Who knew how similar general elections
are to the misuse of certain sleeping pills?
Apparently if it is misused zopiclone
induces hallucinations, insomnia,
anxiety and fatigue-exactly what listening
to too much electioneering in the media
will induce in the viewer, who is too dazed
to withdraw their complicity, and switch off.
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| Increase your vocabulary about being human, and make language your friend when you can, the diversity of expression that the extra words will bring you will be your best help when you need it most. |
Foreword; Frank Zappa was too much the sarcastic autodidact for him to ever appeal to easy going middle America. He could never stop at being merely entertaining, his being self taught got in the way of him wearing his learning lightly. He was also too much the comic who wanted force his audience to laugh, whether they wanted to or not. In 1981 he wrote the following, which appeared as the liner notes for an album rather than it's intended place in a public journal.
This article was originally prepared for publication in Newsweek. After it was sent to them, they rejected it saying it was too idiosyncratic. Since we needed something to fill up this space, this article will now meet its destiny as decorative filler material.
It has been suggested that the Gross National Product is perhaps not the best indicator of how well we are doing as a society since it tells us nothing about the Quality of our Lives . . . but, is this worth dwelling upon as we grovel our way along in the general direction of the 21st Century? When future historians write about us, if they base their conclusions on whatever material goods survive from Present-Day America, we will undoubtedly stand alone among nations and be known forevermore as THOSE WHO CHOSE CHEESE.
As you will recall, folks, nobody ever had as much going for them in the beginning as we did. Let's face it... we were fantastic. Today, unfortunately, we are merely WEIRD. This is a shocking thing to say, since no Red-Blooded American likes to think of his or herself as being WEIRD, but when there are other options and a whole nation CHOOSES CHEESE, that is WEIRD.
Our mental health has been in a semi-wretched condition for quite some time now. One of the reasons for this distress, aside from CHOOSING CHEESE as a way of life, is the fact that we have (against some incredibly stiff competition) emerged victorious as the biggest bunch of liars on the face of the planet. No society has managed to invest more time and energy in the perpetuation of the fiction that it is moral, sane, and wholesome than our current crop of Modern Americans.
This same delusion is the Mysterious Force behind our national desire to avoid behaving in any way that might be construed as INTELLIGENT. Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity. To cosmeticize it, many otherwise normal citizens attempt a peculiar type of self-inflicted homemade mental nose-job (designed to lower the recipient's socio-intellectual profile to the point where the ability to communicate on the most mongolian level provides the necessary certification to become ONE OF THE GUYS). Let's face it . . . nobody wants to hang out with someone who is smarter than they are. This is not FUN.
Americans have always valued the idea of FUN. We have a National Craving for FUN. We don't get very much of it anymore, so we do two things: first we rummage around for anything that might be FUN, then (since it really wasn't FUN stuff in the first place) we pretend to enjoy it (whatever it was). The net result: STRESSED CHEESE.
But where does all this CHEESE really come from? It wouldn't be fair to blame it all on TV, although some credit must be given to whoever it is at each of the networks that GIVES US WHAT WE WANT. (You don't ask -- you don't get.) Folks, we now have GOT IT . . . lots of it . . . and, in our Infinite American Wisdom, we have constructed elaborate systems to insure that future generations will have an even more abundant supply of that fragrant substance upon which we presently thrive.
If we can't blame it on the TV, then where does it come from? Obviously, we are weird if we have to ask such a question. Surely we must realize by now (except for the fact that we lie to ourselves so much that we get confused sometimes) that as Contemporary Americans we have an almost magical ability to turn anything we touch into a festering mound of self-destructing poot.
How can we do this with such incredible precision? Well, one good way is to form a Committee. Committees composed of all kinds of desperate American Types have been known to convert the combined unfulfilled emotional needs and repressed biological urges of their memberships into complex masses of cheese-like organisms at the rap of a gavel. Committee Cheese is usually sliced very thin, then bound into volumes for eventual dispersal in courts of law, legislative chambers, and public facilities where you are invited to eat all you want.
If that doesn't fill you up, there's the exciting Union Cheese . . . the most readily available cheese-type offered. The thing that's so exciting about Union Cheese, from the gourmet's point of view, is the classic simplicity of the mathematical formula from which it is derived. In fact, it is difficult to avoid a state of Total Ecstasy if one contemplates the proposition that no import quota yet devised has proven equal to the task of neutralizing the lethal emissions generated by the ripening process of this piquant native confection. Should we not be overtaken by some unspeakable emotion when we consider the fact that the smaller the amount of care taken in the preparation of each Union Cheese Artifact, the more triumphant the blast as the vapors stream forth from every nook and cranny of whatever it was that the stalwart craftperson got payed $19.00 per hour to slap together?
Still hungry? Union Cheese might be the most readily available, but no type of cheese in America today has achieved the popular acceptance of Accountant Cheese. If it is true that YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT, then surely our national willingness to eat this stuff tells us more about ourselves than we probably wish to know. Obviously we have found The Cheese To Believe In. Why not? It is manufactured by people who count money, endorsed as nutritionally sound by Civic Leaders, and delivered by The Media door to door.
The Quality of Our Lives (if we think of this matter in terms of How much of what we individually consider to be Beautiful are we able to experience every day?) seems an irrelevant matter, now that all decisions regarding the creation and distribution of Works of Art must first pass under the limbo bar (a/k/a The Bottom Line), along with things like Taste and The Public Interest, all tied like a tin can to the wagging tale of the sacred Prime Rate Poodle. The aforementioned festering poot is coming your way at a theatre or drive-in near you. It wakes you up every morning as it droozles out of your digital clock radio. An ARTS COUNCIL somewhere is getting a special batch ready with little tuxedos on it so you can think it's precious.
Yes Virginia . . . there is a FREE LUNCH. We are eating it now. Can I get you a napkin?
This is what today's life is all about.
In my own strength I can be resigned to everything.
I can find peace and rest through the pain.
I can put up with everything-even the dreadful demons
who horrify me, and the skeletal one who terrifies me,
even when madness silently flaunts its fools costume
and I understand from his silence and the look on his face
that I am the one who should wear his costume.
I can still save offer my soul to be saved
as long as my chief concern is that I love my God,
and this love helps me conquer the urge to vanity
behind my everyday concern for earthly happiness.
Freely adapted from page 49 of the 1843 treatise on anxiety
and Bible study into the story of Abram and Isaac, 'Fear and Trembling'.
Tuesday 30th April - Breakfast was served on the roof top. It was served slowly by the hotel owner's wife, who like many such women overtly lacked confidence. This is a trait that it would be easy to be annoyed by, but saying so the men who cause the lack of confidence is not on. We had fresh orange juice, flat bread, a local recipe pancake, a choice of jams and tahini, a hard boiled egg, and served last, coffee with milk. It was filling, I had my man-bag with me in which to put items for lunch. Hard boiled eggs flat bread were the main items squirreled away.
Refreshed from breakfast we had two decisions to make. The first was what to do about the suitcase if Anthony declined to put it into the hold at check in on our return then he was likely to be charged another eighty euros, the second decision was what to do about hiring a a car. With the suitcase I knew what Anthony wanted; either to get through checking in and boarding the plane with his suitcase and not be fined, or get the offending feet and wheels sawn off the suitcase so it would pass. We agreed in the end that he would have my suitcase and I buy a new one for my getting through customs. We set out along market stall alley and looked at suitcases at a distance first, and then close enough to attract the attention of the owner of the hole in the wall/stall. There, as if we could not have predicted it, we got the hard sell fairly fast, where we felt the seller was going to be bored if we did not part with our cash fairly fast. We did not part with our cash at all, though we looked closely at what seemed right. The sticking point that stopped our wallets opening was knowing the right size of suitcase. We left that stall holder saying we would return later. At another stall a very kind young man whipped out his smart phone and looked up Ryanair regulations for the size of suitcases. which we memorised. Then we found another hole in the wall salesman who rented out cars. He seemed like the real deal, so Anthony went ahead and produced his driving license, and passport and I paid a deposit of forty euros. The balance to be paid later the same day.
Both of us went back to the hotel room and emptied our suitcases so that he could fill mine and I could go out and get the suitcase we saw and liked after checking it's dimensions. This was where things want wrong. My sense of direction and orientation has never been the best.
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| Some of the vernacular art photographed when I was lost. |
At first I could not find the suitcase stall/hole in the wall I wanted to go back to, because on my own every stall/hole in the wall looked similar. In the end I found the stall that I had a visual memory of, and handed over 250 dirham, equivalent to twenty five pounds. I got the suitcase. Better oriented I would have haggled to pay 50 dirhams less. Then I bought two litre size bottles of water. and put them in the suitcase, to put it to good use. After that I got confused. could not remember the name of my hotel and walked up and down the length of the alley several times. Eventually I recognised the sign that was my turning and, tired and hot, returned to Anthony who said that I had been gone longer than he expected.
I helped myself to a small slice of humble pie for lunch by admitting to Anthony that I had got lost/disoriented. With the vital decisions made, my new suitcase packed, the balance of the money paid on the car rental paid in euros and the confirmation of when and where to be to collect the car we could go out and explore.
We looked around the stalls of the central market trying to ignore the opportunities to spend money. We could sense the desperation of most of the stallholders, and most of the goods seemed so alike that any distinction seemed like the narcissism of minor difference on the part of the stallholders. We wanted to resist being seen as tourists. Anthony had memories of his mother buying items on her Moroccan holidays in the 1980's that when she brought them home did not compliment their final destination. In spite of this ready made lesson as defence, my eyes alighted on a stall that sold what I guessed were heavy woollen coats with 'ethnic' designs on them. In the end I bought one, Anthony watched and commented to help as the stallholder got different examples of the coats down
Going back to our hotel room, the thing we had to do most was dump the suitcase that had cost Anthony eighty euros in fines. After that we settled into reading more. 'Confessions of a Fallen Angel' is making more sense the further I got into it. It even made sense of the abuse of alcohol and made the problem of the abuse seem lighter than the problems that the alcohol abuse sought to mask.
In the early evening we returned to the tout with the smile we liked, and the restaurant with the menu that seemed to be the most inspiring. Anthony had the dish he was most looking forward to, well almost. I had a tagine and he got a dish of grated steamed vegetables baked in crispy pastry case. At least the menu said his dish was vegetarian, and we asked the waitress whether the dish was as vegetarian as the menu said it was. But Anthony could tell that there was chicken in it when he was about half way through eating it. By then we were in a bind. The chicken was relatively flavourless and he had eaten too much of it to complain and force them to take it back. And if we had complained vehemently and insisted they get it right then it would have been easier for them to give us a refund and ask us to leave than for them to serve us the right vegetarian pastry dish. At the time I suspected that either the chef did not have the vegetarian dish that day, and did not want to admit that the pastry case dishes were all meaty or the waitress had made the mistake, or lied to the chef of what Anthony's order was when she put the order in, When there are two or three links in the chain of a mistake and you are not witness to any of the transactions that were part of how the mistake was made then it gets harder to attribute cause. I was also reminded of how meat eaters simply don't care and will lie very casually about what they want to serve vegetarians. 'Chicken is not meat really' is an excuse that slips easily out of their mouths. I'd heard my sister say it to make her life around me more convenient for her. Lies about food slip from dissemblers mouths as easily as their poorly disguises for their lack of concern of what they eat actually is and where it might have come from. Carelessness about food and language go together alarmingly well. But to the careless being alarmed by such casual dissembling... ...well they don't mind being lied to so why should anyone else?
We got out of the restaurant in reasonable humour after Anthony lectured the waitress, and made mildly squirm. If there was any slight revenge it would have been how much smaller the tip we left was than it might have been.
That night I had odd dreams that a yodelling country singer resembling Slim Whitman had just died. I was one of the costumiers going through his stage wardrobe after, only to find a secret compartment where there was women's clothing that was nearly child size-as if as a heterosexual he had a major bondage fetish and had secretively found willing partners to indulge it. The dream was either about fetish wear, or the clothing in the secret compartment reflected the status of women in the lyrics of his songs.
If I had to guess where that dream came from it would be the demeanour of the waitress who had to listen to Anthony complain about the chicken in his vegetarian pastry bake.
Please left click here for part four of this diary.
There is the new self I have found on Whats App,
who is all butter fingers before finding the right keys,
the self who is at rest as he writes at his desk
on his thirteen year old laptop, the fifth such machine
for writing and thinking with, which will be retired
when Mr Microsoft stops supporting Windows 10.
In the meanwhile it allows me the luxury
of thinking slowly as I type, and reflecting
with positivity how much I am loathe
to dispose of old technology I am attached to.
Then there is the self that enjoys good food,
but keeps a house that is cluttered enough
for me to distrust inviting guests to meals,
assuming I could find the people to invite.
I am better at being the guest
who makes unexpected contributions.
Last and least are my oldest selves,
the people who were so adrift in thrift
that they willingly disguised meanness
even when it marked them for life.
I frequently want those people to rest,
and never see them again.
But I can't stop them lurking,
and seeking to be in the driving seat again
and make my being clumsy seem like a necessity.
Oh Lord grant me patience, peace, chastity. But not yet.
I started the new decade in the most unpromising and unexpected way. I was sacked from a job where the pay was low and the shift work was demanding, where what I had hoped for most was a win-win style exit from the job but a win-lose exit was the only way out. In that first few days of being free of the job I could not tell what I should be most glad for, getting the most restful sleep I'd had in ages, or simply having more time to myself. Being sacked seemed like a double edged New Year gift. If two years earlier I thought that I had finally got ahead of the trends by getting work that might last, and I had resolved which came first? Moving address or having the new job lined up? Then I had made progress, but the work had left me too tired to think clearly. I had no plan and unemployment was rising. I said as much in the closing therapy session, where over the previous five sessions the therapist had attempted to demonstrate to me that where I could not have had a plan, then I had the courage to get through a less well planned life.
Even my being on reduced Income Support rates could not take the shine off the shift work ending abruptly. I needed time to think, rather than be driven by the whim of strange schedules that I was in no position to refuse. One item I glad to have for being a newly minted jobseeker was the half price day time bus pass, which made my days of browsing shops in Nottingham City Centre cheaper.
With time and money being as slack as worn elastic, and close friendships being one of the items now off the ration book that had been created by the shift work I was more free within my new economic limits to rediscover Nottingham. The vegetarian/whole food shops in the student sector became the place that I regularly bought my unsliced wholemeal bread. The wholefood stores usually ran as collectives, a form of economics that seemed radical in itself. There was more than one whole food collective, but what they all had in common were shelves with idealistic left wing political lifestyle books for sale. There were always a few books on openly 'being gay and lesbian'. The stock in that section changed little. But the presence of those titles every time I went to buy my bread was a reminder to me of the questions about homosexuality that I had not found the courage to frame, where when church leaders spoke about the issue I followed their creative evasions, rather than have a more truthful courage for myself.
Progress with regard to me more fully accepting that I was gay was going to be slow. One way I saw of trying to change was my quietly recognising the circularity of the arguments people made against me, or anyone, 'coming out' as gay. Since the thinking was circular, then, bit by bit, I had to change the character of the circle, the argument. But that was work for me to do on my own. The progress that most of the people who knew me were more keen to see was me getting nearer to being in paid work. In a left wing book shop I found my answer to these christian concerns. It was called 'Laughing Matters a cartoon anthology'.
I was also seeking out helpful and positive male friendships in church with young men nearer my own age and disposition. I was far from alone in my disposition, the churches had their fair number of young men who were economically displaced/unemployed/in temp work and on low pay who were struggling to settle down, as well they might. Being distant from their birth family and not being anchored in marriage and parenthood themselves these young men presented a problem to a church and society that for convenience' sake liked to slot people into fixed places that they would stay. I found a temporary place to slot into with voluntary work, in a weekend night spot run by St Nicholas Church serving espresso coffees and other non-alcoholic drinks. I am sure I volunteered partly to be able to choose the music for the sound system. It being circa 1990 the albums that had most effect and were of the moment were 'Three Feet High and Rising' by Da La Soul and 'What's Up Dog' by Was (Not Was). This was the church reaching towards the world, and not standing on ceremony.
Spyder was a guy I liked a lot who found me at St Nicholas' Church, off Maid Marion Way. His nickname represented how he kept his hair spiked up punk style. He was one of the few people who understood how much what the church said about homosexuality hit an un-empathic note with so many gay men. He very non-judgemental and he got results. He got answered prayers, for his being willing to accept gay men at face value in their being estranged, and worse, when they felt officially rejected by the church and got a phobic 'don't want to know' response from society. His major interest was music. In his best world he would have been a professional commercial disc jockey/broadcaster. As it was he was a secret pirate broadcaster, and an occasional sound man for bands who played in pubs. I remember going with him as a moral support when he was booked to set up the sound for Nazi Punk band Screwdriver, not a gig Spyder expected to get. He got a good sound balance with their equipment in the pub by late afternoon. But later they sounded terrible. He concluded that they had changed the settings he had made with the amps. It was quite something else to witness and resist the raw distorted sound absorbed by a pub that was packed with Nazi punks pogoing to sing-a-long choruses about how Rudolph Hess lived for thirty eight years in Spandau Prison before ending his life, aged ninety three.
As I write this, thirty four years after last knowing him, I have no recollection of Spyder's first name and sir name. I have no way of tracing him. The best way I have of remembering him is how pleased he was when I gave him the well worn-in punk/biker's jacket that I had been given just a seven years earlier. I decided that as a slightly older person, an older looking wardrobe was better for me. It fitted him perfectly, and he was pleased as Punch with it. It would not be the last trade in of what my youthful self once meant that I would be quietly happy to make.
To be directed to Chapter Nineteen please left click here.
On my last holiday I saw no postcards,
and I was quietly disappointed by this.
I realised that the production and sale
of postcards was yet another thing
that the smartphone had killed,
with how easily transmits images.
Later on I looked back on an old friendship
built on once a week visits of an hour a time,
prearranged with a brief landline phone call.
There the talk was slow and quietly confirming
and when less was said, then it proved
how little needed to be said in friendships.
The coffee, the cake and the ambience said it for us.
One of the low key ways it worked
was for the guest to bring one 'art' postcard
on each visit, for a mini-discussion around it.
Those days of slow living are long gone,
but for how long they went on
they sure were rewarding.
The government of my country
is attempting to renew it's mandate
where the wealthiest divide society
by how relative the poverty
in it is, where poor are encouraged
to define themselves
as worthy or unworthy,
by how hard they work
at staying in their poverty;
the harder they work the more moral it is.
Of course, their message
is more slippery than my analysis suggests,
but politics is so infested with sophistry
whilst pretending not to be
that the individual voter's suspicions
are all they have to hang on to.
I don't mind my government
trying to abolish more taxes,
abolish all public services
and public service values,
and privatise everything in sight.
I don't mind it if I am make to live on nothing,
as long as the gov't do not tax the fresh air
I am left to live on, and make it dirty.
The limits of democracy
for everyone who strives
to respect, rather than other,
other people is that the limits
of Freedom of Speech
are that we do not shout 'Fire'
in the media when there is no fire.
We do not frighten the folks
in and outside of the lobby,
religious and political lobbyists
that many of them are.
This is why I trust less
in American warnings
about the end of the world,
even as I see the planet burning.
Born again Christians and others
have been shouting about Jesus
ending the world for millennia
in the hope of getting people
to prepare for a hereafter
that they cannot describe,
such that it is hard to know
how or when to take them seriously.
But I accept the end of me,
and of my world, with alacrity.
It was only after the slaves
collectively absconded
that the slave owners
who insisted the road be built
realised where the road ended.
Smartphone, smartphone, in my hand
Who is the fairest in the land?
If it is not me then guide me who it is,
that I may inordinately admire them.
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| Because when our love and our intentions become so inconsistent with each other then both will be compromised. |
'We are where we are' and
'I am drawing a line under (insert name of event here)',
meaning 'I want you to stop ask me about... '
are modern classic lines for insincere denials,
when leaders and CEOs are asked by journalists
'Do you ever feel the need to apologise?'.
The odd thing is that real apologies
increase the size and esteem of those
that make them when they are due.
But when what you have to apologise for
is a hubris so huge that it will make
the apology stop in the craw of the leader,
and get no further then we should expect
a lot of people with much less to say
about what they have done
to say that less, and say it at length
in every media outlet that will have them.
Still their insincerity is easily confirmed
by the readiness with which they apologise
for every disastrous event
that happened on other leaders watches,
which they had no part in.
Maybe they hope future leaders
will do the same and exonerate them...
29th April - We appreciated the rest when we were shown our room, had put our luggage down, and had surrendered our passports to the hotelier so that he could fill in the form that every hotelier has to fill in, to hand over to the police, listing his guests, where they have come from, and where they expect to be next.
Once we were rested we realised that the room was a little small, and that we had to do something about Anthony's suitcase and about food. But first we had to retrace our steps back to the market alley, to investigate that. Anthony led I followed and had to take note of what I saw and limit how much I allowed myself to be distracted. Then we had to get some money from a cash point. There was only one place on the square where there was a cash point, and it had two cash points. That place was the post office. The queues were long at both of them. We got in the nearest queue and shuffled forward slowly about thirty minutes in the sun, getting quietly annoyed at the sense of entitlement in the comments of some of the people ahead of us, We both got our allotted two thousand dirhams, the maximum that could be taken out per day, equivalent to two hundred pounds.
Walking back, not quite ready to eat yet, we stopped at different restaurants and looked at their menus, where the they put one up outside the establishment. The menu that mentioned pigeon caught my eye. Whilst we looked at a couple of other places to eat, the restaurant the might serve pigeon was the one we returned to. It was normal but still felt good to have our starter of olives and bread, The earthquake of Autumn 2023 had done it's damage to the whole of Marrakesh and a tiny part of that damage was how uneven the floor was. I fixed the solution to the table rocking was for me to put some of my olive stones as chocks underneath the table foot to the near right corner of me, so the table rocked less. Anthony had the vegetable tagine, I had the chicken tagine. A tagine is both a serving dish and a recipe. The dish is a thick circular pottery base with a rim, diameter about ten to twelve inches, inside but close to the rim sits a conical lid. They withstand great heat. The recipe is whatever vegetables and meat are arranged in a conical shape for the lid to go over it comfortably. Carrots and potatoes are basic to the recipe, whatever else is put in. It is the spices that the Moroccans use that stop the dish becoming a hot pot in disguise.
Walking back to our hotel in the evening was a relative pleasure. There were no mini-dumper trucks ferrying hard core from sites where the earthquake had struck like there had been earlier in the day, I'd guessed that he felt rather put off by the scale and closeness of the traffic in that narrow space earlier in the day. I had coped, but did not really want to know how I had got through it. I guessed I would be finding out on my own at some point tomorrow.
That night I slept well on my own in my single bed, as did Anthony. Particularly when he got me to change position because with my sinuses 'being bad' I was snoring. I had the full compliment of company in my dreams, where all the friends I'd known in my twenties appeared in ways that lifted me up, whilst the family home was full of arguments.
Find Part Three of this diary here.
The Leavetaking
We Embrace each other,
My hands touch the rich material
Yours touch the shoddy.
The embrace is hasty
You are on your way to a good meal
The executioner's men are after me.
We speak of the weather
And of our enduring friendship.
Anything else would be too bitter.
Emigrant's Lament
I earned my bread and but and ate it just like you.
I am a doctor; or at least I was.
The colour of my hair, shape of my nose
Cost me my home, my bread and butter too.
She who for seven years had slept with me
My hand upon her lap, her face against my face
Took me to court. The cause of my disgrace:
my hair was black. So she got rid of me.
But I escaped at night-time through a wood
(For reasons of my mother's ancestry)
To find a country that would be my host.
Yet when I asked for work it was no good
You are impertinent, they said to me.
I'm not impertinent I said; I'm lost.
My best Christmas present of Christmas 1988 came from the NHS, it was a six week course with a Gestalt therapist that started in the first week of December and ran three weeks into January 1989. But even before the therapy started I set up my biggest new year resolution of 1989 for myself, which was to change my address. Part of the setting up of this hoped for change include accepting beforehand that I would not know when it was going to happen.
One of the people from my mid week Bible study group who I got to know a little better on the church weekend was Adelaide, one of several social workers who were part of the event. To this day I don't know what the right collective noun for social workers is, a concern of social workers? In my darker moments on the weekend I reflected how far away I was from the care home, called a school during the time I was in it, over a dozen years earlier. There one member of staff in particular who let other boys know that I had a social worker, and that her name was Mrs Hunt. In one memorable morning assembly the sports teacher Mr Mahoney pronounced her sir name with a C rather than a H to cynical laughter all around. Part of what he was aiming at was both how inept I was at sport and my acceptance of a limited gay identity in the school, which is to say that aside from being weird I also gave selected boys, all older than me, oral sex on the quiet. At least here the social workers were an enlightened group, and my hidden past was not going to be used against me.
Adelaide stood out among the social workers on the weekend because she was a senior social worker, and like Celia, her accent cut through the estuary English. She had a broad but clear Liverpool accent. After the Autumn church weekend I invited her to dinner in my bedsit room, which I thought seemed cosy. But given the light and space of the three storey house she lived in with lodgers, in Lady Bay she may well have seen my room as cluttered rather than homely. Whether she saw clutter or homeliness, one thing she did not see was the house bricks that I had retrieved from the garden to replace the collapsed leg on one corner of my single bed. It was improvisations like this that I had undertaken without saying anything to Mike the landlord that made me think about moving. As she talked about her house, which she called 'Agape House', it became an obvious question on my part to ask her to consider me, or put me on her list, as a possible future tenant.
Not long after the sociably unromantic meal I received a letter from my doctor that told me that my therapy placement had been arranged, and gave me a date and time for the first appointment, and an address to present myself at for the therapy to start. My experience of therapy was limited. I had read no books on the subject, though if I had been given a reading list I would have followed it. What I had experienced that was called therapy was mostly not therapy and was not therapeutic. It was called 'directive therapy' and I had received a few sessions of it in Lincolnshire, and I had been generally directed towards it by Christian/gay support network, True Freedom Trust. In directive therapy the client gets to speak and say enough that people who believe The Bible believe they should not say, and the session ends with the Bible being quoted by the therapist, and The Bible over-riding all that the patient or client has said. I had received four hours of emergency therapy in one block at Christian arts festival, Greenbelt in 1985, which undid quite a lot of the blockages the directive therapy had built up. But for all that I thought I had left a lot of pain behind after the four hours I got, when I was left the festival I still had to sort out the consequences of what I had shared with the Greenbelt counsellor back home, in Lincolnshire.
The therapist opened me up quite easily. She got the overview of my life that she wanted with my initial assessment, which was itself a place and moment which felt therapeutic. From the beginning, taking on material sequentially, she listened when I spoke about the many conflicts that had become part of how I accounted for family life, and the conflicts I endured between home and school. In family and in school some behavioural shorthand always came into play, either a punishment or a change of scene without explanation, and because what had happened was complex, where I simply could not follow either what had happened or the dramatic change of situation that denied what had previously happened. She had me talking to a cushion as if the cushion was either my younger self or an adult member of my family. Talking to my dad as the cushion was the hardest role play, throughout my life he was always the most opaque of people. I found talking to the cushion as if it were a person strange at first. She did not tell me that what I was doing was part of the process called gestalt therapy. I learned that much, much, later. I had to be on my own or somewhere very quiet for at least an hour after each therapy session, to slowly come round to being back in normal life a partially changed person.
If anyone had ever said 'you are not a full employee of a place until you have worked there at least three years', I would have said 'That is absurd' thinking mostly of how so few employees ever stayed in some jobs long enough to get a contract because the job itself become difficult to settle with, and how unfair the limited availability of work contracts seemed to be. But thinking in terms of how work pressures can vary from soft and light, to quite severe, where the level of severity comes less from the work changing, and more from the season in which the work has to be completed in changing. Thus it was, with Christmas approaching. Several of the care assistants tried to gazump each other by asking Matron before others could ask for either Christmas day off from work, Boxing day off, or New Year's eve day or New Year's day off. The sense of the year's work having been hard, and of our entitlement to time off, was in the air. Particularly after the October meeting where it seemed the best reward Matron had to offer any of us was a no-fault exit and she only had one to offer, to one person.
I made no claim to any particular day off. I had nobody that I wanted to spend any special time with if I was given the time off. Everyone knew I had no close family, nobody knew I was in therapy which was a commitment I wanted to keep going with. Matters came to a head when matron had set the Christmas and New Year schedules, and held a meeting with all the staff present, even if it was their day off, in the downstairs foyer, near the stairs, to set out with us all the schedule she had set. The foyer was the biggest open space where the residents could still be observed, as they had to be for those on duty in the meeting. It seemed bizarre that the residents, forgetful and repetitive with dementia as they were, formed such a close backdrop to the meeting.
If Matron had a cohesive argument about fairness in the schedule when she wrote it down, then that argument fell apart in her explanation of it. She lost the argument with us. From memory the full schedule she wrote contained one member of staff on nights, every night. Three members of staff 7am to 2 pm, One extra member of staff on a shorter day shift, noon 'til 4 pm. Two or three members of staff from 4 pm to 9 pm. The three most assertive of the staff gave in their notice with immediate effect. It was worth losing the wages they were owed. They were going to have their time off whether they kept or lost their jobs. Given the poor pay that we were all on, the time off was more rewarding anyway.
Attentive readers will realise that know that I had been in this job around a year. This was my second Christmas/New Year working for Windrush Nursing home. But it was the first where I had been there throughout the cycle of a whole year. The Christmas was the first where I understood from the inside why they were so keen to accept me with so few misgivings last year.
Getting new staff to cover Christmas who would be up to standard, at that short a notice was never really on. Matron got half the cover she wanted. For three weeks, over Christmas week, New Year's week and the week after I worked fifty hour weeks each week because matron did not have the staff. By the middle of the third week I was becoming a zombie. Matron could see it happening if she wanted to. She didn't. But somebody else did and her witness of my tiredness became my exit point from the job. That somebody else was a relative of one of the patients who witnessed my peculiar mix of my frustration and exhaustion with one particular resident, off whom it bounced with ease.
By the time of the closing last therapy session I had lost my job. But with the therapy I had got the tools for a new approach to life if I could figure out how to use them. And I was in the position of being on full housing benefit, but half supplementary benefit rates for six weeks because from sheer exhaustion I admitted to being sacked when I made my claim. My refusal to have a holiday earlier in the year meant I had a little more money than I expected to have whilst being on half rate supplementary benefit.
I had to visit the job centre and apply for jobs but was happy to apply for jobs I did not have the slightest chance of getting. My old friend, unemployment, renewed our acquaintance.
To be directed to Chapter Eighteen please left click here.
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| The seagulls making the best of the bins at my local seaside port of Newcastle, County Down enjoying their consumer research into the contents of the chip wrappers from the local take away food outlets. |
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| Since these photos were taken, local bin design has become more secure but the birds still have a rich social and culinary life, and find other places to exploit human waste and lack of observation. |
In Los Angeles, before the judge who examines people
who are trying to become citizens of the United States
there came an Italian restaurant keeper.
After grave preparations, hindered, though,
By his ignorance of the new language,
In the test he replied to the question:
What is the 8th Amendment? falteringly: 1492.
Since the law demands that applicants
know the language he was refused.
Returning after three months spent on further studies,
Yet hindered by the new language
He was confronted with the question:
Who was the victorious general in the civil war?
His answer was: 1492 (Given amiably in a loud voice).
Sent away again and returning a third time
He answered a third question:
For how long a term are our presidents elected?
Once more he said: 1492.
Now the judge, who liked the man, realised
that he could not learn the language.
And so at his fourth appearance
The judge gave him the question:
When was America discovered?
And on the strength of his correctly answering 1492
The restaurant keeper was granted his citizenship.
A poem by Bertol Brecht written when he was living in America
and trying to account for the generosity of the place to him,
but not necessarily to less feted people.
From 1975 onward, when I was an touchy teenager,
she worked at the cheap end of the black economy,
staffing a junk shop owned by a rumoured millionaire.
When there were no customers in this warehouse
for goods, that aspired to be a proper shop
she filled in her time cleaning the ovens and greasy tops
of the cookers that the secret millionaire brought in
from local house clearances. He never stopped.
The cookers came in filthy and had to be cleaned,
for them to be saleable to the claimants on benefits,
who got grants from the Dep't of Social Security,
to pay for them, including their delivery,
only for the claimants to get the ovens dirty again.
This upcycling of goods with government money
and Mothers elbow grease, was a win-win for the boss
and the claimant, but for Mother it was a loss,
beyond how it justified her being away for longer
from the house she and we lived in
that it was her duty to manage, unpaid and unthanked.
One of the more disturbing
and disruptive aspects of AI
is how much advertisers have used it
almost as a fake mirror, to imitate
human behaviour and likenesses.
In one sense I can't blame them,
after all if you have goods to sell
then you will find the shortest cut
to sell them with. I am in no way a salesman.
Most people would say that I'm lazy,
but it takes lazy person to recognise hard work.
I do wonder whether we would be
more creative if advertising took
to selling what is honestly more alien
rather than selling us imitation homeliness.
How much more creative would we be?
I Need No Gravestone
But if you need one for me
I would like it to bear these words:
He made suggestions.
We carried them out.
Such an inscription
would honour us all.
The Tombstone Of The Unknown Soldier Of The Revolution
The unknown soldier of the revolution has fallen,
I saw his tombstone in a dream.
It lay in peat bog. It consisted of two boulders.
It bore no inscription. But one of the two
Began to speak.
He who lies here, it said, marched
Not to conquer a foreign land,
but his own.
Nobody knows what his name is.
But the history books give the names
of those who vanquished him.
Because he wanted to live like a human being
he was slaughtered like a savage beast.
His last words were a whisper
For they came from a strangled throat,
but the cold wind carried them everywhere
to be heard by many freezing people.
Monday April 29th. After last night's argument where I was at fault to the point where I was not allowed to help recover all seemed clear, the usual warm morning greetings. Breakfast was one and a half pan raisin and proper strong coffee, a very French breakfast. We were packed, the packing checked, and the suitcases and hand luggage in the car, and the car on the road out of Caylus, for 10 am. First stop Caussade, where Anthony stopped at his opticians to check when his next eye test was, not for a few months. He had hoped it as sooner. I looked at the bric-a-brac stall on the market market, and was happy that the one stall was all I had time to look at.
Everything went smoothly after that until we got to boarding the plane. Anthony had no problems with the motorway tolls or the parking, where the care was to be left whilst we were away. We had no problems with the tram and bus to the airport. In the airport Anthony insisted on a coffee and slice of lime tart. He thought we were still in good time, though I would have not been so sanguine about the flight times. We got through security fine, together and apart. Me taking the lead. Ryanair boarding procedures are a subject for complaint all to themselves, as anyone who as put the word Ryanair into google will find for themselves. Yes, they are cheap if you book early enough, but I wonder how cheap they should be to justify a boarding process where those taking the flight are made to queue, repeatedly at different intervals to no obvious use or advantage. I have experienced this enough recently for it to remind me of some of the infant school trips I remember which were said to be about visiting a particular place but were more about the teacher's fear of disorder getting there to the point where the pupils collectively regretted leaving the classroom, and were not allowed to say so; it would have sounded too much like an adult response to being treated like a child.
The problem we had was Ryanair falsely reinforcing an old regulation of theirs where the feet of Anthony's suitcase made it fit awkwardly within the measure they used, but the body of the suitcase was well within limits. Anthony paid the eighty euro 'fine' for 'over-sized locker luggage'. He was not the only one to be made to pay and have his luggage put in the hold. He was more angry at the young female stewardess who feigned being harassed better than he could calmly stand his ground and insist he could keep his luggage for the overhead locker. Eighty euros poorer but knowing the stewardess had Anthony over a barrel we boarded. My book for the flight was 'Confessions of a Fallen Angel' by Ronan O'Brien. It described a Irish 1980's maladjusted childhood. It was easy to read, the main area where it diverged from my expectations was that the lead character was heterosexual and having no difficulty getting girls to like him, or dump him. He keeps getting dreams where people he likes die in oddly accidental looking circumstances. And the dreams come true. I got a third of the way through the book before we landed at Menara Airport, close to Marrakesh.
Out in the open air just outside the airport we looked for a man holding a sign with Anthony's name on it, or said sign on a board. The smart young man who was our taxi driver into the centre of Marrakesh that afternoon was walking with his shoe laces undone, holding his 'Anthony' sign up with one hand, and holding his smart phone with the other. He was pleased to see us, and said that he had recognised Anthony via an image of him that was on whatsapp which confused me. I did not know that Anthony was on whatsapp, though he has a distinct and characterful presence via his own website. I was struck by the question with partnerships/buddy ships how much do partners tell each other about their online adventures? It is on a par with recounting dreams, in both the activity is non-corporeal. In the taxi we sped away from Menara Airport and towards our hotel, pre-booked for two nights by Anthony.
Twenty minutes later we were dropped off with our luggage in one corner of Marrakesh central market square and the direction in which to find our hotel was pointed out to us with not much more clarity then the next few yards direction about where to go. We had no clear sense of how far down it was, where to turn off, etc. We walked for more than ten minutes down a crowded alley market place, down which motorbikes and cyclists weaved in and out between a constant flow of people, and clearly stoned men offered us dubious directions until we eventually located the left turn that after a couple more turns got us to our hotel, the Hotel Tamazouzt.
Find Part Two of this diary here.
We build our worlds on circular arguments,
with variations that the longer they continue
the more we get lost in them, until we think
-whether it is provably true to others or not-
that the arguments we accept are those
that most readily centre and calm us.
Tribes rely on it, sometimes justifiably,
for a tribal identity that keeps them alive
in circumscribed tribal circumstances.
Religions are famous for this; doctrines
are drawn from unprovable histories for ideas
that the speaker uses to point us towards altruism,
the better to make the world a kinder place that day,
Meanwhile the circularity
in the contradictory government policy
seek to send us the other way.
If the blackouts in work that made me go to the doctor were the start of my change in direction, then in themselves they seemed like inauspicious material for recognising that change was due. I was literally more disappointed than I could say at not being selected for the no-fault exit from Windrush Nursing Home that autumn. Matron only called all of us into a management meeting if the situation was severe. So we knew the situation was severe when matron insisted on talking to us all, together. The way she chaired and scripted the meeting meant that we were there to listen and obey, matron was there to talk. If as a team we were good children, she was the adult defining our goodness. But by calling a meeting she exposed this quasi-family structure to the work, where before I had felt that structure but had been hidden. The meeting both exposed how much we were collectively caught by the team work in support of the patients and how much matron sought to deny this, lest we think and act for ourselves. The meeting also exposed how much matron both scripted and relied upon our lack of time for informed reflection. Given chance several more of us would quite happily have taken our no-fault exit from the job, either collectively at that meeting or individually later, were we able to think through the consequences of leaving fast enough to take advantage of the choices in front of us.
From the comfort of my rented bedsit I admired the church people who opened homes they owned for meetings of more than half a dozen people once a week. Such meetings were quite a commitment, and the bedrock of the satellite structure of the church. I liked those meetings but they were not places where anyone could admit to deep personal needs. It would be wrong to describe the meetings that went on in people's homes as 'fair weather churchmanship'. It would be fairer to write that where some attendees of the Sunday mornings saw the church as a place to find friendship, that friendship was best facilitated in people's homes. That such friendships excluded individuals from sharing the most personal details of their lives became a given. That those most personal details had to find some shared expression was also a given. But that was where single people in the church were caught between several unyielding places.
Midweek house group meetings partially recharged me, socially. Though with work being as hard as it was the charge usually drained away quite fast. At the end of one mid-week study and prayer session one elegantly dressed old lady who liked to be part of things, but often avoided the complicated questions and answers, spoke at the end of prayers. She asked to be hugged. Because I worked with the elderly and because my work was by definition one of the most tactile jobs on the jobs market, albeit one more built on patient need than informed consent, I spontaneously gave her the hug she asked for. Her name was Celia and the obvious reason I found her easy to hug on request was her accent. She spoke in a broad Sheffield accent that made people listen. There was a song in her speaking voice, and her choice of a more basic vocabulary cut through the estuary English and social worker speak that some in the meetings all too easily reverted to, which rather distanced our discussions from some of the earthier points about life that The Bible expressed more aptly than modern life permitted.
It is obvious to me now, but I was utterly blind to it at the time, that meeting Celia was like meeting my gran as I would like to have done but was never allowed to do when I was young and gran was a healthy pensioner. When I was young my family replaced giving each other time, individual attention, and active listening, with constant family action and group behaviour where we all partially ignored each other when together, until we saw the green light from other family members to use them to show boat and utterly demand other family members attention, Gran was never seen without her husband, Bert, and had to overtly limit how her daughters, Mother and Alice, vied for her attention and favour. Gran also had to control the flow of who knew what about whom, and when they knew it, to contain and disguise the negative effects of the family motto 'Where there is a Will, there are Relatives'.
Just in herself Celia was a modest matriarch, with none of the emotional family baggage that made other matriarchs, like my gran, matriarchs. But Celia did have a difficult back story, where at the age of sixteen she had become pregnant and been locked in a mental hospital for it. The child was taken from her and she remained locked in the mental hospital for decades, which multiplied the limits of her schooling to make her seem much more 'backward' than she was. She was one of the people who the government of M. Thatcher spent a lot of money on, to get her to recover her sense of citizenship of, in order to close down the mental hospitals that took her sense of adult citizenship away. She lived in a shared house run by two long tern foster parents who cared for limited ability adults in an adoptive family set up financed by social services. There was an ancient phrase that was probably from Yorkshire that described Celia well. 'She may have dropped out of school, but she still knows how many beans made five.'. Celia always knew how many beans made five, but lived in a society that discredited her with such knowledge.
Some time after the hug she asked for somebody to visit her and pray with her for an hour a week. I became the obvious candidate and accepted the role. With my shift work I tried to always keep Friday evenings free to spend an hour with her. I would visit her in the foster home, she would make a drink of tea for both of us and we had the use of her bedroom as a place to talk, just the two of us. I would get her to talk through who she wanted to pray for and what they were like, and then we would say the prayers together. I never thought of it as being therapeutic in any particular sense. But I can see now that all personal attention we offer each other on a one to one basis is therapeutic with a small t, I saw the times with her as me giving somebody else the space and careful attention that I would want to be given, and I was in the NHS queue for, myself.
The arrangement could not last. I was due some personal changes, and her long term foster parents would eventually move house with the assistance of social services. And towards the end Celia had, well, romantic female designs on me that could only be filed under 'fantasy; do not act on this idea.'. But I was quite proud of me being the object of her having ideas that could not be acted on. The fantasies were material for her to learn through and we all need such material to mature ourselves through. That year to fifteen months of giving Celia an hour of my time each week when nobody else would now seems exceptional in so many ways that it is hard to explain the value of it in the brief space I have here.
It was the opposite of the church weekend, where as a satellite church we booked a large house for a weekend for a time of more continuous study and sharing, including meals, than Sunday morning meetings allowed for. I enjoyed that first weekend. But it played havoc with my sense of fantasy vs mature reality. If Celia later harboured ideas about me that were unrealisable then my imagination was much wilder. One of the Lady Bay leaders, David, openly admitted to being gay with the insurance cover/catchphrase of always saying he was 'gay and celibate' to shut down any enquiry about before it might start. I knew enough about what 'camp' was and how humour in gay circles was much more abrasive than heterosexual humour. David was mildly obese. There was a 'cabaret' at the end of the weekend. To this day I have no clue as to where I got the notion of me and David and A. N. Other, another male, on the weekend presenting ourselves wearing shimmering evening dresses, dressed as The Supremes, swishing to the beat of the music and miming the words to 'Stop! In The Name Of Love', with us all doing the traffic control hand signals that went with the chorus of the song in the television performances of it that we knew of in spite of not having seen the clip of it.
To this day, the incomprehension of the would be audience to such a performance, and yet what the performance would embody, is both what makes the image deliciously funny to me and a reminder of how institutions become institutions through how they mis-account for people's lives. Anyone who forgivingly enquired about Celia's past would find the proof of that.
To be directed to Chapter Seventeen please left click here.
My thoughtless heart
knows enough to know
it is less an organ for thought
more an organ meant for feeling,
where in a thoughtless world
it mostly finds venal stupidity
within what passes for government policy,
where the longer it left to continue
the more it hurts to observe it.
But reliable exits from the pain
that a thoughtless world promotes
are not recommended.
If the length of time the slave trade
was legal and regulated proves anything
then let it show just one sharp point;
how much the depths of avarice,
or as The Bible puts it 'the love of money'*,
made us see our neighbour as our enemy,
whilst blinding us to their need for autonomy
and respect, much more than we ever needed to
for our comfort.
Since many of the early Christian converts
were bought and sold, enslaved by Roman,
it is a shame more than words can express,
that later Christian slave owners
did not have the humility before God
and each other that their fore-bearers,
the converted Christian Roman slaves, had.
Such humility in those later eras
could not have stopped the spread of disease
but would have made modern life less rapacious,
and, for a while, made the world a better place.
*Paul's first letter to Timothy Ch 1 V 6, the full quote being
'For the love of money is the root of all evil:
which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith,
and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.'. .
A friend of mine once wrote a poem
in which he described his friends
as 'odourless attempts at living',
for them being being two faced,
falsely cheerful and showering
once a day, twice during summer.
This was long before the internet
made conversations between people
becoming inattentive and one sided,
where what cheers up commentators
is a like, or a comment by way of reply.
So now, not only are people odourless,
and hypocrites they have lost the art
of even slightly disguising their disengagement.
*a catch phrase coined by Douglas Adams
that he gave to one of his character in his book
'The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Universe',
the character Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Particularly books that through flannel and charm
make points that puncture taboos, similar to the way
that 'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance'
took on mental health issues among teachers-
including a teacher having a nervous breakdown-
where as Robert M. Pirsig (1928-2017) wrote around
a teacher having a breakdown he was lucid, humane,
gentle and perceptive when no other author
could approach the subject with the same finesse.
Even more he wrote about the recovery of the self
from a breakdown in a way no other author could,
and rarely has since to such inspiring effect.
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| This 2019 installation by Klaus Littman is called For Forest: The Unending Attraction of Nature. |
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| In every press description of deforestation the phrase 'the size of a football field' is used, and few readers know how big a professional football field is-and they vary. But between 90-120 metres long 50-100 metres wide. How many trees might be contained in it? This one held 299. |
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| Obviously this is an unrepresentative image. It is an installation and artificiality comes with the territory. Obviously the longer the trees remain the bigger they get and the forest they are part of matures with them. So the older the forest cut down the more it is in tree years, where one year in the life of one tree is the unit of measurement. |
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| This forest was not natural. It was self-limiting by design. Who knows where the trees went afterwards? If they went nowhere for a longer life then art is often like that. But if it helps anyone to imagine what 'a football field of trees' looks like long after it is gone, then it's job as an installation is still being done. All images from here, photographer; Gerard Maurer. If none of this moves you, then please listen here to Brian Wilson cosmic ode to global warming, plastics, and forest fires 'A Day In The Life of a Tree'. |
