Pride.

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

Death by Complexity.

I often think back to 2001 and Grandpa  Croucho finding his first tool. He loved that bone. Never happier than having a good whack he was. And Uncle Erectus inventing round, that was a game changer alright. Ah simpler days. And now we’ve got Screwfix. I mean there’s a lot to be said for being able to get a five kilogram hammer drill for under a hundred quid but do I do click and collect, drive there or have it delivered when I’m out? B&Q do a 5% off on Wednesdays for the over sixties though Wickes are cheaper and Homebase are nearer, but you can’t get out of there without buying a 3ft electric barbeque set that’ll go rusty before you’ve used it twice. It’s all got a bit more complicated. I mean how come my pensions guy turns up for his yearly chat about his football knees in an Audi when I’m still driving a Renault Scenic? And don’t talk to me about discounts. How come in a 50% sale with an extra 10% discount for being born on a Tuesday comes out the same price as what it was last week? By that reckoning my storm proof Everglaze windows would have originally cost the same as a moderately sized maisonette. So how about you supply all the walls and roof etc for free and I’ll provide the windows myself? And all this is nothing compared with high finance. How is it a space big enough for a PC conveniently placed 50 meters from some internet node costs  $1,000,000 pa to rent? Because you can make $2,000,000 pa profit from being a millisecond faster than the other guys. Some guy’s created a trading floor with a ‘bump in the road’ that introduces a 2 millisecond delay that does something, I forget what. So that’s really really complicated. Basically it’s smart people make the most money. Human evolution has come down to dealing with complexity. Remember the super long necked giraffe that could reach the tallest branches but died out because it kept falling over? Well OK probably not because I just made it up but it illustrates the point. Our capacity for creating the ever more complex might just make us all fall over. 

Brockup by Brassholes.

 BR the once noble acronym of British Rail has of late become the chosen prefix of the Union Jack and bovver boots of the EDL or “Britain First” as Pres.., sorry I can’t type it, as chubby hands Trump would put it. I’m amazed after Brexit it hasn’t spawned a wider use. “Oi brunt you brocksucker you can kiss my brass you brastard,” or “Our broverment are a load of bruckers and brankers are all brembezzlers.” Anyway this morning Bramber Brudd announced she would be looking at continuing the open door of EU brimmigration into the UK where such brimmigrants would benefit our economy. Hold on, didn’t Brexers vote leave to stop all that? Is there a picture emerging here? We, well they to be honest voted leave but leaving is proving to be the mother of all shit pies right. We want to continue with the customs union and free trade agreement and now we’re opening the door to the previous EU policy of free transfer of labour. And what did Teresa May keep repeating? “Brexit means Brexit.” Now why would she say such a thing? I mean who in their right mind would say “Potato means potato”? No what she was really saying was “Brexit means Remain.” We will negotiate a great deal for the UK that we will call Brexit but will actually take the form of remaining in the EU. Everyone’s happy, the stock market will leap up, we won’t need to pay alimony and Polish plumbers will persist in plying their profession. And what will we call it? Bremain. And best of all; you can bruck off chubby hands Trump.

The Epidemic of Porn.

Most people have a limited definition of porn, which is a shame. A recent FB post exposed the debilitating effects of pornography particularly on young teen males. Not the prudish ghost of Mary Whitehouse but the evidence of numerous scientific studies. But I’d like to claim it as a more universal phenomenon: The phenomenon of replacing real life with mind-only stimulation. By this definition we live in epidemic times and like sexual porn it can have a corrosive influence on many aspects of our lives. Advertising is porn, Facebook etc is porn, TV and smart phones churn out porn endlessly, even politics is porn in that it exists as mind-only political machinations rather than the real life experience of the rest of us. In the media, commerce, finance and governance porn corrodes the link between cognition and reality. What better example could there be of erectile dysfunction than our present government’s recent record? In the interests of science I Googled ‘Overcoming porn addiction’ (at the risk of being branded by internet algorithms and inundated by ads for all sort of new things) and got http://www.uncommonhelp.me/articles/overcome-porn-addiction/  Pretty useful advice for everything that falls within my expanded definition, and a perfect confirmation of my theory. All I’ve got to do now is convince the Conservative front bench they’re all wankers in need of a spell in rehab. 

The Internet’s Flooded.

It’s been raining since 6am necessitating me and Britney to remain in bed till 11. And now at 11.30 after 15 minutes of trying to get the little bar chart to lose its exclamation mark my pop3 server has not responded and do I want to wait? Obviously the internet has been flooded. I know this because it was the first answer that came to mind. Am I to be marooned on the desert island of my own vicinity? This realisation assumes biblical proportions. My aunty in Kurdistan, ebay’s amazing deals, Amazon’s quick deliveries, the stock levels of my local Screwfix, all unavailable to me. Ironically I very very slowly get an ad for Dryrod Damp Proofing Rods- 10 pack- £27.00 by Safeguard Europe Ltd. Well it’s a bit bloody late now, and no use to me seeing as our local DIY shop has probably never heard of them. The realisations keep flooding in. No Facebook to keep abreast of cat fails, no YouTube or Vivo vids, no Wikipedia to find scant knowledge of everything. And no internet banking, so as our local branches have closed that’s a five-hour walk to the town centre. I’m beginning to hyperventilate. But then in the midst of this gloom I begin to see a Disney silver lining lighting the sky from the east. Pictures of my old life back, people chatting in shops, promenading down sunny streets listening to brass bands or, feeling no implanted impulsive need for a wider television, having the time to learn piano. And as this glorious outcome reaches its crescendo emails begin to flood in again. It’s all been a dream. The internet is back on, hooray I’m saved! I’ve regained my foothold on that old familiar treadmill. So where was I. Ah yes, John Lewis have a new range of swan feather pillows from Indonesia, motorcycle boots that will protect your lower leg in the event of a crash providing a perfect transplant for some other unfortunate, Julian and Nigel are pictured drinking in Costa del Sol, elephants can hear a thunderstorm from 500 miles away, cats do make trajectory mistakes while dogs work on sympathy, and my bank is advertising it will give me back a small percentage of what it’s already taken if I shop at Waitrose. And now it’s 1.20pm, my arse is sore and I haven’t done a bloody thing. 

Free Money.

Apparently there have been numerous experiments giving away free money, a minimum weekly payment like an unearned wage with a surprisingly wide ranging of benefits. It seems a ridiculous idea yet we gave away free education and most people would agree it worked far better than our current fee-paying debt-incurring system. Giving free birthday presents is still seen as a great idea too. Even surfs and slaves were given their necessities for free after their long hours in the field but that’s stretching it a bit. But today we are paid a wage for work. It’s a tight merciless link, no work, no pay though our necessities remain. This engenders a feeling that we only have value in the work we do, and in turn that as a human being we don’t. This creates a fundamental juxtaposition between value and wealth so that individuals of wealth are valued more than those without. We even value ourselves in these terms thinking ourselves valueless if we lose it like the bankers in the great depression. This runs deep in our psychology. Sure we can value friends as people irrespective of wealth but only because we know them. All this sets up a chain of values. We value having expensive things because they are a product of our wealth. We value buying things, throwing things away and buying new ones all because we value ourselves on the work we do. We value ourselves on long hours, on our position even on the stress we undergo. And all this myriad of secondary self-valuations leads to a stressful inefficient and wasteful lifestyle. It’s most likely this is why experiments with ‘free money’ are so successful, and why in the long run they, counter intuitively, boost the economy, are less wasteful and promote happiness and human growth. It’s because we should value ourselves for the quality of ourselves as people not for the size of our wallet. It’s not centralised communism or greedy capitalism, it’s the natural way EVERYTHING ELSE works. Even in the jungle everything’s free.  

Male Fear.

Detectorists is a gentle drama about two metal detector guys, not the most spectacular hobby in the world, and tenderly exposes a barely conscious fear at the heart of masculinity. Two hundred years of industrialisation have somehow left us in no mans land, our allegiance split between family and employer, between some unholy pragmatism and a connection with the sublime. Our employee status has taken on the facile nature of a video game, enthralling but disconnected, yet in some hidden subconscious corner there’s a yearning to connect. This visceral conflict is our fear. OK we’re used to acceptable fears, bravado, rutting like stags in some financial competition or ski jumping and the like, but these only provoke stress that in itself evidences our deeper visceral conflict. Cricketers love the game but become depressed playing it; how can that be? Some like Trump are totally absorbed into their own video game have no need of air or the earth so long as they wins the next round but even they are driven by this same fear. But how can we admit to it, ‘to be or not to be’? Now there’s a question and yet another problem. Female kind has not been subject to this bread-winner conflict. They haven’t the same history of being conflicted in this respect and now appear the braver sex. We men have a fear we’re barely aware of that we can’t afford to accept that viscerally conflicts us AND we’re out-gunned by our women who have remained more connected. Of course they have a proclivity for blowing smoke up their own arse but that’s not the point here. What are WE going to do about it? What does ‘to be’ really mean? Obviously parlance has moved on since Shakespeare’s day but I suggest it might in todays speak be ‘fuck you’. When faced with monetary seduction, power plays even one’s own ego to refer to one’s inner sense of right and say ‘Fuck you, this is not a game.’ It’ll be hard at first; speaking your truth will feel unbelievably risky, well it is for me, but slowly a healing will occur. The boat may wobble but it won’t sink. The world needs men to reconnect with our own visceral honesty, to lose the fear we’ve been burdened with for two hundred years. It really doesn’t turn on the next deal, the next paycheck, the next win. It turns on the dance moves of your spirit.