Last week the Sun (I think - one of the crap redtops at least) ran a side headline on the front page 'Adele [a singer of medium talent] earns £41,000 a day. Below this was a follow up line 'Here's how she would look holding the money!' together with a picture of the singers head grafted on to a body holding a double armfull of bundles of banknotes. What I ask. was the purpose of this crude story. Were we supposed to feel jealous that in these days when we at the bottom end of the labour market earn less than half in a year what this girl earns a day, someone could be doing so well. Were we supposed to applaud her in her good fortune and say she deserved every penny. Were we supposed to take to the streets and put every rich money grabbing bastard up against the wall. What, I ask again was the point of this story. The incident was not of course isolated. Last year we learned of Tara Ecclestone (the playgirl daughter of a motor racing magnate) spending £1 million on a marble bath with gold taps ("Well - I spend alot of time in the bath was her rather plaintiff excuse for this ludicrous extravigence) but again I failed to see what we were supossed to make of the matter. Do the papers really want to see the downtrodden masses rise up and take vengence ala russian revolution style on these bloated plutocrats - is that what it's all about. They spoon feed the masses crap about the lives of the celebrities thereby generating the opium of publicity that fuels these ridiculous fools - and then publish these stories with a sort of slimy "Look at what they've got that you haven't" feel to them. Get real Papers - stop playing silly games. Get real people - stop supporting papers that provide no more than brain numbing pap at the expense of the news you need to know.

I've just made a sandwich for my lunch at work. Nothing to get exited about there you say, but wait on! I threw the first three pieces of bread I took from the bag away - they were so flimsy as a result of all of the fibre and nutritional goodness being washed out of them, so full of air pockets and holes, that they fell apart in my hand on the way from the wrapper to the work-surface. Luckily I managed to get the next two onto a flat surface before they disintigrated and then glue them into slome semblance of stable rigidity with a thick layer of butter. The cheese my wife had bought (from Poundland so I shouldn't complain too much), on cutting felt decidedly rubbery for what was desribed as extea mature cheddar. I tasted a bit and wished I hadn't. A more tasteless elastic mass I have never before put into my mouth exept as a child when I used to eat my pencil-top erasers in class out of boredom with the lessons (another subject I must adress at some point!). No, I tell a lie - the erasers tasted better. This 'thing' was so far removed from anything recognisable as cheese that it could have stolen first prize in an 'animal, vegetable, mineral' competition any day of the week. I progressed to the tomato - not a good colour, not a nice red that would fire the loins of any self-respecting bull eyeing the jacket of a tourist in a west-country feild, but a wishy orange streaked yellow red, a neither here nor there red, a not really red at all red. I sliced of a ...slice. No seeds and juice - just that mushy bit that normally sits in the central section. Slice again - more mush. Slice mush. Slice mush. I breathed a bit through my nose and turned the remnant through 90 degrees. Slice mush. Eye twitch. Slice seeds! Slice seeds! At last I had hit pay-dirt and I wasn't giving up now untill the mine ran dry. Four slices in - just enough to barely cover the cheese lying like a pvc cover on my air pocket peppered bread (a culinary version of the memory foam matress) - the mine ran dry. Still it was enough. More out of a sense of cynical prescience than out of any genuine expectation I popped the last piece of tomato into my mouth. Yep - tasteless as shit. A mushy-pap pulpy mess of tastless pith and skin. Not the remotest resmblance to what a real tomato tastes like; not even in the same universe as the tomato's of my youth, those dark red sweet and juicy globes that were heaven to eat all alone with a squirt of salad cream or a shot of salt and viniger.

Somehow I had to inject some flavor into this thing that was to serve as my main sustenence in the eight hours ahead. To date the entire list of the ingedients of my sandwhich had been without exeption as devoid of anything even approaching flavor as the packaging they were wrapped in. The sweet lamb of flavor had been mercilessly hung on the foul gibbet of shelf-life, drawn on the bloody alter of processing, quatered on the smug decking of healthy eating. Anything remotely nutrtious or flavorsome had been ruthlessly extracted, mercilessly driven out, spirited away on the chariot of modern 'food science'. "The bastards! The complete bastards!", I said to myself. Little wonder that more children proportionately are being admitted to hospital with malnutrition now than were done so fifty years ago. The processing of food and the modification (genetic or otherwise) carried out to increase shelf life and thus profitability have slaughtered the nutritional value of our food. And the food industry is proud, I say proud of this! Adverts like 'Why sell them meat when you can sell them water' abound in the meat trade journals. Bakers joke that the current aim is to make as much water stand up on it's own as possible. Nutritional value is washed out of grain and used to feed pigs and we are fed the remaining husk ground up for bread and cereals. Long-life fruit is sold on the supermarket shelves as if to our advantage. 'Ripen at home peaches' that simply never ripen at all but wither dirctly from the hard unripened state they are sold in. Meat with no fat, cereal with no salt, food with no taste.

I looked disconsolately into the cuboard. Taste, taste, how to get it. Ahh - there we have it. Mustard and pickle. A good teaspoon of each and things were looking better. Against all the rules of hygene I licked the spoon clean and the resulting blast of umami made my eyes roll back in my head. There - thats what I want. I don't want to live for ever. I don't want to look like a twenty year old at eighty. I don't even mind paying a bit more for my food. Just please, please, please stop fucking around with my grub. I want to tast my food!

When I am sixteen I can join the army and be shot at for a living. I can decide I am homosexual (or indeed heterosexual) and persue a relationship to the limits of it's ...er....limits. I can have a baby, get married, leave school, get a full time job, pay taxes and go to jail. But I can't buy a cigarette, I can't buy a drink and I can't cast a vote. Who makes up these rules?

Now I am fifty I can drink, smoke (and vote) myself to death. I can buy 2 kg of chocolate a day and eat untill I'm fifty f*****g stone - but I can't buy a breakfast cereal with enough salt in it so I can actually taste the mushy-pap crap. Who I ask again, makes up these stupid f*****g rules!

"Formerly when religion was strong and science was weak, men mistook magic for medicine. Now when science is strong and religion weak men mistake medicine for magic."

So goes the quote from Thomas Szasz in his 1973 work 'Science and Scientism'. That we still place an almost unreserved trust in the medical proffession and it's ability to heal our ills goes without saying but the following two anecdotes should serve to illustrate it's limitations and bring what can and can't be expected of it back into perspective. Some ten years ago my father in law started having pains in his abdomen. he went to the doctor who diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome and prescribed a peppermint based preparation that had no effect whatsoever. For 18 or so months Ted returned intermittently to the GP with the same complaint which, while he could live with, was making his life uncomfortable. After this period had elapsed the GP referred Ted, in his 70's, to a consultant. The wait for the consultants appointment was some 6 months, by which time the trouble was getting more problematic and he was clearly loosing weight. The consultant recognised that something was amis and within two weeks Ted was attending his local hospital for scans etc to determine the nature of the problem, Sure enough the expected diagnosis of cancer of the large intestine was made and a short while later we took Ted in to have a colostomy opperation.

As we waited in the waiting room for Ted to be admitted we were given some information to read about his forthcoming opperation. Sucess (if it can be called such) was, we were informed entierly dependant on early diagnosis. The leaflet gave a range of 'five fear survival rates' based on the speed of the diagnosis being made after the condition had developed. If diagnosed in six months, survival rates after five years were good. After 1 year, a little less so. After two years (Ted's diagnosis time) the chances of being alive in five years time were pretty bleak. Given our situation I breathed hard but did not make the observation that had Teds GP reffered him at the outset then we would have been in a much better situation and it remained to be seen how much that delay was going to cost him!

The colostomy was performed and for the next 18 months or so Ted muddled along, not unwell but not well either. After this period of time he was again feeling pretty rotten and was refered again to see his consultant who carried out a colonoscopy examination and gave him the all clear. Ted began to loose weight and suffer from collapses and following a particularly nasty one of these was readmitted to hospital. A CAT scan was carried out and again the all clear was given. Ted was sent home after being given a 'talking to' by the nurse. "You have to eat." she told him. "No wonder you are falling over all the time!"

Ted returned home and tried to follow the advice but he was feeling sick all the time and couldn't keep his food down anyway. He was as thin as a stick and it was obvious he was dying. Two days after returning home he collapsed, was readmitted to hospital and an exploratory opperation carried out. When we saw the egyptian doctor who had performed this he was grave. "I'm afraid your father is dying." he said to my wife (not too great a shock as I had already told her this some weeks before), "He has no functional bowel left due to the spread of the cancer and will pass away soon." Within three days he was dead. This a man who had been given an all clear by his consultant, an all clear by a CAT scan and sent home with the instructions to 'feed himself up' all within two weeks of being dead.

My second anecdote is a sad story concerning the father of a girl I work with. The man, in his fifties, was suffering chest pains, arm pains, pains in his jaw etc (ie all the normal indicators of heart problems) and attended his GP. He was referred to a consultant and a thorough examination was carried out. He was subjected to exercise stress on the treadmill, blood samples for heart function taken, ECG's and scans perforned. Given a clean bill of health the man was sent back to work. On the strength of this even the man's family started to doubt that his symptoms were 'for real' (this was one of the hardest things of all to deal with said the girl). He returned to work and then one evening a short while later died of a massive coronary heart attack. The doctors somewhat weakly said that 'other vessels in his heart must have been taking up some of the work-load and thus disguising his symptoms'. Cold comfort to the mans family I'm afraid.

My point in recounting these sad tales is important. Medicine is not magic. Make no mistake there is far, far more that doctors do not know about what goes on inside us than what they do. But here is the thing you have to remember - doctors are trying their best. They are doing what they have been taught - and are often fooled themselves by their own press. They have allowed this image of themselves as infalable beings to be built up in the public mind and have done nothing to stop it. They have flown high on borrowed wings and it is no suprise that often do they take a fall. And one final thing; medicine may when all is said and done be pretty weak - but it's the best we've got!

WTF is it with people and their kids. Last night in the shop we had a woman with a three(ish) year old boy on the shop floor and she let him run riot around the shop to the point where it was all I could do to stop myself telling her to f*** off out of it. He took the baskets we use for people to put their shopping in, scattered them all over the shop, used them as a sled to ride around the shop, put them on his feet and did every thing but go for a crap in them. He knocked stuff of shelves ran around the shop screaming and shouted in rage if anyone so much as atttempted to restrain him. The woman for her part felt that all that was needed was to shout at his screaming voice (where ever it happened to be coming from) while she atempted to make the difficult decision as to whether to buy a pound of Galaxy chocolate, or a pound of Cadbury's. At no point did she see the need to heave her 24 stone bulk to whatever part of the shop he was destroying and actually restrain him by hand. When I attempted to take a basket from him that he was driving into the shelf displays she looked at me as though I was trying to cut his throat in an act of ritual slaughter. In the end the situation resolved itself when he left the shop under his own steam and I politely said to her "Is your child alright going out into the road on his own." At that point she developed the speed of a racing greyhound and dissapeared to be seen no more - hopefully for good.

This phenomena is not unusual. The idea that everybody else must be as indulgent with a child as it's besotted parents seems to be the order of the day and undoubtedly some parents even revel in the chaos their children are causing in public places. What they fail to realise is that shop enviroments can be dangerous. There is large amounts of heavy stock being shifted from place to place and a small child does not fare well with three hundred weight of stock on its head. And this is not the all of it. How many weak innefectual people have I seen come into that shop bawling and screaming at their poor cowed children just because they are the only thing on the planet that has to, or will, take it from them. They come to the till to spend £30 on scratch-cards, booze and fags and then rage when the child picks up a twenty pence chewee bar. They shout to the world "Look at me - I've got kids. I'm the one in controll here, and being a mother is sooo stressfull!" Never mind that the only work they ever did was to lie on their backs with their legs in the air for ten minutes and we've all been paying the bill for it ever since. The idea that a child has to be physically restrained untill it is old enough to understand verbal commands eg by 'reins' or holding it's hand, seems to be lost in the lazy vacuousness of modern parenting. 'Discipline' has become a dirty word and we have and continue to produce children who have no idea of what it means to exercise self-restraint on their own lives - and one day (if it is not already) society will pay the price for this.

In Tesco's ( I did a short stint working there as a shelf-stacker) I always remember a woman coming down the isle calling out "Byron! Byron! Behave yourself Byron!" I thought to myself that she clearly had no idea of whom she had named her wayward son after and would no doubt reap full 'Byronic' returns as the years went by. And snacking, What is that all about. Is that what used to be called 'eating between meals' and deeply frowned upon in my parents day. Again in Tesco's I remember hearing a 20 stone women turning to her porcine children and saying "Right - we've got the meals sorted out, now what do you want for snacking on." Tempted as I was to suggest a bag of lemons I kept a judicial silence. Day in and day out I witness obese parents feeding their children on nothing but a diet of coke, pizzas, pot noodles and pringles. And I'm talking barely more than infants. It is no suprise whatsoever to me that cases of 'malnutrition' in children recorded in hospitals are at a higher level than at any other time in the last eighty years. These parents cannot feed themselves let alone make the right dietary choices for their kids. What is going on in a house when someone has to come out at 10.45 pm to buy a tin of baby food. Is that, "Oh shit - I forgot to buy any food for the baby at all - better go get a tin" or something like that? Is that not frightening?

Haircuts and tatto's are another thing. Why do parents eem to need to make their children become little clones of them selves. Dad, shaven head and 'Engerland!' t-shirt; ditto ten year old son. They stand glaring beligerantly over the till side by side for all the world like those stupid 'nodding dogs' you see in the back of car windows. It seems to be the parents greatest desire to instill their own sense of anti-social irresponsibility into the child at the earliest possible instant. The latest craze is to have a v shaped block of hair extending from the nape of the neck up over the crown. It is all I can do to stop myself from saying "Excuse me mate - I think you've got a fanny crawling up the back of your head." Match magazine - a kids football magazine regularly comes with a fake 'tattoo sleve' for your kid to pull up over his arm to make him look lihe Vinnie Jones or Wayne Rooney. Why don't they throw in a couple of 50 yo hookers and a schoolgirl to 'roast' as well. Please learn parents - your kids will become anti-social parasites in their own good time without your encouragement, so let it be. In the meantime if I never clap eyes on one of the blighters again - it will be too soon!

Last Thursday I made a visit to my local library. I had been on a website and had come across the opening paragraph of Herman Melville's classic novel 'Moby Dick'. Inspired by the prose of that small sample I decided to read the book in full and thus my afore mentioned visit.
I first searched for the book on the computer terminal in the hallway - well that is I would have had not the screen informed me that the search contained terms that were outside the library's 'acceptable use policy' - must have been the word dick I guess - so I proceeded to the desk where two women were buisily engaged, one with a magazine and the other with a mobile phone into which she was texting something of no-doubt national import. After a brief wait while it registered that someone was at the desk one of the women asked if she could help me. " I'd like a copy of 'Moby Dick' please" I said.
The woman tapped away at a keyboard, looked puzzled, tapped some more, clicked with a mouse a few times and then finally looked pleased. Turning to her workmate she said "Have you had trouble logging in today?" to which her friend replied in the affirmative. "Now, what was it you were after?" she said, returning to me, the complex problem of logging in having been resolved. "Dick", I replied (no I didn't - I just thought it was funny.) With some irritation now beginning to creep in I was perhaps a little sharper in my reply than normal. "Moby Dick". "Ah yes", she said and once more we began the tapping game. "How would Large Print be?", "Fine", "It's out on long loan - due back in October."
I breathed out through my nose and said slowly "Have you anything to hand; a small print version, even an audio one would be ok." She looked again. "It's not much in demand", she said apologetically, "I think you're out of luck". "Never mind - I'll just have to cast my net a little wider." She winked at me in a conspiratorial manner "Be carefull what you catch".  I was tempted to reply "Well, it won't be Moby Dick will it!", but refrained. My library is pretty centrally positioned so I thought I'd run over to a nearby large bookstore and buy one of those cheap 'Wordsworth' editions for a couple of quid that bookshops sell of out of copyright classics. On the way out of the library I noted that there were three copies of Katie Price's (aka ex page 3 model Jordan) latest ghost written novel (everything else about her is fake from her marriages to her t*t's - why should her novel be any different) with which I could console myself if I chose. Ariving at Waterstone's I went to the section where the cheap classics were normally kept only to discover that they were no longer stocking these cut-price ranges. I could still purchase the book in a glossy Penguin edition for £8.99 or a hardback copy for £17.99.  I turned away thwarted at the last. I would have to make do with what I could dig up at home. Perhaps Frank Frazetta's "Death-Dealer: Prisoner of the Horned Helmet" would be worth another read. Give me culture, but.........no - 'but' nothing! Give me culture full stop - I'm certainly not going to bloody well pay for it!

I fear for the Olympic opening ceremony. If last Mondays 'Queens Jubilee Concert' was anything to go by we are in for the most excruciating few hours of national shame ever to be foisted onto a people by it's govenors. Dig your hole now is my advice - the ground may need a bit of help swallowing all of us at once.

What went wrong you may ask. Well, aside from the questionable wisdom of making an 86 yo woman sit through three hours of ancient rock and pop music out in the cold it's difficult to know where to start. The presenters is as good a place as  I suppose. To put (supposedly) cutting edge comedians in as link artists between the acts was folly in the extreme. They could not perform their normal material that (supposedly) makes them funny because it is pepered with F words and obscenity and they could not make the palsied matereal they were given (or allowed) anything other than embarrasing to watch. They were emasculated to a one by the setting and should not have touched it with a barge pole. The spectacle of Rolf Harris trying to get the crowd to sing 'Two Little Boys' as a time filler will ever be seared into my shuddering memory - but ten out of ten to the old trooper for having a go; a true proffesional even if he does have a pencant for over schmaltzy sentiment. Peter Kay gave sighns of being alive, but only just and similarly Lenny Henry.

But for me the main problem was the artists them selves. We were treated to a fistfull of aged performers battleing to belt out thier oldie hit songs in the way they did forty years ago and failing miserably. They croaked the high notes; they avoided them altogether if they coud, thereby ruining the songs; they swivelled thier arthritic hips with barely concealed groans of pain as they pretended to be young again for a day. There was not the one of them that you didn't want to sit down with a mug of coco and put a blanket across thier knees. Elton John, Paul McArtney, Cliff Richard - do your self respect a favour and never - never - set foot on a stage again. Notable exeptions here were Tom Jones who sounded as good as ever and (amazingly) Grace Jones whose hip swivelling skills would have put a Bankok ladyboy on the catwalk to shame. Stevie Wonder could just about pass muster and JLS did what they do tolerably but Gary Barlow and Cheryl Coles almost complete abcence of talent when away from the tweaked world of the recording studio was clear for all to see.

Now the point is this. All this was ok to us and even bought a lump to our throats because we know these people. These are our institutions, our history. It will not however cut it with the rest of the world. What we can forgive in the rose tinted wash of our sentimentality on our Queens day, will not do for the rest of the world. I read aghast that Sir Paul McArtney is to close the opening ceremony of the Olympics. (Noooo!!..........echoing away down into the pit of pre-disaster anticipation) No - this will not do. China gives the world 50,000 people choreographed to almost automaton levels of synchronicity and complexity with men with jet packs flying all over the arena and we offer up Paul McArtney. Please guys - please! Do not do this to us! We do ceremony better than any country in the world (exept perhaps the yanks) - let us do what we are good at. Or perhaps even better - do nothing at all. I mean it. Do nothing - scale it back to zilch rather than stage a fiasco of past it rock stars and ill prepared kids and comedians for the world to laugh at. We deserve better.