Pretty internet

It's a wonder I ever get anything done. Oh wait.


WRINKLE IN THE EYES FROM STRESS!

*

"What is undervalued in the sale pitch of this item (and it's overall sense of delight while you sun-bathe on the car-port covered in at least six of these freshly delivered delights) is the wonderful "SPAK" sound it makes when you throw it to the linoleum."

*

"That's right. Instead of the London Astoria, we get a hole in the ground. A building site. Fuck all, basically."

*

"I tried to laugh off the fact that I was going to eat a chocolate sandwich - embarrassing, when he was living on miso paste and seaweed. He gave me two-fifths of a smile and started rummaging around in the silverware drawer."

*

"While Vickie danced, J. Howard tried to grab her breasts. Thus began J. Howard's aggressive pursuit of Vickie's affection."

*

Up your hoohaa, America!

*

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

Fave new world

Blast. I seem to have been gently forced to upgrade. I don't care if it's better, change blows. But really, couldn't they just let me use their old machinery for as long as I liked? It's not like there are health and safety issues. Grump.

The trivialities of the day!

- Dog stole my remaining pain au chocolat from where it nestled on the kitchen worktop, wrapped snugly in plasticy stuff. That beast. He is becoming roly. He is sleek enough to look at, and that narrow collie waist looks almost worrying next to the booming Nottweiler ribs, but when he sits down you can see all his fur sort of ruck up like a carpet. If you had the strength, you could probably lift him by grasping a handful of dogflesh almost anywhere on him. His actual surface area must be vast. Still, it's just a bit of not-unhealthy flab. He has an extraordinarily boring and frugal dry diet, which is why he puts his head in the bin and steals patisserie fare when he can. Ah well. As long as he's not anywhere near Rusty standard (how did those ruminants ever get him back? They will only feed him pies! Stupid country).

- Did I mention that my non-Pod has niftily merged Bjork's 'Greatest' with Take That's 'Greatest'? Well, it has, and it is still amusing.

- What, oh what is the use of Bloc Party? Their music is ugly.

- Why do Bowling For Soup still have a career? Their music is uglier, but at least it knows and sort of acknowledges it's ugly, whereas Bloc Party's music thinks it is beautiful. This, as superbly explained by Stephen Fry, is the worst kind of ugly.

- I was going to put in a link to Fry's brilliantly brilliant 'Room 101' performance featuring the above explanation, but ten minutes of searching through a MOUNTAIN of SHITE on YouTube has yielded nothing. Why do they not make YouTube search better? Why must I wade through a thousand bits of cobbled-together, crappy-stills-set-to-cringey-music-to-no-end-whatsoever bilge before still not finding what I want? Warum?

I would put YouTube into Room 101. I don't care if it enables me to see hilarious things. (I'm not putting links to any hilarious things either. Grump grump grump.)

- Isn't it sort of nice that Big Brovaz have another (not terrible) song out when everyone had chalked them up as an example of how evil record companies build up young naive types and then destroy them?

- I have been watching too much of the music television.

- But I am allowed! since I did write 47,121 words. 6,000 or so of them went in a second in a meeting the other day, and I didn't bat an eyelid. That is how mature I am. Naturally I put laxatives in everyone's coffee because the ruthless purge of those innocent words needed to be marked in some way, and it seemed as good a way as any.

All that's left now is some tinkering and filling-in and stuff. I kind of want to do it again. It's sort of hard to let go of. There is still so much to say. And it all needs to be said by me.

- Word of the day is 'jejune'. It's almost onomatopaeic, in that when you say it sounds like a sneer, and thus beautifully true to its meaning in its sound.

- After months of languishing in the kind of hip hoppily baggy jeans I would previously have hesitated to wear while decorating, I have today at last purchased some tight items for my legs which make me feel sort of human again. And they were nine pounds and look like I paid ooh at least 15.99 for them. Yes! And some grey trousery things which look lovely from the rear but like they're crying out for the subtle bulk of male genitalia at the front. But that's what you get on the high street. Obviously they haven't heard about all the oestrogen in the water. Etc.

- I can't go into all the reasons 'Creep' is terrible right now, but I will do at some point, because it needs to be said. It is so very poor. I hate it when people make bad horror films because the genre gets enough grief as it is. And it makes me squirm when I get the feeling that the makers of a bad horror film have made it thinking "yeah, put this and this in and have this happen, that'll be scary", when in fact scaring an audience is an awesomely subtle and meaningful psychological undertaking which requires love and care and intelligence and so shut up with your awful heap of crap that should have got laughed out of the office where they decide what horror films should be allowed to be made.

Note: there are seven films called 'Creep' on IMDB. Not that you can infer anything from that.

- Oh look, now I have to put labels on. I feel vaguely uncomfortable. It seems rather a vain thing to do. (Like blogging isn't. Oh yes, I'll take this family-sized package of vanity, but woah! easy on the tiny toddler dish of vanity there, slick.) I mean, is anyone really going to come here and feverishly look up everything my dog has ever done? I suppose the nice people who come here when I actually write something relatively serious deserve the chance to filter out the rest of the tripe. Guys, this is for you.

Idiots in idiocy shock

But first: 28,004. Rock! Only another 10,000 or so to go I reckon. Tra la la. And some interminable tinkering obviously.

So I stopped watching Big Brother because my telly broke, although I would probably have stopped anyway as it was becoming painful. I don't find people being horrible and humiliating each other or themselves entertaining even when it's fiction, let alone reality. Now telly has been cleverly reset in a way only someone who's not a techno-arse can manage (thank you), and I'm going to be drawn back to it just to see, just to seeee if those awful women are as bad as the massive furore suggests. It's hopeless.

It's difficult to pin down whether or not the fairly obvious bullying of Shilpa Shetty is specifically racist or not, but oh the issues, the issues it raises. 21 MPs have signed a Commons motion condemning it, and Channel 4 have refused to make any proper comment beyond a generic one. The former probably haven't seen the programme, and the latter are going to milk the controversy beyond the point at which it's acceptable for a show which is always going to seek controversy. Both stink. You do have to jump on racism very hard as soon as it raises its head, but you've got to establish that it is racism first, otherwise you are making matters worse in much the same way as women who cry rape do. Channel 4 are going the other way, and getting very close to being irresponsible.

Part of my problem is that all the howling about racism rather excuses the fact that she's been called a cunt by that nothing-boy Jade Goody is porking - so sexism's OK - and undermines the fact of the bullying itself, which isn't acceptable behaviour either (although it might be inevitable in the BB house; they did do it to that poor fucked-up bloke last year... oh... and he was Pakistani. But that's probably a coincidence. He was dreadful. But still).

So I agree with maybe 20% of Germaine's argument - the rest of it is the usual naive crap that gives people credit for the kind of Machievellian plotability that only a sociopath could sustain. I really don't believe she's at all manipulative - she's got no need to get the British public on her side to further her career, she doesn't care if she wins or loses, and she didn't know anything about the show before she went on it. I've rarely seen anyone appear to be so genuine on there, celebrity or otherwise. Thus, Germaine, I need to say my love is eternal but do shut up, you intermittently horrendously erroneous windbag.

I think the racism's there, but it's the fat end of the wedge. It's just oozed out of the general nasty garbage bag (yes, I hate Americanisms too, but 'rubbish' just doesn't convey the kind of rancid goo I need here) of hatred that the other idiots have for the woman. If you're a moron and you find someone objectionable for something specific and fleeting, then you find larger, permanent, personal things about them to hang your objections on - a pair of specs, a big arse, a funny accent. It's because you can't quite articulate your objections in and of themselves - they have to be attached to something. Specific objections are subtle and fiddly and require a bit of analysis - vulnerable personal attributes are like big child-sized building blocks you can grab onto and throw about. Plus, morons think hate is fun. It's like bingo. This is why they don't do it alone. It's a communal, bonding activity, and a bind against the dark suspicion somewhere in the echoing cellar of their brain that the world might find them pointless.

Shilpa is very un-pointless - she seems to be a great example of humanity. She's immensely successful, poised and cultured and well-mannered and beautiful and a lot nicer than you'd expect. The others have had varying degrees of success on the basis on not much talent or beauty and must know how limited it is. They might have some subconscious sense of how 'totally and utterly ordinary' they are by comparison, and how beastly and base they are. Maybe they suspect Shilpa knows it, and so they're just childishly going all out to prove how very horrid they are to her, in that sheep-as-a-lamb sort of way. Or they might just be galloping gormless oafs with no idea of how to treat people.

I don't think they can justify their behaviour on the basis of Shilpa's behaviour, as I think they are doing to themselves, even if Shilpa has been annoying. They're reverting to the lowest possible insults in the face of someone who outclasses them so comprehensively that they can't digest it. But I had to laugh when I saw a clip in which Danielle Lloyd, a dead-eyed Scouse twit who never puts a 'T' on the end of anything when a simple Gordon Brown-esque unhinging of the chin after a vowel will suffice, slobbered "She carn even speak English proplee!"

I suppose I should feel sorry for her, as her flimsy career will be in ruins and she'll probably need to pay for her own protection, which she will need because a lot of other ignorant bastards will want to beat her up. A most mature response, especially when most of them will be the kind who regularly spout much worse in the pub. But for the time being, I'm just finding her a nasty little girl.

The trouble is that the wilfully ignorant often seem to claim a sort of psuedo-racial immunity from criticism. When Jackiey Goody had that scrap with Shilpa over mispronouncing her name, she bellowed "If I can't pronounce your name it's not my fault". Why isn't it? Because no one should ever expect you to make a tiny bit of effort to get someone's name right, so you can show them that most basic level of respect? Well, not if they're foreign and have a silly name. It's their fault for having a silly name, and you don't need to apologise for not being able to get your flapping gob around it. Or it's just the fault of the universe in general. The universe in general cops for a lot of shit from the stupid.

Nothing is ever an idiot's fault. It's just this automatic failsafe against criticism and means nothing, beyond "you are not allowed to criticise me because I am a poor bear of very little brain". This can be augmented by insistences of shit childhoods, drug problems, other problems, other nasty people, etc, but it usually stands up on its own as this impenetrable wall of ignorance. But you can always make an effort, however intellectually challenged you are - you can always try. That elevates you, that you're aware of your shortcomings and refuse to offload them onto others - if you can't pronounce a name, you are contrite about it, not hostile. Why would you be hostile? How can you justify it? You don't need to - it's not your fault, so fuck them. It's just always easier to be permanently on the edge of defensive hostility, and to absolve yourself of responsibility for that and everything else, with the get-out-of-jail-free card of your idiocy.

I can't wait to hear the justification Jade and Danielle and Jo will have for this. I suspect Jo will be horrified and will repent enormously in an ohmigod-what-have-I-become sort of way - she'll wring her hands over ever going into the house in the first place and apologise profusely, having realised she does still want to be famous and liked after all. Danielle will just dig herself in deeper with more twittery, and try and justify it, and flutter her lashes, and then Teddy Sheringham will dump her, or defend her, or defend her and then dump her. Jade will just shout that her dad was black, and then go into hiding, then make a kind of mockery of a Kate Moss-style comeback, possibly by being photographed snorting coke. Shilpa will just go back to her great life in India where she is adored and venerated by all, and hypocritical self-loathing newspapers will call us all cunts.

Then stupid people will continue to be rewarded by society for staying stupid, remaining infants, and causing any amount of damage for which we don't hold them to account. Maybe this is a good start on that score. I try to believe in freedom for everyone to be what they want to be, but I find it so hard not to be militant about idiots. I think they're the biggest problem in the world, and idiocy knows no boundaries of race or nationality. It's only lucky for us that they're too stupid to unite, otherwise we'd be fucked. It's bad enough as it is. (It would be totally inappropriate of me to mention for example suicide bombers at this point, and to speculate that the most significant thing about them is not their race or nationality or religion but their rampant and self-justifying and dangerously energising and self-perpetuating and contagious idiocy. So I won't.)

I might write a book. And then go into hiding.

Links! that I am too rubbish to work into the post properly (I'm not very good at this blogging lark - I should make an effort and elevate myself, or something)

Uniquely British 'not-quite-racism'

Good point, really

Ha ha. Yahoo news is no better than Jackiey "Shoopa... Shuffpa" Goody

Hellen: a handcart

I'm late with this too but, y'know, illness and all. (Now I think I'm getting another bug on top of the first one, oh ferchrissakes it's not like I actually do dangerous things like going out and mingling with people, give me a break.) The objective has been achieved, but every little helps as those megalomaniacal product-peddlers keep telling us.

I'm happy to do my bit (even if it's only symbolic now... ill, ill...) in helping Girl with a one-track mind propel Nicholas Hellen of the Sunday Times to the top of Google for all the wrong reasons. As she explains, he was one of the disgraces to the profession who tried to bully her into falling in line when she was outed by them last year. The email he sent threatened in the lowest way to expose her - dangling her family in front of her, inferring that if she didn't cooperate they wouldn't pull any punches (after all, she is the kind of infamous whore slut painted strumpet who should consider herself lucky she isn't paraded through town in stocks on the back of a donkey cart of smelly sin). And all in a tone of... what is that a tone of? It's not unctuous. It's not exactly faux-polite. Whatever it is, it is calculating and nasty.


"Dear Miss [my name],

We intend to publish a prominent news story in this weekend's paper, revealing your identity as the author of the book, Girl With a One Track Mind.

We have matched up the dates of films you have worked on - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Batman Begins and Lara Croft Tomb Raider - and it is clear that they correlate to your blog. We have obtained your birth certificate, and details about where you went to school and college.

We propose to publish the fact that you are 33 and live in [my address] -London, and that your mother, [her name], is a [her address] -based [her profession]. The article includes extracts from your book and blog, relevant to your career in the film industry. We also have a picture of you, taken outside your flat.

Unfortunately, the picture is not particularly flattering and might undermine the image that has been built up around your persona as Abby Lee. I think it would be helpful to both sides if you agreed to a photo shoot today so that we can publish a more attractive image.

We are proposing to assign you our senior portrait photographer, Francesco Guidicini, and would arrange everything to your convenience, including a car to pick you up. We would expect you to provide your own clothes and make up. As the story will be on a colour page, we would prefer the outfit to be one of colourful eveningwear.

We did put this proposal to you yesterday, but heard nothing back. Clearly this is now a matter of urgency, and I would appreciate you contacting me as soon as possible. To avoid any doubt we will, of course, publish the story as it is if we do not hear from you.

Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Hellen

Acting News Editor
Sunday Times"


This sort of hypocrisy and gruesome treatment of ordinary people may be widespread in the media, but there's no reason why everyone should be tagged with it. There are plenty of staunchly ethical and thoroughly decent journalists, some of whom I've been chuffed to call my mates, and much as they'd like to flag up grubby little swine like him and disassociate him from themselves and their profession, they usually can't. So I hereby linky for them as well as for Ms Lee, who's dealt with the whole nightmare brilliantly and turned it around for herself. Booyah.

Incidentally I think Andre at A Beautiful Revolution put it much more succinctly (and politely) at the time than I ever could have done.

And now, some politics

This was work.

HANGING AROUND I N T E R M I N A B L Y FOR DEMOCRACY

Thursday 14^th December, 2006

16.20
Meet companion for coffee to fill in SOCPA forms. The Application for Demonstration forms (3175A, retention period 7 years), will enable us to demonstrate outside Parliament in celebration of democracy, provided we hand them into a police station six days in advance of the demonstration. Our intention is to join a 'mass lone demo' on the 20th December in which many people obtain individual permission to protest simultaneously. Faffing about with bits of paper as is now required for us to carry out this most basic civil right is something we’re happy to do, in order to essentially give the entire oppressive rigmarole two fingers in public. Swig drink, feel warm glow of righteousness.

16.50
Arrive at police station in north London. Find young trendily-dressed couple, a single woman and a bloke or two waiting. Plonk down on fixed metal seats. Have a bit of a natter. Check forms correctly filled in. Observe bleakness of waiting room, out-of-order phone and scribbled-on walls.

17.00
Become aware of friction between couple queueing. She seems to be trying to reassure her fraught boyfriend – he is irritated and harsh. “Just back off, Gisella. Don’t touch me again. You’ve wasted four hours of my day.” Female officer is dealing with a bloke at the window. Gisella slinks away in her heels, then wanders back. One or two more people come in and ask if this is the queue. It is. They shrug and sit down.

17.05
A gaggle of teenage boys in hoodies slouch in and occupy some of the remaining seats. One of them slips off his pristine Fila hi-tops. The others complain loudly about the “cheese”.

17.11
Gisella continues to stroke her boyfriend’s leather-jacketed arm, cuddle up to his back and put her arms around his waist. “You touch me again and you’ll see what’ll happen. I will hit you in the face.” Exchange worried glances with companion. Gisella murmurs something sullen in unidentifiable European accent and hovers near boyfriend’s elbow. Boyfriend sets jaw and glares about him. We seethe quietly at his beastliness.

17.16
Read graffiti. ‘Bacon sarnie die’. ‘Jihad’. Someone’s MySpace URL in fetching blue felt tip under the hood for the knackered phone. The single girl gets out a laptop. Samuel Beckett is mentioned.

17.19
Gisella draws near boyfriend, puts fingers on his sleeve. He flinches violently to shake her off, throwing his arms up and out and turning away. Heart drops at the movement. More worried glances. Is he really going to start beating the crap out of his woman in a police station? Officer has disappeared from behind window. Gisella traipses off again. After making a call on her mobile and having a fag outside she circles back around. Begin to question her state of mind. Shortly, there is a revelation.

17.21
“Look, Gisella – this has got to stop. You come to my building, the porter puts you out, you come back in again. You have been following me around all day. You need to stop. There is no ‘us’. You need to get in a cab, now, and go home. Just… delete me from your memory. And everything will be okay.”

17.24
Wish for television, and perhaps a hot chocolate. Gripe softly about absurdity of bureaucracy intended to prevent people criticising the government. Consider going out for a paper. Think about horrendousness of the news and mendacity of Tony Blair. Reconsider. Shuffle feet about. Teenage AsBoy fires up 50 Cent on his mobile and slumps down in seat.

17.26
Man we now understand to be harrassment victim occupies a seat, leaning forward to prop chin in hands. Gisella hunkers down to look into his face, unmindful of the fact that she is hunkering almost between the previously unfettered knees of companion. Companion scrunches up in seat. Frowns exchanged, and some of those stifle-it-or-there-will-be-bad-things sort of nervous smirks.

17.32
Gisella and her man get to the window. Fiddy is in full effect and drowns most other things out, but the man is evidently explaining to the officer that this woman will not leave him alone. She strokes his arm reassuringly. AsBoy flicks through to find The Game. “I slept with her a few times last year,” says the man. Imposing Irishman comes in, asks where the queue starts, shrugs, sits down and opens a paper.

17.37
Officer takes man away to take a statement. Gisella leans, like a forlorn cat out in the cold, against the door to the inner station where her beloved is telling the police about her. She paws at the door. Then, in hypnotic state, wanders out for a fag. Get a glimpse of her face and see her glazed eyes.

17.38
That bit from ‘8-Mile’ where Rabbit finally trounces everyone in the battle on the mobile. AsBoys rap along with considerable skill, but also with touchingly-deferential hushedness. Blair’s noble ‘Respect’ project can wind up in the knowledge it has done what it set out to do, and more.

17.50
Want drink.

17.52
No one at the desk. Decide to stand up and get in the queue proper.

18.00
No one at the desk. Single girl quietly tapping on laptop. AsBoys getting fractious. Lead AsBoy, in tall woolly hat, presents himself at the desk and spies officers of the law photocopying in back room. “Scuse me,” he enquires. “Ooo-oooo.” Rest of gang sniggers. AsBoy whistles as if to errant Staffy. Photocopier continues important photocopying. AsBoy swaggers back to seat. Speculate as to the possibility that we’ve been run over by a bus, and are in hell. Note there is no clock. No clocks in hell.

18.05
Low-level grumbling swells, like a growing storm of pissed-off people who want to be in the pub.

18.06
Really want drink.

18.07
A man and a woman with a clipboard appear. “Is this the queue?” “Yes.” “Sigh.” He approaches the still-bare, lonely window. A woman materialises on the other side, her back to the desk, doing something with some paper. “Excuse me,” says the man. Her back shows no recognition. “Scuse me.” Nothing. “Excuse me.” She turns with a blank face. “I need to somethingsomething.” “I don’t work here.” She vanishes. Man retreats in defeat. Man and clipboard-woman loiter beside queue. Gisella circles restlessly, silently.

18.10
A woman and two men come in and go straight to the window. We watch them warily. This is Britain. A nation of dignity and honour, where people queue. We are renowned worldwide for the orderly and humble nature of our queues. Some of our queues can be seen from space. This is how things are done. Commence muttering about having proper system and avoiding fights. In the distance, past the glass, Gisella’s man is still giving his statement, his leather jacket hung on the back of his chair. More people come in, see the queue, look a bit aghast. No one at the window. Photocopying.

18.12
Bit of Justin Timberlake. Excellent.

18.18
Companion gets on phone and calls the police station we are standing in to enquire brusquely as to why there is no one on the desk. People smile. Talk to Irishman and other man behind in queue. “I’ve never waited so long to sign my name,” says Other Man. We say we’re just here to hand in some forms. Explain SOCPA. Ponder the subtle genius of the red tape involved. It’s almost as if they want people to get put off demonstrating.

18.20
Companion goes out for a fag. Officer comes out to talk to Gisella. “Look, he doesn’t want to see you, he doesn’t like you. I know it’s hard, but you just have to accept it.” Gisella says nothing. Young man talks to mate on his mobile. “I been here an hour. Got hunger for the desk, bro.” Check as requested companion’s head for fresh grey hairs.

18.21
Another officer comes to window and sees the woman and two men. Companion points out not unreasonably that we have been queueing for an hour and a half. Woman blasts with authority that she is there to pick up the belongings of someone who’s been found dead. “My brother,” says one of the men. Companion is silenced. Atmosphere balloons and subsides like fitfully-snoozing sea-creature. Officer emerges from a side door and is almost rushed by loitering man and clipboard-woman. They are accepted and vanish into the belly of the station.

18.24
Group leave with dead man’s effects. AsBoys rock up to the desk again and recommence Operation Copper-Attention-Get. Operetta of moans and gripes is now into its thrilling second act. AsBoy tilts head to the gap at the bottom of the window and is gallantly insistent. “Hey. Hey! There’s some ladies here that need to hand in some forms!” Resist urge to pat him on his woolly-hatted, uncertain-futured head.

18.30
Gisella hangs around the automatic doors, gazing out into the night. The doors stay expectantly open. There is a draught. Want to slap Gisella.

18.35
Officer comes out and asks Gisella to go with her. Gisella accompanies her eagerly to inner door, then seems to finally gather that perhaps she should get in a cab and go home. She takes a faltering step back. The officer takes her by the elbow and gently but firmly moves her inside. The door closes on “I am arresting you for -” and they are swallowed up. AsBoys erupt in cackles.

18.37
Companion gets call back from the station we are standing in with bollocks explanation of why there is no one on the desk, despite the fact that any normal office would make sure reception was covered at all times. Muse on the possibility of the police, like the Post Office, being opened up to competition from other companies. Dream of lovely Duluxed waiting rooms with fish tanks and water coolers, and a better world for all.

18.40
AsBoy, who more closely resembles the Artful Dodger (the 60s film version) by the minute, hangs around the inner door. “If you kick it, they will come out,” he explains to us in matter-of-fact voice of experience. “But they *will* arrest you.” Start to weigh up pros and cons of this option.

18.43
AsBoys finally succeed in attracting attention and hunch over in deep discussion of forms. They are jumping ahead of the single girl but she is unperturbed. And it is only supposed to take them a minute, after all. But we are on police-minutes.

18.50
Single girl has got to window and is attempting to get back her missing handbag. Two other women come in and stand at the other window. We tense and glower, having by now returned almost entirely to the wild. Officer disappears with reference numbers.

19.02
Officer apparently despatched into wardrobe and currently negotiating with Narnia officials to obtain location of handbag. Other Man is now into his stride and starts complaining bitterly about how long it can possibly take to find it. Go up and ask single girl what’s going on. “They’re not going to find it,” she shrugs. “I’m going to lose it twice.” Someone emerges and takes the two women inside. Irishman and Other Man go through initial phases of bonding process. Hover behind single girl waiting to pounce before officer can flee. Irishman insists the yellow line must be stood behind. We all smirk at each other.

19.04
Photocopying.

19.15
Officer returns empty-handed. Single girl takes her reference numbers and departs. We lunge forward like jaguars and push our limp forms through the gap. Officer apologises for wait.

19.16
Companion finishes explaining to officer what to do with the forms. Officer duly takes forms to cursed photocopier.

19.17
Tumble through automatic doors into street clutching validated photocopies of silly forms. Cheer lustily. Skip down road full of glee. Decide to just quickly check second page of form marked ‘Police use only’, crucial to validate our presence at the station today and protect us from possible detention under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. Find it blank.

19.20
Back in queue. Irishman and Other Man and two others very understanding.

19.21
Point out error of officer’s ways. Officer stamps forms upside-down.

19.24
Drink.