Two sided stories blog

A Bridge not big enough?

Footballers who get to the top of their profession play in the English premier league. But nearly all English players retain a little bit of pride in playing for their country too, so is Wayne Bridge being a bigger man by refusing to play for his country because... because...

what the hell is it because?

I am all for discouraging adultery - and the England player Terry was stripped of the England captaincy because he "played away", as in, he is a married man, he fell for the charms of a serial shagger of soccer players.

In this case, this one had happened to spend a little bit of time, previously, as in 'long ago finished with', Wayne Bridge, a former club and erstwhile England team mate...

Now I can get that this might be mildly upsetting - seeing your ex with another guy you thought was your friend, but have the words "get over it" not been rightly said to Wayne in this context?
To give up your England career, because that is what he is saying in effect, seems to be a bit daft. His colleagues say his mental state has been crumbling due to this event, and while he may be ready to play opposite Terry as a club opponent, he is only just this close to having to take a complete break from the game.

Sorry Wayne, but if this is over your ex going on to shag someone else, then Football was never the career for you in the first place... and you can bet that unless you come back now no future England manager is going to have you down as first choice for left back.

the average Joe soccer punter on the street may not be the sharpest on emotional psychology but will wonder why anyone who earns that much money and attracts that many soccer shagger types in every night club can get upset over the similar idiocies of another over paid player.

An every day story of indecent exposure being completely misunderstood.
the title linked piece is being rightly pursued as a ridiculous way to treat a breast feeding mother...
I agree - people should be allowed to breast feed in public (unless the recipient is an adult who should know better.)

The bus driver and anyone else who objects should realise that exposing ones breasts is not an offence anywhere...never mind if there's a baby suckling a well hidden boob under a sloppy jumper-

they don't really object to this...

they just don't like seeing real, less glamorous ones being used for their main purpose... pathetic..

Anna Ford.

I always thought there was more than the looks that made me find her attractive, made me switch my news viewing habits way back when.
Then she went on to set up TVAM with David Frost and others. Those others including Jonathan Aitken, then just a rich Tory PR scum bag, rather than proven to be a lying, bribing, cheating arrogant Tory MP convicted of contempt of court,- scumbag.

She threw a glass of wine over him in public when she learned of his role in selling out the fledgling station and dismissing her from the presenting team. As it turned out this was much less than he deserved, as his arrogance proved too much for his own survival and hubris landed him in prison for contempt of court.

Her latest attack is on the godfather of her own daughter, Mr Martin Amis, the well known arrogant misogynist writer, son of the also well known arrogant misogynist writer, Kingsley.
She details in her open letter (see title linked story) just how self obsessed and uncaring he really is in his private life, utterly ignoring the request of Anna's dying husband to be their daughter's godparent, and generally behaving like a spoiled schoolboy who got lucky and inherited the head boy's typewriter.

I have never read a Martin Amis novel.
I have read a short piece of his in the paper and heard him interviewed on an arts programme, and until then might have been persuaded by the sway of popular sales to try a novel. But these exposures swayed me against him, and now Anna Ford seems to help make it clear why my almost instinctive judgement of him was correct. I would rather whiny spoiled brats like him rotted, wingeing, unread, in some preppy study room full of smoke, than buy one of his books.

So, here's to you Anna.
As well as being a strong woman, done down by the system, you remain a hero of taste in a world where deference to rich, nominally "successful" men, no matter how shallow their characters, is utterly undeserved but somehow expected.

What does a murderer look like?
Many times you hear neighbours talk of how they were the nice quiet type, and what a surprise it is to learn that nice Mr Shipman killed all those people.

The Dubai authorities have now shown us what a typical Israeli hit squad looks like. They have also revealed how they will clone passports of people living in their own country - for the convenience of being able to use deception at national border controls to carry out murders abroad.
The picture (right) shows a smiling assassin having had his photo pasted into an Irish citizen's passport in order to be part of the squad that took out a Hamas leader in Dubai.

There is a little bit of diplomatic upset about this, "How dare they use our citizens' passports?" our embassies are saying to the Israeli ambassadors. They might even give them a strict telling off and not allow them sugar in their coffee at the telling off meeting...
But very few are seeking to draw the long reign of terror of the Zionist regime to an end...
So very many still justify, at least to themselves to avoid guilt feelings, the murderous actions of the invading and occupying Israelis by saying "Aaah but the Palestinians are firing rockets at Israel"...

...a swallowing of Zionist propaganda that is equivalent to an American tribunal accepting the justifying of the Vietnamese My Lai massacre because a child spat at one of the US soldiers who had just shot his mother...

This is not "one bad apple" - this is fifty rotten barrels of Zionism and its blatant defiance of civilised states' moral codes. It is a way of invasion and occupation, backed by deceit and murder that needs to be stopped by international outrage.

nice objects...

These two artificially rounded rocks were dug up when we were excavating our garden to put in new beds and landscaping. The locals stroked their beards and pronounced them to be bowls - but ancient cheap bowls, like French boules, not the rounded biased wooden bowls the English regard as an institution.

The former pub that we inhabit gives a clue as to how these could get abandoned in the garden - which was first part of a pub, before 1600AD...

games have been played in this country for so very long, and I guess that on summer nights before we became a more indoor people, this would have been a popular pastime...

Front page of the Guardian today: "Lost genius" and "darkness has won".
- it is almost as if a Royal Queen, rather than a Mac Queen, had died...
and the inside first two pages are covered with the stories linked to in the title.
You might think that The Guardian was slightly too keen on hagiographies of Gay celebrities...they assume their audience places fashion in as important a place as politics, world affairs, literature and painting. Maybe they do, and I am out of touch. That would make me sadder about the shallowness of the Guardian readership...

I note from the google search pictured today that the hits for his high street available items dominates...shoes, bags, skull scarfs, perfume, at least until google catches up with his death. To me these searches are anathema, designer labels are like a Coronation street full of broken pencils, utterly pointless. However, unlike perhaps Jan Moir, of the Daily Wail, who will no doubt be thinking it is "part of the Gay disease", I am sad about his passing.

It is the manner of his death that makes me sad.
He killed himself, just as his mentor and friend Isabella Blow killed herself three years earlier...

Those of us who have worked with the suicidal know how it can run "in families" - farmers have a high suicide rate (covered over by coroners for many years due to the stigma). It is as though a son is given permission to take an early exit by the parental use of the same scheme.

In this case we had the prompting factor of his mother's death from natural causes, within the month, but hang on...was life really so bad?
Artists committing suicide following bad moods has a history, and yet ordinary people's suicides following mothers dying does not...

I have friends and professional contacts whose lives are enough to have made anyone depressed: abuse, bereavement, death of child, murder and assault, bankruptcy, war, refugee status, deportation...

What I am saying is that people whose lives are entirely focused on the power of their own egos appear to include suicide as a reliable escape option rather than understanding its cause and effects. Being too vain to admit to having problems when one has a persona of success is, I suspect, a big part of this. My anger at McQueen is that by doing as he has done, just like Blow, he too has laid down a model for others, for the fast escape from oneself.

I believe this escape is a pathetic one in the rich western world, one that vain people need to get past through hard, deconstructive and reconstructive work. People with real class, and a life that does not depend on shallow ideas of self, don't commit suicide because they have lost someone.

"Don't worship these celebrities" is something you will often hear or feel me saying - now it is underlined as even more true...and yet another model has been laid down for the unthinking, shallow persona worshipers to follow.

The darkness will truly have won if people are so wrapped up in the end of a flashy party that they cannot wait until dawn to understand the night and day cycle and the real work of a real life.

The Pope is due to visit the UK this coming year and has announced his desire to see women locked up and enslaved as was the tradition within the Catholic church for many of its centuries of abuse of power.

Archbishop Nichols, the great British drag queen and ring kisser in charge of "Catholics for regression to the dark ages" said that the Pope was not trying to meddle in party politics, "...but he wants his reasoned voice - formed by the treasures of the Christian heritage which is deeply embedded in our culture - to be heard."
Ahhh....
bless his little perverted brain.
The very idea that the Pope, and this archbishop, or their Christian heritage, with its history of the inquisition, inequality, torturing, abusing bastard of a hierarchy, designed to comfort the rich and take from the poor, can have a "reasoned voice" is beyond a bad joke.

If people with Islamic names can be put on no fly lists as suspected terrorists, then surely these threats to our hard won secular freedoms should be simply banned from entering the country?

Of course, they will argue that they have said sorry about the centuries of female subjugation but this latest assault shouting about going against natural laws (as if child abuse was within those same laws)...is about being forced to allow those horrid gay people to be allowed to teach in their faith schools.

Why any gay person could be seen to be so desperate for a job as to want to work under the strictures of these homophobic Neanderthals is beyond me, but the law is there to create equality of opportunity ...
this is clearly a concept beyond the Pope's understanding.
This is also not surprising.
What is surprising is that we are still offering deference to something way beyond religious freedom in the fact of state support for any of these faith schools. Funding them in any part from general taxation is anathema to a modern free democratic society.

Maybe, just maybe, this will be the test, and create a rising up of public opinion that shows the government that its time to stop feeding these predatory priests their delusions with this gravy train of public funding.