The Dark Satanic Speed Camera

So, according to the BBC, it looks like fixed speed cameras across Avon and Somerset will stop working from the end of March. I, for one, don’t consider this to be a Good Thing. However, I am aware that there are many who regard speed cameras to be the work of the Devil himself, so when I posted this news story on my Facebook page, it came as no surprise to see my In Box fill with rants from my (it must be said) middle-aged male friends who are delighted to see the back of them.

Now, I know I’m a bit simple-minded when it comes to breaking the speed limit. I bow to the laws of physics and tend to agree that the faster you are going when hitting that errant pedestrian who stupidly stepped out in front of your (skilfully driven) car then the more likely you are to kill them. I’m also a bit radical in my view that driving under the (arbitrarily chosen) speed limit is a demonstration of your ability to control your vehicle and that, if you are unable to do so, you shouldn’t be driving it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming to be a better driver just because I hold these controversial beliefs. I haven’t yet been caught by a camera but I’m well aware that I might be. I can’t guarantee that I would never drift over the limit, but I do endeavour not to do so.

However, the rhetoric of the anti-camera brigade never ceases to amaze me. The comments on my post varied from the, frankly, moronic to the tortuous logic twisting variety (supported by the most dubious of statistics) that manage to apparently prove that speed cameras are actually the most dangerous thing out there. We had the ‘speed cameras are a weapon against the soft middle classes’ response; that one also seemed to claim that the ‘scum with no insurance’ are somehow exempt from speed cameras. Didn’t quite follow that particular argument, to be honest. We had the ‘saying that speed kills is like saying that guns kill when we really know its bullets’ diatribe. We had the ones about how the misuse of motorway lanes is the real problem ‘out there’. And, of course, we had the ones written by people who had been on advanced driving courses who had driven ‘perfectly safely’ along country roads at 120mph while sat next to a police officer. That proves its safe, that does.

Why is it every moron I have ever met has done some kind of advanced driving course? What motivates people to do these courses? Is it the thrill of sitting next to a police officer (while safely doing 120mph on a country road) that gets them going? I always remember a particularly charmless colleague of mine who always had an appropriate mate ‘he knew down the pub’ that he could invoke whenever an argument was leaving him behind. You know the sort: ‘My mate is in the army/police/merchant navy/air traffic control (delete where applicable) and he reckons (insert bizarre piece of logic to back up your argument)’. I’m pretty sure he’d done some kind of super advanced driving course that involved driving in excess of the speed of sound (perfectly safely) while sitting next to a police officer on a country road. I’m also pretty sure he didn’t like speed cameras.

Well I do like speed cameras. You can go on about safe driving all you like but at the end of the day, the faster you go, the more likely you are to kill someone and if you can’t keep to the speed limit (no matter how inappropriate you feel it is) then you shouldn’t be driving. If you are one those arch speed camera conspirisists who thinks that lazy local government workers are just using them to take your money to spend on a big caviar fuelled Christmas party, then you could really spite them all; try sticking to speed limit.

The Strange World of Kirsty Young

The other night I watched Kirsty Young’s ‘The British at Work’ (10^th March, BBC2) with the usual mixture of anticipation and dread that any new documentary series on the BBC can generate. For all the entertaining enlightenment I might get out of a BBC doc’, there is always the danger of Alice Roberts spending at least  half a program making sure I know what it’s about (just in case I’m a bit thick or too distracted by the ‘Hello’ article I’m trying to read at the same time).  The first part of Kirsty’s series was okay, I suppose, but I couldn’t help feeling irritated beyond belief by Kirsty’s somewhat sheltered view of the typical British working experience.  This first part was entitled ‘We Can Make It’ and dealt with the travails of the working Brit in the post-war period 1945-1964. As interesting as this might have been, she set the scene by poking one of my bugbears in the eye with a big stick.

‘Nowadays, most of us’, we were informed, ‘do a job we like’.

Oh, do we?

‘In fact, most of us would say our job defines us’.

At this point, I have become so cross that I had to rewind five minutes later as I realised I’d stopped listening and was simply venting cartoon steam from ears. Kirsty’s point was that in the twenty-first century we are all lucky enough to choose what we do, while our parents and grandparents simply did whatever they could to keep a roof over their heads. Kirsty felt the need to point out that even her grandparents (we got rather a lot of Kirsty’s grandparents over the course of the program) had awful jobs. Her grandfather worked in a shipyard (presumably while wearing a flat cap and clutching a pint of ‘Heavy’) while her grandmother put the walnuts on our whips (the cheeky little minx).

Of course, nowadays we all have fulfilling jobs in the media.

Except we don’t. Speaking as someone with twenty-two and a half soul destroying years in the civil service behind them, I can absolutely guarantee that many of us do not like our jobs and would be horrified that anyone thought these jobs defined us.  But enough about me. Does Kirsty not even manage to get down her local Waitrose? (I’m taking a shot that Kirsty may not be an Asda girl). I’m pretty certain that even in the mighty ‘Trose, the average shelf-stacker does not consider that their stacking duties ‘define’ them in any way. Kirsty fails to realise that many people are trapped in jobs by their financial commitments. This wasn’t just an immediate post-war phenomena; it’s as true now as it ever was, perhaps more so. Many of us have never found out what we’re good at. As clichéd as it might sound, some people may just never have got the ‘breaks’. Who, exactly, does Kirsty think clean the toilets?

If it sounds like I’m a bit too worked up about this, just remember that Kirsty might just be representative of the media types who make these programs. I hope not, but you can see all too easily that this might be the case. An awful image forms of Kirsty and her media chums sitting in a trendy London bar talking about their next project for a public they know nothing about; a public that seems to be invisible to them in a world where bins empty themselves and the wheels just turn by the collective wishful thinking of their social set.

Or am I being a bit dumb here? Was Kirsty talking to me, personally? Well, not just me. That would be odd to say the least; but me as a representative of that oh-so-important group of people: The documentary viewers. Perhaps Kirsty assumes we’re not like everyone else. The shelf stackers are all watching the X Factor and the civil servants are all retreating to some alcoholic refuge to hide from their own souls. I find this view even more disturbing. Kirsty has decided that her program is not for everyone; just nice people with the wherewithal to achieve their career goals and get nice job in the media. You can watch if you’re not one of us but don’t expect to enjoy it; we didn’t really make if for you.

Oh well, on that dark note, I look forward to the rest of the series if only to discover at what point Kirsty thinks we all got nice jobs and found self-fulfilment. I wonder what that episode will be called.

False Identity Crisis

So I’m told that it is a Good Thing for budding writers to have a blog. Goes against the grain a bit as Grumpy Old Men like myself tend to wonder why on earth anyone would want to read a blog; but one thing I have learned as I have got older is that one should keep an open mind (even if one’s gut remains defiantly closed).

So here we go.

First thing that crosses my mind is that I’m really not sure whether I’m supposed to use my real name or not. Up to me, of course, but what is the ‘done thing’ among the blogging community? Now I’m supposed to be good at research so I dedicate a full ten minutes (maybe even eleven) to an examination of online opinion.  Well, Penelope Trunk (who is, apparently, a ‘brazen careerist’) tells me I should use my own name.  However, somebody by the name of Amanda Chapel seems to have made herself terribly unpopular on Penelope’s page by daring to suggest that such advice is akin to ‘go play on the highway’. No agreement there, then.  MetaFilter also seem to favour revealing the real you but as I have no idea what a ‘community weblog’ is (and probably don’t want to know), I’m not sure I’ll take much notice of them either.

So let’s think about it. People’s big fear seems to be about their employers finding out. But as I am currently many things but not actually working for anyone else, why do I care? What am I going to put in a blog? Well, I could tell you about my local’s new management’s attempts at organising a pub-quiz last night. The fail was, as they say, epic.  Ah, now I see a problem already. I am ‘known’ in my local. Actually, I appear to be surprisingly well known throughout my neighbourhood; it’s amazing just how much of a z-list celebrity you can become in your local micro-world when you’re a Pub-Rocker. So do I want the new management (or anybody who knows them) seeing me mercilessly laying the boot in on their lack of pub-quiz wherewithal? I suspect I do not. In fact, the more I think about this, the more of a no-brainer it becomes.

Anonymity for me then. I might change this in the future (on the assumption that I can work the settings to do so) but for the moment, I shall remain JK, The Blogger from 20,000 Fathoms.