Time to create

Last Tuesday I started a course at the wonderful Bricktree Gallery in Caistor, called "Create some "me Time".  The course is run by Sara Scott, who has set up the Facebook page and group the above link leads to.

Due to my recent bereavements, I haven't felt like creating much recently.  Everything seemed trivial and pointless, and whereas I normally feel inspired to take up some sort of creative tools, I wasn't feeling it at all.  Tuesday changed that.  I met some lovely people, did a creative visualization and decorated a journal, and enjoyed feeling connected again.

Sara mentioned the book and creative course The Artist's Way which is by Julia Cameron and has been around for the past 25 years.  She had a copy with her, and so I leafed through it and was impressed by the fact that it is a spiritual way, and also with the number of testimonials from people who felt the book and its suggestions had changed their lives.

Money is a bit of a problem at the moment, but sometimes you just know that what is right is right.  I found a copy of the book for £6.50 on Ebay and bought it.  It arrived this morning.

I'd actually already read the first couple of chapters of the book online and while looking at Sara's copy, and so I started straight away with the Week 1 chapter.  There are a number of exercises to do.  The first is "morning pages" which means stream of consciousness journalling first thing in the morning, three pages at least.  Well, I've already been doing that since last Wednesday, as it was one of the things suggested by Sara, to do in our newly-decorated journals.  The second is Artist's dates.  She suggests taking $5 to the nearest five and dime shop and buying an unfeasibly large list of art materials with it, as a suggestion for an artist's date.  Well I suppose the book is 25 years old.  Maybe you could buy such a long list in the 1990s!

I took £5 to the nearest charity shop as the next best thing to a five and dime, and found a pure new wool sweater in beautiful colours of green and blue.  Yesterday I was reading about a woman from Estonia who designs and makes the most beautiful coats, using felted knitted materials and crochet etc.  I had decided that I would give that a go - 3D felting doesn't seem to be my forte, although I lost a bit of heart doing that because the dog got hold of my felting work and chewed up my first creations.

The idea of creating 2D art with felting and felted materials does appeal to me.  It seems to me it might be very forgiving, like oil painting and pastel drawing, in that you can always go over anything which doesn't work properly.  I've always liked crafts where you can layer and play with materials, and so although I don't think I will be able to make a coat any time soon, I think I may play with some smaller projects as a start.

The jumper was marked £3 and I ummed and ahed about the price of something I was really intending to destroy.  Eventually I decided to go with and told myself my art was worth it.  Arrived at the counter to find that all clothing is 50p today, and so it only cost me 50p.  a bargain!

I came home and put it straight into the washing machine on a high heat, and then once the machine had started, realized I was supposed to put it in a mesh bag to avoid clogging my machine with wool which has come off the jumper.  I stopped the machine, found a cushion cover that zips up and put the jumper in there, and then set the machine going again.

Tizzy and I went for a lovely walk.  About ten minutes walk away there is a dog walking field, which she loves.  It was beautifully sunny with hardly a cloud in the sky when we left, but once we reached the field the clouds were rolling in.  Being on the edge of the wolds, it is sometimes possible to see the edge of weather fronts, as they hit the edge of the wolds, which are rolling hills just outside Market Rasen.  There were a lot of seagulls wheeling around the field, making a lot of noise.  Often the arrival of  a lot of seagulls indicates rough weather is on the way, as they come inland from the coast to shelter.  We have had some very windy weather over the past few days, so maybe they've been sheltering from that.

I decorated my journal with a sunset over the sea, and as I walked I thought that maybe the colours and design of the jumper would lend itself to a similar design.  I think what I may start with are a number of square panels, and make patches, with a view to one day turning them into something bigger.

I love the sea.  I find it energizing and inspiring.  My sister has invited me to go and stay with her in Torquay which is a coastal town, and I am looking forward to that when I can.  for now I'm off to see what a hot wash at 90 degrees has done to a pure new wool jumper!

Hands off my books: Tidying up with Marie Kondo

As a dedicated clutterer of houses, I've got a bit of a love-hate relationship with programmes which deal with housework.  I watch programmes about hoarding and feel generally positive about myself.  You don't have to tunnel your way to the sofa in my house, yay!  I watch programmes like Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and feel a guilty pleasure in knowing I'll never put her theories into practice in my house, while still hanging on her every word.

I've read about the Konmari method of tidying of course.  Various hilarious articles by fellow clutterers decrying the method with "I found none of my clothes or any of the vegetables sparked joy and so I threw them out and hid the credit card bill for the replacements from my husband in a lovely little box" etc. 

I was impressed by how much presence a tiny woman can have, and how connected she seemed to the houses, but not so much their occupants.  She advises people to deal with their clutter in several stages, starting with clothes.  Then you move onto books, then papers, then miscellaneous, then sentimental items. 

The problem is that the method ignores the fact that people live together and may not enjoy the things the others enjoy.  In the programme this didn't become a problem for any of them, as we didn't have one partner ranting about having to live with 500 milk bottles or 200 Barbie dolls, and everything seemed to suggest that the Konmari method was helping relationships by dealing with areas of dispute.  But it would be very interesting to see how the method works with a collector of things their partner hates.

I have to say that some of the people in the series have more current clothes piled on their beds than I have owned in my whole lifetime.  I'm down with the clothes sorting - I don't have that many.  Although I did understand one client who complained that although the item of clothing did not spark joy, it did fit, and that's more than most items did.  Like many women who have had a baby, she was waiting to be able to fit into her pre-pregnancy clothes, and kept her maternity clothes too, so she could have another baby.  Three wardrobes don't really fit into the spark-joy method of clothes sorting.

It is in the area of books and papers that I would have the most problems.  Marie Kondo advises keeping no more than 30 books, ideally.  I have hundreds, and I like my books.  As for papers, I love some and hate others, but I don't think the tax authorities will accept "It just doesn't spark joy for me" as an excuse for not doing my tax return.

I enjoyed the programme, mainly because I like people, and seeing into people's homes and lifestyles is always interesting for me. On the whole, the method does appear to work for the people featured in the programme, but then they've all asked for help.  I'd call for help if I saw her approaching down the garden path.  My clutter sparks joy for me, and I'm keeping it.

Sex education, American style

Having had a heavy cold, and not feeling like doing anything too intellectual, I decided to take my sneezes to the sofa and watch something on Netflix.  I chose Sex Education, which is a Netflix Original written and directed by an irritating collection of writers and two directors, with a creator credit to Laurie Nunn. 

The first thing to know about the series, is that it is played with an English accent in some sort of parallel world where all the worst things about American education appear to have been transported to England.  The place and even the time of the series is left undecided, with a very American house, American school, and American high school values and problems transported to an English cast with English accents.  It jarred with me, very much, tripping me up with the inconsistencies which really would not be typical of any English setting.

There's a certain Stepford Wives vibe about the high school too - one of the main characters wears black and looks a bit gothy, but the rest of the school's rentacrowd seems to have been put through a advert-style superwash, they're clean and tidy and very much not the sort of crowd one sees pouring out of colleges and schools in the UK.  

There are all sorts of things which make you go "WTF?" For example: one of the girls in the group which are part of the main story, lives in what seems to be essentially a stately home.  Is it likely that one of the people at this state high school would be living there, in England?  No, she'd be at the private school around the corner or some public school or at finishing school.  It's almost a trope of the US coming-of-age film that there should be a poor girl and a rich girl made to rub along together.  It's not one in English film making on the whole because it's untrue.  We've had a lot longer to delineate the sides of the tracks. If it had been set a couple of years later with a university crowd, the mixing of high income and low income families would have been more believable. 

However, I'm a Quaker, and we are asked to find new light wherever we may come across it.  The meaning of that has always seemed to be that no matter how wrong something may be generally, there may be a nugget of truth in it.  And so I kept watching to see if the nugget of truth might be there.  

It's had universally good reviews as far as I can see, and that relates to the performances of the main actors, and the fact that it seems Americans can recognize truths in the situations dealt within the series very readily.  But that makes me wonder why they didn't go the whole hog and set the thing in the USA?  Maybe the disconnect and annoyance I felt when watching was deliberately caused.  I'm not sure what the English setting added to the programme. 

I got over the constant tripping up over these things, but it meant for me that it could never seem truthful, because it's in this fantasy place where US-style education  has taken over England.  Even the house where Gillian Anderson lives looked American.  It may be that it tells a truth for some US people about their teenage years.  It can't be a universal truth, because it doesn't resonate with me at all, and I was a teenager, once! It doesn't seem to tell the truth about anything contemporary... all the people with sexual problems would be googling for dear life, not paying good money to sit in an abandoned toilet with a virgin teenager, no matter how talented.

I'm assuming it can only be good for another series, as English schools do not allow people to stay in high school indefinitely, and the actors are likely to grow up inconveniently and stop looking like teenagers.  Although most of them don't look like any teenagers I ever met, anyway.

New year, new start

I have not blogged for a long time on my personal blog.  2018 was a truly awful year for me, in which my estranged husband had a stroke and needed help, my mother fell ill and needed nursing and then died at the end of June, and my partner Eelco died at the end of November.  I wrote an obituary for him on my Caliandris Pendragon blog here.

It feels like I was never able to take the time to adjust to the previous shock before another came along.  The death of Eelco so suddenly and so young (he was 47) was so shocking I barely felt it for about a month, emotionally.  I've heard people say that they were numb after a death before; I never really knew what it meant.  I do now.

The impact of his death has come in the last couple of weeks, and I have begun to miss him dreadfully.  Although we spent a lot of time apart, I talked to him in the mornings, we texted during the day and then talked all evening, and so I probably spent more time "with" him than a lot of people who live together.  

Speaking to someone recently, I realized that I was thinking of my future as one enormous blank, because all my plans had involved him.  We planned to live together permanently once he was able to.  His father has been seriously ill for a long time, and had deteriorated recently, and so Eelco had been helping his parents at weekends, and was unable to visit and stay with me as often. 

It dawned on me during that conversation that I needed to sort out my future for myself, and not wait for the universe to sort it out for me.  I have allowed my blogs to fester for about a year, since I wasn't able to blog while looking after my husband (we'd been separated since 2010) and then my mother.  Since her death I hadn't really felt like it, and since Eelco's I haven't really felt like doing anything at all.  

I've had a cold the last couple of days and so I've been watching a lot of Netflix.  So I thought I'd start my reblogging with a couple of reviews of the shows I've been watching.

In which I appear on Radio 4's feedback re home education

This week I was invited to the BBC studios at Lincoln to be interviewed by Roger Bolton for Feedback on Radio 4.  My reason for contacting feedback was that Winifrid Robinson had presented a programme called "Out of School, out of sight" for radio four which had been broadcast a few days earlier.  Depending on when you are reading this, you may still find it on the iplayer.

The programme started with an interview between Winifrid and a someone from the family who had withdrawn their children from school allegedly in order to home educate, who had told their family they were moving to Dubai, and had decamped to Syria.

For some reason, Winifrid believed that if the family had been registered, this would not have happened, ignoring the fact that when a child is deregistered from school the local authority is automatically notified by the school, and therefore is "registered" on a list of electively home educated children in that area.

Starting the programme with that case set the wholly negative tone of the programme from that point on.  The programme makers were definitely of the opinion that registration and inspection were the answer for children who were claimed to be home educated and clearly were not being home educated, in the face of its own evidence that this is not the case.

Two of the problem families, a mother struggling to home educate child who was threatened with a pupil referral unit if his attendance didn't improve, and a Jehovah's Witness man who had been home educated by his mother, were subject to regular inspections by the authorities... and yet this didn't appear to be helping or have helped.

Ignoring that, the programme went on to interview a couple of actual home educators, firing questions such as "What qualifications do you have to be a teacher?" at one poor woman, and spending some time on the continued breastfeeding of the other.  Neither of them appeared to have any problem with inspections or registration.

In fact, the styles of home education, the benefits of home education and the success stories of home education were not a part of this programme, which a BBC statement claimed was entirely commissioned to concentrate on the children slipping down the holes in the system, either because they were not being educated suitable to their age ability and aptitude, or because they had been opff-rolled by a school desperate not to have their results cluttering up their test scores.  However, as I told Roger Bolton on Feedback, this was not obvious from the programme and was not stated anywhere in the programme.  It was presented as though the freedoms that home educators rely on were the problem, and if these were withdrawn everything would be fine.

I feel it gave a very unbalanced and negative view of home education which was not in keeping with the ethos of the BBC, and should be rectified with another much longer programme studying the positive aspects of home education.  Or maybe that's a programme we will have to make ourselves.

Sceptics and cynics and fleas

I've had a real problem with fleas this year.  The dog has those spot-on drops usually, but she missed a dose while I was down south looking after my mother after her fall downstairs, and when I returned she was fairly covered in the jumpies.  It's been a bad year for fleas, and vacuuming, spraying the carpets and her bedding and washing everything helped but didn't eradicate the problem.

I've tried a number of commercial solutions, but I am highly sensitive to the commercial flea spray and developed eczema on my feet and eyelids, so was looking for something else and found recommendations from hundreds of people for diatomaceous earth.

I hadn't heard of it before, found a food-grade supplier and ordered some, which came today. It's a white powder with odd properties... it has a drying effect as it absorbs moisture and oil almost instantly.  I've read a number of sites which swear by it and say that it works like magic for fleas, but you have to be careful only to use a little as it tends to dry out the coat in animals.  I was worried about the prospect of Tizzy licking the stuff off her coat, but she doesn't seem inclined to do that and it's not harmful if she does.

In doing internet research on diatomaceous earth I found a lot of claims for a whole variety of health benefits for people, in ridding them of parasites, lowering cholesterol, and adding silica to the diet.  I looked for research, mainly aiming to establish its safety and the quantity required for a therapeutic dose, and came across a website denouncing its use in humans.

I read the article expecting to find some evidence to back up the claims of quackery, but found none.  This is one person's opinion that people cannot make claims for this substance because it hasn't been through clinical trials for this purpose, and denouncing those making any claims for it.  But actually, there seems to be little scientific evidence for or against it.

This is true of any number of natural substances which have been used by people for centuries.  And what angers me about this sort of "trust me, I'm a doctor" approach is that it is one person's opinion, and no more valid or backed up by science than someone who tells you that diatomaceous earth is good for ridding pets of fleas, or red mites.  It is backed up by anecdotal evidence, which is entirely dismissed by the scientific fraternity, although for many traditional remedies, that's all there is.

When drugs have been put through clinical testing, you can be sure that any harmful effects are recorded, and that the boundaries for safety of the substance has been established.  But do all people react to all substances alike?  Aren't some fatally allergic to peanuts while another will happily munch away at a bag of them unaffected?  Can science cater for the endless variety in people's reactions?  No.

The third leading cause of death in the US is inappropriate treatment or medication - medications which have been through clinical trials.  It must be the reason that when doctors go on strike, the death rate actually drops, instead of rising as one would expect.  Would I prefer that diatomaceous earth had been put through clinical trials?  YES.  Am I going to wait to use it until they happen?  NO.

Drug companies and those invested in medical research will not pay for medical trials of substances that can't be monetized by patenting.  For this reason I think there should be a research tax in the UK which could be used to fund research into commonly used substances.  When research was conducted into lavender oil, many of the traditional claims for the oil were substantiated.  And like diatomaceous earth, there were a lot of claims in many different directions.  I don't think I need to take the word of experts or laypeople... I am going to try it, and see what I think, the same way I might try a drug the doctor prescribes... although in that case I might read the patient leaflet and decide that I'd rather not, thanks.

SAVE the NHS

I haven't blogged for a long time. However the upcoming election is making me feel very unhappy as so many people recently have said to me that they don't believe Jeremy Corbyn is capable of running the country. In the end, I don't think that's the issue.  The issue is, do we want the Conservatives to throw the NHS and all it stands for away?  I don't think we do.

Jeremy Corbyn's policies are what people should be looking at.  And the major item at a crossroads in this election is not Brexit but the NHS.  The tories have been starving the NHS of money in many ways at once.  They have made the NHS use commercial contracts for services which were traditionally provided by local hospitals, which in some cases seems to have replaced a working system with nothing at all.  People are complaining that having waited six months for a paediatric appointment they have been left in a no-man's land when Virgin healthcare have taken over the supply of services. 

Through the magic of corporate accounting, Virgin Care doesn't just make no profit, but actually makes a loss, and thus doesn't pay any tax in the UK.

The government are treating health services the way they are treated in the USA, as a commodity or a product, as though the long experience of dealing with a patient or trying different therapies with a consultant is worthless.

Taking contracts and money away from hospitals so that a service can be run by a for-profit company also takes money and flexibility away from hospital managers.

If you care about the NHS and its future as a free-for-all  health service you cannot vote Conservative.  That's all.

International Women's Day

I'm reminded by the Google Doodle that it's International Women's Day.  It's a day to be bombarded  by images of women doing amazing things, but it always makes me feel quite sad.  When I was at school in the 1970s we were definitely given the impression that being "just" a wife and mother was not a cromulant ambition for an intelligent woman, and I believed that.  I looked at my mother, who left her job when she was pregnant with me, and saw that women in her generation and those before her, had very little choice but to give up any career they'd begun for themselves, in order to stay at home.

I started work in the City as an industrial journalist, working on technical magazines, annual reports, and a staff magazine for Lloyd's Register of Shipping, more or less convinced that I would never want children.  I was the eldest of six, and knew all about the sleepless nights and mess and chaos which came with children, as I was almost old enough to be the parent of my youngest sister.

I married, and we were both agreed we wouldn't have children, but when my sister had her first baby I realized that being a mother wasn't just all the negative things I'd already experienced with my siblings - it was also unconditional love, and caring for the next generation.  An opportunity to bring up a child in love and nurture them.  Having brought myself to the point where I almost believed that I had no maternal instinct at all, seeing my sister with her baby awakened me.

It was another couple of years before I had my first baby, and I realized how much your own experience as a baby affected how well you are able to parent.  I began to have flashbacks of being a baby, and remembered trying to sleep with lights in my face and people talking loudly, feeling the backs of my legs cold when wrapped in a blanket... and those things informed my parenting.

I was definitely not an earth mother at first.  Even the night before my first baby was born, I was still thinking it might be practical to fetch my husband home to deal with dirty nappies.  Of course, all that was forgotten the moment he was born.  And I began to learn that what I had thought of as endless drudgery can be the most rewarding job you've ever done... it's all a matter of perspective.  I know that not all mothers fall in love with their babies, and not all mothers fall in love with all their babies, but I was lucky, and I did.  And I didn't find looking after them to be a brainless and unfulfilling occupation, but the best and most enjoyable work I ever did.

I can't help feeling that our society is discarding something valuable by trying to claim that men and women are equally capable of mothering children.  Millions of years of evolution, and the fact that our bodies are designed both for the having of the babies and the feeding of them once born, must offer some advantages mustn't it?  There are some women who are terrible at looking after children and some men that are brilliant at it, but on the whole, even in relationships where the tasks are shared evenly, the women have the edge.  When my mother worked in an old people's home for a while she told me that it was always their mothers that elderly people cried for, never their fathers.  If properly bonded in the first few hours of life, I believe that mothers have a bond with their babies that comes from nine months of being in the same body.

That's not to say that I think people can't love and nurture babies they haven't carried, I don't, I think the instinct to protect and nurture the young is there in everyone who had a loving upbringing.  It's harder to do though.  A woman who is allowed to bond properly with her baby in the first few hours of life doesn't have to make any effort or use logical argument to make her care for her baby, it's as natural as breathing.  Writing about this is making me uncomfortable, even though it is what I believe, because I fear to offend those who have adopted children or taken on stepchildren, which is more and more prevalent in our society, or for those who had post-natal depression and have struggled to bond with a baby.  I can't help feeling, though, that society would be a kinder and better place if we did recognize the damage that can be done to the mother-child relationship by interfering with the bonding process in childbirth and afterwards. 

I don't like the fact that feminists seem to disparage the work that women have traditionally done in the home and family as though it were worthless.  The view seems to be that only a moron or someone brainwashed by society or culture to think it is the only thing they can do, would ever want to be a full-time mother and housewife.  There has been a definite rise in the media of the attitude that women who want to be full time mothers are letting the side - and their children, especially their daughters - down.
But the original suffragettes weren't fighting for the right to be men and do those things which men had traditionally done.  They were fighting for recognition that the things traditionally done by women are worthwhile and of equal value.  Their campaigning for equality was not designed to make everyone work in a career, but to allow for the truth that our work, no matter where we do it and whether we are waged or unwaged, is of value to the family and to the country.

All that has been lost in the scramble for equal pay, and equal opportunity.  The net effect has been to devalue women's traditional work until it is seen as little better than being a road sweeper or loo attendant - the lowest of the low job. Women who want to do it are looked down on.  I was shocked when I realized that although I was the same person who worked in the city and organized two departments and six million pounds worth of printing, I too became someone who made people's eyes glaze over when I mentioned I was at home looking after a baby.  The implication is that you become a person of no interest to others the moment you stop work.  I even wrote to the Times to express that surprise, and received a lot of mail from women who felt the same.

I felt betrayed by the women and careers officers who guided me and gave me the impression that being a wife and mother isn't something worthwhile.  I fear that women today have no more choices than their grandmothers - where once they had to give up work, now they must work and have a career, whatever their own desire.  It seems to me that we have lost as much as we have gained, and that days like International Women's Day are designed to fire up girls to want to be astronauts or engineers, even if their dearest wish and natural talents mean that they want to stay at home and raise their own children.

I have a hope that the rise of transgender and multifaceted sexuality may one day mean that a person of any gender or none might be able to listen to their heart and follow their desire, whether that be for a wife/husband/civil partner and family or professional career, or dancing, or artistry, or hedge-trimming, or house building or genetics, and that society will begin to recognize that the nurturing of the next generation is not a cop-out for lazy people but a worthwhile job which brings rewards, not just for individuals, but for their families and society too.

There has been an immense amount of propaganda over the past century designed to manipulate the working population to provide what commerce and the war machine has required in terms of workforce.  Perhaps one day we will recognize the truth of what the suffragettes were fighting for and accord nurturing the children in a family the same status and reward as making armaments to kill them.

What sort of a world do you want?

I've been thinking a lot over the past couple of weeks.  Being alone gives you a lot of time to think without interruption, and while Tom has been away I have been thinking a lot.  One of the things I had been thinking about was how stupid it is that our government is subjecting the ill and disabled to assessments and denying them the benefits they need, and that this is costing more than it used to when we relied on doctors and medically qualified people to do it and were less punitive.  So many news stories have been published recently about people dying shortly after they were assessed as fit for work.

I live in a mainly Conservative area, and I can't understand it!  The people here are lovely, kind and warm, and it seems impossible that they should support a party which is forcing families and the sick and disabled into abject poverty.  So this morning I printed out and stapled together a poster I have pasted to the big window in my house.

What sort of world do you want to live in?

One in which disabled and sick people are cared for by all of us?

Or every man for himself?

This government and the previous government have been systematically dismantling the welfare state

They are now subjecting disabled people and terminally ill people to long assessments and interviews and 40-page forms, and their new system is actually costing MORE money than simply paying the disabled and sick and accepting some people may be frauds.  Many people who need benefits are being denied them.

People on benefits are "sanctioned" which means removing all financial support and the right to free prescriptions etc, in order to meet targets set by the profit-making companies now in charge of these things.  It isn't only the people on benefits who are suffering, many of the employees of these companies are under extreme stress.

More people than ever before are on the streets, or admitted to

hospital with malnutrition.  Use of food banks has grown dramatically.

Not only do sanctions cost more to administer than they save, (National Audit Office) which means we're paying more to starve families than we did to feed them,  if we closed the loopholes which allow corporations and rich individuals to avoid paying a fair share of tax, that would gain £37 billion - more than we need to offer social care and support the NHS.

If you  agree with this, please write to your MP, and consider whether you want to support these changes in our country.

Is this the world you want for the future?

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. 

I believe that love requires us to act now.

I put a PS on the bottom to say that I am neither on benefits nor disabled, because I wanted people to understand that it wasn't my own self-interest which was driving me to take action, but a wish to help those who are being penalised by the crazily awful system we have in place.  Although there would be nothing wrong with someone who is on benefits or disabled writing such a thing, of course, they would be open to the accusation that they would feel that, wouldn't they?

Don't want privatised NHS? Then FIGHT for it!

Poll after poll in this country says that a majority of people want a public NHS free at the point of contact.  Our NHS was the cheapest and most efficient health service in the world, as understood by outside opinion, and we are letting the Conservative government take it away from us.

But guess what?  The government is our government and they are supposed to represent us - not their own self-interest or their dearly-held personal opinions.  US.  They represent our interests in parliament and they're doing a bloody terrible job of it at the moment.  SO TELL THEM.  Use the "They Work for You" website to contact your MP and tell them that you don't want people resorting to private medical insurance because they aren't funding the health service properly. 

And if they argue that we don't have the money, point out that they seem to have the money to bomb places and buy a new trident deterrent, and if they don't have the money for the NHS perhaps they could cancel trident or maybe charge multinational corporations a fair amount of tax instead of allowing them to use loopholes to pass money around internally until they don't have any profits left to pay tax on. 

Ad maybe, if enough of us do this, we will get our representative to truly represent us, and pay properly for the NHS.

Arms and humanity

Bombing in Yemen from Wikipedia by Ibrahim Qasim

The UK has become the second biggest exporter of arms in the world.  The promotional leaflets talk about "defence exporters" as though the results of our "defence exports" weren't being used to kill women and children and to bomb hospitals in Yemen. 

Our whole approach to this must change if we ever hope to have a world in which we end wars.  At the moment we are allowing rich corporations to make money by selling death and destruction to other countries, and we are spending money we don't have on a nuclear deterrent that deters no one.

We need to be thinking about these things on a smaller scale, the one thing about Margaret Thatcher that appealed to me was her ability to do that.  Our renewing trident, for example, is like a family deciding to spend their money on some sort of state-of-the-art burglar alarm while starving in the kitchen.

The arms trade is worse.  That's like a family selling their knives to the next door neighbour knowing he plans to kill his wife and children with them.  We should get out of it.  It starts with making the trade less lucrative by refusing to allow licences for any country that is acting aggressively towards its neighbours.  There's no way that we could be selling arms to Saudi Arabia (who are aggressively attacking Yemen, including bombing Medecins sans frontiers hospitals, against international treaties).

Years ago I saw a documentary about East Timor, and among the facts in the programme was the fact that we were selling arms to the Indonesians knowing that they would be used against the East Timorese... in fact there was film showing the jets we had sold to Indonesia being used against the populace. 

I wrote to Alan Clark, completely astonished that someone who was so active in care for animals, would sell arms to a repressive regime that would use them against their own people.  Somewhere I have the letter I got in reply, which said that the Indonesians had signed agreements not to do that, and basically indicating it wasn't OUR fault if they weren't as good as their word.  Don't forget we also armed Saddam Hussein, who was originally our ally.

It's all a game to them.  It sems to me that if we don't stand up and be counted, they'll simply continue to sell arms while it is profitable, and damn the consequences.

I'm a nice person! Not a bully, not a trot

One of the things I admire about Jeremy Corbyn is that he has rebelled and voted against the party when his conscience told him to.  I hate that the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) has used this against him, trying to claim that they support all his policies, and have only voted against him specifically because they don't think he is a good leader.  They try to claim that they are in favour of democracy and then try to make the coup look like a vote of conscience.  How can it be when they claim to support his policies?  It makes no sense.

The PLP began talking about Momentum, the Corbyn supporters' group, as though they were hired assassins or left-wing terrorists from the very start of the coup.  Aghast at the huge support shown for Corbyn when more than 10,000 people gathered on Parliament Square, they tried to make those people look like loony lefties, violent thugs, or rabble.  From the very first interview on the radio, they talked about calling off the dogs, as they put it, and made it sound as though Jeremy Corbyn had gathered a gang of old militant left wingers to intimidate the right wing of the party. As ordinary members, our realisation that the news media colluded with this view of the Corbyn supporters by not challenging anything the PLP said, and that the PLP had a deliberate campaign to malign the ordinary members of the party, became clear.

They used outright lies (Angela Eagle's window wasn't broken.  a window in the same building was broken and that's a routine occurrence, not part of a campaign of intimidation), lies (Angela Eagle was not homophobically abused at her CLP meeting - she didn't attend) and frankly weird stuff (Joanna Baxter crying on News at One because a legal letter had been sent to the NEC and Owen Jones had texted her a perfectly benign tweet).

I'm not saying there haven't been foul things on twitter and in other places, or that people haven't trolled the PLP MPs.  But it isn't one-sided, Jeremy Corbyn and members of Momentum have been mercilessly trolled.  The difference is that they haven't immediately blamed the other side for not controlling their members or supporters, and haven't demanded action on internet trolling.  Many of the people prosecuted for trolling and stalking members of parliament aren't a member of any party, they are mentally ill.  And it was pretty rich, the PLP claiming intimidation and bullying, when they had bullied (by reports from MPs present) the democratically elected leader of the party, with the most overt personal abuse.

Every time a member of the PLP coup is interviewed, they link Momentum with a negative word or image, even though the people I've met in Momentum have been ordinary supporters of Jeremy Corbyn just like me.  There are people from every walk of life in the group.  Many people are aware of the untruths because they are either members of Momentum or know someone who is.

I celebrated when the court overtturned the ruling that new members of the party weren't able to vote, because I thought it was designed to disenfranchise people who had been promised on the website that they would be able to take part in the elections in the party.  That shouldn't have been promised if it were not going to be delivered, and the NEC ought to be owning up to that and accepting the court's judgement.

Instead I find that Tom Watson, who is deputy leader and pretended to be loyal to Corbyn, has been instrumental in going forward with an appeal against that judgement, which will cost us a lot of money.  Does it seem right that the NEC should be able to use our money to try to disenfranchise the new members who paid that money into the coffers?  Especially when you consider that a majority of the members are in favour of Corbyn and want the new members to have a vote.  Even those who aren't in favour of Corbyn are not in favour of the underhanded double-dealing which has been a feature of the last few months. 

At the heart of this is the question of who is the Labour Party?  Is it the members?  Is it the MPs?  or is it all levels of the hierarchy together?  If the latter, then how do we resolve the problem that the PLP seem to be out of step with the membership.  They seem to have an entirely dfferent view of the party and its chances of election - which for ordinary members seems to be being vandalised by the PLP!

They need to understand that Corbyn will again be elected with a landslide.  They need to understand that the membership are not going to put up with being slandered and libelled at every opportunity, and that when they say negative things about Corbyn or his supporters, all they are achieving is a negative profile for the Labour Party they profess to love, in the mind of the public.

Tom Watson, who is fast becoming the least-liked member of the party, has written that young members of the party are having their arms twisted by trots.  Really?!  I'm a 57 year old supporter, not a trot, would never twist anyone's arm to go with anything but their conscience.  I'll argue the case for Corbyn, but I wouldn't use any violence - again the violent language, designed to cement in the public's mind the image of Corbyn supporters as trots and as violent.  Many young Labour supporters have written to Tom Watson to object to his language and to tell him that they were capable of deciding for themselves thank you very much.

Maybe the PLP and Tom Watson can see that they are not making much headway, and with a new party in mind have decided to damage the Labour Party as much as possible in the process, as the future competition for their new party.  They couldn't have done a better job if they had tried.  Before the coup Labour were three points ahead of the tories.  As each day goes past they are sinking lower and lower in the polling.  A name and website for Future Labour was apparently incorporated in April this year.  I can only hope that they get over there and stop bothering us as soon as possible.

How on earth the PLP and Owen Smith can lecture about Unity and unifying the party when they have been the most divisive and hostile towards the membership of any group in any party that I can remember, I don't know.  They think the public and the membership are stupid and biddable, is all I can suppose.  I am hoping they will get their come-uppance shortly.

Noam Chomsky wins - we don't have a free press

I am absolutely shocked by the bias in both Guardian and BBC. Particularly the BBC which has allowed Labour MPs in the rebel group to slander Momentum as "dogs" and "thugs" without the least bit of proof that there is any violence given or threatened by Momentum, which as far as I can see is ordinary supporters of Corbyn like me.

I expected bias in the Murdoch press, and any press which is owned and operated by someone with an axe to grind, but I really expected better fromthe Guardian and the BBC. They say that you only notice how inaccurate reporting is when you are close to a story, but this is more than that. They are using negative words to describe Corbyn, allowing claims that he lost the labour vote on remain although 62% of Labour voters voted remain, nearly as many (1% less) as the SNP who had all their MPs onside and campaigning for remain.

That there are newsnight journalists tweeting unattributed negative rumours on twitter accounts which identify them as being from Newsnight is shocking to me. They obviously are partisan. I feel I've wrongly argued in my head with Noam Chomsky for 20 years that our press are not as biassed as he said, only to have him win the argument, because they are.

The Guardian does publish occasional positive articles, but in the main it is a constant stream of hogwash from the partisan Polly Toynbee - who, I'm sorry, should be disbarred from writing anything at all with such a personal grudge against Corbyn. And neither the BBC or Guardian are challenging the renegade MPs on the fact that they can launch a leadership bid any time, and should do this or shut up if they believe in the democracy in the Labour Party.

There were marches yesterday all over the country for Brexit and those are reported. There were also marches all over the country for Corbyn, and those have not been reported. The BBC have a one line report in their Corbyn article on the website, saying there were marches in Leeds and Liverpool of about a thousand. Liverpool was 3000 at least and there were also marches and demonstrations in Durham, Cornwall, Cardiff, Hull and many other places.

They allow Angela Eagle to spin the lie that support among party membership is decreasing while 60,000 people have joined up in the last week. most of them, if my twitter and facebook groups are anything to go by, are joining because they are appalled by the behaviour of the PLP and the antidemocratic nature of the challenge to the leadership. It's scandalous that they allow her space to say things like that and don't properly balance with some facts.

The Immigration problem

I partially watched Question Time last night, partly because I turned over late, and partly because I turned off early.  It was a frustrating experience, because of the things that weren't said as much as the things that were.

The comedian on the panel, Russell Kane, talked about the attitude of his family towards the result and said that Labour had failed to take up the initiative on immigration and address the problems which the people in the country have with it.  He also gave us a window on the xenophobia, saying that his relatives were dancing around the room declaiming that the immigrants who were undercutting their jobs as plumbers and builders, were "going home".

In a nutshell, this is the problem facing all parties in the wake of the referendum vote.  The Leave campaign made a number of promises they couldn't have a hope of keeping (not least all the money for the EU going to the NHS) and that a vote for "Leave" was a vote for controls on immigration.

The problem all parties face is that it can't be, unless we abandon all hope of trading with EU countries and maintaining a relationship with the EU.  This, I believe, is at the heart of Labour's inability to deal with the immigration issue: any realist will tell you that if you want to do business in future with the EU under the single market, migration of labour will be a part of that.

I'm not saying that I think immigration controls would be a bad thing - I have been astonished at how little planning councils and government do for changes in population - but that they are impossible to impose in the way the Brexiteers promised if we continue to trade freely with the EU.

Now, I know that a lot of the people who voted for Brexit for the reason that they feel they are being unfairly affected by the incoming immigrants, will simply declare that we should give up the single market for that reason.  But then we have the overwhelming problem of how to handle the people who are living here under the freedom of labour within the EU - and all the British people abroad who are happily working elsewhere in the EU.  Untangling that isn't going to happen overnight or next week or next year... it's a complex and very costly exercise you're looking at, with ramifications which extend beyond our borders and beyond.

The rise of racist and xenophobic attacks is going to get worse if we don't do something about it, because the people who are threatened by immigration are not likely to be listening to reason arguments about the impossibility of doing what they were promised.  The problem is that their anger is likely to be directed at what they perceive to be the problem - the immigrants - and not towards the people who really deserve their ire.  The self-serving bunch of fools who made the promises in the first place.

Our country has been strengthened by immigration over the course of centuries - from the Romans to the waves of Jewish and Caribbean and Asian immigrants in the 20th century.  The addition of people in times of plenty was positive, adding colour and cuisine to the country.  A lot of the problems we have at the moment are entirely caused by austerity - the NHS underfunded, social housing sold off or under-replaced, unemployment high in areas where old industries have been killed off or died.  But it is easy to see why people who are directly affected by a drop in income because they are experiencing what they perceive as unfair competition from the immigrant community might place the blame on their neighbour and not on the government.

Solving the problem properly requires investment in the social fabric, to the NHS and the social services and social housing.  I think it also makes sense for there to be changes to the rules on free movement of labour, especially when there is a big disparity in living standards between a newly-joined state and the other places in the EU.  It stops states being able to plan for their populations if there can be mass migration from one place to another without any controls.  And moving because you have a job in another state is rather different from moving to another state because you can make more money there.  We have opted out of being able to influence a change, although it is questionable whether there is a will to make that change in the other countries of the EU.

The people who are doing manual or labouring jobs don't have any protection in the current climate.  They don't have job security, they don't have the safety net that once was offered to them, and they don't have the same level of housing benefit or social security to fall back on if they lose their job or come to the end of a contract.  If they are self employed things are even more precarious.  It isn't surprising that they are the ones who feel most threatened by an influx of people.  They are also more likely to be living in areas where there is cheap housing, which attracts people in similar trades.

In the end, people thought they were voting for a couple of things.  Extra investment for the NHS.  Controls on immigration.  The remain camp weren't able to offer anything to counter those promises except more of the same.  It's only surprising to me that the vote wasn't even more decisive.  And our problem now is that no-one can deliver on the promises made.  And that's going to make people angry.

Jeremy Corbyn for Prime Minister

The referendum result and the chaos in both Tory and Labour parties have forced us to review what we are looking for in leader.  I was appalled to find that David Cameron, despite being paid to be Prime Minister of this country, didn't have a plan for the result which was returned on Friday after the referendum.  We pay the man to lead the country and he makes no plan for June 24.

It seems that both teams in the referendum had no more plan than "win referndum" and looked no further.  The Tories on both sides, Cameron and Johnson, pointed to each other and claimed the other should have made a plan.

Just when the Labour Party could have held the Tories to account, they decided instead to play a game with the leadership of the Labour Party.  Despite Jeremy Corbyn being elected with the largest mandate ever, they decided to blame him - not the people who made absurd claims about the money that could go to the NHS (Johnson, Farage Gisela Stewart), not the people who had made absurd claims about the possibility of access to the single market AND controlling EU immigration, but Jeremy Corbyn was the target of their abuse.

As a paid-up member of the Labour party who joined because I was so impressed with Jeremy Corbyn, I felt betrayed.  I don't think I will be able to trust the politicians who betrayed Corbyn, simply because people like Angela Eagle praised him a few days ago, and reversed her opinion once the leadership attack was on.  Which time were you wrong, Angela, I wondered?   When you praised the gruelling schedule that Jeremy Corbyn had followed, or when you said he didn't do enough?

She didn't look towards Gisela Stewart, who allegedly came up with the £350 million a week slogan, or the others in the Brexit campaign who had been too stupid to understand that access to the single market was not a given and would come with a price tag.  She looked towards Jeremy Corbyn.

I think it was his touching honesty and total belief in the things he says which first attracted me to listen to what he was saying.  Something which is a rare gift in a politician.  If he says something you know that he believes it.  That's something I look for in a leader.  Honesty and integrity.

Over the past few days, people have resigned at regular intervals from the shadow cabinet, and people have announced their intention not to support Jeremy Corbyn.  He has withstood the blows from the people he thought he could count on, those who are ostensibly on his side, but who refer to his supporters - people from their own party - as dogs and rabble.  He has withstood this onslaught with dignity and has not descended into the sort of personal attacks that others might feel justified in making.  He's shown remarkable strength of character.  That's another thing I look for in a leader.

To listen to the parliamentary Labour Party talk, you would think that Jeremy Corbyn was so far left of centre that he was calling for the establishment of a communist state.  But everything I have heard Jeremy Corbyn talk about has been moderate, proportionate, and reasonable.  A return to the public ownership of the NHS (it's escaped the notice of a considerable number of people that we ever moved away from that), looking after the poor and disabled, housing people, giving them meaningful jobs and paying them adequately.  Reducing the gap between rich and poor.  I think they are socialist policies that all the membership would support.   And so his knowledge of what needs to happen and his grasp on the policies that need to change is impressive.  Another thing I look for in a leader:  knowledge, but an ability to say more information is needed if required.

If you were to ask me if I see these things in any of the candidate on the Tory side, I'd have to say that the only person who impresses me is Theresa May.  But she lacks the final qualities I look for in a leader: warmth, human kindness and an understanding of the lives of ordinary people.  Jeremy Corbyn doesn't use his time in parliament to build up money by claiming expenses he isn't entitled to.  In fact he doesn't claim things he is entitled to, preferring to travel on public transport, and use a bike.

He talks to people, acknowledges policemen and others he encounters in the course of his work, and spends time interacting with those that make up the electorate whoever they support politically.  I admire that in a leader.  It's too easy to become part of a Westminster-focussed club and forget there are ordinary people who have spent their hard-earned money on being able to vote for a leader in the party elections.  He doesn't forget that, and we love him for it.

The Parliamentary Labour Party may look for different things in the leader they elect.  Certainly some of them have written lies about having consulted their Constituency Labour Party before resigning, or tales of people on the doorstep demanding a change, as though the ordinary electorate are likely to say those things arbitrarily, and should be allowed to decide who the leader of the Labour Party is.  I'd have respected them a bit more if they had been honest.

Jeremy Corbyn stands for everything I want - more social justice, a return to the publicly owned NHS and looking after the environment and the people in this country.  I want him as leader of the Labour Party, and I would vote for him to be our Prime Minister in a heartbeat.  I think the PLP have seriously misjudged the mood of the country.  And if, as many people are saying, this is all about Chilcot, then woe betide them.  Because we'll support Jeremy all the way if he calls for Tony Blair to be prosecuted.  And there's bugger all they can do about that now that they've failed to oust him.

Why do I support Jeremy Corbyn?

I moved north to rural Lincolnshire in 2013.  I love it.  I moved away from a constituency where I was happy to vote for my constituency MP because he had been very supportive of me and other Home Educators in 2004, when the incumbent Labour government had been threatening to change the rules to make home education much more difficult for parents.

He was an unusual Conservative: he spoke against the Iraq war, and stood on a platform with other people from other parties to oppose it.  He cared deeply about the local constituency and attended countless local events and gave his support to local people.  He was a Conservative MP but he was someone who voted with his conscience... which is probably why he was recruited to the whip's office.

Moving to another part of the country and another constituency meant that I had to re-examine the choices I had made in the past.  I think I am probably a natural Green supporter, and I am a Quaker, which means that social justice and equality are highly important to me.

I had been a Young Conservative in my misspent youth, because I associated the Conservatives with individual choice and freedom, and for reasons I can't account for I didn't feel mass movements were a positive thing.  But as I have got older I have become more and more left wing.  I have begun to connect to the things I actually believe in and the world I really want to live in, and it isn't an island of rich people surrounded by poverty, even if I were one of the rich ones.

By 2013 we had the coalition in power, and I was not at all happy at the changes that had been wrought in the welfare system, in the NHS, in the way that corporations and companies seemed to have more power and clout than the constituents that MPs were supposed to represent. I yearned for social justice, for fair pay for fair work, for a politician who wasn't on the make or screwing the expenses system, and who would stand up for ordinary people.

I joined the Green Party and eventually attended a meeting locally, but that attendance coincided with the beginnings of the leadership campaign after the Election in 2015, and as it happened, one of my social media friends posted a video of Jeremy Corbyn speaking.  I watched, found more on youtube and watched those.  Once he had confirmed that he was against fracking, I signed up to vote in the leadership election and then joined the Labour Party.  Here was someone who stood up and said the things I wanted said, who worked for the common good, and took public transport.

In the months since then, my affection and admiration for Jeremy Corbyn has only grown.  When he refused to deal in personal insults and instead insisted on dealing with the issues, when I heard him talk passionately about the need to reduce social inequality and saw how charismatic he was, my support turned into a passion to see him in government, able to implement his policies.

I was grateful to Jeremy Corbyn for something else:  before I supported him I believed we had a more or less free press and that Noam Chomsky was exaggerating when he said that the belief that we had a free press was actually as damaging as anything else.  I have been horrified by the way in which the press handled the first nine months of his leadership and how partisan they are - even the Guardian which was my paper of choice.

It's possible that the people briefing against him have been on his own side for all these months, and if that is true, I think it is disgraceful.  The democracy in the Labour Party was one of the things that drew me to it... if the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) manage to oust Corbyn against the will of the membership, that democracy is dead.

I don't want spin, or blustering politicians who don't have any principles and can spin on a penny, I want real conviction and real commitment to serving the people of the country.  That's what I find in Jeremy Corbyn and is exactly what seems to be missing from the PLP who seem to think their views on the leadership overwrite the will of the membership because they are in parliament, eeven when their own Constiituency Labour Party (CLP) are loyal to Corbyn and instruct them to be likewise, please.

I'm no fanatical SWP supporter, I'm a peaceful anti-fracking activist who believes, as Corbyn does, than in the end it all comes down to talking, and we should do that earlier, not as an afterthought.  I'm not an extremist and I offer no threats to those who are in opposition to my views.  But I'm not a pushover either.  I examine what I am told, and I think for myself.  And I support Corbyn because he has shown no lack of leadership in my estimation, only a lack of people willing to submit to leadership.

I agree with him that a resignation would only serve to betray the Labour Party members who are the party and to destroy the Labour Party as we know it.  Perhaps that is coming anyway, but I don't think we should allow the PLP or the shadowy companies and groups who support them to be the arbiters of that.  For if the Labour Party abandons democracy and Corbyn, who will stand up for them then?

TL:DR Cheer up! Stand up for what matters for you! Change the world for the better!

My children have been feeling pretty depressed by the result of the referendum, and I think that all the remain camp have been feeling low since the result.  The feeling deepened when it became clear that the Brexiteer plan was “win referendum” and they had no plan in place to deal with the fallout once they did, and the coup in the Labour Party has only made the directionless void in government even worse.

I’ve signed the petition for a second referendum because of the number and size of the lies told to the country, not least that the prospect of a free fall in the markets and prospect of a recession was “scaremongering”.  It is clear that many of the people who voted to leave thought that the gates of the UK would clang shut on the end of the count, and those people are going to be severely disappointed when they realise that the likelihood is that whoever is in government will have to agree a Norway-style agreement to the free movement of labour, which constitutes 80%+ of the movement of EU citizens. So it probably won’t change much.

The ones who thought a vote for leave was a vote for £350 millions plus to the NHS are going to discover that we will in all likelihood be paying the same to the EU and getting nothing in return, rather than the roads and fast broadband and investment for poverty-ridden areas like Cornwall.  If those areas are hoping that government will plug the gaps, they are going to find out how wrong they are.

However, we had an economy and a life before the EU and we can have one again.  During the swinging sixties we weren’t a member of the EU.  The way the country has been over the past ten years isn’t the way I want the country to be.  We’ve been chipping away at the NHS, removing the safety net for poor families, increasingly removing the very things that many people think is drawing others to the UK.  We don’t support families in crisis, we don’t provide for people who are too sick or too disabled to provide for themselves.

We are rewarding the richest in society and not demanding that they pay their fair share of tax, and we are making new laws which favour corporations and companies and not the ordinary people.  We have sold off our water, electricity, railways, and are busy selling off schools and hospitals. 

If this world isn’t the way you want it to be DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Join a political party which has a vision you can share - it won’t be 100%, there are going to be things you disagree with.  I joined the Labour Party last year once Jeremy Corbyn said that he didn’t support tracking, even though I had spent a lot of time fighting the Labour Party over their policies on Home Education.  I am naturally a member of the Green Party, but I couldn’t see that my membership was making any difference to what was actually happening, and so switched to the Labour Party.  If the coup against Jeremy Corbyn succeeds, I will join the Greens again.  

This is an ideal chance to examine what’s important to you, what sort of world you want for the future, and to decide to work towards it.  Too often the future is painted in financial markets and the prospect for interest rates and employment and not in terms of who we want to be, as people.  Do we want disabled people starving to death in their homes?  Children to be hungry at school and to need access to food banks in order to eat?  Hospitals losing money because they are paying profit to private companies? This is what we have now.  We can change it.

If you want a different type of Britain, it is time to stand up and work for it.  If you don’t feel able to join a political party, at the very least, support the causes you support, and write to your MP on a regular basis and tell him or her what you think.  They do take notice if a lot of constituents write - not the rote letters that the charities and pressure groups send out, but personal letters, will have an effect.

Set the intention, to support the things you value, and stand up for them.  I don’t think most people in the country are racist or intolerant of foreigners.  I think we are a tolerant, kind, polite society in general.  Don’t let the binary vote we were faced with change the way you think about other people.  An awful lot of them were deceived into thinking they were voting for the NHS, not against the EU.

And cheer up!  Politics is an artificial world but the sun still shines, the flowers still bloom and we have everything we had last Thursday and can make it through this morass.  And if enough people set an intention to defend the NHS, to improve life for the poor, to make the rich pay their dues, to prevent corporations from avoiding their fair share of tax… then maybe we can all change the world for the better, despite the last week.   

The Machine Stops

From today you have 23 days left to listen to The Machine Stops, a dramatization of the short story by E.M. Forster.  If you have never read the short story (and aren't likely to) I recommend it.  Otherwise make for the text of the short story, which is available here.

I first read The Machine Stops as a teenager in the 1970s.  It seemed then like a lot of science fiction, partly futuristic, but containing some language and elements which struck me as old fashioned, like many of the works of C.S. Lewis and other writers of that age.  It was written by E.M. Forster in 1909, and given that television and radio were in their infancy at that stage, he was able to imagine a world far ahead of its time.  That much was clear in the 1970s when I related the screens and sounds to tv and radio, but didn't really understand the irritation which minute delays caused one of the characters in the story.

The next time I read the story was in the late 1990s, when the internet had become a thing.  I got online in 1998, and soon recognized just how prescient Forster had been, with his imagining of the machine connecting people around the world having hundreds of messages from people in many different places.  Having started with a dial-up connection which often failed to connect me to the BBC website, one of the few UK places to have a website then, I understood the frustration and wish to hurry up by then.

Hearing the story in 2016, I realise that there is much I didn't understand in the 1990s which makes more sense to me now.  In 1998 I was very rare in the UK, writing a blog, uploading it via ftp to the Geocities website.  I was listed then in a list of blogs, and counted only seven UK blogs.  People would say "What's a blog?" and look puzzled if I told them.

The brilliance of the imagined world includes so many of the elements which apply to the internet and the way it works today.   In 1998 being able to attend Webinars was still in the future, and the rise of ideas and originality as a driver for success was still in its infancy. 

More than that, there was a message in the story which I believe was meant to warn us against polluting the atmosphere and making the world into a hostile environment.  The modern listener will immediately conclude that nuclear war has made the surface uninhabitable, but of course the invention of nuclear weapons was not to come for another 20 years when Forster wrote his story.  The industrial wastelands of the north of England and industrial towns elsewhere in the world may have given him reason to believe we might be heading in this direction.

Today I fear that we face a choice, between the continuation of fossil fuel reliance or putting our all into the development of renewable forms of energy.  Our country doesn't have long to take that decision between investing in a future world which can sustain life, and one in which we have ravaged the environment in the search for cheap fuel.  Already in America there are towns subject to poisoned water, increased earthquake activity and pollution from fracking, which have reason to regret allowing corporations with money to direct the policy they follow.

I worry that we are being swept up by a machine comprised of corporations which have mission statements that amount to "make money" which are blind to the damage they are causing, annd the human cost of the pursuit of wealth in the short term at the cost of our futures.  Indeed, the government machine in this country is busy crunching up the poor and disabled and spitting them out, in the pursuit of an ideology which has been dreamed up by rich people who have never had to search down the back of the sofa in order to buy a pint of milk.  They don't understand life in poverty and think that everyone has a support network which will pick them up when the state sanctions the benefits you rely on for food and heat.

Perhaps the message of the story is that we should all beware giving up our human compassion, human life, human failings, in favour of a perfect machine, whatever that represents.

Tum-ti-tum-ti tiddly no more

I used to love the Archers.  I'd listened all my life, initially unintentionally, because it was on in the kitchen in my childhood, and then gradually by choice.  I enjoyed the everyday story of farming folk, and it seemed to me to be fairly true to life - the occasional argument, the odd accident, the ebb and flow of normality and a window into a rural life where it was necessary to get up at 5 am for morning milking or do the night shift in the lambing shed.

I felt affectionate about the characters in the programme, and the way that they matured over time, the antics of Nigel the upper-class twit and tearaway in the local mansion gradually giving way to Nigel the responsible landowner and Nigel the family man.  It was easy to listen to, gentle and entertaining, on a Sunday morning over bacon and eggs, and seemed as English as afternoon tea.

It has to be admitted that the programme began dramatically with fires and disaster in the 1950s but it had settled into a very happy and beloved institution where things seemed normal... a balance of good and bad, nice and less nice, as you find in real life.  With added farming detail.

Then, they drafted in a producer from soaps and everything changed.  There started to be more dramatic events than normality.  Everything suddenly became fly-on-the-wall and first hand, instead of dramatic events being gossipped about over the counter in the village shop, or at the village pub.  Nastiness crept into relationships, and more and more drama was injected until there was nearly no-one in the village who didn't have a difficult relationship or difficult life.

Where the programme had been used throughout its run, sometimes a bit cackhandedly, as a way of informing the public or the farming community about government initiatives or  current concerns in farming, they didn't seem to want to use the dramatic storylines to inform the public in other ways.  Most of their social interest is skin deep nowadays.

The end really came for me when they cynically pushed Nigel off a rooftop, for dramatic effect, not because the actor wished to leave or the storyline called for it, but just in order to punch up the drama.  I hated that, and really I haven't been able to listen to it consistently since.  I felt they'd crossed a line into the type of soap on tv like Eastenders, where constant misery is an excuse for ever more dramatic events, usually centering around a celebration like Christmas or Easter.  Yay!  Happy Christmas, we just ran over/burned/decapitated a beloved character....

I've tried to come back, but instead of the easy, gentle listening experience which used to be the omnibus on Sunday morning, it's become a teeth-clenching, awkward, unhappy event.  I usually last five or ten minutes.  This morning it was two before I was driven to rant in my blog.

I'm sad that the programme has been taken in the direction of Eastenders.  I'd like the original programme back, but I've stopped listening.  It seems to me that Radio 4 has gone in pursuit of another type of audience, and I don't fit the bill any more.  Which makes me sad, because Radio 4 used to be everything I wanted from a radio station - and Radios 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 don't fit the bill for me, not at all.

All is one and one is all

Twenty-one years ago I was walking down uxbridge High Street with my daughter in a pram.  I wasn't thinking particularly spiritual or meditative thoughts.  It was an ordinary day, the high street in Uxbridge is always busy during the day and there were people everywhere around me.

One moment it was normal, and the next minute I was floating high above the market house in Uxbridge, aware that I was a part of God and all that is, and also myself.  I could discern other individuals there with me, but I was distinct from them.  There wass overwhelming peace, love, all those things which people who have hd a peak experience talk about.

My attention was turned towards the love I felt towards everything around me.  It's held together with love, that's what holds it in the material world.  I realised it wasn't love towards my fellow man or the birds and other animals only, but love towards the roof tiles, the bricks, the things we think of as inanimate, everything that forms part of the world we live in and beyond.

I have always had a conviction that we - humans - are all connected, and that some people are able to access the consciousness which runs beneath and connects us, but it came as a shock to realise that the oneness of all extended to the inanimate things of the world.  I was at the same time the consciousness that was loving the material world and the consciousness which was surprised by the fact that the love extended to bricks and roof tiles.  I was both at once and myself.

I do not know how long the experience lasted, and I don't know what my body was doing while my consciousness was off in the sky.  I do know that since then I have not had to be convinced of the oneness of all, I have experienced it.  I know it.  It's not something I know intellectually, I know it in my heart.

I don't remember if I told anyone about my experience at the time.  It took a while to process.  But when I did share it some years later, I got such a negative reaction that it was years before I shared it again. 

When terrible things happen, like the bombing in Brussels, the shootings in Paris or the constant bombings in Iraq and Yemen currently, I feel the sadness and pain that the families of those killed and maimed in the bombings have experienced, and I feel the desolation that it causes for those who are close or far from the blasts.  I know that we are eternal beings and so for the individuals who have been killed, they have been, as Penn says, turned over from time to eternity. 

I believe that when we die we experience our lives from all perspectives and experience the impact of the things we have said and done, from all angles.  I pray for the people who blew themselves up and those who are contemplating doing the same, as they are about to experience the oneness of all, and learn the consequences of their actions.  Who would need a hell?  Experiencing first hand the pain and grief that they have caused in their lives will be punishment enough.