Aspirational parents condemn their children to a desperate, joyless life

George Monbiot in The Guardian


 

'But to what are we aspiring? A life that is better than our own, or worse?' Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

Perhaps because the alternative is too hideous to contemplate, we persuade ourselves that those who wield power know what they are doing. The belief in a guiding intelligence is hard to shake.

We know that our conditions of life are deteriorating. Most young people have little prospect of owning a home, or even of renting a decent one. Interesting jobs are sliced up, through digital Taylorism, into portions of meaningless drudgery. The natural world, whose wonders enhance our lives, and upon which our survival depends, is being rubbed out with horrible speed. Those to whom we look for guardianship, in government and among the economic elite, do not arrest this decline, they accelerate it.

The political system that delivers these outcomes is sustained by aspiration: the faith that if we try hard enough we could join the elite, even as living standards decline and social immobility becomes set almost in stone. But to what are we aspiring? A life that is better than our own, or worse?

Last week a note from an analyst at Barclays’ Global Power and Utilities group in New York was leaked. It addressed students about to begin a summer internship, and offered a glimpse of the toxic culture into which they are inducted.

“I wanted to introduce you to the 10 Power Commandments … For nine weeks you will live and die by these … We expect you to be the last ones to leave every night, no matter what … I recommend bringing a pillow to the office. It makes sleeping under your desk a lot more comfortable … the internship really is a nine-week commitment at the desk … an intern asked our staffer for a weekend off for a family reunion – he was told he could go. He was also asked to hand in his BlackBerry and pack up his desk … Play time is over and it’s time to buckle up.”

Play time is over, but did it ever begin? If these students have the kind of parents featured in the Financial Times last month, perhaps not. The article marked a new form of employment: the nursery consultant. These people, who charge from £290 an hour, must find a nursery that will put their clients’ toddlers on the right track to an elite university.

They spoke of parents who had already decided that their six-month-old son would go to Cambridge then Deutsche Bank, or whose two-year-old daughter “had a tutor for two afternoons a week (to keep on top of maths and literacy) as well as weekly phonics and reading classes, drama, piano, beginner French and swimming. They were considering adding Mandarin and Spanish. ‘The little girl was so exhausted and on edge she was terrified of opening her mouth.’”

In New York, playdate coaches charging $450 an hour train small children in the social skills that might help secure their admission to the most prestigious private schools. They are taught to hide traits that could suggest they’re on the autistic spectrum, which might reduce their chances of selection.

From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment. For the sake of this toxic culture, the economy is repurposed, the social contract is rewritten, the elite is released from tax, regulation and the other restraints imposed by democracy.

Where the elite goes, we are induced to follow. As if the assessment regimes were too lax in UK primary schools, last year the education secretary announced a new test for four-year-olds. A primary school in Cambridge has just taken the obvious next step: it is now streaming four-year-olds into classes according to perceived ability. The education and adoption bill, announced in the Queen’s speech, will turn the screw even tighter. Will this help children, or hurt them?

Who knows? Governments used to survey the prevalence of children’s mental health issues every five years, but this ended in 2004. Imagine publishing no figures since 2004 on, say, childhood cancer, and you begin to understand the extent to which successive governments have chosen to avoid this issue. If aspirational pressure is not enhancing our wellbeing but damaging it, those in power don’t want to know.

But there are hints. Mental health beds for children in England increased by 50% between 1999 and 2014, but still failed to meet demand. Children suffering mental health crises are being dumped in adult wards or even left in police cells because of the lack of provision (put yourself in their position and imagine the impact).

The number of children admitted to hospital because of self-harm has risen by 68% in 10 years, while the number of young patients with eating disorders has almost doubled in three years. Without good data, we don’t have a clear picture of what the causes might be, but it’s worth noting that in the past year, according to the charity YoungMinds, the number of children receiving counselling for exam stress has tripled.

An international survey of children’s wellbeing found that the UK, where such pressures are peculiarly intense, ranked 13th out of 15 countries for children’s life satisfaction, 13th for agreement with the statement “I like going to school”, 14th for children’s satisfaction with their bodies and 15th for self-confidence. So all that pressure and cramming and exhortation – that worked, didn’t it?

In the cause of self-advancement, we are urged to sacrifice our leisure, our pleasures and our time with partners and children, to climb over the bodies of our rivals and to set ourselves against the common interests of humankind. And then? We discover that we have achieved no greater satisfaction than that with which we began.

In 1653, Izaak Walton described in the Compleat Angler the fate of “poor-rich men”, who “spend all their time first in getting, and next in anxious care to keep it; men that are condemned to be rich, and then always busie or discontented”. Today this fate is confused with salvation.

Finish your homework, pass your exams, spend your 20s avoiding daylight, and you too could live like the elite. But who in their right mind would want to?

Dying at 22 is too steep a price for being ‘the best’

Shobhaa De in The Times of India

My heart broke while reading the tragic account written by a devastated father on hearing about his 22-year-old son’s sudden death in a San Francisco parking lot some weeks ago. Sarvshreshth Gupta had done all the ‘right things’ ambitious Indian parents expect from their children. He was supposed to be living the Great American Dream, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, interning with Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, before landing a job as a financial analyst with Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. His young life followed the golden script written for — and sometimes by — aspiring desi students. Those who toil hard to get into the best business schools in the US, achieve great grades, repay huge loans, make their folks proud, bag high-paying jobs, work harder still… and then collapse! Like young Sarvshreshth did. The unreasonable pressure of a system that expects young people to sweat blood so as to make other people rich, finally got to the analyst — perhaps, had he listened to his father and walked out of his job a few hours earlier, he would have been alive. Fired, perhaps. But alive.

Sarvshreshth’s exchanges with his sensitive, understanding father tell their own story. And it’s a pretty common one. He writes of being severely sleep deprived, working for 20 hours a day, spending nights in an empty office, completing presentations while prepping for a client meeting early the next morning… all the while putting up with the tyranny of a senior VP breathing down his neck — pushing, pushing, pushing. Whenever his father advised him to take it easy and look after his health, Sarvshreshth would bravely reply, “Come on, Papa. I am young and strong. Investment banking is hard work.” As it turns out, the young man was not as strong as he imagined. And yes, the hard work as an investment banker is precisely what killed him.

When I came across the grieving father’s poignant online essay, ‘A Son Never Dies’, I thought about several parents and their children in similar situations. I thought about my own children and their friends… what a scary world they occupy. Look around and you will find many other Sarvshreshths — young men who are literally killing themselves in jobs that pay big bucks, but extract a gigantic price. Yes, Indians today can lay claim to being the best-educated, highest paid ethnic group in America. But, at what cost?

Right now, hundreds of over-wrought parents are undertaking pricey campus tours of various universities abroad. They believe this is their ‘duty’ since they want their kids to ‘get the best’. Is this what they mean by ‘the best’ ? We have equally good universities in India. What sort of absurd pressure is this that forces parents and students to go overseas in the hope of ‘bettering prospects’? Why not have confidence in your child’s ability to shine in India, without going through the sort of trauma Sarvshreshth suffered? Yes, we have ragging in our colleges, and no, some of our academic laurels are not as prestigious in global job markets as Ivy League degrees. So what? If you’ve got it, you will make it. Anywhere!

Just a short while before Sarvshreshth’s body was found (cause of death not officially declared so far), his father had told him to take 15 days’ leave and come home. The fatigued son’s forlorn response was, “They will not allow”. Hours later, he was dead. This sad story should act as a wake-up call for both over-ambitious parents and over-achieving children. Not everybody can take the almost inhuman pressure of the rat race. This young man was missing home-cooked food, the comfort of family and an emotionally reassuring environment. If only he’d had the courage to say, ‘To hell with it…’ and come home, his devastated father would not be writing that pathos-filled essay today.

It’s time we took a fresh look at our craze for ‘foreign degrees’ and ‘foreign jobs’. Today there are over 100,000 Indian students on US campuses. Most will think of this time as the best years of their lives. Some will stay on and be successful there. Others will return and pursue successful careers back home. But a few will crack, crumble and succumb under pressure. The system sees all kinds. But this is not about the survivors. This is about the vulnerable. Every parent wants a child to succeed. But not at the cost of their life.

I wish Sarvshreshth’s father Sunil Gupta would take this important message to many more parents still debating about their child’s future. Earning a degree and bagging a great job are fine goals. But living a wholesome life with people who love and respect you is infinitely more rewarding in the long run.

Irony. This was the worst thing to happen to a young man whose name means ‘The Best’.

We don’t live to work, we work to live. Why don’t we say so?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

 

‘It appears that you need to be in the bull-headed world of high finance before you can make this simple assertion: I’m don’t have to justify scaling back my work on the basis that I’m swapping one role (‘hardworker') for another (‘mother'). Photograph: Loop Images/ Alamy



“Hardworking” is the ubiquitous political denominator of our age, source of morality, citizenship, respect and status. It slips inanely into even the blandest legislative literature: the psychoactive substances bill, for instance, vowed to “protect hardworking citizens from the risks posed by untested … drugs”. The precise meaning of the phrase is rarely explicitly spelt out (except in the context of benefits and universal credit, where the working week that qualifies as “hard” is endlessly recalibrated by the Department for Work and Pensions). How many hours constitutes hard work? Can you even count it in hours? Does working hard to care for someone count? What about pets? Is there any room in this formulation for work that you find hard – poetry, aerobics – which doesn’t bring in any money? Or is it really a measure of economic productivity, turned by hazy phrasing and sleight of hand into a badge of honour?

This picture jars, rather, with the priorities of the people who are actually doing all this work, as described in the Flexible Jobs Index, out this week. It is compiled by Timewise, a recruitment organisation that also studies cultural attitudes to the workplace. “If you put together the people who work part-time who choose to, plus the people who are working full-time when they would rather work part-time, because they have no choice: that’s half the population,” says Karen Mattison of Timewise. This tells quite a different story to the one we’ve come to accept, of an insecure and underemployed workforce who would like more hours. About 14.1 million people want to work flexibly. One in 10 British workers – or three million people – don’t have enough hours, rising to one in five in so-called elementary or low-skilled occupations. But professionals tend to have more hours than they want.

We could ascribe this to a fundamental difference in outlook between one class and another, with energy levels and can-do attitudes peaking at the lowest pay grades then tailing off among higher earners. But it seems more likely, to me at least, that all these figures point to the same conclusion: people work extremely hard when they can’t live any other way, and steadily less hard – or wish they could work less hard – when they can afford to.

Hard work does not seem to be valued for its own sake, as a marker of identity or bestower of meaning. Work is part of a greater entity known as “life”, and even the fabled “work-life balance” is a bit last-century; given the choice, we see work as a subset of life, and not its rival.

This is already reflected in the reality of work – 95% of companies already offer flexibility – but it’s completely absent from the way people talk about work. In the language of recruitment, ambition and fealty remain inseparable – the truly committed employee thinks only of the job. “The research is saying,” Mattison concludes, “that we have to stop talking about flexible working and start talking about flexible hiring.” From a distance, it is a complicated distinction, but up close, obvious: there is no language in the process of getting a job that allows you to say you want it but only for 60% of the time. Just imagining this crushing awkwardness – when do you even bring it up? – is enough to trap many people in existing jobs they’re overqualified for because the hours work. It’s very wasteful, for them and for employers, who could often get someone much better than they could afford if they were only prepared to have them for fewer hours.

This is one of the critical modern taboos: the way we really feel about work – that it’s OK in its place but cannot be the wellspring of all fulfilment – nor occupy all our hours; versus the role of work in the sociopolitical narrative, in which the solidity of your citizenship is built on the foundations of your fervent industriousness. Partly this is because everyone insists on framing it as a conversation about work versus children; which in turn makes it a women’s issue, which in turn leads people to dismiss flexibility as a signal that ambition has receded, leaving only maturity and reliability in its stead. Going part time is the cultural equivalent of shifting from Cos to Boden.

Furthermore, the new consensus about hardworking people, hardworking families, human units defined by the intensity of their effort, actually sounds, when you decouple it from whichever smooth voice whence it came, a bit Soviet. It calls to mind those glory years of post-revolutionary propaganda in which to work – particularly with your top off – was to wrest back dignity from the capital forces that had tried to steal it from you. And yet we are meant to exist in this era of self-interest, in which our sense of identity is created not by work but by consumption. It’s a totally contradictory trope: of course it couldn’t brook challenge or nuance or an honest account of what work actually means to people. It would disintegrate.

“This is a work-life thing. That life isn’t just children. That life is life,” says Clare Turnbull, who has worked in the famously inflexible world of asset management and hasn’t done a five-day week since 2001. I’d asked her if she would go full time once her children left home. It appears that you need to be in the bull-headed world of high finance before you can make this simple assertion that we should all be able to make: I don’t have to justify scaling back my work on the basis that I’m swapping one duty for another, one role (“hardworker”) for another (“mother”). I don’t have to justify it at all. This life is life.

The Muslim Ummah have abandoned the Rohingyas

by Girish Menon

While the Rohingyas starve, live in fenced in camps or are on boats in high seas with no country willing to accommodate them the Islamic organisations are loudly quiet in their response while western human rights organisations as well as Jewish holocaust survivors espouse their cause. So what happened to the universal brotherhood of Islam? Why don't they offer refuge to their fellow brethren?

The Rohingyas were used by the British during the second world war as a fifth column to defeat the Japanese in Burma. Towards this end they were resettled in the Arakan area of Burma, given arms, money and training by the Allied forces. After the British withdrew from the area and new countries like East Pakistan was created, the Arakan province was to become a part of Burma. At this time the Rohingyas started a jihad against the Burmese government to get their territories to be a part of Jinnah's East Pakistan. Many Islamist organisations were active in this jihad.

----Also watch

-----

At the time the Rohingyas used the 'dar-ul-harb' concept to refuse to integrate with the Burmese population where they were in a minority. Like their Muslim brethren in the northern plains of India they did not wish to live in a country where they were in a minority. They were actively supported in this jihad by Islamic organisations in Pakistan.

The Burmese, unlike the Indians, when they defined their citizenship laws were unwilling to accommodate this group with a separatist and jihadist motive and the Rohingyas were deemed stateless. So, from then on the only way out for the Rohingyas was to pay smugglers to get them out of the Arakan province into countries where they could lead a decent life.

So why are the Islamist countries not going the extra mile to help their brethren? Why is Pakistan (The holy land for the pure) not inviting these Rohingyas to resettle them in their lands? Why is the Islamic State not taking them to Iraq or Syria nor the al Qaeda making attempts to rescue them? Can we say that NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) supersedes the Islamic Brotherhood?

Why Virat Kohli has to rid Indian cricket of bad habits

Suresh Menon on BBC website

In cricket, as in any sport, there are two kinds of mistakes.

The bad mistake arises out of confused thinking, lack of focus and a poor understanding of tactics. The good mistake, on the other hand, implies a well-thought out plan gone wrong or an attempt to force the issue backfiring.

Increasingly as his captaincy progressed, India's most experienced and successful Test captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni kept making bad mistakes. Giving his bowlers one-over spells, for instance. Or wasting a fielder at leg gully.

Good fortune and hunches can take you only so far - every captain in the game's history has taken chances with an inexplicable bowling change or an illogical batting line-up and surprised everybody by winning. But that cannot be the basis for captaincy.

Positive attitude

Virat Kohli, at 26, younger than Dhoni by seven years, is not yet tactically sound but has two important things going for him: a positive attitude and enormous self-belief.

Not since Tiger Pataudi has an Indian captain been willing to risk defeat in the pursuit of victory like Kohli in the December 2014 Adelaide Test against Australia.

The essential difference between the past and future of Indian cricket is that while Dhoni was clearly on his way down, Kohli can only improve.

He will face many of the problems Dhoni did - a poor bowling attack, especially abroad, the pressures of being on the field for beyond 50 overs or a single day, the hope that victories in the shorter format will make up for their absence in Tests.

India had caved in without a fight in 13 of 17 Tests abroad before the last Australian tour. They lost the 14th in Adelaide, where Kohli led for the first time, but the texture of the defeat was different. The Anna Karenina Principle applied. "All happy families are alike," wrote Tolstoy in his novel, "each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Similarly, all victories are alike but defeats are wildly different.

Kohli is younger than Dhoni by seven years

India went down in a blaze of glory, attempting to make 364 runs in a day and coming startlingly close.

Playing for a draw was never an option, said Kohli, perhaps aware that India had the batting to win the Test, but not to draw it. Still, there was promise of a change in the standard narrative. Optimism is infectious, and it is easy to catch it off a captain who is full of it.

Kohli projected that optimism and spirit right from the days when he led India to the Under-19 World Cup win. He was marked out as future captain.

The IPL has a lot to answer for. But in Kohli's case, it actually helped.

Finding a balance

After initially tasting its many enticements, Kohli settled down. In his corner was his team Royal Challengers Bangalore coach Ray Jennings, who told him that the Under-19 triumph would soon be forgotten, and that he would be judged as an adult cricketer. Anil Kumble helped to channelise and focus all that energy. And he was made captain in anticipation of the bigger job to come.

While Kohli's captaincy in the one-day format has been aggressive and focused on winning, in Tests he will have to learn - as his bowlers too will - the virtues of patience and long-term planning.

Indian cricket will have to find a balance between Dhoni's tendency to let things drift and Kohli's impatience with uneventful overs and sessions. There is an element of fishing in the longer format. You put out your bait and wait. Kohli will have to learn the waiting game.

Whether it is a reflection of the times, a consequence of playing too many matches in the shorter formats of the game or a question of temperament, India's cricket is currently characterised by an impatience that makes them perform well below potential.

Bowlers are in a hurry to take wickets or simply run through their overs, batsmen seem to have forgotten how to play session-to-session. Kohli will have to rid the team of bad habits.

While many believe that a captain is only as good as his team, the best ones have inspired their teams to play above themselves. Pataudi for one, Mike Brearley or another.

Kohli's advantage is that he is the best batsman in the side, and there are no immediate candidates for his job. In other words, he will be left alone to develop his full potential as captain, unhampered by the need to constantly watch his back - an occupational hazard with Indian captains of the past.

He has it in him to stamp his name on an era.

How to cohabit (and live to tell the tale): 10 essential commandments

Emma Jane Unsworth in The Guardian

Cohabiting is about accepting each other as human beings with human bodies. As the bumper sticker almost says: “Stuff Happens.” Illustration: Anna Parini

Moving in with someone can do many things for a relationship. It’s a way of ramping up the commitment and lowering living costs. It means you get to enjoy more time in each other’s company while simultaneously doubling your daily shirt-and-sock options. It’s also that thing you often do when you reach a certain point, and, while I’m generally against things we do simply because we feel we should, I can’t deny that sooner or later, in any relationship, I find myself wondering about living together.

I’ve just moved in with a man for the fourth time in 15 years (different men), and there’s a lot I’m going to do differently this time, because there’s a lot I’ve learned. So in the spirit of sharing, I’ve developed the following set of handy rules. Behold, my Ten Commandments for Cohabitation.

1 Thou Shalt Start With A Blank Canvas

As the saying goes, there’s no accounting for taste. That may be true, but it’s important that you both have an equal chance to inflict your aesthetics upon a place. Fair’s fair. It’s not good for your psychology, or the power dynamics of your relationship, to slot yourself around someone else’s stuff and, by proxy, their past. So even if you’re moving into your paramour’s place, gut it, decor-wise, and start from scratch – together. From then on, it’s about negotiation, tolerance and compromise.

Example: my boyfriend likes crows. One time I walked into the bedroom to find a crow cushion on the pillow so realistic that it looked like an actual dead crow. I took a photo to put on Instagram, and then reacted with an almighty shriek.

Compromise: the crow cushion doesn’t go on the bed any more, and we continue to have sex.

2 Thou Shalt Divvy Up The Chores, Somehow

An ex told me that he found tidiness as oppressive as messiness. Nice try, huh. But it’s all too easy to forget whose turn it is to clean the hob and, unless you’ve got a dusting fetish, there’s nothing erotic about Mr Muscle.

If you can possibly afford to, splash out on a cleaner. I’d go so far as to say it’s worth two bottles of wine a fortnight, and that’s not something I would say lightly. The main peril of this, if you’re working class, is guilt – and guilt is even less erotic than Mr Muscle.

3 Thou Shalt Neither Repress Nor Celebrate Thy Bodily Functions

I’m sorry to include this – I know there are recipes in here and you’re halfway through your brunch, but this is a crucial one. Catherine Zeta-Jones once cited the secret to a long-term relationship as “separate bathrooms” (I know, they split – but they’re back together!). Not an option for the non-Hollywood stars among us, alas. But maybe it’s also about accepting each other as human beings with human bodies. As the bumper sticker almost says: “Stuff Happens”.

A friend of mine overshot it when she took her boyfriend of nine months to stay in a luxury shepherd’s hut for a weekend, as a “living together practice run”. I think we can all see where this one is going. The toilet was a funnel, a metre or so from the bed, behind a curtain. They split soon after. Another friend went to the doctor’s with chronic stomachache a few weeks after moving in with her man, only to be told it was because she was repressing wind.

I’m not saying you have to let it all hang and fly loose, but try to relax. Your body, your home, your air space.

4 Thou Shalt Not Steal… Food

My first experience of living with people that I wasn’t related to (and therefore didn’t expect to fight me at the dinner table) was at university. And it was there, within the walls of my student halls in Liverpool, that I learned one of the harshest lessons about non-familial domesticity. One evening, when I returned to the communal kitchen to retrieve my dinner, I found that someone had stolen my jacket potato from the oven. Then I remembered Susan, scurrying past me in the corridor, looking distinctly uncomfortable as she gripped her hoodie around her midriff, looter-like. Of course she denied it. But I knew she was lying.

And yet, after I’d angrily eaten a neat tin of tuna, I found I could let it go. Furthermore, I felt a deep need to go forth and perform the exact opposite of my natural instinct at that point, which was meanness. These days, I fill the fridge and I don’t count my teabags. I expect anything I leave in the freezer to go, and I don’t care. It actually feels nice. Because meanness doesn’t even make you that much less skint, but what it does make you is miserable.

So I’m grateful to that girl now, for what she taught me. No, really. Get in touch, Susan. Or at least send me a potato

.
Emma Jane Unsworth: ‘Tell your partner about their bad habits. The ones they don’t know about. Do it tactfully, but for God’s sake, do it soon.’ Photograph: Michael Thomas Jones for the Guardian

5 Thou Shalt Be Open To New Experiences

In a pressure-cooker space with someone, you can discover life-changing things that make you wonder how you survived without them. My former housemate Eden brought RuPaul’s Drag Race into my life, for which I am truly thankful. I introduced my best friend Alison to pesto with pasta when we lived together at university in the late 90s. As she destroyed the entire bowl, she looked and sounded as if she was having an orgasm – maybe she was. We now look on it as a foundation stone of our friendship, and given the fact she eats it at least once a week now, it’s a source of much pride to me that I was able to give her the gift that keeps on giving. We’ll always have pesto.

6 Thou Shalt Allow Each Other A Few Ludicrous Idiosyncrasies

This again boils down to compromise. My mum vigilantly turns off every single plug socket every night before she goes to bed. I think she once saw an episode of Corrie where a dodgy toaster burned down Sally Webster’s kitchen, and it stayed in her mind. She also unplugs the microwave because someone told her the clock uses up a lot of electricity overnight. I’ve tried to explain that this is simply not true, but not even Google can convince her otherwise.

My dad doesn’t seem to mind her frenzied routine. Nor should he. Because you know what? Everyone’s allowed their minor idiosyncrasies. Everyone is allowed to be ludicrous about one thing, once a day. Even the girl I lived with in my early 20s, who couldn’t find her keys one evening and decided to “lock” the front door by pushing it to and wedging the Henry vacuum cleaner behind it. When I came home, I thought we’d been robbed. Then I saw the vacuum cleaner, and realised I just lived with an idiot. But, you know, so did she, some nights.

7 Thou Shalt Not Inflict Animals Upon Your Beloved

Animals can be a deal-breaker. Allergies aside, some people don’t like the idea of furry creatures around things like food and furniture. I love cats. To me, a house without cats in it feels resonantly sad, but not everyone’s the same. I’m still half-convinced my last attempt at romantic cohabitation ended when I got a cat and it took to urinating on the duvet, generally square on the crotch of whoever was in bed. Morning! It materialised that as well as an unpleasant experience, this triggered bad memories for my then boyfriend, who had once lived with a cat called Moon, who’d systematically terrorised him.

But really: never live with anyone who doesn’t like cats. Those people are suspect and, at the very least, social perverts.


My mother turns off every plug socket before she goes to bed, and the microwave. My dad doesn’t mind – and nor should he

8 Thou Shalt Have A TV

And the internet. My most recent housemate and I tried to do without both for a year, in a bid to “be more productive”. We lasted a month, then we got online (mainly for RuPaul’s Drag Race). Books, I hear you cry! What about books? Well, books are all well and good, until you have a hangover. Then you just need something to look at while you sweat and cry for pizza. Entertainment options other than each other are the key to a happy home on those evenings, or days, when you just want to flop. I also recommend a karaoke machine.

9 Thou Shalt Not Assimilate Resentment

The assimilation of resentment is the death of love. Tell your partner about their bad habits. The ones they don’t know about, I mean. Do it tactfully, but for God’s sake, do it soon.

I have a terrible habit of leaving dirty mugs everywhere; something I only discovered after a man I’d been living with moved out and the mugs began to accumulate on the sink, the toilet, cistern, all of the windowsills – until I ran out of mugs and looked around and saw my awful truth. I called my ex and asked whether he thought I had a mug problem. “Oh, that,” he said. “I guess I just got used to picking them up every day.” “You must have hated me a bit for it, though?” I asked. To which he replied: “Well, I guess I sort of got used to the resentment, too.” (Insert Blaring Relationship Countdown Siren, set at T-minus two months.)

10 Thou Shalt Revolutionise The Meaning Of Romance

Cohabitation brings new meaning to what constitutes romantic behaviour, and you must embrace this, because we’re not getting any younger, and life is short, and love is the greatest, wherever you can find it. You’re not dating any more, and some of the more superficial magic might be gone – but there’s a wealth of possibilities by which you can demonstrate passion and kindness within the confines of your new situation.

Before we said we’d move in together, my boyfriend was staying at my flat and I gave him my keys for the day while I went out to work. My keys were a daily source of woe – identical Yales for a two-lock door; the great Law of Sod meaning I invariably tried the wrong key first, and would stand there, jangling and cursing and disturbing the neighbours. When he returned the keys, he had bought two coloured fobs from the hardware shop on the high street, and put them on. He even gave me an easy way to remember which was which: Blue for Bottom; Gold (yellow) for Top. Now when I open my door it’s a breeze. My everyday is that bit easier. If that’s not true romance, then I don’t know what is .

Please, FBI, investigate the 1966 World Cup – if only to shut up Greg Dyke

Marina Hyde in The Guardian


 

‘There is a huge section of fans – and, clearly, administrators – with absolutely no idea how much England is detested within world football, nor any idea as to why.’ Illustration: Andrzej Krauze

You know when World Cups started being corrupt? 1970. And anything up to and including 1962. Between those dates, there was a brief and ineffably beautiful interregnum in the chicanery, which thereafter was never allowed to happen again. Why? Well, there was a global sense, really, that the sainted custodians of both tournament and trophy during that time were simply too exquisitely mannered, too morally faultless, too humble, too generous-spirited, too brilliant at football ever to be permitted to shame the rest of the world in this manner again.

Did you enjoy that story? If so, you may be Greg Dyke, or have suffered a recent head trauma. Either way, please seek help immediately.

The Fifa scandal erupted a mere 10 days ago, and it took barely two of those for England to make it all about itself. Ooh, you’ve no idea how they treated us during the bid process. Ooh, the main thing about this is that we should be given one of the disputed World Cups. The scale of the FBI takedown of Fifa is vast. England is like a diner in one of the ground-floor restaurants of the Towering Inferno building, wondering how what’s going on upstairs is going to affect its drinks order. Odd how they underplay the fact that England’s bid team gave the wives of the executive committee – their wives! – Mulberry handbags. This isn’t being “above” bribery. It’s being unable to get out of the group stages of bribery.

Already, culture secretary John Whittingdale has announced that England is ready to host the 2022 World Cup, should Qatar be stripped of it. Newsflash, buddy: at their current rate of acquisition of English landmarks, Qatar will already own all our major stadiums and half our infrastructure by 2022, so that’ll be just the sort of pyrrhic two-fingers in which we specialise. Yes, Qatar, you’ll know we’ve really beaten you when England lose to Paraguay in the opening match of the tournament at Liverpool’s Qatar Airways stadium (when you go down the tunnel on to the pitch there’s a spine-tingling sign that reads “THIS IS DOHA”.)

I say “we”, but there is no longer a “we” as far as the Fifa exposé goes. We had a good innings, being all in it together. People who don’t even care for football were remarking how watchable footballing arrests were. The utter insufferability of Sepp Blatter was something we could all get behind, while his victory last Friday was an election result on which we could all agree, so soon after our own one, on which we couldn’t.

But the point-missing parochialism was always in the post, and its arrival marks the end of the cross-party, cross-club, cross-everything love-in that has characterised the Fifa story.

From phone-ins to frontbenches, you now cannot move for Little Englanders telescoping world football down to their concerns. At their notional helm is FA chairman Greg Dyke, who did such a bang-up job dealing with the Hutton inquiry that he’s decided to come and bring that same grasp of nuance to what he presumably imagines to be his moment on the global stage. I suppose the best you can say is that there’s less left to damage with English football than there was with the BBC. But really, there hasn’t been a managerial double whammy like it since André Villas-Boas swept from Chelsea to Tottenham.

Historically, there have been few statements less guaranteed to fill you with confidence than “this is a matter for the FA”. Unless you count something like “this is a matter for the Jockey Club”, whose two-legged overlords were traditionally intellectually outclassed by their four-legged underlings. The competition to be the worst-run British sporting body is always hard fought, but the FA has won the title more than any of the others.

And they look to have another in the bag with their reflexive prejudging of corruption allegations, ill-advised speculation about the FBI investigation, and jingoistic bleats about how unfair it all is. It’s just a marginally more self-regarding version of throwing cafeteria furniture across a city square in a Sun-issue Tommy hat. They are naturally supported by said newspaper, whose Pooterish idea that Sepp Blatter was paying attention to what was in their leader column saw it declare in 2010: “Today the Sun makes this plea to Mr Blatter and Fifa. Don’t be put off by the BBC rehashing ancient history. Despite BBC muck-raking, the Sun trusts Fifa to put football first.”

Even our football-loving prime minister is just another Englishman whose criticism of Fifa is based solely on self-interest, as opposed to principle, and whose pettiness only serves to underscore the global perception that our position on everything is based on sour grapes. Back in 2010, he too criticised the British media for daring to investigate Fifa, while the bid team called it “unpatriotic”. Cameron has spent the past week falsifying his anti-Blatter history while failing to disguise his belief that nicking the 2018 World Cup hosting rights would be the perfect money-shot to his prime ministership.

England ready to host 2022 World Cup in place of Qatar, culture secretary says



Consider these powers the perfect spiritual leaders for a tribe whose analogue is probably those Americans who genuinely hadn’t a clue they were even disliked before 9/11. There is a huge section of fans – and, clearly, administrators – with absolutely no idea how much England is detested within world football, nor any idea as to why. And no interest in getting one.

Ideally, each and every one of them would be forced to attend a six-week residential course in which a series of instructors prepared detailed presentations on the matter, which concluded with the rhetorical inquiry: “Do you now understand why everyone thinks we’re just absolutely massive arses?”

Unfortunately, I am told that given the numbers involved this is not a scaleable solution. In which case, just for the merriment, please, please let the FBI open an investigation into how hosting rights for the 1966 World Cup were won. I don’t even care about international law any more, or the increasingly bonkers mission creep which has seen the US announce additional probes into the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, as well the 2018 and 2022 vote, and which will now clearly end in this being the US’s legal equivalent of Nam. I just want someone – anyone – to bring home the realisation that we really are the Ukip of international football. And, increasingly, of international life.