Bluggered

At last, a solution to the gay marriage problem. You know, you don't have to marry gays really. No one's going to make you.

It's easy to laugh at Americans. They get worked up over the most ridiculous things.

Look at Old Hag, for instance. Buggered if I know what she's on about. I like it though. I wish I could be bothered reading more than the headings, but I get scared by posts that are mostly links.

Still, we're no better.

Papers full of how we're going to be swamped by "economic migrants" (that's people looking for jobs, you know). My great-grandpa was one of those. He tired of digging taters in a field somewhere in County Sligo and headed for Liverpool, where, he was reliably informed, the streets were paved with Maris Pipers.

My great-grandma, mind you, was Welsh. My dad dropped that one on me the other day. "You mean, she was the descendant of a shipwrecked Spanish sailor, perhaps a hidalgo, the bastard son of a count, and we are the rightful heirs to the throne of Navarra?" I said, perhaps more in hope than expectation. "No," he dashed my dreams into pieces. "She came from Rhyl."

On Top of the Pops tonight I saw Raghav. (Yes, I do. Yes, I know it's sad for a man my age but I can't break the habit. It makes me feel superior.) I didn't like the song, but the whole hiphop meets Bollywood thing fascinates me. More and more you hear R&B mashed up with Hindi.

Bring more, I say. I love curry. I had two different types of daal tonight. Zenella munched a poppadom. The guys in the curry shop are economic migrants to a man.

So were the Chinese men and women who died picking cockles in Morecambe Bay. A Tory MP has caused outrage by telling an offcolour joke about it. I've heard or read the same joke in maybe five other contexts. All the papers that reported the outrage also quoted the joke.

The same papers are pumped full of outraged reviews of Mel Gibson's film. Not that we really give a shit. Britain is truly not in the grip of antisemitism. The idea that the Jews were responsible for Jesus's death will fly over the head of most here. It's a thing you're taught in Sunday school but means nothing. It doesn't translate into hatred of today's Jewish people. Maybe it did when my great-grandpa was still Paddy O'Rule, village idiot of some Sligo backwater, but now we're too busy hating gypsies, Albanians, Muslims of all hues, and whoever else seems fresh enough not to have worn out our fear of the new to spare any for people who have lived here with us for centuries. (Who are us, in other words, since it's always been true that if you stick around long enough, we simply can't remember that you aren't English, because we lost the leaflet that told us how we can tell and well, bugger it, my dad knew your dad, innit.)

I say we. I mean them. Dr Zen cannot be bothered hating anyone. You never know who you'll be wanting to borrow a fiver off.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:24 am