the brilliantly leaping gazelle

July 13, 2015

Is George Osborne channelling the spirit of Josef Goebbels…

It’s not as outlandish a proposition as one might initially think, and by that I don’t mean that I’m accusing George Osborne of having any far right wing tendencies, just right wing tendencies. Because under the pretext of austerity, he’s pursuing the ideological agenda of the right, namely minimum state intervention, greater private sector involvement in what remains of what’s left, cutting taxes to enrich a few but to impoverish many.

Welfare cuts aren’t well, fair, which proves that George Osborne really does put the con into Conservative

It was Goebbels – Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda – who said
“The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous. “ Humpty Dumpty said pretty much the same thing, that words can be given whatever meaning one chooses. If people then misunderstand you because they didn’t bother to establish what you meant, then the fault lies with them. Lie of course, being the operative word. Which brings us neatly back to Goebbels.

Because George Osborne’s use of the word recovery does not equate with any traditional definition of the word, it might do in the world in which he lives, but given he’s on a salary of £134,000, owns a 15% stake in his family wallpaper firm and stands to inherit a baronetcy, his world is far, far removed from mine. And the vast majority of people the budget will adversely affect. Recovery means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ”A return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength.” George Osborne must have his own meaning – one which he hasn’t felt the need to share with anyone else if he deludes himself that what he advocates is “A return to a normal state. “ If he does, he puts me in mind of the guy who goes to collect his car from a garage after a repair, only to discover that it’s now 4ft long.

Back however from the genius of Chris Morris to the brass neck of George Osborne. In his budget on Tuesday he announced, with a face that is straighter than he is, that “Because we seek a truly national recovery, today I also ask our banking sector to contribute more. But as our banking sector becomes more profitable again, I believe they can make a bigger contribution to the repair of our public finances.” That’s a monumental understatement. It deftly avoids apportioning any of the blame on the banks, who were, let us not forget, all in favour of the light touch of regulation that helped create the conditions for the state we’re all in. And while we’re on the subject, wasn’t it the very same banks and other financial services who were steadfastly against any government intervention in financial industry until they found that actually, they were in favour of the government – the taxpayer – bailing them out of the mess that they had helped to create. As Caroline Lucas MP said, addressing the crowd on a recent anti austerity march.” It wasn’t the poor who caused the economic crisis. It wasn’t people on Jobseeker’s Allowance who brought down the banks. It wasn’t people with disabilities who wasted billions speculating on risky financial markets. So that’s why we’re here to say: stop punishing the poor.”

Once again proving that George Osborne puts the con into Conservative he went on “I am today raising the rate of the bank levy to 0.21 per cent. This will raise an additional £900 million a year.” Sounds almost impressive. Until that is one realises that the Royal Bank of Scotland – of which the taxpayer owns a 79% stake in – paid bonuses amounting to £588 million last year. And that’s just one bank! Just take a moment to reflect upon that, as one considers the other cuts to public services George Osborne announced, and then think of how craven the government is to the whole banking sector. Adam Curtis made an excellent point in his short film for Charlie Brooker’s Wipe 2014, when he pointed out that hardly anybody had been charged, let alone jailed for financial scandals. Despite a steady stream of scandals, hardly anyone has had to chew a prison pillow. You can take your pick of banking scandals – there’s no shortage of them – from the Libor rate fixing scandal, the PPI mis-selling scandal, various money laundering scandals, interest rate hedging scandal, the foreign exchange rate scandal….

My point is that if any of the banks’ fined – essentially a slap on the wrist given their vast profits – were benefit claimants then they’d have faced a very different fate. Yes some high profile bank chief executives do make the press, but their humiliation is intense but short lived and they have a rather agreeable severance package and pension to console themselves with. Unlike the seemingly constant fly tipping of human nature that is the media’s obsession with benefit scroungers.

If the media was serious about exposing people sponging off the state, living it large, while the rest have to live it small, they could instead look at corporate welfare, which is estimated to cost £93 billion a year. Whereby the government decides to subsidise corporations and businesses, estimated because no one is sure. Are tax-credits a form of corporate welfare? Lets think shall we? Tax credits are only available to people who are in work and are a means by which the government tops up the wages employers pay. So in effect the taxpayer is subsidising employers who pay low wages, (and that’s only one of many examples of corporate welfare). For a more comprehensive and less contentious analysis of what it means in practice and the cost to the UK I’d urge you to have a read of Kevin Farnsworth’s – an academic who’s trawled through countless papers so I don’t have to – eye-opening article revealing the sheer scale of greed. http://www.renewal.org.uk/articles/the-british-corporate-welfare-state/

Speaking of greed – one that firmly imprints the boot-mark of the state upon the face of the taxpayer and pushes it right down into the mud – is there any more obscene contradiction of the ‘we all in this together’ nonsense than the fact that whilst elsewhere benefit claimants are facing swingeing cuts, one household is seeing its benefits increase? The Royal family prove that falling out of the right woman’s womb dramatically improve your life chances, because that’s all they’ve done.

My worry of exhausting your patience prevents me from mentioning the taxpayer owned remaining stake – the 79% which cost us over £45 billion – that Osborne plans to sell off, will generate a projected loss of £7.2 billion. Or that by sneakily changing the way benefits are calculated Osborne saves £40 billion a year. This country has enough money, it’s what George Osborne chooses to spend it on that’s important. So when he says the budget is a ‘contract for Britain’, is he meaning a contract full of hidden nasty surprises, rather like a ‘phone contract someone else has taken out on your behalf, that because they’re not paying for it, they’ve only skimmed it. Or the fact that the budget deficit has increased by 50% under George’s stewardship of the economy.

Which brings us neatly back to Goebbels:

“The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous. “

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July 4, 2015

Iain Duncan Smith. Is there no start to his talent? Or his he the political equivalent of East 17?

Really? Is there no start to his talent? Or maybe it’s just me who thinks that Iain Duncan Smith puts the ‘me’ into mediocre? Actually, he does have talent, just not according to any accepted dictionary definition of the word, that is. Talent implies some degree of natural aptitude, skill or flair for a specific activity. Either that or being a highly attractive member of the opposite sex. He demonstrates none of the former, whilst I hope his wife considers him to be one of the latter.

To most of the rest of us who are not concerned by his personal attractiveness, it is his ideological attractiveness – or lack of – that is more pressing. IDS – or IBS as I sometimes refer to him as he gives me the sh*ts – is a Marmite politician. You either love him or hate him; your standpoint governed by whether or not you or anybody you know is a lucky beneficiary of his reform of the welfare system.

Now the first thing to point out about welfare reform is that it isn’t well, fair. (That topic is deserving of a post all its own, which it’ll get next week.). And that the second thing to point out about welfare reform is that it isn’t. Well not reform as defined by pretty much every English language dictionary. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, reform is to “make changes in (something, especially an institution or practice) in order to improve it.” (my italics).

One cannot help but think of George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ especially the sentence “It (the English Language) becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are 
foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”, when one thinks of his definition of reform. Or, if one is feeling a lot more charitable than his welfare reform is, one might deduce that Iain Duncan Smith is taking as his precedent that well known social campaigner Lewis Caroll and his political tract ‘Alice through the Looking Glass ’, “ ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’”

How else might one explain the decision of Iain Duncan Smith to redefine what is meant by child poverty. Despite calls from all of the U.K’s children commissioners to protect children from welfare cuts, his decision to plough forward with this idea is a good case of changing the facts to suit his purpose. I can’t be the only one to notice the irony in cutting the welfare budget to benefit future generations so they are not saddled with debt if it means exacerbating the hardship suffered by this younger generation.

In many ways Iain Duncan Smith reminds me of an ex boyfriend who’s been invited by the groom to the wedding of his ex. (You may or may not remember that at one point Iain Duncan Smith was once leader of the Conservative Party.) So imagine this scenario; David Cameron in an act to show he’s the lucky guy who gets the girl, he cultivates and maintains a friendship with Iain Duncan Smith. This is in order to constantly highlight to Iain Duncan Smith that the fiancée – the Conservative Party – much prefers him. That’s why he invites him to the wedding, to maximize his humiliation but he’s not alone in his misfortune. – Cameron also pulled the same stunt with William Hague. He also asks Iain Duncan Smith to oversee the catering, which he does by treating the poorly paid workers abominably in the hope that it will endear him to the newlyweds.

Or I could point out that Iain Duncan Smith is the political equivalent of East 17. East 17 recently held a gig in Dublin where only thirty people turned up. Iain Duncan Smith held a speaking event in Liverpool that attracted 67 people. Or of course I could have chosen to mention the fact that he had his official credit card cancelled by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) for claiming expenses he wasn’t entitled to. I could have drawn a nice little comparison between the treatments his department routinely hands out to the treatment he received. However, IPSA released a statement a couple of days later saying that the error had been entirely theirs. Which is somewhat ironic given the amount of errors that are to be found in the overall benefits budget.

Speaking of benefits this brings me nicely on to ‘Betsygate’ the wholly unintentional oversight whereby Iain Duncan Smith employed his wife Betsy as his secretary at a cost of £18,000. Despite her not doing constituency work, fortunately, an investigation cleared him of any deliberate wrongdoing. So that’s all good then.

Actually I was wrong. Iain Duncan Smith does have talents. Most notably for landing on his feet, by a) having lied about his university qualifications and then b) marrying into money resulting in the happy coincidence that c) he lives in a £2million house set in three acres on his father-in laws estate where d) he is the father to four children despite telling benefit claimants they should only have two children or risk sanctions. Essentially he is exactly the sort of person he quite happily demonizes.

And also he unites people. Admittedly against him but I suspect he see’s this as a vindication, not a condemnation, of what he’s doing. A wide cross section of think tanks, countless charities, trade unions and no end of advocacy groups and many thousands of people who’ve benefitted from his reform, who are cross with his ideological goal of shredding society’s safety net.

I had a vague idea of using the quote attributed to Winston Churchill that he is reputed to have made about Clement Atlee, “He was a modest man who had much to be modest about.” in relation to Iain Duncan Smith. But them I came to my senses. After the general election in 1945 Labour were swept to victory with a promise they reform. Actual reform, that is.

In the space of six years and with a crippling national debt accrued during WW2 – we only stopped paying the Americans back for their loans in 2006 – they created the National Health Service, laid the foundations for the welfare state and bought into public ownership the railways, the steel, electricity, gas and coal industry. So much so, that by 1951 20% of the U.K. economy was in public hands.

And they enhanced rights for workers. And women. (This was in 1945 after all!) And children. They set up legal aid. They made free secondary education a right. In fact they doubled spending on Education. I could go on but the point is that the sheer scale of their ambition is matched only by how much of it they achieved.

Iain Duncan Smith is to Clement Atlee what fast food is to haute cuisine.

Next week…how welfare reform isn’t well, fair…

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June 27, 2015

“If you wear that you’ll look like a girl”….

If it is said that the thing about common sense is that it isn’t very common, then in my experience at least, fashion sense has been out of fashion for most people since birth. By fashion sense I don’t mean men who wear skirts as natty headwear, women who wear waistcoats as trousers or children who wear bras as earmuffs. Rather that most people do to some degree dress as if they’ve pulled something out of a clothing (un)lucky dip.

One that just gives one any old thing, again and again until one has the requisite amount of clothes that are a) appropriate for prevailing weather conditions and b) sufficient for one not to be arrested for public indecency. This can be the only possible explanation that solves the mystery of why people wear what they wear. It isn’t as if there is a shortage of people willing to give advice. The problem is more the lack of people willing to heed it.

I myself am not, as I’m often called,‘ a fashion whore.’ a charge levelled at me by people who’ve clearly been ‘fashion celibate’ for years. Admittedly, the only brand I’m loyal to is Adidas – their trainers only, not they’re other sportswear. (Am I alone in finding it ironic that sportswear manufacturers make sportswear in sizes that only people who are clearly no stranger to the light of the fridge at midnight could be poured into?) Anyway, I’ve always worn Adidas trainers, in fact as I write this I’ve got this pair on, not only because they look nice, but also, if you’re like me, you can match it to your outfit/s, or as I did once, base my entire outfit around a pair of trainers. I see nothing wrong in this.

What is wrong – and it’s only my opinion so I might be wrong but I very much doubt it – are people who don’t colour co-ordinate, as it makes things so much easier clothes wise. If you see an item of clothing but you couldn’t make at least two outfits out of it with what you’ve already got, you don’t buy it. If you can, you do. The most expensive item of clothing in a wardrobe is one that’s only been worn a few times and then languishes, unworn and overlooked. If an item costs say £250.000 but you wear it frequently, because you’ve bought wisely and it creates at least three items in your wardrobe, its initial cost falls with wear of it. It may well be a self-serving justification, but some clothes ultimately pay for themselves.

As with most behaviours, the root of this one lies in childhood. I have both my mother and father to thank for my innate sense of colour co-ordination. Every Spring, my mother would pack away her Autumn / Winter wardrobe – it sounds more glamorous than it was – and get her Spring / Summer one out. As she looked it over and put things together, I’d make suggestions, such as ‘What about combining this blouse, that skirt, those shoes…and perhaps this handbag and those earrings?’ My father by contrast, had he been caught by the fashion police, would’ve been given life. He was an accident that’d already happened. Like most men, he believed that as far as clothing was concerned there were only five colours. Black, white, blue, brown or gay (bright colours). There are, of course, exceptions. If an item of clothing is gay, but has a logo or brand name clearly emblazoned on it, then it isn’t gay.

Some years ago, I knew a girl who was interested in me but was perplexed by someone who had his own shirts and cufflinks made. So she asked me, ‘Are you gay?’ Now most of the gay men I’ve known have been well dressed, had a well developed sense of humour, opinions I liked and a way of expressing them in an articulate way. In short, good eggs. A proportion of them were simply carbon units using oxygen, but less so than heterosexual men I’ve met. So my reply was ‘No, but I think my boyfriend is.’ On other occasions it’s been either that or ‘No, just cheerful.’

All of the above might help explain my reaction the other day, when I tried on an item that I’d just bought from Etsy. I knew I was taking a gamble on it size wise when I bought it – it was a blouse – but it had a wonderful floral pattern. Little Miss Sunshine looked at me, and with all the considered wisdom of a four and a half year old said, ‘If you wear that you’ll look like a girl.’ And I thought of a swanky party some years ago, where I wore a pink fluffy cropped top, purple Adidas gazelle trainers with a full-length shiny silver skirt. Trust me, it worked. The amount of women who were nonplussed at my reply to their question ‘Why are you wearing a skirt?’ made giving it worthwhile. Pausing only to cast a slow withering look up and down at them, I’d respond, “Because I look better in my outfit than you do in yours.” Amazingly, I wore not a single drink that evening.

Little Miss Sunshine then asked, “Do you like looking nice?” At the time I had changed and was now wearing the aforementioned trainers, white linen shorts, and a red gingham checked short sleeve shirt. So I said, “Hazard a guess?”
Clothes are not the problem, people, the way they put them together and the gender identity they assign to them are. Her statement was a revealing insight into how, at such a young age identities are manufactured. All that matters to me is if something works. Saying that then, most people’s wardrobe should be unemployed.

Next time..Iain Duncan Smith and how ironic it is that the once ‘Quiet Man’ of British politics isn’t…

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June 21, 2015

Glastonbury 2015? It isn’t only the cows that are milked at Worthy Farm…

But at least the dairy cows have good reason to be milked. If they aren’t, they will eventually stop producing milk. Makes sense to me. What makes less sense to me is the cash cows that, much like the dairy cows, obligingly herd themselves into Worthy Farm, and for the duration of the festival delude themselves that they’re doing something that means something. Unfortunately, what it means is that in the famous phrase attributed to Lenin, they are being a ‘useful idiot.’

Some explanation might be useful at this juncture. In the political sense a ‘useful idiot’ is someone who acts a propagandist for a cause, but is not wholly aware of what the cause is or what it’s ramifications are, and therefore their lack of understanding is cynically exploited by the leaders of the cause for their own ends. In a cultural sense, this charge could be reasonably levelled at anyone who repeatedly goes to Glastonbury. Not however at someone who goes once or twice and thinks better of it. Youth is when you’re meant to make your mistakes and learn from them, not continually repeat them. For one thing, it’s an expensive mistake.

This year a ticket to the Glastonbury Festival costs £220. Then add to that the cost of getting there and back. Oh, and the camping gear. Essential that. Except that I’d wager that a significant proportion of people who go to Glastonbury have never been camping before (and won’t be in a hurry to repeat the experience!) More expense. And unless you go by car, you travel by train – a journey down which puts one in mind of soldiers going off to the First World War, all cheerful enthusiasm but the return journey is one of subdued silence, a sleep deprived, haunted by what they’ve seen and done, look. One that doesn’t invite questions. Or by bus, which I imagine is the same; only the agony is massively prolonged. And that’s before you get there!

Now getting there at the right time is crucial, and given that the festival site opens at 9 a.m. on the Wednesday, getting there early and pitching your tent on as high a ground as you can will pay off if – when – it rains on the Thursday. Even a light shower will, when over 100,00 people have trampled all over it, turn a lush green farm into a muddy nightmare. Heavy rain on the Thursday is even worse. Even if the sun shines for the rest of the festival the dye has been cast, or more accurately not cast. Because cast implies solidity, which the ground won’t be. Which brings me on to the mud.

As anyone who’s been to Glastonbury when it’s rained a lot will attest, there isn’t only the one type of mud to be found there. One might almost think that the mud was one of nature’s revenges against having the festival at all. So nature’s opening gambit is to first add a drizzle of rain onto the grass in order to make it as slippery as possible.

With the addition of so many festival-goers trampling all over the site it soon resembles a nightmarish version of ‘It’s a knockout.’ The BBC, instead of providing live streams of the performances should instead provide coverage of the campers trying to set up their tents while trying not to sustain serious injury. They could put it to music. This music turns everything into comedy gold. Once the assembled hoards have found somewhere to pitch their tents and have nicely churned up the grass then it is time for it to rain again and for part two of nature’s plan to come into effect. This is the mud that when you tread on squashes out of the sides of your by now ruined footwear in the same way as cream will do if you squeeze on a chocolate éclair. If enough people trample on this, this will turn into porridge like mud. This is whereby the campers’ turn what was navigable mud into porridge like mud of indeterminate depth, which you’ll have seen on countless news reports. Normally featuring some drug addled loons swimming or sliding in it, not realizing that the showers are a long way away. And the final type of mud is the suction mud. This is mud that is nature’s ace in the hole. Helpfully, this type of mud, is normally found on steep inclines or near to toilets and payment for traversing this mud is normally in the form of footwear. The only good thing about mud at Glastonbury is that it means that there aren’t any jugglers! But it also means that one’s ability to prepare and consume drugs is severely limited.

Anyway, anyone who says “You don’t need drugs to enjoy a festival” has clearly never properly enjoyed a festival. I went to Glastonbury twice when it rained and it was sh*t. The one year that it didn’t rain and was all wonderful sunshine I got totally and gloriously sh*tfaced. All I’m saying is mushrooms. Anyway the point is that a festival without drugs isn’t half as much fun as a festival on drugs. However a festival isn’t the place to try drugs for the first time. There are far too many people about – the fear, the fear! – not to mention the worry that if you’re taking some drugs for the first time you might forget who or what you are.

Or indeed who ‘The Who’ are! Consider for a moment that the last time the trout lake owner and the researcher last bothered the Nation’s ears was in 2012 with yet another re-issue of ‘My Generation.’ Which is ironic really, as the generation going to Glastonbury will only know who they are by asking their parents. Or, if they’re really young, their grandparents. This year the Glastonbury Festival sold out in minutes, months before the line up was revealed. The useful idiots conclusively proving that there is indeed something magical about Glastonbury, not least in persuading 177,000 people to pay £220 for a ticket. Is it only me that finds a delicious irony in the fact that while the festival is held at Worthy Farm, when one buys the ticket one doesn’t know if it’ll be worth it?

The useful idiots really prove themselves useful again when buying things. Glastonbury has become a bazaar for those who imagine themselves to be bizarre, people so edgy that they’re practically wall huggers. But only for three days. Until then they are flogged remorselessly – captive consumers, sold everything – but overpriced for the smallest portion. Food and drink especially – but dishonourable mentions go to toiletries / cigarettes, especially king size Rizla papers and when it rains, any item of waterproof clothing. The age-old capitalist saying is reversed inasmuch as ‘you pay too much money and you have no choice. Glastonbury isn’t cheap – once you’ve added up the ticket cost, getting there and back, camping equipment, food and drink and drugs, it can easily top £400. This guy reckons that you can eat and drink at Glastonbury for £27 a day. I’d like to know what drugs he was on because they certainly work! Because this site offers holidays over Glastonbury weekend for less than the cost of the ticket, but sadly without the bad weather, overpriced food, dire accommodation, questionable sanitation.

Glastonbury offers privation without privacy. So it will come as no surprise to you to learn that I am hoping for rain in Somerset this Wednesday because I’m that kind of person. In my case the milk of human kindness has gone sour.

Next time….”If you wear that you’ll look like a girl.”

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June 12, 2015

The mystery that surrounds the exact colour of my therapists teeth…..

Twice in the last week I’ve demonstrated that I’m as deep as a puddle. The first occasion was when I met Simone, a potential care worker that my agency had sent to me in order for me to assess her suitability. When I was asked what my impression of her was, I remarked that her bingo wings were so big that if she were a bird she’d be flightless – there was simply too much weight to get her off the ground! (If you think that’s a bit bitchy might I remind you of the first line of my first blog when I said that I put the me into mean.)

The second occasion occurred yesterday. I have therapist from a nearby hospital who makes home visits. But that’s not important right now. What is is that yesterday she attempted to throw me a curveball by means of having her stomach making noisy and frequent protestations about her having skipped lunch. This I could have overlooked, were it not for the fact that she had patently cut her own hair. This is not me being bitchy – she freely admitted doing this when I asked if she had had a haircut. However these pail into insignificance when I come to the frankly mysterious colour of her teeth. Quite how one is expected to remain focused on one’s own problems when sitting opposite you is someone who has clearly some of their own. She has clearly not bothered a dentist in a good many years. She may be able to help with my mental health but it would seem she’s neglected her own dental health.

In point of fact, if one had teeth colour chart hers would be on the faint tobacco stain yellow / smeared dirt grey border. With thin vertical brown streaks as a finishing touch. When one is discussing matters that do not normally get aired this is one of the last things you should be thinking about. Namely, why do her teeth look like that, has someone told and she doesn’t care, and what colour ARE they. Her teeth are worryingly distracting and at times I have to consciously make an effort to avert my gaze from her mouth, lest an intently quizzical yet fascinated look spreads over my face. It’s interesting but irrelevant. What we were discussing was how I positively abound with dichotomies.

An example being the following: on the one hand I feel anger and frustration to various degrees quite a lot of the time. Yet on the other hand because of my innate sense of good manners I feel unable to express these. I’m aware that this puts me in conflict with myself and that expressing your feelings is a healthy thing to do. Except that as a child I saw my parents being healthy to an unhealthy degree. I learnt as a child that people said things in the heat of an argument that they soon regretted but as they were in the middle of an argument they couldn’t take it back – rather like an angry genie, released from lamp. As a child when you witness this happen again and again it necessarily has an effect. On one occasion my parents had had an argument in the morning and a friend of my brothers came around in the afternoon. Now at this time my brother would have been about 11 or so and me about 13. My father however, saw nothing wrong in referencing the argument he’d had with my mother that morning by asking my brother’s friend a direct and embarrassing question.
For this and many other reasons I’ve become rather selfish with my bad moods. By that I mean if I’m in a bad mood I remove myself from company until it has abated. I see no reason to rain on other people’s parade. Other people are selfless with their bad moods – they’re in a bad mood and they want every one else to share in it.

Anyway, I was talking about dichotomies. Here’s another one: the fact that I don’t want to do things because they would not be as good as I would have done them before my brain injury. Yet I don’t persevere with any exercises that will help me improve any. My handwriting is a good case in point. Every time I sign a cheque I look at my signature and despair. This despair however doesn’t encourage me to do anything about it. I could of course by now have made significant improvements into my handwriting but no. The fact I’m aware of this dichotomy only makes it worse. But if one knowingly does something against ones own best interests then that’s madness, right?

Speaking of madness my therapist is keen to grade my progress thus far. One of the questions she asks is “How many times in the last week have you had feelings of suicide?” My reply is always as follows: “Yes I have suicidal thoughts at least once a week, and yes I have a viable plan but as it is a viable plan I tend not to dwell on it. So my thoughts are theoretical and not practical. Just because I don’t like living doesn’t therefore mean I want to stop living, it simply means I really can’t abide it.” She looks at me and then at the small box on the form and wonders how on earth she’ll squeeze it in. I leave that up to her.

Now, in case any of you reading this are under the misapprehension that I’m a nice person allow me to disabuse you.
Some years ago I was sitting on a park bench and on the other side of the park I could see a guy walking whilst eating his lunch. Now this guy was huge. I mean he was like a bin bag full of yoghurt and he was stuffing his face with a baguette. At any rate chomping down on the food was a single-minded determination of his, so much so that he fell over and people rushed to his aide to see if he was alright. For me however, it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen! I couldn’t stop laughing and my laughter was so loud that I received some angry glances from the passers by who stopped to help but really…I mean come on, if someone is so busy eating they fall over its impossible not to laugh, well for me it is!

Next time…Glastonbury 2015 and how it isn’t only the cows that are getting milked at Worthy Farm..

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June 6, 2015

George Osborne puts the con into Conservative….

If George Osborne had any more gall he’d be called Asterix. And it wouldn’t be at all wise to remind readers of his past friendship with a dominatrix. (Although according to the Daily Mail’s perverse moral code calling her a prostitute was somehow less degrading than calling her a dominatrix.) When he claimed he hadn’t really known her, she tweeted a , a ‘photo of him in her flat. For this, she was arrested by the police and charged with ’abusive behaviour.’

A charge that could well be levelled at himself, playing fast and loose with the public finances as he does, and not being honest with people in a way that most everyday people would understand. People well versed in the very technical and nuanced language of economics might understand what national debt is. Everyone knows what debt is – after all, most of us have some. But it’s when one examines what they mean by national debt, then it all becomes confusing. The accepted and widely used figure is the net debt of the UK; simply put what we owe minus what we own. We’ll return to that later.

And the UK national debt has increased massively, doubling in the last five years. So much so that according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s stock of debt will keep on rising for years. Anyone saying otherwise is wearing flame retardant pants. Understanding how they arrive at this rather alarming conclusion makes me go a bit ‘Scanners’ because it waxed my woody when I was unable to make head nor tail of it. You might have more luck. Click here.
Anyway there is a surplus. Or a deficit. And we all know what they are. They’re basically Mr. Micawber’s recipe of happiness, as outlined in ‘David Copperfield, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Sticking with ‘David Copperfield’ for a moment, this is when we get some Uriah Heep type accounting. Anyone familiar with the book will get the reference, but if not then I pity you, because it’s a work of brilliance. Oh, and Uriah Heep is exposed as crook at the end, using peoples ignorance of certain facts to embezzle money. This helps when you consider the notion that is the structural deficit. Now the structural deficit is the deficit, only it’s been adjusted to strip out the cyclical nature of the economy. I think that means it’s the underlying deficit that’s not affected by economic performance. I know, me neither! Okay, it’s like when you go out for a meal with work colleagues. When the bill arrives, so do raised voices. Someone had only water to drink, someone else only had a starter and a salad, and yet another had…you get the gist. Structural deficit is kind of like that inasmuch as everyone only wants to pay for what they themselves have consumed. Unless of course you’re Greece and you threaten to leave without paying in order to obtain a reduced bill. (For a more illuminating economic analysis, I commend you to check out Collaterlie Sisters).

Then there is borrowing and reason deserted me completely at this point. If I’m right – and it’s a big if! – the current budget is how much it costs the government to govern, the day-to-day housekeeping if you will – in order to keep the country running. If we are in a deficit situation then we need to borrow just to keep things going. There’s no money for anything else – infrastructure, like high-speed rail for example. Imagine a household just about keeping the wolf from the door. Every penny is accounted for, but it’s still not enough. So they get a loan to help tide them over. But their neighbours’ have bought a new car and their friends have been on exotic holidays and their relatives have…well you get the idea, so they get another loan to pay for that. And then they have to get another loan to service those ones. The UK is that house, a bit like Boo Radley’s house, in need of repair and forlorn looking, one that people just run by.

And the amount of our national debt is a staggering £1.541 trillion
A trillion is, if you’re British at any rate, a million billion. And a billion is a million million. Helpfully, the Americans have their own system of quantifying these things. To put it in graspable terms, a million seconds is 12 days, a billion seconds is 31 years, and a trillion seconds is 31,688 years. And as anyone with a debt will know only too well, it isn’t so much the original sum borrowed that’s crippling, as the interest that remorselessly keeps on adding. In the UK’s case the interest on our national debt is £5,170 a second. And it keeps growing – see here for the current total and watch it increase before your eyes! (And if you think that’s bad, check out the amount of interest paid on global debt here. And we think Wonga’s bad!)

Remember how earlier on I said how the net debt is what we owe minus what we own? Well George has had the idea of selling what we own to raise cash. The sell off of the remaining government stake in the Post Office is estimated to raise £1.5 billion. Sounds a lot, until one remembers that the interest on our national debt is over £1 billion a week. Imagine a bath of infinite size and a tiny plughole letting only a trickle of water out whilst the taps are full on.

So when George Osborne proclaims that the national debt is under control, that his long-term economic plan is working, one wonders what kind of plan involves it doubling in the last five years? Is George Osborne doing to the economy what his former friend let men do to her?

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May 29, 2015

When a care agency, doesn’t…

I wrote in my first blog that I would alternate blogs between my own situation and those of a wider significance. Mainly because writing about me is of little or no interest to me or anyone else, not when there are far more interesting things happening to write about.
However, of late this self-imposed rule has been broken for wholly understandable reasons. Firstly there was the election, and as anyone who knows me is well aware, I am inordinately fascinated with politics and secondly, because the election result made me a very unhappy chappy, I necessarily wrote about me and my own concerns.

So there I was earlier today thinking about my blog and how I would suggest that the Queens speech was less of a sequel to ‘The Kings Speech’, than more ‘This is Spinal Tap’. That will have to wait until next week. And believe you me it’s worth the wait! They do say that inspiration comes in the most unlikely of forms, and in my case inspiration for this blog came in the unlikely form of a manager from my care agency that had been dispatched to account for the unaccountable.

Anyone who has read my blog will be aware that I depend to some degree on my support workers to assist me with my daily activities. Previously, when a support worker was leaving they conducted a handover shift, whereby they would show the new support worker exactly what needed to be done, and more importantly what worked in practice. Unsurprisingly, and as my previous blog pointed out, this hasn’t happened. Matthew, my former support worker, tells of a similar lack of foresight befalling his other clients. The fact that I am not alone in this is of no comfort whatsoever.

My care agency charges me a management fee for every hour a support worker works with me. I’m severely tempted to report them to the police for obtaining money under false pretences for doing so, because there is scant attempt at the management of my care. Meaning that the money I pay them to manage is tantamount to fraud on their part. This puts me in mind of Alan Clark’s – yes that one – history of the First World War ‘The Donkeys’. He was of the opinion that the soldiers in the trench were badly served by their commanding officers, basing his title on the widespread belief that they were ‘lions led by donkeys’. The similarity with my support workers is pretty much the same.

So it was with an air of affected enthusiasm that I wore like a badly fitting suit for the meeting with Alopecia this morning. She apologised for the mistakes’ that had happened in the past with all the sincerity of someone who’s keen to move on from them with all the haste of a sex addict at an orgy! She was sympathetic to my plight and eager to find solutions, if only I could think of them. Thankfully, sitting on my right – does that make her my right hand woman – was Old Blue Eyes. As I’ve noted before she has not so much gone the extra mile on my behalf as run a marathon in a world record time. She also has the ability – which I do not – of remaining focused on the long-term goal and not getting side tracked by irrelevancies. By irrelevancies I mean the woeful lack of any management style that is either effective or designed with that goal in mind. I liken their management style to fire fighting inasmuch as they react to immediate situations and seem incapable of planning in advance. I bet the old rope shop next to their offices does a roaring trade.

She was quick to suggest that a new chapter was to be written by her, one that would fully meet my expectations. I, however was doubtful about this, a feeling not helped by her showing me a profile of a support worker which began “I am a Christian”. Anyone who knows me will be aware that is like a red rag to a bull – or it would be if it weren’t for the fact that bulls are colour blind to red. She then enquired about any speech or language input, and upon hearing that we were going to try someone out but that there was nothing definite, she was quick to offer her services to introduce us to a speech and language therapist in Harley Street. Only a cynic like me would think that some form of finders fee was involved. The meeting ended with her rather optimistic assertion that things were on an upward trajectory.

If however, the chapter she had been writing had indeed existed, someone had unfortunately pressed the delete button on the entire works! Within minutes of her departing I received an email from the care agency which put another nail in the coffin of their competence. The email was a rota for the next two weeks, informing me of the people who would be covering my shifts. Imagine my delight when I discovered that out of the eight possible shifts only three were covered. This joy was further heightened by the fact that even though the rota clearly stated that only 18 hours would be worked, the total amount of chargeable hours had magically grown to 40 hours. No doubt they’ll blame this on an administrative error but it is odd, is it not, that all administrative errors are always seem to be at your expense, never theirs. Funny that!

Next time…How the Queens Speech is a bit like Spinal Tap…

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May 23, 2015

As things change, so they remain the same…

I get that life is all about change. About adapting, or renewing, or incorporating new things into one’s life. But equally, change can also highlight the very absence of the need for one to do these things. The rather unpleasant realization that while others are moving on with their lives, making and then realizing plans, you on the other hand are doing….nothing of the sort.

Next Wednesday is my support worker, Matthew’s last day with me. I know and understand his reasons for doing so, Darwin knows, he’s constantly mentioned his wife’s business ever since I met him. I can see – well sort of, what with my Bells Palsy – why it’s the right decision for him. He needs to make this investment in his future now. He can help his wife’s fledgling business achieve greater heights by drastically reducing his work as a support worker and instead support her. I get that. One would have to be as thick as a whale omelette not to.

But in him making a bold decision, one that he’ll hopefully succeed in by his own efforts, his own ingenuity and skills, it necessarily brings home to me the harsh reality of my own too real reality. Plans are only as viable as one’s ability to bring them to fruition. My tree is dead, my ingenuity exists only in the cerebral, not the practical realm. By that I mean I abound with great ideas, but I’ve no way of making them happen – nothing to do with finance so much as doing things myself. Burning the midnight oil by tinkering and refining an idea into something is something of a challenge with a lack of fine motor skills and a shared house. Maybe not impossible, but not an inspiring prospect either.

Speaking of uninspiring prospects leads me onto Matthew’s potential replacement. I say potential, because as Dylan Moran has it, potential is best left alone, it’s potential. Why be disappointed by the reality of it, when as potential it can be wonderful. Same thing with my potential support worker, whom I met for the first and last time a few days ago. All I had to go on was her profile, and on paper she wrote herself up as a potential. But proving not for the last time, that expectation is better than realisation, she was like one of those online dating horror stories, where one thinks, ’Really?” It wasn’t that she’d lied so much as, as the song has it, applied ‘Accentuate the positive / Eliminate the negative.” to her profile.

Mind you, she was a bastion of truth compared to one profile I saw from someone who claimed, and I quote, “Philosophy wise, I have chosen to live each day as if I could more from the day before.” Apart from his philosophy needing some additional words, it’s also a well chosen opening gambit, one that’ll endear him to people, who by dint of the fact they are reading it in the first place, will have had their life circumstances drastically altered, and not for the better either. He then gets into his stride when he writes, “My caring experience began in Primary school. From the age of 8, I supported a 7 year old male with Cerebral Palsy until I finished in grade 6.” So not so much a carer, as a childhood pal then.

Now for the good bit, and do bear in mind as you’re reading this, this profile was written by a man. Ready? “In high school I then supported a girl who had brittle bone disease, whereby myself (sic) appointment (sic) was to assist her with some personal care, assisting with pushing her in her wheelchair around the school campus and if need be, any other requests. This occurred for three years.” Less charitable souls than me might well speculate on what happened after three years, but those less charitable souls would be well advised to have uppermost in their minds as they did so, the laws of libel and defamation.

Anyway, the potential support worker, the one I met, was as much use to me as a eunuch at an orgy. In the course of Matthew telling her what I’m like, he said, ‘Oh he gets on well with everyone.’ Only by circumstance. Not through choice. One of the recurring themes of this blog has been – and will be – the subjugation of my true nature in pursuit of a more immediate goal. In other words, the gulf between what I think and what I say. Matthew then added that he and I had become friends. My psychologist used to say that about all my support workers, that I should see them as friends, and not as I do, people who’re paid to be with me and are only with me for the duration of their shift. I’ve had countless support workers since my accident and only one has ever just popped round. So friends? I don’t think so.

Which brings me on to Mr. Punch, a thankfully temporary support worker so irritatingly cheerful, I just want to punch his lights out. He’s agreeably cheerful, by which I mean he agrees with everything you say in such a nauseatingly cheerful way. So much so that I’m almost tempted to say something overtly racist or homophobic just to see what he’d say.

I started off this post on a glum note, managed to rise above it by writing about it but reading it back to edit it has bought me back down. However, not wishing to end on a sour note, check out Be My Eyes and if you’ve got a smart ‘phone do something really smart with it. Once you’ve downloaded the app, thanks to video chat wizardry, you can receive requests from the visually impaired, anything from checking the expiry date on jars of food to..er well anything.

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May 16, 2015

Not so much personal as practical grooming….

I write this within the last five minutes of having returned home from a visit to the hairdressers. Now, as most of you will know from your own personal experience of follicle folly, this can be a depressing experience. You enter the hairdressers with a sense of unbounded optimism and a clear set of instructions, cogently impart them to the hairdresser, who intimates to you that they’ve understood them only for them to then demonstrate they haven’t. You sit there, fuming because with the first few snips you’re both aware that a point of no return has been crossed. As irreversible as it is inevitable, you are all too aware that when they’ve finished and show you the back of your head in that mirror, you find nowhere else, and ask you what you think, that you’ll lie through gritted teeth to hasten your arrival home. Once there, you’ll stand in front of the mirror attempting to salvage something halfway decent out of it. And don’t tell me you haven’t because we all have, it’s just that no one admits to it. Because there’s no ombudsman for hairdressers, there’s nothing you can do, they can’t very well make it how it was. And if there was an ombudsman for hairdressers would it be called ‘Ofcut’?

My own experience was not of the usual coiffured calamity of days gone by. With nostalgic affection I look back on my skinhead, my perm, my wedge with highlights….thankfully no photographic evidence exists of these and my many other trichological misadventures which ended up playing tricks on me. Back when the hair that was cut off didn’t land in the gown and serve as a harsh reminder of the passing years, acting like a colour chart of ageing, going from light to dark and then light again. Equally cruel were the photographs of the models on the walls, not only because they were a triumph of optimism that the hairdresser couldn’t deliver upon, but also one knew that one couldn’t afford such rash experimentation. I can’t begin to imagine what goes through the mind of a style conscious old person. Or perhaps it’s more that I don’t want to, because one day I’ll be that old person sitting in the chair looking into a mirror only to get a reflection of recrimination looking back at me.

And wondering where the scissors are going, if the hairdresser near me who used try and perfect his updated version of Sweeney Todd barbering was anything to go by. To a soundtrack of banging techno, he’d flounce around behind me as if he was in a club and then – snip – he’d cut something off. You couldn’t see from where because he was dancing around you in a frankly alarming blur. You went there for a haircut but what you got was hair-raising. Outwardly, one feigned nonchalant indifference to his carrying on but inwardly one was shrieking ‘I pay you earth pounds to cut my hair and not my throat. You cavorting around me like a raver buzzing off his tits whilst clutching a pair of scissors is hardly the Vidal Sassoon School of Hairdressing.’

But today I had a haircut dictated by circumstance, namely the Bell’s Palsy, more specifically the eye patch. The eye patch, which has the benefit of securing my assorted eye paraphernalia in place, but unfortunately because it has an elasticated band, leaves a tramline in my hair. Actually no, not a tramline. Imagine a valley with a dried up river coursing it’s way through it. Well my hair is the valley and the elasticated band the dried up river. This means that my hair looks more unkempt than it normally does. And given that on Monday I’m going to indulge in one of England’s greatest gifts to civilisation, namely afternoon tea at a top London hotel, my hair doesn’t need to look like something the cat dragged in.

Anyone who says afternoon tea isn’t A VERY GOOD THING INDEED clearly hasn’t had one, or if they have had one then it wasn’t any good. I mean, scrumptious sandwiches and even more scrumptious cakes served with unobtrusive efficiency in wonderful settings. Really, how can any sentient being not enjoy that?

I didn’t overly relish the prospect of my hair doing a creditable impersonation of a wearable art installation atop my scalp, entitled ’Delusional Optimism In A Wind Tunnel.’ But given the rather exasperating circumstances I have to work with, my preferred choice – a short back and sides – isn’t really an option. Thanks to my lack of fine motor skills, neatly combing my hair and getting a precise parting just isn’t going to happen. Unless, of course the parting parts company with any accepted notion of what a neat parting on a short back and sides actually means.

So my haircuts have, since my brain injury, been determined by necessity, in this case the overarching desire not to look like a plum. Which isn’t an ideal state of affairs but then neither was brain injury. Therefore I decide upon the most practical hairstyle and not the preferred one. But hey, it’s all for a good cause.

(This so isn’t the thing I’d normally do but hey it’s my blog! So to prove that this is the exception that proves the rule I’d like to give a big shout out to Emily, who stayed at our house this week and who informs me that she reads my blog on her ‘phone.)

And just in case you’re wondering, I got a Number Two crop all over, which is, to save anyone else the trouble of thinking it, highly appropriate. A Number Two for a Number Two!

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May 8, 2015

This country is now governed by a bunch of illegitimate counts…..

Frankly, I’m gob smacked. My flabber has been well and truly gasted. I stayed up until 8am this morning watching the election results, and they seemed nothing less than to be mourning the death of socialism in the UK. This is so not what this county needs right now. This country doesn’t need a government of illegitimate counts.

In what possible universe can David Cameron claim any legitimacy to preside over a government of a united kingdom, when it so plainly isn’t. A cursory look at the election results map confirms this. Only one Conservative MP in Scotland. A 36.9%share of the popular vote earned the Conservatives 331 MPs whilst Labour who won 30.4% of the popular vote earned 232 MPs.

Even worse still is the fate of UKIP. Now anyone who reads my incoherent ramblings will be aware that I’m not a huge fan of UKIP, but I’m even less of a fan of an electoral system that gives a political party with 12.6% of the popular vote, just one MP. One thinks, as one does, of Malcolm X, who said “I’ve got a plate in front of me, but nothing is on it. Because all of us are sitting at the same table, are all of us diners? I’m not a diner until you let me dine, then I become a diner.”

Up until now, the main political force pushing for proportional representation has come from the left. Mainly because their share of the popular vote hasn’t translated into MPs. But now pressure will be coming from UKIP as well. And the Green’s – 3.8% of the vote, equals one MP. And Labour will realise, that after the decimation in Scotland, they cannot ever win an election under the present system. A form of a proportional representation would revive their electoral fortunes.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this, how Ed Millibland would’ve fallen on his sword if only it hadn’t been so…blunted, how last night was, from a Lib-Dem point of view, a tartan bloodbath, how the current electoral system doesn’t invite all the parties to the party, and more if I wasn’t feeling so forlorn right now.

This sums up exactly how I feel.

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