Wild? We’re Absolutely Livid!

Now this is what I call a proper documentary. Intelligent, unintrusive commentary, no inane chatter, very little done to camera and no incessant recaps. I refer of course to last night’s Wild Isles, David Attenborough’s latest (and last?) docuseries. It’s lovely to see a work on Britain for a change and as ever the photography is stunning. The ‘how we did it’ section at the end shows just how much work goes into a few minutes of film. This is utter dedication and love and it puts some so-called documentaries to shame.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0f0t5dp/wild-isles?seriesId=p0f0t893

There’s controversy about the last episode, though, in which he talks about how much damage we are doing to the environment. This is reportedly going to be streaming on iplayer rather than broadcast live, and some people suspect that the BBC has once again caved in to pressure from right-wing Tories on this.

There’s a theme emerging here, what with the Gary Lineker fiasco, though that seems to have been resolved now; the BBC have reinstated him following the disaster of Saturday night’s football coverage, given how much support Lineker got from colleagues and players.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2023/mar/13/gary-lineker-match-of-the-day-bbc-return-live

This was very heartening to see, and the more it happens the more the government seems out of step with its own people. Amazing how we didn’t hear a word about free speech from the usual quarters; makes you wonder whether, had he tweeted in support of the government, he would have been disciplined in the same way. It looks very black (or blue.)

I could, if I allowed myself, get angry on a regular basis. I try not to because it’s not good for my health and it doesn’t achieve anything – but I must say the government works very hard to rile me; between interfering with the BBC and Rishi Sunak’s ridiculous swimming pool (never mind that he’s paying for it, what about the carbon emissions? Bastard bastard bastard!!!! Deep breaths, deep breaths… it is very hard to stay calm these days. I’ve just been round the supermarket and noted how many prices have gone up yet again – after paying £20 for a miniscule amount of petrol which would have cost me a fiver just a couple of years back. So yes, no wonder when I think of Wild Isles I want to say ‘wild? We’re absolutely livid!’

Word of the day: skimpulse – when you suddenly put something back on the shelf because you’re worried you can’t afford it.

Kirk out

Money

I’m thinking about money. There’s never enough of it, some people have far too much and don’t know what to do with it and we spend half our lives thinking about it, but what is it? I’m writing a story at the moment about the collapse of money; not the economy but money itself – a situation where money no longer means anything therefore nothing can be bought or sold.

In this scenario the banks have disenfranchised so many people that they’ve given up on making money and started to form small communities. In these communities resources are shared and the more people join the more resources are available. In the end the only people using money are the very rich who finally find themselves in deep doo-dah when money itself collapses and everything they own is suddenly worthless.

In a way this is a utopian vision but in another sense it’s something that could happen because of the way banks are going. It’s also been inspired by ‘Bullshit Jobs’

https://davidgraeber.org/books/bullshit-jobs/,

on how many jobs are pointless and despite being well-paid, serve no useful function at all. There are examples in every area of life but the one that often occurs to me is government; in my youth there used to be about 20 minsters in the cabinet but nowadays we seem to have a minister for almost every aspect of life. It’s a gravy train: it’s bullshit. Meanwhile those doing useful jobs – nurses, sewage workers, cleaners – find themselves being squeezed on every level. Caring doesn’t pay any more, and it’s not only in the ‘caring professions’ that caring happens – the chief objection to doing away with, say, ticket offices in stations is not that a machine could sell the tickets but that the staff deal with multiple unexpected human problems every day. As for doing away with guards on trains, the prospect is horrifying. A friend of mine who was once a guard told me of all the human situations he’d dealt with over the years, from dealing with drunks to helping deliver a baby. This society sucks, and why? Because nothing matters unless you can put a price on it. We need to do something about this, and I’m not convinced that electing a Labour government (though I really do want one) is the answer.

What is?

Answers on a postcard please (or comment below).

Kirk out

The Joy of Bank

No, that’s not a euphemism. I’ve been banking with Nat West ever since I was a student, which is more years ago than I care to remember: in those days campuses were swarming with banks eager to get their hands on your student grant, though not so eager to offer an overdraft. This was fine by me; credit is far too easy to get nowadays and that makes me – well, uneasy. Be that as it may, there came a day when I fell on hard times and needed an overdraft. By then it was all too easy to get, and thanks to the charges I got deeper and deeper into debt; in the last few years my balance has bumped the limit of the overdraft on a monthly basis. I was just about coping with the charges but then they saw fit to double them, since which time I’ve been desperate to change banks. Nationwide, being just about the only mutual left, is the obvious choice, but how to do it? I could have transferred my overdraft but I wanted to start with a clean slate, with an account that had no overdraft facility. Yet how was I going to get my hands on that sort of money?

And then there was a windfall. Miracles may take longer but they do happen, and thanks to this windfall I was able to pay off my overdraft in one fell swoop. I kept opening my banking app to gaze at my balance, in the black for the first time in years. But the greatest joy of all was to give Nat West the heave and switch my account to Nationwide. The switch was completed today and it gave me huge twinges of pleasure to cut up my old debit card and stick it in the bin.

The joy of bank.

Kirk out

Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic!

What’s the best way to start a fuel crisis? It’s easy; first you have a referendum, then you leave the European Union, then you have a pandemic and last of all you tell people there’s no need to panic. Right now we are being run by a dysfunctional Dad’s Army where Captain Mainwaring has been superseded by Corporal Jones who’s rushing around trying to keep his trousers on and telling everyone not to panic. To be fair, the great British public have no small share of blame in this, going around selfishly buying petrol they don’t need (at least unlike loo rolls, there’s a limit to what your tank will hold, though I’ve seen pictures on Facebook of a man filling his boot with bottles of the stuff, which surely has to be illegal.) And yesterday I was driving along the ring road when I fell into a traffic jam. Unusual, I thought, for this time in the morning. Maybe there’s been an accident. I should have known: as we inched closer to the scene of what I always think of as a follon – the Spanish for fuck-up – I realised it was caused by people queuing to get into the petrol station. Not only that, but someone in the other side was waiting to turn into it, a completely hopeless cause, and blocking traffic on that side. I drove self-righteously past, smug in the knowledge that I’d filled up last week. And just as well I had.

Some parts of the media have a share of the blame too, in spreading stories of impending shortages which then become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But seriously, panic buying has to stop.

Got to go now, the tank’s less than half full so I’d better get some before it all runs out. Actually I know where to get some. But don’t tell ’em, Pike!

Kirk out

They’ve Taken Some of My Essence

Had a rather early start this morning to make a 7.50 appointment for blood tests. They’re being thorough; several phials of my essence are now whizzing off to be tested for vitamin D3, vitamin B12, coeliac, immunoglobulin and something else relating to the liver. So we wait to see if I have any or all of these problems. I can’t fault the staff at the surgery – they’re unfailingly pleasant and helpful when you get through to them. The problem is getting through. Anyway, here’s hoping something will come of this lot because I’m really sick of being tired all the time. On the way back I bought some mini-ciabattas and Abergavenny goat’s cheese for breakfast, but what I really wanted was to be in France, to have gone out for a walk and come back via a small patisserie where I could get some croissants and pain au chocolat.

The lack of a holiday is starting to get to me. It’s been nearly two years since I had a proper break and I realise I’m not alone in this regard but there’s no real prospect of getting away this summer either, and that’s starting to depress me. I would love to have a week by the sea somewhere quiet, just to walk and swim and cycle and read and chill out – it’d be great. But the best I’m likely to do is a weekend in Wales and some days out on the bike. Oh well, better than nothing I suppose.

I sent off another short story yesterday and I’m preparing another to send soon. It’s all about keeping the momentum going; I found this when I was unemployed in the ’80s and applying for jobs – it’s much better just to keep applying without worrying too much about the outcome. So as soon as a story comes back, I’ll send it somewhere else and, just as I did eventually get a job, so I will get more stuff published. I made a list of publications yesterday as I keep forgetting, and it’s more than I thought. Did no-one read Mem Mat yesterday? I didn’t get any comments on it.

Mind you, the job I eventually did get was problematic. I’d been going to a Job Club – these could either be good or useless depending on who was running them and fortunately this one was run by a pair who knew what they were doing. They encouraged me to apply for a job with an arts organisation; the post was for a manager and even though I didn’t have management experience they thought my teaching skills would come in useful. What they didn’t tell me was that the guy running the Job Club had also worked there and had the most awful time with the other manager. I don’t totally blame them for not telling me about this guy, who I shall call Kevin, but he turned out to be worse than David Brent. He was incompetent, devious and manipulative and he drove me round the bend. I ended up making a complaint to his manager and after that he went around with a wounded expression as if he couldn’t quite believe I’d done that to him. Anyone who’s ever worked in a toxic environment will know how demoralising and debilitating that is. But as it was still the 80’s and I was in a management position I was earning a good salary, even if the job was a bit like this one in Black Books:

Anyway, it paid for a holiday in Spain which eventually led to me living there. So that was all good.

Enjoy your day.

Kirk out

Privileged? Moi?

Years ago OH and I tried to make a series of these jokes, such as ‘Pretentious – moi? Pedantic – I? Repetitive – me myself personally? and so on. It was necessarily quite a short series but it amused us for about five minutes.

Then this morning I was wondering what it must be like to be privileged; to have doors open for you, taxis waiting, queues jumped, money always available and waiters jumping to attention. I can’t imagine it. And then I thought, what about the kinds of privilege I have – like education, race, class and so on? And I guess the answer is that when you have privilege you don’t notice it. I don’t notice that I’m driving and NOT being stopped by the police, or walking down the street and not being abused, or not being being able to access certain classes or join in certain discussions; not being able to climb steps or negotiate kerbs. When you have privilege it’s like the air you breathe; you don’t notice it till it’s not there.

From time to time there are people – usually journalists, sometimes politicians – who deliberately put themselves in the place of the less privileged; sometimes to make a point, sometimes just to find out what it’s like. George Orwell did this when down and out, doing some of the worst jobs and living in the filthiest holes in London and Paris; Polly Toynbee (in Hard Work in Low-Pay Britain) did some of the worst women’s jobs in the country and from time to time politicians have tried to live on the dole for short periods; the one I remember most is Matthew Parris who thought he was going to save £3 a week and ended up sitting in the dark for three days because the meter had run out. But noble as these efforts are, they are transient; at the end of it you know you’re going back to your old life and even if you don’t, you generally have the safety-net of family, friends, contacts etc who are all likely to be well-off and able to help. You have hope; more than that, you have a time-limit when you know you’re getting out. You may be in purgatory but you’re not in hell.

I don’t really know where I’m going with all this, except that when people like Lawrence Fox say there’s no such thing as male privilege, I think ‘how would you know?’ Because basically unless you’ve had your oxygen taken away, you don’t know what it’s like not to breathe.

One privilege I shall definitely enjoy soon is Wimbledon. It’s late this year, presumably because of Covid, not starting till June 28th but I’m looking forward to it. Andy Murray has a wild card so it’ll be interesting to see what he can do.

Have a good weekend. We’ll be doing the non-Sabbath thing tonight and tomorrow so I’ll be incommunicado for that period.

Kirk out

I am Doing Reconnaissance

Having cycled 18 miles or so over the (admittedly long) weekend I’m going to have a rest today. I was going to cycle to Barrow yesterday, meet a friend, have lunch and then over to Quorn and back via the road, but this proved to be a little overambitious. It’s a lovely ride along the canal to Barrow – I’ve walked it many a time – but what I had forgotten is that the path crosses over at Pillings Lock and there’s a Bloody Great Bridge over which bikes must be carried. I reached it; I looked at it, I looked at the map and I thought ‘nah. This is far enough.’ So back I went, and far enough it jolly well was.

I’ve been thinking, as one does at this time of year, about holidays and travel. Like most of us I imagine I’d really like to get away but apart from the fact that nobody really knows what’s going to happen with Covid, I’m beginning to rethink tourism altogether because as a tourist you feel like a walking consumer. There are, it’s true, delightful holidays where you don’t have to feel that way at all – hiking in the Dales, climbing Monroes in Scotland, renting a cottage in the depths of France – but on most holidays you tend to feel like a walking market in which people are always trying to sell things. Buy this! Eat this! Look at this! Get the t-shirt! You can’t blame them – it’s the way most of them make money – but it’s not a pleasant experience. But though tourism may bring income to an area or country there are many hidden costs, not the least of which is accommodation. Last time I went to Southwold I felt very sad as I walked around and realised how many of the lovely houses near the sea front were actually holiday lets. Instead of staying in the heart of a town we were living in a tourist village where most of the locals had probably been completely priced out. I have very strong feelings about second homes too – appealing though it is to have a pied-a-terre somewhere delightful, it often means that local people are priced out and that you end up living in a community of city dwellers who only come down at the weekends. Besides, people have no business owning two homes when some people don’t even have one.

We’re going to have to stop flying anyway, so why not rethink tourism altogether? Instead of regarding the world as a spectacle to be consumed, see it as a place to be discovered. Instead of photographing everything, see and interact. Let’s forget tourism and bring back travel: in fact, let’s regard travel as a form of reconnaissance. Then again perhaps it’s like one of those irregular verbs: I am doing reconnaissance, you are a traveller, they are tourists.

Kirk out

A Message of Heartfelt Gratitude

This is going to be a rather cryptic post as it’s addressed to the person who put an envelope through our door some time last night or this morning. I was completely choked when I saw what was in it, and I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, thank you. You know who you are – although I don’t.

That’s all for now. More later, including some possibly exciting news…

Kirk out

Let’s Play ‘Hammer the Poor’

Words cannot express, though I must try to make them, how much I loathe the system under which we live. It’s a system which rewards the rich, no matter how undeserving, and hammers the poor, no matter how they came to be so. It’s a system which assumes that wealth equals merit and that the poor deserve their fate. It’s a system which bypasses, even demonises, compassion and makes an enemy of welfare. It’s a system which punishes benefit claimants and hammers those in debt.

I’m not one of the worst-off. Not even close. I’m not on the streets or hanging on a phone line trying to find out why I owe the DWP money having received a threatening letter, nor am I a refugee about to be put on a plane in the middle of the night (Priti Patel makes my blood boil). I have somewhere to live and clothes to wear; I can’t be deported and nor, thank god, do I claim benefits. But I do have a substantial overdraft and no means of paying it off. Until recently I was coping with the charges: they made a hole in what I laughingly call my income but I could manage. And this month I was sure that in spite of Christmas and Daniel’s birthday (neither of which I grudge in the slightest) I had enough in my account to cover the charges. But this morning I had a text from the bank which I am not ashamed to tell you made me cry, because it informed me that I was about to go over my overdraft limit and should pay in funds today to avoid further charges. Fortunately I can ask OH to help me out here, otherwise I would be on a downward spiral to god knows where.

This has happened because last January the bank decided, out of nowhere, to virtually double the charges for those owing over a certain amount. Why? Just because they could, I guess – they didn’t bother giving any sort of rationale for it. I guess they needed to make up some money they were losing elsewhere, and who better to take it from than people like me; the poor, the overdrawn, those with nowhere else to go? I mean, they could hardly ask the rich, could they? You can’t ask someone like Jeff Bezos for money – he’s far too well-off. As George Bernard Shaw’s Millionaire says, ‘a man as rich as I am cannot afford anything.’ But we shall leave the rich in their self-made prisons for now and consider how many people out there are in my situation; stuck in some kind of debt incurred through no fault of their own – losing their job, an inability to make enough money, disability or illness – and being hammered by government, banks and other bastards. We feel isolated and helpless, we feel constantly hammered and unable to climb out of the mire. We feel abandoned by society and blamed for our own problems. We feel defeated.

We have to do better as a society, to find ways of helping each other. This is not a plea for money but for a better way of doing things. So let’s give our minds to that and together we will find a way.

Kirk out

On The First Day of Christmas

We all know the carol, right? On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me… but when actually is the first day of Christmas? As Nigel says exasperatedly to Adam in Rev, ‘if I have to tell one more person it’s not Christmas yet, it’s Advent, I shall go stark staring bananas.’ I can’t find a clip but I promise you that’s actually what he said. Meanwhile here’s another quite pertinent clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbs8MVRGEfc

Technically Nigel is correct: it’s Advent until Christmas Eve when the festive season actually begins. It may actually begin with Midnight Mass, I couldn’t swear to it. You’d think I’d know these things having been brought up in or very near the church, but I’ve blotted it all out – much as the church spire used to blot out the view… anyway, the first day of Christmas is actually Christmas Day, and the season of Christmas is the twelve days thereafter.

Not that you’d know it now. Christmas begins as soon as someone can get away with setting it all off. Of course this year is different, but normally you sense that retailers are nervously watching each other wondering who will be the first to break cover and announce their Christmas collection. It’s generally some time in October; we don’t even get the chance to celebrate Guy Fawkes (don’t get me started on Hallowe’en) in fact the children have barely settled into another school term before the Great Rush begins. By Christmas Day evening it’s all over; the presents have been torn open, the dinner eaten, the crackers pulled, the Queen watched (or avoided) and the dishwasher stacked. Or some poor sod sent into the kitchen to wash it all up.

It’s not that I’m particularly a traditionalist. I’m not Nigel, but I do deplore the over-commercialisation of Christmas, the guilt, the sense that you have to show you care by buying expensive presents, the overindulgence in food and drink. But more than all that, it’s the fact that Christmas nowadays is completely front-loaded. The whole thing is out of balance; we jettison the period of fasting and reflection and skip straight to the feasting. All cultures – so far as I know – celebrate something; the new moon, the harvest, a new birth, a coming to man- or womanhood. Jesus was not born on 25th December; the Midwinter celebration is much older than Christianity which was merely grafted onto it. But all traditional cultures have fasting as well as feasting and all the major religions include periods of abstinence as part of their calendar. It’s about balance – and our culture is way out of balance.

I’ve also become somewhat plaintive about the absence of the Queen from our airwaves. I’m not a flag-waving royalist; I’m on the fence about the monarchy, but I do think she should have put in more than one appearance during the current crisis (or crises). I think she should have made a series of speeches to encourage people which, though they might have nauseated some, would have provided comfort to others. If we’re going to have figureheads like the Queen, they should at least pop up and say something in dark times. So whether it’s her decision not to speak or someone else’s it’s a bad decision. Mind you, I wouldn’t put it past Johnson to prevent it on the grounds that it might make him look bad.

Or worse.

Anyway, that’s where we are. We try to celebrate Christmas by not panicking and not buying too much, just a few nice things. Oh god, how many presents have I got left to buy? Can I get my Sainsbury’s order in on time? Oh no, I haven’t sent any cards yet!

Aaaaaaaaaaaand breathe.

And let’s spare a thought for those who are going to be alone.

Kirk out