Day, Month, Year

If you said that I was anti-American, I’d have to laugh. Me? Anti-American? How can this be, with my love of Funk, of Jazz? With my many American friends? When I sing, I use my catch-all American accent, unless of course, I’m singing something self-consciously English, like Ian Dury or Syd Barratt or Ray Davies. Actually, it’s a kind of Irish-American accent. Unless it’s blues, in which case, it moves south. Or maybe west. I even like Americans called Bill – Bill Murray, Bill Hicks, Bill Gates… OK maybe not Bill Gates, but two out of three ain’t bad.

However it must be said that there are several deeply infuriating things about America – by which I mean The United States of – that irk even a lover of that nation, and I am not talking about the obvious things – Camp Delta, penal executions, not signing up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (an honour it shares only with Somalia), ignoring global warming whilst being the world’s greatest environmental pollutor, calling a small, scarcely international sports contest the “World Series”… I am talking about the details, wherein lies El Diablo.

It is often the small things in any relationship that become the focus for terminal annoyance, leading eventually to murderous frustration. “I killed him because he wouldn’t put the cap on the toothpaste” said Irma Bloomfest, aged 72, giving her reasons for poisoning Ike, her husband of 36 years, by filling the Colgate tube with a compound containing arsenic. “I could handle the incessant farting, the endless abuse of our hispanic neighbours, and his compulsive gambling, but the toothpaste cap did it for me.”

Why does America insist on writing dates: Month / Day / Year ? It makes no sense at all. It is completely illogical. Surely it should run in some order relating to scale? Europeans write, Day / Month / Year. This is because days are smaller than months, which in turn are smaller than years. Easy! It seems an arrogance based on curmudgeonly rigidity that the USA won’t just do it correctly. I can see the point in avoiding problems by adopting an international Year / Month / Day format which at least has a logic to it, but no, this system has to be maintained because, well, it’s American.

The shame of it is that today is a nice date, a palindromic date if you live anywhere else in the world – 6/3/6 – like my own birth date, it is the same backwards, Madam, except in America, where it is 3/6/6. I am sad that this beautiful symmetry will be lost on 300 million people today, I shake my head, and for 24 hours, I mourn the lack of there and back.

Now that rant is over and done, some pictures I took yesterday (5/3/6) and earlier today (6/3/6) of glamourous Islington, in the early spring light, which have absolutely nothing to do with the Oscars. Whatever they are.