Going Back To Greed Today, my ten month old career in the care industry came to an end. I've been spat on, kicked, undermined, undervalued, physically and verbally abused, had my hair pulled and ruined a perfectly good pair of slippers in the guddle and am glad its over. I quit this morning, two weeks after handing in a month's notice. I quit in protest! I have stood on principle for the first time in ages and it feels good. Tomorrow I have a meeting with the operations manager for the area during which I will make a political protest that will be noted and hopefully acted upon. It's terrible, the state of the care industry here in the UK. For one thing, it has to be one of the biggest in the industrialized world. For such a wealthy country, we appear to not do a very good job of raising our young. At the first sign of aberrant behaviour, a strop, opening time, happy hour or the appearance of a syringe full of anything interesting, we appear to dump the kids on the metaphoric church steps and never look back. The parents of some of the kids I've encountered in these ten months are swanning about in fancy clothes with the latest in everything lining the walls of their council flats and yet we are left to raise their kids. We're soft as shite, aren't we? And yet, sadly, raising people's kids for them only pays about seven quid an hour, which is something that wants looked at - paying peanuts and attracting monkeys being the key adage. Anyway, I'm out - the grand idealogical experiment of doing something that benefits others has been pushed down the stairs well and truly. I'm going back to capricious avarice starting October 9th.I've landed a job with a media cataloguing company, writing synopses of new DVDs and CDs for industry use. It'll do me for the forseeable. Before going throwing myself back on the rocks of close-fistedness however, I'm leaving the day after tomorrow for an unexpected visit to Brisbane or somehwere thereabouts, to see The Special One till I start this new job.

Kilt Rock This is Kilt Rock (background behind waterfall) in the Trotternish area of the Isle of Skye this past summer. The weather was perfect - about 30-some degrees.

TopShop Hires 'Posh Hoover' Moss Well, could boss-eyed twiglet Kate Moss's bounceback from drug-addled shame of the nation to, well, pretty much better than before, have been any more swift or certain? It struck me that I wasn't hearing anything about how, suddenly, after what has to be the swiftest period in rehab ever, she was once again poster girl for a dozen illustrious brands all over our TV and magazinery. I reckon hooking up with that Pete Doherty was the shrewd move in it all. The lumpen proletariat, knowing nothing of the appetite of the fashion business for powder, seems to see it as their little doe-eyed lovely having been corrupted by a dirty-nailed little shambles of a man whom they had already been told to hate. Never suspecting the obvious, of course - that her habit was probably twice as productive as his. It was all so neat it couldn't have been scripted better. Today, then, I batted not an eyelid when it was announced that Kate Moss will join Topshop to design her own range for their highstreet stores.

Chav OBE I've just witnessed the incredible sight of a half hour documentary called "CHAV" on sky 3 which posited that Jimmmy Saville was the Godfather of Chav. Not only did sir Jimmy not agree with this, he took part in the show and talked at length about how the chav thing, he had been doing it forty year ago. He then showed off with great gusto, his gold and silver lame (that's "lah-mey," rather than the and other perhaps more obvious pronunciation of the word) taunting chavdom with his bling and clobber. The whole show and the fact that it exists is pretty much the last nail in the coffinlid of the very notion "chav." It showed a parade of celebrities (chiefly a testy, corpulent Julie Burchill and a withered Tracey Emin) verbalizing at length on what chav means. Thus, of course, highlighting the sort of inverted joke that is posh, rich people wanting to glorify or make somehow ironic, the notion of poor poeple pretending to be rich. The promgramme clumsily tried to make ropey parallels between other youth movements. Thus did everyone from mods in the 60's to pickets in the NUM strike in the 80's, Sir Jimmy and Harry Enfield's "Loadsamunny," become, collectively, chavs. Burchill might have a few points but she comes over here as a frothing madwoman hellbent on scrieving the chin of poshness (her career in a nutshell, I suppose!) and divests herself of any spelk of credibility. I don't know how I feel about it at all. I find some comfort in the commentary of the show, and find sympathy with the people of the council estates, having been one, but I can't help thinking its all very patronizing. By singling out the "working classes" as the program calls them, in any way, don't we patronize? Like many insults, the only people qualified to use it with any authority are the people it describes and most people who could be described by the term would die rather than use it in reference to themselves! Ultimately, it has already become tainted with a derogatory connoitation and thus shall it be remembered. Endy Story and shove that up yer cludge, Julie! The origin of the word, incidentally, is apparently from a romany word "chavvy" meaning boy or kid. Chatham, it appears, is center of the chav universe.

Re; the Roaring Calves 2 Well, don't I just feel sick to my pit? I just witnessed the farmer dragging the corpse of one of the calves (mentioned in a previous post)across the whole field behind a tractor! Dragging! Its limp body hit every stone, lolled at every hummock, The worst part wasn't that though, hell no. The other calves all ran behind him, mooing in some macabre bovine funeral procession. I don't know if they were giving their mate a sendoff, though. I think more likely they just associate a tractor with food and were blindly charging after it, unable to grasp the meaning of their peer on a rope between them and the source of food. They've been settling in so well lately too - the mournful mooing has become only intermittent. Living in the country, you see harsh truths. I must be a big softie, I confess I was pretty upset at seeing one of these wee dumb orphans on a rope - on his way to the fuckin glue factory.

My Identity, Thieved Today a curious thing happened to me today. I'm a person that's careful about online security - I am very aware of phishing mails and what they appear as. But recently, my two gmail accounts suddenly rejected my password (the same one, having said how careful I am). Gmail, if you've ever had any doings with it, is apparently not all that. If you have this kind of thing done to you, there is no comeback - they raise an electronic shrug and you are left to scrabble among the beans of your email career with them. So, first that. Then I get an email from Paypal saying that my account had been suspended, pending appeal, because "a third party" had tried to access it. Worried, I immediately got in touch and pleaded my case. I managed to get that cleared up without losing so much as a rusty nickel to the third party interloper. Then today, incredibly, my ebay account rejected my password. Thankfully, Ebay is well suss with this kind of thing, and have an online chat system whereby you can access a live helper. Mine was called Eddie. I plead my case to Ed, and ask at the end of it all, - has my identity been hijacked? He says "it certainly sounds like it." Well! You would have knocked me down with a feather. There it was, proof positive. I felt violated. Eddie was my "Knight In White Satin Armour" and got me all set up. The little nerd that had done this to me, had changed my sexual orientation to "female" and changed my name to a cast member from Hollyoaks and even mis-spelled it at that. Then changed my password and that was that. The dirty, unfunny, unimaginitive little bastard. I now have extremely complicated passwords for everything. I have also given up on using the same one for everything - at Eddie's suggestion. I bet all of you are shitting a brick now - cos you all do that don't you?!! You all have one password for your entire online portfolio don't you? Well, take it from one who is ultra careful, it's folly.

Rockstar Supernova Update My favourite among the many dozens of over-used bon mots on Rockstar Supernova; 1. "A whole new level of intensity" 2. "Bring it" 3. "I so bought it, dude" I'm like a moth to a flame. This show just rocks me OUT.

Happy 9/11 (Excerpted. Found today on a 9/11 memorial website beside the airbrushed picture of a weeping bald eagle that would be at home on the side of a 70's customized Ford van with a loveheart porthole in the back) Letter To A Terrorist" You're a poor marksman...You may have hit the World Trade Center, but you missed America.You hit the pentagon, but you missed America. You hit helpless American bodies, but you STILL missed America. Why? Because of something you will never understand. America isn't about a building; it's not about financial centers, or military hubs. America isn't about a place, America isn't even about its people......America is about an IDEA. An idea that you can live free.... Most of the time, it's a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of Spirit...... until we're crossed by a coward..... then it becomes an entirely different kind of Spirit....Wait until you see what we do with that Spirit this time. Sleep tight.....if you can. We're coming. Signed, America." I've always been amazed at how the marketing machine in N. America can shamelessly appropreate any occasion to sell things, primarily chips, dip and pop. Come within a month of the merest whiff of an occasion and suddenly there's twofer and combo deals everywhere - quite oblivious to any soupcon of taste or any sense of the inappropriate. Today, then, I can't help but wonder if there mightn't be a little special on somewhere, a pizza shop or mom and pop mart inviting customers to get their 9/11 chips and dip combo special with a free two liter of pepsi product of our choice. Ah now, ah now, its solemn occasion and no mistake, let us not make light. But sitting going through the newspaper this morning and the TV specials of the last two weeks run-up which have left no particle of trade center dust unturned nor any gory detail unexploited, I'm at odds. There is no denying that this is a sad thing to have happened, and the families of those concerned know that better than anyone. But what have we done with this tragedy but to translate it into a thousand other tragedies? I for one was not even slightly suprised at the events of five years ago (was it five? six?). As I stood watching the buildings falling live, eating my cereal on my way out to work, I felt that here it was - at last - our catastrophic foreign policy come home to roost. The wars we had long waged on foreign soil and the trail from the atrocities that had entailed, had led someone to our front door. This may seem shocking and unpeecee as all hell but have you ever thought what bravery, what dedication must a man have to carry out such a dreadful thing as flying an airliner into a building? What does it take to put that much intelligent thought, planning and effort into what is, essentially, killing yourself? It's not something even the least tolerant man in history might do as a result of a dispute with his neighbour, boss, government or wife. It's not the act of someone not in their right mind - how can anyone be so fucking stupid as to believe that?! Something has driven these men and I'm fairly sure it is not some brand of muslim-exclusive lunacy. These were not a random group of certifiable persons who'd met up in an asylum self help group. Nosir. Something is driving domesticated, inexperienced young men from Bradford and Leeds to travel around the world to fight on their own coin, to take the great risk and personal sacrifice involved in bombing London trains etc. I believe there's a great injustice being meted out on a great many people on a daily level somewhere to cause this level of upset. My heart goes out to the mothers of everyone killed in the name of this conflict that apparently has only one side. If they live in Connecticut or Kandahar, they have lost children to a very unworthy cause - that of idiocy and apathy - primarily on our side where we persist in voting for people exposed clearly as liars and war mongers. Where we not only elect but reelect those who've made persecution of the bearded and be-turbaned, even if by a third hand, their stock in trade. We'll need another caricature when North Korea comes into the picture -- which may be sooner than is convenient for us. They're all pretty clean shaven, turban-free and non-menacing up there. We may need to consider a separate atrocity to justify that one - we've about milked 9/11 dry, really. See, incredibly, we're still content with the picture our government hands us down, of raving loonies with headbands, beards and olde fashioned rhetorical English. How gullible we've truly become. How unwilling to challenge our media and governments' simplistic and convenient truths. It's my feeling that we can expect much more threatening behaviour, builders' rubble and plenty more beheading videos until we force someone to review our foreign policy for us.

Maputo, Mozambique I should mention that the past months have not all been dusty, I did go on a little trip away to visit someone very special to me at Easter. I went to Mozambique - the capital, Maputo. It was my first experience of Africa and it was pretty much as I had imagined it. Mozambique is still a poor place, but one shudders to think how far it has had to come since the Portuguese left. The city is just a poor city in the mold of any run down city, looks-wise. This first picture is of the classy part of town - Avenida Nyere in Maputo, shot from the roof of our hotel (through a pair of sunglasses, incidentally). However, it's when you get out in the country that you start to see how truly austere most people's lives are. This woman was walking, as was everyone in the area, to the main road to try and sell whatever is in her bundle. They appear to do this every day and the road she's on was almost impassable to our Landrover in places - great muddy ruts that threatened to topple us. We had an amazing moment just further along where a group of really small children, upon seeing us coming, arranged themselves into a sort of haka line and started doing this amazing little warrior dance as we slowed alongside them. We though "aw that's so cute" as we drove away then we turned to see if they were still dancing and the whole pack of them were hanging on the back of the spare tyre, grinning madly as the 4wd bounced and rattled along the track! We sped up to try and shake them and most jumped off but one hung on like a prize rodeo hand until we stopped and gave him an apple and he ran, cheeering and air-punching back to the rest of the downtrodden pack. The end of that road was amazing though - away from the muddy waters of the bay at Maputo and facing the open ocean, there was an amazing beach with nary a sunbather in sight. We spent a lazy afternoon on the beach then ate more prawns. Prawns feature big in Mozambique and they do them very well. It was an amazing experience and timely. At the time, being away from everything that was reality to me allowed me to gather my thoughts and I came away from the place feeling very much more in charge of my emotions. Is being a foreigner an addictive process? Do you have to be careful not to get addicted to it? I sometimes wonder if I am only able to be truly myself now, when I am ostensibly alienated. Perhaps I've forgotten how to function in a place I'm too comfortable in. Maybe I work best on the back foot? But yeah, once again, I noted in myself that I'm more comfortable, strangely, in worn down towns - I felt strangely at ease walking about in the capital - the same feeling I get in Bangkok, say. It was a memorable trip that will stick in my memory and I'm thankful to have had the opportunity. It's good to occasionally go to places nobody goes to on holiday, for a short break. I will say this; if you ever have the misfortune to pass through Nairobi aiport, either give yourself four hours lead to make your connection, so alarmingly fast can be the process, or else take a good book as you may be waiting for a large number of hours. Every flight coming or going seems to be very early or else disastrously late. Also, the baggage transfer process appears to be in a constant state of disfunction -- desk attendants running full tilt towards departure areas carrying heavy suitcases was an alarmingly common sight. This is a beer advert painted on wall for local brand "McMahon."

Calves Orphaned In Shock Move At this time of year, the new calves of the year are separated from their mums for the first time, after walking, suckling, graduating to grass all at their mother's side. They are taken to a field together then the calfs are separated out and shipped, ideally out of earshot, to a separate field. The mothers are immediately busy with The Bull getting next year's babies made. This evening, the field beside the cottage here was charged with the calves that had grown up there with their moms over the last months. I know some of their faces as they had free rein over the field immediately adjacent the garden also. This evening, drying the dinner dishes, I watched them run gleefully out of the trailer, canter loosely across the field away from the farmer. They returned after a lap of the entire field by which time the farmer had locked the gate and gone. They stood there, blinking at the shut gate. They looked around them for their moms. They looked, pleadingly, at me sitting on the step having a fag. Then they began to bawl. O! Didn't they bawl? Then they began another lap of the field, stopping to look back at me, searching for their mammies. It is now 10pm and they are still howling - in fact it got even more boisterous at the crepuscule. It's a mournful occasion altogether - I just went out for another fag and butted it out early to escape their pleading and beseeching. This evening's may not be the most fitful of sleeps. Apparently they keep at it for a few days. If their mothers are within a few miles they actually call out to each other in blind bereavement and disillusion. Worst of all, they are eyeing me with suspicion! Even in the dark they are staring at me - I see their eyes reflecting the exterior light. They take me for the only human they've known - the dirty farmer's bastard that locked that gate. They are making me feel guilty and ashamed of my species. They're bumming out my mellow in a supreme fashion. Man.

"Have A Go At This, Mate" Prime Minister John Howard said Irwin was a typical Australian larrikin who brought joy to millions of people around the world."I am quite shocked and distressed at Steve Irwin's sudden, untimely and freakish death," he said." Well, it's RIP Steve Irwin. A goddamned stingray. Right through the main pump. I don't know why, but I'm a little moved by the news. I suppose he never aggravated me the way he did many because how I viewed him was perhaps different. I kind of felt sorry for the bugger, really. I mean he was such a huge nerd, wasn't he? However, what I respect was that he was pasionate about something. Whether it was his own laurel-gathering or whether he really did want to further the cause and diminish the negative image people hold of the reptile world doesn't matter, he did things with fuckin GUSTO at all times. I respect that. The deal with his baby-flail was all blown out of proportion, I feel. It wasn't like the Michael Jackson infant-dangling (which itself might have been made more of than necessary). I seriously think The Crikey Man was making a point very clearly which I for one, got. Anyway, props to the chubby little devil - Discovery Channel will be a worse place without his stubby shorts and his colourful reactions to sudden reptile movements. May he rest in peace.