So many possibilities, so little creative thinking

Someone pointed me towards http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/wont-go-back-to-creationist-zoo-bristol , posing the question “How long before we see something like this on the Isle of Man?”

Strictly speaking, of course, we already do. For a start there's every Manx schoolchild’s nightmare “field trip” to the God World theme park (or as Manx Heritage insists on calling it, Rushen Abbey). There impressionable children are chased round a muddy field by the strange folk from Scripture Union, who want them to consider how much fun it would be to be a mediaeval monk. As any kid who watches Horrible Histories knows already, the answer to that is 'Absolutely none'.

Apparently SUMT get paid for this, which I've always found odd. It seems to me if little children are keeping care-in-the-community candidates off the streets it's the kids who should get paid for performing a public service, not SUMT. An over-literal interpretation of the Bible might well be an early sign of psychotic illness, but it doesn't excuse a failure to look for a proper job.

Then there are some of the Tourist Department's odd niche holiday breaks.

A couple of years back, I'm told, they were offering discreet discounts to off-island churches to organise Celtic Christian tours of the island. I suspect they got the idea from a wily cleric who used to strike deals with local travel agents for tours to various Christian pilgrimage sites, both UK and much further abroad. In return for rounding up a bus-load of punters, said cleric and Mrs Cleric got more annual free holidays than he already racked up as fact-finding missions to sunny climes for various government bodies on which he......well, not so much served as turned up and collected benefits.

But as there aren't actually any functioning island churches which date back more than three centuries, and towns have changed so much since even the 19th century that these are in semi-abandoned villages, the Celtic Christian trail is a bit thin. The presumed sites of any worship prior to that are windswept places in the middle of nowhere, so in practice the tours consisted of dragging pious elderly types up moors, through bogs and down slippy cliffs on wet days during Force 9 gales. I'd have thought the insurance alone would have made the price too high for all but the most determined masochist.

And talking of masochism....maybe we could clean up on another Manx fetish - birching. I'm sure the UK S&M scene is over-run by wealthy ex-public schoolies who would pay through the nose (possibly even other orifices) for a spot of corporal punishment. At last, a useful and valid economic role for all those sensibly shod ladies, built like battleships, who marry diminutive Old Barrovian heirs to Manx businesses then spend decades angrily polishing churches to within an inch of their lives.

Or again, for those who remember the chimp's tea parties that used to be a feature at UK zoos, how about putting up public seating behind a splatter-proof screen at the side of the dining area in large Manx hotels which specialise in corporate affairs and political receptions? Surely foreign visitors would pay to watch what happens when one of our more excitable Rotarians or MHKs hears a polysyllable uttered by a fellow free-loader?

So many possibilities, so little creative thinking from the so-called experts.

Is it any wonder Manx tourism is dying?

Centres of Excrement

This (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/district-news/big-plans-for-site-of-albert-road-school-1-4705523 ) worries me. Not a lot – yet – because over the years a lot of idiots have put forward a lot of grandiose schemes to ‘save’ Ramsey, which all fell flat.

Sometimes, it must be admitted, after conning huge wads of public money, and sometimes after wrecking sober plans for decent change which might otherwise have been considered. But they fell, because their proposers and sponsors were idiots so it follows naturally that their schemes were idiotic too.

So is this, because if lunacy was an Olympic discipline this fundament of faith-based folly could win gold without getting out of bed. Which many of their clientele don’t do too often anyway. In fact, judging from the scenes some days around their current den of iniquity the whole CotR empire may be built on tithes from the benefits of the permanently unemployable.

Which is why I worry at least a little. Because if they cannot put up the money for this project, then who is?

Without even digging, I can think of two local developers with form for pulling shady deals using religious groups as a front. In both cases literally millions in public funds and years of effort by public servants have been wasted already. I hope neither of them is up to their old tricks, because if they are the results will be a further disaster for Ramsey.

 But it beggars belief anyway that the Manx government is so willing to give away a valuable chunk of land which is supposed to be earmarked for social housing and community facilities.

And it is a massive insult that the simple and persistent request by Ramsey people for a decent community centre could be answered by letting a ragbag collection of right wing religious lunatics not only plan it, but control it.

Apart from anything else, the best rule of thumb a sane person can have for planning forays into local cultural life is to find out where batwits go to eat or entertain themselves, then avoid it like the plague.

Do you know anyone who has had a wedding reception or ‘charitable function’ at Mount Murray? What church do they and their guests go to?

I rest my case, but would you really want the entire potential for community life in your town controlled by some jazz-handing Jesus junkie clad in beige polyester?

If this freak show gets government help it won’t even be a case of “Will the last person to leave Ramsey turn out the lights.” 

Because there won’t be any lights to turn out. I wouldn’t put it past this lot to nick the light bulbs and sell the lamposts for scrap.

Unintentional Comedy Week

You can tell Tynwald Day is approaching because government bodies – both local and national – have been pushing junk mail through our letterbox. The professionals’ are getting increasingly desperate for anyone at all to turn up to what they laughingly describe as a ‘programme of events’.

If yesterday’s entertainers in Strand Street, Douglas, are an example this is no surprise. I’m guessing that the white faced lads in stripey shirts were clowns, and not government advisors demonstrating their usual disorientation in time and place. If so, they were following what Alexei Sayle once called the Open University Theory of Comedy, which states that if you have a white face and baggy trousers you must be funny. As Sayle so rightly argued: “Didn’t work for Mussolini, did it?”

Unlike Manx public sector senior executives, of course, who would happily work for anyone and do anything, providing they get to arrange their own salary, expenses and pension.

I said last week that I see no point in looking in on the farce being played out on Tynwald Hill. From the comments on the IOM Newspapers site it looks like most of the Manx public agree. Similarly, in my (quite large) workplace I don’t know one person who plans to waste a perfectly good day off work watching one bunch of chumps in penguin suits watching another bunch of chumps playing out the disturbing arcadian visions of some Edwardian clergyman after too much  communion wine. George Bernard Shaw always said you should try everything once except incest and folk dancing, which rules out both Manx politics and Manx heritage as far as I’m concerned.

Both, sad to say, are equally in evidence judging from the other leaflet we got through the letterbox, threatening us with another Ramsey National Week. Everything from the opening attraction ( a photographic exhibition around Royal Visits to Ramsey which, judging from the Commissioners I saw sneaking out of the Ramsey Town Hall back door, I’m guessing involved surreptitious public outlay on alcohol) through to the closing event (Ramsey Songs of Praise and Blessing of the Lifeboat) is sure to have the ratepayers turning up in……oh….. their half-dozens.

Another highlight is 100 years of Manx Fairy Tales at the Methodist Centre, supported by the Ramsey Heritage Trust. So that’s a night of more supernatural whimsy dreamt up by the aforementioned Edwardian dipsomniacs at a church which no longer dares to even call itself a church, run by a few navel-gazing geriatrics who used their considerable political connections to deprive Ramsey of the last affordable venue for kids parties and fundraising events in order to pass around their old photos and whinge about how everything was better when they were young.

Of course it was. Because during their working lives anything in Ramsey for anyone under the age of 70 that was not closed through their daytime business incompetence was shut by their evenings of local governmental neglect.

You would think by now the organisers - a tight, self-interested collection of  bods whose tiny social circle and limitless daytime availability  means they can elect themselves on to every local and national government advisory committee going – might have got the message. Two weeks back, at a fundraising curtain raiser to the ‘main event’ held in the Town Hall, they were reduced to buying all the raffle tickets because nobody else turned up to find out what we are in for. At least, I take it that is why all the names drawn out of the hat were committee members.

By now some disgruntled plastic patriot will be asking why all us dissatisfied punters don’t try and do better instead of moaning. That would be because we’re not moaning, Dearie, we’re too busy laughing.

At both the sheer naffness of this and the Diamond Jubilee fiascos on the day after Tynwald and the fact that, in order for a fewTrumpton dignitaries and business bumpkins to have another chance to out-yokelise each other, everybody else gets two days off work and free of the lot of them.

At least these chumps got that right –  even if by accident.

Too lazy to even poke fun properly

Excuse my recent apathy. I wish I had a good excuse – but the truth is that (a) I decided that I cannot be bothered with ‘serious’ topics any more and (b) nothing much in the Manx news or even accounts of international religious idiocy has tickled my ribs recently.
The thing is, I once believed the local newspaper (and possibly even regional radio) could hold up a mirror to the community, chronicling its ups and downs, shining a vital light on dark doings and so on.
I now accept that this is no longer possible - at least in the Isle of Man. The local media is nothing but a nonsense box, reduced to reproducing the inanities of those who feed it most. So from now on I intend to leave ‘real’ journalism to those who live in delusions of a real world, and concentrate instead on surreally reporting the odd, the hilarious and the genuinely interesting.
However, the first details of one of the most cringeworthy weekends in the annual Manx leisure calendar have just been released (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=44436) and I cannot resist a quick smirk.
Oh dear!
Pardon my hilarity, but there is just something about the upper middle classes trying (and failing) so desperately to be hip that brings out the old Class War punk in me. I must have worked with more than my fair share of Tarquins and Gemimas in the Finance Sector over the last decade or so, and the funniest thing about them is their deluded leisure hour dabblings in everything from alternative therapy to world music.
Ahhh! Bless their cotton-wool brains. Where would the Manx New Age be without so many over privileged halfwits to keep it rolling around like an (upper) crusty full of bargain bin scrumpy?
I would poke fun – relentlessly – but by the oddest coincidence the Daily Mash has been taking aim at a similar target (see http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/new-festival-aimed-directly-at-twats-201203285064/ ), so I can just go and do something else instead.

This squib just got damper

A month ago (see Another year, another damp squib) I mentioned that Firestarter, the excruciating annual loonfest put on by a bunch of Pentecostal Peter Pans, was moving to yet another venue. I also predicted that the honeymoon would be over as soon as the new venue sent the bill and Firestarter’s cheque inevitably bounced.
Again.
Seems I was wrong. Because the ill-fated couple didn’t even get as far as their shotgun wedding. From a Manxnet news item posted today (see http://www.manx.net/news/2478/firestarter-festival-moves-to-union-mills ) it looks like either Ardhwallan’s owner did a quick credit check or, being a little short of punters himself, has at least decided to cut his losses.
And Firestarter’s over-the-hill organisers seem to be doing the same judging from the new lower ticket price. Or maybe they just cannot sell any tickets and have resigned themselves to a couple of days of paunchy, ageing ’youth pastors’ playing alone sadly with their water pistols.
Again.

Cinematic horror special

I generally insist that people have a right to do what they want, providing they leave others to go about their own business too, but there are limits. And I have to report a case which exceeds them.
Because Living Hell (or 'Living Hope Community Church', to give them their official title) have a planning application in (number 11/00621/B) to set up another permanent base in the former gym by Douglas’s Palace Cinema.
Apparently they currently run their Sunday freak show in the Shearwater Suite. Now they want to start holding it in the Palace Cinema instead, setting the gym aside for a separate child abuse session.
I have to protest.
It is not just that parents in the cinema, eyes swivelling and mouths frothing as the lunatic at the front gets into his stride, will not hear their offspring screaming to get out from the gym. It is also a public health issue.
Years ago I worked in several large Victorian psychiatric hospitals, so I know what happens when largish groups of mentally disturbed people get over-excited. Apart from the obvious danger of physical harm to each other as they thrash about (though as the Living Hell acolytes are, in law at least, consenting adults that is their business) they lose control of their bodily functions too.
There is no way to put this politely. Places where this happens regularly develop stains and odours which no amount of bleach and hard scrubbing ever remove.
Adults may decide to put up with this if the film is good enough and the prices are low (neither, admittedly, seem likely at a Manx cinema). But the Palace Cinema is also a place where kids are taken to be entertained.
Any parent will have difficulties explaining to puzzled tinies why the place stinks like a blocked toilet and the floor appears to be stained with faecal matter. And sane or responsible ones would never allow the lights of their lives in such a cess pit in the first place.

Another year, another damp squib

The Micturant Tendency of the local evangelical community have announced details of their annual August freakfest.
If you are a concerned parent or householder, see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=35566 for the times and places to avoid.
Interesting choice of venue. Surely nothing – I repeat nothing – to do with them being thought beyond the pale even by the standards of the German religious cult that has taken over The Crossags (or possibly just because Firestarter still haven’t paid the utility bills run up at previous Christofascist damp squibs held there or in St. Johns).
And surely nothing – I repeat nothing – to do with Ardwhallan’s owner being a prominent member of the golf club whose secretary used to annually write to Ramsey Commissioners complaining about the noise from the festival.
Maybe these penny-pinching oddballs were just made for each other, or maybe, having fallen out of favour with every other Christian landowner, the honeymoon will end yet again when Firestarter get invoiced – and try to pass that invoice on to their parent churches, who try to pass it yet again to an inter-church youth committee which has eventually dealt with it in the past, but may no longer be able to do so, having been put further and further into the red by a decade of bills run up by childish, over-the-hill bible-bashers.

Woe, woe, woe, woe....Portaloo

The Deluded Herd were trying convene another Homage to Nuremburg this morning. This time they used their special privileges to ‘do a Glastonbury’ down at the godawful Bay Festival (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=45882 for more).
Under normal circumstances they wouldn’t need a tent. A festival Portaloo would have done the job nicely and had just the hot, sweaty atmosphere evangelicals seem to like.
But was there more to this than meets the eye?
Last year’s original Bay Festival set new local precedents for the over-pricing of tickets to see sad burn-outs, inconveniencing of locals and, in return, mass disinterest. It was no surprise that the organisers irritated Peel residents and local politicians so much that nobody wanted them back –ever – or that the commercial set-up behind it eventually went bankrupt.
How or why our national misgovernors ever fell for the whole charade all over again and lent an even bigger venue in the capital - Nobles Park - to the ‘new’ festival management we’ll never know. It certainly couldn’t have been a brown envelope job, as most island retailers are having nothing to do with a ‘business’ which probably still hasn’t paid last year’s bills, never mind wanting a credit line for this year.
The ticket prices are just as outrageous – with an average family needing to spend in the region of £100 to see the Sunday afternoon X Factor runners up meet Britain’s Got Talent runners up extravaganza which features the only artists anyone under 40 has heard of. So how handy that godbothers, presumably, could stroll in free on Sunday morning then ‘forget’ to go home again, and I’m sure nobody from the churches would have thought of that – them being such paragons of virtue and all.
Or it might be even simpler than that.
This year’s festival has been played up like nothing is wrong (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Bay-Festival-fever-hits-as.6369304.jp ), though that’s probably more to do with the advertising clout of the ‘sponsors’, but it’s noticeable that yesterday what should have been a crowd-filler (the Diversity show) eventually offered free entry to kids with every adult ticket in order to make the place look even half-full. And this ‘looking full’ is the key because (as the unsuccessful organiser of a previous festival once told me) the money is in the webcams, not punters on the ground.
Maybe the simple truth is that even the Sunday afternoon show isn’t shifting units, so the organisers are happy to have a few hundred godbotherers waving their hands about and looking blissed on camera – kind of like crowd extras in a Hollywood blockbuster who you don’t even have to pay, and who don’t even need to act because they’re naturally enthusiastic about total rubbish anyway.
Yup, reckon that’ll be it. Though that won’t be the way either godbotherers, tourist department or festival organisers will spin it in coming weeks.

The horror's not over until the fat lady.....

One of the ways you know you’re getting older is when your family hijack your celebrations for their own purposes. Like yesterday, when my ‘birthday treat’ was to accompany her indoors and the infant prodigy to an amateur operatic thing I’d run a mile from, given a choice.
The thing is, I had to experience Manx amateur operatics professionally in the 1980’s, when I was given a ticket and told to say something nice about it for the newspapers. There was little choice. For reasons rooted deep in the twisted psyche of small town life, many frustrated types spend their days making millions at conservative professions while dreaming of the kind of release only attained by wearing a spangly costume and tunelessly belting out a big show number. The worst thing for a newspaper is that the greatest disparity between the two lifestyles is inevitably found in the biggest advertisers.
So, I know all about this strange and depraved subculture and try to avoid it.
To be honest, the only reason the prodigy wanted to see it either was the title, Beauty and the Beast, and the suggestion that it was ‘based on a Disney film’. It may well have been, if Disney made Friday the Thirteenth.
It was also advertised as a family musical. I thought it closer to a murder mystery, in that the music got murdered and even by the end I hadn’t worked out which of the stars squawking a quarter tone flat was the beauty and which was the beast. I almost solved that one when the beast finally took his mask off to reveal himself as a supposedly handsome prince, the kids at the front screamed and their parents yelled ‘put it back on, put it back on’.
Honestly, we loved it.
Just not for the reasons the cast thought we should have.

Question Time at Camberwick Green.

I spent the earlier part of last night, along with the family, at the Manx Radio Any Questions session at Ramsey Town Hall. We thought we could combine free family entertainment and simultaneously demonstrate an interest in community politics.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I’ve seen enough ‘meet the politician’ type events to enjoy the sheer inanity providing I can escape at the first hint of a teabreak, while I suspect my wife just wanted to know how long it would be before her boss, a cheery Boris Johnson clone and the token ‘business panellist’, would be reduced to a gibbering wreck. My daughter – well she’s happy to accompany her mum to any new experience, and you’re never too young to learn that local democracy in action usually isn’t any of the three things implied in the phrase.
So it was that we slipped in at the back behind a selection of the retired, retarded or otherwise unemployable loons who always attend such things, presumably because they haven’t mastered the On/Off switch on the TV yet and have no other friends or entertainment. Britain’s Got Talent was on at the time, so watching a roomful of clueless losers who can’t spell ‘ironic’ was similar to our usual Saturday night in, except it was live. Well, sort of.
How to describe our experience….
Imagine a radio version of Question Time at Camberwick Green, with the Education Minister as Mrs Honeyman and the leader of Liberal Vannin as Captain Snort, and you’d be close. I still don’t know what any of the actual questions were, as the careful arrangement Manx Radio had made for a wide-ranging selection to be read from cards got shouted down within seconds by a rabble whose only interest seemed to be (a) why the pier hadn’t been restored, (b) why Ramsey isn’t a lively metropolis and the hub of island life and (c) why the café in the new civic swimming pool isn’t as good as the old one.
The answers, though no-one dares to say, are (a) because only the senile want the pier restored (b) because almost anyone with a job works in Douglas and (c) because swimming pools are for swimming in, so any additional social function as an impromptu day care centre where the confused can sip tea and moan is a free bonus, now stop complaining.
It was interesting watching the panellists try to avoid this, and particular brownie points go to the token business panellist for, effectively, managing to intimate that before pier restoration takes place there first needs to be a town with modern facilities built close by for people to take their aged relatives around after 30 seconds reminiscing about the ‘good old days’.
We also enjoyed watching the ‘small business lobby’ complaining about local shops not being supported. As mentioned before, one reason for this is that hardly any Ramsey resident works there. So the town’s daytime visitors are the elderly, the disabled and mums with small kids -none of whom can get down the narrow, broken pavement in the main street because shopkeepers park their 4x4s with two wheels on the pavement.
Of course another reason for empty shops is that there’s only so much of a market for novelty mugs and scatter cushions bearing twenty year old jokes. If shopkeepers offered something their potential clientele need – say incontinence pads – then they might get some custom.
According to the Manx Radio website report which drew our attention to this hilarious night out: ‘Highlights from what is expected to be a lively evening will be broadcast on Manx Radio next month’.
Well, that’s another hour I’ve freed up for you then.