Welcome to my blog which is sitting
in the kitchen where I can see the back garden which is abundant in flowers and
vegetation that has become triffid like in the rains. The garden is such a
treat because I never know what is going to appear next. Because it has been so
wet, some flowers come and go between the storms and may never be seen. For me
it is a quiet morning after a trip up North yesterday which became quite tiring
as a 3.5 hour journey stretched into 4.5 both ways owing to accidents closing
the motorway. This type of closure now seems to happen once in every three journeys
and always there is the mixture of relief at not having been in the accident
and of a reluctant acknowledgment that such a catastrophe could happen at any
time.
What did happen was that at 8.30 in
the morning, I called into the services for a cup of tea and to buy a pint of
milk for the friend I was visiting who lives in a boat faraway from a shop.
When I paid for the milk, the woman behind the counter said, ‘And what about
the tobacco?’ ‘What tobacco?’ I asked. ‘The Drum Gold tobacco that you asked
for and that I put on the counter,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ask for tobacco,’ I
said, ’and I didn’t see any on the counter’. She wasn’t satisfied with this. ‘I
put it there,’ she reaffirmed. ‘You can check my pockets, if you like,’ I offered
as I began to empty them, only to find that the first thing I took out was a
packet of Drum Gold tobacco. ‘This can’t be the one you mean,’ I explained, ‘look,
it is half empty.’ For a long five minutes we repeated ourselves until suddenly
a look of horror appeared on her face and she said, ‘Oh, I am so sorry. I
remember now, it was a different man. Really I’m too tired for this job, I’m no
good at it, I’d rather work with animals.’
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Nearly every moment this week has been
focussed on the Day of the Dead. (Obviously that isn’t actually true. It just
feels like that. The places where my mind has actually spent its week neither
of us want to know.) On Tuesday morning I was despondent as I envisaged an
ill-attended financially mortifying event losing me the best part of £5,000.
This was always the danger of budgeting realistically. Fortunately, my friend
Ali is an unmathematical optimist and she spent the best part of Tuesday and
Wednesday rejigging the figures more rosily. A plan to increase the possible
income by transferring the hip-hop event from one venue to another was
scuppered by the ‘straighter’ venue which refused to have the vomiting and
non-spending youth on their premises. I asked if we called the genre rural
grunge rather than hip-hop, would we be allowed in but only got a wry smile in
return.
Although I’ve resisted budgeting, the
panic I’ve been feeling, ‘not enough people will come’ and ‘I’ll lose a small
fortune’, are clearly budgeting thoughts that needed to be examined and, hopefully,
discreated. The numbers I need not to lose money are quite considerable but
not, I suppose, unattainable. In the meantime I’ve sent begging letters to Nick
Cage and Mike Eavis. Once Ali had misaddedup me into a loss of £500, I found
myself justifying a further allocation of £500 to the much desired (by me)
Copperdollar n the grounds that this is my sixtieth year and I deserve to give
myself a present I want.
---
The temporary but Olympian North
Koreanization of Britain by the BBC and the Tory government continues apace. As
I speak the commentators are congratulating themselves that ‘the country has
never felt like this before.’ It is truly embarrassing and seriously worrying.
The same media are stirring the crowds to scream and shout idiotically whenever
a british competitor appears, even though they probably compete in sports that
precious few know or care about. This adoration of freakish brawn is positively
primitive. When I say that we should have bigger crowds to watch scientists
think about the universe, I am treated like Victor Meldrew. I’m not anti-sport
and I felt really thrilled to watch the Ethiopian woman 10,000 metres runner
storming to the finish with a big smile on her face but the combination of
narrow patriotism and heroic hyperbole is driving me nuts.
(Incidentally, just heard Michael
Phelps called ‘hugely talented.’ No; he’s a swimmer with big feet.)
For the past hour or so, I have been
perusing my copy of ‘Deep Socialism’ by Wilberg to find a pithy quote to
explain my disquiet with this abuse of intelligence called the british
propaganda Olympics. (Which, by the way, has hastened the end of the adverb.
Blair began it when he said ‘we will do it right’ but the sports world has
taken the adverb abolition by storm.) Unfortunately there isn’t an axiom that
says it all but basically it is to do with the market commodification of value.
The nauseating sponsor-driven identikit ‘Team GB’, (cynically paid for by
coco-cola and a host of other multinationals) is part of this turning of real
human value into the symbolic value of a brand – the very economic Nazism that
has allowed the fraudster banksters to impoverish the 80%, the huge global
underclass, the under-nourished, the under-valued, the under-paid, the under-employed
and unemployed.
So it goes.
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