Have You Ever Had A Lack Of Resolve?

You are far from alone if you have.

Each morning I turn my radio on
in the hope that what I hear
will help me start the day better,
and leave me with some comment 
that might set me up right for the day.

Of late I have taken to using the off-button 
well before the news headlines finish.
The hierarchy of the reports has seemed awry
and with the disputes and conflicts reported on
refusing to resolve themselves I have had
no choice but to treat the news the way my parents
treated me when I was young enough to think 
that sibling rivalry was the height of valid debate 
that when I won it proved my intelligence.

I am not tired of life, but I do tire
of the infinite lack of resolution
to certain stories that my radio
presents me with every morning.
    

Live Lightly Whilst You Can

You never know how close to a lack of 
support you might be in future....

 

Out Of Date/Out Of Time

Who reading this remembers when
food was first sold with dates on it,
for when it was best consumed by?
I don't, and it now it seems not to matter.
My life is now past it's 'best before' date,
which was probably before I was born.

This is why I have to be my own guide,
and eat what I eat with little regard
for the date on the side of the packet.
I do the same with radio programmes.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Three - The Unknown Familiar

 It was predictable that the Friday I left Gainsborough was packed and sociable. I woke up with Alan. He was friendly but left in some haste whilst I was making my breakfast. Mid-morning Mother came and went, with her shopping trolley, taking away perishable food I had left. Later I walked a few doors up the street and said 'Goodbye' to Sue Hethershaw at her house. She was cheerful about it, as if my coming and going like this was nearly normal. Her husband, Nick, was about and distant but pleasant, as if I were interrupting his work-I was. As she put it 'You are not going away forever. You'll come back.'.

At home I checked again the boxes I had filled, took out the boxes I had part filled and stored out of sight, and since it was a sunny day put them in the yard ready for Graham to put in his car. I was at ease when Graham, leader of the Christian youth group, appeared. We very quickly used all the space in in his car that was not for the driver and passengers as we economically packed every box in it. I had only ever been  a part time student in lieu of being unemployed in my home town, I was unused to support that both encouraged me to move, and supported me with the move. My family were not like that. I never recognised Graham's help as being like that of a parent who helps their new student son or daughter to move into their first digs for the first time. But that where Graham was coming from.

The ending of locking the door, putting the keys through the letter box, and setting off with Graham felt so light, it did not feel like the ending it was. The biggest change seemed to be the change in certainty levels. With my life up to leaving Gainsborough, Gainsborough was my safety net, and many times I had felt was supporting it, more than it supported me. But I could not say that without seeming churlish. A lot more could go both wrong or right now, and I would have my wits and sense of being an adult to rely upon to get me through.

My knowledge of Graham was built around how he had led the ecumenical Christian youth group, rather than sharing a car with him. In such groups the group always mattered more than the individual. I knew that there was a lot that he did not know about me and I guess I knew relatively little about him. Friendship built on the absence of knowledge might well have been more common than we realised. Discussing it might change that too much. He was a patient driver. I was surprised at how good I was at giving directions and telling him which lane to be in with the multi-lane roads. He helped me unpack my boxes and put them in one corner of the living room. At first sight they seemed an odd collection of things that jarred against the sleek modern ambience of the new house in a way I had not predicted. Graham spoke briefly and pleasantly with my new landlord and got an image of somebody who lacked maturity from him, and the impression my tenancy would not be long there. Then Graham gave me a firm hug as he said 'Goodbye'. 

By 6 pm I was in the house and on my own with the landlord for the weekend. I forget his name now, I am going to call him Mike. Mike gave me a run through of the rules of the shared house, where several words came to the fore of mind that I just had to avoid saying, these words included 'bachelor pad style furniture', and 'unused kitchen' because that was what I saw. The impression of him being a show-off bachelor was further cemented with the arrival of his guests that evening, two young women; Mike's university friends who both had bank clerk type jobs. One of the women lived there. It clear to me that Mike had designs on her being more than a friend. The second young woman was her friend who was there to make sure his designs on her friend remained that-unimplemented designs. I was part of the evening but I felt tired. The two women were pleasant enough but opaque to me, at best.

My landlord worked as a junior manager for a bank. It was easy for me to excuse myself from their shop talk by recognising that how they talked was mild stuff but above my grade of benefits. The main reason Mike had the house at such a young age, about the age 25 to my by being 27, was because of special low interest loans his employer had offered him, which he thought he was putting to good use by investing the debt in property. If money had proven anything to me, then I could recognise that I was going to have a hard time proving anything to him. I had spent the last decade of my life always close to being on the dole and never earning much more than dole money levels of income when I was offered work. Most of the work I had done was on government conscription jobs. Any discussion would have been a small-town-hick-vs-city slicker type dialogue.

But first there was the beer and pizza evening with the two young women to get through, after their hard week working behind glass shutters in their demanding white collar jobs.  

The evening ended on a an a beyond weird note for me, though I hid my bafflement at the time. At some point Mike put the television on and left it on ITV for the late Friday night what-to-watch-when-the-pubs-are-shut entertainment. Somewhat distractedly I watched the WWF, World Wrestling Federation, wrestling programme for that evening starting, whilst the girls contrived to ignore the television in the corner, I assume because they believed that such a well coordinated exhibition of apparently pure testosterone could only be fantasy, and whatever they fantasised about it was not television depictions of machismo.

But to me, closeted and gay, raised within macho small town values that I could not, and did not, want to copy, but which nonetheless remained the popular image masculinity. To fit in I watched the television pretending to watch partly from the perspective of the young women present, bemusement and disbelief at the WWF wrestling. As the new tag team 'The Powers of Pain', The Warlord and The Barbarian, both very big, very fit, very lean, men in black tights and boots, demolished two anonymous no hopers who were marked out as such from the start. The Warlord and The Barbarian performed with an agility that belied their size, performing somersaults and back flips before ending a very short bout. There were several more wrestling matches in that hour long programme. But to me, tired and socially out of my depth, the mix of the acrobatics, the great size and strength, the perfect finishing skills, and most importantly a pliant referee who looked the wrong way at the right moment, was such a stunningly intense, but brief, show that I'd had my fill of the whole programme with that match.

To be directed to Chapter Four please left click here.  

An Exceptional Foreword To An Exceptional Book

'In our positivistic civilisation one of the inappropriate compliments sometimes paid to literature is to reduce it to 'artistic knowledge'. Not that such cognizance does not exist but art is both more and less than knowledge. It is unique, sui generis, a thing in and of itself. And it's experience is one of the justifications for our own existence.

  While the work of art 'enriches' (another unsuitable analogy), at the same time it creates a post partum sense of loss: the first experience is unique, an act never to be repeated - no matter how great the understanding and appreciation later achieved through the most intent study. If only we could erase from our minds the memory of our favourite books and return to the still unsuspected wonder of those works! When we recommend them to our friends, we do so in envy - that we cannot recreate that initial magic in ourselves. And the more we love a book, the greater our wistfulness. We cannot step into the same river twice, not so much because the river is different, but because we ourselves are in flux.

  If you are about to read the stories of Varlam Shalamov for the first time, you are a person to be envied, a person whose life is about the be changed, a person who will envy others when you yourself have forded these waters.

  Kolyma tales tells of life on the Soviet forced-labour camps and the stories are regarded by historians as important documentary materials. Nevertheless the Gulag has many chronicles and only one Varlam Shalamov. This book can profitably read as a fictionalised history; the phrase 'historical novel' is itself a 'historical accident'; history in literature is not limited to the larger genres. But Kolyma Tales is much more than that. lf the camps never existed, this volume, one of the great books of world literature, would be only the more astounding as a creation of the imagination.'-John Glad.

John Glad translated the tales into English from Russian and was writer of this foreword. The collected stories 'Kolyma Tales' - Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982), was published in 1994 where this excerpt from the full foreword comes from.     

Still Lost For Words

As Russia enters it's third year
of invading Ukraine, and it's tenth year
of a propaganda campaign beyond compare
to prepare the world for World War III
I observe how little I have said
about Russia, in public or in private.

These matters that have gone on
above my head and above my pay grade.

Both of Russia's efforts
have become avalanches of bad news,
fit to bury both the dead, and anyone
unprepared for self perpetuating lies
coined in defence of bad government. 

As a would-be pacifist
my best defence against
the power of propaganda
has been my ambivalence.

The propaganda is the firing gun
for the start of any war, long before
the first of the bullets reach their target.
The propaganda is the test of our reason
where pacifists fail to apply their pacifism
against the lies, so it becomes too late
to stop what comes after.

This is why the first victim
in every war ever fought is truth
-it died before the battle started.

As a would-be pacifist who knows
that wars start for all sorts of reasons,
I know enough to be wary of reason itself. 

The avalanche of bad news reports
took my words. I notice my ambivalence.  

How To Prove You Are Not A Robot

And if are a non-musical non-robot
who has difficulty choosing which box
to tick, guess anyway....  

 

Bad Puns, Spoonerisms, And Malapropisms

Are one of my favourite ways to communicate,
because of their openness, and for how much 
they put me in touch with the spirit of my Mother
who made a speciality of them when I was a child
to keep us amused when the atmosphere in the house
got a little on the chilly side with dad's drinking.

Consequently my own malapropic life
tends to towards the sadder side.

1-if a person lives well, materially
whilst lacking empathy through out
their life, then in old age do they go
to live in a cold people's home?

2-If the government set out legislation
to revise religious freedom of speech
should it be called 'The dangerous Gods Act'?

on a lighter note there is...

Calvinism-an incline-ation towards denim jeans.

Canon fodder-membership of a traditionally led church. 

What Is The Point Of Lent?

For anyone who attends a church,
whether they prefer their conversion
to be noisy and dramatic, declamatory,
or whether the change of conversion
should be slower, much more gradual, 
what is always more slow to be adopted
is the purpose behind the church calendar.

The church calendar runs parallel to,
and is eclipsed by, the secular calendar
where every day is a day of consumerism,
every day is a day to be consumed, to eat,
to expel, to buy and sell without regard
for tomorrow, or for the day after. 

In both calendars the twin peaks of activity
are Easter (April) and Christmas (December).
The point of Lent is that it is a time of reappraisal,
an annual life audit over the six weeks
before the celebration of The Resurrection.

That it is the least understood of periods
in the church calendar is unsurprising
-more than any other church season
it goes directly against the tempo
of the secular consumer calendar- 
for which no life audit is ever required, ever.
Because the more careless our materialism is,
and the more thoughtless our consumption
the less tomorrow, and today, ever matters.

Homo Psifoforos*

In 2024 a figure approaching a quarter
of the population of the world will be offered
the latest chance to vote for a government.
Two billion voters will be going to the polls
to choose what their media will predict to be
a new and more vigorous government.

These voters hope to be able to trust
in certain basics for a successful vote
the reliability of the electoral register,
fair regulations for being able to vote,
and most of all, that the public can rely
on the votes being cast being accurately counted.

The media noise of cliches and slogans
doing battle for the voters attention span
is a given that those voting can rely upon.

Even when they know what to trust,
the noise of isms fighting each other
to be claimed by voters is just terrible.
Though it is not quite as much of a racket 
as the purest authoritarian propaganda.

That noise is something that no amount of lessons
in civics and civilisation can ever counter,
because when 'freedom' means we are free
to share only in cliche, the weakness
of our  freedom is laid bare to all.

But if by some miracle, enough scales
fall from enough voters minds for them
to recognise how they have been mis-sold
their new government, then how many of them
will find the means to protest in non-cliched terms?

When slogans sell us our values
we are the last to recognise
how they reverse the situation
of how it we are sold to them.
For repeating them, we become
the cliches that we are sold to. 

We sold them our ears with our listening.... 

*Greek for voter   

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Two - A Serendipitous Escape Pt 2

The following is the second of several complete chapters of my next memoir, with more chapters less fully realised which will arrive in their own time. So please enjoy this chapter on it's own and be patient with the slowness of the arrival of later chapters...

A friend a bit younger than me called Richard, who I had not seen for a long while called by at the flat. Having chatted for a while he suggested that we go swimming in the local baths, thirty minutes walk away. I admitted to him that I could not swim but found my trunks and towel and we went anyway. A walk is a good excuse for a more open conversation. He told me in more detail how much he enjoyed working in Nottingham. I  replied by talking in clear enough words that I once wanted to be a nurse but now knew I could not train for it. We both knew that all the local nursing assistant jobs were not just non-unionised but effectively a single gender closed shop for women workers, by order of the employers.

He suggested I join a government work programme in another place, where I would be paid as an unqualified part time care assistant/nurse and have a year's contract. He gave me the contact details of the government scheme where he worked as a junior administrator, a Leonard Cheshire nursing home in the Lady Bay area of Nottingham.

In November I went for an interview and explained that part of why I wanted the job was to help me get around the question of sequencing how to get a job and  move to do the job when  I was on the dole and money was tight. My interviewer knew about this problem, I did not have to ask her 'What comes first? The new address or the new job? Or do I get both sorted in the same time frame?' I must have interviewed well. They took me at face value and accepted me for the post of nursing assistant in the Lady Bay area of Nottingham on the condition that I would sort out where I would be living and contact them to start. I knew nothing about Nottingham but returned for a day trip by train one mid November Friday. I got a local paper and a city map including bus routes, and I scoured the small ads at the back of the paper to look for a place to live. I wanted to get an affirmative response that same day so that I could tell the nursing home that I had found somewhere to live, and I could start as soon as they wanted me. My expecting to be able to do this in one day tells you how green I was.

Nearly all of the landlords who were advertising flats and shared accommodation who had advertised in the paper that day proved unavailable on the phone, and when they answered and they were in enough for me to visit their premises, their premises were unattractive. The usual excuse that I could not refute, but to varying degrees was a bare faced lie, was that they'd had several rooms and only the worst one was left. Early in that Friday evening one landlord, a man who was younger than me who was clearly out to make money out of the property he now had a mortgage on made a firm commitment for me to rent a room. The house was rather new and posh but the room of my own in the shared house was affordable and housing benefit friendly. If I was as green as people could see, I was also very lucky.

I was now set up to move and take up my new job in early January. The local jobcentre were surprised when I presented them with the code for the government programme job in Nottingham, which was part of the important paperwork to be completed. Their response was 'We've never seen anything like that before'. But they processed it, and I gave my notice to leave Spring Gardens for January 1988. 

Knowing that this was my last Christmas of living so physically close to my family did not bring me any closer to them emotionally, but knowing that I was leaving made 'the season of good will' seem more transient. if as family we were more distant than we pretended to be, the pretence seemed easier, to me at least. In the past the new year always brought with it a sense of a lull in activity as if the new year was slow to start up. There was far less of the sense of lull with New Year 1987. I had a date by which to leave, on Friday the 8th Jan I was away, and nothing was going to stop me.  

Since my first attendance there I had always been the oldest member of my local Ecumenical Christian youth group. I had not left because nothing had given me cause to leave, a romantic attachment leading to other commitments might have moved me on. But with me being closeted and gay that was impossible. A serious local job might have occupied my time more fully, but no such job had found me. When I shared that I had got this job and I was moving they were all pleased for me. Those last meetings had an odd edge to them. To 'see me off' constructively and be helpful the leader of the Christian youth group, Graham, volunteered to drive me and all I was going to take with me, my clothes, my large collection of LPs, my tapes (including plenty of Grateful Dead live tapes) and my hi-fi and speakers, to the new address on the last Friday of the old tenancy/first night at the Nottingham address. As 'a gift' to the fully furnished address at Spring Gardens I left behind a colour television and video set up which I was happy to leave behind. 

The unexpected happened to me on my last night I was in Spring Gardens. That day I had packed and boxed up as much I could, to prepare to leave the following day. I got a surprise late night visitor, a gentleman caller known as Manchester Al. I should have called him 'Mr Unreliable' on the quiet but people pleasers like I was back then found the wit, and cynicism in being perceptive, when they needed it most. He was a rather handsome but unsettled ex-soldier who I had first met giving blood when I was eighteen, eight years earlier. I could never work him out or be a proper friend to him for two reasons. Each reason was linked to the other. He had a drink problem and either he was gay and closeted, or he was bisexual and simply too lazy to work out who he was. Either way the net result was that he would only come and see me when he was slightly drunk and/or when he simply wanted sex. But part of his act was that he always wanted me to be the one raise/discover the subject of sex. Any sex that happened had to happen because he had made me want it, made me responsible for it, and because neither of us was gay. 

  Manchester Al was actually from Liverpool. Every time he had visited had been hobbled by his hints to cover his denial, and me resisting having sex with him because I did not want him to be quite so passive as to make me responsible for both of us. This time, because he was drunk and I was leaving tomorrow, I took the lead. He was stiff in all the right place and pleasantly pliable, going as far kisses. I had always thought him handsome and was thankful for how he made my last night of living in Gainsborough such a positive, if somewhat vague, memory. I took him to my bed and where if we lacked coordination with what we did, we were at least forgiving and consensual about it. I would have liked us to have kissed more. But what we did was gentle and it felt good to be held in a pair of strong arms. He left in the morning, he did not even want breakfast. He had somebody, presumably who he lived with normally, to go meet and give his apologies to. Fair enough.

I was as pleased with him visiting me as I was with my not telling him that I would not be there the next time he called. I knew I'd had enough of propping Mother up in recent years, whilst my dad drank and disbelieved it had any deleterious effect on him. I did not want to start a secretive more-off-than-on 'affair' with a man who had a better relationship with alcohol than he did with sober, half well organised, human beings.

To be directed to Chapter Three please left click here.   

 

A Billboard For The Busy

Because it is all very well to have
multiple ways to be in 'emit' mode
in one sided communications systems,
where if we are responsive to the messages
we receive then they at least imitate
two communications, but the best
two way communications come from 
dropping the tech and being personable. 
 

 

The Tools, The Tasks, And The Space To Perform Them

When people say 'Smartphones are wonderful things'
they don't say it as often as the adverts for the phones
that manufactures put out to support the illusion
of progress that lies behind popular turbo-capitalism.

And smartphones do have design features that I like,
more than their equivalents on older designs of mobile,
like the ease of the keypad and the message writing process.

But this is where I part company with the rest of the human race,
People say that the 'smart' in smartphone comes from how many tasks
it can perform, how many programmes such a small machine can store.

In 1978 I bought one of the new range of calculators.
It could perform thirty four different maths processes
including the bane of every maths student, logarithms.
I used it for at most eight of those functions,
and half of those eight I practiced in my head,
to maintain my speed of doing mental arithmetic.

If a smartphones are like swiss army knives
-so many apps and functions in so small a machine
only so many of which can operate simultaneously-
then does that make an old fashioned laptop
more like a kitchen, with more space for the blades?
You decide what space you need to use the apps
that manufacturers insist are 'the future' for today.

Tomorrow the apps might change,
but knowing the space you need
to use them in comfort remains your constant.      

Alexei Navalny Died Yesterday

Aged 47. This is the quietest still that I could find
in the 2022 CNN documentary about him
that was edited to American tastes, the better
to spread it further in the English speaking world.
I saw it on youtube, where now it can be rented,
If anyone has access to BBC iplayer then they
can watch it for free here and remember better
how effective he was as a campaigner.  
 

 

Failing Better All Year Round

Beyond the will to write, I find sustainable
new year's resolutions impossible to follow.

By the middle of Feb, when I write this,
I know that everyone who made a resolution
six weeks ago will have found it easy at first,
and then some sudden drop in support
will make maintaining the change a struggle.

When the struggle get too hard, the focus shifts 
to some lighter distraction, the resolve started 
in times of ease will then be quietly abandoned,
with no recognition that the aim of the change
was complex enough to need better backing
than it was given when it was started.

With only the sense of rest on the day
the resolution was made for support
all will to keep up change collapses. 

The best all year round resolution was said
by Samuel Beckett 'Try again, fail again, fail better.'.
If you follow that, and back it up with solid support
you fail well indeed. You'll be the best failure ever.  

' ...Just Another Day Down On The Dole Queue.... '*

I am a bad pacifist
when my local job centre
told me 'We have targets',
as if their aims at life
had been stunted before then.  
I replied 'Targets are for armies.
Am I in your line of fire?'.

I half expected one of the staff
to throw a pen a me, and say
'There you are' as their idea 
of inclusive school boy humour.

But they did not even suggest
that I look at the cards on their boards, 
profiles of jobs that folk might apply for
where if job adverts came with 'sell by' dates
then half of what advertised was past it.

They had long since marked me down 
as 'passive aggressive-unemployable
for lack of experience'. I was one of many,
but one of the few to attempt the wit to prove it.

*A line from the prologue to the side long suite
by Roy Harper 'One of those days In England Parts 2-10',
which took up all of side 2 of his 1977 LP 'Bullinamingvase'.
Find the whole album on youtube here.      

The Arnold Bennett Guide To Grumpiness Through Wealth

On listening to the BBC adaptation
of Arnold Bennett's story cycle
of five novels set in The Potteries,
I found that every factory owner
was an impatient, imposing, male
who only recognised others
through imposing on them.
I cannot stop myself thinking
that Bennett's quintet are his guide
to men whom wealth has aged
prematurely; grumpy middle aged men.

Here is one place to share
in my listening experience.   

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter One - A Serendipitous Escape Pt 1

The following is the first of several complete chapters of my next memoir, with more chapters more or less fully realised which will arrive in their own time. So please enjoy this chapter on it's own and be patient with the slowness of the arrival of later chapters...

My 1987 escape plan went that smoothly that what I planned did not feel like the intent to escape that it actually was. After twenty six years of what had seemed like waiting and more waiting I wanted to put my life on a more reliable, footing than the town I had grown up had allowed me. From where I lived, to my education and the work I had done, and other attempts at making commitments, the 1980s had been one false start that led to another. The later false starts were improvements in the early attempts at life, work, and friendships. But I needed something with clarity and energy behind it, to give me the same.  

To wind back a little, in the autumn of 1985 I was living in Gainsborough in North Lincolnshire and I was helped to move to a new modern flat by my new best friend, Sue Hethershaw. She did this after I had had some traumatic arguments within my family which made a change of address required for improving my mental health. Sue had been looking out for me before I knew she was, our friendship grew out of us both being secretaries of CND, me being the first secretary, her being secretary a year or two later. After years of waiting to be useful to me I had confided my sense of loss with her after having a horrible row with my mother. Sue tapped her contacts in the building trade and found me a recently renovated flat a few doors down from where she lived. The move was both physical and emotional for me. I was making my first official move away from being emotionally dependent on my mother. 

I had been close to my mother for years, as if it was a given. In 1985 new stories appeared about how she brought me up that put the way she brought me up in a bad light. Even with the change of address that improve the term on which we knew each other I could no more stop her from doing my laundry twice a week any more than King Cnut could stop the tide by placing his throne on the shore and bid the waves 'Stay back.' as he reputed had done in Gainsborough 1000 years earlier. I was happy enough to make lunch for both of us when she appeared several times a week. We relearned how to chat as friends again after I had recovered my sense of myself from some of the rather dark and difficult arguments to do with how she brought me that I had she was forced to confess, and would have done anything to avoid admitting but for the letter that proved to be 'the smoking gun', evidence of what she covered up.

I would have liked Mother to be friends with Sue Hethershaw, for Mother to be friends with my friend. They met once, in Sue's house. The lack of interest and disengagement that Mother showed made it plain I was on my own with that wish.

Did I say I was a people pleaser? I should have before now. From the way my family had previously made me behave towards them it was obvious to everyone except me that I was likeable, but I lacked drive. My education was underwhelming, late in being completed and very muddled. I could not drive, or learn to drive and I successfully compensated for that with hitching lifts. With the change of address came a more productive acceptance of my homosexuality than my family had previously allowed me. I would not be surprised if the 'people pleaser' part of me, along with some painful experiences that I had absorbed that I was made to be secretive about, were most strongly expressed through the casual sex of the cottaging, the seeking anonymous sex in lieu of being publicly allowed to be in the relationship of my choice that I could not have. But with a comfortable home. a few men who were uncomfortable with themselves came to visit me, to express their discomfort the better to get it to subside. 

Where other people saw me as heterosexual, then to explain the lack of girlfriend, or interest in women, they also had to add to the script that I was a very late, very slow, developer. I.e. I was gay but had no guide in that area of my life beyond support to be more convincing when I had to overtly pretend to be heterosexual. 

As a member of a church/Bible study housegroup I was invited to the wedding of two mature people who were key members of the group. They were friendly towards me, so why would I not attend the wedding service? My recollection of the marriage service is as clear as day to me, still. Mostly because of the rising panic attack that I had to suppress half way through the service when I realised that everything that was being shown in front of me, the hymns, the uplift of two people who had been well prepared to declare their public support for each other 'til death do us part' was leaving me feel short of breath and gripped by a terror about how I would never make such vows. All I would ever know would be a semi-permanent isolation and a sense of dislocation where how I was described myself was not who I was. I would never be able to argue for who I felt myself to be with clear conviction.

 

As a people pleaser my fantasy job was that of being a male nurse, a delusion that the further away from the training for it that I was kept, the stronger the delusion remained. When I finally made formal contact with the head office of a nearby training hospital they dashed my hopes so casually I could barely believe it. After that I was left scratching my beard about what delusion to hold on to most, only for disappointment to destroy my hope with good reason. Removing the delusion of wanting to train as a nurse clarified one point; there was no point in me returning part time to college to study any more 'O' levels, except where attending such studies got me out of the local government works schemes for the unemployed. The rewards of these dud local jobs were Sysphian in scale and approach. I also learnt afresh that the best advice from the local careers office was always more about them keeping their jobs of giving advice than being honest and informative. What they said was very rarely of any help to the person asking them for help. They were lazy and officially in charge, but practically in charge of schemes supported by public money. But in October 1987, I got my lucky break. 

 To be directed to Chapter 2 please left click here.

Keep Your Country Tidy

and limit the rubbish you create now. It may
have a much longer life after you are gone
than you can predict, even as you are alive now.
Bin it before you force other people to.
Photograph: Ying Tang from The Guardian.

 

The Left Handed Club; Jimi Hendrix vs Ringo Starr

For those who are natural outsiders,
seeing yourself as scapegoats, black sheep, 
or identifying with more benign creatures, 
the feeling you have as you go through life
is that whatever you do is not just a rehearsal,
or practice. You had to teach it to yourself
because it often seemed nobody else would.

For many this is partly a conflict
where their being left handed
in right handed world marks them
with an awkward dyspraxia
-until they can adapt their world
to make their gaucheness seem elegant.

There are many modern examples
of making a success out being left handed.
One of them is the drummer Ringo Starr,
whose signature economy of style
comes from how his drum kit is set up
to be played by a right handed player,
but he leads from his left when he plays. 

The other example of changing the rules
that others set to develop your creativity,
when you are left handed is Jimi Hendrix.

He was a man whose talent was too big
and lucrative for him to be easily managed.

The biggest difference Starr and Hendrix
was Brian Epstein, who made relatively little
of the money vast wealth there was to be made
from the talent of The Beatles for the band.
But he knew how to keep his clients safe,
the better for them to marshall their talents.

Hendrix had no such figure to cover him
as he hit the heights in the music business. 

Who would not be awe of the dexterity
that Hendrix shared with how he changed
the recording process, and hugely extended
what could be said economically with a guitar? 
I still wish his instincts had been sharper,
and he had been wiser with the contracts he signed,
and set tighter limits in how he should be managed.

He wanted ease and rest from the chaotic place
his musical genius had brought him to.
His death was banal, for being unconscious
from sleeping pills whilst inhaling his own vomit
from being drunk he died of asphyxiation.

He did not die of being left handed, but he might as well have.

So left-handed people understand yourselves
as best you can, to be clearer about how to live
in right handed world and stop it disorganising you,
disposing of your gifts cheaply and devaluing your life. 

Existential Anger

Memory is like history,
where there is no physical proof
for a thing, verbal assertion proves it.

All there is left to ask
is how much anger should we use
to convince the people we need
to believe us of what we assert?

Anger has been a valuable tool
for backing assertions for longer
than we have the ability to remember,
mostly because anger has erased
much of what we later have to get angry about,
to prove what was once there
before an older anger destroyed it.

I don't know what will outlast us.
I hope that anger does not ride on it.
and burn it out, then the anger
will have to find another carrier.

More reflective emotions are available.

Libraries Are Valuable Resources

because, for both good and ill,
words are the fuel of any civil society,
the engine of mutual understanding
and libraries are full of words
so let them go at your peril.
 

 

When Youth Was Wasted On The Young

When I was young my pocket money
made sure that I was not going very far.
I was not a greyhound, but the phrase
'treat them mean to keep them lean'
would describe well how my family
budgeted for my individuality. 

To add to the lack of funds
to go where I did not know
for being disallowed from asking,
the stories of wartime rationing
that my mother raised me in
became her idea of the adventure
that I was permitted to imagine.

She told me a cycle of vivid half-true stories,
that for being told from a child's point of view
lacked an adult's sense of safety and autonomy. 
Somewhere inside the words there was the story
that for her being the youngest girl everywhere
she was sent, she became the easy target
for older girls to bully, and pull rank on.

Her age and size made her unable
reply with sharp retorts to their taunts;
she thought too slow to answer back. 

What dismayed me most as I listened,
though I had no idea how to point it out, 
was how poorly mother recognised
that with her retelling how she suffered
she was replicating the power dynamic
of how she once suffered, but the roles
were reversed; she was now the bully
who, as my mother, disallowed me any exit from her.

I was too young to be able to use history
and language the way she did; I repeated
her former role as the submissive without her
being remotely aware of the role she led me into.

When she told her stories she spoke
as if I was predestined to suffer similar.
Mother knew want Calvinism was. I did not.  
Was she my guide? Or my trapper?

Mother was the first of many guides
whom I sought to safely steer me
through the eternal war against hope,
in which, whether I liked it or not,
I had to find my place as an adult.

Later guides knew better what distance
to keep from me if we were to remain friends.
They allowed me my follies, and even better
helped me escape the consequences. 
They were clearer guides to self-knowledge
than my mother could ever have imagined. 

Limitariansim

is another of those recycled philosophies,
revisions of good ideas from the past
where the goodness in them got lost,
after it's first and best proponents
was erased from social history.

The idea is simple; in any given society
the wealth of the wealthiest should be limited
by a certain multiple of the poverty of the poor.

For the absolutely poor no multiple
of what they have could be sustaining
for anyone trying to live on it.

The biggest problem is with the source of the inequality;
the unequal value of the sweat of the brow of the self-made,
pulled-up-by-his-own-boot-straps-from-nothing millionaire
vs the cheaper sweat that brings far poorer returns to the poor.

The millionaire will always say
'My sweat earned me this, I deserve it,
untaxed, even though I will only live
on a fraction of it.'. The poor person will say
'My sweat and wit have helped me survive,
have shown me how to be generous
towards those with less, or who have nothing
to speak of at all.', mutualising misunderstanding.   

Timepeace

Anyone who thinks, and makes others think,
that time is money is wearing the wrong watch
-whatever the time on it is when they look
they will be paying for it all their lives.

The watch that gives the best sense of time
engages with time via tasks, where however long
a task takes to complete, doing it well
means not having to do it again.  

How To Make Potato Bread

Presently the calendar is between St Bridget's day - 2nd of Feb - and St Patrick's day -  17th March. As the date of Lent approaches, when people are meant to eat less/eat simpler what home made food could be simpler and more Irish than potato bread? In the spirit of such simplicity I present a version of the recipe I learned from a close relative thirty years ago. Recipes are food memes, for them to live and change they have to be passed on. Job done? Maybe.... 

1-Scrub clean but leave on the skins on two medium-large sized potatoes.

2-Boil the potatoes halved in salt water until they are cooked, but are definitely firm.

 

3-When the potatoes are cool, grate them, skins included, with a coarse grater into the bowl.

 

4-To the grated potato add flour. How much flour? This is the guesswork: Add two handfuls at time, or a small pile, on top of the potato. When you have kneaded the flour into the potatoes evenly enough that the result is a half-firm ball of dough with the mix that is how you know you have used the right amount of flour. The ball of dough might fall apart a bit, but overall if it only just holds together that is about right.

 

5-On a large surface, put a spread of wholemeal flour and or/sunflower seeds.

6-Divide your dough in two and put one half on the flour/sunflower seed surface.

7-Roll the dough out, putting some flour or sunflower seeds on the top side between the rolling pin and dough to reduce sticking.

8-Roll it out very thin, not much thinner than the shop-sold commercial potato bread you might see.

 

9-Cut to shape, either palm sized squares or half circles, using the lid of a small pan as a cutter/shape and bisecting the rolled out dough.

 

10-Put each piece you have cut to one side (hence the large surface).

11-In a skillet or large pan put a 50/50 mix of olive oil and sunflower oil, just enough to cover the whole surface thinly.

 

12-Heat your pan to medium to high heat and put in your shapes of potato bread using all the space in the pan.

13-Watch them so that they seal and brown slightly in the heat.

14-Place 'done' pieces on a side plate.

The two medium-large size potatoes make six to ten pieces of potato bread using the pan lid cutter technique. From the potatoes being left to cool after boiled, the whole operation has taken me forty mins. 

I usually put the pan/skillet on the heat at the same time as starting the first cutting out, and 'multi-task' by rolling thin the dough and cutting more pieces out whilst watching those on the pan or skillet and having the plate ready for the finished pieces. As I take fried pieces out of the pan/I put them on the plate/put more pieces into the pan/cut more pieces out/watch the frying/put the next finished piece of potato bread onto it's plate/cut out more shapes/put more potato bread in the pan/maybe adding a bit more oil/and back to rolling out more dough and cutting out more shapes, all in a rather circular movement ideal in a galley kitchen where free space is premium. My buddy, Anthony still likes potato bread. He likes to tidy the mis-shapes that get made in the process well before we sit down to have them warm with-what else? Our own homemade blackberry jam.     

How To Teach Children

Who Charles Darwin was and why his ideas matter.

First make the class size in the school about thirty
each class to diminish their sense of individuality,
the better to stop them thinking for themselves.

Then make these people between the age of seven
and eleven subject to rules for how to compete
with each other where for being competitive
they cannot work out the basis of the rules.

Without defining fairness tell the pupils
that the teachers are always right; the rules are fair.
Then get the teacher to be as selectively unfair
as they can be without being seen to be; the pupils
that teacher wants to observe and reward are those
who recognise soonest the distance the teacher keeps,
from the rules they are meant to apply, such pupils 
then know much better how to be safely break that rule,
and be unfair or worse, particularly when their motive
is to best slower pupils who have not worked out
why the teacher has not stopped them being bullied.

Where the subject of mentoring or coaching appears
teachers should explain that where it is offered
it is offered so that those helped will win prizes
on behalf of the school in inter-schools competitions.

The teacher must deny any link the pupils might make
between improving their performance with input
from the teacher; teachers are there to examine
for failure, and crowd control more than to teach. 

This is why when the pupils play football
even a dead dog from the street would know why
why some are bad at sport; they lacked the mentoring,
which would make them better at what they are bad at.

What the pupils want to avoid, but have to meet,
is what comes next; secondary education,
secondary in the sense of what is primary,
what matters most, is that when a child lacks
the innate smartness to convince the world
how smart they are, then their world will insist
that they be barred from improving, the more
to use them for what they lack, support
for their intelligence and application.

Divine Terroir

The scene; a baptism. 'Jacinta knew that Treadway did not look at the Croydon Harbour Eagle the way she did. He saw other things in it, things that had to with his travels over the land, things that he and other men of the cove, and many of the women, recognised as their own spirit, made of the energy that came off the land. There was an energy in the English eagle and another energy altogether in the Labrador eagle. They were so different that everyone knew-Treadway knew and Jacinta knew in a different way-that the pine eagle did not belong in church at all. But it was there and so were the spruce-wood pews, and the plain windows, and the wooden nave, and the ordinary house carpet, and the glass jugs of flowers picked from patches of ground descended from the tender but incongruous gardens planted by Moravian missionaries along this coast in the early nineteen hundreds. There were pansies poppies and English daisies, flowers that the cliffs and seas and raging skies dwarfed but the hearts of the first German and Scottish women settlers had needed to not break upon Labrador stones. This whole religion Jacinta thought-and Treadway knew without thought-depended on people more than people depended on it. You didn't need it unless you died not have the land in your heart; the land was it's own God.

A paragraph from 'Annabel' by Kathleen Winter, published in 2011 and shortlisted for the Orange prize for Fiction in that year.         

George Bernard Shaw On English Entitlement

 'At every one of these concerts in England
you will find rows full of weary people
who are there not because they really like classical music
but because they think they ought to like it.

There is the same thing in Heaven,
a number of people sit there in glory
not because they are happy
but because they think they owe it
to their position to be in Heaven.
They are almost all English.'.

from his play 'Man and Superman'. 

My Contribution To 'Gay History Month'

Sir Roger Casement, the diplomat, social activist,
Irish hero and 'gay diarist' who was gay
when homosexuality was an activity,
rather than an aspect of character,
and his homosexuality was the least
part of who he was, with his intelligence
and charisma. When with his death the British
besmirched his character still he 'outed'
the idea of an Ireland free of the British Empire,
much to the chagrin of Unionists today.
homosexuality,
remained mostly unknown outside
the Bloomsbury group of writers      

 

Picture Set Of The Month - February - The Paintings of Captain Beefheart

Though he ceased to be Captain Beefheart
when he stopped both making music and painting 
and chose the one talent - painting - full time.
His agent for selling his paintings said 'one career only.'.   

His friends said of him that from the second half
of the 1970's onward he showed early signs of
having the multiple sclerosis that made him use
a wheel chair in the 1990s and eventually
ended his life. It was affirmative pragmatism
for him to choose painting over performing music;
painting paid him more, gave him much more time
 to lead a creative self contained life
whilst allowing him to manage his health better.

Please left click here to see all the paintings 
by Don Van Vliet a/k/a Captain Beefheart
from 1962 to 2010, on the artist's website.