It’s years since the BBC ended its Grumpy Old Men series, in
which a group of middle aged men, including Rick Wakeman, Bob Geldof,
Jeremy Clarkson and John O’Farrell (and a host of other actors,
writers, broadcasters and comedians) expounded on a wide range of
issues, great and small, that quite frankly pissed them off. It was
great fun and I found myself agreeing with a lot of it. Around that
time, I was working in Bulgaria and together with three
colleagues, all of us of roughly the same vintage, used to meet up in an English
pub close to the hotel and stage our own version of the show.
Together with copious amounts of beer (local and imported) and
delicacies such as cottage pie, burger and fries, and a local dish
called a pork sword – it was a 12” long skewer of pork sausage
meat and onions, grilled to charcoal and served with chips, and apart
from looking frankly obscene actually tasted pretty good – we used
to spend hours complaining about this that and the other, and
reminiscing about the good old days (primarily the 70s and 80s) when
football was a Man’s Game, the music was much better and the beer
and women stronger and cheaper. And politics. And religion. And
work.... You get the drift.
I’ve mellowed a
bit since then, lost track of all my GOM colleagues and found
something resembling peace in retirement. Stuff that wound me up
terribly then never even crosses my mind these days, especially the
nonsense we had to put up with on mismanaged projects where the
customer was always right and we consultants always wrong and scope
not so much creeping as galloping away unchecked from contract
commitments despite our best efforts. Happy days......then and now.
But there are things
that still drive me mad.....pissing me off seems an
understatement. So I thought I’d have a bit of a rant with this
week’s essay. So here, in no particular order, are six of the
main culprits and why they still piss me off.
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Tardiness. There
is simply no
excuse for it, under any circumstances. If you have an appointment –
at the dentist, the bank manager, hospital, or to catch a train:
whatever
– get there on time. Not when you fancy it. The train won’t
wait, the dentist or hospital will cancel your appointment (and quite
right too!) and make you
wait weeks for another one, and
the bank
manager will probably refuse
your loan application. If you’re late for an interview, then job
gone. It will be nobody’s fault but your own, so don’t bloody
whinge about how unfair it all is. Besides anything else, it’s
simply rude – someone is giving up some of their own time to deal
with you, or someone more ill and in need of help than you is going
to be inconvenienced because of your tardiness. If your school day starts at
8, be there at five
to, not ten past. Your teacher is there on time, probably most of
your classmates
as well, so why should their efforts be disrupted because you’re
too lazy to set
the alarm on your phone? It’s not the job of your parents or
anyone else to get you moving. Live with it. Get used to it. It’s
your future and your duty.
Sloppiness. In
the same way as poor time keeping gives a bad impression of you, so
does your appearance. Wash your hair and clean your teeth, often. Shave.
Wear clean clothes and at least try to look smart before you leave
home in the morning. This is not something to do merely for an
interview or a date, it should be a given. If you can’t even be
bothered to make the effort with yourself why should people think you
would make an effort with anything or anyone else? It’s about
respect: if you respect yourself, you’ll find it easier to respect
others. Do that and the world – and your life! - will be better and
easier.
Rude people,
especially on public transport. I
went into town the other day, partly to do a bit of shopping, and
partly to meet up with My Beloved and conclude a bit of business (in
the nicest possible way). I traveled by Metro, by tram and by
suburban trains to get into the centre of the city and then off to a far
flung suburb, and traveled in the middle of the day, off-peak. It
was fun, I bought what I wanted on my shopping trip, was on time
– a bit early in fact
(note that!) - for my meeting with the missus and
we got everything done to our benefit. But there are just so many
rude and ignorant sods around these days. The Metro service came in,
half empty, as you would expect at 2 in the afternoon, the doors
opened and some people started to get off. I stopped to let them,
and found myself shoved aside by half a dozen people desperate to get
on, even before the people had finished getting off.
And these were not young schoolkids: they were middle aged, even
elderly, men and women, blabbing away
on mobile phones or swinging
wheeled shopping trolleys (I still have the bruise on my shin) who I
would expect to have known better. We all got seats, so why the
free-for-all? Simply ill mannered. It was the same on the tram when
I got off, so I used my own elbows and belly to carve a way through
the idiots shoving on – brought down to their level, I’m afraid.
Which pisses me off even
more than they did!
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Now
some biggies:
Governments. As
opposed to politics, which I find endlessly fascinating in all its
complexities. No, it’s governments that really piss me off. They
are a necessary part of the human condition, and have been since the
dawn of time. No matter how important your individuality is (and
it’s part of what makes us human rather than animal) I would argue
some form of government is still needed for the greater good. The
days when an individual could essentially do what the hell he wants
to to
make a living and support a family are long gone. Even in the most
remote tribe in the Amazon jungle or wherever, leadership is needed
for the benefit if the tribe. That is what government is for. So
why
do they never seem to work? Why is it that when someone achieves a
place, an office (no matter how minor), in a “government” then
all the scruples and promises they made to their electorate go out of
the window, forgotten or denied? I
cannot remember a single UK government in my lifetime – and
that’s quite a few, going back to Macmillan in the 1950s - that
has not been racked by broken promises, incompetence, dishonesty,
sleaze, nepotism, stupidity, self interest and personal greed.....and
the current one is perhaps the worst of the lot! Then there are the nations that are nor democracies - or at least in the accepted meaning of the word - where some gangster or religious nut seizes power, eliminates all opposition by prison, exile or death, and reigns supreme for years, with occasional "elections" where they are returned with 98% of the vote. Meanwhile they milk the state coffers to amass fortunes in cash, real estate and luxury goods like yachts and planes, before being bumped off (or if lucky retiring in old age) leaving his hated family and the population to pick up the pieces. Think of Mr. Kim, he of the world's dodgiest haircut, in North Korea, that butcher Assad in Syria, and of the KGB's very own Vladimir Putin (amongst a long list of others). With them, there is no more than a team of lackeys to do their bidding as they see fit: this is not government, it's despotism. And it still proliferates throughout the world. Now that does piss me off.
Diplomacy
– especially with respect to the old Soviet Union and, now, Putin’s
Russia. If diplomacy is the art of negotiating in order to find
compromise and solutions to big international
issues without causing open
warfare, then it seems to be working less well these days. Diplomats
the world over tend to be urbane, intelligent and usually
multi-lingual, able to represent fairly their countries' best interests, adept at picking their
way through intellectual minefields to achieve tricky objectives
without loss of face. It requires an intelligence and tact, the
ability to criticise in public without offence, and accept criticism
without anger. It also requires an ability to lie with a straight
face, and recognise when being lied to without reacting in public.
Of course, the results are
rarely all that one side is demanding, or often less than the other
side is prepared to give. It rarely avoids a conflict but can delay
one. All well and good. But these days, especially in dealing with
the Great Bear, it has become so transparently dishonest that no-one
in their right mind could believe the tripe that Putin’s lapdogs,
led by the urbane, intelligent and multi-lingual Lavrov are saying
over the Ukraine crisis. I watched in awe yesterday as the Russian
representative on the UN Security Council, during the debate on that
situation, denied that Russia had ever done anything bad to Ukraine, that
any problems were the fault of either Ukraine, the US or the EU and
NATO (or a combination thereof) and the few troops that were
surrounding the Ukrainian border were on legitimate exercises. How he
kept a straight face while spouting this filth, and his audience
refrained from laughing their heads off at it, is quite beyond me.
In an article in the New York Times yesterday, the distinguished American
historian Anne Applebaum, an expert in Russian and Eastern European
affairs, married to the former Polish Foreign Minister Radek
Sikorski, argues that Putin and Lavrov have spent the last 20 years
lying and abusing Western diplomats, simply ignoring international treaties
that they themselves had negotiated and signed up to, and were generally making complete fools of Western diplomacy by their bullying
dishonesty (I paraphrase from the poor quality English to Polish and back
to English translation I saw, but that is the gist of it). She is,
of course, absolutely right. She also said it was about time Western
diplomats stopped allowing this to happen and bit right back, with a
few home truths, both at the negotiating table and in the usual
stage managed press conferences. Call them liars to their faces.
Refute their nonsense with verifiable facts and examples – there
are more than enough to go around. I would go further than that.
Russia should be removed from the UN Security Council, and all
Western countries break off their “diplomatic relations” until
such time as the 150,000+ troops and their weapons (tanks, artillery,
aircraft, missiles and all) are removed – once again, verifiably. Unlikely
to happen of course, because Western governments lack the moral
courage to do so, and I believe the UN lacks the authority under its Charter to
remove a permanent member of its Security Council without the
agreement of the majority of its overall membership, and Russia can always
reply on the veto of China, Belarus and Cuba, amongst other client
states. But, God, it pisses me off big time the way that cocky little
toerag in the Kremlin gets away with murder – quite literally.
The International Olympic Committee (and others). For good measure, let's add here FIFA and UEFA, but in pissing-offness the IOC reigns supreme. It's supposed to run international athletics, but also for good measure runs winter sports like downhill skiing, ice skating and - er - curling, and brings 'em all together every four years in the world's biggest (and by a margin most expensive) sporting event costing billions of dollars to host but generating even more billions in profits (most of which finds its way back into the coffers of the IOC). The Olympics was always the preserve of the plucky amateur, and sometimes there is a little feel good story that supports this notion (think of the Jamaican bobsleigh team and Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards 50 odd years ago, or this year's Jamaican downhill skier who at 38 is competing despite not trying on a pair pf skis until he was 32). But once the sports turned professional all kinds of skulldugerry has come along - notably the widespread use of "performance enhancing substances" - i.e. drugs. Now and again, someone is caught doing it - remember Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter and gold medal winning "fastest man in history" years ago? Weight lifting has long had its dopeheads too. Then came our friends from Russia: after being caught in several doping cases, their drugs testing facilities and practices were found to be so bad that Russia was kicked out of elite level (i.e. Olympic professional) sport. After a predictable outcry, mainly from the Russian press and of course Putin, the IOC caved in, quite disgracefully in my view, and allowed them to compete - but on condition the team was called the Russian Olympic Committee, wore unadorned tracksuits and equipment and didn't carry the Russian flag. Punishment? Pah! Don't make me laugh..... They did so in the 2020 summer games, and picked up a total of 71 medals, including 20 Gold, and returned home heroes as the nation laughed at the rest of the world. At this year's winter games they are again competing, and despite regular protestation about how clean they are, a 15 year old girl ice skater - yes, fifteen - has been found to have failed a drugs test - two months ago! Why was she allowed to compete, let alone win a team gold? And compete, even after the furore, in the individual competition (where she finished fourth, which so displeased Putin that the future lives of the girl and her family are being discussed....). It's a travesty: the entire team should be kicked out and stripped of any medals won. As indeed should any team where such practices are uncovered. As far as FIFA and UEFA are concerned, while doping is not widespread (at least to my knowledge) both organisations and their leaders have been investigated for corruption, falsifying tournament bid results, paying and receiving bribes. The leaders involved have been kicked out, and sanctioned, court cases and lawsuits flying all over the place, while still denying doing anything wrong. Their replacements, while not apparently adopting corrupt methods - despite the rumours - are busy ruining the sport with stupid rule changes and proposals to hold a World Cup every 2 years alternating with a biennial European tournament, to add to the biennial South and Central American tournament and African Cup of Nations competitions....as well as increasing numbers of club competitions. No wonder players are often accused of burnout....... And, as a life long football fan, this one really really pisses me off!!!
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By the way, this was not intended to be the anti-Putin, anti-Russian piece it's ended up. But then, as the saying goes: "If the cap fits...."
