Pride.

Funny how watching ‘Pride’, the film about lesbians and gays supporting the miners’ strike in the mid 80’s, boosts your metabolism. It’s like adding a dose of mycorrhizal fungi to your root system. It caused Mothermouse to reminisce a march where High Gate Girls School sang, “Maggy Thatcher walks on water; everybody knows that dog shit floats”, and happy days teaching in London. Much has changed since then. And before that watching the Passchendaele Ceremony that followed a similar if more dreadful change. But something has been laid to waste in those thirty years since the miners strike. Could it be Thatcher’s small town shopkeeper’s distorted grasp on the economics of happiness? ‘We don’t make anything here, we just make a profit.’ Or our ‘special relationship’ with America that, as experienced by various European psychologists and me personally, is a fear filled place, where underneath its confident exterior it’s a high wire act needing protection by guns, greed and a host of prudish insecurities. Or more lately by the all consuming binary connectivity of computers? It’s frightening when pointed out that all the connectivity industry demands of us to fuel its own profitability is our endless attention. It doesn’t care if it’s life enhancing only that we keep clicking. And as a result a reduction in skills and creativity, values replaced by sales, pleasure reduced to panic and intent dissipated in abstraction. It may be comfortably soporific but it’s not what the Tommys died for. They had Pride.