Second Hand Health And Safety

I like my present day neighbours, I really do.
Neighbours who can agree with each other,
whilst being from such differnt backgrounds
are a 'win - win' particularly when they share the prizes....

Even so differences can be divisive, particularly when  
I can admire, but I cannot quite follow, their ideas,
on health, safely, and risk.all of which depend on a wealth,
education, and life chances, that my head can't get around.

But when the space makes us all slightly looser,
for a little drink, I can be honest about how rough
some of my life was, without me sounding like
I took too many wrong turninings for my health,
wealth, and sense of safety, being so second hand.  

The Compariusons Where We Don't Recognise Ourselves

Elon Musk has sometines been quoted as saying
that 'Douglas Adams is my favourite philosopher',
often after quoting Adam's advice on the cover
of 'The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy'
on the prototypes of his (Musk's) latest venture.
as if quoting 'Don't Panic' gave Musk license...

But in other people's minds the Adams character
who Elon Musk has the most in common with
is Zaphod Beeblebrox, the archetypal playboy
billionaire ruler who is so trivial in his creativity
that he never gets beyond his own playfulness,
in whom the narcissism has so inflated his ego
that he cannot recognise it, and who is blind
to the consequences of the chaos he causes.

Similarly Space X, xAI, and Tesla combined
are all like Adam's Sirius Cybernetics, where
the self opening doors of the space ships
sigh with satisfaction as they let people through,
and the lifts share aggresssively happy slogans
with their carriers to a level of cynical indifference
to the general effects of 'hubris thought technology'
at any, and every cost, where irony remains unknown.

Knowing ourselves means knowiing our own irony,
I keep refreshing mine, when I have to re-teach myself
to accept it when I have landed on my feet, when
I know how to be myself on other people's territory.

I wish Mr Musk well in his respecting
the unlimited ironies of his creativity,
and finding out what his wealth can't buy.

When Will The Next Luddite Revolution Begin?

As a new generations of skills that were once purely human,
laborious and poorly remunerative but which allowed people
to live, are now being copied, and 'improved on', en masse,
by machines so powerful they seem to dwarf the common man.

As the new hyper-wealthy present the new technology
which not only monetises what these machines do, 
the help the hyper-wealthy reinvent the idea of 'money'
for people who are too poor to reinvent themselves.

'The new elite' present themselves
as the measure of everything.

But for all that their technology reinvents them,
it is only the new guide to recent past, re-explaining
recent life in the latest distortions of human understanding.

 Who is going to tell the tech bros, so that they will listen
that they are has-beens of tomorrow? Whilst they think
they equal the total sum of human history?

 

Rag Rugs Like This One

RAG RUGS were made from old clothes or mill waste since the 19th century. They were revived in the 1930s and 1940s. The craft is now a hands-on sustainable lifestyle activity.

   Were an example of what was put in front of the hearth, and made the centre pieces the rooms that they were put in my grandparents home. The rugs were always kept clear in the often small rooms that were otherwise too full of the furniture they were required to contain. When I saw my granparents in their home I did not understand them. I was a child, born in the 1960s, in single figures and short trousers who was not given a watch to wear to know what the time was until I was 14. In my short trousers, without a watch, and not really understanding anything much about money, beyond 'keep it secure in your pocket'. I was sent seven miles on the bus into the country, from the town, to stay with my grandparents 'on holiday' for a week in July for probably four years. Whilst, without me being there, my parents got on with redecorating and rearranging the house they owned, in which my dad prided himself in how much he had bought everything that we saw, and it all matched. He wanted nothing we saw to look hand made. And with the television being on all the time that he was home, attempting to read any book, him reading his collection pulp fiction paperbacks apart, was frowned on as the peak expression of boredom. 

  Staying with my grandparents as a child was always some sort of respite to me from the pressures of growing up. Their home was much more settled after all the changes that homes go through as they raise chilren towards becoming adults. They did not have a fridge, but had a cooling pantry and kept milk in it fresher for longer via evaporative refridgeration. They had a small screen 1950s black and white television that they kept a pleated cover over when it was not on. There was a stillness about their home that I thought was attractive. I was going through changing schools, whereI I changed bullies, from one school the next school, until the bullying got really horrible. There, the pressure to conform into I-did-not-know-what increased more than I had words to decribe it with. I was expected to mainmain my optimism for the sake of the teachers who saw it their job to standardise the pupils by removing their mannersisms, taking away their rough edges and weak habits, for the sake of future teachers, and examiners.

  My grandparents home was a  place where I felt safe from the pressures of 'self improvement' and the standardisation of children to make them fit into the future. It was in one of the sheds in the yard of the farm next door to their home that I found a pushbike with no 'support wheels' either side of the rear wheels on it. I first learned to ride a bike in the yard, where there were cattle in some of the sheds. There I felt that what I had learned was an achievement, and I could be thankful in an unforced way for the person whose bike I had borrowed to learn with. There were no such 'safe spaces' as they would be called now, uncompetitive places, where I could discover new basic skills, near my parents house. There everything was much more regimented by the march of time and progress, which was mediated to me most by the change in the tone of the adverts on television, which fascinated me, and by the change in the toys that amused me. 

  Scale model Jumbo Jets really could keep male children quiet as they looked at the instructions for all the different parts, detachable from the plastic frames they came in. There, the concentration required to follow the instructions, and not get glue on your hands as child, was acute. The mimicry of new technology we only saw on television, like these kits, was an easy sell. Even when it was presented in the form of plastic model kits. But once the kits had been completed what was the child meant to do with them? Beyond, as clutter, keeping  the object, once complete 'on display' in their own room where, otherwise, it had no other use?   

 For my grandparents genrations the most durable games involved packs of cards. From simple family games at home to whist drives where the ladies met that were set up in the Gertrude Morris Hall which today, well over fifty years since my grandmother would have been a stalwart there, still holds inclusive quilting afternoons and council meetings. So whatever the decor at home, local arts and crafts for whoever wants to follow on in such ancient skills is as possible now as it used to be there.

Popular Doom Loops

permiate the news we watch and read until we wonder
'Is the future worth the effort it takes to get there?',
when it has to be. How else to think outside the present
without us returning to pasts many of us barely remember?

But as more media companies save more money
in the pursuit of wealth for the Commander in Chief
and the shareholders who live beyond the wealth of Croesus,
the news rooms will be more operated by semi-autonomous
AI operatives where the human viewers of the news
will seek to ask each other 'Is this real? Did this happen?
Or is it some AI fantasy built on what happened in the past?'

The truth will only hit the fan when enough of the viewers
turn away from their screens and seek to recognise each other,
collapsing the revenue stream of the channel, from advertising.

Even then channels will change owners, be relaunched, 
with promise that the AI is checked more thoroughly,
where the evidence of such claims will be witheld,
because 'The information is commercially sensitive.
Such is it's value, it would affect the shrinking markets
for information that is not adjusted by hype and AI.....  '. 

'If I Were You I Would Not Start From Here.... '

One of the phrases that was quaint,
nearly funny, in the town I grew up in
happened when a stranger asked a local

The local would reply with their hands
pointing left and right into the distance
telling the stranger which way they should go
without saying the street names of the places
they will have to pass through which their guide
preferred to avoid thinking about as if
they were lost in the stream of local consiousness.

At some point the guide would yield to their usual habit,
and stun the stranger using the phrase 'If I were you
I would not start from here, to get to where you seek. 
I would start from somewhere else.'.

I eventually felt lost in the town
that gave the people who lived there
that rather circular sense of direction
that led nowhere else. I found my way out.

I have not looked back since, 
whether I was lost, had mixed directions,
or was travelling using dead reckoning,
pure guesss work to get to where I thought
I was meant to be going to, I got there in the end. 

Anid in the end found the place I never found
when I had to ask for directions for it: the place
I can call home where whether I am active or inactive
I can rest and I can give myself clearer directions.   

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes And Innocents.....

Meanwhile the pupils in the theology class
are studying the text of Matthew Ch 6 verse 21
'Where your treasure is your heart will be also.....  '.