richard godwin is rubbish, I am better

Somethimes a writer pens such an awful piece of ripe, stinking, self-serving bollocks that it is the solemn duty of other writers to rinse it as much as possible in the hope that we can bully the perpetrator into never, ever writing anything again.

Today Richard Godwin, music critic on my favourite bastard-Tory newspaper The Evening Standard, committed such a crime.

He’s writing about a recent stag do he went on where, basically, they rode around Cornwall or somewhere on bikes, got pissed a lot, then went to see the Eden project. But oh! How he tells it!

Godwin can’t decide whether he’s Chaucer, Dickens or Shakespeare; but he does his best to sound like all three. The trip is a ‘jaunt’, his friends are ‘fellows’, ruckus is ‘ribaldry’, drinking alcohol is ‘imbibing’, and jokes become ‘japes’. It’s like the Famous Five Go Mad in the West Country. Enid Blyton couldn’t have done it better.

The flowery pomposity of the language reminded me of Reader’s Digest. You know, that bit where the old biddy readership gets to write in with humorous tales of their exciting lives. Two of the most annoying bits are where he uses ‘Thence” and then “Alas” to fit his two of his sentences into their paragraphs. I swear on my life, I honestly thought we were living in the twenty-first century. The way Godwin tells it, I saw the whole episode in sepia.

I don’t think that there is any excuse for this kind of writing, it betrays a really bad understanding of our modern language, an ignorant carelessness even. People just don’t talk like that, and as journalists we should be trying to reflect the new paradigms of modern communication. Okay, so there were some long words there, but I honestly couldn’t find better ones to fit so I’ll let myself off.

So far I’ve just stuck to slamming Godwin’s style, but I think there is some deeper shit behind it. Insisting on writing like a Victorian diarist reveals something about a person: they want to sound clever. They think that inserting a load of long-up, convoluted words in to their writing will somehow lend it credibility and authority. It doesn’t. I’m sure that Godwin is a really clever bloke, but he basically writes like a ponderous old fart.

Aaaagh! I feel I could go on for ever, but I’ve got to go to the shops so I’ll wrap it up.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps that’s the house style at the Evening Standard and poor Godwin’s been forced to write like a knob. In which case, Richie I’m very sorry. By all means have a go at the standard of writing on my blog, I’m sure I’m crap too in my own way.

Filed under: media , evening standard, media, writing

london planning

Everyday the Evening Standard devotes nearly a whole page to an article disparaging Ken Livingstone. Today we had Rowan Moore, the Architecture Critic, blaming Livingstone’s urban planning for every problem in London, right down to, get this, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. “Under Livingstone,” he whinges, “The richest and poorest sections of the population have expanded, while those in the middle have declined.”

Quite how the town planning powers of local government have had such far reaching economic implications is beyond me; but not, it seems, beyond Mr Moore. He tries to explain this bold assertion as a consequence of the mayor’s call for affordable housing. Apparently demands for affordable housing have pushed up the cost of what Moore calls ‘unaffordable housing’ (homes built for profit). This apparently squeezes out people in the middle who are not eligible for subsidy and can’t afford to buy at market price. Hence the decline of the middle classes in London and the ever increasing disparity between the rich and the poor.

This does not ring true for a couple of reasons. The ‘middle classes’ usually already own their homes: that’s what makes them such smug posh fuckers. And those eligible for subsidy are not simply the poorest sections of the community; they are key workers like firemen, police and teachers.

Moore is simply attributing the results of long term macro-economic policies to Livingstone’s urban planning failures. It is not the fault of the town planners that the rich are getting richer. It is the fault of central government for implementing policies and tax regimes that subsidise the wealthy. If all the rich people in London paid fair rates of tax then local government would have the funding to house everybody at reasonable prices.
Dx

Filed under: London , evening standard, London, mayor, politics