Author Archives: Nick

Driver Awareness

Keep Your Eyes on the Road...

The sunniest afternoon of the year spent in a windowless Korova Milk Bar-like Holiday Inn in Eastleigh, being reprogrammed by Borg from Hampshire Constabulary Driver Awareness Training. A perfect illustration of ‘When Outsourcing Goes Wrong’: a grotesque David-Brent-meets-Magwitch ex-policeman performing opposite his Royston Vasey female counterpart.

roystonShe, an apparently drunken Tim Burton-styled apples ‘n’ pears landlady, wearing metaphorical hobnail boots, the soles of which — imprinted with stopping the distances for jellied-eels at 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70 mph — stamping again, and again, hour after hour, into my face in retributive justice, as I scream ‘only a fool breaks the two second rule…’

Eurovision’s Waterloo?

“…Waterloo, couldn’t escape if I wanted to… do dooooooh do…

Conchita Wurst and Nigel Farrage pretending to be a man

“It was the best of times, it was the Wurst of times?” Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst and Nigel Farrage (farrago, shurely, Ed?)” The Janus-faces of Europe?

Highlights of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest included Poland’s entry – a disturbing potpourri of nationalist costume, incongruous Bangra-Rap beat musical ‘styling’, and Men Only fantasies.

Conchita Wurst (no really) - Head of Women's Studies, University of KrakowSlavic to the Rhythm? Poland’s Eurotrash re-defining entry ?

Meanwhile, France – managed to combine the kind of terrible, attention-seeking bad club-dancing one would only see of a drunken pair of Essex swingers on a Saturday night, alongside breath-taking cultural stereotyping…

Three French Dicks - France's Vision of Europe

“…sock it to me baby! (not)” – a limp, lamentable effort from the French at half mast.

…thereby narrowly taking the lead from Poland’s Transform Clinic-sponsored Bangra-rap-nationalist ‘butter-churn’ act.

As this Al Qaeda recruiting poster of Trans-Euro Excess unfurled,  one could only breathe a sigh of relief. The Danes, having closed and converted the Refshaleøenex dockyard in Copenhagen into the venue for the contest, are further aiding Europe’s re-positioning from the manufacture of dull old things like ships and castles of steel, towards the quintessence of the tone — and vision — of Europe?

…Waterloo, I was defeated you won the war…La-la-lah-la-lah-la…”