I asked about this in GQ because the whole of my local area smells like shit, since the sewage works went up ten years ago. I am sick of tasting shit in the air every other night. I am sick of no-one doing anything about it.
Not many things make me really angry, but by God this does. Three miles from here there are 7-bedroom mansions selling for £400,000. And in Govan the only two well-maintained shops in the high street are the bookie and the off-licence. The shop used by the SNP for their candidate in 1997 is still painted in their colours and standing derelict, for Pete’s sake! No wonder they lost votes, everybody thought there were two candidates! Three hundred yards down the street is a poster congratulating Glasgow on its 1988 Garden Festival. It hangs in tatters.
The kids in the street just BREAK stuff, all day long. You tell them not to and you get put in hospital. I’m talking about TEN YEAR-OLDS AND BELOW. Their parents talk to them in ways I’ve never heard in PORN films.
There was a time when this place produced the fighting ships that won a WAR. This was once the FURTHEST AWAY POINT of the Roman Empire. WHY IS IT LIKE THIS? I haven’t got any more reasoned argument than a HOWL. WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN? WHY? WHY? HUH? WE HAVE TO LIVE HERE. GIVE US SOME MONEY and get the drugs and the piss and the hatred OUT OF HERE. The place is riddled with sectarianism, Catholic vs Protestant, deep, ingrained, alcohol-fuelled hatred, decades old, but of course nobody even believes in God. Nobody believes in ANYTHING. I wanna break something myself.
I’m going to write to this recently re-elected New Labour MP gentleman. If he doesn’t sort it out pronto I shall be walking rather pointedly in the opposite direction whenever I see an election poster. We know how to protest.
Yep, spiced oatrage with a teaspoon of brown sugar and a healthy dollop of lard - nothing like it.
Tell me, is it the same THEM who keep on hiding my old copies of Rolling Stone Magazine? Because if so, then I may have to give THEM a piece of my mind, believe you me!
I really prefer my spiced oatrage with fresh invocations of history, but when they’re out of season, the frozen do nicely. The canny invocations of history, however, just taste, well, canny.
Now, to be fairProte, the giant ants were not radioactive themselves, but rather a mutation caused by radiation.
Ross, it looks like you have a real sense of civic duty. Be a rabble-rouser. Be an “agent for change”. Run for public office. You’ve got a chance to change things, so try. I look forward to reading about you in the news.
I’d give him an 8.5. He’s expressed something absolutely primal in the human experience.
Like Nelson what’s-his-name in David Brin’s EarthRoss asks the fundamental WHY? Why is everything like this? Why is my life-neighborhood-family-world this way and not some other way?
And that’s the beginning of knowledge. The vast VAST majority of people never ask the question. They find it easier to just live their lives never knowing what’s moving to create their circumstances.
So, Ross, by asking WHY you’re opening up an opportunity in yourself to learn about (in this instance) politics, sociology, economics, psychology and a host of other topics related to your town.
And that makes you the inquisitive small fraction of the most powerful species the world has ever seen: humans.
So I applaud the HOWL. Sometimes it’s good to howl. It gets out the fundamental questions that most people ignore.
Ahhh, Yes, In the olden days the roads were paved with gold, kids respected their elders, shit didn’t stink, and people didn’t kill/hate others of a different race/class/religion.
You’re from Great Britian right? Shouldn’t the good old days bring to mind C. Dickens? Dirt, disease, child labor, crime, etc… Do the bad kids pick your pocket and bring the money to a guy named Fagen?
I would really love to have a bunch friends carry around scorecards just so we could hold them up when someone falls over/blows up/embarrasses themselves. It would be cool, very “Trigger Happy TV”.
As for the old days… yeah, I know, they sucked too. I wasn’t really trying to say they were great, so much as to… well, to question the lack of posterity around here, I guess. Not that war is good, either. The area is like an old man who once fought long years for his country, and is now left to a lonely, festering death by a society which forgets too damn fast.
But if kids round here didn’t respect their elders, the elders were at least not living in fear of them. This much is true - just because it has become a stock catchphrase doesn’t mean it’s not true. Sure, there were other problems. Bigger ones. But a guy was put in hospital with brain damage by eight year-olds a month or two ago… all he did was not give them a light for a cigarette.
Who am I angry at? I dunno. Myself and everybody like me who could help and so far hasn’t done enough. Rich politicians whose feet never touch the ground. Maybe I’m even angry because there isn’t one specific person to blame. But I’m angry enough to do something about it…
(close-up on tear-stained face, hardening into flintlike resolve)
… and I WILL.
(turns on heel and walks out, leaving saloon doors swinging)
(run credits)
voice-over: and “Ross of the West” returns next week for another hour of vaguely reasoned shouting… next on BBC, Labdude stands in for Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, while over on BBC2 Alessan is the guest critic on Week In Review…
Alright, well, we sacked London and York. Me and my army of bored layabouts… I mean, unemployed skillseekers… I mean, mercenaries.
You guys will shortly be receiving a bill for 900,000,000,000,000 sacks. And the coach fare from here to London. We hitched back up to York.
Plus, I’ve a feeling they’re onto us. It’s hard enough finding a lift which can carry 900 million million sacks full of golden goblets and trinkets, without trying to keep it under wraps. When we were questioned we couldn’t help blurting out your names… sorry…
Ross, cell 12, Barlinnie prison for Weird Anachronistic Crimes inspired by faintly anonymous internet folk
You are very badly off indeed, they are selling masions round our way, newly built, for £1.5mill within the same 7 miles of one of the poorest regions in Europe, the Seacroft/Gipton estate.
They shut all the pits near where I now live and we were granted European reconstruction aid, unfortunately our politicians would not comply with the rules that stipulate this money has to be additional and not substitutional expenditure for the money that was to used from central government funds, so we are still waiting for any investment in our area, unless they decide to put up another bloody millenium fiasco like the Earth Centre or the Centre for Popular Music-a complete misnomer since nobody goes there.
Anyway, to coin a local saying round here, Where there’s muck there’s brass lad, it might be shit to you son but it’s bread and butter to some.
casdave - would you mind if I hung onto our ICQ number or something? We have got to get some kind of activism going, and we may as well start now, if you haven’t already. I worked out of Drumchapel for a while - equally, known as a poorer area than most of Eastern Europe. What is going in Drumchapel, Possil, seacroft/Gipton, MossSide? Aren’t we supposed to be the affluent, decadent west? THIS SHIT SUCKS.
