What Sundays are for


What Sundays are for
The chores - those bores, 
For the pores to regain focus after the Night 
Befores' Hocus Pocus


For the Non compos mentis to go away
You could pray 
Or watch a bunch of sportstars play on tele
Go for a walk in wellies
Fill up your bellies with Roasts or 
Cheese on toast
Or if you are Roman Catholic, the Host


Sundays are not Mondays
And there must be a reason for that
You hang out with your dog or your cat
Or you hang loose in a duvet
Or hoover
Or move her 
Or the him, or the hymn
From the night before dimness sets-in 
And the working week begins
Move them out of your bed, your head, 
From sharing your Ted, 
Say goodbyes, hit high-fives, 
Soak it all in with a pint
In your local
Full of other locals
Nobody ever really knows but 
Don't Tell


Eastenders omnibus is on BBC ONE
And you can watch the soap opera 
From start to finish
In two hours it can't diminish
The DRAMA is always worse than your own


And for drinking,
It helps thinking, which is what Sundays are for,
That quiet gap
The stopover motorway services in the road ahead
And your bed
You can clean the sheets
Or clean your teeth
If you forgot to at all in the last weeks trawl


Fishing trawlers - you could go to the Sea
In theory
You can see a picture of the Horizon 
In more Clarity 
Than any other day of the week
Even if it's only on the TV


So that's what Sundays are for
Writing poems, calling friends, chatting shit, having the bends
All of that in a single day
The day you don't have to do anything
Yet you still get around time to do
What you want to


I love Sundays 

Middle-Managers

Oh I am going to do it.  Against my best interests, and with a heavy heart.  Solidly because no middle managers I have ever worked for will be reading my blogpost - and also because it is a subject so close to my heart it almost falls into palpitations at the very scheme of your average Johnny Middle Manager typecast.

I have experienced Middle Managers personally across a very many kind of different working environments. I have also come across them in life.  In the guise of friends who seem to pass and go as often as a thought might cross your mind, and also my friend has just extolled a tale of his own experiences with a Middle Manager kind of geezer.  And I can pixellate my own kallaida-skope (private reference to my own middle manager jaunt.  You won't get it) with his.  If the need comes to it.
I don't think it's particularly necessary to envelop this blog with a homage to the MnM. (The anacronym I will be using).  I don't feel like sullying my page with their sullen faces, when a cup is left at a dodgy angle for instance - premeditating a huge and all-emcompassing biblical style deluge as would have been avoided if the REDEMPTION offered in the Health and Safety guidelines CLEARLY OUTLINED.

No no no.  I will merely pay an account to the general theme and 'Articulate' race of these articulated lorries of terrible human beings in this blog.  That would be far more amusing.  Laughter keeps them at bay.  It is the garlic to the Vampire.  The crux in the crucifix seperating their jaws from devouring Common Sense and Decency.  So we can just use that, rather than go there way and walk their line into being spoken about.
Because I believe, that is why they do it.

So- we do an overview of various occasions (all metaphorical of course) of where and when one might have encountered such a MnM.

1.) The titan of MnM in Media - The Daily Mail.

This is not an original casting session.  It is just that if I was assistant bookings agent at a line call-up of MnM across Life, I would be sure to encounter the Daily Mail near to the front of the queue, jauntily stuffing out a cigarette in the pavement before shouting at the street-sweeper to come and do his f-ing job as he is paying for it.

We ALL pay for the DM.  The closeness of DeMon here is without the need to be pointed out.  Each new day brings a fresh oppurtunity to further empower the army of MnMs scattered throughout Middle England.  The version of Middle England which makes me feel like self-diagonising myself with ME and staying in bed. Just in case I come across literally ANY of them, the readers, in real life.  And AS the DM has a big readership, I am afraid that there are a lot of them out there.  Zombies.  Some read them for fun.  My journalist friend informs me correctly that the online source (A MASSIVE hit in America) known as the Right Hand Column is referred to in the journo circles in the know as the 'Weighty' column.  Specifically one place we can all go to to laugh at various cele-breties 'cele-bravities'.  Such as wearing a bikini on a boat in Summer.  Cere-brial breakthrough.

It only encourages more shit to come to the surface for the MnMs who have never really been picked for a team at a school sports day.  So, just bare in mind their informed badly spent youth.  These are their PAYBACK times.  They can pronounce all of the political correctness gone mad that they want.  They can boil it up in a cup of lukewarm tea, and carefully remind readers that England is currently under attack.  Not only from immigrants, religious extremeists and OBESE people, but ALSO from shallow people who only meant to bring entertainment into their lives through their talent, but who ALSO have the audacity to SHOVE IT IN THEIR FACES by 'yaughting about all day' and also having, not PERFECT bodies at the exact same time.

The CHEEK of it.  It really gets my gall.  Bladder.  Bladder to them all.

2.) The Political MnMs
We exclude honourable ones such as Simon Hughes (my friends godfather no less) who is the CLASSIC example of an incredible force for good against MnMs and may he remain in the Commons with the common touch for as long as he wants.

Boris.  Old Bozza, is the archetypal form of the MnM to name a name isn't he.  You know you all want to say yes.  You want to agree because there is just something not right about his jovial 'here we go' spirit in the run-up to a) the Olympics b) the Boris Bikes (with Kelly Brook appearing in a positively stupid near state of undress for press campaign shots c) his Mayoral campaign.  I am not going into anything personal on this level as that would be just the kind of thing an MnM would allude to, when it is not relevant whatsoever.

It is the VOICE of the MnM I am alluding to.  The silly posters advising each Londoner to avoid travelling into work in their normal way, via a humurously patronising cartoon.  Or the PINK used in the London Underground to represent the WAY TO GO for various tourist sites - which PLAINLY not even PALIN-LY, are what tourists already buy tourist site books for.  They are not that stupid.  They can even read English.  And why on earth Pink?  To represent 'The Gays?'  To help the gays to go the right direction for the parties?  Or for the children?  Or what.  I don't know.  But I find it, for one incredibly irritating having the silly stickers on view each time I take the tube.  And this diminishes in direct proportion to (exponentially?) the closeness we get to the BOLympics.  I hope they get taken down.  When decent irreverant street art stickers are taken down by cleaners running along with MnMs guidelines and the alternative is state-sponsored (Mainly Lononder sponsored) stickers.  Well, enough said on that.

3.) Third in line, would be those 'Homey Types' of Homo Sapiens MnMs.
You know, the ones who write the shows that consistently pop up on your television informing you on how to 'Spruce up your garden' or make your front room look better.  Or how to eat better.  Or how to not get fat or how to get thin or how to not get unhealthy or how to eat correctly or how to do HOW TO things such as put up a shelf all by yourself.
They just make everything so much easier don't they.  I would have forever been terrified of getting out my rudimentary vacuum hoover had it not been informed in briefing alongside, thanks to a tree somewhere, a paper version of HOW THINGS WORK.

I am not talking about the Delia Smiths.  Nor the Jamie Olivers.  More the Linda Barkers.  (Who I was in a lift with the other day.  Damn she looked so shiny!  Perhaps I SHOULD re-watch Changing rooms, the very beginning of her home range etc etc etc. )

You can't blame paper for where there is a demand.  I once worked at a place where there was actually a Poem entitled Don't Walk By, and in the very same language as Rudyard Kipling had penned the seminal 'What If' we have the lexical totally shattered by an emotional poem that handily at the same time, informs people to Tell Someone, if they see a fax machine unplugged for instance.

Clip Art is also, I'm afraid, a telling sign of the MnM

That is the type of MnM we encounter on a daily basis.  That is immunity.  However, seeing it as a form of entertainment on TV is more problemmatic.  I don't know what to do about that, but throw my hands up at it.

4.)  MnMs like me, who try and point this out.  There are loads of them as well.

This is the personal sting.  I am guilty of being a Middle Manager.  Because none of the things I am saying are at all original.  Everybody thinks them or writes about them.  They just chose to ignore them and get on with the actual art of living.  AND THIS is where MnMs beat all.  I would never say I was one.  GOD NO. But I am still commenting on other people aren't I.  And anyway, afterall, none of its all THAT important.

Hence I find an end to this blog update.

And go off to cry silently into my heart-shaped Ikea pillow, you know, that really tacky one that you saw on all those advertisements, the one everyone said - OH GOD THAT IS SO UGLY WHO THE HELL WOULD BUY THAT.

Well, I got it as a gift.  I didn't get foresight as a gift.  I didn't get the implications of how much worse this cry is going to feel now I am one of THEM who has FALLEN for the advertising of the MnM.

I DID cut out the label pointing out how to wash it however, I shall exclusively be washing it in my own hypocritical tears.

It even has arms FFS 

Yo Beyonce - stop with the nonce (accent excluded)

Yo,

So I was intending to come and write a post about feminism, positing Beyonce Knowles with her recent track, 'Who Runs the World' against Joan Smiths 'Misogonies.'

But then I realised that feminism has advanced in enough a form for me to speak about something else.

Something omissing / missing from our Olympic-hype uprun.  The riots.  From Last Year.

Just walking down my road towards the nearest internet cafe where I was to write my piece, I glimpsed upon a phone eavesdrop from a lady wearing a JAMAICA top chatting shit to someone about 'Only English people get this'.  Her son was about 5 and wearing a Kanye West t-shirt.  (I approve of the Culture bringing us together against government shit that divedes us but STILL.)

This time last year, I was living in Dalson.  I remember well the night that the riots hit our area.  I remember staying inside, and being totally confused by the helicopters buzzing overhead.  I remember the cool feeling the next day that our local Turkish shopkeepers had protected their businesses from the rioters (Young Kids) and remember also, my mate, from Scotland, who had just finished a recital on his fiddle, who then decided to cycle back to his fiddlesticks in Bethnal Green, against my advice, so that he then got chased and he injured himself whilst running from a crowd who were after his Bike.

I remember all this above hearing the smug Boris Yeltsin/Johnson tannoy announcement recently, when I was on a train headed home.  His posh Eton voice, bringing all of its aristocratic verve to us commuters, reassured us that millions of people were coming....SO WE HAD BETTER BE NICE.

WELL.  One thing is.  One Year Is.  Not good enough to force yet more pressure on us Londoners.

Just what has been done about the Riots of this time last year?  Is it the Pink Elephant in the room?  Yes it is.

Because we all knew about the funding that was going into the Opening Ceremony back last year.  When Danny Boyle is creating a piece worth many millions, in the very borough that many of the worries came out of, and the WORTH of his idea is further speculated in the Media.  Does this help anyone? 

How important it is to represent London along the good capital country vibes that it represents, is true.  It is cool- it is an all-embracing country.  And Danny Boyle can hopefully translate some decent values to the World about what the London Olympics is about.  But as far as TEAMSPIRIT goes - HOW MUCH has changed, since this time last year?  How much has been addressed and combatted for the people who were so desperate that they went on the rob.  That it all seemed a game, because reality seemed so utterly shit.

Doing SPORT is fine.  It is a great outlet for people who need it.  It helps communities and indivuals symbiotically.  But analytically, how much has the London Olympic Games helped us to progress from Last Summer?

I don't know.  I would hope that we can learn from this Olympic Games.
I hope that it offers more HOPE for the people involed in the Riots.  From the Givers to the Haters.

But I find it quite distasteful, that nobody seems to have acknowledged the suffering that goes along with living in London at the same time.

We can only wait and see.  

What is love.

Love is a quiet thing.
When you match someone else
In the Whole World

And it is frightening

And it makes you feel a bit sick
Because you never really want to go with it
Let go with it

Because it is something so mysterious
Something so serious
And a vow
Which you never want to really take
Because of all of the other things at stake

You are meant to live
A life that you want
And the thought of being led
Astray
By the way-side
Is scary

To try

It is better to know
Though
That being alone is fine
And you can always be alone
And defined
By that person

It is just that
There is someone with whom
To share that
At your own pace
And in your own race

So you can relax
And wonder
At it