Middle Class Supermarket Sweep

I am one of millions who's mind turns off
when I hear the phrase 'cost of living crisis',
which is all over BBC radio like a rash,
often as not spoken by the middle classes.
They have plenty, and are unafraid of debt,
but are newly aware of how food price rises
can cut through their financial defences.

But, to my shame, I know I am like them.
The first place I look in the supermarket
is the short dated shelf where the goods
cost less and if they seem good to me,
then I will enjoy the variation in diet.

I write this. I know that many countries
are poor enough to not have supermarkets,
much less many branches of multiples
multi-national chains across each city,
each chain with a long distribution chain
that works food providers very hard.

They make life cheap and convenient,
so that people like me can worry less
about my means matching my ends,
as I try to hide my inconsequentiality.

Where 'The Fall' Never Happened

Because empty arguments that blame Adam and Eve
for the mess that the world is in at present cannot exist
there, But open questions about how 'God breathed'
Ada and Steve remain valid enquiries...
  

 

Sexual Labelling Theory As A Moebius Strip*

When I was growing up
there were three sexual labels,
'straight', 'gay' and 'lesbian'.
None of them were ever used;
to even think them implied choice,
something that had to be taken away
if society was to be cohesive and unified.

The word 'married' euphemised trust
and stood in for all three categories.
Marriage was the license to breed,
and make the carrier of the child
responsible for it's rearing. Breeding
was the only justification for sex.

Where sex education existed it explained,
rather poorly, how to breed whilst avoiding
the question 'Why would any young man
ever want to be a father given the distance
that fathers kept from their children?'.

If youths wanted to know anything about human biology
then it was 'What was good sexual technique that satisfied them?
Who has most of it?' and 'How often could they (consensually) practice it?'.

The unspoken reason for having children
was less to populate and subdue the earth,
the Biblical reason given in the Old Testament,
and more for men to compete with each other
to buy bigger houses and have better jobs
than each other, the better to make family
a class ridden, Darwinian, competition.   

All this went on without explanation;
any explanation would have to explain away
why so much of the past was so hideous.

Nowadays, we have 'heterosexual',
along with 'LBGTQI+', a/k/a 'everyone else'.
Where each letter directs young people
towards a sort of performative individuality,
where being companionable comes last, if it has any value at all.

A moebius strip is a loop with a twist in it,
in which following one surface will confusingly
land the follower in the reverse position to where
they started. Here explains it better than I can.  

I Once Had A Friend

who got medication for manic depression,
then refused to take it, though the pills
would have made him a better friend
than he proved to be, to me, in the end.

He ordered the meds only to prove
to whoever he needed to prove it to
that since he was ill, he should not
have to be made to look for work.

For him sex was the best medicine.
It was the cure he found for himself
when he was a teenager, long before
he ever thought about mental health,
before he knew how his moods altered.

I observed him through the ups and downs,
where he blamed everything and everyone,
but himself when events went wrong.

He swore by the good effect
of alfresco sex with strangers-
it was the best cheer he could find.

He regularly told me his adventures
and make sex sound like the weather.

He was half right when he pursued
his sexual interest in gay saunas- 
they were places where men regularly shed
the many pressures to appear to be normal,
by securing their everyday lives in a locker
and wearing just a towel, if that, for several hours.

I don't know if he was addicted to sex,
I do know that he was self deceiving
about his mental health, but he is surely
just one of many to be so deceived.

In the three years since I last saw him
I have been able to recognise myself afresh
with fewer friends but greater honesty. 

The Double Emptiness

When a parent dies, their children
has a final choice of what to miss;
more of the life they always wanted,
which was reliable and consistent
and life was that good it made them
want even more, the life that made
more of the same readily available.

Or the parents can promise a life
to the child that they can never deliver.
Where the more the child has to trust
in what the parents say should be there,
the more it remained around the corner,
and the more corners the child turns,
the more they miss the milestones of life.

The future that was meant to be
never was, and it never existed,
all trace of it slowly disappears. 

With the death of the parents,
the non-events of the child's lives,
and the lies they have been held to,
the end result will be doubly, triply, empty.
Such an emptiness will find truth in cynicism.

The Frustrations Of A Slow Learner

With sex, and 'coming out' to myself,
as with so many other subjects in life,
by the time I coined the questions
that might, if answered them right,
get me slightly ahead in the race
that was going on around me, 
I was too old to have anyone teach me
what I hadn't been taught much earlier.

It took having a life-partner to teach me
who I was and then only in skeletal form
of notes I wrote each in the diary I kept.
And then it was only with reading the diary
a long time after, when the partnership ended,
that I came to see in the shadows of the words
I once wrote in the moment who I actually was.

Now I live alone and see very few people,
I encounter more human life via the media,
and seeing few people comes more naturally
than I wish it did. I can repent of the errors
of my past, that I remember, at my leisure.

Is that what 'retirement' is for ? 

The Hope Of The End Of Shame

No amount of preparation
can prepare us for when others
make avoidance (of whatever)
the point and focus of their life,
and the point of our life around them.

Even after who we avoided life with
is long gone, and we become aware
of what they denied and how deeply
they denied it, what remains of our ability
to prepare for the future seems to be
slimmer picking than we expected.

By then the best consolation
is to see regret as absurd and pointless.
Shame does not come into it.    

My Appreciation Of Competitive Sport

is weaker than my appreciation of advertising.

I was always limited by how I saw
professional sport through the lens
of the media, where with my parents
we read the red top press,
because like as not the sport reporting
was the most reliable part of the paper.

In recent times I came to believe
that cricket was more about statistics
than competition, and golf
remains 'a good walk spoilt'. 

But even more recently I have noticed
the rise and rise in the status of women
playing football, Such that I expect
that one day Lil-lets will be sponsoring
the biggest international matches.

Any message such sponsorship sent out
with the football would thrash hands down
the message once sent out by Durex,
when they sponsored Formula 1 car racing, 
for durability, reliability, and excellence.

Change And Attentiveness

Many people want to be messengers,
and work some anger off through
telling other people what to think,
whilst disguising that they are doing so.

I always wanted to be a signpost.
Signposts can quietly change,
like the destinations they point to,
and like the people reading them,
if they happen to be attentive
of how journeys change us all.

Unconstitutional

Every country in the world has a ruler.
Many countries have constitutions,
where the obligations and choices
open to citizens and corporations
are laid out for all to read and quote.

Where judges head courts to decide
what the constitution allows or bars,
where the history of case law
becomes the history of the constitution,
and what was banned before may now be legal.

I have travelled to relatively few countries
and I was too incurious to learn how they worked
when I was there. But I find it hard to imagine
how national arguments work without a document
from which the arguments start. 

In my country what a constitution
is, and does, get hopelessly fudged.

The populace are regularly fed
with substitutes for rational argument
with phrases such as 'the unwritten constitution'
and 'Our royalty are/embody our constitution',
as if such non-arguments are as self-renewing,
moral, and substantial, as the case law
built on a written document might be.

A constitution is the best source for a national argument.
Arguments can start without a state source document,
to supply the basis of an argument. But to have no source
document for any national argument is to covertly admit
to a level of avoidance by legislators that were it recognised
it would be a source of embarrassment, beyond shame.   

How Sensitive Should We Be

about how sensitive we actually are?
Or to ask it another way, how much does
sensitivity multiply through conversation,
until we all seem so fragile for what we say
that what we say needs to be EQ'd all the time,
in real time, to rebalance our dialogues
until we have erased and forgotten
where our thoughts started out...

I still hold the a Garcia/Hunter couplet in all this,
The Grateful Dead having been my guide for life
in so many ways when encounters with a real live
human beings would have been too intensive for me.

In the song 'Althea' Robert Hunter wrote the lyric 

'Can't talk to you about talking to you/
we are guilty of the same offence',

where if the shared offence were oversensitivity
the words explain why it so easily divides people.

Thought For World Endangered Species Day

If I were to be reincarnated
and I could choose what I was going to be
then I would choose to be either

1- a species that was believed
by scientists to be l-o-n-g extinct, 
thus sharing the resilience of nature
in spite of the indifference to diversity. 

Or  I would be 2-some luminous strange shaped creature 
who survives the lack of light on the ocean floor
where my presence might halt deep sea dredging
for precious metals by corporations that ought to not exist.

However long I lived I would show humanity
what they didn't know they were missing
and why they should leave some things well alone.
.  

Schools, Sport, And 'Gentlemanliness'

I never understood school sport.
I found it to be a time of torture,
where the rules of the  game
become excuses for hierarchies,
but finally I understand
the principles around which 
male team sports work.

Rugby is a thugs game played by gentlemen
and football is a gentleman's game played by thugs,
where the thuggery is the working class element.
And being a gentleman is middle or upper class.

Both required a concentration and co-ordination
that I lacked. I was a dropout who got trapped
within 'the system', an escapee
from the pressure of class expectation
particularly within education.

When I sound like a gentleman now
it is because I have learned to think
more than act out my lack of co-ordination.

When Johanne Goethe Wrote....

'Music is liquid architecture, architecture is frozen music'
he cannot have been thinking of luxurious interior decoration
like the above, which takes his quote to a whole other level.
If anyone knows the music quoted with the notation
 on the bannisters then do let me know....
Image credits; 'The Piano Stairs' by Hong Kong born 
painter and photographer Clement Tsang (born 1953).  

  

 

This Is What Progress Looks Like

Whether what happens next lives up to that intent
or whether the next generation slides back
into casually cruel and abusive behaviour
remains to be observed.   

 

Take A Chance On Inequality

The morality of gambling
should be less that it entertains
the great mass of the poor,
as week by week they seek
a wealth they can never win,
and more that the virtue
of gambling is how it disguises
justifying the rich getting richer
whilst it presents everyone
as 'having a chance', when chance,
and wealth, are so unequally distributed.

In that respect gambling
is nearly as consistently moral
a force in society as banking is.

Morality relies in justified poverty
for making opportunity for the few.     

When T.I.N.A. Is Your Leader

Not only is change not allowed,
be cause There Is No Alternative
but even talk of change is muffled
as the great leader ages, and selectively
his record becomes 'his legacy',
what he wants to be known for
as he tries to do more to be sure
of what he will be remembered for.

Only for the voters to realise,
that change is the only constant
that ensures the future,
including a change of leader.

Three Women

Long before 'Three Sisters'
by Anton Chekov was first staged, 1901,
the intrigues that happen between three women
-particularly sisters living in provincial towns,
as they plot their escape from surrounds them, 
has been been a staple of stage and life.

The format has had many 20th century updates
each time it has reappeared in each new media, 
film, radio, then television, then back to print
where it has always started off, in scripts.

Each newer version has been more feminist
and has had to explain better the absent male.
Never more so than in my favourite update,
the 1980s radio situation comedy 'After Henry',
where the formula was perfected, the male
appears only in the title, him being survived
by a daughter, wife, and widowed mother in law,
in a house big enough for each of them
to have their own door, their own space,
but they can't live apart from each other.

The series has one man they all like
but he is gay and runs a book shop,
and has a partner who the listener
hears a lot about, but never meets.

Listen to the first series, of four, here.

Beauty And Nothingness

...and the nothingness is all the more perfect
when it is more transparently imperfect.... 

 

22 Instructions For Better Living That King Charles III Will Ignore

Because  whilst he will claim to 'be green',
and appreciate simplicity and recycling etc,
the palaces and castles he lives in rely
on levels of luxury that are worlds apart
 from how his ordinary citizens/subjects live.
Also he knows that he is the acme of privilege
and abnegation of responsibility that many
millions of rich people, who live on less than him
but much more than most people, aspire to follow. 
   

 

Progress Through Stasis

If boredom could be made more immersive
and make people more attentive on less
-think of all the effort we would save!

Think of how what is presented as 'news',
is not just not new, it is actually speculation. 
We could avoid all that by rejecting
already desperate looking headlines.

Whole digital news channels would die,
leaving advertisers looking for viewers
more prepared to be restless elsewhere.

Last and far from least reflect on
we could review all the changes
we would not need to go through,
because our stillness and contentment
have now proven them unnecessary....  

'Just Between Us Bots..... '

Today I heard the future of human communication
on my radio, as spoken by a human from the past.

The discussion was about access to banking
where the spokesman for the past said
to a fellow customer, or maybe a banker,
'in future my bot will be talking to your bot',
the programme rushed past what these bots
might say to each other, or respond to,
and what the humans who initiated the bots
might gain from the bots' engagement.

In a later programme a similarly detached
management had been applied to the care
of a child who was severely handicapped.
The family had a social worker 'on call'.
But the only detailed direct access
the family had to the social worker was a zoom call
with the social worker at a time dictated to them
by the management, who withheld all paperwork
from the family involved and was on the end
of a telephone they could leave messages on.
Where the manager would not ring them back.

When management keep their distance
via technology and says 'It is all very new,
the system has yet to bed down.'.
Users of the system will know to disbelieve them. 

Humour And Awareness

I have resisted as long as I could
from commenting on the media hype
about so-called 'Artificial Intelligence'.

The media hypes so many things
that I thought I might as well wait
for the next subject to be hyped,
before saying anything about A.I.

But since a friend leapt in on facebook
I found myself drawn to comment,
and I found a surprising angle
from which to make my contribution.

My friend (who shall remain nameless)
blathered about 'Is AI safe?' 'Is it well labelled?'
and other questions that missed the point
about what is quite a technical subject,
that requires a supple precision in language.

To be clear, AI is intelligence without awareness;
the easy way to understand AI is to compare
the limits of AI machines with is employees,
where part of why people do the work
is that they are paid more than they otherwise
would be, to motivate them to avoid
being aware of what surrounds them,
where the money comes in useful after.

My memory went back to seeing a film
called 'I'm your man', with German subtitles
where a professional middle aged woman
is invited to date a new type of robot,
designed to be be a new sort of companion
in a world where companionable
male humans for professional women
are in short supply. It was a sort-of comedy.

'Amazing' thought I, 'A.I. was found to be funny
in German, a language where humour
was most enjoyed by native speakers
when it is dead-pan, and bone dry.
For non-natives, reliant on captions,
the jokes resisted all conversion 
into outright explosions of laughter.'.

So there we have it - intelligence, including AI,
need not lack humour, but when it's jokes
need translation for humans to find them funny
the humour in the jokes shrinks with explanation....

This 'proves' the limits in awareness of machines. 

Hoorah For Albania

It is one of the few countries
in the world that does not have
McDonalds fast food outlets.

Now all the country has to do
is work out how to hold on
to the youth of their country
and give them an attractive future
that has more of a sense of arrival
than they find with foreign travel.
  

1066 And All That

I could not think, much less comment,
on the news about the events
going on today in Westminster,
where it was news to the public
that 943 years ago a French invader,
and reformer of English government,
was crowned king there, and part of his reforms
were that the coronation of every ruler,
since then, will happen there. Ever after.

In other news a mere 543 years later,
circa 1649, many of the original instruments
for the coronation were melted down
and many of the jewels in them sold
by the Republican, Oliver Cromwell.

The instruments of the coronation
were reinvented a mere 11 years
after they were dismantled. 
This reinvention of pomp and process
has maintained the non-constitution ever since.

When the news is that old 
the everyday value in it
that our life consists of,
will be hard to find, thank God
coronations do not happen that often.

Weather Report ?

I have never been able to 
preface the conversation
I want to have with someone
with talk about the weather,
as if such fare were a scene setter
that gave me time to think
and listen before I spoke next.

When I am asked how I am
I usually offer my listener
a rating out of ten, which covers
how and why I feel angry or sad
whilst leaving all specifics to later.

I have often sensed that the language
we apply to the weather also applies
to the mood or place we might be in.

Perhaps I would cover
myself better
if I left myself out of it
and just rated the weather...

Signs Of Freedom

seem to be few in the world I now live in.
I saw one very quiet sign the other day,
whilst having my packed lunch
before going the the cinema
in the student area of Belfast;
two young men walked along 
a quiet street, holding hands in public
-an act as simple as it was powerful
in a world where complexity
and 'We can't because....  '
stops everything, all too easily.       

Watching Ourselves, Watching Others

The most dangerous freedom of all
is the freedom to not think,
and to disbelieve in the consequences.

The people that do think
know how dangerous that freedom is
-they observe it often in others
and are wary of it in themselves.  

Picture Set Of The Month - May - Posters Designed By Ken White

Ken white (1935-1985) was an American poster designer
for International Business Machines, in Boulder, Colarado. 

His posters were displayed on the walls of halls,
conference rooms and cafeterias throughout IBM's
many places of work.  

The subjects of his posters included health and safety,
extended creativity through collaboration, equal opportunities,
through to family days out.

Ken White co-headed the design team at IBM
with John Anderson and Tom Bluhm.
There is a book about their work, find it here.