My life at the moment.

 

 

This is just a short blog post about my life at the moment.

 

I work on an IT helpdesk for a large retail company. My Head Office is in Wythall, Worcestarshire, which involves a three mile walk every morning from the suburbs of Birmingham into the leafy Worcestershire countryside. It is a great tonic for the constitution, going for a country walk every morning. You can breathe deep the smells of countryside, which some people don’t like, but which I think is healthy. I walk past farms with cows and sheep, and small country shops. There is a farm shop near where I work which sells a wide variety of delicious food. Our office is a very modern office, which has gourmet coffee machines and free Wi Fi.

 

I work four days a week, but get paid for five. I have every Wednesday off, which is pretty cool. I spend my Wednesdays listening to Lauren Laverne on Radio 6Music and watching This Morning. Some afternoons I watch Loose Women as well. Sometime I go for lunch at various restaurants in Birmingham. I like Nandos, and Handmade Burger Company. A restaurant I’m especially fond of is Yo! Sushi, in Selfridges. It is a very cool restaurant with a conveyor belt of small plates of sushi, which you help yourself to. I love the funky chopsticks in Yo! Sushi  and the especially delicious soy sauce. On Wednesdays I also like shopping for clothes. I do a lot of my clothes shopping online, where I think you can find a wider range, but you get some good deals in shops in Birmingham. My favourite brands are Firetrap, All Saints Spitalfields, Bjorn Borg and Fly London.

 

Weekends are spent playing with my kids. I also like lying in. I have a Samsung tablet which is very important to me as it has all my apps and data on it. One app I especially like is TuneIn radio. Some weekend mornings I stand in my back garden listening to 88.2 Rude FM with a rollup hanging out of my mouth. Rude FM is a London based drum and bass station, and listening to it gets me to a certain place. Another good station for zoning out is the Moscow based DNB FM, which is dance and techno. It’s easy to forget the strictures of the 9 to 5 world when you are listening to a radio station from the other side of the world and feeling the compartments of your brain dissolve in the early morning sun. 

 

On Saturdays I sometimes go to the Custard Factory. The Custard Factory is an arts and creative quarter in Birmingham, which is the home to many switched on companies. The exterior decor of the centre is pretty cool, as they have sculptures and cool wall art, as well as many funky shops. I like a cafe there called Yumm cafe, who do an especially delicious salmon, cream cheese and cucumber bagel. I often tweet the cafe after I’ve been to thank them for the yummy food, and get a friendly tweet back.

 

I think the media often viewed me as a solitary figure in my several campaigns against them in the mid Noughties. This isn’t really true. I have quite a wide network of people that I meet and talk to in Birmingham. I volunteered for BE festival and the MAC last year, and met a lot of cool people that way, like Nina at BE Festival and Dorothy at the MAC. I’m also active in the poetry scene in Birmingham, and meet a lot of clued up people that way. I’m friends with a poet called Laura Yates, who used to write for the Birmingham Mail. I’ve also met Charlie Jordan, a former Radio 1 DJ who is now a poet in Birmingham, I’m friends with her on Facebook, as well as friends with Gary Longden, a former punk poet who used to feature on Ian Drury albums. I have met various other people too; I have friends in Selly Oak and also talk to work colleagues outside of work too. On top of that is the support network that is my wider family. I socialise with my nephew, who is 21 now, and my in laws regularly.

 

On Saturday nights I’m usually having a tipple watching Saturday night TV, and listening to the sounds of the motorway near my wife’s house. I imagine I can see the people travelling along it, and spend a few moments in a reverie sharing their lives, like little fireflys buzzing past my window.

 

I don’t tweet the media as often as I used to, and don’t update my blog as often now. The media doesn’t seem that important to me anymore. It used to seem like a very glamourous place to me, but one man’s glamour is another man’s 9 to 5. In the past few months I have had tweets from Miranda Sawyer and Lauren Laverne, which is cool. I also write letters to other public figures sometimes, and get letters back from them, which is cool.

 

That’ all I have to say for now – thank you for reading.

Why Charlie Brooker isn’t my cup of tea

Is Charlie Brooker you cup of tea?

This is a short blog post about why Charlie Brooker isn’t my cup of tea. I should point out that I have never met him, so in the real world he may for all I know be a very personable chap. I am basing this blog post solely on what I know of him from public arenas.

When I was a teenager I was a big fan of Red Dwarf. I like the iconography of a fat, slobby, lager drinking, vindaloo eating nobody hanging out with his laddish mates. I was a big fan of Red Dwarf until I was in my early twenties, when it took a screen break for a couple of years. When I next watched it, a decade later, I couldn’t stand it. By that point I had a career and a girlfriend, and I was renting accommodation in a leafy middle class suburb of South Birmingham. When the Red Dwarf reboot happened a coupld of years ago, I wasn;t interested. It was mainly due to the fans, who I think cut quite pathetic figures. They are mainly men who have never married, read Viz, eat Pot Noodles three times a day and do not regularly change their underwear. I think an adult life deported like this is an adult life in a disgracful state of disrepair. I wasn’t interested in communing with failed men by watching Red Dwarf.

Charlie Brooker seems to me to fit into a tradition in the media which also includes Viz and Red Dwarf. Some people think his media schtick is very cool and ultramodern, but I don’t agree. It strikes me as a little childish and also preoccupied with the trappings of childhood, namely computer games and social media.

I think its easy to write a Charlie Brooker article. You just let yourself go, and forget your own manners and redeeming social conditioning. So if you want to write a Charlie Brooker article just wilfully say disgusting things that your internal censor wouldn’t normally let pass, such as “I would love to watch the Prime Minster f*ck a pig”, or make jokes about Jimmy Savile reaching out of your television and interfering with your own child.

I’m not saying Charlie Brooker is mentally ill, although I personally think there is a wide ranging conspiracy of silence about some people’s mental health issues in the media, for example Lenny Henry and other genius-bothering comedians, both of whose ideas I cannot approve of the instantiation of. Its just that some of the things Charlie says could be construed as a little unwell. I suppose its a fine distinction between rapier sharp cutting edge comedy and the disturbing utterances of someone with a mental hygiene issue, but if you already have doubts about the provenance of that person then the distinction becomes a little difficult to delineate.

I have nothing further to say on this matter for now.

Majid Salim

Marina Hyde in the Guardian (9/3/2013)

I greatly enjoyed Marina Hyde’s article on Saturday about Vicky Pryce. She is a talanted writer. She certainly wouldn’t be my first choice of person to talk to at a newspaper if I had to. Whilst I’m sure she is very accommodating at a distance there are lots of reports from bloggers who have met her who describe her as a waspish, ice cold person. I even heard a rumour that Jimmy McGovern can’t stand her guts. Certainly my previous skirmishes with her would seem to confirm she is quite a cruel person who likes sabre rattling. If I was going to talk to someone at a newspaper about my life I would choose someone infinitely warmer, like Jayne Moore at the Sun or the pretty 3am girl I used to talk to after she went on The Weakest Link. Having said that, perhaps one of Marina Hyde’s redeeming points, if there are any, is that she has a sense of humour, however clinically warped.

 

I sometimes wonder if Marina would approve if I talked to a newspaper about the several interesting things I have done. I have been in the national media at a distance, and as I have said previously in this blog, some of the thing I have done would certainly interest the red tops. But I don’t think you should spill the secrets and confidences of your private life in public, unless you don’t have choice. I often wonder if the papers would like to talk about me. They would certainly need more information than the academic essay-style emails I send them to see why to bother. And I’m not telling, so it look like that window has to shut for now.

 

Marina has form in being gotcha’d by newspapers. She was once escorted out of the Sun newspaper office by security guards after she was found to be emailing the editor of another newspaper, with whom she was having an affair, something that enraged her then boss David Yelland. I don’t think she was slaughtered too badly in the press at the time, most probably due to her very respectable family background. I have a slight feeling sometimes in my guts that I could say anything on this blog, and yet myself not get too mercilessly had at by the press. There does seem to be a norm in Fleet Street to talk to me as little as possible, which is a shame because I could tell you some interesting stories about people I have talked to in public arenas, and events I have been involved in. But there are secret histories, and it could be that a lot of what my waking hours were spent doing between 2004 and today will never be noted down.

 

As a general rule, you shouldn’t talk to newspapers, so insofar as that is the case I agree with Marina Hyde. Having said that, if you are a powerful person, or a person whose consciousness is sewn into the media, you probably have to talk to them. I have talked to lots of national media journalists and never had the sense from them that they could beat me at my own game, so I generaly feel pretty confident about if a hack were ever to stop me and ask about this or other tweet or email. They are only a feral baying mob if you have no power. If you are a powerful person, like I most assuredly am, you don’t have to worry about them. In fact it may be the case that precisely the reason why I have never been doorstepped by a hack before is because of the intimidating intellect and personal authority I swing around in email missives to the papers every day. I am a published author and I tackle big subjects in the media with no fear.

 

To be honest, having been in the media a while now, its not being splashed all over the front pages that I fear. The worst things that can happen to you in the media never make it anywhere near the world of print, as both myself and Marina can jointly attest I am sure.

 

Majid Salim

Countries I have visited.

This is a blog post about countries I have visited around the world.

I have been to a couple of countries, but not as many as other people. Luckily I live in a big city in the UK, so am in daily contact with people of a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures, so I get an injection of foreign influence at home in Birmingham, which I enjoy. What follows is a description of what I was doing in each of the countries I have visited, and what I thought of it.

1) USA – I visted the US when I was 18. My first image of the USA is looking at Manhattan’s skyline outside JFK airport, seeing the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the Empire State Building towering about the cityscape in the sunset as I climbed into a taxi. I spent five weeks travelling around New England helping my cousin sell POS systems for flower shops. My cousin, Tariq Farid, is a self made millionaire who is regularly on US television. I was great seeing Massachussets, Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont. In Massachusets I shopped in bookshops in little English style colonial villages. In Maine I ate crab and walked along beaches during my lunch breaks. In Connecticut, where my cousin lived, I enjoyed a lot of natural beauty in the State Parks and by the Quinnipac River, which is also where the Sikorsky helicopter plant is. My cousin and I also spent a week in Florida, where we visited Fort Lauderdale and Orlando. I have fond memories of Fort Lauderdale to this day. I wish we had time to go down to Key West, Miami or up to Cape Canaveral, but we never had a chance. I also got to spend a little time in New York City, and went up the World Trade Centre with my cousin, which was cool. But most of my time in NYC was spent at a trade fair at the Javitts Centre. All in all the USA was a lot of fun though.

2) France – I visited Paris for a week in 2000 for IT training when I was working for a tech company based in Thames Valley area. One of the cool things I remember about Paris is the underground system. I thought it was miles better than the Tube as it had more stations and more regular service, and was cheaper. We were based in a three star hotel near the Bastille, but ate out at restaurants almost every night, so got a good grip of Parisian cusine whilst we were there. I got to do a few touristy things, even though I was in high intensity training in an office in La Defense most of the day. We got to go around La Louvre and went to the top of the Eiffel Tower. We went shopping on the Champs Elysses and saw the Are de Triomphe, as well as Arc de La Defense.  I ate delicious seafood in a restaurant dans le septieme aronidissement and bought red wine from wine merchants near Notre Dame.  It was a great week and I would love to visit again.

3) Greece – I spent 48 hours in Athens once. I flew there on a whim in 2004 when I was bored one afternoon. The entire trip was financed by my credit card as I wasn’t working at the time. In retrospect I should have chosen a package holiday to a Greek island, but I wanted to see the Collisseum and experience a little Athens culture. It was October when I went and Athens was boiling hot. I shopped in bazaars selling beads and cheap sunglasses and walked around the foot of the Collisseum, which at the time was covered with scaffolding. I ate Southern European food in a cafe and spent a lot of time in my non-air-conditioned room, on the bed, enjoying the hot weather. I would definitely visit Greece again, but perhaps not Athens as I would like to be by a beach.

4) Spain – My honeymoon was spent in Gran Canaria. We went in the week between Christmas and New Years Eve in 2007, and whilst it wasn’t roasting hot it was still warm enough to sunbathe quite a lot. We didn’t get to see much of Gran Canaria other than the Yumba Centre, a big shopping Centre in Playa Des Ingles. A lot of time that week was spent on the sunbeds by the hotel pool, rather than the beach. We did have a trip out to sea on a yacht to see dolphins and turtles but I was violently sick the whole time I was aboard ship, and there weren’t any dolphins that day. I think this is one of my favourite foreign trips, as it was my honeymoon and I enjoyed being a newlywed for a week with my wife.

5) Iceland – Iceland is a cool country, I was in Reykjavik for 2 weeks working for a phone company and an ISP. I went in November, and it was very, very cold. I only really got to see the city on the weekend between the two weeks, and I did a lot of shopping in Reykjavik. I didn’t really get a chance to leave the city, but I saw the Northern Lights, which is one of the reasons lots of people go to Iceland. I also ate Hardfisk, which was cool. I have a photo of me standing by a statue of Leif Errikseen by a church in Reykjavik, the church being one of the city’s tallest buildings. I loved the hot water in bathrooms in Iceland, it was slimy and smelled of sulphur. They also have nice coffee everywhere in Iceland.

6) Eire – I was in Eire for three months working for a phone company in Dublin. Dublin doesn’t really count as a foriegn country as it is so similar to the UK. I did drink in Temple Bar and visit a couple of museums. I remember a statue near the port of a starving family during the Potato Famine boarding a ship to America. Other than that I just ate in Pizza Hut and went to the Odeon, just like in a normal UK city.

7) Pakistan – I went to Pakistan when I was 25. I had a great time, although the extremes of poverty and wealth were marked. Its definitely the most ‘different’ country I have visited as everyone carried an assault rifle and the rats and ants scurrying along the streets were huge. It was also the hottest country I visited, one day it was 45 degrees. One of my favourite memories is driving up Murree, a hill near Islamabad that is 12,000 feet high (which would make it a mountain anywhere except the Himlayas!). On the way up we bought roasted corn from a man selling it by the side of the road. I also enjoyed plaing cricket with local kids and giving money to homeless people. I enjoyed Lahore more than Islamabad as it is a more distinctly Asian city, with all the chaos that entails. Another amazing memory is the salt mine you go through driving south of Islamabad, it is like something from a Wiley Coyote cartoon. Would definitely visit again but you need a lot of money to hand if you want a really special time.

8) Scotland – I drove from Manchester to Edinburgh in 1995 whilst I was at University, to visit my friend Ben who was at Edinburgh studying Spanish and Law. I went with Rashid and Chris, computer scientists, and Bryn, a philosopher. Also with us were Dolly and Neelam, ligusistics students from Taiwan who were friends with me and Rashid. It was December and Edinburgh was cold, wet and windy. We went to the Scott Monument and shopped on the Royal Mile. We stood at the top of Arthur’s Seat and stood in the carpark of Edinburgh Castle. We got there Friday night and left Sunday night. I spend Saturday night getting drunk with Ben in Teviot Bar on Pernod and blackcurrant. I really wanted to see the bricked up bubonic plague street from the Middle Ages under the Library, but it wasn’t open to the public at that time. We spent some time in a tartan shop which was cool. I didn’t eat a deep fried Mars Bar, but mean to next time I visit Scotland.

 

 

Majid Salim

My Political Beliefs

I have decided to write a blog post about my political beliefs.

Some people in the media believe I am some kind of agent of the Right, and that I am a deeply Conservative man. This isn’t historically true, as when I was in my twenties I was very clearly a Leftist of some conviction. I argued stridently against the War on Terror and the 2003 Iraq War. I spend nearly two years debating politics on USENET, mainly opposing US foreign policy and Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians. The main part of these posts can be found elsewhere on this blog, in the book USENET Posts. But recently people have suggested all manner of strange things, such as that I am a poster boy for the Right, what with my deeply entrenched conservative views that (apparently) are demonstrable all the time. 

So am I really a Machurian candidate for the Right? Am I a really a Neocon, just as Tony Blair was labelled Tory Plan B? I decided to head over to www.politicalcompass.org to find out.

Political Compass is an online test that measures your political opinions according to the scales of Social Authoritarian/Liberatrian and Economic Left/Right. Some of the questions seemed pretty obvious to me, such as “What happens between two consenting adults in a private bedroom is of no interest to the State”. Other questions were less obvious, such as “Protectionism is sometimes necessary in trade”. But I answreed all questions as honestly as I could, even if this meant giving sometimes contradictory answers when several questions on a theme appeared. I did the test in front of a couple of friends so I can vouch that I am not fixing the results, and they are a genuine reflection of my political opinion.

Winston Churchill once said “If you are not a Socialist at 20, you have no heart. And if you are not a Conservative at 40, you have no brain”. Its been a good 10 years since I was last really an activist of any description, so I was interested to see how much I had changed. Am I really a true-blue Tory now, believing in state protectionism and wars that defy international law? Or was I still a idealistic Respect Colatition voter at heart?

The results were interesting. I had an Economic Left/Right score of -1.25, and a Social Libertarian/Authoritarian score of 1.90. My place on the chart is indicated by a black and yellow square. Interestingly, I have more in common with Francoise Hollande, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela that Mitt Romney or George W Bush. Or indeed Rupert Murdoch, for that matter!

So what does this mean? Do I still feel like a Leftist, just as I did when I was in my twenties? Its a strange one. I sometimes feel a bit firmer on some social issues than I used to, but maybe that is because I am a husband and a Dad now, so perhaps family men are more naturally conservative than freewheeling young singletons. I still believe in the Progressive debate in politics though, and feel that I can be often found saying quite Progressive things. Some of the questions in the political test were about whether corporations should be allowed to do what they want, socially and environmentally, to maximise profit. I answered those questions with a definite No, because I believe a balance has to be struck between human economic activity and the holism of the ecosystem. On other issues, such as the need to instill discipline in children and use the education system to prepare young people for the world of work, I answered a bit more conservatively, agreeing that this should be the case.

It would be interesting for me to take the test in another 10 years, to see if I have changed yet further still. In the meantime, I will sign off – not quite as a Leftist firebrand, but as a liberal minded 30 something believes in a fair society.

Majid Salim

Haters

This is a blog post about people in the media who don’t like me.

There aren’t that many now, you can count them on the fingers of one hand. Most people seem to have a slowly adopted a benevolent neutrality towards me. The notable ones are at the Guardian, a newspaper which has given me press passes to its events and which has published my articles, but which I once had a stormy relationship with. Around 2006 I tried suing the Guardian because I belived they had made money by associating with me in absentia without paying me a penny, which I believed constituted fraud.

It was a strange life, taking on the whole of the Establishment. I was young and single with no dependents so perhaps I had a sort of bravery that older men wouldn’t have. I was under no misconceptions about what risks I was taking though, you would have to be stupid or ignorant not to realise what a murky world it is, and how many people end up being found dead in the woods with a sucide not in not quite their own writing next to them. I’m not important enough to die in a tunnel in Paris but knew if I ruffled too many feathers something unpleasant might happen to me.

Until I was 27 I had no interest in the media whatsoever, and never applied to go on Big Brother or Come Dine With Me or anything else. I happily enjoyed a young man’s life in Birmingham, talking to my friends, going to work and playing on my PlayStation. It all changed in the summer of 2004 when I noticed things weren’t quite right with the world around me. The only real reason I started publicly accusing the media of wrongdoing was because I felt myself to be in a deeply ineviable position at the time thanks to the mechanics of the situation I found myself in. I was on survival instincts and did not expect to live if I did not take very clear action against the specific dynamics of the threat I felt I was faced with. At the time I really did think the people I was accusing in the media of defrauding me were amongst the most depraved and satanic monsters in the whole world, but everytime I tried to document the evidence for this, all that would come out in writing was a load of slightly unbalanced sounding nonsense, so in effect I was a bit stuck in a very deep well not of my own making, with no ladder. Perhaps I would have broken the phone hacking story if only. I. Had. Known. How. To Do. It.

Did the media actually defraud me? I’ll leave that to your subjective judgement whilst you enjoy your horse burger and do a Google search for all the nice things they used to say about Cyril Smith.

Its strange that eight years on, well after I have met, phoned and made friends with dozens of media types, that some people still nuture a rancour towards me. It doesn’t bother me, its about a real a threat to my everyday life as someone running with scissors on Alpha Centauri. I wonder about the psychology of such people though. It takes determination to keep sniping at someone years after they stopped giving a shit about you. Maybe its a little infantile, but having said that nobody ever accused journalists of being amongst the most emotionally mature amongst us. It could be that perhaps the essence of their media schtik is to keep talking about me. But in order to make that assertion I would have to first posit that I am some kind of media black gold, a private agenda item in the media, a secret show put on for invitees only. Perhaps stories about me traverse private trust relationships in the media like a drug dealers phone number, and whilst my name isn’t quite mentioned alongside Tom Cruise’s, I am nonethless a very lucrative form of media anti-matter.

The miniature salvoes do get a little tiresome though. Like, can’t we all get along?

My Birthday

It was my birthday on Boxing day. I am a few years shy of 40.

I share a Boxing Day birthday with a number of interesting people, including poet Thomas Gray, Jared Leto, and Dermot Murnaghan. I was born on the same day as Czech porn actress Lea de Mae, who died in 2004.

It was a day spent taking stock of my life. I feel I have found a nice plateau, and I am happy with what I have. I think I have reached a point in life which most people reach when they get into their fifties, whereby I don’t really want to do much at all, but want the rhythm of life simple pleasures to remain uninterrupted. I am happy with my career and my home life. I have plenty of hobbies and friends. I’ve been in lots of relationships and have made some money. I have a busy social life which involves doing lots of interesting things and attending interesting events. I have plenty of entertainnment and and allowed to talk to whoever I like. I was the youngest of four children by quite a gap, and have lived most of my life being doted on by people. When I look inside my brain I don’t see any pressures or drivers that make me want to change into anything else.

The big Four-Oh is fast approaching for me. I don’t feel particularly old, in fact I still look like I’m about 26 years old other than for the few grey hairs on the sides of my head. I think in a couple of years I will be a very young 40 year old. Turning 40 is traditionally the point when people have a long think about where they have been and where they are going. I’m happy to say that I’ve done almost all of the things I wanted to do in life. There are dimensions of my life that don’t really fit into the overreaching narrative quite just yet, and in some of these dimensions I’ve done completely incredible things and had incredible successes.

There is a motorway one hundred feet behind the back garden of my wife’s house. It is raised on pillars to about sixty feet above street level, and runs through most of North Birmingham in this way. You might think that such a thing would be a tremendous eye sore, and that it would be a horrible place to live. But to illuminated people like me, the motorway is a wonderful spiritual thing, and a beatiful poem in my soul. A road is a narrative, taking people from one place to another. I often thing about the people travelling on the motorway. I only really know them by the sound of their car engines, but in my minds eye I think of their dreams and ambitions, their hopes and desires. It is like having spiritual river running past your house, that you can look to for inspiration and as a balm for the soul. I think motorways are sort of beautiful things and I think I am lucky to live by one.

I suppose that now I am in my late thirties I am reaching the halfway point in my journey down Life’s road. I have very good health and many friends. I’d love to be very rich indeed but I’m sort of already bored of buying expensive things – I know money can’t buy you much at all in life. Just enough to keep buying Fly London shoes and Ed Hardy T-shirts is working out very nicely for me at the moment.

Majid Salim