The calling I feel to write comes, I believe, from a deeper urge to think. Maybe it's because I'm an only child but I've always has a tendency to daydream, to wander through places of my own creation rather than engage with the real world around me.

An example of this is the following recurrent daydream:

I'm in a situation were Tony Blair is meeting the public and the press are there, snapping and flashing and fishing for soundbites. He makes his way along the line of plebs, eventually coming to me. I smile politely and nod while he extends his hand.

I don't move to reciprocate and he slips into that wonky open mouthed smile, his eyes sharpening slightly, we've all seen him get ambushed, you know what I mean. He moves his a little closer and I say:

"No thanks, blood's hell to shift."

Now while there's part of me that just likes the turn of phrase and situation from an abstract, writing point of view, that little scene has always bathed me in a warm, fuzzy and satisfying feeling.

I must now confess however that it had not occurred to me until today exactly what that feeling was. Initially it had masqueraded as some imagined moral victory but today I realised that it is actually nothing more than the sadistic pleasure of feeling superior to someone.

And so this particular daydream is now terminally soured. As angry as I feel towards Mr Blair I know that
making him look like an arse in public, or hanging him as a war criminal as some have suggested, wouldn't actually achieve anything.

The only possible way to genuinely counteract the damage done by such politicians is to change the minds of the people who support them and this can not be achieved by abusing the said politicians, regardless of how tempting that may be.

Down at the Hyde Park Picture House last week I saw a trailer for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's global warming(1) doc. The journey I took in appreciating Michael Moore's work has provided a template for my response to all such films.

I'm excited that finally a big film doc is being made about the subject matter in question.

I enjoy the style and feeling of belonging that comes from hearing your own views expressed through mass media.

I realise that for the difference it will make, the cinematic event in question may as well have been a fiction and it collapses into a mere film accordingly.

The vast majority of people who go to see such films do so because they already agree with the message and, subsequently, it doesn't change anybody's mind. Sure it may cut through some apathy and ignorance but that's not what counts in this game.

Telling people that they're wrong and greedy and are killing everybody's children may be entirely accurate, and fun, but alienating them with insults doesn't stop them being or doing any of those things.

I've written this before, many times, about "people being more concerned with winning than solving the problem," etc and yet here I am getting off on landing a witty jab on Blair's nose in public.

The problem with trying to live your life to a moral code(2) is that you can't just lay back and expect breaches of that code to make themselves obvious. In order to live clean as it were, you need to think about everything.

But hey, nothing worth having is easy right?

So how did I come to gain this unforeseen perspective today? Well my ipod is currently knackered and I'm feeling a bit bereaved to be honest. Having a head full of the Wizard, or any other dirty, fuzzed out doom riffs makes it so much easier to get to work in a morning.

Anyway on the bus today I got fed up of looking out the window and resorted to reading the Metro(3). I came across a story about an asylum seeker, 36 year old Mr Manuel Bravo, who hung himself in Yarl's Wood detention centre so that his 13 year old son would not be deported back to their West African home.

Now this is clearly a pretty shitty situation but as I read on I reached the following line:

"The pair had been detained at their temporary home in Leeds by immigration officers..."

Instantly a memory barged into focus. Last week I attended work's Staff Briefing. This consists of pretty much every single employee of the Social Housing ALMO(4) I work for (half in the morning, half in the afternoon,) attending a meeting to discuss issues affecting the business.

Sitting on the bus, the last paragraphs of the piece as yet unread, I pictured as clear as the wakening day beyond the glass part of a presentation I had witnessed wherein a manager listed the achievements of his department and, subsequently, the whole ALMO.

One of these that we had found and helped take into custody nine asylum seekers living illegally in our properties. Suddenly I felt that was a solid, albeit nebulously indirect, link between myself and this man and his son.

It was a distinctly sickly feeling of which only traces were guilt. No the main basis of the frown I must have then worn was shame.

I counted the numbers of times I've recently referred in conversation to my job as being, 'guilt free' and thought about calling my friend at BAE Systems a baby killer. I remembered feeling good about not having to sell anything or make lethal products or equipment.

I'm a part of the machine too.

This led me to consider other potential discrepancies between my beliefs and my actions and hence the daydream outlined above.

The third stumble, you knew it was coming, concerns an exciting idea I've had recently. The manuscript I finally submitted last week is part of a larger project involving a 'creative writing for depression' workshop I'm trying to organise.

This project touches upon several issues and causes one of which is an attempt to try and build a kind of indie lit scene in Leeds, taking writing back to grassroots in the same way that film and particularly music have done recently.

On the horizon of my imagination this project began to grow into a much more ambitious design and I began to do a little speculative research into the idea of starting an independent publishing house.

Anyway I was pondering the myriad considerations of such an undertaking when I suddenly remembered a whole chunk of relevant abstract thinking I'd done.

Having never seriously contemplated setting up a business before all my thought on capitalism, trade and commerce had been theoretical. Suddenly faced with the reality of actually implementing those heartfelt beliefs I admit, I shat my pants.

Now I stand by everything I've said and if I do it, then I'll have to do it right, but god damn it's daunting. I must admit though that once I'd absorbed the initial shock the fear quickly distilled into a kind of unnerving excitement.

How cool could it be?

So what's the point of these three here then, has this been nothing more than an exercise in self flagellation?

Well no actually. I'm not beating myself up about any of these things but thinking about them has given me a useful reminder of my own weaknesses.

I see no necessary hypocrisy in not living life in perfect adherence to one's own moral code, what counts is that you care and you keep trying.

So I just want to say that I know I bang on about the great rights and wrongs and how everything should be, but if you're thinking, I can't live up to all that! then you know what? me 2.

footnotes

(1) yes GLOBAL WARMING not climate change, this particular exercise in rebranding has been hideously successful.

GLOBAL = the whole world, affecting everyone,
Climate = usually used in a local context, allows ease of geographic distancing for scary thoughts,

WARMING = perfectly describes the situation and supplies a definite direction,
change = admits to nothing regarding direction and carries with it overtones of the unavoidable,

so it's GLOBAL WARMING ok? I caught myself saying climate change the other day and felt utterly violated, get the fuck out of my head you fascist loons!

(2) just wanted to say that this doesn't have to come from organised religion, despite what most of them insist; as it happens I not really sure an organised religion can fill this role at all but that's another post altogether,

(3) METRO is a free paper distributed on buses and trains which I generally turn my nose up at due to some of the spurious shite I've seem them print about weed in the past,

(4) ALMO: Arms Length management Organisation, a private company fully owned and run by the local authority, basically a half privatised council department,