Why am I Doing This?

Sometimes I grow tired of my mutterings. This constant need to jabber endlessly and offer unsolicited opinions on matters that mean little to other people seems pointless. My posts take on a decidedly vacuous appearance. Even saying this seems egocentric.

I want to shut up.

Maybe I’ll change my mind in an hour or two. Or tomorrow.

Do check back if you feel so inclined.

TTFN, and thank you.

Miracles Do Happen.

My ex works in a home for people with severe brain damage. One man was completely paralysed. Couldn’t move a muscle and couldn’t utter a word. He spent his life lying on his back, unable to communicate and having everything done for him. His only variety came from having his useless body wheeled around the garden and the city centre now and then.

Last night he woke up and began talking. Great excitement, needless to say. They put him in a wheelchair and he was able to propel himself around. Suddenly. Without warning. Helen was so excited that she sent me a long text about it this morning.

Don’t things like that give you one almighty lift?!

A Gentler Age.

There’s a lot of concern in Britain that the town and city centres are becoming no-go areas at night. The streets are awash with hideously drunken young people fighting, vomiting, urinating, falling over, wandering in front of traffic, and so on.

My mother used to tell me that when my granddad was a young man, he and his friends went for a pub crawl, got a good skinful, and then gathered under a street light to sing ‘I’m a poor little lamb that has lost his way. Bah, bah, bah.’

In harmony.

And they still got moved on by the police.

Don’t times change?

Emptiness.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. It’s from The Snow Man by Wallace Stephens. It’s a favourite of mine because it works on two levels for me.

On a physical and emotional level, it’s a beautiful evocation of the peace to be found in a winter wilderness, when the cold world is being cleansed to prepare for renewal. But there’s a metaphysical message in it too, although I have no idea whether Stephens meant it to be taken that way. It’s the most poetic evocation I’ve read of the fundamental claim of Vedic mysticism – that the state of bountiful emptiness is the stuff of ultimate reality.

For the listener who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Another Coincidence.

When my mother first met the man who was to become my father she found that his family included a younger sister called Hilda. The two women recognised one another immediately. They had been close friends as children, but had lost touch when my mother’s family moved from the area. They were both twenty six at the time.

As far as I know, the two women didn’t become particularly close. My parents separated eight years after they were married, and then a few years after that Auntie Hilda moved with her husband to Coventry. I don’t think they ever saw one another again.

But then something interesting happened. Fifty years after they’d been ‘reunited,’ my mother died at twenty past eleven on the night of 9th August. I learned when I called my cousin the next day that Hilda had died at midnight – just forty minutes later.

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On an unconnected note, don’t trust your comments count today. If you haven’t already noticed, Google is well up the creek. Suggest you go into Comments and check them.

White Horses and Sages from Lebanon.

The lovely Miss India would, it appears, prefer that I continue my practice of making supremely silly late night posts. Right then... If there’s one thing that’s become apparent over the last couple of months, it is that the lovely people who read and comment on my blog (and to whom I’m immensely indebted, I should say) rarely share my sense of humour. Take tonight, for example. I was giggling like a schoolboy over one of my favourite jokes: A white horse walked into a bar and ordered a drink. ‘Blow me,’ said the barman, ‘a talking horse. Did you know there’s a brand of whisky named after you?’ ‘What,’ said the horse, ‘Kevin?’ Cracks me up every time, but I’ll bet there’s a line of people stretching from Washington State to Scotland to Mumbai to Sydney, NSW saying ‘What’s so funny about that?’ Mmm... Big news, though. I think I finally have the answer to the famed Zen koan ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ I can’t tell you, of course, since that’s one of the rules of contemplating Zen koans. Wild horses wouldn’t drag it out of me. (Come to think of it, a few White Horses might.) But, no. You’ll have to work it out for yourselves. It’s really good being mad sometimes. And I’ve ordered a used copy of Khalil Gibran’s book Spirit Brides from Amazon today. I like that bloke, I really do.

Rule by Numbers: the BMI Story.

No, not the British budget airline – Body Mass Index. It raised its silly head again today when some brainless council somewhere was forced to apologise for writing to a boy’s parents, telling them he was clinically overweight. He’d failed a BMI test, and you can’t get much worse than that, now can you?

Some years ago the British medical establishment decided this would be the definitive way of assessing obesity. There’s no complicated formula involved; it’s simply the ratio of weight to height - nothing more than that. And because it’s nothing more than that, it’s quite meaningless when taken in isolation, and quite unfit to be used as a judge of anything. It is true that obese people have a high BMI, but so do heavily muscled and big boned people. A doctor friend of mine agrees with this, but the British medical establishment does so like to play the rule-by-numbers game, and so they’re sticking with it.

It gets sillier...

A couple of years ago the British Army decided it must use BMI as one of its list of entry criteria. Anybody with an index above their set limit was automatically excluded because they were ‘obese’ and therefore unfit for the rigorous life of a soldier. It meant that a lot of fit, well muscled young men were being denied entry to the army based on a false assumption of obesity.

Now, wouldn’t you think the army would have doctors with eyes who could look at these men and say ‘Hang on a minute, this man isn’t obese, he’s just very well muscled. He’s exactly what we need, so why are we refusing to let him join?’ Well, maybe that’s exactly what did happen, because the army saw the error of its ways and changed the rules.

Did they scrap the BMI test? No. What they did was increase the level that was deemed acceptable. So now there are still fit, well muscled young men being refused entry to the army, but more genuinely obese young men being let in.

Why do I continue to be surprised by the sheer mind-boggling incompetence of people running the show over here? I really should be used to it by now, shouldn’t I?

Suburbia.

I spent the first thirty years of my life living in the English suburbs. It’s where most of the English spend the whole of their lives. And then I moved to a cottage – a modest, semi-detached cottage, but a cottage nonetheless – in the country. What a revelation.

In the suburbs, nature is tagged on in bits and pieces to an environment of inert brick, steel, glass, concrete and tarmac. It’s also carefully placed to be tidy without being intrusive. In the country it’s the other way round. The environment is, if not entirely natural in the strictest sense of the word, at least still subject to natural forces. It’s the buildings that are tagged on.

I started noticing things – like how big the sky is, which direction the wind is coming from, how the seasons shape the production of crops and wild plants. I’d never known before that fruit bushes like elder and blackberry have flowers in the spring, and when they fall off in the summer the fruit starts to grow in the same place. Where had I been all my life? And I discovered that the seasons make their presence felt more strongly in the country. Summers are cleaner, winters colder, springs more vibrant and autumns more melancholy. I knew then that I never wanted to move back to the suburbs.

At first my reasons were purely environmental. I developed an increasing level of distaste for the manicured nature of the suburbs. The matching houses, the scrubbed pavements, the tidy gardens and the neat rows of cherry trees seemed simply characterless. Some of the older ones had a charm of sorts, but that was about it. There was no richness and no cutting edge. As I grew older, however, I realised there was something else.

The suburbs have become the model of domestic ubiquity in most parts of the developed world. Little boxes on a hillside. They are the homeland of Middle England, Middle America, and Middle everywhere else. And they are one of the primary mechanisms by which we are controlled by whoever is controlling us. It isn’t so much the suburbs themselves that are the problem, but the mentality they engender. The suburban mentality has surely become the dominant force driving the predominant mass of western populations.

I would suggest that the suburban mindset is more about belonging than living. It’s about tidiness, control and surface comfort. It’s about walking carefully between the tramlines with everybody else. It’s about reviling anybody who dares to be different, and mocking anybody who argues for a different way of seeing things. In short, it’s about the fear of not being part of the crowd. And that’s exactly where the system wants us. Rule by fear is still the major method of control, just as it was in the days of the Roman Republic.

I came across these words from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet today. They’re part of his homily on houses.

And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone in the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

I think we’re going roughly in the same direction.

Thwarted!

Today has been really interesting. I counted the stars on Google’s depiction of the US flag. I was hoping there would be forty nine or fifty one or something, so I could moan about it. Nope. Google got it right. Damn. It’s ages since I had a good moan.

And who lives in Virginia? I want to know.

Good morning, Miss India. I hope it rains on you today. My ex spent a few months in India a couple of years ago. She found the monsoon rain almost as terrifying as the giant spiders.

‘The rain in Calcutta falls mainly in the gutter,’ says the old rhyme.

No doubt the rain in Mumbai falls mainly from the sky. And maybe the rain in New Delhi falls mainly on the smelly.

I think I should stop making late night posts. I’m not doing myself any favours.

The World Owes You a Living. Part 1.

I remember being told as a kid: ‘The world doesn’t owe you a living.’ It’s one of the oldest clichés in the book, and I used to believe it. I don’t any longer, and I’ll tell you why.

The developed world has changed immeasurably over the last fifty years. It’s done so in many ways, but three of the major ones are these.

Number one: Social cohesion has loosened considerably as people have become more dispersed. Today’s older folks remember what it was like when they were growing up in the sort of industrial town where I was born. Several generations of extended families lived in the same street or within a few streets of each other. Neighbours all knew each other as close friends. Everybody drank in the same pub on the corner of the street, and they all shopped in the same shop on the opposite corner. The men worked in the factories or the mines that were just a few minutes walk away. It was essentially the same in the rural villages, of course, and one of the advantages was that it produced a close-knit support system when times were tough. That’s how people had lived for thousands of years.

Those times have gone. Most people’s families are now scattered around the city, or in different parts of the country, or even in other countries. The local pubs have almost disappeared, and everybody drives to out-of-town supermarkets to shop. We rarely see anybody we know when we go to a supermarket. Like so many other things, it’s an experience rooted in social isolation.

Number two: The technological revolution has come along to do a lot of the work that used to be done by people. In the 1960s the pundits were forecasting a coming Utopia. They said the machines and computers would create all the wealth, and the need to work long hours would be gone. We would all be working twenty-hour weeks, they said, and be paid even more in real terms for doing it because the technology would be working quietly away creating the wealth for us all to live a leisurely life. The first part of the prediction was spot on; the second part fell miserably short.

Why? Because in the late seventies Mrs Thatcher came to power in Britain and set about changing the traditional British mixed economy into an aggressive free market one. In short, we converted to the American Way. Social concern was replaced by support for the new heroes: the entrepreneurs, the merchant bankers and the city whiz kids. And that’s where the vast majority of the wealth went, into the pockets of people like Richard Branson and Bill Gates. The technology took over the work as predicted, but the money disappeared into the hands of the privileged few.

Number three: The technological revolution also transformed the domestic scene. I spent most of my childhood in a street with about sixty dwellings. Only three of them had cars, about half of them had a TV set, and as far as I know, none of them had a phone. My parents’ generation didn’t even have TVs when they were young. They lived in houses equipped with basic furniture essentials, plus a tub to wash clothes in and some means to cook food. That was it, and they were perfectly happy because people don’t miss what hasn’t been invented yet. Compare that with today’s situation.

If you want a job, nearly all the major employers take applications online only, so you have to have a computer or at least access to one – and you have to know how to use it. Benefit rules require the unemployed to seek work up to thirty miles or one hour’s travelling distance away. Many of the workplaces are dispersed in out-of-the way places, so you’ve virtually got to have a car. People in shops don’t ask ‘are you on the telephone?’ any more. They say ‘give me your phone number, your mobile number and your e-mail address.’ People expect to watch DVDs and listen to MP3s, because everybody else does. And so on and so forth... The fact is, we have developed a living system which requires people to have a very large number of facilities on hand in order to function in what is considered an acceptable way. And they all have to be paid for.

Now, I’ve made it clear in earlier posts that I don’t think it’s either right or sustainable to live this way, but we aren’t going to change it until something forces us to do so. In the meantime, we have to live with what those in power give us; and what they give us in the developed world is not only the promise of a highly materialistic lifestyle, but also the demands it makes on us. The problem is, the means to meet those demands in comfort are confined to a few rich people. The majority still work long hours just to keep up with the back edge of the game. And there are plenty who genuinely try to get work but can’t do so because the jobs just aren’t there. Technology is doing them. What’s more, I doubt there has ever been as much stress in the minds of the majority as there is now, because you have to have so much just to belong. This brings illnesses of all sorts in its train, including unprecedented levels of mental illness. The NHS in Britain is bigger than it’s ever been, but it’s having trouble coping with demand.

So, if the ‘system’ insists on producing this situation, the system must also accept responsibility to take care of those who find it difficult or impossible to keep up with the back edge of the game. It must do so willingly and adequately, not just grudgingly hand out a pittance and then denounce the recipients as ‘welfare scroungers.’ It can’t have it both ways. It isn’t just and it isn’t decent. It has created a world of unprecedented demand and, in the process, effectively destroyed the social support mechanisms that people in difficulty traditionally relied on.

I now firmly believe, therefore, that if you think ‘system’ when you look at the word ‘world,’ then the modern world most certainly does owe everybody a living. It carries that weight on the back of its own creation. It’s dripping with wealth and can easily afford it, if only the will is there.

So what should we do about it? I can see two possibilities that are both achievable and sustainable. But this post is too long already. I’ll leave that one for another time.