Those crazy Republican fuckers are right, socialized medicine sucks.

When I lived in America, I had cause to interact with its world-class health service twice.

The first time, I was in LA at a conference.

After a heavy night of boozing, I woke up with a big throat problem, my uvula swollen up so bad I could hardly breath, and went to the nearest walk-in ER.

The doctor diagnosed two serious diseases, both potentially fatal.

He prescribed me $300 worth of pills and pointed me in the direction of the nearest Rite-Aid.

The condition itself cleared itself up within about five hours. I called my mum, an NHS nurse, and she told me I was merely dehydrated due to a massive hangover.

The side-effects of the medication, on the other hand, kept me in a state of constant gut pain for a week.

A few days later, I received a $100 hospital bill and a $200 doctor’s bill, which I duly sent off to my health insurance company.

Several years later, I ran a credit check on myself and discovered that the hospital had been chasing me for five years over the bills, which my insurance company had refused to pay for bureaucratic reasons unknown.

I had a $600 hangover and a big black mark on my credit rating.

The second time I visited a doctor in America, I was in agony with what I shall refer to as “lower back pain”.

I couldn’t even get to see a doctor.

The insurance card in my wallet apparently wasn’t an insurance card, for reasons beyond my ken, and the cunt of a receptionist refused to even give me a ballpark figure of what it would cost if I paid out of my own pocket.

I ended up having to go to an ER again, paying $100 for meds and receiving another silly-big bill that my insurance company refused to pay.

I still have no idea why. The manual the insurance company sent me, explaining what I was and was not covered for, was as thick as a fucking phone book.

*

I moved back to the UK in late 2007.

The plan was to hang around for a couple months and then head off to Asia for a year. I figured I’d need some shots.

I was 14 or 15 last time I visited my National Health Service family doctor (in the UK, they’re called GPs). Half my life ago. That was enough time for my records to be expunged from their system.

So I called up to make an appointment.

“Are you registered here?” the receptionist asked.

“No,” I said.

“Okay, that’s not a problem,” she said. “We can have you fill out a form. Can you make Wednesday at 2pm?”

I showed up at Wednesday at 2pm, dreading the form.

I had to fill out my name, address, telephone number and date of birth. It took all of 30 seconds. I did not have to provide ID.

After a five-minute wait I got to see the nurse practitioner. She asked me which countries I was going to, then checked on a computer to see what the current vaccination advice for these countries was.

She made me an appointment for the following week to get the first of my shots.

The next week, I showed up, and she gave me the first shots. I was now pretty much immune to tetanus and two flavours of hepatitis. Which was nice.

I had two more appointments over the next two weeks, to receive the rest of my injections. Because that’s how the medicine works: you need to take a course.

Despite it being essentially elective treatment, I didn’t have to pay for any of it.

I then went to Asia and didn’t contract any nasty diseases.

I’ve been back in the UK for some months now.

Recently, I decided to get something checked out.

I’d had it for a while, but I’d self-diagnosed using the internet and figured out it was the kind of thing that is so trivial that doctors often don’t even bother treating it.

But it was beginning to annoy me, so I called the same GP and asked for an appointment.

“Are you registered here?” the receptionist said.

“No,” I said.

“Okay, that’s not a problem,” she said. “We have nothing tomorrow. Can you make it Wednesday at 2pm?”

I showed up Wednesday at 2pm, filled out the same form with my name, address, phone number, and date of birth. I did not have to provide ID.

I asked if I could officially register with the practice. I was told it might be a problem as I lived outside the surgery’s catchment area and I might have to pick somewhere closer to my home.

I waited for five minutes before I could see the doctor.

I went in. The implausibly cheerful doc took all of 45 seconds to confirm my self-diagnosis, tell me there was nothing to worry about, and refer me to a specialist.

He then called through to reception and asked them to officially register me with the surgery, without being asked.

The next day I went in, filled out a form, had a five-minute medical.

Didn’t have to pay anything for anything.

In my limited experience, there is nothing worse than the American healthcare system, and I’ve been to hospital in Vietnam.

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I was all set to write a blog post about the price of alcohol in England. I was idly composing such a piece in my head on the bus today.

I would have started with a quick overview of the facts: the government’s chief medical advisor wants to set mandatory minimum prices per unit of alcohol sold in shops.

I would then probably have embarked upon a rant about how booze in England isn’t cheap, and that the country’s alcoholism has less to do with cost and more to do with culture.

I would have called the levy proposals “Like putting a band-aid on a…”

I never got to complete the simile, because at that moment I looked out of the bus window and saw a chalk board outside a pub, advertising

BREAKFAST AND A BEER – £4.50
(9am-12pm Mon-Fri)

and I lost the will to live.

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[citation needed]

Definitely the best, most flexible accidental punchline in the zeitgeist. [citation needed]

Like ever other person with a fixed abode, I find pizza menus on my doormat on a daily basis. They all also offer kebabs and burgers, fairly standard, as well as something called “parmos”.

Because I’m beginning to feel like a tourist in my own country, and specifically my own region of my own country, I felt compelled just now to look up “parmo” on Wikipedia.

A parmo, it transpires, is a flattened chicken, deep-fried in batter and covered in cheddar cheese. It is to northeast England’s heart disease mortality figures what fried Coke is to Texas’s.

The full Parmo is usually served in a pizza box along with its chips/fries and side order due to its large size, though a large round polystyrene tray is also common.

Cheers.

There are variants, such as the Parmo Italia, with cheese, ham, and more cheese.

None of them appears to actually contain Parmesan.

Here’s the full list from Wikipedia.

• Parmo Hotshot – Chicken or Pork, topped with cheese, pepperoni, peppers, garlic butter and chili
• Parmo Kiev – Chicken only, topped with cheese and garlic butter
• Parmo Italia – Chicken or Pork, topped with cheese, garlic butter and ham, with a further topping of mozzarella cheese
• Parmo Bolognese – Chicken or Pork with Bolognese sauce
• Meat Feast Parmo – Chicken or Pork topped with pepperoni, chicken and ham
• Hickory Chicken Parmo – Standard parmo topped with ham and BBQ sauce
• Pizza parmo – Chicken or Bolognese parmo served on a pizza base with chili and garlic sauce [citation needed]

Come on chaps. Don’t slack off. Dust off those pizza menus. Find us a citation.

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“You know what the funniest thing about Europe is?”

“What?”

“It’s the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they’re a little different.”

“Example?”

“You know what they call Tropicana Some Pulp in England?”

“They don’t call it Tropicana Some Pulp?”

“Nah, they’re limeys, they wouldn’t know what the fuck Some Pulp is.”

“What’d they call it?”

“They call it Tropicana With Juicy Bits”.

“Tropicana With Juicy Bits. What’d they call it with Lots Of Pulp?”

“I dunno, I don’t think you can get it.”

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“Can yer borrow us a fag?” said ratboy.

One of the ratboys. There were about eight of them, getting in my face, trying to intimidate me. All tracksuits, zits and spiky hair.

There were two females amongst them. Puffer jackets, hoop earrings and woolly boots, hair ponytailed back so tight it looked like it had been botoxed.

“Nice jumper,” one of them sneered, as I attempted to walk past/through them.

Fashion tips from a chav? I’d sooner take legal advice from Pete Doherty.

English teenagers, it seems, are still arsing great twatbags. Strategically position enough of them in a group on a street corner or down an alleyway, add liberal amounts of White Lightning and their mums’ Bennie Hedgehogs, and quickly the screeching bravado gets turned up to 11, so it becomes mentally impossible for them NOT to verbally accost literally every non-chav who attempts to walk past minding his or her own damn business.

I found a web site called ChavTowns.co.uk, and this salient piece of advice:

To anyone who is thinking of coming to Darlington, forget it. It’s the centre of Chavdom and the whole place is full of ignorant, racist wankers who love to drink, fuck and smoke and raise little bastard kids (who in turn will rob you, me…)

It starts with the Oh Fuck Moment.

You round the corner into the alley and spot them, a full argos of chavs, huddled into a Burberry blur, standing halfway between you and where you’re going.

“Oh fuck,” you think.

But it’s too late to turn back. Eight pairs of beady eyes are already trained on you.

If you turn back now, it’ll be worse for you next time, and the next time.

They’ve figured out they’ve got about twenty seconds to come up with the wittiest epithet possible, to be delivered through their noses the millisecond you’ve passed by.

Twenty seconds later…

“Your trainers are shit.”

Oh, I wish I’d said that, Oscar.

There’s a big fucking gang of the little cunts right outside my window as I type this, probably the same bastards who tried to stare me down in the alley, and I’m finding myself having to resist the urge to throw something heavy at them.

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I’m sure I’ve picked up plenty of non-British readers over the last couple of years, most of whom will be unfamiliar with the great traditional festivities associated with Bonfire Night, November 5. So I thought I’d explain.

At least a hundred years ago, this gang of Catholic fellers decided to blow up Buckingham Palace because they didn’t like the Queen.

A bit like Reservoir Dogs, they all wore exactly the same clothes and hats, grew exactly the same beards and had exactly the same faces and names.

Look at them, the big Catholic idiots.

Evil Papists that they were, they all gave themselves the same pseudonym, after a kind of chopstick used by the Italians of the time to eat spaghetti, the guido fork. Or “guy” fork. Thus, the conspiracy later became known as the Guy Forks Gunpowder Plot.

The plot was foiled on November 5, and the conspirators were arrested, hung, drawn, quartered, and then locked in the Tower Bridge of London for the rest of their lives.

“Remember, remember,
November the Fifth.”

For hundreds of years, it became the tradition in most parts of the UK to dress a randomly selected Catholic in a funny hat and fake beard, and then burn him, every November 5. This custom was forcibly ended in 1992 by the Europeans.

It is now common for young boys to instead stuff an old shirt and a pair of their dead granddad’s trousers with offal, creating an effigy of a Guy Forks conspirator, then push it around in a wheelbarrow for the week leading up to Bonfire Night, begging passersby for “some penne for the Guy”.

On Bonfire Night itself, the dummy full of guts is ritually burned, while families stand around chanting “Wooh!” and writing swearwords in the air with sparklers.

It is still customary for Catholic death row prisoners to be executed the evening of November 5, although this hasn’t been televised since 1992 due to poor ratings.

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“You can’t say it’s political correctness gone mad. Portraying madness in a derogatory fashion is disabledist.”

That just came out of the mouth of some kind of Student Union wonkette on the telly.

I’m not sure whether she was serious. I am sure, even though I wasn’t looking at the TV at the time, that she must have had at least one facial piercing.

Hardeep Singh Kohli had just asked said wonkette to explain why her Union building had done away with Gents/Ladies or Male/Female signs on the toilets in favour of “Toilets” and “Toilets With Urinals”.

Something to do with transsexuals.

But also, I imagine, probably an excellent way to get your jollies if you are a straight man who’s as fascinated by faeces-related pornography as I apparently am.

I was not very surprised to find this vaguely anti-political-correctness segment of BBC One’s The One Show being presented by Singh Kohli. My only prior encounter with his work was this partially amusing YouTube recording of him humourlessly hanging up on a badly prepared radio interviewer who couldn’t seem to get past the race thing.

“Are you Asian British Scottish or British Scottish Asian? It’s very important to get them in the right order these days isn’t it?”

“Um, no.”

Wikipedia, incidentally, describes Singh Kohli as “a Sikh writer, presenter, broadcaster and reporter”, as if his Sikhness is the best bit. The entry later notes that he’s not, in fact, a Sikh. His parents were, but he just wears a turban and has a big bushy beard.

It seems that political correctness going mad appears to be as rampant in the British memepool as it ever was. If anything, the expansion of the EU and consequent influx of Polish people, which happened while I was away, seems to have fed the notion.

I actually spoke to an English person the other day who claimed, with a straight face, that “white British” are now the most oppressed people in the UK right now.

Why’s that? I asked.

Because his place of work used to have a blackboard and now it has a more politically correct whiteboard.

“You don’t see white people getting offended by a whiteboard, do you?” he asked.

No, you don’t. Just like you don’t find many (if any) black people who are offended by a blackboard. Unless it’s being used at a policy meeting of the BNP, maybe.

With people like these around, it’s hardly surprising that Trevor Phillips, who’s head of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights and black, finds himself having to defend his intelligent and nuanced views on race and poverty from wilful misinterpretation by racist idiots.

The editor of the Daily Mail must have spunked his load when one of his reporters filed this copy on Monday: “Trevor Phillips will break with years of political convention to call for the law to be changed to enshrine positive discrimination in favour of disadvantaged whites.”

A video of Trevor Phillips explaining himself on Channel 4 News was posted to YouTube by a user named BNPukBNP, who characterised Phillips’ position as a “U-Turn”.

“Trevor Phillips who has strived to see Britain as multicultural to the loss of rights of the indigenous now shows all his pushing and race card waving will no doubt backfire and as he scrambles now to support down trodden whites as he acknowledges that a backlash in the current economic climate is sure to happen,” he wrote.

I’m not sure BNPukBNP listened to his own video. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t understand what Phillips was getting at: that a failure to help out poor whites in addition to poor non-whites could lead to an increase in the kind of back-door racism that the BNP advocates.

In other words, helping out the whites indirectly helps out the non-whites.

He’s not saying multiculturalism is bad. He’s saying that poverty breeds violence.

When they’re downtrodden, people look for scapegoats.

I asked my blackboard-loving white British friend whether, given that his ethnic demographic is apparently the most oppressed group in the country, he would have preferred to have been born black, since they have it so much better.

“No, of course not,” he said.

I’ve never heard anybody answer affirmatively

(You can also rework that admittedly smart-ass question to close down any argument with an unthinking liberal who says something like “We should respect their culture” when discussing, for example, the oppression of women in Islam.)

Political correctness is not the oppression of able-bodied, white, middle-class, heterosexual men. It is, as Stewart Lee put it, “a form of institutionalised politeness”.

It’s worth quoting Lee more fully, because his views as expressed on that occasion happen to coincide with my own: “If there is some fallout from [political correctness], which means that someone in an office might get in trouble one day for saying something that someone was a bit unsure about because they couldn’t decide whether it was sexist or homophobic or racist, it’s a small price to pay for the massive benefits and improvements in the quality of life for millions of people that political correctness has made.”

The most extreme example I can recall of that “small price” being paid was that poor bastard in Washington DC who, in 1999, was compelled to resign from his position in the mayor’s office after, in reference to a budget proposal, publicly using the word “niggardly”, which was incorrectly interpreted as stemming for the same root as a well-known racist insult.

So, one guy lost his job because his constituents were fucking idiots. Big deal. The incident should have sparked public debate about standards in American education, not political correctness. He got his job back a month later, anyway.

The only time I ever witnessed in person anything close to oppression based on unhinged adherence to political correctness was an occasion at my apartment in San Francisco several years ago, when a young, white, southern, Britney Spears type was reduced to tears because she inadvertently used the term “coloured person”, which was in common use in Georgia or whatever hick backwater she had until recently resided, in front of a hostile African-American woman (she was not hostile, I hasten to add, because she was African-American, or a woman, but rather because she was also a big fat dyke) who berated her for ten minutes for using racist language.

“What should I say instead?” the blubbing blonde asked.

“Person of colour,” the big shaven-headed man-hating hairy-arsed rug-muncher said, as if it should have been obvious.

The whole exchange served only to reduce to me to fits of giggles.

Coloured person: bad. Person of colour: good.

My nephew’s baby-daddy is black Zimbabwean. But he’s not. He once told me that, because one of his grandparents was white, he’s technically “coloured”. Even in racially charged Zimbabwe, where skin colour is, under Mugabe, every bit as divisive and oppressive as it was in pre-MLK America or apartheid-era South Africa, “coloured” is not an intrinsically offensive word, it is just the word people use for those who are some way between white and black.

Similarly, in Asia this year, for a few weeks I was travelling with a half-black-half-white English lad who referred to himself unselfconsciously as “half-caste”, a term I for at least a decade have eschewed on the basis of political correctness in preference to “mixed-race” but which didn’t bother him.

What’s politically correct depends entirely on where you are.

I discovered when I was dating a Japanese-American girl, shortly after my arrival in San Francisco eight years ago, that while the word “Jap”, as an abbreviation for “Japanese” along the same lines as “Brit” for “British”, may not be considered particularly offensive in the UK, it most certainly is in the States, where innocent Japanese-Americans were subjected to a thoroughly unpleasant time during WWII, you racist limely dickwad you can pay the tab fucker I’m going home now NOW that’s what I said shithead.

I didn’t get my dick wet that night, but I neither did my innocent indiscretion make me feel oppressed by political correctness.

(Incidentally, it’s still possible to hear ostensibly non-racist Brits, of all ethnicities, up to and including mainstream British comedians and television personalities, refer to the male urethra as a “Jap’s eye”, which, when you think about the imagery, is probably about as black-and-white racist as it gets, even if you do consider the word “Jap” an abbreviation rather than an epithet.)

I make no apology for my ignorance in the “Jap” matter, just as George W Bush made no apology back in early 2001 when he, during a the closing stages of a critical nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan, potentially the direst political incident since the Cuban Missile Crisis, referred to “the Indians and the Pakis” during a press conference on live TV.

While the use of the word “Paki”, a slur ranking possibly higher on the offensiveness charts than the n-word here in the UK, where for decades “Paki-bashing” was an evening’s entertainment for the BNP crowd, made me almost choke on my coffee, the Pakistani embassy in Washington officially shrugged it off with something like “Hey, it’s not really considered offensive in America”.

Yet the n-word is considered so offensive in the US that it’s virtually impossible for a non-black person to say it in public, regardless of context.

Britain’s highest-paid TV presenter, Jonathan Ross was suspended from the BBC today for making a retarded prank call to an elderly celebrity a couple of weeks ago.

Yet, when he asked Chris Rock about his famous “I love black people but I hate niggers” stand-up bit earlier this year, using the word itself, not only was it okay to broadcast, but the BBC actually selected the clip as a highlight to post to its YouTube channel. You can watch it here, or just look at the reaction shots I’ve captured above.

American readers: imagine that show being broadcast in the US.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong about a white person using the word “nigger” in a non-offensive context. I did it here, back in April, because the story relied on it.

But Jonathan Ross has been the BBC’s main movie-review guy for about a decade. He’s presumably visited America at least once a year during that time, and has perforce been immersed in American culture.

He knows precisely the kind of reaction he’s going to get when he says “nigger” to Chris Rock, with Tom Hanks watching from the wings. It was pretty cynical. If I was his producer, I would have given him a slap after the show.

Rock, while looking initially taken off-guard, took it with good humour.

This, I believe, is the appropriate response.

Political correctness does more good than harm, and on the odd occasion when it throws you some random illogic or silliness, just grow up and laugh it off.

 ::  Read on

I’m sitting on my backpack outside Kings Cross station in London, waiting for a train and watching a stream of the blotchy, chilly, chubby, and heavily stressed flow by.

England.

I’m back.

And it’s terrifying.

Nine years since I lived here.

Thirteen since I lived in the town of my birth.

The England I left still loved Tony Blair and thought Gordon Brown was a prudent overseer of the nation’s coffers. Jokes about Diana were still considered inappropriate. Terrorism still meant the Irish.

Britpop and Cool Britannia, as the guiding cultural zeitgeists, were fading. Lads and ladettes were still knocking around the collective mindset, even though Loaded had not been readable for some months. Home and Away was still on ITV1, except it was just called ITV, then.

The internet was still considered vaguely nerdy and uncool. It could take up to ten minutes to download a 1MB RealPlayer file. Only yapping tossers in suits on trains had mobile phones. People went to Boots for their photos. The TV remote did not have a Red Button.

Today, the front page of the Independent leads with a story about government plans to record all our phone calls and emails, in case some of us are terrorists.

It also offers me a cut-out voucher, for a free no-strings cheese sandwich. Almost like a Welcome Home gift designed especially for me.

Redeeming it at the Upper Crust on the station’s main concourse, I look around. Standing in that one spot, I can see 24 CCTV security cameras and infer the presence of at least half a dozen more.

I doubt I’ll notice this kind of thing, eventually.

I doubt I’ll notice when I start involuntarily having opinions about “chavs” and “WAGs”, or when I meet two Polish people at the same party, or when somebody tells me we should give the Conservatives a chance and I find myself agreeing with them, or when I find myself downloading a novelty ringtone.

I doubt I’ll notice when I realise I know who Kelly Katona is.

One day, I expect, she’ll just be there, lurking, in my brain, and I won’t know how she got there. I expect it will feel like she’s always been there.

But for now, the prospect is terrifying.

 ::  Read on

When you have to wait an extra two weeks for Cloverfield to come to your local cinema, meaning you dare not read any of the usual sci-fi blogs for fear of spoilers.

1 comment  ::  Read on

British breakfasts and American breakfasts differ about as much as two randomly selected San Francisco taqueria dishes differ from one another.

They both use the same basic components, but they can produce radically different results.

An English-speaking breakfast either side of the Atlantic needs merely eggs, potatoes, some kind of bread-based product, some meat if you’re into that kind of thing, OJ and coffee.

My local breakfast place in San Francisco, Boogaloos, arranged these components like this: A pile of perfectly seasoned tender potato cubes, topped with melted cheese, green onions, sour cream and salsa. Chunky, creamy, scrambled eggs. A warm American-style “biscuit” with chilled separately-served butter. Freshly squeezed orange juice. A plate with no visible whitespace, and a coffee cup that is never empty for more than a few seconds.

My only similar experience of breakfast in England since I moved back here was at a local Wetherspoons chain pub a few weeks back. It performed somewhat poorly in comparison. Prebuttered white toast with a crowning dollop of watery scrambled eggs, accompanied by two wedges of greasy, tasteless store-bought hash browns. No hot sauce to be found in the entire establishment. OJ from concentrate and mediocre coffee, both of which could be acquired only by getting up and walking to buy them from the bar.

Both breakfasts will give you a heart attack, eaten in sufficient quantities, but I’d give my left nut to have an American breakfast joint along the lines of Boogaloos down my street in England, rather than suffer another British greasy spoon brekky.

For a little extra cash at the Wetherspoons, I could have had a “traditional” breakfast. Which would have been the same deal, but with half a grilled tomato, a big fried mushroom, and a puddle of sugary Heinz baked beans thrown in.

Any one of those additional components, on its own, would make me barf.

Bacon and sausage could of course have been added, for those who eat that kind of thing. For vegetarians such as myself, a Quorn sausage or two can be added.

Fucking Quorn.

Drunk at a party, many moons ago, I had a wonderfully bonding ten-minute conversation with an equally drunk guy about Quorn.

I’d accidentally had a brief liaison with his girlfriend some weeks earlier, and I was eager that we bond, even over the most trivial of commonalities, to reduce the chance of my skull being caved in.

It had seemed like my strategy had worked. We really felt like we were both on the same page.

But in the cold light of day, it later transpired that the whole time I’d been talking about Quorn, the mushroom-based protein meat substitute, and listening to his opinions about Quorn, the mushroom-based protein meat substitute, he’d been talking about Korn, the California-based nu metal band, and he had in turn assumed I was also talking about Korn, the California-based nu metal band, rather than Quorn, the mushroom-based protein meat substitute.

But the conversation apparently had fully worked from both of our perspectives, so I can only assume my views on Quorn amounted to little more than “Quorn is fucking shit. I hate Quorn. It makes me want to puke.” Which could also, I assume, easily apply to Korn.

While I’m quite happy to chow down on any number of soy-based protein meat substitutes, if the apocalypse happened tomorrow and I was forced to to fight a disabled puppy for the last Quorn sausage on the planet, I’d gleefully strangle and eat the puppy, raw, instead.

Sadly, Quorn is the de facto standard meat substitute in this great nation, more popular even than tofu. My mother and sister, both of whom I converted to vegetarianism many years ago, can’t get enough of it. My parents’ freezer is rammed full of the stuff.

Personally, the very thought of Quorn, or indeed any mushroom-based product, makes me want to jump on the next plane to the Whole Foods store on Valencia Street, even if one meal would cost me a month’s blog income.

 ::  Read on