The Remaindered Life

is like the lives of the books that get remaindered,
and all the food that gets close to its 'sell by date'
which has to be sold off at a much reduced price
because the shop has no wish to have on their site
the necessity to recycle organic matter or plastics,
that would cost them more than the hit of the loss
of selling the food below it's cost price.

As long s it is sustainable,
even when it is seen as waste,
then what, and to whom, does it matter?

My life matters to so few people nowadays
that even positive relationships assume the tone,
and the aspect, of being remaindered.

When my neighbour has an item
that she no longer likes the look of,
but feels still has value I am the one
to be given the first option on it
when the alternative is the bin.

Being remaindered, I try to make
my cheap life seem useful to others
for as much as that holds,
but what I truly put my hope in
is my non-corporeal remains, 
being remaindered in eternity.         

Have You Ever Been Oversold Anything?

Where is the pill that will give us a better resistance
against the life engineered to be unscientific
where the best medicine is always overselling?

 

Scabrous Thoughts

I see the Israel/Palestine conflict
as 'The wound that resists all healing'. 

From the latter days of the Ottoman Empire
(1517-1917) Palestine was always a backwater
for the many bigger countries in the empire
to promise to build up, and fight each other over,
whilst laying waste in the fight to the materials
that would have made good on the promises.

This would be well before ideas of Zionism
took their first primitive shape, in the late 1800's.

Palestine was to the Ottoman Empire
what Belgium was to Western Europe,
a non-country that created peace
by settling competing empire ambitions
that were ground to a stalemate
in the countries that surrounded it.

Rather than the land being a country
with a people and an identity
that was definitely it's own, Belgium,
and Palestine, were buffer zones.

When the Ottoman Empire was no more
the Jews made plans for it as a homeland
whilst Palestine's historic inhabitants
kept the lesser identity of themselves
of being par buffer zone part future
to the many Islamic republics, an image
those countries enjoyed playing up to.

Nowadays the politics of Israel vs Palestine
vs other Islamic countries plays out
like an episode of victim (Palestine) vs
persecutor (Israel) where Islamic Republics
of different size play rescuer to Palestine,
whilst making a victim of Israel etc.

I don't really want to go there.

Spiritual Origins

A common phrase observes well
how attached folks get to their origins, 
'You can take a person away
from where they were raised
but you can't take where they born
out of who they are.'. 

A quote that seems more cogent
the more damaged and sentimental
beyond all reason their upbringing.

I know too few people well enough
to ask them as friends about the child
vs the adult in them without me
being accused of 'playing  the psychiatrist',
but I would love to be able to ask them
'What did you think 'spirituality' was
when you were a child? and as an adult?'
Is it different now, to how you expected it to be?'.

If asked this myself then I still don't know
what the answers would be, but they exist.

The Charisma Question

One of the most commonly observed
but least understood human phenomena
is charisma, which exists in animals too.

Defining charisma is relatively easy.
In a situation where instruction is involved
charisma is a quality where those instructed
are more malleable because of the charisma
of their instructor, It is much more than seniority,
or pulling rank within a tightly defined hierarchy.

To be a religious leader, a politician, or musician
and be a success at it requires measures of skill,
organisational ability, and (cue fanfare... ) charisma!
For the demonstration of your skills etc to take effect
and the charismatic person to become wealthy.

Charisma is the gift for finding the switch
in ordinary people's brains that makes them believe,
without being able to form questions, what they are told.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Eleven - The Near And The Far Away

I had no complaints when after six weeks of being a peripatetic care assistant the council changed my job title, and my work, from care assistant where I visited people in their homes and helped them start the day, to being a care worker and visitor who would visit them well after Breakfast. I was relieved that my morning bus journeys to work were standardised to two long journey via the city centre, with the variations of my choice for the journey back. From being a student ten years earlier I had always been 'a bag person', that is I always had a carrier bag with me taking the days required items in one direction and finding more to take back. In Nottingham the upgrade was to a medium sized frameless rucksack, a then-recent charity shop purchase into which I put the food from my late afternoon post-work shopping trips as part of my journey home.10

From April to December I applied myself diligently to the task of being one of a team of three misfit male care workers, and one manager, Pete, who were sent to work in a large fixed portacabin which had several rooms in it, as an office in the middle of one of the more thoroughly run down working class estates in Nottingham where there was not a church, social services, or any sort community building within a three mile radius of the estate. The community I was sent out into were tired and socially withdrawn from so many of then making their benefits stretch to cover their living costs whilst they rented council houses and flats where the council seemed somewhat distant from them. They felt left behind by both Thatcherism and local government. I was employed to make local government seem a little closer and more relevant to them than it had seemed in recent times.20

I write 'misfit', we were all using up the remainder of our part time Manpower Services Commission contracts by doing a job that would either not be done at all or would be more naturally done by women. We were paid to visit local residents and be the better informed neighbour, who when a resident of the area presents a problem as part of a conversation, for us working for the council/living outside the area we could see more clearly that the council had a service that would partially or entirely fix the problem. That is a short profile of what a care worker was meant to do.26

Outside of making council services like meals-on-wheels more amenable to the residents, one of the more useful questions we were licensed to ask was with respect to state benefits. We could and did ask people 'What benefits are you on?' and 'Are you getting all the benefits you are entitled to?'. Quite a few local resident had built up debts that had to be repaid with interest that they could not repay to companies that sold goods from catalogues. One of the still useful parts of the welfare state was to get a loan from the Department of Social Security that repaid the debts with interest that residents had taken out, where the DSS loan was charged at zero percent interest which was repaid at rate agreed with the claimant out of their benefits. We were good at helping local people fill out benefit forms, partly because we were only one job title away from filling in forms on the dole ourselves. We always made sure that the claimant was seen to have filled the forms in, themselves.37 

I liked Pete, the manager, he was going to keep his job with the council, though he might change title and project, long after our contracts ended. Now a man does not have to be gay to feel okay doing what others define as 'a woman's job' but it might help. Up to a point, I think my sexuality helped me do the job better. The job was not going to help me out of the closet-that would take a more personal and emotional push than the job could be. Of the three of us Arthur was the oldest. He was in his early fifties, had an interest in the Citizens Advice side of the work we did from a leftist/journalist's union perspective. He was married and he managed a drink problem. His wife suspected him of adultery, not realising his commitment was to alcohol rather than another female. When he changed his choice of alcoholic drink to one that he was happier having less of that made his wife and his financial position more secure. When I went on a visit and came away with some further choice of action on behalf of who I had just visited  Arthur was a person who saw clearer than I did whether the householder really wanted the help I thought they wanted, or whether they were nearer being bored and making up needs they did not want met.52

I was not alone in getting on badly with the other care worker, Michael. He was the youngest of the three of us. If he was not gay then he was camp enough for others to think he was gay when he was being abrasive and declamatory in the office. With many of the visits we were chatting with women heads of households who were on benefits, who had sons who had moved away. I knew that it was easy for them to see us to see them as like their sons. I knew to be wary about temporary attempts to relate to others with an age/gender gap like that. I tried to keep my visits formal but friendly. That said, I'd level with the women I visited when it felt we were both safe doing that. Goodness knows how he handled the age/gender gap on his visits. If it was anything like his acting out in the office during breaks then he was truly taking the Michael out of the job, particularly when he revealed how well his weekend job as a assistant at HMV paid by comparison. 63

Arthur got annoyed when Michael took the job less seriously in the office, but than we all did,  during the summer months when there seemed to be more time than there seemed to be work to do to fill that time. Michael was one of the few people I can remember privately being very clearly angry and contemptuous towards. Perhaps he had some special technique for getting under the skin of those around him, or I was thinner skinned than I realised in the first place. 68

The latter is more than possible. Pete was the young university educated team leader who kept us all motivated in the face of the indifference around us. He was advancing his career by training as a therapist. I liked him, but then I would have liked any man who seemed personable and had a beard. That said, any attraction that I found through my submerged homosexuality always left me with more questions than I could openly ask myself. The secrecy and lack of explanation it came with required something like assertiveness training to blow the cobwebs away off the subject for me. 75

One day Pete and I got sat talking alone. All the other staff were out on calls. I was lingering over some minor file updating that could be done anytime. By some sort of conversational accident he began talking about his training as a therapist. As far as I could tell my 'being gay' was something others might be able to decode in me if they wanted to. But even if they did, neither of us would have had the words to directly discuss what they had decoded. To me such a dialogue required courage to invent it. But as Pete talked about his training as therapist I was persuaded to reveal one of the earliest unfortunate episodes around my father and his relationship with alcohol. It involved me reading out Christmas cards aged five, and seemingly setting off world war three between my parents just a few feet away from me. 84

Pete very easily regressed me right back to being that five year old in that small living room, reading that card. We were both frightened at how easily he had done it, and both nervous about what to do next to bring me back to a more secure adult state. I found the solution. Aged five I was keen to prove I could read, I read out a Christmas card which caused my parents to argue in such an explosive way that it left me with a hidden trauma. So with Pete, and still in the emotional state of being traumatised and five years old, I teared up a piece of paper as if it were the Christmas card that had seemingly caused me the trauma. This immediately restored me to being the adult he needed me to be, by giving my five year old self an exit they could use from a situation that originally lacked any such exit. But what Pete and I did was dangerous in any setting, and particularly risky in that makeshift private space. 94

I was more glad of that free therapy session, dangerous as it was, than I expected to be at the next works summer Friday night at the pub. At these occasions I joined in because I felt I had to, but I felt I had a lot to be modest about. From the unofficial therapy session onward I felt more confident amid those sometimes disjointed Friday night conversations.96

To be directed to Chapter Twelve please left click here. 

A Life Tested For Shrinkage

 Will always fall short. Will find both life and shrinkage. And the less serious and less thoughtful the shrinkage, the bigger that shrinkage is. There even laughter seems cheap and diminished, a hollow noise where once life seemed fuller. But when you are the butt of the joke enjoy it. You are still making somebody laugh somewhere, there is always a rich life beyond ourselves, and it will often be richer than we think it is, give others what they need and don't worry about your own shrinkage. It happens to everyone.

Self Reinvention Is Never Far Away

Unless we are born into royalty,
or somehow become cult figures
who can command total deference
for life from those we attract,
and deference in the hereafter,
we are all, to a degree, half-formed.

We will never be the people
our complex society advertises we will be,
even when they give us half the means
to be complete, expecting us to busk the rest.

The pressure to conform is easy.
All it takes is an advertisers' nudge
or the withdrawal of gov't money
to make us much more ill at ease
whilst being half-formed, and pressurise us
to doubt the half-sense we have of ourselves.

Whilst signing out of this deal
is difficult, we should not worry.

When societies becomes data
every society is only as good
as it's data storage systems,
and when they collectively fail,
as data storage systems will,
there will be no other version of us,
we are complete in our half memories
complete in how we reinvent ourselves. 

Faith In Language

Until I looked the words up,
I did not realise that the phrase
'super injunction' were so recent
in being coined, or by whom.

2006, and The Guardian, since you ask.

But I understood it straight away.
I had a long memory of living
as part of a family where explaining
to ourselves and each other
what we were doing
and why we had to do it
was an anathema, or at least
it would have been if they knew
what an anathema was.

Adopting religion, well a faith,
did not help the way I thought it would.
There I found not just taboo,
but taboo about taboo, until faith
in language became that difficult
I did not know what to.

Starting from scratch I kept the faith,
but with George Orwell as my guide
I decided that language has to be direct,
active not passive and what mattered
was being able to say who did what,
and when and why they did it.

To ask all this in faith meant that
I could at least have faith in language,
and maybe language could reflect
the life that I thought I was living.     

The Market For Having An Identity.

It is strange how easily old Hollywood,
for being aberrant and ahistorical in itself,
could push images and perpetuate myths
that were nonsense multiplied for viewers
to take as gospel long after the film first had currency.

In 'It's A Wonderful Life' there is a scene
where the towns people lay siege to their local bank
'to ask for their money back' as if the money
they once put in the bank long ago was still there,
their names were on the notes, or at least on the boxes
that their money was stored in, in the safe, as if  the bank
was a safer version of putting the money under their mattress.

To state the obvious, money does not work like that.
Nor does identity and every identity based on money
and property is only as stable as the market for exchange
that it is part of. The process of exchange, new money for old, 
identity updates and advances with age, are what supports
the renewal of every given community and society. 

You will still exist, whatever the bureaucracy.
Whether it is a bank holding your details,
and money that was only ever notionally yours
at the moment you handed it over. Or when the gov't
holds details that facilitate what seems to be the life
style of your choice, when it was chosen for you.

If you want an identity outside of all that,
then first you have to realise the size
of what you are asking for-it is a lot.

As for me, the bank no longer ask for my i/d
as they asked before, the tellers recognise me.
I could not ask for more than that.

       

Unintentional Virtue

The biggest mistake anyone can make
is to deny the possibility
that they will make mistakes.
It can only mean they make more
of the mistakes they made before,
and do worse-through not learning.

The best we can do is adapt
our errors in the hope of change
-making a different mistake-
in the hope of finding virtue in them.

 

Sex, Honesty About Risk, And Genuine Safety

What no teenager appreciates,
because the adults they depend on
rarely have the means to explain it,
is that every society has it's predators
and every society in history is sexual.

Modern societies like their talk of sex
to be clean and safe to share,
in their modernity they play down
notions of risk, to up the sense of safety
whilst denying bad things happen
with their partial explanations.

What parents deny is how much
youths are attractive to predators,
and all the more attractive for their
not knowing how attractive they are,
whether the predator is their employer
or that 'family friend' they see from afar. 

However old I get I hope I understand
what 'virginity' should be, operationally.
'Being a virgin' never meant not knowing
what sex was, it meant knowing enough
about sex, along with working definitions
of what money and power are,
to resist being corrupted by them.

We have to know what corruption is
to be able to resist being corrupted.
Nobody should argue otherwise.

Three Rules For Effective Work?

   

These 'rules', maxims would be a more accurate description for them, have become misattributed to physicist Albert Einstein. They originated from a 1979 article where, physicist John Archibold Wheeler, who worked with Einstein late in the latter's life, wrote about Einstein, including his one time mentor's approach to theoretical science. Wheeler wrote 'There are three additional rules of Einstein’s work that stand out for use in our science, our problems, our times. First, out of clutter find simplicity. Second from discord make harmony. Third, in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.'. I am fine with saying that about a blackboard full of equations, but I am unsure how well the maxim applies the further it taken from academia into ordinary every day life.  

It should not be surprising that the credit for the quote has migrated to the more famous of of the two physicists. The internet, and our continuous partial attention span, does that. As information travels so it loses tags and origin points. Nor should anyone be taken aback at how the quote gets applied to business rather than the science and the field of physics that it originated in. The internet has fed more inattentiveness in more different directions than any other media in history. 

Seeking simplicity and harmony and the midst of what seems at first sight to be ugly and complicated long predates the study of physics, it is the logic behind the beatitudes amongst many other spiritual quotations, that are partially lived out every day. So it is no surprise to me that in the midst of scientific investigation spiritual values are rediscovered. 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Ten - Life On Hangman's Row

In this brave new start I had found, of living on Hangman's Rd, my biggest personal decision was to stop keeping a diary. I found the last six years of diaries among the things I kept in my room. From reading some of the entries in them as I filed the diaries away I realised how much over the last six or seven years of writing them that at best they were inconsistent in the details they recorded. At worst what I wrote seemed like trivia, and I had been highly evasive about putting my personal feelings in the diary entries. That my most personal feelings had only found expression in activities that seemed to not have a name seemed to be beside the point. By deciding to not keep a diary from then on I abandoned the diary I had started. I resolved to by whatever means open to me develop the intent to be more honest about myself in my person, more than I had in writing where I believed that I had fallen short of the standard I wanted to keep.

I was not the only one of my friends to move. One close friend, Graham R, had finally organised himself to get out of the English midlands and lead the life he always wanted to live in Cornwall. His parting gift to me came with mixed blessing attached to it. It was a black and white portable television that he did not want to take with him and I was the best choice of recipient for it. In one way I was lucky with the gift, I did not have to buy a license, the landlord's license for the house covered my viewing habits. He had left a colour television in the kitchen for communal use. where whoever of the five of us was there together the most agreeable consensus for it's use was at most some sort background distraction where nobody particularly liked the channel it was set to But whoever was there disliked the other channels more. That there were only four channels to choose from simplified any disagreement on which channel it should be set to when the set was on.

I watched what I really wanted to watch in my room, albeit with reduced quality. The black and white television sat on my bedside table and I would watch it from the warmth of my single bed. It felt quietly luxurious to me when 'The World's Strongest Man 1988' was broadcast and I watched it alone in my room. In no way did I recognise that I effectively had a soft porn habit fed by my choice of television programme, where I rendered the screen images of these big men lifting big weights and moving buses etc as my definition of porn. The television presentation of their efforts assisted me in this. It was complimented by slow motion replays of certain lifts etc, and interviews with the performers who claimed to be, and were presented as, athletes who were strictly in competition with each other. But when the camera lingered on the lightly dressed rather large bodies of these 'athletes' and the body moved and flexed a little, creating a reaction in certain viewers the physicality of the athletes seemed to be more important than any competition they were supposedly part of. Who could place where the narcissism loop actually started, when the chain ran from the athletes in training in private and went via their open competition with each other through the television screen through to the millions of viewers? Who could care enough to want to resist the loop after it had become self perpetuating enough as to become a fixture in the commercial television schedules?

The external formalities of settling into this new room proved a lot easier than I expected them to be. The form filling for the housing benefit went a lot more smoothly than before and because Nottingham City Council had taken over the remaining contracts set up by The Manpower Services Commission everything was 'in house' and between the city council and West Bridgford council it was all dealt with far more promptly than before.

I liked the room too. In the parental house my sister had got the best room in house for it being the most hospitable room that was the width of the house, I was getting the same at this new address. The other renters were working class men of mixed ages, jobs and backgrounds who accepted that they were nicest in small doses, such as when they met each other in the kitchen whilst cooking a meal for themselves. A meal which they ate on their own in their bedsits. Nobody ate their meal in the kitchen even though it was meant to be a communal space. It was too indifferently furnished for anyone to want to stay  there too long, We carried our meals to our rooms even though it meant carrying our plate climbing one or two flights of stairs that were dimly lit from above.

I attempted the occasional attempted communal meal. One tenant worked for a time in an abattoir. By agreement he brought home for free a whole pigs head from which he removed all the edible meat. His show his expertise with sharp knives on the kitchen table of what was clearly head shaped was quite a sight, the nearest we would get to theatre  in that shared house where really we  shrank into our rooms as much as we shrank to fit around the world we were supposedly part of. The idea worked, once, We all had our fill and the meal was cheap. But experiment was not repeated. 

I found a much better prepared communal life in people's homes through work. With my first job working directly for the council as a care assistant I was sent to different addresses across West Bridgford and nearby The Meadows to help the disabled and the elderly, mostly men, start their days. Helping them to get them up and wash themselves, and making their breakfast for them on a tight schedule was rewarding work when they were keen. I spent a fair amount of unpaid time on buses getting to and from appointments, but the bus journeys between clients became my break times. I was not issued with any sort of pass to reduce the prices of bus fares, but there was an expenses scheme to collect my work related bus tickets for, I liked working on my own. I was comfortable with knowing management was there to support me, and the client would report back to them if anything was amiss. But other than the expected client feedback to the management I was left to get on with the job. The work did not feel to me as if it was 'woman's work', nor did I see myself as an exception in my gender for doing the work that I did. Much less did I hanker after my former placement in the Leonard Cheshire Home, close as it was to where I now lived.

One client was particularly notable. He was a young man who had been wheelchair bound since birth, but he was obviously intelligent for all he was slow of speech. He saw himself as Christian. I went to my first classical music concert as his attendant, It was a performance of the large scale choral piece by Edward Elgar, 'The Dream of Gerontius'. That it was live music-something I saw rarely-should have impressed me. But the overall impression that I felt was one where the performance was the musical equivalent of a large piece of solid looking dark stained Victorian furniture.

He was not only a Christian but he had passed theological exams, and was part of a circuit of preachers. In the time I knew him he got himself booked to speak from the stage at Christian camping events. Being a Christian, myself, I temporarily became his ideal choice of carer-for-his-travels. I attended several camping events with him, events where away from their home churches, Christians looked for renewal via spiritual insight and fresh thinking.

I got my share of that through showing the levels of practical charity involved in waking a disabled person up whilst in their sleeping bag in their tent, then sitting them up comfortably at the edge of their tent so that I could fit their catheter and start to fully dress them. Only then could I lift him into his wheelchair, which I had to steer slowly over rough ground for us to go off in search of breakfast. Whatever anyone might call the mix of a gentle attitude, physical strength, and a lack of squeamishness about the human body, I had enough of all of them for him, until he found somebody else with a similar aptitude. 

To be directed to Chapter Eleven please left click here.

 

Home And Abroad

'A ghetto' is what we say other people
live in, in countries where even when
we know they have difficulty leaving,
and the laws they live under are unfair,
'we don't like to get over concerned'.

We say 'I live in a community' which is
what limits our concern, whilst disguised,
we 'other' our neighbours, by declining
to recognise them as being anything like us. 

But there remain similarities to be observed.

The first is who sets the connections
that make a people cohere to each other?
Where a people set their own boundaries
and the fences seem good from both sides
it makes for good neighbours but how long,
in a competitive, materially grasping, world,
will that go on? Even as we like peace at home
we export war and disease abroad for our comfort.

And the greater the comfort
the further away from us
we have to keep war and disease,
whilst importing luxury materials
until where we live is our empire.

Between The Logarithms

that give us more of what we liked before
because it is what they know we liked
-like parents pleasing a child not realising
that children grow and change their minds-,
the astounding copying facilities of AI
-where the sense of the uncanny spooks us-,
and last but far from least the human capacity
for rumour, error, and disguising how we lie
-both to ourselves and to each other-
the men who seek to sell us powerful computers
have to do a lot to convince us of why to trust them.

But then as children we grew up with families
who liked recreating pasts past their sell by date
by the time we tried to live them out,
grew up with teachers who wanted their pupils
to be better copyists of the best of the near past,
and grew up with liars for whom the last thing
they wanted was to be found to be fabricating.

If that was the analogue, and human, version
of what computers can do with greater consistency,
if not also greater ease than we dare imagine,
then let us not be surprised when the digital version
of ourselves replicates all our faults
as well as our sense of human invention. 

A Rainbow In Curved Air - Live!

 This famous piece of music has been around for a mere fifty years or so. The studio version is great music for driving on motorways. The music starts at the 4 minute mark. The introduction before that by Terry Riley is also worth listening to at least once or twice.    

A Page From The Book Of Disquiet

By Portuguese poet and prose writer
Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935) an author
 so prolific he wrote works under 75 other names
and spoke and wrote in at least three languages

 

Continuous Impartial Attentiveness

is the state of mind that it is hard to find
in Homo Sapiens, where how they think
never resolves to a single settled state.

It is the fate of even the finest minds
to not merely need to wander, but requiring
somewhere else to be, and when to be there,
for them to be fully but briefly engaged
with where they are in any present situation.

So when you leave off reading this blog,
and click on the next tab, and site after that
just remember that you were here once
even if it seems unclear what you were here for.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Do zombies have a consciousness
by which to know that they are zombies?

Or would thinking you were a zombie
mean that you were not one, even when
your thoughts, and other people's comments,
tell you that you are? 

as it says in exam papers 'discuss....'.

Planet 0 Humans -500; Extra Time Limited

At last I have found a use for football,
it gives me a unit of measurement for the rate
of the slow but clear advance of the sixth extinction.
Who would have thought that a game
played in schools to 'use up spare energy'
in primary school pupils would have such
a powerful existential afterlife?
As unit of measurement for the removal
of generous, quiet, life-giving ancient 
forest all there is left to ask is how many
trees can grow on an area the size of
a football field. Please left click here
for one answer. Though what disturbs 
me is next uncalculated question,
the number of tree years in each football field's
worth of virgin Amazonian forest chopped down.  
For this there is only one answer; too many,    

 

Supermarket Spirituality

In these multi-media multi-faith times
people are used to being divided by group
in their opinions on spiritual matters.
We all follow this online page, that website,
where faiths that promote themselves as unique
are taken back to their origins of being one faith
among a throng, who willing supported diversity.

So now we can go online to shop for nurture
for our spirit as we want. Atheists too have fora
to observe the phenomena of what they disbelieve,
though how scientifically they dis/believe
what they all observe remains to be argued over.

Meanwhile I notice as I walk to church
not only my faith in walking, but how much
church goers drive to their place of worship
the same way people drive to supermarkets,
in a state of consistent subdued distraction.
 

The Unbelievable Life

Anyone who tells those around them
'I would sell my soul for [insert ambition here]'
clearly has ambitions beyond all reason.

They may be the success
that they first set out to be,
and by some post hoc logic 
will reckon the price they paid
and where what it got them 
to be 'worth what it cost'
even when where it got them
was short of what it was meant to be
and the process can no more be undone
than it can be repeated
but there is room for doubt there.

Their wants could only be lived once,
and after their soul and sanity returns to them,
both slightly scarred, an ordinary life beckons 
where their former ambitions will seem absurd
and well beyond retelling.        

A Better Measure

If only there was an index,
and units of measurement,
that got the measure of corporate insincerity,
the sort of thing when a corporation, a minister
or some small town bully business man 
finds the wrong side of public opinion
through their actions-to the point
of being publicly rebuked, fined,
or pushed into taking the actions
they originally ran for office to perform
but got bored with maintaining,
because changing their plans
brought them too much money to count.

Then we would have a measure
of the world that properly measured
the depreciation of public service values.
  

Your Lifelong Audio Companion

Unwelcome as it is, tinnitus is a daily experience
for many, including for the deaf who hear the whistle 
ringing, buzz or hum when they hear little else quite as clearly.
There is nothing making the sound, which comes and goes
in either one ear or the other in it's own time. Some get a stereo image
of it, as if it is coming from the both channels/ears, or from
the centre of their head.
For others it is musical, similar but different to ear worms-
when a random well known tune comes into a person's head.
Please left click here to hear what mine sounds like,
or here for the UK Tinnitus Support website for more
about the noise that nobody can avoid when they hear it.   

 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Nine - Momentum

When any tenant seeks to rent a room in a city there are different questions to be answered. What is the character of the area of the new address like? Does the rent seem reasonable for what is on offer? Does the landlord accepts housing benefit? How good is the room? Does the address have access to a garden? How close is the address to the nearest grocers shop? How near are the nearest bus routes and roads useful for getting into town or work? And last, but far from least, does the landlord seem amenable? With these questions, particularly the last, I had been hasty first time around. But hast was necessary for me to get my placement started, and unlike the average student moving away from home for the first time did not have a supportive family protecting my back, as I chose where to live.

The first tenancy was hastily and ill chosen, but even with the hindsight of just a few weeks in work I could not see how I could have chosen with more discernment. And that tenancy was supportive enough to be my first firm foothold on life in Nottingham. This included going through the process of finding the right council office to send my housing benefit forms to at the second attempt, as opposed to taking the forms to the wrong one for not knowing, and nobody in the department saying anything. When West Bridgford Council put in an appeal against me receiving housing benefit from when I first arrived in spite of having delivered the forms to the wrong council department, I won the appeal, they lost. I was paid in full. All of this prepared me better for when Mike gave me a fortnight's notice to move to another address. But finding my feet through making mistakes did make trying to settle feel like a close run thing, and this was without my work for the Leonard Cheshire Home coming to an end more abruptly that I could have imagined. But I had a work contract that had most of a year left to run.

Pierrepoint Rd was not the most positive sounding address I could imagine myself living on. Why live on a road named after the last hangman in England? Albert Pierrepoint was also known as a distinctly disgruntled chap, for lack of work towards the end of his career. Or so I was told. I might very well have wondered how he compared with my new landlord, on Pierrepoint Rd. Brian was a divorced middle aged man who earlier in his life had been in a childless marriage and had been the manager of a pub. The house Brian lived in, and rented rooms to others in, was his main financial asset after what must have been a difficult divorce settlement and downsizing. Even when he was at his most cheerful and everyday there was a clear melancholy about him. How much of his ache was due to the shock of the divorce and it consequences was hard to tell. He did not even have a store of anecdotes about cheery times in the pub he once ran.

Maybe Brian's melancholy was what I was looking for, and I did not realise it at the time. When I lived with my parents both dad and next door neighbour Stan were men whose lives had somehow stalled, all progress in their lives went on hold from when they were about forty onward. Stan had married a German woman some time after WW2. He had swiftly become resigned to being a widower/bachelor from the time his wife died in the 1950's, some time before my parents bought the house next door to him in 1960. As of 1988, when I moved to Pierrepoint Rd, my mother was going shopping for him as if shopping was 'women's work', and he knew too little about it. Dad had lost his job aged forty four, just ten years before I moved to this new address. He was uncomfortably adjusting to the idea that after over twenty years in the same job he might never get paid work again.

My own sense of melancholy came to the fore when I finally unpacked everything I owned as part of my settling into Pierrepoint Rd. Some young adults could take leave of their parents with good things 'from the bottom draw' that their parents had saved for the child to use to making a home that was entirely their own. I had no such family or privilege. From aged seven I had slept in the attic, surrounded by boxes of things where the boxes took up space that I might have valued. What blocked my future changed the older I got, from the lack of physical space to excuses as to why this that and the other that was normal for other folk 'was not for us'. Nonetheless I had done my best over the four changes of address over the last eight years to accumulate enough good for the place I wanted to live in.

As I looked at some of what I had brought with me, all my worldly goods, scales fell from my eyes in ways that I was unprepared for. For the first time I was confronted with my own adoption of the avoidance and poor judgement that I associated with my parents. Part of the storage I had kept things in was a shopping trolley. When I had lived in Gainsborough I had used it for putting my shopping in. In Gainsborough it seemed mildly worn but useable to me. In it's new place it looked like something a bag lady would look at with condescension. It went to the bin promptly, along with one other odd object that I could barely credit as to why I had kept it. It was the painted glass front of a radiogramme, the 1950s equivalent of a music centre, showing the different radio stations that when the tuning knob was turned an indicator passed behind the glass, lit from below, to show the frequency and station the set was tuned to. Why keep something so useless away from what it was originally part of?

My mother's sentimentality is the short answer. The longer answer is that the radiogramme the glass came from was once part of was one of the items of furniture my parents had been given when they first moved into the house dad bought when they married, in 1960. By 1965 it had stopped working and they care too little about it to get it repaired, and continue to listen to it. Instead dad reorganised the living room in 1968 and made the black and white television he started renting the focal point of the living room. Between dad never fully completing tasks and Mother being a hoarder, the radiogramme got as far as the back yard and stayed there, the cheap walnut veneer pealing slowly with the seasons. In 1971 when I had some sort of nervous breakdown I spent the summer of 1972 away from family in the back yard. I whiled away the hours imagining the voices that might have come from the radio. When I was eventually sent away the deal that my parents came to was that the radiogramme was to go to the dump, but the glass was to be retrieved and kept as a souvenir for me, to be kept in my boxed-in attic room until in 1985. That year was when the attic room had a bath put in it. If installing a bath in the attic seems to be a strange arrangement then that strangeness was mild compared with the awkward compromises and explanations for compromises that my parents had cooked up between them over the decades, with Mother doing most of the cooking, since I was born.

At mother's bidding I had kept the glass from 1985 onward. She thought that it was part of my relationship with her. If I felt different then I knew to not say so. Still, I was surprised at seeing the glass wrapped in local newspaper in February 1988, and surprised at how what looked now like a piece of junk had once had so much feeling invested in it. With my third change of address since the glass left the parental house, the glass, and much more besides, was put in the bin.

To be directed to Chapter Ten please left click here. 

How To Deal With Cold Callers

who call on the phone, whose aim
is to sell you something expensive
you never needed to 'improve your home'
which won't be an actual improvement;
tell them 'I rent my home, your sale pitch
should be aimed at my landlord, the owner.'
without giving the caller a phone number.

They won't know whether what you say
is true or false. Long before they rang you
they were more caught up with being better liars
than they think you could be, and you were not to know that.

Great Turn Off's Of Our Time (37)

'The Economy is turning a corner'
is a phrase that if people were paid
to have to listen to being trotted out
then the economy really would change.

As it is economies move too slowly
for us to feel them change and our feelings
are what needs to turn the corner, before
the economy drives us clean round the bend.

But more seriously whatever the metaphor
for how we feel about the money we don't have,
but expect in our hand, to buy the future we expect
we can't know the process of purchase in advance.

We are the ones turning the corner
with the money we have in our hands,
where the poor live close to within their means,
but the rich see their wealth as a way to lever debt,
as if debt were the future they can buy now, and pay for 
much later, if ever, because their capital buys them that. 
 

Picture Set Of The Month - April - Paintings by Suzanne Duchamp

                                                         

 

Top; 'Funnel of Solitude' (1921)
Second; 'Broken and Restored Multiplication (1919)
Third; 'Radiation of Two Lone Ones at a Distance (1920)  
Bottom; 'Marcel Duchamp's unhappy Readymade' (1920),
All painted by Dada artist, and sister of Marcel,
Suzanne Duchamp (1889-1963) one of four of the six
brothers and sisters of the Duchamp family who became artists.
Please left click here for more on Suzanne Duchamp. 

 

Bring Out Your Undead

One of the phrases I have long thought
deserved to be in a blog, but I could never find
the right news cycle to attach it to, is
'Zombie Capitalism; Night of the living debt.'.

My problem has always been when,
and in response to what crisis, to use it.

America, and the wider world, runs up debts
that either get written off or are never repaid.
Such a phrase could only be apt for a crisis
when repayment for old debts is so extreme
it is beyond absurd. But America pushes
the definition of absurdity just like it resists
repaying it's debts, until it is never absurd;
it is more that the world it leads is not enough
in hock to economic growth to recognise
the macabre energy behind it's reinvention.    

Homophobia Inc; A Survey

Uganda is far from the only country
to criminalise being gay and lesbian.

The death penalty for a non-procreative
companionship and same sex intimacy
is also available in Iran, Northern Nigeria,
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar,
Brunei, the two stans Paki and Afghani,
Somalia, Yemen, and finally Mauritania.

In total sixty five British Commonwealth countries
have laws that make homosexuality both inevitable
and illegal. We can be sure they would all threaten
to leave the Commonwealth if asked to modernise
their old colonial laws and, like the mother country,
accept what can't be regulated; sexual minorities.

I don't know which is worse for inspiring homophobia,
but whether their spur is Islam or colonialism,
these countries have good teachers in how to not forgive
those who are are unwilling, but natural, outsiders 
to a system, patriarchal marriage, which is meant
to benefit the few, wealthy men, and provoke
many more to a state of dis-ease, managed unhappiness.

 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Eight - The Funeral Part Two

When I arrived at the parental house to complete my family duties I could see something had changed in the living room, but I could not work out what it was. Everything looked it's usual sort-of in order, but the room seemed to have shrunk. Whether the shrinkage was from some extra clutter or from how my parents visibly shrank from each other was hard to separate in that small space. One habit had changed. How they ate. With just the two of them they ate from trays put on their laps as they sat in comfortable chairs facing the television. I found that I could not remember when we all last sat at the table to eat. From tme being about eight years old onward the table had been an increasingly uncomfortable place to eat, but for as long as the formality outweighed the discomfort it seemed the better option. Now comfort and informality were 'in' and the television was even more the focus of the room than before.

The evening of my return dad went out to the pub. Mother's clearest sign of welcome to me was turning the television off immediately after he left. She needed to update me on what had happened with Gran and say some things about herself that she had to deny when dad was about. The following day she asked me to go with her to the allotment. Only when we were over half the mile from the house did Mother breathe more easily and explain some of the more difficult details of Gran's declining health in her last years, Facts that Gran had kept to herself, or she had shared with Alice. But Alice had withheld from Mother until it was too late for Mother to do anything make Gran's life easier in her own right.

Mother also repeated how, particularly from when Gran and Grandad had moved to the flat, Alice had started charging Gran and Grandad over the odds for doing their laundry and getting their groceries, and had over claimed for petrol money etc. It took some time before Grandad told Mother about this. But that was when Mother took those duties from Alice and did them for much more modest sums. When Mother challenged Alice about this Alice went all falsely meek and defensive about it to cover her tracks. 

The way Mother spoke going up to the allotment made me wonder where I had been that last three years. 'Kept out of the loop' was the shortest answer, where the loop was an all female family network and even if I was told something I could do nothing to change it. I had seen Gran in the flat quite often. I can still picture the knots on her knuckles and the swollen joints of her fingers, which became fixed permanently at forty five degree angles to the palm of her hands due to the severity of her arthritis. Her head bent would be resting over her chest because the curvature of her spine had been allowed to go that far. Pillows supported her head at a comfortable angle to her body, In her last years Gran could no longer swallow food but with her head supported she was able to drink a little warm tea when she was fed it from a saucer every time that Mother got a lift to visit Gran and Grandad from her best gardening friend, Ted Hepenstall, and insisted that I come too. Mother's delivered them some food and collected their laundry. 

Between Gran and Grandad it was hard to know who clung to who more, or why. Did Gran resist going to hospital because she knew her illnesses, or because she knew she would not return home from the hospital? There she would be assigned a social worker and they would keep her until a nursing home place was available. Or did Grandad, not the obvious model of carer that he was, fear that her leaving would be the end of their marriage? And with that all his companionship? What was clear was that after nearly sixty years of marriage they had hit the 'for worse' years and were both vehement about not giving up. 

I also wondered why women, well Mother, explained their physical ailments to each other in such a colloquial and convoluted way. But then again I'd only just had my first taste of the administration of modern health care in the Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home for comparison. However brief that experience of modern health care, modern health care, along with the finances that underpinned it, felt like they were several universes away from the parochialism and lack of resources that my Mother and others explained away, and Gran apparently embraced.

Seeing Gran's body in her coffin, in the chapel on my own. was the first time I saw a dead body. Seeing it was calming. Neither the body, nor the spirit that once occupied, it were suffering. Where ever her spirit was now it was more free than it had been in her lifetime. If life=creativity and conflict then the calm of Gran's body seemed no bad thing now. I saw Grandad that day too. I was introduced to one of the neighbours who were supporting him through the early public sense of loss. Seeing him, by turns I got the double image of an old man bearing up to the loss the world had given him to learn through, and the sense of him being almost child-like in how he sought to be looked after.

The funeral went well. The church was full and the service was formal but simple. In the funeral oration the vicar revealed that however ill Gran was she had paid her membership fees to The Mothers Union. It was an organisation that she had grown up with, she had achieved a record of sorts with her formally being a member of it for seventy five years. Though in the last ten of those years they had to visit her much more than she could attend meetings. As her immobility issues advanced, so the greatest strength she had left to offer them was prayer. 

Well before the end of the vicar's retelling of gran's life, the last verse and chorus of the last hymn, the final words of blessing from the vicar, and the inevitable polite words of small c consolation with friends and relatives outside the church, many of them slightly numbly expressed, my lasting reflection became how fleeting time was when we experience it 'in real time' so speak. Funerals are not just rituals where the living mark the passing of those who have died. Nor are they merely occasions for reflecting on time and change, after all television and radio was full of performers who reflected false nostalgia for a living, with no clear need to know who the audience for their words might be in future.

Funerals are safe public rituals for closing the chapters of one individuals life, enacted by those who have out-lived the person the ritual is celebrating.

To be directed to Chapter Nine please left click here. 

Pity Poor Portland, Oregon

It was the first state in the USA
to experiment with reducing racism
by legalising all drugs, in Measure 110
passed in 2020, since the drug laws
were the commonest cause
by which black and brown people
were disproportionately convicted of crime.

There were several reasons why,
for all the wealth and good intent
the project failed; taxing cannabis
raised a lot of revenue that the state
was slow to redistribute in rehab centres
and the genuine medicalisation
of the problem of addiction,
whether physical or psychological.

Then Covid turned society inside out
and upside down by limiting when,
and how, citizens could safely meet
and greet each on the streets.

Isolation amid addiction
increased addiction further,
listen to all the explanations
on BBC World Service here. 

But what finally did for the project
was lawlessness from beyond the border,
namely from the Mexican drug cartels
flooding the USA first, then the world,
with cheap and concentrated Fentanyl
in quantities enough to destroy all civic reasoning. 

Given how the raw ingredients for fentanyl
come from China I am surprised how little
anyone has mentioned 'the opium wars'.

But then in America, televised democracy
is now the legal opiate of the people, set up
as the longest running soap opera of all.... 

The Humour Of Queueing

When the British want to humour themselves
about how easily their sense of time gets misused
they say 'I like a good queue, whatever it's for,
the wait makes me feel like I am part of a community.'.

And in one sense that is right thing thing to say,
both communities and queues are made of time,
the hours spent queueing and the numbers of humans
involved are how we explain these things to ourselves.

But the difference between a community and a queue
is that a community has cohesive values beyond the time
spent making said values. And points of view affect changes
in society, where change equates with personal renewal.

Whereas a queue is over for us when we get to the front
and buy what we came to buy/do what we came to do.

In modern corporate Britain there is a clear pride
in not answering the telephone on enquiry lines too soon,
thus making people queue in the comfort of their homes, 
whilst repeating the message to use the web page instead.

My answer to this is to wait for the live human being,
and on the pad I have for recording useful formation,
I count the number of repetitions of the same message
and piece of Mozart and make farm gates, four vertical lines
with a cross bar as I make a mark with every repetition...

It is the patient way of passing the time of day, whilst queueing....      

Quotidian Thinking

My family rarely said anything original,
that was both insightful and good, 
to prepare my sister and I for adult life.
But maybe they unknowingly excelled
to prepare me early for the jaded life
of a retiree when, as we talked about
how serious problems were solved
by agreement more than disagreement,
we used to say 'Great minds think alike.'
to which Mother always replied
'And mediocre minds seldom differ.'.

Her glass-half-empty thinking,
drained even of the energy of cynicism,
was how she normalised the loss of hope.

I wanted to be an optimist.
Now I am older than four of the five
British Prime Ministers since 2010.
Like my mother I find that they have
had far too few ideas between them
for them to be seen as even mediocre.

   

The Nuts And Bolts Of Democracy

The international USA based news
is full of 'Trump did this/did not do that'
type commentaries and stories, as befits 
the news cycles where the media so readily
adopts the tone of a soap opera.

How else are they to report a self-made
 'bad boy' billionaire with such a flare
for self promotion? I don't blame them,
though I tire of them reporting Trump
when he announces 'something big',
that becomes yet another damp squib,
to be filed and forgotten, along
with all his previous bankruptcies.

What I find myself less ready to forgive
is how much, whilst they help set up
future damp squibs, the US media ignores
so many of the other, smaller, stories
where democracy has resulted in
a win-win situations, and further ignore
the numbers for November 5th 2024.

435 House of Representatives seats are up for grabs,
as are 34 out of 100 Senate seats, maybe 30 mayors
11 state governorships, 10 attorney generals,
10 state treasurers, 7 secretaries of state 
and hundreds of seats for the 52 state legislatures.

Last but not least, some states elect their judges.

In 2020 an estimated 599 seats were fought over,
and decided, and 24 states held plebiscites
on issues that included decriminalising cannabis for personal use. 

Whatever the number of seats up for grabs,
and different plebiscites, this time looks like the last, 
the maintenance for the future is what matters. 

Strategic Vagueness

is the modus operandi of modern management
when they need to be seen to be doing something
whilst making sure that they keep the credit
for what they have made somebody else do.

Never is this made more clear than in laws
passed by parliaments that ban this and that
and set severe penalties for the ownership
of what is banned, but then they don't allow
a budget for the policing or inspections
of what they have banned, and still
spokesmen state 'job done', until they
unapologetically admit in interviews
'Oops, we still have more to do.'.

Everyone who hears this
is too jaded and tired
to even raise their eyebrows.   

Through The Snow-Varlam Shalamov

How is a road beaten down through the virgin snow? One person walks ahead, swearing, sweating, and barely moving his feet. He keeps getting stuck in the loose, deep snow. He goes far ahead, marking his path with uneven black pits. When he tires he lies down in the snow, lights a home made cigarette, and the tobacco smoke hangs suspended above the white gleaming snow like a blue cloud. The man moves on but the cloud remains hovering above the spot where he rested, for the air in motionless. roads are always beaten down on days like these - so that the wind won't sweep away this labour of man. The man himself selects points in the snow's infinity to orient himself - a cliff, a tall tree. He steers his body through the snow in the same fashion that a helmsman steers a riverboat from one cape to another.

Five or six persons follow shoulder-to-shoulder along the narrow, wavering track of the first man. They walk beside his path but not along it. When they reach a predetermined spot, they turn back and tramp down the clean virgin snow which has not yet felt the foot of man. The road is tramped down. It can be used by people, sleighs, tractors. If they were to walk directly behind the first man, the second group would make a clearly defined but barely passable narrow path, and not a road. The first man has the hardest task and when he is exhausted, another man from the group of five takes his place. Each of them - even the smallest and weakest - must beat down a section of virgin snow, and not simply follow in another's footsteps. Later will come tractors and horses driven by readers, instead of authors and poets.     

'Through The Snow'-a short story by Varlam Shalamov from his book 'Kolyma Tales'

If Heaven Were A Library

The day of judgement that I would like
would be one where God and his angels
are the great librarians of eternity
who could list for me every book
I ever read, and when I read them.

Even now, I regret how much
I have forgotten about what I have read
from when I started, onward.

For sure, there would be a fair number
of books I would rather forget, and regret
for having wasted my time consuming them.

But for all the junk there are going to be
more treasures that recount the sense
of when grace undercut the pressure
that human life was put under,
not least all the prison literature.

From the hyper clarity of 'Pilgrim's Progress'
to the boredom with himself of M. de Sade
to the writings-on-the-run of St Paul,
to the memoirs of Casanova and secret scribbles
of Soviet poet and writer Irene Ratushinskaya, 
prisons have inspired women and men 
to take up their pen and become authors.

If my eternity is to be a place I cannot leave
then wisdom wrought from similar places,
albeit of more suffering should sustain me. 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Seven - The Funeral Part One

Gran first learned that she had cancer in 1980. She told nobody. My mother, and her sister Alice, took a very short time to suspect something serious when they knew Gran had visited her doctor and they could see a lingering tiredness in their mother-who quiet stubbornness was her strength. Eventually Gran being tight lipped about her health became the give away. But she had good reasons to keep the diagnosis of the cancer to herself. When she was bringing up her daughters, they learnt from her the malapropism 'Where there is a will there are relatives.'. Her silence let the rumours mutate and spread, rather than stop them. Until Gran's officially let it be known that, yes, she had cancer but no she not accepting treatments for it. Had any of us who had unintentionally spread the rumour looked into what treatments there were for cancer locally, then they would have found that the NHS might have treated the young people with it in some far off city hospital. But medication for pain relief aside, the old had to take care of themselves, particularly if they valued the independence of their own homes.

At the time Gran confirmed her cancer my relationship with my parents was somewhere between being pliable and an awkward stand-off. My late teens had been difficult for them. My parents had endured several different stages of attempted self determination on my part, all of which they tolerated whilst what they really wanted was for me to get a job that would instantly make me middle aged and have no interests, because interests cost money and take time they thought they could organise better. They did not want me to be vegetarian, did not want me to be secretary of anything, least of all my local CND, and they definitely did not want me taking 'O' levels whilst on the dole. What they wanted me for me was an employer who remove any ideas, drive, and character, that they had failed to remove, and for the employer to pay me handsomely enough for that so as to set me up to start on the property ladder. Not that they ever expressed their hopes for me in that way. 

I regularly visited a friend whose parents were kind enough to him to give him a whole room for him to use as a music listening room and a place where his friends felt welcome. The parents themselves had no interest in music. The centre of Graham's music room was the hi-fi which was set up like a shrine with everything to play on it, tapes and LPs, either side. Corner lighting, scatter cushions and two big settees set against the walls of the room made it ideal. And the house was the end house of a terrace so no neighbours were disturbed by his playing music at volume. 

My last act of imagination was for me to buy a hi-fi like his, though without the room to go with it, the hi-fi was very little of what I wanted. It was the last straw for them when my parents learned how much I'd spent on the hi-fi. But by then my parents had drained each other and me of initiative, enough for me to be find organising myself difficult. Shared houses for rent were rarely advertised. With my parents wanting me to be in well paid work and on the property ladder, rather than renting and on benefits, their utopian fantasy was becoming my anxiety dream. But I eventually did find a house to rent at short notice.

This was only part of the personal conflict I was enduring prior to this utopia-on-the cheap twenty first birthday party. I had also endured completing a youth training scheme which my trainer had moulded into it being a knocking shop for his personal pleasure, where the problem was more the lies he told himself and made me act out then the fact that the lies were about his sexual appetite. The worst part for me was that I could easily be a bad judge of character, and I thought him to be a friend when really he was an opportunistic sex pest. No matter that sex pests need good cover to disguise themselves....

With my head bound by all those conflicts it was easy for the women in the family, Mother cousin Heather and a few others took over so easily and hatched their plan of having a garden party where Gran and Grandad had to be present as guests of honour, at an event supposedly for me. This became the last of the family gatherings that Gran and Grandad attended. Gran who enjoyed being in a garden seat in the sun, amid the noise and pointless milling about. There was a stillness about her that was affirmative, which I would have appreciated more if only I could have screened out everybody else. As it was I found the event somewhere between mildly and extremely excruciating. The best part was the relief of it being over. Gran and Grandad got out of the village and into the town less and less often after the party.

Four years after the diagnosis, and fifty years after they bought it, Gran and Grandad sold their home, two workers cottages knocked into one, 'Maydene', and moved to a first floor council flat for the elderly in the village. The house had even been named after Gran, her first name being May, and still nothing was said about how it was a sign of an era closing. Perhaps less was said about the sale of the house because of the serious structural repairs that they could not afford to get done, which must have reduced the sale price of the house.

Alice, my mothers sister, was one of the few in the family who had a car and driver, in the shape of her husband Terry. Alice was the one who took it upon herself to both move Gran and Grandad down the street, to their new flat, and to clear the house to make it fit for sale. I only heard about the sale of the house and the move after it was all over. I'd often found Alice to be secretive and high handed, and been unable to say this out loud. I only heard  after it was done of how Alice and Terry had cleared the house and furnished the flat with furniture etc from the house kept enough of what Gran and Grandad owned to furnish the new flat that they moved to, and in the interests of 'efficiency' cut Mother out of the process. Mother would have found it hard to be as ruthless and efficient as Terry and Alice, but still she would like to have been invited to help. On the other hand, Mother was a hoarder and being denied the chance to take items away because they held personal value when her house was already bunged was temptation averted.

Nearly forty years on from the sale of Maydene, and nearly fifty years since I last visited there, I can say that I found the clutter of that house to be welcoming. The height of the doorways 'quaint', the cool of the pantry under the stairs with the 'milk safe' at the back, the range, the rag rugs and comfy light armchairs in the living room all seemed friendly. Gran must have made the rugs, herself, when she and Grandad had moved into the house in the 1930's. If I could have saved anything and somehow found a future life for them, then the rugs are what I would have rescued. But then I was pre-judged within the family for falling on the sentimental side of materialistic thinking. If ever I liked an antique, then I liked it for it's aesthetic value and my connection with who it previously belonged to, more than the price it would raise in an auction. More than any material heirloom of Gran's, I had somehow followed her faith. I was the only one n the family to do so. 

To be directed to Chapter Eight please left click here. 

Two Cheers For (Engineered) Democracy

Should we be wary or weary when,
even discounting the mighty power of A.I.,
and the mutability of the digital expression
of human character, the leaders of empires
lead us through manicured Public Relations
exercises designed to eliminate any doubt citizens
might have about their democratic credentials,
by raising the voters' levels of credulity and fear
to where they simply cannot think the obvious;
that when the system of change of government
allows only one serious candidate then the vote,
is more the coronation of the leader than anything else,
whilst the electorate lose their sense of choice and direction.

 

A Better Class Of Unemployment Support

Given half a chance I could be nostalgic
about the past, but what I have to look back on
is a family that sounded self important
when they lied by rote about a past
that had more gaps in it than glory. 

Then there is the imitation of affection
for the town's oldest and most used buildings
where the modern imitator had no use
for the lives of the humans of yore,
who once made the building seem vital
for the town that they are no longer part of.

Last and least there is the mis-accounting
for changes of names of government departments
where the processes named remained the same
but the name change made the process seem more plastic.

My favourite in this was when The Labour Exchange
went from being a scuzzy hidden hole-in-a-wall room
understaffed by shifty looking middle aged men
to being The Job Centre, a place where the staff
were better dressed, got half empty filing cabinets
and desks to hide behind, where the jobs that applicants
resisted applying for, and dummy notices, became easier
to find on walls that made cynicism about the lack
of local opportunity a much more satisfying endeavour.