Nothing’s Black&White.

The Guardian 30/3/2012: “Police face racism scandal after black man records abuse.” Police officer: 'The problem with you is you will always be a nigger.' Hold on, look at the headline. Even the Guardian doesn’t report this as an English man or a young man or simply a man, he’s a black man. I presume the officer involved was also English and an older man, who called the younger man a nigger and went on to say, “Don’t hide behind your black skin.” What was in his mind to say that? Now imagine some twat accosts you in the street: Do you remonstrate? And might you be accused of racism if he’s black? There’s a sort of mutual collusion throughout society, even including the Guardian, that there is a divide, blacks and whites. It began in the fifties when immigrants began to appear and were shunned because of their difference, the most demonstrable being colour. They spoke differently often with poor English, they lived differently with different food, smells, music and customs. Most rose to the challenge of acclimatising to their new homeland and have enriched our culture but some took their difficulties as a badge difference. They began to class themselves as different, the most demonstrable being colour, taking pride in being a black man in a white society. The successful ones simply took pride in being themselves, in the genuine nobility of overcoming the many obstacles their own choice had put in their way. So some took pride in their inclusion and some in their exclusion. Now the task of the police is to police society, which includes everyone living and visiting this country whatever their feelings, beliefs or allegiances, so how is this background reflected in this recorded conversation?  Both are playing out this sixty-year drama. The young Englishman is playing out the ‘proud to be an excluded black man’ and the policeman is offensively and clumsily pointing this out to him. In saying, “Don’t hide behind your black skin,” he’s saying don’t exclude yourself because of it. True this drama has been sixty years in the making and true the youth probably has good reason to feel excluded but there comes a point where we must all lose our own exclusivity of exclusion and join in, otherwise we’ll ‘always be an n-word.’

Try Creativity, it’s Cheaper.

Apparently in Greece people are going back or moving forward to a direct economy, personal exchange and local currencies, a creative way of iceberging the Titanic of their public spending. It won’t help the deficit but that’s in euros so it won't affect them. So creativity? It’s a bit like dyslexia or a sort of cognitive Tourretes. I was born with it as a relatively rare aberrant condition. Though I have a thirst for knowledge I don’t readily accept teachers are right, they’re just sounding off on a subject they believe they know something about. The only real teacher is my own experimentation of doing things differently, often perversely. Where as learning requires an endless supply of books and teaching and such like, creativity requires a pen, paper, a brush, a musical instrument, not cheap I admit, or whatever one needs to apply imagination to. Where a linear-ite might want new cloths, a more exciting car, a more gourmet dinner, see more interesting places, the creative, by which I mean I, will be happy considering the relative merits of pigs in space or Shauberger’s implosive energy in a shed. It drives Mothermouse mad. But I’m cheap. Guitars, admittedly more than one, have occupied me for 50 years, motorcycle mechanic for the same, DIY for 35 and pen, paper and art materials for nearly forty. And all for the price of a Citroen Picasso. And somehow one learns how everything is connected, how things work and how things not yet invented might work, and how to utilise what comes to hand. Last night our cat Britney appeared in the bedroom at 1am mewling proudly over her new kill. A raw sausage. It often happens when the weather’s nice enough for a barbeque. 

For All Things Good.

Liam Stacey tweeted “LOL he’s dead” and worse after Fabrice Muamba’s near fatal heart stop during a football match and will shortly begin 56 days in prison for inciting racial hatred. Now I didn’t get that tweet and I’d guess you didn’t either, in fact it was probably only read by a few of his mates who probably responded with, “Stacey’s pissed again.” I’m guessing from all the general outrage that few, if any replied, “Good point Liam you’ve made me realise all black people must die in unfortunate circumstances.” Definitely not because if they had they’d be occupying the next cell to Liam. So his tweet, one amongst millions, was somehow found, logged and traced to its owner, his address found and a summons sent. And now millions have read his drunken stupidity via newspapers and TV. In fact he’s now so notorious his 56 days in prison will probably be followed by a similar period in the Big Brother house. So who has purveyed racial hated the most, Liam to his pub mates or officialdom and the media? Now Margaret Thatcher is not black or dead but there are some of my acquaintance who are itching to post, “LOL she’s dead.” So should they? In case you haven’t got the message yet let me spell it out. Be careful what you post, tweet, what you say in pubs that might be overheard because ‘they’ have the means to track you down and prosecute. Say only what it is acceptable to say. Never indulge in ironic humour even to those who would recognise it as such. Speak as politicians do basically. And speaking of politicians, the Conservative Party treasurer, Peter Cruddas, caught on camera offering clearly illegal access to cabinet policy for party donations has not been prosecuted. His defence was ‘an error of judgement’, and he was stone cold sober! So if an experienced middle-aged person in a position of power can be forgiven for an illegal error of judgment surely a twenty one year old drunken student can. But no. Our social media that so evidently connects us all is connecting us all in the manner of a flock of emotional sheep running this way and that from one knee jerk reaction to another with no deeper consideration than “I’m offended by all things bad” and obviously “I’m for all things good.”

Martin Buber, You or Me?

I love ‘Outnumbered’, particularly Karen’s delivery of the potent logic of children. She showed their unabashed ego, their acute reasoning and curiosity and unconcern for the emotions of others wonderfully. It’s now a few years on and the young girl playing her has changed. She can’t quite pull off that magical trick. That’s no criticism just an observation. It’s this time of year the young highland cattle at the farm are separated from their mothers and brought into their own enclosure just like the first year of primary school. They’re delightfully unsure, curious and playful, and it only takes a few short months for them to find themselves and develop their own place in that new society. For me it defines a process of brain development where something essential, I’ll call it ego, is added to by a block of computational cognition of the self/other relationship. Karen has lost her clearly delineated ego for something much more complex.  Now earlier this glorious March morning I noticed a cat some 30 feet up a tree at the bottom of our garden. It was stuck poor thing and may be starving, should I try to rescue it? Was the way it swished its tail a sign of distress? Should I ask at doors if people have a grey cat that’s gone missing? I decided to wait and see. Later it had gone so I imagined it had summonsed up its last vestiges of bravery and, weak limbed, clambered down and joyfully regained the ground. I told Mothermouse who said she’d seen it jump down casual as you like. So there you have it. Young Karen would have said, “Why is that cat up a tree?” and maybe the slightly older Karen would have pestered her dad to try to save it. As in ‘Mice do Theatre’ she now has a long journey back to where she started. It may take some time.

SportRelief.

Some 68 years ago my parents had one child to give me the best opportunity in life from their limited finances. That or my emerging presence made them change their mind. They weren’t poor or rich either. In general developed countries have a third less children than the third world. It’s also reasonable to say that human over population is making unsustainable demands on our planet, mostly by us the 20% using 80%. The demands of a poor African family are miniscule compared with mine. So Sport Relief asks for our sympathy to redistribute our wealth to that African family on the basis every child should live and have what we have, or at least a little more. If our efforts are successful more African babies will survive to grow the population and have education, which they will absorb ravenously. In comparison our younger generation often see it as unnecessary and will join our labour market when it’s already over priced in the world market. In the last twenty years the only people who can afford to pay our labour rates is us, which is why we have been reduced to service industries serving ourselves, and why graduates work in Tescos. In the long term our life style is just as unsustainable as those African children, and when they come to fruition as a highly motivated and educated work force the boot will be on the other foot. Already Portuguese youngsters are moving to Mozambique to find opportunities because there are none at home. So in sustaining those poor African families we are fuelling the expansion of our already over populated planet and offering them the opportunities of our youth. Of course it would be callus of me to refuse them help but it would be equally callus of me to harm the planet and the future of my sons and their children. It’s not the easy emotional decision it appears to be. 

Mice Do Theatre.

I’m hoping to do a talk on Clowning in Counselling; in itself a triumph of arrogance over experience, but theatre, clowning and counselling are all about how we strut our stage in an effort to make our chosen role more authentic. This last weekend I did a training in Playback Theatre. It’s a form of theatre where ordinary mice play the stories of ordinary mice back to ordinary mice in a series of improvisations. No script, no director, no rehearsal, just step off a cliff and go. There are groups all over the world and we’ve been struggling this last year to set one up in Sheffield. People have come and gone and now we’re a settled team working on, well it’s hard to say. After giving it some thought over the morning’s washing up it’s about being really there. I some times think if on my deathbed I’ll think ‘if only I had been there.’ I’m not talking about the Taj Mahal or somewhere, just about being there, being present. It’s a deceptively difficult concept. I mean what of myself is present: The father, the toy inventor, the husband, money earner, the laconic urbane punctilious proud yet sardonically humorous well-dressed persona? Or me? And what is me without these cloths? Am I a man or a mouse? Well obviously…. And somehow in this long process of mousification I find myself more loved, a strangely unexpected benefit. And yet it’s obvious enough. We’re all involved in a constant process of reverse engineering each other, like ‘OK fine, but where exactly is this person really coming from?’ I mean it takes so much energy! And that’s just the beginning. We then have to create strategies to counteract the strategies other people are using to counteract ours. It would make Deep Blue go limp at the AI thought of it. So that’s what we’re working on, mousification. It’s a technical term. Anyway the weekend was delightful and as we stood in a circle at the end I was me. I lifted my T-shirt and proudly announced to everyone, “This is my tummy.”

No Ads for Me.

TV ads always feature beautiful kids. Whether they’re eating fish fingers or playing muddy football they’re always at the centre of an adoring mummy and daddy family, except when the daddy’s deceased and should have, and luckily did, purchase life insurance. All mothers, blissfully free of any form of harassment, glide about their immaculate kitchens as their lazy but affable hubbies watch TV. Only alcohol swigging teenagers are allowed a little mess. Men crave female lust and all Lawyers4You are 38, serious and suited where as bankers are allowed a slight hint of humour. All double-glazing men would make horrendous neighbours and supermarket workers are so normal you wish you lived next to one. Anyone over 60 is busy planning for death while phone ads feature the young, the only ones of us who live such exciting lives that they need to spend lots of money telling other young people where they are. And then there’s Bingo. Bingo ads feature lard arses that are so happy at winning ten pounds they never stop oscillating their gargantuan weight with delight. Obviously Bingo people have an enormously good time before they peg out with heart failure from alcohol poisoning. It seem no products are aimed at me, a happy, normal, highly sexually attractive 68 year old. 

Mountain Dew.

Well this is the wackiest thought I’ve ever had. The pyramids were built at a time of climatic change in the region; North Africa was slowly turning from lush forest to semi desert and there was a mass migration into Egypt from what’s now the Sahara. The most important thing all those extra people needed was water. So what if the Pyramids were giant dew collectors? Obviously now they’re not, the surface has gone and it’s far too dry, but if the sides were glassy dew might form and be collected at the bottom for irrigation. Winds would flow round and over the surfaces so that millions of cubic meters of air would contact the cold surfaces and drop moisture. OK it’s a wacky idea but everyone knows razor blades hadn’t been invented back then. And this myth about them being tombs is only because they buried their rulers in the foundations which is only like cementing George W Bush in the basement of the new Ground Zero building, and we’d all like to do that.

Very Damp Toast.

How much does a cloud weigh? It’s the sort of question I’ve often asked myself while dancing across a field barefoot in a frilly skirt. I’ve been thinking about water a lot lately after seeing babies drinking ditchwater on Sport Relief and being ill. They need clean water and the water in air must be pretty fresh but even if you run around with your mouth open all day you can’t get much. It’s locked in and wafting about but how much is there? Well air at sea level has a density of 1.22Kg per cubic meter. That’s like the same as a 2.5lb bag of sugar! Air weighs that much!? And the water in air is very roughly 1% of that, ie 12 grams. So assuming a cup is 250cubic cms i.e. 250 grams you could get a cup of water from a room 3x3 meters or air at 1m/sec passing through a tube of 1sq meter section in 20 seconds. That’s a litre of clean drinking water every one and a half minutes. Wouldn’t that be a solution? Anyway I’m working on it. So back to how much a cloud weighs. I’ve picked as a example a 1km x 1 km cumulous cloud that extends 1km up, a typical English cloud. It floats by the way because wet air is less dense than dry air which is a bit counterintuitive but true. And it would weigh, wait for it, one million metric tons!! Yes if that fluffy grey think fell on my head mid way across the field in my frilly skirt I’d be toast. You’re just not safe anywhere these days.

My Football Blog.

Well Chelsea last night, Man City tonight and rounded off by the second half of Matrix Reloaded. That must be why I’m currently seeing Balotelli in a dark blue strip being whacked a hundred foot into the air by a miffed John Terry in sunglasses. As far as I can tell the Matrix is about cause and effect, a concept Balotelli has yet to grasp. Anyway Man City started confidently enough under an obvious belief that the waterfall of numbers on a screen somewhere would see them easily overcome their one/nil deficit from the first leg; Sporting Lisbon being little more than an upstart Sunday league side. But then Balotelli made a tackle in the style of a Humvie sideswiping a cyclist and Sporting scored from the free kick. This added a new level of difficulty for the home side but made Sporting manager very happy. He apparently looked like Hugh Grant to the Sky commentator but my HD TV portrayed him as more like the vagrant who tried to tap me for 50p last week. Man City continued to play like an overweight Maradona trying to impress his grandson’s primary school side until the kids scored again as Mancini looked on with a thousand mile stare of disbelief. Now they had to score four to win. Eventually they scored one, then a penalty, then scored another. Ten minutes to go and they began to show some urgency, mostly by Balotelli wrenching stricken cyclists back to their feet. Five minutes and the Sporting players took to sitting on the pitch in an effort to make miraculous recoveries from life threatening injuries. Seconds to go and Joe Heart almost headed the winning goal, almost. So Man City are out and Balotelli, whose real name is Illetolab once he gets his bib on right, is still giving, albeit in the style of a scowling tyrannosaurus. Never the less, good one Chelsea, well done! 

Seeing into the Box.

As part of an exercise in our shamanic group a few nights ago I found myself looking into the beautiful blue eyes of a young woman, an experienced therapist. Eyes are of course the portal to the soul especially in someone practiced in opening it; a delightfully captivating experience. Cut to a Joan Collins comment on the radio this morning about kids saying, “I want the one on TV.” The TV is a portal too, but to what? We can easily believe it’s just a picture box for our entertainment. We laugh at sitcoms, are excited by sport and inseminated with desires by ads but we are discerning arbiters of content, we can decide which insurance or hair products to use, which programs to watch, it’s just a convenient entertainment pipe. It would surely be a flight of fancy to consider that we are looking into a soul of some sort, wouldn’t it? Many years ago my oldest friend wouldn’t have a TV because he didn’t want to be exposed to the matrix of intentions of program makers, which amounts to the same thing. He felt that unlike theatre, where the production is eye to eye with its audience every night, the makers of TV’s entertainment do their work behind closed doors, in offices, at meetings, free to toil and trouble, froth and bubble their concoctions under the influence of their own intents, more profit, more success, more control and manipulation of their audience. If you look deeply into the screen past the images and performers as I did those beautiful blue eyes you begin to see in many programs the manipulation of a darker, more sordid soul, a Svengali saying, “You will want what we have.” And children will say, “I want the one on TV.”

Words of Therapy.

For those amongst you who’re not knowledgeable about therapy I though I’d explain some technical terms, it being world ‘Boy do You need Help’ day.

1-     Congruence- believing what you think is true so you have every right to express it.

2-     Empathy- being attuned to someone so well you begin to know what they’re thinking.

3-     Unconditional Positive Regard- feeling the same warm glow of superiority that one gets with little children.

4-     Spontaneity- swearing when you feel like it.

5-     Obsessive Compulsive Disorder- stop wiping your arse while I’m talking to you.

6-     Cognition- what we do when we’re not at a football match.

7-     Self worth- what you don’t have when we lose because of your own goal.

8-     Oedipus Complex- Yes it’s true, you would shag anyone.

9-     Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow- a well earned snooze.

10-Passive aggressive- a term used by belligerent people when the other person won’t elevate a minor conflict into a fistfight.

11-Tourette’s syndrome- Have you ever thought of doing stand-up?

12-Person Centred- for therapists who desire approval

13-Gestalt- for therapists who don’t desire approval

14-Neuro Linguistic Programming- Approval not necessary, I’m just as dumb as you are.

Education Time Share.

So first time morning TV in years. Eighteen year olds oinked in to talk about uni education. “So under the new student loans system you will be paying back twice what you loaned, say £75,000.” One lad thought he’d pay it off in a year. “No it will take you twenty five years. Doesn’t that put you off?” “Well no because we value our education so much, it’s just the price we have to pay.” One dumpy girl wanted to be a Fashion buyer, the other a journalist. OMG this is like taking candy from a baby, it’s government sponsored time-share on a national scale! Sir Allen Sugar wouldn’t just say “You’re fired”, he’d leap over his desk, grab you by the throat and provide you with a need for dentistry. Uni education is like demanding £40,000 for a ten-year-old Vauxhall Viva, “but you can pay it back over fifteen years so no need to worry.” But isn’t that a bit expensive? “No, not when we’ve got a ten story forty acre showroom, a hundred tyre polishers, a two million government loan and a coffee machine to pay for.” But that Viva would be just the ticket; I only need a little runabout for the shops and stuff. “No sorry, if you value your means of transport that’s just the price you have to pay.” Well screw you, D&G Autos got a ’98 mini for £495. “Ah but we have the franchise on MOTs and they don’t.” You bastard! “I know.”

Rosa Parks v Audi Owner.

So knitwear owner Sarah Duncan parked her large Audi blocking the traffic in a busy Bath street. A passer by filmed it on his phone. She and her husband followed him for some fifteen minutes as he walked away. The video has gone viral. It seems because it takes little more than a finger exertion to press ‘share’ anything that captures the zeitgeist will spread like a forest fire in a munitions factory. It wasn’t the inconsiderate parking, which Audi drivers have an inane right to, but the harassment. It was, shall we say, Audi-esc. Where Mercedes are for wealthy has-beens, I’ve got one, and BMWs are for lads and drug dealers, Audis are for aspirational bullies. So the lady, lets call her Sarah, oh I already have done, and her husband, lets call him Dunkin, felt affronted by their inconsiderate Audi-ness being captured for, as it turns out, the world to see. In a wonderful example of transference these people accused the bystander of harassment whilst pursuing and haranguing him as he tried to walk away. This one sided conversation encapsulated the arrogant bullying, assumed entitlement and quite frankly the general lack of intelligence of the middle class better than any PhD dissertation. Their argument consisted of repeating the same phrases repeatedly by repeatedly repeating them, a gambit well known to the Conservative/Republican Parties. In fact this couple may be like those unsung catalytic whites that harangued Rosa Parks on the bus that day. It seems today’s heroes are more likely to be unknown iPhone users with the notoriety going to those they capture. But before you get too smug anyone who isn’t homeless in the UK or US is in the world’s middle class. Last night for example I happened to read an NRA handout on ‘keeping hold of what you’ve got.’ It suggested preparedness for catastrophic social breakdown, you know where rampant hoards of starving gun-toting hoodies break in to your home, which is pretty ironic considering it’s from the NRA. I mean what would you do when you’re down to your last stick of celery and Sainsburys is closed, forEver? Do you say, “My God we’re all starving! We must help each other to rebuild our society”, or buy a gun?

Lanzarote & War Rules

Well Lanzarote turned out to be like hiring a supercharged sunbed on Filey beach in early April. One makes the same emotional progress as a Crème Brule, first blowlamped then fridged, acquiring a crisp brown skin in the process. Like experiencing the warm weight of an exotic lover and the cold blasts of a nagging wife all at the same time; Mothermouse being of course the former. The rest was eating, drinking and Martmouse’s funny stories. Personally I’m not a humorous mouse preferring to look back over my personal history as a bleak but honourable learning process, definitely not the sort of jolly japes suitable for public entertainment. I am for example trying to light the last third of a roll-up and burning my nose as we type. It must be the way I tell them. When Martmouse joined forces with Jackmouse, a fellow footplate man during the days of steam japes came thick and fast. Sacks of spuds on the dead mans handle, afternoon shopping trips in a shunter, and explosive charges for warning oncoming trains of a breakdown thrown down shed stove chimneys to cover its occupants in soot. After fifteen minutes of these stories I became aware I was the only one really listening as each was using his off time lining up another ready for his next turn. I begin to think about masculinity. We do seem to carry on in the vein of an ancient spear throwing conflict. We throw one, dodge one, and then throw another. I think men fight wars under this basic law; either we die or throw another. Women don’t understand. We may have super sophisticated stuff to throw these days but the principle’s the same. There’s a TV program called Future Weapons where a hard bitten ex marine tests new guns that shoot round corners, pencil case sized automatics that fire 120 rounds a minute and artillery pieces that can obliterate a dozen eggs at 22 miles, and my favourite, a shell that blasts through a concrete wall then explodes inside the building to the dying bewilderment of all its occupants. And he does all this with the gleeful excitement of an eight year old with his first catapult. I mean I don’t have anything against ‘shells that blast through concrete walls then explode inside the building to the dying bewilderment of all its occupants’ so long as they’re not given to men with enemies.

But all these weapons are far too cumbersome and slow for female conflict. Female conflict is over while an SAS man is still assembling his Schmouser. (or is that a dog?) It revolves around the none life threatening use of verbals, nail files and scissors. They don’t know the ‘throw, dodge, and throw again’ rule, and see dying as pointless. Kick a man when he’s down and he goes further down but kick a woman when she’s down and she magics into a verbal sub machinegun post. I’m sorry guys, I know it’s unfair but women should always be appreciated; they don’t play by our rules and are the undisputed masters of none life threatening conflict. 

I seem to have drifted from Lanzarote.