1997 looks like being a truly bad year for celebrities; the Dead Pools must have been working overtime, especially over the past few months. I blame Princess Diana, for triggering a wave of copycat terminations. Mother Teresa, Jeffrey Bernard, John Denver, and now Michael Hutchence, joining the list of rock ‘n’ roll suicides — at least pending the outcome of the coroner’s report. However, at least no-one can mutter about unfulfilled potential in this case, since INXS’s last hit was years ago — Hutchence’s funeral was the biggest crowd he’d pulled in quite some time. And there’s been no polite period of mourning before the Hutchence jokes started to fly. Tuesday morning, and the following landed on my desk:

What’s the difference between Michael Hutchence and Manchester United?
United can still play Giggs.

But it remains the ultimate publicity stunt, guaranteed to revive the most flagging of career, at least briefly — for any publicity is good publicity, more or less (though I think Gary Glitter may have overstepped the mark a little). Even I must confess to having pulled out the one INXS album I possess, and putting it on — perhaps in some ghoulish attempt to see if there was a subliminal message in there. [Of course, it could be in there, backwards masked, but that’s a problem with CDs, that they don’t really lend themselves to such things — unlike record players, which needed no more than your finger, and an absolute disregard for the state of your stylus] Hmmm, does ‘Suicide Blonde’ indicate anything? God knows, when you can make out about one word in six.

His wake was, admittedly, a kind of who’s who of Antipodean tottie, and I almost expected Kylie Minogue and Paula Yates to engage in a hair-pulling catfight in the middle of the floor. [Ok, make that “hoped”] And for all his faults, Hutchence was a rock ‘n’ roll star. None of this clean-living, sandal-wearing, rain-forest saving nonsense favoured by the new generation of pop stars (Liam and Noel Gallagher excepted — though the size of their egos negates any praise due). It’s hard to imagine, say, Baby Spice hanging herself with a black belt. Er, actually, it’s not, but that probably counts as some kind of hopeful wish fulfillment, alongside thoughts about their tour bus crashing into an enclosure of ravenous panthers.

But perhaps it’s not so hard to understand. You wake up and suddenly realise that a) you have a daughter called Heavenly Hirani Tiger Lily, and b) you gave up Helena Christiansen for Paula Yates. Given that, who can blame Mr.Hutchence for taking his own life…

I have a theory about the 70 tourists who were killed in Egypt earlier on this week. It’s easy to blame the usual Islamic fundamentalists, but my theory would be that the Luxorites just got pissed off with enormous hordes of dumb foreigners wandering round their city, and decided to take the direct route to…well, to quote that fine philosopher T.Bickle, “Someday a rain’s gonna come and wash the scum off the streets”.

I fervently pray that someone does something similar here, and if I knew their address, would even write to the Islamic Jihad committee (or whatever they’re called), and hint that London is a hotbed of seething Western decadence, worthy of being put to the sword. And the centre of this evil empire is Leicester Square, which you could safely napalm and not even touch anyone with a London bank account. In fact, pretty much anywhere in Zone 1 would do — chalk up another reason why South London is superior to North London, any tourist who ventures down here is embarking on a trip which makes ‘Heart of Darkness’ look like a ride at EuroDisney.

“But think of the damage to the economy”, I hear you whine. Well, let’s look at the businesses most likely to go under if we practiced a little ethnic cleansing:

• Shops that sell plastic policemen’s helmets
• Theme restaurants — the Rainforest Cafe, I *ask* you! Bring on Belsen King…
• Most of Covent Garden
• Rock Circus and Madam Tussaud’s
• English language schools
• Fleabag hotels charging fifty quid a night
• Europa Food Stores

With regard to the last, can someone explain to me why a loaf of bread should be twice as expensive because you’re buying it near Trafalgar Square. And don’t give me that ‘rent’ bullshit; neither HMV, Books Etc nor anyone else feel the need to jack their prices up. But that really deserves an entire rant to itself. Suffice it to say that I fail to be overly heartbroken at the prospect of any of these places biting the dust.

When the Libyans and friends were blowing up American planes, life in London was great, because tourism dropped so much. You could shop, eat, live in comfort, even go to the theatre if you wanted (though, let’s face it, only tourists do that sort of thing). And I still treasure memories of walking through a deserted Camden Town just after the IRA set off a bomb there — though admittedly those memories are mostly ones of fear and panic because I was carrying a suitcase of ‘questionable’ video tapes through an area where there were more police than pedestrians.

But that’s still preferable to thoughts of “get out of the way, you STUPID tourist”, as they stand on the wrong side of the escalators on the tube, then when they get to the top, fumble around in their bum bags for their one-day Travelcards, seemingly surprised by the presence of a ticket barrier LIKE THERE IS AT EVERY OTHER GODDAMN TUBE STATION! And after they get through, they don’t move smartly away, but hover around, blocking it up as they wait for their friends. This is just one facet of London life, a single area that they make unbearable.

It’s all an interesting exercise in divisive intelligence. If one tourist has an IQ of N, then two will have a *combined* intelligence of N. So will three. Or five. Or twenty. Get enough, and you have something which would lose at Trivial Pursuit to a dish of penicillin. So, pretty please, I’m begging any terrorist groups who feel a need to kill tourists. Come to London. Shoot all you want. Just don’t stand on the wrong side of the escalators…

“Schadenfreude” is one of the great German words, alongside “kugelschreiber” and “Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte mit Schlagsahne” [sadly, Notepad is unable quite to deliver their full umlaut-laden beauty]. However, if I was to write about ball-point pens or Black Forest gateau with whipped cream, I would be inviting sarcastic comments from Lino about it being another slow news week, so I am forced to talk about the delight one feels at the misfortune of others, especially when the “other” in question is Tony Blair.

So high, so mighty, so Christian bloody Socialist in opposition — I never forgave the twat for being the first to sign up for David Alton’s anti-video bill. And now, he’s finding out that it’s a goddamn sight harder to actually govern the country, rather than merely whine about how it’s being done. There are all those nice vested interests: people do not hand you seven-figure sums out of the goodness of their heart. Oops! Better U-turn on that decision to ban tobacco sponsorship in motor racing. Except it becomes doubleplusoops when the details of that million pounds crops up; even if you hand it back, its stink lingers around. Not so smug NOW, are we, Tony? And that’s aside of them making you pay to go to university, dumping wind-chill payments for OAPs, and abandoning the bill to ban fox-hunting. Principles are the exclusive prerogative of being in opposition. It all goes to prove what I’ve said all along: one bunch of tossers are just the same as another.

Mind you, ‘new’ Labour and F1 Racing would seem made for each other, going by the jaw-dropping fiasco of Michael Schumacher. German sportsmen with that name are apparently able to cheat blatantly, and with disregard for life and limb, yet escape punishment. Readers may recall a goalkeeper called Schumacher who launched one of the fouls of this, or any other, century on a French forward and got away scot free. A decade later, Michael has been given a non-punishment of jaw-dropping stupidity; he loses the points he won last year, but not anything else – such as the money or the trophies. This is a bit like penalising the FA Cup runners-up by taking away the goals they scored in the final, so that they were defeated 3-0 rather than 3-2. Who PRECISELY does it hurt?

I have bizarre nightmares in which Max Moseley sits in judgement on Louise Woodward: “The bad news is, you’re going to prison for 15 years. The good news is that it’s back-dated to 1982 — we want you to pretend really hard that you’ve been in jail since then. Case dismissed.” Still, what do you expect from the son of Sir Oswald? Given this “interesting” approach to justice, if I was Ralf Schumacher, I’d mount a bazooka on my car for next season, ‘cos he could probably nuke the rest of the starting grid without fear of repercussions…

My, how I laughed at Scott Adams’ book, ‘The Dilbert Principle’, with its wacky tales of life in the lunatic asylum of big business. But yesterday was like waking up, only to find that your nightmares are infinitely better than reality.

It started off with a departmental re-organisation, the company equivalent of the three-card trick, in which you try and move the managers around so fast that they give the illusion of productive work. These frequent, effectively pointless exercises are simultaneously carrot and stick: good managers perhaps get allocated extra areas of empire, others get them taken away. Mine was given control over the switchboard — I’m not sure which that counts as. Of course, nothing will actually change. More meetings will be held, and the number of people actually doing any work will decrease.

It’s symptomatic of the longer-term approach, which goes something like this

• A new head of department comes in, full of bright ideas.
• New head of department decides to scrap all the projects of his predecessor, and move ahead on to the cutting edge of new technology.
• They junk large quantities of hardware + software.
• They realise no-one in the department knows how to work the new technology.
• Hideously overpaid contractors are employed, and training is thrown at us.
• We see the promised delivery date for the new system.
• We laugh hysterically.
• We realise with horror that they aren’t joking.
• Working like amphetamine-crazed beavers, we produce the electronic equivalent of finger-painting, and hope the users won’t notice.
• People leave in droves with their new skill-set, before the shit hits the fan.
• They hire even more hideously overpaid contractors to try and rescue things.
• They don’t.
• The head of department falls on his exceedingly well-paid sword.
• A new head of department comes in, full of bright ideas…

We’re now on the third cycle of the above. Is it any wonder that my enthusiasm for actual work is not overwhelming? However, I don’t think we’re especially bad at it, which is I’ve been here eight years; going anywhere else wouldn’t change anything.

And then, bizarrely, yesterday became Corporate Tie Day. Midway through the afternoon, the PA to the deputy head (approximate title: god knows what it is, post-reorganisation) came through like Santa’s little helper, distributing ties with the company logo on them to all male employees (hideously overpaid contractors excluded). The women will apparently be getting scarves later. We just laughed. The company’s share price has dived 40% in a month and this was their response? We hadn’t exactly been demanding neckwear, and a month or two back the company boss sent round a memo asking for ways to save money! [“Stop sending round dumb memos” was a popular reply…]

It’s almost impossible to fathom the thought processes behind it; as a token of appreciation it’s backfired utterly, though the ties themselves are quite nice, in a psychedelic way. But I guess the odds were always against them offering us lap dances from a babe clad only in a company T-shirt…

So said Lino, when I informed him of the subject of this week’s piece: plumbers. Well, it has been, convicted nannies notwithstanding (of course, unlike the jury, most of those whining about the case didn’t sit through every second of evidence, and relied on the soundbites in the media here — and still they think they know better). Nothing has even happened about last week’s “abusive” email.

This allows me to bitch about unprofessional professionals. In the house at the moment, we’re renovating the bathroom, with the aim of getting rid of the shower- room, as it’s suffering from damp. However, the bathroom is still a way off being ready, but the shower packed it in recently. With malevolent intent, it would work for about five minutes, then stop dead — inevitably just after you’d worked up a good lather, forcing you to trail soapsuds and curses up to the bathroom.

Now, with the bathroom imminent, we wanted someone to come to look at the shower, and fix it if it could be done quickly and cheaply; otherwise we’d just survive on baths for a while. I turned to the Thomson directory to find suitable candidates. Why are so many plumbers called A.A.Aaaaaaaaardvark? Yes, if you’ve got a leak, you might not agonise over your choice — but if so, neither are you going to carefully begin at the beginning, and your sodden leafing might just as easily take you into the plumbing section at page 6.

I dumped all those, since I wanted a shower looked at, not a game of Scrabble, and phoned a couple of companies with real-sounding names. No, they wouldn’t come out and take a look at the shower. Not unless I paid them 42 quid for the first hour. Plus parts. Plus VAT. Call it 50 quid. Christ, if I get called into work, they get FOUR HOURS out of me for that, and this could be a five minute, “it’s dead, Jim” kind of task. I bit the bullet and booked one, vowing that I would, if necessary, lock the plumber in the cellar for 55 minutes.

And what happened? They never appeared. What, 50 quid not enough to get you out of bed? Hell, for that price you could get a lawyer or a blow-job, and I bet you good money THEY would turn up. I am tempted to send them a bill for the three hours I spent sitting round playing Tomb Raider and watching TV, except that I couldn’t honestly say it was thus any different from my usual Saturday morning. But I think I’ll be sticking to baths…