The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

The time when it occurred to me to write about The X Factor is now long past - it was in the audition stage, the early weeks of the series. So take that into account when you read the below.

There are people in my house who like to watch The X Factor. While I'm not a fan of talent shows (although once in a while they'll throw up a Will Young, for the most part their insistence on getting them to sing a range of styles means they end up with people who are generically competent without being individual), I have no problem with them per se. But I have a big problem with The X Factor, which goes out of its way to mock and belittle people. Most of the time these people are just sadly deluded about the level of their talent, sometimes you can't help thinking that they actually have learning difficulties (which I believe is the current accepted terminology) and someone should be looking out for them. It is the exact modern equivalent of the freak show. This lambs to the slaughter element was bad enough in previous years, when you'd have these poor saps being cut down to size by Simon Cowell and his stooges in an audition room, but they upped it this year by holding the auditions in front of a live audience. So you have people preparing to perform, thinking they might be about to have their moment, then stepping out in front of thousands of people and getting booed and derided even before Cowell gets his say.

I stay out of the room when it's on, because it makes me angry, but inadvertently caught a couple of minutes a few weeks back. It was a duo of two cousins, he 16, she 17, who had called themselves Casyr, standing for care and support your relatives. There were about 20 members of their family there and you could tell before they started to sing that they would be terrible, which they duly were. I said that this was what I hated about it, that people like them were put through from earlier unseen auditions, had their hopes needlessly raised, specifically in order to humiliate themselves in front of an audience. I was told no, all the auditions were now done in front of an audience and the judges and they just showed the best and worst. In a way it's understandable that people believe that, because that's the way the programme portrays it, even though a fairly cursory bit of maths would make it obvious that there's no way Cowell could sit and see the tens of thousands of people who want to audition. Anyway, in order to prove my point I did a bit of digging and found this. It's not exactly a shocking expose, but it brings home the wretchedness of the whole miserable X Factor culture.

Hot Fuzz then. Sigh. Where to start?

About a month ago someone in my household suggested that I watch the film Hot Fuzz. She'd watched it a couple of weeks previously and said although it wasn't great, it was an enjoyable enough way to spend a couple of hours. I didn't really want to see it, partly because I suspected that the only great joke had been in the adverts on TV (the fence one), and partly because of what I'd read and heard about it. Mark Kermode on Five Live reviewed it when Simon Pegg was in the studio and you could hear him straining to find positive things to say about it. He said it had passed his six laugh rule for what constitutes a decent comedy - six laughs out loud. And I think what put me off was that several correspondents then wrote in and asked how he'd found six. That said - and this is important - I went in with an open mind. And even if I hadn't, I'm convinced it wouldn't have mattered. I've got plenty of examples of going into something expecting, indeed wanting, it to be one thing and finding it to be another. One of each - I wanted The Office to be useless because I so hated Ricky Gervais on The 11 O'Clock Show and his chat show, but it was brilliant and my antipathy counted for nought; and I was drooling when I went to the cinema for The Simpsons Movie, only for it to turn out to be a massive disappointment which made me laugh about three times.

Anyway, Hot Fuzz. I didn't laugh once. It's obvious from the above that I wasn't really expecting to, and maybe if I'd been drunk or just watched something hilarious I might have been predisposed to (actually I'd just watched David Mitchell on good form on Would I Lie To You, so scrub that), but I just didn't find any of it funny - apart from the fence which I'd seen a dozen times before. Even if you put to one side the old hat "country people are all weird inbreds who fear outsiders" element, which has surely been taken as far as it can by The League Of Gentlemen, the jokes just weren't good enough. And as it went on being not funny, I started to get annoyed at it. About 40 minutes in I had a "give me strength" moment at this exchange:

Nick Frost: "What made you want to become a policeman?"

Simon Pegg: "Officer"

Nick Frost: "What made you want to become a policeman officer?"

So at that point I thought OK, it's not going to be funny, I'll just run with the murder mystery side of it. But then that got a ludicrous resolution - which, again, wouldn't matter if it were funny, which I presume it was meant to be - which was itself then jettisoned to make way for the interminable Hollywood shoot out ending. By which point I was so bored I just started to wind through it.

The next day, to reassure myself that it's not just me and that the film has been whipped up by a partisan British press, I went to imdb.com to look at some of the comments. Inexplicably, it's rated 8.0 out of 10. The main featured review says "Hot Fuzz is crammed full of excellent characters, ranging from the eccentric to the diabolical, and every one gets at least one laugh during the course of the movie and most of them get many more. I don't mean to suggest that this film is wall to wall gags; in fact it is far from it, instead it is just very clever and often very subtle humour that runs continuously throughout the film." Very subtle humour? Very subtle humour?! "For me this film was every bit as good as Shaun of the Dead, and it's definitely one of the best comedies ever made." This last sentence may very well be the least accurate statement ever made about cinema.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe people pissing on the floor in pubs is comedy gold. Anyway, enough of this subject - it's getting as boring as the last half hour of Hot Fuzz.

So I dyed my hair.

This may not be an extravagant gesture for most people, but it was decidedly out of character for someone who last gave a damn about how they looked over 25 years ago. I can actually pinpoint the moment at which I decided not to care about my appearance - it was July 1982, when I wore a pair of leather trousers to a Police concert in Aylesbury and was openly mocked for it. If the people of that grim little market town are deriding you, it's time to give it up. So after that I went through an extended phase of anti-fashion Hawaiian shirt wearing and then, when they all went in a car that got stolen, just gave up altogether. I can't be bothered to tie up my shoelaces. I wear slippers in the office. I don't own a suit. You get the general idea.

This apathy extends beyond clothing to personal grooming. I haven't combed or brushed my hair since I was a teenager. I shave a couple of times a week tops. I'm not a handsome man, and I see little point in wasting time and effort trying to make the best of a bad job.

But a couple of months back, I decided to dye my hair. I don't know why. It was easy to attribute it (and many people did) to the cliched midlife crisis, but it didn't feel like that. I've had periods in the last decade when I've felt like time is racing away from me, but this summer hasn't been one of them. I have no great desire to remain youthful. I wasn't especially happy when I was young, so there really isn't much to recapture. My only real achievement of any merit is fathering some children, and that's an ongoing task. So it was difficult to pin down exactly what the rationale behind the decision was. In the end, I put it down mostly to boredom. Every day the same chores, the same job, the same place, the same routine, and no realistic way to change any of it. So if I couldn't alter any of that, I could alter myself.

Here's where it got weird though. For something I did just for the hell of it, just for something to do, it made me feel good. I don't imagine I look any better, but I look different, and that's been oddly positive. There was a fair bit of mockery, which was to be anticipated, but some highly unexpected positive feedback as well. Amongst other comments, a woman at work told me it was sexy (she's heavily pregnant, it wasn't a come on, calm down). Sexy is not an adjective that has ever been used of me before, certainly not by anybody to whom I'm not married. In fact sexy is not a word anybody in full possession of their faculties would ever remotely consider using of me. But someone did. After nearly 30 years of consciously avoiding mirrors, I suddenly find myself not minding if I chance to see myself in one. I feel OK about how I look. This is a sentiment to which I can not accustom myself.

All of which made me remember that, however much we kid ourselves we're the finished article, we never are. As we stagger and stumble through life, each backward glance makes us smirk at the fool we've left behind and smile smugly at the self-knowledge that we now know ourselves and are fully grown. And it's nonsense. We're never done, we're a permanent work in progress.

One of the curiosities about supporting a football team is the misplaced sense it gives you of the prestige of a particular town or city. So it is with Gateshead, whose team is relatively minor (it has a very fragmented history and has only this season achieved the dizzy heights of the Conference), resulting in my indolently foisting upon the town, about which I know nothing, the same vague sense of irrelevance and mediocrity.

This, of course, is stupid and unjust. So as a belated continuation of my gazetteer of places Oxford have played for the first time as part of their non-league odyssey, I give you Gateshead, Tyne & Wear. It has a rich, varied history - the first recorded mention dates from 623, in the writings of the Venerable Bede, and mining in the town dates back to 1344. The first cable laid between Dover and Calais was manufactured in Gateshead, as was half of the first one across the Atlantic (presumably the half that started here and stopped when it met the American half). It is also home to the MetroCentre, which is the largest shopping centre in the European Union. That sounds a bit grim, doesn't it?

If you believe JB Priestley, it wasn't much to behold 75 years ago. Writing in "An English Journey", he said that "no true civilisation could have produced such a town", adding that it appeared to have been designed "by an enemy of the human race". And that was long before the Trinity Centre car park.

But you can't say they haven't tried to redress the balance, with the wonderful Millennium Bridge, and the extraordinary Sage.

And of course, you'll already have an opinion about this. Mine is that it is a stunning, audacious statement of civic pride and if I didn't already live in one of the most beautiful cities in England I'd be a bit jealous.

As I get older, I find religion increasingly odd. I'm a bit bemused that people don't, as they experience life and all the arbitrariness and misery it has to offer, conclude that surely it can't all be part of some grand plan or omniscient construct. I realise that my bemusement is down to my failure to understand the concept of faith, which by definition requires you to accept that there is a rationale for the seemingly irrational, but my mystification increases all the same.

Which brings me to Saint Therese. Her bones (or some of them at least) have been touring the country, and people have turned out in their thousands to see them. I'm almost lost for words at how bewildering this is to me. These are the bones of a woman who, while undeniably good and worthy, was still just an ordinary person. She lived a simple life, which apparently is what made her special. She didn't have any visions or similarly ethereal experiences. Why on earth are people bothered about seeing her bones? Which in fact you can't even see, given that they're contained in a big silver container. Which in itself is inside a perspex box. The bones are said to promote healing, and although I imagine that's the motivation of some particularly superstitious visitors I refuse to believe that tens of thousands of people are turning out for that reason. What the blazes is going on here?

Here's what I find oddest about it though. If I were religious, I'd be a lot more interested in what was happening on the spiritual plane than the corporeal one. The whole business of religious relics seems to be missing the point to me. The advantage religious people have over the rest of us (or disadvantage, depending on your perspective) is that they have a spiritual dimension which we do not. Why sully that purity of vision by worrying about bones and shrouds and miscellaneous other bric-a-brac? If God is going to be within you, surely he's going to make a direct trip. He's not going to find a route in via a heavily guarded femur.

I notice from my statistics that it is a whopping 56 days since I wrote anything. This is a long time for the as many as two people who sporadically read this weblog to wait, so here is a list of subjects about which I have considered posting recently. The first person to reply by ranking them in order will get the article of their choice forthwith:

Hot Fuzz
Saint Therese
Gateshead
Crawley
The X Factor
Dying my hair

I had a friend request from Bebo this morning, from someone called Victoria Thomson. I don't know Victoria Thomson, and I have no wish to be her friend. In fact I have no wish to be on Bebo, which I only joined under unpleasant circumstances. A little over a year ago, one of my children was targetted by a group of bullies at his school, who set up a page on Bebo where people were invited to mock him. The page was titled "I Hate... " followed by his name. When I found out about it, the only way I could contact Bebo to express my concerns (fury might be a better word) was to join the site.

I sent a complaint, saying that I wanted the page taken down and I wanted to know who was responsible for setting it up in the first place. Unsurprisingly I got a stock response, saying that they were not able to divulge the name unless criminal proceedings were ongoing and they were asked by law enforcement. I understand that. I know that it is right and proper that they are unable to give out information without just cause. I am in agreement with the protection of such data.

But it did make me wonder to what extent the people who run sites like this fully understand their social responsibility. Not giving me the details I wanted is very responsible, but it is also enshrined in law. Where is the responsibility not to provide a forum for malevolent children to make other childrens' lives miserable? Why were they not able to prevent that from happening with the same efficiency with which they could rebuff me? Why is their position in such situations always reactive rather than proactive? I don't know how a site like Bebo can be expected to monitor every group that is set up for potential bullying, but, in all seriousness, that's their problem, not mine. If they can't do it, then the site shouldn't function the way it does. It simply isn't good enough to say that they take such abuses seriously and act promptly whenever they are brought to their attention. By the time we found out about it, the page had been up for weeks. Weeks. That's weeks of a 12 year old boy being ridiculed by his peers. Try and remember how it was to be 12, and how that felt. Remember how long weeks can feel when you're 12.

By the time I would have been responding to their answer, the page had been taken down by the person who had initiated it, so my ire dampened. I found the whole experience so demoralising that I don't think I ever replied in the end, preferring to obliterate the whole experience from my consciousness as far as possible. My son was incredibly stoic about it, and in fact withstood it all rather better than I did. I have tears in my eyes writing about it now, although that is possibly just self-pity at my own inadequacy as a parent for not taking his protestations of the treatment he was getting at school as anything other than the usual rough and tumble of school life. The bullying receded and my son has enjoyed a positive year at school. It all feels like a long time ago now.

Still, now and again I get these stupid friend requests, so I decided it was time to log on to Bebo and cancel my membership. Wading through their help section to discover how, I found the below:

If you decline a friend request or delete a person from your friend list that person will not be notified. They will just flounder around in their own unpopularity without ever knowing why. Your personal contact information will be removed from their friend list. Gosh, life can be cruel.

Reading that, it is hardly surprising that the vindictive elements of society gravitate to Bebo, where they clearly find a home.

Most of us, I suspect, have aspects of our character which we feel mark us out as different from the majority. Individual traits which, while perhaps not defining us as people, nevertheless distinguish us. Quirks, if you will.

I have a few. I don't like hot, sunny weather (this, though unusual, is actually more common that you'd imagine). I don't know how to drive (and don't want to - it frightens me). I listen to jazz. I don't own a mobile phone. However, none of these comes close to making me feel as estranged from my fellow man as not drinking alcohol.

Which makes this article quite interesting from my perspective. While some of it absolutely mirrors my experience, some of it absolutely doesn't. Each of the case studies makes an observation that I could have made myself (the first one is mystified by beer drinkers above all else; the second could tell you when a fruit salad is on the turn; the third doesn't understand the culture of excessive drinking; the fourth never grew out of finding it as unpleasant as when she was 14), and yet the overall picture doesn't reflect my experience of not drinking.

I've never had even the slightest suggestion that anyone thought I wasn't drinking because I was a recovering alcoholic. The man who says that that's the first question he gets asked can only be adhering to the stereotype of what journalists expect the teetotaller's experience to be. Either that or he mixes in some very odd company. (Seriously, can you imagine saying that to someone if they told you they didn't drink? Then following it up with asking if they were religious? Cobblers.) Nor do I believe for a moment that "drinkers envy the self-discipline and confidence required to abstain in our booze-soaked culture". Pity yes, envy no. For the most part people just don't know how to react, and that can show itself in lots of ways - generally men can't hide that they think it's plain weird, to the point that a lot of them are quite unnerved by it. Sometimes I get the reaction I imagine men must get when they tell other men they're gay. A woman I work with responded with "How sad", which annoyed me so much that I told her that was one point of view, as was thinking it was sad that some people aren't able to have a good time without having to drink. Which is not a view I really hold, but adopted in that instance.

What drinkers can't understand, looking as they do from the inside out, is that there is a culture of alcohol in this country that is overwhelming. It's not just the binge-drinking, vomit-rivering laddish element to which I'm referring, it's the all-encompassing association of alcohol with enjoyment that runs throughout every facet of our society. That's what makes people who don't drink feel so like outsiders, the assertion (conscious or otherwise) that it is simply impossible to have a good time or function as a fully rounded member of society without having a drink.

I don't drink for the very simple reason that I don't like the taste. The by-products of not drinking - not losing control of my senses through over-indulging, not being hung over the following day, not running the risk of becoming part of the 43% of violent crime attributable to alcohol - are just a bonus. I'm not one to proselytize about the benefits of teetotalism, but don't anybody try and tell me I'm missing out.

I was reading about the BNP yesterday. Unlike most woolly liberals of my type, I'm not unduly disturbed by the election of a couple of BNP MEPs. It's not like they're going to have any real power, and getting them elected might actually increase the profile of the BNP to the extent that rather than people thinking they're just some vaguely patriotic organisation, their true nature emerges. Because although I have no evidence for this, I can't help thinking that most of the people who voted BNP did so as a gesture of misplaced patriotism rather than because of genuinely fascistic leanings.

The BNP's white supremacist beliefs have hardly been mentioned over the last few weeks. They've made great play of immigration from the rest of Europe and got mileage from Islamophobia, but nobody's really focused on their ludicrous views about race. And I say ludicrous not because I disagree with them, but because they're simply preposterous. I can see there's a debate to be had (a debate too complex for me, and certainly far too complex for the membership of the BNP) about the recent flurry of immigration from within the EU. Personally I think that if people have got the wherewithal to get off their backsides and travel to another country to better themselves, that's exactly the kind of people I want here, but I'm happy for people to debate it and actually feel the main parties have shied away from doing so for fear of being seen as post-imperialists. But there's no debate to be had about "firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home" (which Nick Griffin updated from the previous policy of forced repatriation). I imagine almost everybody knows somebody like a colleague of mine - half Trinidadian and half Nigerian by blood, thoroughly English by birth and upbringing. If he is to be firmly encouraged (and it's pretty easy to imagine what that would be like) to return "home", to where? It's as ill-conceived as it is repellent.

Similarly, I doubt most BNP voters are aware that Nick Griffin is a long-standing Holocaust denier. Or that he thinks that when a white person has a mixed-race child, "a white family line that stretches back into deep pre-history is destroyed. While the BNP is not racist, it must not become multi-racist either. Our fundamental determination to secure a future for white children is restated, and an area of uncertainty is addressed and a position which is both principled and politically realistic is firmly established. We don't hate anyone, especially the mixed race children who are the most tragic victims of enforced multi-racism, but that does not mean that we accept miscegenation as moral or normal. We do not and we never will". Or that the BNP proposes that citizens should keep a rifle and ammunition in their homes. Or - and this is my favourite - it plans "to end the conflict in Ireland by welcoming Eire as well as Ulster as equal partners in a federation of the nations of the British Isles". Ha ha! I wonder if they've ever met anybody Irish. (Or perhaps I should say Eirish, since they seem to favour the archaic term which I'm told Irish people can't stand seeing used in its English version, without the accent.)

I find it hard to get too animated about the BNP though. They're a tiny minority, and - here's the thing - they're on a hiding to nothing. Britain is multi-racial, not just in its demographic but in its heart and soul now as well. Every Theo Walcott goal, every Nitin Sawhney album, every chicken tikka masala makes that more of a fact, and there's nothing the BNP can do about it.

What has happened to spammers these days? They're just not putting the work in. Look at these two efforts that have arrived in my inbox in the last few days.

Pathetic, aren't they? They don't even bother with a story about a widow and an unclaimed inheritance. Dr Malik Ali, from whom I hear on an almost daily basis, would be horrified by their lackadaisical approach to his pitiful form of conmanship.

In other news, the good people of FHM have once again asked for my opinions. This time the questions were all about alcohol. Given that I am approaching my 20th anniversary without partaking of the substance responsible for most of society's ills (yes that's right, I did write that), I am not the ideal subject for topics like:

How far do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements about drinks?
• I worry about the long-term health effects of my alcohol consumption                    
• I sometimes feel pressured to drink alcohol in social situations even if I don’t really want to                    
• I enjoy getting drunk                    
• I tend to drink more alcohol in the summer months than in winter                    
• I often go to work with a hangover

I also disagreed with the statement that their website is a good place to go for a quick entertainment fix, and when asked to choose from these words to describe it - Trashy, Entertaining, Safe-for-work, Confusing, Intelligent, Cluttered, Engaging, Cool, Useful, Topical, Funny, Sexy, Informative, Amusing, Sleazy, Immature, Modern, Up-to-date, All-encompassing - I plumped for trashy, sleazy and immature. I'd like to think this will finally prompt them to kick me off their panel, but thinking about it the idiots who run FHM probably take those adjectives as badges of honour. On the other hand, I hope they will have been a little confused by my answer to the illiterate question

Which celebrity would you most like to spend an evening drinking with down the pub?

To which I responded Richard Dawkins. Then again, they almost certainly won't have heard of him and will greet it with a neanderthal grunt.