Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Andrew Twentyman and Thomasina Miers need to collab

We aficionados of Homes Under The Hammer see plenty of ‘rough’ property developers as contributors but they’d all be lower middle class in terms of assets, right?

Truly, nobody wants to be LMC.

I did once go to a pizza restaurant in Lausanne where they'd done that thing where every pizza was the 'David Guetta' or the 'Lionel Messi' or whatever. This was about 2011 and the 'Gordon Brown' had been crossed out on every menu and replaced with the 'David Cameron' and I just thought wow, brutal.

Not as brutal as the 'Wayne Rooney' pizza that was like 80% pork products though.

Powerless, rudderless and adrift: Covid-19 has crystallised how England feels
A sense of exclusion and abandonment is as central to people’s experience of this crisis as it was to the Brexit vote

John Harris

80% pork, 10% cigs, 5% base, 5% crust

Pork products that wouldn't stay in position

John Harris takes a look at his bank statement, sucks his teeth, and dusts off the same piece he submits every month

i had a kebab pizza in the rhone valley once, sat in front of a bonfire made of broken furniture in a farmhouse courtyard under the stars

(this sounds fanciful but is actually true)

kebab pizza is fine, no way to do pizza wrong, not taking questions at this time

I'll probably end up saying this on the main thread at some point again but the self-employed are a massively expanding group at the moment and neither main party has established itself as the party of the self-employed, despite being a big group that's there to play for.* It may be that a Deliveroo driver and, say, a journalist or business consultant have very little in common in terms of their wider lives but the covid crisis has established obvious shared interests that weren't apparent otherwise - and a lot of self-employed people live in poverty hand-to-mouth.

*Labour under Corbyn tried this a bit but also seemed to be doing so half-heartedly. Sunak has treated the self-employed as an afterthought throughout the crisis and taken longer to get cash to them or put measures in place.

I've heard quite a few finance headz saying Rishi isn't using the printed money very intelligently. Chucking a load of dosh at companies that were going to bring back furloughed staff anyway and if they were going to let staff go a grand is hardly a big enough inducement to make them change their mind. I'm convinced he's partly an absolute idiot who hasn't a clue what he's doing but also a callous tory wanker!

The Sunak approach was fundamentally to look after capital, in the form of companies. The furlough money flowed through the companies, ensuring people had to retain links with their employers, rather than directly to people social security-style. The self-employed aren't important enough to count in that worldview, even though it's blinkered politically. xp

cigarette butt pizza crust is like the evil twin of the cauliflower pizza crust

TBH I don't think there's really time to obsess over value for money right now, it doesn't really matter and as an attack line it's a non-starter. I think I also agree that it's going to cost more in the long term allowing companies of all sizes to collapse, the hole in the tax base and the difficulty of getting people back to work during the recovery is going to be more damaging than decades' worth of public debt.

Arguably this is separate to the social security question which has been massively underfunded. Doesn't change the fact that, for millions of people, the biggest and most valuable contribution they could be making to society was to stay at home and not work. That's a gigantic shift for traditional economists to get their heads round, but these people needed to be properly incentivised to do so, and they weren't.

I did once go to a pizza restaurant in Lausanne where they'd done that thing where every pizza was the 'David Guetta' or the 'Lionel Messi' or whatever. This was about 2011 and the 'Gordon Brown' had been crossed out on every menu and replaced with the 'David Cameron' and I just thought wow, brutal.

Not as brutal as the 'Wayne Rooney' pizza that was like 80% pork products though.

Surely it's the David Cameron pizza that should be pork-based?

Aren’t you thinking of pigs in blankets?

I’m Danny Dyer, and I’m about to meet Britain’s most working class FTSE 100 CEO.

— P.G. Chodehouse (@mynnoj) July 9, 2020

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dCBobI3TmVU

(I think I used to know Helen Pidd’s father, nice fellow.)

Sorry for the lack of embed, that's a link to "Twenty Man Dead" by the excellent Cutty Ranks, which has obviously been running through my head since yesterday.

Jesus, I’m in pieces after reading this.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/ng-interactive/2020/jul/14/david-squires-on-the-life-and-times-of-jack-charlton

Missed out his brave consolation goal at Wembley in 1967 when the World Champions were murdered 3-2 by Scotland.

small nation mentality 😅

I respect what he did for the RoI but for his long association with the dirty dirty dirty white shite I can't get sentimental and care as much as if he was one of the many slimy brown trouts he battered to death with his whacker!

the dirty dirty dirty white shite

credit to calz, he could be talking about two different things here lol

Not got a clue what you mean there!

The England football team?

yes haha

First thing I noticed when I saw that cartoon was he seemed to have transmogrified into Billy McNeill when he was managing Middlesbrough.

Lol I thought imago was inferring I hate white ppl!

I can imagine big Jack huffing some carcinogenic smog in Middlesborough before training, just to show what a working class legend he is!

Which reminds me, Jack Charlton, Billy McNeill - yet moe footballers, specifically central defenders who ended up suffering from dementia.

Jack 'Bloodsports' Charlton:

https://www.fieldsportschannel.tv/jack-charlton-death-good-says-anti/

Xp
Could be freshwater fishing related?

He was getting eulogised on twitter as a socialist ledge, the fucker was probably pro-capital punishment!

One of my fave Jackie memories is that TV show he did on ITV? in the 80s? where he shouted at kids training for not kicking each other hard enough

Anyway he was a legit legend and I mourn him, despite dirty Leeds

I assume all old school footballers are Tories unless it can be proven otherwise.

I think the tweet calz is referring to named a lot of managers as socialists? Ferguson, Shankly, that kind of thing

More like the older managers. Mou is fash obv.

I think I saw what I what you are referring to, but I also other posts calling him a socialist. Personally he reminds me of a composite of every fucked up bully PE teacher of the 70s/80s with a bit of beetroot faced geography teacher dna thrown into the mix. Well I had violent bald geog teacher who used to crush kids hands and hit people on the head with thick hardback editions!

Yeah I don't know why Charlton is a socialist. Ferguson and Klopp do talk politics from time to time. Seen enough quotes by Shankly over the years.

He marched with striking miners once I think.

People were saying he stood with striking miners and donated to their funds.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ec3wcwsWAAALeag?format=jpg&name=large

I thought I recalled him having a soft spot for minors

Never forget that Jackie took the Ireland squad to Harry Ramsdens for a massive fish-eating contest the night before a crucial Euro 96 qualifier. He was a Harry Ramsdens shareholder.

From Niall Quinn's autobiography:

"We all shuffled into Harry Ramsden’s. Jack is a shareholder. Packie or Paul or somebody cut a ribbon and officially opened the place. So the night before the game, after a week of drink, I settled down to fish and chips. Garry Kelly took the Harry Ramsden’s Challenge and ate a fish about a yard long and a mountain of chips and anything else they challenged him with. He thought there’s be a certificate but he got a free desert instead, which he duly ate. Jack herded us out pronto. Twenty minutes later, it’s dusk at Lansdowne Road and we’re all waddling about the pitch, groaning, full of fish and chips and trying to do a training session the night before this must-win game. We’re burping and farting and creased over with laughter. Our main thought was it’s been a happy era and it’s ending soon…Sometimes you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It was all over for Jack."

"Both of them would have taken an empty symbolic gesture today without thinking" sheesh

Garry Kelly took the Harry Ramsden’s Challenge and ate a fish about a yard long and a mountain of chips and anything else they challenged him with. He thought there’s be a certificate but he got a free desert instead

not lolled so hard in weeks!

One of the worst Guardian arts articles in a long time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/14/writer-lockdown-diary-amy-sackville-creative-writing

I'm sure I've read worse, my eyes just sort of glazed over really, I feel like I've read fifty variants on that since lockdown started.

There should be a nationwide ban on the phrase 'sourdough starter' by now, as well as columnists telling people they aren't reading Proust. The overwhelming majority of humanity isn't reading Proust right now.