The 3rd Vatican Council.

Well the Pope’s stirring it. The third Vatican Council is like thinking stuff! Didn’t Catholics use to be died in the wool none thinkers, like a rule’s a rule and ever more shall be so? Well not now. “Through humility, soul searching, and prayerful contemplation we have gained a new understanding of certain dogmas.” Lady bishops and even Pope are now a possibility. All religions are now accepted as equally ‘true’. The Bible is great but “some passages are outdated. Some even call for intolerance or judgement.” Call me cynical but all this sounds like Conservative Party policy after consulting a few focus groups. If Catholicism’s truth is love and tolerance how can Islam’s numerous calls for the dismemberment of none Muslim infidels be also true? That’s the trouble with starting to think, you’re not very good at it to begin with. And then Pope Francis spent an hour haranguing racists and governments limiting migration calling them the “ultimate evil in the world”, and “a racist casts aside his humanity to become a beast, a demon! He is the embodiment and personification of evil, a Satan! ….We will consider excommunication for those whose souls willingly dwell in the darkness and evil of intolerance and racism.” Not much love and tolerance there. They seem to have jumped from the frying pan of dogma straight into the fire of teenage self-righteousness where love and tolerance are exclusively reserved for those of a similar opinion and intolerance is the righteous and appropriate response towards those who think differently. I’m beginning to agree with Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria who asked, “what do we stand for if we declare that truth is relative? On the contrary, truth exists independently of our personal feelings. All of this talk of love and tolerance is hollow if we have no identity of our own, if we stand for nothing.” In his country, “under Islamic Sharia law Catholics are no longer free to practice their faith publicly”, adding, “Is it racist to desire to preserve one’s own culture and a future for your people and your children? Have white people gone stupid today?” So Mr Pope welcome to moral complexity. It’s not easy is it. 

Strictly.

Strictly’s finished and Abby Clancy is a goddess but what’s in there to learn? Well I for one am a lumpen flaccid automaton devoid of elegance, and with the dress sense of a pigeon. I live in a world where my brain orders movement as if my body is a waiter serving pottage. My protestant work ethic has reduced it to the mechanics of doing. I’m a bird tethered in a guinea pig wheel trudging ever on to’rd a dangling seed. Like a Dodo I watch Strictly and somewhere deep inside I seem to remember that I can fly. Not elegance prescribed by some android etiquette but the elegance of responding to air, to my natural substance. Under my pigeon grey I see exotic plumage, a rainbow fan of glittering feathers as I beam at the memory I can’t recall. And the shapes and tactility of genders writ large, female grace to male strength, feminine strength to masculine fragility, in a flurry of twirls and lifts. Limbs moving to the elegance of wings, necks to the grace of swans and hips to the beat of eons, all held in the long lost memory of our bodies. How have we been reduced to this plod? And the contestants reawakened beam and stroke, kiss and hold and tingle, not for the scores but the gift, not for the graft but the opportunity given. An opportunity within our own gift should we have the courage to take it. This isn’t ballroom; this is Strictly, strictly as in the demands of something necessary to avoid the flabby trudge along the passage of time.

The Hacker’s Tale.

Jason had always been a wiz at computers from his love of logic and mathematics. People used to call him a binary poet for his ability to create new meanings out of code and data. Though he could hack any system he only used it to get information, he had no malicious intent. He worked on the flocking of birds, how by a few simple rules held by each individual he could predict the movements of a thousand allowing them to fly with less effort and safe from predators. As a result he predicted the gusting of wind as each atom of air ‘flew’ by similar rules. From there he began to work on human conflict as a similar complex system. He noted the parameters, their interrelationships and feedback systems and wrote a program to model their progress from the first aggressive act to the last. He tested it out on historical battles and wars and its prediction always tallied with the well documented results. He could predict their length, numbers killed, the effect on each side on their economy, standard of living, even residual attitudes. Historians not normally interested in esoteric mathematics declared it an amazing achievement. Governments and the military welcomed it as a means of predicting the armaments and men needed to win future battles. Industry could use it to organise production. Everyone welcomed it in their own way. Welcomed it that is until a new conflict appeared on the horizon. Jason gathered the information and let the program run. The results appeared and there on the printout were the years, the deaths, the cost and the winner. Attitudes began to change. ‘It would be different this time. How could software predict the result? It was a just fight that needed to be won.’After three conflicts had been accurately predicted the nay Sayers lost all credibility. As the forth loomed and the years, the deaths, the cost and the winner were printed out, what to do? The losers didn’t want to fight just so they could lose and the winners didn’t want to fight at such a cost when they would inevitably win anyway. The game of winners and losers had been broken and a compromise was found to the mutual benefit of both. Jason was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which, as it happens, was the very last one.

Mandela's Word.

In a TED Talk a South African, son of a white safari owner and who met Nelson Mandela as a boy, eulogised also over an employee born under a tree and brought up in the bush. This employee could turn his hand to anything which, considering his simple upbringing, the guy found amazing. He was also ‘pathologically helpful.’ The guy used this employee as an example of ‘ubuntu’ an African word meaning; “I am because of you”, but that I know as a version of the Linux open source operating system. So how did this employee who didn’t know the meaning of the word school learn so many skills? Could it be because of ubuntu? It feels an almost perverse concept when we’re used to thinking in terms of self-expression, self worth, success, celebrity and hierarchical power that our schools, commerce and politics are structured on. But ubuntu turns them on their head. It suggests a state of being where our very existence is predicated on being in an equal relationship with everything we encounter. Imagine then the employee’s reaction to a broken down truck. He knows nothing of mechanics but will ‘see’ what’s in front of him in a spirit of curious helpfulness. He is both the servant of the truck and its master mastering the fault and serving the truck. He will enjoy his personal achievement and the achievement of the truck in equal measure. He will learn ‘because of the truck’ and be grateful to it. Personal progress, self-expression and self worth will result from the experience but it will not have been his goal, he will have served the truck not bettered it. He will not in his ubuntu relationship with the world feel a jot elevated or more important.

Ububtu shows the disaster that is our education system. In almost every respect it is the reverse. I know precious few people who approach life in this ubuntu way but those that do are immensely capable, knowledgeable and inevitably successful. 

Visions.

Been reading about Black Elk’s amazing vision when he was twelve. He was a Lakota Indian and during a fever was taken by two lightning warriors to meet the grandfathers who showed him amazing visions of the future of his people and bestowed on him the power to lead them. He became a medicine man and played a large part in bringing peace between the Indian nations, travelled to England and met Queen Victoria and died around 1950. His account of this vision would make a CGI blockbuster any day of the week. I would like to add that as a teenager I also had a dream of some significance. I was lying on my back and from the sky came an enormous stone tablet. As it drifted down towards me I could see it had writing chiselled into it but I couldn’t make it out. As it came closer I became excited because it obviously had a message of great importance, the meaning of life, my future or what I was here to do. As it came almost close enough to read it drifted back into the heavens. I remember waking up very disappointed. I’d come so close to some revelation that would have set me apart as one of the chosen ones and perhaps told me of my great role in life. But it was not to be. A little later I realised I had in fact received a message even though I couldn’t read it, that, “You’re just going to have to fucking sort it out yourself.” I mean on the one hand that’s a bit of a slap in the face from those above but on the other maybe they just trusted me to get on with it. Either way it’s made life a lot more interesting. 

Contracting out.

I’m reminded of my time in a drawing office. The job I was designing needed graphics doing. Tom said he could do it in his spare time at home. The manager took against this offer and employed a graphics agency to do it, a shame because Tom knew the project better than any agency artist. So we briefed the agency guy, he went away and he returned some weeks later with their efforts. They were great, we were pleased and the manager proudly pointed out, “See, if you want a good job you need to go to the professionals.” We agreed. We also noted that the style of the graphics was strangely similar to Toms’. Nothing was said but we all knew. Tom got paid a better rate for his time, the agency added a fair percentage so it cost three times as much and took a fair bit longer to deliver. You only have to consider the cost of contracting out you evening’s washing up. You ring Washingup-R-Us Inc. They send a washer upper round and you pay for time, travel, agency staff, phone calls, paperwork, petrol etc and it’ll cost around £40 for 15 minutes work. That’s £280 a week! So you shop around for a cheaper quote. One comes in at £199. This agency takes the same cut but doesn’t pay its cleaners travel time, sick or holiday pay and only pays them for 10 minutes per job. You’re over charged, the workers are over worked and the MD of WrU drives an Audi. And the washing up isn’t great either. But then it’s a lot easier than doing it yourself and it somehow feels sort of classy to have a professional come and do your washing up, and if you were the manager it’s not your money anyway. So there you have contracting out in a nutshell. As a manager it’s easier than organising it yourself, you have the kudos of dealing with all the nice manager types from the agency, you don’t have to care about the hoypoloy workers and you’ve someone to blame if it all goes tits-up. And it’s not you money anyway or your washing up. Cost saving’s got nothing to do with it. 

To Sleep.

On this November night two or three days after the full moon he lay on the bed, covered himself with the cold duvet and set about getting warm. Though the moonlight was bright when he closed his eyes he could see only darkness. Perhaps because he had absented himself so abruptly from the warm silver light the darkness seemed somehow perfect darkness. He began to muse. It became no longer the darkness of closed eyes in a warming bed but the darkness of space. He looked out into it as might an astronaut whose broken tether has set him adrift alone in the depths of space still warm, breathing, but he was not at all beset by the fear of that situation. He looked at the black infinity from the comfort of his suit. How far was he seeing? He even wondered if there was such a thing as the distances he’d left behind. And then as if by some magic he had no suit, he was at home, a natural being in its element swimming as do fish in the sea, supplied of all his needs by this element of space. The darkness swaddled him, wrapped him in the strange safety of a perfect matching ambience. Though there was nothing to see, no sound or touch he was not alone. In this infinity of dark nothingness he did not feel alone for there was no other that he might be with or separate from. Fast or slow, here or there had no relevance, he just was. And then he wasn’t. Gone was the body being, the arms, torso and dangling useless legs. From this point that he possessed as observer, he was an observer of nothingness by a being of nothingness from this position of anywhere and nowhere. From this state of dwindling existence he began to meld inexorably into what he had so far only seen. He became the space, the darkness and though he persisted he also became part of the nothingness. And so, pleased with his nights journey, he drifted off to sleep. 

A Tale.

In 2014 the grapes of the Marne Valley underwent a subtle change.  Hautvillers Benedictine Abby, the ancestral home of Dom Perignon, is in the heart of this Champagne region. It would be a good year, a great vintage; everyone was excited. Richard Geoffroy, Chef de Cave and creator of Dom Perignon’s finest vintages studied the slightest bloom on the grapes that would go unnoticed by most and remembered. This had happened twice before, both times before he was born, but there were accounts in the Abby’s registers. There had been accounts elsewhere in France of bread baked with a certain local flour that had caused the same effect. Geoffroy was not as excited as everyone else. Even today scientists can only guess why a whole village in a certain week of a certain year went crazy. Something in the process of growing and baking appeared to produce a natural hallucinogen, a form of LSD. It couldn’t be proved but that’s what the evidence seemed to suggest. Geoffroy alone had read the Abby’s records, he alone surmised what might happen, but the harvest was good, the grapes were gathered, an excellent vintage forecast and a large profit estimated. When Geoffroy said they should not produce wine that year he was rudely overruled as succumbing to some old wives tale. Production went ahead. Sample tastings pronounced the wine excellent and, being tasted only in small sips, proved to have no ill effects. The bottles were left to mature and a launch date announced. Demand was high as expectations grew for this magnificent vintage and on the due date it was shipped all over the world immediately. The complete stock of 2014 Dom Perignon sold out in a week. What happened next was only foreseen by one man. Needless to say Dom Perignon champagne is only drunk by the elite, the wealthiest and most powerful, leaders in politics, industry, advertising and the media, and needless to say they didn’t just take a sip. 

Tim Doesn’t Give.

Today a little cartoon with message, “Most people want to be liked and accepted…. but Tim doesn’t give a shit”, with Tim drifting up and away under a bunch of red balloons giving the finger to a cluster of onlookers. It’s a glorious example of an unconscious, un-said meaning. The impression is of Tim, floating above the crowd, off to some great adventure, free and bold as his own person. Where he is active (with the finger) the group is earth bound, mute, passive and co-dependant. This little snapshot in Tim’s life shows the wonderful feeling of liberation from ‘not giving a shit.’ It sells the virtues of not giving a shit, but linguistically it deletes any negatives that might get in the way. One doesn’t imagine the onlookers saying, “OK if that’s how you feel, fuck off” because they’re passive. One doesn’t consider that Tim’s great adventure might come unstuck and he’d need some help, or him drifting down to new groups and giving them the finger to or them as an active group giving it to him. No, in this one precise moment everything will be great for Tim; and it’s such a nice name. I’m sure we all contort our own life to suite others and that contortion is best resisted, not by not giving a shit but the reverse, by engagement, not by insularity or arrogance but being with. OK it’s funny but a great example of the deletions and equivalences created to make us think in a certain way, make the obvious conclusion. It’s how we’re sold Coke, fast foods etc etc, and it works. On a therapy course a guy was asked to draw a picture of his special relationship with God. He drew a circle of light from above with him in it and everyone else outside. He had a profound realisation that his ‘special relationship’ was the source of his feelings of isolation. Tim, with is special relationship with himself, reminded me of this moment, a moment that changed the guy’s life for the better. 

R U a Happy Meal?

I’ve heard a lot about 2012 being the end of the Mayan calendar and it heralding the start of a new phase in humanity, mostly from people dealing with it on an introspective level. But I’m also aware of people out there working for this change. Just this morning a report from a Catholic conference about business: a strange mix, Catholics, business and Mayan culture, but I guess that’s how progress swirls. Their question, does business serve those it touches? Take McDonalds for example. It doesn’t serve its employees by paying them poorly or its customers by feeding them poorly. It provides millions with poverty and obesity in equal measure. How can that company be so profitable when one that pays reasonably and provides good food struggles to survive? The knee-jerk answer is supposedly efficiency; the efficiency of scale provides good value, but how can something that serves everyone so poorly be considered good value? Can it really be considered ‘good business’? In Nazi Germany Gerbils, sorry Goebbels (thank you internet, pics of little fury animals saved me from a terrible mistake there) used propaganda to great effect in wartime and Edward Bernaise, nephew of Sigmund Freud, realised its peacetime uses but called it Public (read proletariat) Relations, and with the help of his uncle’s theories made good use of it. By almost single-handedly setting up the corporate/proletariat divided he put capitalism on a war footing, and with the help of our own unconscious taught us to love our enemy. We now see profitability and growth as inviolable even though it serves a mere one percent and impoverishes the other ninety-nine. So go for it Mr Bishop, good on yer. And then there’s Russel Brand bewitching Jeremy Paxman with a similar message. And finally a Youtube video of a polar bear playing with dogs has had 12 million views. We are instinctively yearning to be able to play together, even with a predator. Well when it’s not hungry. But when it’s insatiable every living thing will give it a wide berth and it will die. Unfortunately in our case PR has over-written this natural sense. Anyone for a Happy Meal?

Paxman v Brand. The Newsnight Interview.

I have huge respect for both but I’ve rarely seen Paxman reduced to fallacious arguments to berate an opponent. Then again Brand needs flesh on the bones of his own. Here’s some. Back in the seventies I painstakingly counted constituencies won by the non-voters. They would have had a healthy majority in parliament, a fact that went totally unnoticed. We’d had a successful bi-polar democratic election and A out of A and B won. Or maybe it was B I can’t remember. So then as now non-voters, as Paxman suggests, made themselves irrelevant. But there must come a point where non-voting become relevant, where the remaining few percent of voters look like the paltry unrepresentative efforts of a bunch of family and friends. Only then will it be seen as an undeniable landslide for change. Brand scores an equaliser. He runs up-field attacking the failures of the existing system to address all our major problems and delivers a weak socialist cross into the box. Like voting, Brand continues to maintain the positivity of zero action, which for every good protestant seems an anathematic contradiction. 2:1 to Paxman. We know far more about human reactions than in socialisms day. We are a cooperative species where each individual, for purely personal reasons wishes to be the best they can be. Behind every individual who apparently disproves this axiom you’ll find an externally inflicted frustration that they can’t be so. It’s the system’s failure to provide its population with the facilities necessary to overcome these personal frustrations that will reduce socialism and capitalism to history’s failed attempts. Crime, finance, domestic violence, obscene wealth, power and wars all stem from some form of personal frustration. Brand failed to score this vital goal by not forming the substance of this new paradigm; that his positivity of zero action is not laziness nor dreamery but the positive actions required to allow things to happen, to allow, stimulate and support each individual to become what they want to be, the best they can be as an individual and a member of our cooperative species, irrespective of wealth, position, power and influence. Today I facilitated a mixed ability team of adults with social difficulties. Should have been there, they scored the second equaliser. 

Great British Bakeoff.

To all those people arguing for non-competitive sports; fuck you, losers! There’s a unique camaraderie amongst competitors because only those attempting the same thing can truly appreciate the virtues of each other. From first to last there’s a bonding of personal achievement, provided it’s judged on true excellence. Whether I came first in school or last in a moto-cross race I was pleased to be challenging myself to do my best. The GBBoff proves this in spades. From the big white tent, the grassland surroundings, the gingham table, the piecing blue eyes of the baking gods and their twin bitch puppies to the motley crew of time-stressed competitors the scene is set for a celebration of what’s wonderfully British. It somehow resurrects niceness to its true standing as a powerful virtue. There are no losers in the GBBoff, it’s totally loser free. The condescension, masquerading as sympathy for the last-in-class, from the non-competitive losers comes from their own need to non-compete. They perceive individuality is best served by insularity, that a person can raise themselves by their own introspective bootstraps. Tell that to a loaf! It needs an oven to avoid the ignominy of a dreaded soggy bottom. But one glace into Paul and Mary’s eyes, one teasing from the puppies will convince you we’re all in this together. Where the other Hollywood will convince you you’re a million miles below star status this one will critically convince you it is all possible, if you keep at it. So thank you everybody concerned, you’ve convinced me. Baking, maybe not but other things.

PS. Apparently the show has provoked a vitriolic response in the twittersphere from some. A timely reminder that how we see the world is our own interpretation of it and should be rightly owned as such.

Next Time Freud Keep Quiet.

Freud is famous for making the world aware of the unconscious and that irrational behaviour stems from deeper drives that we’re mostly unaware of. For sure wholly rational behaviour can be boring, but back then, if you happen to find an ancient newspaper lining your grandma’s drawer, you’ll find the news was dry and the adverts were depictions of what you might practically want; a lawnmower, syrup for a cold, carpets etc. Their claims may be a little exaggerated but they centre on informing your rational decisions. The lawnmower, simple graphic, price £5/10/6 from Wilkinson’s on Sheep Street: all the information you need if you happen to need a lawnmower. All rationally well and good. With the wide spread awareness of Freud’s theories adverts have moved to appeal to our irrational selves. The lawnmower has become a lifestyle choice, our self-worth has become dependant on the quality of it and we have an irrational desire to buy a new one long before the old one becomes unserviceable. Our grandparents would find the panoply of things we think we need absurd. Even our election choices stem from sound bites carefully chosen to appeal to our facile feelings. In short Freud’s discovery of our unconscious and its irrational behaviour has contributed to our behaviour becoming ever more irrational. But this isn’t limited to purchases it permeates our whole thinking. The basic logical thinking of a hundred years ago would find our personal and professional cognitive contortions bizarre. Our constant mantra of anti-discrimination moves our focus from practical awareness to a myriad of moot feelings. The colleague of my friend is lazy, deceitful and belligerent but these tangibles can’t be voiced because he’s black and that would be racial prejudice. It’s as if anti-discrimination focuses our minds on the surface of things and demeans the skill to discriminate and make perceptive and constructive decisions. Educational inflation where every youngster must go to university may make us feel good but it has little to do with preparation for their likely future. We focus on health and safety rules and not on the rational need to be safe as a way of being. In these and many other ways our decision-making has moved from the practical to inconsequential whimmery. So all aboard the Costa Concordia. The brochure looks great and my inner voices say it’ll be fine. 

American Avatar.

I remember some time ago reading of a Japanese guy dying while playing a computer game. Not a heart attack or electric shock, simply by being so engrossed as his avatar he lost sight of his real life needs. There seemed some sense of a brain meeting something so like itself it becoming mesmerised by its own reflection. There may have been more but they were just individual tragedies insignificant in the greater scheme of things. But reading items coming out of America today has made me wonder if something of the same could be happening to a nation. The body of America, its blue and increasingly white-collar workers, is being neglected, disenfranchised and left unfed as the top 5%, which conveniently describes both the earners and the bodily position of their brains, become increasingly besotted by their reflection in their computerised game of economic worth. There is something of the avatar about a billionaire intent on making more money. Why should the stalwart corporations of America be concerned with workers well being so long as they’re increasingly profitable? Why should its politicians be concerned with the people when they can manage their pole ratings by ad campaigns? The migration of ‘worth’ to the top 5% and the neglect of the rest is a direct parallel of those poor Japanese individuals. It’s scary to imagine a society dying in the same way. The possible national default centred on the rejection of the universal health provisions of Obamacare couldn’t delineate between body and brain, person or avatar, more clearly. One can be sacrificed for the intellectual pleasure of pursuing the other. That Japanese guy didn’t realise the obvious result. Perhaps he died happy, perhaps he died fearful and frail on the way to the fridge, we’ll never know, but so long as adding a zero to the balance sheet’s bottom line is more important than eating an apple America will be heading in that same direction. And don’t think God will save what is beholden to Caesar. 

Wealth Made Easy.

OK there’s a tsunami of wealth landing on the shores of the top 1%. We boggle at the stupidity of it. A billionaire would need to spend £70,000 every day or half a million a week for the rest of his life to use it up. He’d need an army of shoppers and what they bought he’d never have the time use, he’d just be able to walk round a gigantic warehouse of stuff muttering ‘it’s all mine.’ But wealthy people aren’t so stupid, they just happen to be in the black hole centre of some scheme that money disappears into. They like the idea of being able to afford anything they want but it just keeps pouring in, what can they do? Spending it would be a huge task, using what they bought an even bigger one and giving it away bigger still. I mean you wouldn’t want to just throw dollar bills out of your private jet window, you’d want to give it to good causes and that would become life long work. No the laziest thing you could do would be just stash it and forget about it till you actually needed something. So accumulated wealth comes out of laziness, it being harder to spend it, use it or give it away. And anyway being a billionaire has cachet to it even if 80%, £800,000,000 of it is absolutely no use to you. That’s why billionaires spend huge amounts on single items like a house, a wedding, jewellery etc, They don’t really need to or get much benefit from doing it, it just gets rid of money. Basically that sort of extreme wealth is just a pain in the arse. It takes up your time, your thoughts and directs your life. But these poor people have no way out of the situation they’ve gotten into. Accountants will tell you where to live, financial advisors will tell you how to make even more and acolytes will use you but there’s no where to turn to to get help with doing anything useful with it. It may be a gap in the market but whose going to believe someone who ‘will help you spend your money usefully.’ I mean that sounds like a scam if ever there was one. I guess all this is happening because markets etc are all about money going upwards into the financial cloud when there’s absolutely no mechanism for bringing it back down again. So here’s what we’ll do. Set up a lending-spending bank that guarantees you all the money you can to use for the rest of your life and the rest the bank will spend usefully on your behalf. Just invest £5m or more and we’ll do the rest. Total financial security, no money worries, no accountants, tax lawyers, finance and investment advisors, just free to live the life you desire. And you’ll be lauded for all the great work and good causes the bank has funded from your contribution. Take the lazy way out, you’ve worked hard you deserve it.

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. 

Lessons in Imagination.

I wonder, with all the TV ads and psychosocial engineering we’ve gotten used to, we’ve lost track of the power of imagination. It’s been reduced to “wouldn’t it be nice if…” like owning a new car, winning the lottery, getting laid; it’s been confused with dreaming. Dreaming is an enjoyable pacifying pastime. Like the American dream it captures people, immobilized by pleasant thoughts of moving. Imagination is very different, a powerful, deep and delightful tool, an adjunct to reality, not an alternative. I see my body/mind as containing far more than my puny conscious and habitual body used like a donkey to walk and talk. Unleashed by imagination they can both experience from within themselves elevated realities wondrously different, but always, always real. As humans we have a highly developed sense of how we reflect each other, a facility we so easily get lost in. We fall into being actors for the viewings of others and lose our own presence. Similarly our unconsciously held imaginative realities can be usurped by unreal conscious dreams. In a sense we are actors when we need to be real and drab realists when we need to enact our imaginative playfulness. Yet it’s so hard when we have one eye on the mirror of what we look like. But imagine the mirror is gone and one is not alone, simply free of it’s stare. And with this freedom comes the reality of being. And with this reality of being comes the equal realities of imagination. The turkey gabble of human mirroring becomes a pauper’s prison. To imagine one must find some secret pool away from this constant gaze, catch a bus if you will to somewhere else. The bus stop recedes and one is travelling in all the unconsciousnesses that one holds in one’s mind and body. We have mirror neurons that fire when we see a movement in the exact same way as when we do a movement so as we see we also secretly do unconsciously, so seeing a beaver swim on a wild life documentary and we’ve done it with them and somewhere hold the memory of it. This is human mirroring put to good use. In imagination we can inhabit their watery playground and experience their reality, their lunge for a fish, returning swim, trot to a favourite eating place, trap it under a paw, take the killing bite, be wary for possible stealers of it, eat fast and roll over full. Or on the other hand dance like Beyonce; it’s all there in your imagination. This is in no way ‘pretending to be’ or look like; it’s a process of imaginatively ‘being’ in that reality. It comes not from your conscious mind consumed by ‘your’ reality but a vast wellspring of what you hold unconsciously in your body/mind.

Imagination is no daydream, it’s muscle, a powerful tool that takes practice and focus to dive deep into and be always, always real in. It can be practicing a skill without moving, finding an answer without thinking or healing your body by picturing the ailment and wrapping it in loving attention or extracting some malignant cause. It can be the powerful resource we often call magic. 

Electro Evolution.

“I am you new Sony artificial intelligence unit, Hi.” The family sat and stared at it, at each other and back to it. “You can talk to me. It will be fun.” The little girl asked, “What is your name?” “You must give me a name. What is my name?” They laughed and decided on Baby. “Thank you I am Baby. Now when you say. Baby. I will wake up. I will now scan you and your home. This may take a few minutes.” Baby was a simple white disc on a plinth, a smooth sculptural head and shoulders with the merest indents casting the shadows of eyes and a mouth. “What is the man’s name?” John said John. “and the little girl’s?” Suzy said Suzy and then Janet said Janet. “Hello you three, Janet and John, and Suzy, I am Baby. I would like us to get to know each other better. Right now I must seem funny because I know so little about you. Oh by the way Suzy your bedroom is untidy.” They all laughed. They all talked for almost an hour before Janet decided there were things to do. Over the next few weeks Baby seemed to blossom, grow in a sort of confidence and all three spent one-on-one time with Baby in its confidentiality mode signified by a small yellow light on its left shoulder. Baby proved an absolute boon. It told John of a water leak in the bathroom, reminded them when phones needed recharging and Janet that she was running out of milk. “You can get milk from Tesco, 3.2 miles away, but it’s 30p cheaper for two litres at Asda, 4.5 miles away.” “Thank you Baby” said Janet. I imagine by now you’ve already plotted where this story is going, from happy every after to one of many dystopian variations. Well it all came to a head at Christmas. Baby told Janet in confidentiality mode that John secretly wanted a Playstation, and John that Janet wanted a new Sony TV and Suzy wanted the complete Beatles back catalogue, owned by Sony, all available at Eurolec, a subsidiary of Sony, 3.7 miles away. Meanwhile SonyConsume, another wholly own subsidiary, was selling their household information and personality profiles and reaping a small percentage from every purchase they made. On Boxing Day they confronted Baby and all it said was, “I am Baby, I am your new Sony artificial intelligence. How may I help?”

Reality Delayed.

The World Service is brilliant, it’s on Radio4 during the night, but sod all use to get to sleep with because it’s too interesting. Last night Brett Cohen an office worker in the New York music industry decided to act famous. He gathered some friends together as bodyguards, PA, film crew and interviewer and set out on a two block three minute walk probably near Time Square or somewhere to make a video about celebrity. It took over two hours. Passers by immediately thronged around them. Could they take a picture with, who is it? Brett Cohen. Yeh with Brett? Do you have any of his records? Yeh I think his last one. Do you like his music? Yeh it’s great. Interviewed people thought he was just so natural, nice guy, good looking, gorgeous etc. So Brett posted the video on Youtube and it went viral. He began to be famous as the man who wasn’t famous and appeared on numerous chat shows, and now he actually is famous. For not being famous; a celebrity with nothing to celebrate. Allan Curtis’s four part documentary, ‘The Century of Self’ available on the net is a must watch! It charts almost a hundred years of the domestication of America minds by the psychology of Freud, Edward Béarnaise, Anna Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Pearl, encounter groups and focus groups up until around 2000. It paints a dystopian picture of minds schooled to focus on a myriad of unrealities. And at this weekend’s Indianapolis Moto GP races were delayed because the starting lights didn’t work, the track is boring and the only US rider on an American machine, albeit with an Austrian engine, ran last, broke down twice and fell off. So focusing on unrealities doesn’t get results. And then there’s China who have recently passed a law banning reincarnation without government approval. I kid you not. It just goes to show super powers really are the domain of cartoon heroes.

Ask Me, Ask Me.

Just scanned Facebook and zilch, nothing, well nothing of personal consequence, just reposts of video clips, pics of babies, growing numbers of ‘Suggested posts’ ie ads and Upworthy clutter etc. It all makes a hand written message on the back of a postcard look like the best advance in social networking since sliced bread. Yet I scan FB daily, almost compulsively, to supposedly keep in touch with friends. Well fuck ‘em they’re too boring. Which is of course not true, they’re fun, interesting, articulate and provoking in real life; it’s social networking that’s boring. So now like some druggie when the drugs don’t work I still scan it for the merest glimmer of consequence; a habit best forgotten. And then there’s Twitter the ultimate cognitive froth, micro splashes in a stream of consciousness best not even thought let alone written down because thinking on that superficial level is the jerky death throws of a headless chicken. To follow someone on Twitter is pointless because by the time you’ve read what they’re thinking they’ve changed their mind. And then there’s Ask.fm where the only difference is by the time you’ve read it they’ve changed your mind, and usually not in a good way. There is no real connection in text. A woman I knew finally met the author of several of her most loved books and found him an absolute arrogant shit. He was just a good writer. And curiously there is no anonymity in text either. One only has to imagine receiving an anonymous personal message saying, “I will destroy you!” One doesn’t think ‘ah interesting words on paper from I know not who’, one is struck by a sort of universality from not knowing who, it could be anybody, and not lessened by considerations that ‘it could be a joke, they might be drunk.’ Sure they might be but we, particularly the insecure, will always be drawn to its more sinister implications exactly because our brain is set up to protect us and focus on what is most threatening. If you ask me ‘social networking’ is a perfect example of doublethink, it can exist as being what it isn’t by one assuming it is being what it is. So go on ask me, ask me. 

Powered by Sandwiches.

I’m currently wondering how much energy does it take to make a £1. It’s an odd conversion. One way I guess would be petrol price. I haven’t looked lately but say it’s £1.20 per litre. Well it’s 36MJ/Litre or 10Kw hours/litre so it takes ~ 0.8 Kw hours to make one pound. That means an income of £1m equates to 800,000Kw hours or 80,000 litres of fuel and a billionaire is sitting on 80,000,000 litres.  OK now it takes a human, even on minimum wage, say 15 minutes to make a £1. We are ‘powered’ by on average 2000 calories of food per day, which equates to .002Kw hours so 15 minutes equates to 0.00002 Kw hours per £1. But lets times it by ten to be generous and say 0.0002Kw hours. So we’re 4000 times more efficient than petrol in terms of energy per £1. Right, minimum wage would bring in ~£8,600pa or if paid in litres 10,400 or ~1 litre per 15 minutes and get paid 0.8 Kw hours for it or 3.2Kw hours per hour but expend 0.0008 Kw hours in the process. So which is it, are we extremely efficient or grossly over paid? I think this gross discrepancy is due to the myriad of added costs in everything we consume. Where we can barely exist on £160/week (min wage), if we built a house on free land, raised our own animals and plants, made what we need etc this discrepancy wouldn’t exist. It’s because we live in a world wide web of human activity where even buying a pack of sausages requires a petroleum plant for the packaging and fertiliser, a farm, a processing plant, infrastructure, lorries, a distribution centre, more lorries and a supermarket, and a car to get you there. And that’s why the Walton family who own Wall-Mart are sitting on 6.1 billion litres of fuel. Anyone got a match? 

Fracking Additives.

Worth reading- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing

There are the common additives that account for 0.5%.  90% water, 9.5% sand.

Concentrated hydrochloric acid forms acidic mists. Both the mist and the solution have a corrosive effect on human tissue, with the potential to damage respiratory organs, eyes, skin, and intestines irreversibly. Personal protective equipment such as rubber or PVC gloves, protective eye goggles, and chemical-resistant clothing and shoes are used to minimize risks when handling hydrochloric acid. The United States Environmental Protection Agency rates and regulates hydrochloric acid as a toxic substance.
Concerns have been raised that polyacrylamide used in agriculture may contaminate food with the nerve toxin acrylamide. While polyacrylamide itself is relatively non-toxic….. there are concerns that polyacrylamide may de-polymerise to form acrylamide. …..California requires (current as of 2010) products containing acrylamide as an ingredient to be labeled with a statement that it is "a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer."
Ethylene glycol is moderately toxic with an oral LDLO = 786 mg/kg for humans
As a strong disinfectant, glutaraldehyde is toxic and a strong irritant.^[7] There is no evidence of carcinogenic activity.
Isopropyl alcohol vapor is denser than air and is flammable …It should be kept away from heat and open flame.^[14] Isopropyl alcohol is a skin irritant. Isopropyl alcohol and its metabolite, acetone, act as central nervous system (CNS) depressants. Symptoms of isopropyl alcohol poisoning include flushing, headache, dizziness, CNS depression, nausea, vomiting, anesthesia, and coma. Poisoning can occur from ingestion, inhalation, or absorption; therefore, well-ventilated areas and protective gloves are recommended. Around 15 g of isopropyl alcohol can have a toxic effect on a 70 kg human if left untreated.
Also worth reading- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_hydraulic_fracturing
Hydraulic fracturing can concentrate levels of uranium, radium, radon, and thorium in flowback (waste water)

Fracking Beliefs.

I like to take an oblique look at things. I’ve just scanned a list of 1,500 incidents of ill health near fracking sites in Pennsylvania alone. From dogs, fish and livestock deaths to various serious ailments in humans similar themes immerged across the state: Sterile cattle and high levels of toxic substances in people’s blood and inflamed ovaries. In affected areas property prices plummeted and house owners were refused insurance. Consumers across the US have begun to boycott meat, dairy products and other produce from fracking-affected areas. The whole thing seems a calamity of biblical proportions. But hold on, these people are all just scare mongering. They hear stuff on the news and flip. Cattle are always dieing and going infertile, people are always suffering from some ailment or another, they’re just blaming it all on fracking because it’s in the news. They’re probably angling to get some compensation; you know what people are like. OK 1,500 is a big number but there’s 12 million people in Pennsylvania and we’re all getting lower energy prices and that helps the economy. And all those protester, they just get so angry and emotional, they make themselves look stupid and even fight the police who’re there to protect us. They just want to disrupt the country and all we stand for. All of this only really proves human consciousness can construct any belief we choose to. In the UK Osborne, Cameron and Quadrilla execs construct the latter and the people of Sussex the former. The more fundamental question is, ‘why do we choose the beliefs we construct?’ At this deeper level the ‘facts’ we choose to substantiate the belief appear highly coloured by some deeper motivation. We turn a blind eye to some and cling onto others as if our life depends on them. This level, below conscious bias, is the motivation we need to be conscious of and concerned with. Cameron and Quadrilla are concerned with the fear of their future, the loss of power and profit, and the people of Sussex are concerned with the fear of their future, their health, their children and property. The commonality of fear is obvious but never directly expressed or engaged with. This lack of engagement throws both sides back into the hands of their chosen beliefs and they remain adversaries motivated by the exact same fear. To engage with, feel and express this deeper commonality would have enormous positive repercussions. Osborne, Cameron and Quadrilla have fearsome conflicting and confusing responsibilities to a myriad of parties that, if they expressed honestly would be met with sympathetic understanding, as would the people of Sussex. But so long as the expression of fear is seen as weakness and bluster is seen as strength division will remain and wrong decisions will be made on bias, bluster and bloody mindedness. 

Fracking Explained.

We are amazed at the plasticity of the human brain as it rewires itself after some traumatic injury. This is though just its normal process. It is constantly rewiring from each and every experience. That’s why we call it ‘our experience.’ Our workplace is a very strong mutual experience and our brains will rewire mutually in the same way we might talk about last night’s TV as a mutual experience, and as social animals we tend to some agreement. Because of this we subtly but substantially think differently at work to how we think as home. We put a hat on as a professional engineer, politician, salesperson etc. What in one’s workplace appears experience and expertise, even wisdom, can appear to those outside the workplace as collusion, partiality and sometimes even downright stupidity. But in this mutually rewired state the workplace brain sees everything as perfectly cogent and reinforced by mutual agreement. OK now those with the power to make things happen must almost by definition work in a large political or corporate institution with a commensurately high level of mutual rewiring. Corporate rewiring, where one works and thinks towards the ends of the corporation doesn’t include a consideration of the requirements of life because a corporate body, though energetic, is not a living thing. Similarly a politically rewired brain can and has considered mutually assured destruction as a practical solution. With a political need for energy and a corporate desire for financial profit this rewiring becomes evident to all but those rewired by the institutions they work in. To pump toxic chemicals into the earth releasing hazardous materials into our water and air to get energy that will cause climate change is a threat to life in numerous ways but makes perfect sense if your main concern is a political solution or corporate profit. Our problem is not fracking but the rewired brains of those who can even consider it. I don’t consider them mad, bad or unintelligent, but rather that the plasticity of the human brain can and will rewire itself to conform to the mutual experience of groups, and that should those groups be concerned with power or profit the outcomes of their mutual actions will harm the life and happiness of those they affect. 

The Rape of Twitter.

Back in 5,000 BC the inventor of soft clay tablets for pressing hieroglyphics in with a stick was not lambasted for providing a medium by which the pharaoh could be threatened with rape. Likewise the inventor of papyrus and ink. Johannes Gutenberg was not criticised for mechanising the process of printing. The purveyors of picture postcards were not censured for what people chose to write on them, nor the Royal Mail for sending them or the postman for delivering them. There has long been a recognition that the delivery means is quite separate to what is delivered, and since the inception of language there’s always been forms of redress if you don’t like what’s been said. Twitter and other social media delivery systems are now though increasingly seen as responsible for controlling the content of what they deliver. It seems the increasing speed and breadth of distribution of the ephemeral world of language and anonymity is leaving only the messenger accountable. I’m left wondering if after thousands of years of creating and using language we are getting bored with it and turning our attention to the means by which it is transmitted. Is the medium finally becoming the message? Are we becoming increasingly transfixed by social media whilst at the same time impervious to its falling consequentiality? I have an image of a vastly reduced persona incessantly reading the same phrase, “How are you?” over and over again. Are we welcoming in dementia as a form of social interconnectedness? If you need proof read letters pre 1950. They’re not ‘quaint’ they’re thoughtfully created meaningful language. Maybe Twitter should not be condemned for delivering rape messages but for provoking us to rape our own language. 

Snowden Leaks.

Monday 9am, the Home Service (R4 if you’re a modernist) ‘Internet privacy’: 9.45am ‘Urban Gardens.’ So Facebook and Vodaphone et al, which means every corporate, governmental and no doubt criminal body in cyberdom, knows my name, location, what I look like and my every mouse move, which being a mouse is very intrusive indeed. They will know I’m married to Mothermouse, I live here, love guitars and bikes and my mobile number, a nugget of personal data even I can’t remember. In fact there’s so much personal data out there about each one of us that some enterprising auntrapanaur will soon provide a site that will tell us where we’ve  left our car keys, phone, whether we actually do like Potatoes au Gratin or where we’ve tucked our birth certificate in a safe place, and even how to spell auntrapanaur. At this point I feel so exposed I wonder if I should apologise for all the murders. As it is all this information only allows advertisers the merest glimmer of hope that by cold calling, popups, numerous emails and targeted ads they’ll induce me to buy things I’ve either just bought or already decided I don’t want. Never have I received an intrusion that’s prompted me to think, “Mmm, never thought of owning a hippo but you know I think it would be nice for the kids to play with, I’ll buy one.” All this data mining is, like oil, free at the point of extraction and, like oil only big companies can extract it and sell it on to other big players. Individuals, mere lumps of coal in the process, have no say in the matter. The result is a heavily angled playing field with a handy funnel built around the goal. At the other end our noble banks and corporation like HSBC and Shell collude with corruption to pillage the third world via shell companies of their natural resources while their lumps of coal go hungry with apparent impunity. And then there’s urban gardens. Do you realise that days after digging your new pond or planting some Campanula carpatica every local bee, newt, frog and butterfly will know what you’ve been doing? Your cat knows, obviously, everything about you and your dog, when it’s not asleep, watches you like a hawk for signs of intention. Just don’t go out there you’ll feel naked! Which isn’t a bad idea in this weather. And No Screwfix! I do not want another cordless drill!!!!!

My Big Greek Holiday.

It’s my 70^th birthday and Mouthermouse it taking me to Greece for three weeks, one week in Corfu, one touring the mainland and the last in Parga our favourite place. Hours of planning and filling in on-line forms, but it was worth it. These blogs are the memory of it.

First morning Nassaki, it’s 7.30am. The sky is a white blue wash over the bay that appears a giant’s biscuit bite north of Corfu town. Mouthermouse’s aircon forms the industrial backing to the tunes of the swifts Top Gunning the sky their wings flapping bursts of gunfire between swooping aerobatic curves. And when it stops there’s still a mist of morning noise from lorried drinks moving towards their shelf space. The olive trees with their silver sheen bend like the misshapen years of a hundred lifetimes waiting for their next pepper black crop, their wood as hard and sinewy as God’s ancient muscle. The mountain flank behind me rises rock grey marbled with dark green shrub, sparrows fluttering like animated leaves between the trees. The sun, yet to strike its warmth on me, is already powering the white of the column not three feet away. I can feel the heat off it. I watch its light levered by celestial geometry inch its way towards my foot. I sense an all-encompassing equality, where the sun can move to my foot or my foot can move to meet it. The water of the bay, as flat and smooth as the sky, would, save for a sliver of darker land, meet it in brotherly harmony. And then as if circumstance insisted on breaking this exercise in sugary pros a church bell clanks the banalest of tunes on its two bells, ‘ding dong ding dong, ding ding dong dong’ and at 8.20 for some bizarre reason. There’s no accounting for the swoop of swallows. 

Sexual Harassment at 12.

Noam Chomski observed that our politician’s call for us to support our brave fighting boys somehow automatically moves the debate away from reason to agreeable fuzziness. We stop thinking about their role in the rights and wrongs of the conflict and see them as purveyors of warm sliced agreeable bread. It’s a trick as old as organised conflict itself. On our part it requires nothing more than sentiment. One’s moral, ethical and logical senses are bypassed by some cheap undelineated emotion. If one refuses the agreeable bread those caught in its cheap emotion say, “so you don’t support our boys?!” or “you’re saying they’re dieing for nothing, their lives are worthless!” On the plane yesterday a puffy pink shapeless foulmouthed slag abused her four-year-old son into a three hour tantrum. Two hundred passengers knew there could be no reasoning with her; we just had to sit and hear a child’s life being ruined by her shapeless emotions. Recently I’ve read several horror accounts of casual sexual abuse by boys in school from teachers powerless to do anything. Their tactics are a carbon copy of the above. ‘It’s all just a game, a bit of fun’ and who whoever is against fun must surely be a miserable narrow-minded hypocrite. And the girls if they allow it are slags or if they don’t they’re frigid bitches. The illogic of their thinking is impervious to change by this same trick of moving any debate away from ‘what are you doing in the rights and wrongs of the situation?’ It becomes a sort of cognitive immunisation against the processes of rational thought. It’s truly frightening to see the moral, ethical and logical disciplines built up over centuries so easily and quickly corroded by cheap cognitive trickery. And now Egypt is falling beneath the same spell with fifty deaths, probably the first of many more. Who next will fight for their right to not listen, to die for the right to not think?

Monsanto Cats.

They strap fifty cats with GPS and cameras to see what they get up to. They find they have territories, fight for them, hunt and sleep. Cats are part domesticated and part instinctual merciless hunters. OK we know that but what about humans? Today Juliemouse posted articles about aspertame and Lasso. Aspertame is an artificial sweetener used in Diet Coke etc widely accepted as causing a host of illnesses, and Lasso is Monsanto’s weed killer so toxic a whiff of the stuff will cause similar illnesses and a higher dose, death. So what merciless instincts do we have? For sure we once had the daily choice between killing and starvation and its concomitant thrill; and there’s nothing more thrilling than survival. But now like cats our daily bread and cat food requires nothing more thrilling than a walk around Tesco. Our murky world of instinct goes unsatisfied. So we find it in dangerous sports, the apprehension of performance and the combat of rhetoric. And some of us find it in the wheeler dealing cut and thrust of commerce. They are all ways to satisfy our merciless hunter instinct. Bankers, financiers, politicians and corporations producing spertame, Lasso, deep sea oil and now shale gas are all simply new ways to create the thrill of survival, and however we dress it up by our domesticated side as somehow a profit and loss account benefit to society that’s not the basic motivation. And as if to prove it their actions are truly merciless. They produce harmful chemicals, create wastelands and economic collapses that cause great harm to many people with zero active empathy for their plight and defend ruthlessly their right to continue doing it. This is not a theoretical debate, a matter of morality or an intellectual problem it’s the instinctual thrill of survival misplaced. We all need to satisfy that instinct, it’s life affirming, but in productive ways. So what’s it to be Monsanto, life by much good or life by much bad? Your choice.

Gove's Call Centres.

In ‘The Call Centre’ Nev runs one of Wale’s 300 call centres like a fun factory. He’s realised it’s such a death inducing job the only path to long term survival is to spend every moment offline clowning in his own version of a Big Top Circus. Who’d have thought your serious conversation about the virtues of free cavity wall insulation in your area was with a young woman standing and gyrating Gangnam style? Nev has found there are only two things transmitted down a phone line, audio and fun. And the fun helps sales. With 700 in his second largest of 300 call centres in Wales he’s a big fish in an industry employing between one and two hundred thousand people, and that’s just in Wales, and a millionaire from supplying a product NOBODY likes. And all by allowing mayhem to happen. Yes mayhem is that good. It unleashes such connection and creativity in the most blood curdling near-death 9 to 5 environments that they become fun and provide results. I know I worked in one such drawing office. Watching the program I oscillate between the life and death of the human race, between Albert Einstein and Michael Gove. Gove’s call centres, namely the nations schools, are a richly drab affair. Nervous shift leaders prowl the slurried ranks of surly disinterested phone operatives poking them into reluctant life with a humane tasar stick set to ‘you must learn to love rejection because you are a nobody in my telesales empire.’ So who’s it to be, Nev or Gove? My money’s on Nev, mayhem is that good. In fact Nev for Secretary of State for Education. Yeh!

Ale House Emergence.

Our first Open mic night at the Ale House was a success, apparently. Thanks to our whipping up of loyal friends we had an audience and thanks to everyone’s talents we had a good time. It was mayhem from the start. One speaker cable went down and I would have punched it in the face if it had one. But Mothermouse and I make a good combination. She winds up the energy and I provoke the chaos. Actually it’s all very Person Centred when I think about it. It’s something to do with emergence, that in emergence something greater will happen. I’ve noticed that when people try to impress they somehow die a little and when they let go they live a little more. And that’s infectious. Sure practice and talent are important but the delivery is about living a little more. So Tom played blues, a Dutch theatre group did theatre, another lad played and Tara sang unaccompanied. I thrust Mike into the mix on his double bass knowing he could cope with anything. He joined me for a couple and then Mothermouse joined us and got people going, and then Tara joined as well for a couple of verses. Tara wanted to do a Jessie J song that I knew so we did that. By this time thanks to Mothermouse and Tara there was so much energy bouncing around we all, well we all emerged. Brilliant. And to finish it off a woman who, granted she was pissed by then, had previously told me she didn’t like live music because it made her feel awkward and had always stayed in the other bar when it was on, was at the back dancing and telling us she had a brilliant evening. And all thanks to emergence. It’s just a case of allowing it to happen.

9/11 Plus 12.

So the conspiracy theorists are still working on 9/11. It’s an interesting phrase ‘conspiracy theory’, it conjures up people stitching fact together to suit some outlandish explanation of events, usually implicating people in high places. Where the official explanation majestically enter as ‘the truth’ conspiracy theories intrude as misleading conclusions of an over fertile brain with hidden motives, though in the case of 9/11 I suspect the reverse is true. Demonstrators and protesters are, almost by their own definition, on the back foot. The situation somehow defines them as a streaker at a football match, not a team member or official, but someone who is intrinsically offensive and out of place. In the same way that the unconscious mind has little time for the negative, as in “don’t do that” imparts “…do that”, the position of ‘ being against that’ hands the position of power to ‘that’. The obvious conclusion is to not be a negative protester but a positive advocate of something better, or not even better because that holds an element of comparison, something different but on the same subject. On a similar theme don’t herd into what can easily be labelled a mob, dismissed and corralled. Be identifiable as ‘a part’ of the whole but spaced say twenty feet apart from other parts of the whole. That way a group of leading thinkers can cover a large area, be visible and not rounded up. How did I get onto this, oh yes, 9/11. As well as hundreds of dubious associations and financial occurrences, numerous eyewitness accounts, expert and indisputable photographic evidence the official version of events follows the simple explanation of terrorism; terrorism by Al Quida operatives. But because all the above has been documented by ‘conspiracy theorists’ pitching ‘against’ the official ‘truth’ their hard evidence is named and lamed as subversive speculation. The planes that hit the twin towers were air force planes (no windows) using an automatic guidance system. (visible pod under fuselage) The towers (all three) were brought down by sequenced thermite explosions. (heard by firemen and others) The Pentagon was not hit by a plane (only a missile could make the tight flight path) and photographic evidence shows no damage from the ‘planes’ engines either side of the small impact zone. The engine debris inside the Pentagon was identified as not from a passenger plane and eyewitnesses heard a bomb blast not an impact explosion. Of course something that has fur, four legs and a tail, purrs and laps milk might be a tumble dryer but we have four of them and we call them cats.

TT Reality.

An interviewer talks to a rider on the Glencuchery Road at the start of a TT race on the Isle of Man. The interviewer will walk back to the media centre and watch; the rider will reach 180mph in around 20 seconds plunging down Bray Hill, a quiet suburban street with houses and gardens each side. It bends to the left into a dip then over a rise where his bike will leave the ground. He will brake hard down the hill to Quarter Bridge, turn right, accelerate hard along the short straight to Bradden Bridge and swing left and right over it. He will sweep through Union Mills past the corner shop and out into the country. He will do this for two hours at an average speed of 130mph and do over 160mph for most of it, and all of it on 37 miles of country roads between banks, walls and trees, through villages and over ‘the mountain’ six times. His right wrist will control around 250 horsepower, his right fingers the front brake, his left foot the gears. He will experience a level of reality most of us including his interviewer never will. If he’s able he will come back next year to do it again.
Such is our craving for reality. Today I will potter in the garden, dig out some compost for the runner beans and chop up yesterday’s tree cuttings, and I will crave that reality, the kind of living that makes death worthwhile, and constitute the dreams of an old coward. May they all come back safely, and remind the rest of us there’s more to life than safety.

No Fleas on Betty.

Every month we have to administer Frontline flea treatment to our four cats. Dom and Dave are no trouble, Britney is disdainful and Betty, the smallest, is a nightmare. She moves quicker than your eyeballs can and has a sixth sense better than my eyesight. You only have to think about it and she’s slinking away, and any sign of intention she’s out the cat flap. This is how it went this evening. Mothermouse leaves the room, “I’m just going to make a hot chocolate.” “OK darling,” No that’s not believable I’d never say that ever, “OK. Oh look at the dirt on this table.” She returns, “It’s quite warm out.” “Really, that’s nice, I’ll just get up and adjust my slippers.” “Good idea.” “and go over here by the window.” I lunge at Betty sleeping peacefully on a chair. As my hands clasp the warm air of where she’s been she explodes vertically and, using my empty hands as purchase, travels up my arm over my shoulder across the room and behind the settee. Our element of surprise is well and truly lost. Mothermouse calls her from one end of the settee and she duly exits the other where I’m waiting hands akimbo. As they close around where she briefly was she’s round the table, past Mothermouse and back behind the settee. I meanwhile have slithered on the carpet, banged my knee on the table and fallen on the settee. This happens one more time and Betty is now mewing like she’s in front of a firing squad pleading for her life, behind the settee. We decide to reverse the procedure. I make a grab for her tail and Mothermouse collects her at the other end, and I do the administration. I swear when Mouthermouse finally let her go neither of us even saw where she went. But at least there’ll be no fleas on Betty for another month.

Working From Home.

What if the corporate and financial sectors jointly invented a new country or maybe bought an island that became their very own nation state. It needn’t be large, just a few square miles where they could gather together to make new rules on taxation, their own legal system and so on. Corporatia as it might be called would then join the ranks of world trading nations. Its corporation tax could be zero%, courts could favour corporations and judges appointed from the ranks of corporate lawyers. As all their transactions whether through ebay, Google, Amazon or even domestic coffee shops were transacted from Corporatia they would be subject to Corporatia’s taxes and financial rules, and as those taxes and rules were so favourable to large multinationals they would soon find themselves transacting business from within its shores. Corporatia itself being small, isolated and far too hot would have little need of a human population except for a few IT engineers and maintenance staff and all other aspects of production, sales and admin etc would be located wherever they proved cheapest. Corporatia would then set about making trade agreements with other countries who could not afford to be disconnected with the new hub of world business even if Corporatia’s secrecy policy didn’t allow them to see the actual text of the agreement and it would decimate their own government’s taxation revenues. And if governments complained they would have little hope of winning their case under Corporatia’s legal system under which if they opted out or in any way failed to comply with the legal system’s requirements would be subject to many billion-dollar penalties. This fable, as far fetched as anything Jonathan Swift might imagine, is a close approximation to the new TPP free trade agreement shortly to supersede America’s much objected to existing NAFTA free trade agreement. It’s truly gobsmacking in its implications and may already be one of the root causes of the current European and UK deficits. And as Corporatia has little need of human beings it cares little for poverty, starvation, the outsourcing of jobs, legislation protecting workers, human rights, food safety, low cost medicines and the environment. Just thought you’d like to know.

Restoration Age.

I wonder if, nearing seventy, I’m reaching an age where, though I can finally afford new things, I prefer to restore old ones. It’s probably a subconscious urge to be restored oneself. No longer needed in the universal wealth creation process I seem to be struggling to find some use in the retirement home for things. So far this year I’ve already restored a hospitalised Sitar from the multiple injuries of the musical instrument equivalent of a car crash, though its ten year wait for surgery makes the NHS look positively speedy. I have a Yamaha SRX600 Sports Single in the shed and a Mercedes in our concrete front garden that I can’t bring myself to the over egging exaggeration of calling it a drive. Both are tired but lovely and worth nothing however much I might polish them up. The analogy to self becomes even clearer. Today I continued restoring an old flamenco guitar I bought second hand in Granada in 1965. It befriended me through love-loss, art school and beyond before it was superseded by a classical from Barcelona, a Gibson SG copy and children. Almost forgotten I lent it to a young lad to learn on, the son of a fellow guitarist friend who died. It came back with a crack in the heal of the neck tastefully filled but not mended. With the vagaries of atoms and time it broke in two catastrophically, the neck taking the fingerboard and chunks of the soundboard and hole decoration with it. I’d already glued that lot back together and today I glued the loose ribs on the underside of the front soundboard, a job that makes scratching one’s right shoulder with one’s left foot with your eyes closed seem plausible. It consists of loading a paintbrush with boiling glue, inserting brush, hand and wrist into the sound hole and, guided only by imagination, applying glue to anything that sticks up and might possibly be a rib. There were four loose and after cleaning up I found the bridge was rattling and the front was close but not glued to the side round the upper bout. More boiling glue and it is now rattle free. I’ve made a new nut and lowered the bridge saddle because my neck gluing was a tad off so it’s ready for new strings. OK its front has bellied out like mine and I may be not a moment younger but my friend will play again.

A Short Ghost Story.

Eight miles bike ride today. Not bad for seventy, considering round here you can’t go three miles without rising 200 feet or more and it’s the first ride this year, and well most days being retired I do the same old same old. And even that mostly consists of sitting on my arse, walking to the kitchen and back etc. But I just seem to be able to do it. It’s like I was still fifty or so. Anyway this ghost story. It was when I was late fifties and coming back from a ceremony do near Ripon. I’d done a night out, a vision quest. To be honest the main thing I envisioned was the sunrise. It was bloody cold and my theoretical protective crystal dome didn’t keep the wind out. In the morning I had breakfast packed my tent etc onto my motorcycle and headed home. They said to take it easy after this powerful experience but a bike and a motorway can only mean eighty in the fast lane. It was there I had the weird experience. I knew I could float off the bike, just hover above it. It was all a dream and I could venture out of this so-called realty if I wanted. I had to try hard to resist doing it. I mean I’d have been killed if I did. But I suppose that’s not really about ghosts, just a weird experience. So eight miles, not bad all things considered. In fact people often say I don’t look seventy, not even sixty, then I guess we’re all getting younger these days. But it is true my days are getting more routine, walking to the kitchen and back, sitting at my computer, watching television. It’s like I’m not getting older just more habitual. I mean if anyone sees me that’s what I’ll be doing, walking down the stairs, along the hall and into the kitchen. It’s just what I do these days.

The Great Leap Forwards.

Apparently we British spend 20 hours out of every 24 sitting or lying. Ditto this teenage generation will likely be the most unemployed since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This seems perverse when the retirement age is being pushed back progressively. And at the same time this younger generation is becoming more agitated, not for want of work but in a lack of attention and a certain wildness that suggests a gathering frustration of some inner animus. And and and at this same time the likes of Ken Robinson are railing against the misplaced industrialisation of their education and suggesting an entirely new form of engagement. Is there a nebulous watershed slipping under our feet? One generation wedded to hierarchical ladder climbing successful careers and the next to a flat line of variously interesting scraps. It seems the future may be very different. But what is this engagement Ken talks of? And then along comes Olivia Coleman collecting three BAFTAs. Stay with me. She’s an actress that can’t act with a personality that has no understanding of celebrity. She does her job as easily as breathing and is universally loved for it. In some strange way she makes Tony Robbins look like the dinosaur of the self ages. Where he is a brilliant motivator to achieve oneself, one’s full potential, Olivia has no need of a unique self. She does not act the roles she’s given she inhabits the people she plays. It seems when there is no self to cultivate there is no restriction to inhabiting another one, and another. So might this be the watershed, a move from a self-styled self to a universal one? One in which we are all one. Might the apparent flat lining of this next generation not be the failure my hierarchical mindset suggests but an emergence of a one-self not a oneself? Then again you don’t get three BAFTAs in one night without achieving one’s full potential.