.
Deep in greenest, most verdant Devon, in a marquee in the grounds of a well-known boutique hotel, for one night only, Fascinating Aida!
Or Sweet FA, as they sometimes used to call themselves. One of the funniest, wittiest and most original musical entertainments you could ever see. The local jungle telegraph has been busy and there's a complete sell-out of the show, despite there having been no advertising for it, and despite it taking place on a cold, rainy night in a location that's practically impossible to find if you're not familiar with the terrain. You reach it via several lanes that are basically just wide enough for a handcart.
They're billing this as their Silver Anniversary tour, and it's a real gem. They've performed at this particular venue on a number of occasions, to a venerable audience of the South Hams' upper-crust of wealthy, mainly retired, folk. Average age about 70. The perky old boy sitting next to me was 80.
God knows what he made of the song about dogging. Or the one about Tesco. Or the series of so-called Bulgarian folk-style ditties. They were wonderful and hilarious from start to finish. A magical evening that’s witty and satirical and which totally raises the spirits. What fantastic original talents. New CD on sale now. The Silver Anniversary.
Chatting to Dilly Keane, the leader of the trio, their piano player, during the interval, I heard they're not doing any London gigs because it's impossible to make any money there after the cost of a venue has been paid. So much for our capital of culture.
Here's an excellent and very comprehensive review of the current show:
http://alexhopkins.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/harmonised-anarchy-a-review-of-fasinating-aidas-25th-anniversary-tour/
----------------------------------------------------
At the other end of the spectrum my spirits were cast into the deepest, darkest pit by the lead article in this week's Guardian Education. Christ knows why but they decided to feature Chris Woodhead and his new book. "Know your enemy", I suppose.
Ghastly, horrible, appalling man, with his vacant gimlet eyes staring out from the photo on the front of the supplement. Nasty, reactionary, ignorant fascist. He even rants on about the gene pool of the lower orders being responsible for their supposed lack of interest in education and lack of achievement. Whoops! What a give away.
I think I need to quote directly from the article to give a proper flavour of this ludicrous bozo, who taught for about two years and considers that qualifies him for the status of pontificator-in-chief on schools and the state of education. He's even got the fucking gall to be disrespectful to Jim Rose and Robin Alexander, his two colleagues on the Primary 'methods' review back in the mid 90's.
The fact that those two eminent gentlemen and scholars take a diametrically opposite view to his on teaching and learning doesn't phase him one bit. Of course, he's right and they're wrong. He has no actual evidence or experience to back up any of his Neanderthal views, but no matter. He's still right.
He never lets doubt enter his mind for one moment. How could he? He's built his whole life and his career on being the scourge of progressive educational thinking. It's what he does. It's what he is. The right-wing media and the private educational sector adore him and pay him handsomely for it, now that he's no longer taking money from the public purse. I suspect his pension and his investments have crashed, thanks to the exploits of his right-wing chums, and he's back in circulation, as it were, trying the generate income from a shitty and very unwelcome new publication.
Take this little gem, this perfect pearl of wisdom: "There is a huge propaganda machine that's lobotomising the teaching profession." And you're not part of the machine, Mr W? So that's you and me folks, should you happen to be a member or an ex-member of the teaching profession - lobotomised. What a patronising, ludicrous tosspot. He just can't see that the instrument of terror and torture, Ofsted, which he helped to create in his role as HMCI and as a collaborator with two utterly reactionary governments, is what's responsible for so many members of the teaching profession acting as though they have no brains.
I hesitate to mention, for fear of promoting it, that his book's called The Desolation of Learning. The sheer nerve of the man to talk about learning when he knows zilch about it. According to the interview he did with Polly Curtis he tries to be the 'antidote' to the 'educational research establishment', the majority of which, he says, reject his passion for grammar schools and "traditional" fact-based learning. Well too fucking right we do, you ignoramus.
He goes on to say that he's 'sickened' by efforts to make education more "accessible" and "personalised", rather than "rigorous". Well, woe betide us if education becomes more available to those who want it, or if it's at all designed to meet the actual learning needs of pupils and students. He wants to have a system of education that divides kids into grammar schools and into other ‘non-academic’ schools for those who just need to learn such things as manual trades. "Practical education", he calls it.
According to Woody, "It would be unlikely that large numbers of grammar school kids would come from disadvantaged areas". And why is that, O wise one? "The genes are likely to be better if your parents are teachers, academics, lawyers, whatever." Maybe add to that bankers, stockbrokers, politicians, estate agents, etc. So it's all down to genes, you see. Presumably the genes are even better if you happen to be white, since that's the dominant group within those professions.
"And the nurture is likely to be better," he adds. So that's the reason I'm such a fucking underachiever. Crap gene pool and lousy upbringing by idiot, unloving parents. If only I'd been blessed with the advantages of Woody, and his ilk. If only I could have grown up to be such a balanced, thoughtful, wise and open-minded individual, and if only I had such a thorough understanding of genetics, eugenics and child psychology. Better still, if only I could have gone to boarding school and grown up away from my parents, like Tony Blair and the Bullingdon Club bozos.
So, finally, here's what the Wooden One has to say about education.
"There are two fundamentally different views of education. On the one hand, there is the emphasis on the child. The insistence that everything must be relevant to the child's experience and to the perceived needs of society. The argument that the teacher should be a mentor or a coach who facilitates the growth of the child's understanding. The current obsession with personalisation. On the other there is the belief that the school is an institution in which children are initiated by teachers, who are authorities in their subjects, into a body of knowledge which has no immediate connection to their lives or necessary relevance to the problems of society. I believe in the latter."
Big C believes in initiation. He believes in teachers who possess subject knowledge and who know fuck all about pedagogy, or how to "facilitate the growth of the child's understanding". He sees no place for mentoring or coaching. He cares not a jot that the "perceived needs of society" include the need for individuals who possess large measures of emotional, social and spiritual intelligence, and also creativity and imagination. He just wants to stuff "a body of knowledge" into kids' heads. Obviously a body of knowledge that he personally approves of.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Woodhead has motor neurone disease, which he says is unfair. Given his belief in God and the all-determining nature of genetics, it's surprising he doesn't consider God's will, and genetic pre-disposition. Is God unfair? And genes that predispose you to having a loud self-opinionated mouth, a narrow mind and a huge ego aren’t necessarily intelligent genes when it comes to physical intelligence and longevity. Or is MND simply a disease that can affect anyone, no matter how ‘good’ their genes?
No matter. I'm with Chrissy on this one. It's unfair. As someone once said, life's a bitch and then you die. Desolation Row, indeed.
Returning to my conversation with the nun earlier this week, however, I still can’t find it in me to actually wish him happiness - not after all he’s done to ruin the possibility of children actually enjoying school and being happy to go to school every day. Woody would be the last person to care about whether or not children actually discover happiness and enjoyment at school. And forget about the joys of self-discovery. Initiation into subject knowledge, and desolation, is all.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/may/12/chris-woodhead-teaching
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Brother B, who did so much to sort out mum’s place when it got flooded by a leak from her loft whilst I was away in Japan, showed me a recent article in the Sunday Times magazine by AA Gill, on the desolation of old age.
Its strap line reads, “Most people in this country die weepingly lonely, left in no doubt that they have overstayed their welcome. This is the greatest shame and horror of our age.”
“Old is not a number, it’s not a date. It’s simply the absence of youth, the absence of attraction, interest, new friends, society. The absence of conviviality, warmth, choice, or surprise, or life.”
“The old aren’t the problem. It’s the rest of us. It’s you and I that have the problem. It’s our collective refusal to look at the old, to be in a room with them, to ask them into our lives. The great terror of our age is age. We would rather consign the old to a netherworld, a waiting room where they are out of mind and out of sight. The old are the zombies at the end of our own home horror movies.
“[The old] live on every street, in every block of flats, above every parade of shops, in every dripping-laurel cul-de-sac, up communal stairs and down muddy lanes. The old sit in mushroom chairs, never further than two feet from a radiator, a phone and the TV. They don’t go out much because out is frightening, panicky, hostile for the old. Outside is a country they don’t belong to any more. Where they’re no longer included.
“You will see none after dark. The old live like Transylvanians, terrified of the young, the swift and supple, loud and late, irritable young. Even when they do venture out among us we don’t look at them, we don’t see them; they cling to the wall, curl up like dead leaves in bus shelters, press themselves into corners.
“The old are slow and cold, brittle and cancerous, breathless, toothless, sexless, forgetful. They’re victims of bugs, of councillors and chancellors, or welfare and weather. They’re also the victims of grief and pity and comedians. To be old is to be stalked by taxes and frost, flights of stairs, and finally God. To be old is to vanish behind the sum of incurable, piteous conditions.
"For many, the final furlong of life is spent immobile in a chair, in a bright room that’s euphemistically called a “home”.
"All life ends in failure. However much you’ve laid aside for the package tour of an afterlife, it ends in failure: heart failure, failing eyes and limbs, the failure of bladders and balance, the failure of memory and hope.
"But it should also be a long moment of success - the pleasure of a race well run, the pride in a family born, nurtured and fledged, a valedictory break on the bench to remember times transcended and misfortunes overcome or stoically subdued.
"We are one of the very few cultures in all the world, down all the ages, that don’t treat age as an achievement in and of itself.
"Ageing is so frightening in part because we treat the old so badly, and we treat them badly because we’re frightened of them. We ignore them and consign them to horrible solitude because we can’t face the truth that someday someone will banish us. Most people in this country die weepingly lonely . . . ”
“We never listen to them; we’re deaf to the old. We assume they have nothing to tell us, nothing but loopy non-sequiturs and circular complaints. Even when the news is about them, nobody asks an old person what they think.
“You know, you really should spend an hour listening to someone who’s lived twice as long as you, not as social philanthropy or goodness, but for your own sake, for the sake of your self-worth, to calm your speechless fears about ageing, and because you’ll hear something funny and clever, touching and probably astonishing.
“Most old people are more interesting than most young people, simply because they’re older. Experience may not bring wisdom, but it does make for some cracking stories. Every old person you ignore has lived through times and done things, seen stuff that you never will, and its worth hearing about.
“We should, at the very least, ensure that nobody, none of our kin, compatriots, kith or countrymen, ever sits alone wishing for their own death because they know of nobody who wishes them to live. We will abate our own fears of ageing by ensuring that someone else isn’t fearful and lonely. You get back what you give.”
Tell that to Chris Woodhead, who I truly hope isn’t a sad and lonely old bastard, even if he can’t go mountain climbing any more.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5980973.ece
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Friday, May 15, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Layer 154 Dartmoor and New Directions in Westminster.
.
Rumbling over the cattle grid and out on to the moor I never fail to get a thrill from entering into a different world where there are no trees, no hedgerows, no fences, no fields and no houses. The very few people who are up on the moor are either driving along the ribbon of road or hiking. There’s an immediate feeling of freedom and limitless horizons up on Dartmoor, on top of what is essentially a mountain covering a very large area on which stand a series of rocky peaks known tors.
The more I go there the more I love what the moor has to offer. The essential thing is the feeling of timeless space and freedom from all the clutter and nonsense down below. The road up from the rolling hills of South Hams is steep and narrow, and runs through a dense canopy of trees that shuts out the light. Tall banks beside the road and tall hedges make the narrow track of the road feel even more restricted. And then there’s that glorious moment of bursting into the clear and into the wide open spaces.
Down in Ashburton the owner of the bar had suggested going to a part of the moor where very few people ever get to. Not that it’s particularly remote. Heading towards Widecombe you veer off towards Hound Tor and then almost immediately go left down an unmarked road which eventually makes its way to the village, way down in the sheltered valley.
Having parked the car in a spot high above Widecombe I hiked up through a scattering of wild ponies that were calmly feeding, a number of young foals among them, and made my way up to Bell Tor, Chinkwell Tor and Honeybag Tor, from where the views all around were fantastic.
It’s just under 1500 feet, and you can see clear across to the west where the TV mast stands on its peak above the prison and Princeton. You can see beyond the moor to the north, south and east. I can’t think of anywhere else in Britain I’d rather go to walk and to enjoy landscapes and huge vistas of hills and skies.
-------------------------------------------------------
“Ordinary party members, you valiant few, get up and tell your MPs that Gordon Brown must go.”
So concludes Polly Toynbee in her Guardian column yesterday. Coming from someone who’s opinion is so respected in centre-left circles, and someone who supported Brown’s ascendancy to the party leadership, that’s really telling it like it is. Doomsday for our Prime Minister.
“It’s all over for Brown and Labour. The abyss awaits. As long as he remains leader, there is nothing that wretched Labour candidates can plausibly say on the doorstep at next month's European elections. They are struck dumb. Why should people vote for them? The horse manure bought on expenses is garnish for a decomposing government. The heart of the matter is the economy, and Brown's responsibility for the bubble years. He personally is to blame for Labour's failure to ensure that ordinary people on median incomes and poor people at the bottom received a bigger share in national growth: it turns out that they fell back and only the wealthy prospered. Labour made the rich richer and the poor poorer: growth for the few, not the many.
That is a failure so fundamental to Labour's purpose that the party can't go into the next election led by the man responsible. His other failings as leader pale beside this one monumental fact. While he is there, Labour cannot claim "fairness" or "social justice", so what is left to say? What is Labour's offer?
Gordon Brown has been tested and found in want of almost every attribute a leader needs . . . That he was no great public orator or warm telegenic talker would never have mattered had he gained a reputation as a gruff, unspun man of honour, vision and purpose. I thought it an asset after Blair's glibness and Cameron's suavity. It wasn't the medium that did for him, but the message. There wasn't one. What was Labour for?
“An essentially neo-liberal ideology coupled with timidity prevents him taking this once-only chance to reform the City, demand more of bankers and separate high street from casino banking. Despite the crash, he harbours the same old reverence for, or fear of, the money-men who wrought this global mayhem.
The morning after the 4 June election a majority deputation from the cabinet, bearing a long list of MPs' names, should knock on the door of No 10 to tell him his number's up. Plot it now, do it fast. The Tories are lethal with their failed leaders: Labour MPs facing annihilation must find the bottle. There is nothing to lose.”
--------------------------------------------------------
The great pity is that there is currently no-one available with the profile and the stature that Labour needs in order to put in place a proper programme for progressive government. I agree that Brown has to go, but so do all his cronies and the whole damn right wing of the party leadership that hijacked the party and turned it into a neo-conservative machine that was programmed to follow the nostrums and ideologies of the money men, the markets, and the majority of the media.
Polly Toynbee favours Alan Johnson to take over, but he’s never impressed me as a thinker or as a potential leader. If it has to be someone from the current cabinet then I’d probably pick Harriet Harman, who at least made some left of centre noises in the Deputy leadership contest, and who spoke to the hustings with far more conviction than Johnson and the others. In the same way that Thatch was underestimated prior to her leadership bid, Harman could turn out to be unexpectedly radical should she ever get the top job.
Logically she should be supported in the Cabinet by the Compass group, which also happens to have some very thoughtful left of centre thinkers as members. These people must now seize the time, and lay out a bold programme for progressive reform of the entire system of governance, including constitutional changes, proportional representation and much tighter regulation of finance and the economy.
They have to make it clear that excessive profit-taking by the banks will not be tolerated, and that sectors of the economy that properly belong in the public realm, like the railways, will be returned there. Hospitals and schools, and in fact the entire health and education sectors, will be put back into the hands of the professionals, who will be told to make both those services work effectively for the benefit of their users. No more political interference from half-baked politicians and their ‘advisers’ and think-tankers.
Furthermore, the Alexander review must be used as the basis for a complete revamp of the Primary sector, and a new review put in place to research what’s needed to create a Secondary sector that’s fit for the 21st Century.
There’s no point in fiddling about now with the current system. Labour simply has to admit where it went wrong under Blair and Brown, make its apologies, and say very clearly what now needs to be done to create a society that most people in Britain actually want to see. It’s what we wanted in 1997, and it’s what we want now.
It’s a sane vision for a society where poverty has been eradicated, where there’s greater equality and social justice, where quality of life matters and not just size of income, where crime and drugs are minimised, where there are excellent public services, where there’s a thriving mixed economy with strict regulation of finance and the banks, and where children can go to school to have their developmental needs properly met and learn how to become creative, imaginative citizens who feel proud to belong to a society in which liberty, equality, justice and fraternity are the key words of active citizens.
There now. That’s not too difficult.
.
Rumbling over the cattle grid and out on to the moor I never fail to get a thrill from entering into a different world where there are no trees, no hedgerows, no fences, no fields and no houses. The very few people who are up on the moor are either driving along the ribbon of road or hiking. There’s an immediate feeling of freedom and limitless horizons up on Dartmoor, on top of what is essentially a mountain covering a very large area on which stand a series of rocky peaks known tors.
The more I go there the more I love what the moor has to offer. The essential thing is the feeling of timeless space and freedom from all the clutter and nonsense down below. The road up from the rolling hills of South Hams is steep and narrow, and runs through a dense canopy of trees that shuts out the light. Tall banks beside the road and tall hedges make the narrow track of the road feel even more restricted. And then there’s that glorious moment of bursting into the clear and into the wide open spaces.
Down in Ashburton the owner of the bar had suggested going to a part of the moor where very few people ever get to. Not that it’s particularly remote. Heading towards Widecombe you veer off towards Hound Tor and then almost immediately go left down an unmarked road which eventually makes its way to the village, way down in the sheltered valley.
Having parked the car in a spot high above Widecombe I hiked up through a scattering of wild ponies that were calmly feeding, a number of young foals among them, and made my way up to Bell Tor, Chinkwell Tor and Honeybag Tor, from where the views all around were fantastic.
It’s just under 1500 feet, and you can see clear across to the west where the TV mast stands on its peak above the prison and Princeton. You can see beyond the moor to the north, south and east. I can’t think of anywhere else in Britain I’d rather go to walk and to enjoy landscapes and huge vistas of hills and skies.
-------------------------------------------------------
“Ordinary party members, you valiant few, get up and tell your MPs that Gordon Brown must go.”
So concludes Polly Toynbee in her Guardian column yesterday. Coming from someone who’s opinion is so respected in centre-left circles, and someone who supported Brown’s ascendancy to the party leadership, that’s really telling it like it is. Doomsday for our Prime Minister.
“It’s all over for Brown and Labour. The abyss awaits. As long as he remains leader, there is nothing that wretched Labour candidates can plausibly say on the doorstep at next month's European elections. They are struck dumb. Why should people vote for them? The horse manure bought on expenses is garnish for a decomposing government. The heart of the matter is the economy, and Brown's responsibility for the bubble years. He personally is to blame for Labour's failure to ensure that ordinary people on median incomes and poor people at the bottom received a bigger share in national growth: it turns out that they fell back and only the wealthy prospered. Labour made the rich richer and the poor poorer: growth for the few, not the many.
That is a failure so fundamental to Labour's purpose that the party can't go into the next election led by the man responsible. His other failings as leader pale beside this one monumental fact. While he is there, Labour cannot claim "fairness" or "social justice", so what is left to say? What is Labour's offer?
Gordon Brown has been tested and found in want of almost every attribute a leader needs . . . That he was no great public orator or warm telegenic talker would never have mattered had he gained a reputation as a gruff, unspun man of honour, vision and purpose. I thought it an asset after Blair's glibness and Cameron's suavity. It wasn't the medium that did for him, but the message. There wasn't one. What was Labour for?
“An essentially neo-liberal ideology coupled with timidity prevents him taking this once-only chance to reform the City, demand more of bankers and separate high street from casino banking. Despite the crash, he harbours the same old reverence for, or fear of, the money-men who wrought this global mayhem.
The morning after the 4 June election a majority deputation from the cabinet, bearing a long list of MPs' names, should knock on the door of No 10 to tell him his number's up. Plot it now, do it fast. The Tories are lethal with their failed leaders: Labour MPs facing annihilation must find the bottle. There is nothing to lose.”
--------------------------------------------------------
The great pity is that there is currently no-one available with the profile and the stature that Labour needs in order to put in place a proper programme for progressive government. I agree that Brown has to go, but so do all his cronies and the whole damn right wing of the party leadership that hijacked the party and turned it into a neo-conservative machine that was programmed to follow the nostrums and ideologies of the money men, the markets, and the majority of the media.
Polly Toynbee favours Alan Johnson to take over, but he’s never impressed me as a thinker or as a potential leader. If it has to be someone from the current cabinet then I’d probably pick Harriet Harman, who at least made some left of centre noises in the Deputy leadership contest, and who spoke to the hustings with far more conviction than Johnson and the others. In the same way that Thatch was underestimated prior to her leadership bid, Harman could turn out to be unexpectedly radical should she ever get the top job.
Logically she should be supported in the Cabinet by the Compass group, which also happens to have some very thoughtful left of centre thinkers as members. These people must now seize the time, and lay out a bold programme for progressive reform of the entire system of governance, including constitutional changes, proportional representation and much tighter regulation of finance and the economy.
They have to make it clear that excessive profit-taking by the banks will not be tolerated, and that sectors of the economy that properly belong in the public realm, like the railways, will be returned there. Hospitals and schools, and in fact the entire health and education sectors, will be put back into the hands of the professionals, who will be told to make both those services work effectively for the benefit of their users. No more political interference from half-baked politicians and their ‘advisers’ and think-tankers.
Furthermore, the Alexander review must be used as the basis for a complete revamp of the Primary sector, and a new review put in place to research what’s needed to create a Secondary sector that’s fit for the 21st Century.
There’s no point in fiddling about now with the current system. Labour simply has to admit where it went wrong under Blair and Brown, make its apologies, and say very clearly what now needs to be done to create a society that most people in Britain actually want to see. It’s what we wanted in 1997, and it’s what we want now.
It’s a sane vision for a society where poverty has been eradicated, where there’s greater equality and social justice, where quality of life matters and not just size of income, where crime and drugs are minimised, where there are excellent public services, where there’s a thriving mixed economy with strict regulation of finance and the banks, and where children can go to school to have their developmental needs properly met and learn how to become creative, imaginative citizens who feel proud to belong to a society in which liberty, equality, justice and fraternity are the key words of active citizens.
There now. That’s not too difficult.
.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Layer 153 Totters, Meditation, Happiness, Politicians and the Ox Year.
.
Totnes is a curious town. I do like visiting it. Sitting in the sun with a coffee outside the Seven Stars on a sunny Monday morning gives you a real sense of how busy the place can be. There are steady streams of traffic coming and going from four directions, and a terrific variety of people walking to and fro.
It’s interesting to observe the retired community as they come together in the various cafes and coffee shops around mid morning. Relaxed, cheerful, chatting and just gazing at the world going by.
There’s a community of young women in their late teens and early twenties who clearly don’t have conventional nine to five jobs, who also sit in little groups, chat, talk on their phones and send texts to friends.
Then there’s the young hippie element, also enjoying the Spring sunshine, with their signifiers of identity showing their tribal loyalty - clothes, hair, piercings, tattoos, etc. One young woman who’s about eight months pregnant has her entire enormous bulge on display to the town in general, with just a skinny top barely covering her ample breasts.
The older ex-hippies tend to move around singly or in pairs, looking eccentric and alternative, and vaguely authentic. They’re by no means in the majority in what’s essentially quite a bourgeois town, decent and prosperous, but they’re clearly more ‘at home’ here than they would be elsewhere.
Most people are just conventional Brits, largely mono-ethnic, well-to-do or passably well-off, and out shopping for families and homes.
There’s a new shop in town, just opened at the weekend, selling Bulgarian earthenware, textiles, jewellery and clothing. Fair Trade, naturally. A pretty young Bulgarian woman sits expectantly within the empty shop, amidst her thoughtful and creative displays. It seems she came to Totnes a couple of years ago for a language course, and fell in love with the place. And also with a guy she subsequently married.
These little shops open and close all the time, as people either fail to earn decent money from them, or just get bored with being a retailer, or find something more lucrative or more interesting to do.
---------------------------------------------
In the evening I tag along to a meditation class down by the River Dart. £5 gets you two hours with a Buddhist nun, listening her talking about the practice of loving-kindness, and how to achieve happiness through letting go of self-obsession and self-cherishing, and attending properly to helping others to achieve happiness.
She wears a yellow robe trimmed with deep purple, and has extremely short hair. An audience of about 20 people sits on chairs listening attentively and joining in when she invites us to meditate, still sitting on the chairs, noticing our breathing and letting go of troubling thoughts.
I have to admit to feeling irritated when she continues to murmur during the meditation about happiness, about kindness towards others, and so on. I’m quite troubled by the concept of happiness, and the pursuit of happiness, either for oneself or on behalf of other people.
It’s the same kind of irritation I feel when Jehova’s Witnesses and other evangelical types come around assuming we’re unhappy and offering to help us feel better. What’s the point of wishing for someone else’s happiness? What’s the point of going around smiling at people and looking benevolent? What right has anyone to assume they could possibly bestow happiness on anyone, just by being pleasant and caring towards them?
Obviously it can’t do much harm to float around trying to keep one’s ego under control, trying to curb any tendencies towards self-obsession, and being nice to people. But logically there’s a problem here.
If it’s futile to go around pursuing one’s own ‘happiness’ (and I agree that it is), rather than self-actualisation and self-development, then surely it’s equally futile to go around hoping to wish happiness on others if they too can only achieve happiness through acts of loving-kindness towards others and through finding their own ‘Way’ towards self-development?
Therefore what we should perhaps aim to do is simply to mind our own business, get on with our lives, live as productively as we can, and hope that if we can succeed in acting always in a spirit of loving-kindness that others too may come to realise that they may need to cultivate positivity, emotional and social intelligence, and spiritual intelligence.
I’m quite troubled by the nun’s failure to draw any distinctions between emotional, social and spiritual intelligence. It seems to be a common trait amongst religious types to create this melange of ‘goodness’, in which ethics, morality, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence are intermingled and undifferentiated. Ultimately this can’t be helpful.
Personally I need clarity and precision when analysing human frailties and difficulties, and when suggesting ways to progress towards being more enlightened, and living life on a higher plane.
The beauty of Zen, to me, is that it points directly towards a kind of wordless and conceptless understanding of what’s important in life, and aims, through meditation and learning from lived experience, to increase our capacity for spiritual intelligence.
Enlightenment? Don’t know what it is. But I know it when I see it.
---------------------------------------------------
Since being back from Japan I can hardly bring myself to pay attention to what’s happening here in politics and current affairs. But just putting one’s head in the sand is no solution and not helpful either.
Like everyone else I’m enraged by what’s come to light in the past few days regarding Members of Parliament and how they’ve had their snouts in the trough of public funds.
We already knew about Jacqui Smith, of course. Seeing those policemen outside the house of her sister in Peckham toting pistols and machine guns is still infuriating. It’s so outrageous that she calls that house her ‘main residence’ so that she can claim all the living expenses, including the cost of the mortgage, that are incurred in her real home in the Midlands, where her husband and children live. As if anyone could possibly believe that just because that house in Redditch is actually in her constituency it’s merely a ‘second home’!
And now we can see plainly that Prescott, Blears, Darling, Miliband, Mandleson and most of the rest of NuLabour are also stuffing their bank accounts with bogus claims, albeit within the ‘rules’, for ‘expenses’. Not that the Tories are any better.
Prescott claimed for additional ‘Tudor’ beams to tart up the front of his Hull house. Blears has been dodging capital gains tax by regularly switching the designations of her different properties, each time she does up a flat and sells it on at a profit. She even has the gall to claim £200 a night hotel bills for periods when she’s been waiting to move into the next flat after selling her previous one.
Does she really have no idea of what a repulsive figure she is as she puts on her inanely grinning little feisty face whilst dodging reporters in the street? She plainly has no shame whatsoever. None of them do. And why should they? They’ve done nothing ‘wrong’.
Like fuck they haven’t.
------------------------------------------------------
1979 - The year of Thatch. 1989 - The fall of the Berlin Wall and communism in Eastern Europe. 1997/99 - The beginning of NuLabour, Tonyism and cronyism. 2009?
The year that unregulated capitalism was totally exposed as bogus, shambolic and a completely fraudulent economic philosophy.
The year that Obama set about clearing up the enormous shit heap left over from the era of Bush, unregulated capitalism and untrammelled American imperialism.
The year that British parliamentary multi-party politics was finally exposed as a totally corrupt, ineffectual and inept system of government.
The year that even the moderate wings of the NUT and NAHT said enough of these bloody SATs and league tables.
The year that NuLabour lost whatever little credibility it had left.
The year that the British people finally saw clearly what happens when politicians give businessmen, bankers, speculators, hedge fund managers, stockbrokers, financiers, the City of London, fat cats, oligarchs and plutocrats everything they have always demanded - complete freedom from regulation and taxation and complete freedom to move all their ill-gotten gains offshore into tax havens.
Well it seems to me that this year something dramatic should happen, because it’s now or never as a moment to bring about radical changes to our systems of governance and economics. If not now, then when?
---------------------------------------------------
I said to the nun that I couldn’t find it in me to wish for happiness for all those politicians, bankers, etc.
She responded that it wasn’t a good thing to wish for someone else’s unhappiness. I pointed out to her that I wasn’t wishing for their unhappiness - I just don’t think it’s a good use of my time and energy to wish for their happiness.
I don’t feel benevolent towards them, and I don’t like what they’ve done to fuck up regular people’s lives with their greed and their rapaciousness. I want to see justice done. I want to see them punished. They did nothing illegal? They did worse than that. They did things that were immoral and unethical. Just like the politicians. I want them to be punished as well.
I could have pointed out the interesting case study of Jonathan Aitken, who lied to the courts and tried to sue the Guardian for defamation. Thankfully he was caught out, found guilty of perjury, and banged up in prison, as all fair-minded people hoped be would be. None of us wished happiness upon him.
He then had a period of time to think about what he’d done, how he’d been living his life, and how he needed to change his outlook and his approach to life. He had time to meditate. He had an opportunity to meet ‘real’ people.
Eventually he had some sort of spiritual renaissance, and since his release he seems to have shown a lot more capacity for compassion, understanding, humility and grace. He’s done some good work for prison reform.
None of this would have happened without his demise as a politician and a high-flyer, you can be sure of that. Slinging him in pokey was a very good thing for him, in the long run. That may be an example of ‘tough love’, and it’s a fine example of the need for us to expect justice when bad people do bad things.
Or even when basically decent people do things that are selfish, greedy, corrupt, unethical, immoral, etc. Anyone who does anything to harm or exploit anyone else, either consciously or without proper regard for the consequences of their actions, in my book forfeits the right to have other people wish for their ‘happiness’ or care about their well-being. End of.
Such people need to look to their own salvation, and put in some hard work on themselves. Set themselves some targets. Aim for higher achievement of higher things.
I’d like to see people like those named above having to rank themselves in a league table against one another. I’d like to see them debating with one another and with Parliamentary inspectors from the Office of Standards in Politics whether or not they have reached the required or expected levels within the various statements of achievement. Especially those for probity, honesty, decency, effectiveness and value for money.
And I think any Zen master would probably want to give them all a damn good slap for being such snivelling, conniving, pathetic arrogant arsehole apologies for human beings.
.
Totnes is a curious town. I do like visiting it. Sitting in the sun with a coffee outside the Seven Stars on a sunny Monday morning gives you a real sense of how busy the place can be. There are steady streams of traffic coming and going from four directions, and a terrific variety of people walking to and fro.
It’s interesting to observe the retired community as they come together in the various cafes and coffee shops around mid morning. Relaxed, cheerful, chatting and just gazing at the world going by.
There’s a community of young women in their late teens and early twenties who clearly don’t have conventional nine to five jobs, who also sit in little groups, chat, talk on their phones and send texts to friends.
Then there’s the young hippie element, also enjoying the Spring sunshine, with their signifiers of identity showing their tribal loyalty - clothes, hair, piercings, tattoos, etc. One young woman who’s about eight months pregnant has her entire enormous bulge on display to the town in general, with just a skinny top barely covering her ample breasts.
The older ex-hippies tend to move around singly or in pairs, looking eccentric and alternative, and vaguely authentic. They’re by no means in the majority in what’s essentially quite a bourgeois town, decent and prosperous, but they’re clearly more ‘at home’ here than they would be elsewhere.
Most people are just conventional Brits, largely mono-ethnic, well-to-do or passably well-off, and out shopping for families and homes.
There’s a new shop in town, just opened at the weekend, selling Bulgarian earthenware, textiles, jewellery and clothing. Fair Trade, naturally. A pretty young Bulgarian woman sits expectantly within the empty shop, amidst her thoughtful and creative displays. It seems she came to Totnes a couple of years ago for a language course, and fell in love with the place. And also with a guy she subsequently married.
These little shops open and close all the time, as people either fail to earn decent money from them, or just get bored with being a retailer, or find something more lucrative or more interesting to do.
---------------------------------------------
In the evening I tag along to a meditation class down by the River Dart. £5 gets you two hours with a Buddhist nun, listening her talking about the practice of loving-kindness, and how to achieve happiness through letting go of self-obsession and self-cherishing, and attending properly to helping others to achieve happiness.
She wears a yellow robe trimmed with deep purple, and has extremely short hair. An audience of about 20 people sits on chairs listening attentively and joining in when she invites us to meditate, still sitting on the chairs, noticing our breathing and letting go of troubling thoughts.
I have to admit to feeling irritated when she continues to murmur during the meditation about happiness, about kindness towards others, and so on. I’m quite troubled by the concept of happiness, and the pursuit of happiness, either for oneself or on behalf of other people.
It’s the same kind of irritation I feel when Jehova’s Witnesses and other evangelical types come around assuming we’re unhappy and offering to help us feel better. What’s the point of wishing for someone else’s happiness? What’s the point of going around smiling at people and looking benevolent? What right has anyone to assume they could possibly bestow happiness on anyone, just by being pleasant and caring towards them?
Obviously it can’t do much harm to float around trying to keep one’s ego under control, trying to curb any tendencies towards self-obsession, and being nice to people. But logically there’s a problem here.
If it’s futile to go around pursuing one’s own ‘happiness’ (and I agree that it is), rather than self-actualisation and self-development, then surely it’s equally futile to go around hoping to wish happiness on others if they too can only achieve happiness through acts of loving-kindness towards others and through finding their own ‘Way’ towards self-development?
Therefore what we should perhaps aim to do is simply to mind our own business, get on with our lives, live as productively as we can, and hope that if we can succeed in acting always in a spirit of loving-kindness that others too may come to realise that they may need to cultivate positivity, emotional and social intelligence, and spiritual intelligence.
I’m quite troubled by the nun’s failure to draw any distinctions between emotional, social and spiritual intelligence. It seems to be a common trait amongst religious types to create this melange of ‘goodness’, in which ethics, morality, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence are intermingled and undifferentiated. Ultimately this can’t be helpful.
Personally I need clarity and precision when analysing human frailties and difficulties, and when suggesting ways to progress towards being more enlightened, and living life on a higher plane.
The beauty of Zen, to me, is that it points directly towards a kind of wordless and conceptless understanding of what’s important in life, and aims, through meditation and learning from lived experience, to increase our capacity for spiritual intelligence.
Enlightenment? Don’t know what it is. But I know it when I see it.
---------------------------------------------------
Since being back from Japan I can hardly bring myself to pay attention to what’s happening here in politics and current affairs. But just putting one’s head in the sand is no solution and not helpful either.
Like everyone else I’m enraged by what’s come to light in the past few days regarding Members of Parliament and how they’ve had their snouts in the trough of public funds.
We already knew about Jacqui Smith, of course. Seeing those policemen outside the house of her sister in Peckham toting pistols and machine guns is still infuriating. It’s so outrageous that she calls that house her ‘main residence’ so that she can claim all the living expenses, including the cost of the mortgage, that are incurred in her real home in the Midlands, where her husband and children live. As if anyone could possibly believe that just because that house in Redditch is actually in her constituency it’s merely a ‘second home’!
And now we can see plainly that Prescott, Blears, Darling, Miliband, Mandleson and most of the rest of NuLabour are also stuffing their bank accounts with bogus claims, albeit within the ‘rules’, for ‘expenses’. Not that the Tories are any better.
Prescott claimed for additional ‘Tudor’ beams to tart up the front of his Hull house. Blears has been dodging capital gains tax by regularly switching the designations of her different properties, each time she does up a flat and sells it on at a profit. She even has the gall to claim £200 a night hotel bills for periods when she’s been waiting to move into the next flat after selling her previous one.
Does she really have no idea of what a repulsive figure she is as she puts on her inanely grinning little feisty face whilst dodging reporters in the street? She plainly has no shame whatsoever. None of them do. And why should they? They’ve done nothing ‘wrong’.
Like fuck they haven’t.
------------------------------------------------------
1979 - The year of Thatch. 1989 - The fall of the Berlin Wall and communism in Eastern Europe. 1997/99 - The beginning of NuLabour, Tonyism and cronyism. 2009?
The year that unregulated capitalism was totally exposed as bogus, shambolic and a completely fraudulent economic philosophy.
The year that Obama set about clearing up the enormous shit heap left over from the era of Bush, unregulated capitalism and untrammelled American imperialism.
The year that British parliamentary multi-party politics was finally exposed as a totally corrupt, ineffectual and inept system of government.
The year that even the moderate wings of the NUT and NAHT said enough of these bloody SATs and league tables.
The year that NuLabour lost whatever little credibility it had left.
The year that the British people finally saw clearly what happens when politicians give businessmen, bankers, speculators, hedge fund managers, stockbrokers, financiers, the City of London, fat cats, oligarchs and plutocrats everything they have always demanded - complete freedom from regulation and taxation and complete freedom to move all their ill-gotten gains offshore into tax havens.
Well it seems to me that this year something dramatic should happen, because it’s now or never as a moment to bring about radical changes to our systems of governance and economics. If not now, then when?
---------------------------------------------------
I said to the nun that I couldn’t find it in me to wish for happiness for all those politicians, bankers, etc.
She responded that it wasn’t a good thing to wish for someone else’s unhappiness. I pointed out to her that I wasn’t wishing for their unhappiness - I just don’t think it’s a good use of my time and energy to wish for their happiness.
I don’t feel benevolent towards them, and I don’t like what they’ve done to fuck up regular people’s lives with their greed and their rapaciousness. I want to see justice done. I want to see them punished. They did nothing illegal? They did worse than that. They did things that were immoral and unethical. Just like the politicians. I want them to be punished as well.
I could have pointed out the interesting case study of Jonathan Aitken, who lied to the courts and tried to sue the Guardian for defamation. Thankfully he was caught out, found guilty of perjury, and banged up in prison, as all fair-minded people hoped be would be. None of us wished happiness upon him.
He then had a period of time to think about what he’d done, how he’d been living his life, and how he needed to change his outlook and his approach to life. He had time to meditate. He had an opportunity to meet ‘real’ people.
Eventually he had some sort of spiritual renaissance, and since his release he seems to have shown a lot more capacity for compassion, understanding, humility and grace. He’s done some good work for prison reform.
None of this would have happened without his demise as a politician and a high-flyer, you can be sure of that. Slinging him in pokey was a very good thing for him, in the long run. That may be an example of ‘tough love’, and it’s a fine example of the need for us to expect justice when bad people do bad things.
Or even when basically decent people do things that are selfish, greedy, corrupt, unethical, immoral, etc. Anyone who does anything to harm or exploit anyone else, either consciously or without proper regard for the consequences of their actions, in my book forfeits the right to have other people wish for their ‘happiness’ or care about their well-being. End of.
Such people need to look to their own salvation, and put in some hard work on themselves. Set themselves some targets. Aim for higher achievement of higher things.
I’d like to see people like those named above having to rank themselves in a league table against one another. I’d like to see them debating with one another and with Parliamentary inspectors from the Office of Standards in Politics whether or not they have reached the required or expected levels within the various statements of achievement. Especially those for probity, honesty, decency, effectiveness and value for money.
And I think any Zen master would probably want to give them all a damn good slap for being such snivelling, conniving, pathetic arrogant arsehole apologies for human beings.
.
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