No blame = punishment

Those who follow my blog will know that I rarely get overly political and normally try to inject some humour but occasionally even I have to get serious.

I have just started the process that is required to resolve the last steps of my divorce and it reminds me of the plight of men in these situations. Before you stop reading let me make two things clear; this is not a rant against women and I was not the party responsible for my divorce, my partner had an affair.

So with that straightened out let me explain what happened to my ‘marital home’. To set the picture, I had a mortgage before I met my wife and the various properties that we resided in were entirely in my name, she was never added to a mortgage. So we split up and we have children, she cannot afford to make a home so the court orders that she shall remain in the house and make ‘best efforts’ to remove me from the mortgage.

Herein lies an issue that the legal system has not caught up with. No ‘best efforts’ will convince a mortgage company to remove a wage earner in favour of a welfare case, in their defence it would make no financial sense. So the ex stays in the house for 15 years and the fella has to make his own way, I have no particular objection to this it makes sense in terms of easing the burden on the state.

But, because he remains a mortgagor, the fella cannot move on in any real terms. The days of simply obtaining a buy to let mortgage are gone and you now have to provide evidence of your primary address, the one that you don’t live in anymore. Simply put, for 15 years you are prevented from owning your own home and have to suffer at the hands of the rental market. And when these 15 years are done? you are probably too old to take on a mortgage for the standard term.

So whilst the party who remains in the house moves on and enjoys a home that she will eventually be able to purchase at a bargain basement price the fella sees his capital eroded and spends his time renting rather than purchasing. This seems to me to be an unfair penalty on the fella and it is one that the courts are complicit in since they make no provision for the exiting partners accommodation.

Surely if she has not removed your name from the mortgage then she has not complied with the courts instructions I hear you say. Well firstly the instruction is a vague ‘best efforts’ and secondly what can the court do? Whilst the bank are a party to your life (and will be for at least another 15 years) they are not a party to the divorce and therefore the court can do nothing to compel them to do anything. I am not saying for one minute that I have the answer to this but isn’t time somebody asked the question? why are we condemning men to back street lending or high cost commercial lending simply because their marriage has failed?

I would like to say that this is the last political post but feel the subject may continue to irk for some time yet.

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Inappropriate blushing

A few years ago something changed in the brewing of Becks lager and I became violently allergic to it. This was not just flushed cheeks but itchy, burning skin and difficulty breathing. Some experimenting revealed that the challenge was specifically the bottled product and I henceforth avoided it. It would be nice to think that was the end of the story but, since Ms Nature is involved, it is not.

Since the rather scary incident with Becks I have developed occasional alcohol blush. This reaction results in scarlet blotches across the skin and is a common ‘allergic’ reaction in Asians. The cause of it in Caucasians is less well understood but it does tend to be random, as I have found, rather than every occasion.

Thanks to Dr Google and some unintentional experimentation I have moved a step closer to understanding the triggers, further experiments will be needed to confirm. The theory is that a reduction in ALDH slows the metabolism of acetaldehyde which is also the mechanism used in drugs to treat alcoholism.

The annoying thing is that the symptoms seem random, well they did. On Saturday night I drank some beer, nothing unusual in that, on Sunday afternoon it hit. After one pint a friend enquired as to whether I had been welding, the colour is that vivid. But here is where research is king, apparently ALDH reduces with hydration levels. Obviously drinking beer reduces hydration but there is one other key from the weekend, chinese food!

I have not eaten Chinese food for some time, I avoid it because it is unhealthy, often unpleasant and also because it dehydrates me. This weekend I had a craving for crispy chili beef which I satisfied on Friday. Unusually for me I conserved part of the meal for Saturday night and thoroughly enjoyed it. It would seem that the combination of alcohol and salt reduced my hydration level and this triggered the blush. I think that there may be more to it than this because I didn’t suffer a hangover which is the usual indication of dehydration but it’s a start.

In other news I have yet another scary example of the welfare culture of this country. My friend’s daughter asked to do something over the weekend and he explained “daddy doesn’t have the money for that”. Without a thought his daughter advised going to the bank to get some money. Daddy then had to do the whole ‘you have to work for money speech’ to explain how money gets into the bank.

Ever thoughtful his daughter was not going to leave it there “don’t they put money in your bank for you? They do for mummy” obviously he attempted to explain the reason that mummy got money paid into the bank but his daughter seemed less than convinced. I felt for the guy and the situation he found himself in, how should he explain it, in fact how could anyone? Do you explain to your daughter that in the UK the state sponsors mothers? But if you don’t then you have to make the case that mum is wrong and that’s not a winner either.

In a country that is massively over populated, has high unemployment and huge welfare dependency how do you explain state sponsored childbirth? Like the ever improving economy and the never ending glass it is a myth but unlike the last two we believe it. So the friend whose young, part time employed son has recently become a father was proud. The lad has split with the mother but “give him his due he helped her move into her flat”. As a father, hell as a human being he should be in despair. Another child with no future, born to a young mum and funded by a bankrupt state, it’s not an inspiring situation.

Of course the father will ‘step up’ and graciously accept the £1 per week reduction in his tax credits which the state will impose as child maintenance. The mother’s parents will be declaring how well she is doing as the state funds the next 16 years of her life. This general acceptance of the situation is symptomatic of people faced with a situation that they cannot understand. It won’t be long until the card makers hit upon this lost opportunity and produce ‘welcome to the gravy train’. A clothes company will produce baby clothes with ‘sponsored by the national debt’ emblazoned upon them. Remember you heard it here first.

The language of youth and devilish reversing

I am clearly no longer a young man and one of the ways this shows itself is that I do not understand the language of youth. I understand this, it is as natural as the creaking arthritis that is becoming a more constant companion and the desire to hear the words in music. I am not completely oblivious to the altered interpretations of language that the youth use, I don’t dive for a bucket when I hear them say that something is sick. For me the youthful adaption of the language is quite unpleasant, the desire to mimic cultural tones of those less educated than oneself demonstrates a sad lack of identity and confidence. But the youth, by their very nature, will always be younger and always trying to differentiate themselves.

There are some aspects of the development of language that are more disturbing as they creep into general use. I am deeply unhappy, for example, that welfare has become “pay” or “money” in the UK since this softens the reality that the state is sponsoring a person. For some reason I got to thinking if I could educate the world as to one piece of language what would it be. The answer that I have fallen upon is the difference between the words ‘want’ and ‘need’. I think that if we could educate people as to the true definitions of these two words the world would be a happier and more fulfilled place and, more importantly, I wouldn’t get so angry.  I set out to establish some easy examples and came up with:

• You ‘want’ chocolate’ but you ‘need’ oxygen
• You ‘want’ takeaway but you ‘need’ food
• You ‘want’ beer but you ‘need’ water

At this point I started struggling, I could find loads more ‘wants’ but struggled to justify more ‘needs’. A home came to mind but, as many prove nightly, that is not a true need. Human life is a simple mechanism that requires fuel and hydration to survive, if it’s not one of those then you don’t really need it. We have complicated our lives and I fully accept that we need to pay the mortgage or fill the car to get to work but we don’t need to go the pub or visit friends, they are nice things to do but not essential.

In part this fuels the welfare culture, this belief that we need Sky or we need beer or, perhaps most sadly, that our children need toys. The happiest children in the world have little more than the love and attention of their parents but society, especially in the UK, creates artificial aspirations and beliefs. So we have parents who believe that their children’s happiness and welfare is directly related to the volume of “Made in China” labels under the Christmas tree. An aspiration to provide toys for your child is normal and correct but this has been manipulated and mutated such that, for so many, it is impossible to achieve. So we end up with badly educated parents trying to achieve the unachievable, giving up and getting drunk.

The result of this ‘feast or famine’ style of parenting is that little Johnny is fed garbage all year in a vain attempt to pay the loans taken out to pay for last years Christmas. By the time this Christmas comes around little Johnny’s parents will despair that they cannot afford more junk so will slip into self pity. The truth is that with no loans little Johnny could eat better and he would be happier making jam tarts with his mum than watching a drunk dad racing cars on the X-Box that the family ‘needed’. Next time that you find yourself saying that you need something just stop and check if you mean that you want it.

That’s my early morning philosophy done for today, next up the devilish train operators. I find myself on the first London departure from Derby today as I have to head South for a medical, the train departs at 04:37. Now normally this is the 05:00 departure but before Christmas they took to retiming it and running it on a diversion route. Without going into the technicalities of the diversionary paths from Derby station I will just say that the train departs in the normal direction but then stops and continues the journey in the reverse direction. I know this and so I claimed a seat at the ‘rear’ of the train facing in the ‘wrong’ direction.

My traveling companions did not seem to be aware of this twist to the journey and so they boarded the ‘front’ of the train. The train crew clearly knew as well as I do that the position of a commuter’s seat is more important than the arrival time, they ‘need’ to be at the front. So before the train sets off the train crew announce several times that the set has been retimed but will follow the timetable after Derby, no mention of the reversing move. With the doors locked and the train setting off in the ‘right’ direction tickets were checked as normal. Then comes the devilishness, an announcement that the train will shortly “come to a stand for a few minutes whilst the driver changes ends and will then continue with first class leading”. This announcement generates a stampede to join me in the ‘rear’ of the train. The thing that I found so English in this whole scenario was that following the first station stop the tickets were checked again and every one of the ‘end changers’ was greeted with “can I see your ticket please” before their flustered look elicited a “oh did you change ends”. No matter who you are in life you will always have a chance to know more than somebody else!

Nature’s alarms and Mr Mum

Ok so maybe my post yesterday re the battle with Ms Nature was premature. At 2am this morning I shifted in bed and woke to a spike of sharp pain and a crunching sound! I consulted my encyclopedic knowledge of medicine for an appropriate course of action. So if you happened to be passing my apartment at 2am I trust that explains why I was doing dumbell curls.

This morning involved another good soak in warm water to get some movement back. This technique is great but not brilliantly suited to cold days when the temperature change can be quite unpleasant to say the least. But I’m no quitter so whilst I may have declared victory a little early it was only the timing that was incorrect and not the outcome.

Over the weekend I was struck by another aspect of the ‘defeminisation’ off women. The big butch, chain smoking women with children seem to have taken over the ‘father figure’ role and abandoned the mother one. This is not a critique of size or appearance, there is something more in the general demeanour of these women. They are easily observed at one of their frequent meeting places: the cafe or Iceland on welfare day and the pound shop three days later.

These people move in packs like a terrorist cell and can be quite intimidating. But the really scary thing is the affect that they will have on their offspring. The sons will grow up thinking that women fight like men and can take a punch. These will not be boys that grow up caring for their mother, there will be no fragile old ladies to visit with grandchildren.

Then there is the daughters, brought up with a wrestler as a role model. These girls will learn from a young age that it is better to learn to slug it out than to waste your time learning to construct an eloquent repose. They will attend the first school disco looking like they put their makeup on with a magic marker, having asked mum for advice.

Remember that I just point out this stuff, look around you this week and you will soon spot your own examples.

It’s not odd but it is mean

I had a conversation, well message exchange, this week that reminded me that my life is not quite normal. I guess that when you spend enough time doing something you forget that everybody else is not doing the same. This particular example was dietary habits but there are many more.

As you know I work away from home, at the least I am away Monday to Friday and sometimes longer. I have worked this way since before I had children, it’s my normal way of working and what I am used to. Living out of a bag is how the majority of my life is spent, not just odd weekends away, it’s just what o do. The thing is that the apartment which I call home is also a transient location in my head. I may have lived there for eight years but I rent it and don’t consider it to be permanent.

The apartment has no freezer and, even if I chose to add one, insufficient space for one. Whilst I am free to waste food you will appreciate that in reality my domestic environment restricts my diet. Now the conversation started around dinner, forgive me for forgetting why, which is a health shake. For those that think hotel residency revolves around the restaurant let me assure you that is only for visitors. For those of us that live in hotels restaurants are the places we go to entertain, if we have to.

Even the healthiest restaurant menu is not something that you want to be eating from 4 nights a week. Apart from not being healthy it is disconcerting when you know the full menu verbatim in a number of establishments. So for me dinner is a health shake and probably 6-8 cups of tea throughout the evening. But of course I have a cooked breakfast don’t I? Well no actually I don’t, I am not a breakfast person and always leave the hotel before breakfast.

I rarely have time to eat lunch and to be honest if I did I certainly don’t have the inclination. Occasionally I will add a packet of crisps to my weekday diet but, in the main, it consists of chocolate shake. The shake itself only originates from the accident and I consider it my nod to nutrition.

So I get home and eat for England right? Well no it’s actually not that simple. Grocery shopping on Friday is performed at a small local convenience store so choice is not huge. Anything fresh that is purchased on Friday must be consumed or discarded by end of sunday. My weekend diet will rotate around common carb themes. Arrabbiata and rice/pasta is good and mushroom risotto is a staple, meat and fish are oddly uncommon. I have no intention of being vegetarian it’s just that meat and fish are not often offered in packages that suit my lifestyle.

Part of this is efficiency, I love cooking but I hate inefficiency. Why would I use an oven to cook a roast that only I will eat? The inefficiency alone is enough to ruin the meal. Take away menus are banned from my apartment because they only get called into play when I’ve had a beer and always result in mornings full of regret. One unintentional consequence of this lifestyle is that I struggle to eat large portions of food nowadays. So if I go out to dinner with friends I am uncomfortable for days afterwards. The other consequence, also unintended, is that I have reverted to the new parent vacuum technique.

I struggle to keep food in the apartment which I guess is my subconscious telling me it all has to be gone by Sunday. Multi-pack snacks are a disaster and rarely get past the weekend but of course this takes the place of dinner and so I end up ‘grazing’ rather than eating. Of course, I know I’m not strange really and that there are many people that follow the ‘gav diet’ so I thought I would speak out so the other know that they are not alone.

One other point that I would like to cover today is children. Whilst I know that this subject will be contentious I believe that I am sufficiently qualified. Much is made of the gift of life that a mother gives a child and it is indeed a wondrous thing to see but I challenge the concept that it is always a gift. At the local level when mum is on welfare with no prospects then I am sorry that is not the gift of life, it’s selfish and mean to bring children into the world if you can’t support them.

Life takes many twists and turns and nobody can see the future but if your life is a mess and supported purely by welfare having never worked then getting pregnant is not wondrous. What you are doing is condemning your children to a tough start that no parent should want for their child. Often we hear of examples of children that ‘rise above it’ and of course they happen but go to any of the thousands of sink estates in the UK and you will see they are the exception and not the rule. If you cannot offer your child the best start in life, better than your own or at least as good then let’s be clear this is not the miracle of conception but simple laziness in contraception.

I would extend this further, since I am not against offending nations, to the so called developing world. I don’t care if you think condoms are from the devil and babies come from the stork if you cannot feed your mouth then shut your legs. You are not a developing country or a civilised one if you are breeding mouths that you cannot feed. The only difference between welfare Sharon in the UK and the christian aid poster girl in Africa is that charity is legally enforced in the UK (we call it welfare). This is why I don’t give to foreign charity, to do so is a crime against those poor children because their ‘parents’ won’t learn.

I’ve heard people say they will only support birth control charity but I don’t believe that works. We have proved categorically in the UK that unprotected sex is the preserve of the feckless and hopeless and only the hard working consider consequences. I know some wonderful parents, both fathers and mothers, that struggle to bring their children up. But for me one of the saddest things about so called civilised society is that we have lost the ability to criticise those that bring children into the world without a thought to their future.

Welfare, tax and snack runs

On the train this morning I realised, yet again, that the welfare state has failed. A system that was designed to prevent starvation and malnutrition has evolved into a system that provides a better standard of living than the market dictates. The system breeds a laziness that says there is no need to work at education because the fall back really isn’t so bad. In a world where even the qualified struggle to get work it actually looks like a daft choice.

This morning’s delight was a middle aged couple whose biggest conflict seemed to be who was the butch one in the relationship. They were off visiting and spent the journey debating the other trips that they would perform during the festive period. Let me assure you that I didn’t presume that these were a welfare couple because of their obesity, facial tattoos or shell suits. Oh no I was informed by the loud conversations regarding who was lending who what money until their benefits came in. Honestly, declaring yourselves a couple is so last year there’s just no profit in it!

With the eloquence of a 3 year old monkey they proceeded to list the items that were needed for a trip down south. They would need to charge I-Pods, phones and, because it was a long journey, tablet computer. They would need to pack lunch because the first train had no buffet on it. In fairness they looked like they packed snacks whenever they had to leave the sofa. Once they had reached London they could stop at McDonald’s because it would be ‘nearly lunchtime’ hey never let it stop you ladies, it’s always lunchtime somewhere in the world!

In order to achieve the three trips that they have planned for this month there needed to be a level of financial planning. To paraphrase an advertisement ‘this is not just financial planning, this is welfare financial planning’. Rent had been paid last month, that is not actual rent but the top up that the state allows you to pay from your welfare to have a better property than you need. That left rent due third week of December but “we can knock that” because “they never chase until January and then we can pay £5 extra a month”.

On top of the three social trips they had to plan a shopping trip to Westfield, thank god for welfare they didn’t have the time to work! Of course in between these visits they had to see the diet consultant. That will be a nurse, paid by the state, who advises really stupid people that the more that goes in your mouth the bigger you get. Like job centre meetings these appointments are just ‘hardships’ that they have to suffer to maintain the welfare cheques.

I don’t doubt that if you took the time to learn their language and speak to these people they would tell a different story. Like so many of the population they would talk of ‘entitlement’ and ‘quality of life’ and that is where it goes wrong. It is this misguided belief that everyone is entitled to a good standard of living that encourages people to keep breeding, condemning future generations. You are not entitled to a play station, beer or satellite television. You have no right to travel, follow fashion or smoke. I, and many like me, made a contract with the government that we would fund welfare as part of our tax. It’s kinda like an insurance policy that we pay when we can and call on should we need to. In short we are paying for your I-Pod, your trips out, the gifts under your tree and the house you put the bloody tree in!

For the tax payers amongst us I would like to leave you with a thought. During the festive period when the pubs, hopefully, are busy count up how many people in your ‘welfare round’. This is not the physical round of people that you purchase a drink for but those that drink on welfare, the ‘hidden round’. If the two groups mix then take the opportunity, on your shout, to miss the welfare drink out. When you are asked why you missed them simply answer “I brought the last one”

Would you like a bag for that?

Occasionally I feel the need to give a voice to some information that appears to have passed a significant proportion of the population by. Today, I am afraid, is one such day. Having watched the ‘delightful’ portrayal of neighbouring towns on the mini series ‘bouncers’ last night I had pretty much despaired of the human race. Now it is easy, very easy, to condemn some towns as offering nothing more than a good place to drop bombs but is that too simplistic?

I think there is an underlying current here, something more is at work. My train was delayed heavily today and it left me with little to do other than people watch, I use the term people loosely. There was a young woman and her partner in the seat bay opposite me, they travel on this service regularly. By way of a description the man looks physically incapable of any work that he is mentally equipped for, you know the sort whose hands are perfectly formed to fit a can of cheap lager and has a body that reflects that ‘mum went to Iceland’. This is a man who gives no indication that he would be able to extricate himself from his hoody for the purposes of actual employment. His partner has all the femininity of Mr Ed, genes have not been kind to her but she has compounded their cruelty. The baggy clothes are not baggy, the plastered makeup does nothing to hide the square lines and marked skin. Her spoken words indicate that she only learnt her signature in order to file her welfare claim.

This couple argue and snipe incessantly, well that is to say she does. For his part the man ignores her for extended periods broken only be hurled profanity. What I noticed today was that in order to get his attention or to direct him his partner would lift her chest and offer it as a reward “you want some of this”. In this we see the underlying current that I mentioned. They are forever telling us that air brushed pictures of models cause women to have low self esteem. Apparently this sets aspirations for looks and body shape that cannot readily attain and this is indeed a sad thing. But what is worse, as seen on the TV last night and in pubs and clubs every night, is those that give up and don’t care.

Not for these girls the yo-yo diets, crazy workouts and expensive makeup. Oh no, they de-construct the concept to basic biology. These are the girls with no shame, that offend the eye and consider it sexy, you all know that you have seen them. They have lazily interpreted the word ‘sexy’ as ‘female’ as if it is simply a matter of what sex you are born. Overweight? Mouth like a sewer? Intellect of an uneducated mouse? It doesn’t matter, have breasts am sexy just chug ten pints and expose yourself you will be claiming joint welfare by Wednesday!

These women are supported by men that play this game, that accept it and nurture it, like some sort of zombie race they feed off each other. Theses people don’t care and are welcome to each other, I feel sorry for those that still persevere. The friends that I have who believe that they are ‘lanky’ not ‘leggy’ the pretty, confident women who feel that they must have some issue because they are not in a relationshit*

Don’t worry girls it’s definitely not you it’s the rest of them!

* correct spelling