Prop'tay Porn

Indulge me. I've a report running on a database and a few minutes to spend. I'm not picking on the English here, well I am but any brain dead trend in England or the US will be taken up with enthusiasm here. Sadly that can't be said of interesting or exciting new developments. Our TV schedule is dominated, it seems to me, with 'property porn' shows. Some airhead presenter will go abroad with some people with money and ask them to compare "prop'tays". It kind of reminds me of when I was a kid and Blue Peter would be on and they'd be talking about their sticky-back-plastic and cutting out "pattons". For the life of me I couldn't figure out what a "patton" was. Was it some kind of template? I didn't realise that English people can't pronounce an r after a schwa sound unless the schwa is at the end of a word and not followed by an r in reality. So 'Africa' is pronounced 'Afriker' and 'water' as 'watah'.

Anyway, the jarring pronunciation just highlights the word which is my problem. They'll be standing there in front of a house and saying things like 'so what do you think of this proptay?'. When did the word house cease to mean a house? At whatever dimwit school they went to were they taught the alphabet with 'p is for proptay' and a picture of a house on the wall? Anglo-American-Irish obsession with the price of residences has made a whole generation of people who cannot distinguish between a pile of bricks and a set of rights that you can enforce against other people. Our greed is sickening. Not only that, but unlike say stocks and shares, we have three societies devoted to nonproductive assets. I should point out that this applies less to the US than England and particularly applies here. We are pouring the wealth of the country into something which will swallow it up and never give it back. We have largely leveraged our capital to disenfranchise anyone under 30 already in this country and we are moving abroad like the rapacious carpetbaggers we are. The massive increase in disposable capital in this country has produced no rise in innovation, no amelioration of poverty that is supposed to be expected when the tide rises, and development that is so skewed to the construction industry and the rising value of a nonproductive commodity that the future seems almost as scary as it did in the 1980s. When we had no money and we were all miserable and we all emigrated. I wonder has the 'leave this country' gene been wiped out by a decade and a half of full employment? Will twenty somethings start thinking to themselves that they have no chance of a decent quality of life, of fair and reliable tenancy (as buying is a mad dream for most of them) in this country and up sticks like we all did?

Or will the 'soft landing' the credit institutions and government are desparately propagandising about turn out to be a rough and catastrophic one? With every extension of leniency on credit the banks, in the interest of quarterly returns and the ultimate morality of shareholder value, risk the whole confidence trick of this economy.

I'm worried. I like it here. I feel too old to move out again. It's home and I want to stay here but if the arse falls out of the economy I migh be forced out. Mind you, if it does those with capital after the deluge will be able to make out like bandits (or those who multiple bought in the 1990s).

Vive la revolution... or at least we'll have a strike

Just came back from over a week in France, in Toulouse and Carcassonne. Had a great time, bought a load of records, went to a match with my da for his seventieth birthday and it was great, came home later than expected. I love France, and in general, I love the French people. Though the civil service there seem to get their only thrill in their stunted, joyless, impotent lives by being arseholes. Off work they're probably fine.

I was sitting in Carcassone castle enjoying the sun and reading 'House of Leaves' by Mark Danielewski (extraordinary book - David Foster Wallace's 'infinite jest' is the major reference that comes to mind. But without the smug annoying self satisfied onanistic backslapping on its own cleverness and with terrifying voids of horror and emotional damage)and I met some nice Americans while I was having a glass of wine. They insisted on buying me a glass - no other nationality would have in that circumstance, Americans are actually, genuinely much nicer than Europeans. One thing that struck me as odd was that they were genuinely annoyed by French people going on strike. I was kind of 'why do you care? I mean it doesn't hurt your economy...' Which is kind of my attitude to incomprehensible things that you can't change and don't really effect you. I often find it funny when people in Europe get heated about US domestic issues. It's not like you can vote. Anyway I was saying that they had a revolution so that they could do this and if they were the same as everyone else why would people come to France? We were sitting, as I said, in a beautiful huge castellated medieval city. If it was in Ireland every tourist image of the country would have it. But the more I thought about that issue the more the revolution came into my head. Revolution often fills my head. When I was in school I remember writing a parody of Hopkins called 'that nature is a Hegelian dialectic and of the comfort of the revolution'... Anyway. I think the reporting of the current French strikes and protests against the law to 'liberalise' the youth employment market misses the point. The protestors are the children of petit bourgeois, functionnaires. The French revolution was a petit bourgeois revolution. It was unnecessary in England as merchants ran the country rather than aristocrats. The US revolution, by contrast, was a revolution of aristocrats and oligarchs avoiding paying tax to the English. As a result France is run by and for the petit bourgeois: the US is run by and for the ultra-rich who don't pay tax. Where does that leave us? I've said before that we took the Canadian option when we were run by our local version of the US revolutionaries: rich landgrabbing Anglos that didn't want to pay tax to England. And then we had a revolution. Or did we?