Bitch!

Scorpios Beach Hotel nestles peacefully between the tomato cannery and the transformer works with the oil-powered power station set back from the main beach road. For those interested in 90’s archaeology a little further on are the remains of disco night spot full of flaking paint and fraying concrete that must have opened and closed quicker than Springtime for Hitler. Across the wide windswept beach road, optimistically marked for three lines of coaches, a verge of white trunked trees leads to the beach formed by the ground up coking plant slag that Santorini is famed for, unlike Barnsley, and which appears to be 50% iron filings judging by the room key magnet’s ability to create an afro from it. Monolithos has one other hotel, two tavernas and a sparsely stocked mini market. The road to Kamari is as straight as the airport runway and barely 50 meters from it and bejewelled with glistening green Heineken emeralds. Kamari is much bigger and a wonderful place to view the rivets on aeroplane undercarriages. Its mile long beach front has countless variations of the same thing. Waiting in a bar for the hire car a brown and white dog sits by my hip for companionship as sax-twiddling jazz accompanies silent ski jumpers vying for length on the TV. The following morning we drive 300 yards and park by a fish taverna: so much for tourism. The beach is empty. There is nothing here that hasn’t been here for millennia. In the taverna there’s a dog that one might role against a door to stop draughts, a man whose daily inert meditation has done little to enlighten and a woman trapped by some historical circumstance, who appears from the kitchen like a beaten dog but bursts into smiling gratitude with the smallest kindness. This place as in every place has its stories but their sparsity tells them as clearly as any novel. I like places where I can count the number of things with the fingers of a hand and innumerable things that don’t lend themselves to counting. Two twin tweedle dumpsters in a permanent state of readiness hang their lids akimbo in the dirt by the metalled surface watching the dust rise and fall from cars. On the beach appear a handful of people and dogs dancing morris with leads. They belong to a dog and donkey sanctuary up a path at the back housing Santorini’s stray dog problem. Where possible they export them to tourists befuddled by sentiment I righteously conclude to Germany and the UK. The following day late in the afternoon she appeared. Medium sized, feathered tail, glossy figured mahogany, all friendly and eager. She had decided we were her mother and father and she would never leave us. I was no longer righteous; I was loved, as was Mothermouse. She walked with us home into the hotel passed the swimming pool, up the steps and into our room. It was a prodigal homecoming commemorated by half a pork pie I’d stashed for the journey. This was our dog and she would fit right in with our four cats back home. We had a nap and she licked and squiggled in bed beside us and we were besotted. We took her for a walk on a length of flex in the evening and she slept on the floor content. In the morning we were greeted and Mothermouse gave her a slice of yesterday’s pizza. She trotted down the steps, over the wall and we never saw her again. The bitch! I can tell you we felt used. We looked, we walked up to the dog and donkey sanctuary and took two for a walk on the beach like the other tourists befuddled by sentiment but it wasn’t the same. It was empty somehow. And now back home perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to take her home with us but I can still see her lying by me on her back in bed legs spread, her warm body next to mine panting as she licked my ear and wagged her tail. No she wasn’t a bitch, just a little likeable lesson in love, and we all need that. As for Fira and Iuo they’re very pretty but best viewed by Kodak at home in retrospect. Too many stories, too little love. 

The American Dream.

‘The Interpretations of Murder’ is a great fictional page-turner based on the documented evidence of Freud and Jung’s visit to America in 1906. The growth of psychoanalysis since then is now history as is the establishment of the American dream. In this TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory.html Ms Loftus looks at false memory and concludes they are easily implanted both purposely and carelessly. It appears we do not have a memory as such but a state of current processing that favours certain thoughts that we give credibility to as memory, a subject in its own right. But here it’s Freud and his creation of the American dream. An unintended consequence for sure but he opened up the Pandora’s box of the unconscious, the true source of our motivations. In America there grew up an industry of plundering our unconscious either for profit or therapy. As such we became conscious of our unconscious or at least we became conscious of other people’s unconscious. This is the seed of the dream, the capacity to doublethink as George Orwell put it. Today we know we buy a car on power and speed, the lust behind glamour or the constituents of good box office and happily play the game as if to not do so would show us up as naive. And, and this is where false memory comes into it, all these ‘wholesome desires’ for the next iPad or epic film are seeded by the very advertising that we ‘know’ knows us better than our own pathetic attempts to know ourselves. We have capitulated to the dream, become mesmerised by a fabrication that both economically and cognitively has won power over us. No one is thinking anymore lest we show ourselves as simpletons. On the plane yesterday I read in the glossy travel mag of the brilliant new eateries in Hackney whilst eating a hot bacon baguette worthy of zero stars. It appeared to make sense to me that the grotty place where I used to live is now a hip centre of gastronomy and the purveyor of the grotty bacon baguette had credence to direct me towards good food. We are not inured to the quackery of glossy words and pictures; we accept them as part of our dreamscape. Somewhere secretly we hope the false memories they’ve implanted are reality whilst knowing they aren’t. So thanks Freud, thanks a lot. 

Spoon Safety.

The gov says we need to innovate, think outside the box, to beat the recession, which, having taught this generation to tick inside the box isn’t likely to happen any time soon. But here is a simple route to fame and fortune.

There are hundreds of dangerous items and situations we all encounter daily. All sorts of injuries and deaths can be caused by incorrect use of, for example, spoons. It is no laughing matter if someone dear to you finds themselves in A&E with a spoon in their eye, especially a particularly cherished toddler. This must never be allowed to happen again, so the first step in the process is to take on the vital task of creating social awareness if this life threatening implement. In your spare time create a web site named SITE.com dedicated to publicising the epidemic of ‘Spoon In The Eye’ injuries and its media suppression by the heartless cutlery-manufacturing lobby. Once the risks are fully appreciated by the public one can begin the second stage. One begins to lobby the government for spoon laws and compulsory spoon education. This should be pretty straightforward as government could never be seen to disregard the safety of our children. One has now made oneself the central expert in the field of spoon safety and the gov’s obvious choice to deliver both the education and the necessary statutory examinations. One is now set to reap the rewards. One can charge for providing the special courses, sitting the exam, marking it and receiving the qualification. One can receive fees from government for administration, database maintenance etc, annual fees for maintaining each individual’s qualification and from cutlery manufacturers for advice regarding future spoon safety. After a few years one can sell your successful NGO company to G4S for a large sum and retire, happy in the knowledge one has done a great social service. With the huge number of implements and situations we all need to be made fearful of we begin to see the endless potential in this approach to beating the recession. Lets all make fear the new growth industry. 

Teachers.

A personal view. I began school in 1948, O Levels in 1959, A Levels in 1961. When I visited a local private school in ~1995 it surprised me how similar it was to my old Secondary Modern back then. In the fifties there was hardly any TV, our only visual entertainment was kids Saturday morning cinema for 2 hours. The rest of the week out of school I went fishing, made balsa wood aeroplanes, raced my bike through the trees of the local parkland, practiced with our skiffle group and went to the local youth club. In lessons we accepted the authority of the teacher because ‘that’s how it was.’ We pushed the boundaries but they were there clearly defined but largely unspoken. Every year our reports showed subject marks and position in class, and in the final year were given responsibility and more freedom. Though we never thought about it we implicitly considered ourselves embryonic compared with the adult teachers and magisterial headmaster. We knew we were there as learners.

There have been many changes since then and my generation caused most of them. There has been a new reverence for youth and concomitant scorn for ‘past it’ adults. There has been the rise of vacuous celebrity and an enormous rise in visual entertainment from our two hours a week to around thirty with TV and even more with computers. There has been a rise in a ‘be yourself’ philosophy and ‘don’t care what people think.’ There has been a rise in centralised government testing and teacher bashing with the inference that poor student learning is solely the result of poor teaching. All these things militate against teachers and the classroom situation. The teacher is a pathetic has-been who isn’t even good entertainment and if students don’t learn it’s not their fault, and if anyone says anything they can say, “I don’t care what you think, I’m just being myself.”  Teachers are caught between government bashing, brainwashed students, self-involved parents and their own need for income to take on the responsibility for ‘learning’ when their responsibility is to teach. The responsibility ‘to learn’ which I encountered at around the age of eight now seems to begin at fifteen or later. The result is stressed over-worked teachers trying to do the impossible and poor learning outcomes. And perhaps even more importantly a generation that have missed out on the fun, satisfaction and rewards of learning and being skilful. The government’s response to the recent report to begin formal lesson at six or seven as ‘misguided’ is lamentable. Those two or three pre formal school years are absolutely necessary to lay the rules of engagement, that learning is play, it’s ‘what I want to do’, it’s my task and the teachers will help me achieve it. Gove must have had a terrible education that only taught him to respond, not think!   

The Ale House.

Open Mic night at The Ale House was a cornucopia. It was quite a test of my belief that ‘everything will be alright’, but it was. Two hours to fill with so many unknowns; who will turn up, who will play, who will leave and who will enjoy, all the time leaving everyone short of my attention yet absorbed in the myriad of life stories brought and somehow juggling with their energies, and by taking on the focal role being allowed to swim in it all. I’m struck by the importance of the role yet my desire to be unimportant as a sort of invisible conjurer. That’s not modesty; it’s just allowing the garden to grow unfettered, each flower in its own way. This is the payment plus a few free beers. And today a 90 minute film on money, both frightening and liberating in this same way. Money as we know it is in decay. Money as a ‘promissory note’ is an IOU and leads back to a debt somewhere along the line. When a government prints money it is creating debt, £1 for £1 of debt, and the interest on our accumulating debt requires GDP growth to cover it. Over the years more money has been created until today the world is ~$70 trillion in debt, but to who? Nobody, it’s just that that’s the amount of promissory notes that have been issued. Looked at this way money seems like a giant ponszi scheme, a ponzi scheme that the financial markets have learnt to rig so they hold all the promissory notes leaving the rest of us with the debt. And over those years money has become our fundamental form of valuing things. That’s where The Ale House comes in. There was no payment just an exchange of energy, of gifts and talents. This is the frightening and liberating prospect, how to turn this corner in human valuation with the minimum of hardship. That aside we had a good night and felt well rewarded for it. 

Diversity.

So was it evil Assad, a false flag op by Al Qaeda or a cock-up with chemical weapons supplied by Saudi Arabia with instructions by Ikea? Who knows. For me a PBS documentary nails it. In 300BC the Persians, led by their omnipotent God encrusted leader, invaded the Athenian meritocracy. This culture clash of a democracy against a ruthless despot-lead hoard is still being played out today. The Middle East has a long history of despotic rulers; it’s in their culture to be restrained by some ultimate authority. Without it all hell breaks loose in emotional feuds between minorities of every description. It’s a viable form of governing a people caught up in the dramas of grief and victory. But the ideas of freedom and democracy add a spark to this combustive mixture. You can’t take the lid off a pressure cooker without getting jam roly-poly all over the ceiling. Even Disneyland Dubai under its own despotic leader is a foretaste of a dystopian dream where borrowed finance uses slave labour to build what looks like utopia but has only a weeks water reserves and a sea full of excrement. From this to Russell Brand who has tasted all our western ‘benefits’, often to excess, and found them fascicle, and become one of the few honest voices on the planet. And then to totally overwhelm my concepts of diversity there’s, ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’, thanks to Bethmouse. Honey Boo Boo is a six-year-old American redneck with her father who says, “Aar lerv ma faimly”, her mother whose pronunciation of English requires subtitles and her two sisters. They is proud of raiding dumpsters for household appliances and prove not only that the American diet will add twenty pounds for every year of your life but that not having a TV gives a lot of time to, “harv furn.” They is as content as a family of baboons and make it a strangely attractive proposition. They ain’t intelligent, successful, skilful or motivated to do anything more than scratch, laugh and struggle with their indigestion. So here’s a question. Do you fight to the death for what you believe, introspect to be become the best you can be or just, “harv furn”? It’s not easy. 

Len McCluskey.

Len McCluskey says we’re ‘living in interesting times,’ and we know what that means. Milliband’s post Falkirk initiative to distance his pre-owned Labour party from Unite is, well, interesting. By biting the hand of automatic subscriptions to show Labour is free of union influence he also breaks free their autonomous power, presumably on the assumption they don’t have much left. Len though seems to relish the idea. The only problem is unions represent workers and workers are the labour force and Labour is the name of the Labour party. What’s coming is the last stage in a major political realignment that started over fifty years ago. Conservatism moved with the change from individual factory owners, the original capitalists, to corporate and financial ownership of industry. Today workers work for and every person purchases indirectly from what the finance industry provides. Where mill owner had a connection with their workers and customers the finance industry might as well be on a different planet. In the traditional left/right tug of war the right has subtly moved ground and left the left pulling in the wrong direction. The new tug is between all ordinary people and faceless corporate finance with its ad fuelled offers to provide everyone’s selfish dream DFS sofa that constituted the new seemingly unchallengeable political middle ground. Labour merely adjusted to present its own version of it. Both parties, as well as struggling to look different, could not fathom how to curb the new destabilising power of finance. Len, I think, is relishing a new left that correctly defines its opposition and leaving the Labour Party to sink in its middle ground. His plans for Unite are not merely for the work force but for the representation and empowerment of all the people against the supposedly unstoppable forces of finance. Will he draw back the curtain to reveal The Wizard of Oz or will we go the way of other indigenous peoples as marginalized support workers or off the radar entirely?  Read about Dubai here  http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

A Moments Thought.

We walked from Wormhill into the dale and up the other side. We stopped to practice Howler Monkey and later for a drink of water. Howler Monkey is fairly simple; put your head back, make a big ‘O’ with your mouth and push out a series of loud open throated ‘ooohs’ sufficient to ward off any potential aggressor. It’s not a howl like a wolf or a grunt; it’s a sort of belly sound. Anyway the upshot is a wonderful feeling of togetherness quite the antithesis of sitting round a pub table with a group of friends piddling about on their mobile phones. If you want to bond with family or a group there’s nothing better than a spot of Howler Monkey though in some circles it can be misinterpreted as insanity. We walk on and Mothermouse loses her book of walks we’re following. These, she told me later were her thoughts in the moments that followed. ‘Bugger I’ve lost the book. It must have fallen out of my pocket down the hill. No! How far down the hill? And trekking back up it! Why is he looking at me like that all smug? He must have picked it up and not told me. Must have it behind his back or somewhere. He’s still not saying, look, what’s he doing now waving his hand about and smiling, bastard, that’s no help at all.’ “What?” she says eventually as I continue pointing. “It’s in your other hand.” We continue and I, in mock grump, complain about the road going left when the book says, ‘next right’, and she, no doubt still smarting, tells me she is not appreciating my happy banter and to shut up! On the next climb out of the dale a gate, neater than any pickpocket, snatches her camera out of its holster and leaves it hanging on the bolt bit. We stand there amazed at its inanimate impudence. I save the day again. Honestly on days like this it’s wonderful being me. We get back to Wormhill and go home via an ice cream.