Jamie Oliver and the Big Fucking Flatscreen Telly Conundrum

Food, or a Big Fucking Flatscreen Telly (BFFT)? That’s the dilemma. Every day, people with little money can be seen wandering the aisles of supermarkets across the nation, a concerned look etched on their face, as they weigh up the pros and cons of the two options.

Celebrity chef and owner of big lips Jamie Oliver has had enough! He just can’t understand why poor people are making the wrong decisions. He’s not judgmental,but…

Food, obviously, is great. But you can’t use it to watch Jamie Oliver’s programmes about how terrible poor people are at eating the right sort of food. Still, maybe you’re too tired from working overtime to supplement your terrible wages to want to watch them anyway. Maybe you just want to collapse on the sofa with a takeaway, which you can buy at any of the plethora of takeaway establishments in any town. In my town, there’s a market once a week (which no-one who works can get to) and a farmer’s market once a month. Poor people don’t all have “local markets” to walk past and get their mange tout.

On the other hand, you can’t eat a TV. It’s alright until the glass breaks, at which point you find yourself with a mouthful of pointy shards and blood, and a floor covered in glass. Worse, you’ll probably waste that glass, because there’s so much of it in your BFFT. If you’d only thought to pop to the local electronics market, you could have purchased a smaller TV, with just enough glass for your evening meal.

Perhaps Jamie knows of a recipe that uses stale remote controls, since poor people probably have them in abundance. I suppose we’ll have to wait for his new series to find out.

Jamie (can I call you Jamie? I’m going to.) is sort of alright I suppose, generally, but he is understandably viewing the world through the filter of a £150,000,000 bank balance. Because that’s what he has, apparently. In the world of the rich, and even in the world of the not poor, the BFFT has become the boldest symbol of the undeserving poor.

Poor people's TVs can only show Jeremy Kyle. True fact.

“They can’t be REALLY poor, have you seen their BFFT? Of course you have, it’s so big you can see it from the MOON.”

“If they’re so poor, why don’t they sell that TV and use the money to buy some tasty* quinoa?”

The BFT is wheeled out in TV programmes about benefits. It’s referred to by celebrity chefs when they’re on their high horse (which they have mounted in order to PUBLICISE A TV SERIES).

Here are some things I just thought about BFFTs:

1.     It is pretty much impossible to buy a TV which is not a BFFT. A SFFT (Small Fucking Flatscreen Telly) only costs a few quid less than its big brother, to encourage you to supersize your TV in the same way that McDonalds encourages you to supersize your meal. It is impossible to buy a non-flatscreen TV in 2013, unless you own a TARDIS.

2.     BFFTs are worth the square root of bugger all once they’re about six minutes old, because the new model has come out. If you sell your BFFT to Cash Converters, they’ll probably offer you about £6.50, or perhaps a week’s supply of mange tout.

3.     I bought a BFFT once. I had a job when I did. I might not have a job next week, who knows?

There’s a hashtag going on Twitter at the moment: #AskJamieOliver. I think I’d like to ask him whether he still thinks he’s not judgmental, because I think he is.

Oh, and: “I’ve got some mouldy bread, do you have a recipe for that?"

*overrated.

Loan Moan

Something which has really been invading my brain space and fucking me off recently is people who have never known hardship thinking it’s appropriate to tell people who do, or have done, or may do sometime in the future, that they shouldn’t moan about hardship.

Most recently, this has been done by whichever person wrote the Rothschild investment bank’s report on how best to remedy the fact that investors aren’t interested in buying the MASSIVE student loan debt from the government (who will use the money to line their dishonest, career politician, detached from the real world pockets, or to pay consultant friends vast sums to tell them how they can fuck up the NHS, or austerity the fuck out of everyone’s benefits payments, or just generally spunk it up the wall in some other way which makes the general public wonder what in fuck’s name we’re doing voting for these tossbags anyway)

*breathes*

Anyway. What? Oh yes. Selling the student loan book to private investors.

Apparently the private investors don’t want it. Because it’s been set up in a way which means it wouldn’t make them enough money to be interested in it.

Obviously, I’m crying into my Tesco Value cornflakes over that predicament, but there we go.

How nice to be able to turn down an opportunity to make money, because it wasn’t going to make you ENOUGH money. I’d just like something to make me any money. But I digress. Again.

Obviously, the solution to the problem of the loan book not making enough money is to shit on all the people who took out the loans (because they had no choice, because it was the only way they could afford to go to university) by increasing the interest rate.

Which is FINE, by the way. I’ve always expected it would happen eventually. It will probably make little difference to the fact that I’ll likely be paying that bastard loan back at a rate of bugger all pounds per month for the rest of eternity, before passing the remainder on to Cam like some horrible parting anti-gift.

That’s probably not how it works, does it get written off at some point? Or do they come around and chop off your arthritis riddled legs in lieu of cash? Or maybe put you to work knitting Shreddies?

So, yeah, one option is to increase the interest rates. In some truly “of the people” thinking, the author of the report recognises that perhaps this won’t go down too well (he should have asked me, I’d have told him I’m cool with it *eats beans on toast for a week*) and has included useful suggestions on how the government could bring us graduates around to the idea:

"We all live in difficult times, you havea deal which is so much better than your younger siblings (they will incur upto £9,000 tuition fees and up to RPI+3% interest rates)". (The Guardian) 

SOLD!

Oh no, wait, I mean: SHUT UP.

Because it’s stupid to suggest that the reason I ought to suck up an increase in the cost of my repayments is that my younger siblings have a worse deal. By that logic the next step will be to ask the generations who got grants for their university education to retrospectively pay some money back, because they got a much better deal than I did.

A moment of fairness: we weren’t supposed to see this report, it was all written in secret. Even when a Freedom of Information request meant it was sent into the public domain the vast majority of it was redacted (oh, how I loathe that term). It just wasn’t redacted with a dark enough pen. That’s the calibre of redaction the government has working for them. Perhaps I could get a new job as a professional redactor? I’ll even bring my own black markers.

But now the report is out there, and I know there are likely to be loads more documents, floating around the shadowy halls of power, describing ill-conceived ways of letting the plebs and proles know that they’re coming for you. The country is bankrupt and fucked and has no solution aside from taking more of your money.

Because we’re all in it together. All of us. Except those that aren’t. The twenty plus members of the cabinet who are millionaires. The potential investors (who the report suggests are the least good option to bear the brunt of any financial risk, after the government and graduates). I don’t think they’re in it with us. I think they’re eating five course meals and pissing themselves laughing at all the little people.

One day, I’d like to get the opportunity to tell them to fuck off.

Sorry, that was a bit ranty and incoherent wasn’t it? I’ll post a picture of Cam looking cute tomorrow. Cheerioh.

Bank

Right then banks, I'm not going to sugar coat this or pander to your enormous "too big to fail" egos. I am bored of you.

I am bored of every aspect of banking.

I am bored of going to banks to pay money in. Not that I can, because you're never fucking open anyway.

I am bored of finding out that your traders, or setters, or Chief Executives, or Chairmen, or whoever, have been doing dodgy things. Dodgy things which may not be illegal, but really aren't okay.

I am bored of you being all powerful and having the ability to ruin the ambition of small business people by deciding not to lend to them. Almost three quarters of the loans you make are to other financial institutions, or businesses which are closely affiliated with them. Only 2.5% of your loans are made to the manufacturing industry.

I am bored of no-one but bankers being able to understand the complexities of banking, when really it should be nice, simple and transparent. When even the body put in place to regulate you (albeit in a softly softly don't upset the important bankers way) quite often gets accused of not knowing what is going on behind the doors of those impressive offices I think there is a problem.

I am bored of hearing about massive bonuses. Yes. Because I'm jealous. I want that money. Or some of it. I wouldn't mind so much, but some of you are still paying those bonuses despite your banks being demonstrably RUBBISH.

*Disclaimer: I have some shares in Lloyds Banking Group, from when I worked for one of its subsidiary companies. They are worth pennies. They would probably have greater value if I asked for an individual share certificate for each one and used it as novelty toilet paper for a week or two.

I am bored of how awkward you make it for me and my wife to do business with you. Want to get a mortgage? Fine Mrs L, no problem, you'll just have to prove to us how you got that money you're using as a deposit. Oh, you saved it did you? That doesn't sound very likely, people don't SAVE money, they SPEND it.

I am bored of you being too big to fail, and indispensable. If I want to choose to remove banking from my life, I want that to be an option, but it's not.

I am bored of the thought that creeps into my head every so often: banks might actually ruin the world. Ruin the economy. Ruin the future. The future which I want to be nice and shiny and full of lovely things, so that The Creature can have a nice life.

I want banks to be boring because banks ARE boring. Because they are institutions which exist to look after our money for a bit until we need it. Is it because that's such a boring reason to exist that banks now have to get their kicks by being utterly ridiculous, greedy and borderline antisocial? In fact, I give banking an ASBO.


I don't want banks to be boring because they are in fact interesting. I don't want them to be on the news every day, being barely contrite about some new mis-selling scandal or other arseholery. I want them to be quiet and look after my money.

*turns off news forever*
*goes to scope out caves to live in*
*calms down*

Sorry about all that. I spent a really long time on hold to HSBC today.