Tuesday 14 May 2013

I am not a writer.

The title is pretty obviously true but what makes a writer? I'd like to be one and have the ability to write my thoughts in a coherent and cogent way, well to honest I can do that but it takes a long long time. I did try using dictation software but all that revealed was how often I said 'hum' and made various other noises.
I tried reading the tweets of some authors and found that in the case of Fleet Street Fox what was needed the ability to spin things and to claim anything not proven false was true. It involved having only an agenda of being listened to.
I tried following to and Stephen Fry, this only succeeded in furthering my insecurities and realising what an ill educated oaf I was.
In general I did learn that the way I come over in writing and I believe in speaking as very arrogant and condescending. While I'll admit to a certain amount of that I think I've managed to develop the linguistic tone of someone even more arse holeish than I actually am.
I must assume that this is true, to some extent with other people, that they are inside different from their projected personalities. I am going to experiment with this, by trying to convince myself that Alain and Stephen are in fact bumbling, ill educated prats who fortunately for them come over is intelligent and well educated people, with wonderfully well rounded personalities.
I also recently found out the Mike Hewitt was dead and that rather than being the snide condescending git that he wrote as, in person he was a genuinely nice guy. I'd spent ages slagging him off without getting the joke. My greatest regret is my own lack of artifice.

The Death of Thatcher

Ok so a lot of people waited a long time for her to go and she was as a person arrogant and pompous and her policies did a lot of damage. Some will say that it wasn't damaged but was necessary to fix the economy of the UK and point to various economic booms since as proof that this is the case but the booms do not prove anything, they definitely do not prove that the alternatives that Callaghan and Co were pursuing would not have worked. The rest of Europe followed a different path and do not seem to have done too badly. In the US under Reagan the US spent a fortune on its military pumping money into the economy by means that the right finds acceptable.
What Thatcher did do without question is favour London and the South East. While most of us now rely on private bus companies London benefits from a well coordinated publicly owned and funded services, to go with it's equally lavish rail system.
The economy moved from manufacturing to service industries as they were seen as the future, the German future however included manufacturing and has outgrown the UK since 1979, this included rebuilding East Germany a cost which the UK could not have carried.
One of the most interesting things I found in the numbers was that while the Tory percentage vote went up by 8.1 the Labour vote only went down 2.3 it was the Lib Dems who lost the most at 4.5, given that the Libs are in bed with the Tories this time...