People. Who invented those bastards? He must have been a right sadistic git.

I hate people, and the problem is that they are everywhere and it seems to be that the more that I try to get away from them, the more there are around. I’m travelling as I type this; I’m going to see my parents for a few days, because I am a good boy and make sure I go to see my mother and father every few months, time and finances permitting.

The problem with travelling is that other people want to travel at the same time, the damned inconsiderate bastards. It’ll start on the train platform; people seem to want to crowd around where I am standing. I don’t know why. I’ll usually be there for the train fairly early, as I am mildly obsessive and hate missing the train, especially as I’ll have to change trains two or three times on some journeys, so any delay means the whole journey can be delayed by three or four hours.

I’m usually at the station approximately six hours before my train. I’ll stand there watching earlier trains to my destination leave, until mine arrives.

But I digress. The crowds. These people tend to smell, they tend to be shouting down their mobile phones, they tend to have groups of unruly kids. So I move down the platform, right to the other end.

They follow.

Eventually, the train will have arrived, and I’ll get on and be quite content. I’ll chuck some music on the iPod, and relax for a bit. I will note that the train is surprisingly empty. And the train will pull in at a station, and more people will get on, and the train is still surprisingly empty, free seats abound. Two-seaters and four-seaters, all available.

So what has happened now is that against all available evidence, a pensioner who genuinely smells of (and I make no bones about this,) shit, he has decided that his journey will be most comfortable sat right next to me. Despite the fact that my six-foot frame is already awkwardly cramped into a space designed seemingly for a pygmy. So now I’m stuck here for the next two hours, and I’m hoping for two things.

First, I am hoping that this man, this feculent, disgusting being will get off at the next station. I think it’s Leicester or Nuneaton, both fairly large stations, so the odds are quite high.

Secondly, I am hoping that if he does not get off, he can read what I am typing.

 “Hello, Mr Pensioner guy. I appreciate times are hard, but soap costs barely anything. You can get eight bars for a quid in Poundland. If you wash only twice a week, that is probably enough soap to last you until October. That’s certainly an improvement on the twice a month that seems to be your current rate.”

He can’t read it though. This font is tiny.

I am a coward.

I do however have a couple of days now where I probably won’t have to deal with people. I hope so.

When I get home though, I’ll have to go shopping.

Supermarkets attract people like anything. Christ knows why. They’re awful places, bedecked with gaudy neon lighting designed to make you feel sad and make you buy things you don’t need.

I have around 30 slightly different chilli sauces, most of which I will never use because of mood-changing neon lights.

I am a conspiracy theorist. And not a very good one.

People will stop in the middle of aisles to chat to Mavis from down the road, who they haven’t seen since bingo yesterday evening. I’m polite; if I need to get past, I will ask politely. And they will usually ignore me. So I’ll be a bit firmer, a bit louder. And still they’ll ignore me. So I’ll ask a third time; this time, I will be clear, I will be vocal.

They will stare at me, briefly. They will go back to their conversation.

They will find that a trolley pushed through them is surprisingly painful, but then, they had the option to not be ignorant. I can only assume they prefer a bruise or two. 

Ditto their kids. They’re running around all over the place, and I’m tall, and they’re small. I generally don’t look at the ground below my knees much these days. It’s a bit dull down there, and in a supermarket I can’t see much in front of me anyway because of the trolley. It’s full of food, and it’s about a metre in front of me. Even if I wanted to look down, perspective means that all I would see is the top of a punnet of mushrooms and probably some chicken.

When a kid is inevitably caught face-first by my trolley, it’s apparently my fault. I am supposed to expect someone’s kids to be running around (often now on skates), and be able to react to a tiny, invisible horror.

It’s like some kind of science fiction, but more realistic, and more horrific.

So I will then have to pay for my shopping, but not my actions. I am a sane man, and I am always right.

I’ll have to put up with the woman (always a woman) who has done an entire month’s worth of shopping, and has stared at it as it all moves slowly down the conveyor. Then she might start packing it into bags, if I’m lucky. If I am unlucky (I am unlucky), instead she will be chatting about nothing to the person on the checkout. And then she will look shocked when she is asked to pay. And she’ll have to dig to the bottom of a cavernous handbag to dig out her purse.

At least most shops no longer accept cheques. I appreciate that. Whoever came up with that rule change deserves a knighthood. And I mean that.

If it’s not a woman in front of me at the till, it’s someone who is in there for their only human contact of the day. And they’re going to drag this social experience out by chatting to the checkout girl for as long as possible, perhaps even long after their transaction has concluded, and I’m trying to pack my shopping.

God, I hate people.

It’s a sad fact but a testament to the clever construction of Bruce Willis and John McTiernan’s classic 1988 action blockbuster that the millions of people who have seen and loved Die Hard rarely understood that the film really is a rallying cry from the production team. A call to disband the already well-advanced feminist movement.

To the casual viewer this viewpoint may seem nonsensical, ludicrous even, but the evidence is all there if you’re willing to examine the film in some detail. Indeed, examining a big spectacle movie in detail for hidden motives is itself often a waste of time; the entire aim of the big action franchises is to wilfully ignore all but the most basic motivation and plot points; in it’s most basic form, the hero must rescue someone or something from the antagonist and in the case of the Hollywood action films, with as many big explosions and special effects as is possible to fit into the standard one hundred minutes. It is true that some films may pretend to have a higher purpose – The Day After Tomorrow, for instance, with it’s pseudo-factual environmental plot pretends to be showing damning evidence to the filmgoer of what will happen if they continue to destroy the planet. What it instead provides is a standard action-bollocks affair, with ludicrous plotting and terrific effects. Not exactly high-brow, but definitely entertaining.

Surely Die Hard is the most basic of all of the 1980s action films. It’s credited with starting the whole cycle of films in which a lone protagonist defeats all of the odds in order to defeat the bad guys and preserve some semblance of an American ideal after a terrifying situation. So what makes it different? Where does the anti-feminism undercurrent come from?

None of the events of the Die Hard film would have taken place were it not for the feminism movement of previous years.

John McClane, the protagonist is portrayed by Bruce Willis as the ultimate American family man. He’s a loving father in a difficult job; he’s a detective with the NYPD, strong willed and fair, but he’s found the time to buy great gifts for his children’s Christmas presents. But his family has been torn apart, not by him. Nor by his job putting pressure on the family, but by his wife.

His wife went and got a job.

And for John McClane’s wife, she wasn’t content to just work in the supermarket like the wives of his friends down the precinct. Holly is ambitious, the ultimate embodiment of the 1980s padded-shouldered businesswoman, born of the feminist movement. She’s got herself a high-ranking role within the Nakatomi corporation, and she was willing to end her relationship with John to take the job, tearing the family apart in the process.

Twenty years earlier, this would never have happened. John and Holly would have lived a happy existence in New York. She may have had a job, but it would probably have been in a florists, or a bakers.

If only Holly hadn’t taken the Nakatomi job. That one, selfish decision on her part directly results in the deaths of several innocent people. She doesn’t ever show any regret for this, maybe she didn’t even consider that her taking a job above her station was the cause of unnecessary suffering. But it was. The stupid, selfish cow.

It is probably helpful to elaborate a bit here. I’m assuming that most of you are familiar with the plot; Alan Rickman portrays Hans Gruber, leader of a group of German terrorists who have taken over the Nakatomi Plaza, pretending that they’re campaigning for the release of some of their fellow terrorists, but really aiming to steal millions of dollars of bonds from the company. His henchmen are well equipped with powerful and efficient weapons, and largely seem keen to avoid a mass slaughter. Early on in the film, they do kill the chairman of the Nakatomi Corporation as he refuses to open the safe for them, but immediately after this, realising the seriousness of the situation, his direct subordinate agrees to the terrorist demands and starts the process of opening the safe to release the bonds.

It’s at this point that Holly’s decision starts to affect the plot; if she was not a part of the Nakatomi Corporation, the gang would probably have escaped with all of the bonds. The Corporation would be in ruins, but the cost to human life would have remained at only one man. A huge cost in itself, but relatively small when compared to how the film eventually plays out.

Because of her presence there, John McClane is in town. And he’s pissed off, and despite the fact that his wife has left him, to him there is a hope of reconciliation. So he’s going to have to save her, and in an American action film that can only mean one thing.

It’s one-man-crusade time.

From the very point that McClane turns up at the building, all of Gruber’s meticulous plans are torn apart. Instead of just one killing, a demonstration of will, the viewer is now witness to death after death as McClane acquires guns and weapons in order to save his wife and their marriage. Villains and good guys alike die unnecessarily as a result, all to McClane’s damaged war-cry of “Yippee-kai-ay, motherfucker”, his mind now in tatters, distraught at the thought of losing his family from the possible reconcilation his Christmas trip had suggested to him.

It’s an American movie, so the resolution is inevitable; McClane wins out, and the bad guys are all taken out. Some will have died at his hands, some at the hands of their comrades, some by just dropping off a building very slowly, but McClane wins. He’s battle-scarred, he’s had a hard day and like any man he’s entitled to go home to his loving wife.

And there she is. Holly and John are reconciled, and drive off into the sunset. But at what cost?

If only Holly had been like the other police wives. Stayed in that bakery, worked in that florist. She’d never have been aware of the Nakatomi Corporation. And if that had been her life, John McClane would never have had cause to be at the Nakatomi Plaza in the first place. The terrorists would probably have completed their plot successfully. Only one man would have died. A corporation may have been destroyed, but no corporation is worth more than human life.

And all because of the feminist movement.

Die Hard lays its cards firmly on the table, and mourns the loss of the male-dominated society on a grand, explosive scale.

Or maybe I’m just talking bollocks.

(First published in 2001, filling a gap in 2007.)

It’s a little-known fact that many of the world’s supposedly naturally occurring resources were in fact artificially created in the late eighteenth century by a lowly blacksmith’s son from a small hamlet in the vicinity of what would later become Milton Keynes.

Jeremy Tetrapak was the man responsible for the planet in the form we know it today, and it is he who created many of the things that we now take for granted. His inventions have supported the planet for more than a century now, yet his name is far from being as well known as Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday and Ben Woodbridge, the Scotsman who first dropped a Mars bar into a cooker full of boiling fat, creating a sickly snack loved briefly by the Scottish in the mid 1990’s.

Yet it was Tetrapak who created stone, oil and even water, endlessly toiling with small designs and ideas which would later revolutionise the modern world. The fact that Tetrapak is not well-known is down to the scientific community’s distrust of him and his ideas; the established scientists and professors of his day maintained that stone, oil and water were indeed naturally occurring, and that Tetrapak was simply taking advantage of the poor education of his peers for financial gain.

However Tetrapak was never one to deny that one of his major motivations was financial; indeed by 1792 he had over 100 products on the market, ranging from pre-packaged rocks in such wild variants and limestone, sandstone and even igneous rocks to the preposterous concept of bottled water (still or carbonated), which sold at outrageous prices to those willing to pay.

Again, it is a sign of his success that many of his forgotten ideas, such as packaged rocks and bottled water are now in widespread use over one hundred years later, sold as pebbles in garden centres, or expensive items sold in nightclubs to save the life of a dehydrated pill-popping no-mark from Swindon.

There is precious little documentation on how Jeremy created his inventions - his father’s business barely generated enough money to feed his family, let alone to fund the scientific research of his son. In fact, the family only started making any money at all after the inventions were announced and sold on.

Many people at the time said that the inventions were in fact just a massive scam designed by Jeremy and his father, Isaiah in order to make their family fortune. Both men were renowned for their showman-esque abilities, often entertaining the people of the hamlet with fantastical tales of dubious origin. It was suggested that the inventions did in fact already exist, and that the Tetrapak family had simply struck on the most successful marketing scam of all time.

However those theories often make few suggestions as to why so few stone buildings or remains of them exist from before Jeremy’s time. Walk down the street of any town these days and you will seldom find a building from the earlier eighteenth century or before. Without conclusive evidence that stone, water and oil did exist before the Jeremy Tetrapak discovered them, who are we to doubt the evidence that they were indeed his inventions and discoveries?

With so little known about Tetrapak and the routes his scientific journeys took him on, it is perhaps no surprise that you will not find any information on him in many of the major reference sources, and few museums like to mention him as they are often run by the descendants of the very same scientists who mocked Tetrapak when he was alive. However, if you would like to find out more on Jeremy Tetrapak, or you like the colour brown, or you are a confused old person who thinks I’ve been writing about Horlicks for the last few paragraphs, you might like to visit the Cromer Museum of Scientific Fact, which will be hosting a small exhibition of Tetrapak’ work on the 28th and 29th. Museum curate Bob Holpeg has promised an amazing display, and he is currently in negotiations with Tetrapak’s estate to allow visitors to perhaps even handle the stone and oil, and maybe even drink some genuine Tetrapak water at a small charge.