William Couper

A Hinter Tale.

2010-02-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

Come, take a walk with me.

I don’t do a great deal of wandering around the internet, I’ve got a few places that I frequent a lot – a forum here, a Twitter there, some news sites, social networking stuff, a very few blogs that I don’t read often enough and a clutch of amusing webcomics. I’ve been doing the same thing pretty much for the past four years or so with a few modifications. If my habits were equivalent to walking through snow, my foot prints would be deep enough to do open cast mining.

Not to say that I delve that deeply (I’ve yet to tunnel down into the Deep Web, a term that I was only introduced to recently) nor am I limited to what I view by my habitual site visits, I’ll follow links to places that may grab my interest.

I know there is a lot of odd stuff out there. People seem to often use the internet as a place to offload their madness. The reasoning being that, as far as I’m aware, they can dump the simmering sludge of barmy into the electronic byways to allow them function in a better way with other human beings. I don’t know how well this works as I’ve had some experience with crazies who just seem to dig further and further into their demented worlds.

Or there’s the even less pleasant side where people get to be utterly shit to one another in a way that would get them punched in the face if they did it in a pub. People see it as carte blanche to be unremittingly horrible to one another because they are doing it to a computer screen and not using their real name. That’s the nature of free speech, but I’m surprised that there haven’t been more cases of someone being tracked down and getting the snot kicked out of them for saying someone’s spouse looks like a donkey with Down’s Syndrome.

There’s definitely a lot of entertaining stuff out there that celebrates the best humanity has to offer, but it’s never going outweigh the inane, depressing and boring or simply unsettling content that you lock your peepers and your poor beleaguered web browser on. In times past I’ve bemoaned my lack of web exploration, feeling that there’s a lot to see out there, but I’m not putting the effort into finding it. I’d like to be one of those people who clicks away stumbling across curious bits of the internet, but I’ve never found myself having the time or inclination. Where would I start? I have a hard enough time working out what I’m going to have for dinner each day and my mind doesn’t work like a random subject generator.

Hmm, maybe that’s why I’m such a shit conversationalist. Something worth thinking about in the future that.

I, like a lot of people out there have had mixed fortunes when it comes to the phenomenon of the forum. These are the venues in which the free flow of ideas and the art of conversation can be practiced. More often than not, though they are playground in which people shout, “You’re wrong and you’re a dick!” and, “No! You’re wrong and you’re a dick!”

There are a lot of things that bemuse and frustrate me on such forums, like the habit on some where people say something quite insightful and clever only to be ignored, have someone down the thread say the same thing and be called a genius. Something of a pet hate that one. And of course there’s what I mentioned earlier about people using it as their abuse shield – “I get to call you fuckwit with suppurating genital warts all around your anus and you can’t do shit! Ha ha!”

Of course this all depends on how well the board is monitored for this kind of thing. Some forums are rigorous about having people act as though they have a higher emotional age than three and they prosper because of it. Although I’ve seen a fair few that prosper because (I’d love to say in spite of, but I’d be lying) of this kind of school yard behaviour. Those aren’t the kind of places I’m going to hang around in for very long, I stopped finding playground banter entertaining when I was sixteen or seventeen and seeing it perpetuated by people my age and older is sad and boring. There would be some people less robust than I who might find this kind of thing intimidating.

I’ve been on some forums, small and large, that have been friendly and well-run where there’s a limited amount of animosity and quite a bit of interesting conversation. Those are ones that I tend to orbit a lot and they enrich my internet experience no end.

I’m not going to list them all because you might turn and fucking spoil them but this place, White Chapel is a pretty good place to hang around if you want adults to be adults. Mostly it’s because they are under constant threat of being crushed by the admins if they act like idiots, but mostly it’s because they are a decent bunch of people.

There’s no way I could talk about forums and message boards without mentioning the very odd and specialised breed that are the news site message boards.

News corporations, particularly the papers have had a tough time of it since the internet grew into the all-encompassing tentacle monster that it has. They have all had to up their game and adapt to a medium that they can pin down and control about as well as they could an ocean. The internet comes from so many different directions and sources that to control it would take an insane amount of work – not that that stops anyone from trying.

In their wild efforts to add more content and interest to their sites many papers have comments section below articles and stories. And just like any other forum they have their moments of inanity and times of brilliance.

Weirdly though both of these things are generally blotted out by insane extremists. People who seem to scour the internet to look for these very comments pages to fill up with their hate-filled and often uninformed views.

The most obvious example of this is the BBC News website’s Have Your Say section.

Because, for the BBC, being able to comment on every story would be tantamount to heresy, they pick a few stories, seemingly at random or picked by an autistic rhesus monkey, and throw them out to the public like bread crumbs to pigeons.

And no matter what the story, doesn’t matter if it’s the most inoffensive fluff piece in the world you’re always guaranteed to have someone going and saying that those on unemployment benefits are to blame. Even if there’s a picture of fluffy ginger kitten, you’ll get one comment in capitals thus (spelling and grammatical errors for effect): “ITS A DISGRASE! THESE DOLE SCROUNGERS LIVING OF MY TAXES SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELFS FOR THIS.”

It’s amazing that so many people are so offended by people out of work getting money to help them out that they feel the need to tell the world at every opportunity they get. It must be awful to feel so aggrieved at having to help people in between jobs, do they get annoyed about millions sunk into bad government investments or given to hospital administrators when the medical staff are so low paid?

But then, this is the internet after all and trying to apply rational thought just falls down in the face of all the concentrated insanity that free floats from one place to another. Maybe I should just start wearing wooden clothes and call myself Beverage Carrier Bag XVII, I might just start to look normal…

Will

The record skips and goes to the start of another song.

2010-01-24T05:47:00.000-08:00

It’s the same dreary song we’ve heard over again from the same album. All the songs sound pretty much the same; artistic integrity isn’t the point of the exercise. We all roll our eyes, sigh, grumble, shake our heads and mutter, but we get up all the same and dance along with the dreary tune because we don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. After all we don’t want people staring at us for sitting there with our arms crossed over our chests because we’re not doing what everyone else is when we neither want nor need to do it. That’s just crazy.

So, over two thirds of the way through January and we’re being thrust headlong into another round of ‘Terrorsismania!’. Note the exclamation point. The exclamation point is important. The exclamation point will dance with your mother. The exclamation point will tell you things about what happened that summer in Greece. The exclamation point will stand on the twelve kittens. The exclamation point has Import.

You can call it Terrorismania! or you can call it Threat Level: Severe. It’s really all down to personal taste. One sounds like a musical in the style of ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’ or ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and is probably more apt, while the other sounds like a straight to video action film starring Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren or Steven Seagal, a film that would be really quite good if it were written with any skill or panache, but just comes off as a bunch of pyros going off with people swearing in between – or in the case of Threat Level: Severe standing around waiting for the pyros to go off and not even having the energy to swear anymore until it peters out.

The UK terrorism threat level has been raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. Feel the tension in the air here, people. Or don’t. This American-style scale of, ‘are we going to die in droves today’ seems to hover always around the vague bits. It could happen, but then again it might not. This upping of the heat doesn’t seem to mean anything practical for the day-to-day running of the country.

It’s all a little bit Mystic Meg really. Cold reading the country. There could be terrorists plotting something heinous, somewhere in the world right now and they’re probably right, but in general the people planning them are a combination of mad and incompetent and we don’t ever see them. Unless they decide to become politicians in which case their careers sky rocket.

Now the general theory – denied by MI6, but used by the media and politicians – is that this is in response to the lone clod who failed to blow himself and a planeload of other travellers up in Detroit on Christmas last year (2009 for you future people).

Wait a second. Because a man who seems to have acted alone didn’t manage to do anything beyond scare the shit out of a plane load of people, the UK is expecting some kind of terrorist attack. There’s an interesting jump of logic. It’s almost like saying that nasty dog down the road bit Mister Robertson, all the dogs in the world must be preparing to overthrow mankind!

Never mind that a renegade group of the IRA have been twitching for the last few months, a man with incendiary underpants didn’t do anything was caught on a plane, we must do something! Let’s see, we’ll do a few token things and try to push through a full-body x-ray machine that wouldn’t have detected anything the Nigerian guy was carrying, but will have the benefit of humiliating anyone wanting to travel out of the country!

I am not reassured. I don’t think many people are. I (along with most of the country again) am not that intimidated either.

If it’s going to be Threat Level: Severe I at least want to wake up in the morning with a man (for some reason with a French accent, I don’t know why, I have no reason to believe that the French, Canadians or Belgians are particularly nasty people) sitting next to my bed pointing a gun at my head saying, “Tomorrow it could be you,” before holstering his weapon and walking out of the room. That would be a severe threat level that’s guaranteed to get my attention. Call it Threat Level: Imminent Death or don’t bother with it at all.

The Detroit thing reminds me of the attempted ‘bombing’ of Glasgow Airport a couple of years ago. Another bungled attack that did nothing more than show that the medical students involved were retarded and best off out of the medical profession and made a ned a celebrity for kicking a man who was on fire. It was inspiring, it really was. Apart from the fact that all that would have happened in the worst case scenario would have been a bit of property damage and the two men would have been the most wounded – you see they were clever (in a vicious way) in wrapping the propane canisters up with ball bearings, but they didn’t realise that they are designed to resist high temperatures and when they do explode they tear instead of shattering. Idiots.

What we got then was Gordon Brown (all nice and shiny from the recent hand-over of power) telling us to be more vigilant, essentially that there was a terrorist on every street corner waiting to blow up. A smart move by someone in power.

So in a time of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, the people in charge of the country have decided, in their infinite wisdom to concentrate on attempting to wind the populace up and be the heroes of the hour by shuffling papers and throwing some new terms at us. Oo, I feel about as protected as a cocktail sausage at a Tory Party Conference.

We’d be much happier if you just did your job and helped people back into work and into some kind of comfort.

So let’s get ready to put the record on the turntable one more time; I feel like a bit of a boogie.

Will

The Tower Shakes, But Doesn't Fall.

2010-01-14T06:02:00.000-08:00

I have a hard time dealing with politics. It’s full of politicians for a start – an old chestnut that, but it wouldn’t be trotted out so much if it didn’t continue to be true on a year-on-year basis. It should be something more interesting, but all the really dramatic stuff that happens is lost in a fog of dull maintenance type debate and insipid protocol. It’s kind of like watching Formula 1 except more repetitive.

Heaven knows that I’ve tried to sit through even a few minutes of overfed men – and a few frightening-looking women – get up to do their little spiel about how the parking policy in their constituency’s hospital needs an overhaul or some such. I’m sure it’s very important to the democratic process and to the people that it affects, but it makes watching televised coverage of the House of Commons a major slog.

Who knows, maybe that’s been the point all along, to stop plebs like myself – brought up on half-hour chunks of television that moves along at brisk pace – from paying that much attention to what goes on there. Maybe before they televised the Commons the MPs stripped to the waist and beat each other with sticks to determine who won a debate.

Oh, fuck. That just put the image of Margaret Thatcher stripped to the waist into my head. I will now inflict it on you, good reader; I’ll be damned if I’m going to suffer that nightmare on my own. You too can wake up in a cold sweat, roused from your sleep by the thought of that evil old crone’s (because, let’s be honest, in the eighties she was still ancient, that kind of evil’s born that way) sagging body and the shrivelled dugs that passed for breasts on her bony chest, pale and blue veined as a wheel of stilton.

It’s good to share.

Anyway, I find it very hard to follow all the meta language that goes on within politics. In general a few moments of thought and I’ll know what they are babbling about and trying to evade, but I’m lazy and have other things I want to do than give too much brain-thinky time to how our government wants to screw us over this time.

(It leaves me with something of a grudging admiration for political correspondents who wade through all this political verbal diarrhoea. It’s how the bastards interpret what they’ve sifted that gets under my skin, but more on that later.)

My general difficulty following and getting intellectually involved in political debate, and the whole antipathy towards the breed known as Politician meant that I almost missed the nugget of decency from the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg that turned up earlier in the week.

Still very much in the shadow of the banks’ failure we’re seeing a bit of political upheaval in this country, after the US managed to shuck of a hideously corrupt regime, we’re going to get the opportunity to do the same; only we’ll just let another corrupt lot in right away. As I’ve said before there are more than two parties in this country, but there might as well only be two most of the time the way people vote. Except for the poor (as in actually impoverished and desperate) people who went mad and voted the unashamedly bigoted in so many ways BNP into a local government in England. It was scary, but I have a horrible feeling that as disgusting as the BNP are to the people of this constituency they may have been the most trustworthy of the lot.

Doesn’t say a lot for the democratic process though: if you feel so let down by a mainstream party, why don’t you vote for a party that has extreme views, that’ll show ‘em. Not the smartest move, I have to say, but it did seem to send a message.

It seems though, that Nick Clegg wants to make some major political changes, even going so far as reshaping Whitehall. Yes, Mister Clegg wants to shake up the whole British political map. He’s even gone so far as to get rid of a good chunk of his party’s pledges because they aren’t realistic in the current economic climate. Big words from the perennial also-rans.

But why should they always be consigned to third or even fourth place? If Nick Clegg were to even keep half of these promises it would mean the country would be a better place in which to live. It would make a great change from the continued bullshit of politicians telling the public, “You’ll have to put up with living in financial uncertainty for a few years more, but don’t worry all the people who caused this will stay rich and so will we. Aren’t you happy for us? Don’t you think we’re doing a stand-up job?”

I’ve intimated in the past that the Lib Dems are a bit of a wishy-washy, airy-fairy party, but with this kind of bold statement, and let’s be clear here it’s an honest statement (something you won’t hear me saying often about a politician of any stripe), he’s admitted that the things that his party has been promising for years are out of bounds and then he’s offered an alternative. An actual, concrete alternative. You don’t get that with the Tories or Labour, from them you get spin and more evasion. Just what the electorate want, vague assurances from the two ‘main’ parties that something will be done…but you’ll have to wait to find out what once you elect them.

In any other arena this would be called blackmail, whereas here people just shrug and go, “It’s politics,” and then go and vote for who they’ve always voted for and probably who their parents and grandparents voted for before them. They have the same kind of disinterest in politics that I try to fight through, but they don’t have the interest or energy to do even that.

Then, of course, you have the pundits and correspondents who rifle through all of these political shenanigans and give their opinions on it. I won’t say that they are all the same, I’m sure there are those who give a balanced and fair appraisal of the political climate. I can’t say, because I don’t read enough of them.

However, I’d just like to turn your attention to the BBC and their lead political correspondent and blogger Nick Robinson. The first time I saw Nick Robinson on television, he struck me as a dry and even sarcastic political commentator – just the type of person that I’d like to see giving opinions on the political landscape. I mean, he’s even had a little snarky banter with George W Bush, what a guy!

Then I started reading what he was actually saying in his BBC blog. The breaking point for me came when he varnished over Nick Clegg’s statements to burble on about the Tories and, in particular, the Labour party. He does more spin doctoring than Alastair Campbell. He does a marvellous job of taking what the Labour party says, interpreting it in such a way that it sounds like something more palatable and totally different.

“The government today unveiled plans for mulching newborn babies and using them as fertiliser. Let’s go to Nick Robinson…”

“When the Gordon Brown says he wants to mulch newborns, what he is in essence saying is that more should be spent on Primary Schools.”

I’ve seen this kind of thing a lot on the BBC. We see a politician saying one thing in the Commons and we go to a studio where the presenters tell us a completely different story of what happened. I mean it’s well-known that Politics is full of double-dealing and linguistic jiggery pokery, but can the meanings be that different from what politicians say and what they mean?

We need a more even-handed way of having politics (and the news in general) presented to us. The BBC have bought into the glossy American style of reporting current events that values bias and big events over telling us what’s happened, although they’ve yet to reach the depths of vacuous hideousness that Sky News (the British arm of Fox News, really) has delved. If they pull back again, they’ll probably be fine.

And this brings me onto the insane and shadowy world of the public opinion parts of news sites, but that’s for another time.

Will

That old book.

2010-01-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

A while ago I decided it would be a good idea ot update my Lulu anthology book and have it listed on Amazon. They've added all sorts of extra costs to it, but I hope you'll buy it because you love me and want to see me out of the poor house.

Find it here: Amazon

Will

Oh, I can't be bothered changing the channel...

2009-12-24T07:21:00.001-08:00

“On the first day of Christmas TV gave to me,
Hours of depressing soap operas!”

It’s the season to be merry, have fun, relax (kind of…well not really, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?), overeat, over drink and sit down to watch some bad television. Y’know, the stuff that the channels have been hooting and hollering about since the end of October.

Every year, for those of us who watch any television, we switch on the goggle box whenever we manage to roll out of bed and after we’ve unwrapped our presents and we hope beyond reasonable hope that this year it will be different. This year our expectations will be, if not met, at least given something to chew on.

We will look out on the Arctic nightmare the outside world has become, this year we’re looking at heavy snowfalls and sub zero temperatures, and feel cosy as we curl up in front of the television.

(The bookies must be shitting themselves this year. Hoping that we’ve had all the snow we’re going to get in 2009. Y’see, snow lying on the ground doesn’t make it an official White Christmas, snow falling does.)

We want to be enthralled, entertained, made happy that its Christmas and that we don’t need to interact with our relatives, alternatively grinning at us like they want eat some vital part of our anatomy or scowling at us like they want to eat some vital part of our anatomy. Yes, you’ve given us some lovely gifts and I’m most grateful, honestly, but right now could you stop staring at me like you’re one of the cast from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and let me inure myself to the season with something mindlessly amusing flickered into my brainstem.

Yes, we get the odd gem of good telly. Things like ‘Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death’ and a good film from four years ago will be highlights, but they tend to be few and far between, stuck amongst things like the Queen’s Christmas Speech and any number of rank smelling dramas and television shows that wouldn’t be allowed on air at any other time.

I mean Noel Edmonds is a master of bringing us foetid television, the worst being (and I’m not the only person to note this and I may even have been pointed in the direction by Charlie Brooker, so what? This is the internet, I don’t no stinking original ideas!) ‘Noel’s HQ’ and ‘Noel’s Christmas Presents’. Horrific examples of celebrity guilt schmaltz that would make Frank Capra break out into hives.

Then you have the catering to the soap opera junkies. These poor, zombified souls have been steadily hooked more and more by these insidious dramas, going from being shown two or three nights a week to encroaching on every night. Now the vicarious living that’s offered by these programmes is ingrained in quite a portion of the UK population.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the portrayals of life in these fictional places was, y’know something akin to real life with ups and downs, but the wisdom of dramatic imperative for programmes like ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Emerdale’, ‘River City’ (which is only in Scotland, the rest of the UK can heave a sigh of relief about that) and the grand master of them all ‘Eastenders’ is that life for working class people is a never-ending slog from one kind of deep misery to another. The characters listlessly go through their joyless existences until they are swept off the mortal coil in some way so tragic that it stops you from wanting to get up in the morning. Unless a character comes into the show when they are older, they are unlikely to reach anything approaching old age – most of them are lucky if they make it out of their teens. And don’t even get me started on the miraculous metamorphoses that take place.

The grand high wizard of this crushing misery is ‘Eastenders’, a programme so morose that you’d be lucky to see an actor smile in a month, let alone an episode. These people live such uncertain, tragic and short lives that you wonder why anyone would want to live in Albert Square. Murder, rape, insanity, disease and disaster are staples of soap opera life, but only ‘Eastenders’ is innovative enough to pile it all onto the one character. Yes. Yes! They are visionaries in their desperation to keep the viewers coming to the show.

And the Christmas episodes are the jewel in the miserable crown of the ‘Eastenders’ year. A day when they have to double the depression. We are treated to an hour long episode filled with less Christmas cheer than in the city centre of Tehran.

Which brings the thought of what the writers would do if they could get away with it. I mean, they seem to be so keen to portray life with such grey joylessness, and bleak desolation, why not step it up, take it to the next level? I’ve been thinking about this and it wouldn’t be that hard. It would actually be cheaper than their normal offerings, whether they used special effects…or not.

It start like this: you open with the ‘Eastenders’ theme tune as normal, then you would have the characters all sitting in the Queen Vic. All of the tables and chairs have been removed so that everyone has to sit down. As you have come to expect, no one is smiling, but this time there is quite a concrete reason for this – they are all holding shotguns in their mouths.

Slowly the camera pans across their faces, the deadness created by their grinding lives shining there, perhaps a hint of pleading in the younger characters’ eyes. No one says a word, they just stare long and deep into the camera.

Then the person at the end of the line fires. And so it goes, they blow their brains, making a tune: ‘Jingle Bells’ in 12-gauge minor.

Once this spectacle ends the camera drifts across the bleeding, twitching corpses, showing us the growing pools and rivers of blood as they form on the wooden floor. In the background a baby cries and over the sound track plays Adagio for Strings. This continues for the rest of the hour-long running time, going into silence once the music stops, the only sound now the crying baby.

And now ‘My Family’.

Now, I know that this is what people want, but sometimes perhaps the channels might want to consider thinking a bit differently and have something fun, even funny for us to watch after gorging on our Christmas meal.

A nice dream.

And on that note I say Merry Christmas and, if I don’t feel another rant coming on beforehand, a very happy New Year!

Will

In which I talk POLITICS...

2009-12-10T06:42:00.000-08:00

In light of the pre-budget report being released yesterday I thought I’d have a political rant. A vaguely informed, rambling rant at that. Read on and be entertained at my lack of informed opinion. Hurrah!

Y’know I stopped expecting any sanity from our esteemed government about ten minutes after I played my part in voting that grinning sociopath fuck Tony Blair and his band of Tory Mark II scumfucks (okay, I’m sure they’re not all fuckers in the current incarnation of the Labour Party, but the majority of the cabinet probably couldn’t be trusted to look after a baby without smothering it) into power. Yes, after almost twenty years of continuous Tory rule, most of it under the crushing madness of Margaret Thatcher and the stripping away of public services to private firms I thought, this Blair bloke can’t be that bad.

Oh, the naïveté. I was young and desperate for some kind of hope for my future and my well-being. Cynical hindsight now tells me that I should have smelled something rotten from the moment that the rebranded New (yes, it would be too awful if it was old Labour, fuck having even a shadow of principle there) Labour used that abomination of a song 'Things Can Only Get Better’ and stormed into government in 1997. They crushed the Tories that year.

And crushing things has become the motif of their time in power. First thing to get crushed was the possibility that your average worker would get a fair shake: we got a minimum wage that was multi-tiered. As ever those under twenty-one were entitled to less than those over that age. I can see those under eighteen getting less, because, in general they have less responsibilities than an eighteen year old. As soon as you’re eighteen you are an adult and should be paid as such, instead this wage band is given the insultingly patronising monicker ‘youth rate’. Not that the over twenty-one minimum wage was any great shake. It still isn’t being just under six pounds an hour, a third of which is taken away in tax right away and then you have all your bills and such. Working at this rate you’re lucky if you have anything left.

Yes, I know that people in other countries have it much worse, but I get the feeling that if any UK government could bring our wages down to those rates they’d do it in a heartbeat.

Let’s be honest, the minimum wage was influenced by all those nice, faceless, monolithic businesses that New Labour wanted to stay friends with. Not that it worked. As soon as most of these corporations hear the words ‘human rights’ they up sticks and find a nice third world dictatorship that they can leech from and give those who run them – each already wealthier than all of the working class in Britain combined – those million pound/dollar/euro bonuses that they so require. Really, really, they’ll be in the poor house if they are brought down to their last million.

Before I go too far into the world of the conspiracy theorist there, let’s mention the mess New Labour have made of the NHS. Or rather let’s talk about how they’ve gone about continuing what the Tories had done all through their reign to undermine and damage something that was once the envy of the world. Those efficiencies that New Labour are so fond of has left large areas without local hospitals and those that are left so disease-ridden (thanks to the fantastic idea of having private cleaning firms take over, always a good idea that) that people are afraid to go in because they perceive that there’s every chance they’ll never come out again.

I mean, there’s a lot more, but those are the most prominent things that I can think of right now.

And we come twelve years later, New Labour is limping along after being caught in many lies and a switch to a Prime Minister with all the charisma of a landed monk fish. We also come to the end of a cycle that was also started by the Tories and allowed to continue unabated by our rosy red saviours: The Markets. I hope it’s the end of a cycle.

The banks and The Markets. One should have been monitoring the other, y’know, instead one cloned the other. As we all know this didn’t turn out for the better, as the banks took on the no-hold-barred money-making ethos of The Markets. The wild, testosterone-fuelled grabbing for wealth and growth was adopted by the bank and things didn’t work out well. Especially, as I’ve already said, the banks were supposed to be watching over the fucking Markets!

Y’see the markets, and capitalism in general, seems to work, as far as I can tell, on the principle that growth can go infinitely, that there are resources in the world to be plundered forever. Which is strange as they seem to only hold one ‘resource’ dear: money. Something artificially created by banks to be infinite, but based on real things. Once upon a time anyway. Now it appears to all the world that money’s based on, well, more money. Which is more than a wee bit weird.

This came to an understated head last year (2008, for those people in the future) when a bunch of investments that were never going to pay back started a bit of a domino effect. This started a ‘banking crisis’. Then a ‘credit crunch’ before the governments of the world held up their hands and said, “We might be in a bit of a recession…”

“…That’s the worst since 1929. And half of you are going to lose your jobs. Maybe we shouldn’t have stripped away all those regulations that were designed to stop this happening again. Oopsie. We’ll fix this. Honest.”

They said a lot, oh yeah. Course they would. Standing, pounding on podiums saying, as people had said almost eighty years before (someone hear an echo?), that this can’t be allowed to happen again. And proceeded to wrist-slap their way through these multinationals and banks, who, in public whined about the restrictions placed on them, when they really had to be laughing their arses off that they’d gotten away with (thanks to those pesky governments, har har).

Cos if the banks were so scared of government reprisals why are they still giving their high-ups ridiculous bonuses? When there are people reduced to poverty and either no longer in their home or afraid that it’s going to be repossessed. They didn’t even learn any lessons from the financial institutions that sank because of their own greed.

And this brings me, finally, to the pre-budget report. In which there is another tiny tap to the wrists of the bankers and then it’s time to look at punishing the public. Oh yes, we had the temerity to have no idea of what the bankers and our governments were doing (while they hid it) so now the whip of budget cuts and tax increases are now on the horizon. Supposedly to tax those of higher incomes, but will only hammer the same people living on the breadline who always take the brunt of these things.

The prevailing theory is this is to win them votes for the general election, by people who intone this as though it should be accepted. We mere mortals couldn’t do better. Perhaps, but at least the politicians could at least be a bit more subtle about it instead of pulling down our collective pants and ordering us to bend over. Or even soften the blow to the people they supposedly represent.

But then British politicians don’t have any loyalty to the people of the country, their first loyalty is to the party.

And all this has prompted their brethren on the right to start screaming, “We’re the only ones who can save you!”

Excuse me:

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!

Okay. This is going to happen. I have no illusions about this. The electorate are so blinded to any other parties that they believe that the Tories are the only ones to replace Labour. It’s like forgetting what a bear looks like after it spent a nice long while mauling you. The Tories set this all in motion during the eighties! You’d have to be mad to think that they weren’t going to come in and slink all this back in.

A party that referred, I’m told, to the lower employees in the public sector as ‘minions’. Tells you everything you need to know about their mindset, really.

There are other parties in the UK, but most of them don’t get much of a chance, thanks to the media in the country. Aren’t they nice for showing us all the options? So people think they’re left with just Labour and Conservative; and often start giggling if you mention the Liberal Democrats. Here in Scotland we also have the SNP, Wales has Plaid Cymru and Northern Ireland has a bunch of parties. But the central government is still in Westminster.

After another stinging slap in the face by our government, I’m left wondering what can be done. I mean the only way to become an MP now is to have gone to university and studied politics, so we now have a bunch of dead-eyed, indoctrinated creatures whose whole life is politics and they’ve never really done anything else. Doesn’t seem right does it? A nice locked system for those privileged few who know the right people. I know it’s always had that aspect but with this new wrinkle it’s harder for anyone outside of the loop to get in.

I think I’ll just sit and wait for Christmas and New Year, hoping that it will all be much better once the first of January rolls around.

Will

The Delia Dream.

2009-12-07T10:49:00.000-08:00

I have a dream. Not a recurrent dream just a…persistent one. It involves Delia Smith, the doyen of British cookery and woman with some complicated ideas about cooking Christmas dinner. I imagine if she’d gone down the Keith Floyd route of mixing booze with his presenting.

This is informed by something that happened a few years ago. In which the erstwhile television cook stormed the pitch in the middle of a Norwich City game and proceeded to inform the fans, in a coherent and sober way, what her thoughts were.

Now imagine the scene, our host is standing at her traditional homely kitchen counter, in her traditional homely kitchen (in her very own home we are shown through loving exterior wide shots) the ingredients for the upcoming recipe arrayed all nice and tidy around her with the appropriate utensils. And a glass of wine, with bottle nice and handy.

That last detail is important – watch it carefully.

She launches into her opening salvo; a lovely little starter that involves pancetta and cheese. She stutters and stammers a bit, but let’s be honest, that’s just her style. Saint Delia can be forgiven any kind of inarticulate garbling because she has our best interests at heart, she wants us to learn to cook and enjoy it. Bless her heart.

Try not to be distracted by her earrings, as mesmeric these adornments are – looking like those head phones that people really serious about music wear – you do not want to miss any of this wonderful, tasty recipe. The food is the important thing, not the preposterous jewellery.

Seriously.

During this segment she sips daintily at this wine. Stuff that is probably quite expensive, but that she has a cellar the size of your entire house full of. After all Delia’s a very wealthy woman and rightfully so. She’s worked hard over the decades to bring good cooking and awareness of fresh ingredients.

Y’know until this controversial tome came along, but we won’t worry about that either. Oh no.

At the end of her guide to creating this culinary treasure she looks pretty relaxed and the wine bottle is looking a little over half empty.

It’s all good for Delia.

She now guides us over to another worktop. Homely as the first, forgetting the fact that you’re now being guided through a kitchen that a family of three could live in with room to spare for garage. It doesn’t matter, it’s the illusion that she’s just like you and I, and she happens to know all these wonderful things about cooking.

Our loosened hostess carries the glass and bottle of wine with her to this second counter. There’s already two bottles of wine waiting there, open, for her, but this is neither here nor there.

Her next dish is a, let’s say, stew, full of fresh vegetables, spices, herbs and whatever meat might be in your brain at the moment. A game stew. How’s that? A mix of venison and partridge perhaps. Yum.

The wine takes something of a bashing in this section, as this dish requires a lot of cooking so poor Delia is becoming rather thirsty. And giggly. Really it’s infectious, how much fun she’s having chopping and browning meat and cooking vegetables. She even makes some potatoes to accompany the dish, as well as a nice red currant jelly.

It’s all a lot of work and she babbles with increasing ebullience. Sometimes meandering away from the task at hand, pointing at the camera man and laughing at that oh-so funny birthmark that looks like an ejaculating penis on his face or becoming quiet and contemplative as she ruminates about how much she loves her husband, he’s a pain in the arse, but that doesn’t matter, because we’ve been through so much…

Now watch as an empty wine bottle is discreetly taken from the counter. Delia isn’t even aware as she sloshes some more wine into her glass, gets confused, asks if that was supposed to go into the stew and is told that’s the bottle of red on her right.

She quaffs her drinking wine, while pouring her cooking wine into the pot. A few finishing touches and a few more slugs of wine and we can leave the pot to simmer while Delia brings us to dessert.

“Don’t you take that camera off me, ya basserds!” she shouts when the poor, penis-faced camera man moves a little too fast as she moves back to the original counter.

This counter, by the magic of television and a put-upon and unsung home economist, has been cleaned and the ingredients for the meal’s finale are placed out.

A tiramisu. Oh dear.

She goes through creaming the mascarpone and cream together, swaying and making obscene suggestions to the camera man, “Is that to scale?” she asks the poor man, pointing the mark that he’s becoming ever more conscious of. She manages this, just.

Soaking of the sponges proves too much and things take a turn for the disturbing. The coffee liqueur bottle is to her lips in a flash and its contents are guzzled with disconcerting speed. It’s quite amazing that she doesn’t spill any as she’s swaying like a sapling in a hurricane.

“Thissis boring! Less fuckin’ party!” she cries and clambers up onto the counter and starts to dance, gripping the coffee liqueur bottle, with wild abandon.

The crew look on, being showered by Tia Maria, unsure of what they should do. With grim professionalism, and perhaps a little bit of vengeful glee, the cameraman keeps his lens firmly on the action.

Delia’s warmed to this party idea and is now calling for some “fuckin’ music”. Her blouse has fallen off one shoulder, revealing densely freckled skin, much to the horror of every member of the crew. Except maybe that producer who’s had a thing for her since the early days.

“C’mon! Get yer fuckin’ clothes off! Don’t be such a buncha prudes!” she slurs, undoing more buttons on her blouse. “Get em off!”

Some production assistant has scurried out of the room to retrieve Delia’s husband, who has that ‘oh, fuck, not again’ look about him and grabs her off the counter.

Our last view of Delia as the credits roll is her being dragged out of the kitchen, stripped to her bra and screaming, “Yer alla buncha fuggin’ borin’ cunts! Aaaargh!”

Join us next week when she makes coq au vin.

That is a dream. Isn’t it beautiful?

Will

'Cutting Chills' - second edition

2009-09-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

The second edition of 'Cutting Chills' is now on Lulu.com and on Amazon.com (not UK, unfortunately).

This edition has four new stories and a fantastic cover by Mo Ali.

It can be found here: http://www.lulu.com/content/794103

More information on the Amazon listing later.

Will

And 'Crown Wearer' ends...

2009-09-04T03:43:00.000-07:00

And so the year-long experiment ends. Read the final parts at Crown Wearer and then tell me what you think.

To everyone who read the whole thing and supported me, you have my many thanks.

Will

The finale week...

2009-08-31T02:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right. 'Crown Wearer' has come almost come to the end of its year-long run on Twitter.

So be sure to head over to twitter.com/Crown_Wearer and get in on the last of the story.

Will

Forge Fire Press update.

2009-07-06T03:34:00.000-07:00

Just to keep you informed about my current blogging and writing exploits: Forge Fire Press has an updated reading blog list.

The new list is as follows:

Monday--Sarah Haynes, "Mooring Room"
Tuesday--J.L. Jamieson, "Finding December"
Wednesday--Garon Cockrell, "Demonic & Other Tales"
Thursday--Cixtian Trybe, "Dark Æther"
Friday--Will Couper, "Spinal Curvature"
Saturday--Danielle Dunne-Domanski, "Never Invite a Necromancer to Tea"
Sunday--Phee Stringer, "The Violet Forest"

Fifth week in and I've posted four blogs. Read em and, y'know, open yer yap holes to tell me what you think.

Will

Forge Fire Press

2009-06-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

Working on an idea by Warren Ellis this website called Forge Fire Press has been started, and I'm part of it.

Every day a different person adds a piece until, at the end, the results are collected in a book.

The current schedule looks like this:

Monday--Sarah Haynes, "Mooring Room"
Tuesday--J.L. Jamieson, "Finding December"
Wednesday--Garon Cockrell, "Demonic & Other Tales"
Thursday--Cixtian Trybe, "Dark Æther"
Friday--Will Couper, "Spinal Curvature"

Will

Atrum Tempestas

2009-05-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

It's arrived! A collection of dark horror stories from some of the best rising authors around!

And for a while it'll be on Lulu:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/atrum-tempestas/6925133

Then you'll be able to get it at amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

A big thanks to John and Charlotte.

Will

The Penny Dreadful

2009-03-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

My story 'Cloak Man' is in the first issue of The Penny Dreadful, it's looks very nice and you should have a look if you haven't read the story before. Hell, take a look even if you have.

Will

Crown Wearer Archive time!

2009-03-02T01:26:00.000-08:00

Since I've reached the five hundred update mark (which, incidentally is also almost the half-way mark) on 'Crown Wearer', I thought that it would be appropriate to bundle together some of the earlier posts to make it easier to catch up so go here: Crown Wearer blog

Will

New Crown Wearer stuff!

2009-02-16T05:22:00.000-08:00

There's a new background story at the Crown Wearer blog. It's a gruesome piece of flash fiction, go check it out.

Will

Some bonus fiction.

2009-02-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

Head over to www.crownwearer.com and go to the blog and you'll find a new piece of fiction for your delectation.

Will

It's alive!

2009-02-03T06:43:00.000-08:00

Well, it's up. Yes, willcouper.com is up and alive.

Oh, shit! That means I have to keep up with this thing!

Panic!

Will

Coming soon.

2008-12-18T05:37:00.000-08:00

Soon I will have a dot com. I'll be linking this blog from that and I'll be posting bits and bobs here: stories or anything of interest relating to me.

Stay tuned.

Will