UKHamlet's Blog

I’m not a drug user – I experimented in the seventies, but lost interest in the eighties and I have a certain amount of sympathy with those who believe cannabis use leads to lethargy and psychological problems. In my view, however, there is mounting and undeniable evidence that continued prohibition of narcotics is causing society more problems than it is solving.

The cost of drug prohibition to society is enormous – from policing the supply and use to the cost of property crime associated with drug use, through the cost of NHS treatment for overdoses, AIDS, hepatitis and so on. If you remove prohibition, regulate the supply and quality, allow prices to fall to a market level low enough to remove the need for additional funding from crime, and offer support from the NHS, you will at a stroke remove:

• The cost of policing drug use and supply
• The cost of crime against the person and their property
• The cost to the NHS
• The criminalisation of people that need help not condemnation
• The opportunity for criminals to control addicts, forcing them into prostitution and other crime

You will also create jobs in a new narcotic supply industry – not just at home, but abroad too – where farmers in poor countries can grow cash crops without fear. We will generate income for the Exchequer through taxation, save lives through quality control, allow the police to focus on “real” crime and disassociate drug use from criminality.

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Philosophy or Safety?

I read an interesting blog – by one of those Libertarians who advocates the kind of “freedom” that rides roughshod over the freedoms of everyone else. In this case, it is the freedom to speed in a car or motorbike.

The cause of this puerile outburst which you can read here: http://tinyurl.com/q2b5le – is the new GPS speed governor which is being developed in Australia. “Freedom dies with GPS speed governor” wails Alexander Mark.  His argument is that this is another step along the road to a “dictatorship of rules” against which we will all one day rebel.

Now, in a sense, I’m in agreement with Mr Mark about this dictatorship of rules – we are slowly being hemmed in by regulations and contractual requirements. The former have been instigated by governments who have put in place laws that govern our behaviour and require us to behave as good consumers and the latter are the contractual obligations allowed by these laws that require us to pay forever for things we have already bought.

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Down Shep!

It’s 1977 and me, Jack Dromey and Harriet Harman are on the picket line at Grunwicks. Harriet is the legal advisor to the strikers’ committee and Jack… well Jack is Jack. He is a bluff, charming man with a quick mind, a loud voice and strong, well argued opinions. I am this skinny, long-haired teenager with acne, a smelly Afghan coat, and for most of my time on the picket line, a large lump on my forehead – testimony to the firmness of SPG standard issue truncheons in those days. It’s no wonder Harriet noticed the loquacious Jack rather than me.

Wind forward five years and Jack marries Harriet and they now have two children, both boys, both bearing the surname “Harman”.  Given a choice of that or Dromey, they’ve probably both regretted not picking a partner called Smith or Booth or whatever…

To tell the truth, she wasn’t a raving beauty or anything, in fact she looked like a Blue Peter presenter without the sex, but that’s not what turned my head in those days. Instead, I favoured cerebral, left-leaning older women, with strong opinions and attitude. I still do, but I can do without the attitude and the older bit. Anyway, Harriet was something of a fantasy girl for the young UKHamlet in the seventies – I’m sure she’ll be delighted to hear it – but it wasn’t in a prurient way. Well, not often anyway.

No, I put Ms Harman on a mental pedestal. This is because I worked hard at not regarding women as sex objects in those days, and it would have been a betrayal of my principles to actually fancy getting jiggy with Harriet.

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Bangers and Smash

Kerrranngg - Banger Racing at its best

There are many ways to send a perfectly good car to an early grave, the most obvious is to give it to a company rep. Less apparent, but lots more fun is to take it to Llandre Airfield on the third Sunday of the month and enter it into a contest with the bargain basement Schumachers of South East Wales. For here, on two miles of windswept concrete, the wannabe Formula One drivers of tomorrow pit their skills against each other practising the black arts of banger racing.

Llandre Airfield is at best a cold, desolate place. Geographically and economically juxtaposed between the burgeoning, commercial district of the Vale Enterprise Park and the old, now nearly defunct, Llandre Industrial Estate, it represents a sad reflection of the best hopes and worst fears of that greatest of decades, the 1950s. In the pantheon of ridiculous planning decisions, Llandre must rank up there with Birmingham’s spaghetti junction, Milton Keynes and the age-old decision to site the Capital City in the most vulnerable part of the UK.

Situated some fifteen miles from Cardiff (equidistant from the other nearest population centre, Bridgend), marginally less accessible than the nearby Cardiff-Wales airport and only some five miles from St Athan RAF base, the airfield has no discernible commercial or military purpose. It must have been the fantasy of some long forgotten Alderman serving the adjacent market town of Bont Bettws to have an airport. Perhaps he or she believed it would enhance the status, prosperity and expectations of a town long over reliant on the twin pillars of rural life, the market and the public house. Whatever, the Alderman was wrong and Llandre Airfield suffered a graceless death in the early sixties, existing henceforth as a vivid concrete scar in the middle of rustic Glamorgan’s timeless beauty. That is, until recently when some bright sparks decided to transform it into a Jonni Bach Imola with a Welsh accent. Continue reading

We don’t get on very well. Me and Liz, I mean. She’s not aware of this, which is as well, because I’d probably end up in a car crash or something.  That said, I’d like to pay her a little tribute, and it’s this: you take a great photo, love.

Gawd bless yah ma'am

26th January 2009: I listened to a radio broadcast detailing the Burns’ night festivities in Alloway. This was, of course, on Sunday which is the real Burns’ night, as the broadcaster insisted on telling the audience every third sentence… or so it seemed. Given my Scottish antecedents, you’d have thought I’d be out celebrating the Ayrshire Bard myself, but instead I snoozed on the settee, book in hand, a glass of wine for company. Perhaps I should have opened that bottle of Jura sitting in my kitchen cupboard. 

Still, I needed to rest, because the night of nearly everyone’s celebrations – the 24th January – found me in Llandough Hospital. Not an ideal Saturday night, but fortunately, also one that saw me both free of harm and ultimately lionised for an act that brought happiness to a few lives. Let me tell you a story…

I arrived at Llandough in the middle of Saturday evening, roughly seven-thirty: this is a time tactically calculated to leave me little time to visit with a relative. Not my usual habit, I should add, just a behaviour specific to this particular relative. You would have to meet him to get the full measure of how much a displeasure this is, and it was only because my mother goaded me with guilt laden urgings that would have done a Monseigneur credit.

As I walked through the entrance to the hospital, I met with a friend and former colleague. Her reddened eyes spoke of enough to make me pause in my stride, rather than exchange warm but fleeting greetings. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Mum and Doug,” she started before dissolving. I waited, extending a hand to her shoulder as she added, choking on every word: “Doug is inside. Emphysema. Few days left. He said, he said…”

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Robin Williams once said that getting divorced was like having your balls ripped off through your wallet. My divorce was a similarly cathartic experience: after everything was paid for – solicitors, estate agents, other assorted robbing bastards and ex-wife, I was left with £12,000 of my pension and barely any of the equity in the house.

I think I probably got off lightly – however, that meant that I have to start again…. Not the best scenario for a 46 year old single bloke, so I’ve got a place in one of the less salubrious parts of Rumney down Wentloog Road, left into Greenway Road, right into Harris Avenue. It’s an ex-council house with four bedrooms and view across the playing fields – where on a Saturday night about 11:30 you can see little white bums bobbing up and down…. I’m thinking of investing in an air rifle.

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Leeway Trading Estate in Newport is one of those forgotten pieces of industrial detritus that litter the South Wales coastal plain like souvenirs from a previous economic era. It harks back to the days when someone could earn enough in a forty hour week to keep a family without supplementary benefits, a second income, a forty year mortgage, and credit cards to pay off the credit cards. Did they really exist?

You will not find a call centre anywhere near Leeway, neither will it ever be described as “Leeway Commercial Park”, but what you will find are those islands of entrepreneurial spirit that characterise the best efforts of modern Britain to earn a living as an independent spirit, free from the demands of unreasonable bosses, a cash business that fulfils the most basic of needs: the need for food. I am, of course, referring to the burger van.

There are three burger vans within walking distance of each other on the estate, but only the most centrally placed of them offers that culinary masterpiece: the hot pork sandwich, a favourite that transcends the fad diet of the moment.

If I’m hungry, and I frequently am, there is nothing more satisfying than one of Mike’s Lo Cal, hot pork sandwiches, complete with stuffing and apple sauce. He says the reason he calls it Lo Cal has nothing to do with the calorific value, but rather because it was made just around the corner, so it’s LoCal. The bread is sliced thick enough to expose the limitations of a single hinge jaw and the meat has that distinct, burger van flavour that says; “I’m extremely toxic, but anything this tasty has to be..” I can almost feel my posterior ventricle closing up whenever I eat one of these monsters, but eat them I do, and with a frequency that exposes my background as a Grangetown boy. I was brought up on Clark’s Pies and Scraps, so LoCal Pork Sandwiches have nothing with which my constitution can’t deal, with or without bypass surgery.

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Cardiff Wetlands

I went for a lovely long walk with Patch today – trying to keep up my New Year Resolution to lose weight.

We set off about nine this morning, across the playing fields at the back of my house, where semi-comatose schoolboys limbered up in sub-Beckham-esque fashion, preparing themselves for their weekly dose of parental driven gladiatorial sport. All for fun, of course.

Patch was a ball of joy; prancing and dancing between yawning, stretching, spotty, Nike clad youths like a puppy on amphetamines. I don’t think I’ve seen her so happy. God knows what got into her; perhaps it was the bright, low sun, or the chill north-easterly wind blowing into the sides of our faces. Whatever, she was rejuvenated from her recent sullen demeanour. Maybe she suffers from Subsyndromal-Seasonal Affective Disorder and the sunshine blew away her blues. Or perhaps she sensed my distress at Cardiff Rugby running up a run of fourteen successive away defeats in the European Cup, and was having a laugh at my expense. I doubt it, not even Border Collies can be that malign.

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