The End of Time.

I feel the world slowing. Not the real world, the human world. Humanity is slowing. How can a species slow down on its own? We will stop in real time around 2150. It began slightly with TV and mass media but really got going with computers. We began to perceive through digitised connections. We speak, it is digitised and we hear. What we hear on the phone is not our friends voice but a series of sound packets that most closely resemble the voice looked up in their phones memory store. What is transmitted is not sound but a series of store locations and your receiver reconstructs them into what you hear. In more obvious ways text, e-mails, TV and radio do the same. Algorithms in mp3 and mp4 reduce the content of music and video to the barest intelligible minimum so file sizes and bandwidth are minimised. But how does that slow the human race up? Already many youngsters speak in a slew of syllables as if it’s irrelevant whether or not you understand. Though their typing skills are amazing their handwriting is scrawny because we are beginning and will soon interface more directly with our digital gadgets. Our audio and visual senses will connect directly by digitised connections making speach and writing redundant. Just as we have a human brain on top of a mammalian brain on top of a reptilian brain we will develop a digital brain. But this digital brain will connect via unchanging algorithms much like your phone's predictive text was originated during the Second World War and you’re still using it. Already we are watching old films and episodes of Friends made ten years ago. Music is grinding to a stop. We will achieve full digital integration with X Boxes and play games as part of our real lives. Every desire will be satisfied by what already exists. As we meld with the digital we will increasingly redo what has been done until all we do will be rehashes of what has been done before by others. We will slow until nothing is new and for us time will stop. It will continue for cats and dogs and fish and for the earth, the sun and stars, but for us if we don’t have the courage to resist our digital fascination, time will end. 

Black History Month.

Radio 4 tells me we’re coming up to ‘Black History Month’ in schools. Well ain’t dat de time for celebration. Apparently black people have heroes too and in their own small ethnically challenged way have done some pretty good things, almost equal to us whites, and black children need to know this to bolster their low self esteem from being the sons and daughters of poor ignorant savages. Isn’t it good to know we can offer our pitying hand to these unfortunates one month a year and tell them about ML King, Malcolm X even Rosa Parks so they know they’ve been born into the losing side of this struggle for equality with the white man; so they know their place in society. In fact being born north of the line from Liverpool to the Wash I am probably descended from Vikings and I’d like a ‘Viking History Month’ so everyone knows I come from raping, murdering and pillaging foreigners and should be treated as such. Because in this multicultural society of ours we celebrate diversity. Stop. The middle class, middle age, middle white who thought that one up should be shot! It justifies the individual’s inclination to differentiate themselves from all those ‘diverse’ from themselves. Black people are different, Jews and Muslims are different, Vikings and Angles were different. All ‘celebrating diversity’ does is maintain differences. Only when the Vikings and Angles stopped celebrating their differences did they become the unified English we are today. So forget multiculturalism, we are one society in which we are all different. There are some people I like and some I don’t. I couldn’t give a shit what colour they are.

I miss Greece.

Greece must be a hot bed of terrorist activity. I mean I didn’t see any signs of it while I was there but if the UK with all our special measures can’t keep our own citizens from suicide bombing us, Greeks must be like lambs to the slaughter. The same with teenage violence, drugs and binge drinking. They don’t have CCTV, police patrols or speed cameras. The only police car I saw looked like he was going home for his dinner. And they sell alcohol like its, well I won’t go into that. No, Greece must be overrun with social problems. But it isn’t. Young children play in the streets in the evenings, young people have unproblematic fun, cars without a hope of an MOT, motorcyclist without helmets carrying five year olds on their knees, it all works fine. But surely it shouldn’t. It’s paedophile heaven, an insurers nightmare, drunken teenage joy riders paradise, and fertile Alkida breeding ground. It’s not. But it illuminates the amount of fear, frustration and latent anger in the UK’s social multicultural zeitgeist. On the radio yesterday a woman was complaining about the sound of children in a nearby school playground. What a freak! That is until she described the noise. It wasn’t of children having fun but children shrieking in emotional frenzy that might pass as joy but isn’t. In these little seedpods of our coming generation the zeitgeist is fermenting. It will flower into broken relationships, obesity, unhappiness and the inability to cope. Good times for therapists and policemen but not so good for everybody else.

The Pope's Visit.

So the Pope has come and gone in our absence leaving behind, “Paedophilia is an illness in which free will cannot function” or words close to that effect. As effective in a court of law as saying, “I’m a good bloke really your honour, I just wasn’t myself when I murdered my parents.” I’m left wondering why milkmen and plumbers don’t, as a result of their profession, also succumb in appreciable numbers to this paedophilic illness: Or perhaps the Milk Marketing Board are keeping a closed lid on it. And then there’s his aid who was left at home due to ‘illness’ for saying, “landing at Heathrow airport was like entering a third world country.” Yet I’m left thinking Britain will shortly be a third world country if we don’t regain some faith in the core of the Christian message. A dilemma that, as it takes shape in my mind, is strangely between politics and science. Christianity began as one man talking to individual men and women about their place in this bountiful complexity. Science, though it is tainted by our human intents, is somewhat similar, with individuals sharing their finding with others. Politics however is for mass consumption, a deal between establishment and society, and unfortunately what binds a mass together, be it an establishment or its society, is usually our lowest common denominator, fear. In this instance the Pope was the politician and his aid a scientist sharing his honest findings. The two cannot be seen together. I’m wondering if Britain’s cultural decline, and possibly Catholicism’s, is in this dichotomy. So much of what we think and do is as a member of a mass, be it fashion, music, media, poverty, illness, news or politics. And with each membership comes its own fear to not be the wonderful, perverse individual that you are. I don’t think Jesus wanted us all to be ‘good’ but for us to process the fears that withhold our own goodness. Maybe the Pope made a good point clumsily. That paedophilia is an illness, a deep animal fear of not seeding one’s genes due to an establishment denial, and that without the imposition of such fears one’s ‘free will’ or ‘beautiful self’ will be Godly. Or maybe he was just being a politician talking on behalf of a frightened establishment.

Parga 3.

I was date raped by a Canadian Club in the Island Bar. The club was a three foot bottle that Michael had laid on for his leaving party and regularly decanted into a pitcher, the type they use for table beer in the US; not whiskey. The initial slopes were gentle conversations about living in Parga. They steepened with a difference of opinion about Van Morrison with the feisty Scottish, attractive owner of the establishment. But she downed the Club like a Scot and disappeared early.  Michael, a gentle bear of a body below a sun-browned egg, drank from a thimble sized glass. I apparently did not. As the party broke up Mothermouse et al appeared from their girls night out equally damaged by three Brandy Alexanders and we all went to the Rock Bar. By now the slope was getting steep. Janemouse decided a dance was a good idea so she and I split to find an unmarked door in a back street. Behind was a large room with small lights, big speakers, few people and lots of floor. Here was a perfect opportunity to show one’s style. Being nearer 70 than 60 and on the moguls of a black run style wasn’t the right word. Janemouse fielded me from tables, walls and the other dancers. It appeared to me my reverse wasn’t working. I could do the wibbly wobbly arm waving front and side but there was no stopping me in reverse till I met an immovable object. A teacher once said dance as if you’re on the point of falling over; OK in a class but pissed it came all too easy. I was near falling over standing still. Janemouse thought leaving was a good idea. The rest was a crazy zigzag home fielded by Mothermouse who could walk straight but had her own cross to bear. So date rape, a truly despicable and cowardly offence, wouldn’t work on men; we’d be no use to man nor beast, but I might condone its use by women for getting their own back on dickheads.

Parga 2.

After an early beer, 2 Blue Bar cocktails, 3 ouzos, 2 retzinas and a brandy on my side Mothermouse and me talk about masculinity. Masculinity is bull headedness. Women name call it that like it’s a failing but that’s what it is. Some men are quiet and go about it in secret and others it’s just written on them. Some have it knocked out of them and avoid snapping a twig and others have it knocked into them and knock down a forest. A few talk about their feelings in a feminine sort of way which is pleasing to females, at least at first, but make no mistake, men are bull headed whatever the covering. It runs like root sap up into our branches. It seems to me our brains have far less room for controversy. We don’t have the capacity to flurry through conflicting confusions like women. A stick is a stick and its use is dependant on the situation. Faced with a confusion of feelings my brain blinks to a white spot like when you turn off the TV. Thread thoughts in a neat line like meat on a kebab skewer and I’m fine. But it’s a terrible misconception that men don’t have feelings. We do, we just don’t do it with confusion that needs talking about. We have a feeling and that’s it and talk about something else. Like music; you hear it till the song is over. But then it must be frustrating, like being with someone listening to their iPod with the only clue as to the song being how they tap their foot. We must work on it.

Parga 1.

Parga is on the Greek west coast opposite Corfu. It is its own little state within the country, a bit like the Vatican only with a Mayor instead of the Holy Pontiff, and like Catholicism it changes slowly. In fact the only upheaval in these numerically choppy times was more due to rain. Stefanos whose character and taverna dominate Parga life had a winter collapse. The two balconies of his taverna that shelved from the scrubby cliffs a hundred feet above Voltos bay collapsed in the winter rains onto the rocks below. His new tabled shelves are wider and stronger but still perilous. Stefanos’s restaurant is the best fish restaurant in Parga because Stefanos is a fisherman first, a cavalier second and a restaurateur third. His dry leather glove of a hand that welcomed me was testament to daily salt and ropes. Costas had moved from his usual beach bar due to a fall out, and Michael, whose bar was always a little too aloof to be profitable, is moving back to Canada with wife and winter baby. Elli who tends the sun loungers next to the stream that shyly slots the sand is as ever Elli. Five feet and nothing more with her purposeful feminine shape tends family rather than tourists, playing with babies and bringing everyone up to date with Parga news since their last visit. Mothermouse and Elli loved each other from their first conversation. These are mostly about her dealings with the pontiff, her female account of God and the workings of Parga being a constant thorn in his side. If Elli has ever been untrue to her heart and mind it’s a well kept secret. Catholics take note. An uncomfortable woman is worth a hundred clerics. So Parga where we sleep in and out of the sun bundles up our unwanted cares and posts them along its golden trail to the setting sun one more time.