I have started to see Christmas decorations and whatnot around the place. Instead of just going through the silent weeping and gnashing of teeth that we all seem to do when we start to see the little lights up everywhere. I have made a suggestion repeatedly for years and I would like to float it here again.
Every Christmas most of us get angry at all the nonsense but on the day we enjoy it simply because we can see our families and friends in a nice relaxed atmosphere.
It seems strange that we all decide to do this just one day of the year but treat each other like sh*t the other 364 days of the year.
So, here is my suggestion… from now on we treat each other well for 364 days a year and on Christmas day we call each other every kind of b@stard we can think of. Get out all the negativity on just one day and have a good time the other days.
That said, I think that this advice is unlikely to be followed so I would instead like to suggest you get involved with BUY NOTHING DAY.
The blurb…
Saturday November 28th is Buy Nothing Day (UK). It’s a day where you challenge yourself, your family and friends to switch off from shopping and tune into life. The rules are simple, for 24 hours you will detox from shopping and anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending!
Everything we buy has an impact on the environment. Buy Nothing Day highlights the environmental and ethical consequences of shopping. The developed countries – only 20% of the world population are consuming over 80% of the earth’s natural resources, causing a disproportionate level of environmental damage and an unfair distribution of wealth.
Buy nothing day is also celebrated in more than 50 countries around the world and gets bigger every year.
One year I stood with a friend and some other guys [in the cold] on a stall in Glasgow city centre that was doing a sort of swap-shop thing only thankfully without any sign of Noel Edmonds but you don’t even need to do that. As it says on their site, in this case…” Literally, doing nothing is doing something!”
The thing to think about is this…
For the plastic piece of nonsense that you don’t want/need at Christmas time someone comes up with the idea. Then that someone goes and tells a second someone with more money than they probably deserve that they have an idea to make that second someone more money.
Then that second person goes and pays someone probably less than they deserve for working in dangerous and dirty conditions to go and get the raw materials. Those raw materials are then shipped to a factory somewhere polluting the air, sea and land. They are processed before being shipped to another factory somewhere else, also polluting the air, sea and land. In the second factory the processed materials are put together by people definitely getting paid less than they need. Once assembled, those materials are then shipped into shops in rich countries [did I mention that this causes pollution] which are probably staffed by people being paid less than they need, and sold to the kind of people who buy unnecessary, worthless and puerile gifts.
Finally, these gifts are opened and put it in the bin shortly after, which increases the ever-growing rubbish problem.
Given that all along the line the process seems to create much more misery than happiness, is all this really necessary?
BUY NOTHING DAY this year is 28th November in most countries but 27th in others. Please check for local events.
The Vatican is hosting a Galileo exhibition and while this may cause a great deal of mirth about the hypocrisy of it all we have to remember that institutions do change and this is a change for the better.
Or is it?
You see, the thing with the Galileo story is that the Church did not in fact tell Galileo that he was wrong. They told him he might well be right. They just also told him that he couldn’t go around telling anyone that as it was the church that decided what is true and isn’t.
It is also worth noting that although they eventually made an apology in 1992 to Galileo it wasn’t exactly a full holding up of the hands. Pope John Paul said that the whole story was based “tragic mutual incomprehension”. I would have thought that incomprehension was part of it but I am not sure about mutual.
That reading of the situation was reiterated by an Archbishop this week who talked about ‘mistakes on both sides’.
Bertolt Brecht might agree as in his play The Life of Galileo the only thing that Galileo later regretted was the actual recanting, something that Giordano Bruno never did.
The publicity coming from the Vatican on this [I really resent giving them the capital 'V' on 'Vatican'] is that religion is not opposed to science but that we all must work together.
But to what end? Because as far as I know the doctrine of *papal infallibilty still exists so what is going on with all that. Will the Pope’s next public appearance be in a shade of grey instead of the traditional white. Instead of a mitre will he have a telescope and a compass.
I doubt it somehow but then, 12 years of catholic schooling means I am very quick to doubt anything these people say at all.
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*Papal infallibility was only dogmatised, if that is the right word, in 1870 so was it applied retroactively?
“You know, some people feel that marriage as an institution is dying out but I disagree and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully not long ago by a letter I received which said…
Darling, I love you and I cannot live without you. Marry me or I will kill myself.”
“Well, I was a little disturbed at that until I took another look at the envelope and saw that it was adressed to ‘occupant’”.
I don’t like to post in just a direct ‘I hate..’ way. I usually try to put things in another way.
This however, is a very direct ‘I hate’ post.
The title of this article is ‘Shopping’. I don’t particularly hate shopping. Sometimes it is nice just to wander around. I don’t have the money to buy anything but it can be nice to look at all the ridiculous things that are produced and marvel at the absurdity of it all…tragicomedy if you will.
However, whilst this can be enjoyable, I despise it when you walk into a shop and the split second your toe goes over the door it is “Help you?”
F*ck off.
Leave me alone for a minute, I am just looking.
I know that in some shops the shop assistants are told to do that but it is an intensely horrible thing.
I don’t dress very smartly so usually when it happens I assume they are sizing me up as a shoplifter.
When you say ‘I’m just looking’ they watch/follow you in a pretending not to way.
It is entirely unpleasant.
So this is an ‘I hate’ article, but only in the sense of ‘leave me alone’.
Sometimes it is worse than all that though.
An ex-girlfriend of mine makes films of an artistic type. All simplistic metaphor usually, and she is a great photographer.
She knows a great deal about videos, computers, film cameras, cameras and all those things. I don’t know that much about those things.
Often I would accompany her to the electronics shops. She was very clear about what she wanted and needed and I didn’t know what she was talking about most of the time.
However, we went to the shops and she would explain to the person in the shop and they listened and then explained the products to me. It often went in this way in thought process if not not in actual words spoken…
My Ex [to shop person] – I need/want …..
Shop person [to ME] – Ok this is what you need ….
Me [to shop assistant] – Don’t speak to me dude, I have no idea what you are talking about. Speak to her.
Before you read this please find and read some of the testimony from witnesses and those who lost family or friends that day [appropiate links at the bottom of the article]. I am not a Liverpool supporter and I never lost anyone I know that day.
I can’t write about the event because I wasn’t there but I do know what I have heard thousands of football fans who went to games at that time say, and it includes me, which is simply “that could have been me”.
I also know that although some of the problems that led to the disaster that day have been greatly improved upon, others have not.
The things that have been improved [not perfected] are stadium safety and the general policing of football matches.
The things that haven’t are the police and the media’s reaction and attitude to crowds in general and their reluctance to admit it when they get it wrong.
Everyone who had been to a picket line (both police and pickets) believed that most picketing was peaceful. But a majority of those who relied on information from the media believed that it was mostly violent.
And so it was with football.
The attitude of the people in control at football matches and their lack of concern could be seen in earlier incidents like the Ibrox Park disasters and the Bradford City Stadium fire in 1985. In Bradford the fire was started when [probably] a cigarette was dropped and fell through the wooden stand and ignited the rubbish below.
However…
There were no extinguishers in the stand’s passageway for fear of vandalism, and one spectator ran to the club house to find one, but was overcome by smoke and others trying to escape. Supporters either ran upwards to the back of the stand or downwards to the pitch to escape. Most of the exits at the back were either locked or shut, and there were no stewards present to open them, but seven were either forced or found open. Three men smashed down one door and at least one exit was opened by people outside.Geoffrey Mitchell said: “There was panic as fans stampeded to an exit which was padlocked. Two or three burly men put their weight against it and smashed the gate open. Otherwise I would not have been able to get out.” At the front of the stand, men threw children over the wall to help them escape. Most of those who escaped onto the pitch were saved.
So the people were penned in, with many escape routes closed and no way to put out the fire because the authorities believed they might misbehave. What is more, similar to the Hillsborough disaster, the media have reported the actions of fans unfavourably…
American television network FOX TV controversially aired footage of the disaster in the programme When Good Times Go Bad 3. They incorrectly blamed supporters for deliberately starting the fire; and the program used punning language such as “as rabid as American fans can get, they can’t hold a candle to soccer fans around the world”. David Pendleton, the editor of Bradford City F.C.’s fanzine, stated that the programme was “a vile and callous piece of journalism” Copyright of the TV footage of that day’s events is strictly controlled by Yorkshire Television and the footage is only meant to be used for fire awareness training purposes.
Distasteful to say the least.
Interestingly, after other incidents like these in other countries such as Heysel Stadium disaster and the collapse of a stand in France, as THIS documentary explains, there were prosecutions and sackings. That just doesn’t happen in Britain.
I was fortunate never to see anything like this but any Celtic fan who was there will tell you that the day Celtic played Dundee the year before Hillsborough could easily have been a major disaster as most Celtic fans agree that Celtic FC at that time had a somewhat creative attitude to giving attendance figures and the stadium was dangerously overcrowded. I imagine most people who went to matches at that time have a memory of a game where it was particularly dangerous.
The season before Hillsborough I went to a few games. The Hillsborough season I went to almost every Celtic home game and occasionally to Aberdeen games if Celtic were playing away. This was because I had one brother that supported Celtic and another that supported Aberdeen . Our father didn’t like us to go to games without him so there was a lot of sneaking out involved. My Aberdeen supporting brother would take me along to the Aberdeen games sometimes because I think he wanted someone to go with and it gave him a better excuse. Usually I would go to the Celtic games with the Celtic supporting brother and sometimes I would go alone.
Conditions at most Scottish grounds were primitive at the time and in some of the early matches I went to I made the mistake of standing with my chest in front of the crush barrier. When a goal was scored and everyone jumped forward I got wrapped around the barrier and had to wait till everyone pushed back before I could disentangle myself. I realised how dangerous this was fairly quickly and from then on got to the stadium early and stood with the barrier at my back so that when they all rebounded after jumping down I could at least see them coming and try to position myself in the safest [or least dangerous] way.
The day of the disaster I watched it happening on BBC as Celtic were playing on the Sunday. I remember how the initial thoughts about the crowd fighting or being disruptive melted away. Those were the first thoughts of many people that day because there were some problems with hoolignanism at that time although, as usual, there were no serious attempts to consider sociologically why, except to blame the victims along with the perpetrators and to treat all football supporters like animals. The Thatcher government with the ID card scheme and the media had in tandem demonised the supporters. Just as the government and the media had done with the miners and just as they now do with the protestors.
So just a few days after 96 people had been crushed to death and many more injured due to police incompetence to, the bereaved, injured and traumatised were treated to this…
And this was after TV cameras showed supporters ripping down advertising boards to stretcher away the injured.
I can’t remember exactly but I think the next game I went to after the disaster was Hearts V Aberdeen at Tynecastle [Hearts' stadium]. It was unlike any game I had ever been to. There was a greatly reduced number of fans and for most of them, even though Aberdeen were seriously involved in the league race, the game was mostly an irrelevance. People sang songs supporting the Liverpool fans, abused the police in general and mostly directed their anger against the fact that a similar kind of fence to the one that had been used to pen people in like animals at Hillsborough had still not been torn down. “Get your fences to f*ck” and so on were the songs of the day.
It was a great show of solidarity and I daresay it was replicated at many football grounds in the UK and elsewhere at the time. That and the memorial game with Celtic V Liverpool a couple of weeks later showed me that the fans cared about the bigger picture even if some others didn’t, as is illustrated by this from David Conn in the Guardian…
In a dusty library at the far end of the Houses of Parliament, among 10 boxes of documents relating to the Hillsborough disaster which were made available by the South Yorkshire police following a government order some years ago, is a statement from a police constable on duty that day.
On the front page is a handwritten instruction from a more senior officer. “Last two pages require amending,” it notes. “These are his own feelings. He also states that PCs were sat down crying when the fans were carrying the dead and injured. This shows they were organised and we were not. Have [the Police Officer] rewrite the last two pages excluding points mentioned.”
So although today is about an anniversary for the people who died at Hillsborough and their families, it is also about the others who died not at the same incident, but from the same disease.
For the Hillsborough disaster and so many other appalling incidents in the UK, no one has been brought to account.
What piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.
Yes it is that time of year again.
” Literally, doing nothing is doing something!”
BUY NOTHING DAY this year is 28th November in most countries but 27th in others. Please check for local events.
That reading of the situation was reiterated by an Archbishop this week who talked about ‘mistakes on both sides’.
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