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.  

Honest Money? No Chance!

Listening to my radio I get the news:
small businesses started in great hope
are going bankrupt across my country
at rates unprecedented since the last crash,
debt default is burning through businesses.
High Street pessimism is hitting new highs.

Later a friend calls me and tells me how much
skilled tradesmen now prefer to work cash-in-hand
such that if they are asked to give a quote for a job
they will hedge and prevaricate until the customer 
says the magic words, 'off the books, cash only.'. 

What both of these stories confirm to me
is how debt should be indexed against dishonesty
of aspiration, but then in any such index
who speaks first about debt says it for all, ultimately.         
   

Spinal Tap On Sunday

I was there when my church 
went full 'Spinal Tap' in it's way,
without realising that it was doing it.

The church performed all it's normal words,
and got the expected responses to it's rituals,
quietly unaware that the world they were part of,
had changed, the old rituals had less purchase
on this new world than was presumed.
The ritual also hid the new world,
by sustaining a uniformity of effect. 

We still all believed in what we said
but in the silly world we were all joined to,
we had no way to reversing-engineer
the alchemy-in-reverse of the absurdity.

Truth In Politics And Fiction

'In real life many writers are liars.
Perhaps, when starting off, they all are:
no real story is ever as neat as the writer tells it.
Politicians with a tendency to self-glorifying
exaggeration usually get caught early
and are advised by their handlers to cut it out,
so that Hilary Clinton doesn't land
more than once in Sarajevo 'under sniper fire',
and Joe Biden, who once expended his every
experience into an act of heroism,
eventually learns to feign veracity.
But writers have to advise themselves.'.

-from 'Latest Readings' a 2015 book by Clive James (1939-2019).
I have not yet discovered what Clive James thought of Donald Trump.        

'The Best Of Man Is In His Ruins'

My best friend, and a far better blogger
than I am, once wrote as a line in a poem.

When I seen the abandoned dwellings
and barns without roofs in the countryside
across County Down, where the ivy could be
holding up the walls, or causing their decline,
I can't help but agree with him, and wish for mine.

I would like my decline to be as quiet and slow
as the buildings that I see are quietly abandoned
that add so much to the landscape. That is my way to go,
as part of a bigger being abandoned, forgotten, and disowned.

Entitlement Inc

Pious People are rarely known 
for what makes them laugh.

If they were, then, along
with their sense of being the elect,
their humour would be jet black,
and lined with schadenfreude,
at how much folks not like them
are not going to enjoy their next life
and should not be enjoying this one, 
as if the elect were the more entitled
than others to appreciate this life,
and enjoy controlling the hereafter. 

 

Poverty Multiplied By Inequality Equals......

In these democratically turbulent times
where multi-coloured political party kettles
say that the opposition have gone to pot,
and the opposition need to clean their act up
if they even half want to remain the opposition 
what Governing parties like to affirm 
is that the public needs more
of the old divisions between rich and poor,
the public are better off than they can know 
with a politics where wealth,
whatever the skin colour of it's holder,
entitles the wealthy to the privacy
where the public can't know how racist
and worse, obnoxious towards the poor, the newly rich are.
And the poor will know even less
of the private opinions of the wealthy
after the latter have massaged the poor's vote,
via divisive media, and propaganda that reinforces
the distance between controller and controlled. 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Six - An Unsettled Settling In

 Getting to actually see Richard, the young man who had initiated the idea of me joining the ACE scheme away from home, to facilitate more easily my moving out of Gainsborough, proved difficult at first. When we had first met three months earlier we had both been benignly evasive when the discussion came to him explaining precisely where he worked and lived in Nottingham. It seemed unimportant at the time. Contacting him to arrange to meet up at his digs after I had started the job took more time than I expected. When we met he said he liked music. I don't know whether he actually did like music, or he merely said he liked music because it was an easy shorthand which left covered what he wanted kept covered.

Since I was quite open about liking music it would have been an easy cover for him to claim and have me believe. When he asked me the lend of some of the compilation tapes I had made, the sequencing of which was unique to me and I took a certain small pride in them, I lent them to him and took it on trust I would see him again, and he would return them. I did not tell him that he could have copies of them next time we met, and directly arrange for us to meet again. I did not make copies of the tapes before parting with them. The latter is the way anyone else would have done it. I knew even as I lent him the tapes, that the record collections I had compiled them from were no longer available to me. I expected to see him again. I did see him again, two or three times, but each time he was evasive about whether he had copied the tapes and where they were when I asked. I was disappointed. But not as disappointed as the last time I called when the landlord said he was not there. Not indicating which it was, he was intentionally out that Sunday, or he had changed address/moved house. The bigger evasion all along was him not telling me that he would soon be moving. It did make life in Nottingham seem to make like a needle lost in the haystack of the city.

It was only after reflecting on that last call, when the landlord answered, that I realised how one sided the attempted friendship had been all along, that maybe what Richard recognised was a needy closeted gay man where he hid how he recoiled from recognising the sexual element in that description, however genuine the underlying need was. That was what was going on when I even faintly raised the matter came to returning the tapes and he said he could not find them whilst opaquely admitting that he was highly disorganised. If politeness meant a distance that great that I did not know where and how he lived, I did wonder who was most 'in the closet' about who he was and what he wanted out of life. We can't take out what we don't put in.

There were other places and routines in which to try to feel less like a missing needle in a haystack. One place that seemed promising from the outside of the building was the local Church of England church that was fifteen minutes walk for my new lodgings. I thought to myself 'There at least I will know when the stand up sit down, and what to say and when to say it. There will also be more informal times where the sharing seems more spontaneous.'. When I joined the Bible study group I fell at the first fence, I found it easier to be interested in donating home made shortbread to The Bible study meeting than to get to know people by name. Like many women in church do, I hide behind the teas, coffees, and biscuits as the dominant men dominated the discussion of The Bible, nearly much as the dominant men in The Bible made themselves central to the narratives it had to share.

For every attempted engagement with the city via the adaptation of new schedules and routines there was the temptation to look back on the old, easy to manage, small town life I had left behind. What value was there in going from being a medium sized fish in a small pond to becoming a minnow in a much bigger body of water? In my old life buses were unreliable, trains out of town were few and slow, and a lot of my life had been an exercise in thrift and avoidance. I walked most places in the town, even when carrying things that it would have been easier to transport by bus or car.

I normalised walking two miles to my hitching point to get out of Gainsborough. It worked too, or at least until in her third term Margaret Thatcher had given the County Road Services money to widen the roads into Lincoln and put in a grid of roundabouts around the city which slowed down how soon I got a lift because even when drivers stopped and wanted to offer me a lift the question became 'Which roundabout do you wat dropped off at?' I would say I could be left off at the roundabout for the City Centre and they would be going in at an earlier roundabout. Also wider roads made for faster traffic, and a reduced chance to stop for folks like me. In the world of hitching lifts I always gave myself plenty of time. In Nottingham I still walked a fair amount, but my travels were informed by the bus schedules where I discovered the joy of reading on the bus, over time I read all seven of the Narnia books on different buses.

My being caught in the accepted social evasions of the church social life were mirrored in how well I was fitting in as part the new shared house. With my working class origins and values I struggled to fit in around the urbane middle class manners Mike presented me with. I could see how I was not settling in, but I could not formulate why. Part of my difficulty was how I should have sorted through more of my packing, but I needed to be at ease to know what to discard. Things that were for future use were still in the boxes I had brought them in. My uncertainty about future unpacking annoyed the landlord. Also my claim for housing benefit should have been settled but wasn't. The money Mike was due should be in his bank account. It wasn't. City Hall Housing Benefit department seemed to be oddly slow in processing my claim. After over three weeks of waiting I had to visit them sometimes between work shifts.

I can't remember now who I fell into conversation with. But I took note when I realised that they were better informed than I expected them to be, and they listened well. I told them how I had put the form in with the City Hall Housing Benefit Department in the centre of Nottingham. They told me that I had not got the benefit yet because I should have put the forms in with the same department in West Bridgford Council buildings for processing.

I was prompt in recovering my mistake, and filling the right forms in again, and getting them to the right place. Prompt too in backdating the new forms to the date I had sent forms to the wrong office. West Bridgford paid me promptly from the date I got my forms into them. But they sent the back-claim into their appeals system, where I might or might not get the rent money. It all depended on whether the board sided with the council or with me. The landlord seemed relieved at first when I told him. But as soon as the rent issue was regularised he gave my a fortnight's notice to leave. He did not say it but he could not accept the unopened boxes, after sorting the Housing Benefit out I was glad he took the initiative. Somebody had to be clear. Since it was his house, better it was him than me.

This came not long before another announcement, this time about my job. The government paid me to work part time for a year for The Leonard Cheshire Home, now the government were going to end the ACE scheme on which I had got my contract of work. The initial effect was that The Leonard Cheshire Home was going to make an early exit from it's contracts for paid for government labour via the ACE scheme. I was going to work out the roughly ten months of my contract doing some other care work for another employer. 

Finally my family wrote to ask me to contact them urgently. The did not have a landline but gave me a phone number of somebody who did. The message I got via the phone was that my gran was comfortable, but in hospital. Mother was visiting her there daily. But at the age of 88 she was very very tired. Nobody wanted to say it, but it was obvious that there was going to be a funeral at some point. My phrasing, not theirs. I was to keep in touch for updates every other day. I had more means of keeping in touch with family than they minded to keep in touch with me. 

To be directed to Chapter Seven please left click here.

 

Post Mortem On The Oscars

 

It is a well observed phenomenon that not only do good actresses shine when given good roles in otherwise dull films, sufficient for the actress to be the only person to be nominated for the different awards when the awards season approaches, but that in addition to being nominated such actresses, will also be overlooked for the prize they have been nominated for, in favour of actresses who have performed nearly as well in much more showy and stereotypical roles.

  Thus it was that Lily Gladstone (born 1986), a distant but indirect descendant of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), who was raised on the Blackfeet reservation, and is of mixed Piegan Blackfeet and European origin, was both nominated and snubbed this award season. She won the Golden Globe for her portrayal of Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman who survived the Osage murders in Martin Scorsese's lengthy 2023 crime drama 'The Killers of the Flower Moon', beating internationally nominated competition but in the Oscars lost out to showy faux feminist post-Frankenstein melodrama 'Poor Things', in which Emma Stone triumphed against the odd in the role of a woman beset by male expectation where when she survives those expectations it is less by directly challenging them, more by finding a life away from them in spite of the males. Perhaps Ms Stone won the Oscar because of the character she played, more than her acting, the character too much represented certain aspects of Hollywood for Hollywood to resist rewarding her.

  But still I prefer women like the real Mollie Kyle (1886-1937) who shown here aged 17, is as far away from Hollywood as it is possible to be. She showed a resourcefulness well beyond all natural and legally circumscribed means, in surviving her diabetes, surviving her attempted poisoning, she got her poisoners jailed, she remarried after she got her husband poisoner jailed, got the guardianship over her lifted with the new marriage, and finally regained control of the material legacy that her family should have had full control of, all along. 

That is what I would consider to be female resourcefulness at it's best in the face of white Klu Klux Clan being calculatedly murderous with envy at the rightful wealth of other nations.

There the Frankenstein-type monster in the plot is the Klu Klux Clan, which seems to be about right to me. The undead ghost of white supremacy politics from the losing side of the civil has to be properly represented somehow. I have yet to see an image of Donald Trump with a bolt through his neck as the undead ghost of whate male exclusive entitlement but I shall savour it when I do.      

Hope Goes Out On A Limb

On the Sunday when the media
makes mothering a thing of sentiment,
fit only for being the last item of a news bulletin,
I focus more on all the mothers who foster
and adopt, particularly as single parents
who focus their parenting instincts
in support of children whose lives
have been disrupted beyond repair.

This going-out-on-a-limb for a child
who can't know how stranded they are 
is rarely recognised in my society
which makes the nuclear family standard
for the purpose of mass advertising,
whilst denying how every standard
creates variations that away from
what is predicted has to be managed.

This is why I praise adoptive mothers,
foster mothers, and many others
who seek to repair and reset future society.

Uncertainty Drive

I can empathise with anyone who dislikes war.
Those who seem to know more what it is good for
usually have intentions that the majority mistrust,
and that is before the propaganda has taken effect.

But whatever the state, propaganda, peace,
or some state in between where aggression lurks and hides,
what gets disguised even more with everyday living
is how much technology makes change certain.

So whatever the state, look out for the changes
and prepare yourself to make them work
better for others and yourself as well as you can.

In uncertainty, hope for an improved  tomorrow. 
     

A Policeman's Lot Is Not A Happy One

When I was much younger than I am today
I used to hear it said of international politics
with varying degrees of weary resignation
that 'America is the world's policeman',
which by turns was both to be expected,
and 'a good thing'. One of the many jobs
this policeman had was to define 'freedom',
which America has done with alacrity.

It's arms industry has followed
where diplomacy has gone first
in conflicts all across the world.

Of late America has retreated from it's role,
as the measure and the policer of 'freedom',
and hid behind 'America First' which meant
'Only America' and 'Elite America for itself,
forget the little people whilst using their image
as advertising fodder' when the small print
on the policy was properly expanded.

It became a license for scammers and pyramid sellers.

Spurred by this the world has reshaped itself.
Old empires have renewed themselves
by returning to their old illiberal  habits
with regard to their smaller enemies,
who America has been quick to champion
in words, but slow to act in support of.

Few people want the old policeman back,
any more than they want the old world order.
But an America with a stronger spine, to bolster
it's foreign policy, and with which to see clearer
both friend and foe beyond it's borders
that mostly picks on countries it's own size
and defends countries that are smaller 
is what the many small countries are looking for.

    

'Portnoy's Complaint' By Philip Roth - A Review

I found this in a pile of books left for people to choose from just beyond the check outs of my local supermarket after I'd done my weekly shop. I'd heard of the book, but knew nothing about it beyond that it was understood to be shocking when it was first released, there was film adaptation from 1972, and that Alan Bennett's mother read it when it first came out, knowing nothing about it before she read it.

Bennett in one of his anecdotes explains how he took it upon himself to explain the logic of the writing and the dynamic of the relationships in the book to her, explaining, as I paraphrase it, 'Mam, in this book the authorities have taken sexual hysteria off the ration book'. The government ration book being something that she had lived with between 1940-54 that had made it's mark in every part of her everyday life for years after it ended, and it being something she understood the purpose of at the time it was government policy.

I have also read several books that describe would-be fetish behaviour including the nineteenth century account of the fetish of being submissive, 'Venus in Furs' by Leopold Von Sacher Masoch. In fact I read it twice to understand it better. I too have had my difficulties with the psychology of rationing in my life. When I got 'Portnoy's Complaint' I thought it was book that I would enjoy reading whilst sat at the back of the bus, on journeys between 30 mins and 90 mins long when I could be doing nothing else. It is a brave experiment. Whether I finish the book remains to be seen.

It starts as it means to go on, as an unannounced confession in which the reader seems to be the person confessed to. How funny the reader finds this is depends on whether the reader is okay with taking on the role of unintended confessor, to a character-Alexander Portnoy-who has no obvious interest in any sort psychological resolution, spiritual absolution, or even accepting a logical approach to the easing of his problems. Portnoy is 33 and does a high status job of the city state of New York and lives with his parents, who for him to leave them requires him to marry a female they approve of. His father is a washed out character who sells insurance to black people who don't want it, and his mother wears the trousers in the house.

This is where when Alexander was a teenager he seemed to get caught in this cycle, where his confession becomes.... I think about sex and masturbate all the time, my mother wants me to marry and settle down, if I did marry as she wanted me to then I would not be able to settle down, therefore I think about sex a lot, I masturbate a lot, I sometimes find attractive girls who seem to find me attractive, and they too want to settle down with a husband who works to pay for the home they want to live but they contribute to the maintenance of through how clean and controlled the house is, this makes me change girlfriends often.

From the thoughts about the different girlfriends who the more he gets to know them the more they resemble his mother Portnoy is bounced back round the thought cycle to being confronted/controlled by his mother, repeat and repeat again with minor variations. To modern minds he would be a classic example of a commitment-phobe were his commitment to masturbation not quite so thorough, ongoing, and quite so consistent.

Alexander is helpful enough to his confessor, the reader, to list his fetishes for the first time on page 172 of the book. They are onanism exhibitionism and voyeurism. What he does not add, which might have shortened the book considerably if he had, could have been how for all of his fetishes being different to each other, they all rather neatly dovetail into one set of social actions as they all feed off each other.

Then there is the famous scene with the liver, in which any vegetarian reading the text might feel a certain disgust, but may also absolve themselves of their disgust as they paraphrase the Pharisees prayer, Luke Ch 18 V 11, and say of themselves 'I thank thee Lord I am not as other men (particularly not the young Alex Portnoy)'.

Is the book funny? Clearly yes in one respect, Roth writes Alexander Portnoy's speeches in extended similes and metaphors where the readers realises quite late into reading them that these tortured similes etc are actually jokes where the last part of the simile is the most tortured and extended part of the simile, the punchline of the long disguised joke. At that level the writing is very good, well sustained. But however good the writing is, writing for a character caught up in his own repeating cycle of events, behaviours and responses, much like the character Severin in 'Venus in Furs', does make the character one dimensional and self limiting, and where he is funny the joke is repetitive.

Two thirds of the book read, and Portnoy now has male friends his own age but still the dialogue is at the level of, I don't know-maybe one of the dirtier episodes of Beavis and Butthead, but that is opening out away from the previous accounts of sexual frustration. And still the young women come and go, leaving the reader disgusted and the mind that Alexander Portnoy has to be on one track, which his friends also get locked into when they try to be supportive company for each other.

One third of the book to go. It might be an uphill struggle  but I will finish it.  At the end Alexander Portnoy cannot quite remain the relationship/masturbatory equivalent of Sisyphus condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain only to see it fall to the bottom again, and start to roll the same stone up the mountain again. With no exit from his dilemmas as he continues relive his old traps, whilst half-looking for the way out from them. 

Given the circularity of the plot and of Alex Portnoy's teenage sexual obsessions, and of his sense of perpetual conflict with the (Jewish) faith based adult world that he resists joining, any resolution is going to be a deflation. 

Thus it proves. But how the deflation actually happens I will leave the reader to find out for themselves.

Measuring Heaven?

One of the ways I fail to apprehend
the modern world is when people talk
and write in unqualified superlatives
about the idea of intensity, declaring
that their latest experience of this
and that 'was their best time ever'.

It is a given that certain experiences
don't just have no unit of measurement,
but make it required that rating them
out of five or ten is the nearest
we get to being objective.

Then there is quality of something being immersive,
e.g. when the arrangements and tunes
of a piece of classical music are performed
with enough empathy to please the ear
of the sensitive listener. All that can be asked
is how faithful were the players to the score?
Everything beyond that is beyond measure.     

And wherever Heaven is, it has no units
and is not a place where measuring is apt.  

Bad Alignments

I don't know how to read the present day news cycle,
which, from what it says, does more than recycle
the old human conflicts it says it is 'just reporting'.

These reports add a pointless cruelty into life,
where in reports of wars protagonists of wars
can't hear themselves speak, and won't listen
to how entrenched their enemies have become
in their opposing positions.

And that is just the foreigners who disagree.

There are plenty of folk in my own country
who for being unable to agree with those
who they oppose find the corresponding side
in, from Russia to the USA, to side with
and to underline their domestic position. 

To call such positioning 'a bad alignment'
reproaches it all too lightly, and further
fails to address how such alignments leave us
lacking in inclusivity, polarised, and divided,

Picture Set of The Month - March - Moroccan Star Sand Dunes

Are in the news as natural phenomena that also
appear on Mars and Saturn's biggest moon, Titan. 

Where the base of a star sand dune can be
up to 13,000 years old whilst the peaks
are typically nearer 1000 years old.

A star dune is formed by the wind blowing
in two opposing directions – from the south-west
 and the north-east – leading to the sand building up.

A steady third wind that blows from the east shifts
the dune slowly west at a rate of about 50cm a year.
Please left click here to learn more about this subject.

 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Five - Finding My Way Around

I was thankful the Monday morning that I started work that my work was part time. What I lost in the money I might have earned more if the job were full time but I gained in having more time in which to patch myself into the different businesses and organisations that I was going to be dependent on, to greater or lesser degrees, in Nottingham. The bank, my new doctor, and West Bridgford Council, from whom I had to get the application form for my housing benefit. They were the big three at the top of the list.

Finding where these places were located with a city map took time, finding my way within them also took time. West Bridgford City Hall was not quite like the huge hospitals where new visitors would get lost for having lost their sense of direction, and being blinded by the signs. But like a hospital, so many of corridors looking similar to each other and the signage seeming wilfully obscure. But like many a visitor to a hospital I got a fair amount of  help when I looked slightly lost and there other people about. They spontaneously offered me directions.

With some of the tasks being less urgent than others I was apt to wander round a little, simply to get my bearings by sight. Joining West Bridgford Library was very low on the list of priorities, but the library building was much easier to find than many other buildings, and the process of joining was briefer to complete than for all the other tasks. The library building was a bigger version the library in Gainsborough. Both were fine Andrew Carnegie constructions from the 1920's. West Bridgford library proved to be not just a place for bookish entertainments, but with it's copies of phone books and business directories and other information it was a sign post for many of the places I thought I needed to go. It made many of the journeys I had to go on shorter. It was the second best place to go to. The Citizens Advice Bureau was the first place to go for advice but I did not find out where that was until later.

But the first place to find on the map and get to on the bus was my new employer, The Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home in Lady Bay, West Bridgford. If at some points over the weekend I had doubted the wisdom of moving to Nottingham then the employer was the person to dispel those doubts by putting me to work. The induction was demonstrative whilst being  undemanding. It was partly about becoming familiar with the lay out of the building, partly about how I understood my duties, at meal time towards the patients, and between meals but the most important part was being introduced to the residents out of courtesy to them. I was going to be working a pattern of different daytime shifts where I would be working most in the mornings, with some early afternoon shifts for variety.

This was not my first experience of nursing. If being a volunteer for St John Ambulance counted as nursing experience then that was my first. I was in that from the age of nine to nineteen or so, until I found friends my own age. But I discount that as nursing experience. It was much nearer a junior version of 'Dad's Army', pointless hierarchies and mild incompetence combined so as each disguised and justified the other. Then there was the year I spent as a volunteer of my own volition in Gainsborough's John Coupland hospital, as prelude to thinking I might get nurse training. There I was accepted by the ward nurses, but side lined and underused because I was uninsured. Here I was not only insured to work, but paid as well. Sorting out my banking arrangements for being paid with the head of the home was part of the induction.

This image was taken in 1990
two years after the Ace scheme
placement move, but it is close
enough to what I looked like in the
Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home.  

I liked the uniform but I was not particularly good as a nursing assistant at first. I was prone to impatience. But then this was the first time I was being paid to do something I thought I wanted to do. A lot of the work was slow routine support for people who due to their Parkinson's Disease were slow to act. The biggest part of the work was forcing myself to wait for them to give me their cues to allow me to be helpful, when I did not see and hear easily when I was going to be asked, due to their declining health. Mealtimes were when the cues and patience mattered most, that was when the residents most valued their autonomy. But every daytime activity that was led by the residents also required the same discipline. My impatience was a bad thing for people with Parkinson's disease. People who, depending on their age, health, and vitality, move at fractions of the pace they were once capable of when the Parkinson's was present in them but it not obvious in how they moved. But with practice I learned how to be more patient, within the work schedules that the nursing home ran to.    

Even now, I associate blandness with imminent discomfort. Many of my times that I had to myself in that first few weeks when I was not in work and I had no need to be in the bland house were spent on the buses, getting the lie of the city. I had been to Nottingham three times in the previous decade. Each visit was fleeting and I was a guest of others who was put in the back of a car. The first visit was with a friend to see one of their friends in my CND days. I could have fitted in better that evening than I did. The other two visits were both to the music venue Rock City, first to see Christian band After The Fire, and then to see Bruce Springsteen/Neil Young sides man and solo artist in his own right, Nils Lofgren, with a very different set of friends to CND friends I had. But I had never seen Nottingham during the day and on my own.

I don't know how often I caught different buses and en route took note of the different shops to investigate the next time I was on this route. But for that day I was going to places that I had seen and noted for the first time the last time I took this journey. Church buildings, record shops, second hand book shops and libraries were all of major interest. I was astonished at the floor space of the The Central Library, just off the city centre, it was spread over several floors, records and tapes to take out, as well as more books of interest to me than I could list, much less had the time to read. Library envy is not a feeling I expected to have at that stage of my life, but it was what I felt.

To be directed to Chapter Six please left click here.

 

Is This The Oldest Modern Genocide?

'Circassian Prince at Constantinople' as painted in 1845 by Orientalist American painter Miner Kilbourne Kellogg (1814-1889). The full description of the painting is described as Portrait of Seferbiy Zanoko, Circassian aristocrat, diplomat, and military leader in traditional Circassian costume. Circassia was a small country on the North East shore of the black sea close to Georgia and South Ossetia.

Seferbiy Zaneqo (1798 - 1860) was a Circassian diplomat and military commander and fifth leader of the Circassian Confederation between 1859 and 1860. He took part in the Russo-Circassian War in both a military and a political capacity. As a diplomat he advocated for the Circassian cause in the west, and acted as an emissary of the Ottoman Empire in the region. By the end of his life Zaneqo was the leader of the Circassian resistance.

Between 1763 and 1864 Circassia was at war with the Russian Empire. Between 1800 and 1864 the Russians overran Circassia, and committed genocide on it's Muslim population. Georgia is the only country in the world to still classify what the Russians did to the Circassians as a genocide.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Four - Mismatched Living

The weekend felt very odd. All I had, and all evidently was materially/socially, was in a pile out of direct view in this show house which now housed me, but in which I felt did not fit. The tenant/landlord relationship felt as new as the show house in which it was starting. As far as I could see everything was too shiny for comfort. My past, when I lived in it, had seemed to me to be much poorer materially, but much richer in connectivity. But in the light of the wealth and modernity that now surrounded me my life, as evidenced from what I had brought with me seemed worn out and tatty.

If I had been better organised before I left then I would have an address for Richard whom I had not seen might since that October meeting. But in October  he  seemed  quietly resistant about copying that detail down for me. But no, in the Gainsborough I had come  from, what seemed like friendship seemed easy bt evasive.  With  youth  unemployment  at high  levels young men had more time on their hands than they had money. With the time it was easy to get to know something about other young men using only first names  and  knowing  where they lived by sight, rather than the name and number of the street they lived on. We found it natural to avoid our family background because our families thought we had all  turned  out wrong again for us not being married off, not having full time well paid jobs, and not having a mortgage and our own house to live in and keep other people out of.     

My only company was Mike, who each time he passed me looking at the piles of what I had brought with me whilst thinking what to do next with it all made sort-of-funny but unhelpful comments. My weekend felt more like a very weak end. He was polite towards me, but was distant, making it clear that for him distance was the point. When he drove to join his family for Sunday lunch I was more relieved than guilty at how connecting with him now seemed so difficult. I can see more clearly now what I could not see then; that Mike had taken me at face value when first saw me, because as a landlord he was much nearer being the student he was before he became a property owner. I realised that when I first met and talked to him in the November I had door-stepped him, unaware that that was what I was doing. Even as he  had only recently changed from being  a student  into a property owner, his idea of being a student  was  always  far  better  supported  than  any  idea about any sort of life, as was witnessed by his comments. It did not help that I could not find a single book in the house with which to talk to him as more of an equal. Even my dad, who I generally thought little of, kept a small pile of paper backs of cowboy stories that he liked next to his armchair. There was not even a recipe book in the  house.  A house with no books, no house plants, and definitely not any animals in  it is surely defines the idea of an empty bachelor pad.

As I looked over the pile and slowly moved parts of it into my room, to be tidy, Mike would make passing comments if he was about. His most perceptive comment was in reply to something I said and have long since forgotten. His comment was about how our first thoughts are not always our best thoughts. His lack of curiosity was clear, along with how he had never met anyone who had built their life out of enduring long term unemployment or living on low pay when working. He was right about first thoughts, though. I could say nothing about how I could not get my head around how I was now having to learn to relate to somebody nearly the same age as me, but whose main interest in life was his work and it was a job that made him detached sufficient to bar him from having anything that resembled personal enthusiasm. I had got myself into being the tenant in a shared house with a landlord whose main enthusiasm was making enough money to live in impersonal secure comfort. If I could work out what and who was I could not work why I'd chosen to co-habit in such a situation.

I don't know when I became aware that my new choice of abode was a mistake. Nor do I know when it became clear to me that my past life was much more of a mess than the lives of the people I met in Nottingham. My first clue came to me with the moving of all my stuff that weekend. Mike looked and walked like a man who did not just wore a suit to work, the suit wore him, He looked uncomfortable not wearing a suit. His casuals at weekends were a white shirt, clean jeans and smart shoes. Whereas if there was a dominant theme with my clothing the phrase 'army surplus chic' would describe it best. For coats I had one suit jacket which I was proud of it partly because the label at the neck said 'made in Scunthorpe', a leather jacket on which the central back panel had survived being painted with white gloss paint which made it quite distinctive, a great coat for which the weather was much too warm nearly all year round which I kept because I liked the look of it, One type of jacket I did not have was denim jackets-I had a complete blind spot about them. My favourite everyday jacket was a light army jacket with lots of pockets, and to go with it I had a small canvas army shoulder bag. If the bag itself was small then it was a good place in which to put carrier bags when I shopped for food. My choice of shirts was ex-German Democratic Republic army shirts with the flag of the GDR at the top of the arm where from top to bottom the three stripes were black red and yellow, where the message the colours conveyed was the phrase 'through the night and the blood comes the light'. finally there were several pairs of air wear shoes worn to varying degrees, which were charity shop purchases which had been donated with wear left in them by delivery men, employees of The Post Office.

I disliked army-style 'camouflage' trousers, they seemed pretentious. If I had reasons to disguise myself then they disguised themselves from me. I had one pair of plain green army trousers with the extra side pockets in them to my name. My favoured everyday trousers were ordinary jeans, which I bought in charity shops, where if a got less wear out of them than if I'd bought new they still 'paid for themselves', with the wear I did get out of them. The jeans were usually topped off with the thick leather belt with the movable Fascist Spain belt buckle.

In the middle class West Bridgford that I had landed in, I was slow to understand the logic of detachment where charity shops were for giving to, not buying from. In the trouser department my prize possession was a pair of wide flared jeans that had been only just past being the height of fashion for me, when I first got them ten years earlier, Where they had become worn they had been patched, several times. The method of the patching being to cover the patch I was going to apply with copydex rubber glue, slap it flat over where the cloth of the jeans had thinned, and putting paper over the jeans in case of leaks, iron them both sides where the patch was applied, to heat the glue to make it adhere better. 

As I looked at these jeans I had no idea what was going to make me adhere to the life that was available to me in West Bridgford,

To be directed to Chapter Five please left click here.