France is a very visual culture and it doesn't surprise me that it is the home of farce. Some of the faces of the Parisiens were straight out of films. Stereotypical haughty and high and mighty. On French television every night there are panel programmes talking about politics and the panelists are lawyers, journalists and philosophers. Opinion and debate are sacrosanct.
The sight of a head waiter and bar man arguing passionately and heatedly about the responsibility of keeping an eye out for new customers so that they don't have to wait too long to be seated and served. The volatility subsides with both shaking their heads and offering Gallic shrugs.
Here are four examples of the visual culture I'm talking about even though two of the examples involved the Japanese.
All these viewed through the lenses of my dark glasses
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A Japanese gentleman in his mid 70s making the sign of the heart hands emoji to his wife who was sat across a green square from him who when she saw it doubled up with laughter and a huge smile.
Again a coach load of Japanese tourists had been unloaded with a packed lunch on the Plas de la Concorde. They were all eating or trying to eat filled baguettes from a silver foil wrapping. The facial expressions of those eating and trying to eat was a picture. Sushi it certainly wasn't.
I only saw one cat in Paris and this was a Siamese kitten who was gamely fighting her owner for the food placed down in front of them on a cafe terrace.
Two elderly bald monks with dark grey vestments trying to work out how to use a photobooth in Gare Montparnasse at 10.30am on a Monday morning.
Carry on Camping with Hattie Jacques & Barbara Windsor
White Rabbits! If that is not racist? Pinch, punch first day of the month! Oh you want a ruckus do ya? It's September 1st and what better way to start the month than with a new blog post with a salacious title. There were a series of 4 films made in the 1970's with the title Confesssions of a Window Cleaner, Confessions of a Pop Performer, Confessions of a Driving Instructor and Confessions of a Holiday Camp with Robin Askwith as the main lead in most but not all. I haven't watched any of them, honest guv! They were of a time and place, the sexist 70's with their saucy postcards. The decade of the Carry On films. The decade of football hooligans travelling by British Rail. They were violent and racist times offset by the slapstick and sexist humour. It's only sexist in hindsight mind (to the male gaze)
So you are expecting me to confess to shagging flags? Well not as far back as the 1970s. No my peak flagshagging years were the 1990s. My flagshagging reached its zenith on September 18th 1997 when Cymru/Wales voted by a hairsbreadth for a Senedd/National Assembly. I carried Y Ddraig Goch from Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff where we were listening to the results of the count to the Welsh College of Music and Drama where the Leaders of Plaid Cymru, the Liberals and Labour had gathered, the pro Welsh Devolution Referendum parties. This was a Welsh National flag that I had bought in Siop y Pethe in Aberystwyth in 1992 when a gang of us were up in Ceredigion canvassing for the first joint Green/PlaidCymru MP in Ceredigion. Cynog Dafis won that election so it became a lucky flag and then when a devolved government was narrowly passed in 1997 it became an even luckier flag.
On the night of September 18th the flag disappeared only to be spotted in the hands of some fellow/rival flag shaggers who had taken a fancy to the old fashioned canvas/hessian nature of the flag as opposed to the cheaper ones doing the rounds. A verbal tussle ensued with myself shouting in Welsh "Give us our flag back". I took it home, hung it up on the living room wall of a two bedroom terraced house in Grangetown and carried on with life as abnormal.
Welsh Devolution had happened 18 days after the death of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales (by marriage to Prince Charles who had the title English Prince of Wales bestowed upon him at Caernarfon Castle in 1969) It was an odd and uncertain time culturally and politically. Tony Blair had only been Prime Minister since May so the shifting of these tectonic plates were huge so early on in his tenure. And you think Keir Starmer has been having a rough ride?
1997 was the end of my flag shagging! I lost interest. I became depressed. I went to the GP who said my depression wasn't sufficiently bad for me to be referred to the specialist service in Cardiff Docks. It became Cardiff Bay in 1999. So I was not in the correct mental space to continue to shag flags. I was starting to suspect that there might be a bigger world out there. Bigger than the confines of Offa's Dyke and West is Best.
I was to make the move to England in 2000 and lasting four years before returning with my mental health considerably diminished not by being in England I hasten to add. I enjoyed living in South East London. It was only my second sojourn away from Cymru/Wales having been in College in Watford for two years before that. No my depression, my anxiety, my undiagnosed bipolar disorder, my over sensitivity, my potential for being on the neurodivergent spectrum all caught up with me.
Once you have left Cymru/Wales it becomes less important.
"Cymro Gorau, Cymro oddi gartref"
Only if you live in Australia or New Zealand perhaps.
So you've had the potted autobiography what has this got to do with our current day flag shaggers and roundabout painters in England?
Well I've mentioned Tony Blair and Keir Starmer. Neo-Liberals, Red Tories. There are huge pockets of deprivation and poverty in the South East of England where people have very little other than their flags. Having a flag if you are white and feel under threat shows that you are part of a gang. Every body else has got a gang or a religion to be a part of. Why can't I wave my flag proudly? The answer perhaps is that English flag shagging comes from a place of fear and threat whereas Welsh and Scottish flag shagging comes from a place of defiance. By shagging our Celtic flags we were standing up against the British State which had subsumed us.
There is an unfortunate trend among those who are denigrating the English flag shaggers and the midnight roundabout painters where those who have been blessed with a more liberal arts education are critiscising them for having no education, being unemployed, waiting for Wetherspoons to open, the usual lazy tropes used to describe the English Working Class or in this case the Under Class.
I was a Teacher in a Secondary School on the Downham Estate in South East London. It was an overspill estate from the East End of London after the Blitz and Bombing of the Second World War. The school provided a poor education. There was no grass for children to play on just a concrete quad. It is a fact that the education in the poorer areas of Britain is not of an acceptable standard and then to have that fact thrown in your face as an adult after you've left school adds insult to injury.
Many of the towns and cities who are producing the flag shaggers are concrete jungles. New Towns in Essex created by Town Planners who had forgotten or chosen not to include green spaces. If you don't see nature then your heart turns to stone in my opinion and many people in the inner cities of the UK, their hearts have turned to stone because of poverty, austerity and lack of opportunity. The television is on all the time and who is on there all the time? Nigel Farage. The mood music is one of white flight, small boats, migrant hotels. You are under siege in your concrete jungle from people with different colour skin. You know, your class mates. So a friend becomes your enemy because a posh twat on the telly tells you so. He must be right. He sounds so educated and confident.
Even though the 1970s seems a long time ago it set in stone in the minds of some men that this was the way that Britain was meant to be. These were the sons of the men who had fought in the Second World War. They'd been listening to the Conservatives and Enoch Powell. They felt they had no say then and they feel that they have no say now. If a modern day Enoch Powell like Nigel Farage rides in on a white charger then the sons and grandsons of the 1970s are going to sit up and take note.
I've shagged the Welsh flag and I feel sorry for those who are shagging the English and British flags now because it is borne of fear and not pride. It is borne of fear of extinction. Never mind the history lesson about the British Empire, I'm worried that I don't exist, I'm worried that I don't count are the thoughts tickertaping through the mind of the roundabout painter.
With all the carnage from war in the world this blogger uses the word 'bomb' in a laissez faire manner. How dare he? Well he dares. Who dares wins Rodney!
With Rupert Lowe, spawn of satan, alumni of Radley Colllege, Oxford mounting an attack on the Home Office for compassionately accepting babies and children from the Gaza Strip, from Palestine for treatment by the NHS, this public school orifice condemns them for that.
By this stage I believe that his twitter account is run by a room of elderly bots under a decayed hotel on the Great Yarmouth seafront. He is outrage farming and he's getting a lot of outrage but it's bouncing off the walls of his stables in the Cotswolds.
Back to the title of the blog, why don't you? Instead of removing the charitable status of 'Public Schools' you know the schools that aren't meant for the public but for fee paying sons and daughters of diplomats and officers in the armed forces. When they turn out on a Wednesday afternoon in their Cadet Force uniforms to squarebash around the quad "Bomb them".
The amount of damage that public schoolboys have done to this motley assortment of 'home countries'. Cameron, Johnson, Sunak! Cameron cow towing to Farage of Dulwich College! That was one in the eye of Eton. Brexit Bumhole Britain delivered to you by racist Public Schoolboys on bikes.
There used to be a Twitter account, Labour against Public Schools. That's disappeared. The slow death of taxing them is not quick enough. We need to level up. Remember Cameron's Big Society? Well getting rid of these ancient institutions of class inequality has got to be a definite step to a fairer, more just society.
We need less Rupert Lowes and more Gary Linekers. There is far too much hate and hostility swirling around fanned by the MSM. As if the 24/7 genocide in Palestine is not enough for the bloodthirsty flag shaggers standing outside migrant hotels. Who is putting them in these hotels in the first place? Public Schoolboys, but because they are white, it's allright "One of us, One of us"
The sooner the class system, for it is definitely a system for those that shout the loudest at the top, is dismantled the better. Let's start by taxing their wealth and dismantling their ancient schools brick by brick.
I don't care if it dates back to 1482, bend over, here's my shoe!
