Labels: dear world, holiday, ow, picture, sigh

• South Molton is a very quaint little town, very pretty indeed, but not great for a day out because there's sod all to do.
• Don't anger a chicken. They can run quite fast.
• I finally bought a scarf I've been saving up for... cost £10 normally but I got it for £7, muaha.
• Cadbury's Mis-Shapes are LOVE in chocolate form.
• It's easier than I thought to survive for a week without internet connection or signal on my mobile phone.
• Prisoners in Dartmoor Prison might complain about the hard time they get behind bars, but they're lucky the cat o' nine tails is no longer used there... I never knew they used that in any non-naval circumstances!
• Cows moo very loudly.
• Broken fire alarms are no fun, especially at 4 in the morning.
• Apparently, a rumour has been going round that I stuff my bra. Yay, my bust has been the talk of the town. (As Aneira said, 'what with - melons??' You have to love well-meaning siblings.)
• Writing postcards in French is actually quite difficult without a French dictionary or translator.

Might put up pictures later, might not. It depends on whether I can be bothered or not...

Labels: holiday, list, me, owch

Went to Devon last year and visited the world renowned 'Gnome Reserve'... don't tell me that Devon isn't mad :P

Labels: holiday, me, sigh

My envious photo-editing skills. Yes, I made a fan club for my friend's Jack Harkness coat.

The queue at about 4pm... probably about 300 people came in the end!

Labels: friends, me, picture

These photographs were taken last year in 'Eperlecque', a destroyed bunker planned as a V2 rocket launch site. This is not the bunker mentioned in this post; all photographs taken there were unuseable as every picture ended up being cloaked in a strange, white mist, presumably from the cold/damp conditions.

A few years ago, I went to a World War Two bunker in France. Obviously it was built by the Germans during the occupation of France. If you've never visited a bunker before, imagine a huge slab of concrete with wire breaking out of cracks like veins and flesh. Even the bunkers themselves look like death, grey and intimidating. Imagine walls up to 30 metres thick made of solid concrete, with underground chambers and areas built just to launch rockets, and thousands of captured prisoners working to build it. It's the ultimate irony that the workers who tired and sweated and perished to raise the huge structures from the ground were the very people who the masterminds behind the bunkers sought to exterminate. Anyway, this particular bunker was never finished, because just as it neared completion it was bombed by the Allied forces, killing tens of thousands of slave workers and burying them half-alive under tonnes of rubble and concrete. The bunker must not have been abandoned as this area was built over, and we were able to walk over it. We walked over the accidental graves of thousands of people, and we didn't even know their names. We walked over the accidental graves of thousands of people and they were forgotten by everyone except us. There was no plaque outside to commemorate their loss as anything unusual, presumably because the loss of a few thousand out of 11 million is really just a tiny drop of mercury in an ocean full of the stuff, but to think that we were THERE, only a few metres away from a sea of decay and memories and trapped souls was sickening. I've never seen a dead body before, unless you count roadkill or the scene of a fatal car accident or the mummies at the British Museum. I've never been so close to a scene of complete atrocity. But really, what upset me about it is the fact that all those people were just that; people. They loved and hated and thought and laughed and breathed and WERE and now they're not and no-one knows anything about them. That's no way to leave this world. There should always be someone to remember you, something in which your essence lives on, be it a journal or a son or a photograph. These people had nothing. If any of their relatives are still alive, do they know how they died? Do they think that they died in a concentration camp, or in war, or of disease? No-one should ever have to die without being remembered. At least we now remember the victims of the Holocaust, but we don't remember them as individuals. We remember them as a mass of unfortunate and doomed people, writhing in hatred together, but only as 'Holocaust victims', when before they were Holocaust victims they were sons and daughters and brothers and sisters. The only point I am trying to make here is that no-one should have to be alone and forgotten. If I were Prime Minister, I'd make it a law that everyone went to a graveyard every week and read all the names on the gravestones and thought about that person, whether they knew them or not, and maybe mourn the loss of that person's character and experiences. But we're humans. We don't do that. That would be unselfish.

Labels: dear world, picture, sigh

• Immigrants
• Muslims
• Homosexuals
• Unemployed people
• Youths
• Labour

Now we can add 'The Welsh' to that fairly extensive list. And what is that list? Why, the list of people against whom the Daily Mail has a vendetta. To think that my great-great (x39466) uncle worked for that abhorrent rag. He'd be turning in his grave if he could see the unrivalled tripe it publishes nowadays. Gays? Well, they're trying to turn all our children homosexual! Muslims? All they do is blow up we jolly white folk. Young people? All feral, wild and obnoxious, and usually pregnant too. And as for Labour, don't even get me started on the nanny-state surveying liberal-minded fools!
And the Welsh - well, they're just not English.
What am I talking about? This:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197960/Lady-red-Katherine-Jenkins-opens-Ashes-Welsh-hymn-TWO-anthems-hymn.html

Bear in mind that the entire section on Katherine Jenkins was only added after the Ashes began. Before that section was added, the entire article consisted of rants about how the match - played in Cardiff - would be opened by the Welsh national anthem instead of the British one! What horror! I mean really, how dare they open a match held in Wales played by the English and Welsh cricket team with the Welsh national anthem? It beggars belief! Ridiculous! Political correctness gone mad!
Here are a few choice quotes that the Daily Fascist has to offer us:

1. "It is believed that the move is also aimed at appeasing Welsh Assembly members after the devolved body gave the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) a £3million grant to enable Cardiff to be picked as a venue for the series."
No, my dear folk at the Daily Mail. Only you and the BNP believe that. Others can recognise that the move is 'aimed' at only one thing - the fact that the match is being held in Wales and some of the players are Welsh. If it had been played in England, you would have used 'God Save the Queen', despite the Welsh players, and that would have been just fine, of course.

2. 'They should just have God Save the Queen as they're playing as England not Wales and the rest of the hymns demean it.' - former England captain Alec Stewart
No, my love. The match is being played under the ECB, a false acronym which actually means 'the England and Wales Cricket Board'. Anyway, God Save the Queen is the British national anthem. 'Jerusalem' is widely recognised as the (unofficial) English one. So get your facts straight, dear.

3. 'None of the current England squad was born and bred in Wales, and only batsman Alastair Cook - whose mother comes from Swansea - has any close Welsh ancestry.'
There we are, then. He has Welsh roots. The team is not entirely English. So shut your Tory faces.

And finally, my favourite quote:

4. The musical confusion at the opening Ashes test was branded 'ridiculous' by traditionalists.
No. The musical 'confusion' was branded ridiculous by the Daily Mail, the biggest and most pompous 'traditionalists' of them all.

It's called CHANGE. Guess what, we have immigrants, and it's no longer a hanging offence to be gay, and not everyone works, and some teenagers beat each other up and do drugs and get pregnant. Not all changes are for the better, but if we lived the way you wanted us to we'd still be shipping black people over as slaves and Oscar Wilde would have been shot at birth.

Yours Faithfully,

A white, educated, relatively middle-class, unsperminated, non-homosexual.

Labels: dear world, fascist shit, rant, sigh

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Labels: anxiety, friends, me