Poor Man About Town

There are so many drinking schools around where I live, that the area has become Drinking Academy. You see people clutching tins of beer and strong cider. People in supermarkets buying a bottles of spirits. Then you have the wrecks who collapse anywhere in the street. As I was leaving for work in the morning, I saw what I thought to be a pile of clothes on the corner, as I got closer it was a man in a state of alcoholic catatonia clutching a beer can with another propped by his head to consume for breakfast. I guess that it is the norm around here, no doubt property developers and estate agents will disapprove and have the police move them on to somewhere else and make the place prohibitively expensive in which to live. I don't mind drunks, they keep out the rich.

Stop rising home prices, evict the rich!

Labels: alcoholism, drunks, Estate Agents, Property Development

I see that the rampage of Property Developers is happening up and down the country. Now they plan to rob pensioners of their bowling green in Hales, Norfolk by wanting to build a stunning new development of bungalows on the site. Is there no stopping the greedy wretches. The bowl players, however, have come up with a cunning plan.

Labels: capitalism, property developers;, Property Development

There have been posts when I have derided how trashy television has become, then we have Jonathan Meades with a new series of Jonathan Meades abroad. My faith in good broadcast television , for that matter BBC2, is slightly restored. Meades' television is extraordinary - factual, entertaining, ascerbic, quirky - he writes with a highly loaded pen - his targets are those everyday things that you love to hate, but have never had thought processes to articulate your scorn. His targets tonight were those buildings and environments that are being subject to regeneration. The advent of this, he points out, came with the arrival of Tony Blair and "Social Thatcherism"

In one scene, he goes into a luxury apartment and describes that such apartment blocks are "Housing Market renewal pathfinders" and that they provide "A lifestyle solution". The modern luxury apartment "...is a product of design culture; it draws bar culture, restaurant culture, retail culture, gallery culture, museum culture, culture culture" This voiceover is made over a scene where he goes around the luxury apartment feigning horror at all the design trinkets and tut which litter the flat. It's not just design culture, it's M & S design culture.

Labels: Architecture, BBC, culture, Design, Lifestyle, Property Development, Regeneration, Television