the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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…

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.

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!

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.

2 Comments

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.

2 Comments

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…..

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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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