Ranty Goth

Spring has descended on London. Flowers are blooming, pockets of bright colour in bleak, grey landscapes, the sun comes out and the snow falls (this is crazy English weather). The days are getting longer and although it rains, a lot, you know winter is almost gone.
Also, the spring sniffle is here, in great sniffing, mucus filled hoards. The sturdy souls who soldiered through winter beating the cold virus succumb, the continually ill gain no respite and the pollen count rises so the hay fever suffers join the honking chorus.
Standing on the tube you are assaulted with sniffing, slurping and hacking of snot and mucus. Some sniff constantly, little slurpy sniffs trying to keep that dribble inside the nostrils. Some snort up big gobs of snot, roll them around the back of the throat and audible swallow the offensive goop. Others hope a long drawn out sniff will clear the airways, which fails and is repeated in a rhythmical pattern.
All this occurs in your poor travel distressed ear. This torture could be sufferable if it was relegated to the horror of public transport. Unfortunately it appears to be a rampant carbuncle on the backside of public health. From sniffing over your food in the posh sandwich shop to gurgling mucus, in the hush of a library, every where you go it is there office to retail to the plumber, sniffing! Not only is this gross, wide spread habit irritating it can not be good for halting the spread of the common cold and flu.
Is it too much to ask you to use a tissue instead of sniffing for gold? They are small and now come in convenient travel packs, easily slipable in a handbag or briefcase. Even carrying an old fashioned handkerchief is better than the constant abuse on the general public ears and sensibilities. Possibly if you are that ill you should stay at home instead of spreading your plague to all and sundry you get close to and let’s face it, in London that is a lot of people.
I suppose I can be thankful for one thing. I do not live in a country that it is culturally acceptable to sniff and roll the mucus, so I can offer the next drippy nose a tissue without causing offence but possibly embarrassment.

Further to my comments on UK driver’s licences, today I had to try to replace a lost licence card.

So I phoned the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency). After about 5 minutes on hold listening to how you could order a new card over the phone, I got through, and requested the replacement. But since they still had an old address on file, they had to send out a form by post, not do it over the phone. Security you know. Like the insurance company that spelled my surname wrong by one letter and refused to correct their mistake unless I wrote to them and enclosed a bill with my name on it. Unless you inconvenience people they don’t feel secure. I was at home anyway, so my shoes were already off, otherwise I might have been asked to remove them “for security”.

“Hang on”, I said, “I have correspondence from you here with my new address on it. You do have it on file.”

“That’s for your car registration, isn’t it” the operator said. “That’s a different department.”

“They could verify that this is in fact now my address”

“We don’t have a connection with them. It will have to be on paper. Can I help you with anything else?”

“How about talking to the other department every now and then?”

“They’re in a different building.”

“You could run a cable or something.”

That just about ended the conversation, since we are both at a loss for words.

This may come as a surprise to the DVLA, but car owners are frequently also found as car drivers, and updating one address but not the other is just doing half the job.

I don’t own property, so I end up moving rental once every few years. And then I notify a long list of people. Apparently the DVLA is special; it has to be on the list twice.

Hey, DVLA: If you insist on having separate departments, separate databases (security you know) and separate bureaucratic fiefdoms, here’s a suggestion. You could send out a letter. I’ll even write it for you:

Dear Sir/Madam.

We’ve noticed that you’ve just changed the address for your motor vehicle. We also know that you’re on our other department’s books as a driver at the old address. This has to be changed separately. Don’t ask why, it’s just how we do things. Separate buildings, no cables. Lead shielding against stray wi-fi communications. Different chap in charge, you know.

Anyway, here’s the form, you should fill it in now.

Vegetarian. Not a word that strikes terror into your heart, is it?
Gordon Ramsey may not approve of vegetarians but I bet he could manage to produce tasty food not involving meat.
This word appears to strike terror into airlines food ‘chefs’ hearts. They seem to lose all sense taste and imagination when faced with the concept of a meat free meal.
We are aware that airline food can pretty appalling at the best of times. I have seen the sandwiches that budget airlines charge an arm and leg for, not inspiring at all, but then again you are on a budget airline.
In the last few years airlines have been subjected to an ever increasingly competitive market and have had to up their game in terms of service. Food is one of these, and serving a variety of choices that don’t taste like reheated cardboard is becoming a reasonable selling point.
Recently my husband and I have taken a number of long haul flights, 11 hours plus, locked in a metal tube with 500 other sleep deprived and harassed passengers, that we paid a fortune to be part of as well as shoulder the carbon foot print guilt for. Hell at 2000 feet, at least they provide booze.
You need food to soak up that booze and vegetarian other half, on three different flights with separate airlines has been served macaroni cheese.
I know very little about this dish besides that Americans appear to have a love affair with it and it also seems to be the blandest pasta dish known to man besides plain pasta. I am assured by this article by an English cook it is possible to make this dish reasonably tasty.
When served to you by an airline it goes into another level of hell, becoming either a stodgy glutinous slightly cheesy pile of starch or a chewy, tasteless foil dish of warmed cardboard tubes. It is unimaginative insult to the taste buds of the eater. It is a ‘safe’ option with no thought and effort put into the preparation or taste of the dish.
We are in an age where Heston Blumenthal is making egg and bacon ice cream using some of the more weird techniques you will see in a kitchen to Delia Smith being able to sell out any product she names including instant mashed potato. Chefs have become big name celebrities and the western world is becoming more focused on the healthy nature and taste of our food to a point of obsession and supermarkets produce a wide variety of ready made meals that are quite passable in taste. Why airlines can not manage simple macaroni and cheese or even something more adventurous or are vegetarians that frightening

Imagine that your passport was comprised of two completely separate documents, of different shapes, sizes and construction, and that one was convenient to carry, but not the other. Imagine that you needed to present both of them together. That would be really boneheadedly stupid, wouldn’t it?

When renting a car in the UK, one must present both the laminated credit-card sized driver’s licence, and also the A4 paper counterpart that most people have forgotten about in a drawer somewhere. It’s a boneheadedly stupid system. The workaround to that is that the DVLA in Swansea will verify it over the phone, but only up to 9pm. And the workaround to that is to just ignore the stupidity after 9pm.

Smoking is not the most appealing habit on the planet, I don’t condone it but if people wish to commit slow suicide then who am I to stop them?  I will tell you I am filled with joy with the fact pubs and clubs are smoke free in many places including Britain and Australia even though I would like the pub owners to do something about the stale beer and sometimes wee smell that many establishments boast.
The thing that annoys me most, even more than having to walk through a nicotine cloud when I leave a building, is the butts.  They are everywhere!  I understand it is an addiction and heroin users leave their syringes around but surely a cigarette smoker is not quite as uncouth as all that?
I live in a flat and upstairs we have a smoker and he seems to think no one will notice the huge amounts of butts that litter the garden bed outside our window, flicked from his bedroom window above.  If they turned into viable compost this would be fine, but no, they don’t decay and are choc full of chemicals.  I am sure besides giving my husband grief they are not doing anything good for the soil or plants.
I am not sure what makes the average smoker a litter bug; I am sure they can not be all litter bugs because there would be a lot more litter on the streets.  What makes butts so easy to drop, flick or discard any old place?  Is this because they are lit?  Why are you putting something that burns that close to your face?  I suspect most smokers would tell me they are a small thing.  Really?  Next time you are outside having a smoke look at the ground, and in the gutters, pot plants, under benches and anywhere that appears not to be noticed.  It is an unsightly mess and combine that with the discarded chewing gum you can have my rage on a plate and buzzing in your ear for an eternity.
I understand you have an addiction but frankly that is no reason to force everyone else to deal with your mess from the street cleaners to the tax payers who pay for the street cleaners!
Perhaps if you don’t want to put that stub in your pocket, get one of those portable ash trays or just give up?

You know what I hate? It’s not important but I hate it anyway. I eat a fair number of apples, and I hate those little plastic stickers on apples. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the remains of many apples end up in the garden compost (or the organic recycling if you’re being pretentious), with the little plastic sticker still on them. Which is where you’ll find the sticker, a year or two later, still intact, wedged into the soft compost.

The bloody stickers are impervious to any biological breakdown process. These stickers are probably made as cheaply as possible, and it’s just incidental that they are almost indestructible - just a simple bit of industrial chemistry giving a thin film of plastic that’s going to go down into the geological record of the anthropocene era’s plastic-rich strata for alien paleontologists to pick over in a few million year time, but there’s got to be a better way.

There has been recently an number of articles and an interview about a goth couple and a leash.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the driver is a plonker and I suspect figured he had an easy target, Goths are generally not known to make a lot of carry on public transport beside a spectacle of them selves and would not as rule spit or pull a knife on say public transport employee. So, in my view he is out of line.

BUT what on earth is with the couple? If you are going to wear a dog leash you are going to have to cope with a certain amount of flack. Just as a furry running around in a tail and ears or an adult baby wearing a nappy in the local supermarket would expect weird looks. Kink is kink and it has a tendency to make vanilla (non kink) people feel a little uncomfortable and/or titter like 16 year old girls. You have to expect that.
Dressing as a Goth, you don’t do it so you blend in a crowd even in a crowd of Goths! There is going to be a reaction, be it negative or positive one and you should be prepared for that. (Mind you the bus driver’s reaction of pushing and abusiveness, if reported correctly, is over the top and should not be condoned.) To avoid the issues in the first place she could have held her leash or taken it off. Most dog owners will remove the leash if the dog is well trained enough.
As for the rest of the article(s), my word, they are dressed well for a pair of people on benefits. Most student Goths have to put up with charity shop black or creating their own designs with safety pins! This makes me wonder where the money is coming from, because benefits in most countries are not for being able to dress like a night out in the middle of the day. Maybe I am being a little harsh and they have put on their best clothes for the camera. But surely she should have had a coat, or did Mr Graves* neglect to put on out for his human pet? This was possibly because he was cooking and cleaning?
Now this is possibly where I have a real issue. She admits to not doing anything around the house and he admits that you would not expect a ‘pet’ to cook and clean but really? Is that kink or her taking the young man for a ride? She admits “I am a pet, I generally act animal like and I lead a really easy life,”. This just seems she is just taking the whole lazy student thing to a whole new level that is being justified by hiding behind kinkiness.
As for the comment about having a family, I have no problems with alternative lifestyles, a polyamorous family arrangement can be a little strange to those on the outside but a three or four parents under a roof is not that different to stepparents in different households really. The situations need to be handled carefully, for the benefit of the child. How will they handle this living arrangement? Will Tasha continue to be a pet if she has children? Do the give their daughter a leash for her birthday? Will they go out and get jobs to support these children? Hopefully they will relegate the kink to the bedroom and allow the children to develop their sense of individuality and tastes on their own.
Interesting questions to debate.
I just hope they realise they are going to look back at this in five years time and cringe and he apologies for not giving Tasha a bra to wear!

* No, I don’t think that is his real name.

Dear friends, we surely all agree
There’s almost nothing worse to see
Than some repulsive little bum
Who’s always chewing chewing gum.
Violet Beauregarde Song, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I work in a service industry and I understand there are certain people that like to chew gum. Each to their own but is it necessary to chew it all the time? Especially when you are asking for something and you wish to have the best customer service? You are not going to get that much of a positive response if you insist on chewing with your mouth open, displaying for the entire world to see and hear your disgusting piece of off-white gum. The sound of you madly masticating maybe acceptable in Japan but is not generally acceptable in western cultures.
The sound of chewing is much worse if you have to be in close quarters with people, in situations that there is nothing for it to be up close and jammed together like sardines. Public transport comes to mind.
I suspect some people have no idea what they look like when they are chewing gum, I am sure they don’t eat a sandwich in the same way. I doubt there are many employers and employees that would see eating whilst serving customers terribly professional but will chew gum.
There are places it is appropriate but they are few and far between, even more so when you look on the ground or under tables in public places. Eww, it is gross, I am sure cleaners would be happy to see the end of this vile thing. I think Singapore had the right idea.

Ahhh, the joy of the London Underground, fondly called the tube. I am rather fond of the tube in general, it runs quite regularly and is a fast method of transport. It is the bane of many locals and confusion of many tourists. I don’t hate it; I have seen public transport or lack of it in other countries.

So, why is Mort being pleasant about the tube then, you may ask? Well, it is the people on the tube I am rather annoyed with. Well, furious is a better word. There the whole tube etiquette thing, don’t talk to people etc. But I do think it is a good idea if you are sitting to look up every now and again at the people standing in front of you. They may have a WALKING STICK!

Ok, there are possibly some people out there who use a walking stick just to look like a dandy or some thing, most of use them so we can function in the real world. To get from A to B. Most us, who have to use the blighted thing, are not impressed with our ageing or mangled bodies that have forced our hand to have to use them. I don’t use mine often, I have two, one in my handbag, clever folding up type and one for looking flash with when I am trying to elegant whilst in pain. I used my stick because I am in pain and not stumped your toe pain, but deep hot iron in the hip socket pain. Admittedly as the average tube traveller you are not meant to know that.

Anyway, back to the point. A walking stick generally indicates a fragility of some sort. For all you know they could end up in your lap if you don’t give up you seat. It is polite and believe me, the person more than understands the sacrifice it is to give up that carefully guarded place to rest your bottom. The movement of the tube that you find of tiring is about three times worse if you have trouble walking and absolutely excruciating if you have pain in your joints.

In the past few days, with the cold, I have had my stick with me on the tube, I have also stood for a number of stops whilst people read papers, turned up their audio player of choice, closed their eyes or looked everywhere but at me and my stick. Perhaps, I should have asked my fellow travellers to move, I did think of that but I also thought of hitting them over the head with my stick.

If you are no the tube, have a seat and are able to stand, keep an eye for those who may struggle, ladies with firm round lumps, people with small squirming children and people who are having trouble standing because they are elderly, disabled or carrying a stick, be a walking or white cane and stand up and do a good turn.