What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?

I find this news story, about the nasty little fuckers who kicked and stamped a goth girl to death when she begged them to stop attacking her boyfriend, immeasurably depressing. A similar thing happened to a couple I know, who wear black and have strange hair and lots of piercings and are also immensely sweet, gentle people, and who were badly beaten in broad daylight in a shopping street in front of their small children by a gang of worthless cowardly scum.

My heart is with the weird kids and always will be, so it makes me glad that the judge was able to look beyond the piercings, and described the goth community as "perfectly peaceful law-abiding people who pose no threat to anybody". Like he said, "this was a hate crime against these completely harmless people targeted because their appearance was different to yours".

With this in mind I suppose I should not judge the five teenagers in this story on their photographs but rather on their crimes, but seriously - click on the link - I have never seen such a load of terrifyingly dead-eyed, identikit, unprepossessing chavs. Honestly, I feel safer in Mexico City than I would anywhere with people like that around.

These are the people who make me ashamed to be British. When people find out where I'm from, many of them say "ah, hooligans!" - this seems to be one word of English everyone knows, w00t. But, there is also an abiding image of the British (particularly in places not many of them go) as polite, chivalrous, honourable, fair, well-educated, perhaps rather serious-minded. I am hardly Victorian in my values, but these seem like good things - a damn sight better than ignorance, violence, sociopathy, mindless hatred, and not giving a shit. Where did they go?

At the weekend I was having a conversation with my brother - who is sixteen and suddenly hugely funny and interesting and politically misguided - in which we reflected that as a small, overpopulated island Britain's only real resource is human capital. Which makes these cultural and educational failings all the more frightening, no?

Whilst a story like this does make me ashamed of Britain, of course pointless violence happens everywhere. I was fascinated to read about emos being attacked by other urban tribes in Mexico, including punks, goths, and so on. Whatever happened to the weird kids sticking together? I have a strong impression that kids in Mexico are less likely to run feral and brutish than in Britain, because they are brought up in a culture which places a much higher value on both family and community - but, like everywhere, traditional values are breaking down.

Meanwhile, Mexicans face much greater problems of poverty, lawlessness and lack of access to justice, lack of opportunities, powerlessness, and drugs n guns. I am currently reading "True Tales From Another Mexico" by Sam Quinones - which very much portrays one particular side of Mexico, but is nonetheless fascinating - and have just finished the section on lynchings. His example case is traumatic - he gives one detail (I won't repeat it) which I think is permanently engraved on my brain and makes me flinch every time I think about it - but it is clear that these things happen because people are poor, ignorant, powerless, and have no faith in chronically corrupt criminal justice systems.

Its seems to me that there is a line between the quick act of violence - the blow, the kick - that I think we are all quite capable of when angry - and keeping on kicking, beating or torturing someone to death. I know that group violence can become self-fuelling, but I don't understand how each individual is not stayed by shame or pity or horror.

I just finished reading "The Painter of Battles" by Arturo Pérez Reverte*, which I found compelling even though the characters were ultimately not entirely satisfying. It is full of fascinating reflections and horrifying anecdotes about war. One of the worst was a mention, in the context of the former Yugoslavia I think, of forcing two brothers to torture each other so that one might be allowed to live. The psychological cruelty of that stays with me.

The protagonist of this book believes that such cruelty and violence are the natural behaviour, the natural state of human beings. And the author has seen a lot of wars... But... we are such an impossibly exceptional mixture of flesh and blood and instincts and hormones and emotions and ideas and ideals and ethics. Though people machete each other to death every day, gang-rape and murder mothers in front of their children, all of that... human civilisations, both "primitive" and "civilised" consistently create themselves as something more complicated and more extraordinary than the lowest state that human beings may "naturally" descend to.

Once again, I'm with the judge: "your behaviour on that night degrades humanity itself".

* I googled the title of this book in order to check the author, and I came up with this review in the Times. The act described in this anecdote, trivial though it may be in the scheme of things, is one of the most wantonly cruel and wicked things I have ever heard - and motivated by being too slipshod and lazy to take some genuine photographs:
"DURING THE WAR IN Yugoslavia I was working with a celebrated press photographer, covering refugees arriving by ferry. As mothers with fraught, lined faces carried toddlers down the gangplank, he performed an act of kind-hearted humanity: he shoved bags of sweeties into their tiny hands.
"Then he snatched them away again. As the children opened their mouths to bawl in disappointed misery, he began snapping. Let me give you the photographer's logic: these children had their lives already ruined — it had just momentarily slipped their minds. He was restoring the image of reality, not distorting it."

Onboard entertainment

My journey to work this morning by taxi (shuttup... I was running late and unshowered due to not knowing about pumping water into the tank when there isn't any water and it's bloody Monday) reached new levels of horrifyingness when I noticed that the driver had a small TV (not a DVD player, an actual TV, with an aerial wire going up to the roof) mounted in the space in front of the gearstick. And we were driving along the highway. And it was on.

I can handle seeing bus and taxi drivers with a little TV for when they're not going anywhere. I can handle - mostly I enjoy - them blasting out loud music. But high-octane breakfast TV while driving... even though I love how relaxed Mexico is, that makes me shudder. It IS quite hilarious though.

...and so,

ladies and gentlemen, as the lone piper of time appears at the gates of dawn, and Dawn throws open the window and tells him where to stick his bagpipes...

it's time to mourn Humphrey Lyttleton.

I like to think that the innuendo with which the BBC video tribute ended was a deliberate tribute: "Humphrey Lyttelton possessed great talent, from his hornblowing to being a champion of silliness".

She packed her trunk, oh yes she did

I think this is the most fabulous news story ever, stumbled upon while looking for something else on the internet. A perfect illustration of why behind the scenes is infinitely more fascinating than front of house. I have always wanted a pet elephant, and now I am happy to know she will be able to travel in comfort.

I reproduce the piece below, from Yahoo news, for your delectation, and because I have known their links to die in the past.

FRANKFURT (AFP) - Complete with a chill-out area for exhausted elephant keepers and a resuscitation room for distressed tropical fish, Frankfurt Airport's new Animal Lounge opened its doors on Friday.

The new 3,750-square-metre (40,000-square-feet) hangar has 42 stalls for large animals like the huge number of polo ponies and racehorses that pass through continental Europe's biggest hub every year, or even for the odd rhino or elephant.

There are also 39 smaller boxes, special aviaries and 12 individual, temperature-adjustable climatic chambers providing space for a variety of species, said the firm behind the facility, Lufthansa Cargo.

Every year 14,000 dogs and cats pass through Frankfurt Airport, as well as 1,500 polo ponies and racehorses and 3,000 tonnes of tropical fish. There is even the odd tiger or penguin.

To prevent any bruised trunks, the new facility is fitted with non-slip asphalt floors hich are "more pleasant and comfortable for animals than traditional concrete," the firm said.

Not only that, but built-in partitions ensure no unwanted contact between guests, and if any jet-lagged orangutan does not want to hear the hyenas in stall 17, further sound-proof subdivisions are possible.

The facility even caters for mothers and babies -- or rather mares with foals for example -- and surveillance cameras ensure no prize chihuahua or pricey koi carp is stolen.

The new facility replaces two older hangars and will have 25 vets and 60 carers on hand.

I like toilets

For all the obvious reasons of comfort and hygiene, obviously. They are fine things and we are lucky to have them. But I also like toilets because they are simple, but elegant. If you take off the lid and look inside the cistern, with a bit of thought you can work out what everything does, which is pleasing.

I fixed our toilet this morning, by looking inside and figuring out that the plug that keeps the water from draining out except when you flush it was not in its proper place. Hah, I don't need a man! And it is a very satisfying feeling to have solved a problem from first principles. I bet your basic toilet design hasn't changed in decades, a nice change from incomprehensible technology that you have no way of fixing yourself.

So I do like toilets. But possibly not as much as the people who built a house shaped like a toilet. It is called Haewoojae, or “a place of sanctuary where one can solve one’s worries”. I think I shall put that on my bathroom door.

Hell hath no fury...

...like a woman who has her currency fucked with.

There is nothing like rage to take you out of yourself.

And I am quite speechless with rage at the abysmal fucking hideousness of the new designs for Britain's coins.

I love British coins with all the passion of a sentimentalist. I love all the different designs on them and their symbolisms, which I remember my Dad teaching me when I was very little. I've barely used British currency for a year and a half, but I remember them like friends: the portcullis on the penny, the ostrich feather fleur-de-lys on the two pence piece for the Prince of Wales, the Scottish thistle on the five, the English lion on the ten, the tudor rose on the twenty pence piece (my favourite), Britannia on the fifty. I love that we have coppers and silvers and fat golden pounds. I love that we have heptagons. I love all the different pound coins - roses and oaks for England, dragons and leeks for Wales, and so on.

I short, I have always - and I acknowledge some bias here - thought British money was some of the most beautiful in all the world, in an understated, classical, very British sort of way.

Whereas the new designs are frankly aesthetically offensive - agh they are so horrible! - and symbolically impoverished, sharing as they do only one design between them. The words "contemporary treatment" are by themselves doing quite dangerous things to my levels of rage, which are volcanic. Actually they're just tacky... oh look, if you lay them out in this remarkably unpleasing way you get a picture... gosh, how astoundingly juvenile and unoriginal.

Silly, stubborn child that I am, I actually find it quite deeply painful that I will have to use these monstrosities when I return, and that little ones will grow up thinking that this is what naturally goes on the back of the Queen's head. Every single time I look at one, I know it will make my day a bit worse.

I do not believe this is mere Luddism - I really like some of the special issue coins. And I do realise that there are many more important things to get angry about (and I do), but gaaaaaaah..... Why would anyone deliberately increase the sum total of ugliness in the world when they might make it lovelier instead, just for the sake of doing something new and "modern", or for any other pathetically pointless non-reason?

The RAGE. If there were justice in this world, things would be breaking into flames at my mere glance right now. (Which I think I would rather enjoy...)

(I have just realised that this was news a couple of weeks ago, so I am probably late on the rage bandwagon. Let's all go and shoot burning arrows at the Royal Mint.)

Goddamned ninteenth century Frenchmen...

...getting it so devastatingly right.

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

-- Victor Hugo

Tonterías

The boy I want (and adore) doesn't want me. Or rather, he doesn't want to ruin things because we are friends. Which is to some degree a kinder way of saying the same thing. He is probably right but I wish he wasn't.

I am listening to Placebo's "Without You I'm Nothing" on a loop and wondering how I can possibly do any work. Which I realise is overdramatic, but I am feeling rejected and overwhelmingly alone and unequal to carrying on being me.

I want to go home, and I have no idea where that is. Except that briefly I felt like I was there in his arms. Meanwhile I laugh in the face of things and try to stop my face from crumpling, except when no-one's looking, so that we can still be friends.

Calvin and the Virgin

This morning, it was unkind. Just as I was leaving, I remembered I was supposed to be bringing the groceries my officemate forgot at our house after Saturday's barbecue, plus the milk I picked up for her last night (while I was waiting to meet up with a friend who never showed... grumble, grumble).

Kitchen. Milk - check. Balsamic vinegar - check. Broccoli - check. Grapes - check. Margerine... there are two unopened margerines. My brain siezes up. What do I do? Take both? Take neither? (I didn't sleep too well and early-morning decisions have never been my strong point.) I call her mobile. A strange, unintelligable and sleepy-sounding man answers. He says something about a computer. I stumble through in Spanish and hang up. It later transpires that I have somehow saved the wrong number as her new number. I fervently hope that the man I woke up was not someone I know.

I miss the bus. I wait in the cold (the weather gods have gone mad, such that I have a sunburnt neck from house hunting on Saturday, but I really wish I had some gloves on). I get the next bus, get off at the entrance to campus, and start walking to the offices. Numerous cars pass me and I inwardly curse them. A couple (or at least a couple of people) kindly stop and offer me a lift.

I get in the back. There is something brown on my hand. There is something brown on my bag. I pick up the plastic bag of groceries, which I had put down next to me. There is something brown very definitely on the seat. The plastic bag is covered in vinegar. Resigning myself, I rest it on top of my bag. I quietly panic and run through my options. I cannot face explaining what's happened to the nice couple (I am a coward, and it is early). There is a strong of vinegar. I wonder if they have noticed. Vinegar is one of the smells I hate most of all in all the world. This does not help.

Subtly and with disgust, I begin to mop up the carseat with the sleeve of my jumper. It seems to end up not significantly more stained than the rest of the seat.

I am extremely glad to get out of the car. I beat a hasty retreat to my office and the bathroom, where follows much washing of things before I can have breakfast. I am hungry. The vinegar smell proceeds to make me feel unwell for a remarkably long time.

In conclusion, no matter how much of a rush you are in, I recommend that you always check that the lid of the vinegar bottle is tightly closed.

Anyway... what I WAS going to talk about was the bus. Mexican buses (the rattletrap local ones) seem to be personal to their drivers, and I always enjoy all the paraphenalia they decorate them with. This morning's was both typical and quite special, and it made me grin to myself much of the way to work.

This guy had at some point decided to pimp up his bus with a red and black theme to match his bad-boy image and reckless driving. Hence big red speakers, glossy red seat-backs and black seats and a big red knob on the gearstick (snigger).

To the left of his head (on the "wall") there was the obligatory little shrine: a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe with two vases of fresh flowers fixed underneath - often chrysanthemums but today orange lilies - with a rosary dangling from it. The window underneath was decorated with a tasteful rendition in simple black of a weeping Jesus.

The rest of the windows were also decorated in black, with a kind of frame inside each window and a weird kind of dynamic splotch.

In front of the driver, the area between the roof and the windscreen was decorated as follows:
- in the top at the centre, a large sticker of an "ADO" bus - long distance, first class coaches with toilets and air conditioning and TVs. The kind of thing that might once have been given away as promotional material, or sold as the kind of souvenir that attracts only transport geeks (and as someone with a particular fondness for Scandinavian Seaways playing cards and Caledonian MacBrayne merchandise of all kinds, I cast no stones). It made me laugh because it seemed as if the little bus was dreaming about what it might one day grow up to be.
Below, from the ouside in:
- two glossy red speakers.
- two identical stickers depicting the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character... with a broken leg and crutches.
- a weird cartoon bunny sticker with too much nostril and not enough eye, spoiling the otherwise careful symmetry.
- a sticker of the ubiquitous cartoon of Calvin (as in Calvin and Hobbes) pissing, this time in front of a logo of the football club Chivas, wearing a Chivas strip and pissing on the logo of Club America.
Below:
- a super-cutesy sticker of the Disney version of Tigger at school, with an apple and a blackboard, and flowers.
Below:
- two big speaker boxes (also symmetrically in the middle) beneath, partly obscuring the windscreen, with mirrored fronts. On the mirror, sparkley red stickers with cursive script saying "Porque te conoci" - Because I knew you, or Because I met you.
- on the windscreen itself, those semi-transparent strips to cut down the glare from the sky, decorated with Nike ticks, applied symmetrically ticking outwards - so some will always be the right and some the wrong way round, whichever way you look.

I really don't see how anyone could not fall in love with Mexico.

Today is nature day

I saw a snake!

Just a little one, so I wasn't scared, just enjoying the excitingness of seeing a snake - my first in Mexico outside the zoo. I was cutting across the fields on my way to the office and it was just lying there in beautiful curves on the path being perfectly a snake. It was thick as a thickish finger, and unspectacularly dirt-and-dry-corn coloured, with glittering eyes and a tiny, perfect black forked tongue flickering in and out.

And, I defeated sod's law by having my camera with me. I took pictures of its beautiful curviness and a video of it slithering snakily - and remarkably quickly - away. Unfortunately the conjunction of my computer, my card reader, and the internet is exceedingly rare at the moment, but... a snake, I saw one!

This morning I also saw the cute cat that was in our garden yesterday catch a bird (with a remarkably athletic leap) and proceed to dismember it. Which is the nature of cats and a pure action to which my judgements are entirely irrelevant... but I can't really see it as the cute cat any more.

Sprung

Spring is here. The weather gods have turned their minds to hot hot heat and stormy flashes of rain. The jacaranda trees, with their short-lived and fantastically purple flowers, are in bloom. But I know spring is here because yesterday I saw two hummingbirds.

And yesterday evening I went on an exciting trip into the city with my friend Victor, back to heaven for a concert by Fernando Delgadillo, a Mexican singer of songs of great beauty and poetry (and sometimes humour). He sings extraordinary songs about ordinary life, and seems to be a pretty cool chap - he doesn't have a record company and releases all his own recordings. Being poetical, the lyrics are hard to understand, so by 1 a.m. (when we bailed) I was struggling with sleep and focus, but what I did understand I loved, and he has a hugely candid, endearing stage presence - a mixture of Jack the lad, scholar, granddad and bloke next door. He sang all my favourite songs (i.e. the ones I know) - Hoy Ten Miedo De Mi, Julieta, Entre Pairos y Derivas, and No Me Pides Ser Tu Amigo (all listenable-to on his website and findable on youtube). He sang beautiful songs I didn't know (Elephantes, one which I thought was called Hoy Estas Aqui but I think isn't, and lots I can't put names to). He told stories and made the audience laugh. At some point the listeners began quietly and feelingly to sing along to the most beloved songs. It was beautiful. And it was an evening spent with someone lovely.

Today, hungry and ill-slept, I was delighted to remember that my department was having tacos dorados this morning to commemorate the birthdays of me and two colleagues - we usually get together for a birthday breakfast every month or so. Having arrived ridiculously (unprecedentedly) early into work I was sitting in my office in the eerie quiet of an almost-empty building when one of those colleagues, who I am very fond of and whose birthday it happens to be today, walked passed the door. I wished him a happy birthday and he said you too, and I grinned and said it was a while ago and he said we're celebrating today, we're celebrating another day of life.

Right on.

Currently chair-dancing to...

"Staying Alive"

A conducive work environment...

...probably doesn't usually include "Tragedy" playing quite loudly outside your door. I love our secretary dearly, but she is rather overgenerous with sharing her music. And her tuneless whistling - which just started up as I typed that. Serves me right I expect.

However, I am so far from being focussed in any case that the difference is probably quite minimal...

And if I'm honest "Tragedy" is pretty fun... w00t!

BADY!STANDING IN THE SEADGWI

I wear my favourite belt a lot. It is pink and it has fabulously bad English words and phrases on it. They appear to be bits of songs, but it is difficult to tell. I love my belt.

But, the buckle has a habit of falling off.

I suppose it was inevitable it would fall into the toilet one day. And I should be grateful that there was nothing worse than wee in it at the time.

I wasn't particularly grateful.

PAINT IT! BLACK

Misc.

Chicago was lovely. Holidays are great. There is more to say but not much time to say it in. And no home internet access for the moment, which I suspect will drive me mad remarkably quickly. Although it might help with my resolution to get enough sleep; I actually got some rest in Chicago and I feel SO much better in myself. Not sleeping is clearly a fool's game and although I can't do much about my owlish body clock it is time to crack my ridiculous psychosomatic insomnia.

In the meantime, Dinosaur Comics is always awesome, but given my fascination with tattoos I particularly liked this one.

And today I have discovered that Julieta Venegas, one of my favourite Mexican Singers, will be at Shepherd's Bush in October. She doesn't seem to do a lot of gigs - or at least she hasn't been on tour since I got into her music - and I would so much love to see her live. But it would be very odd and maybe sad to do so in London, especially without any other Julieta fans to go with. So do I assume I will be in Britain by then - that's the plan - and buy a couple of tickets? What a strange thought, to be planning my life so far ahead, and so far away...

packing

After two days of packing up my life into every kind of receptacle I own, and then some, I am terarful, shattered, and quite ridiculous. I do not find the process of packing to be in itself enjoyable, time consuming and grinding as it is, especially given the INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF STUFF I seem to have accumulated in a year and a half. And, it is a sad thing to be saying goodbye to my apartment. It has been my safe haven and I am attached to it. Worst, it reminded me very much of packing up my various university rooms, and the feelings of everything being all over the place and not being ready to go and having to say goodbye to people, whether just for a holiday or for ever. I am only going to Chicago for six days, but the illusion of leaving is sustained by the fact that I really have had to say goodbye to two of my friends, who are going back to Germany today.

Fortunately, my friend Victor was around last night to play the role of my dad - arriving before everything was packed, washing up the dishes in the sink, making expressions of horror at all the crap, packing the contents of my kitchen cupboards into boxes and bags, carrying boxes to the car... the works. This did make the whole thing even more emotionally weird, but I couldn't have done it without him. The only difference is my dad would get cross and shouty, whereas Victor remained lovely thoughout. The man may well be a saint, as evidenced by the fact that he drove away two full carloads of my crap, one on Sunday and one yesterday - and I mean full, the passenger seat and everything - and carried it all into his house himself, where he's going to look after it until I get a new apartment.

Meanwhile I swore at things and laughed hysterically and had hissy fits and cried in the manner of the loon I am. The following is a sample dialogue:
Me: Do you hate me? (for the twenty-fifth time that evening)
Victor: Yes (for the twenty-fifth time that evening) *smile*
Me: *cry*
Victor: Don't cry. Why are you crying?
Me: sniff... I don't deserve you... sniff
Victor: You're emotional.
Me: I always am.
It really doesn't sound any less pathetic in Spanish.

And this morning I packed an amazing amount of last few things and left some in a friend's house on campus and some in my office, and transferred things off the work computer I was borrowing and backed things up and kept a taxi waiting, and kept the friends waiting who were giving me a lift to the airport and struggled to hold back the tears and BLOODY HELL I need a holiday now....

I am in the airport, buying expensive internet, having remembered to write down everything I could want to know about Chicago except the address of the friend I am visiting...

Chicago, here I come!