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.    

The French Have A Phrase For It

'To live happily, live hidden' is what the French
translates as. We are all happier for some of our
life being for just ourselves alone. The author
 of the quote is the poet, and writer of plays and fables
Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755-1794).

 

Honi Soit*

When I was too young to know
'how to read people', I never knew
what was happening behind the faces 
of the adults I did not realise the depths
of my dependence on
-least of all when they spoke in anger.

I naively took at face value
the phrase 'Always tell the truth.',
not realising that in a world of liars
it would make me more defenceless.

When I did not get what others wanted
me to have, when I misunderstood the adults
I was dependent on, to head off my disappointment
before it peaked they said  'I/we fought in the war
for you to have (name the item they said
they wanted me accept instead here)'.

The point now is that they lived through WW2,
but they did not fight it. Many a child was brave
but bravery was in no way equivalent to combat.

I appreciate now how in the slow post-war
economic recovery even living through a war
became 'a sacrifice', even when that life
was far far away from German bombs
and the sacrifice was doing nothing more
than surviving BBC government propaganda.

But still, the greater pains the British people
inflicted, then and since, were reinforcing
poverty and inequality in the name of 'choice',
on scales that are unheroic in the extreme.

We now live by the values of 'the market place'
where we can neither remember nor forget
that making other people suffer for our gain
is the tradeable commodity.

The market for pain and loss
has to be infinite for trade to continue....

*shame be, or evil be, as in 'Honi soit qui mal y pence', shame be on he who thinks ill of this, the Norman French phrase that used to be on British coins    

In My Two Minute Silence

This Remembrance Saturday
I will contemplate the difference,
and the distance, between the 'victor's justice'
that the great powers, England, France,
the new U.S.S.R. and the ascendant USA,
all gave themselves at the end of World War One,
and what 'restorative justice'
could have looked like for the people
living in the countries that made up
the dependent empires of each of those countries
England, France, the U.S.S.R,, and the USA,
which systematised asset stripping on scales
so grand they looked obscene when measured,
and furthered definitively undemocratic norms. 

I may take more time in my exploration
than Armistice day considers to be justified.   

When Humans Do Not Compute

Inattentiveness of each other's lives
was the main reason The Beatles broke up.
You can see it all in the mixed messages
between the humour and lack of eye contact
docuemted in the more conflicted rehearsals
in the film, 'Get Back', which replaced
the badly edited and far more barbed 'Let it Be'.

A decade and a half after The Beatles split,
'the German Beatles', Kraftwerk, faltered
in their creativity. Many outside the band
wondered why. The first member to leave,
who recently wrote his autobiography, knew.

They were not known for their banter
or making jokes in the studio,
but like their predecessors, all four
were known to work well together.

But as they invested more in computers
they invested less in each other.
Where the music was concerned,
what machines might be made to do
was more fascinating than what humans
had to say about each other. 

Now, doctors surgeries are high tech places,
where receptionists get glued to the screens
that the public know are there but can't see.
The receptionists are too busy to receive
patients who arrive for appointments.

That required human confirmation is gone.
When I go in nobody wants to know who I am,
or advise me of the right place to wait.
As a patient I am much nearer being a ghost
that the staff cannot care enough about,
even to exorcise, than anything more substantial. 

The White Poppy

To remember those who lived and died
in wars unwillingly, still committed in their hearts
 to a peace they were left no choice
but to leave it to others to create
after they died, because they died living for peace.

 

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Five - Tafraout

Friday 20th October  2023

  Out early to look for breakfast took us down the street, since our hotel was more basic, not the sort to serve breakfast. More pancakes and bread with tahini, and hot milky Nescafe. We were packed, and the car was packed, and our room was clear and paid for by 9.30 am. 

  

The Touristes Hotel was very simple and very nice. I got one last surprise when I sat in the passenger's seat and Anthony said to me 'We have ten minutes before we leave. I need to look at some maps. Do you want to take more pictures?' So I took more pictures of interesting doors and what ever else took my eye. Anthony says I 'have a good eye', but I find myself oddly ambivalent about taking pictures. In my impression I take my best pictures barely seeing the image but reacting as if by instinct. I am too busy reacting/taking the picture to more fully enjoy the view. For this reason I like taking pictures of things that don't move, that are scenery. Though I know that like the example left of this paragraph waiting for the light to be right requires my patience.

  Our journey to Tafraout was mostly uneventful. One of the pleasures of the journey for me was that this being my second such trip I could take in the scenery much more easily, and Anthony was happy to stop at anything that looked like a photo opportunity, which given the brightness of the sun was plenty. The roads through many of hamlets/small communes were often quite rough which required Anthony to drive quite slowly, which in turn made us all more aware of the photo opportunities in the colours the walls were painted, and the different plants and trees that were either side of the narrow road. When I saw another driver also taking photographs of oleanders, date palms, and even common geraniums that thrived, seemingly uncared for, where there often seemed to be no humans living as we stopped. 

  Tafraout looked bright in the afternoon sun, as we arrived. I had forgotten the sound of the muezzin, which in Tafraout could be heard really clearly everywhere across the village. It is a recording broadcast from somewhere within the tower of the mosque. I assume that once, in the times recording, all muezzin calls were live. When the words were slowly shouted or chanted by the imam from the top of the tower, the speaker's voice would spread as far as ever it needed to. We heard the call to prayer in our previous stop, in Tiznit but it sounded submerged, rather, within the noise of commerce and traffic from our room at the corner of one of the routes into the old quarter. The elongated vowels in the shout/chant of the muezzin always sounded to me like the speech that every Master of Ceremonies spoke to the live audience in the recording, at the start of the wrestling that my dad insisted the television should be tuned to every Saturday afternoon.

  Friday afternoon prayers sounded quite loud from where we were in our new hotel room, as the rest of the village went quiet. We were staying in the same hotel we stayed in last year, even the same room. 

 We were served coffee on the balcony which overlooked the central junction of the town, I knew Anthony was not going to rest after, from how he was energised to take pictures of the shadows the chairs and table made with the brightness of the sun. 

After ordering our meal for the evening, another vegetable tagine to be served on the balcony, that evening. Together we went to see Anthony's carpet dealer. Last year, when I first saw the place I marvelled at his shop and took lots of bad photos of carpets, where the pleasure was more in the taking of the photos than the later processing the images that my camera had captured.

Anthony gave the man the rough dimensions of the carpet he wanted, and said it was going for a tapestry for a large wall. One reason I think Anthony liked this carpet dealer was not just that he was the representative of women's co-operative of carpet weavers, and therefore there was a virtuous circle in buying carpets from him, but also he has good gut instincts for what his customers wanted. The second carpet he brought out to show was the obvious choice. The first carpet we were shown was good, but not quite right. It was as if the first were were a taster for him knowing what we wanted to buy that hid how he knew what we wanted. At this point I should have gone straight to the hole in the wall to get 2000 Dirhams (equivalent to £165) out of the hole in the wall to cover payment for the rug and the hotel when we left. But I didn't, we further investigated the market, telling ourselves we were looking for postcards, we found one or two designs that we liked enough to take take back to our room. Anthony wrote one postcard to friends back home. I have lost interest in sending cards to friends. I have lost enough friends in the last three years that sending cards to the few that are left seems to be an unrewarding venture.

  Before dinner I read more of 'Carn' - Patrick McCabe. Some of it rather exaggerates a sense of drunken queasiness, but like all life in small towns, the queasy parts, and the moments when events spin out of control of the townsfolk, are when people are having the most fun.

     A sharp wind was blowing across the town

and over the balcony in the evening, which meant that we ate indoors, at a traditional Muslim  or Roman table, with near ground floor seating around it, all much lower than a Western dinner table and upright seat. The tagine was perfect and very filling, we refused the coffee that was offered after. Even if it was milky Nescafe then we did not want to be drinking anything more than water that late.   

    Another, rather good, day over, and with something to show for it when we take our purchases home and I take down one of my paintings and put the rugs on the wall in their place.

For Day Six of this holiday diary please left click here.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

I live very well on my limited income,
mostly by buying safe but short-dated food.
I have no problem with the pennies I spend,
and never will have, all things being well.

But soon I will have a problem with the pounds
I might pile on with all the moreish junk food
I see, which my wallet can afford,
but I don't need, and when I buy it
and don't do the exercise to work it off,
eventually it will add to my waistline.

In Modern Day China

There are two newish youth movements,
'The lying flat movement'
and 'The let it rot movement',
both of which exist to protest
against the Chinese work ethic,
working nine hour days, six days a week.

It is clear to these protesting youths
how much the jobs they are offered 
draws them into cycles of work, debt
and attempted property ownership
where they never earn enough
to own the property they might choose
and they cannot stop their job owning them.

This makes their only real choice
to be to set their lives and selves
apart from work that does not work
with clear, if passively set, boundaries.

I admire them in their passive resistance.

There was youth-a-plenty
about the town I lived in
when I was their age,
but we were all pre-aged
into passivity to authority
through our education.

There was no movement, no group
identity with which I could resist
being taken in by the activities
that euphemised unemployment
that were common to those days.

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Four - Tiznit

Thursday October the 19th

  Our breakfast was quiet compared with how the bikers breakfasted. From our table we could say that it was enough to enjoy their high spirits, as after eating they put on their leathers and got on their bikes, and the furniture van was opened up again and bike parts and tools were stored for easy retrieval at the next stop. 

  Our own breakfasts seem to have been prepared with a lack of forethought, as if the breakfast chef was also distracted by the sights and sounds going on outside. Anthony had to ask twice for what he ordered and the orange juice was bitter. Partly because of the way breakfast was served Anthony suggested that we leave Sidi Ifni that day. He felt that the place seemed to be done with us. He had looked up hotels in Tiznit, where we had stopped briefly en route for Sidi Ifni. There seemed to be plenty of characterful places to stay there. The inattentiveness that was with the staff over breakfast was still present when we settled the bill, over which there seemed to be some initial muddle. Eventually it was clarified that Anthony had paid quite a lot up front well before we arrived in Morocco. All I had to pay extra was 500 Dirhams before we packed our bags, put the bags in the car, made sure that we had left nothing behind in our room, We were set to go.

  On the way to Tiznit I very much admired the mountains. They were majestic rather than dramatic, slower in how they impressed me than mountains I'd seen before. Every mountain was spotted with dark foliage that seemed to be small at the distance we were from it, but close up the foliage must have been much larger. It was hard to take the scale of views we were taking in except by how small vehicles looked on the narrow roads next to what was beside them.

 Tiznit was slow to come into view, and then there is was. Tall thick sand coloured walls with entrances at several different points all of which which led inside the outer walls. The first thing we had to do was park the car to work out where we were and where we wanted the car to be. This was when we first realised how labyrinthine and narrow the streets of The Old Quarter were, how much it was a place best explored on foot. And even then the goods on sale in small hole-in-the-wall sized shops were often repeats of what was in other hole-in-the-wall sized shops. 

  We eventually found the right road into the city square, and parked where our car would be watched, but we would have to tip the watcher, to have more coffee before we started looking at the different hotels. I have not been a tourist very much in life, and the habit of having small amounts of money to give away, say, to the person who guides you safely out of the car park was something to adjust with.    

 

The hotel we chose was, well, on the decent side of being run down. Our room gave us a view of the rooftops and the street sounds below were highly audible as we looked across. This was not good for an afternoon snooze but the windows and shutters that quietened and darkened the room at the same time. The toilet and shower facilities were communal, and primitive. But again atmosphere made up for positivity where there might have been seen to be a lack of privacy. nice was 

  Anthony rested whilst I went off to explore the old market, not wishing to buy anything-I had most everything I needed-but wanting to see the sights of the place for myself. It was part of the tipping culture that a person, usually a young man, would latch onto a tourist and take them directly to where they thought the tourist wanted to go. I got caught in that a bit, but also resisted because what he showed me on the way was more interesting than where he wanted to take me. I thought the doorways sunk into the outer walls of the fortress were

rather splendid. They had a character and variety that reminded me of how I imagined the doors in 'Lord of the Rings' to be. The history of Tiznit is that it was originally five villages or communes, until 1880 or so when Sultan Hassan the !st built a fortress that became an administrative and commercial centre for the five communes. drawing all life from outside the fortress walls inside, or close to the walls.

Jewish silversmiths found themselves a new base there when they made the town famous for it's fine silverware. 

  In the early evening Anthony a guide soon found him and helped him find the restaurant mentioned in his guide book. The guide took us part of the same route that I had been unwilling guided early in the afternoon. We had the nearest experience of the week to gay, or camp, fun at the restaurant. The food was very good and we were offered beer to drink. It was all served to us by a young waiter who having to decided that we were 'gay'. He clearly enjoyed flirting with Anthony, who good humouredly flirted back. I have gay friends who like visiting eateries with young waiters who are nearly always wearing tight fitting trousers. This young man was never going to be that knowingly louche, but there was a distinctly non-literal tone to the conversation in French, which I was surprised at. Anthony was charmed. 

 And so, after a last late night walk back to the hotel, we came to rest at the end of another day. The communal washing facilities were easy to navigate, there were very few of them.

Please left click here for Day Five of this diary.   

    

An Unanswerable Question

Was it merely evil genius
on the part of Soviet Communism
to not only to craft propaganda
that had the highest ideals
that humans beings might aspire to,
but then thru sequential five year plans
kill as many of the local populations
it contained is it could, because
of their sense of local ethnicity,
as it could? And in bigger numbers
than the Nazis could dream about?

Not only did tens of millions of people die,
but The Empire kept a vast paper record,
surely now digitised, and definitely secretive,
so full of the details of the arrest, torture,
and placement in death camps of more people
than anyone could take in how accept as a record. 

And to do all that whilst denying the victims
any easy-to-identify handles-place names
like Treblinka or Auschwitz that the families
of the liquidated who survived-might use
as a shorthand to explain their sense of loss
-that takes a genius of statecraft beyond belief.

Before the Soviets, in 1915, the Ottoman Empire
did something similar to Armenian Christians,
but that was a once off and it is doubtful
that there was any quality paper trail left behind. 

To cause a suffering on a vast scale
is not beyond belief, and is far from unique.
Even now, newer empires seek a similar
destructive power to that of the gulags (1917-1986)
with which to repeat the worst deeds in the past
but this time do it morally, and in the name of virtue.

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Three - The Rest Day

Wednesday 18th of October 2023

  Awake gone 8 am, and dressed and down for breakfast for 9 am. A fabulous breakfast, warm flat breads, butter, marmalade for me. Anthony had pancakes with fresh banana and chocolate sauce. Fresh orange juice and milky for both of us. At home I would have my coffee black and strong, but with the coffee as it was presented in Morocco, the milky version tasted best.

  After Breakfast it was time to walk into the town. Our first task was to find a chemist. 

  Anthony had to present a prescription from the French health system to present to the chemist there, for him to get medicines that now were available off prescription in Morocco for him to take back to France where such meds were no longer available. The chemist was generous towards him and gave him forty pills rather than the suggested prescription number of twenty eight.

  Getting 2000 Dirhams out of the bank proved to be much more of a trail. First Anthony wanted to try his card in a hole-in-the-wall machine. He was half blinded by the sunlight so that he could barely read the screen. From his reading of the screen he thought he was going to get his money out and a receipt. When neither appeared he asked the staff inside for assistance. They assisted him, he got his card back and the assurance that he had not lost the money but he had misread the screen's instructions. Then we drove around the block to park the rental car in a better place and take a break from the stress of cash machines after the previous altercation. It was my turn to try and the first machine I tried had a touch sensitive screen and I tried using my debit card. The sun was a serious impediment to reading what was on the screen, but it was clear that the machine was not accepting the card. Enter a Moroccan policeman telling us that the care was inappropriately parked. He was calmed when I produced both our passports from my black bag. With the car moved to a place that disturbed the local police less, we found another hole in the wall and this time I could read the screen better and it had buttons to press at the side which was an improvement on previous attempts. I tried the debit card card and the machine did not want to recognise it. So I tried the credit card and slowly got the hang of interpreting the instructions. With the first two attempts I got used to cancelling the transaction and retrieving the card. At the third go, and speaking out the instructions on the screen to Anthony beside me, who told me what to press we got the better of the instructions and got the money and a receipt. All by 11 am. The point being that for me at least, in my home country I would usually fill in a withdrawal queue and get money from a live bank teller, partly to slow down the bank automating it's services. But in Morocco the hole in the wall was what we had to work with.

 The walk back to the hotel was via a wander around the only French-style supermarket in the town, there was nothing there for us-at least not today.

  Anthony wanted to see the mountains close to Sidi Ifni, so between 12 noon and 3.30 pm we were on the roads out and around the town. For lack of vehicles on the road, the power steering of the car making the drive so comfortable. and the dramatic backdrops we passed through, we could have been in a very long car advert. Not that cars in adverts stop to give lifts like we did. Twice we stopped and gave local men twenty to thirty minute journeys to the next town from seemingly random stop point on the road. 

  Soon after we arrived back at the hotel a group of motorcyclists stopped and parked their bikes close to each other, in front of the hotel, with a large moving/storage van full of who-knows-what in terms of bike mechanics connected to the bikers as back up. Their arrival and settling in rooms in the hotel, and then having afternoon drinks outside was all quite a show of activity, added to by the display of workaday masculinity where the local boys were particularly impressed by the bikes and some of their mothers got permission for the boys to sit on the bikes and be photographed on them. 

  Our evening meal was fish surrounded by salted ice, with side portions of stuffed aubergine. it looked impressive when it was served. The hotel had agreed the meal with Anthony in the afternoon, where if they did tell him what sort of fish it was then his hearing aid did not help him catch and pass on to me that bit of information on to me. But the town was known for being a fishing port and went with the flow about the fish. It tasted okay, and there was plenty of it. Part of me would have liked a few different veg for more variety of flavour. The bikers were again the centre of attention as the dozen or so of them ate together, and collectively decided to eat their main course in front of the hotel, by taking their tables and chairs there, by agreement with the staff.

  Read more of 'Carn'-Patrick McCabe before bed. I could admire how he satirised small town Ireland by reframing his fictional Irish small town as one of the many small American towns where in the late sixties the presentation of pop music on vast temporarily erected stages nearby became like some new kind of circus coming to town. Woodstock and Monterey were the names of the towns that came to my mind. I could admire his satires of certain English towns whose previous characters were warped by forced expansion, and later similar changes were wrought by dramatic economic shrinkage. But sometimes the grafting of different imported realities onto his fictional Irish town took more than a stretch of imagination, it stretched credibility. Anthony was mostly puzzled at what McCabe seemed to be doing, he had seen the Irish town McCabe was writing about for real, in the 1960s. 

 The third day was over.

Please left click here for Day Four of this diary.  

Blocked

In the Wealthy West we know,
but don't want to acknowledge,
how close every new year is
by the increase in the volume,
and the intensity, of the adverts
in our choice of media, from
Youtube to commercial television
and every media outlet in between.

For those with the adblockers
that ease their online life
to make it more productive
the only questions left to ask
is where do they get their
Christmas blockers from?
Can they share where they get them from
or would that be too much like advertising?

Picture Set of The Month - November - The County Down Floods

Downpatrick submerged in flood waters Nov 2023  

These floods were the worst in living memory.
Not even the oldest, longest trading, local traders
could remember scenes like it. 

In Newry a boat would have got you further than a car.

The canal, central to Newry, flooded the commercial
centre of the town to such a degree that some traders,
and many charities, will not be back. 

If that car belonged to the landlord of the property
then that landlord is sunk twice or three times over,
with how their neighbours trading prospects are sunk too.