Auf Weidershen, Pets

I've spent most of this weekend working on a daft distance learning thing. It's basically an employers market at the moment and as such most companies feel little compulsion to train or develop staff. I therefore figured it'd be a positive step to take the initiative and do a few things that I could add to my CV. Unfortunately, as the whole thing was done in a sort of 'tomorrow is too late' spirit I ended up signing on for the first course I came across, which was a course in Equality and Diversity. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm generally all for equality, diversity, tolerance and rainbows, but when 90% of your course material can be summarised as 'don't be a bigoted dick-meister', then you'll forgive me if after a while I began to find the whole thing a bit tedious.  

One lot of people who would probably agree that the whole thing was a waste of time - although probably for very different reasons - would be PEGIDA (Which stands for Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes. Duh.), who were just up the road in Newcastle the other day. If, like me, you are baffled as to why a German right wing nationalist movement were demonstrating in the north of England it seems that the group operates a sort of franchise system within different countries (a structure it shares, perhaps ironically, with Al Qaeda), so it was basically the English Defence League/Britain First/The National Front waving different flags and trying to piggyback on the success of a more successful group of toss merchants. Even so Newcastle seemed a rather arbitrary choice of venue. I spent several years years living on Tyneside and it never really came across as a powder keg of racial tension. A cynic might posit that it was selected as the North East has quite high levels of social deprivation and historically such places tend to be fertile breeding ground for the angry slap heads.

The organisers predicted that there'd be thousands demonstrating and, in all fairness, they were correct, with attendance around 2,000. However it should be noted that those thousands were on the other side of the police barricade, at the counter demonstration organised under the banner Newcastle Unites. PEGIDA meanwhile managed less than a fifth of that, and most of those seemed to be coming from outside the region. For the most part though, it seems the Geordies simply couldn't be arsed.  The inorganic, bussed in nature of the whole thing was probably best illustrated by the fact that the organisers had utterly failed to take into account that Newcastle United were playing at home. Given a choice between standing in the freezing cold, shouting into the drizzle about things you hate or doing something halfway enjoyable with their Saturday most people seemed to have plumped for the latter. In a nice little demonstration of the occasional synchronicity of the universe, the Geordies won their match with a goal by Pappis Cisse, a practicing Muslim. Back in the Bigg Market meanwhile, a lot of council taxpayer's time and resources was spent humouring the clash of civilisation fantasies of a handful of professional miserabilists. So that's something.

Most of the way through a page for Rag and Bone, added a work in progress below. should have it finished by next week. Huzzah