Our Haddon Hall Trip.

Yesterday Mothermouse and I visited Haddon Hall and artisan fair. The Hall is a 13^th, 14^th, 15^th and 16^th century building with one wall dating back to 1100 and elevated gardens some thirty meters above a lovely meandering river. What isn’t meter thick stone walls is 2½ inch oak doors and high leaded windows. This would become important later. Between hot sun and heavy rain we wandered the tented artisans and then the hall itself. Dates are one thing but staring at a 3 inch solid oak worktop worn clean through by 16 generations of servants brings a richer meaning. We wander through the banqueting hall and oak panelled galleries with massive hanging tapestries and end up walking through a heavy oak door into the simple elegant gardens. Mothermouse spotted a small summerhouse stacked with chairs and as it was raining we decided on a rollup in said building on said chairs. We continued down to the lower garden looking for the exit. As no solid oak doors were open we wandered back to the one we came out of. This was also shut. Slowly our minds assembled the facts, an impregnable building on the one hand and a 30 meter shear drop on the other and the staff packing up ready to go home. In a flash Mothermouse was on her mobile Googling Haddon Hall’s phone number. She explains we’re in the garden and, yes with the house on our right, good, and gone down the steps, OK, and we’re standing by the pond. “We don’t have a pond.” It transpired Mouthermouse had phoned Haddon Hall Care Home. Back to Google. Man answers, “Lucky we answered it” in a jocular if somewhat irked tone suggesting he’d already got his coat on and it was a long walk back through the banqueting hall, long oak panelled galleries etc. He opened a door and quizzed us on what exactly were we doing in the summerhouse for so long, and probably thinking we might well be escapees from the similarly named care home. Even now, a day later, I don’t know what we’d have done if he hadn’t answered. I know smoking is bad for you but I’d never considered dieing of exposure in the back garden of centuries old castle. 

Why the West is Failing.

Must listen to BBC R4 8pm tonight. Imagine an overbearing parent who, through numerous prods and pokes, convinced you you wanted, at age eleven, a stamp collecting set when you really wanted a bike. He was proud of his achievement because he liked philately and happened to have a spare stamp collecting set in a drawer and felt bikes were horrible oily mechanical things. Convinced, you half-heartedly stuck down penny purples and made planes from the empty pages. The current truly rampant manipulative use of social media is such a parent. Facebook et al are fundamentally conduits for the act of being overbearing. “You don’t really want that, you want this.” Like the old game where two people interleave hands and repeatedly pull out the bottom one and place it on top. That’ll make more sense if you do it saying the phrase. Western governments have institutionalised being overbearing, deciding what people want and foisting it on them. It’s now a fundamental part of our social fabric, and like that old hand game we’re going nowhere, achieving nothing of value and giving out stamp collecting sets to people who make paper planes out of them. That visceral motivation you would have got from a bike is missing and we’re all just going through the motions working ever harder towards objectives as nebulous as, well Brexit. Have now listened to above program recounting Oswald Spengler’s 1918 prophecy, the fall into decadence of every empire in history. Unfortunately it does seem inevitable. Initially a society has common youthful energy. In time it displaces that common energy with individual fragmentary comfort. In so doing it separates into those who acquire ever-greater comfort and those who don’t. Greater comfort assumes the greater increasingly disassociated power that separates the fabric of common energy. That fabric becomes weak and divisive, its energy consumed in internal nonsense. It can’t compete with other’s common youthful energy. It becomes insular, dictatorial, seeing its only salvation in isolation. It becomes that overbearing parent suppressing its youth, its only chance of a comfortable old age and a fresh start. 

Sympathy for Trump.

OK we went on Sheffield’s ‘Fuck-off Trump’ march on Friday but the man’s had a hard life. When I was five in bliss on our landing riding my new scooter he probably got cufflinks befitting the son of a multi millionaire. When I was twelve adventuring on my second hand bike he was probably riding his ranch on a top-notch pony. At fourteen, I contemplatively fishing, he hunting dear triumphantly. At sixteen me struggling with self-image and girls and he having his pick of the most beautiful, I weak and spindly, he strong enough to beat up any guy. At twenty-one his father gave him a million dollars to make is fortune and my dad wished me luck. All in all we learnt different things. He could have what he wanted and could acquire the best, and I had to work, learn and struggle with old moto-crossers, people and myself. He was educated by privilege and I by Mr Green at my secondary modern. I’m not romanticising the nobility of struggle rather its potential for growth, fulfilment and the pure pleasure of it. I’m not enviously bitching about Trump’s silver spoon wealth rather the paucity of his education by privilege. How could he grow when pre-given everything? Where is the pleasure in not attaining it? How can you feel fulfilment when you can just grab the pussy of existence? He was born on a bleak mountaintop where only ego, needing nothing but itself, can survive. And the rest of us, born much lower in uncertain yet fertile valleys, have the potential to flower. No Trump has had the worst of it by far but still doing his best to achieve worthless trophies and bully fortune to his uneducated will. He might still be, albeit unconsciously, trying to find out what the rest of us know, how to struggle with insecurity, exams, overdrafts, real relationships and true fulfilment, and the pleasure in achieving them.  

Reading for the Sake of Nothing.

We all have internal dialogue. At best we use it to formulate solutions, do I go here or there for a holiday, or worse to endlessly pursue imponderables, or even worse to emote over ourselves and/or others. Social media externalises this pursuit. It provides a vast ocean of opinion to swim in. Someone loves Jeremy Kyle someone else hates him. She said this, he aid that. He’s doing this, she’s doing that in an endless stream of fruitless stimulus, fruitless because opinion is the inverse of education. It’s how someone feels about the third law of thermodynamics. How do I feel about the third law of thermodynamics? What the fuck is the third law of thermodynamics? Why don’t people ever talk about the other two? Well the first two are simpler. Yes but they’re still important, aren’t they? Yes but is the third breakable. Breakable? Does it impose a false limitation? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. No because you don’t have the education dumb ass. So opinion is a great way of building a house on quicksand: Easy but a waste of time. Personally I’d rather spend an evening with a calculator than a person full of opinions, which are essentially the real fake news. I’ve heard Hitler is still alive and living in the Philippians. Really. And 9/11 was done by devilishly cleaver Islamic terrorists. Really! Not by the US and the owner of the twin towers? Oh god no. Excuse me if I get my calculator out. Social media might have been fed by misleading Russian or otherwise fake information but the real damage to our society is its capacity to opinion-ise our state of mind. Once we’re opinion-ised we can be fed any garbage the movers want. So take it easy, just keep scrolling down, the page is endless.