The Abomination of Ukraine.

 

Not quite 10 years ago, shortly before the Euro 2012 football championship co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, I was lucky enough to spend a weekend in Kiev.  I had a great time, and liked the place a lot.  I came away thinking that I'd like to see more of the country, not least the Crimean Peninsula with its Black Sea beaches, long hot summers and a free and easy culture that appealed to the aging hippy in me.  I posted a lengthy blog about the trip, complete with pictures I took around the city: it's at The World According to Travellin' Bob: Kiev - Euro 2012 (travellin-bob.blogspot.com) if you want to see more.  But here a few extracts from it:

 "We went back the following evening, as it was getting dark, and it was super.  There was a carnival atmosphere still, and we spent a good couple of hours wandering around eating McFlurry’s from the inevitable McDonald’s outlet, riding the carousel and enjoying the street entertainment.   At the end of the street there is a big square that will be one of the viewing areas for Euro 2012 – the big screens were being assembled and there was some kind of bar or UEFA exhibition centre under construction, designed to look like half a football.   I would guess there will be a great atmosphere there.  Then sharp at 10, alarms went off, and a couple of police cars cruised from one end of the street to the other and back again – and the street was no longer pedestrianized but open to traffic.  Efficiently done."

 "Close by was another park overlooking the river.  At the top is the Museum to the Great Patriotic War (that’s World War 2 to you and me).  Surrounding the building is a good array of tanks and armoured vehicles, field guns, jeeps, helicopters and in one separate section some aircraft and Soviet era missiles.  The aircraft ranged from WW2 fighters, through Korean War MiG fighters, 1970s and 1980s Sukhoi supersonic fighters (one of them, for a fee, you could sit in) and, a bit incongruously I thought, a US manufactured Dakota freight plane.  We had a stroll around and paid the extra for Kuba to sit in a MiG 21 fighter – got some decent photos – but I have to say the exhibits were not in the best condition.  Probably standing outside in all weathers (and Ukrainian winters are vicious) doesn’t help them much."

 "The museum itself forms the plinth for a massive statue to the Mother of the Nation.  It’s a huge statue, not unlike the Statue of Liberty, but carrying a bloody great sword and shield rather than the torch of peace, and instead of white marble it’s made of stainless steel and towers 62m above the Museum roof (overall the height goes to over 100m – 330 odd feet).   It’s an impressive monument, especially when floodlit at night.  You can see it for miles.   The Museum itself is circular and on three floors so you kind of spiral your way up from the lowest to highest, and of its kind is pretty good.  It’s well laid out and has some great exhibits, but at the end you’re left with the impression that the only combatants between 1939 and 1945 were the USSR and Nazi Germany – no-one else gets a look in.  Now I know there were more Russian casualties than any other nation during the war, and that their switching sides after Hitler ordered the Barbarossa attack in 1941 essentially ensured that the Nazis would lose in the end but still….it’s an incredibly inaccurate and slanted view of history that Uncle Joe would be proud of.   Whatever else it may have done, the USSR did not save the world.   I wonder if Ukrainian educationalists are doing anything to change that, and owning up to some of the more blatant untruths and inaccuracies……  Do they admit that the famines that decimated the local population in the 20s and 30s were Stalin’s fault?  Do they admit that behind every patriotic regiment advancing fearlessly on the Nazi lines there marched a regiment of NKVD killers who were to shoot dead any soldier retreating?

Probably not."

 "There are still, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall that precipitated the demise of Communism, many monuments to the Old Guard scattered around the city.   My favourite was one to Lenin, in typical pose, head thrust forward in mid oration, that stands perhaps twenty feet tall and is in a little park area at one end of the main shopping drag.  The thing I liked about it was not the statue itself (that is no better or worse than any other of its kind) but that on the little paved area at the foot of the plinth there is a small tent topped by the old Red Flag, and in the tent was a group of guys in military fatigues who were keeping watch on everyone who paused there for photo opportunities or whatever.  Whether they are genuinely members of the Ukrainian army or merely a bunch of unreconstructed Communist sympathizers who are enjoying playing soldier I have no idea, and the banners and placards draped over the tent, as they were of course in Russian, were meaningless to me.   They left us alone while we took our pictures, as did the police on duty (the adjoining road junction is quite busy at all times) – even when we pulled off the road and parked on the footpath next to the monument and, later, reversed back into the traffic flow."

 "Another trip into town gave us the opportunity to ride a funicular railway up the side of the hill from the main road alongside the Dniepr to the top of the hill and visit the beautiful Cathedral and Monastery of St. Michael.  The building is exquisite, painted a pastel blue with white pillars and stunning gold domed roofs.  Inside, every flat space on the walls, the floor and the ceilings is covered with beautiful frescoes.  There are a number of places to light prayer candles (that can be purchased from a small shop just inside the main door), but no seating – everyone stands.  When we visited, a monk or priest was leading a small ceremony of some kind: there was no congregation, but he was chanting his prayers in a deep and sonorous voice, with responses coming from the choir of monks in a balcony facing him.   Although I understood not a word, it was very moving somehow, and beautiful.   Like most such places, no photography is allowed inside, which was a shame – I would love to have been able to shoot off a bunch of pictures because this paragraph just doesn’t do the building justice."

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Two years after I wrote this, Russia invaded Crimea, and the typically weak response by the US and NATO allowed Putin's forces to annex the entire Peninsula, and within weeks conduct a referendum in which an overwhelming majority voted to "remain part of Russia" and secede from Ukraine.  There was much handwringing and cries of a rigged vote, but no more.  Crimea remains annexed and forgotten by most of the world. My beach holiday there will never take place.

Emboldend, two provinces in the east of Ukraine, around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk (collectively, the Donbas region) announced they were breaking away and wanted independence.  Overnight, thousands of armed militia, carrying state of the art weaponry and wearing unbadged military combat fatigues, appeared on the streets: a rebel army.  They were widely believed to be Russian troops smuggled in to assist the "rebel commanders", and within a very short time genuine Russian troops joined them.  A war broke out between the breakaway states and Ukraine, and 8 years later it continues to rage.  A war memorial in Kiev carries photos and the names of nearly 15,000 Ukrainian armed forces that have died in the conflict.  Added to them are no doubt several thousand innocent civilians, including nearly 300 slaughtered when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, passing over Donbas en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down by a Russian BUK anti aircraft missile.

No-one has been brought to justice for this atrocity.

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So in some respects, the Russian invasion that has been brewing for weeks, stoked by Putin's anti-West paranoid rhetoric and executed last night should be no surprise. 

Neither should the so far inadequate response from the US, the EU and NATO countries, including Britain.  A raft of promises have been made pledging support and weapons, but not fighting troops, to support Ukraine in its hour of need.  Sanctions have been announced aganst Russia and its oligarchs and business community, but on their own they are unlikely to work - and in any case appear inadequate.  For example, a graphic on a Polish tv news bulletin on Tuesday showed that the US and EU had each applied sanctions against several hundred businesses and individuals while the UK had applied them against......5 small banks (that no-one has ever heard of) and three individuals described as "close to Putin": all three individuals have been operating quite happily for the past 8 years, despite being sanctioned by the US after Crimea was annexed.  Hardly "the world leading action" announced by Johnson.  

Meanwhile stronger sanctions, such as removing the Russian rouble from the international banking payments system SWIFT, removing the licence of every Russian bank trading outside Russia, and cancelling the diplomatic accreditation of Putin himself and cronies like Medvedev and Lavrov, while issuing internatioinal arrest warrants against them for the MH17 atrocity are nowhere to be seen. Nor likely to be any time soon....

So we are now watching lines of armoured vehicles and battalions of troops pouring into Ukraine through Donbas, through Ctimea and through Belarus (sanctioned by Putin's equally insane mate Lukashenko) heading, presumably, for Kiev.   And so far, unimpeded - except for resistance in Donbas from a Ukrainian army dug in since 2014.

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Where it is all likely to end is anyones guess - how can you predict the actions of a psychopathic megalomanic with any degree of confidence?  And yet that is what Biden and Johnson and von der Leyan and Stoltenberg and the resat of the EU and NATO leadership must do.  There are no easy choices and no clear path to peace, but simply a straight route to carnage, as far as I can see.

 

                                                  

                                             

     

                                                  

Things that piss me off......

It’s years since the BBC ended its Grumpy Old Men series, in which a group of middle aged men, including Rick Wakeman, Bob Geldof, Jeremy Clarkson and John O’Farrell (and a host of other actors, writers, broadcasters and comedians) expounded on a wide range of issues, great and small, that quite frankly pissed them off. It was great fun and I found myself agreeing with a lot of it. Around that time, I was working in  Bulgaria and together with three colleagues, all of us of roughly the same vintage, used to meet up in an English pub close to the hotel and stage our own version of the show. Together with copious amounts of beer (local and imported) and delicacies such as cottage pie, burger and fries, and a local dish called a pork sword – it was a 12” long skewer of pork sausage meat and onions, grilled to charcoal and served with chips, and apart from looking frankly obscene actually tasted pretty good – we used to spend hours complaining about this that and the other, and reminiscing about the good old days (primarily the 70s and 80s) when football was a Man’s Game, the music was much better and the beer and women stronger and cheaper. And politics. And religion. And work.... You get the drift.

I’ve mellowed a bit since then, lost track of all my GOM colleagues and found something resembling peace in retirement. Stuff that wound me up terribly then never even crosses my mind these days, especially the nonsense we had to put up with on mismanaged projects where the customer was always right and we consultants always wrong and scope not so much creeping as galloping away unchecked from contract commitments despite our best efforts. Happy days......then and now.

But there are things that still drive me mad.....pissing me off seems an understatement. So I thought I’d have a bit of a rant with this week’s essay.  So here, in no particular order, are six of the main culprits and why they still piss me off.

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Tardiness. There is simply no excuse for it, under any circumstances. If you have an appointment – at the dentist, the bank manager, hospital, or to catch a train: whatever – get there on time. Not when you fancy it. The train won’t wait, the dentist or hospital will cancel your appointment (and quite right too!) and make you wait weeks for another one, and the bank manager will probably refuse your loan application. If you’re late for an interview, then job gone. It will be nobody’s fault but your own, so don’t bloody whinge about how unfair it all is. Besides anything else, it’s simply rude – someone is giving up some of their own time to deal with you, or someone more ill and in need of help than you is going to be inconvenienced because of your tardiness. If your school day starts at 8, be there at five to, not ten past. Your teacher is there on time, probably most of your classmates as well, so why should their efforts be disrupted because you’re too lazy to set the alarm on your phone? It’s not the job of your parents or anyone else to get you moving. Live with it. Get used to it. It’s your future and your duty.

Sloppiness. In the same way as poor time keeping gives a bad impression of you, so does your appearance. Wash your hair and clean your teeth, often.  Shave. Wear clean clothes and at least try to look smart before you leave home in the morning. This is not something to do merely for an interview or a date, it should be a given. If you can’t even be bothered to make the effort with yourself why should people think you would make an effort with anything or anyone else? It’s about respect: if you respect yourself, you’ll find it easier to respect others. Do that and the world – and your life! - will be better and easier.

Rude people, especially on public transport. I went into town the other day, partly to do a bit of shopping, and partly to meet up with My Beloved and conclude a bit of business (in the nicest possible way). I traveled by Metro, by tram and by suburban trains to get into the centre of the city and then off to a far flung suburb, and traveled in the middle of the day, off-peak. It was fun, I bought what I wanted on my shopping trip, was on time – a bit early in fact (note that!) - for my meeting with the missus and we got everything done to our benefit. But there are just so many rude and ignorant sods around these days. The Metro service came in, half empty, as you would expect at 2 in the afternoon, the doors opened and some people started to get off. I stopped to let them, and found myself shoved aside by half a dozen people desperate to get on, even before the people had finished getting off. And these were not young schoolkids: they were middle aged, even elderly, men and women, blabbing away on mobile phones or swinging wheeled shopping trolleys (I still have the bruise on my shin) who I would expect to have known better. We all got seats, so why the free-for-all? Simply ill mannered. It was the same on the tram when I got off, so I used my own elbows and belly to carve a way through the idiots shoving on – brought down to their level, I’m afraid. Which pisses me off even more than they did!

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Now some biggies:

Governments. As opposed to politics, which I find endlessly fascinating in all its complexities. No, it’s governments that really piss me off. They are a necessary part of the human condition, and have been since the dawn of time. No matter how important your individuality is (and it’s part of what makes us human rather than animal) I would argue some form of government is still needed for the greater good. The days when an individual could essentially do what the hell he wants to to make a living and support a family are long gone.  Even in the most remote tribe in the Amazon jungle or wherever, leadership is needed for the benefit if the tribe. That is what government is for. So why do they never seem to work? Why is it that when someone achieves a place, an office (no matter how minor), in a “government” then all the scruples and promises they made to their electorate go out of the window, forgotten or denied? I cannot remember a single UK government in my lifetime – and that’s quite a few, going back to Macmillan in the 1950s - that has not been racked by broken promises, incompetence, dishonesty, sleaze, nepotism, stupidity, self interest and personal greed.....and the current one is perhaps the worst of the lot!  Then there are the nations that are nor democracies - or at least in the accepted meaning of the word - where some gangster or religious nut seizes power, eliminates all opposition by prison, exile or death, and reigns supreme for years, with occasional "elections" where they are returned with 98% of the vote.  Meanwhile they milk the state coffers to amass fortunes in cash, real estate and luxury goods like yachts and planes, before being bumped off  (or if lucky retiring in old age) leaving his hated family and the population to pick up the pieces.  Think of Mr. Kim, he of the world's dodgiest haircut, in North Korea, that butcher Assad in Syria, and of the KGB's very own Vladimir Putin (amongst a long list of others).  With them, there is no more than a team of lackeys to do their bidding as they see fit: this is not government, it's despotism.  And it still proliferates throughout the world.  Now that does piss me off.

Diplomacy – especially with respect to the old Soviet Union and, now, Putin’s Russia. If diplomacy is the art of negotiating in order to find compromise and solutions to big international issues without causing open warfare, then it seems to be working less well these days. Diplomats the world over tend to be urbane, intelligent and usually multi-lingual, able to represent fairly their countries' best interests, adept at picking their way through intellectual minefields to achieve tricky objectives without loss of face. It requires an intelligence and tact, the ability to criticise in public without offence, and accept criticism without anger. It also requires an ability to lie with a straight face, and recognise when being lied to without reacting in public. Of course, the results are rarely all that one side is demanding, or often less than the other side is prepared to give. It rarely avoids a conflict but can delay one. All well and good. But these days, especially in dealing with the Great Bear, it has become so transparently dishonest that no-one in their right mind could believe the tripe that Putin’s lapdogs, led by the urbane, intelligent and multi-lingual Lavrov are saying over the Ukraine crisis. I watched in awe yesterday as the Russian representative on the UN Security Council, during the debate on that situation, denied that Russia had ever done anything bad to Ukraine, that any problems were the fault of either Ukraine, the US or the EU and NATO (or a combination thereof) and the few troops that were surrounding the Ukrainian border were on legitimate exercises. How he kept a straight face while spouting this filth, and his audience refrained from laughing their heads off at it, is quite beyond me. In an article in the New York Times yesterday, the distinguished American historian Anne Applebaum, an expert in Russian and Eastern European affairs, married to the former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, argues that Putin and Lavrov have spent the last 20 years lying and abusing Western diplomats, simply ignoring international treaties that they themselves had negotiated and signed up to, and were generally making complete fools of Western diplomacy by their bullying dishonesty (I paraphrase from the poor quality English to Polish and back to English translation I saw, but that is the gist of it). She is, of course, absolutely right. She also said it was about time Western diplomats stopped allowing this to happen and bit right back, with a few home truths, both at the negotiating table and in the usual stage managed press conferences. Call them liars to their faces. Refute their nonsense with verifiable facts and examples – there are more than enough to go around. I would go further than that. Russia should be removed from the UN Security Council, and all Western countries break off their “diplomatic relations” until such time as the 150,000+ troops and their weapons (tanks, artillery, aircraft, missiles and all) are removed – once again, verifiably.  Unlikely to happen of course, because Western governments lack the moral courage to do so, and I believe the UN lacks the authority under its Charter to remove a permanent member of its Security Council without the agreement of the majority of its overall membership, and Russia can always reply on the veto of China, Belarus and Cuba, amongst other client states. But, God, it pisses me off big time the way that cocky little toerag in the Kremlin gets away with murder – quite literally.

The International Olympic Committee (and others).   For good measure, let's add here FIFA and  UEFA, but in pissing-offness the IOC reigns supreme.  It's supposed to run international athletics, but also for good measure runs winter sports like downhill skiing, ice skating and - er - curling, and brings 'em all together every four years in the world's biggest (and by a margin most expensive) sporting event costing billions of dollars to host but generating even more billions in profits (most of which finds its way back into the coffers of the IOC).  The Olympics was always the preserve of the plucky amateur, and sometimes there is a little feel good story that supports this notion (think of the Jamaican bobsleigh team and Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards 50 odd years ago, or this year's Jamaican downhill skier who at 38 is competing despite not trying on a pair pf skis until he was 32).  But once the sports turned professional all kinds of skulldugerry has come along - notably the widespread use of "performance enhancing substances" - i.e. drugs.  Now and again, someone is caught doing it - remember Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter and gold medal winning "fastest man in history" years ago?  Weight lifting has long had its dopeheads too.  Then came our friends from Russia: after being caught in several doping cases, their drugs testing facilities and practices were found to be so bad that Russia was kicked out of elite level (i.e. Olympic professional) sport.  After a predictable outcry, mainly from the Russian press and of course Putin, the IOC caved in, quite disgracefully in my view, and allowed them to compete - but on condition the team was called the Russian Olympic Committee, wore unadorned tracksuits and equipment and didn't carry the Russian flag.  Punishment? Pah! Don't make me laugh.....  They did so in the 2020 summer games, and picked up a total of 71 medals, including 20 Gold, and returned home heroes as the nation laughed at the rest of the world.  At this year's winter games they are again competing, and despite regular protestation about how clean they are, a 15 year old girl ice skater - yes, fifteen - has been found to have failed a drugs test - two months ago!  Why was she allowed to compete, let alone win a team gold?  And compete, even after the furore, in the individual competition (where she finished fourth, which so displeased Putin that the future lives of the girl and her family are being discussed....).  It's a travesty: the entire team should be kicked out and stripped of any medals won.  As indeed should any team where such practices are uncovered.   As far as FIFA and UEFA are concerned, while doping is not widespread (at least to my knowledge) both organisations and their leaders have been investigated for corruption, falsifying tournament bid results, paying and receiving bribes.  The leaders involved have been kicked out, and sanctioned, court cases and lawsuits flying all over the place, while still denying doing anything wrong.   Their replacements, while not apparently adopting corrupt methods - despite the rumours - are busy ruining the sport with stupid rule changes and proposals to hold a World Cup every 2 years alternating with a biennial European tournament, to add to the biennial South and Central American tournament and African Cup of Nations competitions....as well  as increasing numbers of club competitions.  No wonder players are often accused of burnout.......  And, as a life long football fan, this one really really pisses me off!!!

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By the way, this was not intended to be the anti-Putin, anti-Russian piece it's ended up.  But then, as the saying goes: "If the cap fits...."

The Y-Word and Spurs

 

NOTE: Some readers may find the following comments offensive.

Who decides when a term or word, particularly one derived from an old and established word, becomes offensive?

Tottenham Hotspur FC has spent the past three years conducting a survey of its fans, including on-line questionnaires, focus groups and all the other opinion-forming tools used by consultancy firms (that were no doubt closely involved in the process) to decide whether using the.....errr....Y-Word in the stadium or in other forums to describe themselves was acceptable, and if not what term to replace it with.  Leaving aside the costs involved (consultants of any description don't come cheap) this seems a frankly ridiculous exercise driven by a need to be seen "politically correct" - something imported from the US that is in my view equally ridiculous.

Look in any dictionary to see the definition of the word - if it offends you, please look away now - "Yid" and it will invariably describe it as deriving from the word "Yiddish", and then announce that the long form has been in use for several hundred years, particularly in Europe, to describe the Jewish people and their ancient language.  It also sometimes says that the term has been used by those people to describe themselves. This all seems perfectly reasonable to me, and is what I had always understood for both the long form and its abbreviation.  And yet these same dictionaries now flag the term often in bold type and capital letters - even before its definition - "This term is offensive".

Now Spurs has always been considered to have a strong connection with the Jewish community, so that in the grim old 1970s football era hooligans from other football clubs, as was the way back then, took it upon themselves to taunt the Spurs faithful with some appalling chants and songs referencing the Holocaust - offensive and unacceptable in so many ways, both then and now.  To combat this and show their solidarity, both with themselves and their club, the Spurs supporters started calling themselves The Yid Army, as has been the case ever since.  Fans of other clubs use similar actions to signify their own bonds: Liverpool's Red Army, for instance, or Newcastle's Toon Army.  Essentially, it's part of being a football fan.

But over the last ten years maybe, the Spurs fans find that suddenly their Army is somehow more offensively named than anyone else's.  High profile Jewish supporters, notably the alleged comedian and author David Baddiel, have been very vocal about how offended they are by the term, how it's a racist slur and should never ever be used under any circumstance, sporting or otherwise.  And so we come to today's announcement by the club that the results of the consultation are in and can supporters please "move on" (the club's term) and "refrain from using the Y-word".  OK, Mr.Levy - what term should we use now - give us a clue?  No answer.

This is also frankly ridiculous, in my humble opinion.  I get that some words are offensive in any context these days - the N-word being a prime example, although I once knew a man, not that long ago, who owned a black Labrador dog and happily called it "N*****" - and no-one in his neighbourhood took too much notice.  But that word has always been used in an insulting and derogatory way, harking back to the slave trade, and is now rightly considered beyond the pale.  

But the term "Yid" doesn't seem to me in the same vein.  If it is offensive, then why isn't "Brit" (the most common abbreviation for British)?  Or Pole (Polish)? Aussie (Australian)?  They are all commonly used abbreviations for a nationality, rather than a racial slur, surely?   Who decided it was an offensive word, and on what basis?  I simply don't understand it......  In the context of Spurs and its supporters, it seems to me more a badge of honour, something to be proud of rather than ashamed.

Of course the world has changed, and is doing so every minute of every day.  I get that.  But it seems to me there are far more important things to worry about and be offended by than a term used to describe a group of people.  This whole fracas seems way more offensive than the term itself.

Am I the only one?

A State of Mind: Part 3 - Slaying Demons

 

So.....another update.

I've received some good and helpful advice from various people - a  lot of it common sense, but also some helpful links and questionnaires/workbooks from specialists.  It's all good - the information sheets that came with the workbooks in particular gave me a lot of information that has eased my muddled mind, though the workbook stuff and assorted advice over creating mood diaries and so forth is a lot to take on board.  I have to confess I've not made any practical steps to start working through all of that - whether rightly or wrongly I'm not sure yet.

Partly that has been down to time.  Despite all the stuff I'm trying to work through, I still have all my everyday things to do, and despite being notionally retired, a house husband and father, there's a lot of it.  Shopping, cleaning, sometimes ironing, cooking, walking the dog - it all takes up time. Add to that keeping this blog running and responding to the comments I'm getting nowadays (MORE please!) and working on the other writing projects I have underway, my days are quite full.  Come the evening, by 8 or so, I find myself nodding off - which I find incredibly annoying and put down to some kind of Covid hangover still plaguing me, as I am generally sleeping better than I was when this thing first hit me.

I'm not complaining - all the time I have these things to do, I'm keeping focused on something and my mind isn't wandering into places I don't want it to go.  It's also helping me physically too: my dodgy arm, though still not right, is a lot better and not really a handicap anymore (though I still have to be careful); my hips and knees are no worse than they have been for years - at least most of the time - and the exercise with Lulu is helping that.  I'm looking forward to spring and better weather when I can ramp that up and get the bike out of storage.  And finally, after three years of often interrupted effort my weight is close to where I want it to be - in fact, one day last week it even dropped a bit below my target.

So all in all, I'm feeling more positive than I have for several months.

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There is still a way to go, though.  

The thing I realized at the outset of this journey was that, like most people, there are demons, ghosts from my past (back even to my childhood perhaps) that I need to exorcise.  In the first conversation I had with someone I trust, who has experience with these things both personally and professionally, I listed maybe a dozen issues that were weighing heavily on my mind. There may well be more that haven't come to the surface yet, but will eventually, and will also then need addressing.

The obvious way to do that is through regular sessions with a psychotherapist of some kind - as I wrote in my last update. The same points raised there are unchanged: finding one here is difficult and no doubt costly, so probably not within reach, at least right now.  Similarly my support network is little changed - although I am now getting more interaction through this blog, which is helping, and interestingly through participation in my football club's fan's forum helps too.  I'm on it most days, and although I know not a single person face to face - they are simply user names and avatars - talking football and sometimes politics, music or whatever, despite the piss-taking and sometimes vitriol flying about, I find a great help.   So, my thanks to all those people who take the trouble to read my stuff and interact - it's a great help and encouragement to this old Traveller.

None of that is going to help exorcise those damned demons, though.

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But now I seem to have stumbled across something that might.  

For the past year or so, one of my writing projects has been revising and tidying up some short stories I wrote donkey's years ago into something like book form.  I've also added a couple of new ones.  Whether they're any good or not is for someone else to judge, perhaps, one day, but I think they're ok.  Anyway, I kicked off one new yarn back in the summer (like all of them very loosely based on a minor episode from my life: this one doubts over a potential career change) and got about half way through in a week or two - not writing every day, as is my way - when I hit a creative brick wall.  Not uncommon as any writer, no matter their quality, will own up to.  

I left it for a few weeks then had another go.  And again....perhaps three or four times up to Christmas.  During these break times and the holidays I continued thinking a lot about my problems, trying to sort them out into some kind of rhyme or reason to plan around, as well as what to do about the damned story.  Last week, I came back to it and re-read the story so far. A light-bulb went on in my head.....and I recognized that the story, completely unplanned, had morphed into one that in a roundabout way addressed one of my recognized problems.   In two writing sessions the story was finished, and the added bonus for me was that the thing that had been nagging at my subconscious for 50 years no longer mattered to me.  The writing had clarified my thinking, and the resulting dialogue in the story, although completely and utterly fictitious, had made me understand that my worry, my guilt over the particular issue, that I had been carrying all these years was, frankly, bloody stupid.

It was a weight off my mind.  A small one perhaps, but still - one demon slayed - but many more to go.  All I have to do - perhaps! - is think up some more stories that can perform a similar trick on one or more of the other things that are bugging me,  It won't be easy, I know that very well, and it may not work, but in terms of therapy it should at least help me think things through more clearly - I always find it easier to break down and address any serious problem through the written word rather than verbally, and always have.  It's the way I am.  And I might even get a decent book out of it, one day.

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So to start with, I need to sit down with a pen and paper, and write a list of all this stuff - Document my Demons if you will - that I can then edit as and when they go.  Manually on a notepad would be best, I think, rather than word processing it on LibreOffice.  In another small way, it's taking back control of my mind and tracking my progress in a more direct way.  I think it will be more meaningful to then do the list editing by taking a thick black felt pen and drawing a line or two through each entry as I kill it off, rather than just lining up a cursor and hitting the Delete key on here a few times.

I can perhaps list them in order of the amount of grief I perceive them to be causing me, or perhaps how easily I think I can deal with them, or for that matter just list them randomly as they come to me.  I'll have to think that one through a bit, as I'm not sure which will prove easiest to manage.  But either way, if setting goals is a recognised way of dealing with Depression - and that certainly is the case, based on everything my confidantes and the workbooks have said - then I will have a clear list of things to achieve and measure my success at doing it.

Which must be a good thing.

The B-Word two years on, and a book to remind you....

 

I watched that chancer Johnson's less than sincere apology in the House the other day when the Grey report dropped, with a mixture of amusement and disgust.  I'm not sure anyone in the country was fooled for a minute, especially after May and Starmer and Blackford dismantled his posturing - the man is clearly the most damaged of damaged goods.  His response  to Starmer's initial rebut was disgusting in the extreme - raising the memory of Jimmy Savile in a crude and inaccurate allegation against the former DPP to deflect criticism away from himself was uncalled for and rightly criticised by most - even some of his own allies - , and I can't remember ever seeing a Member looking as angry as Starmer rightly did.  Johnson's subsequent "apology" was even less sincere than anything he's said in the wake of Partygate (if that's possible).  So much for the disgust.

The amusement came when he started reeling off his achievements since becoming PM, led of course by "getting Brexit done" (as if that is something to be proud of....) and defeating Covid (which is still raging across the world, in case he hadn't noticed, even if less virulent than before: and the improved situation is completely down to scientists and health workers, NOT Boris Johnson!).  The claims would be laughable if they weren't so tragic.

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But the purpose of this piece in not to give Johnson another flogging (even though he deserves it) nor to go over the old ground of Brexit - as Johnson rightly points out, it's done.  Whether people agree with it or not, nothing will change for a generation.  I have not a shred of doubt in my own mind that the Leave vote was the biggest electoral mistake in the country's history, and the worst is yet to come.  Many of the economic effects have been masked by the measures that had to be taken over the past couple of years to manage the Pandemic, and in this respect Johnson and his co-Brexiters have been very fortunate.  But that will not last forever: as the economy opens up again, and the empty shelves, rising prices and supply problems that are becoming increasingly common (ask any trucker stuck for up to 16 hours on the M20 this week) start to bite.  It will get worse before it gets better.

I suppose this Parliamentary pantomime struck me particularly strongly as I was at the time finishing reading an excellent book, "Middle England" by Jonathan Coe.  Based in and around Birmingham, the novel charts the fracturing of an ordinary working class family, largely through the unexpected viciousness that characterized much of the 2016 Referendum campaign.  It's an excellent book, well researched and well written, and covers all the key events leading up to the vote and the chaos the result led to (and indeed is still being faced by people across Britain to this day).

The politics isn't forensically examined but there is no need for that: probably everybody in the country still has them fresh in their minds.  The few real life characters referred to by name - notably Cameron and Corbyn - do not come out of it well, nor do they deserve to.  Cameron is blamed and slated, rightly in my view, for being a wealthy Old Etonian Tory with a very light grasp on working class Britain, for calling the Referendum in the first place, then complacently expecting the Remain side of the argument to win right up until the last few days of campaigning, then being cowardly in resigning within hours of the result being declared, despite insisting throughout the run-up to the vote that he would never do such a thing. In doing so, he created a power vacuum that May and Johnson have so far failed to fill.  Corbyn, meanwhile, comes across as an ineffectual and incompetent Opposition leader whose politics (whether Marxist, Communist, Trotskyist or a mix of all three) turned out to be both irrelevant and outdated, and incapable of making any kind of commitment one way or the other - all of which I would suggest is completely true.

The increase in racism and xenophobia that characterised much of the Leave campaign - something else Johnson should be ashamed rather than proud of - is well described, as were the Birmingham riots a couple of years earlier, and the increasing sense of alienation felt by older people (that I recognise from within my own family), as well as the brutal and unnecessary murder of Jo Cox, are all movingly woven into the tale.  I would strongly suggest that none of these societal problems have been solved or even addressed by Brexit, nor are they likely to be resolved by this Government: it's something else that will take a generation to unwind (if it ever is).

But the book is not all doom and gloom - there is humour there too.  The vacuous individuals that came to the fore in government circles during Cameron's two terms (the coalition with the LibDems and his own Tory majority) are brilliantly illustrated by the recurring character of a slimy Deputy Press Secretary from Cameron's office, who speaks contradictory nonsense in as fine a selection of sound-bites as I've ever seen in one place.  He is picture perfect, and meets a suitably humiliating end with Cameron's demise and May's ascent.  There is also the bumbling would-be author struggling to finish his meisterwerk and find a publisher - now that one really rang true! - who ends up opening a writing school in rural France without any students to speak of, but still manages to get long listed for the Man Booker Prize.  And there is his best school friend, now trying to make a living as a children's party entertainer engaged in an intense and ultimately violent rivalry with another clown.

The blurb on the cover describes it as "the Brexit book everyone should read".  I'm not sure I would put it that strongly, but it is a very very well written and entertaining piece of work that should resonate with  anyone who, like me, lived through those turbulent times  It would also make a damned good movie or tv special, that I would certainly watch.

I'm not sure Our Leader would share my view, though - but then the man has no taste.