Ain't Ease A Deceptive Thing?

We never know how exceptional
our closest relationships are;
when we are in them we are too close
to the other person to see ourselves clearly.

It takes a stranger, or a crisis,
or some other life event,
for us to see that our life
was easier than we thought,
and the quotidian loneliness
is nearer what 'normalness' is. 
      

The Company Of Dogs

Bertol Brecht supposedly said, more or less,
that he wanted a simple tombstone,
one that dogs would want to urinate on.

How dark a dark joke his comment was
depends on us knowing how much
he braced himself to live by conflict
and how much he accepted
that dogs get banned from cemeteries.
 

Listen Whilst You Speak!

Don't say you are right too often, teacher,
Let the students realise it
Don't push the truth:
It's not good for it.
Listen while you speak!    

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Fifteen - Between Sex And Death Something Always Has To Give

With it's insistence on celibacy, the Catholic church that the Franciscan monk belonged to, and that had found his vocation in, was clearly the driver of the behaviours that had pushed him into that catch-22 place where firstly he was to make deny his masochism to himself, then secondly make him develop unrealistic behavioural strategies to accommodate his sexual tastes, tastes that he was officially not meant to have, so as to make faith and celibacy seem consistent and attractive. I was caught in a similar but different catch-22 because of my cottaging.

But where the monk had started to be open with me about his tastes for sexualised violence and a knowingly poor perception of what mutual consent meant with sex, I did not have the language or the courage to say to him 'You do not have to believe that sex always has to linked to violence begotten by the state and church, who you know will use it to falsely make people feel guilty.'. Just as I did not have the courage for him so I lacked courage for myself. Equally I knew nobody well enough who when I might have told them I had recently cottaged then they would be unembarrassed enough at what I admitted to that we could explore with me how such behaviour could be described by the mechanics of it, which if outlined would reveal a consistent secondary logic, and justification, of it's own which needed to be understood to be resisted. Maybe such person would have some inclusive jokes about the latent absurdities of cottaging that would bring about the most inclusive release possible. Jokes are sometimes good as enlightened short cuts through complex explanations.  

But alas no such person existed for me, and if I'd had such a person then the first thing that they would expect of me was that I somehow got my work situation in the care factory on a more sustainable setting than it was turning out to be. Several months into the job, and long past my trial period the was sustainable for the management-they set the terms on which I worked for them. But the work was proving less than sustainable with me.

My surface understanding when I started as a care assistant was that in so far as anyone could work, then technically nearly anyone could be a care assistant if the employee had a consistent enough sense of vocation for the patients coupled with them being mentally and physically fit enough to withstand constant shift work. There was nothing high status or precious about the work, silently valued by patients as it was. The management had two key ways of measuring the work for either maximum profit or for optimum sustainability for the employees doing the work. They could vary the staff patient ratio or vary the patterns of shift work. If they set the staff patient ratio at one staff member per six patients then they made the work as intense as was possible to be whilst it remained sustainable. The ideal shift patterns for the such intensity of work I estimated to be a thirty hour week. The management calculated the best shift pattern to be a thirty six hour week, which wold have been okay for the staff had the staff/patient ratio been lower. But the management insisted on the full 35 hours of shifts with the maximum staff patient ratio, as if they could push that and nothing would 'give', the system was sustainable. They did not see the staff turnover, people leaving the job, as proof that they should ease back on the work to maintain the team work that there was, going better.

With my doing one shift per week too many for the balance of my mental and physical health over the winter/spring quarter and beyond I continued to do the the job well enough but accumulated a certain depleted sense of self. This tiredness showed itself in a way that seemed unexpected when it came. I'd never imagined until it happened how a job could eat into person's life the way this job had eaten into mine. Matron wanted all the staff to book their two weeks annual paid holiday. Everyone else, who could compensate better than I could for doing a shift a week too many with the support they drew from their partner or friends, booked their two weeks of holiday time, to have a have time out with their friends etc. I had nobody I wanted to spend any length of time with. With a sense of blankness that was creeping up on me slowly I did see the point of a week off. I was the last to complete my choice of holiday weeks, even now I am unsure I actually booked any. What I remember more clearly is the open row I had with matron where my indifference to having a week off stretched to saying to matron that I wanted it in the form a a shift less every week. I did not get my shift less every week. Nor in my recollection did matron say anything to me about burnout in work, as being the reason we got our weeks off. For management to admit that they knew about the potential for burnout among staff would have been to close to them admitting that the way they ran the home could push staff towards burnout. Management was much more about creating plausible deniability for the consequences of some of their actions than they could let on they knew about.

When Autumn came there was the nearest that matron would ever admit was a crisis in the home. Too many of the elderly residents whom they had accepted for continuing intensive physical care for were dying sooner than expected. Too few relatives had applied for their tired and elderly to live in the home to replace the residents who had died. Some of the deaths were both a shock and a relief when they happened. One particularly memorable slow death came about when one patient, Elisabeth, not only retained her dignity, but retained it by refusing to eat and only occasionally drinking. She starved herself to death in the most dignified way we could imagine. When she finally breathed her last as skeleton tightly covered by skin, the dignity she had maintained was at least as shocking as the means of her death. Another patient who never really settled from her arrival onward died of an infection incurred by the bed sores she sustained because she lost interest in moving. She died of the consequences of the shock of moving into the home. In spite of these times I tried instil some humanity into my work heaving patients to and from in the process of feeding them, washing them, toileting them, changing their clothes and bedding, all in one perpetual motion cycle of daily activity in the home. My best memory of trying to humanise the place came when Radio Four reported the death of dance band leader Victor Sylvester, and I told one of the more sentient patients of his death as I was helping her to bed, and I saw her cry at being reminded of his life.

If I had hoped that with the staff/patient ratio lowering with the empty beds, and the lower staff patient ratios that, however unfortunate it was for those gone, I would restore my work life balance a little I was disappointed. When the home unwillingly let go of one member of staff in a no fault departure from the job I was second in line and only one person was allowed to leave with no penalty being incurred, or black mark being registered on their work record. I forget the name of the member of staff but she was due to be imminently married which was a more creditable reason for leaving than simply being knackered.84

It must have been about that time I started having what with hindsight I will call short blackouts. Moments in work where I'd be in the midst of completing three or four different tasks, all of which interlocked with each other, and my mind would go blank. It would say 'what are you doing here?' to me as if I should not be where I was. I told my doctor about the blackouts and how much my work was structured to wear me out to the point where I could not think clearly about changing jobs. I felt sort-of-better for telling him about it all. He did not give me medication to take.

He set me up for what indirectly would become the turning point in my life. He put me on a list for one to one therapy on the NHS. Meanwhile through unlikely circumstances I became the prayer partner with  somebody in church in a one hour a week one to one prayer time. Who knows how much in her simplicity and honesty Celia spiritually propped me up in my work through the week, whilst I was waiting for the therapy to start? I don't know.

After the unresolvable and secretive encounter with the elderly monk, I was enjoying a more wholesome and balanced reciprocity with one elderly person in my church and house group.

To be directed to Chapter Sixteen please left click here.  

Zen And The Art Of Understanding Dementia

Everybody has heard of the book title
'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance',
it is a best seller, now fifty years old.
It's anniversary is being celebrated in the media.

It is a a book about philosophy that seeks to synthesise
several complex ideas within an engaging narrative,
literally a journey through a landscape and the mind.

To converts the book is beguiling,
to others it is discursive, distracted and indirect.
In other words it is the definitively woolly
1970's idea of a statement about life.

What better subject for material for a follow up
to apply such discursive thinking could there be,
the patience and lack of aim that is part of 'Zen',
in the 2020's, than to dementia? 

There the absence of memory becomes a spur to fear
as a person seemingly feels their personhood ebbing away
in dribs and drabs that they fear will later become a torrent;
they have less of themselves with which
to hold on to what remains of themselves.

Just like the nervous breakdown that is at the core
of the 1974 book, our going through why we go through
changes in consciousness might seem to be circular,
but if through the thinking we, and our neighbours
and 'loved ones', find where we and they are,
then we might find the place we feel 'present' in. 

Momento Mori

But remember whilst you can
to live before it calls again. 

 

Never Mind The Journey, Feel The Ride

When the journey is from sophistication
to sophistry it will be that subtle
that most won't recognise
their final destination
when they have arrived.

They will argue that their world has changed
but they remain who they always were.

But the wise around them know
that when the world changes
it also change them, keeping them part of it,
and the sophist will be left behind
to face the future by living in the past.

 

Washes Whiter Than...

The term 'sports washing' is rather new,
it was first coined less than ten years ago
by Amnesty International to describe
the repression that was covered up
by the 2015 European Games
put on in Baku in Azerbaijan,
a former Soviet Socialist Republic.

If there had been an award
for levels of political repression
then as host country
Azerbaijan would have won that too,
though they would have to fight
The Russian Empire for that medal.

If the dead could be resurrected
then they would have got Adolph Hitler,
the earliest known sports washer, to make the presentation.

Developing Backwards

One of the more wistful
and repetitive news stories
I hear on my radio every day
is that of the first reports
of a new development,
set out to save humans time
and rearrange the landscape,
comes when reports are made
of trees being cut down 
in some, ahem, 'iconic' landscape.

As a person who lives where there are
more trees than people I empathise,
When we cut down big trees
we destroy the support for all life
that was meant to have
a longer lifespan than we have, 
but with the human attention span
shrinking so the life span
of what we depend on shrinks even more.

Pleasures

The first look out of the window in the morning
The old book found again
Enthusiastic faces
Snow, the changes in the seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Taking showers, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Taking things in
New music
Writing, planting
Travelling
Singing
Being friendly.

This is a 1954 poem by Bertol Brecht (1898 - 1956) that has become the spur for creative writing in German classrooms. 

Listen to a thirty mins radio documentary on the poem made in 2019, Brecht's life at the time of writing this list poem and how the poem became a teaching aid here.    

The Millstone

of 'being a success'  
is there for any and all 
who seek to grind others down with it,
as wealth and fame makes them
perpetuate false selves so successful
the genuine self is nowhere to be found.

Nowhere is this truer
than in modern popular song,
where if the artist is young, female,
and is the image of 'marketable',
such that they are modern barbie dolls
with musical talent added via technology,
performing songs to be heard in supermarkets
where the sound can be ignored by discerning shoppers. 

Urbane Life

The sort of modern competition
I prefer is birdsong being louder
in gardens that are close to roads 
so that birds can still hear each other.

With nature so wildly off-balance
in the midst of expanding urban life
the traffic noise must be offset somehow...
    

Here Be Monsters

I am too young to know
what American life was like
between 1925 and 1929,
the year of the great depression,
which was indirectly caused
by Edward Bernays reinvention
of 'need' as 'want' through advertising,
so that manufacturers could sell more
to now-eager consumers who soon after
found their wealth and health devalued.

But with my experience of the internet
I recognise the reinvention of human restlessness
and hyping up of expectations of world change
that can't be met, and will prove to be chimera.

I sense that we have been here before,
and our fate now is like our fate then,
we cannot hope to escape that easily.  

Time And Experience

Because what is at work when we ask for expertise
where the skills and competence take 10,000 hours to learn
and we don't want to/can't pay for that help, and we know
that we need their skills - we will quench the training
we have gained from that will bring the expertise
and experience to the near future. After us.   

 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Fourteen - Life Away From The Care Factory

Less innocent in humour was the truth universally acknowledged that in any mixed group of adults attending an alcohol based party, the first person to get silly-drunk will always be the nurse or the nursing assistant. I was never invited to parties and whilst I had a few church friends my own age I often found that organising my social life away from the care factory on the limited budget that it allowed me took more than the average amount of discipline. I enjoyed my days off, but to get the maximum best use out of them meant partially accepting vegetating, even as I might have been out and about. When I got two days off together then the first day was always spent resting from the long run of shifts that I had to do to get that much time off in one block.

One way of requiring fewer friends to be sociably antisocial was going to the movies on my own. I have no list of the films I saw in 1989, but the first year I remember exploring the movies on my own I know that I saw both the Bond film 'Licence to Kill' and the Peter Greenaway film that was influenced by Jacobean drama 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover'. With both films the cinema house that I saw them in was a commercial movie theatre. With the Bond film the cinema house was full. If something registered with me between the explosions and car cases/escape sequences then it seemed like thin gruel-which was perhaps better for the tired and inattentive movie goer than I expected it to be. Gladys Knight sang the title song, her performance hit home with me. I wanted to personally commiserate with her that her vocal lit up the credits of such an unaccountably unmemorable film. With the Greenaway film I must have been equally tired from work. Both times I watched it I practically alone at the sitting. The first time I saw it I could follow the plot well enough and was wowed by the eye popping set design and lighting. But the spleen vented and the violence, which flowed logically out of the well acted words, were beyond extreme. The logical and clear depiction of a consistently violent and deceitful world was colourful and immersive. I had to see it a second time, to make sure I had seen what I thought I had seen the first time. After I had been the second time I 'joked' with the members of my Christian house group, normally a place of calm and middle class decency, that I had to check that it was as disgusting and overtly sensual as it had seemed the first time I saw it.

But the place I took a more sustained interest in seeing movies at was the Broadway Cinema House in The Lace Market area of Nottingham. It was the first cinema I had found which showed foreign language films with subtitles. From being a teenager onward I'd had a rather squashed interest in art house/subtitled films. It started with being allowed to stay up late on my own aged seventeen to watch 'And Then There Were None' (1945 20th Century Fox) on BBC2, where the film was in English. But what made me want to watch it was that the director was French. For him being French he knew better than an English director did how to extract maximum tension from a complex plot, right down to him directly addressing the viewer in his voiceover to ask them if they have guessed who the real murderer was before putting a sixty second clock up to emphasise that it was their last chance before the explanation for the plot came. I found the upending of how the viewer must have known it was a film, with Rene Clair addressing the audience in the voice over and showing the countdown style clock inspiring. My second start with 'difficult' films came with seeing 'My Beautiful Laundrette' with it's infamous gay kiss, and the elevated post-kitchen sink drama films that Mike Leigh made when Gainsborough Trinity Arts Centre started showing films from 1985 onward.

I mentioned my Christian House Group a couple of paragraphs ago. In Lady Bay I had not only landed on my feet with where to live, but also with where to go to church. West Bridgford had a large Baptist Church just up the road from my place of work which was usually full for evening services. But the church also encouraged the sharing out of responsibility/authority when it 'planted' much smaller community sized satellite churches in the different areas of West Bridgford. I settled well in the Lady Bay church and in the house group that met every Wednesday evening. I enjoyed the Bible studies, and I veered toward the liberal and inclusive side of any theological opinion on which we looked for a consensus with.

With my belief that I was gay, and half knowledge and lack of explanations for it, I had a difficult enough time in church. Telling them that their 'answers' were pat and evasive when homosexuality was the question was not an option. Finding somebody I could be plain and honest with when I waved my willy in the public toilet in the dark would have been my miracle. No such miracle happened, though there were men of responsibility in the church who admitted they were gay. I wanted somebody that explained to me how to stop cottaging and why men did it, because I could not comprehend what propelled me into the circular logic that lay behind my behaviour. The church was caught in a different circularity. In the scrambled shorthand the church often spoke in, every sinful logic-including the logic behind homosexuality-was the same. 'Since the logic is itself sinful, then to discourage the sinful behaviour in the world, we won't talk about the logic amongst ourselves.'. It did make me wish that one of Jesus parables had used the illustration of somebody sticking their head in the sand to avoid understanding themselves.

The most acceptable way of introducing the subject of homosexuality in church was to study 'the clobber passages', six passages where some odd sounding same sex sexual behaviours that were nothing like 20th century homosexuality were condemned. The first and most infamous clobber passage was Genesis 19:1-38. There the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are accounted for. Even when the consensus from studying those verses was that the besetting sin of the two cities was a spiritual meanness, though the sexual vices were wrong too, I left that Bible study meeting feeling like I was one of  one of the less obedient dogs in dog training class run by Barbara Woodhouse. For all that her voice was firm, and The Bible was right, I was a failure because I cold not stop myself acting out what I tired too easily of being shouted about, to be trained to not do it.

Away from my retreating from the feeling of being shouted at and not knowing where to go, I merely felt lost. Never more so than when a Franciscan monk picked me up at the toilets that had become my favourite haunt when I was denying to myself how low and tired I was. He wore ordinary clothes, a Marks and Spencer checked shirt and jumper, and he was in his unsexy sixties. I only discovered that he was a monk when he invited me to his room where I could see him in the light and see from his room how he was 'on mission', living away from the monastery. Rosary beads lay on the dressing table. On the walls were more prayer aids. Beyond that it was a typically untidy bachelor pad with worn and mismatched furniture etc.

What he wanted was somebody to with a sense of natural ease and lack of shame to quietly wank him off. He got that from me that night. After all, discreetly offering such services for free had been part of my youth training in Wilson Carpets ten years earlier. By mutual agreement I saw him several more times. But the more of  ourselves we introduced the more we led each other to where our understanding was blocked by the opaque explanations that we had ben taught to live by. Each time this happened an increasing sense of detachment set in. Conversations retreated from the personal to the safer ground.

I did not know what to say when he revealed that one of his favourite films was Ken Russell's 1971 shocker 'The Devils', based on the 1952 Aldous Huxley book 'The Devils of Loudon'. He showed me his battered looking VHS copy of the film, thankfully making no move to play it. From memory the book was a rather ascetic account of disagreements between the French State and Catholic Church where the sub plot that took centre stage was a seemingly spontaneous sexual hysteria at the charismatic Catholic priest who was acting mayor in the castle city of Loudon. He liked the film for how it depicted sexual behaviour.

What I should have said to him was that with video players and recorders now being the norm, more people than ever before had found that they were more likely to develop a porn habit than was predictable in the age before video machines and tapes. I didn't say that. Nor did I say what my preferred televised porn substitute was, underdressed trained up musclemen. Rather weakly, I tried to imply that linking sexual intimacy quite as much as 'The Devils' did, with a legal and militarised contrariness and ultra-violence surely made ordinary sexual happiness difficult. But if he enjoyed the film for how much it portrayed a pre-Marquis de Sade sadism then he was truly a masochist. And masochists will burn through a lot of relationships out with their expectations.

To be directed to Chapter Fifteen please left click here.

 

Empire-The Ultimate Opiate Of All

Many reading this blog
will be familiar with the history
of that shifty thing, The British Empire,
including the so called 'Opium Wars' (1839-42)
where China wanted to sell Britain tea, silk
and porcelain in exchange for silver,
but, via colonised India, the British wanted to pay
China in smuggled opium, which had been
a ready and open market for a very long time.

Such habits have not gone away,
indeed in the era of synthetic drugs
new temptations towards addiction
and death are being refined every day.

But they now come more from a strong China
to a weak UK much more than they did 185 years ago
and the British press has trouble keeping track of it all.

What Strange Timing

It is when more of us than ever can live well
into old age, by adapting our physical limits
to suit our ourselves, and yet the trickster
we can neither track nor beat is dementia.... 

And all this whilst we make the world
harder to read and navigate than it used to be,
by how we make smart phones so easy to use
and so vitally multi-purpose that in old age,
as our minds gently crumble, the levels
of misinformation we have to process
multiply to volumes that were unreadable
when we were mentally fitter....

A Blog For Men

like Donald J. Trump and Andrew Tate
who have little to no ability to reflect on how
when others have the same sense of self entitlement
as them the buck won't always where they expect it to,
far away from them.

Because sluttish behaviour starts with the expectations
of the men who corrupt others and go on to accuse them
of being sluts after they have forgotten their own behaviour 
after being the author/director of the behaviour of others.

The immoral exceptionalism of Patriarchal thinking
is practically infinite, and is only forgiving when it
accounts properly for itself about who it has directed.       

 

Media Vita In Morte Sumus*

Ask any gardener and they could paraphrase
Job from The Bible for you, not knowing
where what they are saying comes from.

People who have little time for plants say
of those who do have the time for plants
that 'they have green fingers, I don't'.

What every gardener and pet owner knows
is how their life span is many times more
than that of what they nurture,
whether it be plants, animals,
or even children for that matter.

To live is to nurture what will die
before we too will die
which we can't know in advance of it happening.

 

*'In the mist of life we are in death' Job Ch 14   

So Just Where Does It Hurt?

Visitors to patients in hospitals
who hear their friend, the patient,
call the nurse they most dislike 'A Nazi'
out loud may be shocked at the language
directed at the profession the visitors
are distantly taught to put on a pedestal,
the better to not need their care.

It is not that nurses have thick skins
when they show little reaction,,
or know that the place is theirs,
and can extract their revenge later.

It is more that doctors and nurses
recognise the symptoms
of pain relieving drugs
being slowly withdrawn
and patient returning to earth
with insults and expletives galore
to re-embrace the gravity of their situation.

Now can anyone explain the medication
that those who use the phrase 'Grammar Nazi'
and it's several more personal variants
are having withdrawal symptoms from?

I'd love to have the answer....     
  

The Glass Of Life

When air becomes breath we experience life,
whether the glass of life is full, half full, or lower.

When breath becomes air the spirit is gone,
there is nobody there, the glass of life
has been drained beyond refilling.

I write this for the living, we don't know
enough about the realm of the dead,
and can only hope that the glass of life
forgives us just enough to refill itself.

A Page From The Book Of Disquiet

 

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (38)

Whenever I here the phrase
'Oh but that was so long ago'
applied to a time when I thought
I was a sentient adult then,
I want to take the speaker back
to the times they were born in,
so that they know what the adults
thought when they were children,
and even before then, because
the 'so long ago' phrase that describes
what they dismiss is living history
which was as real as it was lived
and it is what got us to the present. 
 ,
 

The History Of Debt

is a history where so much spurious reason
is made to work so ridiculously hard
at justifying such gross inequality,
it is the modern history of idolatry
that everyone wants to ignore.

From statues of figures rooted in wild stories
to modern mathematics written in copperplate,
an ancient and now illegible lettering,
both are abstract figures
that demand our obedience
to false and unforgiving pasts. 

We want the old gods disguised
and alive, but unrecognised,
so we can't see them anymore. 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirteen - In At The Deep End

I thought I had come a long way from being the pretend-nurse people pleaser that I was three or four years ago, in the last days of my relative innocence of loosely orbiting around my parents in Gainsborough. Working full time for Windrush Nursing Home was going to be my first shift work job and my first proper nursing job. When I started the job I did not know how big the step up was going to be, from working part time in a comfortable office, for the council to working full time and in shifts for a private nursing home.

But I figured that there was only one way to find out, and as long as there was a safe exit from the job-which there was no way of asking about in the interview for being accepted for the post-then I would be okay. I would find the exit route later. I had grown up with the instruction to no more be fussy about work than food, and with the idea that I should be grateful for any job; it had to be better than being on the dole. The staff in Gainsborough Job Centre must have been surprised when I ask one of them if I could get a job as a chicken in the chicken processing factory. But beyond easy sarcasm about feeling badly processed the instruction to grateful  instruction clearly did not work; many jobs disappeared circa 1980 as if they were snow in summer. Their replacements were government subsidised substitutes for work which buried all discussion of how to value of work and the differences between what local employers collectively thought in private and any utterance on their behalf in public.

That December 1988, for the first time in my life I was living where there were the jobs to be had where if a person was unfussy enough to take them at face value. If the pay was poor and the job was one that did not have career prospects, then that was their publicly accepted and fixed base line value. So, knowing that my Manpower Services contract was about to expire, I accepted the Nursing Assistant post. If the money was poor-from memory I was paid £2.20 an hour rising to £2.40 before I left-then I could still get my Housing Benefit. If was I scraping by then, I would be able to test for myself the non-monetary value of a low paid job, assuming it did not test me beyond endurance.

Including the laundry room in the cellar, Windrush was a former four storey grand house that had all trace of it's former grandeur erased with it being turned into a nursing home for thirty residents. It was owned by two women in their forties, both of whom were married to dentists who worked in the same practice. Windrush was the wives' business empire, where the original source money was from their husbands' work. Every fortnight these two short to medium height women would appear, their hair dyed black and usually wearing dark furs, to make sure all was well in the place. Neither of them ever spoke to me and I said little about them. But seeing them walking together, their dark furs sweeping all before them as they brushed against the narrow magnolia painted walls, did remind of some vaguely genteel but threatening scene that might have originated from the pen of  Franz Kafka.

The thirty patients had their beds in six rooms, across three floors, from ground floor to attic. With one ground floor room being for only one person. In addition there was a small Matron's office, and bath/shower rooms and toilets on the ground floor and the first floor. There was a large kitchen next to a living room that was lined with comfy chairs, where a television could often be heard addressing nobody in particular. Last and least was a small well maintained garden beyond the living room which was there for show more than anything else. The staff had their tea breaks on the foyer on the ground floor where they were called on to be sociable to any passing residents, several of whom in their dementia would ask every five minutes 'Have you seen me mother? Only I was meant to be seeing her.... ....I don't know where she is.'. If we even slightly hinted at a less than deferential and appeasing answer to this question repeated every five minutes then matron would hear of us saying it. So it was not worth the risk even if we assumed that in their dementia they would not remember us saying what we had. We might well have believed the walls had ears given how much the staff were made responsible for any aggression that the lack of personal space and packed layout of the home both engineered and denied. The only space where some degree of openly asking 'Why are we doing this?' was in the laundry room in the cellar. It was the only place in the home that no resident ever went near.

With the distance of hindsight I don't know how long it should have taken me to adjust to a thirty five hour week of shift work, morning - 7am through to 2 pm, day time 9 am through to 4 pm and evening 4 pm through to 10 pm, where the only allotted slack moment in the day was our break. Even then we had to stand or lean in the small foyer, talking to residents as they passed. The only perk was that we sometimes got were free meals from the kitchen that fed the residents, but even that perk mostly made us more available for more work. The best description for the place was to call it 'a care factory'. That factory like urge of making maximum use of all available space. It was self evident that there was no physical space allotted to mental retreat from why the place was organised as it was.

The staff/patient ratio was what made the work harder. In a care home for the elderly with dementia that also cares for it's workers too a ratio of four patients to one front line member of staff is stretching it, but adequate. In Windrush Nursing Home the staff/patient ratio was one member of staff to six patients, which in addition the lack of rest from the shifting shift patterns made the staff more or less perpetual motion machines. There was one other male nursing assistant, every other nursing assistant was female and most of them were in their early twenties. One black woman who was in here fifties was the nearest there was to my idea of being fun to work with. l don't know how many times I was on duty with her on the evening shift, starting to put residents to bed, and I asked her 'Have you got a pencil?', to which she did not need to have a reply. My next line was 'Well, first we have to draw the curtains.', All I will say in my defence is that repetitive jobs require repetitive humour to leaven the pressured circularity that the jobs create.

To be directed to Chapter Fourteen please left click here. 

The Potency Of Cheap Music

It is fifty years since I got my first record player.

It was a Dansette and my Mother got both it
and the Tommy Steele single 'Little White Bull'
as my first record to play. Both came from the junk shop
where she minded the store, and worked cash in hand
cleaning ovens and other white goods, for resale
whilst the owner of the shop was filling his van
with the goods from his latest house clearance. 

Popular music back then was relatively simple;
what the BBC played was what was popular
and nobody saw the irony in selling 'rebellion',
where a truer rebel would say they were not for sale.

I spent my 30 pence pocket each week on singles
that for having left the charts were no longer played
on pub jukeboxes. I paid the price of what it would
have cost to play on the jukebox to buy the single.

I accumulated quite a lot of music that way.

Nowadays the recording industry is a different beast,
and the premium is on music played live, the music CD
is a loss-leader to the point of becoming nearly worthless
soon after being issued. CDs would become landfill
were but for charity shops getting what they can for them.

So from 20 pence a single fifty years ago, 
it is now 50 pence a CD, for a whole album,
as found now in your local charity emporium.

Once bought it will remain in your house
as long as you let it stay. There, it's currency
is no longer money, but the length of time
spent listening to the CD, all the better
to appreciate the artistry of the performer.   

Ear worms have never been so cheap, or as potent.

Injustice Starts Here

In the USA racism goes
well beyond it's police stations,
it also fuels the courts,
and the execution chambers too.

Black people have a 220% higher chance
of enduring a botched lethal injection execution
than white people. 

Who knows how much higher
the % of chances of injustice are
on all the stages of justice system
before the black man lands on death row?

The failings of American Justice have never been clearer,
and never more ignored in the rest of the world. 

If you feel that you would like a small voice
that is your own about this issue please left click here.

Your Life Long Friend

Who can change in tone 
and you wish would leave you alone,
but is there to teach you patience.

 

Signs Of Greater Age (58)

1-Getting less post the older you get.
But the postman leaves more leaflets.
The ultimate in impersonal post
being price reducing vouchers
for incontinence pads for adults,
where uncomfortably under-dressed
slightly brain-dead looking,
late middle aged men and women
model the pads as signs of self awareness.

2-In the privacy of your own home,
and garden, saving your urine,
rather than flushing it away. 
Diluted, it becomes plant food,
and having more plants in the house
than you have friends their food is vital.

The Hope Of Imperfection

Improving on imperfection
is not a matter of destroying it
with what we say will be perfection,
but taking the terror out of error.
Whilst being constructive with our mistakes.  

     

The Asymmetric Universe

Everyone alive lives in an asymmetric,
out-of-kilter, world where the main point
for each and every struggler is trying to make
the asymmetric competitiveness work better
for them, or if they are generous attempting
to make he asymmetry a win-win life,
in the short and mid term at least.

This applies whether it is gender based rights,
disparities in wealth, and goes down to privacy
or personally defendable space in a house
and up to the imbalance in propaganda
and military hardware when your country
is at war with another, or an empire
and the first fight is for your own truth
so feel free enough to ask  'Who does asymmetry favour?
and think that you can get an answer worth hearing.

When you can't ask, then 'loser' is a rhetorical term,
and 'winners' will only talk among themselves.

But beyond the label we choose, or can't escape,
this asymmetry goes beyond Darwinian competition,
where Darwin ignored Kropotkin-style co-operation,
it goes to show how we seem to be alone in the universe,
until we learn how to recognise contented alien life forms.  

Picture Set of The Month - May - Posters For The Film 'Stalker'

'Stalker' is a 1979 Soviet science fiction film,
filmed in uncertain present day dystopian setting. 

The writers of the film were Arkady and Boris Strugatsy
from their 1972 book 'Roadside Picnic'.

It is a 'quest' film, 'The Zone' is a place in which there exists 
a room which grants a person their innermost desires.
 Guides to the place are called Stalkers. The Professor
is one such guide who takes a depressed writer and a scientist
through the wasteland that is the outer layer of The Zone.  

The film combined elements of philosophy, theology, science
and fantasy in a way that took the dogma out of each element.

The idea of getting past guards to investigate 
a derelict industrial landscape to find the room
that grants people their wishes grants a poetic
ennobling of that post-industrial world.

The men do eventually find the room, and find their
selfishness or altruism reflected back at them within it
as well as telling the story of a previous stalker/guide. 
To enter the room requires an act of sacrifice. The film's  
film's ultimate message is one of struggle and the need
for selflessness to survive.
 through struggle