Everyone knows that politics doesn’t work. Not in this country, not in most countries. So it’s probably worthwhile for folks like me, as infinitely amazing as we are, to sit down and come up with a few ideas for how politics can succeed in properly serving the people of a country. In this case, Britain.

I’ve got years of experience working in government departments, so I have a bit of an idea of what happens. Whitehall departments are stacked with staid out of touch senior civil servants that are employed and paid to nod their heads, and the more senior of them go to the PM every now and then to bullshit about how well their department is performing, and, most importantly, to barter for more money.

So the Whitehall departments get their ridiculous amounts of dough (always much more when Labour get in) and so long as they spend it all, they are pretty much guaranteed as much the next financial year. Therefore, there’s no incentive to use the money properly and every incentive to make up jobs, piss it all away and use lingo and bullshit a la carte served on a platter, to justify where it’s all gone and why. Labour ministers need no convincing of the merits of cash a la piss up the wall, because so long as they see cash get spent, they can rest their weary blessed consciences that after all, wealth is properly being redistributed, and all is well.

There’s one small problem. The system is fucked, it fucks everything up and everything gets fucked because it’s all a load of fucking shit. Unless I forget to mention, the word ‘fuck’ appears a lot because the word aptly demonstrates what happens to a nation when this sort of system is allowed to continue. It gets fucked.

The amount of money that gets wasted in government is the stuff of legend. Savvy journos talk about it, tax payers lament about it, and lefties down play it. Overall, however, it’s effects cannot be underplayed. Because unless we want to bankrupt this nation, politicians need to wake up and realise that urinating public money away indefinitely has consequences. And it’s also unfair, as it means there’s less wedge for important stuff. Like completely re-building the public transport system and infrastructure and overhauling the way we get about.

Solutions? Well, firstly, were I elected PM, as I may be be one day, I would completely change the way government works and how it’s various departments are funded. First step: decentralise. And I mean bring about devolution to the regions, in order to encourage and fan the flames of democracy. Then, set in place a system whereby the politicians and apparatchiks and lowly civil servants in those localised regions get paid and praised according to how wisely cash is spent.

Sound weird? Ok, follow this:

As a Libertarian, I tend to have a lot of faith in science, nature and consequently, the free market. Look at any business, and the boss knows that unless he works hard, spends his cash sensibly and appropriately, he will go under. He needs to compete, come up with new ideas and generally be a crafty fucker.

Let’s have a look at one amazing example of a top businessman. A perfectionist. Someone so anal, he is able to look after a sprawling empire whilst paying anal attention to detail. I am talking about a chef. His name, as everyone will have heard, is Gordon Ramsay.

I’ve just come back from holiday and have been blown away by his book “Playing with Fire” which I picked up from Waterstones at Manchester Airport. In this book, Ramsay knocks my bollocks off onto a plate by talking about things like ensuring letters are written properly and posted neatly and that the toilets are completely immaculate and designed to perfection. What a crotch stomper. If I were female, I’d tackle that man to the ground and impress my less noble parts on his cheek.

As a quick sampler, I give you a quick quote from page 98 of the paperback edition:

“The study of a restaurant and the movements, sight-lines and habits of its guests all combine to give a clear indication of what needs to be planned early on. A restauranteur would do well to look at all aspects of the operation. Take the ‘ladies and gents’ as an example: you should play the role of the guest, listing a thousand considerations, all of which will take you a step towards getting it right. From a seat in the restaurant, your guest will want to navigate a route to the loo with as little fuss as possible. A well trained waiter will gently indicate to you that he knows what’s on your mind and lead the way. Nothing beats this for guest attention…

…the doors leading to a lavatory in a restaurant are critical. Gentle swing-doors are to be considered. Who wants to touch handles in a place like this?…”

Now that’s what I’m fucking talking about. The man is a God. A genius. Just imagine if we could get politicians and civil servants to be that passionate and anal about their remits? The country would be one big fucking version of Switzerland without the mounds of ice and gaggles of bored checkpoint guards. It would be fantastic.

Have you seen ‘Casino’ wtih De Niro and Pesci? De Niro plays a Casino manager with mob ties. Unlike many of these gangster characters who slob over pasta and finish the night off wtih a messy murder and a glass of Scotch, ‘Ace’ Rothstein goes about his business with the grace and elegance of a gilded butterfly. Every single nano-detail is obsessed about, and when he realises that the chef in the kitchen puts disproprtionate amounts of blueberries in various muffins, he bollocks him and demands that an “equal amount of blueberries go in each muffin”. Why would he do this? Because he is a perfectionist businessman that knows to a tee what the punter wants and what the discerning punter is looking for. I admire this fucking shit, and if politicians behaved like this, I’d lick their envelopes and stick my ballot in their box.

I’m not just talking about efficiency and savings in departments, I’m talking the whole shebang. And in order to encourage the right sorts of people to go into politics and government, we need incentives. After all, ‘Ace’ Rothstein, the fictional character, and Gordon Ramsay, the larger than real life chef, wouldn’t be in business unless there was a pay off for them at the end. In government, the civil servants have no incentives to work hard (they are impossible to sack and performance related pay is a non starter) and the politicians have no incentive (they are enormously well paid and knowing their opposition on the other side of the House of Commons are equally as inept and clueless, are happy to stick about for the cash, kudos and possible Honours).

So, with the principles discussed in mind, I suggest some form of proper performance related incentive for politicians and civil servants. No more fat budgets to blow every finanical year, but a simple and democratic system whereby the feedback gained by the public in various localities get to vote on their satisfaction and their overall opinion on how their politicians and representatives have served them. The higher the rating, the better the pay and bonuses for the civil servants and politicians. Instead of budgets being spent and demanded again, every year would be a proper sit down session with a board of financial experts (or tight fisted fuckers as I would term them) who’s incentive would be to drive down waste and keep costs down. Regional government departments would have to convince the board yearly why they need cash and what it’s for, using the scoresheets from the public votes as back-up. Merely spending it all and saying you’re broke would not suffice as it does now…the system would be harsh and unrelenting, until every last penny was accounted for and appropriated sensibly.

The panel of financial fuckers would have an incentive themselves, with their decisions being published and held to account. There ain’t no rottweiler more vicious than the media and any loose decisions would be seized upon.

My plan is about complete openness, democracy and transparency. The people decide. They get to set, the a greater or lesser degree, the amount of money deserved to be paid to their politicians. Their feedback would determine whether a pay cut or a pay rise is in order. Let’s face it folks, when it comes to money, the dirty dollars, the pernicious pounds, the irksome Euros, people soon shape up and act fast if it affects their stash. Harsh and unseemly, but true. Why do you think politicians are so disrespectful and blase about their actions? Because they don’t really need to give a fuck or care about you: they are massively well paid and privileged and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. They line their pockets, we get shit services. End of.

Going back to the Ramsay discussion, I would love nothing more than to see my system bring about a political class of Ramsay’s and ‘Ace’ Rothsteins. Instead of lolling in offices, they would get out there and see first hand what was wrong and how to put it right. Take a Minister for Transport for example. He or she, along with their localised counterparts, would go cattle class on trains and on dirty buses and knackered roads and figure out, with the eye of a perfectionist, how to put it right. How to make it spot on first class for the public. After all, it is they they must please, not just for votes but for pay. You’d see no more filthy trains, late, overcrowded tubes and buses, packed roads and unsustainable petrol-propelled cars with their enormous running costs.

Department for Health? You’d kiss goodbye to MRSA and dirty wards in no time. Department for Work and Pensions? The welfare state would getting the trimming it needs for starters and the collosal leakage of cash and misappropriation of money wouldn’t last long.

And of the Home Office? Well, the most outrageous developments of recent decades would surely come to an end. As everyone knows, the public has been as vocal as it can be on the softness on crime, and no-one has lifted a finger. I dare say under my system we’d see the hopeless criminal justice system and unnecessary bureacracy placed on cops come to an abrupt end and rejuvinated into a proper working and healthy system.

Spiel over. Hope you followed and if you’d like to add your views, do comment below or email us using our new Contact Page.

Adios

John “The Don” Demetriou.

People outside of London may not be aware of this, but the capital’s bus drivers are having a right laugh with TfL.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7521923.stm

Now, I don’t mind bus drivers apart from those on a certain route near me who are complete nutcases. Accelerating into a bus stop isn’t the idea guys, okay?

But this lot are, frankly, taking the piss. In short they want £30,000 a year to do 38 hours a week. That’s less hours for more money!

It’s not the hours and the pay per se, it’s the amount of money. Maybe nobody has told them that they are bus drivers and not accountants.

Because rewarding a bus driver with 30 grand of the Queen’s finest paper is a stark message to the nation and the students who will soon join the workforce: don’t bother.

Let’s be harsh, bus drivers are generally the people who were in the lowest sets at school and haven’t got very many qualifications. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just life. Some people are barristers, some are athletes, some are bus drivers. Others are politicians, boom boom! Oh dear…

But to basically either be a bit unintelligent or a lazy bastard and then getting a job driving a big red thing about, then years later being given £30,000 to do it is a kick in the teeth for all of us who worked hard and studied.

What’s the point? Tube drivers earn a truly obscene wage. Green to go, Red to stop, say a load of crap over the speakers about doors at Mile End, sit on your arse all day reading the sport with your thermos, sue the boss for sacking you after being caught sitting in a room full of thousands of empty and half full beer cans and being pissed out of your mind. And here is a cheque for far more than nearly everyone who gets on receives.

Why? Because Ken Livingstone was weak and confused. Hard right Stalinist fucker on one hand, loveable cheeky chappy of the masses on the other. Now the Unions led by that utter cunt Bob Crow (may very well do an article soon here, because I hate the man nearly as much as Lee Jasper) have got their oar in, they can twist the knife, to mix the metaphor, and leave TfL up shit creek. Without an oar, or paddle, depending on your point of view. Anyway, it has a knife tied to the end of it now so it’s ruined.

The Unions, particularly transport, are now so far to the left in the 21st century, reality is a distant memory. Tube, train and bus drivers on more money than people with degrees who run offices and are immune from any action.

Really it is all a ploy. They want to be told ‘no’ so that Crow and his Awkward Squad can have a strike. They like a good strike, makes them feel like real men telling the average worker what to do and getting them to lose a days pay after 51% fo the 20% who bothered to vote agreed with themselves.

Problem is, Boris Johnson is now saying he would like to, but he doesn’t have the power when really he should be telling them to fuck off and give him back his paddle sans knife.

Why, our favourite newspaper of course!

See the logical pictoral equation below for the full demonstration:

+

=

The beautiful simplicity of the world’s most deranged newspaper is that it can be as filthy and salacious as it possibly can, whilst simultaneously (at least in the eyes of its readership and editorial department) maintaining a proud, patriotic, Pro-British disposition. As if all those endless torrents of daily tits and arse stories, complete with semi-pornographic pics, are respectable items of journalism that fails to detract for a moment from the ’serious’ conservative writings of its staff.

I loved the Private Eye’s recent discussion of the Mail and its Online Edition. Apparently Paul Dacre is such a technophobe, he stays well away from the online edition of his paper and leaves it to lesser minions. I know his standards are low, but would he really approve of his online copy being so utterly drenched in quasi-porn? Actually, maybe that’s a question best left unanswered. In the world of Northcliffe House, anything seems possible.

The equation is more truthful and accurate than many people will dare to admit. Amidst the sordid stories of sex and flesh and lust, are inserted, almost daily, tales of rape and kiddy fiddling and blacks seeking out white women to abuse and destroy. No other paper goes into quite so much weird, pernicious detail as the Mail on these nasty, deliberately sought-out and spun tales. And let’s not forget it’s usual political fare - if it doesn’t feature middle class suburbanites getting stitched by the cluster of compulsory enemies (gays, the Left, women, foreigners, the EU etc) then it will be pulped before it gets to the reader.

So what is your Mail reader left with? Tits, Snatch and Fascism. A beautiful combo I’m sure, and in some cases, hardline deranged authoritarian right wing politics and sex needn’t be separated. I’m sure many a Mail reader felt subconsciously awkward at reading that Max Mosley story. Maybe it made them feel guilty. Maybe, just maybe, they decided to skip the daughter-in-the-shower spying and go tinkle with the Rover on the drive-way. Who knows. Though with every day being a Hate day, there’s plenty of time to hate and all day in which to hate some more.

Get hating Hate readers. Not much time before potatoes give you cancer and your house starts rising in price again. Enjoy!

If I told you that I had a jab that, if you take it, you will never get brain cancer. You would wouldn’t you?

Okay, what about a problem with more human causes, say, heart disease. You will never get it. The side affects may be that fat people stay fat, but I think it’s a safe bet that the normal person wouldn’t run out and just eat burgers everyday. There are other issues: getting fat for starters, cholesterol, an actual heart attack.

So a jab for pre-sexually active girls that stops them from dying from an horrific cancer, great stuff. Men and women, normal people, have dedicated years, decades to produce a vaccine against cancer and this is the first. The NHS will now be handing this out for free and a programme on channel four, Dispatches with Jane Moore, is looking into it.

So who pops up? The same old bloody Bible bashers and ‘clerics’ claiming it’s dirty and sordid. Their theory is that if a 12 year old girl gets it, she will be exposed to ‘an uncomfortable’ conversation about sex.

Tell you what’s uncomfortable sweetheart, fucking cervical cancer!

It’s a disturbed reality that these people inhabit. No real evidence, just a feeling that their daughters (this is a great bit) will get the jab and then go out and shag everything they can and get knocked up. News flash for pew number five, if she is such a perfect little angel in the light of the Lord, surely this wouldn’t happen? Or is the jab satan’s cock?

Of course not.

She will get the jab, have a chat about what it means (surely by 12 the girl has had a chat about this? I mean she is 12) and what she needs to do, then she goes back to class and carries on with her life.

Tell you what though, after my BCG I was straight down the hospital rubbing up against TB sufferers shouting ‘I love it!’. Had to throw me out in the end.

Then we have the other pathetic mob who are even more so, seeing as they haven’t even got the church to fall on. No, their brainwashing happened at the hands of a rabid dog media and people like Peter Hitchens.

Their argument is that they don’t trust the state. ‘Look at MMR’, they shout, ‘you can’t trust it’. Um, some serious medical experts, trails, papers and researchers would disagree with you there. Then we have the Hitchens argument, which borders, and I don’t want to be rude, upon the moronic. You can’t prove a negative.

You can’t prove a fucking negative.

I ask you, what argument is that? ‘Just because there is no evidence to show it causes autism doesn’t mean it doesn’t’. They have no concept of balance of evidence. It’s up there with saying that just because you can’t prove their is a God, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. How do you argue with them?

And this is the problem, you can’t.They don’t trust the state, they don’t trust Science, they don’t trust anything that they are told is good for them. They don’t trust recycling, they don’t trust health drives. The lot. What they are is conspiracists, but call them that and you will soon know about it.

The issues with the vaccine are the cost and the fact it doesn’t cover all the strains of the virus that causes the cancer.

These are valid arguments, but they are decisions we can only delegate to peope who add up the figures and know the statistics of how many it will save. One of the new wave of vaccines has to be picked and if it was another one the same argument would be held with that.

But what mustn’t dictate the argument is these morbid bastards who are quite happy for people to die of cervical cancer rather than have an awkward chit-chat with Beatrice, or risk having little George die of Measles in a false belief that he might have gotten autism. You can’t prove a negative you see.

And the people who should be roundly ignored are the ones who wave a holy book in one hand whilst spouting utter rubbish about how their daughter will become a whore if they have a possibly life saving jab.

My message to them? If your daughter becomes a slut from having a jab at 12, then you have raised a slut. It’s pretty simple really, the jab isn’t going to awaken the inner slag in all women. The hatred of women and the belief that they are all sluts and whores who have abortions at every chance they get and spend Monday, Wednesday and Friday having gangbangs. Saturday night is for common whoring in bars.

This vaccine can only be a good thing and it is certainly not a slapper inducer. Just for once, let’s listen to the medical experts for once shall we?

Reading this tat in the Mail (yep, back on the strong stuff since coming back from holiday - it’s like knocking back the literary equivalent to meths after a stint going dry) and I’ve got a sore head and a bruised fist. My wall needs replastering and my neighbours are wondering what the hell is going on. Maybe I’ll get round to telling them one day I have a perverted compulsion in reading annoying ’stories’ in very annoying newspapers…

McKay, or McFucky as the Eye sometimes calls him, is one of these grossly overpaid commentators who writes for the Hate. The sort of Nigel Dumpster type character who keeps a well-leafed black book with the contacts of various glitterati and celeb types so he can do what that bitter twisted bitch Linda Lee Potter used to do for the Mail’s equally nasty bitter readers. Slag people, slag ‘em some more and when you’ve done slagging them, reminisce about the fifties for a bit, and sign off, leaving your ageing readership to look at pictures of tits, arse and camel toes dotted around the rag whilst summoning the courage to beat one off before Vera comes back in to top up the cornflakes.

McFuck takes a pot shot at Marco Pierre White for his ‘announcement’ regarding a new found love. Apparently this is impudent and vulgar and chefs of such calibre should be ‘punished’ and thrust back into their fiery dungeon kitchens. Eh? Firstly, I fail to see any remote scent of ‘impudence’ or vulgarity here. I can conjur a million examples of behaviour that fits this bill - Pierre White’s ‘announcement’ (it wouldn’t be such a fucking announcement if Mail hacks didn’t dredge such non-news up and write about it in newspapers with high circulations) doesn’t really count. Even by standards of yore.

The piece left me wondering more about what it is that TV chefs have done to offend Fucky, rather than anything said or done by this little niche section of society. To be honest, I’m not really bothered what sort of things are said by TV chefs, rude, foul or otherwise. I know my standards of conduct in this regard are a thousand light years below that of your average liberarian fundamentalist, but I actually think that people, regardless of profession, should be judged on their actions and achievements. Pierre White may be an arrogant cunt, but he’s obviously good at what he does or he wouldn’t be around. Same for Ramsay. In fact, I’ve just finished reading Gordon Ramsay’s book ‘Playing With Fire’, which is obviously riddled with swearing, but is absolutely awe inspiring and brilliantly candid. Why wank yourself up into a stupour about vulgarity when you can cut past that and see a man’s true mould and merit? I’ll possibly do a book review for ‘Playing with Fire’ in one of my next posts. Till then, back to slagging off shit annyoying Mail hacks and their pitiful excuses for national journalism.

After a few pieces of utterly boring, uninsightful garbage, McFuckFace turns his attention to the much Daily Mail - maligned ‘Rolling Stones’ (one of my favourite bands of all time) in small piece called “Jagger and Wood, growing old disgracefully”. The Fuck said: “Those of us who preferred the Rolling Stones to The Beatles in the 1960s did so because the former were outrageous while the latter sought to please parents as well as teenagers. So it has remained.”

Really? Because my understanding was that people preferred the Stones because they did different and often better music. Listen to the Stones now, they sound like a fresh band that’s just broken through with amazing jazz/blues infused rock of such immense calibre, it’ll sell millions of records in minutes. The Stones’ music is timeless, ageless, brilliant and it completely altered the musical landscape. It was pure genius, it still is, and it offered something entirely different to the Beatles’ supine, boring and now highly dated brand of pop. (At this point I am aware that when Mr Boatang reads this, I will thereafter die a Tarantino-esque death. My apologies to my fans for dying so young, but this is the price one pays for brutal honesty. Mr B…I am sorry to offend thee. But I’m no fan of the Beatles.)

To return to my original point, Peter McKay is wrong about the Stones and I do wish this moralistic agenda of the Mail would end. It’s weird. It belongs to an old guard of the ‘68-er years where society fragmented into the uber-puritanical moralists and Whitehousian church going types, and the sorts of people who went on to become the parents of my generation: spoilt, rich, free to do whatever, and the owners of annoyingly staid 3 bed semis in the burbs.

In truth, both parties have become the Mail readers and writers of today. Both out of touch, both utterly hypocritical, and both unable to grasp what has been happening to the world they have grown old in. Too busy being cunts to read, people in their 50s and 60s have singularly failed to realise that human behaviour and societal norms have exhibited remarkably similar trends through the centuries. Morality isn’t something that had a sell by date that was unjustly brought forward in the 60s by a careless shop keeper. It is not only a concept difficult to define, but get this…people were corrupt, dodgy and uncouth in various ways 100, 200, 300, 1000 years ago. Ain’t nothing new here, so why write about it?

Hacks slag people off, regardless of whether they deserve it, because we, the readership, just love to sit back and point our fucking fingers at people and say “Nurrgh, look at you, aren’t you fat / ugly / old / stupid / disgusting / wretched / immoral / promiscuous [add adjective here]“. And where there’s a market, there’s the next generation of Linda Lee Potter Polly Filler hacks to collect a pay cheque and throw a few paragraphs together for the latest bitch ‘n’ moan session. The Mail are good at this because they have chosen the biggest market. Not the best writers, fuck me, I could do their job standing on my fucking face in the bath. No, they have the market. All they have to do to make it work is get the paparazzi to file their daily saucy pics of dirty looking vixens and cellulite exposed D listers, and they’re away. Shit story + piccy = better copy that shit story on its own. Hence why the Online edition of the Mail has come to resemble Hustler minus the full pussy shots. To be fair, it’s not getting that far off it. Fairly ironic surely, given the moralistic droning of most Hate articles.

And so people like me lament, and the world goes on and tittle tattle and meaningless nonsence becomes ever more popular reading in national newspapers. It’s like the world has gone mad. Utterly insane - the sight of right wing papers lamenting dumbing down and sex and immorality and disgusting behaviour…only to exhibit it and encourage it. The Telegraph is at it, the Times, there’s no getting away. Everything has turned into Heat overnight, it’s like living in a nightmare you can’t wake from. This is what comes with getting bored at work and flicking through all the rags online…you see the British media dying on its arse slowly but surely. Every new day a victory for the paparazzi, the publishers, the media barons, all those vultures out to turn a profit.

The losers? The people. But they make themselves the losers, because if they wanted the real journalism they need to ensure a healthy society and democracy, they’d vote with their pockets and computer mice. They don’t so the market shifts and the people get the journalism they deserve rather than need: utter, utter, utter, woeful, unintelligent, completely-missing-the-point, shite.

There’s a reason why journalism has died in Britain (not to mention the States for similar reasons): there ain’t no money in good journalism. So what’s the incentive for hacks to leave the hotdog and the swivel chair and go get real news? There aint none. Excellent quality journalism doesn’t sell papers and make money. Tits, fanny, blabber mouthing and nicking stuff off news feeds is good enough. So why try harder? Plus, it’s far safer to fart around in your London office pod than it is to go do what the likes of Paul Foot and Joseph Pulitzer did. Find shit out, come what may, through hard times and tougher still.

If celebrity chefs failed to fill restaurants regardless of how good their food was, would they have made it off the starting blocks? Would they be rich, selling books and going on TV? Course not. Which is why we have the drought of good journalists, good journalism and worthy news worth gracing papers with. It’s why all the rags are seriously on the slide. There are so many online publications now, people are so in need of a quick easy fix in their insular, fast-food lives, there’s not the hunger or seemingly the need for proper news.

In a way it’s great for fuckers like me. More targets to sling custard pies at, more things to write about, more reasons to get worked up and have a go. After all, I’m no hack and I don’t pretend to be. I don’t want to be one, but I will say this: I crave the writings of a good one. Good journalism will get good write ups on B&D. Till that day, I keep my literary M16 at the ready and god fucking help those cocks in the press who provoke my ire.

Ante up, bitches!

Ciao.

The Demetriou is back, finally. The ‘D’ is back from the Land of ‘E’. Or was it?

One thing that I have observed since my last visit to the island on that ill-fated week of 2002 is just how far it has changed…less drugs, less hedonism, less Dalian surrealistic visions of mystopia, less drug crazed coked up monsters out to kill someone etc. Yes, it was a different experience.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older. Perhaps, in my older married dotage, I have become an old fart before my time. Not so much rose tinted glasses as two eye patches and a few too many glasses of rose.

Either way, things have definitely moved on and I saw a very different island to the one that nearly body bagged me up in 2002.

Firstly, no-one tried to sell me drugs. This was odd. I went clubbing. I went again, and again, and nope. Not a dicky. Not that I was looking or waiting for them, I just expected some annoying cunt with a torn Pacha t-shirt to try and blag a nifty off me for a gramme of shit Senegalese-cut rank dodgy cocaine that has been sweated on by a hundred galley slaves in a tug boat off Gibraltar. Not only did it not happen to me, I didn’t witness any deals being done either. Just one incident where I walked into the bog of some pretentious wank bar in Ibiza Town and some bloke was busy snorting. Hell, the way things were going I was probably mistaken and he was actually sniffing the glimmering skin of a freshly caught Bream to appreciate it before tossing it on the grill.

In 2002, the fridges behind the various dotted bars in ‘Eden’ (one of the Super Clubs in San Antonio) stocked line after line of ridiculously overpriced mini bottles of water, that flew out like they were being given away to Hurricane Katrina victims at a Baseball Stadium in one of New Orleans unluckier districts. If you asked for a Bacardi and coke, or a beer, people looked at you from the other side of the bar as if you were a Martian who’d just landed in Gdansk asking the nearest policeman for a Quidipplet of Scmodder and Valashivinkz. Anything alcoholic, and you clearly weren’t on ‘E’ and therefore were utterly out of place. I may as well have slapped my willy on the counter and asked her to stick it in the blender. Hell, to be fair, some of the bars in the less salubrious strip of the town’s ‘West End’ still encourage that.

But this time, the entire experience was different. Instead of the clubbers drinking water and hovering around with very red foreheads, beaded with sweat, looking into space with a stupid smile on their faces, they ‘danced’ with a beer or a glass of mortgage-linked sprit and mixer. I say danced, it wasn’t really dancing. More, as I said before, hovering in packs. The amusing thing is, it’s probably not because they were fucked up, but because they’d been drinking their pissy little San Miguels from the hotel bar since midday and were probably fatigued and yearning for their beds. Only pride and the desire to stay out the latest (typical Brit-abroad trait that never seems to die) keeps them out till dawn.

So what happened with the drugs thing? Well, undoubtedly it still occurred, I’m not that fucking naive. Although my observation holds a valuable truth - the drug ‘culture’ is not so engrained and utterly intrinsic to the experience as it was in 2002. It is no longer utterly tied up with the clubbing experience…it is no longer a prerequisite for a visit there.

The reasons are two fold: Over the years, the island has become so expensive, that it has essentially sorted out the low life twat bags from the rest. You still get your idiot Man Utd shirt wearing tattood pie and mash Only Fools ‘n’ Horses ‘GIMME MY PIE AND CHIPS NAAAGH’ brigade, but they are the minority rather than the majority, which you’d see in shit holes like Malia, Faliraki and Magaluf. It is simply too expensive to be a scummy cunt AND keep going to Ibiza these days, regardless of how many shifts they put in at Sainsbury’s stacking the shelves or how many hours they spend doing the Poles out of a job at the local building site.

Secondly, the local law has gone mental. The Guardia Civil (the armed local police that make our cops look like pacifists in fancy dress) have felt it incumbent upon them to shoe the living shit out of anyone that breaks the rules laid out bare in the latest crack down.

This crack down entails closing businesses and restaurants that stay open too late and that don’t obey the usual bureacracies you hear about over here. With an added twist. It’s part of a ploy to stamp out the multitude of places that acting as fronts for drug dealing dens. A few years ago, the Russian Mafia and its cohorts tried to muscle in on the island’s lucrative drug trade. They took over bars, told the cops to fuck off and pissed off the island’s established elite. Fuck, the Russians may be hardcore, but you wouldn’t walk in to Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen and start telling the Chef de Cuisine how to boil an egg would you? These Ibizans had things nicely sorted out, a nice little arrangement that saw club / bar / restaurant owners and police share their little bits of the vastly illegal pie while the punters were kept happy and encouraged to come back to throw millions more till the sun went down for another season. The odd drug related death would be swept under the carpet and covered by the local rag read by about 12 ex pats and a few downtown civil servants on their lunchbreak - the cash cow had to go on being milked.

The Russians were successfully warded away, but not without a cost and adjustment to the way things were run. So instead of 24 hour clubbing and people popping pills at 3pm to stay awake another 72 hours, the Guardia Civil make sure their job of ‘policing’ is manageable by making sure everyone is closed by 6am. No fucking excuses. The big drug barons are targeted and their locations of trade fully monitored. It may lead to less kick backs, less bribes, less profits, but it was either that or let the Russians in through the back door. Better to deal with your friend during the day than your enemy at night.

So the days of the fabled 38 and 72 hour benders are up…Ibiza has changed, one might say, become slightly more civilised. You’re more likely to find your seasoned party goer chilling out by Cafe Del Mar, watching the sun go down with a Mojito, than you are to find him face down in a Cactus while the locals are snoring during siesta and the fat Lancastrians are following their red, sweaty noses down the main roads looking for the cheapest egg and chip lunch.

Indeed, this was a location I found much to my liking. The more up market end of town where you have Savannah, Cafe del Mar and Mambo overlooking a beautiful bay and where people watching is an Olympic sport rather than what bored commuters do during rush hour at Liverpool Street station whilst waiting for their train. Time stops. The sun comes down, people whip out their digital cameras and take their blurred shots and dreadlocked white people throw sticks on fire up in the air and pretend they’re the next best carnival act since Houdini. It’s fucking great.

It’s funny how certain places do downhill. In ‘02, Kanya was the place to be seen. Loads of magazine cover wannabes posing with their tinted aviators and Zoolander mugs poking out in all directions. Women wearing very little, blokes with washboard stomachs diving into pools with 5 inches of water and still popping up the other end like Sean Connery minus the Brylcream. Dutch girls talking about this being their 5th year on the island, despite them not looking old enough to have an N.I. number let alone a Passport 5 years prior. Blokes called Barry squirming in their sun loungers, crunching their jaws and nagging their friends for a pill so they can settle down a bit before downing half a bottle of Jack Daniels and going on about how the music is “so fucking good”, despite it sounding like slightly pumped up elevator music.

Now, other places have taken over. Your Cafe Del Mars will last the distance, but San Antonio is growing. The local authorities (who impressed me no end with their constant maintenance and cleaning of the streets and local amenities) have built a walk way that runs from those serene bars by Kanya and Sunsea Bar at the posh bit of the bay, all the way round past Mambo, Cafe Del Mar and to the port, stuffed with boats and yachts of varying sizes. The investment in the area has worked, and where other Med destinations have become jaded and died off, Ibiza has clearly managed to pull its head of its arse and re-invent and rejuvenate itself sufficiently to market itself in an increasingly competitive and ever changing tourist market. Greek islands have been slow to react to the Euro and the fact this currency has deterred punters. Ibiza has been clever, using its expense as a selling point, and looking to those things that the market find priceless. Super clubs and umissable sun sets. They say people travel all over the world to see the sun set at certain bars round the bay, and to go to Pacha in the old town. Bollocks. They go because they marketing says people go, so people go. The marketing works because, well, look at the fashion industry - it’s based around chic, image, status and all those things people crave. Value for money it aint, but as a place to dress up and feel trendy while lining the pockets of those who seek 10,000 % mark ups on their products, it’s A1.

And why not spoil yourself? Even unfashionable geeky cunts like me get to throw on some well chosen, well advised garments and feel like a movie star for my little 15 minute slot. Doesn’t mean it’s “me”. It’s ok, I’m not a contestant on Big Brother who craves attention and needs to ‘find myself’ in front of 4 million bored, stupid people every day. It’s a window. Ibiza is a window and there’s no harm in slapping on that aftershave, dressing in impossible amounts of linen, standing there at a heaving entrance while a middle aged peroxide blonde lady straps a VIP paper wrist band on you and sends you through a side door, so you can move your ill-timed body to the beat of tracks you’ve never heard, to genres that were invented 20 minutes ago. It’s a one-off, it’s an experience. For those who pass through fleetingly, that is. For others, Ibiza holds open to them an entire world, an existence you could say. While I punch holes in the world’s most pointless bits of paper and append them to files destined to see less sunlight than a dead albino in an underground morgue, there are people I know who live their days in that Balearic Island 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round. I wish them well, whilst finding myself re-writing the definition of the word jealousy to give it a potency not seen described in any worldly dictionary. If Dr Samuel Johnson were alive, I’d kick him in the fucking bollocks and tear up his first draft.

Tomorrow, work beckons. And my sun tan becomes that little bit more faded in the British “summer” gaze.

But he’s breathing!

He’s not breathing, look at him, he is no more, he has gone to meet his maker. This is an ex-prime minister.

Gordon Brown’s latest performance at PMQ’s simply rubber stamps the fact that he is no more, he is a dead parrot walking. His reasons for doing things, the way he then does it and the way he announces it with such mundane contempt all show that his time his up.

His bucket has been kicked. Even more so now that he has to find a billion quid after scrapping the fuel duty. In a treasury thatt has no money, that should be a right barrel of laughs!

I just had to comment on this because of the sheer scale of despair it has created.

I love football, like most guys, but the state of the game causes concern when an apparently talented player would rather sit on the bench in semi-retirement in his mid-twenties than play on the pitch.

It is said that this 4 year deal is worth £80,000 a week. This is an appalling sum of money to pay a sub, but it says more about the mindset of a small group of players in the modern game.

Most of them seem to be at Chelsea, Carlo Cudicini springs to mind. This guy in turn could have been one of the best keepers in world football. He was rated highly and when Cech joined teams such as Manchester United and Arsenal wanted him. He refused. He preferred to earn a vast sum of money instead of winning serious medals. Italy won the World Cup, he was in his house in London.

Chelsea seem more than happy to be paying a staggering amount of money to a player they could replace for a quarter of it and it makes a mockery of their claims to want to break even.

Bridge played nine games last season, 133 since he joined in 2003. Ashley Cole is ahead of him and he has no chance of taking his place. He even turned down a move to Portsmouth and regular football.

The lads he claims are the reason he want to stay, so he basically like being at a very expensive youth club playing pool and darts, while the bigger boys play matches that make money to pay his wages.

The example it sets is obvious and any young pro must look at him and wonder why they bother. If you are a youngster at Chelsea the message is to give up, because the club would rather tie a player with Bridge’s attitude into a contract on stupid money then give one them a chance. They could have effectively given ten young players 4-year contracts.

You cannot blame a man for accepting that sum of money and the security is brings, but this is not what should make a person become a sportsman. He has basically betrayed the very values that made him at Southampton all those moons ago: hard work, passion and ambition.

Hopefully it is not an indictment of the next generation of English football.

Shaving. What’s that all about then? For me a tribute to pain and suffering through years of effort and blood and tears.

In that time, shaving has become an almost religious (watch it!) experience. I always knew that somewhere there was an answer, a truth to be found, a reason. Finally I may have found it in a very nice product indeed, but that isn’t the point.

The point is, why?

Why have I spent the best part of ten years struggling through hell and back to shave? I don’t have to shave, I could grow a beard and moustache, I spent very large parts of it with stubble instead because I simply didn’t want to.

But still I persisted. I must shave, I must shave, I must shave. That has been the mantra.

Maybe it is the masculinity of it. A man shaves. Or he grows a big bushy beard. One or the other, but most men shave. You see your Grandad in front of the mirror as a kid with a foaming brush and a double edged razor, carefully scrapping the strangely evocative smelling cream from his face like an expert surgeon.

It is a craft, a skill that enters you to manhood. Boys don’t shave, men do.

It’s the smells, the barbershop of old re-created in the bathroom with all those gentlemanly odours. It’s not hard man, it’s more wood and cigars, like a Rolls or a Club.

It’s all the things you can buy, the handles, the blades, the razors and oils and creams and balms and brushes and mirrors…. Inside every man there is a collector, that’s why we love gadgets and cars.

You can spend a fortune on shaving. Razor and brush sets for hundreds of pounds, creams and balms that easily enter double figures.

And no matter what, we do. Some hate it, some love it, others may have a strange obsession with it, but maybe it is the last really male thing we have.

Men shave there faces, so do some women, but it is a truely male domain. A world women could never understand.

If you do it right it really can be an uplifting experiance. Not the everyday going to work shave, but the going out, something special extra-time-and-effort shave. The one where every pass is planned and executed, every contour is mapped and tackled. Afterward you feel smooth, new, fresh.

At the end of the day it is just a man shaving, but is it more than that? Is it a right of passage? I would say so, it is an achievement when you get it right, something that one day you will stand in the bathroom teaching to your son.

Then one day, maybe your grandson will sit on the edge of the bath and stare at you as the blade glides over your aged skin, taking it all in and one day remembering.