Me and Red Sal.

Back in the 60’s when me and Red Sally were teenagers we were at it. No I mean fermenting ideas about changing the world to the sound of The Who and the Beatles. This was ‘My Generation’ and we were up for it. Mods and Rockers and rollers, Beba, Carnaby Street, Apple and the Maharishi. That’s what teenagers are for, arguing the toss about stupid society, religion and politics with dim-witted decrepits. And now as we reach frosty top status ourselves it’s like we’re having to come out of teenage retirement because the current crop are as passive as a wet fart. Give them a TV and alcohol and they’re as disputative as a stick. The pinnacle of their discourse on moral ambiguity is hair straighteners. Questions like ‘Is there a God?’ would only become relevant if he was featured in a new primetime sit-com series. Catholicism would only achieve cachet if it ran adds where a guy knocks on an attractive woman’s door and asks, “Hi I’ve just moved in, do you have a cup of the blood of Christ I could borrow?” Without adds for walking, sports, hobbies, debating and playing music, which there won’t be because there’s no profit in them, they just won’t feature on a teenagers agenda. Wake fucking up! They will always only prompt you into paying for things. You’re not here just to supply Carlsburg and Clairol with money! You’re not just the cash cow for unis, landlords, Microsoft and skunk growers. This is ‘Your Generation’, your life and your society. Start thinking or they’ll happily enslave you. Maybe Gordon Brown did save the world from financial ruin, or maybe he just capitulated to commercial forces, choosing to save the banks and saddle you with debit rather than take the more difficult, messy option of fighting for fairness for ordinary men and women. It’s your fight now; Red Sal and me have our bus passes and want to grow old gracefully. Yeh right, like that’s going to happen.

David's Great Escape.

So Ed’s made his first speech as leader of the Labour Party. He won them over with, 1/ humble origins, 2/ struggle, 3/ other people did stuff wrong, 4/ England is fab, 5/ I am your leader now and 6/ I offer a new beginning. It’s not a million miles from what his brother would have said, what Gordon, Tony and David did say, and I’d imagine what Adolph Hitler said when becoming Chancellor but without the stylish arm movement. At any rally of the faithful the first few rows are reserved for fellow politicians and the further back you go the more ordinary people see it from a distance. There’s a sort of fog that descends on these politicians from the years it’s taken them to progress the twenty five yards to front of the hall, all that experience of other politicians, of political thinking and how politics works. They applauded Ed’s speech because it ticked all the political boxes yet it’s content is as bland and futile as Miss World’s desire for world peace and an end to poverty. And just as Miss World is preoccupied with her beauty and the length of her eyelashes so too politicians consider their appeal and standing in their own beauty contest. It’s not that they aren’t intelligent, hard working and well intentioned, it’s that the process of getting to where they are has induced in them a collective delusion that they have with power great responsibility. They are the one who will shoulder the personal responsibility of millions and mistakenly gather it into a position of great importance. One after another line up to take on the role that will make them old men. It’s as if they don’t recognise their future in the hollow eyes and drawn faces of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They study history as though it won’t happen to them. But it does. It will. Maybe in ten or fifteen years David Miliband will look back and see a merciful release.

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.