Pay for PleasureFind out more

Read what you like,
Pay what you think

I hope you will find this site creative and innovative. The core of it is that you can download any of my books and read them before paying (or not) what you judge they have been worth to you. The rules are simple.

1

Download Book

2

Leave a review and make a contribution. This amount can be anything from zero to a king’s ransom!

3

That’s it. You can see that this inverts all normal buying habits. It puts you in charge.

 

You deal directly with me, the author, both by contribution and feedback. No middlemen. No Amazon. No need for prior reviews in the literary columns.

I hope you all become a fan of the site and tell all your friends, or tell me what you think of it here.

Jack

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Trial and Punishment

Monday, January 24, 2022

I wrote this epic poem during the second lock-down. Beset by concerns for my children and grandchildren in an unravelling climate emergency, I dropped into a purple vein and finished the poem in six weeks, a 22 line stanza a day marathon. Written like a science fiction novella, it sets out the terrible fate that might await humanity. Two individuals, a modern day Adam and Eve are chosen by alien arbiters to decide the planet’s fate. You can download it from this site.

Here’s a quote from the Second Canto:

Canto Two

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones.’

-William Shakespeare

The Species

1

Humanity’s self-styled ‘third’ millennium

Had not regained the equilibrium

It once had before the rise of norms

Of ownership, coinage and cuneiform

It had endured a moral regression

In contrast to its scientific progression

Making knives to bombs-atomic

Dividing and conquering, in chronic

Tension between good and evil

Disintegrating through the visceral

Urges of the species, the Us and Them

The blood of battle was never stemmed

Whether on streets or in imperialist mayhem

And often in defence of some religion

Fervent faiths that burgeoned

On mystery and legend

Furthered through conduits of lie and fraud

Intent on spreading the word abroad

‘Sacred’ books followed to the letter

And rituals convincing them they were better 

Than others who took oaths to different tracts

Based on equally mythic facts

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Eighty is the new fifty!

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Writing as a Longevity Pill.

Ok. so now you are eighty, in the land of diminishing returns. So many friends have taken leave by the wayside and, like part of an expedition into the unknown, beset by danger, you belong to a small cohort, braving the hostile terrain ahead.

To live a long and healthy life one is supposed to have one’s existence shored up by five essential pillars: diet, exercise, sociability, mental challenge and purpose. But even then there is a creeping assumption that once you’ve hit the three score years and ten mark, life becomes a roulette game with a horribly grinning Fate turning the wheel. But, whatever age we have reached, most of us are desperate for a bit more life unless illness, trauma or extreme fatigue has taken us by the throat so that we have felt forced to whisper, “OK – I give in – take me.” Assuming one does not want to be taken, how does one cross the dwindling tundra of the end game?

At eighty, I studiously attend to all the five pillars but the latter two – mental challenge and Purpose are handily conflated into one; Creativity. I write and therefore I am. And shall probably be so until the dot dot dot of my final sentence of my final paragraph.

I took a quick search of writers who were still in commission after their eightieth birthday and there are a few notable examples. One – Lorna Page – wrote a bestselling thriller Dangerous Weakness in her nineties and used the money to buy a big house, whereupon she invited people in from care homes to indulge in the Creative Purpose, thrusting acquiescence to the Grim Reaper behind them. 

However, when I didn’t include the number eighty in the search, Google was packed full of lists of  ‘ageing’ writers, where the definition of ageing seemed to be fifty years! This sums up the communally held view that you’re getting towards the end of your productive life once you’ve reached late middle age. Publishers love young photogenic blood and seek out the latest literary stars with their twisty words and tricky plots – biting hugnrily into their soft, vulnerable necks to feed the blood sucking needs of the fiction industry. 

There is also that cliche: most novelists have only one book in them. The notion that you might be someone like Edgar Wallace and knock out a book a week, belongs to a parallel universe of pure fantasy.

Still, the fact of the matter is that writing requires daily exercise to keep the creative muscle taut and strong. Fear not that psychological blocks will prevent the wannabe author in you from putting meaningful words on the page. Just write. Anything. A diary. A blog to yourself, a stream of unrefined consciousness.  The very act (these days called journaling) of doing so is both therapeutic and practical. It is a clearing of the stream of consciousness each day of the weeds of historical baggage to allow it to flow readily when you call upon it for a focused creative endeavour. There is an adage I have used extensively elsewhere that you write yourself into knowledge.

I had a full and relatively productive academic life, ending up as a Professor and Director of a University Research Centre. Writing was my living, of course. Articles, reports and books were part and parcel of the job. But, at the same time, I spent spare hours – usually on trains, planes and in hotels – writing novels, plays and poetry.

Today, all time is mine to have and to hold. The latest product of this disciplined daily routine is my book of short stories, just published, called The Fortune Trader of Samarkand and other Tales Through Time. A temporary valediction upon reaching my eightieth year. The collection comes from a year and a half of podcasts of the short stories I buckled down to write every week. At the same time I am gradually bringing, blinking into the light, hibernating fiction that I have written across the decades, dressing it up in new clothes for public view.

During a long life, different interests and challenges develop. I have often said that despite thinking the door is shut, along comes Fate and opens it with a beckoning finger. Thus I have written novels about social behaviour, detective fiction, philosophical fantasy and science fiction. I have published a book of aphorisms on Zen Management and have another ready to roll, shedding light on social conditioning and personal freedom. And I have written plays and poetry. The marker of these outputs across time is not that they have been accorded the reward of a critic’s praise but that they have opened up channels to personal understanding. This is the primary goal. You are your first reader. Later, you can seek out the approbation of the masses.

One must reframe fear of the blank page. It does not represent the tyranny of the unknown but the seductive promise of the soon-to-be discovered. Whatever each of us does with that page, it will be unique. No two people have the same creative fingerprint. And as we exercise our imaginations, the quality of our verse or prose may improve until we  speak with unique voices.

Then, along with the increasing quality in our artistic expression comes something else. The term for it is channelling. Like Carl Jung I believe we are all a living expression and facet of something termed  the universal unconscious. We are born from it and die back into it. Being creative enables us to establish living channels to it. The universal unconscious is the repository of all of human experience: the past, present and the future. The act of writing (and of composing, painting, sculpting and all other realms of artistic expression) can be elevated to a point where the writer becomes a conduit to that unconscious realm, and draws from it lessons for us all to learn. This results in authors having a unique voice and having ‘something to say’. 

This is why I still write every day at 80. It makes me feel a part of the complex interplay between the daily reality of the failing body and the magical, mysterious vastness of Universal Unconscious. It’s my job. And I love it.

I hope I have been persuasive enough for you, particularly the older viewer, to try it. You will enter a garden of delights if you are prepared for the long haul. It has to become a way of life.

So – I finish with a bit of advertising. You can find my novels and collections on Amazon Books, usually through your country’s Amazon link. British readers go to Amazon.co.uk for example. My name is Jack Sanger. As I speak I have so far uploaded:

The Fortune Trader of Samarkand – a collection of cryptic tales across time, from 40 000 years in the past to 40,000 years in the future.

Hot Flushes – a comedy of pre-millenium manners where four husbands embark upon affairs to revive their marital relations. They think!

Edward “Teddyboy “ Silver Master of Chaos – a modern Marlowe thriller full of twists, turns, sex, drugs and rockn’ noll.

The Lone Shark and the Scent of Prey – a dystopian climate thriller with an imperious female assassin

And in the next week or so  I’ll add

The Mental Traveller – and – 

 The Second Birth of Aniis Balanchine.

There will be more after that!

Please try them – and leave reviews!

Meanwhile, pull out a ream of paper and dip your quill in the ink ….

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The Podcaster

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Here I am, getting all techy sith my mic, baffles to absorb sound and a rather neat podcasting platform called Buzzsprout. the intent? To draw people to this website and encourage them to download books.

it’s quite addictive, actually. Choosing extracts to read, getting the head around presentation, music underpinnings, the arts of sound shaping with various effects like ’fade-in’, ’fade out’ and ‘sound normalisation’. But the big one is the actual reading! Do I put on voices? Do I heavily dramatise?

In the end I have opted for a nuanced narrative voice, no character accents, but building up a style that is clear but allows the reader to impose her/his own interpretive subjectivity. I think I’m getting better at it.

If you’d like to listen, go to the following link: https://hisauthorsvoice.buzzsprout.com/ and I hope it entertains you!

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The Transitory Nature of Life

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

My son Joseph mentioned that in Japan, where he lives, ceramics are worth a great deal more if they are broken and then mended with gold filling. That led to me writing some lines in a Blues, as follows:

Yet the greatest thing I have to share

Is that love’s like china and oft needs repair

But if you mend each crack with melted gol

Its beauty increases for all to behold

Its beauty increases for all to behold

(Cracked China Blues)

At the heart of this is a reverence for how the transitory nature of life can be held up momentarily for inspection, while accepting the inevitable order of things.

I have been unlocking poems I wrote thirty or so years ago, refreshing and sprucing them up to meet the demands of my older eye. They deal with the same subject, though in a more direct. challenging way.

Passing

We make a mark in sand or snow to watch the tide 

Or sun erase our passing tracks

We press a finger on another’s cheek

To see the soft-red imprint, dull then fade

We lie upon the hothouse summer corn

To watch the stalks rebound upon our love

We sit upon the dry stone of a grave

And dampen it with thoughts of what will be

Spectres

Four events emerge 

Ghostly through the driving

Winter snow

A rabbit bobbling slow

With myxomatosis

Feeling blindly down a furrow

A dove dancing along a fence

Cooing, impotent, in the gale

A crow blunt-beaking frozen flesh

On a tree-hung corpse’s bone

Three acts

In play on nature’s stage 

Conjoined

By a fourth, 

An invisible trudging man 










    

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The Three Legged Cow

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

What’s in a gift I ask of you?

Over my life I’ve received a few

But none to match my five year old joy

At receiving a gift from a miner’s boy

Of a brown lead cow with a leg short of four 

Which I carefully placed in my secret drawer


From then until now there’s been no repeat

It’s been lead in my heart with each gift’s receipt

The ones that made my heart go cold

Like a box of chocolates white with mould

Or socks that were more than a size too small

“I never realized you’d grown so tall”

Or a tee shirt with a motif I once desired

With the label: “Keep away from fire”

Or a prog rock vinyl, corners frayed

With scratches showing it’d already been played

Or a radio implanted in a knight’s vizored head

Whose kitschiness conspired to fill me with dread


Or those ‘perfect’ presents, so carefully thought

That somehow still amounted to nought


From birth to puberty to adult male

Birthdays and christmases left a trail

Of dashed expectations as hope ever dwindled

That those five year old’s feelings would ‘ere be rekindled


I never knew that that wondrous day

Would leave me this void I can never allay

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Mandala in Purple

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

“Don’t visit my grave,” you said

“It’s an empty shell,”

But I lay purple petals on the earth

Defying you with a spell

For though you were right you weren’t to know

That I need a certain place 

Where memories may come and go 

And looking down on my small bouquet

They form a mandala, a ring, a Mobius

Strip encircling time

Making a Now that whispers Us

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Long before there was Christmas

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

The family sits separate around the tree

Among wrapped gifts tied in ribbonry

Carols on the telly and turkey on a spit

Sweets being chewed, mobiles all lit

Cars outside under fairy lights

Hanging from trees and eaves through the night

Under floor heating at 30 degrees

Tee shirts with logos and neatly pressed jeans

The house is just one of millions at play

Fleetingly observing a middle eastern day

A babe in a barn and three wise men

A virgin mother and a Bethlehem

But long before that and swamped by time

There was a feast which had more reason and rhyme

Family gatherings had an intimate knowledge

Of why they must gather and pay the sun homage

This was the solstice, the midwinter feast

That marked the new sun’s ascent in the east

Before the invention of prophets and gods

And the wheel and the horse were not yet shod

When spears and arrows had flint splinter tips  

And tying was done with fine leather strips 

And wolves became dogs to guard the camps

While the moon and torch were nightly lamps

On this shortest day and longest night

Hunters and farmers engaged in a rite

To banish the dark and nurture the sun

And remember a year of lives come and gone

They doused an infant, the newest born

And pressed its lips with salvia soaked corn

And girded its ankles in copper thread

And a cloth soaked in rosemary tied round its head

And they built their fires near holy trees

Whose fruit made a potion that set the soul free

To voyage across the Sea of Dreams

In a burning raft of juniper leaves 

With root crops and sour fruit sweetening the tongue

Fermented in honey while the old sun shone

With stored grain baked in a twisted braid

In a pocket of embers while the old year was laid

Under the black with its prescient stars

They drank to forget the previous year’s scars

And toasted the kin who were lost to the feast

And would never again share the flesh of the beast

They drummed and chanted the ancient song

That nurtured the sun and made it strong

And they sang for the stars that mapped all new birth

And sang for the rains that nourished the earth

For much of history this feast’s potent power

Fuelled the sun so that nature could flower

But then it was stolen and given a new face

By creeds where its rituals no longer held place

And with its going communion was lost

Nature disowned at humanity’s cost

Replaced by feasts both specious and crude

In praise of false gods and material goods

The family sits separate around the tree

Among wrapped gifts tied in ribbonry

Carols on the telly and turkey on a spit

Sweets being chewed, mobiles all lit

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The Lilac Tree

Sunday, August 9, 2020

One day when I was six or seven

And doubted there might be a heaven

A place with angels and a bearded God

Who ruled the Earth with his lightning rod

Well, on that day, I had to pee

And Mrs Drummond let me be

So out I went into the yard

Where urinals waited, yellow tarred

By years of bursting childhood wee

From nose-held careless infancy 

I did my bit to add more stain

With my little spray of acid rain

Then, just as I had started back,

I stopped mid-step on my usual tack,

A rush of colour caught my gaze

The playground tree was a purple haze

It enticed me up its bursting tower

Of dripping pendules of lilac flower

I found myself a place to perch

High inside its pagan church

And fell into a reverie,

A drug-enhanced cacophony

Of flies and beetles, stripy bees

Murmuring on the violet seas

And there I dozed until the bell

Which let my schoolmates out as well

Some climbed too so they could be

Co-celebrants in the sorcery

By telepathy we shared a prayer

To an Ancient One we sensed was there

That childhood spell still wraps my skin

And stops life trying to shut me in

From the lilac tree I still derive

My sense of truly being alive 

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Stop the World

Sunday, August 9, 2020

Stop the world I want to get off

For I hear my father in my cough

My life was carved in words now worn

On the altar stone when I was born

Stop the world enough’s enough

Of collecting all this material stuff

That builds around me like a tomb

And turns the sunlight into gloom

I want to die and be born anew

So I do not do what others do

I want a path to love not war

A paradise on a far off shore

Stop the world I want to try

And look around with a baby’s eye

And smell the scent of a thousand flowers

And sleep below a broad leafed tower

At home among the fur and wings

Of a thousand living breathing things

To be a feral wandering soul

Without a sense of aim or goal

Stop the world I want an end

Of seeing what is round the bend

All I want is to be known

For words in water not in stone

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Stray Woman Blues (song for guitar 15)

Monday, April 27, 2020

This morning I woke up in my secret lover’s bed
I woke up in a cold sweat in my lover’s bed
I‘d just had a nightmare that filled me full of dread
 
 
I was dead in a coffin made from the willow tree
I was dead in a coffin made from the willow tree
And my eyes were open for the whole world to see
 
 
And the ladies all spat as they passed me by
And the ladies all spat as they passed me by
But they curtsied to the man who stood at my side
 
 
“Oh my wife,” he whispered, “I killed you for your lies
“Oh my wife,” he whispered, “I killed you for your lies.”
“I loved you and forgave you not just once but twice”
 
 
“You played me for a fool, left my side in the night
You played me for a fool, left my side in the night
For another man’s bed and to share his delights.”
 
 
“The third time you strayed I put a knife in your heart
The third time you strayed I put a knife in your heart
For we swore the Book that we would never part.”
 

This morning I woke up in my secret lover’s bed
I woke up in a cold sweat in my lover’s  bed
I‘d just had a nightmare that filled me full of dread

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Super Hero (song for guitar 14)

Thursday, March 19, 2020

 

She works as a hotel cleaning maid
For a nasty boss who’s rich and mean
The pay just covers living costs 
=With a bit left over for her laptop screen

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

She dons a lycra body suit
With hood and gloves and full face mask
And heads off to the sleazy streets
To execute heroic tasks

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

She breaks the necks of evil men
Pushers, hitmen die in reams
She rips the throats of racketeers
And pimps with all their sordid schemes

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

And on every victim of her rage
She sees her boss’s callous face
It’s the only way that she stays sane
And a part of the human race

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

So through the night she cleans the streets
With untold acts of bravery
And through the day she dusts and cleans
In a life of modern slavery

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

 

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

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The Power Brokers (song for guitar 13)

Sunday, January 19, 2020


Governments come and governments go

Jumped up puppets in a show

National boundaries soft as chalk

Sovereignty is empty talk

There are those beyond the public gaze

Who know no laws and shape our days

We think we are autonomous

No-one else is quite like us

But we’re controlled by unseen forces

And follow pre-determined courses

There are those beyond the public gaze

Who know no laws and shape our days

Every act and every thought

Changes nothing matters nought

For us it’s Anonymity

The background noise of history

There are those beyond the public gaze

Who know no laws and shape our days

We live and love, we age and die

But never once will we espy

Those beyond the public gaze

Who know o laws and shape our days

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

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Passing Through (Song for guitar 12)

Monday, January 6, 2020

There is nothing here left of you

To show that you once passed through

Nothing to show we shared time

No evidence of a crime

No prints where your hands used to touch

No smudges on the rims of cups

No texts on my mobile phone

No photo I might want to own

You’re a mystery wrapped in a cloud

Who I dare not question aloud

I ‘d be certified if I insisted

That you may once have existed

Is your next lover beside you now

Will he one day question how

You could leave without a clue

No sign that you’d once passed through

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

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The Devil’s Handshake (Song for guitar 11)

Friday, December 20, 2019

I am a cold unfeeling phanton

Existing with no flesh and bone

I’ve lost my friends and all my family

A just reward for what I’ve doneI was a family man of virtue

I was a family man of virtue

Until one day I strayed alone

And met the Devil at the crossroads

From that day my seeds were sown

“Just shake my hand upon our contracT

And bend your knee to my command

And then I’ll make you rich as Croesus

Known across both sea and land”

I was a family man of virtue

Until one day I strayed alone

And met the Devil at the crossroads

From that day my seeds were sown

Oh I was rich as rich as Midas

All I touched was turned to gold

But my heart once warm and giving

Was now gripped in Satan’s hold

I was a family man of virtue

Until one day I strayed alone

And met the Devil at the crossroads

From that day my seeds were sown

Now I’m a stranger in a strange land

Ghouls and wraiths for company

I rule this place twixt hell and heaven

I am the Lord of Purgatory

I was a family man of virtue

Until one day I strayed alone

And met the Devil at the crossroads

From that day my seeds were sewn

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

1 comment

Later a Fox (Song for guitar 9)

Thursday, December 5, 2019

 

Mother and daughter went into the shop

The girl wanted pizza and a bottle of pop

The counter boy gave her the coke and the grub

In a plastic bottle and a plastic tub

 

Shop pop grub tub shop pop swag bag

 

Daughter and mother went dancing along

Drinking and chewing and humming a song

They dropped their rubbish in a litter bin

Full of paper and plastic and stale food and tins

 

Along song bin tins along song bin tins

 

Later a fox came looking for food

And thought that something smelled really good

He toppled the bin so the rubbish was spread

And ate some crusts of buttery bread

 

Food good spread bread food good spread bread

 

After a while a strong wind came by

And blew pizza wrappings up into the sky

One fluttered about like a kite with no string

And stuck on the head of a gull on the wing

 

By sky string wing by sky string wing

 

The gull was blinded and crashed to the sea

Where the wrapping came off and let her fly free

The plastic sank down like a clear parachute

And a jellyfish thought it might make a cute suit

 

Sea free chute suit sea free chute suit

 

Then a seal gulped the jelly with mouth opened wide

But it wriggled away leaving plastic inside

The seal got sick and washed up on the shore

Where children were eating a pizza for four

 

Wide inside shore four wide inside shore four

 

They called the coastguards but the poor seal had died

So they checked his stomach for what was inside 

There were wrappings from pizzas and chewing gum goo

And horrible stuff people put down the loo

 

Died inside goo loo died inside goo loo

 

The seal was taken and buried at sea

The rubbish was placed in a bin by a tree

Later a fox came looking for food

Knocked over the bin as he smelled something good …

 

Sea tree food good sea tree food good

 

 

Later that day a strong wind came by

And cheese pizza wrappings blew into the sky ….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blue Angel (song for guitar 10)

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Like a bright shooting star
You shone from afar
You colour my night
In Black and White
Your face does not lie
There is truth in your eyes

Marlene Marlene Marlene O

A century ago
Saw Blue Angel on show
Though our times are apart
You captured my heart
But time cannot hide

What I feel here inside

Marlene Marlene Marlene O

I sit here alone
When her movie is shown
I never leave until
The cinema is still
The curtains pulled tight
And turned-up house lights

Marlene Marlene Marlene O

I’m not out of my mind
My heart is not blind
For one day my queen
You’ll step from the screen
And in a hot blooded bliss
You’ll wake to my kiss

Marlene Marlene Marlene O

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

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Lilith (Song for guitar 8)

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

All you men now heed my warning      

Of what will bring you pain                    

And the demon who will mete out justice  

Well Lilith is her name  

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

You think that Eve was the earliest woman

From Adam’s rib she came

But the first female to give him trouble

O Lilith was her name 

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith was her name

For she refused to lie beneath him

Equality was her aim

So God threw her right out of Eden

O Lilith was her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith was her name

But that made Lilith very angry

Now vengeance was her game

So she became a vigilante

And Lilith is her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

She roams the night to create mayhem

She offers pleasures untamed

But she’s intent on retribution

For Lilith is her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

So any man who thinks he’s god

And a woman tries to shame

A she-devil will bring him down 

And Lilith is her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

She’ll eat his heart she’ll burn his soul

She’ll leave him mad insane

She’ll kill his child to end his bloodline

Yes Lilith is her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

No comments

Cracked China (Song for guitar 7)

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

I’m old my son so what have I learned?

Now my race is run and my candle is burned

My eyes don’t see what they once did

And my ears don’t hear what I am bid

And sometimes my ears don’t hear what I am bid

Oh the women I’ve known who made my heart flutter

My memories spill over like rain from a gutter

The wins and the losses the joy and the pain

The bodies I’ve known ‘gainst which I have lain

The bodies I’ve known ‘gainst which I have lain

I thought through the years how to give this advice

On the meaning of love in your journey through life

But I couldn’t find the words that would make it clear

When I know that the young just don’t want to hear

When I know that the young just don’t want to hear

Please listen my son to my hard won belief

You can’t steal love like a light fingered thief

It has to be given to sweeten your soul

Love is worth nothing if theft is your goal

Love is worth nothing if theft is your goal

Yet the greatest thing I have to share

Is that love’s like china and oft needs repair

But if you mend each crack with melted gold

Its beauty increases for all to behold

Its beauty increases for all to behold

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

No comments

Extinction Rebellion ( Song for Guitar 6)

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

 

We’re on the greatest planet in the stars

We orbit between Venus and Mars

We can treat it full of love and grace

Or turn it into trash in space                   

It’s the first, last, best and the most

A Paradise from coast to coast

 

From oceans deep to mountains high

From desert heat to polar ice

From north to south and east to west

It’s our only world, let’s make it the best

 

Don’t turn its air into fumes

Don’t build until there’s no more room

Don’t spray with poison to kill the weeds

Don’t dump your rubbish in the seas

It’s the first, last, best and the most

A Paradise from coast to coast

 

From oceans deep to mountains high

From desert heat to polar ice

From north to south and east to west

It’s our only world, let’s make it the best

 

Come on we’ve got to work together

Save our planet now or never

Ask yourself deep in the eye

“Will my children live or die?”

It’s the first, last best and the most

A Paradise from coast to coast

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Carnivore Coda (Song for guitar 5)

Thursday, March 21, 2019

The curse was scratched upon a wall

In a cave hid from the light

It said, “Beware millennia

Of glut and then of blight…”

But we just laughed at the prophecy

In our Paradise delight

On the final day of the thousandth year

A strange old madness showed

We cut the throat of a suckling calf

And we watched its final throes

Indifferent to its reckoning

And its mother’s howls of woe

“They cannot think, they feel no pain,”

We chanted blind with blood,

“Let’s rear them for our pleasure

To be our staple food.”

We turned all land to grazing

Convinced that meat was good

Blinkered to the land’s decay

And the rivers running dry

We sucked the life from Paradise

With countless sheds and sties

So when the new millennium dawned

There was no Paradise

We added to the land’s decay

With mass insecticides

And nitro-phosphates by the ton

Sprayed down from the skies

So in our new millennium

There was no Paradise

A scorched earth, a barren land

A leafless tree of life

A bird-less sky and empty seas

And silent silent nights

Thus began our living death

Our thousand years of blight

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Our World (Song for guitar 4)

Friday, March 15, 2019

 

We’re marching for our futures

We’re marching for our fate

We’re marching for the pl

Before it is too late

 

Governments say “Go back to school

You do not understand

Stick your noses in your books

We’ve stuck ours in the sand”

 

We’re marching for our futures

We’re marching for our fate

We’re marching for the planet

Before it is too late

 

Governments have lost our trust

By sitting on their hands

And allowing greed and avarice

To pollute the sea and land

 

We’re marching for our futures

We’re marching for our fate

We’re marching for the planet

Before it is too late

 

Our air is full of toxins

That poison every breath

The old will live a full life span

For us – an early death

 

We’re marching for our futures

We’re marching for our fate

We’re marching for the planet

Before it is too late

 

Rebel against the establishment

Rebel against its power

Strip it of authority

And make the planet ours

 

We’re marching for our futures

We’re marching for our fate

We’re marching for the planet

Before it is too late

 

 

 

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Returning Angel (Song for guitar 3)

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

This time it was in a casino bar

There were blue lights on the ceiling

Reflecting on your lamé gown

Neck to waist revealing

With your crimson lips and finger tips

And your pigtailed platinum hair

Your skin as white as sun-bleached bon

And your haughty naughty stare

You wore spike shoes and elbow gloves

And chained bag on your shoulder

With eyes that promised parad

I never acted bolder

I bet my life against the wheel

And watched the ball careering

It spun its arc of destiny

Fate riding on its steering

The final click and it settled down

With the crowd all gasping around me

But all I saw was your nod and smile

As you pushed the prize towards me

And like the son of a seventh son

With brothers six before me

The ball had answered all my pray

And I was rich as royalty

You stared at me as I stood there

I’d visions of our history

Of other lives in other times

When you appeared – to save me

I hoped this time you’d halt the wheel

And make our cycle end

But you turned back to spin the ball

And abandoned me again

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

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Dentist Blues (Song for guitar 2)

Friday, October 13, 2017

I had white teeth like a set of bone china
They were cut to fit, you couldn’t get finer
When I smiled you could see me across a full diner
Then I got the bad teeth blues
Then I got the bad teeth blues
*
Sugar and booze each and all took their toll
Until my pretties got rotten with holes
But my wife and my friends never acted cold
I got the bad teeth blues
I got the bad teeth blues
*
One day a dentist set up in town
Had a pretty assistant that drew in the crowds
She booked me in and calmed me down
I got the bad teeth blues
I got the bad teeth blues
*
She leant forward as he gave me the dose
I could have kissed her soft lips her face was so close
She patted my tears and smiled at my woes
I got the bad teeth blues
I got the bad teeth blues
*
I froze on his couch, my knees knockin’ like drums
My eyes went wild like an old drunken bum’s
And I moaned as I watched his needle come
I got the bad teeth blues
I got the bad teeth blues
*
He drilled and he filled with the shiniest gold
And polished the enamel so it shone as of old
And my grin was a wonder for all to behold
No more bad teeth blues
No more bad teeth blues
*
Now everyone calls me Mack the Knife
I’ve lost my job and I’ve lost my wife
No-one trusts my smile with their life
I got the good teeth blues
I got the good teeth blues
*
When I think back I feel an old ache
For the days when my teeth were a pair of old rakes
Before my mouth fired-up like a birthday cake
I got the good teeth blues
I got the good teeth blues

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

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Lords of Disruption (Song for guitar 1)

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Beware the Lords of Silicon Valley

Who create new worlds in binary code

They’ve convinced themselves they’re freedom fighters

They believe they’re Kerouaks On the Road

 

They vow to eradicate injustice

They vow to shake the Powerful’s hold

But every act has its consequences

Whose ends can never be foretold

 

We are on display as algorithms

Our very natures sold and bought

It is the end of incognito

It is the end of private thought

 

They’re creating tools of mass deception

They’re adding windows  to our souls

Despite the wish to fight for freedom

They’re creating tools for mass control

 

Beware the Lords of Silicon Valley

Who create new worlds in binary code

They’ve convinced themselves they’re freedom fighters

They believe they’re Kerouaks On the Road

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Bobbies on the Beat

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

I lived through the period of bad policing under Thatcher and after. Racism in the Met and beyond, corruption in the West Midlands force etc BUT I have always felt that community policing, sensitively done, with officers of diverse skin colour, religious and social backgrounds, is essential in developing a tolerant, open minded and pluralistic society. More guns and fewer police creates authoritarianism and, eventually, the seeds of dictatorship. It is ironic and devastatingly tragic that, as the government spends more on technological anti-terrorism, those that would cause devastation become anti-tech in their modus operandum. What use is hi-tech against a kitchen knife, a van and implacable psychopathy? Only men and women officers on the ground who care for their fellow beings, can counter such primitivism by being the eyes and ears and shapers of society, fully trusted by the people they work among.

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OJ Simpson: Made In America and The Keepers

Friday, May 26, 2017

There’s been much made of the changes in viewing habits in the last decade. The move towards box set blow-outs being one of the trends. On the one hand they satisfy an audience’s desire for gorging gratification and on the other they turn a TV series into a vehicle for writers, directors and actors to explore complexity and nuance which might be denied them in a 2 hour film. The two most recent unswitchoffable documentaries to stalk my eyes and adhere me to the late-night sofa are: O J Simpson: Made in America (BBC4 catch-up) and The Keepers on Netflix. Both are documentaries. OJ (you think you know the story – you don’t) tears American so-called democracy into naked strips and hangs them on the line. Race, trial-by-emotion, Shakespearean tragedy, social inequality and the interior landscapes of all the lead players make it a proper Oscar winner. You are left certain of guilt – but it is guilt on a massive, national scale. Meanwhile, The Keepers is a strangely conceived and deeply disturbing investigation into a decades old cold case of a Nun’s death – uncovering a paedophile conspiracy of police, Catholic Church and prominent members of the Baltimore political establishment. The detective work is driven by two unobrusive women who had been children in the school at the time and had no inkling of the obscenities that lay behind the school priests’ doors. Layers are stripped back, appalling suppressed memories are released by victims with a courageous frankness that sears and you are left contemplating darkly about how large a percentage of the world’s (male) population have desire in them to commit acts of such depravity.

 

 

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Corbyn’s Terrorism Speech Today

Friday, May 26, 2017

Corbyn will be vilified by the right wing press and politicians for raising a passionate critique of UK foreign policy in the Middle East. It is already being said that he is using the awful and appalling Manchester attack by an Isis-trained killer as a political football. There is absolutely no defence for the bomb, the bomber and the ideology that cares not a jot about innocence and humanity. But if we do not clear our heads and seek reasons from the current and past picture of British foreign policies, then we are cowards and imprisoned in false beliefs about our much vaunted open, democratic society and its ‘British Values’. As I write the people of Yemen, among the poorest in the world, are being bombed to a bloody dust by Saudi-led forces and supported in it by the UK and the US. This follows Cameron’s foray into Libya. And Blair’s in Iraq. The intelligence agencies warned Cameron and Blair that there would be consequences on our own shores.

Corbyn has every right to raise the issue. And it is the electorate’s responsibility to listen to his case.

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The Ballad of Theresa May (The Mary Poppins of Brexit)

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

 

Cynical MPs who piss-take our voters

New laws that further impoverish our sufferers

A Cabinet of ears with nothing between

These are a few of my favourite things

 

Ever more food banks to feed low paid workers

Concessions to Company high-paid tax shirkers

Houses affordable for those with some bling

These are a few of my favourite things

 

Leaving the EU with huge unpaid bills

It’s all jam tomorrow plus the ringing of tills

Trolling Claude Juncker cos’ I’m hard and right wing

These are a few of my favourite things

 

But if you doubt me

And say that I am mad

I inanely repeat that I’m stable and strong

And then I don’t feel quite so bad

 

mary-poppins

 

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Thirteen Reasons Why

Monday, May 1, 2017

It’s time to jettison misconceptions – unless you are under 21! The threat to one’s sense of identity as a mature consumer of all things cultural should surely prevent even glancing at the first episode of Netflix’s Thirteen Reasons Why. An American High School setting. Early forays among late adolescents in a world of rocky identity against a volcanic background of sexual awakening does not augur well for box set bulimics. Yet, a glance became a stare and a stare became hours of intensely disturbed concentration. Thirteen episodes of subtly appropriate young adult dialogue in which deep, eternal issues are played out through the behaviour of a brilliant cast, leaves you drained but frighteningly educated. For those parents with teenagers it is a must, a connection with this rapid-filled period of parenting in a world they themselves have never experienced, the centrality of technology in self-identity and the fear of falling foul of others. For non-parents of the age group and the rest of us it is a prism revealing darkness and light, as much a journey into an opaque culture as The Wire. Add to this its moral core against the unrelenting motifs of rape and suicide and you have something very extraordinary.

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Europe Farewell?

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

 

In 2016 the news went fake

The Brexiters were on the make

Politicians lied and more besides

The poor got austerity and the rich got cake

 

(chorus)

It’s sad to say we are on our way

We won’t be back for many a day

Our hearts are down, our heads spinning around

We’ll need a visa to be Europe bound

 

They said we wanted no EU law

Despite being forced to clean up our shores

They said we’d have cash for the NHS

And our borders would have signs saying No not Yes

 

They said we’d be free to trade to excess

And turn the map pink with our exports’ success

And we’d all be rich, an easy feat

For the world would want to sit at our feet

 

—————————-

 

Now it’s 2026 and we have British laws

Once banned toxins now cover our shores

Hospitals are downsized to A & E

It has to be spent on security

 

Everywhere you look it’s Social Care

The City of London has a derelict stare

Its ledgers suggest that our GDP

Will not even buy us a cup of tea

 

Oh we yearn for the days of cheap flights and vacs

With wine in our hands and the sun on our backs

And those friendships made with foreign hosts

Who ignore us now as turncoat ghosts

 

We left the EU for liberty

With a Church a Crown and democracy

We may have a Third World economy

But there is nothing like feeling proud and free

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The history of human vice

Sunday, February 5, 2017

The History of Human Vice

 

The Brexiteers have blocked from view

Why we should stay in the EU

Which is that a Higher Court of Peers

Can clip the wings of profiteers

Of human shame

Who’d otherwise be free from the blame

Of comforting those regimes

Who use every heinous means

To strip human rights at their very seams

Or downgrade international compassion

As if it was a card to ration

Or appeasing megalomaniacs

Who make all criticism a criminal act

Or succouring Merchants of Misery

In banks, conglomerates and military

 

The history of human vice has shown

Little virtue comes from going it alone

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Leaving Europe

Friday, June 24, 2016

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,–
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,

this LITTLE ENGLAND

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Utopia Channel 4

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Thoughts on TV series ‘Utopia’. I’m watching Season 2. Cult status. Critical acclaim. Brilliantly perverse. Mould breaking plot. Seasons 3 and 4 pulled by Channel 4. Why? One suspects the best conspiracy thriller in a decade has fallen foul of conspiracy itself. Weaving fiction with allegations of CIA MI6 dirty deeds involving real time events (assassination of Airey Neave and other politicians across Europe), the Bilderberg group, 3 Mile Island… Utopia plays with history as science fiction ought. Given that many (Enoch Powell et al) believed MI6 were killing their own for dark political reasons, this bleak comedy pulls no punches. The central moral dilemma – if we kill 95% of the world’s population now with a virus, we’ll actually save the future for humanity – is reasonable and appallingly grotesque in equal parts. Methinks Channel 4 felt the full weight of the Tory establishment and ran screaming to their Deal No Deal bland safety net.
HBO are remaking 1 and 2 and adding 3 and 4. Good for them. Hope the actors are British if only for the regional accents…

 

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The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson

Sunday, November 29, 2015

I’ve just seen ‘The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson’ directed by Julian Temple. The Dr Feelgood guitarist is filmed during a revelatory last year of life as he is given ten months to live from pancreatic cancer; a William Blake ecstasy as all material things come into transcendent existence, from scenes round Canvey Island to monasteries in Japan, from shimmering pavements to majestic trees against the sky. He is an atheist who fears no death. Rock and roll is for many theultimate zen of living-in-the-moment and he discovers and describes what that truly means. Try to see it. You’ll cry but be uplifted. Even changed.

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Fargo Season 2

Sunday, November 29, 2015

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll’s Jaberwocky in my childhood day was the precursor to The Goon Show and Monty Python. Daft and gentle. In a stroke of dark, venomous humour the poem is put into the mouth of Bokeem Woodbine, a Kansas City killer as his car travels an ominous empty road towards conflagration. It becomes a hitman’s anthem. Fargo Season 2 is even better than 1. The fabulously inflated classical allusions, the death toll, the black humour, the wonderfully diverse cast. Utterly fantastic.

 

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The True Cost

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Would you buy clothing from the High Street if you knew that the article in your hand came from a country where: millions work for less than a living wage, village water supplies are routinely poisoned, vast numbers of children are born malformed and with severe cognitive impairment, staff are beaten at work for any complaint, hundreds die in factory accidents, Govt, troops fire on protesters asking for higher wages, 250,000 farmers commit suicide in cotton field land grabs? In fact more than 90% of all fast fashion clothing comes from appalling human misery in these countries. High Street brands force wages down annually, turn a blind eye to the social consequences and rake in huge profits. Watch this new documentary and take a breath as you enter a shop… The True Cost (2015) Andrew Morgan.

 
 

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Sense8

Friday, September 18, 2015

The Matrix was breakthrough sci fi eye candy with the sufficiently strong philosophical message that we are all dumb sleepwalkers, mere scripts in machine programming. There are philosopher-scientists who believe this could, in fact, be our reality. Anyway, the directors of that film, The Wachowskis, have created a new tv series called Sense8. With the strap line that sense8s are one chromosome different from normal human beings, the 8 are spread across the world; India, South Korea, Kenya, Mexico, US and Iceland and were all born on the same day and month and learn to enter each other’s lives and help each other out in bad times. This Cluster of chromosomally different homo sapiens are hounded by their nemesis who looks alarmingly like a Tory make-over of Jeremy Corbyn. The intermingled 8 story lines have drama and punch and plenty of issues, the on-location filming brings different cultures into vivid juxtaposition, different mores to challenge the viewer. The actors are uniformly good. The gay sex scenes are more natural and fervent than most films have ever managed and the movement in and out of Cluster realities feels innovative. The tension is provided by the question; what’s to become of them? Will normal, nasty, isolated, war-mongering, acquisitive humans find them and exterminate them for being different, X-men style? Back to the Tories and Jeremy Corbyn.

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The Mental Traveller

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

New review!The-Mental-Traveller

An intriguing exploration of what happens when a writer is disturbed by thoughts of sharing his life with another and faces a choice between the unknown consequences of intimacy against familiar well-ordered solitude. Emerging against a series of digressions and flashbacks, this central concern maintains suspense as the story draws to its conclusion.

Vanessa Ahlberg

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You are what you sing

Monday, September 14, 2015

The last refuge of biography in dementia is where musical memory is stored. You are what you have heard, danced to, made love to and sung. The vinyl, the CDs and tapes, the pirate radio stations, the downloads, the shuffles of your chosen greatest hits. Remember this. Document it. For when you are apparently lost to dementia, it is the one thing that will keep your self alive. The brilliant film, “Alive Inside” shows wonderful old people, having not communicated – sometimes for years, faces blank, hands wringing, wheelchair bound, being gently strapped into headphones. The effect! With IPods playing tunes from their histories, their faces light up, their hands dance, their feet tap. It is breathtaking. Then their eyes suddenly clear talk and they talk coherently. Even if you never watch the documentary, remember that this is how you can open a channel of life and light to someone with dementia. One day it could be you.

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X + Y

Friday, September 11, 2015

X + Y = A Brilliant Young Mind – a terrific film of depth and perception about a maths genius of a boy’s shut-off, asocial awkwardness as he edges towards warmth and belief in others. It’s extremely funny, tear-jerking, sensitively acted and reminiscent of say, Kes or Billy Elliot. Centred on the British team’s preparation for a ‘Maths Olympiad’ it follows the boy’s attempts to grapple with his mother’s love, his tutor’s brave and balefully funny management of multiple schlerosis, a maths ‘training camp’ in China whose culture and exotic ways comfort him momentarily and the (to him) pain-inducing idea of competition against international peers. Truth is beauty and therefore, QED, maths gives the young man beauty in his isolation. We all feel alien at times in our lives and so it’s no step at all to occupy the shoes of the boy and relive all the emotions to which painful aloneness can give rise. It also reminds us of our responsibilities in our relations with others.

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Mr Robot

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Looking for a new box set? Waiting for the experience of an obsessive nightly fix or a gross-out weekend of end-to-end viewing? Fargo Season 2 is on the horizon but a gem lurks and it’s up and running.

Mr. Robot.

It’s brilliantly scripted, wonderfully photographed and unerringly acted – but might not accord with those who steer clear of the picaresque. Drugs and computer coding form a dark wallpaper (the program coding is nailed on by experts to keep geeks happy) against which druggie/idealistic hackers seek to save the world from multinational cyber barons. It raises, in its tense depiction of extremes, the slithering underbelly of modern, technology-dependent life.

 

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Melancholia

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Melancholia (2011): Is it a drama, is it a sci fi, is it a study in psychological depression? One thing is certain, it is a film by Lars von Trier. The studied authorial eye is as beady and detailed as always, as is his drive to subordinate art to a philosophical thesis. Imagine landscape gardening by Capability Brown, aerial shots of country lanes with magnificent galloping horses, mists, a stately pile and the most appalling nouveau riche wedding you might ever encounter and you have the setting. Counterpoise this with a bride’s disintegration into depressive aimlessness and involuntary bursts of escapism and cap it all with the impending arrival inside  Earth’s gravitational field, of a rogue planet, once hiding behind the sun and you have the ingredients of maybe the best von Trier film. Whether you read it as a treatise in individual human fragility in the face of a harsh and pointless existence or an entire race’s collapse in the face of an externally imposed, insuperable finality, the effect is the same. It is disturbing to watch as you realize that Kersten Dunst’s character is not an irritating, self-advertising, selfish melancholic so much as someone’s response to having a clairvoyant’s understanding of impending disaster – so where is the meaning in marriage, above all else?

The film contains one of the most wonderfully constructed scenes in cinema. The approaching planet – the Melancholia of the title – begins to fill the entire horizon. Dunst’s character, until now a black hole of emotion which those around her have tried perpetually and unsuccessfully to fill, takes charge and comforts her sister and her nephew, the only ones remaining in the house with her. She has them build and occupy a magical defence against cosmic annihilation, a skeletal pyramid of sticks. Huddled inside, their hands clasped, they draw succour from Dunst’s nihilistic preparedness to face whatever might come.

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Enemy

Saturday, August 15, 2015

 

I once walked from Bungay to Ditchingham across the Norfolk/Suffolk border by a back road. An old man came down the hill and passed me by. We did not speak. When I looked round a few moments later, he had disappeared. The reason I turned was because he seemed familiar. Too familiar. He was my older self.

The notion of identical selves occupying the same time and space has preoccupied creative minds often enough. The latest film on this theme is Enemy (2013) with Jake Gyllenhaal playing two identical men, one of whom sees an actor in a film and pursues him to discover why they are identical. The feel of the film is of cold war East Europe with its leached browns and yellows, totalitarian architecture and complete absence of human warmth. As the characters and their female companions begin to mesh and grind in a hopeless foursome, the foreboding in the film increases. A small review cannot be a spoiler, so I will only say that Gyllenhaal is remarkably subtle in demarcating the two characters he plays, that a strange, unfathomable symbolism appears and reappears, hanging like a black pall over the city, that there are some disturbing extremes of human behavior and that it ends with a single moment of abject terror.

 

It has elements of Christopher Nolan, of Wim Wenders and of Michael Haneke but it is also impressively the unique work of its director, Denis Villeneuve.

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True Detective 2

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

True Detective 2. A mesmerising mix of Grand Guignol blood and violence and powerful emotional characterisation, Season 2 provokes both bewilderment at sudden, unfathomable plot lines and eyes-on-stalks tension as key events unfold. Fantastic credits with Leonard Cohen’s “Never Mind” growling over industrial decay, a uniformly brilliant evocation of a society whose toxic margins are creeping into the mainstream, excellent and at times sensational acting and a conclusion both better and worse than Season 1. Mullholland Drive married to Infernal Affairs with the occasional glitch of easily editable B movie indulgence. Colin Firth and Rachel McAdams are terrific, the sense of a social world spiralling into moral, environmental and political degradation is unflinching and the risks it takes are sometimes exhilarating. Roll on Season 3.

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Of God Particles

Thursday, August 6, 2015

For everyone who wants more from a film, in particular an engagement with that prickly darkness that resides below every day consciousness wherein we dare to question how much freedom we actually have, then ‘Frequencies’ will be a delight.

In a new book of aphorisms I am cooking in the oven there is one that is pertinent to this review:

We exist in a God’s first novel; our lives are full of paradox, blind alleys, weak characterisation and illogical endings

 The feeling that under the deepest scrutiny life just does not add up suddenly grips us from time to time. It can be unsettling and we tend to banish it to the depths and ‘get on’ as best we can knowing full well that we are choosing to gloss over our unrest. Have we free will or are we fated to live our lives according to an opaque grand design? Is there, in physics, perhaps at the quantum level, a code that defines what we are and the limits of what we can do?

Frequencies’ is a brilliantly unorthodox film, a perfect other world, a story of code-crossed lovers, of god-creation and of a society where each must play a designed part until …

 

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To be or not to be

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

 

It’s a pleasure to have a seriously challenging sci fi series on tv. Not the futuristic, philosophically hard-wired, Interstellar-style but creeping, unsettling daily life sci fi. We have two Roombas in this French house. They are programmed to come on and vacuum floors in the period between coffee in bed and being up and about. They speak several languages. We prefer English. One had ‘her’ being reprogrammed by my twenty month old grandson to speak in Spanish and start work at lunchtime. These magnificent non-sentient disks of hard labour are as far removed from sexual appeasement as can be conceived. Not so in Humans Channel 4. The blurred lines between android or ‘synth’ and ourselves cause moral mayhem. Picking up the same theme that is core to the film Ex-Machina, reviewed earlier, the viewer is forced to question whether, if in every possible way except being built of flesh and blood, a synth acts human, then shouldn’t we treat it as such and get on with congenial cohabitation. Humans provides the viewer with a variety of synths upon which to meditate, from lackey to sex worker to the fully conscious (and, in some cases enigmatically seductive).  It is unsettling. You both identify with the faulty, imperfect error-prone human beings and at the same time are drawn into the plight of these newly created creatures with their Munch-like screams of human consciousness locked inside. The plot is great. It’s full of the unpredictable. There are good lines. If you have missed it, watch the re-run or rent the set from Netflix when it arrives.

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Under the Skin

Friday, July 3, 2015

 

Under the Skin, with Scarlett Johanssen in a quease-making central role, underlines one of the age old adages of cinema – first class novels make second class films and vice versa. I’d read the book before seeing the film. The result was curiously schizophrenic. Watching the movie was overlaid by hovering images that had remained with me from the book. These two bands of experience were almost completely different. It was only afterwards that I could tease out one from the other. While the book is a little above average, the film is innovative, shot largely in darkness and with an eerie, neck-tingling soundtrack. Using only a twisted fragment of its source material it creeps insidiously under your guard. It’s great cinema if you want your horror cerebral and you prefer not to be spoon-fed with predictability.

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Ex Machina

Friday, July 3, 2015

Would you be happy if your child married an android?

 

When you meet someone new, your bio-chemistry does an autonomous evaluation: do I fancy her? is there something dangerous about him? will we get on? etc. The overriding sense of the interaction boils down to authenticity. Can I believe this other person enough to trust him or her? Maybe we can be friends – or more. Alan Turing (the subject of The Imitation Game where he is played by the excellent Benedict Cumberbatch) is a kind of hero in Sci Fi in that he suggested a methodology for testing an android or robot to discover whether or not it is sentient and, therefore, human. Ex Machina is a film which pivots on this methodology. It is a philosophical tale of horror where there are strange inversions of the Beauty and the Beast motif. It calls into question our assumptions and attitudes towards ‘others’. The film, The Matrix, was a winner partially because it is based on what many science-philosophers believe to be a possible reality (that we are just clever scripts in an advanced computer program) and in the same way Ex Machina (like Blade Runner before it) asks us whether, if Turing’s tests for sentience are passed, could we eventually treat androids as fellow humans? The film is a discourse on this enigmatic theme, with enough blood and guts to oil the cogs and wheels of its artificial beings. It’s good. It’s chilling. It makes you wonder about the nature of the species.

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Bobby Dazzler

Friday, July 3, 2015

 

 

I’m much the same age as Bob Dylan and he has grown and changed beside and in front of me all my life … (I first heard his ‘protest’ songs a year after Russian ships approached Cuba and I had waited in panic for the US to broadcast a four minute warning to the world that a nuclear strike had taken place). His genius as a poet, soothsayer and philosopher to capture in songs what has preoccupied me as I have wrestled with the deeper, more intimate questions of the here and now, is matched only by his refusal to wear the straitjacket of a fixed sense of self. Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, after all our years together, still symbolises liberation from the shackles of my own or anyone else’s expectations of what I can or cannot be.

 

 

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Channeling

Friday, July 3, 2015

 

 

Like catching a big fish in a darkening lagoon just as you’re about to put away your tackle, I found Channelling on Sky Premier almost not seeing it breaking the surface. Unexpected. Hardly a review. Nothing on Rotten Tomatoes. No publicity. Winner of a minor London sci fi best film award 2013. But never ever going to a cinema near me or you.

It’s a bit flaky at times but has a raw magnetism. It’s Rebel Without A Cause in the era of Facebook and live streaming from the intimacy of the bedroom and building up your followers to prove you exist and being egged on to go naked or commit a viral act and be famous for five minutes. No place here for the poetry of the ambiguous phrase, gesture or gaze. We broadcast therefore we are. Now, what if we were to take it further? What if we stream those acts that border on the socially unacceptable or cross the lines we call taboos. What if our contact lenses contained cameras, connected to our smart phones and our lives became truly ‘live’ and our unscripted moment by moment acts became an unending serial reality …

 

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The Duke of Burgundy

Friday, July 3, 2015

 

 

Our fingerprints, our retinal configuration and all else about us are unique, including our perceptions, dreams and fantasies. Even so we talk about being ‘normal’ as though it is a virtue. Society pressgangs us into conformity. To stray outside the fencing that society erects to herd us along the path of life is to risk certain  vilification.

When I directed a research study many years ago into the behavior of children playing computer games in their homes, an unanticipated by-product of the data gathering was the complete lack of pattern across families’ behaviors. 100 families equalled 100 eccentric ‘cultures’. Once inside the front door of a house rules seem to be invented and invoked, either explicit or implicit, which each family regards as normal and acceptable. It is a conundrum. Society values highly the sacred autonomy of family life but still demands the gloss of public conformity. Only when behaviour spills over into the socially unacceptable are front doors breached. Yet, under the guise of household normality, the bizarre, the strange and the problematic co-exist without constraint. It seemed in our research that no two families were remotely alike. We couldn’t cluster them in categories. Yet, in all their wondrously divergent ways, they created viable and relatively stable habitats, no matter how outlandish they might appear when one examined the detail.

The Duke of Burgundy is a film about intimacy. What is depicted in its slow, erotic flow is a range of behaviours between two women which necessitates keeping the front door firmly shut. They do together what their obsessions demand of them. Their ‘normality’ is not a recognizable one. It has a recurring life cycle, like the butterfly of the film’s title, with alternating phases of sexual dominance and subservience that reach a crescendo before beginning all over again. Wonderfully filmed in deep shadows and claustrophobic rooms, close up and intense, it is a terrific cinema.

We all think we know what love is. We may be daft enough to think that others experience it as we do. The film, like the research mentioned above, suggests otherwise. The love of the two women is unlike anything society might imagine as normal. Yet it is definitely and unequivocally love.

 

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You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone…

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

How much do we sleepwalk through life, imagining that all is fine and it’s a blessing to be in the ‘free’ world? Meanwhile, what we assume to be a ‘democracy’ subtly and inexorably sucks the juice out of our liberties. Whether it be GCHQ mass surveillance a la Snowden, reduction in free legal support for the poor, increasing observation of households through computers in the home, unfettered criminal banking behaviour, the impunity with which the Cabinet Office at Westminster and senior police officers cover up high-level corruption, including paedophilia, the insidious pressure of the multinationals in shaping government policy and deregulating  ‘red tape’ to ensure profit, regardless of the consequences for the environment …

… but this is a blog, not a list…

Three films to watch which will turn the viewer into a radical revolutionary, if he or she can be credited with any critical consciousness at all, are the portrayal of real-life freedom fighters in The Internet’s Own Boy (Aaron Swartz), Citizenfour (Edward Snowden) and Kill the Messenger (Gary Webb). They are unadorned documentaries compiled from footage of interviews, events and documentation. Though ostensibly about unbelievably vicious and unwarranted US government attrition (sadly, largely under the Obama administration) they also point up how freedoms are being eroded by all governments.  Wherever one lives, the films are a testament to the need to arrest sleepwalking.  The brave, central figures in these films wanted to seek the truth, to expose government criminality, corruption or the repressive docking of freedom of expression under the guise of protecting national security, while they were actually serving the profit-motives of the rich and powerful.

Webb and Swartz committed suicide in inexplicable circumstances and Snowden is in hiding in Russia.

It is easy, with elections looming, to believe that life is all about the pound in your pocket or foreigners taking your jobs. It’s not, it’s about the loss of civil liberty, the freedom to speak out against injustice, empathy with others and the will to curb the powerful. Better to be a little poorer in a compassionate society than witness, silently, the draconian laws being passed almost daily by authoritarian, scare-mongering governments.

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Marketing – By Royal Appointment

Sunday, January 4, 2015

The gullibility of a population knows no bounds but even then some kind of psychic sea-change may bring down a Tzar, a wall in Berlin or produce a velvet revolution elsewhere in Europe. One day Putin will lose his credibility. He bought it in the first place, his marketing men orchestrating his he-man image, hoisting his half-clad, heroic body on to a photogenic nag. But equally there is a power to dethrone, even in the face of total media control. What is it? It is the ordinary person’s eyes which can suddenly see through the deception of the president’s new clothes. Enough eyes and the veil of seduction and trumpeting propaganda is lifted and it is all change. Glib, self-aggrandizing politicians come to know this at election time. What seems like certain victory becomes a crushing humiliation.

Prince Andrew is today embroiled in allegations of rape. The House of Windsor have categorically denied his culpability. Twice in two days. This tottering institution on its high, ornately fashioned heels, wigs and frock coats has become a skilled master at managing modern marketing ploys. A word here and there in high places, in the ears of police chiefs, newspaper barons, military generals and the lickspittles of Westminster and bad news stories are scuppered before they even tickle the deaf ears of those in the common herd who drool at pomp and ceremony.  And when they do and ears become unblocked, and all hell seems about to pay, the oily palmed machine bursts into full throttle. The manner in which Prince Charles’ and The Family’s treatment of Diana and the elevation of Camilla has been reconfigured as an acceptable royal history is a remarkable feat of social engineering. The royal weddings, the babies, the interminable visits abroad, the New Year Honours, the garden parties, the Princes at war, all go to present a continuous pageant of meticulously manicured superiority. The population pays the royals a queen’s ransom for the honour of being Her Loyal Subjects. The institution is sold, seductively but falsely, as being as good as the Disney corporation in bringing foreigners to the UK to marvel at its archaic spectacles. It provides glamour. It is a current day opiate for the masses.

It is an absurdist theatre, scarcely credible to anyone with a belief in rationality, fairness and equality in all things. It has nothing to do with democracy for it perpetuates the inordinate, selfish power of blood and wealth in a country kept free by the blood-sacrifice of selfless, impecunious ‘subjects’. Robert Graves’ ghostly footage appeared on television today. He was bemoaning the celebration of victory at the end of the Second World War. For him it merely presaged further wars to come. Market the end of war well and people will return to the trenches willingly when the next one comes along. From their run-down urban estates, their agricultural villages, their benefits-reduced poverty, they will heed the call to queen and country. And they will believe it and be proud of it. That’s the power of marketing.

Yet even on the sceptered isle one day the veil will be lifted. Forcing the BBC to pull its documentary on royal media manipulation will not prevent it.

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The Times They Are A Changing

Thursday, December 11, 2014

The death of any soldier causes distress. Distress for loved ones, for comrades and for those that are protected by military action. Yet the individual significance of such an end to a life quickly melts into stone, another name inscribed on a monument by a village green, or becomes another ceramic poppy in a gigantic art installation. War is obscene, made more so by soft handed politicians’ callous and hypocritical motivation in sending the young to experience the horrors of killing and maiming, more often for economic gain than anything resembling a universal morality.  Such behaviour is exacerbated further by underwriting, in so-called peace time,  acts of torture that defy the Geneva Convention.

There was a period in the nineteen fifties when, because of the hell of the First and Second World Wars, many of the young (I was a teenager) refused to wear poppies. It was not disrespectful towards the dead but represented a deep antipathy towards what was seen as a glorification of something hideous. There was a feeling that too many had died in vain, that much suffering could and should have been avoided and that war was a crime. It was at the same time that I remember some of us refusing to stand for the national anthem in the theatre or cinema (a ritual at the time) because we associated such needless death with a British establishment whose keystone was the queen. I came to realize in those formative years that death rituals involving carriages and cannon, medals and uniforms, black ties and overcoats, hats with veils and shiny shoes, plumed horses and flag covered coffins were a grand illusion, a deception, a marketing campaign to instill in the bereaved, pride in a family member’s death, a form of mass hypnosis persuading them that to fall in battle represented a supreme act of giving, not losing.

The sixties intensified people’s mixed attitudes to pomp and ceremony. White poppies made an appearance. Vietnam saw flowers in gun barrels. Polished wood gave way to body bags. It became harder for politicians to pull the wool over the people’s eyes. A bishop giving blessing to a nuclear submarine provoked outrage.

Yet there is one thing sure about humanity. It swings on a pendulum. The levers of power will always regain control. Today, marketing is again in overdrive. The townsfolk come in their thousands to pay their last respects. The bereaved show gratitude for the momentary majesty afforded their dead sons and daughters.

And the politicians and the powerful, made up for the occasion, stare soulfully into the cameras and then go about their business.

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The Professional Pyramid: posturing on paedophilia

Thursday, November 20, 2014

 Having spent my working days at every level of education from primary school to PhD supervision, as well as doing five years in intensive residential social work, and finally having spent the latter end of my toils doing research on nationally funded projects, I suppose I feel I have some kind of obligation to tell it how it is. The thesis is this, the higher you go up the career ladder, the easier the work is, whether in health, social work, policing or education. In fact, the better educated and more articulate you are, the more you can slip into senior positions, pick up the lie of the land and spout persuasively about what needs to be done, what lessons ‘need to be learned’ and what strategies should be followed. This applies to every level up to ministerial.

I am reacting to one of the darkest manifestations of human behavior; the rape of young girls and boys by men, whether in gangs drawn from specific social or religious backgrounds through to networks of the most powerful individuals in the country whether they be teachers, celebrities, politicians, senior police officers or army generals. Yet another report released this week, this time by Ofsted, criticizes the lack of cooperation between agencies to protect the young. (Ofsted itself has a deplorable record in uncovering child abuse over the last decade!) Similar reports in the last twenty years have located this lack of integrated work between all relevant agencies as a root cause of the lack of protection. But nothing has changed.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the career of individuals is a greater motivating force than the distress of the young. Careers are made in separate professional worlds, the territories of specific disciplines. They are mini-cultures with their own languages and ways of seeing and doing. In each, defenceless children are their units of currency and they don’t take kindly to passing this currency on to others for fear it might weaken their bargaining power. In effect, each profession builds its empire on the pain and suffering of its young ‘clients’.

The second reason for the complete inadequacy of professional bodies in understanding, empathising and finding ways of assuaging the terrible hurt of the young, thus giving them a chance to break with their troubled pasts and construct better futures, stems from the same source. Working with desperate individuals in the throes of extreme distress is as hard as it gets. To bring about change requires extraordinary skills and aptitudes plus an exceptional emotional stability. Within the career structures of agencies, such people are paid the least and the most is expected of them. The best among them are soon promoted and leave the raw nature of the field. As managers or supervisors they no longer face the vile expressions of inhuman acts every hour of the day. As they become senior managers even less. But the higher the tier, the higher the pay, and the more distant the involvement with on-the-ground staff. Over time they become utterly divorced from the rapidly changing cultures of deprivation and depravity. They have less and less understanding of what constitutes torture in the daily lives of those they are charged to keep from harm. Good current examples are internet-based paedophilia and bullying.

But they are, nevertheless, articulate middle class professionals, well rehearsed in admitting corporate guilt and suggesting what should be done.

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Trolls

Sunday, October 26, 2014

 

When I was young, trolls used to live under bridges and reach up and grab your ankles and drag you down into their gnashing-toothed depths. A regular song on the wireless ran, “I’m a troll foldy roll…”The symbol of the bridge is significant; a division between two realities, the every day and the otherworldly. Plato theorized about the very same. Do we truly exist in the every day or is life a fantasy and we are mere shadows on a cave wall? Today physicists posit whether we can exist in parallel universes, quantum beings with myriad identities?

Human beings tend to make realities out of their imaginings. We dream, we play with ideas, we invent. If we believe strongly enough in the possibility of something existing then it becomes, to all intents and purposes, real.

The metaphysical battles fought between philosophers over the nature of existence  have paled as your average man and woman have embraced alternative realities. They live shadowy lives in cyber space. Under noms de plume they tweet, blog, buy and sell, and form otherworldly communities of similar taste and inclination from the virtuous to the visceral, from the moral to the perverse, from the mundane to the bizarre. Everything is possible out there in the ether.

The Internet becomes a cosmic therapeutic playground wherein its users enter via an airlock between one reality and another and create new rules and roles to be played out on landscapes as malleable as their earthly one are bound. In their Wonderlands they can unleash what has been repressed in them over time from overseeing parents to the policing of society.

And people believe they exist there with impunity. They become trolls and expect the bridge to protect them from visibility as they let loose their atavistic nastiness on the world that passes overhead.

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Trolling

Saturday, October 11, 2014

After last week’s eulogy to the freedom of the Internet and its capacity for anarchy and the puncturing of pomposity (and notwithstanding its propensity for the exposure of lies and tyrannical behaviour of all sorts, its soap box for the disenfranchised, the successful tilting at windmills – for example yesterday’s culmination to the campaign by Greenpeace against the Lego/Shell tie-up – there is another side to the picture. There is always another side of course. There is the dark net, the shrouded world where, we are informed, terrorists, gangsters, sexual predators and the like roam. But in the broad daylight of the everyday, publicly-lit platform for views, comments and opinions, one can find degrees of behaviour that defy one’s instincts for the virtual good of the medium. ‘Trolling’ is central to this disheartening statement on human potential. The other day a woman committed suicide after trolling the mourning McCanns. Her village friends said afterwards she was a wonderful friend and a pillar of the community. She had been outed by a reporter for her bizarre on-line vitriol, accusing the McCanns of murdering their own child. Teenagers have committed suicide all too frequently as a result of trolling from school peers. And at the back of the Internet, where human ants write codes, engineer platforms, create the virtual habitats that we can enter at home, misogyny and sexual harassment rule. It is as though the Internet is sand and people put their heads in it and fantasise, imagining that no-one can see them as the authors, that the medium guarantees anonymity. In today’s Guardian on-line there is an insightful article:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/09/trolls-men-witch-hunt-internet

with the premise that it is mostly men who behave appallingly and that they are so enamoured with their beliefs in the ‘heroes’ of the medium that they refuse to accept any contrary view – resulting in the forms of misogyny mentioned above. If you are fans of Richard Dawkins and Julian Assange, read it to test your credulity.

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Mashing it up

Friday, October 3, 2014

In a political world where for centuries the individual had been a statistic, a mere single vote, a consumer of political rhetoric and high street junk, a loyal, unquestioning soldier, a cupcake on a table laden with gastronomic desserts scoffed by the multinationals, the banks, the church, the royal family, the landed classes, the judicial system, Westminster politicians and all the rest that make up the establishment, the elite, suddenly along came the internet, created by hippies on LSD. It looked ripe for a commercial and political killing, the latest invention in the capitalist dream of seduction and control, a way to individualise the clarion call to the cash till and the ballot box. But, built into its DNA, in codes so basic that they hid in broad daylight, conceived and developed on tables heavy with cocaine and whatever else fired the synapses of Silicon Valley, was the Anarchist Gene. The Web, the roaring tiger of universal communication, had a tail so dumbfoundingly capable of transforming the beast into a spitting, unmanageable demon that the once despised and benighted individual could suddenly change the direction of mass markets, expose the pompous face of the rich and the would-be powerful, the duplicitous nature of government actions whether despotic or pseudo-democratic, the obscene exercise of power in all its forms from paedophile priests to preening presidents, secret government agencies to globally corrupt corporations. And with the technology came the individual heroes and heroines, the committed evangelists for a new order, the righteous campaigners, the rule-breakers, the scoffers, those once-humiliated but now retaliating millions of voices. All worms turning. From cassetteboy to Edward Snowden they each have a voice that once would have been muzzled.

(see youtube.com/watch?v=0YBumQHPAeU)

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History Homework

Friday, July 25, 2014

Having tried a story in seven tweets once, I quite liked the challenge. So here’s another for your delectation and delight.

 

1

The Captain was finishing a coloured picture of a new species of fly. His ship rocked gently under a hot sun.

2

As he added the last brush stroke there was a little pop. He was gone. Just like that. It was as if he had never been.

3

A time and a half later a girl called Xanxy was doing some homework with a history hook and line. She twitched it.

4

“Stop that at once,“ said her mother. “That’s your Father’s. It’s not a toy. You can cause all sorts of time knots at your age.”

5

She looked inside Xanxy’s collection tank as a bewildered man in a uniform appeared, carrying easel, brush and inks.

6

“Have I done it right, Mama? It says, Research and illustrate the shipping terms Captain and Shanghaied and present them  to class”

7

“Don’t ask me,” said her Mother. “Just make sure the poor creature goes back where he came from, once you’ve shown him in the lesson.”

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A Tale in 7 Tweets

Monday, July 21, 2014

I was struck by the notion of David Mitchell’s (not the comedian) attempt to create a seven tweet story. Each tweet the usual 140 characters or less, including spaces. Below is my own foray into the form, the Twitter version of a haiku-like constraint.

 

1.

“Rainin’ in my heart”: The song bounced off the bone inside his skull in time to the trolley’s squeaking. The drug made it symphonic.

2.

Blurry masked faces. Transparent tubes and steel. A whistling dive into darkness and the grim recall of a somersault into a sycamore’s trunk.

3.

Observing from the ceiling. Heart out.  New heart in. The surgeon’s reddening gloves. The robot’s precise blade.

4.

His body welcoming the flesh and blood prosthesis. A sense of his memories being torn and fluttering.

5.

Wife, children, house, dog, job, university, school, childhood, babyhood are shreds in a storm. New images emerging.

6.

The delight of soil, beetles, worms, fermenting fruit. A leather muzzle. The sweet seduction of truffles.

7.

Whistling back to consciousness. Identity returning.  But something else – an overwhelming craving to root his nose deep into damp earth.

 

 

 

 

 

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Unkind cutting

Saturday, July 5, 2014

I haven’t written a blog for some time and with this one I am breaking my flow of childhood reminiscences.

I was talking on Skype to my son in Japan. I said that once you hit seventy you have a prevailing picture of the Grim Reaper, scythe glittering in the sunshine, walking down a long hill towards you. If you are feeling particularly good in yourself, he recedes up the track to become a dot on the horizon whereas if you feel under the weather in some way he becomes increasingly magnified. The fact of the matter is that, at seventy, you are in his stalking territory for this is the killing field of the Hooded One. Around you friends and acquaintances of approximately your own age are dying with terrible regularity. Cancer and heart attacks. There is a harsh imbalance to it all. Why can’t we all go together in one merry swipe of the blade? Instead we have this haphazard genocide and as much unpredictability as can be squeezed out of what is, of course, the most predictable of our seven ages. It is true, too, as I mentioned in a recent tweet, that you age, usually become somewhat wiser but have less and less time and energy to employ your hard earned wisdom. This vicious irony is further exaggerated by the brain’s consistency, changing from chunky cheddar to holey Emmental so that sagacity deconstructs into quicksilver, sliding away from attempts to focus upon it long enough to communicate it to those around you.

Anyway, I went for knee replacement surgery here in France. The events of that carving and remodelling of some of my body parts are now a surreal dream of lumpy mattresses, debilitating pain, morphine-induced visions, a mad woman screaming through the night, padding nurses carrying hypodermics and pills to thrust into my quivering body at all hours and feats of endurance to get to the toilet and somehow try to evacuate my bowels as a consequence of the plates piled with food that reduce your appetite from minimal to non-existent. And finally the kines, the physiotherapists with their softly growling machines-diaboliques, into which your leg is strapped and which bend the resisting, swollen joints into something vaguely resembling their original right angle, regardless of the pain.

The operation itself was a miracle of modern surgery conducted by a gentle and humane man. Everything now seems straight and true. I now have my own machine on loan at home and am a masochist working my way back to happiness.

Better still, the cowled character on my landscape has retreated far into the mists of my blue-remembered hills.

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I am a Camera

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

I was an advisor to the British Board of Film Classification for ten years, bridging the twentieth and twenty first centuries, a member of a lay panel that debated public concerns regarding children’s viewing habits, trying to establish guidelines that might help parents. Everyone’s life has threads that only become apparent in retrospect. This one began when my parents brought me to England from India where I was born. Apart from losing half of my bilingual skill on the boat trip and having the undoubted trauma of leaving my personal Ayah behind, the equivalent of half a mother, we arrived in a very cold Leeds to stay with my grandmother. The winter was so severe and rationing so limited our ability to heat the house, that I was taken every day to an Odeon cinema to be put next to the hot projector. What did I see, a short-sighted four year old not yet in spectacles? What did I hear? I can’t remember but can only imagine the coloured flickerings and loud, echoing voices and thrilling music. Hot celluloid, occasionally bursting into flame. Oily whirrings. The laying down of a lava bed of dimly-discernible, melding worlds.

Where the thread went next is more clearly caught on the hook of remembrance. My father bought a Rover. It was his pride and joy. It smelled of leather and the scents of the landscape we trundled through. By now we lived near Durham in the north east of England, in a village recorded in these scribblings; Shadforth. Around us were the pit villages above their coalfields. Within twenty miles, a half dozen of these linear developments each boasted a cinema. My father was typical of the ex-military. Austere and unable to show too much emotion except when closeted in the darkness of a Gaumont or an Essoldo where none could see his face. He took us to musicals with Grace Kelly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and religious epics such as The Robe.

Later again, as a seventeen year old, living six miles from Newcastle now, I took the bus to watch foreign films at The Tatler News Cinema on Northumberland Street. None of my footballing and fishing friends did. I was a Martian to them, a weird otherworldy fellow. I had to walk home along Scotswood Road at 11.00 at night past the yellow-lit, piano sound-tracked, boisterous pubs, disgorging their drunken revelers, my head full of the Nouvelle Vague.

Since then I have gone to cinema to watch everything and anything with any pretension of quality, from the popular to the esoteric. Film has competed with literature all this time. Its encoded realities have taken me into weird and wonderful worlds, into the psyches of strangers, into near-death experiences, into heroism and cowardice, into sentimentality and tragedy. It has always encouraged me to think and go beyond. I am still ready to be as spell-bound as a four year old as the lights go down and the Pearl and Dean jingle swells. 

When I became a research professor, it was little wonder that I directed an early British project about video and computer games in the home. This successful study of the ways families related to each other around their televisions and the cheaply available images, was a tying of knots. It took me to the advisory role at the BBFC.

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The Day Trip

Sunday, May 18, 2014

“Oh where are we going,” asked the children, staring wide-eyed at the driver.
“Far, far away,” came his wicked-smiling response.
“Will there be sweeties?” they asked as one.
“Everything you always wanted. Just settle down and don’t ask questions.” With that he turned to the steering wheel and the doors closed with a metallic clang. The vehicle grunted into life and left the village empty of its young, silent save for the call of birds and the bleating and snorting of farmyard beasts. It was the one day in the year that tranquility eddied around their mothers while far below the rumbling tyres their fathers hacked away at black rock, helmet lamps barely piercing the gloom, a life-saving canary warbling dismally in a swinging cage.

The shiny red tube bounced along; out through the meadows and small, golden, cereal-waving fields, under the green gloom of interlaced branches and past the short ribbons of back to back housing. There was a swelling chorus of “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountains” with screeches of laughter and a gasping red-faced halt at the verse, “She’ll be wearing smelly knickers.” Notes were passed among the cargo, not one of whom was under five or over ten. “Will you be my boyfriend?” “Bruce wants to go out with you.” “Jenny says you stink.”

Then, after hillocks and mounds, gorse and broom, the conveyance topped a final rise to screams of, “I can see the sea.” There was a lurching halt in a potholed car park and everyone was made to sit still for a moment. “Make sure you have got everything with you.” Four adults, who seemed to have materialised suddenly at the front, and the driver, dismounted and watched beadily as boys and girls jostled down the aisle, lovingly prepared carrier bags of picnic food, towels and costumes clutched to bosoms. A straggly, jigging line made its way down and on to the sand.

I had no idea who the driver was and had only the barest inkling of the grown-ups. If you had asked me about where we were I would have stared at you in puzzlement. It was immaterial. This was the Miners’ Mystery Trip and its details remain just that, even today. My main memory was padding back from the water’s edge and finding I was lost. I had left my spectacles on my pile of clothes. There were blurred faces all round. A geyser of tears erupted from my eyes. I sobbed wildly, “I want my Mummy” and someone whose face I never saw took my hand and led me across the sand before passing my subsiding form to a life-guard who guided me to the lost children’s hut. Inside there were several children, becalmed. The only sound was the noise of placatory toffees being worked into fudgy balls. The silence, the gravity and the sense of being lost rushed through me again and I burst into more tears. The hut erupted as all the seated occupants started bawling in sympathy and it remained like that until one of the four grown-ups came to claim me and pluck me away from the purgatory.

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Looking for Eric

Friday, May 9, 2014

I cannot be compared to Eric Cantona, either as a boy or a man. I would never have progressed beyond the school football team and I never did karate. But I like to think I am a better philosopher. I might even be a better actor. Anyway, bridging to the last blog-post and the search for my former self, it is football and our dissimilarity that concerns me here.

Even in the early nineteen fifties most boys loved football, although few probably had aspirations of playing for their local professional team, in my case Newcastle United. I learned a big lesson from my father, a Captain in the army’s PT corps; practice makes you better at everything and can give a shine even to the most lacklustre of performers. So it was that I practised for hours, days and weeks with balls of all sizes and eventually developed a modicum of trickery. Being tall and liable to be toppled by low-gravity, thickset tanks of miner’s sons was a perennial problem but the plus was that I was never in the last batch to be chosen for the two teams in class games. And being in the middle ground of competence also meant no ridicule and no bullying. Basic acceptance. I could breathe easily.

The culmination of my football talent occurred one day on the sloping field at Blaydon Grammar School in my fifth year. I was playing on the right wing and up against the school’s left back. I received the ball midway in his half, lifted it over his despairing tackle with sumptuous ease and hit it on the half-volley goalwards. It was a screamer. Top corner. Goalkeeper in the mud. The whistle sounded and I turned for plaudits only to see the teacher pointing for a free kick somewhere behind me. He hadn’t seen the goal. He was separating two boys, red in tooth and claw. Nor had anyone else seen it except the goalkeeper and the left back. And they weren’t going to say anything, were they?

Whether that was the source of my recurring, unrequited, fruitless dreams with their unwanted denouements, I don’t know. But when I wake up these dreams often contain the same element; myself as would-be hero, about to wallow in success and approbation but losing it all in a terrible twist of fortune that only a Stephen King or a Maupassant might devise.

This idée fixe now percolates my writing. Everything I do has to have a twist ending, bringing the reader up short with a gasp at a story’s culmination. But not necessarily, I hasten to comfort the prospective follower among you, a twist for the worse.

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Autobiography: to have been or not to have been

Thursday, May 1, 2014

I tweeted recently (@profjacksanger) that “The past is but a blank page on which the historian writes fiction.” In many ways, the business of autobiography follows suit. We re-write our histories incrementally as our lives progress so that they fit and augment our circumstances at the time of writing. Whether we recognise it or not, we are the lead players in our histories and everything is refracted through the prism of our reminiscences. If you are an avid reader of people’s reflections on their lives, it is worth remembering that they are always more fiction than fact. The project of trying to reduce their histories and contain them in nutshells is such a preposterous violation of reality that they cannot be claimed to be anything other than some vague after-taste of what might have transpired. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a great piece about the accuracy of maps when representing reality:

On Exactitude in Science

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map
of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

In other words, unless we were mad enough to write everything down as it happens – which means we wouldn’t have time to experience anything and our lives would be stuffed with writing and little else, a diarrhea of words about nothing – we must accept the evils of selection and reductionism.

Here’s a tale. In an early blog I, Jack Sanger, described the change that took place in my psyche at the age of eighteen at college when I decided to take my middle name, Jack, in preference to my name of the previous seventeen plus years, Eric. As in some drama of film or stage, the change was from an introverted, shy individual to an outgoing socialite, actor, scriptwriter, stand-up comic and serial lover of women. I include the latter, not as an attempt to inflate my sexual standing (which, you will have gathered from above, might well be the case) but to reminisce on the effects of this change of name upon my behavior with the said young women.

For some months as I settled uneasily into this new persona, I vacillated between these two characters; the introvert and the extrovert. When I kissed and fondled and was touched in turn, I had the distinct impression that it was not Eric who was enjoying life so royally but the new outer person, Jack. Jack was having all the fun and Eric was a mere onlooker – or, to be more accurate an outlooker.

As time went on it became easier. I was Jack. In the psychic battle between my two selves, Jack subsumed Eric. Where is he now, the old Eric? He is called up by the magic lamp of my keyboard for he is the object of all my autobiographical blogs up to the age of eighteen.

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The fruit of knowledge

Friday, April 25, 2014

There are windows in our lives that open momentarily and shut forever. They reveal where we have come from and point to where we will eventually go. Like angels balanced on the points of pins, we are given a gift of knowing and then it is taken away from us. We are young and in our minds there is a maelstrom of memories which jostle, incapable of articulation because the tongue cannot yet act as the brain’s tool. We have just learned the glimmerings of what it is to be alive and the enormity of separateness. Only if some empathetic adult intuits that the window has opened and teases out our pictures, will the revelations pour out before it shuts again.

I was sitting with a tiny girl not yet three years old, at a gathering for a meal. The hubbub acted like an insulation. I asked her about her first memories. No, before that. Before the pram. Before the milk from your mother’s breast. Where did you come from? She sighed and looked at me as though I should know the answer but told me, nevertheless.

I was an apple in an apple tree. The tree stretched up into the night full of stars. One day I fell slowly though the branches. I landed on grass. A man with a beard came with a knife. He wrapped me and gave me to my mother.

The room had gone silent. The magical little vignette hypnotized the guests. Then the little girl’s mother whispered that when she had been born they had used old green towels and the doctor was a bearded man. But, like the rest in the room, she had no explanation for the apple tree and the stars and the velvet night.

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Sanity not vanity in the author

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Ok, think about a bordello. Think about one of its rooms. Think about what happens inside it in microscopic detail. There is a sperm with its single imperative. Where’s the egg? Oh there it is. Isn’t it huge? Like a sun about to supernova. It must beat its tail harder. It’s a marathon and a sprint and millions of others are in a line. Just one effort and a scream of abracadabra and the portal will open and it will enter and achieve singularity and meltdown.

The bordello is the world of publishing. The egg is the publishing house. The sperm is the writer. The medium in which they all exist is the literary landscape.

What, on this landscape, apart from competition with other sperm, complicates and exaggerates the quest to penetrate the egg? Well, there is a lack of signposting. Gone is the well-trodden relay of readers and editors giving thought to every well turned phrase, sifting out the most fertile tail that wags its owner. Instead there is a new kind of eugenics. The traditional primitive, lusty, organic coupling has given way to a laboratory wherein the sperm are spun through the centrifuge of a literary agent’s subjective criteria to separate strong from weak. The DNA is configured so that the egg will allow it to break through its semi- impermeable shell. The ovum prefers this outsourced, artificial determinism and waits in a kind of languor for the fission of new fiction.

The other way to achieve conception is to swim in different waters in another room. It is a laboratory in which there is no eugenic differentiation. Eggs are as abundant as sperm. Every sperm can find fusion. Here e-publishers make the latter-day supernovae look like mere candles in the cosmos. This is the black hole of e-publishing. No-one ascertains the vigour of the wagging tail or the profile of the DNA inside it. It is a compressed Darwinism. Millions of couplings. Millions of births, all but a very few strong enough to survive for more than days or weeks. Yet every snuffed out spark of life has still contributed to the egg increasing in size and being greedy for more fertilisation.

There is a third way.

Create your own laboratory with your own eggs and sperm derived from your own stem cells. Couple them. Nurture your self-propagated offspring and let them live in this world you have conceived. Let them be promiscuous with strangers. Allow them in turn to be intimate with your creations and, as before, enjoy an earthy, lustful unpredictable intimacy. Then, as they leave the bordello, they can place on the bedside table a payment for what the experience was worth.

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A Room With Two Views

Friday, April 11, 2014

I’m in Soho, London. The sun is bright but does nothing to mask the purgatory of the city’s coagulated humanity. I know that I must be seeing it like a Martian because I have been a mountain man for months. I have overwintered beside a wood burning stove as the snow piled ever higher on Mount Canigou above my house.  I’ve shut the shutters each evening as the early dark approached, hiding within the four walls in semi-hibernation. The physicality of tending to flame has given way to the passivity of  a hotel’s central heating, the shutters to double glazing, the vistas of successive ridges in their lines of ever-darkening blue to rearing concrete and brick cliffs pressing against my chest, blocking sight lines, cramping my breath. People sacrifice their bodies to be here. They relegate their needs. They promote their wants. Rats fight to the death when their living space edges towards point zero. It feels like that here. The oppressiveness is only driven back into the shadows by tantalising artificial rainbows with their lure of crocks of gold and better times ahead.

I sit on my bed and look out of the window but, as in the short tale on this website, I don’t see the street and the tops of determined human voyagers but a corner shop at the end of a village green, at a t-junction. I see through time’s window, scales fallen from my eyes. There are no cars on the road. I swing round and round a lamppost and fall, breaking my arm, and sprawl on to the stone-chip tarmac, perfectly safe, crying for my mother. I stumble into a bush of deadly nightshade and spend the night, imagining I am going to die. I plodge in the stream knowing there is a troll under the bridge. I see ghosts dancing on my moonlit bedroom walls. I hack at a y-shaped branch, perfect for a catapult and gouge a hunk of flesh from my thumb.

But, counteracting all such traumas and fearful visions, I walk on my own to Cissie Joyce’s shop with a ration coupon in my hand. I buy a bulls-eye, so big my cheeks ache accommodating the rough, sugar coated ball, tongue just free enough to lick its sweet surface, smoothing it and by doing so changing its colour and reducing its size. I go to the farm shop to buy home made dandelion and burdock and to the house that, in autumn, sells bags of robin pears. At five years old I am free to do as I wish, go where I please, and like my hero William, be an incorrigible boy far away from his parents’ gaze.

The scene fades and now, below my London bed, I see uniformed children returning from school, hands firmly grasped in those of anxious adults, unseeing, deaf, marching parallel to the growling traffic and the horns, through the obstacle course of swinging briefcases, protruding umbrellas, puncturing stiletto heels and home to the sanctuary of bespoke bedrooms, televisions and games consoles. Far away from their parents’ gaze.

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This little site of mine …long may it shine

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

I sometimes believe in reincarnation. I look at a tree and think, “That’s a bit like me,” that mountain ash. Or, imagining my future self as a hawk. Or experiencing the conundrum of seeing myself suddenly as another human being; precipitated by a child’s eyes or bearing. A life lived can often result in these momentary refractions of wonder about what might come next when all is over. New lamps for old is a theme I often write about. And so to this website. It is another stage. Another me. Another incarnation.

It proposes an unusual thesis; take the act of consumerism and turn it on its head. Let the reader enjoy (or otherwise) the product and then decide what he or she is going to pay for it, if anything.  Thus, its brief is to remove all the marketplace trappings between the reader and the writer. No need to wander around a bookshop or a library armed with the latest reviews. No need to choose by dustjacket and blurb or a sly riffle through pages to try to gauge style. No jumping on the bandwagons of Waterstone’s or Amazon’s hit lists. No, the responsibility  is merely to exist in that narrowed gap between conjured text and scanning eye.

Writing is done in the isolation of mind over matter. When it is finished the result is inverted and becomes matter over mind in that a story now takes up a space in the world and occupies the thoughts of its readership. Every tale takes days, weeks or years to make. What results takes a fraction of that time to absorb. There has always been this barter, the alchemical trade between storyteller and audience, since those days of being illuminated by a fire in a cave to today’s backlighting of an e-reader or the collection of bound leaves in the hand. At the beginning, as the raconteur finished a tale, there would be an immediate reaction of approbation or otherwise. Today, on this new website, response is not physical but virtual. A few words from the reader to the storyteller to say he or she has entered and left the author’s world.

Pay-for-pleasure

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A Peeping Tom and War Poetry

Friday, January 24, 2014

Bingo, a peeping tom and war poetry
It would be hard for any technology-using child of the 21st century to put themselves in my place in 1953. Earlier posts on this site draw pictures of an innocent time of nesting, damming streams, fantasy medievalism with lances and shields, a tiny primary school of 23 pupils and only the occasional fisticuffs creating small dark clouds on the horizon. I can’t recall much to fear in those days, though this may be due to heavy caution and some capacity for adroit language in staving off incidents before they erupted. I recall being paralysed up a tree as I witnessed older boys lying in the grass and inducting younger girls in the arts of having foreign fingers moving like furtive crabs claws inside their knickers. Though I must hardly have known what was involved, I knew that it was a transgression and both boys and girls would get into trouble.  I knew telling tales would have me kicked and punched. Better to hang there like a frozen fruit and wait for the call of the school bell ringing in the teacher’s hand outside the main door, setting everyone scarpering the quarter mile to be in on time. Better no-one ever knew that I knew.
Surprisingly, I did not suffer from stage fright. Nor have I ever. From plays to speaking at UNESCO to hundreds of delegates, I have been able to create a zone and stay in it, impervious to the possibilities of pratfall or the humiliation of sudden silence. When I was into double figures, age-wise, I embarked on a concert tour with another boy called David Salinger. I was a soprano and he was an alto. Our duets would seem today to be a bit sugary and designed to melt old ladies’ hearts, I suppose. Maybe we simpered as we learned to play on audience emotion. The concerts were organized by my father to raise money for the construction of the village hall in Shadforth. The acts were redolent of a post-war period. A handsome twenty odd year old crooner called Lennie sang The Old Rugged cross:
On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
the emblem of suffering and shame;
and I love that old cross where the dearest and best
for a world of lost sinners was slain.
… so that a mournful, reverent hush fell upon the audience, many, I realize now probably having had family members killed during the recent war. Another individual, nameless now, a drama queen in his middle aged splendour, recited J. Milton Hayes’ The Green Eye of The Little Yellow God. It began..
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
It was a poem from the Raj. My father may have been behind its choice. He never really recovered from his prominent status in the army in India. The concerts always ended with a prize draw and Bingo, then called Housey Housey, a communal competition to win a prize too big to be easily got with ration coupons; “Two fat ladies sixty six, one and one legs eleven, six-oh blind sixty…” I know you could have heard a needle drop, the intonations of the caller and the silence of the audience only interrupted by the screech of “House!” from a winning contestant.

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Father and Son: an end to certainty

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

God, the father and son: an end to certainty.
How old is a child before he knows his father is not omniscient? How old is he before he knows that the village priest is an empty vessel? The latter is easy to answer. It came to me when I asked, during choir practice, “Who made God?” The answer was pat, as I remember. Perhaps I  embroidering it by suggesting that Canon Tillard had a look of smug, priestly insincerity as he stared down at me and said, “God made himself.” Even if he said it in all piety, it did have an extraordinary effect upon me. The vaulted Romansque Anglican church, given to Latin mass, white surplices and incense swinging, reverberated with his words. Its stones’ echoing hollowness amplified what seemed to me to be the absurdity of his reply. Even in science fiction, as promoted in the Eagle comic, the most fiendish of aliens did not make themselves out of nothing. Something could not come out of nothing. Whatever laws of reality I held dear in my head at the time were so confounded by his reply that I abandoned the choir and Christianity. I was eleven.
Around the same age I was selected to represent Shadforth C of E primary school in a road safety competition with another school. My team (the only three pupils in the top age bracket, about to take the 11+) spent a week or two swotting up the Highway Code. My father offered to test me. When it came to the sequence that traffic lights go through, he stopped me and said I was wrong. I showed him the Highway Code. He said that it was a mistake in the text and illustrations. He had driven for decades and the sequence was different. He rehearsed me to remember it. Needless to say I was asked that very question. I can still remember the conflict as I struggled with the book’s authority and my father’s. He was in the audience of course. I opted for his version. I was wrong and as a result received three out of four marks for my answer.
It marked the beginning of the end of his omnipotence. Where once I had believed everything he said with an almost fierce fervour, doubt now lurked in my childhood Eden, in all its snakiness. It was the underpinning of my skepticism regarding all forms of certainty in later years, even, ultimately, feeding into my PhD on observation methods in qualitative research. But I don’t want this to sound like retributive carping against my father. He was a fine father in many, many ways. But he was a product of Edwardian England, the army, subservience to the establishment, fair play, the importance of rules and undisputed male dominance within the home. Suddenly seeing him as flawed helped me to be aware that that all people have their weaknesses. I am sure he suffered terribly that evening in the school, sitting among his fellow villagers.

Loss of pride for a man of his generation was even greater then than today. The unimpeachable justice of the father was integral to his sense of identity.

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Slates, frozen milk and green woodpeckers

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Slates, frozen milk and green woodpeckers

My slate was a rectangle, big enough it seemed to my small hands. It was bordered with wood, maybe pine but probably beech. The writing implement, my stylus, was not chalk but a smooth cylinder of slate, too. I have no memory of  the holders. They were probably owned by the children of families whose parents used something similar for cigarettes …! My parents, who both smoked at the time, certainly never provided them. Cigarettes in our house came in soft, colourful packets.

There were two school rooms and a small kitchen. The bigger room also contained the hall and was used by the five to eight year olds while the smaller one was for the older children on their way to the eleven plus. When school milk arrived it was put in the kitchen. In winter the milk was frozen in the bottles and had to be thawed out. As I write this I have an involuntary recoil at the memory of over-heated milk. Cold milk with a shake of icy creamy froth on top, was perfect. Older children thawed out the bottles. The little kitchen was also used for monitorial purposes. Apart from my sister, when she was three, I must have helped teach many children to read and write.
I remember being caned by the class teacher for laughing too much; that involuntary, impossible to stop, eye-watering laughter that feeds itself and those around. The caning was administered with a four foot, unwieldy garden cane. The teacher was not adept at sadism and every time she tried to lift and bring it down upon my hand, it caught the table and went askew. This fuelled more side-splitting laughter and led to less punishment.
An inspector came to the school and looked at all the children’s work. He singled out a composition of mine because I wrote that King Alfred’s ships were like swans in the bay. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy from that moment. A later teacher, at grammar school, scrubbed out my word ‘nadir’ and said the word did not exist.
I was somewhat proficient at art and had pictures displayed on the wall. I painted or crayoned birds and football teams. There was a strong thread of shimmer in them. I liked the clashes of green on red in a woodpecker and my teams also had green and red stripes, though no such strip existed.

My two bibles then and later were the Observer Book of Birds – I learned to recognize every species together with the patterns on their eggs – and an annual three inch square book of the previous season’s football recorded in tiny print with results and tables throughout the season.  I had a favourite team for every division and knew the home strips of all teams in all divisions.
As I have said in a recent post, colour dominated my life, as though it depended upon it. Later, much later, in my fifties, I discovered that I had a genetic abnormality, one which made me both short-sighted and vulnerable to retinal detachment.

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Distance lends confusion

Friday, December 13, 2013

Distance lends confusion
I have just looked up the village in which I spent seven years, from 1947 to 1955, Shadforth. Now it has a small website and a sort of potted history which, if not directly contradicting my memories, at least allowing little place for them. ‘Potted’ here is a metaphor as in the reduction of a pig to Spam. The village green where Sir Lancelot and Gawain fought is now part of a conservation area. The houses around it, including the school I have recently described, are part of this embalming of the past by today’s well-meaning bureaucrats. The rough grass,  overlooked by these dwellings, upon which wickets fell, a boy had an epileptic fit so massive we all ran away in fear of the Devil and where my compatriots skipped, bowled hoops, ran races and fought until blood was drawn and we were separated by minimally concerned adults, carries no scars or trophies of those days.
This insulated sphere of my childhood’s adventures has lost its unique otherworldliness on today’s internet. It is overshadowed by a village a mile away called Ludworth. Ludworth has Pele tower remains and a more historic lineage. Shadforth is only unique for one thing – its name. There are no other Shadforths (“shallow fords”) in England, according to the data on the site. In my early years there was a dome around Shadforth as palpable as The Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. To venture beyond its security brought trepidation into the heart. Immediate unfamiliarity crowded in on the wanderer. Perhaps half way to Ludworth (a place where unspeakable roughnecks roamed) along a country path, was a big pond. The way to it was through this alien territory. To leave it could mean death. But here was where newts could be caught, in all their red livery, as exotic and mythic to us as Golden Salamanders. It took days of planning and hardening of the heart to make the trek, one which you never made alone.
I remember, though I was too young to take part, that a battle was to be fought between the Ludworth and the Shadforth boys. It was heralded for weeks, vying in our credulous minds with the battle of Bosworth Field. The stomach tightening fear and anticipation of the event has erased any knowledge of the result.
This blood-thickening nostalgia is more than a spurious, dewy-eyed tug at the heart strings. It is more than a Proustian episode. I want to reconquer, to reclaim the world that was Shadforth, to be an enfant sauvage, to enable childhood ghosts to walk again, to see the school spilling out at lunchtime, to regain the totality of life under the dome.

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The Fields of Dreams

Sunday, December 8, 2013

The Fields of Dreams
The green sward stretched out before us. Ladies in fine gowns held the favours of their champions as they sat in the gallery waiting for the tourney to begin.  Knights, to a man, were armoured and horsed with lances held perpendicular by their saddles. Shields protected them. Some were like Lancelot, in disguise, willing to deceive those they loved. Some were like Galahad, pure and unaffected by earthly temptations. There were no green Knights as I recall.
The jousts took place at lunch break on the village green between the school and a stone wall which became the balcony for the fair ladies of Arthur’s court – the girls in the school’s two classes. The lances were wooden vaulting poles. The shields were dustbin lids. The favours were ribbons used to denote teams in PE. The whole organization can only have come from the heated imagination of one or two children like myself who, ahead of their reading age, loved Arthurian legend. I recall winning a joust and galloping over to the balcony, turning to allow a young damsel from the first years’ class to ride upon my back as I celebrated my victory. Courtly love was everything to a nine year old.
In the winter, the battles were grimmer. No fair ladies. Feet beating the snow, woolen-wrapped, heads in balaclavas, Brussels sprouts stems in hand with their thick bulbous clay-bound roots and only the ubiquitous dustbin lids to protect us, we set about each other. The lids were dented out of shape by the barbaric onslaught of our medieval spike ball maces, never to fit their bins again.
I lived in a world of Norse Gods and Heroes, sagas such as Beowolf, children’s versions of Malory’s Morte D’arthur, Greek and Roman myths. And they seamlessly elided into the modern, the Superman and Batman comics, The Eagle, The Rover. Fantasy knew no real boundary. Superheroes populated the imagination in all shapes and sizes and with varying degrees of rational underpinning.

I wonder now whether my imagination was my universe and reality amounted only to meals and sleep.

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Intimations of Mortality

Friday, December 6, 2013

Intimations of Mortality
I need to backfill slightly for those of you who have not read an earlier post this year but which kicks off the present one. I was born in India. By the time my family returned with me to the UK I spoke Urdu and English. By then I was aware that my elder sister had drowned and it took three or four years for my parents to conceive me. Four years after me they produced a girl, too. Until I was forty five or so I had the story of my sister’s death imprinted on my brain by my mother. She would say, “Little Margaret would be fifteen now” or “Little Margaret would be twenty five now”. In other words my dead sister was ageing as I was, a ghostly precursor to my life. She died, I knew – I had been told many times – at the age of a toddler, two or three, found drowned in the water tank in the garden. She had apparently climbed over the little protective fence. There she was found, like Ophelia.
I returned one day with my dying father to find my sister’s grave. He was reluctant. Maybe the prostate cancer and the catheter made him feel unprepared. Anyway we went. We found the grave. It had been partially defaced with strange hieroglyphs. We interrogated the register in the little church. There was her name, Margaret Sanger. There was her age. Six years. Now, can you imagine? Six? But she was surely a toddler! Finally my father talked about that distant time.
Margaret was born with a fear of water. She hated being bathed and would scream. When she was eighteen months her screams brought adults into the garden to find her pointing. A toddler was drowning in the fountain but her prompt but precocious warning saved it. She wanted to learn to swim. When my father took her to the swimming baths she grew rigid as she approached and turned blue when he gently eased her into the water. He taught hundreds to swim in his later life. He became a swimming pool manager after the army. But not his own daughter. Not Little Margaret. The very strange thing about her death was this: the post mortem showed no water in her lungs. My father could not explain it except that she may have died from fear. Or, I told myself, she had been asphyxiated and thrown into the tank. Who knows?
The reason for repeating all this is that I must have had some kind of preternatural cognizance of what death meant from the very beginning. One cannot walk in the footprints of the dead all one’s life without some extra sense of it’s presence. But, as you will have gathered, my mother never let it inhibit my freedom to roam, to play beside water, to take chances. She was not a character that could have fitted in the plot of that terrifying film for all parents, Don’t Look Now.
The first deaths I can recall were those of the wrung-necked chickens. Then there were the annual cub wielding forays in the barns of the farm next door as the rats were smoked out. We always had a cat and so I have many images of the creature bringing presents of mice, voles and moles to the dining table. A boy, climbing the sand quarry at the top of Shadforth, fell and was suffocated. It did not stop us going there for Sand Martins’ eggs. I climbed another cliff and took a young Jackdaw for a pet, one day taking it to school on my shoulder. It did not fare well in the hen coop where I kept it and died. Fish died in jamjars or the ponds I made in the garden, lined with clay. Death was everywhere, as natural to me – even if intimidating – as the business of living. The mother of a school friend and teacher in our tiny school, died of cancer. And, to connect with the last post, an effect of death is the fading of colour; in the eyes, in the flashes of red on a fish’s flank and even in the gleam of the coat of a kitten killed by the warning snap of our dog protecting his dinner bowl.
I’m not so frightened of the prospect of the last journey, that Arthurian float across the waters that divide, because death was there from the very beginning, sniping away. Being inconsiderate. I wonder whether life can be truly lived without an acceptance of it’s constant presence?

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The Colour of Memory

Thursday, December 5, 2013

The Colour of Memory
Modern life is destroying colour in a kind of genocide, a universal clearance of the natural spirit of tone, shade, tint and hue. So it appears to me in retrospect.
The following lines by A E Houseman encompass the notion that for each of us, memory has its own presiding colour. For him, blue represented a time, an age to which he could never return.
INTO my heart on air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
  I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.
For me it is colour in its very being. As I have already ventured, I became a putative Zen Buddhist in its early adolescent form though without any such label. The brief vignette in an earlier post in this series recounted the rhapsodic nature of being in a lilac tree or the extraordinarily vibrant flashes of blue and yellow in corn fields that were not yet annually brutalized by spraying. Those were the days when a farmer or gardener fought cunning battles with predators, with their blood constantly on his hands, and had a kind of grudging respect for his foes, even though today we might regard the strung up carcasses of birds and animals to deter further predation, primitive and inhuman. We now prefer mechanised killing on a grand scale from planes, from tractors and from genetic laboratories and have a growing population of city estate children with no knowledge of where eggs or milk or the beef in burgers come from, or of nettles and thorns or wild fruit and fungi. No, those playful days provided arrays of colour in the hedgerows, meadows and cultivated fields that burn in the mind’s eye.
Nothing since compares in my mind to the spectacular spectrum of colours to be found in birds’ eggs, their positioning next to each other in cardboard containers lined with cotton wool. If a rainbow had been constituted from the colours to be found in my box, it would have stretched right across the sky. I suspect that in those immediate, post-war British days where the range of paint was limited in houses, where products in ironmongers and department stores were similarly lacking in much beyond magnolia, green and brown, when fathers wore dun and grey utility attire and women had not cultivated the seeds of fashionable independence, eggs were a wonder. They were a child’s stained glass windows affording a view of the spiritual essence of existence. Since then industrialisation and mass production have led us to a point where we cannot pick wild flowers without guilt and where more and more flora and fauna are necessarily added to the lists of the protected. It is said that 96% of all species that have ever existed have become extinct. In my own private lifetime with its unique visual history, it is the bleaching and extinction of so much colour, wild, savage and limitless that causes the pang of loss. It is as if, as I age, Death, the robber, has begun to visit early to begin pilfering my sensibilities from me.  
He is particularly keen on colour.

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Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Autobiography 5: How to be a man
My father found it much easier to show affection to a daughter (hardly surprising, having had the terrible heartbreak of the first born girl’s death by drowning) and to the youngest versions of me, his son. As I grew older, the physicality of touch diminished until, one day in his seventies in Lanark, when he looked a bit wobbly and I put a hand on his shoulder, he leaped away from me as though branded. He knew my liking for literature and was fulsome in his condemnation of D H Lawrence who was essential reading in the 1960s for anyone interested in the sexual revolution. I wondered later whether he had conflated him with T. E. Lawrence whose extra-military exertions with Arabs would have been, for him, obscene and worthy of a hanging. He was an excellent crossword puzzle solver, doing the Daily Telegraph offering each morning – providing my mother did not get there first. She told me with great amusement one day that he had not been able to solve a final clue whose answer was lesbian, and when she put it in, he was visibly shaken when she told him its meaning.
But in my childhood and youth he was a powerful role model of what it was to be truly male. I believed in him. It was a principle not to lose against either my sister or I at the games that children loved then, whether draughts, cards, word games, football or cricket.  Nor did I begrudge him his victories. It added to his aura of invincibility. And it made me competitive. I suppose I was a fragile child in some ways, thin and awkward, knotted in the knee and wearing glasses. He bought me bright red boxing gloves when I was about seven and set up a bag for me to punch. I was given a pewter-coloured, grey potato and lead slug pistol that required strength to spring load it and when I was a bit older an air rifle. I watched him wring the necks of chickens we kept in the garden and follow their awkward post mortem zigzags between the denuded Brussels sprouts’ stalks, their heads dangling. My mother helped in this conscious stiffening of my male resolve by taking me out on to the back step to watch the thunder and lightning storm approach. She talked wistfully of India’s monsoons.
He did create a tremendous sense of privilege and camaraderie, a Boys Own bubble at times. I would be sent to bed on time but told that he would wake me up in the night for the Big Fight from America. I know it happened a few times but I distinctly remember sitting in front of a roaring fire in the early hours, with the lights off, wrapped in a dressing gown, feet in slippers as the crackling commentary was relayed from Madison Square Garden or some other pugilists’ paradise. Particularly, I remember Rocky Marciano’s bouts with Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott, not the fights but the celebratory ambience of the sitting room. My father would be like a hairpin, bent forward, elbows on knees, staring into the middle distance, living every described punch. He had been a Captain in the PT Corps of the Lancashire Fusiliers, seconded to the Indian Military to help build the officers’ training centre in Dehra Dun. He had boxed, high dived, done gymnastics, played football, tennis and cricket, all at a high competitive standard. What stopped him from becoming a Major was his leaving school at 14 to work in the mines to support his mother. He was not privately educated. “Not officer material’ was stamped across his otherwise exemplary record, the best anyone had ever encountered both academic and physical. How he could remain a Tory supporter after that rebuff I never could work out.
When I was young I marveled at the changes that had occurred in my parents’ lifetime: television, jets, man on the moon, domestic technology. Yet even more change has taken place in my own. But the sheer domination of the monolithic walnut encased wireless in those early years is a far cry from the range of whizzbang electronic media  today. My favourite stood tall and slim and had wings that ran down its sides similar to the accretions on American cars. The dial shone like a halo. The sound emanated magically from some Mount Olympus..
www.chronometerpublications.me 

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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Autobiography 4: From the Big Bang to Steady State
The latest scientific speculation suggests that there had to be something before the Big Bang, poetic flat universes like bed sheets occasionally coming together to create a terrific flap and give birth to yet another. If the first of this series of posts on my childhood began with a memory of my own big bang – the lighter striking fire and the curtain conflagration, I’d like to borrow from the pre – Big Bang scientific supposition and make mention of what existed before.
My first memory did not kick start my life, of course.  That was done in India. I was born into an exotic, even traumatic medium of events and emotions which are now, at least temporarily, lost to me. I was a second child, the first, a sister, having mysteriously drowned aged six in India before I was born. From having a dedicated servant and hot earth I was in no time seeing only white skins with a cold ground under my feet. From bilingual at four – Urdu and English – I was made monolingual by the new culture of the unrelieved, accented English of a Geordie pit village by the time I was five. I started wearing spectacles suffering from very short sight.
All this pre-history and early existence conspired to make me feel different, a bit of a loner, at least this is what my adult self now informs me sagely.  I remember having many friends but no blood brothers. My sister came along four years after me and by then my sparateness was somewhat determined. I spent the first hour in bed this morning trying to uncover early memories after the Big Flame.  Here are a few.
A square cube known as a ‘blue bag’ on the kitchen window sill to ease the pain of frequent bee stings. My mother’s horror at a jam jar of pond water and a beetle so big inside it, it seemed to fill it entirely with its black back and red belly. Plodging in the stream on the way to school and through the dark and terrifying tunnel under the road to the other side. When I revisited this landmark as an adult it seemed impossible that a child could have crawled through, never mind stooped his fearful way in his wellies. Birds eggs in boxes padded with cotton wool. Butterflies in jam jars as well as bees. A man my parents called my ‘uncle’ who was a magician and bandaged his thumb and cut it off making it bleed copiously before re-engaging it and restoring it to health upon undoing the bloody linen. He gave me a silver coin of some kind. Our pebbledash, tiny cottage with its two small bedrooms, and in winter the ice on the inside of my bedroom window which refracted illumination from the street lamp outside, casting monsters on to the bedroom walls. My father having his zinc-filled bath before the fire and the prudery of him. Our dog which was a black Scottie and yapped. Our cat, that frequently attacked a neighbour’s Alsatian so that it cowered, ears flat whenever passing our house. A peck on my willy by a hen that came to watch me pee through chicken wire, causing me to scream and my mother to laugh for minutes on end. Reading. Every day a new book from the village library which was in my primary school and was on revolving shelves that served the children by day and the adults after school and on Saturdays. By six I did not differentiate and the librarian indulged my tastes. I can still see Captain Hornblower R. N. by C.S. Forester in its vivid, adventure suggesting dust cover. The Scarlett Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
These memories are like dots, not joined up yet into proper pictures, isolated stars not yet sufficient to make the Milky Way. But, as Dylan Thomas says in Welsh Incident , “I was coming to that…”

www.chronomterpublications.me

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Sunday, November 24, 2013

Autobiography 3: Abandoned child, wild gorse and honey bees
I think I may be dashing about in time. I cannot really put things in date order. My memory seems to be a bit like a dark night sky wherein a star suddenly appears and I fasten on to it with my telescope.
My parents drove me to friends of theirs where I was to spend a week on holiday. We went in the new (second hand) family car, a big Rover with walnut dashboard and leather seats. My father must have been doing well as a soft drinks salesman. He had given up on the motor bike which, once every few months, he would dutifully strip down and clean in front of the fire. I never knew why I was ejected from family life like this. Until I left home for college this was the only aberration in a continuous existence at home in Shadforth. They cannot have lived too far away and they were called Donaghy. They had a much older son in his mid teens. They lived in what was a piece of Durham’s mining-related architecture, a hamlet of houses, a handful strip of each on either side of the road. Their toilets were out the back and communally shared with other houses on that side of the street. A horse and cart came once a week to remove the contents of the joint septic receptacle which ran along under all the wooden toilet seats. You sat in your cubicle, above the floating mayhem of drunken miners and their Edwardian pursed lipped wives, hoping to be quick and to get out before being overcome. Constipation was a slow death – not that I can remember having it.
Two memories of this visit. The first was that my father gave the teen of the house a steel compass and other mathematical tools, embedded and glittering in a velvet and wood box, as a present. I know I felt jealousy. They had been in the Shadforth house for some time. They were MY heirlooms. Many years later my father gave someone else my half-size slate-bed billiard table, much to my volubly expressed anger. He said I had gone to college and didn’t think I wanted it. It was a curious element of his complex personality. He seemed to need to be seen as generous even at the expense of his son. Or is that too harsh? It was a table I had paid for.
Behind the latrines was a small field, though large enough for me. It was a meadow but inundated with dock, dandelion and gorse. It must have been summer when I was there. I spent much of the time catching bees in a jam jar with holes in its lid to help them breathe. The art was seeing how many you could capture. Many times you might lift the lid to entrap yet another and accidentally release one or two. Stings were common. I put flowering dead nettles inside to make them comfortable.
Why was I sent to the Donaghys? I assume with the jaundice of adult wisdom that something must have been up at home. My sister, four years younger than me, was not excommunicated. When you think back you find certain events which have nestled in your brain as unchallenged, isolated islands, suddenly develop a hidden plot, a conspiratorial odour. My child-like, lonesome distraction from wondering about the motives of my parents could be found in jars full of yellow striped or red-bummed bees. 

www.chronometerpublications.me 

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Friday, November 22, 2013

Autobiography 2: Earth, Air, Water and Blood
So my earliest memory was fire. Casting my mind back I have a sort of metaphorical sense of what memory is. It’s a concertina which, when pulled out reveals all that extra capacity that cannot be seen at the outset. Or like a set of books whose spines are all that is visible on the shelf, with vague titles which must be lifted out, one by one to reveal their mysterious substance. Memory is two dimensional for the purpose of retrieval and multi-dimensional once you get hold of it. Nothing is actually forgotten but it can take unusual circumstances and lateral purchase sometimes, to draw people, events and perceptions back into consciousness.
Since an autobiography, to be true and accurate in all respects, would be vast and never-ending, to embrace the span of a life, it behoves the writer to provide vignettes, fragments that suggest the whole like shards of a hologram, isomorphic representations.
After Leeds we moved to Shadforth County Durham. We lived for a few months across the village green, opposite the school. Here are a few flashes from that time. Becoming lost and eventually found in the neighbour’s dog’s kennel with my arms around a dog notoriously big and feared by the postmen. Going to the toilet just before playtime (not yet five) and using one of the girls’ outside toilets. Just as I flushed it the bell went and I had to barricade myself in by jamming the door closed with straight legs, as I sat on the seat, trouserless. I was petrified with anguish and embarrassment as girls hammered on the door keening that they knew a boy was in there. 

Yet, not far away across the concrete yard was a lilac tree. It was here that my immersion in Zen began. I recall climbing it and reclining in its branches, curtained about by pale purple panicles, shutting my eyes and swooning in the heavy scent, my ears drowning in the deep buzzing of bees and higher pitched drones of other insects.
In that Elysium of nature, a stream ran close to the bottom of our garden. Above it swept down a hill of corn, hosting the electric blue of cornflowers, the golden fat yellow of buttercups and the powdery white branches of old man’s baccy. Has my sight faded? This memory of colour is almost-trip-like in comparison to today’s perceptions. Perhaps my present eyes do not deceive but in that natural wild-foraging state of early childhood I saw the very essence of colour, its very spirit as one finds in Shintoism. All since has been facsimile, perfectly serviceable but without the power to truly burn the retina.
I dug deep holes on the little path that ran around the field and covered them in thin sticks and grass and leaves to trap the farmer. A gang of us trekked to a nearby quarry and stole a length of rope which we tied high above the stream so that we could swing down from the high bank on one side of it, screaming like our muscular hero in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan And The City of Gold. We made dams. We tightrope walked the narrow concrete divides between the effluence tanks of the sewage farm.
The last snippet, cut from the cloth of that time, is of a birthday party. I must have been five, I suppose. Perhaps four or so boys had been invited. They brought presents. The only one I can remember was from a boy whose parents had no money, or so my mother informed me. He gave me a tin cow, a Guernsey I can now affirm. One leg had been broken off. I took the treasure and placed it on my shelf in the sideboard cupboard. I can see it now, just managing to stay upright, all on its own, lit by the searchlight of inexplicable pleasure.

It was when I learned that it is the thought that counts.

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In an autobiography, a thousand memories must begin with one

Monday, November 18, 2013

In an autobiography, a thousand memories must begin with one
Writing an autobiography represents a worrying collision of two gropes of thought. I am not talking here of the autobiographies of those who have jumped to fame on the serendipitous back of media-enhanced celebrity and deliver their usually ghost-written accounts of their first years of fame. I am more concerned with autobiography as the summing up of a life, a kaleidoscope of events and characters, memories, dreams, reflections and might-have-beens which together comprise the vaguely stable core at the heart of the ever changing mist of what has been experienced by the author. The two ropes of thought, at least for me, comprise firstly a superstitious fear that writing it might have the same import as a will and may somehow mark the end of my imaginative writing. The second is that if I leave it too late then the record of my life will become too faded, my ink drying in the pen and the very tool of my imagination, the carefully wrought word and phrase may give way to something so prosaic it has none of the character of my writing when all my faculties are present!
With autobiographies, timing is all. It must be got down before the brain is more colander than crucible.
So, beginning at the beginning, I have no memories at all of India where I spent my first four years or so of life. Suffice it to say that India has still been a dominating motif, affecting my sense of self, a background like the foundation glue an artist uses to prepare a canvas. No, despite being bilingual, nothing remains of those early naked-running native years in Dehra Dun. My first images come from Leeds, a cold northern city where we stayed for a few months with my father’s mother, not the most gracious of individuals I am told. It was there, or in some subsequent accommodation that I took my father’s cigarette lighter and hid behind the curtains, flicking it on and off. I seem to recall the mystery of this fire-maker but have no vision of the burning curtains as they exaggerated that tiny spurt of flame into an ascending line of fire and thence to the Christmas decorations.
It was the only time in my life that my father came close to hitting me, if I am to believe my mother who I am sure would not have lied about such a traumatic early event. I am assured that he did not, instead sending me to my room. The fact that he did not strike me is surely the perfect education for a son. After all, a room going up in smoke is among the worst of scenarios. I have not hit my own children and I am sure they are the same with my grandchildren. Scientists now believe that genes can be switched on and off during a life. I have displayed on occasion the willingness to battle, to use fist and foot, so the warrior gene can burn brightly if the button is pressed – but not within the fomenting confines of familial relations.

I realise, writing this, that it is possible that autobiographies might delineate more exactly the characters of those around the author than the being of the author himself. 

My father will, no doubt, not be immune from this.

For free novellas and other work go to www.chronometerpublications.me
For the Azimuth Trilogy go to www.jacksanger.com


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Ghosts in the Machine

Monday, September 9, 2013

Ghosts in the Machine
I have just finished the second or third draft of a short story called Rupture. The title has strong resonances for me. Life contains ruptures though, being survivors, we try to gloss them over, smooth them out, fill in the voids and talk ourselves through the miseries they cause because we want our lives to be frictionless, running like the well-oiled wheels of dreamy steam trains. From broken relationships to relocation, from children’s injuries to their untimely deaths, from dying parents whose desire for a last, healing conversation went unrequited to unspoken praise and cowardly refusal to challenge, our lives have events which rupture our hopes and fantasies about ourselves. The aftermaths of these accidental or willful intrusions stay with us forever, popping up in our dreams or causing us to adopt aberrant behaviours dislocated from their cause by denial. Life is tough and in the main we prefer to recount and make ourselves believe the glossy, Hollywood version of it. Dwelling on the ruptures makes us morbid and unsavoury companions.
In the short story of which I speak, a ghostly piece, the main protagonist undergoes a massive rupture of his delightful existence. The hemorrhaging away of warmth and intimacy begins when he views, like a peeping tom, a videotape of the family life of people he does not know.
It was like watching an old cinema classic in which he felt deep pangs of longing for an actress who might by the time he was viewing it have lost her glorious early beauty or even died. All old films contained moving death masks.
I am drawn to old films, not because of their reputation necessarily, though that helps me to swallow the pill with a coating of sugar, but because of the surreal sense of rupture. The past has been ripped out of its continuum and is dangled before me. These once flesh and blood actors, plying their trade with one-time verve and optimism under the spotlight of fame, now parade their wares on a screen in my sitting room.
They unsettle me.
Twitter @profjacksanger

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Saturday, August 31, 2013

New Review for The Azimuth Trilogy
Jack Sanger’s sprawling epic, Azimuth is a trilogy that brings to mind myth and folklore of times long gone. It conjures memories of a barely remembered past; one that feeds the subconscious and brings to life archetypes almost forgotten, yet still resonate in our collective unconscious; the stuff of dreams and legends. The narrator, Kamil has been commissioned to tell the story of the Magus – ancient patriarch of the current dynasty – to Sabiya and Shazrad, royal princesses of the court. The story is a dual revelation; one of origins and the other of court intrigue and danger. It is reminiscent of such fables as Morte D’Author, Lord of the Rings, The Arabian Nights and the Adventures of Ullyses; even stories of Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita from ancient India. Its appeal is multicultural and encompassing; something for everyone. For those who revel in that nebulous region where myth and memory blur, this book is for you; and for those who simply love a great read. The story is broken down into chapters, each one relaying the life and adventures of the Magus; stories of magic and mystery. Each chapter is self contained yet the stories are connected and masterfully intertwined with the myriad plots and conspiracies of life at the royal court, which are the backdrop to this amazing adventure. I give it a Five Star rating and recommend it to all lovers of myth and pre-history. Can’t wait for the movie!
Dr. Rachel Campbell
More reviews at www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews

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Monday, August 26, 2013

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The Hidden Persuaders
Working in a convent home for the care of emotionally disturbed adolescent girls can throw up insights into the hidden worlds of communication. Telepathy, empathy, subliminal advertising. I remember Vance Packard wrote a book in the late 1950s, called The Hidden Persuaders. That was sometimes what it felt like as an atheist working with committed religious women. They were kind, generous and philosophically open, as earlier blogs will vouchsafe. Anyway, more of their strange powers a little later.
A form of communication which will have by-passed most men’s knowledge (and some women’s) is via hormones. All the women and girls in the convent had synchronized periods. New girls would fall into the same menstrual cycle within a couple of months of arrival. I remember taking a nun into town for three months supply of sanitary towels. They filled the back of the mini van!
The fact that we communicate with each other in subliminal ways seems to be within most people’s experience. It is usually laughed off as statistically inevitable that synchronous thought should occur. Despite all those Russian experiments during the cold war to produce secret agents who might gain the west’s secrets via telepathy, it remains an unlit area of scientific progress – unless you add in the latest thought controlled cursors in computer technology or quantum theory which stipulates that any observer will change the patterns of movement within atoms by observing the interactions. My vignette is more prosaic and easier to follow than Heisenburg’s masterful theory.
We took all the girls to the Lake District. Climbing big hills is symbolic for urban girls who do not know that milk comes from big grass-munching beasts and that there are places where you cannot see a house no matter how hard you look. The nuns had a sister convent up there with dormitory accommodation and some separate rooms. We arrived in the evening after a long drive from Norfolk. Nothing much happened to me that night. The next day was a successful hiking, climbing, blistering, prickling, stinging sort of day. The girls were tired out. They went to bed early and that was that. I retired eventually. I lay in bed and was about to fall asleep (or did so, who knows) when I was presented with a shimmering figure of Christ. The apparition, delusion, actuality did not speak but communicated mind to mind, as it were. It was trying to persuade me to become a Christian. It was surprisingly powerful. I remember my stock reply was something along the lines of “That’s not why I am here in this life”, thereby opening a door to the notion or reincarnation perhaps but nothing more. This struggle of wills went on for a few hours. The Christ figure in hippy beard and long hair, robes etc (a rather late version of him as artists cloned this image from a Roman god; all the original images being hermaphroditic, bare-faced and late adolescent) eventually disappeared. I slept a couple of hours and then faced the day. The nun who accompanied our party from the convent in Norfolk asked whether I had experienced anything unusual during the night. I felt a bit embarrassed to recount what I had seen. Before I described it, she said;
“You see, we were all praying for you until late in the night, hoping you might see the light.”
There  are many levels and forms of communication of which we are either unconscious or only dimly aware.
Twitter @profjacksanger

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Sunday, August 18, 2013

The bearable lightness of dying
The last blog presented a sliver of the existence I knew as Sister Daphne. I have always – well, since a teenager – been preoccupied by the fundamental question of what is this thing called life? And as a corollary, what is this other thing called death? In fact, going back to the college days represented in a blog a week or two ago, I remember I was writing nihilistic poetry for it seemed as if I was teetering on the edge of the abyss. Fortunately my character never embraced any notion of suicide no matter how bleak the answers to these questions might turn out. Rather, I realized that there was time ahead of me. And with time might come an answer to what constituted my mortal coil. It was this train of thinking that still finds itself shaping what I write. Azimuth is a trilogy about the search for meaning. www.azimuthtrilogy.com The four novellas (three free downloading) I completed earlier this year all dance around a totem pole with a death’s mask at the top. www.chronometerpublications.me  And Twitter is especially good for fashioning aphorisms and the like which prove to be arrows pointing at my perennial affliction. For example at @Profjacksanger you have the following:
It is curious is it not that people want to die in their sleep after a lifetime of waiting for that moment?
A peer of Sister Daphne was Sister Katherine. I liked her very much. She was translucent. Unlike Sister Daphne she was pure convent nun. There were no doubts in her and yet there was no attempt to proselytize either. She emanated goodness. I used to enjoy conversations about life and death with her, sitting under an oak tree.
I hadn’t seen her for some time and asked after her health. “She’s a bit weak,” came the answer, “but she’s sitting in the garden at this moment”. I went to find her. Not the usual place. A glade, more secluded.
“How are you?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
‘The Sisters said you were a little weak.”
“Oh that. Yes.” She paused and then said, “I am going to die next week on (I’m sure she said) Wednesday.
“Of course you’re not!” I huffed, no doubt feeling she needed some uplifting jollity.
“I am. It is my favourite Saint’s day. We often die on our favourite Saint’s day. I don’t think there’s anything else I want to do and so another year is too much.” She smiled her wonderful, engaging smile.
Sister Katherine died the following Wednesday. Having not seen a physician for a long time, there was a post mortem. Her body was riddled with cancers and had been, the doctor judged, for years. He wondered how she had kept going for so long.

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Friday, August 9, 2013

On Exorcisms
You’ll find references to an exorcism I attended if you check the blogs for December 2012. Writing about Sister Daphne in the last foray into my biography reminded me of another one. (Memory is like thousands of bags full of substance but which are tied at the neck to each other so that you have a metaview, like a list of contents but have to untie each neck to get at what is harboured there.)
As I said, I worked as a social worker in a convent. We had about a dozen extremely emotionally disturbed adolescent girls, twenty or so staff and used a technique called regression therapy to enormously beneficial effect for most of them. Despite its efficacy it was never taken up country-wide because of its sophistication and cost in terms of skilled staff required. Anyway, imagine the premises we worked in on the convent estate. A truly gothic, mullioned, slit windowed red brick building with turrets. Very tall, particularly in morning and evening mist. Bedrooms along narrow corridors. A chapel which frightened the girls, situated between their rooms and my flat. Better than a thousand locks.
One girl came to us and Sister Daphne and the head of the unit, Sister Rita, were soon perturbed by  the girl’s smell. So were the other boarders. Though she washed and had clean clothes she exuded something which made the hair rise on the nape. She had a thin small voice coming from somewhere deep within her overweight body. She seemed to look from a depth so deep in her skull that you could not imagine its source. She heard voices.
One day we heard a noise that antennae told us wasn’t right and raced into the kitchen just in time to disturb the girl strangling another and thereby saving her life.
The priest to the convent at the time was called Godwin, believe it or not. Because we were not equipped to deal with psychopathy, the would-be strangler was moved to secure accommodation elsewhere. There were those among the staff who swore that she was possessed. Despite her leaving and much use of powerful cleaning products, her room retained her otherworldly odour. Father Godwin conducted an exorcism of the room. The smell disappeared. As girls left, so did its temporary history of  succour to the malevolent.
Twitter: @profjacksanger

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Wednesday, August 7, 2013

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Sister Daphne’s Dilemmas
When we first met I was in my fifth year of teaching. It was the time of liberal studies in colleges of further education. The naming of courses is always political. Liberal Studies became General Studies and then Communication Studies as the cultural imperative to give apprentices and those returning to education after failing at school, a broader sense of the world, a critical consciousness and a capacity to see behind the media’s gloss and bias, slowly foundered on successive governments’ strategies to force social engineering to the forefront, whereby the young would be fitted for what was called ‘the world of work’.
Anyway, as a liberal studies teacher I taught psycho-drama to professionals (doesn’t that have the ring of the times?) The acid generation, the hatred of the establishment, the dropping out, the hair and gaudy attire, the last great surge towards personal freedom and anarchy, were all part of an optimism that helped constitute and drive the curriculum.
One of my students was Sister Daphne.  I set up a mining accident in the classroom. Lines of chairs became tunnels. The game revolved around whether you would escape or save others at risk of dying. One of life’s great dilemmas. Sister Daphne died on the classroom floor. In tears. Afterwards she said it was totally disturbing. She also came to me with dreams she was having. I don’t remember them now except that they revolved around the shattering of structures – including the convent walls.
When she joined the convent the biggest day of her life was the day she would leave her novice status and take the ring of Christ. A bride. She was overjoyed and after the rituals and prayers she told me she ran outside, flinging her arms in the air in exultation. Her new ring slipped away into the bushes.  The search took hours. Once repatriated with it, she said that the sun shone every day for five years.
This did not mean that she was immune to tests of faith. Her most graphic story involved her at Evensong prayers. Her mind began to slip away from a holy focus. A darkness seemed to cloud her thought. Her head ached. She put her hand up to ward off the pulse of evil and her hand contacted an enormous spider, sitting over her ‘third eye’.
I was very fond of her. She was always open about her internal battles between faith and skepticism, always tolerant of others and it was she who asked me, an atheist,  to work in the convent, to care for emotionally disturbed adolescent girls, an experience that has coloured my social and educational philosophy ever since.
Twitter: @profjacksanger

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Thursday, August 1, 2013

Ch ch ch ch ch ch changes…
David Bowie’s song came to mind as I started writing this blog. I was reflecting on the mysteries surrounding what we call fate. Fate is often a rationalizing of events that have occurred and which seem to have conspired some change in one’s life. A trauma, a chance meeting with someone who becomes one’s partner, an act of god, a range of domino-like incidents that then create a context which enwraps one in its coils. In an earlier blog I recounted how such a train of events over decades became a pattern – in hindsight – that led me to live in Ghana.
When I left school in 1962 and went on to a teachers’ college in Sunderland I took a spur of the moment decision which completely changed my life. Until I walked into the men’s hostel room which I had been allocated I was known by family, school and village friends as Eric. Now Eric was a quiet, retiring, shy boy in glasses, somewhat askance at the very sight of a pretty girl. Until the last couple of years he had been thin, bony and gawky. Then he had applied himself with some discipline to body and mind. He became a good tennis player, cricketer, swimmer. He did weights in his bedroom. He meditated on a cigarette lighter to levitate it from its resting position. He read Zen. I suppose Eric was both consciously and unconsciously preparing himself to be a different person. Like a snake his skin was too tight, too dull and too unattractive.
In the hostel, a young fellow from a nearby room wandered in and introduced himself, following this up with the “what’s your name?” question. “Er…Jack,” I answered, using my middle name for the first time. Within an hour I had met a dozen or more new compatriots and was known by my new monicker. I remember my brain turning rapidly on the axis of this newly discovered ‘Jack’. Who was he? Well, he was the opposite of Eric in many ways. He was outgoing. He was easy with the girls, he was sporty enough but didn’t mind being philosophical. He wrote poetry. He acted. He directed plays. He wore sideburns and a quiff. He played bass. All these things I admitted to within that first day. All these things became me and were expected of me. Are me. Although, over the years as I’ve experienced more and reflected more, the two sides of my character have melded. Introversion and extroversion only dominate in certain contexts.
There seems to me little doubt that major changes can be effected at any time in a person’s life despite the obvious caveat that the later one leaves it the harder it becomes because one’s history and one’s current circumstance tend to combine to force one’s ‘self’ into the straitjacket of social expectation. A close friend told me, when dying, that a sudden revelation in the previous weeks had led this individual to a sense of a life misplaced, of cards badly played, of an unnecessary subordination to social forces. Of a sense of loss.
I feel a lot better for being Jack with a bit of Eric going about his business happily underneath than the other way round; a timidly unassuming fellow with an increasingly frustrated other self wanting to burst from its constraints.
Twitter @profjacksanger

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Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Hail Stones In the Pyrenees

Thought I’d digress from the current flow and describe an event, yesterday. Imagine the scene: sunshine, reading Montaigne on the recliner, rearing cliffs behind me with crows and woodpeckers creating a drum rhythm. A blackbird chortling solos above my head on the pear tree. All hot and humid and very south of France. Ten minutes later a towering black cloud breasts the peak of Canigou. Indoors I wander, taking stuff from the washing line on my way. Ten minutes more and hell unleashes its fury and a Mordor darkness descends. Giant hailstones crash and crush, stripping the fruit trees and the tomato plants, holing the parasol canopy, dimpling the metal on the car roof and bonnet, destroying the plastic laundry basket. A great brown river rushes down the road past the house carrying stones and tree branches. Everywhere is covered in white cobblestones.

Later I hear that cars have been junked, Velux roof lights shattered and bedrooms filled with ice.

Here’s a bit of doggerel on the event:

Twas a normal day in Ol’ Casteil
The sun it was a shining
Then all went black
The lightning crack’d
And crumbled heaven’s lining…

www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Friday, July 19, 2013

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“Dream Lover Where Are You…”
Hearing accounts of other people’s dreams is about as tasty as eating cheap mozzarella. They may intrigue, exhilarate, perturb or cause great distress to those who experience them but today’s listener generally remains turned off  by the telling – unless s/he is some kind of eager interpreter. Those who, like myself, find them uncannily redolent of parallel worlds, may have been influenced by Jung’s great work, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Every primitive culture accords the dream with significance. In the so-called sophisticated west we have generally forgotten – or deny – their importance in our lives. While science attempts a rational explanation of the brain’s machinations while we sleep, it is their very irrationality which links us to a kind of other-worldliness.  Waking up out of a dream state is like emerging from an underwater swim and finding life above its surface momentarily foreign. The dream, still clinging wetly to us, then falls away in droplets as we transit from one world to the other until. When we are dry again, we have divested it from our consciousness.
Maybe like you, I sometimes wake with such a sense of yearning for what I am leaving and a rejection of what I am re-entering that an angst stays with me as a dull ache all morning. It may have been a landscape or some other aspect of nature which I discovered like an intrepid  explorer or a realization that I was in an ongoing, deep and intimate relationship with people in a world far removed from my usual conscious one.  At times, when this sensation of having enjoyed another life with an individual or network of people is especially strong, I am convinced that it is the world into which I have woken that is the fraudulent one, the illusion, the true dream state. I feel absolute despair at not being able to continue my life with them.
After one particular event in which it seemed as though I loved, to my core, a woman who bore no likeness to anyone I have ever met, I started writing what turned out to be a novella called Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story. The narrative plays with the notion described above: which is the more authentic reality, the conscious one or the unconscious alternative?
@profjacksanger for tweets

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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Zen and the Art of Psychic Maintenance
We had moved to a village called Ryton, close to the Tyne. I was about twelve. Naturally I joined the public library. In the earlier village of my childhood I was taking out adult books. By twelve I had read the vast bulk of the better American crime noir by Chandler, Cheyney, Wallace et all and was now on a lifetime’s cruise through space and time with Sci Fi. Another reason for attending the library regularly was that there was a pretty young librarian and fellow tennis player called Joyce Strong. The library was at the end of a ten minute walk, which included a graveyard.
Anyway, enough of this cursory filling-you-in. Despite Joyce’s undoubted charms, I loved books and was able to leave her at the desk and lose myself among the shelves. One day I succumbed to what Arthur Koestler called The Angel in the Library. For this angel to aid you in your life’s quest, you must clear your mind of trivia and/or a premeditation concerning what you want to read next,  and wander with your eyes virtually shut, up and down the aisles. At some point you will open them and be staring at the spine of a tome that will solve a current impasse or help shape your destiny.
I took down a book with Zen in the title. Zen has been my companion since that day. I published a relatively successful little book called An A to Zen of Management (the last few are boxed in my cave here in France) which consists of seventy odd aphorisms to open the minds of business leaders. The woman who illustrated it with Japanese calligraphy is now my son’s wife. My book, Azimuth, has a newly minted Zen aphorism to begin each chapter. Finally, I took to Twitter like a Zen intoxicant, finally finding a medium where the interplay between concise language and infinite thought could become an every day discipline.
So you see, that day in Ryton library when I, the callow youth, took down, unsuspectingly, an obscure collection of writings on paper within board covers, once opened proved to be a portal to my future life.
Examples:
Abandon what you have lost before you carry it
The impossible is the stillborn child of the unimaginative
Is your life-script the consequence of your authorship or your readership?
The Azimuth Trilogy:  www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Twitter: @profjacksanger

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Saturday, July 6, 2013

I said I’d write a sequence of blogs on the mysteries that attend my life. I am assuming that I am not unique in being subjected to uncanny forces beyond my powers of reason. I expect most people, if they spent a bit of time in personal reflection, would dredge up the inexplicable in their own lives. The fact of the matter is that if we do experience events beyond the pale, then we tend to consign them to deepest memory because we know we’d be ridiculed if we intimated we believed them. Our friends and acquaintances are always ultra-rational when it’s not their own lives held under a spotlight.
In the last couple of blogs I have introduced what Jung terms synchronicity, events that are bizarrely connected across time and space and seem to defy normal forces. Here’s another example, a vignette which speaks of the irrational.
I was born in India. By the time my family returned with me to the UK I spoke Urdu and English. By then I was aware that my elder sister had drowned and it took three or four years for my parents to conceive me. Four years after me they produced a girl, too. Until I was forty five or so I had the story of my sister’s death imprinted on my brain by my mother. She would say, “Little Margaret would be fifteen now” or Little Margaret would be twenty five now”. In other words my dead sister was ageing as I was and as a ghostly precursor to my life. She died, I knew – I had been told many times – at the age of a toddler, two or three. She was the daughter of an army man and his wife. My father was a significant player in building India’s military academy in Dehra Dun, a couple of hundred miles north of Delhi. He was seconded to the Indian military whilst also a captain in the PT Corps. He helped stage those old TV  events at Earl’s Court where services competed in assembling canons, doing gymnastics and the like.
My sister was found drowned in the water tank in the garden. She had apparently climbed over the little protective fence. There she was, like Ophelia. It nearly destroyed my father and my mother had to be strong to hold their relationship together.
Moving on forty years. I accompanied my dying father back to this place where he had been ‘the man’ and where my ghostly sister began her immaterial ageing. Being an academic I was invited to address India’s leading military trainers and stood before a packed lecture theatre with my father sitting in the front row, observing his son doing something he had done forty to fifty years before. We had tea in the bungalow where I first crawled. This was my first return after the intervening decades.
I decided to find my sister’s grave. My father was reluctant. Maybe the prostate cancer and the catheter made him feel unprepared. Anyway we went. We found the grave. It had been partially defaced with strange hieroglyphs. We interrogated the register in the little church. There was her name, Margaret Sanger. There was her age. Six years. Now, can you imagine? Six? But she was surely a toddler! Finally my father talked about that distant time.
Margaret was born with a fear of water. She hated being bathed and would scream. When she was eighteen months her screams brought adults into the garden to find her pointing. A toddler was drowning in the fountain but her prompt but precocious warning saved it. She wanted to learn to swim. When my father took her to the swimming baths she grew rigid as she approached and turned blue when he gently eased her into the water. He taught hundreds to swim in his later life. He became a swimming pool manager after the army. But not his own daughter. Not Little Margaret. The very strange thing about her death was this: the post mortem showed no water in her lungs. My father could not explain it except that she may have died from fear. Or, I told myself, she had been asphyxiated and thrown into the tank. Who knows?
I went to see her grave the next morning early. I had arranged for the gardener to put flowers on her stone. He had filled an indent in her slab and rose petals floated there. I heard a little girl crying in my mind. Self-delusion, no doubt.
My parents had more luck with their second daughter. She took to water like the proverbial duck. In fact she became one of Britain’s leading women breast-strokers, aged only thirteen.
Little Margaret would be 74 now.
www.chronometerpublications.mefor free reads and ones to buy.

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Sunday, June 30, 2013

Daydream believer

I’ve had a number of readers kind enough to compliment the direction of these blogs. Well, that’s not quite exact. There have been more compliments as the blogs begin to entertain the mysterious and the uncanny. Read the last few and you will see what I mean. The place of strange events in our lives gives rise to all sorts of mental hocus pocus. It’s the same unconscious foundation in our brains that gives rise to religious faith, fatalism and alien abductions, I’d guess. In some far-off blog which the researchers among you might be able to weed out I commented on the brain’s ‘god spot’. Put an electrode in there and even Richard Dawkins would be seeing angels. Another blog, at a different time, at some point in December 2012, recounts the adventures of yours truly as I extricate a friend from the belief that he has been sent to this earth to tip the devil back into the darkest pit for another one thousand years.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m not really given to beliefs in the paranormal. There have got to be explanations for these events even as they happen to me but it doesn’t stop me being bemused and unsettled by them. The most recent has been discovering that I had written the future, in the early eighties (described in my last little essay here) and one that has since come to pass. On reflection in bed this morning, allowing the dawn chorus to permeate my spirit with its songs of the infinite cosmos, I realized that my life has been punctuated by mysterious events. Given the interest the last one or two have generated, I’m going to continue in that vein. First a bit of background.
I was born in India. At four I was perfectly bi-lingual; Urdu and English. On the sea-going trip to Britain which lasted a number of months, I lost all Urdu. It probably blighted by academic development. It’s a well known syndrome. However, my starved bilingualism led to an inordinate desire to write in the one language remaining. A school inspector visiting Shadforth  C of E junior school commented that I was going to be a writer. He read out, “King Alfred’s ships floated in the bay like swans.” Something of that ilk. I was a very imaginative child. I had the whole school (thirty children) playing jousting knights with Brussels sprouts stalks for clubs, sticks for lances and dustbin lids for shields on the school field. Girls sat on a wall watching and we gave our favours (bits of ribbon) to the Guinivere we loved best, upon a victory. After such a tournament I wandered off down the steep meadow, to cross the stream to my house. As I approached a hedge I remembered I’d had a dream of a nest in just such a bush. It was the shape of a spinning top and had three eggs. I moved excitedly among the blackthorn and found the place. There it was, exactly as dreamt. I took one of the three ovals for my collection. But it was with a curious sense of power. If I could do this, maybe I could use this force at will.
I couldn’t. But I could do it without will. Over the years whenever I wanted something that might progress my immediate train of action, it would drop into my lap. Second hand shops were perfect territory for disgorging valuable pieces of the jigsaw of current life. It proved a strong version of serendipity. When I got to be a student in a teacher’s college in Sunderland I always ran out of grant at the end of the term and my father never subbed me what he was supposed to. I went off with my last ten shillings to the bookmakers and won what I needed to last until the end of term.
It’s very low level, this capacity to bend fate to my will. I haven’t won the lottery, for example.
I know this is all a bit weak and lacking in force majeure but it’s a start. (Believe it or not I wrote the French just now and had to check what it meant. Yet another example of writing from the unconscious tolling the years back to King Alfred or onwards to the eventual creation of The Azimuth Trilogy.)

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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

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The sorcery of scribbling
In a blog, many moons ago, I wrote about the creation of The Azimuth Trilogy. I was fascinated by the act of writing myself into knowledge. Since I had placed the novel in ancient times and wasn’t a historian, everything in the books came from my imagination. When I had finished the thousand or so pages I became suddenly concerned that the work would be embarrassing. What if I got my facts wrong so badly that I would be a laughing stock? So I checked. It was amazing that my sure-footed imagination had dredged from somewhere a whole world that had truly existed. In incredible detail. You can search through the early blogs on writing to flesh it out but the basic tenet is that writers can be conduits to the shared experience of homo sapiens. Mystics call it channeling but the term may a bit too mystical for me.
Then, only two or three blogs ago, I wrote about the mysterious experience of finding myself in Ghana and how some imperative had drawn me there, despite myself. It consisted of a series of synchronous events, spread over time, strange in themselves; portents, if you will.
I am experiencing much the same again. I discovered the delights of the OCR recently. This is computer software that recognizes scans of printed pages and turns them into editable word files. Now, in my writer’s war chest, I have a number of novels. I always wrote even when leading a reasonably fulfilling academic career as a research professor. It was a necessary complement to the less glamorous life I was leading.
When I finished my novel earlier this year about a super-heroine in a dystopian future Britain, A Woman Who Kills, I turfed out one of these novels. It was typed and legible enough for the OCR. Three days later I had transcribed it into a word file. It is called Middle Ages and deals with the vicissitudes of a group of overweight women and their husbands in Norwich, England. Middle class angst. A dark comedy of manners. Coming eventually to a kindle near you. Or a shop. What is completely engrossing is that I hardly remember writing it, have no idea of the plot and find it a real revelation of life and mores in the early 1980s. It stands up as a sociological exposé of those Thatcherian days. But (segwaying back to the beginning of this blog) what is truly occult is that the names of the characters, chosen at random when I was writing, have all become key names among my friendships and associations, developed in the years long after the book was finished. Not only that but all the issues about being overweight for a woman are headlines in the media.
And, of course, those who are following these blogs would know that I married someone four years ago, Helen Teague, who designs clothes for large women and is in partnership with Dawn French the comedienne and writer. Imagine me, therefore, editing this novel, written by a former self some thirty years ago and finding in its pages, all sorts of foretellings of what has since come to pass. Creepy or what?
More of my writing at www.chronometerpublications.me
The Azimuth Trilogy at: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Helen’s and Dawn’s clothing website is: www.sixteen47.com  

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Saturday, June 22, 2013

I write therefore I exist – but only if you read
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no-one around to hear it, does it make a sound? is a well known philosophical conundrum – since sound is only a vibration in our ears. Those that write e-books are posed with a parallel train of thought. If an e-book is written and posted on various platforms but is never downloaded, did the author ever write it? After all, text on a screen can only exist once a brain with eyes deciphers it. Even then the author may be forgiven for believing  s/he exists as a book’s progenitor only when a review pops up on Amazon or elsewhere.
We humans are vulnerable creatures. Evolution of our central nervous systems has led us to conjecturing whether we are here at all. Does everything around us merely constitute glorious figments of overactive imaginations, bound to dissolve into nothingness upon our decease? If every man and woman is an island then our creative artifacts represent home made rafts upon which we attempt to cross from isolation to the mainland of human gregariousness. Writing books bound for e-readers, those electronics clutched by our customers and whose screens become filled with the outpourings of our imaginations, are our acts of attempted escape from the unbearable isolation of being.
So, Dear Reader, if you download avidly, remember the author cannot exist until you review what it is that you have read. It is a great responsibility; the existence of the author!
More writing from Jack Sanger aka Eric le Sange can be found at:

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Sunday, June 16, 2013

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Ghana and Synchronicity
Perhaps you know about Jungian notions of synchronicity but if so – bear with me a moment as I explain. If events occur that seem more than mere coincidence then they are synchronous. I begin this way as a preamble to three such experiences, occurring at different points in my life which came together in some kind of otherworldy fashion and point to the extraordinary.
The first of these connective events took place some forty years ago. A close friend at the time, Vic Clarke (publicly known as Lindsay Clarke, the writer) and another writer and myself met once a week to discuss our latest outpourings. Vic published a novel called Sunday Whiteman which was loosely based upon his experience as a teacher in a village in Ghana.
Some ten years later I was living in a terraced house in Norwich and came across an old lady who had been a teacher in Ghana, also writing a book while there, called Ashanti Boy. I wrote a poem after her death which I am including at the end of this blog.
Then, some twenty years on, my son Joseph was invited to play keyboards with the reformed Osibesa, a Ghanaian Afro-pop band that was very big internationally in the 60s. He went over to Accra and spent time with them playing at weddings and funerals (!) before a tour of the UK also involving a few days at the Edinburgh Festival.
Some fifteen years later I communicated via chance circumstances with a woman in Accra, the business partner of Dawn French in a clothing venture – fashion for the larger woman. We met up – and became married.
The point is, prior to my meeting with Vic, I knew nothing about Africa. I am sure the idea of going there was beyond any desire or fantasy. India (where I was born) filled that particular niche in my psyche. Now I have lived in Accra for four years, sharing it with France. But it’s a strong case for synchronicity, don’t you think? I was drawn to Ghana whether I wanted to be or not though the pull did not become a conscious force until the very end.
Here’s the poem:
Nocky
She carried, deep within her, an unwritten past in Africa
and held it smouldering in a bricked kiln of stern pride
through whose vents the Norfolk winds whistled up the shapes of things gone by
in sudden snurts of flame.
Halfway through her second book, Nockv died,
Africa gripped by a final writer’s block.
She’d walked this grey brick Norwich street beneath the gathering charge of swallows
pulling shopping, her grey hair awry, like any other of our heavy ankled folk
stumping out of life.
Yet behind her slightly batty eyes no dementia hid or interminable
list of trivia; but Africa dipped in pen and pressed
against each page, dark and bleeding still,
Africa behind the still net curtains and heavy-bolted blankness of her house,
Africa silent in the eyes of her cat
stiffly waiting at the window.
So when the police broke in with their neat removal of a backdoor pane
to find her fallen open like a dried flower,
the curtains shook and the cat stretched and Africa was at last let out
in time to seek a home-going on the black dispatch of
attendant swallows’ backs.
More writing at www.chronometerpublications.meincluding 3 free novellas to download.
My wife’s company with Dawn is: www.sixteen47.com
The book of mine I’d like you to read, in particular is at www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Sex with her indoors 16th century style
Apologies for the non-PC heading but it serves a purpose. Well, two. The first is to garner some attention and the second is to point to the fact that times haven’t changed much since Montaigne wrote the essays for which he is now remembered. I am basing this on Sarah Bakewell’s excellent book: How to Live which is a sort of discursive biography of the man.
Though he apparently loved his wife (more as time went on) the very idea of having raunchy sex with her was not on the ticket. He would have been sick at the thought. In France in the 16thcentury it was a cultural no-no. The belief was that if you decided to try the various positions one might find in the Kama Sutra you could easily turn your wife into a nymphomaniac. Sex had to be sober and a duty rather than a pleasure. If you wanted a bit (well, a lot) on the side you should find it elsewhere in affaires or pleasure houses.
Montaigne liked sex very much, even if beset by the small problem of his diminutive penis. Nevertheless, amusingly,  he had much to say about female ardour. If a woman’s heart is not in it he says that she ‘goes at it with only one buttock’.  In similar vein he addresses the lover whose mind is not on the job but is fantasizing about another man altogether; ‘What if she eats your bread with the sauce of a more agreeable imagination?’  He points out that the graffiti daubing the walls of stately homes, which show male appendages at three times life size, have the dual effect of raising unrealistic hopes on the part of passing women while making men cower in low self-esteem.
The realization for any sociologically minded person in the 21st century that the place of sex in society is largely determined by convention rather than the result of some universal verity, should be enlightening and lead to more challenge of what is regarded as the norm. The assumption of what is unacceptable is rarely universal. Religions reveal their shaky foundations as they try to proscribe certain sexual acts. Governments likewise. Travel round the globe and cross not just national boundaries but sexual ones too. Or dip into history.
For various depictions of sex, from the unvarnished to the highly embroidered, you could try my various books, some of them free at: www.chronometerpublications.me

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Sunday, June 9, 2013

 

Big is beautiful
Watching a Sky Arts panel discussion  chaired by Mariella Frostrup at the Hay Festival, I was struck by an author I did not know called Lionel Shriver. She (she had assumed the male first name by choice when young) has just brought out a new novel, Big Brother, which echoes her personal tragedy of losing a middle aged brother to obesity. It is not the book that has prompted this short essay but what she said in response to Frostrup’s remark that she might have problems of her own regarding food. She denied the problematic nature of her eating habits but defended them from a quite novel perspective.
She has coffee at 11.00 am and eats at 11.00 pm. Why? So that she can regain the lost innocence of childhood where eating was unconditional until you felt full. No thoughts to health or fashion, just a response to the body’s immediate needs. Shriver said that she eats as much as she wants until replenished. She also said that by eating this way she has a closer intimacy with food. Her experience of what she eats is greatly accentuated.
The idea of a lost innocence or at least a lost world of natural eating, seems insightful. She went on to say that nearly everyone has some kind of neurotic relationship with food. Eating habits are the consequence of cultural imperatives. At the furthest extremes of anorexia or obesity they are profoundly self-evident and become visual markers worn on the sleeves of the sufferers, social taboos that are not confronted person to person but are nevertheless discussed without any sense of empathy, behind the individuals’ backs. For Shriver this is a profound injustice. Not only do people have to manage their organic, physiological debilitation but they have to navigate public denigration, mostly, she feels, resulting from a fearful projection on the part of critical onlookers that they, too, may one day succumb. They are somehow blamed for what they have become and are lesser human beings as a consequence.
My wife designs fasionable clothing for the larger woman and receives, daily, tributes to her Company’s wares because they enhance customers’ body shapes in the same way any fashion house’s products only do for those of slim proportions. Customers feel valued and respected and no longer the outcasts of a society dominated by a narrow view of so-called normality.
See the clothing at: www.sixteen47.com
Literary works by Jack Sanger aka Eric le Sange, including 3 FREE novellas at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Saturday, June 1, 2013

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Living with Montaigne in the mountains
I was reading Sarah Bakewell’s excellent book, How to Live, on the writings of Montaigne, today. You can imagine it; me laid out on my French terrace, blue skies, rearing mountain cliffs behind me, spring blossom from the Wisteria above, the ratcheting croaks of carrion crows in the woods and a particularly tuneful blackbird mimic on the very top of the pear tree. I suppose being only three hours from where Montaigne lived adds a certain piquancy to reading about him. He was extraordinary. Possibly the first blogger – because that is how we might view the ‘common place diary’, today – he wrote about what was happening about him and wanted to know why. Why do we feel the things we feel, what is life, how do we know the experience of another person?  How do you live a good life? I find it riveting and a little chastening that what he has said and inscribed is as pertinent at this moment as it was then. Apparently, it is the experience of most of his readers over the last few hundred years, from the finest philosophical minds to the every day person keen to extend his/her view of existence, that we all feel we could have written exactly what Montaigne wrote. He plumbs the business of being human.
One vignette jumped off the page as I was indulging in this sun and silence. He talks of  a historical event. A man is found guilty in court and is due to be hung. Just before the execution another man confesses but the justice of the time ignores the new evidence. They go on with the hanging because they don’t want the the judge’s verdict to be brought into disrepute.
As I was saying, the relevance to today is striking. In every western, so-called developed society, police and judicial criminality is regularly covered up in the interests of ‘trust in the law’ or ‘the national interest’. Meanwhile, politicians of all persuasions, judges, senior police officers and the rest are outed and held to account by bloggers or the media (when it suits them) with appalling frequency.
In A Woman Who Kills, my new book to be published later this year and set in a dystopian future Britain, corruption is everywhere. Rather than have my characters fight a holier than thou war against the pervasiveness of their cancerous culture, I found them refusing to seek insurrection. Instead, they choose to chip away at the rottenness and not risk a complete breakdown of stability. Better the semblance of justice than none at all.
While I absolutely hate it as a notion, this is the way that societies exist and flourish. Something in me as a writer was rather pleased to be in accord with old Montaigne. It’s murky out there. Murkiness is part and parcel of our lives. We know this even as we strive to bring clarity, tolerance and harmony to our societies.

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Thursday, May 30, 2013

 Telling it how it is – Azimuth
A marketer said I should be more explicit about the story of the Azimuth Trilogy. Here’s what I have written. It’s now on the site.
A royal historian, Kamil,  is called to the court of his emperor. He is commissioned to write the history of a famous man, a magus,  who lived many centuries before and whose thoughts and deeds influenced all the major religions and moral practices thereafter. The history is to help educate the willful teenage daughter of the emperor, Sabiya. He writes the history and proceeds to read it to her. As he does so he discovers that she is intelligent, provocative and manipulative. Not only that but she realises that this plump, middle aged man has a forensic brain and enlists his support in protecting her against her enemies, who would either kill her or find the means to disinherit her.
So Azimuth consists of two parallel stories like a double helix. The life adventures of the Magus represents one aspect of every chapter and the doings of the court and Kamil’s entwinement in the world of Sabiya, represents the other. The Magus’ story is told in separate adventures, chapter by chapter and each is prefigured in sequence by the esoteric major Arcana cards of the Tarot pack.  They, mysteriously, give some inkling of what is to follow but they are cryptic and obscure.  At the same time, wrapped round these adventures or tales, the story of the court with its intrigues, devilment, passions and bloody violence, maintains a tense narrative that frames the historian’s readings.
Book One: The First Journey, begins with the Magus’ extraordinary, almost magical, arrival in the world and follows his growing up and his discovery of his talents, his relationship with his ‘foster’ father and his questioning of everything around him including his heretical attitude to religions and their gods. Each of his 22 adventures is like a short story, yet is linked to the next. We see him grow, make mistakes, face great dangers, come upon worlds peopled by extraordinary three dimensional characters and display a maturity of thought far beyond his years. By the end of the book he is a powerful warrior of a man, a sage in the making and his impact upon the lives and cultures of those he has met is exceptional. Each story challenges the reader to think about aspects of life and death, of love and of belief but never intrusively.
While these stories unroll, Kamil gradually becomes embroiled in the machinations of the court and shows he is a dab hand at solving murder and unraveling a scheming plot against Princess Sabiya’s life. But will that be enough to save her?
Book Two: The Second Journey, has 22 more tales, headed by the same sequence of Tarot cards. This is the middle stage of the Magus’ life and encompasses what he became famed for. He is more of a sage, has crystallized some of his thinking about the nature of existence but is faced by the likelihood of a terrible war which will lay waste to the populations of  east and west. His journey to resolve this awful, impending conflict is again broken into separate adventures, linked and then fused as the book reaches its tense conclusion. All the while the Tarot cards display more and more influence on events both within the tales and outside them. And Kamil’s readings of the tales help to influence Sabiya’s desperate fight to save her prospective empire.
As in Book One, Kamil’s life and power within the court slowly grows. Princess Sabiya is now a young woman. She is to become empress one day and is much sought after. There arrives in the court a strange, malevolent Rasputin of a creature called The Red Man who seems bent on the court’s destruction, as well as sullying Sabiya’s physical and emotional world. Kamil may be her only defence against the man’s hypnotic, rapacious powers. All the while, Kamil’s own life undergoes change, much of it orchestrated by Sabiya, herself, who has taken an interest in changing him from a ‘dry old historian’ into a social, attractive man of the court.
Finally we arrive at Book Three: The Final Journey. This is the final phase of the Magus’ life. He is recognized everywhere for his power and authority, his wisdom and central philosophy. He is now known as The Magus. There are 22 more chapters but the tales are now melded into a flowing narrative as the Magus journeys with a man of extreme evil to discover the secret of immortality. There are still tales within the overall tale, bloody adventures and disturbing conflicts, as good and evil edge towards a climactic and utterly unexpected conclusion. Who will be victor? Who will gain immortality?
This part of the history of the Magus is read by an older, wiser Kamil to Sabiya’s daughter, Shahrazad. Sabiya is now empress and commissions Kamil to write a third book about the Magus and to read it to her daughter.  Again, Kamil is faced with protecting a willful, manipulative late adolescent girl who is at least the equal of her powerful mother in bending fate to her will. But here, instead of threats to the court, he is drawn into the mystery of Shahrazad’s very being and her desire to discover her blood roots. Kamil and Shahrazad embark on adventures that vie with those of the Magus himself in their mysterious, almost magical nature and their chilling  danger. Tarot cards occupy their lives even more, though their profound messages are often difficult to interpret until after events have taken place.
And thus The Azimuth Trilogy comes to a close, two narratives ending in the last chapter, each with a conclusion that is spellbinding and unforeseen.
For more on The Azimuth Trilogy go to: www.azimuthtrilogy.com 
For other fiction plus #free books go to: www.chronometerpublications.me 
For tweets go to @profjacksanger


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Monday, May 27, 2013

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Bare faced liars
I watched a programme made for the telly about the Dark Ages and how light they actually were. This one focused on Christianity in the first 400 years after the supposed birth of Christ. It examined the art of that period. For three hundred years there were no depictions of Christ at all, only ciphers, codes, anagrams. Then there emerged the first portraits. Since there is nothing in the New Testaments to guide the artists, no lean-jawed, steely-eyed, hippy peace-lover, they did exactly what games programmers do today and sketched the ideal. For them it was a beardless youth, androgynously breasty and sweet of lip. Christ was both male and female. He carried a magic wand with which he did tricks called miracles. Like computer programmers they had cast around for useful prototypes, the bisexual equivalent of a Lara Croft or a shoot-em-up platoon leader. They found it in Roman art. Apollo was ideal. Blonde and curly haired, appealing like David Bowie to both sexes. The suggestion made in the programme was that there were no female figures to idolise in Christianity at the time. Then along came depictions of the Marys, the virgin mother and Magdalene the lover (eventually twisted into a new shape and vilified as a prostitute). Now that the female aspect was clarified the artists and the aggressively developing Christian church could look to the Roman God Zeus for new inspiration. Bearded, mature, a powerful leader, lord of all he surveyed. What better image for their proselytizing?  What an archetype! It has lasted a couple of millennia. Christians the world over, black, white and every colour in between, regardless of the place of beard and hair in their cultures, venerate this ubiquitous image of the hairy saviour.
Advertising is a powerful tool if you get the symbolic essence right.
www.chronometerpublications.mefor free novellas and other books to buy
www.azimuthtrilogy.comfor the best of all worlds where the invention of a sage is highly visual!

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Sunday, May 26, 2013

For Queen and Country
A soldier dies in London, hacked to pieces by two extremists. It is horrific. It is in broad daylight. The killers display a crazed imperturbability to the hand held cameras of ordinary passers-by. A woman bravely accosts them. Police arrive and shoot and injure them before they themselves are attacked. The media circus follows. The soldier’s family are put on camera in their desperate grief. Every news broadcast takes the viewer to the growing mounds of flowers and tributes. Politicians talk of terror. Low-tech attacks like these cannot be prevented. We are all in danger. We should be afraid. Now the Home Secretary wants to reintroduce a snoopers’ charter which will enable everyone to be watched, followed, have his or her privacy undermined. The dead man fought for Queen and country in one of the most unpopular wars imaginable. Britain is in Afghanistan supporting its corrupt government. Britain is in Iraq where the toppling of a tyrant has led to vicious tribal war and the disintegration of its society because Britain and its allies did nothing about ensuring peaceful transition after the dictator died, having first supplied it with arms like most countries in the war torn Middle East. The death of the soldier helps the government. Cameron talks about the country being stronger for the murder, united against terrorism. He can project himself as the resolute leader. Still the media roll the images. The dead soldier’s town. The priest at his memorial service talking about the local lad who fought for Queen and country and who died on the streets outside his barracks. The poor man suffered his death in the worst circumstances imaginable but it was never going to be a personal tragedy. It was going to become something else, a cynical opportunity to raise a population’s defiance, an opportunity to divert their thoughts from the dead soldier’s fellow men and women who are being killed overseas every day in wars that could never be won and where the civilians’ obscene  death toll continually mounts. An opportunity for manipulation. An opportunity to rewrite history, gloss it over, emphasise what a democratic country Britain is and how just, therefore, must be its overseas campaigns. An opportunity to get people onside. To induce support for the military. To deflect focus away from the political establishment.
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Thursday, May 16, 2013

Writing “A Woman Who Kills”
I’m about half way through a final edit of A Woman Who Kills. It ended up being 230 pages rather than the fifty or so that I had imagined. (See last blog.)Having finished Azimuth, got it printed and then put on every conceivable device platform, I wanted to keep writing but at a less intense level. By this I mean that The Azimuth Trilogy is deeply philosophical, a moral maze, a facing up to the quandaries of this existence. It is not religious in the usual sense but deals with spirituality as seen from a skeptic’s point of view. It is a big book. It is my opus. It is what I wanted to write before I died. Now it exists in real and virtual worlds. The reviews have been more than kind. Anyway, this preamble was to explain my desire to write a few novellas. I wrote three in five months, a science fiction called Future Imperfect, a tale of facing death called The Sense of Being Sinbad and a curious soft horror story called The Visionary. They have been (to my eyes anyway) hugely successful. As I write, 167,000 pages have been viewed in three months. A friend asked me what it was like to know that your words have been consumed by so many people. Not quite like having sex with a stranger, I said,  but a virtual me having sex with virtual strangers. In other words it is a form of twice removed intimacy.
A Woman Who Kills began as yet another, different again, genre novella. I liked the idea of a challenge to live within the means of a new set of expectations. But it grew. I liked the main character, Grace Dart, who shares with the Magus of Azimutha certain amorality. The genre (if it is one – it is in film, of course) is superhero or super-heroine. In this case I loved the whole Kate Beckinsdale, Michelle Pfeiffer, Angelina Jolie package of the sexy woman who is more than an equal of men, physically and the ballet of the choreographed action. The girl in Hanna, the replicant women in Blade Runner also come to mind.
The challenge was not the gradual changes in Grace’s character or evincing a dystopian Britain where the global collapse of the internet brings the country to its knees but the action itself. Superheroes have many battles, the genre demanding that they be against individuals, groups and massed ranks of opponents. Making each bit of action different and full of tension is mind stretching. I have had some compliments about the visual nature of my writing and here I had to ‘see’ every tiny element of the big picture of physical conflict. It’s been great!

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Sunday, May 5, 2013

In with the new….


I started what I thought was a novella before Christmas, following the somewhat successful completion of three novellas which I offered free on my website and which have amassed nearly 150,000 pages viewed in just over two months. See them at: www.chronometerpublications.me
Like best laid plans in life, the novella has gone astray. 200 pages astray. The end is in sight for the first draft which I thought you might like to taste here. It is the first short chapter and exactly how it came out on the page. It’s called A Woman Who Kills and is a take on superheroes, here set in a dystopian future where the internet has gone kaput.
Chapter One 
She sat hunched with her back against a broken dry stone wall on the hilltop of a bumpy ridge in the Farmsteads. The bony line of uplands ran down most of the centre of the country so she could see hundreds of square miles to the east and the same to the west, sugared with frost. Not far away, its motor chugging on vegetable oils like a steamroller, stood the camouflaged car. Built like a tank, every external element of it was designed to withstand bomb and bullet. It had three rows of seats, the central one for its cargo; the wealthiest of private passengers, senior civil servants, gangland bosses and Cabinet Ministers. And her.
Far away, coming out of the southeast, its fuselage flashing in the low winter sun, was an armoured tank of a car with two motor cycle outriders moving in a shallow arc up the escarpment towards her. Her mobile phone had sent her exact co-ordinates towards it. The newly positioned tele-communications satellite was making work that much easier for those with membership of its elite population of clients. Everywhere, people had mothballed their once state of the art video-phones against the day that prices dropped sufficiently for them to subscribe to the new network. For at least another couple of years the devices would be worth next to nothing. There was talk that Spacecell Inc., which had launched the satellite, was planning to keep the new systems incompatible with the old.
She stood up from her shelter, into the wind, its razor edge making her eyes water. Then she stepped gingerly over the springy bog turf towards the meadow with its circle of standing stones. The car drew to a halt fifty metres from the prehistoric site. A tall man in a long black cashmere coat and balaclava climbed out. She pulled a scarf around her nose and lower face and entered the circle. He came in from the other side.
“Grace,” he acknowledged with a moneyed accent.
“Sir,” she greeted him in return, her tone light and amused at the lengths he went for secrecy.
“Are you well?”
“Fine.”
“No news from your father?”
“No. None expected.”
‘He was always a reprobate. But we must be thankful that he and your mother produced you.”
“It was no fluke.”
“Indeed. Your biography confirms it. Time for the ultimate work now.”
“I am listening.”
“It’s all on here,” he said, taking the drive from his pocket in a yellow, card envelope and passing it over.
“I’ll take a look.”
“Good. Threat to Parliament. Plots against our noble realm. The prevention of a meltdown of life as we know it, eh? As if we hadn’t melted enough already. Nobody is exempt. Even me. ”
She laughed. “I hardly know you, so that won’t be a problem. What about my relations with Bloque?”
“Maintain them as normal. Bloque is especially interesting which is why I introduced you. He eats too well for a Service Head. He will suggest you eliminate a retired she-hag. Do so. She deserves retribution. But use his commission to seek out her network. She is not far from the centre of my concerns.” The man turned away. Then he looked back at her, offering a small metal badge stitched on to leather. “You might need this from now on. You’re official. Show it sparingly.” He took a pace away, “It’s good we could meet here. My first visit to Arbor Low. Gives a bit of spice to our rendezvous. What do you think of its ambience?”
Grace stilled her mind. She picked up a faint fizz of static. “It has presence.”
“Yes. Once the communications satellite of its time. Ok Grace. You can go. I’ll meditate awhile.”
Her last image as she glanced over her shoulder was of him facing the keystone with its hole for the winter solstice, arms crossed in front of his chest, palms on shoulders. Everyone to his own. 
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Twitter: @profjacksanger

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The Azimuth Trilogy (New review (2))

“Azimuth may well be intimidating to some, such is the considerable heft of the trilogy, though this may be one advantage of reading them separately – or on a Kindle – where you get all the joy of the text, without the workout of holding up the book.
 
Once opened it is a joy.
 
The first thing to note is the ambitious structure, a story within a story, twin plots running simultaneously,separate but with certain parallels, generously spelt out, in case you were in danger of missing them, by Kamil. For me it works unusually well. I often find stories composed this way lack symmetry, leaving the reader (or viewer) interested in one story disproportionately relative to the other, and impatient when faced with the “lesser” story. Azimuth finds an admirable balance. The longer, perhaps senior, story-within-the-story, is captivating and will linger in my memory, I suspect, for a long time. The circumstances surrounding the reading of that story serve as book-ends either side of each chapter, and are themselves engaging and worthwhile.
 
The pace is pleasing, and the prose beautiful and evocative. The characters have real depth and it is interesting that so many of the strongest characters in the book are female. Extraordinary attention to detail makes it a very visual book, with descriptions of clothes and scenery putting you in a world that is magical, mystical, beautiful – but not excessively fantastical. Many reviews compare it to The Lord Of The Rings, an obvious and understandable comparison, not least because it is a trilogy. But for me it is also a misleading one. This is not a world of ogres, elves and goblins. In the first book, particularly, the book I was reminded of most was Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, a similar blend of journeying, fictionalised history and religious philosophy – and of course with similar references to The Magus.
 

That feels like the crux of the book, a biography of a fictional character, the imagined father of atheism – or humanism. The evolution of his Right Path feels like the genesis of a great religion, making The Magus akin to Jesus, Mohammed or Buddha. It sounds heavy, but there is enough travel and adventure to lighten the mood.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews
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Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Thatcher
I’m not going to say much. I have been watching Sky, BBC and various other news stations. I have seen the jowly conservatives in obeisance.  I’ve seen the angry younger generations of those she abused, celebrating her death like some medieval pageant. I’ve seen the re-writing of history. I’ve heard over and over again that Thatcher ‘saved’ Britain. That she was a great leader.
My definition of a great leader is, like Mandela, one who brings about reconciliation. Thatcher was incapable of such a sentiment. Class war exists today in the UK. The poor are ever more downtrodden, more ill-educated and unhealthy. It is the inevitable consequence of free market capitalism.  Remember that it was Thatcher that broke society. Deregulation and privatization have been an unqualified success for the few and a plague on the houses of the many. The very idea of a state-like funeral ceremony for a woman who had no empathy for ‘society’ but saw the all-conquering individual as the deus ex machina of change  is, quite frankly, appalling. She protected Pinochet. She supported the whites during apartheid in South Africa.
I was brought up on council estates in mining communities. Good, hard-working people. Their bonds irrevocably torn asunder by a mercenary police force. The same kind of force that was responsible for the death of football supporters and the lying vilification of working class Liverpudlians in the Hillsborough disaster. Thatcher quashed an early, critical report of the police’s actions in Sheffield on the basis that people should not have their trust in the police undermined. If Thatcher had been a great leader she would have dealt with Scargill, summarily,  and found a way of bringing the miners and other industrial workers onside. Of softening the blow of unemployment. Of making people feel valued. Of saving their towns and villages and culture.
Instead we got the gross greed of the loadsamoney generation. The conspicuously rich making money from privatizing industries and ripping them off while the country’s infra-structure was allowed to rot.
Politicians are extending their sympathy to her twin children. One of them is an arms dealer and a gun-runner. It’s all too sick for words.
Ceremonial funeral?
It is as though nothing has changed in man’s inhumanity to man. You might want to read:
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Monday, April 1, 2013

Latest Review of The Azimuth Trilogy
I decided to wait until I’d read all three of these excellent books before reviewing, because I knew in advance that the threads of the first continue all the way through to the end of the third. Now, my memory of the first book is almost as a prelude to the other two.
There are two main stories in the trilogy: That of “the Magus”, a semi-historical, semi-mythical warrior/philosopher; and that of Kamil the historian, set centuries later in north Africa (but a long time before the present day). Throughout the book, the tale of the Magus is told by Kamil to Princess Sabiyah, the impetuous and fiery – yet sharply intelligent – heir to the throne.
In the first book, we get to know these and other principle players. As the history of the Magus’s youth unfolds, and his character is forged in fragments of history (each linked thematically to a Tarot card), Kamil and the princess become embroiled in dangerous politics and – of course – their own destinies begin to be affected by the Magus’s tale.
At first the reader may assume that Kamil’s is the “main” story, but as the first book nears it’s conclusion the legend of the Magus gathers pace and becomes gripping in it’s own right. However, I never felt that the changes between the two worlds were jarring or contrived – I was allowed to slip gracefully in and out of the different periods in history (or legend).
In the second book, the Magus is now a man, and so his story becomes less fragmented, and has more direction and momentum; meanwhile a unique and fearsome enemy enters the lives of Kamil and Sabiyah. This new character’s terrifying exterior and malevolent intent are perhaps my most vivid memory of the whole trilogy, and events are set in motion which have repercussions right through to the startling double-conclusion of the third book.
All of the characters are dynamic, fascinating and occasionally shocking. The rotund and studious Kamil in particular is a delight, as he reluctantly becomes entangled in a sinister and complex plot.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a “fantasy” novel. Rather it reads like a mix of history and legend. An “alternative history”, perhaps, which reminded me in places more of “Le Mort D’Arthur” than “Lord Of The Rings”, though with the concise descriptiveness of William Golding’s “The Inheritors”. As a result the trilogy has a timeless quality – it seems impossible that it could have been written at the dawn of the 21st century. This will surely become a classic.
Joe (Japan)
www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews
www.chronometerpublications.me

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Saturday, March 30, 2013

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Water water everywhere – but sometimes nought to drink?

I don’t think it has rained more than three times since October when we got back to Accra from France. The UK may be suffering the coldest Easter on record with temperatures of minus ten degrees (I remember swimming in the North Sea at Easter up near Newcastle, at much this time of year and, though cold, my genitalia didn’t completely retract) but Ghana is drought-like. Temperatures stay up around 33 degrees and the humidity is around 80. Even Ghanaians are suffering heat rashes. The consequence is water shortages. And water wars.
The latter are fought between the well-to-do in the much sought after areas of the city. Here, half acre plots boast large houses and tropical gardens. Every house has a decent-sized water tank to see it through the days when the mains water does not run. This was fine until someone realized that if you add a pump to the tank you could exert extra suck on the mains and fill up even when water pressure is low. Soon, the inevitable, either you get a pump or you have no water.
Where we live (a mix of large houses and shanty squats) there is less water acquisitiveness but it does not mean we are out of the loop of steadily escalating self-interest. We had a full tank the other day, enough for two weeks, normally. Two days later it was nearly all gone. Why? We have theories. Leaks? Not likely as there are no damp signs on the soil. Neighbours burrowing under the wall and putting a T joint on our house supply? Again, no signs. The gardener selling water to locals (a common reason for sackings at the big houses). No – he’s a good feller and I am in the house, writing, when he is around. The neighbours joining the water pump army and sucking water from our tank? Possible. Anyway, our plumber is coming to fortify these precious resources. Also we will soon have the bore hole fully operational and be able to draw water when and how we like. In this latter respect we are, to use the North Korean metaphor, going nuclear.
All this does not disguise the potentially frightening issue of water becoming more precious than any other resource, even in Ghana. The country has the financial wherewithal and the climate to provide water for everyone all of the time. It is now oil-rich. But a governmental ideal that everyone, from the poor upwards, should be cared for, is sadly lacking. Thus the rich secure water by whatever means and what is left is spread thinly among the rest of the population.

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Thursday, March 21, 2013

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Of flying horses and thwarted lions
Encouraged by my interest in his forefathers, the gardener tells me another tale. It is magic realism at its best. I’ve repeated it to one or two people and they don’t get it. To them it’s mad, bonkers and childish. It doesn’t feel like that when you listen to it. Something about the eyes of the teller, the excited expression, the relief that someone is listening without criticism. Anyway, it goes like this:
“My grandfather’s brother built a house which stretched from here to the junction (he is indicating about a half mile). This house was so big a stranger would never find his way out again. My grandfather’s brother had thirty wives. Every wife had many chickens. His brothers had wives but only six or eight each. There were thirty thousand chickens around the place. When strangers came to the gates, my grandfather’s brother had to greet them himself. Then he would find out their business and arrange for them to be taken into the house.
One day he had to travel to Burkina Faso. There were no roads and there was jungle everywhere. He went on horseback. His steed had been prepared like the dogs in the previous blog. Four lions stalked him, wanting to eat the horse. They came at him from all sides. My grandfather’s brother made his horse rise into the sky, just above the mouths of the biting beasts. Here they stayed until the lions became tired and left them alone. He continued his journey in peace.”
I believe he believed it. I believe that such stories have some intrinsic symbolism that I can’t fathom and that my friend, the gardener, has sad eyes because he has lost the understanding as well. He knows that these stories will end with his generation. Those that have come afterwards are full of Christian  or Muslim mythology and symbolism, grafted on over the last decades.
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Tuesday, March 19, 2013

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Giving dogs super powers
Our part time gardener is of an indeterminate age. He does his job on a timescale known only to him. He moves around the compound cutting grass and shrubs and attending to the dogs in a slow, inexorable pattern. Sometimes he sits in the shade for a hour or two and sleeps. Remember that temperatures in Accra hover always above 30 degrees with high humidity. The sun is like paint stripper on the skin. We have anecdotal conversations once in a while. Because I research local medicinal plants and we grow them, I pass on what I glean. Locals here have forgotten the efficacy of what burgeons around them. For example, a shrub called bitter leaf prevents malaria. Chewing the leaves kills parasites in the blood.
He was saying yesterday that his forefathers knew such things. He was busy coating the Doberman with shea butter and spraying both it and the bitch, a blonde Alsatian, with a spray I concocted from soursop leaves. This is a summary of what he said.
“My grandfather had six dogs. To protect them he went into the bush and collected plant leaves, bark from trees and roots. These he boiled and then bathed the dogs in the juice for a week. This made the dogs strong. In those days there were lions and animals with long back legs and short front ones. They could open doors and kill your creatures (chickens, cattle) but once the dogs were ready nothing could harm your beasts. If a lion tried to bite a dog it would jump back as if it had touched an electric fish. The dogs could not be cut by anything. Anyone coming to the village with a gun could not shoot the dogs. The bullets would never hit them. This knowledge has died with the forefathers.”
Our gardener became a Muslim in 1977, the only one of his generation. He is sad that the old ways and the old knowledge are not being maintained and that he, himself, does not carry them inside him. He knows that they are at odds with modern religions which stamp out ancient lore in the interests of a single god..

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Sunday, March 10, 2013

 

New Gods for old
Further conversation with a young Ghanaian male about his unshakeable belief in Christianity provides insights into cultural dissonance. That is, between him and me and between him and his traditions. There is little doubt in my mind that one of the reasons why Africans take to Christianity with a fundamentalist zeal is that its rituals are sacrificial and mysterious. His blood. His flesh. There is also the Old Testament with its patriarchal, forbidding and vengeful God. Since the white man brought ‘the book’, the new religion had the effect of breaking down social infrastructures within tribes. Where once women ran commerce and saw to the delicate business of maintaining the balance between labour and survival, the imperialist empire builders, brandishing their words from God, would only deal with males. Rupture followed. We see the consequences today, everywhere. And now the men have guns and women and children become ever more vulnerable.
Fortunately, for the time being, Ghana is peaceful and there are strong remnants of the old world co-existing with the new. Women choose tribal chiefs. Land is still passed down the female line. But the traditions are being eroded by land registry and other western business practices which tend to discriminate against women.
Back to my young Ghanaian friend, the one who laughs hysterically at the notion that I might not believe in ANY god! In northern Ghana, he tells me, The crocodile Chief in the river has a ‘red cap’. He will not kill humans. You can sit on him. He is a kind of godly manifestation in the water. But kill any of his tribe and humans will die as a consequence. He tells me another story. The tribal custom is to bury the umbilical cord of every human birth in a particular spot. The Chief travelled to the US and married a white woman whom he brought back. She set about, in a western health and safety kind of way, clearing up this site of decomposition. Once cleared the Chief’s body underwent encroaching paralysis; hands, arms, legs…. A further myth or traditional reality is that before you die you must be ‘instructed’. If this happens then you can communicate with the living and vice versa.
He tells me these stories with a curious reticence which gives way to enthusiasm as I don’t deride them like the Christian priests do. Pagan black magic. It reminds me of the extraordinary nature of churches all over the UK. The believers stand, sit, kneel and pay their respects to the One God and all around them are symbols of pre-Christianity. The Green Man. Fornication. Images of Lilith who preceded Eve. Bestiality. Christianity was the progenitor of imperialist (and capitalist) subjugation of the old traditions. And it is still doing it consummately well, here in Ghana.
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Sunday, March 3, 2013

Hypocritical Oaths
Closed minds are like houses shut up for the winter only to find that their owners are never returning. They become dusty, dark, places of foreboding and creepy crawlies. You have to break in from the outside to lever off  hinges on doors or windows to let some light in. Well, it may be an overplayed analogy but it represents my feelings of utter dismay when it comes to discussing serious issues of life with Ghanaians brought up in villages in an educational system that sometimes makes creationism look like a liberal intellectual’s dream philosophy.
Coming out of DVLA in Accra the other day, refusing to pay a bribe to go to the front of the queue, a young Muslim accosted me.
“Is that your wife?”
“Yes.”
“English?”
“No. Fanti.” (A coastal tribe in Ghana.)
“She is white.”
“Yes, but her twin is black.”
“God is wise and works miracles.”
“No. It is called biology.”
“You are a Christian?”
“No. I do not believe in God.”
“You have a long way to go.”
“I have been further than you will ever travel. There is no God.”
“God makes everything, sees everything, even the smallest thing.”
“You pay bribes?”
“It is how things are done.”
It comes to my mind that in this Ghanaian world, where corruption is endemic, praying to God and giving your weekly tithe, is just another form of bribery.
A young man, who has progressed from illiteracy to being a photographer and user of Photoshop in five years tells me that in Ghana you must be whipped if you are late or absent from school. He was. (And left it, illiterate, as I said.) There is no other way. There is no tie up to the Christian principles of love thy neighbour or parables about lost sheep. Nor can their be any open discussion with the teacher or the priest about the foundations of thought and belief.
Earlier blogs give accounts of  mandatory prayers at medical conferences introducing drug company reps with their latest spiel on the efficacy of innovative compounds, at new bank launches or before politicians’ speeches at the hustings. To deny God in Ghana is to invite anything from rib-tickled disbelief to aggression. The notion of having a critical consciousness about ALL things is not on the table. Churches rule daily social lives. The only learning they vouchsafe comes from within the tight parameters of the bible. The same young man, mentioned above, talks about “When the white man brought the book …” as the point of change for the better in Ghanaians lives, though he has no idea what life was like before the missionaries. Looking at Ghana’s remarkable, world-beating GNP, little of it is percolating down to the poor from its religion-embracing Ministers of State. Meanwhile, the poor pray for miracles to change their living conditions because it is in God’s hands. The illusion of Heaven drives all religions alike. Everything will one day be wonderful, you will find yourself at God’s feet, serving His will. Meanwhile, just suffer with good grace.
The adherents of the world’s religions here steal as much as they bribe. It is occupational. Gangs come and disconnect your electricity at night and come to put it on again in the morning, at a price. Kilometres of cabling are stolen regularly leading to blackouts. All the country’s essential services are regularly ‘chopped’ by  staff wanting backhanders to do normal work, selling equipment taken illegally from central stores, demanding bribes for releasing imported materials and so on. The same folks invariably go to church on Sundays for their various forms of absolution, their prayers for consumer items, their hopes for the future. They see little inconsistency in week long criminality and Sunday holiness.
Before you think this is a rant from some racist outsider, please take stock of other blogs I have written. I (as a long time educationalist)  see the blame for Ghana’s troubles at least partially at the door of religions. They breed closed minds with absurd certainties and they (as they have done through time immemorial) keep the poor in its place. While religious institutions exhorted their followers to enjoy a peaceful presidential election recently, one can’t help thinking that their real concern was the status quo, their hold on the purse strings of the poor.
For other writing:
Three FREE novellas at www.chronomterpublications.me
The Azimuth Trilogy www.azimuthtrilogy.com First TEN chapters FREE.

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Thursday, February 21, 2013

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Have you got anything for me?
Generally, we don’t get the law enforcement we deserve.
I suppose a great litmus test on the quality of a culture is the behaviour of its police force. In the UK, a vast, conspiratorial network of corruption has recently been uncovered relating to football tragedies, phone hacking, framing suspects and everything in between. But on the streets, generally, you feel that law and order prevails without the taint of bent behaviour on the law’s part.
Wherever I have travelled, either for work or for pleasure, I can, more or less, remember what the police were like. Back in 1968 when I was in Paris during the student revolt as an active supporter, the police were baton crazy against these leftist destabilisers of the State. On one occasion we were relaxing away from the barricades having a picnic on the Seine. A police van drew up and a half dozen stick wielders charged down. “Speak English, for God’s sake,” said a French friend. We did. They said we were there for sex and would soon have our clothes off. We pretended, vociferously, not to understand. Eventually they went off, batons unbloodied.
I was in an insolvent New York in the early 1980s. The train from the airport was as heavily guarded as I can ever remember. In fact an entire train had been ‘stolen’ not long before. I had to ease past two police officers at the doors of an extraordinary caterpillar of a machine, multi-coloured carriages with inner city graffiti, as though it was camouflaged to pass through downtown garishness. They were brusque – and frightened. When we set off they walked up and down the aisles as though one of us was Matt Damon from the Bourne Trilogy and they were going to discover who. What do you do? Shut your eyes and ostrich the journey out, hoping that when you open them you will be in Grand Central Station and safe?
In Uzbekistan I was giving an impromptu lecture on the street when I got jostled by secret police, remnants of the KGB, I assume. They had taken exception to my using the word democracy. I remember that their firearms seemed more threatening because they were in plain clothes. As though wearing a uniform ensures that the would-be shooter is constrained by ‘procedures’. While in Tashkent, a Canadian friend had some money stolen. The police came and took away the house staff and beat them for a couple of days until one owned up. We never knew whether the boy had committed the act or couldn’t take more bruising. We wouldn’t have told the police had we known – even though the theft was quite major.
I could go on and on with stories but want to say something about police in Ghana. Everyone without fail here knows that corruption is everywhere. Whatever your misdemeanour (mostly on the roads) you will find yourself searching for a polite way of offering them money. They are not interested in your explanation of being stranded on a crossroads because you avoided being hit by a taxi running a red light, for example. An attempted explanation is met with the non-sequitor, “Are you trying to tell me my job?” In this case I eventually dredged up a useful phrase from my wide lexicon, “Can I make a contribution to the police station?”  And we were free.
A driver of ours, gentle and late middle aged, was cuffed and thrown into a police cell for training a learner without his licence which he had left at home along with the boy’s. They were taken to court and outlandish fines levied by a judge whose complicity with the police was painfully evident and whose loyalty to the State’s revenue stream via fining was paramount. Police can use a variety of indirect requests for palm greasing but my favourite euphemism, at a barrier on the way to Cape Coast, is “Cleanse my blood.”
Ghana has everything to be a prosperous nation. It has an extraordinary GNP largely from oil and cocoa, a genuinely peace-loving population, enough rain to help farming feed its population. There is no reason why corruption should be endemic from politicians all the way down to a police force that is reimbursed reasonably well when compared to the rest of the population. But everyone pays their bribes, from doctors to road sweepers, from water sellers letting traffic cops take a sachet without payment to allow them to sell illegally by the lights, to bankers wanting to park on yellow lines. You cannot deal with governmental bodies such as customs without bribes if you are in international business, or your goods could remain forever untouched and gathering hamatan dust in a bonded warehouse.
For Ghana to become a developed country, corruption has to be tackled. Loyalty to family, clan and tribe – which pressurizes individuals to bend the rules and siphon off money – must somehow be subordinated to a loyalty to the State. In return the State must reward public loyalty with fair justice for all. Trust in the police at a day to day level is paramount or the economy will always fail.

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Friday, February 15, 2013

Intelligence intelligence everywhere but who can stop to think?
A young man here in Ghana is expanding his knowledge of the world by asking questions. He came from a village in the north and much of what he believes is so indelible it is difficult to shift. He believes that female circumcision keeps women from being promiscuous “and many women ask for it’. When I ask him whether it should be the case that any man who has a woman circumcised should also be circumcised, he doubles up in laughter. What kind of world is that? He believes that it is impossible to not believe in God and finds my extreme agnosticism part of a stand-up comic routine. He believes that the sun goes round the earth and, on occasion, the moon swallows the sun. He thinks that the moon is small. The idea of a moon landing has never made itself part of his consciousness. He believes he cannot bring me bad news and so won’t tell me when things might be going wrong in the business. He lies, in western terms, when he says he is not smoking to an older woman who is working alongside him and finds the odour reprehensible. Three times. Biblically. Later I ask him why and he says it is wrong to inform his ‘mother’ of such things. He was brought up to treat all older women as his mother and all older men as his father. He has been taught by the Company to use the internet, Photoshop and Word though he has only been speaking and writing in English for five years. He is the best photographer we have ever encountered. He has an eye for how to bring out the essential nature of textiles. At the same time he has no sense of how the internet works and connects people or that there are satellites in the sky or that people have unique postal addresses.
Being from a village and uneducated, his existence was different before he came to Accra seeking a better life. It was opportunistic. A matter of survival. Very little was planned. It was a matter of reacting to what was thrown at you. Only the imperatives of sowing and reaping and husbandry necessitated planning. So, with his very clever mind, he does work of a very high standard – but he cannot plan it yet. His approach to problem solving is as opportunistic as when he was in his village. Scattergun. Trial and error. No methodical steps. He is learning chess to try to lay down a sense of strategy in his mental processing, the moves that might make the future better for him – and the Company.
Sometimes he is so certain that he is right that he cannot hear you ask him to do something at odds with his world view. He is the product of a lack of educational provision and an evangelical Christianity that does not encourage critical thinking. Jesus has supplanted the old Gods and provides an answer to everything. Just pray.
We have thirty plus ‘blue collar’ workers. We pay them three times the national basic wage for the work they do. We bring in free literacy and numeracy and IT. We train them. They work according to western notions of a seven hour day and a five day week. They are all bright and intriguing individuals making their way in a new culture, far removed from their upbringing. The demands are often alien to them. They cannot see what is going on, what is behind what they are being asked to do. The peoples from developed countries are born into something that they are not.
To run a company along western lines in Ghana requires a very sophisticated sense of cultural dissonance and a realisation that sheer intelligence, which is everywhere here, is compromised by early conditioning in worlds so far removed from what a foreigner might assume to be the case. The logics that underpin the way that people from developed countries behave are not the logics of the traditions of village and tribal life. Ghana’s GNP is among the highest in the world. What will it spend its oil money on? Health and education? Hardly. There is little middle class desire to change the lives of the poor. Ghana needs its own Marx. A velvet educational revolution.
It is saddening in the extreme.
The Magus travels among a hundred cultures and discovers cultural dissonance for himself! www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Friday, February 8, 2013

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Feeding the five thousand
A funeral. 500 mourners. The body of the deceased on display for the file past. In Ghana it is hard to gauge how many people will turn up. You don’t send invitations after all – you post the day of the funeral in the popular press. Ghana state television also has exceedingly long sections where the obituaries are read out and the place and the time of the funeral are stated. Dress can be critical. Black for an untimely end. White for a ripe old age. Certain mixes representing subtleties of life span and illness.
The problem in Ghana is that people you would never expect to see, turn up. As I have said before, funerals are social imperatives as well as having their obvious, deeply spiritual side. Rather like being one of the five thousand being fed, it is possible to go to a funeral once or twice a week and be fed. No-one is going to question your presence. There is also the widely held conviction among Christians that the more that turn up, the better the acceptance in heaven. It has a prid pro quo element, too. When it comes to your turn to take the bus to that far off land from which none return, everyone will reciprocate and be there for your collection of the ticket and making sure you are seated comfortably with paeans of praise ringing in your ears as the coach draws away.
As a religious ritual, I found the 18thand 19th century hymns dreary. Their view of a just warrior god, smiting his enemies and meting out justice with arcane references to Babylon and the time of David, was surreal. The tunes (Methodist) hardly lifted spirits, even the post-formal ones with a sprightly reggae beat from the all purpose electronic music-box. On top of this, the bishop, rather than spending time on the biography of the deceased, chose to vilify Christianity’s competitors, highlighting ‘universalism’ which he defined as allowing everyone from any other religion into heaven. This could not be. His God was very particular and certainly wouldn’t admit into the vaulted reaches of heaven, those who strove under the base illusions of karma and reincarnation.
What was moving was the reverence for the dead and the desire to venerate the departed in her last moments as an intact person (no scattered ashes, yet.) The very elderly, some a decade older than the 82 year old deceased, filed past her on walking sticks and in wheelchairs, gazing upon her embalmed and not-too recognizable features, seeing in her marble austerity their own faces and their own ends of days. To some extent it raised a celebratory breath in my lungs, despite the grim solemnity of the proceedings. It was stirring and authentic.
There are blogs before this one that suggest we write living wills, choreograph our endings and decide exactly how much of our mix of good, bad and indifferent should be the subject of tributes. This might be in a church, mosque, temple or synagogue or a venue of humanist irreverence. Choose your hymns NOW, or your classical pieces, or your rock anthems, write your autobiographical parting or record it– the last everyone will hear from you about your life; what joys and tribulations you are leaving behind. Decide on your mode of transport to infinite oblivion or the golden-lit, crystal sea beaches and verdant pastures of paradise and give your mourners a break. Liberate them from mouthing homilies and glossing uncomfortable truths. Let them say what they actually think. That is the mark of a true celebration of a life.

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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Laying to rest
The laying out of the dead happens in many religions. A final procession of the bereaved to gaze upon the face of the dearly departed seems inextricably bound up with primeval feelings. It is the equivalent of putting your fingers in the nail holes of Christ. It is a public affirmation before witnesses that this person is no more amongst us. For some it is also a last glimpse of the wholeness of the individual. In the Azimuth Trilogy there are many encounters with death and the handling of it among different peoples and sects. The most ghastly punishment to be inflicted upon the bereaved is to cut up the body and distribute it where it cannot be found and made complete. I have long held the theory that the dismemberment of corpses by psychopaths harks back to such primitive rituals.
Someone close to me has just died. In Ghana this means the preparation of the body for the (in this case) church and the last viewing where the congregation queue to pay their final respects (sometimes as indicated in an earlier blog, up to a year after the formal pronouncement of death, the body being kept nearly frozen – not actually frozen as ice crystals form and disfigure). Preparation involves making the person as near to the original as the cadavar will allow. There is much veiled criticism if this is not done with sensitivity. The shroud (ie the clothes to be worn in the coffin) must represent the style and character of the deceased (a bohemian cannot be buried in dodgy stodgy old people’s dress). They must be white for the marriage to God (or death as I, as a non-Christian, see it). They must be specially made to be worn the once. The hair must be brushed at the very last to be as naturally consonant with images people have of that individual, the face must be made up with the cosmetics she used, there should be white socks and often there must be extra undergarments so that the slow decay into fleshless bone which often happens with the elderly, is disguised. In other words, the final picture should be of rude health, a person somewhat younger than in this final reckoning.
The Egyptians were rather good at all this but the superstitions and taboos linger today. The send-off on the last great journey requires many protocols, even, as in Ghana, where there is suspended ‘inanimation’ before the final goodbyes.

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Thursday, January 24, 2013

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Jacking up death
An amusing coda to the recent musings on death and how we might stage it arose the other day at a friend’s countryside retreat here in Ghana. A powerful figure on the political and economic landscape for decades here, my friend was commenting on a recent bereavement and the disposal of the body. As I said the other day, cremations have arrived in Accra.
He did not take to the notion at all, the reason being that he was worried that he might be in a coma when the all-consuming fires embraced him. I suggested that the crematorium might try burning a tiny part of him to check his state of consciousness but no, burial was what he wanted. He said that if he was not dead but woke up under the ground, he might then lever the lid off his casket. I said that he would need to leave instructions that the lid should not be screwed down and that the earth above should not be too deep. (It reminded me of Tarantino’s Kill Bill scene where the alluring assassin, Uma Thurman, uses her karate powers to break free from the earth, pounding the coffin lid until it splinters under her bloody knuckles.) I also suggested that he should be interred with a car jack to facilitated awakening from his deceptive sleep of death.
In Azimuth the dire warning that you will cut up and scatter your enemy’s dead body across a terrain to prevent the soul’s journey to the next place, is dramatically realised.  You cannot cross the divide, less than whole. It is a harsh deterrent to those who might mess with you, your cult and your god.
Nor has this atavistic belief completely disappeared. Recent distress in the UK at organs being appropriated for research without permission from hospital mortuaries and, as a consequence, offering up the body, incomplete, attests to it.
www.chronometerpublications.me

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Monday, January 21, 2013

Authoring your own funeral
Did you ever see The Big Chill? Friends gather for the funeral of one of their own tight group. It was very funny at the time but what brings it to my mind was the soundtrack which included The Weightand other 60s and 70s rock hits from The Rolling Stones et al. Part of its fascination was the notion of a funeral being other than an airbrushed and glossy choreography of a life. As my last blog explores, funerals tend to be for the living rather than the dearly (?) departed. As a consequence they can leave the mourner feeling bitter about what remains unspoken, or unresolved or that the quirks and failings in the deceased’s character have not been addressed and embraced. It seems extraordinary that it should be so. In Ghana there is a latter day Christian tradition that the dead should be given a warts-free send-off to the next place. As though the Christian God is mindful and persuaded by a funeral’s carefully orchestrated marketing.
If you live in a land where your last wishes count for anything, you can choreograph your own funeral and take the ticklish issue of people being forced to distort their public views of you, out of their hands. This is sometimes called a ‘living will’. Some undertakers provide you, in advance, a comprehensive document to fill in, covering every aspect of your funeral-to-be. So – you can ignore, deny, evade the responsibility of ensuring that your funeral is true to the curious mix of strengths and weaknesses that make you who you are, or you can wrest control from people’s failure of courage or desire to project a one-sided picture of you..
Arranging the final curtain can then be seen as your last act, a self-portrait, an autobiographical creation to hang before the congregation, whatever their religious or atheistic leanings. Imagine, you are reaching across the Great Divide and saying, “Hello, this was me and don’t you forget it.” I think it is within your last rights to exert this last opportunity to shape fate and leave a tasty mix of sweet and sour in people’s mouths, resonating with the memories of the person they once knew.
A wry novella I wrote last year describes an unusual choreography of death and can be downloaded FREE from www.chronometerpublications.me

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Monday, January 14, 2013

A Dying Art
Last week I heard of a birth and a death on the same day. Both events very close to me. The door to the place beyond seems to be a revolving one.
Here in Ghana much of people’s lives is spent doing the rounds of births, deaths and marriages. (The extended family can run into hundreds of people!) It is a phenomenal industry and involves the collection of funding from all family members to support it. I suppose, in emergent countries, there is a greater likelihood of old traditions sitting alongside modern life without conflict. Anyway, it is possible to go to one of the events mentioned above, every weekend. It is THE social activity and it brings food and drink to everyone and constantly cements tribal as well as family loyalties.
The death part of the equation is steeped in protocols. About 80 % of Ghanaians are Christian and the death alluded to above, was of a Christian woman in her eighties. Normally she would be made a wedding dress for laying out in public view in the church as she is being married to God. Her hands must be covered in gloves, her hair washed the day before, her feet covered by ankle socks and her face made up to look as she might have done earlier in her life. None of this is executed by an embalmer (as in Six Feet Under) but by a female member of the family, perhaps the eldest daughter.
A body may be kept in the morgue for up to a year before burial as members of a family’s diaspora are contacted and make plans to return home from the UK or the US or wherever else. It is the group of family elders (always driven unseen by the women) who ensure that protocols are met. It is very inflexible. There is a ten page guidance document which covers every conceivable element from food to flowers, from seniorities to attendant roles and functions. Only certain accessories are allowed in the coffin. Even if the deceased is famous for some symbolic piece of clothing, it will not be permitted to be with the body as it lies in local state. While the young want to spread ashes poetically where an individual made her mark on life and land, the elders may insist that the urn is buried. The elders determine everything. If my wife, for example, asks me to follow certain steps (no service, a humanist end, cremation, certain songs and no hymns) the chances of her wishes being carried out are negligible. I cannot overrule the female seniors. Funerals are for the living and the living are very adamant about what is permitted.
In Azimuth, a fanatical religious sect cut up their enemies into tiny pieces and spread them wide and far because they believed this would prevent the spirit from ascending to the place beyond. It also made the sect’s enemies very frightened of it! (www.azimuthtrilogy.com). Thus it is in Ghana, at least in my limited experience.
I suppose death preoccupies me as one of the great mysteries of existence. I’m a believer in the atoms untangling and spreading across the cosmos at death, some sticking around to be part of the constitution of a new life (the revolving door again.) My last novella The Sense of Being Sinbad is a sort of meditation on what is actually possible, leading up to one’s death. It is free for you to download. Tell me what you think about it at: www.chronometerpublications.me

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Thursday, December 27, 2012

New lamps for old

The west exports lifestyle assumptions to the world, constantly. This includes medical accessorising, designer brands for every conceivable disease or malaise. The Ghanaian population are more and more hooked on the flagrantly disseminated notion, “new cures good, old cures bad.” Despite drugs growing on trees all around, they are quickly forgetting their bio-heritage and opting for packaged alternatives. There is an extraordinary advertisment on television at the moment for paracetamol, finishing with an entire, grinning, happy family celebrating the father’s cure of a headache, by synchronised dancing and the father holding up the product and pointing to it. It is truly bizarre. (Equally strange is the activity of a friend of ours, a famous veteran of Ghanaian folk songs who has gone round the isolated villages, singing and play acting about Unilever products – followed by a lorry from which villagers can buy them.)

Back to drugs. There is a cultural battle going on. Old treatments or new? Doctors here are trained mostly in allopathic medicine and few GPs give credence to the old ways. Meanwhile, foragers from the drug companies go trekking round the outer limits, sniffing out traditional treatments in the hope of finding new cures – to be packaged in glistening cellophane, in tablets and capsules. It is worth remembering that these companies cannot patent the natural world but CAN patent extractions.

Anyway, here are two natural drugs that grow on trees in our garden. I am starting with the caveat that I cannot be held responsible for the efficacy or otherwise of the two. You can start searching the internet for verification.

The first is bitter leaf. Now this shrub (I grow a hedge of it) is the natural killer of parasites in the blood and so is helpful in preventing malaria. It also cleans out the organs, reduces sugar in the system for diabetics and cures most skin diseases.

The second involves the dark green leaves of the soursop fruit tree. Boil ten of these in a litre of water for 30 minutes and drink a cup or two every day of the concentrate. Soursop is vaunted to be 1,000 times more effective than chemotherapy against 8 of the major cancers.

Are these just folk lore or is there something almost magical in their essence. Am I living in false consciousness (see the last blog) by taking bitter leaf and no anti-malarial prescription from the chemist? Likewise with my daily dose of soursop? Is it any worse than going to the pharmacy and believing what is scripted on the wrappers?

www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Another dollop of false consciousness
You may recall – or didn’t need me to tell you in the first place – that when people, mistakenly, believe something to be true when it isn’t and the evidence suggests it isn’t, they are suffering under an illusion we call ‘false consciousness’.  Once it is ingrained it is hard to shift. Like creationism. Like the place of patriarchy in current world religions. Like the world ending on the 21stDecember 2012. (Although, for several thousand people it must have been their death knell!).
When you come up against it personally it certainly raises a sense of the surreal, sometimes the tragically absurd. Like you are Alice and this is a bleak Wonderland
Talking with a man who has a very good and expanding brain the other day, someone who in four or so years has left his village to become literate, bilingual, an ace photographer, adept at IT and a senior manager in a clothing factory, I came away disconcerted. Despite my protestations and careful arguments based on concrete evidence and even biblical or moral evidence (he is an avid Christian) I could not shake his belief in female circumcision, in women not being the equal of men and that God is behind every act in a person’s life from the great to the small. My suggestions that the world should be – and often is – otherwise, was greeted with cackling laughter, as though I was the greatest stand up comic of all time. There was no way in to unseat his moral universe.
Openness to evidence and a critical consciousness are all we have to counter such resolute beliefs in the indefensible. And they have to be taught from birth whether it is to the young of Ghana’s many tribes, or Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus or the communists of North Korea and China. Once such consciousness is properly released and matured, it cannot be put back in the locked box of social conditioning.
But the powerful know this, from the corrupt democracies of the west to the corrupt dictatorships of the East.  Heavily proscribed education that imposes the authority of the state and the inviolability of the curriculum is always the prize tool of social engineering, whether in faith or secular schools.
For a riveting and mind-expanding read on the moral mess we call life, read: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
All my published work can be found on www.chronometerpublications.me 

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Saturday, December 22, 2012

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Last Stop
O it was a moonless night suddenly filled with dark foreboding. The invisible  birds had begun their metallic piping, the bats were squeaking among our ripe mangos and a thousand supplicants in a distant evangelical hangar were laying down a keening back beat. Then, like a solo singer to this orchestra of sound, there was a noise we had never heard. A grunting. A flapping. A scraping. Somewhere, close to the house, was a terrible manifestation. It had surfaced from the depths of our ancient fears. And it was working its way around our house.
Not given to craven submission to the agents of hell my wife opened the main door, fearless and intrepid. No weapon in her hand. Just vulnerable flesh and blood.
She disappeared into the Ghanaian night, submerging herself in its hot, thick embrace.
The malevolent sound reached a crescendo and then stopped abruptly and I heard her in-drawn gasp as clearly as if she was sitting beside me. It was followed by a terrible silence as if an unspeakable act had eradicated the very signature of life itself.
The door opened and there she stood like a female Beowulf carrying the gory trophy in her hands, a piece of folded card with thick glue on one surface. It was Last Stop, a trap for black mice the size of British rodents.
Our big but gentle Doberman, Sirius, had had it stuck to his paws.
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

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You are who you write
I wrote a short story recently – which will appear for free on www.chronometerpublications.mewithin a week or so. It’s called The Sense of Being Sinbad and deals with the last three months of a man’s life. I sent it to a friend who is wrestling with the best exit strategy for one who feels everything must be planned in advance of transit to ‘another place’ as he calls it. He reviewed it just as he would a student’s work, liking the prose style and some imagery. However, he then went to some lengths to tie me to the main character. He seemed certain that it was ‘future autobiographical’ and I would follow the lead of my character as the days wind down. Now he is very intelligent and so cannot be easily dismissed for his views. Does it mean that I have planned the last weeks of my life? In my deliberate renouncing of the usual narratives of death in modern society, religious or atheist, was I doing a bit of advance mapping? Was the novella, in fact, wishful thinking?
Of course, to some extent writers cannot escape themselves when they create characters but to say that I am a rapist, a murderer, a fat detective, a sixteen year old girl, an ancient magus and so on would be over-egging it a bit. The alternative view is that they are all fantasies, sometimes wishful and sometimes acting as a form of exorcism from the troubled depths of the unconscious. A third version and one to which I adhere, is that we are gem-like in our personalities and every facet represents different aspects of our characters. Each facet then can find its way into fully-fledged existence on the page.
I think that writers do what they do because they want to live other lives. It is very convenient. They don’t have to go ‘missing’ or seek a divorce. They just shut themselves away and split into their parts, each one of which graces their prose as a flesh and blood creation, a simulacrum of reality.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Thursday, December 13, 2012

Magyck, Mystery and Morality

A brief discourse on the making of Azimuth so that you know what you are in for!

A portly and dry historian is commissioned by an emperor to write a trilogy, a history of the progenitor of all modern morality, a man remembered as The Magus. He reads the first two volumes to the daughter of the court and the third to the daughter’s own daughter. As he reads to them they draw him into the machinations of court life with mysterious murders, plotting against the throne and occult events. His life is changed as he becomes a detective, a Poirot of ancient times, falls in love with a brothel keeper and kills for the first time. Each of the three volumes consist of twenty two tales recounting the adventures of the Magus. They are set in chapters which also describe the trials and tribulations of the historian. So, like a double helix you read about the historian’s own day and then fly back through time to the journeyings of the Magus and his search for the meaning of his existence, involving him in the conflict between good and evil, religion and reason, life and death. His skills as a warrior are gradually superseded by his desire to find a different way to live among people. Reading the tales affects the lives of the historian and his listeners, too. The two narratives begin to intertwine.

Each volume concerns a different journey lasting many years. The Magus ages and becomes wiser. The 66 tales are headed by the images of tarot cards whose interpretation by the historian add a mysterious frisson to proceedings. Each chapter is underscored with a cryptic statement, an aphorism, a zen-like pronouncement. For example:

Chapter Two
Believing what is seen is a form of blindness

The book is a roller coaster of action and philosophy and is full of mystery and suspense. The early reviews say it all:

www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews

At this same site you can download the first three chapters, free. I hope you do!

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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

 Some Reviews of the Azimuth Trilogy

“Reading great book. It is either for learning and information, or for pleasure and escape. Azimuth combines both of these. I was fascinated and transported but also what I learned about meditation and spirituality in this epic has helped me on my own path. It is a must read and must own.” – Andrew, Lord Stone of Blackheath
“I love it. A brilliant read, an extraordinary story………..It was compulsive reading — dusting went undusted, vacuuming unvacuumed.  I even ate some meals in front of my computer. How gross is that? “– Val, a Canadian reader
“I wanted to write and say a heartfelt thank you for bringing these stories to life. I took so much enlightening and thought provoking thoughts from them all, and yet, far from feeling like I was in a dry lesson,  I revelled in the excitement and suspense of the storytelling, yearning to know what happened next at every step and relishing each new discovery. At the same time, I loved each reminder of a philosophy I had forgotten but which now appeared as an old friend with new clothes. I think I have some catching up to do with some of them…
Much to my dismay I discovered that I don’t have the gifts of the Magus and couldn’t see what was coming at all -which meant it was hardly possible to put the book down. Although of course it is this capture of curiosity and emotions within a tale that I love so much about reading a good book.  Each time I moved from Kamil to the Magus and back again my heart would fill with sadness that I was leaving one and yet joy that I would find out more about the other. I’m in awe of your talent!
I feel so excited about what I’ve read that I could ramble on but as there’s no point preaching to the converted, :-) I’ll save it to encourage more people to read the book.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the book will continue to reveal further insights and secrets on each reading depending on one’s own place in life, much like in the way each traveller saw something slightly different when they looked at the fool’s card. And I’m excited to know the book will be on my bookshelf to provide inspiration in future.” Lizzie, UK
“I loved the way the plot came together. Surprises but ones that didn’t strain credibility.
The second two books seemed to me to have tremendous jeopardy – both in the holding story and that of the Magus.
It built to a real crescendo in the third book – both stories absolutely compelling.
The whole turned overnight into a page turner. There’s also something very new about what you are doing in the book. Something to do I feel with the tarot cards
and the aphorisms and the female characters but I am not familiar as you know with the genre”.  Vanessa UK
“Story telling at its absolute best!!!! If you would like to be transformed to another world, rich with real people, human beings with all their frailties, and share their gripping journey then read this book. It has all the suspense and excitement of an adventure novel, but much more than that, it offers magic and mystery, it offers the opportunity to suspend disbelief and enjoy and engage with your and the author’s unboundaried imagination. As you travel through the trilogy, you will find yourself unsure as to whether to race ahead and discover what happens, or hold back savouring the opportunity to immerse yourself in each chapter’s revelations and reflections.
Whichever you decide, the wonderful world of Azimuth is somewhere well worth escaping to.” Heather UK
“Jack, in “About the Book” you tell us that it has taken 10 years to write Azimuth. Believe me, it has been time well spent. I love both the story and the way that it is told; the trilogy has been keeping me company in planes, trains and automobiles for a few weeks. The book functions and succeeds on so many levels, whether it be as an adventure, as a tale of court intrigues, or as an examination of some of life’s more profound questions. The trilogy is written in a highly visual style and I think that it would lend itself well to becoming a trilogy of films; this would be a fitting tribute to a man who loves cinema so much. The opening paragraph is beautifully crafted and hooked me from the outset; as I am sure that it is intended to do. The pace and energy continued to carry me through page after page; chapter after chapter; and eventually, volume after volume. I read the book in Kindle format, which deprived me of Holly Etheridge’s beautiful artwork on the cover, but the electronic form is kinder on my arms when I am travelling. However, my partner has just bought the paper edition, so I can still admire the artwork and the quality of the paper by proxy. I shall post a review of the individual volumes when time permits.” (Greg Switzerland)
Excellent trilogy, definitely up there with the Northern Lights trilogy and Lord of the Rings books.
I have recommended this to everyone I know! (Drew UK)
“Un libro fantastico. Debes comprarlo!”. Libro entretenido desde la portada hasta el contenido. Lleno de aventura, magia, bien escrito y caracteristico lleno de fantasia. Merece la pena leerlo. Inmerste en un mundo de magia y aventura. Disfruta de la imaginacion de este fantastico autor. Maria UK/Spain
Sometimes I feel sad when I finish a really good book because I can’t live in its magical world anymore. This time I’m delighted as there’s a second and third part to come! I read this on holiday and had the luxury of being able to read for entire days. I didn’t want to leave the world of the Magus. I love the magic and the story and the questions of faith / destiny / contemplation. I think actually it would make a really good film, a lot of the journey of the Magus there’s no need for speech and the open landscapes conjured by the prose could be filmed beautifully. It’s spiritual, romantic, exotic, intriguing and a real page-turner – un-put-downable. Jennifer UK

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Friday, December 7, 2012

“The Devil you say…!”

We human beings are a credulous lot. We will turn a bush at night, into a lurking monster, the creak of a floorboard into a ghost and some coincidental meeting or act into evidence of Fate. We have invented the history of God, a fairly full life for Christ and sit and shiver in fear as we imagine the Grim Reaper or the horned beast. Close to my home in France, people are gathering for December 21st 2012 when the world will end. In a broad sense this will mean we will all go happily together rather than individually in the ragged, patternless way that leaves us bereft when family and friends die or we go before them.

In philosophical terms all of the preceding are the consequence of what is called ‘false consciousness’, that is that if enough people believe, they make it happen or they insist it is true. Human beings set up conspiracies of belief, from Santa Claus for the under fives to creationism or reincarnation. There are many who believe in vampires and werewolves, in spells and potions, in the power of distance healing through prayer and in the Second Coming or the Antichrist. It is possible because we are born into a mysterious flow of life forms and events for which we have no explanation but it is so richly varied that we can impose whatever we like upon it and any hypothesis seems to fit the facts. “If men believe a thing to be true it is true in its consequences,” said W. I. Thomas, or words to that effect. Magicians the world over play upon our capacity to believe what is not and cannot be true whether it is sawing a lady in half or climbing a rope hanging from thin air. Groups of people will convince themselves that someone should be lynched for crimes despite having no evidence. Politicians and generals will wage war, stating that their strikes against targets are forensically exact and do not have a child or woman’s face on the end of their missiles. Propaganda is what human beings do best to vindicate their actions or assuage their fears.

And now a tale. A few decades ago I came across a friend who was undergoing an episode. He believed he had been chosen to throw Lucifer down the bottomless pit for a further millennium. This man had suddenly developed a hypnotic power and with it he had collected a handful of women (married, in their thirties and forties) whom were necessary to help him in his fight against evil. His wife, alarmed by this turn of events phoned me and explained that her husband was naked, standing on a special carpet with a Persian motif, he on the central abstract shape and the women on smaller, peripheral shapes. She felt he was possessed. I got in my Morris Minor, put a crucifix around my neck and phoned a friend to ready himself. When I picked him up he was in his priest’s habit, a bible in his hand and a book on exorcism. We arrived and were shown into the house of devilment. While my friend went round the place waving his burning censer, I entered the room and stood before the man. He put his hands on my shoulders and began to intone that I had come as he had directed and would now fulfill the destiny that had been prescribed. The hypnosis was very powerful but did not lull me into credulity. My priest friend arrived and between us we talked him into lying down and sleeping, there on the carpet. As if a curse had been lifted, the women hurried off to dress. The next day he was in psychiatric hospital. Whether this was the right place for him is a moot point.

Looking back I am not sure how much is true in my current telling. Everything, actually, I believe is the truth, except for the naked women. I think this could have been relayed to me by the wife before I arrived. She was certain that part of the relations he was having with his female acolytes was sexual.

What intrigues me in this set of events is that the man was able to convince the women of his and their place in biblical history, that he was ‘talked down’ by an old fashioned exorcism and that I felt sufficiently alarmed as to wear a silver cross, though my religious beliefs are non existent. I do remember feeling very anxious as I drove towards the house.

I’d like to believe in reincarnation. I’d like to think that when I return to this earth I will find a sane civilisation of rational, humane, loving human beings who get on with life, knowing that this is their one chance and are making the most of it!

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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

–>

Janus, the writer
I thought I’d offer you a debate to be held after Christmas with your arty friends. It’s one that can get very passionate and it’s as old as paintings on cave walls.
“Can you be totally captivated, informed and elevated by the work of an artist who, you discover, is an appalling human being?”
There have been many writers who have led disreputable, even loathsome lives but whose work still grace the shelves of the great and the good. I happened to see an old edition of QI the other night and Edgar Allen Poe was featured at one point. Illegally marrying his 13 year old cousin and an alcoholic, he was also the founder of detective fiction, science fiction and came up with the Big Bang theory eighty years before science could catch up with him. At the extreme end, Eric Gill, a Catholic multi-skilled artist, sexually abused his children and his dog as well as having a sexual relationship with his sister. Hitler loved Wagner’s work. At a dinner with friends in France last year a close friend said he detested Woody Allen and would not watch his films because of his social behaviour (including his current and long time sexual relationship with his one time adopted child). Another friend said he’d never watch a Stephen Fry programme, given what he did to Simon Gray. The fact that he is bipolar was not, for my friend, an excuse.
So, can we divorce the biography from the work? There is no doubt that many artefacts that we currently consider to be exquisite works of art may have been fashioned by people we would have liked to have imprisoned for life for their inhumanity.
A lot of you, reading this, will be writers. It is possible that you divorce who you are in the day to day, from whom you prefer to be as an artist. On the one hand you may lead a blameless life and create works of disgusting sadism and on the other you may be a sadist to all who cross your path and create wondrous works of beauty.
What are we to do with you?

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Saturday, December 1, 2012

You might like to read a whole short story in the hopes that it will seduce you to read other books of mine at www.chronometerpublications.me

–>

The Visionary
By Eric le Sange



Chapter One
Jen Cord had not known that she possessed the gift.  It made itself known to her on a day that was indistinguishable from any other in the working week. She had entered the ophthalmic operating theatre early, as was her habit, to prepare to receive her staff rather than arrive after them. Jen was aware of role modelling. She was also anxious not to take anything for granted in her work. Human error lurked in everyone.
Despite being an attractive woman in her early thirties she had not married nor it seems did she have a partner in tow of either sex. In the flesh, blood and disease intimacy of surgical theatres someone as beguiling as she  was singularly odd,  enduring, as the male doctors saw it, the privations of a solitary life. There were many who would have liked to put an end to her solitude for though assiduously non tactile, she was warm, engaging, amusing, alluring and unconsciously seductive. During the time that she had worked in the hospital men from various strata of the institution drifted towards her hopefully only to find themselves gently repelled by some force within her, as though her magnetic core was designed for that sole purpose.
She never discussed her private life with anyone, having chosen this job among the many offered her because it was as far from family and friends as it was possible to imagine on this overcrowded island. Her mother had died giving birth to her. Her father had then filled the gap of her absent mother, offering her limitless love and forbearance, sacrificing a social life to attend to her growing up. Then, one day, the purity of their relationship, the unequivocal bond, was snapped by an event that, whenever she thought of it, coiled in her stomach, turning her intestines into snakes. The pain of discovering what she had been too blind to see led her to return to medical school within an hour of its revelation. She did not answer his calls or emails or texts, eventually changing her numbers and addresses to emphasise her desire for an irrevocable break. Even then he found her easily since she was on the national register of ophthalmic surgeons. Now and then she received a long, laboured, handwritten letter in his awkward, spiky script. The length of their separation eventually stretched to a whole decade, yet, despite her anger and sense of betrayal, there was not one day when she did not think about him.
There is a special preternatural calm about a silent operating chamber. The battles for vision, the pain necessarily inflicted, the concentrated minds of staff, the electronic bleeps and liquid gushes of the glittering machinery, are temporarily banished. It is as though the theatre has become a sleeping beast in the waiting darkness. She switched on a beam above her head and looked down the list. It was short, in inverse proportion to the complexity of the cases. Each would take at least two hours. She had arranged it some days before with the managers, as best she could, to allow some variety, knowing her predictions of what might constitute severity would probably be proven wrong.
Settled in what she termed her ‘driving seat’, she studied her notes. Her attention was caught and held by the first name on the list, Sandhi Dalah. It broke a dream that she had had the night before. She remembered that she was walking on a thin peninsula of land on the Mediterranean coast, towards the sea. A man with his back to her was painting a canvass on a full easel. Her foot caught a loose pebble sending it skittering into the water. He turned violently, his face angry, his long waxed moustaches erect at their ends.
“Who dares interrupt the work of Dali?” he growled.
“I am an eye surgeon,” she replied firmly as though that was reason enough. His face instantly changed to subservience. “Ah,” he said plaintively, “There is no resisting a witch such as you. You open and shut the windows to the soul.” He closed his eyes as if to demonstrate. But the lids had slits in them which opened, regardless,  to reveal dark holes. As she watched the holes merged and became the growing mouth of a long tunnel, swallowing Dali’s face, then his entire body and then the easel. The darkness gave way to light at its far end where the ocean’s small waves could be seen rolling over one another. She approached the water and found steps leading below the surface. Descending them she discovered herself in a vast cave. Artefacts floated in tidy rows everywhere, from the every day to the exotic, from the recognisable to the surreal. Each was inscribed with Dali’s famous signature. She reached out to touch a painting. It was of a giant eye, large, singular and forlorn, drooping shapelessly over the edge of a shelf. As her fingers brushed it she was pulled backwards by a sudden force, back from the chamber, back up the steps, back through the tunnel and back into herself.
The image receded and she was staring at the name Sandhi Dalah again. She knew enough about Freud’s work to recognise that there was sufficient similarity in the sound of the name to that of Salvador Dali’s, to have precipitated her dream. She studied his notes. 46. Anglo-Indian. Samanera. Member of a western Buddhist sect which had set up a community on an island in Scotland. As coincidence would have it she had intended to visit it a couple of years back when on a touring holiday but the weather was atrocious and the narrow channel of sea, spitting enormous white topped waves, precluded any crossing. Dalah was suffering from a sudden loss of sight in his right eye. The optometrist who had sent him to her had found a strange patina on the surface of the retina, like a scattering of a single layer of cells, pale and a touch opaque. She cast her mind back but could not remember her first consultation with him. The waiting rooms were overcrowded these days and patients were pushed through the investigatory processes in industrial numbers. He seemed not to be British or of British extraction. His name suggested Tibet but it might be an erroneous connection. She had a sudden image of unnaturally green eyes. Were they his?
Her thoughts were arrested by the arrival of the first of her nursing team. She gave instructions regarding what would be needed. Within five minutes the entire team was assembled, the technology was blinking and piping high notes and then the patient was led in. She was troubled that she hadn’t been able to remember him. In fact she now had misgivings as to her state of mind at their first meeting, so idiosyncratic was he. Something must have interceded between her visual appraisal and her memory store for there to have been such a blanking out. Yes he had green eyes but he also had olive skin and luxuriant black hair scraped back and tied in a long, intricately woven ponytail. His features were hawkish like a Parsee’s and those green irises burned with a feverish intensity.
“Please sit,” she motioned at the waiting chair. “We are going to make a couple of pinpricks to numb the eye and make it immobile. Then I’ll put a protective shield over your face, exposing it for surgery.”
“How long will this last? he asked, evenly in a slightly accented voice.
“It might be brief. It might take an hour or two.”
“And I will be fully conscious throughout?”
“Indeed. Rest your head back. Good.” The mask was put in position and the injections administered. “You can talk at any time, if you want to. Tell me to stop if the going gets hard.”
“Hm.”
“You are a samanera it says here, from that Buddhist island in Scotland? What does that mean? ”
“You asked me that last time. A novice.” This further unsettled her. She had great pride in her memory of useful, associated facts regarding her patients. She stayed silent so as not to expose her failed faculty any further. Once he was settled and the eye perfectly still and levered slightly from its socket for her to begin work, she began a preliminary examination through the enlarged pupil. She focused the magnifying lens into the dark centre of the emerald halo and turned up the light. A moment later she recoiled slightly in disbelief but forced herself to bend forward again as her incredulity gave way to unprofessional curiosity. Instead of the cavern whose walls should have been covered by the rods and cones of the retina and substratum of blood vessels, her beam was lighting up a photographic album. It was as though her light was exciting memories in the retinal cells and they were conspiring to project images from Dalah’s life. It was mesmerising as snapshots flashed, one after another; meteorological, topographical, urban, wild, nocturnal and diurnal, flames and water, people and houses, jostling together as though competing to be the one, final and most memorable, single image. The cascade suddenly ceased and there, before her was a vast Buddha, carved into an immense rock face. Half of it was lit by golden rays and the other half remained in a dark shroud.
The Buddha spoke in a deep, sonorous tone, “To love with only half your being is not to love at all. Ambition is unworthy of a samanera.”
Upon these words the Buddha disappeared and her view of the faintly white retinal surface returned. She quivered from the unworldly experience but covered her reaction with her normal, cool expertise and set to, probing the vitreous chamber with her instrumentation. It did not take her long. Needles removed and stitches inserted, she settled back.
“Relax,” she said. A nurse slowly raised his chair. She pushed away the gantry above them so they could sit face to face.
“What was it? he asked, “The gauzy stuff on the retina?”
“There was something and nothing,” she said. “It may be real and may be an illusion.”
He looked at her, his face expressionless, “Then what must I do?”
She turned to her team and said, “Give me five minutes with the patient, will you?” They looked a little bemused but left quickly. She turned back to him. “I do not know how to tell you this.”
“I can take whatever it is. WI have been trained.” He looked at her calmly.
She pursed her lips and started, “In your eye I saw something…I think it must have come from your frontal cortex … an image … I saw a huge Buddha, carved in a stone cliff. One half of him was lit and the other dark. He said, “To love with only half your being is not to love at all. Ambition is unworthy of the samanera.” Sandhi Dalah’s face crumpled and he began to sob silently, his entire body shaking. She took his hands in hers until he subsided. When the nurses knocked and entered quietly they found them like this in a silent tableau.


Chapter Two
She told no-one her experience, continuing her work as if nothing had happened but her mind revisiting the event, every time she looked at a patient list. A few weeks later she received a letter from the leader of the Buddhist island community. It thanked her for her expertise, not surgical but spiritual. Sandhi Dalah was a changed man. He had recognised that he was not ready for the contemplative life and must find the half of his being that was not yet at-one and so he had set off on a journey to find that which he did not know. The letter brought back the vividness of her vision from inside the man’s eye and in all likelihood precipitated her next surreal adventure. Once again a dream precipitated a novel reality which she only recalled when she saw her list. The name that arrested her attention was Helena Trott and the consequent dream had some similarities to her encounter with Dali. A woman was standing by an ocean in a long flowing robe with a golden hem. She held an ornate eyepiece to her face of a kind Jen Cord had never seen. Sails of innumerable ships were creeping over the horizon towards her. Again, something she did, some clumsy act that communicated itself to the woman, made her turn in fury.
“Where are my guards? No-one can approach a queen in this vulgar, unsolicited manner.”
“I am a doctor of eyes,” she replied.
The queen took a step back. “I fear all physicians. They are little more than legalised murderers. Many suffer intolerable pain or die from supposedly efficacious potions dropped into their eyes. Where once there was clarity, the disease of the white curtain is pulled across vision, denying the soul’s view of the living world. If it cannot see, we have no evidence of our purity.”
“What of those born blind?”
“Damned to helplessness. Victims of the sins of their parents.”
That was all she could remember of her dream. She looked at her notes of her first meeting with the patient. Helena Trott, aged 90. Living in a small hamlet close to the city. Frequent retinal tears over the last decade. Regular laser treatment. Like the samanera she had had a sudden onset of blindness in her right eye. A scan had revealed the same faint smattering of a white deposit on the retinal surface, like a carpet of cobwebs on the lawn that you sometimes find on an autumn morning. An amusing vignette came to her mind in which she turned the dried old husk of Miss Trott upside down and shook her so that the white dust floated everywhere as in a child’s glass snow scene.
With a heightened sense of anticipation she had her team prepare equipment for possible surgery on the old lady’s eye. Trott was helped to the patient’s chair. They shook hands; the elastic fleshed, pink-nailed firmness of one, encasing the fleshless, hard-boned, mottled skin of the other.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Not so well,” said Helena Trott. “The last ten years have dawdled along and then this sudden blindness arrived to shake me up.” Her voice was firm and a little self-deprecating.
Once the eye was immobilised she shone her magnifying light into the wide pupil. The ageing cells and filigree nature of the retina with its dusting of powder gave way to a cliff top cemetery, eroded through time so that only one stone had not yet fallen into the sea. On it was inscribed:
Helena Trott
Home at last where she is truly loved
As with Sandhi Dalah, there was no instrument fine enough to scrape away the single cell layer of film from the retina, whether a trick of the ancient eye or real. She finished her probing, in case there was something she had not itemised and put away her instruments. Then, with a mounting sense of entering a disturbing new pattern to her life, she asked her team to leave her alone with the old woman. After explaining that she could do nothing for the eye for the condition had not been encountered before by the medical profession and would need much research to ascertain its pathology, she told her haltingly about the vision she had seen. Helena Trott smiled in sudden rapture, nodding her head repeatedly and placed her old fingers on the surgeon’s wrist.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
The inevitable letter arrived several weeks later. It bore a foreign stamp. The address was typed using an old typewriter so that letters were not perfectly spaced nor in a neat line. It read:
Dear Doctor Cord
You have wrought a miracle. Miss Trott, our beloved benefactress, returned to her estate here in Kerala after fifty years absence. She spent a last blissfully wondrous week of her life on the bougainvillea covered veranda of her old home, submerged in beauty, eyes drinking in the ocean, waiting, if I may be overly poetic, for a barque to carry her to that shore to which we all must one day sail. Here she wrote a final will, sound of mind I can assure you, leaving this estate to myself and my family forthwith for which we are eternally in your debt, for it was your gift to see inside the dark well of our desires that determined her homecoming.
Your humble servant and grateful friend, always,
Khumi Kurup
Estate Manager (Grandson of First Estate Manager)
The English Villa
Gokarna
Kerala
India


Chapter Four
By the end of the year she had had a dozen encounters of this extraordinary kind, always presaged by dreams involving well known figures from history or characters from classical fiction. The names, as in classical psychoanalysis, related to those of particular individuals on her lists, sometimes in a crudely obvious fashion and sometimes requiring a more labyrinthine interpretation. They all suffered from sudden blindness in their right eyes with a seemingly related fine carpet of something alien on their retinas.  It was almost comical the way her mind functioned at this Freudian level of correspondence and symbolism. The pageant of famous personages that passed by her inner eye was often little more than a cluster of tiny sketches held together by some well known anecdote or singular characteristic, mental figments from her early school days. She wrote out the list of her patients’ names in one column and beside it in another, the dream inhabitants.
Sandhi Dalah
Helena Trott
Robert Heinz
Belle Bird
Colin Tick
Christian Pillar
Casey New
Shirley Mansion
Michael Roddie
Bee English
Sandy Angel
Sally Eye
Barnaby Richardson
Mary Aspray
Salvador Dali
Helen of Troy
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Karl Marx
Christopher Columbus
Casinova
Sherlock Holmes
Mickey Mouse
Elisabeth the First
Martin Luther
Salome
Charles Dickens
Margot Fontaine
In every case a letter had followed her entry into the mind of her subject extolling her for her miraculous gift of prescience and her ability to use it to change the life of a sufferer or a victim. It was occult how these lives had been transformed in profound ways owing to her intercessions. As she stared at the list, wondering if there might be a deeper significance holding these names together, there was a knock at the door and the registrar stuck his head inside her office.
“Coffee Jen?” he asked.
“No thanks,” she replied without really seeing him. But what had caught her gaze and kept it fixed there was her nameplate on the office door above his head. Jennifer Cord. He looked at her and then up at the plate before shaking his head and shutting the door.
Meanwhile, with gathering emotion, Jen Cord allowed the dream that had just burst into her consciousness, to run across the inside of her eyes like an old scratchy film. In it she was walking in the garden of her childhood in a winter’s early snowfall. Her father was burning leaves and the dead heads of roses and twigs. He stood silhouetted against the flames and the white landscape and then turned to face her. He had grown a moustache and wore a strange red uniform. He smiled wolfishly at her, baring his teeth and then, with a crooked forefinger, he directed her gaze to the blaze. She looked past him and saw a stake at its centre and a woman tied to it, naked, skin blistering, bubbling and falling from her. The rapid dissolution of her flesh left her a skeleton except for her two eyes, piercing and urgent in their bony sockets. The skull spoke but she could not hear the words because of the crackling of the leaves and the explosions of the twigs.
She sat, alone in her office, a cold fear making her shiver. She added her name to the bottom of the patients’ column: Jen Cord. And then opposite it she wrote Joan of Arc.


Chapter Five
Jen Cord, ophthalmic surgeon, finished her list at six and returned to her apartment in an elegant square in the old part of the city. It was the most minimal tribute to her history. The furnishings were sharply geometrical and toned from white, through greys, to black. Only the light beech, highly polished  parquet flooring offered a contrast. It was a haven for internal dialogue, there being nothing to distract her from listening to music, reading or contemplation. Here she laid out case notes and her columns of names together with summaries of all her dreams. As she stared at them the vision in her right eye started to dim. She put a hand over her left and, as she looked on in despair, the writing first became indecipherable and then disappeared into a blackness. The last name that remained distinct in her mind was her own.


Chapter Six
It was two in the morning when she arrived back at the hospital. The genial, fat uniformed man who was manning reception and acting as a guard smiled and raised a hand before returning to his television screen. She walked through the waiting room and bumped into the registrar, now on night call, going through a file of case notes. A patient sat holding his head in obvious distress. The registrar looked puzzled but did not question her presence nor did her fixed, stern expression suggest he could ask her for help.
She keyed in the code for the operating theatre and entered, closing the door firmly behind her, at the same moment switching on a low, ambient light. Then she went over to the patients’ chair and switched on a small overhead beam. She sat down and faced her invisible surgeon, imagining their conversation.
“And how are you, Miss Cord?”
“A little tense. Somewhat concerned. This kind of operation is experimental … you know. “It is unpredictable.”
“Have no fear, Miss Cord. We know what we are doing. Now, I’m just going to put some drops in your eye to enlarge your pupils. Look up.” She administered the drops by pulling away the bottom lid of her right eye and dripping the chemical into the pouch she had made. While the drug began its work, she set up the ophthalmic magnifying lens with its tiny bright beam of illumination. Experimenting with the beam and lens she focused it and watched as the image from them was relayed on to a small monitor above her head. There was her brown eye steadily dilating, her untended lashes and one brow in need of a good plucking. It was a little crude but satisfactory for her purpose. With the beam turned very low she waited for the dilation to be complete and then began to increase the illumination, focusing it through her pupil and on to her retina. Perfectly healthy she thought until she saw the almost invisible flakes of white dust, like motes in sunlight, falling on its surface.
As she looked at the little screen she found herself being drawn into it and through the falling powder so that it gathered on her hair and shoulders. The vault that she had entered expanded and became a cold scene of dark sky and crisp white snow. A single house stood in front of her on a hill side. Below it, terraces caterpillared down into the valley below where there were was a small industrial town with factories and chimneys giving out black smoke. She walked towards the house, her high heels making circles in the snow, her thin red silk dress, clammily cold against her calves, her black satin shrug with its glittering fake diamond brooch pinning it at her throat and the black pillbox hat with its red feather perched jauntily on her head.
She came to the door. Everything was familiar, the hard cold iron fluting of its handle as she turned it, the hallway with its flowery Victorian tiles, the oak stairs. She climbed without hesitation. This was her home, as intimate to her as her very skin. She opened the bedroom door with an expectant smile upon her face and froze. Lying on the bed was her father, older and greyer than when she last saw him and, nestled against his naked body, was herself, Jen, his daughter.
A terrible screech startled her and she lifted her head from her father’s shoulder to look at the doorway where she had been standing a moment before. In her place there, was her father’s young wife, in a white nightdress. Ten years before she had been her closest friend, her confidante, like a sister so tight was the bond. As she watched, tears coursed down the young woman’s cheeks, hands fluttered and her body twisted and convulsed against the door jamb. The bereft waif was keening something repeatedly, her eyes fixed upon Jen’s own, until finally Jen could just make out the words, “Is this what you want? Is this what you want?”
“No! No!” she heard herself cry as the scene dissolved.


Chapter Seven
Slumped back in the patients’ chair, Jennifer Cord lay with her eyes closed. A cavalcade of ghostly figures walked under her twitching eyelids. All of them, led by Dali and Helen of Troy, bowed to her as they passed and then vanished into the air. Last of all was Joan of Arc, now returned to flesh and blood, voluptuous, breasts bare, shining with the light of intense purpose and holding a gleaming sword above her head. As she, too, disappeared, Jen heard the door of the operating theatre open. The registrar stood there.
“Is that you Jen? Are you ok?”
Her gaze took in his handsome, swarthy features and his intrigued, concerned eyes and she felt her body twist as though it had a magnetic core and the poles had just reversed. At the same moment her mind became clear and her vision lost its right sided opacity so that she saw him in almost transcendent three dimensions.
“A bit shaky,” she whispered, over-dramatically. “Give me a hand.”
He stepped quickly to her side and helped her up. Self-consciously she pressed a breast against him, her head looking over his shoulder, smiling.
                                                                  End
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Leveson and the UK

It is in every author’s interest to contest any attempt by the State to introduce legislation regarding what can or cannot be the subject of media interest. Freedom of the press (TV, art and literature generally) is the cornerstone of a critical society that keeps its politicians in check. Democracy implies ‘the voice of the people’ and that voice must never be muted. We know that when there is oppression of any kind, people will tend to shy away from speaking up. They need the media to speak up for them.

To maintain an ethical code for decent, informative and investigative journalism merely requires heavier penalties for criminal and spuriously invasive activity together with front page retractions and apologies. A resort to existing law should always determine whether privacy violation is criminal or for the greater good.

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Rock of Ages

I watched successive television news coverage of the Rolling Stones at the O2 arena the other night and was struck by the ageist tenor of much of it, particularly on Sky. Plucking the main threads from their verbiage I was left with they are very old and they are charging a lot of money. Indeed a couple of the presenters, attractive women in their mid-thirties, screwed up their faces into pictures of prudish disgust at the thought of going to a Stones concert. Dirty old men. Just as similar women did when the Stones were young and brash and irreverent and a banner headline in a middle page spread asked, “Would you let your daughter marry one of these?”It is curious to have grown up with them. I am around the same age as Jagger. I don’t feel particularly venerable. Whilst they may be tame compared to those early days they still have retained a symbolism among those who have grown older alongside them. Rebelliousness. Maybe they have stopped a sizeable proportion of people from becoming atrophied and truly old in their minds and slippers by mirroring their desires to be freer agents.

We have three dogs in a large compound in Accra. A male Doberman, a female blonde Alsatian and an Alsatian/lurcher cross. We bought the first two because our previous two dogs died of a reasonably old age (very old for Ghana where a dog’s life expectancy is low owing to diseases and heat.} The latter is 14 now and quite deaf and blind (what news presenters imagine The Rolling Stones should be). He was  a curious animal when his first two companions were alive. Third in the pack, always craving attention but generally impeccably behaved except when there was a fight between the other two. He’d see which way the battle was going and join in the maul with the victor. He wanted to belong. Nowadays this deaf dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean chase the ball. Actually he’s not dumb, he barks lustily as he vaguely follows the other two in their chase for balls, mangoes and oranges. Sometimes he wins because his nose is as good as ever. We give him the prime cuts from the offal, helping him to eke out his comfortable and occasionally exciting old age. To say that he was revivified on the two new pups arrival is an understatement. Now they are big dogs aged two. And his old tail whirls and he prances on his toes, occasionally half-falling from a stab of arthritis.

The point being that ghettos are bad for everyone. The old need the young and vice versa. They both need rock and roll to energise their desires for nonconformity. Those Sky “ladies’ could do with a bit of naughtiness.

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Sunday, November 25, 2012

Shadows on the Cave Wall

I know what Plato meant when he said that we could not apprehend reality directly. Everything is an echo or a facsimile or obscured or misrepresented or a lie. We are islands unto ourselves and though we build bridges to each other’s habitats, we never actually cross to them. Love is our best word for reaching out and almost touching the other. Abandonment is the horror of discovering that it is just one more slippery word.
As writers we are experts in the field of deceptive realities, though, paradoxically, we believe that our fictions contain more truth than the most meticulous academic factual account. I have just finished the first draft of the novella, now with a changed title. Easeful Death has become On Being Sinbad. I am working on the dialogue. It says too much at the moment. It is too literal. Literality does not really exist in the world of human communication. Approximation is all there is and that’s when you’re really good and have a real handle on words words words. Cutting back the dialogue so that it is truly spare enables the reader to make it his or hers by filling in the gaps. That’s what we like as humans. Filling in the gaps others leave. We are not then faced with the enormity of being on islands and uncomprehending of each other’s plight.

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Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Casting Bread Upon the Water

I made the point some time ago that writing e-books was akin to putting messages in bottles on your desert island when what you really wanted was a full-size steamer to come by and save you (a book publisher). A friend muttered the other day that he did not want to broadcast his thoughts, implying that tweeting and blogging somehow involved a dumbing down of the high arts. I pointed out in return that there he was, nearly seventy, and unable to pass on his worldly wisdom because of fear of exposure. In other words, since he felt he could not measure up to Tolstoy then he had better keep his powder dry for reincarnation.

I once wrote in an A to Zen of Management (www.chronometerpublications.me) “Tell everyone everything there is to know about you and they cease to have power over you” That’s it, really. Exposing oneself in tweets, blogs and e-books begins in acts of faith that you have something to say and ends with a sense of empowerment because you have added your individual voice to a discourse. We are made to feel embarrassed and a failure in our schooling and this carries on through life unless we use aversion therapy – which, in this case, is publishing and broadcasting our views.

Writing blogs and tweeting are both acts of personal exposure but also of marketing. Read my blogs and you might read my books, should you like the style, the humour, the insights…

www.chronometerpublications.me

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Sunday, November 18, 2012

Cheating Death

As you will have read in the last blog, I am writing a novella about what happens when a man is given three months to live. Maybe this preoccupation with death is just my age. Close friends have died this last year. It’s a conundrum to have them alongside me one moment and then not, the next. Thus it is that odd phrases are caught, mid-air, from what people say or from what appears in text. Phrases that stop you ‘dead’ because you hadn’t interrogated their meaning in depth. ‘Cheating death’ is one such. It is used a lot. People escape from infernos, the water, severe diseases and other seemingly impossible situations and we say that they cheated death. Death is personalised. The Grim Reaper. In The Seventh Seal the hero plays chess with death and can live as long as the game can be drawn out. But the end is inevitable. Cheating Death is anything from a momentary experience to a life long one. Babies cheat death. People live to a ‘ripe old age’ before succumbing to the scythe.

I’d like to cheat death for a little more time yet. I may be doing the right things, who knows? It appears it is all dependent upon telomerase. Look it up. If you have long ones you will go on awhile. If you have short ones then get your pen and paper out and write a fancy will. The startling news is that you can lengthen them. Diet, exercise, purpose in life and social networks. Can you be bothered? That’s the thing. Most people can’t until it’s too late. Once the sentence has been handed down, then they start scrabbling around for their 5 a day.

In Azimuth, Death is a Lifetaker and differs according to the person’s psychological baggage. S/he can be anything from a cuddly pet to a devil with horns. We live uniquely and we die uniquely.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com
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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Easeful Death

As a subject for a novella, proscribed time is very powerful. This is the common enough eventuality that you will know exactly how long you have to live. Until the surgeon tells you and you are in a care home or a hospice or you are finally returned to your bed for the last few days, you tend to disregard it. Throughout our lives time is attenuated to the point where it seems infinite on the one hand and crudely finite on the other. You can keep both notions in your consciousness at the same time, sliding from one to the other, almost unwittingly. I would assume that we have evolved a mechanism in our brain which mutes the prospective horror of an eternal blankness to enable us to get on with our daily round.

Given that it is the subject of my current writing – whose working title is also the title of this blog, I wonder what line you might take in constructing a fiction about it. Would you put yourself in the place of a friend who endured such an end to his or her life, documenting sadness and loss, bitterness and rage? Would you make it the subject of a thriller narrative as in Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith and the great film, The American Friend by Wim Wenders, in which a man given weeks to live, is offered a fortune which will take care of his family after his death – IF he commits a murder. Would you focus upon the effects upon his or her children? Would you offer the tantalising bitter-sweet picture of falling in love with no time to go? Deeply psychological treatments can be found in Golding’s novel Pincher Martin and the quite brilliant little film called Incident at Owl Creek or in Becket’s novel Malone Dies. The transition from life to death is one of the two great changes in our lives. It makes for magnetic reading but is a huge challenge to the writer. Like the bad sex awards given to writers who hump their prose to the point where it becomes risible, there should be bad death awards for those who create such a cloying sentimentality that we are asphyxiated in the syrup. The film Love Story comes to mind and the death of Little Nell.

Maybe with that baggage in my mind, Easeful Death is a tale wherein there is no sentimentality, no empathy and very little sympathy.  As such it might fall into the category of black humour. But maybe it shouldn’t be put in that box. Maybe it is the best way out for us all!

Eventually it will appear at this portal:

wwwchronometerpublications.me

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Friday, November 9, 2012

 
“…two nations divided by a common language”

This quote is likely to have issued from the lips of George Bernard Shaw and, of course, refers to Great Britain and the United States of America. Having watched, or had inflicted upon me, the election carousel for the American Presidency over the last few months, I become more aware how language causes cognitive and emotional dissonance. In other words I am at a loss to fully comprehend or believe what is actually being said and felt by US citizens. This goes all the way from manual worker to the President himself, whose rhetoric can be so overblown and flowery it has me trying to uncurl a tightly locked bum. Of course I wanted Obama to win but at what cost? The amount spent on the election (money that would have wiped out Sandy inflicted debts) the continual reference to the United States as the greatest nation on earth, the projection of the US as ‘one family’, the over simplification of issues, the relative lack of reference to the disastrous Bush years and the negative campaigning seemed less like a democracy in action and more like a mammoth, self-inflicted character assassination. When I worked in Uzbekistan after the break down of the Russian confederation, the whole impetus of American businesses there was so capitalist, market hungry and self-aggrandising that I could not work with them. Not that the UK, in its own unique way, is any less paradoxical when it comes to self-presentation. Or France. Or Ghana. Each imagines it is democratic but has a different way of demonstrating it and conjuring it up in language and behaviour that is hard for outsiders to penetrate fully..

Having worked and lived in Accra for nearly five years, partially supporting my wife’s business www.sixteen47.com which involves around forty staff on three times the national average wage for their lines of work and with free literacy and IT programmes, medical support and western working hours, the difficulties of expressing exactly what I want from colleagues are manifold. They are equatorial people without many UK/US business reference points such as seasons of the year, postal addresses, disposable income, legal process, reporting, appraisal and so on. It has taken over a decade to create a critical mass of staff who understand the disciplines of working as one team, planning and being strategic within a global marketplace. This is often because these concepts are utterly different from the world of their upbringing in an oral culture that is opportunistic, dependent on largesse and reactive to harsh daily circumstance and the often corrupt practices of the powers that be. Even though they speak English as well as tribal languages, everything still has to be painstakingly defined by stripping down concepts to their absolute essence. The consequences can be gratifying for everyone. Now, every worker can go to a cyber cafe and download his/her paycheck, every one has a bank account, illness through poor diet has decreased measurably and the ethos of the work place is vibrant and lauded by regular inspections from Ministry agencies. These days there are no senior managers. Everyone is in a team and has a supervisor with strict parameters of responsibility. Individuals who were illiterate a few years ago are handling orders, stocking the website, taking fashion photographs, discussing problems with UK colleagues and supporting their sometimes irascible customers.

The point I am making is that cultures are often deeply antithetical even when a language is shared. The effort to establish shared meaning requires intensive intellectual labour and dedication to the notion that it is lack of opportunity and experience that prevents a village man or woman here from aspiring to middle class wealth and achieving a career and a future for his or her family. Ghana suffers from poor to non existent universal education and health programmes. Its middle classes are not overly disposed to raise universal standards.

On top of that there is this problem of language. As a Star Trekker might say,  “It is the English language but not as we know it Captain.”
















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Sunday, November 4, 2012

Prose Portal

You might take a look at www.chronometerpublicatons.me which is my portal to books I have written. The Mondrian design presentss an instant summary of what I have to offer. The two novellas I have completed since I published Azimuth are yet to be added. They will supplement the range of genres. What you have is the Azimuth Trilogy, a one thousand page saga following the life or death adventures of a man in search of enlightenment, embedded in a further narrative of political intrigue; a noirish, mordant detective story called The Strange Attractor in which chaos theory plays a significant role in catching the criminals and Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story which approaches the taboo boundaries of family life. To be added is a sci fi story about the death of one civilisation and the birth of another called Sex:Future Imperfect and a surreal fantasy about an eye doctor who operates on her own eye called The Visionary. Currently I am working on Easeful Death, a novella about what you might do if you are given three months to live.

As you see, #writing is now my way of life. It keeps me sane. It is a fantasy land, every bit as real or unreal as every day life. It is a conversation with the unconscious that draws self-knowledge from the well. It is a bridge between my world and yours. It says far more about me than any attempt at direct self-description. It is a curious paradox that we hide so much from each other in the normal to and fro of existence but if we become writers we disclose far more than we might like. The writer exists in a goldfish bowl of his own making.

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Saturday, November 3, 2012

To be or not to be

I love The Unicorn by Rilke, a fact I have mentioned before. It goes to the absolute essence of human credulity.

O this is the animal that does not exist,
But they didn’t know that, and dared nevertheless
To love it…and Because they loved it, it came to
be a…pure creature.
They always left a space for it,
and in that space, clear and set aside,
it lightly raised its head, and hardly needed to be.

We live in a world of make believe and erroneous assumptions. For example Americans firmly believe they enjoy one of the world’s great democracies and that they are a leading light in bringing freedom to foreign climes. But it is a society which is dominated by money and roughly half of it sees no reason why the other half – the poorer – should be supported in any way by State largesse. Nor does it question unduly its history abroad which is riven with appalling self-aggrandising policies, wars and sinister interventions in far off places the vast majority of its population couldn’t find on a world map. In Ghana here, cultural differences become apparent after a few years. Romantic love,  which drives much of present day western advertising, social networking and daily fantasies, hardly exists at all in a country that sees its people more concerned about relationships which provide food and shelter than ones that put stars in their eyes.

Religious people believe in an unprovable God. Here, in west Africa the evangelists encourage adherents to pray for worldly goods like houses, cars and washing machines. Religion as pure capitalism.

The point of these few examples is that the more you travel and explore the psyches of other nations and the day to day rituals and beliefs of their populations, the more you realise that everything we do and believe is constructed by human imagination and has no great basis in fact. There is little that is universal.

Good writing reveals the absurdities, false assumptions and personal belief systems of its characters. Sometimes this is called irony and sometimes it is more direct and polemical. The paradox is that a good writer lures you into yet another world of erroneous assumptions and persuades you to believe it, just as you believe the one in which you are currently living. Reality is a grain of sand that promotes a pearl. But the pearl is precious only because we believe it to be. The pearl is fiction.

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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

The Great Unread

In a recent tweet I coined a very Omar Khayyam type couplet:

Our lives are kisses on the surface of the river,
Tiny whorls that catch the light and then disappear 
It represents what faces us all; transiency. For the writer (there are previous blogs on this) the making of books is probably a spurious attempt to lengthen, if not one’s life, at least one’s name on the lips of others. In short it is an attempt at creating legacy. Writing Azimuth has already fulfilled a major ambition for me. It’s a trilogy which investigates the meaning of this short life through adventure, fable and mystery. The reviews are great and the paperback version is a little showcase in cover design and printing.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews
But, even knowing I have achieved even more than my optimism hoped for when beginning the work, the fact remains that it is not yet a best-seller. Sales are slow. Only by employing a marketing company or spending all my time as a salesman, will I push sales along. But I want to write, not market. Something has to give.

The surprising thing in all this is that many people (friends, acquaintances) I expected to buy the book, haven’t as yet. The days of patronage are over! So its pages await the multitudinous hands of  readers, anonymous or known. II would like to think of it as an unknown treasure. Whether it is at the end of a rainbow or for real, only time (and money or labour) will confirm.

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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Volcanic Eruptions and Purple Prose

I started a new novella the other day. It began well from a purely eyes down, words per minute point of view. Like most of the prose I write these days (as opposed to academic writing where I used to plan, make a flow chart, look for supportive and critical references, do drafts and finalise in bored exhaustion), what I do is organic. One word leads to the next, decisions are taken at a less than conscious level most of the time and the story is revealed to me much as it will be to the reader. We are always warned by sages (most of whom have never written a fictional sentence even in jest) to beware our purple prose. If by that they mean sudden lurches into ornate, too clever by half, swamped with metaphor, writing, I agree. But most serious writers have those days when they are like the Romantic Poets and, in a purple haze brought about not by laudanum but a sudden transportation to the deepest levels of the imagination, their work explodes on to the page. Hours later they stare in unfeigned amazement at the ten or so alien pages that have appeared on their screens or in their note books.

As I said, I write organically. The story is plucked berry by berry from the thorny brambles of my mind. One thing leads to another and the pie awaits the totality of the picking, washing, cooking and baking. I suspect that the pie has always been there and I am unwrapping it, as if from a delicatessen. In Zen terms the pie is baking me. At the moment I have a story about a man who is given a short time to live. What does he do? It’s in the second person singular which I’ve never utilised before. It’s hard. I keep drifting into the third person and I have to go back and amend. But it’s curiously direct. Even more so than the ‘I’ of the first person. Anyway, he has met a drug dealer and a woman who researches the moment of death. All three are about to meet for the first time as a trio. I’m agog.

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Thursday, October 18, 2012

More Liberty from Insanity

The title is only half in jest. As life imitates art so does an article on the BBC site proclaim that many writers would become mad, save for their art. I’ve never felt close to mad, even when I worked with mad folks I never felt any contagion. But I did write a blog to that effect and constructed a couple of tweets on the subject. The basic theory is that genius and madness are divided by a cigarette paper and writing keeps such people from falling into the abyss. At a lesser level (I am not claiming great things for my prose) writing keeps me from feeling profoundly angry with my lack of literary output. I don’t like sulking and so to have begun another novella leaves me at the end of the day feeling chipper. Here’s the beginning. It seems to be called, Easeful Death. I have plagiariswd phrases fom the 19th century romantic poets for a couple of recent titles.

Easeful Death

What should be your reaction when the Messenger speaks about the end of days? Your end of days? Had you really considered it before this point? Had you taken notice of the nods and winks and grimaces of your physiology or the raised eyebrows and sudden stern expression of the harbinger of this prognostication, your GP? Had it even sunk in when you first set off to meet the Messenger in his swivel-chaired, Formica den with its strip lighting and touch screen computer, linked to all the data bases of the hospital?

That’s how it starts. How it ends I have no idea but the notion of being told you have six months to live has stimulated the flow of words. Six pages in two days is better than no pages in two months.

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Thursday, October 18, 2012

Whose Death Is It Anyway?

I was struck by a personal illumination a week or two after returning to Ghana. I had had the long hard summer of the expected operation for a hernia but then was forced to undergo the assault of treatment on my right eye’s detached retina. The effects are recounted in the Latest News diary at www.chronometerpublications.me. Now, reading the diary, I see the brave face I was putting on. I managed to do much that was part of my daily disciplines: writing, reading, driving, exercising. But it was in a twilight world where verve and vibrancy had been banished to the margins. I only realise this now. I felt at the time the transiency of life and the speeding up march of death. This, as I have inferred above, changed once I got to Accra and started swimming every morning and luxuriating in a heat that is constant, humid and cosseting. I reconnected with my sense of immortality (entirely spurious I know!).

But it got me thinking. We always assume that the mind (brain) gets to the point when it has had enough of life. “She lost the will to live.” “There was nothing left to live for.” But supposing it is not like that? I wrote recently that the heart has its own separate brain and it now seems possible that different organs also have neuronal complexities, communicating with the brain but also autonomous at times. I also read that eye conditions often presage an earlier death. So my thesis at this current point in my life is that the body tells the brain to shut down as often as the other way round. It makes sense. The body is in a slow but quickening downward spiral from our early twenties and there may come a point when gradually it turns its lights off.

It suggests that the focus on staying alive (if that’s your plan) may need far more concentration on making the body a temple to vibrancy through diet, exercise and social tactility, at least as much as doing crosswords and taking up a new hobby. Then the brain is forced to reassess and do its job, if grudgingly.

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Saturday, October 13, 2012

The Drama of the Mundane

I watched Another Year by director Mike Leigh last night. It is a year in the life of a relatively uncharismatic group of individuals, The script is excruciatingly accurate. Anyone who made an early decision in his or her life to leave the predictable and eventless world of their parents, wishing to become dramatic figures on a different landscape, would feel totally exonerated. The central couple play out their habituated lives with in-jokes, sly smirks and public togetherness, exhibiting an aura of the steadfast rock of the family and with a self-satisfied all-knowingness in their small canvass way. They tolerate the desperately seeking woman who visits regularly at the times they decree, privately amused at her indiscretions, failures and social ineptitude. They are entranced by their dour son’s new girlfriend who, in her jolly effervescence, is on their wavelength. The slight change in their behaviour, which only amounts to a brief admonishment to the hapless woman for turning up when she has not been invited, represents the only real dramatic shift in the film. It decimates her. Otherwise everything remains dull but they don’t see it that way. For them this is a life of ups and downs but to the viewer they are little more than perturbations on a flat-line graph.

It is billed as a comedy and it has some of the same qualities as The Office in this regard. More funny peculiar than funny ha ha, most of the time. With our toes curling and our horror mounting at the wave of banality swamping us, we are transfixed by the awfulness of it all.

I have my own childhood memories of my council estate family house and its mausoleum of a front room, my father (an undoubtedly clever man, if right wing and gender-discriminating) doing the Telegraph crossword and picking his horses for the day and my mother, loving but generally flattened by the unchanging days and months and years. Remembering this, Another Year brings cold recognition to my bones. Yet this is life. It is somehow horribly authentic and makes me ask whether I view it with the angry snobbery of someone who did flee for a different landscape or, more to the point, whether I can dredge up some empathy for their human capacity to make much of little and be happy with their lot. That’s it, actually. The film makes me feel less of a person for my deeply prejudiced view of the family’s unflinching humdrum, self-satisfaction.

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Sunday, October 7, 2012

Purposeful living

I’ve just returned to Ghana after five months, mostly in France but also in the UK and Spain. During this time I have to say that one or two people have really irritated me by the blithe way they have discovered I am an author and then interjected, “I’ve been meaning to write a novel”, or “When I have some time I’ll write a novel”. In those simple sentences they effectively diminish your achievement at not only writing novels but completing them! Having sufficient purpose to work at your art in a disciplined way and forcing your path through the brambles and thickets of stubborn and willful characters, cul de sacs in your plots and distractions from outside your fingers and brain is quite a challenge and these would be authors have no notion of it.

In the brain there appears to be some defective mechanism that would stop you doing all this – let’s call it fulfilling your destiny. It seems to operate from the simplest of tasks to the most severe. I have just done some gym work before settling down to the keys. It was an effort to go and start. The actual exercise was not unduly hard and was even pleasurable in a sober kind of way. Such an essential part of my daily round may well keep me alive for longer. Certainly I have not succumbed to paunchiness or a multiplicity of chins. Yet even knowing it is good for me both from a vain and physical point of view does not have me go to the gym with a light heart. I go there grumbling. Similarly I have not practised French for three days or picked up the guitar. The retrograde part of my brain resists me doing anything regularly which is for my own good. People admire my productivity but have no notion what an hour by hour battle is involved.

I think that is why I wrote Azimuth. The whole enterprise is about Purpose – probably the one thing that differentiates people into classes, from the spineless sloth to the hyperactive renaissance artist.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Saturday, October 6, 2012

Lost times

Sometimes you see something in a documentary and it is so poignant, you wished you had written it in your dialogue as an author. I saw a couple of programmes when I returned to Ghana both on case histories of people with exceptional memories. They were so exceptional we watch flabbergasted at the thought of being able to do it ourselves. There was someone who can do a dozen Rubik cubes within a few minutes and even do three, blindfolded, having only seen the layouts first. There was another who could tell what day of the week it was for any given date and a further couple of individuals who could remember what they were actually doing on any day of their lives post six or seven years old. Memorising a pack of cards instantly, remembering and being able to draw architecture you have seen once or being able to play a complex tune after one hearing are all baffling to those of us who have memories that seem to to be disgorged as fast as they are taken in in and which require diligent techniques to fix them in our brains.

A problem for us is that, though memories are concertinaed in our brains and we cannot immediately retrieve them, when we write we have an unconscious conduit to them so out they pour. Many of them will be rehashed or partially remembered bits and pieces from other authors’ work. A bit of every author’s work must include unwitting plagiarism. If you are like the cases described above you probably could never write fiction as everything would be lifted from some page or other!

Anyway, back to the poignant line in the documentary. The young man who has a brilliant memory of every day of his life is sitting with his boyfriend. Both at university. His lover says to him sadly that this day, as they sit on a cut lawn sipping white wine and looking into each other’s eyes, will fade from his own memory but not that of his boyfriend who will be able to call it up at any instant.

Before seeing this I never really considered how relationships that have long histories also have innate difficulties since those long histories will not be recalled in the same way or to the same degree. For one the glass of history is half full and for the other it is half empty. The conflicts that ensue are the stuff of life and it is messy and awkward.

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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Killing them softly

I saw this film last night. It was brutal, a choreographed montage of everything that lies beneath the self-deceiving hyperbole of American politics. Set against the electoral rhetoric of Obama, Bush and McCain the script is taut, gutter-dirty and with a self-contained obscene morality that is so authentic it makes you reel. Life is brief for all of us and most of us realise it far too late to do much about it. In this film it can be so brief that the characters have barely time to lift a head in wonder as the bullets arrive. To die incidentally, as minor protagonists in an unknown plot, is the worst of all deaths whether as ordinary folk in state terrorism, as a result of famine in an ignored catastrophe or as  pacific followers of the wrong religion in a certain place at a certain time. We would like to think of our deaths being somehow the noble ends of lives well lived, even when our final months are distressingly ignoble.

I wrote a tweet in homage to Omar Khayyam recently:

Our lives are kisses on the surface of the river
Tiny whorls that catch the light and then disappear

Gentle and poetic I hope. The perfect antithesis of Killing them Softly

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Friday, September 21, 2012

Time and Space in a Story

It is said that Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time is the least completed book by its readers in inverse proportion to sales. The more it sold the less it was read. It was the title that seduced its buyers. I think this is because we want answers to deep questions about our existences. When we are young, life seems inexhaustible and when we are old it most painfully is not. What’s going on with time? Time is synonymous with gods and the mysteries of birth and death.

I’ve just travelled from the very south of France to the UK by train. A whole day’s movement through changing landscapes. I felt a day older at the end of it. Much of our lives is spent in dislocation from realities, in artificial environments, in cabins and offices and untrained to make the most of each passing moment. Our lives leave us in their wake rather than the other way round. Maintaining a true grip on second by second reality is not part of our armoury.

Why I liked writing Azimuth was because it was about how people gain this true grip. It contains three long journeys, each lasting many years and the time and space for its central character to begin to understand what his life is all about. Despite the obstacles, the battles, the deaths and meeting individuals with vastly different outlooks on the preciousness of existence, he comes to a point I hope is within us all. A sort of rich acceptance of the brief history of our time.

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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Abandoned not ended

Even the above introduction to the character of Jennifer Cord has had to be changed slightly. The description of Jennifer so that her qualities are consistent with the tale that is to follow. It’s right to say that no act of writing is ever finished, merely abandoned. This has been attributed to just about everyone though Paul Valery is possibly the first documented. Writing is its own tyranny to those who have fallen into the pit of the unconscious. I like the Robert Benchley remark to the effect that it took him fifteen years to realise that he couldn’t write but by then he was famous. Writers (and I am no exception) are pathologically desperate for attention. Unlike those with various forms of emotional and psychological illness our acting out tends to be virtual. I’m writing this on a creamy warm morning in the mountains. It infuses me with the desire to write creamy prose. By that I mean warm and seductive. This is probably why Jennifer’s character has been slightly altered!

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Wednesday, September 5, 2012

In Azimuth there is a scientist who ‘sees below the surface’ using a glass fashioned from crystal. The idea of the eye not seeing reality is the stuff of philosophers’ musings. I have just finished the first draft of a novella in which the eye is not quite a window to the soul but at least a window to a hidden and sometimes repressed reality. I wrote it one-eyed on a recliner on the terrace with the mountains guarding me. You can read the full diary of this awkward eye in Latest News at www.chronometerpublications.me But I am digressing from my intent. This is to mention the first ever recorded forensic examination of a murder. It took place in China, centuries ago. A man is found dead from a cutlass slash in a village. Solving the crime is beyond the headman who sends for an investigator from the capital. This man asks for all cutlasses to be brought to him. They are arranged in the sun. There is, of course, no blood on any of them. He waits. After a while tiny flies congregate on one blade. Invisible flecks of blood have attracted them. The murderer is revealed. Our eyes need back-up, even on an every day basis!

Seeing all these CSI-type documentaries on TV plus films that purport to utilise the latest investigative gadgetry makes you wonder why crimes take so long to solve. I quite like whodunnits which relay less on technology and more on plot, character and the psychology of the killer. I saw some of Manhunter last night, a rather well-wrought film by Michael Mann which seems to me to be superior to Silence of the Lambs which used the same plot. The investigator enters the mind of the killer, despite having had a break down when he did this once before.

Find out about Azimuth at: www.chronometerpublications.me
or from the dedicated website: www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Saturday, August 25, 2012

 A great film needs a great writer

I added this to my diary Latest News at www.chronometerpublications.me just now. And it fits here as well.
Had a two hour walk today down the mountain to Vernet Les Bains, once the home of Rudyard Kipling. The eye held up ok in the heat. Thought about a clutch of films I have seen this year: The Good Shepherd, Page Eight, Tinker Tailor (plus the old TV series) and, last night, A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg’s take on Jung and Freud. Why bind them together like this, apart from the costume drama nature of them? I like the writers’ penchant for telling lines, the fact that they all had a literary, stylized feel and they had an eye for period psychology. Keira Knightley has leapt to the top of my want-to-see actresses. She is phenomenal in the last named film by Cronenberg. In a sense, this latter film is just as much a spy drama as the others in its emotional subterfuge, deceptions and uncovering of truth. Trust is at the heart of all the films – broken, abused and rarely unshakeable. Just So stories for me. It made me want to get back and write a bit more of the novella about the eye surgeon and her discovery of the conduit to the soul.

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Sunday, August 19, 2012

On The Road Again! And another short story

Thanks to Canned Heat and a bit of Kerouac for the title which sees me writing this in Millau – the place of the greatest bridge this side of St Peter’s Gates. As The Latest News window mentioned ( www.chronometerpublications.me ) we were in an Auvergne B&B last night. The host, Francois, appears to have done everything the 20th century hero should have done. He’s a pilot, a seagoing captain, a mountaineer, a hunter, a driver for ambassadors, a wine maker, a cheese maker and has the capacity to talk the hind legs of a herd of donkeys. Less of that and more of something else. He said he could never write, though he keeps a diary. In due course he told me about his father – a perfect little tale, which I will convey to you with all the lack of frills of Borges.

“My father was forty and knew he was going to die. He bought a coffin and placed it in the front room, near the front door. Every night he slept in it for practice for the final moment. He died when he was forty three. When the autopsy was done it was established that he was perfectly sound and there was no reason for his death.”

You see? We writers imagine our tales like card players but constantly find our hands outplayed by life. For my own yarns, longer and fleshier, go to:

www.chronometerpublications.me

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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Empathy and Reality
I was struck, after my two hours plus fully conscious operation for a detached retina (gory details in Latest News: www.chronometerpublications.me), how doctors must inflict pain to do their business. Also that, in the main, they will have little idea of the depth and variety of pain that a patient suffers. The best they can do is empathise. Maybe we wouldn’t want them to fully comprehend and feel our suffering at their hands. It might impede their cool professionalism and disinterested decision making. Emotional doctor? Probably not.
When it comes to writing, the picture changes. Travel books are enormously popular. So are cod historical fictions with a researched background such as The Da Vinci Code and remarkable classics such as James Joyce’s Ulysses. People read them knowing that the writer is giving a first hand account of his or her experiences. Autobiography in all its forms is exceedingly seductive.
So, is out and out fiction better for the writer having experienced what his or her protagonists are being put through? Is the fact that I have had the eye battle more likely to improve my depiction of suffering, generally? I think so. Having read some Joseph Conrad recently, it seems likely that his books are enormously enriched by his experience on the oceans and rivers of the world. But having had extreme experiences does not make a great writer, per se. It is how the writer can them move on and apply the essence of such experiences to events they could never have encountered, themselves.  For example, Sci Fi writers have not experienced space or time travel but something in their biographies may provide the raw material for it.  William Golding’s sea trilogy is based upon general knowledge of the history of the colonisation of Australia by British immigrants plus the reading of a single manual on ships of that period. But Golding could then infuse his refined understanding of human psychology within this exotic canvass.
William Blake suggested that you can see the world from the bottom of your garden. We write from our histories, whether limited or expansive, but the greatest literary imaginations can utilise personal experiences like cookery ingredients, making an array of cakes, varied and delectable and extraordinarily different from the originals. They combine empathy with reality.
When I wrote Azimuth, there was much of it that was based upon my growing experience in a natural pre-internet world – but transmuted into fable, adventure and action that bore little relation to my biography.The pain that the Magus suffers at various points in the trilogy is probably better expressed because of the pain I once suffered. Maybe I could now write it even more grippingly after recent events!

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Sunday, August 5, 2012

Writer as medium

The joy in writing what you could never have known to be true until afterwards is both spellbinding and uplifting. During the ten years of Azimuth’s emergence from my unconscious I learned to leave control over the destiny of the narrative to my imagination. What transpired was occasionally quite spooky. Characters with strange lineage, implements that they used, landscapes and cataclysmic events, the stuff of fantastical fiction, later proved to have more than a grounding in fact. Checking it later was at times like a history programme searching for evidence of solid events which might have given rise to what we have always regarded as mere myth: Atlantis, Ulysses or astronomy of the Ancients.

Writing has this capacity to transcend mundane reality, to travel across time, to make miraculous connections so that, in a sense, nothing need ever be lost from the human experience. It makes a writer feel like a medium, a little bit of a shaman not a sham.

www.chronometerpublications.me

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Saturday, August 4, 2012

Life Imitating Art
This is going to be brief because my eye hurts! But it has resonances.
I wrote Azimuth over a ten year period and regard it as my ‘legacy’. It is a strange book, both an adventure story and an agnostic’s search for enlightenment. Much of it was written in a divine effluvia, a semi- unbridled outpouring from the unconscious. Looking back, a two month work posting from the EU to Uzbekistan must have kindled much of the landscape and history which is a backdrop to the trilogy. Samarkand is a truly magical place.
This week I had a decidedly gruelling eye operation for a totally detached retina. Two hours and fully conscious with lasers and needles and oil. The woman who did it? A young, beautiful Uzbek, straight off Azimuth’s pages. The chances of finding an Uzbek eye surgeon in the UK must be zilch. To discover her as MY eye surgeon? Jungian synchronicity par excellence..
Afterwards, in an act of circularity that you might find in a Borges labyrinth, I gave her a signed copy of Azimuth. A thank you to her and also to Samarkand.
www.chronometerpublications.me

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Monday, July 30, 2012

Mind muscle
The mind is a strange sleight of hand trick of the brain (to mix metaphors), without which it cannot exist. Damage the brain and the mind is impaired. Nevertheless, we differentiate them so that the mind becomes the subject and the brain becomes the object in their relationship. The mind represents the driver and the brain represents the vehicle which carries us through life. The most significant element of the mind is the will because (we are led to believe) it precipitates our brains to do things for us. Unless it fights the mind’s battles for it, we become slaves to everything around us. It makes us a puppeteer rather than a puppet, autonomous rather than dependent.
I know this is a rather slanted and reductionist summary of a vast literature on mind and brain but it gets me to my main thrust, one I have approached in previous blogs. One that bears innumerable mentions, I feel, for any writer or thinker.
When you say that you want to stop trying to master something because your head hurts, that is the time to keep going. You have to exert your will (therefore your mind) to make your brain do the business for you. It is best to treat it as a tool that needs constant tempering. This is why I have said that only by writing every day do you begin to perceive real subtleties in the relationship between imagination and expression. Encapsulating as much information in as small a wordage as possible can only be achieved by practice and the brain actually learns how to do it by constant exercise. Thus your very wordy one thousand page book is reduced to 300 pages because you use metaphor and simile and concise phraseology.
I am intrigued by this process. Having produced a book of aphorisms called An A to Zen of Management I turned latterly to tweeting. The restrictions on length of tweets should be seen as a mind-muscle challenge. How much can you say in so little wordage? Most tweets say very little. They appear to be vomited on to the page rather than sculpted and placed there.
It does make your brain hurt but mastering the concise sharpens your brain tool fantastically!
Tweets at @profjacksanger

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Thursday, July 26, 2012

All writing is fantasy 

These blogs are shoehorned into travel. I am now in England after days in Cahors, Chartres and Calais. Whether they are stylish and durable footwear is another thing.

I tweeted the title of this piece this morning @profjacksanger because I was taken by the notion that whatever I have executed as a writer, whether in the guise of an academic, a novelist, a playwright or a poet, required, even at the most stringent point in my portrayal of realities, imaginative dressing. No matter how diligent I was at stripping words of any spurious, arty-farty subjectivity, the results were never more than a nod in the direction of verisimilitude. As I said in a recent blog, we are what we write. We are never utterly disinterested and objectively scientific. Life since Plato’s illuminations, has been seen to be illusion and writing does little to pull back the curtain that veils the truth of the nature of existence. Thus it is a relief to have left academia and its false gods and self-deceptions for the rich, imaginative world of ‘fiction’ which, to my mind, luxuriates in its lack of pretence that it is actually nailing reality.

In that unalloyed modesty, it may say as much about our universe as any so-called factual account within the scientific establishment.

www.chronomterpublications.me

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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Writers and Jung

In the deepest well of the writer’s imagination is all the good and evil of the universe. In this we must be adherents of Carl Jung. In many of my preceding blogs about the art of writing (should that really be the psychology of writing?) I am taken with what that Jung proposes: there is something beyond the mechanical, projected, intentional in our scribbling. Derrida talks of ‘meaning leaking’ from our work no matter how much we try to control it. The universal unconscious is, indeed, the deepest well where everything lurks, good or evil, fantastical or prosaic. The more we write and allow ourselves to trust this repository of human experience, the more we will drag, dripping from its depths, stuff beyond our ken – and the ken of humankind.

www.chronometerpublications.me

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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

 The Writer is revealed

Writing is meditation. The page is a mirror. Khayyam’s moving finger traces our changing features as we age. We write ourselves into knowledge. All of our history comes into play. Not only what we think we remember but also what we don’t know we remember.

In Azimuth the assassin comes from east of Samarkand along the Silk Road. The place is an explicit (and exquisite) memory as I visited there just after the Russians pulled out but there are many elements of his sudden, mysterious eruption on to my pages that came from beyond my knowing. The same with the African mercenaries. Bits come from my time in Ghana regarding their values, much from somewhere else.

We are what we write – but we are also written by our writing.

www.chronomterepublications.me

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Friday, July 20, 2012

Sci Fi Fo Fum, here comes the blood of a future man
Writing a short sci fi novella this last month was a pleasure. (Sex: Future Imperfecti). Pure imagination. No research save for the years of reading that no doubt helped to shape it. Twist ending. Voila. Here’s a snippet, taken after a rather visceral opening, an account of a player’s death in a game simulation:
He was recovering fast. As always, he could not recall the mental trauma just before death though he knew it had been intense. Even with players like him the psyche needed careful protection. There were concoctions that could replay it from his memory again but unlike many of his friends he never dwelt on the past, it was the transiency of pain that appealed. “Fantastic!” he laughed. “Phenomenal! Outrageous! Worth a month’s pay.”
“That’s what Mortality costs,” said ABZ-, admiringly. “You certainly know what to spend your allotment on.” They lay side by side on the bed of air in the vaulted chamber, their fashionable loose fitting white bachelor robes floating around them.  A-Prime107’s apartment was chic and hi-tech in the extreme. There was not one retro appliance or stick of furniture or soft furnishing anywhere to be seen. He loved the air-press islands that, on his voice-activating command, would provide bodyfit shapes on which he could recline, wherever and whenever he felt like it. He loved the shell’s capacity to become any colour he desired, currently the palest blue, as well as the opaque or transparent modifications that came as basic. At this moment they lay on minutely rippling air which massaged A-Prime’s aching physique. A-Prime tended to have the shell of the chamber on mirror-translucent, maintaining privacy while allowing him to look across the urban wrapping, ninety percent of which was silvered bubble like his own.
“It takes it out of you, doesn’t it?” reflected ABZ-, “The body suffers from the mind’s torture.”
“I’m ok. I got on to level 7.”
“Arghh! That’s no-go! You are a freak. That’s why you have a Prime rating!” ABZ- had never gone further than basic, level 1 on the death programs before feeling sick. Indeed, he was worried that they sent back info to the authorities if anyone got as far as A-Prime was doing. Everyone knew that there were built-in detectors. Every game could be looped back to Central.
It’ll be out in a month or so, when my editor has put down his scalpel, needle and thread.
All my output at: www.chronometerpublications.me

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Thursday, July 19, 2012

Being Caught short: the novella
It was like this. Having spent ten years writing Azimuth and pouring into it everything I could regarding the metaphysical, the fabulous, the adventurous and the quirky so that it became an adult’s fairytale without fairies but with gods and heroes; no that sounds a bit of a put-off, as well – allegorical, that’s the word. Oh, read it and be enthralled and tell me what it is! Anyway, like any long term relationship come to an end, I soon needed the thrill again. So I wrote Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story about taboo in family life. Meanwhile, I continued to market books through these blogs and tweets but the old yearning took over again and I have just today finished Sex: Future Imperfect, a science fiction novella.
Novellas are an interesting form. You haven’t time to really develop characters through action but have to make them rounded enough to be believable, immediately. It’s akin to going to a party and chatting with someone and ending up in bed with a relationship to look forward to, it seems so right. They must jump off your page ready formed in the same way. Also, in my case there has to be more of a sense of the ending at the outset to help drive direction. Normally I refuse to think about it, wanting the characters and the events to push the plot along and discover for myself the ending almost at the same moment as it comes into sight on the page.
In novellas, too, there is a bounty placed on every word you don’t use. Spareness counts. The plot drags you in and spits you out, even if it is a psycho-drama. In the case of science fiction, a future world has to be painted in a few sentences and it must be sufficiently technological for the reader to feel that time has moved on and that it is a believable step away from the present. Anyway, I suppose the novella should feel that it could have been a fully-fledged novel but there has been a distillation which gives it the punch of a glass of spirit.
From what I’ve read, the novella is the medium with the message for today’s computers who want to read a whole story in a day. The sound byte generation. We shouldn’t be snooty about it. At the end of the day we are providing a service, a refueling of the imagination.
All the books mentioned above can be found at:
and in one form or another on Amazon Kindle where I write as both Jack Sanger AND Eric le Sange

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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Let the Good Times Not Roll too Soon
I have been heavily involved in writing a novella over the last four weeks, which led to its completion this morning, at least in first draft. It’s the first time I have written sci fi (in my Eric le Sange body) and, like most novellas, it had to have a twist ending. Somehow, the idea of writing a fifty to a hundred page story without a big clout of an ending seems to me to be anathema. Even in Azimuth, each chapter has twist endings and the two narratives, at the end of the trilogy have proven already to have upturned its readership with delighted surprise.
I approached the ending of the sci fi story: Sex: Future Imperfect with mounting excitement (excuse the unconscious pun!). After all I only worked out the twist myself as I was going to sleep last night. So, I began developing the narrative towards my imagined ending and then, just at the point where the twist is introduced, I downed tools and went off into the garden to look at the mountains (see photo in last blog). Why? Deferred gratification. Indulgence and delight. I was putting into practice something that I have learned over the years. Defer the best bits as long as possible to let your mind envelop them and tease out all the ins and outs and consequences. Really enjoy being the author for moments like this are to savour. You are the first reader of your own work. Make it great for yourself.
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 2
Here’s the view from my window as I write this. As you can see I am not in a bordello.
Part One, if you remember, advanced the notion that the business of writing contains within it an almost mystical reward. For a man it is his, admittedly minor, sublimation for not being able to give birth, in the real sense. For a woman who is childless, maybe the same, I have no idea. For a woman who has been fruitful in flesh and blood terms, maybe it acts as a delightful coda. Perhaps someone could enlighten me!
Part Two is a bit of a hazy ramble I am beginning to feel. One or two friends have written asking me whether my ebooks are half as successful as 50 Shades of Grey has been. I feel confused at what my response might be. Do I just say no!, truculently, and forget it? Do I enter into a disquisition on how I am pursuing the noble, artier end of writing not the seamier end? (This is a dodgy response since sex plays a key role in two of my books under the name of Eric le Sange, an appellation which separates my genre writing from my heroic (!) offering, Azimuth!) Do I just say that I don’t need to write a bonkbuster for I can get by in my garret here in the Pyrenees on a modest pension and my reason to be cheerful has already been covered in Part One. Maybe I could say that my offspring (curious how some of the progeny of sixties hippiesque creatures like myself are a bit coy and defensive if their father writes any sex scenes at all) would find it difficult to have a father renowned for his prurient pen wielding.

The sins of the father have probably been bad enough without that. So, taking immense pleasure in the act of writing is sufficient, even though having a much greater audience for it would be, as we used to say, a real turn-on!

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Saturday, July 14, 2012

Communication from Beyond
Before you get uppity and think I am an adherent of spiritualism, I am not! But since this is a meandering set of blogs about the process of writing, I thought I’d take a look at inspiration. Even for the hardened writer, never mind someone suffering from the dreaded block, there may be a brief period when he or she casts around for some catalyst or other to propel the pen across the virgin page. In earlier blogs there has been much discussion on the gathering of data for the novel but where does the author find a state of mind that might precipitate looking for a launch pad?
It is easy to make a list of possible sources of inspiration; autobiographical events, news stories, criminal cases, anecdotes, books you have loved, people you have met. Yet these represent the mechanical beginnings, explicit sources that you can link to your tale. What about prime movers that are non-explicit but somehow make it possible for you to cast around for one of the above stimuli? For example, some writers submerge themselves in music. The nuances of emotion that stem from such experiences are not literal but nevertheless causal – or at least contingent. Then again, writers have always been known to isolate themselves in landscapes, whether they be the lake poets of the British C19th or present day hideaways in Provence. There is a growing band who immerse themselves in other cultures, imbibing the mores, the sights and sounds to give their novels an exotic ambience. The need to research is these days a precondition for a large group of authors, a troubling fact for me. I spent a great deal of my professional life as an academic researcher (look elsewhere on this blog site) and have come to fiction largely because I want to exercise the imagination rather than fit stories into real, well-realised settings. Though I enjoy this house in the French Pyrenees with its stupendous setting, the people here and their customs have never entered one line of prose in my books. The mountains may have, but incidentally, not as a result of copious note taking. The mountain that frames the final book in Azimuth is more like a Japanese Fuji than Canigou, the sacred Catalan/French mountain upon which my house perches.
But, as an amusing post script to the above, a stimulation I have felt on a few occasions has been the visiting of the graves of writers. It’s certainly not a religious experience.  It’s not spiritualist. Maybe it’s a bit Buddhist or Hindu if you follow the line that when we die we disaggregate into individual atoms and become part of the future aggregation of another individual. Oh, and another aside, I don’t make trips to graves as a central thrust of travelling. But If I’m there and one turns out to be nearby…! Thus, Robert Graves in Majorca, T. E. Lawrence in some country churchyard in the west country, Robert Frost in New England, Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey and, by far the greatest experience Novodevichy Cemetery in St Petersburg. Here, in a really small area in the middle of the city are truly majestic poets, writers, composers and artists. Phenomenal. If ever you want to write but can’t get the pen out of your desk drawer, try communing by the grave of one of our own, a writer now deceased. People tell me that I am the least sentimental person they have met – so what I say is not sentimental. It’s more like a private ritual in a belief system of one! This very motif is played out in Azimuth. How much of what we seek and believe ‘out there’ in the world, is really ‘in here’?
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Friday, July 13, 2012

A Reason to be Cheerful: staying true to your art
Even if you are not interested in the lives of great artists I am sure common knowledge will have filtered down, like rivulets and streams into the great river of shared consciousness, that many artists we now regard as ‘great’ were not recognized as such in their own lifetimes. By artists I am including every medium, not just Van Gogh and his ilk. Perhaps writing is the least tenable part of this thesis in that, unlike the paint stroke, the word has a capacity to become rapidly dated and best sellers particularly so – unless you go back to Dickens and Tolstoy et al. Will Booker prize winners be read in twenty years time? One or two but the majority not. This is because writing has the quintessential capacity to speak of the now and most reading revolves around the now just as pop makes up the vast proportion of music, being immediately gratifying and then unsatisfying. Most art fulfils a primary criterion and that is to give pleasure to the passing of time; the series of connected nows, if you like. The greater the art, the more attenuated the sequence of nows, stretching even across generations and epochs like Shakespeare.
There is obviously a scale of values implicit in this debate. Because of the technological revolution the writing media is now more varied. Tweets, blogs, articles, essays, poems, plays, novels are all forms that we have to fit consciously into our subjective measurement of worth.
In the end it is the Jungian universal unconscious which will be the final arbiter because great art communicates through it via a mysterious process of connections, both explicit and implicit. Catching the zeitgeist can make for overnight success but slow burners get there too – and sometimes only after translation into another language or medium such as film.
As artists and here we are discussing novelists in particular, we can and maybe should be driven to try to reach the highest levels of expression but we shouldn’t be dismayed that our oeuvres are not recognized in our lifetimes. We must console ourselves that the fulfillment of making narratives that would never have become born without our individual existences and unique experiences, is a particularly major reward.

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Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Janus in the writer
I tweeted a couple of hours ago about schizoid writers, of which I am obviously one!  Why do it? Why be two people? Why write under different names? We know that for many reasons writers have (like stage and television celebrities) opted for an alias (in this case a pen name). This can enable them to lead a private life as well as a media focused one, or become a different gender more acceptable to the reading public of that genre, or disguise a profession which might not take kindly to a writer of outré fiction. Whatever.
For me there was a decision to be made. I had an academic career as Jack Sanger and when it ended I wanted to write at least one fine book. It turned out to be a trilogy and took me ten years. Azimuth was its name and you can read the early reviews at: www.azimuthtrilogy/reviews
I was happy with my name moving over to embrace fiction at this point. But what next? I felt the need to go on writing and many of the blogs before this one talk about the motivation and psychology of writing. I also wanted to be experimental in different genres to see how it went. I had already written plays that had been produced – though not in the West End? What about crime fiction? What about  an intense sexual novel? What about sci fi, of which I am an expert but so far only as a reader?  Yet writing these would not be the same as writing Azimuth. That book distilled so much knowledge and experience of what I had learned as an academic; philosophy, sociology, psychology and tried to transmute it into a saga, an odyssey of strange and fabulous adventures which would lead the reader to question the nature of reality just as I had.
So, wishing not to besmirch the brand of Azimuth, yet try to establish a reputation as an adept, amusing and highly capable author I opted to wear the garb of Eric le Sange

www.chronometerpublications.me

The name was half-lifted from a 1970s French film called Serail where an English writer named Eric Sange, stays in a French house to pen a novel. And here I am in France in my French house, penning away!

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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Writing: the heart of the matter
I am feeling a sense of dismemberment. My greedy hands that played until recently with the minor characters in Azimuth are itchy to do something else. The fifty blogs on writing that preceded a foray into the literary lives of walk-on parts, represent a sizeable contribution to the debate on how a writer’s psychology is played out in his or her work. Not that my hands direct my writing. Do they? Sometimes I go into a haze and letters, words, sentences appear before me, filling the page with unique meanings that no-one else could have written. It’s deeply meaningful, this act of creation. When I was about twenty, my close friend, a pianist – now dead – used to say about  la difference, “Women are, men do.” His musical compositions were sublimations of giving birth, he used to aver.
What is this leading to? I tweeted yesterday about a programme on television about the heart. A rather intensely sad presenter was wandering like a ghost from expert to expert trying to work out why his heart was broken at the loss of his wife to severe clinical depression. All he was sure was that it was not a brain thing. It was a pain in the chest thing. He started with Leonardo’s heart drawings which showed the dissected heart not as a pump but as a mysterious chambered glory of swirling flows. He compared it with the science of the ipost-ndustrial age which isolated the heart, emphasising its mechanical utility to the body. This view has pertained until very recently. At school I was taught that the heart was a pump. Indeed, it turned out later during my life that a mechanical pump could take the place of the diseased organ and circulate the blood admirably.
However, in the last few years of medical exploration the heart is shown to be so complex, the blood flows so reminiscent of Leonardo’s drawings that one is mind-blown at the infinite complexity of its workings and purpose in the body. It is a wonderful creation of chaos and order. But what turned present day research into a vindication of anecdotal and poetic understanding of the heart over thousands of years of human history, is the discovery that the heart has its own neural network, independent of the brain. Indeed, when it comes to emotion it can be the heart that informs the brain how to react to events in the world. Heartfelt, broken hearted, heartless, a heavy heart, lighthearted. Terms we took as symbolic are actually attached to real, organic responses to the world.
I have often felt that really good writing comes about from a melding of the intellect and emotion, creating a sort of controlled passion which we call the creative imagination. Now, at no risk of sounding like a cross between a writer of bodice rippers and academic treatises, I can say that fine writing must involve both the heart and the brain.

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Monday, June 25, 2012

Minor Keys No. 15
The path of a book to the heavenly library is strewn with good intentions. The character of Raashid in Azimuth was one I always imagined I would develop. As you can see from this extract, he is a favoured friend and potential lover for Princess Sabiya. In this sense a novel mimics life in that you meet people and you think that a great friendship might ensue but somehow the fates deny you, or your emotional needs become satisfied elsewhere – or they turn out to be less attractive the more you get to know them. Indeed, a friend of mine often quotes his acquired one liner, “The greater the friendship the greater the treachery.”
Later that morning she was visited by a handsome young man, a noble dressed stylishly in the silks of the day, his burnished hair made up into a topknot, -Your wig is a work of art, she giggled, -Was it taken from the living?
 -In truth, yes. It is a woman’s head of hair which I purchased and had made up, so. It cost silver. When my normal hair grows enough after my interlude as a scribe, I will store it until I have use for it, again. His eyes were mischievous and bold and there had been moments when Princess Sabiya felt that she might make him her first lover but, somehow, the feeling always passed.
Why am I drawn to him? I suppose in my own life I have always found charming reprobates attractive, whether men or women. Being a double Libran, I am told, magnetises me to beautiful, creative people. Whatever, Raashid is a naughty young man but noble and loyal despite his errant nature. He grew up the apple of everyone’s eye, a sort of Hamlet in court life (before the killing of his father), a lover of the arts, a frequenter of gambling dens and an indulger in high class courtesans. He grew up alongside Sabiya but could never quite rid himself of his sense of her being more like a sister than a potential lover, despite his blood being aroused by her beauty. As we know from Azimuth, he is a theatre director and actor, taking much pleasure in lampooning key figures in court life. He is also an adept drummer and swordsman. Raashid is, in fact, the most eligible bachelor in the empire.
Despite the events in Azimuth, where, because of his loyalty to Sabiya’s daughter, he crosses her formidable mother, he is forgiven and eventually made commander of all the armies of the empire. Whatever it was in his upbringing that made him seem at times feckless, he never displayed it as a military general. He was adroit, tough and uncompromising when it was needed. However, his charm and lateral cast of mind meant that wars were few and harmony prevailed between the empire and its neighbours. He made an exceptional marriage, following the trend set by the Emperor Haidar in marrying a black-skinned Ethiopian from Sabiya’s blood line and had seven children by her. He was responsible for the first ever public health programme, entrusting its management and development to two young doctor friends of Sabiya’s daughter, Shahrazad and he rewarded all clan chiefs who ensured that their people could read and write, a silver piece for every one who could pass a test for literacy. It was owing to his efforts that there was an enormous explosion of science and the arts across the empire, which was then responsible for a general renaissance of intellectual striving in occidental societies. Raashid lived to a venerable age and was given a state funeral of extraordinary splendour by Shahrazad, which was attended by dozens of heads of state from across the continents. He proved the theory that, if you put your trust in a man of the arts rather than a professional politician to run social affairs in your country, you can develop a culture which is fair, just and responsive to its people.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Sunday, June 24, 2012

Minor Keys No. 14
The importance of food in societies through time has two obvious sources. The first is that we eat to survive and so we ritualize food and exalt it, making it central to our various measures of the quality of life. We are what we eat. The second is that it represents the most obvious route to friendship. We offer food to bond with another. Traditionally, particularly in more nomadic or isolated societies, a stranger is housed and fed and no questions asked. Do you bite the hand that feeds you? For royal courts the opportunity to eradicate the ruler, at the moment when all guard is down, is always there. Food poisoning was an act that struck at the heart of the ritual of proclaiming friendship and kinship, where all enmity was supposed to be banished. It is hard today to feel the intense power of this human tradition given that everything we do today has become distanced and displaced, particularly through our virtualising of relationships with mobile phones, laptops and social media. People still go out to restaurants to eat together but the act is almost always a carefully choreographed one, even on first dates with strangers. They are not usually invited into the home for a first viewing, nor is a cold call knock at the door answered with, “Come in and eat.”
To guard against the royal guard being dropped, so to speak, food tasters were employed by courts. None took this more seriously than the head cook whose very life depended on food reaching his/her masters, perfectly presented, tasting sensational – and carrying a guaranteed list of healthy ingredients excluding additives such as strychnine or arsenic. In Azimuth we never meet the head cook but he is referred to here, by a royal maid:
“The head cook is well liked as a master. Though he swears and shouts he is very fair to all. Why, he had to dismiss a young cook only yesterday for pilfering but he still took pity on him and gave him a week’s wages.”
I’d imagine, like many of the minor characters being fleshed out in these blogs, he comes from generations of cooks. From an early age he was groomed by his father, himself the revered chef of a noble family, to go out to the market, to choose produce carefully, to experiment with complementary flavours and textures, to explore the staple crops, herbs and spices of other cultures, to research the effects of food on sexual activity, physical health and sleep until, in the end, the head cook became an expert all round therapist.
To remain at the top of his profession – head cook to the emperor – he had to be a harsh task master. He was sympathetic, if loud and dictatorial, to his staff and developed a tight coterie of loyal workers. It was very hard for any family to get a son apprenticed to him for he refused bribes on that score. His most difficult emotional issue was in the employment of a food taster. It was a paradox that this individual , the recipient of all that was great in the culinary arts, would be the ultimate indicator of the head cook’s professionalism at the kitchen end of the food chain. At the other end, at the emperor’s own table, was a second taster who tried everything on his plate in case an assassin had poisoned the food en route from kitchen to table. He was never allowed to meet this second taster in case the bond that they developed would represent an Achilles heel in the security of the Emperor. The head cook’s fame came not only from his immense gifts in cookery but from the fact that at least ten tasters had died in his kitchen, defending the emperors with their stomachs. The head cook consoled himself while crying bitter tears, by insisting to himself that these victims had tasted food that would have caused the very gods to salivate.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Saturday, June 23, 2012

Minor Keys No. 13
How many men have a fantasy of a harem? It has been the stuff of literature and actuality over the centuries, whether based on a historical Persian model, the tribal realities we may still find in parts of the world, the brief epoch of free loving hippy communes or the strange megalomania of religious cults. The latter I have always found most unsettling. In my own journey through life, a reasonably varied and entertaining one, I have come across a number of individuals and communities with religious pretensions of the more esoteric kind who conflate sex and religious ritual with a perverse dynamic energy. I wrote in a recent Twitter one liner that it was a measure of a religion’s value to humankind, how it embraced sex (@profjacksanger). Sex has the capacity to be a wild demon, capable of reducing priest, nun, king, queen or law-abiding spouse from any stratum of society from  God-fearing conservatism into obsessional irrationality. Whole kingdoms are thrown away as the lure of sex transcends the most ingrained social conditioning. Sex and power can hardly be divided. It is likely that hundreds of thousands of men and women alive today have more than a smattering of Genghis Khan genes, such was his prodigious sexual appetite. Indeed, you may come across a similarly driven individual in the third book of the Azimuth trilogy. And it is not just in the extreme embrace of lustful desires that we can see the odd relationship between sex and the theological. In the social control of whole populations religions have sought to maintain their hold via a vice-like control over the sexual instincts of their adherents with complex regulatory rituals and measures regarding what is permissible and what not. In Azimuth there is not just one minor character representing this awkward area of human endeavour but many, the numerous women living harmoniously with the man who saved them from sexual slavery and death. Their saviour is speaking here:
So here I was in this mountain refuge with so many women. None wanted to leave. They had been soiled by life. At first they thought they might set up a religious clan but I persuaded them otherwise. Believe in yourselves, I said. Make this retreat a place of delight, a sanctuary for your spirits. You will find god in other ways if that is what you need.
Their background, if we are searching for commonality, is that they are all village women from the fields. Their entire lives until their kidnap by armed pillagers would have been spent following a daily round with little exception, brightened only by feasting at births, marriages and deaths. Having been captured and their men and children killed, then taken to a mountain hideout, their future was condemned to be little more than slavery, abuse and death. Suddenly all this changed. Like a dervish, their saviour came with his sword in the night and dispatched all their captors. Now free they could have gone back to find husbands in other villages but they chose not to. They preferred instead a harem life with the one man they could trust. In return he gave them protection and education and he fulfilled whatever sexual and maternal desires they had. Life was now different. It was no longer a question of having implicit social roles. Each day could be entirely as they wished. The effect upon them was profound.  To have lost their husbands and children was appallingly traumatic. To have found liberation and autonomy was utterly magical. Which life would they have chosen now that they knew both?
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Friday, June 22, 2012

Minor Keys No. 12
Some lines of poetry guide you through life. Believers may find them in the Koran, the Bible or the Vedas but for me the distillation of meaning that a poet achieves occasionally is inextinguishable, burning like pure sulphur on water. Here is a quote from one of Rilke’s poems about The Unicorn.
O this is the animal that does not exist,
But they didn’t know that, and dared nevertheless
To love it…and because they loved it, it came to
be a…pure creature.
They always left a space for it,
and in that space, clear and set aside,
it lightly raised its head, and hardly needed to be.
Why do I find it so powerful? It is an emblem of the imagination. I wrote in a recent tweet, “Reality is limited only by a lack of imagination” (@profjacksanger). Literature is an outlet for boundless thought as in all the arts, including film – Tarkovsky’s Stalker comes to mind as having similar power in fuelling my own imaginative output. The key for me in the Rilke lines is that the artist creates what was not there and it becomes ethereally extant, a new reality for those who see, touch, read it, affecting their lives forever, in some way small or big.
Creating the other world of Azimuth allowed me to construct a space where I and my readers could play. All the elements of life that are hard to fathom – death, love, war, existence – could be explored, shaped, remodelled, dissected and in such a way that we become one step closer to understanding the nature of our living reality. But lightly, with amusement and tolerance for how patched up and imperfect we all are as human beings.
A minor character that makes just one appearance in Azimuth: the Second Journey, is the assistant librarian. He is introduced thus:
Where were the vibrations from above made by slippered feet or the movement of furniture? Even though it was just daybreak there should have been much servant activity. Then he caught the sound of someone coming down the circular stairs. He was unnerved but fought off the desire to hide and sat facing the bottom of the staircase where three steps were visible. First a pair of red slippers and then the hem of a robe became visible until finally his assistant turned the bend.
His story (beyond the pages of Azimuth) is a familiar one. He was born into a family which for generations had been literate. Not scholars, you understand, but the kind you still see today in countries where education is sparse and who sit at desks with typewriters in village squares preparing documents for their illiterate fellows so that they might navigate the imposing tyranny of a country’s bureaucracy. Apart from an arranged marriage and the rare day when he is allowed to see his wife, the assistant librarian’s whole world is encompassed by the circular walls of the royal library, his vitality sucked from him by the shelves of dry parchment and arid tomes. He has none of the gifts of the royal historian, being, essentially, a trained orderer, tidier, cataloguer, categoriser of the artefacts that are collected for the royal library. He reads enough to place them where they can be found again but little more. There is too much to be done and his existence does not allow for the self-advancement of his mind. Thus he lives and dies – and it would be hard for anyone, no matter how much s/he believes in the value to humanity of every individual’s life, to make a case for the assistant librarian’s as offering anything to the common good.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author (and aka Eric le Sange) at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Thursday, June 21, 2012

Minor Keys No. 11
As an agnostic, Buddhism has many attractions, not least its refusal to give any oxygen to discussions about the possibility of a god. Azimuth debates whether a god exists but surreptitiously, like a niggling little voice at the back of the reader’s mind while s/he is engaged in the Ulysses-like adventures of the Magus or the labyrinthine plots and mysteries of court life. Writing an engaging discourse on the nature of reality, religions, life and death via the vehicle of an accelerating historical saga full of everyday AND extraordinary events was intoxicating and I hope that this is conveyed to you when you read the book. The inner tales of Azimuth are set at a time before the Buddha, containing much of the great man’s practical advice for living a good life and within them there is plenty of opportunity for other theological debate. A minor character with much to say about such matters is the Scientist who lives on an island in the middle of a great river, somewhat like the Volga. We meet him thus:
A short while later the door re-opened to reveal a tall, white-haired man in the silk robes of a merchant. His eyes glinted in his smiling face. He strode forward and embraced the Warrior heartily. Then he turned and gave the woman a graceful bow.
  -I was expecting you, Warrior and this woman.
  -My Mother.
  -Nay, she is too young and delicate to have birthed such a lion of a man! The Warrior smiled at his mother’s confused pleasure at the traditional compliment.
It was a joy to write about this man even if, as I have said, the words passed through my brain without touching the sides. Why? Because he represents progression and rationality in civilized enquiry. We know that scientific advances are haphazard. Great breakthroughs occur and are not recognized for what they are for decades or even centuries. Some advances such as gunpowder or the crossbow were discovered and used by the Chinese hundreds of years before their ‘discovery’ in the west. Columbus was pre-dated in his so-called discovery of America by numerous unsung heroes. The Scientist was full of exceptional discoveries. One such which he showed to the Magus and his mother was a prototype of a magnifying glass revealing much that the eye can not discern. A wonderful little conceit for the novelist wanting to allegorize about reality! If there is more than meets the eye then whatever else might exist beyond human perception?
So what is the back story regarding the Scientist? What might I tell you that might provoke a little curiosity so that you want to read about his influence on the narrative of Azimuth?
Well, he was obviously precocious from a toddler onwards. Being from a rich merchant family he picked up language alarmingly quickly and accompanied his father along the Silk Road to the east. Wherever he went he sought out alchemists, philosophers, poets musicians and adventurers to further his fanatical curiosity. He could play twenty or thirty instruments. He concocted new cures for illnesses, he smelted rare metals and used them in the construction of strange mechanical machines, he mapped the heavens and developed further ancient astronomical knowledge of the way that constellations affected the affairs of humankind. He was skilled with weapons and fought with the best, enjoying the physical respite from the intellectual storms that shook him. In short he was a an all round genius, brilliantly perceptive and probably having more effect than any other single scholar on the history of humanity. In his lifetime he fathered several dozen children because he had developed a theory that a genius had a responsibility to make his blood available to humankind, given his rudimentary sense of how hereditary factors affect human progeny. Hadn’t he received his father’s language skills and his mother’s musical abilities and his grandfather’s astrological prowess?  He was utterly apolitical, feeling that the leaders of peoples were generally of low intelligence, ignorant of everything that was important in life. He lived to a ripe old age, around a hundred and twenty years, influencing great thinkers and, in his last decade, conducting experimentation on life after death. Was he successful? All I can say is that he succeeded in getting me to write about him, anonymous though he might still be. And how could that happen?
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Minor Keys No. 10
The last character to catch my eye in Azimuth, The First Journey, is revealed briefly in the following action and dialogue. Again, a minor individual, meriting just a few lines of prose, is actually a prime mover in a grand narrative. In philosophical terms, you and I are here today because of a ludicrously cosmic series of events. From the Big Bang (if that was the very beginning) to today, the billions of years of what may be termed fate (something the Magus must grapple with in his journey towards understanding) has led to this point in time when I write and you read. Each of us is the product of an almost infinite number of forces, changes and twists of fortune, genes, happenstance and serendipity from amoebic life to the complexity with which we are now endowed. Even as you read this you are in constant change and so am I. So, in a narrative such as Azimuth, a character’s acts before the book begins is just another perturbation of the surface of the ocean of fate, yet the book was written with some kind of implicit recognition of prior events. That is in the nature of all narratives, is it not? We never write from ground zero. Our first words contain assumptions of what went before. So here is the first reference to the individual at the centre of this blog.
Gradually, one after another placed a hand on his heart with the other offered towards the Warrior, palm stretched out and turned up. Except one. The Warrior saw him without moving his eyes. The man was standing at the edge of the circle, drawing a bow. Yet, even as he did so, there was a whistle of a knife, the sound as it struck the man’s body and the sight of him falling to the ground. The bewilderment for all was that no-one could tell who had thrown the knife. The three on horseback had seemed not to move, nor had the six behind them and yet the knife had impaled the man’s chest. One of them must have thrown it.
-Who was he? called the Warrior, eyes probing the crowd.
I am not going to give the answer to the Warrior’s question here. It will spoil the narrative. Instead, let us go back in time to that point (a bit like the Shire in Lord of the Rings) when everything in the valleys was rosy. In one valley a girl is born and in the next valley a boy, younger brother to the rapist-heir to the chief. All their lives become extraordinarily intertwined later but at the moment they are separate. They know of each other via their clans but do not meet. Azimuth contains much information about the girl’s eventual life but elder and younger boy remain ciphers to be partially broken at the very end of the first book. The younger sibling idolizes his oldest brother. From a baby, just able to crawl he follows him around, despite being occasionally harshly treated. When their mother dies, their father has little time for all except his heir, the eldest son. There are no women left who are related by blood to raise them and so the clan chief decrees that his fourth wife, known by all as ‘the witch’ because of her tendency to curse anyone who stands in her way, to make spells and to attempt the healing of those inhabited by spirits – not very successfully. The younger boy becomes wilder and more ill-disciplined, seeming to try to elicit his eldest brother’s love through more and more bizarre acts to gain his attention. Though this does not succeed, he is, nevertheless, accompanied by his brother on escapades where he commits acts both lewd and felonious while his brother watches in amusement from a distance. When the eldest takes a first wife to maintain the blood line, he hitches to the woman’s sister whom he treats disgracefully. He becomes increasingly bitter and falls out of favour with everyone in his clan, save that of the beloved brother to whom he is a useful tool and accomplice. His one arena of excellence is archery, for which he is universally praised. It is an irony that this single métier should be the cause of his ultimate downfall.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Monday, June 18, 2012

Minor Keys No.9
Late on in the first book, the Magus, now beginning to really question his role as a warrior who kills, sets out a strategy to encourage villagers to protect themselves. He teaches the art of bow making and offers a reward to the best bow-maker;
-Who made this? No-one stepped forward, –I repeat, who made this? It has a balance that sets it apart. A girl, new to womanhood, stepped forward. Some men allowed their indignation to show.
-I did not speak at first for I thought you were about to mock me.
He smiled at her, -It has a special quality. He took an arrow and notched it. When he released it, it flew over the heads of the circle of watchers and embedded itself in the centre of a tree. He spoke loudly, -She found wood such as we brought back for drying. She has cut it well so that the balance graces the hand. It is small but carries the power of many a larger weapon. He gave it back to her and offered her one of his arrows. She aimed at the same tree and the missile struck it just below his own. There was a shout of approval from the villagers so that her face reddened.
-You have a choice of reward, he said, –I have face colourings from alchemists far away in the east or a bow maker’s knife, crafted by metal workers in the City in the Mountain.
-I will take the knife! 
There are many instances in the Azimuth trilogy where women’s roles are questioned and plenty where women’s traditional roles are reversed. It is one of the pleasures of writing that you can question current mores and, being a management consultant for so long, in this case explore the ‘glass ceiling’ preventing women’s advancement in allegorical forms. The Magus has now developed a consciousness where he sees no difference in the capabilities of men and women in many arenas and insists upon their equality therein. As you can see, a warrior female from a peasant background creates cognitive dissonance among her male peers.
So why was she so different? And what happened to her after the Magus left the village? I suspect the following is true. She was secretive and somewhat androgynous, if not in physical attributes, at least in her psychology. From a child she harboured both female and male aspirations. She wanted to be a mother but she did not want the skivvy drudgery of being the marital slave of a village man. She did not like the boys, nor the men around her, including her father whom she had to avoid because of his prying eyes and obvious intent. She would take herself off into the fields and practise physical movements which, she imagined, would serve her well in battle. She stole a knife from a boy bully and learned to throw it with accuracy despite it being not constructed for this purpose. A little while before the Magus came to save the village from mercenary soldiers her father trapped her in her bed. In an instant her knife was at his throat, making a neat superficial incision. She enjoyed his jabbering apologies as he fell off her and then stumbled out into the darkness. Her mother scolded her saying that a daughter was her father’s first to take and her husband’s second, everyone knew that.
As happened to many who were affected by the Magus’ calm, unemotional convictions about respect and harmony, she resolved to leave the village and seek her future elsewhere. Her story had a happy ending unlike so many recounted in these ‘extra pages’ of Azimuth. She came across a merchant who travelled with a small band of guards to bring chinaware from the south in exchange for northern mountain wool. Her female nature meant that she could dress as his wife and enter the halls of the rich where his armed guards could not accompany him. On the occasion that would have brought his death, her knife throwing saved his life. His smouldering interest in her blew up into a raging flame and he pleaded with her to become his third wife. She agreed and became his favourite from that day on. She taught her children, three girls, the arts of knife and bow and then her grandchildren.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Sunday, June 17, 2012

Minor Keys No. 8
I came across a minor character towards the end of the first book of Azimuth and realized I could have made him the first to occupy my pen since he appears early in the first chapter. He is Sabiya’s most loyal guard. You cannot imagine him turning on her like Indira Ghandi’s assassin or any hit man in history who has wormed his way into the confidence of a ruler. We first meet him in the section below:
The door swung open, an enormous armed guard peered at him and then stood aside to allow the Princess to enter. She was too slim to be beautiful to Kamil’s eye and too tall for all but a royal family member. Her black skin revealed her father’s predilection for Ethiopia. Her eyes were a glittering blue set wide apart above the family’s long shallow nose. Her rich plump red lips pouted at him.
Characters write themselves on to the page and once there create a tiny vortex which has minute but inevitable effects upon the storyline, the equivalent of the beat of a butterfly’s wing. They may take no greater part than opening doors and hanging around like any minder but the fact that they are there is always significjust ant. Why? Because, for example in this case, any jeopardy that envelops Sabiya must be written to take account of her faithful mastiff of a guard, having established his perpetual presence.
I like this fellow. It is deep seated and probably goes back to the playground years. Big, muscular boys who can crush you and your spirit are potent. If they are kindly then all and sundry love them because all and sundry realize that with the flip of a psychological coin the world could have gone dark.
He was such a boy, ragged robed and genial, doing extremes of manual labour long before he was a man. He was often seen pulling his plump child of a mother in a cart, shepherding his four sisters through the market or taking on all challengers in weightlifting sheep and calves. The Emperor Haidar saw him one day, with a sheep under each arm, laughing uproariously in his deep baritone and marked him as a likely guard for his baby daughter, Sabiya. He paid his mother for him and put him in his military training camp where early attempts to bully him were met with many ringing skulls. He could not be daunted by man or weapon and was soon installed on a pallet in a tiny chamber close to the little girl. He was her favourite after her doll Walidah, doubling as crawling mount and giant protector. As Kamil discovered, even as a precocious girl, Princess Sabiya had a maturity about sexual needs and she arranged a search party to bring her loyal defender the perfect young woman from a village on the lap of the sacred mountain. This robust creature was given a house near the outer palace walls and he was allowed to visit her when Sabiya was safe in her father’s company. Many children ensued, fast upon another.
In spite of his repetitive opening and closing of doors and general baleful, roving gaze for anything untoward in the vicinity of the Princess he remained a constant feature in her life, so much so he often seemed to disappear from view, despite his enormous frame. But even this consistency, as predictable as sun and moon, was to fracture in the flow of impassive Fate.
But for that you must read Azimuth.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Saturday, June 16, 2012

Minor Keys No. 7
Sometimes characters in books have no description to make them physical entities in the mind’s eye yet they still provide volition to a narrative. One such is an envoy in a city where the Magus agrees to protect a young princess from assassination. There is a deadline, for the attempt on her life must take place within 24 hours of the first sign of her first menstruation. The envoy reveals much about this time of wandering warriors when he pleads that the Magus should accede to his queen’s request for protection, as follows:
-She wishes to entertain you. You are a great warrior and have magical powers. A shaman. Such men are rare.
-Such men may not exist at all except in the minds of the gullible.
-Yet you are such. There are many tales about you. How you wield an invincible sword. How you can throw a knife with the deadly accuracy of God’s blessing. How you can cure kings. How you speak with your horses as easily as with people. These stories are true?
-These are just stories. Is there a face in the moon?
-Some can see it.
   -That is my point.
One of the central themes of Azimuth is how a moral code comes into existence and becomes the basis for civilized social life. Today, in film particularly, whether we are talking about Kurosawa or Tarantino or manga comics, I feel the popularity of the genre owes much to modern warfare’sanonymity, the political indifference to civilian death or, indeed, the death of the young men sent by politicians to kill for their country. Samurai codes and behaviours represent a return to a time of face to face mortal combat on a human rather than inhuman scale. Whether we have blood lust or are pacifists, it is far more comprehensible than a military drone.
Anyway, in the envoy’s words above the mystique of a warrior’s skills are revealed.
So what kind of man is this young fellow? He must have been born of parents loyal to the throne and with the income of at least the semi-skilled. As soon as he is able he runs errands for all the nobility. He is good natured and with a quick smile and generally trusted for he learns to say nothing of his go-between activities, some of which border upon deception and unfaithfulness. The queen likes his looks as he enters manhood and ties him to her with gifts and social elevation. He even stands outside her chambers and tries to shut his ears to her moans beneath the thrusting noble thighs of courtiers.
Meeting the Magus, even for this brief few seconds, stirs in him the desire to emulate and when the iconic stranger has gone, he also leaves in order to find fortune and skill with the blade. He finally finds a sword school led by a retired mercenary of some repute who does not feature in the pages of Azimuth, though his roguish exploits would have been worthy of Kamil’s inclusion. He does well and establishes himself as a leading apprentice here but, as with so many young men enamoured with fantasies of personal invulnerability he is killed in face to face battle with a man from the east, a man who is seeking out the Magus to add him to the list of his victims thus adding lustre to his growing infamy as a feared assassin.
You can find details of Azimuth at www.azimuthtrilogy.com 
This and my other books can also be found at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Friday, June 15, 2012

Minor Keys No. 6
The next characters momentarily to cross the pages of Azimuth are the Spice Traders. They make me think of Fellini’s Satyricon, strange creatures that inhabit the margins of social life. Given that Azimuth is an arterial river of a book, fast flowing and dangerous enough for the intrepid adventurer on the surface but with depths to satisfy the seeker of hidden treasures, minor characters can bring jeopardy and unexpected insight in equal measure. This is how the women are introduced:
He and the girl permitted themselves to be seen at some distance. The richly coloured robes of the two caught and shimmered in the sun. They were both women as like each other as two fruit from the same branch. He tried to restrain the hope in his mind. They each rode a horse and towed a mule. The horses were wiry mountain beasts. The women themselves were tiny with facial features unlike any he had seen before; moon-like, angle eyed and with unblemished skin faintly greened by colouring powder and shaded by wide-brimmed hats. Their hands were gloved.
At this point in their own great adventure, the Magus and a small girl he has saved from a child abductor come across the spice traders selling their wares on the endless trail which runs across the great continents, east to west. The hope he feels in the extract above is that they will take the child off his hands. The women, though occupying little space in the grand design of the Azimuthtrilogy, nevertheless have a much significance in the development of the Magus’ thought about life’s purpose. They pass on to him a small fraction of the wisdom they have acquired in their ceaseless travelling.
I expect, in the fifty or so years of their lives they endured extraordinary privations, abuse as well as the degree of idolization which was usually afforded exotic travelers passing through the isolated and culturally insulated villages of that time. Born twins, within a minute of each other, they brought good fortune to their parents for a while, being heralded as having occult powers owing to their ability to speak in seamless sentences, beginning and finishing each other’s words, their telepathy and the gift they quickly developed for cosmetics.  They cut hair, dyed it, painted faces for weddings and other festivals and gave advice on jewelry and other accessories. But, as so often happened to money spinners of this sort, they were abducted and made to work for the owner of a caravan train before they had reached their first blood shows. On a night when storms the like of which had never been seen brought violent rain, frogs and fish falling from the skies and a burning light that crossed the heavens to plunge into the earth close by, they took advantage of the fearful disarray to lead two frightened horses away from the chaos and into the battering darkness. Thus began their nomadic life. Befriended and protected by horse traders they travelled across great steppes, learning at first to trade by gathering plants and soils to make paints, creams, ointments and medicines. After years of journeying from east to west and back again they gained more wealth by buying and selling herbs and spices common to certain places but rare in others. They gave their bodies  happily to the horse herders as payment for their peace of mind but never conceived children, having ways of preventing it, as well as ways of ensuring their bodies remained free of disease. Finally they travelled alone being older and less in demand for their bodies. The terrible acts that were perpetrated on them prior to being saved by he Magus did not break their wills. Their lives remained in constant movement with an empathic sharing of the wisdom they gained regarding people, gods and nature. It was as if this was sufficient Purpose for them. When, by mutual consent they felt that enough was enough and no further knowledge might be gained on their travels, they stepped off a cliff together, hand in hand, carrying their wisdom with them and smiling in exultation.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Thursday, June 14, 2012

Minor Keys No. 5
A tiny character (in every sense of the word) that next catches my eye in Azimuth is the girl who works in the brothel that the rather staid and portly librarian, Kamil, visits. Nothing much is said about her, even in inference – save that she appears conditioned by the culture of prostitution so that she has no moral perspective on its practices. Here’s a snippet from her short visitation to Azimuth’s pages.
The young girl stood before him, –You wish Madame Aidah to entertain you? He shook his head, asked her to bring him iced water and mopped his brow. He would have liked to throw off his cloak such was the heat in the room. She brought it, -You want another lady? Young? Older? Connoisseur? Her accent was from further to the east.
   -I would like to speak with the mistress.
-She not for sale.
-I do not wish to buy her … her services. I need to talk with her. The girl stared at him unmoving, –Go! She turned perplexed as though she felt she had misunderstood his request. Time passed.
Reading it now brings home to me (oft discussed in my blogs about writing that precede the current run, is that the idea of the girl may well have been planted in my mind by a film I saw some twenty to thirty years ago, Pretty Babyby Louis Malle. If I remember it clearly, the film was controversial because of the depiction of a girl in a brothel. Whether the similarity ends there is for others to decide.  In Azimuth she appears to wait on tables and run errands. There is no information regarding what else she might do.
I understand (now I interrogate my imagination) that she’s pre or early teenage. She is the daughter of a prostitute who once worked for Baligha, the Mistress of the House of Senses, who had to take her as a ward owing to the following circumstances. Her mother, a slip of a young thing herself, failed to take the precautions of that time demanded by Baligha of all her courtesans, either before sex or after with one partner. She had become obsessed with a young noble who marked her out for his sole ministrations. She was narrow hipped and frail, so much so that despite medical help she died in the last hourse of pregnancy and the child had to be cut from her body by the distraught and guilty Baligha. As a baby, toddler and young child she was mothered by all the prostitutes. They followed a code laid down by their Mistress that the girl should not be witness to any unseemly act though it was impossible to stay her curiosity about the work that they all did. By the time we meet her in Azimuth, she is on the cusp between innocence and experience. But what happened to her later, after Kamil had constructed his Tales of the Magus?
In effect Baligha groomed her to manage the brothel while inculcating in her a sense of obstinate pride in her virginity. By the time Baligha gave up her ownership of that lucrative business, the girl was in her twenties and was protected by her own guard of loyal, honest swordsmen. Her fame spread across the empire and it was natural that young men fell for the allure of her virginity and beauty in this place of famed and highly skilled sex goddesses. Curiously, she never married nor lost her maidenhead but, when she retired and passed on the business to another, a little like herself, wrote an autobiography of her times with frank and quite explicit details of the desires of men and how women might satisfy them without ever losing their dignity and sacred sense of their bodies.
A single poem survives from her writing:
O callous phallus you prey in red the maidenhead
But know that tenderness in ingress helps virgins burgeon
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Minor Keys No. 4
The barber stepped forward nonchalantly, his attendant following with a tray of combs, razors, scissors, brushes, oils and hot water. Kamil sat while a towel was placed around his shoulders. The man was quick and sure. His face moved round Kamil’s, close enough for him to see the coarse skin filled to smoothness with stiff cream and smell the unguents that had been massaged into the cheeks. Following the cutting and shaving, similar fragrant oils were applied to him.
We are at a point in the ‘framing’ narrative in Azimuth where Kamil the historian has been revealed as only 41 and Princess Sabiya pretends to be perturbed that he might have base sexual fantasies about her. She has seen him thus far as a decade older and more like a grandfather. In her coquettish way she decides to spruce him up. Hence the barber in the extract above.
Who is this barber and why has he appeared in the narrative? Part of my novelist’s brain seems to have been working autonomously on the backcloth to the main stories in Azimuth. Many readers have loved the visual nature of the book and being transported to a recognisable yet alien world and, I suppose, it is through a minor character like the barber that so much is said about court life in a few literary daubs.
Unlike the physician the barber is the latest in a long line of his profession in the court. His name in the language of the day meant ‘son of my father the barber’. Even when just able to wield a pair of scissors, a comb and a shaving razor he was given coconuts to shave, shredded linen balls to cut and a donkey’s mane to groom. Living within the grounds of the outer walls of the palace meant that he was privileged to a degree. Despite his homosexual certainties he followed the dictates of his blood and produced enough sons to ensure that one, at least, extended the barber line. His wife took lovers from among other similar professions in the royal household as was the accepted way. As he grew older, the barber maintained his sexual interest in boys about to become men. Built in to his behaviour, a sort of genetic engineering, was the capacity to be silent in the company of royals, obsequious in body language but rarely in word. He was proud of his skills and though much disliked in the main by his aristocratic masters he was indispensable to their vanities. And this is how he lived and died, never challenging those above him, autocratic to those below, enjoying young flesh while secretly loathing the ageing skins upon which he mainly worked.

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Monday, June 11, 2012

Minor Keys No. 3
Our next minor character is the physician who tends the king in the City of White Stones (I turned the pages of Azimuth Book 1, just a moment ago and this character caught my eye – thus, I am going to write about him as a stream of consciousness now and see where we get.) It is here that the young Magus’ inherent power to heal first comes to the fore as he and his father are drawn to the court of the city. It is also one of the earliest examples of CSI in human history! The boy examines the king’s wound, the result of an arrow strike.
-The tip in your husband’s body has been sawn from a poisoned hunting arrow, he told the queen,  -The kind of arrow which is used to slow the death of wild beasts. The shaft you can see here has no clean break. The royal physician removed its metal head and then inserted the tip of a corrupted hunting arrow in its place. Your husband would have recovered quickly enough from his wound had it not been for the introduction of the poison. This man chose his venom carefully to allay suspicion. The shaft would have been thrown away and no-one would have suspected him by the time the king died. If another physician had investigated his body it would have been unlikely that he would find such a small tip. If he did then it would have been seen as an understandable oversight on the part of the doctor.
What happens next with regard to the royal physician you will have to read for yourself. Remember that Azimuth is a trilogy with serious intent, despite its being cloaked in fable and adventure. It is a discourse on philosophy and religion, too and people’s search for meaning in their lives.
So, to the physician!
He began medicine as did most at that time. His family were not well-to-do, surviving on low level trade, buying and selling corn and other staple crops. Wanting something better for their eldest son they paid for him to become a physician’s apprentice. He had an aptitude and did well. He was ambitious and managed to hide it under a generally fawning exterior which helped him develop his own clientele. After many years he was approached by blood relatives of the king who wanted to supplant him as ruler and within a short time the king’s old physician disappeared mysteriously on an errand to save the life of a nearby noble. He now became a mole in the court but was instructed to do nothing by his secret employers but ingratiate himself with the royal couple and after some time became trusted. All the while his wealth increased, his patients being attracted from a richer stratum and he tended to the king and queen in a most proper manner. He built a most admirable house, enjoying the advice of the king’s architect, married well and had five children. He was a key figure in the temple and was seen to pray longer and harder than any other, always making lavish gifts to the god of that city. No-one suspected that he was the cause of royal still births nor his judgment that the queen suffered from an imbalance of elements in her womb that could not be remedied. Satisfied that there could be no competing heir to the throne, his fellow conspirators finally moved to act and it is at this point that the young Magus and his father became instrumental in the events above described.
So there we are. The physician. Funny business writing isn’t it? All the while you are telling your tale you are excluding strands in your imagination which you might otherwise follow because there are more important characters developing and choking page space!
www.azimuthtrilogy.co
www.chronometerpublications.me

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Sunday, June 10, 2012

Minor Keys No. 2
So, the first significant minor character we meet in Azimuth is the High Priestess who is the first woman to influence the thinking of the young Magus. It is she who drugs him, changes him momentarily into a woman to give him the experience of motherhood and the realization that the world he inhabits is dominated by male power. She only appears on a couple of pages in Azimuth and she is described by the boy’s father as follows:
They were lying on their beds. The night candle spluttered, offering an intermittent yellow light.
-What is she?
-The wisest, noblest woman you will ever meet. A true shaman.
-What does she…? He couldn’t think what he was asking.
-It is best to think of her as a high priestess but one who has no god of her own. She offers wisdom to those who come to her. For many she is the difference between joy and despair. But for others she is someone to hate. It is only because she is protected by the ruler of this territory that they have not moved against her.
-How can anyone hate her?
-They have their gods.
-For that?
-For her all true gods are of the same essence. She says that a true god is a conduit for love. Some choose gods of war, some vengeance and some the oppression of the poor. These are many kinds of gods. Not all are true.
 -This is obvious.
– It is. But men who seek to have power over others choose their gods carefully. She says that they make gods out of their own tribal histories to justify their futures.
-I have no sense of any god, said the youth.
I sense now that this female pope is ageless, one of those individuals in a generation who has had an uncanny wisdom since birth such that she learned quickly how to manage her parents demands. She left her family in the night when she was fifteen to follow a burning inner directive and travelled, disguising her femininity, to places where holy men and women gathered willing crowds around them. In these arenas her questions confounded with their sharp insights but as soon as the credulous supplicants tried to install her as their new seer, she left again. She took lovers. She learned the relationship between gold and men’s hearts and their chosen deities. With ease she used her powers to establish herself, protected by a Lord who venerated her wisdom, in a modest palace filled with aesthetic artifacts brought to her as gifts by those seeking her counsel. Here she became a kind of oracle, a pre-Sufi intent on supporting and developing all that is good in the hearts of humankind whether practical or spiritual. She favoured no one god.
After the events involving her meeting the young Magus in Azimuth she continued her benevolent work until the army of a despot ravaged the land and took the Lord prisoner. Refusing to flee she was imprisoned in a cave and became an anchorite but the despot dared not kill her for all knew of her power to change the path of fate. Here she remained until she died, meditating on goodness and aware that every thought to that end was a breath in the wind that battled with the storms of evil. Her thoughts reached out to untold numbers of seekers of truth who assumed they were of their own making, unaware of her existence.

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Saturday, June 9, 2012

Minor keys No. 1
I thought I would take a break from writing directly about writing. 50 blogs is quite sufficient for the moment and they are all there for the interested reader. What I intend to take their place results from the comment of a keen follower of Azimuth who, a bit like the fanatical fan of the writer in Misery (no, it can’t happen to me, can it? I’ll just hide the sledgehammer!) was distressed at the end of the trilogy not to know what happened to the half-humans once the book had ended. “I love them,” she said. “They are real.” Now these magnificent seven adventurers may still be living in the cosmos. I may have created them or they may have made me create them but the fact is that they go on existing albeit in some pure thought form. This not such a bizarre concept. Indeed I saw a documentary asking serious questions about the basic quantum force of the universe and ‘thought’ was one hypothesis. Just as in The Matrix films it is posited that we are all actually a few lines of clever code in a vast computer program (again some scientists posit this as a strong possibility to explain present human reality) the characters that authors create may also live on after the last page of a novel in another medium. Rather a charming notion if we look back over great literature, don’t you think? Anna Karenina enjoying ethereal conversations with Hamlet and Bilbo Baggins. In this alternative universe all the characters every author has created, don’t die but exist in an ‘elsewhere’. The notion that minor characters in novels and plays have been unjustly marginalized by authors is not so new. Immediately I think of Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello or Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. The conceit in these and other literary artefacts is that we, the readers, are desperate to know more biographical detail about them than the author allows or even knows.
Since Azimuthcontains dozens of minor characters, there could be plenty to write about. It will encourage me to go into a channeling state, like a batty medium, and make contact with them again. One knock yes, two knocks no. My encounters with them might entertain you and at the same time lead you to buy the core material, Azimuth the Trilogy. I can’t be more frank, can I? This is marketing but not as you know it, Captain. Tune in for the first minor character’s extended life tomorrow.

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Friday, June 8, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 50
I suspect that writing is changing and I don’t mean the usual changes that occur over time such as the treatment of taboo subjects or social observation or Joycean playfulness with words. The coming generations will not be wedded to the printed word or screen-based text in quite the way I was for most of my life. Their world is technologically different, they carry communication to the entire world in their pockets, they are receivers of visual stimuli constantly, they are interactive…
I remember running a research project many years ago (the book of the project is advertised on www.chronometerpublications.me) which was one of the earliest forays into the experience of children with video games and computers. Already there was the generational rift between the child and the luddite parent which these days is exacerbated by computer-based social media like Facebook and Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Friends Reunited. At the bottom end of the generational ladder users’ speed at managing the world of apps, fast tracks them beyond the ossifying brains of their elders. Now I am not up to date with any of it but I would still surmise that the plastic brain we all have (more amenable to learning the younger we are) is forming new ways of seeing and interpreting the world, influenced and even conditioned by these new technologies. Questions we dealt with on the British Board of Film Classification’s Children’s Advisory panel are even more relevant. Are people more likely to commit anti-social acts if they play video games constantly? Are the young finding it more difficult to distinguish the virtual from the real? Has everything got to be sound-byte size? What technology will be in our pockets or chip implanted brains in ten years?
For a long time a rattling good tale will still carry sway over readers BUT getting them to the book in the first place is the question. Even an e-book. Somehow we may need to be more innovative in our very presentation, syntax and lexicons to draw them in and appease their critical disinterest in the word. We may have to package how we write as well as what we write to fit the smart phone user. Some time ago Umberto Ecco made the point that people read in paragraphs now, hardly bothering to step heavily from sentence to sentence. Long books (Alas poor Azimuth!) may be too far off the radar of the young. They may need to be presented like a Dickens novel, in serial byte form though, I believe, various attempts to do this have met with mixed success. As writers we are in competition with so many media, vying for windows in the technological time of our customers.
Whilst I, as a novelist, try to be innovative, I can no longer stay at the bow wave of innovation (if I ever could!). All I can do is write more visually, borrow tricks from mould-breaking films and seek plotlines to illuminate the existential dilemmas that face oncoming generations as they grapple with human identity in a universe which conflates flesh and blood with pixilated other realities.
www.chronomterpublications.me

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Thursday, June 7, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 49
Time and continuity are essential ingredients in books and films unless the author or director is setting out deliberately to play with our daily conceptions of the its passage. So the film Memento travels backwards in its plot and Pincher Martin by William Golding envisages the entire action in the novel being the last few seconds’ thought of a dying man. Watching one of the new Nordic Noir series this last week (The Bridge), there were discontinuities which irritated so that, despite the production’s overall value, they detracted and undercut the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. The serial killer simply could not have done what he did in the time available. Novels are much the same. Time is one of those ingredients that a writer must get right, not only in murder mysteries where it can be almost an ‘extra character’. I believe that it works at an unconscious level and even if the reader never investigates your plot (some do, of course and write to tell you, gleefully) it adds to a pervasive, if slight disenchantment with your tale’s integrity. Events in general fiction (by which I mean that fiction which represent life as lived) must adhere to certain principles. In Azimuth the Magus hunts and prepares and eats meals. Whether using shorthand or detail the time taken must be conveyed to the reader. In Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story it is ‘time the character’ which becomes an explanatory force, drawing together apparently unrelated hemispheres in the globe of the story. As mentioned in another blog, Azimuth covers sixty of more years of a man’s life. The central character has children with two different women, he ages, as does his mother and all the other character and so I ended making up a post-hoc time chart for myself which led me to make many small modifications. I didn’t want even an unconscious frisson of doubt to impair the story’s progress in the reader’s imagination.
The backcloth of time can help you in unusual ways, too but you must be explicit with the reader about what you are doing. As in film where we now expect flashbacks, slow motion and parallel imaging, a novel needs to signal exactly how the story’s time-line works, even if it is a post-script denouement or twist in the plot. In Azimuth a sage demonstrates how time is almost infinitely extendable and I conveyed this by setting up the different time scales being lived by three characters in a scene by using different punctuation and an explanatory preface within the account.
For verisimilitude, get your time scale right for the reader and aid his or her total immersion in your story.
Through a Mirror Clear and other works at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Sunday, June 3, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 48
The Inspector is a play about the conflict between a dynamic artistic culture and that form of philistinism perpetrated upon the citizens of a country  by the social engineering of governmental policies based upon skills, league tables, labour fodder and bottom line accounting.  Although it is yet to be performed on stage it has had a number of compliments from upcoming UK West End producers/directors. The problem is that they do not buy into a theatrical construction which is based upon tightly choreographed mirroring between the two time periods. The current preference is for more organic, sprawling artefacts rather than, say, a Borges-like cultivated labyrinth which passes back and forth between 1960s and twenty first century England.
The play balances the different ideological viewpoints through two characters who appear both as young students and later as a teacher and an inspector. Does a teacher proof curriculum, tightly controlled, produce a more humane and economically viable society than that of a looser edifice where art flourishes next to the 3 Rs, IT and continuous testing? How can we create a caring culture which is vibrant in its thinking and whose citizens are naturally critical of its politicians’ limited understanding of what enriches the spirit? Curiously I watched a news clip the other day which focused on how technological engineering had spurted when think tanks in industry included artists but how, when recession hits it is the artistic input which is junked first.
The play contains violence, sex and humour and in readings appears to be verbally seductive and visually gripping as well as intellectually satisfying.
For me, the difference between playwriting and other fictions is that everything is pared down to sound and image. Like one great Zen aphorism, all of life is contained in the space the audience sees before them and their suspension of disbelief is harder to inculcate in this public arena than in the private fantasy world of personal space where there are fewer intrusions from strangers in a strange setting and where the imagination delivers visuals at will and according to biographic need.
Having staged a number of my plays in small theatre groups over the years I learned a great deal about dialogue, about modulating it through adopting different voices and about exactly how much scaffolding is needed to keep the reader aware of who is speaking without interfering with its flow. Given that Azimuth my recently published trilogy contains so much dialogue and is not Borges-like, being more organic and sprawling then theatre people might find it more acceptable and buy into it! Maybe even make a play from it.
The Inspection by Jack Sanger www.chronometerpublications.me
Azimuth by Jack Sanger www.azimuthtrilogy.com and Kindle Amazon

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Friday, June 1, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 47
“It came straight through my brain without touching the sides” is my common response to questions about how I wrote Azimuth. Ten years may see forever even for a big novel but then life seems forever until suddenly your candle starts to flicker and then gutter. The psychology of spending a decade on a book, albeit in three volumes, seems to me akin to writing a diary; not the trivial, passing thoughts concerning events which you might find in ninety percent of Twitter or Facebook posts: “”I am standing in the crowd waiting for the Olympic torch to race by, drinking a Café Nero cappuccino”, more the serious log of someone at the heart of a struggle for independence,  a riot, famine or natural disaster. In my case it was like looking through a wormhole at two points in the distant past, one post-Mohammed and one pre-Buddha. I peeped, I saw, I recorded what passed before my eyes. I have said before in these blogs how characters seem to control your pen and this is precisely how it felt.
“The moving finger writes: and having writ, moves on,” declared Omar Khayyam. Just so. I couldn’t go back and head the characters off at the gulch, nor could I steer them one iota from the course to which they seemed committed. I was more like a commentator than an inventor, being complimented on my writing style rather like a TV guide to some social happening. This experience of being a conduit has happened to many other writers. You feel almost embarrassed when people say nice things. “Aw shucks! don’t flatter me, sing praises instead to the vital, mysterious source of my prose which gave vent to the divine effluvia that produced it.
Anyway, as I said, it is like being a medium, even if, in my case, a flawed one. What came out was not a perfect, glittering gem like Kublai Khan but required a deal of post-editing to sharpen it up. The experience felt Jungian, as though I was tapping into the universal unconscious and it feels like this should be taking the plaudits, not me!
Download Azimuth by Jack Sanger on Kindle Amazon or as a paperback and PDF at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
All my work can be found at www.chronometerpublications.me

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Thursday, May 31, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 46
I’d like to continue the refrain of Jack Sanger good, Jack Sanger not bad which I began in the last blog. It was in answer to the question I posed myself after my illustrious writer friend opined that I maybe should not deign to build a central character who is a successful writer. My first answer involved the notion of ‘critical introspection’ from my academic days.
Admittedly I am not (yet) a household name in the world of fiction but who knows, I have ambition! Let me think a little more about my weaknesses as a writer, some of which will have leaked on to the screen of previous blogs, more as incidental  remarks than focused literary self-criticism. So, let’s go. These are areas I have recognized I should watch carefully in order not to pollute my prose with infelicity.
I appear to have a problem with prepositions. I make more adjustments to prepositions than any other part of my syntax. Why? Maybe it goes back to childhood at school, maybe the cadences of my inner dialogue betray me with alliteration and other sound resonances which then produce the wrong word. Maybe it’s because I hate repetition in a paragraph and stick in an inappropriate preposition in an attempt at variety and then revert or change again, sometimes having to alter the whole sentence to avoid repeats. Occasionally I can’t think which preposition is the right one and stare blankly at my notebook or screen.
Another failing I have is over-extending metaphors. I begin well enough but find myself moving from fluidity into a stick morass as I chase the meaning into cul de sacs of ornate meaninglessness. Why is Kamil in Azimuth a fearful detective? Well, he is not used to it being a man of the library rather than of action. But, having spent a sentence or two delivering this picture I go on and on, reveling in his fears and historical anti-heroes.  The answer to this is worth a note. What can be said in an effusive paragraph can be spread more thinly through the whole book so that the picture of Kamil is in the form of a drip-feed and we have, from the novelist’s point of view, a kind of character striptease. Since, like most writers other than the most obsessively pedantic, I hate rewriting or erasing my ‘flow’, this was a hard lesson for me.
There are times when I am too pleased with the sound of my own voice. That is, I find my own views coming from the mouths of characters rather than theirs. It is obtrusive and crass and has to be scratched regardless of the sheer beauty of the text (!).
I can write pages of dialogue without the scaffolding of description or helpful positioning pointers, assuming the reader can follow who is speaking. This, of course becomes increasingly cryptic if there is more than one person involved in dialogue.
I rely too much on my own definitions of words and later I have to check in a dictionary what they actually mean. Occasionally it is the opposite of my assumption, a sort of malapropism. I used the word ‘enervate’ entirely wrongly at first. our This can then throw my careful building of  poetic expression.
Weaknesses become apparent over the years and we attend to them laboriously and somewhat truculently. That’s the way of it. We play to our strengths and excommunicate our evils. Now should I have used that word there?

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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 45
Taking up the theme from blog 44, I’d like to enlarge upon this notion of the ego of the writer – or my own ego in particular! Having been a professor in my last but one incarnation (teacher, social worker, PhD student, researcher, chair in management research and management consultant) I probably have a different take on the process of exploring the mechanics and conceptual subtleties of writing novels than most. I was reasonably successful in those roles even if none of them gave me the ultimate sense of ego-value I probably desired. I always wanted to be a writer. Indeed this ambition saw me as a bit of a marginal academic in that I never really played the academic game; building networks, kowtowing to the bureaucrats and chasing the journals. I did publish a great deal but was more concerned with readability than aridity. What I am sure I was good at was generating research reports that had impact and supervising students to complete better than average PhDs. The quality of my writing was not the real issue here, it was a capacity and motivation to understand the processes that underpin social behaviour, whatever that might be, such as children’s experience with computer games, information handling in classrooms or the effects of appraisal of doctors on their medical practice. I had developed a style of critical discourse involving all those with whom I worked which meant that openness, frankness and fairness dictated how we approached everything we did. There was no room here for lily-livered sensitivities about personal expression. Everything could be contested for how else could anything be improved?
So when it came to writing up PhDs and research reports and the occasional book there was much dissection and self-analysis.
Now, at an age when it is unusual to think in terms of beginning a new career (fiction) I am honour bound to continue in the critical vein that I had established long before. I have written what I consider to be a significant contribution to literature (Azimuth) and also some titles which are less profound, more ephemeral but with elements that make them worthy of a reader’s attention. All of them can be found at the website listed at the end of this piece.
So these blogs are part of an introspective discourse on the processes of writing. I write therefore I am and because I am who I am I want to understand  what is making me! What is this mysterious process, this alchemy which has me pouring myself on to the page. There is a very nice Buddhist story, probably in Zen Flesh Zen Bones by Paul Reps, concerning a caterpillar or millipede being asked by a passing insect how it managed all its legs so wonderfully well. The multi-legged wonder considered this question for a moment and immediately toppled over. Many people believe that by being self-analytical we destroy the subtle processes which make our work what it is. I supervised a sculptor who felt this way. He made great steel installations for public spaces. He also wanted to do an MPhil so he could teach in an art school. By using stop frame photography and writing about what each frame represented in the process of his creation he changed his fundamental relationship with his work. What had been an opaque and magical process was now articulated in his mind. It lifted his work to a new level. The intellectual and the creative could walk hand in hand.
So, back to ego. I am not on a trajectory to prove what a great writer I may be but to be as honest as possible about what for me writing fiction involves.
www.chronometerpublications.me

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Monday, May 28, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 44
I spent the weekend with a writer, internationally well known and a long time close friend. We discussed my novella Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story, at some length. He had read it twice and made notes on it. It was the kind of experience most writers crave, if they are not too thin skinned, where virtually every sentence is turned over for sense and value. At the basic level he found ambiguities where I had not meant them, despite my attempts to produce sharp, clean prose. Yet it was in a subtler area of debate that I really benefited.
One of the pervasive threads of the novella involves the central character being a writer. It is he who undergoes ‘gothic’ experiences. My friend (who eschews publicity at all costs, unlike me!) felt that to have a writer as the main protagonist made me vulnerable to a particular kind of hazard. Since the hero of Through a Mirror Clear is very successful in his authorship, this possible pitfall is cranked up (or dug deeper). Not only is he internationally famous within the horror genre but his reading matter appears to be  from the top, classical drawer. What my friend argued was that by casting him in my tale thus, and by invoking his highbrow literary interests, I was by implication placing myself shoulder to shoulder with the greats and promulgating the merits of my own prose. How could I presume to invent such an individual and his world without antagonising the reader or at least inciting him/her to be far more critical of my work than would normally be the case?
So, does it take a great writer to create the life-world of another writer and provide the reader with a profile of the inside of such a person’s mind? I never thought so before. On this basis a novel which includes God as a character would be a step too far, even for Tolstoy.
To be even implicitly self-aggrandising was not my intent. I wanted to develop a drama in which the writer’s success in his genre might provide ironies and resonances when he became faced with strange and unsettling challenges to his reason, as horrifying as any in his own work.  What I would say is that it tests nerve and skill to include quotes from your author-character’s published text. I had to do some of this in Azimuth and found myself later scratching a lot of it out.
But, as I have stated many times elsewhere in these blogs, what the writer thinks s/he gives and what the reader receives can be two very different things. I suppose we hope that if most of the people most of the time are mostly unperturbed then we have done ok.
So there’s a thing to prick the conscience of any king of words. In the manner of Russian dolls, here am I in a blog on writing, discussing a fellow writer’s thoughts about the art of writing, particularly the problem of being a novelist writing about a novelist’s relationship with his writing. And finding it extremely problematical and labyrinthine!
All my own writing, including Azimuth and Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story

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Friday, May 25, 2012

The Art of Writing No 43
I have just finished reading a couple of Joseph Conrad novellas; Heart of Darknessand Youth. What strikes me as instructive for the aspiring writer in both of them is how Conrad’s knowledge of the sea and the technology of ships, albeit in the early days of metal hulls and mechanical navigation, becomes a kind of mystical manual for the reader who has not and will never spend such time on dangerous water. I suppose Victorian and Edwardian times, the era of empire building, gave writers licence to provide an early superhero identification and escapism for the reader. But I’m no literary critic!
What makes me turn over the experience in my mind is how expert knowledge can be presented in such a way that we are drawn into it as if being initiated into the mysterious rites of some exotic fellowship. The naming of parts, the special lingo, the daily round and the required practices of seafaring men all have a seductive appeal. Much of writing stems from such ingrained knowledge and it seems to me to be superior to that ‘researched’ backcloth to much of literature today. Why? Well, I would imagine that the telling of tales has greater power if expertise is implicit rather than explicit because it imbues every word we read and does not appear forced.
I remember Jorge Luis Borges’ satirical response to any crude writing which flaunts a writer’s expertise in a subject, in this case the taxonomical knowledge of the animal kingdom:
  • Those that belong to the emperor
  • Embalmed ones
  • Those that are trained
  • Suckling pigs
  • Mermaids (or Sirens)
  • Fabulous ones
  • Stray dogs
  • Those that are included in this classification
  • Those that tremble as if they were mad
  • Innumerable ones
  • Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
  • Et cetera
  • Those that have just broken the flower vase
  • Those that, at a distance, resemble flies
What I take from this is that a novelist has an infinite set of possibilities at his/her disposal. Being keen to flaunt expert knowledge may restrict the flight of creativity. As Borges shows, we authors can be experts in fabulous taxonomies of the imagination.

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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 42
I mentioned plagiarism.
There is a form of it which divides writers down the middle. It can be subtle, invasive and even contaminating. It revolves around the issue of whether a novelist should read other writers’ fiction during the process of making a novel.  There are many writing manuals which focus on a writer’s need to read quality fiction in order to develop good habits rather like student artists being made to copy famous paintings in order to understand the strategies that great artists employ. I saw a documentary on Jack Cardiff, the finest cinematographer ever, who studied paintings in order to understand how light works to dramatic advantage on celluloid. The better the fiction, the more it instructs, though I feel that the process is one of immersive osmosis rather than direct imitation. What I mean is that the brain is so complex that it will mix your range of reading in a melange and bring out your improved literary expression. Read Timothy Galway’s The Inner Game of Tennis  to understand this. He argues that by merely watching another player, the brain assimilates so much information it reproduces good strokes in a way that pedantic, step by step teaching cannot achieve.
For myself, reading other authors while I am writing fiction is a no-no. Inevitably (because I am competitive!) I am constantly comparing my work with theirs and it slows me down. I also find myself with the wrong ‘voice’ in my head, that of a character in another author’s work. I use expressions which I know are borrowed.
Establishing your own literary identity is a hard won battle with every book you have ever read. My advice is to leave a gap between the last fiction you have read before starting writing, read non-fiction or listen to music or do a Cardiff and view art, anything to dislodge the last exciting chapters from your mind! It is only through time that your unique qualities will show and no-one will be able to point to unconscious plagiarism.
I wrote Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story(as Eric le Sange rather than Jack Sanger) because I was irritated by a Julian Barnes novella winning the Booker Prize for literature. I felt it was mechanical and artificial. There was little in it which was organic and truly of the heart. Not that I want you to compare the books, just to underline the effect that reading others’ work can have. We are private individuals are we not? We live in our fantasy universe and have to deal with whatever comes our way. I make sure now that these incursions are not from the prose of another artist!
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic love Story by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon
Azimuth by Jack Sanger in paperback at azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth by Jack Sanger in three separate books on Kindle Amazon

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Sunday, May 20, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 41
In a long series of blogs about one subject, writing, there is bound to be crossover, overlapping and repetition, just the very things the blog warns you against! But, unless it becomes a blog novel, I don’t have to spend time doing excisions and elisions to give it a flow. This, of course, intimates that I have written about today’s subject before though this blog is tangential to the last offering on the subject
If you follow me on Twitter you will know that I am on a crushingly tough course to bring original thought to issues that perplex us. Every day I write a couple of zen-like mind benders. The art of reducing a complex concept to a few characters is time consuming even when you have developed the mental muscle to fashion such aphorisms. There are two purposes in doing it. The first is to continue to refine my mind-tool and practise control over language. The second is to persuade readers that my voice is intriguing, occasionally illuminating and a good test as to whether my novels are worth obtaining. Among my tweets are little adverts for my books. I hope they are sufficiently redolent of my other cryptic tweeting in their power to persuade.
My first tweet of today says: Stereotyping is how society tailors you a straitjacket
Stereotyping is a massive element in our lives far beyond race, gender and religion. We are conditioned to present ourselves from nursery school to the grave with  growing certainty, calling it maturity, as though we have discovered who we are and those around us can feel secure in our predictable identity. We learn to behave according to this template and find it extraordinarily difficult to do anything which contradicts it. Each time we try our society in the shape of friends, work colleagues and family try to push us back inside the casing we have developed. A great deal of literature concerns those individuals who break the mould, or have it broken by events and then try to come to terms with the changes forced upon them. The changes in a character give the reader the opportunity to identify with, and to play vicariously with, projected changes in his or her own life. There must be a novel which focuses on completely uninteresting people doing uninteresting things but, unless it is a post-modern (and unintentionally funny) antithesis of  the drama in normal literature, who among us will read it?
Most of the characters in Azimuth undergo change, even the minor ones and some undergo enormous geological disturbance. A minor character who brings an unearthly, sorcerous and mystifying colouring to the plot is my version of the old Lilith myth. If you don’t know her it is worth discovering how she refused to lie down under Adam and was booted out of Eden as a consequence. Since then she has been blamed for much of the wanton mayhem that erupts in civilized life. I won’t tell you who she is because the fact is disguised for much of the second Book. I advertised her presence like this among my regular tweets today:
In Hebrew texts Lilith was Adam’s first woman bringing blood, chaos and upheaval to humanity; she lives on in Azimuth: http://www.Azimuthtrilogy.com

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Friday, May 18, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 40
I had the problem that most writers have when they go back to draft novels they have written some time before, intending to refurbish them and flog them as ebooks. This is not to suggest that they are not good enough for publication on paper but, like hundreds of good to great pieces of fiction (!), they were declined owing to the subjectivity of the publishers’ new police, the agents. At least the internet provides a platform and if you can catch the zeitgeist of current literary preoccupations, your readers can do for you what that anonymous person in an office with rejection templates in front of her/him could not do. Or, better than that, you can break the mould and create new kinds of fiction.
Anyway, such was my problem with The Strange Attractor. I had worked like a slave on it but got many rejection slips, a few of which suggested that someone had read the first twenty five or so pages I had sent on their demand. I had a version of it on an old computer and so the raw material was there for a re-write. What did I discover about my former self, the individual who wrote it? What needed changing in the prose, characters and plot? As far as the ‘I’ that wrote it was concerned, the ten years had not made too much difference. I think I was less relaxed, possibly because writing was my night job. This evidenced itself in the sometimes cryptic nature of the prose. Given I could not give it the time I would have liked, somehow the prose reflected this. The dialogue was pared down too much. The descriptions were too skeletal. I think I was also being a bit too fancy dannish in my cleverness in an attempt to woo the agents. Perhaps there was an element of fantasy projection going on, too. Maybe I was looking for a new, exciting partner and created versions of her in my pages!
As far as the novel is concerned the most obvious issue that leapt from the page to smack me between the eyes, was how quickly it had become dated. Not in a good way. My re-writing involved being more tolerant of the need to explain, the desire to support the reader securely, to be less ambiguous, to ensure that the key turning points of the plot were well advertised (even in their veiled nature) and to revise street argot because it had already passed into retro-nerdism. The technology in the book (a key constituent) was what was prevalent before the miniaturisation revolution and even the attitudes between males and females did not sit well with the post feminist changes in society, so these, too, needed updating.
The re-write was slow and pernickety because it was  more a matter of changing the odd word or sentence on each page and making sure that everything in the book, spoke of a particular time in social history, particularly the way the ‘hero’ uses chaos theory to solve crime. (Strange Attractor is a key term in chaos theory but has undoubted strength in its metaphoric ambiguity, as a title). What I learned from the reupholstering of the book’s innards was to think more carefully about slang, the material things that date quickly and the social changes which make characters seem oddly behaved and out of place in the present day. Either I could have edited it as a period piece or brought it up to date. Doing the former would have meant a lot more research to couch my phraseology in those times (which is not my greatest skill) or refreshing as I went. That is what I did.
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange aka Jack Sanger, Kindle, Amazon

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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 39
Here is the beginning of the novella, Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story,I have just published on Kindle, Amazon. I wrote about its genesis two blogs ago. I thought I’d try to explain how I set about trapping the reader (hopefully!) at its onset.
It had happened with increasing regularity if you looked upon it from the vantage point of today. He was sure it had not occurred in the first thirty years. There must have been
isolated outposts of it over the next decade which he had put down to daydreams and
nothing more. But hardly any time seemed to go past now without some singular event.
They were both disturbing and exciting, a sinister mystery and a delight.
What was the most teasing aspect was that if he tried to capture them, using his mind
like a high speed camera to create a still, the images with which he should be left were
blank leaving him swimming in a void. On the contrary, if he did nothing but continue
with the unfettered run of his thoughts, they remained as a blurry background, something parallel and almost incorporeal. Almost.
The latest visitations were the most definitive yet in that in them he had a strong sense
of a female presence, if not of a reality around it.
While the story as a whole seems to engage very well I was unsure for a long time about what to do at the kick off. I wanted to put the reader immediately into a puzzle, whet his or her appetite and, as the story progresses, get him or her guessing increasingly about what is going on. On the latter score I am sure it seduces as a whodunwhat.
Given that it is a long short story, I decided that all the ingredients of the puzzle should be in the reader’s mind within the first couple of minutes of starting the story. Hence the reference to strange visitations, the high speed camera line and the enigmatic female presence. Being a horror story about taboo, with technology as part of its setting, it seemed essential to create an air of mystery and immediately precipitate the guessing game. Also, I wanted to provoke reader identification with the condition the main protagonist suffers. Most of us have experienced daydreams, dreams, nightmares and peculiarly bizarre thoughts beyond our immediate control. We tend to ignore them even while a part of us wonders at their import. This human condition of being vaguely aware that there is something beyond immediate reality was what I was trying to capture in the novella.
There were, when I last read the literature, two kinds of human learning; serial and parallel. If you are a serialist you like information in building blocks, logically connected until you have constructed the whole. If you are a parallelist then you start from the whole and gradual break it down to the component parts. Parallelists like all the information at the start. This is a novella for parallelists. Within a couple of chapters they have all the information they need. After that all is embroidery. Only the last line confirms or disconfirms their hypotheses regarding the plot.
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Jack Sanger Kindle, Amazon

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Monday, May 14, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 38
Repetition is the bane of the author. There is a high incidence of the repetition of a word or phrase within a single paragraph, never mind chapter!
Consequently there are many writers who sit with a thesaurus by their computer or notebook. Not many of us have a labyrinthine vocabulary and having at hand a resource which provides synonyms can help us produce a much more involving and entertaining text. (There are free ones on the internet).The issue for the writer is that the more intensely you operate in the ‘zone’, with words spewing from your tommy-gun-like-brain on to the paper – for there seems to be nothing inside your head to impede their progress – the more clichéd your writing becomes. Arrestingly innovative sentences help make a book. Using alternative words and phrases gee us up because they create hooks for our imaginations, momentarily, by stimulating our pleasure in the new and fresh. You have to be a very great writer indeed to write in a fever of concentration and still maintain originality and freshness in your choice of words. I remember reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and twice, maybe three times he talked of the hero ‘gunning’ his car away from some scene or the other. I felt short-changed. His writing is never more than adequate. The better the writer, the more he or she tries to avoid repetition of a word, be it noun, verb or adjective. I remember seeing a rather fine film set in my home city of Newcastle, called Get Carter. An excellent phrase was used by either a gangster or Caine, I can’t remember which, but whoever it was described the eyes in someone’s face as piss holes in the snow.  Then I happened to see a B movie some couple of years later and there was another gangster using the same phrase, attesting to its B movie status.  The same happens with novels. It is careless and lazy to plagiarise from other sources, as well as being an act of thievery against a fellow professional. It is also careless and lazy to plagiarise from your own novel, either a previous work or the one you are currently writing! Remember, plagiarism can be unconscious – the mere duplicating of words and phrases you have used already.
Essentially, most repetition within your work breeds banality and a lifeless prose. Avoid it.
Having said all that, when my editor read the first draft of Azimuth Book 1,she said she could not remember who some of the characters were because I did not repeat the ‘handles’ which enable the reader to follow characters through the plot.  Instead, I had resorted to a variety of synonyms when describing them. I learned that repetition might actually be necessary. The cast of characters in Azimuthruns into the hundreds and since for most of the inner narrative there are no names to distinguish individuals, I had focused on making my prose rich and diverse, offering different adjectives to describe a character every time he or she turned up, thereby confusing the reader. Using the same noun and adjective to re-introduce a character helped. The ‘fat boy’ is always reintroduced at his next entrance as the ‘fat boy’, not the plump boy, the rotund boy, the obese boy…. It is the same when introducing characters’ appearances. Try to give a unique visual profile to every one of them so that there can be no confusion. This extends to names. Don’t even include names beginning with the same first letter. Books are made from words, not visual images. Generally we can differentiate people easily in films and on TV by their features alone but in books we have to be sure we are including enough detail to make a character unique.
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric le Sange on Kindle Amazon
Azimuth by Jack Sanger, in three separate volumes on Kindle Amazon
Azimuth, the trilogy, in beautifully produced paperback (and PDF) www.azmuthtrilogy.com
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle, Amazon

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Sunday, May 13, 2012

The Art of Writing No.37
Today, I have released a novella called Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Storyas an ebook on Amazon Kindle. I thought it might be worth a little detail on how it came about.
I had made all the agreements with printers, typesetters and illustrator to ensure that Azimuth the paperback would come out on time and in reasonable nick, in fact a paperback with beauty and weight. Whilst I was waiting for Azimuth to be produced physically and before I began the long, hard road of marketing it, I decided to write a novella. I wanted to try something different, testing myself with a plot, characters and writing style far removed from the historical imagination of Azimuth.
The idea came to me when I was being introspective about my brain and my mind. Why was it that I experienced visions of people, events and environments that I had never encountered before, in daydreams? Where did they come from? Was my brain driving my mind to experience these events for some undisclosed purpose? This was heightened when an unknown beautiful woman reappeared a handful of times in my thoughts, I had the germ of a plot. The Cheshire Cat-like woman took me back to a poem I liked when young, Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot. In it there is a mysterious, almost ghost-like woman who has probably inhabited my unconscious ever since first encountering her.
I had no idea about plot line other than finding a literary way of explaining her visitations. I invented a character – or at least one leapt to the screen – whom I named, as soon as the story permitted,  William Jethro Blake. Blake, as you may know, saw visions much as he saw other forms of reality. The Jethro element referred to Jethro Tull, the gardener.
My first ten or so chapters came off my keys in a strange, dislocated, haphazard fashion, rather as the visions did, themselves. In fact, iteratively, I had William (or he had me) musing on exactly this lack of cohesivness to the narrative:
The consequence was that he found himself interrogating his notebook’s words and phrases for a pattern of meaning but they would not cohere and make sentences and paragraphs. They remained obstinately asynchronous, discrete, islands unto themselves. The experience defied that essential human capacity to make sense out of partial information. He had run writing classes and given people exactly the kind of hotchpotch he was now staring at and they would come up with a wonderful variety of story threads, combining them all as if the words were polarized magnets and could twist and turn to clump together. No, here they were repelling each other and refusing any attempt at union.
I moved on to the second half of the novella, intent on drawing all this disparate information into one flow of sense, giving the story a punch-line such as I described in the last blog. It came to me. The ending and the reason why the first ten chapters were written the way they were. Alchemy took place in my unconscious and I opened a portal and let it out. Have trust in the imagination. Ah the brain and the mind, they are our tools but may become our straitjackets, if we treat them as servants.
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric le Sange on Kindle Amazon
Azimuth by Jack Sanger, in three separate volumes on Kindle Amazon
Azimuth, the trilogy, in beautifully produced paperback (and PDF) www.azmuthtrilogy.com

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Saturday, May 12, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 36
When Little Nell died she caused a national outpouring of grief in Victorian industrial Britain. Readers of the chapter by chapter novel The Old Curiosity Shopimplored Dickens to find a way out, a resurrection of the character. In its time it was the epitome of fine writing about a deeply difficult subject. But, not so long after, in the literary scheme of things, Oscar Wilde said,
“One must have a heart f stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
Writing about death, to be effective and keep the reader’s attention and empathy, is a matter of hermeneutics. Everything about it must ring true to both the context of the story and the time when a person reads it. Of course we can read about the demise of Nell today, and enjoy it even while we regard it as mawkish and sentimental. We make allowances for the period and transport ourselves back to what it must have been like to have a Victorian sensibility. Most of us will write about death or the dead at some point. In The Strange Attractor I described an illicit visit to the morgue to watch a post mortem. That was easy in the sense that the bodies were dead and the act of dying lay outside the narrative. Also the attitude of the observer, Edward Silver, a private detective, was cool and detached. But in Azimuth, a major character is killed. I tried to write about grief and death within the context of the book, sentimentality not being a dominant trait among my characters.
They seated her body, her head bowed, on her roan, holding her there from either side and walked slowly to the nearest high ground, a small, exposed cliff of brittle red stone. They laid her along its base and the Warrior took powders from saddle bags and mixed them before working them into a crack in the vertical face just above her prone form.
  Whatever she had been before her death was no longer evident no matter how much he reached his mind out to her, –May your spirit go where you have always wished it, he said in a soft, caressing tone, -And may further life spring from your decay.
  -Goodbye my Grandmother, whispered his daughter in a breaking voice, bending to straighten the dead woman’s hair, so that her tears fell upon the lined face. She and her father looked down upon what seemed too tiny a form for so powerful a woman, dressed as always in a warrior’s garb, knife in her belt and sword in her hand.
Looking at it now I remember going over and over the lines which included:
  -Goodbye my Grandmother, whispered his daughter in a breaking voice, bending to straighten the dead woman’s hair, so that her tears fell upon the lined face.
Was I being mawkish? I think I certainly was in my initial descriptions of the burial. I said far too much about the granddaughter’s emotions. In the end I opted for these short lines of a sorrow that breaks through her disciplined and wise nature. You must decide.
When writing something like Azimuth (perhaps within the canon of moral sagas like Lord of the Rings, Beowulf or His Dark Materials) I was always aware that I had to integrate a modern day audience’s rejection of cloying emotion with the harsher times of my characters. It is part of the macro business of persuading readers that this vast, cyclical drama, though it is ostensibly about the changes in a man who begins as a warrior and ends as a sage, is relevant to people’s lives today and the period is immaterial when it comes to being human.
Books by Jack Sanger (aka Eric le Sange)
Azimuth by Jack Sanger paperback and PDF www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth, the ebook, by Jack Sanger in separate volumes Amazon Kindle
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Amazon Kindle
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric le Sange , Amazon Kindle

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Friday, May 11, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 35
Jacques Derrida and others of the postmodern literary circus, formulated a theory that it was impossible to produce unequivocal, unambiguous prose. Whatever you do as a writer, no matter how much of a Hemingway or Beckett you might want to be in the Spartan simplicity of your text, it will be read equivocally and ambiguously. Other meaning, said Derrida, leaks out. Reception Theory suggests that every reader reads with a unique interpretation. Fifty readers, fifty different books. Now I have said earlier that one of the ways we might attribute value to writing is to ask if a book lends itself to multiple interpretations. While acknowledging that even simple prose can produce wildly differing understanding (think about instructions to build a wardrobe), more complex expression extends it to infinity.
But the point to be made is this, the ambiguities of great literature are rich and lead to a far greater depth of discourse because the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts, the words. The very use of language, its poetry, its apparent verisimilitude, its authentic dialogue, its factual accuracy, its labyrinthine plots, its realistic and complex characters, all and much more, conspire to beguile the reader.  And the closer you are to achieving such quality, the more you must be diligent over key turning points in your narrative. For example, if you are writing a crime novel, you will lay down, you hope unobtrusively, clues that will later prove to be threads in the rope of the plot. For this to work, each character must be in the proper place at the proper time, every motive and relationship must be credible. Look through your narrative and decide where the key junctures are – and then go over what you have written at these points and make sure you have refined them as much as humanly possible. There is nothing worse than finding yourself (as I have mentioned before) in the position of  Raymond Chandler, caught out by film makers who discovered his plot did not stack up. As I have suggested, people will still interpret and believe they have read something that was not there, as a consequence, but on revisiting the vital section, they will grudgingly concede that you couldn’t have done more to inform them. Indeed, good writing leads the reader to acknowledge your arts in deceiving him or her, long enough to get a good tale told.
When I was writing Azimuth I became very befuddled because I was dealing with an extraordinary long time line and children were being born and growing up, events were happening that changed the course of later history, people said and did things which bent the fate lines. I had to create a flow chart at the end and check whether my time line actually worked over generations. I made alterations. I located passages that seemed to me to be main springs to the health of the book and worked on them again.
It is very difficult to get everything in a 300 page novel absolutely perfect but manage the key scenes for the plot to work and you will evade much criticism. Reading for most people, most of the time, involves unconscious editing as they go. They miss bits out of your writing without knowing it. They are not doing a Masters course in literary criticism so it does not matter to them.  Key scenes are their stepping stones across the river of the life of the novel. Don’t let your readership get swept away because you have not made the footholds solid and supportive.
Azimuth trilogy paperback by Jack Sanger available at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth by Jack Sanger in 3 separate ebooks at Kindle (Amazon)

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Thursday, May 10, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 34
Once you are writing every day and your imagination begins to bulk up on its muscle, ideas come to you many times every day regarding plot lines. I said in an earlier blog how some writers carry an ideas book in their pocket and note down the significant in what they are experiencing whether it be the looks of a person, a few lines of dialogue, a landscape, or a telling aberration in their physical or mental worlds. Some writers have files of recorded data which see them through the lean times when, otherwise, a portcullis of a writer’s block might fall across productivity. The notion of having such a resource is more appealing as a concept than a reality for many writers. You only have to look at the planet to realize that humans find it difficult to plan and conserve, against the future. We exploit instead.
Anyway, as I said, ideas come to you (like dreams) the more you make ready for them and reward them with records of their appearance!
Here is a typical example. I watched a documentary last night on science and the light it casts on the nature of life. Like many such programmes it did not quench my thirst. I’d love to know what is the factor that stokes up the extraordinary mechanism that we call DNA. At one point in the programme it was stated that scientists over the next decade or two will create the first unicellular life form. Immediately I thought of a neat Sci Fi short story. At the moment these cells are made and escape from the laboratory, a cataclysm wipes out humanity. Over millions of years they develop into the varieties of complex life we see today; until scientists reach the point where they can create their first unicellular life form… The twist in the tale involves the realization that we are in a never ending loop of creation and destruction. Very Hindu. It would have to be written so that this is disclosed at the very end of the tale.
In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler suggests that creativity, in the main, comes from taking two disparate pieces of knowledge and bringing them together to create a third, already known but not, until then, with any connection to the first two. This happens in music, maths and comedy. In music, the final movement may resolve the countervailing nature of what has gone before. In maths, the QED in an equation (forgive my O Level knowledge) produces a pleasing line of proof from separate and hitherto unconnected pieces of mathematical information. In comedy we have the punch line.  I even use the latter to set the scene in the website for Azimuth:
A samurai once asked Zen Master Hakuin where he would go after he died.
Hakuin answered “How am I supposed to know?”
“How do you know? You’re a Zen master!” exclaimed the samurai.
“Yes, but not a dead one,” Hakuin answered. – Zen mondo
On a grand scale, a novel does the same. The ending should be an intellectually and pleasing denouement which brings together what seems contradictory or paradoxical and shows that a logic pertains to all the books events.
Azimuth by Jack Sanger (paperback and PDF at www.azimuthtrilogy.com)
Azimuth (separate volumes of the trilogy) as ebooks also on Amazon Kindle

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Tuesday, May 8, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 33
I was reading blogs yesterday about the art of writing for ebooks. There were many interesting asides in them, comparing ebooks to traditional paper based literature.
The first one was the splendid (for the author) notion that a book is never out of print once it has been fired into the stratosphere.  It hovers forever to be discovered by generation after generation whereas books go out of print and an author is very lucky indeed for resurrection to occur once the publisher has disposed of the last copy. It also means that as fads and fashions come and go, a novel can come into its own at a time the zeitgeist chooses. Since one of the lines of argument in these blogs is that we authors are satisfying a desire for some kind of legacy through our writing, ebooks may be our eternal children, or our virtual tombstones with extraordinarily long epitaphs written upon them!
The second is the malleability of an ebook when compared with the traditional form. I spent so many months with illustrators and printers producing Azimuth to get the quality of cover image, paper and a layout that does justice to the complex multi-leaved essence of the story, but with an ebook this final form is never reached. I know that subsequent editions of a successful paper based book usually bring with them changes in art and format, yet the process is still static once these decisions have been made. With an ebook that does not sell, you can change its appeal. You can write a new, more dynamic synopsis, add a new front cover and even change the label (this being the way the book is pigeon holed; crime, romance, SF, fantasy…). It makes one think of Paul Valery, the French poet, who said “A poem is never finished, merely abandoned”. Thus it is with enovels. Indeed, should your reviewers all point to a passage in your book that that they feel undermines the book’s general quality, you can re-write it and insert the change.
Third, it is liberating to feel that your novel is not a hostage to fortune in the shape of the preconceptions and subjective judgments of agents and publishers, nor, if it leaps those hurdles, the reviewers in the press. It all comes down to your work and the reactions of your readers. Will they enjoy it? Will they text their friends and tell them how good it is? Will the book snowball on the back of a gathering storm of readership? However, your book is not in a bookshop. It is not a physical entity. And this classical way of selling stories is the one where currently the big money is made. Not for much longer, though. To counteract traditional selling techniques, you have to shepherd your audience to your ebook by equally effective, but innovative forms of marketing.
I write this blog and hope it directs readers to Azimuth. If they like what I say and how I say it, it can help persuade them I am genuine and the book should be a great read. I tweet aphorisms every day to a similar end: @profjacksanger. Today’s first one is:
Religions are insurance companies offering a single policy, life after death, asking you to take it on trust that there will be a payout
Then there’s Facebook and Linkedin. But marketing is hard work. Are you prepared for the daily grind and will your imagination’s well never run dry?
Azimuth (the paperback trilogy) by Jack Sanger at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth by Jack Sanger in ebook in 3 separate volumes Amazon Kindle
Jack Sanger also writes under the nom de plume Eric le Sange and his work appears on Amazon Kindle

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Monday, May 7, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 32
The advantage of writing a blog is that you are not restricted by the logics of publication. Your various outpourings may overlap and reiterate what has gone before. Like much of writing it has a special capacity for helping you articulate what is an evanescence until it is put into words and becomes moored in your thought. When I was an academic we used the phrase, writing yourself into knowledge.  The act of writing can be, therefore, a primary act of formulation.
One of the absolute pleasures of writing is finding that you have conversed with your unconscious and drawn into view a flame which had, until then, remained a trickling line of smoke indicating there was a fire somewhere. This fishing into the depth of self becomes easier over time as you learn to trust it. Like a sportsman or woman, at the height of his or her powers, who plays intuitively, beyond the intercession of thought, you are hardly aware of the substance in what you have written until you examine it later, as its first reader. It is then that you have to decide how authentic it is, how much is plagiarised or pure! The pinnacle of such experience is in writing poetry which, like music, tells its truths as a potent alchemy that is more than the mere words on the page. Meanings echo and ricochet away from it, ad infinitum. The more you work with your imagination, the more it comes up trumps. The result can be an insight akin to that delivered by ‘automatic writing’ or ‘stream of consciousness’, a kind of authorial therapy, but it can also be the route that takes you into exciting realms beyond the conformity of your previous work.
This process evidences itself most in the way you manage the themes that underlie your work. I have already discussed their place in your narratives. Finding a fresh way to express the complexity of these themes can result directly from the unusual metaphors and insights that erupt from your unconscious, unfettered by the shackles of logic. And this is also true of descriptions of places, people and events. Having no fixed sense of any of these and allowing the creative juices to bring them to the fore can produce the strikingly real and unusual. The plasticity of your brain can either be increased by the appeal to the imagination or decreased by a rigid approach to expressing exactly what you have pre-ordained.
I watched a programme last night about human survival in the icy wastes of the far north. An igloo was built. It was almost exactly how I described an igloo being built in Azimuth. Now, many of you would have googled the strategies for building these ice houses before writing. Fine. But then you have the problem of making what you have researched seem natural and part of the flow of the narrative. When I wrote it, I WAS there with my characters solving the problem of how to survive a terrible night and so it came out in the very portrayal of traits, place and dialogue. I hope I am not sounding too vain here, it is as dispassionate as I can make it and, as I have said before, you can check my introspective analysis by reading the relevant section in the third Book, The Final Journey.
Azimuth by Jack Sanger, the paperback trilogy from www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth as separate E-Books, The First Journey, The Second Journey, The Final Journey) from Kindle Amazon or as PDFs at www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Sunday, May 6, 2012

The Art of Writing No 31
I have written about how the first paragraph of you novel can seduce the reader in the bookshop or on a website. The opening paragraph of a novel should really be returned to, time and again. It is probably the most refined piece of writing in the whole book. Almost equal to it is the final paragraph. Why it comes second is that usually it is not a factor in someone actually buying the book though I do know people who read the end first to see whether they are going to like it!
The worst that can happen in writing is finding too late that your novel is a cul de sac, that the end just will not come or cannot be satisfactorily resolved. The second worst problem is finding a perfectly adequate ending that leaves the reader feeling underwhelmed. The third worst finale is disbelief and anger at being led up the garden path to no purpose. The fourth is an artificial tying up of all the loose ends – even though people love closure and have done so since the time of Dickens. Modern audiences, however, want resolution tinged with a little uncertainty. Realism should prevail and life is never that tidy.
Best endings tend to be the reverse. As I was outlining above about opening paragraphs, repeated returns to the end game help you, consciously or unconsciously, to find a path to the conclusion which sits naturally in your narrative.
Since I write organically and have no idea of the ending, I use my growing reminder sheet at the bottom of my draft to suggest possible endings. Over time, these get scrubbed out, leaving the one that will go live and even that will be modified at the very end. In Azimuth there are two stories, like entwined DNA, both being long and complex and each ending falls, only two or three pages from the other, at the very culmination of the book. You can read the reviews of Azimuth on the Kindle site or on my Azimuth site (see below) to check out the effect the endings have on readers.
In Miseryby Stephen King, the story hinges on a female fan of a novelist who kidnaps him to try to stop him killing off the main character in a series of successful books. An ending she could not condone after all the endings she has read in the series. It is the perfect illustration that endings must satisfy. We understand her fiendish fanaticism and identify with it. Thus, King provides uswith a great ending about the nature of endings!
After reading Azimuth, a friend said she felt bereft. “But what is happening to those wonderful part-humans, now? she asked, “I miss them and worry about them.”
Azimuth by Jack Sanger in paperback and PDF at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth  by Jack Sanger in separate volumes on Kindle Amazon

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Saturday, May 5, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 30
Returning to the subject of ‘themes’ in novel writing: a couple of blogs ago I outlined the thesis that you can elevate the quality of your work by having your characters wrestle with issues that are current, perennial, local or universal. In Azimuth one of my central protagonists spends his life searching for enlightenment but, in the mean time, being deflected from his course by adventures. A bit like Odysseus, unable to get home as the gods seek to thwart his plans. So, at the heart of the 66 Tales within the three volumes, this man returns again and again to this theme, exploring it through the eyes of the people he meets and via introspection on what befalls him. I hope there is no heavy sermonizing at any time. I am an agnostic but wanted to write in an open way so that the reader could follow his or her paths to personal understanding. The reviews suggest that many people were buoyed up and stimulated by this theme. Others just loved the mystery and unpredictability of the adventures themselves, as well as those of the historian who tells the tales.
All good novels smuggle in far more than their genre might require. A novel is a Trojan horse which you take inside the walls of your mind, willingly, and once there begins to stir up your thinking. If, as an author, you want to proselytize because you are, say, a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim – whatever – the effect could be somewhat censorious. The only people who will enjoy your work are those committed to your belief. Your books become self-fulfilling prophecies. But if you write in such a way that the ambiguities of belief, the case for and against, is represented naturally through the thoughts and actions of your characters, then you will draw in many more readers. You do not wish to convert them but merely get them thinking. Your dialogue becomes Socratic.  Representing good vanquishing all evil in a cut and dried narrative leaves critical readers thinking ‘but that is not like life’ and doubting the integrity of your tale. For me, raising critical consciousness is central to fictional writing. A critically aware population is far less likely to accept any form of totalitarianism.
You may think this is a bit high falutin’ when all you want to do is write something which is a good read. So be it. I believe that fiction has more purchase over the way people develop a skeptical approach to what is presented to them by all media than any number of sermonizing tracts.. Novelists have responsibilities, whether they are writing to a formula or are attempting something grander in scope.  The classic ingredients in storytelling; good vs evil, the so-called battle of the sexes, the moral dilemma of killing, utopian ideals vs messy human reality, innocence and experience and many more, if ignored in your work, may make it appear superficial. Touching on themes such as these, allowing some characters to play out their dramas around them, can lift your work on to a different level.
Azimuth by Jack Sanger www.azimuthtrilogy.com
The three Azimuth books also in Kindle Amazon

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Friday, May 4, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 29
A possibly difficult area for any novelist concerns writing about the opposite sex. We know that in a number of genres, male-written books tend to make women sex objects, crime victims and adornments to their hard drinking, all-action heroes. On the other side of the coin, there are women writers who portray men in an equally simplistic manner; lantern-jawed, tousle haired, romantic and strong. Or whatever. Dan Brown’s books give little insight into character, not that it has affected sales since the plot line appealed to a readership that wanted conspiracy and religion tied into a narrative bundle. And what better title than The Da Vinci Code? If Brown had managed real depth of character maybe the books would have won an even greater audience – and literary prizes. The point being made is that writers often portray the opposite sex as little more than clothes hangers.
I wrote earlier that  writers need to challenge and test the possibility of stereotyping in their work. Are the characters rounded? Do they do unexpected things? Are they shaded from good to bad? Are there as many female as male minor characters in the general background of your tale?
It is worth spending time on characters you have introduced. You may base them on people you have known or you may invent them from the mélange of types that swim in your head. If you are a male writer, are you sure you are making your women independent of you and not the stuff of your fantasies? Or payback for hurt? Or an unfulfilling relationship with your mother? The opposite for female writers. The cliché is that women are emotional and men are rational, women have intuition but can’t read maps, particularly dim blondes. Men are not in touch with their emotions and take risks. Women multi-task and men are serialists when it comes to work. Any reading of research on cognition would make you dismiss most of this as claptrap. It is better to evolve complexity and forget gender until it actually matters in conflict, sex or other interactions between the sexes.
In Azimuth there are many more strong and unusual women than men. The main protagonists are equally divided in gender. By being determined to display a whole range of types, both male and female, over the ten years of writing the three volumes, the pages became peopled by idiosyncratic individuals. As I’ve suggested before about writing Zen aphorisms, once you get into the swing of developing new ways of seeing and writing, the muscle hardens and the work becomes easier. Early female readers have told me they love the women and can find much to identify with. Perhaps you will find the same when you read it but I’d be as interested if you don’t!
Azimuth by Jack Sanger at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth Book 1, 2, 3 separate also in Kindle Amazon

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Thursday, May 3, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 28
I began a writing MA at the University of East Anglia around 1970. I was the only student and I followed the year after Ian McEwan. I did not succeed the vagaries of the course which then required you to do two terms of the Literature MA. I left after the first term feeling I had more to offer as a social worker than a writer! My tutor had been Malcolm Bradbury. He said I had a messianic drive to offer answers to the unanswerable. Curiously, I hadn’t even thought of my work that way. Now I have written Azimuthand what is it about? – people who search for answers to the unanswerable, albeit on a rollercoaster of mystery and adventure! Probably many authors feel they have something to say that might change readers’ perceptions or attitudes to some aspect of existence, big or small.
Even among the majority of writers, those who make their niches within a strict genre, there is a desire to turn the odd phrase, expand on a concept, throw in a philosophical swerve ball, all to make the reader sit up and say Ah! as s/he experiences a shock of illumination. As I’ve said in earlier pieces, writers are the gods of the book-worlds they create. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author explores just such a theme.  The film The Matrixtransposes it to computer programs in which the avatars want to discover who has created them and rules their virtual universe. Blade Runner has replicants (artificially designed humanoid creatures who can work in deep space) returning to earth to find who built them.  The relationship between an author and characters sits on a spectrum, as I have said, between cipher and flesh and blood, three-dimensional reality. The more you veer towards the latter, the more your characters must influence the narrative. This often results in us asking the following lit crit questions; is the theme one that matters? Do the characters change and develop because of how they experience the effects of the theme in their lives?
For there to be a positive answer to these questions there need to be substantive issues running through the narrative which are returned to over and over again, explicitly or implicitly, via the actions, attitudes and insights of the book’s characters. They can be the thin skin of civilization in Lord of the Flies, the pantheistic glorification of sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, totalitarianism in 1984 and Animal Farm or agnosticism in His Dark Materials.  On the other hand, the themes may be small scale and intensely psychological but recognisable within most people’s lives, such as father and son relationships in A Voyage Around my Father. The more a book’s characters are engaged in some way in trying to handle and navigate what we all find complex and challenging, the more they grow in significance. They cease to be run of the mill, two dimensional appendages to the narrative. They become extensions of ourselves.
All literature, whether formulaic or idiosyncratic and organic, benefits from the author’s dexterity and focus on questions that vex most of us, from the apparently imponderable to the depressingly or upliftingly ubiquitous. They can be like a trace of spice in a bowl of rice or a rich and satisfying sauce on a meal that has taken days to prepare. Depends on what you are writing.
Details on Azimuth can be found at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
 

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Tuesday, May 1, 2012

The Act of Writing No. 27
Excelling at what you do, you would think to be a basic human aspiration. It is not. Having, in my previous life, been a management researcher/consultant working with dozens of organizations, I found that a large proportion of staff in these workplaces were content to ‘get by’. This lack of drive to achieve cannot be tolerated in writing. Even if you are writing to strict formulae laid down by genres such as bodice rippers, manga-inspired graphic novels, zombie horror or elfin fantasies and your publisher or agent is draconian in what might or might not be included, a writer can never be less than rigorous in delivering the goods.
There is a received wisdom that one in a hundred novels is completed, one in a thousand is published and one in ten thousand makes money. The odds against becoming another J K Rowling, therefore, are heavily weighted against success. Writing, as I have advanced in earlier blogs, requires the individual to be convinced that this is as arduous as anything s/he has done in life thus far.
They say that everyone has a novel in them. As a general rule, the first novel tends to rest heavily upon personal history. So, a useful adage is that you have to be able to exorcise the demons of your biography in order for you to free yourself up to write, unencumbered by the almost conscious desire for expiation. There will be some whose novels are perennially snatched from their lives, so rich have these been but most writers do not share and have not experienced the environment, plot and challenges through which they put their characters. Most rely on a vivid imagination and empathy. This is not to say that an in-depth knowledge of a field of interest does not provide you with rich pickings to play with, a realistic context for your plot. In The Strange Attractor I write about a crowd arriving at a football match. Having worked on a research project for the Home Office on crowd control and having been a supporter of Newcastle United since I was six or seven, did me no harm. I was able to take my central character, an amoral detective, and place him in that context. I knew what he was going to experience BUT I was freed up to let him react to it in his own way, not mine. You can pillage your biography all the time but, having written the first novel, this pillaging becomes less an obvious reflection of how you navigated the vicissitudes of your life story and more a multi-textured backdrop to what your characters have to face. These characters are no longer different facets of yourself but capable of sustaining a rounded, independent existence from you.
That’s it in a nutshell. Once you jettison the need for therapy from your writing you can face the greater challenges and personal fulfillment of creating new worlds, ones that you have not and are unlikely ever to occupy.  A new kind of therapy takes over, not expiation for past deeds but a continuous flow of illumination about yourself that helps you feel capable of dealing with whatever the present throws at you. You establish yourself as a storyteller in your tribe. How energizing is that?
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon
Azimuth by Jack Sanger (www.azimuthtrilogy.com)

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Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 26
Many people reading this will be from the new medium of e-book writing. Given the extraordinary sales of e-readers over the last couple of years, it is obvious that this medium is going to be the main outlet for creative writing in the future. The previous blogs seem to me to be equally appropriate for physical and virtual books but there are notable differences that are worth a note or two.
Producing your book for Kindle, IPad or Sony (apart from a reliance on teckie knowhow, yours or an agency’s, to translate your book into an acceptable format) gives you a great deal of power over your finished product. It is you who decides how pages look, what font, what glyphs (symbols that act as dividers within chapters) and what cover. In other words you become a designer-writer. Some of you will baulk at the very notion, preferring to stick to what you think you know best but others may find this previously barricaded world, worth breaching. I read a friend’s new book this year and the cover looked as though it had been designed by an android. It had nothing to recommend it. Remember that a great percentage of buyers in bookshops buy books after being attracted by their covers. Now, when you buy e-books, you also have a facsimile cover to help persuade you.
My three recent books (five if you split Azimuth into its three volumes) gave me a great deal of pleasure in the formative stages of designing their covers. In two cases I gave the book to a designer to read and also outlined a rough brief. She (Hollie Etheridge www.holsterdesign.com) offered a variety of interpretations for me to look at. I chose what was nearest to my projected vision and suggested amendments and then, through this iterative process, all was accomplished, a JPeg was sen to me and I uploaded it in the relevant area of the site.
The front cover has to grab. Since Azimuth is a multi-layered, historical fable, the cover had to represent mystery, Tale-telling and adventure set in a Persian empire. Hollie produced the following:
In The Strange Attractor, a crime novel with echoes of Raymond Chandler, the aim was to have that nourish, amoral feel to it, harking back to the forties and fifties:
With Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Romance, I worked with my wife who is excellent at PhotoShop. This probably allowed even more hands-on decision making. The aim was to represent a novella which tells a tale about rupture in family life and which explores the capacity of the mind to deceive and inveigle:
So, you see, creating a book can be extended by new technologies and the author can have an even greater sense of omnipotence over his or her world!
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle, Amazon
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Romance

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Saturday, April 28, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 25
How deep do you delve into your main character(s)?
It’s a question that faces all novelists. Revealing character has a spectrum from the implicit to the direct but usually it has to be some mixture of the two. By implicit  (in the extreme) I mean that character is being explored through actions and without the author adding his or her pennyworth through direct descriptions of people’s traits and attitudes. The reader makes up his or her mind through the accumulation of evidence as the book marches on. At the other extreme, the entire character is laid on a slab and forensically dissected in a ‘pre-mortem’, so to speak.
Most readers appear to like some balance between the two. They like their characters introduced as they enter the fray of the narrative so that they can ‘see’ them and sense the same kind of information they would get at a first flesh and blood meeting. Then they would like them to develop as they navigate the extraordinary circumstances you have arranged for them. A well described character at the outset, who does not develop, results in the novel’s hold on the reader being entirely dependent upon the intricacies of plot, like in an Agatha Christie. Do we learn that much more about Poirot than we gain in the very first pages he graces? Poirot’s adventures are more like crossword puzzles than an illuminated manuscript. The characters are roughly daubed and tend to be stereotypes.
Here is how I introduce the Historian in Azimuth:
If a man could be said to be constructed from the tools of his work, then Kamil was just such a man. He laboured with pen and paper and from them he built history. His flesh was as dry and pale as bleached parchment, his blood so dark it could have been extracted from crushed beetles and yet his intelligence was as sharp as the knife he used to give edge to his quills…”
Kamil is a typical scholar of the period, fat and preoccupied with library affairs. Over the 920 pages he becomes a detective, falls in love, faces death and… commits acts of which he is less than proud. All the while we are privy to his inner thoughts about what he has to face. At the end I was very tied to him. He was more real to me than many acquaintances. But I am just one reader of my work. And it is for you to determine how three dimensional he becomes.
When you are editing your book, it is worth tracing whether the events you have included in your narrative are leading gradually to greater understanding of your dramatis personae or leaving abandoning them as two dimensional ciphers.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com (for paperback and PDFs)
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon
Azimuth by Jack Sanger  Books 1, 2, 3 on Kindle Amazon

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Friday, April 27, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 24
I thought I’d mumble on a bit about first person and third person characters in your writing.
In many ways, writing in the first person is more difficult because it challenges the reader to identify with the ‘I’ in your story as opposed to ‘he’ or ‘she’.  There is a far greater degree of distancing when your hero or heroine is depicted in the third person.  The reader has choice as to how much s/he identifies with your central character when ‘he ‘or ‘she’ does this or that, whereas if it is an “I’ who is doing it, the reader is faced with the direct question as to whether he or she would ever do such a thing or feel like that. Given the way that most narratives are, it is also easier to write in the past tense. The past tense also allows some distancing and emphasises the storification of people’s lives. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there“,  was the wonderful line by L P Hartley that emphasises my point. We are used to being entertained in this way, from early childhood fairy tales.
Writing in the present tense is not particularly unconventional but it is a strain on the writer. Having written a novel in the continuous first person present about a Marlowe-like Private Dick, The Strange Attractor’ I found when I started editing for the third time, I still had sections that had slipped into the past tense. You may be better at it than me! The real difficulty is in conveying dramatic action. “I am punching him as he grabs my throat. I fall back, half-exhausted” or, “I press my lips against hers and watch as her eyes half close but a glint…”  can be very effective and even seductive but you have to do it through the whole novel. The third person present tense is a little easier, maybe. But nowhere near as easy as third person past tense.
In Azimuth, all but the first Tale is in the past tense but in the first Tale I use the continuous third person present. I wanted to draw the reader into the birth of the central character in all the Tales and make it dramatic. It starts the whole train of events, lasting 3 books and 920 pages! Since it happens while the mother is being hunted down by assassins it was an effort of concentration to keep to the format.
Mixing first and third person narratives can give a multi-dimensional set of perspectives on a Tale as events are seen through different characters’ eyes. Mixing past tense and continuous present provides an equally rich range of possibilities as we move from a past period to the present. If you prefer to map out your work before you start, you can work out the different media you are going to utilize to make your work truly gripping. If you are more organic in your approach, you will find yourself wrestling with the narrative constantly – but, we hope, fruitfully.
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange, Kindle Amazon

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Thursday, April 26, 2012

The Art of Writing No 23
A game I used to play when waiting for someone in a bar or sitting waiting to be called to the departure gate for a plane, in fact whenever I had not had the sense to bring something along to entertain myself, was ‘scenarios’. Before developing the fluid structure of the game I had occasionally found myself wondering about one or two people around me because the way they dressed or talked or acted made them the centre of attention. Then I began to think of the sin  of omission – why was I not as attracted to the rest of my immediate humanity? I remember teachers in school being faced with describing the children in their classes. The research showed that there was a hierarchy of connection (good or bad) with a percentage of pupils but there were also many who just slipped through classroom life, unnoticed. Once I had started down this road and tried to observe people equally, life became immeasurably more interesting. I even wrote an academic book called The Compleat Observer for researchers.
My observation led me to create scenarios for the people around me; their histories, current circumstances, ambitions, sexuality, psychologies… It had the effect of broadening the range of characterization which was later to prove handy when writing fiction. The best bit about it (since we humans love solving conundrums) was seeing whether predictions about people turned out to be true. Of course, among strangers this was rarely possible but during an evening an occasional hit made me grin to myself. “He is having an affair with a younger woman and is waiting nervously for her”. “He is going to be stood up.” “ She is sad and waiting for a friend to join her and commiserate.” On the other hand, the occasions when my predictions proved utterly wide of the mark, showed how I, like many I know, have inbuilt ways of seeing that belittle the potential of those around me. They weren’t sad. They were not poor. They could be massively extrovert.
This all adds up to understanding what stereotyping really is and how dangerous it is for the writer. It is far more than crude gender dichotomies, race, religion and so on, it is within us at all times and is part of the way that we construct the world. A novelist has the advantage that all the characters in his or her novels are as transparent as needs be even when they begin as strangers to the author and gradually, as the plot thickens, take on a flesh and blood reality with any number of subtle psychologies. We read books where only the main characters have any claim to be life-like. The rest have walk on parts and may not even be graced with a description or name. Tom Stoppard’s Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a lovely poke at how we write off minor characters by giving them a complex life beyond anything Shakespeare had decided for them.
So, the point of this little essay is to ask you whether you are caring for the whole of humanity in your fictional universe. To be fair to your characters (whether good or evil) have you said enough to make them sufficiently real to please the reader? Have you looked round the bar of your novel and given time to those you would once have ‘written off’’ without even knowing it?

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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 22
What differentiates a professional writer from a writer, i.e. any literate individual? In the last blog I showed examples of how we must interfere with regular brain patterns to produce something worth reading as a fictional artefact. Just because everyone can run doesn’t mean that they are athletes worth entering for prizes and being watched by millions. Obviously, being a professional writer involves discriminating your text from the humdrum realities of every day communication. Under normal circumstances your brain is tuned to do the minimum required to accomplish any act. So – knitting is difficult at first and requires programming the brain to do pearl and plain and follow graphic patterns but soon you can knit and watch the television – or, during the French Revolution, watch heads roll under the guillotine. Knitting is relegated to an autonomous part of the brain.
Establishing a unique style that is communicative and expressive and draws readers into your world needs an interference with basic brain patterns, as I have said. Just as with knitting, editing our writing is extremely onerous and laborious at first. By being ruthless with our work, appraising every word, finding better similes and metaphors, cutting out flab and all the tiny acts of improvement in which we must engage, our writing becomes more honed and effective. And, like knitting, as we exercise our brain muscle and write in a disciplined way every day, we find the need for drastic editing actually diminishes. Our brains become configured to what becomes known as our ‘style’. This does not mean that editing becomes eliminated. Not at all. But it does mean that editing can concentrate on felicitous expression rather than the chopping away of crude surpluses. Raymond Carver, long regarded as the master of the concise short story, never mastered it. Latterly, it turns out that his unheralded editor did it. Whether true or not, the essence of the story is that it is in the editing that style is finally nailed to the page.
It took me three months to edit Azimuth, with professional help and I still find slight wrinkles that irk me.It took my alter ego, Eric le Sange, a month to do the same for The Strange Attractor.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon

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Monday, April 23, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 21
A further note on writing dialogue.
People speak with different sentence lengths or breaks, they use personal metaphors, their language varies in richness and substance yet much of what passes for speech in novels is barely differentiated. The writer often uses his characters to talk the plot along but not deepen our sense of individuality.
Trying to separate out characters has to be done via our descriptions of what they look like, what they wear and some account of how they speak. By doing this the writer builds a mental construct for each character and should enter that construct every time the character talks. Reading aloud what has been written helps to pinpoint what is different about the individual – particularly reading dialogue aloud with or to a friend.
From the reader’s perspective each character is signposted. A verbose person is easily differentiated from a brusque one, a child’s metaphor and simplicity of language from an adult’s, an individual’s acuity from a dunce’s denseness. Gradually, as empathy with each character becomes more easily experienced and transposed into text, dialogue takes on a robust strength and the writer finds that he or she does not need to scaffold conversation with constant descriptions of how the character is speaking or feeling (“he interjected angrily”, “she said sadly”, “he agreed amusedly” etc). As I pointed out in an earlier blog, once framed  a conversation can elicit much that you don’t need to put into words. Much of the time a question mark, a few dots or an exclamation mark delicately steers the reader through the conversation as though he or she is listening with a glass at the wall of a private chamber.
In The Strange Attractor I tried always to maintain the central character’s flip, Marlowesque speech patterns but diluted by his sense of impotence at events. In Azimuth I spent much of the time in female characters. Many of them and all different. It was a test to create speech patterns that served their profiles.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon 
Twitter @profjacksanger

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Sunday, April 22, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 20
There is a very appropriate zen tale of the centipede who is asked how he manages to coordinate all those legs and promptly falls into a ditch. Like the centipede we do a hundred things without ever questioning them.
It is very difficult and takes a great deal of diligence and practice to refashion your writer’s mind. Recent developments in cognitive psychology show that the brain is almost infinitely plastic which means that by adopting new habits and rituals we can reinforce new ways of seeing and doing. The other day I watched  a documentary as a young man, blind from eight years old, had become a bat. We saw him cycling down a road making a clucking sound and navigating by the echoes. He had realigned his brain so that he could see with his ears.
Think of writing first as an every day activity. We do it. We send emails, letters, fill forms, make lists. We sometimes edit them afterwards, if we feel they are significant enough and would represent us badly should we not do so.  In the same way that we might walk down a road and use the experience to give directions to others, the process tends to be shorthand and reductionist. We don’t convey the full experience of walking down the road. Writing can be like that. A sort of minimal communication of a story, bereft of richness and vibrancy. Are there ways of intervening with what has become a knee jerk process? I think so. To change the very structures of thinking involves doing things differently.
I stayed in the countryside one year and while there I became interested in writing a book of aphorisms for management, based upon zen conciseness and depth of meaning. The first took me two days. Days! Ten words. Fifty letters. Pre-Twitter! The second took me a day. The third took half a day and so on until I could write maybe five in a day. Two months and I had produced An A to Zen of Management. The fact was that I began to see words and meaning differently. My brain became retooled. Here are two examples:
Autonomy: an illusion, very material to motivation.
Coach: every king needs his fool.
Since then I started to tweet using the same newly shaped brain. Today, for instance:
Each person comprises many selves but rarely develops more than one; the perfect subsistence culture (@profjacksanger.com)
In Azimuth I adopted a horrendous new punctuation for speech. My editor threw up her hands in disgust. But by using it I found myself studying the nature of dialogue completely differently. Instead of some superfluous conversation, it attained at times (I hope) a touch of zen.
You can check all I say against the proof in my books!
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon

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Saturday, April 21, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 19
There is a much discussed cliché concerning writing. This relates to the difference between a hard day’s slog and a seemingly purple day’s outpouring. The received wisdom is that the dufference is too minimal to make a case for inspiration providing greater quality than perspiration. A good friend and well known writer once said to me that writing prose was like pulling teeth. It was painful, hard and sometimes he only wrote a half page in a day. He won the Whitbread prize for best novel of that year.  I tend to agree with the overall drift of the argument. Purple patches are wonderful for the writer but the reader may never discern which bits of a novel have been created in this way. When I edit my work I have no recall over what came like a dream and what was a struggle though I have had experience of quickly written pieces being more like colanders than sturdy vessels that hold sense properly. Of course poets like Coleridge stimulated their imagination with drugs to ensure the purple patch effect!
The upshot of all this is to write write write. Develop a ritualistic behaviour which ensures a discipline. I tell myself that if I write three hours or so every day, I can finish a book in six months to a year. A book a year seems a reasonable return. In the 40s writers like Edgar Wallace were spent up and drunk every Sunday, wrote a crime novel between Monday and Friday and started the process of obliteration all over again at the weekend. But writing so quickly has its drawbacks. Usually these relate to fissures in the plot.
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep had a major discrepancy in the plot, not discovered by readers but by film makers when they came to put it on the screen: a telegram was sent to Raymond Chandler asking him “who killed the chauffeur?” Chandler replied, “Damned if I know.” I suppose a little anxiety I suffer from concerns such an obvious flaw line in the narrative. While writing The Strange Attractor meant that I could revisit and cross check easily, it being just over 200 pages, Azimuth is 920 pages with innumerable characters and full of ‘seeding’ of alternate plot lines, as described in previous blogs. Hence the author’s alerts list I regard as a necessity.
If every writing day is like the last, your desk is left exactly how you last used it, you also abandoned your prose for the day knowing exactly what your next sentence and paragraph is going to be, then the discipline of writing is being properly supported. Some days will be much slower than others but when the smell of ink has dried and the reader take up your book, none of this will be apparent.

The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle books, Amazon
www.azimuthtrilogy.com for a complete guide to Azimuth by Jack Sanger

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Friday, April 20, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 18
The convenience of an ‘alerts list’ at the bottom of your growing draft novel is not to be underestimated. Take this note I placed there while writing Azimuth. I had just conjured it up in an early part of the narrative and was so taken with it I copied it for later reference:
  “Find the she-worm and feed his flesh to her as he sleeps the sleep of truth.”
Two things about this. First, when I wrote it I did not fully understand it. The words came through my brain without touching the sides but they had a Blakian feel to them and were obviously an answer to an as yet undisclosed hazard facing Princess Sabiya and Kamil the Historian in the Second Journey. So I copied them on to my list of reminders of all the seeds I was sowing for later writing. Every time I continued the narrative involving these two characters my eye would glance down at this note to myself. I would reject utilising it many times, patiently waiting for the storyline to reach the point when the quote could be reinserted to drive the story line through its deepest waters.
These alerts are like faint pointers to the direction of travel. They are not strong enough to take hold of the story but by having them in your mind when you are writing they act like mild currents under your vessel. It is still for you to steer. So, the second thing to say about the invocational words I copied is that the imagination will write for you if you learn to let it. Some of the best and most timelessly magical bits of Azimuth came to me without knowing and challenged me to incorporate them in the text.
In case my references to Azimuth seem to suggest it is a fey genre novel about pixies and elves, it is no such thing. The reviews at http://pushes.jacksanger.com/reviewsmay dissuade you. So might me saying, “It is an adventure story full of danger to its characters and their search for answers to why they are alive.”

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Thursday, April 19, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 18
A reader has pointed out that my dichotomy of clay and lego to crudely divide approaches to writing are somewhat patronizing and imbalanced. That was not the intention. By clay I meant organically developed narratives where the writer is only one step ahead of the reader in understanding what is going on, while by lego I meant that much of literature is plugged together from familiar elements within a genre.  Maybe I should have used plasticine and meccano as metaphors, though those remembering that latter are fewer on the ground as each decade passes! The reader pointed out that the terms themselves are from a child’s world, not from an adult’s. I tried to defend myself by saying (did I wholly believe it?) that authors should have a child-like playfulness to be properly creative. Engaging with the construction of a novel is akin to entering a playroom, bursting with potential, eyes wide and trusting.
Actually, the reason we have genres in writing is because there forms are so appealing. Most successfully rich authors are those who mine a stratum of precious metal efficiently, satisfying their readers’ desire for certain verities; structural topographies, a range of characters, degrees of credibility and satisfying narratives.  It does not mean that they do not borrow from plasticine’s organic elements. Better still if their novels belong to a series where the reader feels s/he knows the chief protagonists and their relationships, traits and modus operandi. If clay is an art and lego is a craft, all writers will try to utilize some elements from each.
A reader’s review I had the other day regarding Azimuth (http://pushes.jacksanger.com/reviews) said she loved the trilogy but did not know much about the genre. This nonplussed me. What genre is it? By stipulating a genre it might be easier to market it to a specific audience but that would obviously be limiting, as well. Most writers would love a crossover hit of a novel that appeals to everyone at some level or other. Azimuth contains elements of fantasy, fable, modern philosophy, labyrinthine plotting and pulsating (!) adventuring. A one name genre title would surely be too restrictive.
I realize this blog has been less practical than I might have wished so will tether an useful insight to it.
Because I write organically myself, wondering where the next paragraph of a meal is coming from and because it is easy to forget detail as I progress through my novel’s circumlocutions, I constantly make notes about people, places and events at the bottom of my draft concerning what has just been written. These are seeds which alert me to what MUST be dealt with later, what facets of character might affect future behaviours, what puzzles must then be solved, what an environment looks like, the colour of hair and eyes, the skills and/or character defects of individuals. Once I have satisfied the reason for keeping this self-advisory note in my later writing, I scrub it. Thus, I try to ensure that there are no loose ends that will trip up the storyline. It is the novelist’s version of ‘continuity’ in film. This does not mean being too smartass neat and tidy at the end of a book but rather that the integrity of character and plot has been maintained throughout , even if there are still poignant questions hanging in the air at the end.

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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 17
What I ended up doing in the last blog, was show how complexity in characters’ profiles provides a springboard for a book to go in many directions. We can demonstrate this by looking within the action of your own tale. You have three characters. If each displays only one characteristic (thus being a cipher) then you have a maximum of three believable outcomes when they interact with each other, since each acts true to this trait.  If not the reader dumps the book because the characters’ behaviours aren’t credible. But take the same three characters and build into their profiles ambiguities, paradoxes, dark and light and there can be limitless potential in the products of their interaction.
So much depends upon the setting up and evolution of the characters in your story. The greater the depth, the greater the potential for rich progression as the story moves on. However, we must also realize that authors have their limits of tolerance as far as open-endedness is concerned. For some, too much ambiguity and range can easily lead to writer’s block as they become swamped by infinite possibility. Finding the right balance between character depth and plot imperative is at the heart of a long piece of writing. I suppose we have to establish our ambition. We can earn our way in any of a number of genres by tamping down our characters just enough to augment but not impede the pace of the narrative. We can make them credible with rough brush strokes because readers of genre fiction have in-built tolerances themselves and have a less exacting expectation of character development. But if we take upon ourselves a higher brow ambition, then characters will vie with plot for which has the greater significance.  There are many great examples of  novels and plays which are practically plotless from the usual physical and geographical action perspectives but whose narratives are entirely concerned with evolving psychosocial relationships between protagonists. Becket, Joyce, Kafka and many more subverted the need for traditional plot lines in favour of exploring in the greatest depth, character. Authors must temper literary ambition with an awareness of personal capability. Books take a long time to write.

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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 16
Let me pursue this question of character complexity. What I said in the last blog was that those that people our pages, to be life-like, have to have shades of dark and light. There is a unique moral colour chart for everyone and it includes sin and evil. What is revealed it is a consequence of circumstance. So, even if you create a totally virtuous being as a character, he or she will only be believable against a backdrop of the mixed morality of those around him or her and similarly with a character who is wholly evil. Such completely exceptional natures must become a central focus to a novel or not be there at all. You just can’t sell a novel with a cast list where everyone is a monochrome figure. That is usually the stuff of comics, propaganda or puppetry. So think seriously about how you might explore right and wrong through the messy profiles that people actually have in life rather than by a crude simplification of character. To be enriched by the experience of a novel means that the reader leaves it believing they have had an experience which makes life more comprehensible and even a touch more manageable. A book is a vicarious and unique experience for each reader.
In Azimuth, one of my central characters kills frequently at first but over the course of the trilogy the regularity of death decreases as he gains a moral direction. Establishing this as main plot construct makes it attendant upon me to present him at first as a man in whom empathy for others is just a putative trait among many such as courage and honesty but one which grows through experience to dominate his profile. Each time he kills his internal conflict grows over his actions. To make this psychological tension vibrant, every death must be described uniquely, the nature of death itself explored and the impact on this character’s further experiences built in to the succeeding narrative. As readers we must not be able to predict when or, indeed, whether he will transcend his upbringing and gain enlightenment. Azimuth is a saga and has dozens of characters, from walk-on parts to those that affect the direction of the story line significantly. What I tried to do with each was provide enough ambiguity in the profile of each so that the maximum number of possible actions was open to every one of them. If you establish this as your modus operandi as an author, your plot becomes pregnant with continuous possibility. But if your characters are single trait ciphers, unpredictability  and tension will not haunt your pages.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
twitter@profjacksanger

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Monday, April 16, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 15
The question of having characters as ciphers or as complex human beings who beguile, infuriate, seduce, anger, irritate and illuminate the reader in turns is crux. In much of fast food literature, written to formula whether bodice rippers, blood rippers, space trippers or crime grippers, women may be depicted in short authorial shrift. They fulfill the roles of victim, sex partner, wife or mother against a generally greyed out background to the fast narrative. Likewise, men have their stereotypical roles in this range of fiction as victims, progenitoirs of evil, husbands, killers and so on. The more formulaic the genre, the less human characters usually are. Descriptions of them are rarely truly interesting because the writer hopes that the imagination of the reader will fill in the flesh where it is missing.
The reason Dexter is such fine TV is that the hero (!) is a serial killer with whom we can identify. The complexity of his character and motivation is so multi-layered that we catch ourselves wanting him to get away with yet another macabre act and, as a consequence, wondering about the dark sides of our own natures. It is viscerally funny and poignant, disgusting and sentimental and utterly riveting. Clearly a writer can write about anything, no matter how taboo but getting away with it is another matter. By that I mean, inveigling the reader into a world he or she never normally occupies, making it familiar and then building identification with the characters’ struggles, therein.
Why characters have to have complexity is because it allows the writer to explore the unexpected. If, in formulaic writing, a character commits an idiosyncratic act that cannot be explained by depth of character, then that act is not credible to the reader. All of us buy books to suspend our disbelief. The writer, like any stage magician, does this through complex layers of human psychology in his or her cast list.
To tie this up to previous blogs, books are mostly about people in extraordinary circumstances in which they have sex, kill, love, hate, are terrorized by reality or otherwise, go to war, abuse their loved ones, engage in magical journeys… The humdrum is not what we are seeking when we pick up a book in a bookshop.  That is the place from which we may want to escape! Generally we want to know why these characters have got where they are and how they are going to navigate what is in front of them. The more we feel we know them, the better we believe it.
It is a necessary exercise to look at your book in its first full draft and take each main character through the interweaving plot. Are you creating a wafer thin profile? Are you ensuring there is no ambiguity or paradox in this person? Are you limiting his or her power to surprise us by transcending misfortune in some noble way? Can we understand and find credible the wonderful and terrible things characters do, equally? 

Can we identify with them, full stop.

I was asked at the launch of Azimuth (I did it here in Accra) after I’d done a couple of readings, with whom of my characters did I identify most, as the author. I said every one of them, even the most pathological of the killers and the most pure of those seeking self-knowledge. But, if pushed, I would choose the manipulative and occasionally heartless sixteen year old heir to an empire. That’s writing for you – a male writer, nearly seventy years old, creating a sixteen year old mixed race Persian princess who has become as real to him as any close friend.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Sunday, April 15, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 14
To bridge this blog to the last two, let me state that sex and death are inextricably linked in much writing because they are in life. The French call an orgasm un petit mort, as if to emphasise the point. In the BBC series about the neurotic, fat psychoanalyst who helps police solve cases by profiling killers, Cracker, the overweight fellow often refers to the buzz that killers get from killing which makes them want sex before and after murder. I met a Frenchman once who was elated because he had knocked down and killed someone. Now he had achieved this particular ambition in his life. Yet in much of writing, apart from high literature’s deep psychological studies, killing is almost an afterthought. It is wham bam and on to the next scene. When victims are mere ciphers and killers show little thought to death owing to the writer’s pen, then you begin to wonder. Are you writing a superhero comic, a run of the mill crime novel or something which educates and informs? There will be many future blogs on the issue of complexity, moral or otherwise so that’s enough for the moment except to say that all good writing must rest upon the author’s empathy with his or her characters, good or evil.
Azimuth’s three volumes depict, among other things, the gradually changes in a heroic figure as he comes to terms with killing. In this trilogy he deals with (and deals out) death easily at first but begins to realize the enormity of what he has been doing. Meanwhile the historian, Kamil, who has written the hero’s history, also kills under a strange force that leaves him powerless to do otherwise.
Kamil stared at the  dripping blade in his hand and a coldness swept his body followed by a momentary exultation which, later, he could not fathom.  Was it the relief at his survival or the fact that he had killed for the first time?  
You will have to read the books to follow the way that the characters’ experiences change their inner pathologies but nowhere in the book is death taken lightly. Because I, as a writer, have a repugnance for killing, whether by individuals or states, every act of death is a challenge to me to understand the act and empathise with BOTH killer and killed. I don’t want my idealism to result in proseltysing because the reader would see that as a sermon and not true to the awkward and contradictory nature of human profiles. As I said above, as writers we can attempt to understand complexity or we can play by established formulas and do little to advance the cause of human enlightenment.
Buy Azimuth at:
or download from kindle as an e-book

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Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 13
More nuts and bolts about sex, if that is not being too euphemistic! And euphemisms, metaphors and similes are often at the heart of scenes of physical intimacy.
Having discussed people’s sneering at hyperbole in the last blog, it may help in the writing of sex scenes to consider two steps. First, determine whether such a scene helps the plot along by being so explicitly detailed or should you make only passing reference to it. Does it deepen our understanding of our characters and therefore make plausible the scrapes they get into? The second step is attendant upon the first. Having decided you must explore how this flesh, blood, heart and mind activity affects character and plot development, play with the following (by no means exhaustive) strategies and see which works best for you: 
1               Write from the outside as though you are a forensic biologist
2               Write from the outside as though you are a Martian
3               Write from the outside but focus on one element of the act in such a way as to convey the whole
4               Write from inside the heads of one or both of the participants
5               Write from the physical reality of participants
6               Write from the emotional reality of participants
Meanwhile, use a thesaurus and try to provide a rich variety of terms for parts of the body and the convulsive acts, themselves.
As I inferred in the last blog, we are all possible experts in the basics of sex but the way we engage with others is unique. For a sex scene to be successful in your novel it might  educate, excite, challenge, amuse, create identification, surprise, induce longing. However, overriding everything, at the conclusion of it we should know more about the psychology of the participants. We shouldn’t feel that the writing was gratuitous or formulaic but that the writer navigated all the pitfalls rather adroitly, unusually and even – poetically.

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Friday, April 13, 2012

The Art of Writing No 12
It seems like a lot of you are now following these meandering blogs about writing. I have spent most of my life as a writer, both academic and fictional and there is much to pass on, be it idiosyncratic and personal. However, there must be much that is generalisable, should you take it and extrapolate it into your own context. Being a series of random acts, these insights are just how they arise in my mind. Maybe later I will order and refine them into a manual and put them on kindle for free.
Anyway, sex.
I wrote recently on twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/Profjacksanger) The pen penetrates the blank page in an act of copulation and the cells of the story begin multiplying.  In a Freudian sense, sex is in everything we do. If men think of it every ten seconds and women not quite so much, it must infiltrate (or inseminate) our writing. Nevertheless it still has an aura of taboo for the writer. How to describe the physical, emotional and intellectual consequences of such intimacy? Like fingerprints, everyone has sex as part of his or her make-up but, like fingerprints, the experience of it is unique.  So we are aware, when we write about the sexual act that if we over-indulge, people will scoff and if we take Wittgenstein’s view (that which cannot be spoken of, should be passed over in silence) the reader knows we are copping out. What kind of writers are we then?
Overwriting is a bit like Hitchcock discovering Freudian imagery in the sixties. Towers rising and falling, trains rushing into tunnels, shoals of little fish thrashing about. Hyperbole and sex don’t seem to go together. Sex-writing, like everything else, should be conditioned by the relationships and the setting in which it takes place. If the couple have an edgy relationship then does sex between them smooth out or intensify the edginess? Sex in a luxurious hotel may be very differently described from sex in a back alley or in the domestic bedroom where it has taken place hundreds of times and can show the break down of a relationship or, indeed, the rejuvenation of one.
So, when it comes to writing about sex, you must spend far more time on getting it right than when describing other human acts or scenery. Here’s something I wrote in The Strange Attractor (Kindle e-books Amazon):
“On the chair,” says your pleading voice between the probing tongue strokes in my ear. It stands waiting, a deus ex machina of odd limbs in the centre of the room. And now I am almost silent in my gorging as you fill all my horizons. You speak and croon to me in barely intelligible growls and moans. You are astride me and your naked thighs are rising upon me. The chair tips precipitously and my limbs strain into delicious pain as I hold you mid air so that you can let reason go and make your animal instincts blot out all logic. Your pincering internal muscles grip me and work on me as I bend to your breasts and lay hand and mouth to your nipples. Finally, we ride together, sound-tracked by your jolting whimpers, into a temporary eyes-shut darkness.
Does it do what I have said? Does it capture some aspect of the womanising male detective’s character? (He is the ‘I’, the first person narrator of the story). Is it sufficiently unique? Does the setting of the chair, an art piece installation, promote enough of an environmental difference? You could of course download the book and enjoy all of Ted Silver’s sexual and other exploits!
The Strange Attractor by Jack Sanger Kindle Amazon

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Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Art of Writing No 11
What I have found useful in developing plot lines is as follows. Given that in these blogs I crudely dichotomise writers into two camps, lego and clay, let me  look at how narratives are developed in each. Plot lines of the clay type writer are a little more mysterious than those of the lego. For the clay writer they are much more organic and evolve from an alchemical mix of characters’ psychology, previous action and the environment. There is a sense of the plot unfolding as the heady mix of interactions go on. To some extent you are at the behest of the characters that you have created, their will being stronger than your (maybe) desire to control them and speak through them! On the other hand, lego writers like to create a predestined pattern or formula for their plots, particularly in, say, crime fiction. What both camps desire is that the ending of a narrative cannot be guessed until it happens, whether this means that the guilty party is revealed or that an illumination of character and circumstance occurs which makes the foregoing plot line suddenly translucent.
The problem we have as writers is that we plagiarise unwittingly (if we are honourable!) and so it is easy for the reader to latch on to what has become a plot cliché. We borrow from films, books, the internet, news stories without realizing it.
So – before you go too far, whether you are clay or lego, ask yourself whether you can remember anything similar to the events you are portraying and, if so, scratch out and start again. Horrible to do. I have said on Twitter that writing is an addiction but editing is cold turkey! (@profjacksanger.com)You may have to take extreme measures to make your plots unique but also believable. Some writers begin with an extraordinary ending and then work towards it, some write bits of plot and character on study cards and then riffle them and try to cohere the new pattern of events. Some set up a group of characters and then introduce an act of god to see how they will behave.
I don’t see myself as a crime writer but have one book of that genre on kindle under the pseudonym Eric le Sange. In it I use a little knowledge of chaos theory and work out how a Private Dick solves crimes utilizing it. By this introduction of a novel detection technique both plot and character become different. Add to that the notion of a womanizing detective who is shamed  and blamed by most of the women he meets and a richness evolves. Good luck!
www,azimuthtrilogy.com
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange, kindle e-books, Amazon

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Monday, April 9, 2012

The Art of Writing No 10
Having a writer’s block is like having a terrible on-going organic ailment to the writer, particularly to the artist whose self-value is almost totally and inextricably tied up with the need to express himself or herself in words. How we live and how we die is a conundrum we try to solve (or evade) throughout our lives and the writer attempts it by giving birth to poems, novels and short stories which allow the reader glimpses through to vast panoramic insights into his or her existence. It can act as a tombstone (albeit one with rather a long epitaph!).
So not to write for such people is akin to a disease. Let’s call it stultification. Everything from the mind to the pores in the skin and the various other orifices of discharge, appear bunged up. What to do?
Here are one or two solutions for this, in no particular order, for the more major issues in blockedness (I dealt with incipient writer’s block in the last blog):
1               Ignore any thought about the entirety of a piece of work and just write, write write whatever, drivel through to well coined phrases. Every day. Perspiration eventually leads to inspiration. It is astonishing how you can suddenly find yourself in the groove and all you have to do is dump the meandering introductory riffs. It is also astonishing how themes emerge this way and your apparent discrete elements become cohered.
2               If the block is in the middle of your work, write the ending. Or write character descriptions for later. Don’t allow a silence to grow between your tapping keys and the screen, or pencil tip and paper. Stay with it. Trust it and your brain will come up trumps.
3               Organise your desk so there are no distractions. I always do this at the end of one project and the beginning of another. A spring clean, including the  desktop on the computer.
4               Attend to outside constraints (relationships, jobs, friends, environment can all lead to lower self-worth and a sense that you have nothing to say. You MUST give yourself the licence to do both write and sort out. Strike a bargain with yourself. Sorting out elements in your life will give you the reward of writing. Sort out writing and the joy of fulfillment spreads into your every day life.)
5               Take a notebook everywhere. Allan Ahlberg, the children’s writer, a life long close friend, makes notes everywhere he goes. Snippets of conversation. Paradoxes in adverts. Phrases used by writers he admires. Malcolm Bradbury, once my writing supervisor, wrote much of The History Man  and Eating People is Wrong by ducking into the toilet and scribbling down what academics were saying at parties. Never forget to write down an idea as it happens to you. Afterwards it could turn from diamond to paste in your memory, if not.
6               Think small and allow the big idea to materialize as a book progresses. In Azimuth, I wrote a short story about the birth of an extraordinary child in pre-Buddha days. Then another. Then I began to realize this was a biography of an early thinker…920 pages later, full of strange fables, adventures, illuminations, the book is out on show…
After writing Azimuth a lot of people asked me what I was going to do, knowing that the book had taken ten years to write. What I did was take my own advice. I began writing whatever came into may head. Suddenly I realized why I was writing and what the story actually was. A neat (I hope) novella emerged with a satisfying kick at the end, called Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story. The title is a quote from The Lady of Shallot… and will be on Kindle shortly.

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Saturday, April 7, 2012

The Art of Writing No 9
How do you leave your writing each day? Have you a tendency to writer’s block? In Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance by Pirsig there is a great vignette in which a student is unable to write, set the task of describing a building. The teacher tells the student to focus on a wall, then a line of bricks, then a single brick. The student begins to write. You may have to develop your own rituals but here is advice I gave to my many PhD students.
Never leave your notebook or computer (whatever medium you use) at the end of a chapter, paragraph or even sentence if you feel that you are completing a train of thought. The full stop that you insert at this point is tantamount to inviting writer’s block if you suffer from it. Instead, leave your writing in the middle of a flow where you can be more or less certain that you can pick it up again and continue with the sentence and paragraph. For example, in the middle of a description of a person, scenery or an event. When you come back you can complete it easily and on you go. Our brains have what is to come all ready and waiting if they are given the right signposts on the route of travel.

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Thursday, April 5, 2012

The Art of Writing No 8
What’s in a name? A rose is a rose is a rose.
We are superstitious about names. Our personal histories are such that we attach significance to names for good or ill. We may scour books for the meaning of names before we register our children. We believe these names go back to antiquity and that they affect the character of the person, once the appellation is designated. All this may or may not be true. There are, in the case of my own name, good Jacks and bad Jacks. I remember being somewhat mortified by William Golding (one of the best writers in English in my reading experience) naming the sinister boy who undermines human virtue in Lord of the Flies, Jack. Why? Perhaps because Jack is a diminutive of John, the commonest name and he was intending to show that there is evil in us all.
Choosing names for characters in books can be a matter of instinct but then again, if you are to plunge into the history of names it may guide your development of characters on the page. In Azimuth I did a rare thing. I researched. Because there are so many characters in the trilogy, I wanted each to be defined further by what might lie implicitly beneath the surface of his or her name. This is because I believe, in the Jungian sense, that names act within us at an unconscious level. They are multi-layered with meaning accreted through the ages.
Take my three central characters, spread over the 920 pages; Kamil, Sabiya and Sharazad. Kamil, the middle-aged historian’s name means ‘perfect’ and in Azimuth he is God fearing and proper, always trying to aspire to goodness. Sabiya, on the other hand means eastern wind or morning. In Azimuth she represents  a new kind of woman, mixed race and manipulatively intelligent. Sharazad, her daughter, on the other hand, means ‘story teller’ as in 1001 Nights, a highly influential book for me because it contains two narratives, one encompassing the other and Azimuth follows the same kind of structure. By naming my characters I was also giving them an endowment to be that kind of person and it helped them to navigate idiosyncratically through the adventures that befell them. They ceased to be ciphers but flesh and blood to me.
(www.azimuthtrilogy.com)

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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 7
Possibly one of the most irritating idiosyncrasies a reader has to put up with is the spattering overuse of “he said”, “she said” or “replied”, “retorted”, “interjected” and so on. I am not saying that they should not be used, far from it, but in dialogue they should be used initially to determine who is speaking and then sparingly thereafter.
Let me develop this further. Two people are talking. You have set the scene, as discussed in the last blog, so the reader has a picture of where the two characters are situated and one speaks and the other replies. From then on, if the dialogue is sharp, maintaining the characteristics of each of them, we do not need to be directed as to who is now speaking because the dialogue tells us everything. We know the speaker from the ping pong flow of their communication.
Here is an extract from Azimuth. Note how all the elements discussed above come into play. There are sections in my trilogy where whole pages are just dialogue and (I understand from feedback) are perfectly easy to follow:
Kamil pronounced his next words quietly, for emphasis, -It means a release from your petty pilfering and the attentions of the palace guard, a life reborn in another place where none know you. Now tell me why I have brought you here, do you think? Kamil levelled his eyes at the man so that they flashed behind his mask.
-I cannot say. They came in the night, the monks, and wrapped me in that blanket and took me to a cell, then brought me here blind to the world. For what reason I know not.
-I ask you once more. Why you? What have you done?
The man’s eyes were downcast. He still shook spasmodically, –I had thought all my debts were paid and now it is as if I have done naught..
-What debts?
-For stealing from the soldiers’ kitchen. It was wrong but my wife and child were without-
-And?
-A palace guard was spying on me. It must be so because I was too careful for it to be happenchance. He gave me a choice. He would cut off my right hand unless I did a certain thing about which I must say nothing.
-He gave you three names and told you to go to the captain of the guard with them. You were to say that you saw them meet the Princess’s maid.
The prisoner looked bemused and blurted out, -In the palace garden. You knew this already?
(www. azimuthtrilogy.com)

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Sunday, April 1, 2012

The Art of Writing No.6
To give a narrative authenticity the reader should be able to locate himself or herself  in the environment in which the characters play out their dramas. Whether this is a vast landscape of forests, plains or deserts or whether it is it is the interior of a single room, it is as well to think of the five senses and how you might prioritise them. Landscapes are brought alive visually first and then there is sound, smell and lastly touch and taste. An interior can be made to produce a whole range of emotive reactions by giving ascendency to senses such as smell and touch. Thus you can make it claustrophobic or warm and embracing, cold and lifeless, decaying or alien. By imagining yourself inside the character’s mind, how does this person navigate the environment you have created? Indeed, why have you chosen this environment? How does it further your tale? My editor pointed out to me that landscapes were like extra characters in Azimuth. The characters interacted with them and they played their part in adding tensions and volition to the narrative. So, if the location is to be a character in your plot, you cannot make it blurry and inconsequential. It must be substantial, four dimensional and provide challenges and aids to your characters. There must be enough detail of its effects on the senses to be believable and to persuade the reader that he or she is right there, for good or ill.
(www.azimuthtrilogy.com)

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Saturday, March 31, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 5
In general when learning your craft, it is better to simplify your expression. Long sentences exacerbate difficulties in a reader’s cognition (particularly the young, brought up in byte-sized management of information). Paring down your words to the minimum a la Samuel Beckett, removing adjectives and erasing all repetitions of nouns, will inform you as to whether you have conveyed the maximum information in the minimum number of words. Then, as you redraft, you can add what is needed to round out characters or give telling substance to the environment which sustains them.

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Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 4
So, you have written a gripping first sentence or two for the browsing buyer in the bookshop but books get published by publishers and that means sending the first three chapters and a synopsis of the plot of the book to an agent. Hardly any publishers are interested in looking at new work, even from established writers and prefer the agent to do the wheat from chaff processing. It feels wrong, I know, to have to desecrate your work by amputating it in this way. 
For what it’s worth, agents are not necessarily that bright. They have fixed ideas of what sells, they want to do as little work as possible for maximum financial returns and that means often making crass decisions that nearly precluded Lord of the Flies, Harry Potter or Watership Down ever being published. So we can all curse and spit on their graves – but take heart, I suspect the democratising effects of the internet e-readers will level the playing filed eventually.
Having said all that, the first three chapters need consideration. Given that your opening sentence gambit presents a definite come on, then what follows must help to accentuate the reader’s curiosity. My advice is to get into plot as fast as you can and keep your long descriptions of people and places until later. I know that if you are a clay writer this can be difficult since you feel you are channelling your creativity from your unconscious realms but there it is. The fishing analogy is that many fish don’t bite on the hook straight away but need ‘playing’. Of course if you are the son or daughter of Dickens then your long descriptive opening is a lure all on its own. But its best we don’t have such high personal opinions!
Being brief at the beginning also serves two other purposes; the first being that the reader can exercise more imagination the less you attempt to nail everything and the second is that the discipline of saying as much as possible in as few words, carries you through the book. It becomes part of your style.

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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The Act of Writing No. 3
How do you start a novel? You know yourself that when you go into a bookshop you will pick up books, maybe look at the dust covers and, more likely than not, read the first paragraph of the first chapter. Then you will dump it – unless…something arrests you, something which is like the shard of a hologram in that it encapsulates the possibilities and potential of the whole story to follow. It can be cryptic:
Call me Ishmael. (Moby Dick)
It can be fulsome:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. (A Tale of Two Cities)

But, however you start it must not fail the test of the first few seconds’ glance in the bookshop. For those of you who are clay writers, the first line may have come to you before the novel really began to register in its full glory. For those of you who are lego writers, you may have written the entire book and then gone back to the beginning and thought to yourself, “what’s a good way to start all this…”
Here is how I started Azimuth. What do you think? (It came to me after I began the first chapter. I realised I wanted to take the reader immediately into the head of the historian who recounts the Tales of the Magus).
If a man could be said to be constructed from the tools of his work, then Kamil was just such a man. He laboured with pen and paper and from them he built history. His flesh was as dry and pale as bleached parchment, his blood so dark it could have been extracted from crushed beetles and yet his intelligence was as sharp as the knife he used to give edge to his quills. If in total he could be thought of as a book, it would be a thick, learned, heavily annotated leather-bound tome, with a simple modest title and his name in small letters beneath. And it would gather dust, rarely read except by other scholars, in the Great Library.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0934311.html

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Sunday, March 25, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 2

Novelists of the clay kind may begin with a great first sentence, a single idea, something overheard, a personal itch or trauma – whatever – and it becomes like grit in the oyster forcing the imagination to create a pearl. Novelists of the lego kind like to gather a mass of data in which to immerse themselves; historical events, genre expectations, real life scenarios, technical detail etc and cut and paste them into a narrative. Whereas the clay type grows the novel, through accretion, allowing characters to form and plot lines to develop as they will, lego types sculpt from the mass that they have collected, obeying self-imposed rules to maintain consistency and characters to further the plot. William Golding tended to read one book on factual information so that he could get jargon, terminology right for verisimilitude in his sea trilogy whereas Luther Blisset in Q had a mountain of data relating to the reformation. In some senses the clay type is homeopathic in approach while the lego type if allopathic. While, as has been noted in the first blog, the one bleeds into the other, pick up any piece of fiction and you can show quickly whether the author is clay or lego oriented.

I am a clay writer: www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Friday, March 23, 2012

The Act of Writing No. 1
I thought I’d write a series of blogs about writing. Having just published a three volume historical fiction called Azimuth that has taken ten years and 920 pages, maybe I have something to pass on to those who wish to follow literary careers. (For the validity of my thoughts you can see for yourself at www.azimuthtrilogy.com)
Where does a writer start? Basically there is a dichotomy between clay and lego. If you are clay then your work is organic and you write to see what happens, everything unfolds and you have the feeling that the work is channeled through you. The end can be as much a surprise to you as to the reader. If you are lego then you adopt certain formulae. You immerse yourself in the expectations of a genre, you plan the plot line, you assemble the characters and you plug all the pieces together in a satisfactory whole.
If you are clay then the danger is in becoming rambling, unfocused and with no tension to your narrative. If you are lego then the danger is that your work is creaky and mechanical. You can see from this that to be successful and take the reader on a ride that keeps the pages turning avidly, clay needs to borrow a little from lego and lego needs to borrow a little from clay. A novel must please. In The Act of Creation, Koestler talks about the punch line in a joke. If it’s good we laugh out loud, pleased to have been brought to this happy conclusion. Books are more long winded than jokes, of course, but the same emotive element should endure through their pages. We must feel that reading has been worthwhile, we have experienced the unexpected and we have learned a little by proxy.

What kind of writer am I? www.azimuthtrilogy.com

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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Dead sure about doomsday

Another prophet like so many of his fellows has proven inadequate to forecasting accurately ‘the end of days’.  Instead of mass extinction last week, those of us who have not yet succumbed to natural wastage are readying ourselves for the next doomsday pronouncement, the very big one on December 21st 2012.  Soothsayers, exactly like the rest of us, have been dropping like flies for centuries suffering desultory demises long after the much promised final moment. Over their lives their apocryphal ambiguities will have hit the occasional mark in the manner of shot from scatterguns.  Because one or two pellets strike the target it foments their followers to dance and gibber, express themselves in tongues, while failing or not wishing to see that the vast bulk of lead shot is littering a still living landscape.
How do these would-be shamans magnetise their disciples?  I suppose there are many among us who wish to be saved from the horrors of mortality and would rather believe in a bizarre salvation than the occupation of a mundane slab in the mortuary.  Others, with exalted thoughts above their station, fall for the notion of being ‘chosen ones’, notwithstanding the fact that all supplicants of all religions have this as a germinating notion at the root of their belief.  For others it might just represent a sublimation of  suicidal tendencies.  Better being part of a mass rapturous exit than a solitary one from a ledge or a bridge.  Or is it for some that life is dull and this represents excitement in an otherwise nondescript existence and they are attracted by the buzz of projected mayhem like rubberneckers at a traffic accident up ahead?
Whatever, the fact is that anyone prone to prophesying, no matter how crass and transparently unbelievable he or she appears to the majority, will gather adherents.  Most of us are gullible and impressionable given the right circumstances no matter how much we might uphold rationality as our banner, as can be witnessed by the number of atheists and lapsed believers who recant on their deathbeds.  The spectre of death drives us into many a strange realm.
“I have seen the future and it is very much like the present, only longer.” Khelog Albran (The Profit).

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Tuesday, May 17, 2011

The Death Divining Device

There is some interesting news today and long overdue, particularly if you are a science fiction reader.  For the measly sum of 400 pounds (a thousand cedi) you can undergo a simple test that gives you an indication of how much longer you are going to grumble and stumble your way across the planet!  Apparently chromosomes have little dangly bits which erode over time.  By checking the rate of wear a calculation will tell you how much life you have left in your carcass.  Though, as yet, the dangly bits cannot be lengthened, it is believed that their rate of decrease can be slowed by not harbouring the usual suspects of booze and fags, fast food and couch potato inertia.

This could change society as we know it, Captain.  Insurance companies could insist on the test before taking you on as a client, businesses may wish to see how long you can be reasonably seen to be employable, future wives and husbands might want to see if you are all flash and no stamina and you, yourself may wish to have conclusive proof that you should change your ways or get some living in before the great day.

Our western societies run on a strange premise and that is that you don’t know when you are going to die.  This ignorance insulates you from having truly to explore your natures with that concentration that comes at the prospect of your hanging.  Your relationships with near and dear as well as those you just about put up with would change dramatically as the dangly bits are seen to have all but disappeared.  The youthful, irresistible force of a personal belief in immortality which lasts well into middle age for most of us, will weaken until you are faced with the bare facts of the end being nigh.

Will you be more caring and empathetic to others, eschewing war and territorialism or will you become greedier for pleasure and riches and develop little instinct to love your neighbour?

The choice is yours – for 400 pounds.

 

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Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Black Hole of Islamabad

Continuing  the theme of asking how it is possible to square the assassination of Osama Bin Laden with the US’s avowed intent of exporting democracy and the principles of a justice which is universal and does not discriminate between rich and poor, I see that the American administration is cementing its story that there was ‘no alternative’ to the killing.  Obviously this is a nonsense.  Releasing pictures of Obama and the war cabinet viewing what amounts to a ‘snuff movie’ merely underlines the event as a global advertising campaign for the assurance that American vengeance will prevail everywhere.  In fact there were several senators who concurred openly with Obama on that score.  Far from being the least bad scenario in terms of its consequences for peace and harmony between creeds and races in the world, its very calculated and atavistic nature will enrage and incite those for whom life amounts to a jihad against anyone who is different from them.
I watched a programme on black holes the other night and there is a growing number of scientists who believe that there is a black hole nestling in the centre of our planet, having its most demonstrable effect on the Bermuda trench and the Marianna trench, resulting in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle history and the same heap of weird occurrences on exactly the opposite side of the Earth.  In fact the suggestion is that there are black holes everywhere, the biggest nearby being the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.  Apparently our little, local one still packs a punch and could be having effects upon tectonic plates, volcanoes, weather patterns, the ocean flows and all else.  One of the outcomes of this likelihood is the theory that the constant creation of new life forms results from a physically changing earth.  The supreme violence of black holes leads to the birth of new possibilities.
No doubt Obama, who seems a straight fellow in most ways despite a certain religiosity that does not sit well with me, hopes that by exporting his own black hole into the centre of Pakistan, something creative will emerge from the act.  But what?  Stretching my mind I cannot embrace any likely good.  Instead, as with the Bermuda Triangle, all I see are more anomalous disasters, planes coming down, ships sinking, buildings, dams, railways lines, airports blown up.  The problem for Obama is that what he has precipitated and witnessed is in complete contradiction to his rhetoric.  He cannot now ever be a Ghandi or a Christ or a Buddha figure.  He has, like Macbeth, stepped too deep in blood to ever redress his extreme act and find redemption.

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Tuesday, May 10, 2011

To Kill A Mocking Bin Laden


I remember liking a film starring Paul Newman, called Hombre.  The scene which stuck in my mind was when the baddie takes off his weapons and goes to face Newman (white man brought up by Indians and despised because of it) who, nevertheless, is protecting stage coach passengers who hold exactly those racist attitudes towards him.  There is some verbal interplay where Newman refuses to bargain with the outlaw.  The outlaw eventually says he’s returning to his men.  Newman smiles and asks him why he thinks that is going to happen – and then shoots him.  For me it was my first example of a number of films where the hero ditches a code of honour and does the improbable – if you like to believe in fairness, justice and the right to a trial.  In fact, last night I was watching yet another episode of Homicide, Life on the Streets (by the team that went on to make The Wire, that beacon of confused and tangled morality, and currently, in season five, one of the detectives is under pressure because he killed a very unsavoury drug dealer and murderer when he could have taken him in.  Like Dirty Harry films, he believes that the villain will not see justice in the liberal courts.

So it is with mild surprise that I have not heard or seen anything in the media which challenges the killing of Osama Bin Laden.  He could be one of the worst villains around from the West’s point of view, whatever he and his followers believe to be justifiable in their acts but it raises the question of assassination being suddenly regarded as lawful (in David Cameron’s terms and acceptable).  Is it?  Obama gives the nod, watching streamed images of the attack and there is no jury, just a group of gawping politicians and soldiers.  Isn’t most western law so framed as to try murderers through an impartial judicial system? The problem for the Americans and liberal consciences everywhere is that by disregarding it, it brings the whole political game into disrepute.  Shooting an unarmed man in cold blood.  It justifies everything the Israeli death squads do around the world, the Russians, the Pakistani Mumbai terrorists, Chechnyans, Middle Eastern dictators, African state militaries, secret services everywhere.  If you can’t draw a line in the sand over such a high profile killing, then how can we uphold international law?

I am not sure we can use the excuse that to let him live until he is tried and hung like Saddam Hussein would have caused more terrorism.  If you are going to export notions of democracy to the world, there have to be hard and fast rules.  Haven’t there?

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Saturday, May 7, 2011


Spy-ders and webs of intrigue

I watched yet another programme about the end of the world happening on December 21st 2012, according to the Mayan calendar, the patterns in the I Ching, Chinese astrology, Revelations in the Bible, a variety of soothsayers and some scientists who say that the earth, the sun and the black hole at the centre of our galaxy are in alignment for the first time for 25,000 years which could lead to the poles reversing and untold doom.  I’d seen it all before and there is a part of every person prone to a hysterical flash of deep fear when presented with the presentiment of his own death, never mind all of humankind.  That having passed, there was a piece of evidence that I had not seen before and which lingered when calmness returned.

Apparently, by using spiders – search programmes – that run around the web, information can be gathered of even the tiniest import, which gives something like an accurate projection of events and when they will occur.  It began (naturally) as a means of forecasting the stock market (crashes in particular) and moved on to political, environmental and social events.  What I thought was intriguing was that the programmers believe that their spiders create a zeitgeist-like understanding of macro events because they are linked in to the combined consciousness of everyone who uses the internet.  Very close to Jung’s idea of a universal unconscious which he believed we tap into for our visions, dreams, innovations and creations.  Anyway, the spiders also say that December 21st 2012 is human race ground zero.  Of course they must be gathering all the other prognostications listed above in their travels around data topography which itself must be influencing millions of internet browsers but even so, it was a new perspective on doom.

No doubt these spiders or spybots are used extensively by all intelligence units throughout the world.  Every nation wants an economic, social or political edge never mind a military one.  But I have not read that the banks who brought us into economic ruin have been subject to our web creepy crawlies.  Of course not.  They are above rigorous investigation as are their auditors.  They eat and drink at the same troughs are our political masters and leaders of multinational companies, move across international borders with impunity and gamble the day and night away.  Wouldn’t it be good if a spider-handler did a wikileaks on them and we were given some illumination into the murky world of the hidden controllers of human destiny?   

At least until December 21st 2012!

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Tuesday, May 3, 2011


In the name of justice…

Well, it’s been a week of it!  Two billion watching the Royal Wedding just as they had when Princess Diana was the then royal bimbo of choice.  The War Cabinet in the White House watching Bin Laden being blasted off this mortal coil by a US assassination squad, Pope Paul passing Go towards beatification with Robert Mugabe there to watch the proceedings by special decree of the Italian Government.  We are a global viewing community are we not?  Cameras on mobile phones bring news to YouTube watchers of war, rape pillage and one on one humiliation, the content of which governments, special forces, girlfriends or classmates would like to suppress, CCTV everywhere and the media’s own trained sleuths with their nosey distance lenses capturing celebrities at it (it being whatever they want to think of as private).  If you can’t see a recording of it, it doesn’t pass muster in modern society.

There was something of Ancient Rome about Emperor Obama’s watching the assassination.  His thumb had pointed earthwards and so the dogs of war shimmied down their ropes to put an end to Bin Laden’s hateful stratagems of terror in a tiny arena outside Islamabad.  There was something undeniably unseemly and surreal about Paul being elevated towards sainthood on the strength of a nun’s recovery from Parkinson’s.  In front of a million flagwaving amnesiacs or deniers. This, the man who had presided over child abuse from his priests for more than two decades, his administration blocking investigations, covering up the horrors of it all, moving on bishops and priests to enact their life-shattering crimes over and over again.  And all this with Mugabe, apparently a devout catholic, given special permission to pass through Rome to be there.  Mugabe!  Special friend of the Vatican!  Given the history of Catholic atrocities, I suppose he must be regarded as a fellow traveller, bedfellow, bosom pal.

The Americans could have taken Bin Laden for trial. Benedict could have prevented his church from swimming even more in a filthy quagmire of hypocrisy.  Mugabe could have been told that his Catholic soul would rot in hell and no amount of last rites would bring absolution.  A litany of ifs and buts that bear no relation to the upper atmosphere of politics.

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Friday, April 29, 2011

Royalty – the soap
Well it’s not exactly a day for republicans in the UK.  Gimlet eyed I turned on the TV to watch the world news and avoid any reference to the wedding, thinking that Al Jazeera would be the one to eschew the saccharine pomp and ceremony at Westminster Abbey.  What was their main news story?  The same as everywhere else.  Not Syria or Libya.  One becomes a sexist monster muttering expletives at the female kind as you watch hitherto calm and even intrepid reporters going girlie, ogling, eyelash fluttering and sugar voicing their way through the ‘making of history’.  David Cameron who just the other day told a female MP to ‘calm down dear’ several times, also warbled like a reed bunting about a thousand years of royalty and what it has done for Britain.  No killing of wives, imprisonment and executions of competitors or German take-overs there then!
A while back I did some work in St Petersburg and was fortunate enough to visit the Tikhvin, a small cemetery which contained the graves of many Russian composers, artists and poets.  I sat on a stone and wondered whether their still decaying bodies were throwing molecules into the air that I was breathing.  Maybe I was imbibing the spirit of creativity?   And I have gone on to write a three volume fictional piece which I begin to edit today!  Who knows?  As an atheist of a kind I am not averse to believing in some things and the way we pass on memories through our genes and atoms is one of them.  Anyway, in the Abbey is Poet’s Corner, a bit like that Russian quarter acre.  So the bride and groom will walk through the lush grass of approbation from the great and the good and ‘some ordinary people’ -Al Jazeera, and imbibe the molecules tossed into the air by poets turning in their graves.  Well, some of them: 
“The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living” – Epitaph on the memorial to T.S.Eliot.
The monarchy seems to me to be a palliative, a bit like football.  For so many people it arrests their development into critical members of society by filling their heads with dreams of princes and princesses, glass slippers, thousand piece tea sets and maybe a bit of acceptable bodice ripping, sexy phone tapped calls, murky deaths, disagreeable humour, racist attitudes and heavily regulated liaisons.

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Sunday, April 24, 2011

Of dogs and men
Away from the dogs of war in Libya, Cote d”Ivoire, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq – I suppose the list would comprise a whole, dispiriting blog without any further content but this is holiday time as those atheists and agnostics among us piggyback on the Christian calendar.  There are a number of churches within earshot of our half acre compound and Easter Sunday sees them in full flood,  vaguely Anglican hymns melding with ululations that sound as if they came off that Paul Simon African-inspired album.  In case you think that that must be wonderfully exotic, it is not.  It is loud and intrusive.  There have been a number of cases of complaint around Accra at the pain caused to neighbours by these open air  concrete hangars (not agnostic or atheist neighbours but Christians of a quieter, indoors, enclosed hue.)  Complainants have then been threatened and victimised by the proponents of the ecclesiastical loud speaker systems.  Recently I have come across a new dialogue here.  There are (admittedly academic) those who see the evangelical mission in Africa as a form of imperialism.  Since Ghana had an all-seeing, non-gendered, abstract notion of God before the missionaries arrived to infuse souls into pagan black bodies and promulgate Jesus-worship with its own pagan communion rituals, there is a harking back to what this colonialism has meant for indigenous culture.  What is being lost?  Whose god is it anyway?
Anyway, Easter Sunday is no different from any other day in the compound.  The three dogs play out their strange relationships and are an unceasing source of wonder and debate.  If you remember there is the old dog, a bit like Tommy, deaf, and blind but loudly not dumb and once about to die.  His two mutt friends for ten years or more both gave up on life, not raging into the night but happily sleeping under the bougainvillea and so we bought two pups, a Caruso bass Doberman called Sirius and a female, eye-lash flickering Alsatian called Andromeda, the daughter of Ghana’s leading drug-sniffer dog.  Andromeda goes in the pool every half an hour for a swim, a half-length at a time.  She is also likely to swim out to you as you do your lengths in meditative silence and try to get on board, nearly drowning you.  The Doberman is very big and excels in ball chasing, fending off the other two.  Heracles, the old boy is now frisky and excitable, enjoying his two young companions who seem to treat him with respect and can’t sleep unless he is nearby to reassure them.  Each wants to be the favourite of their human owners.  They bat each other away, Andromeda hangs on to Sirius’ collar and tries to drag him to the ground and Heracles cunningly waits and eases in for a stroke while the other two squabble.  They play tag with a tennis ball, the rule being that the one who has it wanders around, nonchalantly, chest puffed out and the others run in circles and wait for it to drop.  Sometimes they can be seen careering up and down the half acre, making up new rules for the contest.
If, as many have pointed out, dog is god spelled backwards, then our three  anagrammatic deities have shown that differences can be assimilated in fun and peace for the pleasure of all.

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Friday, April 15, 2011



 I know it’s only rock and roll…

I walked into a supermarket in Accra today and asked who was in charge of the poultry section.  A nice feller came up to me and said “I am the Eggman”.  I wondered whether he had heard of the Beatles and he looked pinched before nodding dubiously.  No Ghanaian wants to say no to anything.  We shop in supermarkets because there is more chance of hygiene being applied to food preparation and storage, though sometimes, when there is a gap between electricity supply going off and generator coming on, there is a smell that drives you to the food that is not raw.  We tend to buy in bulkwhen desired offerings appear on the shelves because there is no guarantee you will see them again for weeks.  Hence, the fruit and vegetables we juice every morning are at the centre of the shopping quest.  It is not unusual to see us making off with several kilo bags of carrots, beetroot, green beans, cabbages, ginger and the fruity rest.  There are scares about buying on the markets because sometimes root crops are grown in effluent.

Which reminds me of shopping in Tashkent, Uzbekistan a few years after the demise of the USSR.  There, the supermarket had what it had.  There was no rhyme nor reason for what was on the shelves.  I remember seeing a brass telescope next to umbrellas and tinned goods.  Then, next to them I became excited because there were piles of vinyl, albums by British and American artists, copied in the old USSR, despite their degeneracy.  I got everything that fulfilled my love of the riffs of progressive rock music or which, like The Eagles or The Band melded rock with country. 

So once again in 2011 I was shopping in that same opportunistic way, sticking my hand in the bran tub of surprise and pulling out a plum; Jack Horner rather than Jack Sanger.  I thought to myself, placing a half dozen big white eggs in my basket, that I was never the Egg Man, more Jumping Jack Flash which then reminded me to look for Brown Sugar.

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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Dear Brother Leader and Sister Burqa


Some news items are difficult to write about. and some not.  Libyan citizens (apart from Gaddafi’s own tribe) have generally been oppressed for forty years with secret police instigated disappearances, torture and an absence of the freedoms they would like to take for granted.  The African emissaries did themselves much harm in toadying up to the dictator and offering a ceasefire that would consolidate his military hold on Libya.  To insinuate that he was in a club of like-minded African Heads of State did little to make the continent feel good about itself.  But then it has been Gadaffi’s oil money that has underpinned many an African dictator’s hold on power.  The Dear Brothers’ League of nations will continue to turn a blind eye to ordinary people’s suffering.

Some two thousand women in France consider themselves to be suffering.  They must divest themselves of their facial encumbrances if they want to go shopping.  They claim it is an attack on their civil rights.  Probably.  They claim it is an attack on Islam.  Not.  There is nothing in the Koran which preaches such extremes.  The nearest the Prophet came to limiting a woman’s attire was when he asked that she retained a degree of modesty. 

All religions appear to have a problem with sexuality – usually a woman’s.  Since the Romans, according to Foucault, first began to institute  laws to limit women’s freedoms in order to guarantee men’s progeny their right to property, women have been receiving a raw deal.  Most religions limit their powers to lead in their organisations.  Many still enshrine in ecclesiastical law, constraints on their sexual rights.   The burqa is the symbol of a property being owned by a man.  Imagine, in an Alice in Wonderland world if, in a religion, a wife must wear a burqa in the home but not in a public place.  How long would the religion demanding it, last? 

In Lysistrata the play, women stop war by withholding conjugal rights.  Zuma and company should be brought to heel by their African women for their patriarchal despotism.  Meanwhile, the French two thousand would do well to read the Quran and question what  their husbands are demanding of them.






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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Blind spots
I was reading a BBC website article on acronyms and the internet this morning and had one of those rude awakenings that my parents must have had after I first played a 78 of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock as it ushered in teenspeak from the United States which was completely unintelligible to them.  Grooving, cool cat, square, daddy-o, fast, free love and the like studded the language of teenagers, coined mostly by beatniks and black jazzers and the early mainstream drug pioneers.
My call to senses came when I read the following paragraph:
But many mistake “LOL” for “lots of love”, leading to some unintended “LOLs”, such as the infamous tale of the mother who wrote: “Your grandmother has just passed away. LOL.”
Now like the author of the message above, I always thought LOL meant lots of love.  After all, many of my female friends put it at the end of their missives to me.  Yet all the while their  communications may have been tongue in cheek, sardonic or, even worse, privately amused!  Ah well, you are never too old for schadenfreude.  It actually means Laughing Out Loud!!!
Here in Ghana there is much to learn in the mutation of the English language.  I got a touch of conjunctivitis the other day and was instructed to go to the pharmacy and ask for drops for Apollo, the common name for it.  Apparently a vast proportion of the population looked skywards imagining the moon landing and this coincided with a particularly virulent outbreak of the condition. One had obviously led to the other.

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Sunday, April 3, 2011



Upwardly and laterally mobile in Ghana

Maybe life is a struggle for everyone, rich or poor if you see it through the eyes of each individual but it doesn’t look like that from the outside.  While students in developed countries fight to maintain their grants and fulfil the expectations of having universal education, albeit with varying degrees of fee-paying in the latter stages, what happens when you are born and brought up in a Ghanaian village where, if you are lucky, there is some rudimentary primary education and little else afterwards for the vast majority?

I will try not to be sentimental about what follows.  A young man, in his early twenties came to the house as a gardener.  Illiterate and not speaking English (the post-colonial language of Ghana) he worked very hard and with intelligence.  He was moved to the factory which sells uniquely designed clothes directly to customers in the UK and elsewhere but not in Ghana.  Here the staff at all levels are paid three or four times the national average for their levels of work in the fashion industry.  Our young man became an ironer.  A couple of years later he was literate and taking photographs of garments (having a very rare eye, even for so-called professional photographers).  Now he is quality controller in the factory and patrols every phase of production with a forensic eye and a completely immovable force (resisting sixty staff’s desire to bend the rules has broken a few spirits!).  He is earning money he could never have dreamed of.  He still spends his Saturdays with us, cleaning.  Much of his income goes back to send his sister through school and for other family needs.

Where does he live, here in the sprawling morass that is Accra?   Every possibility exists, from under a tree to a sumptuous gated property with armed guards.  But the majority live in kiosks and rough-made dwellings built from any available material, usually small, windowless and in acreages of the same or – and here we come back to the protagonist of this blog – on any available land that has not yet succumbed to the builders, both private and municipal.  Just so with our man.  Yesterday he could not come to clean because the Accra Metropolitan Authority was moving his kiosk on.  At this moment his house will be on a trailer heading for a little plot he has had his eye on for some time.  This is his third such move in three years.  I expect he has found somewhere and I will hear about it tomorrow, at work in the factory.

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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The eyes have it but who cares?
I have always had problems with my eyes and, in the course of a fairly physical as well as intellectual life I have suffered just about every operation on them known to ophthalmologists.  If eyes are the windows to the soul, then whatever spiritual essence resides inside must be mutated out of all recognition!

Anyway, my retina managed to throw up another problem three thousand miles from my regular consultant in the UK.  A good friend arranged a private appointment with an ocular expert in Accra (actually, nearly all Ghanaian medical treatment is private).  I arrived at the clinic in good time, registered and paid for the consultation.  Then I sat and waited for the doctor to arrive.  His list was full and the waiting room crowded.  Nearly an hour passed and then he phoned to say he was stuck in traffic.  This is normal for Accra but, if I had been the doctor I would have taken account of it, wouldn’t you?  I decided to abort the appointment, feeling demeaned and angry.  I wondered whether a doctor who shows that much respect for his patients would be any good, anyway?  The more a professional feels accountable to customer, client or patient the more he or she ratchets up the quality of his or her work.  For a number of years I worked across the medical firmament in England, developing appraisal measures which might improve not only the quality of expertise among doctors but also their attitudes to patients, nurses, managers and juniors, their time keeping, their team work and their self-critical faculties.  It was a rocky ride because there was so much professional arrogance abroad at the beginning.  But it helped to change the culture.

Many if not most of the consultants here in Ghana train in the UK or US.  If in the former then they would have had to abide by the appraisal system to which my team and I contributed.  Then they return to Ghana and a proportion of them are too delighted to embrace arrogance and dump any notion of accountability.  They have re-joined the Ghanaian middle class.  When I asked the receptionist whether the doctor was usually late, she smiled benignly and said, “He is a doctor”.

In Ghana, accountability hardly exists in practice though the rhetoric is very western in language and structure.  If someone sells you a bum service there is little redress.  Socio-political reforms show hardly any palpable result. The general populace is utterly cynical about government bodies, professional services, corruption and backhanders.  It is sad because ordinary people in their towns and villages are remarkable in their general capacity to get by.  Change will only occur here when the middle classes forget about feathering their nests and maintaining their vantage point in the class system and begin to institute hard-edged offensives against corruption and grossly unprofessional conduct.

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Sunday, March 20, 2011

Skin deeper
I am writing this on the road back from Cape Coast to Accra.  We have just spent the weekend on the beach; long stretches of sand and coconut palms, a few local villagers walking to and from Elmina, a small and delightful fishing port.  From the chalet they are silhouettes, carrying large basins full of yams or firewood through the palms with the sea breaking behind them.  We ate fresh grilled lobster and squid, grouper and snapper under straw lidded canopies, walked the isolated sands and rested.   This morning we drove to Elmina on the way home to buy fish.  It is an enjoyable half hour if you like haggling and checking the species covered in ice in big pails.  All the while the sellers assume you will pay four or five times the price a black skin can afford.  Even with the help of a six foot female who calls herself the Queen of Togo, the bartering is in favour of the locals.  Not that I mind.  The redistribution of wealth is built in to skin colour.  If I can buy fish at half shop price and they can sell it to me at twice local price, then who can complain?  We are a bit late at the market so there is no squid or octopus and few of the more exotic shapes and colours but we buy two plump and richly red snappers, some silver fish which are flat ribbons, moss green grouper, barracuda and a bag of whitebait.  I like it at the market, the bustle and noise, the shouting of wares and the smell of a fresh catch.  It is redolent of childhood forays with my father to North Shields from Newcastle on the electric train, to fish off the quay at seven in the morning, catching crabs and coley and the occasional cod.  It’s strange how smells which might turn the nose of someone new to them become familiar, embracing and latterly nostalgic.

As I write we are half way to Accra and have just passed a couple of young men trying to sell grasscutters.  I must look them up.  One of my first Ghana blogs included a description of grasscutter stew.  The grasscutter appears to be a large rodent, a bit like a coypu but they are sold by the wayside in smoked form.  Imagine quite large bellows, flattened or spatchcocked, except the bones are visible like x-rays against the deep brown of the charcoaling and on being held in front of the vendor this gourmet’s delight obscures half of his body.

The skin colour based interchanges mentioned above work rather badly for mixed race individuals  Someone with a fair skin (for Ghana this means, say, Lebanese brown) may be the subject of racist abuse in Europe and then find himself or herself similarly dealt with over here, in reverse.  A victim in both worlds.  In general I have found Ghanaians remarkable in their ability to laugh at the racism they have experienced abroad, though I would have exploded with outrage, I am sure.  I interviewed a woman the other day who had been a supply teacher in the UK only a few years back.  She had arrived at one primary school and the receptionist told her to pick up an apron and join the canteen staff in the kitchens.  When she revealed her identity, the woman was embarrassed and said that because her name was so English sounding (traditional English names are common in coastal Ghana from the slave trade and gold mining) she had expected a white woman for the teaching job.

Managing staff can be difficult too.  Skin can get in the way.  Ghanaian culture, for example, has little evidence of what we might term depersonalised critical dialogue.  To manage anywhere in the world you need to establish the criteria upon which you judge a person’s performance.  But to tell someone that their performance is under par even when citing previously agreed and understood criteria can be taken very badly and the race card can appear.  We carry our skins like badges as we traverse the world.  A lot of the time and energy is spent in finding ways to disclaim responsibility for this birth-packaging.

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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Covering the Japanese Tsunami, UK style
I suppose that the more you travel, the less jingoistic you become.  I am three thousand miles from the UK these days and it seems like so many light years from home – not!  That’s it, really.  Home is for me an ephemeral outdated concept, maybe the place of my childhood or childrearing years but many like me are now wandering creatures,  itinerants in search of answers to questions we have had little time to frame because of our very movement, the constant change that has become our way of life.  We may, like the Buddha, seek through our journeys to find enlightenment, somehow knowing it is not likely to be found in the fixed geography of our history but what we discover are peoples in lands who are just like us, clueless as to what existence is all about.

The expatriated gypsy flunks the test of knowledge more often than not by assuming that coming to terms with a new location, a foreign culture is somehow the same as discovering deeper answers.  While engrossing and diverting, it rarely is.  We carry our history on our backs.  We live and die in new scenery, that is all.

Meanwhile, those we have left behind and who populate the ‘old country’  seem to become moored and mired in their unchanging homeland.  Everything is weighed and measured against its history, its traditions and its certainties.  Even when these stay-at-homes cross borders, they have one eye over their shoulders to make sure they can get back to safety as soon as the little adventure is over.

I  am digressing in this ill-formed way as a lead-in to something which seems obvious to me but may not be to those whose news service it is.  Watching the UK’s Sky News coverage of the tragedy of Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami, I felt somewhat ill at ease by its approach.  It had a team out on Japan’s east coast.  They made it seem that they were braving danger. They were concerned about the British who might be caught up in it.  They talked to Save the Children workers about what they might do to alleviate the horrors for Japanese children.  They rolled out the Minister who proudly boasted of the sixty odd crack force on a search and find brief.  They marvelled at the Japanese refusal to loot, their order and discipline, they produced little cameos of individuals searching flattened towns for their loved ones.  Worse, they played over and over the engulfing black sea of destruction as it took everything in its path, played it with their own version of  the sinister Jaws theme, deep reverberations and oriental cymbals in disharmony.  They played up the fears of radiation and how far it might be spread by winds.

In other words, it was news for those who can never shake off the notion of home.  It was a cake of horror and it was to be eaten by those who are safe and far away from it all.

Al Jazeera, on the other hand, gave it straight, without translation into a UK cultural context. 

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Tuesday, March 8, 2011

It’s life but not as we know it, Captain…

Leaving aside belief in gods, the hereafter, heaven and hell and the trappings of metaphysics, where are we when we drop, for example, the meta in the last domain? Where are we with science, generally? Do we believe it? The professions are certainly beholden to it. Law now has its forensics, medicine has its pharmaceuticals, the food industry has its nutritional values, the home has a complex reliance upon science in all its forms, from entertainment through heating, cleaning, birth control, depression and on to an induced good night’s sleep. Gradually, the science is outstripping our capacity to understand how it works. But hasn’t it always been so?


The arrival of margarine heralded a new healthy alternative to butter. It was decades before it was realised that trans fats in margarine were potentially lethal. Obesity is rising rapidly in all countries that adopt western fast and processed food regimes though the manufacturers stay on the legal side of the scientific protocols for what constitutes harm. Salt and sugar are being reduced but only after a few million heart attacks, diabetes and early deaths. Powdered milk is being sold to mothers in subsistence cultures as they are being weaned off breast feeding. Skin bleaches are sold openly across black nations with some terrible consequences. Cosmetic surgery is a growing trend for the emerging middle classes.


Thalidomide was sold as a safe drug until misshapen babies arrived. We were captivated by menthol cigarettes as a healthy alternative to straight tobacco; “cool as a mountain spring’ was a strap line. All the while, in ads, we see serious looking white coated professionals, still with clipboards, researching the efficacy of products. We buy the hype and then curse ourselves when the bad news filters out and it is too late. We assume, I suppose, that the tests are all finished with, that the beagles and rats and volunteer humans have given their bodies to make us safe.


That is why the Sky News expose of the maltreatment of Gressingham ducks in Hingham Norfolk, with brutal keepers holding birds by the neck to beat the others into the hangars, while dead birds lay untouched on the ground to rot, was so offensive. Trust was broken. These had been sold by Waitrose Supermarkets as having been regularly inspected by their scientific vets. They were sold as organic birds and were at the top end of their sales meat chain.


It was visual agitprop for how we have become disenfranchised in understanding the science of our own lives.

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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Enemies of the People


As Gaddafi unleashes sub-Saharan mercenaries, threatening to kill the children in every family that has protested against his tyranny, Cameron the UK Prime Minister is wandering with a band of British arms dealers around Kuwait. His snake oil salesman’s rhetoric runs along the lines of ‘every country needs to defend its borders’. After the Libyan foaming dog sent in jets against his own people we may allow ourselves a little vomit in our handkerchiefs. The jets weren’t built in Libya. They were sold to the country by previous incarnations of our grubby salesman.

Meanwhile, away from oil rich states and firmly among the oil poor UK, the same Cameron and his siblings of state have introduced a new health test to check on people’s capacity to work. In an eloquent article in the Guardian today, people with terminal cancers, distressing pains, traumatising depressions and the like talk about the humiliation of the testing procedure. Do you watch East Eenders or Coronation Street? To do so means you can sit for half an hour. Nice for office work. Not that there is any work waiting for them. It is symbolic humiliation only. In the UK there is no culture of sensitivity towards those unable to work. They are just like elderly bed-blockers, a barrier to the capitalist enterprise.


In Soylent Green, an old but good science fiction film, the elderly and the extremely ill can opt for a fantastic, almost heavenly euthanasia to get them off the eating register. Fewer mouths to feed. Not only that but their cadavers are recycled as food tablets.

Now this is something the Tories would love to get their teeth into!


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Sunday, February 20, 2011


The Courage of Convictions

Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid is a rather piquant quotation from Franklin P Jones. Watching the domino demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa where thousands march in the face of guns is a humbling experience. It is too easy to see small figures on a tv screen and allow the brain to comprehend it as a spectacle, a computer game, a film with a cast of thousands and somehow discount the fact that every person out there is facing personal fear. It takes such courage to put one’s life on the line for the principle of democracy. Time and again, determined faces come up close to the camera and say ‘freedom’, ‘no corruption’, ‘peace’, ‘fair elections’. Old, young, religiously diverse, professional and every day workers, march for a future for their children, their fellows and their country.


Meanwhile we have to witness the great ‘unbrave’, the milk-toothed leaders of western states and their foreign representatives pontificating on how these toppling regimes must suddenly behave towards their citizens. The very same individuals and their governments have supported these same criminal dictatorships for decades without a murmur, without a single proclamation in support of their downtrodden citizens.


Let us see what transpires. Meanwhile isn’t there a sense of schadenfreude at our first world governments’ Uriah Heap hand wringing as they reap middle eastern everyman’s repugnance for their hypocrisy?

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Thursday, February 17, 2011

History is egg-shaped


When I was a boy in Durham I used to go egg collecting. The tallest risk-laden trees for rooks’ eggs, sinking marshy waters for those of the black headed gull and flimsy attic floors for a starling’s ice blue oval. The lure of the colours, shapes and sizes, the art of blowing them, the need for some kind of natural lore to hunt and broaden the collection was time-intensive and obsessive. But all that changed. Even then we knew never to take an egg unless we could leave at least two. Now we protect and take none. Those who do so are rightly prosecuted.

The skull is a little like an eggshell. Indeed, scientists are called eggheads. Recent finds in Cheddar Gorge, England, suggest that CroMagnon man used the skull as a drinking vessel, either for religious ceremonies or for more prosaic dietary purposes, around twenty thousand years ago. It seems he did this in a brief warm spell between ice ages when Britain became temporarily accessible. We don’t do it now – unless we have some kind of Hannibal Lector psychosis!

The nearest I came to the skull being used in a less than meritorious way was in my early days of teaching. Students who were engaged in what was called liberal studies, broadening their apprentice shoe-maker curriculum, turned up for class with skulls they found on Dunwich beach in Suffolk. Dunwich was the same size as nearby London in early medieval times but slowly succumbed to an encroaching sea, a monk’s graveyard being among the last vestiges of its existence to fall from the retreating cliffs during the early nineteen seventies. The young would-be cobblers put light bulbs in them. You can imagine the lit eye sockets by your bedside. Strange to think of all those monks seeking illumination during their lives and finding it, perhaps, only after their deaths.

The times they are a changing fast; attitudes, behaviours and beliefs. Each one of us can find epitaphs to them within our own histories. Something CroMagnon Man and the Monks of Dunwich may not have been able to ascertain.

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Friday, February 11, 2011



On shellfish and the selfish


Paris in early February. Cold, clear and sunshine arriving by late morning. The whole city has a half-awake feel to it. Somnambulistic shopkeepers powered down, the lights in their eyes barely glinting. But the restaurateurs know that people have got to eat, especially the tourists who have come on cheap breaks and the business people who have to be here for the expositions. So they are zappy and chatty, unless you don’t speak French when, I am told, they turn an epaule froid and offer the service of a tundra-ready robot. Since I can converse at a level which manages the every day but falls short of the philosophical we can exchange mild jokes and gain the security of acceptable tables. All of which is a lead-in to a half dozen oysters in the Mascotte in lower Montmartre. They were as good as any I have had. Large and succulent, bedded in icy salty water, their taste so indefinably faint, their texture so softly enticing that it is an almost not-there flavour. Compared to the full range of gastronomic tastes available they are off the scale at one end where, say, three day marinated boar is off the other. That’s my spectrum anyway.

On another note I see that Manchester has closed all but one of its nineteen public toilets, some of which have been monuments to Victorian architecture. It is happening everywhere and now everyone runs the gauntlet of getting into pubs in the evening, using their amenities and exiting without buying anything. At the same time libraries are being closed. We will all have to have in-built brain chips, catheters and colostomy bags if this continues. Privacy in downloading everything from the word to the turd is the future. Personal rather than public conveniences.

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Sunday, February 6, 2011



History: It Never Lets You Go


Sometimes you encounter these odd triangulations in your life. As if it has all been a dream from which you have woken, temporarily. Three bits of your life juxtaposed, though years apart and from different countries, even continents.

I am on a Virgin Atlantic plane heading to London from Accra. This us MA what happened. I saw a film called Never Let me Go from a novel by Ishiguru. As I watched I saw countryside and coastal settings as familiar as the mind can recall. They were all in Norfolk. Places I had walked and talked. Places I no longer really saw because they were every day familiar. The film is worth seeing. It is both unsettling and also a period piece, set in the 1970s. The first decade of my time there. It is sufficiently unsettling to be classed as science fiction in a Margaret Atwood kind of way. I could almost have written it. It felt as if I had. After all I did the Creative Writing course at UEA the year after Ian McEwan and before Kazuo Ishiguru. What happened on that course might fill a number of future blogs!

I got up at the end of it to wiggle my toes and do what you need to do to stop deep vein thrombosis and caught sight of where the aircraft had reached on one of those moving maps beloved by early cinema and copied in Indiana Jones films. We were just past Barcelona and directly over the house I own in France, near Perpignan. Accra, Norfolk, the Franco Spanish border, Ishiguro. Triangulation is needed to tell you where you are. But it doesn’t tell you who you are.

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Thursday, February 3, 2011


You too can be a great musician

Both of my sons are musicians. One plays and creates using a number of instruments some of which he makes and the other composes using electronics. The older started with piano and the younger with guitar. They went to teachers, off and on until their teens. Somehow both managed to cross that divide into which the vast majority fall and never climb back up. I don’t really remember dragooning them into practice. I have heard a number of grown-ups say that they wished their parents had ‘forced’ them to continue so that now they might have a degree of musicianship, enough to entertain themselves and friends.

Vanessa Mae was compelled to practise by a very forceful mother (“I love you but it is conditional on you playing”) and now, at 30, she is beautiful and wonderfully accomplished at her violin. A sexy soloist. I say that because, in the documentary I saw yesterday there was film of her from 15 upwards in hot pants, bikinis and figure hugging dresses. Her mother made her iconic. Classical prodigy as pubescent pin up. She has not spoken to her mother in eight years….

Vanessa was asking herself a question: how much is my mastery owing to hard work and how much to some innate quality? Nurture or nature. She would have preferred the latter to have dominated. She didn’t want to give too much kudos to her mother. She went to experts in this and that who scanned her brain, tested her bravery, explored her extroversion and sought to discover how true was her ‘ear’ for sound. At the end the jury was half in and half out. You have to have aptitude but then most of us actually have. Then you have to practise for between 5,000 and 10,000 hours by the time you are adolescent to become a soloist. The brain is shaped by all this until you only need to exercise the desire and you perform.

I am glad we managed to encourage my sons to play. It is a huge part of their lives today. I have always thought they had aptitude, something lacking in myself. I can strum some chords and sing some songs but nothing like them. Now I realise I could have done it, too. But my parents did not think of it. And if they had forced me, my relationship with my father would have zeroed like Vanessa and her mother.

It all does prove something and that is that whatever we want to become is merely an exercise in willpower. You just have to want it enough to practise for 10,000 hours.

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Myopia and mortality

There is little motivation among societies’ leaders to take a long term view when establishing policies. That’s why we have environmental disasters, genocide, diseases, poverty, multinational corporations overruling the interest of ordinary folks, bank collapses etc etc. Everything is measured in terms of their own lives and their own comforts. It is not just that they want to see immediate outcomes and benefits and bask in the glory of their achievements, it is, it seems to me, to do with a deep-seated psychosis at their own mortality. Human beings are egocentric and want as much history as possible encompassed within their own existences.

I was shunted down this train of thought when watching a programme on the history of soothsaying and the great prophets of doom. Nostradamus and the Book of Revelations, for example. The Bible Belt in the US has an alarmingly high population of believers of prophecies. In fact there is a two century tradition of Christian ‘prophets’ who forecast the end of days but always within their own life times! Thus they prepared their congregation for a rapture, an Apocalypse, an uplifting of their souls to God. When it didn’t happen they simply changed the date of the world’s extinction, claiming a simple error of calculation. Their credulous congregations swallowed it.

And the end hasn’t happened yet. Obviously.

Here in Ghana and wherever else the evangelists have hooked their pernicious doom-mongering claws into fearful people, whipping up frenzies during church services and running bible classes that promote its every written word as the truth, they proclaim that the prophecies in Revelations are about to happen now, in their lives, thousands of years after they were written by a mad, hermit isolate. In fact Revelations was just another example of doom-laden prophecy limited to the immediate world of its writer(s). Not beyond. Not for now. It related entirely to the horrors of Roman (Nero’s most likely) sadistic occupation and fears for the end of their race. Not 9/11, Stalin, Hitler or a present day rise of the Antichrist.

It is too much for men and women to believe that the important events of humanity’s extinction will fall outside their three score years and ten. They want them to happen now. Not even a generation or two down the line.

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Sunday, January 23, 2011

The drying of the will

The hot, dry winds from the Sahara still blow across Accra. The dust gets thicker and the attempts to stave it off become more desultory. Any notion you might have that equatorial Ghana is plush with forest, dripping water, snakes and crocodiles must be relinquished immediately! It is an effort to keep vivacity going through the long, hot days and it got me to thinking about the will and personal discipline.

What is our relationship with inner drives? We talk about how by strength of mind we can rein them in and channel them to our advantage but the fact of the matter is that for too much of the time they control us rather than the other way round. Let me take some examples. I’ll try to think of four. The first is keeping in shape. We now know that physical exercise elongates life’s path. Let yourself go and the brain suffers and you become prone to faster ageing and the various diseases associated with it. I have a pool, a gym and, separately, a treader with elastic skiing straps which I can mount and watch the tele as I go. This affords me the opportunity of watching documentaries and toning up. That’s the idea, anyway. But do I do it enough? No. There are days when something inside creeps out of the darkness of the unconscious mind and prevents me. I might go two days without pool or gym or treader. I feel really irritated afterwards but at the time I am blithely evasive about facing myself.

Now, what would be the second? Writing. I need to finish the third and last book in my fictional trilogy about the beginnings of humankind’s dallying with religion and the apparition of death. If I wrote two pages a day, I’d be finished by May. But there are days when I don’t write at all or prefer to do a blog like this or a number of emails to friends. My mind tells me that I need to think about the next piece of writing and allow it to gestate. But is that a fallacy? I know when I attack writing with discipline, no matter what corner my characters find themselves in, I can get them out by some alchemical process.

My third? I play the guitar and learn songs. I do this because it is good for me, I know. Highly meditative. I am not even averagely good at music. It is all a struggle to keep things improving. It goes back to when I was eleven and sang tenor to another boy’s contralto in concert parties to raise funds for a village hall. My voice broke and a deep musical depression fell upon me. So when I am playing and singing today I am facing the demons of early ageing!

There has to be a fourth. Probably hundreds more. Some things I manage without fail Diet, except when on holiday where I implode – or explode, actually! Daily raw fruit and vegetable juices for instance. Let me say, reading. There are books I should read. They would help in backing up my skimpy knowledge about the history of human thought but I just don’t. In fact, as I have said, I can’t bear fiction which is well researched because it seems to preclude the real power of the imagination. I read the odd page of non-fiction and a few bytes of the internet.

So, as you read this, what do you not do that you know you should? Why do you desist when you know the consequences could mean the lopping off of years of your life? What are the hot Sahara winds that lay you low and desultorily pondering?

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Thursday, January 13, 2011

The dust settles on Accra

I was reminded of Dickens’ Bleak House this last week because Ghana is experiencing the Hamatan. It is dry and the sir is full of Sahara dust. Read the quote from the beginning of Dickens’ novel and substitute dust for fog and you’ll get the picture!

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green lanes and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

The light is milky and it affects breathing and how clean you feel. Coming back from work reveals your clothes filmed in it. Our house here in Accra has no glass in the windows, just mosquito netting so the dust penetrates everywhere. It would take a whole below-stairs of Dickensian staff to keep it from being a repository of dunes. You just paddle about and ignore it.

The contrast couldn’t be greater when watching the horrors of water-logged Australia or the strangely surreal European snow reports on Sky News. At the same time our swimming pool, which ought to be called Wikileaks, is allowing the water to seep away so we are encouraging the process by bucketing it to the garden. It’s ankle deep at the shallow end and the new Alsatian pup, Andromeda, appears to be unlike her cowardly big friends, the Sirius the Doberman and Heracles the Alsatian cross. While they are bumptious on dry land, they run a mile when you suggest having a dip. She, however, a mere three months old, scampers in and thrashes her paws in the water making a fine spray. The other two watch her curiously as though she is an alien.

Meanwhile, back in the UK which seems less and less where I would want to live these days, the Tories have cut an education programme which gives free books to children from poor homes. Maybe three million or so? The Tories are the Hamatan of culture. Any notion that the reason why people might want to live and work in the UK is because it is a natural habitat for creative artists is quite beyond them.

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Thursday, January 6, 2011

Lies, damn lies and poor interpretations of statistics

Funnily enough, when I was flying back from Japan, I saw a programme called Freakonomics based on the book of the same name. I hadn’t read the book but understood it was a lateral look at the myths that can abound when people make wrong inferences from data. Well, two outcomes that stuck in my somewhat jetlagged nut. One related to Japan. The other to New York.

First the Japanese angle. What the documentary showed was that when a society has, it imagines, in-built ethics or traditional cultural behaviours, it will not face the consequences of these being brought into disrepute. We saw sumo wrestlers. Here is an ancient art, a rule-ridden battle between men whose weight is more significant than their body shapes. Giants who are fed like the carp in Japanese ponds until their mountainous flesh vies with Fuji itself. They fight their way to the top where the pickings can be massive and include enamoured, beautiful, slight-bodied women. And NO-ONE could envisage even the sniff of corruption in this stylised, mannered world. No single event had come to light until an ex-sumo coach said that fights were fixed. Uproar. The media tried to shut him up. But our intrepid statisticians looked at the data and, over thousands of fights they found an anomaly. There was a huge bias where victories by opponents did not hurt the losers because they had already enough victories under their great leather belts to progress to the next championships. The Japanese federation accepted that in certain cases, injuries among sumo wrestlers (some died in training) were the result of abuse but would not accept the statistical pattern showing that a big proportion of fights was rigged. This notion that culture has its purities that we need to believe in, regardless of the true state of affairs, rings a bell, does it not? Politicians peddle it when they defend the police, secret services, religious schools, the royals, foreign conquest and so on. We are not expected to challenge these verities. Wikileaks exposed not only the malady in ambassadorial life but also the hypocrisies that abound when people like Hilary Clinton defend their nasty email injunctions to spy on America’s friends.

The other angle was the New York one. I have to admit that I was a sucker for the story about how New York was reformed by its Mayor and its policy of zero tolerance. By jumping on the small details of antisocial behaviour (breaking windows, throwing litter, petty stealing) the big ones do not occur in the same numbers. What a great breakthrough in public order. Well, our number crunchers looked at the data. What did they find? Following Ceaucescu’s fall from power in Romania it was discovered that he had forced women to have babies to swell the labour market. Twenty years later these unwanted babies had inflated the criminal ranks of the country. At around this time, the American Senate passed what seemed to be an unpopular law which allowed women to have abortion. Twenty years later, the crime figures for New York and elsewhere had dropped sharply. Unwanted pregnancies had been so diminished. Of course, religious fundamentalists don’t like it that abortion is a possible tool for ensuring babies are born to their mothers when they are ready to support them. Others on the liberal front attack the connection on the grounds that it appears to be biased against the poor, suggesting they are poor parents and irresponsible. But the causality is striking, make of it what you may.


Two examples from Freakonomics. You have to be brave to challenge social orthodoxies that underpin your culture and you have to control your own destiny, regardless of the State. But you may die for such causes. Take Punjab Governor Salman Taseer who was assassinated this week for wanting to repeal blasphemy laws. Laws that do not stem from the Koran but from bigots who want to limit freedom of speech and frank debate about religious and other pillars of Pakistan society.

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Thursday, December 30, 2010


The Disease of Disney and the Solace of Zen


Japan is an oyster whose pearl is the asceticism of Zen and the consequent aesthetic of minimalism. Thousands of years of philosophical struggle with the eternal questions of existence and thereafter run a deep course beneath its modernity. I have to admit I am deeply affected by it. It needs protection from the global consumerism that reduces the spiritual and intellectual quest to gift shop retail. Of the latter let me make some vitriolic comments.

Japan has a strange fixation with cartoon realities. Everywhere you go, the shops, the people, the tv programmes have elements of humanity reduced to the simplicity of animated creatures, anthropomorphised into stylised representations of human characteristics. If there were seven versions of the human condition then the Seven Dwarfs would represent them. Kuresawa’s The Seven Samurai would involve Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy et al being ‘collected’ by a central, smiling, androgynous hero to take on the mission of saving humanity. Or the more serious version would be found in the vivid, sometime violent and perverse renditions of a Manga graphic novel. Walk down the roads of Electric City in Tokyo and you begin to believe you are a figment of the Matrix and there is no separation between you and the virtual.

That is the every day. Then go to Disneyland and what is already a twee world becomes exacerbated into the outlandishly infantile. Here, the garish and the glitzy, the caricatured and the personified become a treacle of mawkishness, as devoid of the sweat, flesh and blood or intellectual curiosity of the human condition as it is possible to experience. Millions visit every week. They can queue up to an hour for ‘rides’ and if they manage three special attractions in a day’s slog, they go home happy. Do not imagine I am talking about children. From my viewpoint, primary school and younger ones were actually a minority. Couples, mature professionals, pensioners and every other age group and type of worker wander about with blissed-out expressions as they take in the Disney experience. This chasing of the dragon of fantasy is an addiction. A friend of mine, known internationally for his pithy and delightfully creative children’s books was once visited by the wife of the Japanese Ambassador to the UK with her about to be married daughter. They wanted my friend to sign some of his books created for five year olds. He learned that they would be added to a ‘shrine’ of artefacts that the daughter was gathering her marital boudoir. English and American children’s books are much sought after.

I visited Miyajima Island on my last day’s trip to Hiroshima. The usual tourist traps were full of souvenirs, superficial replicas of the Buddha through to ornamented rice paddles and sake bottles and cups. The narrow streets, despite the bitter cold, were thronging. Only twenty metres above the main shopping street is a wonderful Buddhist building of ancient, polished planks and massive columns. Peace and tranquillity rule. The structure radiates an imperative to ponder on the shortness and superficiality of life and what meaning might be squeezed from its fruits. While I was there, there were only a couple of other visitors.

Disney and the Buddha emphasise that life is but an illusion, an unrolling celluloid that one day will flutter off the reel. Take your pick as to which one offers a path to enlightenment.

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010



Masks or blindfolds


I am in Japan at the moment. It’s a relief to be back in a culture where there is no tipping of waiters, no backhanders to get things done, a country where people bow and show respect at all times (except the Yakusa!) . Not that I have ever been a traditionalist, bemoaning the behaviour of the young or writing hang ‘em-flog ‘em letters to the right wing press. Quite the opposite. It has always seemed to me that a radical youth is needed everywhere to stir up societies and stop them becoming moribund or reactionary, even though it upsets those who are approaching their dotage or who have a monopoly on power.

Wanting to shape a country’s culture shows a person cares about it. In the fifties and early sixties we teenagers felt alive and sensed we were dominating attitudes and beliefs. We behaved badly but the arts flourished with our headstrong attack upon the establishment’s control of what counted as culture and what didn’t. Eventually we were marginalised as our creative forces were subsumed in the new consumerism but much changed. This condition still pertains. Ideas are merchandise like everything else. Walk the streets of Tokyo or any other city in the world and you see fashion appropriating every form of disaffection, muzzling it or neutering it. The young are disinheriting the earth.

As I said recently, student revolt in the UK over fees bears little comparison with earlier student revolt over disproportionate power and control where the haves dominate the have-nots, keeping them firmly embedded in ignorance and powerlessness. Similarly, marching to Aldermaston or Greenham Common encampments had a different order of caring for a country, its people and humanity as a whole, than breaking windows at Tory Headquarters in London. When people march for their rights to gather, to be uncensored or not to be discriminated against. there is hope.

I visited the Hiroshima Peace Park, yesterday, for the second time in three years, with its museum attesting to the devastation of the Atomic bomb in 1945. The images and artefacts are so unsettling that the mind revolts against them, trying to deny them access. No human being could do this, surely? Harry Truman did and he was no Hitler or Stalin. The order was passed. The decision was made not to warn the civilian population. Days after Hiroshima the Americans turned on Nagasaki. The carnage was stupendously obscene. The bombs we have today are thousands of times more powerful. Many countries have them. Yet, in the main in the apathetic west we don’t protest about the world’s ills beyond our doors. We keep our heads down and let our politicians, our own Harry Trumans, do what they may. Even if we could be flattened by H Bombs or environmental suicide.

When I was forced to drink coffee in the smoking area of a restaurant in Tokyo, a young couple came in, their faces covered in those white anti-pollution masks. They took them off and lighted up cigarettes. It seemed to sum up the Wonderland we live in very well.

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Friday, December 17, 2010

Charles and Camilla

One of those symbolic moments occurred the other day on Regent’s Street, London, captured in a short take of film by a lucky photographer. And from it was extracted a single frame of film in which Camilla stares open-mouthed and Charles in bemused consternation at the parallel universe beyond the glass of their vehicle. The world, in its unpredictable proletarian reality, was washing up on the shores of their royal separateness! The prince is not used to his subjects being other than forelock tuggers on his estates, or the Uriah Heaps of the royal retinue and the landed gentry of the county set. Of course, the Prince’s Trust has its charitable offerings to needy young folk who aspire to making it in business and the prince might have assumed that it was a conduit to understanding the downtrodden masses. Until now. Nothing had actually prepared the surreal pair for this rupture of their rarefied universe.

The most significant element of their brush with unwashed studenthood was the attack upon Camilla’s royal person. Was she, as was originally claimed but not really corroborated by the Home Secretary, ‘poked with a stick’? If so, how Neanderthal. Even today, in this world of technology, virtual aggression and climatically controlled vehicles, we can be prodded by an oaken branch, from the same genus of tree that another royal Charles once hid from republican Cromwell!

For Charles, rhetoric and reality are not considered complementary. He it was who paid for a planeload of black lilies or some such plant to be brought from South Africa for a swanky do whilst well into his cant on environmental sustainability and man’s odious place in that narrative.

As you will know from a previous blog, I don’t feel that much solidarity with the student revolt this time round as there seems little ideology or altruism in it but, at least, it has given genesis to that iconic photograph of the future king coming face to face with the people he must one day rule.

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Sunday, December 12, 2010

You Dear Reader, may not exist…!

There is an excellent series on BBC Knowledge showing in Ghana at the moment. I suppose you may have been able to see it a year or two ago but time here does not behave like yours does. Last night I watched Morgan Freeman, who fronts it, ask what the latest scientific proof might be for God. Get to see it unless you are so smitten with your religion that you could not bear to be challenged. The latest theories were like a gourmet’s meal for famished philosophers. I’ll have to watch it again because my brain buckles with so much being thrown at it. Here’s what my depleted memory store can regurgitate for three of them.

Theory One: we are living in a simulation created by our descendents. In 50 years computer power will be so extraordinary that this world we know as our own, with you, me and everything could easily be created and because we are part of it, like in The Matrix, we cannot tell that it is not real. Think Playstation 50+ and the Sims. Evidence can be found by examining the very fabric of our world. On close inspection it is made up of pixels…

Theory Two: put a magnet over your brain’s right lobe and focus its power and even atheists have God-like experiences. Because we know death is an end to existence our anguish is converted into the means to alleviate it with spiritual experiences. Great prophets may have access to this part of the brain and thus ‘see’ God.

Theory Three: a beach bum with a PhD and a mind that has moved on since Einstein has come up with a theory for everything, mathematically speaking. It excludes God but is so elegant that it makes it appear that God or a supreme Physicist must exist. It (the metatheory) says that only by random do the constituent four theories of gravitation, electro-magnetism and weak and strong forces fuse together on this planet….

As I gurgled in a recent blog, our brains are undoubtedly capable of believing that what they conjure up, actually exists outside them and that our senses apprehend them.

Oh no! I have just realised that mine may well have done this. My brain is so capable of such creative self-deceit that it has fabricated this blog, Ghana, my life thus far, the programme called Through the Wormhole and even the illusion that I am an atheist…!

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Friday, December 10, 2010

Whose God is it Anyway?

There they were in Israel trying to change the course of nature which, according to Sky News had become ‘biblical’ in its form and effect. There is a seven year drought and we all know that plagues, pestilences, floods and the like go in seven year cycles in the Old Testament. God might work in mysterious ways but His ready reckoner tends to get stuck on seven.

“They’ who had got together to seek God’s intervention, were spiritual leaders of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims. Joint prayer. The paradoxical element of this is that there is widespread belief among adherents to different faiths that the God of each is not necessarily the same God. Otherwise why would Muslims and Jews be in a death conflict, or Christians and Muslims? Or are they saying that it is the same God but each road has different scenery and they are fighting over the view out of the window?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a God? We’d all be happy and in harmony. But we don’t really believe it or we’d stop the bloodshed immediately.

If there is a God then I doubt He bothers too much about people praying and genuflecting to Him. A bit demeaning to His intelligence, don’t you think? What kind of Being finds His ego inflated by men and women on their knees? Hardly an all-seeing, all-knowing, loving God!

But there they stood on the dusty terrain, hedging their bets as they allowed each in turn to invoke the rain through God, whomever had the most scenic route to Him.

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Friday, December 3, 2010

On level playing pitches and moving goal posts

So, as I mentioned a couple of emails ago, FIFA had little intention of supporting England’s bid, despite it being the best constructed, most viable and economically beneficial to grass roots football throughout the world. The 22, largely old men, who are steeped in forms of negotiation and power that are beyond the comprehension and experience of the Brits had little compunction in saying they were going to support the English bid and then reneging at the last possible moment.

Why?

Well, I am a much travelled man and what you discover when you travel is that cultural norms differ wherever you find yourself. For example, in Ghana it is likely that, whatever you suggest will be agreed by your opposite number. This is a norm. It has little bearing on what your opposite number may decide to do. People here regard it as showing good grace. But they dislike intensely any criticism, implied or direct, regardless of the justification for it. I found when working in Uzbekistan that people agreed with your strategy and then went off to find out whether it was politically acceptable. Similarly in Russia. In France there can be a nationalism that rejects suggestions, theories and hypotheses from ‘foreigners’. In Africa, generally, everyone suspects voting results because they know the likelihood of rigging and many indulge in it for themselves, anyway. Bribes are part of every day interactions, as they are in most countries outside those with an investigative free press and openness to public scrutiny.

England was on a loser from the beginning (as were the USA and Australia). Blatter’s word sways delegates from the developing world because he has the power to award funding and doesn’t really hide it. He is also known to dislike the British. He has an overblown sense of personal legacy which, in his terms means that he has raised his profile as god of football as a means to bring about social and political development in his empire. It is no surprise that FIFA decided to hold two ballots on one day, making it possible for collusion between delegates to advance the causes of Russia and Qatar to the detriment of the traditional football playing nations, despite the odds. It is also no surprise that FIFA laid down one set of criteria (which the English felt made them pre-eminent bidders) but, at the death, changed the goalposts.

So, thinking about it, the English did not stoop (in their terms) to the internecine tactics of their competitors who then gleefully walked off with the prizes. Over time more will come out (perhaps through Wikileaks) but the chances that anything will be done about it will be minimal. The English and Scottish may have invented the rules but they were the rules of football, not of football politics.

And this latter point holds in it the promise of biters being bitten. Russia kills its investigative journalists with impunity. Its mafia roam free and its institutions kow tow to the old KGB. Qatar imprisons homosexuals, restricts peaceful assembly and has different laws for foreign workers. The votes of two women are generally regarded as equal to one man. The World Cup brings with it the cultural norms of other nations and there is nothing more liberalising than the every day traveller and his/her expectations. Alphadogs and Emirs are about to discover the cost to their power and influence.

Maybe Blatter IS a god and this was his strategy all along… Why do I doubt it?

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Thursday, December 2, 2010

The End of Days

This phrase, appearing in Revelations, has a deeply mordant edge to it because of its sheer poetic finality. Watching a programme about the battle between dark matter and dark energy led me to the speculation that it is no wonder some people find life intolerable and top themselves.

You see, it appears (in our latest scientific theorising) that dark matter keeps everything together like an all-pervasive glue, from the atoms in our bodies to the great galaxies of space. We are formed in it and then it supports us in an invisible miasma of togetherness. BUT, as in action comics, if Dark Matter is our saviour, Dark Energy will have none of it and seeks to tear everything apart. They call it The Big Rip. Currently, computer models show that the universe will break down, not in shreds but in sub-atomic particles.

It got me wondering about the stability of our psyches. We live and then we die. That’s painful enough and we invent all sorts of thinking to handle it positively (God, heaven, reincarnation and the rest) and those of us who have kids take comfort in our genealogical line heading off to infinity. Not in this universe. Even the sub-particles of God will succumb to the disintegration of Existence, He being a human construct and thought itself not surviving, even if science fiction suggests it might one day disengage from its physical home.

So, what is the point of being ‘alive’ when we discover the bus we are on is the number 13 and humanity is on the road to nowhere?

I suppose I gravitate towards Zen Buddhism because it acknowledges this in its maxim of living within the moment. That is all there is.

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Thursday, December 2, 2010

Prince Andrew: the Royal Right Wing

There is a genealogical line in the Royal Family I believe that has seen them, over the decades, breathily embraced with fascism. The Queen Mother had her somewhat tarnished reputation for all things Right and nasty, heavily glossed in the second world war, to make her appear a war heroine, one of the first campaigns over which Saatchi would have been proud. And she was just the latest in a long line of Nazi sympathisers. Oh no she wasn’t! Did not William go to a ‘natives and colonials’ party in Nazi uniform? The Queen seems to have kept herself to herself in most matters political but she did marry that consort to racism, Philip and thus they produced Andrew who, for some unaccountable reason, goes under the title of Royal Ambassador or some such toff tosh. The fact that he is figuring in Wikileaks is hardly a surprise. It turns out he hates the Guardian for its nosiness in business deals, particularly those involving arms sales to countries that have no compunction in using them against their own people or their neighbours. Like his father he is incapable of moral judgment. Given their generations of wealth acquisition, tax dodging and EU handouts in all sorts of dubious circumstances it is hardly a surprise.

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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Taking a leak

I have been watching Hilary Clinton and the apparatchiks of the White House for the last two or three days in increasing amusement tinged with not a little disgust. The leaking internet is pouring their urine back over their heads and they are attempting to put up the sanctimonious umbrella of victimhood as though the world they live in is devoid of deceit and wrong-doing. A bit like Watergate in the early days. Diplomacy is being undermined, they thunder, through the fluttering eyelashes of denial. We cannot get on with our work of protecting democracies throughout the world.

At the same time, Sep Blatter and his corrupt cronies on the FIFA Panel are saying, more or less openly, that The Sunday Times and BBC exposures of vote-rigging for money (plenty of it) will mean that England will not host a World Cup.

The way the world is means that the virtuous cannot inherit the earth. These powerful groups within their establishments have got to their lofty positions precisely because they operate within what they call realpolitik. Like Putin the self-confessed alphadog, they claw and stamp their way to the top with sweeteners and threats their tools of the trade. And they expect the world to genuflect to their missions and admire them for it.

I once did some work for the Home Office in the UK, developing case studies on public order and the like, to help train police recruits to understand ‘complexity’. At the time, some branch of the secret service was tailing vicars, landowners and any proles who were supporting a campaign to stop nuclear waste dumping in Lincolnshire. I interviewed individuals who swore they were beaten up, cars trashed and whatever, as the then UK Government sought to further its democratic vision of a subservient and ignorant public. Is it any wonder we, the voters, who are normally excluded from the whispering corridors of power, feel duped and disenfranchised? The Unites States has a history of dirty deeds in the name of spreading democracy, undermining and toppling regimes it does not like. We swore it was going on and it always denied it. So we sit back and grin at the schadenfreude and sick sanctimony, scrabbling to find a way of presenting their incredibly expensive diplomatic machine as though it was a misunderstood and much maligned force for good. The fact is, reading some of the transcripts, they disgrace the name of democracy, are little more than the bilge of bigots and have as much cultural sensitivity as a whole legion of Prince Philips.

They don’t want us to know. Vive L’Internet!

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Thursday, November 25, 2010

The Right Royal Caper

There was a curious anomaly the other day. Research is needed. Nobody bought clothes for about 9 hours. You see, my partner runs a woman’s e-commerce business and sells all the clothes outside Ghana. High quality, classically designed and drawing 500 plus visits every day. Sales are great, even during these hard times. Then, at roughly 11-00 am one fateful morning last week, everything ceased, as if we were in a science fiction movie – you know, when everybody wakes up and discovers they have lost nine hours of their lives, checking their bodies for undulating movement under the skin. Kate and William announced they were to be married.

One assumes it was this and not something even more bizarre like a trial run of the virus that will end the world as we know it, that was the cause. What happened belied the science of statistics. Look at the patterns of buyer activity on any day and you have hot spots and cooler periods but you don’t have no activity for nine hours!

Now, the full royal machine is running on its well-oiled cogs. The right wing press is oohing and aahing. This is going to be a wedding for everyone! You are all invited. Westminster Abbey. 2000 guests. Everyone? Have an extra day’s holiday, businesses won’t mind paying the wages, the PAYE.

It feels like after the nine hours I woke up to discover that I had passed on the other side of the looking glass. Wars, famine, disease, nuclear bombs, killer viruses, Armageddon had all been left behind. Never mind all that, let’s have a nice cup of tea and watch the bluebloods at play. That’s the reality. And the royal confidantes have been on-screen warn us in their cut glass accents that the Windsors will have to be careful and make the wedding seem not too glitzy like the Charles and Diana do because the poor people won’t like it, you know, they are suffering a recession….

For me, for what it’s worth (not much, I know), having a royal family is having a keystone in the arch of a largely corrupt and iniquitous establishment. If you are a top stone, everything is fine. But the rest of us hold them up, unable to move because of the weight of their wealth and vested interests.

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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

From Beatniks to Vandals

The Government in the UK have introduced higher tuition fees for university students. For the priciest courses the fees for a three year course can amount to nearly £40,000 or $60,000. It is a far cry from the free education of my beatnik youth and the reaction to it is very different from the heady days of 1968.

There I was in the heart of the French-led student revolt, in Paris, in Brussels and in Geneva, making the odd incoherent speech but not about education being a mortgage for life but about transparency of student records, open, critical debate, democracy. It was tied up with what was then called the counter-culture, West Coast American hippy idealism, flower power, the end of war and time to make love. Of course it all looks naïve and simplistic today but it wasn’t then. We were touched by idealism and wanted to change society and change the way that society thought about itself and its young. It was the inevitable politicising of rock and roll. OUR music.

Watching some students in London smash their way through glass panes in Conservative party Headquarters, there was none of that. It was all about money. In fact the multitude that marched peaceably did so about fees alone, as far as I understood it from the media and my armchair in Ghana. I don’t know where our idealism got society when our descendants, now at university, can only think in those terms. They were not talking about the quality of education only the price of it. Meanwhile the inevitable University Chancellors were doing their interviews, wanting more money for the trough in order to ‘compete with the elite universities across the world’. What a travesty of the truth. Over the last decades, university senior managers have become well off at the expense of education. Larger classes, lectures to hundreds and falling standards of teaching and research are the true indicators of what has been happening among our ‘elite’, together with tie-ups to multi-nationals in the private sector. In my time I have ‘saved’ PhD students from Oxbridge colleges who never saw their supervisors and were referred in their vivas. And the fee for a year’s work in helping turn these students round? £100. This was only a short while ago. The students in question were being charged £8000 PER YEAR. Academics are as greedy as bankers, in the main. Greedy to pursue their own careers by publication, greedy for status and about as altruistic as panhandlers in a river of gold.

Decades of education have not raised critical consciousness in the UK or American society any higher than it was in the fifties. Everyone has bought in to capitalism and acquisitiveness. The vital energies of the young are chanelled into intellectual and creative dead ends. It would have been remarkable if the march in London had signalled the beginning of a philosophy of a new world order but it was more about students feeling that they were being priced out of consumerism.

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Friday, November 12, 2010


Me greedy, you dead

We’re heading for another global crisis. It is another banking crisis, too. Not money this time but fat laid down around midriffs, bottoms and thighs. The OECD has just released a report showing that developing countries, as soon as their populations begin to join the middle classes, adopt western lifestyles. This means processed foods with transfats, sugars, salts and the rest. It means increased diabetes, heart attacks, early senility and many conditions where the correlations have not yet been done. Going into Accra Mall at the weekend provides you with plenty of evidence for this. Fast food, western style outlets buzz and waistlines increase. The Ghanaian middle classes are not eating a balanced diet. The Daily Graphic today was lamenting the fact that Ghana, which has wonderful potential for feeding itself and exporting far more food to the rest of Africa, was developing a cultural dislike for home grown rice and other commodities.

Meanwhile, watching a programme about the human body, it turns out that if we eat less than 2000 calories a day, we can rejuvenate our hearts and make them 15 years younger! Dieting rats outlive those who can eat whatever they like by up to 33%. That’s a lot. Now we can stuff ourselves like junkies with food that is bad for us and go down with our flags flying, in a hospital bed for months, saying that we preferred fewer years of life but stuffed full of crisps, pizzas, burgers, pre-prepared meals, chips, restaurant meals and the like or we can live many years longer on raw stuff we buy and cook for ourselves.

At the same time, food and water will be what is fought over in the decades to come and western lifestyles and protectionism will increase, exponentially, famine and disease elsewhere. When I overeat, another anonymous person dies.

On the same programme I saw a man who survived seventy odd days in the ocean by eating fish only. If he had been eating, as usual, as a westerner, he would have been dead in days but his brain overwrote his wiring and made him suddenly desire the eyes, liver, kidneys and other bits of the fish carcass that we routinely throw away. All the fish vitamins. The lesson in this was that if we change our eating habits, eat properly but far less, there will be more food for everyone. We would develop a taste for new, healthier foods that we chuck away (currently one third of all food bought in the UK ends up in the bin) or never buy. The body is a chemical machine, not an altar to greed. We need to learn to control it but it is a lifelong discipline.

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Monday, November 8, 2010







Peanuts in Space


I was watching the British Prime Minister yesterday talking persuasively about his mission to create a big society to be the senior partner of a much reduced government. At the same time the attack on the poor and ill-educated goes on. They will bear the brunt of the losses incurred by banking gamblers. But then, the poor, who make up a fairly big proportion of the big society have little going their way when it comes to influencing governmental thinking, so it was obviously not them to which he was alluding. For example, they wouldn’t be passing a bill to pick up litter in order to get their unemployment benefit would they?

We know that it is only at election time that would-be politicians genuflect to the wishes of the public, often fabricating what these might be to suit their ideologies, so, now in power, Cameron’s rhetoric is beginning to unravel in the way of all politicians. Under the urbane and much cosmeticised exterior (his photographer has now a paid post in the civil service) there beats a heart that is indistinguishable from those of Tories through the Ages.

It led me to wonder, as I have done before in these blogs, what alternatives there are to having Oxbridge boys, silver-spoon fed and chubbily self-important, running the country. I won’t pursue this, having done it before but what I did not discuss then, was the matter of their intelligence. Now, I have worked in delight and despair with people from all walks of life for decades, finding high intelligence randomly distributed across all the social divides. Yet, when I see and hear politicians, I find a low correlation with the world outside Whitehall. There is a level of articulation that passes the demands of media questioning but I have never sat back, shocked into serious thought, by anything a politician has ever said, as I have been by an artist or a philosopher or a scientist. It appears that only those who will never achieve the highest levels in intellectual and creative fields turn to politics. We put our countries in the hands of people who we could not elevate elsewhere.

The picture from the BBC science site shows what I mean. It is my metaphor for politicians, worldwide (with obvious exceptions such as Mandela, Ghandi et al). It is an asteroid, mostly ice yet with its own jet exhaust and comes into public view once in a while. It is a space peanut and does nothing for the rest of its universal kind and has been there from the beginnings of time. Sound familiar?

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Monday, November 1, 2010


If we were more like eels…


A while back I wrote an adoring blog about a meal I had in Paris which began with smoked eel, a rarer delicacy in England than France. Now I discover that the creature is, like too many species of animal, plant, fish and bird suffering huge losses in its numbers. What to do? My life seems to have spanned a post-war delirium of open fields, wild flowers, clean water and every bird and animal on the doorstep through to today’s dereliction of human duty to the environment.

First, let me persuade you that the eel, a creature that ties your fishing line into knots and covers your hands with slime, should be a symbol of the extraordinary, a true miracle in mucous. Eels were not born, according to the great Izaak Walton, they sprang from the “action of sunlight on dewdrops”. Actually they are born in the Sargasso Sea and stay there as ‘yellow eels‘, feeding and growing and swelling and darkening, for perhaps 7 years if they decide to become a male, and 12 if they’re female. (It’s always harder, being a lass.) But there you are. It’s the future for us, too. Soon, all humans will be making similar choices, in order to save ourselves and the planet. The Chinese are doing it under State edict. More and more people are choosing the gender of their children as a design statement. Not for long. Necessity will triumph.

The eel forgets about the need for genitals until procreation becomes a possibility. That is why Walton became so poetical about its apparent spontaneous combustion into life. Perhaps we would all be better if we grew genitalia later. No more prudery about the naked form. We’d be as blank down there as Angels in a fresco (in the pictures I have seen!). Maybe we’d only cover up later when we are about to procreate with our newly grown appendages. That would be the difference between ‘parents’ and those who have no children.

Eels can live undisturbed in forgotten pools for 25, 30, even 40 years. They are Zen creatures meditating on the meaning of existence, uninterested in sex, drugs and rock and roll. Then (read the BBC science blog) one dark night, usually in September or October, usually after rain and when the moon’s overcast, they get the call. No one knows why. They turn a kind of mottled green-black on top, silver underneath. They head downstream on the flood, and swim 3,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea. Then they spawn, and die.

There must be a sense of completion in this mass sexual encounter at the end of days. Who would not feel ‘closure’ as the current cliché has it? Wouldn’t our lives be richer and more meaningful, if we ended them on an equivalent social high note?

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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Mondo Cane: it’s a dog’s life….

We keep two or three dogs in the compound here in Accra. They run freely, are well behaved and well trained. Everything they do (in the main) is in the best possible doggie taste. But, as you may remember from a recent blog, two died, leaving old Heracles, a grey muzzled Alsatian cross. He is such a genteel fellow and did not, in any way, mourn the loss of his companions of ten years or more. This is because he was third in line to the canine throne. Now he was top dog with no usurpers in sight. Life could not get any better, could it?

Then, yesterday, we bought a Doberman pup, aged four months, the reason being that you should always have at least two dogs here; one running and one in a (spacious) doghouse, at night. Robbers in Ghana throw poisoned meat over the wall to eradicate the threat of four legged guards. In a couple of months or so we will take ownership of another pup, this time a white Alsatian. Anyway, back to old Heracles and the insurgency. Already, the old dog is teaching the young new tricks. The little one follows the big one round the garden, like an imprinted duckling. And the old one enjoys showing him around. “This is a nice place to pee, this is where my dead friends are buried, this is the swimming pool, here’s where you eat, this is Master, don’t dig up plants or you will be in trouble, I can tell you, this is Mistress etc etc.

In the way of cartoons, Sirius has taken to living here immediately. He did not bark all night but tucked himself up in his shed with Heracles lying on the other side of the wire. In the first day he did the following: he fell into the pool and was rescued standing on his hind legs at the shallow end, his paws on the edge, crying lustily. He walked into windows (the first experience of glass in his life). He bounced off mosquito netting doors for much the same reason. He sat (firmly pressed!) next to Heracles as they got their coconut halves to gouge out – good for the teeth – and took it to eat on the grass next to his sudden big friend). He barked at planes which flew too low and at passing irritations such as boys with bells on little mobile food bicycles. He appears indomitable and eminently ready to be trained in all matters of house protection. As we figured, the greying Heracles is his teacher, friend and playpal.

It brings to mind the whole business of culture. What we are all born into (whether it be as dog, plant or human) helps to define our growth and behaviour in the world. Much of our learning is at a level below the conscious. How else do we come to feel love, loyalty, fairness, protectiveness…? We like exactly the right proportion of external control and freedom of choice (which varies with the individual!).

We, in the house, are not cursed by too much sentimentality. Dogs are dogs and not humans. They have their place in the pecking order and must be shown it. But a dog’s life doesn’t seem that bad – or that different from our own, give or take the odd bone!

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Monday, October 18, 2010

Gain without pain

Someone wrote to me the other day and said that I seem to have a hatred of ‘believers’. I suppose some of these blogs could be seen that way but the intention has never been to demean people, only try to understand why they believe. I certainly have a dislike for organised religion which seems to have been able to perpetrate crimes from torture, imprisonment and murder through to genocide without, apparently suffering that much from people’s disaffection. I don’t think that the original tenets of the world’s great religions ever intended to aid and abet their disciples in committing sin, in any circumstances but the fact has been – and is – that they do.

I would be very happy in myself if my quest to find a deeper meaning in this existence was even partially answered. The more I investigate religion, the less it seems a viable route to understanding. Any system of thought that requires an individual to forego so much evidence to the contrary has little chance of seeding itself in my skull.

A friend in Ghana, the other day, said that he went to church because this seemed the only possible way he might meet with and talk with his beloved mother, now long dead, either in this life or when he, too, had passed over to the other side. He is a scientist. It seems that there are very few individuals in Ghana, with a scientific bent of mind, who would follow Richard Dawkins’ brand of atheism., or even the softer line of agnosticism. It is culturally unacceptable here. The churches spring up as fast as banks and the preachers are wealthier. Bible classes are for indoctrination and not for critical discourse.

I had something of an enlightenment on these matters the other day. I was watching a programme on pain. When you scan a person in pain (let’s say from the application of some torture of the Inquisition) the resulting patterns of neuron-firing are generalised across the brain and unique to each individual. The same degree and intensity of torture produces wildly differing results. One person’s headache is another person’s decapitation! BUT, and this is very bizarre, it is possible to hypnotise these dissimilar individuals with the following effect.

By telling a person under hypnosis that pain is pleasure, then they can take a dental extraction without anaesthetic and love it. Not only this but, in the residual pain that follows, they gain equal pleasure. They have become hard wired to perceive pleasure where there should be pain. That is how the brain works. Examples were given of people with terrible injuries, crawling for days over rough terrain to get help and only experiencing pain once friendly arms picked them up. So the brain can sublimate for itself, too.

My illumination is this. Life, in general, is a painful business. We look around and see the horrors of war, famine, Man’s obscenities in every day life and, really, we should top ourselves. We are the most insidiously disgusting, immoral creatures imaginable. How do we cope? Well, if we are a Muslim suicide bomber, we turn the pain of a bomb belt into a Paradise with virgins. If we are Christian, then God’s judgment will take us into heaven. If we have a more eastern religion, we may be reincarnated as someone better. All beliefs. All based on perception. All based on a form of hypnosis via conditioning. That is what belief without authentic evidence amounts to. It is also why preachers from Africa to Asia, from the Bible belt to Russia, regurgitate quasi-evidence along with hypnosis techniques to get brains to perceive the opposite of what real evidence might tell them.

A great example of this was on a Ghana TV channel the other night. A preacher was asking people to get their credit cards out and make donations of at least a thousand dollars to his church. We saw four or five operators in a call centre, apparently taking the ‘gifts’. The preacher told people to keep trying to get through because the lines were so busy. “Give your seed of a thousand dollars and you will reap God’s harvest!” He raged at immorality, he thundered about being saved, his choirs were great and sang lustily for the Lord and he told his viewers that they could only be saved if…..

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Thursday, October 14, 2010




Three Men in a Boat



Here is the image of the front cover of a new novel. It is also part of a tale of synchronicity. Three or four decades ago (my mind is sharp on image and blurry on time) you would have found three men with a modicum of middle age adorning their skin, sitting in an old attic, like the upturned hull of a barge and reading poetry and prose to each other. As I recall, it was a ripening experience. All three of us went on to write, in our various media. One was Mike Mackmin and one was Lindsay Clarke. The other day he sent me this poem:



THE STILLNESS OF THE FOREST


Ghana. Dry season. Nineteen Sixty-Three.

the heat was dropsical, and if we felt

the need to swim we’d drive for hours along

the road the JCBs had opened through

two hundred humid miles of forest

till we reached the coast at Winneba

where palm fronds rattled in the breeze

and lush Atlantic combers surfed the beach.


I can smell the stillness of that forest now –

the steam already rising off the bush

at dawn, the grey, high-buttressed trunks

of Odum trees, a hot mist sauntering

across the canopy, the cobwebs strung

from branch to bough, green strobes of sunlight

shuttered by the leaves. And if you took away

the road, the world had always been like this.


So I remember the relief of breaking out

on to the coastal plain – that breathing space

of scrubby grass and sand abased beneath

unshaded sun. And if you’d told me then

that long before I came to write this poem

those close-packed multitudes of trees would all

be gone, I would have called you fanciful,

and had my swim; then turned back for the long drive home.

He spent three years in Ghana but his memories of it remain powerful and are still helping to form him. His first novel was called Sunday Whiteman which leant more than a little upon his time here.


Meanwhile, across the road in a terraced house in Norwich, I met a white woman who had lived in Ghana. She had had some success with a children’s novel called Ashanti Boy.


Fast forward our lives and here I am, beyond prediction, in Ghana, living, writing.… Meanwhile, no less in this country, though physically in the softer climes of Somerset, England, Lindsay has just published The Water Theatre. Ghana permeates it. The pull of this country does not end.


So, this blog is a preview of his new book, as I await its arrival here in Accra. I am certain it is a fine novel and a testament to Ghana’s capacity to seduce and stimulate. The reviews suggest as much. To have kept the forest fires of West African experience alive and then to have tempered them in literary steel, is

a gift from the ancient gods…


Read it. I shall.

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Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Sad but true

I am becoming a scholar of the early Catholic Church, a curious fact, given my distress and anger at what organised religion can and does get up to. Anyway, the latest fruit of my labours (apple shaped since it involves knowledge that the early orthodox Christians tried to place beyond mortal ken) is the Seven Deadly Sins. So what about them?

First, there were actually eight. These were drawn up by Evagrius of Pontus, alone in the desert, excommunicated from social life and trying to muzzle his consequent desires. To those sins we have all had drummed into us, he added vainglory and sadness. Pope Gregory, at the end of the 6th century, removed these latter two and instituted envy instead. So, the final list is the work of the fevered minds of men (like the contents of the bible, the Koran, the Vedas …). It all depends on your belief systems, the degree to which you feel that God was speaking through their authors.


Anyway, back to the Catholics. Pope Gregory, in tightening up the vices, re-engineered the way that the church operated in those turbulent times. As well as refining what constituted vice, he saw to it that priests should be celibate. The reason appears to have been economic. If priests married then their wealth would be passed to their children and not the church. In order that priests might manage their celibacy, the move became part of the train to make sex a sin. Full stop. Soon it was for procreation only and must never share a bed with lust. Before this, lust was seen as a natural expression of male and female desire in Greek and Roman times and had none of the demonology associated with it that came with Gregory et al. Were they such evil civilisations? Only a lateral branch of ‘heretics’ or free lovers, called Gnostics, continued in the old ways, seeing priestly, public and group sex as a form of sacrament; that is until they were ruthlessly expunged and their religious writings destroyed.

But I digress. What interested me was not the behaviour of the Catholic Church, then and now but why sadness was regarded as a sin in the first place and then later airbrushed from the list along with vainglory. The latter seems obvious in that every time I have entered a Catholic house of God, I have been struck by its glorification of the material things of life. The gold, the tapestries, the art, the incense, the wine, the rich life of priests even in poor communities. Yet sadness…

It is a subtle and enduring emotion. Perhaps it was felt that sadness, caused by the death of another, or the loss of a lover, was an emotion which undermined the glories of the life hereafter. How could a truly religious Catholic, imbued with the spirit of the Holy Ghost, feel sadness? Pray and this corrosive emotion could be washed away.

I would have it back there among the Seven Deadly Sins instead of lust. Lust, as those who study the brain might aver, is the result of chemistry which, more often than not, subjugates reason. As long as it is not imposed on another and causes no physical, emotional or mental harm, lust should be de-listed. Sadness, however, whilst part of the mourning that comes to us now and then, should not be an indulgence. Then it truly is a vice. I’ll finish with a story from my own experience.

I was talking with an old soldier who lost all his platoon companions during the first world war. He was perpetually sad, even morose. Why had he survived? It wasn’t fair. I suggested to him that he should be living a celebratory life on behalf of those who had died for his sake. It was an illumination. He grasped my hand and went home. I felt the sin of self-congratulation.

The next day we met and he told me that his wife wanted me to keep my mouth shut. For her, the man was an embodiment of sadness. That was what she loved and what kept them together.

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Sunday, October 3, 2010

God and the Fortune Tellers

Having just returned this weekend to Ghana, I watched a History Channel programme on Nostradamus and his modern equivalent, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Who is he? Well, he’s a mathematician who has a futurological algorithm which suggests prediction of events involving humanity is possible. Paid handsomely by Fortune 500 and the State Department for his secretive maths he has cross-checked Nostradamus’ various foretellings, and come to similar outcomes. QED, we are all about to die in catastrophic events involving some combination of the rise of the third great Anti-Christ, an asteroid hit bringing fire from the heavens and/or nuclear war. Grim plot lines.


Since Bruce was roughly correct on the rise of Al Qaeda and the Twin Towers attack, among other modern events, he has a certain fervent following. Some fellow mathematicians are pretty irritated that they can’t take out their red pens and check his workings. But they couldn’t with Nostradamus, either, since he cracked the number codes in the texts of the Ancients and then hid his discoveries in cryptic, revelatory prose. I suppose if you are reading this and have a penchant for global hypochondria, then you can imbibe your fill of doomsday scenarios by following the thread of December 21st 2012 on Google and see how the world will end, according to all the available predictions from the Mayans, Revelations, the Chinese Horoscopes and, of course, Nostradanus, himself.

This latter prophet could not proclaim his predictive capabilities at the time, unlike Bueno de Mesquita, because he would have been hung, drawn and quartered by the Catholic Church for assuming a power which only God exercises. He had to stay this side of heretical. And here is the nub of the paradox. Those among us who are critical of the place of organised religion in society may agree with the Catholic position, if not its reasoning. If there is Fate, then there is possibly a god-like force that has written the script of life on earth, the universe and everything. If Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is right and his sums add up so that his QEDs equal actual scenarios, then atheism may have to float out of the window. And, unfortunately for many of us, so might religion. Why? Well, it seems to this benighted thinker that people tend to pray in order to persuade their God to do this or that; save a stricken relative from an incurable disease, save one’s soul, save the planet or win a lottery. There is an assumption that S/he can intercede.

Either God knows everything that ever was and ever will be or S/he has set in train humanity’s careering journey into the future, giving it the capacity to choose a path that is either self-destructive or filled with glory. If everything is laid out in warp and weft and we have no choice, then God becomes a bit of a supernumerary and certainly beyond any need for disciples and their prayers since they wont change one jot of the narrative. If it isn’t then Nostradamus and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita are remarkable indeed, for their mathematical equations are taking the forces that bind us to life and, by the application of Games Theory or numerology, are prognosticating events which are as beyond the ken of God as they are us.

Which is exactly what God might have planned for the two of them. Or not.

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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Obituary for The Ancient Mariner

My friend Sean, poet and translator of the Greek into the Irish, sent me an email today regarding footballers who cross themselves at the beginning of matches. Sean wonders what gross perversion of morality has them praying for a hat trick rather than for the millions who will die from starvation in the oncoming months. This religious egocentricity is common enough and aeons old. As Mrs Thatcher might have said, “There is no such thing as Christianity or the Caliphate, only Christians and Muslims!”

News yesterday that the bones of a 14 year old boy have been found close to Stonehenge, that circular astrological and religious wonder of the Ancients. He had an amber necklace around his neck. Very important person. A bit like footballers’ bling. When his teeth were analysed it was discovered that he had grown up in the Mediterranean. This was 3,500 years ago when Stonehenge was THE place to be seen at, praying. How had he got over to the sceptered isle? No doubt by rowing, think the archaeologists.

What did he pray for? Should we conjecture? Hardly for the wealth and wellbeing of nations, tribes or clans. More likely that he would have a long and successful life and become a Chief of men. But he only made it to fourteen.

No change there then.

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Friday, September 24, 2010

Christians awake!

The other night I watched a Derren Brown special on demystifying magic and miracles. For anyone who does not know this entertainer, he produces illusions of consummate skill. Where others might saw a woman in half, Derren Brown would quarter her, where others might suspend themselves in shackles from a rope, he would do it in a pool full of piranha. But where he really scores is in the psychology of deception. He beats top class poker players and chess players at their own games but not by their rules.

He is also a hypnotist. In his programmes, conservative people have conducted themselves outrageously, whether in bizarre social behaviour or by undertaking fiendish or seemingly impossible challenges. Whole groups have ‘seen’ ghosts in ancient buildings. Taxi drivers are suddenly unaware of a landmark like The London Eye which towers above them, in full view. I read recently that he ‘persuaded’ the passenger on a plane to take over the controls because the captain and co-pilot were struck down by illness. The man, unknowing, ended up in a flight simulator but believed, totally, he had undergone the heroic act of bringing down the plane and saving his fellows.

Back to magic and miracles. In the programme he set out to show that faith was a trick of the mind, only and bore no relation to evidence. He passed himself off to well known protagonists in a range of fields and was accepted by them as a great purveyor of their arts. Ufologists, spiritualists and the like found him demonstrating extraordinary, supernatural powers. Then there were the atheists.

Gathering together a profoundly irreligious group of individuals, within ten minutes he had them believing in God. Rather like all priests of the smack em on the head and dump them in water, brigade, Derren Brown placed a hand on the forehead of an unbeliever and the individual would experience a profundity unlike anything he or she had ever known. They fell, one after another, into their chairs and woke up announcing that they now believed there was a god. What struck me pleasingly, as an academic who likes the notion that evidence should guide human action, was Brown admitting that he had been a devout Christian until, in his twenties, he had reviewed the historical evidence and realised that it didn’t add up. Synchronous viewing, on my part, had me watching programmes on how the Christian church developed in the early days, how the New Testament was formulated by men who eradicated women from power within the church, vilified Judas (the disciple closest to Jesus and chosen by him for the dastardly deed) and created the patriarchy of the priesthood. I also watched, on Euronews, a chief honcho of the Vatican saying, brazenly, that it was the Catholic Church that was responsible for civilised behaviour in the world. Very little appeal to evidence there, then!

Here in Ghana, conversions are every day events. The preachers have big churches, wear their gold neck chains and drive chauffeur driven cars. They encourage prayer for consumer items. They are very much like Derren Brown. Only he shows us that there is nothing mystical or magical in all this. Just sad, vulnerable people who would rather subordinate themselves to belief than face the evidence that there is probably nothing out there and our lives are (as a priest said eloquently) flights of butterflies through the front door of a building and out of the back.

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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Is God a Diagnostic Molecular Imager?


Well, He, She or It seems to be a prevailing theme for many of these blogs. God. Does He, She, It exist? How do we know? Does the knowledge liberate us or further constrain our paltry attempts to be free agents beyond the scheme of an all-seeing Fate? It’s a good week for God doubters. As I write, the Pope is trundling around ‘secular Britain’ in his Popemobile just as described in my last blog. As he passes by, the crowd is hysterical with the adulation accorded to pop stars. Would the sound of their screams and supplications, their raptured eyes and offerings up of babies for him to bless be any different if another Messiah, say Elvis, was risen from the dead and equally enbubbled in his glass topped car? I doubt it. In fact all the tickets would have been sold. But, as in Julius Caesar, I come to bury God, not to praise him.


By that I mean, bury the memory of a rather bizarre event the other day. Being an academic of sorts, as you can see from the CV on the website, I like to go to lectures in other disciplines. Why? Well, rather like Thomas Kuhn or a 19th Century rennaissance man, there is a certain pleasure in seeing that science, that flagbearer of the objectively focused, has common themes and structures that appear everywhere and follow the fads and fashions of the philosophy of the day. So, anyway, I went to a symposium in a medical department of a university here in Accra. It was on the treatment of osteoporosis. It turned out to be less a forensic account of the condition and its effects (there is no epidemiological data on it, in Ghana) but more a chance for Roche, the pharmaceutical conglomerate, to sell a drug and an independent entrepreneur to advertise his mobile machine for diagnosing the disease in the first place.


I have no wish to demean the individuals selling the treatment and the diagnostic machine: everyone seeks to survive here in Ghana, but I wanted to recount a couple of incidents during the event that brought God and Science together in my head; an unhappy conjunction. The screen saver on the inevitable power point presentation had three nails that appeared (I have no idea if this was so) like bloody iron impalers. The text said, Tougher than nails!” I DID think of Christ when I saw them, despite myself. When the session eventually got started (attendees at any event in Ghana arrive an hour or more late for sessions) the MC, running the programme, asked us all to pray, with the phrase, “Christ take control of this meeting…” I didn’t genuflect, feeling outraged as an agnostic and a fellow traveller of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and the rest, not to mention Dawkins and his irreverential ilk. When the event came to its end, the same MC thanked God for overseeing it and prayed that Roche Pharmaceuticals would enjoy great success in its business.


I am sure that Roche is very happy to have Dylan’s anthem, “With God on our side”, playing in all its lifts in Switzerland, the US or wherever.” Maybe the Pope has it playing in his “look but don’t touch” motorcar. But, to be frank, I don’t want God on my side. Call me perverse if you like but I’d rather have the same equanimity at facing eternal darkness as our dog, Juno, who died on Sunday aged 10 years. He came to say goodbye to me and my partner, separately. Then he walked unsteadily down to a patch of earth beneath a bank of bougainvillea and died. His eyes were open, taking a last long look at the world he was leaving.

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Friday, September 10, 2010



I should cocoa
…

When I wrote the title for this piece, it occurred to me that most of my readership (which is truly multi-national) would not understand its nuances. The phrase I should cocoa means that you are not going to do something, whatever someone has asked of you (see the following explanation).

It is rhyming slang and originally stood for “I should say so!”, a sarcastic exclamation to express disbelief, derision, scorn or indignant negation. You might also render it as ““You must be joking!” “Not on your life!” or “No way!” http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ish1.htm

Anyway, after this long-winded beginning, I used the title to refer to one of those events that occur rather rarely except when you are in a new country (Ghana, here). The title is ironic because I feel, having encountered it, that everyone should cocoa!

A member of staff gave me a present the other day. In a plastic bag I found three alien objects. I knew that they were fruit of some description but had not seen them before. He said they were cocoa pods and I should scoop out and eat the contents.

This I have done and the results are astonishing, appealing to all the senses. Inside the brown-speckled yellow rugby ball shaped exterior are cocoa beans the size of thumbnails, each packed in a sweet, sticky white glutinous film. The beans are bitter. They lie inside as if they are extras from that fifties film, They Came From Outer Space. I looked them up and discovered that these raw beans contain a myriad of essentials for a healthy body and are the number one killer of free radicals. They also increase brain power which may explain my earlier long-windedness – more words per second, unfortunately! They are the greatest superfood on the planet.

Meanwhile, the Pope is visiting secular Great Britain in a multi-million pound beano, paid for by the tax payer. They are paying their agnostic taxes and he will go there and try to convert them. He will travel around in the usual papal bubble. After the Vatican’s failure to make available its files on child abuse across Europe, I think he will be a little like a bean in the pod in my photo. Sweet on the outside and leaving a bitter taste in the mouth. But in his case, there are no health benefits.

NB If the Pope’s visit turns you to smoking, eat very dark chocolate – the cocoa in it redresses some of the worst effects of tobacco. Then shout “I should cocoa”

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Sunday, September 5, 2010


A Vampire May Visit You Tonight


Maybe there have always been fears of the bloodsucker. I remember as a child, wading in streams and ponds and watching diligently for a leech to attach itself to my welly. I was magnetised and terrified at the same time, wanting to see whether it could suck my blood through the rubber. It never materialised but that didn’t cross it off my list of horrors. In the taxonomy of terror, long before Bram Stoker’s Dracula gave it a human form around which to coalesce, we have worshipped the vitality of blood and we have known that having it siphoned from our body is bad news (except for the aforementioned leeches, which have recently made a medical comeback). Maybe the Aztecs or Mayans drank it in acts of religious fervour and Christians attach great significance to drinking Christ’s blood, if only in a symbolic form. Nature programmes show bats and other creatures suckling away at their unaware victims and the sight can disgust us with tremors of identification.

Here in Accra there are vast colonies of very large fruit bats in the city centre that hang blackly on avenues of trees, like dark, misshapen fruit. Despite their provenance as vegetarians, visitors can be decidedly ambivalent when they see the heavens darken as their collective will sees them reach for the skies.

In Ghana, mosquitoes are the great bloodsucker. I am told that the malarial mosquito does not come out until after nine o’clock but I don’t believe that these creatures from the depths, are timekeepers. I take my medicine and daub on my toxic barriers the whole time. We also have mosquito nets and spray the rooms. The consequence is that we feel pretty secure. Imagine us in netting that has a heavy hem to keep it snug to the floor. Nothing can get in. But, ironically, it is like a film of innocents locking themselves in their ‘panic rooms’ and then discovering….

What the audience discovers in horror films and what we discover inside our net is that something unearthly exists ALREADY inside. It is voracious and wants our blood.

The bedbug.

News is out today from America that there is a global pandemic on the way with these creatures of the night. They are becoming impervious to sprays. They bite and cause nasty discomfort although, at least, they do not spread disease or, like Cronenberg’s The Fly, infect and transmogrify us into giant bedbugs. But, let us be plain about this, we do not want ANYTHING inside our sanctuaries. A human being should have a bed to call his or her own where the predators of the world are either banned or exterminated if they try to force entry. We have enough nightmares without that particular reality.

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Monday, August 30, 2010

Ghana’s young middle class: cutting and running

I was at a glam wedding in Accra this weekend, a tapestry of beautiful people enjoying themselves. There were several events, culminating in a dance on the final night of the two days of eating and drinking. I don’t propose to talk about the clergyman and his self-indulgent sermonising both in the wedding service and at the reception, save to say that sometimes His loyal servants give Him a bad name – even among agnostics like myself. What was both magnificent and very sad related to a contingent of young Ghanaian professionals come over from the UK. Indeed, bride and groom are living there and many of their friends were doubling up holidays with a few days in Accra for the marriage.

What was sad? Well, they were fine looking, articulate, fun-loving, hard-working and successful middle class people who play by the rules and are on top career trajectories in law, medicine, management and the City. In the UK. Not in Ghana.

I remember several occasions when I lived in the UK when there was an outcry about the ‘brain drain’ from the UK to the US. Thousands going west for better prospects. Here, it is pernicious. The continuing diaspora of young, ambitious Ghanaians to UK and US educational institutions and who then ‘stay on’ leaves the country with a deficit in the intellectual elite who can challenge the establishment and the archaic and sometimes corrupt practices of Government bodies. Every country needs youth to lock horns with the previous generation, forcing change, improving the lot of people with altruism and rationalism before they, themselves, become corrupted or de-clawed by osmosis among the insidious ruling (largely male) political, social and business elite. But I don’t sense much of that idealism exists. Perhaps the lure of middle class England is greater than the challenges and vicissitudes of middle class Ghana? Perhaps, in mythological terms, they don’t, symbolically, want to kill the Father and prefer these fleeting visits to keep in touch with the old country but not to get involved in intractable problems of its society.

I met a Japanese girl who is currently working in East Africa for Medecin Sans Frontieres. Now there is a charity worth supporting! She is an idealist, giving some of her life for the benefit of others. Ghana needs its own young people to be filled with the same idealism. It should not be a breeding ground for western-bound intellect and skills or it will, forever, be ruled by dynasties appealing to the largely poor and ill-educated populace with reductionist slogans and offering them little likelihood of meaningful change in their lifetimes.

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Monday, August 23, 2010


Surviving the worst

Hardiness is a much valued human characteristic. It often underpins bravery. We love hearing about how miners survive underground explosions, children are pulled from rubble, pensioners take on and defeat robbers or cats who travel a thousand miles back to their original homes, after their human families moved to another part of the country. On the one hand they are examples of role models. We identify with them. We like to think that in the same situation we would emulate them, even the cat. Therein lies a mistaken feature of our perceptions of the world. Most of us would never be the hero nor the obdurate survivor. We are social animals who prefer to keep our heads down and live quietly alongside our neighbours. Indeed there have been many studies that show that most of us will take orders, despite our role being to inflict apparent pain on others. Most of us defer to authority, no matter how unacceptable and inconsiderate that authority’s demands upon us. So, as far as following role models in the real world goes, it occurs mostly in our fantasies.

On the other hand, much is made of these incidents by God-fearing folk. “Miraculous!” they say. It was used many times about survivors of the Twin Towers attack.

What is the opposite of miraculous? Natural? Normal? Prosaic? In fact there probably is no antonym for the term, even among atheists. This may be because we prefer evidence of there being some supernatural order to existence that can bend forward and intervene, even when all seems doomed. One last chance, a gift from God. The randomly rare nature of these interventions undermines the existence of deities for unbelievers but, paradoxically, prove how difficult He is to please for believers, since, more often than not, the dead outnumber survivors in catastrophes. Isn’t that the definition of them?

It may be better to take on personal responsibility to do as well as we can and not speculate on, or ask for, God’s or Satan’s interventions. Try to be hardy. Try to be heroes within reason. Question more.

Scientists recently took some rock from Beer, a place on the south coast of England. They attached it for more than a year to the outside of the space station. When they got it back it was to discover that bacteria within it were still alive. Is this a miracle? Are these microbes heroes? They are certainly hardy.

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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Staying abreast of women’s fashion


I’m on a train travelling at high speed towards Paris. Suddenly it is cooler. The heat of the south is giving way to weather much like one might expect in East Anglia in the UK. People in the carriage are donning extra clothes. A woman in the seat in front has screwed down a tight leather jacket with a ribbed back, much like those beloved by French film directors. I think she is a shoe designer because I half overheard her talking about footwear and she was pointing out a pair of blood red boots to her companion, not in that ‘wouldn’t these be nice to own’ kind of way but with a proprietorial, ‘these are my children’ lyricism. Women’s magazines are also stuffed in a rack beside me. My companion designs clothes.

When I look through them, there are all the expected images of women, emphasising, shot by shot, different parts of their topographies, as though, in essence, there is actually only one woman and she has been dissected and then rendered in cameo sections to the reader, as a benign gift of attainability. But this composite woman cannot be emulated by her readers. She is a phantasm, populating their dreams but never their realities.

Look, she has all the bits that men crave for and in such perfect order. See the breasts in particular. Aren’t they just sugar coated seduction?

Except when they have a baby attached to them. Then there is shock and rejection. Do not enter the fantasies of magazine readership with those sort of realities. One female writer sent an email to a news programme this week saying that breast feeding should be kept to the privacy of the toilet, not public spaces.


This places it nicely in the pages of life, doesn’t it?

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Monday, August 9, 2010

A Night at the Opera, rural French Style


We are still in France for one more week, the weather is as hot as Accra but the air is dry and, being up a mountain, there is a clean crispness that is very reviving. It is a perfect counterpoint to the humidity of equatorial Ghana and I am made to feel like a swallow by my excursions here and back. To labour my point about climate, the other evening we went to a village called Mosset, armed with a variety of warm clothes, dried fruit, blankets and thermos flasks, despite the day temperatures being in the upper twenties.

Mosset has a tradition of staging operas at this time of the year in its old castle – a sort of reinforced version of the original. It tries to integrate local people in a vast chorus with a few semi-pros or young singers, hopefully on the way up. Incomers (Dutch in this case) produce and direct the whole affair and tickets are hard to come by. It begins late, at about half nine, to ensure that darkness lends it a special atmosphere. And indeed it does. Well worth the visit. The crowd scenes are full of kaleidoscopic colour and pinball vitality, hugely ambitious and yet most of the time managing to avoid catastrophe or disbelief. Mercutio is particularly virile and believable among the leads and, if better choreography had engineered it, the exceptional masks and costumes and other elements of dark menace would have lifted some scenes even more.

It would be an injustice to call it amateur opera but it also falls a lot short of professional staging. As it happens I am not a great supporter or afficionado of singing theatre of any kind, finding the plots usually too ploddingly bathetic to carry the frequently haunting melodies. Usually, too, the acting lacks a call to passion. In the end I am happiest attending some highly stylised, minimal set and a form of gesturing that stay within the convention of semaphore rather than a plunge into hot breath and fleshy contact, thereby allowing my ears to dominate my other senses.

So, in the delightful Pyrenean village of Mosset, it happened that, when Romeo the plank tried to get it on with Juliet, the ice siren, there was a squirm or two on my plastic seat. The voices were ok, hers better than his, but I was left at the end wishing that the death-embracing philtre of poison, taken by Romeo, was Viagra.

That would have made for an erect, rather than recumbent and somewhat limp end to proceedings!

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Sunday, August 1, 2010


Vodafone: polluters of an African heritage

Here I am in France, with space for reflection after a rather hectic time of it. I am at an age when, gradually, assumptions are made that with the passing years the vital edge of analytical thought decreases and the demand for my labour consequently diminishes. I finished my ten year stint with the British Board of Film Classification a week or so ago as a member of their children’s advisory panel, though that was the end of a natural span of service but I also found that management consultancy in the public sector had been excised by the latest Tory edict. Before that sounds too crabby and personal, it suits me. I have to complete the final volume of a three stage fictional account of the beginning of agnostic thought among the demons and gods of a time pre-Buddha, a cross between Rider Haggard, A Thousand and One Nights and Samurai legends. In other words attending to a personal sense of legacy.

But the blogs will also continue because they are part of a discipline. They maintain the focus on everything from social change to agnosticism in the same way the vicar compiles his sermons for a Sunday. They also put out into the ether certain questions and challenges which others might take up. Tiny snowballs that accumulate into landslides, if the time is right.

Of course, snowballs are beyond most Ghanaians ken. In that tropical clime it is possible to witness hailstones from vast cumuli disturbances overhead, where rain drops are shuttled up and down in the deep miles of cloud, icing, dropping, rising and dropping so many times until, too heavy, they crash upon the world beneath. But snow, no.

What most Ghanaians seem oblivious of, also, is the insidious way that mobile phone companies are destroying any aesthetic that might exist within traditional communities. Few people have landlines. Vodafone have recently bought Ghana’s main telephone system and are joining the forces of pollution that are turning some of the historical sites of Ghana into vast advertising hoardings. How it is done I have no idea. Equally, how it can be stopped is also beyond me. Whether money is exchanged for officials to turn a blind eye or whether the eyes are blind at the outset and do not see the increasing travesty, I don’t know.

Just imagine this. You live in a pretty Cotswold town in the Uk or in the Lake District or any medieval town in Europe and along comes a telephone company and paints the main building on a confluence of roads at its very centre, red. Or yellow. Or purple. Then, to add the icing they put lots of Vodaphone, MTN, Zain or other branding insignias all over it. This is what is happening in Ghana.

I look out on my unspoilt village in France and reflect on Cape Coast along the sea road from Accra. To help you empathise with my troubled thoughts, you can see in the accompanying photograph the main bridge in its centre, now a crude yellow vehicle of advertising for MTN. Vodafone are rapidly catching up. They want to paint every town red. Ironically, the photograph was taken from the slave fort, built when the British, Dutch and Portuguese thought in equally demeaning terms about the Ghanaian people.

Could you argue that if the people don’t object, then it can’t be bad? Like Avon selling skin bleaches to African women. Or tobacco companies turning their financial strategies towards poor countries where peoples have to be conditioned into the consumption of cancer-inducing cigarettes?

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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Phone sex and basic instincts…

Sometimes I feel I have to write a blog because something has happened which, I know, is another step towards a change in human affairs and that my grandchildren will be living in times that make today prosaic by comparison. On QI, that TV programme which occasionally reaches the twin peaks of erudition and comedy simultaneously, there was much amusement at historical quotes from famous people and their incapacity to forecast what products, inventions or activities would take later hold of universal consciousness and become commonplace. The domestic computer sticks in my memory. No chance. Why would people want such a thing? But the computer is now part of an inexorable drift in the way we see and deal with the world. It has become a seedbed of ‘applications’.

The other day I saw someone use a calculator to work out what she owed me from five pounds. I had bought something from her stall for one pound fifty. It had become for her, a surrogate for that part of the brain that does sums. From the onset of writing via pictographs through to phonographs, tape recorders, film, video, holographs and now the microcomputers we carry in our pockets, machines have steadily appropriated mental functioning for us, recording our thoughts, offering strategies for our futures. And we now use computers to build better computers (the doomsday scenario for many science fiction writers from Asimov on) so that they can take on more sophisticated tasks for us.

At other levels (see old blogs here) they are used to create simulated environments in which people can play, vicariously, with each other, virtual worlds which they can inhabit, alongside this one. In these worlds people can try out new personalities, new genders, new ages. Some are so intoxicated that they become addicted and lose the thread of their ‘real’ lives.

This weekend, in the UK newspaper. The Observer ( I receive it by certain means, here in Ghana, two days late!) there was a magazine article about Grindr, a new website that locates, via your mobile phone and GPS, the nearest enrolled gay man to you at any time you inquire. He could be anything from a mile to a foot away. A grid of pictures on your screen shows the nearest person top left and then down to the bottom right, the furthest away. In the article, there were comments about how sex had never been so instantly available. It will be unrolled as a heterosexual application very soon…

What is happening here? Yet another facet of consciousness is gradually being technologised so that we don’t have to use our instincts or our intelligence. Instead of being in a room, sniffing the pheromones in the air, wondering whether we might meet a woman or a man who could change the next few minutes, hours, days, weeks or years of our lives, all we need to do is call up Grindr (or whatever the hetero-equivalent might be) and get it on.

There will come a time when everything we do from our basic instincts to our higher order consciousness will be managed for us by technological prostheses. What will happen then to our sense of identity?

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Friday, July 2, 2010

I Spy

Leaving the grotesque nature of war aside and the appalling way that international politics is geared to decrease the chances of states like Ghana from achieving trade parity with the west, the news recently on other obscene fronts is equally dispiriting. Spying and assassinations are all the vogue.

Israeli hit squads travel across borders to erase their enemies without any moral qualms or consideration of the sensitivities of foreign governments, never mind the inhuman nature of these acts against individuals that are far beyond the parameters of justice. Likewise, the Russians poison dissenters with plutonium and bump off free thinking journalists and develop a spy network in the United States which seems to exist in a suburban world that mixes Desperate Housewives and 24 Hours. All of this comes to light through the usual bungling of which even the most professional human beings seem capable. As I have often remarked in these columns, entropy is endemic in human affairs. No matter how like Bourne or 007 these agents of state terrorism try to be, they slip up. Forged passports, indiscreet emails, letter drops, buried bank notes and writing in invisible ink bubble to the surface of scrutiny as though they have a life of their own, unbeknownst to their human couriers.

This is what we can see. But, like the proverbial iceberg, most of it we can’t, though, eventually, it will percolate into the public arenas of the future as spies write their autobiographies, or files eventually come to light as state apparatuses change.

It seems to me to be totally unforgivable that governments from west to east and north to south play with each other’s employees in this inhumane way, as though their lives have no other meaning than virtual figures in computer games. Ministers of State must sit down in their grand offices and discuss, coldly, the extermination of foreign nationals. War is obscene and unfathomable but there is something even more evil in this personalised visciousness.

But it is only a jolly game, after all. Obama and Putin’s puppet are keen to keep the latest spy furore as a sideshow because they have ‘greater considerations’ driving them. Israel still gets its huge subsidies from the United States despite the sickening nature of its apartheid policies and its high seas piracy. China is not really challenged on Tienanmen or Tibet. We witness everywhere Governments who have no sense of moral credibility, whether they be our own or those of others.

The fact that the eleven Russian spies lived and worked among US citizens for so long may show levels of deep-seated ideology on the one hand but they also show that they are like you and I or they wouldn’t have been able to exist, untroubled, in that every day ordinary world.

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Sunday, June 27, 2010


Two legs good, four legs bad…

When you are viewing the World Cup in Ghana as an ardent football supporter, the phrase ‘opiate of the masses’ returns to thought, often and enough. Last night was very wild here. Horns. Singing. Dogs barking. Chickens cackling and crowing. Goats bleating. Speakers blasting. Euphoria as the goals went in. Skill beats brawn. And the silky skills were Ghanaian and the brawn was the Imperialistic US!

Since this is my adopted country, it was a tense but rewarding affair. There were many eulogies banded about in the televisual media such as ‘All Africa is behind Ghana’. In the mean time, one of the ads on tv has leading African footballers packing bags in grainy black and white. A ‘profound poetic voice’ speaks over the images, saying, “Football called us. We answered the call’. To riches and fame far away from their African roots. The success of Ghana so far has been gained despite the poverty of the infrastructure here. I’m glad that they beat the US because that country insists on handouts (they call it aid) and prohibits free trade. Dependency rather than independence. Slavery by other means. Another version of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Thus it is that everyone from footballers to nurses and doctors fills the holes in the UK and American football league teams or health services rather than building their country’s own infrastructure. Thus it also is that Ghana, like many other African States, never tackle corruption because their leaderships channel aid into the pockets of the elite. Thus it is that wherever you go, everyone seeks to ‘chop’ and take bribes. (Chop means to slice off money for yourself from whatever aid or investment there may be). It is endemic because at the heart of things, the elite in these countries are self-serving rather than seeking to serve their people.

For a few ecstatic days, Ghana is Africa. It is learning about national identity (in itself a miracle given the tribal divisions which tend to procreate political parties) and it feels very proud of its achievement. Would that this translated into a government that truly looked after its own people and built its putative democracy to such an extent that the western and now Oriental capitalist megastructures were forced to treat it as a partner, not a poodle running on a lead over its mineral-laden territory.

And what a football force it would be. The Brazil of the African continent.

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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Homos have rights too…!

This was the headline on the front page of the Daily Graphic in Ghana yesterday.

I remember a couple of science fiction novels based upon the premise that, among the infinite number of parallel universes, it must be that each of us has infinite possibilities of playing out our existence. Take what is happening here. I am writing and you are reading. Everything I write could be exactly the same in another universe, save for a full stop…or a different word…or a typo…or I didn’t write it at all. All the possibilities lie within infinity. My life and yours are being played out in parallel, infinite variations. We could be evil, we could be good, we could be philanderers, we could be bisexual, we could be nuns and monks, we could be presidents and we could be killed at birth. On and on. And in parallel universes, time can move backwards and forwards, denying us the certainty of the progressive arrow arcing to the furthest edge of existence.

In some of these science fiction tales, the heroine or hero goes back in time and then returns to exactly the same point at which she or he left. Everything seems the same but then… a different party is in power, adverts are different and friends are not, somehow, the same. There are some scientists who say it is possible that ghosts are our other selves in parallel universes. Universes touch and we see through, momentarily.

All this is a roundabout, literary affectation to bring you back to the headline that begins this piece. Maybe you would have seen it in a red top newspaper in the sixties in Britain before there were changes in public attitudes which led to the repealing of laws on homosexuality but it underlines the difference in cultural norms between Ghana and the UK. Bodies resulting from macabre rituals, photographed in situ at the murder scene, are routinely published. Accounts of sexual acts are graphically described. There is less observance of what the British call ‘decency’ in coverage, less gloss, less euphemism. As a result, the truth – or at least the evidence upon which truth may rest – is less varnished.

I have been here for two years and will be happy to remain here until I am jettisoned into a new life in a parallel universe after death – or some quirk in fate thrusts me elsewhere. Anyway, it will take me twenty to thirty years to fathom the subtle differences between Ghana and the UK, so headlines such as in the Daily Graphic yesterday don’t make it seem that, unbeknownst to my current self, I have flipped through time or across universes but am solidly rooted in a culture I understand.

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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Just my cup of tea….

I can’t remember if it was the Goon Show on the walnut caesd wireless but I suspect the sketch came from there. I was intoxicated by the Goons in a way that maybe viewers took to Monty Python later. Catch phrases, surreal plots and resident characters that grew and changed over time, the point about these programmes was that they broke the mould of previous comic structures and actually seduced their audiences into new ways of seeing. They appealed to the young because they were opaque to older audiences who had been brought up on Music Hall and gave the new generation a language and experience much as rock and roll did, which offered personal possession of a whole slice of culture. When I was at school, there was a distinct division between the Goons and the Anti-Goons. The former adopted the voices and endlessly repeated favourite sketches while the latter talked about girls and getting your end away. Maybe the Goon Show represented the beginning of the sexually immature Nerd.

The sketch I alluded to at the beginning of this, possibly infinite set of regressions (!) went something like this:

“We were out in the garden when war was declared (World War 2) and our Mum said, never mind about that, let’s have a nice cup of tea.”

In succeeding programmes, disasters were shelved as the willow pattern cups and saucers appeared with their efficacious brew, dissolving angst, magically. Unlike coffee, the range of recipes of how tea must be drunk is almost infinite. Strength, with or without milk and/or sugar, lemon, blend and (to me very important) colour. I have seen people wave a tea bag over boiled water, allowing it to dip once like a martin, taking in fluids and discolouring the liquid very slightly while others require a pair of scissors to snip off the brew as it reaches the top of the mug. Tea in Britain is a bit like the weather, never predictable and rarely acceptable, even when you make it for yourself.

So, it must be a relief for the reader that I come to my point. Tea, it turns out, does NOT dehydrate. It offers as much as water in rehydration BUT on top of that it is an anti-oxidant, doing wonders for all manner of bodily processes.

In the excruciating aftermath of English goalkeeper Robert Green’s feckless attempt to save a bumbling shot from the United States, I heard myself saying:

“Never mind about that, let’s have a nice cup of tea.”

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Thursday, June 10, 2010

The New Creationists

A long time ago in the hazy dawn of my memory, aged around eight years, I was for a while in the choir of the local church before being expelled for various bits of nuisance, including questioning God’s status. My mother used to say that Shadforth church was ‘high’. I had no idea what that meant, except that it suggested a notion of altitude. When I became the main tree climber of the village a bit later, I had to take on the dare of climbing a tree by the church and sitting in a nest that was above its main roof. I can still remember the fetid smell of birds’ droppings, musty twigs, asthma inducing feathery refuse and insect larvae. Up there was a different world. Rooks are very gregarious and get annoyed at a boy’s invasion, so it was like being an alien, sitting on the accumulated ledge of ill-formed housing that rooks go in for and being bombed by indignant residents. None of your weaver bird architectural niceties. More like the trolls in Tolkien.

Anyway, before I got thrown out of the high Anglican church with its quasi-catholic tendencies of Latin, gold-edged robes and funny hats, its incense swinging and so on, Canon Tillard told a story about God and scientists. Scientists took a seed of corn and broke it down into its various ingredients (we’re in the mid Fifties) and made a copy. But a priest pointed out that, although the seed was in every obvious way the same as the original, once planted, God’s seed would grow and the new one wouldn’t.

Let us career on to the present day. Canon Tillard would need to revise his well thumbed note book of sermons because this week a scientist named Craig Ventner has produced a synthetic microbe called (scientists are rather bad poets as a whole) Synthia. It is a breakthrough of immense significance, well into the territory of the wheel, the microchip and the atom bomb. The next fifty years will flash past faster than the half-century I have just spanned in this blog and a theological question will become part of everyone’s attempt to understand the nature of existence.

Will these new life forms be godless, since they were created by man? Or will there be a revision by the world’s religions to the effect that God has intended humanity to supplant itself with a species, perfectly formed and equipped to deal with a dying planet and conquering space? A species which will one day extinguish its human antecedents because of their incapacity to tend to their environment and manage a life of peaceful, creative co-existence.

This could be a species that will outlive the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas and any other tracts that lack proper scientific validity and begin to assemble its own manual of existence.

In the beginning was the Ventner. And He did engineer Synthia. And He was pleased.”

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Thursday, June 3, 2010

Killing Boat People

As I was born in India, I have a great regard for Ghandi’s peaceful protests in Africa and in his homeland. My father, who trained Indian military during the second world war, saw things differently. Ghandi, as far as he was concerned, was ‘troublesome’. I am sure that the Greek women (as depicted in Lysistrata) who refused their husbands sex unless they stopped fighting, were also called troublesome. However, these days, to be troublesome can be, in some eyes, synonymous with terrorism and it can lead to death.

Non-violent acts are and have, in recent years, been punished by deadly violence in a whole host of countries where the State has felt its authority is in question. Tiananmen Square, Iran, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Russia and in many parts of Africa here, have all seen peaceful, protesting people mown down in the midst of their outpourings of hope for better times.

It is as wholly evil as it is inexcusable.

The latest example was the assault on the humanitarian aid flotilla as it sailed indomitably towards Gaza. Israeli gunboat diplomacy was illegal, it was cynical and it was predictably bloody. However the scales are set in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, they weigh more heavily on the Israeli side which seems to have contempt for lives other than those that, they assume, share their own blood. Gaza has been made a prison, a concentration camp. Hit squads on the sovereign territory of other nations, the killing of non-military medical volunteers and air assaults in cross-border battles with their neighbours, are hardly the work of a humane, peaceful and civilised people. And yet the Israeli Government seems unperturbed by opinions beyond their boundaries, whatever reservations some of its own population might have.

The point is this. Peaceful protest can only be effective in countries where the rule of law and a sense of decency prevents soldiers or police from killing those who are merely voicing their protest. Building a population profile which legitimises peaceful protest takes decades. It involves independent courts, freedom of speech, a democratic education system and a belief that to take from others, whether it be their land, their wealth or their dignity, is unacceptable.
Israel is, therefore, uncivilised. Anyone who says different is troublesome.

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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

The Big Nightmare

The second biggest fear, after cancer, in the United States, is Alzheimer’s. This degeneration of the brain can not only rob you of your memory and clarity of purpose but, seemingly, of your identity; the stuff that, when in conjunction and melded into a composite, makes you who you are. Thus it is that the former elements of decay become disturbingly obvious to the sufferer and the latter, in the later stages, become an ordeal for family and friends.

The notion that our identity is nested in groups of cells firing electrical charges to each other is bizarre, is it not? Somehow, the traditional view of personality is that it is a mysterious non-material part of us, much as believers think of the spirit or the soul. But, as the cells die and holes appear in our brains, we lose even our selves. Oliver Sachs said in one of his books – probably The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat – a book which is surprisingly positive about degenerative conditions, that the last thing to go which is recognisably the person, is his or her signature. Like the Cheshire Cat our identities fade away, leaving only a just legible scrawl, which is our name.

In the interests of your health, wherever you are, I watched a brilliant documentary on this whole area, pulling together the latest scientific developments. There is no doubt that a cure is on the way – an injection which rids the brain of the plaque and tau-tangles that kill cells. But in the mean time, here’s what you must do if all this scares you.

1 Don’t eat processed fats and sugars or go mad on alcohol but take in lots of fruit and veg

2 Take lots of exercise – which makes brain cells work more efficiently

3 Keep a strong social network (isolates die a lot earlier)

4 Profens, normally used to kill pain, protect brain cells against the assault

5 Take up new activities which demand you learn – languages, music, crosswords

Then, even if your brain is showing advanced signs of degeneration, the brain may still function remarkably well.

Whether we have one or a number of identities – the jury is still out! – we’d like it or them to ride to the last sunset, carrying us along, lightly and with grace. So, we must do what we can and follow the rules until the drug arrives on the market that gives us protection.

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Friday, May 28, 2010

The Big Sleep (part 5)

Why is it that when you have been writing about a subject (death in this case) your life imitates art. Not that I have died since my last blog, nor anyone that close to me, but the subject of death has entered conversations and I am sure that I have not guided it there. Maybe something happened telepathically, the way it can. Jung called it synchronicity, a sort of juxtaposition of events, thoughts or feelings that seem beyond normal understanding. (I have just read that paragraph and it raises the interesting notion of communication from beyond the ether by blog. You wouldn’t know whether I was dead or alive, would you?!)

Anyway, I was asked at a dinner party whether I believed in God and I said no, I was more of a rudimentary Buddhist. The conversation went on to whether there is an Afterlife. I said that no-one, as far as I know, had come back to tell us that there was. I remember once going to a spiritualist church where everyone believed their families were out there or up there, waiting for them with open arms but it seemed to me to be on a par with end of the pier magic shows.

Anyway, one of the group, a seemingly staid vet, told a gripping tale about the death of his mother. When they were gathered together as a family, to share out her jewellery and other possessions, an argument broke out between two of her daughters over a particular piece which was missing. Then a third daughter broke in. Speaking in their mother’s voice she declared that this particular heirloom was hidden in a drawer and described where they might find it. The girl had never spoken in tongues before or since and they were all rather scared by hearing their mother speak through her. Whether this constitutes proof of life after death I know not. But it did to them. I am unsure whether Christianity embraces ghosts or otherworldly communication, since my religious education ended when I was eleven and thrown out of the choir of the local church but I have a feeling it doesn’t. Heaven has air-locked gates and no email, wireless or sepulchral voices to communicate with us.

My own mother swore than when people in the family died, the fire irons would rattle in the hearth but I never saw it.

There are plenty of stories but they never happen to me. I am a Doubting Thomas, I suppose and want to see the wraith or hear the disembodied voice, myself. I would willingly spend a night in a haunted house, happily waiting for the chains to clank, the doors to creak and the hollow tread on the floorboards.

Back to the dinner party, it emerged that all of them missed their parents – mothers in particular – so much so that they wanted there to be an afterlife so that they could rejoin them. Maybe I am made of sterner stuff or maybe I am an unfeeling old sod but I don’t experience that longing, much as I loved my Mother. It seems to me that whatever this life has for us, it does not include extensions into other dimensions. Buddhists believe that there is a connection between this life and the next and the others that follow but the analogy I heard one of them use was that of a snooker ball striking another and then that one striking a further ball. The first ball makes the others move but they remain, sadly, separate and unable to communicate, otherwise.

So, if you wish, the hereafter is all balls, unless you are a believer.

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Saturday, May 22, 2010

The Big Sleep (Part 4)

Going to funerals was not something that grabbed my younger self. Life was for living and these events usually meant a kind of farrago of hypocrisy about resurrection, whatever the religion – Buddhist and humanist ceremonies being the exception. I am thinking about this subject because yesterday I went to another Ghanaian funeral, this time one that was almost patrician in its panoply. It is the first that I have attended where the body was on show and everyone was asked to file past and pay their last respects. The deceased was an indomitable woman in her 91st year. I had met her a couple of times. While I waited my turn to be ushered forward, I observed that more than half those who were paying their last respects, did not look at her, keeping their faces averted. One or two others later told me that they thought she had been prepared well and looked at peace. Someone else told me that this was a step forward because, in Ghanaian terms she was fair skinned which means of mixed blood, going back generations and embalmers are not so used to the cosmetics needed for whiter skin. Indeed, this friend told me that a few years back a white man’s skin was bright yellow as a result of the injudicious use of the wrong pastes. All of this had immediate surreal resonance for me since we have bought the entire box sets of Six Feet Under, that miracle of ensemble acting which takes place at an undertakers.

So, back to my thread, here are some memories of such events, although I can’t include among them a single final get together where the priest, the vicar, the imam, the rabbi or the humanist proclaimer, said anything that added to my store of knowledge about the human condition.

First memory: a new friend, but one who I sensed would become very close, was killed in his twenties. It was the first time I had seen artificial grass covering the mound of soil. An old friend (now himself dead) said that he had visited D H Lawrence’s grave in New Mexico and there were artificial flowers everywhere. Poor D H, the defender of all that nature brings! My second memory concerned a little church where, as the service came to an end, a red admiral butterfly flew into the light of a stained glass window like the fleeing spirit of the deceased. Next, a very dear friend, internationally lauded for her illustrative work in children’s books was being lowered into the ground at a humanist farewell, when a steam train shunted its way past the cemetery, hooting to her. This was in the present epoch of electric and diesel railways, quite recent in fact, but her work is chiefly remembered for its evocation of the 1950s when such trains were the conveyance of the time. The ghostly engine and its quaint wooden carriage had come to carry her off. My final illustration is of a burial of my boy Joseph’s great grandfather. Joe must have been six or so. When we asked him if he wanted to go the the cemetery he said no because he did not want to walk on the planks. Staring at him, I asked him what he meant. It turned out that he had been to an archeological dig with his class and fully expected that a burial would involve walking along planks and looking down into holes where bones lay exposed!

There are other such memories of goodbyes to dead folks I once loved and/or enjoyed but I want to finish with the events of yesterday. All the hymns were from that time in the 17th and 18th centuries when the evocation of the Christian god was of a wrathful Father, carried by missionaries to Africa. One stanza, for example, talked of Heaven being a place where one could lie forever at His feet, able to look upon Him forever – if He so allowed. The Methodist preacher occasionally thrust his face forward and spoke in an impulsive, declamatory resurrectionist screech, as he sought to impose a frisson of mortal fear in us all. Apparently he was very restrained compared to what is the more usual. What was really touching were the personal tributes and the visual intimacy with the dead woman, the emotions of the bereaved and the symbolism of everyone wearing black and white, the mark of a long life that must be celebrated as well as mourned, though, from the priest himself there was too little of the former.

I mentioned ‘living wills’ in an earlier blog in this series on death and it made me think. I suddenly recalled The Big Chill, a rather endearing film about friends coming together for a funeral in which the church resounded to The Rolling Stones great track, Love in Vain and I began to wonder how my own parting could be effected. I should choreograph it, I thought. One last chance to impose my taste and general cultural interests and ideals upon those left behind. A bit of an Irish wake, bawdy and rumbustious with the forest or the sea or the mountain top (yes!) rocking, and everyone having a laugh.

But I could not do it here in Ghana. The wishes of the dead are usually ignored and the imperatives of the various church denominations rule. Here, their god can be a vindictive old beggar, who judges harshly, expects your life to be pretty miserable and full of sin, but who, in some act of last minute teasing forgiveness, allows you supplication at his feet.

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Monday, May 17, 2010

The Big Sleep (Part 3)

I saw something the other day which was new to me. I like to keep myself as fit as possible, swimming, multi-gym, running on a trampoline and so on. In Ghana this requires true dedication to the contours of the body. Even in the evening it is close to 30 degrees and the humidity is extremely high. Thus, exercise is both a challenge but also a reward as the sweat pours of me and so I can cut down the time I spend in this masochistic pursuit of a few more years of life.

Perhaps you have heard that at seventy you can have three-quarters of the strength you had as a young, vibrant, semen-rich twenty year old male. I can’t think of the equivalent hyperbole for women but it must exist. At the same time we know that the body replaces cells at a fantastic rate (some, every three days!). So, the question arises, why do we age? The answer appears to be that when the body replaces cells, it copies the last known version as its prototype. Now, imagine taking a photograph and then scanning it. And then scanning the last scan, on and on for eighty years. What would you have? The answer is a very decrepit version of the original. A pixelated morass. It is another example of entropy. In the academic world, plagiarism is a crime probably worse than homicide and here we have the body managing it on a huge scale. It seems irrevocable then that we just break down. That is why there is such a buzz about stem cell surgery. Take some stem cells from me when I am very young and store them until I am very old. Then begin growing and replacing bits and bobs of my body, not with the zillionth copy but with relative originals. It will happen but nor for my generation.

This entropic process continues all around us, from New Labour ‘running out of steam and ideas’, to houses needing constant upgrading, to businesses who forget to develop their workforce, to crockery and glassware. The universe itself is heading, it seems, for its own final Big Sleep where all the atoms that comprise it are spread through an infinity of icy blackness, so far apart that they can no longer interact and make stars, planets or us.

So what those of the end-game generation are doing is encouraging cells to copy cells that are a bit stronger than they would have been otherwise. The finishing line may or may not remain in the same place but we will run as close as we can to it before the final crawl.

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Friday, May 14, 2010

The Big Sleep (Part 2)

I saw a documentary clip about comas. In it a woman was exhibiting on what has become a familiar medical screen, the nearest to a flat line that you can get without being vegetative. Her children were going scatty with worry and despair. What did they do? They assumed that she could hear, though the doctors were doubtful. One of them told her that their father and her husband (of forty or fifty years) had decided to take another woman on their long planned cruise around the world. The effect was instantaneous. She sat up, opened her eyes and proceeded to be highly indignant!

I suspect this might be a good dinner party game. What would wake YOU up from a coma? Since science recently is theorising that our emotional centres rule our logical consciousness to the extent that we respond to situations by gut reaction – and then summon up post-hoc rationalisations, what wakes you up must be exceptionally disturbing/passionate or even obsessive. We hear that people have been woken from their Big Sleeps by being played their favourite musical tracks – the karaoke cure, by the arrival of their dogs or cats – animal magnetism, or by smelling the scent of their favourite flower – pollination. Yet without these mysterious trial and error interventions, they might have lain there forever, puttering along in their interiors, happily ignoring their physical interaction with the world in favour of floating ever closer to the great abyss.

Death will arrive all too soon and flatten out, forever, the lines of our mental functioning. So, the sooner we leave instructions on what our nearest and dearest must do to raise us from this simulated extinction, the quicker we will click out of comas and engage with the business of living each moment as if it is our last. This is probably a better definition of a ‘living will’ than the usual.

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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

The Big Sleep

I have had computer problems despite supposedly being well protected. Everything ground to a halt a few days ago and the last escapee from its innards was the latest update of the book I am writing called Azimuth. The fact that it has taken me 8 years and is 600 pages long, added to the frisson of despair that attended my attempts to right the sinking ship. But this is Ghana and around the corner a fellow dived like a BP engineer off the Florida coast to where the wreckage of my data was spewing into the ether and rectified everything; data returned and all working properly again for the princely sum of seven pounds and fifty pence.

I have written often enough about entropy – how everything we do, no matter how exacting we are as task masters over our own destinies, gradually breaks down and chaos ensues and here was yet another example. Meanwhile, in parallel, I am watching quite an old but brilliant series called The Human Body, fronted by that genial doctor with the perfect mix of humility and curiosity, Robert Winston. If you have not seen it, please take this as a strong recommendation. It follows a journey through the life of human beings, from egg to dead. The science is fascinating and the lessons, extraordinary. I am at that age where much of the journey represents where I have come from until this moment. The last of all episodes deals with the death of a German in Eire. It is poignant, challenging and uplifting. The camera does not show his last breath but it is a pretty close run thing. He didn’t want the cancer drugs, preferring a slightly shorter life of greater quality than being hospitalised in an intiseptic, clinical environment. He was an atheist and somehow this added lustre to his struggle.

All of us have to face the final curtain, as the cliché goes but most of us want it to come down while we are asleep. I’d prefer to be awake and see it come down. Winston says that we cannot divulge what happens in the end-game, despite the thousands of near-misses that people have had – reporting tunnels of light with their loved ones waiting with outstretched arms. It turns out that even this is a trick of the mind. Astronauts on high speed simulators report the same illusion as they lose consciousness. If it is to be so private and personal that no-one will ever know how we moved from dead in our heads, then so be it. But it would be worth being awake. Our last lesson learnt as the brain ceases to function.

Then our atoms break free from the little force fields that held them in body colonies and are carried away in the universal tide. They were there from the beginning of time and have travelled through suns and planets and cold empty spaces all their existence. Nice that they spent a few brief flickering moments as part of a human life, don’t you think?

It’d be great to have someone take me, at the penultimate second of existence, round the corner and have all my data and processing restored for seven pounds fifty. But, since that day belongs to a genetic progeny of mine far into the future, I will be content to keep my eyes open until the last.

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Saturday, April 17, 2010

Nice pair of genes!

When is it amoral to have an affair, no matter whether it be a one night stand or something a little meatier?

The other day I caught a story in which a rather crestfallen man discovered, by chance and DNA testing, that all four of his children had been fathered by other men! His wife, during ovulation, had sought out partners of a particular genetic profile. It was probably not conscious, more a driving need but she gave way to it on four separate occasions. One thing is for sure, something about the make-up of her husband’s cells sent her scurrying for something different!

Once, when I did some consultancy work for a hospital management team, I was told by midwives that anecdotal knowledge, accumulated over time, suggested that between one and two in every ten children are not born of their legal fathers. The official figure is one in ten. Women of all walks of life, rich or poor, are fully capable of breaking the bonds of happy matrimony and playing the field.

This is a paradox at the heart of societies. While the majority uphold social conventions regarding the sanctity of families, they can still be susceptible to their loins and then their logic gives way to illicit sex and bastard offspring. The rather poignant point of their behaviour is that their genes override everything conventional in their attitudes and set them on this course towards extra-marital promiscuity, for entirely worthy reasons.

The cause of their philandering is that they ‘sense’ that their partners’ gene pools are not sufficiently different from their own to be certain that their offspring will be healthy. In an experiment to show this, women and men were asked to sniff the tee shirts of members of the opposite sex and rate them according to their attractiveness to them. The pattern of results showed, unequivocally, that they rated the tee shirt which was most dissimilar from their own gene profile as the most attractive.

It doesn’t matter whether you are male or female but you have this sense of which you are consciously unaware. Let’s call it genetic sensitivity. Could it be a defence that might stand up in a court of law? As Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene, could we argue that in certain circumstances we are not of sound mind, we are at the behest of our DNA? Should we even allow divorce on the grounds of a woman’s infidelity when she is driven by altruism rather than lust? Seeking an unalike genetic partner must be a biological imperative to ensure that her own genes and those of humanity, as a whole, prosper, thus reducing the opportunity for malfunctioning DNA to weaken the population.

This must be the true meaning of the French maxim, vive la difference!

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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The Politics of Empty Rhetoric

So, the UK election fracas has begun in earnest. Being 3000 miles away gives me a certain dispassionate objectivity these days where once I would have been spitting tacks and feeling that if the Tories get in it would mean the end of life as we know it, Captain. Like all manner of experiences, the mind becomes indifferent when the object of desire loses its immediacy. But I manage to hang on in, some days, and evaluate the rhetoric as I see them doing their TV-glossed thing.
Cameron said today that this would be an end to Big Government. Instead a Big Country would be in charge. The Uk’s social infra-structure would see far more guidance and leadership from ordinary people who have a right to determine what is being done for them. A bit socialist, prithee! Meanwhile he has managed to cajole one hundred and fifty Big Business leaders to sign up saying they support the Tories in not raising national insurance contributions. I suppose I could get a hundred and fifty figures from any walk of life to sign up to a policy which increases their profit margins.
At the heart of this bandying of policies is a curious contradiction. Cameron says that the incumbent Government have no credibility in the face of the combined experience of business leaders. They know nothing. However, the Tories do not suggest that businesses would be run better if Big Business Executives shared their power with a Big Country, or even those lower down the organisation. Here, they are in absolute agreement that the Executive must rule the rest.
Both Labour and Tory rhetoric promotes the increased engagement of the everyday person in all manner of professional services. More public accountability, they both bleat. I’m not so sure. What on earth is the point of training professionals to do medicine, education, social work and whatever else and then hamstring them with a committee of naives, laypersons, novices, obsessives, fanatics….
The law can take care of those who break it in any profession and it is there that a jury of ordinary men and women can have their final say. It is the professions that must take the ultimate responsibility for their development and moral purchase on social life, based upon fairness, respect and equal opportunity for all. Give the public the lever of power to lead these domains and we’d have hanging, flogging, a curriculum of learned facts without the nous to apply them, classified drugs everywhere (except alcohol which kills more than the rest put together) and a dictatorship of the middle classes (because the lack of education of the poor at present prevents them having any say in their Big Country). It’s time we stopped electing MPs (who have shown their propensity for venal, invidious and self-aggrandising behaviours) to further the outdated ideologies of their Parties and, instead, elect them for their independence of thought and their expressed concerns for particular issues. Then Parliament might be fun, intellectually absorbing and in itself an education of the Big Country, instead of a ragbag of ill-educated, emotional trumpeting from all sides.

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Thursday, April 8, 2010

Sadists, Paedophiles and Dissemblers: All the Pope’s Men…

Imagine a grand palace where officials wear gold and purple, where the decor is splendid beyond even the capacity of a billionaire to reproduce, where there is a hushed silence everywhere and where the central figure, a man among men, is treated as though the Divine emanates from his every molecule. Meanwhile imagine a grim barracks-like detention centre where there is nothing playful to lighten the day and where children are beaten, sexually abused and have their childhoods systematically robbed from them. The latter may have taken place over hundreds of years, there is no way of knowing. The former has been the staple diet and centre-piece of the Catholic Church’s control over millions of people through time.

My knowledge of the history of religion is somewhat piecemeal, mainly because the doings of the various churches that have Christianity at their core, leave me cold and sometimes furious. In fact a key source is a book called Q by Luther Blissett which traces, fictionally, the Reformation. For those of you who know the name Luther Blissett, he was a footballer who went to one of the Milan clubs and played outrageously primitively but created a cult of adoration. A few fans turned out to be good historians and wrote Q, under the pseudonym of their hero’s name! Anyway, back to my thoughts: maybe it is not the place of an agnostic such as I to be critical of religion but even so I expect someone called The Holy Father to eschew riches, be pure of heart and demonstrate in his every act, the teachings of his purported Son of God.

Instead, the abysmal gap between the Pontiff’s Vatican and the Catholic care homes, schools and seminaries around Europe over the last few decades, seems as wide as is conceivable. Although his lieutenants obligingly apologised to their flocks on Easter Sunday, at the same time another of the Pope’s ‘mouths’ was saying that scurrilous rumours regarding the Pope’s previous role as a bishop and condoner of his priests’ unforgiveable crimes was akin to the treatment of Jews in the holocaust. Hyperbole is not dead. A further senior mouthpiece for the Papal tongue, said that rumours regarding the Pope’s behaviour were trivial gossip. Meanwhile, the Pope said nothing.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that an organisation that purports to uphold Christian values, that believes in one God, his Son and the Holy Spirit, would, as a matter of course, be able to tease out those who do not demonstrate the much needed piety and purity. But there have been no such tests of the quality of these servants of God. Whether they entered the Catholic Church in order to perpetrate crimes against the very young, or whether the culture of the seminaries is such that their desires were fed by their brethren, I have no idea but these men (and some Nuns in Eire and elsewhere) were able to stand in front of their congregations, issuing homilies about how to live a good life and meanwhile make demands on the rich and poor to give generously to the Church. And all the while, their horrific acts were concealed by their superiors, to protect the reputation of the Vatican or to protect their own criminal pasts.

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Thursday, April 1, 2010

Advertising Death in the Taxis of Accra

I have reported occasionally on notices in the back windows of taxis and trotros because they contain enigmas, ironies or plain challenges to my own imagination. Two that I have seen during the past week are symbolic of key forces that are shaping Ghanaian society. If you have read previous blogs you would know that drivers go off to a cheap store and buy acid coloured sticky-backed letters which they then form into words or messages for following drivers and passengers to read. They are mostly religious, declaring their love of God (or fear of Him) usually via the channel of Christianity. They declare bits of biblical text and warnings if these are not heeded. But, as inferred at the outset, some seem to have been written by inscrutable minds, determined to baffle, amuse or create philosophical discourse.

The first one I saw was, “Heaven gate: no bribe”. Now isn’t this the perfect drawing together of religious and social politics? Ghana, despite Obama’s flattery about it being politically clean, is riven with problems of ‘chopping’, the local word for bribery. It is a great shame for the people here are generally courteous, passive and tolerant and the country would do much better if corruption was eradicated. At every level of business, most individuals who have a direct role in one’s life seem to expect backhanders, whether it is customs, Government grants, traffic cops and all the usual Ministries. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that people, merely doing the job they are paid to do, will refuse to do it in good time, unless they are paid bribes. Even sometimes refusing to do it at all! Here, people shrug and say that that is the way of it. Some even suggest that it is no bad thing, since no-one is paid a decent basic salary in the first place. But to get into Heaven requires a purity of purpose and spirit that does not exist in every day realities.

The second sign was, “Ending is the problem”. How do you read its sense? I pondered a long time, after initially laughing out loud at its strange, cryptic truthfulness. For all of us, the ending is the problem. Wittgenstein, the philosopher, a conformed atheist, was seconds away from the final curtain when he realised that his impeccable logic, which proved that there could not be a God, could mean, equally, that there was a God! Deathbed revisionism. It is said that a sizeable proportion of lapsed Catholics enjoy a return to the fold during these dimming times. Anyway, as a writer and a mortal, I have often found endings to be a problem. We humans want the stories of our lives like those of good books, to be satisfying with everything tied up neatly and properly, regardless of whether we hope to spend eternity with a handful of virgins or a pastel Heaven full of angels with harps or being blown through the universe, dissembled into the atoms that originally came together to construct us.

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Friday, March 26, 2010


The Medium is the Massage

A while back now I was in Tashkent in Uzbekistan and developed a bad back. Someone arranged for a physiotherapeutic massage. I turned up at what seemed to be a night club in the basement of a high rise block of unsympathetic concrete. The tale could be a long one. Suffice it to say that the masseuse was a lithe woman, dressed only in a white towelling dressing gown. She spoke no English and I no useful language. The effort to beat, pummel, knuckle, twist, scrunch and slap my back utterly exhausted her. At the end she collapsed into a chair, her gown fell open, revealing her nakedness and in this intimate and frank posture, she had a cigarette. I suspect that if the course of events had been what she had expected, she would have been less tired!

This week I visited a health spa in Ghana, near Accra, run by a doctor and with a little flock of engaging Ghanaian masseuses. I had a two hour session of oil massage. My masseuse, Celestine, worked very hard for the entire period. She did not want conversation and was very careful about unwarranted physical contact, other than what her fingers and palms intended. It was almost pitch black. Music played at a level below really hearing. Two hours went by and all but the obviously taboo areas were kneaded and cajoled into soft rubber. It struck me how extraordinary such activity is. The meeting of strangers who are in constant physical contact but with their own thoughts and mental isolation. What did she discover about me in that long silence? Did my muscle and skin speak? What did she learn from these daily encounters with passing human trade? What fulfilment was there for her in this work?

I never had the opportunity to ask her. She blanketed me at the end and told me to wait five minutes before getting dressed. Like an oil-slicked creature from a deep sea, I emerged into the light, no wiser about Celestine and only a little wiser about myself. My body had been like Braille but I had no idea how literate its reader had been.

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Friday, March 12, 2010

Brain damage is good for you…

Of course, when I was a boy there was no such thing as sats – standardised tests of children at ceratin stages of their school careers. But there was the eleven plus examination which weeded out snotty grammar school children from grubby secondary modern children. When they dropped this divisive and discriminatory examination in all but a few independent schools it was with great relief to all parents except those who were snotty in all regards and felt it was their privilege. The pressure was fearsome. I was lent a gold Parker pen by my father, as if this magic implement would turn an ugly duckling of an exam paper into a swan. The nib was scratchy and I was impeded by its progress across the paper but I didn’t dare tell him afterwards.

One of the post-war myths among those of us who were trying to transcend our inauspicious beginnings and go to grammar school, was that a girl in Newcastle had had her head run over by a bus , following which she became a genius. I am not sure how many of my peers considered this unique therapy to please their despairing parents but I am reminded of it as I see on Sky News that a man who had a cerebral haemorrhage has been changed into a poet and a painter as a consequence of the blood letting. It seems as though there are short cuts to better brain output, then. Perhaps we could adopt the approach announced today in skin cancer treatment. Eighty per cent guarantee of a cure. A cream is put over the tumorous growth and then a sticking plaster to cover it. The cancerous cells gobble up the cream. Three hours later a charge is released which turns the cream into a potent killer and the tumour dies, leaving the healthy cells to grow again. No scarring.

We should do the same with our kids. Instead of sats, that long term inhibitor of flowering creativity and self-assurance, we should put cream on their skulls, wait three hours and then charge it up. All the dumb cells would die, leaving the healthy ones to propagate. A bit like the old vinegar and brown paper cure for Jack in the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill.

The trouble is that everyone would then have kids bordering on genius and those that have always relished their children’s dominance in exams and the wold of work, afterwards, would bring in a law to protect their interests. You can’t win in class warfare if you belong to the underclasses.

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Saturday, March 6, 2010

Under the skin of Geert Wilders

Being a beatnik; donkey jacketed, side-burned, quiffed, d.a.’d, Aldermaston-marching late teenager in the early sixties, I had the utmost respect for Michael Foot and am sorry he has passed to that other place where idealism conquers cynicism and humility snuffs out ambition. I hope his soap box is a golden wing’d chariot so he can declaim forever from a moral height upon democratic principles. More or less at the time of his death there arrives in the UK a Dutch politician from the far right called Geert Wilders with a short film about Islam. He too declaims about democracy but his freedom is about keeping Holland for the Dutch and excluding all others. In those days when I found Foot’s rhetoric so persuasive, I also found the Dutch tolerance of youth culture in all its forms, seductive. Today (though I’d come across it before) the Lemba tribes of Zimbabwe have been shown (genetically and in many aspects of their current social/religious behaviour) to be a lost tribe of Israel dating back 2,500 years. If you take a swab to your inner cheek and send off the resulting evidence to a genes web site you will inevitably have African lineage. It’s true of us all.
Geneticists say we probably all descend from the same tribe in East Africa, long before Moses. The Lembas were just coming home. Wilders’ antecedents (the same folks that became the Lembas) instead settled up north and gradually whitened their skins under pallid suns. So it was with the Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists and all other god fearing folks in all their skin colours and eventual nationalities. They prospered in their different ways and slowly forgot their roots.
Now, tens of thousands of years later, they pretend to themselves that they are different. They develop hatreds. They develop pretentious self-esteem. What’s to be done?

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Thursday, February 25, 2010

Robbing Banks

There was a time when I was a lad, running wild through the fields of Durham, building dams and shooting at birds – with no success – that my father was paid cash in a small brown envelope with holes in it, each week. I don’t know at what point it happened, probably in the sixties, that his money came into his bank account. He never disclosed what he was paid to my mother in either case. She was given her house-keeping and a bit extra for clothes if she asked for it. I became a student and my first student grants were in the form of postal orders and it was when I started teaching in 1963 that I had my first bank account. At the time the bank was another version of the counter at the post office. It was irritating to discover that I had to have a bank account and that my wages went into it and the bank charged me for the pleasure.

The gun I used in those early days was, I think, a Webley slug gun. It was black and cold metal. To cock it you had to press the inner barrel on something hard so that it retracted. When you fired the inner barrel jumped out and the slug sped away.

It never occurred to me to stick up a bank, even in play, although I was a gunslinger some of the time.

Reading the news on the internet, I see that there is an outlaw, based in Britain, who is robbing banks in Latvia. Using twitter, he is disclosing more and more information on bankers to the Latvian public, showing how they have been receiving government bail-outs but meanwhile, living it large and pretending they have been taking cuts to their salaries. Where once I was a tracker, hunting my prey physically through hill and dale, this fellow is a hacker, hunting his prey virtually through data mountains.

He is being chased by Latvian police. What he is doing is illegal. The bankers are versions of my father. They don’t want their power and authority undermined by people knowing what’s inside their accounts or their little brown envelopes with holes.

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Monday, February 22, 2010

The sin of Anger

The media have been full of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s anger tantrums for the last few days. I even saw a clip of him saying that he had never hit anyone in his life. It’s all a storm in a thrown teacup one suspects. What the press are saying is that he is regarded as a bully. Well, I have worked with many Chief Executives in my life and very few, I’d conjecture, would get away with an unblemished record on this score. One person’s strong and confident leadership can easily be another person’s aggressive bogeyman. If Brown showed no inclination to demand his own way, the press would quickly have him down as a weak PM. Nothing worse in the public’s eyes.

And it’s not just a matter of style. There comes many a point in every week if you are at the top of the tree, when you have to make tough decisions. They can be about a range of issues from individual performance to strategic change. You may have to make people redundant or close a unit. The better you are at it, the more you appear as Attila the Hun, to many. As you will know from these columns, I have not found an organisation without its fair share of entropy. That is, staff underperforming, making mistakes, working at snail’s pace, taking the mickey and all the rest of it. British Airways, for example, is sinking into deeper debt. The most obvious recourse for management is to cut staff, as this is always the biggest single cost to an organisation. The cabin staff have shown an inclination to strike, thereby maybe ending the life of the airline and their own jobs. Postings have flown across the multi-faceted features of Facebook and each accuses the other of bullying. Gordon Brown and every Prime Minister before and after him, has to handle excessively controversial issues. Like all PMs he wants the best research, the best strategies, the best communication, the best decisions. At most what he will get will be patchy because that’s what people are like. He will stamp and shout in those circumstances where he can’t contain himself any longer.

Anglo Saxons have big hang-ups when it comes to displays of passion. I doubt whether Italians or French would bat an eyelid at their Presidents or PMs having a hissy fit. And what does it say about the so-called bullied staff? Why don’t they stand up to the yelling and accusations of incompetence? Or are their fragile egos unable to cope with the heat of the governmental kitchen? Worse, are they claiming to be bullied because they know they don’t measure up and can’t bear the criticism?

We have to be realistic about human beings. In the main we can run our companies and departments using charm, reason and sets of protocols and procedures. We can stamp our authority where and when it matters. But, occasionally, if the heat is really on, we can end up stamping our feet and letting rip with one of the seven deadly sins. Anger.

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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

A Rough Guide to TV Social Anthropology

I suppose I am a well seasoned traveller, having worked in over 20 countries in Europe, North America, Russia and Central Asia. Now, here I am in West Africa. This is Ghana, which most UK institutions seem to think is an annex of Nigeria and, therefore, a credit card pariah of the world of personal finance. Despite having British bank accounts, if I try to use the cards on the internet that these banks doll out like confetti, I get blocks put on them, immediately. I am suddenly a high risk, scam merchant. The nastiness of it allows me to mouth off my displeasure at these intuitions as I pay for expensive phone calls to them so I can buy and trade in a less virtual way for books on Amazon or whatever.

Working in countries that are foreign to your place of birth brings home certain truths that cannot be gleaned from holidaying, no matter how rucksacked, sandalled and low spending you might be. Travellers, in general, follow the grooves in the vinyl that they have bought into. If young, they tell each other where to go and rarely strike out into environments that The Rough Guide and The Lonely Planet regard as too lonely, dangerous or unpropitious to give them a kick (or a hit). If older, then there is always Michael Palin and assorted other comedians such as Stephen Fry and Paul Merton to provide a route across the world. In fact, their programmes are advertised here in Ghana llike tour guides for the better off. ‘Thousands now walk in their footsteps’, says the bleating advert. no doubt expecting to see the cultural anomalies that attract their rather lame, look-at -those –native- people- doing –silly- things, humour. And lame they are. There is nothing to compare to Ray Mears in the outback or this fellow Bruce Parry who fronts Tribe on the Discovery Channel. I haven’t a soft spot for him because he is occasionally too gigglingly hyper and intent on going native with those he is travelling among, to be authentically a social anthropologist. But he tries. He does what the tribes do and it makes I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here programmes look even more gratuitously superficial.

Last night I was viewing his latest hosts who live in rather splendid wood and thatch houses on very high stilts because in the past local head-hunters came a-calling. He went with them to kill boar, had his arm tattooed in the most painful way imaginable and ate sago yeast, chopped from trees and pulped. It was so dry he could hardly swallow. But the worst was yet to come. In these tree boles live sago pupae, like extra-terrestrial maggots in Michelin suits. The native tribesmen put one in our traveller’s ear to eat out the wax. To see a close up of poor Bruce’s ear, with this white bulbous thing waving a yellow head or butt – it was never explained – from it, didn’t help my supper go down. Then he was also requested to eat one. His face, unlike the comedians I mentioned above, was a perfect mix of respect for his hosts (who were chewing them like gourmet Cheshire cheese balls) and sheer disgusted agony. They were all stomach-creasingly merry at the whole business but what was very fine was that we had no idea whether the tribe were having a laugh at Bruce or not. Bruce, as the perfect visitor he is, laughed too. Out of respect.

In a way he was working with them, which corroborates my first point, that working alongside is the way to understand culture not being there as part of an extreme version of 18-31, or Saga Holidays.

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Thursday, February 11, 2010

“You Dirty Rat”!

Seems like we are having more and more difficulties as a species in developing an agreed ethics when it comes to animals. On the British TV Channel, ITV, is a programme devoted to putting minor celebrities in the ‘jungle’ and asking them to survive a series of challenges to their capacity to stay calm under duress: (eating insects, walking in a pit of snakes, spiders and whatever). Probably the idea came from a Japanese quasi-documentary series a couple of decades ago where competitors had to suffer extremes of torture until the last person standing took a sizeable prize. A scene shown on some comedy programme I watched had the competitors up to their necks in sand, their heads liberally gunked with honey and then a nest full of ants let loose, not poisonous, of course, but thousands of them niggling and itching…

Anyway, on this programme competitors had to catch, kill, skin and eat a rat. ITV were fined for cruelty. The rat took 90 seconds to die and squealed for some of that time. The RSPCA filed the complaint.

Now, probably, most people have a sneaking empathy with Animal Liberationist when they are revealing cruelty in poultry houses or zoos or science laboratories – if the latter’s guinea pigs are nice creatures such as Beagles or chimps … (confusing metaphor…!). They lose most of our sympathies if they try to intervene in our pleasures of the flesh (pork, beef, goat, chicken, ostrich, kangaroo) providing the creatures have not been maltreated. We even make national heroes of animals that escape abattoirs or the culling of a foot and mouth diseased herd. Like our shifting moralities regarding sex, homicide, parenting, religious observance and death, to name some of the more obvious examples, we have no consistent approach to animal rights. As long as there is plenty to go round, we can afford to construct cases of cruelty as in the aforementioned rat instance. And people can have jobs seeing to it that animals get a fair shake of the dice.

But if there is no food, as in Haiti and ice-frozen Mongolia or many parts of Africa here, there is no organisation around to take you to court for eating a rat and saving your life. Funny that!

Come the Apocalypse, when we can’t all stowaway on Noah’s new vessel, it may well be a couple of celebrities who survive, eating their rats, waving to the departing ark and wondering why the dead and dying around them are making such a fuss. Each of them will hunker down with a club in his hands over a hole in the skirting and say what James Cagney actually said in Taxi: ‘Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat.’

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Friday, February 5, 2010



Open wide. Say Arrgh!

Of course, most Ghanaians never see a dentist. Until recently their teeth weren’t subjected to processed foods with all that sugar and, anyway, apart from having a tooth wrenched out, there would be no thought given to any other treatment. It would be too costly.

I paid my first visit to a dental surgery for many years, here in Accra. Having seen my father have all his teeth removed, most of them healthy when still in middle age because in the nineteen fifties dentists were paid per extraction, a form of piece work, I have an abhorrence for a glass tumbler by the bed with magnified, grinning dentures. So I have opted for an expensive implant to replace what my Ghanaian dentist took away.

Back to the chronology of the visit. I registered and went into the surgery. The little theatre was very sparse compared with UK environs. I always remember the Monty Python sketch where doctors were clustered around a machine that went ‘ping’, their newest gadget. No-one had the slightest idea about what it did beyond making that impressive, technological noise. Well here there were no superfluous machines. I was screened off from the noisy patient next door who was making a noisy fuss. My dentist was most agreeable. He gave me a book on management leadership to read. He sang a South African traditional song as he skipped between patients. He murmured ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’ as he put the needle in various places that did not want to receive it. He told me how brave I was which made me feel as I did as a child when refusing to make any sound as bullies tried to Chinese burn my wrists into a torturous intensity.
Feeling the tooth coming out seemed to tell my brain that it was painful as I could visualise and isolate fibres and flesh and bone giving way. But, actually, it was tolerable. Then, amusingly, he asked me if I wanted the spare body part, showing me the tooth I had nursed for its last fifteen years. I declined the monster. It looked like an asteroid, pitted by a thousand encounters with space debris. But it left my body with a feeling of time passing and a nostalgia for those far off days when milk teeth had just popped out under pressure from the real thing. Funnily enough, while I had been waiting to go in to the surgery, I struck up a conversation with a pretty, eighteen year old student. She was having milk teeth removed because they didn’t want to give way to their elders and betters.

It is easy to feel isolated and mortally vulnerable, three thousand miles from a true national health system. You could spend all your time out here being an anxious hypochondriac. What is driven home to me is that in the west the whole of medicine is focused on the reduction of pain and any intimacy with it. Once, even in my lifetime, you would have expected some pain to be borne. Enough, not to fear it unduly. Enough to know that, once over, the body forgets almost immediately.

Today, people use anaesthetics to obviate pain: Cesarean sections, pills for sleeping. People become obese and a prey to disease and more anaesthetics as much because they don’t want the hurt of exercise as because they over consume junk food in the first place. It is all too painful to feel the heart pumping, the wracked lungs, the painful limbs when they can wallow in a painless hell of over indulgence.

I liked the dentist experience. It was man to man. It was pared down to essentials. I had to endure enough pain to act as a momentary epitaph at the end of my tooth’s life. But no more than that.

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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

In Flagrente Delicto

For those of you who are not aware – and there are readers in Mexico, Russia, and in Indonesia, say, for whom it may not be of any interest (they may not like football) – the Captain of the current English football team is one John Terry and he has been discovered to have had an affair with the girlfriend at the time of his club and English team mate, Wayne Bridge. Much has been made of the similarities with the Tiger Woods case in that both men have squeezed the last drops (cents and pennies) from their image rights in advertisements as men of true probity. Jacob Zuma, the South African President has transgressed the same fateful boundary in that he has apparently impregnated a friend’s daughter, though I am not sure what his image was when running in the recent election..

The boundary between acceptability and unacceptability has its no man’s land in the courts when an injunction is served to prevent disclosure of an individual’s personal life by the media. The judge ruled in the case of Terry that his income was partially derived from his use of a (false) image of the family man for whom no transgression was possible. Live by the claim of purity, die by the stain of discovery.

Generally people do not follow the biblical injunction to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In fact hypocrisy is part and parcel of the multitude’s character (if one can cluster the human herd into a singular mind like this). Regardless of what they may do in the privacy of their own homes or the anonymity of the groups with whom they run, they develop a piousness towards others’ trangressions that would make a priest think twice. In some countries there is less breast beating, though no less breast caressing, and it goes without saying that in Ghana, for example, it would be no great brake on a man’s progress in his career. For women here there is the usual universal condemnation of anything they might do that is illicit. In France, the funeral of a president can be publicly attended by both wife and mistress.

But sport is the new politics and in some weird and wonderful way it is becoming a theatrical sublimation of national and international conflict. The stars of a football pitch are known the world over in a way that politicians can only dream of and what they do exercises moral dispute in a far more exacting and flesh and blood way, as a consequence. In industry if you sleep with the boss’s wife you might find the shortest route between your desk and the exit but, in general, Terry’s behaviour would not result in a disciplinary. It usually comes down to your ability. Would you rather have a sexually profligate research scientist who invents products that make you great profits or a mob of staff who are straight jacketed fundamentalists, wielding their moral compasses?

Like most people I cannot escape the reaction that it serves them right, these paragons of sudden ill repute. Hoist with their own petard. The latter saying comes from Shakespeare and briefly means that you are blown up by the bomb you are placing at the gates of your enemy. Terry, Woods and, Zuma, the latter in an Africa where religion grasps the short and curlies, were all planting holier than thou bombs against the other side of the screens in our living rooms. It’s no wonder we stare smugly back with the grim satisfaction of knowing schadendfreude when we see it detonate before our very eyes..

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Swan Upping

So, Tiger Woods is not the only one in the news for belying his carefully manicured image among advertisers, the media and those who held him in such high esteem as a family role model! That bastion of dutiful and faithful creatures, the swan, is now a number one target for those who would uphold creatures who symbolise all that is good, right and proper in human social mores. It has long been held as incontrovertible that swans pair up for life. Maybe they have been around humans too long (from Leda on) but the times they are a-changing. Well, our view of their monogamous behaviour certainly is.

Some few years back I remember seeing a nature documentary in which night vision infra-red cameras were trained on swans on a pond. What a shocking set of events unrolled. One or two male swans – cobs -drifted silently away at night and had their bit of tail in watery lay-bys before returning pre-dawn, as if nothing had happened.

Now, on the BBC web site and on tv news programmes, I see a headline which reads ‘Scientists shocked at swans’ ‘divorce’. First, let me say that I don’t know these scientists but the fact that they are shocked is a bit of a disappointment. I always imagined scientists to be a dispassionate lot whose constant appeal to reason would make them immune to moral outrage. Actually, thinking about it a little more seriously, all the scientists I have met and whose work I have read, display what Derrida calls a leakage of subjectivity. They can’t keep their emotional baggage out of even the most arid pieces of work. Anyway, you can picture the scene in the lab as they are rerunning footage of swans setting up new homes next to their old partners. “NO! I can’t believe this! Check it again, Miriam! My God, what is the world coming to? We can’t show this on prime time tele, I’m afraid.”

Given that Emperor Penguins became the totems of monogamous living for the US Christian fundamentalists as a result of the film showing how they survived the arduous ice flows of the far north, by sharing household duties and looking after the kids, it is borne home to me (and you) that we search for animal metaphors in order to shore up social convention. In this regard, it may be no coincidence that the greatest golfer of all time is called Tiger and tigers are actually a bit wayward in their affections, putting it about, as we say.

His Dad might have called him Swan Woods a while back but to no avail.

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Addicted to love…

Addictions appear to be on the increase. Note that I am using the plural here. So what I am talking about is not an increase in the population of addiction but the range of possible addictions available to us all! In the 18th/19th Century, at a time of imperialism and empire building, medicine underwent a similar process of enlarging the territory of the brain and claiming the territory with new names, theories and treatments. No doubt you have seen film reconstructions of the rich and famous watching cranial work in an operating theatre from the safety of the gallery. Foucault’s work on the history of madness amplifies this, richly. The process, started then, continues today, particularly as we apparently discover more about the very essence of mental functioning. The debate about whether a particular psychological condition is a result of some organic feature of the brain or whether it is a mental condition, inorganic and treatable by therapies, also continues.

And the one may feed the other. So I smoke cigarettes because I hear they have a calming effect. They calm. In time I have a craving and addiction for tobacco. Similarly it is thought that eating junk food or drinking coffee can result in obsessive desire to have more. People can be addicted to power, to murder, to solitude etc etc.

A few blogs ago I wrote about Tiger Woods and how this ‘shamed’ sportsman (that is how Sky News described him yesterday) was being dropped by advertisers because of his sexual encounters with white, blonde women. Now, apparently, he has gone into rehab for sexual addiction. I wonder who determined this condition and on what evidence? Was he eating, sleeping, dreaming of the next blonde he would bed? Was this put down to a black man’s sense of inadequacy because of racial belittling of the colour of his skin so that these acts were proof of his equality with powerful white folks?

Does it mitigate his behaviour, if it actually needs mitigating, for him to be able to announce that it was an addiction and that he has now been cured? “I am not responsible, it was my condition!”

I quite like the heavy metal number that is also the title to this piece. The reason why? Well, most of us have experienced what is meant by it and, rather than go into a high-fee clinic, we would rather be out there, experiencing it in all its obsessive glory!

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Thursday, January 14, 2010


Ghana and the ‘opiate of people…’

Intellectuals, who are also religious, have always fascinated me. Since whatever religion one might favour is, at its heart, based on belief rather than fact, I want to know how, contrary to human logic, these usually evidence-based individuals end up constructing a personal cosmology with a god at its centre.
There is a story about Ludvig Wittgenstein, the language philosopher and noted atheist. Lying on his death bed, reviewing his life, he had a blinding revelation. The logic he had assiduously developed, which proved to him that there was no god, could be turned on its head to prove entirely the contrary! He promptly summoned a priest for his last rites!

Here in Ghana, it is rare to come across intellectuals prepared to talk openly about their lack of belief. Indeed, to prosper in Ghana requires lip service to a god, preferably the Christian version. Somehow, the various Christian groups have so infiltrated social life that prayers, entreaties, blessings and greetings, infuse formal and informal gatherings, business meetings, emails and conferences. Every politician sprinkles godly phrases in his or her public utterances. Church, on Sunday, is so all-pervasive that the roads, normally nearly gridlocked, are clear. Driving to the ungodly supermarket past these places of worship gives one a sudden immersion in hymn singing, clapping, praying and glossolalia. The churches in Africa appear to have little time for intellectual and other freedoms (witness the discussion in Uganda, driven by three US evangelists, regarding intoducing the death penalty for homosexuality). As far as Christianity in Africa is concerned, reading and writing are necessary only to enable adherents to get fulfilment from bible classes. Bible readings, pulpit pontifications, quasi exorcisms, healing, prayers for consumer items and the conspicuous consumerism of priests tie the evangelical to worldly possessions and career success. Foundational reading and writing actually enables the process of indoctrination. Too much and the fires of intellectual questioning begin to grow. Religion in Ghana is the opium of the people, as Marx actually stated it. Until an intellectual cadre of individuals have a critical voice here, Ghana will not achieve much desired parity with developed countries. The opiate quality of religion hangs like a fog permeating Ghanaian manners. To be critical of people and institutions are examples of bad grace or, if severe, might lead to reprisal. To have forums where endemic bribery among politicians, church ministers and the civil service are publicly denounced, are rare.

Some intellectuals are appealing in their spirituality and convey it to you without the slightest desire for you to understand existence in the comforting way that they do. They can enhance your own life with their open thought. But imagine being poorly educated, in poverty and with no sense of the future. Then you become ripe pickings for the gods of capital, either purportedly spiritual or otherwise.

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Thursday, January 7, 2010

T Pyxidis is not a glam rock band or a disease, it is a death star……

Well, here we are into the new year and still having difficulty writing 2010 instead of 2009. But it won’t be a problem soon if my recent tv watching is anything to go by. There has been a plethora of programmes about Nostradamus and, in particular, a newly found original work consisting of a few illustrations by him which, they say, depict the end of the world as we know it. They showed the illustrations on the programme, of course and to my untutored eye they looked like major arcana from the tarot deck, of which I know a little. The end of the world (I wrote about this earlier in these columns) will take place on December 21st 2012 and this has also been certified by the Mayans, Chinese astrologers, the Book of Revelations and some scientists who are concerned that the earth is moving into alignment with the centre of the galaxy (a black hole) and we will be bombarded by some kind of invisible and incredibly minute matter, a bit like a microwave effect (I made up the simile, here because I have no idea what they mean!).

And Sky News this morning has a text headline that says that scientists have found a supernova primed to go off and the effect could be the extinguishing of all life on Earth. Not such a happy new year, then! The name of this super-beast of the celestial heavens is T Pyxidis. If and when it goes off it will strip everything from the ozone layer down to cockroaches (which are supposed to handle nuclear fall-out, though I have a few upturned ones in the shower at the moment that could not withstand my odourless hand-held mosquito spray!)

What Nostradamus did not prophesy was the multiple deaths of four individuals in the pump room of our pool. The pump went off and we had to bring the electrician in. He found a quartet of electrocuted frogs.

Meanwhile, Zen provides salutary good sense. Since every new moment involves the death of the last moment, we should get used to the ceaseless endings that stretch through our lives. T Pyxidis doesn’t change the human condition at all. Like the four frogs, one minute you’re hopping and the next you are cooked.

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Wednesday, December 30, 2009


Forever Young: A Trade Secret

Canute is often depicted as trying to repel the waves as he sat on his gilded throne on the sandy shore whereas, in fact, he was teaching his courtiers a lesson. Sick of their sycophancy he was showing them that he was a mortal and had no power to control nature. Thus it is with all of us. Despite our attempts at evasion and distraction we get older and seem less immortal by the microsecond. The thought which seeds itself in my mind is a historical footnote before I have even become aware of its import. My body is ageing inexorably, bits of it doing less and less what they are supposed to do. It is a slow degeneration which only became vaguely noticeable at around thirty and has slowly accelerated ever since. Entropy, I suppose. The second law of thermodynamics or whatever. Order giving way to disorder.

A bit like Canute, there comes a time when you decide to make some show of pointless defiance. You take a look at yourself in the mirror, at the bulging midriff or those jug handles for a waist and you say to yourself that this year you are going to reverse the trend towards geriatric gormlessness and corpulence. I did this a while back, years ago, in fact and have had a little success. I am not saying that out of the decay there are green Adonis shoots or anything like that but there is a mild and appreciable return to what I used to call, form. Now in my upper sixties, I think I should share my secret with you all. This is a recipe for a gentler ease into old age, not the sudden vault into slippers, breathlessness and morbid self-doubt. If it was (easily) expanded into a self-help book, then I might make a lot of money. Imagine, The Sanger System of Self–Sustenance.

Here’s what you might do. (Note, I didn’t say should do. I cannot bring myself to impose my disciplines upon you!)

Get a high quality juicer. In Ghana I juice five vegetables and five fruit (together with raw ginger) to make a daily power drink of roughly half a pint. Here I use pawpaw, melon, oranges, pineapples, apples, pears as well as beetroot, carrot, cabbage, white radish, green beans. In France I use local fruit instead of the exotic ones I can find here. In the Uk it may be slightly different again. To juice takes about twenty minutes for two days worth if you have a worm-screw juicer which cold presses. Cheaper machines use a spinning disc which damages the ingredients so you have to drink them straight away.

Have your roughage at breakfast whether it is muesli or heavy brown breads which can give you energy for most of the day if you take the juice with it. I eat my main meal at around tea time and have protein and a cooked vegetable or salad. No carbohydrates! Then there is a snack in the evening just to stave of hunger. The additional add-ons I take are fish oils and glucosamine/chondroitin for the joints. On top of this you MUST exercise each day. Whatever you find agreeable and not too boring. Half an hour of reasonably challenging activity. Get the heart beating fast. I am lucky. I swim for forty minutes.

Drink plenty of water. It washes away the rubbish.

In case you think I am a Spartan and a fanatic, I eat butter and full cream milk, have chocolate when I feel like it and often have wine or even beer and good ground coffee. But the great thing is that I am the same weight as I was at thirty when considerations of mortality first began to make themselves known through the creeping impairment of faculties and physique. And my brain seems to go through all the gears.

There you are. You didn’t have to buy my book. Get a bit o discipline! Live longer. Live happier. Free yourselves up a little to do the stuff that matters to you! Happy New Year!

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Saturday, December 26, 2009

Vulture on a Hot Tin Roof

So what did I do on Christmas day? Well, it wasn’t the UK story of snow and ice and a red peaked northerner pulling a sleigh. It wasn’t holly and mistletoe and carols at the door. Here in Ghana there are black-skinned red peaked equivalents who are sleigh-less as far as I can gather and there are no chimneys for them to climb down. But I had little to do with them, either. It is the winter solstice period but that still means that temperatures are around 32 degrees. There is a national holiday for most and, taking advantage of this, we are staying three hours away from Accra on a beach. The chalet is simple but air conditioned and the seascape is rural and undeveloped with sheep outside the door, coconut palms a few metres further on and the breakers rolling in beyond that. Vultures the size of geese seem to like our roof, eyeing egrets hopping behind the sheep and picking up their droppings. Walking on the beach, we meet eight year olds who shimmy thirty feet up the palms to bring me coconuts which they prepare for me to drink. As I mentioned many blogs ago, coconut water can be used as an alternative to blood plasma, it being sterile and containing a large array of vital traces minerals.
Eating in the beach bar is simple, too. A fully grown and challenging lobster costs around five pounds. This was my alternative to turkey.
So there we are, an exotic Christmas break befitting one who finds most organised religion hypocritical and a travesty of human endeavour. But that’s just me. I hope you and your gods get on well this next year and make peace a priority. And the same goes for the godless among you!

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Saturday, December 19, 2009


Can’t see Woods for shes

I’ll let you into a secret. I feel less of a man because I can no longer aspire to the perfect symmetries and successes of the Tiger. I stare at my Gillette razors in dismay. They no longer have the magical power to promote youthful skin and manly insouciance. I won’t ever work for or with Accenture again. The man with whom I could identify has morphed into something else.
Becoming a celebrity has its pitfalls, as we know. There is possibly a formula for correlating fame with acute self-awareness in that those who are blessed with it seem to avoid the recidivism of their less endowed peers who return time and again to the stocks and the public humiliation of tomatoes and rotten eggs. Examples of those who manage to keep celebrity and pride would be Nabokov who, after writing Lolita, only did interviews by postcard, Pinter who did few to none and Tony Benn, who records everything so that he cannot be misrepresented later. Joanna Lumley uses her celebrity status to further the cause of the Gurkhas without a sniff of scandal in her life. To wit, the brighter ones use the media and are not used by them.

But the media is juiced up to fuel the juggernaut of product selling. Ad agencies seek celebrities to endorse their dubious products. They lie, for that is the first imperative of their trade. Think of how the banks were telling us to trust them (and still are) a year ago as they were out, like pools winners, on the dog tracks of the world with our money, betting on flaky US property enterprises. If you are going to be mendacious, then you need an image to dispel the aroma of seamy selling. The cleaner the image of the celebrity and the more successful s/he is, the more the lie seems like a version of the truth. So, behind that very successful, clean cut, sparkling toothed, sweet-skinned, perfectly proportioned visage hide the serried ranks of global hawkers. Tiger Woods, with his platinum blonde trophy of a wife, his perfect child, his incomparable sporting prowess and his manicured, anodyne urbanity, was top dollar in this regard.

Now, in a month all has changed and he has metamorphosed into a serial womaniser, a cad and a bounder. It is as though the authentic, Dorian Gray-like picture in his attic slunk downstairs to claim its inheritance again. So the advertisers are leaving in droves, clutching their contracts with the fine print out-clauses that there should be no adverse publicity that might erode the image of their perfect specimen.
It’s an irony, since their products have a far stronger affinity with the newly minted, disreputable Tiger than with the old.

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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Ex-Pat pontifications

There was the usual shock of recognition as we disembarked from the plane last night in Accra. The temperatures were up near 30 degrees, the humidity was around 70 % and everyone on the plane had been pulling off their UK winter gear to reveal short sleeved shirts and tee shirts or blouses. Being Christmas, the customs was in eagle-eyed form, insisting that returning Ghanaians open their many suitcases. There are spoils to be had. Some returners have as many as five cases per head so the extra costs must be phenomenal. I was waved through with my paltry one big case and computer hand luggage.

Today I sit in my shorts, acclimatising and working in my office. We don’t have air conditioning here as we feel it is not green. Instead we use mosquito netting without window glass. As I have said before, this means the noise from outside is louder and slight breezes flow across the rooms. Fans help augment the need for moving air. It is all a far cry from Bradford, Leeds and London where a mass mania seemed to have clutched the hearts of the population and the shoppers were out gathering their Christmas gifts as though no recession had ever existed. And this was during a week day. In Leeds I went into a coffee house in order to avoid further slaloming along the high street. It was called Caffe Latino. For some reason, probably as a result of my need for constant enquiries about the composition of food and drink, here in Ghana, I said I’d like cream. We don’t sell cream. Then I’d like full fat milk. We only sell skimmed milk. This is a specialist coffee shop! I don’t think that the company have the nation’s health in their mission statement. Does anyone complain? No. The British will take their coffee the way it comes, it appears. Meanwhile I will only drink coffee with cream, believing that my active life style more than compensates for cholesterol. Actually, I also believe that it is GOOD cholesterol….

Meanwhile, like the curious ex-pat that I suddenly am, I came across a rather wonderful performer (on television) who has come to the fore in the last two years and, therefore, since I left those island shores. Michael McIntire seems to me an exceptional talent and the HALF MILLION attendees at his national tour events obviously agree with me. He is that brand of comic who homes in on the absurdities of the every day. The ones that all of us are prone to and hardly think about until it is illuminated for us by a satirical mind. His thesis on the art of hovering made me cry, particularly as he mimed focusing on an alien object on the floor and accelerated the vacuum cleaner towards it rather than picking it up to protect the machine’s innards. His rendition of the cleaner’s gasp of pleasure at the change of noise as the nail is sucked inside was blissfully funny. On the plane back I found another recording of his oeuvre. I suspect he could go through the events of any day, impromptu, and find bizarre behaviour in the population at every turn.

Like all my fellow (!) Ghanaians, I did some shopping for my children and grand children while I was in London. I must admit feeling a bit let down by Hamley’s on Regent Street. I haven’t been since my sons were kiddos but it was all a bit brash, pop musicky and technological. The innocent mysteries appear to have disappeared with terms of endearment such as wizard, super and champion. Did I just write that? Have I become a boring old fart? Probably, though it doesn’t feel that way. I am certainly not a Roger Scruton (he who recently did a programme about how the UK had become ugly in its aesthetics). There is beauty everywhere, if you could only open your eyes. But that is my Zen bent of mind and It didn’t appear to be in operation when I was in Hamleys.

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Sunday, November 29, 2009

Hacked off.

I had an interesting debate last night with a friend here in Bath, UK. We were discussing the young fellow with Asbergers syndrome who had penetrated the inner computer files of the Pentagon, purportedly seeking classified files on UFOs. If you haven’t caught the story wherever you are in the world, there is a big campaign to stop him being extradited to the US to stand trial. Maximum sentence is 60 years. (By the way, the extradition process is distinctly one way as very few US citizens are allowed by their government to be hooked out of that land and into the UK). Anyway, my friend’s argument is that there is a due process of law and, Asbergers or not, he should stand trial. We discussed whether a plea of unfit for trial could be brought and he was also against it saying that that was part of the judicial process. Anyway, the debate travelled down its circuitous routes until we ended up with his suggestion that we are all good and bad and the Pentagon is no better nor worse than anywhere else and so we shouldn’t paint it as an ogre.
This got me thinking about something I actually know something about – not necessarily an element in most debates I find myself in! It came to me that the Pentagon is unlikely to enlist people like, say an advertising agency or a retail store or a hundred other kinds of organisation. The process will be highly focused on enlisting staff it can trust to do its business. And its business, as we know, is to be top dog in warfare, in arenas of US interest and in ensuring that the US economy remains strong. These are priorities which outweigh any moral reservations its staff might have about strategy, tactics and their implementation. In fact they can’t afford to have staff who suffer from any concern at all about consequences for human beings elsewhere, that might result from their activities. So, to a great extent, they must enlist staff of a particular psychological make-up with the result that the organisation becomes a monochromatic, self-fulfilling vehicle, carrying out its brief. The same with MI5, or any state police, anywhere, whether it is Mossad, the Stasi or the KGB. As in Orwell’s 1984.
In other words they are not like everyone. They are special in their capacity to deliver a government’s agenda without recourse to the Hamlet-like hand-wringing that you might have, otherwise . So Gary McKinnon is unlikely to get much sympathy for his condition. He hacked and he will be packed off to a US cell.
Given that the British government won’t stop the extradition, all we can do is make a big enough fuss so that the Pentagon show trial becomes an international event that focuses the world’s scrutiny on its judicial processes.

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Monday, November 23, 2009

We are star dust, we are golden…

An amusing episode the other day concerned my partner’s aunt who, at eighty, is as sharp as a porcupine’s quill and who, on listening to a debate we were having on time travel and teleportation, offered the following:
“I saw on the news that they had teleported a table one metre.”
This being Ghana I did not offer too much disparagement of what I thought of as a nugget of fool’s gold. “Are you sure,” I asked, “I think the latest breakthrough involves teleporting one photon from one place to another.” My partner quickly cut in, “Perhaps you meant futon, Auntie.”

At the moment there’s stuff in the media every day about the micro world of atoms, particles and sub-particles, nano-technology and the infinitely small worlds beyond instrumentation. At the same time there is a continuing fixation with astrology. Humans are like that. Rationality and belief as bedfellows.

In an attempt to bring these various areas of scientific and quasi-scientific exploration together, I ask myself, under what conditions would astrology work? First, think of what happens after conception. Cells divide and stem cells gradually take on the role of developing specialised bits of the human form. DNA (as recently discussed here) seems sensitive to environmental influences and, as a consequences, changes its formula in modelling a unique human entity. At this time, the sac of cells with their dna may also be influenced by great bodies in space, the sun and planets, just as in the old days, when grooves on cylinders were formed by playing music live and having a needle cut the wax in symbiosis, so that the phonograph could reproduce the same music later, if another needle ran along the sound sculpted groove. Thus our dna may be influenced when it is exposed to planetary shifts.

We have little sense of how the sub-atomic universe is fashioned and refined. We tend to think of ourselves as separate entities with clearly defined edges but we are not. Atoms are making a constant fuzzy storm as they enter and leave our external surfaces. We also contain atoms from all the people who ever lived and died – up to twenty years or so before we were born. There are atoms in our bodies that have travelled across galaxies, in and out of suns. It would be sillier to imagine that none of this has any influence on our biologies and psyches than imagining the opposite.

In The Fly, Cronenberg’s hero teleports himself and does not realise a fly is in the pod with him. The resultant mix provides the horror and tragedy of the narrative. A gripping fiction but, at the heart of it, there is science …

They may be teleporting photons now but it will be futons in the future.

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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

With God on Our Side

Reading the papers in Ghana throws interesting insights into the political and social processes of a country redefining itself as a real democracy. There is certainly freedom of expression and nothing seems to my eye to be too sacred to be raked over. In the Daily Graphic yesterday there was a tough article on the way that Ghanaian Christianity, whether in its orthodox or evangelical forms, is bleeding the people dry to feather the nests of priests in Armani suits and gold chains. Indeed the article pointed out that Ghana would be the holiest country in Christendom if you measured it in acts of worship rather than secular acts. If you quantified it by the latter, then the picture would be somewhat different!

I read this as we meandered through the traffic, leaving at 9-40 precisely as this is a window when we can do the journey to work in about a half hour. My column reading is interrupted by beggars banging on windows, the beep of the horn at some indiscretion on the part of a tro tro driver and sudden braking.

The business pages often point to the barriers to economic progress caused by sinning from Monday to Saturday – by this I mean nepotism, backhanders, sharp practices often concerning Government officials buying land cheaply and then selling to foreigners and land being sold several times over – and then recanting passionately on Sunday. There are further barriers which are not mentioned. Imagine going to business meetings and finding people being asked to pray before the meeting. Imagine receiving emails which begin or end with phrases invoking God’s beneficence and His love of you. Indeed, sometimes you wonder whether anyone believes he or she is responsible for anything! Only God is. However, He is never the culprit when things go drastically wrong! The whole business leaves one wondering whether many Ghanaians are too scared to expose their performance to critique. I have found in many settings that engendering critical self-examination of performance is akin to some kind of Spanish Inquisition in colleagues’ eyes, so unused are they to tough cross examination of the quality of outcomes. This attitude seems to stem from the Ghanaian national character where courtesies are far more important than substance. It is a shame when you meet it because the other aspect that dominates the psyche here is a very welcome warmth and desire for peace.

For the country to succeed in its endeavours, it needs to accept that God has His rightful place in the temples, synagogues and churches where He can set to work remodelling moral and spiritual standards while people go about their daily business, accepting absolute responsibility for the consequences of their acts.

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Thursday, November 12, 2009






Mad or bad

I see that John Allen Muhammed was executed by lethal injection this week for murdering a number of people in Washington DC. What to make of it? The assumption in most western law is that if you are sane then, wherever they observe the niceties of state execution, you could eventually leave Death Row for the last walk of your life. Administrations that maintain the death penalty often execute the sane – who might have some chance of rebirth as an inoffensive person – and keep alive the insane, who have a more limited potential for beneficial change. Unless, of course, you are in a country like Iran or Afghanistan, where being publicly stoned to death doesn’t differentiate between the sane and the insane but focuses on acts that are found, for whatever reason, to be unacceptable. Acts that can range from going to a school if you are a woman, through adultery to murder. (In the US, too, it is possible to make executions public to provide closure for family and friends of victims when they observe the last thrash of a killer’s limbs.) The nature of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is embedded in the structures of all early societies. Vengeance is served hot or cold for it avers that the enemy might not repeat the mistakes of its individuals and cause you harm again. The notion that someone may not suffer the death penalty owing to his or her mental state, is relatively recent. The French once enshrined in law, crime passionel, to cover an emotionally distraught act of killing for which you were not held wholly responsible. In the US they have a plea for the same emotional aberration which is called, temporary insanity.

I wrote recently about how our genes are affected by our experiences in life – quite a paradigm shift given that we assumed genetic structures were fixed at birth. Research published this week shows that mice who are traumatised in their early months by separation from their parents, have a much decreased capacity to handle stress and behave normally. Since psychopathy can, therefore, be attributed to either an at-birth incapacity to know what is socially acceptable or not, or the result of later traumas changing genetic structures so that a person no longer has the power to control his or her actions, we can only execute them if we adopt ancient practices and rid ourselves of the problem of determining who is sane or insane.
So how do you judge a man such as Muhammed? If sane, he surely could not have done what he did, day after day, because a person capable of such gross acts is not like you or I. He is not sane. If he is insane, therefore, he cannot be held responsible. In truth, if we take into account how people who have killed in war suffer a guilt-ridden stress at their acts, we know that for a sane person, killing is not good for the psyche, no matter what the circumstances.

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Monday, November 9, 2009

Taxi slogans in Accra

Returning to a theme which permeates these blogs, I saw a taxi in Accra with Side Issues in flashy letters on its back windscreen. This form of advertising is a rudimentary form of Facebook. The rear screen in a car is small so the advert has to encapsulate a lot in a few letters. If you remember I got to wondering what makes a driver decide to choose a particular phrase. I think my partner suggested that these must have been the only individual letters left in the ‘bin’ at whatever wholesale depot was selling them (bright orange, fluorescent in this case). So the driver had to make up the sign he wanted to display on his cab from a bunch of leftovers. Think Scrabble and anagrams. Most drivers seem to buy ready made up slogan such as Judgment Day, Gethsemane , God is Good. There are very few which, even at a stretch of the imagination, might be construed as secular.

Side Issues is one of these. Or is it? What has persuaded the driver to make up this phrase? Does it mean that he is willing to pick and drop customers but, en route, take you round the houses as you knock a few extra minor ‘must dos’ off your list? Or does it mean that he actually believes in God but he has a few reservations which he is parking for the moment? Was he alluding not to his own but to Jesus’ side issues? For example, persuading His disciples that Mary should always sit at His right hand at the table or that poor Judas was in a no-win situation since he had no choice but to play out the drama which hastened His death by kissing Him in the garden.

In other words there is something in the phrase side issues which puzzles the more you think about it. It is either redolent with meaning, as suggested above, or it is offhand and dismissive, almost saying, I could advertise something really significant but am not bothering.

Watching it weave its way through the traffic (taxi drivers here often drive just as you or I might make our way along a crowded platform in the Underground, dodging left and right, accelerating and braking, expecting everyone to telepathies with the sudden switches, I suddenly realised that the driver was actually stating a fact. For him, everything on the road, including me, was a side issue. The only issue that mattered was his fearless path through the groaning rush hour traffic.

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Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Thank you for your time

Time is relative said Einstein and Hawking’s Brief History of Time underlined the fact, though, it is said that the time to write the quasi-populist tract and the time to read it actually belong to two different universes. Let us call them the apple universe and the pear universe. The time to write it was obviously finite, let us say a couple of years , while the average time it takes to read it is beyond my mathematics O level capabilities. The latter equation is complex because a large proportion of readers never completed reading it and so the time they are taking over it is stretching inexorably towards infinity. I don’t know how to work out the average when part of what you are averaging is infinite. For example what is the average of one hundred pears eaten over anything between one minute and ten minutes when added to pears that are not eaten? Can you do it? Do tell. I expect there is some remarkable math involved that covers several blackboards in chalk hieroglyphics.
In the main, though, time seems to be measured relative to one’s own existence. A lifetime. Politicians govern on the basis that thinking about anything beyond their time in office is redundant. Witness global warming, species’ depletions, education, health services and on and on. It’s all short termism to reflect well upon them and get them into power next time round.
I saw an Israeli settler the other day in some sequestered part of Palestine, stating that he was only taking back what was Jewish land 3000 years ago. On that basis an African tribe that began the repopulation of the world many tens of thousands of years ago, actually owns everything, including Israel. I saw an indigenous Indian from North America demanding that the Prairies be returned to his tribe, a tribe that tried to stop the carbon dating of a skeleton, on the basis that the skeleton was sacred. Anyway, morally right or wrong, the scientists chipped a bit off the old blockhead and dated it, discovering it was from some European tourist, who travelled there across the frozen north west, many thousands of years before the most extreme dating of any North American Indian’s remains.
Time is relative to an argument. The passionate rush of blood in the young, demanding answers and actions this minute becomes irrevocably replaced by the indifference of age. Thus it is that nothing much changes, except through terrible acts by people for whom time is immaterial because it is virtual while stuff you touch is what must be possessed. The Egyptians spent their entire lives preparing for death because they reckoned that infinity is a better reward than the limited lifespan in this world. For them, the mathematics of averaging out infinity and limited time was not the problem I find it.

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Friday, October 30, 2009

Cure Cancer with a takeaway

We are like ducklings, imprinted with the terms and conditions for life as laid down (or not) by our families. I suppose mine was relatively decorous, given that it began in India, in a military environment, with an Edwardian father who had a keen sense of what was socially acceptable at the time. As I grew up (until college days) I was the lucky recipient of Indian curries made by my mother, from recipes she had learnt in Dehra Dun. We had to display good table manners, which included how food was put into the mouth, as well as ensuring no post-prandial escapes could be heard or smelled, as a consequence of ingesting this exotic foodstuff .
It was a bit of an eye-opener, or nostril flarer to visit friends’ homes in my teens and discover that very different rules applied. Indeed, my peers often made a virtue of the length, loudness and suffocating poison of escapee gases.
When I got to college it was to meet with an exponential increase in the competitiveness of young bucks with regard to their skills in such matters. This was particularly so when they’d been for a cheap curry and had had a few beers. It was the time of lighting the methane jet.
In general I did not join in, being imprinted as I was. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I read the latest research on anti-cancer agents. Top of the list comes turmeric, that yellow ingredient of curries. All those student emissions turn out to have been unconscious ritualistic behaviour for cleansing the body of its toxic waste, cancer cells and all.

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Monday, October 26, 2009

Four Countries and a Funeral

In the last six weeks I have been a good Bedouin and trekked ever on, pitching tents in the UK, France, Eire and Ghana. Now I am back in Accra where birds have idiosyncratic sets of hoops, hollers, screams and warbles, where the temperature is in the mid thirties and where the pool is the place for exercise each day because even walking two metres to the car makes you want to change your shirt. In this land of the permanent fan (we eschew air-conditioning on environmental grounds) I am settling again to running foreign affairs by email and Skype, while helping to manage a factory of fifty folks, who – I hasten to end any speculation to the contrary – earn up to six times the national average wage as dressmakers, cutters, ironers, packers etc. Certainly no sweat shop. Chanel 4 came once to try to nail the company as a typical UK-driven exploitation, only to leave with no story and a lot of expensive egg on its face. So, anyway, there is always another issue to resolve here. More work to do. Maybe I will illuminate factory life in a later email.
Given that the trip was, as always, work-oriented and the reason for going to France to my house and to a Cork hotel, was to do some deep thinking about business strategies in differing locations, for inspiration, it was a successful time away. The beach in Cork was delightful and the temperatures held up remarkably for October. But it is now an expensive location with the euro matching the pound and prices for the visitor seeming to have trebled as a consequence. It was the same story in France, though my place there is designed to be as cheap as possible. When you travel, you feel recession in palpable ways, that, when you are embedded in a society, are not so noticeable, unless you become unemployed. In London, for example, there were still big crowds on the pavements outside bars in Marylebone and Camden market was chock full, despite it being a Tuesday when I was there. I didn’t visit Seven Sisters or Croydon or Southwark where there might have been a violent contrast, but the moneyed seem still to be flashing their cash in the more genteel environs. Also in the UK, the postal strike was in full swing. My socialist leanings are torn apart these days when I see appalling management practices (why can’t they be coached by experts to handle disputes?) and an old-style labour leadership which seems equally intransigent and willing to destroy the organisation whose teats it sucks. Creative intelligence in modernising a company seems non-existent.

Meanwhile, BA have introduced bigger, flashier jets for their Ghana flights, after years of old tin cans, occasionally rude service and, for the passengers, a distinct sense of racist scheduling. A 777 brought us into Accra and within a few days, reintegrated and acclimatised, we went along the coast for a funeral. This is how it was organised. The deceased, an active lady in her village and beyond, attracted a congregation of several hundred people in a marquee. Everyone was fed at the following feast, which comprised tilapia (fish), goat-light soup (big pieces of goat in a very hot liquid), roast chicken (always done to a deep heavy duty crisp, which puts the emphasis on extremely well preserved molars and incisors), jollof rice, yams and salads. The funeral service lasted a couple of hours and had some eulogies, lots of singing and praying, dancing (there is a tradition among the Ashanti that if you dance before all the congregation you do not need to contribute to the event). In this case, everyone danced and everyone contributed. The dress code was black and white as the deceased had had a long life. All the women, of whatever size, wore figure-hugging dresses in traditional black and white patterns. Most of the men wore black, satinised cotton shirts and black trousers or traditional cloth lengths, wrapped round their bodies and slung over their shoulders. Buckets were placed around the square, a very eccentric brass band built up steam and we all conga’d to make our offerings. These events have to be fronted with cash, which can run into thousands of pounds, and this is a way of reimbursing the backers. There are even those who make it their skill to underwrite weddings and funerals and take a return on their investment – by sharing any excess of income over expenditure. All in all it was not the most exuberant of events, compared with some that occur elsewhere in the country but it had a focus and commitment from everyone that seemed more appropriate to saying goodbye to the dead, than in many a western church or chapel. Maybe it was the way that the evangelical church had been grafted on to something older, more pantheistic and more determined to let people vent their emotions.

I should have introduced this latter section about the funeral by saying that all this took place in perfect sunshine, with views of the sea through palm trees.

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Thursday, October 15, 2009

Einstein, Mighty Mouse and Gold Medal Grannie

You are a mouse and one day they clamp a recording device on one of your neurons. One. Neuron. In the hippocampus. Imagine the size of the clamp. We must be talking micro-nano here. Anyway, you find yourself standing at the end of a long corridor? You run to the other end. Easy. Hm… someone gives you a piece of cheddar. Champion! So you run back again.. Gruyere. Great! But the humans are at it again. You aren’t actually running. You are stationary except for your feet which are making a ball turn round.

What you don’t realise, Mickey, is that you are involved in a virtual simulation. Your head is motionless but your active neuron thinks it is memorising a maze.

This is the science of the brain these days. It reminds me of a psychology book I read a few decades ago which described how Einstein was laid on a bed and electrodes fixed to his skull. They recorded his brain pattern in this quiescent state. Then they instructed him to think of E=MC² and watched the burst of energy cross his synapses, hoping to learn more about what Woody Allen called ‘my second most favourite organ’.

Taking these two events you get some sense of the progress of life on the planet. A mouse is now doing what Einstein once did. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, a redoubtable and very happy female centenarian has just won a gold medal in the shot put. There’s video of her putting the shot to four metres plus. They created the new 100+ category just for her. No-one can doubt her Einstein moment but, before long, a mouse will emulate her, putting the shot into the middle distance, yet not actually moving. It’ll be another breakthrough in neuroscience. Worth a bit of gouda, don’t you think?

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Friday, October 9, 2009

Over par: golfing in Cork

This was a taster to see whether I still like the game. I do but there has always been a touch of the inedible being hunted by the unspeakable about it, especially in the Home Counties where pomposity, prissiness and self-inflated egos abound. However, as in so many other ways, the Irish are different. Probably the most literate society on Buddha’s earth, they imbue much of what happens on their island with their self-constructed national type. They are not obsequious which is a big plus when being served in bars and restaurants They seek to engage the visitor in the sunny side of life. In a SpaEurope (the sort of store that abounded in the UK before supermarkets, I asked how expensive the batteries were. ‘We pride ourselves in only selling the most expensive goods’, he replied urbanely. This hit at the heart of the economy here which is reeling under the unparalleled strength of the euro. A bar of chocolate costs three pounds fifty when it used to be one-fifty, for example. The cheapest plonk is six quid and is the stuff you use to keep the weeds down.

Anyway, the golf. There is a nine hole course near here boasting the emerald grass, the shallow and infrequent bunkers and the most perfectly playable fairways imaginable. A kind of Elysian field for the afterlife. The old feller in the hotel that owns it could not find change and so let me have the clubs on free hire. The groundsman found me some balls. He also explained the nature of the layout which was impossible when looking at the course layout on their map. It had all the beauty of the London tube map without any of the logic. At several holes players play across each other’s heads. Luckily this is October and I play in a blissful solitude. In the clubhouse (where you pay on trust by slipping your fifteen euros into a letter box) it is like the Marie Celeste, with all the evidence of a bustling social life and complex organisation, yet no-one around.

To cap off this rumination, I turned on the television and found three channels showing identical images of pretty painted buildings in pretty painted Cork towns. What was extraordinary was that one had a rock anthem playing over it, another had a sentimental modern Irish love song, plush with strings and the last had Irish pipes accompanying a frenzied updated folk song somewhat in the manner, if not the anarchism, of the Pogues. Why? Given the lush tourist literature everywhere extolling everytning from local cookery to surfing and the fact that everyone seems to be employed in selling the aforesaid national character, I suppose these are ads on loops, artistic installations to feed the frenzy of the gullible tourist, whatever the musical taste. But I didn’t hang around to check.

Here in Eire, being literate does not necessarily mean being cultured. In Ghana the reverse can be true.

They do have golf courses in Accra. More of them as and when. I am bitten by the bug again – and I don’t mean mosquitos.

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Saturday, October 3, 2009

It’s not life as we know it, Captain…

Imagine a long, winding set of lights on a wire. Some of the bulbs are on and some are off. The wire twists around another one. It’s the double helix. And, do you know, until I saw this mock up on the box I assumed that the lights that were on, stayed on through your life and the ones that had failed to ignite, stayed doggo. Not at all. Watching one reel of a new tv series on twins in London, en passant, I became educated in the knowledge of (I think) epigenesis. Whatever the term ( I remember Piaget using it, so I could have got it mixed up), I was assured by the very nice doctor that these lights can be switched on and off through life as the genes interact with the environment. This means that at our very core, the blueprint of life, the map of what makes me different from you, is not static. I always imagined it was. But identical twins show that it isn’t. If they live life differently, epigenesist happens and they become less and less identical. It means that change can be wrought in our DNA. It means that we will eventually be able to press back the tide of death, forever.

I have written before about the thrust of medical science taking humanity into a future wherein we are able to redesign ourselves so that we can live in any place; Mars, the Moon, interstellar space, under the sea. The great debate (originally won by Darwinists, or so they thought) that evolution was a slow battle of the survival of the fittest, via natural selection, may now have shifted in favour of the Lamarckians. Lamarck suggested that evolution was a complex mix of environment and alchemy! Essentially we evolve towards greater complexity in an orderly manner and this does not need to take generations but even sudden shifts in the environment can cause a species to change. It was a theory of its time but, symbolically, it seems closer to what science has on offer today. Stem cell surgery and bionic bits are fast becoming as much part of our bodies as new fashion on High Street rails . Now, even the atomic level is open to our alchemy. We can turn the base lead of our every day bodies into the gold of champions. We can all become super heroes.

We are Gods.

From my point of view we can’t do any worse than the Gods we have had up to now.

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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Hereafter and Now

Thinking of my last blog and its serpentine subject, I wonder whether the eel evolved from the same source as a snake or from a different fishy ancestor or from a reptilian, losing its legs as it found slithering quite acceptable, like those children who bump along on their rumps rather than crawling, until one day they stand up as homo erectus. Who knows? Probably Darwin did. Charles D. was a remarkable man and a national treasure to the British. He was one of those enlightened individuals who seemed to have been blessed with an original and deeply penetrative mind and applied it, like a blow torch, to the cobwebby dry leaves of the religious cant that held sway in his day – and still does in parts of the United States.

I noted with the stomach twisting resignation of déjà vu that a new film about his life has not found an American distributor as yet, because the religious Right regard him as a humanist pervert, blaspheming against the history of Man as recorded in the Bible. More or less at the same time as reading about the film’s lack of support, I discovered that there was an intriguing new book out by David Eagleman called Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives. It proves to be very funny, a mix of philosophical musing, surrealist burlesque and genuine challenge to all who have their own beliefs regarding what happens to us after we are gone. The story I read last night had a plot which suggested in its final sentence that we could be on a path of downward evolution, bound to be something less than human the next time round and that we began this spiral journey as highly intelligent aliens.

He’s an American nuclear physicist or somesuch scientist and the book has been published over there but has yet to fall on the desk of the fundamentalist belief-police who, apparently, cannot accept Darwin’s premise that we might have ape genes in our stock. But they are slow readers, Neanderthals all, and still live in the fantasy world of the caves of the Garden of Eden, resisting the eel’s exhortation to them to try a bite from the tree of knowledge.

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Slide ‘em down your throat like wonky wheels…

Name that tune as some old tv programme catch phrase went. Got it? Jellied eels. I experienced one of those coincidences that set in train a whole barrage of images,. I was watching TV in a Paris hotel and BBC World had an item about eels being yet another dying breed. Apparently 90% down on its population in the UK, the eel is on its way towards the same oblivion to which we all seem to be heading on Planet Earth: this, despite its bravely versatile habit of crossing untold miles of land, sea, river and lake in search of food and its lover in the wide Sargasso Sea, where it breeds. I caught a few of these serpentine savages in my youth and then, when I had sons, they, too, had that frisson of excitement crossed with horror, as they hooked the maniacally twisting creature, greedy for their worms. In the lochs of north east Scotland, where local fishermen would never cast their superior lines because of their obsession with trout and salmon in rivers, I taught the boys to spread a newspaper on the bank and drop the creature upon it before disgorging the barb; otherwise hands, line and fishing net would be covered in their noxious slime.

It never occurred to me to cook it. Back it was despatched to continue its relentless journey. Being a northern boy from a pit village, eels weren’t on my menu. I stretched a point for the bony pike, a decent dace and whatever fed off the end of the sewer pipes on the Tyne, baking them on a make-shift fire, but eels did not inspire the savage imagination in me, unlike southerners.

It was rather late in life that I bought eel from a north Norfolk smokehouse and discovered its delightful taste and texture. Slightly herring-like and yet more fulsomely reminiscent of shark, I ate it when I could get it. Then there was a great hiatus and none was offered by shop or restaurant.

Until this lunch time.

Then, in St Germain, at a delightful fish restaurant called La Poissonerie where we have eaten several times, smoked eel was miraculously on the menu. Served on a little stack of marinated carrot, a meaty slice perched with a round of fresh cream atop, like a chef’s hat and surrounded by a circle of pale green gooseberry juice producing an exact simulation of a loch’s surface, with the hills beyond, it captured the entire history of my relationship with the wild creature.

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

The Moor not Merrier

Comedians can be paradoxical individuals. Many are insular and introverted yet force themselves to face an empty stage and a baying audience as though it is a cold turkey treatment for life itself. They can be depressives, hypochondriacs, vertically challenged, self-hating gays, cross-dressers, cleanliness fetishists and any combination of these and a myriad other traits and imbalances. Some, of course, are relatively unfettered by psychological problems and have found an early career in the medium of humour. But, I would wager, among the very best there is often a problematic core that gives their performances a tragicomic quality that appeals to our own sorrows and conflicts.
Whether there is a sizeable element of the population which would like to experience life through the eyes of personalities that are complete opposites to their own, I don’t know but I suspect that a majority would take it if offered, if only for a day: men wanting to try out being women, timid wishing to be bold, losers desiring that winning feeling, the ageing wanting to be young again and the poor wanting to be rich (forever!).
In this world of potential contrasts, one that has always fascinated me is the funny man or woman who wants to go straight. You don’t have to click the digital control too far to see those radical young stand-ups from the Edinburgh Festival;, sporting their Perrier awards all the way into a tv series or film, where the real money is. These days, most comics don’t stay that way very long. The dying of the light in the comedian’s career is unlikely to be a lonely dressing room on a pier in some resort with drugs or alcohol as the sole companion. More likely it is a comfortable existence in some sunny expat colony by a warm sea.
But a particular thread still survives. This is the stand-up who wants to do straight theatre. I remember seeing Lee Evans in Becket recently, Max Wall also in Becket, Frankie Howard in Midsummer Night’s Dream, albeit in a comic part and – last night – Lenny Henry in Othello. I am in London, as you might guess and saw the nation’s favourite take on possibly his biggest challenge as the Moor.
He did well enough for me not to find my bum going in and out in dreadful anticipation of lines being blanked or choreographic gaffes. His stage presence is dominating if, at times, in need of sharper direction to ease out occasional woodenness. His real identification with the dark racial heart of the play gave some of his speeches an angry pathos that spiked my heart and made me conjecture how much he had suffered from prejudice as he climbed his comedy career ladder. Was that why he wanted to take on the part? Some kind of exorcism of dreadful days?
There was a relief mixed with delight in his adoring audience last night as they gave him a number of enthusiastic encores. He had done it! Pretty good for one of our favourite black sons playing the ultimate black man’s part.

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Sunday, September 6, 2009

Death in the Public Eye

I was induced to ponder on the curious rise in the notion of celebrity the other day when I received an email from one of my oldest friends who now lives in Canada. She writes exceptionally pithy emails and should be supplying articles for the Guardian about the idiosyncrasies of life in that country. Anyway, her tale involved a child with Asberger’s staying at her house, on holiday. He managed to cut himself and had staples inserted. The doctor told him how to remove them when the wound had healed and gave him some device to do this. The primary school aged boy was excited and said he would delay the removal of the staples for an extra week. Why was this? He wanted to do it in front of his class in the Show and Tell session…

Now if we take a graph of normal distribution, a bell curve, where one end is where an individual tells no-one anything and defends his privacy like Harold Pinter or a true hermit friend of a friend in the Pyrenees, I suppose the boy is a bit over half way on the curve towards what we find at the other end. Towards this final graph point we have various sad, sycophantic individuals who only exist as flickering realities in the media and have no worthwhile contributions to make to society beyond their stints in the stocks of public derision. At the very end are those who want, despite their lack of talent and grace, to make one Big Bang in the steady state universe of every day life. Here we have the two boys who intended to reignite the Columbine tragedy in the UK but were caught with the means to do it, just before the anniversary of that American nightmare. Some months earlier, one of these boys did an involuntary Show and Tell in an essay in which he forecast his role in his forthcoming attempted re-enactment.

Every week it seems, punters reveal their grisly intentions or life-culminations on YouTube. I recall, for example, one man goaded by his Watchers to top himself. There have been mobile-phone recorded killings and beatings posted for everyone’s delectation.

When I was a young feller, the most publicity you could get was among your mates in the village or class at school and it lasted maybe a day or two. Despite your wish to become notorious, somehow everyone conspired to snuff out your little fantasies. So you grew up a little circumspect about revealing your inner bits and pieces.

The truly serious stuff remained like a canker in the apple of the local community. I don’t mean the grim, perverse behaviours now related every evening on the news but, for example, the slashing of competitors’ leeks in the annual competition in the North East of England. The act would, like a Shakespearean curse, be carried by blood from generation to generation. Thus, in my village, there was a leek-slasher’s grandson! The poor boy never did anything wrong in his life but people were always suspicious of him and his potential for agricultural crime.

I suppose incidents of media-broadcast acts of destruction, depravation, defamation and the like will continue to rise as those among us who feel aggrieved that they have been left in the long grass beside the highway of the public’s appetite for the macabre, work themselves up into a state of pathological obsession and try to catch our eyes by flinging themselves into the unseeing traffic.

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Wednesday, August 26, 2009


A grave subject

I’ve done my share of investigating the beginnings of religion, not first hand, using primary evidence like a proper researcher but reading this and that. Fodder for the mind and also the very long epic I am writing about the times when there were many Gods and the current one – Jehovah – won the lottery to become the one and only God, at least for the Jews of the time. As I gathered it from such reading, He had an advantage over all the competition in that He was responsible for everything. This omnipotence meant that suddenly when things went wrong, He was displeased and when they went right, he was over the moon. (That’s where heaven is). Thus it was far more economical in time and effort to pray to the one and only God, even if he punished you for untold crimes by dispersing you all over the world.

A branch line of conjecture for me then and now, is the disposal of our bodies on death. Though it is not an inclusive list, for there must be tribes and races who turn up some more exotic ways of dealing with the fleshy and bony remnants of a person, the more common procedures offer a choice between interment, burning (fires and cremations), a Davy Jones or Ganges-type submarine experience and being left on a mountain top for the buzzards to strip you clean. Being shot into space will be the next.

Of all these I prefer the buzzard on the mountain top ritual. It fits with the vaguely Buddhist notions I have about being dissipated into billions of atoms and reforming as something else. An organic death.

So, as usual, I can now reveal what brought on this bit of flimflam. The plot next to Marilyn Monroe was sold for 2.4 million dollars recently. So far, the successful buyer has not let himself or herself be known. It must be a he, I’d think. Lying next to Marilyn! An ex-Kennedy (ie one who is dead) or her assassin (conspiracy theory) or someone she rejected and is still determined to be her eternal companion, or someone who wants his or her own grave looked at and feels s/he will find fame by association or someone for whom I cannot construct a motive, has won the Ebay auction.

At some point in the last century, an entrepreneur realised that car number plates could be sold on if they had magical acronyms or initials. In the same way, this Marilyn story might be the beginning of a lucrative new trend whereby we can bid to lie beside a lifetime’s obsession. Someone we could not get near yet exalted from afar. Out with family tombs and in with celebrity squares of sacred soil where the famous one is surrounded by the less-desirable coffins of his or her fans and followers.

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Thursday, August 13, 2009


Shofar sho good

On the news the other day was some footage of a number of Rabbis in an aeroplane, circling over Israel. One was blowing a ram’s horn, called the shofar and the others seemed in various degrees of commitment to the cause. This, it turned out, was a high altitude prayer-in to help Israel repel the invasion of the virus that we know as swine flu.

It set up the following train of thought, as I watched it. How do those religions that have forsworn pork manage swine flu in their systems? Does it contaminate their souls as well as their bodies? Both virus and soul are invisible to the naked eye, though the virus can be seen with instrumentation which has yet to catch a glimpse of whatever is imagined to be the holy spirit; that which bestows life upon humans, though not, as yet, on animals. Is being in an aeroplane an act that might bring these holy men nearer to God since in the early days of religion He was ‘up there’? If this is so then, knowing how competitive religions are, we have a new prayer race on our hands. The further up, the closer my God to thee. Or does praying at twenty thousand feet mean that the prayers will fall, weighted by their solemnity, like rain on as wide an area as possible? The height must be just right or they could fall on Palestine which could prove to be a sad waste of supplication by turning God’s beneficence into support for the enemy.

It was a curious piece and Sky News didn’t know how to play it, other than show it. There was an element of ‘straight-faced but aren’t they funny’ in it but not enough to inflame the Jewish lobby and its propensity to see anything amusing or critical as anti-semitism.

At the same time, it was announced that swine flu had reached Amazonian Indians. In fact, it is certain that it has invaded the hosts of believers of every religion known to the planet, as well as agnostics and atheists.

My partner pointed out that if this had been a group of traditional village doctors from the countryside of Ghana, the story would have been much more satirical, with a sub-text suggesting that Africans have not yet emerged from the age of superstition and magic, even though it is conceded by some of the more liberal adherents to world religions, that, unlike animals, they could have souls….

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Thursday, August 6, 2009

You Dirty Rat (Part 2)

The rat is a proven master at managing the hurdles that humans present it. Following on from my last farrago of nonsense (though admittedly chilling for those who fear the creatures) sticky paper was laid on the track the rats were taking from entry via the hole in the mosquito netting to various locations of food, placed there for their delight and hastened death. But it seems to be more like their delight and edification. After the first one left all its body hair on the said carpet of glue and retired to its lair, prematurely bald, subsequent familial rodents have somehow managed to remove the succulent opiates from the centre of the sticky pads without even getting a gummed up paw or whisker. How do they do it? Do they work in pairs like acrobats? (Actually they do – I saw a film sequence once of a rat on its back carrying an egg and others pulling it along like a trolley! Or was it ants I am thinking about…)

But, laying my erratic memory on one side, news of other creatures’ activities puts everything into context.

Rooks can, when first meeting the problem of a worm floating in a test tube, drop enough stones in the tube to raise the water level and, therefore, the worm to their beaks. Like Aesop I hear you cry. I reported magpies some time ago that were seemingly capable of recognising themselves in a mirror. And another account purported to show that wallabies in Tasmania raid the marijuana fields of a medical research centre (nice work if you can get it) gorge themselves, then retire to the nearest corn field and proceed to dance like dervishes, creating – you guessed it – corn circles!

I remember reading a theory once (called morphogenesis, I think), though those who read this column regularly will have a suitable wariness at any claim of mine to be factual. The theory was that if a creature learns something in one part of the world, his or her ilk in another gains something cognitive from it, So, if we take the rat learning a complex maze in the UK, it might take an hour. Once it learns it, it runs the maze very quickly, of course, But a rat in the Amazon, faced for the first time with the same maze will achieve a result which suggests learning from the first rat has been ‘transmitted’. We might posit Jungian pools of the unconscious here. We might consider that animals have telepathy. We might hypothesise that creatures of this world have forms of intelligence way beyond our capacity to comprehend.

But it is intriguing to project a scenario where any one of the aforementioned life forms uses ingenuity to bring a meal to its mouth, checks that it is properly groomed in a mirror and then heads for a rave in the nearest clump of illegally sown marijuana and finishes off in a perfect circle of flattened cereal crop, sleeping it off.

One thing is for sure, it will appear on YouTube and we will sit in ignorant wonder on our settees and imagine, erroneously, that it was staged with computer graphics.

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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

You dirty rat!

The house is in a mixed area of human striving. There are several biggish homes of which this is one and all the land between them is in-filled with shanty development. The house, itself, is built round a quadrangle. There is no glass in the windows, only mosquito netting which means we don’t use air conditioning which means we are a little more ecological. In this sprawling, fissured, sandy-tracked part of Accra, unlike the various guarded, sentry-posted estates nearby, there is a sense of nature close in tooth and claw. A cobra scaled our wall and our squatter neighbours came to warn us. A big thing lives in the roof space. It scuttles and sometimes we can hear the despairing last gulps and moans of its prey which it has brought home to feast upon. Chickens and goats scratch and munch around the little lawn in front of the high walls of the property. Birds boom, warble, shriek and make electronic beeps. The goats bleating at night sound like women in labour.

All very well, producing an acceptable sense of cohabiting with all except the mosquitos, the over-loud stereophonic speakers of the evangelical churches, nearby – and the RATS.

For the last few days, the rats have come, probably, judging by their intelligence, from being stowaways on a ship that passed a nuclear power station in Le Havre where they have been fast-breeding in the dark spaces by the reactor. Naturally we want rid of them fast. They may be only six feet from you wherever you are in any urban environment in the world but not materialising in your own kitchen and living room. Last night they were chortling as they dropped into the courtyard and tap danced on the tiles.

They were triumphant because, it turned out, they had discovered our last stash of poison, stored high but, unfortunately, not out of reach. They had dragged this box of ratty hemlock down to the floor and then devoured the contents by first shredding the polythene and cardboard. Like some horror film we have no more poisonous gifts until tomorrow! What will become of us tonight? You see, they enter the house by biting holes in the mosquito netting. Nowhere is safe. Not even the bedroom…

If we survive, then it’s off to the shops for more armaments. Do we buy these seductive pellets again? We can’t set traps because they may harm the dogs who are largely empty-headed creatures that would investigate them with their muzzles. The locals use something interesting but perverse, rather like an artefact out of a Laurel and Hardy sketch. It is sticky paper. Mr and Mrs Rat investigate, love the smell and the expansive dance-floor, practise their tango, becomes gummed up and finally, totally incapacitated. Thence to our own abattoir – the gardener, because killing them by machete or whatever, is a step too far for me.

It will only be a temporary reprieve in the war for, as we know, The Rat is dead – long live the Rat!

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Tuesday, July 21, 2009


Obama in Ghana

It’s summer in England and winter in Ghana. Having just got back to Accra, my last social event being what turned out to be a swine-flu party, I find the skies grey and the daily temperature around 28 degrees centigrade. Now this might, for you who manage to be numerate with a weather eye to boot, seem rather warm but here in Ghana it means that workers can don their woolly socks and anoraks. At night, blankets appear. Being conditioned by English grey skies I often emerge in the morning, only to find, without fail, that it is blissfully warm. My morning swim of forty or so lengths is in delightfully cool water but the locals treat it as though ice floes might impede my path or I will be dragged unconscious with hypothermia from the 24 degree waters. In the warmer seasons when the air temperature is 34 to 40 degrees, the water is as warm as a cup of tea left standing for ten minutes.

I was warmed in a more emotional way by a new sign on the back of a taxi (you may have discovered a dozen or more cryptic, aphoristic or beautifully ungrammatical signs in this blog over the months), which said Don’t Underrate. I can sit, as I am being driven to work and meditate on the various levels of meaning in these taxi-proclamations to passers by. It is an injunction. But who am I not to underrate? The taxi? Myself? Life in general? God? In Ghana it is the last, most probably. Anyway, such signs are manna when the traffic is grinding along, the daily paper has been read, the street sellers and beggers need to be pointedly ignored and there is a final quarter of an hour to kill.

As you may know, Obama was here when I wasn’t. I saw his speech on Sky Television in England. It contained many a hardly veiled reference to corruption, dictatorships, coups, poverty and general mismanagement of peoples and countries in Africa. The assembled throng cheered and clapped his every criticism. A white American president would have limped home with a chant of ‘racist’ drumming into his ears. But being black and speaking the truth has a certain dynamic consonance here. A good thing too. One hopes that the speech laid down a few pointers to despots and dictators about what might be coming to them, at the same time as wakening a concerted Africa-wide movement for democracy and even-handed, sensible governance. Obama was kind to Ghana but it, too, suffers, even if less than most, from tribal in-fighting, bribery and sloping playing fields. Coming through customs a female official asked us for a ‘present for Auntie’ after demanding to see inside our bags, which brought a curt response from my Ghanaian partner who naturally feels deeply let down by such blatant behaviour. I like Ghana very much. The people are generous and not inclined to aggression, yet, like everywhere, those that enter politics can be the exceptions that prove this rule. Even here in the oldest democracy in Africa.

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Monday, July 13, 2009

Wild Water Swimming

Occasionally these blogs devote themselves to environmental issues, though not in the usual polemic sense. Rather, they turn out to be ecological as a by product of reminiscence. Those blue remembered hills and meadows. It is only when a news headline catches the eye that I am forced to think (with a gulp) that, indeed, nothing is as it was and I am now rapidly becoming a living memoir of what used to be. Even at their most mundane, conversations can home in on life as was. I enjoyed a London party on Saturday night, a small gathering of artists and designers where strawberries in jelly raised the observation of how we used to pour Carnation Cream over it as the proper topping. Indeed, being a northern boy, jelly used to be attended by brown bread and butter, too.

Well, if Sunday High Tea was jelly and Carnation Cream, Saturdays and the remaining part of Sundays (if visitors weren’t in the front room and I wasn’t being forced to be present) would be spent doing boys’ things. This might involve damning a stream like Just William, setting a trap for the farmer (digging a pit and covering it with sticks and grasses) or fearless walks across the sewage pits. These were deep and foul smelling receptacles of fetid liquid, open to the air, formed by concrete grids. The walks were for the foolhardy, as they measured maybe a foot across and, I imagine, methane mists hung over them on still days.

I am a strangely unfortunate being because my elder sister died in a drowning accident, aged six, before I was born, in India. She preceded me through life as a maturing girl and then young woman, remembered my mother on what would have been her birthday. “Little Margaret would have been twenty today..” All the way through adulthood. My ghostly sister is still a few years ahead of me, calling…

Anyway, I saw the news story about wild water swimming. Some unfortunate boy drowned in a gravel pit while out swimming with his pals. The story flagged up modern concern about ‘wild’ water, naming dangers such as weeds, hidden underwater obstacles, currents and the like. The people being filmed to illustrate this pursuit wore bathing caps and trundled around a lake doing prim breast strokes, with a disgruntled duck watching them, nearby,. Hardly wild and hardly a newsworthy tale.

I’ve always swum better than most but never as well as my younger sister who was effortless and did well in national championships. I was good enough, though, to swim natural waters wherever I have found myself, including the Mississipi, The Volga, The Thames, The Seine and a number of other rivers, fast flowing, cascading, erupting and fierce. At one time, recently, I thought I ought to dip in all the ‘capital rivers’ of the world and write a book about it called something like The Big River Library before I realised that I had enough to do in this life to finish the trilogy I have begun. But it gave me a plot line for one of its stories. The hero will swim fabled wild water in search of his dead sister but not as the media could ever know it and the event will be placed in an epoch thousands of years before sewage farms and bathing caps.

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Monday, July 6, 2009

Anyone for Tennis?

The Wimbledon men’s final lasted so long that I had time to take in vital games while doing a decent garden weeding, hovering the attic, preparing food, writing emails and that was probably only half of it. It was like a painting that came alive whenever I looked at it. I’ve always liked tennis and could claim, once upon a time, to be more than a bit good at it.

It began when I was about twelve. My father was an Edwardian with fixed opinions and a sense of certainty that dismissed whatever contradictory knowledge might be found in expert literature. He was an ex-army captain in the PT Corps who gave rise to my birth in India when helping establish the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun. I suppose he was an obdurate product of his times and so, naturally, made life uncomfortable for his son. We argued, which was futile as I could never win. The competition between us rumbled on throughout his stay on this earth. Anyway, being in the PT Corps and expert at all things physical such as gymnastics, diving, swimming and all the regular sports, he decided to make me a tennis player, largely because he would have an opponent on tap but maybe also because he needed to feel he had passed on this selfish sporting gene.

Over the course of the next three summers, I played and improved but that was not the real cause of my flowering as a serve and volleyer. It was the winter practice in the north east, near Newcastle. Each day we would do three different sessions. At the back of our council house he erected two eight foot steel poles and strung between them a piece of tennis netting, about a metre and a half wide. I served a couple of hundred balls every day. In the attic he placed an old mattress over a side board. I pummelled it with forehands and backhands, the ball dropping dead at my feet after a healthy thwack. The last practice involved going out on the field, covered in corn stubble and, sometimes, snow and volleying. Aiming for ever higher records. Could we keep it up a hundred hits, two hundred and so on. He was obsessive, my father and I think that his fantasy life was strong enough for him to believe he could still go on to win something.

The upshot was that I became reasonably good, which led to my being school tennis captain, captain at badminton and captain at cricket, despite being dismissed as ‘four eyes’ for the first four years of secondary education. Confidence flowed whenever I had something in my hand with which to hit a moving object. And that has led to other spheres of confidence.

There’s a lesson in all this. When I am presented with some seemingly intransigent problem, particularly one that also tosses me into some kind of emotional vortex, I think of those three practice technologies in that working class environment, one that was not blessed with the sophisticated paraphernalia that every child expects today.

The strung net, the cushioned wardrobe and the snowy stubble.

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Sunday, June 28, 2009

Walking on the Moon

Seeing the TV shots of thousands of fans collecting for their mourn-ins for Michael Jackson in different parts of the world was a reminder that in the Internet age people will gather for a rave or a funeral, equally voraciously, driven by mobile phones, blogs and social networking. Twittering hype transcends any real depth of emotion as style drowns substance. Warhol’s fifteen minutes thesis is screwed a thread deeper as people submerge themselves in untold weeping minutes of fame-by-identification. The reality of their relationship with the pop star seems nothing but a hysterical projection. All the while Jackson’s images flit across Plato’s cave wall. Michael Jackson dancing like a wayward sprite. Michael Jackson singing – from the early years’ voice of a wayward angel fronting his elder brothers – to the man with the tonsils of a bi-polar castrato. The man who would be white. blanching his features and feminising them, step by step, as though no-one would detect the transformation. The man in the hospital mask. The man who went out in a wheelchair to malls dressed as an old lady. The man who slept with children. The man who pretended to nearly drop his baby from a great height. Now the man who would be king, now dead.

Outpourings of sorrow in this age seem proportionate to the dimensionality of the celebrities that are being grieved over. The realer the person the realer the grief. The more the person exists as a simulacrum constructed by mirrors, smoke and lanterns, the more the crowd will vent a momentary bathetic despondency before attaching itself to the next white or black hope for immortality.

Having entered my teenage years with pre-vinyl platters of hard bakelite, as rock and roll, itself, arrived, I have, like all my contemporaries and those that followed us, become fixated with this star or that, this band or that. What mattered always for me was an identification with the words and tunes and how authentically they were delivered. And did they speak for me? Thus it is that perhaps only one fragment of a rock star’s oeuvre may have appealed. One tune only.

So, probably already too old when Michael Jackson came along, I respected the dancing feet, the timing in the unique voice and the images but never at any time did I identify with the sad creature at the heart of it. Rilke’s poem, The Unicorn, suggests that the charmed, horned horse existed because people wanted it to. Similarly with Michael Jackson.

Bob Dylan has a great personal take on this phenomenon. People trying to get to the heart of Bob Dylan, the man, are rebuffed because, as the man himself has said, ‘he’s not there’.

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Saturday, June 20, 2009

Missing the link – out of the loop

Very occasionally, owing to the exigencies of fate, you can travel blissfully unaware of something that has been going on for years. I’m not talking about a spouse’s affair or a tumour silently gorging itself on some part of your body, or the fact that an inter-stellar domino effect of galactic implosions will be catastrophic for Earth, a billion years from now. A bit more small scale than that. Nevertheless, given that I have an interest in cinema and slightly more than an occasional interest in television, what has transpired as an unfathomable blot on my mental landscape, a lacuna in the ebb and flow of my tentative grip on culture, has turned in a curious way to my advantage. Like finding a donkey’s years old winning lottery ticket in that pair of trousers I forgot I bought and left in France for the next visit, only to find them two years later.

How can it have happened that I would miss something so riveting and better than anything else I’ve seen for years. Not only miss it but miss the hype? Can it be that my travelling between countries has been a passage of neat sidesteps so that every time there has been an eruption of popular debate and a deluge of critical acclaim, I have just happened to be occupied elsewhere, my head fixed on my navel, or in the clouds or in someone else’s business. Who knows?

Yet here I am, years after its inaugural run, buying the first four series, with another one to waiting. This is, in itself, a first. Going on the recommendation of my younger son, confirmed by the opinion of one of my oldest friends, an internationally lauded writer of children’s fiction and a sardonic critic of most things popular, I just went out and bought eighty quid’s worth of TV episodes. It could have been exactly the kind of aberration that catches us out now and then in life, the kind for which you never truly forgive yourself. But it wasn’t.

It was made in cine-heaven by angels with dirty mouths. It transfixes me each night as I limit myself somehow to two episodes an evening. I dream dramas in Baltimore street patois. Like a junkie from the series (there are plenty of them) I flop about, stare distractedly, scratch and mumble my way through the day, until I allow myself to switch on the DVD player.

Oh bliss! Two and two thirds series to go. Over thirty episodes at around 45 minutes a time. And another thirteen episodes in series five which I will buy on the way back to Ghana.

I am high on The Wire.

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Saturday, June 13, 2009

Of Kakis and Coconuts

I’m in France again under a sky like half a starling’s egg. The garden has survived the winter (it rained and there is still snow on Mount Canigou to feed the rivers). I had a bad dream that the kaki tree would have died but it is there, glossy leaved and sprightly. If you haven’t tasted the fruit, it is an exotic shock to the system. When the leaves have turned red and orange, they drop away in early November leaving bright lanterns of orangey red, rather like peppers from a distance. They stay firm and if you eat them the juice turns to sour sand in your mouth. (I was once given a wine tasting lesson by a great UK importer, Simon Loftus in Southwold and I proved ok at bouquet, taste and the look of the wines but was really bad at the texture. I couldn’t differentiate gravel from sand from satin, from silk,,,,). The Kaki is no such paragon of ambiguity. You have to leave it until it starts to rot and then, presto!, the sand turns to something slightly satin and gloriously sweet and you spoon it out like a Moroccan fruit yoghurt. It is a great reward after abandoning my daily mango from the garden in Accra with an exquisite perfume and taste that is lost when the fruit is exported.

On the way here I stayed in a B&B on the Roman Wall, near Hexham. I don’t usually advertise but it is called the Carraw and beats any hotel. Heavy complex breads, local black pudding and organic farm produce complement the views of the fells where the Romans once walked, their faces (I imagine) twisted into despair like visitors to Cromer in late autumn, hoping to catch a rare glimpse of a Keatsian autumn sun but instead being knifed by Siberian winds. Remember this was June and it was snowing in Yorkshire!

A few miles away is the archaeological dig that has produced the greatest find in British archaeology – very human letters from Roman civilians and the military that show we have not progressed in needs or desires much since those days. I prefer social history to old buildings. Anything to throw light upon the opaque business of existence.

So here I am for a week or two. Ghana is far away but does not lose the allure of its rawness and challenge to most of the cosy assumptions and expectations of western Europe. I have the wine and I have the cheese and can sit out in the tranquil mountain air but I have had to exchange it for my daily coconut water (which is a substitute for blood plasma in battle zones and fortifies the body against the constant heat and humidity of Accra life).

There must be a novel in it. The Kaki and the Coconut.

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Sunday, May 31, 2009



A Cloud over Cuckoo Land

I’m leaving Ghana tomorrow for the UK and then France. France is where my house is. It’s smallish and on the lap of Mount Canigou in the Pyrenees, with a thirty mile vista one way and a vertical rock face a little behind. I have seen eagles slide over it, wild boar tramping across the road to the village and a kind of chamois flashing between the trees on one of the many walks in the semi-wilderness. Then there are so many birds.

One summer song I will hear is that of that two-tone Mod, the cuckoo, the quintessential symbol of parental infidelity. They travel, as you might know, from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and have a good time laying each other and then leaving eggs in other birds’ nests. What they do then I should research! Maybe they laze about in the sun and limber up for the return journey like the idle rich with wet nurses and nannies and boarding school. Bringing up the young is just too tiring, My Dear, for any well brought up cuckoo.

I see that mating pairs have almost halved in Britain. I saw on BBC World a couple of human mothers with their young, wandering around some woods with a cameraman and interviewer following, saying that they want their children to hear its authentic sound before it goes for ever, which, they said, would be a shame.

I don’t know whether it is the ageing process and that my neurons are disintegrating, dredging up memories from the muddy waters of my youth but seeing a bit of footage of the cuckoo reduced me to a sort of sentimental regression. I suddenly remembered drawing and colouring one in in a primary school that held about thirty pupils and is now a house. I remembered having a jackdaw which sat on my shoulder all the way to school and then had to be taken home because they didn’t enrol birds. I remembered neck-broken chickens running for a minute or two in the garden. I remembered knowing every bird in Britain by memorising the Observer Book of Birds and being regularly tested by my sister. I remembered almost falling asleep in a lilac tree at break, aged about six, filled with the heady scent and the murmurous haunts of flies and bees among summer leaves. I remembered the brilliant colour of corn flowers, growing unbridled among the cereal crops before the advent of spraying.

This vibrant, technicolour living, breathing world of the 1950s swamped me for a while. Nature red in tooth and claw but also every other colour in its more peaceful states.

The film of the bird threw me back in time and the delinquent creature soared into my brain and laid perfect little capsules of memory there.

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

The corrupt world of moats, ducks and toilet seats

From a Ghanaian perspective, the behaviour of UK MPs regarding their expenses seems small beer. Here, the papers are reporting how the current left of centre government is trying to eradicate a pervasive bribe culture. The most paradoxical story I read on this subject was when a Ghanaian businessman took two men to court who had promised him that they would ‘arrange’ a senior post for him in the Ghanaian embassy in a Scandinavian country. He gave them several thousand pounds to bribe officialdom. In the event he was being duped so he took them to court! The judge judged on extortion and seemed not to take into account, as we might have guessed, the issue of bribery and corruption. Here, the ancient ways of the culture have melded with modern politics to produce the scenario where an MP is a Chief in other clothing. Ancient etiquette has the Chief of an area looking after his tribe, and particularly his own family. To become an MP brings with it expectations from nearest, dearest and others that largesse will follow. Africa has many countries where parliaments are dominated by tribal groups who tend to put their own interests before that of the country as a whole. Ghana may fall foul in the same way but there is a realisation that it is a gross barrier to economic progress in the country and, one hopes, corruption will eventually be stamped out. However, unlike the UK where the populace are angry owing to the fall in the moral standards of their MPs, in Ghana the populace will be up in arms if their MPs adopted such a morality. They expect nests to be well feathered.
I was talking to someone yesterday who disburses grants from The World Bank. He visited a community outside Accra and was accosted by a businessman.
“You have not given me a loan.”
“We don’t make loans.”
“I receive nothing.”
“Your case was turned down.”
“But where is my money?”
Here, the expectation is that if you have a relationship with anyone who augments the passage of funds from one point to another, then you must become a beneficiary. It is a country of hand-outs that, sadly, relies upon western funding to manage its economy. As I have mentioned before, if the West reduced trade tariffs rather than gave funding to Ghana, the economy here would prosper far more. But the suspicion is that Western aid is a way of constraining growth and stalling competition, not encouraging it.

Since President Atta Mills seems to want to clean out the corruption in these Augean stables, there is hope. But he will be battling against the cultural tide, the exact reverse of what is happening in the UK.

Watching the UK expenses debate among a panel on Sky just now, an idea suggested by a historian seems worth recycling and beefing up. There are too many issues on which MPs follow party lines and vote like lemmings in the fearful company of their obsequious colleagues and beady-eyed Whips. Secret ballots, where every MP votes, guided only by his or her own moral compass and not party dogma, would truly enliven politics.

UK MPs of all persuasions live in a hothouse media village, a culture and tribe protecting its own feathered nest. No wonder the golden eggs have gone addled.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009



Members of Parliament

To most of us MPs seem to be missing links in the historical chain that connects us with primitive humans. They roar a great deal as they hunt for votes but once in parliament their calls are different. A lot more restrained, a lot more equivocal as they move into the self-enclosed world of law making and social engineering. They develop protectionist herd instincts to demarcate them from the main, later evolutionary strand of humankind which we call society. They use their new but rudimentary forebrains to fashion sound bytes, this being the maximum amount of information they can hold at any one time. Though communal, they retain the atavistic urge to kill and eat their own kind. Their binocular vision enables them to look straight ahead and ignore or simply not see what is going on around them. They use their opposable thumbs to grub for expenses.

They are, in fact like Ida, the much heralded missing link being publicised by some biological archeologists yesterday. Found in perfect condition despite being over 40 million years old (you can see her hair, you can see what she ate last) Ida will soon be displayed on a TV near you. She is, in fact a species of lemur. My screen was a bit wonky when I read this and I misread it at first as leper.

Hence my inspiration for this blog.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Having the heart for sex

The most clicked story on the BBC website today concerns a study comparing the emotional profiles of over two thousand female twins. The hypothesis from the study is that sex is largely governed by emotional intelligence. Apparently, a third of all women find orgasms difficult or impossible to achieve and this study suggests that the ones who gain most are those who have high emotional intelligence.

Now, in my reading of the primary texts, which cannot be regarded as comprehensive, emotional intelligence became faddish a few years back, with the work of Daniel Goleman and its application to the business world where women were often excluded for their lack of the cold reason prized by men. The men themselves proved often enough that they found it difficult to motivate staff and engender loyalty because they could not appeal to their emotional worlds. Goleman’s work stemmed from that of Howard Gardner’s publications on multiple intelligences which provided a critique of school systems that relied only on literacy and numeracy to grade pupils. Gardner proposed that we have a variety of intelligences which should be valued, equally. Gardner’s work was not validated by empirical studies but is still hugely influential.

Recently I watched a National Geographic travelogue treating the wombs of twins in much the same glossy style as a Michael Palin walkabout in foreign climes where people are funny because they act differently different from Brits. The main insight was that there are many variations between even ‘identical’ siblings. It raised scepticism regarding all research based on twins, in my mind at least, as, despite the scientists’ beliefs, they are not actually comparing like with like.

Emotional intelligence is not so easily measured, and it may not even be a constant feature of personality. Some days empathy is high and others not. Women may have more of it than men but there are striking exemplars of either gender who can reach out to others and understand and help solve their problems. When it comes to sex, as usual we are in a murk. It is the old nurture nature debate. According to this research we have emotionally tuned orgasmic females on one side and, sadly, a deficient third who lead a less than fulfilled sexual existence. And where do the skilled purveyors of sexual engagement, who have learned their trade as geishas, gigolos, courtesans or prostitutes, stand in this heart-brain controversy? Are they more likely to employ emotional intelligence or are they cool and calculating and good at faking it?

The problem with concepts such as right and left brain, male and female behavioural traits and emotion versus reason is that they appear to have some validity at large population levels which are often confounded in the case of individuals. The third of women who appear to be missing out on the fruits of the heart and therefore the body are not served well by being told that their emotional intelligence is too low to secure them the rights to an orgasm. It sounds too Barbara Cartland to be scientific, doesn’t it?.

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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Boys, toys and wish fulfilment

I watched a rather mediocre film last night called Jumper. The plot suggested that through time aberrational humans with the godly power to leap through wormholes to any point in the world they liked (fixed by a photograph from a brochure etc) were being hunted down by religious fanatics who were protecting God’s monopoly on said powers. The central characters were two young men, the subject of this demon hunting. Being young they could rob banks by appearing inside their strong rooms, drive cars at unbelievable speeds and get the girls, though the film stopped short of them appearing inside the underclothes of unsuspecting prey.

It was another example of the escape fantasy genre for the young adult, whose immortality seems more assured than the likelihood of death (the reason why boys should be kept off motor bikes until they are in their mid twenties and have developed a neuron or two of realism.). Anyway, whatever the value of films as aesthetic artifacts, even those that have little merit can provide instances of fulfilment for the craving viewer. The language of the medium is so advanced that even the most neanderthal director shoots within acceptable artistic limits, producing pleasing visual effects and juxtapositions. Turn the sound off when the dialogue is clunky and/or the sound track is a noisy interference and focus on light and shade, figures against landscapes, desert beauty or urban decay. Because it lasts ninety minutes plus, every film has something worthy to offer, if, like an inveterate Oxfam shop browser, you are willing to put up with the gungy crassness, the fetid smells and the acres of detritus in order to find a little treasure.

How we spend our time is important, unless we are nihilistic and have a value free journey through life that is completely devoid of meaning. We can easily embrace far more fulfilment in our lives than we do but curious counteractive, negative forces often prevail and we end up doing little of consequence. Zen teaches us to focus in depth on everything around us and by doing so we can draw new meaning from the every day. In qualitative research terms, the cliché is to make the every day exotic. See everything like a Martian just arrived on earth.

So, back to Jumper and wish fulfilment. The essence of its limited appeal is that it feeds on the desire to bend reality to an individual’s narcissistic tendencies.

Well, here in Accra, it can be an every day experience. As we sit in a line of traffic at a crossroads, we can roll down the window and drop twenty pence in the hands of a thin but lively youth carrying a flag, a tree branch or anything he can wave to look authoritative. Off he races to the crossroads and belligerently stops the cross flow, waving us through like royalty, yelling ‘Bless you!“. In Ghana, money bends reality like Uri Geller does with spoons or super heroes do in films.

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Thursday, April 30, 2009

Malaria, swine flu and those cunning Chinese

I watched a fascinating programme at lunchtime today and it brought back to me the perennial debate in research between inductive and hypothetico deductive approaches to scientific discovery. Having exhausted most of a book on the topic, it is not in my mind to go over that ground here except by being as cryptic as the desire for reader accessibility will allow. In essence, if you want to solve some problem in the world, you can go and collect evidence from sites of interest (eg people actually suffering from malaria) seek patterns, try remedies from folk lore and from existing knowledge and build the most efficacious medical approach you can. Alternatively, you can establish a scientific model, push it this way and that in the laboratory, try it on people and refine it over time. Inductive means ‘discovery, grounded in context’ and deductive means ‘testing existing models’. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, getting scientists to change their paradigms is a task beyond mere collection of contrary evidence. Their professional lives depend on what they have achieved, erroneous or not.

Two competing forces of imperialism are head butting each other over the treatment of malaria in Africa. The Chinese claim to have eradicated it from some small populations by adopting the inductive approach. At the same time as they offer hope and a malaria free future to village people, they gain access to mineral wealth. The World Health Organisation will not accept Chinese claims because they are not published in reputable medical research journals and peer reviewed. Their imperialism is one of professional reputation and protective approaches to medical disciplines.

A nice zen story involves scientific sampling. Statistics depend upon using a sample from a population and generalising from the knowledge gained from that sample, to the whole population. Zen asks, ‘how do you sample a house?’. Is a brick a sample? A window? A brick and a window? In other words, a house is not conducive to sampling. It is too complex. Drugs that pharamaceutical firms offer are based on statistical sampling. They are nearly always crude in their appropriateness for complex diseases in whole populations. Think thalidomide. Think Viagra. Look at the side effects of long terms studies of individual drugs. It’s a game of poker involving percentages.

Science does not like the unprovable even if the results are astounding. The Chinese think they have won a battle in the fight against malaria. The WHO is snooty about it. Here in Africa people want to be malaria free. If god, the devil, witchcraft, dog’s piss or some bitter tasting plant gives a cure, they don’t ask if the treatment has been peer reviewed.

As I write, swine flu is moving more like a virus carried by the media, itself, than something biological, into pandemic status. After it is over, there will be miracle stories of cures that will sink without investigation, particularly if they are associated with efficacious concoctions of diabolical Chinese herbs. Meanwhile, tamiflu will have been dolled out to everyone who sniffs and sneezes, paranoia will reign and the scientists will be busy isolating and manufacturing a lucrative successor to tamiflu which will be operational in six months time. And will receive prestigious column space in the Lancet.

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Zen flesh, Zen bones, pork and the sun

Having left behind the extraordinary silent harmony of nature and nurture (see photograph) around the Buddhist temples of Kyoto and Hiroshima, I am back in Ghana where the chaos of the roads, electric sounds and utilities prevails, as always. If you asked me how I’d like to spend my last few hours of this life, it would be in a Zen garden. There is something exquisite, a deep personal response from one’s essence when viewing sand sculptures which seem to preserve every grain in place, or individual plants, bushes and trees that are accorded place and reverence in the spread of foliage and earth. Very different from UK gardening programmes which, even in the most planned of country estates, use such hyperboles as ‘rich’, ‘riotous’ , ‘pageant’ and portray the garden as a site for drowning, a multi-sensory paradise. Well, Buddhists haven’t the same symbolism and paradise doesn’t come into it. It is not a form of drowning either but rather an uninterrupted meditation. Its effects permeate Japanese society where interiors are spare, where the meal table is aesthetically pleasing, where flowers are arranged in vases, according to a centuries-developed art, where targets shoot arrows in a Zen stillness and where cherry blossom has a spiritual symbolism that drives the entire population to picnic under the falling petals.

Well, so it seems to me on my brief visits there. It may all be superficial and I am taken in like a gullible tourist. Then again, when one is willingly taken in and the experience bolsters a basic drive to find meaning in life, then it can be almost ecstatic in its effect.

Surface and depth were paraded on BBC World News this morning. First, the sun has dimmed. It is not known whether this is similar to the 70 year dimming that led to a mini ice age a couple of centuries ago but its surface has turned turbulence-free. The second story concerned three piglets that are sharing the good life in a pen with a tiger. They have been clothed in stripy jackets so that the tiger’s natural predisposition for a pork lunch is counteracted by its desire to look after its own kin.

Western-philosophically speaking, from Plato on, human beings have pondered on the degree to which life is an illusion. Phenomenologists have sought to train the mind to empathise with the reality of living things, inanimate material and of others’existence. But most philosophy agrees that we can know the act of knowing but never the object of that knowing. Maya in Hindu belief.

Zen gardens, by their attention to the essence of things, make you aware of the illusion of living; the pork under the tiger skin or the leopard sun that can change its spots.

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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Watchmen

I was born before Graphic Novels achieved their genre status as adult literature. But their precursors, Horror Comics, had their heyday when I was pre-teens and used to go up the village to have my hair cut at the part time barber’s. He sold everything that was unacceptable which gave him a certain consistency in that his haircuts were equally lacking in whatever confers self-esteem on a youngster. Anyway, condoms, horror comics, pre-marital advice books and photo-nudes were tantalisingly half-hidden around his garden shed. So you can ask me about those days and not about graphic novels. The only one I have is in French and concerns Zatoichi, the blind samurai.

One tag line for the film Watchmen, asks “Who watches the Watchmen?” Well, at one linear strip of time it was my son and I in Hiroshima last week. We cycled through the night and left our bikes outside the cinema. Unlocked. Safe. This is Japan. Three hours later, after a complex plot where not even a single atom was safe and with a death toll of 15 million plus (no mathematical error) we cycled back through the night in that hyper state which follows a good viewing. (At times I identify to such a degree with car chase films I have to restrain my driving.)

Watchmen is full of good retro dialogue and a rather sideways and sometimes sadistic take on super hero films. None of the characters are actually good. Their flaws cause many of the plot’s twists. The movie plays an interesting riff on liberal conscience. The central anti-hero, Rorschach, has a number of speeches in which he derides the liberal conscience, particularly when it comes to paedophilic killers and low lifes who have no moral parameters. As a would be tolerant and well meaning liberal, I found myself identifying guiltily with Rorscach’s bloody vendetta. I suppose it is the sign of good cinema that you can be traduced into identifying with characters that seem to be a long distance from your own. But maybe that is only the way we idealise our selves. Maybe we have the worst inside us and life is about handling and conquering what we know is base and irredeemable. The battles we fight with our consciences are micro wars that merely reflect what goes on around us on a greater scale.

Anyway, Watchmen took over a decade to be made. It is set in Nixon’s Cold War and creates a background collage of people and events of that period all played with great verisimilitude by actors. The soundtrack is redolent of the time-honoured mix of disregard for the establishment and narcissism that epitomises much of the best of rock since the fifties.

Iloved the film and it is still with me. Grrrrrrrrrhh….

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Thursday, April 9, 2009


Border Crossings

The flight from Accra to Osaka, via Dubai, leaves a triptych of images of their Customs. Until I started writing this I had never thought about the metaphoric ambiguity of the terminology. When we enter a country we expect to meet different cultural norms and there, at the border, this expectation is flagged up in the sign saying Customs. From this point everything may change for a temporary immigrant. To leave Accra I had to hand over my passport with my right hand. I remember Tony Blair, trying to impress a Muslim leader with a present of a miniature Koran and sliding it acroos to him with his left hand. Worse than no present at all. Accra’s Customs are possibly the most orderly element of Ghanaian life. It is as though international etiquette reaches this point and makes no further impression on the country. A sort of Canutish sea of anarchy washes it from the inside. It is said that it is a doddle to buy your way into Ghana without the necessary papers, at an official kiosk here. Bribery is rife, according to the newspapers. Every civil servant throughout the country expects to make his or her wage via backhanders. They’d die in penury without this oiling of their palms. It is built in to bureaucratic life.

Dubai, on the other hand, is above such lawlessness. But money drives this weird, artificial settlement in the desert, nevertheless. The Customs here have marble floors and gleaming steel and spacious lifts and white robed men and black robed women, speaking impeccable English with grave courtesy, sliding you seamlessly through the protocols and on to the lifts that rise silently to the Arcade above. You exit and are shocked that, at two in the morning, the place is jostling with thousands of shoppers, packing the half mile stretch of counters selling everything from newspapers to gold. It is retail land at wholesale prices, opulent and inviting. An Aladdin’s cave.

In Osaka Airport I disembarked from the internal shuttle train and followed the sign saying ‘Foreigners’ between the maze of posts and red ribbons that turn people into rats and reached a barrier of around ten gates, manned by people in white medical robes, white masks and white gloves.. It was reminiscent of when the scientists came for ET. Signs exhorted visitors to declare their diseases and a disembodied, gauze sieved voice verbalised it to me. “Have you fever? Have you complaint? Have you illness?” I hid my cold and tried not to be adenoidal in my straight faced , “No”. “Where from?” asked the mask. “Dubai, “ I replied, omitting the Ghana bit for fear of being hauled into a hose down module of some kind, a human cattle grid. Thence to a second line of barriers where my retinas were photographed, my finger prints taken and my bags searched.

Three types of Counter Culture. Under the Counter. Over the Counter. Counter intelligence.

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Monday, March 30, 2009


Home Alone: end-games

I am still being pursued by researchers from TV programmes who want to explore how computer gaming undermines society as we know it! Years ago, in the mid-90s The British Library awarded me a grant to direct a research project on video games in the home. Unlike the highly suspect statistical research of the time, we went into 100 homes and observed and interviewed children with their families over a period of time. The results were sufficiently entertaining and challenging to put me on Newsnight and other media outlets. I suppose the limelight lasted about six months after which I refused further show time on the basis that the research results were past their half-life.

At the time I argued that computer games were actually beneficial and that addiction in this sphere was no greater than in any other. The incidence of ‘loners’ resulting from games playing was a favourite topic of debate. As it still is. I also argued that video games, despite being extremely violent in some cases, were unlikely to ‘trigger’ psychopathic behaviour. I received quite a lot of mail, most of it uncomplimentary. Computer games were the work of the devil and rotted the brain, or at least the moral centre of it.

In the intervening period, because of my work as a panellist for The British Board of Film Classification, I have read much more research which seeks to prove that gamers become anti-social, autistic, criminal, morally corrupt and so on. Most of this research comes from America and most of it is self-fulfilling, being sponsored by politically or religiously motivated groups. Their work cannot differentiate between individuals with deep-seated social problems who gravitate to games playing for kicks and the millions who play every day and are not affected.

I also proposed that gaming has many valuable qualities in the development of social and intellectual skills, having seen how children teach each other, work in competitive and cooperative peer groups and seem to undergo intensive learning spurts. It was not just hand-eye co-ordination but something deeper, as though levels of cognitive awareness were being developed under the surface.

Whatever, the research proved contentious because all research ends up in a political bunfight as unscrupulous or blinkered individuals and pressure groups seek to use it for their own ends. When I suggested that schools were outmoded museums and beacons to failure and should be re-drawn as workshop spaces with teachers conducting research in their own specialist areas alongside their (secondary) students and that there should be separate centres for developing social understanding of sex, parenting, cultural difference etc, I was vilified by oponents. The bastions of the traditional territories and structures of the educational profession are difficult to breach.

So, with pleasure and a bit of a smug “I told you so” I see that the BBC website reports research in Amsterdam which confirms my hypotheses in those early days of domestic gaming. Very few of the hundreds of young people they have treated are addicted. They suffer, instead, from social alienation brought about by poor upbringing. Their condition is reversible, following a bit of love and affection and social development.

If you play with your kids on their machines a little and demonstrate you love them, no problem!

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Friday, March 20, 2009


The Sins of the Father: Fritzl

Josef Fritzl is an extreme deviant. How does a society deal with such individuals? There are always a handful of aberrant people who commit such appalling acts that they shock and bewilder even the most experienced psychologist of human nature. I spent an evening once with the then UK Government’s top psychiatrist, someone whose life is spent shuttling between serial killers; psychopaths who are unique in their symptoms and behaviours. There are no real patterns across cases, just a continuous malfunctioning in each of them concerning whatever it is that keeps us abiding by social conventions, moral or religious codes; no critical self-awareness. These (mostly men) have little sense of social pressure to conform to anything. The worlds that exist inside their heads bear little relation to the one outside, which the rest of us inhabit. Inside their tiny universes, they reign supreme and whatever the desire that arises, it must be satisfied. Whether their adult condition comes from abuse, lack of love, trauma or some genetic aberration, the result is often so excessive in its barbarity that it raises in us the desire to have them eliminated from life. They are not non-contributors like people in comas because we can await their re-awakening in some slight hope. No, they will never be released and we have no hope for them. Their only value to society is as guinea pigs in the slow growth of understanding of what causes these conditions. The man I met was remarkably easy going and unaffected by his forensic questioning of diseased minds. When I pointed this out, wondering about the horrors of possible transference, he said that the creatures he visits are so far removed from normalcy that he sees them as Gordian knots through which no sword will slice. He only has words and drugs.

Fritzl has blamed his mother for his acts, having spent time with a psychiatrist who may or may not have fed him this rationale for what took place over more than two decades. Our parents can do terrible things to us, wittingly or unwittingly. Whether his mother’s crime tripped his lack of critical self-awareness to the extent that his incest-fantasy would consume him totally, will never be resolved. What does seem to have happened is that he viewed a videotape of his daughter’s 9 hour testimony while she sat in court. Reality forced its way in, enough for him to apologise. But not enough for the world to accept his contrition. He will stay in prison hospital for ever, probably. But at least his daughter Elisabeth, after her long, abused and nihilistic incarceration, saw him with her own eyes as a sick old man, shuffling to and from court and collapsed in on himself, never again the powerful Dad who had taken so much of her life’s potential in his hands and torn it apart in his cramped cellar.

Meanwhile, Fritzl and his lawyer have received thousands of death threats from Austrian citizens. And Elisabeth’s tenuous, anonymous new life with all her children has been revealed in the press. She is hunted as though she must remain a State victim. One wonders about those in humanity who may be short of becoming psychopaths but who can do a fine job in stamping brutally on the defenceless victims of the deranged, never mind the so-called ‘monsters’ themselves and those that are legally bound to defend them on the public’s behalf.

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Thursday, March 12, 2009



Eating people is wrong…

…except if you are in the Andes and have survived a plane crash and there is nothing to chew on except your newly dead fellow passengers. Whatever it is that makes us develop taboos, it cannot be the Divine. If that were so then there would be some semblance of conformity among the world’s religions and faiths, always assuming that behind them all is One True God. However, not even cannibalism is a universal crime. The early colonists thought, in their passionate desire to impose religion and pillage the riches from tribal lands everywhere, that native peoples were godless and soul-less. Particularly those who ate their enemies after battle. They were little better than animals. Having such low esteem for their fellow men made it much easier to use and abuse them as slaves.

Somewhere in all this murk is a hierarchy. Taboos always have hidden levels of acceptability. More often than not these depend on the notion of context. So for UK thinking, if a man and his sister are the last surviving couple on a desert island, who would deny them the solace of each other’s bodies? For sex or for food? Or their desire to produce surviving offspring, despite the risks. Elsewhere, however, the same act may be acceptable within local law. But that is a familial taboo and we are talking here of eating issues! I saw a film in 1962 called Mondo Cane. It was a documentary horror film containing the bizarre stuff people stick down their throats around the world, a precursor to today’s TV jungle celebrity eating challenges. I vividly remember bluebottles on toast. On the news there has been widespread condemnation of cat farms in China, which provide delicious feline flesh for the meat market. The film showed a multitude of cats of all types and markings, inside a large wire cage. Yes, pretty pussies. Meanwhile, most of the ‘developed’ world other than Norway and Japan, is distressed by the thought of eating whale.

One argument in this conflicting set of attitudes to what should be prohibited from a menu, is that the hierarchy of acceptability is based on the degree to which animals are like humans, in their intelligence and their looks. The brighter they are and the more anthropomorphic, the greater the revulsion we have. But this ignores pig in some cultures and it ignores horse in others. It ignores monkey where that is eaten. In fact, when it comes down to a stricter examination, there is nothing that is not poisonous that is not eaten somewhere, no matter how bright. Octopus is more intelligent than a dog. Pigs are even brighter and have a sort of army colonel character to their faces. Even the ugly looking blowfish, that most venomous of finned creatures, is prized in Japanese restaurants. Young chefs have to eat their own cooked blowfish before being allowed to practise on their customers. Custom develops over centuries and, if I am to be believed, human beings then embroider these into their religions or socail mores and have their gods or their cultures decree that such and such is lipsmacking and that other stuff is not.

I have probably eaten dog under the loose disclaimer of ‘meat stew’ in an Uzbek corrugated-roofed café by the road, on the way from Tashkent to Samarkand. Muslims and Jews have eaten pork in error, often enough. They live to tell the tale with no apparent harm to their ethical cores. Whether entry is prohibited to heaven or some other paradise owing to such contamination remains to be seen..

It is hard for us to comprehend that what we refuse to eat is the result of mere sentimentality or expediency and that there are no universal laws out there. Here’s a quick TT (Taboo Test). Order the following food, according to your degree of revulsion, should circumstances require you to survive. Put the most mouth watering first and the least appetising, last:

Dolphin, Flies, Snake, Snail, Worm, Rat, Penguin, Bat, Crow, Tarantula

Bon appetit!

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Saturday, March 7, 2009



Slumdog Millionaire – Piss and Tell

I like Danny Boyle as a director, from Trainspotting on. He handles colour and crowd movement brilliantly. He also has a gift for managing the sordid so that it hurts and yet there is no overly glossy dramatising that you get in most American gangster films, for example. And he shocks in ways that audiences pay for. A bit visceral. Always pushing the plot on. He also seems a nice bloke, judging by the interview at the wonderfully conceived (by Mark Kermode) world premier of his ‘lost’ film, Alien Love Triangle in a twenty odd seat cinema behind a suburban house in Wales, which made my tears well.

Therefore, with the hype of all those awards woodpeckering about my ears and a personal interest in India – I was born there and have been back – I settled down for the film, Slumdog Millionaire. When it finished I expect I had a screwed up look of bemusement on my face. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it. It was engaging enough: the picaresque journey of two uneducated brothers to early adulthood, one through crime and the other through petty crime and, finally, winning Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It also contained the oldest narrative line of girl lost, girl found, girl lost again, girl found for good, twining around the tales of maturation.

It wasn’t great in its humour – the scene of the uneducated boy scamming a foreign couple about the history behind the Taj Mahal was too corny to be funny – and the recurring TV clips of him in the Who Wants to Be A Millionaire show somehow lacked laughs and dramatic tension. As well as this, it missed out on the drive and fury of the ensemble playing of, say, City of God, which managed the coup of depicting the desperate plight of those in favellas while respecting without endorsing their complex, sometimes utterly despicable behaviour.

Then there is the Indian thing in me. Or is it the general business of portraying poverty? For example I dislike nearly all films whose plots have white stars against the backdrop of black faces. I didn’t really enter Slumdog empathetically. What always strikes me as a western non-tourist walking through slums, is the mixed feelings of guilt at being, relatively, so well off and that strange desire to observe and store up experiences for recounting. Piss and tell. Something in me both wants to do something to help change matters and something else remains detached and objective, as though, when I come to depict events, I’ll be able to describe them for maximum effect. I refuse to be overcome by emotion, regardless of the knives of empathy in my insides.

By the end of the film, I felt that it was hardly a specifically Indian experience, despite the Hindi and despite the child blindings. Dickens did this kind of plot much better. Even the Bollywood ensemble sequence in the railway station at the end borrowed heavily from Zatoichi, where the samurai plot finishes, bizarrely, with the flourish of a tap dance.

I am sorry it’s not a more analytical review. Why am I so concerned about authenticity when I don’t apply this criterion to every film I see? Everything has its context and the film I saw prior to Slumdog was The Class (Entre les Murs), a year in the life of a multi-ethnic mixed ability class and its teacher in a slum of Paris. It was riveting and set up so many complex debates about poverty, race, culture and what can be acceptable in context, that maybe my mind was still trying to unscramble it, days later – when I sat down to Danny Boyle, where everything appeared a mite too cinematically glib.

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Monday, March 2, 2009


Vice and Virtue in the Virtual

There are times when you must extol the virtues of the Internet. It can be a Pandora’s Box upon which politicians and the unseen mulitnational forces that conspiracy theorists believe run the world’s affairs, would like to sit. At other times it can be a Medusa’s Head of writhing snakes, whose tongues flicker at the innocent user, invariably making him or her an unwilling prey.

The dramatic tension is increased because monitors and key boards have become prostheses, biotechnically grafted on to our persons. We suffer viruses, freezing, unhealthy intakes of spam, Altzheimic lacunae, senior moments and the like. If everything slows down to the pace of a zimmer frame, we invoke the second law of thermodynamics because we are reminded of our own mortality.

I was sent, the other day, one of those execrable pyramid diatribes about how white people in America were suffering because the US legislature had passed laws over the years which gave minorities rights, thus demeaning the supremacists’ sense of the order of things. It is bad enough when such communication comes unannounced and anonymous past the filters but this was personal. Someone from my past, from school days in fact, had included me in their roll of honour. Maybe it was an assumption of ties forged by going to Blaydon Grammar School, as though all who had survived that piecemeal, lethargic, educational process, like the children of Jesuits, must have been conditioned to see the world through the eyeholes of a peaked white hood. The person who had forwarded this email of racist rancour had seemingly succumbed to its post-script stating that only 5% of those receiving it would be brave enough to send it on. I dealt with it as well as I was able, feeling that my role in the affair was to attack the virulence and let everyone on the aforesaid roll know how despicable I felt it all to be.

But, of course it is a lesson.

Something significant that the Internet is beginning to do which seems, so far, to have escaped the theorists and the pundits, is make us all players in the way we manage human affairs. We may no longer be able to repeat those dishonourable crimes of the past and claim to have no knowledge of holocausts or genocides. Today, there can be no excuse. You are in the thick of events and you can contribute to them, one way or another. No newspaper editor can block your letter of protest. No TV producer can discount your wish to repudiate a character assassination or perceived slight to your ideals. Everything that is known to be happening in the world is there at the end of a Google click. There is no excuse now just to allow things to escalate, to wash over you like a tide of sewage.

In the old days, the Christians among us would talk of bumping into Peter at the Pearly Gates and having our sins weighed against our virtuous acts but, even for Christians, there must be a realisation that God has gone techno. The meeting with Peter will have him a PDA button away from a spreadsheet which will give the statistics of how much you contributed to the fight for good over evil in your Internet behaviour. No doubt the same scenario holds for the followers of every one of Earth’s religions. And for agnostics like myself.

So, if you’ve never done it, try it. Take part. Save your soul or validate your sense of justice. Send an email supporting something you truly believe in, or attacking something you find unpalatable. Otherwise, those with extremist agendas will increasingly corrode and corrupt our social life.

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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Dying for it

It is a prevailing feature of these blogs. Ruminations on the nature of death. Obviously I have a personal interest, growing more so as the end of my candle burns a now disproportionate path and, judging by a growing readership, so do you, whatever condition your own tallow is in! Maybe it’s life imitating art, but the rather public death dance of Jade Goody is followed by the media and their audiences with an obsessive vicariousness that needs some attempt at explication. Curiously, switching TV channels, here in London, I also found myself listening to Patrick Swayze talking of his own battle to press back the perimeter of his life. His face displayed the lines of the warrior in the midst of his final battle. His cancerous cells were, to his mind, intelligent enemies, changing form like wraiths as they sought the more vulnerable channels through his body. Whereas, Goody projects an almost religious novice’s beatific radiance, her shaven head adding to the image of almost nun-like otherwordliness. Hers is an acceptance of what is to be and a grasping at the drama of living it, bathed in the sympathetic eyes of a population not given to absorption with death.

I am looking at that last sentence. Yes, I feel it is true, death being the last taboo, particularly if it is twinned with old age. Thus, it takes the virtually lived deaths of public figures to seduce audiences into the dreaded discourse on mortality that is normally evaded by wilful acts of denial. In Jade Goody’s brief tenure on a public’s imagination, her chosen behaviour at the end seems to have touched a hidden nerve of admiration and empathy among many. She had already achieved a kind of fame with her brash insensitivities and street-wise, broad-brush repartee, becoming one of the many who become TV generated icons, gained without any gift other than her will and her larger than life representation of a particular slice of humanity . How many girls now see celebrity in similar vein?

One can do no other than wish her well and wonder if a miracle might occur for her. At the same time, there is a lesson from her transient, screen life as there is with Patrick Swayze’s. Their last curtain calls bring home the realisation that we tend not to think about our own final hours until they are ticking by on the face of an actual clock beside us.

One of my management clients, a heart doctor, as it happens, replied as follows to a patient questioning him, in a piece of dialogue that could have been taken from a dark comedy:
“Who wants to be a hundred?” asked the patient.
“A ninety nine year old, usually,” replied the surgeon.

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

From Lover to Carer: John Suchet

We are fragile beings, here temporarily and ever hopeful that we will make the most of our stay in life, to the very end. Not a bitter end, but a sweet drift from everything we know. I was listening to John Suchet on BBC Radio 4 this morning in the sub zero beauty of the Pyrenees, talking about his wife Bonnie and how she was being taken from him by Alzheimers. How he has spilled into anger occasionally at her increasing ineptitude – with all the resulting guilt.

It brought back to me ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’ by Oliver Sachs. You may have read it but, if not, it is a series of well written, wry case studies of people with personality problems which have resulted from brain lesions, cerebral diseases and rare conditions that impair a person’s sense of self. In it are people who live in micro worlds of short term memory so that everything is experienced and forgotten within minutes, people who have no sense of self in space (proprioception) and have consciously to keep their eyes open and tell themselves what to do with every bit of their bodies or they will collapse in a heap and people who mistake and confuse every day objects to such an extent that life becomes an impenetrable series of perplexing labyrinths. What Sachs suggests is that, despite the severity of these conditions, there is something, some essence that remains which is quintessentially human, even if the personality of the individual has fled the brain.

The false belief at the heart of the fragility, it seems to me, is the notion that we have a unity which we call ‘the self’. The reason, perhaps, is probably our need to be social creatures, consistent, coherent, relatively easy to get on with, so that we become stereotyped in our habits, attitudes, behaviours. People then think they ‘know us’ and so we present no threat. If this uniformity begins to break down and our acts become inexplicable, then we become social problems. We present a picture of ourselves to the world that is incompletely human.

What to make of it? There would hardly be an individual among us who would want to face the slow extinction of the personality, even allowing for the fact that after some point in the disintegration we wouldn’t be aware of it. It comes back to the clichéd question of ‘who are we’? If a disease can rob us of our personality then was it a mere chimera in the first place? An illusion? What held it held together for so long, anyway? All those cells in the brain and body interacting chemically and electrically, conspiring to project on the screen of the mind the wavering image that each of us are taught to think of as the self. No wonder we embrace religious convention to give us the potential comfort of a meaningful life now and a Hereafter where this wavering montage coalesces into a heavenly form. It is too painful to feel that our entities are merely the result of the capriciousness of tiny cells.

And these same cells make us empathise with John Suchet, feel for his terrible dilemma, and write reactions to it just like this.

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Thursday, February 12, 2009

February in Paris ….

…doesn’t have the same sense of rhythm and cadence as the April song, nor the allure. After 34 C in Ghana, here I am suffering some minus measurement or other with a wind as sharp as a knife uncapping a soft boiled egg. L’Hotel Terrasse is well-situated on the edge of Montmatre, equidistant from the Sacre Coeur and the industrious sex shops and clubs along the Boulevard Clichy. The third element of my mental triptych is below my hotel window. It is the Montmatre Cemetery, so significant that they had to build an iron road bridge over it. It is typical of French flamboyance, a Lilliputian city of splendid grey stone tombs, clinging to the steep gradient of the hillside and descending higgledy piggledy under the aforesaid bridge. It is prime real estate. Do the living offspring have to pay rent? Some of these mausoleums are bigger than the average mobile kiosk, a tardis-sized wooden box that can house a whole family in the shanty in-fills of Ghanaian cities.

Anyway, sex, death and religion are near at hand, which is diverting, if not particularly comforting.

We ate in a bustling fish restaurant along the road last night and the surreal suddenly fell upon us like the icy air in the street. The place became invaded by Scots in tartan, a sad bagpiper who could only play Scotland the Brave and a group of ageing bohemian artists, the men with their grey hair in pigtails or swept in luxuriant waves behind their ears and down below their collars. One was wearing an electric blue full length coat and another the white equivalent. Their accompanying women were, as with feathered birds, less conspicuous.

So there was much kissing, embracing and loud talk as the MacDonald moths danced around the blue and white flames. As a floor show it wasn’t bad – probably more perky than in the lap dancing arenas in the other direction. Some, given their age, may be hoping to reside in comfort under my window, providing the ground rent is fully paid up and their ancestors have subsided enough to provide elbow room.

As for the Scots…? Their resting places will be, generally, less well advertised, given their tendency to moulder in the unknown graves of their Diaspora.

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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The shape of gods to come

I see that sufferers from multiple sclerosis in its early stages have responded well to stem cell surgery and wondered, as usual, what road we are on as a species. Some time ago I posited the view that our capacity to develop ourselves in dramatic ways, using the full range of medical interventions, was essential if we were to get off this planet before we made it completely inhospitable. We will eventually be able to design humans for all environments and social and political demands.

Until now the majority of us have projected our need for a god on an Immortal, outside ourselves, thereby attributing to Him or Her or It the power of omniscience and omnipotence over our affairs. Thus, in Ghana, the winners of the December election, the NDC, thanked Him (in this case) for prevailing upon the electorate to vote them in. The opposition would have done the same if they had won. Sadly, the opposition have not held No-Thanks-giving services for their defeat! I didn’t realise, until I read The History of God by Karen Armstrong (a nun who leapt the convent wall), that the Jews fell for the notion of Jehova at a time when there were competing gods in their pantheon, because – Big New Idea – he rewarded when things went well and punished when they didn’t. This was a Mark 2 god, I would guess. Before this, in Mark 1 times, you needed a god for each good outcome you might desire, weather, harvest, victory over your enemy, love… and there were even gods who dished out the bad stuff. Having one god who acted judge and jury was innovative and since He dealt with all possible events, he beat off all challengers.

Now we are quickly moving to the aforementioned position of recreating and constructing ourselves in a myriad ways. Not in a god’s image, presumably, but according to our own sense of purpose. The Mark 3 God now exists inside our human consciousness. It will mean a radical rethinking of whatever underpins our moral precepts. We are at a stage of Gods R’ Us. It is distinctly at odds with the Mark 2 Ten Commandments, for example and the denunciation of (graven) images that are not a likeness of Him. On a website: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_10co.htm
it is reported that even the Anglican Church seems predisposed towards this irrevocable change in outlook, if its quote is anything to go by: “Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.”

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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Headers in footer and the intellectually challenged

I was running along the inside left channel, hardly able to see. The rain, lashing down, was turning my spectacle lenses into something approaching the patterned glass of the bathroom door. The ground under my feet squelched and I am sure that my private parts had withdrawn to warmer climes inside my body. Football on the school field circa 1957. I remember the ball coming over as I reached the penalty area and, in an act of sheer bravado, I rose to meet it, despite its sodden leather weight and clumsily tied cord lace. By some miracle, it turns out, my team’s centre forward, Norman, noted for his massive thighs and obdurate head, barged me aside and headed the ball into the net.

The miracle is this. On the BBCs website today it is revealed that concussion sustained in adolescence can have effects that last for thirty or more years. In tests, those that achieved prowess in contact sports, or who simply fell on their heads in odd acts of carelessness, were outscored consistently in maths and problem solving, when compared with those, like myself, who either ducked cranial contact or were too inept to manage it.

It seemed to me, on reading this, that here was an explanation of how women appear to get better, intellectually, with age and many men seem to stand still. After all that sport, followed by regular banging of their heads against the wall because they can’t get right answers in their jobs or in the home, some men seem to give up and start reaching for their slippers at the age of forty or so while women (apart from those intent on shattering the glass ceiling by leaping upwards) rise to new challenges and responsibilities.

Then again, thinking about my increasing lack of control over the simplest operations of memory, I may have suffered some blow to the head of which I am now unaware. Perhaps I blacked out and the details of the event never came back to me. As, for example, when the maths teacher, one J. A. Brown, or JAB for short, went round the class with a blackboard T square, thumping heads that couldn’t manage equations, heads that had just come off a wintry sports field. I have no notion as to whether I was one of his victims but I am pretty certain all the other boys suffered near decapitation. And I wasn’t that good at equations.

It’s an interesting fact of this new research, is it not, that those that had knowledge beaten into them at school, are, in their later years, unlikely now to manage more than SATs Stage One, if I’ve got the right name for it. I can’t quite remember.

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Sunday, January 25, 2009

Stories without words

When media presenters and reporters talk about stories ‘breaking’, they are referring to the crude refinery that is a news room. It is like a well gushing. They take the crude oil or data with all its impurities and makes a sharp, clean, narrative from it, thereby excluding the dross (ie that which doesn’t fit or add anything to the story). We watch and listen to it attentively, blearily accepting the authenticity and moral stance of the service, tut tutting here and there, wondering why such and such a fiend has not been assassinated YET, annoyed at the prominence of this or that, irritated by the amusing tales they insert so that we don’t reach for the Stanley knife at the litany of bad news. Sometimes we focus a little more and argue aloud at the tv set, because the party line of the programme OBVIOUSLY doesn’t confirm our own ideals or philosophy. I do this quite a lot with Sky News. Recently, one of the royal brats showed his blue blood colours on video, when using offensive terms to his non WASP brother soldiers (all in the spirit of friendship, of course) and Sky prefaced the news item with “some of you might find what the prince had to say, offensive”, as though there were any doubt about the matter. Getting your news unprocessed and comprehensive is a search that the faint hearted may as well resist. Most news is propaganda, one way or another. Some of it is in your face but most is hidden in the sub-clauses of polite and glossily dispassionate rhetoric. In hope I watch CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC World to try to extract another view, another perception, even one depending on an alien ideology.

Two recent experiences seem worth relating in this regard. The first was on Euronews. It’s a programme I watch in France and it is available here in Ghana, too. It runs an extremely hypnotic section every hour which is labelled underneath: “No Comment”. There is no voice over, just a series of images taken from some event from war torn Gaza to Chinese children in school. Well, before you rail at this blog, I know that images can be selected to imply or underwrite the subjectivity of the camera-wielder but the long panoramic sweeps, the tight focus on details, the minutes-long takes, allow me to look around and not be chased into a particular view by the commentary. Thus it was that, after seeing Obama being inaugurated on one channel, I switched to Euronews and was spellbound by tracking shots of the presidential limo with its inches thick metal and glass, heading for the White House. It took forever and made it feel as though you were in a Godfather film. The car inched along flanked on four corners by Agents-Smith from The Matrix and further State security guards hanging out of the doors of accompanying cars. When the camera swept upwards, there were the snipers on roofs. When the camera panned the crowd, herded behind rails I was like the guy in Jaws, watching for the shark to leap and take someone. Not another JFK my mind muttered.

Speaking of sharks (I don’t need to mention them again!), the notion of animal as killing machine came to the fore last night when probably the most riveting natural narrative to come out of a camera lens was documented on National Geographic. Eight and a half minutes of being in the right place at the right time and with a loaded zoom movie camera. This was the ‘plot’. Tourists, cameras flashing, watching a herd of buffalo, A pride of lions attack and cut off a buffalo offspring, forcing it into the water. Suddenly there are five or so lions mauling it. It screams. At this moment there is a ferocious geyser of water and at its head flies a big crocodile. The lions are bemused like the cat in your house when presented with something alien. It snaps and shows its teeth, then grasps the baby victim. There is a tug of war and the croc is pulled out of the water. Too much. He lets go and the lions prepare themselves for the feast with much purring and gnashing of teeth. The baby continues screaming. Then, out of the left side-frame of the image comes the herd, again. They come close to the lions, indecisive at first because of their apparent ages-old enmity. But one – a Darwinian change agent – suddenly transcends fear and charges, forcing a lion away from the pack and chasing it off. Another (was it the same beast returning?), charged again and lifted a lion into mid air with its horns. Then the calf was miraculously free and melting into the herd to be replaced by rows of lowered horns. The lions ran, ignominiously, though that’s my word and terrible anthropomorphism! Eight and a half minutes of pure gold camera work. No cutting room. No voice over, except for yells of shock, disbelief and triumph from the tourists.

It’s on YouTube and millions have watched it so far. Will you?

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Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Fitting in to the scheme of things

Having had something of a Christian upbringing – at least until the age of 8 or 9, I have a certain grounding in biblical matters. Given the seasonal cycles of church offerings, every year the lessons and sermons and readings would come round again and again. And these were then repeated in school. By the time I became a teacher, I had immersed myself in the ocean of agnosticism. But that doesn’t stop phrases being quoted by my brain, whether I decree it or not. The extraordinary New Testament lines from John did this the other day: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God. And the word was God.”

It happened like this. I was reclining on the sofa, watching DSTV’s The History Channel, one of a clutch of programmes under the title, Space Sunday. Now, for any science and science fiction fan and proclaimed agnostic, the day was filled with goodies. Not that I watched them end to end but in recordings, like a string of pearls over a week. Anyway, the one I was worm-holing into was called something like The End of the Universe. Rather in the style of a holiday programme, it took the viewer from a camp fire in the American desert to the beginnings of time. On the way we met planets, stars, galaxies, super novae, hyper novae, wombs of stars, black holes, quasars, searching for the furthest point from which light has emanated. The Big Bang. At the end we were there. (The static snow flakes of your television, when waiting to be tuned to a station, are receiving this earliest broadcast from the beginning of time). And what WAS there? It all started with a singularity so small and so dense that when it exploded, the entire universe was formed as a result.

“In the beginning was the word and the word was with Jack. And the word was sub-atomic particle.”

That everything that we know (or imagine) was concentrated in this initial spark, whether we regard it as the wilful act of the Divine or an implacable law of a disinterested Nature we cannot comprehend, is probably the greatest paradox in our consciousness. Infinitely small and infinitely dense, containing neither space nor time but giving rise to both – and mass. It is hard to wrap one’s brain around it except as an utterly testing metaphor. To know, too, that we have atoms in our body that have travelled across galaxies from this initial detonation, is stupefying. We are, as the New Agers and Buddhists will aver, at one with the universe. Well, we would be, if we bothered to meditate on it.

Maybe Richard Dawkins is right and there is no God to be found in The Big Bang’s unrolling (after all, the end of space and time is now posited to be an icy nothingness with every atom that once constituted it at its most grand and architectural, dissipated into solitary aloneness, unable to interact with any other because of the vast distances between them). Whatever, I have exchanged the stained glass windows of a very rigid ecclesiastical building in my childhood for the colour enhanced wonders of space and time. It is more reassuring to imagine the atoms in my body heading off on their strange pilgrimages into the infinite when I finally succumb to the dissolution of the flesh, than visions of Paradise, whether with angels or virgins or the souls of the Good.

Religions seem incapable of stopping their adherents from visiting destruction on each other. They are all so earthbound, despite their protestations to the contrary. But look into the space time continuum and life down here seems a bit of a sideshow and not worth getting too excited about.

I want to end up like those early savants who wrote The Egyptian Book of the Dead (1240 BC). But instead of spending my remaining existence preparing myself and my boat for the trip across the river to the Afterlife, I’ll be giving a final service to my atoms so that they can continue on their fateful, onward journey.

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Saturday, January 17, 2009

MacBush: that play

Macbeth points out at some stage in his journey to destruction that he is too much in blood to retreat again to any moral position. Shakespeare’s point being that once an individual or nation embarks on a murderous course, only the intervention of external or occult powers, can halt it. There is something in the nature of our species that becomes gorged on the flesh of our enemies so that the belly expands and must be kept fed by more deaths. We are beyond helping ourselves and need someone else to step in and halt the crimson fountains and pools, to put us in prison or out of our crazed misery. The United Nations ought to fulfil this macro role but its lip-serving members won’t make unanimous decisions that inhibit their own capacity to inflict war crimes or go after the mineral wealth of theose unable to defend themselves.

I was thinking this as I watched President Bush make a goodbye speech to the people of the United States. In a sense he paraphrased Sinatra’s (and Sid’s) rendition of My Way. All that he had done had been the result of interrogating his own conscience, he said. Everything from the Middle East to Guantanamo, from the deregulation of the banking sector to the pursuit of enforced democracy worldwide. His regret was not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and plastering victory notices after initially downing Sadam. It was a fittingly unheroic, miserable presentation from a man at sea, never waving, always drowning.

What is difficult to swallow is that the eight years or so of his presidency limped bloodily by as he conducted foreign and national policy and all we or his own people could do was sit it out. As if we were all bit players or extras in MacBush, the play, and were never given meaningful lines that might change the dialogue’s imperatives. Rather like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, we sat at our dinner parties or around pub tables, discussing our impotence, conspiracy theories, the evils of capitalism and trying to make sense of being in the dark, so far away were we from the shadowy doings in the Oval Office. That’s the thing about democracy. Those that are elected have a term of office or two to impose their ideology on their people. Now that the US has had their eight years of neocon liberalism, the global markets are drowning in the effluent that is still coming in sewer loads from their excesses and the economy is on its knees. Will the US head back to some kind of social democracy, where people can afford health care and housing? It is doubtful. They revile any sense of socialism there because they see it as a constraint on an individual’s freedom to ‘screw thy neighbour’. Even Obama will be hard put to soften the inbred adage of the survival of the fittest.

Bush and his lieutenants were a nasty lot and they did very nasty things. The world did not take one step towards being a safer or better place for its inhabitants as a result of their tenure and the United States is not an emblem of democracy but of capitalist greed and imperialism. Let us hope its people deserve Obama and begin the long haul towards international sensitivity and internal and external social justice.

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Monday, January 12, 2009

Babes in Arms: Israeli Spokeswomen

Scanning the internet and You Tube, in particular, I see there are swathes of criticism being directed at Israel for her inhumane war on the Gaza people. Enough for me not to reiterate. However, atrocities cannot pass without a blog such as this adding its small voice to the debate because every discourse about morality should be enriched and deepened in whatever way possible. Freedom can be gauged in the number of voices that are allowed to take part in the assessment of political and social acts. From a Jungian perspective, even what we think adds to the universal pool of understanding. To write, if we have the means, makes it more concrete, more manifest. To talk publicly is even more powerful. I believe it was Roland Barthes (memory?) who suggested that speech is superordinate to writing because in writing there is always the possibility of erasure, whereas you cannot unsay anything.

Which brings me to this lateral perspective on the Gaza atrocities. Having learned from the debacle in Lebanon two and a half years ago, Israel prepared very carefully for the assault on that overcrowded strip of land. Not just with its sophisticated weaponry but with its spokespersons. Hearing them, night after night, handwringing over civilian casualties, swearing they are on wonderful terms with aid agencies such as the Red Cross and constantly referring to their victimhood under the barrage of Hamas’ rockets, I have the palpable feeling that the scripts were written months ago. Scripts for exactly the eventuality we are now seeing. At the same time they effected a news blackout on independent observers by keeping journalists as far from the action as logistics allowed. No doubt the media trainers that worked with the oh so suave Prime Minister’s spokesman, the female foreign minister and the blonde female military spokeswoman, coached them in adopting the same calm, personable, almost warm, reasonable, open-eyed candour. Phrases such as “All we want is a bit of peace and quiet for our population in the north”, as though they were discussing an ASBO on an unruly neighbour. Or, “…surgical air strikes” just prior to the bombing of the United Nations school. But how these attempts to control the spin of a war’s trajectory come unstuck. The dissonance between the Foreign Minister in her fashionable white jacket and the ravages of civilian life in Gaza sinks deeply into the emotional unconscious of any viewer. As does the good looking blonde woman in battle fatigues, speaking for the military offensive. Isn’t she a heroine? You can see the reasoning behind this. If women are speaking for Israel, then they are truly not the offenders here. Perhaps I belong to such a bygone era that the foregoing analysis needs squashing in the age of equality but I always felt that it was men who went to war, who perpetrated the worst evils, and that the hopes of humanity rested mainly with women, for don’t they bring children into the world and nurture them? Haven’t they a monopoly on mercy? I know it’s not cut and dried as a concept and that there are plenty of nasty females who will commit horrific crimes or goad their fathers, sons and husbands to do the same, but overall…

Whatever, I would guess that this logic lies behind the choice of spokeswomen in war. Females, generally, would not inflict horror on other women and children in the way men will always do, so listen and empathise.

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Thursday, January 8, 2009



Small boy! Where are you going?

Continuing the theme of language from my last blog, I will start by commenting on the blurb sent to me regarding a spring fabric exhibition in Paris. My designer companion and I attended last September and so knew what to expect this time. It bore out what one discovers if one has a particular specialism, whether through work or as a hobby. The world turns out to be full of villages, each stretched across and around it by the nerves and translucent skin of the internet. An internet village is what an academic colleague of mine once called “an intelligence community”, that is, a collection of like-minded people lightly bound together by an obsession or interest. Be it ancient scrolls, garden gnomes, doom-mongering, sexual proclivity or any other of the infinite range of possibilities you might conjure up, the internet enables you to club or cluster. But this is not the end of the story. As you congeal as a virtual group, you develop a village language, sometimes with arcane acronyms, sometimes with exotic nomenclature as a result of the ingrowing nature of your correspondence. Language serves the purpose of denoting who is on the bus and who is off it, as the late Tom Wolfe had it in his trippy Kool-Aid Acid Test. Anyway, back to a quote from the blurb:

The city silhouette is emerging as harmonious and light coloured. Extreme fineness, omnipresent in suitings as in shirtings, is never ethereal. Lightness feeds on consistency to structure clothing with neat or energetically floaty lines.

Now who writes this? Not a failed poet, I’m sure, but someone who regards language as a novel mix of whatever he or she can extract from a battered thesaurus. The words are extracted and randomised, rendered down further in the artful discourse of a cocktail-sipping focus group and spewed on to the page. At the exhibition (a large enough village of several thousand inhabitants, drawn by the lure of fabric to a Paris suburb) the language is cosseted and repeated like some Gnostic text. It then re-emerges on fashion websites, having become the acceptable lingua franca of the trade.

Meanwhile, language flourishes in other vibrant ways, in Ghana, as I have often mentioned. We were returning home yesterday and the smallest taxi I have ever seen, a Daewoo that would take one passenger and a handbag at maximum, slowed our path. Our driver hooted at it unceremoniously and told us that the translation into English for the twi term for the vehicle, is:

Small boy. Where are you going?

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Sunday, January 4, 2009

On ciggies, race and toilet humour…

I have been reading Simon Gray’s final memoirs, written just before he died in 2008, called, appropriately The Last Cigarette and the last in The Smoking Diaries series. It’s a bitter sweet, funny and dark affair. A sort of extended blog, a stream of consciousness which includes many a vitriolic diatribe against people, events and the forces of the state. It’s unusual in that he was a very liberal grumpy old man and so his targets sit relatively comfily within my own sights. He sometimes homes in on prey which also makes an old socialist like myself uneasy. Particularly when it comes to language and what has become socially unacceptable. For example, some deputy police chief from the London Met stated recently that it was unacceptable to use a sentence that contained both the words, Islam and terrorist. Gray gave a whole list of paradoxical sentences to show the idiocy of this, the best being the policeman’s very own!

“It is unacceptable to use a sentence that contains the words Islam and terrorist.”

Language is a slippery old beast and, as Derrida pointed out, has a habit of leaking meanings that the author desperately tries to curtail. As anyone who has attempted to create a survey questionnaire will know, unambiguous questions and statements are very hard to come by. If a statement is shifted into a new cultural context, then further complications arise. As was discovered by my partner, who, when in London, was talking to some social worker or other and mentioned half-caste friends of hers (she being quarter-caste but seemingly white). She was duly reprimanded for being non pc, whereupon she snapped back that she had every right to use the term since in Ghana it was part of the fabric of language. Ignorant professionals in the UK should research cultural contexts a bit more and pontificate a bit less. On the other hand, a woman once came to her door in England, asking to speak to her mother, ‘the mulatto’. Now this term, being derived from the slave trade is deeply offensive. In Ghana, as in many parts of the world, there is a consciousness of skin colour which defies western attempts to deem what may or may not be acceptable. C. L. R. James, in ”The Black Jacobins” on Haitian culture, suggests that at the time of writing, there were a hundred and forty descriptors covering variations in skin pigmentation, currently in use. So far, in Accra I haven’t felt discrimination against my white skin, at all. But then it is not white-white but a subtle bronzed sallowness that probably originates from my being born in India. I’d call it beech, myself….

One or two other bits and pieces that have caught my eye over the last few days. A programme on Ghana TV this morning, advertising ‘style’ showed a happy family around a table and on chairs, all of which were, apparently, modish. On the table there was an array of matched china but, right in the middle there was a small black plastic bag containing something bought for their meal. This ubiquitous bag, which is used to sell everything, except goods in the classier mall shops, has a somewhat amusing, if macabre name here, “head in a bag”.

Meanwhile, the election is finally over after the protracted run off for the Presidency. Ghana is the oldest democracy in Africa and has done its citizens proud. As I write there has been no insurrection. The conservatives are out after eight years and the socialists are in, and the latter are making exactly the right noises about integrated, inclusive government. The new President spoke gravely and well. There will be no victimisation of those who supported the last incumbents. Let us hope not. One amusing incident in this otherwise serious and uplifting set of events, was the ‘vacuous’ question posed by a studio anchor woman to her roving reporter who was at the count in an outlying small town. “There must be a lot of people, media, political and so on there. Have they enough conveniences to cope? He stared back into the camera but could not remain straight faced. “Around here, there is a lot of bush,” he responded, cracking up, “But I am not checking on the coming and going.”

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Monday, December 29, 2008

Of blackbirds in pies and turkey voting patterns

It is such a burdensone cliché to mutter that something is so bizarrely contrary to personal welfare that it is like turkeys voting for Christmas. I thought that twenty four blackbirds voting for pies might be a fresher analogy. This is not just because of the nursery rhyme but because blackbirds’ songs are as pretty and complex as any, while the Russians have a penchant for the lachrymose. Russians? Well, they have just been asked to name their country’s heroes in a national poll. Joe Stalin was No. 3! Well, since it is Russia, maybe the analogy should be that it is like bears voting to be shackled to dance away their lives, encircled by grinning humans.

I called in to the tele room just now to catch up on the Presidential run-off here. It is very close with less than one per cent difference in total votes cast. While I was wondering about the consequences of either candidate getting in, along the bottom of the Sky screen was the breaking news concerning the Russian vote. Well, riddle me with bullets from a Kalashnikov! What does this say about memory, herd mentality, nationalism, love of one’s land or social drives? Tens of millions died under Stalin’s yoke. There were the pogroms against intellectual and religious dissidents and those peasants whose faces did not fit. And there were the vast military marches into death against Hitler, whose people and troops were themselves almost exactly mirroring the grotesque tragedy of their enemy. It is a paradox that, when the chips are down, the collective urge is more powerful than the individual. Even when choosing the former means almost certain death. Wars are fought between collectives and if enough fear is instilled in the individual, then s/he will generally throw her/his lot in with the herd led by its powerful oppressor. However, sometimes, particularly in democracies, under the icy illumination of historical rationale, heroes become villains, victories become Pyrrhic, dissidents turn into saviours and a sense of incredulity develops between the then and the now. We wonder what led us humans to do such appalling things. The holocaust. The many examples of genocide in countries who have dictatorships.

But the Russians have voted. There can scarcely be a family in the old USSR who did not suffer from the heel of Stalin’s boot and now they are saying that the death of a good proportion of the nation’s young is worth it, if the world is forced to sit up and accept that their country is a major player. I’ve really enjoyed working in Russia and, if I was not suffering from some poetic fog, I sensed, everywhere, a deep pain in people’s eyes. A sorrow. The Russian spirit is half-ploughed into a thousand battlefields and labour camps. Under the Tzars. Under the communists.

I worked in Uzbekistan and drank beer with a Genghis Khan label. He’d get a top vote among national heroes, there, despite his Mongol imperialism in defeating the country’s tribes. Perceptions change. History is about winners and no matter how they won, the vast multitudes, who can’t win at very much in their lives, want to identify with them, regardless of whether they were psychopathic beasts of evil. If the Germans had defeated all against them in Western Europe, when would we be voting Hitler into third place among our national heroes? How long would it take?

We should take a tune from the blackbirds’ song book and sing bitter-sweet, glorious, heroic verses about those who have made our lives freer, more harmonious and informed. They should be our heroes.

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Sunday, December 28, 2008



Cleanse my blood

I am wondering as I now observe the title for this piece unwrap itself from my thoughts and slide down my arms, pass through my fingers and appear upon my monitor, what each of you readers make of it? Those of you who harbour anxieties verging on hypochondria, may be looking eagerly for my report on yet another medical advance. Perhaps an anti-ageing procedure. Those of you who seek spiritual solutions in all things, may associate it with the altar and a purifying communion. There may be others among you who would prefer to dwell in a partial world of medieval fantasy (still being lived out among Sicilians, for whom this is a pointed reminder of the loop of Mafia history.) It could also resonate with those ageing Draculas among you who are desperately seeking renewal via a virgin’s blood.

Well, of course, it is none of these.

I am writing this on the balcony of a simple, palm-thatched cottage overlooking a perfect bay in Ghana. On an island. It is misty still but the sun is just visible as a white yolk. It feels like being trapped in a fable or fantasy that millions might nurse in their private thoughts. When I woke up an hour or so ago, all I could see from my bed, were the bleeding spots of red flowers in the fog.

I need to put on my trunks and swim to cleanse my blood of the wine I consumed yesterday evening. But this is not why I used the phrase in the heading for this piece.

On our way here we had to stop at a police checkpoint. A burly feller carrying a very mean instrument of death, knocked on the side window of our car.

“Cleanse my blood,” he directed.
“When we return later,” said our driver, stiffly, staring straight ahead.

The man gave a resigned grunt and waved us on with his gun, our purses intact, his palms free from grease. His blood uncleansed.

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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Lest we forget…

The latest joke on ageing came my way when I was in England. It was about the newest chair lift. It is very fast. It is so fast that you can remember why you went upstairs! I think I have always found myself in dilemmas resulting from forgetting why I have arrived in some part of the house or other. It’s not a problem of ageing – or multi- tasking (which, despite myths to the contrary, men can do as well as women) but more the way my brain relegates the activity to some weedy area where the imperative to do this or that rolls into the long grass. I remember my mother shrieking in amusement as she found herself pouring sugar down the toilet instead of tea leaves. She was under fifty at the time and lived, sparkily, into her eighties. It also seems to be true that we live in an era where ageing is the enemy of youth, beauty and advertising executives; so much so that we are sensitised, like hypochondriacs, to the slightest sign that our faculties are on the decrease. This is how we prepare ourselves for that last great occasion in our lives – the moment of death. As our vehicle gradually slows, we seem conditioned to view the scenery through the windows as less colourful, less verdant, more deserted and monochrome, more night than day, when, in fact, it is not the case.

Here in Ghana, parties are for everyone, whatever age. Zimmered up, old men cavort and eye young flesh with mischievous grins and old women shake their bums, invitingly, like they always did. Holding on to vitality and a colourful environment seems a paramount drive.

Ageing can also lead to mellowing, whatever we remember or forget but the other end of the spectrum is not uplifting at all. I don’t mean the capacity for the elderly, especially in the west, to become slippered up for a dreary two or three decades of doing little except look out of the windows of their lives as described above, but the psychology of those who want to exercise power to tighten their dying grip on existence and their hatred for the young, who will continue to live on for some time, after they, themselves succumb.

Mugabe, for example.

He is an obscenity and, as in many a state in Africa, his single minded addiction to power, at the expense of his own country’s people, is a horrific reminder of how ageing can also lead to a complete indifference to the suffering of others. Whatever memory loss he suffers, it does not include how to torture, starve, murder and despoil. His contemptuous challenge to other African states, yesterday, that they hadn’t the bottle to try to topple him, is based on a terrible truth. Leaders around this continent will not condemn him because they know that what goes around comes around and they, themselves, are all too often busily storing up enough personal sins to bring War Tribunalists running to catalogue their acts of depravity.

It behoves us all to grin at the usual shortcomings of our memory systems when they involve involuntary lapses of the sugar-in-toilet kind but not to pretend forgetfulness at the terrible plight of those who must endure the tyranny of dictators, especially those who have made lifetime careers of it and will continue on their destructive paths to the very end..

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Monday, December 15, 2008

He Madoff with the money

This blog is a day or two late because of the journey back to Ghana from the UK. Apart from the unhappy business of discovering that the pound is an albatross currency that only really works in the UK, I won’t gripe over this septic isle – this time! But what are my money concerns when compared with the horror story of one Bernard Madoff who ran the US banking sector’s equivalent of a pyramid selling scheme? This conniver gave profits to existing clients entirely from the investments of newcomers. Some 30 to 50 BILLION dollars disappeared in this way, including millions from British Banks. His scam had been inspected by US authorities very recently and found to be top hole. Now I know I am a sucker for the argument that Corporates are greedy and screw the public at large. Also, I am incensed that, as a customer of a bank, if things go a little pear-oriented, then you are treated like a malaria bearing mosquito, batted from pillar to post, losing whatever they can send in the baillifs for – including your house. But when THEY cock it up, we all suffer badly and nothing much happens to those responsible. No doubt Bernie the Brag will get his just deserts but US Inspection teams won’t, nor will the fund managers of the British Banks who swallowed his guff, hook line and sinker and threw our cash at him.

And so the domino falling goes on and on and houses lose their value and people lose both homes and their jobs and STILL the CBI and the banks pontificate about how the Government should run the economy, treating the public sector like it is a dim-witted cousin, who, in Spartan times, would have died at birth on a freezing night on a roof top.

So now there is another black hole in the money world, dragging constellations of financial houses beyond its event horizon, where, the laws of physics posit, they become incredibly debt-heavy with incredibly shrinking pay-outs. Meanwhile, note the elision, another black hole makes the news. This one is at the centre of our galaxy (indeed, another theory suggests that all galaxies are generated by black holes) and it is enormous, millions of times bigger than our sun. Will we end up being sucked into it on December 21st 2012, as discussed in an earlier blog or will we still remain on this peripheral end of a spiral arm, gloomily self-obsessed with ‘this seat of Mars’, indignantly voicing off about the holes in our pockets?

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Monday, December 8, 2008

The War on Error

Clive James has a piece on the BBC website about how he can only think in chaos. It appears he has one of the rooms from hell (I assume that in hell, there are an infinite number of rooms); a vast jumble of related and unrelated sources of data in the form of books, newspapers, half-finished writing and unwashed cups. For myself, such a state of affairs would elicit in me the opposite of creativity, a sort of constipated, distressed inertia. Just as Canute tried to demonstrate that even a king cannot prevent the waves from washing his feet, I cannot prevent waves of nausea roll over me as the debris of past engagements with the word begin to mount on and around my desk. There is a Macbethian sticking point where I must take courage in both hands and bring order to bear. When everything is just so, even to the moment when the last pencil is safely entrapped in the container for writing implements, I can look again at the virgin page, pen poised. This kind of tidal activity goes on incessantly throughout life. Thus, I have, despite all the signs of being a dissolute desk user in my youth, become a tidier upper.

However, the thesis in this little essay is bigger than the battle for control over my desk. It concerns one of the laws of thermodynamics culled from the Hitchhikers Guide or some such; the law of entropy. Basically stated (at least to my subjective satisfaction) it is that all systems break down, from those relating to a human individual to those of a society, to those of the cosmos and, eventually, those of this and the many other posited universes. At the big end of this spectrum, everything in time and space will eventuate in a vast, dissipated deep freeze of practical nothingness and at the small, human end, the Forth Bridge, despite all those continuous coverings of resilient paint, will disassemble into random particles.

Being a management consultant, I am forcefully aware of entropy in human activity. It is a perennial salvage yard for broken down orderly systems, well-intended behaviours, protocols, lists, models and accurate projections. The intended effectiveness of organisations perish like rubber bands in sunlight, their elasticated vitality giving way to a sticky, brittle waste product. Like foraging ants, we consultants move through the administrative and interpersonal mess and drag away the detritus, leaving, momentarily, healthy order. But, despite our best efforts, with good behaviours embedded, creativity refurbished, communications effortless and effective and interpersonal dynamics restored, we know that in the months and years ahead, it will all end in tears. Again.

Mao had one good premise, in my experience. He called it ‘continuous cultural revolution’. In effect, life for each individual is a solitary battle for order in chaos. In the human groupings that make up a society, the problem is exponentially intensified. Look at the global breakdown of banking.

The only answer to the perpetual imperative of systemic order to crack up, to age, to fragment and return to the dust that first constituted it, is a daily war on error. That’s why it takes a life time of Canutish hard work even to write an article such as this.

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Monday, December 1, 2008

Of camels, climates and politics

Life, as they say, throws up its anomalies. I’m in the UK for a period of work which has taken me to the north. After an over night flight from a hot, humid Ghana, I am stuck in a hotel that will never be graced by adjectives of approbation. One minute I am moving slowly through an Accra heat, only ever picking up speed when I’m maintaining a semblance of fitness in a swimming pool, while half-listening to chanting evangelicals, their hymns punctuated by tropical birdsong (like tiny drops of ice being poured into an inkwell or a piercing three note warning call which also raises me from slumber at 5-45 every morning) and the next I am in a land that seemed almost to have faded from memory. Except the grey drizzle and the frozen wind come forcefully back in a déjà vu moment. The world of red-red stew and grasscutter soup is replaced by micro-wave heated processed fish and chips, mash potato and sausages and something called goo-johns which four people at the next table order. The wedding celebration has left the bar in some distress, with balloons half-deflated, ribbons trampled into the carpet and a few hangers-on talking loudly about what has just occurred or bitchily about the people who have attended. I particularly noted the Alan Bennett-like comment, “She doesn’t work in a shop, Jimmy, it’s a boutique!”

The taxi driver had spent most of the journey from the station to the hotel venting his equal hatred of Gordon Brown and Margaret Thatcher; bungs, lobbying and general corruption which was, at least, comparable to conversations I have had recently concerning Ghanaian politics where both major parties talk about ending patronage based on bribery and its grease-my-palm tribal feudalism. The national election takes place next week and ‘the youth’ (a Ghanaian phrase for unstable post-adolescent gangs) are paid one way or another by the self-same parties to turn up at the polling stations to intimidate, cajole or seduce the electorate. There is talk about the outbreak of ‘war’ again (similar to the disturbances in Nigeria). From my naïve perspective, it’s the usual rock and a hard place choice between the incumbent NPP conservatives who keep the peace but embrace the worst excesses of multi-national Corporates and Chinese and US imperialism and the socialist NDC opposition who shared wealth while imprisoning intellectuals and bumping off judges last time they had control.

The shift from the politics of oppression to something approaching civilised tolerance is often invisible in Africa. But then it is so in the West, too, only there social conventions give it a labyrinthine gloss under which the poor and ill-educated suffer without a voice or much hope. There are entrenched, vested interests in both worlds and they are intent in keeping things that way. Humans are capable of anything.

To finish this meander on a slightly lighter note, the treatment of children HAS moved from oppressive to humane as a result of world scrutiny in the rich Arab regions, where camel racing is the gamblers’ preferred arena. Recently, children rode these foul-spitting and halitosis-ridden humps round a track at ungainly speeds, now they are mounted by robots, chased by air-conditioned four wheel driven cars, whose owners press remote controls to operate the toddler-replicants’ whips and whisper imploring instructions into microphones that are broadcast via implanted micro-speakers in the camels’ ears.

“Go through the eye of that needle, camel!”

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Sunday, November 23, 2008



Lonely Hearts: Love and unfaithfulness …

I was interested in the following table on the BBC’s science site. Some psychologists have been analysing the key words that men and women use when advertising their wares in the shop window that is the Personal Columns. As you can see in the table below, women have a more pragmatic, economic outlook to the way they prioritise what seem to be the top five evolutionary ingredients in preserving gene stock. It goes some way to explaining the beautiful woman/ugly bloke scenario, though, here in Ghana, one might expect, given my last blog, that Resources would be closer to the top of a woman’s list.

Men’s preferences

1. Attractiveness
1. Commitment
3 Social skills
4. Resources
4 Sexiness

Women’s preferences

1. Commitment
2. Social skills
3. Resources
4. Attractiveness
5. Sexiness

There were other differences, further down the list, such as humour. The rather toe-curling acronym, WSOH, which people liberally apply to themselves, is meant differently by the genders. Men are looking for approval for their humorous offerings while women see them as a means to illuminate the psyche and resourcefulness of the male. Crudely put, men want their partners to think highly of them and, therefore, not go off with another male’s gene possibilities. Women want to know what they are getting into, though they may not be as prescriptive about their own faithfulness as previously thought.

There was some research done a few years back which suggested that more than one in ten children born were not the offspring of the male partner of the time. Midwives have plenty of anecdotal evidence to support those findings. Since everyone is aware, at some level of consciousness, of what appeals to the opposite sex, self-advertisers tend to present themselves as having a potent combination of these top traits. They manufacture appealing self-images.

It is not surprising, therefore, that lying provides fuel for the biggest complaint among those who indulge in Lonely Hearts advertising.

After all, more recent scientific studies have found that most people in the West engage in the ‘three stages of love’. Lust, attraction and then attachment. A little more physical and chemical than advice found in Eddie Cochrane’s Three Steps to Heaven. No wonder then, as male and female correspondents create and present their seductive fibs to each other, most potential relationships never even reach stage one.

If your heart is yearning and you want to do something about it, take the table at the top and study what your would-be partner is likely to be looking for – but get the traits in the right order! Then, having met your lonely heart, hope to play out the reality of the three stages of love.

Good luck!

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Sunday, November 16, 2008

Sex, flirtation and romance on the Internet

The latest moral maze that has extruded from Second Life even made national news in the UK. Second Life, for those of you who don’t indulge (there are over 50 million who do!), is a virtual community where you can live a life interacting with others of similar bent. So, the news story goes, a man logs on to Second Life and chats up some female and his real-time partner, who has warned him once before about having licentious thoughts which find fruition in virtual reality, kicks him out of his real house. But he says he didn’t do anything except flirt. One on one with another avatar. And who knows who that was? It could have been another bloke. It could have been a teenager trying out a bit of slap and tickle with his or her parents’ generation. For a laugh, like. But for her, the thought is what counts. She doesn’t want a bloke whose libido is raised by alter egos in the never never. Even if it could have been the creation of some potbellied redneck loser, dressed as a schoolgirl. She wants a man whose every thought is focused on her.

Are we on the cusp of transmigration of the physical into the virtual, where the Second Lifer carries with him or her an entire moral suitcase, packed by a partner, sworn never to be opened on the other side? If, as some pundit said on Sky News, people’s lives can be so humdrum that they gain their sole fulfilment in virtual worlds, then it is not surprising sometimes that with the freedom to express their deepest desires in this animated Pandora’s Box, comes the sexual tension of being found out in their First Lives. Sinning gains an unholy halo of extra frisson when it crosses the line, drawn in the sand, by a partner’s toe, even when that toe is hypothetical.

Was the woman right to inhabit this moral high ground? Walk along any high street in any country and watch men and women walking together in apparent happiness. Then focus on the eyes. Mmm how they slither this way and that, dragged into focus by the exploding pheromones of a passing male or female! Here in Ghana, the very notion of Second Life for most people would be an activity verging on ridiculous fantasy. The self-indulgent madness of the cosseted. The case, outlined above, would be given short shrift. Eyes are expected to stray. Men are expected to play the field. Sex is not shrouded by the same moral rip tide that washes away western sinners. Romance is not the social ideal that westerners espouse in their relationships. When you are fighting to survive, there are far more pressing issues. Better a relationship that is economically sound than one that is sexually or romantically fulfilling.

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Sunday, November 9, 2008

Obama in Ghana


Well, it happened! The American public voted him in. Meanwhile, two so-called white supremacist, would-be assassins were caught by police, Palin suggested that Africa was a country, not a continent and Berlusconi, that obnoxious manipulator of Italian politics, congratulated Barack on his tan. These are merely connected filaments in the mycelium which exists beneath the surface of white, western societies. They join up to the millions of historical dots that are/have been the expressions of racism. They leak into the itineraries of the media in various forms; some as terrifyingly real threats and some as ‘amusingly’ ignorant gaffes, but all are based on a singular premise – that the colour of skin defines differences between peoples. And that white is superior to any other shade. The absolute indicator of the end of racism will be the day that skin is not used as a primary descriptor of a person, in every day life. We probably will always rely upon it in the criminal field, in profiling a suspect but, come that day, it won’t add one atom of antipathy, deprecation or prejudice. All that will matter is the simple fact that the sought-after individual is Chinese, Asian, Caucasian or whatever. It won’t infer, in any way, that this is a lesser being and that there may be a causal connection between skin and act.

For the moment, it’s great he won. Ghanaians, I have met, even those who have as much knowledge of American politics as Palin has of this continent, know and love one thing. Obama is black. He may prove to be a great President. He may fall from grace. But now he enjoys the right to do so, just like any white human being.

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Saturday, November 1, 2008

Swear words in The United States: socialist and liberal


During the heavy crawl through the toxic fumes that can suddenly envelop me in Accra gridlocks, I am able to be the perfect social anthropologist, taking notes on the human traffic that weaves its way between the vehicles. These fit young men and women are, as has been noted, models of grace and tolerance. Whatever they are selling, they must endure a hundred rejections to each sale. And the combination of goods is sometimes surreal. Bath plugs and chewing gum. Road maps and T shirts. Electrical adaptors and death masques. There are also some who sell books. What must be the biggest seller among them, is a book entitled Barack Obama which contains some of that presidential candidate’s political views. His name is also on the back window of many cars as though the election is taking place here. Which, of course, in real terms, it is!

You have to live in Africa to understand the degree to which folks here are (literally) praying for an Obama presidency. The hundreds of years of appalling inhumanity towards skin and race, from the early days of slavery to the present, insidious, institutional denigration of black people’s capabilities, give a black person a sense of injustice, frustration and (sadly, sometimes) a lack of self-confidence, whatever his or her remarkable achievements. The white man has ruled supreme and still does so. The money he spends on the home, war, nuclear defence, oil-imperialism and the promulgation of dubious versions of democracy so dwarfs the funding needed to feed and water the millions who are climatically, economically and politically destitute, that it has become an obscenity. Yet it has also become a way of life, a way of thinking that has never recently been challenged by a US President. Instead, the virtues of free-market capitalism are expounded by politicians, as though there can be no alternative. This, despite the latest Wall Street crash and the violent convulsions of a deregulated market that allowed capital full rein and, as a consequence, has enabled its uber rich beneficiaries to screw the American Dream: a dream that is now being shored up by billions of dollars of joe-public’s money.

McCain’s rhetoric shows little deviation from the standard hypocrisy that has dogged campaign after campaign in the last and current centuries. In order to raise his invective against Obama he has begun to pillory him as a ‘liberal’ and a ‘socialist’. As such he is obviously a threat to the American Way. He will redistribute wealth from the middle classes to the poor. What crime can be more heinous than that? The fact that Christ allegedly extolled it, is conveniently forgotten. In the US, Christ, after all, is believed to support the American President, whatever his course of action – and the redistribution of wealth can never be a Christian option. The Bible is gutted for supporting evidence of the American mind-set and anything remotely looking like a virtue of socialism, is deselected. (In much the same way that the Koran is ransacked for quotations by extremists, to defend the treatment of Muslim women, when the Koran clearly extols the basic human value of equality).

Obama could never be a socialist. It is hard-wired in him to be what most Americans are: devotees of competition wherein the best rises to the top. His success (one hopes) in becoming President, will actually prove the capitalist case. But he carries a calling card that, though often forced by acts of denial into the deepest pocket of American consciousness, emerging now and again like a spiteful Djinn to raise images of the ‘strange fruit’ of their history, tells them that a black man might assume the most powerful office on Earth.

If it happens and he becomes President, it is enough, however well or otherwise his time in office goes.

It is why he is revered by all shades of black people here in Africa and elsewhere. It is why, just to hold the book among the exhaust fumes, feels so great. Finally, in global terms, a black man will have transcended every barrier white folks have erected against him.

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Monday, October 27, 2008

Seeing things?


You will probably have heard of the psychoanalytical tool called the Rocharch Test. I believe it was also nicknamed the ‘inkblot test’ at the time of its inception. In it you view a series of abstract shapes, like mutating amoebas, and say what you see. The analyst takes your interpretations and from them construes a narrative representing your deep concerns. So, if you fashion from the ink blots various sexual elements, you may have personal difficulties in managing relationships or in your potency. If you see cakes and biscuits, you may have an eating disorder. Whatever, whether it is a familial problem or some form of phobia, it can come to the surface via your attempts to find meaning in the ink. It is not unlike Freud’s stream of consciousness approach to fishing truths from the unconscious.

Among the variety of TV channels available to me in Ghana (from South Africa!) are several that deal with the supernatural. In them people claim to see a variety of otherworldly objects, apparitions and events from the present, past or from the future. Whether it be a ghost or a UFO, they stare earnestly into the camera lens and aver that it was as real as you or me (an extremely dubious analogy for any philosopher!). The point is that they interpret the data out there in the world, the way their unconscious minds deem appropriate. We all do it to a greater or lesser extent. We manage our successful close relationships, for example, by selecting the facets that make it feel fulfilling to us. By doing so we generate a fairly constant and emotional picture of another person from the vast amount of sensory data we have at our disposal. We don’t want to see what others around us might find disagreeable.

Recently, I wrote a blog about the messages that are displayed on the back windows of tro tros (mini buses) and taxis. I saw one at the weekend which took the Rocharch biscuit.

“Observers are Worried”

What to make of it? Being something of an aficionado of science fiction films and also intrigued by the recent release by authorities of official documents relating to UFO visitations to Britain (!), it seemed like a message from the stars. We are being watched. Aliens are decidedly jittery regarding what we are doing to Earth, that most desirable and eternally entertaining of holiday destinations for the more affluent among them. They are so concerned they are communicating their fears via messages on Accra taxis!

This surely beats corn circles. Not to mention the creamed potato mountains in Close Encounters of the Third Kind which Richard Dreyfus realised were a sure sign that there was intelligence out there and it was coming to visit and that the mash sculpture portrayed the exact topographical spot.

Aliens are bright enough to send us messages in the appropriate language…. Look around you.

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Thursday, October 16, 2008




Croc of gold part 2

How weird but not very wonderful that my earlier blog today spun together the gold ring in a crocodile’s stomach and the calamity in the stock market. Glancing at the news just now I see that the same croc is not dead and in reward for its gorging on the entirety of a British tourist (the Aussies hate the Poms THIS much?) it has been put out to stud for the rest of its life. Meanwhile, Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, having brought about the demise of his company by gorging on countless individuals, walks away to his various studs with 500 million dollars a year in a golden handshake.

It’s a fact – you can’t tell one croc from another.

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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

A croc of gold and the global market crash

During the last three weeks I have been travelling: England, Paris, South of France, a party in Cornwall and now back here to Ghana. The curious aspect to it all is that, despite only having lived here for a few months, it felt very good coming back. I was born in India and my parents took me to England after a four year life of servant orientated luxury. Not only to England but to dismal Leeds in late November with food rationing, no fuel and certainly no special servant assigned to make my little life all a-cosset. There’s a certain familiar feel to being here (apart from having a batman or Ayah!!!) in that nothing can be taken for granted; poverty, though not starvation, stalks the rutted earth roads and there are great disparities between the urban middle classes and country villagers and the squatters who grab any spare land in the city, and have corn as high as an elephant’s eye in a matter of weeks. Thus I am claiming a kind of circularity, a tarot cycle which has brought me through innumerable vicissitudes back to being the unnumbered Fool card, a wandering rootless character, wondering whether I have finally come home.

I wrote a blog or two while travelling, on issues that drift like leaves in the autumn of life and put aside, for future writing, what seemed like nourishing material in the news. This included the ring of a missing person in a crocodile’s belly, Colin Powell dancing impromptu hip hop at a public gathering in London, the fall in the World Stock Markets and the fact that I am suddenly in receipt of the State Pension, which I still think of as the ‘old age pension’. Can they be encapsulated in one blog?

First, I have no time for Powell who is regarded here as a coconut (black only on the outside). The fact that he has a sudden public penchant for hip hop just shows how deeply hypocritical the man is. I am old school rock and roll and never felt that the Devil’s Music could be aligned with the Right in politics, never mind the fundamentalist/neo-con/creationist extreme of it. Second, sixty five seems a good age with lots to look forward to, including strutting to some raucous band or other, mouthing an anthem to sex, liberty, nomadic adventure or the political struggle and fantasising what life might have been like if I had had even a modicum of musical ability in my fingers. Third, watching, rather too closely, the shifting shares in the global market place was a bit like viewing bad election results, knowing that those flickering figures represented not just the inane financial risks taken by executives of banks (who, no doubt, pilloried and/or imprisoned Joe or Jane Bloggs for some overdraft transgression, re-possessing their houses, while themselves receiving 79 billion pounds over eight years in bonuses) but those same figures equated to lost pensions and unemployment for millions.

Fourth, the croc of gold. A man goes missing in Australia and his ring ends up in a crocodile. Certainly a human tragedy. Beyond that, symbolic. A crocodile is killed or dies. Forensics discover that the swallowed human cadavar has been digested and transmuted into crocodile flesh but the ring of gold remains, immutable, unchanging, desirable. The Stock Exchange normally has bull and bear markets. But that was in the protectionist old days of gluttony and self-gratification among our financiers. What we have now is a crocodile market. Everyone’s lives are being ground up in the teeth of rabid market forces that are gorging on everything, including themselves.

Only gold holds its value.

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Monday, October 6, 2008

The End of the World is Nigh: 21/12/2008

Does December 21st 2008 (11.12 am GMT) strike a chord with you? It will. I shall be in Ghana then and the fanatical charismatic Christian churches will be whipping their supplicants into a crescendo – if they have read their Mayan, Druid, Chinese…and scientific futurologists’ claims about this particular day. There appear to be innumerable warnings that the world will change irrevocably come Judgment morning. While the soothsayers are in some accord, so, it appears may be the scientists. This is because Earth lines up exactly on the axis of the Milky Way, in direct and rare congruence with the Black Hole that lies, menacingly at its centre. There is, some say, a likelihood of transgressive solar flares disrupting all communications, the magnetic poles could flip and/or appalling elemental forces unleashed. On the other hand, if the science is discounted, the clairvoyants (using the ancient sources mentioned above) predict a massive asteroid collision or something equally calamitous.

Try Googling the date and you’ll see it’s big time in the fear stakes. I was alerted to it by a History Channel programme that was so alarmist I hardly savoured the wine I was drinking at the time.

So, what is the import of all this on us mortal souls? Woody Allen said, pithily, that life is hard and then we die. What seems to be wired into us is some mysterious desire NOT to know the date and time of our death. We live in perpetual denial of any construct that undermines the open-endedness of our days, as though, superstitiously, to admit such thinking would take away the final vestiges of our belief in immortality. The fear of death is bad enough and is the central battering ram at the doors of atheism. But to KNOW the exact moment of extinction would actually change every religion as we know it.

The death of everyone – or most of us – on one particular day creates a certain kind of fateful frenzy. No longer do we have to contemplate our own individual deaths, as some kind of unique solipsistic event and, therefore, memorable but now we have to share the finality with everyone else. Sartre said, ‘Hell is Others’ which sums it up, really. I want my own, unique ending, not some messy travesty of an apocalypse involving all those people I don’t know and never met. How banal and anonymous!

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008


Nearer my God to Thee: Designer Coffins

Of course, religion is an insurance policy. The amount you invest in praying and hymning, builds your deposit account in the Bank of the Supreme Being. It may, on the other hand, merely be an opiate to stop you worrying about the hereafter. Hearing the innumerable churches in full flood, around the house in Accra on a Sunday, seems to confirm these dual possibilities. For example, I passed a church the other day on the Spintex Road and there were probably a thousand plus supplicants, writhing and swaying and halleluiahing as the preacher whipped them into a frenzied delirium of worshipfulness. In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby there is the cutting line, “The rich get richer and the poor get children”. In Christian evangelicalism the preacher gets rich and the poor get robbed blind. From the outside it seems hardly different from the ecstasy induced trances of the clubs in the land I left behind but at least there soul refers to a species of music and not part of a higher purchase agreement..

Further on I passed a broken down tro tro (a cross between a bus and a taxi) with the immortal (literally) words emblazoned on its back, “God has the Power.” He certainly had – and He wasn’t going to reconnect it in that vehicle! In the face of every kind of personal or public disaster, faith affirms that God is good and Jesus saves. The sole survivor from a crash in Thursday’s paper extolled God’s mercy, making no mention of His harsh judgment on the victims who didn’t make it.

Getting to heaven is BIG. The Biggest. And how you get there matters to many a worshipper. Along the same road there is a coffin maker. His current offering is a fish shaped box – for someone who was a fish monger or a fisherman. He makes screwdriver shaped receptacles for electricians, chicken shaped for egg producers and taxi shapes for the tro tro men. You die in a trade and there’s a bespoke chariot waiting to whisk you away.

So when I depart this mortal coil, it may be in Ghana and it may be in an agnostic-shaped construction of wood. The problem for the coffin-maker will be to create the perfect zen paradox. All the sound and fury of one Jack Sanger which actually signified – nothing!

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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Dark Matter: Dark Energy

I, like many a philosopher I’ve read, seem to have the flimsiest grip on reality when it actually comes down to it. Part of me exists somewhat awkwardly in the world of matter and part of me seems to get lost in labyrinths of thought. I’ve always wanted to know why things work. It began when I was about five and started taking to pieces anything that my parents decided did no longer work. In time I took apart clocks, starter motors, locks, air guns and the like. My parents’ joke was that I was ‘mending’ them. The irony in this was that I rarely made anything work by my investigations. On the other hand, I learnt basics about how things operate in this every day world of matter. I cast light on what had been dark. Much of it was pretty basic. Children often throw things against the wall or beat them with a heavy object, just to see what comes out. Removing the skin of a golf ball with a knife led me to discover that inside it was a mysterious liquid sachet, wrapped round with fine rubber banding. I conjectured that the liquid was acid. I used fire to make different coloured flames; or to heat a soldering iron so that I could melt and fix a hole in a plastic ball; or I made my own lead weights for fishing, or pellets for my air gun.

In short, the child’s view is that if you don’t understand something, take it apart. If you don’t have the tools or nous to do this elegantly, then you smash it to hell and back with something blunt.

The CERN experiment involves the Large Hadron Collider which will propel protons towards each other at nearly the speed of light around a 27 kilometre underground race track. Scientists seem to be just like I was in my childhood.. They can’t take these invisible mysteries and unlock them elegantly so they bash them around to see what happens.

It appears that they believe the vastness of the universe is inhabited mostly by dark energy and some of it by dark matter. The fraction left over is the stuff we regard as normal physical reality. They want to make all the darkness visible. It’s a model quite close to the one I developed when I began reading Zen, at the age of 12 and which accounted for my own existence. The body is physical matter, the mind is mysterious dark matter and death results in dark energy being released back into the pool of Jungian universality.

I might, like some 19th century biologist, have taken a human being apart to see what made it tick or have beaten it about to see what emanated from the collisions but my dark matter contained something called a moral conscience and so that route was, fortunately, barred. So here I am, scratching for meaning, banging my neurons together with little sense resulting. I hope the child scientists at CERN are doing somewhat better.

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Tuesday, September 9, 2008



Kevin Keagan : death by hierarchy

If you go back a year and ferret around you will find that I support Newcastle United and have done since I was very young. There was a time when I was taken to football matches in a three wheeler Reliant by two Burma veterans! We used to stop off in a dingy bar near the ground while they supped their ale and passed offensive comments on all and sundry. The unaccompanied women in the bar were ‘scrubbers’, the bar staff were ‘lazy teds’ and the city was an ‘effing dustbin’. The fact that their wrists and ankles had been eroded from their diet during their incarceration by the Japanese and gave constant pain, didn’t lessen my youthful embarrassment. Their comments on the Newcastle Board of Directors were unprintable. Since Len Shackleton’s famous blank page, under the chapter, “What Club Directors know about football”, I seem to have survived so many upheavals in the stewardship of my club. None of these has been remotely tolerable to someone who makes his living helping sort out organisational management, never mind your average supporter who’d prefer to focus entirely on the black and white stripes.

The latest debacle (for those of you who know nothing about the case) involves the likely constructive dismissal of Kevin Keagan, a pied piper of a club manager for Newcastle fans. The new owners set up a continental-style hierarchy to run the club, above him. Usually, in UK football, the manager does everything from hiring and firing to media communications and, most importantly, the coaching. Keagan says he was promised that he would have the final say on hiring and firing players. Indeed, there is much documented evidence that this was the original agreement, from the mouths of the said hierarchy via the club website. But, over time, they reneged on his powers until he felt so strait-jacketed that he resigned.

My business brain says that the principle that the owner, Mike Ashley, wanted introducing is not such a bad thing. The question revolves around whether the manager has the final say on which footballers enter and leave the club. Good, sensitive communication would make the manager feel good, while taking much of the work off his shoulders. It appears that Keagan felt that this was a possible scenario. Then the hierarchy bought a couple of players without him even having heard of them and didn’t buy players he wanted – in those positions that the team was terribly weak. So, he didn’t have the promised strengthening of his team’s profile.

Meanwhile, writers for The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and Sky News presenters ran a line that Keagan is a ‘walker’. That is, that if the going gets tough, he is a coward and leaves. They pointed to the fact that he has left other jobs, including the England job – which, he said, was beyond his capabilities. In the world of organisational management, he is a gem. How many managers can you think of, that decide they are not up to the demands of the job and step down a rung? They should be able to do it with equanimity. Otherwise the Peter Principle prevails – that every one of us will eventually rise to a position in which we find ourselves incompetent. Poor honest Kevin.

My two, now dead, guardians in their Reliant Robin would have had a field day this last week. I can hear them mouthing off about Newcastle being sold to a mafia of effin’ southerners and at least the effin’ Board used to be effin’ Geordie sh**s.

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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Jolly Hockey Sticks

Enid Blyton was recently voted the UK’s most loved author by some literary pole or other. I must have been about eight or nine when I moved on from the Famous Five and the ‘Adventure’ series. Living in a council house in a village in the mining districts of south Durham, I suppose the books represented a safe escape from those restrictive circumstances. But they also contained an element of the exotic for they described a tribe beyond my comprehension. It was an early introduction to social anthropology, if you like. They had their own, distinctive mores, a freedom from adult intervention and a lingo that seemed both of my world and not in the sense that I got the drift but not the nuance. I can’t honestly remember to what degree they used words like spiffing, wizard and jolly hockey sticks but, even if these outbursts of pleasurable excitement never actually appeared on the page, they existed between the lines.

On the BBC’s science web site today, reference is made to the recent triangulation of whole sets of data regarding global warming. The initial hypothesis, in 1998, based somewhat on tree-ring theory, suggested that after a thousand or more years of steady state (the handle of the hockey stick) there was an abnormal recent upsurge of global temperature (the bit that hits the puck). Scientists who owed their living to either the US Government or the vested interests that drove that government, sought to discredit the hockey stick hypothesis, even demanding disclosure of scientists’ bank accounts, thus insinuating that the hockey stick was paid for by a conspiracy of loony, renegade lefties. Bush made speeches of denial and all the US industries that poured toxic gases into the atmosphere gave more funding to the Republican Party – and any research that would take the hockey stick out of the global picture.

Denial is something humans are rather good at. At one extreme it can make us noble and heroic in appalling circumstances but at the other it can make us greedy, uncaring and dangerous. The thousands of senior managers and the millions of workers in dirty industries, who owe their living to Government patronage, take their wages without protest, even as they deny to themselves that the work they are doing has the potential to make their children’s and grandchildren’s futures a rabid misery. And even those of us who are not quite so obviously morally unclean deny that we are culpable, even as we put technology on standby or leave the tap running as we clean our teeth or run the car a half mile to the shops.

Thus it is that Enid Blyton is our favourite author. Her hockey stick is jolly and innocent. Her world is environmentally perfect, a pleasure ground for young adventurers. Reading her books amounts to entering a nirvana of denial.

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Wednesday, August 27, 2008



China Syndrome

Look at all those happy smiling oriental faces, the colourful costumes, the delightful dancing, the precision marching, the fireworks, the buildings, the sheer scale of inventive entertainment…China is such a lovely place, isn’t it?

Now, let’s get this straight, I love sport. Some world shattering events in Beijing misted my eyes. But I am a bit of a fundamentalist and would eradicate all those activities in the Olympics that seem too far removed from the traditional business of the athletics stadium, the pool and the gym; football, tennis, BMX and so on. But, leaving my asceticism aside, the biggest blot on the Olympics’ showcase of human endeavour these days, is the marketing of a deceitful image of a host country that seeks to hide its inhumanity, institutionalised corruption and imperialism under the saccharine glitz of the ‘ceremonies’.

The notion of promoting national pride goes all the way back to Hitler. Miraculous fusions of Busby Berkeley routines, mammoth pyrotechnics and hi-tech gimmickry have now become competitive in their own right. Each successive Olympic Games presents the host country with an even more costly and wasteful mountain to climb. China’s sins remain in the shadows behind the TV set. And not just the gross suppression in Tibet, the pillaging of African resources or its internal, geriatric dictatorship, leading to the slaughter of the young at Tiananmen Square, but the every day abuses of its citizens such as the neglect of the thousands of bereaved and homeless families following the recent earthquakes or, in order to stage the Games, the rape of the most basic resource of all.

This latter concerns the huge consumption of water at the Games, not just to hydrate the enormous population that had been so dramatically gathered in one place but also the lush environment created as a backdrop to the spectacle. To do this, the Chinese authorities effectively endangered the livelihoods of thousands of poor farmers by stealing their water. It takes a truly oppressive regime to regiment multitudes, create fantastic architecture and promote a profile of itself so far removed from actuality that the huge circus that gathered in Beijing and the audiences around the world, embrace its presence as a leading power in the new world order, while, at the same time, averting their eyes from the inhumane governance of its own population and that of its neighbours.

We should dump the Olympics unless some kind of moral compass is used to measure the culture in which it is to be staged.

So that’s stuffed London, then! In fact it’s stuffed just about every country that I can think of!

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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Birds’ Eye View

Those of you who are regular readers of this weekly blog will know that I spend time in both Ghana and France during the year. This toing and froing is punctuated by management consultancy work in the UK, or the little I restrict myself to these days. Currently I am in France in my Pyrennean eyrie. Each time I drive up here from the plains around Perpignan I see magpies. They are rather smart looking birds in their white bibs and black tails. And like a certain type of boorish dinner guest, they are argumentative bullies. I suppose I am falling into the trap of anthropomorphising their black and white natures but, as in most writing, it is a manipulation of the world to suit my literary purpose.

Given that my professional work involves a multi-disciplinary approach to developing teams and individuals to become more effective and humane in their professional practice, my key focus is normally upon self-awareness. Unless an individual develops this it is unlikely that he or she will go on to be able to change behaviour in any meaningful way other than by rigid imposition of some stick and carrot regime. At the same time we all have blind spots and these can be perennial or can emerge owing to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. A blind spot may be a personal trait that irritates others at one end of the spectrum or, in extreme leopard-like circumstances, the spots become so numerous the individual is virtually friendless – and still doesn’t know why.

The BBC web page has an interesting little science update which bears strongly upon the foregoing. The latest research on magpies shows that they can recognise themselves in mirrors. Apparently, bits of sticky tape in various colours were affixed to them where they could only be seen in a mirror, whereupon the said birds scratched and pecked them off, just as we try to remove the embarrassment of a bit of tomato skin between the teeth, or dab away dripping mascara or cover a hideous (to us) erupting spot on the cheek with creams.

While this was not seen to equate with self-awareness in the birds, it was regarded as a possible precursor to what was once thought to be a unique human mental ability. I realised, on reading about the research, that I have missed a trick in my professional work. Before I enter into a ‘coaching relationship’ in future, I will secrete rolls of sellotape of varying colours, in my pockets…

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Thursday, August 14, 2008

Sex and Death

Back in the sixties when Timothy Leary held an influential sway on new social possibilities and we wore Loons and mini skirts to advertise it, we also brushed against religion with our growing, mystical wings. The influence of Alan Watts’ Zen translations was strong on me. I remember an aphoristic question of the time, or perhaps it was more a loose allegory but it went, “How does a goldfish know that there is a God?”. The answer was, “Because how else is the water changed twice a week?”. Along with that there came the philosophical nicety that the one thing that a goldfish could never know, is water, itself. It is much the same for humans. Much of what we, ourselves, swim in, we don’t understand. We exist in so much invisible, intangible stuff that we don’t even see. We postulate that there is ‘dark energy’ blasting the universe apart and dark matter, grimly trying to hold the galaxies together and that everything in the universe is so filled with space, from atoms to molecules to our very bodies that we ought to be able to drive trams through each other.

The sixties was also a time of an emerging cognizance that sex was an atomic driver in the broad spectrum of basic energies. The Victorian religious zeal that had promoted fundamentalist strictures to keep sex for procreation was suddenly eroded, though, as any strict Catholic will maintain, echoes of it still remain. Even as we got to grips with the potential of Tantric sex and the Kama Sutra and reading Lady Chatterley, there was still an awkward stumbling for words, an embarrassment if it became a matter of public discussion round the dinner table with friends, never mind strangers.

From the taboo of sex we gradually moved on to the taboo of ageing. The myth was born that old age was the period of post-sex. The lines on the face and the flapping of once-toned muscles became signals of the lost fight against mortality. A great proportion of the elderly are maltreated daily by their families and in their care homes. Their images appear in the Sunday magazines as either pitiful victims of abuse or, at best, the subject of aesthetic camera work which sees them not as people but as intricately marked miracles of the ravages of time. Asexual subject matter. Like detailed shots of the moon’s surface.

The two foci, sex and ageing, have come together in recent research which, the NHS affirms, proves that orgasms delay ageing. The more we get it on, the less wrinkles, the less cancer and the less mental senility. This could lead to an interesting conflict in social attitudes. Sex is big business in the media which likes to reveal as much of our jig-a-jig as it can, always pushing back the envelopes of our skin. But what will it do when the skin is somewhat leathery, the bones protrude and the muscles waste ? Will the camera, no matter how much it is tuned to the wonderful filigree of lines on their ancient faces, ever show us two lovers, fighting back the last tides of mortality, heaving in ecstasy with the Karma Sutra opened beside them on the shag-pile carpet?

Or will these acts remain a taboo; dark energy and dark matter, something we know is all around us but will we never see?

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Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Chaos Theory

It is said that the beat of a butterfly’s wing may eventually precipitate a hurricane, ten thousand miles away. Everything is connected. Similarly, the food thrown away by the average family in some parts of the world, now results in the deaths of families at similar distances removed. However you examine it, life is being squandered in rubbish bins.

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Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Work is a four letter word

In the 60s when I started work, there was a kind of hemp-stained anarchic change in the air. Having been in both Paris and London in 1968 and witnessed and to some extent been part of the ‘student revolution’; on the run from French and Belgian police in the former and participating in sit-ins in the latter, I have a curious set of definitions for the word ‘work’. Whilst I DID work in the 60s and 70s, when many friends and acquaintances chose to drop out, trial the new drugs from dope to acid and set up squats or smallholdings or hitch to Afghanistan, I can’t say that I saw a great purpose in it. Work, that is. The cliche then was the phrase used in the title for this blog. I enjoyed the teaching and I liked the tough adolescents, making their own way, far removed from middle class hippy indulgences but work was something imposed and a restraint on what seemed to be the inalienable right to grow how you might.

Then I cared for disturbed adolescents in a therapeutic centre and work became idealistic and altruistic. Even political. Every child that came, abused, neglected and fragmented by family and/or social services was the focus of unconditional love and support. A high proportion made their way out of the cycle of generations of degradation and into something more socially comparable with their average peer. They didn’t want to drop out. They wanted to belong. Later still I took up research and found it was something I could do. I didn’t have to be a dry, middle of the road, small c conservative academic, playing the game to get a professorship, either. There was enough room to be marginal and creative. Work had suddenly become intellectual play. But it was/is a privileged kind of play which depends upon a brain and the capacity to have an impact on individuals and organisations. As a management consultant (a little distant from the howling laughter provoking depictions in The Office, I hope) I can mix play with challenge, insight, analysis and development and produce a notion of work which is, personally, highly fulfilling.

Now I am in Ghana and these latter definitions of work seem even more the toying of a man in the developed world where there is little sense of the real value of basic human requirements such as food, sanitation, water, safety and electricity and they are squandered until they are at a premium and market forces prevent more and more citizens from using them. Driving in to work among the somewhat undisciplined cars and lorries here, the lines of traffic somehow stop at red lights. From the sides of the roads swing into view the young men and women, literally, earning a crust. They carry water sachets, loaves and fruits of all kinds in head-baskets, arms festooned with cheap Chinese imports of toys, sweets, fabrics and so on. The heat is oppressive, even now in the temperate months of a daily 30 degrees and high humidity and they toil for hours in the exhaust fumes. They are admirable in their proud stoicism in the face of drivers’ lack of consideration for their safety, the continual spewing of exhaust fumes and their low ‘hit rate’ of sales. They are also, often, astonishingly graceful and beautiful in a way that damns the pretensions of the average European or American walking a high street. You have to be very fit to carry so much weight, perpetually balanced on your crown in such conditions.

Work for these people is also a four letter word. Food.

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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

US astronaut confirms existence of aliens!

I began my interest in science fiction when I was about twelve. I had lived in a small village near Durham called Shadforth and went to primary school there. There were around thirty children in the school and one and a half teachers. Maybe having a half teacher gave me the necessary sense of ambiguity to be interested in SF. Anyway, the school doubled as a library. All the shelves in the hall (maybe twenty by forty feet) swivelled and the adult library lay behind. By the age of nine I was reading adult literature. By ten I had read every western in the place followed by all of the noirish novels of Peter Cheyney, Raymond Chandler et al. By eleven I suddenly discovered that half people, like my teacher, came from planets across the universe where half was the norm and the full person was an alien! Maybe by living in a small pit village but with an over-exercised sense of mental adventure, I was ripe for journeys through time and space following in the solar jet stream of ‘Dan Dare, pilot of the future’.

I even wrote a dissertation in the early sixties defending science fiction as literature when, like now, it was regarded as the work of pariahs who were barred from eating at the table of high art. I think, in all the ensuing time, I have read every conceivable exegesis on time and space travel – not that that excludes a delightful lurch into the new at some point in my diminishing biography.

Imagine my wry amusement with the news this week that the exponent of the longest walk on the moon, Dr Edgar Mitchell, US astronaut, claimed that aliens have been landing here for the last sixty years and governments had hushed it up. This was quickly followed by a denial from NASA and the suggestion that the old feller was Ed-gaga Mitchell. However, he claimed insider knowledge and so we must keep open minds. As I have over-elaboratedly pointed out, I am vulnerable to suggestions of this kind. Why, once, following my reading of some philosophy on solipsism (the central thrust being that I was the only person in existence and all else was my fabrication) I walked through the city of Norwich and wondered whether the teeming people around me were, actually, ghosts. Even bumping into them did not provide supportive evidence for Dr Johnson’s rebuttal of Bishop Berkeley’s proof that the world did not ‘really’ exist. I kicked stones and bumped because I was testing how strong my self-perceived world, was.

Anyone who comes out with a theory or an experience which is regarded by the majority as ‘outlandish’ (a good science fiction term) is derided or exterminated. Ask the ghost of Galileo who is sitting by your side, at this moment. The result is that few speak out, in fear of repression or of committal to the asylum that houses science fiction writers and their kin.

There is a wonderful poster on a road near here, in Accra. It has the memorable phrase:

The tip-off. Your civic responsibility

I don’t think it works here and it doesn’t work for Dr Mitchell, either. At present.

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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

God’s Chariots.

I said in the last blog that I would focus a little bit more on how God infiltrates every aspect of Ghanaian culture. The evangelicals are here with a vengeance. Churches are springing up everywhere and there are some extremely gold-laden pastors, as business class passengers may have noticed on flights to Britain for the recent Lambeth shindig. Every morning I hear neighbours practising their gospel harmonies or having prayer meetings or playing God radio loud. Sunday-best pedestrians walk the dusty streets to their all-day fare of sin-letting.
Meanwhile, in the neverending river of metal and rubber, rear windows are adorned by curious messages that reflect the way Christianity is grafted on to something older, just as it also is in Europe with its paganism, Green Man pantheism and the Sheelas. A kind of neo-magic, if you like for the superstitious.

These messages range from the mundane (The Jesus is Coming Mobile Phone Company) to the cryptic (1000 hate 1000 lies). There are the short, enigmatic trumpetings (Believer, What God proposes, Angel on Board, Mercy Seat) as well as intensely personal (Kill Me, Love A).

All of which tends to be displayed in the same shivery yellow capitals that I associate with 1950s horror comics’ banner fonts).

It was suggested to me that drivers must go to a particular store and pick up whatever letters are currently available and make up the best message they can with what they’ve bought: a sort of religious Scrabble. Given the way that some of them drive (overtaking on blind hills and corners at high speed) it is no wonder Ghana has among the least safe roads in the world. But, with God on board, there is a double whammy. If you survive, it is because of Him and if you don’t, He can read your rear windscreen from heavenly miles away and let you in to the Holy Garage in the sky.

The perversity of it all is one reason why it is such a joy to live here.

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Monday, July 14, 2008

Today we have naming of parts…

Place names everywhere can be fascinating when they tell a story or refer to a mystery. On the other hand (as in the UK) they can be a clogged-up banality of flowers, trees and shrubs. Laburnum Groves and Avenues, Oak Streets, Ash Drives and the like may have had a cache when the empire-building middle classes flexed their monetary muscle in the late nineteenth century but, as the new towns and villages began their post-second world war spread, they became part of the property developers’ incongruous spin in glossing over constructions that lacked a single brick’s worth of aestheticism.

I once lived in the Derbyshire hills in the aptly named Dirty Lane End Cottage. I don’t suppose I effected any improvement to its environs as a consequence! I have lived in Norwich which boasts the strangely macabre White Woman Lane. There was also, somewhere, Hanging Dog Lane. In Norwich, also, there was a pub called The Murderers but its name was changed owing to someone’s misplaced sense of propriety. I observed to a taxi driver as we were heading to the outer parts of North London, recently, that The World’s End was the ultimate name for a pub, as it would draw in all the angst-laden for miles around. He laughed and said it would be interesting to know how many suicides had drunk there before topping themselves. Come Apocalypse Now, I think everyone’ll be crowded in there or in any one of the other five similarly named, he could think of in London, alone.

These thoughts have been precipitated by my first week or two in Accra where nomenclature takes little notice of property developers but is a mix of folk lore and recent incident. I’ll add more examples as I go along with these blogs but two or three will start the train off.

In the area where I am living there is Puppy Junction, where you can buy a pup, Jacuzzi Junction named after the revelation that a former President of Ghana had had one installed in his house, there, Give-us Your-Wallet Junction where ambushes and muggings were once rife and I Only Ate Corn Junction, where some poor fellow was found beaten and left by the roadside having nicked a head of corn from a nearby plot.

Naming by the people for the people!

In a blog, soon to come, I will list some of the ways that God has descended upon the Ghanaians, infiltrating every aspect of their private and working lives. To whet your appetite, God Never Fails is the name of a small business that installs and mends car brakes!

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Saturday, July 5, 2008

In Praise of Nick Broomfield

Being three and a half thousand miles away from the UK seems as nought when I tune in to BBC World News, here in Ghana, and catch the weather forecast and the politics. It is true that the further you are away from the culture that helped define you, the more you see how trivialising and twisted much of it is. The pet obsessions of the media are like fast food; insubstantial, unhealthy and sprayed with a garish gloss. No longer is there even lip service paid by journalists to the erosion of the significance of the arts and intellectualism nor the corrosive governmental attack on the social infrastructure of families, traditional communities and society as a whole, which began with Thatcher and the miners and has continued, implacably, ever since. The gap between rich and poor grows ever greater, education for those who live outside the avaricious bubble of the middle classes, continues to degenerate and free market philosophy dominates all strategies to deal with any consequent eruptions of discontent.

It was, then, with a kind of nervous frisson of involvement that I watched Nick Broomfield being interviewed on BBC World’s Hard Talk. Broomfield has been around such a long time and is associated with making documentaries about the have-nots, the picaresque, extreme individuals such as serial killers or the bestiality of troops in Iraq, (the latter through the reconstruction of events where key participants in a massacre are played by ex-soldiers, relatives of Iraqi families who have died and so on).

He was heavily quizzed in the interview about his depiction of events. Was it lurid sensationalism? Was he riding, commercially, on his own radical bandwagon? Was he conspiring to deceive those who had suffered or who had caused suffering, in order to advance his own world view and reputation? Was he ignoring the good things that people did in order to skew his images to bolster the case he was making?

Throughout the interview he stuck, doggedly, to his theme. He makes his films as truthfully as he can. He tries to elicit plural perspectives of events and allow the viewer to make his or her own judgment. Everyone, from the serial killer to the soldier to the child dying in a famine is a victim of some kind and, even though we may not offer sympathy for some of the acts they might commit, we do better to try and understand how they came into these arenas of obscenity and death, rather than execute or imprison them in disgusted and vengeful ignorance. We must help societies to progress towards forms of understanding which might eliminate many of the root causes of extreme and awful human behaviour. Unfortunately, we have to learn this lesson over and over again. There will always be those in the political arena who put expediency and an appeal to the populist desire for eye-for-an-eye revenge and punishment, above any long term desire to fashion, from our troubles, a liberal and caring society. The Nick Broomfields of this world fight that fight. We become more enlightened and savvy because of what they do.

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Monday, June 30, 2008

Pigeons, mobile phones and grasscutters

Apparently pigeons have been trained by the inmates to take mobile phones and drugs into Sao Paulo prison. When I think of pigeon post, it is a picture of a sepia tinted time where history is ‘another country where they did things differently’ and the pace was slower in all things – except post by bird, of course! I think of wars in trenches or wizards in castles. I am using dove-carriers in the work I am doing on an agnostic’s guide to the spiritual, mentioned in previous blogs and whose early chapters can be found on this site. This trilogy of novels is set in a pre-medieval world of tribes and clans who worship different gods in different ways. To have pigeons as vehicles of modern technology seems like a figment from one of those science fiction films or novels which use medieval cultures as the basis for any futuristic mise en scene. Remember Gilliam’s film, Brazil? Or the Star Wars series? Post apocalyptic visions often combine societies broken down into feudal anarchy or fractured dystopias, yet with the alarming technologies that destroyed them, lying around and still available for use and abuse. It is difficult to write novels which are entirely of the future because we find it too challenging to read and identify with something which is so completely alien. We have to have a map with ‘You Are Here’ on it, a familiar starting place from which to march out and engage with the novel or the extraordinary. Making the common place exotic is the basis of much fiction. But there is always a bit of the common place for reassurance.

Pigeons carrying mobile phones in what we think of as of the real world of the here and now, raises the question of what comes next? My thoughts turn to aerial spying, the carrying of microphones and cameras and all the guff of surveillance. A spy pigeon in London would be lost in the infested sky of city birds and could do a lot of terrorist damage. Particularly if it had been trained in the mountains of Pakistan.

I am, currently, in Ghana (I will intersperse blogs on my times here with the usual diverse murmurings) and here there is a directness about surveillance which has its amusing side. Large posters adorn walls and boards with maxims such as:

“The Tip-off. Your civic responsibility!”

This seems refreshingly old world when compared to the civic-spy cameras positioned everywhere in Orwell’s 1984 which nowadays have become an accepted part of UK urban furniture. Here, there are mobile phones aplenty but the pigeons are too small to carry them. On the other hand, I ate a creature called a ‘grasscutter’ yesterday. I don’t know what it is or whether it crawls, runs, burrows or glides but I am wondering about its potential in the arms and telecommunications race. The name suggests it flies very close to the ground, at stalk level, invaluable in getting under enemy radar.

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

The Despotic Mongol, the Animated Iranian and the Abducted Child

When I’m in London I become a cineaste first, gallery viewer second and eater, third. Theatre has drifted down my list. of priorities. I find it harder than ever to suspend my disbelief, except on first nights when the adrenaline is burning through the actors. But, then, tickets are at a premium and I don’t organise myself that far ahead. The opportunity of choosing from so many screens, pandering to every taste from art house to gross-pop, always makes a trip to the capital, inviting. Usually. Also, there is an opportunity to catch up on something that you may have missed, embedded as I normally am, in the Pyrenean mountains. So, I thought I’d mention three films I have seen over the last few days here. These are Persepolis, an animated autobiography of a young woman’s life in Iran (including her escape to Vienna), Gone Baby Gone, a child abduction drama and Mongol, an epic about Genghis Khan.

Despite the adulatory reviews, Persepolis seemed to me to have neither a mould-breaking approach to its animation nor a gripping narrative, exacerbated by its somewhat pedestrian black and white format. Whilst it dealt with revolution and war, the bizarre, horrific and cruel Islamic and Shah regimes remained so broad brushed that I came away no more informed than from watching the daily news. I know people’s lives in such circumstances are appalling, degrading and almost without hope. Art should have the power to tear away the bandaged wounds of my heavily doctored response to the bestial, in new ways and open them up again.

Gone Baby Gone explores an alternative, grim underbelly to the McCannesque abduction scenario. We are all aware and, to different degrees, (unless we are emotionally crippled) affected by what happened to Madeleine. It is a parent’s worse nightmare. In this film there are no articulate middle class advocates. The milieu of this abducted child is seedy and indefensible in any society. The plot line is so labyrinthine it takes you a while, afterwards, to tease out the strands. It is tense and well acted, using down at heel, mouth and spirit locals to grit out the textures. Casey Affleck is a fine actor and produces a compellingly nuanced but entirely different performance from his Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James, one of my favourite films of recent times. However, the production suffers somewhat from too much plot and not enough backfill on character – but it’s worth a look.

Mongol was a disappointment. If you have a look around my website you’ll find the first couple of chapters of a trilogy I am undertaking, set in Central Asia in some indeterminate past and drawing heavily on the notion of the shaman-warrior, the beginning of ethical codes and the unification of clans into tribes and their belief-constructions of Gods and Fate. In effect, it is also an agnostics’ guide to spiritual experience for our current times. I have a vested interest, therefore, in depictions of similar periods in history. Having spent time in Samarkand and Tashkent, I am aware that Genghis Khan is revered as a hero in bringing together warring factions and introducing a code of loyalty to the Khan and country. At the same time there was an uncritical acceptance of his violent, heartless and inhuman capacity for mayhem. But the film is episodically free from an underlying rationale for his rise to power and purpose. In fact, it struck me that there was little of his life, as highlighted in the narrative, to substantiate the claim that he would mature into that most terrible of the Khans. In those days, threat was dealt with as summarily as in a fundamentalist Islamic court in Persepolis, yet on at least three occasions, the young but hardly formidable loner, Genghis, is allowed to fester in stocks or prison, rather than be impaled, minus his body, on a pike. The film looks good some of the time but the script is barely competent and doesn’t know how to engage with the dangerously chaotic borders between the prophetic and the psychotic.

Afterwards, in my hotel room, I watched A History of Violence, Cronenberg’s brilliant foray into the dark mainstream. Now that’s a film!

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Thursday, June 12, 2008



Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing

Reading the paper over coffee this morning I noticed that Health Ministers are giving the go ahead for hospital consultants’ success and failure rates to be put on-line. This could be as bad as it gets for patients.

Some time ago now I developed one of the first appraisal systems for top medical professionals. An issue emerged that caused me a great deal of anxiety. Imagine five heart surgeons in a specialty. We want to appraise and measure their expertise so that, if they need extra training we can pinpoint where. We take the hard data on each of them. It turns out that Mrs Brown is by far the worst performer. Roughly 80% of her patients die. Looking into this more deeply we then discover that Mrs Brown ONLY operates on patients with a 2% chance of survival. In other words she is a brilliant surgeon. If we publish her results, she might (as actually happened later in reaction to league tables in some hospitals) decide she is only going to operate on patients who have a reasonable chance of survival. Patients with severe conditions will be turned away. This will make the overall tables for the speciality look a lot better – and the hospital benefits from extra funding!

This is an example of the gruesome consequences of the unforeseen. Often, policies are produced and implemented in social organisations right up to cabinet level, which result in unpredictable side-effects. So, in the case of the publication of consultants’ surgical records, what might result, adversely? Well, those surgeons who are easily bullied or are vulnerable to criticism, may leave for warmer climes where this tyranny by transparency does not occur. Those that are, like Mrs Brown, capable of offering the 2% chance of survival might withdraw on the basis that all the despairing Googling patients from a thousand square miles might want them to take on their inoperable conditions. Then again, given the way unscrupulous or frightened senior managers have fudged or skewed their hospital data over the last few years, to appear less conspicuously inept in league tables, who is to say that patients will actually be seeing robust evidence of performance, anyway?

BUT, probably the worst fall-out of the proposed online information, is that our terrified, death-sentenced, Googling patients will discover that there is only one Mrs Brown in the country and she just isn’t available, either because of the length of her lists or because she’s having a break down, trying to manage so many would-be patients. So they have to accept they will be under the knife of Mr Grey, whose success rate with those with a 2% survival-chance is, well, bang-on 2%.

Try telling them to go into the theatre, feeling optimistic .

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Wednesday, June 11, 2008



It’s a load of Balls Ed

For some time the dubious solutions to failure in the private sector have been imported into the ‘uncompetitive’ public sector. The assumption behind the strategy is that by introducing competition, then standards rise. Thus, cleaning firms win the right to increase MRSA in hospitals by offering minimum wages, rock bottom tenders and dirty floor cloths. And security firms win the right to bang up prisoners as if they were Ryanair passengers or battery chickens whilst ensuring their claustrophobia is alleviated by extra supplies of drugs.

Now we are told that schools are to be on 50 days parole and if they still fail then they could be closed and opened as academies, or twinned with successful schools. We know how easy it is for business to go into liquidation and then reopen under another name, thus thumbing their noses at creditors and sad punters but it seems that the strategy appeals to Ed Balls and the Men from the Ministry. It is this or the slightly passé approach of removing senior management and bringing in a flying squad of super-heads.

Meanwhile, the problems just don’t go away. Schools remain an inappropriate means to an end. Their primary purpose, actually, is to keep the great mass of adolescence off the streets so that their unpredictable hormones don’t cause chaos in the social order. If you want career education for your young then, providing you have the wherewithal (fees, post code, influence, parental coaching) you can pay the value added and get it. No amount of management tinkering will change this overall pattern.

I began life as a teacher in a run down secondary school which was due to close the following year, with everyone moved, en bloc, into a purpose built comprehensive. I had a knife pulled on me, whole class attempts at disrupting my lessons, blatant sexual provocation from 14 year old girls and a headmaster who was more interested in his roses than the school. I came through it, somehow. At the same time I felt affection for the pupils and the area. Some I helped and some I didn’t. I was thought to be a better than average teacher, despite the failures under my care and when they left, students with whatever academic outcome shook my hand and grinned their awkward goodbyes. Of course nearly all of them could have done better, given improved home environments, better facilities and brothers and sisters who were academic role models. At the same time they felt it was their school, for better or worse and that it was connected to their lives and, in a roundabout kind of way, respected them, whatever their ambitions. The teachers, like myself, taught how they wanted. One or two should have been summarily dismissed. But there were no league tables, no SATS, no competition with the school next door, except on the playing fields. I doubt the results today, overall, are any better or worse than then, except in one respect and that was that the teachers were not under constant threat and my first school was closing within a strategy of providing better facilities for all.

Today’s teachers are pressured to be technocrats. The system is a positivists’ dream of measurement with myriad competencies and skills. Training has superseded education. All is regimented. Teachers deliver by the accepted manual. To impress the public, there must be those schools and individuals that fail and become pelted in the stocks of inspection and closure. It is not an education for all. It has no visionary socialist intent. It is neo-con, nasty and class driven. There is no liberalism left in it.

Haphazard education, with no clear sense of what the outcomes might be, where relationships between people are most important and emotional stability the first credo, might do a great deal more to help society cohere, than this mumbo jumbo of market forces and standardisation.

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Saturday, June 7, 2008

The bald shall not inherit the earth

Some research says baldness can be equated with extra virility in men but that cuts no ice in today’s desire for a beautiful, undifferentiated ‘norm’. Scientists have found a way to extract hair-producing cells from my scalp and propagate them in the laboratory before injecting them in my bald area and waiting for them, like seeds in the spring soil, to sprout their many-branched shoots. This skull-based husbandry will be universal in five or so years – they say. All those ads in papers and magazines stretching back to the last but one century, showing before and after treatments, including dung-based preparations, herbal extracts, monkey glands and electrolysis to the latter day business of transplanting follicle-clumps, like sods, from one overgrown area to a hitherto lawn-free pate, will be a thing of the past.

Is the ‘problem’ of baldness in men our own version of the main body image issue in women? Has the desirable man become someone with luxuriant, ungreyed topiary and a hairless chest, just as the media-inspired desirable, catwalk-prancing woman has become a slim boyish figure with obvious breasts (but not over large)? Men are now, apparently, suddenly consuming an enormous range of cosmetics to retain their quasi-youthful looks.

How can we men retain our self-confidence if we do not conform to this multi-million pound inspired ideal type? Here I am with an ever-expanding spam (the remaining hair shaved very short to give my baldness a semblance of ‘style’) and an unaccountable, almost tropical growth of chest hair. Why is nature playing this paradoxical game with me? What evolutionary purpose is it fulfilling? Whatever its hidden benefits are, they are remaining just that, beyond my ken.

At its heart, the preoccupation we have with our bodies and how they look, is tied closely to mortality. The loss of hair is symbolically equated with the loss of the power of the body. Samson, after all, lost his strength when his hair was cut. The army conscript loses his unpredictable independence. The hairless man is a dead man walking. Meanwhile the growth of body hair is a atavistic shift to a more primitive state of evolution. The hairy chested man is the ape shambling. Combining one with the other for a monstrous parody of beauty and the beast, creates a perfect opportunity for marketing. So much visual dissonance to straighten out with the products of the age and a single desirable image for today’s man.

It becomes a social imperative. We must wax our chests and cover our head-skin with wigs, replants or expensive remedial head treatments, straight from the snake-oil factories of our pharmaceutical giants.

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

High speed junk

Being an academic by profession enabled me to be in at the beginning of the computer revolution. At home I ensured we had everything from ZX Spectrums and Amstrads on. My MA dissertation was typed on a golf ball and my PhD thesis was word processed. In the former, when I inadvertently put down the wrong letter or the wrong word, I pondered awhile and tried to form a new word or sentence to encompass the mistake I had in front of me. A game of micro-consequences, if you like. Anything to avoid Tippex. It forced me into creative language. Occasionally it even sent me on a new path of thought. But above all, writing then involved keeping everything in your head in an order that could be relayed in sequence to the typewriter keys. Nowadays, writing is hewn from blocks. There is no need to sift, shape and deliver in the head. Just throw down the words and then sculpt and refine them out there, in front of you – or, worse, have an automatic editor do it for you.

Alongside this, everything has speeded up. With spell checks, letter and line manipulation, formatting and so on, together with the capacity to use an instant thesaurus and web searching for information on any word, term or subject, writing ceases to be internally gestated and aesthetically pre-formed but interacts with the undigested text-landscape outside it. Umberto Eco said that people now wrote in paragraphs where once they wrote in sentences. They also write like unconscious pack animals, unaware how their texts are conditioned by everything around them.

Does this capacity for speed bring any benefits? Probably not. It outstrips the minds of most and encourages them to think that the fireworks-effect of depositing words on screen or on paper via a printer equates with a meaningful contribution to knowledge. Making it possible for everyone to be an author does not translate into a widespread increase in worthwhile literature. Journalists must write to meet the demands of voracious production deadlines and it shows. Sound bytes and word bytes are thought-lite. News is thrown together and uploaded on to screens in the lemming rush to be first and the consequences are there for all to see, with innocent people branded, events misconstrued, innuendo recorded as fact, moral panic raised and cynicism spread.

It would be a good move for civilised writing to have USB memory pens. Your computer would not be able to word-process what had not been handwritten and recorded first, before you uploaded your draft.

Then again we could all go back to lead pencils and erasers.

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Friday, May 23, 2008


Eating time….

We have all some knowledge of our biological clocks – not the ones that tell us our libidos are under threat – the others, the ones that tell us to go to sleep. When we are jetlagged it is because we have contravened a basic regulatory mechanism in our cells. Our eyes don’t like light when it should be dark, our ears want to close up their trumpets and knock off from the all day concert, our limbs want lassitude and the last thing our noses want is the smell of unwashed companions as we are landing at a far away airport. Long flights to Japan, apparently, take a week or so for the body to adjust.

Thus, time takes us prisoner.

But research on mice (aren’t mice lucky to discover practically everything first!) has shown that this time-clock is not the only clock we have. There is a master clock whose tick is so deep we are unaware of it. It is our eating clock. If we begin to starve, its beat becomes all-pervading and drives away tiredness until we have scavenged or trapped or stolen something to stave off the pangs.

Before you think, “Ah, get that cotton ball, waterlogged leather and green sponge parody of food, that is served up in a polystyrene tray, down you,” stop and consider what these mice have to tell us. Go hungry! Refuse the Trojan gift. Wait, as the cabin fills with the siren-smells of the food trolleys, and buckle yourself like Odysseus to your seat and refuse it all. Now, with stomach rumbling and the eating clock firmly to the fore, you land in Tokyo and head off to the nearest sushi bar. Before you can say ‘gochisōsama’ in thanks as the last nipped rice particle leaves its chopstick for your mouth, you will be acclimatised.

You have eaten time.

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Saturday, May 17, 2008


Who are you, who who, who, who…?

The Embryology Bill is to be placed before the House of Commons this week. It is full of the most intractable issues but the one I’d like to ponder on here is the use of animal and human mixed gene experimentation. Being somewhat older in the tooth (but feeling every day younger in the brain), my mind becomes a surrealist’s delight of juxtaposed images culled from all my years of swimming in the black lagoon of culture as I think of this. Looking back there was Beauty and the Beast, the American import horror comics that I bought from my basin-cutting barber in his garden shed in County Durham, bug-eyed monsters in science fantasy magazines, films that preceded and then included the Alien trilogy, Mary Shelley, Franz Kafka and, more recently, the whole zombie-plague genre. (As a footnote to the last, I have, here in the womb of the Pyrenees, a satellite dish which brings in about a hundred free channels and there is a strange one called Open Access which is an unheralded and bizarre mix of poker, God and 1930s and 1940s long-forgotten films. Recently I was mesmerised by one called The Last Man on Earth, which was so badly acted you’d have thought the neighbours had wandered in for a game of charades but the plot prefigured George Romero, Danny Boyle, Cronenberg et al’s later oeuvres, in a remarkably satisfying way. It appealed both to my sense of myth and, at the same time, the sci fi nerd in me!). Meanwhile, leaving behind that digression, the Embryology Bill, I think, suggests that by terminating the mutations at 14 days, enough time will be allowed for scientists to test genetic fusions that may cure some of our worst and most heart-rending diseases.

Probably, like most people other than fundamentalists who believe God created everything, except our free will to play God (oops, another digression – I was amazed to read that the Pope’s Outer Space Spokesman is gestating the idea that God created aliens, too) I am somewhat distanced from any sense of emotion in this part of the embryology debate. We seem to be at a time in our evolution, as I have discussed before, where the species is beginning to refashion itself to meet the exigencies and calamities it and the universe have in store for it. Just as wheat is being genetically modified to handle the worst droughts or diseases, so the human species is modifying itself to handle the worst scenarios that face it, internally and externally, both on our current planet or in readiness for those to which we may have to migrate. One can see that a composite life form, a ‘Terrabeing’ may eventually emerge which is an offspring of everything that lives and breathes in the world today. And it is this extraordinary hybrid mutant that will colonise the near universe.

Imagine a world where there can be no racism, no sexism, no fundamentalism – in fact no isms or consequent wars – because we have all metamorphosed into Oneness!

The One will have inherited the earth!

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008



Still gathering no moss in their sixties

Of course those of us of a certain age have grown up with the Stones. We decided (or didn’t) that they represented our sexual drive in a way that the more melodic and less edgy Beatles never could. Their lyrics were more dangerous. They lived as our alter egos. Jagger’s fey athleticism appealed to boys and girls alike, The music seemed created precisely to draw from him that uninhibited, unashamed and dangerous sexuality. And the group personified wickedness on stage. I remember “Would you allow your daughters to marry one of these” being spread across the two inside pages of one right wing newspaper, with four long-haired grimacing faces staring out. The fact that they were middle class, intelligent and articulate passed us by. We, who couldn’t inhabit the seedier world of groupies, wild women and drugs, watched and fantasised. But we could dance. We could prance and pout at our girlfriends, scream out the punch lines, liberate our libidos to a series of great rocking anthems.

Martin Scorsese has a CV with rockumentaries. The Last Waltz is an exquisite rendering of The Band’s work, the Dylan four hour biography is so wonderful that it acts as a contrapuntal diary to our own lives over the same period. And now this single concert in “Shine a Light”.

Some of the reviews were scathing in a nasty, sexist and revealing way. They found these ‘old men’ in their sixties, still getting it on, horrific. Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times, particularly so. Being film reviewers they felt they could revere Scorsese’s film making while rubbishing the ageing subject matter.

If the Stones had been black Chicago musicians, there would have been none of it. (I saw so many wonderful R&B legends at Ronnie Scott’s in the sixties and they certainly did get it on to both reverential and hardly sexually repressed reactions.) No, jazz and blues men can do what they like and it’s art. But rock and roll…? Give us a break.

In fact, the Stones (despite the sickly horror of being presented to Bill Clinton, Hillary and a horde of gruesome hangers on in so-not-rock-and-roll haircuts and suits, were tight, professional, awe-inspiringly athletic and phenomenal value for money. At the same time, Scorsese’s cameras caught loving camaraderie in the shape of smiles, grins of delight, facial caresses, kisses and strokes. Jagger ruled with hard-headed control, as though these were his family of errant boys, yet at the same time, still managing to cavort his way through numbers, adding a girlish, deliberately un-coordinated St Vitus dance to his routine. Keith Richard is still the epitome of the enfant terrible who has survived the extremes into yet another piratical decade. Ronnie Wood is still the stranger at the feast. And dear old Charlie Watts. What can you say? Hair untinted, face as solemn as ever (except for one delicious knowing moment when he pretends it’s all too much, whacking skins at his age), you’d still love him to pop round for supper.

For all the ‘they’ve sold out’ stories, the boys can still do the business and they are so mega rich they could have copped out years ago but like all who have touched the stars in whatever they do, they drive themselves on because they love it, love each other and love whipping up a storm.

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Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The Sweet Tooth Fairies

When I received my PhD all those years ago, all the new doctorates in the country were revealed in some academic journal, I can’t remember which. Anyway, it was engrossing to discover what parallel brains had been working on during the four years I had slaved (with, I admit, mixed results). I have long felt that there are only two areas of genuine freedom in education for the student. These are the nursery classroom and doctoral study. In the first there is space and time to play with physical matter and in the second to play with grey matter. A key ingredient of a PhD should be originality and for the tiny child, almost everything seems original. Anyway, the title that eventually caught my eye in the not very long list of theses’ titles, was ‘Slippage in Meringues’. I’m not sure how long the author struggled with the central complexity of the meringue and I never requested a micro-fiche copy from the British Library but it was a lesson that in this life people pursue the most idiosyncratic of intellectual quarries.

A recent New Scientist issue contains a story about women’s voices. Apparently they shift in some previously unknown scale as the woman progresses through the menstrual cycle. When they are at their most fertile the timbre becomes liminal, bridging the gap between them and men:

…scientists have suggested that very subtle changes caused by the rise and fall of different sex hormones can be detected by men, who then perhaps find a woman more attractive without necessarily even realising why.

One can imagine the laboratory with rows of speakers whispering huskily their siren-like recordings, drawing ignorant males from all over the research campus to stand, in chest-puffed queues, scratching their heads outside the code-locked doors and not having the faintest clue what has brought them there.

In this respect there is a lot in common between meringues and men. Gooey centres.

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Monday, April 28, 2008

The revolt of the cyber no-brainers


There was an article this week in the Sunday Times about the latest research being done by Professor Susan Greenfield, a front-edge thinker on the degeneration of the brain, as a result of ageing, disease, trauma and so on. She has produced a book on the subject: ID: the Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. Her work in this sphere has taken on a social dimension in that she avers that the young, by playing long hours on their screens could be irremediably affecting the plasticity of their brains. A consequence is that they may lose their sense of individuality. By submerging themselves in You Tube, Second Life, Face Book and all manner of social networking sites and avatar-based multi-user game programs, their sense of self may become increasingly diminished. As some readers will know, this has also been a preoccupation of many of these blogs. Greenfield also feels (the article could well have mashed her discursive thought into something unrecognisable, of course) that education’s historic importance in producing the brains needed to promote humanity’s future, is in decline. She cites the significance of learning facts, of recitation, of having to build personal structures of understanding from text and numeral in creating independence of thought. This new technological world will eradicate all this by addicting us to the quick fixes of the virtual world with its dopamine-releasing qualities. These neural changes may well result, she feels, in an increase in extremist behaviours such as dependency on cults and doctrines (gangs, terrorism, Waco, Jonestown etc) as the person loses his or her independence of being.

While many of these blogs have explored the effects upon identity of the virtual worlds within which some of us prefer to reside, I would not make any leap of connection to the thesis that the world is becoming increasingly extremist. Nor would I suggest that education was a positive experience of the kind she suggests. At the height of facts-based education, the 19th century was not exactly terror free! 9/11 is chilling for its symbolic power even more than its reality for it hardly compares in actual figures to deaths perpetrated by the regimes of Stalin, Hitler or Amin.

The problem, as I see it, is the reverse. The world of the classroom has become increasingly virtual in that it has become, over the decades, an alienating experience for the young. Lip service is paid to parenting, sex, drugs, crime and, latterly, the cyber experience. It was evident when I was responsible for primary research on computer games and videos in the early 1990s (Young Children, Videos and Computer Games: Issues for Teachers and Parents: 1997, Falmer Press) that the classroom and the bedroom were travelling in opposite directions. In a sense what has happened is that the cyber world has become today’s counter culture and one that does not just embrace intellectuals but people of all walks of life and propensities. The classroom has become seen as arid, over-structured and disconnected from the business of living, with its focus on league tables, examination results and a narrow interpretation of what it is to be educated. It is a factory that fails its products.

If the brains of the young are losing their vitality, as Professor Greenfield suggests, it is not the technology that is the root cause, it is a social system which refuses to become involved enough to educate the young as cyber as well as real citizens, in domains that really matter.

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

A Tale of the Unexpected – Synchronicity

We don’t know the truth of the hypothesis, but Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity is a gripping one. Jung suggests that extraordinary coincidences and inexplicable events may be the result of connection and communication which exist below the surface of consciousness. Telepathy, empathy, intuition, foreknowledge and so on are forms of mental transmission made possible because the unconscious of each of us belongs to a universal human pool, and we offer up our individual droplet to the vast unconscious whole and, in this way we are connected to every other droplet.

Here is a story, a case study, supporting Jung’s contention.

A woman friend in England, was feeling homesick and so decided to read a book, written a hundred years before and set in the city of her birth, Bordeaux. She had read several chapters of this story, concerning the love of a young man for an older woman, a tale of languishment and the hidden springs and poetry of love.

In the middle of reading it, she went off to work as usual, through the city that she could never call home. She called in, in that haphazard way we often do, at a charity shop. Her eyes scanned the lines of books. What was this? There, on the shelves of the good, the bad and the ugly of English literature, were two books in French. One was a translation of the Qu’ran and the other a slim volume of poetry by a minor French poet. Both were leather bound with gold edging to their leaves. They were both published in the middle of the 19th century. She bought them. When she got home she put them on her shelves for later reading.

Returning to her Bordeaux roman, she read a chapter or two over the next few days. Then she came across a passage in the story which described how the young man had found a poem by a contemporary author which summed up his desperate love. There, in the novel, was a complete quotation of the poem, the name of the author, the title of the limited edition and the page on which the poem sat. My friend looked up and above her head was the self-same collection! She opened to the page aforementioned in the story and found the poem, exactly as quoted.

This is as perfect an example as one might find of synchronicity.. The only reason I am not an atheist is not because of some weak longing for a God but because of the unexplained in daily life. These events seem to occur often enough to my friend. She will, I hope, write and publish them one day – in a more vivid and arresting detail than I have summoned up, here.

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Thursday, April 17, 2008



April in Paris – Pigalle and the Picaresque

Probably April has never been the best month to visit Paris. It’s not too warm and the wind blows and there is a sense of a city coming out of hibernation. A few years on from my first visit, I approached the Museum of Erotica in the Pigalle, slaloming around the street girls in their leopard skin tights and mobile phones, the men adopting that bored but crafty-eyed observation of passing human traffic, the sex boutiques and the seamier arenas of below-the-belt entertainment.

The museum, itself, has not changed too much since my last visit but now includes more video and some early simple line-drawn animations. From the ground floor to the sixth there are displays of artefacts which encompass every possible take on sex. At the top is the latest in Manga-type extremism. At the bottom are the primitive, the ancient, the puzzling and the ambiguous. In effect, as one ascends, there is a gradual transmutation from non-pejorative, matter of fact depictions of genitalia and sexual practices, through Freudian uncertainty, fetishism and the commodification of sexual parts and related instruments of pleasure and pain, to a point where the human essence of the body is totally eradicated. And explicit representation is all. Unlike the Barbican Seduction exhibition, which I blogged earlier this year, there is a closeness, a tangible intimacy in the exhibition which can draw or repel. Here the body is loved and hated, lampooned and degraded, there it is transported to the divine and exalted. The lack of any aesthetic treatise in integrating the objects within some evolutionary (or revolutionary) theory of sexuality, is a plus. You make of it what you will.

At the end of the visit I felt curiously sober and contemplative. The museum would soon be including examples of the replicants discussed in the blog before this one. The historical sweep of the exhibits provides stark evidence that humanity could be slowly breaking its sensory bonds with the exhilarating joy of being sexually alive, as it loses touch with the primary sensuality of its skin, flesh and bone and consigns the body to the domination of market forces.

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Monday, April 14, 2008



She’s giving me good vibrations…

A new book has just arrived in a bookstore near you. It’s called Love and Sex with Robots and is written by David Levy, an expert in artificial intelligence. In the review of it that I read yesterday (the excellent Christopher Hart, Sunday Times), it appears as though we have already entered a world that science fiction has presaged, for decades, with gloom. We are long used to blow up life-size sex dolls and penis-substitute paraphernalia but Levy recounts that the rich are already ordering replicant females for their entertainment and gratification. Replicant? Well, if you’ve seen Blade Runner than you know what I mean. These are state of the art, electronically wired and programmed, flesh-simulating, indiscreet objects of desire (to parody Bunuel). They can be programmed to service whatever proclivities their owners have and, apparently, provide this perfect companionship for life – providing you keep the batteries charged.

There is no doubt that making and keeping relationships is an arduous, rewarding but sometimes ill-mannered process. We often find balance between ourselves and our partners difficult to attain and maintain. Our joint sexual needs can seem to have random harmonies and discords – which are all part of the messy business of being human. As we age we note the changes in our sexual appetites as if they have become the true markers of mortality, the first light-fingered touches of death.

So, what better than rid ourselves of this whole awkward business and, for less than the price of a luxury car, buy ourselves one half of perfect immortality, a partner who is compliant, designed to please, stays forever young and whose eyes mirror, not reality, but an egotistical Dorian Gray.

On many occasions in these blogs, I have pondered on the nature of identity as the technology we create, slides over us, wraps round us and infiltrates our pores, our cells, our neurons. Technology should, at best, remind us of the glories of transient human life – providing we learn to love ourselves with all our failings. If we hate what we are, then technology becomes our master or mistress and erases our very reason for being.

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Wednesday, April 9, 2008



Torching Tibet


Hearing an apparatchik, on yesterday’s news, conjuring up disturbing realpolitik regarding the demonstrations against China’s conduct in Tibet, was just about as reprehensible as could be imagined. This Olympic Official said that the protesters were without political conviction and were just jumping on a new bandwagon to air their personal grievances and gain attention to themselves. This man ought to be subjected to Chinese justice.

The Olympics are no longer the clean dream of Baron de Coubertin. There is nothing innocent about them. They may be so for some drug-free athletes and a proportion of starry-eyed, blinkered spectators but they are also an arena for media wars, profiteering, cynical manipulation by Governments and a gravy train for their careerist representatives. The rings have become manacles.

It could be argued that choosing China for these games had a hidden agenda. The eyes of the world and all that guff – opening her up to international scrutiny. Making her more democratic. You just have to look at the eyes-of-the-world scenarios in Iraq, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Russia, Palestine and on, and on, to know that it’s economic realism and revolution that brings down regimes, not the eyes of a mainly self-interested world.

Whereas any campaign attracts agitators who have personal grievance, it will, if authentic and moral, gather momentum through international empathy fuelled by constant exposure. These days this is usually the result of the work of committed, honourable individuals, in direct action and using the internet. People can now talk openly to people – not sieved through the sanitised medium of the Official Spokesperson. News can no longer be glossed and standardised by endemic bias or direct intimidation. The result is that the path of the Olympic Torch illuminates, for all to see, China’s monstrous behaviour in Tibet rather than being, as China hoped, an internationally hallowed symbol of its undertakings and it’s honoured place among nations.

What more hideous counterpoint is there than the images of peaceful Tibetan monks, following their gentle and loving paths and a torch which now symbolises the burning of their culture?

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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Self-administered brain growth

Well, I watched the BBC 2 programme last night on meditation, half-expecting the same result as when I, myself, meditate, falling asleep just when I think I am getting somewhere – or, actually, nowhere, that being the point of it! I’m glad I didn’t, not because Kathy Sykes, Professor of perspiring femininity and Doctor of divine dewy-lipped deportment (usually, jogging in tight vest and shorts) was at her most artfully wide-eyed, but because the last quarter of an hour raised something intriguing for this reader of popularised scientific research.

It was this. Meditation, in its various forms such as focus on breathing, focus on a small object, cognitive deep relaxation or transcendentalism, results in brain growth! Measurable. Significant. If we accept without demur all the strong, anecdotal evidence that it makes us more loving, compassionate and peaceable as well as curing physical ailments and move on – then, let us look at this one extraordinary fact. When a person meditates s/he changes the structure of her/his brain. The physical neural matter. Jugglers, for example, concentrating on learning how to fling their balls, beanbags and batons, show marked change after only three months.

Maybe, Reader, you are wondering at my effusive incredulity? Or you may be one step ahead!

This is my frisson, my philosophical flight of fancy: if, by meditating, I change my brain, is this ‘I’ who does this, part of my brain at the same time, bootstrapping itself to a higher order of neural processing? Is the brain a self-evolving entity that boots up to better things by deciding to adopt a state of deep quiescence? As we manage to contain and dissolve our atavistic, emotional chaos, bung full of anxiety, pain, jealousy and other forms of stress by shifting it all from right brain focus to left brain focus (another hypothesis in the programme) , who, exactly is the ‘we’, doing this? Is it something beyond the neuro-elastic brain, residing as a diffuse self throughout the molecules of our bodies? Is it a soul?

If the conundrum doesn’t bother you, fair enough. At least be practical and meditate for half an hour each day. Life will be rosier for you and people will love you for it. It’s not difficult. Sit comfortably. Look down your nose into the middle distance and concentrate on feeling and hearing your breath go in and out to the exclusion of all else.

See! Told you!

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Friday, March 28, 2008

Dying to know me…

Probably because of some deep and penetrating correspondence with a friend, who is currently in India, I lay in bed last night and considered the conundrum regarding why thinking about existence seems to be such an elusive pastime. I see Julian Barnes has brought out a book, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, but, according to the reviewers, he has done a pirouette around death, maintaining it as the empty fulcrum of his dissertation on how well he might be prepared for it. I WILL read it when the right time comes (not THAT time – the penalty shoot-out, I mean the right reading time). I was discussing with my friend how, through meditation, we attempt to achieve a death-like state, more than le petit mort of the orgasm, but a sort of total unknowing, of our existence. We often consider death to be on a par with pre-being. The abyss from which we flew, at conception, is paralleled by some with the ultimate nothingness into which we fall, wingless, at death.

To me there is no real resonance between the two. Whilst coming into life gives us a multitude of canvases whereon all things may be painted, the final acts are ones where these canvases are scrumpled up and our exhibition space is closed down. We never have to come to terms with original being. It just is. The completion of life is different. As I said at the beginning, it is hard to train the mind to reflect with absolute rigour and focus upon the end of being. If you experience it like I do, the more you try to pin down its amoebic formlessness, the more it shapeshifts, leaving the pins holding only themselves.

Religions race in at this point, blowing the trumpets of redemption or forgiveness or believable, to some, gnostic ladders into the unknown. Many of us grasp them in relief because it stops us having to battle with the awesome business end of life. So, generation after generation has little of worth to pass on to its offspring about how they might manage the conundrum better than us.

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Friday, March 21, 2008

Cancers may be cured – but we will still die

Arthur C Clarke died this week. I remember going to the Edinburgh Festival to see 2001 in the sixties. It was a premier but whether world or British I can’t remember. It was too earnest a gathering to have druggies sitting in the front row, being blasted into a semi-religious trance by the kaleidoscopic drift down to the planet at the end. One of my favourite images in film is the last man, sitting in a minimalist white, echoing room, turning to look at us, as we enter that space. Clarke gave us a lasting glimpse of the irrepressible place of religion in human affairs and the consequent conundrum of identity. The druggies loved the monolith in 2001 because it epitomised the otherness of spirituality, far more, perhaps, than temples, churches and shrines. It was a religious artefact for the modern age. Scientology took root among some because Hubbard, its father figure, a Sci Fi writer of no particular repute, saw the connection between space travel, aliens and desperate seekers after the truth of existence.

As anyone reading these blogs will have gathered, I love science fiction because it can provide left field perspectives on issues which rear up in front of us to such a degree that we can’t see round them. I am reading a 1930s dystopian novel by Karin Boye, called Killocain. Here’s a quote:

“My Chief,” I interrupted, impatiently, “I’ve already taken the liberty of ordering five test persons from the Voluntary Sacrificial Service. They’re waiting outside in the hall.”

The ‘I’ here is Kallocain, himself, the main protagonist of the story, a scientific experimenter who has discovered a truth drug which the State may be able to use to uncover dissidents. The guinea pigs are healthy people who see the Voluntary Sacrificial Service as a noble career in the preservation and furtherance of the State.

On the news, as I had just put the novel down, was a big story about cancer clinics being set up all over Britain where experimental drugs can be tried to see their efficacy against cancer. The programme is NHS and Cancer Charity supported. Those with terminal illness and a short sentence of life, can volunteer for radical, untested treatments. As the doctor being interviewed, said, “It speeds up the whole process…”

No doubt most of us would want to try something, rather than rot away in a miserable chemo-therapeutic semblance of normality. There is a belief, inbred in us, that miracles can occur. We will queue up for such a possible reversal of the ticking clock. We wish to pervert the course of justice, where our sentence has been meted out by a white coated specialist. But there is something disturbing about it, nonetheless.

Perhaps what we need, more than anything, is a belief system which focuses on how to make life worthwhile, whatever is happening to us, no matter how tough, how appalling, how out-of-our-hands; worthwhile, second by second. A sort of zen wonder at how fantastic it is to exist – and to know it.

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Monday, March 17, 2008



Juno what I think?

Juno, the film, is about teenage pregnancy. It divides critics. There are those who find it awkward and clunky and others like myself who had a real laugh and thought it very wittily written. Talking to people who hated it and restraining myself from adversarial passion (something I have to guard against) I tried to be the researcher I’m normally paid to be. Listening, eliciting, clarifying, corroborating. And what do you know, out of the data sprang a central theme, just as it is supposed to in my own research methodology books.

People liked her stepmother. They liked her father. They thought her boyfriend was played to a brilliant dumb T and her ebullient girlfriend was fine. What they didn’t like was her. The pregnant one played by Ellen Page. She irritated some. She just wasn’t believable said others. Nobody speaks like that. She’s far too knowing for a sixteen year old. She’s so weird that you can’t identify with her.

Now many, if not all, these critical beings go happily to super hero movies or Woody Allen comedies or the Truman Show/ Groundhog Day/Inside John Malkovich surrealities and chatter happily about ‘genre’ and how they like it because it does what it says on the big round flat metal can. Juno, on the other hand, apparently, is not enough of this world. Art, since the Dadaists, has been as much about the improbable as the real and every day and film is a wonderful medium for exciting our attention about what might be.

It seems to pass the detractors by that Ellen Page plays a smart oddball and creates a role model for young women to be different, uninterested in anorexia as a fashion statement, uninterested in bronzed, loudmouthed, made-to-order boys, uninterested in most of the values of her sub-prime, credit-crunchy culture and, finally, wants to find her own way, no matter what obstacles social expectations throw at her.

Which is why I liked it so much. I may not have daughters but I am looking to my grand daughters to pick up on her batty intelligence and run with it.

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Friday, March 14, 2008

Premature Burial: how does it feel?

There are some films that you know are probably very good but you are prevented from going to them by a deep inertia caused by fear. You are unwilling to expose yourself to a meditation on a possible state of being which is so appalling that you go rigid at the very thought. And this state of being could be just round the corner for any one of us. It is not a rare condition. It could be Alzheimer’s or a stroke or a crippling accident or sheer senility.

Whether you read Poe or Lovecroft or Crowley or Kafka, you are aware that the pit is a form of interment and the pendulum continues to tick. Being buried alive has a pedigree of crazed fear that must reach back to the dawn of sentience. To be still alive and yet incapable of drawing attention to your flesh and blood, your neurally networked reality seems an extreme too far.

It is this jumble of gibbering horror which lies beneath the urbane decision not to go and see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Only the title seems wrong. A little too whimsical, despite the film’s extraordinary range of emotional enquiry from the crudely sardonic to hardly bearable pathos.

The story, if you are unaware of it, is about a man who has a stroke which severs, effectively, the upper cortex from the rest of the brain. In awful brief, he is left with an eyelid that he can mobilise. We, the audience, communicate with this eyelid and when it rises we can enter his thoughts, memories, feelings and his commentary upon his condition. We eventually see him write a book about what has happened to him as his remarkable nurse calls out letters of the alphabet and he gives a single blink for the one she must choose. He died a few days after the book was published.

The strong beam of light in this film, the searchlight that almost blinds its two-eyed mobile watchers, is this. Existence is unbelievably precious. We only value our consciousness when we are about to be deprived of it through death or are bereft of it through desperate circumstance. We are alive. It’s a thing of wonder. We must exploit it to the full, just as the great hero on which the film is based did, in the terrible circumstances in which he found himself.

It is a film which is magnificently life-affirming.

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Monday, March 3, 2008



There will be blood then? Not really.

Well I saw Daniel Day Lewis et al in the Rive Gauche arts cinema in Perpignan this afternoon knowing all the hype, the Oscar, an interview with the King of Guignol, himself, on television but with the sinking heart of one who fears the worst. I wasn’t far wrong.

Those who have compared There Will Be Blood to Citizen Kane want to examine their capacity to differentiate that latter, flawed masterpiece from something which is not much more than an average celluloid vehicle for overacting. The relationship between Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview and the fire and brimstone priest, Eli Sunday played by Paul Dano begins unevenly, totters along hysterically and ends in total bathos, the latter being brained in the bowling alley symbol of Lewis’ oil-based wealth. Compare it to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford wherein the death of James (Brad Pitt) at the hands of Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), despite being forecast by the title, is full of tension and wonderful, complex portrayals of human frailty, throughout.

Both are long films. Both are quasi-historical philosophisings on the shaky foundations of modern America and both rest on central male relationships. But I’ve written at length about the outlaw film. What about the oil one?

It all comes down to whether you find DD Lewis and Dano believable as characters because the plot barely sustains interest. Lewis dotes on his son but rejects him for a period when he is blown deaf by an oil rig eruption. He kills an imposter who claims to be his brother because the man fooled him. He is blackmailed into being ‘saved’ by the priest in a full blown exorcism which Plainview goes along with in exchange for the rights to run a pipeline to the sea. He takes his son back and then when the boy is older and married and wants to go off and be his own man, he rejects him in a nasty prosy speech which should have stayed on a page somewhere: the whole being an attempt to encapsulate the morally bankrupt industrial empire building of late 19th century America.

The mining sequences are over long and consequently lose their dramatic potential. The character studies are grossly OTT with little light and shade or complexity. The soundtrack is a constant distraction. The rest of the characters are shadows on a cave wall.

It all goes to prove that films that in some way appeal to a history as young and terrible as America’s can be pure box office. The more outlandishly Punch and Judy, the vision, the better.

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Friday, February 29, 2008



Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings

Anyone who was anyone reading about anyone in the early seventies will have come across Janov and primal scream therapy. Apart from giving a name to a good rock band, primal scream experience involves getting to the emotional core of your being by having a good yell or two. Well, probably a lot more than that, but it has sufficed to bring me to my theme for this blog. Janov has adults regressing through their emotions to the birth and foetal state but I’m going to offer two vignettes regarding what is possible with your own children – in a safe and often wonderfully enriching way.

The first time I tried this was with a close friend’s two and a half year old. The key, I think, is that the child has just begun to conquer basic language and can conceptualise the temporal states of yesterday, today and tomorrow, So it’s quite early in language acquisition. Then, gently ask them to remember the first thing that they can remember. You might have to coax a little and say, “..before that..?”, etc. What comes out can be astonishing.

Back to my first story. Lucy thought for a while and looked at me as though I should know without her telling me. Then she said that she had been at the top of an apple tree with stars all round and she dropped, well, slowly, on a rope through the branches of the tree until she landed on a green carpet. A man with a beard came with a big knife and wrapped her up. In turned out that the doctor who delivered her did have a beard and there was only a green towel available!

The second story took place last week. I had told a close friend who has a two and a half year old about Lucy and encouraged her to try it. Her child thought for a moment and said something like, “..do you mean when I was born?” Gulp, thought her Mum, “Yes”. Well…said the little one, “ My head fell into my heart.”

My reading of this is that she woke from the pure emotional sea of her mother’s womb and came into consciousness. The first articulation of reason.

Try it if you can or get your close friend with a child that age to try it. It would be good if you tell me what happens – and I’ll print every story on the blog.

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Monday, February 25, 2008



Shorn (of respect) Connery

Currently, one of the television channels in the UK is running a top one hundred of the most embarrassing/obnoxious/gets-on-your-tits individuals of this past year. I have no idea if SIR Sean Connery is one of these but he should be. This tartan Bahamian (The King of Scotland should have been about him not Idi Amin) has let it be known that he will only return to Scotland when it becomes independent. He is also an avid (and financial) supporter of Alex Salmand and the break-away Scots. Meanwhile, from his crofter’s cottage in the western isles of the Bahamas, Sir Sean pontificates on politics in the way only those who believe the grandiose hype about themselves can.

Having accepted a Knighthood and the lickspittling that that entails (read my blog on Dame Helen Mirren) he rides forever on the assumption that a man who once played James Bond, is, somehow, really some kind of James Bond, forgetting that James Bond represents probably the ultimate bounder among the English establishment’s cavalier, amoral-patrician heroes. Connery’s Scottishness is as ersatz as Japanese Scotch, a spin, a deluded self-construction that sells his image.

Maybe what he is and represents is what Scotland will become with independence; a kind of MacDisneyland full of quaint fables, funny accents, insularly self-satisfied and bedecked in tartan. A bit likely Eire, in fact! Isn’t it time that we forgot all this nationalistic nonsense and got down to being European, anti-chauvinist and egalitarian? Be proud of our histories, maybe, but prouder of what might be achieved if our cultures were allowed to enrich each other, freely.

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Friday, February 22, 2008

Is there anyone out there?

I’ve written a few essayettes on the question of reality and identity posed by the artificial worlds developed by arcade and internet programmers. If we enter these worlds in avatar form (constructed selves built to our individual specifications of desire and need) are we experiencing and learning (or not) in the same way that would happen if we physically existed in such worlds? Many influential gamers think so. Their very insistence on this central tenet resonates, inversely, with the Hindu notion of Maya or Plato’s shadows on the cave wall. Through time, religious and secular philosophy has pondered reality and illusion. For any thinking individual, human existence is fraught with this problem. Is this stuff I see around me, people, objects, events – everything! – really there? Does it disappear when I die? Do I die? Was I ever alive? Am I part of the Matrix programme? What the fuck is it all about?

The projections that are emanating from IT geeks today suggest that within 25 years we may have computing power which is a billion times the power of today’s machines and A THOUSAND TIMES SMALLER! So small, in fact, that it will be possible to insert computers in the brain, vastly amplifying neural processes in all their forms, affecting the senses, the emotions and rationality. Interactions could occur which don’t so much blur further the differences between illusion and reality, but completely eradicate it. The gamers, Plato, Maya et al will all be finally proved right. There will be nothing out there. It will all be in here, snugly fitting on the top of the cortex.

25 years. I could still be alive – physically speaking. Will the insertion of this magic brain bullet of vastly superior intelligence allow me a wondrous vista of possibility as my ageing neurons are supercharged for their last great hurrah, so that the dissolution of my body becomes a mere lightning storm beyond some distant ridge? Will death become something I fear no longer because its symptoms are subsumed in a fantastic last epiphany?

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Sunday, February 10, 2008

Facebook: Now you see us now you don’t

We’re apparently nearer to a CCTV camera than we are to a rat in the sense that CCTV watches us more of the time than rats do – and make no mistake, those rodent eyes bore into you wherever you go. And as if this surveillance was not enough, some huge proportion of us gladly exchange the one way mirror of personal freedom and private citizenship to expose ourselves to as many people as possible on the web. We facebook ourselves, to coin a new verb.

The name has the ambiguity of high literary coinage, it could have flowed from the pen of Orwell or Zamayatin (whose brilliant book, We, influenced Orwell’s 1984). Face – book. It is as though we want people to be able to read us like a book. We want to figure as the central characters in our novels. We want to stare out from monitors all over the world as though, solipsistically, the world is ours and ours alone, daily, hourly, second by second. We want anyone out there from the most perverted to the most holy to share in the thrill of studying our narratives, placing the face within it and finding us as interesting as we are to ourselves.

There was a time, within my lifetime, when to be enigmatic, aphoristic, private and sphynx-like were elements of what was thought to be an interesting personality. If photographs were about to steal our souls, then we’d throw up a defending arm and run for cover. The world used to love the mystery of who we might be and we’d go through life cupping the solution in tight fingers. Or so we deceived ourselves.

Now, we buy into the total publicity of the self, put billions into the coffers of American neo-cons, and reveal that we are..er…without much interest. We are thinner than cardboard cut-outs in our autobiographies, so thin that it’s hard to discern whether there is anyone there at all behind the photos, the videos, the logs.

Where once we had to fight a deep, introspective and painful battle to self-discovery, now we think we have ourselves taped via the trappings of technology. The Pharaohs’ bodies were heaped with symbols of what was felt to be significant to their status as they took the last journey.

We can’t wait that long. We undertake the process of mummifiction from the moment we virtualise ourselves.

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Friday, February 8, 2008


Sharia, no fear, not here – or anywhere

As I wrote, probably longwindedly, in an earlier blog, there should be no blurring of state affairs and religious dogma. It doesn’t matter whether it’s American fundamentalist Christians or Mormons, Islamists from wherever, the Vatican’s long nose in South America, Zionism or any as yet unknown future attempt to pervert the course of justice through shaky beliefs in the Divine, religion should be confined to the home and the place of worship. It may be a matter for hot debate in bars, restaurants and Speakers Corner but we must not provide even the slightest foothold for the politics of the spiritual on the rock face of state-determined justice. This does not infer that the morals that underpin different religions can’t bring a richness to the debate about how a society might govern itself, humanely. Morals are merely distilled ideas about what constitutes good and bad and we must debate them constantly, whatever their source.

The Archbishop’s arch remarks about Sharia law and its acceptance, even in part, bespeaks a loony laxness of thought. As though we can take bits and pieces of different religions and amalgamate them into a legal edifice within which we can all be coexist. There are aspects of most religions which can bring out a cold sweat in any peaceable individual and we are not just talking stoning women, cutting thieving hands off or supporting a basic inequality between sexes. Male and female circumcision, polygamy, the quaint taxonomies of what can and can’t be eaten, the refusal to have blood transfusions to save your child, the caste systems and so on are all mad and often bad. Whatever the various prophets said and did, virtuous or no, those that have followed have long since twisted their thoughts into filigrees of self-serving desecration of the original ideals.

Why should the laws of the state be premised in the minutest way upon a belief in God? We must stop it becoming mandatory to be superstitious, primitive of thought, ill-educated in the matter of evolution or to be suffering from simple blind faith, as a prerequisite to being a member of society. Let’s just be humanitarians and socially responsible citizens, all of us. Leave the rest to the fireplace and the place of worship.

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Friday, February 1, 2008


Better the Government We Deserve than the Government We Get

It is an anomaly as painful as it is real. Political leaders do not represent the cream of generations. They are rarely credible enough for their nations to feel even minimal respect. In most cases they would not rise to the top of a multinational company or professions such as medicine or philosophy or astro-physics. Instead, they stump along the avenues of power with their ill-developed intellects, scantily clad in designer sound-bites. They learn to live in the self-serving villages inhabited by all political elites, insulated from the fields and streets, the pain and pleasures of their disenfranchised, cynical or alienated voters. They look happiest when they are meeting politicians from other countries who share their sense of importance and who suffer the same delusions of grandeur. It has been thus since opposing kings and princes shared tents and watched as their armies fought each other.

Our politicians shuffle around cabinet posts as though they are supremely capable of handling any brief from law to media and science, from the military to health. They only really connect with the public when events go drastically wrong and they knee-jerk their way to formulating policies that result from dramatic or traumatic singular cases and prove utterly unsuitable to meet the general need. They live, neurotically, in the now of their own lives, not even able to plan for their children’s futures, unable to develop true global strategies that might offer hope to the starving millions or those that suffer the tyranny of weaponry.

We watch the superficial razzmatazz of the American elections and see how this drawn-out show business, hyped event makes no demands upon presidential candidates to display intellectual quality and true social concern while furthering the careers of elite groups around them who will benefit substantially should they achieve power. It is the same whether you are in China, Africa, Pakistan, Britain or Eastern Europe. Everywhere. Always there is the constant disgrace of inequality and distress that politicians bring to the livelihoods and welfare of a substantial element of their peoples. A never-ending cycle of economic and social abuse.

How do we deal with this? Perhaps in a Brave New World we make it mandatory for the brightest of our population to undergo community service, to be trained and developed in social science, philosophy, politics and economics and from thence to running the country. Perhaps it would be better if we impose leadership upon the capable, than fester under the random yoke of the incapable. As with the Dalai Lama, our leaders might find they have become distinguished by their range of qualities and have a consequent duty to serve their people. And this would not have been as a result of blood, class or vested interest.

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Friday, January 25, 2008

Of Capital NIghtmayors…

Having had a life spent in both the north and the south of England (and with a family in Scotland) and, latterly, living in East Anglia and Surrey but working in the north (Manchester, Sheffield etc) it has been borne home to me that there IS a divide in the country. When, finally, I come to spend most of my time in France, yet continue to do some work in the UK, then what was a feeling, an impressionistic surmise constructed out of the corners of my eyes, so to speak, suddenly becomes palpable.

The South, and London in particular, have an obsessive self-regard, a preoccupation with wealth and status, a presumption of high culture that sucks the energy from the rest of the country, while mocking, arrogantly, it’s parochialism. Its size and mores of disinterested anonymity, its Dysneyesque world of ancient buildings and a thousand ‘things to see and do’ makes it seductive, dream-like, unreal, a place where wraiths live; the natural location for 28 Weeks Later. Since Pepys, Defoe and Dickens documented a century or two of the subcultures of poverty, acquisitiveness and base human drives, among the vile effects of early capitalism, London has established a genealogy of extreme competition redolent of the murderous fight for survival in all arenas of nature.

Marx’s insights about capital and class may equally be applied to the constant war for supremacy at city-level; as if, as writers often portray them, cities are some kind of super-organism. Go north and settlements become less well-endowed, the artefacts of higher culture become sparser and the battles for resources constantly lose out to the capital city. People in the north often display a simmering anger and disgust at the concentration of wealth and obnoxious assumptions of superiority of ‘Londoners’ or ‘Southerners’ – those who live down there, regardless of their often forgotten origins.

And here in le sud sud of France, guess what? People feel the same way about Parisians.

It would take a mammoth act of faith and vision to help people become equal in more than the eyes of the law and the spouted hypocrisy of most politicians who have relocated to the Westminster Village. The hub and spoke economic mechanism of communal living spins too fast, constantly throwing uncompetitive humanity to the very rim of acceptable existence. And even in London, there are further internal hubs and spokes that produce the same centrifugal injustices, in fractals of finer and finer detail.

Best to know what the Mayoral elections are actually about!

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Saturday, January 19, 2008

No Country for Old Men: the film of the book

I read Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name, a month or two back, saw the Coen Brothers film yesterday and watched the Newsnight critics half-dismiss it the same evening. There was some praise but, in the main, they felt it was over-hyped. One found the psychopath, Chigurh, robotic, a mechanical killer and the whole enterprise little more than a series of murders, strung together without any deeper meaning. One felt it represented a dark shadow passing over the US in 1980. The third yearned for some humour. They did agree that the dialogue was brilliantly terse.

How curious it all seemed: the literary village people and their tone-for-television views. Feeling somewhat resident of another planet, I was mesmerised by the film. It was essentially faithful to a book which is so spare it feels moulded out of the desert sand, desiccated by its sun and scarified by its wind. It is a relentless battle to oblivion between a fast disappearing morality and a modern world which has little imperative to show any compassion and where the basest human drives inhabit imaginations, leading to mayhem and death. The sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and the psychopath (Javier Bardem) crisscross the savage landscape, playing a game of chess for the life of a local man (Josh Brolin), whose almost involuntary, mad act is stealing two million dollars from the death tableau of a shootout which has left nearly all the drug runners dead. The sheriff says tiredly that he has been ‘overmatched’ by the killer who employs an icy desire to live up to his promises of retribution towards anyone who blocks his path. Sometimes he spins a coin for their lives, sometimes he doesn’t. He is random and utterly out of a Jungian universal nightmare. He symbolises the crazed world of the gun lobby, Columbine, the deference to and celebration of killing that characterises so much US foreign policy (Vietnam, in the film, acts as a social conditioner, a raison d’etre for characters’ actions). He is a creature too insatiably insane to be called wicked.

All the while, the old ways with horses and neighbourliness is giving way to anonymity and machines, thoughtless, brutal acts and the lure of money and drugs. The resolution is merely a lull in the driving storm of destruction. We do not leave the cinema sated by justice, or think that things might turn out for the better.

It IS exceptionally funny in certain moments. It is full of menace. The dialogue is pure gristle.

Go and see it!

And then see the extraordinary Tommy Lee Jones again in The Valley of Elah. So much in store!

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Monday, January 14, 2008

Caution – Lust may not be erotic!

I saw Ang Lee’s latest film at the weekend. I had the same reaction to it as I did to Brokeback Mountain. A long, very stylish but somewhat vacuous film which depended on a single taboo to keep the audiences filing in. In his cowboy predecessor it was, of course, the love that could not speak its name and in Lust, Caution it turned out to be the love that dare not say it was actual sex before the cameras.

Whilst some people might find Lust, Caution erotic (after all, there are people who find all kinds of situations and interactions between humans and objects, birds and beasts, sexually charging) it left me in a state of secondary voyeurism. By this I mean that I find myself disengaged from the visuals of perspiring bodies in unusual positions and watching the camera, watching the action. I wonder whether the director is calling, “down a bit”, “right a bit”, “deeper, deeper”, “what’s your spare hand for, for God’s sake!”, as he orchestrates the action. Or did he lay out a chart of the sex moves and ask them to improvise around them? Whatever, it felt like a fabrication. Not that the filming of real sex has any great interest for me, either. What other people do is what they do and it’s up to them whether they want to beat the daylights out of each other, manacle each other or half-suffocate in plastic bags. It only appeals, in cinematic terms, if it furthers a plot and deepens my understanding of character and the perambulations of humanity. In any case, film relies totally on sound and vision and actual sex is as much dominated by touch, taste and smell which film can never convey, unless it’s a truly remarkable piece of cinematography.

At the end of the day, the attempted graphic realisation of sex in Lust, Caution tries to eradicate doubt as to what is going on and, in doing so, eradicates also the potential for sexual fantasy in this viewer.

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Monday, January 7, 2008

Parents! Get a life and leave your kids alone…

I met a bloke once who got irate with me when I said all private schools should be abolished. He explained that he was (relatively) poor because he was sending all three of his children to private school, just like his parents did with him and his sister. There was no way he would entertain them going to ‘ordinary’ schools because they would be under-educated and fit for nothing. I mused internally that he meant by this, ‘be consigned to the lower orders’.

There have also been a spate of articles recently concerning the degree to which parents are encroaching on their children’s lives in school…and beyond! Not only are they researching for them, helping to write their poems and essays, giving them swotting time and networking good contacts for their field assignments but once they leave school or university, they are preparing them for jobs and even interceding on their behalf regarding pay and rations!

We have reached such a nadir in our consumerist society that our children are becoming our designer dolls. We pour whatever wealth we can scratch together into them and try to sculpt their lives, often towards destinations that we, ourselves, failed to reach. Children are becoming our second chance, our alter egos in life. They are our virtual computer game protagonists, seeking glories in education and work that eluded us, by surmounting obstacles, collecting rewards, climbing the meritocratic ladder.

Where once the very well-off and the aristocracy indulged in this blood-insured road to success, now it has become a widespread obsession. The aforesaid bloke and his ilk are giving up much of their lives to feed the frenzied desire for their progeny’s success. And it will continue in a cycle through oncoming generations.

They don’t stop to wonder about the strange equation that they have created. It is this. If all the energy and resources are poured into the next generation, no-one has a life. Neither the hapless, denuded parent nor the suffocated, manacled child.

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Saturday, December 29, 2007



Season of discounts and discontent

The time is back with us when people scratch their heads and wonder why the not very great and not very good are on the Queen’s Honours list Given my republican tendencies (well, leanings that have tipped me over into a horizontal defiance) it always surprises me when people conflate the need for royalty with these devalued awards. Their semi-mystical logic is that royalty transcends mundane, common life. That a head of state should have an ineffable quality to which an ordinary Joe or Josie could never aspire. And to receive an honour from such, imbues the recipient with self-esteem laced with awe.

My view is that an elected President would confer on behalf of all of us, the State’s gratification for an individual’s contribution to its security, culture or economy in a way which might be transparent and based on agreed criteria; because a President would be truly one of us, the people, not a curious offspring of a line of blood that has resulted from historical accident and murky acts. We could then rid ourselves of cash for honours, bowing and scraping, awards that are based on class, privilege or brownness (see earlier blog!) in the civil service. We might also begin a process of restructuring our society so that the establishment no longer grasps the social tiller with its self-aggrandising hand.

Last night I watched The History Boys on the tele and marvelled again at dear Alan Bennett’s flair for words and drama. In this consummate piece of writing he says more about the parlous state of the education of the young than a thousand academic reports. Today, time-serving technocrats rule the curriculum, teacher training, resourcing, measurement and the so-called development of the next generation. As a result we have fewer university entrants from those in relative poverty, schools as factories and a social experiment that has eroded our cultural creativity. Education policy resonates in its mechanistic aspirations with the dimming of the light of free speech, new draconian laws, ID cards and talking CCTV cameras. In The History Boys, Hector, a camp but harmless gay school teacher, professes to have no other purpose in professional life than explore the history of ideas. How his students use the experience and to what ends, is their business and responsibility, not his or the State’s. He is pitted against a moderniser, a smart teacher, a man who knows how to train students to appeal to exam boards and interview panels. Culture is seen by the latter to be a basis for expedience, a means to gain status and privilege, a book of useful facts to brighten one’s dinner party charisma, a dumbing down of what we might offer our society. Smart but never profound.

The anarchy of people, their cultural aspirations, their refusal to be dragooned for economic and political ends should be central to education. We might then see a critical revolt against the specious nature of monarchy, class and vested interests and a line of Governments whose limited intelligence and vision constrains and stultifies the vital energies of our society.

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Thursday, December 27, 2007

Faggots and Maggots

Long in the tooth as I am – the first record I owned was a 78, Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley, the other side being Thirteen Women and Only One Man in Town – the various incidents of BBC intervention on the part of a minority (or majority) have always stood out as pathetic beacons of shirt-in-underpants conservatism under the great pleasure dome of rock. These interventions have usually meant the banning of tracks from the main airwaves whether they be by Jane Birkin, the Sex Pistols or Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The latest decision (since rescinded as the maggots in Auntie’s carcass have been squirted with the bug killer of liberal sentiment) was to smudge out the word faggot from Fairy Tale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. This was on the grounds that it might offend the feelings of gay men and was made on their behalf. The song is twenty years old and is said to be as much a part of Christmas as mince pies and the Queen’s Speech. Well, I know which of three I would retain, if forced and it wouldn’t be the annual nonsense from the House of Windsor or the appeal to my gluttony. Songs have long been a way of causing the wounds to open as the cultural knives of the New meet the desiccated flesh of the Old. This has always happened in social, religious and political terrains.

Real rock music keeps alive the rebellious youth in the ageing and sustains the vitality of the young as they seek to supplant what they find to be vacuous and deathly. Rock music is part of the great tide of art’s radicalism. Even an inoffensive, anti-religious ditty such as Fairy Tale of New York may contain lines that might damage your bourgeois sensibility but it is in its overall message of bawdiness rather than in the word faggot that this power resides.

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Monday, December 17, 2007

The browning of Britain

I read somewhere recently – I remember, it was in one of those answers-to-impossible-questions books that are piled up near the door in Waterstones; the sort that people buy for friends when they have run out of ideas – that the basic colour of the universe is brown. Examine all the colour spectra of everything that exists in space and time and brown dominates. Just like when you were a child and you painted something really pretty but couldn’t leave it alone and you kept adding and adding more colour until what you had left was a soggy brown rectangle of sugar paper. Not only that, but your paintbox had also been transformed into a uniform khaki. So when God or Nature made the universe’s infinite vastness, He/It, too, must have ended up over-egging the colour aspect.

Sludge brown is probably the pigment of bureaucracy rather than its usual association with grey. The reason is this. The more bureaucracy is vested with responsibility for aspects of social life, the more layers of it become implicated. And layers mean lots of individuals at different levels of the hierarchy. And the more they confer via their emails, memos, conferences and break-out sessions, the more the clarity of an original, possibly appropriate decision becomes an opaque, unworkable sludge. Brown, in fact.

In some ways it is even worse than this. Brown may be the least liked colour in all the tins on the shelf. I am sure research would prove my hypothesis to be true. Colourful people are creative, active, go-getting, interesting, risky and sometimes difficult to take. Put the ones who are, let us say, brownish or, at least suffering a dearth of vibrant colour, into any organisation and they accelerate the dunning of its bureaucracy. The non-doers, the risk-less, the organisationally dependent for their very identity, once they become social administrators, in their varying shades of drab, develop the curricula for schools, the by-laws for the council, health and safety regulations, laws to close loopholes in laws, multicultural niceties, obscenity criteria, prevention of humour that might cause offence….. and on and on. Put in another, even more graphic way, they are like a multi-hued, if muted, kaleidoscope of food on a dinner plate when they begin their careers. What is the uniform colour that they share when their organisations eliminate them from their bowels into the outer world?

The reason so much of British society is dull and lacking, is that the brown have inherited the earth.

Kerouac was right. Bureaucrats steal our time and our choices through legislation. They mess up our paintbox.

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Saturday, December 15, 2007

The Assassination of Jesse James by Jack Sanger

Let me explain the background to this odd title. I saw a documentary on Jesse James recently and then went to see the film with Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, (excellent!). Both were reasonably well researched and showed Jesse James to have been a psychotic killer. Rather like Billy the Kid, he became the subject of contemporary US equivalents of penny dreadfuls – cheap paperbacks that eulogised him as a hero. The song, ‘Jesse James’ has helped to consolidate this myth and it is sung by country folk singers all over the western world.

What, of course, the song does, is prop up the case for Americans’ inalienable right, within their constitution, to bear arms. Making heroes of killers is one of the earlier examples of ‘spin’ that was, and is still, so powerful, it is continual free publicity for the American gun lobby. I don’t think I’m being PC in rewriting it, merely historically correct.

Jesse James

Jesse James was a lad, he killed many a man
He robbed the Glendale train
He stole, fought and lied with his brother by his side
He’d kill without shame, he was insane

Chorus
Oh Jesse had a wife to mourn all her life
Two children they were brave
But that weak neurotic coward who shot Mr Howard
Has laid evil Jesse in his grave

It was on a Saturday night, the moon was shining bright
They robbed the Glendale train
With the agent on his knees, he delivered up the keys
To those outlaws Frank and Jesse James

The people held their breath, when they heard of Jesse’s death
They wondered how he ever came to fall
Robert Ford, it was a fact, shot Jesse in the back
While Jesse hung a picture on the wall

Oh Jesse was insane, something in his brain
Though he never killed a mother or a child
He stole, fought and lied, with his brother by his side
And at the hand of Robert Ford, he died

Well, this song has been remade to show the world today
That Jesse was a killer in the west
He lived by the gun and was shot by fellow scum
As a hero he could never pass the test

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Friday, December 14, 2007


What a load of Bali nonsense

Whatever weak resolution comes out of the talks about the global environment, the fact remains that the US has become the caricature of a self-aggrandising bully. Whilst its history of ‘exporting democracy’ at the end of a gun over the last decades, whether in South America, the far east or the middle east has had all the hallmarks of a schizophrenic’s inability to understand and reflect upon his or her violent attrition, the ‘buck’ doesn’t stop there. It is forever trying to bolster its economy to the detriment of others, whether equally developed nations or those that are trying, grimly, to raise themselves from poverty. Thus any attempt to curtail its massive depletion of carbon fuels and the ingredients that keep our atmosphere stable, is met with hostility from its deep core of industrial and domestic gluttony.

Even though there is a large percentage of Americans who disagree with national policies, they hardly scratch the chromium plated gloss of Washington’s rhetoric. We will wait forever for the Americans to drive a global effort in the equitable sharing of resources because the US psyche is driven by a basic belief in capitalism, not the wholehearted support of the extremes of neo-con, necessarily, but at every level there is competition to grasp what’s available. This happens at individual, communal, state and national levels. It results in no healthcare for poorer people, homelessness as a result of the greed of the sub-prime market, the bearing of arms that leads to children and students’ deaths and the conspicuous guzzling of resources by those who can afford them.

Societies cannot maintain civilised, democratic and socially responsible behaviour without a barter between entrepreneurism and socialism. Global democracy means going without to a certain degree, in order that those who have little or nothing can gain enough to make life tolerable. Bali is a battleground between battle-hungry exploiters and would-be cohabitees of global conservation. The US, as a nation, hardly comes anywhere near the line between the two.

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Monday, December 10, 2007

Dealing with your naked truth

If television is not pandering to the fantasies of people wanting a place in the sun or, at least, a new location, it is offering a new skin for them to live in. This is cheap-shot reality viewing and, in some ways, it is TV’s own version of Second Life, the Internet-based virtual community discussed in an earlier blog. Woody Allen once said, “Life is hard and then you die” and there seems to be a prevailing notion that if you can acquire a swisher house or a more attractive identity, then this, at least, will result in a more interesting journey to the dark abyss.

To meet your Reaper in better shape, according to current lore, you could do a lot worse than metamorphose under the all-seeing eye of a body expert. In brief, if you can’t change the world around you, then change yourself and become a different, more desirable personality in that world. However, this is apparently too difficult to do on your own, even with NLP.

To effect the cure, it appears you must subjugate your essential self to the strict regimes of pseudo-posh women whose beauty-orientations are on a dizzier and more spiritually pure plane than your own. Alternatively, offer yourself passively to strange otherworldly humanoids who, because they prize their own rarefied sexuality above all else, cannot be accused of physical impropriety and are thus able to touch your private parts in the interests of broadening your hosizons and creating a better you. Whichever you choose, dominatrix or camp commandant, these experts will denigrate, ruthlessly, your current body and personality by revealing, under the exacting lens of the camera, all that makes you an abject social dud. Now, suitably deconstructed to an apathetic heap of total irrelevance to humanity, you are perfect for reconstitution into the kind of person who advertises in Soul Mates: “Vibrant tactile female, confident, great shape, wicked sense of humour, looking for partner to take me where none has been before. No hang-ups.”

And off you go. You are no longer you but carry an implant, a retained set of ego-cells from the expert who has rebuilt you in his or her likeness. The road to hell is full of such good retentions.

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Sunday, December 2, 2007

The case of the Sudanese teddy bear

Alexander Pope satirised the enmity between families caused by a suitor’s removal of a lock of a woman’s hair without permission, in Rape of the Lock, by comparing it to the rape of Helen of Troy and untold misbehaviour of the Gods. The ‘storm in a teacup’ that underpins such satire comes to mind over the teddy bear in the Sudan imbroglio. It would be hard to imagine a less offensive act to Islam than the naming of the said toy, Mohammed. From what I have read there is nothing in the verses of the Qur’an which prohibits such naming. It is inconceivable that Mohammed, himself, demanded that his name should not be taken in vain, such was his apparent humility! Just as with the Christian bible, much such proscription may have been added later by zealous scholars. It all goes to show how easy it is today to globalise hate, ignorance and religious fanaticism , no matter how trivial the cause. People everywhere can interpret a religious tract how they will, whether they be Christian, Muslim or Jonestown-style fundamentalists. If they have any charismatic power they can gather around them the vulnerable and the susceptible and turn them into a rabid mob.

The soft toy we call ‘teddy bear’ came into existence as a western companion to childhood innocence when Teddy Roosevelt refused to kill a helpless bear. From 1902 onwards, the toy was sold in shops. At the end of the 20th century it suddenly asserted itself as a symbol of masochism. Elvis wanted to be one, with a chain around his neck. Maybe the Sudanese Muslims should have left Gillian alone in her innocent ignorance and put the bear to trial. Pope would have been pleased.

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Sunday, December 2, 2007

Naked animosity

Here is one of the drawings referred to in the last blog. If you are interested in seeing more of the artist’s work, email me on my website and I will forward your email to her.

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

More sex problems

I met up briefly with an old friend the other day, in Gerona, northern Spain. She’s an Austrian painter. Recently she attended a master class with an international array of well-known artists and part of the work they were set involved ten minute life studies, a traditional exercise in observation and line. The nudes were a man and a woman and they could be arranged however the individual artist wanted. My friend accomplished six or seven such studies, each one a short narrative of possible relations between couples, though she said that she only drew what she saw and she arranged her pairing, almost intuitively. In many ways the works are more erotic than most of those in the Seduction exhibition, covered in my last blog but a visit to the Picasso exhibition in Barcelona would show that they remain firmly within a tradition of such depictions and hardly stray from the natural ground of, let’s say, the bedroom.

She had been asked to bring examples of her work to a gallery in Gerona and when she disclosed her pieces, the reaction was what one might have expected from any time since sex became taboo, owing to biblical interpretations of western religions, (and today, no doubt, many Moslems would adopt similar attitudes). It wasn’t the fact that the pictures are of nudes, it is the sexual charge that each picture contains. This was deemed “too strong” for the gallery’s public.

When the same artist showed her work in an exhibition, the related website received many emails that were abusive for depicting naked forms and some that assumed that the artist must have permissive attitudes, herself, bordering on ‘nymphomania’. Men, particularly, apparently bought post cards of the works and said they would return to buy the originals but once home they were made to renege on their promises by their infuriated partners.

Why? Were the drawings depicting uncomfortable realities in the homes of would-be buyers? Were these men trying to communicate to their wives something about the shortfall in sexual relations? Or does the same prudishness reign today as it has done through recent centuries?

Like any inspired artist, when she draws, it seems to me, she unconsciously influences line and space with all that she’s seen and heard. The works are vignettes with appealing ambiguities, even though individual viewers may see only one interpretation.

Just a few lines and shading on paper exploring what happens behind many a closed door. Inflammatory for many, nevertheless.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

Sex sex sex sex sex….

Always an attention grabbing headline, don’t you think?

Anyway, it is an appropriate handle for what follows. I went to the Barbican yesterday to see the Seduction exhibition. It is an arty form of what you might see in the various sex museums throughout Europe, such as the one in the Pigalle in Paris. Drawings, sculptures, paintings, photographs and videos depicting naked bodies and sexual acts from early times to today and encompassing the Occident and the Orient. The exhibition is wonderfully well spaced out and the audience admitted in restricted groups so that there is a kind of intimacy necessary for such an event. In other words you could stand in front of some act of fellatio or fornication without feeling you must ‘move along now, sir’.

Whilst there was much graphic representation to see (and warnings that sections of the exhibition might shock) the overall effect was remarkably untitillating. Whether we were being extolled to see sex as a mystical union with nature, a purely physical act of conjoining or self-obsession, or an unequal economic exchange between the genders, the images slipped by and my mind turned over the social and philosophical implications of what was on view, rather than their erotic or pornographic content. There was remarkably little sense of ‘seduction’ in it all. Rather than exploring a range of wiles to persuade the ‘other’ into sexual congress, there was, instead, a cavalcade of frank and sometimes disconcerting, portrayals. Most of what human beings get up (or down) to, is here but, if anything, it lacks the capacity to draw the viewer in. In this sense it is less erotic than one might have hoped – if one agrees that eroticism involves a high degree of mental commitment and participation in a gallery audience.

In the end, I left fully confirmed in my unshakable belief that sex should be the least problematic area of human existence. It should be celebrated for the capacity it has to make us feel less alone, to transport us to poetic realms or to deepen the feelings we have for each other. It becomes a taboo and a danger only when it is used as the oppressive coinage of religious or political bigotry, of debasing commercial interests, or if it lacks true and unequivocal consent by one of the parties involved.

It is really worth paying for sex at the Barbican. But go expecting a cool and surgical account of this most significant human activity, rather than any deeper analysis of its ramifications in the exigencies of social life.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Celebrating psychopathy…

It was reported, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, that the numbers of deranged adults who were admitted to psychiatric institutions was at an all time low. Psychopathy had its outlet in killings, kneecapping and other forms of intimidation. There was a grim social place and status for the aberrant.

In Basra, women, sometimes with their children, are being murdered on a daily basis for not wearing full female Muslim dress under a murderous interpretation of Sharia law. This follows years of Shia, Sunni, and Al Qaeda inspired murder, rape and torture that have resulted from the occupation of Iraq by western powers with absolutely no conception of the consequence to their acts.

If there are any lessons from history – and the likelihood is that there are very few – one stands out. This is that when a society is fragmented and convention, order and the subtle interactions of daily life are torn to shreds, then the diffuse and complex way in which the insane amongst us are contained and marginalised, is excised with it. They become liberated and their obscenities are condoned as heroism and celebrated beneath religious or other flags of convenience. Worse, their insensitivity to committing extreme acts begins to excite and stimulate blood lust among their once moral and reasonable fellows. Obscenity multiplies like a virus.

Whatever the society, no matter how perverse the powers that keep it stable, we must consider this one lesson from history if we feel virtuous enough to intercede. How can we remove the virus and leave the body healthy?

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Thursday, November 8, 2007

“Too much in the sun…”

This paraphrase of a mourning and recalcitrant Hamlet, not wanting to spend time in the glitzy court of his murderous stepfather, came to mind with the latest knockabout findings of health scientists. For years the skin cancer lobby would have us returning to those Victorian days of white skins and multi-layered clothing, parasols and factor fifty. There was always a slight chink in their armour when it came to the sunless winter depressions suffered by people of the north but, they would argue, a skin stays young that sees no sun.

Research, out yesterday, suggests a new take on the place of the golden orb in our health and happiness. Vitamin D, which slides down sunbeams and into our bodies on magical motes, actually keeps us younger at a cellular level. We may look like wrinkled cow-hide handbags from the outside but, unlike most of that kind of container, the contents are ordered well and maximally efficient.

We are vaguely aware that health is the new politics and the body, the subject of ideological war, as vested interests seek advantage for their product ranges, their personal careers or their belief systems. But, typing this in a still hot south of France in November, my body feels pretty damn good and I try to listen to what it wants, rather than what scientific experts might tell me.

I want to be like Hamlet and stay out of the health spotlight, refusing to spend time in the media court or be subjected to media courting.

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Saturday, November 3, 2007

Are they taking the Mickey?

If it had been April the First everyone could have laughed. If you were a science fiction reader or a pro-life activist maybe the lips were puckered and the eyes narrowed as the news came out that mice have been modified, genetically, to run kilometres instead of metres before being exhausted, to eat like a dog without getting fat and to live longer and have sex more often. Funnily enough I saw this news as I put down a hard-boiled but engrossing Sci Fi detective thriller called Black Man by Richard Morgan. The black man in question had also been genetically modified by activating an atavistic gene we used to have when we clubbed everything to death that moved. He is bigger, better, faster and smarter than any unmodified human – and he is also amoral. In Morgan’s distopia the black man is a thirteen and the fundamentalist Jesus freaks of future America regard him as an abomination. Thirteens are hunted down and sent to Mars or imprisoned. Or used to hunt and kill. The racist attitudes of today become magnified to a national fomenting hatred.

Other viewers of the news may have made the not too intellectual leap from Mighty Mouse to themselves and worked out that if they could go to the clinic and have a simple gene-modification they might also be able to run like a cheetah, eat Big Macs without adding an ounce of fat, live to be a hundred and fifty and have sex like a Hitchcockian train and tunnel; infinite entering without ever having to leave.

We seem to be accelerating our capacity to modify ourselves and our fauna and flora in any way we think might meet the challenges of the future; a poisoned atmosphere, over-population, colonies on hostile planets. It is all happening below the level of our consciousness. On the surface we live our varied lives and die and our immortality lies only in the genes that we have passed on to our children, for good or ill, a random lottery set up at conception by adults who have been, for whatever reason, attracted to each other.

However, we are teetering now on the edge of a designer-gene world. Our very natures are entering the laboratory so that our progeny can be planned, mapped and sculpted. As Morgan’s and Mary Shelley’s books both intuit, these offspring could switch from being bonny babies to fearsome monsters.

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Friday, October 26, 2007

God – guess what I’ve heard….!

Over the last few years, as technology has moved from pen to typewriter, to typewriter with a memory and finally to the computer into which I am presently feeding my thoughts, a certain set of possibilities and potentials have been put in train. Whether it be with a text on a mobile or a sudden psychological rupture in our defensive wall as we think we are sending out a secret email, we can make mistakes that cost. No longer, as once, a single letter misdirected and arriving at the wrong door but a missive intended for one person, suddenly dispersed like autumn seed on the fertile ground of the internet to a myriad strangers.

These mistakes can be costly to the individuals concerned and for whom it should be a private matter. But, seizing upon the heavily publicised consequences and realising how appalling they are, protagonists of pain have entered a new dimension. Now, there is commonplace posting of embarrassing images on Facebook, the bullying of classmates or teachers on You Tube, the sharing of mobile-phone video-nasties and even the mocking up of party political broadcasts to lampoon and undermine candidates. (The latter not necessarily a bad thing!)

Once upon a time the only way we could make our views felt was via a letter to an editor and then, more often than not, the politics had to be in accordance with the paper in question or the letter had to achieve a certain literary merit. Now, a little skill with photo-editor and text and a motivation to do damage has allowed us to recreate the medieval stocks and place our chosen victim there. As with all things infinite, the potential in the world wide web is for good or ill. Burma has closed off the Internet but what does get through sustains hope for its suffering people. Meanwhile, here in the cosy affluence of our sceptered isle, with little better to do, we turn our hands too often to serving our base emotions and causing hurt and misery. There are powerful tools about. We should cultivate better ways of using them.

Excuse the gossip in the last

The email set off far too fast

For my personal checks to halt its flow

I hate it when the dice’s throw

Has dropped from inside my sleeve

Without a single ‘by your leave’

And suddenly the world does know

That I’m a prurient so and so

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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Drink? – Fat chance!

Our physical selves are much in the news these days. By 2050 the majority of UK citizens will be clinically obese. At the same time the current epidemic of binge drinking has been augmented by middle class quaffing. And it, too, is projected to get worse. As a sometime resident of a village near Guildford, it comes as a thrill to realise that when I shop at the weekend I am eye to watery eye with the nation’s heaviest every day tipplers. They are downing wine by the carafe-load most evenings without thought to their significance as British role models. At the same time I am slaloming past the expanding girths of the town’s citizens.

The species is undergoing a metamorphosis that points towards Lamarck rather than Darwin. Even as I speak, people are changing. Children are inheriting the evolutionarily dead-end, dominant genes of their parents. If all the statistics are true they are fatter, more depressed, work-shy, indolent, drunken and thick. And all this is happening in my one lifetime.

Since the majority determine what kind of government we have and the laws that that government pass, it is easy to forecast that by 2050 the thin, fit, hard-working, emotionally stable, intelligent teetotaller will become a squashed, second class citizen, hardly able to breathe beneath the soft underbelly of the new ruling class.

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Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Fancy an Affair?

Notes on Japan: 7

There are outlets in some of the major Japanese cities, called Alibi shops. These are purveyors of apparently innocent goods. They comprise the full range of city souvenirs – from any destination but the one in which you may be shopping! In Kyoto, for example, you can buy chocolates, mugs, paper flowers and fans branded with the insignias of Osaka, Tokyo or Hiroshima. The shops flourish for the obvious purpose – to support illicit philandering and provide concrete proof that you were where you said you were.

In the land of exquisite manners, even an affair can be aesthetically arranged and packaged in a deliciously duplicitous wrapping.

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

The Neanderthals and their Nuclear Clubs

Notes on Japan: 6

In my last post I raised the question of how nations could become psychopathic. Why take this despicable, cruel alternative rather than a more benign route? Each year, on the anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb, the Mayor of Hiroshima sends a telegram to every head of state, reminding them of that appalling crime and pleading for peace and an end to nuclear testing. He does the same whenever a nation joins the elite club of nuclear protagonists. Hiroshima, after a sentence of death for over a hundred thousand of its citizens, chose the humanitarian, route of peace and love. One of the handful of buildings that survived, stood beneath the hyper centre of the blast and is now a preserved, gutted skeleton, an epitaph to that appalling day. Around it is a tranquil Peace Park. The museum is a paean to human sorrow. In it the citizens of Hiroshima, still ongoing victims of the great obscenity of a weapon of mass destruction seek restitution for the whole human race.

Why have the Jews of Israel, sufferers on an unimaginable scale from man’s inhumanity to man, developed their own nuclear bombs? Why have they become one of the world’s cadre of inhuman military aggressors? Why did Hiroshima go down one road and Jerusalem, another?

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Saturday, September 22, 2007



Gotcha! 250,000 killed in American bombing!

Notes on Japan: 6

When you have been to the Peace Park in Hiroshima you wish that every politician in the world could be dragged to its museum and made to look at the images of devastation following the dropping of the atom bomb on the city. A quarter of a million people died here and Nagasaki. These are some facts I didn’t know (I now realise I was fed propaganda in the fifties as a growing youth!).

Truman and his aides discussed warning the Japanese. They didn’t.
The US Government discussed up to ten potential sites. They chose these two because there were no prisoner of war camps nearby.
Both sites sat in a topography that would result in greatest carnage.
The bombs were dropped to explode at an optimum height (500-800 ft) to maximise civilian and material destruction.
Despite knowing the devastation of Hiroshima, the US dropped a further bomb, the next day, on Nagasaki.
There was a US spin that said that dropping the bombs shortened the war by two to three years and probably saved lives. Yet, the Japanese had run out of military resources.
The million or so Japanese troops would have fought to honourable death, it is said but the enormity of the bomb meant that they were saving their families by dishonourable surrender, thus justifying civilian carnage.

I haven’t read any plausible grand theory concerning the psychopathy of nations. The US. Nazi Germany. Stalinist Russia. China. The Japanese, themselves. Darfur and countless other African genocides. The British in Australia. And on and on back through time for the last however many thousand years.

To close down the intelligence in another person’s eyes, forever, is among the most obscene acts of which a human being is capable. To do it on the scale of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is beyond any comprehension.

Yet, there are among us, on this globe, as many who try to protect the sanctity of life as degrade and destroy it. Almost everywhere we look we see governments that are cynical, indifferent, callous and capable of dehumanising the so-called enemy, thus justifying whatever gross acts that might be committed. But among their own citizens are countless kind, considerate and humane individuals.

As long as we are taught to differentiate people into us and them and fail to see that there are no essential differences worth a pinch of salt between any two human beings (after all we all come from the same genetic ancestor!), then carnage is always likely. Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, communists, capitalists, black, white, brown, will seek, when times are hard, to devalue the humanity of others, in any way different from themselves.

To see ourselves in others’ eyes is the first premise of civilised existence.

Who could then press the red button over Iran?

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Tuesday, September 11, 2007



Tips for eating:


Notes from Japan: 4

One of those irritants that keeps me consistently inflamed in life, is tipping. In our UK, class-ridden society the argument is rarely about the principle of tipping, it is about the degree: whether ten percent or fifteen percent, usually. I have a non-mathematical friend who argues that inflation means that it should now be fifteen percent!!! I have other friends who argue that tipping, particularly in a well-frequented restaurant, produces better service and, often, better food. Then there are those friends who reserve tipping for particularly well-prepared and presented meals, as though good eating cannot be taken for granted. They thus elevate themselves to gourmets, with all the attendant snobbery that this entails.

When I worked as a waiter all those years ago in Newcastle, I felt consigned to serfdom by the ignominy of relying upon tips as a means of making a reasonable wage. Hell is others, said Sartre and there seems to me to be plenty of evidence that Purgatory, at least, materialises whenever ‘others’, that is most of the UK population, have the opportunity to lord it over those less fortunate. Tipping is the perfect arena for this often subtle form of class discrimination. Imagine Dear Reader, whatever your job, be it doctor, teacher, company director, judge – how you would feel if your salary was made up by voluntary subscriptions from your clients. Would it change your sense of personal value and social status? I think so. Sorry to single out certain professions among this blog’s faithful readership but other readers, perennially made to feel lower in society’s invidious pecking order, presumably don’t need the iniquities of tipping, spelled out to them!.

Empathise with this curmudgeon’s delight to discover that there is no tipping in Japan. I have no idea whether this means that everyone has a reasonable wage (as should be the case, everywhere) but customer service was uniformly high, enthusiasm for doing the job well, abundant and I never felt I was being pressured into a dominant/subservient role play which exists in all tipping societies. It made the act of eating (Japan’s cuisine is an undoubted glory) an almost transcendental pleasure.

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Friday, September 7, 2007



Zen garden, Kyoto

Notes from Japan: 3

Outside Kyoto, up in the hills, there is a Zen garden some 500 years old called Riyoanji. I saw it at a fairly early hour – that is, before the tourist buses arrived. The setting is peaceful, in the middle of hectares of lake and trees. I viewed the rectangular artifact from a shady wooden pagoda, sitting on well worn planks. There was no place from which my eye could take in its entirety, despite it being only about the size of a tennis court.

The garden is, as one might imagine, a paradox. It represents nature’s garden by displaying no natural growth, save moss that adheres to the shadows of rocks placed on its shale. The shale is raked long-ways and is pale grey. The rocks are of varying sizes and they seem to have no obvious pattern in their distribution. I struggled to recover the original conception that coalesced in the mind of the monk who laid them this way. In other words, for me it became a physical version of a Zen koan, a metaphor for the impenetrability of existence. The experience forced me to sit and meditate – not in the usual sense of the act, as part of some spiritual quest – but in an unforced, serendipitous way that crept up on me.

Now, back in the UK, I think of having experienced all those art installations in their gallery-laid post-modernity, premised on the desire to make me think. None has held a candle to this gently disturbing encounter near Kyoto.

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Sunday, September 2, 2007



Not just a load of old bollocks…

Notes from Japan: 2

In Innsbruck there is a memorial to the Emperor Maximilian in which a series of statues, larger than life, clutter the side walls of a little church. They all represent heroes of one kind or another and are cast in gunmetal black. Curiously, one of them is our own – or French, depending on your nationality – King Arthur. What is especially striking about this moral and chaste Head of the Round Table are his well hung orbs. Unlike the rest of the tall effigy, his sacred testicles are golden and are only this colour because of the incessant attention given to them by the furtive fingering of young women, seeking successful conception.

I was reminded of these burnished baubles at a Shinto shrine on the edge of Kyoto. In the woods there are the broken-stone hind quarters of a horse statue. They are wrapped in red cloth, as though to heal them. As I watched, an elderly couple arrived and stood behind the horse, in turn. They rubbed its hind quarters first and then their own thighs. A young couple followed suit. All four crawled under it’s half-belly, having to squeeze awkwardly between stone and earth in a final act of atonement to the god, thus represented, together with (I guessed) a prayer that their own infirmities might be eased.

Nearby there is a shrine with lines of blank wooden foxes’ faces which require its supplicants to inscribe their features, offer coins and prayers. At another a stone ball rests on a ledge and after a monetary appeasement, the believer guesses its weight and wishes for some happy outcome to a current impasse. If it is lighter, the result will be propitious. If it is heavier then the outcome may be bleak. At a Buddhist shrine it is possible to ‘buy’ a a twist of paper, with your fortune written on it. If it’s optimistic you keep it but if the augury is poor, then you can drop further coins in a slot and pin it to a wire where a monkey god will rescind its awkward news.

Throughout time all cultures, whether they be the so-called advanced nations or those patronisingly termed ‘primitive’, have externalised their hopes and fears by creating icons upon which they could project their hopes and desires. Alongside scientific reason, magic and superstition continue happily to occupy the human imagination.

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Wednesday, August 29, 2007



Bums on seats

Notes from Japan:1

Cultural differences have their honeymoon period in the eye of the visitor, during which there can be a clarity of detail that, over time, melts back into the flux of the every day. Living with family members rather than as a tourist enables one to stay clear of the well worn grooves of convention so that these details can be magnified for personal illumination.

For example, the trains. In Kyoto, that venerable city and repository of so much Japanese tradition, I learned that each train line has its own tannoy jingle. The Japanese love bits of melody. In the railway stations you can hear the familiar ditty of your train approaching as well as seeing details on screens and hearing voices over. In the carriages the seating may look familiar, except that the passenger can revolve seats to make up group spaces or create more privacy. The ticket collector-cum-guard enters the carriage and bows to everyone and when he leaves he does the same, thanking you for your cooperation. Extreme politeness, efficiency and enthusiastic customer care pervades every avenue of commercial life. As one who has never thought too much about it, putting up not too stoically with the wide range of attitude one meets in the UK service, retail, transport and leisure arenas, it came as a pleasant surprise. I found myself nodding and smiling back to everyone I encountered in stores, trains, restaurants and the like. And because I was smiling I felt rather good! The experience will sharpen my discontent on my return to the grimy, late, fixed seat conveyer belt lines that are UK trains, where customer care amounts to being warned against fare dodging and even a cattle prod could not force more people into a commuter carriage.

In Kyoto, too, I made my first acquaintance with the heated toilet seat. In its off-cream bulkiness, it fell, in a design sense, half way between 1950s modernity and one of those patented but failed innovations of the 1930s which never saw the public light of day and are now exhibited as curios in science museums. Except, in that parallel universe called Japan they took off and have become very popular. It was explained to me that the Japanese suffer, en masse from haemorrhoids and these seats offer the solace of warmth (going up to a heat that would cook in milliseconds the immured products of an egg bound chicken) and an up thrusting jet of warm water to cleanse the unloaded orifice. Instructions are in Japanese script and also in English and are stridently concerned to have you avoid splashing water from the shower on to this prized monument to the technology of ablution. The dire consequences are not spelled out but can easily be imagined.

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Wednesday, August 1, 2007



In praise of NCIS

I don’t like fictional programmes based upon current or recent events. I squirm from a disgust at what we humans do and also because these productions feel like exploitation. Dramatisations of 9-11 or soldiers’ lives in Iraq or Afghanistan, for example. I wonder about family, friends and acquaintances of those who have suffered. When it comes to military programmes seething anxiety is doubled. Not only are we supposed to identify with the ‘just cause’ but also endorse the sending of men and women to their deaths. So I don’t watch military drama on principle.

With this as background how do you explain the following? By chance I watched an episode of NCIS on Channel 5. Then another. And another until I realised that I was hooked to the point that, while it wouldn’t stop me going out, I’d be irritated at missing it. It has many of the ingredients I hate. Plots are up to date and based upon national events affecting American military (terrorism, particularly). The boss figure is as patriotic as could be imagined. He believes in truth, justice and the American way (until the bitter end!). Plots are sometimes ludicrous and revolve around extraordinary use of computer hardware and software, extreme forensics and a mix of front edge expertise in its characters.

BUT, it has some of the best scriptwriting around. It has an ensemble playing that transcends everything above. This group of actors could be dropped into any script and would make it come alive. The interplays are sharp and believable. They veer from very un-pc behaviours to moral uncertainties. What is even more important; they grow and mature with each other, refer to previous episodes, bits of biography and underpinning psychological traits. As well as all this, it is very funny indeed. And central characters that you have learned to ‘love’, die.

NCIS is the froth on my pint of human bitterness. I think it is the only light television I bother to watch; certainly the only series. It is the Achilles heel in my snarling, frothing dislike for much of the dumbing down that seems increasingly to clog the multi-channelled screen.

This feels like a confession!

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Tuesday, July 17, 2007



Im-Putin-g the Russian Bear

The appalling death of Alexander Litvinenko, amid a trail of polonium-210 residues has led many commentators to talk of a new Cold War. Fortified by its gas and oil, Putin’s Russia is chesting it out with all its clients, neighbours and global partners. Its hard-nosed attitudes and complete lack of empathy for other traditions is based, many would argue, on a 20th century calumny in which the communist regime ‘purged’ intellectuals, dissidents, refuseniks, the independently minded, non-Russian nationalists, peasants et al. Estimates vary between 20 and 60 million people dying through this political cleansing and the consequences of war. The overall result has been the embedding of a set of cultural values which continues to uphold the state above the individual, where life is cheap and to kill does not involve much moral uncertainty. Meanwhile, in Britain, the life of the individual is held in the highest ethical regard. Litvinenko’s death was one of the first nuclear radiation assassinations and dozens of other British citizens were, to some degree, contaminated.

Now we have entered tit for tat Cold War diplomacy. Britain will deport four embassy workers (Russian secret service) and wait to see what the response is. Almost inevitably it will be more of the same, the tightening of visa restrictions and so on. We insist that the chief suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, be extradited for trial here. The Russians (given their history, summarised above) have an implacable constitutional barrier to any extradition but have offered trial on their soil. Our Government says it would be skewed and have refused. Bad slur. Bad politics. We are becoming involved in a formulaic set of encounters that reduce communication, understanding and a possible way out of the impasse.

What should we do? My own view is that we should take the Russians up on a trial in their own country. They are hidebound by ideology and haven’t a subtle projection of what might happen when such a trial becomes the subject of international interest. TV cameras from every country in the world. All poring over the trial’s processes. Discussions of fairness, openness, honesty. Mother Russia would be on trial for its legal stature. If she blatantly manipulates the due legal process, then she loses face, dramatically. If the evidence is strong enough in her own and international eyes to lead to prosecution, she gains.

Life is a mixture of order and chaos in all its aspects. The more we try to impose logic, pattern and prediction upon it the more our best laid plans produce consequences that are far removed from our intentions. It is from within the chaos of the unpremeditated that much richness and value can emerge. Instead of trying to control British relations with Russia in stiff, ambassadorial predictability which could lead to months if not years of stand-off, why not acquiesce to their insistence on a Russian trial for a Russian suspect? We may gain far more than we can conjecture.

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Sunday, July 15, 2007

Carbon guilt

Is it just me or is this continual barrage of guilt-making publicity about how each of us is killing the planet beginning to pall? The ordinary person appears to have become the major target and repository of cause and effect syndrome. I catch a plane. Have I planted a tree as a consequence? Do all those trees I planted long ago when immersed in a Good Life existence count? Or, since there was no apparent problem then, not – because I was not assuaging my guilt. I put in a new light bulb and stare at its ugly phallic dimensions, trying to make the supposed feel-good emotion outweigh aesthetic revulsion. I get into my little car and wonder whether I should, instead, walk the six miles to the store, despite the vehicle’s fifty to the gallon economy. Then, again, at a very carbon heavy fiftieth birthday party of a friend, a fellow who runs a racing car stable pointed out that a jeep was far more planet friendly than a Prius because it will last twenty years and metamorphose easily into another jeep through the knackering process. While a Prius, with half that lifespan, must be expensively de-aggregated before reincarnation. It’s a moral maze. When I get to the store I should make sure the produce is local, thus counting for fewer carbon miles. I should eschew packaging. And so on.

Well, here in France, the supermarkets sell big durable bags for shopping. It is illegal, or at least, socially reprehensible for them to use plastic ones. I have about five capacious holdalls in the car because when I forget to take one, I am forced to buy another. I don’t mind. The decision is taken out of my hands. My head is not full of carbon shopping statistics. I am not struggling with the possibility that the planet will die before me – if you get my drift. I don’t feel as though every interaction with the world results in a visit to some mental confessional. I can get on with my life.

I know that there are concerns about nanny-statism, a lot of which I share, particularly when it comes to eliminating all risk, determining what we eat, how we’ll be policed, surveillance, identity cards etc etc. But, from the moment Thatcher’s Government deregulated the constraints on industry so that it could pollute waters, bury poisons, screw its customers, (or kill them, in the case of railways) all for profit, we have had successive governments of all shades who seem to think that they can’t intervene on any grand scale (except in Iraq to protect oil). Why don’t they outlaw nasty light bulbs and then there’d be competition to produce pleasing energy savers? Why don’t they ban plastic bags? Why don’t they insist on the removal of packaging from goods (and thereby save a big percentage of the price to the shopper. In other words, why don’t they attack the problem at source, instead of berating the symptoms – us and our behaviour?

At the moment, the individual feels the guilt – and also pays the price of this obsequious genuflection to the profit motive.

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Thursday, July 5, 2007



Banksy and George Melly

There is much debate about Banksy in the Art World. In today’s Guardian, the critic Jonathon Jones gives a somewhat sniffy and disparaging account of Banksy’s work and its place in the territory that the apparatchiks of high art assume for themselves. He mentions the fact that young people rated Banksy third in the list of influential artists behind Walt Disney and Peter Kay and ahead of Leonardo da Vinci, in a recent poll. He talks about how he immersed himself in Banksy’s oeuvre, as if he were a blank photographic plate, in order to see whether Banksy measured up to the hype and would imprint an image of genius upon him. Remember that Banksy has moved from tagged graffiti on Bristol walls, to the dividing wall in Ramallah, from multi-storey car parks to works mysteriously appearing in the most esteemed galleries and museums. He has impacted on American culture, too.

But not like Damian Hirst. Oh no. Damian is an artist because of his passion. Banksy, however, mocks and cuckolds the art establishment.

In the end, of course, Jones fills two pages in the Guardian with his absurdist rambling and throws more publicity-invoking petrol on Banksy’s reputation. Is Banksy the latest in a line through Dada and Surrealism? Of course. Fortunately, people make up their own minds most of the time and there is enough goodwill towards Banksy’s enterprises, to maintain him as an influential, satirical, socio-political commentator, for the moment.

He takes the piss the way we like it. I’d liked to have asked George Melly what he thought. But, alas, that great mischief maker died today. We all do, you know, Jonathon Jones. Some of us make the journey to that final state, fun for the rest.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Tony Blair: the last days

So, the guitar and all the other bits of glitz are leaving Number Ten. Greyer, no wiser, and underlining his status as a populist Prime Minister, Tony exchanged his last major PM photo-calls and sound bytes with Arnie Schwarzenegger. No doubt they discussed their respective roles in the Terminator films and how closely life has borrowed from art. The differences, after all, between the first five years of his tenure and the second have been quite striking. In his central role in Terminator One, Tony represented hope. If he could prevent the forces of global technological darkness sweeping over us and the horror of a future without Britain as a leading player in the world, he had to stop Arnie’s robot from snuffing him out.

However, in Terminator 2, he, Arnie and their producer decided, amusingly, that they should swap roles and moralities. In this sequel Tony played the quantum bio-killer, sent from the future to assassinate a child who will grow up to save humanity.

Ten years ago, when he first came to light as a young actor, we saw Tony as a piece of raw political material, refreshingly young and apparently solidly human. Gradually, over time, he acquired the ability to be the slinky, fluid shape-changer he is now.

Listening to the wireless this morning I was struck by how much speakers were yearning for solid unspun politics, a PM who cannot change his shape and someone who actually bases his decisions on evidence, made transparent to us all.

Times have suddenly changed. David Cameron, in basing his persona on Tony’s role in Terminator 2, is out of touch. Another film is hitting our screens. The hero is going to be serious and a damn sight more ethical.
We hope…….

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Friday, June 22, 2007



Brasyl

On a lighter but much happier note, I’d like to recommend a book to all readers of this blog! Brasyl is science fiction and high literature and contains pleasing explorations of quantum physics, parallel universes, many selves and three narrative timelines. Ian MacDonald should be revered here because, as in his last book, Rivers of God, this Northern Irish author brings Joycean word play to his compelling storytelling, powerful characterisation to his depictions of other cultures and an imagination that risks all. He is magical! This book should top all fiction’s best sellers, never mind sci fi. If you buy it or order it from your library, it would help!

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Friday, June 22, 2007

Is the Pope a Catholic?

No more than Tony Blair, apparently. Our almost late Prime Minister has been genuflecting in public and then private for maybe thirty years. Why didn’t he make it a public talking point? After all he does that with most things, doesn’t he? Actually, no. I remember now. He uses every means to conceal, selectively promote, distort and refute anything that detracts from the Blair Story. In this case he knew that being a Catholic is just not on in British politics at the highest level. No Royal can be one. No prime minister in God knows how long has been one. Better not risk public anger and stay an Anglican. You may have gathered if you read these blogs regularly that I don’t have any truck with religion in government. I don’t want an administration with the slightest contamination of zealotry. But something about his behaviour makes even an agnostic like me rise, scandalised and cobra-like at this news.

This means that Mr Blair has put his career before his religion. Live now, pray later. Lie now, come clean later. It means he has gone to war, sent British men and women to their deaths, helped account for the 100,000 plus Iraqi civilians who have died during the invasion and, in the mean time, has been having ‘private audiences’ with a priest who has been helping him prepare for religious conversion, once this moral crusade was over.

There was a series of clips of him recently, milestone sound bites, so to speak. On at least two occasions he said, more or less, “Whatever you might say about me, I am not a liar.” Does he suffer from a psychological condition which insulates himself from his actions? Of course not. He’s a Catholic! Think the obscenities committed by the priesthood. Think Nazi sympathisers. Think The Inquisition.

He started his premiership with big speeches about ethical government. He ends his ten years with more big speeches – now shorn of the morality we had all hoped for.

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Monday, June 18, 2007



The operation was a success but the patient died…

The chances of becoming more diseased in UK hospitals has increased, according to hospital self-assessments released today. MRSA and its fearsome ilk propagate virulently, in unwashed corners of wards, equipment and hands. Why?

It goes like this. Once, hygiene was recognised as the major combatant against diseases spreading. Bugs could be, literally, washed down the plughole. Medical staff and home-based carers didn’t need to think twice about it. But there has been a revolution in perceptions and attitudes.

First, death has become so taboo that until it collides with us, suddenly excising those closest in our lives, we avoid contact and thought about it. We don’t take simple steps to delay it in case we might be accused of superstition. We prefer the fantasy of immunity and immortality until we go, screaming into the night.

The constant, drip-feed publicising of the miracles of technology has made people think that, somehow, medical science will have the answer to whatever might afflict us – particularly those things that occur because of personal neglect. Miracle remissions hold sway in our consciousness. A few bogey-diseases rupture this artifice of personal security – the pervasive flood of cancers or genetic malfunctions that erupt into physical or mental disorder. But, since they have all the incomprehensible power of an alien invasion, we suppress our fears and hope for the best.

Underpinning this wilful evasion of thoughts about our mortality, is the increasing alienation a growing part of the population experience between themselves and the stuff of life around them. They succumb to advertising that increases the hygiene-glitz of their houses, thus allowing their children no capacity to build immunities. Nature, itself, has become a packaged genre of TV programming. Meat exists, pinkly, in plastic trays. Trees loom above the unseeing on city streets. Simple physical environmental jobs involve bringing in ‘someone who knows’. People are losing the sense of their interrelatedness with everything that exists. They are hardly connected to much except virtual projections of what is ‘out there’.

Finally, as an earlier blog suggests in some detail, people are becoming more vulnerable to personal and social entropy. The way they do their jobs has an attendant lack of personal monitoring that is needed for those jobs to be done consistently well.

In other words, they have a growing capacity to be inept.

Taking all this into account, is it any wonder doctors, nurses, administrators, cleaners and visitors ignore the disinfectant gel by the ward door? They hardly see it. It does not exist within their sphere of self or public interest.

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Simone Signoret: Smoker

I was struck by a photograph of Simone Signoret by Jane Bown in the Observer this morning. She reminded me of my Auntie Eva at a particular point in her life. Signoret is smoking. She is not smoking in a post-modern way. The cigarette is planted sternly between her lips, firm, part of her face. There is no diffident concern about possible harm. It is as though the cigarette exemplifies an intellectual requirement, a concentrated focus upon the serious matter of being alive.

Since those days in the late sixties smoking styles have become more and more ambiguous, trumpeting the fact that the cigarette is a troubling social act, no longer essential to deep reflection or a flaming spear that helps the smoker burn a passage through the chaotic wilderness of existence. The cigarette has become loosely attached to male lips as though emphasising a disparagement of anything serious, almost a denial that the act is taking place. As Magritte would say, “Ce n’est pas une cigarette!” For women, smoking has begun to revolve around oral moments of entry and re-entry, underlining the pretence that an overt sensual symbolism is fulfilling needs and desires far removed from a crude addiction to nicotine. The cigarette can never be left in the mouth. It embellishes the fingers like another jewel.

Animal research has shown that birds and beasts at times imbibe rotting fruit or hallucinatory plants. It is suggested they do it to clear their brains. A kind of MOT. Video footage shows them begin to feast with a concentration as stern and focused as Simone Signoret.

Some of us smoke to aid the transportations of our art. Some out of a need to quell life’s deep dissatisfactions and failures. The very way we take our drugs by drinking, swallowing, injecting or smoking, publicises in non verbal images, what it means to us to be connected to the world via a chemical… But smoking is a great example.

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Saturday, June 9, 2007


Four legs good, two legs better.

Watching a satirical programme the other night about Britain’s new anti-terror and public order laws brought home to me how insidiously they creep into the legislation. It is as if the Government is trying to validate the whole premise of George Orwell’s 1984, voted this week as the book that best sums up the last century. Shots of Tony Blair in 2002 defending free speech, by smarmily upholding people’s rights to scream abuse at him were juxtaposed with a young woman being bundled into a police van for wearing a Bollocks to Blair tee shirt, in 2007. The old fellow who shouted ‘nonsense’ during a Jack Straw speech at a Labour Party Conference and was then roughly handled by heavies, was among those that figured in an alarming hour. The fact that it wasn’t a particularly well-made programme somehow added to the sense of gloom and doom on this side of the screen. There were middle class women who marched for Peace too close to the Houses of Parliament and were very unpeacefully jostled about and the odd man or two who had uttered the F or some other word in public fora. Like some historical pageant in a play by Shakespeare, I saw Aldermaston Marchers, Suffragettes, Trade Unionists, the Jarrow Marchers, Greenham Commoners and on and on and, as a one-time supporter of the Labour Party, asked myself the obvious question. “Didn’t the Labour Party come into being and gain nurture from just such public dissent? Has it now become, as in Orwell’s other masterpiece, Animal Farm, a case of the Pigs taking over and desecrating the memory of ordinary folks’ protestations at bad government, by epitomising exactly that?

9/11 and 7/7 were contingent consequences of pathologically bad interventions in the Middle East, US vested interests in Israel, the criminal negligence of the people of Palestine and heinous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The laws that have recently been introduced must be seen as attempts to vindicate, post hoc, all that went before. Having delivered us into a world of fear by their actions, the Government is now shoring up its credibility in managing the ‘state of terror’, by harsh legislation. Shame on them all. They lack integrity, humanity and moral intelligence.

PS
The young woman on Big Brother who tried to demonstrate her cool symbiosis with a black fellow contestant, calling her the N word, has not been arrested under any of the new laws. Oh really, there’s a surprise.

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Friday, June 1, 2007



Invasion of the body snatchers…

In the first decades of my lifespan people listened to the wireless and went to films. Also, they read books. Certainly they gazed at art. And then they became enraptured by the early days of television. Even at that point it didn’t change much. What? Oh, sorry! The distance. The distance was that palpable membrane which separated people from what they viewed, read or heard.

It seems, in retrospect, as though it was a solid, reassuring distance. They, the media people, knew what they were doing. We, the audience knew what was required of us. Even when we edged, a little shame-facedly, across the gap by reading articles in the Radio Times, weekly comics like Radio Fun and Film Fun and those Christmas-time film annuals, hoping to discover what went on over there, in their exotic land, we realised absolutely the difference between our own world and theirs.

We did, of course, identify, fixate, romanticise, swoon, obsess. But it didn’t feel unhealthy because we knew each emotion for what it was and the objects of our desire were unattainable. It all had a sort of gentle, self-inflicted irony.

Now, with virtual communities like Second Life developing all over the Internet, so many people become involved in huge, interactive fantasy worlds. Their daydreaming is not the wistful momentary passing of self-aware hallucination but contains passages of time when illusion matters more and appears more real than their physical every day universe. It takes precedence.

This month, an every day, pretty, female US pole vaulter has been transmogrified by hungry web users into a sex object, her image repeated endlessly and comments added from the laconic to the lewdly distasteful. Like the mythical native Indian who felt his soul had been taken by the camera when he saw his photograph, her sense of self is daily being wrenched from her, as the virtual wolves tear at her relatively innocent being and reconstruct her how they will.

In other words, the membrane between audiences and their media is hardly there at all. They intermingle. Big Brother, talk shows and the rest of the unnerving and deeply unsatisfactory business of ‘reality media’ is eroding the very edges of people’s being. These edges are the bits we have to fight for because they tell us where we stop and others begin. And, if people don’t maintain their boundaries and their roles, then, as our mothers always told us; “It will all end in tears”. And it does. Lose your sense of being in the here and now and you live only in la la land.

On the other side of the disappearing membrane are barely controlled, foraging alter egos leaving their physical selves as vaguely shaped personalities that can exist in anything from a blank torpor through to carrying guns and knives on the streets.

Give us our bodies back!

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Sunday, May 27, 2007

Are you playing my Toon?

It is with mixed feelings I hear that the team I have supported for some fifty five years has become the fetish-object of a billionaire. They run pro and con like this:

Pros

Freddy Shepherd will sink, like the R101, below our radar for ever with his personal greed, appalling acumen, crude sensibilities and continual self aggrandisement

We will compete with Chelsea, Man U, Arsenal, Liverpool on the mezzanine that overlooks the so-called level playing field of the Premiership

The Magpies will steal great players from other nests

We will become a world-brand and all who see our stripes will know us

We will play with the artistic swagger we have always craved and only Keagan has given us in recent times

WE WILL END DECADES OF NO SILVERWARE AND WIN THE PREMIERSHIP AND THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE AND VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING WE ENTER

Cons

The beautiful game is now out of the hands of fans, becoming a backgammon board for FIFA and EUFA bureaucrats, the corporate and the rich – look at the disgraceful treatment of Liverpool supporters in last week’s final and the paucity of tickets for true fans at any major football final nowadays

We’ll have to change our fan – image from blubbing losers, for whom all except Mankies, Scousers, Gunners, Mackems and Chelskiites have held some sympathy, to hated winners because of our untold wealth and appalling new arrogance

We’ll lose our victim-empathy and become part of the priestly cast who will pass by on the other side when other cash-stripped clubs go into free fall and liquidation

We will be left homeless and orphaned when our Sugar Daddy moves on

This is how the irrational love of the team of my life (see early blog) inspires so much intense speculation and over-wrought emotion. It exhausts me. Who can explain this bathos? Answers please……

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Sunday, May 13, 2007

Sunday Punk

Sundays for me follow a pattern established through the years – at least when I am in England. In France (two weeks each month) I buy the Observer (if available). Here, I take the Sunday Times as well, probably under some misguided notion that my objectivity is increased by placing the acetate of the Right over the Left so that their combined image is a truer reflection of ‘what is going on’.

I have discussed in a recent blog on Bryan Ferry how commercial interests have taken the rebellious, anti-establishment voice of rock and roll and used it as soundtrack seduction to get us to buy anything from flash technology to pensions. The assumptions behind such adverts may include the fact that:

1) we, relatively well-off baby boomers, sentimentalise our rock heritage and are more vulnerable to any advertising that appeals to it
2 ) most consumers in their fantasies like to feel they have a wild side
3) we all hate any suggestion that we have become the establishment
4) most of us feel we are failed rock and roll stars
5) the great decades of rock and roll (mid fifties to late seventies) have become an Elysian past, an Atlantis of radical creativity and retro-reference has, therefore, become obligatory
6) we all become conservative with age

Thus it is no surprise to be faced with the gross irony – not to mention hypocrisy – of the Sunday Times trying to sell more copies than its competitors by offering a CD compilation entitled 30 Years of Punk. After all, most of those thirty years have involved millions of words fulminating at the nihilism of the upcoming generations with their excesses of drinking, drug toking, sex and fashion And, to illustrate this splenetic hatred, beatniks, hippies, mods and rockers, skinheads, punks, Goths and hoodies have all been pictured, sneeringly, in forensic close-up. The Sunday Times has railed against the ‘shock of the new’ in every medium and level of post-modern art as though it constituted a portal into anything from societal breakdown to communism.

‘Anarchy in the UK‘ is the first track on the CD.

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Thursday, May 3, 2007


Arms and God

The Right to bear arms

Does this distinguish the liberal from the fundamentalist United States’ citizen? Guns help define its society inside and its foreign policy outside. Together with an interpretation of God’s will.


The right to bare arms

Does this distinguish the democratic from the fundamentalist Muslim state? Is this what ‘body politic’ means? Human skin helps define an Islamic society inside and its foreign policy outside. The subjugation of women comes down to an interpretation of God’s will.

Talking Turkey

One million Turks marched through Istanbul demanding no religious interference in Government. Could this happen in the USA or Iran? If it did, would the world become a more peaceful place?

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Monday, April 23, 2007

Bryan Ferry: Art Lover

It’s always a shock to find your idol has feet of clay – or in this case fascist toes in pool of slime. Not that Ferry was ever a real favourite of mine but he first came to notice when I was in my early twenties and he was from the same place as me, at a time when rock and roll was synonymous with anti-establishment mores. And he managed one or two creditable tracks in that cool talking – not singing – way of his. Next he spawned an idle-rich kill-the-beast fox hunting son. Now, he outs himself (apart from that ‘style-period’ of moustache and Stormtrooper gear) as a Nazi sympathiser. Well, he says, that’s not being fascist, he is merely recognising the quality of the art produced by that period of incalculable obscenity against Jews, the disabled, Gypsies and virtually anyone non-Aryan.

I suppose I can call Ferry, legitimately, a Geordie twat, since I grew up in the Blaydon of races fame, rather as Lenny Bruce could castigate fellow Jews without ever being called an anti-Semite.

There appears to be a gruesome cycle for us war babies. We more or less bred a constant stream of explosive and self-imploding rock stars who lived out for us the worst excesses of our fantasies; idols who seemed anti-establishment, young, couldn’t-care-a-fuck and were definitely like us. Now, many of them take gongs from the Queen, spout right wing vacuities and defecate on those once shared dreams.

The ones who have mostly survived this grotesquely lickspittle u-turning are, ironically, the ones who died mid-rock-coitus.

Yet, even their graves are desecrated and pillaged by baby-faced admen and women who use their anthems of ecstasy and despair to sell anything from sleek cars to banking services.

Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty be warned. Your society needs you. For good and ill.

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Friday, April 6, 2007

Plenty more where they came from…

William Blake invoked us, in his Auguries of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower

Blake also said that he could see the world by going no further than the bottom of his garden. Our understanding of the infinite has probably always been massaged by meditation on the finite.

Meanwhile, our relationship to great and small has become environmentally acute. Fears over erosion of the physical world have led to pressure groups’ virulent attacks on any semblance of human activity that might contribute to it. Ian McEwan’s behaviour is a case in point. He admitted taking a few pebbles from Chesil Bank so that they might perch before him on his desk and encourage poetry and a sense of place in his writing. (He has since returned them, owing to the outcry from beach protectionists.) What do we make of this?

Are we here in the complex world of the ends justifying the means or not? Is the taking of a handful of pebbles a crime of any kind or is it in fact a deeply human act of communion with the planet? If McEwan’s book is wiser and more acutely in touch with the environment because of it, then its intensification of its readers’ empathies with nature would exponentially outweigh the grams lost to the beach. In some expressive way it is connected to our ancestors taking vast boulders to form Stonehenge for, probably, a similar desire to see the infinite through the immediate, to try to touch the stars via a circle of stones. I wonder how long it will be before there is a pressure group wanting them returned to their original hillside.

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Thursday, April 5, 2007

Big Brother…

The phrase ‘locus of control’ stems from a mix of jargons from psychology and sociology. It seeks to position, on a spectrum, the degree to which any individual is constrained by others, in his or her behaviour. This spectrum stretches from being personally responsible for all aspects of your own behaviour at one end and being completely externally controlled at the other. If you are among the former, you will sift through all possible actions and choose what you think is the most appropriate for any particular context. If you are from the opposite pole, your behaviours are chosen for you – by the state, the workplace, medicine, your peer group, gang or family. Most citizens exist somewhere in the middle. They behave tolerably well towards others, treating them as they would wish themselves to be treated. They accept that laws are there for good reason. They tend not to commit criminal acts. They recognise the balance that must be struck between the public good and private desire. However, the more that individuals become anti-social, the more they require controlling, ‘for the good of society’.

Controlling the population is a government target, though one they could never make explicit. In previous blogs I have discussed how we might exercise freedom, challenge authoritarianism in local and national settings and enrich debate so that decisions that affect us all are made on good evidence. In the meantime, anti-terrorist legislation, ASBOs, official database access, communications monitoring, interference with impartial judicial procedures and so on, whilst introduced for apparent good reason, are now so lacking in discrimination that that they are accelerating the switch in our so-called liberal society from one where the locus of control is assumed to be internal to the individual to one where it is externally driven.

From the Middlesbrough pilot talking CCTV scheme which denounces bad behaviour on the spot and is now being ‘rolled out’ elsewhere, through to biometric identity cards, we see the shift towards external controls on our behaviours. And all this is carried into being on the willing backs of a population which was first cowed by fear, instilled by our government’s hysterical propaganda and then offered the apparent salvation of these ‘necessary safeguards’ of national security.

We become ever more compliant. And ever more open to the remit of totalitarian control. We should all read Orwell’s 1984 again and remind ourselves of our responsibility not to acquiesce without a murmur.

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Monday, March 26, 2007

Saying Sorry for the Slave Trade

For an insightful and perturbing thesis on the human condition you could do worse than read John Gray’s book, ‘Straw Dogs’. His views about our species are not very complimentary for those believing in human progress. We are the most pernicious animal that ever spawned itself across the face of the earth. Our cruelty knows no bounds. We destroy at far greater levels than we create, whether it be other animals, plants, the atmosphere, the oceans, or ourselves.

Yet, moving on from Gray’s exposition, through it all we are also capable of such acts of beauty, compassion, heroism and self-sacrifice that our dark side must, we feel, become diffused by the light of goodness as time goes on. We thrash around in painful self-flagellation at our inability to eradicate the beast within us – and erase the sheer obscenities of our historical acts.

Should we, the present day white adults in our society, say sorry for our part in the Slave Trade?

It seems to me to hinge upon the following. If today we lived in an inspirational, cultured, compassionate society with no racism, no demeaning exploitation, no bigotry, then, whatever the colour of our skin, there would be no demand for an apology to history. The fact of our sense of having actualised as a benign and humane species would render an apology unimaginable. We could place it in our species’ evolutionary progress towards what we have become.

The very fact that it is the subject of such emotive debate today is that, in extreme discomfort, we are conscious of the depths of depravity for which, as a species, we continue to be capable.

To say sorry is to admit this in absolute terms. We would prefer to talk about those people centuries years ago, their culture, attitudes and beliefs as though they belonged to a ‘foreign country’. If we construct history in that way, then it becomes very easy to apologise.

But, if we are, as is intimated in ‘Straw Dogs’, incapable of rising above the thoughtless cruelty of our genetic make-up, then what have we to apologise for? It has always been thus.

It is still thus.

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Monday, March 19, 2007

The Trap (BBC 2 Sunday 9.00)

I watched the second of this three-parter, last night. It is an analysis of how the US and British governments have slavishly followed a doctrine of hands-off government, when it comes to the shape and direction of society. By reducing Big Government and tossing the stubborn infrastructures of bureaucracy and class into the liberalising air of free market economics, our leaderships assumed that the space created would be filled with millions of human butterflies, intoxicated by choice and motivated by consensual priorities. This would lead to an invigorated society of upwardly mobile citizens.

Instead it has produced a partial maggot heap with constituent features such as corporate Enron type greed, Hospital Executives twisting data to increase funding, greater divides in schooling and an increasing overall acquisitiveness and self-serving cruelty. When Government reneges on its role to lead on moral accountability, there can be no public service ideology. The public sector and private sector meld into a force that rigidifies social strata. Meritocracy feeds greedily on the vulnerable and disadvantaged, wearing wealth as a badge of cold disdain. The poor are poorer, their choices ever more limited.

Running vast computer programmes that create targets for a homogenised society, covering everything from waiting lists to birdsong in an urban garden, the government then leave the means of meeting those targets to public and private agencies. They do not have the wit to see that this laissez faire capitalism unleashes the disease of self-interest, not least in their own high ranks where sleaze, deliberate trampling on moral imperatives and arrogant careerism is a feature of a leadership that conjoins New Labour with recent Conservatism.

In their arrogance they have reneged on their duty to see that humane and compassionate behaviour needs constant nurturing and protection or they will choked by the vigorous growth of burgeoning self-interest.

I switched over to watch the end of the 100 greatest stand up comics. Here I found hope and despair. Hope in the bravery of comedians to take on tyranny in all its forms and despair that Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson draw crowds with their virulent and degrading effluence towards anyone they do not perceive as like them. On comparing his wealth to the poverty of the Third World, Davidson smiled and said, “Fuck them”.

Well, fuck you and your ilk, Jim, whether on stage or in government. It is our greatest quality, human tolerance, that allows you all to continue to vandalise the delicate filigree of public service and moral sentiment. What an irony.

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Monday, March 12, 2007


The Secrets of Suicide

In my role as a Panel member at the British Board of Film Classification, I occasionally see films that have caused the viewing public some disquiet. The Panel’s role is to debate whether such films have been given the most appropriate classification. I enjoy Panel meetings. The debate is penetrating and represents a wide range of value positions. In real terms, the experience brings home to its members how well the BBFC does its job. It rarely errs on the side of reckless tolerance for it operates powerful checks and balances, cross referencing decisions among its regulators and, as I intimated, its panels. Then again, it is hardly ever castigated for being too protective or censorious in its decisions.

The film we discussed most recently was called The Bridge, directed by Eric Steel and released last month. It won’t have much distribution. It is a documentary based on a year’s observation of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. In all 24 suicides take place. Some are graphically captured. There are interviews with families and friends of the dead. A central motif follows one suicide, Gene, in recurring images throughout the film, as he prepares himself for his plunge, walking, throwing back his long black hair, rubbing his forehead, being passed by tourists and finally climbing over the railings. He dies as though he knows he is being watched, in a graceful backwards arc, crucified in the camera lens. We see others, less elaborate, clumsier, as though they had not prepared themselves for this final event. The Golden Gate Bridge is an organic element of the whole; mythic, sometimes brooding, sometimes resplendent in the light and shade of sun, fog, storm or eerie darkness. As though anthropomorphised by John Carpenter, it draws suicides to it more than any other single location.

The debate in the Panel centred at one point on the ethics of making the film. Was it a terrible intrusion? Should films feature actual deaths? How could a director record dispassionately such moments of intense human despair? How could an audience be asked to watch it? Would it lead to imitation among those viewers who could feel their own lives peeling and fraying from what may have once been a comforting solidity?

A doctor friend said to me recently that suicide is statistically near the top of the list of ways of dying but is rarely part of the public debate on mortality. Try Googling it. He was right. Watching this film is both harrowing and educative. We are brought up close to something we might prefer to have been locked away in unscanned data. We might resent these suicides in that their perpetrators have rejected us, our friendship, our religious beliefs, our own fear of dying, our preoccupations with staying alive and finding meaning in our daily existence. For them there is one last foray into emotions at which we can only guess. Bleakness? Glory? Erasure? Fulfilment?

Who knows what goes on in the minds of others at the self-imposed culmination of their lives? Try to see this film. It has an emotionless, research-like quality that gives you maximum room to develop your own attitudes and judgments towards a taboo subject that hitherto has remained largely hidden.

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Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Oscars and Helen Mirror

The last couple of years have seen the eulogising of the impressionist, the mimic, the imitator to the detriment of the actor who creates a character. Capote, Amin and the Queen are part of the current cultural establishment’s fetishism with bringing out good copy. Actors can spend hours of research with videotapes and radio speeches to try to capture every last ounce of verisimilitude. Very good, but is it art?

I watched a clip of Helen Mirren’s acceptance speech and as she worked gooily up to her finale, the words began to stick together, so unctuous were they. She didn’t fluff her lines for that would be too light and ethereal a metaphor. She gagged them. It was when she was saying that she was only there because of one person – the Queen, herself. The words coagulated in her throat. How bloody marvellous! Helen Mirren had brought the Queen to Hollywood. Funny, I had never seen her as a lickspittle. For me great acting is creating character, not regurgitating it. One reason why Shakespeare is endlessly enticing is in discovering how an actor brings Lady MacBeth or Hamlet to life. It is why Robert De Niro’s burning creation in Taxi Driver far outstrips any bolt-on biography. (Bruno Ganz’s Hitler in Downfall seemed more creation than mimicry in that the reality of Hitler had become lost in a global, mythological symbolism. Somehow, the creation made him more obscenely real).

Meanwhile, another act of copying, The Departed, based on, arguably, the much better Infernal Affairs, won best film, demonstrating that we are clogging originality in the compulsion to create glittering reflections. In literature, these days novels blur the line with biography in their meticulously researched recreations of past times and environments, so that we have fewer and fewer acts of pure imagination and more and more worthy and ‘realistic’ portrayals of bygone times and people. I believe William Golding admitted that he had read one book about the mariners’ world before writing his sea-going trilogy and that was so that he could imagine what it was like to be on board a ship at that time. All else was in his head.

Let’s have more outpourings from inside heads than faithful recreations of the outsides of them.

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Sunday, February 18, 2007


Who are You? Mark 2

For those who haven’t read it, Richard Dawkins‘ book, The Selfish Gene, suggested that the flesh and blood persons that you and I are, do not necessarily represent primary life forms. This honour goes to our genes. They ride our bodies through countless lives, reproducing and refining themselves as they transfer from host life to host life, for some survival purpose that seems beyond our conjecture. Curiously, we are at a point in this invisible journeying within us, where we can intercede and block our genes’ implacable progress. Not only can we choose to be childless (a kind of ya-booh response to discovering we have been duped!) but we can modify our genes and, thereby, remodel ourselves as hosts (the ultimate cosmetic surgery). Is this a point that the genes are programmed to reach – the point where mastery of the future is transferred to us as hosts such that we can mutate as we wish, to meet whatever faces us? Or will we be, as history suggests, merely the victims of a consummate evolutionary double bluff?

Next time we watch a Family Tree programme on TV, imagine that in some mysterious way our genes are also aware of it, amused at our ignorance of their latest ‘spin’ in underwriting our misplaced self-importance or, more correctly, self-impotence.

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Saturday, February 17, 2007

Who are You?

It is a paradoxical fact about a person that, in fact, there is no one there! Ask anyone to be introspective about the self that should lurk behind the senses that connect us to ‘the world’ and a befuddlement ensues. Try as people might, they can’t locate who lives indoors. David Hume wrote about this state of flux in the early 18th century! Instead, they can talk, happily, about their attributes and perceptions, their strong points and their weaknesses. “40 yr old male, GSOH, likes reading, films, bondage, seeks…” etc. In other words people can discuss themselves as though from the outside, as a collection of descriptors and a history of experiences.

Look in a mirror and stare at the image that is, apparently, looking back at you and say what you see. Isn’t it just a physical shell round an emptiness? You don’t see the personality. You don’t see the spirit. You don’t see the self.

It must be that all we are is an amalgam. From birth to death we record every detail, no matter how small, direct or indirect, explicit or implied, and these continually feed the misty picture of the self, changing it, distorting it, illuminating it. It is never an entity. It is never complete in any way. It wavers and shifts as we journey on, adding to what we know, negating what we thought we knew, erasing certainties and raising new possibilities.

Is this a fearful thought or can it be liberating? I think it is the latter, for once we come to terms with the lack of immutable self, at the heart of being, we are freer to become conscious of the flexibility and tolerance of not being fixed in thought or feeling. We can grow more complex and richer. We can empathise with others for we recognise aspects of our shifting interior with theirs.

The alternative is to allow ourselves to believe in a self of internal rigidity which calcifies inside us with its fixed views and fixed responses to everything ‘out there’. The self that is so formed accepts only data which confirms it. It says, happily, “What you see is what you get.”

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Monday, January 29, 2007



God and Country


For any thinking person life is riddled with the absurdities of people’s belief systems. Personally I wonder why people think royalty has any place in today’s society. Equally, I have no real idea why we maintain an established church. On top of this I cannot understand why our political imperatives pay such overweening regard to any religion, per se. Put the lot together and you have a strange political-cum-social stadium that straightjackets the playing field of thought and expression.

Wouldn’t it be better if religion was a totally private matter between a person, place of worship and his or her god and then we could set about developing social structures that maintain a constant winnowing of the chaff of the so called sacred? If people behave according to the fundamental virtues of their religions but don’t aggrandise such behaviour with the language and gesture of religious superordination, then we may develop better conversations and rub along a lot better.

Meanwhile, we have a royal family, an established church and a governmental system which act together to reward privilege. To salve their consciousness for this self-evident iniquity they then adopt a policy of appeasement for fear of upsetting other religious groups whatever their ethnicity. This whole deluded absurdity undermines any hopes we have of releasing the potential of ALL peoples, regardless. Let’s move towards a society that affirms our rights as equal citizens but denies us any right to expect any more or less than these because of our particular version of God.

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Sunday, January 21, 2007


Goody Goody MPs

Is it a sign of an egalitarian society that Jade Goody is regarded as a significant subject on whom self-opinionated, pompous parliamentarians can focus their sound bytes? Big Brother appears to create a virtual fence over which we can all be neighbours, spilling our vitriol, whether we are taking part like Jade Goody or voting her out. All is virtual now. We can be voyeurs. (We can even up the ante and enjoy a new life in an Internet universe, our first so-called real one being a recipe for insignificance and ennui.) Our MPs can express virtual moral outrage, basking in the reflections from the virtual blaze of publicity of a culturally bankrupt TV show. Our priests can declaim, virtually, their saccharine truths. Our news presenters can fake orgasms over the consequences for international relations with India – for most a seeming virtual state full of call centres where its workers are coached in British soaps so that their virtual identities seem authentic down the line. Meanwhile, programme makers at Channel 4 rub their grubby, culture-free Pilate palms and deflect any notion of guilt by claiming they had initiated a necessary national debate over racism.

Has it escaped every one’s virtual attention that Jade Goody is not real? She is a character in an alternative Truman Show. If we watch, it is we who may be racist. Certainly, Channel 4 is racist for ensuring the whole virtual garbage continues to spill over our virtual garden walls.

No, she is not a sign of an egalitarian society but a cipher for how easily we are willing to switch from life and death realities, from the challenge of making our world worthy of our children, whatever their background, to a virtual game world where everything from the appalling to the toe-curling can attract our fulminations whilst never really impinging upon us.

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Wednesday, January 17, 2007

“God, how brilliant was that?!”

Not very, most of the time. I watched a programme about University Challenge a couple of months ago. There were cuts from Bamber Gascoigne’s times to Jeremy Paxman’s. There was an amusing infill from the Young Ones and shots of the then student, Stephen Fry, gaunt and earnest. A central motif was that this was a programme that showcased intelligent people displaying their knowledge. Of course it is no such thing. It is merely a high-flown version of Mastermind or Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

What all these programmes require of their ‘contestants’ is the ability to remember. The brain is reduced to its simplest function, that of an MP3 player, and it switches back and forth to find the appropriate reference point to produce an answer. There is nothing remotely intelligent about it. Nothing has to be debated to evince an evidence based surmise. There is no stretching for an answer that lies beyond current thought. There is no appraisal of concepts in order to create an overview. No intriguing new perspectives on anything at all. Let’s try to use terms relating to our brain’s operations a little more rigorously. How about the following delineation:

1. Clever: – the capacity to recall facts and the relationships between them
2. Intelligent: – the capacity to utilise 1. to create further meanings and insights
3. Intellectual:- The capacity to utilise 1. and 2. to create hypotheses and theories that account for them and even connect with others in other fields

Now, what human examples might you give representing each of the three categories, sticking to a single profession, from fields such as politics, the arts, the sciences? Here’s a stab at comedy:

1. Ruby Wax, Jimmy Carr
2. Victoria Wood, Stephen Fry
3. Jennifer Saunders, Eddie Izzard

Hm… what do you think?

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Sunday, January 14, 2007


Tony Blah, Prime Minister

What can one say of a Prime Minister who has led his people into war, his socialist party (New ‘Labour’) to drown in private sector mores and lately suggested that individuals could not be held responsible for their carbon footprints? (forget his gruesome u turn). What is the explanation for this apparent disregard for self evident truth? The pervasive one is that he suffers from a middling messianic pathology and thus counters the discontent with his leadership, as any messiah does, by intoning to himself, “Only I can see the true path…” With it goes an unshakable assumption that eventually he will be proven right in his decisions.

I prefer to see him in a different light. He is the ultimate public figure of our time. He works hard. He is confident in his prowess. He seeks adulation. He is a product of celebrity culture. He is ambitious. In the superficial world of quick-wittedness, thinking on your feet and smooth articulation of an appealing populism, he is a Master; a true alter ego for the vast anonymous, passive masses. But deep thinker he is not. Cultured, no. Self-aware, in the meaningful sense, certainly not. Perfect for a society that dislikes intellectuals, he is the ultimate water boatman, flashing importantly over the surface of British life, ignoring any complexities that lie beneath. Like Mrs Thatcher before him, his solipsistic tendencies deny the mass in favour of the individual. Individuals can be addressed. Connected with. Embraced. Blamed. Extolled.

Its personal.

So what of his comments about air flights? He is seeking approbation from us as individuals. “I am like you,” he is saying. “We need our holidays. We need to consume. It is our way. The scientists will clean up our mess.”

Sorry, Mr Blair, but we individuals must act upon moral conscience in all matters; and challenge all forms of inhumanity, whether they be the indefensible invasion of other countries or the environmental legacies we leave our children.

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Friday, December 29, 2006

Father and Son

There have been many novels and short stories based upon the sins of the father being vested in the behaviour of the son. The murderous instinct. The weakness for alcohol. The failings with women. More so than mothers and daughters, I’d venture. Perhaps men have a greater propensity for weakness, full stop.

In the last Blog, I mused on the notion that every serious condition has its weaker form in so-called ‘normal’ behaviour. In this case, as we age and time begins to speed up, we start to morph into our parents. Not wholly, for there is some fought-for traits and beliefs that we maintain to salvage the respectability of our individuality. Nevertheless, we find ourselves uttering phrases, coughing, adopting a body position or a splenetic view of some social behaviour and cringe inwardly as we realise the awful nature of our metamorphosis. Our parents, often from beyond the grave, occupy us like those aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

A dear friend gave me a wonderful, three volume, early 19th century translation of A Thousand and One Nights, for Christmas. I am reading it at exactly the same age my father read it to keep alive his Urdu. For at least a thousand and one nights he had waded through the Sanskrit, and practised orally on a Pakistani family in Lanark to prepare for his last trip to India. As he processed round Delhi, crowds gathered when he spoke, for his accent was unchanged since he left in 1947.

“Your father is great man,” they’d say, “He speaks Urdu classically. It is such a pleasure for us.”

Meanwhile, I completed a novel, as Christmas approached. You can find the first two chapters elsewhere on this web site: Kamil the Historian and His Tales of the Magus. The structure is similar to A Thousand and One Nights and I had that book’s form firmly in my mind, as I wrote it.

No matter what I do. No matter how much I loved and hated him, he is still there, like some burrowing fish, stirring up the ocean-bed of my mind.

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Monday, December 18, 2006

Stockholm Syndrome

It’s a strange thing, Stockholm Syndrome. I first came across it when Patty Hearst raided a bank with her captors. Recently, the kidnapped Austrian girl, Natascha Kampusch, now a young woman, revealed her fondness for the man who had kept her in a cellar for all those years. So far she has refused to reveal what he did to her. Prisoners of war have displayed similar feelings towards their guards. Whilst these extreme cases make exotic and disturbing reading, I began to wonder about more humdrum examples. Psychologists are becoming interested in mild versions of the various psychoses and neuroses that, in their full-blown forms, might lead straight to the padded cell, drugs or electric shocks. Quite a proportion of the population wander quite happily (or miserably) through life, without causing harm to anyone and without any need for a diagnosis of their slight abnormalities. As bell curves go, there must be within the range of what we think of as ‘normal’, a fair proportion on either side of the apex, who display symptoms just short of dysfunctionality. We may even think of them as ‘characters’.

So what would be the faintest imprint of Stockholm Syndrome in every day existence? Supporting a football team that never wins anything, yet loving it beyond measure (previous Blog)? Staying in a marriage which shackles us in the misery of another’s narrow horizons and calling it love? Unable to put down a loathsome pet? In fact, any continuing circumstance or ritual which both subjugates us and at the same time makes us feel we do not want to change it, no matter how banal and every day.

We are all, to some degree captive to behaviours we know are demeaning, belittling or simply irrational. We should stop and ask ourselves what we want to be. Imprisoned or free.

It only takes an act of will. Only….

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Monday, December 11, 2006

To Disrespect

The verb seems to be used everywhere. Once the word was known primarily for its noun status. You showed disrespect to the elderly, the flag, the humanity of another, a creed. Now, seemingly, it has become overused in its transitive verbal form. People disrespect each other at all levels. Street gang members are maimed or worse for disrespecting those of another. Boyfriends fight like enraged bullocks if they imagine disrespect towards their females. Spokespersons bleat endlessly in the media about disrespect towards their so-called communities (see previous blog!). Football managers grunt that their competitors disrespect them by putting out weaker teams against them. The workplace is riddled with complaints of disrespect whenever performance is challenged (see another previous blog!).

Some of these scenarios may have more than a kernel of validity to them but it’s the use of the word I find disrupting my sense of fairness.

Where it impacts most perfidiously is when someone or some group objects to criticism. Rather than accept that criticism is part of life’s healthy debate and should be rebutted by the use of evidence, now we hear people complaining that they are being disrespected, as though they are unfailingly virtuous. The verb ‘to disrespect’ has crept in on the clunkingly cruder end of political correctness. It is used to forestall debate by implying that its victim inhabits a natural moral high ground which protects him or her from any challenge.

It is too often an active agent of censure, a straightjacket on the freedom of speech.

It is in that sense I disrespect it.

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Monday, December 4, 2006

In today’s Guardian, Germaine Greer attacks a nerdish Plain English group for awarding her The Golden Bull, a kind of pseuds’ corner prize for purveyors of opaque English. Germaine’s defence is that she was quoting Immanuel Kant – as she was certain most Guardian readers would have realised (!). Her diatribe was splendidly over the top, a literary swatting of lesser humanity. I couldn’t resist my Muse, if a little crude in her influence:

Hell hath no fury like Prof Greer
(Big Brother flunkette and TV seer)
Piqued by the Golden Bull, her rant
Showed she can be an awesome Kant –
disciple

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Monday, December 4, 2006

(Musing on the way objects, people and environments quickly become caricatures of themselves as the media fixes them in the aspic of populism, led to this poem.)

Venice


Venice is a recumbent dead octopus engorged in the sun of a hot May day
Its tentacles rising and falling, bridging canals and submerging in a lagoon
Pinkly soft, offering itself, benign and bloated, without threat
To its Bank Holiday feeder fish, picking morsels off its exposed parts

It has the Borges quality of absurd paradox, a tenacious refusal to adapt
Despite the domino effects of time, a self-fulfilling prophecy of flotation
It only exists for the solipsism of its visitors, in coffee table books
In films and in lines of water-soaked verse. Central is
St Mark’s Square, a great bowling alley with one enormous skittle
Like a misplaced Diane Arbus close to one end of a runnel
Edged by exclusive terraced grandeur, windowed deathly open eyes
Blind to the liquid flow of human desire to embrace and know

Venice is not for depth, it is a metaphor for surface
A circulatory theme park, the antithesis of bone and blood
Whose cold carcass is caught in the voracious kiss of nature’s maw

Starting again with a clean bay, who would draw this profile now?

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Monday, November 27, 2006

Of Fetishism and Football

There are scientists who aver that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, our senses play a three card trick with reality. If you turn the pasteboard rectangle of existence over, it reveals – nothing. Life, as many an eastern sage discovers, is illusion. There are scientists (not necessarily the same ones) who affirm that emotions prefigure events and in some sense cause them. They are not the fall-out from our experiences that we might believe them to be.

These two motifs may together explain the strange phenomenon of fetishism – that absurd devotion to the trivial that raises it to an almost holy significance. How else can one explain people’s fixations with garden gnomes, stamps, shoes, trains, buttons, stars, gods and the devil unless one posits that they are delusions engineered by the firings of unthinking neural networks? They can only be self-defying con tricks, nesting resonantly alongside everything else, in the great illusion of existence. These obscure, unpremeditated mental gymnastics lead us to become collectors, stalkers, fetishists, fanatics – all of them faithful disciples of the absurd. The flashes and claps of thunder, crackling and banging along our mental pathways, project upon our consciousness obsessive longings and desires that give rise to an all-consuming intensity.

In a universe devoid of intelligent design, fetishism is just another crude signpost pointing to how meaningless everything actually is.

Yet even as I suffer the pains and tribulations of waiting for a final whistle, praying that my black and white striped team hold on for a Premiership victory, the fact of its total meaningless triviality is lost in the chaotic forces that flood me and drown out my reason.

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Monday, November 20, 2006

Community

Whenever I encounter the word community being used in the media I have a picture of being proffered a shiny sugar coated gaudily wrapped sweet by a smiling stranger with emotionless eyes. An ersatz sweetener that contains no gram at all of sustenance. It has become the ubiquitous term that is reached for when a certain mass of the population are to be embraced by a collective noun. It is a many handled vessel into which, if race is the issue, can be poured, Muslim, Afro-Caribbean, Hindu, Sikh or Jew. Each one is depicted as a community. If the odds are high enough they can all be coalesced into black. The word is equally durable as a means of expressing groups of the poor white working class, the Welsh, the artistic or the scientific. On the other hand we don’t apply the term community to those who exist on the edges of conformity; freedom fighter, terrorist, hoodie, rapper, rocker or green activist… It is a binding noun to include those with whom there can be political negotiation, one which conjures an illusion of potential interdependence and togetherness.

Its political purpose is to define a group of people within a population. Once thus defined, individual spokepersons can be selected to represent this homogeneous mass. They speak for the group. Dialogue with power can then appear to take place.

Yet, when we examine any such group we find no such bonding, no comprehensive agreement on attitude, belief or approach, just heterogeneous units of idiosyncratic individuals who might share one or two characteristics such as religion, colour of skin, race or work profile. There is no such thing as the Muslim community, the Jewish community, the white community or even the local community because there is no such thing as community.

We all have shifting interests and allegiances, contradictory beliefs and behaviours. We must learn to be more active in expressing our individuality so that we broaden and enrich the political debate, at whatever level and stop the self-aggrandising posturing of these so called community representatives and the easy gloss with which politicians and media hacks interact with them.

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Monday, November 13, 2006

Imperfection and Blame

It transpired, the other day, that British Gas had managed to do what my genetic mapping had failed to do for over sixty years. It had given me a completely new identity, including gender. I had become Anthea Saimon; this, despite BG being the recipient of four years of direct debit under my better known, masculine persona. As always happens, a train of thought developed. The first station it stopped at was one that embodied the flights of hypocrisy of politicians, leaders, media hacks and celebrities; those often pock-marked standard bearers of righteousness. Thence it slithered further down the rails through an every day deluge of faultiness, ineptitude, error, excess and miscommunication that befall us on our daily round from home to work and back again.

The journey was a well worn one. It had the tedium of familiarity clackety clacketing through it. People, it chuntered, often seem to have a high propensity for low competence. They can miss deadlines, evade difficult challenges, underperform regularly and, yet, taken overall, seem pleased to ‘get by’. This may be at work, at home, at leisure, as a parent, a worker or a friend. Wherever we look for evidence, from the Big Picture – the way we treat the planet – to the Little Picture, the way we manage the seconds, minutes, hours and days of our lives, we see imperfection, obsolescence, approximation and, at best, a partial sense of attainment. In human enterprise, excellence is rare, perfection a mirage.

Why then do we constantly cavil at everything around us?

It is because we are flawed but don’t wish to face it. To do so would be to admit that we will never close the gap between who we would like to be and who we are. So we fulminate against the world, making so much noise that we cannot hear our self-critical thoughts. It is our condition. The miracle is that, either individually or in groups or in societies, we get anything done at all.

Of course it is hard to cope with this realpolitik in our personalities. We prefer our glossed-over fantasies of who we are and what we can do.

Lack of self-awareness is the greatest curse of the human condition.

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Monday, November 6, 2006

Vierzon, France November 2006.

I own a small mountain house close to the Spanish border. It’s a long drive from wherever you might want to land on French shores. I often go via Dieppe and choose a half way point to spend the night. Last week I had trouble finding a hotel because of French school holidays and was directed to Vierzon to stay at L’Arche. Normally I would prefer an old, small, family run business. This is what I found:

The hotel was in a new ‘Place’ and looked kitsch from the outside. Bizarre lighting and lots of Disneyesque concrete and glass. Inside was a decor that seemed to issue from the mind of an obsessive collector. The concrete corridors that led to bedrooms were festooned with 1950s posters of women in modest bathing costumes and obscure fifties French and other films. The metal doors to the bedrooms were redolent of Jailhouse Rock or noirish prison break movies. When the lift opened at each level, there were installations of fifties memorabilia. The breakfast room had a gigantic fruit machine next to an early 19th century stove, a parrot squawking, more posters, vases, cups and glasses, knicknacks on every conceivable surface.

What puzzled me was why we do this? There was once a brilliant documentary series on TV based on people’s ‘front rooms’, the rooms that they felt represented them to the outside world. The places visitors would sit and edge from being strangers to acquaintances. The range of styles, decor, objects in these spaces raised intriguing sociological and psychological perspectives. Just as some birds adorn their nests with glittering or highly coloured found art (milk bottle tops, coloured string, feathers), humans have developed the same urge to a complex and subtle degree.

We are what we display.

L’Arche Hotel displayed an authorial mind that may have been searingly formed, traumatised, recontructed or reborn through some post-war, newly permissive Damascan episode. What led The Owner(s) to go to such ornate lengths to create this ambience? Was it merely the crudest form of ‘theming’ or something Baudrillard might have leapt upon…where identity is projected onto selected media, and mirroring then intensifies the growing fantastical identity. Whatever, we, the travellers, settled down inside the mind of this other, cocooned in tinted photographic images and the covert sexual mores of a past epoch.

We know ourselves only through how we are reflected in the eyes, words and behaviour of others towards us. We are a collection of fragments in a changing kaleidoscope. I have an idea now of the mind of The Owner of that hotel. Should I go on….

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