Igor’s rants

This morning, I rose early and, rather than do any of the interesting things that I would actually have liked to do in the time before work, I started on the list of intensely irritatingly necessary action points life had imposed upon me, and tried to carry out chore #1 by going to the Post Office to pick up the unexpected packet they'd been “unable” to deliver the other day. (I’d decided in advance not to get into a dispute about the precise level of their delivery “abilities”.) Was it waiting for me, as promised? “Sorry, Sir, no, it's not here - I know it says that you should wait 48 hours and you’ve waited about 64, but, well, even though a number of hours in this type of ‘literature’ usually refers to actual hours rather than one-seventh or one-eighth fractions of business days, as otherwise of course they’d have specified business days, in this case, it means business hours, yes, including the night time, yes, and you see yesterday was a Bank Holiday, so it hasn’t come back to the sorting office yet”. You fuckers. You fucking fuckers.

So I cycled home, took advantage of one of the few compensations of shitty weather by putting on a warm, comforting, shitty-weather coat, and started the half-hour trudge down to the bank to carry out chore #2, “pay in cheque”. See, banks usually don’t open early, because as we all know, they’re egotistical, usuring, global-economy-devouring, economic-fallacy-propagandizing, regulation-squirming, capital-propping fascist bully-boys who’d rather piss on their own feet than actually provide a realistically useful and useable service to their “customers” unless doing so happens to coincide with “streamlining their processes”, but one of my eagle eyes had happened to take in on a recent visit to said establishment a notice proclaiming the immediate effect of their new early opening hours, so I knew it would be OK. Until I arrived to discover that not only were the bastards staying firmly shut until 9.30 today because it was a Tuesday (of course), but they’d actually taken the trouble to print up notices to that effect and plaster them all over the bloody windows, with the single intention, I felt, of rubbing my recently-arrived nose in it. Fuckers. Fucky fucking fuck fuckers.

Chore #3, “buy boring but annoyingly necessary toiletry crap” was mildly less irritating insofar as the individual items of annoying crap I needed to buy were actually in stock, but as if to mitigate that small mercy, the shop fuckers had yet again moved every single thing that I needed to buy to a different place in the shop. Are you people so staggeringly crass that you think that if I arrive in the deodorant-should-be-here place and find, I don’t know, swimming goggles or thrush cream, I’m suddenly going to go “ooh yes, now I think of it, you never know when your next bout of candida will be, do you?”, and pile excitedly in to a buy-one-get-one-free offer? You fuckers!

So, maintaining a suitable combination of upper-lip stiffness and attempted muscular looseness (a tricksy manœuvre at the best of times), I moved onto chore #4, “take pleasingly nostalgia-inducing selection of old photos filtered from pile discovered in bag in cupboard under stairs during weekend faffing mission to Snappy Snaps for cheapo automated scanning”. Imagine my escalating delight on being casually informed that yes, Snappy Snaps does indeed engage in the paid scanning of photographic materials, at £1.99 per scan, and, further, my strangulated gurgles on being told that in fact no, that’s not crazy, it costs £1.99 per scan, and that’s pretty reasonable. Hang on, are you people mad? Don’t you have some sort of brutal automaton capable of ripping through this stuff at breakneck speed? If I wanted some poor human to waste hours manually scanning and cropping a load of not spectacularly interesting photos, wouldn’t I do it myself at a charge of exactly nought pounds for fifty scans, rather than ONE HUNDRED ENGLISH? You fucking, fucky fucker fuckers.

And all of this before nine o’clock in the morning. Oh well, at least I saw a big splatty pile of splatty yoghurt mess in the road.

One carriage. One carriage. What is it about Sundays that transport operators think makes people either less likely to want to travel home than they were to want to travel wherever they were going the day before, or less deserving of some vague semblance of reasonable treatment in return for the stratospheric fees they have no choice but to stump up? Is this some sort of atavistic legacy from an ancient fear that a wrathful deity might smite the train drivers for daring to compromise his rest? No? Then why on earth are we lowly Sunday-travelling passengers treated like cattle even less deserving of any consideration or concern than the same beasts on any other day of the week? Surely a genuinely loving God would want His people to be happy and relaxed on His day, and to reward those who willingly sacrifice such calm in the service of others' comfort and convenience with peace, long life and everlasting virginity, or something? Anyway, to those whom it may concern: a train, consisting solely of one carriage or otherwise, which is shown plainly by the people standing in the aisles and entranceways to provide insufficient seating for the number of people to whom the train operator is prepared to sell tickets, is simply not good enough. The issue of its being composed of a single solitary carriage is consigned in light of this simple truth to a mere slapped face after the fact. Sort it out, railway-operating oligarchs.

Written on the wall of a Turkish mosque on Kingsland Road. What you can't quite see in this shitty mobile-phone photo is that someone’s taken a much less legible ballpoint to the existing marker-pen scrawl and crossed out “Islam” to replace it with “Christianity”. No, you. Your religion’s more boring than mine. You smoke the skunk. Yeah. And your mum. Yeah, well at least I used a legible pen. Yeah, well, that’s ’cos you‘ve got nothing better to do ’cos your religion’s so boring, if you smoked enough skunk you wouldn’t have to write on walls. Yeah, well, the writing’s already on the wall for your religion. Yeah, well, your mum’s burqa’s see-through. Yeah, well »OH, SHUT UP! THE LOT OF YOU! HONESTLY, I DON'T KNOW…«

Please wait? PLEASE WAIT? You just made me sit on the tarmac in Belgrade for over an hour with no real explanation, you gave me crap and insubstantial food on the ’plane, you farted around trundling around the runway trying to find somewhere to park your ’plane when you’d eventually landed the damn thing, and now you want me to stand here like a placid mule, hanging on your whim for 20 minutes before you’ll even deign to let me know which conveyor belt you're not going to put my luggage on for a further 25 minutes? Are you having me on? I’ve got a booze-up to attend, you know!

Just now, I worked out that I could retrieve the photos from my ’phone using Bluetooth (oooh, check me - I’d thought my ’phone was too crap, but in fact it’s just about capable), which made me look at some pictures of things that had been lurking on it, practically forgotten, for up to a year. That reminded me of things from ages ago in general, which in turn reminded me of a list I made ages ago in response to a question I was asked about which sorts of things annoy the hell out of me. Not “annoy” in a big, important, politics-y kind of way, but in a niggling, irritating, gets-right-on-my-tits kind of way. This is that list. Well, the following bit is. The bit after this full stop. No, this one.

1. My frequent inability to find things which I only put down about 2 minutes ago.

2. Inanimate objects not doing what they’re told to do or staying where they’re told to stay, like: “I told you to stay balanced on the edge of the sink, plate! What the hell do you think you’re doing jumping on the floor and spraying gravy everywhere? You’re just an inanimate object! Do what you’re told!”

3. Related to item 2, but additionally: every (I repeat, every) time I put a bowl or pasta dish or whatever in the sink to wash it with the tap on, the spoon jumps as though with voluntary power instinct to the centre of the bowl, the stream of water from the tap gets deflected off the concave surface of the spoon and it sprays, fountain-like, all over me. I really hate that.

4. Damn wires everywhere.

6. Technology that looks really good and should do something I really want, but just doesn’t work or (even worse) works for just long enough for me to have a Damascene moment regarding its potential applications, and then breaks irretrievably.

6. Screaming kids on public transport and in supermarkets, particularly when I’m hungry or tired.

7. Actually, when I’m hungry or tired just about anything pisses me off.

8. Oh yeah, mosquitoes. Mosquitoes make me angry. "That’s my blood, you little bastard, not yours! Die! Horribly!"

9. Not being able to kill mosquitoes ’cos the little fuckers have learnt to teleport to the other side of the room right at the last femtosecond (I LOVE THAT WORD) and then just sit there, smirking at you.

10. Obsessive food snobs who turn their nose up even at better-quality premade foods, like, I don’t know, Covent Garden soups. Look, we all know that it’s not as good as a proper home- or restaurant-made soup. We all know that it hasn’t got the same quality ingredients. Etc., etc., ad nauseam. For a carton of gunk which costs about 2 quid and which you can heat up in a few minutes, it’s really not bad. Stop being a nob.

11. Anyone who actually values anything they got from The Alchemist, The Celestine Prophecy, etc, etc. Stop being a tit.

That's the end of the list. Well, that's as far as I got when I wrote it, anyway.

Now look here. I might not like it, but I accept that iconography is of necessity public. I accept that the received perception of an image once representative of a cause, even if promoted to such status by an over-zealous or misguided personality cult, can and often will in time become one of an entirely detached symbolism pointing to events, operations, entities and episodes far removed from that cause and its original context; a sign for sign-readers of a different age, populating a world cracked across a semiological chasm neither of their making nor within their ken. I even accept, damn it, that if you want to engage the attention of an attention-deficient age, perhaps even with a grander purpose than simply shifting more units (such noble intention being behind this campaign, I'm sure), you must make bold, provocative statements; even, that sometimes the end might just justify the means, and EVEN that "yeah, well, it grabbed my attention, didn't it?"

I might not like any of it, but hey, I have to go along with it.

But HEAR ME NOW: do we HAVE to have that bearded bastard, that reverse Midas, that profligate populariser of the paltry, metamorphosed for sales purposes into a chimerical mutilation of something which once - for all its naïveté, for all its doomed idealism, for all its easily-deconstructed fallacies and its practical inapplicabilities, for all its collapse into the gutter of history - excitedly, blissfully, joyfully looked at the stars?

I suppose we do. I suppose we get the signs we sign up for.

As Proudhon put it, "property is theft, so I'm nicking your mountain bike".

OK, I paraphrase - he was actually talking about the keys for the bedsits for which he was the property manager, and the fact that the people who built these bijoux spaces kept nicking said keys so that they could sneak in at night and really assert their natural rights of property on them, not mountain bikes - they didn't have mountain bikes back then. In fact the stupid penny farthing didn't even dare show its stupid face 'til about 30 years later than when Proudhon was moaning on about how bleeding unfair it all was, so never mind how visionary he might have been, he couldn't possibly have been complaining about people nicking bikes of any description really. Well, not proper ones with pedals and cranks and that.

OK, not really; I don't know whether this was a mountain bike that was nicked. Mind you, it probably was, because it seems to be the law that anyone riding bikes in London has to ride a mountain bike. 'Specially the ones with the big thick tyres and the bouncy suspensions, 'cos they're really good for slamming into the Olympian 6-inch kerbs on our treacherous city roads.

Anyway. Thieving bastards.

Tesco put this shop into the retail space on the ground floor of a new apartment building near to the one in which I live. After overcoming my initial uncertainty as to whether to shop there due to their monopolistic methods and boilerplate approach simply on the presumably universal grounds that it's convenient and comparatively cheap, even if the food is frankly crap and the choice limited, I dared to ask the store manager if they would be able to get a different, additional flavour of the already obviously extremely well-selling Innocent fruit drinks in, because I like them a lot and would buy the new ones regularly.

No, he said, grimacing slightly, they wouldn't; the stock was all arranged at head office "on the computer", and the computer knew best. I implied in response that it seemed unlikely that, no matter how advanced its algorithms, said computer would know best as to whether one or possibly more real humans living in the streets surrounding a given branch were sufficiently partial to orange, carrot and mango Innocent "superfoods" smoothies that they might therefore not be giving Tesco even more money than the company was already creaming in, and he said that that was as may be, but that head office, as universal arbiter of taste and quality, decided and would continue to decide.

Finally I suggested that perhaps he might be kind enough to tell head office that a customer had asked for this particular flavour, and he informed me, his grimace converted to a smirk, that he wouldn't, because it was for me to send them an email - "on the Internet" - should I so desire.

Here's the latest stroke of advertising genius from Samsung, or whichever bunch of clearly peerless copywriting wizards they throw their money at:

"Imagine an LCD TV that's as brilliant off as it is on".

Seriously, what do you people take us for? You openly admit that the content available through the device you're attempting to convince us to exchange our hard-earned cash for is so stultifyingly poor that the damn thing may as well be left switched off, for all the difference doing otherwise would make, and you expect us to collapse into a swoon of gratitude?

I ask you.