love and hate

2006-08-17T05:09:00.000-07:00

Here's my first post. It's in the form of a list, which I suspect may be the case with a lot of my posts.
I'm a bit of a fan of hate lists - in fact it was the 'Pet Hates' post on helgoescamping.blogspot.com that inspired me to create a blog.
I’ve tried to avoid all the obvious ones, like I love my friends and family, I hate the rise of the BNP. You can take that sort of thing as read if its exclusion concerns you.
You might notice that there's a lot more under hate than under love. I hope this reflects more on the fact I ran out of time than on my attitude to life.

Things I hate:

1 – Radio 4. It’s the voices that do it. I like every regional accent, and posh accents for the most part too, especially the clipped, military sounding ones. I also have no objection to the generic southernish ‘non accent’ that I and many of my friends have. That doesn’t leave much to hate, but what there is left radio 4 have taken.

2 – Computers. Time thieves, every one of them.

3 – Broadsheet newspapers. Tabloids are crap too but at least they make less effort to hide the fact. Plus you can read them on a platform in anything other than a dead calm without getting them wrapped round your head.

4 – Columists in Sunday magazines. Like radio 4 on paper.

5 – The general public. (On a bad day).

6 – The fact that as I get older I down grade my ideals and aspirations in the face of life experience. It’s a bit like a war of attrition that I’m almost imperceptibly losing over the course of several years. Is this what it felt like to be a German in 1917? I’m trying to combat this erosion of my radicalism by not thinking about things very much, on the grounds that I can’t then change my opinion on them.

7 – Anarchists holding down jobs or completing courses of study but choosing not to display this basic competence in their activism. You are responsible for the increasing shakiness of my faith (and it is now faith, no longer considered opinion) in non-hierarchical organisation. See point 6.

8 – Grey squirrels. At best one up from a rat. They are such a menace that in Cumbria if you see one you can ring up a number and some guys turn up in a Land rover with guns and hunt it down. I want that job.

9 – In fact I’d settle for any job where I got highly trained and issued with a fire arm. Preferably it would also involve land rovers or helicopters and wearing lots of black. The problem is that it would also have to be ethically acceptable to an eco-anarchist. So far, despite lots of thought, I haven’t come up with anything. Until I do I guess I’ll stick with carrying boxes for £7 an hour.

10 – Cats and their wildlife killing ways. Well, maybe hate’s too strong a word.

11 – Feeling tired in the day. In fact any lack of energy or enthusiasm. But not being fucked from doing something good like running over mountains, training hard or staying up all night on drugs. I like that.

12 – Ideological Non-Violence.

13 – Packet sandwiches and other over-priced convenience ‘food’. Why do I buy it? The exception is tea at motorway services, or better, train station cafes. Love it.

This brings me on to things I love:

2 – Listening to radio 2, especially while driving.

3 – Music. Not all of it but a lot. Especially country and euphoric house.

4 – Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut. Currently number 1 in my list of best books, and has been for over a year.

5 – Being up early to do something active, especially on a Sunday. It’s the light – everything looks fresh and pretty and full of unspecified potential - plus the undeserved feeling of superiority over your fellow humans.

6 – Overgrown gardens full of blackberries and nettles.

Be Like water

love and hate