Girls, girls, girls.

Girls fight a lot these days, apparently. They abuse alcohol and drugs practically from the cradle and shag slack-jawed youth and fight each other and film each other fighting each other on their mobiles. They might not have been given any moral scruples or aspirations by their parents but they've all been given mobiles.

Life's tough in some parts of our land. I read somewhere that nowadays chief executives ern about 17 times what their workers earn. Apparently not that much earlier in the 20th century the ration was 5:1. And yet what we're wanting from women is that they get themselves out into the workplace. Never mind if you have to rip your nipple from the squalling mouth of your tiny infant and stick in a dummy instead - the important thing is to take your rightful place as a paid up member of the Almighty Workforce. Doesn't matter what you do with that kid - get yourself out there.

So you have low-paid families who don't see each other, eat together, or have more than the haziest idea about what each other are doing; parents who probably hate their lot and drink too much themselves. Excellent. Then we send the kids off to primary schools which will coach them to pass exams at ages 7 and 11, and not bother about the rest of what the world has to offer, so that they can gain entrance to secondary schools which will teach them the subjects which are the easiest to gain 'good' GCSEs in, so that they can get 'good' ratings in the League Tables. And of course if children are particularly difficult, and aren't doing well, we can quietly not put them in for said GCSEs. So you have bored, alienated, under-educated children. Better and better. Then you spread the heinous and unforgivable dogma that teaching children from a working class background about high culture or high thought is elitist, and that what they need is to learn things that are relevant. By which they mean relevant to a life as a wage slave.

Then you make alcohol universally and copiously available to children and throw in a few drugs for good measure. You know what Marx said about religion being the opiate of the masses? Well, no. Opiates and alcohol are the opiates of the masses, except they are not dulled by these drugs, but enraged and filled with loathing at their miserable, meaningless lives.

And all they have is football and celebs and boozing and shagging and fighting. And then there are weird low-browed men who think that women fighting is sexy. Probably in the same way that they think girls who booze so hard that they're sick and have lost the ability to say no to them are sexy. So stigma is gone.

Then you light the touchpaper and retire and hope that they just all kill each other and don't get out into the light where the rest of us live.

The neglect and waste of generations disgusts me, as does the attitude that says that it cannot be otherwise.

Don't listen to me

People have a skewed idea of what democracy is. They think it boils down to the ascendancy of the majority view, but that was never the plan. In ancient Greece not everyone had the vote.

The essence of parliamentary democracy is where we accept that we don't know how to run things ourselves / don't have time or resources to run things ourselves / can't be arsed to run things ourselves and therefore we employ professional politicians to do the job for us, on a fixed term contract to be renewed if they're doing well, paying them out of the public purse and firing them when they step out of line. Our job is to do the hiring and firing. Our job is not to do the thinking for them - why keep a dog and bark yourself?

I looked forward to Gordon Brown coming in. I thought he'd do the sensible thing - come in, sdtand for election, win hands down and thereby give himself 5 years to make all the difficult decisions, accept the howls of opposition at PMQ and reassure himself that he was doing the right thing, and that by the time he came up for reelection, his record would be his election campaign. Thank God! I thought. Here is a man who won't be America's poodle! Here is a man who is not telegenic, who will not be charismatic, who will be rubbish on TV and is practically incapable of cracking a smile. Because he is a serious man. He is an intelligent politician. He is an intelligent man. He is the kind of man who can do great things for this country. Unfortunately he is also a massive wimp. Because he didn't stand for electuionm when he should have done, because he was worried to an unseemly and indecorous degree. And he's not making the tough decisions because he knows they are unpopular.

He keeps telling me he's listening to me. I don't want you to listen to me. I want you to lead me. I want you to tell me how it should be done. I want you to be better equipped than I am to run the country because, to be frank, if you're counting on the numbnuts in this country to tell you what to do, we're all f***ed. And we might as well be anarchists. It'd be cheaper.

That's Plato up there, by the way. About as keen on democracy as I am. And he didn't have to contend with what passes for it now.

Get out the red pen for th statute book

I like to fantasise on dog walks about what I would so if I were, even briefly, in charge of the country. If I have an opinion, I must test it and try to think about ramifications.

My latest idea is that upon entry to number 10, my first priority would be to rebuild a healthy idea of community, to rescue it from the nightmarish Thatcherite 'community of one' inhabited by the poor benighted youth of some hellish quarters of this land.

My first act in this regard, and it would not be quick, would be to go through the statute book with a thick red pen and get rid of anachronistic, outdated or superceded laws and then enforce the relevant and effective laws which remain.

Let's take the rash of drunken assaults which have seen such tragic, brutal, bestial murders committed by young people recently.

Under the Licensing Act of 1872, you can be done for drunkenness in a public place Let's enforce that, (but we could lose the extra penalties which apply if you're drunk in charge of a bicycle, pigs, sheep, cattle and/or a steam engine). The same act stipulates that you should not be drunk in a Public House; it would be nice to see bar staff refusing to sell drinks to drunks. It used to happen. When I was serving in a bar in the 80s we'd routinely refuse to serve drunks. Forfeiting profits, sure, but also preventing violence and a really bad reputation. (Martin was recently in the US and was impressed to see a barman refusing to serve some drunk people in a bar; impressed by the attitude of the barman, but also of the drunks, who after trying a couple of times to get friends to appear sober and buy drinks, acceped the ban and went away. Here barmen would be frightened of violence.)

The threat of violence could be dealt with under the same act with the charge of 'Drunkenness with aggravation': If you're drunk and threatening you can be charged for drunkenness with aggravation by refusing to leave a licensed premises when requested, and for being drunk and disorderly - a broad term and a useful one. The moment a drunk lout yells at an old lady or a lady in a burqa or whoever else they could be picked up on a drunk and disorderly charge. Or one of public drunkenness, or if they're under 18 then their alcohol should be confiscated and their parents troubled as stipulated under the 1997 Confiscation of Alcohol (Young Persons) Act.

And come down like a ton of bricks on shops which sell alcohol to kids, and come down like an equally large ton of bricks on gangs of kids who intimidate shopkeepers into selling them booze. And make sure that police are alert to emergency calls from shopkeepers. If you can't stop illegal supply of booze through legal outlets, then you must expect that the ramifications will be a widespread disregard for minor laws, and, by extension, major laws and the law itself.

So much more to say but I have to go to work...

Shits happen.

A friend of mine lost her husband 6 years ago yesterday. Yesterday also she received a text from a man she had been seeing for several months confirming that their relationship was over and there's no way back.

She had a great relationship with her husband, the father of her children, and for several years after his death licked her wounds and tended to her children. But then she decided that she was lonely and wanted to find love again. And in the time since then she has met a number of men who have dumped on her in a big way from a great height.

There has been a weirdo who checked her mail and her texts and God what else and who frightened the bejaysus out of her, a lothario who visited her but found excuses not to have her visit him and was probably married, and a couple of cowards who fizzled out with pathetic excuses.

Then lately came this weakling who crowded her, squeezing out all the oxygen around her, integrating himself into her family's life so that he occupied a central place, ingratiating himself with her kids. He came to take her out to lunch from work. If she had a night out without him he was often there to take her home. If she went away he might collect her from the station or the airport. He came around to cook for them, or brought goodies. The children enjoyed having him around. My friend felt spoiled. But the deal was that she was not allowed to ask to share his life; her access to him and his time was rationed. Lord knows that their short relationship would have been much shorter had she behaved as he did, because one night they had an argument about an arrangement he'd made and lied, or at least flim-flammed about, and he decided that he felt crowded and dumped her. After a few days silence, mealy-mouthed texts and emails arrived about how it wasn't her, it was him; how he needed to be on his own; how he hadn't had time since his divorce to sort himself out. How he needed to find himself. He's nearly 50 for crying out loud! Don't men realise what a laughing stock when they talk like that, especially when such a statement is going to make the hearer unpick the facts of the case and that will always, ALWAYS, make them look bad.

The lack of imagination of this man as exhibited by what he has done is breathtaking. He probably coungratulated himself on how well he was getting on with the kids. He thought he was doing a really good job. His ego was masturbated.

A message to all those divorces out there: if you need to find yourself, do it on your own before you involve some poor woman in your self-indulgent navel-gazing. If you feel you must indulge yourself and avail yourself of the attentions of some attractive and engaging woman, but you suspect that there might be some possibility in the future that you might feel the need to find yourself, then choose a woman without commitment. Don't sink yourself wholeheartedly into the life of a family and do all you can to put yourslef at the heart of it. And if you can't avoid that simple rule, avoid at all costs choosing a woman and children who have lost the most important thing round about the anniversary of that loss.

Decide if you need to find yourself before you do these things. Because it is not honourable to do so. It is not respectable and it makes you less of a man.

Now if anyone in the Bristol area would like to meet an engaging, lively, slightly crushed woman and her lovely family, see me, because I'd like to vet you first.

Andrew was right

I started to think about Andrew's comment that I was more effective when I wrote about personal experiences, rather than my 'big ideas' and it rather shut me down. I think he's probably right. And in real life I'm probably more effective when I just tell anecdotes rather than preaching at everyone. Certainly my kids think so. It's been a tough upbringing for them with Mum overstating the case at every turn.

So I think now that I'm restarting this thing I'm going to try and keep my comments on what's happening in the world a little more pithy. It'll be a useful discipline for me because pithy isn't generally what I do well.

I've been away busy with work and wasting time on Facebook, that most uiseless of 'social utilities'. This is going to be my open blog. I'm going to start a more scurrilous one where I can vent anonymously though. I think I need it...