2D Goes Live.

Read a weekend newspaper article on our ever-present screens, on compulsion, addiction and a lack of any convincing argument against their growing consumption of our time. TV provides entertainment, iPods music, iPads a myriad of social networks and multi-media information and iPhones pictures, texting and voice communication. We have the technology to enjoy, learn and connect like never before. Where parents have their suspicions the older generation like me appear jabbering luddites incapable of grasping the supposed advantages of this two dimensional technology. I’m not talking about computers here, I’m skilled in their uses in graphics, CAD design and engineering, publishing and music, each one requiring a long learning curve in their own specific and costly software. I’m talking of the generation of screens post computers that require little more than the ability to prod a screen and use a remote. Where learning a CAD program takes a three-week full time course to just get started the functionality of iScreens can be fingered into action almost immediately. Like Sparky’s Magic Piano, if you’re old enough to remember it, no effort is required to bring them into all singing all dancing life. But it’s that seductive easiness that brings its own perils because life is not that easy. The effect seems to be to install the belief, not that life is easy but there is a valid techno alternative, a sort of two-dimensional life that can provide an easy alternative to the more demanding enjoyment, learning and communication experiences of real life. Enjoyment can become the re-living of one’s ‘on screen’ experiences, one’s anecdotes the dialogue from favourite sitcoms rather than the pleasure and perils of actual doings. Learning similarly comes from ‘on screen’ facts. People can become a walking encyclopaedia of TV programs, celebrity lives, sports and sporting careers, which, though impressive as a feat of memory, has no real world application. The same encyclopaedic knowledge applied to horticulture might get you on the panel of Gardeners Question Time but as it’s not derived from years of direct experience it remains a bubble of disassociated facts and opinion that are no use to anyone. And finally if 80% of face-to-face communication is non-verbal a phone conversation is at best 20% and texting and tweeting must barely register. iScreens are not high tech information gateways to a bright new future but the sleek equivalents of a pre-schoolers activity centre. Studies have shown it takes around 4,000 hours to become skilled at an activity and 10,000 to achieve mastery. What does that say about an iScreen if one can master it in thirty minutes? That it’s just incredibly easy to use or that it’s not really a valid activity at all?

The Enigma Machine.

I’ve just read the scandal mongering connections between 55 Conservative MP and the private health sector. It seems the left wing press are spending all their time seeing ulterior motives behind the bonds of friendship and social concern that form the corner stones of our great society. It’s only right and proper that Conservative MPs act as shining exemplars of these bonds and our noble Christian traditions. Who for example, seeing a friend in need would not cross the road to help him, go that extra mile to see his needs met? Does he need a job, a contract, a little extra cash? Of course you’ll help, and in the sure knowledge he’ll do the same for you. And when the prosperity of our country depends on parliament and commerce working together it’s totally appropriate we have mutual concern for each other, especially as we frequently move back and forth between the two. I think the left simply don’t understand that we don’t know any poor people. In fact we need protection from them because they can be infected by weird and vicious ideas of inequality when we’re just the same as them. And being realistic what use would it be to give them a share tip or a lucrative contract when they couldn’t afford to act on it or a job they quite patently wouldn’t be able to do. And they’re hardly likely to be able to repay the favour anyway. But of course we look after them as best we can.

Paul sitting across the table from me shows me his ear. It’s hidden under clusters of scabs from some infection. He is taking antibiotics so he can’t drink, which means he’s saving the money he would normally spend on cider. His fingers chocolate brown from a thousand rollups are dipping into a full tobacco tin as he looks on the bright side and smiles, “at least I won’t have to be picking up tab ends this week.” He’s not going to get a share tip any time soon. He asks me if I have any tobacco as he is prone to do. I glance at his tin, smile and tell him to “fuck off.”

3-100,000.

The two bombs at the Boston marathon were despicable, a healthy happy event marred by a twisted mind that should be rightly condemned and punished. My guess is it’s someone with a grudge against his high school PE teacher rather than international terrorists; the bombs barely touched the nearby buildings. I remember I was ill when Baghdad was attacked, I watched the shock and awe from my bed, the night sky incessantly fireworked in red for hours. I’m juxtaposing these two with regard to the news coverage and how we feel about the dead and injured. For hours the news has shown the same clips of a runner falling, people being evacuated in wheelchairs and Obama’s moral pronouncements of such a thing happening on peaceful American soil. Similarly hours of live video followed the Baghdad skyline through the night. Not puffs of smoke from backpack bombs but the shuddering violence of high tech incendiaries a thousand times more damaging: And not two but countless. God only know what was happening on the ground that night. I think I can safely presume thousands were killed, tens of thousands injured and a million traumatised but personally I didn’t feel the dreadful emotion that should accompany that mass decimation of human kind. I saw it from afar as if it were the buildings being punished. In Boston they were people, the little boy who died was like a neighbour’s child. From the tenor and closeness of the coverage I did feel the emotion. Should there be a connect and disconnect in these two instances? Do not they bleed as we do? Haven’t they the right to feel a thousand times more resentment than we feel? Should we be surprised if they do?

Decadence Training.

At eleven I was a failure. I flunked my ‘eleven plus’ and went to a secondary modern school. By fourteen I had grasped something and became a success. I don’t think I thought in those terms and have no idea what that something was. It may have been falling in love with the landlady’s daughter on holiday at thirteen, cycling to Windsor and back, playing in a skiffle group or a hundred little incidentals, but somewhere along the line I found I could do stuff and it felt good. I’m mentioning this to explore, ‘what if I hadn’t?’ What if, as in the tale of Sisyphus, I had learnt that rolling a boulder up hill would only result in having to watch it roll back down and my efforts come to nothing? What if I’d embedded deep in my psyche that, rather than success, it was failure just around the corner waiting to meet me? These are truly frightening questions for me, but I’ll persist. I would expect failure, engender it, and almost welcome it as a constant if not good friend. My efforts would be half hearted, no reason to accelerate towards the inevitable car crash. I would in a sense be absent from intent and present in illusions of success just as Sisyphus might dream of some well placed dynamite whilst pushing his boulder. It would all be a process of dreaming not learning. And all the time my mother would be on my back wanting some return on her life’s investment. Not some trite currency but my achievement of life itself, bright eyed lusty life in a fair wind heading for the Azores. If she berated me I would blame her, if she supported me I would abuse her sanctuary, if she left me to drift I may or may not find some territory. If she encouraged me it would disgust me and if she believed in me I would disagree with that belief. But not just mothers, fathers, friends, siblings, teachers and employers would all meet this same no-win situation. In my case my father helped me learn, he infected me with his own enthusiasms and supported me in mine with his skills. I learnt I could be successful so I was. All this was prompted by a neighbour and her son but I’m finding it strangely relating to Thatcher and her Britain. She had that same matriarchal commitment; she must get it right as the first mother of this country. She knew what was best for us and recalcitrance was not an option. The good sons would be praised and the bad chastised. Maggie wasn’t a witch just a political mother trying to do her best, and our current reaction is as teenagers not wanting to be her children anymore. To do that we must learn to be successful on our own account.

Ding Dong.

Somehow the tone of the seven-hour service of remembrance in the House of Commons on Wednesday was in large part a snub to the life of Baroness Thatcher. Few talked with her fearless abrading conviction. There is something mesmerising about tyrannical self belief that leaves people befuddled yet touched by a leader who allows one to lose the necessity to think or assume any personal responsibility. It was a time when, the witch being dead, the ‘vegetables’ could choose for themselves but could only muster the remembrance of what she would have wanted. The dichotomy of the public’s reaction at this passing is between thinking and un-thinking, between those who rationally consider the plus and minuses of her achievements and those who continue to yearn for a matron’s firm hand. The grieving is for Britain’s most authoritarian leader and the jubilation is for the possibility of becoming free of it. The eulogies and semi-state funeral will polarise these opinions. What I don’t understand is the divide of empathy. How can I and as it happens the Queen be acutely aware of the plight of those who haven’t led such charmed lives while Ian Duncan Smith glibly says he could live off £53 a week? How can the poor be branded as ignorant, feckless no good scroungers? How can I and my two friends conversation last evening be berated as a sinister meeting of antisocial yobs? Thatcher was a bully and inaugurated a culture of bullying that exists to this day. Through name-calling, surveillance, disempowerment and, where necessary, brute force her legacy is so devoid of empathy as to be sociopathic. Undoubtedly a strong, formidable, unique woman but not a legacy to be proud of.

Football Blog.

Paolo Di Canio is a football manager. He was, wasn’t, is, isn’t or is lying about being or not being a fascist. There’s a simple test; just ask. A true fascist would never say he was one. He did so he isn’t. Then again he’s a football manager so a certain parochial fascistic tendency is de rigueur. Ask Alex Ferguson, he’d never say he was one. Fascism has been described as "a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism." Couldn’t put it better myself. Not good for Germany or Jews or currently North Korea as a form of national politics with guns and stuff but for eleven men and only a ball to inflict damage it has a certain appeal. But to proclaim oneself a fascist is the ultimate in naivety. Either one is intent on grabbing the political power of a nation for oneself, in which case telling everybody beforehand would be shooting oneself in the foot, or one is a follower of a fascist leader which is telling everybody I’m a stupid mindless moron. Far better, like Hitler and Boris Johnson, to act the incompetent fool who no one takes seriously until they feel a stabbing pain in their back. I’d imagine Di Canio is neither he just likes the idea of being in ultimate control of a team of lads playing football. I doubt he has secret intentions to invade Newcastle, except to perhaps grab Papiss Cisse in the summer transfer window. Fascism like racism and cannibalism is a black word, an anti that we can all agree on and that bonding ‘against’ someone or group is itself fascistic. Better to think; one’s brain isn’t in the jerking of one’s knees.