Britain grabs Olympic Gold in Whingeing

Britain’s whingers put a smile back on the nation’s face after a sensational triumph in last night’s whingeing finals in the face of strong opposition from, of all countries, the United States. Team GB walks tall this morning having surged to position 48 in the Medals Table. The US challenge was masterminded by Head Coach Mutt Romney, who cast aside his compatriots’ habitual manic optimism and in an audacious move, outsourced the team effort to the Tea Party cult. They came up with some epic whingeing on the subjects of immigration, welfare, taxation, abortion, gay marriage and the great American surrender to Socialism and looked to have established a winning position. But the British fight-back was awesome – the Dream Team (Baroness Warsi, Eric Pickles and “Wee” Danny Alexander) showed their class with some wonderful whingeing directed at disability claimants, welfare scroungers, public sector parasites and the last Labour government’s appalling financial legacy, concluding in a high-risk strategy with a whinge about their fellow atherletes’ frailty in the field of combat and their miserable haul of medals. Romney’s team responded instantly with a spectacular whinge about the innate British capacity for whingeing, an unfair advantage achieved by generations of unchallenged supremacy. Spirits sank in the British team and all seemed lost until sprint-whingeing specialist (and Team Captain), Michael Gove came to the crease and unleashed a volley of whingeing on the subject of education. Spectators were stunned when he reminded them that not a single British school-leaver was capable of building a Large Hadron Collider without assistance or counting to a million in Roman Numerals. Skipper Gove took whingeing to a new level with a bitter complaint about the national cult of educational mediocrity which had brought this once-proud nation to financial ruin. Judges were unanimous – Gove had inspired Britain to an unassailable position and Gold was, at last, within our grasp. On a sad note, Romney was less than gracious in defeat and questioned the entire basis of the British triumph claiming, “Yeh, the Brits were good, but they got some questions to answer. What we saw tonight was whingeing at the limits of human endurance. I’m not saying these guys were on anti-euphorics and depressants but someone needs to find out the truth.” 

 A Phil Space exclusive from our man in the empty seat.
 

Watford in Three Lines

Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) was an intriguing character who at one point in his career had a day job as a senior civil servant in the Ministry of War that he somehow combined with an active involvement in anarchist causes. Under another hat he wrote as an art critic noted for his enthusiastic support of Neo-Impressionism and the work of Seurat, Signac, Luce and Pissaro. In 1906 Fénéon was employed by Le Matin newspaper in Paris to entertain readers with a selection of stories from the day’s news rewritten in condensed form. An anthology drawn from the total of 1200 was published in translation in 2007 under the title, Novels in Three Lines. 

A recent discovery deep in the archive of this miniature newspaper (West Herts and Watford Observer) from March 15th. 1963 is a voice from a time when JFK was in the White House and Macmillan was in Downing Street. The back pages are full of employment advertisements for genuine full-time jobs in manufacturing. And Cliff Richard and the Shadows are performing at the local Gaumont. The news pages produced a rich harvest of dispatches from the foothills of Metro-land that seem to lend themselves to the Fénéon treatment and ten examples are presented below. 

Speaking of their 16 year old daughter, parents told a court that they had done everything for her but she had been a continual nuisance up to and including leaving the family home to live with a 20 year old man with whom she had been intimate. 

After a number of false starts, identical twin ginger haired brothers in late adolescence separately travelled by air to overseas destinations at the expense of the Royal Air Force. 

An aversion to abusive language induced a publican to arrange for a customer to be forcibly ejected from his premises. The said customer’s head impacted upon the pavement with such force that his earthly existence was terminated. 

A conscientious intruder successfully forced entry into six homes at consecutive addresses in the same street for the purpose of relieving the occupants of their most valuable possessions. 

Approaching the end of a lifetime of sorting letters and hand painting a collection of 1,000 model soldiers Mr. Harold Marsh was presented with an Imperial Service Medal by the Assistant Head Postmaster. 

Informed that he would be charged with dangerous driving and excessive speed, a van driver expressed his disappointment and requested the police officer to charge him with any offence but that. 

Noted for his ability to recall seeing swans wandering daily in search of food, Mr. Oscar Rees Gibbon died at the age of 93. For 53 years his home had been in Bushey Heath during which it had lost its rural character. 

The sum of £2 was extracted from Martin Card by way of punishment for his impudence in trespassing in search of game on land held in the possession of the Earl of Dudley who did not take kindly to this sort of behaviour. 

A performer who spoke not a word on stage during his act gripped the imagination of his club audience to such an extent that members were in turn reduced to a most untypical condition of prolonged silence. 

His second wife was a sister of his first but even the amputation of a leg in Cape Town was insufficient to extend his life beyond the age of 79, although he had in the past impressed many of his acquaintances with his intellectual stature. 

What the Papers Say

We were chatting with some visitors from Holland and they happened to mention that they were astonished by the sensational tone of the press reports on knife crime, the Max Mosley court case and the trial of Anne Darwin. They had been following these stories in the pages of The Times! With heavy hearts we had to point out that The Times was but a pale shadow of some of the nation’s more illustrious tabloids when it comes to sensationalism.



Just as a civilised society has need of the services of those brave enough to descend into the darkness of the foulest sewers and do battle with human waste at its worst so we depend on people of the calibre of Anton Vowl prepared to descend into the foulest depths of British journalism and report back on the atrocities they have been witness to. When it comes to depths, there are none deeper than the level at which the current incarnation of the Daily Express has chosen to operate. Partiality, distortion, bias and bigotry are nothing new but the editor and proprietor of the Express have discovered new depths to sink to. There is a dark, dark core, deep in the human spirit where all conscience dies, where honour, generosity, reason and fellowship are extinguished, where raw, unmoderated brutal self interest prevails. This is the region that the Daily Express inhabits and brews and spreads its poison. It’s a publication that Goebbels would be proud of in the sense that it is calculated to appeal exclusively to what is most base in the human spirit. It’s a far cry from a decade ago when Rosie Boycott remodelled the Express into an unlikely supporter of New Labour.



Dedicated observers of tabloid culture have a vast layer of hypocrisy in which to excavate. A special pleasure at present is to read the apparently endless and impassioned accounts of the death of good manners and civility in “Broken Britain”. There is no group anywhere on Earth less suited than journalists to lecture the populace on this subject. Their rude and boorish, bullying behaviour can be witnessed on almost any TV news bulletin as they vent their aggression on some hapless tabloid victim. Accounts of their vanity, treachery and deceit fill the front pages of every issue of Private Eye. The unbelievably crass and offensive behaviour of the pornographer and proprietor of the Daily Express has been extensively reported in Private Eye. And yet these very people, in their impudence write repeatedly on examples of unmannerly behaviour as if we had just emerged from a golden age of politesse in which you could scarcely move without encountering extravagant demonstrations of elaborate courtesy.


So, let us pay tribute to the efforts of Anton Vowl at The Enemies of Reason. Not only does he read and monitor these repellent publications but he also goes online to monitor the backwash on the message boards and ‘Have Your Say’ pages. He has exposed the way in which the fearless defenders of freedom censor all dissenting views on their message boards. He’s also demonstrated how extremist groups on the right mobilise their members to monopolise reader feedback. In return, the tabloids seem to go out of their way to provide a platform for right wing extremism. Yet again, the most shameless in this respect are the propagandists at the Express. The twin obsessions with immigration and a certain missing child seem to have driven this newspaper out of its collective mind as reason and decency have been utterly discarded. This has to be the most astonishing sequence of front pages in tabloid history. The multiplicity of mutually contradictory headlines must have left the readership in a state of permanent bafflement and it has cost them a lot of money to compensate the McCann family and Robert Murat for all the damaging fiction they printed. It’s a shame that each and every one of the decent and hard working visitors from overseas cannot sue for similar payments to compensate them for the sustained and relentless campaign of lies and defamation to which they have been subjected. It’s exceedingly depressing that there are good people who are kind to animals and love their families who still fork out 40p a day for this filth but it is reassuring to know there are still some people around who are not prepared to take it. So, hats off to Mr. Vowl and long may he prosper and retain his sanity.