The Wages Of Hope Are Disappointment

The time when the word 'maladjusted'
most aptly described me in school
was when the class was taught maths.

I knew how to do sums.
I'd learnt my times tables by rote,
out loud in infants school. Aged 7.
I could add, subtract and multiply, fine
-as long as the numbers were abstract.
But the older I got the more often maths
was applied to something called 'real life'
-which was the very thing that divided me.....

I was tasked to do a sum based on wages
and deductions and my mind froze.
My bones knew about work, wages and taxes-
they all caused worry and created a stress
where we were glad when domestic violence
was merely occasional. Where it happened
it was a respite for some, whilst for others
it reinforced a cowering dependence with no exit.
Because of this my parents house was silent
on all matters pertainign to sex, poltics, religion,
or money. Nobody ever talked about wages. 

The pressure to live cheaply brought more pressure,
to live more even more cheaply. Under pressure
we censored all discussion about why we lived that way.
My father kept this rule by keeping the figures
on his pay slip to himself. Mother colluded in this
by accepting what he chose to give. His earnings
were one of our many of very well kept secrets.

I know now that I should have said to the teacher
'I can't do your sum because my family does not discuss money,
you will have to write to my Dad and ask him what the answer
to this sum is since it is about wages. Only he in the family knows about them.
The questions I am permitted to answer have to have no relation to real life.'.

Or I could have asked the teacher the following....
'Where in this sum is the man's drinking money?'
and 'If drink costs X per pint then how much cash
will he have to spend with his mates in the pub,
for them to remain suffuciently sober enough to get home
without falling over, but still drunk enough to threaten
and beat up their wives when they arrive?
How much alcohol will they all need to keep in their system
to collectively forget/deny their actions the following day?'.

But this was maths, not real life.
Questions about substances could only be asked about in Science.
And all talk of money was to meant to teach us grattitude at being kept.

The More Things Change The More They Remain Unchanged

After the riots in Belfast in September,
and the police chief's call to reason
through the media I found the following
in an old email. It is a timeless
piece of writing, when I first read it
I was acutely reminded of one
of my favourite writers J. G. Ballard...

The Irish Times - Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Heroic Belfast youths engage in rites of noble heritage

NEWTON EMERSON

NEWTON'S OPTIC: THIS WEEKEND’S rioting in Belfast shows the adaptable, innovative and modernising side of the city’s feral underclass.
Think of a sectarian interface in Northern Ireland and you will almost certainly picture inner-city streets of run-down terraced housing, separated by corrugated iron peace walls decorated with naff “community” murals.
But the flashpoint of this weekend’s disturbances was a new roundabout over a six-lane underpass, connecting a retail park and a shopping centre to the M1 and Westlink urban motorways.
It would be hard to imagine a more typical 21st-century landscape, let alone one more forbidding to human interaction.
The roundabout itself is nearly a quarter of a mile wide, surrounded by multi-lane approaches and high-speed on-ramps. Pedestrian access is strictly corralled through crash-proof steel barriers.
Yet the heroic youth of loyalist south Belfast and republican west Belfast crossed this hostile wasteland to engage in the rites of their noble heritage, proving that the ancient traditions of Ulster will not be crushed beneath the tarmac and concrete of materialist car culture.
In so doing they reclaimed a sterile space which the planners had sought to deny them, echoing other progressive urban movements like London’s guerrilla gardeners or Italy’s slow cities campaign.
Ironically, it is suspected that the Westlink was deliberately built to separate South and West Belfast, so rioting on its major overpass subverts its intended function in a joyous celebration of spontaneous urban vitality.
It is only a pity that the 123ft-high aluminium peace sculpture in the centre of the roundabout has not yet been built due to lack of funds, as it could have been dismantled for missiles and weapons in a powerful act of symbolic repossession.
After trashing the roundabout, trouble then spread to the nearby Bog Meadows Nature Reserve. It might seem that rioting in a bog is a backward step, pandering to outdated and possibly racist stereotypes of ignorant muck-splattered savagery.
However, the Bog Meadows Nature Reserve is a Unesco award-winning wildfowl refuge based on the latest thinking in wetland and grassland conservation. Bringing this challenging space into the sphere of rioting venues is a triumph of logistics, lateral thinking and environmental awareness which greatly advances the dynamic of urban conflict situations.
It means, for example, that when a police officer shouts “duck” they might now be referring to an actual duck.
Finally, after trashing the Bog Meadows, both sides attacked the Donegall Road Kentucky Fried Chicken in a postmodern rejection of both shallow consumerism and their own disgusting obesity.
This is the largest Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Ireland, while the US state of Kentucky is strongly associated with Ulster-Scots influence, tying in potent themes of cross-community and anti-capitalist tension with the “drive-through” motif of the earlier disturbances at the roundabout.
In many ways, the entire weekend can thus be seen as a triptych of performance art set-pieces, unconstrained by the physical and mental barriers of provincial bourgeois society.
It is often said that Belfast’s shiny peace process makeover is a superficial development which has passed the urban underclass by. This weekend, loyalist and republican rioters proved otherwise.
They are every bit as happy wrecking the new city centre as they were wrecking the old one.