All in it Together.

Are we all in it together? We live in a world where 62 individuals hold the same amount of wealth as half of the world population about 3.5 billion. I am not a socialist but that is not a fair or sustainable distribution by any stretch of the imagination. The UK is supposedly the fifth richest economy in the world but who actually benefits from that wealth? Bankers and CEO’s are paid multi-million pound salaries and bonuses, I can’t imagine why, they are not worth it. The majority of people, however, are less safe, less smart and less well-off than they were decades ago. Come on folks you know you are being exploited but have you thought about just how much and how corrupt are your exploiters? You don’t have to take it, fight back. Like the good old hippy that I once was, I would aspire for all of us to live in a world where everyone was free, had a good life and lived in harmony with each other and the environment. Unfortunately, we cannot even hope to do this with the population level we have at present, about double what it was when I was young; or over 3.5 billion extra people in my lifetime. It is by far the biggest threat to our world and our way of life; there is not a single problem facing mankind that would not be easier to solve if there were far fewer of us.  So, unlike Jesus, who many believe gave his life to save mankind, I am going to try and stay alive for long enough to save the world from mankind. I have no wish to save more than a comparatively small number and the population of over 7 billion is now rising at the rate of 200,000 every day, the graph is vertical. Basically most of you are Donald ducked and I just hope you don’t take everything else down with you. Contrary to what many say you are not destroying the planet, which will continue to orbit round the sun long after mankind has gone. What you are destroying is the environment that we share with all the other forms of life as we know it. I am hoping that a small elite will survive and if you stick with me and get more involved you might just be one of them. For sure I will help to make you smarter, more aware, better off, more attractive, healthier and as such more likely to survive and thrive when it inevitably goes tits up for everyone else. Even if I am wrong or premature we will have a better life. The sheer number of them is the problem so there would be no point in trying to save them all or even a lot of them; if you think we should, you are wasting your time here. The current migration crisis in Europe is just a taste/ wake-up call of what we can expect to see as the population continues to explode, more of the world becomes uninhabitable and people flee the inevitable wars and famines on a scale we can only begin to imagine. In my opinion in the not too distant future we will see Royal Navy destroyers blowing boats full of migrants out of the water and a sort of dad’s army of citizens with rifles patrolling our coastline.

Honours

Why do they keep giving honours to assholes who have no honour? Sir Philip Green, Sir Robert Maxwell, Sir Jimmy Savile. Assholes get knighthoods and those who work their butts off all their lives to help their communities are lucky to get an MBE. My father had to crew on fast gunboats across the North Sea under the noses of the Luftwaffe and U boats to get his MBE.

 

First blog post

Have you ever noticed how lavatories, both public and private, often seem to reflect national characteristics?

America, of course, has the biggest ones, massive monuments to capitalism in gleaming white porcelain and shiny chrome. Fold down sanitised paper cut outs cover the seat, “for your safety and convenience”, pardon the pun. If you get a dose of clap or crabs in the United States you cannot claim to have caught it from a toilet seat; neither do they have graffiti in public loos, as most graffiti is ironic and they don’t understand irony, neither would they condone vandalism even if mitigated by being witty and amusing. When you flush a lavatory in the US about twenty-five gallons of blue coloured, sterilised, deodorised, detoxified water sluices down in a sort of whirlpool, you never need a second flush. Even the urinals are proper, stable sized stalls, and offer unparalleled privacy and cleanliness. The urinals all have an automatic or manual flush and you will get a dirty look or even a comment if you micturate and walk away leaving traces to offend the nostrils of those who come after. All this of course is in white middle class America, in the poorer parts there is poverty to rival anything in the third world. The people who live there consider themselves lucky if they have a bush to go behind. 

In the UK Victorians were the first to universally introduce clean water, WC’s, and sewerage systems in towns and cities, an initiative that has almost certainly saved many more lives than the medical profession. As you would expect, our loos are by now state of the art in terms of efficiency combined with the economical use of water and many of the public sewers, state if the art in Victorian times are still in use. You may need a second flush with an British loo but not every time and there is always a brush in a pot at the side in case of pebble dashing. Thomas Crapper, who is often wrongly attributed with inventing the flush toilet, did, however, do much to popularise them and probably was the inventor of the ball valve for wc cisterns. It has to be said that initially even the better off Victorians tended to build their facilities outdoors as it was considered unhygienic to have them indoors. Eventually, Thomas Crapper and his eminent and sometimes royal customers brought the wc indoors, but only for the better off. The working classes still had to go outside and freeze their arses off, for many well into the nineteen sixties. As with all other aspects of Victorian life the Art Nouveau movement created some very elaborately decorated conveniences and Lady Lucinda Lambton’s excellent book “Temples of Convenience” has many examples.

If we move on to Austria, the birth place of psycho-analysis, and Germany the wc’s have a built in shelf at the rear of the pan where your turds sit, waiting to be examined by those of a scatological bent, prior to flushing away. I sometimes wonder if Freud suffered from constipation and that was what gave rise to the term “anal retentive”.

 In France the loos are dirty and vary from the “having seen this do I really want to eat in this establishment” found in expensive restaurants down even further to the really disgusting. However, in French bathrooms there is usually a bidet so you can wash your nether regions in preparation for or following sex, never quite sure what the etiquette is regarding that. I have had French girlfriends but that was in England so no bidets. Personally, I prefer my nether regions to be clean when starting a sexual encounter but the French I must say are not always so fastidious. Jane Fonda, when she was in a relationship with Roger Vadam would infuriate him by rushing off to wash herself immediately after sex when she should have been lying on the bed with him for a post coital Gaulois.

Japanese loos are high tech, all you have to do is sit there do the business and the loo will give you a squirt of warm cleansing water up the butt and a gentle waft of warm air to dry you. Gentlemen who do not know Japanese symbols should leave it on full automatic and refrain from pushing any buttons, one of them is a tampon remover which has led to surprises and even injuries when deployed by a male. Looking at the Japanese mentality and urge for innovation it is only a matter of time before they come up with a loo that has a screen showing porn and gently masturbates you at the end of a stressful day. In fact, they have been beaten to it by the Chinese who already have a wanking machine used for harvesting sperm for artificial insemination.   

Greek loos on the whole are pretty basic, though usually clean, but even in the most expensive hotels you have to put your paper in the bin as the infrastructure apparently cannot handle it. Greek people tell me that many of these small bore systems were installed by the British in the 1930’s but I find that hard to believe, given the vast experience we had in this field. As with so many things Greek, they had one of the earliest civilisations, but have gone downhill ever since. However, they are lovely people and I have holidayed in Greece many times, we love them, they love us and we make allowances for Greece that nowhere else would get away with. However, archeologists tell us that the Palace of Knossos, in Crete, had flushing toilets in the Minoan period around 2000 BC, thus predating the Victorians by nearly 4000 years.

 In many parts of Eastern Europe and especially countries that were in the former Soviet Union they have holes in the floor, the more expensive places have better decorated holes in the floor. This is probably due to the communist regime preserving old buildings, which in the West would have been pulled down and replaced. Turkey had these until about twenty years ago and one often saw a conversion where the hole in the floor had a WC plonked over it, creating a sort of moat around the loo. Useful I suppose for men with a bad aim, although I must say women are not immune from this. I once had a girl friend who, due to an excessive sense of hygiene would not sit on a strange loo seat, and would crouch and piss from a great height. Unfortunately, she also had a habit of not lifting the seat first; a complete reversal of the usual complaint from women that men always leave it up. Whenever we stayed with or visited friends I always had to go to the loo just after her and wipe the splashes off the seat, as a man I would automatically have got the blame.

In expensive Egyptian hotels a man with a warm towel starts sidling towards you as you are washing your hands, fortunately not while you are having a piss, as soon as you have washed them he hands you the towel and has his hand out for baksheesh, as with everything in Egypt. The vulgar rich have bathrooms where everything just has to be expensive special marble tiles that cost £500 each and so on. When I first went to London I was assisting a photographer who was producing a catalogue for a manufacturer of very expensive bathrooms. We were doing a bathroom room set which featured solid gold taps and fittings destined for a client in The Middle East. They arrived at the studio in a Securicor van with two guards who watching them at all times.

Of course we should also be aware that about a third of the world population don’t have any loos at all and often have to carry out their ablutions in public! I will never forget the culture shock I experienced when I went to work in Warri in Nigeria on the 70’s. We were driving along the road from the tiny airport; it was a dirt road with a drainage ditch along the side. Women in colorful dresses balancing incredible loads on their heads would stop, hitch up their dress and piss in the ditch still balancing the loads on their heads.