Tour-Isn't

Tour-Isn't
When we were asked whether we wanted to pay £5 to park and enjoy the attractions, we should have either turned the car around or carried on driving off the cliff

-          comment on TripAdvisor web forum regarding the ‘Amusement Park’ at Land’s End, August 2011

Opening the doors of our sewage treatment works allows people to see how multi-million pound sophisticated treatment processes safeguard our bathing water, recreational waters and shell fisheries.

-          James Rider, operations manager of the new ‘Bournemouth Sewage Works’ tour, Dorset (quoted in ‘Crap Days Out: 10 of the worst days out in Britain’, telegraph.co.uk)

I’ve always found it faintly astonishing that there’s a massive tourist economy in Britain. It just feels too rainy and pedestrian. ‘You want to see this?’ I wonder to myself. ‘Really?’ To me they might as well have come to photograph the road works.

There always was a pretty Cornish village or a crumbling pile in Hertfordshire that could make a bit of cash from day-trippers, but that’s nothing to what’s out there these days. If an area’s seen its industry ripped out and factories closed down, goes the thinking, all it needs to do is open a Visitor’s Centre and it’ll be flooded delighted families flocking in to see the room where Victorian children used to get their limbs torn off. Take the brochure for the Great Orme Ancient Mine in coastal Wales – essentially a large hole with ambitions. ‘Stonehenge is certainly a world class monument,’ it generously allows, ‘but now it is joined by the Ancient Mines on the Great Orme.’ Elsewhere the King Edward Mine’s buildings are Listed ‘Grade 11’, meaning they are of ‘national importance’. On this kind of scale I think our bathroom lime scale probably ranks at Grade 15.

Holiday of a lifetime: 
the Bournemouth Sewage Treatment Tour

Scrape the barrel and what you find there half makes you sad, and half makes you shake your head in disbelief. It's not tourism. It's tour-isn’t. ‘Enjoy a 30 minute tunnel trip,’ said one I’d found for Standedge Tunnel in Yorkshire, ‘while one of our entertaining guides explains all about the geology and history of the tunnel, as well as thrilling you with tales of the folks who designed, built and worked in the tunnel.’ Alternatively you could just drive beneath the Thames at Blackwell for free.

If these are the minimum standards, it occurred to me, there would be nothing to stop an enterprising fellow like myself from setting up my own ‘Garden Shed Experience’.  

Reasons you’d want to visit Dale’s ‘Garden Shed Experience’

-           Full self service buffet, with hot drinks available 

-           New themed ‘history’ feature with a couple of photos blu-tacked to the wall to explain the story of the creation of the garden shed

-           Guided tour down the garden path to the shed, and back up again

-           Unparalleled views of other neighboring garden sheds

-           Interactive ‘media hub’, involving a TV screen, radio, and a couple of old magazines placed in a pile

-           Additional, free access to the shitty clump of weeds in the corner that nobody can be arsed to uproot

-           Fuck all

My own personal favourite was the ‘Hack Green SECRET Nuclear Bunker’ (just off the A530 Whitchurch Road) which is so secret and undercover that its GPS reference and opening times were openly displayed on the back of the leaflet. The leaflet – a remarkable work of spin managing to rebrand what is essentially a radioactive hole in the ground as a multi-function adventure playground – was a sort of public relations stunt worthy of MI6. ‘Younger children can have bundles of fun as secret agents following the ‘Soviet Spy Mouse Trail!’ it boasted. ‘The only thing missing from the experience is the radiation sickness and a slow lingering death.’ From the sound of it they were doing their best to make up for that.

How to make yourself feel better about destroying the planet!

F**k it up and still feel good! 

•          Buy a ‘Bag for Life’;
•          Switch off a radiator;
•          Buy some soap that must be good for the environment because it comes from a cool shop;
•          If you’re Barack Obama, convince the populations of fragile, environmentally protected regions that what will really help is to plough a three hundred foot drill into the earth;
•          Toy briefly with the idea of becoming vegetarian;
•          If your company name has the word ‘Petroleum’ and 'British' in it, change the word ‘British’ to ‘Beyond’, because after all, people probably won't think about it very much;
•          Decide that you haven’t the energy to become vegetarian, but you will start buying Free Range eggs;
•          Switch to a different energy supplier because they have the word ‘sustainable’ on their website buried three screens down beneath a picture of a rainbow;
•          If you’re a multinational oil company, redesign your website with a green colour scheme and lots of words like ‘green’ and so many references to things like ‘green’ energy that anyone would assume you were a start-up developing ‘green’ solar panels rather than a corporate behemoth shitting millions of barrels of oil into the gulf of Mexico;
•          Start recycling;
•          Move to a villagey type place filled with cottage industries who massage the guilt of middle class professionals by selling them artisan food and home-made crafts and allow them to indulge in the fantasy that they're living inside a fucking Thomas Hardy novel;
•         Try to reuse peanut butter jars;
•          If you’re David Cameron or George Osborn, ignore the criticism of what the Coalition has so far done to reduce carbon emissions (nothing, basically) or promote a move from nuclear to renewable energy (nothing, basically) or improve infrastructure for cyclists (nothing, basically) or nurture the green economy (nothing, basically) or sustain grants for people to insulate their homes (nothing, basically) or not decide to sell off large tracts of Britain’s forests (nothing, basically) or curb unnecessary car use or short haul flights (nothing, basically) or try to live up to the promise you once made to be the ‘greenest government ever’ – nothing, basically – as you cheerfully help us all to commit species suicide because it’s good for the economy;
•          Watch a David Attenborough documentary about the ocean;
•          Learn to enjoy your plasma TV, hot showers, Wi-Fi, short haul flights, phone, fridge, laptop, cars, hi-fi, and all the other million things that make massive demands on the earth’s exhausted resources and generally hasten the onset of eco-geddon while telling yourself you’re blameless because you installed a high efficiency lightbulb;
•          Just learn to stop worrying about it.

How to land a job in the media with the least resort to sexual favours!

Media "networking"

 Here are the options available to the graduate seeking a role in the TV industry:

a) go to school with the producer;

b) go to school with the producer;

c) go to bed with the producer;

d) go to school and bed with the producer;

e) come from a family where your dad went to school with the producer;

f) come from a family where your mum went to school with the producer;

g) come from a family where your mum and dad both went to school or bed with the producer and his girlfriend, at different times;

h) mortgage your time, energy, youth and self respect ‘volunteering’ your services for virtual slave-labour photocopying, coffee making and surface wiping while your privileged shitbag employers treat you with the kind of respect a dog shows towards a lamp-post while all the time acting like you should be grateful for the privilege;

i) tell yourself you’re working on a “screenplay”;

j) print a flimsy business card with your number and email at the bottom and the words "Independent Producer" beside your name in a stylish font at the top; 

k) do an M.A. in Media Studies or something; 

l) start a Microsoft Word document entitled “Screenplay” which you stare at blankly in the few precious hours of your free time until the blood begins to seep from your eyeballs; 

m) cry; 

n) pay £25 to go to an unbelievably shitty media “networking” conference where every other person there is an opportunity-starved media graduate exactly like you;  

o) go to bed with the producer;

p) go to bed with the producer.

Things that make me think Armageddon might not be a bad idea

 Gregg’s cheese and onion pasties

A volcanic hunk of gristle that tastes like a brick of processed cheese fed through a chemical sludge pipe and inevitably burns the top of your mouth off, which means you end up gingerly teasing little bits of it into your gob like you were a porn-star trying to arouse the viewer with the sight of you eating a big fat turd made out of grease.

Constant and pointless reminders that the podcast is on a website, when you’ve just downloaded it from that website

‘You can find this and other podcasts on the BBC website,’ the voice tells you. ‘Just go to bbc.co.uk.’

          I know. How the fuck else do you think I got this shitting podcast? Why do you have to keep telling me, you pricks?

David Cameron’s “green” credentials

“I want this to be the greenest government ever,” David Cameron once said - a guy who spent the five years before being ‘elected’ (or, if we want to nitpick, ‘not being elected’) running around with a rhetorical watering-can trying to make the Tories look caring.

         Here are just some of the resounding achievements of Cameron’s leadership in the environmental sphere:

•        In 2006 David flew to the Arctic in order to take a photo of himself with a wolf 
•        Since getting elected he’s made some really passionate speeches about green issues
•        Maybe it wasn’t a wolf, actually, but a husky
•        Sometimes the podium in his press conferences is a bit green
•         Something with ears and a snout, anyway. Yes. Probably a husky  
•        He did his best for sustainability by trying not to choose to sell off large tracts of Britain's forests, but failed 
•        His team of cleaners and housekeepers only use green cleaning products
•        His 320 hectare lawn’s quite green

The shitty doors on Virgin Trains

Which never open when you want, meaning that you have to punch your way through the entire train as if you had anger management issues and were only taking the sodding train because you liked beating up small electronic buttons.

Julian Lennon

In the plaza of the new yuppiedrome ‘Liverpool One’ complex, a bit of sculpted public art bears an inscription quoting the son of the famous Beatle. ‘Dad once said to me that should he pass away,’ it says, ‘if there was some way of letting me know he was going to be okay… The message would come to me in the form of a white feather.’

          ‘Then… When I was on tour in Australia,’ it continues, ‘I was presented with a white feather by an Aboriginal tribal elder.’

So there you are: the mystical insights of the oldest continuous civilization on earth are utilized to speak to a poshboy millionaire touring his shitty vanity project around a desert.

Books: the 'irritate the Hell out of me' top 5

Cookbooks that seem to assume that the reader is brain damaged

‘HUNGRY?’ asks the ‘Recipes by Innocent’ book as you open it up. ‘The Innocent recipe book… for filling your family with good stuff.’

There are books that inspire, books that educate. There are books that herald the imminent end of civilization. Into this latter category must be placed Recipes by Innocent by the bottled Smoothie people, a fluffy, cutesy, wutesy gloop of smileys and stick-drawings which appears to have been written for cooks who have very recently learnt to use the alphabet.

‘We’re Innocent,’ it explains, ‘and we make stuff that tastes good.’

          It actually gets worse as you go on. At its best it’s like being taught how to make cupcakes by Beatrix Potter; at its worse it’s like self-harming with bake mix.

There’s even a chapter called ‘Bear Food’ accompanied by cute, dainty Winnie The Pooh illustrations of various kinds of bears enjoying the Innocent recipes. ‘Some bears are big,’ it tells us, ‘some bears are small.’

If ever Soviet Realism had done cookbooks this is what it might have looked like.

‘Neuro-Science’ books
Many-layered insights into human behavior – love, sex, philosophy, choice of political party – asserted with total confidence from the observation that when you stick people in a laboratory and show them stimulating pictures a portion of their brain becomes slightly brighter.

"Literary" novels with words like 'awakening' in the title and a picture of a sodding meadow or something on the cover 

So serious and profound you'd think that a fucking pressed flower was going to fall out when you opened the first page.

Girl-hating books written by girls

In ‘Beat The Bitch’ (How to Stop the Other Woman Stealing Your Man), author Tess Stimson, a sort of Bear Grills in a miniskirt, reverses about five hundred years of feminism with all the charm and sensitivity of a female terminator unsheathing a strap-on.

‘Somewhere out there,’ she warns us, ‘a scheming Bitch who can’t be bothered to train her own man to put the seat back down has set her sights on yours.’

A sort of malevolent femi-bot from Planet Misogyny intent on extinguishing all available sexual competition with a flamethrower, you start to wonder for Tess’s sanity as the book goes on. ‘Thumping the shit out of a punchbag while imagining the Bitch’s face pasted onto it,’ she says on page 144, ‘will make you feel one hell of a lot better about life.’

‘There’s an old saying that goes men need only four things in life,’ she concludes. ‘Food, shelter, pussy – and new pussy.’

Women burnt their bras in the sixties so that this could happen. 

‘Posh woman’ cookbooks

Astoundingly stylish recipes for meals that cost £2,485 to make intended to be consumed by tumbler-clinking shitbags in their retro-fitted cubist prisons.

          ‘Now some might just rustle this up on the hob, but I prefer to fire up the low-emmision charcoal-stove we erected beside our recent barn extension…’

If it looks like child porn, it's probably just being ironic.

‘Our models are real girls who are often employees or friends of the company,’ announced edgy retailer American Apparel the last time it was criticised for using startlingly young looking models in explicit poses in an ad campaign, something they found themselves in trouble for recently once again. 'They do their own hair and makeup and aren't Photoshopped. From time to time people are made uncomfortable by this, and it occasionally causes an unfortunate reaction.’

          Which evidently shows just how far we uptight Brits have misunderstood their vision. While they might have looked like predatory profit driven marketers peddling a kind of quasi-child pornography to lend an ‘edgy’ look to their products, they’re actually liberating us all from the tyranny of those plasticky Photoshopped models. A bit of reality. That’s good, isn’t it? After all, what kind of uptight prude could possibly label this

           as ‘pornographic, exploitative of women and inappropriately sexualised young women’, as the stuffy old Advertising Standards Authority would have it? 

You see, according to the hipster-targeted retailer, these are the kind of ‘real, non-airbrushed, everyday people’ that ‘normal people can relate to’. They’re the kind of images ‘people regularly share with their friends on social networks’. Nothing wrong with that, is there? I’m on Facebook, and I don’t think any of my friends on there would think anything odd about someone passing around a photo like

 that. True, you could say that stripping girls who look about seventeen and photographing them in their underwear for commercial purposes is the kind of thing which might get some people landed in prison, or at least get them a reputation as exploitative quasi-pornographers. You could say that a company that asks potential employees to submit full body shots of themselves before they’re taken on, that’s plagued by sexual harassment cases, and owes $121.5 million to Lion Capital and Bank of America because their sneering, faux-hip, looks-obsessed brand is starting to look a bit – well – eugenic, deserves everything it gets.

But only prudes would say that! You can’t call American Apparel ‘exploitative’ just because they’re exploiting people; they’re just part of the liberated entertainment industry that's empowering girls by stripping them and taking photos of them. After all, could there possibly be anything more empowering and liberating than

 that? If it looks like child porn, it's probably just being ironic. Imagine how great all these young women must feel with all this empowerment in the air.

Shitty jobs – that’s how we’ll make Britain great again

‘We’re looking for outgoing, proactive people here,’ the woman in charge of recruitment said joylessly, in a tone of voice that suggested she’d missed her medication that morning. ‘Would you say you fit that description?’

I watched the drizzle hammer at the window beside a sign that said ‘Performance Targets’.

‘Er, yeah,’ I mumbled. ‘Outgoing and proactive... Yeah, that’s a pretty good description of me. Sometimes, anyway.’

I really didn’t want to be here.

This isn’t just because I don’t like wet, miserable business parks. It’s because I don’t believe in this. In any of it.

 ‘We need to get Britain working by creating jobs,’ ran the Conservative manifesto in 2010. ‘Millions are living the misery of unemployment.’ Left or right, the consensus is that the panacea to our limping, staggering economy is jobs. Jobs provide income, income provides growth, growth provides jobs. Jobs are a Good Thing. Everyone thinks so. Jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs...

            Well I don’t. I think a lot of jobs are pretty awful, quite frankly. And unnecessary. Sit in rush hour traffic and you could self-harm your way through an entire Heart FM breakfast show before you saw one fulfilled looking face; alright, maybe you wouldn’t expect to, but are these jobs really all that useful for society? Builders and dinner ladies and teachers are useful. But management consultants? PR wonks? Ambulance chasers? How is it of benefit to society to have a load of people sitting in a business park cold-calling people at home who haven’t asked, aren’t interested, and would be better off without it? All those call centre slaves peddling junk loans or no-win-no-fee claims – how does that make a better, more trusting society?

I’m not trying to undermine just how horrible unemployment is. But does that really mean we get to justify any kind of job whatsoever on the basis that it provides ‘growth’? As far as I can see, drug dealing adds to GDP and employs people (and also contributes to at least one kind of ‘growth’, to judge by the number of students visiting garden centres to buy industrial numbers of window boxes) – does that mean we should encourage that too? How about jobs that involved mis-selling PPI, or ruining businesses, or bankrupting the state from the offices of a City skyscraper? Are they a good thing too? How about the jobs created by clearing up the financial wreckage of the biggest recession in half a century, created by people whose jobs were supposed to be good for growth? Is that good for growth?

I’m confused.

‘Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma of work,’ says the nineteenth century revolutionary Paul Lefargue, in a book rather attractively entitled The Right to be Lazy, ‘and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.’ Well, I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but I did happen to see some ‘miserable slaves of machines’ with my own eyes recently when by some bizarre chance an agency picked up my dishevelled joke of a C.V. and got me an interview for a call centre position in a business park three and a half thousand miles outside of Manchester.

Or at least it felt like it as I rode there in the rain. The road began as a friendly, curvy little thing, like a partner making pleasant chit-chat on a date – and then suddenly without any warning tipped me unceremoniously into a ditch and announced that it was now a motorway, Thank you very much. I had to drag my bike through the mud another half mile just to get off it; finally, spattered and fume-choked, I escaped onto a slip-road, doubled back, doubled up, squinted at a bus stop, nearly went as far as the airport, thought about leaving Manchester via the airport, before I finally chanced on a building that looked like an oversized Kodak camera and staggered up towards the entrance lobby.

I have to admit it wasn’t exactly a great start. I was already appallingly late, and by now looked as if I’d slept in the field of one of the local farms, possibly cuddling up with a family of pigs to get me through the night. A woman standing at reception watched me in horror as I neared the entrance. For a minute I thought she was about to press the alarm button and have me manhandled to the floor by security, but perhaps they were used to people coming in to beg for change, because with a wary look she buzzed me inside.

‘Did the agency tell you the wrong time?’ my future employer said hesitantly, glancing at my dogshit trousers, my rain-spattered face.

‘Er... Yeah,’ I muttered, turning red. ‘Probably. The fucking road turned into this motorway...’

I tailed off. 
‘Yeah, they told me the wrong time,’ I muttered.

There was a silence.

‘I... guess you’d better come upstairs.’

I was led past a hive of call centre drones, all gabbling and babbling into headsets in long, regimented rows. It reminded me a bit of that scene where Neo wakes up in The Matrix, except the embryonic humans in the film weren’t attempting to get someone to sue their local swimming pool. Also, the ones in the film at least had the chance of suddenly waking up somewhere in a better reality. A beefy bloke on the end stared at me in amazement, as if I were the first outsider he’d seen for months. I suspected they might have kept him chained to his seat.

My interviewer walked quickly, like she was worried I might be about to pocket some of the electrical wiring, and promptly seated me in a little interview room where she cross-examined me with a checklist.

‘Are you working at the moment, Dale?’  

I cleared my throat.

‘Er, I’m sort of freelancing,’ I said, in what I hoped was an outgoing, proactive kind of voice. ‘Trying to get a writing career together.’

She glanced at me with the same kind of warmth you might regard a tricky carpet stain.

‘Writing career?’

‘Yeah.’ I felt myself wilting a little. ‘Er, I’m sort of putting a few feelers out there right now.’ 

A long silence.

She looked at me with a sort of vague sympathy for someone out of work. I looked at her with a sort of vague sympathy for someone working here.

‘Right,’ she said.  

The rest of the interview took about as long as it takes the average person to blow their nose. As I stumbled back out of there (rather unceremoniously shown the exit, I noticed, without much in the way of further contact mentioned), I gazed around at the drizzle, the voided landscape, the acres of asphalt, the gigantic motorway, and wished – just for a moment – that I could believe in all this: that I could readily spring out of bed each morning and burn a cloud of hydrocarbons along a massive motorway in order to sit in a cramped booth for nine hours ringing up people I didn’t know, making the world an even shittier place than it already is, and be glad I had a job. But I couldn’t. I just wanted to go home. They might call it growth, but quite frankly I think it's just an enormous waste of time.