view from the cheap seats

Had to wait half an hour for a bus today, which wasn't a great start to the day as it was bastard freezing. My mood was not improved by a rather depressing revelation, namely that if I had spent the last four weeks slacking off at work and making the minimum required effort with tenants my job would currently be far easier that it is.

I have a friend who often argues that many structures in society drive people towards criminality because subverting the rules is so often the only way to get by. In much the same way I am beginning to see how bad practice is actually encouraged, albeit unconsciously, in the public sector.

The public sector is, currently, unavoidably fucked in my eyes because they are simply not compatible with our economic systems. Organisations like the NHS have one single, and very obvious, purpose: the best possible provision of a service.

It seems to me that an ideal economic system for such a body would be driven by the needs trying to be met. What needs to be done? would be the first question while, how much will it cost? comes later. The point is that the money here is a means to a non financial end.

Our economic system doesn't work like this however, our system is geared to fit the private sector and in fact works in the exact opposite way. Here the ultimate goal must always be profit, even if you wish you do noble things with it, the money has to be made. The service or product being supplied is always a means to a financial end.

Because of this public sector organisations and projects run over budgets on a regular basis. The struggle to bring these services into life did not end with their creation but continues, ignored, today. This then, is the backdrop against which employees find themselves, an overstretched organisation trying to tear itself in half.

This seems to lead to a lot of people without either the time or the inclination to take on problems outside their own remit. One problem with this is that when someone does try, because their like me they're too soft to pass people on, word gets round pretty quick.

Naively delivering work with speed and efficiency can also be a mistake. It just tends to lead to an avalanche of work. As I mentioned above, had I dragged, my feet through the first projects I worked on and been an ignorant dick on the phone I'd be getting paid the same but for an easier job.

The system is driving me towards apathy and bad practice. A lot of people would consider being a dole bludging hippy is a mortal sin but dropping out of these systems is the only sure way to be free of their hugely powerful, and often negative, influences.

What you do is part of who you are which is why I'll keep being good at my job even though it's bad for me. It's tough though, I feel like I'm some weird, slapstick foreign country where left is right and everything's backwards. If this is the 'real world', the mainstream centre ground, you can keep it.

Turn on, tune in & drop out.

A comment the made on Swine Of The Week WK:16 by my good friend Murray(1) set me thinking about authority and how fragile an illusion it can be. I didn't get too far however until, as usual, some other random things fell into place.

I remember the first time I saw 'The Who Wasn't There', I was stoned and sitting in the Hyde Park Picture House and it blew me away. One line that I've always remembered comes from a guy psyching himself up to go into his bank manager's office. He explains how they're just ordinary people like you and me, 'they puts their pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else'.

It's a great phrase and I was reminded of it the other day when watching the news. One thing I really like about Channel 4 news is the whole double interview setup with the presenter playing devils advocate, (Newsnight do this too to be fair.)

Anyway watching C4N the other day I saw one of these concerning the controversial result of the recent Palestinian election. One of the guys being interviewed was someone who had been in long term regular contact with Hamas. He said that Hamas had set themselves a target number of seats before the election and that they had achieved almost exactly that target.

At the time this information was being used to demonstrate that Hamas had at least some political skill and I didn't think any more about it. A few days later however I was watching BBCN24 and caught a report from one of their people on the ground claiming that Hamas were just as surprised as everyone else at their victory.

My gut instinct at the time was that the BBCN24 reporter was wrong, mainly because the C4N guest seemed to be a specialist on this particular issue. This, however, was not the point. It's so easy to take the accuracy of our media for granted and believing their hype about how shit hot they are gives us a sense of smug satisfaction over other parts of the world.

The fact is though that these people also put their pants on one leg at a time, they also get things wrong. The big ideas we wrap organisations up in can feel really nice and even be of some use but they should never be taken for a true likeness.

footnote

(1) check out http://finntravis.blog.co.uk

A common, if adolescent frustration comes when wondering why people can't just live sensibly. If everyone kept each other in mind and did what was best for society as a whole all our lives would be so much better. Indeed many people spend their whole lives in such a mindset, some of them making very successful careers out of it.

Unfortunately such a naive way of thinking is fundamentally flawed. Persons can be driven by moral and logical argument, people on the other hand, are driven by practical day to day concerns. My oft cited example of this is the decline in public support for the Vietnam war.

This did not come about via the changing of minds or the wining of arguments by the anti-war movement. It was simply that the number of dead and wounded servicemen continued to grow relentlessly, crossing more and more people's threshold of tolerance as it did. The exact same process seems to be starting again now with yet another ill planned conflict in an exotic and dangerous far away land.

Does this mean people are inherently selfish? Should the masses be condemned for their persistently self centred view of the world? No. We are a race of six billion self preservation machines. If you want to try and make people feel guilty about such a basic instinct you may as well join the Catholic church and try to stop people having sex.

In fact this facet of human nature provides a strong case for more small scale, decentralised governance, but that's a whole post in itself. What it also does, looking at the various unnecessary causes of suffering that abound, is beg the question in the sparkling words of Mr De La Rocha, what's it gonna take?

What has to happen before people refuse to tolerate the madness carried out in our names? How many people feel betrayed by Blair, can no longer trust that same old grin? We now have a situation, over education reforms, where a Labour Prime Minister is actually siding with the Conservatives against his own party. Is that enough? Is that sufficient for people to finally say 'fuck him' once and for all? Apparently not.

My girlfriend and I have recently being trying to find an NHS dentist in our area, as one of my wisdom teeth has been giving me grief. The best we could do was get added to a six month waiting list, after which we might be accepted. We could probably afford to go private, though I never would, but what about people who can't?

This nation which boasts so proudly to the rest of the world about it's healthcare-for-all system, is currently failing to provide some children with basic dental care on the grounds of personal wealth alone. Is that enough to get people up in arms, to demand that the NHS get what it needs? Apparently not.

It's tempting to think that these things just aren't quite nasty enough to evoke the self preservation response. Things like the successful poll tax riots or the not so successful miner's strike are perhaps better examples of how, when asked to eat more than a certain amount of shit, people get up and say no.

The trick is, it seems to me, communication. If people are made aware of the direct causal relationships between what they may consider remote and removed situations and the hardships they face in every day life, that inbuilt safety mechanism could be harnessed to great effect.

Still, this requires something to happen, something that enough people can agree is unacceptable and so we come back to the original question, what's it gonna take?

Speaking of pivotal events I just wanted to talk briefly about Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections. My initial gut instinct here is that this could be a really good thing. I know a lot of people, particularly in Israel and the US, are shitting themselves that one end of such a volatile situation in now in the hands of a terrorist group, but I'm hopeful for a few good reasons.

Firstly, due it's rigid structure, Hamas is a pretty tight outfit and apparently lacks the endemic corruption until now perpetually associated with the Palestinian authority. Secondly, besides slaughtering innocent civilians in cold blood, Hamas has shown that it is capable of dealing with more civil matters, such as building, running and maintaining orphanages, schools and hospitals.

These latter infrastructual skills should serve them well as they begin governing the Palestinian people. Finally, the former skills mentioned, ie. murder, have been justified in the past as ‘necessary’. Just like terrorist groups throughout time and across the world, they have claimed that they have no choice but to wage war.

Hamas now have the opportunity to wield political power with a democratic mandate behind them. Now they do have a choice, there is another option. This being the case surely the violence of their past can no longer be justified. If Hamas are as noble as they claim they will seize this opportunity to better the lives of the people they now officially represent and maintain what they consider their moral high ground.

Of course it’s possible that they’ll just act like wankers, piss everyone off and cause a whole load more death and suffering for Palestinians and Israelis alike. An unfortunate side effect of this would be to shake people’s faith in democracy, (though having said this people seem to forget that Hitler was democratically elected.)

If Hamas do get their shit together, however, and it turns out their priority really is the Palestinian people an interesting, though probably bloody, situation may well arise. Imagine Israel launch some form of air attack on an a Palestinian area and Hamas respond with a rocket attack.

In the past Hamas’s actions would been considered terrorism with no questions or thought involved. Now however, we would be talking about one democratically elected government responding in kind to a military attack on it’s territory from another. Could the condemnation now be justified?

If Hamas can make this work then their victory will be ours as well as they will force us all to re-evaluate our definitions of ’terrorism’. And the way things are today maybe nothing less than that is what it would take.

Betrayal is one thing that always leaves a bitter taste and, right now, no matter how much sugary goodness I load up on I just can't shift the tang. Of course feeling bitter tends to make people angry and resentful, not the best conditions under which to be entirely objective, but I'll do my best with the aid of the following caveat:

Sometimes the only person you can really blame, having been betrayed, is yourself. Maybe you should have known better or perhaps you've been fooling yourself all along, I really shouldn't have got my hopes up.

I'd been teetering for so long on the edge of tolerance, so tempted to abandon mainstream politics all together, but held back by one irrational image: a bench going through a McDonald's window. It's no good knowing how to save the world if the rest of society isn't with you.

The arrogance required to believe that 'you know best', and therefore your actions are always justified, is the hallmark of pretty much every major religious or political group there's ever been. The only way we'll save the world is alongside everybody else.

This said, how could I give up on mainstream politics? The system must be used to change itself, I thought. Maybe this is why I found it so easy to believe that there was some hope, that there was a way into the behemoth bureaucracy. And so I voted Lib Dem at the last election.

Excited by Charles Kennedy, seemingly a real person in politics rather than the standard opposite, I was also impressed by Greg Mulholland, my very own Lib Dem candidate. Not long after Mr Mulholland won his seat he appeared on TV with two other MPs, one Labour one Tory.

The Tory, whoever he was, was the expected sneering cliché while the Labour guy was so insulated by spin you began to wonder if there was actually anything real in there under his suit. The two bickered and looked like twats, all so very familiar, while my own elected representative remained rational and reasonable and came across as the only adult at the table.

For a while I relaxed back into the shallow comfort of an easy answer as the Lib Dems as a party proceeded to occupy the exact same niche across the board. They really did seem different there for a while, even sometimes sparkling as 'what the Labour party should have been'.

How is it then that now, just a few months on, they're 'just like the Tories were'? Ever since Kennedy was spectacularly stabbed in the back the whole thing has unravelled like so much neatly wound bandage. The weeping sores underneath show a party just as twisted and rotten as any of the other old invalids we have to choose from.

Rent boy scandals, denials and doublespeak are all the required clichés to tell us that the party has descended into a cannibalistic orgy of self destruction. Whatever emerges from the exhausted mess of limbs and careers will be a different Liberal Democrat party to the one I voted for.

The finally kick up the arse came when I emailed Greg Mulholland, Menzies Campbell and Andrew Stunell, the Lib Dem Chief Whip to share with them my disgust at the beating they'd given Kennedy. My MP replied first followed much later by the whip. Still waiting for ole Merciless's office to get back to me but I suppose they're pretty busy right now keeping their feet firmly under the table.

The replies I did get(1) were just more copies of the same letter I been receiving from every authority I've ever written to. The final nail in the coffin, they really are just as bad as everyone else. So this week's Swine Of The Week is the Liberal Democrat Party, or their top ranks at least, for getting my hopes up and letting me down; for acting like the best of Labour when you were second rate Tories all along and for making me feel like a fool.

tags

footnote

(1) to read those emails in full just look http://underthecheapsseats.blog.co.uk and hit the 'neither Lib nor Dem' tag.

A couple of unrelated news stories connected in my head today via the concept of the self image. The first one was from yesterday, I think, and detailed how recent research has shown that chimpanzees are actually more closely related to humans than to other apes.

If my understanding is right, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the ways things stand at present is that humans occupy a separate branch of the evolutionary tree to chimpanzees. Whether they are our ancestors or we share a common predecessor I'm unsure, but I think the relationship is akin to that of wolf and dog, ie. lupine and canine.

The recently published research suggests that we may in fact share our sacred branch with chimpanzees, reducing the difference, again I think, to that between spaniel and terrier, ie. canis x and canis y. Now this will no doubt send a whole swarm of US evangelists into frothing apoplexy but it may also be disconcerting for the more sane among us as well, why?

It may be just a religious hangover or perhaps it's something more, but most of our impressions of ourselves as a race tend to share one universal theme: we are above and apart from all other species on earth.

Now rationally I consider this a naive and ultimately dangerous way of thinking but I find it is also an inherent part of the way I've been taught to look at the world. Such stains run pretty deep and can be hard to shift.

In this case it seems that the particular self image in question is a fantasy and that insisting, against abundant evidence to the contrary, that the fantasy is reality is causing us all no end of trouble. Why can't we just accept ourselves as we are? Why can't we just get real?

Well that was pretty straightforward so I am, of course, instantly suspicious. Let's consider the other story which I read today. Apparently Google has bitten the bullet and decided to set up shop in China, or within 'the Great Firewall of China' as the media clearly just loved to say.

Until I read this piece I was unaware of Google's ethical credentials, but apparently their company motto is 'don't be evil' and they have strived to maintain high moral standards in their business practices. Now the move to provide their service within China itself means that they will have to agree to self censorship as dictated by the Chinese government.

Apparently searches or search results containing certain key words, such as 'democracy' or 'Tiananmen' are to be blocked. Google have defended their decision by saying that users within China will be told when searches or results are blocked and that they will still be able to use google.com.

They also point out that providing some level of service is better than none at all. As a major profit making organisation Google didn't really have a choice about going into China, as far as capitalism is concerned it's just too good an opportunity regardless of politics of ethics.

Now the question is, considering the conclusion reached earlier, do we want Google get real and just say, 'fuck it, we're a business, let's go make some cash!'? Well I certainly don't, any efforts by such companies to at least try to act with some social responsibility is surely to be encouraged for everyone's sake.

It may well be relatively easy to pick holes in Google's image of itself as a noble and decent organisation, but if that self image drives them to strive for more ethical practices then isn't it better they keep it?

Self images can be exceedingly powerful things and it's easy for them to become so significant they take on a life of their own. In the end however they develop in order to serve a purpose and, most importantly, can be changed if those original needs are not being met.

In short, deluded ourselves doesn't help anyone, but reaching for something better sometimes can. Hell, maybe I should have just written that to start off with!

Working is shit, shitty, shit, shit, shit. Sorry, just had to get that out. I feel bad bitching when the job's so easy and the other people in the office are so nice, but having a job is just crap. Anyway, let's leave this and get on with things so I can fit in some stoned lounging before bed, got to keep my hand in y'know.

If there's one thing I like it's a good argument. This sentence can be interpreted in various ways and I mean most of them. I admire the structure of a well reasoned debating point and I also enjoy a bit of well natured verbal sparring. I also believe, however, that arguments are a fundamental foundation of our society.

Ideas can only be improved through being challenged. If you have an idea or opinion that is particularly important to you, for example, mentally attacking it from every angle you can think of is a good way to strengthen your faith and understanding.

Argument can also be a great way to get to know someone as not only do their thoughts and opinions tell you things about them, you also get to see how they think. Of course all this conflict is preferably consensual and without malice.

Stupid arguments are a frustrating waste of time. Again this sentence can be taken a number of ways and an example of one way springs instantly to mind. I saw a journalist from some right wing newspaper on BBC Breakfast(1) the other day making the lamest point ever.

Apparently during the same period in which contraception and sex education has become more available to teenagers, the number of teenage pregnancies has also risen, therefore the first causes the second.

In order for this argument to prove a direct connection between these two observations it has to be assumed that any other influencing factors have remained perfectly constant during the given period. This is clearly spurious bullshit.

What about the commonplace sexualisation of children and teenagers in pretty much all facets of commercial advertising and popular culture? What about the continually growing increase in the divide between rich and poor?

The point is not that either of these are things are the answer instead, but simply that they have had an influence on the considered situation as well and so the argument's basic premise if flawed. How do people like this get to write in national newspapers and go on national TV!?

So that's one way, another is how frustrating it is to see people using very capable minds and thinking skills solely to get out of paying for a drink or not having to be the one who answers the door. There's also a third way of looking at this however.

A lot of arguments can get very nasty with both sides hurting each other over nothing more than a basic misunderstanding. The precise definition of a word is a common tripping hazard over which we stumble into blazing rows and there is nothing more frustrating than the semantic argument.

Such a deadlock is utterly irresolvable because the parties involved are not speaking in quite the same language and so are doomed to dance round in hair tearing circles until somewhere a door is slammed.

As has been sneakily demonstrated in this post along the way, the most simple phrases and words can have several meanings, each subtly yet significantly different. How can we possibly know exactly what someone means when context is not always sufficient?

Well it seems to me that the most obvious way to improve on this is to gain a better understanding of the other person. This can mean anything from learning the quirks of a close personal relationship through to a grip on where a stranger is coming from. It's about empathy instead of sympathy, not what would I do in their situation, but what they would do.

Of course it's not an exact science and there'll always be awkward moments and the odd ruck, it's just a skill that can make everyone's life a bit easier and you don't have to go to school or uni to learn it. In the end it’s essential to some extent if you actually want to successfully connect with anyone around you. It doesn’t matter with Oxbridge college you went to, nor how vast and articulately used your vocabulary, the word is not enough.

footnote

(1) I hate BBC Breakfast, it’s cack, unfortunately all breakfast news is and it’s the only news I seem to get to watch now. Gone are the days of reading the paper regularly and having BBCN24 and C-SPAN on all day long. I did read The Guardian online today during lunch though so maybe I can redress the balance a little bit that way.

I’ve had several conversations with people recently inspired by the publication of a report linking the rise in mental health problems to the rise in the amount of processed food we eat. The quite terrifying rise in cancer rates has also been linked to our eating habits, or rather our habit of treating our food with a myriad of chemical agents.

Unfortunately our food is not the only way in which we allow these chemicals to enter our bodies, the air we breath and the water we drink are also ways in. What occurred to me during these conversations, is that while individual chemicals are tested, and safe levels set, it is pretty much impossible for anyone to definitively determine the potential consequences of all these different compounds being mixed together in our bodies.

Of course currently these chemicals are not only tolerated but actually celebrated as miracles of modern technology, the wonderful fruits of a golden age of convenience. Now here at my desk, one of my duties is to arrange for properties to be tested for asbestos, a substance that was celebrated as a fix all material until relatively recently. More recently of course we’ve realised that asbestos is actually a lethal poison.

The question is, how many things do we take for granted in our everyday lives that may actually be killing us? Mobile phones spring instantly to mind, no pun intended, but there is more to this line of thought than simple technophobia.

Sat at my desk at home last night I was copying some CDs onto my new iPod nano and found myself gripped by sheer wonder. That such a tiny device could hold my entire CD collection, some photos and still have room to spare just blew my mind. Sitting there looking at the sleek little thing I suddenly considered the various wires wound through the furniture that connect all this technology together.

How many years will it be before that scene will be hideously out of date? Before the iPod nano looks like the brick mobile phones of old? Probably not that long. I was reminded of an especially mind bending theoretical physics lecture I once had wherein past present and future were represented by a great X.

The triangles above and below were the past and future while the point where the lines crossed was the present. It didn’t more than a second for my imagination to add flesh to the bones of this memory and produce a nice mental image.

As time passes and the safe becomes lethal, the sleek becomes clumsy, it’s as if we are stood within a vast sand timer, straddling the hole between the two bulbs as the shifting sands roar by. To live in a world of perpetual flux may seem scary, overwhelming even, but in the end it’s the only world we have.

Had a pretty crap day today, families suck, but just wanted to get down some thoughts I'd had on ID cards over the past week or so. This hot potato has been around for ages now and it's starting burn everyone's hands, but the issue has been in the news again recently for a couple of reasons.

Firstly the bill fell at one of the many hurdles it must face as the Lords sent a big 'fuck you' down the hallowed corridors of power. Can't say I didn't smile a little when I heard that but I was quickly frowning again when another news item was dragged into the media eddy.

A whole bunch of public sector workers have had their identities stolen and used to fraudulently claim large amounts of tax credits. A big breaks story about ID theft breaking at just the same time as the government takes a beating on their ID card bill, hmmm...

Anyway Blair claimed that the rise in ID theft supported the argument for the introduction ID cards while giving off his best, 'if-only-these-people-would-let-me-get-on-with-saving-the-country-from-itself' vibes he produces with such practiced ease.

Of course the vital piece of information was omitted because, while the fringes of such a story could give the government a lift, the heart of the matter is a great leaden anvil. How, exactly, would ID cards have prevented the mass fraud recently exposed?

All the costly technical wizardry they try to blind you with isn't worth shit unless the person and the card are both presented to an official with the equipment to verify the card. The fraudsters in this case committed their crimes online while many other official procedures with the potential to be abused use phone and postal services.

A super spanky ID card, with no smiles but plenty of go faster stripes, serves absolutely no purpose under such circumstances. Now the most basic an obvious use for cards has been cited as enabling the police to identify people with greater certainty. If a copper stops you in the street and asks to see your card, how does he verify it?

If they're just going to look at it and decide by eye then all the 'biometrics' are rendered completely obsolete. If not then what? Maybe you'll have to go to the station where there'll be verification equipment, but wait, unless a copper is actually arresting you, you're not obliged to go anywhere with them. Will the introduction of ID cards subsequently require fundamental changes to powers of arrest in the UK?

Well maybe not, there is another option. Police officers could be equipped with and trained to use state of the art portable verification equipment, easy. How much will this cost? Nobody knows. With or without these new toys for the boys in blue, the government refuses to give even a ballpark figure for how much this whole thing is actually going to cost us taxpayers.(1)

Apparently there is a good reason for this. To announce a cost estimate would apparently undermine the bidding process among the private companies vying for this particular golden goose. As offensive as this seems at first, something far worse lays just below the surface.

Most people agree that without compulsion an ID card system is pointless, ie. for it to work it must be illegal not to have and carry an ID card. These cards will not, under any circumstances, be free, hell no, you want to live in a safer world you must pay the price, in cold hard cash, bitch.

Sorry, I think I was just briefly possessed by a raging capitalist for a moment there. Anyway, whatever they cost, every single one of us will be legally obliged to purchase one. The bidding process mentioned will, presumably, have a single victor, one large private firm.

We will be in position where, for the first time I think, please do correct me if I'm wrong, every citizen of the UK will be required by law to spend a minimum amount of money with a privately owned business. Somehow I feel like I'm on the verge of living in some bleak dystopian novel.

The whole thing is clearly a sack of pants and I for one will resist it for as long as I can, fuck the man! On a more pleasant note I must admit I really did enjoy watching my old friend, and Santa's retarded cousin of course, Home Secretary Charles Clarke announce his climb down on the governments cannabis 'policy'.

Ho, ho, ho, you silly fat wanker!

PS. I wanted to have a smoking smiley there but I've just noticed there isn't one, is that political correctness or something? Well fuck it, I'll make my own: :r

footnote

(1) that's right, I'm paying income tax again and have thereby earned the right to bitch about how badly it's spent, it's my god given right as a working mug,

The weekend is here and it's been a long time since I appreciated it quite so much. Weekends haven't really meant anything since school but now they're sacred and this one more than most. Between a bastard wisdom tooth bugging me all week and a nine hour slightly-hung-over-from-my-birthday-yesterday shift today, I'm in a foul temper and enjoying some angry music.

The perfect circumstances then to return to our recently overlooked pastime of hunting that ever present plague upon our lives... the Swine. I'd been thinking of writing a brief post about how I choose what to read but I've realised the process is relevant here too.

Example: My first edition of Burroughs' 'Soft Machine'(1) has been on my mental shortlist of books I definitely want to read soon pretty much since I got it. It wasn't until a couple of other random things fell into place that I actually took it off the shelf however.

In his 'Baghdad Blog'(2) Salam Pax mentions in passing that he is rereading 'The Ticket That Exploded'. This is the final instalment of Burroughs' trilogy which started with 'Naked Lunch' and continued with, you guessed it, 'The Soft Machine'.

Since starting this dull, dull, DULL job my personal interests have felt a bit under threat and I'd been thinking that I needed some more extreme escapism in my literature at the moment to balance things out. The mind fuck I'm currently making my way through is plenty extreme and thoroughly disturbing, so like I said, things just fell into place.

Now before the winter solstice break, my good friend rithompson(3) entered the long awaited, first ever nomination for a place on the League. Turns out Middlesex Uni is scrapping it's history department due to lack of uptake(4) But hey now, who can help that?

Well that postcard I keep talking about,(5): ‘When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty,’ isn’t just about us scruffy dopers, or those super trendy protestors/vandals, it’s about ‘real people’ too.

The idea of tying university department funding to annual intake is patently at odds with the very nature of academic institutions. Universities are supposed to be centres of specialist knowledge, not production lines and treating them as such doesn’t help anyone.

This being the case, the postcard says those working within that system have a responsibility to resist it’s injustices. It’s not acceptable, in the eyes(6) of the postcard, to just say, ‘it’s shitty but it’s all I can do’. Such behaviour is a fine example of Swinery and big thanks to rithompson for spotting it.

This got me thinking about those people who, in their ordinary, everyday lives, have significant power over us. The authority figure, the one in charge, in other words, the man. A little time went by and then, yep, another couple of random things happened.

First, while I was being swamped with kick ass birthday presents by my lovely girlfriend yesterday, her mobile rang. Now my better half works in a large shop in the city centre, part of big chain, if you live in the UK you’ve probably been in one at some point in your life. The phone call was from one of her colleagues who, along with another workmate, had found herself locked in the shop.

The manager on duty had apparently forgotten about them, then locked and alarmed the store before switching off his mobile and leaving the city. Chaos, of course, ensued and many evenings were spoiled but there was no system at fault here.

This was someone neglecting, rather than abusing their power. The opposite came in the form of another unexpected tale I heard recently about a friend of a workmate of my girlfriend who was, until recently, living in a squat here in sunny Leeds.

A few nights ago the West Yorkshire Police burst into the property with a dog unit. Now these squatters were no amateurs and had their legal shit together meaning that the uniforms couldn’t actually do anything but WYP weren’t going to let a little thing like the law get in the way of doing the right thing.

The occupants of the squat were searched and made to lay face down on the floor with their hands on the back of their heads while the property was searched/ransacked. The officer with dog was apparently riling the animal in his care and using ‘it’ to scare the shit of the guys on the floor.

Now the friend’s friend in question is currently studying law at Uni and decided to try and ask a question, big mistake. The dog removed a significant piece of flesh from one of his calves before being finally restrained. When the officer handling the dog saw the damage the animal had caused he swiftly removed his numbers from the lapels of his uniform and backed off.

The police hung about doing nothing much around for another 45 minutes before leaving without arresting, cautioning or even speaking to the now well and truly fucked off squatters. At this point the guy was finally rushed to hospital by his friends. The wound is too large to be stitched and he is soon to return to hospital for the first of many, many appointments.

So there it is, all the signs are there, this week’s Swine Of The Week is ‘the man’, that mother fucker holding you by the short hairs in any given situation. Not only is this first nominated Swine it’s also probably the only one so far that absolutely everyone has had some experience with too so double thanks to rithompson!

footnotes

(1) as found and purchased at Elephant Books, take a break from the view and check out the detail http://underthecheapseats.blog.co.uk (hit the ‘ELEPHANT BOOKS’ tag,)

(2) also from Elephant,

(3) check out http://random-veryrandom.blog.co.uk

(4) here's an email explaining their reasons, http://underthecheapseats.blog.co.uk (hit the ‘MidSexUni’ tag,)

(5) here’s that postcard, http://underthecheapseats.blog.co.uk (hit the ‘postcard resistance’ tag,)

(6) they’re on the back,

Before I started bumming around pretending to be a writer I worked in a bookshop. I ended up working the music section, which consisted of an information desk upstairs, and when I did the late shift I'd usually end up with literally nothing to do for the last few hours.

I thought standing in an empty shop staring into space would be the most bring job I could ever have. I was wrong. Despite impressive nature of my new job title, I'm an Officer(1) don't you know, it's really just a combination of data entry and taking phone calls and I think it may be boring me to death.

The three weeks worth of work they set me when I started took me four days and I'm now doing other people's work on top of my own just for something to do. Anyway, I was sitting at my desk today wondering how long it would be before my brain started dribbling out of my ears and I realised something.

I've written at length about just how incomprehensibly significant our systems of communication are to us as a race. Our ability to move information from our heads and into another form is what has brought us this far, we owe everything we have and all that we are to this magical talent.

Of course this doesn't mean that every instance of communication we undertake is a religious experience. I suddenly realised that all I really do all day is just move information from one place to another, mainly from paper into spreadsheets and databases.

If the council got their shit together and invested in some decent OCR(2) equipment my job would disappear in a puff of smoke. Luckily (?) for me the council tend to steer clear of common sense and financial efficiency.

More to the point, I'm spending all day every weekday facilitating a form of communication. This sounds like exactly what I'm all about and yet it sucks! It's a sterile and vapid form of communication whose needless inefficiencies lend the process a distinctly unsatisfying aftertaste. I want to be doing this for a living, or rather this via cryptic fiction, ie. communicating with people.

Various technologies now allow us to store and move vaster amounts of information than ever before, but what good is that if the stuff itself is dull, useless crap? The skills of moving data around have born vast and wonderful fruits so far but choosing exactly which data is worth moving is just as important as developing more efficient methods.

footnotes

(1) Administration Support Officer actually, I've got a badge and everything

(2) OCR - Optical Character Recognition, with a slight redesign of the various forms, a decent scanner and some pretty standard software, the council could save themselves a packet.

I knew there had to be some benefits to being a respectable working citizen and the spanky new iPod charging on my desk right now is one of them. I've always had a very intense relationship with music and the ability to listen to tunes on the move is something I've missed for a long time.

Somehow music has the power to make the world that little bit more tolerable and, for me anyway, it's a power vastly underestimated. Used well, music can lift my mood far better than the psycho meds my GP suggested, and it'll do it without the side effects too. Strange then that music is almost exclusively considered a luxury, a recreational pastime, not the stuff of serious day to day practicality.

Nutrition is another area whose massive influence on our lives is widely ignored. A recent report suggested that the unsettling increase in mental health problems in our society is directly linked to the increase in the amount of processed and chemically treated food we eat. While it made a vaguely interesting news story for a day or two, the report won't be shifting any great tenets of scientific theory.

So how does this happen? How is it that we end up point blank ignoring the potential benefit or harm of aspects of our lives as major as what we put in our ears or stomachs? Well this is an area that I'll be exploring in detail in forthcoming post entitled 'the danger of counting,' but for now these two examples are a good way to get into one aspect of that.

The problem lies in our obsession with measurement, and in particular with how we treat things that cannot be measured. Simply put, if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Mental health is a good example of something so inherently subjective that it defies rigid, traditional measurement. Music and nutrition also pose a similar problem so trying to accurately determine the exact relationship between these is, not surprisingly, just too hard for our scientists.

Unfortunately for us, recognising the limitations of a system on which we have come to depend so utterly is modern day heresy and so instead we just pretend that the things we can't get a grip on aren't important. This is of great detriment to us all but a kind of intellectual class system keeps us from questioning those 'in the know' and so nothing changes.

It's understandable that people should have so much faith in maths and science, they are, after all, quite incredibly powerful tools. Watching a documentary about future commercial space travel the other day something occurred to me, besides the excitement of seeing a childhood dream become increasingly possible.

The theory of a flat earth was discounted many ages ago, and a wide variety of people across the globe and human history 'proved' that the earth had to be round. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century however, that we finally got up there and could actually see for ourselves the truth we had 'known' for so long.

Before the polarisation brigade get too uptight let's get to the point. Maths and science are fantastic, and when I'm listening to some crushing bass lines instead of screaming kids on the morning bus I'll be the first in line to bow at that altar, they're just not everything. There is more beyond and the longer we insist on staying blind to what we can't easily see the worse of we'll all be.

So who's immortal words are those? Well any self respecting HST fanatic will recognise them as just one of the many golden phrases to fall from the lips of his one time nemesis, Richard Millhouse Nixon. He was promising to return order to the streets of a USA rocked by the ripples of a war in distant Vietnam.

That silent majority Nixon was speaking to were the people not protesting, or doing dope or putting flowers in their hair. The decent, upstanding mainstream backbone of the country were proud of their conformity and their subsequent silence and were just looking for someone to get things back to 'normal'.

The recent departure of Charles Kennedy from the Lib Dems has forced me into thinking seriously once more about British politics, never a pleasant task, and our own silent majority. The fact is, (as explained eloquently and in detail in Richard Linkater's excellent film 'Slacker',) that the people who don't vote in this country have won pretty much every election in living memory.

Now the problem with using the phrase 'silent majority' in our case is that it assumes that the people not using their votes are a single cohesive group and there are only two ways this can be true:

a) everyone who wants to vote does, leaving the rest united through apathy towards the electoral system,

or

b) everyone who doesn't vote belongs to a single group that is not represented by any candidate,

Clearly neither of these are the case so our silent majority cannot be homogenous. There are quite obviously some people who don't vote because they just not interested. From personal experience however, I know that there are also people who do want to use their vote but have no-one to give it to.

Like many people, I've cast my vote through a process of elimination in the past. I could never vote Conservative so I always thought I'd vote Labour. I tried that and felt thoroughly let down so that just left the Lib Dems. Their recent shenanigans have shattered the image I had of them and so now I am screwed.

The last time I was up at Elephant (1) a good friend of mine told me the GK Chesterton used to go to the House Of Commons as a spectator to observe the process of government. Apparently he described the British political system as being like a swarm of dwarves trying to cook a whale. While this is possibly the best simile I've ever heard, it's also disappointingly accurate.

I was made aware of one example of such self defeating chaos in a recent meeting at work. There are currently six ALMOs(2) responsible for council housing in Leeds and they've been around for nearly three years. The staff in my department are finally moving into our 'new' offices at the end of this month and the ALMO structure may finally be somewhere near up to speed.

Unfortunately it's all a bit too late because the guy chairing the meeting told us that Leeds City Council has decided to merge the six ALMOs into two or maybe three larger ones. The is a chance that, once into the new offices after three years of waiting, we may have to move again when the new structure kicks in.

But wait, we're civil servants aren't we? We do what we do for the public good so if that's what's required to best meet the council housing needs of Leeds we should get on with it right?

Well the thing is that the housing ALMOs were apparently a controversial Labour idea passed when the council was fully under their control. Last May, however, Labour were ousted from Leeds City Council and now both the Tories and Lib Dems are taking the opportunity to tear up the idea they didn't like and start again with their own plans.

Does the insane amount of disruption help council tenants? I am really sure that it doesn't but that doesn't stop this sort of thing happening on a fairly regular basis. I also learned about something called 'negative subsidy' at that meeting:

The tenants in our properties pay about £120 million a year in rent. Unlike a Housing Association, who would receive that money directly, this money goes to the government. They then give us about £100 million back. Neat huh?

Well that's not even the best bit. Of that £100 million, about £90 million goes on 'debts and costs'. I asked someone who knows today and it turns out that these debts date back decades to the first large scale council house construction schemes. The councils didn't have the capital to fund such large building projects so it was all done on credit.

The short and the skinny of all this is that our tenants pay about £120 million a year in rent of which we end up with £11 million to spend on them. This is representative of a serious problem with the way in which our systems of government function, they are not achieving the objectives they were designed to.

On top of this there is no way any significant change can be brought about through our current electoral system. As I realised when talking this through with a friend on the phone the other day, now that each of the three parties have disqualified themselves, in my eyes anyway, there are only two options:

a) sit around and wait for a new party to present a viable alternative,

or

b) sit around and wait for an old party to change into a viable alternative,

To be honest I'm getting fed up of all these twos cropping up. It's time to start thinking in threes, so let's find another option. If we really want to be democratic we need a system that better measures the electorate's needs. Most importantly the 'silent majority' needs to be defined, exactly how many people are actually apathetic and how many are unrepresented?

Although at first glance this may seem incredibly difficult there is actually a very easy way to achieve this. All we need is an extra box on the bottom of every single voting card labelled: NONE OF THE ABOVE. Every person who values their vote too much to waste it on the tired big boys or the hopeless fringes could still be heard. No longer would we have to chose the best of the worst but instead we could express how we actually feel.

I admit there is potential for difficulty here, but to be honest that's rather the point. It is simply not in the interest of any current politician to reform a failing system when they benefit so greatly from it's flaws. They justify themselves and their actions by hiding under a flag of democracy and wielding so-called 'mandates'.

Imagine an election where the majority of votes were cast in favour of none of the parties running things. There'd be no getting away from it, we would, as a nation, be forced to address the problem. This very act would in itself go someway towards solving the problem as it would restore both interest and trust in the process.

So there you, simple as. Now how do we go about making this happen? Well a mate of mine suggested starting the NONE OF THE ABOVE party. A nice direct solution but, in the end, only a fallback position due to a few drawbacks.

Firstly, the are regulations concerning the names of registered political parties, such a name mat contravene these. I'll look into it. Secondly, a candidate would have to run for every seat and as this costs about £1000 minimum, each, that's a pretty tall order. Finally there would undoubtedly be individuals and groups who would attempt to hijack the party for their own ends.

What we really need is to change the design of the voting card itself. I'm not sure how this works, whether there's an official body in charge of it or whether it's legislated. I'll find out and get back to you but in the meantime I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions...

...and yes, I have seen Brewster's Millions, what's your point?

footnotes

(1) I’ve decided that instead of trying to cram info into these little footnotes I’ll dedicate another blog to reference info to support these posts, this copy of the latest Elephant Books flyer is the first example, check it out: http://underthecheapseats.blog.co.uk

(2) ALMOs: Arms Length Management Organisations, private companies owned entirely by the council.

Yesterday's rant, along with some comments on the post before that about the inherent wankness of how politicians, are both examples of all together too common bitching. We could all write endless posts speculating about the general and specific causes of the apparently universal incompetence with which we all have to deal but, for today, let's concentrate on the other end of this problem.

As I'm sure I've already mentioned, the computer systems I'm using at work are quite hopelessly inefficient. Now examining and berating the reasons for this don't get my job done any quicker. Instead of waiting for things to improve, and with the help of a very good friend of mine, easy mate , I'm intending to modify these systems. A bit of relatively simple work with some of Excel's higher functions should make life easier and will probably cause my boss to shit bricks with glee.

This wouldn't be the cheap seats if there wasn't a tangent and so here it is. Reading the utterly fantastic Baghdad Blog, Salam Pax, I was struck by everything, but one brief comment in particular sparked the idea for this post.

When the US began dropping bombs on Baghdad the residents found that the air raid and all clear sirens were not as reliable as they could have been. In response to this a grassroots warning system quickly emerged whereby, as soon as bombers or bombs were spotted the local mosque would begin to call a certain verse.

The moment any other mosque heard this verse they would join in and very quickly the alert would spread over vast areas. Besides being hugely impressed this tale made me realise something. In any society we delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to specific people or groups. We do this so that we don't have to perform those tasks, not because we can't perform them.

How do we fight the vice like grip of the capitalist behemoths or break into the tinted glass world of our so-heavily insulated political leaders? The answer is simple, we don't. We don't need to fight the corporations or reach our politicians, we can just marginalize them.

We have the means to provide for and organise ourselves, all that is lacking is the will. What this comes down to is that there are things in our lives that just have to happen, be it doing the job you're paid for or avoiding death from the skies. If the people entrusted with facilitating these things drop the ball we can do it ourselves.

The truth of this is plain to see in areas of the so called 'developing world' where the masses are, quite rightly, refusing to bend over for big business and are taking their countries and their resources into their own hands. The problem is not how fucked everything is, but rather the fact that we've been tricked into believing it couldn't be any other way.

I was down in the city the other day and approached a crossing behind a group of other pedestrians. Looking around I noticed that there were no cars coming and the crossing light may even have turned to green, I'm not sure, but the crowd didn't move. Without slowing I just squeezed through them and carried on across the street, after which the crowd gradually started to follow.

Walking on a bit I realised that the people at the back of the crowd hadn't even looked at the traffic or the signal, but had instead concentrated solely on the heels of those in front. Talk about a metaphor for life! If we could just get more people to raise their heads and actually look at the world we could take back the power we entrusted to the few, that power they've abused for their own ends.

So look around you everybody, the little green man is right there just willing you to move forward!

I'm really starting to hate sitting in front of a computer. This isn't so bad, comfy and with tunes, but at one point today at work I honestly thought my brain was about to dribble out of my ears. Unrelenting tedium has a strange anaesthetising effect on the minds higher functions and a decent stretch leaves you feeling like some backward cousin incapable of tying your own shoes or even remembering your own name.

Something I realised pretty quickly working for the council is that despite being a public funded public service, the fundamental flaw in their working is the same as that inherent to the vast corporations, ie. a fixation with money.

Rampant lust for profit is a familiar concept to us all but it is not the only way in which our financial disease manifests itself. Obviously the housing depts of Leeds City Council are not looking to turn a profit, instead they are, unavoidably, obsessed with saving money.

At some vastly higher level the decision was taken to use private contractors for all our work,(1) but how to choose between them? Do we look for the people best suited to do the job, those who would ensure the highest possible level of service to our tenants?(2)

No, we choose the people who'll do it the cheapest because we have to. That's capitalism in action and fuck the little people. It doesn't matter that, because of the insanely inefficient and self defeating admin systems, we regularly pay our contractors for work they haven't done, or pay them multiple times for the same job.

It doesn't matter that this makes the actual costs far higher than they were before everything changed. None of this matters because, when the decisions were made, we had a piece of paper that proved we were getting the cheapest deal.

Has your council tax gone up recently? Do you wonder where it all goes? Well rest assured it doesn't go where it's needed, well most of it doesn't anyway, your hard earned taxes go straight into the pockets of those lucky enough to have got on the gravy train. Forced to follow some nigh ranking suit's false economies we civil servants just plough it all into a big black hole every day.

Maybe, in the space of just five working days, I've become completely disillusioned with my job and employer, or maybe I'm just being a bit pissy because it's a Monday. Regardless of the reasons behind my tone, the content is still valid.

I had a better idea for a post than this but I'll save it for tomorrow as, a) I felt like having a bit of a rant, and b) said rant lays the foundation for the next post. Well that's your lot for today, I'm off to milk as much as I can out of my evening before getting another stupid, crappy early night, grrrrr...

...ahhhh, that's better...

footnotes

(1) as opposed to council employees which, as I understand it, used to be the case,

(2) tenants or 'customers' are we are supposed, though I refuse, to call them,

I'm yawning as I write this, having not yet fully adjusted to my new lifestyle. I'm also entirely sober as the police are coming round later tonight to take a witness statement. Basically, one of my noisy neighbours apparently recently assaulted one of my friendly neighbours and I heard the ruck through the wall.

So, after spending a pleasant couple of hours chilling up at Elephant Books today, I came home and tidied up a bit, ie. removed bongs, skins and any other obvious evidence of my illegal lifestyle choices from the front room. Just another day pretending to be someone else.

Anyway, the first thing I thought of when I walked into the offices of my new job was the stunning resemblance, in decor and atmosphere, to 'The Office'. Subsequently my girlfriend thought it would be fitting for us to rewatch both series of this excellent sitcom, which we have this week.

Being a massive Ricky Gervaise fan I am continually impressed by his writing and performing prowess but it was one phrase from The Office in particular that set me off on a particularly topical train of thought.

Mr Brent is tangling himself in his usual bullshit when he mentions 'team individuality' as a management concept of his own devising. I've heard him utter these words a million times before but this time they sparked something in my mind.

The is a general consensus among most of the human race that people should be given the opportunity to be involved in the systems that run their societies. Democracy is usually vaunted as the perfect embodiment of this desire as it is, supposedly, a method by which every citizen of a nation(1) is involved in the decision making process.

Looking at the news media over the last few days however it is clear to me that far from us all sharing the burdens of running the world, individual characters are still at the heart of our political systems. Two such individuals are Charles Kennedy and Ariel Sharon. Both these men have, single handedly, changing the fortunes of their respective political parties, and we have all lost out from their respective exits from the political front lines.

Growing up I would have always thrown my cap in with Labour in the belief that they represented the working class majority of the population. New Labour, and then Iraq, shattered this image forever in my mind and the politicised I became the more convinced I was that the problem lay with politicians and political parties themselves.

How could I trust the words of a politician when I know they'll say the exact opposite next week if it serves their purposes? I could never vote Conservative and now Labour was out of the question too leaving the Lib Dems as the only option left.

Faced with such a choice I felt that opting out of the whole system was the only way I could really use my vote to accurately portray my feelings. Then Charles Kennedy became the Lib Dem leader and things changed.

It wasn't so much that I felt his leadership made the party or its policies more viable, but rather that here was someone working as a politician who I could relate to, who was saying the common sense things I said to myself.

His perpetual dismissal by the media and political insiders as, not being a good enough politician just ingratiated him even more with me. Here was a real person, a genuine guy and so, wanting to reward and encourage such an approach to politics, the Lib Dems got my vote.

Mr Kennedy's recent admission about his drinking problem did nothing other than re-enforce this image of him in my mind. We all battle our own personal demons every single day and here was someone doing a politician's job who wasn't trying to pretend to be perfect.

I mean think about it, if the guy's got the balls to admit to the nation he has a drink problem, telling us the truth about the basis for a war would be a no-brainer for him. Do we really believe that he is the only alcoholic in the Houses of Parliament? That all other members, elected or otherwise, live like nuns and monks?

Anyway, Charles Kennedy alone won my vote for the Lib Dems and now their disgraceful, and particularly un-liberal, un-democratic ousting of the man has lost it for them. An example of an individual personality having more significance than our complex political systems.

The departure of Ariel Sharon from the Middle East political scene is a cause for far greater concern. Serving many years as a complete right wing nutter earned him the opportunity to make a real difference in the area, who else could have sold the Gaza withdrawal to Israel?

For all his fascist thuggery he is not by any means a stupid man and it seems he had realised what many of his colleagues could not: lasting peace requires sacrifice, the only other option is perpetual suffering all round. The void created by his absence looks like it can only be filled with painful chaos but I’m keeping various things crossed that this will not be so.

Watching the coverage of Sharon’s struggle it occurred to me that Israel may be the only country in the world to have a worse media image than the US. I am determined to believe that a majority of people everywhere, including the US and Israel, just want to get on with their lives in peace but these are not the people I see on my TV.

The two Jews I saw interviewed were not, I am sure, your average Jews or Israelis. They were Crazy Jews, just another flavour of nutter like Crazy Christians or Crazy Muslims. The first guy said that Sharon had been struck down by the hand of god for letting Gaza go while the second claimed to have cursed Sharon by asking god to kill him.

The suggested solutions to the crisis of the Middle East are all political, suggesting systems within and through which peace can be found. Despite this the whole thing has hinged around one single man, a man who is now laying in a controlled coma.

Is this David Brent’s ‘team individuality’ in action? Maybe, the scary thing is that the Brent-Master-General himself probably couldn’t do a much worse job if we let him run things. I suppose what I’m really craving here is honesty. If we’re going to rely on simple popularity contests to run our world we should at least say so and not dress it up in grand ideas.

footnote

(1) unless of course you're too young, a criminal, or in some states of the US, black,

Sitting here writing, stoned, wearing dirty comfortable clothes and bathed in tunes, this is the first time I've really felt like me in days. I've realised that the real me is Stoneleaf and that the name on my passport is that guy who’s spent the last three days wearing a shirt and sitting in an office. As you may have guessed, I’ve finally started my dreaded day.

It’s boringly easy but the people and atmosphere are nice and it’s good money for flexible hours. The biggest downside is that I’ve been too knackered to post or do anything else the last couple of days as getting up at 6:45am every day is bit of a culture shock to any self respecting slacker’s system.

At least I’m not wearing a tie, though every other guy in the building is. When I rang up before I started and asked about the dress code the woman I spoke to told me I didn’t have to and no-one’s said anything so I’m not going. Feels weird though, being the only one, but fuck it, I don’t want any kind of noose round my grubby neck, no matter how colourful.

Anyway, on to something less self indulgent and potentially more interesting. I’ve written in the past about the nature and influence of so-called ‘unconscious systems’. I have to admit that one of the benefits, for me as a writer, of working a day job is that it provides experience from which I can draw.

The unconscious systems I am currently learning to traverse at my local city council have given me a fresh perspective on this area of personal interest. From the short time I have spent working with them I have got the distinct impression that the other people at the office are hard working, professional and conscientious. This said the overall level of service received by council tenants is vastly below what i would consider an acceptable standard.

How can this be? If everyone’s doing everything they can why doesn’t it work? The answer is painfully simple, the efforts of each employee are crippled at every single turn by the systems through which we have to work.

example:

We have one contractor who deals with all gas maintenance but for some ‘IT problem’(1) they can’t be added to the list of contractors on the computer software we use. They currently have offices next door to us but we’re all moving into larger shared offices soon.

Anyway, whenever we want to give them a job instead of the computer just automatically logging it with their computer, as in other cases, we have to print out the job description and fax it to the Service Desk(2) who then fax it on to the contractor.

This system is to remain in place when we share an office meaning that if I want to give a job to an engineer sat on the other side of my desk I have to fax it to him via the service desk. The fax will probably even come back to the same machine!

Unconscious systems are massively powerful creatures and for all the fantastic use we can get out of them they can do just as much damage too. Council bureaucracy isn’t the only thing that’s going to present me with the challenge of managing frustration.

For all that the people at the office seem nice I’m already wondering how much I have in common with any of them. I can make polite, pleasant and even comfortable conversation all day long, but I don’t find it the least bit satisfying.

Unfortunately that is definitely all that is going to be on offer, and biting my tongue, so as not to ‘get into’ anything is something I’m going to have plenty of practice at. I feel guilty now, but I’m really not slagging these guys off, they’re sound, it’s just... hard to explain, here’s an example:

Stoneleaf “I was told I had to take some holiday before April, can you tell me how many days do I have?”

Colleague “You get twenty a year so you need to divide that by twelve and times it by three.”

SL “So just divide it by four then...”

(pause)

C “I‘ll get a calculator.” (leaves)

SL (to no-one in particular) “3/12 is the same as 1/4, so it‘s five,”

C (returns with calculator) “It‘s five.”

Maybe it’ll all seem worthwhile in a few weeks when payday rolls around, though I doubt it. I don’t have my own login for the computers at work yet so I can’t go online or anything but once I’m settled I’m hoping I might be able to write this blog during my lunch.

I was concerned that I might just be too knackered to keep up with it but I’m reading ‘The Baghdad Blog’ at the moment which has really inspired me. Blogs can be wonderful things and given how much better I feel for writing this I’m more determined than ever to carry on being Stoneleaf under my stupid smart clothes.

footnotes

(1) IT problem: utterly meaningless one size fits all excuse, the guys in the IT dept could all be sat with their thumbs up their arses for all we know.

(2) The Service Desk was established when Leeds City Council ran all it’s own housing. A few years ago the council housing administration in Leeds was kind of half privatised through the formation of six ALMOs, (Arms Length Management Organisations) basically private companies entirely owned by the council.

The Service Desk has been completely superseded by the ALMO’s but is under a five year contract which still has at least two years to run. For this reason all the ALMO’s in Leeds must continue to pay the Service Desk for it’s entirely unnecessary ‘services.’

Just a quicky today as I’m freaking about starting work tomorrow. Of course I’ve left everything until the last minute and found that half the shops I needed to visit today were closed, not to mention the various things I intended to do around the house that somehow haven’t got done.

Anyway, in an effort to distract myself and actually get some sleep last night I was casting my minds eye far and wide and stumbled across an interesting little observation. Throughout history there have been situations where ideologies have been portrayed as evil and aggressive, ie. capable of subverting the minds of ‘normal’ and ‘decent’ people.

Be it Communism or Islam, or anything else that’ll serve as scapegoat-of-the-day, these systems of belief are complex both in their theoretical and historical basis as well as their practical implementation. It’s within this complexity that the evil magic apparently happens and the ‘natural’ worldview is somehow replaced by sick and twisted delusion.

Ok, so there’s thread number one, hold onto that while we fly off at a tangent. In bed last night I was reflecting on the clock my girlfriend got for Christmas which now hangs on our bedroom wall. Now as a rule I cannot stand clocks that tick and I absolutely cannot sleep in the same room as one. This clock, however, is slightly different.

Although it does tick it doesn’t do so with every twitch of its hands. For some reason the volume of it’s timekeeping progress varies such that each second can produce a wide array of sounds, or even nothing at all. It turns out that I find this clock far easier to ignore than a standard ticker and so it doesn’t keep me awake, though plenty of other things do.

I realised that I can snooze quite happily to the sound of the TV or rain precisely because the sound is random, the brain seems to be able to filter this kind of thing out into a low background hum. Why then, is a much quieter but regular sound, like a clock, so damn irritating?

Around about here came the revelation: Engaging with complex systems, from political ideologies to the ever changing patter of the rain, requires some conscious effort. This requirement automatically gives us a choice because we can always withhold that effort and not engage.

Some systems however, such as the ticking of a clock or a simple repeated image, are so basic as to not require any mental effort whatsoever. The brain, designed over millions of years to spot patterns, cannot help but engage with these things and subsequently we have no choice.

With this in mind I find it difficult to get too concerned about the ‘brainwashing’ effects of belief systems. I’m not for a second playing down the potential harm that misguided souls can do, I’m simply saying that there are ways to counter that.

For a start the abundant apathy currently pervading the west and much maligned by the media can prove an admirable natural weapon against being misled into extremism. Beyond this of course, education is the by far the most effective and proactive weapon. This is only the case because all these ideologies spend a great deal of time trying to justify themselves to themselves, ie. the complex progression of argument and idea will always provide a space for discussion.

What is far more worrying, and utterly underestimated, is the effect of those in society who rely on the simple and basic to achieve their ends. There are people who make it their business to rape our minds thousands of times a day by slipping right into the brain’s core just like the damnable tick tock of a clock.

From the instantly recognisable logos and the tailored feelings of need they trigger through to the three note jingles that will not leave your head and spread like plague when you hum them. It is these tiny, basic ideas that we should be concerned about. These are the systems that actually can infect people’s minds and change their behaviour and we are all riddled with them.

So here we are on the very first day of 2006 and I have to say I'm relieved. 2005 was without a doubt the worst year of my life so far and I'm more than happy to let it start to fade into the realm of 'Top 100...' shows and occasional news references.

I've spent the last couple of weeks stuffing my face and generally trying to lose myself in the festive season and forget about everything else. As a result however, I haven’t blogged or written a thing throughout and must now scratch that itch. The idea of forgetting seems as good as any to get back into things with so here we go.

As I said, I’m happy to see the back of 2005 which was not a good year for my family with various members losing their lives, minds and homes respectively. I didn’t get a single piece of work published but I did fall off the roof rescuing the damn cat and bust up my knees pretty bad. I couldn’t find a single literary agent willing to shake my hand but I did manage break my hand punching a door.

I could go on but the whining sound is hurting my ears. Anyway, to bring some kind of relevance to these proceedings, it’s easy to forget that plenty of other people in the world had far worse years than mine. The everyday immediacy of our own lives can overwhelm us if we’re not careful but all that is required is the regular switching of gears from the local to global mindset.

Do we really ‘forget’ about everyone else, or do we just struggle to think of multiple situations at once? Maybe there’s a kind of ladder of forgetting where the lowest rung is the stuff you haven’t so much forgotten as are simply not thinking about. Then you can step up to info you know you definitely know but just can’t bring to mind.

Further up lie those things that have ceased to exist for you because you haven’t thought about them for so long. Those things like childhood memories that a sudden aroma or scene can bring crashing back into your mind like a joyously rampaging golden elephant.

Higher still and we’re into the clouds, thick grey tendrils obscuring everything. Here we reach true forgetting, those things that, even with concrete evidence and trusted testimony in abundance, you just cannot recall occurring.

Now all the steps so far have shared some common ground, namely that the info is in our heads somewhere, it’s just a question of our ability to find it. Even on that last and foggy rung, the details that refuse to confirm themselves are in there somewhere because our brains record absolutely every minute detail of experience we undergo.

There is another rung though, above the clouds and into a cold, barren void. This is a new level of forgetting, here lie those things forgotten not be an individual, but by society, even humanity, en mass. Far from our view being obscured here, there is simply nothing, open and cold. If you’ve never known something in the first place how can you remember it?

Before this strays off completely into the realms of pretentious bullshit let’s return to earth and examine this last, and most interesting rung via an example. Now I’ve written much in the past concerning the monumental significance of the written word, in particular of its status as the pinnacle of a communication system so sophisticated as to change forever the evolutionary course of our species.

I also recently posted some ideas about the root of the us vs them split that seems apparent in every facet of human culture. I suggested that the transition from timeless, animal-like hunter-gatherer to farmer 6000 years ago established a conflict between two rival human lifestyles and that this conflict continued today.

Now, before your very eyes, I will link these two apparently unrelated topics without any form of camera trickery. It occurred to me the other day that situation I had outlined for the transition from H/G to farmer sounded rather familiar:

So 6000 years ago we have some peeps quite happily knocking about amid the trees of a vast paradise. They’re not really aware of themselves or their situation as they don’t need to be. They pick fruit as they find it and occasionally hunt for meat.

One day something changes. The peeps somehow become aware of themselves and are no loner simply unconscious parts of a wider system. This loss of animal innocence leads our peeps to seek some degree of control over their environment and instead of relying on nature to provide, they go out onto the recently formed and expanding plains and start to farm.

See it? No? Ok here’s another clue then, imagine that when our peeps recognise themselves for the first time they decide to cover their bits with fig leaves... yeah, that’s right, there you go. According to the bible, and other holy books, human history started with Adam and Eve losing their innocence in the Garden of Eden and what was god’s punishment to Adam for his ‘sin’ of knowledge? He had to work the fields in order to feed himself.

Now I don’t want you guys to panic, I haven’t undergone some evangelical conversion and suddenly decided that everything in the bible is true. What I’m interested in here are the ideas being recorded, forget about the punishment/reward systems of morality that have been superimposed since. The fact is that the core ideas of this traditional story about the dawn of man seems to line up uncannily with the current conclusions of modern archaeology and sciences.

So maybe that’s quite interesting, but here’s the real kicker. The story of Eden etc was actually written down about 4000 years ago and so, obviously, without the skills and techniques we currently use to probe our distant past. The point of ‘holy’ books was to record the most important ideas that they be passed on and remembered.

So the original ‘authors’ of the Eden tale couldn’t have worked out what had happened for themselves, and let’s assume that it’s not just a great big coincidence because, let’s face it, that’s no fun. The only option left is that we, somehow, preserved the story of our transition, basically from animals to people, for 2000 years before technology caught up with us and it could be recorded with relevant permanence.

The pace of technological advancement has exploded in recent times and we find ourselves back on that lowest rung when we forget that, for the vast majority or human history, people have got by perfectly well without the innovations we take for granted.

The fact is that the majority of the human race throughout time have run their lives and communities without the use of written language. The practice of maintaining a purely verbal history, of relying on story telling seems quite terrifyingly unstable to us now, comfortable as we are in our world of abstract symbols.

In the relatively short space of time taken by the meteoric rise of technology, including literacy, we have managed to almost completely forget the wider ranging skills of verbal communication. And so this is us, on the highest rung of that ladder, looking back over past achievements that not only boggle the mind but now utterly confound it.

Can you imagine passing on a story from your life to your descendants in the year 4006 using nothing but the spoken word? No, because we’ve forgotten how to do it.

You’ll always forget far more than you remember and of what you do remember there’ll be plenty you wish you could forget. The trick is not to lose the really important stuff, the stuff that could really help us and now that there are so many of us with such impressive toys we don’t really have any excuses left.

PS

How’s that for a comeback!? Should start the year as I mean to go on I guess. For the pedants among you I am aware that my ‘Books Read in 2005’ list is still up here but I’m not intending changing it until I finish reading ‘The Baghdad Blog’ by Salam Pax which will be the first entry on the new list.