Better Quality Stress Relief

Are you looking for that perfect gift for yourself
or the person next to you, who you care for most?
Book a cheap holiday flight for somewhere you know
but have not been to for ages, but don't buy insurance
against the flight being cancelled. 

Then wait for the silly season headlines in the broadsheet press
where the airline blames the international air authorities
of different countries for not supporting the airline's schedules,
which leads to many passengers losing out as flights get cancelled.

Alternatively work out the price that return flights
that your chosen journey would have cost, including stress,
and give the money to a trusted pet rescue charity. That is what I did....  

Memo To Authoritarian 'Democracies' Everywhere

By which I mean kleptocracies that renew
their profit base be debasing the vote, 
where government money is channelled
into the bank accounts of the elites
who make their money on the backs
of those with far, far, less than them.

But to make such profiteering as pointless,
as well as disproportionate, as making the path
to prison easier than that of education is folly indeed.    

 

Introvert/Outrovert

Other folk can do their own ratings
of how highly they score with these boxes.
I am middling at best with it,
and not just because of my age,
slowly approaching retirement,
but also because the introvert I used to be
no longer exists, in age he was replaced
by a newer model; even being an introvert
has it's variations and dynamics.

 

Perfect Cover ?

I appreciate that governments across the world
and across the ages like to have the choice
of some of their deeds in defence of democracy
being secret to protect their citizenry
from what their government might do to them. 

What I will never understand is why the people
who act in secret are rarely given the sort of cover
for what they have to do, where nothing seems amiss
there is no evidence of a double or triple lives
or of forced divisions in how the individual chose to live
for their descendants to discover, and to feel perturbed about.

What hurts after is less the rumours that were hidden
and more the way they were stored, only to be revealed
long after only the slightest suspicions were fed. 

Not Quite A Room Of my Own

Of all that I wanted when I was growing up
what I wanted most was a room of my own,
a door I could close against those around me
whose overt unwillingness in sharing space
I could neither point out, nor hide from.

My escapes from Boarding school life were few,
we were not meant to like melancholic music.
One boy who attended classes lived in the town,
he was the person I was drawn toward; The flat
his parents lived in was cramped but friendly.

I shared his interest in amateur electronics
where  his bedroom was his workshop
and as introverts we had to stick together.

Time spent with John cannibalising
old transistor radios to make amateur
short range emitters from their parts,
and other time-consuming experiments,
was my escape from the boredom of school.

That John's room was his own,
and he would get a job from his hobby,
was immaterial to me. He was kind,
and through sharing his slowness,
his creativity. He reduced my anomie.

The Best Medicine?

I always learned best where what I was was taught
was shown to me with an affirmative sense of humour, 
I could connect through the humour and the calm
much more than I did through the contained anger
that tainted most of the communications with me.

Alas, most of the humour I grew up with
disguised varying degrees of anger,
and the humour got darker the older I got.

Whilst I was relieved at the time
with how the anger was contained 
I later felt trapped by what was not said,
and found releasing myself difficult.

In the model of masculinity I grew up with
alcohol was always the best medicine; 
it was never rationed or put on prescription,
it was like freedom; enough is never enough.
Their wives would say 'it got men out of the house'.

I thought that inclusive humour was better,
for it being uplifting wherever it was shared, 
but it is taking me a long time for me to prove this.  

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Four - Kierkegaard Becomes My Lifeguard

I was not the only person to have a new job, though mine was only temporary and his involved more radical and permanent change. My new friend Jerry, who I had met and 'come out' to me as 'having had gay experiences' in church at the end of a life changing church service merely a month or so ago had also got a new job.3 

His new job meant him permanently moving to Exeter. Thus distance came to cement our friendship in a way that I did not expect it to. We wrote to each other, and he phoned me. He was good with phones. He made me much more comfortable with phones than I had been before, though sometimes the comfort I felt came from the glass of white wine from one of the half a dozen demijohns of home brewed white wine that he gave me before moving, because he did not want to have to transport them. That I was not quite sober surely helped me through the less expected phone calls. Normally we could quite easily have engaging conversations that were forty minutes long, unless another person in the house signalled that they were expecting a call, which was something new for me. The future was nearer than I thought. 10

But then there was a lot that was new and futuristic happening at the time. Adelaide's house was the first house I had lived in as an adult, where there was a land line phone. My parents had no interest in having a land line fitted at home. They would have argued with each other where on would argue that such a such a thing was unnecessary and a luxury and the other would argue the opposite. If they looked like coming to a consensus then one of them would change their argument for the sake of avoiding a decision. They were like that. Living with informal agreement and constructive consent was a new thing for me.18

Between the ages of eleven and sixteen I attended the care home/boarding school for thirty nine weeks of the year. There there was a pay phone for the boys to use and be rung up on there, usually of an evening. Early in my time there Mother rang me on that pay phone once a week early every Friday afternoon. She went round to the Social Services offices, close to the parental house, and used their phone to have long chats with me. She dealt with her discomfort with money and phones by having local government pay for the calls. 24

This new adult relationship I had with phones was quite an advance away from family. Most contact with family remained by letter and card, where Mother wrote on behalf of both her and dad and I never knew what he thought or did not think beyond her bland reassurances designed to hide anything personal.

Adelaide was fine about the gift of the home made wine, stored in the cellar. Adelaide was pro-sensible drinking and anti being-drunk. I quite liked the philosophy of modest drinking close to where my bed was, the better to be able to lie down after more quickly. The wine also aided my appreciation of the melancholic nature of many of my favourite angsty middle aged singer/songwriters, who combined regret with reflection in their songs.32

I worked for Boots the Chemist for seven weeks. My job was simple and repetitive. It was to count, and note what I counted, nothing else. What I totted up were the values of vouchers that had been given as Christmas gifts and had been spent straight after and label the totals by shop. The work demanded concentration and persistence, rather than any show of intelligence. The work room demanded being able to present a degree of sociability in spite of being disinclined to. It was a windowless room somewhere below the ground floor of the building where all four of us worked together made faking sociability a necessity. I was the only male, the only temporary employee, and the youngest in a team of four people. The leader of the team reminded me slightly of an embattled Patricia Routledge in one of the roles she inhabited that had been created by Alan Bennett. The job could never be designed to be interesting, and whilst some humour might have leavened the sociability, the concentration required for continuous counting and noting stores went against any lightness of mood. The job could not be made interesting, however much anyone tried to improve it. 47

Counter-intuitively my way of making the time there more interesting to me was to try to immerse myself in my 1938 paperback of 'The Journals Of Kierkegaard' in my break times and eat my packed lunch in the windowless room every day, rather than investigate the canteen. It was not the first book by Kierkegaard that I had read. In the 1980's I'd read 'Fear and Trembling' and other theological works by him. With hindsight it would be easy to see that my choice of reading was a form of anti-social protest, where I, the outsider, chose to read about the life and thoughts of another outsider - Kierkegaard - to prove my sense of being an outsider to the team I was part of. If that is so then I was guilty as recognised. But then again part of me had always been an outsider who was awkward to draw in, often with seemingly little to be directly outside of. 

If my choice of reading was symbolic of some other protest then I will leave up to the reader to decide what it was that I was against. 62

I kept up the A4 diary that gave me the better night's sleep, probably processing what I had read from Kierkegaard's diary at lunch and some of the more evasive, but still quite personal, social encounters in the windowless room. It was difficult to feel glad of the constrictions that the job, and it's location, placed upon me, and expected me to fall in line with. But it was only a temporary job anyway. One great gain with keeping the night time diary was that where the job placed certain pressures upon me, pressures that previously, unbeknownst to me whilst doing other jobs, had made me more likely to cottage then one gain from the temp job was that through the night diary I was able to gauge, roughly, the level of pressure of work that was was more likely to make me want to cottage via what I wrote. What I was unable to correlate was the pressure of work/forced sociability against the urge to cottage/seek sex in public toilets. The diary was a subjective exercise at best. But at least the diary entries, well, allowed me the space to ask such questions even if it left me unable to answer them with confidence.75

One area of argument that the night diary allowed me to test out more fully, with the help Kierkegaard, was the rarely fully stated church argument where the church argued along utilitarian lines that 'God invented sex not intending 'the fall' to happen but when it did his creatures could replace themselves before their deaths, with future offspring. With 'the fall' death is a fact of life; reproduction is vital for species to continue. But still reproduction is purely a duty, not a pleasure. Any and all sexual intercourse should only ever be dutiful and in the cause of producing children within marriage. Anything else, including bastardy-something my mother viscerally warned me against enough to put me off marriage, is 'the works of the flesh'; acts and thoughts that were fit to be severely punished even before they become nasty rhetorical punishments in themselves. 84

As an argument it seemed more like a pair of blinkers, the leather squares designed to stop a horse looking sideways when it is in harness to a carriage, than anything else. To apply the 'Do as you are told, do only what you are told, and do not think. Do only what the church wants. Think only what the church wants.' utilitarian logic made the church seem like a place to be conditioned by, ala B.F. Skinner or Pavlov, even as it spoke about 'Jesus will set you free'. Church teaching made faith based humanity seem like humans were robots who should reject the idea of choice. Or maybe the controlled breeding argument disguised how one taboo, maybe several, and created several further taboos, where the taboos multiplied and indefinitely shut down choice, using false reason.93

From reviewing my diary entries I began to see they directed me towards the conclusion that 'I was in the wrong place'. I inferred that there had to be a right place to be where honest enquiries would be rewarded with non-judgmental answers. If my cottaging, my having sex with random partners in public toilets, was wrong and careless, then my being a sexual being was not wrong in itself. But how to start again, from where I was? Could I find the place, the relationship, where I could start from scratch? The utilitarian blinkers that passed for church teachings were worse than useless. Apart from anything else, without them saying so they required me to be on the escalator of property/work/debt/pressure/the delayed but sure rewards of the protestant work ethic. I unfit for the sort of competition that entailed that level of sustained effort, and delay for reward. 104

The diary allowed me to have a dialogue with myself about the sort of sex life the churches quietly and rhetorically argued against, where Canute like they argued against the inevitable. I could begin to say to myself 'Can I live better without bad sex if a bad sex life is all that is available to me? Or is a better quality relationship, including sex, out there, to be found through faith?'. This was a debate where the start of the debate was about quality, a debate that required fresh arguments and bucket loads of courage for me to honestly review my sexual experience so far. 110

Away from the repeated family cover ups and conflicts I felt I should be able to decide how to live better than I had in Lincolnshire. By mutual agreement Boots terminated their short term contract with me and I returned to the safety of the dole queue. The sense of choice became more important to me when I had more time on my hands and less to feel outside of. 114      

Now Wash Your Hands?

2024 is the year for elections across the world
 the most in the shortest period of time for years
which incudes many a vote that is not even to renew
 the choice of candidate, even autocrats like
to be voted back into power too, even fraudulently.
 
However the vote renews the mandate 
of the country, and either puts new men or women 
at the top, or returns the old guard-
all that is left for voters to do after their 
democratic duty is for us to wash their hands
and wait for the charges of mis-accounting
the vote to come after.

 When the lawyers and judges have finished
the government that will set to work
and who knows what the result will be?

 

New Technology, New Waste, New Recycling

Is the new phrase that describes
Urban Mining is the latest name
given to recycling activity
as done by my country's treasury,
amongst others, in their pursuit of gold,
retrieved along with other precious metals
from computers past well their use-by date.

Gold never goes out of date,
nor does information,
but information storage devices
are like second hand cars,
when new models come out
with splashes of advertising
old models seem tired and pointless. 

getting rid of the past usefully
takes more effort than it is worth.

Them Or Us ? Thus !

Of all the plot points difficult to discuss
in the novel '1984', the role of the state
when it acts as a goad or agent provocateur
to Winston Smith's ideas about freedom
must rate as among the hardest
to clarify with any clarity.

Is his why the Chinese state permits
its subjects to read the book,
but discourages all discussion
of '1984' online? This must inhibit
personal one to one discussion
of what sort of society the book is
a mirror for, where it is easier
to believe the book only describes
the activities of foreign governments.

One point that every group defined
by its opposition to it's government,
that works well outside of Parliament
knows that it will attract provocateurs
from the government among its members.   

Great Turn Off Of Our Time (40)

One of the phrases that makes me inattentive
of what is said after it is used is when something
'Is a victim of its own success', as used to describe
a project that succeeds beyond all natural expectation,
where the next project cannot succeed as well.

In every sphere of life on the great sphere
that is planet earth the greatest success
anyone can have is to give to what will be
the great success that follows them
where the supplier of the seed won't be there.

And the best measure of success
is the diversity with which
success can be measured.

 

Overused Words In Different Languages

If 'free' and 'freedom' are the most overused words
in American English, or at least in US Politics,
then what are their equivalents in other tongues? 

'Il faut', 'it must' is the phrase that the French turn to
more than they need to, where the list of what must be done,
the words that follow Il faut is so long it is too long for here.

'Literally' gets overused and misused in many tongues,
though Germans side-step the trend. Many words and phrases
in German can be translated as 'literally', but with words
such as 'wortwortlich' or 'im wahrsten Sinne des wortes',
the Germans restrain themselves in how they use them.

'Saudade' in Portugese is easily misused,
because it is about feeling absence, of a person,
object, or idea. Saudade does not refer to actions,
it is not a verb. It refers to what we can't control.
Brazilians and Portugese who want to be correct
about the commonplace say 'sentir falta' for 'missing something'.
There is nothing missing in their precision with language.

The Absurdities Of Modern Entertainment

Are many and necessary,
they start with the advertising pressure
it takes for the modern consumer
to find out about this or that new release,
where the advertising takes on the aspect
of being a fire hose to grab the attention
of the public, where there no fire to put out.

Much more a surfeit of choice and product
to blast to one side, where once people
lived well and knew more, with far less.

The less said about the practically infinite
hours of digital and cable television
full of repeats and adverts the better.

Then in the music world with the advent
of veteran artists from times past who left
hour upon hour of rehearsal recordings
that were never meant for public consumption,
and live recordings that long after the event
only the most devoted know about.

These recordings are no longer allowed
the cache of being collectable as bootlegs
but get collected in multi-CD sets, some
with up to thirty CDs in them, all remastered
and sold with a book, for a small kings ransom.

All this when the more mature way
to appreciate the artist for who they were
is read an insightful biography of them. 

The Confession Of An Unpopular Person

Nowadays I have a very few friends
and few more people who are confident
when they tell me how and what to think,
based on what they tell themselves.

For any person prepared to live on less
that is plenty to be going on with.

Whilst those with plenty to say,
who enjoy playing status games,
can, and will, repeatedly fill the air
with their opinions, and never tire
of filling the silences around them
I would rather the silence I live with
fill me and make me more replete in myself.

I wait, but I don't know on who or what
I wait on, certainly not the end of the world,
but the beginning of self sustaining quietude.    

Who Was Dorothy Thompson?

And when was she important to world history?  

Today we live in the era of Godwyn's Law,
where from 1990, the start of the online life,
whoever is the first to mention Hitler
in support of their argument loses by default.

But in 1931 Dorothy Thompson
was the woman who not only met Hitler
before he ascended to power, but interviewed him.

She was among the first to recognise
what he wanted to do to the world
-well before everyone else did.
.
Listen to her voice and story here,
and learn abut how before 1936
the new Olympian movement
stumbled into the age of mass media
and totalitarian presentations of power. 

Welcome To The Latest Competitor

In the latest race against extinction
according to the Darwinian principle
of the supremacy versus extinction.

This Persian Onager foal called Jasper
is hailed as one life for a breed that faces
thoughtless extinction, as if there
were some other sort of extinction
that was fair and just, most extinctions
just don't bear thinking about,
and often are not thought about at all.
    

 

The Triumph Of Modern Design

Was never more complete, more vibrant, than with
the life and work of British Industrial designer
Sir Kenneth Grange (1929-2024), who designed
and made good use of this handsome bookcase 
in his life knowing that with the books and shelves
removed when he was finished with them
it was meant to be adapted as his coffin.  

 

Orwellian Times

As the national broadcaster of my country,
the BBC, finds yet another of the presenters
it has paid well and made part of zeitgeist
is exposed through his arrest to have lived out
a cruel and criminal secret life, the broadcaster
he worked for is going through its vast output
in which he features strongly to 'put in storage'
images where he is front and centre; the presenter, 

I don't support what the news presenter did in secret,
and I can't imagine who would excuse his behaviour.

But there has to be a better solution for the BBC
than to employ it's team of Winston Smith type-figures
and have its Records Department update it's archive
as if it were subservient to The Ministry Of Truth,
and I was reliving '1984', and thinking 'Its All True',

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Three - Moving Sideways

The church weekend and events that came after put me at an unexpected crossroads. Normally I would say that talk of 'being at a crossroads' was a cliche to be resisted, but there I was my cliche was real life. I felt that something in me had changed, but I had not worked out what it was, or where it was going to take me. One of the more obvious ways in which I felt this was that I was sleeping badly. Without talking to anyone about this, not even my doctor, I struck upon what seemed like a workable solution.

In the gestalt therapy I had experienced one of the oddest experiences I'd had up to that point in my life. In it I felt both united and internally divided as I watched myself obeying instructions from the therapist to talk as an adult to a cushion that represented my insecure and frightened childhood self. It seemed both strange and normal at the same time. I was not going to get therapy via my doctor for at least a year. I decided to start what would now be called journaling simply so that I could get better sleep. Without prior thought or planning my idea proved to be quite intense; it was to fill an A4 pad with every thought I'd had that day that had not gone anywhere, but had remained in my head, before going to sleep. Even if the idea even partially left my head before the night I put it down on paper. Who knows how much I was influenced by the phrase of St Paul, 'Don't let the sun go down on your anger.'? I didn't know, I had my problems with how St Paul was quoted anyway. What I knew was that filling an A4 pad was a cheap cure for a lack of sleep and over time it might allow me to reflect on, and change, the way I thought. It might help me put an end to ideas I'd had that were awkward to own around other people, church people. 

When I was not that much younger my mother had shared with me a similar, but less helpful, idea. In her version the troubling situation was written out in a piece of paper and the paper had to be destroyed, flushed down the toilet or torn to bits, as if flushing the description away flushed away the real life trouble, itself. And anyway with Mother's 'flush it away' approach I could not stop myself thinking that where the trouble came from real people in live situations that we refused to deal with then the piece of paper flushed away left us doubly exposed to the real life source of the trouble; we thought we had dealt with it but we had not. And anyway hadn't I been flushed round the education system via her consenting to me going to the boarding school/care home between 1972, and 1977? And even then I had been returned to my family in a different, but as bad, a place as when I was first sent away? My privacy was what allowed me to keep the writing, my place of safety that allowed this therapy substitute to do it's work. I felt a lot better keeping the  jottings that aided my sleep, and using them to reflect further on situations where flushing the description of the problem away left me with a watery and unhelpful real life situation.

Being one of Adelaide's tenants, I was now in a much more open space. It was open in a way that we were all grown ups who could choose much more what to rely on each other for, whether that meant video taping programmes for each other when one person was out, or basic household duties like cleaning and tidying the garden. Adelaide had a shelf full of psychotherapy and social work books which were part of her training reading for being a senior social worker which she allowed me to borrow, read, and return. I don't have a list of the many books I read but I read which included all sorts of esoteric takes on trauma, and counselling, some of which I identified with, a lot I didn't as much as I'd hoped.

By far the most helpful psychotherapy book was one that I found by chance in a charity shop in West Bridgford. It was called 'Dibbs: In Search of Self' by Virginia Axline. It is the verbatim account of the play therapy process of a child of privileged professional, but distant, New York parents who was withdrawn and angry towards with his family. The parents sent the child to a play therapy unit, where under the influence of Carl Rodgers the therapist had to watch Dibs play with the soldiers and other figures in the sand box, and talk with Dibs, then talk with him to get him to be open about the thoughts behind his play. The therapist had sit level with Dibs to get close with him as through play his constricted emotions, including anger, are slowly loosened and express themselves through the commentary and narratives Dibs gave the figures he plays with.

I cannot underestimate  how much this book meant to me, both when I first read it and for a long time after. As I read the book, so my gestalt process extended and Dibs' therapist became my therapist. As Dibs' verbatim responses in therapy, and anger and many other emotions slowly unlocked themselves through his play, so I found my own responses and thanked Bibs' therapist for helping me let out a quite a lot of my emotions onto the A4 pad. I emoted less than Dibs did. But with the open-ness of what I wrote on the pad, the pad became even more of a reliable emotional prop for me. This diary was started in the November of 1990. I stopped adding further entries in the April/May of 1992. By then I felt emptied. I had let out as much of the long supressed emotions through writing as l could.

If local people saw me as more approachable for keeping the better sleep diary then they did not know why, their incuriosity could only help me by accident. Beyond surface observation they would always be incurably middle class. One subject that came up in the A4 pad was the period of time I'd had earlier as part of a hot headed Pentecostal church where their belief in miracles was such that they thought that if they had access to mental hospitals then by breaking into the hospital and forcibly laying their hands on the patients they could heal the patients and put an end to the medication that in the view of the Pentecostal church perpetuated the illnesses that the patients were suffering from. There was nothing as hot headed in the beliefs of West Bridgford Baptist Church, but there was a sense of detachment from the views of mental health professionals, the better to believe that the church knew better than the mental health professionals did, whilst avoiding any of the specifics that might prove the church wrong to itself.

The church response to homosexuality was nearly as neutral as it's responses to troubled mental health. Their collective public view was that both homosexuality and the gay culture were some sort of false construct made by men and women whom the church believed earlier in their life had received too little support to be a good example of from the parent of the same gender as the lesbian or gay man. This 'blame the parents approach at least held the tongues of church goers from blaming the gay men and lesbians they met who were open about their sexuality in the hope of being more responsible about how it worked. But this argument was rarely opened out because the easy counter argument was 'how are you going to get the horse back in the stable once it has bolted? How are you going to get the parents of these gay people who you say with hindsight raised their children in imbalanced way?

My friend from the city centre church, Spyder, met gay men socially and accepted them at face value. He must still have known more than he could share about the stereotypical passive/active role play that gay men were apparently prone to. He once shared with me a shockingly lame joke about two camp gay men in which they played the role of being camp to the hilt and it fitted all too well around the misconceived machismo of heterosexual male society all too well. But on the whole he steered an affirmative path with the gay men he thought of as his friends.

I knew about the role of sexual passivity, it was implied to me when I was in short trousers and around older boys. I had first experienced it, when violence was said to be 'playful', at age twelve. I could never imagine me playing out an 'active' sexual role to somebody else being passive. But then I was still effectively 'in the closet', as regards what I could imagine. The emotional diary writing had not really opened up that side of my life, though it would get closer to doing that later. But even so opening up about the forced social passivity of my past, and how it made me sexually passive, was like dismantling the fuse of a live bomb-evoking any memories too precisely, particularly bad memories, would make me want to re-enact them.

Meanwhile that Christmas the biggest surprise came to me when an employee of the church who worked for Boots the Chemist gave me the tip off for a temporary job working for the company. It started straight after Christmas. The biggest surprise to me was how well I was paid. For the first time ever, after being available for work for fourteen years and doing hand to mouth temporary part time jobs this job was full time and paid me wages that put me above being able to claim housing benefit for the first time... 

To be directed towards Chapter Twenty Four please left click here. 

Surely

'free will' and freedom
are what pave the road to Hell
where else they might take us no-one can tell. 

Taking The 'Arian' Out Of 'Authoritarian'

Whoever becomes the next president
of the United States, everyone knows
that they will have immense power
and they will need all the human skills
that could be accumulated in one person
to manage the complex levers of power
integral to the running of American Democracy.

Whoever wins the most votes in the electoral college
they will seem authoritarian and on the wrong side
to a substantial minority of voters, who will want
'once and for all' the question of race to be decided.

But whether a non-white woman wins the popular vote
and the electoral college or an elderly man wins both
for the first time in his history of standing for office
neither will be the last word on the matter of race.

They will be the last word until the next election,
surely be his last, the campaign cycle for which
begins fairly soon after the winner's inauguration.

Holiday Diary Morocco - Chapter Nine - The Last Day

It could be a function of getting older, or trying to keep a better ordered life, but the starts to the days seem more even, more alike. The variations in the days come after Breakfast. I thought that we should be out of the hotel and onto the road for 9.30. Anthony had different ideas where the nearest he got to sharing them was appearing to not want to leave the hotel with any haste. I could get the luggage to the car, sort out the empty water bottles. But he sat in the hotel room browsing The Guardian on his smart phone. 

When he got to the car and was prepared to leave, then he was openly underwhelmed by how we were blocked in from making our exit but poorly parked cars. The car that was the worst offender was a taxi, which Anthony scrapped ever so slightly, trying to get past it. This delayed our exit by ten mins whilst the junior manager who I privately called 'Mr Bon Appetit' for his overuse of the phrase took it upon himself to stop us leaving whilst he tried to report the damage to the taxi driver who he could not get the attention of on the phone. In the midst of. us waiting on of the hotel staff presented Anthony with the scissors he wants rid because they would otherwise be binned at the airport and his smart phone. Evidently he did not realise that he had put it down on the bed when he left the room which took the edge off how the manager of the hotel had detained us with his concern for his reputation as a manager.  

Reunited with his phone, which Anthony had not realised was not with him before, and Mr 'Bon  

Six dogs hiding under a van from the sun
and from the pinched spirit of the locals
in Asni. Another dog joining them.  

Appetit' had proved relieved that the damage to the taxi was practically non-existent-though he still remained uncertain about how close or far he had been from seeing his honour damaged, we escaped the hotel. 

We soon escaped the town of Asni which Anthony had quietly disliked anyway. He recognised tiredness and a meanness of spirit when he saw it, or rather when it pursued him.

We got to the airport in very good time to complete the arrangement for handing over the car-11 am. The car park was huge, something we had not anticipated and several attempts at ringing the car hire people and getting them live on the phone ended with us being left with the option of only leaving a voice message. Anthony wondered if he had the right number, and to be doubly sure rang the number on their card which I had been keeping from the first time we found them, a different number from the one he had. Nada, Nothing. At 11.30 we left the car unlocked with with keys etc in the glove compartment. We got in the airport and joined the right queues to check in, to exchange our dirhams for euros, I got 85 euros in the exchange, if it should have been a hundred euros the main point was to get to France in one piece. 

We girded our loins up for security-two or three sets of it. The queues were huge, half to two thirds of a mile long in great zigzags packed close together. But somehow we found the humanity in the queue. The women in the queue were better at seeing the panic on men's faces than other men were. As the time ticked by and our flight time got closer and the queues moved but so slowly, that they seemed to not to move, we were let through the worst queue to the front of passport control not twice, but three times, by mature women from mostly Latinate countries who recognised the look of plight in our body language and faces.

Even after that great leap forward through the big queue, fifteen minutes from our flight supposedly leaving there was another layer of policemen checking passports and boarding pass slips which was thankfully much shorter. Then as passengers we were made to queue outside in the open air in single file by Ryanair. On the plane relief mingled with regret as we sat down in our seats and divided our attention spans into the books each of us had to hand to distract ourselves with.

Getting off the plane, Anthony made me go first with my luggage, perhaps wanting a bit of space from me given how little space their might be after, and I watched as he struggled with his case going down the steps, and a young man with some foresight took the case from him and gave it back to him when Anthony had reached the bottom step. It was at that point I realised how fast and reactive travel plans have to be with modern travel; if Anthony had thought beforehand and left his luggage in the hold, the better to be able to walk down the steps....  but that discussion about what to do never happened, part of the promise of cheap flights is that you can have what you want and it does not cost the earth. We are encouraged to think we are omniscient and can manage all the costs well enough. 

Getting out of Toulouse Blagnac Airport was okay. Anthony still had to stop for a pee in the airport toilets, having been denied a pee on the plane because he wanted it towards the end of the flight. I found my block of ten metro tickets. We got the bus, joined the tram for two stops and then found the car where Anthony had left it locked. I don't know how much I portrayed that I was tired, after all anyone changing the country they are in and getting home in one day flat is bound to feel tired, but I strove to be attentive, Anthony bought pancakes and some special treats at a butchers in urban Toulouse that was near closing, and the return journey was without incident. The sunsets were blander than they had been the last time Anthony had driven us from the airport. Getting off the motorway and returning to narrower, more familiar, roads was a relief. Each small road closer to home was more relief.

Our meal of pancakes plus different savoury leftovers from the fridge was surprisingly uplifting. The white wine helped. And so to bed, but not without me giving him a back scratch to ease his sleep before going to my own bed, where I lay wishing for my bed in Ireland. I would get there soon enough.

Stigma Multiplied

In twenty four countries in the world
the stigma against poor mental health
is reinforced by laws that make suicide
-a symptom of poor mental health-illegal.

The punishments vary from country to country,
Empire to Commonwealth, the worst is
life imprisonment (The Bahamas), rarely enacted,
below that the average is a mix of fines
and custodial sentences. No offender gets less
than a misdemeanour mark on their criminal record.

This means the criminals being unemployable
where employers collectively refuse to employ
once suicidal ex criminals whose time is spent.

The stigma of surviving attempted suicide
gets added to the stigma of criminality,
so that the stigma of being unemployable
can complete the shameful trio. 

These events are survivable-
ask hard enough for nothing
and it will be enough to survive.

Face it; every competitive social system
has to a poorest who can live with the least,
and those with the least surely includes
surviving failing to commit suicide.    

 

Memo To My New Socialist Government

Because as privileged as Edward Morgan Foster was
he had his ideals. If they were high enough as ideals
that it was inevitable that he fell short of them
the ideal would be what remained.

 

Oh For A Fixed Eternity For All....

In the unlikely event any government
managed to prohibit it's populace
from 'taking drugs', whether legal or illegal,
recreationally - for a few years at least -
and they all lived with never knowingly
seeking to alter their consciousness,
then think on how much more improbable
it would also be for the population
to wean themselves off advertising....  

Holiday Diary - Morocco - Chapter Eight - The Descent

One of the themes emerging from this holiday seemed to be that it was becoming a survey of the many styles of hotel and auberges that tourists would stay in, a survey that looking at the images of the hotels online could only be a poor imitation of, by comparison, for all that the online images could be seen by millions more people. 

The food changed far less than the hotels did, the standard meal being the tagine, where the variations it offers being the choice of ingredients though even that limited variety reduced with the vegetarian option. But the hotels and auberges varied a great deal from old to new, to when-did-this-building-last-have-an-upgrade? As it was The Auberge Targa, Mninoun was a new, modern, and earthquake proof, hotel with more than acceptable amenities where how modern and secure it was made it seem to lack character.

The stray dog that followed us around The Auberge Targa showed more of the kind of elegant but shabby chic that we admired the country for than the hotel did. The dog also knew what distance to keep us at from it whilst still being content to follow us. Though the hotel scored higher on the shabby chic scale by having a swimming pool with no water in it, and a small parched looking orchard with orange trees in it. I picked one of the two oranges that were on one of the trees for a future lunch. 

We were only an hour's drive up the road from our next destination, The Hotel Safran so there was the usual gap of about a couple of hours between one hotel closing and another opening if we were out of the first hotel in good time for the cleaners to be allowed into our room, and unhappy cleaners they looked too.

But we were leaving behind their unhappiness and the empty sense of modern comfort of the place for, well, we did not know what until we got there. If it was like The Auberge Targa we would go along the same road three times before we found the sign for it, which when we finally saw it seemed obvious to us that it made us feel like fools. It remained consistently strange how the signage seemed to be so directional and well hidden before we saw it.   

The Hotel Safran proved to be at the far end of a large town. When we arrived the weather was hot and the town looked busy as we slowly drove through it, our passage through delayed by roads that were choked by busy traffic. The slow passage allowed me to view the life on the pavements. The town seemed to be quite poor. I have often been drawn by examples of cheapness suggesting choice, so when we passed a pavement sale of clothing I thought 'I have not seen a stall like that since I was allowed to roam small town France on my own.'. That said, I knew I had too many clothes, and even at a distance far enough away to not see clearly the clothing looked well past it's best.

The Hotel Safran was a large old hotel with plenty of room for parking at the front and a pleasantly sheltered area at the front and to one side of the hotel where the guests drank chilled freshly squeezed orange juice very slowly in the late afternoon and studied their smart phones for news from home. At least that was what we did after checking in and getting our cases and bags to our room on the second floor.

This was going to be one hotel stay where we ate every meal at the hotel, because the food was good. I also like the appearance of the guests. It was obvious that the hotel attracted bikers both young and old and they brought to the shared eating spaces a faint air of friendly unpredictability that regular tourists like ourselves did not generate.

Picture left; Anthony's jalaba, a traditional men's robe that it was common for men to wear in Morocco, waiting for him to put it on. This was one of many pictures taken in the room, which had many details and fixtures that practically invited us to photograph them, as the light and shade of the day changed what the room looked like hour by hour that first afternoon. The heat outside, on the street, was forbidding and since there was really nothing that we wanted to buy beyond cool drinks we were best staying in our room with the room temperature bottled water that I had brought up three flights of stairs.

By this stage of the holiday-one more hotel to stay in

before we were to leave Morocco, and an awareness of the regularity, of how repetitive the life around us was, Sleep, eat, walk, read, sometimes write a few notes on things that seem different or interest or go for a drive to pleasing scenery I had lost interest in writing any notes of what there was that seemed interesting and new.

On the second day in the hotel we looked around the local market. For a down-at-heel town it was good, Anthony bought some spices to take home from a stall, I looked at a lot of things but not with any interest in buying. If I saw a hat stall I might have been curious but the hats that were for sale were made for tourists to buy thinking they would wear them at home, Very few Moroccan men took any in covering their heads with the sort of thing the market sold. Though maybe the locals made their children wore the hats at the behest of their parents, for practical reasons like protecting the child's head from sun stroke in the heat. 

The time went by for us at reasonable pace, but it must have gone by much slower for the locals who saw the same things every day. On my own I bought two small bottles of saffron less because I needed the spice more because I recognised that we needed time apart.

In the end recognising each other by our shadows and the slightest variant of our image was the best way around being together in us being together in a place which we found it difficult to explain to ourselves and each other what the place we were in was for beyond how it made us consumers among other consumers. The image left, of Anthony at the table of his evening meal on the last night with me absorbed by the shadow of the tree on the right sums up the days in the hotel Safran perfectly, In the light of life we are all passing shadows where all the images we cast are dependent on the light that creates the shadows and all shadows are ephemeral.

There would be one further hotel, in the small town of Asni. It was several hours drive away and the drive was going to be enjoyable, the amount of money the French government poured into Moroccan roads through epic landscapes was generosity beyond belief. How well we engaged with what there was around us at the hotel might also improve. But whatever happened was a matter of us having the self discipline to engage in spite of the familiarity that surrounded us.

Please left click here for the last episode on this holiday diary series. 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Two - Unknown Territory

Going to the gig in the October was definitely not 'a long strange trip' for me, though going into the unknown on public transport held a fair number of small surprises for me. I had grown up unemployed in the midlands, a place that discourages travel, social mobility, and even the slightest belief in other places. It was natural for me see London as a place that I thought of as being another country, But a train journey is a train journey. The journey from Nottingham to London St Pancras was surprisingly short but otherwise predictable. In advance of my journey I had checked for where to go on the underground when I got off the train. But I need not have bothered. The deadheads were everywhere on the underground when I got there, they were distinct for being casually dressed and untidily coiffed in a vast variety of styles. They stood out quite a lot from the commuters who were the usual customers. My journey became a simple matter of following them through the underground. The nearer we got, stop by stop, to going above ground the more we formed the majority of passengers in the underground carriages, until we formed even bigger majorities above ground to join the queue to get into Wembley Arena, which had a definite buzz about it, which came from more than the smell of cannabis being smoked in the open air. The Grateful Dead had played there when it was called The Empire Pool Wembley in 1972 and everyone knew how good that was from the live album 'Europe '72' and memory means a lot in that 'community'. 

I was one of over 12,000 fans of the band present that night. From the distance of my seat, high up to the right of the band playing at one end of the venue I was at a great distance from the band. They were more like well lit matchstick figures than anything else. But the sound  in the venue was good, it was rich in detail. The keyboard playing of Bruce Hornsby cut clear through the cheers and requests for different songs that the audience did not realise that it was useless to ask for. They simply got off on shouting the name of the song they wanted the band to play. I know how the fans behaved because I was one of them. I shouted 'Terrapin Station' until I was hoarse. They did not play it. If you have ever seen the footage of Beatlemania, where the audience are too busy screaming to hear themselves or the band, then that night was my experience of the same thing but with a much better sound system than The Beatles ever had. 

Would I have enjoyed the music more if I had listened more attentively if I had shouted less? Probably. But that night I embraced being part of that audience and that is what we all did, for most of three hours. In the midst of a major catharsis such as a gig on this scale the last thing attendees do is think and evaluate the catharsis when it is in full flow. I bought some merchandise, the European tour programme which obliquely excoriated the now deceased Brent Mydland for his absence on the tour whilst celebrating his contributions to the band and two T shirts. One of them from the official stall, the other was unofficial and from a seller somewhere down one of the many corridors connecting stations of the tube to St Pancras after I left. I was still very much caught up in the buzz from the gig on the train home, It would not be the last time I would hear their music live and catch that buzz again.

After an epiphany like that I felt permanently changed, though the change may have been less permanent than it appeared to be. In the comfort of my room in Lady Bay I played their albums all the more. I must have mentioned having been to the gig to more people than I realised needed to know. But funny highs are like that. If a similar high had come about from an encounter that had happened in church then they would have understood it more. But equally something else was happening. I started sleeping less well, and feeling, well, disconnected from the people I previously felt at ease with. I could cover the disconnectedness when I felt it but I decided to to go to my doctor and ask him about this sense of a gap opening up between me and the people I had previously assumed to connect with. He listened, and asked me a few questions. He commended me for getting the best I could out of the first lot of therapy that had ended in January of that year. Then he put me on a list for for a consultation for another round of therapy, group therapy this time. He did not suggest I go onto anti-depressants. 

The phrase 'Baker days' was common in England circa 1986-90. Everyone  knew what they were. 'Training days' was their official title and they were mini-conferences for the teachers in individual schools. They were part of the emerging managerial culture. Kenneth Baker was the Tory government education secretary 1986-89. He changed how schools ran to the point where he felt he needed to explain the changes at a macro level through local mini-conferences what his changes were. The conferences were usually one or two days long. There was even an enduringly funny Radio 4 sketch about them, listen it it here. Many of the members of the Lady Bay church were teachers. So it was natural that autumn for them to suggest that as a congregation we have a mini-conference, a church weekend. An event where as many of us willing stayed in each other's company in a large house for one night and most of two days and do different exercises to get know each other better.

I attended the November church weekend and enjoyed the event when I was not half hiding from and half exposing my acute sense of personal discomfort. The labour market might have cured me of wanting to be a trained nurse. I had learned enough to know that to be that useful and skilled took a better family than mine, and a lot more support and training than would ever be directed in my direction. By now my inner do-gooder and putter of other people on a pedestal said it wanted to be a social worker, without me ever linking that ambition with it being the profession of my landlady. There was a mask making session where the masks we made was part of what we wanted to be where my discomfort disguised as ambition was at it's most acute. 

But the worst part was the 'cabaret' at the end of the weekend where many put on some nice, genuinely entertaining acts where I would have loved to be straight man/feed to another church member being funny. But nobody recognised my wanting to be included in a way that felt safe for me.

At another level my mind turned at complete right angles to the event in front of me, where I wanted to be with the other two gay men I knew in church and in front of the Lady Bay congregation getting ourselves up in drag as The Supremes and mime to 'Stop in the Name of Love' doing the hand signals for traffic directions. That what I imagined was an outright fantasy and would have been very much against the spirit of feather-light entertainment was obvious enough to me. But wanting the drag act as if I wanted to be at a different event and imagining that different event is something that I was unable to shake off. But in partial justification I will add that such fantasies are more common for young, partially closeted, gay men than the heterosexual world can admit, as this video for 'I Say a Little Prayer' shows. The worst point for me was my sinuses being so completely bunged up over the whole weekend that I was sometimes unsure of where I was, and was relieved when the event was over.

You might think that I had had enough of church for one weekend. But I went to the evening service and tried to join in with the sincere enthusiasm of the service in the central building when all the congregations met and mingled. My sinuses were bunged and I was in pain, God only knew why I went. The service ended, as many do, with an altar call. The only limit set on responding was the sense of need. I heeded that call. I went up to the stage and sat in one of half a dozen chairs. Two men stood, one either side, of me, and asked me what I wanted prayer for. I said 'My sinuses, I want them to be clear.'. I wanted relief. Hands were laid on my head. Prayers were said and the sinuses cleared instantly. It felt wonderful. Then, prompted by who knows what, there were further prayers over me and I was given a phrase to take away, and remember God's promise by. The phrase I was given was 'The Lord will restore the years the locusts have eaten.'. The phrase is from the minor prophet, Joel Chapter 2 Verse 25. I did not know what to make of being given that phrase. My sense of  camp remained quite strong. When I spoke from the stage, though to others it was a platform, I said 'Thank you I feel like I have won a beauty contest.'. 

The evening ended with me meeting one person who would be a part of my life for a long time after, far longer than I dare imagine. Jerry is his name, and he was jubilant at being healed of crippling back pain that night, like my sinuses, instantly. He was the first person in church that I confided to that I was gay. I had chosen better than I could have guessed. He could  have been openly distant from me in that moment. He was positive and accepting, though I doubt either of us knew what it was that he was accepting of.

Beneath the surface churches, like other organisations, became more aware than I realised about social diversity. They had a headline ideas of recognising racial and social minorities that was well meant but rather unyielding. But individuals could be more yielding at a personal level where the church stance was their insurance/cover when they took risks. In my minority status, being gay, I now felt more at home than before. I still felt the gap in church between the official non-recognition of homosexuality and the acceptance by some individuals that the world was more accepting of being gay narrow. But individual Christians I began to partially know showed how Jesus accepted gay men as individuals in the hierarchy that was the church. I felt a clear change in myself, for my now knowing better than to try to live up to other people's assumptions that I was heterosexual, and bind myself according to their projections of a heterosexual monoculture.

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

'The DNA Of Fear'

must be the title of the year
for that thriller that has not been written yet,
but some author will claim the title.

And since fear does not have any DNA
it is an emotion that plays upon the mind,
then whatever the author has in mind,
it will be the ultimate macguffin,
the substitute for a real cause for fear
that drives a thriller forward.

Whilst a book of that title
is not yet in print I will share
where I first heard the phrase,
from a lesbian describing
how she felt attending church
when she was too young to refuse
believing what her family did,
particularly when it made her feel invisible. 

The church disbelieved in DNA,
and disbelieved in lesbianism,
and bound believers to disbelieve what they did,
away from the church, though,
the world was a much more diverse place. 

Concidering The Alternative

Would understanding Donald Trump
be a lot easier for millions more voters
if they renamed his social platform

   - Post-Truth Social? -

That way they would have a workaround
for what is difficult and rather embarrassing.

'Oh Dear' his followers will be able to say
with their new label for his comments,
'Another truth that fell wide of the mark... '

Holiday Diary Morocco - May - Part Seven - Downhill From Here

Leaving the Kasbah Imini Hotel and Restaurant, Douar Taourirt was as smooth and pleasant a departure as we could ask for. Anthony wanted to photograph more of the rugs and soft furnishings before we left. I thought 'okay, that is one way to respond to how you know you are not going to be back this way again'. I was happy to leave behind in the room the bit of quartzite and the stone I had found wandering in the plain behind the hotel restaurant. I knew that a lot of the pictures I had taken were duds but I had the storage on my camera to live with that and sort out later. We had paid up, got everything packed and said our 'Goodbyes' in good time.

Anthony was in for a long day's driving. Our next destination was The Auberge Targa. To get there we were going through the areas where the rug making family communes lived. He had got the details of the location for where they were from our last visit to Morocco, which was well before the earthquake had struck. We did not know that we would be driving through where the earthquake had destroyed either the means to a living of many families in the family based carpet making communes, or worse; it had destroyed many of the buildings that sheltered people, where because the foundations of both the lives and economic choices of were weak, nobody knew how little it took for desperation  to take hold.

We knew before we got anywhere near them how easily fatigue set in at seeing too many rugs, from how our visit to the fourteenth century fort had gone. There every other house on the route from locking the car to the first sight of the fort itself seemed to be a place of high level sales pitches where the tourist should never take the pitch at face value; either the item was overpriced or it was not the age it was sold to be, or it was not the thing it was sold to be.

Having been through all that, we thought we knew, between us, how to deal with the high pressured sales pitches better. So two and a half hours on the road from Douar Taourirt  and after another later lunch of items rescued from the breakfast tray that was brought to us retrieved from my bag, we reached the town where Anthony expected for there to be families businesses where the family made and sold their own rugs.

And yes, there were clearly many buildings where the rugs on display outside, in the sun that were for sale that may well have been made inside the building. But it was a very scrappy town overall, and the most forward people in the  town were the male owners of the businesses who took one look at us and went into overdrive to attract our attention and disliked it when the limit of our attention span was us getting our cameras out and photographing rugs we liked the look of but would never have bought and it would have seemed rude to say so.

When I thought of the carpet shop from the last holiday where it took us two attempts at choosing the rug we wanted. With the first try we narrowed our choices down to two or three rather handsome rugs. The vendor knew he had a sale from then on. We went away and worked out which we really liked, and got money from the hole in the wall to complete the purchase at the second attempt. With this present holiday we realised how much of a world away we were from the carpet shop, with it's slowness and ease.

Carpets for sale... ...in Agunce 

But Anthony was right in one way, he wanted to see what life looked like when we were close to where the carpets were made. 'Bare and uncomfortable' was the short answer to Anthony's question. After a couple of near encounters with some Moroccan men who were more hostile than we expected for us attempting to photograph their rugs we stopped at one house that looked more promising.

 There we went through the ritual sales dance where we were shown many carpets and given mint tee. It was much easier to say what we did not want than to be able to decide quickly what we did like. The mint tea was rather good, not as sweet as some would have made it. It could have taken us forty five mins at the first attempt to choose what to buy, and another thirty minutes to decide with the second attempt what we were going to settle upon. Anthony had an idea that whatever he bought he wanted it to be all wool, no synthetic fibres. But how could tell what fibre was synthetic and what fibre was natural in the short time we had to see all these rugs and weavings? There was some respite to choosing when we were shown the grandmother of the household actually threading some weave on a carpet. It may have been her age speaking but as a process it looked quite meditative.

Having seen the elderly woman with the lines on her face and delicate wrinkled hands working we settled on what to buy, paid for it and got it wrapped before leaving. The purchase being complete was a burden lifted. We could concentrate on finding Auberge Targa Nmimoun in the two hours after that. We found it easily enough, but we had to go through the usual routine with finding our hotel. The map and online info that Anthony had noted down said one thing but all it took was for the sign to be facing the opposite direction to the one we were going in for us to pass the sign and not know we had passed it. At the third attempt at finding the Auberge we found it.

Anthony was somewhat weary when we stopped and went in to find the hotel manager and were met by some serving staff who were rather all over the shop. Still the first order was for afternoon mint tea in the dining area and enjoying not moving anywhere. I took our bags to our room when we were shown it, and took the passports to the manager for him to fil the form in for the government as to who we were, where we had been and where our next destination was. I lied on the forms, said we were going to Marrakesh but these forms, well who knows what it worth to the government for us to fill them in with any honesty?

The hotel was rather large and had very few guests, must of whom seemed to be rather detached. There was a dog that seemed to not have an owner whom we quite liked when it followed close to us. When we went on an afternoon walk the day after arriving, and saw images like the one here it followed us for fifteen to twenty minutes of the walk and as we headed back it found it's own entrance to the hotel car park, well ahead of Anthony and I who had to take the long way round.

We spent two nights there and we liked the food, repetitive of Moroccan cuisine as it was. If it is repetitive to say that the hotel seemed isolated, then it can be said that the isolation felt different to the isolation in the previous hotels that we had been in. The walks outside of the hotel were more engaging and there was a small rather parched looking orchard which had a orange tree on it. I picked one of the oranges and when Anthony had it declared it to be delicious. Next stop Hotel Safran for one night.

Please left click here for part eight of this diary.  

Picture Set of The Month - August - Creative Graffiti In Belfast

which for all it's ordinariness is far
from being a grey place full of dour people.

One of hallmarks of this sort of work
is that it is rare to see the artist and what 
they make is a sort of anti-propaganda.

Which if it is ignored it is of no matter,
as far as they are concerned, it is always
a self renewing form of unwaged creativity.

And there will always be places
in the city that lend themselves
to less systematic ideas about

what passes for 'popular creativity'.