The distance that I lived from my parents worked well for me that summer of 1988. I had a job, something my family approved of. I had found a secure address the right distance from my family where I was part of a distantly adoptive family of male adults who give each other space and were helpful to each other on request. I liked the room I lived and ate in. From the time I first saw it I thought that it must be the best in the house. I liked the sense of privacy that I found with the closing of the door. Whilst I had to walk a fair distance along the landing and down the stairs, past the stair cupboard, to the kitchen I found it to be good exercise. There was a rota of duties that we all roughly adhered to for the cleaning of the shared spaces, and there was rarely a queue for the use of the the automatic washing machine for washing our clothes. There was also a communal vacuum cleaner for everyone's use, including cleaning our own rooms. Though the task of emptying the dust bag always fell selectively on the person who discovered that it was full before they wanted to use it.
With my sister now married and a young working mother who lived in Bodmin, Cornwall, and me temporarily settled in my job and at the address I lived at, my parents now had just each other to see and live around daily. Both my sister and I had escaped. Given how recent our escapes were-her escape started three years before mine, and was somewhat angry and hasty-it remained to be seen how permanent we could make our escapes. I was happy to take the train for the weekend and visit the parental house in Gainsborough. Mother seemed pleased to see me, but I said nothing when I felt an air of neglect about the place-old packets of muesli with weevils crawling through it that should surely have been thrown out a long time ago. I could remember the classic line of argument I'd experienced as a teenager 'Don't you dare treat this house like it is a hotel.'. With things like the live muesli what came to me was how it looked like they both wanted to co-exist in the house in a way that their avoidance pushed the other partner into being observant, and doing more tidying up. And with his place of worship and friendship being the pub, dad was much better at avoidance than Mother was. I was thankful that I could check out of the parental house and return to my own life.
If dad's place of worship and friendship was the pub then my place of worship and friends remained the church. Visiting the family and houses of Christians I knew on my visits from Nottingham I realised that houses and families existed between two extreme models. Some houses and families made space in the house for the young people having friends their own age and gave the young people a sense of privacy, sharing what they all had. Others, like mine, made me leave the house as a child and a youth to find friends. My parents let very few people in, even keeping adult relatives at bay where ever possible. Part of how the parental house conditioned me was that from an early age I was always more to be received as a guest by other people than I was to be receiving friends as a host.
But sometimes my new situation came up trumps. On one Autumn weekend visit to friends in the Christian Youth Fellowship in Gainsborough I told them that Hawkwind were playing Rock City in Nottingham and that same afternoon a car load both said they wanted to see the band and agreed to collect me in Nottingham on the way. I had seen the band live before, but at Glastonbury when they were some distance from the audience. There the lasers impressed me but the sound was not loud enough for seeing them to be immersive. The December that the members of the youth group came to my room before the gig they were my first guests, even if I was as much their guest in the car. The gig was brilliant, my ears were ringing for three days afterwards, and the playing and projections achieved a deeply immersive and transporting effect. Seeing the band and being that close to the speakers made all the difference. That said the moment that had most impact on me came to me when mid way through the gig when I was standing away from the crush for a rest. I found myself watching a young man struggle to put a LP record in a carrier bag not much bigger than the record. This brought out the care worker in me. Amid the noise I stood close enough to him and I held the bag open so he could get the record in more easily. Who he was did not matter, with his need he humanised that gig for me.
Not that my sense of altruism always won me appreciation. When Brian, my landlord, talked in downtrodden tones about how that week his house was worth ten thousand pounds less than it was worth the week before, not thinking through what to say I replied to him that houses were for living in. His instant response was to call me 'A Socialist' as if such a term was the height of wit whilst it was mildly abusive. I know what a market is, and that they come in different definitions of who they favour. But I no more understand buying and selling in the abstract and for their own sake now than I did thirty five years ago. I am happy to not understand that aspect of life.
Six months into the contract as a care worker, and well into the Autumn, I wanted to do the job for as long as I could. Everyone was happy when Michael left early, HMV could have him. It left more work for Arthur and me to maintain. But we both knew that the set up we were working from was going to end when our contracts ended. Peter, the manager, was encouraging us to apply for jobs and leave sooner. The first jobs we were encouraged to apply for were filing and care type posts with Nottingham Council via their in house bulletin where such vacancies were listed. But to zero effect. Anything we m applied for that was within our experience quickly attracted too many applicants for us to believe we had even half a chance, even when Peter was our referee, were we to get that far with the post.
The great moving on came to Arthur and me in late November. We were both sent off to a training unit to update our skills in applying for jobs and hone our interview technique. So that if we got that far then we might get further than the other applicants. Frankly however I tried to dress up my work experience over the previous decade or so, the jobs I'd done all looked like filler more than jobs that could amounted to anything to a notionally serious employer. But at least I learned to leave my secondary non-education in a care home for the maladjusted off the CV and I did have five 'O' levels which was more than many young working age men had. Though how much they were part of the qualifications inflation process and how much getting them was about beating such inflation was debatable.
As a care worker I had learned something about presentation. So, even as I would have looked awkward and felt uncomfortable in an office -style white shirt, suit, and dark tie, I looked okay with my idea of being smart, a suit jacket over a fisherman's jumper and dark not-quite-matching trousers. What mattered to me more in a presentation was that I spoke in whole sentences where I sounded like I knew where the sentence was going and would end before I started the sentence. I got this idea for how to speak from the radio, from the way that Alistair Cook spoke on Radio 4's 'Letter From America', which I listened to in awe of the longevity of the programme. Forty years and sounding strong.
The novelty of the training was that not only would we be given a mock job interview, based on a mock application form, but our performance were be video taped and the interviewer, my boss Peter, would through the video of our performances, for pointers for us to improve upon. I was never media trained, but the video of my interview was quite flattering. The only question the video left unanswered was whether I would have interviewed as well if I did not know my interviewer, and my interviewer did not know me.
With the last few weeks in the job specifically including daily time off from completing care visits to check in with the job centre the pace of change was apparent to me. With Christmas so close and ten days left on my contract the staff at job centre got in touch with a nursing home who needed staff, fast. I was interviewed the same day I found out about the job. For them it was Hobson's choice. Their choice was me or nobody. Because nobody else had enquired. The matron said nothing about how she overlooked my lack of experience and suitability, and how they would have preferred that I was female. I will let others decide whether they took me on mostly because I did not know what the job involved.
The job was not flattering. It was helping elderly and infirm women residents get up in the morning, wash, dress, and get their breakfast, and repeat the same process to rinse, for every meal until bed time when the residents had to be tucked up. Not knowing what to say about such work, or what such a life might be like I accepted the job on the spot. It gave me a reason to not see my parents over Christmas and New Year, which I knew would be an emotionally flat time anyway.
To be directed to Chapter Thirteen please left click here.
Many of my readers will know of
Person Centred (Rogerian) Therapy,
devised by psychologist Carl Rogers.
There the therapy is directed by the client,
and the role of the therapist is to follow
where the client leads to help the latter
rediscover how right they were,
through the therapist's listening ear.
There is a role for the therapists voice,
but it is mostly in the silence that the client
gets to understand afresh how to live.
But away from the therapy room,
the change I want to see in society
is technology assisting us day in day out
to live slowly and use as much of our time
as helping humans find trust in each other
whilst completing daily tasks slowly,
Enable technology and money to help people meet
more easily and effectively to complete their business,
rather than making isolation the more effective path.
is like the lives of the books that get remaindered,
and all the food that gets close to its 'sell by date'
which has to be sold off at a much reduced price
because the shop has no wish to have on their site
the necessity to recycle organic matter or plastics,
that would cost them more than the hit of the loss
of selling the food below it's cost price.
As long s it is sustainable,
even when it is seen as waste,
then what, and to whom, does it matter?
My life matters to so few people nowadays
that even positive relationships assume the tone,
and the aspect, of being remaindered.
When my neighbour has an item
that she no longer likes the look of,
but feels still has value I am the one
to be given the first option on it
when the alternative is the bin.
Being remaindered, I try to make
my cheap life seem useful to others
for as much as that holds,
but what I truly put my hope in
is my non-corporeal remains,
being remaindered in eternity.
 |
| Where is the pill that will give us a better resistance against the life engineered to be unscientific where the best medicine is always overselling? |
I see the Israel/Palestine conflict
as 'The wound that resists all healing'.
From the latter days of the Ottoman Empire
(1517-1917) Palestine was always a backwater
for the many bigger countries in the empire
to promise to build up, and fight each other over,
whilst laying waste in the fight to the materials
that would have made good on the promises.
This would be well before ideas of Zionism
took their first primitive shape, in the late 1800's.
Palestine was to the Ottoman Empire
what Belgium was to Western Europe,
a non-country that created peace
by settling competing empire ambitions
that were ground to a stalemate
in the countries that surrounded it.
Rather than the land being a country
with a people and an identity
that was definitely it's own, Belgium,
and Palestine, were buffer zones.
When the Ottoman Empire was no more
the Jews made plans for it as a homeland
whilst Palestine's historic inhabitants
kept the lesser identity of themselves
of being par buffer zone part future
to the many Islamic republics, an image
those countries enjoyed playing up to.
Nowadays the politics of Israel vs Palestine
vs other Islamic countries plays out
like an episode of victim (Palestine) vs
persecutor (Israel) where Islamic Republics
of different size play rescuer to Palestine,
whilst making a victim of Israel etc.
I don't really want to go there.
A common phrase observes well
how attached folks get to their origins,
'You can take a person away
from where they were raised
but you can't take where they born
out of who they are.'.
A quote that seems more cogent
the more damaged and sentimental
beyond all reason their upbringing.
I know too few people well enough
to ask them as friends about the child
vs the adult in them without me
being accused of 'playing the psychiatrist',
but I would love to be able to ask them
'What did you think 'spirituality' was
when you were a child? and as an adult?'
Is it different now, to how you expected it to be?'.
If asked this myself then I still don't know
what the answers would be, but they exist.
One of the most commonly observed
but least understood human phenomena
is charisma, which exists in animals too.
Defining charisma is relatively easy.
In a situation where instruction is involved
charisma is a quality where those instructed
are more malleable because of the charisma
of their instructor, It is much more than seniority,
or pulling rank within a tightly defined hierarchy.
To be a religious leader, a politician, or musician
and be a success at it requires measures of skill,
organisational ability, and (cue fanfare... ) charisma!
For the demonstration of your skills etc to take effect
and the charismatic person to become wealthy.
Charisma is the gift for finding the switch
in ordinary people's brains that makes them believe,
without being able to form questions, what they are told.
I had no complaints when after six weeks of being a peripatetic care assistant the council changed my job title, and my work, from care assistant where I visited people in their homes and helped them start the day, to being a care worker and visitor who would visit them well after Breakfast. I was relieved that my morning bus journeys to work were standardised to two long journey via the city centre, with the variations of my choice for the journey back. From being a student ten years earlier I had always been 'a bag person', that is I always had a carrier bag with me taking the days required items in one direction and finding more to take back. In Nottingham the upgrade was to a medium sized frameless rucksack, a then-recent charity shop purchase into which I put the food from my late afternoon post-work shopping trips as part of my journey home.10
From April to December I applied myself diligently to the task of being one of a team of three misfit male care workers, and one manager, Pete, who were sent to work in a large fixed portacabin which had several rooms in it, as an office in the middle of one of the more thoroughly run down working class estates in Nottingham where there was not a church, social services, or any sort community building within a three mile radius of the estate. The community I was sent out into were tired and socially withdrawn from so many of then making their benefits stretch to cover their living costs whilst they rented council houses and flats where the council seemed somewhat distant from them. They felt left behind by both Thatcherism and local government. I was employed to make local government seem a little closer and more relevant to them than it had seemed in recent times.20
I write 'misfit', we were all using up the remainder of our part time Manpower Services Commission contracts by doing a job that would either not be done at all or would be more naturally done by women. We were paid to visit local residents and be the better informed neighbour, who when a resident of the area presents a problem as part of a conversation, for us working for the council/living outside the area we could see more clearly that the council had a service that would partially or entirely fix the problem. That is a short profile of what a care worker was meant to do.26
Outside of making council services like meals-on-wheels more amenable to the residents, one of the more useful questions we were licensed to ask was with respect to state benefits. We could and did ask people 'What benefits are you on?' and 'Are you getting all the benefits you are entitled to?'. Quite a few local resident had built up debts that had to be repaid with interest that they could not repay to companies that sold goods from catalogues. One of the still useful parts of the welfare state was to get a loan from the Department of Social Security that repaid the debts with interest that residents had taken out, where the DSS loan was charged at zero percent interest which was repaid at rate agreed with the claimant out of their benefits. We were good at helping local people fill out benefit forms, partly because we were only one job title away from filling in forms on the dole ourselves. We always made sure that the claimant was seen to have filled the forms in, themselves.37
I liked Pete, the manager, he was going to keep his job with the council, though he might change title and project, long after our contracts ended. Now a man does not have to be gay to feel okay doing what others define as 'a woman's job' but it might help. Up to a point, I think my sexuality helped me do the job better. The job was not going to help me out of the closet-that would take a more personal and emotional push than the job could be. Of the three of us Arthur was the oldest. He was in his early fifties, had an interest in the Citizens Advice side of the work we did from a leftist/journalist's union perspective. He was married and he managed a drink problem. His wife suspected him of adultery, not realising his commitment was to alcohol rather than another female. When he changed his choice of alcoholic drink to one that he was happier having less of that made his wife and his financial position more secure. When I went on a visit and came away with some further choice of action on behalf of who I had just visited Arthur was a person who saw clearer than I did whether the householder really wanted the help I thought they wanted, or whether they were nearer being bored and making up needs they did not want met.52
I was not alone in getting on badly with the other care worker, Michael. He was the youngest of the three of us. If he was not gay then he was camp enough for others to think he was gay when he was being abrasive and declamatory in the office. With many of the visits we were chatting with women heads of households who were on benefits, who had sons who had moved away. I knew that it was easy for them to see us to see them as like their sons. I knew to be wary about temporary attempts to relate to others with an age/gender gap like that. I tried to keep my visits formal but friendly. That said, I'd level with the women I visited when it felt we were both safe doing that. Goodness knows how he handled the age/gender gap on his visits. If it was anything like his acting out in the office during breaks then he was truly taking the Michael out of the job, particularly when he revealed how well his weekend job as a assistant at HMV paid by comparison. 63
Arthur got annoyed when Michael took the job less seriously in the office, but than we all did, during the summer months when there seemed to be more time than there seemed to be work to do to fill that time. Michael was one of the few people I can remember privately being very clearly angry and contemptuous towards. Perhaps he had some special technique for getting under the skin of those around him, or I was thinner skinned than I realised in the first place. 68
The latter is more than possible. Pete was the young university educated team leader who kept us all motivated in the face of the indifference around us. He was advancing his career by training as a therapist. I liked him, but then I would have liked any man who seemed personable and had a beard. That said, any attraction that I found through my submerged homosexuality always left me with more questions than I could openly ask myself. The secrecy and lack of explanation it came with required something like assertiveness training to blow the cobwebs away off the subject for me. 75
One day Pete and I got sat talking alone. All the other staff were out on calls. I was lingering over some minor file updating that could be done anytime. By some sort of conversational accident he began talking about his training as a therapist. As far as I could tell my 'being gay' was something others might be able to decode in me if they wanted to. But even if they did, neither of us would have had the words to directly discuss what they had decoded. To me such a dialogue required courage to invent it. But as Pete talked about his training as therapist I was persuaded to reveal one of the earliest unfortunate episodes around my father and his relationship with alcohol. It involved me reading out Christmas cards aged five, and seemingly setting off world war three between my parents just a few feet away from me. 84
Pete very easily regressed me right back to being that five year old in that small living room, reading that card. We were both frightened at how easily he had done it, and both nervous about what to do next to bring me back to a more secure adult state. I found the solution. Aged five I was keen to prove I could read, I read out a Christmas card which caused my parents to argue in such an explosive way that it left me with a hidden trauma. So with Pete, and still in the emotional state of being traumatised and five years old, I teared up a piece of paper as if it were the Christmas card that had seemingly caused me the trauma. This immediately restored me to being the adult he needed me to be, by giving my five year old self an exit they could use from a situation that originally lacked any such exit. But what Pete and I did was dangerous in any setting, and particularly risky in that makeshift private space. 94
I was more glad of that free therapy session, dangerous as it was, than I expected to be at the next works summer Friday night at the pub. At these occasions I joined in because I felt I had to, but I felt I had a lot to be modest about. From the unofficial therapy session onward I felt more confident amid those sometimes disjointed Friday night conversations.96
To be directed to Chapter Twelve please left click here.
Unless we are born into royalty,
or somehow become cult figures
who can command total deference
for life from those we attract,
and deference in the hereafter,
we are all, to a degree, half-formed.
We will never be the people
our complex society advertises we will be,
even when they give us half the means
to be complete, expecting us to busk the rest.
The pressure to conform is easy.
All it takes is an advertisers' nudge
or the withdrawal of gov't money
to make us much more ill at ease
whilst being half-formed, and pressurise us
to doubt the half-sense we have of ourselves.
Whilst signing out of this deal
is difficult, we should not worry.
When societies becomes data
every society is only as good
as it's data storage systems,
and when they collectively fail,
as data storage systems will,
there will be no other version of us,
we are complete in our half memories
complete in how we reinvent ourselves.
Until I looked the words up,
I did not realise that the phrase
'super injunction' were so recent
in being coined, or by whom.
2006, and The Guardian, since you ask.
But I understood it straight away.
I had a long memory of living
as part of a family where explaining
to ourselves and each other
what we were doing
and why we had to do it
was an anathema, or at least
it would have been if they knew
what an anathema was.
Adopting religion, well a faith,
did not help the way I thought it would.
There I found not just taboo,
but taboo about taboo, until faith
in language became that difficult
I did not know what to.
Starting from scratch I kept the faith,
but with George Orwell as my guide
I decided that language has to be direct,
active not passive and what mattered
was being able to say who did what,
and when and why they did it.
To ask all this in faith meant that
I could at least have faith in language,
and maybe language could reflect
the life that I thought I was living.
It is strange how easily old Hollywood,
for being aberrant and ahistorical in itself,
could push images and perpetuate myths
that were nonsense multiplied for viewers
to take as gospel long after the film first had currency.
In 'It's A Wonderful Life' there is a scene
where the towns people lay siege to their local bank
'to ask for their money back' as if the money
they once put in the bank long ago was still there,
their names were on the notes, or at least on the boxes
that their money was stored in, in the safe, as if the bank
was a safer version of putting the money under their mattress.
To state the obvious, money does not work like that.
Nor does identity and every identity based on money
and property is only as stable as the market for exchange
that it is part of. The process of exchange, new money for old,
identity updates and advances with age, are what supports
the renewal of every given community and society.
You will still exist, whatever the bureaucracy.
Whether it is a bank holding your details,
and money that was only ever notionally yours
at the moment you handed it over. Or when the gov't
holds details that facilitate what seems to be the life
style of your choice, when it was chosen for you.
If you want an identity outside of all that,
then first you have to realise the size
of what you are asking for-it is a lot.
As for me, the bank no longer ask for my i/d
as they asked before, the tellers recognise me.
I could not ask for more than that.
The biggest mistake anyone can make
is to deny the possibility
that they will make mistakes.
It can only mean they make more
of the mistakes they made before,
and do worse-through not learning.
The best we can do is adapt
our errors in the hope of change
-making a different mistake-
in the hope of finding virtue in them.
What no teenager appreciates,
because the adults they depend on
rarely have the means to explain it,
is that every society has it's predators
and every society in history is sexual.
Modern societies like their talk of sex
to be clean and safe to share,
in their modernity they play down
notions of risk, to up the sense of safety
whilst denying bad things happen
with their partial explanations.
What parents deny is how much
youths are attractive to predators,
and all the more attractive for their
not knowing how attractive they are,
whether the predator is their employer
or that 'family friend' they see from afar.
However old I get I hope I understand
what 'virginity' should be, operationally.
'Being a virgin' never meant not knowing
what sex was, it meant knowing enough
about sex, along with working definitions
of what money and power are,
to resist being corrupted by them.
We have to know what corruption is
to be able to resist being corrupted.
Nobody should argue otherwise.
 |
In this brave new start I had found, of living on Hangman's Rd, my biggest personal decision was to stop keeping a diary. I found the last six years of diaries among the things I kept in my room. From reading some of the entries in them as I filed the diaries away I realised how much over the last six or seven years of writing them that at best they were inconsistent in the details they recorded. At worst what I wrote seemed like trivia, and I had been highly evasive about putting my personal feelings in the diary entries. That my most personal feelings had only found expression in activities that seemed to not have a name seemed to be beside the point. By deciding to not keep a diary from then on I abandoned the diary I had started. I resolved to by whatever means open to me develop the intent to be more honest about myself in my person, more than I had in writing where I believed that I had fallen short of the standard I wanted to keep.
I was not the only one of my friends to move. One close friend, Graham R, had finally organised himself to get out of the English midlands and lead the life he always wanted to live in Cornwall. His parting gift to me came with mixed blessing attached to it. It was a black and white portable television that he did not want to take with him and I was the best choice of recipient for it. In one way I was lucky with the gift, I did not have to buy a license, the landlord's license for the house covered my viewing habits. He had left a colour television in the kitchen for communal use. where whoever of the five of us was there together the most agreeable consensus for it's use was at most some sort background distraction where nobody particularly liked the channel it was set to But whoever was there disliked the other channels more. That there were only four channels to choose from simplified any disagreement on which channel it should be set to when the set was on.
I watched what I really wanted to watch in my room, albeit with reduced quality. The black and white television sat on my bedside table and I would watch it from the warmth of my single bed. It felt quietly luxurious to me when 'The World's Strongest Man 1988' was broadcast and I watched it alone in my room. In no way did I recognise that I effectively had a soft porn habit fed by my choice of television programme, where I rendered the screen images of these big men lifting big weights and moving buses etc as my definition of porn. The television presentation of their efforts assisted me in this. It was complimented by slow motion replays of certain lifts etc, and interviews with the performers who claimed to be, and were presented as, athletes who were strictly in competition with each other. But when the camera lingered on the lightly dressed rather large bodies of these 'athletes' and the body moved and flexed a little, creating a reaction in certain viewers the physicality of the athletes seemed to be more important than any competition they were supposedly part of. Who could place where the narcissism loop actually started, when the chain ran from the athletes in training in private and went via their open competition with each other through the television screen through to the millions of viewers? Who could care enough to want to resist the loop after it had become self perpetuating enough as to become a fixture in the commercial television schedules?
The external formalities of settling into this new room proved a lot easier than I expected them to be. The form filling for the housing benefit went a lot more smoothly than before and because Nottingham City Council had taken over the remaining contracts set up by The Manpower Services Commission everything was 'in house' and between the city council and West Bridgford council it was all dealt with far more promptly than before.
I liked the room too. In the parental house my sister had got the best room in house for it being the most hospitable room that was the width of the house, I was getting the same at this new address. The other renters were working class men of mixed ages, jobs and backgrounds who accepted that they were nicest in small doses, such as when they met each other in the kitchen whilst cooking a meal for themselves. A meal which they ate on their own in their bedsits. Nobody ate their meal in the kitchen even though it was meant to be a communal space. It was too indifferently furnished for anyone to want to stay there too long, We carried our meals to our rooms even though it meant carrying our plate climbing one or two flights of stairs that were dimly lit from above.
I attempted the occasional attempted communal meal. One tenant worked for a time in an abattoir. By agreement he brought home for free a whole pigs head from which he removed all the edible meat. His show his expertise with sharp knives on the kitchen table of what was clearly head shaped was quite a sight, the nearest we would get to theatre in that shared house where really we shrank into our rooms as much as we shrank to fit around the world we were supposedly part of. The idea worked, once, We all had our fill and the meal was cheap. But experiment was not repeated.
I found a much better prepared communal life in people's homes through work. With my first job working directly for the council as a care assistant I was sent to different addresses across West Bridgford and nearby The Meadows to help the disabled and the elderly, mostly men, start their days. Helping them to get them up and wash themselves, and making their breakfast for them on a tight schedule was rewarding work when they were keen. I spent a fair amount of unpaid time on buses getting to and from appointments, but the bus journeys between clients became my break times. I was not issued with any sort of pass to reduce the prices of bus fares, but there was an expenses scheme to collect my work related bus tickets for, I liked working on my own. I was comfortable with knowing management was there to support me, and the client would report back to them if anything was amiss. But other than the expected client feedback to the management I was left to get on with the job. The work did not feel to me as if it was 'woman's work', nor did I see myself as an exception in my gender for doing the work that I did. Much less did I hanker after my former placement in the Leonard Cheshire Home, close as it was to where I now lived.
One client was particularly notable. He was a young man who had been wheelchair bound since birth, but he was obviously intelligent for all he was slow of speech. He saw himself as Christian. I went to my first classical music concert as his attendant, It was a performance of the large scale choral piece by Edward Elgar, 'The Dream of Gerontius'. That it was live music-something I saw rarely-should have impressed me. But the overall impression that I felt was one where the performance was the musical equivalent of a large piece of solid looking dark stained Victorian furniture.
He was not only a Christian but he had passed theological exams, and was part of a circuit of preachers. In the time I knew him he got himself booked to speak from the stage at Christian camping events. Being a Christian, myself, I temporarily became his ideal choice of carer-for-his-travels. I attended several camping events with him, events where away from their home churches, Christians looked for renewal via spiritual insight and fresh thinking.
I got my share of that through showing the levels of practical charity involved in waking a disabled person up whilst in their sleeping bag in their tent, then sitting them up comfortably at the edge of their tent so that I could fit their catheter and start to fully dress them. Only then could I lift him into his wheelchair, which I had to steer slowly over rough ground for us to go off in search of breakfast. Whatever anyone might call the mix of a gentle attitude, physical strength, and a lack of squeamishness about the human body, I had enough of all of them for him, until he found somebody else with a similar aptitude.
To be directed to Chapter Eleven please left click here.
'A ghetto' is what we say other people
live in, in countries where even when
we know they have difficulty leaving,
and the laws they live under are unfair,
'we don't like to get over concerned'.
We say 'I live in a community' which is
what limits our concern, whilst disguised,
we 'other' our neighbours, by declining
to recognise them as being anything like us.
But there remain similarities to be observed.
The first is who sets the connections
that make a people cohere to each other?
Where a people set their own boundaries
and the fences seem good from both sides
it makes for good neighbours but how long,
in a competitive, materially grasping, world,
will that go on? Even as we like peace at home
we export war and disease abroad for our comfort.
And the greater the comfort
the further away from us
we have to keep war and disease,
whilst importing luxury materials
until where we live is our empire.
that give us more of what we liked before
because it is what they know we liked
-like parents pleasing a child not realising
that children grow and change their minds-,
the astounding copying facilities of AI
-where the sense of the uncanny spooks us-,
and last but far from least the human capacity
for rumour, error, and disguising how we lie
-both to ourselves and to each other-
the men who seek to sell us powerful computers
have to do a lot to convince us of why to trust them.
But then as children we grew up with families
who liked recreating pasts past their sell by date
by the time we tried to live them out,
grew up with teachers who wanted their pupils
to be better copyists of the best of the near past,
and grew up with liars for whom the last thing
they wanted was to be found to be fabricating.
If that was the analogue, and human, version
of what computers can do with greater consistency,
if not also greater ease than we dare imagine,
then let us not be surprised when the digital version
of ourselves replicates all our faults
as well as our sense of human invention.
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| By Portuguese poet and prose writer Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935) an author so prolific he wrote works under 75 other names and spoke and wrote in at least three languages |
is the state of mind that it is hard to find
in Homo Sapiens, where how they think
never resolves to a single settled state.
It is the fate of even the finest minds
to not merely need to wander, but requiring
somewhere else to be, and when to be there,
for them to be fully but briefly engaged
with where they are in any present situation.
So when you leave off reading this blog,
and click on the next tab, and site after that
just remember that you were here once
even if it seems unclear what you were here for.
Do zombies have a consciousness
by which to know that they are zombies?
Or would thinking you were a zombie
mean that you were not one, even when
your thoughts, and other people's comments,
tell you that you are?
as it says in exam papers 'discuss....'.
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| At last I have found a use for football, it gives me a unit of measurement for the rate of the slow but clear advance of the sixth extinction. Who would have thought that a game played in schools to 'use up spare energy' in primary school pupils would have such a powerful existential afterlife? As unit of measurement for the removal of generous, quiet, life-giving ancient forest all there is left to ask is how many trees can grow on an area the size of a football field. Please left click here for one answer. Though what disturbs me is next uncalculated question, the number of tree years in each football field's worth of virgin Amazonian forest chopped down. For this there is only one answer; too many, |
In these multi-media multi-faith times
people are used to being divided by group
in their opinions on spiritual matters.
We all follow this online page, that website,
where faiths that promote themselves as unique
are taken back to their origins of being one faith
among a throng, who willing supported diversity.
So now we can go online to shop for nurture
for our spirit as we want. Atheists too have fora
to observe the phenomena of what they disbelieve,
though how scientifically they dis/believe
what they all observe remains to be argued over.
Meanwhile I notice as I walk to church
not only my faith in walking, but how much
church goers drive to their place of worship
the same way people drive to supermarkets,
in a state of consistent subdued distraction.
Anyone who tells those around them
'I would sell my soul for [insert ambition here]'
clearly has ambitions beyond all reason.
They may be the success
that they first set out to be,
and by some post hoc logic
will reckon the price they paid
and where what it got them
to be 'worth what it cost'
even when where it got them
was short of what it was meant to be
and the process can no more be undone
than it can be repeated
but there is room for doubt there.
Their wants could only be lived once,
and after their soul and sanity returns to them,
both slightly scarred, an ordinary life beckons
where their former ambitions will seem absurd
and well beyond retelling.
If only there was an index,
and units of measurement,
that got the measure of corporate insincerity,
the sort of thing when a corporation, a minister
or some small town bully business man
finds the wrong side of public opinion
through their actions-to the point
of being publicly rebuked, fined,
or pushed into taking the actions
they originally ran for office to perform
but got bored with maintaining,
because changing their plans
brought them too much money to count.
Then we would have a measure
of the world that properly measured
the depreciation of public service values.
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| Unwelcome as it is, tinnitus is a daily experience for many, including for the deaf who hear the whistle ringing, buzz or hum when they hear little else quite as clearly. There is nothing making the sound, which comes and goes in either one ear or the other in it's own time. Some get a stereo image of it, as if it is coming from the both channels/ears, or from the centre of their head. For others it is musical, similar but different to ear worms- when a random well known tune comes into a person's head. Please left click here to hear what mine sounds like, or here for the UK Tinnitus Support website for more about the noise that nobody can avoid when they hear it. |
When any tenant seeks to rent a room in a city there are different questions to be answered. What is the character of the area of the new address like? Does the rent seem reasonable for what is on offer? Does the landlord accepts housing benefit? How good is the room? Does the address have access to a garden? How close is the address to the nearest grocers shop? How near are the nearest bus routes and roads useful for getting into town or work? And last, but far from least, does the landlord seem amenable? With these questions, particularly the last, I had been hasty first time around. But hast was necessary for me to get my placement started, and unlike the average student moving away from home for the first time did not have a supportive family protecting my back, as I chose where to live.
The first tenancy was hastily and ill chosen, but even with the hindsight of just a few weeks in work I could not see how I could have chosen with more discernment. And that tenancy was supportive enough to be my first firm foothold on life in Nottingham. This included going through the process of finding the right council office to send my housing benefit forms to at the second attempt, as opposed to taking the forms to the wrong one for not knowing, and nobody in the department saying anything. When West Bridgford Council put in an appeal against me receiving housing benefit from when I first arrived in spite of having delivered the forms to the wrong council department, I won the appeal, they lost. I was paid in full. All of this prepared me better for when Mike gave me a fortnight's notice to move to another address. But finding my feet through making mistakes did make trying to settle feel like a close run thing, and this was without my work for the Leonard Cheshire Home coming to an end more abruptly that I could have imagined. But I had a work contract that had most of a year left to run.
Pierrepoint Rd was not the most positive sounding address I could imagine myself living on. Why live on a road named after the last hangman in England? Albert Pierrepoint was also known as a distinctly disgruntled chap, for lack of work towards the end of his career. Or so I was told. I might very well have wondered how he compared with my new landlord, on Pierrepoint Rd. Brian was a divorced middle aged man who earlier in his life had been in a childless marriage and had been the manager of a pub. The house Brian lived in, and rented rooms to others in, was his main financial asset after what must have been a difficult divorce settlement and downsizing. Even when he was at his most cheerful and everyday there was a clear melancholy about him. How much of his ache was due to the shock of the divorce and it consequences was hard to tell. He did not even have a store of anecdotes about cheery times in the pub he once ran.
Maybe Brian's melancholy was what I was looking for, and I did not realise it at the time. When I lived with my parents both dad and next door neighbour Stan were men whose lives had somehow stalled, all progress in their lives went on hold from when they were about forty onward. Stan had married a German woman some time after WW2. He had swiftly become resigned to being a widower/bachelor from the time his wife died in the 1950's, some time before my parents bought the house next door to him in 1960. As of 1988, when I moved to Pierrepoint Rd, my mother was going shopping for him as if shopping was 'women's work', and he knew too little about it. Dad had lost his job aged forty four, just ten years before I moved to this new address. He was uncomfortably adjusting to the idea that after over twenty years in the same job he might never get paid work again.
My own sense of melancholy came to the fore when I finally unpacked everything I owned as part of my settling into Pierrepoint Rd. Some young adults could take leave of their parents with good things 'from the bottom draw' that their parents had saved for the child to use to making a home that was entirely their own. I had no such family or privilege. From aged seven I had slept in the attic, surrounded by boxes of things where the boxes took up space that I might have valued. What blocked my future changed the older I got, from the lack of physical space to excuses as to why this that and the other that was normal for other folk 'was not for us'. Nonetheless I had done my best over the four changes of address over the last eight years to accumulate enough good for the place I wanted to live in.
As I looked at some of what I had brought with me, all my worldly goods, scales fell from my eyes in ways that I was unprepared for. For the first time I was confronted with my own adoption of the avoidance and poor judgement that I associated with my parents. Part of the storage I had kept things in was a shopping trolley. When I had lived in Gainsborough I had used it for putting my shopping in. In Gainsborough it seemed mildly worn but useable to me. In it's new place it looked like something a bag lady would look at with condescension. It went to the bin promptly, along with one other odd object that I could barely credit as to why I had kept it. It was the painted glass front of a radiogramme, the 1950s equivalent of a music centre, showing the different radio stations that when the tuning knob was turned an indicator passed behind the glass, lit from below, to show the frequency and station the set was tuned to. Why keep something so useless away from what it was originally part of?
My mother's sentimentality is the short answer. The longer answer is that the radiogramme the glass came from was once part of was one of the items of furniture my parents had been given when they first moved into the house dad bought when they married, in 1960. By 1965 it had stopped working and they care too little about it to get it repaired, and continue to listen to it. Instead dad reorganised the living room in 1968 and made the black and white television he started renting the focal point of the living room. Between dad never fully completing tasks and Mother being a hoarder, the radiogramme got as far as the back yard and stayed there, the cheap walnut veneer pealing slowly with the seasons. In 1971 when I had some sort of nervous breakdown I spent the summer of 1972 away from family in the back yard. I whiled away the hours imagining the voices that might have come from the radio. When I was eventually sent away the deal that my parents came to was that the radiogramme was to go to the dump, but the glass was to be retrieved and kept as a souvenir for me, to be kept in my boxed-in attic room until in 1985. That year was when the attic room had a bath put in it. If installing a bath in the attic seems to be a strange arrangement then that strangeness was mild compared with the awkward compromises and explanations for compromises that my parents had cooked up between them over the decades, with Mother doing most of the cooking, since I was born.
At mother's bidding I had kept the glass from 1985 onward. She thought that it was part of my relationship with her. If I felt different then I knew to not say so. Still, I was surprised at seeing the glass wrapped in local newspaper in February 1988, and surprised at how what looked now like a piece of junk had once had so much feeling invested in it. With my third change of address since the glass left the parental house, the glass, and much more besides, was put in the bin.
To be directed to Chapter Ten please left click here.
who call on the phone, whose aim
is to sell you something expensive
you never needed to 'improve your home'
which won't be an actual improvement;
tell them 'I rent my home, your sale pitch
should be aimed at my landlord, the owner.'
without giving the caller a phone number.
They won't know whether what you say
is true or false. Long before they rang you
they were more caught up with being better liars
than they think you could be, and you were not to know that.
'The Economy is turning a corner'
is a phrase that if people were paid
to have to listen to being trotted out
then the economy really would change.
As it is economies move too slowly
for us to feel them change and our feelings
are what needs to turn the corner, before
the economy drives us clean round the bend.
But more seriously whatever the metaphor
for how we feel about the money we don't have,
but expect in our hand, to buy the future we expect
we can't know the process of purchase in advance.
We are the ones turning the corner
with the money we have in our hands,
where the poor live close to within their means,
but the rich see their wealth as a way to lever debt,
as if debt were the future they can buy now, and pay for
much later, if ever, because their capital buys them that.
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| Top; 'Funnel of Solitude' (1921) Second; 'Broken and Restored Multiplication (1919) Third; 'Radiation of Two Lone Ones at a Distance (1920) Bottom; 'Marcel Duchamp's unhappy Readymade' (1920), All painted by Dada artist, and sister of Marcel, Suzanne Duchamp (1889-1963) one of four of the six brothers and sisters of the Duchamp family who became artists. Please left click here for more on Suzanne Duchamp. |
