Subject: Fw: The deeds done by others.

 

We are in a loop of self examination.  When ever I turn on the TV I see the same old clips and listen to the same old cliches being spoken time and time again. It's as if time has actually stopped and we have to make the most of the terrible events of last night by asking the same questions over and over again.

As a nation we are prone to a mild form of exhibitionism, especially in our show of mourning the dead. From the solemn national parades for the fallen, to the dignified laying to rest of a monarch. The enormous outpouring of grief for Diana Princess of Wales to the flowers in Manchester to signify our solidarity against terrorism.

The country seems these days to have a penchant for wearing its emotion in full view. A far cry from the stiff upper lip of my generation and before. We seem these days to be in competition as to who feels the pain the most. Who's pile of flowers is the highest and represents a sort of morbid competition to 'out do' our neighbours.

The TV journalists are still at it on my muted screen, as they have been since 6am this morning, repeating ad nausea the same story the same phrases, each channel seeking to out do its competitor.

The great and the good, and the not so good, are trooped out before us each with a similar message to be vigilant, to be brave, to understand we are in good hands and the authorities know what they are doing and what is best for us.

Strong leadership, that Churchillian flavour of finding within us the resolve to dig deep. Margaret Thatcher taking on those pesky Argentinians for a handful of farmers and a few sheep. We rise to the bate each time but we rarely question the fundamentals.

We shy away from asking the hard questions since the answers would be unpalatable. Our raison d'etre has been lost in the image we gave ourselves, of being powerful and of leading by example in the world. After the Second World War we had shrunk and whilst we still had fond memories of Empire we simply couldn't afford to keep it up. 

 And so we did what we thought of as the next best thing, we crowded the Empire onto our tiny island, irrespective of what the locals thought since the establishment were "rulers" and "rules" wouldn't ask the natives what they thought would they ?

A bit like the motto of Tesco's founder, Joseph Cohen a market trader in his early days, "pile em high and flog em cheap" so our political masters, unlike Germany who rebuilt her industries from scratch and trained local Germans to work there, we in Britain decided that to compete, we would import cheap labour from the Colonies to undercut the wages we were paying our own local workforce. 

Today we have a polyglot island with little or no ethnic commonality. An island with competing ethnic claims. An island, unlike Germany which had to import over a million Syrians to recognise that culture and tribal affinity are stronger than the rules written in a parliamentary legal code. An island that has introduced the seeds of its own discontent if not destruction, by, as usual, not connecting the dots and recognising that money is needed to instil a sense of belonging, it's an artificial construct at its most simplistic. Leaving communities to their own devises might have been ok in the days of Empire but today the disparity is seen everywhere you look right across the multicultural spectrum. The inadequacy of a wage to provide for the family spreads disheartening consequences, especially the discontent levelled at "the other" be they white or black. Being poor is the common denominator these days and being poor inflames the raw edges of our social fabric to blame each other for the deeds done by others.

Sleeping is a wonderful thing.

Subject: Sleeping is a wonderful thing.

The thing about being asleep is that you are not awake. The thing about being awake is that you are aware that being awake means there is a responsibility attached to it.
So there you have it, sleep allows you to shuffle off the chains of being responsible, the on going intrusion into your thoughts and actions by others who having thoughts themselves and wish you to be collegiate and share yourself with their concerns.
Individuals sell or barter their individuality on a daily basis by amending their interests or indeed, their lack of them, by showing awareness  where naturally none would occur.
Holidays, like trips to the shops are booby traps waiting to happen. The course of events are often a compromise with no one truly happy since there is often a half hearted attempt to justify why you are doing what you do, whilst secretly wondering what is happening in the place you would rather be.
Sleep relieves us of all this. Sleep dumbs our senses and makes us children again with only the occasional nightmare to unsettle us. As perhaps we wrestle in our dreams with old demons (I never remember my dreams) at least we are secure in the thought that when we awake we will not be left with the bill for our actions whilst dreaming.
"To sleep perchance to dream but there's the rub for who knows what" ---wait a minute Hamlet old boy, that mortal dread you talk about is in your imagination, the real dread is the reality we face in our real lives which thankfully sleep relieves us of at least 6 to 8 hours per day. So let's not knock sleeping, of lying in bed, oblivious of what going on around us. Let's celebrate sleep, let's welcome those moments as we drift out of reality into a dream world where we become what ever our waking imagination and the connection the chemical synapses's had been working on just before sleep closed down the action for the night. The state of sleep and the state of being awake are bedfellows (pardon the pun), that yin and yang of our personality, the totality of who we are.
"To sleep perchance to dream" is a continuum of who we are. It's just that the dream world is passive in contrast to the hours we are awake, both full of both good and bad but at least in our dreams we can do no harm.

Prolific

Subject: Prolific

Prolific. The word was position perfect it related to a conversation I was having with a Moldovan friend about my latest blog. He said that he hadn't read all of them but had read only some because of time constraints and because I was so prolific in churning them out. "Where did you learn that word" I said ? "From the shrimps" he answered.
Our vocabulary, built up over time is dependent on what we do and who we talk to. It's dependent on what we read and the programs we watch on the TV. It's dependent on our hobbies and interests.
So shrimps (his hobby and business) breed prolifically and the word found its use in describing the manufacture of my blogs.
I am always amazed how some people find learning a language much easier then others.
The guys who work with me are from Russia, Lithuania, and Moldova. They all speak English really well and when, amongst themselves they will revert to some lingua  franca of there own they seamlessly step into English whilst I am there. 
Learning another language was a talent I never had. I lived in South Africa for years but never learned Afrikaans. It was all around me but I would wait until English was used and never bothered that I missed out on what was said if spoken in Afrikaans. 
Laziness yes. Mentally deaf to other languages because English is spoken across the world,yes. Part of the colonial superiority which resides in most Brits, yes.
Andrews girlfriend is learning Tibetan. To my ear it's an amazing mixture of linguistic contradictions a really difficult language that has no connection to the Latin based language we speak. How she retains and makes connections out of her lessons I have no idea but some people are gifted with the patience to unravel the syntax.
When starting out in 1961 on the trip that took me all around the world I lived in Amsterdam for a few months. The chap who would accompany me as far as Cape Town, John Thornhill soon learnt to speak Dutch. He was proficient by the time we left and it stood him in good stead when we arrived in SA to merge what he had learnt into understanding Afrikaans. I was oblivious to Dutch as I was to Afrikaans, it was a dead zone to me and whilst intellectually I longed to speak  the language I was, as a Teflon pot is to food, nothing stuck.
The inroads into comprehension, the strides you make in affirming your collaboration with someone if you speak the same language in a foreign country, the less foreign you become with benefits all round. But no, whilst I could see the case I was not prepared to put in the hard miles and I wonder if it was not a case of my being insular, lost in my own world, satisfied in the discussions which were whirling and continue to whirl in my own head.
Perhaps the blog is a manifestation of this "one sidedness", this singular conversation where thoughts can be expressed without fear or favour, without a contradiction to destroy their pristine imagery.

Inflicting their ills on us

Subject: Inflicting their ills on us.

There been a flurry of interest shown in reports that people who have contracted AIDS are now living a full life, with expectations of living as long as a normal person.

Doctors and AIDS support groups have welcomed this as a conquest of medicine over a scourge which threatened a world wide epidemic. People who have the virus willingly  confess to their new life as a miracle, an opportunity to live their lives as they desire, in a sexually explicit fashion with  multiple partners, knowing that the pill or pills will keep the virus in their blood at bay for years on end and that the dread which once haunted the homosexually active AIDS community on a knife point throughout their lives is a thing of the past.

Reporter after reporter described the medical advances relating to the disease as a triumph but no one mentioned the cost. No one mentioned the financial strain put on the NHS. No one, least of all the smirking gay man, thought of the expense they have brought to society by simply not curbing their sexual ardour and practising safe sex.

The hedonistic pleasure is deemed a "right" irrespective of the thousands of pounds each patient will cost you and I, year in and year out. Why practice self discipline when someone else will pick up the tab. Better to gloat at being free to continue their proclivity since the stupid public will be happy to accept the cost without connecting that due to a squeeze on funds, people will have to wait, often in pain, an extra year or more before the same health system can afford a hip replacement. One hip replacement probably cost the same as a months tablets for our gay friend but the consequences of his actions are lost on him in his demand to do what he wants irrespective of the price. 

I wonder as he pops his daily pills does he ever consider where or who contributes to his narcissistic demand, it certainly didn't seem to pass his mind in the interview he gave on television.

The NHS is groaning under the weight of self inflicted ills from drunkenness, to obesity.

The psychiatric wards are full of drug induced paranoia. Smokers have long known the damage they do to themselves with every packet of cigarettes and yet they continue and so, as we goggle at the money which is sucked like a sponge by our medical service, perhaps it is time to charge those people who knowingly inflict their ills on us. 

Living on the edge of civilisation

Subject: Living on the edge of civilisation.

A Grand Tour of the Western Isles in days gone by, as a journey was a tour de force for the sailing ship and the men on board her. North of Scotland these small groups of islands such as the Faroe Islands midway between Scotland and Iceland and closer to home Shetland, the Orkneys  and the Hebrides and the people living on them have braved the vicissitudes of isolation and poor weather which gives them a sense of their own worth a worth not hewn out by the adman. Their stoicism, an individualism, mixed up with small community mindfulness makes them assured in their own values. The singularity of life on a small island brings the focus to a point where the everyday fundamentals are the essence of life and a simplicity ensues that life's purpose has a chance to grow and prosper in a way denied to those living in the hustle and bustle of mainland cities.
I suppose it's like going on "retreat" where only the basics are allowed, silence is golden and consumption of everything toned down to a minimum, the inner self revived by ones own singularity, no longer playing games to court the unanimity of others.
Many of the islands are nothing more than a days walk from one end to the other. Crofters have a mental and physical spectrum which is tied to the needs of their croft, bolstered by good weather and hunkered down by bad, their vision is of the earth and sky defined in a way most people on the mainland are defined by a place to park their car in a busy city. The sense of life's simple bounty being due to their own efforts not the effort of a mechanised Supermarket, brings the circle of day and night into sharper perspective since only through your own effort and commitment will they survive at all.
The individual islander is first and foremost an individual, stoic by nature, patient by temperament. Having learned the time of day by the chores which await him or her, each day the pattern and rhythm of living on a small spec of land, surrounded by unhelpful sea is microscopically drawn to the particular.
And so perhaps the concept of a "retreat" is at odds with the simplicity of survival.
The hedonism of believing we can gain much from withdrawal and contemplation is countermanded by the austerity of life, living on the edge of civilisation.

The Insider v the Outsider

Subject: The "Insider" v the "Outsider".

The "Insider" and the "Outsider" as sketched in Yanis Veroufakis latest book describing his political turmoil dealing, as Greece's Finance Minister with the "troika, the EU, the ECB and the IMF, is Orwellian.   In Larry Summers words, the "Insider" never trades his position with the "Outsider" irrespective of the harm or the logic of the "Outsiders" position.
The "Insider" belongs to a club where the unwritten rule is that you never 'grass' on the members. Their position of power is reliant on their exclusivity, their inner possession of knowledge and secrets, a Byzantine Maze of devious and surreptitious practice which is the cement  holding together the desire of the rich and powerful.
No amount of conceptual analysis will break through the protective bonds which tie these movers and shakers. No moralistic code of fair play, not even a whiff of fair play is in their nostrils when they go in to negotiate. The status quo has to be defended at all costs, especially when the costs are born by some else, and especially when the cost is born by the "Outsider", you and me.
Once inside the gates of the citadel you are secure that Alice's reign, or at least that of the Mad Hatter is impervious to common sense, imperious to right and wrong. Decisions have been taken, in the interests of a few and the "Insider" plays the game, or risks being thrown out to become what all "Insiders" fear, that being shut out from information and power.
The world is full of cabals and ghettos, of exclusiveness and division. How when I hear of plans to reorganise a space within an office I am reminded, the staff must not know. Intrigue seems to be in the nature of people the sense I know something you don't and implicit is that I become an "Insider".
It's all a psychological game but with devastating results when it effects the lives of people. The "Outsiders", you and me, are powerless, our needs subjugated to the needs of a few. Thrown the bone of democracy people are led to assume that they effect the power base when in effect the real power lies in the hands of an unelected few who will move heaven and earth to remain the real arbiters of our future.

Stephen Timms

Subject: Stephen Timms

I know I am accused of banging on about political things when your real interests are what happened on your last holiday or the news that Susan has given birth to a boy. These are the practical things you relate to, the stuff which used to be the talk of neighbours, back in the time when you knew your neighbours. 

Politics, made up of unscrupulous people is a game played out with words, words once the highest attainment of human connectivity, now down graded to lies and deceit, to the phenomena of  fake news and propaganda.

Why sully your mind in trying to interpret the mind of a politician.

Yesterday I was walking in the London Borough of Newham when I came across a the known Labour politician Stephen Timms canvassing for the General Election. Timms was a government minister and as Chief Secretary to the Treasury was in the Cabinet of the last Labour government. I had always liked the cut of his jib as they say but this was the first time I had had a chance to talk to him. After pleasantries I said I was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and was impressed by Corbyns leaked manifesto pledges on which he plans to fight the election. It was if I had driven a dagger into a dummies heart. With a pained expression he said he had been at odds with Corbyn but didn't elaborate any views towards his leaders choice of political platform. In fact he was akin to a wolf in sheep's clothing standing with his labour leaflets and his rosette pledging his allegiance to something he didn't believe in. As to what he did believe in was vague beyond that he believed in the Labour Party. There was no intellectual toughness, no sense of a shrewd political mind able to instinctively shift gear from the banal,  "I want to see my bins emptied twice a week" (which is in the gift of the municipality) or the closure of the old people's home down the road, which seemed to trouble most of the shoppers in the street, when it came to the nitty gritty of social policy he was a void. 

Perhaps because he knew I was not from his patch and therefore of no value as a voter but when having returned from breakfast and having read of the backlash the Tories were promising the Electoral Commission for having dared to bring an action against the party for their misuse of funds in the last closely fought election (only 12 seat majority) where the spending limits on electoral candidates had been massively overspent in crucial swing seats at a ratio of 6 to 1. The police had been called and dossiers assembled but the Public Prosecutor, who's decision it is as to whether to prosecute had decided there was not enough evidence to bring criminal proceedings. Malpractice had occurred, funds had been spent where they shouldn't but it was all put down to accounting errors

We have a Tory government who's election may or may not have been aided by the money spent on candidates in getting their message across. We balk at the sight of the many millions of dollars spent in the American election where it is deemed necessary to spend these colossal sums because they do effect the result. Clearly money talks as they say and the fact that the Tories have been allowed to get away with it and worse who now seem hell bent on pillorying the body set up to oversea the spending is bizarre. Even more bizarre was the luck-warm response I got from Mr Timms when I challenged him over Labours near silence on the matter in Parliament. His shrug of the shoulders says it all. Perhaps the celebrity status in the Borough and the £74.000 a year is enough for this man, who needs political discourse still less commitment when a promise to look into the refuse collection is enough.

As a representative of the peoples vote to carry our voice into parliament and enact laws to protect us, heaven help us.