Sweet Friday Afternoon: Half-Arsed Weekly News Round-Up

Trenton Oldfield, the man who disrupted this year’s boat race, upsetting dozens of rowing fans all over the country, was found guilty this week of causing a public nuisance. He will be sentenced next month, and was warned by the judge that he may face a custodial sentence, as posh people were highly disgruntled by his actions and poor people were amused by them. Mr Oldfield told the court that the stunt was a protest about elitism in Britain:

“It's a symbol of a lot of issues in Britain around class…Seventy per cent of government pushing through very significant cuts are Oxford or Cambridge graduates. It was a symbolic gesture to these kind of issues.”

Oldfield’s actions have sparked a healthy debate not only concerning elitism, but also about his right to protest. One report in the Daily Mail was a conduit for predictably enlightened and open-minded comments from its readers:

“Shoot him and make his family pay for the costs to transport his body back to Sydney.”- Steve from Perth, Australia, helpfully suggested.

“This idiot has done nothing for his ‘cause’. The media should not give him any more oxygen of publicity. Off with his head!” Nick Willey from High Wycombe Buckinghamshire, only half-jokingly opined.

“Hope he gets a dose of the runs, it would serve him right” someone improbably named Bawheid from Stoney (?) bellowed.

Is it me or is the Mail’s readership mellowing with age?

A Mail reader enjoys the Gay Pride parade earlier this year

Jobs at the London Fire Brigade are under threat as Boris Johnson has demanded that it saves £65 million over the next two years. The order was made in response to reports that 23 of its 112 stations are called out to less than one emergency a day. In light of these call-out figures and the sharp fall in the number of fire-related deaths, cuts appear to be justified, but upon further investigation the brigade still provide an essential service to the capital’s more maladroit residents.   

Despite unremitting complaints about London’s young people hanging about on the streets, smoking illegal herbal substances, committing petty crime, prematurely reproducing and publicly listening to terrible music which literally does all sound the same on their ipodphones, efforts to provide them with something else to do are being thwarted by people who want to live in a city but don’t want to be surrounded by other members of the public. Plans for a multi-use games area in Ham have been blocked by local whingers like Michael Burgess, who complained that a sports area would “stick out like a sore thumb” if it was built in the proposed location – next to a youth club. He’s a man who knows incongruity when he sees it. And then there are the protesters in Barnsbury, north London who believe children should be at home on the Playstation eating Quavers where they belong, and not out climbing trees and making a nuisance of themselves by providing career women with a constant reminder of the increasingly loud ticking of their body clocks.     

Not in my back yard

An unconvincing transsexual was found guilty this week of manufacturing improvised explosive devices in a mental hospital in Purley. Angie Dawes, formerly Mark Cann, made the devices in an attempt to prove that she would excel as an army bomb disposal expert after narrowly failing the exam and being told by the interviewer that she would never make it as an explosive specialist. Upon their discovery her devices caused the Southleigh Community Hospital to be evacuated and criminal charges were brought against her. Despite this, part of her sentence is to return to the hospital for treatment. Judge Jeremy Gold, who dismissed her previous conviction for manslaughter, when she killed her former partner, as “all in the past”, told her that “The workers at the Southleigh Community Hospital will no doubt welcome you back,” and instructed her not to do it again.  

If you have some time on your hands this weekend, are in the Potters Bar area and are not sure if you are breathing, why not visit the Furzefield Centre, Mutton Lane, and have your mind put at rest?