Anyway, this song has been a friend to me for as long as I can remember, at least a quarter of a century. That explains why I think of James Taylor as this beautiful young dude with long hair but now the reality is this much older face. When he sings this song the music transfigures him, it reminds me, and it moves me.

Like, I said, it’s always raining in the morning round here.

You have until Friday 27th January at 11.00 a.m. to submit your question using the #askgove hashtag

Graham Stuart MP, who chairs the committee said

“This is a good way of breaking down the seemingly vast gap between the governed and the governing. We are always looking at ways of reaching out and making sure people can use our services to help us hold the government to account.” More on the story here

I’ll start the ball rolling

Why does the Minister feel it necessary to impose his own personal curriculum likes on the children of the 21st century? #askgove

How will the Minister rebalance the curriculum to ensure that the value of education lies in the process and not in the production of league tables? #askgove

Does the Minister feel it would a good idea for him to shadow some teachers to get a real feel for the scale of the task the profession faces in today’s test-mad culture #askgove

I could go on…

The Northern Lights, Cresswell Beach, Northumberland by Lee Jennings

When I run out, I will have to think up my own.

Schrödinger’s cat explores the interpretation of quantum mechanics through the possibilities for the fate of the cat in the box, before the box is opened and observed.

It’s a good mental warm-up on a Sunday for the woman thinking of cooking an unobserved roast dinner.

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

From his new album, out in February.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I seem to live in a gap somewhere between Professor Brian Cox, and his ilk, who calls anything that can’t be directly observed, or quantified through some baffling mathematical equation, merely wu wu, or woo woo (how do you spell that Bri?), and that bloke with a white beard whose address is @heaven.

I know there are scientists who have faith too, Professor Robert Winston never called anything wu wu in his life, but I think they are in the minority. I love science but its breathtaking theoretical arrogance is a right turn off at times and, well, that more or less goes the same for the religious life. It’s like we have to jump to one side, or the other, or consider yourself without a framework for life.

Except there is the middle way and it is to be found in the arts, and I call philosophy an art too, albeit a maddening one. So when I saw this TED Talk by Alain de Botton I watched it and I realised that when I stood in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern the other week, and leaned on the rail over the void, clasping my hands as if I was 7 years old and kneeling under the watchful eye of the Virgin Mary and St Norbert in church, I was not going as mental as I thought I was.

I only thought to step nearer
The drinker shrank back.
Opposites do not always attract:
the drunk, the sober.

The drinker needed the distance
to be maintained – at least
two feet, and a half, between us;
at all times. Safe.

We were like a Danse Macabre,
without the orchestra.
A chasm of shame
Holding its sickly breath

A heartbreaking, shaking ritual
In the shadow of turning.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Plato

David Cameron was asked about the new increase in the employment figures today at Prime Minister’s Questions. Here are some ‘facts’.

• Today’s announced rise takes UK unemployment to 8.4% (the highest since 1996).
• The UK has the second fastest rising rate of unemployment in Europe. The fastest is Greece.
• The UK Employment Minister has made no commitment to getting the percentage down (the message there is that it’s not going to, and anyway it’s a price we are prepared to pay to keep shrinking the state).
• Ed Miliband says youth unemployment is up an incredible 102% in the last year alone – the official figures are that unemployment for 16-24 year olds runs at 22.3%
• Yet the government say the number of people in employment has increased – they say that’s the reality – check here for their ‘reality’.
• That’s partly because more women and students are in work. And that means part-time jobs. Yes folks if you can support yourself, and your family on a part-time wage, you’ve no worries.

 
In Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron insists that youth unemployment is going down. He also said that the government takes full responsibility for unemployment and is doing it all it can to tackle it. He also says that this government’s back to work programme is better value for money than the last government’s was. Evidenced by what, I ask myself? It is at about this point in reading the PMQ transcript that I want to just shout, ‘Spamhead, Spamhead, Spamhead’ at him.

Do you know what the government have done to tackle unemployment? I can’t lay it all out right here because it would make the post too long, but let’s take it gently and start with the square window (when my blood pressure returns to normal we can look through the circle and the arch windows too…).

They axed the last government’s funding streams to support people into employment: The New Deal, The Flexible New Deal and Pathways to Work and replaced them with The Work Programme. This funding is administered for the government by private companies like Pertemps and Reed *shudders*. I will tell you why I shudder. Those companies are monolithic 1980s throwbacks of recruitment agencies that operate for profit and not for the benefit of jobseekers. Every jobseeker comes with £££ on their head.

I’m not against profit, and I’m not against value for public money, but I am against redistribution of our resources amongst companies with little experience of getting the long-term unemployed back to work, whilst simultaneously cutting out those providers that had the experience and expertise of doing exactly that. The facts are that those big companies administering the funding are casting about for the providers that were doing the work in the first place, although some will have gone to the wall already and some are struggling to survive because the funding comes with impossible strings attached.

Like, the quick turnaround some of the funding comes with. What chance do you have of getting someone with skills and experience gaps, perhaps with mental health barriers into a job in less than six months? This is the timescale for some real cases I have come across. And if you do manage that feat, what are the chances of every individual sustaining that new work for 6 months, which is when the 20% performance-related funding kicks in?

What is happening is that the organisations doing this work are, for issues of survival, prioritising those clients who are nearer ‘job-readiness’ than not. And those people won’t be the very long-term unemployed with health issues, or indeed the very young with few qualifications and little, to no, work experience.

There is a flourishing scrap heap in this country and our government is prepared to turn a blind eye to it in private, whilst shooting their mouths off in a froth of PR spin on the other sides of their faces, in public.

Reality check required people: that’s you, me, everybody! Otherwise we are lumbered with the current brass-neckery of those who tell us that whilst we see unemployment going up, in their distorted reality, all is not quite as it seems.

Confused? I am. This government should come with a cognitive dissonance warning stamped on their collective spamhead. And they should be forced to agree the interpretation of the stats with the opposition before wasting a proportion of Prime Ministers Questions on a pantomime disagreement over figures, wasting everyone’s time & money.

*ceremonial