Have Yourself A Minimalist New Year

 Because part of the joy of minimalism is how effortlessly it starts, from the simplest musical pulses, and how from there it grows into a tuneful noise of epic proportions by engaging with musicians who range from the least to the most skilled/experienced where the noise each musician makes is of equal value to the end result. 

I Am Attracted To Food

as much as the next man,
but often recipes defeat me,
particularly those in weekend
lifestyle magazines where a chef
who owns a restaurant
takes something simple
and makes it complex
by adding hard-to-find ingredients
to reinforce his master chef credentials.

Given the odd flavours these cooks throw in,
to make themselves see more impressive,
I almost expected to find his kitchen sink
listed as one of the ingredients
he added to added to make the dish seem special.    

  

The Written Off Life

 I was born wrong for the world
I was raised in, that I was meant to inherit.
There men were men, and if some of them
were bullies, and others got drunk,
then 'a bit of bullying never hurt anyone',
because bullies were never hurt by anything,
and they were the measure of everything.

According to the them only the folks
who nursed grievances ever got hurt,
and they hurt themselves
more than anyone else. 

The only kind of male who mattered 
was hierarchical in character
where whatever else he was, was always boss
of his own world. Particularly when
that world disagreed with itself internally.

I was egalitarian, a male of a type
that went unrecognised, where
for my sense of fairness to be believed
it needed internally consistent behaviour.

I found my greatest consistency as an adult
when I endured being written off by employers
who required me to have an experience
that they all expected other employers to provide.

I was 'too soft' in my inexperience
to be the sort of aggressive team player,
who was fit enough to fight against
the opposing teams of other employers.

My life's mission has been to make do
and patch up the leftovers
rejected by harder men and women.

Worse lives happen at sea,
where the tides wash away
more than men ever remember. 

Meet The New Realism

It is just like the old pessimism,
but it is clearer eyed and more self renewing,
the better to set tighter limits on false hopes
and diminish cheap optimism.   

 

My First New Year Card of 2023

A rather jolly image of hope for the year to come,
in all the ways it combines hope
with the allowance for mistaken outcomes.

 

Lough Neagh Has Gone Green

From agricultural waste and pesticides
seeping from the land into the water.

And also from local government no longer having
a dedicated department to look after all the waters,
all the loughs and rivers, in the modern N. Ireland. 

This lough was formed by the giant Fin McCool
supposedly scooping out the the earth and throwing it
at a rival Scots giant, and missing but creating
the Isle Of Man between Ireland and Scotland.
I wonder what angry green giant, what driven reformer,
can restore the waters to health and fitness for fish,
and for human swimming in? And when can they start?       

 

My Memories Of The Quakers

I remember well the Quakers meeting house,
and Quaker meetings, I attended as a teenager.
The building was so old the government bade it
be preserved, and yet it was so plain inside. 

Quaker politics were critical of government,
the government of the days I that I knew,
and every other era, from the 1650's onward.
This made them attractive to many,
who were looking for more than to rebel;
they sought a more enduring rebellion. 

Rebelling seemed like the easy part,
what was harder was finding the flow
of meetings where the silence should come
from our insides until we were invited to speak
but then only through the spirit. To the uninitiated,
meetings felt like solving a spiritual crossword
where they did not understand the clues.   

What the meetings make clearer
to the newbies there was how full of noise
our heads were, which the more experienced
were ill prepared to explain, to help them
quietly dispose of the aural clutter,
which the experienced mostly hoped,
would pass if those newbies stayed the course
which they would complete in other places.  

Nowadays I have no family.
I live alone in the country,
and I like quiet more than noise,
and some noises more than others.

I like the Quakers most,
when I met them socially, in town,
where, by pure chance,
they had a spare ten mins
and we could find a quiet spot
to have an impromptu meeting.  

Between me and the screen,
I have now what I lacked then
the more open meeting place
through which to guide myself
past all my own old noises,
towards the quiet that seems restful.

This blog is dedicated to the memory of Keith Nichols and Sue Hethershaw, two very particular people I met at the Quakers, without whom I would not be the person that I am now.

My Fourth Christmas Card Of 2023

This card seemed perfect in it's homage
to a reassuring past, it's invitation to
built in obsolescence, and wholesome
way of being recycled, it simply melts!

 

The Best Approach To The Season Of Good Will

Because at least that way we will retain
whatever good will, out there, there is to be shared.
 

 

Putting the 'War' Into 'Forward'

The meaning of 'The Stockholm Sydrome'
has changed a lot over the fifty years
since the phrase was first coined.

It was once a byword for the feelings
hostages have for the men who confine them
where the hostage were said to identify more
with causes of the men who held them
than with the authorities trying to free them.

As an explanation for perverse values
it came from the police and the authorities,
Where else could such an idea come from?
Who else could speak with authority?

Only in more recent times has the story
been re-examined and the lack of empathy
from the police for both the bank robbers
and their captives, alike, been recognised.

The original captive, bank clerk, Christine, 
had her own reasoning and her own way
of surviving being captive. Over time
ideas like 'battered wife syndrome'
and other ideas nestled in around it.  

But captives everywhere
have to find their own way
of surviving both their captors,
and the often hostile treatment
of their rescuers after.

Presently Gaza is in ruins,
more than 20,000 Gazans are dead
many more refugees, displaced abroad.
A presently unhappy story can only get worse.

In Gaza there is not a single hospital,
or more practically a mortuary,
and the living, told to leave places
that Israel says it plans to flatten
to places where Israel then searches,
and does not find, even the ghost of Hamas.

Hamas or Israel are tied together in a Gordian knot,
both accuse the other, and accusations, backed by arms,
only tighten that knot; We don't have to side with,
or against either, we should side with the non-combatants,
the ordinary Palestinian people as they struggle towards
picking their exit from the purgatory that traps them.    

My Third Christmas Card of 2023

'Dylisheus 3', by Don Van Vliet more commonly known
as Captain Beefheart (1941-2010), under which name he,
with the support of several different line-ups of The Magic Band
  released twelve fine avant-garde blues albums for nine
different record labels between 1967 and 1982
and tour Europe, the UK, and the USA, in support of said albums.
Painting scored over music with him not least because
it does not require a record label, does not require touring,
and it very much does it require musicians who were apt
to rebel when asked to play music and adopt pseudonyms
that seemed plain weird beyond all comprehension. 

 

Technology And Language

Presently many people lead comfortable lives,
that are more assisted by 'AI', than they realise.
They don't recognise it because so far A.I. has
been confined to tasks that are rich in mediocrity.
The work has gone on, and on, and on, uncredited.

Now AI has been allowed to work more
with language than before. Huge swathes
of world literature have been fed into machines
in an imitation of giving typewriters to monkeys
and expecting Shakespeare. If we wait long enough.

Computers have proven to be better at copying
than monkeys proved adept at writing plays,
replete with long words, unstable, characters
and plots that seem to be made up on the spot, with hindsight.

Living authors are annoyed at how the creativity
they once lived well off and took a small pride in
now pays them nothing, because machines
give away inferior versions of their work for free.

Beyond the loss of income for what was once,
talent permitting, a comfortable way of life, 
there is a much more serious area of life
that we might call artificial, about which
we are right to worry; war and reporting. 

There is always a danger connected
to collecting the facts in a military conflict.
This makes the truth hide from journalists,
who seek to share it with the world,
whilst resisting the pull of propaganda.

Hamas vs Israel is only the latest example.  

Have Yourself A Minimalist Christmas

 Because like having a minimalist rest of the year, occasion and non-occasion, you can have it anytime, and a little musical minimalism can help us reduce stress. It will always carry the same sense of time flowing, and making sense, in the moment in which it happens. The less the fuss we make of 'the season of goodwill' the more we will sense the sense the goodwill the season is meant to represent, and be taken up in it. Music credits; 'A Rainbow In Curved Air' as written in 1968 by minimalist composer Terry Riley, and performed here on April the 15th 2012 in the VPRO office. The piece was arranged here by Anthony Fiumara and Arnold Marinissen, played by Luna Park Ensemble.

When I Go To Parties

 I don't do that badly;
when people talk to me
they know my name,
whilst I temporarily forget
theirs, and who I am,
and where I come from.

But still, I am accepted. 

Other Non-Events Are Available

I remember the spectres of Christmas past
clear enough to want to leave them be,
the cards from that many relatives
that when we put strings up on the living room walls,
to put the cards on, there were always too many
for them all to go on display. 

With our many relatives living in the town,
most of the cards were delivered by hand.

With the way that so many cards were sent,
that also demanded a return, Christmas was a campaign
thought for what and whom it was hard to tell.
None of us were church goers, and if one of us
ever thought to go, another would stop them going,
for fear that going might make them being happy. 

The detail I remember most, and now find most odd
is the tiny plastic pegs which reflected the light
as they held the cards on the string on the wall.

No need for them now. I get two cards a year
and send the same. I expect the cards I send
to be treated the like the cards I receive
-the are best kept in a draw, and left unopened
until long after the non-event they celebrate.

Concentrate!

The world media have been calling the places
where refugees congregate to survive
'refugee camps' for many decades now.
Whereas if  these place were labelled
according to function they would be called
'Displaced persons camps', because
the people there were displaced
from where they were before,
though calling the second and third
generation 'displaced' is pushing it. 
Most honestly 'Concentration camps',
is the best phrase to describe these places
because they concentrate there,
because world they are part of
won't let them disburse anywhere else.      

The Ever Popular P. T. Barnum Effect

I wish I could be given a free lunch
for every time in recent years
I have heard P.R. promotions
based around the rebuttal of some 'fact'
or story which when I examined it
revealed that what was rebutted
could not have been
even slightly true in the first place.

The story was an answer
to a question that nobody had asked,
and nobody had any interest in.

It was a ruse and a lie, used to draw
the public's attention to some bigger fiction
that the artist who had made the rebuttal
was out to make a lot more money out of.

My Second Christmas Card Of 2023

'Abstract Composition' as created in 1921
by Hungarian artist Fred Forbat (1897-1972).
The best goodwill is of necessity somewhat
abstract, and distant. That way it retains more 
for later when it will be more needed.

 

Thought For The Day

In most modern speech-based radio programming
the question of religion is awkward, to say the least.
For many programmers, who programme for a secular
and liberal audience, saying the least is their best option 
-their safest choice with regard to religion.

To this end the Today programme on Radio 4
has 'Thought for the day', a daily faith-based
reflection on issues in the news agenda.

There the quality and deftness of the comment
varies between the issues of the day, and the faith
of the presenter. At three minutes long it is brief.
Saying anything substantial in that short a time
that also does sound, well, cliched, is difficult.

I still don't understand why the slot
is the time length of one side
of a seven inch record, and how
that length of time was chosen.

The comments made in that three minutes
speak most of the country of the broadcaster,
which when heard in other countries,
even when you know the language,
may sound distant, foreign and tired.

But when the listener can imagine the parish,
or faith community, the speaker is from
this helps them recognise how every faith
starts somewhere, and ripples into a wider world.  

The Online Half-Life

In the context of online petitions
what should 'taking action' mean?

It seems like common sense to say
that it should mean more than adding
your signature to the cause of the day.
Online we are all, to varying degrees, 
keyboard warriors looking for a cause
to 'fight' for. But action is something
that happens away from the screen,
like sharing a meal, washing up, or gardening.

Actions are where we meet people, we listen,
and decide together how to change the world,
and be part of the change we want to live with,
well beyond us being keyboard warriors.       

We Measure And Flatten

the world through how share
the statistics that we hear hurled
by important people at each other
across a media, where
what the numbers mean
is only the start of the argument
about how to share our wealth
with people we never meet,
the measure of whose existence
is how much they suffer.

Our distance from the needy
is something we keep for our benefit.
The rich no longer have the loose change
to give to the beggars they pass on the street
-they are too detached in their security
and now they only use smartphones,
on which they store their visa details.

When being able to feel means feeling pain
for whatever reason, whether real or feigned,
then any and every unfeeling serenity 
will always always be our route to insanity.

My First Christmas Card Of 2023

The sender did not leave their name inside,
for me to send them one in reply. Maybe they feel
as numb about Christmas as I do, and knew
that their numbness had to be left somewhere.
I am happy to receive their numbness
and do not blame them at all. 

 

The Appointed Hour

Many an adult who grew up in the England
of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s will remember
how parenting was presented. What it meant.
The virtue of the gender based division of labour,
which soon turned into the inequality of reward. 
The male absenteeism from the home,
where the mother waited up, not knowing
how sober their husband would be
until he rolled up, the pub closed.

Much less dare she speculate
on the money he spent when there
and where that money might have gone
to improve the home he came back to.

But all that was there for any stranger to read,
were they ever allowed to see the household
and the family at their most honestly messy.

All this would be tidied away from the child
before the hour, appointed by the mother,
where after a dozen years of the parents
stalling all talk of conception and birth
with 'Babies come from under gooseberry bushes',
the reckoning has arrived for 'becoming an adult'.

With the child quietly sat down
the mother starts to bluff her way
past all the years of playground-led
slang-laden misinformation about sex
that she can no more describe than override
using the text in the book of line drawings
about 'how bodies work' that she quotes from,
to make herself sound authoritative and scientific.

The battle is over before it is begun.

The child knows that when they have to be still to listen,
they won't be listened to, they have nothing more
to offer than rigged assent to 'the conversation',
where the mother knows that she has to hide
all the unnamed links between sex, shame,
wanting, and the consequential financial debt,
which, if well explained, would make celibacy for life
seem like common sense, were it manageable. 

But the mother says what she says to encourage the child to marry.....   

Greedflation And War Profiteering

with wars presently between Russia and Ukraine,
and Israel and Palestine, and wars in many other places 
are surely the modus operandi of all the companies
shown at the centre of this map. 

Just as surely as each of the brands listed here
is the favourite of the state it is shown in
remains omnipresent in the lives
of the people of that state.

Where America leads, in consumerism,
it expects the world to follow. So big brands
around the world will institute greedflation
in all the countries that cannot stop themselves
from being exploited, whilst being reassured
by wall-to-wall international advertising. 
, 

 

Misplaced Gratitude

I remain happy to sign online petitions
for causes I believe should go further
though I never know how much my name
added to the list really furthers the cause,
or how much signing might further me.

What gets to me is the follow up email
where the organisers thank me, to invite me
to other actions in support of their cause.

They have no need to thank me.
When they do it reminds me of how
with nearly every interview I have heard
whilst I have been listening to my radio,
the interviewer thanks the guest,
and the guest thanks the interviewer
in a show of courtesy so synthetic
and showbiz-y it makes a mockery
of sincerely meant 'good manners'.

I wish they were mock-rude instead,
it would be more genuinely friendly.    

A Life Of Stillness

Here's to the lives of people's whose life
has stopped because they exist in communities
where the power of speech means accepting
not being listened to. The result is still a life,
even when their routines have the momentum 
of a stopped clock-what they do is right
twice a day, but nobody knows when.

Such limited cogence from thought to word
to action is all that is left open to them.

For all those whose lives are so highly structured
that by rote they turn a deaf ear when they sense
other people's need to be heard, you ignore
the stillness and the ache in the wait to be heard
by others at your peril. Being ignored will come
to you in good time; I hope you understand it then.

 

Hot Feet?

Is it more than muddling metaphors
to suggest that those who 'drag their feet'
in any particular area of their life,
and in the lives of others, 
should have said feet 'held to the fire'
to stop said feet dragging any further?

Low Times Pass Very Slowly

I have tried to fit myself in
around 'the season of goodwill',
but for all my adult life it has been
a square peg/round hole operation;
more and more I fail to recognise
who I am from the words I use,
with  every attempt at complying. 

My thoughts run dry against
the infinitude of false sentiment
the commercial culture generates
every December, and now much earlier.
Such that from November on, for safety
sake, I permit myself to talk to myself,
but I will not say anything personal
to anyone else, to them I accept
being a mute but agreeable nonentity.

It is better to avoid conflict in conversation.

The Potency Of Cheap Music

Forty five years ago I was a teenager
on reduced pocket money who propped up
the divisions my parents kept between them,
submerged in my mother's life, as her helper.
The only interest I could laid any claim to,
as mine alone was popular music in it's several forms,

the national pop music station
was the cheapest, all it required
a lot of time, and mine was cheap.

Then there was the thirty minutes
a week when T.O.T.P. was on television.

But music I could buy and play
by myself meant more to me.
This is where the local grocer came in.
For years they had a box to the right
of the wooden payment counter
that was regularly refilled
with ex-jukebox singles sold at my kind of price.

The grocers must have looked at me a lot
as I looked through the contents of the box
much more than other people did, combined,
as I slowly chose which single to buy that week.

Fast forward to small town life in Ulster,
far away from where I grew up.
Music  is still my major interest, only now
I find music made from the 60s to the 90s,
randomly on CD. I use it to learn about
music I was never exposed to in the past.

As an adult I remain the expert in cheapness
that I was apprenticed into as a child.
Unlike then, I no longer watch television.
Music scores over television every time.

Picture Set of The Month - December - The Abstract Paintings of Simon Hantai

'Blancs' one a series of 1974 paintings by
Hungarian born French painter Simon Hantai.

Hantai (1922-2008) started painting in Hungary,
but the art market proved to be a powerful draw
and a passport to the world. The centre of that world
was Paris. His first home became The Surrealists.

'Tabula' a 1976 painting by Simon Hantai, an artist
who went through many art movements, eventually
settling on creating his own names for his work.  

'Mariale m.a.' as painted in 1960 by Simon 
Hantai, a painting created just before
when the language of art criticism
changed, thus he was saved from
a lot of the false selling that was to come.   

'Mariale m.d.4' as painted in 1962 by 
Simon Hantai (1922-2008) a man who devised
the idea of pliage (creased) a kind of work
where the random creases makes meaningful
shapes of what would otherwise be uninteresting.
Here is more information about him. 

 

Corporate Malfeasance

As an adult I felt the need of a faith,
and a faith community to be part of,
whilst I struggled with a secular world
where I found community to be lacking.

Sometimes openly worried agnostics
would privately ask for my reflections 
on the Roman Catholic Church.

To save time and stop early confusions
my reply to every asker got set as
'The Catholic Church is the oldest
multinational corporation in the world.'.

It got me out of a lot of discussions
about doctrine where both my asker
and I would have raised more heat
than light discussing Catholic doctrines
that neither of us knew enough about
to be able to enlighten to each other. 

What my answer avoided
was how national laws work
against international corporations,
and against each other,
but given that civil law
was secular, and less led by taboo,
discussion about it should
have been a more open dialogue.

In theory corporate law
was open to discussion
as any other subject
that any civil society
that claims the word 'free'
to describe itself could be.

But none of us could shed enough light
on the opaque self preserving character
of corporate power, beyond recognising
that from the reported numbers of secretaries
who were shamed and lost their jobs,
for being impregnated by their bosses,
power was proud of how it created imbalance. 

Where the churches said little about sex
beyond how 'adultery was female in form
and mentioned quite often in The Bible.'.
They made it difficult to probe further.

We could never count the number of subjects
that The churches shut down with what they said,
but the part that patriarchies played in adultery,
where the women got the blame was obvious.

But a well informed liberal consensus,
in film and print, would, and did, campaign
to end that silence, here is a recent answer.

The Win-Win Situation I Could Live With

I always lost when I used to play monopoly,
usually quite early. I never realised that it was
a game designed to teach (losing) players
how Capitalism worked.
 This is version of Monopoly is one that I
would play more readily, with literacy
and reading everyone is the winner,
it is a big leveller-up. What is there to dislike?

 

The Future Of Rubbish

is brighter than it has ever been before, 
as disposability becomes more saleable
and industrialisation increases waste
to levels, where very slowly,
more folk recognise the damage,
the need to use less, and to recycle more
than ever before in human history.

But help is at hand, soon satellites
will see show us from outer space
the vast scale of the problem
-not least by explaining the levels
of space junk in the earths atmosphere
that will not land in the layers of heat
where that heat that would burn it up.

Sunday Sermon

Whether your neighbour
is your enemy, your friend
or somebody you can't imagine
wanting to know who they are
and what they are like at home
in a thousand years,
assuming you could imagine
that degree of longevity,
the quality of neighbourliness remains fixed.

The individual choice we have left,
is the distance that we keep from it.

Irony Hides

like the tongues in cheeks
of people who think they are funny
when the butts of the humour
clearly sense that they are not 
-only it's outline gets pointed out.

Target Practice

Whatever the country, the oddity of Politics
is less how easily the discourse becomes absurdist theatre,
played out for mirthless laughs
that end in bathos or gallows humour,
and more about how when governments set aims 
part of their aim is settling levels of carelessness,
about whether their targets are human or abstract.

Every target becomes like they are
-a straw man hollowing out leadership
through reliving the failures of the past.

...And This Is What Gaza Was Like In The Better Times

 Previously I tried to post the whole film, 'Gaza' (2019, directed Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell) rather than this trailer. The full film is on youtube. But since it is age restricted the result was that youtube presented a blank image on the blog post, and an instruction to go to youtube and comply with youtube's age restricted regime if they wished to see more than a blank screen. This trailer is PG rated, please enjoy it. The film is probably rated as 'parental advice required for anyone under the age of fifteen'. 

 Anyone who wants to see the full film should left click here. Anyone who left clicks on the link will receive a warning that the film they want to see contains images of violence etc, and be presented with a choice of whether to view the film, or to decline to view it.

  I can only wish that the people of Gaza had the same choice of being able to decline their present situation, of tanks flattening buildings, Israeli soldiers in Palestinian hospitals, not having enough water per person, or fuel enough to run desalination plants and hospitals, as youtube offers the viewer of the film. 

  But I know that the choice youtube offers it can offer what it does because films are not real life. Films start and stop, and have narrative-neatening cuts and edits. Whereas real life goes on and on, and on again, even in the most appalling circumstances. And when real life stops many wish that it did not stop. 

  Still, I wish real life were better in Gaza, and that through seeing this film, limited and age restricted as it is, more people could have more empathy with the people of Gaza. 

  How they translate that empathy into thought and action is the open question...

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Eight - Going Home

 Monday October 23rd

  We 'broke new ground' when we discovered where the breakfast hall was in the hotel, and also found that we could pay 50 Dirhams apiece on the spot for a much better breakfast in a much nicer ambience than the one we might have bought if we had taken the walk out of the hotel, and gone down the street. The hotel did a self service buffet of different breads and pastries with a varied selection of jams and spreads to accompany them. They also presented a choice of tea, coffee, and orange juice, which tasted as if it was freshly squeezed. Anthony secreted several pastries in one of his deeper and cleaner pockets for lunch, later. For not having slept so well I did not think as clearly as he did, to take advantage of the self service character of the buffet.

  Back in the room, post breakfast, it was 'tidy up, make sure you have left nothing out or behind, and leave the suitcase and hand luggage' time. Anthony had to buy herbs at the market because the herbs and spices in Morocco are so much fresher than their equivalents back home, whether home was France or County Down. I had around 400 Dirhams in me, and they were no use outside Morocco so we had to spend them now. There were about three stalls open in the whole market, every thing else was shuttered and closed. The three stalls that were open were herb and spice stalls. After a little indecision we got the best selection of spices we were going to get. I still had 200 Dirhams on me, Anthony was itching to spend them and I looked at the postcards that were for sale in what was otherwise a silversmith's shop. 

  One thing I am never sure about is when salesmen engage with the targets of their sales pitches how conscious are they of the theatricality of their sales pitch? How aware are they that the boundaries and roles of the situation are artifice, artificial and there is a degree to which, if we both chose to acknowledge it, the contact between two people could be played out in a much calmer way? The silversmith was either a very good actor or absolutely desperate to sell what looked to be very good wares. So for 200 Dirhams Anthony bought a silver bracelet from the silversmith where with all the dramatic salesmanship the silversmith employed to get Anthony to buy the bracelet, the bracelet was surely worth 800 or a 1000 Dirham. And maybe the display of dramatics in salesmanship was worth paying something for as well.

  I still wonder if by having so little cash on me I cheated the silversmith. Something about the scene still does not read right with me. If he was in a conversation with Anthony and me, then as he kept dropping the price, not knowing how little we had, the more he lowered the price the more it felt more like he was talking to himself and were meant to be witnesses to his diminishing grasp on reality. He got his 200 Dirhams, though. Back at the Hotel Kamal we took our luggage, rugs and all, to the car. Having given the silversmith all our Dirhams, all I had left were Euros. Anthony paid the doorman as we left with a 10 Euro note. We were out to the car hire office and their driver was booked to use the car for our last journey, to the airport in plenty of time. But Anthony and I have always had a different sense of time with travel. I like to give myself plenty of time ahead in airports, train stations and bus stations, and he likes to have less time in such places, where we meet is that we both know that they are good places to read and ignore the bustle for journeys other than the one we want to take.

 The driver the car hire company offered us was hired because he knew the most direct route to the airport. Anthony sat on the front passenger seat, I accepted a back seat. I enjoyed seeing areas of Agadir that I would not have expected to see, seeing these places was part of the premium of being a back seat passenger. Even when many of the sights I saw could be described as 'urban sprawl', they left me intrigued. Our arrival at the airport seemed sudden, even with all the clear road signs that long in advance clearly signalled where we were going. With travel, time will play tricks on us, and each trick has to seem fresh for it to work.

  I was relieved that we had more time than we thought we needed in the airport. Anthony had been unable to print his boarding pass for the journey before we left home. He did not know what the wrinkle with the form was but the boarding pass download simply would not download. So he had to go three desks and explain how he tried to print his boarding pass, but to no avail. The best help he got was directions from one of the many policemen in the airport. Anthony's persistence won out in the end and we went through security. Again, his luggage caused more delays. He had left a small pair of scissors fit only for cutting paper with in his suitcase, on the upside this meant that security were not interested in the large tub of yoghurt that was in his is hand luggage, which we could then take home.

  Sitting and reading kept us calm up to a point, after all the 'duty free' shops in Agadir airport were full of tat that you'd be appalled to be seen carrying with you. But then there was knowing when to move to the departure gate and guessing how long we might have to wait there. It all clarified slowly. First the many people formed queues because they thought they ought to then some staff appeared and they were absorbed by the screens behind the desks that were their stations. Then there were announcements and the queue was a buzz with the expectation of movement. From being in the position of being part of it, expecting to board the plane for Toulouse, I could not be objective about how the sense of time felt vs what it might have looked like and been measured as, by somebody looking at it with hindsight. The sense of time passengers have with airport queues defies analysis unless you are an airport manager. I have no idea how airport managers form over-views of the passengers they process.

  The flight was calm and ordered, I made notes about the days, rather than read. Being sat nearer the back then Anthony was, I was slower than him to get through Toulouse Blagnac Airport. It felt good to be within reach of home, But on leaving the airport we were still several hours from home and bed. The car was parked on a side street that was about four stops away on the relief bus out of the airport that was running because at present the tram was shut down.     

   Everything went smoothly, The car started at the second attempt. We were soon whizzing round the ring road that went around Toulouse, and found the junction that would get us to the toll motorway that would take us towards home. The evening skies either side of the motorway were rather dramatic but we were travelling at speed so whilst I could have my fantasy of taking a picture of that sunset, the memory of wanting to take the picture was the nearest I would get to it. Anthony had his five euro not ready for the machine when we got to the exit point, so we were calm getting off the motorway. Soon the colours muted. It was not dark yet, but it was getting there. Anthony dislikes driving in the dark, so it seemed to be a mix of good planning and good luck that we got home with enough light in the sky for his liking, at 7.30 or 8 pm. 

  We had a light meal of salad and leftovers from the fridge that was surprisingly good. The end of  very good holiday.  

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (36)

Once, years ago, I used the phrase 
'drain the swamp'-talking with friends.

I used it to describe the clearing out
of a brand of politics I disliked,
that I thought was bad for people.

Now it has become
an all purpose dismissal
of something the speaker
doesn't want to know about.

It's modern usage dates back forty years
to American politicians, about lobbyists
who had multiplied and infiltrated politics
to such a degree, that the lobbyists
had become like malaria-carrying
mosquitos that live in actual swamps.

It's earliest usage goes back to the 1880s
to when American politics
was about reclaiming land,
when the swamp was physical
but draining it was political,
a project where the enemy
was seen to be inanimate and/or invisible.

I repent of misusing the phrase,
all those years ago,
a swamp is a swamp
and Politics will never stop.

When our enemies are human
it is often hard we to see
how we might be like them.

Pacifism Vs Technology

As technology desensitises humans,
and reduces actual human agency
by reinventing it through machinery,
one of the harder philosophical positions
to hold fast to is that of 'being a pacifist',
because of how personal a position it is.

Being a pacifist means knowing
that we can't help but make enemies,
but further knowing that by every means
we know, we must limit our enmities.

With technology comes detachment.
In peacetime, tech appears to connect
unknown others with other unknown others
in ever greater numbers and at greater distance.

What those who think they connect ignore
is that the distance through which
they presume to connect is also
how enduring enmity arises.

I feel as removed from the zero sum battle
presently going on in Gaza as I do the wars
that have Israel has fought over fifty years. 
Too many civilians die on both sides,
with many more dying on the Gaza strip
than Israel would allow on it's own territory.

The rubble of total war leave me cold.

I want images of ordinary people living ordinary lives,
which means them reducing their personal enmities,
whilst resisting the world-dividing power of Propaganda.

The Ghost Of Primo Levi Rides Again

I have tried to listen to the news,
but at present I don't know how to.
In the past I have had periods
of 'going blank', though that is
too succinct a phrase to describe
the fog of unclear thought I get stuck in.

The war that is in the news most
in my choice of media is the Hamas-Israeli
conflict, going on all across the Gaza strip.

I admit that I know little about Hamas.

If I were told 'Well ought to know about
how bad and wrong Hamas always were.'
I would not know why. I could only imagine
that that my teller wants me to be as angry
at the world, and as self righteously ignorant
of the scales of human history as he* is,
as if his message was 'Don't get numb,
be angry at the victims. They have earned it'. 

Right now all I can hear are the voices
of the population of the Gaza Strip
speaking the words of Primo Levi to me
As they quote Levi's 'If This is a Man'
their eyes ask me 'How did we deserve this?'.
All around them what were once homes
have collectively become a death camp.

*my teller is bound to be an argumentative male.

 

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (35)

The phrase 'The tip of the iceberg'
is a shorthand and introduction
used by a lot political commentators
and youtube 'citizen journalists',   
to imply that the latest dirty deed
by politicians X and Y is just one
of a long list, the contents of which
are not particularly fresh sounding,
which they then proceed to supply...

But with that many tips,
and so much corruption,
there must be a lot of criminal icebergs
that like to hide in very cold waters
such that the credulous should wonder
'Whatever happened to justice and global warming?'

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Seven - Return To Agadir

Sunday 22nd October 2023

  From the start, the day felt more like the holiday drawing to an end. The German/French couple had checked before we presented ourselves for breakfast, which seemed to be served inattentively. But the sun was out and our plans seemed simple, get some money from the hole in the the wall, pay the hotel for the room and the meals, buy some spices to take home and some pastries for lunch, pack the car with all we have with us, and get on the road to Agadir. 

  There was a queue at the hole in the wall. So I watched whilst I waited. The people ahead of me were a group of men and women from either New Zealand or Australia. There were about six of them. One by one they approached the machine to get some money and one by one the machine refused the cards of five out of the six of them. Cue minor whinges and criticisms of each other before they left not knowing what to do next on a Sunday with nothing open, whilst having no money. Whilst the tourists were not getting their money I watched as two doors down from the hole in the wall a stray dog was taking flat breads from a pile outside a bakers, and, one by one, eating most of the flat breads he took, leaving an edge of the bread on the pavement. I had tried in this visit to keep an eye out for the street dogs whilst I was in Tafraout, and this was the best viewing of any dog I had yet seen. 

  There was also a young beggar who I had no small change for, when I knew that Anthony always gave such people something to them whether he was in his now native France or as a visitor in Morocco. I got my 1000 Dirhams out of the hole in the wall and returned to the hotel to settle the bill. It was then that Anthony asked the proprietor, a cook, about the best place to buy spices. We went and of course it being Sunday morning they were not open until the afternoon when we were going to be halfway towards Agadir. We realised that we should have made the purchase the precious afternoon when we spent time looking around the small market for maybe the third time.

  Room emptied, car packed, and room checked twice again to make sure we had not left anything behind, on the way to the car Anthony met the young beggar I met earlier and gave him some loose change, which pleased him no end. I don't know why I got into a mental block about giving small amounts of money, money which meant little to me, to the poor of Morocco who seemed delighted with any notice being taken of them on their terms. I would give back home. Somehow I could not sort my head out over such simple generosity away from home and in a different currency. I observe this, Anthony made up for what I lacked.

  On the road to Agadir there was further opportunities for generosity. We picked up one man seeking a lift of alas only about twenty minutes length. But he was standing at the side of a misty road in the heights of the Anti-Atlas mountains where the clouds met the road we drove through the clouds, and we had seen no other car pass us for at least half an hour. 

  When we stopped for a break from Anthony driving, and to eat the pastries he bought from the bakery earlier whilst he was looking for spices to take home, the place we chose had to be photogenic spot. Taking pictures was part of the pleasure of the holiday. There were so many places to stop and so many sites that seemed photogenic that part of the pleasure was being being spoilt for the choice of where to stop. One factor that encouraged a sense of 'enjoy it whilst it is there' was that we knew that eventually we would be coming into huge and unphotogenic Agadir, where if we knew that we were on the right road for the Hotel Kamal we might be surprised. One of the weather effects I could not stop myself liking was the mix of sharp and soft outlines of

peaks where the clouds covered some    peaks

but did not cover other peaks, I had admired this effect  from a distance at home when I saw the Mountains of Mourne in County Down. Even if the effect looked the same the world over, with every mountain range in the world, I'd still be pleased by the sight of that effect.

  Lunch, and our last photography break over, we descended from the mountains to where the road flattened out. Apart from some small settlements and the odd rather 'sculptural' looking dead tree which would not have lent itself to the good photograph we wanted, the scenery became mundane.

  We crept upon outer Agadir through the many smaller towns that Agadir's expansion and development had swallowed up, such that we could not tell where one small town ended and another began, or when we were in Agadir proper. The weather turned grey and wet, this further added to the sense of us passing run a series of down places. The signage on the duel carriage ways was good. It was because the signage was as good as it was that over the two hours or so that we took to get through the joined up small towns into central Agadir we did not have to turn around, or reverse-though with the big roundabouts we often went around twice, sometimes three times, to make sure we found the right exit for the next roundabout. I remember for the briefest second seeing a dig curled up, looking contented and apparently asleep, on one round as we came off one exit and on to the roundabout. 

  Between the good road signing, and what seemed to me like travelling by dead reckoning we found our destination, the Hotel Kamal, much sooner than the staff there expected of us. We rolled up to sign in to our rooms and rest before 4 pm.

  Rested, showered, and refreshed, and our notes on the journey up to date, we set out to walk, partly for some fresh air, partly to find a hole in the wall, and partly to find a restaurant since we did not know the procedure for eating in the hotel. At the hole in the wall I got out 400 Dirhams, that was what Anthony said we would need on top of what was in my wallet. When looking at where to eat, the stand out choice was an Italian restaurant, not that we saw a menu or saw what it cost. But we had been eating Moroccan all week and the only other nationality of food on offer was Japanese. We saw a menu and it did not inspire us.

Me in my handmade 'Mondrian' T shirt 

  When we rolled up at the Italian restaurant we were quite hungry and tired. The presentation was rather posh, stiff white linen napkins. It seemed like a good start when we saw on the menu that we could have a beer. The rest of the menu was more opaque there were items that were listed as salads, but that could mean something light, small and tasty or, well, what arrived in the end. I ordered a salad for starter and a main course of roast aubergine and ravioli. When the salad arrived it was huge and delicious, there were medallions of roast beef in it, and a whole large avocado sliced finely. The dressing was very rich but it did not overwhelm the taste of the lettuce, tomatoes, and other ingredients over which I felt it was my duty to take my time. The way I had been brought up with food excluded eating at restaurants, but made eating at home and pleasing the maker of the meal happy by presenting an empty plate for the washing up, which as a teenager I would pressed into helping with. This salad was seriously sumptuous, and it was added to by Anthony, who had a similarly full plate, giving me the large prawns that he decided he did not want.

  If we could have changed the order and said

Anthony in Moroccan djellaba  

 to the waiter when the salad arrived 'Please, can we cancel the ravioli, these salads are big enough to be a main course?' It would have been a good thing to have done, if only for our stomachs. But we accepted that the main course had to arrive. I enjoyed my ravioli, mostly by eating it slowly, and we both had a second beer. Eating out like this was a major occasion. We rested and said 'No Thank you' to coffee or any of the small puddings in the list.

   When the bill arrives it was obvious to us that we had not calculated the costs of the meal before we ate very well. The bill came to something over 500 Dirhams, I worked it out to be the equivalent of about £45. We were not expecting that. It was lucky for us that they took credit cards, and that I had mine on me. 

   That night I slept poorly, I could not find my medication for helping me sleep and I was afraid of my snoring, not knowing I was snoring, and waking Anthony up. 

Choice With Books

has always been a complex and personal matter.
Thankfully, books are not like possessive children, 
they never  argue back when we put them down
in favour of other characterful material. 

 

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Six - Tafraout

Saturday 21st October 2023.

  Anthony enjoyed further conversation with the German/French couple across breakfast tables whilst I felt that I did not know what to say to them. It was easier for me to be more focused on the choice of foods for breakfast, the scrambled egg with Moroccan spices, several jams, honey, and tahini that were all to be eaten with the generous amounts of flat bread. 

  After breakfast the main thing we had to do was to return to the carpet shop. What should have happened before we went to to the shop was that either Anthony should have prompted me to go to the hole in the wall or I should have known to go, unprompted. But I held back partly because Anthony had reminded me much earlier that any Dirhams we got were no use outside Morocco. So, our money counted up but no more money taken from the bank, we returned to the carpet shop to look again at the choice of wall hanging that Anthony had admired yesterday. In the shop a question hung in the air, unstated until the carpet man showed us several more carpets. That question was 'Why don't you buy a carpet, Malcolm, as well as Anthony?'. I had never bought a hand made rug before. I had been given some by Anthony to furnish the house I lived in, which he liked to visit when he lived in Ireland. But me buying a new handmade rug for wall space on one of my walls had never struck me.

  The carpet that changed all that was shown to us alongside Anthony's choice from yesterday and it took about five minutes of looking at the two rugs for the decision to buy both to seem obvious. I had known I was, ummm, 'picky' about how I liked to be sold things. I disliked being induced to haggle. I liked to think of goods as being of fixed value and worth, where the choice of whether to buy or not was a formality. There was nothing much to actively negotiate. All that was required of me was to count my cash and decide if the goods were worth the price on the label. I remember feeling a certain horror at witnessing a particular open air event where a man was trying to sell bed sheets to housewives who were unused to open sales of stock that was clearly not part of any regular trade. The stall holder presented what was meant to be an auction, but instead a limited dialogue where the housewives could bid and would be acknowledged, the stall holder made his sales pitch into a horse racing style monologue where he did all the talking, where the housewife had to interrupt him talking to buy the goods they wanted at the price they thought heard. That price may not be what the commentator eventually asked for. Seeing this display of popular machismo persuaded me that if displays of hucksterism and machismo were signs of being male, then I was not male and they were not for me, ever. 

My new rug

  To return to our carpet shop, the owner presented us with an obvious, almost self selecting, pair of rugs at prices that it was silly to query, where somebody more cautious would have wanted to ask how he seemingly plucked a price for the two out of thin air. But to do that would have been to enquire about the process of his trade, profit margins and the like, that it seemed rather too much to enquire about-as if he might not be that generous towards us if we asked for his generosity to be quantified. He gave us a price, 2450 Dirhams, when sold apart they might be worth nearer 3200 Dirhams. 

  He wrote the sum 2450 out on a piece of brown wrapping paper, which he then took from my hand and stuffed out of sight between two rugs, where even if I wanted to see it again I could not find it. We paid him in a mix of Euros and Dirhams and he rolled the rugs tight, wrapped them in brown paper and parcel tape. The common exchange rate was ten Dirhams to one Euro. I would not have known what to say if I was asked to explain why I had that many Euros on me for. At the time I was in the carpet shop I was simply relieved that they were useful as a means of paying for the rugs. 

  We were out of the shop with our parcels under our arms in the late morning sun when the first people we met and recognised were the German/French couple who seemed politely pleased for us when Anthony told them of our adventures in the rug shop. He would have offered to show them his purchase, but they declined and walked toward the market.

  Putting our rugs, still tightly wrapped in brown parcel paper, in our rooms, Anthony suggest that we go for an afternoon drive along the roads around Tafraout. On the journey I mentioned to Anthony how the carpet seller had written the number we paid on a piece of paper and then discarded it. Anthony explained that his approach to money and government had to be very different to mine, his ideas about what caution was would be different to mine. Anthony said this, or words to that effect, and he knew me. But he did not know the memory I had of the open air sheet seller who sold his sheets to housewives, using a horse racing commentary to cajole cowed housewives into buying something they would normally take much longer to consider buying, and only buy when all excitement in buying was subsumed by a sense of utility, and 'family values'.

  Soon the grandeur of the scenery we were passing through quelled any further enquiry about the carpet transaction, and we returned to the primary purpose of our being there-to feel as if we were part of a landscape that opened us up without really trying. Anthony also very much enjoyed driving because the power steering of the rental car made the car easy to steer. The brakes were very sensitive and needed a much lighter touch than his old car at home, In fact the only aspect of the car where he might have been less than ideally pleased was when he sometimes did not find the right gear, as he changed gear, without looking. But the brakes were that good that not getting the right gear first time usually happened when we were driving slowly and in controlled settings, like lots of traffic, that made the mistake safer.

  We ate out in the evening. In the small town centre there was a restaurant that Anthony felt we should try. The menus were slightly difficult to interpret at first. Yet again we avoided the chicken, beef or fish based dishes. With a lot of the spiced vegetable dishes we had been served over the week there was a clean taste to them that any meaty or fishy flavours would have diluted if meat or fish was added to the veg. 

  The portions at the restaurant were huge, and quite tasty. The meal also cost surprisingly little. And from our seats we could watch life on the street, including the traffic passing and some of the handsome young men, no doubt extended members of the same family, who seemed to have nothing more to do than hang around the general stores and fresh fruit and veg stores, even when there were few customers to serve because of the time of the evening it was.

 A lot of life in Tafraout seemed to consist of waiting and watching, rather than doing anything much. We slept well that night.

Please left click here to find Day Seven of this holiday diary.    

 

King Herod And Rev'd Mr Malthus

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was a perceptive and humorous writer who ever so gently drew out the absurdities that hid behind the culture of deference towards authority and wealth in Victorian society. His original idea for humour was to have dialogues between two historical characters whose ideas contributed to history and made their name...  

Herod was the king who had 4000 children killed in his attempt to kill the infant Jesus, who Herod believed was out to succeed him. 

Reverend Mr Malthus was the eighteenth century mathematician and clergyman who devised unintentionally erroneous mathematical models about population growth, in which he hid his lack of concern for the poor behind the mathematical terms he used.

     

The Reverend Mr Malthus: I am delighted to meet your majesty. I have always considered you a grossly misjudged monarch. You have my sincerest sympathy.

King Herod: I thank you. These are the first kind words that I have heard for eighteen hundred years.  

The Reverend Mr Malthus: No doubt your methods were a little violent - in fact as a clergyman of the Church of England I can by no means sanction them. But it is not your methods, it is your principles that interest me and fill me with admiration. I hail in you the earliest exponent of  the Theory of Population.

King Herod: You are referring, no doubt, to the so - called Massacre of The Innocents.

The Reverend Mr Malthus: Quite so. And do not imagine for a moment that I am deluded by the ridiculous account which has reached us of your Majesty's motives in the affair. No, no; a reasonable man knows how to discuss the childish fantasies of ignorance and superstition. You were not a bloodthirsty tyrant of fairyland; you were a royal philosopher, who  understood the great principle underlying the whole structure of the social fabric - the principle that population increases in a geometrical, and subsistence only in an arithmetical, ratio.         

King Herod: I am appreciated at last!

Reverend Mr Malthus: You understand the fatal consequences of over-population - poverty, misery, disease, vice - an inevitable decline in the whole standard of existence - and you resolved to prevent those evils at all hazards. Accordingly, you ordered that every child under the age of two in your dominions should be destroyed. The measure was drastic; yet it might well be argued that it was ultimately merciful, like the cruelty of a surgeons knife. But the instincts of humanity were against you; your name has been branded with indelible infamy; and no monarch, however enlightened, has ventured to follow your example. 

King Herod: All that you say is true. I did not take into consideration the profound irrationality of mankind. But you must admit my position was a difficult one, I saw the evil; I saw the cure; and I was possessed of absolute power. Supposing you, Mr Malthus, had been King of Judea, what would you have done?   

The Reverend Mr Malthus: As a clergyman of the Church of England, my position would have been so extremely anomalous that I hesitate to answer. But this I will say; I should have taken care to not outrage an instinct so deeply rooted in the human heart as the love of parents for their children. Persuasion is more effective than violence. There will be no need for a Massacre the Innocents when you have induced men and women to realise the folly and wickedness of bringing too many innocents into the world.    

King Herod: You think you can induce them to realise that?

Reverend Mr Malthus; I am an optimist I think I can. 

King Herod: But even supposing you can - what then? My dear sir, I cannot help smiling. You talk of my outraging an instinct deeply rooted in the human heart; but what else, I should like to know, do you propose to do ?  What instinct is more deeply rooted than that which brings men and women together ? And you quietly suggest that they should suppress that instinct - and you imagine they will indeed supress it, when once they can be made to realise that if they do not the world, at some future date will be less  prosperous! That is optimism indeed.  

Reverend Mr Malthus: Common sense and self restraint is all I ask for. 

King Herod: And that is much too much. A few stoical philosophers, a few fanatical ascetics, my follow you; but the great mass of human beings will never set a limit on begetting children, for the simple reason that the begetting of children is the result of the greatest pleasure they know of.    

The Reverend Mr Malthus: Your argument is forcible, I confess. The almost inevitable consequence -! that is also indeed - would it were not so! And yet I remain an optimist. I cannot but hope that some way out of this dreadful difficulty may yet be found.  

King Herod: Who knows but it may be ? Mankind is irrational, but it is ingenious. I too shall continue to hope.  

The Reverend Mr Malthus: There are all sorts of possibilities; and I see no reason when they, at any rate, may not be left to fruitify - if I may use the term - in the womb of time.