Merry Christmas? 1. Mad Friday and Panic Saturday

Yesterday was “Mad Friday”, the peak night of alcohol-related injuries before Christmas. Last year emergency services counted 6,681 alcohol-related injuries during the equivalent Friday. Offices are closing early, so people start drinking early at office parties. Britain is going mad. Overindulgence at office parties leads to dangerous situations on the night that the nation’s pre-Christmas festivities usually climax. Many people are completely drunk before 10pm.

The problem is that being drunk is socially accetable in the UK. I know a social worker who regularly calls his employer on a Monday morning to say he won’t come to work that day, because “I was so drunk last night”.

“Okay mate, no problem. See you tomorrow.”

These aren’t incidents. Christmas binge drinking is a national problem, and it has been for decades.

The website of the London Fire Brigade warns: ”As 60% of house fires start in the kitchen, we want you to think about getting something to eat while you’re out rather than cooking after you’ve been drinking.” LFB advise the public to “grab a takeaway”.

In London, an alcohol recovery centre is operating in the West End and a second treatment centre has been set up at Liverpool Street station. In Birmingham, a similar unit is running in Broad Street.

London Ambulance Service operations manager Phil Powell said: “December is always a busy month for us and the number of people who call for an ambulance because they’ve had too much to drink is much higher than usual.”

In Wales, ambulance crews have joined forces with the police and local authorities to provide a range of support services for Christmas revellers. Dafydd Jones-Morris, Welsh Ambulance Service director of operations, said: “We are not killjoys but we do ask the public to act responsibly and to look after their friends and colleagues.”

Today is Panic Saturday. After a night of drunkenness people need to get in their Christmas shopping. Christmas sales make up 18% of the annual retail sales. £ 1,5 million a minute is spent by Brits today.

And after Panic Saturday binge drinking continues, with Mad Saturday, Mad Sunday, and so on, until January. That’s when the shit hits the fan, because there’s no money left to feed the kids and pay the bills.

Binge-drinking is getting out of control in Britain. One in four adults in Britain are binge drinkers and the UK recently topped a poll as Europe’s heaviest alcohol consumers and alcohol abuse is clearly escalating. The Office for National Statistics reported in November 2006 that the alcohol related death rate in the UK doubled from 4,144 deaths in 1991 to 8,386 deaths in 2005. This year alone these rates have increased by 11%.

Up to 2.6 million children live with parents who drink at “hazardous” levels and around 700,000 children are thought to live with dependent drinkers. Pressure put on women to be “supermums” is felt to be increasing alcohol use as a coping mechanism. Health and social care provider Turning Point said more than 5,000 people who used their alcohol treatment services last year were parents.

The latest data for alcohol-attributable conditions has shown a 9% rise on the previous year, resulting in a doubling over the decade. For 2010/11 the figure was 1,898 alcohol-related hospital admissions per 100,000 population in England, up from 926 admissions per 100,000 in 2002/03.

Merry Christmas?

Identity Mysterious Grafiti Artist Banksy Finally Revealed

For years the identity of the grafiti artist Banksy has been a complete mystery. There have been numerous rumours and theories as to Banksy’s identity. Names often suggested include Robin Banks and Robin Gunningham. Another theory is that Banksy is actually a collective of artists rather than a single person.

Banksy, himself, states on his website:

I am unable to comment on who may or may not be Banksy, but anyone described as being ‘good at drawing’ doesn’t sound like Banksy to me.

 

Known for his contempt for the government in labeling graffiti as vandalism, Banksy displays his art on public surfaces such as walls and even going as far as to build physical prop pieces. Banksy’s work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.

A famous Banksy-quote is, “We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.”

Today we’re finally able to reveal Banksy’s identity. His full name is Banksy Moon, and he was born 13 June 1944. He has some sort of a daytime job in New York and seems to be related to Eastenders’ Alfie Moon and Michael Moon.

Banksy wasn’t available for any comments on the revelation.

My New Viancée – Al-Maghraoui allows it!

Jack and New Viancée

This is my new viancée. As soon as she’s 9 years old we’re able to get married. I can’t wait!

In 2008 Moroccan Imam Muhammad Al-Maghraoui issued a fatwah in which he said it was allowed to marry girls from the age of nine. He based this fatwah on the fact that – according to Muhammad Al-Maghraoui – the prophet Muhammad married Aisha bint Abu Bakr. Aisha was six or seven years old when she was betrothed to Muhammad and nine when the marriage was consummated.

In 2011 the Board of the orthodox As Sunnah Mosque in The Hague, Netherlands, invited imam Al-Maghraoui to come to Holland to deliver a lecture on a five-day conference starting December 23. Abdelhamid Tahiri, the Chairman of the Board, denies that Al-Maghraoui propagates sex with nine-year old girls. “In the Arab world, and also in other parts of the world, it is custom that a girl as young as nine enters the contract of marriage,” explained Tahiri. “This doesn’t mean that it’s allowed to have sex with her. It’s a simple contract; no more, no less.”

Many people, including the Dutch Parliament, are strongly opposed to Al-Maghraoui’s planned visit to the Netherlands. They feel that Al-Maghraoui’s visa should be denied. Iranian-born political commentator Ferdows Kazemi wrote, “A free country like the Netherlands shouldn’t offer a platform to people who undermine women’s rights and use their authority to spread their ideas.”

“The fact that even Moroccan Muslim women are opposed to this visit, says it all,” Ferdows Kazemi said. “Should he be he allowed to come here to take part in the conference and possibly adjust his opinions? I think that would be naive. To me, a person who refers to a 1400-year old tradition to justify the marrying off of nine-year old girls, doesn’t seem to be receptive to our enlightened views.”

I agree with Ferdows Kazemi. Many people with far less radical ideas than Al-Maghroui have been denied entrance to this country, so why not he?

Gastronomics Now Ready for use!

No, the International Gastronomic Reference Work is not finished, and it never will be, because it’s a dynamical process and there will always be new words to add. However, it’s ready for use and it will be updated on a daily basis. Enjoy!

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About Englishness

Wrong. You don’t buy fruit because you want to eat it — the bananas in this photograph would have been binned weeks ago — you buy it for decoration purposes.

For four years I’ve been in a relationship with an English middle class woman, actually a lower middle class woman who moved up to middle middle class (medium middle class?) thanks to a nice inheritage and sending her children to a Jewish school.

Now all these things may sound rather average to you, English people, but to me, being Dutch, they are completely incomprehensible.

Our society is also divided in classes — not nearly as much as English society though — and one reason for that is that the Dutch don’t encourage people to hang on to their local accents. The only reason that the English do encourage them to do that is to re-enforce the class system. Although it seems to be rather tolerant, it’s bloody patronising.

Years ago I needed to get some information from the Dutch Open University, who’s head offices are in Geleen, in the south of the Netherlands, and I expected someone to pick up the phone saying, “Good afternoon, this is the Open University”, but I heard something completely different and I disconnected. In hindsight the woman who answered the phone said exactly that, but in her own southern accent, of which I didn’t understand a word. In Holland we would say this was rather unacceptible from a national institution.

Recently I had an argument with British Gas, and to solve the problem I had to call a certain department. I was connected with a woman with the thickest West-Glasgow accent I’ve ever heard, and I was living in Sussex. Try to argue with a woman with a thick West-Glasgow accent if you’re not from West-Glasgow and you’re fucked. So, to British Gas, this is very functional.

The other day a British BBC journalist from West-Belfast was questioning a Russian politician on national British TV. She was asking him what whas goying on roight noy, and she had to repeat her question three times before he, who speaks English very well, understood what she was going on about. English middle class people LOVE that, because it separates them from the trash, so yes, please, let’s keep the accents! 

The English middle classes divide people into OKAP and NOKAP, meaning Our Kind Of People and Not Our Kind Of People, and the easiest way to do that is to encourage them to hang on to their local accents. So we let the NOKAPs being educated by NOKAPS, and the OKAPS by OKAPS, to avoid them to mix. So English people are quite okay with Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh people presenting BBC News, because they give them the opportunity to maintain the ever so important division between OKAPs and NOKAPs.

Another thing I have learned is that in middle class families, during an argument, you do not raise your voice.  In fact, the more drunk (or tired) they get, the more they will lower their voices, so after three gin and tonics you really have to ask them to speak up. There is another discrepancy here, because in the British Parliament, and institution that sadly enough contains of a majority of middle class people and always will be, never mind if they’re Tories or LibDem or Labour, exactly the opposite is true.  In a domestic argument, however, no matter how good your arguments are, you’re definitely at fault if you raise your voice. “But Jack was absolutely right!” “Could be, but he raised his voice. Absolutely disqualified.”   

English people are always after bargains, and English supermarkets are taking advantage of that inherited defect. Supermarkets like Asda and Tesco try to sell you as much as they can, so they offer you 3 for the price of 2. Although the English people usually only need 1, they buy 3, because it’s an “offer”, and they end up binning the 2 they didn’t need. How clever is that?

Another thing is the wine. Here in St. Leonards we have two Tesco’s — one in Hollington and one in Bexhill. Both sell an excellent white Italian Merlot, but the one in Hollington costs 4.95 and the one in Bexhill costs 2.99. Although it’s exactly the same wine, the same bottle, the same lable, English people would rather buy the expensive one from Tesco Hollington than the cheap one from Tesco Bexhill, because they think that the quality of wine is directly related to the price of it. The more expensive the wine, the better the quality. By the way, the same wine costs 0.79 in Italian supermarkets. Must be crap? I strongly disagree.

English people think that they are the centre of the world. So they try to change the whole scheme of things, even the Latin language, which existed ages before the English language was born. The Latin I (“ee”) is stubbornly and consistantly pronounced as “aye”, the name of the once beautiful (before the English came) Ibiza is — horrifying to the ears of civilised people — pronounced as “Ayebeefa”, and when you try to tell English people, even middle class people,  that this really isn’t the right thing to pronounce foreign names, they will say that you might be right, but it’s the English (dominant) way to do, and if you don’t do it people think you’re a snob. So to avoid any problems, the English call the Italian town with the beautiful name of Livorno (not Laayvorno) Leghorn, which in Dutch means “egg producing chicken”. To many people the British Empire never ceased to exist.

I advise you to learn Mandarin. Hopefully the Chinese, our next (almost present) dominant culture will appreciate that there has never been a painter called Vincent Ven Go in the Netherlands, but surely a Vincent Van Gogh (“Vahn Khokh”)

I’m opening a bottle of Chablis (not “Shebliss”) and will try to enjoy it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many English people haven’t got an iota (“aye-ow-tah???”) what I’m talking about.

Dominique Straus Kahn facing more problems

Carla Bruni pregnant

Neuilly-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, is France’s wealthiest suburb, and Tristane Banon, a French journalist and writer, was born there on 13 June 1979. She is the daughter of the Socialist Party politician Anne Mansouret, a regional councillor in Upper Normandy and French-Morrocan businessman Gabriel Banon who served as industrial policy advisor to French President Georges Pompidou and as economic advisor to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

She published her first book, a long essay entitled Erreurs avouées… (au masculin), about the biggest mistakes in the lives of political figures, in 2003, when she was 24. Her first novel, J’ai oublié de la tuer (“I forgot to kill her”), was published one year later. Her second novel Trapéziste (“Trapezist”) appeared in 2006, followed by Daddy Frénésie (“Daddy Frenzy”) in 2008.

Tristane Banon has a very creative mind and she writes about the things that happen in Neuilly-sur-Seine, or could have happened in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Also she writes about things that, in her opinion, should have happened in Neuilly-sur-Seine. If you’re a bored, spoiled little novelist, writing the truth is the last thing you worry about. And why would you?

I write novels on the basis of existing persons, and at the end of the day I find it hard to distinguish the truth from my fantasy. And contrary to Tristane Banon I’m quite a stable person. So I can understand why she mixes the truth with her fantasy, especially when it finally gets her the attention she so deperately craves for.

Yes, you’ve guessed it right, Tristane Banon accuses Dominique Strauss Kahn of attempted rape in 2002, when she was 23.

And that’s not Dominique Strauss Kahn’s only problem. Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is pregnant. Guess who’s going to be blamed for that?

 

To Jump or Not to Jump

The road is blocked. Six police cars, two firebrigade trucks, and one ambulance are standing by.

A ladder is brought to a window. A young man wants to commit suicide by jumping out of the window, and the firebrigade wants to prevent that by manoeuvring a ladder in front of the window.

The fireman is a bit embarrassed. In the mean time the young man’s buddies have arrived and they will try to talk him out of it.

The police, the firemen and the ambulance guys are relaxed, but they won’t reveal any detail of the situation.

Okay, the young man has calmed down. Everyone can go back to base.