Summertime, and the living is easy.....

Well here I am a couple of weeks into what we school staff refer to as the 'long holiday' and it's unfolding quite pleasantly so far. This may sound obvious to many but as someone who decided to make a fairly robust all round lifestyle adjustment a couple of years ago it's not as simple as it may at first seem. Gone are the days (or rather evenings) of self lobotomisation. Therefore gone too are the vapourised mornings, the midday scrabbling around for sustenance and the looong afternoons spent checking my smoking supplies and wondering how much longer I could possibly continue in such a vein, feverishly waiting for one of my two favourite hostelries to open their doors and, at least in my imagination, welcome me across their thresholds with open tills. (Actually one of them is open from about midday but I liked to think that, even in the last days, I clung on to some standards and held out until 5pm. Or so.)

Instead I get up earlyish, make coffee and go on line to check emails and follow the progress of my dearest friend who, emerging from a turbulent year woman wise and who also works in a school, has charged off around southern Europa seemingly determined to fill every moment with painfully energetic, if not downright dangerous, activities before renewing his acquaintance with the local beverages in the evenings (and the locals themselves for all I know but I'm far to polite to ask. Until he gets back :-).)

The rest of the day consists of any combination of things such as eating breakfast, shopping, cooking, doing my laundry, sorting out my car/bills/paperwork, putting the finishing touches to my new room in my new house, amassing yet more movies, reading, seeing friends who are my fellows in my new lifestyle, seeing other friends (of whom more another time; maybe) and in particular spending time with my daughters and their mother (of whom more in a moment). I have even spent a couple of hours sunbathing in the local park which, to my mind anyway, is enormous. This, I am given to understand, is 'living in the moment' and a fine way to spend your time it is. Those of a spiritual nature, especially the bloody Buddhists, would no doubt have a great deal more to say on the matter but as I am an atheist of the Marxist persuasion I shall have to take their word for it.



I love this pic. It fits.



My eldest daughter is pregnant with the first of the next generation, leading me to shut my eyes and hold on tight, so to speak, whenever I think about the matter. My contribution, as I understand it, is to 'be around' and be 'supportive' which I think I'm managing alright (although why they insist on knowing the little thing's sex before it's born I fail to understand; apparently it's so that they know what to buy for it beforehand (?!?)).



Her mother has recently taken charge of an allotment and I have been helping her out in her efforts to tame this mini wilderness. It's huge fun and involves getting scored by Hawthorne and brambles, heaving wheelbarrows of decaying organic matter up slopes and breaking up ground which has about two inches of lose soil on top of seemingly solid clay as well as making various compost bins and netted frames. Extraordinarily I keep getting flashbacks to my grandmother's when I was a kid.



As indeed does this!



I mention all this because I am assured that these are the sort of things that people do with their time and they do these things to generate peace of mind. In this way they don't have to put up with that infernal shrieking fear that I and others like me had assumed was normal and can in fact generate their own peace of mind to a large extent. I can even sit up till dawn, as I have tonight, doing this and feel that it is the right thing to do. An enjoyable thing to do. No more terror of insomnia. No more heebie-geebies (Night Fever, Night Fever?). Believe me, people, this is extraordinary, but I am also fully aware that you probably don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Unless you are like me.



Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run........

It's no good you know. This tribute to the glory of sport and human excellence is of course nothing of the sort. Every day I'm reading stories in the press (the normal press I mean not those blasted pinkos) of the people in charge of things and their frantic attempts to arrest anyone they don't know. Some baker chap in Dorset put bread rings in his window and was told to take them out, presumably under threat of life imprisonment or something. A man in London whose business is making artwork for all sorts of companies' publicity using spray paint has been arrested BEFORE committing a crime and told he can't go anywhere near any events or even own a can of spray paint. He has never been arrested before. For anything. In fact he is against illegal street art and tells people so. I was going to include all sorts of links to these stories but there's too many of them and I'm too exasperated.

Then we have the special lanes that only special 'Olympic' people can use on London roads. I must admit, though, to snorting with derision at the fact that they've been named 'ZIL' lanes after the habits of officials in Stalinist Russia. Of course then hardly anybody else actually had cars so there weren't any traffic jams to sail past. Christ, talk about history repeating itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.

The whole G4S security business had me screaming in hysterical laughter at the sheer incompetent insanity of it all. These people were given Himalayas of money to organise the safety of the crowds attending the events and then apparently just said to the government: 'Thanks chaps, we're off now' and all this is perfectly normal according to somebody called Jeremy Hunt (no I'm not going to) who is the Minister for Giving Shitloads of Public Money to Gangs of Barrow Boys and Oiks Who Are SURELY Taking the Piss. Or something.

There is also the case of the Border Agency people who have been in dispute with the government for 18 months over job losses and other issues. 18 months. Finally having had enough they announced plans for a strike during the Olympics. People, you would have thought they had advocated public masturbation. They were accused of, amongst other things, being unpatriotic. They were arguing against cutting the numbers of staff responsible for the 'border security' of the UK yet the hyenas in power, who routinely whip up media panics on the subject of 'porous borders' and 'illegal immigrants', treat them as if they were the modern Bosch. Of course their predecessors tried the same thing during WW2 and it didn't work then. As I write the union leaders concerned are claiming movement on the part of the hyenas and have called off the action.

The thing is though I can't help thinking that there's more to all this than may be immediately obvious. As mentioned in a previous post there must be many of these sweating corporate cutpurses and their political running dogs who will increasingly be looking to a flexible yet brutal state machinery to protect them from the maddened crowd. They must dream of the 'mob' climbing through their windows with numbered lists of London lampposts, names allocated and hanging lanes marked on street maps to ensure a swift passage to their destinations. In their worst nightmares they imagine that by meting out arbitrary retribution, the armed wing of the Provisional Westminster Government can terrorise the population into submission, thereby guaranteeing them a few more years of blood soaked despotism. Till the next time. This then is their vision of the future. This is what they have to offer the overwhelming majority who actually produce their privilege. So 2012 is a year of dress rehearsal for some future clampdown but I'll tell you this; I'm not panicking just yet because they're so fucking crap at it.

In cyberspace no one can hear you scream...

The thing about this writing business is that once you've made a start it is extraordinarily addictive; you literally get a chemical rush from the experience which is handy since I've foregone the toploading variety a couple of years ago. The two people who, to my knowledge so far, read this  have been very complimentary about it. (Of course they both write blogs themselves so constructive criticism is probably the better part of valour - but they're ahead of me so it probably bodes well for the future, readership wise).

However, issues arise like the undead alongside me as I think about this process. For instance, how often should you write and what length of time between posts starts to become neglect? It's been two weeks since my last entry so am I risking having my blog taken into care? Also how do you decide how candid to be when it's likely that those of a familial persuasion will read it? If this were a 'Dear Diary' situation it would be possible to get all Hollywood on the arses of any who happened to open the pages of a hard copy version, however secretly pleased you might be. The same can hardly be said of this situation can it? It's ok if you include 'adult' content because these dear people give you a disclaimer/warning that can be used if needs be. Not in this case though.

Perhaps that's a gap in the process? There could be an equivalent that says something like: "You are about to access material that, after you read it, you may wish you hadn't for a variety of reasons. You may experience detail overload leading to a breadth of emotions which the writer has no intention of accepting any responsibility for whatsoever. If you want to swallow the red pill click here. If you want to swallow the blue pill and never know what might have been, click here." x-))

Moving pictures tell a story 24 times a second.....

 So I've managed to get to my third post without having directly mentioned my healthy obsession with all things filmic. Of course the camera eyed amongst you will have noticed the oblique references already but I shall be scattering evidence of my passion through these pages regularly, for what value life without it's mirror, the moving image?

The moments in what we can call, for want of a more accurate phrase, 'real life' pass so quickly that none of us get a chance to reflect on their significance. It falls, then, to those (film makers) that capture a few, a very few, of those moments; that capture, as it were, the fractions of human existence as if catching a sigh in their hands, to keep for us a small collection of our experiences that we can revisit again and again. The experiences I'm talking about are those that are impossible to describe in words. Walking down a street at night in winter. Sitting in a room alone with the furniture. Standing in a public place and wondering about the life and loves of the people who pass you by, never to be seen again and, of course, standing on a railway station platform. You see? Impossible.

I'm talking about narrative rather than documentary cinema which is it's own country of genius and as such has a language that I'm much less familiar with. Sometimes known as the Seventh Art (I wish someone would tell me what the other six are) or the 20th century art form (ok I get that one) I hope to include examples of what I'm talking about through stills, video, links and so on. Just as soon as I've asked somebody how to do it.

Anyway if you're still with me after that little lot here's something to be going on with: Stop Dave, I'm afraid. First of all the visual beauty is stunning in my opinion. Austere, clinical, almost abstract and the severe geometry and monochrome colour (can you have monochrome colour?) combined with the forlorn, frightened voiceover conjure up, in me anyway, an increasingly clammy panic. That's HAL by the way. He's a computer and he's gone mad.

Going back to our roots...

Over the last few weeks at Hogwarts Academy we have been watching Alex Haley's Roots with our students. It's several years since I spent one Easter holiday watching it from end to end and many years since I watched it when it was originally broadcast on television. It's an extraordinary series considering it must be around 35 years old. Obviously the production values are very much of their time and the mores of mid seventies American television are well to the fore but the attempt to portray the central issues of the whole story of slavery in what became the USA is, in my view, very successful. It steers well away from a facile 'good guys/bad guys' approach and gets across the economic nature of the system very well.

It also manages to show the appallingly corrosive effect such a system has on all the people involved and ends with an introduction to the rise of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan in the former slave states. We have been able to talk about the use of violence and the nature of one law for all as well as touch upon the Black Panthers and talk a little about John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics.

Our cohort has what society is pleased to call 'behavioural difficulties' but by and large they have been riveted and enthusiastically engaged in the many, many issues it has thrown up. (Oh and Ofsted, the curriculum areas covered were: History, Geography, Maths, English, DT, Food, Citizenship, PHSE.....do you even know what I'm talking about? Look it up).

The really nourishing thing about all this is the way that the rich and powerful (and their yellow, running dog lackeys) produce their own gravediggers generation after generation; each time better educated, more worldlier and angrier than the last. It's no wonder that the current crop of hyenas is lashing out with such fury, particularly at any young people who have the cheek to question their rule. These people must lie awake at night sweating; wondering if it is they or their children who are going to pay the price for the terrible cruelty and suffering they inflict on the majority of the world's population whilst they hoard more wealth than they're ever going to be able to use in generations. There's nowhere to run. And nowhere to hide.

I think 'War Poetry' is next.....for instance:

                                 "...rise like lions from your slumber
                                     in unvanquishable number
                                     shake your chains from you like dew
                                     ye are many.....they are few"             (That's Shelley Ofsted. Look it up)

In the beginning...

 ...was the word. Not too obvious a debut then but I've been meaning to set something like this up for a while so here goes.

It seems that when faced with some of the fundamental absurdities of the modern world and the consequent feelings of powerlessness many people resort to the word as a means of interpreting, analysing, scoffing at and responding to these absurdities. That, in fact, they seek in some way to protect themselves. However, whenever any investigation is done into the lives of the writers who do it full time one thing seems to be clearer than anything else about these people. They are all as mad as a box of frogs. So at least on one level it doesn't work very well.

The fact remains though that I have followed the written word all my life and have gained enormously from it. When I was a child I remember my father saying to anyone who would listen, that if I had a book I only needed two square feet of ground and I was happy which was just as well really since he always had the best bloody chair. In the worst times of my life I have always carried reading material with me as if it had magical properties - not so much a suit of armour as a cloak of invisibility. Usually fiction but also non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, it seemed that hidden in these texts were little nuggets of information that were extremely comforting; gems that were buried within waiting to be dug up and stored away for some future prosperity. As I got older I realised that all these words were put together by people who did it on purpose. Gradually I developed a deep admiration for these individuals who could create worlds from a few randomly agreed marks on a white sheet of paper. In my early twenties I spent three years at polytechnic and so glimpsed some of the intense joy and agonising frustration that sent those who made it into careers up the wall. There was no chance that I would get sucked into that madness at the time, so when I left college I got a job in an inner city dole office. This was the mid eighties. Lucky escape there then.

One thing that has never left me, and has in fact grown stronger over the years, is a desire to have a go at this stuff. I knew I had a talent for it. I had been told as much by people whose opinion I respected. It's surprising, though, how much of the quality that the Spanish describe as 'cojones' is required to actually embark on this sort of enterprise. So here I find myself thirty years on with absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not having a go. I'm hoping that what unfolds here over time will be one person's view of life's goings on and - if you're lucky - when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit!