Dentists

I’m thinking of refusing to pay part of my National Insurance. Before you judge me, it’s not in the same way that old people occasionally refuse to pay their council tax because they’ve not come to terms with the fact rationing has ended and bread costs more than a handful of cocoa beans. My reason is true and just, ironically, quite the opposite of the target of my ire: dentists.

If dentists take on NHS patients, then they get paid by the NHS, which is funded by National Insurance. An easy enough system; you might even go so far as to call it fair. Doctors, kind, caring, ever patient Doctors are paid by National Insurance donations, so we can live safe in the knowledge that next time we suffer from tennis elbow, jogger’s knee or footballer’s penis, we will be treated without judgement and for free. Not a penny. The Doctor will already have been paid.
That’s the case if the Doctor treats your leg, arm, or wherever you injured in that tragic fishing incident. They don’t discriminate.

Dentists, however, are a different breed. Despite only ever studying teeth, they manage to wrangle 7 years of study out of university. There are only 32 teeth, yet dentists study for the same amount of time as a Doctor who has to know every vein, muscle, bone and hair in the whole human body.

My last dentist appointment consisted of an angry looking man wielding a rather sharp object in the vague direction of the chair I was to sit in. He shone what seemed to a football stadium floodlight in my eye before beginning wrenching my jaw open, poking inside my mouth with a small sickle and muttering random letters and number.

“A 3, 47 K, QZ 8,962 and p -0.314.” His assistant wrote all this down, and then he poked a couple of my teeth with his finger, whilst sounding as if my mouth was some sort of construction site. “Hmmmmm, yes, mmmm. Interesting. I’ll just do a little scrape here, and lay some tarmac there.”
The scrape involved pricking my gums with the sickle until they started to bleed profusely. He barked at me, “your teeth are fine get out!” and I was sent on my way with nothing to stop the flood of blood, but a gargling of florescent green fluid that looked suspiciously like engine coolant.

For this quarter of an hour I was charged £15; a pound a minute. All of this despite the fact I was an ‘NHS patient.’ I protested that I’d already paid through national insurance, but then the dentist walked into the office wielding some sort of drill asking ‘is there a problem?’ It was like some sort of Russian nightclub charging me to leave.

The worst part of this is, if you’re only an NHS patient you get the equivalent of Tesco Value toothcare; braces made of corrugated iron and caps from papier-mâché. If you want your teeth fixed so they don’t fall out when you sneeze then you have to go private.

All that’s ignoring dental hygienists. Regular cleaners break their back to make sure entire hospitals are germ free and make £5 an hour. A dental hygienist has their subject sat in a chair at a comfortable height and takes 20 minutes to make £60.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have a class. When they leave I’m going to charge £20 each and tell them if they want a grade A they’ll have to go private.

Stealing your soul, everyday

Supermarkets are shit. Travel to anyplace, at any time, speaking in any language and you’ll come to the same conclusion.

Ask an assistant in your local Asda what in season vegetables they have that will complement your black bream fillets, and they’ll most likely just point in the way of the fruit and veg section, whilst muttering to themselves ‘complement a bream? Vegetables can’t talk ... idiot.’

Ask the butcher in Tesco the best way to cook a brisket joint and watch them follow your lips moving, whilst starting vacantly, before moving onto the next customer and starting the whole procedure again. Rejoin the queue, ask them again and repeat the process continuously. After an hour or so you’ll be witness to a full mental breakdown.

On a side note. A butcher butchers. A market trader trades. Following this train of thought, a fishmonger mongs. What is monging? And why are the only two things you can mong, for a living at least, fish and iron?

Supermarkets specialise in food, and yet their entire staffs seem to consist of people who know absolutely nothing about food. Having worked in a supermarket myself, I’m aware that the requirements for the job are rather low. Surely asking a little knowledge about the store’s specialisation wouldn’t hurt?

Imagine going to a car showroom to ask an assistant how many miles to the gallon a Fiesta does, only for them to respond, ‘don’t know mate, I don’t like driving myself.’

Where possible I buy from markets. The food is cheaper, better quality and sold by people who actually know what they’re talking about, mainly because they care. If they don’t please then they don’t make money.

The other day I drove to Oldham market on my lunch break. Once a thriving community hub, now it resembles the scene of a local environmental disaster with everybody relocated. There were 4 stalls open, a stray dog and a hoard of giant mutant ants.

Even with such a sparse environment there was a charge to park. 80p for up to half an hour! I wanted to walk 20 yards to buy some fruit before walking back, and for the pleasure I had to pay 80p. The reason for Tesco’s domination of the grocery market revealed: free parking.

I was tempted to not pay, but an officer patrolled round patting a bat into his open palm. I was going to wonder how many people have to park before his wage is paid, but he didn’t look happy that I would even dare to think on his territory, so I just put the sticker in my window and hurried to the stalls.

I avoided the ants and a few stray tumbleweeds, but the dodging was worth it. Standing alone in the centre of the now deserted, once proud, country famous Tommyfield market was an oasis of edible delights.

The market stall was everything a food stall should be; rammed full of seasonal, locally grown produce, mixed with a selection of imports to choose from. The stall holder was a friendly bearded man, who took great pleasure in recommending various herbs that would go well with my vegetables. The food was well labelled and was a representation of the man selling it; a British Asian with a clear love for hot food, judging by the 7 varieties of chillies on offer in a multitude of difference shapes and sizes.

Proof that you shouldn't play with your food.

I was in my element, surrounded by great foods and somebody who could help me utilise them. It was a place that would be one of many in days gone by, and yet this champion of quality produce is facing a real struggle. His customer base was low before, but now the council, in their infinite wisdom, have charged people to park next to the market, reducing his income still further. People are expected to pay 80p just for the right to give him trade.

As so often in these cases the answers are infuriatingly simple. Scrap car park charges for people parking for under half an hour, and reduce rental rates on the market for food stall holders. The market is dead. It makes no money anyway, probably loses it considering they pay for somebody to ensure that nobody shops at their stalls. Slashing rental rates and removing parking fees will get people into the market, attracting shoppers and traders.

I can’t see it happening though. I reckon most of the councillors were trained by Tesco.

Anything I can do, my Dad can do better

My dad, much like most dads, can do anything. A call often comes from my mum along the lines of:

“Nick, the car won’t start.”
“Don’t worry love I’ll have a look.” Twenty minutes later it’s running like new.

“Nick, the fridge is leaking a green fluid.”
“OK my dear, I’ll see what I can do.” A day later the fluid will be gone.

“Nick, there’s a massive international diplomatic crisis in Somalia.”
“Give me 5 minutes and I’ll be right with you.” A week later, the eastern African state will be conducting democratic elections that see a victory for a progressive liberal party that oversee the transformation to a major world economic power with low crime.

Sadly I’m lagging behind in that department. I recently went to buy a car, and was shown up terribly for my lack of knowledge:

“This car has only done 54,000 miles. Just has a broken stereo.”
“Only 54,000 miles? That’s the same as going round the world. Twice! You say the stereo is broken?”
“It’s easy to fix, just take this Allen key and ...”
“Who’s Alan?”
“Just take it and turn it in your gersabulator.”
“I’m sorry I don’t speak Spanish.”

He charged me £200 extra, added a few long words and I walked out feeling rather flummoxed. I rang my Dad to ask his opinion about matters, but he was busy rewiring the whole house so he could control each appliance with his mind.

“They quoted me £3,000,000 and I’d have to wait 1000 years for the research to be done, but I got this book from the library and thought I’d give it a go. I’ll be able to have a couple of pints with the money I save.”

Needing music for my drive to and from work, I decided to have a go at replacing the broken stereo in my car. Shouldn’t be too hard I thought. The back of my shiny, new CD player looked friendly enough for an electrical appliance. Big plug holes for wires to connect to. No tricky instructions and it even had pictures. Perhaps I’d been giving my father too much credit.

I pulled out the old stereo, expecting to see easy to replace wires, no tricky instructions and even pictures, but all I saw were my shattered dreams. It looked like a Jackson Pollack painting; all colours visible to man, all seemingly merging into the same tiny hole in the back of the unit. To make sure I couldn’t check where they were going, the ends of the wires were bound together with black tape.

The back of my car stereo

With this came the realisation that I’m part of a generation that relies far too heavily on others. So many of us have just one skill, usually the one we have to learn for work, but don’t have a clue when it comes to something that requires knowledge outside of our forced studies.

Having said that, to cheer myself up I logged on to my laptop, checked my email, ordered a new book and bought some gig tickets. By the time my old man manages to figure out how to do that, they will have invented a car stereo that replaces itself.

Not much has changed since the last blog

Music these days is a constant source of frustration to me. It just seems to me as if no effort goes into the production of songs anymore. Take this lyrical creation by the once omnipresent Busted.

“I’ve been to the year 3000, not much has changed, but they lived underwater.
And your great, great, great granddaughter is pretty fine.”

Ignoring the grammatical horrorshow that is the writer’s inability to decide if the whole thing has happened in the past, future, or present tense, and looking at the factual data makes for puzzling reading.

Apparently not much has changed in the future. Not beyond the realms of possibility. Has life really changed so much between 1000 and 2000? We all live in houses and work, the rest are just improvements. In the future however, they live underwater. Stop and think about for a second. They exist in a whole new environment, a realm where up to now, humans can’t breathe in. A world, in which it took millions of years of evolution to create fishes that could breathe out of water. Yet now the singer from Busted would have us believe that humans will be able to make the evolutionary switch to living underwater, in a period of just 1,000 years. On top of that, he states that’s not a big deal, nothing special, "not much has changed." I would suggest that’s a pretty enormous change, something that really won’t happen. It might be pretty fun to think about, but it simply won’t take place; like the banning of all boy bands like Busted.

He also saw, presumably underwater, the audience’s great, great, great, granddaughter. That’s 5 generations on from now, over 1,000 years. That means each baby is born when the parent is 200 years old. 200. Years. Old. That’s Des O’Conner territory. Imagine being a teenager with a 200 year old parent. You score your first ever goal at football and look to the side, swollen with pride, desperate for your father’s adulation, only to see a rotting corpse. Busted and their contemporaries McNuggets, just aren't thinking these things through.

In their defence, crap whilst their songs may be, at least, they’re their crap. The second day of the Bingley music festival introduced me to Professor Green, although he prefers to be called Pro Green. It struck me as a little strange that somebody would go to all the effort of changing their name, only to then have to tell people to change it still further. A bit like changing from John to Arthur, only to tell people ‘actually, it’s Reginald.’

Either way I spent an hour on a sunny Sunday listening to the Pr G, as I think he’s going to be next week. The first two songs that were played I thought I recognised. I held Shazam up on my iPod, and it came up with I Need You Tonight by INXS. No mention of Doctor Blue. The next song was somebody else’s and so was the next after that. Through his entire 40 minute set Colonel Mustard played 9 songs, of those, 5 came up on Shazam as being songs by other artists. He was basically playing a song carefully written by somebody else, and talking over it. I can do that, in fact I do sometimes and my Girlfriend shouts at me.

The set was just other people’s hard work being exploited, and all this by a man referred to as The British Eminem by the NME.

That’s part of the problem; he’s British. He didn’t grow up in America, or indeed live there at any stage, yet he introduced a song by saying I’m gonna tell you about my streets, the bad streets of Clapton. They might not be the best place to grow up, but Clapton is hardly Compton.
In 2005 Compton suffered 75 murders in a population of 90,000, more than one a week in an area the size of Huddersfield.

In contrast, this year there has been 90 murders in the whole of London. London that is home to 8,000,000 people.

Is it so surprising that young people continue to look towards to America to provide their hip-hop needs when British rappers like Professor Green aren’t original, just poor versions of people like Eminem.

Maybe it’ll all be different in the year 3,000, after all it’s hard to rap underwater.

This Blog is live from Bingley

There’s something wonderfully British about festivals. Whether it’s a simple village fete, a cider pressing party, a scarecrow festival, a bonfire parade, or even something grand like Notting Hill or Glastonbury; the variety of gatherings is only matched by the range of nutters, crazy folk and general wierdos that you can find at them.

Plenty of other countries have festivals, but I doubt many countries can manage the range of oddities prevalent in the UK. There’s always somebody dancing to no music, wearing clothes that look like they’re still growing or possessing a collection of badges that has taken decades to amass.

How these people afford it is a mystery. Take Glastonbury for example. Tickets are now £180 for the weekend, that’s before you take in costs for food, drink and most of all, transport. I’ve been to the village of Glastonbury and I remember distinctly trains that only ran when the driver woke up, and the nearest highway of any sort being 311 miles away. Yet it has hundreds of nutters, all of them seemingly working away in various offices, schools, fields, zoos near you.

I went to a couple of festivals in Korea. They were fun, and they even had people in costumes, but those people were laughing and joking with friends. There were no true mentalists. The costume was exactly that. A real crazy man wears a suit made from dandelions not for a laugh, but because that’s just the clothes he wears. That home done piercing filled with a bent fork is that way because that’s what he had handy at the time. Nutters don’t try, they just are.

So when a friend of mine asked me to a music festival over the weekend just gone, my ears pricked. When he said it was in Bingley and only cost £30 I bought a ticket straight away. Cheap and in Bingley, a more fertile breeding ground for nutters there surely never has been.

The festival started on the Friday night and passed mainly without incident. The beers were of festival standard, overpriced and underflavoured, but there was an added bonus. One could earn 10p for every cup given back. In theory this was an excellent idea; it promoted recycling and reducing litter. In practise it led to hoards of children scurrying around feet collecting dropped cups. They swarmed like rats throughout the crowd; some were even urinating to mark their cup collecting territories. I escaped the crowds to order a pint, only to see it swiped from my grasp by a chalice hungry minion.

The Saturday was basked in sun, weather which added to the middle class feel of the whole festival. Most people were sat down with picnics they’d brought. It made crowd surfing tough, and a few people weren’t happy to have me jump on them as they tucked into their kettle chips. However it all kicked into gear with the last two bands. The penultimate act was John Lydon’s band Public Image Limited to be followed by James. On the face of it they were similar, two bands coming back after breaks and both promoting new material. Sadly that’s where the comparisons end.

PIL walked out, and after putting on their instruments they set up their music books to read from as they played. That didn’t bode well. They used them constantly during the performance, meaning no connection with the audience. John Lydon, in his true punk ways, spent the money he earned for doing a country life butter commercial, reforming PIL. He obviously overlooked time learning songs when planning his budget.

A member of the crowd, obviously angered by such an appalling lack of effort, threw his plastic pint at John. It hit him on the shoulder and spilled beer over him. His response was ‘wankers, beers is for drinking, not throwing.’ And so it began.

John was pelted throughout his reading of lyrics, and each time he responded by abusing the audience. According to one NME review, his famous on stage tirades are straight off the cuff and come from within. When John started with ‘We don’t want your government Blair,’ I began to have my doubts. Towards the end he lent his face to the crowd and asked repeatedly ‘can you smell the onions? Can you smell them fucking onions?’ He stopped when a burger was thrown at him. It just added to an image of an old desperate man looking to be part of a world where he is longer relevant. I felt sorry for him.

James, on the other hand, needed no sympathy. I can’t claim to be a loyal fan. I’ve never seen them live and my listening to them is limited to the radio and bars, but from the first bar of their first song Sit Down the whole audience, including me, were hooked. Tim Booth sang and danced with the passion of a man who has been playing gigs for a year and still in love with his music, not a music veteran who’s been touring for 18 years. For recognising how lucky they are and how important the connection with your audience is, I’ll raise my glass to James. At least I would if some kid hadn’t stolen it to sell.

Tony, Toni, Tone

Tony Blair’s memoirs are well on their way to becoming the fastest selling in British history. On pre sales alone it shares the top 3 current bestsellers with the autobiographies of Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson; we do love a good monster story in Britain.

Usually when somebody provokes such ill feeling as Blair, there are a number of reasons for it. Being hated to the point where a million march against you takes some doing. Thatcher stole industries, jobs, communities before she finally rose to full on hatred with the theft of milk.

With Blair, however, there was just Iraq. His smug smile was irritating. Hobnobbing with celebrities and pretending to be a football man both showed a man desperate to be liked, but nobody died. He was just a bit of a loser. That was OK though, people can deal with a loser when unemployment is falling, hospital queues are being slashed and the minimum wage is increased yearly.

Seeing 179 British soldiers dying to stop weapons that never existed managed to take Blair from OK loserish guy, to hated war criminal pretty much overnight.





On Parkinson Blair said he prayed to god for answers about the invasion of Iraq. He then went on to say “You realise that judgement is made by other people... and if you believe in god, it's made by god as well."

When I was at University there was a man who used to walk around the local town centre. He would collect cans, put them into a black bin bag liner and carry them to the same spot at the same time every night. There he would proceed to stamp on the bag and shout “BAD CANS, BAD CANS – THE DEVIL IS IN YOU AND HE MUST COME OUT, BAD BAD CANS!”
That man was unsurprisingly taken in for medical care after a few weeks. He was guided by the voice of god, and yet all that was damaged were a few cans.

There was also a Muslim student who used to tell people outside the student’s union bar that they were being judged by god; that bad things would happen to them in the after life if they continued down their path of sin. He was warned by the University not to go near the union unless he could keep quiet, and yet all he did was talk to us.

Strange then that when, guided by god, and passing judgement on his / her behalf, Tony order the invasion of Iraq and with it the death of 700,000 civilians, he was worried that people in Britain would think of him as a ‘nutter,’ because he was Catholic not Church of England.

Strange also that Blair would describe Gordon Brown as a man with ‘zero emotional intelligence.’ That from a man who patronised the British people so severely by stating they couldn’t accept a leader of another religion.

As thousands working in the public sector are currently looking over their shoulders, worried that they’ll be swept away in the next wave of cuts, one wonders what word they’d use to describe Blair, the man who instigated and authorised the spending of £9.24billion on invading Iraq.

The word ‘nutter’ comes to mind.