Surreal times

Is it just my own, erroneous, impression of the UK at the moment, or are we living in strange times that just don’t stack up if you apply even a smidge of critical engagement with the issues of the day?

This morning the BBC Radio 4 programme kept banging on in the news items about a speech Nick Clegg was going to make later in the day. Apparently, he was going to say something about the lack of social mobility in this country, and it needing to be addressed. When I looked for the speech after it had actually happened, it was no longer news. Extraordinary, what someone plans to say is news, until they say it, and then it is not.

There was also an interview about energy security and the need for investment in more power stations and the like. They always mention renewables at this time, but we know they are really talking about more of the same industrial scale generation or importation. If they weren’t, why would they care that China is now using more and more of the world’s gas… Now, despite the utility companies already having a licence to print money, there is a move to charge customers about another £100 a year as a hidden subsidy, so they can afford to build more power stations and charge us more of our own money that we can barely spare in the future.

I am not a fucking economic unit – I am a person. And, rather than cough up more money to British Gas or Npower or wherever, I would really rather generate my own, albeit variable supply of electricity, from a wind turbine on my roof, or whatever. But of course, the man won’t let me, because Planning says, ‘No’. And do you know what, Mr Expert on the radio? If my electricity runs out from time to time – I won’t care; in fact, it will be a relief. And do you know why? Because when the lights go out, I can be just me, the way I am meant to be and not some performing hamster running on the wheel of capitalist consumption.

And as I spent some time trying to get my head round the ludicrous nature of reporting things that haven’t happened yet, and us paying utility companies to build factories so they can sell us more crack, I mean energy, the IMF pops up with a forked tongue and throws me into complete cognitive dissonance.

The IMF say, on the one hand, that the UK government’s austerity measures are fine and dandy, and then on the other hand, and in the next breath, they say that the Bank of England must print more money for quantitative easing, consider cutting the interest rate even further (at 0.5% how low can you go before the shyster high street banks pass on the savings to customers, even as they increase mortgage interest rates this month), and the government should think about a lower VAT rate to help stimulate growth.

Nothing adds up, the world has gone completely cuckoo, and, yes mother, this is a rant.

The Lost Jockey by Rene Magritte: 1948 gouache on paper

Those band things: formerly known as waistbands

Once upon a time we all knew where the tops of our trousers lived, they lived in the waistband, and these waistbands belonged in their proper place pretty much round our middles, where our waists were, or are still, if you are lucky.

These days the tops of trousers have bands, but they are not for the waist. They float around from anywhere vaguely proximate to your elegantly jutting pelvis bone up to your washboard stomach, or, if you are my age – or just me, they settle in a middling but indeterminate anatomical place that does not a) cause too much muffin-top overspill or b) general stomach overhang. Have I missed anything?

It is therefore necessary to attempt to purchase trousers that are a little more generous than you need, to avoid an unsightliness of unruly and uncontained flesh (previously the waistband would have had all that covered). In these trousers you will then need to employ the services of a belt, but what you will find, is that these days many ladies’ trousers manufacturers have dispensed with the belt loop at the back of the trousers. You are then faced with a choice. Let your trousers fall down all day long, or endure the belt riding high above the trouser band up towards your shoulder blades. I suppose some crafty types might be able to add a further choice and add a belt loop, but this is as likely as flying to the moon for me. I am not proud of this needlework deficit in my life, it just is an undeniable fact.

Imagine my joy today, then, when for the first time in weeks, in a work wear pair of trews, I was able to enjoy not pulling my trousers up, all day long. There is even a belt loop at the back on them. If I think about it too hard, I am aware I may be being slightly garotted around the top of my pelvis, but, as Meat Loaf says, two out of three ain’t bad.

Belts, waistbands, and elasticated trouser hems: it's got the lot!

Well, will it?

Seen outside a barber’s shop outside Southend Victoria station, next the new sushi takeaway. The concourse at Southend’s Liverpool Street line terminus is still no rival for St Pancras’ though; I just heard a radio programme where they said that stations were the new shopping destinations…

To answer the question – it’s a kind of, yes, and a kind of, no. In my experience, if it truly matters today, it will still matter tomorrow. I’d say it’s the wrong question though. Mattering is not a problem, unless you make it so. Providing you are conscious to it, you can suffer it anyway.

As a matter of fact, it’s called life.

*fades in Freddie Mercury*

Nothing really matters
Anyone can see
Nothing really matters – nothing really matters to me
Anyway the wind blows…

From Bohemian Rhapsody

I don’t mind saying the first song that came to mind was by Del Amitri. But that is something else altogether. Never mind, it’s Friday. I don’t dance too much anymore, but let’s have some music anyway and as an added bonus a few engaging introductory words about the ‘list song’.

Moving out, moving in?

I don’t know.

There’s a man who walks some Staffies in the cemetery nearby. He’s often fairly drunk, and often fairly drunk early in the morning after an all-nighter. He supports Arsenal and we used to have a chat but his new younger Staffie and Rudi didn’t really get along so I started to keep a distance.

Now these boots are lined up along the wall outside where he lives. I haven’t seen him for a while, and he always wore trainers as far as I recall, usually with an Arsenal top, so I don’t know what the shoes and boots mean. None of the indiviudal pairs quite have the pathos of Van Gogh’s ‘A Pair of Shoes’ but as a collective they come pretty close

Alcoholism is a sad business. There’s another hard drinking man on the street who also has Staffies. The dogs fling themselves around in a frenzy of barking when you walk past the flat. The tv is always on and even when the windows are closed you can hear the dogs being yelled at to ‘Shut up!’. If the windows are open you can smell the beer. Sometimes the man goes off to prison for assaulting someone. Then he comes back and picks up where he left off. I see him, or his partner who cut off all her long hair like a penance, walking round the corner to the offie to stock up on beer from time to time. In five years, I haven’t once seen them walk a dog.

As yet there hasn’t been a row of shoes in their front garden.

Kevin & Stan

Kevin is the rather idiosyncratic cat and Stan is the Irish Wolfhound. They live with my step-sister in Suffolk.

I am not sure what they are reading there.

Worth 97 billion dollars

Who is?

The Catholic Church, that’s who.

Pope Benedict looking understandably overjoyed

Being brought up a Catholic never leaves you & Pope Benedict has amended a Canon Law amendment to make sure you can’t leave the Church (officially anyway) either.

I’d better stop there because I will get angry and probably blaspheme.

Maybe I should do that as then I might get excommunicated and leave that way…

Occupy Southend @Saturdayafternoon

The Occupy second temporary occupation of Southend was set up today at the north end of the high street outside the Odeon Cinema. A few tents and a video booth, a huddle of the enlightened 99% and an apparently oblivous majority of the same. There was a flag which was quite impressive and a handful of police officers, who were not.

Funny spot. Funny sort of place Southend. The High Street, although a symbol of rampant consumerism and capitalist concerns, is actually struggling – no 1% to be found here. There’s quite a lot of shop space empty and those that thrive seem to be the pound shops and discount stores. Marks and Spencer’s maw gaped open wide, the broken automatic sliding doors were taped off for the health and safety of the beige brigade punters who seem to turn eternal geriatric pirouettes of confusion in the food aisles.

I passed a homeless guy outside The Factory Shop. It’s a an aphorism, but you do tend to notice the homeless more when they are holed up with a dog. Sad but true. I couldn’t tell you a thing about the guy, he was hunkered down with his head in his chest and not in the way a racehorse goes to post, but in the other way. The dog slept, but was a big brown teddy bear type mongrel; looked fierce if needs be and I suppose needs do be often on the streets.

When I walked back up the street about an hour later, the temporary Occupy Southend camp had gone; it’ll be back more permanently somewhere in Southend in February. The homeless guy was on the move with another man, probably not homeless, and the big brown dog. As I passed by, the vagrant chucked his polystyrene cup into a shrub. I don’t suppose he bothers picking up his dog’s shit either – why would he?

It’s not too cold out tonight, but it’s going to get that way again soon according to the weather reports.

All the above makes me think. None of what it makes me think is new. If your are recycling thoughts, it might be time to act on them.

Buy your Littlest Hobo T-shirt at www.myiconart.com

The Gold Standard

The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.

Albert Einstein

You can apply this to anything you like, but it seems to me apposite to think about it in relation to the economic models we have come up with so far.

Historically we have moved from a gold-based system via a representational base-metal and paper money system via a deluge of bound-to-be broken promissory notes. The muddle we are now in seems to have arisen from a digitised money system where we shuffle decimal points and zeros between accounts. If every man jack of us, and his dog, tried to liquidate all those figures into cash at the same time, I suspect no-one would be able to save the current global economic system, least of all our governments.

Governments have the right to create money, but we have drifted into a system where financial institutions give us extra digits and zeros to buy what we want. This is, to all intents and purposes, allowing banks to create money they don’t have.

This is what happens when most of us are sleepwalking through our lives, accepting the education laid out by the government that will allow us to compete in global league tables, but not allow us to hold our own governments to account. Education that does not allow us to even form the questions that might challenge prevailing ideology such as is needed to force real change through a democratic process.

Back to Einstein I think.

National Geographic Gold Miner in Ghana: do we have gold or does gold have us?

For more on this visit BBC Radio 4′s Start the Week

After the sale

Digital switchover turns me right off

For reasons beyond my control, this week I spent 4 and a half hours of my life with some people charged with making sure that televisual viewers living in the latest television area to be switched entirely to digital (London area, including Essex, Crystal Palace transmitter in April in case you care) are aware of what they need to do to get digital into their lives. This is because, I discovered, the very worst thing that could befall us in the 21st century is that we could wake up to a Blank Screen. The ‘catastrophe’ of the Blank Screen was emotively told through individual examples of society’s disconnect from other people, family, and community. What was terrifying was that the television was being sold as an answer to this symptom of a dysfunctional society, a panacea for the masses, and not acknowledged as a potential contributory factor in social exclusion.

Turns out that the other key message is that ‘no-one should be left behind’ in the digital switchover and suffer the armageddon of a blank screen in their lives. To this end, money, and I dread to think how much given that no less than four people were employed to deliver the workshop (although they were pretty tight with the post-it notes), is being spent on a three-pronged outreach strategy so that no-one is ‘left behind’ come the day, come the hour.

All this was delivered with unfaltering confidence and belief in the healing power of telly. No-one seemed to get that those who might be left behind with a blank screen, their target audience, have perhaps already been left behind in today’s strange society. For example we were given an example of some poor guy who lay dead in his flat in Brent, undiscovered for three years. I was left to wonder what it was they were trying to illustrate to us: it would have been less likely to happen if his tv was digital, or at least he had a wider choice of free channels to entertain him before he sadly died and laid undiscovered?

The whole thing was madly topsy-turvy. They are switching analogue off ostensibly because we can get more free channels and better quality picture. But scratch the surface and you will see that they can pack the digital signals more tightly which means they (the government) can sell more broadcast licenses and then the switched off analogue will be re-allocated and those licenses sold on again… These guys are selling fresh air folks, what a wheeze.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t like to think of my grandmother, in her late eighties, without access to tv, but neither would I like to think of her (one of the scenarios we were run through more than once) timing her whole life through the programming schedule of digital tv: breakfast tv – eat, take pills, Loose Women – repeat, and so on. This was taken as far as the following statements: tv is part of a care package, tv has been ‘proven’ to speed the recovery of people in hospital – ‘fact’.

I have tried, but I can’t find this scientific fact about the healing powers of tv and even if I did I would ask what the healing powers of tv were compared to, lying in your own faeces and staring at a wall when you can’t afford the fiver a day it costs to watch Andrew Landsley’s political party broadcast?

I need to stop now because I can feel a rant coming on…

If I didn’t suspect it before, I now know: television is the new state religion.

P.S. If you don’t know what I am talking about please leave a comment and I can deluge you with a tsunami (what I hitherto thought of as an actual catastrophe before I was told it was a blank screen) of beer mats, book marks, leaflets, posters, pens, pharmacy bags, stickers and a story book of information overload. Then if you are over 75, blind, or in receipt of certain benefits (that class you as an economic benefit unit – nice) I can point you in the direction of the service where for anywhere between £40 – £233 you can get all set. If you are not eligible – tough – sort it out yourself and make sure you open the letter they are sending us all.

A 'catastrophe'