Heads up from Cardiff

Hey all,

Haven’t posted here in a good long while, mainly due to excessive self indulgence, on behalf of the government coffers. Being a student has its up and downs. Ups: great social life, the biggest youth based cultural mixing pot imaginable and a fascinating course. Downs: hyperactive liberals, street promoters and plastered flatmates. In true broadcasting fashion, as the saying goes “bad news is good news”, we will talk about the negatives.

Is it somewhere in the student handbook that one must become a activist of some sort, for the duration of your stay at university, be it for charity, Palestine or the national bleeding front (or whatever they call it in Wales). Someone yesterday asked me if I fancied signing a petition to get Cardiff twinned with a Palestinian city. Her reasoning, to show our support and solidarity as a city and to set an example for the rest of the United Kingdom. My reply, with a true sense of deliberate ignorance was YES.

Now let’s just consider this for a moment. Firstly I am not Welsh. I do not particularly care about local politics in this region. I am here for three years and that’s too long. Nothing personal I just don’t like weather. Secondly, We (the UK and US)(may I point out that our mutually sycophantic relationship with our NATO brethren is a topic for debate elsewhere) sell all manner of military hardware to Israel. Take one look at the IDF (Israeli defence force) roster and it’s like looking at the US army circa. 1992. Thirdly (and most importantly, even if the most cynical point) the Palestinian conflict in Gaza and the West bank is such political hot property that no way in a million years would the right honourable procrastinators at Cardiff city council forward such a bold motion, simply because of the statement it sends out. To be fair even if they did, Westminster wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.

So I quite happily signed her form and sent her of back to the small table with various middle-eastern artefacts strewn atop thereof. Do they really think that trinkets from Jericho are going to significantly alter our political views in an instant, hmmmm… The petition itself is a fallacy. They are activists for whatever self-centred anal dependence they like and they will happily scam signatures so they can brag about how many worthless petition sheets of students they “rallied” to their “cause”.

This brings me nicely on to street promoters. I don’t have a problem with them, they are a great way to get information about up and coming events that I might want to attend that I might have otherwise missed. My problem is the numbers… So many of them promoting different events ran by the same company. If each promoting organisation put out one flyer citywide advertising 3 or 4 events, many of the disillusioned students that wave them off may consider taking them.

Secondly the size of the flyer, it’s about 9x12cm. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that. It is too big to comfortably sit in my jeans pocket and definitely too big to sit in my wallet. You want me to carry this in my hand while I smoke/eat a kebab/get into a taxi, while pissed after a big night out. Then you wonder why about 80% end up as a soggy yet still colourful carpet fanning out from the bottom of the main stairs. Seriously either make them A4 paper that guys can fold up, or make them business card sized.

Anyway that’s my heads up from Cardiff normal blogging will resume soonish hopefully. (just to fill any readers, if there any with worlds of confidence :P).

Chow bella figa…

john.