What do you call it when a group of people on small boats attempt to board and gain control of a larger boat on the high seas? If it happens off the east coast of Africa, or around Indonesia, it’s called piracy, and the international community goes apeshit about it, deploying warships and having complicated legal wrangling parties to try and figure out the correct place to try the pirates.

If it happens off the Arctic coast of Russia, they just seem to go for a simpler approach.

Greenpeace has called on Russia to release a ship seized in the Arctic with 30 activists on board.

The Russian coastguard is towing the ship towards the city of Murmansk, a journey expected to take several days.

Four of the Greenpeace activists had tried to board a Gazprom oil rig on Wednesday, to protest against drilling.

Russia accused Greenpeace of violating an exclusion zone around the rig, but the group said its ship was in international waters.

“The safety of our activists remains our top priority and we are working hard to establish what is facing them,” said Ben Ayliffe, head of Greenpeace International’s Arctic oil campaign.

“They have done nothing to warrant this level of aggression and have been entirely peaceful throughout,” he said.

I would argue with that, Mr Ayliffe; if your activists had been trying to board a vessel without permission (and they did, for they promoted the fact and even brought along video) then they were carrying out an act of violence. And they should have known that the Russians, not a nation known for restraint when people mess about with their interests, would have little time for your silly crusades. These are the people who locked up a music group because they were mean about the president, remember – they’re hardly likely to give a shit about the feelings of a group of eco-nutters with more time and money than sense.

I really dislike the Russian way of doing things, most of the time. But this time I find myself quietly amused.

So, Thatcher is dead. And arseholes, up and down the country, are being arseholes about it. From random street parties, to lots of people on ye olde Twitter and Facebook celebrating, there are a lot of people who are showing that time hasn’t healed old wounds.

And the thing I like about it is that most of them are showing that they’ve successfully failed to notice that the last twenty years happened.

They’re still insisting on acting like breaking the over-powerful unions is an issue. It isn’t. They needed to be broken, they were broken, and we’ve all moved on.

They’re still insisting that nationalised companies are good ideas, and they’re generally doing so while using phones and internet connections that never would have happened had the GPO still been in charge.

They’re still insisting that the state should be propping up failed industry, but don’t seem to have figured on what the entrance of pseudo-communist business practices from China would have done to any labour-intensive heavy industry in this part of the world.

Of course, the thing that I most like about it is that a lot of the things that they blame Thatcher for aren’t actually anything to do with her. These things were to do with the world changing at the same time as she was in power. They’re upset that the world moved on from their silly ideals, and they can’t get past the fact that those silly ideas are now exposed to the ridicule they deserve. They still witter on about how Marx would have done X and how they’re looking forward to being able to piss on Thatcher’s grave, not noticing that even Marx’s grave is pretty secure from people who detest him.

In short: their hatred and bile reflects two things. Anger at losing, and anger at everyone knowing they lost.

(Well, maybe a third thing: that hatred learned young survives a long time.)

There is a general theme amongst many of those condemned to use SouthEastern that they are totally useless; for examples of this I would urge the reader to have a look at the #southeastern hashtag on any given day, especially during the morning or evening rush.

I tend not to join in with this abuse, despite some of it being really amusing and being about a topic that I tend to get annoyed about myself. And this is why: there are a great many reasons why southeastern are the way they are, and only some of them are their fault. Many are the fault of Network Rail; many are the fault of whoever decided that the network to the south of London didn’t need overhead line electrification and could stick with the third rail; and some are the fault of the governments that ‘privatised’ without giving people any incentive to invest, any room to innovate, or even the opportunity to buy the damn rolling stock. Essentially, southeastern are stuck with a railway built on Victorian underpinnings, with the constant threat of the government taking away their franchise, and with ever increasing demand. What chance do they have of doing things properly?

Today, however, in the midst of snowmageddon ’13, I came to share in some of the hatred.

This morning was bad enough; there’d been no fresh snow for about six hours when I tried to board my usual train, only to find that it was cancelled. Happily, I managed to get the very last standing space on the very last carriage of a train going in the right direction – albeit one that was already an hour late. This mystery train stopped at such exotic (and fairly pointless) places as New Cross, Lewisham and St Johns, instead of bypassing them as the good Lord intended. Due to the previous day’s snow, the end result was me being late to work by around 40 minutes. Not the end of the world, but not pleasant. At least the driver of the train explained what was happening and tried to add a bit of humanity to the journey.

Given how the rails looked during the day, I then decided I’d try to be smart; I’d fuck off early and do a chunk of work from home in the afternoon. A brilliant plan, I’m sure you’ll agree.

And like any plan, it failed to survive first contact with the enemy:

And here’s where I started to really dislike the southeastern operation. We live in a world with computers, and screens, and mobile apps, and drivers having mobile telephones. How, then did southeastern decide to run London Bridge? By letting all the passengers gather on the platforms, give them nothing to go by on the screens, and then randomly shout destinations and platform numbers at them and see how quickly people could run.

Passengers for the Dartford via Greenwich line, please move to platform one where a train will take you to Cannon Street, where I’m told a train might be leaving along that line soon…

Passengers for all stations to Sidcup, please be aware that there is a train for that line currently awaiting departure from Charing Cross.
Passengers for all stations to Sidcup, please be aware that there is now no scheduled service to that line for the next while as the train at Charing Cross is now a Gravesend service…

Passengers for Greenwich via Deptford, the train about to leave platform one is for you…

Each of these trains probably costs seven figures. Each of the drivers is on a decent salary. Could we not work out some fecking way of investing £99 in the cabin of each so that if the Network Rail infrastructure goes down, at least the drive could send a damn message to the stations on the route so that they can tell people what’s going where?

Also: the snow that fell probably amounted to 5 or 6 inches. Whyfor with the panic?

At lease someone liked it:

Last weekend, as we’ve done several times before,TLW & I went on a jaunt to Jersey. Lots of lounging about was done, and quite a lot of eating, and a fair bit of drinking. I read The Long Earth, and found it to be good. I spent a lot of time playing with our host’s bullmastiff, and found it to be a most excellent dog; it makes our dog look (a) tiny and (b) insane in comparison.

I also found that the curse of Jersey has struck again: I went, I walked on the beach for no more than an hour or two, and I became a tomato; bright red and squidgy. My ability to burn in the sun is pretty impressive, although I’d rather that it wasn’t. As has happened (in Jersey) in the past, I was supplied with after-sun cream, and proceeded to slather it with reckless abandon. Without reading the instructions. Which was a shame – if I’d read the instructions I’d have noticed that this particular after-sun offered to enhance one’s natural tan while minimising the effects of sunburn. I.e., it was basically a moisturising lotion with fake tanning effects.

In short: I look bloody ridiculous. I’m currently hoping that my skin gets on with it and peels soon. So that this stupid red / orange face goes away.

Seeing as how I’ve been writing nonsense to these pages for eight years, it’d be extremely stupid of me to say that writing comments on t’internet was not actually that useful. It’d be just silly for me to denounce campaigning Facebook status updates as pointless, and good for no more than letting you know who to ignore.

But I’m going to say both of those things anyway.

The current pointless comment that’s doing the rounds is as follows:

Remember when Teachers, Policemen, Police staff,Ambulance staff, Nurses, Midwives, Doctors and Fireman crashed the stock market, wiped out banks, took billions in bonuses and paid no tax? No, me neither. Please copy and paste to status for 24 hours to show your support against the government’s latest attack on pensions and public sector workers

See what it does? It lets people show support without doing anything, and it does this by supporting a completely nonsensical statement. I don’t remember things like that statement, y’see. I remember all of us working in the public sector being happy to take pay rises and very generous pensions on the back of taxes paid by the rich and the (now loathed) banking sector. I remember the country borrowing money even when the economy was booming.

I remember those good times, and I recognise that they’re gone. And no amount of fatuous statuses will bring them back.