Change a what?

Sonmouse and I, being DIY experts, are fitting a new kitchen in son’s girlfriend’s parent’s house. Whilst enjoying their enthusiastic approbation I was struck that during our efforts yesterday the family was drinking tea and discussing the price of fish in the front room. OK I accept I enjoy the feeling of self worth it brings and their skills lie elsewhere but it does raise a basic question. Should helpers help the helpless? I mean I only acquired my many skills by not having anyone around to help me; I had to learn to do it myself. From that I learnt to enjoy learning and the rest followed, whereas discussing the price of fish can only get you so far. Now this isn’t a problem when we all have complimentary skills. I will for example be ever indebted to my dentist. But after making sure the household’s services were re-connected I said on leaving “you can turn the hot water back on now”. Within minutes I got a phone call asking, “how do you do that?” Surely there’s a level of practical knowledge about our day-to-day existence that should be within the compass of each one of us who’s achieved the ability to tie shoelaces. It’s not a question of skill, aptitude or inclination it’s laziness. Actually no, it’s just a lack of confidence. Confidence allows one little forays into ignorance to bring back valuable substance, sustenance to go further. Democratic capitalism though neuters this valuable commodity viewing it somewhere between anarchy and communism. The local kitchen fitter would go out of business and people might begin to wonder if we really do need seven different types of shampoo cluttering up our bathroom. Horror! But when it reduces us to a level where all we can do is shop, amuse ourselves on the internet, drink and watch TV, oh and discuss the price of fish, we will have become unfit for the real world. So go, go now and learn where you turn the hot water back on, and while you’re at it where to turn your water, gas and electricity supplies off before it takes the whole nation to change a light bulb. 

Ex Factor.

So the X Factor is back, no BACK, or perhaps BACK or should that be BACK! Well it is and, if the first round is anything to go by, soon to be drowned in its own rasamatasamaras. In fact there was so much rasamatasarasmical activity there was hardly room for contestants. The judges were as before but different people, we’re so interchangeable these days, and the contestants, one might even say clients in a psychotherapeutic sense, needed the same honest mirrors. It seems to be talented one needs to be unsure and to be talent-less requires the confidence a small stone has in being a small stone. Surely the often asked question, “so do you think you have what it takes to win the X Factor?” is not an enquiry as to whether the contestant has the wherewithal but whether they should be automatically disqualified if they answer, “yes.” Already an unsure girl from Ireland has captured the nation’s heart and a young man from London, well he answered yes. This specimen, well worthy of spending his life under a bell jar, had been on before in ’09 and had shown a level of ignorance that even a small stone would find disgraceful, but he assured us in the intervening two years he had ‘grown up a lot’. Unfortunately his command of English, even of his own mouthparts, left one unsure. As ‘growing up a lot’ obviously didn’t include learning to sing he got the same response as before, to which he responded similarly, as before. Audience appreciation nil, small stone intelligence nil. Hence the old saying, “you can’t teach an old stone any tricks at all”, unlike this otter  www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1-MbAAnXJ0  and anything by SlurpyJ on You Tube. Enjoy.

Life in 3lbs.

Our friend has just been admiring Mothermouse’s book about life, a 3lb, A4, 1000 page tome about everything you need to know in your quest to understand this living business we’re all trying to do. As he flicked through it he was impressed with the clarity, the diagrams and the sound sense it made just as I was when I did the same. Mmmm, interesting we both thought. It was obviously written by someone with great insight, education and a wide awareness, with the added credibility of being based on a very old philosophy. There is nothing in its pages I could find fault with or disagreed with. It would thus be extremely churlish of me to then ask a very basic question. Why? I still don’t fully understand my motives. I mean I’d be the first to admit achieving a good life isn’t the easiest thing in the world so what can be wrong with a little 3lb help? I mean I’m happy to turn to my Haynes ‘Mercedes-Benz C-Class’ maintenance manual for help on tracing a leak in the heater matrix, which by the way, for those puzzling over why they keep drowning their front seat passengers, turned out to be a blocked windscreen drain pipe. So am I just male and out of touch with my emotions about anything more personable than a thermostat? No it’s not that. Then coffee table comes to mind. I know. I have trouble following my train of thought too; it’s not just you. It’s a coffee table book. That’s it! It’s like those equally large glorious technicolour books of the Yorkshire Dales that you dip into every once in a while to save yourself the trouble of going there. Dipping into it as our friend did it’s a refreshing reminder of what’s wonderful but used as a manual, which it purports to be, and the Yorkshire Dales will exist forever as just glorious technicolour pictures of how real life aught to be. So my churlish question is not about why it was written but about how it’s read. Stored under my coffee table for those long winter evenings, fine, as a manual for living, I couldn’t ever go there! My butterfly life would never stand the weight. 

Freewill. I'm Lovin' it.

Freewill, there’s a joke. Psychologists experimented to prove we have or haven’t got it, and Saatchi and Saatchi would have us believe we have it yet work on the principle we don’t. Socrates and Plato probably weren’t bothered, being untroubled by Sky rolling News in the 5^th century BC. The joke as far as I can see is in the word, ‘freewill.’ Why bother to prove or disprove a word that within itself contains a basic contradiction? Is blackandwhite, for example, black or white? ‘Will’ could be described as possessing a self-generated intent and ‘free’ as unencumbered by restrictions such as intent. Your freedom to enter the lion’s cage can be curtailed just as much by your own will as it is by me stopping you or the door being locked. Of course I could say freewill is my freedom to follow my own will, but that raises the question, what has constructed my will prior to the event? If my will contains restrictions no amount of freedom to follow it will set me free of them. I suggest therefore that the concept of freewill was created to deceive, the Pinocchio belief, where creatures of wooden habit are conned into believing they have independent life. Wow that seems a bit harsh. I’ll rearrange it. ‘Creatures of independent life who are conned into wooden habit by a created belief that they are creatures of independent life.’ Much clearer. Neuroscience has proved conclusively that our brain makes our decisions several seconds before we’re conscious of them so we’ve no awareness of what woolly musings they’re based on, we’re just left mouthing, “well yes because……” The concept of freewill simply makes us happy to accept any bollocks our unconscious mind comes up with, leaving our unconscious decisions to be affected by god knows what. I’m lovin’ it; fancy a McDonalds? Yes but only because I genuinely feel a little peckish.

Re-birthing Politics.

BBC Radio 4’s program, ‘Medical Matters: The First 1,000 Days’ suggests modern medicine may be fifty years too late. It suggests many of our middle age ailments are seeded in our first 1000 days after conception. That’s to say our high tech preventative medicine is like treating you for nearing the end of the line in Barrow-in-Furnace when you could have bought a ticket to sunny Bognor Regis in the first place, like locking the stable door after the embryonic foal has long since leapt the paddock fence and is now living in Kansas with type two diabetes and a bone disease. With this grand misplacement of effort in mind we attended a party last night with lovely people of a political nature. As we left the debate was about Israel, Iran and N Korea, and the rights and wrongs of having nuclear weapons. I was all set to interject with a reasoning that would have only led to bewilderment when Mothermouse nudged us homeward for Match of the Day. The debate hinged on three unspoken principles, that right wing means ‘lying fascist bastards’, democracy means ‘good’ and ‘it’s only OK for friends to have big sticks’. Stripped of political rhetoric it’s a playground fight. In my, ‘if you want to get to there I wouldn’t start from here’ frame of mind politics seemed to be suffering from the same ‘grand misplacement of effort’ that the BBC’s medical program suggested, that it’s simply a playground fight organised by the protagonists, that politicians are essentially reactionists. But to avoid accusations of vacuous smugness I must suggest an alternative. Erm. Well Reactionists say, “If you do that then I’ll do this”, whereas, for want of a better term, designer-ists say, “How can I/we create what I/we want?” and therap-ists say, “How does that feel?” Maybe re-birthing politics could be strangely similar to the medical example; not how can we react to what was put in place fifty years ago,  but how can we give a healthy birth to a trouble free adult now? 

Big Brother’s back!

Big Brother’s back! And Mothermouse’s ovaries are singing ‘Praise the Lord’ over some slip of a designer stubbled male model who manages to look seriously overdressed in just a pair of jeans. I can see her point. In fact I don’t understand how a torso that makes jeans look superfluous has been chosen to promote their sales. And he’s a touch awkward which, blustering males take note, is far more attractive to the weaker sex that know they’re in charge. But I’m more taken with the young woman from Essex as in ‘the only way is’. She has the perfect vacuity of a blow-up. It’s not sexual attraction, it’s intrigue as to how she manages to walk and talk at all, and sometimes both at the same time. But one does sense she is a fully-fledged human being unlike the young American actress who is already posing the question, ‘Is there really anyone in there?’ Then there’s the paparazzi guy who I imagine will attempt to show us his intellectual side and the Irish slugger who appears to exhibit the same mental damage as Keith Richards only from a different punishment. And in counterpoint, Sally Bercow, wife and mistress of the leader of our ‘other’ house of mere commoners, who appears her own intelligent woman and is likely to know that Putin is the Russian Prime Minister and not the terse way Latvian prostitutes address their customers. Pamela Hoffmeister, nee Anderson, looks a fun loving girl of at least fifty who also suggest the American cult of celebrity is not just a way of life but a way of being. And then, and then, there’s Jedward. I can’t for the life of me imagine Jedward asleep in bed, however much I’d like to. That would require them to cease moving and talking which surely can’t be possible. Fops on acid they are neither vacuously Essex nor plastically alien, being too young for Botox. They’re Irish sprites jittering our human consciousness in all its nonsensical directions, proving, better than Shakespeare ever could, that in whatever role we choose to strut this mortal stage it’s of little consequence. Oh and nice young lad from Coronation Street. Bless. All in all a good mix to gawp at for the next few weeks. 

Virtuality.

Many years ago I heard a story about an American Indian who wouldn’t look at a mirror for fear it would take his soul. It was of course a laughable superstition. For years I thought it was to do with his own reflection, that seeing himself in it might capture him in self-absorption. Maybe, but recently I have broadened that view. From school physics I remember plotting the virtual image that a mirror produces, as much behind as reality is in front. Thus an apple is reproduced in full living colour virtually without its virtues of smell, weight, touch and taste. To my eyes, the twin daughters of my brain, it is complete, indistinguishable from reality, its virtuality missed. Perhaps this was the Indian’s point. People’s propensity for self-absorption will only be reflected in the mirror as it is, but their surrounding reality will lie, untouchable, as far behind as it is in front with their senses unaware of the deception; and we’ve come a long way since the invention of mirrors. These thoughts came from watching a program; yes I see the irony there, about teenage mothers. Their life in imagery towered over their capacity to deal with reality. It was as if their mind had been constructed on the principals of imagery. When reality intruded it was shunned. Perhaps this is what the Indian was alluding to; that if he grew up hunting imaginary buffalo in his virtual imagination he would die hungry eating virtual imaginary meat.

Toothache Plus.

Up at 6am for a urinal requirement and it looks like bloody November! And I’ve got toothache! And wet cat Dave insists on showing his affection by chilling my ankles with wet fur. This calls for Shreddies. I turn on the telly to look for times of MotoGP. I get ‘Crash Test Dummies.’ Two vaguely Australian orange boiler suits gurn at me: no I’m not making that word up MS Office, it means ‘to make extreme facial expressions.’ I may have spelt it wrong but it looks better than all the other attempts you’ve ungraciously put a red line under. They gurn while testing how many toilet rolls it takes to stop a 2.5 millimetre bullet from injuring a melon. This is wrong on so many levels it surely signifies the end of the human race as the earth’s predominant intellectual species. It perhaps does though explain why teenagers of a certain ilk gurn into their mobiles on nights out and plaster them on Facebook. I can only presume their own identity has been so subsumed by sitcoms it’s as lost as a message in a bottle bobbing across the Pacific. And just in case you missed the subtlety of that analogy, a bottle has no means of intelligent directional propulsion, like oars and stuff. I turn to room 101, BBC’s ‘Wake up to this Wonderful Morning’ News. OK then why, when there’s sixty odd million of us does the BBC choose cripples to present these early slots? By ‘cripples’ I am of course not referring to persons with incomplete bodily function but rather the verb definition, “Deprive of strength or efficiency; make useless and worthless.” These are beta version people, incomplete, full of bugs, pre-release specimens put out to the gullible public for testing. The male’s male member is surely a courgette and the woman’s cleavage etc is as alluring as a crack in the pavement. Why my bowels put me up to this early morning experience I’ll never know. 

Imagine. The Rioters.

Imagine you’ve watched all the Mad Max dystopian style movies, been thrilled by violent rap lyrics and enthralled by the heroism of insurgents in the face of American firepower. Imagine all these things fill you with pride. Imagine when you use the word ‘respect’ it means ‘fear.’ Imagine you saw no reason for learning at school and that now, without it, you are without the skills to influence anything, and that you’ve been constantly denigrated for not realising this fact since before you could talk. And imagine you have been surrounded by consumerism based on it, constantly showing and giving you aspirations that are denied to you. Good means bad, all means nothing, respect means fear and society means not you. It only takes a spark for this other ‘not you’ society to coalesce together in ignorant hubris to form an inverse reflection of our own. Imagine being at home with your mates having beaten the police, smashed that window, scared those women and grabbed this brand new boxed 32”, feeling alive, fulfilled and effective. I imagine we’ve experienced three days of prison riots without the prison. Each individual, without exception pieces together a form of self-respect from their encounter with this world. It doesn’t need to be good, moral, intelligent or wise, it just needs to be self-affirming. These imaginings are that affirmation. Now imagine what to do about it. 

Der cont.

American Indians have a name for the white man, Washeetchue. It means, “the one who takes the best part of the meat.” I imagine it is pronounced with some venom considering their history at the hands of white Americans. They might though be pronouncing it with relish now the Washeetchue look unable to pay off their fourteen trillion dollar overdraft, and maybe they and we, as they are derived from largely European stock, should consider that Indian phrase more closely. Our philosophy is to take. Our economy is built on taking. Whether a plumber, a shopkeeper or a banker we take money commensurate with our capacity to take money, though we use the euphemism ‘make.’ Thus ranks of takers compete to pass on money to those with a greater ability. The obvious product of this mechanism is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Statistic: ‘Since 1977 the share of national income going to those on the bottom half of the earnings ladder has fallen by a quarter, while the slice going to the top 1% has increased by half.’ I turned to a spreadsheet I’d put together of UK earnings against numbers of people at each wage level, i.e. from 1.44 million on £6,000 up to 6,000 on £2 million. I calculated a quarter of the bottom 50% earnings and got £62 billion. I then calculated half of the earnings of the top 1% and guess what I got, £65 billion. OK there’s a mismatch in time scales but it shows where our money’s going. The best part of earnings is going upwards. Thus however good you are at taking there’s always someone better at it taking from you. Our philosophy of taking the best part of the meat is showing itself worthy of the Indian’s derision, and from the state of our current finances, unsustainable. Yet finance and politicians seem unable to grasp and incapable to act against this common underlying philosophy that we ALL hold and that requires constant growth to satisfy our individual aspirations. 

Better than TV.

Being devoid of human idiocy our back garden is a picture this sunny morn. No I can’t do it, not even for the sake of mock poetic resonance, it’s ‘morning.’ From the wonderful ‘taller than me’ sunflower nodding its sunrise sunbeam to the bedroom window, to all the colours in pots, to three of our cats playing amongst them, it’s a picture. But wait, three cats in close proximity is a little unusual this early and it not at Sheba time. Britney is waiting Sphinx-like for something to happen, Betty is Essex-ing on her back displaying her Ann Summers shop front and Domino is stealth-mode-ing towards the back of a long container of blue and white Lobelias. Mothermouse is first to spot it. “Something’s going on.” As Domino disappears a wing appears. A pigeon. Quickly the garden constabulary, me, goes into action. I break up the rioters intent on GBH, slowly approach and quickly grab the pigeon, then shout for Mothermouse to open the door of our protection facility. I begin to feel slightly envious that our shed has had more birds than I have, but then it is marginally older. Then Antonmouse is requiring of a chum to go biking so we broom off to a café and meet other bikers who can afford a new bike and the time off, i.e. pensioners. And we pensioners are not short of stories. It’s interesting how some weave in daring exploits, some technical wizardry and others self-deprecating daring technical wizard exploits along the lines of, “the older I get the faster I went” variety; a true biker’s ego fest. Back home Antonmouse tells of a friend who, in an effort to placate a wife, a mistress and a live in current girlfriend, has announced he has SAD, Social Avoidance Disorder. Well the guy’s got balls, that’s for sure. And people watch Hollyoaks! What’s that about? 

London Burning Riots Crash.

Well I don’t mind telling you I feel in a sort of pincer movement here in the moral middle. “Hoodies to the left of me, bankers to the right”, a mis-quote from a song I can’t quite remember. Ah yes, “Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.” I’m thinking as TV slumps to ever new boring lows people seem to be going to extraordinary lengths to inject some life back into it. “They’s bangin’ man. We see them on the telee, you know, bangin’ in shop fronts and flamin’ stuff and we wants some a dat too” and, “Justin says his hedge lost over two. Red screens at night, not a Shepard in sight, yar. Har, har, ha.” Then I’m thinking perhaps it’s just a matter of time. Are you at the forefront of, “Lootin’s just a fun way of getting’ 100% off” and smashing into Comet for a 32” tele and two iPhones,” or the second wave who come later for an mp3 player, or later still for a basket and a pack of blank cassettes they’ve had in stock for three years? Or maybe like me, walk by when the police and fire brigade and everyone’s gone home and idly, but still surreptitiously, pick up a two foot ‘C’, consoling my moral fibre with the thought that no one will want it anyway; a point that will strike me even more when I get it home and am left wondering how on earth am I going to dispose of it without getting banged up for taking all the TVs and iPhones. Am I moral or just lacking in courage? Actually I’m just sitting at home enjoying all the exciting goings on in the news. I mean, without riots, the financial crises and the Premier League, TV isn’t worth compressing your arse for. 

Der.

If you’ve been following the American and European economic situations there’s a common two-sided debate. In the US for example the Republicans want austerity measures to bring down the deficit, currently $14 trillion, while the Democrat’s want to borrow more, to get the economy going again. The problem is demand that is so low industry is if anything contracting and debt levels are already too high. Now consider an orange and two guys, Fred Murdock of Fred Murdock’s Fish and Chip shop, and Rupert Murdock owner of Phone Hackers Inc. One has an average bank balance and the other has squillions. There are millions more Freds and only one Rupert but both will consume roughly the same number of oranges, even if Rupert is on some extreme orange-only diet. So even if Rupert comes off his diet orange growers won’t notice a drop in sales. But if the million Freds are feeling the pinch those same orange growers will go out of business. Now we know the pay gap between rich and poor has increased and we all hate bankers etc but lets forget that and just look at what they buy on a daily basis. Well roughly the same as all of us except the millions of Freds buy their food, TV, electric kettles and cars in the mass market and Rupert buys his banquet, cinema and Aston Martin from elite one-off specialist shops. So as most of us are Freds, and most of industry is geared to supplying Freds, when Freds feel the pinch all of industry, services, schools and hospitals, 95% of our economy will contract. When Rupert feels the pinch he just keeps his Aston Martin another year. My point is when the rich stash away over a certain amount of the money supply there is less to maintain the economy as a whole and we get into this situation. It’s not that they’re just rich it’s that by accumulating too much wealth they strangle the broader economy. We don’t need to tax them because they’re earning a lot, we need to tax them to release a percentage of their dormant cash back into the money supply. The stated UK policy of being a low tax regime in order to ‘attract entrepreneurs’ simply allows those financial to strangle our overall economy even more. It’s rather like the financial sector is a Hotel California for money where it can, “check of anytime you like, but you can never leave”, followed by the finest guitar solo in the history of Les Paul. This is serious stuff. In the US, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and to a lesser extent the UK and Spain, whole countries including millions of Freds are suffering and the debate between more borrowing or more austerity doesn’t even recognising the basic problem.