In writing We’re British, Innit it was hard to avoid including an entry on the National Health Service, as it is one of the largest employers in the UK (and, indeed, the world), it is a major plank of British society and its nurses provided the inspiration for many a Carry On film. So, the reforms of the NHS announced yesterday are an important turning point for Britain and the healthcare of Brits.

Ostensibly, the changes hand more control to GPs, though in effect the control passes from Primary Care Trusts to groups of GP surgeries. A massive and costly redundancy programme will see strategic planning staff and administrators set up their own businesses or be sucked up by larger businesses that will administer the process of procurement of services by GP surgeries. There is little doubt that this is an ideological move rather than a cost cutting move. The Conservative Party have always been ideologically opposed to the NHS as is. After all, the party includes the likes of Daniel Hannan, who slates the NHS at any opportunity and David Cameron has seen fit to meet with the wingnuts at Nurses For Reform, who see the market as the only solution to sorting out healthcare in the UK.

These changes will enact a process not dissimilar to a cross between rail and power company privatisation, leaving the NHS divided and vulnerable to buy outs from large corporations and overseas investors. Andrew Lansley has promised a ‘no decision about me without me approach’, but when the decisions about drugs and treatment are being made by a US healthcare giant or a business owned by a French investment bank (which can and will buy out the smaller GP consortia) then you can be sure that you will not get the treatment that your National Insurance and Income Tax has been paying for all these years.

Wherever there is a profit motive then public service has to reduce exponentially to meet the need for that profit. It is simple economics. Will those with underlying conditions find their GP spend limited upon moving to a new GP and GP consortia? And will you find those drugs that work for you unexpectedly switched for a slightly less effective generic? Not now, but maybe later. You need only look at healthcare for the poor to lower middle classes in the US for your clues. Even those who pay private health insurance are not guaranteed a decent service. That is preserved for premium customers.

One of the great pleasures (or displeasures, on occasion) of being a writer is meeting and getting to know other writers. This also means you get to plug their books and talk a little about how good they are. It so happens that three such friends have had books published in recent weeks, so here is a little round up.

First, mostly due to the fact I love it and the back cover has a quote from yours truly, is Vic Templar’s Taking Candy From a Dog. This is the part memoir, part fiction tale of a very ordinary boy, living a very ordinary life in a very ordinary part of Kent, yet it is also one of the most touching and hilarious books you could wish to read about life as a child. It is warm without being cloying and funny without being too knowing. It is even printed in loving crafted editions by an independent publisher with an eye for the best new authors. It is a tale of picnics, wasps, summers that last forever, Wimbledon, Fred Perry, the Buzzcocks, Gillingham FC and family life in the 1970s. This is a promo video that Vic made for it.

Talking of promo videos, my friend Stewart Home made what he claims was the first promo video for a book way back in 1993. That was for his book No Pity, which you can see below. You can read a 1999 interview of Stewart by me here.

Stewart’s zillionth book, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie has just been published by BookWorks and is a kind of extreme feminist abstract art manifesto brought to you via the medium of spam emails. It is as filthy as it is funny, with Home spamming the lists of art curators, art press and artists that used to spam him, only with twisted interpretations of what they want to hear. Home is one of the few avant garde novelists with staying power in British literature and defies categorisation. You may enjoy his early skinhead-punk-hippie-(anti)anarcho-marxist novels, you may enjoy his cultural theory books, his avant garde essays or simply just read the rude bits. But you will realise that he is something special and unique.

Last but no means least is Ian Vince, who writes about comic matters in his various books, such as his travelogue about a trip on a milk float. His latest book is all about Britain. It is a geological exploration of what lies beneath the land we walk on every day and is entitled The Lie of the Land. Ian has also set up a British Landscape Club for all those who share his interest in making geology more interesting. I have not had a chance to read it yet, but am sure that Ian’s amusing tone and enjoyment of the trivial shines through to make an entertaining read.

Interesting post today on the British Library’s Sound Recordings Blog, which explores the term ‘innit’. Obviously this word is one I have looked into a great deal, mostly during the writing of We’re British, Innit. I first came across it being used by members of the Greek community (immigrants and second generation) in Thanet, where I grew up. Though I do have some memory of it being in use in Cockney and London/Kent English before that, especially as depicted in uses of slang in popular culture.

You can hear it being used by, I think, Keith Moon, in this very odd 1966 Who track. Though there are examples in film going back to the 1950s at least.

The British summer has arrived, which means that it is the time for us Brits to moan about how hot it is. There are two temperatures in Britain: too hot and too cold. There is one day a year, usually in May, when it is, as Goldilocks said, just right. With the end of the football (what, they are still playing out there?) there has been a general de-St George-flagging of England. Football shirts have been put away in the drawer until the start of the Euro2010 campaign or simply burnt en masse in the village squares and high streets of the country.

I have been out and about in the capital doing pieces of promotion for the book and had some time to waste in central London yesterday, so I wandered down to Trafalgar Square to see how the tourists and the pigeons were getting on. I was not disappointed. They were there in their droves, some wearing Union Flag hats or clad in London Underground T-shirts and clutching bags full of replica London buses and snowdomes containing Big Ben in a blizzard. The recession may still be ongoing, but tourists young and old are still coming to Britain. Though they seem to be buying a few cans rather than risk our delicious ale and trying out British pubs, at least they are if the groups I saw are anything to go by. They were mostly downing cans of lager as they enjoyed dangling their feet in the pools by the fountains.

The title of this post is stolen from the wonderfully funny band Half Man Half Biscuit. It seemed apt as it describes a snippet of very British conversation about the weather. And the song is, at least partially, about London.

On Sunday morning the nation woke with a feeling that we could do it. We could beat Germany, put in a performance and finally look like a proper football team. As it was we got to watch a bizarro re-enactment of the 1966 World Cup Final. There was the goal that never was (which was way over the line, unlike the 1966 one), the poor performance from a West Ham centre back (unlike that of Bobby Moore in 1966) and the resolute sticking with the number one striker (unlike 1966, when Hurst replaced Greaves).

But no one performed for England during the entire tournament. Milner’s cross and Defoe’s positioning for the goal against Slovenia was the highlight. Bread and butter stuff that should have happened several times a game. Neither showed any promise again. Capello took off strikers, missed the chance to add height and speed early on and showed a lack of tactical imagination and defensive discipline. He has to go. Roy ‘Woy’ Hodgson looks the best bet. We should grab him now before someone else does. We may need a new defensive coach as well.

In other news, I have been spending my week sweating in the streets of Soho on the way to thankfully air-conditioned radio studios to promote the paperback of We’re British, Innit. You should be able to catch me in some regions around the UK tomorrow. No doubt the debate about a new England manager will still be going on then.

Well, the first piece of business is to tell you that my book We’re British, Innit is out in paperback today, so you should go out and buy it or simply get it from a well-known online discounter.

England managed to scrape through in the World Cup and we now face the Germans, which means a slew of Stan Boardman-esque gags from the tabloids and some serious analysis of our warring psyche from the liberal broadsheets.

We will always have a natural emnity towards the Germans, though maybe it is finally time to knock the war stuff on the head. Anyway, here is my entry from the book, which gives my take on at least part of our relationship.

Schadenfreude
It is said that we use this German word because there is no direct, pithy equivalent in the English language that means ‘taking joy in the misfortune of others’. Obviously we could have thought of such a word by now, but this usage remains to remind us that it is the misfortune of Germans that we enjoy the most. From economic downturn to car manufacturing errors and footballing setbacks, nothing brightens a Brit’s day like turning on the morning news to be greeted with a story about Germans in distress.

*It was actually Steffen Freund who used to play for Spurs, becoming something of a cult figure for his inability to shoot on target.

Was sad to hear of the death of Chris Sievey aka Frank Sidebottom at the untimely age of 54. I never met him but I saw him perform a couple of times, as well as buying some of his records way back when you could buy records. RIP Chris and Frank. Our thoughts are with Little Frank and Frank’s mum at this sad time. He has been on Match of the Day in his big shorts, but now he has gone, he really has.

With We’re British, Innit coming out in paperback in just one week I thought I would talk about some of the updates in this new edition. There have been a few updates throughout the text, but the biggest change in the new edition is the addition of some new entries, which were suggested by readers of the hardback.

The new entries include Bank Holidays and ice cream vans, with the latter entry discussing Tufty, cider ice lollies and the use of Greensleeves. You may just be in time to order it from Amazon in time for Fathers’ Day (as they are dispatching already) or you can simply buy it in the shops from Thursday for £7.99 rrp. Also featured are the Dagenham Girl Pipers, though you will have to buy a copy to see how and why.

In a somewhat unexpected turn of events I have been engaged by the wonderfully British Lady magazine to write a weekly column on all things British, which sits amidst the weekly diary entry. You can read the most recent entry here.

Another not bad England song that I hadn’t seen before. They seem to have teamed Terry and Brown in the middle, but other than that it is pretty good. It is based on an old Studio One track by Anthony Ellis.