Uncategorized | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

June 30, 2014

On how Oscar Wilde politics may destroy humanity…….

I’ve always found politics fascinating. Not the theatrical pantomime of Prime Minister’s Questions – where ironically, answers are few and far between -, but actual politics.

Quite why there persists in people’s minds the idea that politics is complicated baffles me, as politics isn’t complicated at all. One is meant to think that it is, and that suits the main political parties just fine and dandy. Political parties claim to want voter engagement but actually they fear an informed electorate. Largely because, just as Dorothy discovers in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the electorate will realize when they pull back the curtain that the wizard is not a wizard at all, but in fact an ordinary man, and they will react with anger that for so long the truth has been hidden from them.

In a later entry, I promise to outline my theory that anyone who understands how a family operates – the dynamics and tensions that are at play, the ever shifting balance of powers between the parents and the children and the temporary alliances built on need – can understand politics. Anything that is so complicated that at its most basic level it cannot be explained to anyone with an I.Q. larger than the radius of their kneecap, suggests that the fault lies with the person attempting to simplify the complicated. I promise I will outline my theory in another post, but now is not the time.

Instead, I want to draw your attention to Caroline Lucas M.P., who – it seems to me at any rate – is congenitally incapable of uttering anything less than common sense. Given that it is said that the thing about common sense is it isn’t very common, this is a rare quality indeed, rarer still in a politician. It matters not if you agree with what she says or not, but she says it in easily comprehensible English and not in the sophistry laden nonsense that politicians normally speak.

Here is but one example;

On Wednesday 18^th June 2014, the House of Commons Environmental Audit Select Committee was hearing evidence regarding the National Pollinator Strategy. Sounds boring, but is of the utmost concern to any right thinking person. Pollinator is another word for bees and other insects that pollinate a third of all plants on the planet. Einstein once prophetically remarked that “Mankind couldn’t survive the honeybee’s disappearance for more than five years”. This will take you to a far more reasoned and coherent explanation as to why you should care. If you don’t already, that is.

Giving evidence to the committee and refuting the possibility that any research funded by the very companies that stood to lose if the research proved conclusively that there was a link between certain pesticides and dwindling pollinator numbers, was Professor Ian Boyd, Chief Scientific Officer at the Department of the Environment, Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), who said

“That’s a very relevant point, but just because they’re paying for the studies and leading the studies doesn’t mean to say that the studies are invalid” Then Dr. Julian Little, from pesticide maker Bayer told the committee that,“Yes, we are putting the money up for it but it’s being done by independent scientists, they’re sorting out the protocols, they’re working with both DEFRA and EFSA (European Food Standards Authority) to ensure those protocols are relevant.”

Naturally, I was shouting in my head at the radio – the quite excellent ‘Today in Parliament’ on Radio Four – “Has no one heard of the saying ‘He who pays the piper names the tune’’’ when just in time Caroline Lucas restored some much needed sanity to proceedings, when she said,

“In such a contested area, having properly independent peer reviewed research, rather than research that could be seen from the outside as if it would be in the interest of the person paying for it, surely that is a compelling reason to look again at the degree to which the strategy depends on research being carried out by private companies”

But proving, not for the first, and certainly by no means for the last time, that this government has taken Oscar Wilde’s quote that, “A cynic is a man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” as part of its decision making process, Boyd then said, to my utter astonishment “The question is just whether we can afford from a public perspective, to fund these types of studies and I go back to what I said earlier on, that these types of studies are very large scale and the bigger they get, the more expensive they get”

Words fail. What could possibly be more important? In what universe is a tax cut to the top earners from 50p to 45p, more important than funding research into declining pollinator numbers? What good is a tax cut when there’s a chance that in the very near future there won’t be enough food to feed everyone? About as much use as a porcelain golf ball. A tax cut, moreover which, depending on whom you believe, will cost the Exchequer between a £100 million or £3 billion, sufficient methinks, to pay for the research. But hey, I could be wrong.

But we can’t afford this research? Didn’t one David Cameron, the former honorary president of The Oxfordshire Beekeepers Association, giving evidence to the same committee not so long ago, say,”If we don’t look after our bee populations, very, very serious consequences will follow.” After that performance in front of the committee, No.10 felt compelled to issue the following statement, clarifying his position “The prime minister is a strong advocate of beekeeping in his constituency and as he said in the house, it’s important we look after our bee population.” Only a skeptic would draw one’s attention to the careful wording of that statement, especially “ a strong advocate of beekeeping in his constituency” which carefully avoiding saying anything that might suggest advocacy for beekeeping beyond his constituency.

Step forward, then Caroline Lucas, who retorted to Boyd, “It just worries me greatly if alarm bells aren’t ringing throughout government because we can’t afford to do the research we need to do to see if we’re at great risk.”

Exactly.

June 25, 2014

Just to be absolutely clear before I start, this is about MY personal experience of depression, of how it makes ME feel and should not be misconstrued as advocating any course of action by any other person. Sorry about that, but there are some vulnerable people surfing the interweb and one has no idea who might stumble across this when they’re at an especially depressed state. If that is you, then I feel for you, but shut down your computer now, please.

Good.

Winston Churchill famously battled with depression, calling it ‘The Black Dog’ and if Churchill called it that, then mine is the dogs home at Battersea, with the dogs lulling me into a false sense of (in)security by being quiet for a long periods, then suddenly barking all at once, in a seemingly endless cacophony. I can’t recall not being depressed, to some extent, between waking from the coma and right now, this second as I type this. When I say ‘to some extent’ I mean exactly that. Last weekend I was in Dorset, and a trip to the beach was mooted. Well ‘beach’ is technically right, insofar as it was the strip of land between the sea and the cliff. And with the cliff face towering way above you, one is awe struck as one takes in the many layers of fossilized remains, built up and compacted over millions and millions of years. Giving majestic and irrefutable proof that evolution is not a theory but fact and anyone who suggests otherwise is mistaking their anus for their mouth.

The point is that I was asked about my depression and how bad it was. I turned and asked the questioner to look at the cliff face, with its clearly delineated layers of strata, some thick, some thin, and to imagine that to be a measure of depression. The closer to the top one was, the less depressed one was. I replied that mine was considerably below the middle, but for quite a while after waking from the coma, it had been near the bottom. Actually, when I woke up after the coma I wished, as I do now as I write this – and quite possibly until my dying day – that I hadn’t bothered waking up from the coma. That in a nutshell is the root cause of my depression and why, most times I downplay the subject– as talking about my depression depresses me – and change the subject as soon as I can.

I have – for the most part at least – what I call a ‘functional level of depression’ inasmuch as it allows me to get out of bed each day, not a ‘debilitating level of depression’ where you just can’t be bothered with anything, anymore. That happens to me, sometimes. I liken it to a boa constrictor, because in the same way a boa constrictor wraps itself around its unsuspecting prey until too late it realises, and the life is, quite literally, squeezed out of it.

So yes, I have thought about suicide. When I was in hospital, the long nights were often filled with thinking of schemes as to how best to achieve the desired outcome, whilst enduring the minimum of pain. You’ll be glad to know that eventually I thought of a plan, which factored in all my limitations, would cause the least immediate inconvenience to those I knew and above all, was foolproof. After all, any problem, when one breaks it down into smaller problems, becomes infinitely more achievable. Same with suicide. If one focuses with cool calculating logic on the matter at hand and how best to reach your final destination, it becomes easier.

Because what could possibly be worse for your self esteem than to wake up after a failed suicide attempt, most probably in an even worse physical condition than before. This is MY own personal view. And please, since I’ve got enough problems without adding the tabloids and their own brand of right-wing fulminating furore to the list, don’t misread this as somehow being an encouragement for anyone to do anything. It isn’t. Isn’t free speech great? Now you have to second-guess what someone you’ve never met might do. Seriously? Are you having a Turkish?

Once I’d thought of a viable plan it became like a macabre credible deterrent. Much in the same way the U.S might proclaim to South Korea or some such state, do this and let allow us to verify you are doing this to our satisfaction, or this will happen. Once that was in place, I could put it in the farthest recesses of my mind, so as not to be something I dwell upon. And yes, I’ve tried anti-depressants, which in my case, were as much use as an inflatable anchor.

A few weeks ago though, I was mulling over my plan, as I do from time to time to check there are no weak spots in it, when I was roused from my morbid musings by someone who’ll feature in my writing from time to time. Ladles and jellyspoons, allow to me introduce you to, cue fanfare, Little Miss Sunshine or L.M.S, as she’ll be referred to. She woke me up, handed me a satsuma and said, “I’ll help you share it”, all earnest helpfulness, as if she imagined that she had discovered a solution to some hitherto intractable dilemma. (It should be pointed that it was my satsuma she handed me). I mean come on, that is utterly charming, self-serving genius of the very highest order. (As someone who could turn convincing people it was only out of altruistic concern for their well-being to follow my suggestion and any benefit to me would be a wholly unforeseen fortuitous accident into an art form, I’m well able to judge.) And she’s only three! I know I should be shocked, appalled and other things that adults are meant to think, but actually, I was impressed. I asked her to show me her little finger once. I was amazed to find no scars, where she wraps me around it. Her irrepressible enthusiasm coupled with her ceaseless playfulness does me no end of good.

Really, how can you not be bewitched when she has a piece of mango in each hand, looks at each of them intently to gauge their size and thrusts the hand holding the smaller piece at you? (Which says a lot about me that I find it endearing. Mind you, I did warn you, in very the first line of my first blog entry, remember?)

Next time will, you’ll be pleased to learn, not be as maudlin, but rather a homage to the erstwhile Caroline Lucas M.P.

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June 19, 2014

Why I hate football..

I hate football or rather, what I’ve grown to hate is not the game itself, but rather all of the attendant nonsense that goes with it. And I suspect I’m not alone in feeling this.

As a boy I was in my primary and secondary school’s football teams. Playing football was great fun, and you quickly learned that despite every appearance to the contrary, you did have a fiercely competitive spirit.

As I say playing football is one thing, watching it is quite another.

The sponsors of the World Cup in Brazil wish, as all sponsors of sporting events do, that some of the reflected glory of a sporting event watched by billions will rub off on them and so give their brand an image of health, vitality and energy. Look at the sponsor’s of the World Cup in Brazil. And ask yourself how many of the logo’s are prominently emblazoned on screens that players stand in front of at post match interviews or press conferences, ‘How many of them have even the most tenuous connection with football?’

Aside of course, from the cost of staging such an event in the first place which is offset to some very small degree by the money the sponsor’s stump up. The most watched event on earth (according to FIFA – an organization that’s whiter than white – 715 million people watched the last World Cup final) – a marketer’s wet dream – will cost a staggering $14 billion. No wonder there are riots, with six out of ten Brazilian’s believing the money could be better spent.

Football is no longer what it was and that is both a good and a bad thing. We have seen the tragic consequences of terraces at football matches. The death traps that these could easily become have been replaced with all seater stadia – and prices to match – with the result that the average fan cannot afford the price of admission.

My brother supports Arsenal, always has done but he recognizes he cannot afford to go to any home game, as the cost of it is well beyond him. And he earns a decent wage, but given that footballer’s wages are no longer rooted in any discernable reality, the cost of admission has to go someway to pay their wages. On the subject of wages it is ironic that some players in the premier league earn as much in a week as a nurse or a teacher earns in a year.

What kind of society allows this to happen? I mean, ask yourself if you were in need of life saving medical attention would you ask a footballer to help? Likewise if you had a child, and that child required educating, who would you ask? David Cameron may not be everyone’s ideal choice as Prime Minister, but nonetheless, he does what thinks is right. We may disagree with his thinking but still, he juggles lot of balls in the air, some smooth and some covered in spikes. Balls that I for one have neither the time, nor the experts on hand to give me policy options necessary to soberly consider them and thence to make a reasoned evaluation. And nor, I’d wager, do you. And we pay him for making difficult decisions on our behalf, decisions with ramifications so potentially…potent that our heads would explode at the sheer enormity of it all, we pay him less, less, in year – £142,500 – than some footballers earn in a week. I have no clue whatsoever to do about the Isis uprising in Iraq, the consequences for the region in general, global security in particular and our national security. Best if we ask Rooney what he thinks we should do.

As I say when I played football it was fun, but as soon as I stopped playing, I soon stopped being a spectator, because, as I said I hate all the nonsense that goes with it. England are playing Uruguay in the World Cup tonight. I could care less about the outcome, but only if I really, really tried very hard.

June 18, 2014

My ‘recovery is akin to a sadistic version of ‘Groundhog Day’…

Each person, whilst embarking on recovering from some calamitous event in their life, will doubtless suffer numerous minor and not so minor setbacks offset by minor victories before – one hopes – an eventually glorious triumph. That, at least, is how the story goes. Or is meant to go.

However, the person writing my story drew inspiration from the small print of adverts selling financial goods. The ones promising spectacular, risk free returns from a modest investment in large print, whilst right at the bottom, in very small text that one almost needs a magnifying glass to read, a disclaimer disavowing the grandiose claims made earlier warns,

“Past performance is no guarantee of future results and you may not get out what you put in.”

It feels like that combined with a somewhat cruel ‘Groundhog Day’ element. For those of you unaware of the plot of ‘Groundhog Day’ – I use ‘those’ in the loosest possible sense of the word, but you never know, there might be one – it’s plot concerns itself with;

Bill Murray who plays Phil Connors, an arrogant and egocentric TV weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, finds himself repeating the same day again and again.

Walking is a good example of this rather sadistic phenomenon. Before the accident, one of the things I prided myself on was the speed at which I would walk. I used to think there should be lanes, like they have on motorways, for pedestrians in busy shopping streets, closed off to traffic and rigorously enforced. Dawdlers, tourists and school groups could faff about to their hearts content in the slow lane, safe in the knowledge that they weren’t being a cause of irritation to those who actually wanted to get somewhere at a pace considerably faster than an old person trying to wade through treacle. Bear traps at random intervals would get the message across. One of my favourite games with myself was to spot someone walking ahead in the distance, set myself a target of how many steps it would take me to overtake them and then to do it in far less. Which I usually did. Oh happy days. How I remember them, as remember them is all I can do now. I know I have a memory of it. The problem is that I just can’t remember how walking like that feels.

Early on in my road to recovery – which at times feels like a dead end – I was able to manage 610 steps unaided. Admittedly, they were small steps, required frequent stops, took what seemed to me a long time and were so smooth and fluid that they made Frankenstein’s monster seem like a ballerina. You might think I’d have increased the distance, that between then and now my motivation to constantly exceed my goals would have been re-energised. This is the where the financial advert’s small print crossed with a sadistic element of ‘Groundhog Day’ kicks in, because what happened yesterday has no bearing whatsoever on what happens today. It’s all reset to zero, so it seems. A lot of effort – even getting out of bed some mornings seems a task akin to Sisyphus’s fate for scant reward. The effect is such that a prisoner on death row has more motivation than me.

One of the recurring themes throughout this blog will be the seemingly perfect storm, of a seriously depressed mental state with no optimism whatsoever coupled with a fatigued and ultimately tired of it all disposition. Added to that a couple of years of trying various strategies and employing numerous professionals to facilitate them to seemingly no end.

I feel it incumbent upon me at this point to draw your attention to the not inconsiderable fact that I am not the best person to dispassionately evaluate my ‘progress’. As I am given to compare me as I am, against me as I was, which is not, as has been oft pointed out to me, such a wise idea, fateful folly that it is. Much more prudent is perhaps comparing me when I got out of hospital against me as I am now. One might think this is clear-headed and sensible advice of the first order. But that thought has to be tempered with the knowledge that the same person repeatedly suggesting this also thinks broccoli ice cream is an idea worth pursuing.

You may well ask ‘How come if his mental state is as bad as he claims, how then is he able to motivate himself enough to write this blog?’ Which is a fair question.

Firstly, it passes the time. It’s as pure and simple as that. And I think, as I hope you’ll discover if you follow with this blog, that I have a somewhat…idiosyncratic way of expressing myself.

And secondly, I live in a house share, and I pride myself on being considerate of others, so in order to achieve that – to me – laudable objective, I try and subjugate as far as much as possible my depression. Which isn’t easy but neither would living with me be if I didn’t. Hopefully this blog will provide a suitable outlet for my varied pet peeves. And new ones, of which I’m sure there’ll be many.

My next entry won’t be as depressing, unless of course you’re an England fan. It’ll be about the World Cup and football generally.

June 11, 2014

I put the ‘me’ into mean……

The first and most important thing to bear in mind about me is that I am not a nice person.

Admittedly my friends might disagree with that statement. They would say that I could be both witty and generous and, on occasion, loyal. Whether I chose to be, or not depended on my mood at that exact moment. But as I have only a few friends left, that isn’t saying much about me. (How I lost the rest of my friends will be a subject I will return to. Frequently).

Just to be clear about things; I put the ‘me’ into mean. It will help you no end, if when reading the words that follow, that you are not fooled into thinking I am a nice person.

The second thing to know about me is that I don’t enjoy living. I realise that that statement might require some clarification. Not enjoying living is not the same thing as wanting to be dead. As John Cougar Mellencamp’s song ‘Jack and Diane’ has it, “Oh yeah, life goes on / long after the thrill of living is gone.”

Not enjoying living is a somewhat unpalatable fact to have in one’s head all the time. Sometimes right at the front, sometimes edged out of to the middle or the back, but always there, like a spot in-between your shoulder blades, which you can’t get to and a friend has to squeeze, and when they do, you know it will return.

Which it does.

Life in itself is a problematic word, given that I don’t consider myself to have one. An existence, certainly. But life? Strictly speaking, yes I have one inasmuch as life is the interval between when you are born and when you die. But what transpires during that interval is what most people would consider life.

Given that I am a citizen of one of the top ten wealthiest countries in the world, with a functioning democracy, independent judiciary and rule of law, and all the benefits that that accrues, not to mention the benefits I now subsist on, I can’t grumble. I am fortunate to have been born here when I consider I could have been in Afghanistan, Somalia or America.

But I do grumble.

To quote the French philosopher, Jacque Liverot “ An optimist sees half a pint of milk. He says it is half full. A pessimist sees half a pint of milk. He says it is half empty. I see half a pint of milk. I say it is sour.”

This blog will be about the ‘sour milk’ of existence. It will also try to be entertaining and sometimes funny. It will be original and you may well, on occasion, disagree with what I write. If you didn’t, and agreed with everything I write, then you would share my rather jaundiced view of things, which would be a pretty sad indictment of your character. So what, you may well ask, is the reason for wasting your time reading (and hopefully continuing to read) my blog?

Well, some time ago I suffered – what was to me at any rate – a life ending brain injury. I went out for the evening and woke up, some weeks later, from a medically induced coma, during which time my vital organs had seized on this opportunity, afforded them by my tardiness, to pack up one by one.

I awoke to a radically changed me; a me that no one ever took the time to explain exactly what had happened to me and, more importantly, what it might mean. Although, as I soon grasped, what it meant, was that my vague dreams had suddenly become an all too real living nightmare. My ability to walk, to talk, seemingly gone. I had to become outwardly nice. Despite thinking that Sartre was right, when he said “Hell is other people”, circumstance prevailed over conviction. It has to, if you depend on others. But inwardly…. This blog will be about my reversal of fortune and my ability (or more often not) to cope with it. It will also contain my thoughts on what I find both irritating, inane or both about modern life. Suffice to say, there won’t be a shortage of the latter…..

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