning. I just can't handle the stupidity of a manager who repeatedly plays people out of position, then hangs them out to dry when he blames them for a bad result. Not only is it not how you manage a team, it's not how you manage people. Whatever is going wrong at Liverpool feels like it's the manifestation of a very peculiar psychology, the warped ego of a Teflon manager who constantly seems to slip around the blame and watches it stick to others. I'm not even sure about the players they've bought. There doesn't appear to be a coherent structure to the team. Are we looking to play fast football or football involving crosses and a big bugger waiting between the goal posts? All I see is a horrorshow, like the end of Heart of Darkness as Kurtz's madness infects everybody.

I'm unapologetically a fan of Benitez and it's good to see him doing well at Real Madrid. If you haven't got the funds to buy the best players, it's sensible to buy the best brains. Now Madrid have both, they look unstoppable. As Benitez proved at Liverpool, sometimes the best structure can beat the best individuals.  You pretty much knew how his teams would play. Sometimes it was heartlessly rational but it was rational. Liverpool are currently a irrational team but also a team without the heart. I fear for their season.

Hmm... First 200 words of the 2000? I'll stop there. I also need to find a cheap wireless mouse online. I've been bought an Android TV box for my imminent birthday but it has the world's worst remote control. However, with a mouse, it works wonderfully and looks like it might be a adequate replacement from aging WD Live which for some unknown reason stopped working properly last week.

 

Is Liverpool Football Club Dying?

It's a biting cold day here on Merseyside and I'm trying to get the blood flowing in my fingertips by writing a little bit about football. Yet this isn't entirely about football. This is really about how football is reflecting a broader cultural shift.

My argument begins with John W Henry but I don't suppose it's John W Henry's fault. Nor is it the fault of any owner of a football club given the way the world is going. Yet when John W Henry first appeared before the media that evening to confirm that the sale of Liverpool Football Club had gone through, it did feel like a good man had just ridden in to rescue a much loved institution from the hands of corporate mercenaries. I thought football at Anfield would survive and, more importantly, I thought my love of football would survive.

In many respects, Henry has lived up to my expectations. My disillusionment with football has nothing to do with the way he has gone about operating Liverpool as a viable business. My disillusionment is more structural than that. It has to do with the wider world in which Liverpool operates. It has to do with shifts which are destroying sport, literature, culture, and even blogging.

I began to think about the club and its relationship with the fans after I received a thoroughly depressing email yesterday afternoon from the editor of a well known LFC fanzine to which I've occasionally contributed my 'John W Henry' cartoon strips. I haven't contributed a cartoon in a good few months for reasons which weren't entirely unrelated to the contents of the email. The email reminded me of so many blog posts I've written over the years. It was the voice of a helpless man yelling into the void. It was a plea from a man who wanted somebody to say 'carry on' when every instinct in his body is to quit. I've been there. I know the place so well, I even keep my deckchair by the precipice. Every blog post I write I think might be my last because blogs, like fanzines, are dying a slow miserable death.

When I started to blog, nearly ten years ago now, it was a new era of communications. There were some truly great little blogs springing up. Others, however, were just horrible and produced no original content. These blogs would simply surf all the other blogs and recycled material as if it were their own. I was in contact with one eminent blogger at the time who was producing some amazing content and we'd occasionally exchange emails and complain about one particular character who was continually stealing our work. This character had contacted the pair of us separately, asking if he could use some of our material (for no payment). We'd agreed like I guess so many agreed, thinking the publicity was good. Yet as he cherry-picked our content, the readership of our blogs diminished. Meanwhile, his website flourished. It's now one of the internet's larger fish, with a big staff all employed to nick material from other websites and rewrite it as their own. It's a typical content aggregator. Meanwhile most of the little blogs where great content originated have long since died out.

All of this came into focus when the email arrived. It was an odd email for the editor of a Liverpool FC fanzine to send but more poignant because of that. It was to mark the closure of one of the oldest running Manchester United fanzines. 'Red Issue' apparently ran to 295 issues over 26 years. They have apparently called it a day simply because they've become disillusioned with football. “The game we’ve been clinging onto is gone.  Football now is happy-clappy families, half-and-half scarves, tourists and selfie sticks; there’s no point trying to fight that."

Apparently, things are no better in the world of the LFC fanzines. Football is catering to an audience who don't buy independently produced fanzines, which tend to be roughly put together by teams of enthusiasts. If fans want to hear the authentic voice of other football fans, the find it online through forums or blogcasts such as 'The Anfield Wrap'. The written fanzine doesn't appeal. On matchdays, they prefer to buy the glossily packaged pap penned by banal journalists who write in that glib tone that's popular among all magazines these days. It's a voice that's knowingly cheeky, adolescent and lowbrow.  It's a perfect embodiment of style over substance and it usually comes with a glossy pullout wallchart.

That, I suppose, is what the game has become. As I doodled last night's cartoon, I realised that as great as Ronaldo is as a footballer, it is hard to separate his substance from his style. Football is no longer about a solid defence or even a hard working midfield. It's the football Brendan Rodgers insists is the future. It's football packaged for the people who only care about the final third of the pitch. It's football of the spectacular strikes, the genius of one man followed by a densely packed ad break. It is Ronaldo in his Ferrari, by the pool, showing off his muscles. Football is Ronaldo's perfect smile and the dreadful metrosexualism which had infected a generation of schoolboys more interested in their looks than actually playing the game.

Yet the problem with this approach to football is the same problem we had as bloggers. If one or two large sites steal the highlights from what the smaller sites produce, those smaller websites will die out. In football, the tendency is for people to support teams that contain nothing but superstars. It's the dominance of Real Madrid or Barcelona. As Liverpool steal the talent from lower clubs, so too is the talent at Liverpool looking to move to Spain.

That the fans have also moved on is no surprise. Less than half a percent of the match day fans apparently buy a fanzine. Perhaps it's just the passing of an age. The long form of the essay is itself dying out. I'm aware that when people post links to my blog, they'll often append 'long but worth the read'. Yet I don't write long essays. This is only 1400 words long. I merely write longer essays that the 300 word click-bait churned out by media pundits who are instructed to strike quickly, provocatively, and depth be damned.

From the club's point of view, a fanzine is a trivial nothing. They have their media machines to feed the public. However, you have to question your loyalty to a club when, apparently, the club doesn't even answer emails from the editor of one of their oldest fanzines. Yet Liverpool Football Club surely isn't a great institution simply because of the trophies it won. Nor is it an institution because of how well they spin the media. The fans who buy the mechanizing are buying into something they believe is authentic. But that authenticity does not originate in all the other people buying cheap plastic tat. The authenticity came from the extended family of diehard supporters who filled (and, sadly, even died on) the terraces decade upon decade. Men like John W Henry and Tom Werner might look at the balance books. They might look at attendances and keep an eye on the league position. That's what they do and have to do. I look at people I know who have supported Liverpool all their lives and are beginning to question that loyalty. I suspect that something is deeply rotten at the roots of football.

Fanzines are dying. Manchester United have just lost one of their oldest and it sounds like Liverpool might be about to lose one too. Yet the sad irony is that football clubs survive because they are supported by the kind of people who make fanzines. The heartwood of the tree is the most important and once that begins to rot, you worry about the stability of the tree. Fanzines are football's heartwood. A fanzine closing today or tomorrow might not mean much in the world of the billions of pounds floating around modern football. However, it indicates a problem at the base of the business. It is a warning about that point in the future when today's casual fans realise that the great club they support is hollow at the centre. When those fans depart to the next fad in world sport, the loyal supporters won't be around to lend their support during the difficult days.

Fanzines die today but it's the clubs that will surely die tomorrow.

Are You There, John W. Henry?

I wonder if Americans understand football as much as they seem to understand the fine words of a manager who has proved himself one of the slickest prevaricators in the league. Every bad performance is case of 'bad luck' and every crazy managerial decision has a back story to match anything written by another High Princess of Unbelievable Fairytale Bullsoup, Dame Barbara Cartland.

There has to be some reason why Brendan Rodgers is still holding onto his job. Perhaps John W. Henry's attention is elsewhere. Maybe Rodgers has Henry's box set of 'Breaking Bad' and Henry just can't sack him until Rodgers returns it. Up to this year, football usually made sense. Everything about Liverpool at the moment makes absolutely no sense. Won't somebody please educate me and explain the deep underlying structure in this disorganised chaos?

I'm not too sure how much longer this can go on. For Liverpool to lose 3-0 to Manchester United would always be a low point of the season. However, to lose 3-0 to this United team demonstrates the depth of the crisis at Liverpool. I genuinely don't believe it's the players who should take the blame for what's happened. Individually there are some solid players. They work hard but too often seem to lack a system beyond an ineffective tap-it-tap-it-lose-it-to-a-proper-challenge. Even the summer buys don't look as bad as the media portray them, though what Emre Can has to do to get a game must involve dark arts because scoring one goal against Chelsea seemed to mark the end of Brendan's patience with the poor lad. Even the much scorned Mario Balotelli was Liverpool's best player (again) when he came on. He can be petulant, do crazy things and believe in his own hype, but you can also see why managers have persisted with him in the past. He genuinely looks a world class player. If he could just get rid of the petulant little tugs, his game would almost without criticism given he's playing in a system that doesn't suit his game.

What seemed to make a difference were the tactics. One team underplayed but the team selection and tactics made sense. The other team worked hard and made chances but they were continually undermined by odd decisions coming from the sideline. Taking off Moreno, one of Liverpool's best players, to put Lazar Marković in a position where he couldn't attack the back four with the penetration of last week's cameo... Did that seem like a rational thing to do? Perhaps somebody with a better understanding of football can educate me as to why we'd start the game without a proper striker. Why would you refuse to sub Joe Allen whose game is simply not what it was when he looked undroppable for a period a year or so ago? Even more baffling was replacing Adam Lallana, who despite carrying an injury, was head, shoulders and cracked ribs above every other Liverpool player in that first half.

However, Rodgers makes decisions which, even to my limited football knowledge, make about much sense as firing Rafa Benitez during the Hicks / Gillett period, when he was the one man trying to defend the club from those unscrupulous b******s and paid a price for telling the fans too much about what was going on inside the club.

Is this what football has become? A sport where good men are made to suffer for one bad season whilst coping with devious owners yet a preening peacocks with great new teeth can never seem to do wrong? When is somebody finally going to call the Emperor on his new clothes? Please, John W. Henry. Sack Rodgers. If you need a new boxset of 'Breaking Bad', I'll buy one for you myself in the New Year sales.

Brainwashing & Bestiality: The British Shopping Experience

Last night I caught up on the Panorama documentary that exposed the working conditions at an Amazon distribution centre. It made me want to cancel my current Amazon order except, of course, Amazon being Amazon, they’d shipped my order thirty seconds after I’d placed it.

Before the programme, I’d expected to discover that the Amazon operation is dehumanising. Little did I expect it to be ripped from some dystopian novel in which human spirits are crushed with the very worst techniques taught in the gulag. Last year I wrote a book which required me to read up on brainwashing techniques. The Amazon operation reminded me of the techniques the Chinese invented to break a person’s spirit.

I don’t, from memory, recall the characteristic techniques of classic brainwashing but the list is up there on Wikipedia’s entry for Margaret Singer’s ‘Cults in our Midst’:

• "Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how attempts to psychologically condition him or her are directed in a step-by-step manner.


• Control the person's social and/or physical environment; especially control the person's time.


• Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.


• Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person's former social identity.


• The group manipulates a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group's ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors.


• Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order."

I think at least five out of the seven techniques might be recognisable in the Amazon routine: trapping a person in a maze, running them against a clock which is continually counting down and beeping warnings, in a closed warehouse environment where they are given punishments for infractions, imposed by colleagues working for a largely faceless corporate structure beyond the control of governments to control… If the average Amazon shelf picker were a chicken, there would probably be some European rule to cover their welfare or at least prevent them from wearing their beaks down on the bars of their cage.

I’d like to say that this morning I cancelled my Amazon order but I haven’t so I can't. The reality is, of course, that none of us are in a position to do very much about Amazon. I wish I had enough money to donate £10-20 a time to a company simply to encourage them to keep existing, even with their higher prices. We vote for governments to protect us from this kind of thing but, for our sins, we seem to have voted for a government who believe in that kind of thing. Would I have used Amazon yesterday if I’d known any this? To my shame, perhaps I would have. To my credit, I hope that I wouldn’t. I just don’t know.

The problem of Amazon is really a problem with the British high street. I only saw the documentary after a day when I’d travelled to Warrington and then Liverpool hoping to find a new Wacom graphic tablet. Late Tuesday, my Bamboo drew its last cartoon and I’ve had to bite the big bullet and upgrade. Because I foolishly still like to shop rather than use Amazon, I biked the long painfully rough cycle path St Helen’s council provide (loose limestone and mud) until I hit Warrington’s cycle paths (beautiful black tarmac) which led me to the big local PC World. It didn’t sell the Intuos model I wanted but they said they could order one in for me. I declined. Since Warrington no longer has any real technology stores, I spent a fruitless morning there and then took a train straight into Liverpool.

Perhaps I was already feeling particularly remote from the crowds by the time I arrived but I began reflecting on how we individually don’t seem to matter to retailers. Outside Primark, a blind guitarist was playing Shadows hits. A crowd had gathered and was cheering and laughing as I passed. They were cheering an old tramp dancing to the music. I wondered if the guitarist knew what was happening. I wondered about people laughing at a dancing hobo who they’d normally ignore or avoid. Are you mad simply by being different to the crowd, dancing to a different tune? I felt that way after going to one store to the next and being told the same thing: that I was asking for the impossible. Why did I want the professional tablet when I could buy the cheaper model right there?

On Paradise Street, the long new shopping avenue that cuts across Church Street, a huge queue had formed. As I walked its length, heading towards John Lewis, I grew increasingly eager to discover the attraction. It was possibly the longest queue I’ve ever seen. The goal of these people was surely something meaningful. Perhaps a particularly good Santa lay at the end. Perhaps some celebrity. Was I about to see Stephen Gerrard or Ken Dodd?

Sadly not. These hundreds of people weren’t queuing to see a person. They were queuing on a freezing cold November day to have their photographs taken standing next to the Coca Cola truck. I can’t say the truck impressed me that much. It was one of those American juggernauts, decked out in Cola red and satanic chrome, with a morbidly obese Santa painted on the side. People stood up by the cab and smiled so they could say ‘this is me standing next to the Coca Cola truck you see in their Christmas ad.’

Coca Cola’s very good at brainwashing and this, I think, was a show of their strength. This was their Red Square. This their Kim Il-sung Square...

At John Lewis, Wacom’s only local dealer, I was told they only stock the basic model. ‘We can order them in,’ they said with a smile. It had become the refrain of my day and my reply was always the same: ‘What’s the point of that? I can do that myself without leaving the house.’

When I heard the same from the helpful guy in Liverpool’s Apple store, I told him ‘it makes you wonder why you even bother go shopping on the high street.’

He smiled. ‘I know,’ he shrugged. ‘I’m afraid we only stock what sells.’

I felt like pointing out that if they don’t stock something then of course it won’t sell. It means that people like me won’t go and buy other things from them and soon those things will also become things that ‘doesn’t sell’, our choices get more narrow, and their opportunities to sell me things become more infrequent. The things that sell become fewer and fewer.

The high street is dying not just because of Amazon but because of the attitudes of retailers, constantly refining their product ranges to focus on only popular products and the biggest demographic. It means that all shops of the same type have the very same stock. And if every shop stocks the same things, then there really isn’t any need for all these shops.

One final note of optimism.

In Warrington, a new shop has opened, hidden in a side street near the bus station. It doesn’t take credit cards so all transactions are cash only. From the outside it looks like a temporary operation. It sells cases for phones and tablets but they’re products you don’t see in other shops. It’s not as cheap as you might think but sells quality and is a reminder of what shopping used to be like, when you came home with some surprising object you’d discovered in your hunt for bargains. I think these shops are a reminder of what we might find growing in the ashes of the high street. These are the shops ready to open once the big branches have cleared out and rents have come down. Perhaps we need to start again, rid ourselves of the huge national chain stores, with their computerised inventories and corporate look. We need individuality back on the high street, where every town looks different and no two stores are the same.

John W Henry: The Cartoon Strip - Episode 3

I’ve been drawing a cartoon strip for the LFC fanzine, Red All Over The Land and this (below the usual Tuesday ramble) is part 3. I don’t know how many of these I’ll draw. I have another finished bar the lettering and the colouring but I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll make it through the entire season.

I suppose part of my problem is the lack of feedback. I send the strip off and about a week later my complimentary copy arrives. I don’t know if any matchday supporters bother to read it or laugh or simply used it to wipe the mustard off their chin after Suarez’s sublime goal on Saturday. I also suppose it’s a strange thing to draw a comic strip about but John W Henry is a bit of a cult figure in my mind. I like the guy’s humour, his non-corporate way of doing business. I love that he owns Liverpool. My new allegiance to the Boston Red Sox also means that I was up late into the night watching a strange Russian website showing the World Series.

The Red Sox won or I believe they did. The commentary was in Russian but that’s preferable to watching the American feeds. I think I’d go mad if I were American. The breaks for ads are interminable. Russians, on the other hand, don’t seem to have any and they just stayed on the coverage, watching the crowd, players, and management waiting to get the green light once the brash American advertisers have finished shouting in people’s faces.

As I watched the baseball, I was also trying to do a firmware update on my Samsung Note 10.1 which I’m beginning to regret buying. Not that I don’t love it. It’s simply the best tablet I’ve ever bought and my favourite bit of technology. However, for the amount of cartooning I do on it, the screen simply isn’t good enough. I’m pretty sure it’s why my eyes were so bad over the weekend. I compared it with a Retina display on friend’s newish iPad and the two displays are worlds apart. I was dumb. I should have waited but then I couldn’t afford the newer more expensive Samsung Note so I don’t know who I’m kidding. Perhaps I should put a price of £66 an hour on everything I do, as somebody recently suggested in the comments was the least a freelancer should ever ask. But if I did, would anything I do ever get published? I guess I’m one of those amateurs who the great Harlan Ellison says make it tough for the professionals. But the truth is that we make it tough for ourselves too.

Since I’m rambling about vague things that struck me this morning, Neil Gaiman is at it again. I’ve written before about how ubiquitous Neil Gaiman has become. He always seems to go the places I want to go and to do everything bigger and better than I could ever do. It’s like he’s a walking window into a different world where somebody with my exact tastes actually has a following. I wrote yesterday that I was a big Lou Reed fan and naturally, today, Gaiman is writing in The Guardian about how he was a big Lou Reed fan, saw Reed perform live, interviewed Reed, dressed like Reed, even named his child after a character in Walk on the Wild Side. It means, of course, that Gainman has excellent taste but it also means that he’s become even more ubiquitous in my life. He’s beginning to feel like the lodger in the corner of my psyche and what’s worse: he’s not even paying any rent.

The John W. Henry Cartoon

In honour of Liverpool's first win of the season, here's the first of my John W. Henry comic strips I've drawn for the LFC fanzine, Red All Over The Land.

What Reason To Believe The Frackers?

If you travel down the west coast of England, on the rail line running from Manchester to North Wales, you’ll eventually pass through a long tunnel just beyond Runcorn East. I suppose in European and World terms, it’s a very short tunnel. Yet it’s uniquely a long tunnel in an otherwise flat part of the country and has the novelty of making your ears go pop. Travel through the tunnel lasts a minute or so and you emerge just before Frodsham where a view to the Mersey Estuary opens up on the right and stretches for miles across the sand banks that fill the wide mouth of the river to the point where the brown fresh waters meet the grey brine of the Irish Sea.

In the distant past, I worked a year at the cable company, BICC, in Helsby, one stop beyond Frodsham. When I was travelling there each day, Helsby station had just won some national awards for being the best kept station in the country and, to my eyes, it deserved the accolades. It was beautifully maintained with richly coloured abundant flower beds and old style railway buildings that looked like they'd been plucked from some episode of Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. Since then, it’s become unstaffed and much of it is boarded up; no doubt a  little money saved but for an incalculable loss of value…

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="384"] Helsby Hill (Wikipedia)[/caption]

Yet Helsby village itself still sits perched on the side of one of the few proper highpoints in the area, rising 370 feet over the surrounding land. Looking up the sheer rock face is dizzying, especially when it’s being climbed as it often is by people providing points of Lyrcra colour against the reddish grey rock. Walk to the top and the view is magnificent, with the misted mountains of Wales visible through the clouds to the west and Liverpool in the distant northwest where the Liver Building stands distinct and often glitters in the sun against the banks of the brown river. Directly to the north, you look across the runways of John Lennon Airport and the movements of planes make if feel like you’re watching a diorama of a functioning airport, perfect down to the infinitesimal scale. On a clear day, it’s an uplifting view and quite unique in that it gives a view of a huge swathe of the north, filled with remarkable things to see. Yet perhaps the most telling view is to be seen if you turn your eyes to the northeast and look at the eyesore of the petro-chemical industry that’s built up around Runcorn and Widnes.

The scale of the chemical works is something to behold and locals I knew would often talk about the problems they’d experienced living near such concentrated industry. I don’t know how true this is but I was told that one leak (chlorine, I think it was) meant the police ordered the residents to stay indoors. It was wise they did. Apparently, the leak even changed the colour of their windows and walls.

I always found it hard to believe that people could live happily with dangerous chemicals just a few gusts away, but then, closer to home, there was Warrington where climbing off the train at Bank Quay station, you would often be subjected to the smell of the soap works, the taste of washing powder on your tongue, and, at its worst, a mild burning sensation in your eyes and nostrils. I grew up in the shadow of a gasholder, when the full tank would block our TV reception, and I played for hours on the local ‘mountains’ which were actually industrial waste from the local vitriol industry which had dump its spoil there. I’m also far more used to the problems of subsidence, being born, raised, and living in one of the most heavily mined areas of the country. There are old local tales of houses being swallowed up in sink holes and my old school was eventually demolished because of subsidence but I remember its later years when the second floor listed so heavily to one side that it made it difficult to walk down parts of the corridor. Of course, as a child, you find that sort of thing funny, walking on something that resembled the walkway into a funhouse. As an adult you realise that the whole place was literally falling down around our ears.

Although tighter environmental laws mean that things have improved dramatically in recent years, having lived or worked in proximity to the chemical industry and mining subsidence, I’m wary of the promises made by the fracking industry and the assurances they give people about its safety. I worry when I hear another high profile head in the fracking debate suggest that shale fracking should be done in the north to save the industry from the kind of protests they’ve seen in the south. Up here, apparently, things are desolate and there isn’t as much to go wrong should deep fracking cause problems at the surface.

It’s odd that southern politicians and business men should talk like this, almost as though repetition of disputed facts make them more likely to be true. Perhaps they mean that protests will be ignored by the southern based media, which is certainly likely and, indeed, probable. The Times recently sacked their northern correspondent as part of cuts. That is clearly what we mean to those in London.

Perhaps they also mean that influential people won’t stand in their way if drilling is conducted beneath the homes of people with less political sway. That is also true. There aren’t that many rich influential land owners with connections to politicians living in these parts. That’s why the landscape around here is littered with examples of what happens when industry is left to tend to its own affairs.

Yet the perception that the north is desolate is one I don’t recognise at all. My experience of travelling between the north and south is that, except for the densely built area around London, there’s far more empty space in the south than there is anywhere in the North West. High up beyond Blackburn and heading towards the Lake District, things might get more desolate but there are huge swathes of southern England where you can also look from the horizon to horizon without seeing more than a few buildings. In the North West, there aren’t that many times you can look to the horizon and see only green. Industrial estates, new housing developments, towns, and villages seem to spread from Blackpool down to Southport, across to Preston, and down to the densely built belt running across the country from Liverpool in the West, through to Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield.

Energy independence is to be welcomed but while I’m not sure we need yet another dirty form of energy, I am positive that if this industry isn’t suitable for the fields of Sussex and the South Downs, then it shouldn’t be suitable for Merseyside, Cheshire,  Lancashire, and Yorkshire, where more than just a few people happen to live. The only case the government could make is that we really are the second class citizens they seem to believe we are.

Not that I suppose our protests would amount to anything. Not give the kind of casual ignorance demonstrated by those in power. Government thinking is rank with easy stereotypes, from their assumptions about immigration, the poor, the unemployed, all the way to their belief that bankers are victimised and underpaid. Or at least that’s how it appears when Lord Howell, George Osborne’s father in law, explained that he didn’t mean to insult the North East by suggesting it was desolate when, in fact, he actually meant to say the North West.

Given he represents a North West constituency, George Osborne’s recent encouragement to the fracking industry might have been a little surprising had he not already demonstrated a wilful disregard for the north. I just hope his constituents remember this the next time they have chance to stick a cross beside to his name as Member of Parliament for Tatton. Wilmslow, within his constituency, is one of the richer areas of the region, home to Alex Ferguson and many top Premiership footballers from City and United. It's strange how all those golf courses were never thought the obvious place to start the search for shale gas...

 

 

 

John W. Henry Interviews Surprise Candidate For Liverpool Post

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Roman Abramovich Buys The Art World's Most Flawed Masterpiece

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I know... Not come out as well as I'd hoped. Surprisingly difficult to produce a parody of Edvard Munch with your fourth attempt at using watercolours. Bloody stuff gets everywhere. You should see the state of my carpet...

Man With Three Voice Boxes Earns Promotion

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In any normal walk of life, the misfortune of being born with three voice boxes would be considered a disadvantage.

‘You would think that. You might think that. That’s something you might consider,’ says Gary Neville, an unemployed 36-year-old from Manchester, who has bravely overcome his disability to be awarded the lucrative job of Sky Sports' annoying pundit, a position recently vacated by Andy Gray.

After years of therapy, Gary has learned to overcome his problems by training each of his voice boxes to say the same thing but in a slightly different way. He finds it a boon when commentating on matches.

‘Sir Alex always said you had to keep going,’ said Gary as he put pen to paper on the five year deal at twelve o’clock today. ‘Sir Alex never let us give up. Sir Alex said you had to keep playing until you hear the final whistle.’

Yet as disability groups celebrate Gary’s success, there have been some who cast doubt on the appointment.

‘Three voice boxes might be an advantage,’ said an anonymous source inside Sky, ‘but not one of them can say a decent thing about Liverpool.’

When this was put to him, Neville responded with remarkable candour. ‘Sir Alex said that you should always respect the opposition. Respect the opposition, that’s what Sir Alex always used to say. At the end of the day, you have to beat the team on the field especially when they’re a team like Liverpool.’

Sky are delighted in their new acquisition and have dismissed concerns that some viewers might be annoyed by Neville’s habit of rephrasing whatever he’s said another two times.

In unrelated news, Sky have announced that subscribers taking their HD service have dropped significantly over the last two months, with the biggest fall seen around noon today. Sky also admit that viewers using their 3D service might find that they experience more nausea in the coming months. They say this is normal and there is no need to report faulty equipment but paper bags will be going out with this month's Sky viewer's magazine.