Mushrooms at the End

Mushrooms at the End

By Matthew S. Dent

The car sped along the road, with moonlight streaming in through the windows. Ahead and behind, the long straight road was empty, and on both sides the desert was still.

In the front Mummy and Daddy were arguing. The radio was on. Casey could only hear odd bits of their conversation. It wasn’t very interesting- she would much rather read her book.

Mummy had gotten it out of the library for her. Casey had read it over and over. It was about mushrooms.

‘Damnit Steve, we can’t just…’ Mummy shouted. The singer on the radio cut her off. She sounded angry. Tears prickled Casey’s eyes. She focused even harder on her book, tracing the words with her fingers.

Daddy had cooked her mushrooms for the first time last week. She liked the way they had tasted, all meaty, bursting open as she chewed. She loved mushrooms.

‘Mummy, can we-’

‘Not now sweetie,’ Mummy answered before she had finished her question. She had been going to ask if they could have mushrooms at the end of their journey. Mummy was smiling, but in that way that grown-ups do which isn’t really a smile. ‘Mummy and Daddy are busy. Read your book.’

She turned back to Daddy, who said something Casey couldn’t hear. It made Mummy angry again.

Casey went back to her book. There was a picture of a mushroom- a red one with white spots. Casey couldn’t read its name. She traced the letters with her finger instead. It was poisonous, which meant that it was one of the ones that she mustn’t eat.

‘…had to get out of there! You know what will happen if- Marianne, turn that goddamn thing off!’

Mummy pushed the big round button which turned off the radio, and the song stopped. The man had been singing about how he felt fine. Casey liked that.

Without the radio, everything was too quiet. All she could hear was the car’s engine. There wasn’t any sound outside. She wondered if there were coyotes in the desert. She wondered if cactuses tasted like mushrooms.

She looked out of the window. There were so many stars in the sky. She’d never seen so many stars before. There were hardly any stars back in the city. And now there were so many.

And then they were gone. Without warning, everything was bright and sunny, like it was day. Then there was a giant boom, and the ground shook like an earthquake. Daddy said a naughty word, and the car screeched to a stop.

The light faded, back to night, and the stars came back. Mummy and Daddy both looked back along the road they had come down. They looked scared.

Casey looked over her shoulder and gasped. Right behind them, rising up into the black sky, blocking out the stars, a giant mushroom. It was grey, and red, and orange, and was growing as she watched.

‘Drive!’ Mummy hissed, looking at Daddy. He was still looking at the giant mushroom. Mummy hit him on the arm. ‘Drive, Steve!’

The car sped off down the road again. There were more flashes, more rumbling earthquakes, and then more giant mushrooms blossoming all around them. Casey giggled and clapped, delighted to be racing through a fantastical field of mushrooms.

Rekindling My Kindle

Amazon.co.uk Customer Services rose admirably to the challenge of a small, barely perceptible crack in my Kindle.

I got my Kindle for Christmas last year, and was almost instantly transformed from a sceptic into a devotee. It will, my girlfriend and my family will testify, goes with me everywhere, and I’ve spent countless journeys reading novels, novellas, magazines, newspapers on it. And, of course, keeping plugged into the internet through it’s unlimited free 3G access.

So, imagine my distress when I discovered recently a crack in the plastic casing, approximately 1.5cm in length, running diagonally downwards from the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. And it’s not, before you say it, down to mistreatment. It lives in it’s protective case, either in my hand, on my desk, or in a bag.

At this stage, it’s purely a cosmetic fault, but it’s still worrying. It could develop further, and lead to a problem which actually prevents me from using the Kindle. Which would leave me somewhat marooned.

But have no fear, readers! Yesterday morning, I called Amazon customer services, expecting a fight. Each Kindle comes with a year warranty, but I was expecting to hear a thousand reasons why it wasn’t covered, why I’d have to pay if I wanted it fixed.

Not so. I was on the phone for roughly three minutes, and didn’t even have to make the call (I put my number into the website, and they called me). At the end of the call, Amazon had dispatched a replacement to me, and sent me an email about how to return the broken one. The replacement arrived this morning, in the post. So I have a new Kindle, less than 24 hours after calling customer services.

That is fantastic customer service, in my book. Too often I use this blog to criticise and complain, but here I take my hat off to Amazon. I’m sure other people have plenty of bugbears and horror stories about Amazon, but I’ve had a great experience of them.

And now, my Kindle has been rekindled!

This Demonic Youth

Maybe A-Level results getting better year on year is a sign of young people working harder, rather than of academic decline? (Graph from BBC News website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11012369)

Young people today really are little shits, aren’t they?

I mean, if they aren’t lingering on street corners and mugging old ladies, then they are rioting and looting across the country. And then they all take easy exams and get qualifications which aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, because A-Levels have gotten much easier, and swan off to university to do “non-degrees”.

Surely these little bastards are the sole reason why the country is going downhill, right?

Today is, of course, A-Level results day, which means that all across the country 17-19 year olds have been tearing open brown enveloped and gazing upon the results breakdowns therewithin with either glee or devastation, and crashing the UCAS site with judicious mashing of their F5 keys. And the pundits have probably already begun rolling out the tired, annual accusations that A-Levels are a walk in the park nowadays, not like twenty/thirty/forty/etc years ago when you had to wrestle bears just to come out with a pass, or whatever.

It’s the same story every year, and it gets horrendously tiresome.

And on top of that, it’s not a fun time to be a young person at the moment. If you’re not being blamed for rampant civil unrest and the breakdown of society (when it’s actually more likely that you were involved in the clean-up than the destruction), then you’re a feckless waste of space whose achievements are denigrated, and whose very existence is considered a burden.

The fact is, the government makes a palpable show of not caring about the youth- but to be fair, whilst the Lib Dems courted young people at the General Election and then deserted them, the Tories never really seemed to promise them anything at all (leaving aside Cameron’s ridiculous “hug-a-hoodie” PR moment. Tuition fees have been trebled, education budgets have been cut, youth services are being shut down across the country, and even the EMA which would allow less priviliged children continue their education is being heavily curtailed.

But take a look at our society today. This isn’t the Britain of the fifties, where the majority of kids went to work (mostly in industry) at 16, and only the very gifted few went to university. Today we are a post-industrial, largely service economy, and increasingly an undergraduate degree is essential to get anything more than a menial, minimum-wage job. And this is the message that is sent to young people, that if they don’t go to university then they have failed.

With that in mind, is it any surprise that A-Level results would improve year on year? Young people are put under tremendous pressure, because A-Levels are their gateway to higher education. They are forced by their circumstances to work incredibly hard, and the results (I feel) show that.

So here’s to all those who got their results today. Ignore the media, the pundits, and (occasionally, and embarrassingly) the government, saying that you’re some sort of demonic horde, to whom qualifications have come too easy. You’ve worked damn hard, and done damn well, whether or not you met your university offers (or indeed, whether or not you’re going to go to university). The day will come when we’ll be running the country, and I’m not despairing quite yet.

Non-political Politics

Scenes like these, which have marred the cities of England the past few days, are disgraceful. But as well as stopping these riots, we need to find out why they have happened, if we are to prevent them from happening again

Last November, I took part in a mass-march in London, organised by the NUS, against the Tory-led coalition government’s plans to treble tuition fees. I left before they turned into the violent disorder which came to define them, but when the rage of thousands of students crashed like a wave against Millbank (containing Conservative Party HQ), it was clearly politically driven.

Over the last few days, I’ve been watching violent riots and looting, which started in North London and spread across the country. It started because the police communicated poorly after a man was shot and killed in Tottenham, and stemmed from a general deep mistrust of the police in the area. Very quickly it moved beyond that, and young people across London and other cities were rioting, looting and destroying things. And yet, the government’s line is that this isn’t political.

Now, I don’t follow that. I absolutely deplore the destruction that has been rolling across English cities, and if any of them try it here they’ll have to go through me (and, I suspect, a fair number of other Wargrave residents). But calling it “criminality pure and simple”, whilst not being inaccurate, seems to miss the point.

What these young people are doing is criminal, and should be punished, but simply saying that and ignoring any deeper causes seems at best foolish, and at worst catastrophic. Simply put, if the reasons why this has happened aren’t explored and dealt with, then it will just happen again, and in a year or maybe two the shops of London, Manchester, Birmingham and more will be aflame again.

I don’t know the answers to this. However, I have my suspicions. These riots have started, and progressed, in particularly poor areas. Branding the people who live there as “chavs” and “scum” is simplistic. They’re still people, and people who for the most part have had to live all their lives in extreme poverty, and in a materialistic society which prizes products above people. It seems clear to me that when their frustration boils over, it would take the form of such looting as we’ve been seeing.

The fact is that most of these people feel that the world, and specifically the government, don’t care about them. This is underlined by a cabinet full of millionaires, and a Prime Minister whose primary source of irritation at yesterday’s press conference seemed to be that he’d had to cut his holiday short to run the country he is paradoxically leader of. I know that I take very badly to lectures about poverty from people who have never so much as seen it. I can only imagine how angry it makes people who live in that poverty.

I agree that these riots need to stop. They are hurting a lot of people, and are an exercise in selfishness. I’m uneasy about water cannons, rubber bullets and martial law, but a police surge in London seemed to do the trick last night. But what must not happen is for this to be allowed to be labelled “non-political” and left at that.

Politics is not something that happens once every four/five years. Just because the rioters aren’t carrying placards doesn’t mean that this has nothing to do with politics. Politics includes most things in life, and the fact that these people have very little, and what they do have is being slowly taken away through government cuts and disinterest, whilst not even beginning to justify their actions, goes some way to explain the feeling behind them.

What needs to happen is an honest, open debate about why this has happened. And government refusal to engage, as hinted by Cameron’s speech, and more explicitly shown by Michael Gove trying to shout down Harriet Harman making that point on last night’s Newsnight, shows the kind of “brush it under the carpet” philosophy which could tear British society apart before this parliament is finished.

 

On Football and Pies

The humble pie should, I submit, be the benchmark by which football matches are to be judged.

I’ve never been a terribly sporty person. Maybe it’s my asthma. Or the fact that I’m not particularly fit. Or maybe it’s just that I’m bloody awful at it. But I’ve always been a reasonably enthusiastic spectator.

There is something about physically being at a sporting event which defies rational explanation. The atmosphere is infectious, and a good crowd raises the tone of an event in a way that Sky cannot replicate- no matter how many dimensions they show it in. When I went, as a child, to the Manchester Velodrome for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, I was enraptured.

But, for me, the real charm lies with Football and Rugby League games. My football team of choice is Liverpool FC, but they being a top-flight team, tickets are rather expensive. So as a child growing up on the banks of the Mersey, I only went to Anfield the once (it was magnificent, by the way).

More frequently I went to see Scunthorpe United, my dad’s team, playing at Glanford Park whenever we were visiting my Grandparents. I even went to see them at Wembley. The shouting, the drumming, the very air is alive with electricity. It’s intoxicating, and if you haven’t experienced it then I strongly recommend that you do.

For me, a key part of the experience is a silly tradition: the half-time pie. This, regrettably, is something that southerners have consistently failed to fully grasp (argue with me on that point if you like- you’d be wrong). This has been demonstrated to me on two particular occasions, at Wembley (where the pies were vile), and today at Adams Park, Wycombe.

The problem at Wycombe was not the quality of the pie, but rather its contents. See, my theory is that a true half-time pie must contain beef in some form. Steak, steak and kidney, or (my personal favourite) minced beef and onion. A chicken and mushroom pie (which was Wycombe’s sole offering), whilst not undelicious, is not therefore appropriate.

Or maybe that’s just the view of a mad football fan. Feel free to argue it either way.

But although today’s game between Scunthorpe United and Wycombe Wanderers failed the pie test, it met two other benchmarks of tradition: the referee was a moron (that was never offside), and we was robbed!