The Daily Quark: Always First With The Obvious

Here at The Daily Quark we grasp with both hands our responsibility to bring you the knee-jerkingly obvious, presented as news.

Our award-winning coverage of the hedge funds scandals, for instance: People Everyone Always Thought Were Dodgy Turn Out, Inevitably, To Have Been Dodgy.

And our eye-catching coverage of the economic crisis, which took our reputation for being ‘wise after the event’ to brave new highs: Even Though Nobody Could Possibly Have Known This Was Going To Happen, How Come Nobody Knew This Was Going To Happen…?

Next week we start a ground-breaking retrospective, blowing open the sordid world of media and the cartel of woolly liberals who seek to bring down western civilisation by producing programmes like Antiques Roadshow and Country File. First part: Contemporary Comedians Who Are Paid For Their Brand Of Offensive, Edgy Humour May Sometimes Be Offensive. And Edgy.

Constructing New Ghosts

The drool-flecked shadow of Beeching still looms large over the UK’s rail network. Beeching’s talons did for some 3,500 railways stations, of which choo-choo expert Christian Wolmar reckons a third would be of real use today. There goes the environment.

Beeching created a host of ghost stations. As your freshly rebranded 8:14 swishes past, there it is - an incongruously flat space, overgrown with grass, reclaimed by creepers and brush. A tell-tale car park space, maybe even a derelict waiting room and ticket office. Hell’s that ticking sound?! Nothing more sinister than phantom commuters, tutting like metronomes as their own 8:14 is announced to be five minutes late.

And perhaps we are in the business this year of creating new ghosts up and down the country. Just as ghosts stations haunt our suburbs and villages, so on the high street, I guess the new ghosts will be the forgotten branches of banks…

Expect high streets otherwise lively with debt collection agencies, discount supermarkets and charity shops to be blighted by desolate former banks, five pound notes blowing disconsolately, leaf-like, across deserted counters before settling on yellowing cardboard cut-outs advertising the latest 0% credit card.

That’ll do nicely.

The Silent Death of John Smith

Recently a pal from University, who I’d lost touch with, tracked me down through a couple of Google searches and a hopeful phone message. The mobile number he left didn’t work, so I retaliated and searched for him in turn. Two hits later, turns out he’s now married, to someone from Southampton; is a hotshot lawyer; and is still the handsome devil he ever was.

It’s a familiar story. However, both searches were helped by the fact neither of us have particularly common names (makes you wonder how effective similar searches are in Wales). Which, coincidentally, is an emerging trend. As the lust after individuality which began in early modern times now licks its own mirror to the tune of our celebrity culture, parents are opting more and more for less obvious names. It’s thank you and goodnight for John Smith, and hello Sunshine Turtle-Harrison.

Which in turn will feed Facebook, Bebo - and whatever comes after them and makes them look like electronic post-it notes. The balloon of social networking gets punctured by the pin of a common name: put in ‘Peter Williams’ and you can hear it pop and deflate. Fortunately, even surnames are changing, probably more than they have for five hundred years. There are far more double-barrelled names, either through divorce, or a more equal divvying up of parents’ monikers; the double barrelled name now has nothing to do with class. Has it, Kylie Duncan-Flap?

In short, when it comes to names, you’re going to need something a little bit more individual if you’re going to play any part in mainstream society in the future (*licence for dubious argument pending). But never fear, largely because we’re more self-obsessed, vain and increasingly rubbish at marriage, individuality can be yours (in name, at least).

It’s often said that today’s “selfish society” could never fight a World War. Once conscription was announced, too many people would explain that war “wasn’t right for them” or that it “didn’t fit with their personal brand”, which of course would be fair enough. On a brighter note, assuming that were true, with our funky names and our social networks, at least it would be easy to make contact with the few survivors.

Anyone Seen My Chesterfield Sofa?

Every century has a genius for something. Our century has a genius for the fatuous.

This week’s jewel of irrelevance is the announcement they force train drivers to make on pulling into a major station: ‘Please ensure, when leaving the train, you take all belongings with you’. Who does that help, then, apart from box-tickers at the train company?

Do amnesiacs spring up on hearing such a reminder and yell, ‘Cripes! Nearly forgot the parakeet!’ Have the terminally absent-minded, perhaps lugging a Chesterfield sofa around with them, hastily leapt back on the train following such an announcement, to rescue the offending piece of furniture?

Has the train companies’ token thoughtfulness resulted in a net increase in marital bliss, perhaps, as couples heed the advice and, on average, forget each other less?

When leaving this blog, please ensure you take all your belongings with you.

Office blocks to lift the spirit

I note with a real sense of jubilation and relief that the new development outside East Croydon station (pearl amongst commuting stations) will include ‘Grade ‘A’ office space for 500 people’.

Thank God for that! At last. After all, if there’s one thing Croydon needs, it’s more office space. Some skyscrapers would be nice, for instance - some tower blocks and some office blocks to lift the spirit and gladden the heart.

Perhaps we can finally make ‘Croydon – the quaint, rural village’ the thing of the past. Perhaps we can finally banish our town’s reputation as a bucolic backwater and instead lurch, sorry, leap into the ‘white heat’ of the twenty-first century.

Gone will be Hobbledehoys, the Croydon village blacksmith. Away with Gristlegums, the village butcher, and Silas Snout, the wheezing village tobacconist. Away with PC Humble, the village copper; perhaps now our notoriously crime-free idyll can embrace the kind of fashionable crime levels you would expect from a twenty-first century metropolis!

As for the ducks in Croydon village pond, they can sod off as well. Let’s build some sort of dual carriageway through the village green, that’ll settle their hash (as they used to say in ‘Warlord’).

Vive la concrete revolution! More offices means more ‘thinking outside the box’, doesn’t it? And that can only be good, can’t it?

Can’t it?

Low Quality of Clouds Around Here

When water droplets condense, notoriously, something interesting happens. It’s possible that birds see clouds as nothing more than traffic jams. Birds are wrong.

However, if the sky is nature’s monitor screen – and I think we can all agree it is – then winter is a hell of a dull screen saver.

After all, one of the great pointless pleasures in life is to piddle about staring at archipelagos of clouds and imagining in them the faces of traffic wardens we have loved, or favourite doorkeys, or different parts of your own intestine. We've all done it.

You’d think that because winter, with its featureless grey skies, precludes such distractions, we’d all focus instead – ironically - on higher things; or at least on more obvious things. But as everyone’s too knackered, cold and broke to concentrate on anything other than sleep, and perhaps the odd slice of cake, higher things, whatever they may be, don't stand a chance.

So conjure up elusive spirits: cumulus, stratus, nimbus, cirrus...