You Are Worthriss Aric Bawdrin, You Are Worthriss Aric Bawdrin!

I always found it difficult to sleep as a child. For up to four hours a night the eldest sister of the kids upstairs would fight a losing (and what seemed an emotionally breaking battle) to keep her siblings in check. Then, just as she was beginning to flag her parents would come back pished as farts from the pub and kick the shit out of each other for a few hours.

Simpler times…

On the nights when the carnage and the domestic violence gave way to psychological torment and unconsciousness, I would usually dose off around eleven. However, just as I was beginning to drift off into slumber, my bedroom door would invariably flash full with light and the behemoth figure of my mother would appear as an arm-raised silhouette in the doorway.

Held aloft in her hands were my dad’s ‘good shoes’ which when he was on the nightshift doubled up as arachnid destroyers. The shoe would be thrust into my hands and I’d plead for a night where I didn’t have to kill something! Maybe I could move in with the domestic abusers upstairs?

But I was never allowed to… I’d gingerly grasp the shoe taking care not to brush my hands against the splattered remains of the previous intruder’s mashed carcass! A gargantuan task given that we lived next door to a dampened wood collector and so spiders were aplenty seemingly destined to be fed to my dad’s shoes…

I’d approach the ‘beast’ which in reality was nowhere close to meeting the claimed dish-size of the spider in my mother’s head. Nonetheless, she would not be satiated until she saw blood on the carpet and guts on the ol’ size nines!

Fast forward to the present day and I find myself faced with a similar quandary. My housemate Simon and I are both of a similar school of thought on small animals; no killing. However, that has all gone out of the window now that there is a cockroach the size of my fucking thumb darting around our kitchen.

It’s 2am… If ever there was a city where you could get pest control products at this hour it would have to be Hong Kong. However, as a certified lazy bastard I’m reluctant to go out and find out.

And so in a full scale shift from my Dr. Dolittle ethos of not harming anything great or small, I find myself maniacally musing over the best way to murder the little bastard. I’ve never been in the scouts but I read that in between beatings and learning to be a lame-ass, they learn to be resourceful with what is around them…

So after a quick sweep of the flat I find that the most homicidal substances available in our flat are (1) Adidas Power Deoderant (2) Mr. Jackson Lemon Pine Toilet Cleaner and (3) Old red wine. In an instantaneous act of cruel thinking, I lay a small pool of bleach on the work surface, rustle up some courage by glugging at the surely mouldy wine and then spray the shit out of the roach with the Adidas Power Deoderant.

Now given that those little bastards can probably survive a nuclear explosion I felt compelled to spray it pretty comprehensively. The plan was to get it pissed on the alcohol before the more deadly repercussions of being doused at close range in body corroding chemicals became apparent.

The roach, possibly sensing the game was up, made a dash for the top of the cupboards and bloody made it too! When I’m as trolleyed as he must’ve been I can barely walk horizontally – but he had a plan to go vertical and what’s more he managed to follow it through. This again is something I couldn’t do if I was that drunk.

And so it all ended in an embarrassing scenario where I broke into a game of catch-out. I found myself salivating wildly as I turned out the lights then moments later turned them on in an auroric flash of anticipation; but the roach never appeared…

He could be dead…

He could be alive… Plotting and planning my demise from the ragged dried cornflake edges of my cereal bowl. As I write he could be amassing an army of cockroach cunts ready to ambush me upon my return home…

And what’s more, he’ll have so much Adidas Power Deoderant on that he’ll not even break a sweat!

Jimmy... I Hope You Haven't Been Campaigning for Social Justice Again?...

As the United Kingdom prepares to go the polls today, a veritable furore of disinterest towards the election pervades here in Hong Kong. As was to be expected, people are hardly drawing their eyes away from joyous afternoons monitoring their shares to see who out of Clegg, Brown and Cameron looks like flying past the post.

So, in the interest of drumming up something of a political atmosphere in my college, I decided to have a week of politically charged conversational activities with the students. It has cost me a fucking fortune in muffins and panettoné! However, it was worth it given some of the opinions that were expressed during our exchanges…

I started off with the gentle introductory questions inquiring what the students like, dislike and would want to change about Hong Kong. I groaned in resignation as the students respectively responded with shopping, mainland Chinese people and a desire to have more money and success.

Anticipating a long hour, I bit into the bleeding sore of a finger lickin’ good cherry panettoné and asked… Do you think Hong Kong should be a liberal democracy? I built a reservoir of mashed cake in my cheek ready to chew the predicted silence into sugary trans-fat oblivion.

‘NO!...’

All hell broke lose! Partly digested panettoné danced clumsily across the table as I failed blindly to ruminate on the unexpected chorus of negatives I had just heard…

‘No…’ I said, accentuating my disbelief.

‘If we have liberal democracy, people who are irresponsible and poorly informed will vote. Furthermore, people will vote for people because of them and not because of what they are saying they will do’…

This response was even more remarkable than the song of disapproval towards liberal democracy. For one thing, I usually cannot coax a sentence from most of my students without the words descending into a chorus of giggling and embarrassment. Also, most students recoil in horror at the thought of saying something in English to a native speaker; especially in from of their friends.

The enthusiasm and reasoned opinion of this student struck me as remarkable when considered against the image of the politically mobile young person in Hong Kong. Here, the media have conveniently labelled anyone with a degree of political energy under the age of thirty the “post-80’s” generation. And as you’d expect with the news media, the rationed, objective, passionate and intelligent connotations of this label have been overlooked in favour of the negatives.

The “post-80’s” are seen as a nuisance and a threat by older generations and also by many who fall into the category on an age basis. For them, a politically mobile youth in Hong Kong presents a challenge to a social order that keeps most “post-80’s” objectors nailed to their desk for twelve or more hours a day. Apparently, people want democracy but seem less than willing to push for better terms than those plied and moulded in Beijing.

In my opinion, Hong Kong should be proud of its young people. Before they’ve fully learned to stop pishing themselves, the poor children of Hong Kong are thrust into piano lessons, intimidating school interviews and six day weeks in the most needlessly disciplinarian education system. Who doesn’t let five year olds drink water when it’s 30° and 95% relative humidity?

From there, it’s high pressure exams, long (after) school days and supplementary weekend activities during which you spend your days militarizing your memory retention skills under the leaden burden of familial expectation. I swear I saw a fourteen year old kid going bald the other day and even then it was probably from daily beatings lest his parents end up on the streets in old age…

For this is the major problem with Hong Kong. Parents are motivated as much by a desire for their child to do well as by a desire to secure a cushy nest egg for their future. If the kid is a dumbass and they don’t raise enough money to support themselves then it’s an old age spent pushing cardboard around a city that doesn’t give a shit!

‘Cheers we needed the old cardboard, have a pension of less than £80 a month!’

If I had this kind of pressure hanging over me, my parents would be floating in a canal somewhere next to my guilty corpse and the rotted remains of the entire teaching staff of Arbroath Academy; the latter being drug addled but through no fault of my own.

Hong Kong needs to learn to be proud of these “post-80’s” kids and to recognise their remarkable resilience to a life and expectation cycle that would make strong men lose their minds. They should be lauded for showing an interest in their politics that is not echoed in their counterparts in more democratised nations. Instead, I fear the negative connotations attached to these fine young foot soldiers will drive them closer to the dire line of social stagnation. My young respondent will see the pointlessness of fighting the bigger birds and perch on the perch of middle of the road comfort…

Oh well… Perhaps they have Liberal Democrats in Hong Kong too…

"There's Something Different About Blanche..."

During the cold anti-social months when I was a teenager, my days were moulded around three things; Neighbours, Emmerdale and Coronation Street. You could even throw Home & Away into that mixer until the very bizarre ‘Alf has psychosis’ storyline rendered it unwatchable. Not that the others were of a better standard of course…

I remember one Neighbours episode which revolved entirely around a dream sequence. This of course is not immediately unusual until I add that the whole thing was done from the perspective of Bouncer the dog.

Also, as much as Emmerdale and Coronation Street are ripe for ridicule, it would be a sin to write on this theme and not pay special credence to Neighbours’ ‘evil Harold’ storyline. For those of you not in the know, Harold Bishop is a God-fearing moral mentor played by a God hating bike loving party addict called Ian Smith.

His descent into evil occurred after he became convinced that that BASTARD Paul Robinson was responsible for the plane crash (ahem…) that killed his family. Of course, everyone but Harold was happy to know his family was dead as they were rotten to the core as characters and as actors.

I don’t watch Neighbours any more of course. The move to channel 5 rendered it unwatchable given that I live in Aberdeen where the only signals we receive are those from the Lord above telling us to have sex with our livestock and then marry our cousins.

My discontent with the more TV signal friendly soaps such as Emmerdale and Coronation stems not from their unbelievable storylines, but from their insistence on cutting and pasting reality into fiction.

This week, Coronation Street viewers ‘will be shocked and saddened’ by the surprise death of Deidre’s mother; the Gillian Duffy-like prejudiced windbag Blanche. I’m sorry but have these fucking people been living in a wind tunnel? The wonderful actress who plays Blanche, Maggie Jones, passed away about a year ago!

For the TV bosses of course, this is television gold given that the actors and actresses express the rawest emotion imaginable. Those who wouldn’t normally watch the show, do so out of intrigue to follow up on what they’ve read in the news. For others, it’s an opportunity to see which cast members bleat so weakly that you can tell they thought the person was an arsehole.

I hate this kind of shit though! For me, if they are going to augment fiction with reality then they have to go the whole hog. Entire Coronation Street storylines would be neutralised if, instead of someone saying ‘Eddie, I had sexual intercourse with your brother and a duck and now I’m not sure whether our son’s big nose is because of that or the radiation leak from the plane that crashed on t’ street the other day’; the characters would simply say ‘Shut the fuck up Doreen… I’m trying to watch Eastenders!

Similarly, characters should be given license to rip the pish out of each other. For example, if she’s still in it, the cast of Emmerdale should just turn round and say to Patsy Kensit something like ‘I got an erection once watching your sex scene in Qaudrophenia’.

Ultimately, I prefer my soaps to stick with absolute hyper-nonsense. Such as in Neighbours when Harold’s adopted son Paul went off to become a big star playing Australian rules football for a team that doesn’t actually exist; after negotiating an addiction to steroids of course! Or there was the storyline where his neighbour Jack Scully returned from a less than successful spell playing professional football for the great English Premier League; the likely reason for his lack of success being that the team he was playing for (Barnsford) doesn’t actually exist.

So to all those who write for television soaps, I beg you to reconsider when you prepare an in-show homage to your dead. Instead of burying them for all eternity, follow the Australian model of complete ridiculousness and employ a new actor to take the place of the dear departed. If you want to follow the Australian model, perhaps you could replace the deceased with an actor who looks nothing like the person or go nuts and change their gender or species entirely.

When you see past the jocular racism, those Australians have got it bloody all right!