Reuse, recycle rethink

I'm listening to Justin Bieber on the radio. Ordinarily this would make me cry real tears, the result, no doubt of looking into the maw, Dante-esque visions of modern hell. Recently though I have adapted to life without urban stimulus and as a result am singing along most happily viz 'babeee, babee,babee aaaaalright!'

A couple of weeks before I left the UK I found myself snorting with derision at an article in Grazia magazine entitled 'Help! I'm Generation undecided!'. Let me first point out that I would never normally shell out actual cash for Grazia or any other Women's Lifestyle Magazine. This is beacuse I don't have an aspergic need for 700 pairs of uncomfortable shoes which cost £500, consider hair extensions the work of Baphpomet and do not spend every waking hour worrying nerotically about 'my relationship'. On this occasion though I was forced to buy it as it promised extensive details about the final hours of Amy Winehouse and a picture of James Franco in a vest.

Anyhoo, said 'Generation Undecided' are, apparently, modern persons of disposable income, urban addresses and seemingly limitless options. They get in a flap because they are suffering almost infinite variety regarding every aspect of life. Panic when the weekly shop on Ocado takes almost all evening? Spend three hours debating which takeaway to order? Never commit to watching telly but channel surf 800 available programmes in case there's something better on? Have a bedroom full of new clothes you 'might take back'? Welcome! You are a fully paid up member of Geneation Undecided.

Such nonsense makes me suck my few remaining teeth. In my day we had proper societal sub-groups. In my early twenties we had Generation X. Brilliant that was; an excuse to lie around being hurt and interesting, wearing ripped 501s listening to Pearl Jam and bemoaning the fact that our very expensive higher edcation counted for nought in the days of the dot.com boom. Generation X had excellent figureheads like Ethan Hawke in a vest and Winona Ryder looking delicate. Then Kurt Cobain died and we moved swiftly on to The Prozac Generation where lots of casualties from the M25-rave-in-a-field era finally gurned out and went into heavy therapy. We were sort of stuck with Sadie Frost and Pearl Lowe for that one but it was bearable in its way.

By the time I was pushing 40 there was the fantastic invention of 'Middle Youth', which if you ask me was merely an excuse for men in their 50s to not wear socks and women of an age where thread veins become an issue to go off and get some work done while they continue to wear a tube skirt. Which is a distinct improvement on the approach to middle age adopted by my mother's generation. In those days the minute you turned 43, you went out, puchased an 18 hour girdle and had your hair permed and cut short. leading to some kind of kafka-esque world where everyone looked like the same, a bit like the zombie Grannies in The Mighty Boosh. Brrr....

So now we're stuck with Generation Undecided. If you're going to bother with a movement I can't think of anything more useless. 'Oh dear! I have too many retail options! I must take to a darkened room, practice yogic breathing until internet shopping becomes the first casualty come the revolution!'

Don't panic UD's! I have a cure. Move to the Falkland Islands.
Anxious that you have spent a fortune on clothes you will never wear? The only worry here is that you'll turn up to school in the same Peacocks outfit as half the staff and student body. And that's not a particular worry as the chances are you will be wearing several layers and can just remove a couple for a touch of completely unnecessary individualism.

Spending hours trawling round Tesco, Aldi, Sainsburys et al looking for the best deals? As I was told this week 'If you see something you want buy it, because chances are it won't be available next week' which explains why everyone in town is running about with 900 rolls of bog paper from The West Store - its on offer and when they're gone, they're gone.

Concerned that your Sky plus is full of crap that you'll never watch? Move into Bleinhem - no ariel, no telly. Sorted.

All the psychic horror of modern living has been removed. I do not have to get the garden spade out every morning to remove the piles of junk mail preventing egress from the house. I am not unindated with endless unsolicited phone calls from Dehli asking if I would like to take part in a survey/have new windows/be interested in dog waxing. When I walk down the street there are no billboards advertising scrummy objects and services without which my life will be incomplete.

Here life is easier. Yesterday we were walking home when a taxi pulled up alongside us and the driver leaned out of the window to hand my son his hat  which he had left there 3 days previously. Tonight I read to my son, something he would not have endured back home. On the plane coming down I heard a teenage boy say 'I can't wait to get back to the Falklands'. At the time this surprised me having only ever been around over stimulated teenagers. Now I can appreciate that for someone who has grown up here much of life in the UK must appear truly ridiculous and deeply unfeeling.

Not to say that I have completey assimulated. I am finding it diffiult to make my choice from the Narrows menu, I peer myopically at tomatos in The West Store wondering which of the four available would most suit my needs. The Heir and Spare took 45 minutes to chose a DVD from a relatively limited collection but most of all I am betrayed by my middle class insidious need for several dustbins.

For years I have been indoctinated with endless agitprop about the need to seperate my refuse into suitable recepticles for recycling or else it will quite clearly be my personal fault when the good earth veers horribly off its axis and all of humanity into oblivion with it.

In the UK I had 5 different areas for waste. My black bin - generally considered to be evil as it contained general waste which is much to be frowned upon. The blue bin for cans, bottles and other plastics, the brown one for composting and garden waste, a sack for newspapers magazines, paper etc and a kitchen pot for potato peelings (unecessary I found, potato peelings are not a feature of Balti Towers delivered meals). Then there was the weird fella from Swad with the van who went round demanding recyclable household items like fridges and stuff. I met numerous people who had fallen foul of him. No sooner had Curry's dvered the latest washing machine but he'd whipped it off the porch and onto the lorry leaving nought but the packaging which he didn't even bother putting in the blue sack as he drove off at top speed cacking wildly, exhaust from his thieving lorry polluting the lungs of indiginous bird species - THE BASTID!

All of this anietry was witnessed at its zenith, as one might imagine in Brighton. Last year I was at an interview in a school which I quickly realised was actually the model for the school in 'kidulthood'. By mid morning I was desperate to get out as everyone was clearly certifiable, but the senior leaders had locked me in a staffroom with a woman sporting a very noticable twitch and a lot of unusually remarkable conspiricy theories and a geography teacher wearing hemp trousers. Both of them sat extremely close to me proffering houmous and questioning me most earnestly about my political affiliations and views on pedagogy.

The georgraphy teacher explained that he was aiming for a carbon-neutral existance and as such only ate out of skips, made his own clothes, had a thunderbox in the garden and used no electricity apart from his alarm clock.
'Why' I asked 'don't you get an alarm clock with a wind up mechanism? Then you wouldn't need to use electricty at all.' Several moments of silence passed before the geography teacher, a tad green about the gills, stood up and silently left the room. I later discoovered that the following week he was arrested when acting as a human shield at the blockade of an oil refinery. I am unsure as to whether he replaced the alarm clock.

As I was the only candidate, and it was quite obvious that frankly they would have appointed anyone with a pulse, I was offered the job. I managed to wriggle out of it. And thank the Lord in His mercy for such release! Otherwise I would be sitting in a Tapas bar in Brighton right about now worrying about 'my relationship' and whether my kids needed primal scream therapy. Probably wearing last year's shoes.

So while it might feel horribly recidivist not to be separating my refuse, I am secretly quite relived that such torpor has been removed. In any case in the three weeks I have been here I have only produced four bin liners of rubbish. I put this down to the fact that Exportation red wine comes in two lite bottles, no junk mail and a need to eat everything on the plate as food is less available and more expensive.

My guru Laura Ingalls Wilder admits that her life took a turn for the worse when she first laid eyes on a Sears catalogue. She became aspirational and dissatisfied. A former student of mine once refused to accept freebies from Derby University recruitment day as she said they were a waste of resources and would only end up in a landfill. Respec' to both of em I say.

Right! I'm off to photocopy 600 workbooks, if only I can decide which book to study...Hmmm, decisions, decsions...

Borah Out.