the brilliantly leaping gazelle

May 7, 2015

I was going to bet on the outcome of the election…

The one seemingly constant in this election campaign is the way that some politicians have bastardised Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most widely known saying. During his Inauguration Address as President in 1932 he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

But in 2015, those seeking election both instill and feed a fear. A fear of rising taxes and falling living standards. Of rising unemployment and falling benefits. Of rising demands on the NHS and concern about how it can be afforded. I could go on, but frankly, if you’re reading this, I’d kind of hope you’d agree without me having to do a full list.

But yet, there is enough money here. The UK is the 5th largest economy in the world. It’s not that we haven’t got the money, it’s more the choices we make as how we spend it.

£100 billion on Trident and upwards of £42 billion on HS2?

So, £100 billion on something we never want use, but must have – so we’re told – to act as a deterrent. Mmmm. Good idea that! It’s the same as hiring a bodyguard to be at your side all the time, only for him to go rogue and kill you. Anyone seen ‘Dr.Strangelove’ and theDoomsday Machine. Think it couldn’t happen? Then don’t click here. Or here.

HS2. Works out just over £500 million a mile. (Before it’s fully connected up). I do hope they do Super Advance Tickets on that. What’s that you say? Rail services provide a worse service, while the subsidy we pay to private companies is more than we gave to British Rail. And there’s more? Not for the rail user there isn’t, there’s more, more fares now that the government has reduced the legal obligation on rail companies to offer cheaper tickets.

But we can afford an extra £12 billion of welfare cuts, Oh, that’s not welfare cuts to corporations – estimated to be in the region of £85 billion, but to the already poorest in society. After all, the best time to kick a man is when he’s down.

It’s all about choices. We can choose to be fearful. Or we can choose not to be.

By the way, I was going to bet on the outcome of the election, who’d win or lose which seat, what share of the vote UKIP would get etc so if it was bad news, I’d be marginally up on the deal. But never having used online gambling before, I looked at a few sites and found it all too confusing.

So gave up. And on that note, I’m off to vote.

1 Comment
May 5, 2015

How the UKIP is a bit Royston Vasey….

Having read the UKIP manifesto, it’s clear that there is a frankly bewildering lack of detail in phrases such as ‘we will encourage’, ‘we will seek’ or ‘we will campaign.
But my favourite is ’we will aspire’. It’s obfuscation presented as plain talking. My earlier blog regarding political bingo, deals with this. Anyone can aspire to anything. The great thing about an aspiration is that it doesn’t commit you to anything. An aspiration is another, more grown-up word for a wish. Just imagine saying to an excited child on their birthday, “Now take a deep breath and remember when you blow out the candles to make an aspiration.”
Of course, it goes without saying – and so consequently needs saying – that any political party’s manifesto is likely to contain some morsels that are political scrag-end. But at least with the Tories, one kind of knows what a vote for them’ll mean. Admittedly, some won’t like it, but then they won’t vote for them. The same applies to Labour. But UKIP is the reverse political Ronseal; you don’t know if it’ll do what it says on the tin, precisely because you don’t know what it says on the tin.

So lets have a look at my top 5 UKIP manifesto madness’s shall we –there could easily have been more but I don’t want to bore you.

On education, their manifesto states,

“We will also rule that all parents must be made fully aware of the sex education teaching materials being used, before their children see it, and we will continue to respect their right to withdraw children from sex-education classes if they wish.”

Er… hang on? Which country has the one of the highest levels of teenage pregnancy in Europe? Wouldn’t it therefore make sense for them not to respect the right of parents, who due to some utterly spurious notion of freedom want to remove their children from sex education classes? Isn’t true freedom when one is free from someone else’s control?

(And no I won’t point out the glaringly obvious fact that it’s a bit late in the day for the parents to want to withdraw – it isn’t the horse that’s bolted!)

And whist no-one wants a sex education class like this, we might end up with a girl like this.

On the subject of the NHS – for which it condemns both the Labour and Conservatives for using it as ‘a political football’ – it says,

“Numerous EU Directives prevent medical institutions from operating in the best interests of patients. We will scrap the EU Working Time Directive which, by limiting working and training time to 48 hours in any one week, prevents medics learning essential new skills, putting patient care at risk.”

Er..hang on? It’s almost as if the EU is the Scooby-Do gang! “If it wasn’t for those pesky, meddling Europeans then we’d be able to make our junior doctors work until they were dead on their feet. Which is exactly what their patients would be.” Was anyone present at the royal birth suffering the tyrannical limit of working 48hrs? If it’s good enough for baldie and Barbie, then it’s good enough for us.

Whilst earlier on in the manifesto it says,

“We need to get tough on so-called ‘health-tourism.’ Every year the NHS spends up to £2 billion of UK taxpayers’ money treating those ineligible for free care.”

Er…hang on? ‘Up to £2 billion’ isn’t exact. Eye catching granted, but exact – not so much. According to the audit by the Department of Health from which this ‘up to £2 billion’ is plucked, the actual figure is between £1.5 billion and £1.9 billion. And if your thinking thats not much, do please bear in mind that a billion is a thousand million, meaning the tiny difference between £1.9 billion and £2 billion is £100 million.

On the subject of British culture, the manifesto says,

“UKIP will promote a unifying British culture, open to anyone who wishes to identify with Britain and British values, regardless of their ethnic or religious background. This is genuine inclusiveness.

Uphold freedom of speech within the law as a fundamental British value. We believe all ideas and beliefs should be open to discussion and scrutiny and we will challenge the ‘culture of offence’ as it risks shutting down free speech.”

Er…hang on? Didn’t Farage make a complaint to OFCOM concerning comments made on BBC1’s ‘Have I Got News For You’? So a satirical show broadcasts satirical comments and someone who’s appeared on the show as a panellist – Farage – complains. He didn’t complain when he was given prime time exposure on a flagship BBC1 programme. At a time when his media profile needed a boost. Funny that.

And also aren’t British values a rather nebulous concept. Much like ‘sense of humour’ and ‘quality of life’, as a concept its vagueness is its strength. Because everyone knows what is meant by it without the tiresome necessity of giving a specific definition of what it means, or more importantly, doesn’t mean.

On the subject of Heritage and Tourism – of which roughly a third of this part of the manifesto is devoted to measures to save public houses, clearly an issue dear to Nigel’s liver – it says they will.

“Oppose minimum pricing of alcohol and reverse plain paper packaging legislation for tobacco products. “

Er…hang on? Earlier on in the manifesto, when they were banging on about how much extra they’d spend on the NHS, they said,

“We will put an additional £3 billion a year into the NHS in England by the end of the parliament and make sure the money is spent on frontline patient care. We will provide the common sense,…”

Yet according to Pubic Health England, “The total annual cost to society of alcohol-related harm is estimated to be £21bn. The NHS incurs £3.5bn a year in costs related to alcohol. Few other health harms have such high overall costs when the impact on productivity and crime are included.”

So minimum pricing for alcohol isn’t such a bad idea.
And smoking?
“Most of the research in the field derives from estimates made back in 1991. Back then, smoking was said to cost the NHS £1.4-£1.7 billion a year (closer to £2-2.5 billion in today’s prices). Since then, other research has put the cost at £2.7 billion in 2005/6 (£3 billion today) and even as much as £5.2 billion 2005/6 (over £6 billion today).”And that was in 2013!

Again ALL party’s manifestos contain some details worthy of derision; it’s just that UKIP have managed to avoid any rigorous scrutiny until quite late in the day, when their populist appeal has forced both the Labour and the Conservative parties to move ever more to the right, in the hope it’ll garner them more votes. After all, that worked out well in the 1930’s for Germany.

In the spirit of the UKIP manifesto I may not’ve been totally honest when I said I’d only list my top 5.

THIS is by some margin my favourite UKIP manifesto pledge. In the section on housing they state,

“LOCAL HOMES FOR LOCAL PEOPLE
UKIP will encourage moves by local authorities to prioritise people with strong local connections when making housing allocations.”

Anyone else thinking of ‘The League of Gentlemen’, and the village of Royston Vasey with its ‘local shop for local people.’

UKIP is rather like Royston Vasey. Charmingly amusing from a distance, but the closer you get, the more one examines what it actually stands for, the more unsettling it becomes.

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May 2, 2015

Voter apathy and the royal baby prove we’re not all in it together, only the ‘it’ we’re in has a silent sh at the start….

Thursday night was one of the most unedifying experiences I’ve had in a long time. Unedifying because it highlighted the sheer apathy of vast swathes of the electorate. The occasion was a hustings in which all the candidates from my constituency were present and were available to be questioned by members of the public. This was a free to attend meeting, was widely advertised and therefore it was a self-selecting audience – only people who wanted to be there, were there.
I went there with a friend who observed that the hall was full and that there were nearly two hundred people in it and that the doors had been closed. A similar amount of people who’d been unable to gain entry to the hall were outside and hadn’t dispersed, so the candidates had an impromptu discussion with them before returning to the main event. This was my friend said a good thing. To me however it was anything but.
A paltry figure of almost four hundred people attending a public meeting to grill candidates for an election is not a good thing. Not when you consider that population registered to vote in my constituency was 78,605 (in December 2010). Or that the demographic inside the hall was not the same as the demographic outside it. Again, it’s a self-selecting audience. It’s one thing people saying that the reason for their lack of engagement in politics is because politics doesn’t mean anything to them, but by the same token it follows that if people are not bothered enough to take an interest in politics, why should politicians be interested in them? As I touched upon in my last blog, it’s a cycle of apathy that politicians publicly decry, but privately delight in.
Helpfully for the purposes of this blog, I’ve my own personal experience to call upon. At a general election – the one in 2005 – I bet a friend that I wouldn’t canvass in the same street for all of the three main parties. Regretfully I lost. I only canvassed for two of them! I took the view that if nobody said “Hang on, you look oddly familiar. Have you got a twin brother?” then they fully deserved what they got. What was even more shocking was the lack of any interest from the vast majority of people. Some could see that canvassing was happening when they averted their gaze from the idiot’s lantern and didn’t bother opening the door. And when someone did open the door the chances were it was either a child or someone saying they were in the middle of doing something. You hear politicians often saying that when they meet people on the doorstep, people say this or that, but in my admittedly brief experience most people only opened the door to close it in my face. And when they do want to discuss policies with you – I was equally able to argue a convincing case for either parties policies – then the lack of any thought or comprehension, an inability to join up the dots on how policies might interact with each other became all too clear. There was no, ‘But if you say we can have x, doesn’t it mean we can’t afford z and y. And doesn’t your policy on a, contradict your policy objective on b? . ’You could put someone in a monkey suit and they’d get elected. Oh silly me, I was forgetting, they already did that in Hartlepool a few years ago.
I take politics seriously. I did a degree in it and if my brain injury hadn’t happened, I planned to do a Masters, for no other reason than for the sheer pleasure of learning more about something that fascinates me. Some years ago I was working with a colleague of mine happened to have divergent political opinions from me. We both thought about the way things were, how they could be, what could possibly improve them, and the rights and wrongs of various policies espoused by each party. However, we reached different conclusions. He, no doubt, thought mine were as wrong as I thought his were. People were amazed that we got on so well. To me it was amazing that people thought it was amazing. Just because someone holds different opinions doesn’t mean they’re not a good egg. (Cracked maybe….) Only that they take similar basic information and arrive at a different conclusion. Like two cooks given the same ingredients yet plate up different dishes.
John Stuart Mill had the radical idea of letting everyone have the vote but – and here’s the good bit – making certain people’s votes worth more than others. His criteria was based on education. I for one don’t see a problem with this. If you are bothered enough to think of politics and what it means and are able to evaluate competing policy choices and arrive at your own conclusion, then why on earth then should your vote have equal weight with someone who thinks about none of these things. Or as Noam Chomsky once said, it’s amazing when some people say that politics is complicated. But whenever you hear a sports phone in you hear a bewildering amount of views on what a teams tactics should be, who should be sold, who should be brought, how the manager is doing and reasons for the teams success or lack of. They can devote such insight and understanding into something that has no tangible benefit to their lives. And yet politics is complicated? It isn’t. Anyone who can understand the dynamics of an extended family can understand politics. Don’t believe me?
If you imagine that the competing parties at the U.K election are members of an extended family. The Labour and Conservative parties are like an old married couple who’ve been ruling the roost for a long time, but they can see their influence gradually waning. Their children, who are now adults, are rightfully clamouring for their voices to be heard. These are the S.N.P., Plaid Cymru, and the Greens. No prizes for guessing who the drunken uncle is, whom everybody tolerates with a mixture of embarrassment and apologies for his random outbursts. It’s Nigel Farage! (Does that mean then that Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, is a milf?) Any other political parties can be represented by disparate relatives who are shouting loudly from the side lines but have little chance of impacting upon the family. The shifting alliances, the changes in power, the expenditure, the choices that are made – if you can understand how that works in a family, you’ve grasped the fundamental nature of politics.
Speaking of family, specifically one that sponges off the state, lives in free housing, does no actual work – although a grandson has broken that cycle – but faces no sanction for doing so, this family has bought another mouth into the world. There is no denunciation of them in the press, no condemnatory opprobrium for their feckless breeding whilst expecting the state to pay. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that the royal baby is healthy, but aren’t all baby’s royal to their parents? It’s just that her birth proves the lie of ‘We’re all in this together.’ Because we so are not. She’ll enjoy a life of privilege, of luxury and comfort. She won’t go hungry or be reliant of food banks either, because if the body politic is indeed a metaphor describing the nation state as a corporate entity, then she’ll be fed on the taxpayer’s breast.

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April 18, 2015

If Nigel Farage is ‘a pound shop Enoch Powell’, then Russell Brand is either David St. Hubbins from ‘Spinal Tap’ or Reg from the People’s Front of Judea…

Appearing on BBC1’s ‘Question Time’ recently with a panel that included Nigel Farage, Russell Brand, in one of his many populist rhetorical flourishes, called Nigel Farage ‘a pound shop Enoch Powell.’ Cue much applause from the audience, who didn’t know how or why this was an insult, but that nonetheless it was. To be likened to Enoch Powell. And with initials like N.F?

Of course Farage isn’t ‘a pound shop Enoch Powell.’ He isn’t anything like him at all. Most people, if they know anything at all about Powell, might come up with ‘rivers of blood’. Except of course, that he actually never said ‘rivers of blood.’ Not for the first time, popular myth became truth. What he actually said was ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.

You might think I’m nitpicking. If so you can read an excerpt of his speech here. And you’ll also discover he was awarded a rare double starred first in Latin and Greek. So him referencing an obscure Greek poem – The Aeneid – that very few of his detractors would’ve heard of is no surprise. Even less that he referenced him at all, given how he was a professor of Greek at the age of 25.

My point is that anyone can make a rather facile comparison that someone is like Enoch Powell, safe in the knowledge that they won’t have to defend or justify that comparison. It does rather prove the point that the only brand Russell Brand is ultimately interested in is himself. To anyone disenchanted with politics, alienated by a language that politicians use, but which doesn’t make sense to them, most of what he says might seem like straight-forward common sense. But to anyone else with an I.Q. larger than the radius of their kneecap, he might resemble David St.Hubbins from Spinal Tap.

David said this, “Before I met Jeanine, my life was cosmically in shambles, it was ah…I was using bits and pieces of whatever Eastern philosophies happened to drift through my transom and she sort of sorted it out for me, straightened it out for me.”

And Russell said this, ”This attitude of churlish indifference seems like nerdish deference contrasted with the belligerent antipathy of the indigenous farm folk, who regard the hippie-dippie interlopers, the denizens of the shimmering tit temples, as one fey step away from transvestites.” The words, individually make sense, but put together the way he has, it is like a cook taking the finest of ingredients but the way they combine them results in an inedible mess.

(And by the way, it’s not just me who thinks he’s less of a gifted orator than he clearly does. The Plain English Campaign awarded him their ‘Goobledygoop’ prize for that idiosyncratic use of English)

If Brand is a sort of spokesperson for a lost generation, then that lost generation’s bike wheels are punctured. And when his thoughts do make a kind of sense, you kind of wish they didn’t. Here he is on BBC2’s ‘Newsnight’ advocating not voting;
“Yeah, they shouldn’t vote, they should – that’s one thing they should do, don’t bother voting. Because when it reaches – there’s a point – see these little valves, these sort of like little cozy little valves of recycling and Prius and like you know turn up somewhere, it stops us reaching the point where you think, “I see, this is enough now.” Stop voting. Stop pretending. Wake up. Be in reality now. Time to be in reality now. Why vote? We know it’s not going to make any difference. We know that already.”
Basically what he says appears radical and edgy, but ultimately only perpetuates the status quo – the politics of the what is and not of the what could.

The stark facts are these. At the 2010 election 45.6 million people were registered to vote of whom 29.7 million actually bothered to so. Meaning that 65.1% did and 34.9% didn’t. The Conservatives got 36% of votes cast. So when Brand exhorts non-participation, David, Ed and Nick must be secretly grateful. Because politicians know that the older you are, the more likely to vote you are. Hence their reluctance to cut any benefits to a group likely to kick them in the ballots. Conversely, the younger a voter is the less likely they are to vote, and so cuts to their benefits have little electoral risk.

Hang on! If Russell Brand might bear some resemblance to David St.Hubbins, then by spouting such trumpery moonshine, he is channeling the spirit of Reg from the People’s Front of Judea in ’The Life of Brian’. In the same way that Reg is grudgingly forced to concede that yes, the Romans did a lot that benefitted Judea, so anyone who allows reason to intrude upon their thought process must agree, that yes democracy can make a difference. Ask yourself, where would you rather live, England or Eritrea?

Farage does the same trick, albeit to a different demographic and with a different outcome. By appealing to older voters disaffected with what they see as everyone else doing better whilst they do not, he channels their sense of alienation. ‘Yes’, he says, ‘Traditional politics have helped create a feeling of disillusionment, of repeated betrayal; I can understand why you feel that way. I understand the resentment you feel towards politicians who promise all manner of things when they want your vote, but once they’ve got it break them. But not all politicians are the same. I’m new. Different. An outsider. Vote for me.’

Anyone else remember the politician who presented themselves to the electorate in 2010 as a break from the past. And that voting for them would send out a clear message that the old way of doing things was over?

Look how he turned out!

I believe in politics. And if you don’t, then ask yourself why not? Because apathy changes nothing. Voting does. Participation does.
Politics does.

In 2010 65.1% of the eligible electorate voted.

The Conservatives got 36% of votes cast.

The Liberal Democrats go 23%t of votes cast.

Which means 34.9% of eligible voters didn’t vote.

And voting doesn’t make a difference. FFS!

Next time…how politics is to me what sport is to some men…..

2 Comments
April 13, 2015

How necessity is the mutha of re-invention…

A few blog posts ago, I rashly suggested that compared to other peoples depression, mine wasn’t that bad.
And then events of last week proved me wrong. Or rather, the non-events of last week
Firstly I wrote a blog, which although I thought one of my best, no-one else did. I know this because WordPress has a handy statistics page, where you can check exactly how few readers have read an individual blog. (Only the nation they logged on from by the way, not in an Edward Snowden type way.) That was the first thing that didn’t happen.

The second thing that didn’t happen was that Matthew – my support worker on a Tuesday – was needed elsewhere, to work another shift for a client with ‘higher tier’ needs than I. Receiving notification of this by text on Sunday from the agency Matthew works for, means they would’ve known that there was little I could do. Monday was a Bank Holiday, so it was a fait accompli. There was no discussion. Just ‘Here’s our problem and here’s our solution.’

Which as a way of highlighting my dependency on others was a stark reminder. One that got me thinking, and not in a good way either. I don’t like thinking like this, about my situation. It isn’t good for me to ruminate; rationally I know it’s a bad idea, but emotionally. Well….
Or more accurately, not well.

Here’s what I was thinking.
‘My whole pitiful existence – as it isn’t a life in any meaningful sense of the word – is just endless journey of frustration and despair. One that now consists of necessity, of accommodation and above all drudge. The sheer, mind-numbing, joyless drudge of knowing that each day will be repeat of the one before. Yes, granted, tiny details that are out of the ordinary may occur, but in essence, nothing changes. Nothing.’

‘I could do exercises to help with my walking and speech sure, but I’ve been typing away at a keyboard pretty much continually since after the coma and guess what? No substantive improvement. Yes, granted, some incremental improvement, but I won’t be getting a data entry job anytime soon. In fact, I don’t think I’ll ever work again, I mean I know how good I am and I wouldn’t employ me.’

That’s hard to deal with. Not working. Not doing anything one considers worthwhile. Don’t get me wrong, blogging isn’t worthless, but neither is it that far removed from technological graffiti – that title belongs to Twittter. But I’ve always worked. Not because I didn’t get any pocket money, but more that I didn’t want to be beholden to the whims of others – what they could give, so could they take. So I worked, doing paper rounds, after school jobs, jobs to pay my way through college, jobs when I left college, evening jobs to supplement those jobs. So to go from that to….this, is not something that sits well with me – given that I spend enough time sitting down. Which is why I tend not to think about it.

In fact, I tend not to think about a lot of things. As I’ve said before, it’s better to be stupid than clever. Because a stupid person may not be able to fully grasp the possible consequences of a course of action. Or to realise that there exist many possible courses of action. But a clever person can and if they put their mind to it, envisage differing scenarios that might occur, as a consequence.

One consequence of this is the disparity between want I think and what I say. A good example of this occurred late last week at Moorfields eye hospital, for a fitting for eye weights. A doctor asked me about my medical history. Upon hearing of my brain injury, she asked, “How did you get it?” Tempted, but knowing that replying “In a raffle.” was the wrong answer, equally I toyed with asking her was it in any way relevant. But I said nothing of the sort, I just inwardly raged. Having been such a private person before the brain injury is deeply infuriating. And to paraphrase Winston Churchill, ‘Never, in the pursuit of legal entitlement, has so much information been asked of one person for by many people for so little.’ Even worse when a support worker has to share it on my behalf for, as my speech isn’t always understood call centre staff who are tasked with finding out this information. So even more people know things about me.

Whoopief*ckingdo.

Another consequence is that things that had never bothered me before, bother me to distraction now. Other people have always been a case of botheration to me – in much the same way as I no doubt have been to them. But me being in the house so much has exacerbated this to an alarming degree. This can partly be explained by me spending so much time in the house, and partly by the fact that there is comparatively little else to occupy my mind. But mainly, however, because things are not done properly. I used do things in the most efficient and quietest way possible. I hate waste in all things almost as I hate needlessly generated noise. But since the accident I’ve had to bite my tongue so much it must’ve scar tissue on scar tissue. I didn’t realise I was such a control freak until I didn’t have any. I mean I could point out the error of peoples ways, but again, one of the many unpleasant consequences of my accident is my mental cost benefit analysis. Namely, what is the likely outcome of any course of action? So more often than not, my reaction is inaction.

This cost benefit analysis is both instant and instinctive and I hate myself for needing to think this way. I’d never put myself in a situation where I needed to do that before, not since childhood anyway, and I hate myself for doing it now. I’ve had niceness foisted upon me, not through choice but by circumstance. Not that I was deliberately not nice on purpose, but neither would I allow circumstance to dictate my actions. Now however necessity deems otherwise.

And I woke up from a coma for this?

Whoopief*ckingdo!

Next time…Nigel Farrage isn’t ‘a pound shop Enoch Powell.’ He’s more Alf Garnett reborn as a snake oil salesman…

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April 3, 2015

According to the bible, God could go all Bruce Banner…!

In my last post, I deservedly ridiculed some of the frankly bizarre beliefs that hold sway in modern life. Such as UFO’s, the Loch Ness Monster, acupuncture, and the moon landings being faked. I observed that despite there being no credible proof for any of these, they somehow remain lodged in people’s consciousness as truths.

Now for the biggest mass delusion of all. I’m referring, of course, to religion or as I call it, a fairy story for grown ups. Quite how, in the 21st century – over 150 years since Darwin conclusively proved evolution wasn’t just a theory, but verifiable fact – religion isn’t a fading superstition but a flourishing worldwide activity, is a cause of serious concern.

This post will therefore be a tad longer than usual, because I’ve included some background on me, and I’ve also quoted and referenced the bible (The Revised Standard Version). The lesser known sources anyway, as I figure you’re familiar with the Adam and Eve story?

Like pretty much every child with religious parents, mine indoctrinated me into theirs, which just happened to be Catholicism. I knew my mum viewed going to church as more of a social activity than anything else, and my father saw religion as something you paid lip service to, especially if there was communion wine on offer.

Up until my confirmation I was the model of probity. It was during my confirmation classes that things started to go right, I was told I could choose a confirmation name and I was given a book of saint’s names to look through. Told I was allowed to have two, I considered my options and then said I want my confirmation name to be James Bond.  Only to be told that yes, even though there was a St James and a St Bond and that yes, even though I could have any two I wanted, no, having James Bond as my confirmation name wasn’t acceptable. Later, when I was studying Nazi Germany as part of my A Level history, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between the Nuremburg rallies and religion. Specifically, that fact that there was a kind of group think at work, whereby otherwise quite rational people would get swept along in the carefully orchestrated emotional fervour of the moment and would become part of the group. It was about this time that I read Darwin and all of the unformed thoughts in my head suddenly coalesced.

As Julie Andrews sang in ‘Do-Rei-Me’ in ‘The Sound Of Music’, “Lets start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” So lets. In the beginning there was nothing, blah, blah, blah, until in the greatest magic trick in the history of ever, hey presto, God created the world. Never mind who created God! Fast forward a bit and he created man, Adam, in his own image. More blah. Adam was lonely, so God created Eve, using one of Adam’s ribs.

Two problems spring to mind here. One, if God created Man out of nothing but dust (Gen 2 v7), then why did he have to go all rib thievery on Adam? After making the entire universe we’re expected to seriously believe creating a similar but different breeding companion for Adam was beyond his creative imagination and competence? Really? I know women are complicated, but he’d just created the universe and everything in it.
Two. Why didn’t Adam haggle? As anyone who’s ever been to a market anywhere in the world knows, the first price opens negotiations only, one isn’t expected to actually pay it, as this scene from Monty Pythons ‘Life of Brian’ demonstrates. What if Adam had done the same thing? I mean, women are great and everything, don’t get me wrong, but for one rib we got woman? If we could lose one rib, why not two? Or three? We’ll never know what we could have got because Adam couldn’t haggle.

Moving on, the first humans were Adam and Eve. After eviction (And that’s problematic. As any parent knows, if you draw attention to a thing, and then tell a child not to do a certain thing with that thing, guess what?) Anyway. They have Cain and Abel, Cain murders Abel, “Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden” (Gen 5 v 16) Did he have a kip in the land of Nod? No, he got busy. “Cain knew his wife and she conceived and she bore Enoch; and he built a city and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.” (Gen, 5, v 17)

Now who exactly this wife was and where she sprang from is never explained, but it isn’t called the holy bible for nothing, it’s full of holes! No, the really troubling aspect for a book that later on gives us ten rules to live by, is that god is morally flexible when it suits him. Cain, his wife and their son Enoch, populating an entire city? You can see where I’m going with this can’t you? I don’t need to go there, although Cain and Enoch must’ve gone there. Repeatedly.

But that didn’t bother God, it was only when “The Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth… the Lord said ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground.” (Gen 6 v 5 & 7) that he got all Bruce Banner – (The Incredible Hulk) – “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” that he flooded the entire world. Or as Eddie Izzard puts it, did an Etch A Sketch erase. Which meant breaking one of his own moral edicts for everyone else – thou shall not kill – thus proving that the first commandment was ‘Thou shall do as I sayeth, not as I doth’ But hey, he’s God, who’s going to tell him off? Mrs. Badcrumble? So, God kills everyone in the world, “He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground.” (Gen 7 v23), except for Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives.

That’s it.

“And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’ (Gen 9 v 1), “These were the three sons of Noah and from these the whole earth was peopled.” (Gen 9 v 19.) Again, I’m not going to go there. But can I just make the observation that six pages into a supposedly ‘good book’, we’ve had genocide and incest on a – dare I say it – biblical scale.

Sodom and Gomorrah? God gets all Bruce Banner again (Gen 19 v 23-26) It’s the same throughout the Old Testament. Jericho? It’s God doing his Bruce Banner shtick by proxy “Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and asses, with the edge of the sword.” (Josh 6 v 21) Only a cynic would think that kind of violence is eerily prescient of the religious bloodlust of ISIS. “But all the silver and the gold, and all the vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the Lord; they shall go into the treasury of the Lord.” (Josh 6 v 19) Er, hang on; doesn’t ISIS fund their terror that way?

If anything, the God of the Old Testament is a testament to the transformation that God undergoes before the New Testament. Out goes the vengeful, violent and capricious version and is replaced by a more compassionate, peaceful and level-headed version. It’s as if Bruce Banner went into rehab and left The Hulk in there when he came out. The lord does work in mysterious ways, after all…

And to any Christians reading this who are offended, I say this; a) what part of the title of this blog post induced you to read it, b) my soul isn’t damned, the only soul I’ve got is my a@sehole and c) as Bill Hicks once said “You’re Christians…forgive me.”

Next time…Necessity is the mutha of re-invention…

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March 28, 2015

Some people should be disqualified from the human race….

Since my diagnosis of Bells Palsy, I’ve been visiting an acupuncturist in an area of south London that has according to estate agents been up and coming for the last 20 years. (If this area were a man then he’d need Viagra.) Not that I believe in acupuncture, anymore than I believe in UFO’s, the Loch Ness Monster or god, but what I do believe in is the placebo effect. The power of the mind has on producing beneficial outcome on health. The placebo effect has been the subject of double blind randomized trials, evidence gained and made open to scrutiny with the results peer reviewed, which is more than can be said for alternative medicine.

I’m with Richard Dawkins on this one when he says, “If alternative medicines actually worked, they’d be called medicine.” Of course some people will get better of whatever ailment was troubling them, but then that proves not that alternative medicine works but a lack of understanding of regression to the mean. Basically most minor ailments would get better without any intervention whatsoever. (For a detailed explanation of it see here, but for a less detailed explanation of it see here. Or you can believe me without any evidence whatsoever. Rather like alternative medicine.)

Sorry about that, but it makes me weep for the continued existence of the human race, people who believe in all that claptrap. The moon landings were faked? If the KGB had found any proof of that whatsoever, you think we’d have heard about it at the time. Maybe? It’s not as if the Russians had a vested interest in sparing Americas’ blushes during the Cold War. And lets suspend rationality for a second and imagine that they were faked. The conspiracy would need to have been huge. Sure those involved at the upper echelons might have had an interest in keeping schtum. But think about the people who did the catering. Or prepared the fake moon surface. Don’t you think some credible expose of the fraud would’ve emerged by now? Homeopathy? Water has memory, you say? Of course it does! This glass of water in front of me has a faint memory of it being turned into wine once!

People who believe this trumpery moonshine deserve to be disqualified from the human race. I’m not advocating killing them. But rather, by them having demonstrated their abject failure to engage in any deductive reasoning, they should be barred from partaking in civil society. Ask yourself, if you were on trial accused of a serious crime, for which there was a lengthy custodial sentence and social isolation on release, who would you want on the jury? A jury whose job it was after a careful and sober examination of the evidence presented to them, to decide your fate? Equally at elections. Why should anyone manifestly devoid of the requisite skills needed to evaluate one party’s policies from anothers, why should they have the vote? I’m serious.

Participating in democracy isn’t a right, more of a responsibility.

Anyway.

The point I was going to make before I got side-tracked down Tangent Street is that an up and coming area necessarily provides many and varied opportunities for businesses to creatively relieve people of their money. This area of south London isn’t particularly well off, but a tiny pocket of it is reported to be, and businesses charge accordingly. No doubt you will have encountered Artisan bakeries, which gives rise (no pun intended) to the joke, ‘What is the difference between an artisan bakery and a normal bakery?’ ‘About three pounds a loaf!’ I was reflecting upon this in the café I normally go to after my acupuncture, this bizarre notion that expense somehow equates to honest and/or authentic as I was having some tea. Not a lot of tea. Some tea. Now a pot of tea conjures up images of a large pot that you could at least get two cups out of. Unfortunately this café has prices well above its portions, meaning that the pot of tea was only capable of filling just one and a quarter cups of tea. By cups I mean those little dainty things that force you to make that little dainty maneuver with your little finger. This wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t paying £1.95 for the privilege.

I’ve the menu in front of me, their brunch menu offers house baked beans topped with Gruyere cheese on sourdough toast for £5.95. To you and me that means beans on toast with a bit of cheese. They also do a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel for £5.95, but the item on the menu that really takes the (overpriced) biscuit is a croissant with butter and jam for £2.95! One feels like handing them an empty cup and when they ask what it’s for, you can tell them it’s for the p*ss they’re taking.

This is café Twatteratti – not its real name – but a café that is popular with men who have floppy hair, unique facial grooming and worrying amounts of free time. And mothers, forced into the pretence of being mothers while their nanny’s are on a lunch break, loudly praising their portable fecal factory, for doing what an adult would be chastised for. Looking around at all of them I am struck by numerous thoughts none, of them edifying. The first is that the café is a triumph of style over substance. Secondly, and more worryingly, is the fact that when I look around at the easy confidence displayed by the customers, their fastidious sense of appearance, their casual insouciance, it only serves to remind me how far removed from that world I am now. Not that I was ever in any danger of being subsumed into that world before, but now even if I wanted to I couldn’t afford the price of admittance.

Literally. Whilst I wasn’t encumbered by a massive amount of savings, over the years – and thanks to a very lucrative death – I was able to squirrel away a tidy sum. All of my savings have gone, evaporated like a puddle on a hot day. How is now a matter of history, the facts don’t change the end result. Not that I’m angry about this.

I’ve got too many other, more important things to be angry about.

Next time…According to the bible, God would go all Bruce Banner…

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March 23, 2015

How sports news is like Debbie McGee…

For those of you who don’t know who Debbie McGee is, she’s most famously known for being the assistant to the magician Paul Daniels whom he later married. (Or maybe she isn’t that famous if I have to tell you who she is!) And for those of you who do know who she is, you’re now thinking of the infamous clip on the Mrs. Merton show. Which you can find here.

My last blog – which was a few weeks ago – ended with the somewhat rash observation that in this one, I’d be concerning myself with the fact that whilst sports news might be an oxymoron, it least offered a simple and understandable alternative to actual news. I write rashly because in the strict dictionary definition of oxymoron sports news isn’t one. It might not be news as I see it, but if it is information concerning sports that wasn’t widely known to people who care about these things, is, then it qualifies as news. So I write instead that sports news is like Debbie McGee. Allow me to explain.

As every magician knows, if the audience is paying too close attention to them, then there is every chance that they will spot the sleight of hand or other chicanery they are is engaged in. (For the purposes of this argument all magicians are therefore less than handsome men, and it thereby follows that their assistants are attractive younger females wearing as little as the audience will permit). The purpose of the magician’s assistant is to distract the audiences’ gaze away from the magician and to focus instead on something more appealing. In essence the audience looks the other way, so that the trick can be successfully executed. In much the same way sports news acts as a distraction from actual news. Let me give you an example.

Consider the many problems that face the world today. There’s certainly enough to choose from. From arms control to world hunger and everything in between, the problems facing humanity are simple; the solutions to them are anything but. (Although changing its name is one way to make the threat seem less threatening. The most obvious example being when exactly did global warming become climate change? Several large hats off to whatever genius thought of that one!) And if you spent any amount of time dwelling on all these in a very short space of time you’d go mad. At any rate, you wouldn’t be a funster! Let us take what is on the face of it, an easy one.

ISIS as everyone – except for mental pigmies – would agree is a dangerous slide backwards into religious intolerance and barbarity. But how did ISIS come to be? It is an easy question but one that doesn’t lend itself to easy answers. It all depends on how far back you wish to go. One could argue with some justification that ISIS filled the power vacuum that was left after the American withdrawal from Iraq. Anyone with a knowledge of that whole sorry misadventure could counter that with the argument that the power vacuum only existed because the Americans had not only disbanded the Sunni dominated military but had also installed a weak and ineffective leader. Going further back one could also point to the American support of Saddam Hussein provided them with a regional strong man who was totally dependent on them for support. Mind you Iraqi oil revenues didn’t hurt him either and only a cynic would draw a correlation between Iraqi oil and American support. Nor would one think of the one known diplomatic realpolitik phrase “He might be a bastard but at least he’s our bastard!”

Going even further back, one could even point out that the map of the modern Middle East, which as we know it was drawn up after the First World War according the Sykes – Picot treaty. A treaty that, like so many peace treaties before and since, worked well for those not directly affected by its provisions. If anything was guaranteed to foster generational hatred and tribal rivalries for decades to come then this was it. ISIS is but one as an example of how complicated things can be when you start to look at them with any degree of critical analysis. No doubt my own somewhat sketchy overview of events that lead us to ISIS might well be criticized, but that is precisely my point. Complicated things ARE complicated and defy soundbite understanding.

So it is no wonder that sports news provides an easily understandable alternative to actual news. If you follow a football team you know the rules that both sides will play by. You also know that a football match normally lasts for ninety minutes and at the end of it your team has either won, drawn or lost. And you will also know that at the end of the season their place in the league is a certainty, and not open to interpretation.

News offers no such rules based easy to follow narratives. One is always in the middle of news. The beginning of any news event depends on your perspective and your own bias. There is no clearly defined black and white with news, although there are considerably more than fifty shades of grey. Sports therefore act as a magician’s assistant, it distracts one from more important concerns and in so doing it effectively inures people to the more deserving of their attention than sport. Don’t get me wrong. I loved sport, was in my schools football, rugby and cricket teams. But soon after leaving school, I found I’d no enthusiasm for being a spectator of sports. There were far more interesting things worthy of my attention. But not if there’s a scantily clad attractive woman instead!

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February 21, 2015

Never mind the glass being half empty or half full, at least I’ve got a glass!

Last week I posted a blog concerning how depressing it was to write a blog all about your depression only to have a handful of people read it. One of the people who ‘liked’ it, upon visiting their blog and reading some of their posts made me realise that whilst my depression might be all encompassing to me, viewed impartially, and most especially in comparison to their experience, I’m fortunate.

Judging by what they write, they have no family they feel they can speak to, and having no support network of friends only compounds the sense of isolation. They feel totally alone – aside from the thoughts in their head and that I suppose is part of the problem. If one is alone or feels there is no one to talk to about things,  then thoughts of suicide can necessarily grow and develop, eventually becoming quite rational if no one is there to challenge your assumptions.

No I’m not fortunate to have had a severe brain injury and neither was I fortunate to be in a medically induced coma for a month. Nor was I fortunate to wake up from the coma especially, as the me I woke up to was not the me I remembered myself to be. I don’t claim this to be anything unique, I suppose that this is a common feeling experienced by many who undergo a sudden reversal of fortune.

However the reason I say I’m fortunate – and I posted a comment to this effect on the bloggers website – is that I have two extraordinary loyal friends who are seemingly indefatigable in the energy they expend on my behalf. One of them, Old Blue Eyes, who lives in the same house as me, has gone not so much the extra mile for me but has run a marathon in record time. Mind you she does think that broccoli ice cream is an idea worth perusing, so her judgment is questionable. Likewise Avril. I’ve known her for longer than she’d care to remember, quite literally in fact, as she says the day she met me was the worst day of her life! It is she who has schlepped across London almost every night since my diagnosis with Bells Palsy – in November – to ensure that my eye is properly lubricated (why I can’t do this myself can be found here) thereby negating any serious damage. Mind you, she thinks that UB40 were a great band, so….

I was reminded yet again as to my incalculable good fortune when last week I had an assessment from someone from the local mental health hospital to gauge whether I was a suitable case for therapy. Because of my infirmity this was a home visit. Knowing that I had to present a case in a manner that would be both appealing and demonstrate some awareness of my behaviours and how they might effect any treatment they might offer, I decided to engage in strategic honesty. Understandably this might confuse you, this notion of ‘strategic honesty’ if, unlike me, you have a policy of telling the truth most, if not all, of the time. Some years ago when a friend asked me about my flexible attitude to truth. I suggested to her that she thought that truth was a valuable thing, and as I expected she agreed it was indeed valuable. So I continued. She’d readily agreed with the assertion that truth is a precious thing, naturally wanting to be well thought of. So therefore, I suggested, if indeed truth is so valuable and precious one should use it sparingly, if at all.

Strategic honesty is whereby you are truthful in pursuit of a goal, which in this instance was securing treatment and necessitated by the person carrying out the assessment stating that I would only have twelve one hour sessions to start with. This rather helped focus the mind on what was of real and immediate concern to me – and not one of the many demons in my past. I’ve had psychotherapy before and it was suggested that my depression was either a direct cause of the brain injury, me trying to come to terms with the effect of it, or possibly a combination of the two. Being strategically honest, I pointed out at this assessment that the failure for the previous therapy not having the desired effect fell squarely on my shoulders. This demonstrated that I was aware of the barriers I put up then, but was willing to properly engage with the process now. I was only telling her something she may already known, if she had read the previous psychotherapists notes (they work for the same NHS Trust). Because, as I pointed out, the attitudes and behaviors that had served me so well in the past were no longer suitable to my present circumstances.

For many years I was able to compartmentalize feelings, able to lock them away as they were not helpful at the time I was feeling them. This was born out of childhood necessity and became second nature for most of my adult life. But yet when I wrote I had functioning and not debilitating depression upon reading the bloggers posts I mentioned above, I realised that being able to differentiate between your depressions meant that I was in a markedly different place to them. I have two good friends to speak to. The fact that I sometimes choose not to burden them with my darker thoughts is neither here nor there; the fact is I could if I wanted to. But if that option wasn’t open to me I shudder to think what I’d be doing now. This isn’t meant to be a sombre post, rather it is me indicating that I’m aware just how lucky and how thankful I am that I have two such good friends in my life. And when I write ‘in my life’, that is exactly what I mean.

Because without them I doubt you’d be reading this.

On a wholly unrelated point, if anyone reading this could enlighten me as to whether there’s a search function on WordPress and more importantly, how to use it – or if there isn’t, how does one find posts? I ask, because for the last two of my posts, bloggers have ‘liked’ them, and I’ve no idea how they found them.

Next time..Sports ‘news’ may well be an oxymoron, but it does at least offer a simple to understand alternative to actual news…

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February 13, 2015

The Albert Einstein Guide to Blogging…

What is more depressing than writing about ones depression in a blog? Not having many people reading it that’s what!

When I first mentioned to someone I was toying with the idea of writing a blog they asked me what would happen if I didn’t get that many readers. Flushed with enthusiasm for this venture, I replied optimistically, that quality was more important than quantity when it come to readers.

How I laugh at those words now!

Because whilst I feel I have interesting things to say and interesting ways to say them it would seem that hardly anybody is interested in reading them. According to my subscriber lists most of my subscribers are based here in England but a glance at my stats for last week proved that hardly any English interweb users read my blog. This leaves me to the rather unpalatable conclusion that an email notification of my blog goes direct into their junk mail folder. And I’ve yet to get my head around harnessing the power of social media to publicise my blog, because whenever anyone tries, this happens

It put me in mind of Albert Einstein. When he was asked to describe his theory of relativity in language that could be easily understood his quote goes something like this. “When you are sitting on a bench next to a pretty girl an hour seems like a minute but when you are sitting on a hot oven a minute seems like an hour!” The amount of time it takes me to write a blog like the one I wrote about my depression is inversely proportionate to the amount of time people will spend reading it.

Another thing that works against me is that I don’t have a single, unifying theme or subject matter to my blog. It alternates – one week about me and coping (or not) with severe brain injury and the next about something altogether more interesting. Before my injury, lots of many things appalled, bewildered, fascinated or amused me about life, sometimes all at the same time. Quite how my change in circumstance has changed my outlook is beyond me. This blogger encapsulates the dichotomy rather well.

I know that such concerns only highlight the abject lack of any other meaningful activity in my life. As if to prove the point yesterday I had a trip to Moorefield’s Eye Hospital. I was fully expecting them to examine my eyes and to comment favourably on the relative health of the eye and that whatever ministrations I was receiving that they were working, namely keeping the eye well lubricated. (I could make a rather crude and obvious joke about eye’s elsewhere on the body being well lubricated, but I won’t!) I was not however expecting a consultant to suggest that I needed part of my left eyelid sown shut to prevent any damage to the eyeball caused by the eyelid not closing properly. And for good measure the consultant also added that after three months she would have expected to see more movement in the left side of my face. I was reminded not in a good way of my physiotherapist at the rehabilitation unit when he said to me that most gains are made within the first few months and after that it is a series of rapidly diminishing returns. I asked him if he was available as a motivational speaker! (No really, I did!)

Thus I went from being very low at the start of the week to be very, very low at the end of it. And given that tomorrow is Valentines Day (or V.D as I call it!)

Here are a couple of ideas for you.

Cajole a member of the opposite sex who is single and a good friend of yours to engage in an act of public theatre. Book a table in a restaurant on Valentines Day and proceed to have a nauseatingly good time, laughing loudly and with frequent displays of affection with big smiles to other diners. This of course, will have the effect of making everyone else feel thoroughly wretched. Or on the other hand if might unit them in a shared antipathy towards you, either way it’s a win win!

The other idea – which I’ve used many, many times – is a cheapskates guide to romance. If you are an urban dweller no doubt there are many fatal car crashes or fatalities involving cyclists or pedestrians near where you live, some of these see impromptu memorials springing up on the nearest lampposts. What I used to do was to find one of these near to my house with a fresh looking bunch of flowers and take the name tag out and present them to my significant other.
Although what it was signifying was another matter!

Next time I hope I’ll be in a less misanthropic mood.

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