The Measure Of Pleasure

is in immersion which does not have units,
like pounds or pints, or other words useful
for different people to count things with,
it resists all scientific accountability.

After all who would listen to another
caught up in their personal rapture
when their own desire is so different?
It takes more than 'love' and 'patience'
to do that and with today's 'free choice'
such loyalty wears thin all too easily.

Whatever your most immersive activity be,
respect others in theirs as you find them,
where when you find respect in pleasure
you will find your heart, a treasure indeed.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty One - Entries And Exits

My next choice was how to use the no-fault exit path I had from my job, whist it remained a no fault exit. If  I had remained in my job for later than the contracted date then my departure would have cost me financially. Whilst I had enjoyed doing the job over the summer, delivering post whatever the weather over winter was surely a different proposition. I was often slow to finish in fair weather as it was. When foul weather slowed me down a lot more, then the management would be less than happy with me. Working over Christmas and New Year and then being sacked for it was still fresh in my memory. One experience of that was enough for me.

The following explains how I left my post office job. As a postman I got all the gossip and conversation doing the rounds about who was leaving and what was happening among the postmen. I heard before the management were told that one particular long term employee was leaving. He told us first. I guessed that the management would want to replace him. I would have told the management what I had been told, to prompt them to think about this in advance of having to think about it. Except that the management were always too busy to listen to me because I was too low in the pecking order. My work contract was of the last in/first out type. I knew that much. I don't know what they recognised or inferred from the nature of such contracts. I did not know that my contract could have been extended, or how such an extension could be initiated. When the management were told I blamed myself for not being able to tell the management in advance that I knew the other man was leaving, that there would be a vacancy. I blamed myself for the management finding out when they did, because I blamed myself I also felt that I had to leave. By the time the management got around to asking me if I wanted to replace the departing employee I had formally accepted the expiring of my contract. I was in the position of saying 'I can't have that job. For me to stay longer would have required some discussion about it prior to the discussion I am having with you now where I would have told you, and you would have listened to know that person X was leaving.'.

And with that I returned to the relative safety of the dole queue. There I used the time I had to apply myself to thrift and better living on less money, a sort of non-work/life balance. In both the care home and the post office I had been no better off, financially, for working than if I were unemployed. The nearest there was to a personal sense of reward was a sense of being part of a team. With the exits from the jobs I learned the hard way the early lesson that mother had repeated until we both stopped listening; in any situation that I got into I had to make sure of my exits. My family could not teach me that particular lesson because, well what if I applied that lesson to them? What if I got the impression that family life had been bad teamwork or bad management, and I saw them as something  to make my exit from? And what if my impression was objectively provable? That territory was too dangerous to even imagine. But it was a territory that I knew was there.

My family were not Christian. They saw no value in wanting to repent, or knowing that they needed to seek forgiveness from others to restore relationships to more innocent levels of openness. They would deny that family life was ever a dirty slate sorely needed to be cleaned, and defend to the last their actions in situations in the past. That I came from such a family and I was different from them, in three ways, in my faith in forgiveness, in my acceptance of my homosexuality, and in my (often hidden) stubbornness tripled how I felt like minority within my family. Those three distinctions also put me in a different minority within the church that I was part of. For them Christianity was for all the family and homosexuality was something to not forgive and brush under the carpet, leave as stumbling block for others. My sexual minority status was an unaccounted for mystery where there were facts around it, origins stories etc, but they did not cohere and were disliked.

And that is aside from employment matters. The pluses of paid work were meant to be that I took an active part in the economy and I had earned enough to pay deductions out of my wages, and that I had learned about work by doing it. But what I learnt was that a lot of the jobs I might apply for were temporary, low status, work which in addition to being poorly paid would have nearly no other material advantage attached to it, not even a rest room for breaks. If any single thing made these jobs doable for any length of time it was a genuinely sympathetic management. Every manager who presided over low paid could make a show of sounding sympathetic. They had to if they were to hide why they lost employees so easily and attract new employees to replace departing labour. But the difference between a show of concern by a management, and actually making the work conditions of tired long term employees so that the employee turnover reduced was vast. I now needed to be watchful of the jobs I had to apply for as part of my contract with the dole office to find work, to make sure that the economies the job involved did not eat into my personal reserves. 

The highlight of my autumn, was seeing The Grateful Dead live. I had started liking them in Christmas 1980. Back then I was rather awkwardly living with my parents. We were all caught in the stalemate where every way there might have been for me to agreeably move out quickly proved to have too many downsides for it to seen to be a viable exit. To make Christmas more palatable to me Christian Youth Group leader, would-be mentor, and friend John Sargent had lent me the 1977 Warner Bros double vinyl compilation by The Grateful Dead 'What A Long Strange Trip It's Been'. John did not know what a foment of rebellion from family he was starting when he lent me that album.

In one way it was 'just music', albeit with imagery that led towards the uncanny. Plenty of the music I had heard up to then had embodied the idea of rebellion as lifestyle choice. But most of it was just image, one stage prop being leant against another in the hope that each prop held the other up well enough for the musicians to make the money they were in the business for making. I had none of the means to even begin to imitate what the bands I listened to did live. The nearest I got to the music in myself was putting holes in one my vests in imitation of Freddy Mercury's selectively torn T shirt in the glossy Queen video for 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'. I wonder now how many deeply closeted young gay men who saw that video did what I did, and did not know how wide of the mark our attempted appropriation of that image was.

There was something anti-image, a certain charge, that got to me about the material on the double album I was lent to put on tape that Christmas. I had my NME book of rock to look the band up in. The entry for them in that was some help, but it left me few clues as to why they wrote, played, and recorded, in such a different way to all their contemporaries.

I don't remember now how I found out that the band were playing two dates at Wembley Arena in late October 1990. I don't know when or what the process was for me getting my one ticket to see the band. What I say for sure was that after a decade of connecting with them via a UK based fanzine called 'Spiral Light', and the live tapes that the band encouraged the audience to record and swap copies of by post, particularly with deadheads who were in American prisons, they were making their once a decade visit to Europe. It was time for me to connect directly. New material by the band, 'In The Dark', released in 1987, was their first studio album for seven years, and it raised their profile in the media much higher than before. It was time for me join up all the dots and complete what was started for me in Christmas 1980.

But long before I got to the gig I got a shock. Something happened that I could never have anticipated. We all have memories of where we were when we learned about events that changed many lives, though the event did not directly affect us. On Thursday 26th July the band's keyboard player, Brent Mydland, died, aged a youthful thirty seven. On the Saturday I delivered my post as normal, came home and changed, then set out for the town from Lady Bay. Before I got to the bus stop I bought 'The Independent' from the nearby newsagents. It seemed to be a lunchtime like any other. I started reading the newspaper whilst waiting in the queue for the bus. In the paper was the first report that Brent Mydland was dead and the band were in consultations about what they should do next. I was stunned by the news and then mystified about what that meant for their European tour and my ticket to see them. The band had always presented life the way they presented music, a mix of continuity and change. This death put a rather dark full stop at the centre of that presentation. Getting such bad news from so far away that I nonetheless felt quite a lot about at the bus stop near the school in Lady Bay both sharpened my awareness of my surroundings and made me feel separate from them.

To be redirected to Chapter Twenty Two please left click here.   

Emotion vs Recollection

 'The boys were great jokers' says my mother 'They were always up to something.' This was desirable in boys: to be great jokers, to always up to something. My mother adds a key sentence: 'We had a lot of fun'.

Having fun had always been high on my mother's agenda. She had as much fun as possible, but what she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance, for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be, or is already gone. It is possible to reconstruct the facts of this world-the furniture, the clothing, the ornaments on the mantle piece, the jugs and basins and even the chamber pots in the bedrooms, but not the emotions, not with the same exactness. So much that is now known and felt must be excluded.'

Margaret Atwood being precise about memory and recollection in her short short story 'Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother' from her 1983 collection 'Bluebeard's Egg', a book I would commend.   

Book Review - Commandant Of Auschwitz - Rudolph Hoess

 Perhaps 'enjoy' is not the best word for me to put in front of this review of the book 'Commandant of Auschwitz' by Rudolph Hoess, first published in 1951. But I live in praise of Primo Levi, a writer of incomparable humanity given the inhumanity he wrote about, who by writing the forward led me to this book... ...endure where you can't enjoy, it is what Primo Levi did.  

My laptop made me aware of this book, by picking up on my interest in the writings of Primo Levi. The copy I am reading is a UK/Belfast library copy. I am proud to be a user of public libraries and supporter of public service values, not least for the library having books that I would not want to own, like this one.

Primo Levi's introduction to the book is both terse and generous, particularly given that it is written by somebody, Levi, who would have been an arch enemy of Hoess when both of them were alive. But for Levi his enemies, the Nazis, did a lot that they needed to be forgiven for. After the Nazis had been defeated Levi could carefully choose what generosity of spirit there should be in his words, and his work. Any and all generosity he showed towards his former enemies came at great price to him personally, and was scientifically weighed and calibrated.

On a point of enquiry, I wonder what Levi would make of the politics of 2024, when the Nazis are either film footage or somebody else's memory and today's generation know decreasing amounts  about the world as it was before they were born, and this year between a quarter and half of the world will be going to the polls ignorant of the past. This means practically a new generation of right wing parties and candidates standing, and relying on refreshed misinformation about the past to get elected in the present.

In the original German this book is 114 pages long, in the English edition the page numbers run to 181, discounting the nine appendices and index after the main text, whilst before the book proper there is a translator's note and the Primo Levi introduction. Who knows how long and what extras the original Polish edition contains....

In the English version that I am reading, Hoess initially comes across as an okay writer who is somewhat workaday in his approach. He relies on the story to be the driver of the book, rather than any of his phrasing. Some of the plus side of that limitation surely comes down to the translator's work. The credit for this book being so readable should partially go to the translator Constantine Fitzgibbons, a man whom I found a lot more out when I put his name into google and read his wikipedia entry. Fitzgibbons was a high flyer. I'll leave it at that.

As was Hoess, given the heights of authority that he reached in The Third Reich. But to begin with Hoess's beginning he was born into a prosperous middle Class Catholic family who encouraged the young Rudolph to seek his vocation of priesthood in the Catholic Church. This conditioning held with the young Rudolph until WW1, when he saw saw action at the front and was later betrayed by his family; with his parents dead and himself away from home with the war, his extended family set aside the money to make young Rudolph a priest and his sisters nuns and sold the family property, dividing among themselves the proceeds from the sale of the house. This was the end of Young Rudolph's affections for Catholicism and of his trust in his family.

If there was one thing that I would change with this book, then I would amend the lay out so that there were subject headings as signposts for the readers of the one long text design that the publishers went with. The book is relatively easy to read for the first 110 pages or so. But from there, where the side header would be 'Reflections On Different Types Of Prisoners' the book goes up a several gears, with Hoess's reflecting on the different types of prisoners that he legislated over when he was made sole leader of Auschwitz as he ran it, and the conflicting aims of commands of the hierarchy above him. By this time he is well past making arguments where the underlying premise is that he is a good Nazi who tries to be fair among bad Nazis who are plain Cruel with a capital C. Any such argument and reflection of attempted fairness is stretched beyond all credibility or explanation by about page 114, where the side header would be 'Camp Management'. There, besides his being the highest authority in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hoess is given production targets that he has to meet and given limited resources to meet them where production targets are not just mismatched with the resources he is given, but they make the targets impossible to meet.

From page 125, where the side header would be 'Slide Towards Chaos' Hoess describes a scale of loss of human life that is not beyond human imagination. Nor is the suffering beyond description. But if there is a De Sade-ian scale of pointlessness to the quantifiable human suffering that is detailed here, then the book goes beyond that scale. The accounts of thousands of people dying due to a bureaucracy that has achieved a previously impossible combination of detachment with language, descriptions of aims in terms of absolute power, and the exposure through denial of completely shambling incompetence are truly astonishing here. If De Sade had written anything like these pages then they were among the papers that the lunatic asylum he lived in for twenty seven years destroyed well within his lifetime.

When Hoess cannot fight the orders and targets set for him, he too becomes a hapless commentator on the tide of insanity and inhumanity that he is supposedly in charge of administering. His haplessness becomes notably malign when he writes about the relative merits of the social categories of prisoner he had to extract work from, homosexual vs Jew vs Roma. It seems he was almost forgiving of the Roma. Even when he is killing the Roma he lies to the relatives of those he killed, and explains that he disliked lying to the surviving relatives about who he had followed the orders to murder, because he 'liked them'.

But with the Jews Hoess's text makes plain to the reader that in his view they both deserved to be murdered, and deserved the manner and reason for their death to be worth lying about, to the nth degree. Beneath the bile about the Jews there was a hysteria, and clinically insane level of detachment, and that was where he presented himself as half well reasoned.

So where can the author go beyond bile and hysteria? He descends into multiple sequential contradictory statements of why a Jew's life is so worth lying about, and worth nothing else. How much these views were his own views and not him simply absently subordinating himself to 'The Fuhrer Principle' was difficult to distinguish as he proceeded into the section after that where the maltreatment of those under his watch, particularly women, is described in term that are even more off-hand and 'It wasn't me' toned than previous descriptions of cruelty. But he says he must obey the orders given to him whilst also blaming the inconsistency of those orders for the mass maltreatment of the women under his control.

Nowadays we write and talk about 'doom loops' as a shorthand to describe the logic with which some express their thoughts and ideas when the ideas have become both depressing and circular, where the circularity reinforces the projection of being depressed. The Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Homosexuals, Communists, Roma, prostitutes, criminals and anarchists etc in the work/death camps were all caught in a doom loop far more deathly than most situations that get called doom loops today. There the more they suffered and died, the more detached, depressed, and desperate to escape and deny the consequences of their thoughts and actions their killers became. The logic and consequences of the anti-semetic doom loop is the central argument portrayed in this book, it is what is behind every false defence by Hoess, behind every false comparison of relative virtue or worthiness for damnation he implies, behind every pseudo-moral statement he makes.

It was the Allied Forces that broke the doom loop by destroying the German economy which, amongst other things, preyed upon the Jews it killed by removing their gold fillings after it had murdered them by gassing. I'll not go on, but one footnote is telling. When Hoess is transferred to a desk job in 1943 the footnote tells of his replacement as manager of Auschwitz-Birkenau being notably more humane than Hoess was, perhaps implying that Hoess was mentally ill or was suffering from exhaustion when he ran the camp.

In conclusion, whatever the explanation for Hoess's actions and orders, and of the actions of any other similar thinking persons where the idea is couched in terms of 'being dutiful', or renewed patriotism, but the orders and actions elide with obedience to a higher, and more cruel and absolute, authority, then here we have the warning-like Primo Levi says-in this book about the folly of surrendering ourselves to ideas that invite cruelty, whether random or systematic, to lead us in the culture that we are part of. This book is good as a warning to take notice of, in ourselves.

This Is The Tesla Battery

To manufacture it you need:
12 tons of rock for Lithium
5 tons of Cobalt minerals
3 tons of mineral for nickel
12 tons of copper ore

Move 250 tons of soil to obtain:
12 kg of Lithium
30 pounds of nickels
22 kg of manganese
15 pounds of Cobalt
100 Kg of rams
200 kg of aluminium, steel, and plastic.

The Caterpillar 994A used for earthmoving
consumes 1000 litres of diesel in 12 hours.

Not to mention all of the other equipment.
Finally, you get a “zero emissions” car.

Biggest money-making scam in history...
until the next big scam comes after it.

If it 'saves the planet' for the big scam
that comes after it, then that is as much
as human and non-human life can hope for.

P.s please left click here to find out
how many trees have to be cut down
to build a Tesla factory in Europe.  

 

Repetition, Memory, And Sentience

As I age I recognise faster than I used to
how much more I repeat myself,
when I travel less, whilst taking photos.

I take the photos because I used to paint,
images for my walls alone, nobody else's.

Then, when my walls were full,
I took to photography to 'find the eye',
to seek out variations on the images
I sought to depict in my abstract paintings.

I was assisted by how I easy it was
to 'fix' photos with digital technology,
but alas this is what led me to repeated
photographs of exactly the same thing
which had the acronym O.C.D. written
all over them. It became a new way
'knowing myself' that I had not predicted
would find me quite as easily as it did. 

It was the quietest warning I'd get
about how much my culture is a mix
of repetition and amnesia, whilst sentient
the proportions of which you can find for yourself.

How Glossiness Makes Us Gloss Over Subjects

Once upon a time life was relatively simple,
the printing press made protest via pamphlets
the done thing; blackening your enemy in print
became a process where literacy took the black bile
from the author, and put it in other people's hands
in the form of ink on paper, sometimes set to music.

This made the reader think a lot less of their enemy,
until they needed to focus on their shared inhumanity.
Even then they did not know how glad to be
that their inhumanity was finite,
when they hoped it was eternal.

But the more accessible the print medium,
the more we can all have our say,
albeit via machines that made the print
and presentation seem somewhat amateur,
such as with Roneo machines,
the memory of the smell of which I still cherish.

Then photocopiers took over
and the home became an office.
Then computers colonised the house
even more. With glossy adverts
religious charities made their pitch
online against poverty where the gloss
of their presentations match the gloss
of the party manifesto brochures.

The path for returning to a simplicity,
with less to no gloss is hard to track,
but it is there for those that seek it. 

Faith In Uncertainty

The end of all things is yet to come.
The end may never arrive.
Entropy may delay it forever,
hoping for something to live off.

But whilst 'Love' slugs it out with fatigue
and anger over what to allow ourselves
and each other to be uncertain about
and what 'victory' and 'loss' means,
there is still plenty of life to share.

Where 'Love' means absolute certainty,
but how we live is about uncertainties,
then Love may well mean the end all life.

I'd rather live than be that certain.

Holiday Diary Morocco - May - Part Six - Rough To Smooth

Day five of our holiday started with a surprise. We were given semolina porridge for our breakfast. I had seconds and enjoyed it, I'd probably not had semolina since my school days. 

Anthony was less keen on the porridge. More likely his mind was led by thoughts that made the food seem relatively uninteresting. He was equally restrained about leaving the

auberge with any haste. Less because we did not want to, though we knew we should

leave. More because the journey to our next hotel was about ninety minutes, relatively

short, and we/he did not know the area and had no plans for how to fill the spare time

were we to leave the auberge with any promptness. Our next hotel opened it's doors

between 1.30 and 2 pm. One thing this slowness did give us was time to do was triple check that we had left nothing in our hotel room which left us feeling more settled as out car descended the driveway.

Our next place to stay in was called The Kasbah Imini Hotel and Restaurant, Douar Taourirt. It was clearly an  upgrade on the auberge we had just stayed in, but it was still very affordable. It was nearly as isolated from the few surrounding buildings as the auberge had been, and it was on a road that looked much more likely to go from somewhere that mattered to somewhere else that mattered.

The building showed no sign of having been touched by the earthquake, unlike all the previous places we had stayed The Berber style decoration throughout building, the throws on long seats and varied selection of antique looking rugs in many different colours were inspired by the owner being part of a family who had weaved carpets and throws for several generations, something Anthony learned from engaging him in conversation on one of the afternoon rest days we were there. I took my rest times by going out with my camera into the surrounding scrub countryside to look for images that I could take away. It could have been a sign of low level of disengagement from each other that I found the camera and the landscape to be my play space. But still we engaged well with each other and if a lot of my photos were not 'keepers' than taking them was a fine way to discover my fascination with light and shadow. The food was good and the living was light. If waking up to a messy bed, for having moved a lot in the night, is a sign of contentment then I was happy.

Anthony had a sight seeing journey in mind that he wanted to complete our first full day there. So we set off but whatever directions Anthony had in his head, had got from his smart phone, or got from strangers on the way, they proved to be inadequate. We took the same  route  three  times,  each  time  we  found variations on our previous route, but still we  could not find the road that he was looking for. There was one photograph that I chose not to take. Most of the landscape was  bright  and  epic  looking,  even  the different shades of red of the  earth/mud  seemed  to have a subtle variety to them with the way the  light landed on different parts of the landscape. 

There was one small place that was an exception to  the  bright light and shade. The area was  used  for  mining  the manganese and there was one building where the the rock from which the manganese  ore  was  extracted was processed. Because of the work there the building was covered in thick layers of a dark grey dust that covered the surrounding ground to a distance of a few metres, whereupon the colour of the rest of the landscape resumed. There was an, in my view, stunning photo to be taken of this grey spot in the landscape of the manganese extraction  building  surround the varying shades of red earth around it. I had one chance of taking the picture whilst Anthony was asking a youth for directions to this place we could not find. I did not take the picture. It was a trivial loss. No picture is worth annoying a friend over, least of all  on  a  holiday, but there was some small loss of opportunity at tuning into the landscape I wanted to be part of.

The food at the Imini Hotel and Restaurant was good, even as it was uniformly Moroccan in character. The thing that charmed me most was the smallest, least noticeable, thing of all by other people's standards-the toilet roll holder in the shower area.

Would that such effective and simple constructions were used for holding toilet rolls back home, and we could collectively return to leading such simplified lives again.

When we left there would be five more nights, and three more hotels before we got our flight home, but none of the other hotels had the same balance of charm and ease in relative isolation as we found at Douar Taourirt. 

With everywhere else we went the earthquake had quite clearly profoundly shaken the buildings, the people, and the economy en route, if not in the hotel itself. Along many of the roads we travelled there were piles of rubble at the side of the road, all of them former dwellings without foundations that were now building material for the next construction without a foundation on the site. 

The devastation of the people was expressed in the vehemence with which the many beggars begged in the small towns, like the places we stopped for a coffee. The people looked and acted like they had not even something as elegant as an improvised toilet roll holder to hold on to, and wonder at the elegance thereof as they put a toilet roll on it.

Please left click here for part seven of this diary.   

The Enmity Of The People

is something every demagogue likes to stoke up
whilst standing as a candidate in a free election,
whilst they seek to defeat their opposition,
who they want the public to label the antithesis
of the future of democratic representation.

In autocracies the process is much simpler;
the dictator, who controls the media,
chooses who will oppose him, the air time
they will get, the turn out, and by how much
the opposition will lose, in advance.

In autocracies the people's enmity is engineered
and finely tuned to the point where those
who say 'We are free' and similar
can't tell who is making them say those things.

What those who want to protect democracies fear
is that with every election that is free and fair
that returns a charismatic demagogue
the free and fair spirit of that democracy
will be replaced with a majoritarianism
led by humbug laden contrary dysphemisms
which will turn the electorate against each other
-the old against the young, rich against the poor,
all until the best use for wealth is detachment.       

Dysphemism

is my word of the day for today.

Where a euphemism replaces a word
that is recognised as rude and awkward
with another that is more pleasant,
more acceptable for common use,
and more decorous where decorum matters,
a dysphemism replaces a neutral expression
with one that provokes dislike, and a negative reaction. 

Thus 'the civil service' becomes 'the deep state',
'public money' becomes 'taxpayer's money',
where the richest people who claim to pay tax
award themselves the biggest say in what money
that is put into the public purse should be spent on,
when in reality the wealthiest of the population,
from royalty downwards, have always been the best
at salting their money away is secretive locations
and disguising how they live off other people's means.

I could give further examples but I will not.
Suffice to say that this agenda of sowing lies
and hostility into everyday life is one that is
going to run, run again, and run until even 
the most naturally able to resist being subject
to the hostility they sow will be unable to hide
from the storm of malcontent they have fomented
-particularly when the storm gets aimed at them
when they meant it to be aimed at poorer people
who generally are less able to withstand accusation.     

To The Future President Of Planet Earth,

the head of the future one world government;
You can rule some of the people all of the time
you can rule all the people some of the time,
but all to varying depths of personal social control.

But you will never directly rule however many
billions of humans who are alive during your reign
to the degree your advisers say is possible;
they will always deceive you with their flattery
the better for each to defend their positions
of relative influence and control from each other.

And this is to say nothing about how your family
will go behind your when you are unobservant
and cut side deals with ministers you would never
have willingly agreed to if you knew they existed.

Please don't deceive yourself;
The projection of omniscience
always relies on levels of flattery
that undercut and compromise
what the projection amounts to.     

Mixed Messages

I have often looked at media stories
old enough to be 'modern history lessons',
were the reader engaged that way with them. 
Stories that were 'news' when I was young, 
for adults to mark, read, and inwardly forget
in favour of the next story to treat the same way.
Which is why I watched this, with some curiosity.

I sent it to a friend who dismissed  it as 'old news',
as if it was irrelevant even when it was new;
nobody cared circa 1960, nobody cares now,
about the inequalities of life amid new prosperity
when who the money does not reach was well recorded.

But with this story being about new post WW2 wealth
which was meant to breath new life into the community,
support the dependents in households where the male
was the head whose headship went mostly on himself
I paid attention to the footage in a way I never could have
when it was made, but I would like to have done.   

Modern Waste

in wealthy countries has never been
improved on more than with the printers
that are sold for use with the laptops,
the guts of which need constant updates
by Mr Microsoft and his friends, whose secrecy 
is a necessity for their market domination,
particularly where the market place includes
the market for criminality, a/k/a the dark web
assisting the criminality in the analogue world.

But to return to the printer itself, only the ink
sold for use in it is profitable to the manufacturer.
The machine itself is worth nothing and is designed
for it to not be recyclable, neat of design as it is.
And it quickly becomes useless when Mr Microsoft
changes the drivers it uses for the printer to work.

I look forward to seeing the first museum
of printers made redundant
by the changing of the drivers,
the mathematical nuts and bolts,
of laptops, by their manufacturers.

Most likely I'll see it at my nearest rubbish tip. 

Between Two Poles

We all decide between two poles of opinion;
majoritarianism, where the opinion of the greatest number,
however absurd and thoughtless it is, is impossible to ignore,
or we adopt the greater-safety-in-rejection of the outsider.

being the black sheep of my family,
I am drawn to the bad guys in The Bible,
the ones who get the blame from Eve to Cain,
to Lot's wife through to King Saul and Judas,
who I contend was part of God's plan for Jesus
even though his role would never give him credit.

The virtue of how I decide,
and whatever side I  join,
is that I don't expect to be liked
not do I want others to join me.

I'd rather be wrong for who I am
than right for who I am not,
like the great indifferent majority.

All That Jazz

When I was first 'coming out',
in the early1990's, what helped me a lot
was an interest in mental health matters,
which was further buttressed by my interest
in the more thoughtful films and entertainments.

Never was information about mental health
and entertainment more effectively combined
than with the performance of Roy Scheider
as Bob Fosse in the1979 confessional 'All That Jazz',
which for me was truly 'a coming out film',
all the more so for it not being called so. 

It's comparison of the glitz of the showbiz life
with the inconsistent and tawdry reality
going on behind the curtain was telling. 

Life in the closet was consistently tawdry,
where a lot of behaviour was deliberately mis-accounted for
to keep people unaware of the names and consequences of their actions.

Straight society preferred it that way.
It helped married and outwardly 'heterosexual' men
hide their opportunistic homosexual adventures,
and even more hide the role that alcohol played,
with such playtimes, whilst keeping at bay
all talk of anyone 'being gay' as taboo
as all mention of the abuse of alcohol.

I don't know what watching 'All That Jazz'
nearly fifty years on from when it was made 
would be like, but I thank all those who made the film
for breaking so many of the taboos and codes which bound me
to silence. The breaking of the old secrecy made my life better.        

Holiday Diary - Morocco April/May 2024 - Part Five

Breakfast in the middle of nowhere was oddly calm, restful even. If the meal was not the premium meal we might have hoped for, then hearing the birdsong whilst we ate more than compensated for any indifference in how the meal was served. Some of the calm came from how, beside our host family, we were on our own. Fresh orange juice, and coffee, was not going too far with the liquids when there were soft boiled eggs, pancakes, flat bread, and a choice of four spreads to serve on the pancakes. I took my man bag with me so we had our lunch sorted. Anthony said he was rested after yesterday's stressful drive, out of respect for him I took him at his word. Though I could see that he was keen to make the most of the time in Morocco which may make him want to try some things even when tiredness might cloud his appreciation and judgement of the experience.  

We had to go out for the day for three reasons. The first was that we had to use the day well,  the second was that there was a site that Anthony wanted us both to see, the third reason was that close to this site there was supposedly a money point and we both needed some money to continue on the week. The site was called Aït Benhaddou and it is a fourteenth century fortification, a castle as we would think of it, built from impacted mud. The journey there was relatively straight forward, even though the weather en route was unobligingly hot. From then on our experience of the discomfort that everyday tourists put themselves through got rapidly worse, until the only solution was to stop under shade and buy something in a cafe. The touts were out and ready for all comers, I was ready to compare them to locusts, with a choice of collective noun for the touts, plague, cloud, or swarm. We parked and locked the car. I had in my man bag the car keys, some now warm water and our lunch. We had barely moved a yard before a tout apprehended us and tried to say he was the way to go if we paid him. We told him that we had our water and were going to see the fort, where is the hole in the wall for getting money out of? He gave us instructions for finding the hole in the wall, and how to find him online if we were ever interested in buying carpets. We thanked him and walked in the direction of what we thought was the fort, which was not as easy as we thought it would be. After one or two short wrong turnings and fifteen minute slow walk in the heat we got our first viewing of the fort. Walking fast was definitely a bad idea, it would have made us perspire rather a lot in a short period of time. 

The village, where carpets and other crafted goods were sold from  every  third  house,  is called Aït Benhaddou. The  fort is called  the Ksar of Aït Benhaddou and seemingly  most of the village and  people from  well  beyond the village occupied the rooms of the  fort  to sell their modern art and craft goods, because that is where the  tourists  wanted  to  go  and where the money was. 

We walked across the river in front of the fort at the shallowest point to go in, and were immediately charged the equivalent of ten euros apiece for entry. After being nearly misdirected by a youth whose aggression we had not recognised for what it was soon enough, we joined the regular trail of tourists ascending along long zig zags of paths with small dwellings, now shops, going upwards towards the highest heights of fort. At least four very long and crowded paths. We passed I-don't-know-how-many stalls and shops seeking to extract a living from the queues of tourists who passed them, including us. It was unpleasant and that was without taking into account the added effect of the heat.

When we saw a path that descended, and one that went higher, Anthony guessed that that the lower path led to the bridge, which would take us back to the village. We took the descending path and filed slowly past ever more stalls that we did not want to buy from, and knew that if we had any thought about buying, then the next question would be where would it fit in our luggage? In our homes? The high spot of the excursion was the chilled orange juice we stopped for, in the shade on our way out of the village. It was not a new experience to be around younger people fiddling with their phones but it kept them quiet in the heat, something everybody needed. We were relieved when we finally returned to the car, I got the car key out of my man bag, and we got sat inside. Seeing the fort was an overwhelming experience, and not in a good way. 

Our next task was to find the money point. We had been told that it was on our left as we drove down the street. We expect the money point to be facing the street, and could not see it. What I could see but Anthony was less observant of, for him being an observant driver, was that there were two turnings on the left hand side of the road. We had to inspect down both turnings to find the money point, a column that stand apart from the wall behind it down the narrower second turning. It took Anthony four runs up and down the length of the main road for me to recognise the right to turn off. Being a tourist will do that to a person, scramble their ability to think and see clearly. We got our two thousand dirhams, equivalent to two hundred euros, apiece in the end.  

Reflecting later on the visit to the fort, I took at face value the idea of visiting the fort when it was put to me. I did not know what to expect. I doubted Anthony had much forethought as to what to expect either. With hindsight what that experience of being a tourist being slowly moved along with so many other tourists down the many narrow paths in the fort reminded me most of were the descriptions of purgatory I'd read, when wanting to get out is the one thing that those there want, and it is the last thing that they  can arrange.

We were glad of our rooms and beds when we found them, late in the afternoon. The Auberge was rather quiet when after our rest we sought out the landlord to say that we would be eating out for dinner. It took three attempts for me to find his wife, and get her to call the husband with the smart phone and tell him we would not be requiring him to make a meal for us that night. In the phone call we both overcame my speaking poor French and his speaking poor English, thankfully. I did not want Anthony having to do more than he needed to because I seemed to be helpless/useless.

Going out in the evening seemed to be simple business at first. We took the route where we had been refused a bed for the night two nights earlier where the hotels were all booked up due to online booking filling all their rooms well in advance. This time we looked for eateries on the same road. One eatery looked promising, but it proved to be full of belligerent Russians who were shouting at each other and the manager. When we saw the menu we found that it did not serve serious food anyway. In the working class town that had not offered us a bed before there was a restaurant that served us meaty tagines, mine was lamb, Anthony's was chicken. There was not much choice. Tired as we were, the food was filling and cheap, and we were happy. In our rooms for the night I read more of 'Confessions of a Fallen Angel' and Anthony did things with his smart phone including reading The Guardian. 

The day ended with a cuddle, both of us in our pyjamas, which was one of the treats of the holiday, and of most of the times with Anthony, for me.

Please left click here for part six of this diary                 

A Postcard Never Sent, But Shared Here...

 

Lies, Leadership, And Inherited Wealth

 It is much observed in the Wealthy West

that leaders lie about having humble origins,
with a consistency that beggars belief.

They have to, to have anything to say
about where they have come from
because the whole media apparatus
disguises the expectation of wealth,
where the wealthy assume their birth right
is (amongst other things) to talk down to the masses. 

From birth onwards, this benefits the best heeled
to become ever more efficient bullies.

Even the blind can see that if their leader
came from origins even half as humble
as the (Dear, Great, Supreme... ) leader
said they were, then the leader could not speak
with such polish and charm about where they came from.

The true leader has grit, regardless of wealth,
and grit means the leader being honest with themselves
about the riches they grow up with.

My preferred leader would Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan,
a school boy from the mining valleys of Wales
who conquered his stammer with his loquacity,
and his knowledge of language as an adult.

The wealth he found in words,
was greater than the inherited wealth
of his rivals combined, it founded the NHS,
an economic miracle in it's time and with it's founding
that seventy six years on is like a crumbling stately home,
soon be set for the wrecking ball
of American Capitalist wrack and ruin.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty - Please Mr Postman

My route away from the job club, and into a job, seemed in no way assured. First I was on my own, filling in the application form. Then there were ten of us completing a written intelligence test. To this day I am unsure about the role that written tests play in helping employers decide who to accept, and who to decline to employ. Maybe part of what we were tested for was that we had no sensitivity to being put in dingy rooms, because I had passed that test with how well I had endured the job club room. In the moments I half wondered why I was in that room I focused on the half dead cactus on the window sill that was neither thrown out or watered, but soldiered on without nurture. I often thought to myself 'Is that plant meant to be a metaphor for our place in the jobs market?'.

But I passed the intelligence test. Maybe all ten of us present did because it was dummy test where, whatever the questions on the paper were, what we were really being tested for was how sincere we were prepared to be as uniformed dummies. I accepted applying for the job for five reasons. The first was that it was temporary. I simply could not get my head around being happily accepted by any  employer long term being to any clear mutual advantage. This job had a natural, mutually agreed, cut off point. The second reason was that it in no way affected my housing benefit, which made me feel more assured. The third reason was that the hours were part time, albeit starting at 5 am six days a week. The fourth reason was that I would be on my own delivering the post and my distance from the management when on the job made me feel better about doing it. My fifth reason was the free 'airwear' shoes that they issued as standard. These shoes had been my favourite for every day wear for over a decade. If I'd have known what the job was like before I started there could have been a sixth reason. I was not a natural fit for it, but I got to quite like being part of the team, the lack of pretension amongst us was appealing.

On my first day at work I still had my half fares unemployed person's bus pass. In my postman's uniform I dared to use it to get a bus home. The bus driver gave me the ticket for the bus and later queried it with the ticket inspector who got on the bus part way through my journey. The inspector did not approach me. But if he had I would have said 'I am working a week in hand, so technically I am still on benefits.'. I was not working a week in hand, but the urge to thrift that I had made me try that minor ruse to save a frankly petty amount of money was rather strong with me. Maybe my using the card was also a sign of how little I thought had changed for me. Thereafter I paid the full fare.

For six days a week for the next three months my day started at about 4.00 am, I put on my slightly ill-fitting postman's uniform and walked to the depot, thirty mins brisk walk from where I lived. In work we had seventy five minutes to sort through all our post by putting every item into one of the cubby holes labelled with all the different roads on our patch. Then we put elastic bands around the contents of each cubby hole, and more elastic bands around mail for closely grouped addresses, and then put all the bundles in our shoulder bag. I was often slower than the other, more experienced, postmen in my team. They helped me sort my mail faster when I was slow/time was running tight. At 6.15 all six of us were meant to get in the back of the postal van and be taken from the depot and dropped off on the area where we had to deliver our post. Mine was Plumtree, a village five miles south east of central Nottingham. I was usually dropped off at the roundabout just short of the village itself. Soon after I started I was loaned the use of a works bike which I took on the van that carried us all every day. It helped me deliver my post faster and made going home easier.

Of the other five men on the team, four of them were married with young children. One was an older man, of about fifty, who was slim, bald and had a neat white goatee beard and moustache. He lived with his mother, It was clear to all that he was gay, the rest were un- interested in this. But I was curious about the positive impression that he gave out about his living with his elderly mother where they were an unashamed and positive support to each other. He had a quite camp sense of humour which stopped short of being laden with innuendo, but with my encouragement he leaned further that way. The ten minutes in the van with him each morning became a treat for me. That was the time where he and I could trade comments and humour whilst the other four were somewhere between perky and subdued. I would have liked to have met him socially outside of work, but I knew better than to ask for that. That would be pushing it.

I was expected to complete my round by 11 am. I often took until until 11.30 before the round was completed. However long I took to get the round done, my treat to myself was always to sit outside the newsagents and have a pint of milk and a mars bar before going home on the bike. At the time it seemed to be a fine way to enjoy the summer weather.

I found that I could adapt much better with shift work where the shift did not change, than when the shifts did change. But still I tended towards resting in the afternoons. My best (in)activity during my time off was reading, even with the household was mostly centred around the television. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in the February of 1990 we were all gripped by the images of him on his first walk free, and the commentary that went with it. But I was the one in the house who took out of the library one of several biographies the ANC leader that had been published. It was a brick of a book to read and I read it all. But I had followed the anti-apartheid movement from the distance of my television in Lincolnshire half a decade earlier, when BBC 2 had depicted the escape from South Africa of white newspaper editor, journalist, and ANC supporter, Donald Woods, and his family. Woods had been a champion of the writings of Steven Biko. Even knowing that I was a long way from the events that the BBC depicted, they still seemed personal to me.

I enjoyed life over that summer. I now knew that positive change was possible for me, after all I was now living somewhere with the communal use of a phone-this was an advance to be treasured. But I remained unsure that once such change happened how much it was fixed, irreversible. Once again I found myself having odd periods of being uncomfortably sad for no obvious reason, and from no obvious cause. The best I could do was put the timing of these odd feelings down to how close it had been a year since I had seen my doctor and asked for the therapy that had ended nine months earlier. I found different ways of adapting around this ongoing sense of melancholy. Even though CDs were getting popular and grabbing the headlines as the way to sell music, my collection remained vinyl and tape based. My heavy metal and punk phases were long past, though I had the occasional foray into listening to The Stranglers and Led Zeppelin. There is was a lot of melancholy in the guitar based music I liked, where guitarists and song writers like Roy Harper, Jerry Garcia, Gram Parsons, Richard Thompson, Neil Young, Lowell George, Henry Kaiser, BB King and many others, much more that I would have estimated without going through them all. At a guess I had probably 150 albums, and relatively few of them were ones that I had either bought and not played yet, or played too few times for them to not give me a few ear worms of songs that came to me randomly when I was well away from playing the albums.

If they were not enough then there were books that thrived on mixed or unhappy endings to find in the library or buy in second hand book shops. Finally it was one of the recognitions of my homosexuality that was less obvious to me at the time came when BBC 2 put on a series of Saturday Afternoon matinee films starring Joan Crawford and I found them to be unexpectedly engrossing. It did not matter how many times Joan played the self made woman, or the heiress, who fails every time to recognise that her choice of male consort is untrustworthy or doomed, she always seemed to give her whole energy to refresh the role. I think my favourite was 'Humeresque' (1946) where she was the wealthy but tainted woman who supported a talented but emotionally volatile violinist John Garfield. The end of the film had to be him on stage playing soaring Wagnerian violin intercut with her walking into the sea and drowning to the sound of his violin. Repeat with interesting male variations in 'Sudden Fear' (1952) the western 'Johnny Guitar' (1954) and 'Queen Bee' (1956). and others in the 'woman in fear' genre.

The standard catch-22 dialogue and church, mental health and homosexuality ran

Church 'You can't be gay and you can't be depressed if you are a Christian. Christ is your cause for cheer.'.

Me 'I might be a lot less depressed if I could admit my homosexuality to myself.'.

Church 'If you admit your homosexuality to yourself then you will want to admit it to somebody else, somebody who we say has to deny it themselves, and that is aside from you breaking ancient taboos. No. Deny yourself even though heterosexuals don't have to deny themselves.'. 

Me 'But with regard to homosexuality, can the model of a mentally healthy and happy selflessness in Jesus be made to more like it is for heterosexuality? The two models are very different. If the two models were more alike then they would both be more sharable.'.

Church 'Nobody has ever directly asked us that before. Still, you can't be gay, Christian and depressed. Christ would only want you to be happy.'. where in the sleight of argument the church ignores the mental health aspect of the  dialogue. repeat to fade....  

But there was a space to found away from the regular church dialogue outlined above, which was also the beginning of a way out for me from making popular entertainment work as my short term therapy that left wider questions unasked. Adelaide and I both attended a Saturday one day study event that I am sure she discovered, where the subject was an exposition of the Matthew Fox book 'Original Blessing; A Primer in Creation Spirituality', in which we both came away from the day's study brimming with new ideas we seemingly had both long felt about gender, sexuality, spirituality, and most vitally choice.

To be directed to Chapter Twenty One please left click here.  

List Of The Day

Bludgeoned

buried alive

burned

crushed

drowned

gassed

shot

stabbed

In alphabetical order this list tells of the ways that the Third Reich sought to destroy the Jewish population of Europe, among other social minorities the Nazis despised, between 1933 and 1945, after displacing these 'undesirables' from German civil society, and destroying the civility in their lives and rights.

This list cane from here, a lecture given in The Linenhall, in Belfast, in February 2023. 

I wonder what list Palestinians would make of how their lives are being destroyed, right now....  

The After-Bloom

When love flowers late
it's bloom is often brief
and suffused with relief
from being made to wait.

Take your time
and watch the flower closely.

Your memory of what you see,
gathered in recollection, 
will be it's after bloom
until love comes again.

My Mother's Kitchen/My Father's Workshop

I grew up in a modest household,
a house with a lot to be modest about
where my parents divided the powers 
that ran the house between them thus;
dad's shed, his workshop, was where we
were forbidden from touch the things in it,
lest they be seemingly lost forever;
so touchy was he about his personal order.

Nearly as touchy as he was about the surface order
in the house which he said he owned outright,
and he charged Mother with maintaining decorum,
thereof, whilst as children we tried to grow up
through the inconsistent divisions
the house was meant to maintain. 

I could not count the number of contradictory demands
that he insisted she settle, as she was made
to balance the finance, help us grow up,
and we all had to learn to live alongside a man
who, like many patriarchs, misunderstood the limits
and consequences of the rules he set,
rules that he exempted himself from.

Sexual fidelity, in particular
was one subject that remained mysterious;
 all practical discussion of sex was verboten.

My father was the warning to me
about how patriarchy puts others on pedestals
they will struggle to come down from, once put on them. 

As an adult I have had to deal with the habit
of resisting throwing things out, founded on
Mother's shared memories of maximum recycling
and the rationing through the ration books
the government issued  that she grew up with. 

It was reasoning like hers that made the kitchen
her fiefdom, hers for us to keep out of
when she was cooking, though we were accepted
when the matter came to doing the washing up
before we all watched Crossroads of an evening.

Mother had to have her 'queen bee' to admire
and Meg Mortimer/Noel Gordon was a queen indeed,
though I preferred the camp chef Shughie McFee 
for how camp he was, and for his being temperamental.

You can guess how I turned out.
I was not born to be part of a family...      

It Is Not Hypochondria

For an adult to become aware
that as a child they were dyspraxic,
dyslexic, and has dyscalcula amongst
other conditions...   ...and not only
did the adults, the family, they depended on
know about all it, they made sure
that it would never be diagnosed
or dealt with on their watch.

Any adult who as an adult parents themselves
past these treatable conditions in any way
in which their parents couldn't, or wouldn't,
gets my praise for their courage.    

In The Midst Of Life Some People Have Lifestyles

 Advertising malapropism of the month;
'Whatever the lifestyle of your dog....  '
as I heard on 23 June 2024,on youtube,
before I got caught up in, well, whatever,
in the maelstrom of choice that is the internet.

Dogs have lives, not lifestyles,
just like ordinary, modest, humans.

Advertising creatives and executives
are the people who have 'lifestyles'
because they don't have lives
and want to ascribe to other people
the lack of life they find in themselves.

Words Cannot Describe The Following...

 

Holiday Diary - Morocco April/May 2024 - Part Four - Escape From Marrakesh

30th May - In the morning that followed my strange dream, leaving Marrakesh with our sense of ourselves intact was our main aim. We did not care when it seemed that our breakfast was served more indifferently than before, and there was not even any of the usual double strength Nescafe made with milk on offer to perk us up.

Anthony had already paid the hotel bill. We were packed by 10 am, and out of our rooms for 11 am, the room checked twice in case we had left anything behind before the cleaners went in. We sat in the foyer until gone noon chatting with the next person who was going to occupy our room. She was a wealthy middle aged English woman from the home counties who lived in obvious comfort. She had booked her holiday quite late, and had got a flight in to Marrakesh early in the morning. Whilst being tactful enough to not talk about money she obviously travelled in some style. There was conversation of how rotten the English government was, 'An election must come soon' and other Liberal nostrums. As always in these socially awkward situations, Anthony scrubbed up/better in the conversation than I did, he found more things to say than I could. It was less that my tongue got tied and more that my mind got snagged on the thoughts that it was obvious I should not share. Mostly I went sociably quiet. When she was was told 'Your room is now free' and the hotel manager took her rather large suitcase up the steps and we were more free too.

Soon after the lady went to her room we set off in our ten mins walk around the back alleys of Marrakesh to where a car there waiting for Anthony to drive for the week. We had time to spare and had a strong coffee whilst we were waiting. Nowhere outside in Marrakesh was quiet. Our experience of the cafe seemed fine at first. The busker sang several sixties songs in English which was fine. But when the busker played 'Knocking on Heaven's Door' I could have been figuratively doing the same. If there was one song that I could extinguish the universal memory of, then it is that song. I don't know what other song that Buskers the world over would grind into cliche to replace it, where they are all unaware of each other, but maybe it would be a more robust and cheerful song,

Our car was new, a diesel vehicle, white, and capacious. I presented the remainder of the money in euros, over two hundred euros, after we had paid the deposit. Getting in it to get out of the city was a relief. I will always be a passenger with cars. So if I was of any use then, then I had two small jobs, One was to look for the right signs for directions when I was told the name of what to look for. The other was radiate signs of patience when it was clear to Anthony that we had mislaid our sense of direction, this was easier than it seemed when it seemed to me like we were travelling via a sense of dead reckoning anyway. It was helpful that we saw signs for the airport on the way out of the city; I have often felt better for seeing where I am going before I actually have to go there. I can't be alone in this. The only persistent difficulty Anthony had with driving it was finding reverse, which with him being such a good driver was easily adapted around,

With only one moment of genuine doubt about our direction, and with every roundabout and section of dual carriage way passed we became more sure of our sense of direction, out of the city, the scale of which surprised me. I had not mugged up on Marrakesh before we got here, though Anthony drove away from the city as if he knew the way out of it of old, though the roads must have changed a lot since he last drove on the roads around Marrakesh. I did not count the number of major roundabout/duel carriage way combinations before the traffic got quieter and the development either side of the road more spaced out. What I did admire, which I have seen before, is the dogs basking in the heat on the grass of one well landscaped roundabout as the traffic raced around. The utter unconcern of the dogs and depiction of agreement among them, well, goes far beyond sentiment for me.

The sense of relief as there was nothing, no buildings, either side of the road washed over us as we passed through some of the Atlas Mountains. Neither of us had to say 'I am glad we are out of Marrakesh'. We felt each other feeling it. But there was a crisis to be met. We had been in Marrakesh two nights. Anthony had booked a two night stay in a hotel along the road we were on. But the booking was for two days away. We had to find a hotel or auberge somewhere a decent distance from where we had booked-say two hours drive-en route to that hotel for two nights. We tried two hotels before we found a place to stay, both hotels were fully booked, We soon realised that the combined effect of Covid ending, as well as more bookings being taken in advance online reduced our chances of finding food and a bed for the night. One place-clearly a place where truck drivers stayed the night-seemed pointedly rude to us when we asked. We were taking a chance by the fourth hour on the road because only he could drive and we both knew that he was getting eye strain. 

I noticed the 'Auberge Dar Zara' stop first and he pulled in to the left, off the road and up the incline. Anthony could rest his eyes and start seeing single again, after the double vision /blurriness from driving four and a half hours. The place did not look much but it was cheap and welcoming, wonderfully Heath Robinson looking electrics, My single bed base was made from a pallet. Good mattress, poor fitting sheet. Anthony go the double bed. Our dinner was a green salad, vegetable tagine, fruit salad. We kept the banana for later. 

I read more of 'Confessions of a Fallen Angel'- Death sure stalks this character's life. His knowing that drinker talk bollocks/cliches so readily and don't notice they are doing it is well observed. I could say something about my family here, but why bother? I have observed the lives I led around them with enough acuity for me to know I am addressing myself more than any reader of my words. However well they are trodden, old sour grapes are, they do not make for mature settled attachments.

Please left click here for part five of this diary.         

Enough For Everyone

One day 'less' will be the new 'more',
the world will know better than before,  
and the survivors will reap the days
their forbearers were never meant to.

Will the survivors know when 'enough'
really will be enough for everyone?
For everyone and everything to live on ?

That is the question..... 

A Party Political Broadcast By The Cynic Party

 

Oh the bright young men in their tight-buttoned suits:
yeah, the light beams out from capped smiles
to the shines on their lick-spittle boots,
on their lick-spittle boots.
Oh these sharp young sparks with their fresh rosettes –
yeah, the artful way that they promise the earth
to all suffragettes.
What they won't promise we don't know yet.

They say they're building and shaping society
but we know they're just saving for their own
safe home in politics,
a safe home in politics.
Anything goes: look at them run.

Come from every side, noses Pinocchio clean;
lock in synchromesh,
oil the wheels and the gears of the party machine,
of the party machine.
And the final goal is a cabinet seat...
in the trappings of power,
the presumption to speak for the man in the street,
for the man in the street.

Once they move in, they're in for good;
yeah, once they get that bed made
it's a safe home in politics,
a safe home in politics.
Jobs for the boys: look at them run.

Yeah, there's just one thing none of us should forget:
a political man is just in it
for power and the smell of success,
for power and the smell of success.

Yeah, some start out as idealists –
pretty soon they all cop for ideal careers
and a safe home in politics,
a safe home in politics,
a cushy job in politics,
a cushy job in politics;
oh, look at them run.

Politicians fight it out on the conning tower
but they all agree not to rock the boat.
It's a safe home in politics.
It's built on your vote.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Nineteen - Change Comes In Threes

I was slow to appreciate how I had 'landed on my feet' when I settled into being unemployed and living in Lady Bay. The comfortable middle class character of the area masked a lot my prior experience. There I had seen myself as being awkwardly passive and working class. I was a people pleaser when I crossed the T's on my thanks and dotted the I's on my praise for certain things. That was seen as expected with my coming from a bruised background of forced deference. But that spring and summer of 1990 my life opened up on three fronts, all three of which fed into each other and changed how I saw myself.

The first event was that the independent/art house cinema put on it's first season of 'gay themed' films. The British Film Institute had aligned itself with Channel 4 television who were having a season of late night gay-themed broadcasts which included reactions against the passing of 'section 28' where the Tory government limited what could be said about homosexuality and lesbianism in school classrooms. The BFI sent a package of vintage gay themed films to independent movie houses across the country. I went to see one of them. If, as Alan Bennett put it, 'homosexuality came off the ration book' for many English gay men in 1967, then gay men in London were always the first to grasp the opportunities first. The television programmes followed the claims for a London gay heritage, and were meant to be the spur for gay men in the provinces to start from where they were in living out more fully what they thought they believed, however critical the locals might be. I was still officially closeted but 'half out' depending on the circumstances and the company. It was a young and nerdy Woody Allen who said 'I am not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens.'. I surely paraphrased Woody Allen's quote in my head when ever I was in company in which I could not talk as freely as I thought 'I am not afraid of my sexuality, I just don't want to re-experience the shame in the language I am given to describe it.'.

My way around what made the unsayable automatically unpleasant was to see a 1971 film called 'Pink Narcissus'. It was a unique gay fantasy film in which there was  no dialogue and the character seemed to live in some perpetual reverie as he explored different fantasies as if all fantasy was sexual. Only some fantasies became more explicitly gay and directly sexual than others. The film certainly forced my closet door to be more open, and jammed half-open. The film certainly lowered the levels of guilt that I felt when I went places so secret I did not have words to describe them. I admitted to seeing the film to the one person in church who I thought might understand why I wanted to see it. His mix of disapproval whilst being nonplussed was more humorous to me than it seemed to him.

I still had a long way to go to even half-get my head around why I cottaged. I seemed to not know how or why to stop. Christianity Barbara Woodhouse style, with all of it's tut-tutting about 'the gay lifestyle' in church seemed utterly resistant to engaging with something that was more substantial than the 'lifestyle choice' they said it was. And worse, the lack of humour made the church seem defensive. So from time to time I still waved my willy in the dark in front of strangers like me who did the same. But I felt more comfortable with it, partly from thinking how in our own way we were all descendants of the young man in 'Pink Narcissus', all fantasists. If what we did was 'a phase', as many of us might have been told by our parents when we were teenagers, then as a phase it was both real and something definitively out of phase with how the rest of our lives were described and conducted-which is what forced what we did in the toilets into being a fantasy. In it's unspoken way the film's depiction of escalating sexual fantasy gave me a framework for recognising sexual fantasy as being real, if only as the unmet expectations of an unlived life.

I had been at the top of the list for moving to Agape House for some time when a room in the house became available, later that spring. Adelaide's shared house was a three storey semi-detached house, four storeys if the extensive brick floored cellar was included, with a phone, a big ground floor kitchen diner, a shared living room, an upstairs bathroom and four comfortable well furnished rooms upstairs. There was a fair sized low maintenance but smart garden to the rear of the house with a large willow tree in it. I resided there for a relatively short length of time. But from the time of my departure from Pierrepoint Rd to my  departure from Agape House, the difference the move made to my life was astonishing. The Pierrepoint Rd house did have a sense of loose family about it, but often it was much more 'loose' than it was 'family', and the place was pleasantly run down. To go from the looseness and neglect of the old household to being part of a proper substitute family in the new house was astonishing. One odd point was how similar they were as houses. But the big point to note is how all the personal changes that I had been stymied and put of from exploring at every address I had lived at prior to 'Agape House' I felt more safe exploring there.

But first a word about Jed, who moved there around the same time as me. He was a gardener, a church attendee, happily heterosexual and not at all homophobic, and 70 % deaf. His favourite television programme was 'Star Trek; The Next Generation' because he found it easy to follow. He spoke quite clearly. As had happened to me, his life had been mangled and misshapen by institutions. But he had one thing I did not have; a profession. He was a professional gardener. The church always had a problem with single young men who were attracted to the image the church projected, but whose early lives have been disrupted. The church always wanted the men to marry and settle, but the young men would not settle easily where they could not be honest about how they had survived the substitutes for family that made the idea of family life seem difficult and unattractive. Adelaide's individual solution to the presenting problems that the church shied away from accepting, the disrupted early life, was to have a substitute family set up that allowed people like Jed and me to evolve improved approaches to becoming adults in their own way.

The third area of life that changed was work, well nearly. After thirteen weeks of being registered unemployed and not looking very hard for work every claimant got the offer they could not refuse; to join a job club. The only way to leave this club alive was to get a job and hope that you could do the job, and live with the management the job came with. Most of the jobs looked for from job clubs were generic, low-skilled, and basic. If you disliked the job, then exchanging it for a better job situation whilst continuing with job you disliked was difficult. One solution to expect less money and look instead for the jobs with no-fault exits from them, though this often meant a rather indifferent acceptance if you go the job.

The job club met Monday to Friday, mid morning to late afternoon, in an undecorated half- furnished city council office room with tables in a group in the middle of the room, and twenty to thirty chairs all around the outside of the tables. There was no clocking on or clocking off, but members did sign a contract to be there a set amount of time. Our names and attendance times were noted, and the notes kept for promised 'review' interviews that never happened. Attendees agreed to be there the length of a part time job, two to three days a week, to look through the latest local newspapers and council lists of vacancies to be filled etc and update their CVs etc. There was a row of high windows along one long wall that let light into the room, but gave no view out worth seeing. They remained closed. If they were opened then the dust and noise pollution from Maid Marion Way would have been a distraction. There was a kettle, milk tea and coffee for us all to get hot drinks with when we wanted. The set up made Pierrepoint Rd seem attentive and homely. The manager was a friendly enough disabled man who walked with a stick who mostly sat away from the tables. His presence suggested that if the civil service thought he was fit to be 'our manager' then we should think ourselves fit for work, and fit enough to find it unaided. At one level attending job club felt like being in a class of mostly well behaved children on an infinitely extended indoors break where the teacher was absent. At another level we were all there by contract. This meant that there was no cohesion between us, and mutual support was rare. With the pens and stationery at the table we more or less managed ourselves whilst we scanned the city newspapers and vacancy lists for something to apply for, making notes of our efforts, whilst some openly looked instead at all the other sections of the newspaper to fill out their time there.

Some of us were more adept than others at knowing what to put on application forms. The most adept of us knew how to fill in a job application form to make it look like they wanted the job whilst making sure that the management looking at the form would not choose them. Sharing that presentational balance tip on was the subtlest point to share. Make the point but make it wrongly to somebody and the applicant would get the job they neither expected nor wanted.

The goal I set myself was that if I was to work then I needed my distance from how I was managed and I had to have work where mostly where I was left to do the work. This criteria ended with me getting a part time job as a postman.

To be directed to Chapter Twenty please left click here. 

I r ss that and most difficult thing to conveyrs. What we all found most difficult was hiding our collective cynicism about work and our lack of enthusiasm for being there. I don't know how many time I wished I were reading a book on my own, rather than looking to describe myself to employers who did not want to know what the rabbit hole of unemployment looked and felt like.

And then to disbelief and lack of expectation I got a job.