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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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