Jack Havana's World of Crap

Celebrities in Need (....of a Good Slapping)

2009-11-20T01:41:00.001Z

This was first published on 17 November 2006, which just goes to prove: in the World of Crap, shit really does flow in cycles.....

CHILDREN WHO HAVE been bullied, sexually abused, forced into prostitution or who suffer a disability will tonight put their personal woes to one side to help people even more disadvantaged than themselves – vain, shallow, self-satisfied celebrities.
Thousands of children are allowing their personal tales of heartache and grief to be exploited so that a bunch of smug, overpaid TV presenters, soap stars and reality show winners can be given the fame and attention they crave. The BBC’s annual Celebrities in Need night will turn the spotlight on these pathetic, insecure outcasts from society who have failed to find contentment in their lavish lifestyles and obscenely huge wage packets. Though cunningly disguised to make it look like it is the celebrities who are helping the underprivileged kids, it is the children from broken homes and tragic backgrounds who are selflessly helping massage the celebrities’ egos. By allowing their stories to be told, they will be helping desperate cases like the stars of Strictly Come Dancing get the kind of publicity that other celebrities can only dream of – the kind that comes with a generous sugar-coating of “being for a worthwhile cause”.
So Matthew, aged 12, doesn’t mind his parents’ alcoholism being used by Natasha Kaplinsky to bolster a CV that already reads: ballroom dancer, wife of an investment banker and accomplished autocue-reader. And nine-year-old Sammy can laugh off the beatings he received from his drug-dealing dad knowing that he is helping bring Fearne Cotton to a wider audience. “Thanks to the suffering of children like these, more people than ever now know exactly what it is that Fearne Cotton does,” a BBC spokesperson might have said.
Samantha, aged 15, turned to drugs after leaving home following the death of her mother. As her addiction grew worse, she was forced into prostitution to finance her habit. But after hearing that Jonathan Ross had selflessly agreed to make a guest appearance in his showbiz buddy David Walliams’ stage version of Little Britain, she now realises that all those nights without food, spent sleeping in shop doorways and being used and abused by punters were worth it.

WOGAN

Meanwhile, 14-year-old Annie has talked about the agony she suffered at the hands of school bullies, just to make a dream come true for the stars of Hollyoaks and Holby City, who, in a frenzy of self-indulgence, will be singing and dancing on tonight’s show. "I didn't have any friends and I hated going to school because the bullies made my life so awful. They called me names and wouldn't let me sit with anyone at lunch. I used to hide in the toilets. I only felt safe at home but I cried a lot, which made my mum sad, so I tried to hide it from her,” said brave Annie, before adding: “Does Terry Wogan really earn £26 a minute for his daily, two-hour radio show?”
Another bullying victim, 11-year-old Sam, said: "I used to be too scared to go to school. Kids used to say nasty things about me and took money off me. They also hit me and pushed me around.” But he takes consolation in the fact that if the bullies are watching tonight’s show, and endure it as far as Fiona Bruce and Dermot Murnaghan “presenting their unique tribute to James Bond” at 10.35pm, then he will truly have got his revenge.
Steven, now 14, was abused at the age of four by his grandmother's boyfriend. He also has cerebral palsy and finds it extremely difficult to communicate verbally. But thanks to the care and skills of trained counsellors and a modified computer, he is able to put his own torment to one side and let the cast of Bad Girls take centre stage to perform a Bananarama classic live in the studio.
But perhaps the most heart-warming moment tonight will involve a girl called Emma. She was only 11 when her milkman father and karate instructor mother divorced. For a while, little Emma’s life was in pieces. But she picked herself up, dusted herself down, and enrolled at the Sylvia Young Theatre School. Years of hardship and self-sacrifice followed as she pursued her dream of becoming a famous person who could have all her photographs airbrushed on demand. Finally, the day came when she was able to look at her mum through tear-stained eyes and say: “I’ve joined a group called the Spice Girls.” Tonight, thanks to the suffering of another little girl, eight-year-old Mary who has arthro-gydosis - which means she has no movement from her shoulders down, cannot play with her friends and has to be carried everywhere - Emma Bunton will get more of the fame and attention she has craved all her life, when she sings the official Celebrities in Need single.
Mary and the other brave youngsters can also take satisfaction from the fact that none of the celebrities will have to donate any money from their own massive salaries towards the charities that make the children’s lives more bearable. Last year, the public contributed £33 million to Celebrities in Need. That’s the equivalent of a state-of-the-art children’s hospital wing equipped with life-saving equipment. Or six kung-fu documentaries fronted by Jonathan Ross.
All the children recognise that so much money would never have been raised without the celebrities’ selfless acts of putting themselves in front of an adoring studio audience full of banner-waving grannies and people who still point at aeroplanes. They just wonder if a whip round in the BBC canteen might have raised just as much money and spared the rest of us six hours of televised celebrity self-love.
FOR MORE information on all the children mentioned above, and details of how to make a donation that doesn’t involve watching the cast of Two Pints of Lager And A Packet of Crisps pay tribute to Wham!, click here.
And don’t forget, the next big charity celebrity love-in will take place next March 16 2007, which has been renamed Celebrity Hand Relief Day.
© Jack Havana 2006. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without a donation to a children’s charity of Jack’s choice.
This week, Jack Havana unsuccessfully applied for the job of……
……..Minister for Terror. Gordon Brown and John Reid are both playing the “terror” card in their bid to become Tony Blair’s successor, but not doing a very good job of it. Brown just wants to bang suspects up without charge for three months at a time, while Reid doesn’t appear to know what he’s talking about. When asked why no arrests had been made in connection with the 30 active terrorist plots revealed this week by MI5, he told Radio Four’s Today programme: “We have information that the plots are active, but no evidence.” Hmmm. Obviously this is a job for Jack Havana, as regular readers will know. (See Fear of Flying here)

This Goverment Will Drive You To Drink....

2009-09-03T11:21:00.002+01:00

I'M HAPPY the Lockerbie bomber was allowed to go home to die. I, like many people, including families of the victims, believe he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice anyway. It's a shame the incompetence of the Scottish legal system will not now be exposed at an appeal hearing. And this is the nub of the matter. It's not about trade agreements, and it's most definitely not about "Scottish compassion", as Kenny McAskill and Alex Salmond repeatedly claimed, as if the SCots have a monopoly on the trait. It's about the utter ineptitude of the SNP in particular, and Scotland's collective chip on the shoulder about it being a small player on a very large political playing field.
It's well chronicled that Scotland has one of the highest rates of drink-related crime and illness in the civilised world. There are lots of things it could do about it, like impose tougher sentences on offenders or launch realistic education programmes. Instead, it has done this, with effect from this week: banned the sale of alcohol before 10 am in supermarkets.
For the love of Christ, can someone please tell me how this will stop all those moronic drunks stabbing each other outside nightclubs at 1 am in the morning? In the name of Alex Salmond's sporran, can someone explain to me how preventing an honest, God-fearing citizen from trying to beat the rush and do his weekly shop early in the morning(including buying some wine) is going to stop a load of crusty-skinned jakeys getting high on Buckfast down at the local park?
And for the love of decency and common sense everywhere, please can we not vote SNP at the next Scottish election?

The Extraordinary Case of the Englishman, the Racist and Sheriff Norrie Stein

2009-03-28T10:14:00.005Z

A summary of a criminal court case heard at Arbroath Sheriff’s Court on Wednesday 25 March 2009.

“Sheriff Stein clearly has trouble recognising anti-Englishness as vile and offensive”

By a Special Correspondent

A 48-YEAR-OLD GRANDMOTHER was found guilty of racially abusing an Englishman – but walked free from court with an admonishment. (According to this correspondent’s legal dictionary, an admonishment is given only when “an offence is considered trifling”)
Valerie Mary MacKinnon, of Auchmithie, by Arbroath, had pleaded not guilty to a charge of racially aggravated breach of the peace against her neighbour Mr. Trevor Ward at an address in the village on 28 September last year.
Sheriff Norrie Stein ruled that it “was beyond reasonable doubt” that MacKinnon had used the words “fucking Englishman” towards Mr. Ward. He told her: “I’m afraid you now have a criminal record." But he then added: "Several years ago you would probably have been found not guilty, but these days people are more sensitive to these issues.”

SHOCKED

Mr. Ward and his wife Catherine were visibly shocked at the Sheriff’s words.
Earlier in his summing up, Sheriff Stein had said: “I don’t think either of the two parties come out of this with credit.” He said he had found Mr. Ward’s manner in the witness box “overbearing”, and added: “The manner of Mr. Ward played a part in the escalation of this [incident]”.
I leave the reader to form their own opinion of the Sheriff’s words after first considering the facts of the case as agreed by both parties.
In her evidence to the court, the defendant MacKinnon admitted/agreed to all of the following:

That she had moved to the village just four weeks before the incident
That on the evening of Saturday 27 September last year, she had been hosting a party in her kitchen which was just inside her front door, and that her front door was less than ten yards from the Wards’ bedroom window
That she had been playing music, and it “may have been a bit loud.”
That she had been drinking
That Mr. Ward had knocked on her door at 1.30 am and, pointing at his watch, said: “I think it’s time to put a lid on it.”
That she replied “OK” and closed the door
That she then turned down the music
That the following morning at approximately 9.30 am, in a case of mistaken identity, she went to the house of neighbour Mrs. Margaret Spink and said: “Tell your son that if he has a problem with me playing my music, I don’t want him coming round to my door. Tell him to call the police instead.”
That she walked away before Mrs. Spink could say anything in reply
That shortly afterwards, Mr. Ward knocked on her door, but before he could say anything she told him he was “a freak” and repeated what she had said to Mrs. Spink.
That she closed her door before Mr. Ward could say anything in reply
That approximately 20 minutes later she went to Mr. Ward’s house and repeated that if he had a problem with her music, he should call the police.
That Mr. Ward sat down on his doorstep and said: “Can I say something?”
That she called Mr. Ward “an Englishman”.
That Mr. Ward said to her: “Welcome to the village”.
That before, between and since these encounters, there had been no contact between her and Mr. Ward.

All of the above was admitted readily by MacKinnon under cross examination from prosecuting counsel Ms Nicola Gillespie.
In his evidence, Mr. Ward had claimed that MacKinnon had sworn repeatedly at him, calling him “a fucking freak” and “a fucking Englishman”.
MacKinnon claimed she had not sworn at Mr. Ward. She admitted that calling Mr. Ward “an Englishman” was strange, but that she was “upset and angry.”
She had found Mr. Ward to be “aggressive” and “vindictive”, though agreed that it had been her who had sought him out twice the following morning.
Mr. Ward’s wife, Catherine, told the court she had been behind their living room door during the final encounter between her husband and MacKinnon. She had clearly heard the defendant call her husband “a fucking Englishman.” Her husband had been “calm” throughout.

RULING

For the benefit of the reader, I now repeat what the Sheriff said in his ruling: “The manner of Mr. Ward played a part in the escalation of this [incident]”.
And I now repeat the sum total of words spoken by Mr. Ward during his three encounters with the defendant, as accepted in court by both sides:
“I think it’s time to put a lid on it.”…..“Can I say something?”…..“Welcome to the village.”
In her closing remarks, prosecution counsel Ms Gillespie argued that the use of the word “Englishman” alone was sufficient to bring in a guilty verdict.
Defence counsel Mr. Nicholas Whelan meanwhile chose to remind the Sheriff of how, when asked in court what he thought of the defendant, Mr. Ward had described her as “a piece of scum.” He said: “Does that perhaps tell you anything about the type of person Trevor Ward is?”
The Sheriff ruled that it had been “proven beyond reasonable doubt” that MacKinnon had used the words “fucking Englishman”. (And thereby acknowledged that she had lied repeatedly in the witness box)

SPINKS V SWANKIES

Before passing sentence, Sheriff Stein said: “This brings to mind a case in Auchmithie from 1905 involving the Spinks and the Swankies. Mrs. Swankie sued Mrs. Spink, but the Sheriff found in favour of a counter-claim from Mrs. Spink for £10 damages. It seems that this is almost such a case.”
Preparing for sentence, defence counsel Mr. Whelan told the Sheriff that his client’s husband “had sufficient income to meet any financial penalty the court may impose”.
But Sheriff Stein surprised counsel by telling MacKinnon: “Several years ago you would probably have been found not guilty, but these days people are more sensitive to these issues. However, you have no previous convictions and are clearly not one of the criminal classes, so I am admonishing you"

The Victim Responds

2009-03-28T10:10:00.011Z

"Punishment is necessary to defend the honor or the authority of him who was hurt by the offence so that the failure to punish may not cause his degradation." - 17th century Dutch jurist and statesman Hugo Grotius.

"I WAS NOT ALLOWED to respond to the Sheriff's ruling in court, so here I give my opinion of his decision:
According to the index of legal terms at the National Archives of Scotland, the definition of an admonishment is: “If a person is found guilty, and the offence is considered trifling, or there are special circumstances associated with the accused or the offence, the court may dismiss the person with an admonition.”
If Sheriff Stein did not believe this offence of racial abuse to be “trifling”, then what were the special circumstances? Let us look at the possibilities.
Sheriff Stein says: “I don’t think either of the two parties come out of this with credit.”
He goes on to say that my manner had “played a part in the escalation” of the incident. What exactly had I done to merit such rebukes?
I was woken up by the sound of my neighbour’s loud music at 1.30 am on a Sunday morning. Should I have just let it continue, possibly for the rest of the night? Should I have called the police immediately? Was I wrong to decide to deal with the matter by going around to my neighbour’s door and, in a manner that was pitched deliberately midway between “meek and mild” and “aggressive” ask her to “put a lid on it”?
In court, defence counsel repeatedly suggested that I had been “aggressive”, and three times I had to correct him, describing my manner as “assertive”. It was 1.30 am in the morning. Surely, at the very least, I was entitled to be “assertive”? (My wife, in her evidence, also rebutted defence counsel’s suggestion that I had been “aggressive”. She described my manner as “forceful”.)
As agreed by both sides in court, the sum total of my words to the defendant had amounted to:
“I think it’s time to put a lid on it.”
“Can I say something?”
“Welcome to the village”
And yet the Sheriff deemed this sufficient for me to “have played a part in the escalation” of the incident.
The Sheriff then said that he had found my manner in the witness box to be “overbearing”, which is defined as “domineering” or “dictatorial”. Let us consider what may have made the Sheriff come to this conclusion.
First, the defence counsel, as described above, was repeatedly trying to put words into my mouth.
Second, when defence counsel asked me what my mood was the following morning – i.e. AFTER MacKinnon had abused me at her house, but BEFORE she racially abused me at my house – I had said it was one of “resignation” to the fact that we had a new neighbour who, it seemed, was “a piece of scum” - “inconsiderate” enough to play her music loudly at 1.30 am in the morning without having had the courtesy to warn any of her immediate neighbours. I make no apologies for my choice of language. Subsequent events – i.e. MacKinnon calling me a “fucking Englishman” – would appear to vindicate me. Yet in his closing remarks, defence counsel asked the Sheriff to consider what my choice of words told him about the “type of person Trevor Ward is.”
Thirdly, what did my manner in court have to do with my manner at the time of the offence? Could Stein have been embarrassed by my intervention from the public gallery when prosecution counsel began questioning my wife, and neither he nor counsel realised she referred to the wrong day in her opening question? There was a pause as my wife - already tense - was confused by the reference to the wrong day. Only when it became apparent that neither she, nor Stein, nor counsel, were going to correct the fact, did I interject - politely - from my seat in the gallery.
Fourthly, why were the police officers who attended the incident not called to give evidence in person? If they had been, they would have told the court that my manner throughout had been calm, considered and credible. They would have also told the court just how upset my wife had been.
Finally, if I came across as “overbearing”, could it have been anything to do with the fact that my wife and I – especially my wife – had endured six months of stress and worry since the incident; six months in which we had to read about MacKinnon pleading not guilty at two previous court hearings; six months during which my wife had been terrified to step outside our front door for fear of bumping into MacKinnon.
Before admonishing MacKinnon, the Sheriff was almost apologetic as he said to her: “Several years ago you would probably have been found not guilty, but these days people are more sensitive to these issues.”
I would like to place on record my sincere apologies to both MacKinnon and Sheriff Stein for being so sensitive about being called “a fucking Englishman” by a woman whom I had simply asked to turn her music down. (While I'm at it, let me also apologise for being sensitive when on 20 June 2008 at the junction of East Mary Street and Millgate Loan, Arbroath, I called the police after a female had taken offence at my English accent and told me to "get back to fucking England and get a fucking job down there". She was subsequently charged with breach of the peace, though I had no witnesses to confirm her racist abuse, and the case never went to court. Also, on Christmas Eve 2008 at Weatherspoons pub in Arbroath, when I remonstrated with a man who pushed in front of me at the bar, I was a bit sensitive when he replied: "At least I'm from around here." Though bar staff and customers saw the altercation, they all claimed not to have heard the racist's words......)
The Sheriff then referred to a neighbourly dispute between the Spinks and the Swankies in Auchmithie from 1905. His was, in effect, comparing MacKinnon’s offence of racial abuse with a neighbour’s tiff. He also implied that I was lucky not to be sitting in the dock myself.
Sheriff Stein is completely out of touch with the real world. He is a relic from the period he so lovingly recalled in court, i.e. 1905. His ruling makes a mockery of the Scottish government’s commitment to anti-racism initiatives.
Like many of his fellow Scots, he clearly has trouble recognising anti-Englishness as every bit as vile and offensive as other forms of racism. He has effectively said that it is OK for a Scot to racially abuse his or her English neighbour as they will not receive any financial or custodial penalty.
Sheriff Stein has no awareness of how anti-English Scotland is a on a day to day basis. I am referring to the subtle anti-English slant of so many stories in the Scottish press – tabloids and broadsheets – and the almost total absence of non-Scottish faces and voices from Scottish-produced TV and radio programmes.
His is not the message the courts should be sending out when the number of reported race and hate crimes in Scotland has almost doubled in the last five years(according to the Scottish Government Statistical Bulletin: Recorded Crime in Scotland 2006/07)

My wife and I put our faith in the courts, and have been badly let down. Not only has MacKinnon walked free without even a fine, she did not even recieve a stern word from the Sheriff. Instead it was me who bore the brunt of his disdain.

To add insult to injury, I only learned in the course of the Sheriff's summing up that a second charge against MacKinnon of breach of the peace had been dropped because of "insufficient evidence". This is despite the fact police were called to the scene twice within an hour and MacKinnon was arrested and taken into custody. On top of that, I gave police video recordings of her behaviour relating to the charge.

I have no resentment towards the police over this whole matter at all. I suspect they secretly share my resentment at Sheriff Stein's spinelessness and betrayal of the most fundamental principles of justice.

And finally, if Sheriff Stein has any problem with any detail of my criticism, I would welcome an invitation from him to resolve the dispute in a higher court."

Curious Examples of Sheriff Stein's Inconsistency

2009-03-28T10:00:00.000Z

IN THE COURT CASE described above, in which a 48-year-old grandmother was convicted of racially abusing a neighbour after pleading not guilty, Sheriff Norrie Stein ruled that the offence did not merit a custodial sentence, fine or compensation to the victim.

In the same week, he presided over the following two cases, in which the defendants, rather than wasting the court's time, both pleaded guilty to their offences.

Daniel George Reid Smith (28), of Stoneycroft Lane, Arbroath, was fined £100 after admitting committing a breach of the peace by climbing on a roof and threatening to kill himself by jumping.

Steven Michael Quigley (44), of Noran Avenue, Arbroath, admitted throwing a radio at a window, causing the outer pane of double glazing to smash. He was ordered to pay £100 compensation to the occupant, and £130 to Angus Council for the window.

Letter From An Englishman Abroad

2009-03-11T07:28:00.000Z

THIS PIECE FIRST APPEARED ON THE EVE OF THE SCOTTISH ELECTION IN 2007. DESPITE A NEW GOVERNMENT, NOTHING HAS CHANGED......

DEAR ALL,
It’s been another typical week in a Third World country. I went to do my shopping at the local supermarket yesterday morning, but you are banned from buying alcohol before 12.30 on a Sunday. I’m not sure whether there is a high incidence of drink-driving or drink-related violence on Sunday mornings in this country – there certainly is on just about every other day of the week – but it’s a bugger for anyone who wants to do their weekly big shop at a “quiet” time of the week.
I know, I should be used to such anachronisms here by now, but the fact that we’ve got electricity and cars sometimes fools you into thinking it’s a modern, 21st century country. But then you read about millions of litres of untreated sewage being accidentally pumped into an estuary near the capital city – as happened here last week – and realise it’s not.
The place is baying for independence too, which seems strange considering that its only viable natural resource – oil – will run out in about 30 years, and there is no trace of any other form of sustainable revenue in the whole country. The call for independence is just another symptom of the chronic nationalism that afflicts the country.

RABID

As most civilised countries have learned, nationalism is only a short step away from xenophobia and racism, yet here it is openly encouraged by politicians of all parties and the media. The “National Flag” flies everywhere, it adorns many house windows and car windscreens, and the country’s “national day” – April 6 – has become increasingly more rabid in the four years I’ve lived here. OK, I know the English get out their bunting and St. George flags whenever the World Cup is on, but this place looks like it’s perpetually on the verge of declaring war on its neighbours. You’d never know that nearly a fifth of the people living here are non-natives. These “incomers” – including myself – are often made to feel very excluded in the face of such rampant nationalism.
It also makes the country appear incredibly small-minded and parochial, as if anything that happens outside its borders or that involves a non-native is of no interest whatsoever. This petty attitude can be found in the national press every day.

LICE

Take yesterday’s Sunday Times, for example. You might think a story about the US Postal Service issuing some special stamps to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first Star Wars film is about as exciting as lice. But the Sunday Times covered the story because three of the actors being featured on the stamps are Scottish. You might have heard of one of them – Ewan McGregor? The other two name-checked with palpable patriotic/parochial pride were Ray Parks and Ian McDiarmid. No, me neither.
The first paragraph, by the way, read: “Ewan McGregor, the Scots actor, is to be honoured……”(my italics). Notice how his nationality is considered of the utmost significance. A few pages on is another earth-shatteringly important story, this one about a nutritionist who is leading a campaign to save the goji berry. I know, it’s as if Iraq, Darfur and the hospital superbug had never happened. But the reason for this story’s significance could be gleaned from the first sentence: “Gillian McKeith, the Scots diet guru, is spearheading…..”(my italics).

MESS

Elsewhere in the same “quality” newspaper was a 1,00-word “story” about campers leaving a mess behind in some of “Scotland’s most pristine countryside”, accompanied by two big photographs and very little corroborating evidence. (One photo, for example, was a still from the movie Trainspotting featuring “Scots actor” Ewan McGregor, while the other showed a conveniently placed empty beer can next to a picnic bench).
Next to this was another “story” featuring a tenuous Tartan connection. According to it, the melting ice caps will open up new shipping routes between the North Atlantic and Pacific, necessitating the building of “a super harbour” in the Orkney Isles. This is all predicted to happen by the year 2050. As sensational revelations go, I’m sure you’ll agree this is well up there with the news Top Shop is issuing its customers with wristbands to prevent a stampede at the launch of its Kate Moss range this week.

BEER

Here’s some anecdotal evidence to prove how rife and suffocating the country’s parochialism is. I once spent a Friday night in a Scottish pub where the TV was tuned into Sky News, but with the sound turned down. I strained to read the headlines about the latest developments from around the world while the locals grew louder as they consumed vast quantities of beer. But at precisely 9.30 pm the din gave way to an expectant hush as the landlord changed channels and turned up the volume. I thought there might be a football match on so decided to hang around. In fact, it was an episode of a BBC Scotland “sitcom” about a pair of old Scottish codgers called Still Game. Laugh? I thought I’d never start. (Though the rest of the pub was convulsed in laughter for the next half hour. And it was a repeat)
Then, this week, I joined a debate on-line at Scotsman.com about the upcoming elections. I made the same point as mentioned above, that the Scottish media’s persistent obsession with the Scottish origins of people or events is verging on racism. Amongst the more considered replies I elicited were that I had committed an “outrageous slander on all Scots”, and “if ye dont like it... ye can always go hame”. Another comment, referring to a recent poll among Scots on independence, included this: “Of those responding that they want more powers in Scotland, only 4% said they personally disliked the English.” So that’s alright then. You can read the full comments here. (I signed myself as Davina’s Big Mouth, by the way.)

BINGO

The rest of the media is just as bad. There’s currently a TV ad promoting an on-line bingo company called BingoScotland. The slogan says it is for “bingo-loving Scots”. Which kind of excludes all those bingo-loving English, Welsh, Irish, Australian, Polish, Czech, Indian, Pakistani, Arab, etc., who live in the country.
Even leading figures from the country’s political and cultural scene aren’t immune to this arrogance. Recently, the country’s First Minister, Jack McConnell, was interviewed by a tabloid newspaper. After all the boring political stuff, he was asked a question about whom he would be voting for on The X-Factor. He replied: “I usually vote for the Scots.” Imagine if, asked the same question, Tony Blair had replied: “I usually vote for the English.” The X-Factor is not about race nor nationality nor origin. It’s about talent. Yet here was the leader of the government reducing it to an issue of race. It couldn’t have been any worse if he’d said: “I usually vote for whites.”

INTOLERANCE

So I wrote him a letter. There’s enough casual racism in this country as it is without Scotland’s First Minister adding to the mix. I wrote: “Comments of this nature are adding to an unfortunate climate of intolerance in Scotland, where English fans were beaten up during the World Cup.”
In his reply, McConnell claimed his comment “did not exclude all non-Scots living in Scotland.” He wrote: “I think there has been a general agreement in Scotland over the last 20 years or so that the term Scots referred to all who live in Scotland regardless of their origin.”

I find this presumptuous and arrogant. If this country allowed me to buy wine from my local Morrisons on a Sunday morning, could churn out better sitcoms than Still Game and could stop all its shit from being pumped into the sea, then I might not mind being called a Scot. But until then, I most emphatically do.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I can smell the distinctive aroma of Mars Bar being dipped in chip fat wafting through from the kitchen, which means lunch is nearly ready.
Love, Jack.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, it’s the Scottish elections, so…..
….if you’re thinking of voting Labour, please read this: How This Man Is Turning Scotland Into The Laughing Stock of The World.
…if you’re thinking of voting SNP, please read this: Does My Bomb Look Big In This?
…if you’re thinking of voting Lib-Dem, please read this;

...and if you're thinking of voting Conservative, please click here.

Oops, I Did It Again! (Exposed Airport Security As Totally Rubbish, That Is)

2009-02-13T01:44:00.000Z

THIS PIECE WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED IN MAY 2007 AND IS BEING REPUBLISHED BY POPULAR DEMAND.....

[ALL PHOTOS CAN BE ENLARGED BY CLICKING ON THEM]

HERE’S ME ON BOARD a packed jet heading from Manchester to Budapest with a deadly weapon in my hand. I know, I know, it’s starting to get tiresome, hearing about how I defied the “war on terror” to get a weapon of mass destruction past Britain’s comical airport security yet again. If it wasn’t so serious, I’d be rolling in the aisles too.
Last time it was a wine bottle, bought from Duty Free, smashed in an airport toilet, and converted into a razor-sharp weapon.
This time it was something even more potentially lethal – a one-inch, stainless steel, razor sharp blade. The same kind of blade you find in a Stanley knife. Or what the Americans call a box-cutter. As in “the 9/11 hijackers seized control of the planes using box-cutters.”
And the really hilarious thing is that while my blade was passing undetected through Manchester Airport’s X-ray machine, a sour-faced security goon was making me take off my belt and trainers and telling me that I had to pour away the contents of my hip flask. You couldn’t make it up.

This is a cigar cutter, handy for cleanly snipping off the end of a Cohiba robusto or Sancho Panza piramide. It cost two euros from a tobacconist in Madrid. I don’t know whether it was its cheap, plastic casing that managed to fool Manchester Airport’s sophisticated X-ray machines, state-of-the-art metal detectors and comprehensively-trained, highly-motivated security staff. But by pulling out the blade once on board the plane, I had converted it into a terrorist’s best friend. I arrived for flight LS897 to Budapest with Jet2.com last Wednesday, 2 May. I had minimal hand luggage, but amongst its contents was my nervous flyer’s hip flask of single malt. I know, I know, I should have known better, but I keep thinking that one day I’ll meet a security officer who will show a bit of compassion/common sense/discretion and allow me to take it through with me, especially as the 150ml capacity of the hip flask is only slightly more than the limit of 100ml which, according to Manchester Airport’s own guidelines, passengers are permitted to carry with them. This, however, was not to be that day, and so the contents were poured away.
Before I’d even got to that stage, I’d been plucked from the queue, had a metal detector waved up and down me, asked to remove my belt and told that my shoes would need to go through the X-ray machine.
As I re-packed and re-dressed, I asked to speak to the security supervisor. I knew he was only enforcing regulations, but that’s no reason why I couldn’t express my frustrations to him. I was particularly pissed off I’d had my whisky drained away but would be positively encouraged to fork out £25 for a replacement bottle from Duty Free around the corner.
After first of all asking me not to say the word “terrorist” too loudly, the supervisor told me how the restrictions on liquids were not introduced by the airports, but by the Government. That’s true. But what he neglected to mention was the minor detail that the original restrictions, introduced last August, were zero-tolerance, meaning passengers couldn’t take ANYTHING on board the plane with them. This, as you can imagine, caused airport operators great consternation. Whilst a zero tolerance policy would certainly quicken those queues at the X-ray machines and make terrorists’ jobs a lot harder, it also had the unfortunate effect of hitting airport profits. If passengers couldn’t take anything onto planes with them, then no-one was buying anything from the duty free shops. The airport operators had a quiet word with the Government and the restrictions were relaxed, so that nine months later we have the farcical situation where any terrorists capable of concocting a bomb from less than 100ml of liquids – as happened in 1994 - can go about their business unmolested, while the rest of us have our cheap litre bottles of Coca Cola confiscated from us.
Needless to say, this all washed over the supervisor’s head. I left him rabbiting on proudly about how a couple of terrorist suspects had been arrested at Manchester Airport recently.
But the fuckwits hadn’t caught me and my cigar cutter. They’d been so busy celebrating the detection and confiscation of my 150ml of single malt whisky and protecting the profits of their Duty Free shops, they had missed the deadly object I was carrying.
Here’s a few facts about Manchester Airport, gleaned from its website:

It’s owned by the ten local councils of Greater Manchester under the guise of the Manchester Airports Group
It lists “property development and management”(i.e. renting out airport shops) and “car parking” ahead of “airport security” in its list of business interests
It claims to be the “only global gateway” to Northern England
It is used by 22 million passengers a year, a figure expected to more than double by 2030
It also, God help us, operates East Midlands, Bournemouth and Humberside airports, used by another six million passengers each year.
Last year, it was voted Best UK Airport by “the readers of eight travel trade magazines.”

For fuck’s sake, what criteria were these people using? Obviously not security. Definitely not toilets, because the toilet next to my departure gate – number 7 in Terminal One – was flooded. Definitely not seating, because there was a row of 10 seats for two hundred passengers when we were called to the gate(above). And definitely not overall comfort, because Terminal One’s lounges offer about as much comfort and pleasantness as the A&E department of a hospital in Sierra Leone.
What takes all of this – the useless security, the overflowing toilets, the cattle-wagon level of comfort – to an even higher plane of customer abuse is that every one of us who has the misfortune to pass through Manchester Airport has to pay a Passenger Service Charge. It’s included in your ticket price, but is passed on by the airline to the airport. The level of charge varies from airport to airport, but is around the £10 mark. That’s ten quid per passenger x 22 million a year that goes straight into the coffers of the Manchester Airports Group. Money that’s supposed to be ploughed back into airport facilities. But instead of spending it on minor little details like bringing its anti-terror measures up to third world standards, it opens new shops instead. And this is a publicly-owned airport. Or maybe that explains everything…

On the way back from Budapest, I decided to go for the hat-trick. Having previously got a broken wine bottle and a razor-sharp blade onto planes, I wondered what I could try next. The answer came to me shortly after the Hungarian security officials had gleefully confiscated the bottle of Eger Pinot Noir I’d purchased just an hour before outside the airport for £10. (Airport "Duty Free" price: £14) So once through security, I slipped a beer glass from the airport bar into my hand luggage. Anyone who’s ever spent a Saturday night out in Glasgow will know only too well what a fine and deadly weapon that can be turned into.
And here’s the punchline: Budapest’s Ferihegy airport is owned and operated by our old friends, the British Airports Authority, whose greed for profit over passenger security has been well chronicled by Jack Havana previously. To add insult to (potentially fatal) injury, BAA has the cheek to claim it is "considered a world leader in security"

THE SCIENCE BIT

The fact is, the “retail experience” offered by airports is an impediment to effective security. If the security staff at Manchester Airport hadn’t been so busy trying to protect sales at Duty Free by confiscating my 150ml of whisky, they might have detected the razor-sharp blade in my hand luggage. And even if they had, it would have been a simple task for any terrorist to pop into the Duty Free shop, buy a bottle of wine, and convert it into a lethal weapon.
We don’t need airport shops. There is nothing available in “Duty Free” that cannot be purchased cheaper at your local Morrisons or Tesco(booze), your destination(booze, fags, cigars, perfume) or on the internet(cameras, gadgets, designer sunglasses, etc.) Until our airports are operated exclusively as transit hubs instead of shopping centres, passengers’ safety will continue being compromised. How many more times do I have to prove it?
Finally, I will be sending copies of this report to selected UK news outlets. But considering the international outrage over Paris Hilton’s prison sentence and the fact that the new series of Big Brother is less than three weeks away, I expect them to show no interest whatsoever. Just like last time.
NEXT WEEK: Jack Havana will attempt to get a fully-grown Bengal tiger and a complete set of professional kitchen knives past security at Leeds-Bradford Airport.

© Text and photos Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends….
WATCHING: United 93. Showing on Sky Movies Premiere until Friday. No explanation needed. Plus it’s a brilliant, brilliant, knuckle-whitening piece of film-making.
READING: The Base: In Search of Al-Qaeda, by Jane Corbin. The US had crap airport security too, once. And look what happened to them.
LISTENING TO: We Can Create, by Maps.
TRAVELLING BY: Train, bus or ferry.

The Greediest Man In Rock & Roll? Or Just The Ugliest?

2009-02-12T18:30:00.000Z

THIS PIECE WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED IN MAY 2007, AND IS BEING REPUBLISHED BY POPULAR DEMAND(AND BECAUSE, TWO YEARS LATER, NOTHING HAS CHANGED.....)

SHAME, ISN’T IT? With looks like this, only his mother could love him. Geoff Ellis, chief executive of Scottish music promoters DF Concerts, may well be the ugliest man in pop. He’s certainly one of the greediest.
Geoff’s claim to fame is running Scotland’s biggest music festival, T in the Park. Tickets for this year’s event cost £62.50 for a day ticket, or £140 for a weekend camping ticket. But the only way you could buy tickets was to go through Ticketmaster. You see, Geoff has a great deal going with the ticket agency. By giving them exclusive rights to all his gigs, he gets a tidy slice of the millions of pounds they rake in through booking, service, convenience and order processing fees. These fees regularly add anything between 25 and 60 per cent on top of the ticket price. Even if you go to a Ticketmaster-approved retail outlet in person, you still have to pay most of these charges.

APATHY

Thanks to the inefficiency of the Office of Fair Trading and the general apathy of most music fans, booking fees have become just another minor irritation of modern life, like haemorrhoids or Davina McCall. But Geoff Ellis has used his deal with Ticketmaster to really take the piss. For example, he also owns and operates a venue in Glasgow called King Tut’s. If you don’t live in Glasgow and therefore have to resort to Ticketmaster’s website to buy tickets for a gig at King Tut’s, there is a shock in store for you. Even if you decline Ticketmaster’s offer to post the tickets to you(largely because they will charge you £2.95 for the cost of an envelope and a first class stamp) and opt to collect them from the box office yourself, you still face a compulsory Order Processing Fee(usually between £2.25 and £4.50) as well as the booking fee. That’s right – you have to pay extra to be allowed to collect the tickets from the venue!

DEPTHS

This week, Geoff has taken the art of fleecing music fans to new depths. To recap: he has already sold more than 160,000 tickets for this year’s T in the Park. Day tickets cost £62.50, camping tickets £140. You do the maths. And then add on Geoff’s cut of the hundreds of thousands of pounds that were raked in with the aforementioned booking fees, etc. None of which goes to Razorlight. Or any of the other acts performing this year. Except in special cases, the artists only get a percentage of the ticket price, not any of the other fees Ticketmaster and DF Concerts pile on top of the ticket’s face value.
You would have thought Geoff couldn’t squeeze any more money out of his loyal customers. You’d be wrong.

BOXES

Today, I received an email from Ticketmaster with this intriguing subject line: Don’t miss T in the Park 2007 – Locker Boxes.

The gist of it was this. Anyone who has already paid £140 – plus God knows how much in booking, convenience, service and order processing fees – for a camping ticket, was now being invited to buy a voucher for a locker at the site. They have the choice of buying a voucher for one, two or three days, though obviously if you are camping for the weekend, there won’t be much point in buying a locker for anything less than the three days(Fri-Sun).
The cost of the three-day voucher is £12.50. Plus a service charge of £1.25 per voucher. Plus a compulsory secure postage charge of £4.95.

THOUGHTLESS

My point is this: is Geoff Ellis really so greedy and thoughtless that he couldn’t have provided locker storage as part and parcel of the £140 – plus booking, convenience, service and order processing fees – campers have already had to fork out? Is that really too much to expect in this age of recycling and carbon offsets? At the very least, if he did feel compelled to extort even more money from long-suffering festival goers, why did he have to involve Ticketmaster? The lockers were obviously an afterthought anyway, so why didn't he just sell them on site and without the service and postage fees? Probably because he's as avaricious as he is unlovely.
You won’t read about this blatant rip-off anywhere but here. The Scottish media love Geoff Ellis. He gives them complimentary tickets and they get to write about A-list celebrities for a change, instead of Edith Bowman and Carol Smillie. In return, the newspapers are full of glowing reviews. Why last year, The Scotsman even put Geoff in at number 13 in “Scotland’s Power 100”.
I can think of a more appropriate moniker for him – The Greediest Man in Rock and Roll.

HOPE

Meanwhile, there is a glimmer of hope that the days of greedy promoters and ticket agencies may be numbered. Manchester band Puressence are pioneering a hi-tech system which would see fans receive electronic tickets direct from the band via their mobile phones. A brilliant idea from a brilliant band. Why don't others follow suit and help put the parasitic middlemen out of business once and for all?
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends…..
MUSIC: Wine Destroys The Memory, by At Swim Two Birds. Melancholia hasn’t sound this beautiful since Ian Curtis forgot to take his epilepsy drugs.
DVD: The Night We Called It A Day(2005). The story of what happened when Frank Sinatra insulted the Australian media in 1974. It took Bob Hawke to avert an international incident. Hilarious.
BOOK: The Tango Singer, by Tomas Eloy Martinez. Paul Auster let loose on the streets of Buenos Aires.

Desperately Seeking Fidel

2008-02-19T11:58:00.002Z

THE SIGN GREETING arrivals at Havana’s Jose Marti Airport read: “International Sanity Control.”
I had persuaded Loaded magazine to send me and a photographer to Cuba to try to get an interview with Fidel Castro. I had somehow managed to convince the editor that the Maximum Leader of the Raving Marxist-Leninist Party would be happy to be interviewed and photographed – without prior warning – for a magazine that revered Page Three model Jo Guest and tragic drunk Paul Gascoigne as leading role models for the youth of Britain. To help me achieve this world exclusive, I had a beginner’s grasp of Spanish, a tourist visa and the Havana telephone directory. When I left Cuba a month later, it dawned on me that the “International Sanity Control” sign hadn’t been a spelling mistake after all.
So it was we stumbled out into the bright morning sunshine of Havana on a January day in 1999. A couple of weeks earlier, Castro had given one of his famed nine-hour speeches to the millions gathered in Revolutionary Square to mark the 40th anniversary of the revolution. A revolution which had started when Castro, Che Guevara and 19 other bearded, cigar-chomping peasants had set up their mountain lair in the south of country before taking on the might of US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista’s army and air force. That’s 21 hard-core Socialists with a handful of rusty guns versus an army of thousands equipped with armoured personnel carriers and B-25 bombers. Two years later they were in control of the country.

BESPECTACLED

Our first stop was the International Press Centre, conveniently just around the corner from our hotel in the high-rise district of Vedado. A small, bespectacled bureaucrat with a laminated pass around his neck and a shirt pocket full of pens ambled over to us. I explained the situation thus: we were a couple of journalists over from England on holiday with an interest in all things Revolutionary. Was there any chance Fidel might be free for a chat and some pics? With the same sort of open-mouthed look he would probably greet the news that the Americans had just landed and hoisted the Stars and Stripes above the Revolutionary Palace, he led us to the Director of Press. After her look of stony incomprehension had dissolved into hysterical laughter and then back again, she told us that even fully accredited journalists working for grown-up publications that didn't have pictures of a semi-naked Cameron Diaz on the cover, such as Marxism Today, would often have to wait days or even weeks before Fidel would grant them an audience. And besides, he was busy all week. He was due to open an international economists' conference that very morning. Oh yeah, where would that be then? At the Palacio de las Convenciones. Taxi!
There are two ways of getting a taxi in Havana. You can either hail an official, yellow Turistaxi and pay what's on the meter, or you can loiter at any street corner and solicit your choice of vintage vehicle with a knowing look to the driver. It’s the new kerb-crawling. The driver risks a fine if caught, but that's usually outweighed by the lure of your lucre. Later in the week we would enjoy a drive along the malecon – the elegant, curving seafront of paint-peeling mansions that defiantly faces Miami - in the back of a lovingly-preserved 1945 Buick convertible, but for now we were in a hurry, so stuck to the official way. The drive took us out beyond the high-rises of the hotel district to Miramar, once the Beverly Hills of Havana, where the crumbling, palatial piles on either side of the palm-lined avenues had housed gangsters and millionaires before the Revolution had sent them fleeing to Miami. Our driver dropped us as close to the conference centre as the security cordon would allow, and we were left unchallenged to head the rest of the way on foot. We breezed into the building, through the lobby and right to the entrance to the conference hall itself before someone finally asked to see our passes. Erm, we didn't have any, but wasn't there a public gallery, where we could watch from? Now it’s quite possible the security guard might have believed a couple of fully paid-up members of the local Committee for the Defence of the Revolution wanted to spend the day watching a load of economists debating the theme "Globalisation And The Problems of Development", but no way was he prepared to accept that a couple of lobster-red tourists laden with cameras and Spanish dictionaries had nothing better to do with their time on a Caribbean island full of cheap rum and beautiful women.

HERO

Our taxi back was an old Moskovich driven by a Hero of the Revolution. The dog tags hanging from the rear view mirror were from Eddie's three campaigns flying MiG fighter jets for the Marxist cause in Angola. Now he was reduced to driving a peso taxi around town.
Were Cubans worried about the future, we asked him.
"Some people are, yes. They think that once Castro goes, the exiles living in the States, who've been waiting for their chance all these years, will invade."
Like another Bay of Pigs?
"No, they will invade with new political parties, not tanks and bombs. But until then, why worry? In Cuba, we have everything: the sun, the rum, the women."
Did he think we had any chance of meeting Fidel?
"Ah, Fidel! All the women love him, you know. Cuban and foreign women. He is extraordinary, superhuman! But it is difficult to meet him. No-one knows where he stays. They say he sleeps in a different place every night. Maybe with a different woman, who knows? I think you guys would be better spending your time with our women.”
Hmmm, it was tempting, but we were professionals with a deadline to meet. Plus, most of Havana’s Lycra-clad young female population appeared to have fat, middle-aged Germans clamped to their sides. So we tracked down the nearest thing we could find to a “dissident” group, the Centro Felix Varela. The Centro is actually a Non-Governmental Organisation which, in Fidel’s eyes and ideology, makes it practically as dissident as an underground cell of hedge fund investors.
"There are more than 2,000 NGOs in Cuba, but they include everything from pigeon-racing groups to stamp-collecting clubs," explained director Maritza Moleón Borodowsky. "But we are the only real NGO. We are independently financed with money from foreign sources, and some Government ministers here in Cuba see us as a problem, because we are taking their work."
She defined the Centro's work in terms Castro would have been proud of - "helping Cubans find their self-identity and values." But the way she wanted to see them achieve that was less through May Day marches past statues of dead Revolutionary heroes and more through a spot of free enterprise, something the state was only recently and very cautiously encouraging.
"To begin with, Cubans could only set up their own business if they did not employ anyone, but now they can employ up to four people. This has increased average income considerably, but I don't want to give an exact figure, or the Government will increase our taxes."

"SPECIAL"

Cuba was still in its “Special Period”. To the average tourist, this meant shit food and cheap sex. But to the average Cuban, it had meant nearly a decade of food and fuel shortages, wage freezes, unemployment and tighter restrictions on their personal freedom. The “Special Period” was imposed without irony by Castro as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba had suddenly found itself without its major trading partner of the last 30 years. It had no-one to sell its sugar to, and no-one to buy its oil from. And the US had just tightened its embargo with the Helms-Burton Act, meaning even the most distant and tenuous subsidiaries of American companies were breaking the law if they sold Cuba so much as a light bulb. The place was fucked. That’s why the food in even the classiest hotels was shit – nothing other than home-grown chicken and rice was ever on the menus, everything else was rationed – and the sex cheap – Cubans of both sexes needed to earn enough to be able to eat.
By 1999, things were a little better thanks to Castro allowing foreign(i.e. non-US) governments to invest in the country’s booming tourism industry(but only on condition that the Cuban state was given a 51 per cent stake in everything). But food was still rationed and, weirdly, there was a thriving black market in electric showerheads. Castro had banned the sale of these, claiming electric showers were making too big a strain on the country’s power grid. I was to get used to cold showers during the next month.
It had been an illuminating chat with Maritza, but she couldn't help us in fixing an appointment with Fidel - "we invited him to our conference last year, but he didn't come" - so there was only one thing left for us to try. We retired to the terrace bar at the Capitolio – the former home of Batista’s Congress that was built to look like its Washington namesake - ordered a round of the best mojitos in town -rum, lemon juice, ice and, erm, a big mint leaf - and began thumbing through the Havana phone directory.

SEVERAL MOJITOS later, and in a display of investigative journalism Woodward and Berstein would have been proud of, we had located the address of a Fidelina amongst the pages of Castros. Alas, she was no relation to the Maximum Leader. But she knew someone who might be. And so the day continued, a succession of bemused but always friendly faces, a half-remembered name or address of someone they thought might once have known someone who was a cousin or niece of the Castros, and another neighbourhood of once-beautiful apartment buildings where the marble staircases were fouled with dogshit and lines of washing hung from the rusting chandeliers. Eventually, we were forced to call it a day. Grant, the photographer, was due to start a Spanish course, and I wanted to see some of the rest of Cuba. We agreed to meet up again in a couple of weeks.
I bought a train ticket to the other end of the island. I had this romantic, misguided notion of attempting to retrace the young Castro’s footsteps at the site of his guerrilla exploits in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and maybe even trying to visit his birthplace. Neither was on any tourist itinerary, but I’d stocked up on factory-fresh Hoyo de Monterrey Doble Corona cigars so was feeling pretty invincible.
The feeling didn’t last long. Cuba doesn’t really cater for turistas libres – independent travellers. Beyond the central railway line which connects Havana with Santiago de Cuba nearly 600 miles to the east, public transport doesn’t exist. Bus services were virtually wiped out with the fuel shortages. (To compensate, Castro imported a million bicycles from China, as well as replacing tractors with ox-carts.) So whenever I left the train, I had to join the lines of Cubans at the roadside waiting for the trucks that operated between towns. These were crammed to the gills with people and produce, including workers, schoolchildren and patients being transferred between hospitals, escorted by uniformed nurses or doctors and boxes stuffed with case notes and X-rays. On one trip, I was squeezed next to a handcuffed prisoner and his police escort. At the end of each journey, I’d throw myself at the mercy of touts offering rooms in private houses for anything between 10 and 20 US dollars a night. The quality was variable, but several factors were constant: there would always be a soft-porn poster of the naked-girl-astride-a-Harley-Davidson-variety on the wall above the bed, and the landlady would always have a box of counterfeit cigars available for purchase muy barato.
For meals, I had already learned to avoid “official” or hotel restaurants and ask around for a paladar, a private enterprise usually operated in someone’s front room where you ate your rice and chicken while the cook’s family sat around you watching the TV and its endless footage declaring how great life was for Cubans. Occasionally, a discreet whisper would inform me that lobster was available for an extra couple of dollars. Once, in the town of Baracoa – a stomach-churning truck-ride over the mountains from Guantanamo – I was offered tortuga – turtle. (Alas, after I’d eagerly accepted – I’d have eaten dog, anything for a change from chicken – the offer was mysteriously withdrawn).

NEGLECTED

I GOT OFF the train at Yara – the closest railway station to the Sierra Maestra – and joined a truck that was going to Bartolome Maso where, instead of a casa particular, I found a decent but neglected little hotel with a swimming pool. The mountains should have been visible, but were blanketed in thick rain clouds. My plan had been to take a truck the 13 miles to the next settlement of Santo Domingo, from where it was apparently a steep five-mile walk up to the site of Castro’s rebel camp. I reckoned it would be a manageable day-trip if I started out early enough the next morning. My guidebook said there was a museum at the site. I couldn’t understand why my hotel wasn’t offering Revolutionary Day Excursions for tourists like me. The answer was in the hotel register – I was the only foreigner they’d seen for years.
The next morning, there were no trucks heading to Santo Domingo. I had to settle for a ride as far as Providencia instead, leaving a shortfall of five miles to Santo Domingo, i.e. still a 20-mile round-trip to Castro’s rebel camp. This wasn’t a good start, but there was fuck all else in the way of entertainment to do, and the constant drizzle meant lounging around the swimming pool wasn’t going to be an option. At Providencia, three couples got off the truck with me and told me they too were heading for Santo Domingo. They were carrying rice-bags, plastic containers of water and small children between them, so I figured the walk couldn’t be too strenuous. All I had was my camera and notebook. A large billboard poster – looking out of place amongst all the foliage - announced this as the scene where several comrades of the revolution had fallen in battle. Next to that, a sign said: “Santo Domingo, 7 km”.
The road appeared new – wide and well-surfaced. But no concessions for gradient had been made – typical of mountain roads in Latin America – and instead of scaling the mountain in a series of gently-ascending zig-zags, it took the direct route and was as steep as a wall. I had soon left the three couples in my wake, but after 75 minutes there was still no sign of anything resembling a settlement ahead of me. From the crest of a hill I could look down into a valley of impenetrable greenery. On the other side, a ribbon of grey climbed upwards. Not a single zig-zag to be seen. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll come back when the Commies have learned how to celebrate their heritage with a properly thought-out tourist infrastructure. I turned around and headed back to Providencia, where I joined the line of campesinos waiting for a truck beneath the revolutionary poster and its smiling, bearded faces of heroic but dead comrades. You can probably guess the punchline – no trucks ever arrived. I ended up walking the eight miles back to my hotel after reckoning I had just over two hours before it got dark. So much for retracing Fidel’s footsteps……

SEX

In Santiago de Cuba, over a cigar and a glass of neat anejo, I was absent-mindedly weighing up the pros and cons of contributing to the island’s nascent sex industry when a trio of Cubans asked if they could join me at my table. Two men, early 30s, one of them very nervous and twitchy, and a woman, similar age, very sullen. The woman hardly spoke, but the men were keen to talk. The nervous-looking one, Rene, had quite a story to tell.
He’d spent 18 months in prison after a member of his neighbourhood Committee for the Defence of the Revolution(CDR) had overhead him criticising living conditions in general and Castro in particular. He was charged with “anti-revolutionary activities.” That had been in 1987.
He’d shared a cell with six others – “all political prisoners” – and been subject to psychological torture – “warm air conditioning, wrong information about my mother’s health, they told me the only job I’d get after prison would be in a cemetery – working with the dead.”
Over the course of the next few days, I met up with Rene and his boyfriend, Raul, several times. (The fag hag disappeared when it became clear I was not an easy touch for hand-outs, cigarettes or drinks) They invited me to their “home” – the ground floor of a two-storey building which had once been a dry-cleaners managed by Raul’s parents. They had used cardboard partitions to divide it into two areas, one for sleeping, the other for cooking. The cooking area comprised a sink and a stove that had to be hot-wired for use. A poster of Michael Jackson was the only concession to decoration.
Rene showed me dozens of rejection letters from all the jobs he’d applied for since his release from prison. In 11 years, he hadn’t been offered even one interview. He was now, he said, “a clandestine cakemaker”, baking cakes and sweets for neighbours and friends. He charged 25 pesos(about £2.50) a cake. A recent creation stood on a tiny table in front of us, an explosion of artificial colourings and additives.
“I have to keep it secret. I don’t want the neighbourhood CDR to know. They can make life very difficult for me,” he said.
“My life is hard. I feel nervous all the time, there are secret police watching and listening everywhere. Many people are scared to be seen as my friends. People who worked with my mother called her the “Mother of an Anti-Revolutionary” and wouldn’t talk to her.
“Most of my friends escaped during the wave of boat evacuations [of 1994], but I couldn’t afford the asking price of a thousand pesos.”
He had met Raul six years previously, and he supported Rene’s efforts to escape Cuba. “It’s very dangerous for him here,” said Raul.
How many other Cubans are against Castro, I asked.
“It depends on the time of the month,” said Rene. “If you ask them on the 1st, it will be 50 per cent. But ask them again on the 15th or 16th, and it will be 70 or 80 per cent, because that’s when they start going hungry.”
Before I left Santiago, I asked Rene and Raul if there was anything I could do for them. Instead of asking me for money, they said they wanted me to publicise their case once I got back home.
“Things will eventually get better,” said Rene. “But not until Fidel dies.”
Rene and Raul were by far the most intelligent, articulate “ordinary” Cubans I had met, great adverts for Castro’s much-trumpeted education system. Elsewhere, at hotel receptions or in grotty paladars, the picture wasn’t so convincing. The arithmetic of working out my bill would regularly defeat the minds of a succession of young Cubans.
A few of the taxis I caught during my stay were driven by bright, intelligent young men. These were invariably teachers or doctors who’d given up their “peso jobs” to earn hundreds times more in dollars pandering to the whims of tourists. Their neighbours, meanwhile, hadn’t been lucky enough to find work in the tourism sector, so continued to survive on a handful of pesos working in the sugar fields, schools or for some over-staffed, bureaucratic off-shoot of “the Party”. I shuddered at the inequality and unfairness of it all.

IN BARACOA– where I was offered turtle and a female tourist in the same paladar was offered the services of the host’s teenage son - there was a crowd outside a building on the narrow main street. Even by Cuban standards, there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of extremely attractive young women milling about. As I got nearer, I saw that the front of the building was open to the street. It was a courtroom. There were several men in the dock, and a succession of the attractive girls were being called as witnesses. I hung around for a bit, trying to make sense of what was going on, but finally decided to leave when a policeman began waving his hand at me angrily when I tried to take a photograph.
Around the corner I met Alejandro who explained what was happening. It was, in effect, a show trial, hence the public interest. The men in the dock were pimps and faced 20 years in prison. The attractive girls were their prostitutes, and they faced four years if found guilty. They had been arrested under new laws introduced by Castro in response to his Socialist state’s nascent sex industry.
Alejandro, a former geography teacher turned farmer, spoke good English. “Castro means business,” he told me. “He has the people under his fist. The new laws are crushing them. They are not just about prostitution, they affect every part of our lives. Everything is for the Revolution. But people are turning against it. In Havana, it is 90 per cent. Here, it is less, because we aren’t so educated.”
For a farmer frustrated that he couldn’t find any fertiliser because the state had bought up all supplies, Alejandro had a neat turn of phrase: “The fuse has been lit. Cuba is a powder keg waiting to explode.”
As the crowd around the corner gasped or jeered in response to what was happening in the court, Alejandro told me: “If I say something against the Government or put up an anti-Revolutionary poster, I could get 10 years in jail. But if someone steals my bike, they will get a fine of 14 pesos, that’s all.
“You know, all the policemen in Havana are from here [the Oriente, the eastern end of Cuba]. That is because they will not have any family or friends in Havana, so will be tougher with the people and not take bribes.
“Yes, we have a free press, it gives both sides of the story. One side says the Revolution is very good, and the other side says it is even better.”

PLANET

Fidel was born at the Finca Las Manacas near the village of Biran in the eastern province of Holguin on 13 August 1926. It’s only 30 miles from the provincial capital as the crow flies, but might as well be on another planet as far as the turista libre is concerned. After a succession of truck rides from Baracoa – usually under a canopy of tarpaulin because of the persistent rain showers – I ended up in the nondescript town of Cueto. By now, I’d given up on chicken and rice and was existing on a diet of dough-heavy pizzas served from holes in the walls of most towns for a couple of pesos, having changed some dollars into the Cuban currency. In Cueto, I tried another Cuban staple of the “Special Period” – tomato and salt sandwiches. While savouring its, erm, simplicity in the shade of a row of rickety stalls selling bread, eggs and bananas, the drabness of the town square – leaden skies, scuffed buildings, horse-drawn carts – was suddenly illuminated by the arrival of an immaculately-preserved, deeply-polished red and yellow vintage American car. After nosing its way past the horse-drawn traffic, it pulled up in front of me and the two male occupants got out. They obviously found the sight of me – a lone gringo miles from the nearest beach lunching on a tomato sandwich – just as alien and exotic as I found their car. We got talking and within minutes they had offered to give me a ride to Castro’s birthplace. I settled on a price of ten dollars “ida y vuelta” with the leaner of the two, Antonio, while his heavier compatriot, Rafael, was distracted by the girl selling the bananas. Then I got into the backseat with my bag and we set off.
Just before we left the town, we stopped outside an unmarked doorway and Rafael got out. He returned a couple of minutes later brandishing a bottle of aguardiente – sugar cane spirit – and, bizarrely, a bar of chocolate. Before setting off again, him and Antonio conferred excitedly about something before Rafael turned to me and said: “Do you want to drive?” And that’s how I found myself in the front seat of a 1949 Chevrolet, wrestling with a steering wheel so big it grazed my crotch, swigging 60 per cent proof alcohol from a plastic cup and driving along a straight-as-an-arrow road past lush sugar cane fields to the birthplace of Fidel Castro. Rafael, sat next to me, had to operate the stick gears for me while I had to lift my knee almost to my chin to cope with the clutch pedal, and all the time I was keeping my eye on the road through a windscreen so narrow that the landscape was reduced to Cinemascope. Luckily, we didn’t pass any other vehicles other than the occasional horse-drawn cart during the seven-mile trip, and we arrived at the cluster of buildings that was the village of Biran unscathed. As would be expected of the Maximum Lider’s home village, it was a model of cleanliness and efficiency, with a well-maintained school and a collection of pristine houses and agricultural buildings. It turned out one of these was the workplace of my companions(though why they weren’t working today I never discovered). After conferring with a colleague, Rafael returned and assured me that he had spoken to the caretaker of Castro’s Finca and there would be no problem getting in. I was mildly sceptical, largely because I knew that the Finca Las Manacas was still a couple of kilometres further on, and also because Rafael by this stage was extremely drunk, having consumed most of the aguardiente.
Antonio drove us the remaining distance down a track which took us past a stream and into a wooded area where the gravel surface dissolved into grass. From here we could see a chain suspended across the entrance to the Finca and the several, freshly-painted red and yellow buildings behind. As we approached the entrance on foot, I noticed both my companions’ moods had altered. Rafael was doing his best to appear sober and respectful, while Antonio too had assumed an air of deference. This, after all, was the literal source of the Cuban Revolution.
A uniformed soldier appeared in front of the chain. He must have been standing in the shade of a tree, because we hadn’t seen him earlier. He was unarmed but sported a moustache that must have weighed several pounds. Through every second of the ensuing exchange, he never took his eyes off the camera slung around my neck. All three of us shook hands with him before he explained, without the hint of a smile or a flicker of surprise at our arrival, that we would not be allowed in without authorisation from Communist Party provincial HQ back in Holguin. I’d expected as much so wasn’t too disappointed. I scanned the ground looking for something that marked the graves of Castro’s parents. At least I could take some photographs. But the soldier made it clear to me that no photographs were allowed, not even from our side of the chain barrier. I couldn’t understand why, but could sense from my companions’ unease that it wouldn’t be a good idea to press the point. We retreated to the car and I tried to sneak off a couple of shots as Antonio turned the car around, but Rafael stopped me. “Wait,” he snapped, “until we are further away!” The thought of offending the leader of the Revolution and ending up in a cell for crimes against the state had certainly sobered him up. Antonio stopped the car when we were around the first bend, and I took a couple of photos, but they might as well be of any collection of rural buildings anywhere in the world. So I thought I’d console myself with some shots of the car I’d driven to Fidel’s place, but now both Rafael and Antonio had panic in their eyes. “Stop, you cannot take pictures of our car!” barked Antonio this time. “They will recognise it and find us.” I’d explained to them on the journey that I was a journalist – though emphasising I was on holiday – and now they were paranoid that the pictures would be published and the Cuban Embassy in London would be able to track them down and arrest them. They illustrated the severity of this point by drawing their fingers across their throats. I never did find out exactly what “crime” they would have been arrested for. Drink-driving? Aiding and abetting a tourist?
It was shortly after this that Rafael learned from his mate that they were charging me only ten dollars for this little adventure, including booze and chocolate. I thought Antonio was going to drive us into a ditch during the argument between him and Rafael that ensued. Fortunately, Rafael’s mood mellowed when we stopped to give a lift to the curvaceous 14-year-old daughter of a neighbour of his and he slid into the back seat with her while I moved to the front.
After saying my goodbyes in Cueto, I made use of the only type of “bus” service that – occasionally and irregularly - exists in Cuba. The “Camels” are a common sight in Havana, less so in the provinces, but I was tipped off that there would be one heading for Holguin from Cueto within the next 30 minutes. They are huge, fume-belching wagons with an elevated “hump” in the middle. In Havana they had looked fearsome with hundreds of faces and limbs squashed up against the windows. The one that eventually arrived in Cueto wasn’t quite as bad, though I still had to stand up for the 25 mile, two-peso journey to Holguin.

RUGGED

In Holguin, I was curious to see what would happen if I asked for permission to visit the Finca Las Manacas, so I headed to the Partido Communista de Cuba building on the Plaza Revolucion.
The building was modern, airy and spotless. A huge photograph showing rugged cliffs battered by waves filled one wall of the reception area. The man behind the reception desk didn’t know which part of Cuba it was, but agreed it looked beautiful. After explaining my predicament, the man made a telephone call, and after a few minutes I was shaking hands with the Comrade With Special Responsibility For Tourism in Holguin Province, Efrain Villareal. Bearded, forty-ish and dressed casually in jeans and T-shirt, Efrain’s first question to me was straight to the point: “What do you do?”
I’d already prepared a false name and false hotel address – the paranoia of all the Cubans I’d met so far was catching – but hadn’t considered an alternative career. I told him the truth, but emphasised I was here on holiday. He said he’d make some enquiries upstairs but didn’t think a visit to the Finca would be possible. Ten minutes later, during which time I unsuccessfully quizzed anyone who passed about the location of the photograph on the wall, Efrain returned. “I’m afraid the contractors are in doing some work there, so it won’t be possible for you to visit.” This was obviously a lie. There’d been no sign of workmen at the Finca, and the soldier on guard hadn’t said anything about contractors.
After delivering this bad news, Efrain lightened up and switched to speaking in English. Turned out he’d been an English language teacher before devoting his life to the Party. We chatted for the following 45 minutes, mainly about Fidel and Communism, and how in awe of both he was. He had met Castro four times: “I was overawed by him. I got the impression that when Fidel asked a question, he knew what the answer should be.”
He had visited Castro’s Finca five times: “I’m very lucky. Each time is an amazing experience. Everything in the house is exactly as it was when Fidel was growing up with his brothers Raul and Ramon. The garden where they played is exactly the same. His grandmother and parents are buried there. I am moved every time I visit.
“It is a very important and historical place. Maybe one day we will open it to tourists permanently, but I don’t know.”
All of which was no consolation to me. I steered Efrain on to the subject of the Revolution. He explained how Cuban “democracy” worked: “You don’t have to be a member of the Communist Party to be a government official.” Which might be true, but the government will always be the Communist Party because there is no other. On human rights, and the stories I had heard of people being thrown in jail for “anti-Revolutionary activities”, Efrain simply trotted out the official party line: “What are the most important human rights? Health and education of course. All Cubans have these, unlike in other countries.” As for the lack of a free and fair press, this was Efrain’s response: “We have a different idea of a free press. We don’t write about the private or personal lives of our leaders. We write about what the people want to know. They want to know about the development of their country. And anyone can write for our newspaper [the official party publication, Granma] if they want.
“We are a free country. Anybody can do whatever they like and be whoever they want.”
Hmmm. I thought of Rene the clandestine cakemaker back in Santiago. What did Efrain think of the future? After all, Fidel was getting on a bit.
“Fidel himself has said that he is only human and would one day die. He has left hints as to the direction the government should go, but not as to who his successor should be. That would be a matter for the Party to decide.
“I can’t bear to think what will happen without him. He is such an important figure…..” Efrain’s voice trailed off and I felt as if I’d intruded upon a private grief.
Before leaving, I asked Efrain if he recognised the location in the photograph on the wall. “I have worked here four years and that photograph has puzzled me all this time,” was his reply. So much for the Comrade With Special Responsibility for Tourism.

WHEN I GOT back to Havana and met up with Grant, we got out the phone directory and tried the same sophisticated journalistic technique with the name “Guevara”. This turned up 36 entries and, having picked the address nearest to where we were at that point, we set off on a trail which was eventually to turn out to be more fulfilling.
The green apartment block was at least 12 storeys high, so we knocked on the caretaker's door in the basement car park. Yes, someone from the Guevara clan had lived on the fourth floor until recently, but they had moved out, or died, or something. But the family living there now had been friends with them, so they should be able to help us.
We took the lift up to the fourth floor and met the son of the family, all fancy clothes and strong aftershave. At first he was friendly - "Ah yes, the Guevara's did live here, we are their friends, but they've moved now" - but he quickly turned hostile/bored with our poor Spanish and said he didn't know where they had moved to.
It looked like the end of the trail, until we bumped into the friendly caretaker on our way out. He said he was sure he knew where Guevara's grandson lived. He made a brief phone call from his office, and I half expected a crack unit of Fidel's secret police to suddenly appear with orders to get rid of these meddlesome foreigners once and for all. But instead he told us that the grandson was definitely living at the Lopez Seran apartment block at the corner of L and 13, a mere seven blocks away.

NAKED

By the time we got there, it was dark. It was another high-rise, and we had to wait around to ask someone if they knew which apartment Che Guevara's grandson lived in. The lobby was all marble floors and teak walls. There was an impressive art deco marble figure inlaid into the wall between the lifts. A trickle of light from a naked bulb high above us gave it a ghostly veneer. A woman arrived with some shopping. She cursed under her breath as she stabbed at the lift button: it wasn't working. She told us the Guevaras, a young couple, lived in apartment 96, but she wasn't sure whether the husband was still there or not. We thanked her and tried to call the lift ourselves. The stairwell, narrow and unlit, didn't look particularly inviting. There were distant, tantalising rumbles from the lift shaft. Sod it, we'd have to grope our way up nine floors of a strange building if we were to meet the grandson of the most famous political icon of all time. There was dogshit on the third floor, but by then the lights were working again. We arrived at the ninth at the same time as the lift. The woman with the shopping got out and pointed at the door opposite: "That's it," she said, before disappearing down the dimly-lit corridor. We got our breath back to a salsa soundtrack floating from an open doorway further down the hall. We rehearsed our opening gambits, complete with correct Spanish grammar, and then pressed the buzzer. We waited. Not a sound. This time I knocked on the door. I heard someone inside. The door opened. It was a young, dark-haired woman, thin, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. A shadow moved behind her. But it wasn't her husband.
"Yes, my husband is Che's grandson. But he's gone. He left me two years ago, to go to Mexico." Her eyes were filled with bitterness. "Now all I have is our daughter."
And there, suddenly standing next to her, was the great grand-daughter of El Che. Grant was mesmerised by her, too spellbound to even take a photograph. "I couldn't believe it. I was looking into the eyes of Che Guevara," he would say later. All I could think was: I'm at the front door of the great grand-daughter of the most famous and charismatic revolutionary there ever was, she's smiling sweetly at me, what a great interview this could be, except for one thing: she's only three bloody years old!

SWEATY

The four of us stood there awkwardly, silently, me and Grant trying to get our heads round the historical and cultural significance of this encounter, the little girl wondering who these strange, sweaty men with the cameras and notebooks were, her mother probably wanting us to piss off so she could get back to the telly.
In the end, Fidel never did return our call. "Cuba doesn't like journalists," Mariksa at the NGO had told us. But the impression we left with wasn't one of having been stood up or rudely ignored. After all, we'd never been invited in the first place. No, we flew home happy. All the tenuous leads and wild geese we'd chased had taken us to people and places we'd never have otherwise seen. The net result was a privileged glimpse of a beautiful country and, above all, an historical oddity. Catch it while you can, while the big, bearded fella's still in charge. Things won't be the same when he's gone.

Diggory Pokery...

2008-01-29T08:59:00.000Z

[Click on image to enlarge]

Into The Valley

2007-12-02T11:50:00.001Z

Postcard From The Third World

2007-08-27T15:52:00.001+01:00

THEY SAY THE WORLD is getting smaller, yet it still took 27 hours to travel from a modern, safe and civilised country to another which is falling apart at the seams.
The halfway mark of my journey was Atlanta Airport, and I couldn’t help but feeling we were leaving civilisation and comfort behind as my plane took off after a short stopover. And so it proved to be.
The first part of my journey, which took me 6,000 miles and halfway across the world, lasted 16 hours. The final 400 miles, from the capital city to my final destination, took 11 hours, thanks to bumbling bureaucracy, antiquated security checks, airport overcrowding, flight delays and public transport cancellations. I didn’t need any further reminders that I had arrived in the Third World. But I got them anyway……

No luggage trolleys available at one of the largest international airports in the world
A heavy-handed security guard threatening to evict me from the airport because he heard me using the world “moron” in connection with one of his colleagues who wouldn’t allow me though security with a carrier bag(containing no liquids, gels, nor any other prohibited items), which had just passed through security checks at two other international airports, including the aforementioned Atlanta, and flown halfway across the world on two international flights with me without incident
Having to pay nearly £3 for a coffee
Finding nowhere to sit amongst the dozens of shops, bars and restaurants as I waited for my connecting flight
Reading about the cold-blooded murders of assorted teenagers, children and adults with learning difficulties on the country’s violent city streets
Reading about the scandals, frauds, corruption and lack of quality rife in the TV industry, including its publicly-subsidised channels(and wondering if this and the previous point were, in any way, connected).
Finding nowhere to sit on the train – delayed by more than an hour with no explanation given - that took me on the last leg of my journey.
Reading about the antiquated drainage systems which had led to fatal flooding in several cities
Reading a two-page, tabloid newspaper report – complete with photos – about a D-list female celebrity who – shock! – danced with a lap-dancer in front of her boyfriend. In – horror! - a nightclub. Two – outrage! - years ago.
Having to deal with sullen, unhelpful staff at airports, railway stations, cafes and bars.
Reading how the government couldn’t afford to supply its army with basic, protective equipment.
Reading how outdated, 1960s track technology was believed responsible for the latest in a series of fatal train crashes.
Having to pay nearly £3 for a bottle of beer(compared with 25 pence in the country I had travelled from)

When I finally reached my destination, I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to be back in the country I had been in 27 hours and six time zones earlier – beautiful, civilised, safe, smiling Colombia.
© Text and photos Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week Jack Havana recommends….
….all the CDs he has caught up with since his return home.(If only everything in these sceptic isles could be as good…..):
I Wish I Could Have Loved You More, by Candie Payne.
Lady’s Bridge, by Richard Hawley.
Back to Black, by Amy Winehouse
Anyone Who Had A Heart, by Eva Petersen
Twilight of the Innocents, by Ash.

Postcard From Colombia: Land Of The Body Snatchers

2007-08-12T21:28:00.001+01:00

12 August, Bogota.
THEIR FACES looked as though they had witnessed unimaginable horrors. Hollow-cheeked and wind-blasted, creased with fatigue, their eyeballs big, staring question marks. Six hours of suffering, across mountains and jungles. Battered by high winds and constant rain. Tortured by extremes of temperatures. 232 unrelenting kilometres of asking why, why, why, to the drumbeat of their hearts and the chiming of their pedals. The suffering of a country was etched on the faces of the riders who crossed the finish line at La Vega in the fifth stage of the Vuelta a Colombia 2007.
The previous day, a desolate father with his hands in chains marched into the main square of the capital city, Santa Fe de Bogota, to meet the President. He had marched across jungles and mountains, through wind, rain and sun, for seven weeks for this appointment. The pain etched on his face marked 10 years of emptiness. His 19-year-old son had been kidnapped by guerrillas. A decade of birthdays had remained uncelebrated. Day after day of asking why, why, why to the silence of his telephone and the withering of hope.

KIDNAPPINGS

The nation, previously inured to news of kidnappings, had been stirred by the father’s march. Many of them had lost sons, daughters, mothers and fathers to the kidnappers, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, or the narcotrafficantes during the last 40 years. There are currently believed to be 3,000 people in the hands of kidnappers in Colombia. The art of demanding a ransom – like many other business practices here – is a relaxed affair. Many victims of the body snatchers have been in captivity for years.
In today’s El Tiempo newspaper, it was reported that there have been 1,052 kidnappings in Bogota alone during the last eight years. At least thirty of the victims were killed. Forty were foreigners. And at least 200 were snatched by FARC, one of the left-wing guerrilla groups that still controls large swathes of remote countryside here. Alongside the report was a list of Do’s and Don’ts to avoid being kidnapped. “Keep a low profile and don’t publicise any financial success,” was one tip.

TROPICAL

Washed-up has-beens, however, aren’t considered of much value. So no-one’s tried to kidnap me. Yet. I’m the Course Director at an English language summer camp at a farm in the middle of a tropical rainforest just 45 miles from Bogota, but a lifetime away from the capital’s bright lights and fancy bars and restaurants. We are 2,000 metres below Bogota in the foothills of the Andes, in the heart of the tierras calientes – hot lands – where iridescent parrots and humming birds fly amongst the royal palms and orchids, and the threat of tarantulas keeps the kids awake at night. Cold showers, intermittent power and the slowest broadband internet connection in the world are a daily diet. But I have to say – it certainly beats the shit out of working for a certain language school in Edinburgh.

STRONGHOLD

A mile from the camp is the town of Villeta, which was a guerrilla stronghold as recently as four years ago. The taxi driver who took me up the mountain to La Vega for the finish of the Vuelta a Colombia – until he was turned back at a police checkpoint for not having a permit to cross the departmental boundary line, from where I was forced to hitch a lift – told me how the guerrillas announced their arrival by making discreet inquiries around the town such as: “Who are the drunks? Who are the machistas? Who are the troublemakers?” The guilty parties were then given 15 days to clean up or clear out. Though he didn’t admit as much, I got the impression my taxi driver missed their efficiency. They left pretty hastily after the paramilitaries – who may or may not have direct links to the army and government, depending on who you listen to – moved in and weren’t quite as generous with their ultimatums. “They simply took people from their homes, drove them into the rainforest, and killed them,” said my taxista.

PARADE

In Bogota, where I spend my weekends recuperating at the bullfight(there is currently a series of free novilladas and corridas to celebrate the city’s anniversary), football(Millonarios at the clapped-out Campin stadium are my adopted team) or watching the endless parade of Colombian beauties spilling out of the trendy bars and restaurants or posh shopping centres of the Zona Rosa, the legacy of years of car-bombings, political assassinations and kidnappings is all too apparent. It’s the sniffer dogs who check your car before you can enter underground car parks, or the security guards who frisk you in and out of shopping centres, or the razor wire that defines the rich neighbourhoods. It’s the signs on the TransMilenio – high speed buses – that say automatic sub-machine guns or any other arms are prohibited.

LOLLIPOPS

Or it’s the barefoot refugee from the countryside selling chewing gum from the central reservation of an eight-lane highway while his family try to shelter from the rain in a heap of plastic bags and personal possessions. It’s the pretty little girl at the bullfight selling lollipops for 500 pesos.
Back at the summer camp, Cheo, our friendly Colombian handyman who happily played football with the kids and kept an eye on them while they were in the swimming pool, probably thought he had landed on his feet getting work for five weeks in an area not exactly abundant in employment opportunities. But Cheo doesn’t work for us any more. He was, suddenly and quietly, “replaced” last week.

CATTLE

The farm we are based at is owned by Don Ricardo Delgado, a successfully Bogota businessman who also owns several cattle and sugar cane growing ranches. His oily, playboy son, Fernando, who got his architect’s degree in Milan, wears a Mont Blanc watch and drives a vintage Mercedes, has been showing a lot of interest in my female colleague, Lisa. (I should point out at this point, perhaps a mite ungallantly, that Lisa is plain verging on porcine and as charmless as a wet Sunday in Coatbridge, but that she possesses an attribute considered legendary for a female in Latin America – blonde hair). Lisa, however, in a twist worthy of Colombia’s most controversial telenovela – Sin Tetas, No Hay Paraiso(Without Tits, There Is No Paradise) – was more taken with the rustic, understated charms of Cheo.

REMOVED

Don Ricardo was not best pleased for the prospects for his son. So Don Ricardo had Cheo swiftly removed. The official reason was that “the parents of the kids had requested a female lifeguard at the pool”. And so Cheo can now been seen around Villeta touting for work with an outdoor activities agency.
It’s a cruel, primitive country, the kind of country that can leave fit, strong and healthy young men hollow-cheeked and blank-eyed.
And that’s before the body snatchers have got to them……

© Text and photos Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

ABOVE: The author does some intensive research into Colombia's social and political upheavals.
This week, Jack Havana recommends:
DVD: Maria Full of Grace(15). Of course, the average Colombian says his country only produces so much drugs because the rest of the world demands it, but this is a compelling account of life as a Colombian drugs mule.
TV: Sin Tetas, No Hay Paraiso(Without Tits, There Is No Paradise). There’s nothing a Colombian drugs lord likes more than to buy his girlfriend something expensive and ostentatious – like a bigger pair of breasts, for example. Judging from some of the examples I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing this past four weeks, it has become a national obsession. This satirical TV show captured the zeitgeist, and is now out on DVD.
BOOK: News of a Kidnapping, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The greatest living Colombian – apart from Shakira, obviously – wrote this brilliant dissection of Colombia’s number one pastime back in the 90s, but it resonates as strongly today.

The Year Of Living Dangerously

2007-07-10T17:32:00.000+01:00

THIS MONTH MARKS ONE YEAR of writing about the World of Crap. And never have I felt more likely to drown beneath its relentless tide of shit……
Regular readers may recall that back in April, I was actually offered a job. My CV wasn’t rejected as the work of Satan merely because it included a photograph. I didn’t have to fill in a 10-page application form. I wasn’t asked for a copy of my English O-level certificate from 30 years ago. And the interview took place over the telephone. It was a two-month contract managing a residential English language summer school at the not inconsiderable sum of £500 a week, plus free bed and board. I was well chuffed. Suddenly my faith in human resource managers and their ability to recognise talent without the aid of application forms and brain-numbing company presentations involving flip charts and name badges was restored.

CHILL

My only, teeny, weeny reservation came during a series of emails shortly after confirmation of my appointment. They came from the person who would be my “operations manager” and they sent a chill through my heart. Her name was Emma. It wasn’t her chirpy, jolly-hockey-sticks tone. It wasn’t the fact she used the word “axiomatic” in one of her emails. It wasn’t the likelihood that she was probably half my age and would have as much experience of man-management as I have of arable farming. It was the fact that she signed her emails thus: "Em". Em. Emma, it appeared, was just too long and unwieldy and formal. So she had felt the need to shorten it. Abbreviate it by half, in fact. To Em. And this really, really unnerved me. As things turned out, my fears were to prove catastrophically justified....

FLOODS

I started work at 1 pm on Wednesday 20 June. I was sacked and told to leave the premises immediately at 12.20 on Friday 22 June. It was as brutal and sudden as that. After just 47 hours, I was being dispensed with on the flimsiest of pretexts.
I had spent 16 of those hours asleep in bed. Of my waking hours, I had spent 13 of them, at Emma’s behest, helping construct 56 sets of bunk beds, because management had overbooked the number of students due to arrive in three days’ time. During those 47 hours, I’d barely had time to do any “managing” at all. And here I was being summarily dismissed by a purple-faced Managing Director and his flint-eyed Human Resources henchwoman. (Full story here)

WHIM

So my summer was ruined at the whim of a girl who found her name, Emma, to be just too long and complicated to have to write at the end of every email.
It wasn’t just the loss of nearly £5,000 in wages and bed and board that left me feeling about as loved as a Jehovah’s Witness in the Gaza Strip. It was all the other jobs I’d turned down to take this one. It was the holiday I’d promised my girlfriend and now had to cancel. It was having to explain to all my neighbours what I was doing back home again so soon. It was the sleepless nights and mood swings that left me feeling washed-up and worthless. It was the piercing pangs of self-doubt, the plunging troughs of emptiness. It was the sleeping tablets my GP prescribed. It was having to face the sullen, flaccid faces down at my local Job Centre as I was forced to sign on. Again. It was the bitter taste of frustration and anger that I woke up with – and continue to do so – every day. It was the being shunned by teaching unions and solicitors who just didn’t want to know. It was the despair at finding myself in a legal Catch-22, which meant that I could only sue for unfair dismissal if I was a woman and/or pregnant, or old or black(i.e. on the grounds of discrimination). And this was just the start of the storm of shit that was about to engulf my life….

WORLD OF CRAP

I am currently embroiled in legal proceedings against three representatives of the World of Crap. I have decided not to name any of them until I have exhausted every possible means of getting some form of redress. One of them is the caring, feeling employer described above. Another is a local organisation that I am taking to an Employment Tribunal because they discriminated against me on the grounds of age at a job interview. And the third is a solicitor. A solicitor who libelled me.
In the midst of all this I also received an abusive email from the company I am attempting to publish Why Davina McCall Must Die(And Other Dispatches From The World of Crap) with. They wanted the book legalled. I told them I would sign a waiver absolving them of any liability in the unlikely event of a celebrity being trapped so far up their own arse that they threatened to sue me. So I was surprised when they responded that they weren’t worried about that. They were, it seems, more concerned that my book might incite a reader to either hi-jack a plane (see World Exclusive: Why Airport Security is Rubbish) or kill a celebrity (see Why Davina McCall Must Die).

KNIGHTHOOD

I was gobsmacked. My expose of airport security had clearly been in the public interest, while if anyone was encouraged to kill or maim a daytime TV presenter, surely that would be a public service worthy of a knighthood? But my publisher wasn’t amused, and in an email accused me of: “unreasonableness, hostility, intolerable impatience, paranoia, rudeness and insults.” This after I had just transferred £160 in to their bank account.
They have since chilled out a bit, even sending me a copy of one of their top selling titles, Mademoiselle Miss: Letters From a First World War Nurse At An Army Hospital Near The Marne as a goodwill gesture. Though I paid for the postage…..
But they still want a reassuring solicitor’s letter re: my book. And that’s how I ended up being libelled by a jumped-up junior solicitor who had pound signs in his eyes before he’d even finished shaking my hand…….(Full story here).
Hey, but things could be worse. I could have been born looking like this.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana would like to say thank you to the following readers who offered him support and/or the occasional freebie during this shitty period in his war against the World of Crap……
Wendy Grant-Mason and Catherine Hill, at Tayside Business Gateway.
My GP, Dr. Sutherland
Pete Byrne, at Oxygen Music Management
Echo and the Bunnymen
Simone Bett, at Speakeasy Productions
Paula Trafford, at Scarlet TV
Simon Howley, at Kowalski Productions
And if anyone knows a good, cheap solicitor……….

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

2007-07-04T11:57:00.001+01:00

THE TOUR DE FRANCE starts in England on Saturday. OK, it may have turned into a bit of a pharmaceutical jamboree in recent years, but I’m still in awe of the fuckers who can cycle 3,550 kilometres in 21 days(including six days cycling over the Alps and Pyrenees). Sadly, a shortage of funds and ongoing legal battles with the World of Crap – which you will be able to read about here once they are resolved – mean I will be unable to make it down to London for the start. Weather and car bombs permitting, it should be a great day. At least the competitors won’t have to put up with homicidal truck drivers….

Graham Geddes
D Geddes (Contractors)

Swirlburn

Colliston

By Arbroath

DD11 3SH

9th June 2007.

Dear Graham,

“And if a ten-ton truck

Kills the both of us

To die by your side

Well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine”
(There Is A Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths)

What a beautiful day! Glorious sunshine, no wind, perfect conditions for my daily 30-mile bike ride around the country lanes and undulating hills of Angus. I have a set route which keeps me off the main roads and takes me down narrow, winding lanes – and that’s where the trouble lies.
After cycling this route without incident for the last three years, it has become increasingly fraught with danger: reckless truck drivers who think they can go all gung-ho and macho because they are miles from the nearest speed camera or traffic lights.
Today saw the latest incident, in which a ten-ton truck came hurtling down a single-track lane towards me. Instead of slowing down, the driver maintained his high speed – I would estimate about 30-40 mph(this is a ten-ton truck travelling down a single-track lane with a cyclist coming in the opposite direction, remember) – and sent me flying on to the verge. And guess whose name was on the truck? The Geddes Group.
Sometimes it’s a Geddes truck overtaking me – again on narrow, single-track roads – at speed which causes the problem, as it sends a hail of loose stones flying up in its wake. It’s only through luck that I haven’t had a stone fly into my face or been knocked off my bike. Yet.
At least three such incidents occur in an average week on the narrow lanes surrounding your Waulkmill Quarry.
I am not some car-hating tree-hugger. I own a car, but I drive it responsibly and show consideration to other road users(just as recommended in the Highway Code, which maybe your drivers need to re-acquaint themselves with). And I understand business interests. I’m not asking you to stop operations or find alternative routes. All I’m asking is this:
Is it not possible for you to instruct your drivers to pay attention to their driving – and other road users – as they hurtle along the back lanes of Angus? By “pay attention”, I mean REDUCE THEIR SPEED as they overtake, or pull into a passing place if they are coming in the opposite direction. This would delay your drivers by, ooh, a whole 30 seconds, one minute tops?
Farmers in their Land Rovers do it. Day-trippers in their Renault Clios manage it. Even white van drivers have pulled into a passing place and/or slowed down to allow me room to continue. So why can’t your drivers?
I’m pretty conspicuous – I’m six foot two, sixteen stone, average about 17 mph and am shod in garish Lycra. Most of your drivers probably already know me. I cycle the route about four or five times a week and am not averse to indicating my displeasure as another of your trucks speeds past me with barely a hair’s breadth to spare.
I am forwarding copies of this letter to Tayside Road Policing Unit, and my solicitor. Consider it my “insurance”, in case – God forbid – I should end up in hospital, or worse, as a result of your drivers’ reckless behaviour behind the wheel. (“Well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine”)
In the meantime, I look forward to receiving an assurance that you have taken steps to “educate” all your drivers in the basic skills of responsible and considerate driving.
Yours etc,
Cc Insp. Gordon Milne, Head of Road Policing Unit, Tayside Police.
Stephen Wilson, Wilson, Greig & Associates.

OK, I don’t really have a solicitor called Stephen Wilson. Actually, I don’t have a solicitor at all. But it worked. Though Graham Geddes couldn’t bring himself to reply to my letter, I received this email from the police:

I received your letter of complaint regarding the Geddes lorries yesterday and acted upon it same date.
I attended at the Geddes premises where I spoke with a member of the Geddes family. They intimated that they had received your letter and had acted upon it already. They have sent letters to all drivers of their lorries who have been left in no doubt as to the driving standards expected of them.
I hope this will come to a satisfactory conclusion and you can enjoy your cycle rides in safety in the country roads in Angus.
If you have any further need to contact ourselves please contact our Inspector , Gordon Milne or our control room on …….. if you require our services more urgently.
I am a patrol officer based at Forfar and personally speaking I will give the area more attention during the daylight hours in the hope my presence will act as reminder of the standard of driving expected of their lorry drivers.
Yours Sincerely
Neil Robertson PC 8251

© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends…..
MUSIC: Easy Tiger, by Ryan Adams. Latest saloon bar blues from the prolific 12-year-old.
BOOK: The Rider, by Tim Krabbe. Brilliant, philosophical account of a bike race: “Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.”
DVD: Breaking Away(1979). Starring a very young Dennis Quaid, the best cycling-as-a-metaphor-for-growing-up movie ever made. Probably.
CIGAR: Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robusto. The rich, short smoke that won’t keep you hanging outside the pub in the rain for too long while all your non-smoker mates enjoy the fresh air inside.

The Return Of Evil

2007-06-28T19:29:00.000+01:00

IT WAS ONE of the most shameful episodes in history. It brought misery to millions, and left a legacy of suffering that has been passed down from generation to generation. Those that survived the mental torture have grown older bearing the scars. Some can barely talk about it, while others are in denial, claiming that it really wasn’t as bad as it seemed.
It was all about a small group of megalomaniacs sating their hunger for power and money in the most evil, shallow way. They produced some of the most horrific atrocities ever recorded. Their spectacularly choreographed rallies held the world transfixed with a mixture of awe and revulsion. The images of their followers, wearing their distinctive uniforms and worked into a frenzy by crazed oratory, haunts us still, even though in some countries it is today against the law to glorify their achievements.

UGLY

The guilty parties who survived are now ugly and infirm, yet their greed for power and adulation has not dimmed. As well as causing pain and torture to innocent millions, they were conceited and arrogant enough to commit their beliefs to film, literature and audio. No medium was immune to their pernicious influence.
There were many dark episodes during their reign, none worse than the sight of thousands of innocent people – grannies, couples, children - being herded into venues believing they were about to enjoy something pleasurable, only to suffer pain, degradation and worse.

MISTAKES

You would have thought mankind would learn from its mistakes. You would have thought governments around the world would have taken every precaution to prevent history repeating itself. You would have thought advances in science and technology would guarantee we would never see such scenes again. You would have thought evolution would have rid the gene pool forever of greedy, evil, malevolent life forms. You would have thought that our collective sense of responsibility would have made sure that such evil was never allowed to flourish again.
You would be wrong.

The mendacious slogans have been dusted off and are already back in circulation: "We are doing it for our fans" and "it's not for the money, it's to celebrate the music."
Yes, just when the slum-dwellers of Baghdad, Gaza City, Kabul, Sierra Leone and Glasgow thought life couldn't get any worse, the Spice Girls reunion has been confirmed.
At least Hitler and his cronies had the dignity and decency to kill themselves so the Third Reich could never be resurrected.
Did mankind really learn nothing the first time around……?
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

Dead Funny

2007-06-13T10:51:00.001+01:00

IF YOU WERE LOOKING for conclusive proof that today’s celebrities are a bunch of vacuous, talentless, self-serving creeps, you need look no further than the new TV ad for prostate cancer research.
When any charity wants to boost its profile and increase public awareness, the obvious tactic is to sign up a much-loved and respected celebrity to spearhead its campaign. The problem is…..there just aren’t that many much-loved and respected celebrities out there any more.
So the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation did something inspiring. Faced with the choice of having to pick someone from the putrid pile of TV presenters, weather forecasters, reality show contestants, talent show flops, crap England footballers and cricketers, pop stars who sing about the hell of being famous, soap stars, models and Paris Hilton which defines the age we live in, it decided to look elsewhere.

CHARISMA

It wanted someone with that rare mix of credibility, gravitas and charisma. So Vernon Kay it was not to be. It wanted someone with a proven record of being entertaining and original. So that ruled out Simon Cowell. Someone genuinely funny and inspiring. Russell Brand’s phone remained silent. Someone who combined charm with humility. Richard Madeley didn’t get the call. Someone who would be more concerned with the message than the money. Jonathan Ross didn’t make the shortlist. Someone articulate and interesting. So not Chris Moyles then. Someone with self-awareness and sagacity. Eamon Holmes, Alan Hansen, Robbie Williams, Piers Morgan, Ant and Dec……..none of them fitted the bill.

GRAVE

To find someone truly great, the charity had to look to the past, beyond manufactured boy bands, beyond mercenary Big Brother contestants – beyond the grave.
Bob Monkhouse was, and - thanks to the genius at the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation who came up with the idea and the technology that made it happen – remains, a class act.
Expect this ransacking of the graves of the great and the good to continue. The entire, collective charisma quotient of today’s celebrities could be fitted in a laboratory Petri dish and still leave room for the contents of Paris Hilton’s make-up bag. All the true greats are either dead or pushed to the margins of obscure satellite TV channels because the BBC, ITV and Channel Four schedules are clogged up with reality and makeover shows.

DEATHBED

It was only a couple of years ago that, in desperation, BBC producers dragged comedy great Ronnie Barker from his deathbed, dusted him in make-up and sat him under burning studio lights to present a compilation of clips from The Two Ronnies. Expect him to be exhumed and appear on your screens again soon as ratings for the latest Graham Norton vehicle plummet.
The lack of the vital charisma gene in today’s celebrities is why Alan Whicker fronted those brilliant TV ads for Travelocity.co.uk. It’s why a feature film about the life and times of Tommy Cooper is in production. It’s why Noel Edmonds is back on the telly presenting Deal or No Deal. It’s why the likes of David Frost, Bruce Forsyth, Terry Wogan, David Attenborough, John Peel, John Thaw and Leonard Rossiter still stand heads and shoulders above all the morons masquerading as “celebrities” today.
Expect our creatively-defunct channel controllers and programme makers to become the new grave-robbers soon.
*You can see the Bob Monkhouse advert, and make a donation to prostate cancer research, here.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

A Very Modern Nightmare

2007-05-20T21:46:00.000+01:00

IT’S A STORY which has captured the world’s imagination. For the media, it’s a dream scenario. For the newspaper reader or TV viewer, it is their worst nightmare played out day after day in their homes. It has all the key ingredients: the threat to innocence, the anguish of not knowing and the evil of an unseen bogeyman.
The police investigation has gone global, but attracted its fair share of criticism. It has been condemned as too slow, too little, too late. Police have named suspects, but little else. There are rumours of false tip-offs and incriminating material found on computers. But they have produced insufficient evidence to result in conviction. The word “scapegoat” hangs heavy in the air.

INNOCENT

So it has been left to the media to hound and harass the innocent parties who have been tainted by circumstance and association. Innocent lives have been rigorously and repeatedly dissected beneath the unforgiving glare of the TV cameras and Mary Nightingale.
Despite all this, despite the warnings and appeals to the public, the agony continues. Some have said the slow pace and apparent indecision of the police investigation is indicative of the executive which administers it – lumbering and inefficient, using primitive methods to pursue a sophisticated foe, more concerned with spin than action. Others ask: what can you expect from a supposedly civilised country that has only recently emerged from the dark days of a power-crazed, image-obsessed dictatorship?

LIPSTICK

But the big question remains: now that the dictator Blair has finally announced his resignation, will Britain ever get to grips with the War on Terror? Or will it merely continue confiscating our lipstick and soft drinks at airports and arresting anyone who might have rented a Michael Moore DVD in the last six years?
Last week, another three “suspects” were released without charge, after being arrested on suspicion of conspiring with the 7/7 London bombers. "I think this was a totally stage-managed arrest of people whose only crime is to be associated with the people responsible for the July 7th bombings," said their advisor Suresh Grover.

RIDICULOUS

Meanwhile, of the 25 people arrested in connection with the alleged plot to blow up 10 planes over the Atlantic in August last year – which led to all those ridiculous and ineffective security measures being introduced at European airports - the trickle of “suspects” being released without charge continues. This is largely because, in the words of former British ambassador and outspoken critic of Blair’s War on Terror, Craig Murray, “none of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time. In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.”

ATROCITY

Since 9/11, Dictator Blair has introduced THREE anti-terrorism Acts. And he still couldn’t stop the 7/7 atrocity. His first two pieces of knee-jerk legislation were used to arrest 700 “terror suspects” - including an 82-year-old Labour Party member who heckled Jack Straw – and kill at least one innocent civilian in cold blood – Jean Charles de Menezes. Those 700 arrests led to 17 convictions. More than half of the other “terror suspects” were released without charge.
The War on Terror has captured the world’s imagination. It has all the classic ingredients: the threat to innocence, the anguish of not knowing and the evil of an unseen bogeyman. Sadly, it has been aided and abetted by a sycophantic, unquestioning media. A media that prefers to film “reconstructions” of bombs blowing up to illustrate the latest terror plot court case – wow, what a big bang and what a lot of smoke! – than ask any awkward questions.

A media that has recently been too busy chasing its own tail around the sunny streets of Praia da Luz to expose the deceitful scaremongering of our government and the US administration.
A scaremongering that is designed to distract us from the shambles in Iraq, demonise the disaffected minorities in our midst, and keep our leaders in power and riches.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
SCOTLAND IN A NUTSHELL….
My local Morrisons has had a refrigerator-load of Innocents fruit smoothies – the delicious equivalent of two portions of veg or fruit per glass – reduced from £2.99 to £1.99 for the last month. There are still dozens of cartons left. Last week it reduced the price of a couple of lines of South American wine by between £1 and £1.50. They had sold out within 48 hours. The words "fat", "alcoholic" and "lowest life expectancy in Europe" come to mind……

He Died So That Ewan McGregor Could Live

2007-05-07T16:24:00.000+01:00

THERE’S NOTHING YOUR average Scot likes more than to remind you of the triumphs and achievements of his forefathers. There is, apparently, no feature of the modern, civilised world that cannot be traced back to a bloke wearing a kilt, tending Highland cattle and spitting in the eye of the nearest Englishman. These include the telephone, penicillin, Elvis Presley and black US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama. All can be directly linked to the remains of a crofters’ settlement near a peat bog just off the A90 outside Aberdeen.

CHIP

All Scots suffer from hunched posture on account of the massive chip on their shoulders. They believe the whole world – but especially their immediate neighbours to the south – owes them a favour because Scots have given so much that is good and great to the world. Like Sheena Easton and square sausage.
The basic tenet of the Scottish media can be summed up thus:

Everything good in the world = Scottish.
Everything bad in the world = English.

This has accounted for such memorable headlines as this, from the Daily R*c*** in 2001 following crowd trouble at Scottish Premier League match:

HOOLIGANS WERE ENGLISH

Or this from any number of Scottish newspapers after the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Iran earthquake and just about any other natural disaster of the last century:

SCOTS LEAD RESCUE EFFORT

The Scottish media also believes Ewan McGregor, Sharleen Spiteri and Edith Bowman are a modern day, Caledonian Holy Trinity and that if you were to repeatedly stab them with a knitting needle – a recurring dream of mine – they would bleed Tartan-coloured blood. It also believes that no creation in the history of literature is as tear-inducingly funny as Chewin' The Fat, that the beautiful game of football was plunged into an abyss of darkness with the retirement of Alan Hansen, and that the world of light entertainment would be a sadder, more desolate place without the Suzy Maguire afternoon show on Clyde FM.

SYPHILLIS

But you know what? All that history and celebration of anything and everything with the most tenuous Tartan connection has just been rendered worthless. No longer do outsiders such as me have to nod in awe and acknowledgement that it was a Scot who invented the cure for syphilis. No longer do we have to doff our caps at the achievements of Alexander Graham Bell, John Logie Baird, James Watt or Lulu. No longer do we have to quietly endure our nostalgia-obsessed Scottish neighbours’ boasts that John Boyd Dunlop’s production of the pneumatic tyre and David Hume’s contribution to philosophy and politics paved the way for fortnightly bin collections and the iPod Nano. The whole of Scottish history has been thrown in to doubt.
And all because, in last week’s Scottish elections, 100,000 adults were too thick to fill in their voting forms correctly. (UPDATE 10/5/07: The final number of imbeciles came to 142,000)
Brilliant. No longer can Scotland claim to be the cradle of civilisation. A large proportion of its adult population has been exposed as too stupid to be able to put a cross or number in the right place.

MORONIC

The media and political parties are calling for an inquiry into the electoral system. But maybe we should launch an inquiry into the claims of Scottish history. Is it really possible that Andrew Carnegie and Robert Burns are the forefathers of a race of people so moronic that they managed to screw up the simple act of putting an X or number in a box? Is it really conceivable that a nation that spawned Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott could manage to make such a mockery of its own allegedly modern and forward-thinking democracy?
Any independent inquiry shouldn’t be into the design and font-size of the ballot papers. See how user-friendly they were for yourself here. They were designed so that even if you put an X where you were meant to write a number, or vice versa, your vote would still count. Yet somehow, 100,000 adults managed to get it so spectacularly wrong – an act that would practically require you to draw a doodle of the Battle of Bannockburn or write I SEE DEAD PEOPLE on your paper – that their votes were rejected as invalid.

SHAM

No, any independent inquiry should be into all those claims of Scottish greatness from the mists of time. Maybe none of those great figures were Scottish after all. Maybe we’ve been conned all along, and it’s taken a collective act of mind-boggling stupidity by the Scottish nation to expose its claims to historical greatness as a sham.
Maybe – just maybe – Scotland was as stupid back then as it has shown itself to be last week, and that all those brilliant figures – from the inventor of the telephone to the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – were actually English.

© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
RAVE REVIEWS FOR MODERN-DAY SCOTLAND’S ELECTIONS:

“It surprised me that the vote went so wrong. You don’t think that kind of thing should happen here.” – Stephan Hudith, journalist from Slovakia.
“It seems that even the oldest democracy can have the oldest problems, like people not being able to put a cross in the right box.” – Jorge Padilla, magazine editor from Mexico.
“In my country we share a lot of the same issues.” – Zoheir Elsaraj, newspaper columnist from Sudan.
(As quoted in the Sunday Herald on 6 May 2007)

This week, Jack Havana recommends.....
.....further reading on the theme of Scotland being so far up its own history it can’t see the future:
Letter From An Englishman Abroad
How This Man Is Turning Scotland Into The Laughing Stock Of The World
Does My Bomb Look Big In This?

Band Splits To Announce Reunion Tour

2007-04-26T06:09:00.000+01:00

THE ARCTIC MONKEYS this week held a press conference to announce details of their Reunion Tour. It will span seven years, 143 countries and 12,543 venues. Tickets – which will cost from £20 to £60 – will go on sale shortly.
There was an awkward moment during the press conference when a reporter pointed out to the group that they hadn’t actually split up yet.
Frontman Alex Turner said the current economic climate had forced the group to cancel plans to split up, and proceed straight to a Reunion Tour.

DINOSAURS

“With so many old dinosaurs from the 80s and 90s reuniting every week, there’s a serious danger we might miss out on being able to book the best venues or charge the best ticket prices,” he said. “Last month it was The Police. They’ve already booked up every sports stadium between here and Burkino Faso until 2009, so we’ve had to get our skates on. Otherwise fans who were unaware that we hadn’t actually split up might realise what we are doing and refuse to pay the exorbitant prices we will naturally want to charge for such a special event.”
But wasn’t the Arctic Monkeys Reunion Tour just a money-spinning publicity gimmick, asked another journalist.

SEAGULLS

“Yes,” said Alex. “But if Belinda Carlise, Nick Kershaw. Spandau Ballet and The Proclaimers can do it, then I don’t see why we can’t. There are rumours that A Flock of Seagulls might be about to announce their own comeback tour. That would seriously reduce the number of 20,000-seater venues available and would make a big impact on our projected profit margins. Such a big impact, in fact, that it might not be worth our while reuniting in the first place.”
Zimmer frame-pushing journalist from Word magazine: “But you haven’t actually split up yet. So how can you consider not reuniting, when you’re still united.”
Alex: “That’s a minor detail. We have a loyal, worldwide fanbase whom we are not afraid to exploit. We’ve learned never to underestimate the public’s ability to spend ridiculous amounts of their disposable income on any old shite. The Spice Girls proved that. And they’re about to announce a reunion tour too.”
Word: “When will your Reunion Tour take place?”

JAM

Alex: “Well, this year isn’t a possibility. The Police and Take That have got all the best venues and merchandise licensing deals sewn up. Even The Jam have announced a comeback tour this year, but without Paul Weller, who is forming a Paul Weller tribute band and going on tour in the late autumn. Next year probably isn’t likely either, as The Stone Roses, Teardrop Explodes and Bucks Fizz are all expected to be back on the road again.”
Earnest bloke from Mojo magazine: “Don’t you think it’s a bit rich cashing in on the nostalgia boom when your average age is only 20, you’ve only just released your second album, and your best song, Put Your Dukes Up John, wasn’t even written by you but by a much better group fronted by a beautiful woman called The Little Flames who, apart from this gratuitous plug and hyperlink to their website, haven’t had the exposure they deserve?”

BABE

Alex: “Haven’t The Little Flames split up?”
Mojo: “Yes, but they’ve just announced a reunion tour. To promote their debut single.”
Alex: “But yeah, you’re right. Their lead singer’s a babe.”
Twelve-year-old Home Affairs Editor from NME: “Have you heard of a group called The Kissaway Trail?”
Alex: “Why, have they split up? What’s that got do with our Reunion Tour?”
NME: “Absolutely nothing. I just wanted to give them a gratuitous plug and hyperlink to their website where you can hear a taster from their brilliant, self-titled debut album which is available in all good record shops now.”

Alex: "Haven't Girls Aloud just split up?"

Eamon Holmes from Sky News: "Yes, it was breaking news on my breakfast show. We put it ahead of the latest suicide bombings in Baghdad."

Alex: "Well that just proves my point. Watch this space - they'll be reuniting before you can say "Million pound global licensing deal". Just like All Saints did."

BISCUITS

Laura Barton from The Guardian: “Your music ambushed my dreams as I wallowed in childhood memories of ginger beer and home-baked biscuits on a Kent village lawn, and that’s why we love music because like a wisp of smoke it is at once both magical and ephemeral and yet concrete and permanent, so that wherever I am and whatever I do, your line about “what a scummy man” will always be an anchor trying to break free from the stormy seas of my heart.”
Alex: “Was that a question, love?”
Laura: “Ooops, sorry, no, I was just thinking out loud the intro for my column this week. I have to get it written before I do a consumer piece on re-usable panty liners for the Weekend magazine.”

WHIFF

Alex: “OK, so just to recap, this Reunion Tour isn’t yet another indictment of how cynical and cash-obsessed rock stars have become. It’s not another symptom of how we live in an age which has had the merest whiff of spontaneity or rebellion squeezed out of it. And it’s definitely not an idea that came from our accountant rather than our own sleep-deprived minds after an amphetamine-fuelled night of debauchery with Edith Bowman and Vanessa Feltz. If bands don’t announce details of their reunion tours early enough in their careers – maybe before they’ve even formed - they risk being crushed beneath the stampede for all the best venues and ticket deals by bands such as The Police and Johnny Hates Jazz.”

Man from Milk Marketing Board: "Is there time for one more gratuitous plug?"

Alex: "Go on then."

Milk Marketing Board: "The current TV ad campaign for Cravendale milk is the funniest thing since PG Tips' Monkey. Check it out here."

Alex: "OK, that's enough product placement. I don't want anyone thinking we're only in this for the money."
Journalist: “Before you go, I have a question for the drummer.”
Drummer: “Go ahead.”
Journalist: “What’s your name, buddy?”
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

And finally....

....this was Gaby Logan in Monday's MediaGuardian on why we should all watch her new BBC sports magazine show, Inside Sport: "My dad and Kenny[her husband] watched a pilot and they were both really excited about it."

All The Fun Of The Fair

2007-04-22T19:40:00.000+01:00

THIS WEEK, I WAS actually offered a job. My CV wasn’t rejected as the work of Satan merely because it included a photograph. I didn’t have to fill in a 10-page application form. I wasn’t asked for a copy of my English O-level certificate from 30 years ago. And the interview took place over the telephone. It’s a two-month contract managing an English language summer school. I will have the fates of 200 Spanish, Italian, Russian and Greek teenagers in my hands. The wages – by teaching standards – are good, and the school is based in acres of countryside. But an email this morning from the person who will be my “operations manager” has sent a chill through my heart. Her name is Emma. It’s not her chirpy, jolly-hockey-sticks tone. It’s not the likelihood that she is probably half my age and has as much experience of man-management as I have of arable farming. It’s the fact that she signed her email thus: "Em". Em. Emma, it seems, is just too long and unwieldy and formal. So she has felt the need to shorten it. Abbreviate it by half, in fact. To Em. And this really, really unnerves me.
Even if I was able to comprehend the reasons why someone called Emma might want to abbreviate their name to just one syllable phonetically, I cannot even begin to anticipate the kind of psyche that would want to do the same to the written form. So now I’m really worried. Is she going to be the kind of operations manager who will insist I wear the same regulation bright yellow polo shirt as the team of teachers I am supposed to be managing? Will she want every piece of paperwork filled out, on time, in triplicate and in voluminous detail? Is she going to report me to head office if she sees me pushing in front of a group of dozy Italian students in the lunch queue? My start date isn’t for another couple of months. A lot could happen between now and then…..

SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Meanwhile, the job I’d really been hoping for last week was buried away in the classifieds of my local evening newspaper:

Lambing assistant required, no experience necessary, age immaterial, own transport essential.

When I rang the mobile number, I found myself speaking to the farmer who was out in the fields. “I don’t have a pen and paper with me,” he said. “Can you ring my landline number and leave your details and I’ll get back to you?” But he reiterated that experience wasn’t necessary – “you won’t be involved in any of the actual lambing. I’ll need you to chase after the ewes for me, so you’ll need to be quite strong. The fella I had last year was a night club manager from Forfar who wanted some experience of working in the country. He loved it so much, he still drops by every other month to see how the sheep are doing.” Yes, I thought, this was a job I could really get stuck into, so I left all my details on his landline answer machine.

But he never rang back.

DAY OUT AT THE FAIR

Also advertised in that day’s paper was a "Recruitment Fair" for the 2007 Golf Open, which is being held down the road from me in Carnoustie in July. I’d never been to a recruitment fair before, but thought it could be interesting, a chance to meet prospective employers and hand out my CV, that sort of thing. Who knows, I might even get a job!
It was held in a room above Carnoustie Library, and on arrival you were greeted by staff from Job Centre Plus. The first thing you had to do before you were even allowed to look at the jobs being advertised was fill in a Job Centre Plus registration form. The second question on the form was Date of Birth. When I said to the Job Centre Plus person who’d given me the form that this breached the Age Discrimination Act, she mumbled: “Well, it doesn’t really.” Awkward silence. Then she mumbled: “It’s only really for if you’re under 16.” And finally, with a shrug of her mountainous shoulders, she mumbled: “Actually, you don’t have to answer it.” Brilliant! Job Centre Plus staff are undoubtedly the pride of Britain’s civil service. At my local Job Centre, where I occasionally run the gauntlet of benefit-scrounging smackheads and tax-credit-scavenging teenage mums, it is always a joy to find myself being questioned about my job-seeking efforts by a stoney-faced, overweight and monosyllabic member of staff. And now here were the same bunch of insipid, uninspiring government bureaucrats enjoying a day out in Carnoustie.

INANITY FAIR

Having got through this intensive vetting procedure, I surveyed the room around me. It was a sorry sight. The “Recruitment Fair” consisted of four trestle tables and a noticeboard with 16 sheets of A4 paper – each describing a different job – pinned to it. The jobs ranged from Ticket Checker – “man or woman, 7-11 hours per day, £6.30 per hour” – to Traffic Controller – “will be issued with safety clothing for visibility, £6 per hour”. The rest of the jobs were for cleaners, cashiers, “food service assistants” and bar and waiting staff.
On three of the trestle tables were some folded bits of cardboard on which was written in marker pen the names of the organisations doing the recruiting. These were: Sodexho Catering Services, Parking Promotions Managerial Services and Leisure Support Services. Except that no-one from Sodexho had actually bothered to show up, so various Job Centre Plus staff were manning the table and handing out Job Centre Plus application forms. And the man from Parking Promotions Managerial Services had forgotten to bring any application forms with him, so was having to use Job Centre Plus forms instead. Even though one of the promotional flyers for the event had claimed today you are attending an interview of suitability, absolutely no-one was carrying out any interviews. They were merely handing out Job Centre Plus application forms.
Swarms of clean-scrubbed school-leavers and students swarmed around the tables. I felt sorry for them. They’d washed behind their ears and put on their best shirts/blouses, just to be handed application forms. I wondered if, in today’s job market, they’d ever experience the thrill and drama of a proper, face-to-face interview. Then I realised why today’s customer care operatives and call centre staff have no apparent grasp of how to interact with a fellow human being. All they’ve ever known is filling in bits of paper with lists of previous employers and educational establishments attended. Here lies the root of the impersonal society we live in.

AZTEC DIGITAL CAMERA

I asked someone from Job Centre Plus if I had wasted my time bringing half-a-dozen copies of my CV. He shrugged his shoulders and said: “You could always attach it to the application form. We’ve even had some people attach photographs with their CVs.” He made it sound as daring and new-fangled as the horse must have appeared to the Aztecs when the Spaniards landed in Mexico.
Behind the last table, however, was a hint that at least one employer was attempting to take things seriously. It was a fancy advertising hoarding for FMC Catering. The table was manned by a couple of imperious-looking ladies called Annette and Rosemary. They were recruiting waiting, bar and “back of house” support staff. Unlike their rivals however, Annette and Rosemary weren’t merely handing out application forms. Oh no. Theirs was a much classier operation. They were giving out flyers with the address of their website. And asking you to fill in the on-line application form when you got home.
I asked Annette if she’d like a copy of my CV. She shook her head and gave me a deeply sympathetic look, as if I’d just told her I had a very rare and embarrassing illness. “No, but leave us your email address,” she said. “So we can send you a reminder to fill in our application form.”

HOSTS EARN THE MOST

Annette then said to me: “I think you’d make a good host.” She made a big deal about writing the word ‘host’, and underlining it, next to my email address. At this stage, having declined the offer of a copy of my CV, Annette knew absolutely nothing about me.
“What does a host do?” I asked.
“Well, to be honest, it’s normally hostesses we employ for this kind of event. They greet people at the entrance to our hospitality marquees and answer questions, such as ‘Where can I land my helicopter?’”
“Really?”
“Yes, but unfortunately that particular hostess thought the gentleman was joking, and told him he could land it on the 18th green. It didn’t go down very well. But I think you’d make a good host. I think we might have one or two vacancies left. It pays £100 a day.”
“Well, I’d certainly be interested,” I said. But I still couldn’t persuade her to take a copy of my CV.
When I got home later and checked out FMC’s website, the only application form that existed was for bar, waiting and “back of house” support staff. All at £6 per hour. No mention of host positions at all. It also included such legally-dubious questions as Nationality and Date of Birth, though only the former was asterisked as a “compulsory field”.
A few days later, this email pinged into my in-box:
Hi [ Jack ],
It was a pleasure meeting you at the library in Carnoustie. We would love you to come and work for us and so this is just a gentle reminder to send your application in on line as soon as possible. Our website address is http://www.fmccatering.co.uk/
I look forward to receiving your form.
With best wishes
Rosemary Carpenter.
So they would love me to come and work form them, would they? Yet they still expected me to fill in their on-line application form...
I had to lean over my pile of unwanted, unloved CVs to press the delete button.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends….
MUSIC: Oklahoma, by The Answering Machine. Manchester trio cite The Radio Dept. amongst their influences. That’s good enough for me.
FILM: Ghosts, directed by Nick Broomfield. The gonzo documentary maker turns his hand to a dramatic account of the deaths of 23 Chinese cocklers with masterly, understated aplomb.
BOOK: Going Postal – Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine And Beyond, by Mark Ames. The author currently reviews brothels for a US ex-pat magazine in Moscow, but previously he put forward this compelling theory for the amount of shooting sprees in his home country. Review here.
CIGAR: Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2. Review here.

American Psycho

2007-04-18T12:54:00.000+01:00

POLICE HAVE DISCOVERED THIS note, written by Cho Seung-Hui just hours before he went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech university campus, killing 32 students and teachers:
"IF YOU ARE reading this, then it can mean only one thing: that I’ve accidentally killed myself whilst attempting to beat the record for the number of students mindlessly murdered during a German lesson. Knowing me and how clumsy I am, I probably tripped over one of the barely-twitching bodies while trying to change clips on my .22 pistol. So I guess I’ll never know if I broke the record or not. I knew I’d never beat the Beslan total – those Chechnyan rebels are top dudes when it comes to senseless shooting sprees – but I thought there was a good chance I might beat Columbine, Jonesboro and all the other massacres that have been regular front page news since my family moved to the States for a peaceful life amongst God-fearing, tolerant people in a society dedicated to freedom, equality and the right to shoot your neighbour if he flies the Stars and Stripes upside down.

WEAPONS

So I guess you’re all wondering why I decided to put an end to so many innocent lives. No doubt the TV and newspapers are full of stories demanding that America tighten up its laws regarding the possession of potentially deadly weapons, particularly amongst students. Believe me, that won’t help. Some US colleges have tried before. Cape Central High School in Missouri once suspended 253 students who drove their cars to school. "We have a strict policy against any student who brings a weapon that can cause harm, injury, or disruption," explained Assistant Principal Herman Stasi. "An automobile is the most dangerous weapon a person can legally own. It's time we put a stop to this deadly menace." There are still more people killed in automobile accidents than at the hands of gun-wielding maniacs such as myself.

BIG MAC

So then it must the US gun laws, I hear you saying. No doubt as you are reading this, reporters and journalists from all over the world are queuing up outside Virginia gun shops waiting their turn to prove how easy it is to buy a semi-automatic weapon or rocket-propelled grenade launcher for the price of a Big Mac. That’s not the reason either. Do you know, for example, which country has the second highest rate of gun ownership after the US? It’s Switzerland. Yes, little Switzerland slap bang in the middle of Europe. Its unique form of home defence – a small standing army supplemented by a massive part-time militia - means that every male between 18 and 30 is obliged to own a rifle. That means that nearly every home has a gun in the cellar. There are more shooting ranges than dairy farms, and the cost of ammunition is subsidised by the government. And yet you don’t hear of anyone massacring their entire chemistry class just because they “don’t like Mondays.”

PEPPERS

OK, so now you’re thinking: did I go beserk in response to the news that Jade Goody is considering a move to the US? Well, to be honest, that was merely a contributory factor. So too was the news that Madonna was planning to adopt Lithuania and that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were about to release a Greatest Hits album.
So were my actions political? Was I trying to make a statement about the daily carnage happening in Iraq? To be honest, not really. I guess I was trying to make a statement about the carnage in US society. In fact, I feel a bit guilty about causing a welcome diversion for George Bush away from his foreign policy cock-ups. All you’ll be reading about for the next week or so will be my life story, my “disturbing” essays for my creative writing classes, how I was jilted by my girlfriend, all the opportunities America had given me(“Sunday Special: Two 9mm handguns for the price of one!”) and how my fellow students thought I was quiet and slightly boring, when instead the media should be concentrating on what’s happening in Baghdad. Massacres of innocents are ten a penny over there.

FAKE

No, I’ll tell you why I flipped. It’s the story of America. It’s the story of a nation so obsessed with appearing content and happy to the outside world, that it can really freak you out. It’s that fake, smiley culture that you get in restaurants, malls and offices. It’s the daily mantra of “Have a nice day!” or “Hi, my name is Stacey and I’ll be your waitress for tonight.” It’s fine if you’re over here on holiday from Europe or somewhere like that where they take pride in being miserable and moaning about the weather. All the false yet orthodontically-flawless smiles of our waiters, shop assistants, hotel receptionists, cabin attendants and car valets can be an enjoyable novelty, like having to drive on the right or drink our weak beer. But imagine if you had to put up with that stuff every day of your life. Believe me man, it’s not easy. Those smiles and those whiney, well-rehearsed phrases start off as quaint, then quickly become irritating, like a set of hinges that needs oiling, before finally rusting away to worthlessness.

Those people might as well be talking to you in Sanskrit. When that smiling, all-American boy or gal greets you with “Hey, how y’ doin’?” the correct response is “Just fine, how are you doin’?” before the exchange dries up in a fizzle of meaningless rhetoric. No-one gives a fuck about each other. Everyone has adopted the smile as an emblem of normality, of fitting in. Though it’s worse in offices and other workplaces, it exists in high schools and colleges too.

It’s the new racism. As a South Korean, I had no problem being accepted by my fellow students and neighbours. But as someone who didn’t feel the urge to smile all the time or spout empty platitudes – that was a different story. I was considered “strange”.

HERD

In his book about workplace and school shooting sprees, Going Postal, US journalist Mark Ames writes about how in the corporate workplace, a smile is part of the herd mentality: “These smiles are more like mammal calls used to identify the individual with the herd, to keep from being expelled. These calls have to be repeated and repeated: you can’t just recite the backslapping platitudes once and you’re off the hook— as mammals, the office herd requires you to send out the correct marking signals every single day, every hour.”
It’s the same on the college campus or in the aisles of Walmart. If you show signs of not fitting in, of “being an individual”, you might find your opportunities for advancement or promotion suddenly limited. The “herd” is stronger than the individual.

CRAZY

You think I’m crazy? Well, on the one hand, of course I’m fucking crazy, I’m about to march off to campus with a couple of guns and a bagful of ammunition with the aim of killing dozens of innocent people. But on the other hand, maybe I’m the only sane one around here. Consider this, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David K. Shipler in his book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America: “No employer would ever admit to passing her over because she was missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote. Caroline had learned to smile with her whole face, a sweet look that didn’t show her gums, yet it came across as wistful, something less than the thousand-watt beam of friendly delight that the culture requires. Where showing teeth was an unwritten part of the job description, she did not excel.”

SUCKS

That’s where this country sucks, man, because too much emphasis is put on a smile and a platitude. America is just a big, flimsy façade. There’s no substance. It’s not the home of the brave and the free. It’s the home of the scared and the disenfranchised. Behind every smile there is distrust and fear. That’s why the US has the Second Amendment. That’s why it has the ghosts of Columbine, Jonesboro, Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq stalking its well-manicured lawns and white picket fences. That’s why my name is about to become famous around the world – at least until the next, small-town loner decides he or she can’t face the smiles any more.
"Hi, my name is Cho, and I’ll be your lone, alienated, mass-murderer for today……"
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

Attack Of The Corporate Automatons!

2007-04-16T01:19:00.000+01:00

Fig 1: A new batch of Titan Travel tour managers prepare to meet their clients

PREVIOUSLY, I HAVE been rejected for a part-time typist’s job because I couldn’t produce an original of my English O-level certificate from 1977, and didn’t even get an interview for a temporary supervisor’s job at a carrot farm because my CV included a photograph and was considered “too jokey”.
Undeterred, this month I applied for a job as a freelance tour manager – “four to eight weeks a year” – with a “multi-award winning tour operator of Quality Escorted Holidays Worldwide” called Titan Travel.
Their advert said applicants should possess the following attributes:
Experience of managing people as well as the ability to organise yourself and work on your own initiative. CHECK!
Presentation skills are essential, as you need to be able to provide interesting and enthusiastic commentary on areas visited. CHECK!
Smart appearance. CHECK!
Flexibility. CHECK!
Excellent communication skills combined with experience of working in a customer-facing environment. Um, if they meant “dealing with the public”, DOUBLE CHECK!
The advert continued that “previous experience in a tour manager role is not essential, as full training will be given,” and added that applicants should send a covering letter “specifying the geographical areas of the world with which you are familiar and your level of knowledge.”
So I sent this letter:

Maggie Hide
Head of Tour Management
Titan Travel Ltd
HiTours House
Crossoak Lane
Redhill
Surrey
RH1 5EX
19th March 2007.
Dear Maggie,
Re: Vacancy for Tour Manager, advertised in The Guardian 19th March 2007.
I wish to be considered for the above post.
I’m an ex-TV presenter, failed stand-up comic, part-time football referee, former adventure tour guide and freelance English teacher.
I’ve managed deadlines, budgets and egos as a TV producer and Features Editor of a national newspaper. I’ve managed tears and shyness in the classroom. I manage tantrums and hysterics every weekend on the football pitch. And I’ve managed dramas and emergencies in the middle of the Sahara Desert with the nearest phone and line manager a two-day camel ride away.
I’ve travelled all over the world – hey, who hasn’t? – but have particular experience and knowledge of Latin America, North America, the Middle East and Europe. (I worked for four successful seasons as an Educational Tour Director, whose job was to bring the history of assorted crumbling, European cathedrals to life for groups of easily-distracted teenagers – and their heard-it-all-before teachers - from US High Schools.) And what I don’t know, I’m really quick at learning…..
I enclose my CV, including photo, letter of reference and testimonies from satisfied customers. (I have also sent you copies of this letter and CV by email.)
Yours sincerely

Ten days later, I received this “summons” from Maggie:

Dear [Jack]
Thank you for your reply to the advertisement in The Guardian, further to which we would like to invite you to attend a half-day group introduction to Titan Travel. This will include an outline of the company and the role of the Tour Manager, followed by a one-to-one 10-minute interview, which will allow you the opportunity to tell us about yourself. The details of the time and venue are as follows:
Date: 11 April 2007.
Time: Registration 0900 hrs. Meeting begins 0930 hrs.
Venue: Renaissance London Gatwick Hotel
Povey Cross Road
Horley, Surrey, RH6 0BE.
Telephone: 01293 820169
For this initial meeting we will not be offering travel expenses. Following on from this meeting, a list of potential Trainee Tour Managers will be contacted and invited to attend a second interview. Travelling expenses will be reimbursed for the second interview.
Accommodation can be booked at your own expense, at the Renaissance Hotel. A special rate of £95 Bed & Breakfast is available if you advise when booking that you are attending the Titan Travel function on 11 April 2007.
We do hope you will be able to attend and look forward to receiving your confirmation by return post/email.
Yours sincerely,
Maggie Hide.

OK, so on the plus side, I’d been selected for interview without having to fill in an application form. And, um, that was it.
On the minus side, however….. Well, there appeared to be quite a few things on the minus side.
The most obvious appeared to be that Maggie hadn’t actually read my CV or letter properly. If she had, she would have quickly ascertained a couple of quite important facts. Firstly, that I lived 530 miles away - in Scotland - from the venue of the interview. And secondly, that I had a successful career as a “tour manager” already behind me.

SANGRIA

Also on the minus side was that if I did choose to make the 1,060-mile round trip, it would take up two days of my time and cost around £250 in train and air fares, meals and hotel accommodation, even at Titan’s “special rate”. In return, I would be granted a one-to-one 10 minute interview which will allow you the opportunity to tell us about yourself. Now ten minutes would probably be long enough for a 16-year-old school leaver with a paper round to recount their personal history, but my own lifetime of modest achievements would take considerably longer(the tale of how I dissuaded a depressed school teacher from topping herself after one sangria too many in the shadow of the Alcazar in Segovia would take half an hour on its own). And after all that, even if I ended up getting the job, the length of my contract would be an epic four to eight weeks a year.

Fig 2: Jack Havana proves that charisma and personality inspire confidence in students/customers

Hmmm. I couldn’t understand why Maggie appeared to think I would honestly want to travel all that way, and at all that expense, just to hear “a group introduction to…the company and the role of Tour Manager”. (I once travelled to Edinburgh for one of these “group introductions” so beloved of brain-dead HR managers. It was for an English language school in Spain called ModLang, and while it was an eye-bleedingly dull 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back, at least it only cost me a cheap day return on the train). I’d already learned a lot about Titan Travel from its website, and I’ve been carrying out the role of Tour Manager to rave reviews for quite a while now. Also, if she thought I could afford all that time and money just for a 10 minute interview, then why the fuck would I need a wage-paying job in the first place?

CLAMMY

Then I remembered a line from the original advert: previous experience in a tour manager role is not essential, as full training will be given.
A cold, clammy feeling gripped me. Could Titan Travel be one of those companies that trains its tour managers to recite parrot-fashion a load of boring bollocks about how old this cathedral is, how tall that skyscraper is and how many years it took to build that bridge? Could it be one of those companies whose tour managers are wheeled off the corporate conveyor belt with all the charisma and individuality of a circus-trained seal? Could it be one of those companies looking for bubbly, blond(e) and cheap X-Factor wanabees who couldn’t get a job with easyJet?(That would certainly explain why it was giving only 10 minutes for candidates to talk about themselves)
No, surely not. All it would take would be a brief note to Maggie pointing out how far away I lived; that a whole page of my CV contained glowing references from people I’d previously served in a customer-facing environment; and that she was giving me less than a fortnight to arrange accommodation and travel for a date slap bang in the middle of the Easter holidays. (Crikey, you’d have thought a “multi-award winning” travel company would have realised a minor detail like that!) She’d understand and be sympathetic to my predicament, surely? Wouldn’t she?
So I sent this email on 2 April:
Dear Maggie,
Thank you for your letter of 28 March, inviting me to attend a half-day group introduction to Titan Travel on 11 April.
Unfortunately, I will be unable to make it. As someone who is stupid enough to live north of Watford and currently surviving on a freelance teacher's wages, I can't really justify a two-day, 1,000-mile round trip which will cost about £250 for the sake of hearing "an outline of....the role of Tour Manager" - a job I have successfully done for the past three years - and a "one-to-one 10 minute interview". I hope you understand.
I had rather hoped that the detail contained in my CV - including photograph, letter of reference, copies of certificates and glowing testimonies from satisfied customers who I have escorted on trips before - plus the fact that I live 500 miles away, might have been enough for you to consider conducting my "10 minute interview" over the phone. Perhaps even more ambitiously, I hoped it might even have earned me a "bye" to the next stage of your recruitment process, when travel expenses would be reimbursed.
I now realise I was being very naive indeed.
Ho hum.
And would you believe it, dear readers, I am still waiting for a reply. Maggie – who, you would hope, trains her Tour Managers to be polite and courteous at all times – couldn’t even be bothered to send me a couple of lines in acknowledgement, even if they were only: Tough shit. That’s your problem for living outside London.
So what, you may think? Titan Travel is a “multi-award winning” company while I’m just a loser who can’t even get a job as a part-time typist. Well, of the three awards trumpeted on Titan’s website, one appears to be for “selling long haul and short break holidays”(“Travel Awards 2006”), while the others – a Telegraph Travel Award for Best Tour Operator, and 2005 British Travel Award for Best Escorted Tours Operator – appear to have been based on the opinions of readers of The Daily Telegraph and people who need to be escorted when they go on holiday. Here's a typical customer's useful tip: "Take a pen and paper, it comes in handy for jotting down notes, i.e. conection times for the coach, suitcases in or out of your hotel room. Believe me everybody was asking each other for confirmation." Thanks for that to Tony Mayhew who holidayed with Titan last year.(You can read his full review here) It's a shame that Titan's expertly trained Tour Managers couldn't have pinned that kind of information to the hotel noticeboard. Meanwhile, for another opinion, check out Telegraph.co.uk's consumer rights page here.

RECTAL

So not only am I quite glad I didn’t attend the “half-day group introduction to Titan Travel” - which I suspect would have been only marginally less gripping than being stuck in a lift with Richard Madeley - but I’m also pretty sure that if I was ever to book one of their escorted holidays I’d find it about as enjoyable as a rectal endoscopy.
Meanwhile, my crusade to be treated as a literate, sentient life form by the HR managers of the world and defeat the evil forces of corporate automatons everywhere – and maybe one day get a job - continues……
NEXT WEEK: Jack visits a recruitment fair for the Golf Open 2007 and is surprised to find employment legislation being flouted by…….the Job Centre!
© Text and Fig. 2 photo Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends…..
BOOK: The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton. Should be compulsory reading for all aspiring tour managers. Brilliant. Review here.
FILM: Office Space(1999, DVD). Mike Judge, creater of King of the Hill, turns his attention to the McJob culture and corporate automatons in this under-rated gem starring Jennifer Aniston. It’s exactly how I imagine the head office of Titan Tours must be like. More here.
MUSIC: Girlfriend, by Avril Lavigne. And not just because of the video, honest. Say It Right, by Nelly Furtado. Also not just because of the video. Plus I’ve just seen The Don by “teenage Dundonian upstarts” The View on MTV, and it’s brilliant. All of which proves I'm eclectic if nothing else.

Who Dares Wins A Goody Bag

2007-04-09T10:11:00.000+01:00

IN FRONT OF THE Iranian TV cameras, Faye Turney looked a pathetic, cowering wreck, despite a comfortable chair and constant supply of cigarettes, drinks and food. But back in the UK and confronted by a question about how much money she was getting for her story on Tonight With Trevor McDonald, she dug deep into her previously untapped reserves of dignity and courage and adopted the grim face and gritted teeth more readily associated with heroes than the spineless cowards we have grown used to seeing on TV during the last fortnight. It’s amazing how a six-figure TV or newspaper deal can stir the British bulldog spirit in a way that capture by a bunch of crazy-eyed, Koran-touting maniacs never could…..
So with the news that the Shatt al-Arab waterway has been reduced to gridlock as boatloads of British marines and sailors try to get themselves arrested by Iranian revolutionary guards and win exclusive deals with the Daily Mirror, here is the exclusive story of one of the 15 hostages held captive by the Iranians:

BEARDS

“We didn’t have a chance. All we had was the most sophisticated weaponry, satellite tracking and hi-tech communications equipment available, plus the backing of a fully-armed frigate, Lynx patrol helicopter and a direct link to a squadron of F14 fighter jets. Also, we each had years of intensive training and combat experience. But the Iranians turned up in a couple of clapped-out speedboats sporting big rifles and even bigger beards, plus they shouted at us really loudly. We had no choice but to surrender and hand over our armour-piercing weapons, sea-to-air missiles, GPS equipment, plus all our big pairs of binoculars.
“Once on board the Iranian vessel, we admitted everything. They began shouting at us, telling us that we were only required to give our names, ranks and serial numbers, but we knew this was the first, subtle example of psychological torture, and that if we didn’t give them what they wanted, we risked being shoved and pushed about a bit.

SLAPPER

"We had a female colleague, Faye Turney, amongst our unit, and even though she looks a lot tougher than the rest of us put together, we knew we had to consider her welfare at all times. That’s why most of us hid behind her and pushed her forwards when the Iranians began demanding to know what we wanted for our evening meal that night. Faye might look like a fat, chain-smoking slapper, and the rest of us like a bunch of pasty-faced mummy’s boys, but we are the faces of the modern British army and, um, were conscious of that burden at all times.
“We were locked up in cells at a naval base in Iran. The idea of a group of serving soldiers being imprisoned in cells furnished only with comfortable, thick rugs and blankets to sleep on after being arrested for alleged incursion into a sovereign state’s territory will obviously come as a shock to many people, and serve as the backbone of any stories we sell to gullible newspaper editors over the next few days, but that’s what happened. We didn’t put up any struggle. Resistance would have been futile. It could have meant the difference between getting an extra portion of lamb curry or not.
“Conditions were pretty grim. Some of us were forced to share a cell with at least one other person from our group. And the toilet, well…….it was at least a three minute walk away down the corridor, to maintain good hygiene practice. Can you imagine how awful that was, knowing it was so far away after all the pomegranate juice we’d drunk?

GAMES

“We heard some terrible sounds that first night. And it wasn’t just the al-Halal-style slaughtering of all those lambs that were being prepared for our evening banquet. Our guards were definitely playing games. We could hear them slamming cards on the table, or shouting Checkmate! I can’t be sure, but I could swear I heard one group playing dominoes.
“None of us could sleep that first night. The food and drink they had given us had been so good, we spent all night thinking about the gruel the lads back in Basra would be having to put up with.
“The next day, we were transferred to Tehran. We knew things were pretty serious then, because they only gave us half-an-hour to finish off our breakfast of fresh coffee, fruit and unleavened bread. Something about the traffic at that hour of the morning, they told us.
"All the way there, we kept telling them how sorry we were, even though none of us were quite sure what for. We just thought it best to be as polite and apologetic as possible at all times. We didn’t like it when they shouted at us.

DESSERT

"In Tehran, things turned nasty. They told us we would be expected to make a televised confession. Just to leave us in no doubt about the consequences of us refusing to co-operate, they told us there was extra dessert on the menu for that night’s evening meal.

"Again, they insisted that all they wanted to hear from us was our names, ranks and serial numbers, just like those heroic British pilots who were shot down over Iraq during the first Gulf War. They said that episode had shown Iraq to be a really tough regime, and now they wanted Iran to come across as equally uncompromising. But we knew they were playing tricks on us. So our commanding officer told us to confess fully to whatever it was we had been arrested for, no matter how many cigarettes, pastries or glasses of tamarind juice they gave us. One of our lot, a really brave bastard, even insisted on being filmed in front of a map so he could point out exactly how far into Iranian territorial waters we had been when we were arrested. That takes guts, that does.
"Each night in our cells was a nightmare. Sometimes our guards forgot to turn the heating down, and it could get very stuffy, as the window was difficult to open. We’d have to shout at them for at least a minute or two before one of them would turn the thermostat down.

GOODY

"There was a lot of tension amongst us. We’d heard that Faye Turney had been forced into writing a confession. We dreaded the same thing happening to us. It would be the ultimate humiliation. None of us were very good spellers. Fortunately, they let us use dictionaries.
"At night, the psychological mind games continued. We could hear the rustling of paper. We knew it could mean only one thing – they were preparing goody bags for us. We eyed each other up suspiciously, wondering who would get the biggest. After all, none us were any good at fighting, so it could just as easily have been that short arse able seaman from HMS Cornwall as one of us marines who got the biggest goody bag. But in our heart of hearts we knew our fate – Faye Turney was bigger than all of us, so we’d be lucky if we got a single crumb if she was allowed into the room first.
"The days were long and stressful. We just couldn't keep score of who was winning the most chess games without a pen and paper. On some days, we’d be expected to recline on comfortable divans playing draughts or dominoes and smoking cigarettes for hours on end. They’d only allow us to stop three times a day for our three-course meals.

NASTY

"After about the 10th night, things took a nasty turn. The guards took to taunting us over the way we pronounced the name of the Iranian president. They told us that if we didn’t learn to say it properly, it could make us look really stupid when we were filmed shaking hands with him in a few days time.
"So that was it. We were due to meet the President. It was the news none of us wanted to hear. A Presidential audience could mean only one thing - that diplomatic efforts to resolve the situation hadn’t gone to plan, and that after nearly a fortnight of courteous treatment, adequate sleeping arrangements, clean toilets, limitless cigarettes and excellent food, we were to face the worst scenario: being sent back to our shitty barracks in Basra.

SWEETS

"But there was worse to come. As well as the goody bags, the Iranians gave us beautifully-tailored suits as a farewell present. All they asked in return, was that we tried to look as miserable and downtrodden as possible during the TV news conference. After all, they still wanted to appear a tough nation in the eyes of the world. But we just couldn’t. The suits felt so good on us and the goody bags were crammed with so many delicious sweets and pastries that we just couldn’t hide our happiness.
"Then Faye brought us back down to earth with a bang when she asked if any of us had learned to say the President’s name properly yet. It was at that point that the full horror of the last two weeks dawned upon us. If we couldn’t even pronounce President Ahmadinejad’s name properly, what chance did any of us stand of getting a six-figure deal to be interviewed on TV by Sir Trevor McDonald or Kay Burley on our return?”
TOMORROW IN YOUR SOARAWAY SUN: Mystic Meg interviews the spirit of a British army officer who was killed in a roadside ambush just outside Basra. And we don’t have to pay the bereaved family a single penny!! Instead, we'll save the cash to buy the stories from the soon-to-be-returning-home heroes of the England cricket team!!!!

Apocalypse Soon

2007-04-04T06:38:00.000+01:00

THE END OF CIVILISATION as we know it is approaching fast. The last few days have been littered with warning signs. Soon it will too late to do anything about it. But if we take action now, the world can be saved. Unfortunately, it will require more than donating to Children in Need or remembering to switch off the standby button on your TV. It will require something akin to packing Bruce Willis into a rocket and launching him at the asteroid that is threatening to collide with earth. Except it’s not Bruce Willis we should put in the rocket. These are the signs that we are surely doomed….

SIGN NUMBER ONE

Last Thursday on BBC Radio Four, presenter Ed Stourton introduced a report on army medics serving in Afghanistan with this sombre warning: “By the nature of this report, it does contain some serious injuries.” Not: contains strong language, loud bangs and the heavy panting of our correspondent as he dives for cover. Not: sensitive listeners may find this report and the images it conjures up of embedded reporters enjoying a secret stash of whisky and porn while innocent goat farmers are blown up all around them disturbing. But: This report contains some serious injuries.

SIGN NUMBER TWO

I was waiting for a train at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station last Friday when the big digital screen flashed up dramatic pictures from Sky News with this chilling caption: BREAKING NEWS – DERMOT O’LEARY TO REPLACE KATE THORNTON AS HOST OF X-FACTOR. I half expected an audible gasp from commuters waiting to board the 5.09 to Kirkcaldy, or an outbreak of inconsolable weeping from elderly women and young girls stuck in the queue for the toilets. Reassuringly, life continued uninterrupted amongst the good folk of Edinburgh, but I’d like to think that somewhere in a posh London flat the following morning a wife screamed in horror as she discovered her Sky News producer husband had blown his brains out in shame.

SIGN NUMBER THREE

A webcam showing someone’s driveway and a bit of a street in the village of Neilston – 12 miles from Glasgow with a population of 6,000 – has so far clocked up more than 100,000 visitors. Why don’t these people just look out their front windows instead? Or use the internet for something useful and fulfilling, like porn?

SIGN NUMBER FOUR

For the past few months, The Guardian has been running a bi-weekly column in its Friday music supplement called Hail Hail Rock’n’Roll. In it, hack Laura Barton masturbates herself into a frenzy of self-pleasure writing about her favourite songs. Which is a bit like me writing about my dreams. Or showing you my holiday photos. Except not as interesting, I promise. Here’s a sample from Laura’s column on love songs: I have played them repeatedly, loudly, pressed them into my ears in the hope that they might trickle down into the cracks and crevices in my heart and prevent it from breaking completely. When the tears have come, I have used these songs as sandbags against the rising tide. (And believe me, it gets worse. See for yourself here) This has been going on for months. I wrote to the newspaper reminding them of the quote(attributed variously to Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson and Elvis Costello amongst others) that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. They never replied.

SIGN NUMBER FIVE

ITV has just bought the rights to cover the England football team’s home games. There is a certain justice in a crap, inept broadcaster being given the rights to televise a load of crap, inept footballers. This was summed up during ITV’s coverage of last night’s Champions League game between PSV and Liverpool. Unlike Sky, ITV’s coverage of overseas games in the Champions League is in 4:3 format, not widescreen. This saves ITV enough money to pay Robson Green and Dermot O’Leary their exorbitant salaries, but also means nearly half the screen of a widescreen TV is filled with black in the form of two wide, empty margins down the sides. ITV then exacerbates the problem by obscuring what remains of the picture with as many bizarre and needless graphics as possible. Last night, after 30 minutes, a huge blue square appeared in the middle of the screen, obliterating 80 per cent of what hadn’t already been lost to ITV’s antiquated 4:3 format. The square contained the cryptic and, frankly, grammatically nonsensical title TEAM TOP 3 DISTANCE. Underneath were the names of three players followed by a series of numbers. It wasn’t until after several seconds of wondering what we were missing behind this clunky, antediluvian graphic that the commentator informed us these were the distances covered by the most energetic players in the match so far. It enriched my experience of watching the game about as much as having knitting needles thrust into my eyes. And yet today, some limp-wristed, creatively-defunct, illiterate baboon of an ITV Sport producer will be getting a pay rise and slaps on the back for coming up with such a great idea as TEAM TOP 3 DISTANCE...

SIGN NUMBER SIX

Channel Four chief Kevin Lygo this week described Big Brother as “the most extraordinary programme in living memory.”(MediaGuardian, 2 April). Oh. Dear. God. Obviously he doesn’t remember Hector’s House.

All these signs are irrefutable evidence of the collapse of civilisation. If we were living in a black and white B-movie, the creaks from the corridor outside the bedroom door would be growing louder and the zombies’ footsteps getting closer. The consequences of doing nothing are just too awful to contemplate.
Unless the governments of the world agree on a drastic plan of action – such as the banning of MySpace, the public evisceration of Kevin Lygo and, crucially, the confiscation of any audio playing equipment owned by under-12s, the mentally-challenged or Laura Barton - it is now only a matter of time before Armageddon arrives in the shape of the Four Whores of the Apocalypse – aka the Spice Girls minus whichever one’s pregnant at the time – announcing their reunion tour.
If you are in any doubt that society could be so careless as to allow such an atrocity – a global catastrophe potentially on the scale of the Holocaust, the Black Plague or the launch of Channel Four – then think again.
We never learn from our past mistakes. That’s why there were two world wars. That’s why it took two attempts to depose Saddam Hussein. That’s why Tony Blair was re-elected. That’s why Gaby Logan found a new job at the BBC. That’s why Steve McClaren got the England manager’s job. And that’s why Deal Or No Deal was re-commissioned.
You have been warned….
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole – apart from that bollocks written by Laura Barton – prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana has been…..
….listening to the Joy Division-inspired brilliance of Omerta and the Chrissie Hynde-meets-Siouxsie Sioux-tinged vocals of The Little Flames; wishing he could afford to fly to the Shetland Isles to see Puressence at the North Star on Saturday; watching Heroes on the Sci-Fi Channel; and wishing he understood how BitTorrent works so that he could download the final series of The Sopranos which starts in the US on Sunday(Kevin Lygo being too busy wallpapering his bedroom ceiling with posters of Jade Goody to be bothered about announcing dates for its UK transmission).

Further Adventures Of The Unemployed

2007-03-22T09:10:00.000Z

THIS WEEK, I applied for a job as a “Field Supervisor” with a company called Taylorgrown. This is what their advert said:

FIELD SUPERVISOR
Enthusiastic Person with good communication skills required to manage our student workforce for a ten week period starting mid May. This is a varied and stimulating position which would suit an organised individual with the ability to motivate their team. Good hourly rate available to the right applicants.
Applications in writing to:
TAYLORGROWN LTD, Tarrylaw, Balbeggie, Perth, PH2 6HL.
Or email: info@taylorgrown.co.uk

From what I could find out via Google, they apparently grow and pack carrots for supermarkets. So I sent off this letter, accompanied by my CV:
“Dear Taylorgrown,
I wish to be considered for the vacancy of Field Supervisor, advertised in today's Courier.
I've previously managed and motivated teams of students, teachers, tourists and journalists.
Every Saturday and Sunday morning, I currently have to "manage" 22 highly unstable and emotional adults, and have so far done so in a manner which has earned me respect and plaudits.(I'm a referee with the Dundee and Forfar Amateur weekend leagues......)
I've worked as a journalist, TV presenter, chef, adventure tour guide, nightclub doorman and driver. I currently freelance as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language.
I'm fit, enthusiastic, an excellent communicator, and possess a clean driving licence.
I attach my CV, including photo, copy of CELTA teaching certificate, letter of reference and testimonies from satisfied clients."
Before continuing, if you haven’t done so already, you should have a quick look at my CV, otherwise the full, grotesque effect of what is about to unfold will be lost.
Two weeks after writing to Taylorgrown, this email arrived in my inbox:
Dear Mr.......,
Thank you for your quick response to our advert, we appreciate your interest in our company. I regret to inform you that in this instance your we will not be calling you forward for an interview. I wish you every success in your future career.
Yours respectfully
Mrs. Lynne Brudenell B.A. (Hons)
Office Manager
There were several warning signs: the formal tone, the need to use the title Mrs. before her name and the gratuitous use of fancy initials after it. But I still had an urge to find out why my experience as a teacher, journalist and all-round good egg had failed to get me so much as an interview for a job which seemingly had my name written all over it: “enthusiastic person with good communication skills…..organised individual…….with the ability to motivate”, etc, etc.
So I emailed Mrs. Lynne Brudenell B.A. (Hons) the following:
“Thanks for your reply. I wonder if you can help me. I've applied for lots of "supervisory" jobs in the past few months, and sent out what I consider to be a very impressive CV. However, I'm never invited for an interview, which is beginning to make me wonder whether there is some glaring anomaly with my CV which I have failed to notice. Any advice or recommendations you have would be much appreciated.”
Mrs. Brudenell, bless her, obviously has quite an inflated sense of her own importance as an office manager on a farm that grows carrots. Instead of just firing a one-line email back, she chose to telephone me.
She wasted no time in pointing out certain deficiencies in the quality of my CV. Her first observation was this:
“I’ve never seen a photograph on a CV before.”
Then silence. I thought she had stopped mid-sentence, or forgotten what she was going to say. But no, that was the first fault she had spotted. The use of a photograph on a CV.

"Erm," I said. "What about it?"

"I've never seen it before." She made it sound as if I’d Sellotaped a stool sample to the page.
“Oh,” I said, not really quite sure what else to say. “Erm, anything else?”
“Yes, I see you’ve written Teacher, Adventurer and Gentleman at the top.”
Again, an uneasy silence. Was this a criticism, or merely the preamble to the revelation of an even more flagrant breach of CV etiquette?
“You don’t need that,” Mrs. Brudenell continued.
“Anything else?” I ventured, suddenly wondering whether a quirk in atmospheric conditions had somehow resulted in crossed lines with a Presbyterian schoolteacher from 1875.
“Well you’ve obviously got a lot of experience, qualifications and testimonies from previous employers. But your CV is a bit jokey. I don’t think it should be.”
I ascertained that Mrs. Brudenell’s BA (Hons) was in Humanities and then put the phone down on her before she could berate me over my reckless use of the semi-colon. I wondered if electricity or the combustion engine had made it to Taylorgrown yet.
In a world of war, cancer and Davina McCall, my sufferings as a job-seeker(see CV or not CV? and Anatomy of a Job Interview) are pretty insignificant.
It’s just a shame that in a world already depressingly over brimming with corporate automatons and humourless imbeciles, I discovered the existence of yet another one this week.
This week, Jack Havana recommends....
.....sprouts instead of carrots.

Celebrity Porn Tapes - The New Menace

2007-03-07T10:55:00.000Z

A NEW, SICKENING TREND in celebrities’ private videos hit the internet this week. A-list stars have resorted to sordid, new depths in a bid to achieve fame and notoriety.
In the past, all it took to get publicity for a new range of perfume or autobiography was a blurry camcorder recording of Paris Hilton giving oral sex to her boyfriend, or shaky mobile phone footage of a couple of Premiership footballers roasting a lapdancer. But the first in a new wave of shocking DIY tapes has stunned hardened celebrity-watchers.

TRAPEZE

Pamela Anderson, who starred in one of the most notorious celebrity sex tapes of all time, said she was horrified by the new trend.
“My tape with Tommy Lee was a celebration of our love, and nothing to be ashamed of. Sex is a wonderful, natural thing, even when it involves a trapeze swing suspended two metres above a piano and the suppleness of a circus contortionist, “ she said. “But these latest videos are just sick.”
Rob Lowe, whose hotel room hi-jinks with a couple of teenage fans started the celebrity sex tape phenomenon back in the 80s, was also sickened when we showed him some of the latest recordings.
“It’s just not right, dude,” he said. “All I did was succumb to my animal instincts, several lines of coke and a half a bottle of bourbon. But these people must have something seriously wrong with them. To allow themselves to be filmed doing what they are doing and then have it posted on the internet is just obscene, man."

FILTHY

In one of the shocking videos, a top Hollywood actress - believed to be Brittany Murphy - is filmed doing filthy things in her bathroom. Even more sickeningly, she is doing them on her own.
“This is really hard-core stuff, man”, said one seasoned internet surfer. “She’s got rubber gloves on and everything. You can’t see her face, but it’s pretty clear she’s getting a lot of pleasure out of what she’s doing. She’s really enjoying giving that toilet a thorough clean. She’s using Domestos and everything.”
In another tape, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are seen indulging in an act of depravity not normally associated with the pampered, privileged lifestyles of A-list superstars.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said our visibly shaken expert. “She was actually ironing his shirts! She was stood there at the ironing board, using a Morphy Richards steam iron as if housemaids and domestic staff had never been invented.”

POLISHING

There are concerns this new craze of celebrity domestic chore tapes could spiral out of control. There are already rumours circulating internet chat rooms that a high quality, three-minute video of Kirsten Dunst polishing a set of six crystal-cut brandy glasses is in existence.
“These people have no morals,” said a hardened porn paysite user. “Sure, we all know that celebrities have sex. But these videos have taken things down to the gutter. I’m more than happy to watch Paris Hilton and a girlfriend taking turns to blow a guy, even if the lighting and composition could be better. But I draw the line at Lindsay Lohan washing the dishes. That’s just sick.”

In another of the videos, Jessica Alba is clearly shown mopping her kitchen floor. If you look closely, there is evidence that she had previously been peeling potatoes and disinfecting work surfaces.
A spokesman for the Moral Majority said they were powerless to stop more clips being posted.
“If Jennifer Aniston consents to being filmed taking out her garbage, there’s not a lot we can do about it,” he said. “But it has to be consensual. If there’s even the slightest hint that Salma Hayak may have been forced to make martini cocktails or that Carmen Electra was coerced into changing the duvet cover against her will, then we shall demand that the Attorney General takes immediate action.”
Text and photos © Jack Havana 2007. No reproduction in part or whole without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends:
MUSIC: Pioneer Soundtracks, by Jack(no relation). Just re-issued, this 1996 mix of spoken word and epic themes – including a homage to bullfightger El Cordobes - still cuts the mustard more than a decade later. Listen here.
FILM: Walk The Line(12), currently showing on Sky Movies. Johnny Cash biopic that chronicles the birth of modern rock’n’roll. Reese Witherspoon has never looked nor sounded more gorgeous. View trailer here.
BOOK: Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain. Makes Gordon Ramsay appear as macho as Graham Norton after one strawberry daiquiri too many. Under no circumstances to be confused with the execrable Paramount Comedy TV series “based” on the book.
CIGAR: Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2. Review here.

Join This Queue For Consumer Rip-Offs, Customer Exploitation And The Death Of Rock & Roll

2007-02-28T13:04:00.000Z

WORLD OF CRAP pin-up Geoff Ellis is up to his old tricks again. Geoff, you may recall, runs DF Concerts, the promotions company that has a veritable monopoly on the live music scene up here in Scotland. Ever true to the spirit of rock and roll, Geoff never misses a chance to make a fast buck at the expense of hard-up music fans. In the past, he has done it via the loophole of “extra charges”, a strange British custom which the UK’s toothless consumer watchdogs and inadequate consumer legislation have failed to outlaw. These extra charges carry quaint names such as: booking fee, convenience charge, handling charge, order processing fee, etc. Under our antediluvian consumer protection laws, they are perfectly legal, and can add more than 50 per cent onto the price of a ticket. Geoff, in collaboration with international agency Ticketmaster, has got these “extras” down to a fine art.

HEFTY

For example, if you want to see a gig at King Tuts in Glasgow – owned and operated by DF Concerts – but live hundreds of miles away, then you will have to order your tickets on-line and pay a hefty booking fee. (Usually higher than that charged by ticket agencies and promoters for the same artists at comparable venues in England. See Greed, Hypocrisy and Rock & Roll here) So far, so normal. But should you then decide that instead of having the tickets posted out to you, you would rather collect them from the box office on the night, you will have to pay something called an “order processing fee” of around £2.25. Yes, that’s right. Even though you are travelling to the venue at your own expense and have already paid a booking fee, you will have to stump up even more money to be allowed to collect the tickets which are technically already your property anyway, DF Concerts and Ticketmaster having already speedily and efficiently debited your bank account or credit card. (Regular readers will already be familiar with Geoff’s odious pricing practice from previous columns, but for new readers see Greed, Hypocrisy and Rock & Roll here.)

WHEEZE

But Geoff’s latest wheeze would surely have Joe Strummer spinning in his grave. DF Concerts runs T in the Park, which has garnered various awards and accolades over its 10 year history, largely on account of it being the only festival of its kind in Scotland. (Its amazing how easy it is to collect awards when there’s no competition). To those who don’t know, a typical music festival in the UK goes something like this: you spend ten hours in a traffic jam before arriving at a muddy field under grey skies and joining tens of thousands of other people trying to find space to put up their tents. Then you will spend hours in queues for overpriced, dodgy burgers, overpriced, gassy beer or toilets that, to put it politely, simply cannot cope with the demand of all those bowel and bladder evacuations(usually caused by the dodgy burgers and gassy beer). You will also be invited to spend your money on fairground rides, fortune tellers and other 18th century attractions. Eventually, you might get around to seeing some live music, though this will usually be limited to standing at the back of a very large field and peering over the heads of tens of thousands of people at a large video screen relaying what is happening on the stage which is so far away you might as well have stayed at home and waited for your mate to send you some footage from their mobile phone.
So I think it’s fair to say that the average UK music festival is overcrowded.
But this hasn’t stopped good old Geoff from expanding the capacity of this year’s T in the Park. Not satisfied with 75,000 punters paying an average of £55 each per day plus another £10-plus in booking, order processing and convenience charges last year, Geoff has upped the capacity this year to 80,000 per day. He’s also upped the ticket price to £62.50 a day(not including booking, order processing, convenience charges, etc. etc.) That means an extra £600,000 in revenue for DF Concerts. But will any of that extra half a million quid-plus go towards making the festival experience any more enjoyable for music-lovers? Hmmm, let’s see…

SOAP

Well, you’ll still have to buy an official programme if you want to know what time your favourite band will be on(either that or fight your way through the crowds to the “welfare tent” for a look at the blackboard). There still won’t be many cashpoints or payphones. And DF Concerts still can’t guarantee the security of your belongings – “don’t bring any valuables”, the official website warns. (It also advises bringing “a small bottle of hand sanitizer”, which suggests soap and water facilities might be limited too). And unless an agreement is reached with local landowners, there will be no extra stages nor more space for crowds. But the good news is that if you have spent £140(plus booking, order processing and convenience fees) on a weekend camping ticket, you will get an extra few hours of entertainment on the Friday night when, for the first time, bands will be playing.
So, just to clarify, Geoff and DF Concerts will be raking in an extra £600,000 by cramming an extra 5,000 bodies into an already overcrowded festival. (Shame on Perth and Kinross Council who agreed to the increased capacity - I wonder what their cut of it all is?) And he will also be creaming off his percentage of the hundreds of thousands of pounds in extra booking, order processing and convenience fees.

UGLY

Geoff Ellis is treated like a deity by the media up here, which isn’t bad for an ugly, bald Mancunian. By not asking him awkward questions about booking fees, convenience charges or how he justifies cramming an extra 5,000 bodies into a space likely to be no bigger than last year’s, the noble ladies and gentlemen of the Scottish press have done themselves proud, providing DF Concerts with extensive free advertising and guaranteeing themselves complimentary VIP passes for Scotland’s biggest music event of the year.

On the official T in the Park website, customers are warned about the dangers of obtaining tickets from unofficial sources, such as eBay and Scarlet Mist. Of the latter, it says: "It is not one of our official ticket agents. However, we do believe they are operating a genuine, face-value ticket exchange service." This is painfully ironic, as not even the official agency Ticketmaster provides tickets at "face-value" - they are all sold at prices inflated by those booking, order processing and convenience charges.
I wrote and emailed Geoff several times about booking charges last year. He replied, unsatisfactorily, once - including the memorably empty pledge, "My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level" - but then ignored all my subsequent emails(See Greed, Hypocrisy and Rock&Roll here).
I also contacted the sponsors of T in the Park, Tennents, to see what they thought of the dubious, if technically legal, practise of charging an assortment of extra fees on top of the ticket price. They sent me a crate of beer but have never bothered getting back in touch. So I don’t drink their shite beer any more, nor do I go to gigs promoted by DF Concerts. (If there’s a band I really want to see, I’d rather travel down to England than give Geoff Ellis or Ticketmaster any of my cash).

ESPRESSO

I also contacted Trading Standards officers and the Office of Fair Trading. The OFT is currently investigating bank charges, so I thought it might want to take a look at the charging of booking fees too. In the past, all it has recommended is a “voluntary code” for promoters and agencies. Which is a bit like asking Robbie Williams to impose a voluntary moratorium on his daily espresso intake. But no, they haven’t been back in touch either.

The fact is, big promoters like DF Concerts don't need to use ticket agencies and so don't need to charge booking fees. They have the money and resources to be able to sell the tickets through their own website or telephone line if they wanted. But that would upset the cosy cartel that exists between them, ticket agencies and venues, who all take a slice of the millions of pounds worth of booking fees that music fans are forced to pay each year.
And the saddest part of this whole farrago? Tickets for this year’s T in the Park sold out in less than 40 minutes. Geoff Ellis might be a greedy, ugly, bald hypocrite, but thanks to all the stupid fuckers out there who’ve willingly and unquestioningly stumped up all those booking and convenience fees - instead of boycotting rip-off festivals and listening to their Snow Patrol CDs at home - he’s a rich, greedy, ugly, bald hypocrite.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends:
MUSIC: Boring, by The Pierces. A cross between The Corrs and Black Box Recorder. Or an X-rated Sugababes. Listen and watch here.

BOOK: 24 Hour Party People, by Tony Wilson. The life and times of another ugly Mancunian, but this time one of the good guys from the music industry. Get well soon, Tony, the business needs more characters like you.

FILM: United 93(15, DVD). Criminally overlooked by the senile, incontinent old farts of the Academy of Motion Pictures, this is the finest film of the 21st century so far. More here.
CIGAR: Partagas Serie D. No. 4. A fat, tasty monster, perfect for blowing huge swathes of smoke into the faces of greedy music promoters. Dimensions here.

Moving North: A Misery Memoir

2007-02-19T12:25:00.000Z

A PUBLISHER HAS just paid a £70,000 advance to a middle-aged mother of three who writes a blog about giving up her career and – brace yourself – moving from London to the north of England!!!!(The Sunday Times, 18 February 2007). Yes, giving up a metropolitan lifestyle of dolcelatte-on-demand from your corner delicatessen for the hell of life without Waitrose has become the new “misery memoir”. Writers no longer have to circumnavigate the Amazon basin by pedal car to earn a book deal. Nor do they have to confront the suffering of dying parents or diseased children. They simply have to be brave and selfless enough to sack the nanny, stock up their two family cars with as much focaccia and chardonnay as they can hold, and drive to the mysterious hinterland of funny accents and cobbled streets beyond Watford.
The author of Wife In The North – geddit?! – is 42-year-old Judith O’Reilly, a former education correspondent for The Sunday Times. Not a feature writer, arts reviewer or celebrity interviewer. An education correspondent. Here are some exclusive extracts from her blog so far:
3rd January: The people up here are so warm and friendly. And they have the same TV programmes up here as we had in London. And I had no idea the M1 went on for so many miles after the Flitwick turn off. The children love it, though I am not letting them play out in the fields until they have had all their typhoid, rabies and encephalitis vaccinations.
11th January: Marie Claire and Grazia have turned down my idea for a weekly column. I’d proposed writing about the challenge of coming up with something to write about week after week faced by a middle-class, comfortably-off, mother-of-three whose husband earns a fortune in the City. They said that’s what all their columnists wrote about already.
19th January: Drove the Volvo to the local supermarket today in search of some organic tofu and bean sprouts. All they had was local produce, nothing from France or Spain at all.
23rd January: Our nearest neighbours are the Arkwrights, who run the sheep farm on the other side of the hill. They have a severely disabled daughter who needs constant attention. It really puts your own problems in perspective. They can use the disabled parking bays at Tesco, but I have to put up with the parent and toddler bays which are much further away.
28th January: We’ve had to make lots of sacrifices for this move. Michael had to give up his gym membership, and I miss the restaurant reviews in Time Out. Also, the plan had always been to buy a row of terraced cottages and knock them into one home, but in the end we could find only two vacant cottages next to each other. However, the stables at the back will make a handy double garage for our Volvos.
3rd February; I miss Michael while he’s away working in London. It was his idea for us to move up here, but ironically he’s spending more time down there on business. Still, it’s for the best. He always remembers to bring some Harvey Nicks triple chocolate cookies home with him for the kids. Plus he’s earning a fortune down there.
10th February: We had a full scale emergency last night. We had gale force winds that rattled the windows and doors all night long. At about midnight, the front door was suddenly blown off its hinges. Then I heard the smashing of glass and raced up stairs to see one of the windows in Tarquin’s room had been blown in. Fortunately, I’m used to dealing with situations like this. I simply bundled the kids into the car and we spent the next few days at the five-star Marriot Spa hotel just outside York while the builders got on with fixing the damage. But it was a close call. If Michael hadn’t left his Platinum American Express card behind, I dread to think what might have happened……
13th February: I’m pleased about my book deal, but sometimes I wonder if there isn’t already enough, badly-written, lazily-edited, middle-aged chick lit clogging up the shelves of Borders and Waterstones. But then I remember the huge amount of money I will be paid – I’ll be able to afford shopping trips to London every week! – and think: Fuck it!
16th February: Just had a call from my agent. He’s confident he can sell the film rights………

THE DIGESTED READ: Aren't I so wonderful to brave a year living outside the M25 when I don't even know if they have nannies up there and I'm getting paid an advance of only £70,000 which might have been better spent by the publisher on something a bit more original and innovative than this mind-mumbing shite?

Anatomy Of A Job Interview

2007-02-15T01:07:00.000Z

THIS WEEK I HAD a job interview. I received a two-page letter giving me detailed instructions. I had to take with me my driving licence, P45 plus “another document providing evidence of your eligibility to work legally in the United Kingdom, such as a full Birth Certificate.” I would also be expected to bring along the originals – plus “a copy for retention by the panel” – of any “degrees or diplomas etc” declared in my application. I also had to fill in a Criminal Conviction form and return it in the stamped addressed envelope provided. I was asked to telephone before the interview to confirm that my referees could now be approached. Finally, I was asked to telephone a different number to confirm that I would be attending the interview.

NOISY

At the interview, I was seated before a panel of three – two senior members of the department I was applying for a position with, and an “Administration Assistant.” All three took it in turns to ask me questions from the printed sheets they had in front of them. The interview went like this:
What qualities do you think you can add to our department?
Well, I’m a good team player and people person. I can get on with just about anyone, and in my previous jobs have had to work with people of all ages and backgrounds.
The office can get quite busy at times. Are you used to working in a noisy environment full of distractions?
Yes, I’ve worked in newsrooms with tight deadlines. I’m good at closing myself off and just getting on with it.
Do you have any experience of working with budgets?
I didn’t realise this post involved work with budgets, but yes, I have managed budgets before. In other jobs, I’ve been responsible for accounting for even the smallest sums, and have had to ensure the paperwork and receipts all add up.
Do you have any experience of dealing with aggressive people?
Yes. I once worked as a nightclub doorman and attended a course on conflict resolution.
Do you have any experience of dealing with people who may be very emotional?
As a journalist, I have dealt with bereaved families. As a tour guide, I have dealt with distressed holidaymakers. As an amateur football referee, I meet 22 extremely emotional people on a weekly basis.

ODD

Up until this point, I thought I had done reasonably well with my answers(even though I thought the questions a bit odd for the position I was applying for). But then, after a quick glance at her printed sheet, one of the senior members of staff asked me this:
Have you brought the original of your English Language GCSE certificate?
My answer was no. I had passed my English O-level nearly 30 years ago, and, in the dozens of changes of address since, had somehow managed to lose the certificate. But I was confident that by the end of the interview they would be satisfied with the quality of my written and spoken English. I said this last bit with a smile. No-one smiled back. Instead, brows were furrowed and heads bowed. The Administration Assistant began sifting through the pieces of paper in front of her. My answer had caused a system malfunction, and she couldn’t find the approved response anywhere. She found herself with a round peg which wouldn’t fit in to the square hole. Finally, she looked up from her papers and said to her colleagues: “It says here a copy of the certificate is essential.”
The job I was being interviewed for was that of part-time typist in the Social Work and Health Department of my local council. Eighteen hours a week for slightly more than the minimum wage.

But it was clear that by not bringing proof of my English O-level success 30 years previously, I had seriously undermined my chances of getting the job and the £130 a week that came with it. My previous experience and qualification as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, plus my two years editing the features pages of a daily national newspaper, apparently counted for nothing. Perhaps the interviewers hadn’t bothered to read my application form. Or perhaps they were merely following council procedures.

DECENT

Eventually, the Admin Assistant asked if I had any questions for them. I said I was surprised that none of them had wanted to know my reasons for leaving behind a well-paid career in journalism to become a part-time typist. Even after I said this, none of them asked me. So I told them anyway. I thought it was relevant that they should know I was a good and decent man at heart who needed part-time work to bolster his girlfriend’s income and help support his novel-writing aspirations. But as I said this, something strange appeared to happen. I began speaking in a long-forgotten Mayan dialect. At least, this appears to be the only explanation for the row of glazed expressions opposite me, and the awkward silence after I’d finished speaking. It was only broken by the sound of papers being frantically leafed through as the Admin Assistant looked through her checklist to see if she could find a section called How To Deal With A Job Candidate Who Has A Personality. I don’t think she ever found it. I felt like a Dead Man Walking as I was led to an upstairs office to complete my typing test. She left me in the company of a stopwatch-wielding colleague and told me I didn’t have to return to the interview room once I’d finished. As rejections go, it was pretty crushing.

GRAPES

Now this isn’t the sour grapes of a middle-aged man whose 50 wpm typing skill wasn’t enough to get him a part-time job with the local council. It’s simply a tiny snapshot of life in the World of Crap.
The area I live in has more than its fair share of social problems. Yet someone, somewhere had decided that it required two senior social workers plus an admin assistant to spend a whole day interviewing a succession of applicants for a minor clerical post while the problems of the mentally-ill, drug-addicted, HIV-positive, chronically-delinquent, domestically-abused and recently-orphaned were neglected.
Well, you know what? I hope that person ends up down a dark alley and bumping into the homeless, hypodermic-wielding smackhead who couldn’t get an appointment with council staff on the day I was being rejected for the job of part-time typist because I’d forgotten to bring in my English Language GCSE certificate.
And that’s not sour grapes, honest.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction of whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

Real Life Valentine's True Love Photo Romance Thingy!

2007-02-11T19:26:00.000Z

KATIE WAS VERY SAD. Valentine’s Day was almost here, and she didn’t have a boyfriend. “Just my luck,” she thought. “The most romantic day of the year, and I’ve got no-one to send a heart-shaped red and silver balloon to or buy a heart-patterned pair of boxer shorts for. I suppose there’ll be no chance of a shag either.”
It had been so different last year. Then, she’d been going out with Kevin, and VD had meant something very special to her. He’d bought her a single, red rose in a clear, plastic tube with a piece of fraying, gold ribbon around it. It had been such an unexpected, spontaneous, thoughtful and original gesture of affection that Katie hadn’t noticed every other girl in the bus queue was carrying exactly the same thing home with them. And she’d felt tears of happiness welling up inside as she read the pre-printed message on the card Kevin had bought her: To my very special Valentine/Make me happy and always be mine. He’d got one of his friends to write “From a Secret Admirer” underneath. The mystery and intrigue of who it could possibly be from would have been a nice, tingly feeling to have carried around for the rest of the day. Instead Kevin had handed it to her with his dirty football kit and whispered into her ear: “Wash the coloureds separately please love”.

Despite not having a man this year, Katie couldn’t help but feel a warm glow of anticipation as she leafed through all the overpriced magazines with Victoria Beckham or Kate Moss on the cover at her local WH Smiths. They were full of ideas for romantically-themed meals, cocktails, films, holidays, underwear, curtains and sofa cushions. So many wonderful ideas, she thought. She particularly liked the idea of sprinkling rose petals(Interflora £10) over a jasmine-scented bubble bath(Boots £2.79) before opening a bottle of chilled champagne(Sainsburys £7.99) and box of Belgian Chocolates(Thorntons £11.99) and serving them to your partner wearing just a pair of high heels(Russell & Bromley £44.99). “That’s incredible,” she thought. “Who thinks up these amazing, original ideas? They deserve every penny of their enormous salaries.” She was equally admiring when she turned to the section entitled: The Valentine’s Guide To His Erogenous Zones: “I had no idea it was called a freenum,” she sighed.

It wasn’t that she felt under any pressure to suddenly become romantic and loving on February 14th, before reverting to her usual, pre-menstrual self at the stroke of midnight. Things hadn’t quite got to the stage here as they had in other countries, notably the US, where total strangers spent the whole day wishing each other “Happy Valentine’s Day” and bought Valentine presents for their mothers and sisters. No, the commercial and business exploitation of an obscure 14th century legend was, in Britain at least, still confined to couples. She wasn’t required to wish the bus driver or postman Happy Valentine’s just yet. So she didn’t feel any pressure to become romantic – it’s just that she increasingly found herself with an overwhelming urge to buy a chocolate-coated marzipan penis from Thorntons.
Katie stared at her computer screen. There was no shortage of Valentine messages for her. It was just a pity they were all from Easyjet, Agent Provocateur, Virgin Holidays, Tesco, Tiscali Broadband, and that person with the strange name who kept offering her Rolex watches. Ping! Another message arrived. Her local independent cinema was inviting her to a Valentine's Night screening of Casablanca. Meanwhile, the newspapers were full of adverts for Valentine-themed “offers”. Even Barclaycard – Get Ten Per Cent More Romantic This Valentine’s Day – and upmarket hi-fi specialist Bose – This Valentine’s Day, Say It With Music – hadn’t been able to resist their marketing departments’ tackiest urges.
She sighed. It would be another lonely night in front of the TV for her. Still, at least that spared her finding every restaurant or Beefeater full of couples trying to kid each other that having a pre-set menu including half a bottle of fizzy wine was the most original and spontaneous romantic gesture since Anita Ekberg took off her shoes and went paddling in the Trevi Fountain. Though personally, she thought the scene in The Big Blue when Rosanna Arquette returned to her city apartment from the remote Andean research station with an ECG print-out of the heartbeat of the handsome scientist she had met and fallen in love with was much more original and romantic.

On the morning of Valentine’s Day, Katie braced herself for opening the newspapers. Sure enough, there were pages and pages of classified Valentine’s messages, including such lines as "SNUGGLEBUNNY Luvs BIGBUM 4Ever" and "MANDY MELONS U R MY TRU LUV XX". And that was just The Times. Apparently the recipients of these messages received a letter, accompanied by a heart-shaped balloon or chocolate, telling them to look out for a few lines of love from their Valentine. They would then spend the next few hours combing through thousands of lines of small print in a bid to find out whether their Valentine’s couplet was any less predictable than all the others. The amount of thought and planning that was put into such a gesture made Katie go all gooey inside. Then she turned to The Guardian and read How To Make Valentine's Day Wonderful For Your Children Too.
At work throughout the day, a succession of Interflora bouquets was delivered to several of Katie’s colleagues. Most were received with a shrug of the shoulders and air of indifference. After all, how could you feel special when even that miserable, malevolent old cow from accounts got a bouquet the size of a house? Katie imagined millions of pounds worth of roses, irises and carnations were being delivered to homes and offices all over the world today. She thought of all the other, flowerless days of the year. How empty did those days feel for all the people being showered with romantic gestures today? Did they feel loved the rest of the year, Katie wondered. Were these contrived, pre-ordered gestures, from the classifieds to the chocolates, really romance? Was Valentine’s Day, ironically, the one day of the year that had all the love and romance wrung out of it like a filthy old dishcloth?
She considered this during her bus-ride home as she looked at all the bouquets and single red roses which were already starting to wilt under the weight of such profligate commercial exploitation and lascivious expectation.
As she put her key in her front door and stepped over the pile of brown envelopes on the floor, she finally succumbed to the significance of this very special day.

“Fuck it,” she thought. “I’ll watch Desperate Housewives, have a bottle of wine, then get out the Rampant Rabbit.”
TEXT AND PHOTOS © Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends getting all romantic with:
MUSIC: Powder Burns by The Twilight Singers. Ex Afghan Wigs frontman sings like a lovesick troubadour who has just had his heart broken AND been told he didn’t get the fish van driver’s job he’d applied for. A heart-melting antidote to VD. Listen here.
FILMS: The Big Blue(1988, DVD). A dolphin, the world free-diving championships, a sexy Frenchman and Rosanna Arquette. If that doesn’t float your boat, try Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind(2004, DVD) or Solaris(2002, DVD) and prepare to have your heart broken in style.
BOOK: The White Hotel, by DM Thomas(1981). A love story that encompasses Freud, sex in tunnels and the Nazis. A heady hybrid of hard-ons and Holocaust. Unforgettable. If they ever manage to make a film out of this – and Brittany Murphy is rumoured to be the female lead in filming this year – it will be a cross between Schindler’s List and Last Tango In Paris.

"Be Advised Kylie Minogue's Hot Pants Are Intact, Over."

2007-02-07T12:42:00.000Z

DUE TO A TECHNICAL HITCH during broadcast, the transcript of the “friendly fire” cockpit tape got mixed up with the breaking news headlines running across the bottom of the screen. This was how the transcript appeared to Sky News viewers today:

POPOV35: Hey dude.
POPOV36: I got KYLIE MINOGUE’s hot pants evenly spaced along a road going north.
POPOV35: Evenly spaced? Where we strafed?
POPOV36: OK. Right underneath you. Right now, there's a canal that runs north/south. There's a small village, and there they are, at ten o’clock now.
POPOV36: They look like they have orange panels on though.
POPOV35: He told me, he told me they were silver.
POPOV36: They've got something orange on top of them.
POPOV35: MANILA HOTEL, is KYLIE MINOGUE in this area?
MANILA HOTEL: Say again?
POPOV35: MANILA HOTEL, is KYLIE MINOGUE in this area?
MANILA HOTEL: Negative. Understand she is well clear of OLIVER MARTINEZ now.
POPOV35: OK, copy. He’s a cheese-eating surrender monkey anyway.
POPOV36: OK, now we have multiple objects. They look like SHILPA SHETTY. Are those your targets?
MANILA HOTEL: That's affirm.
POPOV35: OK.
POPOV36: Let me ask you one question.
POPOV35: What's that?
POPO36: KYLIE MINOGUE or SHILPA SHETTY? If you had to have one of them?.
POPOV35: Whoa dude! Are you talking like a blue on blue situation?
MANILA HOTEL: . . . (garbled) You were stepped on, say again.
POPOV35: MANILA HOTEL, fire your arty up BERNARD MATTHEWS, and see how we do.
MANILA HOTEL: Roger, standby for shot. They are getting adjustments to the turkeys now.
POPOV35: Copy.
POPOV36: Roll up your right wing and look right underneath you.
POPOV35: (angry) I know what you're talking about.
POPOV36: OK, well they got orange rockets on them.
POPOV35: Orange rockets?
POPOV36: Yeah, I think so. And pink spaceships. And I think I can make out some cute blue bunny rabbits.
POPOV35: Let me look. Dude, you’re right. They are not KYLIE MINOGUE’s hot pants.
POPOV36: HELEN MIRREN! HELEN MIRREN!.
POPOV35: Where? Repeat POPOV 36. Where?.
POPOV36: At the Oscars. Do you think she’ll win one?
POPOV 35: Sorry POPOV 36, you were stepped on. What did you say? Would I give her one?
POPOV 36: Negative. Do you think she will win one?
POPOV35: No way man. It will be that Spanish chick with the heavy artillery.
POPOV36: OK, do you see the orange things on top of them?
POPOV35: I thought we just said it was a negative to KYLIE MINOGUE’s hot pants?.
MANILA HOTEL: Tell you what guys, give me SHILPA SHETTY any day.
POPOV35: Copy that MANILA HOTEL. I'm coming off west just thinking about it.

POPOV36: You roll in. It looks like they are exactly what we're talking about.
POPOV35: We got visual.
POPOV36: OK. I want to get that first one before he gets into town then.
POPOV35: Get him - get him. Think TONY BLAIR. That’s twice he’s been questioned, man. He’s gotta go.
POPOV36: What about JOHN REID?
POPOV35: No way dude. SHILPA SHETTY. I ain’t no faggot.
- GUNFIRE -
POPOV35: Good hits.
POPOV36: Nice ass too.
POPOV35: I got a visual. You're at your high 10.
POPOV36: Gotcha.
POPOV36: That's what you think they are, right?
POPOV35: It looks like it to me, and I got my goggles on them now.
POPOV36: Beer goggles?
POPOV35: Negative. (Pause) But if they were, how many pints would it take to make JADE GOODY attractive?
POPOV36: Is she a friendly?
POPOV35: Negative. She’s a racist and a bully.
POPOV36: Good hits?
POPOV35: Affirmative. But surgically-enhanced.
POPOV36: Then I’d say six pints dude.
MANILA HOTEL: POPOV36 do you copy? Be advised GARY GLITTER has just had his sentence cut by three months.
POPOV36: It looks like he is hauling ass. Ha ha. Is that what you think they are?
POPOV35: What do you think I think they are?
POPOV36: It doesn't look friendly.
POPOV35: They could be FRIENDS OF THE EARTH. Did we buy any carbon offsets for this mission?
POPOV36: Negative POPOV35.
POPOV35: Fuck. Think of the polar bears, dude.
- GUNFIRE -
LIGHTNING 34: POPOV 34, LIGHTNING 34.
POPOV35: POPOV 35, LIGHTNING 34 go ahead.
LIGHTNING 34: Roger, POPOV. Be advised that H5N1 cannot be transmitted to humans through BERNARD MATTHEWS' TURKEY TWIZZLERS.
POPOV35: Ahh shit. What about JOHN REID?
LIGHTNING 34: That’s a negative, POPOV35. JOHN REID is not human, repeat NOT human. And two of the Birmingham terror suspects have been released without charge.
P0POV35: TONY BLAIR’s fucked, man.
POPOV36: What about that GORDON BROWN dude? Doesn’t he have the hots for SHILPA SHETTY?
POPOV35: Yeah, he stuck up for her during a meeting of the UN Security Council or something.
LIGHTNING 34: Hey, POPOV35, abort your mission. You gotta RTB(return to base), looks we might have a blue on blue situation.
POPOV35: Fuck. God bless it. We’ll never make it back in time to see it. Is someone taping it?
POPOV 36: KYLIE MINOGUE and SHILPA SHETTY at the base? Fuck, I hope someone’s taping it.
POPOV35: Fuck, fuck, fuck.
MANILA 34: POPOV34, this is MANILA 34. Did you copy my last, over?
POPOV35: I did. And I’ve just come off east.
POPOV36: Dude! Control yourself!.
POPOV35: They don’t call this a cock-pit for nothing.
MANILA 34: Standby POPOV.
POPOV36: God dammit.
MANILA HOTEL: Hey POPOV 36, from MANILA HOTEL.
POPOV35: All right, POPOV 35 has smoke. Let me know how those friendlies are right now, please.
MANILA 34: Roger, standby.
POPOV35: Gotta go home dude.
POPOV36: Yeah, I know. We're fucked.
POPOV35: Shit.
MANILA 34: POPOV 35, MANILA 34 over.
POPOV35: Go.
MANILA 34: We are getting an initial brief that KYLIE MINOGUE’s hot pants are intact and on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum until June 10th, over.
POPOV35: Copy. RTB (return to base).
MANILA 34: Also be advised that JOHN REID has no brain.
POPOV35: I'm going to be sick.
MANILA 34: And that the rough-looking blonde out of S Club 7 considered killing herself after Celebrity Big Brother.
POPOV36: Ah fuck.
POPOV35: Did you hear?
POPOV36: Yeah, this sucks.
POPOV35: We're in jail, dude.
POPOV36: Fuck. God fucking shit.
POPOV35: Dammit. Fucking damn it.
MANILA 34: Be advised that all your cuss words will be bleeped out on the TV news because swearing is considered much more distasteful than an innocent Brit being killed by friendly fire.
POPOV36: Roger that. Fucking shit bollocks cunt anyway.
POPOV35: Yeah, I know that thing with the orange panels is going to screw us. They look like orange rockets on top.
POPOV36: Fuck it. Damn KYLIE MINOGUE’S hot pants!
POPOV35: Your tape still on?
POPOV36: Yeah.
POPOV35: Mine is end of tape. If we hit the gas, we might make it back in time to catch some of that blue-on-blue action……
TAPE ENDS.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

Why Shagging A Drunk Girl Isn't Always Rape

2007-02-05T00:32:00.000Z

LESS THAN SIX PER CENT of rape cases resulted in convictions in 2005, compared with more than 30 per cent in 1980. (The number of convictions, though, showed an overall increase). So Government ministers have drawn up a raft of proposals designed to make prosecutions more successful. They are not satisfied that all those men being acquitted might actually be innocent, the victims of “flimsy” or “malicious” allegations. Men such as Frank Chisholm(spent 10 weeks in jail before being cleared over false claim of rape), Warren Blackwood(spent three years in jail before being cleared over false claim of sexual assault) and Levi Multilal(suffered nine months of “considerable stress and strain” before a judge cleared him over a false claim of rape).
Of course, the possibility of any rape accusation being false remains unpalatable to certain sections of society. They will never be dissuaded from the notion that all men are potential rapists, their evil fantasies fuelled by the deluge of pornography available everywhere from the local newsagents to the darker recesses of the internet. As a dedicated and prolific user of this material myself, I’ve never really understood how it is supposedly responsible for the quantum leap from sad, lonely, trousers-round-the-ankles tosser like me to fully-fledged rapist. I would argue that there is so much porn out there that any potential rapist just wouldn’t be able to find the time…….
But that’s another argument. For now, let’s consider the Government’s proposed measures for increasing the number of rape convictions.

PISSED

The most contentious is the introduction of a statutory definition of the “capacity to consent”. In other words, a legal definition of the fine line between being sober enough to welcome or decline sexual advances, and being too pissed to care.
Rape, remember, is NEVER the victim’s fault. Getting so pissed that she removes her knickers in the taxi queue, waves them above her head and demands a bite of the kebab of the bloke standing in front of her, however, probably is.
But under the Government’s plans, any woman who wakes up full of shame for having shagged the fat, baldy bloke from stationary supplies will be able to claim rape on the grounds of having “diminished capacity to consent”. She’ll be able to defer responsibility for her actions on the grounds that she was pissed as the proverbial newt. Being unable to remember whether she said “yes” or “no” will be enough to have the accused banged away in prison for at least the next 10 years.
But if the prosecution argues that a woman was too drunk to have been able to consent, then couldn’t the other side argue that she was too drunk to remember that she actually had?
Imagine if this legal doctrine catches on. Assuming there were no witnesses(as in most rape cases), I could get pissed, go for a drive, mow down a couple of pedestrians before stopping off at my local post office, stabbing the elderly post mistress to death and making off with all her takings. When the police called round, I could simply claim I had been too drunk to remember any of my actions.

SHAGGING

So how will “the capacity to consent” actually be defined? By the amount of Bacardi Breezers/controlled substances the alleged victim had consumed? Surely that can’t work, as everyone’s metabolism is different and some people get pissed/out-of-their-heads a lot quicker than others. Maybe the Government will set a drink-shagging limit, like the drink-driving limit, with recommendations for the number of units of alcohol allowed before your ability to have sex responsibly becomes seriously impaired? But that will only work if the alleged victim is breathalysed or produces a urine sample within 12 hours of the alleged offence. What if she’s in no mood to or doesn’t report the rape for several days?
No wonder this idea is being resisted by the Council of Circuit Judges, who believe it should be left to a jury to decide whether an alleged victim was in a fit state to agree to intercourse or not.
Another of the proposals being considered by the Home Office is the use of expert witnesses to advise a jury how a rape victim might be expected to behave. Which carries the odious implication that rape is such an everyday feature of normal life that it brings with it its own standard set of reactions. How can there be a “right” way to behave after something as horrible and dehumanising as rape? Who is more believable, the victim who calls the police immediately, or Ulrika Johnssen who writes about it years later in her autobiography? The fact is, just like with a bereavement, no two people will react the same way to rape. Some will feel better after a nice cup of tea. Others will be scarred for life. Neither reaction is conclusive proof or otherwise that a rape actually took place.

REVENGE

The fact is, false allegations of rape are nothing new. There are many respected academic studies out there showing high incidences of women falsely screaming “rape” for reasons ranging from shame to revenge. (Though not in the UK, where the suggestion that a woman might falsely allege rape is considered only marginally less un-PC than sending orphans out seal-clubbing.) Here are two, oft-quoted examples from the US:

A report by Dr. Charles P. McDowell in the Forensic Science Digest(publication of the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations) in December 1985 examined 556 accusations of rape. 27 per cent of the accusers, either just before taking a polygraph test or after failing one, admitted that they had lied.
In his paper “False Rape Allegations”, published in volume 23 of the Archives of Sexual Behaviour in 1994, Dr. Eugene J. Kanin reports the findings of two detailed studies. The first involved all resolved rape cases in a Midwestern US city of 70,000 during a nine-year period, and found that 41 per cent of “victims” recanted their claims. The second was a survey of all rape complaints during a three-year period at two large Midwestern state universities. This found that 50 per cent of all allegations were false, and had been motivated by either a need for an alibi(53 per cent) or revenge(44 per cent).

Dare I suggest that a correlation between this trend and the more recent phenomenon of female binge-drinking is responsible, at least partly, for the low percentage of rape cases ending in convictions?
Women are drinking like never before. It’s a fact of modern life. But some of them refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. A few years ago, there was a spate of alleged “date rape drug” attacks. I thought that was a load of bollocks. Why would anyone go to the trouble of sourcing and purchasing a few tablets of Rohypnol, when with most girls a couple of large vodkas and tonic will have the same effect? And bollocks is what it turned out to be. The Association of Chief Police Officers studied 120 “date rape drug” cases during the 12 months before October 2005 and found that, instead of being drugged, most complainants had been – to borrow a phrase from Paul Whitehouse’s old soak in The Fast Show – “very, very drunk.”(In 22 cases, the blood-alcohol level was almost three times the drink-driving limit.)
"In most cases, the alleged victims had consumed alcohol voluntarily and, in some cases, to dangerous levels," an Association of Chief Police Officers spokesman told BBC News.

Campaign group Women Against Rape described the study as “unhelpful”. But they would say that, wouldn’t they? The idea of women making false allegations of rape is anathema to, um, women. It goes against everything their ideology stands for. As US author Catharine MacKinnon – “a founding mother of gender feminism” – states in her must-read book Feminism Unmodified: “Feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.”
As fellow fem Wendy McElroy points out: “If this methodology is debunked, if women are viewed as no more or less likely to lie than men, then the foundation of gender politics collapses."

No wonder it’s hormonally-imbalanced newspapers such as the Guardian and Observer who have been most vociferous about the perceived failure of the courts to convict more rapists. We live in a woman’s world, and the idea that not as many men are rapists as we think is just too awful to contemplate for certain, self-interested sectors of society, including Tony Blair’s female vote-hungry party. It’s no coincidence that you have to look a long way down the Government’s list of proposals before you find any mention of removing the right to anonymity of women who make false rape claims.
Remember, the cornerstone of British justice is that there has to be “proof beyond reasonable doubt”. As if there aren’t already acres of doubt about an offence involving two people who usually know each other and where there are no witnesses, the addition of alcohol into the equation doesn’t help matters. But to introduce a statutory “capacity to consent” will be giving a license for binge-drinkers and drug-abusers everywhere to abdicate their responsibilities as decent, moral beings – as many of the “victims” in that date rape drug study did - and consign hundreds of innocent men to prison.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction of whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends.....

MUSIC: Wincing The Night Away, by The Shins. Unfussy, lightweight, infectious, etc, etc.Listen here.

FILM: Red Eye(12), currently showing on Sky Movies. Slick, adult suspense from Wes Craven. More here.

BOOK: Head On, by Julian Cope. Warts and all memoirs of the ex-Teardrop Explodes frontman. Get the dirt on Wyle, McCulloch, Love et al. Review here.

In Praise Of The Spur Of The Moment

2007-02-02T04:51:00.000Z

BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN attempt to buy tickets for this year’s Glastonbury Festival, you have to pre-register and upload a passport-sized photograph of yourself at the official website. “We’ve had very positive feedback from people who are fed up with eBay touts,” said Rob Richards, who is in charge of sponsorship and marketing for the event. “And the organisers feel it will discourage people from trying to get a ticket on impulse, which makes it much harder for people to get a ticket in the first place.”(The Guardian, 1 Feb 2006)
There, in a handful of words, you have a sad indictment of the world in which we live, a world in which nothing must be left to chance, spontaneity, serendipity or impulse, and in which everything must conform to corporate regulation and fit a standard template.

SNUFF

The organisers feel it will discourage people from trying to get a ticket on impulse. There you have it in print, the organisers of Glastonbury trying to snuff out spontaneity. How rock and roll is that? So God forbid I should wake up one day next June and feel suitably inspired by a song on the radio or the sun in the sky to want to travel down to Somerset and see my favourite band perform. It will be too late. Profit margins dictate that I must decide now, five months in advance, in the depths of winter, before the full line-up of bands has even been officially confirmed, whether I want to commit myself to the 1,000-mile round trip from my home in Scotland to a muddy field with dubious toilet facilities. Corporate greed – and I don’t care if Glastonbury does support Oxfam and Greenpeace, it’s still charging £150 a ticket – compels me to make a decision now about a weekend five months in the future, by which time I might be working for a boss who won’t give me time off, penniless and destitute or gun-running in the foothills of Afghanistan. (OK, so it’s not really a commitment, as pre-registering doesn’t actually guarantee me a ticket. But if I don’t go through the rigmarole of pre-registering before the end of this month, then I’m not even allowed to attempt to buy a ticket when the phone lines open on 1st April.)

IMPULSE

Glastonbury’s attitude is echoed around the world. We are being discouraged from doing things on impulse, whether it be going out for a meal or visiting an art gallery. Soon, we will need to make an appointment to go to the shops. You will have to make a reservation seven days in advance for a particular time slot to be allowed to use your local High Street. You will need to “pre-register” your interest in dining at a particular restaurant, watching a film or visiting a museum.
The age of pre-booking has turned our lives into rigid timetables, where we need to pre-order activities to fill the various time slots. Restaurants, theatres, cinemas, galleries, car parks – they all need to be reserved in advance.
Weekend city breaks – at home or abroad - are now fraught with the danger of not being able to find a whiff of spontaneity. Unless you resort to hours of military-style pre-planning by phone or internet months before departure, your romantic break in Paris could be reduced to traipsing between “ticket only” art galleries or from one “sold-out” show to another “fully-booked” restaurant.

If you travel to southern Spain and fancy visiting one of the most beautiful buildings in the world – the Alhambra – forget it. You need to pre-book on the internet, and choose the exact hour and date you wish to visit. (Here’s a tip though, based on painful experience: never book for the 10 pm slot. Half the complex will be closed and the other half so dimly lit that you might as well be in a multi-storey car park rather than in a stunning, 800-year-old Arab palace).
If you want to see an art exhibition in London, Edinburgh, Madrid or Paris, there’s a good chance you’ll have to buy your pre-timed ticket in advance. You can’t just visit London and say: “Ooh, while we’re here, why don’t we have a look at Goya’s etchings?”
If you’re flying to any of these places, the easyJet website encourages you to pre-book your place in the queue with Speedy Boarding for between £2.50 and £7.50(even though the small print warns you they can’t guarantee you’ll be first on the plane if it involves a bus shuttle from gate to aircraft!). The Jet2 website lets you pre-book champagne. God forbid you should spontaneously desire a bottle of cheap fizzy plonk 39,000 feet above Slovenia.

KEBAB

It’s rubbish not being able to do things on the spur of the moment. Imagine if Cary Grant had had to pre-book his impromptu dinner date with Audrey Hepburn in Charade, or George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez had needed to book their table at that swanky bar in Out Of Sight. Two great films would have been ruined by shots of Hollywood icons filling in on-line pre-registration forms. It wasn’t that long ago that you could see a West End show, have a meal in Soho and round off the night at the Café de Paris without having to book any stage of the evening in advance. I know because I did it(and still had change from a tenner for the night bus home). Nowadays, I’d be lucky to find a kebab shop that didn’t need advance reservations.
Even in the remote village I live in now – miles off the tourist trail – there’s no room for impulse. We have one, modest restaurant. Despite having lived here for the last three years, I have never once been able to suggest to my girlfriend on a Friday or Saturday night that we nip to the But’n’Ben for a meal without finding it rammed to the rafters with people who have booked weeks or months in advance.
Who are these people whose lives are so organised and predictable that they are able to book a meal in a restaurant or tickets for the cinema so far in advance? And what came first? The demand that necessitated the booking system? Or the booking system that created a “buzz” and stirred the demand? Is, for example, advance booking of airport car parking really a money-saver, or just a gimmick to create the impression you are saving money? (By experimenting with dates – tomorrow and four months in the future – I found no difference in prices at Jet2’s car parking website) .

HOPE

There is some hope. Some, newer restaurants now operate a no-bookings policy. You might have to queue up for a bit, but some of the best meals I’ve had have come after an hour of standing around staring enviously at someone else’s patas bravas. And some theatres now keep back a selection of cheap seats for release on the night.
A much-maligned feature of modern life also offers a glimmer of hope – ticket touts. The reason for Glastonbury’s pre-registration system is an attempt to stop tickets being resold on eBay. But I would argue that touts offer a valuable service. The most specious argument against them is that they sell tickets at inflated prices. Well, excuse me, but when was the last time you bought a ticket for an event that wasn’t inflated, thanks to booking fees, transaction charges, postage, etc?(See Greed, Hypocrisy and Rock & Roll here) If I did wake up next June with a burning desire to go to Glastonbury, the touts on eBay would be my only hope of fulfilling that impulse. Likewise just about any other concert. There are even third parties who sell on tables at fancy restaurants. Without touts – both of the “booking agency” and dodgy-Scouser-in-a-baseball-cap-variety – I wouldn’t have seen Zidane, Figo and co play in front of a sold-out Bernabeau. I’d never have seen a barnstorming performance – including a rare rendition of Creep – by Radiohead at the Manchester Apollo. If you can afford them, touts serve a valuable public service. They are the last link to an age of whim and spontaneity in a world being suffocated by automated booking services and pre-registration websites.
It’s not just meals out and Glastonbury though. If we lose the ability to be able to act on impulse, what are the implications for our creative spirit? Art – whether it be literature, paintings or music – is already having the life strangled out of it by marketing men, target demographics and trend forecasts. That’s why you have to wade through all the Alan Titchmarsh and Jade Goody autobiographies and the I Traversed the Andes by Unicorn memoirs to find anything remotely decent in your local Waterstones. That’s why the CD racks are full of gurning faces from X-Factor. Nothing’s the result of spontaneity or impulse. Everything’s made to order.
We live in a world where nothing’s left to chance. And that makes it a very dull place indeed.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

Death For A Living

2007-01-31T09:35:00.000Z

THEY CALL IT “delivering the death message”. It’s that dreaded knock on the door, when a mother or father, husband or wife, learns that their loved one will never be coming home.
This is a police officer with Strathclyde Traffic Division in Scotland whom I interviewed a few years ago:
“I remember one Christmas Eve there was a crash on the M74 involving two women. I went around to the mother’s house in Paisley to tell her her grand-daughter had been killed, but her daughter had survived. But by the time we had been to identify the grand-daughter’s body, the woman’s daughter had died too, and I had to break that news to her as well.
“I got home at seven in the morning to find my children opening their Christmas presents. That’s when it gets to you.
“It doesn’t matter how much you prepare, when you arrive at someone’s house to deliver a death message, there is this total fear. You are about to speak to someone you have never met before and ruin their life. It never gets easier.
“At the scene of the accident, you’re professional enough to be able to deal with it. This shield comes down, and you just get on with the job. But when you deliver the death message to the family, there is absolutely no shield there. I’ve been to people’s homes and have watched a guy spend half-an-hour wrecking his living room after I told him. I’ve had a woman slap me. And I’ve had another person simply carry on eating their dinner.”

RECORD

Scottish traffic cops have lately been delivering more than their fair share of death messages. Last weekend saw 14 people killed in road accidents. This in a country of barely five million people. Last year in the Grampian region alone – the picture-postcard Scotland of snow-capped peaks and twisting, mountain roads – a record number of more than 50 people were killed as a result of cars veering off the road, clipping kerbstones, colliding with other vehicles or smashing into pedestrians or cyclists. That's a dizzying death rate of one per 6,000 of Grampian's population, compared with the UK average of one death per 18,000(Road deaths 2004).
It’s hard to pinpoint the reason why a disproportionate number of death messages are being delivered by Scottish traffic cops. Living up here, I’ve grown used to seeing pictures of mangled wreckage and bloodstained roads several times a week on my local news programme. But one recurring factor is the youth of the drivers. Two of the drivers killed in last weekend’s carnage were aged 20 and 17. Another driver, aged 20, is recovering in hospital. And the thing about young drivers is they will invariably pack their car with their mates. Three of the dead passengers from last weekend were 24 or under.
Road crashes are the biggest killer of 15 to 24-year-olds, and one in six (16%) convictions for causing death by dangerous driving in Scotland are against under-21s(Scotland on Sunday, 26 November 2006). Which does tend to beg the question: how can someone be considered not responsible enough to vote in an election or drink alcohol(legal age: 18), yet responsible enough to be given the keys to a 155-mph sports car after a handful of driving lessons(legal age: 17)?

GRIM

Delivering the death message never gets any easier for a traffic cop. But the police try to make things easier for the recipient of the grim news. This is George Trayner, who was responsible for teaching cops throughout Scotland the best way to deliver the death message:
“We consulted families who’d been through it, and learned a lot. For example, when a police officer turns up at your door now, he isn’t going to be wearing a bright yellow fluorescent waistcoat. He isn’t going to stand square on - some people found this intimidating. He won’t go all round the houses, but will use the words ‘dead’ or ‘died’ as soon as possible.
“We don’t call it a road accident anymore, it’s a ‘crash’ or ‘collision’ – to the family whose son was killed by a drunken or speeding driver, how could it possibly be an accident? And in the mortuary, we used to hand the deceased’s belongings back to the family in a bin liner. We don’t do that anymore, it gave the impression we were handing over rubbish.”
Other ways of helping the bereaved have been more concrete. After one crash in which a mother and her baby daughter died, George spent a whole day combing the wreckage for a chain and pendant the family wanted for sentimental reasons. He has obtained locks of hair from the deceased for one family. And he has been asked to retrieve the cassette or CD the deceased was listening to at the time of the crash.
“These are the different ways people have of dealing with their loss, and we now recognise that. We know it is working because of the letters we get from grateful families. Four years ago a Norwegian national died in a quadruple in Erskine. I still get Christmas cards from his parents.”

ONE OF last weekend’s 14 road deaths involved a pedestrian who was crossing the A77 near Prestwick Airport. There’s a good chance the funeral arrangements will have been carried out by Ian Blair, who runs an undertakers’ business in the nearby broken-down seaside resort of Saltcoats.
When I met him a few years ago, he was attempting to drum up business by sponsoring a local bowls tournament: “We normally rely on the Yellow Pages or personal recommendation, but this weekend we’ll have our name on banners around the event. Well, it’s the right age group for it.”
He was juggling this sponsorship deal with the funeral arrangements of an 81-year-old widow. Twenty years previously, when he’d just been starting out in what was then his father’s business, he’d helped carry the coffin of the woman’s husband: “I derive tremendous satisfaction from continuity like this.”
Ian was very proud of his “fridge” – capacity three cadavers – his fleet of Ford hearses and limousines, and his spacious car park, the envy of several hotels along the coast road. But he looked slightly awkward as we passed the nine shrink-wrapped coffins propped up in the corridor: “People don’t like coffins, or boxes as we call them. There is a Rabbie Burns line that says ‘coffins stood around like open presses, that held the dead in their last dresses’.”

BODIES

In his embalming room – all white walls and colourful liquids – Ian told me about the camaraderie that exists between practitioners of this most ancient of arts: “Bodies can be discoloured and bloated when we find them, so we make them presentable for viewing. But it’s not all cosmetic - we’re also responsible for piecing together the remains after a big disaster like Lockerbie.
“It’s funny you know. After something like that you hear of police or army people needing counselling for post-traumatic stress, but us funeral directors and embalmers are expected to just get on with it. No-one offered us any counselling after Lockerbie.”
He is not one to boast of his achievements, but when pressed he spoke proudly of the funeral of a mother and her five children who died in a house fire in the nearby town of Kilbirnie that attracted lots of press attention in 1991.
“We only had the weekend between the procurator fiscal releasing the bodies and the funeral. Fortunately I had sufficient stock of smaller coffins. We dressed the children’s in a lovely white, embossed, swan’s down fabric. The details were very important, because at the funeral you couldn’t touch a door handle on the hearse without hundreds of cameras clicking away.”
When asked about his own thoughts on death, Ian, a church elder, referred to a story about a group of Indian mystics sitting around watching a fire die out.
“’Where do the flames go?’ asks one of the youngest. ‘Do they go east, west, north or south?’ ‘They don’t go anywhere,’ replies the wisest. ‘They go out.’”
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

A Beginner's Guide To Airports

2007-01-29T01:26:00.000Z

THE RESULTS OF AN investigation by the Office of Fair Trading into self-proclaimed “world’s leading airports operator” BAA are expected shortly. The OFT report probably won’t include the words “rip off”, “bungling amateurs” or “bollocks”, so here is Jack Havana’s 20-step Beginners’ Guide to Using Airports.

1. In the same way that most Odeons and Cineworlds are now pick’n’mix megastores with a cinema attached, the likes of Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester International, etc, are in fact huge shopping centres with a couple of runways added on at the back.
2. You are recommended to check-in at airports at least two hours before your flight. This is to allow the airport operator plenty of time to extinguish any feelings of pre-holiday excitement and happiness you may be experiencing.

3. It often achieves this even before you have walked through the automatic doors when you realise that (a) the cost of four return tickets on the Heathrow Express(operated by BAA) has just cost you more than your flights; or (b) you have arrived at the wrong terminal and the only way to the correct terminal is by a shuttle bus which is currently stuck in traffic.
4. Though BAA manages only seven British airports – Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Southampton, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen – these are used by two-thirds of the 210 million UK airport users each year. This is usually on a Friday between 5pm and 9 pm.
5. Contrary to popular belief, airports’ main source of income is not from the landing fees they charge airlines. It is from the amount of rent they charge shops and restaurants from Boots and Burger King to Caffe Nero and Cartier. BAA, for example, makes more from retail than it does from actually being an airport. This is a result of it having a property portfolio worth nearly £2 billion, and owning World Duty Free.
6. World Duty Free, the shop chain owned exclusively by BAA, cunningly gives the impression that everything is cheaper than it would be “on the outside.” This helps exacerbate your post-holiday depression when you return home and realise you could have bought that perfume or digital camera for £30 less on the internet.
7. Because airports make more money from being shopping centres than being airports, it will often be difficult to instantly locate useful things such as check-in desks(they are hidden behind WH Smith and the Food Village at Luton Airport), passport control and departure gates. This is another reason you are advised to arrive at least two hours early.
8. Because airports also make lots of money from renting out advertising space, there will often be more signs for Starbucks or Sunglasses Hut than there will be pointing to departure gates. Gates 21-30 at Manchester Airport, for example, are particularly tricky to locate for this reason.
9. Security facilities are also being rented out for advertising. The US Transportation Security Administration – who allowed 9/11 to happen and who failed to respond to my email alerting them to a loophole in airport security(See Why Airport Security is Rubbish here) – have just approved plans to allow airports to sell advertising space on the plastic trays used on X-ray conveyor belts. Expect this to catch on the UK very soon.
10. At least three out of every five X-ray or metal detecting machines at UK airports will be idle at any one time.
11. The most sophisticated, anti-terrorism measures to be introduced at UK airports since 9/11 – but not until five years after – were the removal and inspection of every fifth passenger’s shoes and the confiscation of soft drinks from small children.
12. These measures have now made using a UK airport statistically safer than walking through a Shia neighbourhood of Baghdad with the slogan “I Voted for Bush” pinned to your back.
13. Considering that 144 million passengers pass through BAA’s seven UK airports every year, there are never enough toilets. And just when you think you’ve found one, there will never be enough functioning cubicles. This is because, unlike shops, toilets contributed very little to BAA’s pre-tax profits of £621 million last year.
14. As well as charging airlines landing fees, airports also charge passengers a Passenger Service Charge(PSC). This is included in your fare but should not be confused with the Air Passenger Duty(or Departure Tax) which is pocketed directly by Gordon Brown. The PSC is supposed to go towards passenger amenities such as toilets and security. Yet this hasn’t stopped Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport from charging all passengers an extra £2 “security levy” at the departure gate. You won’t find any warning of this on the airport website(I was only alerted to it by a paragraph in the Sunday Times Travel section), but you will find pages and pages of detail about the airport shops. So if other, bigger airports haven’t felt the need to charge passengers an extra £2 on top of the PSC, how can Liverpool justify it? Might it be something to do with financing the ambitious expansion plans(i.e. more shops) of its owners, Peel Holdings?
15. If you think Heathrow Airport is unbearable now, consider this. It’s expansion proposals will take annual customer numbers from the current 68 million to 151 million. But there is no information on toilets.
16. Most airports operate “silent” departure lounges. This means there will be regular announcements over the Tannoy to inform you that there will be no announcements.
17. The airport’s Viewing Area will be closed as a security measure.
18. If the weather is a bit foggy at Heathrow, your flight will be delayed until next June.
19. Terminal Five at Heathrow will actually be the biggest shopping centre in Europe. The check-in desks will be for passengers wanting to use the shuttle bus to Terminals 1 – 4.
20. Just because the airport you are flying from isn’t operated by BAA – eg Liverpool, Manchester, Prestwick, Luton – doesn’t mean your experience will be any less soul-sapping.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends…..
MUSIC: Hats Off To The Buskers, by The View. Classy debut from the young whippersnappers who live just down the road from me in glamorous Dundee. As exciting as Definitely Maybe, but with better lyrics. Sample the album here.
VIDEO: Open Your Eyes by Snow Patrol. OK, so the song sounds like every other Snow Patrol song, but the video’s a gem, a bravado-piece of camera-wielding moped-driving through early-morning Paris with a refuse truck almost bringing the whole thing to a premature, messy end. Watch here.
BOOK: The Macadam Road, by John Macadam. Published in 1957, the memoirs a Scottish sports journalist. Like a poor man’s Hemingway, but with handlebar moustache and a ukulele.

The Road to Hell

2007-01-25T17:01:00.000Z

I OFFICIALLY TURNED middle-aged this week. It happened at 4.54 pm on Wednesday when I came home from the shops and saw my neighbour’s car in my parking space. Up until that moment, I’d never been particularly fond of those few square feet of scuffed, grey Tarmac. But suddenly I felt as if we’d been lifelong buddies. And that they’d been violated. There were no broken lines or markings nor legal documents to indicate that this bit of road was actually my property. But that didn’t matter. It was my territory. It was my parking space. And some fucker had nicked it.
The space in question is part of a communal square surrounded by a tight cluster of terraced cottages. It is the part of the public highway nearest to the front doors of myself and three neighbours. So we all leave our vehicles there. But what I resent is that each of my neighbours possesses two cars. They require two spaces. I have only one. And yet this thoughtless, selfish fucker had dared to occupy a second space, next to the space already occupied by his wife’s clapped-out Ford Fiesta*, meaning there was nowhere for my car. My only car. I had to park a bit further down the road, meaning at least an extra 20 feet to walk to my front door. This was unacceptable. How dare they. I stormed home and slammed my Morrisons bags onto the kitchen table. I spent the rest of the evening pacing up and down in front of the window waiting for my chance to reclaim my territory. But my neighbour never left his house again that night. I seethed in front of the television. I tossed and turned in bed. I had officially and irreversibly evolved into a grumpy, middle-aged, small-minded man. When I woke up I was wearing slippers and a cardigan and had a pipe in my mouth.

PATHETIC

But when it comes to car parking, there are people even more petty-minded and pathetic than me. They work in your local council’s highways department, and their mission is to penalise, intimidate and generally bully car owners.

Now this isn’t a piece in defence of car owners. Most car owners aren’t fit to ride a tricycle, never mind something with a 360-horsepower engine under the bonnet. No, this is a slightly meandering piece(that will gradually build to an explosive climax) about the bankruptcy of creative thought in the average city council.

Yes, they have to make money. So they pick on the easy target, drivers. They have lots of other potential to make money from, like the heritage and resources of their own city. But they are too narrow-minded to see beyond installing rows of parking meters or defacing a quiet, leafy street with residents-only parking bays. (As an example of how dull and unimaginative councils are, look at the example of Liverpool. It’s due to be Capital of Culture next year. I was there last month, and there was no sign of any culture apart from the usual suspects of the bloody Beatles and the football teams. Everywhere you went you could buy a mug with John Lennon’s gurning face on it or retro Liverpool and Everton shirts. And that was the city’s dramatic, 800-year history summed up in a handful of tacky souvenirs. What about celebrating the city’s punk explosion of the 70s, its rich TV and cinema heritage or the myriad of music, fashion and other cultural trends which surfaced there during its years as the maritime gateway to the world?)

GRUMPY

Your local council is the grumpy, middle-aged man wearing the cardigan and slippers who complains about the music being too loud. None is grumpier nor more middle-aged than Glasgow City Council, especially when it comes to picking on easy targets for a quick cash injection. As if charging some of the highest council tax rates in Britain isn’t enough to keep it in the black – and the number of public-owned buildings which have remained empty or derelict over the last decade is testament to the council’s accounting skills – the council has recently extended its city centre on-street pay parking. There is a street just east of the city centre that runs along the north edge of Glasgow Green. When I had the misfortune to live in Glasgow, I regularly commuted along this route. As it borders a park in a run-down area of the city, there were hardly ever any cars parked there. But that didn’t stop the good burghers of Glasgow City Council from spending thousands of pounds of tax-payers’ money on transforming its half-mile length into a pay parking zone, complete with painted bays and fancy pay-and-display ticket machines. The result: the handful of cars that did park there now no longer do, and the number of empty bays is a fitting epitaph to the city’s lack of imagination.
Elsewhere, it's amazing the poetic lengths councils will go to to justify charging £1.20 for a half hour’s on-street parking. This is Edinburgh City Council, who made a modest £16 million from on-street parking charges and penalties in 2004: “Badly and illegally parked cars cause congestion, slowing down other road users including buses and can result in accidents involving pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. There were 1,460 road accidents causing injury or death in Edinburgh in 2003.”

DECAPITATION

Excuse me, but how is parking your car without have to pay for the privilege any more likely to cause congestion or accidents than parking you car and sticking a pay-and-display ticket in your windscreen? If motorists have, for years, been parking their cars in Tightwad Avenue without causing a single death or decapitation to passing cyclists or pedestrians, how does turning that road into a “pay and display” zone make things any better??? You see, I have no objection to councils prohibiting on-street parking on safety grounds. But I have every objection to them using safety grounds as an excuse to charge for on-street parking. It doesn’t make sense!!
This is Manchester’s excuse for on-street parking charges: “We aim to make Manchester a safer, more healthy and attractive environment by reducing traffic congestion.” Hmmm. So how exactly does charging 50 pence for 15 minutes parking time and having a time limit of 30 minutes, thus resulting in more vehicles having to return to the traffic flow and pump out fumes while they look for another parking space, contribute to a “healthy and attractive environment”? Wouldn’t it be better if there were no charges and motorists knew they could leave their vehicles parked there all day, with no harmful pollution being emitted? Other motorists would know it was pointless driving around in circles waiting for a space to become free, thus cutting down on the amount of traffic on the roads. It’s not as if Manchester’s short of public transport options, with a fine tram, rail and bus network. The last of Manchester City Council’s “Street Management” Department’s stated aims, by the way, is to “always answer telephone calls within five rings.” Commendable.

BOLLOCKS

Amongst Birmingham City Council’s listed reasons for on-street parking charges is this: “To allow the Police to devote more resources to tackling crime.” This is quite sensationally bollocks. If you don’t charge for parking, motorists can park there for as long as they want, and the police are not required to check whether any traffic or parking laws are being contravened or not, and so can get on with questioning Tony Blair in the cash-for-honours case. If, however, you do charge for parking, then the police inevitably will be involved in disputes arising from whether a car has exceeded its 15 minutes or not, not to mention cases of GBH involving traffic wardens.
So if, as I have conclusively proven in the preceding paragraphs, charging for parking doesn’t actually make roads safer, cleaner or crime-free, why do councils bother painting all those broken lines and installing all those meters? The answer’s obvious of course. It’s less to do with regulating traffic and cutting congestion, and more to do with criminalising drivers. By setting charges and time limits, it’s easy to catch drivers out. And that way great riches lie. Most councils make most of their money from fining drivers, not charging them for parking. In London alone during 2002/03, councils issued a total of 4.9 million parking tickets. This helped Westminster City Council rake in an incredible £100 million in parking revenue, while neighbouring Kensington and Chelsea counted in £81 million.

Something else that helped Westminster rake in such an astronomical amount – particularly for such a small area – was a controversial incentive scheme to encourage traffic wardens to issue more tickets. This despicable practise wasn’t just confined to Westminster. An investigation by the RAC Foundation last year found that other councils were offering flat-screen TVs and other incentives to parking attendants who met targets.
The amount of money raised through parking charges for the whole of England and Wales in 2004 was a mind-boggling £1,094,464,000. After taking away the cost of painting all those lines, employing all those traffic wardens and providing all those flat-screen TVs or Champions League match tickets as incentives, the surplus was an only slightly less mind-boggling £439,125,000(House of Commons Transport Committee Report, June 2006). This is all so very, very wrong.

APPEAL

So what can we do about it? Well, not pay our fines, for one. Try it. Challenge the council to an appeal. You only have to dispute one tiny part of your PCN(Parking Charge Notice), such as the time it was issued, to be entitled to an appeal. Unsurprisingly, councils don’t go out of their way to publicise this fact. And appealing shouldn’t affect your right to a 50 per cent discount for paying the fine within 14 days. This period should simply be re-offered after the outcome of the appeal(though check with individual councils first as not all of them are as magnanimous). There is some extremely encouraging evidence to show that councils often choose not to contest an appeal – to save themselves time and money – and the PCN is withdrawn.
This is supported by a House of Commons Transport Committee report into Parking Policy and Enforcement from June last year. This revealed that 35 per cent of appeals were not contested by local councils in England and Wales in 2004, with some councils not bothering to contest as much as half of all appeals. Of those that were contested, 62 per cent were successful in getting the PCN overturned.
The report concluded: . “Drivers should be encouraged to challenge Penalty Charge Notices which they believe to be incorrect. A simple and efficient appeals process will enhance that likelihood. A statutory requirement to re-offer the 14 day 50 per cent discount after the appeal stage for all appeals rejected by the adjudicators would also address what appears to be a common deterrent to use of the adjudication service.”
And should you ever find that you car has been towed away as a result of a parking offence, you may be interested to learn that the same report flags up the little-known fact that such action might be in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights: “This places a greater duty on councils to have regard to proportionality.... They need to be able to justify in every case why the issue of a PCN alone would not have achieved the desired objective (i.e.of a reasonable level of compliance with legitimate parking restrictions).”

BUGGERS

So instead of charging drivers for parking, why don’t we introduce a system that will have much more of a beneficial impact on the environment? Returning to my own predicament here in my remote, windswept but traffic-clogged Scottish village, why don’t we penalise households for owning more than one car, maybe through an increased rate of road tax for second vehicles registered at the same address? And why don’t we prohibit insurance companies like Direct Line from offering discounts on second cars?
Who the fuck really needs two cars anyway? Of my neighbours, half the buggers work from home or are retired and the other half work down in the town, at the end of a perfectly reliable and daily bus service.
And while we’re at it, why don’t we reward the drivers of cars whose looks and elegance – the car’s, not the driver’s – are aesthetically-pleasing rather than a Vauxhall Astra? The owners of all classic Porches, Maseratis or new Nissan 350Zs should be given generous discounts on their road tax and insurance, and be entitled to free parking wherever they go. That would be a small price to pay for the style and beauty such cars bring to our otherwise drab, Mondeo-clogged roads.

*Vehicle's identity has been changed.

STOP PRESS: The government proposes to introduce compulsory, vehicle-tracking devices for all cars. Drivers will be billed for the amount of miles they clock up each month. As well as being another nice little earner for the Government - obviously those billions of pounds in parking fines aren't enough - these devices will also erode an individual's privacy. Big Brother will know your location - and whether you are speeding or not! - every time you get in your car. Jack Havana urges anyone who values his civil liberties to sign up to the on-line petition against this threat. Signing takes a few seconds here.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana unsuccessfully applied for a job……
…..as a sales consultant with long-haul specialist Travelmood, but wasn’t too disappointed after he found out the basic salary was £12,500 for five days, 9-6, including alternate Saturdays and one Sunday a month. And they say slavery’s been abolished……

Lies, Damned Lies And TV Ratings

2007-01-22T03:40:00.000Z

IT WILL BE A TERRIBLE injustice if Channel Four today decides to scrap Big Brother because of the racism and bullying in its celebrity version. It should have the guts to drop the show because it’s shite, simple as that.
Of course, the channel’s riposte to accusations of dumbing down TV by repeating the same tired and predictable format and its host of spin-offs year after year across its terrestrial and digital channels is this: it gets good ratings. This fails to take into account that Hitler got good ratings with millions of Germans back in the 1930s – that’s how he became Fuehrer - and Osama Bin Laden’s ratings went through the roof with millions of Muslims after his Twin Towers stunt.

CON

More importantly though, the system which measures these “ratings” is almost as big a con as the reality TV dross that constantly seems to top them. Have you ever wondered how the producers at Endemol could ever possibly know that five million viewers had lives so empty and dull that they regularly watched Big Brother?
They, along with the producers of every other lump of steaming, fly-infested poo masquerading as entertainment, pay thousands of pounds a year to subscribe to a secretive organisation called the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB). This supplies data about “the public’s” viewing habits to programme-makers, broadcasters, the media, market researchers and, crucially, advertisers. These all pay annual subscription fees ranging from £2,000 to £111,500, depending on what type of organisation they are and how much access to the “ratings” they want. That top end figure is for broadcasters and is for each channel that they want monitored. If a satellite broadcaster, for example, wanted “ratings” for more than one of its channels, it would have to pay extra. All subscribers pay an annual registration fee of £5,250. So now you know where all that premium phone line revenue goes – not on innovative programme-making, but on subscriptions to BARB.

ARSE

Most channel chiefs regard this as great economics. Instead of spending money on hiring imaginative, creative staff and making loads of fresh, original programmes, they simply subscribe to a service that provides them with “ratings” that reassure them – and the advertisers - that millions of people are actually watching their channels, no matter how spurious that information is. In other words, they collectively pay millions of pounds a year on a metaphorical haemorrhoid ointment that takes away the burning sensation in their arse from where they have produced such an endless stream of televisual diarrhoea.
Now there’s a reason why I keep putting inverted commas around the word “ratings”, as in the BARB sense of “ratings”. And it’s this:
There are approximately 30 million TV-viewing households in the UK. Even more if you count the increasing numbers who refuse to register their TV ownership by buying a TV licence. So how many of those households, do you think, are actually monitored by BARB? The answer is 5,000. That’s FIVE THOUSAND. Not five million. Not even five hundred thousand. Just five thousand.
Now I appreciate that all surveys – on subjects ranging from our favourite sexual positions to what toothpastes we prefer – are based on data gathered from a random sample. But does anyone else agree with me that to use a sample of just 5,000 households – out of more than 30 million – seems a teeny, weeny bit un-scientific? And when a survey does publicise its findings, it’s usually accompanied by some small print saying: “Based on a random sample of 36 cat owners”, etc. But have you ever seen the words “Based on a random sample of 5,000 TV viewers” beneath the headlines trumpeting that Davina McCall was watched by nine million viewers last night? No, neither have I.
So how does BARB get its information from these 5,000 households, and how accurate is it? For the amount of money they are charging subscribers, you’d think it could afford to have a white-coated research scientist living full-time in each of the households. Especially as BARB claims to be non profit-making.

DEVICE

The reality is slightly different. Rather than a clipboard-wielding scientist, BARB supplies each household with a device called a “peoplemeter”. Each member of the household has to remember to press their “allocated button” on the “peoplemeter” whenever they sit down to watch the TV. The device will then record every detail of their channel-hopping. The “peoplemeter” is so advanced that it is able to transmit all the information it records directly back to BARB HQ between 2 am and 6 am every day.
Can anyone spot one minor flaw in this system? Yes, that’s right – the “peoplemeter” doesn’t differentiate between when you switch the TV on because it’s showing something you really, really want to watch – such as Scrubs or The Sopranos, for example - and when you switch it on just out of habit, to provide some background noise while you do the ironing or take a dump. And what if anyone in those 5,000 households forgets to press their “allocated button”? Do any alarms flash at BARB HQ warning of a “tainted” sample? Of course not.
I’ve got a much better, fool-proof system, using a sample based on what dozens of my friends, neighbours and family have been watching during the past week. If any advertiser or programme-maker wants to subscribe to the JACK system for £100 a month, I will give them an accurate indicator of what people aged between eight – my nephew – and eighty – my dad – are watching. It’s no less scientific than BARB’s methods, but a damn sight cheaper. For free, I’ll let you know that my mum – 72 and awaiting a hip replacement – thinks Trevor McDonald has the sincerity of a snake oil salesman and that Jonathan Ross should get his hair cut.

FUCKWITS

The BARB “ratings” we are so used to reading in the newspapers after a big TV event like the Eastenders Christmas special or last week’s Celebrity Big Brother rumpus, are incredibly flawed. Which should be of great reassurance to us all. We are not the nation of brainless fuckwits which the Big Brother or Strictly Come Dancing “ratings” of “xx millions” would seem to imply. Most of us actually do have better things to do than sit on our arses watching Tonight With Trevor McDonald. Davina McCall is nowhere near as popular as her smug fucking grin thinks she is. None of those hopeless excuses for TV presenters – and you’ve been reading me long enough by now to know exactly who I’m referring to – are anywhere near as cherished and adored as their agents and stylists make them think they are. (I have worked with several well-known presenters who would come in to the office waving the overnight BARB “ratings” in their hands as if they’d just discovered a cure for cancer.) The only reason any of these vacuous, self-obsessed imbeciles and the programmes they front get any recognition at all is not because of how many people watched them on TV last night, but because newspapers and magazines need “celebrity” fodder to fill their pages. And because they are never going to get an exclusive interview with Brad Pitt, they settle for an “at home” with Kerry Katona instead.
That’s why in a fair and just world, not only would Big Brother be dropped by Channel Four, but BARB would finally own up to the fact that its “ratings” are nothing but a sham, and will remain a sham until it finds the integrity to add that “based on a random sample of 5,000 TV viewers”-qualification to the bottom of every sheet of its expensively-produced data.
But don’t hold your breath. Did I mention that BARB is co-owned by BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five and Sky TV? Convenient that, isn’t it?
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week Jack Havana recommends:
MUSIC: Golden Skans by Klaxons. For those of you without MTV2, watch video here.
FILM: Just Friends(2005), currently showing on Sky Movies. Anna Faris – the ditzy blonde from the Scary Movie franchise – confirms her status as funniest actress on the planet. This movie is an overlooked gem. Watch trailer here.
BOOK: Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly. A celebration of the magazine that ran from 1951 – 1971 and predicted floodlights and a British league topped by Aston Villa and Hibs. More here.

Could This Man Be A Bigger Threat Than Global Warming?

2007-01-17T09:29:00.000Z

THERE WAS A SHOCKING scene on ITN’s late news bulletin last night. During a report on global warming from the Rothera research station in Antarctica, an iceberg was seen to disintegrate in the background. Reporter Mark Austen – who was delivering a piece to camera from on board an inflatable launch at the time - heroically continued as the boatman took evasive action and accelerated away. Even as a mini-tsunami from several thousand tons of ice collapsing into the sea shook the launch and threatened to tip the cameraman overboard, Austen held on tightly and was able to improvise manfully, referring to the incident as evidence of global warming. At no point did he mention the possibility that it might have been the proximity of his launch and the vibrations from its powerful outboard engine which had triggered the collapse of such a large amount of already melting and unstable ice. Nor did he refer to the amount of C02 emissions produced by ITN during their 25,000-mile round trip to the continent just for the sake of some shots of their anchorman in situ. This extravagant field trip – and all the greenhouse gases it produced – came just a few months after Austen’s colleague and ITN science correspondent Laurence McGinty had made a similar trip to Antarctica for a remarkably similar report, i.e. warning of the perils of climate change.

BANDWAGON

There’s a worrying pattern emerging here. The media has gleefully jumped on the environmental bandwagon in an effort to bring us news which doesn’t revolve around Iraq or the Big Brother house. Having long ago lost interest in the polonium-210 poisoning story – I’m sorry, but is it just me who is still a bit concerned about the implications of all those people being contaminated by a radioactive substance that was somehow smuggled into the UK? – TV, radio and newspaper journalists have turned their attention to the threat of global warming and climate change. Sky News has just completed a week of reports called “Green Britain”, in which viewers were invited to use up as much of the earth’s vital natural resources as possible by making their own short films about what they were doing to save the planet. This had the dual effect of helping fill Sky’s 24-hour programme schedule as cheaply as possible. The amount of camera-phone and camcorder batteries needing recharging as a result of this has probably knocked a couple of days off the earth’s life expectancy.
Of course, it’s been known for decades that we need to change our consumer habits if we are to stop the hole in the ozone layer becoming so big that we are all burned to a cinder, drowned by melting ice caps or savaged by starving, displaced leopard seals. And while the occasional National Geographic TV documentary addressed the plight of polar bears who were running out of ice to frolic photogenically on or prey to feast upon, most newspaper and TV news editors declined to get involved. They were waiting for someone else to pop their head above the parapet first. The media needs a “trend” to report or an agenda to follow. News organisations never make their own, that’s far too risky and time-consuming.(With the exception of Tonight With Trevor McDonald which would turn being left-handed into “a worrying trend” if it thought it could get a half-hour programme out of it) Once a trend has been established, or an agenda set, there are usually PR people or spin doctors to spoon-feed the “news” to ITN, The Independent, Radio Five Live or whoever, and that makes things so much easier – and cheaper – for everyone. David Cameron’s recent photo-opportunity at the Arctic Circle was an example of this. And do you think Mark Austen and his team would really be interested in the melting polar caps if it wasn’t for the fact that Princess Anne will be visiting Antarctica this week?

PENGUINS

There is now a real risk that global warming and rising sea levels will be accelerated as a direct result of the media jumping on the bandwagon. Newspapers like The Independent might include a carbon offsetting index – “we promise to plant two new trees for every polar bear we kill” – but things would be much better if they just didn’t send their reporters or film crews out there in the first place. As well as the gas emissions caused by all those charter flights – it’s not as if you can cycle there – there will soon be more species of Berghaus-shod news anchors tramping over one of the most delicate and threatened environments on the planet than Emperor penguins or wandering albatrosses. Is that a southern elephant seal I can see foraging in the distance? No, it's Eamon Holmes on his lunchbreak.
If they have to experience conditions first-hand, why don’t they go and stand in the storage freezer at their local Iceland for a couple of hours? If they have to interview the scientists at the research stations, why don’t they just email them? If they need lots of nice pictures or footage of melting icebergs or endangered wildlife, why don’t they just ask the British Antarctic Survey for some of theirs?
Going back to that incident with Mark Austen and the collapsing iceberg - do you think he might have asked his boatman to deliberately steer close to the iceberg, in the hope of triggering some kind of effect? I know, I know, what a preposterous suggestion. Why would ITN need to do that? After all, they had loads of other things they could film. Like, erm, ice. Miles and miles of it. It’s just that it all seemed incredibly convenient how the iceberg collapsed, Austen barely paused in his delivery and the cameraman captured it all so perfectly. Almost as if it had been planned.
No, ridiculous. Like I said, there was no shortage of other dramatic stuff for them to film. Why, Austen even ended his report by showing us a copy of the British Antarctic Survey’s newsletter, and a paragraph about ITN’s presence.
Just how much more drama and top-notch journalism do you need?
This week, Jack Havana noticed…..
….how Mark Austen ended last night’s news bulletin with “Goodnight. And thank you for watching.” This is also how Sir Trev ends each edition of his execrable Tonight With Trevor McDonald. It’s a disturbing – and slightly desperate - new trend amongst ITV presenters. They obviously think we are all sat at home going: “Ah, wasn’t that nice, he’s so polite. In fact just for that show of courtesy, I’m going to tune in again next week, even if it is yet another half-hour of contrived, half-baked bollocks.”
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction of whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

Hamilton Academical FC And The Race To The Moon

2007-01-14T18:49:00.000Z

IN 1962, BEFORE SATELLITE TV and instant pictures, a series of live radio broadcasts had the whole of Brazil spellbound. The nation listened breathlessly as its national football team won match after match in the World Cup Finals, being held on the other side of the Andes in Chile. The commentators described how the Brazilian footballers were weaving magic with their feet and humiliating the opposition. Surely, they reported, the world had never witnessed such exquisite, joyful football. Millions of Brazilian hearts swelled with excitement and pride - until the next day when the TV pictures arrived. These showed that the Brazilian team had, in fact, been very ordinary. There was none of the magic and beauty as described by the radio commentators. There could be only one reason – the TV pictures must be wrong. The power of the listeners’ imaginations had rendered the reality false. Brazil’s majesty on the football pitch had been pure imagination – and was therefore completely true.

POWER

The story – as recounted in Chris Taylor’s 1998 book on football in Latin America, The Beautiful Game – serves as a reminder of the power of imagination and dreams, a power that has been increasingly diluted in an age of instant-gratification and 24-hour entertainment. It’s a reminder that there was once a time when we actually allowed our imaginations to run unfettered. We may not have had the amount of music, TV, films, magazines or books as we have access to now, and the internet may have been just an equation on a computer geek’s slide rule, but we had the force and freedom of our imaginations and dreams.
None of the thousands of hours of live football I have watched on Sky TV over the past decade has matched the excitement I remember from listening to a live match commentary while gathered around the transistor radio in the kitchen with my dad. Leeds Utd was his team, so I was lucky enough to be transported to a succession of “continental” outposts with exotic names such as Borussia Monchengladbach, Grasshopper Club, Red Star Belgrade, Lokomotiv Leipzig and Rapid Vienna. To my 10-year-old imagination, these names came from another planet. These days, we take the name “Real Madrid” for granted, but back in the early 1970s, me and my schoolmates found it to be the strangest combination of words ever invented – here was a place so alien and far-off that it needed an adjective prefix to confirm its existence! And on Saturday afternoons, in front of the TV as the World of Sport teleprinter clattered out the football results, my imagination could barely cope with the stirring images thrown up by the names of Scottish teams such as Hamilton Academical, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South and Heart of Midlothian!(Meanwhile, kids north of the border were probably conjuring up their own bizarre images of Sheffield Wednesday, Tottenham Hotspur, Crewe Alexandra, Accrington Stanley, etc.)
I wonder if those names still have any resonance for youngsters growing up today? In an age when the furthest recesses of the universe – never mind our planet – are accessible by tapping a few keys on a computer, can the words "Stenhousemuir" or "Dynamo Dresden" ever set a child’s pulse racing again?

PLUMS

But even more magical than radio commentators with plums in their mouths describing unseen pictures from mystical, faraway places, there was something else that fired the collective imagination of my generation – the space race. We were mesmerised by grainy, black and white images of 30-storey-high Saturn rockets blasting off from Cape Kennedy. The sight of the gantry falling away and the rocket lurching heavily upwards in a silvery bloom of smoke and sparks as a disembodied voice from mission control declared We have lift off had us by the scruffs of our necks. Then came the drama of “radio silence” as the Apollo command modules orbited around the far side of the moon. The brave astronauts were enveloped by the unknown for endless minutes. For me and loads of kids like me, "radio silence" became the new bogeyman. And then came the best bit of all – the moon landings. We could watch the astronauts walking on the moon! They were bouncing around on that shiny disc you could see up in the sky that was actually quarter of a million miles away. And they wore those brilliant space suits and got to drive the moon buggy all over the Sea of Tranquillity. For me and my mates, it was the stuff our dreams were made of.
And then it all got serious with Apollo 13. “Houston, we have a problem” entered the global lexicon. The world held its breath for days. But as soon as the command module had splashed down safely, we all wanted to be astronauts again.
(I don’t think the Space Shuttle missions had quite the same effect on later generations. For one thing, they took astronauts only a few hundred miles above the earth. For another, they had to compete with Playstation and YouTube for kids’ attention. And most crucially, they kept blowing up.)
I have no idea how much the space race contributed to the fields of health, technology and science, or the wellbeing of mankind. But I do know it left in an indelible mark on the imaginations of the generation of youngsters who grew up with it. We didn’t ask why America was spending billions of dollars sending men to the moon. We were just glad it was. The astronauts were our heroes. They broadened our horizons. They made school exciting – we got to assemble scale models of the Saturn rockets and lunar modules in class. They turned the night sky into a celestial playground. We all demanded telescopes, star charts and maps of the moon for our birthdays. My first sight of the moon’s pock-marked surface through a friend’s telescope – a “three-inch refractor” I think it was – terrified and thrilled me at the same time.
Buzz Aldrin and his fellow “star sailors” hadn’t just “slipped the surly bonds of earth”. They had set free our imaginations. Suddenly, anything seemed possible. Our horizons were well and truly broadened. Our worlds were limitless.
It’s a pity it all had to end. Billy Bragg wrote a fitting epitaph for it back in 1996:

Now that the space race is over

It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon

Because the space race is over

And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon
(Full lyrics to The Space Race Is Over here)

GREED

The implications for mankind were far more dramatic than Neil Armstrong's "one giant leap for mankind".Take away a person’s capacity for imagination, and you reduce them to a cipher bound by convention, formula and predictability. Just look at Carol Smillie. Imagination, unlike other parts of the human psyche such as greed and vanity, is underused. It needs constant stimulation. Joining millions of pasty-faced train-spotters as virtual characters in an on-line role-playing game such as World of Warcraft or regularly watching Deal Or No Deal doesn’t really do it. Watching men walking on the moon does.
The reason so much of today’s entertainment culture is mind-numbingly dull – and I’m referring to the usual suspects of television reality shows, manufactured musical acts, chick lit, Hollywood remakes, computer games, etc – is because the producers, contestants, publishers, writers and designers – most of whom are from the generation after mine – have run out of imagination. Or as Billy Bragg puts it, they've "grown up too soon". What the world needs now, more than an iPhone or Pirates of the Caribbean 3, is men walking on the moon. Something to reignite our dreams.
The US has announced plans to put men on the moon again by 2020. By then, we’ll be losing the will to live in front of Big Brother 20. A new space race really might save the world.
Until then, we’ll have to settle for the next meeting of Hamilton Academical and Queen of the South in the Scottish First Division……
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends……
MUSIC: Robbers and Cowards by Cold War Kids. Not out until next month, but you can sample it’s Talking Heads-tinged majesty here.
DVD: Lower City(18). Sex, sweat and violence amongst the slums of Bahia de Salvador in Brazil. A thin plot revolving around a love triangle, but you’ll want to change your shirt and wash your hands afterwards. In a good way. More here.
BOOK:Space Race, by Deborah Cadbury. Gripping account, less to do with the daredevil exploits of the astronauts, more with the backroom boffins on both sides of the Iron Curtain who had the imagination and vision to propel man into space. Review here.

Back To The Future

2007-01-11T10:24:00.000Z

NOSTALGIA ISN’T WHAT it used to be. The warm glow of reminiscence has been usurped by the icy glint of commercial exploitation. It’s been hijacked by big business and media executives who’ve run out of original ideas. They are ransacking the past for profit. And as a result, the future is looking very bare....
The business of nostalgia is everywhere, from retro furniture and fashion shops to the re-issue of punk records. Bookshelves are stuffed with compilations of comics and magazines from the 60s and 70s while the TV schedules are cluttered with “I Love the 70s”-type nostalgia-fests(even if most of the pundits so accurately recalling classic episodes of The Double Deckers quite obviously weren’t even born then). Magazines and newspapers – especially the lads’ mags – are full of features celebrating by-gone eras, fashions and heroes, from footballers’ perms to Steve McQueen. You can buy gadgets to convert your old vinyl records, VHS tapes or Hi-8 cassettes into digital computer files. You can watch re-runs of Fawlty Towers, UFO, The Persuaders and Jason King nearly every weeknight on satellite TV. There’s an anniversary every week giving record companies an excuse to issue repackaged and remastered versions of albums by The Vapors or Flock of Seagulls. Advertisers regularly plunder the archives for soundtracks or images for their mobile phone and credit card commercials. TV documentaries like It Started With Swap Shop recall the days when most average families didn’t have phones or cars and you relied on postcards and buses to swap your Mattel Action Man for the Subbuteo World Cup Edition. Series like Life on Mars celebrate the era of The Sweeney, kipper ties and Watney’s Red Barrel. Vintage icons like Noel Edmonds, Tony Blackburn and Bruce Forsyth are back in demand. Even poor old Ronnie Barker was hi-jacked on his deathbed to help the struggling BBC cash in on the nostalgia craze.

LOSER

So why is my generation – born in the early 60s – so obsessed with the past? Why did I spend weeks tracking down a mint-condition, 1970 box set of the aforementioned Subbuteo table soccer game and drive a 500-mile round-trip to collect it? The obvious answer is that I’m a sad loser with few social graces who still blushes in the company of women. But there’s more to it than that. The dark side of it is all to do with middle-age reminding us of our mortality and making us want to retreat back to the happy, carefree days of your youth rather than face the challenges and uncertainties of the future. In other words, we’re scared of the dying of the light and so want to take refuge in our soft, marshmallow memories of Ker-Plunk!, Etch-a-Sketch(the BlackBerry of its day) and riding our Chopper bikes with multi-coloured tassels streaming from the handlebars. Or it could be to do with the dawning realisation, common to most people over the age of 25 who accidentally tune in to Celebrity Big Brother or find themselves trapped on the end of a telephone at the mercy of an automated queueing system, that actually, you know, things were a lot better in the old days.
Whatever the reasons, have you ever thought what it was like for previous generations? Did our parents suffer from the same pangs of nostalgia when they were approaching middle-age? There was no mass media to pummel them down memory lane. Popular entertainment was still in its infancy. You couldn’t pine for the smell and texture of the recording format that preceded vinyl because there wasn’t one. You couldn’t yearn for a retro-themed bar because the word hadn’t been coined yet. If nostalgia existed for them at all, it probably revolved around memories of war and deprivation rather than Clackers and Curly Wurlys.

TEA

As I scoured the worldwide web for another obscure addition to my Subbuteo collection – ironically, the past would be out of reach without something as modern and up-to-date as the internet to mine it – I began wondering what my mum and dad did for nostalgia in the 50s and 60s. (I rang my dad to ask him but, now aged 82, he could barely remember what he'd had for his tea the night before.) It’s quite likely that they were so busy concentrating on their survival in the present that they had no time or inclination to wallow in the past. (It would be wrong to assume nostalgia, like happiness or anger, is an emotion common to all humans. What has the middle-aged couple who have lived all their lives in a Liberian shanty town got to be nostalgic about?) Or, conversely, it’s conceivable that the very demands of their day-to-day existence meant they clung to their memories of childhood more tightly. My mum and dad brought me and my sister up in a terraced house in Liverpool with an outside lav and no bath, washing machine or TV(yes, that really is five-year-old Jack Havana in the photograph). They – like millions of their contemporaries – thought it was the end of the world when the Russians parked their missiles in Cuba in 1962. Whose life wouldn’t flash before them in a situation like that?
If they did succumb to nostalgia, then their happy, sunlit memories will have remained intangible. They couldn’t indulge their yearning by buying a DVD compilation of Watch With Mother or Dixon of Dock Green. They couldn’t download Bill Hailey and the Comets. They couldn’t log on to Ebay to track down the toys they played with or books they read as kids. Nostalgia is a modern-day luxury of the civilised world.(As I said, you won’t find much of it in a Liberian shanty town).
The theme of nostalgia has provided rich pickings for writers and artists. Feelings of loss and yearning are brilliantly evoked by authors like Milan Kundera and Paul Auster, or by a film director such as Alain Resnais with Last Year in Marienbad. And what’s a classic love song – from Sinatra’s A Garden In The Rain to Girl from Mars by Ash - if not a glorious wallow in the warm soup of bittersweet memory? But now it’s the servicing – rather than the celebration - of nostalgia that has become the business phenomenon of the 21st century.

TREACHERY

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Yes, it’s great that I was able to track down that 1970 Subbuteo World Cup Edition box set(I lost the original as the result of parental treachery too painful to dwell upon), even if it prompts nothing more than glazed expressions on the faces of anyone under the age of 18 whom I show it to. (One of these was my eight-year-old nephew Matthew who once asked if he could use my phone to call his parents. I found him, several minutes later, in a mild state of shock and speechlessness staring at my trusty 1950s telephone, unable to comprehend what the black, circular thing with all the holes in it was or how to use it. Just imagine – his generation will grow up nostalgic for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.) But it’s crap that some of the greatest tunes from my teenage punk years are now associated with such corporate viscera as banks and mobile phone companies(especially if the artists concerned no longer own the rights). And I hate it when a shitty little magazine like GQ or Arena – supposedly at the smart end of the lads’ mags spectrum – can’t think of anything witty or original with which to fill the spaces between pictures of assorted Brazilian models and fawning interviews with Premiership footballers so resorts to a “retrospective” about some drunken thespian from the 60s whom we are all supposed to want to emulate. Fuck off, I don’t want to be force-fed nostalgia just because an art director or editor on a six-figure salary is too lazy to think of anything more original.
And that brings me to the one thing about this current obsession with the past which really, really makes me fear for the future. If so many “creative” minds are pillaging their ideas wholesale from recent history – whether it be a Hollywood remake of Willie Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, putting together a compilation of 70s TV cop shows for a Channel Four documentary or using The Only Ones’ Another Girl Another Planet to sell phones – does this mean we are running out of ideas? Has the seam of originality been exhausted?
There you have it, the perfect epitaph for a civilisation that regards winning The X-Factor as the pinnacle of achievement: RIP originality. Long live nostalgia.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana wallowed in nostalgia by…..
LISTENING TO: Crocodiles, by Echo and The Bunnymen(1980). Takes me back to balmy summer nights getting my head kicked in on the streets of Liverpool for wearing army trousers, overcoat and a bandana made from khaki military netting. Happy days!
WATCHING: Whicker’s World(Network DVD). Eight shows from 1969-1980 featuring the great man’s interviews with, amongst others, Haiti dictator Papa Doc, novelist Harold Robbins and Butch Cassidy’s sister. Sure beats Tonight With Trevor McDonald.
READING: The Damned United, by David Peace. A fictional take on Brian Clough’s 44 days in charge of “the dirty, dirty Leeds” in 1974. A reminder of the days when you could safely use the words “manager” and “charisma” in the same sentence.

Any Old Rope

2007-01-08T12:10:00.000Z

THEY WERE THE TV pictures that shocked a nation. A baying mob surrounding a sinister figure who had brought misery and pain to millions. Rows of security guards, their eyes glazed with indifference. And as the onlookers worked themselves into a frenzy, the character at the centre of their attention continued spouting banal words of defiance. Yes, the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother started last week.
The only difference between it and the mobile phone footage of Saddam’s execution was that one showed a character who managed to retain dignity and composure in the face of turmoil, while the other featured Davina McCall. And the only difference between the balaclava-wearing executioners who put the noose around Saddam’s neck and the placard-waving hordes who screamed themselves hoarse with excitement at the introduction of such world-famous celebrities as Donny Tourette, Carole Malone and Danielle Lloyd, is that some of them were the puppets of an oppressive and manipulative regime, while the others were intelligent and independent-minded Iraqis.

TEETH

Meanwhile, over on the BBC, the scariest-looking double act since Rainbow’s Bungo and Zippy was presenting Just The Two of Us - Vernon Kay and wife Tess Daly. I haven’t seen that much teeth and hair in the same place since the IRA blew up the Royal Horse Guards. Yet Big Vern and Statuesque Tess are the new faces of Saturday night entertainment(Dale Winton and Eamon Holmes being otherwise engaged).
The New Year has, alas, failed to produce any New Ideas in the minds of television executives. My Sky+ remote has been working overtime hoarding films from Sky Movies to fill the long voids between episodes of Coronation Street and re-runs of Cheers. It looks like being another year bereft of creativity or innovation…….
Meanwhile, a million miles away from Presenters Desperately Seeking A Charisma or TV Producers In Search of An Idea, I found myself at various social functions during Christmas and New Year making “small talk” with a succession of new acquaintances. They included teachers, taxi drivers, graphic designers and housewives. With the notable exception of a woman who became very defensive over my criticisms of Davina McCall’s presenting “style”, none of them were Big Brother fans. With the notable exception of the same woman who said her four-year-old daughter was a fan of it, none of them admitted to watching The X-Factor. In fact, in all the “small talk” I had with my new friends, the subject of TV was hardly mentioned at all. I know it sounds crazy, but it was almost as if there were more important things in life.

SCRATCH

Neil, the graphic designer, recounted how he had built up his business from scratch and had recently been able to leave the urban squalor of Glasgow for a new home in the Perthshire countryside with his wife and family. While still in Glasgow, he’d balanced the running of his business with taking a full-time MSc at university. He’d often had to choose between accepting a contract or getting an assignment finished on time. He was also an accomplished musician and played two nights a week in a ceilidh band.
James was a young Bajan studying criminology and history at Liverpool University during the day, and driving a taxi at night. He hoped to get a job with Merseyside Probation Service before returning to Barbados and practising his skills there. He told me how the prison population there was expanding – “mostly Jamaicans and Guyanese for drug smuggling” – and the demands on the island’s probation service were increasing.
Then there was Stephen who had endured a day-long train journey to be at his cousin’s wedding in Dundee. Cheerful and modest, he told me how he financed his dream of becoming a successful artist by teaching at his local secondary school.
Three “ordinary” people I met by chance, each with their own stories of achievement and aspiration. I was impressed by each of them. Not in a patronising, “well done them”-kind of a way. More in a “fuck me, they certainly put my lack of professional and personal achievement to shame”-kind of way.

BUMPS

And it got me thinking. I had met each of them in a roomful of other, “ordinary” people, each with their own modest tales of professional and personal success and the choices and sacrifices they had made to achieve it. What, I wondered, would a roomful of modern-day, instant celebrities have to talk about? What, for example, have Jade Goody or Chantelle Houghton “achieved” in their lives? What would Davina McCall and Vernon Kay talk about once they had exhausted the list of inane TV and radio shows they have each hosted? How do you have a meaningful conversation when the boundaries of your achievements extend no further than being a singing waitress(McCall) or catalogue model(Kay)? When Carol Smillie bumps into Kelly Osbourne, do you think the conversation revolves around: (a) selfless sacrifices they have made to carve out meaningful careers in life, or (b) the last time they actually had to pay for anything?
And that’s why I broke the habit of a lifetime and tuned into Celebrity Big Brother last week. It would provide the answer to my question – what exactly would a roomful of vain, vacuous, nonentities(with due respect and deference to The Lair of The White Worm director Ken Russell) possibly talk about before their eyes started bleeding? Could the achievements of Danielle Lloyd(footballer’s girlfriend) or Donny Tourette(pretend punk) possibly provide even more absorbing conversation fodder than those of ‘H’ from Steps or the rough-looking one from S Club 7?
The answer was a scathing indictment of 21st century life in a country where we take Heat magazine, mobile phone ringtones and Fiona Bruce for granted. The “celebrities” on Celebrity Big Brother don’t talk about themselves at all – they talk constantly and endlessly about Celebrity Big Brother. Because they have nothing interesting to say about themselves and are too self-centred to be interested in their housemates, they speculate relentlessly about what tacky stunts the desperate producers have dreamed up for them. The show's creators have taken the art of self-reference and justification to a new level. In the course of its five years, the whole raison d’etre of CBB has evolved before our weary eyes from “entertainment” to self-perpetuation: I exist, therefore I am.
A bit like the one-dimensional chumps who appear in it.
© Jack Havana 2007. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without Jack’s say-so.
This week, Jack Havana recommends:
MUSIC: Starz In Their Eyes by Just Jack. Condemnation of TV reality shows never sounded sweeter. The Streets for the sentient. Listen here.
Sorry, You’re Not A Winner by Enter Shikari. Bold tempo shifts, precision handclapping and a riotous video make this track stand head and shoulders above the “trance/post-hardcore” genre it is supposedly part of. Watch video here.
BOOK: The Big Book of Breasts(Taschen). A Christmas present from my girlfriend. It does exactly what it says on the cover. Marvellous. More here.
TV ADVERT: Johhny Vegas and Monkey from the ITV Digital ads are reunited to plug PG Tips in the funniest advert for years. See full version here.

A Christmas Tale: Greed, Hypocrisy And Rock & Roll

2006-12-20T01:30:00.000Z

THERE WAS ONCE a young man called Jack who loved music. He spent a large part of his disposable income on all the new releases and on tickets for gigs. He especially loved a song called Trains to Brazil by a band called Guillemots, and one day he read in the NME they were due to play a gig in the nearby city of Edinburgh. His excitement was slightly dented when he rang the venue - a dark, mysterious cellar selling over-priced drinks called The Liquid Room - and found out that it didn’t have a box office and so couldn’t sell the £8 tickets directly to him. He would have to buy them via the internet or telephone from a big, international agency called Ticketmaster, who would charge him a “service charge” of £1.20 per ticket, and another £1.60 to post them to him. Alternatively, he could buy them from an Edinburgh record shop called Ripping Records, where the service charge would “probably be cheaper”.
Jack had been planning a trip to Edinburgh that week anyway – he had an interview for a job as a “river watcher” - so decided to buy his tickets from Ripping Records. When he got to the shop, which was at one end of a stone bridge overlooking the city’s main railway station and in the shadow of a big castle, Jack was told the “service charge” was £1.50 per ticket. So two tickets with “£8.00” printed on them would actually cost £19. He was a bit shocked by this, so asked the man what the “service charge” was for. “It pays us for selling the tickets,” said the man. Jack noticed the tickets were branded with the Ticketmaster logo and the name of the promoter, DF Concerts. So he asked who kept the service charge. The man, who was actually the shop manager called John Richardson, said: “In general we keep the booking fee, though in some cases a part is passed on to a promoter or agent. Obviously I am not at liberty to discuss a third party’s business.” Jack really, really wanted to see Guillemots play live, so he decided to sacrifice his lunch to be able to afford the two £8 tickets which now mysteriously cost £9.50. But during his train ride home, he thought it was very strange that the shop could charge a supplement of more than 20 per cent for the “service” of handing a couple of tickets across the counter to a customer.
By the time he reached home, the thought of someone making such a disproportionately large profit at the expense of impoverished music fans like him had made Jack very angry. Almost as angry as he’d been when he discovered his bank was charging him £35 each time he went over his overdraft limit. Which he’d been doing quite a lot, recently. Now, even listening to the bewitching piano intro to Guillemots debut album couldn’t mellow Jack’s mood. So he snapped open his laptop and went to the Ticketmaster website. There, he found this explanation under “Service Charges”.
“As an authorised ticket agent, we negotiate our charges with venue operators, promoters and others based on costs involved in both their presentation of the event and our services with respect to the ticketing of their events. The actual amount is determined by agreement with the venue or promoter for each event. Reduced fees may be available by purchasing tickets directly at the box office.

“The charges pay for our credit/debit card processing services, merchant fees, distribution network, the installation and maintenance of computer hardware and software, telephone lines, labour and all other costs associated with the ticket transaction.”

THIS just made Jack even more angry, even more so than when he’d found out “river-watching” was actually a physically-challenging job potentially involving dangerous confrontations with armed poachers, not the sitting in a deckchair for eight hours a day monitoring water levels which he’d originally thought.(Which is probably why he never got the job) When he’d handed over his cash at Ripping Records, it hadn’t required the use of any “credit/debit card processing, distribution network, computer hardware or software” or “telephone lines”. It had simply involved a sales assistant ripping a couple of tickets out of a book and handing them across the counter together with his change.
Noting the line in the first paragraph in which Ticketmaster said it negotiated its charges with venues and promoters, Jack got in touch with The Liquid Room. Events Manager Kathrin Mackenzie-Gee sent him a very short reply:
“The gig is actually being promoted by DF Concerts and is not a Liquid Room show. I have no hold or control as to how and by what method DF sell their tickets. If it was a Liquid Room show, then the booking fee would be cheaper.”
Jack was getting more and more exasperated. It reminded him of that palaver he’d had with his local branch of Morrisons when they’d put up signs saying “up to 30 per cent off all Spanish and South American wines” and after spending half-an-hour going through the shelves he discovered that not a single bottle was reduced in price. It seemed to him that no-one was prepared to take responsibility for the “service charge”. So once he’d calmed down, he wrote a couple of letters, one to Ticketemaster and the other to Geoff Ellis, the director of DF Concerts. DF Concerts were famous because every year in Scotland they hosted “T in the Park”, a two day outdoor music festival which attracted thousands of music fans from all over Britain and had won numerous industry awards. Jack had been to a few of these festivals himself so, after complimenting Geoff on some of the bands he’d seen there and explaining all about what had happened with his Guillemots tickets, he wrote:
“I’m just a simple soul at heart, but this is the way I see it. You, as promoters, have a product, Guillemots, to sell. You need a venue, which in this case is the Liquid Room. So anything you charge for tickets will obviously have to include payment for, at the least, the band and the venue. It seems to me that in this case – Guillemots being a new, uncharted band - £8 per ticket is a fair price to cover these elements. So why do you need to muddy the waters with extra, hidden(i.e. not printed on the ticket) charges?
“There’s a remarkable parallel in the world of business with, for example, farmers who want to sell their sprouts, or publishers who want to sell their magazines. They, too, need a venue for their products, which is usually a supermarket or newsagent. The difference is that when I go to buy my pound of sprouts or copy of Word, I’m not suddenly expected to pay 20 per cent more than the price on the bag or magazine.
“I can’t help feeling that despite your nice, glossy website and all those awards you trumpet, there’s a murkier side to your business. You’re ripping off me and thousands of other music lovers, aren’t you?
“I look forward to your detailed response.”

WHEN it arrived, Geoff’s response wasn’t quite as detailed as Jack had hoped. In fact, most of it was about a subject of no relevance to Jack’s complaint at all. It went like this:
Firstly, if I can explain the issue of booking fees. The live industry accepts that nobody will ever enjoy paying a booking fee on a ticket. However, the fact is that a service is being provided by a commercial organisation, be it TicketMaster, Ripping or anyone else. My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level. I think for Ripping Records to charge £1.50 on an £8 ticket is not unreasonable for the service that they provide. I understand your query as to why, effectively, the face value of the ticket is not £9.50 and any service charge made by a ticket agent is kept within the gross price. There are three reasons for this:
The accounting for VAT from two different organisations
The fact that [the Performing Rights Society] takes 3 % after VAT of the gross ticket price. This would then mean that PRS are receiving an income that they are not entitled to and would subsequently mean that ticket prices would have to increase to cover this.
Artists often look at there(sic) earnings of(sic) a relative percentage to the gross box office receipts and therefore, whilst their earnings might remain the same, there(sic) share as a percentage of the gross ticket price would be reduced. Having the booking fee on the top enables the customer to see exactly how much they are paying for this service.
I wholeheartedly agree with your complaint that there is nowhere for you to purchase the ticket at face value and this is down to the Liquid Room not operating any kind of box office facility, unlike many other venues. We have encouraged many Scottish venues, such as the Academy and ABC, to ensure that they provide a box office facility, with no charge to the customer for tickets purchased in person with cash. One option for us is to refuse to put concerts in the Liquid Room until they provide such a facility. However this would deny audiences the opportunity to see most of the bands who we put on there, as the Queens Hall and Assembly Rooms, which are a similar size, are often not viable options.
I have spent considerable time and resources on fighting what I see to be a much bigger issue for the live music fan and that is the increased amount of ticket touting that takes place via unauthorised ticket agents……..
The final half page of Geoff’s letter went on to blow his company’s trumpet about its efforts to stamp out ticket touting. In the process, he appeared blithely oblivious to the fact that touting, i.e. the selling on of tickets by a third party at an inflated price, sounded suspiciously like Ripping Records selling Jack a ticket for a Guillemots gig with a 20 per cent mark up. And yet he had spent the first half of his letter robustly defending this practice, writing that he thought it was not unreasonable for Ripping Records to charge Jack £3 for handing a couple of tickets to him across a counter in a shop where the sales staff were already highly practised in, and adequately recompensed for, the art of handing things across counters. No specialist training or equipment had been involved in the transaction. Yet if Jack had bought, say, ten tickets, the shop would have charged him £15 for providing exactly the same service – handing something across the counter.
One line stood out in Geoff’s letter: My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level.
It just so happened that soon afterwards, tickets for “T in the Park” went on sale. Jack couldn’t afford to go this year, as a result of his spectacular failure to land the river watcher’s job, but one of his friends had managed to obtain a pair of tickets. The cover price of the tickets was £56.50 each. But Jack’s friend, along with thousand of other music lovers, ended up paying a total of £131 for his two tickets. This included “booking”, “processing” and – most memorably – “convenience” fees. He’d had to pay an extra £18 for his two tickets. And yet there was Geoff Ellis telling Jack: My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level. (Meanwhile, Ticketmaster never replied at all)

SO Jack decided to compare DF Concerts’ and Ticketmaster’s “fees” with those levied by comparable-sized promoters and ticket agents elsewhere in Britain. As DF Concerts has a virtual monopoly in Scotland, this meant looking south of the border. The main players in England are promoters SJM and Metropolis Music. Together with ticket agency See Tickets, they run a booking website called GigsandTours. Jack spent a rainy afternoon comparing the prices there with the prices offered by DF Concerts via the Ticketmaster website(most tickets for gigs promoted by DF Concerts are sold through Ticketmaster). He looked at gigs on both sides of the border featuring The Maccabees, The Holloways and Duke Special. This is what he found:
A ticket for The Maccabees at King Tuts in Glasgow on 7 February next year will cost you £7. On top of this is a “service charge” of £1.45 and “order processing fee” of £2.25. The “order processing fee” covers standard postage. If you would rather collect your ticket from the box office yourself, you still have to pay the £2.25. That’s right. The “order processing fee” covers the cost of DF Concerts allowing you to travel to the King Tuts box office at your own expense to collect your ticket. King Tuts, by the way, is owned and operated by DF Concerts.
A ticket to see The Maccabees at the Night and Day Bar in Manchester on 26 February will also cost you £7. The “booking fee” is £1, and the “transaction charge” – which covers standard postage – is £2. So that’s a saving of 45 pence per ticket, and 25 pence on the postal charges, if you’re lucky enough to live in England.
For The Holloways at King Tuts on 27 February or at Manchester University on the 17th, the ticket prices are £8.50 and £8 respectively, and the extra charges for one ticket – including DF Concerts’ “order processing fee” for allowing you to collect your ticket yourself from the box office - add up to £3.70 and £3 respectively.
For Duke Special at King Tuts on 9 February or The Social in Nottingham on the 19th, the ticket price is the same at £7. But those extra charges add up to £3.70 and £3.25 respectively.
There was one other, significant difference between buying a ticket for a DF Concerts gig via Ticketmaster and doing the same for an SJM/Metropolis Music gig via See Tickets. At every stage of the operation with Ticketmaster, a message appears "threatening" that if you do not select your tickets "within two minutes", or complete the transaction "within one minute", the tickets will "be released for others to buy". Jack thought this put unfair and unnecessary pressure on the customer. There was no such pressure at See Tickets.

After his afternoon on the computer, Jack’s mind was well and truly boggled, and not just because he’d accidentally visited some strange websites featuring naked women and animals of the Serengeti. While the extra charges appeared unjustified in all cases, they seemed especially unfair for music fans living in Scotland. Jack looked at the letter from Geoff Ellis once more: My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level. If that was true, why was old Ebenezer Ellis charging punters an “order processing fee” of £2.25 even if they collected their tickets from the box office? If his concern really was to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level, why couldn’t he bring his “extras” down to the same level as those in England, even if that meant having to ditch his partnership with Ticketmaster and hook up with the biggest UK-owned ticket company, See Tickets, instead? As Jack had written in his original letter to Ellis, if a big, prestigious player like DF Concerts led the way in abandoning or reducing booking fees, other promoters might follow suit and music fans would forever toast the name of DF Concerts for making their lives better.
JACK decided to get in touch with a big organisation that is supposed to keep an eye on the behaviour of greedy businessmen and lying hypocrites, called the Office of Fair Trading. He obtained its report on the subject of booking fees from January 2005 grandly entitled “OFT Raises the Curtain on Ticket Agents”. It waffled on for more than 100 pages of notes, footnotes and annexes before reaching the stunning conclusion:
“Ticket agents can provide a better and fairer service for consumers. Clearer price information and the elimination of unfair contract terms would improve choice and value for the public.”
Even more underwhelming was its recommendation:
“…that, in order to improve the standard of contracts in the industry, the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers (STAR) produce model terms for its members and the OFT is currently working with STAR in producing these terms.”
That was no bloody use, thought Jack, so he turned to another, more local watchdog, Edinburgh City Council’s Trading Standards department. The news from Philip Morrison, “Senior Officer, Retail Monitoring”, was just as depressing. He told Jack that, unlike with goods, there was no legal requirement for “services” to be priced, so there was no obligation for Ripping Records, Ticketmaster or whoever to print the cost of the service charge on their tickets(though it must be clearly displayed in any advertising). Therefore, it wasn’t a “hidden” charge. This reflects that the cost of the “service” can vary from outlet to outlet. Maybe some shops have a far wider counter to hand the tickets across, thought Jack, or the book of tickets is kept upstairs, and that obviously requires more effort on the part of staff. Ironically, and rather sadly, in this particular case it was the small, neighbourhood retailer who was being shamed by the big, global corporation. Ripping Records – with the endorsement of DF Concerts - was charging a massive £1.50 booking fee, compared with Ticketmaster’s £1.20. If that didn’t eloquently expose the iniquity of “service charges”, thought Jack, then I’m Mick Hucknall’s secret love child.
Finally, Philip confirmed that there was no new legislation on the horizon, and that all the Office of Fair Trading was doing – in conjunction with that other ferocious guardian of customers’ rights, the Advertising Standards Authority – was suggesting a voluntary code for ticket agencies to regulate themselves with.
Blimey, thought Jack, these consumers’ watchdogs don’t have much bite. So he decided he should write to Ebenezer Ellis at DF Concerts again. Maybe the poor man was under a lot of stress and didn’t realise how mercenary and callous it looked for his company to be charging people an “order processing fee” of £2.25 just for them to be allowed to collect their tickets from the box office.
But despite waiting two months, and despite it being nearly Christmas, Ebenezer Ellis never bothered to reply, which made Jack very sad.
Luckily, Jack had also written to Tennent’s, a big company that makes beer. They sponsor DF Concerts’ “T in the Park” festival, so Jack thought they should know about the excessive levels of “booking”, “processing” and “convenience” fees which DF slaps on top of tickets for this event. A very nice man called George Kyle wrote back, telling Jack:
I am currently getting some background on the charging of "booking fees" around events and will come back to you. Obviously this is a business decision by event promoters based on the commercial realities of their individual gigs / events and Tennent's ability to influence this is minimal(even with our relationships across T in the Park, T on the Fringe, Triptych & T Break)
Happy to send you a couple of cases of Tennent's Lager as a token of our appreciation for continuing to support our music events.
So while Jack is resigned to having to continue paying exorbitant extra charges for the “service” of being handed tickets across a shop or box office counter – at least until old Ebenezer Ellis lives up to his words about ensuring that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level or the Office of Fair Trading gets round to taking some proper action - he is at least able to console himself by getting very, very pissed this festive season.
STOP PRESS! This week DF Concerts and Ticketmaster launched their latest money-spinner, a new outdoor music festival at Inveraray Castle in Argyll next August. The website for the three-day Connect festival offers "early bird" prices of £70 for punters who want to book now, even though no acts have yet been confirmed. But of couse, the tickets will cost significantly more by the time you have added on "service charge" of £6.75 PER TICKET and "order processing fee" of £4.95.

This week, Jack Havana recommends......

......that you tell these money-grabbing bastards - promoters, ticket agencies, venues, record shops -to fuck off by boycotting their festivals and gigs. Stay at home and listen to the CD instead. At least the drinks will be cheaper. These are the greedy hypocrites who are killing live music. The OFT don't appear to want to do anything about it, so it's up to us music fans. By clicking on the envelope icon below, you can effortlessly and easily forward this story to all interested parties, whether they be fellow music lovers, bands, festival sponsors, the music press or even your bloody MP. Make Jack happy this Christmas and forward this story to at least one other person. Click on the envelope now!

JACK HAVANA WILL BE BACK IN THE NEW YEAR. BAH HUMBUG TO YOU ALL!

A Good Day For Bad News

2006-12-17T18:16:00.000Z

THE ROW OVER the Government trying to “bury” bad news has taken a sinister twist.
Ministers chose last Thursday to announce a triple-whammy of bad news while the media was distracted by the Ipswich murders and the results of the Stevens inquiry into Princess Diana’s death.
This meant that news of the closure of 2,500 post offices, Tony Blair being questioned by police in the cash for honours investigation, and the Attorney General’s decision to scrap the inquiry into the alleged payment of bungs by arms dealer British Aerospace, was conveniently pushed off most front pages.
But it has now emerged that there may have been more to it than calculated spin-doctoring. Some critics believe the Ipswich murders are part of a wider conspiracy to provide a smokescreen for the Government’s failings. They believe the serial killer is actually someone with connections to Tony Blair’s Cabinet. This is not as crazy as it sounds: has anyone actually seen or heard John Prescott in public since the murder investigation began? Now it is being suggested that more Suffolk prostitutes could be at risk as Prescott seeks to keep the media’s attention distracted from the England cricket team’s abysmal performance in Australia. There are also concerns that the announcement of December’s unemployment figures could trigger a surge in the amount of grainy CCTV footage released to the media by Suffolk police.

NONSENSE

In the light of these new revelations, police on both sides of the Atlantic are now reviewing former spin doctor Jo Moore’s role in the 9/11 atrocity. She, you will recall, was the civil servant who sent an email saying September 11 “would be a very good day to get out anything we want to bury”. Police are investigating a tip-off that she had direct contact with the hijackers in the build-up to the terrorist attacks, persuading them to bring forward the date from a Saturday to a weekday.
Of course, the idea of Tony Blair’s Government being directly implicated in the killings of thousands of innocent people just to keep NHS waiting lists and Frank Lampard’s performance at the World Cup off the front pages is being dismissed by many as complete nonsense. But then in years to come the idea of a British Prime Minister having taken his country to an illegal war on the strength of dodgy intelligence will probably sound ridiculous too.
As a result of all the speculation, police are re-opening their files on some of the most shocking crimes of the last 30 years, to see if there is any correlation between the levels of depravity and Government policy at the time. So far, this has raised some chilling questions:

Could the arrest of Fred West in connection with 12 murders at the “House of Horror” in Cromwell Street, Gloucester, in 1994 have been a Government ruse to distract the public from the spectacular implosion of John Major’s “Back to Basics” campaign? Or did the Government hope no-one would notice England’s failure to qualify for that year’s World Cup?
Was Dennis Nilsen wrongly convicted of the “bodies-in-the-drains” murders in 1983? Could the real culprit have been Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit? His motive? To distract the British public to such an extent that they ended up voting Margaret Thatcher, still with the blood of the Belgrano on her hands, in for a second term of office by mistake.
Could the Yorkshire Ripper’s reign of terror(1976-1981) have been a desperate last attempt to distract the public as the UK economy buckled during the “winter of discontent”(1978/79)? ) Or did the Government hope no-one would notice England’s failure to qualify for the World Cup(1978)?

The conspiracy theory extends to reality TV shows and some of Britain’s most talked-about celebrities. For example, have you ever wondered what Jordan and Peter Andre are for? Or how someone like Jade Goody or Davina McCall could ever have reached the level of fame and wealth they have without any discernable talent? Or how shows like Strictly Come Dancing and The X-Factor were ever conceived? The answer is dispiriting: they have been sponsored and nurtured by the Government to keep us distracted from important things like the erosion of our civil liberties, arms sales to despots or the latest increase in the TV licence fee.
It is a little-known fact that Russell Brand and his tales of sex and drug addiction were the idea of a spin doctor working in the Government’s Department of Sustainable Energy and Rural Affairs. And that the persona of Sharon Osbourne actually started life as a spin-off from a cartoon character called Tanya Turd, invented by the Department of Environment as a way of promoting sewage recycling before being abandoned at the drawing board stage.

DEPRESSING

Undercover Government agents are continually on the lookout at bus stops and in tanning salons for insipid, vacuous members of the public. Whilst some of these end up as Education Secretary, the others are propelled to instant celebrity status through the medium of Big Brother or “ground-breaking” comedy programmes such as Blunder and Peep Show. Hundreds of celebrity wannabees and potential reality show contestants are being battery-farmed on a disused airfield near Milton Keynes. And the really depressing news is that there are apparently enough “new” Dale Wintons and Carol Smillies in the pipeline to keep the British media and public distracted even if the Iraqi war goes on for another decade.

(STOP PRESS 18 DECEMBER: The truth is even stranger. According to today’s Guardian, outgoing Sky TV executive Dawn Airey plans to buy a leading modelling agency – Models 1 – “as part of plans to create a group that provides stars for programmes and adverts.” The battery-farm really does exist…..)
Meanwhile, if you think the idea of well-known figures prostituting themselves to distract the public from unpalatable facts is far-fetched, consider this: football legend Sir Bobby Charlton was interviewed on ITV news last week about the Munich air crash which killed eight of his team-mates. So what was the occasion? A Christmas appeal to raise money for the victims’ families? An anniversary? No. He was happily whoring himself around the media to promote the launch of the Manchester United Opus, a coffee table book that is on sale for a mere £3,000. He was exploiting the tragedy and the memory of his dead team-mates in the name of MUFC’s profit margin.
Merry Christmas to you too, Sir Bobby.
This week, Jack Havana decided these were his favourite things of 2006:
MUSIC: Best CDs were Pet Grief by The Radio Dept. and Through The Windowpane by Guillemots. Best live performances were Paul Buchanan at Perth Concert Hall and Morrissey at Dundee’s Caird Hall.
FILM: United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass. Currently on Sky Box Office. If you haven’t already seen it, prepare yourself for the most intense cinematic rush of your life. Even though we all know how it ends, the suspense is nerve-shredding. The script doesn’t waste a word - it takes one, short scene featuring a reel-to-reel tape player to sum up air traffic control’s realisation that they might have a catastrophe on their hands. The performances – often by the real-life characters – are never less than compelling. The visual detail – we see the tops of the Twin Towers from the doomed flight as it takes off from Newark, then later we see them on fire from the airport control tower – is flawless. And underpinning the whole thing is a menacing, orchestral score. Not just an artistic masterpiece, it’s a fitting monument to 9/11. View trailer here.
Elsewhere, an honourable mention for the funniest scene of the year – the nude wrestling scene from Borat.
BOOK: Murder in Samarkand, by Craig Murray. Confessions of our man in Uzbekistan – “Her brother was going to be executed, and I was trying to make out her legs through her dress” – and a shocking indictment of Tony Blair’s kowtowing to dubious, Third World despots. More here.
CIGAR: Trinidad Robusto Extra.